How Can I Trust The Bible? | Pastor Anthony Lombardi

"People's choices do not equal God's intent. Just because somebody used the Bible to hurt you does not mean that that is the purpose of the Bible. And it does not mean that is what God intended for that person to do." - Pastor Anthony Lombardi

Few questions cut closer to the heart of the Christian faith than this one: Can the Bible actually be trusted? For some, Scripture has been a lifelong source of comfort, conviction, and transformation. For others, it has been a source of confusion, pain, and eventually, a reason to walk away from faith altogether. In the latest message from The Tree Church's Reconstruct series, Pastor Anthony Lombardi steps into that tension directly, offering a thoughtful and grounded response to one of the most common questions driving faith deconstruction today.

Pastor Anthony opens by establishing why this conversation matters. The Bible, he explains, is not simply a collection of moral instructions or historical records. It is God's self-revelation - the primary way God has chosen to make himself known to the world. Drawing from Romans 10:17, he points out that faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. In other words, our knowledge of who God is, what he has done, and what he promises to do comes directly through Scripture.

He uses the image of a GPS with location services turned on. The Bible does not simply tell us where to go. It tells us where we are. It orients us within the larger story God is writing across human history and extends an invitation to join that story, to live a life of purpose, meaning, and relationship with God. This is why, Pastor Anthony explains, the Bible is opened every single week when the church gathers. It is not tradition. It is the foundation of everything Christians believe and practice.

Before addressing the objections, Pastor Anthony takes time to establish what Christians actually believe about Scripture. Two words carry the weight of that conviction: inspired and authoritative. The Bible was not fabricated by a group of people attempting to start a new religion. Rather, God spoke his truth through human beings. As 2 Peter 1:21 puts it, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And 2 Timothy 3:16 affirms that all Scripture is breathed out by God, profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.

Authoritative means the Bible is not simply one voice among many. It is the standard by which Christians understand God, themselves, and the world. God is revealing himself through it, and followers of Jesus submit to that revelation rather than substituting their own opinions in its place.

Pastor Anthony acknowledges that for those skeptical of the Bible, an appeal to what the Bible says about itself may not be sufficient. So he walks through five reasons, grounded outside of Scripture itself, for why the Bible deserves credibility.
The first is manuscript evidence. With over 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts and more than 19,000 in other languages, the Bible is by far the most well-attested historical document in existence. Scholars widely agree that modern translations are approximately 99% accurate to the original texts, with the remaining variations carrying no doctrinal significance.

The second is early dating and eyewitness proximity. The Apostle Paul was killed in Rome around 64 AD, meaning his New Testament letters were written between roughly 50 and 64 AD - well within the lifetime of people who had personally witnessed the events surrounding Jesus. Pastor Anthony notes that Paul himself, writing in 1 Corinthians, pointed his readers to living eyewitnesses of the resurrection and invited them to go and speak with those people directly.

The third reason is what historians call embarrassing and counterproductive details. If the writers of the New Testament were fabricating a religion, they would not have portrayed their own founders as repeatedly failing to understand Jesus, or chosen women - who held no legal credibility in the first century - as the first witnesses of the resurrection. The inclusion of these details, according to historians, actually adds to the authenticity of the documents.

The fourth is archaeological and historical corroboration. Figures once dismissed as legendary, including King David and Pontius Pilate, have since been confirmed through archaeological discovery. Extra-biblical writers such as the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus also wrote about early Christians and their beliefs, providing independent confirmation of what Scripture records.

The fifth is the coherent narrative across diverse authors. The Bible is not a single book. It is 66 books written over approximately 1,500 years by more than 40 authors from vastly different generations, cultures, and geographical locations. And yet a single, unified story runs through all of it - a story about who God is, what he expects of his people, and what he is doing in the world.

With the foundation laid, Pastor Anthony turns to five objections commonly raised by those who have deconstructed or are deconstructing their faith. The first is one many people recognize from their own experience: they were told the Bible was clear and simple, and then discovered it was far more complex than they had been led to believe.

Pastor Anthony's response is direct. There is room for nuance and even minor disagreement within Christianity. Churches that treat every question as a threat and every doubt as disqualifying have done real damage to people, and that damage deserves to be acknowledged. The Apostle Paul himself identified certain areas as matters of conscience, recognizing that not everything in the Christian life falls neatly into a category of right or wrong.

At the same time, Pastor Anthony offers three principles for navigating complexity. Context matters - historical, cultural, and literary. Not every book of the Bible was written in the same era, for the same audience, or in the same genre. Second, we must allow Scripture to interpret Scripture. The clearer parts of the Bible give insight into the more difficult ones, and what we can understand sheds light on what we do not yet fully grasp.

The second objection involves inerrancy - the belief that Scripture is without error. For those operating with a very narrow definition of that term, certain passages create genuine crisis. Pastor Anthony offers an important clarification. The Bible is primarily about theology, not science, not history in a comprehensive sense, and not anthropology. Its purpose is to reveal who God is.
He illustrates this with two examples. When Joshua prays for the sun to stand still, the text is not making a scientific claim about planetary motion. It is declaring that God supernaturally intervened on behalf of his people. When Scripture references the four corners of the earth, it is using metaphorical language, not asserting a flat earth. The error, Pastor Anthony argues, is not in the text. It is in what we bring to the text. The Bible is inerrant in everything God intended it to mean, not in the meanings we impose upon it.

This is perhaps the most personally painful objection, and Pastor Anthony addresses it with care. The Bible has, throughout history and even today, been used to control, abuse, and harm people. That is simply true, and he does not minimize it. For anyone who has experienced that kind of harm, he offers a clear and direct word: that is not God's intent, and it never was.

People's choices do not equal God's intent. The fact that someone used Scripture as a weapon does not mean God authorized or desired that use. Pastor Anthony points out that Jesus himself rebuked the religious leaders of his day who were committing acts of spiritual abuse on the people around them. Scripture itself warns that there will be people who twist God's word for their own purposes. Rather than undermining the Bible, that reality actually confirms what Scripture teaches about the nature of human sin.

On the other side of this, Pastor Anthony points to the ways the Bible has been used throughout history to bring genuine freedom and healing. Many of the hospitals, schools, abolitionist efforts, and civil rights movements that have shaped the common good were driven by Christians who found their conviction in the pages of Scripture, believing that every human being is made in the image of God and therefore worthy of dignity and care.

Many readers sense a tension between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. Pastor Anthony addresses this through two lenses. The first is progressive revelation - the idea that across the full arc of Scripture, our understanding of God becomes increasingly clear. Reading a single chapter from the middle of a novel does not give you the whole story. The same is true of Scripture. Clarity builds as the narrative unfolds.

The second lens involves the nature of Old Testament law. Pastor Anthony distinguishes between civil laws, which governed Israel as a nation state in a specific historical context, ceremonial laws, which pointed forward to Christ and have been fulfilled through his sacrifice, and moral laws, which carry across both testaments and reflect God's timeless design for human flourishing. What can look like inconsistency is often simply the difference between laws given for a particular time and people and truths that are permanent.

He also pushes back against the idea that the Old Testament God is simply a God of wrath. The book of Hosea portrays a God of relentless, faithful love toward a people who have repeatedly abandoned him. The book of Jonah reveals that even the prophet understood God to be compassionate, slow to anger, and ready to forgive. And the New Testament is not without judgment - Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5 serve as a sobering reminder. God's character, Pastor Anthony argues, is consistent throughout both testaments.

The final objection may be the most difficult. Some parts of Scripture are not merely confusing - they are disturbing. Murder, rape, genocide, and other horrors appear within its pages. Pastor Anthony offers two responses.

The first is the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive. Much of what appears in the Bible is recorded because it happened, not because it is commended. The book of Judges, with its repeated cycles of violence and moral failure, ends with a summary that explains everything: everyone did what was right in his own eyes. The horror of Judges is the point. It stands as a warning. Paul makes this explicit in 1 Corinthians 10, writing that these things were recorded as examples, written down for our instruction.

The second response goes deeper. When we say we reject a God who does something we find morally unacceptable, we are placing ourselves in the position of moral authority over God. Pastor Anthony names this directly and gently. Either morality is objective, grounded in a God who defines what is good, or it is subjective, shaped by individual preference and cultural moment. And we have seen, across history, where purely subjective morality leads. The invitation is not to stop asking hard questions, but to allow God to define the standard rather than measuring God against our own.

Pastor Anthony closes by stepping back to the widest view. The whole of Scripture can be understood in four acts: creation, the fall, redemption, and restoration. A good God created a world and invited human beings to share in it. Human beings rejected his authority, and sin, brokenness, and chaos entered the world. But even from the beginning, God was not finished. Across the entire arc of Scripture, he was working out a plan that found its fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And one day, he will bring full restoration to everything he began.

In those moments when the Bible confuses or frustrates, when the details are unclear, and the answers are not easy, Pastor Anthony points the church back to the cross. The cross holds together the full weight of God's character - his justice burning against sin and evil, and his mercy freely extended to every person who turns to him. It is the clearest picture of who God is and what he has always been working toward.

The world is broken. People are broken. But God, Pastor Anthony reminds the church, is committed to a story of redemption and restoration - in the world, and in every life that holds fast to him.

If you are looking for a church in Lancaster, Ohio, or a church in Logan, Ohio, The Tree Church would love to have you join us. We gather every Sunday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM at both our Lancaster and Logan campuses.

Lancaster Campus 721 N Memorial Dr, Lancaster, OH 43130, USA
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