My wife recently told me about one of her students who was having problems understanding a seemingly simple math assignment. She wondered if the assignment was too difficult, but she also noted that the other students weren’t experiencing the same challenge completing it. As she walked over to help the student, she immediately recognized the problem: The student was working from the wrong book.

As believers in Jesus, we believe that we are working from the right Book because of . . .

• The Author of the Bible. The author of the Bible is God. Paul said that the Scriptures were “inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). This means that God was actively involved in the writing of Scripture. The Scriptures are God’s infallible words to us.

• The unity of the Bible. There are 66 books, written by 40 different authors (kings, peasants, a physician, scholars, poets, farmers, and fishermen) over a period of 1,500 years. They wrote independently, and most of them knew very little or nothing at all of the others’ writings. Yet, Luke says that their writings and prophecies (300 of them) pointed to one Person—Jesus Christ (Luke 24:27).

Statistician Peter Stoner has calculated that the probability of five major prophecies coming to pass by chance would be 1 in 2 quintillion: That’s 1 in 2,000,000,000,000,000,000! Yet Jesus says that He is the fulfillment of all those prophecies (Matthew 5:18).

• The preservation of the Bible. We have more accurate and older copies of manuscripts of the Scriptures (the oldest is about 4,000 years old) than any other ancient historical or literary source.

God has given us the right Book. It’s an authoritative answer to the otherwise unanswerable questions of life. We can trust what the Bible says (Psalm 33:4).