Do you remember the first time you got to experience the purchase a car? It’s a memorable event for sure. It’s also a potentially problematic one, because nearly every car looks great on the sales lot. The paint finish is perfect, the tires are practically begging to grip some highway, and the sticker price seems doable. But here’s the thing: you don’t know if you truly have a good car until you test it. As a boy growing up in Maine, I learned this firsthand. Like any young driver in such locales, I had a few close encounters of the navigational kind in driving on snowy days. Thankfully, I had a car—unspectacular but steady—that could handle the tough terrain.

This principle matters for our faith—and our current study of the doctrine of revelation. It’s one thing to learn the basic contours of biblical teaching on such subjects. It’s another to be able to address some of the common challenges to the doctrine. Now that we have built a foundational understanding of revelation, we close by considering three objections raised to this doctrine.

First, we hear today that the Scripture doesn’t include some books it should. At different points, you may have heard that the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, and the Gnostic Gospels should all have been part of the “canon” of Scripture—the accepted body of texts that make up the biblical text. Different news shows and websites raise a hue and cry over these and other documents, asserting that the early church acted in a partisan way back in the fourth century when it recognized the biblical canon.

It’s true that the church did have to sort out which texts were biblical and which weren’t. The basic process of recognizing biblical books looked like this: the Spirit inspired the biblical author; the biblical author produced a manuscript, which was then copied and passed around among churches; the churches, through the Spirit, recognized the divine origin of the document, and used it in weekly worship by reading, teaching, and preaching from it. In the fourth century, the church formalized the official list of all biblical books.

In the case of all three of the “Gospels” mentioned above, even a cursory glance shows that these texts diverge from the doctrine and teaching of the biblical books. There is no magic formula by which the canonical books were recognized in the fourth century, but if a book did not share the same theology as the other texts used in congregational worship in the age of the early church, the church did not receive it as Scripture. In most cases, we do not need theological expertise to see major differences between non–biblical books and biblical books. The authorship, date, and theological content of biblical documents helped the church acknowledge the canon and thus handle it as the very Word of God.

Second, we hear today that there are many errors in the Scripture. Critics who raise this objection point to the “variances,” or discrepancies, between different biblical manuscripts to make this point. Like the first objection, this is not difficult to handle. Today, we possess a shocking number of New Testament manuscripts—over 5,500 in Greek alone, most over 450 pages long. This means that we have many copies of New Testament documents, around 1000 times more, in fact, than we have of classical authors like Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. Top scholars point out the significance of this reality. Peter Williams, a theologian affiliated with Cambridge University, has noted that the average New Testament document was copied into far more languages—and thus used by far more churches—than the average non–biblical document. This is a heartening finding, to be sure.

With any exorbitantly–large group of manuscripts like this, there are bound to be some copying issues. About 99 percent of all variances—differences in manuscripts—amount to either spelling errors, minor changes, or confused phrases. Just one percent are classed as “viable variants”—we think here of a tiny handful of contested passages like Mark 16:9–10 and John 7:53–8:11. We do not shy away from honesty here: there are a handful of contested passages in the biblical text, it is true. Yes, there are some minor disagreements over our modern translations. Yes, we do have to handle matters like copyist errors in church history. But we still have reliable access to God’s revelation in Scripture, faithfully preserved by the Spirit’s power through the ages.

Third, we hear today that we need a more personal word from God to us. The Bible is presented by some popular authors today as perfectly fine, but not tailored to us. It’s good for standard theological and spiritual purposes, but we need a more personal word, one directly given to us. Along similar lines, a good number of professing Christians think they need and are given “direct revelation” by God to guide their lives. Many of us spend precious little time reading our Bibles and far more time trying to hear from God on our own.

As we have seen, God has already given us his revelation through Scripture, a Bible that is able and ready to equip us in every way for life and godliness. Further, God has nowhere promised to speak audibly to us so that we know which subway route to take, which company to join, or which person to marry. The Spirit gives us guidance, and God offers us assurance and confidence and direction in his special revelation, Scripture.