Why Study History from the Bible?

Written 2005; revised 2014

History is a puzzle. No one alive today witnessed the happenings of 150 years ago and beyond, so we must rely on the fragments of evidence left by people throughout history to piece together the true picture of the past.

Let me pause here to say that there are those who say that there is no absolute truth, and to these individuals I would offer that there is no room for doubt about certain facts. Wood comes from trees; rocks are inorganic; proteins are made up of strings of amino acids; 1 + 1 = 2 and so on. To suggest otherwise is a semantics game. There is such a thing as truth. It is that which is real, not fictional, past or present.  It may even be possible to discern how and by or with whom it transpired, with probabilities filling in the gaps when empirical evidence is silent.

My personal goal of studying history is to discover the truth about our common heritage: to discover how people of past ages lived, thought and created, and to do this alongside my children, in the hope of beginning to grasp God’s purpose for it all.

As we go through the Bible, I approach the study of history from a Christian worldview. I take the Bible at face value and therefore interpret historical data through the lens of scripture. Those in opposition to the biblical account (particularly the six-day creation) tend to interpret history through the lens of evolutionary theory, which has presented its case for the necessity of billions of years to have gone by in order to reach our current state of evolution.  Rocket science aside, time is actually the enemy of evolution. This is due to the tendency for things to wear out over time, or to go from a state of order to disorder, as stated in the second law of thermodynamics. As a result of this and other wrenches in the monkey theory, previously militant evolutionists are coming to the rational conclusion that life is the product of Intelligent Design. I choose to call the Designer "God," and there is a wealth of evidence to indicate that the Holy Bible is His inspired and inerrant Word.

I didn‘t always believe the Bible was true. In fact, I was a rather proud and foolish atheist. I wore a little button pin that said, “God is dead and I want his job.” Never mind the paradox! I enjoyed engaging “weak-minded Christians” in debate, using all the classic questions, such as, “If God is good, why did he create evil?” and “If the earth is only a few thousand years old, why can we see starlight from billions of light years away?” (Russell Humphreys has a very well-thought-out answer for this phenomenon in Starlight and Time.) Somehow, those I asked never seemed to have satisfactory answers to my questions; it was always the “take it by faith” argument, which hardly satisfied the rational curiosity in me. Maybe that’s why I have such a passion to find the answers to difficult questions like these. Granted, I’ll never know a fraction of all there is to know, but I long to be able to answer the skeptics with something solid, not mere speculation, and not just for the sake of debate. There is a place for faith; we cannot please God without it! But at some point before the light comes on, the switch must be flipped, and the mind has to embrace truth.  It strengthens my own faith to see concrete evidence for what I believe, and I can't help but desire to lead others into a more complete understanding of the truth.

So it is with confidence and excitement that I approach history through the Bible. Day 1: God created the heavens and the earth and said, “Let there be light.” I believe that. I buy the whole thing about Critters on the ark; Israelites delivered from slavery in Egypt; David and Goliath; Jonah in the belly of the big fish; Jesus walking on water, His death, resurrection and His promised return to earth to reign as King for 1000 years. I buy the whole thing because it all fits together perfectly. It’s never been proven wrong, it stands up to reason, and it dramatically changed my entire life. I buy into the historical facts, the doctrinal teachings and the sometimes rather painful implications for my own life, from the mundane “Wives, submit to your husbands,“ (about those dishes in the sink…) to the profound possibility that I may one day die for my faith.


I continue to study the scriptures and other historical documents, imparting to my children what I have learned, and I continue to learn right alongside them. We keep all our notes, drawings and discoveries in a history notebook, which we love to look at together, and look forward to adding to for years to come.