Proving God is not a liar

How would you feel if you were married to a guy who came home one day and said, “Good news, Honey! I now believe that you are not cheating on me. I had you checked out by a detective and he said you’re telling the truth”?

This is how I feel when I read that some archeological discovery has “vindicated” the Word of God. “Yippee! Science has proved that God is not a liar!” (At least till the next accusation.) I can only imagine how God feels about the way we take the testimony of notorious liars to prove His truthfulness.

I happen to be in the Old Testament these days, and I came across a casual mention of the tunnel King Hezekiah (who reigned between 727 and 698 B.C.) built to defend Jerusalem against Assyrian invasion:

“The rest of the deeds of Hezekiah … and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?” (2 Kings 20:20).

Should we rejoice that carbon-14 dating proved the tunnel was built when the Bible says it was, confounding centuries of skeptics? Let us rejoice—and then let us be embarrassed that it took the word of geologist Amos Frumkin to persuade us God told the truth. If your marital trust was this thin, you would end up in divorce court.

The tunnel is very cool, by the way. Two teams of men working 700 years before Christ started at opposite ends and hacked through 1,749 feet of bedrock, meeting in the middle. Jerusalem is on a hill and therefore defensible on all sides—with the single drawback that its main water source lies on the cliffside overlooking the Kidron Valley, and would be inaccessible during a siege. The solution was a new channel to redirect water from the Gihon spring to the Pool of Siloam:

“… Hezekiah closed the upper outlet of the waters of Gihon and directed them down to the west side of the city of David” (2 Chronicles 32:30).

In 1838, Edward Robinson startled the archaeological world by discovering Hezekiah’s tunnel. Everyone was surprised, except the people who always put the Word of God above the word of man. It is the same way with everything God says (Luke 19:32).