“We have the Bible because God desired that we have it ...”
How did He do that? Stone tablets or maybe did He use men? Men that He gave authority to?
Tell us which versions of the Bible you consider authoritative and why. Can you?
How did God ensure we have the Bible? Do I need to start at the beginning? Yes, he DID use men, "but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." (II Peter 1:21) And first of all God did write on stone tablets and after that he spoke to Moses who wrote his words down. Then God inspired prophets to write his revelation. Then there was the Word made flesh, Jesus, who spoke and taught truths and then the Holy Spirit reminded those disciples of what Jesus taught after he ascended back to heaven and they also wrote down those words as lead by God the Holy Spirit. God chose Paul to reveal further truth to the believers through letters as did Peter and James, John and Jude. Copies were made of those letters by careful scribes just as those did and they were dispersed throughout the entire known world of believers. The following link goes into further detail http://themeliosproject.com/2010/02/07/reliability-of-the-scriptures/:
Throughout the centuries, men have sought to undermine the Bible and disprove it as what it claims to be: the inspired Word of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:20-21). Countless objections have been raised toward its accuracy and authenticity. How can we be sure that we hold the actual Scriptures in our hands today? Haven’t they been distorted and chopped up throughout the years? Doesn’t the Bible contradict itself? Wasn’t the Bible written down years after the events described in it took place?
For every question, there is an answer. Hopefully, in this post, many of those questions will indeed be answered. In exploring the reliability and authenticity of the Scriptures, four main points are going to be covered: 1) the textual validity the Bible, 2) the archaeological evidence that supports it, 3) the internal consistency of the Bible, and 4) the veracity and magnitude of the prophecies fulfilled in the Scriptures.
This link goes into further detail about The Formation of the Canon of the New Testament http://www.the-highway.com/ntcanon_Warfield.html:
IN ORDER to obtain a correct understanding of what is called the formation of the Canon of the New Testament, it is necessary to begin by fixing very firmly in our minds one fact which is obvious enough when attention is once called to it. That is, that the Christian church did not require to form for itself the idea of a “ canon,” — or, as we should more commonly call it, of a “Bible,” — that is, of a collection of books given of God to be the authoritative rule of faith and practice. It inherited this idea from the Jewish church, along with the thing itself, the Jewish Scriptures, or the “ Canon of the Old Testament.” The church did not grow up by natural law: it was founded. And the authoritative teachers sent forth by Christ to found His church, carried with them, as their most precious possession, a body of divine Scriptures, which they imposed on the church that they founded as its code of law. No reader of the New Testament can need proof of this; on every page of that book is spread the evidence that from the very beginning the Old Testament was as cordially recognized as law by the Christian as by the Jew. The Christian church thus was never without a “Bible” or a “canon.”
But the Old Testament books were not the only ones which the apostles (by Christ’s own appointment the authoritative founders of the church) imposed upon the infant churches, as their authoritative rule of faith and practice. No more authority dwelt in the prophets of the old covenant than in themselves, the apostles, who had been “made sufficient as ministers of a new covenant “; for (as one of themselves argued) “if that which passeth away was with glory, much more that which remaineth is in glory.” Accordingly not only was the gospel they delivered, in their own estimation, itself a divine revelation, but it was also preached “in the Holy Ghost” (I Pet. i. 12); not merely the matter of it, but the very words in which it was clothed were “of the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. ii. 13). Their own commands were, therefore, of divine authority (I Thess. iv. 2), and their writings were the depository of these commands (II Thess. ii. 15). “If any man obeyeth not our word by this epistle,” says Paul to one church (II Thess. iii. 14), “note that man, that ye have no company with him.” To another he makes it the test of a Spirit-led man to recognize that what he was writing to them was “the commandments of the Lord” (I Cor. xiv. 37). Inevitably, such writings, making so awful a claim on their acceptance, were received by the infant churches as of a quality equal to that of the old “Bible “; placed alongside of its older books as an additional part of the one law of God; and read as such in their meetings for worship — a practice which moreover was required by the apostles (I Thess. v. 27; Col. iv. 16; Rev. 1. 3). In the apprehension, therefore, of the earliest churches, the “Scriptures” were not a closed but an increasing “canon.” Such they had been from the beginning, as they gradually grew in number from Moses to Malachi; and such they were to continue as long as there should remain among the churches “men of God who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”