Wednesday, May 11

Wednesday

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.  – 2 Timothy 3:16-17

(Are you all ready for some theology today??)

In these two sentences, Paul is telling Timothy (and us) why the Bible is to be authoritative and trustworthy in every area of our lives.  He says that it is “God breathed”, this is what theologians call the doctrine of the Inspiration of Scripture.  Simply put, this means that it comes from God!  The Bible did not come from the best religious ideas of the apostles or prophets, it is not a collection of the best human wisdom through the ages.  It originated when God spoke to them and they wrote down the words of Scripture.  This is not to say that God dictated the words of the Bible. Obviously He used the personalities and styles of the various human authors, but God originated it and preserved it, and thus the final product is preserved from error.

The only verse which gives us a hint of how God accomplished the process of inspiration is 2 Peter 1:21: “No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy spirit spoke from God.”  The word “moved” is used in Acts (27:15, 17) to describe the effect of strong winds upon Paul’s ship.  Luke says that the ship was “driven along” by the wind, meaning that it was no longer under the control of the sailors, but of the wind.  But just as the sailors were active, though not in control, so the human authors of Scripture were active, but not in control.  The Holy Spirit moved the authors so that the words they wrote were the words God intended.  God was in control of the whole process.

Closely tied to the doctrine of Inspiration is the doctrine of Inerrancy.  This is the belief that the Bible is without error or contradiction.  This is a difficult issue.  Anyone who has read through all or part of the Bible will likely have noticed that there are more than a few difficult passages and even some apparent contradictions.  Yet the Bible itself claims to be inspired, true, perfect, trustworthy, and sure. 

At this point an astute skeptic might accuse me of begging the question. I’m saying that the Bible is the inspired Word of God because the Bible says so.  But anybody can make a claim like that and it doesn’t prove a thing.  So how do we verify whether or not the Bible’s claim is true? 

This is an incredibly important question.  Can we trust the Word of God?

There isn’t enough space or time here to go into all of the reasons for why the Bible is trustworthy and inspired by God.  But here a brief outline of what I think is the strongest reason for the reliability of the Bible

Jesus Christ believed and taught that the Bible is trustworthy and without error.  I believe in and follow Jesus Christ. Conclusion: I must believe that the Bible is trustworthy and without error. Everything that Jesus Christ said with reference to the Scriptures shows that He had implicit trust in the totality of Scripture as the authoritative and reliable Word of God.

The Bible says that God scoffs at scoffers (Prov. 3:34). If you do not humble yourself before God and ask Him to open your spiritually blind eyes, you won’t be able to understand His truth (2 Cor. 4:4, 2 Thess. 2:11-12). Jesus said “If any man is willing to do God’s will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself.”  In other words, the issue is being willing to submit to God.  If you come to the Bible to find fault with it and to provide yourself with excuses to continue in rebellion against God, you will find supposed errors.  But if you come in submission to God, with the desire to follow His ways, you will find solutions to most of the difficulties and your life will be blessed beyond measure!

Jeff Frazier