The Bible: God’s Inspired Word
The Bible is Special. Every Christian knows that. But why?
What makes the Bible special? What puts it in a league of its own?
When we think about scripture, the Bible, there are several things we might say about it. Usually we run to the three I’s – Inerrant, Infallible, Inspired.
And yes, those are great – I affirm them all. But it’s an odd answer to me, because one of those things is not like the others. One is primary, the others are secondary.
What makes the Bible special is that it’s the very words of God. It’s inspired.
More important than infallibility (does not teach error) and inerrancy (does not contain error) is that it’s inspired.[1]
This is Gerald Bray, professor at Beeson Divinity School:
“The Bible is not the source of our doctrine and spiritual life merely because it contains no errors, since the same might be said of a dictionary or computer manual. Infallibility and inerrancy have their place, but divine inspiration remains the key to interpreting the text, because that's what makes it the word of God.”[2]
So, if you recall from previous posts, I kind of gave the framework of Divine revelation. We established:
For creatures to know the Creator, God must reveal Himself.
God reveals Himself through General Revelation (creation, conscience, reason), but that’s not enough for us to have a relationship with Him.
Special Revelation – God’s word – is necessary for us to know Him.
But I stopped short of talking about this actual book. I spoke a little of its formation, but not the final product that we’ve been given.
What makes this book special? It’s God’s self-revelation. It’s from Him, it’s breathed out by God (As 2 Timothy 3:16 would say).
Here’s my point. We don’t love the book for the book’s sake. It’s a means to an end. A means to God, and it’s God who we worship, not the Bible.
John Piper, in reflecting on his decades of fighting for a high view of scripture, compares the Bible to a window of an Alpine Chalet. He writes:
I have stood in front of this window all these years, not to protect it from being broken, or because the owner of the chalet told me to, but because of the glory of the Alps on the other side. I am a captive of the glory of God revealed in Scripture. There are reasons deeper than my experience for focusing on the glory of God. But I cannot deny what I have seen and the power it has had.[3]
The Bible reveals God to us.
Because God gave us the Bible to reveal Himself to us.
And so, the Bible stands alone in what it is and what it does.
Thus everything we believe about scripture flows out of this point – that the Bible was written by God to show us God. What I want to do in my next post is dig into our doctrine of scripture and think through some consequences of inspiration, but today, I’m just going to give two notes on inspiration. I’m trying to keep these emails short, but there’s a lot I really want to cover in them.
Inspiration is Granular
First, inspiration is granular. Every letter, punctuation, jot and tiddle is inspired. There is a precision to God’s inspiration of His text. There is not a stray word in the Bible outside of where God wants it.
We see this in places like when Jesus is asked about marriage in next life, and He says – haven’t you read the Bible? What’s God say to Moses? (This is my paraphrasing of Matthew 22:29) I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” But these boys are all dead.
He didn’t say, “I was the God” but “I am the God.” The verb tense of Am vs Was makes a profound theological point about eternal life. God is their God, not was their God.. Verse 33 – when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at His teaching.
Or, Galatians 3:16.
Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ.
In Hebrew – and Greek – unlike English, Offspring is distinguishable in the singular and plural. I think in English, the plural of offspring is offspring. Like fish or deer. The red squiggly underline of “offsprings” keeps reminding me of this. So that’s not super clear to us, but it certainly was to them.
And so there’s laser precision to what God wants His word to say. And yet, it was written by men, and not emailed from heaven by God. It comes through their own writings.
Inspiration is General
Generally speaking[4] – the Bible was not dictated by God to authors to write. Isaiah didn’t give his first draft to God to proofread, get a version back covered in red-pen corrections, and then go on to publish it. No, man wrote what he wanted according to his own goals and style and education.
Here’s Herman Bavinck:
“The human authors retain their powers of reflection and deliberation, their emotional states and freedom of the will. Research . . . reflection, and memory . . . the use of sources, and all the ordinary means that an author employs in the process of writing a book are used.”[5]
A few years back, I remember I was teaching through 1 John in student ministry, and something of Paul’s in Sunday School. I was shocked at how differently they wrote. Equally inspired and important, but Paul’s thought was more linear and bullet pointed, John’s was more circuitous and repetitive. Two different styles from two different men.
BB Warfield is super helpful in explaining – He writes,
If God wished to give his people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul he brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.”[6]
And so, while the details are inspired, we want to also keep in mind that the authors are human. We have both a general and granular inspiration - and these things are not at odds. They actually come together to create quite a masterpiece.
So, given that God has spoken to us scripture, what are the implications for how we understand this book? I’ll give you a few next week… Or maybe over the next two weeks.
[1] Bray, God Is Love, 55ff.
[2] Bray, 57–58.
[3] John Piper, A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 11.
[4] I say generally because in the prophets, you have some occasions where God tells them exactly what to write. Daniel “what does this mean” “Don’t worry about it, just write it”. But that’s pretty rare.
[5] Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), 195 (RD 1:433).
[6] Letham, 195.