The Inspiration of the Bible

RV173-02

Faith

The great question today is whether the Bible is the Word of God, and thus merits our complete faith and devotion for guidance in daily living. That is a very great question, and we pointed out that, in Revelation 17:17, God says that He has spoken the words of judgment against Babylon. That judgment is in two phases: religious, which is what we've been looking at; and, next time we will begin chapter 18, looking at it its political and economic phase. Everything that God has pronounced against this system is going to be carried out because the words of God will be fulfilled.

So, faith in the Bible today is at low ebb, as the place of people's faith is instead in the principles of humanism, with its rejection of supernaturalism. Faith in man is the thing. So, you have expressions of how these Christians are trying to do this and do that, but you have to always translate expressions like that (what that phrase is saying). People look at us and say, "You guys with all this faith in the Bible, who take it literally, and as truth, are demanding certain conduct. You're demanding certain things in the elements (the institutions) of our society."

Inerrancy

They try. And in the past, they have victoriously thought that they have found a mistake. Some of the old copies (in the 1920s) of the Encyclopedia Britannica had some confident errors in the Bible which had been demonstrated. For example, the Bible speaks about the Hittites' culture. And until the 1920s, nobody ever found anything about the Hittites. There was nothing written. There was nothing in archeological remains, and they concluded that the writer of Bible just made that up like Joseph Smith made up names. And then one day, somebody with a shovel dug up the Hittite culture. It was a big, extensive, sophisticated culture of the ancient world. The Bible was proven right on track. The subsequent editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica had to very quickly change those paragraphs on that subject. So, the Bible simply confirms what it claims.

Satan has brought into question this issue of placing our total confidence in this inspired, inerrant book. To find the mind of God, Satan has pointed people in the wrong direction. He has pointed them to a Bible which is written by fallible men, and has fallible ideas inserted, but these thoughts are supposed to be inspirational, and what is true is to be determined by man's fallible reason. How is that for being smart? The rejection of the Bible as an infallible book, and what is it, can be determined by the fallible mind of man. The inspiration of the Bible is a conviction. It comes to you from God. You can't argue people into this. You get it from the indwelling Holy Spirit. There comes a subtle conviction upon your heart. But the Bible has always proven to stand us in good stead.

We pointed out that the supernatural elements of the Bible are the unity of the message – that so many writers over so many years; the fulfillment of prophecy in detail; the view of the sinfulness of man; and, the refreshing, ennobling teachings, all prove that God has a great view of man once he is regenerated.

So, theologians from New Testament times have firmly held to the Bible's inspiration, and thus to its infallibility. That is no longer true today. Most preachers, who have spoken in their pulpits in their pulpits this day do not believe that the Bible is a book free of all error. Therefore, they reject the whole foundation of Christianity, and the whole foundation upon which our magnificent Western culture was built. The reject the concept that there is a body of revealed absolute truth to be found in the Bible. The question how knowledge can be gained about God.

The Scripture is the answer. The Scripture is the essential link between man's fallen mind and the information that he needs about God. The Bible is the connecting point. It is the linchpin of any knowledge of God. Scripture's essential function of conveying divine viewpoint to the mind of man has been virtually abandoned by most ministers today.

So, what is a believer to do? He is hard-pressed to feed his soul. Those who still believe that the Bible contains all the truth of the teachings of God are dismissed as rather, as one man said, "Pitiful remnants of medieval credulity – The prisoners of a fossilized tradition." To the liberal today, all that the Bible can provide is themes for theology to discuss, but not content.

So, the modern man's problems with the infallibility of the Bible is not due to alleged errors that have been shown in the book, but to the Bible's claim of claiming divine truth, in human language, produced by the Holy Spirit, which is therefore inerrant, and from which you cannot dismiss, and which you cannot argue from. When man leaves the solid ground of inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he inevitably goes into emotionalism or experiences to find truth. That's what happened to the charismatic movement. They left the teachings of the Word, and went into their feelings and into their experiences.

The Inspiration of the Bible

Verbal Inspiration

On the other hand, you would discover, in your studies of the Greek language, that when you come to a man of considerable education, such as Luke, the medical man, that the gospel of Luke is very hard Greek. It has something like 600 words that are not used anyplace else in the Bible (just that one time). And a lot of these words are used in the book of Acts in connection with the shipwreck chapters, where he is using technical terms relative to nautical matters. But it is very clear that Luke has different style, and he has a considerably more advance vocabulary, but everything in the gospel of Luke, in that high-class Greek, is still absolutely true, and guided by the Holy Spirit in its very words.

So, we're not saying that this was a dictation process. The writers were not writing like secretaries, whatever they heard from the Spirit of God. They didn't even know that they were writing Scripture. They were just writing like Luke said when he wrote the book of Acts, to his friend Theophilus. He said, "I've been in on this whole thing from the very first, and I have had come into my possession manuscripts and writings, where people have recorded details about the writings and the early church." He said, "I've taken those manuscripts and I've studied them. And I have collated the information, and I'm going to set it out in an orderly form to give you a history of the New Testament church. And that is exactly what he was doing, but every time his pen touched that parchment, the Spirit of God was guiding him in the words – words from his own vocabulary, but words which were absolutely accurate in what they were saying.

So, this accuracy applies to every word in the original manuscripts (the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts), but the copies that we have today of those Greek and Hebrew manuscripts are virtually the same. There is very little doubt that we have the Greek manuscripts and the Hebrew manuscripts just as they were when they came from the hand of the original writers.

So, the term "verbal inspiration" is the thing I want you to learn. This pertains to what is referred to here, in Revelation 17:17, as the Words of God which are going to be fulfilled. Verbal inspiration deals with the words of the Bible. The words are God's words used in the style and vocabulary of the writers.

You cannot convey a thought apart from words. Try to think of a thought right now without putting it into words. It's impossible to think a though without putting it into words. And you cannot convey a though accurately unless you have the right words.

A business man will dictate to his secretary a letter so that he can pick the right words to convey his thoughts exactly.

When I was in Officer Candidate School in the Marine Corps, we spent a lot of time practicing how to write out orders, and practicing how to be very definitive in the words we used, so that when we gave an order, it was fool-proof as much as possible, and it would not be misunderstood when that written communication was written to whomever it was directed to.

The Bible writers faced the same thing. There are times when they wrote about things that were completely beyond their knowledge – things that God had guide them into, and that God had to explain to them. And that was even harder for them to talk about things that were not within their experience. It was things that were revealed to them.

For example, Isaiah 40:22 illustrates this. Speaking of God: "It is He who sits above the vault (or the circle) of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in." This verse refutes the nonsense of people. One of the mistakes that people thought they found in the Bible was that the Bible teaches that the earth is flat. They concluded that to be the case because the Bible spoke about the four corners of the earth, which is simply a way that we speak about the extensive expanse of the earth. Consider someone like Christopher Columbus, whose great event 500 years ago we'll be commemorating tomorrow, and who was a great student of the Word, and a great reader of Scripture. I have no doubt that he ran across this Scripture, and he knew that the earth was not flat. He knew, as all wise navigators and men of science of his day knew, that the earth was round. They already knew that. Only the most superstitious and ignorant people of the day thought that the earth was flat. And here the Bible clearly speaks about the vault (that is, the circle) of the earth.

Now, how to describe such an earth requires special words given by the Holy Spirit. Another example of that is in Job 26:7. Job was probably the first Old Testament book to be written: "He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing." Now, how could these people know about gravitational pull, and the rotation of celestial bodies? They had no science for that. And yet, here he is talking about that. God the Holy Spirit comes in, and gives them the words so that what he says we can fully understand, and is scientifically accurate.

So, what the Bible does is that it claims divine authority for its very words. The Word is a vehicle for communicating of thought from one mind to another. So, the expression "the Word of God" refers to the Bible as a collection of divinely selected words to convey the divine viewpoint thoughts of God to us. Whatever words came from the mouth of God must, because of the veracity of God, be completely true and trustworthy.

Liberals

No, were the words that the people who wrote the Bible recorded? Were they the same? Were they equated to the very words of God? Yes, they were. Exodus 4:12 is an example of that. Moses is objecting to facing the Pharaoh because he's not eloquent: "Now then go, and I, even I (that is, God), will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say." Now that's very clear. God says, "I have a message. You're going to carry My message, and I'm going to give you the words to say. You're not going to be a stumblebum over your words. You're not going to be a cotton-mouth. You're going speak very clearly, and your words will come very distinctly."

Exodus 4:15 says, "And you are to speak to him, and put the words in his mouth. And I, even I, will be with your mouth, and his mouth, and I will teach you what you are to do." Here, God is speaking to Moses' brother Aaron. And God says, "I'm going to tell you, Aaron, what to say, and you tell your brother what to say." We have explicit words of God being spoken.

So, when Moses spoke, and when he wrote later of what he had said (what he recorded) were the very words of God that he had recently been given.

Please notice Deuteronomy 18:18: "I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you. And I will put My words in his mouth, that he shall to them all that I command them." Here is a great (in the future) prophecy, specifically about the fact that God was going to raise up a prophet like Moses who would be God's spokesman, and that ultimate prophet was Jesus Christ Himself. And here in His humanity, God says, "I'll give Him the words that He will speak." What did Jesus say? Jesus said, "What I have told you doesn't just come from Myself. What I have told you is what God the Father gave Me to tell you." So, even Christ, in His humanity, claimed that His words were the very words of God.

The prophets of God were inspired by God in their spoken words, and they wrote these words down. The information came to them by divine revelation. Revelation is the information that God communicated, many times about things that they had no way of knowing about, like the events of creation. But once God gave that to him, and Moses proceeded to record the information about creation, God very carefully guided the words that He used. And on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, He used the right words. And using the right words conveyed the right message. God placed His words in the mouth of his communicators so that what they said was precisely God's way.

Take a look at Jeremiah 1:9. Then the Lord stretched out His hand and touched and touched my mouth. And the Lord said to me, 'Behold, I have put My mouth in your mouth." Here, the prophet Jeremiah is told explicitly that the words that he would speak would be God's words. This is verbal inspiration. Jeremiah was not just given thoughts for him to put down the way he wanted them. He was given thoughts that God then developed in words that God chose. The same concept is repeated many times in Scripture. We won't read them tonight. Let me give you the passages. You'll find this in Ezekiel 2:7; Ezekiel 3:4; Ezekiel 3:10; Isaiah 1:10; 2 Samuel 23:1-2; Daniel 10:9-11; Hosea 1:1; and, Joel 1:1. All of those verses repeatedly state the words that the messenger spoke were words from God, not just ideas. That's why you have this formula so often in the Old Testament: "Thus saith the Lord." It is because what follows that expression are the very words of God.

The New Testament writers also declared that their words were the words of God. They too, when they wrote, wrote as inspired communicators. In John 14:26, we read, "But the Helper (the Holy Spirit), whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you." Here the disciples are promised that they would receive a lot of instruction from Jesus. And some of that might be hard for them to recall, but the Holy Spirit was going to come along and enable them to recall all of this instruction, and to communicate it in an exact, truthful way. Well, that requires that the Spirit of God would guide them in their words.

1 Thessalonians 2:13 says, "And for this reason, we also constantly thank God, that when you receive from us the Word of God's message, you accepted it not as the word of man, but what it really is, the Word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe." Now, there is an important principle. The word of God we cannot describe as magical words, but the Word of God are Words of great power. This is why Hebrews 4:12 says, "The Word of God is alive and active." There is something that is powerful when you have God's Words. And when you read Scripture, it is all God's Words.

Red-Letter Bibles

So, the Bible, when you read it, you are listening to God. You can imagine a deep base voice; a middle type voice; or, a very high tenor voice, however you like God to sound, but what you are hearing is the very voice of God in His own Words. Now, that makes it very sobering, and that's why the passage in Hebrews 4:12, using the phrase, "The Word of God is alive and active" is well-stated.

I am constantly, in our morning teachers' prayer meetings in the academy, where we go through reading passages of Scripture, amazed how something jumps out at me that hadn't struck me there before. It may be three, four, or five very powerful words that just all-of-a-sudden stand out on that page. And I think, "This is really strange." I mean, this happens all the time. It is something that I've read many times, and here suddenly comes something that is so pertinent, that it stands out – maybe because of what's happening in the world today in some respect. But what I'm experiencing is that active power there in the very Words of Scripture. They are the Words of God.

Does this make the Bible a supernatural book? Its message is supernatural. Does this make the Bible something that we worship, like the liberals accuse us of doing? No, we don't worship pages and ink, and the binding.

I remember one day when I was a junior, and I attended the church service at the Lutheran Church in Chicago. It was a cold day, and I was outside in front on the steps of the Church waiting for my parents to come. And there was a concrete banister that came down to a flat place next to the stairs. And I put my Bible on that flat and I sat on it so I would be warmer – keeping part of the extremities of the body warm. And a lady came out and saw me sitting on my Bible, and she had a fit: "You're sitting on the Bible? You're sitting on the Word of God?" And she had me all intimidated. And I got off that Bible, and I was really warm by that time, and I lost my cushion of protection. To her, that was a terrible thing to sit on the Bible.

Well, we don't worship the Bible as a book, but what is in it, we take very seriously, word-for-word. The Bible stresses the fact that its Words are the very Words of God. And we have shown you that the Bible writers claim that they spoke God's Word. The question now is: did they also write God's Word? Well, let's take a look at Romans 9:17. The apostle Paul says, "For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose, I raise you up to demonstrate my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.'" Here the apostle Paul is quoting Exodus 9:16, which is exactly what Pharaoh said, and he is saying that: "The Scripture said." What Pharaoh said is recorded precisely in the Scriptures as what God said. God said this to Pharaoh, and what God said is what is recorded here in the book of Romans as the very Word of God. What he said is also what's written.

Galatians 3:8 is another example of this – that what God said is what is written in the Bible. The apostle Paul is quoting Genesis 22:18. Galatians 3:8 says, "And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.'" And Paul is quoting Genesis 22:18, and he's calling this "Scripture." So here again, what God said to Abraham (His very Words), Paul in this verse is saying that that was Scripture. So, what we have in the Bible is also what God said.

Certainly, we have to take into account what Jesus Christ thought about the Bible – about the words. In John 10:35, Jesus made a dramatic statement, "The Scriptures cannot be broken." And in Matthew 4:4, Jesus says, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Now how are we going to have the words that come from the mouth of God? There is only one way. You're not going to hear messages. Only the charismatics hear messages, and those are not from God, if they do hear anything. There is only one way that we hear the Words of God, and that is in Scripture: "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God."

So, the words of God, that Jesus said, are what are in Scripture. And the writings of Scripture by Moses are equated by Jesus to the Word of God. John 5:46: "Do you think that I will accuse you before the Father? The one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me." Verse 47: "But if you do not believe his writings, how would you believe My Words?" Moses wrote about Jesus. Moses wrote the words which God gave to him. These were God's Words, and they should believe them. Now Jesus says, I don't speak for Myself. I don't make this up. My message all comes from God. I'm giving you the Word of God. If you don't believe Moses, which you don't, why would you expect to believe Me?" Jesus said that Moses wrote the Pentateuch which prophetically speaks of Christ.

Well, the liberals deny all of this. Do you remember the two disciples on the Emmaus road? Jesus condemned them. He rebuked them in Luke 24:25 for the fact that they did not believe what the Word of God (the Old Testament Scriptures) said.

Matthew 12:40 says that Jonah was swallowed by a large sea monster. Now, those are exact words, and that's exactly what happened. They are precise.

Jesus declared that God created Adam and Eve. Was He a mistaken man? No, that's what the Word of God says. That is exactly the record that we have.

The flood was a historical fact. Jesus pointed this out in Luke 17:26. Was He mistaken? No, it really did happen. What do the geological scientists say today? Some of them say that there was no flood, and that there never such a thing on this earth. They say that there was a total covering of water over all the earth. Who is right? Jesus, or these scientists?

In Luke 17:32, Jesus said that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt. Was she actually salt? Could you have sat there in the field, and cooked a little dinner of bacon of eggs, and scraped a little bit of Lot's wife off to salt your eggs? Yes, you could. It was real salt; it was right there; and, it was for real. There is no joke about it. And everything that Jesus did in His post-resurrection ministry was to explain the Words of God to His disciples.

It is absolute nonsense then to speak about inspired thoughts apart from inspired words. That would be like speaking about a tune without notes. You cannot have a tune without pitch. And pitch is carried by the notes. Pitch is expressed through the notes on the staff. If you don't have notes on the staff, you don't have a song. You don't have a melody. And if you don't have the Words of God, and the exact Words of God, you don't have the exact inspired Scriptures conveying the mind of God. So, without God's Word, there could be no accuracy in the ideas. Without inspired words, there is no such thing as expository preaching. Expository preaching is explaining the meaning of the Words of the Bible. Why should we come to church and spend the time, going in such research of what the words mean, if the words are simply the words of men? There would be no reason for that. But because it is the Word of God, that's what we're explaining, now it carries great impact upon us.

You will remember that it was Jesus who said that the Old Testament is so accurate. In Matthew 5:17-18, He said that all the details of the words are going to be fulfilled. He said, "Not a jot," which is the smallest Hebrew letter. And He says, "And not a tittle" (not a little marking), which is like the dot over an "i," or the cross on the "t;" the little things that you have under the Hebrew letters. Jesus says, "Not a one of those little details is going to be lost until it is fulfilled."

Letter Inspiration

In Galatians 3:16, Paul says that the promise to Abraham to be a blessing to all nations was not through "things" (plural), but through "the thing." Isn't that amazing? Why would Paul get so specific? Galatians 3:16: "Now the promises were spoked to Abraham and to his seed." He does not say, "And to seeds," as referring to many, but rather to one: "And to your seed, that is Christ." So, here you have even the singular or plural is controlled by the Holy Spirit because it was a seed, namely Christ, that the blessing of salvation would come.

Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Inscriptions

In Daniel 5:5, you have the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast: "You are weighed in the balances and found wanting." Even while the drunken party was going on, the Medes were out there, and they had diverted the Euphrates River which came under the walls, and was the source of water for Babylon. They diverted the river, and then came under the wall. They marched right under it, and the city fell to them that night, and Belshazzar was killed. Now, what was on that wall was reported to us exactly. So, any kind of inscriptions that the Bible gives us, that is included in being inspired.

Revelations

Divine Dictation

Records of History

Devotional Literature

Doctrines

The Teachings of Angels

We stress that because the liberals break up the Bible, and they say that some parts of it are not true. The parts that they don't like, that are not true, are those that express the vengeance of God – the parts where God tells us what He's going to do to express His wrath against mankind, such as in the book of the Revelation. And they say that that is not trustworthy, and that that is a misrepresentation of a loving God. The full content of every book of the Bible; all of its doctrinal statements; and, all of its principles – Jesus said that all parts of the Bible were equally inspired.

The writers of the Scriptures were not omniscient. They labored under the same limitations and the ignorance of the people of their day. They didn't know about science; they didn't know everything about history; and, they believed certain things that were wrong, but when they wrote Scripture, their human misconceptions were never included in the Word of God.

Practical Personal Matters

When he found a slave, he sends him back to his friend Philemon, and he says, "Treat Onesimus as you would treat me." This is a personal matter, but it's absolutely inspired.

Everything in the Bible is inspired of God. That's the contrast of biblical Christians against liberal Christians. We hold to what the Bible claims as true – verbal plenary inspiration.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1993

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