Today we’re discussing the third guiding principle when it comes to the doctrine of Scripture, but first let’s do a recap…
Guiding Principle #1: What I believe about the Bible affects what I believe about everything else.
Guiding Principle #2: The Bible isn’t a book about good people and bad people. It’s a book about bad people and a really good God. The main character of every story in the Bible is Jesus.
GUIDING PRINCIPLE #3
The Bible is INSPIRED, INFALLIBLE and INERRANT
(the three “I’s”). It was breathed out by God,
is completely trustworthy, and perfectly communicates everything God wanted to say without any errors.
Let’s dig a little deeper into the three “I’s”…
1. The Bible is INSPIRED.
In 2 Timothy, Paul exhorts Timothy to maintain godly priorities regardless of the circumstances. 2 Timothy 3:1 begins, “…in the last days difficult times will come…”
The time period Timothy lived in was marked by difficulty, depravity and deception. What was Timothy’s COMPASS for navigating those troubled times? The same compass God has given you and me: His Word.
All Scripture is inspired by God
and is useful…
—2 Timothy 3:16 NLT
The word “inspired” is crucial. The NIV translates the word with two words, “God-breathed.”
It’s hard to imagine a phrase that could more strongly communicate the connection between God and the Bible than this phrase, “All Scripture is God–breathed…”
It’s not merely God-blessed or God-sanctioned. It’s God-breathed.
This phrase describes how the Bible came to be. Scripture is the result of the creative breath of the Spirit of God. The Bible originated as an action of God who breathed it out!
One scholar described that phrase like this:
“The Bible is the Word of God in such a way
that when the Bible speaks, God speaks.”
—B.B. Warfield
A2 Church, the church I pastor, believes in something called verbal plenary inspiration. Here’s what that means:
VERBAL. We believe that the very words, not just the thoughts, but the very words of Scripture are inspired.
PLENARY means we believe that every part of the Bible is inspired.
INSPIRATION is that phrase God-breathed.. In other words, we believe that the Holy Spirit inspired or breathed out not just the thoughts, concepts or big ideas in Scripture, but He also inspired the very details and exact words that were perfectly recorded for us as Scripture.
By that, I don’t want to give the implication that inspiration is somehow synonymous with dictation. For instance, if I breath out a message to a secretary, she writes it down, goes back over it with me and then types it and gives it to me so that I can sign it. That’s dictation, not inspiration.
Somehow, miraculously, the writers of Scripture weren’t passive, mechanical stenographers. They weren’t human typewriters that God periodically decided to punch.
Sometimes God would say to a guy like John, “Write this down…” and then God would give specific instructions about what John was to write (Revelation 21:5).
But most of the time,
God worked through a
miraculous divine / human effort.
For instance, God used Nehemiah to write a first-person account as part of his journal. A scribe named Baruch wrote down the inspired prophecies of a guy named Jeremiah. A trained doctor named Luke, documented eyewitness testimony to write the gospel of Luke, and then spent time with Paul to write the history of the church in the book of Acts.
Furthermore, if you know anything at all about the Bible, you know that the different literary styles, vocabulary, emphases, perspectives, backgrounds and personalities of the human authors come through in every book. Peter doesn’t sound anything at all like Paul. John doesn’t sound like David. And, David doesn’t sound like Jeremiah.
The Bible is unique in that it is a divine / human effort. Both divine and human elements were present in the production of Scripture.
The doctrine of inspiration indicates that God somehow used human beings to write words, but He also guided their minds and even life experiences and backgrounds so that they wrote exactly what God wanted them to write within the framework of their individual personalities and backgrounds. Each book of the Bible is full of human personality and style, but it is still God who miraculously breathed the message out.
For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man…
—1 Peter 1:21
In other words, Paul didn’t sit down one day and think, “Let’s see, I think I’ll write Romans…” He didn’t get up one morning and think to himself, “Today, I feel like Galatians…”
Peter said, “The Word of God wasn’t produced by some psychological impulse or inner urging on the part of some prophet or apostle.”
For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man,
but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
—2 Peter 1:21 ESV
The word “carried” is translated from an ancient Greek nautical term. In extrabiblical literature it was used to describe a ship on the ocean. When a ship had lost its sails and its rudder, and it was at the mercy of the wind, waves and currents of the sea, it was “carried along” apart from its own power. It was a ship, but it’s rudder and sails weren’t doing the work. The wind was “carrying it along.”
In the same way, when the writers of Scripture wrote the Bible, they were supernaturally carried along by the power of the Holy Spirit.
2. The Bible is INFALLIBLE.
The orthodox teaching of the Christian church down through the centuries has been that God’s Word in its original manuscripts is both infallible and inerrant. Infallible means that the Bible is completely trustworthy and reliable in everything it teaches. It’s comprehensive and absolute truth in everything it teaches.
We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable,
and you will do well to pay attention to it…
—2 Pet 1:19 NIV
3. The Bible is INERRANT.
Inerrant means that the Bible perfectly communicates everything God wanted to say without any errors.
Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. —Proverbs 30:5 ESV
Even perfection has its limits, but your commands have no limit.
—Ps 119:96 NLT
In his book, Bible Doctrine, Wayne Grudem points out that when Jesus prays in John 17:17, He doesn’t say, “Sanctify them in the truth, your words are true.” Instead, Jesus prays this:
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
—John 17:17 ESV
Grudem writes: “The difference is significant… this statement encourages us to think of the Bible not simply as being true in the sense that it conforms to a higher standard of truth, but rather to think of the Bible as itself the final standard of truth.”[1]
We’ll continue tomorrow with the fourth guiding principle.
[1] Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine, quoted by Joshua Harris in Dug Down Deep, page 68.