Is the Bible inspired?

 

I believe that the Bible is inspired but what does that mean?

 

I believe that the Bible is inspired, but not nearly everyone is clear as to what that means.

 

The Bible itself says in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness."(NIV) Did you catch that word "God-breathed"? That's the biblical term to describe what is meant by the inspiration of God's Word. 

 

Some Christians believe that God dictated the Bible word for word in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and that the writers were simply secretaries who recorded those words. But as we look at the writing styles of the various human authors, it is clear that their personalities are very much in evidence in what they write. There is no mechanical word-for-word dictation going on here.

 

Most Christians conclude that God provided the precise thought to the human author, and he then wrote it down in terms of his own vocabulary, culture, education, and writing style. So we have here no wooden, single-colored document, but a many-faceted and dynamic book.

 

The second problem with the word-for-word view of inspiration is that many of the Psalms (and other passages) are the cries of imperfect, suffering people, who are voicing their own complaints or praises to God. They are words and thoughts emanating directly from the hearts of God's people, which he in turn allowed to be placed in the Bible so we could identify with these complaining, suffering or rejoicing people who are so much like us. God used their words and thoughts.

 

For those reasons Most Christians believe that inspiration should be described as thought-for-thought rather than word-for-word. The human writers provide God's message in terms of their own personalities and historical circumstances, and yet they transmit the message fully and exactly as God desired. So we can call this view of inspiration "dynamic", as well as "verbal" (extending to the very words of the writer) and "plenary" (meaning that the Bible is fully and totally inspired.)

 

So what I believe concerning inspiration is:

• The message God originally gave us is unique, perfect, without error.

• It is the work of the Holy Spirit who so guided the writers of the Scripture that they gave us, in their unique manner, exactly the message God intended.  The Bible says "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost"..

• The Bible is Historically accurate recording events in history exactly as occurred.

• The Bible is Scientifically accurate recording scientific facts hundreds of year before science discovered there truths.

             The Bible recorded that the Earth hung in space, was a sphere, had rivers running through

              oceans(we now call then streams, like the Gulf Stream), describes the water cycle, describes

              the cycle of air currents, describes that the life is in the blood, speaks of dinosaurs, explains

              how space, time and matter came to be, hints of atoms.

              

Humans in ancient civilization could not have known these scientific truths expect God inspired them.

 

 

So we can say that the Bible is a very human book, for we see in it both elegance and lack of polish, both finesse and struggle.

 

It it is a divine book as well, for it is the only book in all the world that is truly "God-breathed".

 

It is humanity's precious gift from God. As I teach, it is God's Love Letter to you and me.