The Authority of Scripture: Divine Inspiration Explained

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"All Scripture is breathed out by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work." So this word, inspired, and the doctrine of inspiration comes from this text, and actually comes from many more texts than this, but this is where we start, and it reminds us something, it reminds us something right off the bat, and that is that Scripture is top down. [00:53:24]

Throughout the centuries of human history there has been a desire to answer the big questions, you know, the big questions of life. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of all of this? And they're not just questions on a personal level, are they? They're also questions on sort of the macro level. Where did all of this, as we look around and see it, where did it all come from? What is the purpose of it? [02:07:20]

And so as we see the era of the Reformation, we also have the era of the Renaissance, right? And with the Renaissance we have the beginnings of modern science, and the beginnings of modern philosophy. And this enlightenment period moves us into this modern age as we come into the late 1600's and through the 1700's and through the 1800's, and increasingly there was a shift away from the church, a shift away from Scripture as our authority, and instead we began to look within our own head, and we began to stress human autonomy, and rationality, and science, and this was the modern age. [04:21:40]

But whether it's modernity, or post-modernity both of those worldviews have a problem with that idea -- that the answers to the big questions are in fact alien to us. That the answers to "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" and "Where am I going?" those answers are not going to be found within our own head. Those answers aren't going to be discovered as we apply all of our skill and all of our acumen and all of our abilities to try to figure out the world. Those answers come from above us. [05:54:92]

In fact there was a professor at Harvard in 1891, published a book by Houghton-Mifflin, his name was Joseph Henry Thayer, and in his book he was speaking of the doctrine of inspiration. Just a few years before, Benjamin Warfield, one of the, called the Lion of Old Princeton, the great theologian there at Princeton Theological Seminary, Warfield had published an essay on the inspiration of Scripture, and Thayer was responding to that essay among other things, and this is what he had to say about Warfield's theory of inspiration. [07:12:04]

The upshot of all of this challenge to Mosaic authorship is that Scripture is not a divine revelation but a human creation, just like all of the other religious texts. And then it moved from Moses and the Pentateuch into Jesus and the Gospels. And so, Matthew is not by Matthew, Mark is not by Mark, Luke is not by Luke, John is not by John, these gospels are in fact the product of later communities and their again sort of ideas of Jesus and who He was, and how we relate to Him. [10:53:72]

As we approach Scripture, we have a fundamental question to ask ourselves. It's a question of commitment, a question of first principles. Is this the Word of God or not? That's the fundamental question. Now, we have to nuance this because we think that Scripture is both a divine book and a human book. We don't see the doctrine of inspiration as implying that somehow the Biblical authors entered into a trance-like state and their hand was sort of taken over, and maybe their eyes rolled in the back of their head and before you know it, there was a book. [13:04:64]

We see that the Biblical author's personalities are preserved in the text itself. There are differences. John reads differently than Paul, Peter reads differently than Paul. These are real human authors, so the Bible is a human book. That's a true statement. It's not written in some mystical language, you know. Well if you look at Hebrew you might think it's mystical, but actually it was just the language that was spoken. And Greek might, it's all Greek to me, right? It might look mystical to you, too, but it was written in the common Greek language of the day. [13:47:40]

But we must always say that while it is a human book it is a divine book. So we need to avoid two extremes there. One is not acknowledging that it's a divine book, this is just a human product -- oh it's a great read, very insightful, might even help in your life if you need it, but don't think of it as God's Word, see? Sort of the secular view. There's a long history of that. Then there's the other side, that doesn't want to take into account the human authorship of the text. [15:07:64]

We see this a little bit more in another text that is used when we talk about inspiration, right up there with 2 Timothy 3:16, is 2 Peter 2. Here as we get to the end of Second Peter chapter two, we see in verse sixteen that Peter again is differentiating Scripture from other approaches or other answers to those big questions. And so he says, "We did not follow," in verse sixteen, "We did not follow cleverly devised myths." There were plenty of those around in the first century. [16:15:24]

It was never produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. You know a nice imagery there sometimes given as a way to understand this is sort of like the way the winds may carry a ship, or the waves may carry a ship, and so there's a preserving there of the human authorship, and Peter well knows his humanity, doesn't he? There's a preserving there of the human authorship, but these words are the words from God. [17:37:24]

If we are going to come to Scripture, if we are going to read it, if we are going to look to it, we are going to have to let it tell us what it is. And what it tells us very clearly is it is the Word of God. Now, different people have tried different ways to explain this doctrine of inspiration. We could have what we call the liberal view; this sort of comes out of that era of the 1880's to the 1910's. This is probably seen best in a quote like Thayer, you know, who says, "We can't bear the yoke of this inspiration anymore." [20:07:32]

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