The Bible Inspired of God

Here's where we are. We are in chapter 2, and we're going to be looking at chapter 2 this morning, the Bible as the inspired Word of God. And the way we're going to be doing this each week, we're going to give you this cover sheet, and it serves two purposes. The purpose is to highlight what we're going to be doing the particular Sunday, each particular Sunday, and also in the corner, There's that homework assignment, which we're going to check on you to see if you've done your homework assignment this morning. Okay, so that's where we're going.

Now, I have a question for you. Each of you has a Bible, and I want to ask you the question, how many have a New American Standard? How many have an IV, a new international version? How many have the good one? The one that Paul wrote, the one that, the King James? Okay.

Now, here's my question to you. Is what you have in your hand the inspired Word of God? What you have, what you have, what you have before you, is this the inspired word of God? Okay, we got no, one no. How many say no? A couple of hands. How many say yes? Okay. It's about almost 50-50. In fact, maybe 60-40. 60% saying that, yes, this is the inspired word of God. 40% saying, no, it's not the inspired word of God.

Interesting. Alright, so here's what I want you to do. I want you to turn to 2 Timothy 3, verse 16. Second Timothy chapter 3, verse 16. And so here's what it says. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. Let me just stop there. It says all scripture. And the word for all there in the Greek is Panta. It means every single word, every single verse of scripture. And it says that it's given by inspiration of God. And the word inspiration is an interesting word. It consists of two words. Theonoustos. Theonoustos. Theo means what? Theos. Theos, God. Nustos means to breathe, a breath, and so all scripture, every single word of scripture, you can say is God breathed.

What's the source? Who's the source? God's the source. So all scripture is given by the inspiration of God. Paul sent this letter to Timothy. What scripture was available? Old Testament. Certainly the Old Testament. Some of the letters in the New Testament were written. So when Paul says, All Scripture, certainly he means Old Testament, because that existed. How about the New Testament? How about the stuff that he's writing? Did he consider that? Did he consider that God-breathed?

Turn over to Galatians chapter 1. Galatians chapter 1. And look at verse 11. Verse 11 in Galatians chapter 1. But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not after man. That little word after there is a little preposition, katah, means not according to man. It's not according to man's norms and standards. So right from the get-go, he says, it's not from man's norms or standards. In verse 12 he gives an explanation.

For I neither received it of man. So just because the other apostles were believers before the apostle Paul, what he's saying, I didn't receive it from any man, whether it's apostles or whoever they were. I did not receive the good news, the gospel, from any man. And look what he also says, neither was I taught it. So there was no man that taught the Apostle Paul.

So how did the Apostle Paul get the Word of God? Well, he goes on to explain. And he says in verse 12, but by revelation of Jesus Christ. And as you probably remember, after Paul became a believer, the Lord took him out into the desert in Arabia for three years.

The Apostle Paul fellowshiped 24-7 with the Lord Jesus Christ in the desert in Arabia And the Lord Jesus Christ gave Paul all of the revelation, at least, I don't want to say all, but gave Paul the revelation of the Gospel, which includes the mystery that Paul talks about. And the mystery in the New Testament is what? The big mystery. The big mystery is the Church. which was never revealed before in the Old Testament.

So here's the Apostle Paul saying that what he is writing is direct revelation from Jesus Christ. Is that inspired? Is that God-breathed? It certainly is. So all of Paul's epistles, no question, are God-breathed, even though, I don't want to say many of them, were not documented at the time. Okay, so, question. All scripture, what scripture is it talking about when it says all scripture is given by inspiration of God?

What scripture is Paul referring to in 2 Timothy 3.16? All? But what's Scripture?

Pardon me? Whatever was written, or whatever will be written by the Apostle Paul. So, let's take a look at what this is saying. We start out with God. And all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And Paul received his revelation from the Lord Jesus Christ. So God is the source, isn't he? God is the source of all revelation. And he reveals the totality of his purpose, the totality of his plan, who he is, his essential essence. Only God could reveal that. He reveals it to authors. So we have all of those, as Roger talked last week, we've got about 40 writers, right, of the Bible, written over 1600 years.

Now, here's my next question. Are these authors inspired? Okay. One vote says they need to be. Were they inspired? Where is the inspiration? Is it inspiring the authors to write? Where is the inspiration come in? In terms of what was put down? All scripture is given by inspiration of God. It doesn't say all authors are inspired. All scripture is given by inspiration of God. So it's not the authors that are inspired.

If we go to 2 Peter chapter 1, we'll see how the Lord utilizes the authors. 2 Peter chapter 1, and look at verse 19. It says, we have also a more sure word of prophecy. Prophecy talking about God's revelation. unto which you do well, that you take heed as unto a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts." Look at verse 20.

Knowing this first, that no prophecy, no revelation of God, no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation. It's not of one's own, the writer's interpretation. In verse 21, what is the source of prophecy? What is the source of God's revelation? It says, for the prophecy came not at any time by the will of man. Notice that man is out of the equation in terms of the revelation. It does not come by the will of man. How does it come? How does it come?

But holy men, men who were set apart by God, spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. And the word there, moved, is a word that will A pharaoh in the Greek means to bear or to carry. That's all it means, to bear or to carry. And so what it's saying is that the Holy Spirit was bearing along or carrying along the authors. And they were under the control of the Holy Spirit. They were being carried along in terms of documenting the revelation of God.

Now the question is, so how did God do that? Did He dictate every single word? Did He just give them the thought, and then these authors put the words in? What kind of inspiration was this? Was it concept inspiration, where the Spirit of God or God gave them a concept? Or was it word inspiration?

Anybody want to take a guess? No? Concept? Okay. Could it be word inspiration and yet see the differences between the authors? So the answer was concept revelation because as you... If I can expand on Marilyn's answer, is that what you see is a different style. Each author has a different style, right? And so it appears concept-oriented as opposed to word-oriented because of the different styles of the authors. Could it be word inspiration and yet have the differences? Okay, every jot and tittle must be fulfilled, that's true.

Okay, when it says, all scripture, in 2 Timothy 3.16, every single verse, every single word is given by inspiration, is God breathed.

Now, this is the phenomenal part. God takes these writers, The Holy Spirit takes these writers with their experiences, with their vocabulary, with their issues in life, and utilizes them to communicate His very Word, utilizing human authors. That's the incredible part. So, Scripture, as Roger taught last week. is 100% divine? How about, is it human? 100% human, too? Sure is.

God used these authors to communicate the truth to the authors, but he utilized them, their circumstances, and whatever, to communicate his Word. So it's Word inspiration. It's inspiration of Word. inspiration also of grammar, so that when we look at 2 Peter 1, verse 21, it says that these men were born along and were moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along. It's a passive voice. It's not the active voice. It was God who was doing it, God the Holy Spirit who was doing it. Okay, so let's try and put it all together.

So we have the authors. The authors aren't inspired, it's the scriptures that are inspired. So inspiration guarantees that the revelation of God by words, using the authors as a vessel. So the authors are a vessel that God uses to document the totality of his revelation to man. So, now, what's inspired here? The original scriptures. So these original scriptures are are the documents that were inspired.

Now, from the original scriptures, they made copies. We don't have one original scripture, and all we have are copies. All we have. And from the copies, then what we've done, or what man has done, is man has taken the copies and made translations. So, when I asked you, is what you have in your hands this morning the inspired Word of God? The answer is no, in the sense that only the original scriptures were inspired. We have translations. And the translations were made from copies. So now the question is, How accurate are these copies? How good are the copies? Because if the copies are good, then what we have is pretty, pretty close to the original scriptures.

I have to tell you a story. I don't know if Roger was there or not, but when we were working out at Buckley Air Force Base, there was a fellow that we worked with. and I don't know what organization he belonged to, but they were having a meeting at lunchtime, and they were having a speaker come in to talk about the Greek manuscripts, the scripture. And so, obviously, people knew that I would be interested, and they came, would you like to ask? I said, I'd love to go.

So, there must have been 75 men sitting in this auditorium. This fellow who spent his life of studying the Greek manuscripts, got up and he talked about these copies, and he talked about the differences between the copies. And the bottom line was this. He spent one entire hour talking about the differences in the copies. I looked at the guys who were there, and the expression on their face I mean, was clear. It was like, I knew it all along. You can't trust. You can't trust the Bible. Look at all of the errors that are in the Bible.

That was the conclusion that they reached. Here's an expert on the Greek text, and he went through these minute differences. And I saw what was happening, and I saw the response of these guys. He opened it up for questions at the end, and I had my hand up, and I asked him one question. And I said, it was more than a question, it was a statement.

I said, isn't it true that the differences that you talked about in all of the manuscripts amount to less than one-tenth of one percent of Scripture in the Greek? Is that true?" He says, that's right. I said, isn't it also true that if you take those differences, the one-tenth of one percent in all those manuscripts, that there are no doctrinal issues? Teaching in Scripture doesn't change the teaching in Scripture. He says, yeah, that's true. To get these guys to understand that there may be differences in the Greek text, but it doesn't impact the doctrine of scripture, and that's key.

So, what we have before us is a very, I think, reliable documentation of God's word. It's not the original word, it's not the original scriptures, but it's very, very close. So here's the argument that occurs between scholars today. I've got the King James. Most of you have NIV and New American Standard.

If we talk about the Greek manuscripts, these copies, there's newer ones that were found more recent. And there's older manuscripts that were written or that were copied longer in time. So we have this range of manuscripts that were copied at different times. Now, five percent of the manuscripts that we have in the Greek New Testament are older manuscripts. long time ago. The newer ones, 95% of the manuscripts were more recent copies, if you will.

So here's the thinking. The thinking goes two ways. Older is better. Older is closer to the original, right? So therefore it would be more accurate. Therefore we should use the older ones because it's more accurate, closer to the original. Make sense?

And so therefore, if you have an NIV, or if you have a New American Standard, then those translations were made from the older manuscripts. So, here are the translations. Now, if you have the good one, if you have the King James, it was made from the more recent copies, 95% of the manuscripts are Byzantine or more recent. My thinking goes this way, that well, the reason why we have these manuscripts, 95% of them, the reason we have more of them is because What it was copied from was more accurate and men recognized that that was a more accurate copy and therefore it was copied more and more.

Do you understand the point? So which is it? I'm not here to expose one or the other. I think you have to look at both as you study. So you've got these translations. Now, notice that between the original scriptures, or the copies, you have some barriers. You have a language barrier, you have a historical barrier, you have cultural barriers. So that when you make a translation, those barriers have to be understood. And especially when you get down to interpretation.

Here we are, sitting here, trying to interpret scripture. So the way we interpret scripture is we go to the translations, and it's good to use them all. We go to the copies that we have. In the Greek, we can go to the older manuscripts, or we can go to the newer manuscripts, more recent manuscripts. We can try to understand the language barrier We need to understand when we look at a word, what did that word mean then when it was written? Because in our vernacular, it may have changed, so we have to look at what did it mean when it was written?

So that all goes into the interpretation process. So you interpret, and then as a result of interpretation, then you correlate. You make sure that whatever you interpret correlates with the rest of Scripture. If it doesn't correlate with the rest of Scripture, you throw out the interpretation. If it correlates with the rest of Scripture, you can feel pretty sure that you've got a good interpretation.

Once you have a good interpretation, then you can say, this is what the Bible teaches. Then you come down to doctrine. This is what the Bible teaches. Does that make it perfectly clear in terms of where inspiration fits into this and where we are today?

We looked at 1 Peter, 2 Peter 1.21. And as you read in your homework assignment, that there's all of these, now Dr. Lewis Barry Chaffer calls them theories of inspiration, and as Vern pointed out, it's a bad word. And he's absolutely right.

Because what we're talking about in terms of the Bible being the very inspired word of God is not a theory. It's a fact. It's a fact of scripture. So it's not a theory. So I've changed Dr. Louis Perry Chaffer's word of theory to views. Well, I guess we'll just do it all at once here. It's hard to uncover this.

So you go over here into the green area on this chart. which those who teach that the Bible is truly, as we've looked at, the inspired word of God, God-breathed, that it's verbal. It's the verbal inspiration. Every word is inspired. The grammar is inspired. And it's plenary. Why is the word plenary there?

Well, because in the past you could say One could say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and everybody understood what that meant. But as time goes on, if you just say that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, there are people that will say, well, yes, it's the inspired Word of God, however, not all of it, not all of the words, not all of the grammar is inspired, so you had to add the word plenary to say totality, from Genesis 1-1 to Revelation 22. So you have to add the word plenary. But even that's not enough, because there are some people, you could say verbal plenary inspiration, and they'll say, well, there are some errors in the Bible. So now Now you have to say it's inerrant. So you have to say that the Bible is the verbal, plenary, inerrant Word of God. And then there are people that say, well, you know, you can't really use the Bible as a guide all the time, because there are some things in there that, you know, you just can't use it as a guide in your life.

Now you have to add another word. that it's infallible. Number one, infallible means that there's absolutely no error. And it will never, never, ever mislead you or misguide you. So you have to add this word, infallible. And as time goes on, we'll be adding more words because men come along and try to tear down tear down the Bible as the inspired Word of God.

In some way, shape, or form. And so, as Dr. Lewis Burr Chaffer shows in his write-up in Chapter 2, there's all these views. There's the concept view. In the concept view, notice we get into shades of red. We're no longer in the green area, and once you leave Once you leave this, now you're into heresy. I don't care which position you take here, in the red, even if it's slightly pink, you're into heresy.

And the first one is the concept view where they say that God just gave man the concepts and man just added the words. No, God gave the Holy Spirit, bore it along, He carried it along, gave them the words. Okay, then there's the partial view, and the partial view, that's the heresy where it says just parts of the Bible are inspired.

Have you ever talked to a person and, oh, let's see, going back to so many conversations, where somebody would say to you, you know, I've just been reading this passage of scripture, and you know what this means? It means this and this and this and thus and so. We had a colonel out at work, and he had this view where if you picked up scripture, and he had what is called the neo-orthodox view, where you can pick up scripture and you do the interpretation. It's as the Lord speaks to you. through that particular passage of scripture.

In other words, you don't go in to find out what is God revealing, what is he saying, it's just as it strikes you. You're fancy, that's the interpretation. So you sit around a table and everybody has a different view of what this passage is saying. And they sit around and say, oh that's wonderful.

I like what you say, and I like what you say, but they never get at the meaning of what that scripture says. That's the new orthodox view. Then there's the naturalistic view, which says that the Bible is strictly a human product. Written by man as God was not involved at all. It's just like any novel that you pick up in the library, it is not inspired by God. So those are the different views.

We have to close, because you're going to answer some questions, right? As I thought through this whole thing, in terms of inspiration of scripture, You can go through historical evidence, you can go through scientific evidence, and by the way, I've listed a lot of that for you, to try and prove to somebody that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. And once a month, here on Friday evenings, we have, this place was filled last Friday, where we have scientists come in and talk about science in the Bible, creation versus evolution. And we must have had 250 people here last time. And with all the evidence that you can present, there are people that are still not convinced.

You know the one thing that I think convinces people that the Bible is the inspired Word There's one thing that really convicts them and convinces them. Can you guess what that is? No? Okay, Art gets the gold star this morning. A changed life. You, you are the one, your life, is the thing that convinces a person that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. My life is the thing that convinces a person that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Because they see a transformed life, and they look at themselves, and they look at you, especially if they knew you, especially if they knew you when you were not a believer. Especially then, when they see a transformed life.

Well, that's the thing. So as we're walking by faith, abiding in the Lord Jesus Christ, beholding him, beholding his glory, the Spirit of God takes us and transforms us into that very same image. And that's a process that happens in our Christian life. And that's a process that people see. They see it day in, day out. And over a period of time, they see that transformation. That's the clincher, I think, that convinces man that the Bible is inspired Word of God. Okay. You tell me. I don't have my notes here.

The questions were what? Number one was the first question? Somebody want to read that question? Question number one, chapter two. Okay, so define what is meant by the inspiration of the Bible. Somebody want to, let's see if I communicated this morning. Somebody want to just give a brief explanation? Somebody comes up to you, your friend, unbelieving friend comes up to you and says, help me to understand. What does it mean that the, you're saying that the Bible's inspired what it's got. Help me to understand that. Describe that to me. What would you say? So you're not going to be a witness to your friends. OK? You can start there. That's a good place to start.

And so you start there, and you say, well, the Bible says about itself that all scripture is given by inspiration of God. So now, what does inspiration mean? It means God breathed. That God breathed. Every single word, the grammar, and He used human authors in their vocabulary, in their experiences. For example, take Romans chapter 7. Here's Paul in this struggle. He decides he's going to live the Christian life by keeping the law.

He knows that the law says thou shalt not covet, so he says The law says that, I'm not going to covet. And the word there is epiphymia, which means desire, any kind of desire. And he says, okay, got it, I'm not going to covet. He finds out the more he tries not to covet, the more he covets.

And then he winds up saying, the things that I know that I shouldn't be doing, those are the very things that I'm doing. The things that I should be doing, those are the very things that I'm not doing. He comes down to verse 24 in chapter 7, and what does he say? O wretched man that I am. Did God use Paul and his experience to communicate his word to us? He sure did. See how inspiration works? He used his actual experience to communicate his very word to us. Okay.

What's the next question? Was it 11? 12? Somebody read 12? What did Christ teach about the inspiration of the Bible? And your answer is? He said it was inspired. Can you give some examples? Anybody write down any examples? In Matthew 5.18?

And what does he say in Matthew 5.18?

Oh, you're saved by the bell. The thing that comes to my mind is like Matthew 19, where he affirms the story about Jonah. He affirms the creation. Haven't you heard what God said in the beginning about God creating male and female, and the two becoming one? He affirms the entire creation account.

Let's close in a word of prayer. Our Father and our God, again, we just do thank you for your word. We thank you, Father, for the Spirit of God that convinces us that all scripture is given by your inspiration and is profitable for doctrine, for teaching, for reproof, for conviction, for correction, for child training. for instruction in righteousness, that each of us may be fairly equipped unto good works. And we thank you, Father God, that we are your creation, we are your instrument unto good works, that all men should see. And we thank you, Father God, that you are the source of that, not only the source of the good works, and that you have the plan for good works, but you are the one that performs it until the day of Jesus Christ. We thank you now for this time together, in Jesus' name.