Bible authority and authorship

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All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. [2 Tim 3:16]

Authority in the Bible comes from God. The human writers of the books accepted as Scripture claim nothing less than divine inspiration for their own works and for certain of the writings of others. What an audacious assertion for them to make. What did they mean, and what do we mean today, by saying these words are “God-breathed”?

God-breathed does not mean that God somehow took over their bodies or pushed them out of the chair and took up their pens. That is the sort of inspiration Muslims claim for the Qur’an. Rather, inspiration means that God breathed his own words through their personalities and pens. He gave them the insight and understanding so that the finished literary product had two authors, one human and one divine.

God’s words seem more meaningful and relate to us on our human level so well, because they have been translated through the lives, aspirations, and faith of God’s very human children. Literally, 2 Timothy 3:16 says that the Bible is not “in-spired” by God but “out-spired” by him.

Writing to his disciple Timothy, Paul says that evil men will go from bad to worse, deceiving other people and being deceived themselves (2 Tim. 3:13). It is noteworthy that the Bible consistently calls those who practice deception evil. A deception is a misleading of others, and anyone who consciously misleads is evil.

Paul tells Timothy to cling to what he has been taught, that all the Scriptures were breathed out by God. Just as we use breath to speak, and our breath carries our words, so the Breath (Spirit) of God carries his Word to us. Paul is making an absolute claim. If the Bible contains one misleading statement, if it is anything less than perfectly inerrant, it is deceptive and therefore evil. Or, if Paul is lying about the infallibility of the Bible, then Paul is deceptive and therefore evil.

There is no middle ground. Either the Bible does not come from God at all (if it contains things that are not true), or the Bible does come from God and is absolutely inerrant and infallible (containing no errors).

It is impossible for God to lie Therefore, the Word of the Lord is flawless. People do, of course, misread the Bible and come to some exceedingly wrong conclusions about what it teaches. All of us who seriously study Scripture occasionally learn we have been wrong about interpreting and applying it. As you have asked the Spirit to lead you to truth, now pray that God will lead you to understand the truth. Since we are error prone, discipline yourself to think carefully when applying Gods Word—and then do it with humility.


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