‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide o amnos tou
theou
College Study
4th teaching
7.20.2012
“the Origin of Holy Scripture”
So now we understand that there is a theistic God,
transcendent, immortal and Almighty… that He is capable of acting within the
universe since He was capable of creating it… and that He has made truths about
Himself known to man both generally through Nature and specifically through
Scripture.
These three things form an essential basis, a foundation,
for all of theology. If there is no God then there can be no Word of God. If
God could not act, then Christ was not resurrected from the dead and our faith
is worthless. If God has not revealed Himself to man, then we would know
absolutely nothing about Him since He is beyond our reach physically and
intellectually.
So with these three
points: God’s existence, God’s actions and God’s revelations, we have our
intro, our foundation and our basis. These three form the Prolegomena.
The next part of
our studies in systematic theology will be in Bibliology, the study of the
Bible, God’s special revelation, since the specifics of God and His are made
known in it.
Bibliology,
part I
What is the Bible?
The word Bible means book. And truly, this is the book of
books. No other book in history spans so much time, has so many authors,
contains so many stories and characters, truths and doctrines, and is the Word
of God indeed.
For the next few
weeks we’ll study the Bible itself, what it is, what it contains, what it
claims to be and say.
But to begin at the
beginning, where did this, the most unique book in history, come from? Where
did it begin? What are it’s origins? Tonight’s topic is the Origin of Holy
Scripture.
It’s funny that we
kind of think the Bible has always been around, that it never really had a
beginning, or that it’s always been the English Bible as we know it today. But
this book is an ancient epic that finds its origins in the eternal mind of God
Almighty.
As the special and
specific revelation of God, the Bible began in the mind of the revelator, the
One giving the revelation. It began with God. Then, God gave the revelation to
His spokesmen, His mouthpieces, His prophets, and they in turn gave the message
of God to the people of their day.
Remember the three
requirements for revelation? You need a revelator (God), a ‘revelatee’ (the prophet)
and a mode through which the revelation takes place. Remember the phone
analogy. I the revelator talk to my friend the revelatee on the phone, the
revelation’s mode.
We already know a bit about the great
Revelator, God Himself. We know what kind
of God He is. And when we get to a section of systematic theology called
Theology Proper, we’ll understand more properly who God is.
As for the
revelatees, the prophets of God, we’ll talk about them in a few weeks when we
address the humanity of the Bible and its human authors.
Tonight, we’ll
focus on the mode of revelation, how the Bible got from the mind of God to the
written words of the human authors. This is called Inspiration. This is the
origin of the Bible: it’s transmission from God’s mind to the written word.
Three parts for
tonight’s study:
PART I, The
definition of inspiration
PART II, The
internal claims of inspiration
PART III, The
external proofs of inspiration
Part I — the
definition of Inspiration
The origin of
Scripture is the Inspiration of Scripture. But what do we mean by inspiration?
I’m don’t mean the same thing as a speech that’s very inspirational or
motivating. I don’t mean the same thing as an artist who was inspired or
encouraged to make art.
The word
Inspiration when used of the Bible means something else. The Biblical word
Inspiration comes from the Latin word inspirare,
which originally meant to blow into.
Eventually, inspirare came to mean to
breathe deeply, figuratively meaning to breathe something into the heart of the
mind of someone.
II
Tim 3:16, Paul
writes: “All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God…” In the Greek language that Paul wrote in, he used the
Greek word theopneustos, in Latin divinitus inspirata, in English
literally God-breathed.
Inspiration
provides a vivid picture of Scripture, that the words came from the mouth of
God, that they were God inspired, God exhaled them. II Peter 1:20-21, “no
prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came
by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy
Spirit.”
Now that’s all fine
and dandy, but how did this happen? How’d the words that God breathed get on
paper? How did He move the human
authors?
How did this
inspiration take place? Let me give you 5 views:
1. The Alien view
2. The Secretary view
3. The Robot view
4. The Free view
5. The Very Words view
Note, these aren’t
the real names of these views. I just thought they’d be easier to identify with
less complex names.
The Alien view,
also known as the Neo-orthodox view, claims that God is so incredibly and
infinitely above anything we can comprehend, that He is so utterly alien to us
that He really cannot be known through Nature and the Bible itself is really
not God’s literal words but only just a hint or a bridge to God Himself who is
the real word of God. This view holds then that the Bible is faulty and that
they’re not God’s words. And so it’s a view of inspiration that holds there is
no inspiration in the Bible.
This we know to be false. For one,
we’ve already seen how Nature reveals the Creator and secondly, there is good
proof that the Bible is the Word of God and that it is infallible in doctrine
and truth.
The next view,
which I call the Secretary view, AKA the dictation method of inspiration,
claims that God used His prophets as a boss dictates a message to a secretary.
Therefore the prophets were perfectly recording verbatim, or exactly word for
word, what God has said to them.
This view is true of some portions of
Scripture: God told Jeremiah to write
this down. But not all of the books of the Bible were created in this way:
some of them are journals or diary-like, other parts are poems that flowed from
passionate hearts, other parts are recordings of speeches men gave and still
others are purely historical accounts.
The third view, and
one of my favorite, I like to call the Robot view. In this view, God set the
human authors in a trance and controlled their bodies, so that it was God
Himself who literally penned every word of the original manuscripts. The
prophets therefore, were just like robots, instruments, lifeless and inanimate
as God took control of them.
The problem with this view is that
there is so much humanity from the human authors that comes through in the
words. The writings of Paul and the writings of Peter differ tremendously in
style and vocabulary. Close studies show that they definitely came from two
different men. The Robot view denies the data of the Scripture. It’s plain that
the men God used to write the Bible maintained some human freedom in their
writing styles and personalities.
The fourth view,
the Free view, is also known as the limited inspiration view. This is the
opposite of the Secretary and the Robot views. Instead of recording perfectly
what God said, the Free view holds that Scripture is primarily the work of man
with limited inspiration from God. God only guided the prophets in doctrinal
truths, but not historic, scientific or mathematical truths.
But this view would make the Bible
worthless. Why trust a book that claims to be true, if it couldn’t get history
right? Rather it is the reliable historicity of the Bible that provides a
backdrop for the truths of its doctrines.
The final view, the
Very Words view, is called the plenary/verbal view: plenary meaning ‘complete
or full’ and verbal meaning ‘the very words’. So this view means the all the
words and the very words themselves are inspired by God. This would fit with
the passage we read earlier, II Tim 3:16, that ALL Scripture is given by
inspiration of God.
And it is not only
ALL the words that are inspired but also, the parts of words and the tenses of
the words that are inspired to portray truth. For example, Jesus Christ in Matthew 22 was posed a question about
the resurrection of the dead. In answering it, He says “But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was
spoken to you by God, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
Christ was making
the point that God is the God of the living by showing that when God said to
Moses ‘I AM the God of Abraham’ that He said it in the present tense. God was
the God of Abraham and He still is the God of Abraham because Abraham is alive
in heaven. And that one tense of the verb I AM illustrates His whole point.
Therefore, even the tenses of the words themselves are inspired of God.
In a nutshell, here’s a good
definition of Inspiration from author Norman Geisler:
Inspiration is the supernatural operation of the
Holy Spirit, who through the different personalities and literary styles of the
chosen human authors invested the very words of the original books of Holy
Scripture, alone and in their entirety, as the very Word of God without error
in all that they teach or imply (including history and science), and the Bible
is thereby the infallible rule and final authority for faith and practice of
all believers.
A little wordy, but
it gets the point across.
Note that the
inspiration of the written words applies directly to the Biblical canon of 66
books alone. The writings of Paul
were inspired by God and not the writings of Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler,
Confucius, Mark Twain, JRR Tolkien or anyone else. BUT not ALL the writings of
Paul were inspired, only those which God chose to include in the canon of Scripture.
More on the canon of Scripture at a later date.
Also, note that the
inspiration of God means the Bible is truth but that it also records some
untrue statements. There is no contradiction here. For example, the Bible
records the lies of a good many people, but it is truly recording those words,
not claiming that the lies themselves are true.
Part
II: the internal claims of inspiration
We’ve already read
that it says ALL Scripture is given by inspiration of God. The Bible claims to
be the Word of God, let there be no doubt.
One easy way to show that the Bible
claims to be the Word of God in entirety is with parallel verses.
Someone turn to Genesis 12:1-3 and someone else Galatians 3:8 for the first example.
Someone else turn to Exodus 9:13-16
and someone else Romans 9:17.
Many, many times
you’ll read that God said something only elsewhere to find that it reads the
Scripture said it. Or vice versa: the Scripture said it and God said it. At the
same time and in the same way. Therefore, God’s words and the words of
Scripture are one and the same: the Scripture is the Word of God.
Like the existence
of God, the Bible never goes out of its way to prove that it is the Word of
God. It simply always firmly makes that claim. As far as it is concerned the
Bible is the infallible, error-less Word of truth.
But there is good
proof outside of the Bible’s words that it is what it says it is:
Part
III: the external proofs of inspiration
Let me give you three proofs outside of the words of
Scripture which show that the Scriptures are God’s own words of truth.
a. The Bible’s Unity
The
Holy Bible is a colossal collection of 66 different books written over the
course of some 1600 years by 40 different authors from very different walks of
life: some authors were kings, peasants, philosophers, fathers, fishermen,
physicians, statesmen, politicians, scholars, poets, and farmers. They held
widely different jobs, lived in different times and cultures. And yet for all this
variety, the Bible is singular and united in its themes and redemptive plan
from Genesis to Revelation. There is no contradiction in doctrine or theme in
the entire book. It has perfect continuity and perfect unity. How is this
possible unless God moved these people to write as they did throughout the
centuries, cultures and groups in which they lived. Read it.
b. The Bible’s Output
The
French writer Voltaire who died in 1778 wrote “Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth!” For
hundreds of years, the Bible has withstood the assault of countless enemies,
philosophies, skeptics and tyrants. But the Bible has never been better. It is
the most distributed, translated and copied book in history. The
indestructibility and immortality of the Bible in light of the many attacks it
has suffered is an incredible proof that it is a supernatural book.
c. It’s unpredjudiced subject
matter
The Bible reports on the lives of many thousands
of men, men whom would later be revered by their descendants. Men like Abraham
and Moses. And yet in telling the stories of these men’s lives, the Bible pulls
no punches. Abraham we’re told was cowardly enough to claim his wife was his
sister, even enduring her abduction into a foreign king’s harem under that
pretense. Moses we’re told was a murderer in cold-blood and a hot-tempered guy.
David we’re told was a womanizer and committed adultery. If the Bible is a
product of men who descended from these Biblical characters, men who are
revered by their descendants, why would they include their sins in the stories?
There are many other proofs.
The closest runner up and the
next major world religion at this time in history is Islam. Their book the
Quran they also claim is inspired by God and is the Word of God. Their biggest
proofs for this claim? That the Quran has great unity and was written in 23
years. The Bible took 1600 years to write. Also, Muslims claim that the Quran
is beyond compare from the viewpoint of its styles and eloquence. It is so
eloquent that it must be the Word of God. What kind of proof is that? Does this
mean the works of Shakespeare and Robert Frost are the Word of God for their
eloquence?
The Bible stands alone for its
uniqueness and its proofs that it is what it claims to be: the inspired Word of
God.
No comments:
Post a Comment