Could the Bible be inspired? (Part 1)

As we continue in our systematic exploration of what kind of foundation the Bible could provide for human beings, we now need to ask the six million dollar question. Could the Bible actually be a message from God? We have already established that a book is a possible means of divine communication (see the blog entitled “Can we really trust the Bible?”). We now need to ask how we can be certain that a book written by men could actually be God’s Word to his variegated mosaic called the human race. The attempt to answer this question is called in theology the doctrine of inspiration. We give here only an outline of how one could draw this conclusion. We will start with the claims that are made within the Bible that is the Word of God. The next blog will explore how one can know that the Bible is what it says it is. 

The biblical writers claimed to be speaking God’s words

There are many statements in the Bible where the writers claimed to be speaking for God. One instance of this most people are familiar with. When Moses came down from spending time with God he brought with him the Ten Commandments that became the basis for the formation of God’s people, Israel. Jesus and the New Testament writers affirmed the Ten Commandments as an abiding and life-giving message from God to the human race showing how people how to love their Creator and how to love their fellow human beings.

In the Old Testament period the Jewish community also considered the written accounts of their history with God as Scripture. They felt the same way about their wisdom literature and again about the words of their prophets. All of them claim to be speaking for God. They used phrases like, “The word of the Lord came to me saying….” The New Testament writers affirmed these prophesies as words from God when they grounded their logic on many of these texts. They often expressed the ground for their arguments with introductions such as, “It is written...”

When we come to the words of Jesus in the gospels we see that Jesus claimed to be the supreme revelation from God. John’s prologue states it definitively: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Jn 1.1; italics mine). Jesus is the Word that John is referring to and he means that Jesus is God and the supreme revelation of his Word i.e., his messgae to human beings. We can see Jesus walking in his authority as the living Word throughout the gospel accounts of his ministry. In response to the Jewish rabbis of his day, Jesus rejected their interpretations of the Mosaic Law saying, “You have heard it said…but I say to you…” In making statements like this Jesus was showing that his words were the words of God. In the story of the man who was lowered down from the roof and healed by Jesus in Luke 5 Jesus forgave the paralyzed man his sins. The Pharisees immediately realized that Jesus was claiming the ability to forgive sins apart from the temple system of sacrifices. For someone coming from an Old Testament paradigm this was blasphemous. What the Pharisees didn’t realize was that Jesus had come to supersede the old order. He taught that the Old Testament pointed to and was fulfilled in him.

Perhaps the best testimony to the inspiration of the Bible comes from the witness of the lives of the apostles, the men who were changed forever by their encounter with the living Word. Jesus saw Peter, Andrew, James and John as they were washing their fishing nets and Jesus simply said, “Follow me.” The lives of these men were never the same from that moment on. They left their nets and followed Jesus as he had said. They then spent three years experiencing the living Word for themselves. After Jesus was crucified, resurrected, and had ascended into heaven he poured out his Holy Spirit on them to empower them for their mission.

Although Paul had never known Jesus in the flesh, Jesus appeared to him in a vision and he too was a changed man from his encounter with the living Word. He was tortured and beaten for sharing Christ with the Gentile world. Church tradition tells us that both Peter and Paul died martyr’s deaths in Rome. They and countless others gave their lives for the gospel of Christ, many dying in the arena and tortured for their faith. What would lead a person to do this? They would have to be convinced that they had encountered something worth dying for, the very Words of God as handed down through the centuries and written on their scrolls, written testimonies that carried power and personal experiences that validated this testimony. How could written words do that unless they held spiritual authority that was and internally recognized by the reader and pointed them to personal encounters with the risen Christ?

The apostolic letters themselves claim to be words from God as well. When Paul was writing the church in the Macedonian city of Thessalonica, possibly the earliest piece of writing that we have in the New Testament, he wrote, “When you received the word of God, which you received from us…” (1 Thess. 2.13). Here he, like Jesus, claimed to be speaking with God’s authority. Even the other apostles recognized that Paul’s letters functioned as the word of God. In the second letter attributed to Peter we read that Peter himself had wrestled with Paul’s words but recognized their authority when he wrote that Paul’s letters, “…contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures to their own distortion” (2 Pt 3.16). Peter not only affirmed Paul’s letters as God’s word but also affirmed the inspiration of the Old Testament when he wrote, “…no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Pt. 1.20-21).

The clearest affirmation of the inspiration Scriptures from within the Scriptures comes from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Paul was in prison and was writing what amounts to his final charge to his young disciple, Timothy. In it Paul told the young man to trust the Scriptures explicitly writing, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3.16).

We can clearly see, then, that the biblical writers recognized the divine unction and authority on each other's work. Each one claimed to be speaking for God and those words were affirmed not only by the other writers but by the churches. As these documents were hand copied over and over they were distributed throughout the Empire, all the churches bearing witness that it was the documents contained in our Bibles, and not the others works available to them, that edified the church.