Understanding the Doctrine of Inspiration

The authority of Christ really settles the issue of an inspired text. If there are errors in the Bible and He didn't know about them, He's not God. If there are errors in the Bible and He knew about them and covered them up, He's the devil. But He is God and He is not the devil and there are no errors in Scripture. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The English novelist Samuel Butler once said, The Bible may be the truth, but it's not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That seems to be the prevailing viewpoint today, sadly even among some professing Christians.

So why should you have confidence that the Bible you read, all of it, is true? And what should you say to someone who thinks the Bible is a good book, that it has a lot of wise moral teaching, but it's not really from God? John MacArthur answers those questions today on Grace to You, showing you how God gave us His Word. The title of his current study, Making a Case for the Bible. And here's John now with the lesson. What is the doctrine of inspiration?

Let me just give you some little categories to think in, okay? Revelation...revelation is the content...revelation is the content, it is God's disclosure of His truth. Inspiration is the vehicle. In revelation, God makes Himself known. In inspiration, the Spirit of God takes the revelation and puts it through the mind of human writers in the Old and New Testament who write it down as it flows from God the Holy Spirit through their minds.

What they write down is the exact and authentic words that constitute the message God wants written down. Revelation then is the message itself and inspiration is the means by which it is given and ultimately recorded on the pages of Scripture. Now let me speak a little more clearly to this issue by traveling around it a little bit and suggesting some things that inspiration is not. Biblical inspiration is not a high level of human achievement. It is not a high level of human achievement. Through the years there have been critics of the doctrine of inspiration that God breathed out every word into the mind of writers who wrote it down so that every word is actually right from the mind of God.

There are some who have said that's not true. The Bible is just a high level of human achievement and you'd have to say that if you wanted to deny divine authorship because you're left with this astounding book with this massive amount of wisdom. And so you'd have to say that this is a compilation of things that have been written by people who are at a high level of religious genius.

They're like any other geniuses. It's like Homer's Odyssey, or it's like Dante's Divine Comedy, or Shakespeare's Tragedies. It's a high level of artistry, of literary craft, like any master work.

The Bible is a master work of human genius, but very human and very fallible. Nobody else suggests that inspiration is extended just to the thoughts of the writers, that God just gave them noble ideas in their mind, planted thoughts. The first kind of inspiration is called natural inspiration, just human genius. The second kind is called thought inspiration. This view suggested that God came along at some point and gave these writers an idea, a religious idea, a spiritual idea and they were left free to express themselves as they liked. Others have some other interesting spins on the doctrine of inspiration and some say that inspiration is only with reference to spiritual and moral teaching.

This is called partial inspiration. That is that part of the Bible is inspired, the spiritual part, the moral part, that's inspired. The historical part, you don't have to worry about that.

The geographical part, you don't have to worry about that. The scientific part, you don't have to worry about it. The Bible doesn't have to be accurate in all categories, it just has to be accurate when it talks about spiritual and moral things. And this explains the errors in the Bible and the legends in the Bible and all the notions in the Bible that are just false. All inspiration, these folks suggest, guarantees is the sacred, it doesn't guarantee the secular.

Well that's a problem because either God wrote it or He didn't. And if God can't be trusted for history and He can't be trusted for geography and He can't be trusted for science, then why would we trust Him for the spiritual? If God can't be trusted to tell us the truth about history and the truth about the material world that we live in, then why would we want to entrust our eternal souls to Him and on what basis are we sure He can be trusted? Why should we believe the spiritual which cannot be verified if we can't believe the historical, the physical, the material which can be verified?

Critical. As soon as you allow the Bible to be untrustworthy at all, you will progress to a total rejection of the Bible. And why would you trust God for what you cannot see and cannot prove if He lied about what you can see and you can prove? That's a needless view to take because when the Bible speaks historically it is true, it has been verified, never has anything historically in the Bible been proven to be wrong, or scientific, or geographical. Now there's another view of inspiration and this is the view that inspiration is an act of God on the reader. This is basically a human book written by some religious geniuses. Some of the ideas may have floated down from God.

You could kind of pile all those previous ones together into one view. But what God does is He existentially moves on the reader. All of a sudden when you're reading this dead book, it comes alive to you because the Spirit of God inspires you and awakens you. This is, frankly, theological existentialism, sometimes called neo-orthodoxy. It's not authoritative, by the way, it's just kind of a spiritual goose bump and you get it when you read the Bible.

It maybe hits you in one way or very different from anybody else, that's how it is for all of us. We're all living in the moment, the existential moment, the being of this moment and in that moment, all of a sudden something jumps off the page of the Bible and there's a wow factor and that's inspiration. One writer says, such men refuse to believe that God performed the miracle of giving us by inspiration an infallible Bible but are ready to believe that God daily performs the greater miracle of enabling men to find and see in the fallible Word of man some infallible Word from God. And how could you have a divinely correct experience through a humanly wrong book?

Well there are a lot of wrong views. One final one, number five in my little list, is that it's mechanical dictation. This kind of goes the other way, that every word comes from God and the writers of the Bible were robots. Mechanical dictation, this is what's called dictation inspiration because we say that God wrote every word, the liberals love to say, that's great, that's great, you believe in dictation inspiration, that the writers were in some kind of a trance, that they were put into some kind of transcendent visionary mode and in that mode they became nothing more than a human machine writing down words which God caused them to write. It is true, God could have used dictation, could have. And we would have had an inspired text.

But He didn't do that. There are many variations in style. There are many variations in the use of the language from author to author. Distinct personalities are clearly obvious, emotional attitudes come pouring through the writers as they write. God used writers said the New Testament who were carried along by the Holy Spirit, they were moved along by the Holy Spirit, they weren't out of the process, they were in the middle of the process, they were included in the very act of writing. In fact, they were writing their own heart, attitudes, their own thoughts, their own insights, their own experiences, their own understanding under the total control of God. That becomes apparent in several passages that are critical to our understanding.

Let me show you three of them. Hebrews is a good place to start. Hebrews 1 verses 1 and 2, we have a good indication of the divine author of Scripture. God after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days has spoken to us in His Son whom He appointed heir of all things through whom also He made the world. First of all, God has spoken. That is the key to a biblical understanding of inspiration.

God has spoken. The Creator Himself removed the obstacles to our understanding of Him by revealing Himself. God has spoken by the prophets and by that He means the writers of Scripture in many portions, palumeros, many sections, many books, 66 to be exact, 39 in the Old, 27 in the New. He spoke in many sections and in many ways, palutropos.

What does that mean? Through visions, prophecies, parables, typology, symbols, ceremony, theophany, an audible voice. And all this was recorded in the Old Testament.

All the times that God spoke and wanted it written down, it was written down. It was God speaking to the fathers in the prophets through many different sections, segments, books and in many ways, all collected together in the Old Testament. Now in these last days He's spoken to us again in His Son, and this is a reference to the New Testament. It is God speaking again.

It is God's self-disclosure. The Old Testament is not a collection of wisdom from ancient men, it is the very voice of God through all the means by which He spoke, what He said and wanted in scripturated was written down by the writers of the Old Testament. We knew He did the same and what He wanted written down is written down by the New Testament writers. Two other texts, just to call to your attention, 2 Peter 1...2 Peter 1 and verse 20, but know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. But men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. The key word that I'd like you to look at here is the word moved...moved. It tells us at the end of verse 21 that men were moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along, born along like a leaf floating downstream.

They were in the process, carried along. In 1 Corinthians again chapter 2 and verse 10, Paul writes, for to us God revealed them, that is His glorious truths, he disclosed His revelation. For to us God revealed them is added, but actually the whole of His revelation through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the Spirit of the man which is in him?

Even so, the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of this world but the Spirit is from God that we might know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak not in words taught by human wisdom but in those taught by the Spirit. All of that is simply saying that they were taught things by the Spirit and those were the things that they received and wrote down. That's what it means to be carried along, to be moved along by the Holy Spirit to write these things down. Verse 21 again says, no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. Prophecy here is a word that simply embraces all of Scripture, refers to all the Scripture, not just prediction as we think often of prophecy. It means the message. It means to stand before and speak, prophaimi, to speak before, to disclose, to talk in front of someone, to tell forth all that God has spoken, all that God has said, all that God has told in the Scripture, all of it comes not by an act of human will, but by men moved by the Holy Spirit who speak from God.

Therefore if you back up again to verse 20, no Scripture or no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. Now let me tell you about the word interpretation. Quickly it is the word epilucis, epilucis.

It can be the word releasing...releasing. And the word here almost means particularly inspiration. The genitive case usage indicates source. So the idea here is no prophecy of Scripture finds its release, finds its source in any one person. One other passage, and again I'm giving you just once over lightly on these texts, 2 Timothy 3, 16, a very familiar one, all Scripture is God-breathed. That's where we started, all Scripture, pasa grafe theopneustos, all writing Scripture, all divine writing is God-breathed.

It is the very breath of God. That's why Romans 3, 2 calls the Scripture a divine oracle, the oracles of God. And so we are to understand inspiration then as that revelation of God given to us in writing by the Spirit of God, putting that message in the writer's mind, mingling it sovereignly and supernaturally with his own experience, his own vocabulary and out of that comes every word that God wants written.

God has no problem using anything or anyone that He has made to achieve His own ends. Scripture gives ample testimony that it is the Word of God. But I want to close with the most important testimony, I think, and that is the testimony of Jesus Christ...the testimony of Jesus Christ. What was the view of Christ when it comes to Scripture? What did He think about the Scripture? First of all, and I'll give you a little list of things, first of all He acknowledged that He was the theme of all Scripture.

John 5, 39, you search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and these are they which bear witness of Me. Christ understood that He was the theme of all Scripture and that the Scripture spoke accurately of Him. From the very beginning all the way through, the Scripture spoke accurately of Him.

Luke 24, 44, He opens the Old Testament and He teaches those on the road to Emmaus everything concerning Himself out of the Old Testament. So He is saying that as far as the Scripture goes, it is a true and accurate representation of Me and I am, in fact, the theme of it all. Second thing, He came to fulfill Scripture, that is He never came to correct it, He didn't come to edit it, He didn't come to alter it, He came to fulfill it. Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets, there is nothing to be tampered with, there's nothing to be changed, there's nothing to be set apart, I have come not to destroy it but to fulfill it. In Matthew 26, 24 He says, the Son of Man goes even as it is written of Him.

I'm on a divine schedule, I'm doing exactly what has been written. He commanded Peter to put away his sword in that same chapter, Matthew 26, because He said, Peter, how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled? He was fulfilling the Scripture in everything that He did. Jesus then therefore said that He is the theme of all Scripture which is an accurate presentation of Him, that He came to fulfill Scripture and there was nothing in it that should be destroyed.

On the other hand, every single part of it had to be fulfilled. He said not one jot or one tittle would ever pass from that Law until all of it was fulfilled. He even based His interpretation of the Old Testament on a single word...a single word.

The words do matter. Jesus was answering the Sadducees in Matthew 22 and He said to them, You are mistaken not understanding the Scriptures or the power of God, for in the resurrection they neither marry...talking about the angels...nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God saying, I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead but of the living and His proof is that God said, I am...I am the eternal living one.

And furthermore, He's not only the eternal living one but all will live eternally as well. They didn't believe in a resurrection and He proved His point, or certainly to our satisfaction proved His point by talking about the eternality of God in the verb to be in the present tense. Jesus established the sufficiency of the Scripture to save. When He said in Luke 16, 29, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.

That's all they need to keep them from well. He showed them that the source of all error comes from not knowing the Scripture. Mark 12, is it not for this cause that you err, you know not the Scripture, you do greatly err. One-tenth of the words that came out of Jesus that are recorded in Scripture were from the Old Testament. He quoted the Old Testament a hundred and eighty times out of the 1800 verses reporting what He said, one-tenth of the time He referred to the Old Testament. And He said He is the truth, that He is the eternal Word. He is our model as far as how we approach the Bible.

Now finally, this presents a threefold possibility. One, there are no errors in the Bible based on the testimony of Jesus. Two, there are errors in the Bible but Jesus didn't know about them. Three, there are errors in the Bible and He did know about them and He covered them up.

There's only one possibility. If there are errors in the Bible and He didn't know about them, He's not God. If there are errors in the Bible and He knew about them and covered them up, He's the devil.

But He is God and He is not the devil and there are no errors in Scripture. The authority of Christ really settles the issue of an inspired text. Scripture then becomes the binding Word of Christ. Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly. The Scripture is the Word of Christ.

He takes ownership of it all. In it, 1 Corinthians 2, 16, says you have the mind of Christ. When you bring the Word of God, you bring every thought captive to Christ, 2 Corinthians 10, 5. Christ takes ownership of the whole Scripture and so should we confidently based on His testimony. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, helping you build your confidence in God's perfect Word. John's current study is titled, Making a Case for the Bible. Well, hopefully, John, if our listeners take anything away from this study, it's that there really is a strong, compelling case to be made for the veracity of Scripture and its divine authorship and its singular ability to transform lives. Well that's absolutely right and I hope we've gotten that across.

I understand how life goes. Most of the people who probably are listening to me now either heard a portion of the series or maybe you haven't heard anything but today's broadcast, and only a few of you probably heard every single message. And that leads me to say this. No Christian should go through his or her Christian experience with any kind of doubts about Scripture. No believer should be victimized by somebody's supposed criticism of Scripture for which you don't have an answer, or somebody throwing the fact that they think the Bible has contradictions or that the Bible is psychologically unsophisticated or scientifically wrong. You should never have to deal with doubts that are raised by those kinds of suggestions, because you can have confidence in the truthfulness of Scripture. That's why we did the series, just completed Making a Case for the Bible.

But I also know, as I said, that you didn't hear it all, and if you did, you need to hear it again. So the series, Making a Case for the Bible, comes on five MP3 downloads on the Grace To You web site, and those are, of course, free. And when you contact us, don't forget to ask about the new MacArthur Study Bible, just released in the ESV, the English Standard Version. Thanks, John. And, friend, this is the kind of series that you'll probably want to refer to again and again.

And that's easy to do. The MP3 audio as well as the written transcripts are available for free download at our web site. The title of the series, again, Making a Case for the Bible.

Download your copy today. Our web address is gty.org. There's a lot of material in this study that we didn't have time to air on the radio, so make sure you get it all.

Download all five MP3s and transcripts for free at gty.org. And whether you're studying along with the lessons you hear on Grace To You or you're following along with the sermons at your local church, the MacArthur Study Bible is an excellent resource to have. Whether you've been a believer for five months or 50 years, the Study Bible's 25,000 footnotes will help you better understand what God's Word means by what it says. The MacArthur Study Bible is affordably priced in hardcover and leather, and even in premium goatskin. To order yours, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378 and then be here next week as John looks at the most important thing your pastor can do.

What is it? And how can you evaluate how well he's doing it? Find out when John returns with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. On Monday, is Grace To You!