The Inspiration of Scripture B

You ought to desire the word like a baby desires milk. Do you understand? A baby desires milk not because they like the flavor, but they have a built-in mechanism that triggers the reality that they have the need. They are dependent on it for the best that life has to offer.

There's nothing that says you couldn't have a jacket without pockets or a car without a trunk. But one thing's for sure, you can't separate ideas from words. Now that concept, the importance of words, ties directly to another concept, divine inspiration, the miraculous process by which 40 or so men were used by God to reveal biblical truth, truth you can trust because it comes from God himself. And John MacArthur will examine the inspiration of Scripture today on Grace to You. Thanks for joining us on this Monday as John continues his series titled How to Get the Most from God's Word.

And now with a lesson, here's John. The Bible has revealed truth. In it, God speaks. New Testament writers affirm the Old Testament as God's Word. In fact, 320 times New Testament writers quote the Old Testament as God's Word. One thousand times they allude to it as God's Word in a clear and definite reference to some Old Testament passage. So 1300 times New Testament writers affirm the Old Testament and they do it in the Law, the Pentateuch, they do it in the history books, they do it in the minor prophets, the major prophets, and the holy writings, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and so forth. In other words, they affirm every section of Old Testament Scripture as being the Word of God in unselfconscious ways. And then they in the New Testament go on to write what they write with that same utter absence of self-consciousness. Paul, reading the Law of God, the Old Testament said the Law is holy, just, and good.

He affirms the holiness, the perfection of God's Law, the Old Testament. Jude quotes Peter as Scripture. Peter quotes Paul as Scripture. And John quotes himself as Scripture.

John just finished writing the letters to the churches. He says, let the churches hear what the Spirit says. John knew he was writing what the Spirit was saying, not what he was saying. The Bible is not some high level of human genius. Now others have suggested that what you really have in inspiration is God reveals concepts.

I don't know why people have to come up with things like this, but they do. And God reveals concepts and the writers could pick any words they wanted. The Bible does not support that. Furthermore, how can you convey concepts without words?

I'm not sure I know how to do that. But the idea is that God conveyed some spiritual ideas, but not verbal inspiration, not inerrancy, and not infallibility. That's not how it is. When God called Moses at the burning bush, and Moses was fumbling around and didn't believe, you know, that he had the eloquence to represent God, and God said, I want you to be my spokesman, I want you to speak for me, Exodus chapter 4. And Moses said, but I, I, I, I, I, I have a speech impediment. And this is what God said to him.

Go and I will be with your mind and teach you what to think. Is that what he said? No, that's not what he said. He said, go and I'll be with your mouth and I'll teach you what to say.

Exactly. Samuel, the word of Jehovah was precious in those days. There was no frequent vision. In other words, it was rare to hear God speak. There was a rarity of Scripture in that time. Samuel did not yet know Jehovah, neither was the word of the Lord revealed unto him.

So there was a time of silence. This is recorded in 1 Samuel 3. Then all of a sudden, God broke the silence and He called for Samuel.

Remember, three times He called him and Samuel said this, speak for your servant hears, speak for your servant hears. Isaiah says, I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us? And then I said, here am I, send me, and immediately it says in Isaiah 6, and God said, go and tell this people... and God outlined exactly what He wanted to say verbatim.

Jeremiah wrote, the word of Jehovah came to me saying, before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee. In other words, it's explicit statement, the word of the Lord came to him and he just quotes it exactly. I sanctify thee, I've appointed thee a prophet to the nations whatsoever I command thee, thou shalt speak. Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth, Jeremiah 1, 4 to 9. Chapter 5 verse 14, I'll make my words in thy mouth fire. You open your mouth, fire comes out, the people are going to be like kindling, he says, and the word of judgment is going to burn them up. Chapter 15, thy words were found and I did eat them. Thy words were unto me a joy and rejoicing in my heart. In fact, in chapter 15 verse 19, Jeremiah said, God is as my mouth. In Ezekiel, he said to Ezekiel in chapter 2, I send thee to the children of Israel, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thy heart and hear with thine ears and go and speak to them.

That's how it was. God spoke and they spoke and they spoke what God told them to speak. There was Amos. He wasn't even a prophet. He says in chapter 7 of his prophecy, I was no prophet. I wasn't even a prophet's son.

I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees. He was a farmer and Jehovah took me from following the flock and Jehovah said to me, go prophesy unto my people Israel. No training, didn't know what he was going to say, no preparation, you just go and you tell them exactly what I tell you to tell them. The Apostle Paul was told by Ananias after he was blinded on the road to Damascus and was called into the ministry, he was told that he would be a witness for the Lord. In response to that, he tells the Galatians in chapter 1, what I preach, he said, I didn't receive from flesh and blood. It came directly from the Lord. The Lord called me, separated me from my mother's womb, called me through His grace, revealed His Son in me and I'm preaching and I never conferred with flesh and blood.

Taught by God. John, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day in Revelation 1, I heard behind me a great voice saying, write in a book. God told him exactly what to write. Even Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, this is marvelous, received His message from God. Isaiah said of Him, Jehovah hath made my mouth like a sharp sword. The Lord Jehovah hath given me the tongue of them that are taught that I may know how to sustain with words him that is weary.

He wakeneth morning by morning. He wakeneth mine ear to hear as they that are taught. Here is the Messiah speaking in prophecy saying, I will speak only what God speaks through me. And Jesus said that. The words which thou gavest me, John 17, 8, I have given them.

That's just what Jesus did. Only what God spoke did He repeat. So when you're talking about the Bible, you're not talking about some general ideas from God, you're talking about every word of God is pure. Not just floating ideas, you can't convey ideas without words.

You might as well talk about a tune without notes, or a sun without light, or a sun without figures, or geology without rocks, or anthropology without men, or melody without music, as to talk about thoughts without words. Now to show you how profound this miracle was, turn to 1 Peter chapter 1 for a moment, 1 Peter chapter 1. 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 10 and 11, as to this salvation, now salvation is the theme of the Bible from front to back, and certainly the theme of the Old Testament as God promises the coming Savior, the one who will bruise the serpent's head, the ruler that shall come between the feet of Jacob, the one who will be Shiloh, the prince that is to come, the Messiah, the final lamb pictured by all the sacrifices, the redemption in the Messiah to come is the theme of the Old Testament. So salvation is the main subject. So as to this salvation, verse 10, 1 Peter 1, 10, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of God within them was indicating as He predicted the suffering of Christ and the glories to follow.

That's a fascinating statement. You know what it says? It says the Old Testament writers studied what they wrote to figure out what it meant. Now if you're an author and you don't know what you mean by what you write, you're in trouble. Whenever you write, you write until you understand clearly what you're trying to convey and you believe it's clear enough for everybody else to understand.

You work very hard. There is no virtue in being hard to understand. There is no virtue in writing things that aren't clear. There's no virtue in preaching things that aren't clear. In fact, I always tell young preachers it's very easy to be hard to understand. It's very hard to be crystal clear because to be crystal clear, you have to be crystal clear about what you're saying.

And that's the challenge. Well, here were men under the inspiration of the Word of God who wrote things they didn't even understand. That shows you the supernatural and miraculous character of inspiration.

And they would write it and then study it to try to figure out what it meant. And there was a distancing from them and their writings as God was using them as vehicles. Now other critics say, well the Bible...the Bible is the Word of God in the spiritual area, but not in those other areas like geology and history and science and things like that.

It really messes up there. The critics love this stuff. They just love it. They say, well the Bible is only right spiritually, it's not right historically and other things. And they use...one of them uses an illustration in Numbers 11, 31 and 32.

I don't have time to turn to it, I'll tell you the story. In Numbers 11, 31 and 32, the children of Israel in the wilderness of Sinai, they don't have any food so God provides food, remember? And a wind blows one day and just blows quail in there. Just blows these quail in and they just start gathering quail. And the quail are...they're ubiquitous, I mean they're everywhere.

In fact, the person who gathers the least gets like eleven bushels of them. And quail is a little guy. We have them in our backyard every morning, they're just little guys. And they're just...they're just all over the place. And they're very compliant, they just kind of fly in and that's that. And they got them all collected there.

God's providing this wonderful food for them. So it says in Numbers 11, 31 and 32 that they were two cubits high. And so the critic laughed at this and said, you know, this is ridiculous. Let's take two cubits might be approaching four feet. Four feet deep in quail?

And it talks about a day's journey to one side of the camp and a day's journey to the other side of the camp. And so you got miles and miles of four feet deep quail. And this critic said that he figured out would be 19,538,468,306,672 quail. He says, see the folly of the Bible.

I mean this is absolute absurdity. What he didn't understand was the Hebrew word when it talks about them being four feet high doesn't mean they were four feet deep, it meant they were flying at that elevation. Which would be the perfect elevation to just, you know, just pick them out of the air. God blew them in from the Nile Valley and He had them flying at the right altitude. Didn't even have to bend over or jump up. The Bible is, listen, written by a God whose omniscient and He knows as much about quail as He does about spiritual things, right?

Not any difference. So the Word of the Lord, the Word of God is just that. You got to have that understanding in order to have the compassion and passion for the truth in order to want to know it, to want to make it a part of your life. Now that you understand what the Bible is, what does it take to be an effective student? Number one, you must be a Christian. You must be a Christian.

You must be born again because 1 Corinthians 2.14 says, The natural man understandeth not the things of God. They are foolishness to him because they're spiritually discerned and he is spiritually dead. Verse 16, he doesn't have the mind of Christ. You can take all the finest theological scholars and all the greatest minds in the field of religion and you can put them together and put a Bible in front of them and they'll misrepresent it. I don't care how smart they are.

I don't care how many degrees they have. I don't care how much theology they've studied. You can see what they do to the Bible. Just go to any secular theology department of any university or any seminary that is full of unbelievers and you will see anti-God, anti-Christ, anti-Bible stuff.

Sometimes they bring them on television. They had a thing on where they want to discuss the book of Genesis so they brought in a bunch of unbelieving liberals to discuss Genesis and they all got it wrong. They all got it wrong.

Why? Because they're natural men. They can't understand the things of God because they're spiritually discerned and they're spiritually dead. And it deeply bothers them that the not many noble and the not many mighty common folk understand the Bible because we have an anointing from God, namely the Holy Spirit who teaches us all things, right? And the Spirit is the discerner. Who knows the things of a man but the Spirit that is in the man, Paul says in that same chapter. And who knows the things of God but the Spirit of God?

The Bible is confounding to any human mind no matter how great that mind is and it is as clear as it can be to any believer who will study it. Second point we made, you cannot be a student of Scripture unless you have a strong desire. There's got to be a passion for it somewhere. You will never get into the deep riches of God's truth unless there's some motivation for that.

And I would venture to say that the reason most Christians never study the things of God deeply is because they just aren't motivated to that. They're motivated to do something else. You need to pray that God would give us that desire that's recorded in 1 Peter 2, 2, like newborn babes long for the pure milk of the Word. You ought to desire the Word like a baby desires milk.

Do you understand? A baby desires milk not because they like the flavor. I think they like the flavor. But they have a built-in mechanism that triggers the reality that they have the need.

They are dependent on it for the best that life has to offer for health and well-being. The same thing is true as believers. If you want true spiritual well-being and true fulfillment, true joy and fulfillment in every area of your life as a Christian, it comes from the Word of God. You need to be motivated to long for that Word like a baby longs for milk. Somewhere along the line, that happened in my life and I thank God for giving me that tremendous drive, that tremendous longing to know the Scriptures, to pursue the truth of Scripture, a love for the Word, to proclaim it, to personalize it, to honor it, to fight for it.

That's a tremendous blessing. No one will ever achieve a knowledge of the Word apart from a desire to do so. It starts with that passion of the heart. If you don't have it, you need to pray that God would give it to you. Read Proverbs 2. You want wisdom? Cry for it.

You want discernment? Yell out in the street for it. Pursue it like gold.

Go after it like people go after things in the ground like gold and diamonds and precious jewels. Job 28 says the same thing. He says, I look and I see these men and they make mines and they go for gold and they go for jewels and diamonds and they sink shafts into the earth where no one has ever been and they overturn the earth and they do all this for human riches and then he asks the question down in verse 20, but who finds wisdom? And the answer comes, only God knows wisdom and God reveals it to those who know Him. Men in our world are very capable of digging up all kinds of precious things from a material side, but when it comes to the true wisdom, they're void of it, aren't they? It only belongs to those who seek it. Only those who know God and in His strength seek to know truth.

That takes me to a third point. If you're going to be a good Bible student, you have to be diligent. It requires diligence. When I was a kid growing up, they used to tell us, you know, read the Bible 15 minutes a day and have your daily devotions. Daily devotions drove me nuts, basically, because I didn't like reading the Bible and not understanding it and then putting it down. And then the next day reading something else, I didn't understand and then putting that down.

I always wanted to know what it meant. Somewhere along the line, there has to be a diligence. There has to be a hunger to search the Scriptures. They use the text of Acts 17. Acts 17 talks about the Bereans who were more noble than anybody else because they searched the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

That's what it takes. Be diligent to be a workman approved of God, needing not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word. Be like those elders in 1 Timothy 5, 17, who worked hard at the Word and doctrine to labor to the point of sweat and exhaustion. Young guys that come to seminary often ask kind of funny questions. I remember one young seminary guy asked me one time and the first time he met me, he said, you know, I just was going to ask you what one book you get all your good material out of.

Well, that's a typical question of a guy who doesn't know there is no such book. But anyway, another one that I've always remembered was a young man said to me, what is the...and he was kind of starry-eyed and I'm sure he expected some spiritual esoteric answer. He said, what is the real key to great preaching? I said, well, it's the ability to keep your rear end in a chair until you understand the text.

Boy, he was shocked. Yeah, that's the real key. What separates great preaching from poor preaching is whether you know what you're talking about or not. Oratorical gifts aside, it's when you understand it, as we said earlier, it's when you really understand the Word of God clear enough to make it clear to somebody else that that's great preaching. And what separates the great student of the Word of God from the mediocre one is effort, effort, just plain effort.

No magic, it's just effort. Let me give you a fourth prerequisite if you're going to be a Bible student. Holiness, look at 1 Peter 2, 1 again, 1 Peter 2, 1, therefore putting aside all malice, that's the word for evil, kakia, all deceit or guile, hypocrisy, envy and all slander. Get rid of sin, get rid of sin. One of the great realities in studying the Bible is that you're going to be taught by the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit is not going to be able to fill you and teach you if there's sin in your life. Sin plugs up that whole pipeline, let me tell you. That's why it's so absolutely crucial to understand James 1, 21. James 1, 21 essentially partners with 1 Peter 2, 1, says this, Putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, all that remaining wickedness that's in you since your salvation, get rid of it and in humility receive the implanted Word. That Word can't go to work in your life until you've dealt with sin. So the first thing you do as you approach the Word of God is confess your sin. Sin is a barrier.

Why? Because it clouds your mind, it cuts off the free working of the Spirit of God. I'll tell you something else. It creates presuppositions for your study of Scripture, because if you're harboring sin in your life, then you're most likely to twist the Scripture so it doesn't confront that. You mess with the truth and the interpretation of Scripture to hide yourself. Or if you aren't willing to be honest about your own life and honest about your own heart, and if you're not willing to expose yourself to the Lord in an open and honest confession of sin, then you definitely will come across passages of Scripture that when they begin to pierce your heart, you'll find another way to interpret. And then when you get into the pulpit to preach or when you get into a class to teach or when you get to a place of discipling someone or leading your spouse or your children, you're going to hedge against the Word of God to protect your own sin. You cannot be an effective student of the Word of God, an honest and effective student of the Word of God with sin in your life. That's why we so often say when people fall away from the Word of God, don't want to come to church, don't care about hearing the regular preaching and teaching of the Word of God, have no appetite for the truth. It's indicative of sin. It's not just that sin, it's the sin that causes that sin of indifference toward truth.

And usually it's a dead giveaway that truth penetrates and exposes something they don't want exposed. So one of the things that has to happen if you're going to really deal with the Word of God and receive the engrafted Word in its fullness and its purity and the power of the Spirit and in clarity is you're willing to give up everything or anything in your life that it touches on. And then a fifth is obedience because in verse 22 of James 1 he says, Now prove yourselves doers of the Word and not merely hearers who delude themselves. You don't really believe what the Bible says unless you live it, isn't that true?

Is that fair enough? So a good student of the Bible learns and applies immediately, puts it into practice. It's not some ethereal thing, it's not some theoretical thing, it's a matter of life. Well, time is gone so I'll just give you the last one, number six, prayer...prayer. Ephesians 1 is a very powerful Scripture. Ephesians 1, 17, Paul prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. And he says in verse 18, I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints. Paul says, I pray for you, I pray for you that God will give you wisdom, revelation, knowledge, enlightenment, understanding.

Pray. People ask me about prayer, I always say the times of most intense prayer for me are the times when I'm studying Scripture. And I'm asking the Lord for clarity, I'm asking the Lord for wisdom, for insight, understanding, enlightenment, to understand His truth and how it applies in my own life as well as the church.

You want to be a student of this miraculous supernatural book? It requires to be born again, have a strong desire, be diligent, holy, obedient, and prayerful. And all of those things are the work of the Spirit, aren't they? So we must come to the place where we walk in the Spirit, yield to Him, plead with Him to work these works in our life.

Let's pray. Again, our Father, our hearts have been so filled, filled with the time of worship, filled with the wonder of your truth. We're so grateful. We pray now that you'll confirm to our hearts all these things. Give us a great love for your truth, which is so life-changing and produces joy and brings you glory. We would know it and live it for your glory and your name.

Amen. You're listening to John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John's current study here on Grace to You is titled, How to Get the Most from God's Word. Now, John, you went down a list of requirements today, requirements for being an effective student of the Bible. And of course, before you can be a student of the Word, you need to have confidence that the Bible is true, that it is reliable. Through the years, what have you found are the best ways to help people get that confidence and trust the Bible? Well, to start with, if a person is not a believer, the natural man understands not the things of God.

They are foolishness to him. The default position of an unregenerate person is they're going to doubt the Bible. But when you become a believer, the Spirit of God takes up residence in your heart, and that is the anointing that you have from God that shows you the truth. One of the results of salvation is not only confidence in the Bible, but obedience to the Bible. So I would say it's part of being a true believer to accept the Bible as the Word of God, because the Spirit of God confirms the Word even as we read it and study it. Having said that, I have to also add that it's possible, and it happens more frequently than I would like to think, it's possible for Christians to lose confidence in Scripture.

They can be assaulted by the enemy in their minds. They can be assaulted by critics. They feel like there are certain things in the Bible that offend people, and so they back off of those. So it is important for Christian people to whom the Spirit of God is giving the truth of God through the Scripture to trust it. And this is where I think apologetics steps in. This is where the defense of the truth of Scripture steps in. It's really something you do for the Christian who may be struggling because there's so many attacks on Scripture. Now, along that line, I want to re-mention what we talked about in an earlier broadcast, that Grace To You has a really important gift to give you.

It's free of charge. It's a booklet titled You Can Trust the Bible, and it takes you into the very, very carefully crafted reasons why the Bible is true. You have the Scripture's own testimony to its veracity. You have the evidence in the heart of the Holy Spirit. But also, you have reason. You can reason from the Scripture about the truth of the Scripture.

And that's what this booklet will help you do. You Can Trust the Bible. If you don't trust the Bible, if you have doubts or questions, this is really going to make a difference in your life. And we'll send it free to anyone who asks, as long as we have a supply for a limited time. So contact us now. Email, phone. Go to the website and ask for your free copy of You Can Trust the Bible.

Thanks, John. And friend, if you have doubts about the Bible's trustworthiness, this booklet will help you settle those doubts and show you just how powerful Scripture is. To get your free copy of You Can Trust the Bible, contact us today. Call our number here, 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. John's booklet, Why You Can Trust the Bible, is a great resource to go through with a new believer, or perhaps someone you're discipling.

Again, You Can Trust the Bible. It's our gift to you. Just call 855-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. And when you get in touch, I'd encourage you to let us know how you're benefiting from our ministry here. Your feedback is more important than you might think. Make sure you let us know how you hear the broadcast, whether it's online or through Grace To You's apps or simply on a radio station.

Let us know when you get in touch. Email us at letters at gty.org, or you can write to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. And now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for starting your week here with Grace To You, and be back tomorrow as John refines your Bible handling skills, showing you a way to study and interpret the Bible that you may have never considered. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.