No psalms, no books, no visions, no poems, no sermons are inspired.
Period. Inspired in terms of the Bible definition means God breathed. Now either something is the Word of God or it is not the Word of God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If you've spent much time in church, you've likely heard that the Bible is inspired, that it's the Word of God. But what does that actually mean, and how does the Bible stack up against the claims of science and history? Can you trust the accuracy of Scripture? John MacArthur answers those questions today in a lesson called Our God-Breathed Bible. It's part of a classic series titled Is the Bible Reliable, a collection of lessons designed to build your trust in God's Word like never before.
So take your Bible and follow along with John as he begins today's lesson. What do we mean when we say the Bible is inspired of God? Are people still receiving inspiration? Are people inspired of God when they write songs or books or when they preach sermons or when they teach or when they make decisions?
Is it Holy Spirit inspiration that gives them wisdom? Now what about the term inspire? The term inspire is not a Greek term.
Inspiro comes from Latin which means to breathe in and it's a little bit misleading. In 2 Timothy 3.16 when it says all Scripture is given by what? Inspiration of God, or all Scripture is inspired by God, the Latin term inspiration does not properly translate the word theopneustos, God-breathed.
Really it shouldn't be inspired, it should be expired. All Scripture is breathed out by God, not breathed in. The idea then in the Scripture is that the Bible is the out-breath of God. It's not God breathing into man's words. It's not God breathing into man's thoughts.
It's God breathing out His words. Now we believe that the Bible is God's breath. We believe God wrote every word of it, God gave it, God revealed it. What is in here is what God said.
Now is it right to claim the same thing for a song? Is a man's sermon really chapter 22 of John's gospel? Should we translate songs into every language and place them in the Bible as the breath of God? Are books that come out about people's visions and people's communication from God really biblical, inerrant, infallible, authoritative and efficaciously the Word of God?
What about tongues? What about current prophecies? I remember being in Jerusalem and a man stood up in the middle of a communion on the Mount of Olives and gave a prophecy. God hath spoken and then he rattled off a long prophecy. Is that really equal to revelation from God? Is He equal to those writers who penned the Word of God? Now someone is going to say, Hey, McCarthy, you're pushing the point.
I hope you're saying that. Somebody else is going to say, Well, you don't understand there are degrees of inspiration. Some things are more inspired than other things.
Oh? You see, some things are inspired to a greater degree than other things and those who wrote the Bible were the most inspired. Now listen, inspired in terms of the Bible definition means God breathed. Now either something is the Word of God or it is not the Word of God. It isn't more or less the Word of God.
There are no degrees. It isn't a little bit of God's Word or a little more of God's Word or more even than that of God's Word. It is either God's Word or it is not God's Word. It is either God breathed or it is not. Either God breathed it out or He didn't.
It can't be more or less. There is no more inspired or less inspired writing of God. God is an absolute. God's Word is an absolute. And inspiration does not allow for degrees. No psalms, no books, no visions, no poems, no sermons are inspired.
Period. The canon of Scripture is closed. That's what we believe.
You say, Where do you get that belief? Well, Revelation 22 18 says, If you add anything to this book, she'll be added unto you the plagues that are written therein. You say, Well, that's only talking about the book of Revelation.
Fine. The book of Revelation is the last book in the Bible. So it says, Don't add anything to this book. Isn't it interesting that it's the last book in the Bible? If you added anything to the Bible, it would have to be added to that book.
And that's forbidden. You say, Well, was there some special thing that occurred to make a book a book of the Bible? Yes, it was a question of authorship. In the Old Testament there were tests by which a book was judged to be true and divinely authored and those were clear cut and there was never any problem. In the New Testament the authors were either apostles who were with Jesus or those very closely associated to the apostles who were with Jesus.
After that, no more Bible writers. There are no inspired writers today. Now you may use the word inspiring in a very kind of general saying, Oh, I was inspired and you may not mean that God wrote something through you as He did through Paul. That's heresy, friends, to say you got revelation from God that is inspiration.
It is not true. I hate to say this, but it's true that not one single solitary sermon of mine was ever the breath of God. Nobody's sermons are inspired by God. They are simply proclamations based on what has already been inspired by God. God does not speak through me direct revelation to you.
He does not send me down my sermons. Or they would be equal to Scripture and I would have every right to be included in the New Testament as a writer of Scripture. Now you see, you must have a very careful understanding of what inspiration means.
That's not a word you throw around glibly. And one of the fearful heresies that is rolling around today is that anybody's vision and anybody's voice from heaven and anybody's Holy Spirit inspiration is as good as Scripture. You know, it is not a far cry...mark it...it is not a far cry from traditional Catholicism which accepts the Bible plus tradition. And we are seeing even in the name of Christianity all kinds of things that are being propagated as the revelation and inspiration of God. So we must understand inspiration. Now I want to give you two things, the definition of inspiration and the defense of it. First of all, the definition of inspiration. What do we mean?
Let's talk about it in a very broad way. Now remember, revelation, important word and you're getting a real course in theology. Revelation is God's revealing of Himself and His will. Revelation is God's disclosure of Himself and His will. Inspiration is the way in which He did it. Revelation is God's revealing Himself, making Himself known. And inspiration is the Holy Spirit taking this revelation and putting it through human writers who wrote the Old and New Testament in order to set down in exact and authoritative words the message that God wanted written.
Now in order to make our definition clear, let's look at some things. First of all, what inspiration is not. Now you know, there's a lot of people who use the Bible for a lot of reasons. There are a lot of people who say the Bible is inspired and you don't know what they mean so you've got to ask for a definition.
So I want to show you some of the things that people say that aren't true. First of all, inspiration is not a high level of human achievement. It is not a high level of human achievement. That's what we call natural inspiration. There are some people who say the Bible is no more inspired than Homer's Odyssey, Mohammed's Koran, Dante's Divine Comedy or Shakespeare's Tragedies.
In other words, whoever put this thing together was just a high level of genius and it's full of errors and it's full of mistakes and it's full of problems and it's a lot of fallible stuff that we can't believe. But my, its ethics in certain parts and its morals in certain parts and its insights into humanity, etc., reveal a genius of a very high level. It exalts the human authors to the level of geniuses but it denies God totally. God did not write the book, smart men did.
Well that's interesting. That just doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is smart men wouldn't write a book that condemned them all. Smart men wouldn't write a book that provided salvation outside themselves in a perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Smart men and even the smartest could never conceive of a personality like Jesus Christ. They couldn't even fictionalize a personality like Christ who surpasses in purity and love and righteousness and perfection anything and everything ever found in the human consciousness.
Where did the authors find a model for Jesus Christ if they made it up? Man is busy writing books that exalt himself, he doesn't write books to damn himself. And incidentally, if this was just a high level of genius, why aren't people adding to it again and again and again? And if the genius, the so-called that wrote it, wrote this, why didn't they write other things that are here? I mean, if Peter was so smart, how come all we have is a couple of little letters if he was a genius? Why don't we have more than that? Why don't we have what we have from Shakespeare if it's a high level of genius? And the Bible says in 2 Peter 1, But holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Let me give you a second thing. Inspiration is not a high level of human achievement. Secondly, inspiration is not extended just to the thoughts of the writers.
Now this is interesting. And I'm going by these briefly, but just to give you some kind of a backdrop. These are things that are being taught in the dominance seminaries and churches across our world. Inspiration does not extend just to the thoughts. This is what's called thought or concept inspiration, that God never gave the writers the words, He just gave them general ideas and they put them in their own words. Like He sort of zapped them with a thought about love is a nice thing and they sat down and wrote 1 Corinthians 13, 1 to 13. Paul just sat down, although I speak with tongues of the men and angels, and he wrote it off because he had love in his mind and God put love there.
But nothing else, nothing specific, no words. The view says God suggested concepts, God suggested a general trend of revelation, but men were left free to say what they wanted and that's why there's so many mistakes in the Bible. What it does is deny verbal inspiration. It denies that God wrote the words. And it means that any kind of exegesis or expositional word-by-word study is stupid.
I would say that the general run of the mill of neo-orthodoxy used to hold on to this. The kind of the far outside, the more liberal end of things, this is kind of where they were at for a long time until modern day, they've got new philosophical things, but they were always saying, well, God's thoughts are there but all the words are just man's words. You know what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2, 13? He said this, we speak not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Spirit teaches. Mark it, 1 Corinthians 2, 13, the words are the words of the Holy Spirit, Paul said.
Now Paul claimed that it wasn't just concepts and it wasn't just thoughts, it was words. In John 17, 8 Jesus said, I have given unto them the words which thou gavest Me. Do you know that 3,808 times in the Old Testament we have expressions like, Thus saith the Lord. The Word of the Lord came.
God said 3,808 times. Now these phrases could hardly express wordless concepts. God communicates in words.
Can you imagine passing on thoughts without words? Very difficult to project a thought without words. Paul says in Galatians 1, 11, I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which was preached by me that it is not after man. I didn't get my gospel from men. I neither received it of man nor was I taught it but by the revelation of Jesus Christ. In other words, he says, everything I teach you I received from the revelation of Christ. For example, when Moses, you remember, was kind of excusing himself from serving the Lord because he had a speech problem, God did not say, I will inspire your thoughts.
I will be with your mind and tell you what to think. No, no, God said, I'll be with your...what?...your mouth and teach you what to say. God did not inspire thoughts, God gave words. This is the Word of God. And forty years later, Moses said to Israel in Deuteronomy 4, 2, You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. Don't take away the words.
Don't add to the words. God commanded those words to you through me...the words. You know, one of the greatest arguments against thought inspiration is a statement of 1 Peter 1, 10. The prophets wrote a lot about the Messiah. It says, of which salvation the prophets inquired and searched diligently who prophesied of the grace that should come, searching what person or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ who was in them did signify. Now let me tell you what that says. The Spirit gave them prophecies, they wrote them down and then read them to try to figure out what they meant.
Say what's so amazing about that? The amazing part of that is they got words without understanding. In other words, they actually wrote down words and didn't even understand what they were writing in its full implication. God didn't give them thoughts and they put them in their own words. God gave them words that they had to feed back to figure the thoughts out.
Inspiration is verbal. Listen to what Jesus said in Matthew 24 35, He said, heaven and earth shall pass away but My words shall not pass away. It is the words in the Bible that God has authored. That's why we make such an important point out of pronouns, prepositions, small conjunctions, all kinds of things in Scripture just seeming minimal.
Remember when Peter said, thou art the Christ, the Son, the living God. And Jesus said, flesh and blood didn't reveal that unto you, My Father in heaven did. He was just speaking right off of what God was planting in His brain. God reveals the words, not the thoughts. Thoughts are carried by words and God revealed His thoughts in words.
We believe the words are inspired. First Corinthians 14 37, if any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. Paul says you ought to recognize if you want to be spiritual that what I say is the Word of God. So inspiration is not just extended to the thoughts, it's extended to the very words. That's what we call verbal revelation. You know, there aren't too many people who believe that anymore. That's where liberalism comes in.
That's the destruction of the church. Let me give you another thought. Inspiration is not the act of God on the reader. There are some today who teach what I call existential inspiration. In other words, the only part of the Bible that's inspired is what zaps you. You read along and you get sort of an ethical goose bump. And when you get your ethical goose bump, the Word is inspired to you.
It is not authoritative. The liberals say that the actual record here is not written by God, it's human, it's fallible and some men witnessed some things and wrote it all down, but it isn't God's revelation, it's a witness to God's revelation in their life. And they got their ethical goose bump and wrote it down. And it's sort of in there somewhere and they say the Word of God becomes the Word of God when you get zapped by it.
Otherwise it isn't. In other words, if it just sits there, it's not the Word of God. If you read it and you say, oh, wonderful, isn't that terrific? It becomes the Word of God to you. When it hits you, when you get ecstatic, when you get emotional, it's not authoritative, it just contains the Word of God.
That's a very, very insidious statement. The Bible contains the Word of God. No, the Bible what? Is the Word of God.
Very good, class. The Bible is the Word of God. It is not just a question of containing, it is a question of is. And it isn't just a spiritual experience, purely existential. You know, this is where you get into the theology where people don't even want to tell you what their ethical goose bump was.
I mean, they don't even want to get into that. So you ask a theologian, has the Bible become inspired you? Ah, yes. And he tells you about his first order experience. Or he tells you about his leap of faith. And you say, well what was it? And you say, ah, ah, ah, it's undefined. It's an existential happening. And you say, I don't understand it.
Who does? The liberal comes along and says, we've got to demythologize the Bible. This is the big word that they use, we've got to get rid of the myth. So they send themselves through the Bible demythologizing and they get everything out like the preexistence of Christ, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the miracles, the substitutionary death, His resurrection, His ascension, His return, judgment. They get it all out and they say historically it's false, but spiritually and existentially it's true when it zaps you.
I don't understand that. They reject the historical character of the Scripture and still say it has something. Doesn't make sense to me because if it lies from beginning to end historically, why would I ever believe it spiritually? I mean, let's face it, folks, if the book is lying where it is verifiable in history, why would I believe it in its spiritual content where I can't verify it? It seems to me that if God wanted me to trust the spiritual character of the Bible, He'd make sure that the historical and verifiable character of the Bible would substantiate its truth.
Don't you think so? Yelder says that 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 the infallible word of God, end quote. How can you possibly have a divinely right experience through a wrong book?
That's what they tell us. Kierkegaard says, only the truth which edifies thee is truth...garbage. If the whole Bible is a lie, every other area, why am I going to believe its spiritual statements? Jesus said in John 7, teen, thy word is truth...truth. No, inspiration is not the inspiration of the reader.
Let me give you another thought. Fundamentalists like us who believe the Bible always get shot down. They say that we teach the Bible as dictated mechanically. A writer just went like this and God moved his arm and he was sort of a automaton, you know, a robot and he just cranked it all out, you see, and that was it. That's called the dictation theory and nobody ever believes that. But the liberals like to accuse us of believing that God just dictated it all and that the people involved were just sort of secretaries and stenographers with no mind involved at all. But that's a little hard to hold to because when you read the books, you find personality, don't you? Every book has got a different character, every author a different style.
It's amazing the uniqueness. Oh, it's true, God could have used dictation and gotten us the truth. I mean, it wouldn't have got corrupted at all, He could have just dictated the whole thing. In fact, He didn't even need to use a man. He could have gone zap and it all would have existed and dropped down in our houses. You say, why didn't He do that?
And I don't know why He didn't do that, but He didn't. It is true that God could have used that. But when you read the Bible, you find a used man, there are variations in style, there are variations in language and vocabulary, from author to author, there are distinct personalities visible.
And have you ever noticed how you can read the emotion of the writer in the time that he's writing? You can feel what he feels as we've gone through Paul, we've seen this. God used writers, according to 2 Peter, who were born along by the Holy Spirit.
They were part of it, carried along. Well you say, how could God write it and it be God's words and still Paul write it and it be Paul's words? Because God had made Paul into the man that He wanted him to be.
Let me show you what I mean. God formed the personality of the writer. God controlled his heredity and God controlled his environment. And God controlled his life to make him into the man that He wanted him to be. When that man was exactly what He wanted him to be and what God intended him to be, he then directed and controlled the free and willing choice of the man so that he wrote down the very words of God. God made him into the man who would think the kind of thoughts that God could use to express His truth and God literally selected the words out of the man's own life, out of the man's own personality, his own words, his own vocabulary, his own emotions. The words were the man's words, but in reality his whole life had been so framed by God that they were God's words. And so I can as easily say Paul wrote Romans as I can say God wrote it and be right on both counts. Notice 2 Samuel 23, 2, the Spirit of the Lord spoke by me and His Word was in my tongue. He says it was me and it was my tongue, but it came out His Word.
Fantastic. Holy men of God were moved along by the Holy Spirit. They were authors, not secretaries.
They made full use of their personalities. You read Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, you see him weeping, it's all there. You read the divine impetus in his heart like a fire just roaring and raging and then you go over to Amos and his inside is like a lion roaring and raging and you can sense their personality there, there.
And it's not any of those things. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today's lesson on the inspiration of scripture is from John's current study here on Grace to You titled, Is the Bible Reliable? You know there are a lot of professing Christians who say they believe that the Bible is inspired by God, but they aren't sure that it's without error. Maybe they've heard some compelling arguments that make them wonder just how much they can trust the Bible. John, how often do you get questions from people who have those kinds of doubts about the scriptures?
Well, I would say this, Phil, I don't get questions from people who are Christians. Those who know the Lord have a built-in confidence in scripture. And that's what John said in 1 John, he says, you have an anointing from God. You have an anointing from God so that you don't need any man to teach you because you have an anointing from God that teaches you all things. And Jesus said, when he was meeting with his disciples in the upper room, he said, when I'm gone, the Spirit is going to come, the Spirit of truth, who will bring all things to your remembrance, who will reveal everything that I have said to you. And the apostles, of course, wrote all of that down because the Spirit of God quickened their memories. So I think for believers, the combination of a Holy Spirit inspired text and a Holy Spirit illuminated Christian shuts out doubts about the veracity of scripture. It's possible that a true believer can be sort of led to be confused, could actually go to the point where they say, well, maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's not inerrancy.
Maybe that's going too far. But I think the natural or maybe you could say supernatural attitude of a true believer is confidence in the Word of God. It just comes with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Beyond that, you can learn why that is true by looking at the Word itself.
And I want to mention a tool that will help you do that. It's a booklet called God's Sufficient Word. Yes, that's the title of it. It'll be a great help to you as a believer. It'll strengthen things in your life. It'll also be a powerful tool for those who don't necessarily believe the Bible is the Word of God. So this booklet, God's Sufficient Word, is foundational, obviously, for everything about Christianity because it's all in the Bible. Does the Word of God hold up to scrutiny? Is it without error, unfailing, complete, authoritative, sufficient? This booklet will guide you to the answers to those important questions. You don't need to have nagging doubts.
You can answer critics. The Bible will help you to do that, and this book will get you on your way. For a limited time, we'll send you a free copy of God's Sufficient Word.
All you have to do is let us know. You want one, request it today. Thanks, John. And friend, this booklet will help build your trust in the Bible as the source of truth that will transform your life and will guide you through the struggles of life. To get your free copy of John's booklet called God's Sufficient Word, contact us today.
Our number here, 855grace, and our web address, gty.org. If you've ever wondered whether the Bible is relevant for your daily needs, you need to get this booklet. Again, God's Sufficient Word is our gift to you, just call 800-55-GRACE or go to our website gty.org. And thanks for remembering to pray for us and for letting us know how we've helped you better understand and apply God's Word. If you have a story of how God has used grace to you in your life, jot a note and mail it to Grace To You, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Or you can send an email to letters at gty.org, that's letters at gty.org. And if you could let us know how you hear this broadcast, that would be a big help. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Keep in mind, Grace To You television airs this Sunday on DirecTV Channel 378, or check your local listings, and be here tomorrow as John shows you how the doctrine of inspiration intersects with the choices you make every day. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.
