Mr. Craig was here from Jamaica, and then Pastor Kimbrough did Sunday School last week. We were on Lesson 13, dealing with the attribute of God that God is true, the truth of God. And so I told you we would take a little bit of a pause and slow down here on the aspect of God's truth and deal with two lessons dealing with the inspiration of Scripture and then the authority of scripture. Because when we deal with the subject of the truth of God, God is true. Everything about him is true. Everything he has communicated is true. And so we want to kind of pump the brakes and look more specifically at God's communication of truth, that being the scriptures, and just deal with inspiration and authority of the Bible. I plan to be gone next Sunday, so Pastor Kimbrough's going to be doing Sunday School next Sunday, so Inspiration today, then we come to Authority, and then we'll wrap up the last couple Sundays of the month of June, finishing this series on the attributes of God. And then remember, we take August, no, we take all of July and August and the first Sunday of September, we'll take off of Sunday school and start back up that Sunday after Labor Day. So just framework of where we're going. But when we consider the Bible, it is a book like no other. When you study the Bible, it is not wrong, it is actually helpful to take everything that you have ever learned about studying literature and apply it to scripture. And so in that sense, we understand that God, when he communicates, he uses figures of speech. He uses various genres of literature. We have some of the sections of the Bible that are historical, and we read it and understand it as a true and accurate representation of history. We have sections of Scripture that are prophetic. We understand that God is talking about something that will happen later. We have sections of Scripture that are narrative. We have sections that are poetic. And you don't interpret a narrative section the same way that you interpret a prophetic section. You don't interpret a poetic section the same way that you interpret a historical section. And so it's important to understand that the Bible is literature. It is the greatest piece of literature that has ever been written. And as we study it, read it, interpret it, understand it, God has written to us in a way that's plain. We believe in the literal interpretation of scripture, but sometimes people trip over that term literal. So when you read in the book of Song of Solomon that he was mesmerized, that his beloved's teeth were like a flock of sheep, he didn't really mean that. He didn't mean that she had woolly teeth in her mouth. That would be gross and just so ridiculous. But we understand the plain common sense of Scripture. That's what we mean by the literal interpretation of Scripture. The plain common sense of Scripture. God has not written in such a way to deceive us. He has not written a mystery novel. He has written revelation. He has written to us plainly. Now, that does not mean that all of the parts of Scripture are equally easy to understand. There are difficult portions. There are portions that, when we read, we have to turn our brain on, and we have to think. We have to understand. We have to compare Scripture with Scripture and understand what is God saying. of all the things that God could have said, why did he say this? Why did he not say the other thing? And so those are all important things to deal with when we consider the Bible, when we consider Scripture. But we, as believers, we have to come back to this foundational truth that it is the inspired, inerrant, Word of God. There are no errors in Scripture. Well, we'll deal with that later. There are no errors in the Word of God. There are no things here that are not true. And so the foundational text is in 2 Timothy. So I want you to turn there, 2 Timothy 3. We'll start in verse number 14. And just while you're turning, this is something I think you all already know, but Timothy was Paul's son in the faith. Pastor Kimbrough, just a couple Sundays ago, last Sunday, I guess, when he preached about the church in Ephesus, Timothy was the pastor of that congregation. Timothy was, if you will, Paul's star pupil. That might be overstated, but I think that's a way to understand who Timothy was. And so Paul is writing these, what we refer to as the pastoral epistles. He's giving pastoral instruction. This is from one pastor to another explaining to him what to do in the ministry. Okay, so in verse 14, he tells Timothy to continue, continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them. And that from a child, Thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect or complete, thoroughly furnished, unto all good works. And so what Paul is telling Timothy is that it is the scriptures that are able to make him, but able to make us all, wise unto salvation. The Bible is God's revelation of his heart, of his will, of his purpose, everything that we are to know and understand God has revealed to us in the scriptures. And so we'll start by looking at what I'm putting here, Roman numeral one, the fact of inspiration, just the simple, plain fact of it. And that stated for us just unquestionably in verse number 16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God, just the facts of it. The scriptures are given by God's inspiration. You consider something of the testimony of the Old Testament prophets, and I'll put a little chart there for you. When you look in the Old Testament, some variation of the phrase, thus saith the Lord, right? So you have the just plain old thus saith the Lord there at the top 430 times. But then if you begin to look at, you know, basically a variation on that theme, so here are other things, the word, or sometimes that's plural, words of the Lord, well, that shows up 277 times. Then you have the Lord said, or the Lord saith. That's 233 times, and you can read all the rest of those. Now, those are pulled from the Old Testament prophets. I have not included in that 1,068 times the times when Moses in the Pentateuch says a similar thing. This is just the Old Testament prophets from Isaiah to Malachi. And so the point of all that is that when these Old Testament prophets were speaking, They weren't making stuff up. They weren't giving their opinion as to what they think God was going to do. Their mantra was, this is what God has said, thus saith the Lord. And you find that whole flavor all through the scriptures, emphasizing the fact that these are not the words of men. These are, in fact, the words of God. And so there comes two very important questions that we need to understand when we look at this phrase in 2 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. We need to understand, first of all, what does Paul mean by all scripture? And then also, what is he really talking about when he says given by inspiration of God? Well, I've got two, or three little paragraphs there under all scripture for you to look at. But in verse number 15 of 2 Timothy 3, he refers to the fact that Timothy from a child has known the Holy Scriptures. And so many look at this and they kind of pigeonhole their thinking into the fact that, well, Timothy obviously had access to the Old Testament. and the Old Testament Scriptures would have been foundational to what Timothy had learned from his mother and from his grandmother, who we're told in another place in Scripture were his spiritual teachers in his early days. But if you start digging a little bit deeper, we can understand that the book of 2 Timothy was more than likely written in the year 67 AD, approximately 67 AD. We believe that Timothy was approximately 30 years old when Paul wrote this letter to him. So we do the math backwards, and we can figure out relatively close when Timothy was born. But then we can start looking at some of the other books of Scripture. And many believe that the book of James was the first of the New Testament writings, and it was written probably between 45 and 50 AD. So just for the sake of argument, if we use the earlier date of 45, then that would put Timothy eight years old, definitely qualifying him as a child. So from a child, he had known the Holy Scriptures. And so he had access to the book of James. But actually, by the time we get to the year 67, there's some debate on some of the books as to exactly when I started to say pen was put to paper, but I think it was bird feather to parchment. But you understand what I mean. By the time we get to 67, there were probably 19 of the New Testament books had already been written. The Apostle John had not really started writing yet, but Acts had been written. Well, no, Luke had been written. Acts was in the process of being done. But by the time we get to 67, there were probably 19 books of the New Testament. Now, should we understand that Paul understood those New Testament writings to be inspired. And that's a question, and that's one liberals will vehemently oppose. And if you go to study this, you'll find in much of the academic literature a thing called the Council of Jamnia. Now the problem with the Council of Jamnia is that it is highly debatable if that council ever even existed. But most liberals will point to the Council of Jamnia as to where the Bible, the 66 books that we have, were canonized. That their official, their authenticity, their belonging in the Bible was voted on by a church council, and that's how we got our 66 books. Well, as conservatives, we don't go there. We don't buy into that argument. Partly, this is a separate line of thinking, but partly because The inspiration of Scripture is not left to the vote of a church. It's not man that decides whether or not what God has said is authoritative or not. It's God who decides whether or not what is written is authoritative. Now, we understand from the writing of the Old Testament prophets, but, and we'll show you some things here, even from the writing of the Apostle Paul, Paul was conscious of the fact that he was writing scripture. Paul was not just writing haphazardly, and then two, three hundred years later, a group of churchmen found this book and said, wow, this is really good. we should put this book on a pedestal. In fact, we should gather up a bunch of books that we think are really important, and we should make for our religion a holy book. and put it together that way. That's not what happened. The church immediately, and this is by miracle of inspiration, but the church immediately recognized the writings of the apostles as inspired, as scripture. Pop quiz here, you folks at camp, hopefully you get this right because this has been on your Sunday Bible quiz for years, so hopefully you get it. There is a New Testament book that Paul mentions that we don't have in our 66 books, in our 27 in the New Testament. Who knows what that book is? The letter to the church in? Laodicea. Laodicea, good job. So why don't we have the letter to the Laodiceans? Well, it's not lost in that, I mean, it's lost and we don't know where it is, but it's not because the church messed up. It's because that wasn't an inspired piece of literature. It's not inspired. Now, did Paul write a letter to the church in Laodicea? Everybody shake your head yes, because the Bible tells us he wrote a letter to the church in Laodicea. He did write a letter to them, but it wasn't inspired. He probably wrote a letter to his mom, right? But that's not inspired either. But those that were inspired were by the Holy Spirit, by the miracle of inspiration, and also by the miracle of preservation preserved for us. And we have them. And so when you're going through the grocery store and you see the Time-Life book about the Bible and the lost books of the Bible, You don't have to get all worked up, right? There are no lost books of the Bible. There is no secret Bible book that we don't have that, man, if we just found that, it would change everything, right? That doesn't exist. It's not there. If that exists, then we throw out everything that God has ever said to us because he's lied to us. And he hasn't. We have in the scriptures the inspired word of God. So we're running out of time here. I'll just read this to you. I put the reference, well, no, I've got the verse. 1 Corinthians 14, 37. Paul says, I write unto you the things, sorry, I cut that off too short. The things I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord. So when Paul was writing in the book of 1 Corinthians, and 1 Corinthians was probably the 5th, 4th, 5th book of the Bible that was written, Paul was conscious of the fact that he was writing scripture. He was writing something that was authoritative. from the Holy Spirit. And so what do we mean by given by inspiration? Here's the other part. And so that phrase, all scripture, we're talking about Old and New Testament, everything that God has communicated is given by inspiration of God. And so most of you are already aware of that phrase, inspiration of God, it's just simply one word in Greek. I put the fancy Greek letters there for you so you can see that, but it's thanoustas. So it is breathed out by God. And so the question really comes to that. Does God breathed mean that God breathed something into the scriptures or does it mean that God breathed out the scriptures? And really the second one is correct. It's not that human authors wrote and God elevated that That's not what happened. It's human authors wrote God's words. Now, that brings us to the means of inspiration. How did this take place? How did God breathe out his word? And so there are various ideas. Five major views have been put forward, and I'll just summarize these very, very briefly for you. But the first one is illumination. Some believe that the writers of Scripture experienced the illumination of the Holy Spirit that really is something that is available to all Christians, but the writers of Scripture were something on the order of super-Christian. especially in a more advanced way, illuminated by the Holy Spirit. They were more connected to the Holy Spirit. And so they were on a different level than the rest of us. Therefore, enabled to write the words of God. So that's one view. The second one is what we call superintendence. And according to this view, Basically, God had oversight into what was being written in the sense that men wrote whatever they wanted to write, but God, by his spirit, was kind of looking over their shoulder and nudging their pen one way or the other and influencing their ideas to make them write what God wanted them to write. He superintended it. A third one is called elevation, and that is that the Holy Spirit elevated the natural abilities of ordinary writers. There's an interesting thing if you start studying liberals. You come to the book of 1 Peter. And Peter was originally a fisherman. And from a Greek linguistic perspective, the language of 1 Peter is excellent Greek. It's grammatically sound, good, highly educated Greek. And liberals will come to 1 Peter and they say, this guy was a fisherman. There's no way. that he could have written this. It's too good. The literary style is too polished for this to be the work of Peter. And so they deny the Petrin authorship of the book of 1 Peter. But the same idiot liberal will go to 2 Peter, and they'll look at the Greek and the style of 2 Peter, and they'll say this is awful. There's no way that this could belong to Peter. And so Peter was too stupid to write first Peter, and he was too smart to write second Peter. And so they just have to have some excuse as to denying the authenticity of these books. But the elevation theory would basically turn these writers into What did I put? Shakespeare on literary steroids. But that's not what happened either. The other one is suggestion. The suggestion, the writers of scripture, had in their mind so many thoughts and ideas that the Lord had put there, and they selected from these thoughts and ideas, and there it is. And then we have mechanical. And that view is that God used the writers of scripture kind of like somebody would use a typewriter. Sometimes this is referred to as the dictation theory, that God was speaking into their ear, and some would even go so far as to say, like especially some of the Old Testament prophets, that they were just in a trance, and they were just robotic, I do typing things. We've got bird feather to parchment again, right? But just like some robot, they were being controlled, and they were being manipulated, and so they dictated out word for word everything that God had said. Now, you look at these five views, and there's parts of all of them that you can kind of shake your head and say, yeah, okay, I see how that makes some sense. I understand that. Because it gets complicated when you start realizing that there are words, there's vocabulary that the Apostle Paul uses that no other writer of the New Testament uses. It's vocabulary unique to Paul. There is a way of phrasing that Luke uses that Peter doesn't, James doesn't, Matthew doesn't. There's There's vocabulary, there's style, there's emphasis, there's all the rest of it that is unique to the individual writers. How did that happen? Well, turn to 1 Peter 1.20. This is the best we have, and this is what God has communicated to us, and this is where our understanding has to be hemmed in. We have to keep everything that we understand about how the Bible was inspired within the confines and framework of these two verses of Scripture, because this is all God reveals to us, really, as to how this happened. 2 Peter 1 20-21 says, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. That's the language that we have to work with. And it's from that language that Bible scholars have tried to understand one of these five things that I just pointed out to you. But what we can safely say is that the Holy Spirit so moved on the writers of Scripture in a divine way that the result is an inspired and authoritative document we call the Bible. That we can safely say, that the Holy Spirit so moved on the writers of Scripture in a divine way that the result is an inspired and authoritative document that we call the Bible. And so when we're looking at this in 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21, if you're looking at that passage in your Bible, you'll see in verse 16, Peter calls Peter refers to as cunningly devised fables. And he said, we're not following after cunningly devised fables. In 1 Peter 2.3, he calls it feigned words, or another way to translate that would be simply deceptive stories. We're not believing deceptive stories. We're not believing cunningly devised fables. We have what Peter refers to as a more sure word of prophecy. And that passage we've looked at many, many times. It's a more sure word. Peter is saying that the things that we read in Scripture, he is saying personally, the things that he reads in the Scripture, he trusts more than his own personal eyewitness account. because when he says a more sure word, that's a comparative adjective, a comparative language obviously, but that more sure word is more sure than his first-hand account, his own personal eyewitness account of the Mount of Transfiguration. That's the context of what he's talking about. He was there, he saw it with his own eyes. But he says, I believe what the Bible says about what happened, more than I trust my own senses. That's really what he's communicating. That's the weight that he puts on the authority and the inspiration of the Word of God. And so in this, in 2 Peter 1, 20-22, if we break this down, we see that Peter uses two negatives and two positives. The first negative, he says, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. Meaning that no prophecy of the scripture originated from that own prophet's outlook on the current state of affairs or his estimation of things, that he perceived would happen in the future. It's of no private origination. That really, perhaps, is a better word to put there than the word interpretation. It's of no private origination. The second negative is, for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man. And that is not that, for example, Jeremiah looked at the sins of the people and was a preacher with a bee in his bonnet and decided to write a book to stick it to everybody. That's not what happened. It wasn't Jeremiah upset with what was going on and, you know, I'm going to tell you people. That's not it. It's not by the will of man. It's not human impulse that caused pen to be put to paper. You understand? Same thing with Paul, for example. Paul did not learn secondhand of all these problems in Corinth, and in an evening of frustration, decide, I'm going to fix this. I'm going to write these people a letter. We do that. We're upset with something. I'm going to send an email. That wasn't what Paul did. It wasn't by Paul's will and impulse and a reactionary spirit that he wrote this. It wasn't by the will of man. But then we have two positives. The first positive is that holy men of God spake. And so God did not use wicked men. Now, we have the record of the speeches and the sayings of wicked men. So you go in the book of Numbers, and we have the words of Balaam. Balaam was a wicked man, but God did not use Balaam as the writer of Scripture. Moses is the one that wrote the book of Numbers. So God used holy men to write the scriptures. He used men that were saved, men that were filled with the Spirit, to write. Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. That's the second positive. These men were able to speak or to write the words of God because they were born along. They were carried along by the Spirit. They were born along in such a way that we just have to set this over in the category of miracle, and I don't understand how all that happened. We have to set it over there and just leave it. They were born along in such a way that their own personalities come through, their own vocabularies come through, yet they were God's words and not man's. How God did that? the ins and outs and all the peculiarities of how it happened, we have to leave to conjecture and guess and use kind of a sanctified common sense to come up with, how did that happen? And these five that I mentioned to you were some effort at sanctified common sense to, how did this take place? We're not denying that it took place. And we don't understand how it all happened. The mechanical view makes all the sense in the world for some sections of scripture, because we have places in the Old Testament where God said, write this down. And that's what they wrote down. And so from there, yeah, that happened. Did God superintend the writing? Well, of course he did. But is that all that happened? Well, it's more than that. Was it suggestion? Of course, but it was more than that too. Did God elevate these people? Yeah, of course he did, but it was more than that too. Like none of them are perfect. None of them are crazy, but none of them are sufficient. It's kind of a, yeah, that's what God did. He did all that. And we have an inspired Bible that is God's words and not man's. And we trust that because that's what God told us that he did. He gave us an inspired Bible. He breathed out the scriptures. And then third, we're close to out of time here, but third, the characteristics of inspiration. Let me just fly through these quickly. It is immediate. And what we mean by immediate is different than the way we would use that phrase. Webster's Dictionary defines the particular use of immediate in view here as being without the intervention of another object, cause, or agency. The inspiration of Scripture is the direct operation of God on the human agent. And so, in that sense, understanding the immediate aspect of inerrancy, or of inspiration, we would tend to throw out the illumination and the elevation views, because those two leave the door open more for the ideas of man being sanctified. And that's not what we're saying by inspiration. It is not man's ideas made better. It is God's ideas. It is God's word. It is God's communication. It's immediate. Second, it's unique. That is, there is no other piece of literature that's inspired. You know, you could sit in a literature class and your teacher read to you some sonnet of Shakespeare and, you know, colloquially use the phrase that, you know, Shakespeare was inspired when he wrote this or, you know, I have, it's always 12-year-old little girls who tell me that they're writing a novel, right, and they were inspired by such and such. That's a different use of the term. It's not inspired in the same sense. The Bible is unique in that it is the only inspired piece of literature. Not the Book of Mormon, not the Koran, none of those were inspired. Only the Bible. Plenary And what we mean by that is that it is complete. This means that the influence of God was sufficient to produce the desired effect. A Bible, a book that is inspired and infallible in all of its parts. meaning that, you know, I used this phrase two weeks ago when we were talking about the fact that God is truth in the Bible. We do not say that the Bible contains the Word of God. Now obviously the Bible contains the Word of God, and when somebody says that, don't shoot them and don't start looking for firewood and matches to burn them. We don't need to go there. But when we say that, we have to be careful. We don't say that the Bible contains the Word of God. The Bible is the Word of God. A liberal will say the Bible contains the Word of God. It's up to you to figure out what part is and what part's not. And when they say the Bible contains the Word of God, they also mean that the Bible contains things that are not the Word of God. And we don't believe that. Everything in it is the Word of God. Verbal, the verbal inspiration, means that it extends to all the expressions of scriptures down to the very words. You can look, for example, at Matthew 5.18. Here, Matthew makes a point, I think I have the right verse. Matthew 5, 18, sure. For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. There's another place in Romans, I forget the reference, but Paul there makes an emphasis on the fact that a word is plural and not singular. or singular and not plural, one way or the other. But he emphasizes that aspect of it, that we get down to, as Matthew 5.18 would even emphasize, the jots and tittles. And so if you've ever seen Hebrew written out, the main letters that you see up top are all what we would call consonants. None of those up top are vowels. All the vowels are dots, and sometimes there's three dots. Sometimes there's a dot that we would call a colon. Sometimes there's a little tiny thing that looks like our capital letter T. Those are all vowels that are all stuck in the word in different places, sometimes below, sometimes inside of a letter. Those are tittles. Those are the little tiny things that even those what we don't reject, we don't throw those out. And then objective, that is, whether man perceives it or not, it is the inspired and errant word of God. It's not up to us to determine whether it is inspired or inerrant. It's not a church council that decides if it's inspired or inerrant. God is the one who has decided whether or not it's inspired or inerrant, and it is. And then the last one, the consequences, that really is just a segue into what we'll talk about with authority. And so we'll leave that for this morning. And Lord willing, two weeks from now, we'll come to an aspect of the authority of scripture. But we're out of time here. So let's close in prayer for this morning. Father, we do thank you for your word that you have communicated to us plainly. We confess we don't understand how it all happened, but we're happy enough to trust you and we are satisfied that what we have and what you've given to us to read, and we've been rejoiced that we're able to read it in our own language, that what you've given to us is sufficient and it is a sufficient guide for life and for godliness We pray that you'd help us to make use of it, and that your spirit would take it up and write it on our hearts. We pray that you'll bless us the rest of the day, in Jesus' name, amen.