Writing about Session: 6 Inspiration, Larry Meiners shares his thoughts on the inspiration of Scripture.
What does it mean that the Bible is inspired? How did inspiration occur? How does one’s view of inspiration affect their interpretation? These are all good questions about how scripture was written. That is one of many reasons why I decided to take the Theology class. To answer questions like these about the Bible and the information it contains.
What is inspiration? The best biblical definition is: The act whereby God guided the writers of Scripture, giving them His words while fully utilizing the human element within man to produce the Scriptures. Making the Bible a product that is 100% God and 100% man.
There are many places in the Bible that clearly tell us that the Scriptures where inspired by God. In 2 Timothy 3:16 -17, Paul writes, that God inspired all Scripture for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness so that man may be adequately equipped for every good work. To further support that in 2 Peter 1:20-21, Peter tells us that no prophecy of Scripture is that of one’s own interpretation and that all the men where moved by the Holy Spirit spoken from God.
Many times we will hear someone say that they were inspired by God to do something. Are they truly inspired by God? Did God guide them in what they did? Or did God simply illuminate them? My opinion of most of these accounts is they are probably illuminated by God not inspired.
Illumination means the act whereby God enlightens us to understand His revelations and its relevance to our lives. So for me to say that God has inspired me to take the theology class here at Lakeside is probably not a correct statement. I should say that through the graces of God, He is illuminating me by taking this class to help me understand His revelation and its relevance to my life. There are several different theories of inspiration.
Just to name a few, Natural inspiration is the belief that certain people were extremely gifted through their natural God-given abilities to write Scripture, Mechanical Dictation inspiration is the belief that God simply used the hand of man to passively write His words, and Verbal Plenary inspiration is that all Scripture is inspired by God who utilized the human element within man to accomplish this without error.
As you read the bible you could say that there are these three forms of inspiration in the writings of the Bible. You can also see that God has a part in all of these. The one that is truly correct is Verbal Plenary. It is important to know that Scripture is the only thing that is said to be God-breathed.
Although the Bible is inspired by God, there are many examples of human element within Scripture. Some examples are the emotions in Psalms and Romans 9, Grammatical Differences in Hebrews and John, Grammatical errors in Romans 5, phenomenological language in Joshua 10:13, and the use of round numbers. There are other things too that are of human nature that you will find though out the books of the Bible.
One thing I took away from this lesson was although Scripture is written 100% by man, it was inspired 100% by God in some form. Whether it is God speaking directly to the person writing, the Holy Spirit directing, or by Jesus coming to the earth and dying for our sins the Bible is truly Gods Word.
Larry Meiners