Lesson 2: Inspiration - Verbal and Plenary, Part 2

Alright, so if you have your books, if you're new here and you want to follow along with us, you can grab a copy of the notebook, it's in the box there at the back, if you don't have one of those, or if you forgot to bring yours with you, or if you need to pick up another one because you've lost it since last week, that's where you can get your copy.

The Biblical Basis for Inspiration

Alright, so I'm going to begin by reading 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 14 and following, and then a passage out of 2 Peter, 2 Timothy chapter 3, beginning of verse 14, you however continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. And then 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 16, for we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. And we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.

So we have the prophetic word made more sure to which you do well to pay attention, as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your.

Hearts.

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.

Let's pray together. Our Lord, we do ask your blessing upon our time here in this study of Sunday School. Help us to understand the doctrine of inspiration and as I teach, I pray that you'd help me to make it clear what it is and what it is not, and that you would bless this time, our fellowship and our understanding and our thinking, that it may be, that we may think your thoughts after you and that we may honor you in the way that we think about the word that you have given to us.

And we pray your blessing to this end and the assistance of your Holy Spirit to that end as well. In Christ's name.

Amen.

Review of Inspiration, Revelation, and Illumination

Alright, so we started talking about the doctrine of inspiration last week and I'm just going to give a little bit of quick review. I gave you a definition of inspiration, actually two different definitions of inspiration, and then we saw that the doctrine of inspiration and the process of inspiration basically has three essential and key elements.

Divine causality, meaning that God is the prime mover in Him making revelation of Himself to men. Second, human or prophetic agency, that is the individual instruments through which God spoke or moved to give us His word.

And those two things added together, divine causality and prophetic agency, give us a written authority. That is that what is written, what is given by inspiration, what is inspired, has an authority behind it because it is God's word.

It's God Himself who has breathed it out. And then we looked at the difference between revelation and illumination. Those are two related concepts. Revelation is the truth or the content of what is revealed.

Inspiration is the process of revealing that truth and then illumination is the understanding of the truth as it has been revealed. And then I gave you a few brief clarifications on the doctrine of inspiration, that the Bible is inspired and not the writers.

When we say that something is inspired, we're not talking about the inspired writers. It's the product, not the people, that are inspired so that what is breathed out is not the people themselves, but the written revelation is what we refer to as being breathed out.

Inspiration is the process by which that happens so that what we have is an inspired product. We don't have inspired writers, we have an inspired product. And then the second clarification I gave you was that inspiration extends only to the original.

Autographs.

That is, the manuscripts, the autograph that Peter wrote, that Paul wrote, that John wrote, that Isaiah wrote, those are what is inspired. And so the question that concerns us is, do we have reason to believe that we have an accurate copy, an actual representation of what was originally written since we do not have any of the original documents that the apostles wrote or that the prophets wrote?

And then the third clarification was that inspiration is in some sense inexplicable. There is a mystery to this, there's questions that we can't answer in terms of inspiration. We take as an article of faith in some ways, because God has revealed that this is the case, that scripture is inspired and given to us and God breathed and the same pertains to the doctrines of infallibility and preservation.

There is an element of mystery here or unknown when we talk about the doctrine of inspiration. All right, then there was a question that I want to clarify because Brad asked it and I didn't understand the question.

I think he asked the question just fine, but later on Sunday after the lesson we were kind of going over and he said, let me clarify my question because I don't think you got it and I didn't. His question was, is illumination involved in the translation of scripture?

And I didn't understand what he was asking, later on I did. What Brad meant was, in order to get an accurate translation of scripture, is the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit necessary to that, in order to get an accurate translation?

And the answer to that is, yes it is. The translators have to have some understanding of the written text, what it is that they're translating, the argument of the author, the context, what the author is trying to say,.

Etc.

They have to have some understanding of that because they're trying to translate as best as they can, not just a word for word translation of the text. The translators are trying to give us an understandable English equivalent of the original text and so they have to have some understanding of the book or the context that they're translating in order to do that.

So illumination is necessary to an accurate translation of scripture. So now today I want to give a few, I want to contrast this doctrine of inspiration with three different views of inspiration that are unbiblical or wrong.

The Modernist View: The Bible Contains the Word of God

So we're on letter E in your notebook, three views of inspiration. There is first the modernist view and this is the view that says the Bible contains the word of God. The Bible contains the word of God.

The modernist view says that certain parts of scripture are divine and true, other parts of scripture are human and they have error. So this is the modernist view that within the pages of scripture God's word is in there and you have to figure out what part is God's word and what part is just man's idea or man's.

Word.

So the Bible is, it's like sifting through the haystack for the pins and the needles that are there. You're looking for truth amongst its pages because not everything in there is true but there is things in there that are true and so the Bible as we have it, those 66 books contain the word of God.

Our job is to find out or figure out what parts of it are the word of God. That was my next question. How do you think they determine that? Yeah, how do you think they determine that? Preconceived notion?

You know what ends up being human and filled with error in their determination? All the stuff that they don't like. All the stuff that doesn't fit our cultural conventions or the spirit of the age. That's usually the stuff that ends up being man's contribution to it.

And so in today's day what would that be? Anything about homosexuality? Anything about women in ministry or women's roles in leadership in a church?

Marriage.

Right, the definition of marriage.

Creation.

Creation or evolution.

Sin.

Anything that's sin.

Right. Pat?

Anything convicting.

Anything convicting.

Yes.

Judgment.

Any kind of message of judgment.

Right. Sean?

Sovereignty of God.

The sovereignty of God. Right, so you can see how it becomes, Scripture then becomes something, it becomes the tool or the piece of Play-Doh for the interpreter.

Right?

When you have a modernist view of Scripture, that inside these pages are gems, those gems come to us from God, that's divine truth, but it's surrounded and kind of clouded over by a whole bunch of elements of human error.

That's the modernist view. The second view is the neo-orthodox view, and we're going to spend a little bit more time on this. The neo-orthodox view, and this is the view that says the Bible becomes the Word of God.

The Bible becomes the Word of God. There's a little slight rhetorical slight of hand here that I'm going to explain here in just a moment. This view says that God speaks to me through the Bible when I encounter it personally.

God speaks to me through the Bible when I encounter it personally. The Bible is not propositional truth, true in and of itself, rather the Bible is an experiential.

Truth.

It is true when I encounter it as truth, when it strikes me and it comes alive to me. Okay, so this is the view that says I'm reading through Scripture, and when a verse jumps off the page of me and grips my heart, and I hear the Holy Spirit speak to me through that verse, that verse in that moment becomes the Word of God to me when it comes alive.

Now, what is the problem with that view of Scripture? Can you identify it? What if I'm reading through the Bible and it doesn't jump off the page of me? Is it still the Word of God? What if I'm reading through the Bible and I don't have any kind of subjective emotional spiritual encounter with its truth or its pages or its message?

Is it still the Word of God? According to the modern day neo-Orthodox view, the Bible becomes the Word of God only when I encounter it in a subjective, experiential, or spiritual way. When Scripture strikes me, then it has become the Word of God to me.

This is neo-Orthodox because it comes out of a sort of a liberal Protestant movement from the early 1900s. Karl Barth, I don't know if you've heard of his name in theological circles. It kind of came out of the, what do you call it, it's the higher critical school of theology and thinking that was birthed in Germany amongst liberal German theologians, kind of in Bonhoeffer's time and around that era, right prior to Bonhoeffer's time.

This is a higher critical view of Scripture that says Scripture only becomes the Word of God when it, or Scripture becomes the Word of God when I experience it or I encounter it in some sort of a subjective way.

So when I'm reading a verse and it speaks to me and I get an emotional feeling and the Holy Spirit bumps, a Holy Ghost bumps, or a liver quiver or something that really strikes me then that's when I'm hearing God speak in that moment.

And just in case you think that this is odd or crazy or it's something that's just relegated to some fringe movement, I spend an entire chapter on this subject in my book coming up because this is the way that most of evangelicalism approaches the Scriptures today.

And I'll give you an example by naming a few people that you may not like to hear me name but here we go. Priscilla Schrier, she is, she has made much out of this idea that God is speaking and whispering constantly in your ear and all these various means.

She writes this in one of her books, Discerning the Voice of God, she says, this again is another reason why staying deeply in God's Word is so vital to discerning His voice. The more Scripture you hide in your heart, the more opportunity you give the Holy Spirit to bring it quickly to mind, punctuated at a specific moment with a personalized message for you.

You see, the Bible not only provides the boundaries within which everything He says will fall, it is the chief mechanism through which God will speak, close quote. Now if you don't understand exactly what the hearing from the voice of God people are teaching by that, here's what she means.

When you are reading Scripture, it is the mechanism through which a personalized message for you will come. So as you need to immerse yourself and constantly be reading Scripture, I would agree with that, we need to be reading Scripture, read it a lot, that is all good, most of us evangelicals would agree with that, we need to be reading Scripture a lot, that is a very good thing.

But for them, reading Scripture a lot, they recommend reading Scripture a lot because it is while you're reading Scripture that God speaks a personalized message for you. That is something jumps off the page and you hear that voice of God.

To quote Shire again, when God's Word leaps off the page, this is quote, when God's Word leaps off the page and grips you, I mean stuns you as though you were awakened from a sleep by a thunderclap, don't rush ahead with your Bible reading, stop right there, lock on those words that have already locked eyes with your souls.

This isn't some random occurrence or coincidence, it is God Himself speaking through His Word, it is the living Word of God at work, close quote. So what does she say is God Himself speaking through His Word?

When it what? Stuns you, grips you, locks eyes with your soul, right? It is in that moment that you have an experience, a personal experience with that, that's God speaking to you. Now see, I would disagree with that.

When I am reading through the genealogies of 1 Corinthians chapters 1 through 11, that is God speaking to me as well. And I don't need a name to jump off the page that oh, that's what I need to name my grandson.

I don't have a grandson and I don't have any plans for a grandson anytime soon, but I mean I'm not naming kids anymore so I gotta use this, that as an illustration. So it is not when I'm reading through that and some name jumps off the page or I get some personal message through every other word or some phrase that leaps off that tells me to go to the store and buy a turkey or whatever, that's not, that itself is not the Word of God.

The genealogy is the Word of God. That is the Word of God and even when I hear a message where the Word of God is preached or I hear the Word of God read or I'm reading the Word of God or I'm listening to the Word of God being read to me in some way, even though I may not have a personal liver quiver or get Holy Spirit bumps or feel something that really strikes me, that is still inspired, authoritative, divinely given Word of God.

Scripture is the voice of God. Not amongst the hearing the voice of God crowd. For them, Scripture becomes the voice of God when it leaps off the page and grabs a hold of your heart and gets your attention.

That's when it becomes the Word of God to you. Let me give you some more quotes. Priscilla Schreier quotes Ann Graham Lotz, quote, when he speaks, it is in a language of our personal lives through a verse or passage of Scripture that just seems to leap off the page with your name on it, close quote.

Schreier writes this, therefore the more acquainted you become with the Word, the more accurately you'll be able to hear from Him. The Bible provides the framework into which His messages to you will come.

Anything the Spirit says will fall within the boundaries of what has already been written. Scripture provides the, close quote, Scripture provides the framework into which His Word of God will come. So it is in reading Scripture, those are the words that the Spirit of God is going to use to jump off the page to get your attention.

It's the framework into which the Word of God comes. No, it is the Word of God. See this is radically different view of Scripture. And I'm emphasizing this so that we don't get caught up into a neo-orthodox view of Scripture which is not orthodox at all, it's actually a heretical view of Scripture.

I want us to understand the difference between these things so that we're not caught off guard, we don't fall into this trap of thinking that this is what we mean when we speak of Scripture being the Word of God.

I'm looking for another quote here, I know I've got a couple more. Henry Blackaby from Experiencing God, quote, the Bible describes God's complete revelation of Himself to humanity. It is a record of God's dealings with humanity and His words to them.

God speaks to you through the Bible. Have you ever been reading the Bible when suddenly you're gripped by a fresh new understanding of the passage? That was God speaking, close quote. That's Henry Blackaby.

Henry Blackaby is a Southern Baptist. He has done more to advance the hearing, the voice of God theology among Southern Baptists and otherwise known cessationists than probably any other single individual in the history of humanity.

Henry Blackaby, Experiencing God. Listen to what he said, the Bible describes God's complete revelation of Himself to humanity. It is a record of God's dealing with humanity and His words to them. The Bible is a record of God's words to them, to people.

There's a little sleight of hand that's going on in what Blackaby says. Is the Bible, does the Bible describe God's complete revelation to men? Or is the Bible God's complete revelation to men? See there's a difference between a description of my wife and my wife.

There's a difference between a description of God's words and God's word. The subtle distinction that is being played out in his words is a subtle distinction but it is a demonic and deceptive one. The Bible is not a record of God's revelation.

The Bible is God's revelation. And that difference is important. According to Blackaby, quote, when suddenly you're gripped by a fresh new understanding of the passage, that was God speaking. When you come to understand the spiritual meaning and application of a scripture passage, God's spirit has been at work.

Let me give you an, I'll give you an illustration that Blackaby provides. Quote, earlier I told you about our daughter Carrie's bout with cancer. That was a difficult circumstance for our whole family.

The doctors prepared us for six or eight months of chemotherapy plus radiation. We knew God loved us. We prayed, what are you proposing to do in this experience that we need to adjust ourselves.

To?

As we prayed, a scripture promise came that we believed was from God. Not only did we receive the promise but we received letters and calls from many people who quoted the same scripture. The verse reads, the sickness is not unto death but for the glory of God so that the son of man may be glorified through it, John 11 verse 4.

Our sense was that God was speaking to us, our sense that God was speaking to us grew stronger as the Bible prayer and the testimony of others, believers, began to line up and say the same thing.

So close quote.

Now do you see what Blackaby just did there? People began to give him the verse, John 11 4, this sickness is not unto death but is for the glory of God so that the son of man may be glorified through it.

What does John 11 refer to, does anybody know? It's the resurrection of somebody who was dead, Lazarus, yes. So is John 11 verse 4 a promise that everybody gets to claim? The sickness is not unto death, it's not, is it?

It was a promise, a description of a historical event that applied to one person in one circumstance and that was Lazarus and to one historical incident which was Jesus' resurrection of Lazarus. That's what it applied to.

But Blackaby started getting this from people and he felt the Lord speak this to him that this was his own personal message that the death of, the sickness of his daughter was not unto death, that she would be healed from this and so he took this as God's word.

Now thankfully, and I am thankful for this, that sickness did not result in death for his daughter. His daughter did come through that and was healed of the cancer and came through just fine and lived through it.

But does that validate Blackaby's use of that passage as his own personal message from God? It was taken out of context, you should never take anything out of context. See the fact that everything worked out for Henry Blackaby in that situation, which is great, does not justify him thinking that that was his own personal message.

How many people read those words from Blackaby, faced a similar situation and heard God speak to them the exact same thing through John 11 verse 4, but then it turned out that their loved one died? Because that is not God's promise.

And just because it strikes you and you say, oh this is God's personal message to me, we don't claim scripture verses that way. This is a neo-orthodox view of scripture and it is a perspective that says it becomes God's personal message to me when it jumps off the page and warms my heart.

That's God's personal message to me. And then he confirms it when other people abuse the passage in the same way. That's God's confirmation to me, which is basically what he did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

His observation seems that so much of this is experiential and emotional and not a detached orthodox view of scripture in an intellectual sense.

And it is.

And I'm not suggesting we should never have emotions or that scripture should never impact.

Us.

I'm not suggesting when I read through scripture and I get emotional, I see a truth and it warms my heart that I should say, oh no, I need to suppress that emotion. That's not good. That's not what I mean.

But what I do mean is that when that happens, I'm not getting anything different from the word of God. It's not then that scripture is becoming the word of God. It was the word of God last year when I read that passage and it didn't strike me just as it is the word of God this year when I read that passage and it did strike me.

It is still God's word. It doesn't become such by my response to it. My response to scripture or what happens to me emotionally does not make it the word of.

God.

It does not. That's not how inspiration works.

Yes, Ken.

Right.

They could hear God speak to them through that, you mean?

Yeah. Yeah.

You could have the same. I mean, look, I read Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's voyage across a failed Antarctic expedition and I've read that book a couple of different times, I think four different times, and man, I just get goosebumps every time I read that book and the story of that.

Does that mean that's scripture? We can have this kind of reader response to almost anything. Words can jump off of you, off the page of a Chinese menu, a Chinese food menu to you and if it warms your heart, does that mean that God's speaking to you?

No.

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. All right, so that's the neo-orthodox view of scripture. Let me see if I have another example. I know, I cite Mark Batterson and Dallas Willard.

That's good.

Most of it's covered by red ink anyway. I'm still revising it.

All right.

So that's the neo-orthodox view and like I said, I wanted to take a couple moments on that just so that you're able to hear the subtle distinction when we talk about scripture. It's not becoming the word of God, it is the word of God.

Yeah, Jess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jess's comment was that Phil Johnson did a critique of experiencing God and it was right.

On.

I've heard the message where he says that Henry Blackaby basically teaches you need to have some sort of a subjective experience to hear God speak. So I won't ruin too much more of the book for that way you'll have a reason to read it when it does come out.

The Demythologizing View and the Meaning of Scripture

So let's move on to the demythologizing neo-orthodox view. So we talked about the modernist view, the Bible, the Bible contains the word of God, the neo-orthodox view, the Bible becomes the word of God, the demythologizing neo-orthodox view, a bunch of different, a bunch of big words there.

The Bible is made the word of God, made, M-A-D-E, made the word of God. We make it the word of God through something that we do. And here's what we have to do to the word of God in order to, here's what we have to do to scripture in order to make it God's voice or God's word.

When the Bible is stripped of all of its myths then we get to the real message which is the word of God. So the truth of scripture is shrouded in all of the mythology that is attached to scripture and we need to demythologize it.

We need to figure out what is the mythology of scripture, remove that out of the way and once you take off the veneer of the mythology of it, all of the stuff that we can't trust, you know, the miracles, the supernatural elements, the allegories and the poetry and all of this, and once you get rid of all of the mythology of scripture then you can see the word of God for what it is.

And once you get to the truth, you demythologize it and arrive at its meaning and then you get to the truth and that truth is the word of God. So in some ways the Bible contains the word of God but the demythologizing view says that in all of scripture you have to strip it of its mythology and then when you get to that, when you strip it of its mythology and then you understand the meaning behind it, that meaning, that's the word of God.

This is just as subjective as either of the other two approaches because you end up, once you demythologize it then whatever meaning you come up with by whatever means you use to strip away the mythology, that meaning then becomes the word of God and we could have different approaches and we could demythologize passages of scripture in different ways.

So this is what this approach would look like, the demythologizing neo-orthodox view. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is just a myth but that story illustrates the fact that through our own personal faith we can become new inside.

That is the word of God in the resurrection account, right? Whether as Spong was his last name, he was an Episcopal, John Shelby Spong, he was an Episcopal priest and I'm not sure if he died or if he's still alive but he was within recent.

Years.

He said that it really doesn't matter whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ happened or not. What really matters is that we understand the meaning of the resurrection accounts. Their historicity is up for grabs and we don't care about that.

We need to understand the meaning of it. So what's the meaning of it? Well you strip all of the mythology of the resurrection away and all the stuff about new bodies and empty tombs and women running and all of that stuff.

All of that stuff is just the myth around it. The central truth is that you and I need to be made new like Jesus was made new in the resurrection account. When you and I are made new inside, when we realize we need to be made new inside, that's the word of God.

That's the message. The message, you need to be made new, that's the word of God in the mythologized resurrection.

Account.

See how this works? Yeah, so you can see how this becomes a ball of Play-Doh that you can just twist into any shape that you want, right? They do the same thing with the creation account. The creation narrative is only a legend.

Can't be taken literally. It's not history. It's just a legend. We can't understand anything about the age of the earth or the order of creation or the significance of men or the role of animals or the purpose behind creation.

All of that, none of that matters. All that matters is the meaning of the creation account. So they would say what creation really shows us is God's care for what exists and the reality of evil in our world which threatens to harm us personally.

That's the meaning of the creation story. It's God's care for his creation and that there's evil in the world that threatens us. That's what you're supposed to take out of the creation account. So you strip away all the mythology of seven days and the order of creation and man and this talking snake.

Come on.

Who believes in a talking snake?

Right?

The serpent that talks. Seriously. And one man, one woman, naked in a garden, right? Is that really paradise to anybody?

No.

So that's all that's mythology. We strip away all of that, get rid of all of that and what do we come up with? God really cares for his creation. See that message behind all the mythology, that's the word of God.

That's the demythologizing neo-orthodox view. Any questions on any of those three before we move on?

Why These Views Fail: Subjective Meaning and Reader Response

Yeah, Brad.

Are all of those, you're really hung up on this illumination thing, aren't you? Are all of those maybe examples of misapplication of illumination? Well, no. I would say that those three views are gonna be different than misunderstanding illumination or not understanding illumination because illumination is gonna look differently in each one of those three views.

So these are really foundational ideas that would affect how one thinks illumination comes.

About.

So for instance, if I hold to a demythologizing neo-orthodox view of scripture, my way of demythologizing that illumination is gonna be different than your way of demythologizing that and coming to some understanding of what it means.

Maybe my demythologizing of the creation account, maybe the message behind the creation account is after I demythologize it is that people should be eating animals because we're a higher order of creation from that.

That then becomes the word of God, amen?

Right.

So you see, what you think is the word of God in any demythologized account or passage ends up being your assessment of what you think that means, what you say that that means. And then who's to go to battle over what that passage really means?

Because your perspective on it might differ from your perspective and your perspective and my perspective and we could come up with, whether it's 60, 70 people in here, we could come up with 70 different ideas of what the creation account means and who's to say who's.

Right.

And this is the point behind those doctrines. There's nobody to say who is right because that word of God is for all of us, right? It's my personal understanding of the word of God and you can't take that from me and you can't second guess that.

Does that answer your question, Brad?

Okay.

If I got it wrong again, come up to me afterwards and I'll correct it at the beginning of next.

Week.

Sean, would these views be considered heretical views?

Yes, I believe these are heretical views because it comes to the nature of Scripture itself. What I think is happening in modern evangelicalism is you have people who do not understand that these are heretical views of Scripture that adopt some of the language and the practice that comes from that unknowingly or unwittingly.

Am I saying that Blagby and Shire are heretics? That's not what I would say based upon how they treat Scripture. I think that they have been inculcated and indoctrinated into an approach to Scripture and understanding Scripture that is in itself heretical, but I think that it is unknowingly.

They're not material heretics. They are, what's the other view? There's two ways of describing heresy, material heresy and they're accidental heretics. What they're expressing is heretical doctrine, the same way that if I asked you to define the doctrine of the Trinity to most people in here, well, no, I wouldn't say that most people in here.

Probably most people in most evangelical churches, if you asked them to define the doctrine of the Trinity, what you would get from them would be heresy. They don't understand it. They say, oh yeah, God's like an egg, you know, there's the yolk and there's the white and there's the shell and the three things make up the one God or God's like a piece of pie that you split into three, that's all three sections on the outside, but all together it's the same in the middle, a nice juicy apple pie.