Lesson 2: Inspiration - Verbal and Plenary, Part 1

All right, let's begin.

I'm gonna begin by reading 2 Timothy chapter three, and then a passage from 2 Peter.

2 Timothy chapter three, beginning of verse 14.

You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and 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 from 2 Peter chapter one.

For we did not follow cleverly devised tales 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 rises 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.

Now let's pray together before we begin.

Father, we wanna give our time and our attention and the focus of our hearts here to you this morning, knowing that you are able to use

this teaching and our time spent meditating upon the inspiration of scripture to equip

us, to give a defense to everyone who asks us a reason for the hope that is in us.

You would give us the ability to articulate clearly why it is that we have confidence in your word, why we can

trust it, how we know that it is true.

And you have provided all these things for us so that we may be thoroughly equipped and fully equipped in every way

to acts of service and worship and fellowship and ultimately to be carried through to

eternal glory.

And we thank you that you do all of these things through your word.

It is majestic and glorious and we can have a complete confidence in it, in your

writing of it and in your preserving it for us.

And we pray that you would help us to think clearly about these things so that we would be equipped in this end to this end we ask

in Jesus name, amen.

We're talking today about the inspiration of scriptures.

And this is where we must begin as we're in the series called God wrote a book, looking at how God has written and

preserved his word for us.

And this is where we must begin by talking about the doctrine of inspiration because we have to ask first of all,

what kind of book is the Bible?

What kind of book is it?

Because if it is not God's word, then it really doesn't matter if it's been preserved accurately for us at all, does it?

Ultimately, the only thing that should concern us and hasn't been preserved is if it's God's word.

If it's God's word, then we ought to be concerned to find out how and if scripture has been preserved accurately for us.

But if it's just another collection of human writings and human musings by gifted sages and pious

religious spiritually minded individuals throughout human history, if that's all it is just a collection of maxims and

Proverbs and random statements and observations about life by people who are average and it turns out to be no

more inspired than anything I've ever written or you've ever written, then it really doesn't matter if it's been preserved accurately for us that really shouldn't

concern us at all.

Then we could just look at it like a chicken soup for the Christian soul and take from it what we can and really

discard the rest of it, have chicken and throw out all the bones.

But if it is God's word, then that is what determines whether or not we should be concerned or

care whether or not it's been accurately preserved for us.

So we're gonna examine three concepts here in the coming weeks, probably taking us into early March to

do this.

We're going to examine inspiration and then the doctrine of inerrancy and with that the doctrine of infallibility

because those two though they are close to, though they are connected they are not the same and then we're gonna talk about the

doctrine of preservation.

So today we're talking about the doctrine of inspiration proper.

So in your notebook there under the doctrine of inspiration proper I have two definitions, I'm gonna read them both to you.

One is from God to Us by Norman Geisler and the second from a book, Theology Texts Lectures in

Systematic Theology by Henry Clarence Thiessen.

So the first definition, spirit moved men wrote God breathed words which are divinely authoritative for Christian faith and

practice.

That is the doctrine of inspiration just succinctly stated.

Spirit moved men wrote God breathed words which are divinely authoritative for Christian faith and

practice.

And then look at the second definition, the Holy Spirit so guided and superintended the writers of the sacred text making

use of their own unique personalities that they wrote all that he wanted them to write without excess or error.

Now today we're just looking at the doctrine of inspiration and what it means.

Next week, well the next lesson, it might not be next week but the next lesson that we're gonna be looking at is the doctrine of

inspiration as Scripture teaches it.

What does the Bible say about itself?

Do we have reason to believe that Scripture is inspired because Scripture makes that claim for itself?

That's the subject next week.

Today we're just looking at the doctrine sort of in a general way.

When we talk about divine inspiration or the inspiration of Scripture what do we mean by that?

Each of those two definitions has three essential elements, three essential elements to them.

And each of these definitions contains these three essential elements because without these three elements you have no doctrine of inspiration.

There are three things that are necessary to have a divinely inspired book.

And any understanding of the doctrine of divine inspiration has to contain all three of these elements.

So the question then for us is the book that we hold in our hands which we call the Bible, is it God's word or is it

men's words?

God's words, somebody says God's word.

Oh, somebody says both.

Right, so it is God's word and it is men's words.

And so this is where our three elements come into play.

So the first element is divine causality.

Divine causality, C -A -U -S -A -L -I -T -Y if you're taking notes, divine causality.

And by that we mean that God is the prime mover.

It is God who is the one who has moved to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture.

That's what we mean by divine causality.

Men do not seek after God.

The original intended super overarching author of Scripture is not individual men.

The doctrine of inspiration has the element of divine causality.

God is the prime mover.

He is the one who initiated a revelation of himself to men.

He is the one who desired to reveal himself to men.

If there is a God, and we believe that there is, if there is a God, then he is a communicating God because we are created in his image

and we are communicating beings, we're communicative beings.

And so if there's a God who exists and he is a communicating God, then he would have taken the initiative to be the

prime mover to make sure that he has revealed himself to mankind or to those whom he has created.

So it's not humans writing Scripture that into which God breathes his word.

We're gonna look at this when we talk about different views of inspiration later on.

But when we talk about divine causality, what we mean is that God himself is the one who initiates this process.

He is the one who desired to reveal himself and he worked in such a way so as to reveal exactly what it is and to write down,

through human authors, exactly what it is that he wanted to write down.

So we talk about inspiration.

We're not talking about a collection of human writings into which God says, okay, I'm gonna breathe power into these, as

if he stumbled upon Romans one time after Paul had written and thought, you know, Romans, that's a really good book.

I mean, we could make that Scripture.

I'll just decide to use Romans in a real powerful way throughout human history.

I might even use that to spark a reformation sometime in the 1500s or something like that.

That's not what we mean by divine inspiration, that God looked through human history and found some writings that men had written and decided that

those would be good documents to call his word.

No, God knew that he wanted Romans written and he worked and moved in such a way that Romans would be written and Romans would be

exactly what God wanted when Paul got done writing it.

So God is the ultimate source behind this giving of revelation.

The second element of the three is prophetic agency.

So divine causality, meaning God is the prime mover, prophetic agency.

This refers to the men who were moved by God to write Scripture.

So this is what Peter's talking about in 2 Peter 1 when he says men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

So these are the prophetic agents or the human agents.

Prophetic agency refers to the human men who were used to write down Scripture.

So God did not use angels to record Scripture.

God used human authors and human instruments and very flawed ones too, by the way.

Can you think of some really flawed men who were the agents of God's divine revelation?

Paul?

Of all the flawed men, you picked Paul.

I mean, I can think of some other more flawed men than Paul but we'll go with Paul to start off with.

But let's go further down towards the bottom of the barrel.

Can you give me some more examples of flawed men whom God used to write Scripture?

Jonah was a flawed man, right?

Peter?

King David?

How about Solomon?

Man, Solomon.

Of all the instruments to use for divine purposes in writing Scripture, Solomon, he gave us the Song of Solomon,

beautiful picture of marital love and intimacy.

He gave us Proverbs, the wisdom literature that's just filled with wisdom for life, right?

Amazing, you can read a proverb and you think that is just a perfect description of life.

And then there's what?

Oh yeah, how can you get away from Ecclesiastes, right?

And there's Ecclesiastes.

And interestingly, God used Solomon's hardness of heart and the

lowest of point of his life in order to give us Ecclesiastes.

So flawed men.

So these are not necessarily the most righteous and the most pious men that God could have chosen or the most flawless

men if they're by human standards of flawlessness but these were in some cases,

some of the most marred vessels that God used as the instruments of his divine revelation.

So he used men so that when we read Romans, we're reading Paul and when we read Genesis, we're reading

Moses, right?

These are the individual men whom God used.

And not only that but he used their situations, their vocabularies, their literary styles,

their emotions, their environments, their personalities, even the individual circumstances and their own minds and their

own backgrounds and the circumstances of their day in order to craft those divine writings.

I mean, think of what went into the variety that we have in scripture when we talk about the word of God in scripture.

Think of what went into that.

So when we read Paul in Galatians, for instance, Paul in Galatians doesn't sound anything like Paul in 1

Thessalonians.

Paul in Galatians is you foolish Galatians.

Who has bewitched you to switch gospels so quickly in midstream?

Did I come to you in the power of the flesh or in the power of the spirit?

And if I came in the power of spirit, why are you now wanting to be perfected in the flesh?

Like, didn't you understand it?

How can you be so foolish?

How can you be so naive?

It's just, it's a, when Paul sat down to write the book of Galatians, you get the impression that he's not concerned about the

relationships that he has within the church.

He has one thing in mind and one thing only, and that's the defense of the truth.

So he sits down to write Galatians and he is coming after the Judaizers and coming after these foolish Galatians who had been so

quickly steered away into a different gospel.

But then you read 1 Thessalonians.

It's my joy, my brethren, my crown of rejoicing.

When you get to heaven, you are gonna be the ones that we boast in.

You are a boasting and our joy.

We couldn't be prouder of you.

You have no need for me to write to you anything concerning your love for one another because you've demonstrated your love for me and you've demonstrated your love for

one another, but I would just encourage you still more and more to continue to be the perfect and ideal church that you are.

That's Paul in 1 Thessalonians.

Do you know what is necessary to get the Galatian Paul and the 1 Thessalonians Paul?

And by the way, it's not split personalities.

It is God supernaturally using all of the various elements in the

Thessalonian life and the Thessalonian situation and those people in order to craft a circumstance so that

when Paul is taken away from them or being with them for only three weeks, he writes to them a letter that bears his

heart and his love for them.

And then there was a whole nother situation going on in Galatia.

And these are not written, these are not like Paul in his early life in Galatia and then Paul the old man.

These Galatians, I chose those two for this reason.

Paul and Galatians are not written very far apart, only a couple of years apart.

But when Paul writes Galatians, he has a situation going on there that threatened the gospel and a bunch of young believers who

were quickly abandoning that and false teachers had come in so that God gives us Galatians and God gives us 1 Thessalonians and they are radically

different.

Totally different backgrounds, still Paul, still his language, still his passion, but totally different epistles,

Galatians and 1 Thessalonians.

Matthew and Luke, consider the differences between Matthew and Luke.

Do we have four identical gospels?

No, we don't have four identical gospels.

That's a very good thing.

Matthew is a very Jewish gospel.

You read through the gospel of Matthew, you get it written by a Jewish man who grew up in Judaism and he is

familiar with the Old Testament scriptures and he quotes them fluently and he is writing to a Jewish audience.

Everything about Matthew is very Jewish.

You read the gospel of Luke, totally different.

Luke is a historian, he is a doctor, the attention to detail that Luke gives to describing the illnesses that Jesus healed is way different

than any of the other gospels.

Luke spends more time and attention talking about the people and the diseases and the illnesses and ailments that Jesus healed and the

ramifications of that than the other gospel writers do, why?

Because Luke is a physician.

So Luke is a physician's gospel and Luke is a historian.

So the amount of historical detail and research that Luke did to write his gospel is different than Matthew.

It doesn't mean Matthew is inaccurate, it just means that Luke gives more attention to some of the finer points of details in

his collection of instances from the life of Jesus and written to a Gentile audience.

So Luke emphasizes in Jesus's interaction with Gentiles.

That's very significant to Luke, why?

Because Luke is a Gentile.

So God took a Gentile man and used him to write a Gentile gospel to a Gentile audience, a doctor talking about the healings

that Jesus did and then God took a Jewish tax collector who had grown up in Judaism and used him to write a very Jewish gospel to a Jewish

audience.

Look at that variety, right?

And this is some of the stuff that we ought to appreciate when we're reading through scripture and appreciating how it is that God has given it to us.

Ephesians is very tightly reasoned.

Romans is very easy to outline, relatively speaking.

Have you ever tried to outline 1 John?

You know what outlining 1 John is like?

It's, 1 John is the themes of light and life and love.

And if John would just talk about them in that order or any order, it would be nice, but John doesn't do that, right?

John meanders through, and I don't use meandering in a bad way as if it's aimless or purposeless, but John sort of meanders through these

different themes of light and life and love and he ties them all together and he weaves them all together, they're sometimes going

from one to the other in all of these different orders, talking about all these various things from all these different perspectives.

And the book of 1 John almost defies being outlined in any kind of a logical way.

And if you compare commentaries on 1 John, you'll find that the outlines vary as much as the personalities of the authors who

write the commentaries.

It's very difficult to outline 1 John.

John and Paul are totally different.

With Romans, you have an outline, almost a lawyer's mind laying out the gospel, right?

Guilty as charged, the first three chapters.

Justified, Romans four and five.

What does that justification mean?

It means that we're no longer slaves of sin, chapter six.

It means that though we're no longer slaves of sin in chapter seven, we still do the things that we don't want to do, but glory be to God, chapter

eight, that he has delivered us from this body of flesh.

So he gets through laying out all of that, it's just a logical progression of the doctrines of grace and the doctrines of

salvation and the gospel all the way through the end of chapter eight.

And then he raises this question, well, what about the Jews then, right?

Romans nine, 10, and 11.

How does that tie in with the sovereignty of God?

And then you get to chapter 12, and after answering all those questions, okay, here are the practical implications of this gospel message.

Chapter 12, the spiritual gifts, and 13, 14, 15, and then it closes, it wraps it all up with chapter 16.

That is easy to outline.

That's Paul's logical, legal mind, a man trained by the greatest legal mind of his day, Gamaliel,

he's a man who models his teacher and he thinks rationally, he thinks logically and linearly.

John, too, all over the place, just through life, love, and light, and what different personality we have in

those two scriptures, right?

All of that is God -given.

It's by the providence of God that we have such variety in scripture.

It's by his design.

Consider the difference between Philippians, the epistle of joy, and the one we already mentioned,.

That we should not speak, Ecclesiastes, right?

Paul, rejoice every more, and I'm gonna say rejoice, and then Ecclesiastes is vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Those two books are in the same Bible.

Those two books are given by the same divine author.

Truly amazing, isn't it?

Paul's language is different than Peter and John.

Sometimes the writings that we have in scripture have run -on sentences, different punctuation

than we would have.

Sometimes Paul begins a thought that he doesn't actually kind of finish.

He sort of gets sidetracked, sometimes like I do, and get off on a bit of a tangent, and then you try and come back to it and you don't quite come back

to where you were at, and you go on to something else.

There's a very human flavor to every writing of scripture.

Like with Ecclesiastes, you get Solomon's heart.

The emotions, the vocabulary, the style, the mind, the circumstances, the upbringing, the

ethnicity, all of that ties in to all of the variety we have in scripture.

And God did all of this without doing violence to the will of the author, without interrupting them.

So when we're reading through scripture, we're not reading through Romans, and if I were studying through Romans and teaching it to you guys, I

wouldn't say, okay, now look at the middle of verse 12.

You can see where God interrupted what Paul was trying to say, and then God started doing his own thing over here.

So then we have, this is the word of God, and then Paul gets back in control over here.

We don't have any kind of a multiple personality or split disorder with the apostle Paul when he's writing scripture.

It is God using the human instruments, and what we get in scripture is our books, each

individual one, with a uniquely human flavor.

So that when you read the writings of Paul, even the language that he uses, it's radically different than the words that John uses.

It's radically different than the style of the apostle Peter.

Hebrews is different than any other book in the New Testament, and it perplexes people.

There are similarities to things that Peter writes, there are similarities to things that John writes, there are similarities to things that Paul writes

in the book of Hebrews.

We don't know who wrote the book of Hebrews, but it bears the mark of divine inspiration, and Hebrews has its own flavor, too, right?

We haven't even mentioned that.

Hebrews is unique amongst all the New Testament books.

So we have divine causality, that is, that God is the prime mover.

The second element is human or prophetic agency.

We have a prophetic agency that is the men who were uniquely moved to write these books, and this results in the third thing,

which is written authority.

Written authority, that is the product of inspiration.

It is a divinely authoritative book.

What we have in Scripture is a written -down authority in writing so that we can say that

all disputes must bow the knee before Scripture, all discussions and all controversies must ultimately bend to the

Word of God, all questions regarding spiritual things or divine truth can only be answered in Scripture, and it is the

only writing that carries the authority of heaven, Scripture, because of this view of inspiration.

We believe that God was the divine author, he wrote through human means, he did this without violating

their will, he did it using their own unique circumstances, personalities, vocabulary, and gifts,

and what we have then is a book which carries divine authority.

So divine causality, prophetic agency, and then a written authority.

So we would say that divine causality plus prophetic agency equals a written authority.

That is the doctrine of inspiration.

Now, look back up at those two definitions that I gave you.

Spirit -moved men, that is what?

That's prophetic agency.

Wrote God -breathed words, that's divine causality, which are divinely authoritative for Christian faith and practice, that's written

authority.

Those are the three elements of the doctrine of inspiration.

The second definition, the Holy Spirit so guided and superintended the writers of the sacred text, that is, the Holy Spirit

is the divine causality.

He superintended the writers of the sacred text, that is, the human or prophetic agency, making use of their own unique personalities,

and they wrote all that he wanted them to write without excess or error, that's written authority.

So what we have is a written authority.

All right, so that is the definition, broadly speaking, of the doctrine of inspiration.

Are there any questions before we move on?

Yes.

Yeah, that's a very good observation.

Scripture contains, because it was written by human instruments, scripture contains all of the emotions and experiences that men can

have.

Right, the joys of sexual intimacy in the Song of Solomon, the depression and discouragement of the life that tried to be lived

under the sovereignty of God in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

You have the joy of Philippians.

You have the passion of Galatians.

You have, in 2 Corinthians, Paul being abused and misinterpreted and him coming to the defense of his apostolic ministry.

All of these various emotions and situations, there's something in scripture that touches on all of those.

There's always something, no matter where we're at in life, we can relate to one of these issues.

The question is just finding it in there and understanding what it is and how it is that we're to relate to it.

Yeah, good observation.

Yeah, Ken.

I think the question is how do we get away from the circular logic that the Bible is true because the Bible says it is true?

We're gonna actually deal with that in the next lesson in some detail.

So maybe hold off on that question until the next one.

That quote, yeah, the first one is from God to us is Norman Geisler.

Henry Thiessen from Systematic Theology.

Henry Thiessen's Systematic Theology text was my textbook in first year, second year, third year of Bible college.

All right, any other questions?

What do we mean when we talk about divine inspiration?

I'm gonna give you some false views of inspiration here in a moment that we'll kind of contrast it with.

So let me give some, let's talk about letter C, related concepts, some related concepts.

And I don't have these listed here, but I'm gonna give you three things that kind of are all similar and related.

I wanna make some distinctions between these three things.

Revelation, inspiration, and illumination.

Revelation, inspiration, and illumination.

These three things are all kind of tied together in some ways, and oftentimes, Christians speak of inspiration as if

they're actually describing illumination when they talk about inspiration.

And sometimes they talk about inspiration as if it's revelation.

So I wanna distinguish between these three so that we're kind of clear in what it is that we're talking about.

Revelation, the word revelation is not the last book in your Bible, though that's called Revelation, true, but

revelation, what we're talking about is the content that is revealed.

Our Bible contains divine revelation.

Our Bible is divine revelation.

I shouldn't say it contains divine revelation.

Our Bible is divine revelation.

There is content revealed in this, content about the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of reality, the afterlife, heaven, hell,

rewards, sin, judgment to come, the nation of Israel, the history of humanity, creation, the persons of the Trinity, et

cetera.

All of that is the content.

When we talk about revelation, we're talking about the doctrine itself or the content that is revealed inside Scripture.

The word illumination we use, sorry, inspiration, we use that to refer to the revealing of the truth.

So revelation is that which is revealed.

Inspiration is the word we use to describe the process by which God revealed that.

Again, God being the one who reveals it through human agency, resulting in a written revelation.

That's inspiration.

The content is what we're talking about in God giving revelation.

So you'll hear people talk about God gave me this revelation or God gave prophetic revelation or we believe that prophetic

revelation is for today or God's still giving revelation today.

They're talking about the content and should be talking about the content that is given and we distinguish that from the process,

inspiration, by which that content comes to us.

The third concept is illumination.

Illumination refers to understanding the truth that is revealed.

Understanding the truth that is revealed.

So revelation, the content, inspiration, the process of revealing it.

Illumination is what happens when we understand the content that is revealed.

So let me distinguish between those three one more way and then I'll give you an illustration.

Revelation is the fact of divine communication.

Inspiration is the means of divine communication and illumination is the gift of understanding the divine communication.

Illumination is the understanding of divine communication.

So let me show you why this is important.

You will hear some people talk about, I was reading my Bible this morning and I came across this passage and just sort of jumped off the page of

me and I came to understand this passage in an entirely new way God was giving me revelation.

Is that a correct statement?

God is not giving you revelation.

What was God giving you?

Illumination provided that what was illuminated was in fact

the meaning of the text and not something that you invented in your own mind.

So if you're reading through scripture and you say, I'll give you an illustration that I'm using

in an upcoming book.

You're reading through the book of Joshua for instance and you come across the name Benjamin and you say, well, God revealed to me what it was that I

was supposed to name our next child,.

Benjamin.

Well, why would you think that?

Well, because I was reading through Joshua 18 and I came across the name Benjamin and it jumped off the page.

God revealed to me something new.

No, God revealed something in the book of Joshua.

So he's not revealing to you something new.

Did he give you inspiration in that moment?

No, inspiration refers to the way in which God gave us the book of Joshua and kept it for us.

The way in which God gave us the book of Joshua is having the name Benjamin jump off the page at me,.

Illumination.

Why not just name him Joshua?

It's not illumination either, right?

Because what jumped off the page at me in that name has nothing to do with the meaning of that passage in its context or the

intention of the writer.

I'll give you an example of a time when God allowed me to, now listen, the process of illumination hopefully happens

when everybody studies scripture.

It happens as you're reading through and you're understanding what it is that you're reading and the amount that you grow in your understanding

of illumination scripture, your understanding of scripture is growing in illumination.

Hopefully that happens for every Christian.

Sometimes it happens in big leaps or big bounds.

I'll give you an example of one time when it happened to me.

I was reading through John chapter 12 where

Jesus quotes or John quotes a passage from Isaiah when Isaiah saw God

high and lifted up in the glory of his train filled the temple in Isaiah chapter six.

And Isaiah saw that and John quotes that passage and says this Isaiah said when he

saw him.

For years I read that and thought yeah, this Isaiah said when he saw Yahweh, God.

Okay, got it.

Read through John.

One day I was reading through John 12 and it dawned on me all of a sudden that the hymn was not a reference to the

father or the God whom Isaiah saw in Isaiah chapter six.

John was saying this Isaiah wrote when he, Isaiah, saw Jesus.

Jesus is the hymn.

So what dawned on me in that moment?

Yahweh, Jesus is the Yahweh that Isaiah saw whose glory filled the temple in

Isaiah chapter six.

That connection with the deity of Christ.

I believed in the deity of Christ but that connection in that passage, I'd never seen that before.

That is the meaning of John chapter 12, by the way.

That is what he's saying.

Now in that moment I had understanding or illumination and insight into a passage of scripture, into the real

meaning of that passage of scripture.

That's what we mean by illumination.

It's not when something jumps off the page and I invent some meaning that is never there for the original audience.

It's me understanding the passage in its context, understanding what the author intended and having some sort of insight

into that.

That's illumination.

That's the work of the Holy Spirit.

So when that happens, we don't say God gave us new revelation nor do we say God gave us inspiration because those are not accurate words to use to

describe that.

We would say God gave me illumination in the text.

In studying it, I did the hard work and the meaning came out of that.

I saw the meaning of it.

I understood the meaning of that.

The Spirit of God shines the light on that.

That is a privilege that is only reserved for believers because the natural man does not understand the things of the Spirit of God.

First Corinthians chapter two.

A natural man, an unbelieving person who has not repented of their sins and trusted Christ for salvation, who does not have a renewed heart and a

renewed mind and the Holy Spirit inside him, he cannot, he can understand certain things about scripture but he cannot have the illuminating

work of the Holy Spirit.

Not until his heart has been changed and his mind has been changed and his nature has been changed can he honestly have illumination.

That make sense?

So those three distinct concepts, we have to keep them differently and make sure that we understand what we're talking about when we talk about

those three things.

Revelation is the content, what is given, the information.

Inspiration is the process by which God revealed that and illumination is our subjective, it is

subjective because it is us as the subject coming to an understanding of that which has been revealed by

inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Any questions on those three?

Yes, Peter.

How do we know that our subjective understanding of the text is accurate and it's what we should be knowing?

That is the result of the work of the Spirit of God and the hard work of doing duty in the text,

doing your duty in the text, in reading and understanding it.

Our illumination, the illumination that we receive from the Holy Spirit as he draws us near to himself and reveals to us deeper, more profound

insights into scripture, that will grow over time as we grow closer to the Lord and we read scripture.

That's why I passionately try and persuade people every year if you're not in the habit of reading through the Bible once a

year, you should do it.

Are you gonna understand everything you read in there?

No, and don't think that I read through scripture with the same detail and attention to detail of the whole

Bible every year that I give to Hebrews.

I can't do that.

I spend 40 hours a week working on what I'm gonna present to you in one verse.

I can't do that for every verse in scripture, but I do read through the entire Bible once every year.

Now, why do I do that?

So that my understanding will grow and my ability to see the context will grow and understanding scripture and how it was

given and what's in there, all of that is a necessary element of rightly understanding the word of truth.

Paul says to Timothy, you need to be diligent to present yourself approved to workmen that does not need to be ashamed, rightly

handling the word of truth.

That is something that requires diligence and work.

And it does require effort.

Yeah.

Yeah, how do you answer the question?

Well, that's your interpretation because illumination does come down to a certain understanding or interpretation of the text.

That's a more complex question to answer simply because if you have an interpretation of scripture, you have to be able to defend that from the text.

And so that's where you have to get into a discussion where somebody could say, well, that's just your interpretation.

And my response to that, well, then what is your interpretation?

How do you interpret it?

Let's go to the text.

Let's open it up and take a look at it and let's walk through it from top to bottom and see.

And you justify your interpretation of the text.

I'll try and justify my interpretation of the text and let's see whose interpretation wins out at the end.

Yes.

Yeah.

Does the practical application of a text fit under illumination?

I think that the answer to that would be yes.

Application is personal.

Application is something that is very individual to the person when we're reading scripture.

We always wanna make sure that our application comes back to a right understanding of the text.

Otherwise, we're naming our kids Benjamin because we ran across it in Joshua chapter 18.

So we always need to make sure that our understanding of the passage determines our application of the passage.

And so that's why interpretation and understanding the text is essential and our application of it

will be very individual.

I can preach one passage of scripture and I've had this happen where I've got done with a sermon.

Somebody's come up and said, you know, the way the Lord used this in my life is he showed me that, he convicted me that X, Y, and Z.

And I think, man, I wasn't even going for that.

Like, it wasn't even on my radar that that would be an application of the text.

Yes.

That's the sanctifying work of the Spirit of God.

So when I come up with an application for the text, I can't say the Lord revealed this to me because then I'm using the term

revelation, new content.

So I have to be careful and you know me enough to know that I try to be very precise with my language so as

not to create confusion amongst people.

I cannot say I came across this passage and I was convicted that I needed to do X, Y, and Z in

my application of this passage.

This is what the Lord wants me to do to pursue holiness.

That might be an application that is obvious and I feel inclined to that.

I should pursue that application.

But I can't say I was reading through scripture and the Lord revealed to me or the Lord spoke to me and said that I am to do X, Y, and Z

because now we're talking about revelation.

We're not talking about illumination.

I can be mistaken in my understanding of revelation but God cannot be mistaken in what he says

about revelation.

So I have to be careful that I'm not claiming revelation for something that's really application or

just an understanding of the text because God is not necessarily telling, I can't know that God is telling me that that's what the

text means because my friend who believed that God told him to name his son Benjamin from

Joshua chapter 18, he believed that that's what God was telling him.

Well, that's new revelation.

I didn't think it was inspiration or illumination nor did I think it was proper application.

I didn't think it hit the mark in any of that but he claimed it as divine revelation, a way that God revealed something to

him.

That make sense?

So in my application, I have to be careful that I'm not saying God told me or God revealed to me.

I can say that the spirit of God convicted me, that's biblical language.

The spirit of God revealed, that's not biblical language because now we're talking about different content rather than just the application.

There can be only one meaning of a passage but that one meaning of the passage might manifest itself in 100 different

applications which is why I talk about, you'll notice that I'm, and sometimes I'm criticized for

this and I will take this criticism, you will notice that I'm very slow to list all of the ways that you can apply scripture

to your life from the pulpit.

So when I'm teaching through a passage, I don't get to the end and say, okay now, here's what you need to do this week, all right?

So Mark, here's what you need to do with your wife and your family this week to apply this passage of scripture.

And Pat, here's what you need to do in your work and in your shop to apply this passage of scripture.

And Josh, here's what you need to do this week.

I don't do that.

I don't get specific like that.

Why?

Because I believe that if God's people understand the clear meaning of the passage, the application of that passage

will be clear to each individual person.

And one person over here might read that passage and hear what I'm saying, I understand that and they know what that means for them.

They don't need me to tell them that.

Somebody on the other side's gonna have a totally different application of that passage because that's the work of the Spirit of God to apply that.

And once I start saying, here's how you need to apply this in your marriage, in your business, in your life, tomorrow morning, et cetera, what I've just

laid upon you is law.

I've just laid upon you a burden.

And I said, here's what it looks like for you.

Well, that might not be what it looks like for you.

That might be what I think it looks like because I'm looking at you and thinking this is what you need to do, but that might not be what it looks like for you.

I'm mostly thinking about Josh, yes.

So I'm very slow to do that from the pulpit because I think that when you lay out the

meaning of the passage and it is so clear to people, they see it in the text, they see it as God's authority, this is what

God has said, then there's going to be 200 applications here on a Sunday morning.

It's gonna look different for everybody.

Not without the working of the illumination, right?

And so my prayer in teaching through scripture is that each person here will begin to see God for what he

is and see Christ for who he is and see what the truth of scripture is and that in doing that, there are gonna be people who are

convicted to do different things as a result of that.

But that's part of the illumination process and application, it's not revelation, right?

Any other questions?

Let's move on to, this is gonna work out perfect because I'm

gonna do D, clarifications on inspiration and then next week we'll do three views of inspiration because I

had a whole bunch of bonus material I'm just gonna work into the second half of this and this will work out good.

So clarification on inspiration.

One thing that we need to remember is, let me just make sure that, yes, it is the Bible that is inspired and not the writings.

The one time that scripture speaks of theonousos, the Greek word for inspiration, theonousos, it

is describing the grafe, the writings and not the writers and this is a careful distinction.

We believe that scripture is inspired, not the writers.

Now I understand that when we, sometimes we are really loose in our conversation, I've done it as well, I talk about the inspired writers.

I mean John was inspired, Paul was when he was writing this but it's not the writers, technically speaking, that are inspired

because what does our doctrine of inspiration say?

God used divine instruments or God used human instruments as the divine cause to produce written revelation.

It is the revelation that is breathed out.

It is the grafe that is theonousos, that's given by inspiration.

It's not the writers who were inspired.

Does that make sense?

Now sometimes we can use the term inspiration to refer to the whole process of God using human authors to

write written authority and that's appropriate and that's fine but we need to be careful that we don't think of

that which is inspired as the writers themselves because if we're thinking that that which is inspired is the writers themselves then what

would that mean?

What would the implication of that be?

They wrote it, right.

Or it would mean that everything that author wrote was inspired.

Was everything that Paul wrote inspired?

Wasn't.

Now how do I know that?

Everything he wrote isn't in scripture.

Paul was a tent maker, do you think he ever wrote out a receipt for a tent that he purchased?

Or John sold off a quick grocery list to Timothy before heading down to the marketplace?

Do you think he ever did that?

Not everything Paul wrote is in scripture.

Not everything that Paul wrote is inspired, none of those authors but when Paul sat down to write Romans, God's intention was to

use Paul as the instrument to write that written authority.

And so what we have in Romans is God breathed.

God breathed it out through Paul.

Same thing with Ecclesiastes, same thing with 1 Peter, same thing with the Gospel of John, et cetera.

God spoke so that the writings themselves, the product is what is inspired, not the writers themselves.

So properly speaking, inspiration describes the product which is the Bible.

Number two, the doctrine of inspiration and the consequent authority does not automatically extend to every

copy of the Bible but only to the original manuscripts.

So inspiration only extends to the original manuscripts.

Yeah, Garrett?

The original autographs, yes.

What did I say?

Yeah, autographs.

I'm using, and right now I'm using autographs and manuscripts synonymously but I understand because manuscripts can

refer to copies of the autographs.

Yes, Jason?

I was hoping nobody would ask that question.

Is it?

Yes, so this is a good question.

Is it possible that Paul wrote something that was inspired but has not been preserved?

We have to, this is a good question because we have to distinguish between

God's intent in speaking inspired in authoritative words and text

and God's intent in preserving for his church over the course of time a corpus of

writings that may include everything that is inspired but it may not include everything that is inspired.

So for instance, the Apostle Paul has two letters to the Corinthians, we talked about this last week, which were written, they've not been preserved for us.

The first letter to the Corinthians which is before our first Corinthians and a letter between what we regard as first and second Corinthians,

there was a letter in there that Paul refers to as the severe letter, those letters have not been preserved for us.

Now were they inspired?

We don't know that, I don't know that.

Was, did God intend to preserve that for us?

That I know for sure, the answer to that is no.

He did not intend to preserve that for us.

Yeah, it does come into how they canonized what they did.

I don't know that the early church ever wrestled over those lost letters of Paul to decide whether or not they were inspired.

So that's why that's a good example because that never came up in the discussion as far as I know, that those letters have been lost to history.

But there are a bunch of gospels that are not included in our New Testament, et cetera.

And we're gonna talk about why those were not included and who decided that and when, et cetera, later on.

But to get to Jason's question, is it possible to have something that was inspired that is not preserved?

I think theoretically it is possible but I can't know that for certain because I can't know if what Paul wrote was

given by inspiration of God.

I can know that everything that he intended to preserve for us, he has.

Only because it is, yeah, we have nothing preserved for us that is not given by divine inspiration.

Right, there's nothing given by divine inspiration that's floating around out there that we know of that we just say, well, God wrote that

and it's divinely authoritative.

It's the product of inspiration but we reject it.

Yeah, Peter.

Is there any recent discoveries of manuscripts that we didn't already have or know of?

No, nothing that we would consider inspired or authoritative because we go into what is it that constitutes what has been preserved and why has it

been preserved?

We're gonna get into that question.

What if we discovered today a document, what if we discovered Paul's First Corinthians?

Right, and it was actually First Corinthians.

What if we unearthed that in Corinth today in an archeological discovery and it actually had Paul's sweat and tears on it?

What if we found that document?

Would we regard it as scripture?

Would we add it to our scriptures?

All right, we'll answer that later on.

And there's a reason why we're answering it later on.

We're building brick on brick and we gotta get to that conclusion.

When we get to that conclusion, you'll see, okay, yeah, here's why we would not or would add it.

I'm gonna spoil it.

We add it, okay.

So the Doctrine of Inspiration refers to the original autographs and not to the copies

or the translations.

Now, we're out of time here.

I'll just quickly deal with something real quick.

This pertains to the issue of translations and do we have a translation, a particular translation of the scriptures today

that is authorized and inspired and given by divine inspiration?

And I'm not gonna pick on Josh's King James only background here.

But there is a group of people within the King James only camp who would say that the King James translation, the 1611

authorized God -inspired translation is actually the inspired passage of scripture,

the inspired translation.

And so that anything that is not the 1611 King James, and by the way, King James only advocates don't actually read

the 1611 translation.

They read a later translation.

But anyway, that translation, 1611, is actually the inspired.

There is a group of people within the King James only movement who would say that God re -inspired, did another

act of inspiration in the 1611 translation to ensure that that version was exactly what

God wanted.

So they would say that the Doctrine of Inspiration applies to the original autographs, but then God re

-inspired it again to make sure that we had it in the English as an actual inspired document.

Sorry, what?

Oh.

Okay, so then they would actually suggest that we would take the 1611 and that that

would be authority to go back and to correct Greek and Hebrew manuscripts based on the English translation

of the 1611.

Now that's some fringe, wacko stuff, but those people exist, and that's what they believe.

So when we talk about inspiration, we're not talking about the copies, which yes, there are manuscript errors in

the copies.

We're not talking about those.

We're not talking about any codex that came 100 years later.

We're not talking about copies of the copies.

When we talk about inspiration, we're talking about the autograph, the piece of paper that Paul wrote on.

That is given by inspiration.

Now the question that we have to answer the course of this is, has what has been preserved for us, can

we know for certain that it is what Paul wrote?

And that's what we're looking at in the weeks ahead.

Yeah, Pat.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah, and even taking into account textual variance, which we'll look at later on, we can still have that

confidence that God has preserved for us exactly what he wrote for us through those original authors.

And the Dead Sea Scrolls help demonstrate that.

Yes, Brad.

Are the current translations of the Bible considered part of the illumination process?

No.

That wouldn't be included in what we talk about by illumination.

Because that's what we're talking about with translation is that when we take a textual, a textual manuscript or the textual,

the original Greek and Hebrew, and we translate that into English, is that process accurate?

Are we accurately rendering from one language to another, God's intended meaning?

Now, the people who do that translation, they are required, they have to understand and know the context.

Because there are times when translating a word or a phrase requires that you have some understanding of what the author is going through.

So those people who do the translation, they have to do the hard work of figuring out what this passage means in its

original context.

Because it's not like you just take one word and you translate it into the next word, and you take the next word and translate it and just do this all the way through

scripture.

That's not how translations work.

Sometimes it's a thought -for -thought rendering of it, sometimes word -for -word.

Sometimes you're trying to take something from the original and translate it into an English equivalent that would capture the meaning and

communicate the meaning, and that's sometimes difficult.

We'll look at examples of that later on.

No, it's not part of the inspiration process, no.

No, it's not in anything of what we're talking about here in terms of translation.

All right, the kids are done back here, so one last thing and then we'll be done.

Inspiration, number three, is inexplicable.

There is a mystery here.

In what way did God do this?

What did the authors feel?

Did they feel like they were under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?

Did they know that they were under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit?

The answer to that is sometimes yes, sometimes no.

What did it look like in the process of it?

There's mysteries here that we do not understand.

Scripture tells us that God breathed out his word to us and that the scriptures are given by inspiration of God.

What exactly that looked like in terms of the human experience and the human writing and their

awareness of what was going on at the time, that we cannot answer beyond some generalities that

we'll look at in a couple of weeks.

Okay, I think that that's it.

Yes, Garrett.

Well, that's why I said after that that sometimes the term inspiration can be used for the entire process.

But the one time that theonustos is used, it's used of the grafe, the writings.

These writings were inspired.

The humans were the instruments that did that, but we can't, it is confusing to refer to the

human instruments as the ones that are inspired since it's the scripture itself which is God breathed.

It's not the instruments that were God breathed, it's the scripture that has been God breathed.

The word inspiration in scripture is used of the product, not of the process or of the person.

It's used of the product.

And the one time it is used, and so that's why I said we need to be careful that we just have that in mind.

I know that if you said, well, the writings were inspired, I know that that's not heresy coming from you.

I know that what we would mean by that when we use that, and I could use that here, and we'd all understand what we're talking about.

But just for clarification, we're just kind of trying to be precise that we're talking about the product, not the person.

Yeah, all right, let's bow in prayer.

Matt, really?

Okay.

In our way of using that term under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, yes.

Because the Spirit of God was moving, men moved by the Holy Spirit.

So there is a Spirit of God who is moving that man, and the word that Peter uses there is carried along, like wind

carries along a sail.

These men were being driven by the Holy Spirit in the process.

So they were being moved, but what they were is not inspired, what is written is inspired.

But they were moved by the Holy Spirit to write inspired writings.

Yeah, okay, now we're praying.

Close our eyes and open to the questions.

Father, we're very grateful for the time that we've had here in helping us to think through these things, and we just pray that the result would be equipping us to

think clearly about your word and rightly about your word so that we may appreciate what it is that you have given to us.

Thank you for these graces, and we ask your blessing upon our service and our time of fellowship to follow in Christ's name.

Amen.