What is the Inspiration of Scripture? - What We Believe, Part 2

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Interpreting Scripture, What We Believe, Part 3

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Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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Well welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, with my trusty sidekick,

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Bud the Wiser. How are you, Bud? I am excellent, sir. How are you today? I feel like we are in the

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Bud Zone. Oh, wait. That's a different podcast. That's your new podcast. I'm sorry. Welcome to the Bud Zone.

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Yeah. So you got that nice, deep voice when you do that, though. You had a really good episode, your recent one, got part two, which

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I guess is turning into part three with your guest. You know, I have an exciting number of plans coming up and thankful for the guests that have come on.

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But yeah, we're going to have a special episode. Oh, is that when I get finally invited on to the

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Bud Zone? See, I'm dealing with you every week. We can't reverse roles here.

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Oh, sure we could. I'm just sitting back. That's fine. I've reversed roles on many. I don't know if you remember, but I reversed roles on Chris Arnzen on his own radio show.

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That is right. I tried to do it without him knowing, and that didn't work so well. But there was an

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Iron Sharpens Iron where we were down at G3 and I interviewed him. I reversed roles with Dwayne Atkinson on the

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Bar podcast, where I interviewed him for his own podcast. It's interesting because when we've done that, people have gotten a lot of feedback because they listen to podcasters that do interviews asking the questions, never answering them.

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And so those seem to be the ones that people really appreciate a lot because they get to know the host that they've been listening to for a while.

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So it's kind of neat, but we have gotten some feedback, bud. We got a five -star review from Greg.

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This one's going to be a long one to read. So just hold on. It says, great podcast.

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It was very informative. It got right to the point. And I like that. See? He just said great.

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And he has an exclamation point. Michelle gave us some feedback as well. This one's kind of nice.

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It's kind of touching. So here we go. It says, five stars, by the way, the rap report is fantastic.

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Andrew is very knowledgeable about the Bible and his delivery of content is engaging.

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I love that I can listen with my daughter and never and not ever be concerned about what she may hear.

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The content in the rap report has led me to grow in my spiritual walk or Christian walk.

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So that's kind of a nice one. So Michelle, thank you very much for that. And hello to your daughter who's listening.

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That is something, bud, that has always amazed me with my teachings. We have this

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Striving Fraternity Academy. I'm always amazed how many people listen or watch it with kids and whatnot, and the kids love it.

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And so it wasn't written or designed for them. And so it really is kind of neat to me to just know that the bracket or age range, both spiritually and physically,

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I mean, those courses were not meant for pastors, yet there's a lot of pastors who watch those courses and get a lot out of them.

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What I've been blown away is how many homeschoolers use them. And they say the same thing. Their kids are engaged with the material.

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It's not about my quirky humor, I guess, keeps them engaged. And I don't know, my facial expressions,

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I mean, I got a weird looking face. What can I say? But it helps them. And that's always surprised me, the age range of people that are engaged and enjoy the show.

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So we welcome feedback. If you would like to leave us a review, which we would like, you can go to lovethepodcast .com

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slash rap report. That's rap with two Ps. And that is a way you can leave us some feedback.

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We love to hear the feedback because that's how we actually know what you guys are thinking about what we're doing, because otherwise we don't know.

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And so we would greatly appreciate feedback. We'd also, if you like this show, please share it with others.

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Follow it. That's actually the way, people don't understand this, but the way that I hear so many podcasts go, oh, write us a review so we get higher rankings in iTunes, or now

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Apple Podcasts. No, it doesn't, that does nothing. When you give reviews, that helps us know how we're doing.

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Okay. Another way you could leave us feedback is email us at info at strivingforeternity .org.

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Info at strivingforeternity .org. That's another way to leave feedback. That just tells us how we're doing so we can hear from you.

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And it is important for everybody listening. If you want to send feedback, please do that, because I can tell you there is a hierarchy of importance on feedback, because I give

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Andrew feedback all the time, and it never goes anywhere. You guys send something in, it goes to the top of the heap.

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So please do that. For the record, I have read one of your feedbacks before on air.

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And you actually wrote it as a joke, thinking that no one was going to read it. And you were surprised then that I read it on air.

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Yes. I remember that. I dismember that. I can go find it. But the way to actually get ranking in Apple Podcasts or the others is the number of followers.

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So when you hit what used to be subscribe, but when you hit follow and you follow the podcast, the more people that do that, the higher we rank.

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We actually, I think we dropped, I should go look this up. See if I can find it real quick. We actually dropped ranking in the charts.

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I think we dropped down to like 200 and something that we were. But I can't find it.

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So let's get started. We'll be last, we'll be first. Don't worry about it. But speaking of that, actually, let me give you some ideas.

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So folks don't always know with Striving Fraternity how, because we target smaller churches to minister to.

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We go to small churches to try to come in, do weekend seminars, help them out to get them discipling their own people, get them making an impact on their community.

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Most ministries ignore the small churches and yet the majority of churches are smaller. And therefore, we don't get known as much as some of the bigger ministries.

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But, you know, when you look at the internet and look at the influence we have with not just our materials online and the courses that we have with the

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Striving Fraternity Academy, which you can go to strivingfraternity .org and see those, our podcast community,

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Christian podcast community, all these different things, we actually have a broad reach when it comes to the internet.

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And when you think of the 8 billion internet or what's called domains, those are like internet sites that you might think of that, you know, when you go to like strivingfraternity .org,

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that's a domain, there's 8 million of them out there. And we are ranked in the world, 169 ,000 in the world.

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And say, okay, that doesn't sound too good. We actually were higher, we've been in the 90 ,000s.

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In the United States, we're ranked 33 ,000. Now you say, well, that doesn't sound so big.

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But when you compare to say, let's, if I compare to like Grace To You, Grace To You is 142 ,000 in the world.

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So we're a little bit behind 147 to 169.

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We're a little bit behind them in the world right now. But when it comes to the United States, they're 47 ,000 in the world, or sorry, in the

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United States, and we're 33. So we actually rank higher than Grace To You, which is the ministry of John MacArthur here in the

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United States. That may surprise folks, because they probably don't realize how many people are coming to Striving Fraternity, reading through the articles.

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It's not a matter of just going there and bouncing on, bouncing off. It's the fact that people come in through search engines or whatever, get the material they want, and keep reading.

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And so that's a blessing that we have as part of Striving Fraternity just to be,

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I mean, that's one of the things I end up checking every once in a while and just go, wow, okay, I didn't realize that. But hopefully we're helping you make an impact in your local church, however big or small it is, that we're training you up so that you're ready to go and conquer your community, your world, to be able to share the gospel, know how to defend the gospel, know how to interpret the

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Word of God. And that's what we're going to talk about tonight or today, the Word of God. Before we do,

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Bud, let's get to our In the News section. You know, we did a podcast some time ago,

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National Security, their position of dealing with domestic terrorism and Biden's view of domestic terrorists.

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We dealt with that. And you and I went through an article that the Biden administration put out. And we explained that this is going to be an attempt of where the government will go after people like Christians and call them violent domestic terrorists, violent just because you disagree with the vaccine policy, you use an encrypted email or an encrypted social media platform.

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I mean, those were the things that define you as a violent domestic terrorist. The word violence is strange in those categories.

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But they say that those things are going to lead you to that. And we explained that we think that this was something that he was doing that was more of a power grab, that he's using things like private companies and things like that.

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Well, he's recently come out and done a great power grab and saying that he knows that. And this is the pattern we see with him.

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He says, well, I don't think I have the authority to prevent people from evicting people that don't pay rent.

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And then he just makes a not he hasn't legislated. He just makes a executive order, which is different than going through a legislature.

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This is the problem that I do have with presidencies where they don't go through legislation.

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We don't have much that the legislature has done. We don't have new laws since Biden.

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But we have a whole lot of changes. Where are they coming from? Executive order. That's like a king. That's not how this executive orders were never meant to be done that way.

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So he's done an executive order mandating mask wearing again.

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He's extending that till January on public travel. He's mandating vaccines.

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And what he's doing is he's putting pressure on companies. Now, they've already admitted that we were right when we said that they're basically forcing

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Facebook and others to. They because his press secretary said they're telling

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Facebook posts to take down. Well, that's not their business. I mean, there's supposed to be that separation. But here's what

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I saw in the news today. Biden wants to monitor Americans banking account.

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Blasted as violating the Fourth Amendment. But here's the thing. He doesn't care if it violates it.

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I mean, he is he knows that the things he's doing are illegal. I think what it is, is he's just shooting so many things that they because the courts, it takes time and it slows it up.

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These these things get implemented. And so it's then it's you can't undo it.

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And so by by going after. By the way, the headline is probably wrong, because I think that should be the 14th

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Amendment. But the the because the 14th Amendment protects our freedoms and their want to get access to your bank account.

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The government should have no say in your bank account. Is this being posited as some sort of plank in his attack on domestic terrorism?

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Is that why he's I haven't seen this? Well, if several right, because you have you have that the domestic terrorism tax evasion.

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So he's giving different reasons for it. And but essentially what it is, is really what this is going to do is they're going to be going after cryptocurrency as well.

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Why cryptocurrency and maybe one day we could we could explain some what cryptocurrency is to folks, because it is something

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I think Christians should take a look at as a way to protecting their money, because it is something separate from the from the government.

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You know, the United States fiat or the money that we think of the U .S. dollar when inflation hits and the

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U .S. dollar becomes worthless. Well, we have other means in cryptocurrency to protect that because we were not based on a gold standard anymore, unfortunately.

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And so just different ideas. So that is too far off. God, let's get let's get to our topic, then.

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All right. So today, what we want to do is what we've been doing is a series on the word of God.

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And in this series, what we're doing is more broadly, we're looking at the doctrinal statement at strivingforeturning .org.

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And you can get there by going to strivingforeturning .org. Under the about section, look at what we believe.

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And in there, you're going to see this is it has a whole lot of things. A lot of people use this as quick reference for theology, just looking something up.

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You can listen to last week's episode to get a good idea why it's important to know theology and check any church that you're going to go visit or attend on their theology.

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But people can use this. You can just click the plus sign and open any section. There's seven sections there. We're in the first section on on the

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Holy Scriptures. We are going to deal with paragraph two today.

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We're going to go slowly through this. But would you do me a favor and read the entire section there for Holy Scriptures?

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So the entire section. We're going to focus on paragraph two, but maybe we'll get to paragraph three.

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Who knows? Oh, we were on sentence to paragraph one, but I'm just here to help.

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OK, the Holy Scriptures, the Bible is God's special self -revelation, which is limited in space and time and are directed to various designated individuals.

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Second Peter one twenty one. The accepted writings that make up the Bible are the thirty nine Old Testament books and twenty seven

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New Testament books without any of the additional writings commonly known as the Apocrypha.

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The Bible provides the only inerrant and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

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Paragraph two. The Bible is inspired by God. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the

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Holy Spirit in which he superintended, controlled and directed the reception to the writers and communication to the hearers and readers of the divine message to mankind.

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Such that the product, the original writing is verbally every word and plenary completely, both inerrant without error and authoritative.

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Second Timothy three sixteen. God spoke in his written word by a process of dual authorship.

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The Holy Spirit so superintended the human authors that through their individual personalities and different styles of writing, they composed and recorded

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God's word to man. A second Peter one twenty and twenty one. They did this without error in the whole or in the part.

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Matthew five eighteen and second Timothy three sixteen. Thus making scriptures completely and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

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Paragraph three. The only means of interpreting scripture is a is a literal, grammatical and historical interpretation which affirms the belief that the opening chapters of Genesis present creation in six literal days.

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Genesis one thirty one and Exodus thirty one seventeen and seeing a distinction between Israel and the church.

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The Bible constitutes the only infallible rule of faith and practice.

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Get numerous verses there. Whereas there may be many applications of any given passage of scripture, there is but one true interpretation according to God.

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The meaning of scripture is to be found as one diligently applies the literal, grammatical, historical method of interpretation under the illuminating of the

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Holy Spirit. And some other verses to support that. It is the responsibility of believers to ascertain carefully the true intent and meaning of scripture, recognizing that proper application is binding on all generations.

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Yet the truth of scripture stands in judgment of men. Never do men stand in judgment of it.

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Yeah. And now there's some things in there like we can agree and we'll get this next week that you and I even don't agree on.

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Right. There's some things with nuance. But yeah, we want the distinction of Israel in the church and we'll look at that next week.

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That'll be one that a lot of people are going to have. A lot of covenant theologians would disagree with and we're going to we'll discuss those and where we differ and why we differ.

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Things like that. But this week we want to deal with the section that deals with the Bible. And this is really dealing with how we got the

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Bible, how it came together. This becomes important because for many people, they don't think so much about how we have the

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Bible that we have that sits in our hands. How did that come to us? We have this word of God.

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And this word of God that we call the word of God, we said last week, God reveals it to us.

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So this is something that we wouldn't know unless he told us. And how did it come together?

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Did God dictate it? Did he speak to the different people?

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And, you know, OK, there's Paul and Paul write this down because we know

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Paul did that. Paul dictated to people who wrote down. And yet we call it Paul's words, even though he didn't physically do the writing.

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And we call it God's word, and he doesn't physically do that writing.

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So when we look at that, go, OK, is that how it happened? That's a dictation method.

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Now, that becomes a method that many will hold to and say that that explains the difference of why

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Paul can write three to four letters to the Corinthians, but not all of them are Scripture. Because God didn't dictate those other ones to him, only what we call first and second

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Corinthians. Well, another view that people have is that the person themselves are inspired.

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So Paul's inspired. Well, that presents a problem because Paul wrote other letters to the Corinthians. We don't have those.

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See, if Paul's inspired, then everything he wrote should be inspired. And so this really deals with that.

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Now, what do we mean by inspired? We get it from 2 Timothy 3 .16. And this is a word that Paul created.

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It didn't appear in any Greek writings in history prior to that.

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And it's literally, the translation would be God breathed. That's the idea of how you and I, when we speak, when we have words, what am

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I doing? What am I doing right now? What you're hearing right now is the vibrations of my voice as I'm speaking.

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The vibrations, the waves, the radio waves are going through, bouncing through, going through the microphone, and you're hearing me breathing.

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That's really what I'm doing. Every time I speak, I'm breathing out. That is my breath.

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Well, that's what the idea of this is that when we talk of Scripture, it's inspired. The Bible is inspired by God.

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That's that first sentence. God breathed, that what he did was he actually spoke it into existence.

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And that's different than when people say that we speak things into existence. But he actually did. He's God.

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He does that. We don't, okay? But we do speak. And what is that speaking? It's breathing out words.

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And you hear me because you're hearing my breath as I'm pushing out my breath and you hear the vibration.

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That's the idea of it's inspired. And what this paragraph is going to get into is dig a little bit deeper in how that happens.

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Because this is going to answer the question, did God inspire the writer?

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I'm going to say no. Did he dictate to the writer? I'm going to say no.

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So, how is that? Well, let's look at what the next sentence says. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the

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Holy Spirit in which he superintended, which means controlled and directed, the recipient, that's to the writers, and communication, that's to the hearers or readers, of the divine message.

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The divine message to mankind such that the product, which is the original writing, is verbally, meaning every word, and plenary, meaning completely, both inerrant, which means without error, and authoritative.

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Okay, now there's a lot there to unpack. So, let's unpack this a bit.

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Each of those words are very, very significant and take some explaining. But what that sentence is doing is defining what we mean by inspiration.

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So, first off, we are saying it's a supernatural work. This is not natural. This is work, as we said last week, only

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God can reveal himself. And so that's what he's doing. He's revealing himself to us.

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This is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. Now you say, but wait a minute, isn't

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Jesus the word? Well, he is. I mean, all the Godhead is involved in what we would call the writing of Scripture.

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But it's specifically the work of the Holy Spirit that we see that works through the writers to do this work of inspiration.

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And so what do we have? The first word, it says, in which he's super intended. Now, this is a very important doctrine.

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This doctrine affects a lot of things and is one that, unfortunately, not enough people study and research because it would resolve many of the debates that we have within Christianity.

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And so I want to camp out on this one just a little while, hopefully not too long, because otherwise we'll never finish the paragraph, which will be fine if we don't, as long as you guys are getting a good education and learning this stuff.

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That's the important thing. Super intended. Now, I put it in that statement, it means the control and direction.

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Right? So this is the idea. The doctrine of super intending is the doctrine that the

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Holy Spirit works within us in such a way that everything that is done is exactly as God intended it to be.

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So when we're talking about the inspiration of Scripture, Paul wrote, John wrote,

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Peter wrote very different styles. Okay. And though they each have a different style, every letter is exactly as God intended it to be.

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Now, how does he do that? Well, he indwells a person in a sense or fills a person. That'd be the proper terminology is to fill them, to control them.

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And Old and New Testament saints, he'd control them in such a way that even though they have their own personal choices, their own style, their own language, and even writing personal things like Peter, Paul's going to say to Timothy or to Titus, say, bring my cloak.

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It's going to be cold this winter or bring my books. Those are personal things. John is going to write to his beloved.

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He's going to write to specific people. You're going to have things like this.

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They're personal in nature. And yet, every single piece of that, every letter is exactly as God intended it because the

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Holy Spirit was working through those writers to write in such a way that even though they chose those words,

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God chose it through them. So that the final product is

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God's word. So who do we give credit for writing the first five books of the

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Bible? Not Moses, God. How about Romans? God. How about Ephesians?

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God. Any book of the Bible. In other words, when you get a red letter Bible, the whole

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Bible should be red letter. It's all God. It's all what God has written. This is the thing that we see.

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This doctrine is very important to understand. And we understand it usually in the doctrine of inspiration. But it's the idea that God works through the human authors in such a way that every choice they made is exactly as God intended it to be.

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Can we fully comprehend that? No, we don't know how that works. Did Paul choose his words?

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Yes. But yet, God gets all the credit. Now, why do I spend the time to explain this?

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Well, let's go into a different area of theology. We'll get there later when we get to the doctrine of salvation called soteriology.

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But after we get regenerated, we start a process of sanctification. Now, many confuse these two.

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Both are referred to as salvation. Because salvation is a general term. You have past, present, future.

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Past is regeneration. Present, for those of us who know Christ, is sanctification. Future is glorification.

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So, regeneration, the time we go from being an enemy of God to a child of God, that starts the process of sanctification, which continues until the point we die, where we're made more and more in the image of Christ.

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Once we die, we're glorified. That is when we have a glorified body. When we no longer have sin, we're in that permanent state.

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They're all referred to as salvation. But what almost every works -based system does, every cult, every man -made religion that uses the

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Bible confuses regeneration and sanctification. And they look at the works that are talked about in sanctification.

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Are there works in regeneration? No, and it's clear in Scripture. Are there works in sanctification?

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Yes, and it's clear. But when you call them both salvation, you get confused.

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Because people often think of salvation just as regeneration. And yet the Bible will say, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

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That's sanctification. James will say that your faith without works is dead.

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He's speaking of sanctification. And what you end up seeing is that groups that will confuse those two have major problems.

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How do we rectify that? How do we answer the question? How do we as believers do good works?

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This is where this doctrine of superintending comes in again. Do we do good works?

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Well, yes. Really? No, because Scripture says God does them in us. This is the same doctrine of superintending.

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Even though we choose to do a work, we choose to do something that is a good work.

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It's actually the Holy Spirit who indwells us that is doing that work through us. So he gets 100 % of the credit.

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Now, I hope that this has helped you to understand this doctrine of superintending when it comes to inspiration and sanctification.

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Many people accept this doctrine in those two. So let me take it to one where many

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Christians battle. Again, in the area of the doctrine of soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, many people battle.

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Maybe you hear the terms Calvinism versus Arminianism. Which one's right?

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Well, the answer is yes. Does that surprise you? The reason is because people are doing the same thing with those doctrines as I just explained with doctrine of salvation.

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They take this broad thing, and instead of being precise, they're taking the broad terminology and then applying it to both.

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That's a fallacy of equivocation. So what we see is that the Holy Spirit has a ministry where he works through people in such a way that the choices they make are exactly as God intended them to be.

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So when it comes to our regeneration, we saw it in inspiration. We saw it in our sanctification.

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I see it also in our regeneration. And it solves the dilemma that so many people have.

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What do we do with Romans 1? God chose you. Sorry, Romans 9.

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God chose you. And Romans 10, you chose God. They're back -to -back, and you see this often back -to -back in Scripture, where it seems to be saying, who's making the choice?

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Well, the answer is God superintended it. So God works through the person. So experientially,

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I chose God. Theologically, God chose me. Which is right? Both.

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Because the Holy Spirit works through us to superintend that choice.

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So the choice to receive Christ is a choice that can only be made when God works through us to make that choice.

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We can't make that choice on our own. If we could, there would be no need for the cross. We could just make that choice if it's just a choice thing.

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It was a choice that God chose Adam and chose to eat of the fruit and brought the curse of sin into the universe, actually.

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The sin was already there through Satan, but the curse of sin on mankind and the universe, according to Romans 8, didn't occur until Adam partook of the fruit, not

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Eve, Adam. And so what you end up seeing there is he made a choice. So we could say, hey, I make a choice to reverse that curse.

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That's not how God works. God ends up dying on the cross as a payment of our sin.

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What that does is that when we look at this, we cannot repay the debt we owe.

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We have to receive that. But can we receive that on our own? No. According to Philippians 1 .29,

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it has been granted to you not only to believe, but to suffer for his sake.

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Our belief is granted by God. That word for granted there means to be forgiven. So it's

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God who forgives us that belief. So this is something that so many people struggle with.

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And when I explain the doctrine of superintending, but I've had countless people, when we have an article on strikingfraternity .org

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that deals with Romans 9 and 10, God's sovereignty and human responsibility is how it's worded. Because I avoid the whole

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Calvin's Arminianism labels and just deal with the issues. God's sovereignty,

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Romans 9. Man's responsibility, Romans 10. Put together, they're both there.

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A lot of people find that very helpful to understand because we understand what we experience. So many people go by their experience, and yet we look at our theology and go, well, no, what we experienced is wrong.

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No, it wasn't wrong. There's a way to marry them together. It's not an either or. And many people think of it and treat it as either or.

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I think when we understand the doctrine of superintending, we see that this big challenge that so many people debate can easily be resolved.

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We see that the Holy Spirit works this way in inspiration, sanctification, not hard to see it in regeneration.

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Any thoughts, Bud? No, I think it's profoundly important to grasp this for soteriology, certainly for the revelation,

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God's special revelation in the word, how that came about. I also think that it's important to understand superintending, not merely in those categories, but also in how the

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Lord is orchestrating history. I mean, I Am the Alpha and the Omega is such a profound and reassuring name of Christ.

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Well, it doesn't mean that he's the beginning and the end and the middle is just sort of left to chance. There is no chance.

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He's orchestrating all of that. He's superintending all of that. He's doing that by what we call providence.

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So every single thing is being orchestrated towards a final end. But with regards to soteriology that you spoke to, you go to Romans 3 where it says no one seeks after God.

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Well, wait a minute. People do seek after God. What does that mean? Oh, well, wait a minute.

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You don't actually seek after God until you've found God. How did you find God? He found you. And that's the work of the

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Holy Spirit. The other thing I might mention is that with regards to the term, when you sort of discreetly distinguish these elements of what broadly is called salvation, understand that regeneration is talking about a forensic maneuver that occurs by God's grace in heaven that has to do with your justification.

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So that is distinct from your sanctification. Same thing, but kind of a synonymous word.

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You can't do anything to become justified before God. Christ had to do that. However, you are told, as you pointed out, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

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That's the sanctification. That's what we would call a synergistic response. We cooperate with the

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Holy Spirit because now we can. He's brought us to a justified position before God.

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He's indwelt us. We're clothed in Christ's righteousness, even though we're in a

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Romans 7 situation where we battle with sin or we don't battle with sin, we obey or we don't obey, however you want to interpret that.

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But we do pursue holiness. Be holy as I'm holy.

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He does all this. You don't take credit for your good stuff. You give that to the

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Holy Spirit. I'm glad you brought up Romans 7. That's a perfect example of what we're talking about because some people, because of their experience, they think that's dealing with sanctification when it's actually dealing with regeneration.

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But because people experience it, they misinterpret that passage into, you go and study

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Romans 7 and you'll see that it changes from present tense to past tense.

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I'm arguing that, I will argue, Paul is talking about his coming to Christ in that passage.

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Now, if you want to turn to 1 Peter 2, verse 11, that describes what you were just talking about in sanctification, the warring against the flesh.

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But some people are going to ask, but what are we dealing with with this? We're talking about the

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Holy Scriptures. Why are we bringing soteriology into this? Well, there's a reason we're talking about the doctrine of salvation here.

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Theology overlaps. When you have a good understanding of theology, you're going to see how it connects everywhere else in the theological systems.

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One part affects another. You have it as a complete package sort of thing.

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When we get to the attributes of God, you're going to see how that's going to influence every other doctrine that comes after it.

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We will see that throughout theology, that there's parts that affect other things.

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So what am I doing? I'm taking this idea of superintending, which is crucial to understanding how we got the scriptures and seeing that that doctrine plays out in our soteriology.

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This explains some of the battles that people have had in that area. So let's move on to some of the others.

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So this is how the Holy Spirit does this. He works through. And what does he do in this superintending?

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He's controlling and directing the person and the writing. So how are we saying it?

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Well, he superintended the, sorry, the recipitation.

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I can't speak today. Reception. Reception. Kind of like a wedding.

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Y 'all come on in. Yeah. What is with me this morning? But the reception and communication.

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So what's the reception? This is going to be to the writers, the people actually writing it.

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So he controls and directs to the writers what was written. He also controls and directs the communication.

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That's to the hearers and readers. So this, what this means is that when we read scripture, the

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Holy Spirit's ministry does not end with what Paul wrote and Matthew wrote and Moses wrote and Samuel wrote.

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It doesn't end there. Yes. He worked through them in writing that down, but the

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Holy Spirit also has a role. And we'll, we'll look at this more when we look at the doctrine of God and specifically a numerology, which is a study of the

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Holy Spirit. When we look at that, we end up seeing that the

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Holy Spirit has a ministry unto us where he illuminates his word to our understanding.

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What does that mean? He brings it to light. He gives us an understanding and an application of his word.

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So this is the thing with the new covenant is we don't need a priest to interpret God's word for us or to tell us how to apply it.

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Like they did in the old Testament, the Holy Spirit indwells us. So when we open God's word, we can with study understand his word.

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Now, let me give a warning with that because many people say, well, I have the Holy Spirit. I don't need to go to church.

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I don't need some man to tell me God's, what God's word is. I know what it means. I typically find that any person that has that attitude usually is so prideful that they never get the interpretation.

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Correct. Words have meaning. We have language and what we, when we interpret, we follow rules of language.

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That's what we do. You you're hearing my words, and I hope you're understanding what

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I mean by my words. If not, then I'm not clear enough. That's called the authorial intent.

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What did I mean by what I said? Well, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to listen to me to see what

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I mean by what I say. Well, of course, unless you're a troll and then you're just looking for how you can, you know,

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You know, put up a new blog article of, well, this is what you have to put today. I do have there.

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There are entire websites. There was a YouTube channels. Dedicated to mocking me.

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Every time we do a class. I mean, the striving for an academy, we had a guy that used to every week, you would take the class and just put the video up in a complete mockery.

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And it was actually kind of funny. You know, he had this really whiny type of voice, which added kind of.

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Yeah. Today. Yeah. But, but there are those that they're not looking to hear what

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I, what I'm actually saying. They're looking for how to try to knock it down. Well, that's called dishonest.

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We don't want to be dishonest with the scriptures. What are we going to do when we come to the scriptures? We want to honestly understand what it's saying.

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How are we going to do that? We want to know what the author meant. How do we do it? We study. We look at that.

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And so this becomes something we have to be. To realize that we have to do the work of interpretation, but you and I are at least 2000 years.

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And at most 3 ,500 years removed from the writing of scripture. It's a totally different culture.

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So we can't just say, oh, I rely on the holy spirit. He tells me the interpretation. No, you have to do the work.

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Because we have to understand the culture. And what did the author mean at the time he wrote to his audience first.

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And see how that applies to us today. But in that research, in that study, in that listening to the preaching on Sunday that you have from your pastor, the holy spirit indwells the believer.

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So that that which was communicated from the word of God. That which he inspired will have meaning to us.

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He's going to take that divine message that he wrote to mankind. And help us to understand it.

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Now we receive that in the product, meaning the original writings that we have now have copies of.

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So we have the original manuscripts that have been copied. We have that and translated into different languages.

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You, that is what you probably have before you is what you call the word of God is the Bible. In your language, probably in English, if you're listening to me, but you have an

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English translation of a copy of the original manuscripts. What did

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God actually inspire was the original. Now this makes us different than some other religions.

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We dealt with this in the past, right? Islam says, nope, in Arabic, there's only one copy.

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And it has to be word for word the same. That's not true. Rabbinic Judaism says the same with the

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Hebrew. And yet we see variances there. What we see from scripture is that that original writing, in the original writing, every word is what the verbal means.

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And the whole thing, that's what plenary means, is without error, without fault.

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That's inerrant. So it's infallible. That's another word we could put in there.

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So inerrant means it has no error and infallible means it has no fault.

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You'll sometimes see both of them. The idea there is that in the original writing, that's the product that the

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Holy Spirit produced. And that product, whether to the individual word or to the whole thing, is without error, without flaw.

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And by the way, it's authoritative in our life. That's what we see behind 1

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Timothy 2, 16 and 17. When we look at that, a lot of people, when they look at 2

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Timothy 3, 16, they look at this and say that's what the purpose of scripture is.

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Let me read it. All scripture is inspired. That's where we get this new word that Paul created, inspired.

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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.

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Now, when we look at, I talked about language. There's rules, interpretation.

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When we have a prepositional phrase like for, that is subordinate to the main thought, means it's not the main thought.

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So when we see, most people say, we'll see the purpose of scripture is teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness.

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Not so. Why? Now, when we look at those four, by the way, that's a teaching style.

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What is teaching? When we look at each of these, we realize that teaching is right thinking.

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Reproof is wrong thinking. Correction is right behavior.

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And training in righteousness is right thinking. So you have right and wrong in whether our thinking or behavior.

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So it's basically saying everything is what you're trying to encompass. But each of these are prepositional phrases.

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They support the main phrase. So what's the main phrase? Let me read it without the prepositional phrases.

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All scripture is inspired and profitable so that the man may be adequate, equipped.

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You see, that's the purpose of scripture. It's not for teaching, reproof, correction, training in righteousness.

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Those are four elements of how the scripture makes us adequate and complete or adequate and equipped.

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That's the purpose of scripture is to make us, because it's authoritative, it has the right to inform us on every area of life so that we're adequate and equipped for life and practice.

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I hope that, folks, that's helpful for you in understanding that. It's a lot to unpack, but let me stop there before we finish up this paragraph.

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Any comments there? No, I think that's exceptional. I would just mention from that verse, because somebody's brought this up to me before, when it says so that the man of God may be adequate.

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That's not just I barely get by. The proper synonym that you might want to consider is to be fitted, to be made complete.

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It's not like, oh, wow, I made it. I got enough to get by. That's not what that word adequate, as it's translated in the

47:09

English there, actually implies. It's about being fitted and being complete, being whole.

47:17

But that's exceptional. This is the effect of scripture. This is how scripture is applied to accomplish this task.

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Yes. The word means, literally, it has the idea of suited, is the sense of it.

47:35

As we move on with this, let's look at the next sentence in this. If you happen to be on strivingforeternity .org

47:42

on our doctrinal statement or reading along with us, let's read the next sentence. God spoke in his written word by a process of dual authorship.

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Now, I have explained this now. This is the superintending. This answers the question, did

47:59

God dictate or were the men inspired? No. God wrote in such a way that there's a dual authorship.

48:05

So we can say Paul wrote Romans, but we can also say God wrote Romans. Both are true.

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That's the idea of superintending. Why does that play into it? Well, what we addressed already.

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Do we do good works in our sanctification? We could say yes, but can we say God does the work in our sanctification?

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Yes. So when it comes to regeneration, did I choose God? Yes. Did God choose me?

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Yes. You see, it solves those dilemmas. Now, let's look at the next, because I did spend a lot of time on the dual authorship under superintending.

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Next sentence. The Holy Spirit so superintended the human authors that through their individual personalities and different styles of writing, they composed and recorded

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God's word to man without error in the whole or in part, thus making the scriptures completely and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

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So this is really what I did here is try to unpack in these last two sentences, the idea of superintending in this doctrinal statement.

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And we spent a lot of time explaining superintending when we got to that word.

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But this is the idea of, this is unpacking that. The Holy Spirit superintended the human authors in such a way that even though you see their individual personalities in their writing and their style of writing and their things that they're going to, they have their personalities come out, they're composing

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God's word. We see this in 2 Peter, which is the passage reference there, chapter 1, 20 to 21, which says,

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But know this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation.

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For no prophecy was ever made by the act of human will, but men moved by the

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Holy Spirit spoke from God. And so that becomes the essential thing that we see in that.

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Now, when we say it's not, it's without error, without flaw, in its entirety and in every individual part.

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Jesus himself said in Matthew 5, 18, For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until it is completed.

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That's the idea that we see there, that this is, the Scripture is there for us to see the completion of it.

50:55

I think this also speaks to what you kind of mentioned earlier about everything needs to be in red, because when you've made this comment here about individual personalities, but also different styles of writing, because when you look at Scripture, you've got all kinds of genres of literature included in Scripture.

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I mean, you've got historical narrative, you've got law, you've got poetry, you've got prophecy, you've got all of those sort of different genres.

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None of those take precedence over the other as far as their inspirational value from God's standpoint.

51:33

They're all equally inspired, but they're transmitted to us in different ways. That's by the superintending of the

51:40

Holy Spirit for the purpose that he wanted to achieve in conveying his revelation to man.

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So don't think that those red -letter Bibles, yeah, well, maybe that's cool and everything.

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Everything is red -letter, all the genres. The poetry is not less important than the history.

51:59

The wisdom literature is not less important than the prophetic literature. It's all equal.

52:07

Yeah, and you and I have dealt with this whole idea of, in the past, the people that have the red -letter

52:15

Christianity. I have a real problem with red -letter Christianity. It's a problem. And the reason

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I think it's a problem is because you have people that try to separate, well, this is what

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God's Word is and not something else, and know all of Scripture, and that's what this is saying.

52:34

What we see is that all of Scripture, in part or in whole, all of it, is without error, without fault.

52:48

So this becomes a major thing that we have to understand.

52:55

All right? This is why we say it's God's Word. He spoke this into existence.

53:03

Now, people say, well, it's circular reasoning to say that because the Bible says it's without error, that it's trustworthy.

53:12

They all say that the reason we know that the Bible is inspired is because the Bible says it's inspired.

53:18

The reason we know it doesn't have errors is because the Bible says it's without errors. Well, the Bible does say that, but why do we know that the

53:25

Bible's without errors? Because its author cannot lie. You see, there's a difference, so it's not circular.

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Why do I know that the Bible cannot have errors, cannot have faults, because of who its author is?

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And when people challenge it, they say, well, you know, who wrote the Bible? And what they mean to say by that is men wrote the

53:45

Bible, and therefore, if a human being wrote the Bible, it has to have errors. And that's the argument that many make, wrongfully.

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Why do I say wrongfully? Because what you see in that is the fact that this is an issue, that people have to know who the author is.

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This gets us back to what we'll look at eventually is the attributes of God. When we understand who God is, we know he cannot lie.

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He cannot deceive. He knows all things. Therefore, if he knows everything, and he's good and just and right and holy, and he's also incapable of lying, then what he writes down can be trusted.

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Why? Because it will be without error and without fault, because he's capable of doing that. In fact, he can't do any other.

54:43

So it's not a circular argument. But what's the purpose of it? Well, we already mentioned this in the passage that we looked at in 2

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Timothy 3, 16, and 17. The Scripture's making complete and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

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That's what it's for. It is to make you and I adequate and complete so that we're thoroughly complete.

55:09

Everything we need to know about faith and practice is encompassated in the Word of God. We don't need anything else.

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We don't need a miracle. We don't need some book written by a person.

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We don't need some experience. We don't need anything other than Scripture. The Scriptures are sufficient for life and godliness.

55:30

So if there's something that the Scripture doesn't answer to, then God didn't want us to know that for faith and practice.

55:39

You say, but Andrew, Scripture doesn't tell us whether we should take the vaccine or not. No, there's principles we can look to there, and that's what we apply, but guess what?

55:51

Taking the vaccine is not a faith and practice issue. There's a lot of things the Scripture doesn't answer.

55:57

It talks about our faith, the practice thereof. That it's going to answer.

56:03

So there it's going to talk about how we live as Christians. So there are some principles that you'd apply when it comes to things like taking a vaccine or not, taking care of your body, taking care of your health.

56:18

Now, what does that mean? It means you're going to have to research and find out whether that vaccine is good or bad for your health. But there's principles there that you apply.

56:27

And so as we look at these things, we will see that we have to understand who

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God is to answer these. Now, we wanted to wrap up at least this paragraph. At this rate, it's going to take us only about a year and a half to get through this doctrinal statement, but we're not in a rush.

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We'll take it slow if we need to. I want to break this down because I want you to understand, and I hope this is helpful for you, to see how important it is.

56:49

I mean, each word in this doctrinal statement was thought through very specifically, to be very specific in the wording, to try to be as concise as I could be in explaining what it is that I believe

57:03

Scripture teaches us, and specifically about itself in this case. And so I hope this helps in answering the question, how was

57:12

Scripture inspired? I hope you have a better understanding of that, and I hope you see how that influences many other theological doctrines that we'll get into that many people debate.

57:24

So, I hope it's helpful for you. Bud, what do you think? Was that helpful for you? I think that's great. Very, very helpful.

57:32

I like thinking about these things. I mean, this is just so beneficial, even where I may be wrong, you can't, you know, we want to be right, we want to learn, we want to grow.

57:47

Thinking on this is a fundamental matter. I didn't know you could be wrong.

57:54

Oh, dude. You have me on here as an example of wrongness.

58:00

Oh, I'm sorry. I thought that was because you make me look good. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. I'm not

58:05

J .D. Greer. It's more of the same thing, Andrew. I'm not J .D. Greer. I don't get other people to write my sermons so that I can look good.

58:14

But there is so much. That verse in 2 Peter, in chapter 1, this is profound.

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We don't understand how profound this is. It says His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, but it doesn't stop there.

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Through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.

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I mean, this is all pointing to Christ. It's all effectual because of Christ.

58:53

Just, we can't fathom the depth of what we've been given here in this gift. Yeah, and the reality is the purpose of today's show.

59:05

We want to answer the question, how is scripture inspired? What is inspiration?

59:12

I hope we've done that here today. And let us close out with a word from our sponsor, and that's from MyPillow.

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