28 March, 2024

How God”s Word Has Come to Us (Part 1): God”s Word Written

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by | 20 January, 2008 | 0 comments

By H. Lynn Gardner

ABOUT THIS SERIES:

This Week””God”s Word Written. How did God communicate through prophets and Scripture writers?

Next Week””God”s Word Collected. What is the canon and how can we be sure our Bibles contain the right books?

February 3″”God”s Word Preserved. How close to the original are the Bible manuscripts we have today?

February 10″”God”s Word Translated. How true to God”s Word are the English words available for us to read?



 

 

The Bible did not drop out of Heaven with a black leather cover, printed in English on paper, with 66 books bound in one volume. How did the Bible originate? How has it come to us?

Knowing how we got the Bible can strengthen our faith in the Bible as God”s Word. This series investigates the Bible”s origin and how it came to be in its present form. This article will explain how the Bible was written through God”s revelation to prophets and apostles whom he guided to write it.

Revelation

Astronauts depend upon communication from NASA to navigate their spacecraft back to earth. Inhabitants on planet earth are dependent upon a word from God. Human thinking alone cannot solve life”s most basic questions””about meaning in life, right and wrong, death, and life after death. Philosophy and science do not provide infallible answers. The only way we can have certain truth on these issues is for God to disclose to us truths about ultimate issues. The Bible is not human speculation in an error-marred search for God. Scripture discloses God himself and his will in the story of human history.

General Revelation. God has revealed himself in a nonverbal way in creation, providence, the physical universe, and human conscience. We call communication of God”s truth in nature general revelation. The Lord of the universe “did not leave himself without witness” (Acts 14:17).1 The physical universe continuously pours forth information declaring the power, wisdom, and glory of God. We should know from the evidence in the physical universe that a creator and supreme being exists (Romans 1:18-20; see also Psalm 8:1; 19:1, 3, 4; 29:1-5; 104:24, 31; 119:89-91; Isaiah 40:12-14; Acts 14:14-17; and Romans 2:14, 15).

The disclosure of God in nature is awesome but limited. From this evidence we can know God exists, but from nature alone we can”t know who he is, how he expects us to live, or how we can have a relationship with him.

Nature does not provide us with a saving knowledge of God. It provides a foundation that makes God”s verbal revelation plausible and credible. The physical universe provides sufficient evidence so those who do not believe in God are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

Special Revelation. Special revelation is God”s communication of his truth to selected persons, in written Scripture, and supremely in Jesus Christ. God spoke to human beings in words so we could know him and have a personal relationship with him. From the beginning God communicated orally with certain persons: Adam, Noah, Abraham, and others. Later he declared his messages through prophets and apostles.

This revelation issues from the divine realm beyond the reaches of human reason and the sources of the physical world. The Bible is God”s message to us. God did not reveal his truths in a list of propositions. F. F. Bruce states, “God chose to reveal Himself as the God of living action, revealing Himself in mighty acts of mercy and judgment and interpreting his ways to men through his spokesmen, the prophets.”2

Biblical revelation includes events of great significance””creation, the fall, exodus, and the incarnation of Christ. Events are described and their significance is explained. Statements and stories are woven into the historical revelation in Scripture. The Bible is God”s Word of truth communicated through inspired men of God empowered by the Holy Spirit to interpret the spiritual significance of events of history.

Seeing the spiritual warfare in prisons convinced Chuck Colson of the importance of the truth and authority of the Bible. He observed that when the Bible was taught as holy and inerrant, faith grew and discipleship deepened. When the Bible was not taught as the Word of God, faith died.3 The Bible is a wonderful treasure God has given us.

Inspiration

Inspiration relates to the writing of Scripture””identifying the process of the Holy Spirit guiding men selected by God to record his truth in written form. Inspiration involves the reception and recording of revealed truth. “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16. See also John 14:26; 16:13; and 1 Corinthians 2:13).

God used a written record in order to make his message accessible, understandable, objective, and permanent. God breathed out his Word through prophets and writers of Scripture. God did not use them as dictating machines, but spoke through the individual writers” personalities, style, language, and culture. As a superintendent, the Holy Spirit ensured the final product was God”s truth written.

Inspiration extends to the words of Scripture. The Lord told Jeremiah, “I have put my words in your mouth” (Jeremiah 1:9; cf. 1 Corinthians 2:13). The entire Bible constitutes the very Word of God and is completely true in the originals.

The Old Testament writers affirm a divine source for their message, claiming such thousands of times with statements like, “Thus says the Lord.” Paul said his message was not just a word of man but in reality “the word of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:13). Christians throughout the history of the church have believed that Scripture is the true Word of God.

The writers used figurative expressions as well as literal statements to express truth. The statements in the Bible are true when we understand them in the author”s intended meaning. We must not interpret the Bible in the light of our experience, rather we interpret our experience in the light of the Bible. We do not worship the Bible itself, but we respect and obey its message because what Scripture says, God says.

The Writing of the Books

Old Testament. The earliest known writing was on stones and clay tablets. Evidence of documents written on skins dates back before 2500 b.c. Leather (animal skins) was the writing material for the Old Testament books. The animal skin was dried, dehaired, scraped clean, soaked in lime water, and tanned with chemicals. Copies of the Law used in public worship were to be on skins from clean animals and in a roll (Jewish Talmud). The Old Testament books were written between 1500 and 400 b.c.

Almost all of the Old Testament Scriptures were written in Hebrew. It comes from a family of languages called Semitic. The Hebrew language is pictorial and emotional, growing out of the religious experience of the Jewish people. All 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are consonants. A Hebrew book reads from the back to the front, and lines read from right to left. The Old Testament, as written, did not indicate vowels. Jewish scribes (Massoretes) added vowel points in the fifth to eighth centuries ad to aid in punctuation. These were quite unnecessary to one trained in the language, but they were helpful to those who spoke another language.

A few sections of the Old Testament were written in Aramaic, a related Semitic language (Genesis 31:47; Jeremiah 10:11; Daniel 2:4″”7:28; and Ezra 4:8″”6:18; 7:12-26). After the Babylonian exile (538 bc) the Jews were using the Aramaic language to an extent that few of those who returned could read Hebrew (Nehemiah 13:24). Aramaic was the international trade language of the near east after the ninth century b.c.

New Testament. The New Testament books were written on papyrus, a writing material made from reed plants that grew along the Nile River. The pith of the reed was cut into strips which were crisscrossed, pressed together, bonded by its natural sugar, and dried in the sun.

The Egyptians used papyrus as early as the third century bc. It was light, easy to write on, and flexible so it could be made into a roll. Drawbacks included a rough surface, being subject to water and light damage, and becoming brittle with age.

The New Testament books were written in the Greek language. In the fourth century bc Alexander the Great unified his empire by making Greek the “official” language. Greek was the trade language or universal language of the first-century world. The New Testament books were written between ad 45 to 95. The autographs, the original written documents, have been lost.

In the first century the common (Koine) language of the man on the street and in the marketplace was the Greek of the New Testament. Therefore Paul preached the gospel across the Roman Empire without language barriers.

The Greek language was expressive, precise, and flexible. In New Testament times Greek was written with large capital letters (uncials) with no breaks between words and with no punctuation marks.

Truth expressed in words is under attack today by those who emphasize story and experience while downplaying words. We must remember God used words to communicate his message. Stories constitute an important part of the Bible, but God used words to record them. While experience was also important, words were used to interpret those experiences.

We can know God and his will for our lives because he revealed his word to prophets and apostles and guided them through the Holy Spirit to produce his Word written. God has communicated from his mind to our minds through the Scriptures. We get to know a person through what he or she says and does, so we can get to know God through what he has said and done.

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1All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.

2F.F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments, Third and Revised Editions (Westwood: Fleming H. Revell, 1963), 92.

3Charles W. Colson, “Foreword” in J.I. Packer, Freedom and Authority (Oakland: International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, 1981), 3.


 

 

H. Lynn Gardner is retired after serving many years on the faculty and as academic dean of Ozark Christian College, Joplin, Missouri.

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