The Truth(s) of the Bible

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Central to the various topics I will discuss in this blog is my perspective on the Bible. Traditionally the Bible has been thought of as inspired, infallible and inerrant.

“Inspired” because as Paul says it is “God-breathed.”  The Bible was written by men who were breathed on by the Holy Spirit, and, thus, the Bible is inspired by God; it contains His thoughts, if not his exact words. 

It is “infallible.”  As Paul says to Timothy “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)  As Tom Lambrecht has written in Good News Magazine, “… the Bible is God’s most objective and detailed way of communicating with us, God’s people. Its infallibility means we can trust the Bible to truly communicate to us what God wants us to believe and how God wants us to live. To ignore or disobey the teachings of Scripture is to contradict its infallibility…” The Bible is completely reliable with respect to faith and practice, doctrine and morals.

But is it “inerrant?”  What does biblical inerrancy mean? According to The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.” I was taught and I believe that the Bible is a compilation of writings of many different forms –history, poetry, allegory, prophesy, law, and theology, and each of these needs to be understood in the particular form it was written. Often the Bible was written based on what people understood at the time of the writing. For example, Genesis 1 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.’ ⁷ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ⁸ God called the vault “sky.” What is a “vault,” called a “firmament” in the King James Version?

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia,

” The Hebrews regarded the earth as a plain or a hill figured like a hemisphere, swimming on water. Over this is arched the solid vault of heaven. To this vault are fastened the lights, the stars. So slight is this elevation that birds may rise to it and fly along its expanse.”

Obviously, this is not an accurate description of the cosmos and the idea of a “firmament can’t be taken literally..

However, it is important to understand that our belief in the very idea of God, and his intervention in the world, requires us to believe in the supernatural, and therefore, to accept the possibility of miracles. Once, as a matter of faith, one accepts the idea of a personal god, who not only created us, but is accessible to us through prayer, it takes only a small step to believe that He intervenes in the world supernaturally. If God made the world, why couldn’t He turn water into wine or order the winds to cease? In fact, if God made the world, why couldn’t He cause a virgin to conceive and bear a son who is, in fact, the Word made flesh?

For believers, the issue isn’t whether the Bible is the infallible Word of God, but rather what does it say about what we should believe and how we should behave. It will take more than one blog post to answer this question.  In fact, I expect it will take quite a few posts to even begin to understand what God is saying to us about any specific issue that causes us to confront the culture, such as homosexual marriage or greed or nationalism. I hope you will walk this path with me as we explore the mind of God.