Posts Tagged ‘Inspiration’
Christmas and the Reliability of God’s Words
Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he reads, even when it’s a passage he has seen many times before. As I was rereading (for the fifth or sixth time this Christmas season) Luke’s nativity narrative, I was surprised by a repeated emphasis on the utter certainty of God’s words. Over the years, I’ve given…
Read MoreWhat Is the Necessity of Scripture?
Sure, Scripture is nice to have. But is it necessary? Yes. Scripture is necessary. We need it. One dictionary of theological terms I checked gave me this definition. The necessity of Scripture means that the Bible is necessary for salvation because it alone reveals the gospel.”1 But that doesn’t go far enough. We don’t just…
Read MoreWhat Is the Clarity of Scripture?
If Scripture is clear, why is there so much in here I still don’t understand? If you’ve spent much time in the Bible, you are no doubt well aware that not everything in Scripture is clear. And when theologians talk about the clarity of Scripture, they’re not saying every reader will understand everything. And to…
Read MoreWhat Is the Authority of Scripture?
How would you have responded to a poll back in 1979? A 1979 Gallup Poll asked this question: If you, yourself, were testing your own religious beliefs, which ONE of these four religious authorities would you turn to first? What the church says What respected religious leaders say What the Holy Spirit says to me…
Read MoreWhat Is Inspiration?
Does God breathe? The Scriptures are God-breathed according to 2 Tim. 3:16. It says exactly this: “All Scripture is breathed out by God” Scripture is God’s product. We call this the doctrine of inspiration. Here’s a definition. Inspiration may be defined as the Holy Spirit’s superintending over the writers so that while writing according to…
Read MoreWhat Is the Infallibility of Scripture?
Ask Pepsi how much error can cost you. Error can have consequences. A computer error back in the ’90s cost Pepsi their money and reputation in the Philippines when they accidentally printed the winning number for a million peso giveaway on 800,000 bottle caps (mentalfloss.com). People make mistakes. We err. But what if the Bible…
Read MoreWhat Is Inerrancy?
What else comes from Chicago besides hotdogs and deep-dish pizza? Back in 1978 in the Windy City, 268 evangelical scholars signed on the line to affirm their belief in the doctrine of inerrancy. Inerrancy means the Bible is free from error.1 They called the document they signed the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” I’ll spare…
Read MoreWhat Is Scripture?
Theology in 300 Seconds (give or take) [follow link to video, previous article here] “The B-I-B-L-E, Yes that’s the book for me.” What about you? The Bible is the Word of God. Jesus is the “Word of God” and “the Word” (Rev. 19:13; John 1:1). The “Word of God” also includes those words God has…
Read MoreWhat is revelation?
As Bernard Ramm put it: “In its broadest sense “revelation is the sum total of the ways in which God makes himself known.”1 We could never know God — we could never discover God — if God did not reveal Himself to us. It would be kind of like Jack Slater from Last Action Hero…
Read MoreWere the Apostles’ Inspired? Or Was It Something They Wrote?
One of the doctrinal errors I warn our church about is found in the New Hampshire Baptist Confession of 1833. It says, “We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired…” According to 2 Timothy 3:16, God inspired the “graphe” or Scriptures, not the men. While the Holy Spirit carried along the…
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