The Canon and Inspiration of Scripture

What was the process of inspiration like?



Here is an example that I presented in the class "Sifting Sensibly: The Thinking Man's Guide to Biblical Faith."



"Someone may say, upon reading the different books of the Bible, the different authors write with different styles. How can the claim be that these are all God's words. A comparison would be to view an imaginary business, say a lawyer's office. Perhaps the lawyer has a legal brief he needs to present. He also is very busy, so he looks around his law firm and finds a third-year law student and gives him the assignment to write the legal brief. The lawyer tells the student the arguments he wants presented, but he leaves it with the student for the actual writing. After the student works on the brief, he gives it back to the lawyer. Up to this point, the style is completely the student's. The lawyer reads the brief very carefully. He finds many sentences written by the student that express the ideas he wants to put forth. Sometimes he will find a word that is not strong enough, so he will cross out that word and replace it with his own. At other times, he replaces entire sentences or paragraphs with his own wording. Sometimes he will give input and ask the student to rewrite a certain section. Finally the brief is finished when the lawyer approves it. At this point, the brief is no longer the student's. It is now the lawyer's. Some of it will contain style or flavoring that is unique to the student, but the lawyer claims responsibility for what is said in the entire draft. The brief, then represents exactly what the lawyer wants communicated."



I believe the process of the inspiration of Scripture was similar. God superintended the process in such a way that when His servant had in his mind a certain wording of the truth that God wanted communicated, and God in effect said, "Yes, that's what I want expressed," He allowed the writer to write down those very words. That accounts for different human "styles." However, when His servant came up with something contrary to what God wanted expressed (at least in the case of Scripture writing) God replaced what the human would have written with an exact word that He chose. The end result was that what was written as Scripture was exactly what and how God wanted it expressed. Also, in some cases, the wording carried the style of the human writers because they expressed what God wanted said in an acceptable way based on the idea that God placed in their minds.



Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your study of the canon of Scripture.