The sixty-six books in the Word of God were written by forty writers over a span of 2000 years. They are sectioned into the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament is comprised of thirty-nine books and the New Testament has twenty-seven. The Old Testament is sometimes referred to as Hebrew Scripture, since it records the events taken place in what was and still is Israel. The Israelites were also known as the Hebrews. Scripture is derived from the Latin word, scriptus, or “writings.” The first five books of the Old Testament are sometimes referred to as the Torah (Hebrew for “instruction and law”). These books were written primarily by Moses. It’s a historical account from the beginning of creation to the journeys of the Israelites after they were freed from imprisonment in Egypt. They also contain the laws given by God to the Israelites.
The second group of books in the Old Testament are known as the Prophets. These people were the mouthpieces of God. They contain the consequences that the Israelites would face depending on whether or not they obeyed God’s Word in the Torah. Even though God worked through the Israelites, they were still human with fallibilities and sometimes chose to disobey God’s Word into what is known as sin.[1]
The third group of books are the Writings. They contain much of the historical accounts of the Israelites from the establishment of the Israelites in the land promised by God (which is modern day Israel). In addition, they record the lyrics used by the psalmists during worship of God as well as wise sayings – both for the encouragement of the Israelites and others who read them. These three groups: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings were written as a token of God’s dealings with the nation of Israel and to inform future generations.[2] It is a standard by which Israelites and Christians can look upon as God’s character and how He relates to humans. They are used as encouragement for the reader and the building of one’s faith in God.
The twenty-seven books in the New Testament start with the birth of Christ and have not concluded yet. In fact, there is no conclusion in time because the last book, the book of Revelation, promotes an eternity where Christians will reside forever with Christ. The New Testament contains the gospels, the letters, and the revelation. The four gospels are the eye-witness accounts regarding Jesus Christ written by four of His disciples. The letters were written as instruction and encouragement to the Church both in its infancy and today. The book of Revelation describes events that are to take place in the end times (futuristic). In summary, the Old Testament covers the creation story until the time of Christ while the New Testament describes the time of Christ throughout eternity.
The Word of God obviously finds its origin in God Himself. Jesus said in Luke 11:28, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.” Jesus referred to His words as the Word of God. He has the right to do so, because He is one of the three manifestations of God (God the Son). God always existed and so did the Word of God. The fact that Jesus then spoke these words about 30 A.D. only points to the fact that His Words always existed – just as God always existed. It is difficult for us to imagine a God who always existed, but that is the divine nature of God. We cannot possibly determine His origin, because He had none. It is up to us by faith to trust in His eternal existence, and the eternal existence of His Word.
Since Jesus Christ is God, and the Word of God is Jesus Christ, He is the final authority and the trusted origin of the Word of God. There is no doubt, therefore, that the Word of God is infallible because the thoughts and words recorded originated with God, even though they were penned by fallible human writers. God’s Spirit worked through the thoughts of these writers to record His infallible Word. God has the power and authority to conduct the thoughts of humans as He wills.[3] Lewis Chafer described Christ’s infallible Word in this fashion:
. . . the Lord Jesus Christ has ever been the expression, or manifestation, of God . . . The living Word is ever the Manifester . . . the final Revealer of God . . . Christ is the voice of God speaking to men, and that is a direct, uncomplicated revelation of God. When beholding or hearing the Son, men are enabled to know what God is like. This revelation is complete, wanting nothing.[4]
Jesus Himself proclaimed that His words, which are the Word of God, came from God the Father and not Jesus Himself: “For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say” (John 12:49-50). We also see the triune God, one God but three persons or manifestations in action. God the Father gave God the Son (Jesus) the words to say. God the Holy Spirit, who is part of the triune God also inspired humans to write the words of God the Father. This three-person development of God’s Word gives us the assurance that God’s Word is genuine and can be trusted.
But how did God use human writers to record His words? God used prophets on many occasions. These were men and women who were given a word directly from God. One example is in the book of 1 Samuel. Samuel was a prophet who was tasked by God to give a message to a Benjamite by the name of Saul. Saul did not initially realize what was happening, but Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on Saul’s head, kissed him and declared Him Israel’s king (1 Samuel 9:25 – 10:1). The rest of the book of Samuel (chapters 10-31) deals with the kingdom and military feats of Saul, which fulfills the prophecy.
Arguably the greatest prophecy is that of the coming of Jesus Christ and His suffering and death on the cross for our sins. There are many prophecies regarding this, but here is one example:
He [Jesus Christ] grew up before him [God] like a tender
shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us
to him,
Nothing in his appearance that we
should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by
mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with
pain.
Like one from whom people hide their
faces
he was despised, and we held him in
Low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace
was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed (Isaiah 53:2-5).
But do these prophecies originate in the thoughts of humans or God Himself. And if the origin was God, how was it transmitted to the human mind. Was it an audible or inaudible voice? Were there visible signs? C.E. Stowe claims that the third person of God, the Holy Ghost (Holy Spirit) was involved in this process. Even though man was operating under “his own spontaneity,” God’s Spirit guided the writer to use his (both God’s and his) own words:
Inspiration acts not on the man’s words, not on the man’s thoughts, but on the man himself; so that he, by his own spontaneity, under the impulse of the Holy Ghost, conceives certain thoughts and gives utterance to them in certain words, both the words and the thoughts receiving the peculiar impress of the mind which conceived and uttered them, and being in fact just as really his own, as they could have been if there had been no inspiration at all in the case. . .. The Divine mind is, as it were, so diffused through the human, and the human mind is so interpenetrated with the Divine, that for the time being the utterances of the man are the word of God.[5]
According to this quotation, God’s utterance cannot be separated from that of a man. The two are inseparable. It would appear that the writer was using his own words, which is true. However, God’s utterances were intertwined in those words.
An opposing view is taken by B.B. Warfield. In this approach, God is viewed as supplying His Word independent of the human author even though it was penned by humanity. Warfield ignores the indwelling of the Holy Spirit upon the human writer, concluding that the “Scriptures are a Divine product, without any indication of how God has operated in producing them.”[6] In Warfield’s defense, it may not appear that the divine perfect thoughts of God can be mixed with the imperfect thoughts and pen of the human writers. But if this were true, then how can we as imperfect beings have a relationship with God? How can we come to Him asking Him to forgive us of our sins in the name of Jesus Christ and then receive mercy, forgiveness, and eternal life with Him forever? Warfield’s explanation seems to follow the gnostic tradition where God exists in His kingdom in all of His divinity, and mankind exists separate from God on this earth. It defies Acts 17:28 which says, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” The intertwining of God’s Spirit (the Holy Spirit) with the thoughts of human writers is further described by John Walvoord:
Essentially, however, inspiration is as inscrutable as any supernatural work of God. If one could answer the questions, how God can create? How God can perform miracles? How God can predict with absolute certainty the future actions of men? And how the dead? Then one could also solve the problem of the mode of inspiration. Inspiration is the explanation of how the Word of God came into being. It is impossible to account for the Bible apart from such a supernatural activity of God through its human authors.[7]
Consider for a moment the words of the apostle Paul, “All Scripture is God-breathed [italics mine] 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). The Greek word for God-breathed is theopneustos, which means “. . . to breathe or blow. Prompted by God, given by divine inspiration, breathed out by God, produced by the breath of God.”[8] Clearly, the apostle Paul who wrote these words to Timothy described the very words he was writing (as well as those from other writers) as: (1) initiated by God, and (2) released by God onto or into another entity. Regarding the first point, “initiated by God” points to God as the origin of God’s Word. With regard to the second point, God breathed out His Word into the writer’s mind. Can a perfect God breathe something into an imperfect writer’s mind? Sure, God can do whatever He wants with His resources. So even though the writers were using their human minds and hands to pen God’s Word, the words originated with God and God breathed or impressed them into the minds of these authors.
Also, consider these words written by the prophet Jeremiah where God said to the prophet: “The word of the LORD came to me, saying,
Before I formed you in the womb
I knew you,
Before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. (Jeremiah 1:4)
The phrase, “The word of the LORD came to me” occurs three more times in chapters 1 and 2. This signifies the working of God’s Spirit, or the “breathing” of the Spirit upon Jeremiah. It shows that a divine, perfect God can impress His words upon a human being.
[1] Sin is disobedience to God’s Word, but it results in a break in the relationship between a person (or nation) and God. With the exception of the creation story in the first three chapters of the first book (Genesis), the remainder of the chapters and books in the Word of God deal specifically with the topic of sin and its ramifications.
[2] Lucas Hagen, “The Bible Was Written to Inform God’s People”, Christianity.com, October 29, 2020, accessed February 10, 2021, https://www.christianity.com/wiki/bible/what-is-the-purpose-of-the-bible.html.
[3] Free choice, however, is still given to humans. Humans have the ability to do what is right and what is wrong. In this case, God has chosen specific writers to record His infallible Word as a standard for all people to abide by.
[4] Lewis Sperry Chafer, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1993), 58 in John A. Witmer, “The Incarnate and the Written Word of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra, (Jan-Mar 1956), 67.
[5] C.E. Stowe, Origin and History of the Books of the Bible (Harford, CT: Hartford Publishing Company, 1868), 19-20.
[6] B.B. Warfield, “Inspiration,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, III, 1474. Cf. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, pp. 131 ff in John F. Walvoord, “Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God?” Bibliotheca Sacra (Jan 1959), 6.
[7] Ibid., 7.
[8] Spiros Zodhiates and Warren Baker, eds., Hebrew-Greek Key Word Study Bible: Key Insights into God’s Word (Chattanooga, TN: AMG Publishers, 1996), 2535.