Inspired
Basic to all that may be believed and spoken about God’s word is the truth that it is “inspired.”
The declaration of 2 Timothy 3:16 is, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” — literally “God-breathed.” Second Peter 1:20–21 elaborates: “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
Divine-human collaboration
The Bible is uniquely the result of a combination of the divine activity of the Holy Spirit and the human instrument of the writers. The result of this divine-human collaboration is a sacred book that came into being by the supernatural activity of the Holy Spirit upon divinely selected men, by which the Spirit through the vocabularies and personalities of those men resulted in writings that are truthful, trustworthy and authoritative.
For example, David, who penned many of the psalms, declared, “The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue” (2 Sam. 23:2). With even higher authority, Jesus spoke of God’s written word as a “word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).
Even so, Jesus attested the inspired writings of David with His declaration to the Pharisees, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’?” (Matt. 22:43)
As an inspired book, the word of God “is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12).
An aspect of this inspired book is that although it proclaims itself to be the word of God, it is also the words of men.
God in His infinite grace chose to communicate with human beings by using human words.
The Bible’s divine inspiration assures us that it had a divine source. By His activity of inspiring its writing, God superseded the adage, “To err is human.”
Being both a divine and a human book, God’s word is without error.
To be sure, the human writers God used in producing His word were not perfect. But God, in His grace and power, was able to produce a perfect book through a variety of imperfect human instruments, just as a straight line can be drawn by a crooked stick.
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