When Baptists speak of the Bible, we use words and phrases like “divinely inspired,” “God’s revelation,” “true” and “trustworthy. ” As first written in the New Hampshire Confession of Faith in 1833 and repeated in every version of the Baptist Faith and Message, we believe the Bible “has God for its author, salvation for its end and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.”
This belief places Baptists squarely in the middle of the confessional stream of the Christian church, which has held from earliest days that the Bible is “God-breathed.”
One reason for this position is the role of divine authority that Jesus and the apostles gave to the Old Testament. For our Lord and His earliest followers, the Old Testament, the Scripture of that day, was God’s Word. It was the final authority and it was unchanging.
In the famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declared that everything in Scripture must be accomplished. “Not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished,” Jesus said (Matt. 5:18).
Such confidence in the authority of Scripture is not an isolated statement recorded by Matthew. Luke quotes Jesus on two occasions, saying what Scripture teaches must come to pass. In Luke 21:22, Jesus talked about destruction coming to Jerusalem and declared the punishment to be “in fulfillment of all that has been written,” a reference to the sacred Jewish writing.
In Luke 24:44, Jesus told His followers that “everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
In John 10:35, Jesus responded to the mob that wanted to stone Him by declaring, “The Scripture cannot be broken.”
There is no doubt how Jesus viewed the books of the Old Testament. They were authoritative and divinely inspired. While arguing with the Sadducees about the resurrection, Jesus asked, “Have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?’” (Matt. 22:31–32).
Here Jesus equated the words written by Moses in Exodus 4:5 with the very words of God. What God said, Moses wrote — that was Jesus’ position.
Perhaps that is why studying the Law (the first five books of the Bible), the Prophets (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 minor prophets) and the Writings (all the other books) was so important to our Lord.
In the argument with the Sadducees about the resurrection, Jesus condemned these Jewish leaders for not knowing the Scripture (Matt. 22:29). In John 5:39, Jesus accepted the position that the Jews “diligently studied the Scripture” because of the writings’ divine authority.
There can be no doubt that Jesus viewed the Old Testament as divinely inspired, true and trustworthy. And that He believed the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms all pointed toward Him (Luke 24:44).
Both the apostle Peter and the apostle Paul believed the Scripture was divinely inspired. Peter wrote in 2 Peter 1:21 that “prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
Near the end of his life, Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy. First he recalled that Timothy had been reared with knowledge of Holy Scripture from his infancy (2 Tim. 3:15). The primary reference of the verse is the Scripture we know as the Old Testament since most of the New Testament was not written at the time Timothy was an infant.
Paul followed that reference with a declaration of his understanding of Scripture. He said, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” That is emphatic and unmistakable. Like Jesus, Peter and Paul believed the source of Scripture was God.
Neither of the apostles spent a great deal of time describing the process of inspiration, but both believed the result of inspiration. Scripture was the result of writers being “carried along by the Holy Spirit,” Peter said (2 Pet. 1:21). Scripture is “God-breathed,” Paul echoed (2 Tim. 3:16).
When Peter preached the sermon at Pentecost following the anointing by the Holy Spirit, he quoted Psalm 16. Then he equated the words of the Psalm with the promise of God (Acts 2:30).
Similarly Paul quoted from Psalms and Isaiah in Acts 13 and described these words as “God’s promise” (Acts 13:32). In Acts 28:25, Paul said, “The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when He said through Isaiah the prophet … .”
It is obvious that both Peter and Paul understood the writings of the Old Testament to be divinely inspired with God as their source.
Bible students are aware that Paul taught that his preaching and teaching were the result of divine inspiration. For example, in 1 Corinthians 2:4, he wrote, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom but on God’s power.”
Yet Paul never placed his words above the words of the Old Testament. In Berea and other places, for example, Paul encouraged the Jews to examine the Scripture (the Old Testament writings) to see if what he said was true.
Obviously the apostles believed what Jesus taught — that the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms and all the rest of Scripture pointed to Him.
This is not an exhaustive look at the inspiration of the Old Testament to be sure. But from these verses, it seems clear that Jesus and the apostles believed in the divine inspiration and the authoritative rule of Scripture. So should we.
Next week, we will continue this topic, looking at reasons Baptists believe in the inspiration of the New Testament.
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