Over the past four weeks we have focused on the four times that Jesus referred to the Holy Spirit in His discourse with the disciples in the upper room on the night before His crucifixion. He alerted them that the Spirit would have an ongoing ministry of teaching them “all things” (John 15:26). A bit later Jesus said directly to them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:12–13).
One of the results of the Spirit’s work of guiding the disciples into further truth was that some of them like John, Matthew and Peter would commit to writing what the Spirit revealed to them. Later their number would increase with the conversion and ministry of Paul, whose name is the first word in 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament. Writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, their writings had the character of Holy Scripture. In a sort of backhanded way, Peter equated Paul’s writings with inspired Scripture, saying, “Count the patience of our Lord as salvation just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:15–16). The equating of Paul’s letters and “the other Scriptures” is obvious.
The Holy Spirit at work
We think of the Spirit’s work of revealing truth to the apostles as inspiration. As 2 Peter 1:21 says concerning the Old Testament prophets, we can say about the New Testament writers of Scripture, “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
The apostle Paul affirmed the idea of revelation from God by the Holy Spirit, saying, “When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Eph. 3:4–5).
Inspiration clearly describes the process by which Scripture came into existence. Does inspiration also describe the product of that process? Christians across the centuries have often confessed their faith that the Bible is not only Spirit-inspired as to process, but also the inspired product of the Spirit working through the writers. Quite evidently, the Holy Spirit used the writers’ unique personalities, vocabularies and circumstances to produce the written account of revealed truth.
Divine revelation
The phrase “the mystery of Christ” further endorses the truth of the divine revelation that we have in Holy Scripture. In short, in the New Testament a mystery is not something eerie or confounding. The term refers to truth that humans could never discover by reason and reflection but rather is truth God discloses. And God’s method of disclosing it involved the work of the Holy Spirit through the human writers.
When we hold the Holy Bible in our hands or experience a worship leader reading to us from it, we can thank God for the Holy Spirit’s inspiration that was at work when the writers were putting truth into words. We receive the words of Scripture in confidence that we have a sure word from God — His revelation that is true and trustworthy. We can affirm with the psalmist that the Bible is thus a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (Ps. 119:105).
Share with others: