Despite great revival fomenting around the world – for example, the doors opening in China, with our fellowship able to openly send missionaries year after year, as well as the Bible now being China’s best selling book – I was dismayed to read on The Bible Society’s website that they don’t actually believe in the Bible for what it is:
“Some people think that the Biblical writers were a bit like human dictaphones, automatically recording the thoughts and words of God in the Bible.This literal, mechanical view of inspiration was held by some Jewish writers and others in the early Church. They believed that humans were the mere tools of God in the creation of the Bible.
Several compared the biblical writers to passive musical instruments that God ‘breathed’ into. However, not many Christians nowadays view inspiration this way. For example, if there were no human input into the Bible whatsoever, why are there so many different writing styles? And if the apostle Paul was just taking notes from God, why would he say that he couldn’t remember how many people he had baptised (1 Corinthians 1.16)?”
It is shameful to have the very society that should be defending the innerancy, purity, power and absolute interpretation of God’s Word becoming relativists who believe that God inspired the writers, but then left them to all the limits of their humanity to carry out their work of writing, compiling and editing.
Aside from the obvious error of reasoning that fails to understand how God was showing us that how many people we baptize should not be bringing glory to the name of man, and is not just an example of the Apostle Paul being absent-minded, they have starkly ignored the Bible’s own proclamations of purity and absolute truth:
Psalm 12:6-7 The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 7 Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.
Revelation 22:18-19 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19 and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
Once you begin to make the Bible anything less than the God-breathed truth, you open the door to relativist interpretation, error and sin. In fact, the main reason for such attitudes is sin – if Paul’s epistles are the scribbled notes of a forgetful old sage, then 1 Corinthians 5 might not mean that fornication is sin and should be punished by discipline after all! Surely if Paul is able to pause in his writings, still directed by God, to give personal advice as separated from the commanding Word of God, then it tells you that he believed that God was indeed using him to write the Bible (1 Corinthians 7:6).
They attack the idea that men were used like instruments, as there are different writing styles, but the analogy fails, as although musical instruments play the notes you make them play, they have different timbres. A piano and a saxophone sound completely different, but they play the same melody that has been written in the score. You get into real trouble if you think that men were not used by God to write the Bible, but as elsewhere stated, that they were inspired to write about God and filtered divine concepts through their humanity.
I thank God that para-church organisations are not our hope, and that it is churches themselves that God has called to preach the gospel and uphold His Word of truth in all the earth. Here’s to Bible-believers, who have not capitulated to the insidious influence of postmodernism, and ultimately, hell.
