Sundays Inspiration

Morning Inspiration with Pastor Merritt

To be under the authority of the Bible means we make the Bible our guide to what we should spiritually believe

The search engine Google recently undertook an unbelievable project. They undertook the task of trying to determine how many books have been written in history or at least as far back as books have been written. They have determined there have been 130 million books written (as far back as we can humanly determine). I want you to realize you have to make a decision. Either what I am holding in my hand is just another book - just one of 130 million other books that have been written (that is just words put to paper by human beings) or it is unlike any other book that has ever been written, because it was written by God himself.

That is exactly what the Apostle Paul asserts.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God.” (II Timothy 3:16)

Stop and think about that. We are told that God literally exhaled the Word of God. When men sat down to write this book, they inhaled the thoughts of God. God exhaled the Word of God.

Another way of putting it is that the Bible is inspired. What that means is what you have on every page of this book is the very breath of God. Men wrote what God spoke. In the first 5 books of the Old Testament, phrases like “God said,” “God spoke,” and “The Word of the Lord came,” occur over 700 times. Over 4,000 times in the Old Testament alone you will hear those phrases.

That means that all of the Bible in its original form was breathed out by God so that a writer wrote precisely what God wanted the author to write. Unlike the 129,999,999 books that are the words of men, this is the Word of God. To put it simply, men wrote the Bible, but God authored the Bible. If that is true, then we must also add that not only is the Bible inspired, but also must be inerrant, and it must be infallible. If the Bible gets it wrong, that means that God gets it wrong. If the Bible says something that is not true, that means that God said something that is not true.

Someone will say, “But you just said the Bible was written by men.” That is true, but they were not ordinary men. They didn’t write ordinary words. Peter said this about the men that wrote the Bible in II Peter 1:20-21.

“Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” (II Peter 1:20-21)

What we have in the Bible is a book that was originated in the mind of God, communicated from the mouth of God, then articulated by the messenger of God. Therefore, it must be the final Word of God