“All Scripture is given by God. And all Scripture is useful for teaching and for showing people what is wrong in their lives. It is useful for correcting faults and teaching the right way to live” (2 Timothy 3:16 ERV).
How could the Bible reflect the words of men like Moses, the Old Testament prophets, Paul the Apostle, the Apostle Peter and others, yet also be the Word of God as well? Here’s how one Pastoral author answers that question…
“Part of the answer to this complex question is simply because God made Paul and Peter and the other writers of Scripture into the men that He wanted them to be. God made the writers of Scripture the men He wanted them to be by forming their very personalities. He controlled their heredity and their environments. He controlled their lives, all the while giving them freedom of choice and will, and made them into the men He wanted them to be.
And when these men were exactly what He wanted them to be, he directed and controlled their free and willing choice of words so that they wrote down the very words of God. God made them into the kind of men who He could use to express His truth and then God literally selected the words out of their lives and their personalities, vocabularies, and emotions.
The words were their words, but in reality their lives had been so framed by God that they were God’s words. So, it is possible to say that Paul wrote the book of Romans and to also say that God wrote it and to be right on both counts.” (1)
These God-inspired messages took many different routes on their way to becoming a permanent written record, including…
- A voice from a burning bush (Moses in Exodus 3:2-5).
- A prophetic vision (Ezekiel, Isaiah, and others).
- A study of some other prophecy (Daniel 9:2).
- The accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of experience (Solomon in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes).
- A personal and orderly account (Luke 1:1-4).
- An undefined means of communication such as, “The word of the Lord came to me…” or similar statements (which appear repeatedly within the Old Testament Scriptures).
So God used a variety of methods to reveal His message to each Biblical writer. The New Testament book of Hebrews condenses these various communication methods into one summary statement…
“Long ago God spoke in many different ways to our fathers through the prophets [in visions, dreams, and even face to face], telling them little by little about his plans” (Hebrews 1:1 TLB).
(1) John MacArthur, How Did God Inspire His Word? http://www.gty.org/Blog/B160713 Retrieved 21 August 2021