#2.

The Word is God-breathed in its entirety

2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; This is an amazing verse! Our translation (and many others) use the word "inspired" to described the creative relationship between God and His Word. The Greek word here is "theopneustos" and it is difficult to find a word in English which captures its sense. You will see from the Greek, though, that we could render it as "God-breathed". In other words, the Scriptures are the out-breathing of God! We need to note several things as we meditate on this subject. First, note how many Scriptures are the out-breathing of God - it is all of them. We have not been left the task of sorting through the Bible and trying to decide which books or passages are the Word of God and which of them are not (which is good, because with our sinful and corrupt minds and hearts we would be certain to choose wrongly!) Some people in recent years have been willing to concede that the Bible "contains" the Word of God. We reject that idea completely. The whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation IS, in its entirety, the out breathing of Almighty God. "ALL Scripture is God-breathed...." Second we need to understand what form this God-breathing took. The very phrase suggests a process of life and power, involving the Holy Spirit of God. And yet a study of the Bible soon shows us that this was no simple act of dictation on God's part, in which the human scribe played no part other than to record what was being spoken by God. We see in each work the characteristics of its human author. Isaiah writes like Isaiah, and would never be mistaken for Paul. James and Paul have completely different styles. So God took these men and fashioned them through their life-experiences and their temperaments to be the instruments He would use to breathe His written Word into being. As they wrote, His Spirit filled the men and superintended their writing to ensure that it was exactly the Word of God, without error or omission, and yet written in the style of the human author. This is how we have in our hands a book written over 1500-1600 years by around 40 different authors living in different places, many of whom never knew any of the others, and yet the book is beautifully self-consistent. Here there are no variations of plot or errors of content, such as may be found in the work of any man or woman who (writing alone) pens a volume that is their own work with no Divine co-agency. Third, we note from the way the writers of Scripture handle the other Scriptures in advancing their arguments, that the role of God's Spirit in the out-breathing process extended to ensuring that the very words that were recorded in the original manuscripts were the words that God wanted to have written down. Paul argues strongly in Galatians 3:16 about the promises of God being spoken to Abraham and to Christ. He does this by showing that the word used in the original is "seed" and not "seeds". If God had not determined down to the very word what should be written, Paul could never have made this argument. We see then that we possess in God's Word, the Bible, a remarkable book. It should also be clear from

what we have seen here that God has gone to great lengths to make sure that what we have is entirely His Word, and that even the exact words written by the original penmen are the ones God wanted to have recorded. We could go on to look at how God has acted in history to preserve with miraculous integrity the writings of the human authors of Scripture through many copying processes, but that must be left on one side for now. The point is that we have the God-breathed Scriptures in our hands today, and we can be absolutely confident of that! The Bible is peerless and unique among books. How we should value its every page and hungrily devour its contents! Let's read it in this way this coming week, and thank God for breathing it so that we could hold it in our hands today! www.graceopcmodesto.org