We can have confidence that the Bible
is perfect because it was written (or inspired)
How important is the Bible to me? There are several ways to answer that question. Some say, “The Bible? It’s just another book. It has some wise sayings here and there, mixed with a lot of genealogies, myths, and crazy visions.”
A second group says something like this: “Of course I know the Bible is important—at least my pastor thinks so. He’s always quoting it and waving it in the air. But I don’t read it too much. I can’t understand it too well.”
There is still a third group, however, who would align themselves with Sir Walter Scott, a famed British novelist and poet, who was also a committed Christian. On his deathbed Scott is reported to have said to his secretary, “Bring me the Book.” His secretary thought of the thousands of books in Scott’s library and inquired, “Dr. Scott, which book?” “The Book,” replied Scott. “The Bible—the only book for a dying man!”
And the committed Christian would have to add that the Bible is not just the only book for a dying man, but it’s the only book for a living man, because it is the Word of God.
In which of the three categories do you fall? Obviously Group 1 represents the typical response from the secular world. It doesn’t know Christ; and it accepts only what seems to fit in with worldly wisdom. For them, the Bible has little importance and less authority.
Group 2 includes a lot of church members, and even some Christians. They know the Bible is important and that it should be a priority and an authority in their lives, but they don’t make much personal use of it. They neglect its teachings altogether. Or they slip by, seldom opening the Bible for themselves, depending on pastors, teachers, or speakers to “explain it to them.” They don’t apply what the Scriptures teach. The Bible remains a mysterious, somewhat confusing rule book that they are supposed to swallow bravely, like castor oil, every morning before breakfast.
Group 3 sees the Bible much differently. For them the Scriptures are alive, literally popping with exciting truths. This group doesn’t live by bread alone, “but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).
But perhaps you’re thinking that you don’t quite fit in any of these three categories. If you are like a lot of Christians, you land somewhere between Group 2 and Group 3. You want the Bible to become more important to you. You want to submit to its authority, but life crowds the Bible out. Everywhere you turn you are enticed, or intimidated, to forget the teachings of the Scripture.
For example, you turn on a television talk show and hear a big star making authoritative pronouncements, such as, “I think everyone should do his own thing, live his own life, and have his own faith.” The studio audience bursts into applause; and you’re left wondering if it’s really very bright (or even American) to think that you, a born-again Christian and member of a church, have all the answers between the covers of such an old and seemingly “outdated” book.
But when we let the world’s value system intimidate us, we forget a basic truth. In a world of relativistic thinking that has no absolutes, the Bible stands as the absolute authority for the Christian. The Scriptures are the Word of God, not someone’s opinions, ideas, or philosophy. It isn’t even a polling of the best thoughts from the best thinkers. Scripture is God’s Word; and that means it has several characteristics and qualities that should make it extremely important in our lives.
God’s Word Is Infallible
Some statements of faith published by churches or Christian organizations say, “The Bible is God’s Word, the infallible rule of faith and practice.” That is a good statement, but I prefer an even stronger one that says, “The Bible is God’s infallible Word, the only rule of faith and practice.” There is a real difference where you place the word infallible in those two statements. The second statement clearly says that in its totality the Bible makes no mistakes. The original autographs (the first copies) were without error. Copiers have made minor mistakes over the centuries, but none of these is serious enough to challenge the Bible’s infallibility. The Bible says of itself, “The law of the Lord is perfect” (Ps. 19:7). The Bible is flawless because it was authored (or inspired) by a God who is flawless. I have already discussed inspiration of Scripture in detail, but the point to think about here is this: If God is our ultimate authority, and His character is flawless, and if He inspired the writers of Scripture to put down His thoughts while still allowing them freedom of personal expression, then the Bible is flawless and it becomes our ultimate authority—our only rule for faith and practice.
The entirety of Your Word is truth, and every one of Your righteous judgments endures forever. (Psalm 119:160)
To put it another way, if we believe God is perfect it has to follow that the original copies of Scripture also had to be perfect. Is the Bible infallible? It has to be, because it is the only book that never makes a mistake.
God’s Word Is Inerrant
The Bible is not only infallible in its totality but it is inerrant in all its parts. The writer of Proverbs says it well: “Every word of God is pure, He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him” (Prov. 30:5).
In regard to Scripture, inerrancy and infallibility go hand in hand. According to the writers of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, the negative terms infallible and inerrant “have special value, for they explicitly safeguard crucial positive truths.” The Chicago Statement, drafted at a summit conference called in October 1978 by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy to affirm the authority of Scripture, goes on to say:
Infallible signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe, and reliable rule and guide in all matters.
Similarly, inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.
As implied in both the above definitions, one convenient way to describe infallibility and inerrancy is in the word truthfulness. In Isaiah 65:16 the Lord calls Himself “God of truth.” In Jeremiah 10:10 the prophet writes, “The Lord is the true God.” The New Testament agrees with the Old in calling God a God of truth. Examples of many such statements include: “God is true” (John 3:33); “the only true God” (John 17:3); “this is the true God” (1 John 5:20).
To make sure we don’t overlook the importance of God’s truthfulness, three times the Scripture stresses that God cannot lie (see Num. 23:19; Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18).
Some critics of Scripture, however, like to point out that biblical “truthfulness” is open to question because Scripture contains terms that are not scientifically precise or grammatically correct and passages that seem to contradict one another. The writers of the Chicago Statement face this criticism head on by saying:
In determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of his penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.
So history must be treated as history, poetry as poetry, hyperbole and metaphor as hyperbole and metaphor, generalization and approximation as what they are, and so forth. Differences between literary conventions in Bible times and in ours must be observed… non-chronological narration and imprecise citation were conventional and acceptable and violated no expectations in those days… Scripture is inerrant, not in the sense of being absolutely precise by modern standards, but in the sense of making good its claims and achieving that measure of focused truth at which its authors aimed.
In a list of Twenty Articles of Affirmation and Denial, the Chicago Statement further confirms the need to understand how God inspired certain men to write Scripture at certain times, under certain circumstances. Article XIII reads: “We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.”
Testimony for the truthfulness of God is found throughout His written Word, and if we don’t accept and believe that testimony we will wind up somewhere in Group 2—those who know the Bible is supposed to be important, but who remain apathetic about what it says. In fact, such apathy can lead to real despair. A young man visited my office and said, “My whole Christian life is in a mess. Everything is falling apart. I can’t study the Bible; I have these doubts.”
I listened to him for about twenty minutes and then I said, “I can tell you right now what your problem is. It’s obvious.”
“What is it?” he wanted to know.
I replied, “You do not believe in the absolute inerrancy of Scripture. If you believe there are errors in the Word of God, then you become confused and don’t know what to believe. That’s your problem.”
“You know,” he said, “you hit it right on the nose. I don’t believe in the absolute inerrancy of Scripture.”
“Then my friend,” I answered, “how can you hope to be an effective student of the Word of God or to ever lead an effective Christian life?”
Is the Bible inerrant? It has to be, because the Bible is God’s Word and God is a God of truth.
God’s Word Is Authoritative
If the Bible is infallible and inerrant, it must be the final word—the highest standard of authority. The writers of the Old Testament made over two thousand direct claims to be speaking the very words of God. Again and again they wrote such phrases as, “The Spirit of the Lord has spoke by me” (2 Sam. 23:2) or “The Word of God came to me” (1 Chr. 17:3). For example, Isaiah opens his prophecy by saying, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the Lord has spoken” (Is. 1:2). When God speaks, everybody is to listen because He is the final authority.
In the New Testament we find more of the same, especially in the teachings of Jesus. Talking about God’s Word in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled” (Matt. 5:17, 18).
That even the tiniest part of God’s Word has authority is echoed by James when he writes: “For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). All of God’s Word is authoritative.
But while the Bible claims complete authority over our lives, many people do not always recognize that authority. Today’s “all-truth-is-relative” way of thinking takes the Bible off its authoritative pedestal and places it on the shelf as “just another book.”
In an article written for Eternity magazine, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote words for the church of the fifties that are especially applicable to the church of today. Lloyd-Jones points out that the attack on Scripture’s authority began in the middle of the eighteenth century when scholars began to take a “higher critical” view of Scripture. Naturalistic presuppositions, along with human knowledge and reasoning and new discoveries in science, were all brought to bear in an attempt to analyze the Bible and “get at its real truth.” All of this developed into the movement we know as liberalism, which held sway throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Liberalism saw the Bible as full of errors, the work of men, and something to be accepted as having no more authority than the works of Shakespeare or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
With the dawn of the twentieth century a new movement began. Neo-orthodox thinkers tried to restore some of the Bible’s authority by reaffirming the sinfulness of man and claiming that while the Bible is not the Word of God, it “contains the Word of God.” As Lloyd-Jones describes it, “The Bible, we are told, is partly the Word of God and partly the word of man. In part it has great authority and in part it has not.”
Lloyd-Jones goes on to point out that this “partly-God’s-Word-partly-man’s-word” position leads to a view of the Bible which holds part of it in high esteem but then understands other parts of the Bible as full of errors and “utterly useless and valueless.”
At that point, observes Lloyd-Jones, we are faced with a basic question:
Who decides what is true? Who decides what is of value? How can you discriminate and differentiate between the great facts that are true and those that are false? How can you differentiate between facts and teaching? How can you separate the essential message of the Bible from the background in which it is presented?… The whole Bible comes to us and offers itself to us in exactly the same way. There is no hint, no suspicion of a suggestion that parts of it are important and parts are not. They all come to us in the same form.
Liberalism and neo-orthodoxy are still with us in every conceivable shape and form. As Lloyd-Jones wrote in 1957:
The modern position amounts to this, that it is really man’s reasons that decide. You and I come to the Bible and we have to make our decisions on the basis of certain standards which are obviously in our minds. We decide that one portion conforms to the message which we believe, and that another does not. We are left still with the position, in spite of all the talk about a new situation today, that man’s knowledge and man’s understanding are the final arbiter and the final court of appeal.
From ministers and seminary students to lay people in the pews, all of us can get caught up in the doubts and skepticism of our age. Even the greatest of Christian leaders know what it is to wrestle with this. Some have wrestled and lost; others have wrestled and won.
Before he launched his career, Billy Graham struggled with doubts about the Scriptures. Recalling those days, he says:
I believe it is not possible to understand everything in the Bible intellectually. One day some years ago I decided to accept the Scriptures by faith. There were problems I could not reason through. When I accepted the Bible as the authoritative Word of God—by faith—I found immediately that it became a flame in my hand. That flame began to melt away unbelief in the hearts of many people and to move them to decide for Christ.
The Word became a hammer, breaking up stony hearts and shaping men into the likeness of God. Did not God say, “I will make my words in thy mouth fire” (Jer. 5:14), and “Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?” (Jer. 23:29)?
I found that I could take a simple outline, then put a number of Scripture quotations under each point; and God would use it mightily to cause men to make a full commitment to Christ. I found that I did not have to rely upon cleverness, oratory, psychological manipulation, apt illustrations, or striking quotations from famous men. I began to rely more and more upon Scripture itself and God blessed it. I am convinced through my travels and experience that people all over the world are hungry to hear the Word of God.
Is the Bible authoritative? Does it need defending? The great preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, said it well: “There is no need for you to defend a lion when he’s being attacked. All you need to do is open the gate and let him out.”
God’s Word Is Effective
One of the most powerful claims to the Bible’s infallibility, inerrancy, and authority is its effectiveness. The prophet Isaiah aptly describes the ability of Scripture to get results when he said:
For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven; and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. (Is. 55:10, 11)
One of the best things about being a preacher and a teacher of God’s Word is that you know it will do what it says it will do. You are not left worrying about what you will say when your product doesn’t work.
There is a story about a lady who lived way out in the country. A vacuum cleaner salesman came by and began to give the woman his high-pressure sales talk.
“Madam, I have the greatest product you have ever seen. This vacuum cleaner will eat up anything. In fact, if I don’t control this vacuum, it will suck up your carpet.”
Before the woman could reply he went on to say, “Lady, I want to give you a demonstration.”
The salesman went to the fireplace, scooped up some ashes and threw them in the middle of the carpet. Then he reached into a bag in his own pocket and poured more dirt and junk right on the carpet. After making a thorough mess he said, “Madam, I want you to watch this product at work. I guarantee it will suck up every bit of everything I’ve thrown on your rug.”
The woman stood there aghast—speechless—and the salesman went on to say, “Lady, if it doesn’t suck up every bit of this, I’ll eat it all with a spoon.”
The woman looked the salesman in the eye and finally found her voice: “Well, sir, start eating. We ain’t got no electricity.”
It’s tough to be caught in a situation where your product isn’t going to work. But that never happens with the Bible. It is always effective, and it always does exactly what it says it will do. Paul talked about this great effectiveness of the Scriptures when he wrote: “For our gospel did not come to you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit and in much assurance” (1 Thess. 1:5). When the Word goes forth, it has power. It has the Holy Spirit, and you have the assurance that God’s Word will do what it says.
To Sum It Up
So what have we said so far? The Word of God is infallible in its totality, and it is inerrant in all its parts. God’s Word is authoritative and demands our obedience. Again and again we see the Bible’s infallibility, inerrancy, and authority demonstrated because the Bible is effective. The Bible does what it says it will do.
Everything we have said so far is good, if we have one more thing—the presence of the Holy Spirit. The need for this vital extra dimension is well illustrated by a conversation I had with a man on an airplane. As we talked, he continually admitted that he didn’t understand the Bible. I didn’t really tell him in so many words, but I hinted at why I didn’t expect him to understand the Bible. He didn’t have the one necessary thing he needed—the life of God in his soul, the presence of the Holy Spirit.
Without the Holy Spirit the Bible is “just another book.” When we have the Holy Spirit at work in our hearts, the Bible is The Book. We will see why in the next chapter.
THINK BACK
1. What is the significance of describing the Bible as infallible?
2. Why is it important to affirm the inerrancy of the Scripture?
3. What additional dimension does “authoritative” add to our understanding?