Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve been going through lately the doctrine of Inerrancy and taking a closer look at the ICBI statement. Tonight, we’re going to be looking at article VII. It reads as follows:
We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.
We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.
At this one, I can agree to it, but I would appreciate if we had had more. For instance, Ben Witherington has written about the act of prophecy in his book “Jesus The Sage.” Of course, it is doubtful we could know about this since I question that revelation like that is going on today.
The denial is quite important however. The Bible was not based on people making lucky guesses. Prophecy was not just someone looking at the events of the time and making predictions. After all, when you have prophecies like those of the seventy weeks of Daniel, it’s hard to imagine about how those could have been predicted. The same with the numerous other prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. There are no doubt some that could have been filled intentionally and by planning, but not all could.
The purpose of such however was not just God showing off, but it was God showing that he knows the end from the beginning and therefore Israel ought to trust Him. Of course, there was the importance of them giving reasons to trust Him and of giving messages to other nations giving them the opportunity to repent.
We can too often approach such prophecy as if it is not really meant to tell us about God, but that is the primary purpose of it. Very little of what the prophets did was actually prophesying, in the sense of foretelling the future. Most of what they did was in fact leading the people to be righteous. They were meant to turn the hearts of the people back to YHWH.
The importance of it being accurate was because it was from YHWH. If someone made a prophecy and it did not come true, then that prophet was shown to be a false prophet and the penalty for that was death. God protected his Word very closely. If someone’s word did not come true, they were not from YHWH and were guilty of leading Israel into apostasy.
The bottom line in this one then is that all Scripture again comes from YHWH and by His inspiration, the prophets were able to know things that they would not have known otherwise. While it would have been nice to have seen more written on the nature of Inspiration and interaction with more scholarly works on the subject, we can conclude with saying that we agree with this article.
We shall continue next time.
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