In What Sense Is the Bible the Inspired Word of God?
Today, when we use the word inspire or inspiration, it has the idea of something challenging to the human heart. We speak of a person giving an “inspiring performance,” or someone looking for “inspiration” to begin a new project. Yet when we talk of the Bible being inspired, we are speaking of an entirely different matter. Though millions of books have been written through the ages, and many of them have inspired the human heart, there was only one Book that has been written by divine inspiration, or with divine authority; the Bible. In this sense of the term, “inspiration” means divinely given, or divinely guided. The Bible Is a God-Breathed Work To begin with, it is important that we understand why we use the English word inspiration to describe the nature of the Bible. We use the word inspiration in the sense of “divinely given” because of a verse found in Second Timothy. The King James Version translates this verse as follows: All scripture is given by inspi...
