God-Breathed

Ephesians 2:19-20 - "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone."

This past week the Supreme Court of the United States made a decision that requires all fifty states to recognize and perform same sex marriages. And those of us who recognize God's Word as the ultimate authority are being pressured to change or update our "religious beliefs." But those looking on from the outside fail to recognize what the Bible really is, namely the Word of God. To say that the Bible is simply a piece of religious literature, or a book of good morals is to lower it well below what it truly is. The Word of God is always connected to the person of God. The spoken word is always inseparably tied to the God who breathed it out. The Bible carries so much weight because it has the weight of Gods eternal character behind it. We can't pick and choose what suits us when it comes to the Word of God. Either it has complete authority in our lives or it has none. I can't say that I'm gonna obey these parts of Scripture, but just disregard those sections because I don't really like them. No, you can't do that. We must submit ourselves entirely to the Word of God. Why? Because of who He is. This is the God who said “Light shall shine out of darkness.” This is the God who spoke the universe into existence. The One who made it all, and He sets the standard. The fact of who He is is enough reason to obey. He sets the standard and that is why it must be kept.

There are those who would pressure us to change our beliefs based on changing times. And if the Bible is just the opinions of ancient guys that lived a long time ago then maybe it does need to be updated. But if this is the Word of the unchanging God then we need to hold fast to this regardless of changing times or popular opinion. So what I want to do is consider the process by which God has chosen to give us His Word, and focus on what the Bible says about inspiration, the prophets, the apostles and illumination.

Here in Ephesians chapter 2 the apostle Paul is writing to a church that is largely made up of Gentile believers. And he begins the chapter by reminding them of their condition before Christ. He talks about how they, and we, were once dead in our trespasses and sins, by nature we were children of wrath. But, even so, God in His great love for us made us alive together with Christ and saved us by grace through faith.
He then goes on to remind us that we were once aliens and strangers, separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ, we who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ and have been granted access into the very presence of God. And we are now being built together, Jews and Gentiles, into one structure. And that's the context in which verse 20 tells us that we are now being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself being the very cornerstone.

According to this verse, this is our foundation. This is what we as believers are being built together on top of. We are being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets. What does that mean? In what sense are we being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets? We've never heard the prophet proclaim his message, right? We didn't sit and hear the apostle Paul as he preached to the church in Corinth. We weren't in the crowd as Isaiah prophesied to pre-exilic Israel. The messages that the apostles and prophets proclaimed we never heard from their own mouths. They lived and died centuries before any of us were ever born. So in what sense are we now being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets? The answer, of course, is in the written Word. We, the church, are being built together upon the foundation of written Scripture, and the apostles and prophets are the human means that God used to record His message in written form in order that it might be passed down through time and come to us today, thousands of years later. So while it's true that we never audibly heard the apostles and prophets deliver their message, we have read it. We have had these things passed down to us through the generations in written form. And as this message comes down to us and we hear it, the Lord now comes and helps us to receive this message and we, the church, centuries later are now being built upon this foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself being our very cornerstone.

Now, we need to begin by considering something that the Bible calls "inspiration." In 2 Timothy 3:16, a verse which most of us are familiar with, we read this - "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness." Now, we're just going to focus on the first part of this verse, "All Scripture is inspired by God." And we need to ask the question, what is "inspired"? Well, if we were to look this word up in our English dictionary the first definition would read something like this, 1) A stimulation of the mind or emotions. The second definition would read something like this, 2) A sudden creative act or idea. So with that kind of thinking we approach 2 Timothy 3:16 and we think, "I get, Moses was inspired to write the Bible. Peter was sitting around one day and he suddenly had a creative idea and just began to write and words were just flowing off his pen." But that is not what this verse is saying. The problem is we're approaching an archaic English word that was actually just transliterated over from Latin, and we've got a modern definition of that word that isn't anywhere close to what the word actually means.

Notice first of all that in 2 Timothy 3:16 the writers are not even mentioned. It doesn't say Moses was inspired to write the Bible. It doesn't say Isaiah or Peter were inspired, it says the Scriptures are inspired. That's important. But we're still stuck with this word, what does it mean?

There are a couple of English translations that are very helpful in translating this verse, and many Bibles have a footnote to help us out as well. The ESV and the NIV both read along these lines, "All Scripture is God-breathed." And that's a good translation. Because this word that's translated "inspiration" in most English versions is a compound word in the Greek, it's two words put together. The first part is the word Theo, meaning "God." The second part of the word comes form the Greek word pneo. And what's interesting about this word is that it's only used a handful of times in the entire New Testament, and every other time it's used it is used to refer to the wind. For example, in Matthew chapter 7 when the Lord Jesus is talking about the two men building houses, the wise man who built on the rock and the fool who built on the sand, He says in verse 25 - "And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock." That word "blew" is the same word. The Lord Jesus also uses it in Luke 12:55 where He says - "And when you see a south wind blowing, you say, ‘It will be a hot day,’ and it turns out that way."

So this word is used of the wind blowing. But now we come to 2 Timothy 3:16 and we find find this word put together with the word "God", so if we were to translate this very literally it would read, "All Scripture is God-blown" or "Blown out by God." That doesn't translate real well though, so we read it like this, "All Scripture is God-breathed."

So what is inspiration? Well, whatever it is, it's the God-breathing out of a book. Like you and I breathe out a spoken word God breathes out a written word.

How does this work? To help us get a better understanding of the means by which God does this we need to go to 2 Peter 1:20-21 where we read - "But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." So 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that God breathes out Scripture. Here, 2 Peter 1 introduces two important components to this process.

Here you have a prophet being introduced into the middle of this process. And the prophet becomes part of a chain of events that results in Gods thoughts being revealed in writing. In other words, you have the prophet coming along and speaking or writing. Now the prophet doesn't have the original idea, God does. And now God picks up a prophet, He moves him by means of the Holy Spirit and the final result is a God-breathed message coming through the mouth or the pen of the prophet.

And according to this verse God does that by driving the prophet along by the Holy Spirit. "Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The people that spoke from God were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Now, what does that mean? Well, that word, to be "moved by" is used over in the book of Acts to refer to a ship being driven along by the wind. We read in Acts 27:15,17 - "and when the ship was caught in it and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and let ourselves be driven along... and fearing that they might run aground on the shallows of Syrtis, they let down the sea anchor and in this way let themselves be driven along." That word, to be "driven along" is the same word used of the prophet in 2 Peter 1. As this ship is being driven by the wind, the prophet is being driven by the Holy Spirit. So the prophet is part of a chain of events where he doesn't have the initial idea, God does, and now the Holy Spirit is going to carry him along to speak it or write it, so that the end result is God-breathed Scripture. The idea didn't come from the prophets mind, and it didn't come from the prophets interpretation of God's mind. The origin is God, and the Holy Spirit drives the prophets to write it down.

That means that what you see in Paul's writings to the Corinthians and what you see in Isaiah's writings to pre-exilic Israel, it's not really their thoughts. but God used these men in order to get His thoughts in written form.

We recognize that the Word of God came through human instruments. God's Word came through Moses, it was God's message but it was still in Moses' handwriting. God's message came through Isaiah's vocabulary and writing style, but it was still God's message. And that's what's being spoken about in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 - "For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe." You received the Word of God. It came through our voices. But when you heard God's message through our voices you didn't receive it as though it were our word but you received it for what it really is, namely God's Word. So essentially he's saying, we're giving God the credit for the work that's being done in you, because we're recognizing that it's God's message even though it came through our voices.
David says a similar thing over in 2 Samuel 23:2 - "The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue." David says, "God spoke, and the way He did this is by using my tongue, my mouth."

A helpful illustration for this would be to think of an artist carving out a statue. You have an artist, the hammer and the tools, the chisels.

God, the artist, picks up the Holy Spirit, the hammer, and a chisel, a prophet, and He does the work so that the end result is from God, but bears the marks of the tools. There are different chisels of different shapes and sizes and they don't all make the same mark, but in the final product they are all driven by the same hammer and they're all perfectly harmonized so that the artist steps back from the finished product and says, "That's exactly what I wanted." Paul’s writings about faith and James’ writings about faith look different, but they’re perfectly harmonized because they’re picked up by the same artist, God, they’re driven by the same hammer, the Holy Spirit, but they look a little different in terminology because God used different tools. Now, technically you could stand back from the finished carved out statue and honestly say that it was made by the tools. I can step back and see that this tool was used to carve out this section, and a smaller, finer tool was used to give this part some intricate details, and it's obvious that it was made by the tools because it bears their distinct marks. But the end result is so perfect that it’s obvious that the tools were not simply thrown in the trunk of a car with a slab of marble, rolled around for a couple days and out popped this perfect statue. No, that's ridiculous. And it's the same way when we come to the Word of God. We recognize that there are different styles by different writers, but the volume of Scripture is so unique and so perfectly harmonized that we stand back and recognize that this is a work of God. There was a bigger artist behind this then simply the tools themselves. 

Isaiah and Paul both have different writing styles and vocabularies, they even used different languages, but they had the same Holy Spirit driving them, like the hammer drives the tools, and they were both held in the hand of the same artist, God Himself.

So what is inspiration? Or we could ask the question this way, what is God-breathed? God-breathed is the process by which God records His message in words, using chosen human authors, utilizing their vocabularies, writing styles and personalities, resulting in an exact record of God's revelation.

Now let's go back into the Old Testament and think a little bit more about the tools that God used to write His Word. In the New Testament the tools that God used are called the apostles. In the Old Testament the tools were called the prophets. So let's think about the prophets. What is a prophet? The Old Testament word "prophet" literally means a mouthpiece. And the primary way it is used in the Bible is to speak of someone as a mouthpiece for God. But in Exodus chapter 7 this word is used to refer to one man being the mouthpiece of another man. You'll remember that when the Lord sent Moses back to Egypt to deliver His people out of their bondage Moses came up with all sorts of reasons why God couldn't use him. And one of the things he said was that he wasn't a good speaker. Well, God eventually told him that his brother Aaron would be his spokesperson. But this is the way He puts it in Exodus chapter 7 and verse 1 - "Then the Lord said to Moses, "See, I make you as God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet."" Aaron was going to be Moses' prophet, his mouthpiece.

What is a mouthpiece? It's that tiny little piece that you put onto the end of a brass instrument, and you blow through it in order to make a sound. So the prophet is a mouthpiece, which is great if he's going to be used to make a breathed out book, right? Scripture is God-breathed, so when God breathes out a book He uses a mouthpiece. When it comes to our instruments, we blow through the mouthpiece in order to make a sound. Here's the picture, God picks up a prophet and blows through him in order to make a sound. God picks up Moses, blows through him and the sound that it makes is the first five books of our Old Testament.

In Deuteronomy chapter 18 the Lord is instructing His people about the revelation of truth. And He gives them in the second half of the chapter the stipulations for a prophet. This is what a prophet is, this is how you know whether the prophet is speaking the truth, this is what you're to do when a prophet speaks, and so on.
He begins in verse 14 by saying - "For those nations, which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practice witchcraft and to diviners, but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do so." The temptation for them was going to be to seek for truth in some fantastic or mysterious way, and God tells them that He's got another plan. He says that those pagan nations seek after witchcraft and diviners, and hundreds of years later when God wrote through the prophet Isaiah He says that they've got the same problem. In Isaiah chapter 8 the Lord warns them not to seek out the mediums and spiritists, those who whisper and mutter, and He asks "Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? should not a people consult their God?" How are we going to consult Him? "To the Law and to the Testimony." See, He says that He's put forth this written Scripture. If you want to hear from God go back to written Scripture. And though the temptation is going to be to seek out truth through a more exciting or mysterious means, He says you need to go back to written Scripture. And He goes on in Deuteronomy 18 to tell them how this is going to work.Deuteronomy 18:15-18 - "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of the Lord your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.’ The Lord said to me, ‘They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him." God raises up a prophet and He puts His words in the prophets mouth. So the words that the prophet speaks are actually the Lords commands. Deuteronomy 18:19 - "It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him." So the words that come out of the mouth of the prophet carry the weight of God's authority behind them because they're not merely the prophets words, they're God's words though they're coming through the prophets mouth. And if you don't listen to the voice of the prophets, you're not simply refusing to listen to men but you're actually rejecting the word of God. And God is going to hold you responsible for that. He doesn't take it lightly. He Himself will require it of you.
Well, someone could get the idea that they could come to the people in the name of God and use this claim to their own advantage. See, God said that the people had to listen to the voice of the prophet, but what was to stop someone from coming along and claiming to speak from God in order to manipulate things? Someone could think, if I go to them and claim to speak in the name of God maybe I can get things working in the way that I think they should be done. What's to stop someone from doing this?
Well, verse 20 goes on to say, don't just listen to everybody who claims to be a prophet - "But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die." Okay, so in order to safeguard this position, God says that the penalty for speaking something in the name of the Lord that God has not spoken, the penalty is death. If he speaks falsely he's going to be taken to the edges of the camp and he's going to be stoned.

Okay, so that's the penalty for impersonating a prophet, but how are we supposed to know whether a prophet is really speaking from God or not? That's a valid question, right? Look at verse 21 - "You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’" Good question. Answer, verse 22 - "When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him." Throughout the Old Testament God was putting divine marks of authentication on His word. He would allow the prophets to do some things that you and I can't do, like predict the future. That's why when we hear the word "prophecy" we generally think of a prediction of the future. Because that's the kind of thing that God would use to verify that the message was actually from Him. So for a prophet 99% accuracy didn't cut it. If a prophet said that something was going to happen and it didn't happen, they were supposed to be killed. So, you want to give it a shot being a prophet? Okay, but it's a risky business to get into. If you're going to do it you had better be right. And God authenticates His message, whether by predictive prophecy or wonders and miracles, God garnishes His message with supernatural elements. God is in the business of the miraculous, and He does this in order to authenticate the true message.

Well, throughout the Old Testament we see a connection made between the word of the prophets and the word of God. When the prophet speaks as a prophet, God speaks. And their words carry the weight of God's authority because they're more than the prophets words, they're God's words. We see this connection made, for instance, in Joshua 24:26 which says - "And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God." Joshua wrote the words, but where did he write them? In the book of the law of Joshua? No, in the book of the Law of God. In this case Joshua's words were God's law.

Another place we see this is in Nehemiah chapter 8 verse 1 which reads - "And all the people gathered as one man at the square which was in front of the Water Gate, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel."Here the book is called the book of the law of Moses, but it says that God is the one who gave it. And these are just a couple of examples, but we see this kind of thing over and over in the Old Testament. You also have statements like this throughout the Old Testament, the prophet says "Thus says the Lord..." and then the prophet speaks. So the Word of God came through the prophets.

When we come to the New Testament we find the Lord Jesus making statements like this in Matthew 22:31 when He's talking to the Sadducees - "Have you not read that which was spoken to you by God?" And then He goes on to quote the Old Testament which came off of the pen of the prophets. Christ says these words which were written down by the prophets are being spoken to you by God, even though you're reading them fifteen hundred years later.

Something else that we see the Lord Jesus constantly addressing with the religious leaders of His day is the issue of traditions. They were setting aside the Old Testament Scriptures for the sake of their traditions. The binding law of the Lord came through the prophets. The traditions were simply traditions and not authoritative because they did not originate with God they originated with man. The Scriptures on the other hand, though they came through men, they originated with God.

So that's the prophet. Now let's think about the apostle. While the word prophet means a mouthpiece, the word that's used for the human writers of the New Testament, the word apostle means "a sent one, a representative, an envoy, an emissary." In the ancient world you would send an apostle because you couldn't pick up the phone and call someone. A king couldn't pick up a phone and call his troops who were 500 miles away and tell them to start the siege. So the king would send an apostle, someone who was authorized by the king, had some proof of their authorization who could then travel 500 miles to where the troops were fighting and tell them to fire the catapults, or whatever. An apostle was an authorized agent, someone who was sent with authority to speak on behalf of the king.

And that's the word that's used for the human authors of the New Testament. And we have the same idea with the apostles of the New Testament as we had with the prophets of the Old Testament. Just like we were able to look at David and hear him say in 2 Samuel 23 - "The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me and His word was on my tongue." The Lord Jesus says to His apostles in Matthew 10:20 - "It is not you who speak, but it is the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you." Same as we saw with the prophets, He says that God was speaking in them by His Spirit. And He also says in John 14:26 - "the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you." This is important. Because what we read in the gospel, the accounts of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, we don't need to wonder, "well how did they remember all this stuff? How much later after these things happened did the apostles write it down? Maybe they remembered it wrong." But Christ says, no, "the Spirit is going to bring to your remembrance all that I said to you." So when Jesus says in Matthew 24:35 - "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away." Who wrote that? Jesus right? No, Jesus didn't write Matthew 24, Matthew did. So Matthew said that Jesus said that His words would never pass away. But here's the thing, Matthew wrote them. Maybe he got it wrong. Is that really what Jesus said? But see, the promise that the Lord Jesus gave to His apostles was that the Holy Spirit would bring to their remembrance everything that He said. And not only that, but Christ also goes on to say in John 16:13 - "But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come." So not only do they have the promise that the Holy Spirit will guide them into all truth, but He's also going to disclose to them what is to come. Interesting that John records this, the apostle who would later be used by God to give us the book of Revelation.
And just like the Lord verified His message through the prophets by supernatural means, like predictive prophecy, Second Corinthians 12:12 tells us that there were certain things that God allowed His apostles to do that verified that they were speaking for God. Just like there were supernatural ways in which God verified His message through His prophets, God allowed the apostles, 2 Corinthians 12:12 says, to perform signs, wonders and miracles in order to verify that this is not their opinion but it is in fact His Word.

So, the verse we started with, Ephesians 2:20, we are now being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus Himself being the very cornerstone. You have the inspired word, the prophets, inspired word, the apostles, and the incarnate Word, the Lord Jesus Himself, and we are now being built up on top of this.

So that's the remarkable way in which God has chosen to bring us His word. But here's the thing, we still need to receive it. How do we receive it? Intellectual study? No, that's not enough. The Word of God is largely rejected in our culture, why? Because the natural man, 1 Corinthians 2, does not accept the things of the Spirit of God because they are foolishness to him, neither can he understand them because they're spiritually discerned. It takes the Spirit of God to come to a person and pop the light on inside of them so that they can then understand and receive what God has said.

So the psalmist comes along hundreds of years after God used Moses to compose Law, and he prays in Psalm 119:18 - "Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things from Your law." Yes, this is an ancient book, it's been around for a long time, but I cannot properly understand this book without help. The Holy Spirit has to come and turn the light on in order that I might understand and accept the things that God has revealed. What light is to the eye illumination is to the mind.

And illumination does not involve the discovery of new truth. That's revelation. Illumination simply helps us understand what has already been revealed.

In Luke chapter 24 after the Lord Jesus rose from the dead He came to His disciples, and we read in verse 45 - "And He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures." This is what we see Him doing earlier on in the passage. He was not at this point introducing more truth, giving additional information. He was simply giving them understanding into what had already been revealed. He took what was written and He explained it to them. "Beginning with Moses and all the prophets He began to explain to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." He took the written Word and helped them to understand that the things that were written in the Old Testament pointed to Him. So we recognizes that Gods message off that page still needs that power and that enlightenment from God to let it connect and help us to understand and accept it. This is why we always approach the Word of God with prayer. We're confessing our dependance on God in order to understand these things and then apply them to our lives.

So just to bring it together, this is how it worked for the believers in the first century, God revealed His message to the apostle Paul, the apostle proclaimed it, and then God moved in the hearts of those who heard in order that they might receive the message.

That's how it worked for them, but it works slightly different for us. See, none of were there in the first century to hear the preaching of the apostle Paul, but all of us have read it. God revealed His message to Paul, and then He used Paul, not only to proclaim it but also to write it down, and now centuries later we read this written Word and God works in our lives to help us receive this truth. 

See, we're not coming up with new truth, what every faithful servant of God does is simply hold forth what God has already spoken.

Psalm 119:105 says - "Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." We recognize that this book is important. We know that it is the lamp to our feet and the light to our paths, but we can't stop there. We need to take it a step further. We need to continue on to verse106 - "I have sworn and I will confirm it, that I will keep Thy righteous ordinances." This is our absolute standard, and whatever it says, that's what I'm gonna do.

The Word of God is not outdated, it's relevant for all time. There are those who seek to dismiss the Bible or change the Bible saying that it's outdated. It's not practical in the advanced culture in which we live today. But the fact is that Gods standard never changes because He never changes. "Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven." When God speaks to an issue it's settled, and we need to stand firmly and unwavering on what He has said, because He is the one who said it. God's Word doesn't change, His standard doesn't change because God doesn't change. In a culture that is constantly changing and constantly adopting new standards and new morals and trying to press us into their mold, we need to stand without compromise on the things that God has said. God's Word is not politically correct, that means when you hold to it as the ultimate standard the world, just as Christ promised, will hate you. But regardless of what the world around us thinks, we need to say along with the psalmist that we have made this commitment, that whatever God says that's what we're sticking to.