This year Pastor Phil and I are going to be taking us through the Foundational Truths (Fundamental Truths) of the Elim Pentecostal Church. We feel this will not only be educational but also help us understand what we believe as Christians and why. We will spend two or three week on each subject each month so that we also are able to pepper the year’s preaching with other things as the Lord leads and guest speakers.
If you are a partner when you became part of the church you will have been given a statement of doctrinal belief that covered the following areas:
- The Bible
- The Trinity
- The Saviour
- The Holy Spirit
- Mankind
- Salvation
- The Church
- The Ministry
- The Ordinances
- The Commission
- The Coming King
- The Future State
The Bible - More Than a Book
Today we are going to kick off this with the Bible - More Than A Book.
Our Foundational Truth Statement reads:
We believe the Bible, as originally given, to be without error, the fully inspired and infallible Word of God and the supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
That’s a bit of a mouthful. So let’s begin to unpack this doctrine.
2 Timothy 3:16-3:17: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
The Bible itself tells us that it is God-breathed.
The Holy Bible was written over a fifteen-hundred year span, by forty different authors from every walk of life. It was written by kings, servants, fishermen, poets, doctors, herdsmen and even a tax collector. It was written on three different continents, Europe, Asia and Africa in sixteen different countries and in three different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Throughout the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation we find unity in the message. Simply stated, God created the heavens and the earth and everything in it. God created man to have relationship with Him. Man broke his relationship with God through sin and God offers reconciliation to man through Jesus Christ.
How can we find a united theme in sixty-six books written over fifteen-hundred years, by forty diverse people? By understanding that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God who inspired each author to record what God wanted us to know through His Scriptures. There can be no other explanation. Without inspiration from God, this would be an impossible accomplishment for man.
[Blog bonus: in our statement of belief we have three terms too: without error, inspired, and infallible. Definitions:
Without Error (Inerrancy): The idea that when all the facts are known, the Bible (in its autographs, that is, the original writings), properly interpreted in light of the culture and the means of communication that had developed by the time of its composition, is completely true in all that it affirms, to the degree of precision intended by the author’s purpose, in all matters relating to God and His creation.
Infallibility: The view that the Bible is incapable of error and cannot deceive or mislead. Some contemporary scholars want to apply the term infallible only to the message of the Bible to avoid the affirmation that the Bible is also truthful in matters relating to history, geography, and related matters. The meaning given to infallible is consistent with the classical meaning of the term, not with the revised meaning of some contemporary scholars.
Inspiration: The superintending influence of the Holy Spirit exerted on the Biblical writers, so that the accent and interpretation of God’s revelation have been recorded as God intended, so that the Bible is actually the Word of God.]
Today we’re going to dwell a little bit on the inspiration of God’s Word to us and look at it being with error/infallible next time.
What Does Inspiration Mean?
“Inspiration” is vitally important.
The phrase God-breathed is not used by accident. It is intentionally there to remind us of the creation account and what happened the first time God-breathed into something!
After creating the heavens and the earth, strs and all the planets, et al, God turns His attention to the focal point of the creation: human kind:
Genesis 2:7: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. God breathed life into us and I believe God’s breath became our very soul. It’s what has separated us from the rest of creation. Only humanity has God’s breath.
God also breathed life into something else. He breathed life into His Holy Scriptures.
The term inspiration is a translation of the Greek word theopneustos which means “Divinely inspired” or “God breathed.”
In the secular sense, we say that inspiration is synonymous with illumination, creativity or human genius. Throughout the Bible, the authors never looked for illumination or creativity to record the Scriptures, and they certainly did not rely on human genius. So their inspiration had to come from somewhere, from one source common to all of the forty authors. That source was from God.
That means the the Bible is alive:
Hebrews 4:12: For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
God breathed life into man, and life into His Scriptures by the power of the Holy Spirit working through each and every author over the course of time.
We can see this evidence throughout the Bible in several ways:
1. What the Bible Says About Itself.
Remember our key verses:
2 Timothy 3:16-3:17: 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Other translations use the word profitable instead of useful. I prefer that, maybe because first read it in the older translations and it has lodged in my memory, but profitable is a stronger word than useful. It shows some benefit to obeying what the Script says.
Therefore inspired God-breathed Scripture is profitable for:
what is right - teaching
what is not right - rebuking
how to get right - correction
how to stay right - training in righteousness.
Verse sixteen affirms God’s authorship of the Bible. This is backed up in another passage too:
2 Peter 1:20-21: 20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Once again we are told that it is God, through the Holy Spirit, who inspires men to speak God’s Word.
There is a duality of authorship in the books of the Bible. God is first and foremost, the main author of every book by His inspiration. The writer of each book becomes the additional author.
When the Holy Spirit inspired the writers, the Spirit did not erase the natural characteristics of the writers. God in His providence prepared the writers for the task of writing Scripture. Each writer, with his own style and vocabulary, recorded the Word of God. So when we read the Gospel of John for instance, we must identify God and John as the authors of the Book.
[Blog bonus - Theories of Inspiration:
Although the Bible does not show us exactly how Scripture was inspired, those who have closely examined Scripture have proposed many theories.
Neo-Orthodox Theory: Neo-Orthodoxy holds that God is utterly Transcendent. That is, God is so completely different and set apart from us that we cannot comprehend him apart from his revelation(s). The issue appears when neo-orthodoxy is compared to Evangelicalism regarding the Word of God. Proponents of neo-orthodoxy claimed that the Bible is a witness to the Word of God or that it in some sense contains the Word of God. Thus, the Bible contains people's experiences of God, yet, because they are finite and can commit error, their writings contained paradoxes or errors. The main problem with this theory is that the Timothy passage tells us that Scripture was inspired by God, therefore it is God’s Word and not just a witness.
Dictation Theory: Just as the name implies, theorists believe that God simply dictated what He wanted to be written down. Therefore, all the author did was write down as he was told from God and the end product was the Word of God. There is evidence in Scripture that God may have communicated a precise, word-for-word message to human authors, throughout all of Scripture He allowed writers to express their own personalities and styles as they wrote. Still, God’s intention was always accomplished through the Holy Spirit.
Limited Inspiration Theory: This view proposes that Scripture is inspired, yet it is limited to certain aspects. It affirms that God guided the writers, yet also allowed them the freedom to express their own thoughts regarding history and experiences they had. This allows the Bible to contain historical errors, yet, it is claimed that the Holy Spirit protected writers against any doctrinal error. Thus, the Bible may contain historical errors but it remains a reliable source of doctrine. If we believe the Bible to be inerrant and infallible, then this applies to the whole of Scripture. If there is one error, then we would potentially question all of the Scripture. The classic example is found in the Book of Jonah. Scripture tells us that Jonah was swallowed by a whale (a great fish) and spent three days and three nights in its belly. Jesus himself made mention of Jonah and Nineveh in the Gospel of Matthew. There are those today who preach from the pulpit that Jonah is simply a parable or merely an illustration.
Plenary Verbal Inspiration Theory: The word plenary means "full" or "complete". Therefore, plenary verbal inspiration asserts that God inspired the complete texts of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and including both historical and doctrinal details. The word verbal affirms the idea that inspiration extends to the very words the writers chose. The Holy Spirit guided the writers along with allowing them the freedom of their own personalities to produce the Bible we have today. This view recognises both the human and divine element within Scripture. We hold this theory to be true. It assures us that the Bible is trustworthy, therefore inerrant and infallible. We can trust that all Scripture can provide insight into the history of God’s people, God’s plan for our lives and tells us how to become all God wants us to be. Plenary verbal inspiration also assures us that the Bible is authoritative. Because it is God’s Word, it speaks with God’s authority.]
2. What The Bible Says About The World
The Scriptures are clearly inspired.
The inspired authors wrote about things that they would have no knowledge of, including scientific facts beyond their understanding.
The Bible is not a scientific book, but the Bible is scientifically accurate. A few examples:
The Earth is Round, Not Flat:
I saw something recently where someone was trying to denigrate those who believed in the Bible by saying, “I bet you still believe in a flat earth too!” This just showed their ignorance, for when science still believed in a flat earth the Bible taught it was round!
In the prophet Isaiah’s book, written 700 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, he recorded that the earth was round, long before science discovered it.
Isaiah 40:22: It is He that sits above the circle of the earth…
See also Job 26:10: He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, at the boundary of light and darkness. (NKJV)
Curiously, many astronomy textbooks credit Pythagoras (c. 570–500 B.C.) with being the first person to assert that the earth is round.
However, the biblical passages are older than this. Isaiah is generally acknowledged to have been written in the 700s B.C. and Job is thought to have been written around 2000 B.C. The secular astronomers before the time of Pythagoras must have thought the Bible was wrong about its teaching of a round earth, yet the Bible was exactly right. It was the secular science of the day that needed to be corrected [https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/taking-back-astronomy/the-universe-confirms-the-bible/]
The Existence of Gravity:
Job 26: 7: He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing. (NKJV)
This might evoke an image of God hanging the earth like a Christmas tree ornament, but hanging it on empty space. This verse expresses (in a poetic way) the fact that the earth is unsupported by any other object—something quite unnatural for the ancient writers to imagine. Indeed, the earth does float in space. We now have pictures of the earth taken from space that show it floating in the cosmic void. The earth literally hangs on nothing, just as the Bible teaches. [https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/taking-back-astronomy/the-universe-confirms-the-bible/]
The Expansion of the Universe
The Bible indicates in several places that the universe has been “stretched out” or expanded.
Isaiah 40:22: It is He who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
This would suggest that the universe has actually increased in size since its creation. God has stretched it out. He has expanded it (and is perhaps still expanding it).
This verse must have seemed very strange when it was first written. The universe certainly doesn’t look as if it is expanding. After all, if you look at the night sky tonight, it will appear about the same size as it did the previous night, and the night before that. Ancient star maps appear virtually identical to the night sky today. Could the universe really have been expanded? It must have been hard to believe at the time.
Secular scientists once believed that the universe was eternal and unchanging. The idea of an expanding universe would have been considered nonsense to most scientists of the past.
When the world believes one thing, and the Bible teaches another, it is always tempting to think that God got the details wrong, but God is never wrong.
Most astronomers today believe that the universe is expanding. This expansion is a very natural result of the physics that Einstein discovered—general relativity.
Moreover, there is observational evidence that the universe is indeed expanding. In the 1920s, astronomers discovered that virtually all clusters of galaxies appear to be moving away from all other clusters; this indicates that the entire universe is expanding.
This effect can be illustrated with points on a balloon. As the balloon is inflated, all points move farther away from each other. If the entire universe were being stretched out, the galaxies would all be moving away; and that is exactly what they appear to be doing.
It is interesting that the Bible recorded the notion of an expanding universe thousands of years before secular science came to accept the idea.[https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/taking-back-astronomy/the-universe-confirms-the-bible/]
[Blog bonus: More Confirmation the Bible is Inspired:
Conservation of mass-energy:
A very important concept in physics is the conservation of energy. This principle states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. There are a lot of different kinds of energy; heat, light, sound, and electricity are all forms of energy. We can change one type of energy into another and we can move energy from one place to another, but the total quantity of energy in the universe is constant and cannot be changed.
There is also a conservation principle of mass. Mass is the property of an object to resist a change in its motion. Things that possess a lot of mass are very heavy; things with little mass are light. We can move mass from place to place, and transform one kind of mass into another (by a chemical reaction for example), but, just like energy, mass cannot be created nor destroyed. So both mass and energy are conserved. In fact, Einstein was able to demonstrate that all energy possesses an equivalent mass, and vice versa. To put it another way, mass and energy are really the same thing manifesting in different ways. This is the meaning of Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2. We can combine these principles into the conservation of mass-energy. Colloquially speaking, the amount of “stuff” in the universe is constant.
Conservation of mass-energy is exactly what we would expect on the basis of Scripture. First, the Bible indicates that no new material can come into existence. This is indicated in John 1:3 and Genesis 2:2. John 1:3 states that all things were made by God, and nothing has come into existence apart from Him. Furthermore, God ended His work of creation by the seventh day of the creation week, according to Genesis 2:2. Since only God can bring new things into existence from nothing, and since God ended His work of creation by the seventh day, no new material will come into existence today.
Second, the Bible suggests that nothing will cease to exist. This is because God is upholding all things by His sustaining power (Hebrews 1:3) and by Him all things consist (Colossians 1:17). Neither matter nor energy will cease to exist, because God is sustaining them, and since nothing new will come into existence, we can conclude that the amount of material in the universe is constant. Of course, the Bible makes room for miracles—supernatural interventions by God, but miracles (by definition) do not conform to the laws of physics; they are exceptions by their very nature. The universe itself obeys the law of conservation of mass-energy.
The number of the stars:
The Bible often uses the “stars of heaven” to represent an extremely large quantity. Genesis 22:17 teaches that God would multiply Abraham’s descendants “as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is on the sea shore.” Genesis 32:12 makes it clear that this represents a number which is uncountable by humans: “the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.”
These are excellent analogies. Clearly the sand of the sea and the stars in the universe cannot be counted exactly by humans, though of course, they can be roughly estimated. Interestingly, the two quantities come out to about the same order of magnitude: 1022, or ten billion trillion, give or take a factor of ten or so. (For other verses using stars as an illustration of large numbers, see Deuteronomy 1:10 and 10:22.)
It was not always believed that the stars were so numerous. The astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (A.D. 150) cataloged 1,022 stars in his work The Almagest. Many astronomers believed that these were the only stars that existed, even though Ptolemy never claimed that his catalogue was exhaustive. Of course, there are many more stars than this number. The total number of stars that can be distinctly seen (from both hemispheres under ideal, dark sky conditions) with the unaided eye is around 10,000. The precise number depends on how good one’s vision is.
Today, with the help of modern science, we have an even greater appreciation of just how innumerable the stars are. Powerful telescopes allow us to see stars much too distant and faint to be seen without optical aid. Even binoculars reveal countless multitudes of stars that cannot be seen by the unaided eye. It is estimated that our galaxy alone contains over 100 billion stars. Astronomers believe that there are more galaxies in the visible universe than there are stars in our own. Each of these galaxies would have hundreds of millions to trillions of stars. Modern science certainly confirms Genesis 22:17.
The Ordinances of Heaven and Earth:
The Bible teaches that the universe obeys physical laws—“the ordinances of heaven and earth” (Jeremiah 33:25). The universe is neither haphazard nor arbitrary; nature conforms to logical, mathematical relationships set in place by the Lord.
The laws of physics and chemistry are examples of these ordinances of heaven and earth. The clockwork precision of the planets as they orbit the sun is due to their strict obedience to God’s ordinances. The stars and planets are never late nor are they early. They do not fail to appear in their proper place at the proper time (Isaiah 40:26).
The laws of nature are consistent and logical, because the Creator is consistent and logical. We can trust that the same physics which worked yesterday will also work today. This principle is foundational to the scientific process. The very reason that science is possible is because the universe consistently obeys simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, God created our minds with an impressive (though finite) ability to interpret the data around us, and draw logical conclusions. We are therefore able to discover (at least to some extent) the ordinances of the universe by observation, experimentation, and logical reasoning. Once we understand the nature of these physical laws, we can use them to make accurate predictions about the future—such as computing the positions of the planets in advance.
Both earth and the rest of the physical universe (“heaven and earth”) obey the laws of nature. Many ancient cultures believed that the universe beyond earth was the realm of the gods. Indeed, the planets were often worshiped as gods. In reality, the planets are simply created objects which obey the same laws of nature which we can study on earth. In an incredible leap of insight, the biblical creationist Isaac Newton realised that the moon orbits the earth because the moon is pulled by earth’s gravity. The moon “falls” just like any other object; earth’s gravity deflects the moon’s path through space. Since the moon has a tangential (perpendicular to the line from the earth to itself) velocity, it falls “around” the earth rather than straight down. Newton also realised that the planets orbit the sun for the same reason; the sun’s gravity keeps them in their orbit. The planets and stars are not gods; they are mere creations (Genesis 1:14–19) in nature which obey the Lord’s ordinances.]
Taken directly from: [https://answersingenesis.org/answers/books/taking-back-astronomy/the-universe-confirms-the-bible/]
Wrapping This Up:
We begin to see the uniqueness of the Bible and understand that it was inspired by God.
We see that it is not the fiction of the writers, but it is “self-attesting,” that is it declares itself as reliable. It is God-breathed.
It’s inspiration is also seen in it’s knowledge of the unknowable (at the time of writing). It declares things that only God knew, for He created all things.
You hold in your hands the most powerful of books: it’s alive!
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