God's Pen

With the New Year, Surge kicked off with a bang last night beginning a 4-week discussion of the Authenticity of God's Word.  And what better way to start the conversation than asking if God really wrote the Bible.  A pretty straight forward question with a less than simple answer.

Before we even started thinking about that, I did a little "pop" quiz about pop music.  I listed the names of some pretty well known songs and gave the kids a multiple choice selection of people to choose from.  I then asked them to select which person wrote the song.  As we went through the 3 songs, the kids picked out the artists known for singing the songs fairly easy, but that isn't what we were looking for.  Afterward, I revealed the names of the songwriters, of which none of them had ever heard of a single person listed.  After all, we tend to accredit a song to the performer, rather than the person who creates the lyrics.  But no matter how passionate the singer sings or how well they hit the notes, the words are the songwriter's.

In much the same way, God used many "singers" to communicate His Word.  They were authors from all sorts of walks of life.  And whether the person who penned the words was Moses, Paul or any of the other 40 writers, we know that there was only one Author.  But how does that work?  How does a man write down God's word, especially when God isn't sitting there telling him the words to write?

We started in 2 Peter 1 and looked at verses 19-21.  In it we are told that none of the prophets who told of what was going to happen did so within their own understanding.  It was not their words or their ability to see what was coming.  Omniscience is one of the characteristics completely reserved for God that makes Him God.  Even Jesus limited his own ability when he was on Earth because he didn't find equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, it was the Holy Spirit revealing to those men the words that God wanted them to say.  The Spirit was their guide.  And so, the words are written down on paper by man but directed by God.

We don't know why God chose to do it this way.  It is certainly within God's ability to write down the words Himself or even to speak a fully-canonized, perfectly-translated, leather-bound Bible into existence, complete with footnotes and cross-referencing.  However, He choose to use men - regular, sinful, fallen men - to communicate the most important words ever written down.  Men from all walks of life, over the course of thousands of years and all over the Mediterranean world.

And why did He go through all of that?  What was the purpose behind giving us His written word?  We flipped back a few books to 2 Timothy and looked at verses 14-17 in chapter 3.  In it, we see God's point in giving us His written Word.  It was to guide us, to help us fix our mistakes, to reveal truth and ultimately to offer us a solution to the problem of sin by the grace of God through faith in His son.  And we are told that all scripture is God-breathed.  From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, all of the words are God's and He gave them to us to help us.

While David, Solomon, Micah, James, John and dozens of other had the privilege of being the instruments of communicating God's story, we can be confident that the Word is completely His and exists to draw us closer to Him and bring glory to His name.