God is…the one who inspired the Bible.

Ask any Christian if they believe the Bible is inspired by God and they will (hopefully) answer yes.

But what does that mean?

Ask a few Christians and you might get a few different answers!

We’ll look at a few possibilities in a moment. But first, some might ask, does it even matter? Isn’t it enough just to believe that it’s inspired? Do we need to know the details of how it worked? Does it actually make a difference to your faith?

Let’s find out, shall we?

There are two essential things to be aware of.

First, the Bible is from God. What does that mean? It means that the Bible has God’s authority behind it. We can trust that what it says is true and accurate, because God himself stands as its guarantor.

Whenever you read a non-fiction book or a newspaper account, or someone tells you a story from their life, there are certain questions you might ask. Is this account truthful? Does this person really know what they’re talking about? Were they really there? Are they just repeating what they’ve been told by someone else? Are they embellishing the story for dramatic effect? Do they have certain biases that might skew the way they remember or tell it? Is there another side to this story I need to consider?

For example, a story told about World War II by a veteran who was actually there is likely to be far more reliable than one told by someone born decades later, who may be only passing on vague secondhand details and inventing the rest.

A description of a political protest that turned violent is likely to be told very differently depending on the political views of the person telling it. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, as the saying goes.

An attempt to disprove or debunk an established scientific theory or historical narrative will be taken much more seriously if the person making it actually has qualifications and experience in the field concerned.

If you are a Christian who believes the Bible is inspired by God, you don’t have to constantly ask these questions about the claims it makes. You can trust that its message is true and accurate because God knows everything and always tells the truth.

Now that doesn’t mean every single sentence in the Bible should always be taken as literally true. The Bible was written for human beings to understand. That means it contains literary devices such as poetry, hyperbole and figures of speech.

When the Bible says “the sun rose”, it’s not suggesting that the sun moves relative to the Earth – it’s describing the passage of time in a way that humans understand.

Or when the Bible talks about stars falling to the earth, it’s not literally suggesting that faraway suns will collide with our planet – it’s using figurative language to describe political events on Earth.

That’s the first thing to keep in mind when we consider inspiration. It means the Bible can be trusted in a way that books of purely human origin cannot.

The second thing to keep in mind, however, is that the Bible is at least partly of human origin.

It’s inspired by God but that doesn’t mean the human authors had no independent input whatsoever.

Inspiration by God does not mean that every single word in the Bible was specifically chosen by God, as if he dictated each of the 66 books word for word to the original writers. That would reduce them from being writers to simply being scribes (and some of the Bible writers had scribes of their own, such as Jeremiah with Baruch or Paul with Tertius).

There are passages in the Bible where it’s impossible to deny that we’re seeing genuine human emotion and expressions of faith. Look at David’s psalms, for example. They would lose almost all of their impact if they were not written by David himself from the heart.

Or consider the bewildered and utterly awestruck reactions of Daniel and John when given extraordinary prophetic visions by God.

So how does it work?

I would not claim to know exactly how inspiration works. I don’t think anyone can claim that. The only way to know would be for God to tell us, and to the best of my knowledge he hasn’t done so.

But what it means in practice is that we have a collection of 66 books written by human beings in a way that has God’s authority behind each one, guaranteeing that what it says about God, about Jesus and about historical events, is true and accurate.

In some cases that could mean God gave the writers knowledge and understanding they couldn’t have arrived at on their own.

Or it could mean that God somehow ensured their written accounts, poetry and letters did not contain any errors that would cause his message to be misunderstood.

Now just as some people take the first point too far and insist God chose every single word, other people take the second point too far and reduce the Bible to being almost entirely (if not entirely) the work of human beings.

For example, some people will argue that the Old Testament descriptions of God’s actions, or the laws he gave to his people, or the commands he gave to wipe out their enemies during and after battle, are not accurate descriptions of what God actually said or did. They’re simply the author’s best attempt to describe God as he (the author) perceived him. Or they’re the product of a nascent people group (the Israelites) seeking a collective identity in a hostile world and latching on to the idea that they’ve been specifically chosen by God (and then justifying their military expansionism as having been commanded by that God).

Or they might argue that when the letters of Paul give instructions on how we ought to live (for example, when Paul forbids same-sex relationships for Christians…) that Paul’s words don’t carry the moral authority of God – they are simply a product of Paul’s own perspective based on his traditionally Jewish patriarchal upbringing. Other Christians might have a different perspective…

For these people, the only words that can truly be trusted as authorised and inspired are the words of Jesus himself. This is despite the fact that Jesus himself didn’t actually write any of the Bible text. We only know what he said and did through the four gospel writers. I’ve yet to hear an explanation for why we can trust those 4 books implicitly but not the other 62.

So what can we say about inspiration?

We don’t know how it works. We haven’t been told.

Inspiration means that the 66 books of the Bible have the authority of God behind them and can be considered accurate and reliable in what they say about him and his message to humanity, in a way that no other book can.

It also means that those 66 books contain genuine input from the human writers themselves. These are the words of people who encountered God, perhaps spoke to him or received visions, and who wrote down what they’d learned in various literary genres and cultural settings. They didn’t make it up or invent it. It wasn’t just their limited perspective on the matter. What they wrote down contains the sum of what God wanted us to know.

May he bless our reading and understanding!