2 Timothy 3:16

Timothy was committed to the divine authority of the Word of God. He saw the authority of the Word of God. Paul says to him by way of reminder, All Scripture is breathed out from God. That’s authoritative, the Scripture is the Word of God, not of man. In John 10:35 Jesus said the Scripture can’t be broken. You can’t break it anywhere. It hangs together. It is totally together like a fragile piece of glass. Break it in one part and it will crash. It hangs together, it is in total, the inspired Word of God, it is in part the inspired Word of God.

All Scripture, this is distinct from the term in verse 15 the sacred writings. The sacred writings, refer to the Old Testament, here Scripture refers to the Old and the New even though the New was not yet fully written, there were still some books to be penned, still the word Scripture is an all-encompassing word. It refers to all of the writings, all of the writings that God gave us.

1 Timothy 5:18 is discussing elders and their compensation and their service, Paul says, “For the Scripture says,” and then he quotes two things, “you shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing,” that is a quotation out of Deuteronomy 25:4, the Scripture referring to the Old Testament. Then he says, “And the laborer is worthy of his wages,” that quote is from Luke 10:7.

Why is that important?

Scripture says, and he quotes Deuteronomy, that’s Old Testament. Scripture says, and he quotes Luke and that’s the New Testament. That is Paul calling Luke Scripture, New Testament is Scripture. Second Peter 3:16, very important verse, 2 Peter 3:16 speaks of the beloved brother Paul in verse 15 and he wrote to you as also in all his letters, so now he’s referring to all Paul’s letters. And he says he speaks in these letters of things which are hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, now follow, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. This is Peter calling Paul’s writing Scripture, just like the rest of the Scripture. Paul says Luke wrote Scripture. Peter says Paul wrote Scripture. This is Scripture, New Testament, and Old Testament.

So God has given us His Word, all Scripture. If you go into the gospel of John you’ll find that Jesus affirms the New Testament is inspired Scripture. When Jesus was giving promises to the disciples, you remember He said things like this, “The Holy Spirit shall bring to your remembrance all that I said,” that’s a promise for inspiration to the writers of the gospels. You’ll remember all I said. They wrote in the gospels the record of Jesus’ deeds and words.

Then Jesus said, “The Spirit of truth shall guide you in to all truth, teach you all things,” that’s a promise for inspiration in the epistles. Guide you in to all truth, truth you haven’t yet heard and teach you all things. And then Jesus said, “The Holy Spirit shall bear witness and you will bear witness.” That’s a promise of inspiration for the book of Acts. And then He says, “The Holy Spirit will teach you things to come,” and that’s a promise of inspiration for the book of Revelation which caps off the New Testament.

The four sections of the New Testament and in the implied meaning of Jesus in those words in John’s gospel, all are to be inspired by Him.

The Word of God

It is a battleground to really believe that Scripture is the Word of God. Now what does it mean “inspired by God”? The word inspiration means “God breathed out.” All Scripture is expired from God. It isn’t that God breathes into a writer and he writes. It is that God breathes out the word and the writer is caused to write it down. It isn’t that God blows on a man and he does something, it is that God speaks and the man records. It proceeds from God. That’s why it’s authoritative.

So, all Scripture is God-breathed, it isn’t God breathing into man some kind of inspiration so he can write, it is God breathing out truth which men then carried along by the Holy Spirit wrote down. God breathed the Scripture and caused men to write it down. It’s no different than creation. The greater book is the creation of the world, it says in Psalm 33:6, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made by the breath of His mouth, all their host.” God breathed out all creation and He breathed out His Word. The book of creation He wrote with His breath and the book of Scripture He wrote with His breath. Scripture is God’s Word.

“Forever, O Lord, Thy Word is settled in heaven,” says Psalm 119:89. 2 Peter 1:21 it describes the process, “No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” God spoke and they reiterated His Word.

The sufficiency of Scripture.

Timothy was called to adhere to the authority of Scripture, and its sufficiency. Those men who stand firm and true for the Word of God are men who not only affirm the authority of Scripture but they also affirm its sufficiency.

All Scripture is inspired by God and useful, the Word is useful, profitable. “It is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”

Scripture is useful for four things, the four necessary elements of spiritual growth, one, teaching. Imparting truth.

For reproof, refuting error. That’s the negative side. For correction, that literally means to straighten someone up.
And then training in righteousness, a word referring to a child, spiritual training. The Bible is adequate to teach, to correct or reprove, that is to refute error and produce conviction, to straighten someone up, restore and rebuild them and train them in righteousness.

With the end result that the people of God, the leader, the pastor and every other Christian may be adequate. That means perfect, mature, complete, fully qualified.

Hebrews 1;2, “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers by the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son.” Now that’s the statement I want you to focus on. I don’t intend to exhaust all of the ramifications of that statement, but in its simplicity it is abundantly clear and deeply profound. It’s giving us the essence of revelation. Mark that word, revelation in its simple sense means to reveal … to reveal, to make something known that prior was not known, to make something understood that was not understood, to disclose truth never before known. God has revealed Himself. And here you have a statement with regard to revelation. God spoke long ago and God has spoken in these last days.

The writer of Hebrews is in effect saying God spoke on two occasions. He spoke once long ago, and He speaks in these last days by His Son. I believe that we are fair in assessing the fact that he has in mind here Old Testament revelation and New Testament revelation. God spoke long ago to the Jewish fathers. Those were the Old Testament prophets, those who received God’s Word long ago under the old covenant. He spoke to those fathers by means of the prophets in many portions, many books, many sections. We know that, there is the Pentateuch and there are the prophetic books and the historical books and there are the books of poetry.

What process then did God use to reveal Himself? Look at 2 Peter 1. Now we go to the process God used to reveal Himself and that has come to be known as inspiration. In 2 Peter 1:20 it says, “Know this first … know this first, first of all … that no message,” the word “prophecy” here has a very generic sense not meaning some kind of prediction of the future, but message, no telling forth, “no message of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,”

What does that mean? It could mean releasing and that might be the truest essence of the term. No message from Scripture is of one’s own releasing. Some have suggested that the best way to translate it would be inspiration because that’s what it’s intending to say. No message of Scripture is a matter of one’s own inspiration. That is to say Scripture does not come out of inspired men in the sense that some men are inspired because of some level of religious genius. The genitive case here suggests that Peter has in mind source or origin of Scripture and that he’s really not talking about interpreting the Bible in the sense that you would describe what it means, but he’s talking about the origin so that it could say this, “No prophecy of Scripture is a matter of origination in one’s own mind.” No message of Scripture comes out of any human source, that’s the idea.

Scripture is not the product of men. It is not the product of the will of men. “But men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God,” very clear and very vital. No message was ever made, aorist passive indicative, the verb means to bear, carry along, convey, produce, bring forth, bring along. No message was ever conveyed, borne, carried along, produced, brought forth by an act of human will, but men—same verb, were borne along, carried along, conveyed, brought forth by the Holy Spirit to speak from God. The Holy Spirit filled them.

The content of the Bible is revelation. The process by which that content was written down is called inspiration. It wasn’t a high level of human activity, it wasn’t even a high level of religious human activity. Men were in the process but it didn’t originate with them and it didn’t come from their desire and their will, they were used as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit and enabled to speak from God. It was their personality. It was their background, some of their insights, their experiences, their perceptions, but ever word was the word of God. That’s the miracle of inspiration.

When you pick up your Bible, you’re not reading the word of men, you’re reading the Word of God that was written down by men who were moved along in the process by the power of the Holy Spirit. Not apart from their personalities and not apart from their experiences and not apart from their vocabulary and not apart from their heart passion and compulsion, but integrating all of that into the power of the Spirit of God and never compromising the truth that every word came from God, a great and glorious miracle, so vital.

So, God spoke in the Old Testament to the fathers by the prophets in many ways and in many portions. And God has spoken in the New Testament by His Son in the gospels and then about His Son in the rest of the New Testament. The process by which God gave us that revelation is inspiration and inspiration was God. He put His revelation in, as it were, the hands of men to be written down first to be spoken and proclaimed and then written down as they were energized, carried along by the Holy Spirit. Men were used and yet no word of God was ever violated.

Jeremiah is a good illustration of this process. Jeremiah, called by God from before he was born, “The word of the Lord came to me,” Jeremiah 4:1 “before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations. Then I said, Alas, Lord God, I do not know how to speak because I am a youth.” Verse 9, “And the Lord stretched out His hand, touched my mouth, the Lord said to me, Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.” What a tremendous statement. I have put My words in your mouth, that was the promise for the writers of Scripture. All Scripture is God breathed. All holy writing comes from God.

The Early Church and the Scripture

We recognize the divine uniqueness of Scripture. The early church recognized it. Even though it wasn’t until 393, 397, the Council of Hippo, the Council of Carthage, about that time, that the church sort of officially established the canon of Scripture comprehensively. It didn’t take that long for people to recognize it.

The church didn’t invent the canon of Scripture any more than Newton invented the law of gravity. Newton discovered gravity which God invented and the church from the very earliest discovered inspired documents which God Himself wrote. And though there was some time before some official church laid down some official label on all of it, it was eminently clear to the early church what was the Word of God and what was not the Word of God. And there are all kinds of erroneous books that have been left out. But what was the Word of God was the Word of God. God is the author of Scripture.

There are about 320 direct quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, about 1,000 inferences. The New Testament writers clearly believe the Old Testament was inspired. They also clearly believe their own New Testament was inspired. They knew they were writing the Word of God. And it wasn’t just some high level of human genius. They were moved by the Spirit of God to do what they otherwise could never do.

Some Crazy Views of Scriputure

There are some people who say, “Well, the Bible is inspired but only concepts, not the real words.” So don’t get bogged down in the word, just kind of grab the concepts and kind of go with the ideas and the flow, don’t worry about the words, that’s just details that get in the way.” You hear people say, “Well the spirit gives life, the letter kills,” and that kind of thing.

Well, how you communicate ideas without words. I’m not sure I understand that. How in the world could you communicate if you were God to somebody an idea without words? It doesn’t make any sense. When Moses wanted to excuse himself from speaking for the Lord because he wasn’t eloquent, God didn’t say, “I will be with your mind and teach you what to think,” He said, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what to say.”

Isaiah said, “I heard the voice of the Lord saying, and He said go and tell this people.” Jeremiah said, “The word of the Lord came unto me saying …” Ezekiel said, “He said unto me, Son of man I send thee to the children of Israel, all My words that I shall speak unto thee receive in they heart and hear with thine ears and go and speak to them.” It was words, not thoughts, without words, whatever they are. Amos said, “I was no prophet neither was I a prophet’s son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees and Jehovah took me from following the flock and Jehovah said to me, Go prophesy unto My people, Israel. Jehovah said to me.

Paul’s marvelous conversion experience, when he was confronted by Ananias, is recorded in Acts 22, “The God of our fathers has appointed thee to know His will and to see the righteous one and to hear a voice from His mouth.” God appointed Paul to listen to Him and speak what he was told.

You can’t have thoughts without words, that kind of concept is foolish. You might as well talk about a tune without notes, or music without a melody. You might as well talk about sun without light, or a sum without figures, or geology with rocks, or anthropology without men, as thoughts without words.

Then somebody else comes along and says, “Well, but the Bible is inspired when it speaks of sacred things, not when it talks about secular things like science and history and geography and all of that.” And you have to
deal with that periodically. There are those who say the history of the Bible is in error. The geography of the Bible is in error. The mathematics of the Bible is in error. The scientific statements of the Bible are erroneous. But don’t worry, inspiration only guarantees the sacred not the secular … which is like saying God is good at religious things but He really needs help in other areas. And there are all kinds of people who want to attack the Bible on that basis.

You can study the Bible and it will predict things historically that are absolutely accurate. Ezekiel 30 predicted the destruction of Egypt. Nahum 1, the destruction of Nineveh. Isaiah 13, the destruction of Babylon. Hosea 13, the destruction of Samaria. Ezekiel 25, the destruction of Moab and Amon. One mathematician by the name of Peter Stoner took eleven of the prophecies with all their detail and calculated the probability of that occurring by chance, one in 5.76 times 10 to the fifty-ninth power.

He estimated it this way, that if the whole universe contained two trillion galaxies and each galaxy of two trillion had a hundred billion stars, we could make all the stars in all those galaxies two times ten to the fifth power out of silver dollars. Incredible number. These kinds of probabilities just don’t happen. So when you see the Bible speak scientifically, geographically, historically, or whatever it is, it’s accurate.

Have you ever thought, that in your life time, you will probably eat 150 head of cattle? Maybe a little more. You’ll eat at least 3,000 chickens, conservatively, 225 lambs, 26 sheep, you’ll eat 310 pigs in bacon and ham alone. Twenty-six acres of grain you will consume alone. And you will eat 50 acres of fruit and vegetables.

Remember what Jesus said, Men shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Our Bible is God’s breathed Word to us.