Articles
Inspiration of the Bible (6)
Inspiration of the Bible (6)
By Mike Willis
I have been writing articles on reasons for believing that the Bible is inspired of God, meaning that God superintended the writing of the Bible so that it is His revelation of His will to mankind. I have previously shown several proofs of the Bible’s claim for itself: its remarkable unity, fulfilled prophecies, and the absence of contemporary science. Another sign of the Bible’s unique character is the unmistakable honesty of the Biblical authors in writing about its heroes. This is so unique that some superintending influence is needed to explain it.
Pagan writers of pre-Christian days invariably represented their gods as blindly partial to their friends. Whenever their kings suffered loss, the non-Israel authors attributed their loss to the opposition of another god. Not so with the Bible. When Israel went into Assyrian captivity or Babylonian exile, their prophets attributed her defeat at the hand of foreign nations to a chastisement from their own God. As a matter of fact, when Moses gave the Law to Israel he foretold what would happen to Israel should she turn away from obedience to the Mosaical Law in Deuteronomy 28:15-68 and much of its subsequent history records the fulfillment of what God had promised through Moses.
By contrast, pagan kings bragged about their victories and did not record their losses. We only know about their losses from the records of their enemies. Not so with the Biblical writers. Both military victories and losses are recorded, usually attributing their losses to Israel’s own sins. You do not find such honesty in ancient writings about one’s own nation.
The sins of the Biblical “heroes” are recorded just as faithfully as are their virtues. In the book of Numbers, Moses told of his own sin in giving glory to himself and Aaron, rather than to God, when God provided water from a rock to supply Israel’s needs while in the desert (Num. 20:1-13). Although David was a successful military hero, king of Israel, and a spiritual leader as shown by the psalms that he wrote, the author of 1-2 Samuel recorded the story of his sinful conduct with Bathsheba—lusting after her, calling her to his palace, committing adultery with her, trying to cover up his role in Bathsheba’s pregnancy by bringing her husband Uriah home from the battlefield so that he might think the baby was his own, and when that failed, having Uriah killed in action (2 Sam. 11-12).
- Although Peter was one of the leading apostles and was a great leader in the early church, all four gospels record the incident after the arrest of Jesus when Peter denied Jesus three times (Matt. 26:69-75; Mark 14:66-72; Luke 22:55-62; John 18:25-27). The authors of the gospels, two of whom were Apostles, record their own ignorant questions are recorded (Matt. 15:16) and describe the unflattering worldly ambitions of James and John (Matt. 20:21).
Other examples could be cited by considering biblical account of the failures of Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Barak, Samson, Eli, Samuel, etc.
All human authors are selective in what they think are significant events in their historical narratives and biographies, but they tend to minimize the negative in the ones they love and highlight the negatives in those they wish to depict as enemies. That is significantly different from what one reads in the Bible. There is an unmistakable honesty in the biblical narrative that commends itself to its readers.
