Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1231 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Inspiration Was a Process - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1231 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word. Last week we began a new series on Mastering the Bible. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday will be Mastering the Bible through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better.  When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers did. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering The Bible – Inspiration Was A Process

Insight Three: Inspiration Was a Process, Not an Event
Dr. Heiser brings some very solid insights into the topic of Biblical inspiration.  Because the Bible quite clearly calls itself inspired which indicates “God-breathed” in 2 Timothy 3:16, we tend to think about inspiration as an otherworldly event. That’s a misconception. The Bible is a divine book, given what 2 Timothy 3:16 says, but it’s also a thoroughly human book. Let me read that verse: All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. Failing to grasp its humanness of inspiration can lead to all sorts of problems in understanding it and can even cause doubt about its authenticity. Embracing the humanity of the Bible is enormously helpful for understanding what’s in the Bible and why it says the things it does.

For example, we have four Gospels. Three of them - Matthew, Mark, and Luke - overlap in content a lot of the time with respect to what they include about the life of Jesus. But they often have things in a different order. Dialogue isn’t always the same. Certain details of episodes in the life of Jesus might be in two accounts and missing in the third. And when it comes to the Gospel of John, 90 percent (literally) of what’s in that Gospel isn’t in the other three.

One thing for sure isn't part of the explanation: the notion that the words dropped from heaven or were downloaded into the brains of the Gospel writers. The notion that God handed out every word just doesn’t work with the Gospels. The Bible never describes inspiration that way. It does describe very human acts. Writers record events and thoughts. They build arguments. They express themselves in poetry. They use sources. They create links between their work and other parts of Scripture.

Writing involves work and careful thought. Biblical books were not slapped together. The Bible bears the marks of human decision making on every page and in every paragraph. Biblical literature follows the conventions of the day for competent, professional writing. Authors are sensitive to genre, structure, literary devices, word choice, poetic parallelism, and narrative art. No part of any biblical book, “just happened.”