Four Vital Matters:
Unique Message, Validity, Inspiration, Inerrancy
The Bible's Unique Message
In taking the three steps necessary for grasping Matt. 6:24, we discover that to enjoy God fully we are to serve Him as a client serves a patron provider (e.g. a physician). We are NEVER to serve Him as an employee serves an employer. So all of God's directives in the Bible must be understood on the analogy of a doctor's prescription, and never as a job description.It was a student in a Berean class in 1979 who first showed me that Matt. 6:24 necessarily implies that God is working for us and not vice versa. I first learned of this unique message of the Bible, however, from hearing my mother claim Psalm 37:5, "Commit your way to the Lord; trust also in Him, and He will work." She would say, "What a comfort to know in afflictions and adversities that when I commit matters to God He will work and make things happen so that in His time stumbling blocks become stepping stones."
Isaiah 64:4 provides a most striking statement of the Bible's unique message: "From of old no one. . . has perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides thee, who works for those who wait for him." See also Psalm 123:2, where God certainly acts differently from the way masters treat servants in human experience.
The Old Testament biblical theologian Walther Eichrodt noted how Israel's consciousness of God, unlike that of her Canaanite neighbors, excluded "fear of arbitrariness and caprice in the Godhead." Repeatedly Israel had experienced God's supernatural interventions on her behalf and declarations of His purpose for her in world history. So Israel viewed herself as God's people, "that is to say [as] a people possessing unity in their situation as clients of a common God." (Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker, 2 vols. {Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961}, 1:38, 40, italics added.)
At the Last Supper, as His disciples argued about which of them was best at ministering to Him, Jesus retorted, "[But] I am among you as one who serves [you]" (Lk. 22:27).
This unique theme of the Bible greatly affects our understanding of what it means to believe in Jesus for salvation.
Proving the Bible's Validity
After comparing the Bible's message with the teachings of other religions it becomes evident that its teaching about a God who works for people is unique. Tragically, however, this message is absent from many Christian traditions that have not kept on testing their teachings against biblical theology so that they might "always be reforming themselves" (semper reformandum).As recently as 1990 it dawned on me that the Bible's unique message provides the quickest proof of the Bible's truth. The proof (Quod Erat Demonstandum -- "what was to be proven" -- Q.E.D.) comes with step #3.
Step #1 The human ego is completely averse to the idea of a God who works for people, because that idea gives the ego no room for pride. So in other religions, as well as tradition-bound Christianity, we hear much talk about our obligation to work for God.
In Islam, for example, one works for Allah and earns "recompense" and "wages" from him (Koran 39:35-36; 55:49-60). But in Acts 17:25 Paul said to the proud Athenians, "God is not served by human hands as though he needed anything."
Step #2 How did the Bible, penned by humans, ever come up with this message so offensive to the human ego? The answer begins with an axiom, a self-evident proposition, verifiable by the absurdity of its denial. The axiom is that every effect must have a commensurate cause. The Bible is an effect. What caused it and brought the Bible into being, however, cannot lie within the realm of human dynamics because human nature hates this message. But since every effect must have a cause, we have to leave the first floor of human dynamics and go upstairs to the "second story" of God's enablement to find the cause for the Bible's existence. 2 Peter 1:21 talks of how writers of scripture "spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." This explains the unique message of the Bible. It exists here on the first story because the Holy Spirit countered the egos of the Bible's revelatory spokespersons and moved them to write a message totally abhorrent to their egos.
Step #3 Therefore (Q.E.D.), the Bible's message is true, because its existence can be explained only as a work of Almighty God.
Verbal Inspiration
In that God moved people to pen such a message we agree with Paul's statement in 1 Cor. 2:13 that he and the Bible's other revelatory spokespersons did not use "words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches." This is one of the statements that leads us to develop the theory of verbal inspiration. Such inspiration, however, is not stenographic dictation because the biblical writers' styles, personalities, and vocabularies are of a wide variety. Verbal inspiration understands that God chose from a given writer's vocabulary and style the wording that would accurately express the meaning He wanted to transmit in the Bible.The Bible's Inerrancy
The intention of the biblical writers was to "make people wise unto salvation" (2 Tim. 3:15). The trustworthiness of every written or verbal utterance therefore is measured against its intention. For example, we do not lose confidence in our doctors' medical expertise if one of them illustrates a prescribed health regimen by referring to a certain baseball team but puts the wrong player on it. Our confidence in physicians would not be shaken by such a discrepancy, for their trustworthiness is measured against their aim to be medical practitioners and not sports analysts. The Bible is thus inerrant in that its writers use precisely the right words (verbal inspiration) to teach us how to be saved from God's condemnation and from our inbred foolish behavior patterns.Jesus taught biblical inerrancy when he said to some religious leaders, "You err, not knowing the scriptures. . ." (Matt. 22:39). In Matt. 13:32, however, he also said that the mustard seed "is the smallest of all the seeds," when today botany knows of even smaller seeds.
In his omniscience as God Jesus knew exactly which seed was the smallest in all earth's flora. But Jesus' purpose was to speak of how something small would do something immense. The best way to do that was to use an example meaningful to his hearers. Thus it would have meant nothing to talk of a seed about which his hearers knew nothing. So Jesus accommodated his perfect knowledge about small seeds to the imperfect knowledge his hearers had on this subject--all to make his hearers wiser unto salvation. Jesus would in fact have spoken error by being scientifically accurate, because he was not intending to teach botany. Thus The Bible is inerrant in everything that it teaches, but not necessarily in things it merely touches upon.
So one wonders about the need for the efforts of some Christian apologetes today to harmonize the recent findings of paleontology and carbon 14 with the biblical account of the origin of the human race at the beginning of the 4,000 years of the Bible's chronology. The sequence of events in redemptive history such as creation, the Fall, and the flood, is essential to a biblical theology that makes us wise to salvation. But the amount of time in between such events is not essential to faith. So efforts to harmonize the Bible with current scientific finds do nothing that faith needs in order to be wise unto salvation. In fact such efforts can be dangerous "red herrings" that distract people's attention away from the teaching on which their souls' destiny hangs.
My Unity of the Bible (Zondervan, 1992), begins with the creation of Adam and Eve and proceeds to build a system of biblical theology on the time-line sequence of the Bible's redemptive history ("a method entirely new"--Jonathan Edwards, and echoed more recently by Oscar Cullmann who said, "A dogmatics . . . of redemptive history. . .ought to be written some day" -- Salvation in History, 1967, p. 292). The historicity of these events, along with the meaning Scripture assigns to them and their sequence, is indispensable to the intended meanings of the biblical writers, whose message we cannot afford to miss.
Therefore it is this "whole purpose of God" (Acts 20:27) that must be applied to our lives so that we become Christ like. As Oscar Cullman has said, "If the decision of faith intended in the New Testament [and the OT] asks us to align ourselves with that sequence of events, then the sequence may not be demythologized, de-historicized, or de-objectified [but taken as it is given]. . . . This means that the message about these events must be taken seriously as a report about something that has happened objectively" (Cullmann, Salvation in History, p. 70).
So let no one think that my insistence on the Bible's purpose "to make us wise unto salvation" (2 Tim. 3:15) lets me mythologize the "first Adam" or be indifferent to the sequence of events in redemptive history. Such talk threatens the validity of that "whole purpose of God" which was the foundation for Paul's three years of preaching at Ephesus.
Send comments to dfuller@fuller.edu (Daniel Fuller)