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2 Timothy 3:16
“All Scripture is breathed out by God.”
The one true God, who is three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—of the same essence, makes covenants with His people and gives them written documents that outline the terms and responsibilities of these covenants. These written documents, sixty-six in total, constitute the Bible. Moreover, the Bible has always been confessed by the church to be the very Word of God, inspired by our Creator Himself.
Our subject today is what it means that Scripture is inspired by God. Few passages are as significant for answering this question as 2 Timothy 3:16, which states that “all Scripture is breathed out by God.” Other versions translate “breathed out by God” as something like “inspired by God” or “given by inspiration of God,” but the English Standard Version gives an excellent literal rendering of the Greek. The Greek term translated as “breathed out by God” is theopneustos, which means “God-breathed.” Here Paul compares Scripture to the act of breathing during speech. When we speak, we breathe out air over our vocal cords to produce words. To say that Scripture is “breathed out by God,” then, is to say that God spoke the words of Scripture in such a way that they are His very words. Of course, we can also say that they are the words of the human authors of Scripture, which we will discuss more fully in our next study. Nevertheless, the words of Scripture are divine words, given by God Himself and possessing all the attributes that belong to God’s speech, including truth and authority.
Scripture tells us that it is the very Word of God in other ways as well, such as by referring to the words penned by a human author as the words of God Himself. For example, Hebrews 1:8–9 quotes Psalm 45 as something that the Lord says even though the psalm comes to us through the instrumentality of the “sons of Korah” (see superscription of Ps. 45). The psalm features the words of the sons of Korah, but those words are also fully the words of God.
B.B. Warfield, one of the most important theologians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has contributed much to our understanding of the Scriptures’ being God-breathed. He wrote in his article “God-Inspired Scripture” that the concept “affirms . . . that the Scriptures owe their origin to an activity of God the Holy Ghost and are in the highest and truest sense His creation.” Scripture, in short, is the very speech of God.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
In our day, many people are tempted to treat Scripture as something other than or less than the very words of God. Paul’s teaching on biblical inspiration, however, will not allow us to do that. To have the Bible is to have the very words of God Himself, so we must attend to them as we would attend to the Lord Himself.
For further study
- Ezekiel 1:1–3
- Hebrews 3:7–19
The bible in a year
- Genesis 25–26
- Matthew 9:1–17
- Genesis 27–30
- Matthew 9:18–10:15