The Inerrancy of Scripture

The inerrancy of scripture is something we hear about in our culture today. Directly or indirectly we are challenged on the infallibility & inerrancy of the word of God

Things like:

“You trust a book written by men”

“These were uneducated laypeople”

“You get your morality from a book that thousands of years old?”

“You don’t know the original… it’s a giant game of telephone”

Even inside the church..

Seminaries & professors that teach the bible is fallible and full of error

New to the church (relatively)

Early Church - Augustine in 405 AD

“I have learned to yield this respect and honor only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error.”

Medieval - Thomas Aquinas 13th century

“nothing false can underlie the literal sense of Holy Scripture”

Reformation Era - Westminster 17th century

Tyndale - “Scripture is that wherewith God draweth us unto him… and therein is nothing false or vain.”

Starts to be questioned in 1700s in enlightenment

By the mid 20th century, theologians, seminaries & even denominations were drifting from inerrancy

In October 1968, nearly 300 theologians & pastors gathered together to create & sign the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy to counter the drifting

Men like RC Sproul, Ji Packer, James Montgomery Boice, Norman Geisler, led the effort

3 Statements

1. God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God’s witness to Himself.

2. Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

3. The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning.

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.

5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

19 Affirmations & Denials

So why inerrancy?

Because I want you to trust your Bibles & be able to defend this

Definitions

Inerrancy -

“The inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.” - Grudem

“Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching…” CSBI

Infallible -

Inability to err

We can be inerrant

But we are not infallible. Scripture is inerrant because of it infallibility

Defense

The Bible is God’s word

Even if one doubts that reality, they can’t doubt the bible’s claim that it is God’s word

400+ times in OT “thus says the lord”

God speaks through prophets

1 Kings 14:18 “And all Israel buried him and mourned for him, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by his servant Ahijah the prophet.”

Deuteronomy 18:19 “And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.”

Jeremiah 37:2 “But neither he nor his servants nor the people of the land listened to the words of the Lord that he spoke through Jeremiah the prophet.”

NT Confirms OT

2 Timothy 3:15–16 “and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture (graphē) is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,”

graphē - referring to OT

Sacred writings in vs 15

50 times in OT and every time is referring to OT

2 Peter 1:21 “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Matthew 4:4 “But he answered, “It is written, “ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ””

Jesus quoting Gen 2

Genesis 2:24 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

Matthew 19:4–5 “He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?”

Also true of NT

2 Peter 3:16 “as he does in all his [Paul’s] letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”

1 Timothy 5:18 “For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” [Deut 25] and, “The laborer deserves his wages.”” [Luke 10:7]

Discussed last week other NT affirmations

1 Corinthians 14:37 “If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.”

God cannot lie

2 Samuel 7:28 “And now, O Lord God, you are God, and your words are true, and you have promised this good thing to your servant.”

Titus 1:2 “in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began”

Hebrews 6:18 “so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.”

Therefore, if all of scripture is God’s word, and God cannot lie, then all of scripture is free from error

Bible affirms this

Numbers 23:19 “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?”

Psalm 12:6 “The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.”

Proverbs 30:5 “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.”

In fact, Gods word is the standard of truth

John 17:17 “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”

Verbal plenary inspiration

Verbal - every word

Plenary - All of scripture

Jesus’ view

Matt 22 Sadducees challenge Jesus on resurrection with marriage and 7 brothers

Jesus answers

Matthew 22:29–34 “But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching. But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.”

Jesus is refuting them based on the tense of the verb

Have you not read what was… SAID to you by God

Quotes Exodus 1400 years before

The originals

Only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired & therefore inerrant

So what about our Bibles?

Not a game of telephone

We have over 5000 greek manuscripts of the NT. 0 original documents

With so many copies, we can recreate the original

copy notes by hand, spelling, duplicates, skipped lines, etc

Daniel Wallace, a leading bible textual critic says this

“We have more variants because we have more manuscripts. If you compare them, you find how much agreement there really is. Over 99% of these variants make no difference at all.”

Bruce Metzger (Princeton):

“The amount of variation among the manuscripts is both large and insignificant. No doctrine of the Christian faith depends upon a disputed reading.”

Bart Ehrman

“Most of the changes are completely insignificant, immaterial, and make no difference for the meaning of the text.” (Misquoting Jesus, 2005)

“The position I argue for in Misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”

— Bart D. Ehrman, interview appendix, Misquoting Jesus (2005)

Normal language

Ecclesiastes 1:5 “The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.”

Matthew 14:21 “And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.”

Imprecise language

Genesis 41:57 “Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, because the famine was severe over all the earth.”

In what it teaches, not says

“Inerrant in all that it affirms…”

Genesis 3:4 “But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.”

Bible doesn’t affirm that but records it

Style, grammar, spelling

We see different style, odd grammar, Paul runon sentences

Objections

We don’t know what the original says

There are contradictions & errors

If we reject inerrancy

God breathed but false? Is God lying to us

What can we trust to be true?

We become the ultimate authority

Who says it’s details only and not doctrine

You can trust the word

You can commit to the word

You can obey the word

You can stake your life on it, because Jesus did (legion of angels)