“We … thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thessalonians 2:13)
Commentary from the sermon “Accepting God’s Word” by Alistair Begg.
“What Paul is claiming here for his own words is divine authority. What he’s saying here is that ‘we told you about the Old Testament Scriptures, and then we spoke to you. And when we spoke to you, the message that you heard from us you received as it is—the very word of God. …’ He says, ‘We do not bring the word of man’—logon anthrōpōn—‘but we brought to you logon theou. We brought you the word of God. We brought you theological words,’ if you like. And the testimony is that they received it as the very word of God.
“This is a reminder, just in passing, of what we understand as the dual authorship of Scripture. Because somebody might read this and say, ‘Well, that sounds strange to me. After all, surely it was Paul’s words. He said that he was the one who was teaching them; therefore, the words were coming out of his mouth, even though they’re now written down.’ The words of Isaiah were the words of Isaiah. They weren’t the words of Micah. They weren’t the words of Jeremiah. They certainly weren’t the words of John. They were his words. So who wrote Isaiah? Isaiah. Who wrote Isaiah? God. ‘You mean God and Isaiah wrote Isaiah together?’ Yes. … When God wanted the book of Isaiah written, He raised up an Isaiah. When God wanted the Pauline Epistles written, He raised up a Paul. And Paul speaks the very word of God, and the people receive it. They don’t just say, ‘We don’t need to listen to this.’ They receive it as it is: ‘the [very] word of God.’
“And Peter clarifies it when he says some of the things in Paul’s writings are ‘hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:16 NIV). But he says the way in which this whole thing works is that men were moved by God. The ‘prophecy of Scripture’ never ‘came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Peter 1:20–21 NIV 1984). That doesn’t mean that they said certain things, and then God breathed life into those things that they said, but it is that as God breathed out, He breathed out through the very instrumentation of those who were the authors of His Word and of Scripture—and that’s true in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.”
