Who Wrote the Bible, Really?

To paraphrase Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is expired.”

“What!” says someone. “Does Scripture have an expiration date? I thought Scripture was inspired by God.”

That is traditionally the way the passage has been translated—in the King James Version, for example. Of course, people also say that Mozart was inspired, or that he was inspiring for those who hear him. They mean that there is a certain liveliness to his music, or perhaps that some creative force from outside of him empowered him as he wrote.

That’s not what we mean when we’re talking about the Bible. What Paul says is that all Scripture is theopneustos, “God-breathed” (NIV) or “breathed out by God” (ESV)—expired by Him. It is not that God took a writer or a body of writing and empowered them. No, God Himself breathed the Bible out. It has its origin in Him, no less than our own words emerge from within us on our breath.

But what does this mean, then, when we speak of Paul writing 2 Timothy or Moses writing the Law? Who can we say really wrote the Bible?

Dual Authorship

When we say God breathed out the Scriptures, we shouldn’t imagine that God made man into a mechanism, like a typewriter or a laptop—as if Jeremiah somehow or another went into a strange psychological neutrality, and before he knew what had happened, he had written a book. Nor is it a kind of fifty-fifty split, where God gave the outline and Jeremiah fleshed out the details, or where Jeremiah drafted and God edited. No, God wrote it, one hundred percent; and Jeremiah wrote it, one hundred percent.

Theologians call this the dual authorship of Scripture. William Hendriksen describes this process excellently: “The human authors were powerfully guided and directed by the Holy Spirit. As a result, what they wrote is not only without error but of supreme value for man. It is all that God wanted it to be.”¹ In other words, God, operating through His Spirit, guided the writing of the words of Scripture in such a way that every Word, without reservation, can be said to be His.

God, operating through His Spirit, guided the writing of the words of Scripture in such a way that every Word, without reservation, can be said to be His.

Yet Henriksen also explains that “the Spirit … did not suppress the personality of the human writer, but raised it to a higher level of activity …. And because the individuality of the human author was not destroyed, we find in the Bible a wide variety of style and language.”² Thus, the psalmist wrote the Psalms, and he wrote them from the depths of personal experience; and James wrote the epistle of James, leaning on and repeating the teachings of his older brother, Jesus. The individuality of the individuals involved comes through because they wrote organically. Yet, in a way that is true of no other book, they also wrote exactly what God intended them to write.

Concurrence

B. B. Warfield writes, “If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.”³ In other words, God, who is sovereign over all things, can bring about exactly the circumstances that will prepare His people to write His Word.

Through His sovereign ordaining of people and circumstances, God acted to write His own words to us in the Scriptures. The prophets and apostles indeed wrote them, but more importantly, God wrote them.

God, who is sovereign over all things, can bring about exactly the circumstances that will prepare His people to write His Word.

The theological term for this is concurrence. The life of Joseph in the book of Genesis gives us a clear picture of this concept. Speaking to his brothers, after all has been revealed, he says, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Gen. 50:20). The human activity was commitment on their part to the destruction of Joseph. Yet they were actually fulfilling the purpose of God, who was active in it all to save many people. In the same way (but without the evil intent), in the authorship of Scripture, human authors were completely active in writing out the Scriptures, and God was completely active in composing—breathing out—the book of salvation through them.

This means that Luke, as he was writing his Gospel, didn’t hear a voice and write down what it said. No, he testifies that “it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account” (Luke 1:3). His Gospel comes from the mind, desires, and motivations of Luke. Yet God had prepared Luke, with all of his historical acumen, with all of his medical input, with all of his eye for detail, to write exactly the Gospel he wrote.

The Spirit’s Work

Finally, God is actually superintending the process. As Hendriksen says, God “suggested to the mind of the human author that language (the very words!) and that style, which would be the most appropriate vehicle for the interpretation of the divine ideas for people of every rank and position, age and race.”⁴ In other words, “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). God actively worked in and through them as they spoke or wrote.

It was the work of the Spirit of God to advance the truth of God in the lives of the apostles of God and then through them to others.

In John 14:26, as He was preparing to leave His disciples and return to the Father, Jesus told them, “The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” In 16:13 He adds, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” It was the work of the Spirit of God to advance the truth of God in the lives of the apostles of God and then through them to others.

Jesus received the words that He spoke from His Father (John 17:7–8). Jesus in turn gave them to the apostles. The apostles, under the invisible direction and jurisdiction of the Spirit like the prophets before them, spoke those words to those who would come to believe in Jesus. And they wrote them down.

What the Bible Tells Us

Sinclair Ferguson writes, “The Scriptures do not tell us everything about everything.”⁵ You can’t go in the Bible and find out how to improve your golf swing. You won’t find the name of person you’re meant to marry. You won’t find a recipe for overnight oats. Those things aren’t in there. They’re not supposed to be.

But Ferguson reminds us, “Scripture teaches us something about everything.”⁶ When you go in the Bible, you discover—from dozens of authors over thousands of years—one compelling story showing that salvation belongs to the Lord and explaining the why of it all. It tells us about the origin and ultimate destiny of humankind. It tells us about the world that God made. It tells us about God. It tells us what we must do to be saved.

God tells us. The Bible is a book breathed out by God. This is why the Bible is the priority, authority, and sufficiency of all Gospel ministry. May we learn, then, to say with the disciples, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

This article was adapted from the sermon “Scripture: God-Breathed” by Alistair Begg.