On the Verbal Inspiration of Scripture

Verbal inspiration of Scripture is the truth that the Bible is exactly word-for-word what God wanted to say. This doctrine has been under attack by liberals and post-moderns. They argue that God did not put the writers of Scripture in a trance and use their bodies to write the Bible, nor did audibly dictate to them exactly what to write like a boss to a worker. And we agree with both of these statements. So how did God get word-for-word what He wanted out of the writers? Below is a great quote by Gordon Clark on this topic…

“Verbal inspiration therefore must be understood in connection with the complete system of Christian doctrine. It many not be detached there from, and a fortiori it may not be framed in an alien view of God. Verbal inspiration is integral with the doctrines of providence and predestination. When the liberals surreptitiously deny predestination in picturing God as dictating to stenographers, they so misrepresent verbal inspiration that their objections do not apply to the God of the Bible. The trouble is not as the liberals think, that the boss controls the stenographer too completely; on the contrary, the analogy misses the mark because the boss hardly controls the stenographer at all.

Put it this way: God, from all eternity, decreed to lead the Jews out of slavery by the hand of Moses. To this end he so controlled events that Moses was born at a given date, placed in the water to save him from an earthly death, found and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, given the best education possible, driven into the wilderness to learn patience, and in every way so prepared by heredity and environment that when the time came, Moses’ mentality and literary style were the instruments precisely fitted to speak God’s words.”

Gordon H. Clark – God’s Hammer, The Bible and Its Critics