What Is Inerrancy?
00:00:00.000 | Pastor John, in its most basic form, how do you define biblical inerrancy?
00:00:12.100 | Before I go to the definition of inerrancy, let me give you the soil or the roots of why
00:00:18.360 | you'd even ask that question.
00:00:21.160 | The 66 books of the Christian canon is what I'm talking about when I say Scripture or
00:00:28.520 | Bible.
00:00:30.320 | They are, we believe, inspired by God, 2 Timothy 3.16.
00:00:36.660 | Or to say it another way, 2 Peter 1.21, "No prophecy was ever produced by the will of
00:00:42.960 | man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."
00:00:49.680 | So the reason inerrancy rises is because we claim this book is the very Word of God.
00:00:58.280 | The center of God's revelation is Jesus, and He's called the Word of God incarnate.
00:01:07.360 | And He said, "Scripture cannot be broken."
00:01:11.600 | He said, "Until heaven and earth pass away, not a neota, not a dot, little as teeny little
00:01:16.080 | dot, neota, will pass away from the law until all is accomplished."
00:01:20.360 | So, the Word of God validates the Word of God written.
00:01:24.760 | The Word of God incarnate validates the Word of God written in the Old Testament.
00:01:29.880 | And then He commissioned apostles to speak His Word as the foundation of the church,
00:01:36.320 | and He promised when the Spirit of truth comes, truth, Spirit of truth comes, He'll guide
00:01:41.520 | you into all truth.
00:01:44.480 | So Jesus stands at the center as the Word of God incarnate, and looking back, He validates
00:01:49.440 | the Word of God written, and looking forward, He validates the Word of God written, and
00:01:54.240 | the apostles took it that way because they said amazing things about their authority.
00:02:00.120 | Paul said, for example, in 1 Corinthians 14, 37, "If anyone thinks that he's a prophet
00:02:07.520 | or spiritual, he should acknowledge the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord.
00:02:14.560 | If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized."
00:02:20.000 | That's incredible.
00:02:21.240 | And the only reason he has any right to say that is because he said, "We are teaching
00:02:26.080 | in words spoken not from men but from the Holy Spirit because Jesus promised, 'I'm
00:02:31.960 | going to guide my apostles into all truth.'"
00:02:34.880 | So there's the reason why the whole issue of inerrancy even arises.
00:02:40.840 | We have a book in front of us that claims to be the inspired Word of God.
00:02:49.480 | And since God doesn't lie and doesn't make mistakes, we say the Bible doesn't lie,
00:02:58.840 | doesn't make mistakes.
00:03:01.800 | What does error mean?
00:03:03.920 | If we're going to say inerrant—and by the way, I'm not one of those who gets bent
00:03:08.960 | out of shape about using the word inerrancy as over infallibility or truthfulness.
00:03:14.220 | To me, the average person out there, if you say the Bible is completely and totally true
00:03:20.100 | and the Bible is completely and totally infallible and the Bible is completely and totally inerrant,
00:03:24.460 | they're not hearing any distinctions.
00:03:26.340 | And I'm not either.
00:03:27.520 | So I don't like it when people quibble about these words.
00:03:31.640 | I think it's good to use them all to make sense out of the word inerrant.
00:03:40.300 | No error.
00:03:41.300 | We have to define error.
00:03:43.220 | What is it that isn't in this book?
00:03:45.980 | And we have to define error in terms of the author's intention.
00:03:52.720 | And in the Bible, since we've got God inspiring this book, we've got God's intention mediated
00:03:59.880 | through the intention of human authors and going beyond them—I would say always going
00:04:07.300 | beyond them—because he sees all the innumerable necessary implications of what they can't
00:04:15.180 | see.
00:04:16.180 | I include in meaning or intention the necessary implications of what an author says, some
00:04:26.500 | of which he can see and some of which he can't, and God can see them all.
00:04:31.860 | And therefore, when I think of the intention of the author, I'm thinking all that the
00:04:36.900 | human author intended to teach and all that God intended to teach, which is bigger always
00:04:46.020 | than what humans can see in their implications of what God inspired them to write.
00:04:52.860 | Now, the reason intention is crucial is because there are all kinds of ways that we say things
00:05:02.340 | that could be taken as error, which aren't error, if people didn't pay attention to
00:05:07.500 | our intention.
00:05:09.380 | I might say, "Tony, you scared me to death walking in here like that."
00:05:14.700 | You would not respond to me, "You're a liar," or "You're a fool because you're still breathing."
00:05:19.820 | You wouldn't, because you wouldn't know this is an idiom for "You really scared me."
00:05:25.940 | You wouldn't quibble over the fact that I'm not dead.
00:05:28.800 | You wouldn't say, "Error, error."
00:05:31.080 | And so we have to be alert to those kinds of things in the Bible.
00:05:36.500 | What did the author mean or what did he intend?
00:05:39.820 | Another example would be in Job, the book of Job.
00:05:42.640 | You got 29 chapters of erroneous theology.
00:05:47.380 | Job is putting sentences in his inerrant book that are full of errors.
00:05:54.180 | The counsel of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar is bad counsel.
00:06:01.060 | And Job is telling the story and including the bad counsel.
00:06:06.020 | So what you have to do to say, "Now, how is the book of Job inerrant?"
00:06:10.480 | The book of Job is inerrant, not because it doesn't include stupid sentences from Eliphaz,
00:06:17.160 | but because Job has written it in such a way that we know they're stupid and we know they're
00:06:22.400 | erroneous, and thus he makes a true point by pointing out the falsehood of the bad theology
00:06:29.240 | in his book.
00:06:30.240 | That's the way literature works.
00:06:32.080 | That's the way we talk.
00:06:34.300 | We are inerrant when the thing we're teaching is true and not false.
00:06:42.640 | So what I mean by the Bible being inerrant is that the biblical authors, with God as
00:06:50.040 | their guide, do not teach anything false or command, as God's will, anything displeasing
00:06:59.000 | to God.
00:07:00.000 | Or to say it another way, what the authors intend for us to understand or obey, properly
00:07:06.560 | understood in its nearer and wider context, is true.
00:07:13.920 | It's not misleading.
00:07:15.240 | It's not errant.
00:07:16.680 | It's not false.
00:07:18.560 | It corresponds to the way things really are.
00:07:21.520 | It commends behaviors and attitudes that God really wills.
00:07:27.480 | It raises many questions, and I would refer people to the Chicago Statement on Biblical
00:07:32.080 | Inerrancy because that document is sometimes treated superficially as being naive.
00:07:37.380 | It's not naive.
00:07:38.480 | If you read carefully the distinctions that are made in that document, it's a good guide
00:07:43.680 | for us, I think.
00:07:45.280 | So let me just close by saying I love this truth because I love the Bible because I love
00:07:51.400 | God.
00:07:52.400 | God, Word, inerrant, to me, are continuous.
00:07:57.520 | You can't break off—I can't break off anywhere in there and feel like I have treated
00:08:02.680 | God or His Word or the truth honorably.
00:08:06.740 | From history and from my own experience, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance
00:08:12.840 | of the truth of the Bible.
00:08:14.780 | We humans are incapable of finding out what we absolutely have to know.
00:08:21.640 | We can't overcome sin.
00:08:22.640 | We can't escape the wrath of God.
00:08:24.000 | We can't become new creatures.
00:08:26.040 | We can't walk pleasing to the Lord.
00:08:28.240 | God must reveal these things to us or we perish, and this he has done and continues to do by
00:08:36.200 | means of a written Word, the Bible.
00:08:39.860 | And when a person has understood what the Bible teaches, he has understood the revelation
00:08:45.920 | of God infallibly, inerrantly, verbally.
00:08:49.280 | Yes, very good.
00:08:51.360 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:08:52.740 | And please check out the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which can be found
00:08:55.880 | online for free, and it's not that long either.
00:08:57.920 | I think it's under 4,000 words or so.
00:09:00.560 | The easiest way to find it is just to Google the title, the Chicago Statement on Biblical
00:09:04.760 | Inerrancy.
00:09:05.760 | Well, do podcast preachers, preachers like you, Pastor John, and do podcasts like this
00:09:11.180 | one, make local church pastors irrelevant?
00:09:14.340 | Why or why not?
00:09:15.340 | We'll talk about this question tomorrow.
00:09:17.380 | I'm your host, Tony Rank.
00:09:18.380 | We'll see you tomorrow.
00:09:18.980 | [BLANK_AUDIO]
00:09:26.580 | [BLANK_AUDIO]