Was Any Biblical Writer Aware He Was Inspired?

00:00:00.000 | Steve in Nashville writes in with today's question. Pastor John, thank you for your ministry. To your knowledge, were any writers of the Bible

00:00:07.820 | self-consciously aware that they were being inspired by the Holy Spirit as they wrote? What would you say, Pastor John?

00:00:14.820 | Let me answer by pointing to three authors of Scripture or at least three kinds of writing in Scripture.

00:00:22.780 | Even though

00:00:24.860 | we're not

00:00:26.180 | given a window

00:00:28.700 | onto the very moment when the Old Testament prophets put their oral prophecies into writing,

00:00:35.180 | I think it's fair to infer that

00:00:38.260 | since they knew God was giving them words of his very own to speak orally,

00:00:45.280 | he would also take care to help them preserve those words when they or others came to write them down.

00:00:53.480 | If you look up in a concordance,

00:00:57.500 | how many times in the Old Testament the phrase

00:01:01.140 | "Thus says the Lord"

00:01:04.480 | occurs?

00:01:06.660 | You will find in the ESV that it occurs

00:01:10.220 | 417 times. Wow. That's incredible.

00:01:14.680 | 351 of those, and by the way, that's only "Thus says the Lord." It might be "says the Lord" or

00:01:24.020 | "says God" or I only looked up that one phrase. There may be hundreds and hundreds of others with various wording.

00:01:31.020 | 351 of those occur in the books of the prophets, and in some of these cases God himself

00:01:38.540 | says to the prophet that they should say "Thus says the Lord."

00:01:42.900 | Like Jeremiah 11 3, "You shall say to them 'Thus says the Lord' or Zechariah 6 12,

00:01:49.860 | and say to them 'Thus says the Lord' or Isaiah 38 5, 'Say to Hezekiah,

00:01:55.640 | "Thus says the Lord God." And the point is that God intended

00:02:00.860 | for his authoritative spokesman to know that they were speaking

00:02:06.300 | authoritatively for him.

00:02:09.020 | Now, we should remind ourselves, I think, that the reason we embrace the Old Testament

00:02:14.980 | Scriptures as God's Word is not

00:02:19.620 | insanely because every author makes explicit that he was inspired by God. They don't.

00:02:26.340 | But that the Lord Jesus

00:02:28.940 | himself

00:02:31.020 | put his seal on

00:02:33.020 | the authority and the inerrancy of the Old Testament in several places in the New Testament, like John 10 35.

00:02:40.500 | "The Scripture cannot be broken," Jesus said.

00:02:43.820 | And that the Scriptures themselves

00:02:47.940 | reveal a

00:02:49.940 | self-authenticating glory as the very Word of God.

00:02:52.980 | My second example of an author is Paul.

00:02:57.660 | He said to the Corinthians, "We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God which God decreed beforehand for the ages for our glory."

00:03:05.860 | These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

00:03:11.540 | "We have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things

00:03:17.980 | freely given us by God." And we impart these in

00:03:22.620 | words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 2

00:03:30.180 | 7 to 13. And we can get a glimpse

00:03:33.820 | into how Paul saw the way this played out in his

00:03:38.900 | writings—so we go from human words taught by the Spirit down to the writings in 1 Corinthians 14 37—

00:03:45.820 | where he says, "If anyone thinks that he's a prophet or spiritual, he should acknowledge

00:03:50.300 | that the things I am writing—

00:03:53.500 | writing to you—are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not

00:04:01.620 | recognized." In other words, Paul saw his

00:04:04.620 | writings as

00:04:07.180 | carrying an authority—referred to back in 1 Corinthians 2—which every other claim to prophecy

00:04:14.020 | should submit to. And the last illustration I'll give is the Apostle John writing the book of Revelation.

00:04:21.820 | He says, "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show to his servants

00:04:27.660 | the things that must soon take place, he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,

00:04:35.100 | who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.

00:04:41.500 | Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and keep

00:04:48.740 | what is written in it."

00:04:51.540 | So it seems pretty clear to me that John knew he was receiving special

00:04:58.860 | revelation from the Lord and that it was being written

00:05:02.700 | down. But again, let me stress—in conclusion, let me stress—that our

00:05:08.020 | final, unshaken

00:05:10.900 | confidence

00:05:12.660 | rises not

00:05:14.660 | decisively or finally from the personal claims of each biblical author to have been

00:05:22.660 | inspired, but rather

00:05:25.340 | from the peculiar marks of God's glory that shines through

00:05:31.500 | God's Word when the Holy Spirit

00:05:33.500 | enables us to discern what it means. I wrote a whole book about this last year. It was just published this year.

00:05:40.860 | It's called "A Peculiar

00:05:42.860 | Glory—How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete

00:05:47.660 | Truthfulness." And if that's what Steve is wrestling with, I hope he'll look at it.

00:05:53.140 | Yeah, very good book to check out at DesiringGod.org/books.

00:05:57.860 | There's a lot of great books to read there, too. Check out everything we have—

00:06:01.220 | over a hundred titles, I think, now available for you—DesiringGod.org/books.

00:06:07.580 | When it comes to this podcast, you can find our audio feeds and our episode archive, and you can reach us via email all through

00:06:14.140 | our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. And on Friday,

00:06:19.380 | we're gonna close out the week by pressing into one of the more common questions that we get in the inbox—

00:06:24.340 | one that I don't think we've ever addressed yet in the past.

00:06:28.340 | And it's a question over whether or not our loved ones who are in heaven can look down on us and see us.

00:06:32.860 | We'll take a biblical look at a few different texts to try and figure out this question on Friday.

00:06:39.460 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you then.

00:06:41.620 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:06:49.960 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Was Any Biblical Writer Aware He Was Inspired?

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