God’s Word for You
1 Corinthians 2:12-13 Verbal inspiration
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, November 16, 2022
12 We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know what God has freely given us. 13 We also speak these things, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.
Paul isn’t talking about his preaching here, but rather he is talking about his present, written teaching. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of the world is the spirit of the fallen world, that is, nothing else but the devil and his murderous twisting of truth, righteousness, and everything that is godly. It is sin and every inclination to sinning in mankind. This sinful Satanic spirit cannot possibly give anything good or beneficial to man, most especially not the Word of God. We have received the Word of God from the Spirit of God, “so that,” Paul explains, “we may know what God has freely given us.” This is the sum total of the gospel: Christ crucified for our sins, and risen as the firstfruits of our resurrection.
The doctrine of this giving of the Word of God is called inspiration, or more properly, verbal inspiration. It is described in several famous passages, and it’s good to recall them. Peter said: “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 1:21). Paul said: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). And Jesus our Lord said definitively: “The Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35).
To these we might add Moses: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
“Verbal inspiration is the mysterious and miraculous process by which God the Holy Spirit inspired men to write his Word. He called the holy writers to write. He supplied the content they were to write, and he guided them in the choice of the very words they used. ‘Every thought they expressed, every word they used, was given to them by the Holy Spirit by inspiration.’ This verbal inspiration was not a mechanical dictation but a ‘word-for-word inspiration,’ that did not deprive the holy writers of all intelligence and organization, and of individuality of style and diction. It did, however, keep them from error.”
This means that our Bible was given to the writers to write in two senses. First, he gave them the content. The content was the information itself, as it were a memory witnessed in the experience of inspiration. But more than this, the Spirit also used the language, grammar, turn-of-phrase, and even personal memories of conversations and events, and guided the writers to use just the right words to convey the message with those words. Therefore, each and every word is inspired by God. It is God’s Word, because God himself has chosen it to express himself and his thoughts. The Holy Spirit used different forms of expression equally well and with perfect mastery: the historic storytelling of Moses and Joshua, the poetry of David and Asaph, the prophetic language of Isaiah, Jeremiah and others, the eyewitness accounts of the Gospel writers, the history based on interviews from Luke and Mark, the epistolary styles of Peter, Paul, John and James, and the apocalyptic imagery of Ezekiel, Daniel and of John’s Revelation. The Spirit did this like a master musician, able to play the same beautiful tune equally well on a flute as on a piano, or even the seemingly tuneless precision of the percussive lists in the genealogies of Genesis and Chronicles.
This has been the doctrine of the true church all along. We have already shown that Moses, Paul, Peter, John and the other writers all agree with Christ, that “the Scriptures cannot be broken,” which is to say, the Scriptures cannot be accused of anything false or inaccurate. We also rejoice when we find voices in the ancient church that taught the same thing. Augustine, for example, says: “I confess, dear friend” (he was writing to Jerome), “that this fear and honor has come down to the books of Scripture alone which are called canonical, so that I most firmly believe that none of their authors could at all err in writing.”
Although Luther, in his younger years, sometimes spoke carelessly or with frustration about such authors as James, he tempered his views and his words very carefully in his mature years, and we should pay close attention to statements about the whole Bible, such as: “We can and should depend on Scripture genuinely and with constant faith,” and, “I believe that in Scripture God, who is truthful, is speaking.”
The writers wrote at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and all of Scripture is inspired, free of error, and perfect. Anyone who denies this subverts the Word of God and becomes the thrall of the devil, doing his wicked work for him. We take the Scriptures at face value, joyful that God would speak plainly and clearly to us, unworthy as we are, purely out his Fatherly love for us. “Let your compassion come to me that I may live, for your word is my delight!” (Psalm 119:77).
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.