daily java

Daily Java:

Now go and write down these words. Write them in a book. They will stand until the end of time as a witness. (Isaiah 30:8)

I have always believed that the writers of the Bible didn’t know they were writing the Bible when they did.

There is a song in Jesus Christ Superstar that has the apostles singing at the Last Supper. In it is the line: “Always hoped that I'd be an apostle. Knew that I would make it if I tried, Then when we retire we can write the gospels So they'll still talk about us when we've died.” It’s a funny line, but I don’t think anything like that happened.

I believe in verbal plenary inspiration. I believe every word in the Bible is where it should be. However I believe it differently than many others of my comrades in arms. I believe that God guided the men who wrote and that when they wrote they pretty much said what God wanted.

I do not believe, however, that God grabbed them, wrung out a book while they were in a trance and when they woke up, arm cramping in pain, they had written Romans. For one thing, each book bears a definite characteristic of its writer. John is different from Luke, Paul from Peter, and so on. Someone says that God used their style, but to what end. If God had just dictated the book, they would all sound the same.

I do believe that the God of the Universe is big enough and powerful enough to speak the world into existence. Therefore he is big enough to order the minds of men (which he after all created from nothing) to say what he wanted them to say without co-opting their minds and bodies. They could write what he wanted and still be conscious.

But I don’t think they necessarily knew that what they wrote would be preserved for thousands of years. After all, there were a lot of writers in the first century writing a lot of letters to a lot of churches. And each of these letters were essentially Bible classes on paper. In the absence of any central document, every teacher, every apostle, everybody (good and bad included – look at some of the books like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene) wrote them. God guided the hands of those who collected them and let just what he wanted float to the top of the pile. And the Bible was born.

Can you imagine the Lord appearing to you and saying, “I want you to write a book for me to put in my Bible. The book will last for thousands of years, be hotly debated, people will parse and dissect every single word and take much of what you say out of context. Now get busy. We’ll call it Colossians.”

You’d freeze right away. What will I say? How will I say it? You would go through draft after draft and still not be able to say just the right thing in just the right way. It would drive you crazy.

They knew what they were writing was important, that people would read it and get good out of it. They knew it was valuable to the church. But I don’t think they knew it would be THE HOLY BIBLE.

It would surely scare me if I knew these blatherings on my blog would last forever.