The Holy Spirit, then, guided these men to write down both the Old Testament as well as the New Testament Scriptures, Ephesians 3, verses 1 through 5 [“For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for you Gentiles—if indeed you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me for you, how that by revelation He made known to me the mystery (as I have briefly written already, by which, when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ), which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets…”]. And these Scriptures have been compiled into a collection of books that are called The Bible. So we are able to read, to study, to understand these writings, and, thereby, know the Will of God—know the Mind of God—have God’s breath on us.

This process of “inspiration” is easy to talk about, it is important to talk about it, and it’s important for us to understand as much as we can about it. But I submit to you that it is difficult for us to comprehend the exact “how.” The Bible tells us how it was done and describes the process to us: “inspiration”—“in breath”—“God’s breath.” But it does not reveal the exact way it was done or how it was accomplished.

Some would suggest that the Holy Spirit just took over the mind of the writer, that information was just assimilated into the mind directly and then it flowed out through the hand. Others might say that it was really a thoughtless process on the part of the writer because the Holy Spirit just guided that hand and it followed the direction of the Holy Spirit. Well, I’m not sure about that, but I think the process of inspiration is a little bit more subtle, and is more involved than just the Holy Spirit infusing His thoughts, word for word, into the writer’s mind, or the Holy Spirit seizing the writer’s hand.

The reason I say that is because, while he was guided and directed, while he was inspired of the Holy Spirit, the writer’s personality was still able to come through. His own writing style was able to come through. That’s one way that scholars believe that they can identify that Hebrews was written by the apostle Paul, because of the “style” of Paul’s writing and some of the phraseology that are common to the epistles that we know Paul wrote. Well, how could Paul have a style of his own if his hand had been seized and he was just following whatever the Holy Spirit directed him to do? With that in mind, don’t let me leave you with the impression that these men were on their own. Certainly not! I’m saying that the process is a very intricate one, and one that I don’t fully understand. Maybe you do. In some way, God’s Word was written down just exactly the way He wanted it to be written. But yet there was the ability on the part of the writer for his personality and style to come through.

Here’s something else people think about: The Holy Spirit just dumped all this knowledge into the mind of the writer and that was it. It was there! But think about the fact that Luke states in the first chapter of his Gospel that he had done his own investigation of what he was about to write. He had done some research, some “digging,” so to speak, Luke, chapter 1, verse 3 [“It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus.”] Even though that was the case, he still wasn’t on his own. He didn’t gather facts and then assimilate them and put them together as his own will. Whatever he found, whatever he did to confirm the information that he had been told (remember, he was not an eyewitness to the things that the others were), everything was completely accurate, done just perfectly, even though he had done his own investigation.

So the Bible, indeed, makes a claim to be inspired!

Now, there are some FALSE THEORIES OF INSPIRATION. There are some who would talk about a Natural Inspiration. That is the idea that the Bible writers, such men as Luke, or Paul, or whomever, were inspired indeed. But they were inspired in much the same manner as a poet, or a writer of literature, or maybe an artist. So this false theory is that those who wrote Holy Scripture were inspired in the same way as, let’s say, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Longfellow, and others.

Well this theory obviously contradicts the Bible’s claim that it comes from the Mind of God. This theory of Natural Inspiration would allow for human errors and inaccuracies, if this were the case. Those who are inspired in this Natural Inspiration are not inspired of God. The Bible claims that the writers who wrote the Scriptures were inspired.

Another False Theory of Inspiration is something called Degrees of Inspiration and, one that is very similar to that, Partial Inspiration. Degrees of Inspiration puts forth the theory that certain parts of the Bible are inspired to different degrees. In other words, maybe the words of Jesus are inspired, but the other words are not. So if you have a red-letter edition, then you can look and see that those words in red were inspired and all the others were not. Well, again, that’s in contradiction to what the Bible says. The Partial Inspiration suggests that only parts of the Bible are inspired. Now the challenge in either one of these theories is, who gets to decide what parts are inspired and what parts are not? I think that maybe a good bit of that is going on in this day and time. Maybe they don’t call it that, but in this sort of “cafeteria minded” world that we live in, a person says, “I’ll take this part, but I’ll reject that part.” The unspoken idea here is that some things are inspired, while others are not.