April 15, 2000
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Inspiration and Miracles by John MacArthur
The Doctrine of Inspiration Explained
Selected Scriptures
We come now to a wonderful opportunity to consider the great doctrine of the Inspiration of the Scripture. We're going to look at the theology category that is called Bibliology, the study of the Word of God. What do we mean when we say the Bible is inspired? Do we mean it's an inspiring book because it inspires in us faith and religious feeling and understanding? Are people today still inspired when they write songs in the same way that writers of the Bible were inspired? Are books today inspired? How about sermons? Are they inspired?
The term "inspire" comes from the Latin, to breathe in. The actual Greek term is God breathed, theopneustos from which we get pneumatic, pneumonia, those kinds of things related to breath. But the actual word translated inspired in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All Scripture is inspired by God, given by inspiration of God," is "All Scripture is God-breathed." It is not us in-breathing, it is God out-breathing. It is God breathing out His words, not breathing into us in some inspiring fashion. We believe that the Bible came right out of the mouth of God. God breathed it out.
There are degrees of inspiration. Certain preachers and song writers can be inspired and certain people who receive revelations and words of wisdom and knowledge from God. They are inspired but they're not as inspired as the Bible writers. It's inspiration to a lesser degree. There are no degrees to what God said. Either He said it or He didn't say it. Either God breathed it out or He did not breathe it out. Either the words are God's words or they are not God's words. They can't be more or less from God.
One way to understand that might be to think about the fact that we may refer to something as the highest or the best or the most. We call that a superlative. There's no higher than the highest, better than the best, or more than the most. There are no more inspired or less inspired writings of God. God is absolute. God's Word is therefore absolute. God is a superlative. God speaks in a superlative fashion. Inspiration has no degrees. He said it or He didn't say it. And there are no songs and there are no books and there are no visions and there are no revelations and there are no sermons that are the direct revelation of God.
To even consider that is a scary proposition since the entire Bible ends with the following words, Revelation 22:18, "I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book...meaning the book of Revelation...but this is the end of the revelation of God, the Canon, so it applies to anything added to this book which therefore would be added to Scripture in total since this is the final book...I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book." That's a very, very clear warning and that is how the Bible ends. Don't add anything to this book and to add anything to that book would be to add something to the Canon of Scripture which that book completes.
Songs that you write are simply reflections of what God has revealed in His Word. Sermons that you preach are simply efforts to make the already inspired and revealed Word of God clear to the listener. Books that you write follow the same path.
What is the Doctrine of Inspiration? Revelation is the content. It is God's disclosure of His truth. Inspiration is the vehicle. When we talk about divine revelation, we're talking about the content...the message, the truth that God revealed or disclosed. When we talk about inspiration we're talking about the method that God used. How He breathed it out. In revelation God makes Himself known. In inspiration the Spirit of God take the revelation and puts it through the mind of human writers in the Old and New Testament who write it down as it flows from God the Holy Spirit through their minds. What they write down is the exact and authentic words that constitute the message God wants written down. Revelation then is the message itself, and inspiration is the means by which it is given and ultimately recorded on the pages of Scripture.
Biblical inspiration is not a high-level of human achievement. This really doesn't work and it doesn't work for a lot of reasons. The personality of Jesus Christ and the way He is described surpasses everything in human thought. Whoever would invent a person like Jesus Christ? No one could come up with that kind of person. He surpasses in purity, in love, in perfection, in righteousness anything ever found in any character in all of human literature. There is no one like Him anywhere in human literature nowhere. He is beyond the capability of any person to invent. And then when you realize that He is the theme of the entire Bible and you have a period of at least 1500 years and a little over 40 writers writing all over that space of time, that span of time, 1500 years, and all that they say directed about Him is consistent and coherent and transcendent, it's inexplicable that such a loosely connected assemblage of human geniuses would all craft the same person who is remarkable beyond any human imagination.
Furthermore, who would have written a book that damns the whole human race? Who would write a book, what collection of human geniuses would write a book that says there is no hope apart from this person Jesus Christ? All other religious books by all other religious geniuses aided and abetted by supernatural geniuses that we would identify as demons, contain salvation by works. They bow to human pride. There's no other person like Jesus Christ in any other religion in the world and always genius exalts itself. If the authors of the Bible were human religious geniuses who had just achieved a high level of genius, why didn't the Bible writers produce other writings equal to the ones in the Bible? The fact of the matter is left to themselves they could produce some good things but not inspired Scripture. Paul wrote a lot of letters and he wrote 13 in the New Testament but he wrote a lot more than that that aren't in the New Testament. They were just Paul...Paul at his best but just Paul. In fact he wrote a couple to the Corinthians in addition to the two that are in the Bible, but they were not inspired by God. He was also a pastor like any pastor and an evangelist like any evangelist who was saying things that were true but they were not the directly inspired words out of the mouth of God. Inspiration cannot be just a high level of human genius. You can't come up with Christ and you don't damn the whole human race and leave them no hope but this perfect Christ.
Somebody else suggests that inspiration is extended just to the thoughts of the writers, that God just gave them noble ideas in their mind, planted thoughts. The first kind of inspiration is called natural inspiration, just human genius. The second kind is called though inspiration. This view suggested that God came along at some point and gave these writers an idea, a religious idea, spiritual idea and they were left free to express themselves as they liked. This is a denial of verbal inspiration. If this is true, we're really wasting our time doing exegesis of the text because the words aren't the issue. First Corinthians 2:13, "We speak not in words which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches." Paul says when I give the revelation of God, when I write down that which God inspires in me, it is not words coming from man's wisdom, but which the Spirit teaches. In John 17:8 Jesus said, "I have given unto them the words which You gave Me and they have received them." The message was in the words, there is no message apart from the words, there is no inspiration apart from the words. More than 3800 times in the Old Testament we have expressions like "Thus says the Lord," "The Word of the Lord came," "God said," it's about the words. There are no such things as wordless concepts anyway. When Moses would excuse himself from serving the Lord, he said, "I need to do something else because I'm not eloquent." God didn't say, "I'll give you a lot of great ideas, you'll figure out how to communicate them." God didn't say, "I'll be with your mind." God said to him this, "I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what you shall say." And that explains why 40 years later, according to Deuteronomy 4:2, Moses said to Israel, "You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you." Don't touch anything I command you because this is from God.
In fact, the opposite is true. Bible writers wrote down words they didn't understand. In 1 Peter 1 we are told there that the prophets wrote down the words and didn't understand what they meant. The prophets, verse 10 of 1 Peter 1, who prophesied of the grace that would come made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. Here they are writing about the sufferings of the coming Messiah, writing about the glory to follow the suffering of the Messiah, and then they're searching what they wrote. They're inquiring in the very words which they were inspired to write, to figure out what person and what time is in view. They couldn't even interpret fully the meaning of the words they were actually writing. God did not give ideas without words but in some cases He gave words without complete ideas.
In Matthew 24:25 the Scripture is very clear, "Heaven and earth shall pass away but My words...My words shall not pass away." When God speaks He speaks with words and the Bible are the...is the representation in writing of the words that came from God...the words that God spoke.
Thoughts are married to words like a soul is connected to a body. One writer says, "As for thoughts being inspired apart from the words which give them expression, you might as well talk of a tune without notes, or a sum without numbers. Thoughts are conveyed by words and the thoughts of God were conveyed by the words of God and passed on to us through the means of God breathing those words into the minds of the writers to write exactly what He wanted them to write and collecting it all in the Bible.
Some say that inspiration is only with reference to spiritual and moral teaching. This is called partial inspiration, that is, the spiritual part, the moral part. The historical part, the geographical part, scientific part, you don't have to worry about it, the Bible doesn't have to be accurate in all categories, it just has to be accurate when it talks about spiritual and moral things. And this explains the errors in the Bible and the legends in the Bible and all the notions in the Bible that are just false. All inspiration, these folks suggest, guarantees is the sacred, it doesn't guarantee the secular.
But if God can't be trusted for history and He can't be trusted for geography or science, then why would we trust Him for the spiritual? If God can't be trusted to tell us the truth about history and the truth about the material world that we live in, then why would we want to entrust our eternal souls to Him? Why should we believe the spiritual which cannot be verified if we can't believe the historical, the physical, the material which can be verified? As soon as you allow the Bible to be untrustworthy at all, you will progress to a total rejection. Why would you trust God for what you cannot see and cannot prove if He lied about what you can see and you can prove? That's a needless view to take because when the Bible speaks historically, it is true. It has been verified. Never has anything historically in the Bible been proven to be wrong, or scientific, or geographical.
There's another view of inspiration, that inspiration is an act of God on the reader. This is basically a human book written by some religious geniuses. Some of the ideas may have floated down from God. All of a sudden when you're reading this dead book, it comes alive to you because the Spirit of God inspires you and awakens you. This is frankly theological existentialism...sometimes called neo-orthodoxy. This is not an infallible Word from God, this is not right out of the mouth of God. But God does a really good thing. As you read it and it comes before your eyes and your heart, He zaps the Word because He gives you some sort of ecstatic experience. He gives you a moment of contact with this divine reality. We're all living in the moment, the existential moment, the being of this moment and in that moment all of a sudden something jumps off the page of the Bible and there's a Wow factor and that's inspiration.
The same people who say that say, "However, don't think for a moment that the Bible is actually telling you historical truth. In fact the same people who believe in existential inspiration believe also in demythologizing the Bible. What are the myths? The Trinity, the pre-existence of Christ, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, the miracles of Christ, the substitutionary death of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the ascension of Christ, the Second Coming of Christ, eternal judgment, we have to demythologize the Bible, we've got to get all of that out. Now you just take the rest of it and hopefully at some point as you read it, God will zap you and you'll have an ecstatic religious experience. This is what Francis Schaeffer used to call the leap of faith, a leap into nowhere. One writer says, "Such men refuse to believe that God performed the miracle of giving us by inspiration an infallible Bible but are ready to believe that God daily performs the greater miracle of enabling men to find and see in the fallible word of man some infallible word from God." And how could you have a divinely correct experience through a humanly wrong book? God would be validating lies. The Bible is either the Word of God or it is the biggest hoax ever. God is going to give you a legitimate spiritual experience through a hoax? Why would God do that?
A fifth view is mechanical dictation. This goes the other way, that every word comes from God and the writers of the Bible were like robots. This is what's called dictation inspiration. God could have used dictation, and we would have had an inspired text. But He didn't do that. There are many variations in style. There are many variations in the use of the language from author to author, distinct personalities are clearly obvious. Emotional attitudes come pouring through the writers as they write. God used writers, said the New Testament, who were carried along by the Holy Spirit, they were moved along by the Holy Spirit. They weren't out of the process; they were in the middle of the process. They were included in the very act of writing. In fact, they were writing their own heart attitudes, their own thoughts, their own insights, their own experiences, their own understanding under the total control of God.
In Hebrews 1:1-2, we have a good indication of the divine author of Scripture. "God after He spoke along ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son whom He appointed heir of all things to whom also He made the world." First of all, God has spoken, that is the key to a biblical understanding of inspiration...God has spoken. The Creator Himself removed the obstacles to our understanding of Him by revealing Himself...God has spoken by the prophets...and by that He means the writers of Scripture...in many portions, polumeros, many sections, many books, 66 to be exact, 39 in the Old, 27 in the New. He spoke in many sections and in many ways, polutropos. What does that mean? Through visions, prophecies, parables, typology, symbols, ceremony, theophany, an audible voice...and all this was recorded in the Old Testament. All the times that God spoke and wanted it written down, it was written down. It was God speaking to the fathers in the prophets through many different sections, segments, books and in many ways, all collected together in the Old Testament. Now in these last days He's spoken to us again in His Son, and this is a reference to the New Testament. It is God speaking again. It is God's self-disclosure. The Old Testament is not a collection of wisdom from ancient men, it is the very voice of God through all the means by which He spoke, what He said and wanted inscripturated was written down by the writers of the Old Testament. In the New, He did the same and what He wanted written down is written down by the New Testament writers.
2 Peter 1:20. "But know this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The key word that I'd like you to look at here is the word "moved." It tells us at the end of verse 21 that men were moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along, borne along like a leaf floating downstream. They were in the process, carried along. In 1 Corinthians 2:10, Paul writes, "But for us God revealed them," that is His glorious truths, He disclosed His revelation, "For to us God revealed them," is added but actually the whole of His revelation, "through the Spirit for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, for who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him. Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of this world but the Spirit is from God that we might know the things freely given to us by God which things we also speak not in words taught by human wisdom but in those taught by the Spirit." All of that is simply saying that they were taught things by the Spirit and those were the things that they received and wrote down. That's what it means to be carried along, to be moved along by the Holy Spirit to write these things down. Verse 21 again says, "No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will." Prophecy here is a word that simply embraces all of Scripture, refers to all the Scripture, not just prediction as we think often of prophecy, it means the message, it means to stand before and speak, prophemi(?), to speak before, to disclose, to talk in front of someone, to tell forth all that God has spoken, all that God has said, all that God has told in the Scripture. "All of it comes not by an act of human will, but by men moved by the Holy Spirit who speak from God." Therefore if you back up again to verse 20, "No Scripture, or no prophecy of Scripture, is a matter of one's own interpretation."
The word "interpretation," quickly is the word epilusis. It can be the word releasing. The word here almost means particularly inspiration. The genitive case usage indicates source. So the idea here is no prophecy of Scripture finds its release, finds its source in any one person. No prophecy is made by an act of the human will. All Scripture comes by the Holy Spirit as men are moved along, carried along like a ship raising its sails filled with the Holy Spirit, carried in the direction He desired so that they write down what God has spoken.
II Timothy 3:16 "All Scripture is God-breathed." "All Scripture," pasa graphe theopneustos, all writings, scripture, all divine writing is God breathed, it is the very breath of God. That's why Romans 3:2 calls the Scripture a divine oracle, the oracles of God. God is the author of what the Bible says. You find this testimony given by many, many Bible writers, obviously. You read through the Old Testament over and over again, just a good exercise, read Jeremiah 1-3 and see how many times Jeremiah says, "Thus says the Lord."
We are to understand inspiration then as that revelation of God given to us in writing by the Spirit of God putting that message in the writer's mind, mingling it sovereignly and supernaturally with his own experience, his own vocabulary and out of that comes every word that God wants written. God has no problem using anything or anyone that He has made to achieve His own ends.
I want to close with the most important testimony, the testimony of Jesus Christ. What was the view of Christ when it comes to Scripture? First of all He acknowledged that He was the theme of all Scripture. John 5:39, "You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and these are they which bear witness of Me." Christ understood that He was the theme of all Scripture and that the scriptures spoke accurately of Him. From the very beginning all the way through, the Scripture spoke accurately of Him. Luke 24:44, He opens the Old Testament and He teaches those on the road to Emmaus everything concerning Himself out of the Old Testament. So He is saying that as far as the Scripture goes it is a true and accurate representation of Me and I am, in fact, the theme of it all.
Second thing, He came to fulfill Scripture. That is He never came to correct or edit it. He didn't come to alter it. He came to fulfill it. "Think not that I have come to destroy the Law or the prophets." There's nothing to be tampered with, there's nothing to be changed, there's nothing to be set apart, "I have come not to destroy it but to fulfill it." In Matthew 26:24 He says, "The Son of Man goes even as it is written of Him." I'm on a divine schedule, I'm doing exactly what has been written. He commanded Peter to put away his sword in that same chapter, Matthew 26, because He said, "Peter, how then should the scriptures be fulfilled?" He was fulfilling the Scripture in everything that He did.
Jesus then therefore said that He is the theme of all Scripture which is an accurate presentation of Him. That He came to fulfill Scripture and there was nothing in it that should be destroyed. Every single part of it had to be fulfilled. He said, "Not one jot or one tittle would ever pass from that law until all of it was fulfilled." To Him Scripture was as a whole the revelation of God. That's why in John 10:35 He said, "Scripture cannot be broken." You can't cut it anywhere. It is cohesive, comprehensive, complete and whole. He compared Scripture's duration to the duration of the universe. Death comes when sin invades. The Word of God is pure and it endures forever. It is untouched by sin, which means it is perfect.
It was Jesus who emphasized the importance of every word.and every letter when He said, "Not a jot or tittle will ever fail." He said in Luke 18:31, "All the things that are written through the prophets shall be accomplished." He even based His interpretation of the Old Testament on a single word...a single word. The words do matter. Jesus was answering the Sadducees in Matthew 22 and He said to them, "You are mistaken, not understanding the scriptures, or the power of God, for in the resurrection they neither marry...talking about the angels...nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God saying,'I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?'" He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And His proof is that God said, "I am...I am the eternal living one." And furthermore, He is not only the eternal living one but all will live eternally as well. They didn't believe in a resurrection and He proved His point or certainly to our satisfaction proved His point by talking about the eternality of God in the verb to be in the present tense.
He placed Scripture also on an equal plane with His own words. Matthew 24:35, "Heaven and earth will pass away but My words shall not pass away." Scripture will not pass away and My words will not pass away. They are equal. His are not important, they are equal, neither will pass away. He acknowledged the power of the Word of God in temptation in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 when He was tempted He answered with Scripture. He referred to Scripture repeatedly by saying, "Have you not read...have you not heard...did you never read...is it not written...it is written?" On the cross He personally fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies when He said, "I thirst." Cause that's exactly what Psalm 22 indicated He would say. He confirmed the following accounts in the Old Testament by His own words, the creation of Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, Noah and the Flood, the role of Abraham, circumcision, the destruction of Sodom and Lot's wife, the salvation of Lot, the call of Moses, the Law of Moses, the manna from heaven, the brazen serpent...I could go on and on and on. He affirmed the truth of the Old Testament.
Jesus established the sufficiency of Scripture to save when He said in Luke 16:29, "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them." That's all they need to keep them from hell. He showed them that the source of all error comes from not knowing the Scripture. Mark 12, "It is not for this cause that you error, you know not the Scripture, you do greatly error."
One tenth of the words that came out of Jesus that are recorded in Scripture were from the Old Testament. He quoted the Old Testament 180 times out of the 1800 verses reporting what He said. One tenth of the time He referred to the Old Testament. And He said He is the Truth, that He is the eternal Word, He is our model as far as how we approach the Bible.
Now finally this presents a three-fold possibility. One, there are no errors in the Bible based on the testimony of Jesus. Two, there are errors in the Bible but Jesus didn't know about them. Three, there are errors in the Bible and He did know about them and He covered them up.
There's only one possibility. If there are errors in the Bible and He didn't know about them, He's not God. If there are errors in the Bible and He knew about them and covered them up, He's the devil. But He is God and He is not the devil and there are no errors in Scripture. The authority of Christ really settles the issue of an inspired text. Scripture then becomes the binding word of Christ. "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly." The Scripture is the Word of Christ. He takes ownership of it all. In it 1 Corinthians 2:16 says, "You have the mind of Christ." When you bring the Word of God, you bring every thought captive to Christ, 2 Corinthians 10:5. Christ takes ownership of the whole Scripture and so should we confidently based on His testimony.
Biblical Inspiration Validated By Miracles
Selected Scriptures
To believe the Bible is a work of God in the heart. The natural man apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, no matter how much evidence you give him about the veracity and validity of Scripture does not have the capacity in the darkness of his unbelief to believe the Bible. It is a work of the Spirit of God. But to those of us who have had that work done in our hearts who understand that the Word of God is in fact the true Word of the living God. It is important for us to be further strengthened and encouraged by the evidences that that which we believe is in fact true.
I to consider some of the elements of Scripture that affirm to us its truthfulness. Let's talk about miracles for a moment to start with. The Bible is filled with miracles. In fact, it starts with the most massive miracle of all miracles, the creation of the entire universe in six 24-hour days...a monumental miracle or a monumental sequence of miracles. Another set of miracles unfolds, the most notable of which is the miracle of drowning the entire human race and rearranging the surface of the earth and changing the atmosphere in the Great Flood where the canopy of water that surrounds the earth is broken up, a deluge pours down on the earth, where the continents are rearranged and divided and the reservoirs of water in the deep are cracked open and water gushes up and the whole surface of the earth is changed and altered and the drowning of the whole human race except for eight people out of which comes the earth as we know it today, its life having been protected and preserved animal life and even human life on the ark. All the plant life begins to bloom again after the Flood, a staggering miracle.
Not long after that you have another monumental miracle after miracle, you have the Tower of Babel where God in a miraculous way creates all the languages of the world and separates people by virtue of those languages as a judgment on them so that they cannot easily circulate their heretical and false religions and were off and running in a series of miracles. You go all the way through the Bible and there are some times when miracles come at a more concentrated level, such as at critical times in the life of the prophet Elijah and the prophet Elisha. But there is an explosion of miracles, the likes of which had never occurred since the time of Genesis in those early physical miracles and that is the time of our Lord Jesus Christ when miracles abound in the three-year period of His life for all intents and purposes He vanishes disease from the land of Israel. He does miracles that have no explanation other than divine and they proliferate in every direction. The Apostles then have a delegated ability to do miracles. They continue for a little while through the book fo Acts, then they disappear. By the time you come to the book of Revelation, we hear that in the end of the age there will be massive miracles that will occur again, physical miracles will occur in the sky and on the earth as the Lord brings judgment. And finally the creation of a new earth and a new heaven.
We're not talking about a miracle in the sense of something out of the ordinary or unexpected. Let me use C.S. Lewis' definition of a miracle. He said, "A miracle is an interference with nature by supernatural power." Westminster Dictionary of the Bible says this, "Miracles are events in the ex...in the external world wrought by the power of God and intended as a sign. They are possible because God sustains, controls, and guides all things and is omnipotent." A miracle is when God does what is supernatural, when God breaks in to the natural course of things and does something that is supernatural. A miracle is God stepping in to our world, setting aside normal laws of nature to do something that has no natural explanation, to do what is naturally impossible.
Either we live in a universe in which there is a God, or we live in a universe in which there is not a God. You only have those two options. Either there is a supernatural being, or we live in a natural world. And we are the product of natural forces that essentially came from nothing. If naturalism is true and there is no God, then there can be no supernatural invasion because there is no supernatural reality. If there is no God, there can be no miracles. If there is no God, nothing can come into nature from the outside because there isn't anything outside. All there is is nature, that's naturalism. There isn't anything else. There's nothing outside. There is no such thing as a miracle. If you're going to use the word miracle, you're going to have to apply it to finding a parking place at the mall on Friday night.
But, if there is God, if there is a supernatural power in the universe, if there is a supernatural creator who made the universe, then miracles will occur every time that supernatural God acts independent of the natural world. So if we have no God in the universe and we just have a natural universe and the equation "nobody times nothing equals everything" is true, then there's no such thing as a miracle because there's only the natural and there is nothing else. But if there is God and there is a supernatural God, then for Him to act is easily allowable. If there is God, then outside thrusts from the supernatural world into the natural world is to be expected. If there is God, then there will be miracles. God who created can invade His world which He created any time He wants to do anything He wants with anyone He wants.
If you believe in God, miracles isn't a leap at all. If God wanted you to know He was there, how would He convey that? If He wanted you to know that there was in fact a supernatural God outside our natural world, what would He do to introduce Himself to us? He would have to step into our otherwise natural existence. Not only are miracles to be expected and normal, they are necessary for us to know that there is in fact a God. And in fact there is a God and He wants to reveal Himself, then He must do what is supernatural, stop the natural process, inject Himself and we must assume that He will do that in order to let us know that He is there. That is all a miracle is, it is God letting us know that He exists.
That's why the attempt to demythologize the Bible is so ridiculous. So-called Christian higher critics have attempted to demythologize the Bible and what they mean by that is take all the miracles out. They want to de-miracle the Bible. If you do that, then in what sense are you a Christian? In what sense are you a theist? In what sense do you even believe in God if you cannot let God act?
If God is, then let Him act. Miracles prove that God is and that God acts is consequent to the fact that He is. If there is a book which God has written, it will be filled with God acting. Because the Scripture has to be the revelation of God and if God has revealed Himself, then He just can't do what everybody else can do otherwise it's no revelation at all. He has to do what nobody else can do. So when you're looking around for a sacred book, find the one that contains the most miracles which are believable, which have eye witnesses, which are historical and which have stood the test of time and you're going to come to one book, and that's the Bible. If you don't have miracles, all you have is a book on ethical philosophy, and furthermore, you have a forgery and a fraud and a sham because this book claims that God does do miracles. If there is a book that is a true revelation of God, it will be the book in which there is a record of God acting supernaturally in the midst of a natural world.
What is evidence for believing the Bible is the Word of God? It is miracles. They must qualify on three counts. One, the miracle must be a sensible event. It's not something God can do in secret. Miracles that do reveal God must be subject to sensibility. They must be open to the human senses, something that people heard, something they saw, something they felt, something they tasted, something they experienced.
Secondly, they must be clearly supernatural. That is to say there cannot be another explanation. This is not providence. This is not God kind of working things out a little bit to make things kind of fit together in ways that appear on the surface to be somewhat natural. A miracle to be deemed a miracle must be transcendent to all natural law. It must be an invasive act by God in which He suspends the natural law and does what is supernatural. So it must be sensible and it must be divine so that there is no other explanation. We'll call it supernatural.
Thirdly, it must have a redemptive purpose. Is directed at people recognizing the true and living God for the revelation of His own glory in redemption, that is to cause people to turn to Him with all their hearts and worship and embrace Him as the true God. They are not tricks by a magician, they are not to appeal to human curiosity. They are not designed to entertain. They are to reveal God as the Savior and Redeemer.
You don't need to say, "Well, there are some extraordinary miracles and there are some not so extraordinary miracles." No, they're all absolutely extraordinary...absolutely extraordinary. The thing that's so amazing is that throughout the Bible the writers of the Bible who record these miracles never say, "Now what I'm about to say is really going to be hard to swallow. What I'm about to say is going to be hard for you to accept because it's way out of your normal experience." It never says that. If God is who He is and if God is who He is, He has a right to act however He chooses to act. And if He wants to reveal Himself, He reveals Himself in a miraculous way and the true Scripture would then be the record of those revelations. So you expect the true Scripture not to have no miracles but to be loaded with miracles. And that is precisely where we begin with the Bibles self-authentication. The true revelation of God must be THE record of God acting miraculously. That's the Bible, miraculous from beginning to end, from creation to new creation and all in between.
Let there be miracles, unless you're an atheist. If you have no God, then you have no revelation and you have no Bible and you have no hope because you have no salvation. But let God be God. And when I open my Bible and I see miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle I say, "This is the book that reveals God." He acts and He speaks. If it's not a supernatural book, you can pitch it, throw it in the bin with all the rest of the lies and deceptions. This reality of the miraculous element of Scripture is the evidence that this is, in fact, the revelation of the living and true God.
