What Exactly is "Inspiration"?

0:00David asks this, I think he heard your conversation with Peter ends on Peter ends his podcast a while back, and I think Peter kind of thinks that divine inspiration, the scriptures, that's basically people documenting their own experiences with God. But they're not documenting God in and of God, so God's not giving them words, they're just talking about their own experiences. And so David is very intrigued by this, and he asks you, how would you define divine inspiration and does or should that interpretation of an inspired text change over time? And I think kind of the nuance there is that the nice thing about Peter ends his perspective is that, well of course it changes over time because we're just documenting our experiences with God.

1:01And so those experiences change over time. But now if you don't think that that's what divine inspiration is, well that means that you should, whatever it was then is what it should always be, and there doesn't seem to be as much room for possible change. What are your thoughts? On this Peter and I disagree a little bit, I agree with them that the biblical authors are recording their experience. But I think the concept of inspiration goes beyond just them reporting their experience, because you could say that about any ancient text, they're recording their own experience. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3 that all scripture is breathed by God, and Theo and Nuestos, God breathed. And so God has some action in this, he's breathing this, now that doesn't mean dictation, that every word they wrote down is exactly what God wanted, and you can tell that just

2:02if I read in the Bible, every author's got their own perspective, every author is operating out of their own cultural conditioning, and operating out of their own limitations, and things like that, but God's breathing through that, even breeze through some of their mistakes. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 1, he says that the Corinthians were divided over who baptized who, and who had the best baptism or whatever, and Paul says at one point, I think God didn't baptize any of you, that he says, well, except for the household of Stefanus, and then he goes, actually I don't remember who I baptized, but the point is this, don't be divided over this, and so God's breathing doesn't take away people's personality and their fallibility and all the rest, but it is God breathed, and that gives it a unique kind of authority. I think divine inspiration comes down to this, it means we have to take

3:03every part of scripture seriously, we have to wrestle with it, even if we don't like it, even if we don't understand it, we have to wrestle with it, because it's got some kind of God-breathed meaning for us. That goes to David's other question about doing interpretations change, and I would say that the interpretation of the original author, trying to understand what they originally meant, that is unchanging. Now we may not be able to access it, we may have to kind of guess at it, but there is a meaning that the author intended, and that is the staple meaning, that's the bedrock, and that doesn't change. Now maybe we'll get more insights through exegesis, archaeology, and whatnot, but the meaning is there, there's an objective meaning, but that's not the only meaning of a text, because it's God breathed, it can have other kinds of meanings, and the church has always confessed this, that there's multiple meanings to scripture, and you can see it is just

4:05by looking at the New Testament. The New Testament authors, when they mind the Old Testament, to see how it points to Christ, and that's what they're always doing, because Jesus tells us that all scripture is to point to Him, and so whenever we are tripping in the Bible, we can find out the original meaning, and then find out how it was pointing to Christ, but they pull out meanings that the original authors couldn't possibly have had. You know, out of Israel I've called my son, it was AS6. Well, it was AS talking about Israel, but Matthew applies it to Jesus, and he's making the theological point that Jesus is the new embodied Israel, and so wherever there's a parallel between Israel and Jesus, he points that out, and he uses the word fulfilled. This fulfills that, which was written, but it does mean that that which was written prophesied this or predicted this, it means it just fills out the full meaning of that. A lot of Christians get, you know, kind of a skewed on this, when they think that the soldiers casting for lots under Jesus'

5:07garments, because it fulfills this scripture, it must have been predicted, and that means God must have foreknowed that they were going to cast lots and given vinegar for water and whatnot. But it just means that this event is filling out the full meaning of that text, the mistreatment that people have always received from Godless people. Well, Jesus is the full incarnation of that, and so, and that meaning can change, as new things happen, you know, in the light of Christ, the authors of the New Testament found a whole lot of meaning that the original authors didn't intend, and it can have an as history is unfolding, we see other parallels, other fulfillments that are happening. You know, we're in the book of Revelation at Willon Hills, and we've been there for two and a half years, and we're strong, and, in fact, this week, I'm talking on the follow-up Babylon, and I think there's a lot of ways in which our nation and our current world situation

6:12is fulfilling the follow-up Babylon, and that's also been partially fulfilled in a lot of other ways, whenever empires have fallen, but, yeah, so that meaning, I think, can change and evolve, but the original meaning is the staple meaning, and that's objective and invariant. Whether we can get to it or not, it's a different question, but we have to work on the assumption that they had, they had an original meaning. Okay, that's really good. I read Peter's book, the Bible tells me so, and first of all, let me just say he's a really good writer, and I really like reading his writing. The sense I got from his perspective is that if God is not an active agent in Revelation, as you kind of indicated, then it just, I don't know how to read a religious text as anything other than a mirror of that culture in that time. And so, like, in order for it to speak to me, there has to be something that transcends the people who wrote it, and that thing that

7:16transcends the people that wrote it is God. And otherwise, I don't know how I can really say that this is written for me. Yeah, and I appreciate where Peter's coming from. You know, he's coming out of and reacting against more of a divisional model of inspiration, and as you're dealing with the Bible, honestly, you have to come to realization that these people were very, very human. All the authors were very, very human. And see, that itself, I think, so I agree with them on that. And as for the original meaning, we do have to kind of look at it at the passage or in a book and say, how does it reflect its surrounding culture? How does it, you know, interact with things that are already there in place? Because that fills out the meaning of what the author would have meant. But because it's God breathed, as you said, the meaning transcends the original meaning. And that's the way the church has always understood the Bible. And you have to have some guardrails around that because people can find all sorts of crazy meanings, you know, subjective,

8:20pose on the Bible, whatever you want to find. And the ultimate criteria is Jesus Christ, that all meanings the scripture have to be consistent with. And in some way, they're witness to Jesus Christ crucified, who is a full revelation of God and God's plan for us and God's will for us.