What is the Bible?

The scriptures are the permanent expression of the mind and will of God, furnished as such with His authority. They are His expression of His own thoughts. They build up, they are profitable — but that is not all. They are inspired. It is not only that the truth is given in them by inspiration. That is not what is said here. They are inspired.

Just as in creation the finely made vessel of clay — for "the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground" — became a living thing only after God breathed into it, for He "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature," so what would otherwise have been only a collection of literary fragments has, by the fact that God breathed into every part, become one living whole; living and powerful indeed, since it is the inspired Word of God.

The unity of Scripture is one of the clearest marks of its inspiration. To find a collection of sixty-six pamphlets, written by some forty authors, several of them unknown, and to find the whole marked by one controlling mind, plainly lifts the Bible as a book into a category of its own.

The Scriptures have a living source, and living power has run through their composition. Hence their endless range, and the impossibility of separating any one part from its connection with the whole, because one God is the living centre from which everything flows; one Christ, the living centre around which all its truth circles and to which it refers, though in varied glory; and one Spirit, the divine sap that carries its power from its source in God to the smallest branches of the united truth.

The Scriptures testify of Christ. Our Lord said, "It is they that bear witness about me." Whatever else they may set out, it is clear that the great subject of God's revelation to man is Christ Jesus the Lord. In various ways, through many instruments, at different times and in all kinds of circumstances, the divine glory of His person, His perfect manhood, His moral excellence, His infinite perfections, His finished work, His fullness and His offices are all presented to us in the Scriptures of eternal truth.

The apostle sets before us the great gain of the Scriptures. First, they are able to make us "wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." Second, having directed us to Christ so that we find salvation in Him, we go on to learn that "every Scripture" is profitable for the believer… We may be blind to our own faults, and so full of our own importance that we are deaf when others correct us; but if we are subject to the word, we find that Scripture brings conviction, for it is "living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." What is more, the Scriptures not only convict, they also correct, and having corrected they instruct us in the way that is right.

The word of God is living, for it produces life, and life can only come from life. We read, "You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God" (1 Peter 1:23). "Of His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth" (James 1:18). Under the hand of God, by the working of God's Holy Spirit, millions of men and women all through the world's history have been given life by the Scriptures of truth.

But how are we to know that the book we call the Bible is the Word of God? We reply, it carries its own credentials with it. It bears its own evidence on every page, in every paragraph, in every line… We do not need man's voice to certify God's book; and if we do, we are certainly standing on unbelieving ground as regards divine revelation. If God cannot speak directly to the heart — if He cannot give the assurance that it is He Himself who speaks — then where are we?