Our culture, you see, relegates the Bible to one collection of thoughts about God—good ones, perhaps, but not unique. Every religion, we think, has got something to offer, and we’re all just trying to figure this thing out together. So when we look at the Bible, we assume that it’s an honest attempt by mistaken individuals to grasp at the unknowable.
Jesus never believed that. He used the Scriptures all the time, and every time Jesus used the Bible, he did so authoritatively. Jesus believed that when the Bible spoke, God spoke. Even as the very Son of God, he saw himself as the explainer and fulfiller of Scripture, never its corrector. He even said that heaven and earth would pass away before one dot of the Bible would become untrue (Matt 5:18).
I know that’s hard for 21st-century minds to accept. How could something written by fallible humans be the word of God? I’m not saying it’s an easy or obvious doctrine—any more than Jesus being 100 percent God and 100 percent man is easy or obvious. The Christians doctrine about the Bible is patently miraculous. But it’s also the way Jesus (and the author of Psalm 119, and every other author of Scripture) saw things.
And here’s why that matters: If you see the Bible as a collection of enlightened thoughts, a consensus of wise people “doing the best they can,” that’s not going to inspire a lot of delight. Sure, there may be parts that are interesting, even inspiring. But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, we’ve always had wise writings, and we usually don’t follow them; why would we listen to this one if we don’t listen to all the others?
Seeing the Bible as enlightened thoughts might inspire us. More often than not, though, it’ll just confuse us, because we’re still responsible to figure out which parts are worth keeping and which parts aren’t. At first, keeping ourselves in the driver’s seat might seem appealing. But it’s actually a huge problem. There isn’t much use in getting a map if you know that 20 percent of it isn’t right, but you don’t know which 20 percent. You might as well not have the map at all.
And that’s precisely the beauty of the Bible. If we’re lost in darkness, stumbling along in life—as Christianity says we all are—then we don’t need enlightened thoughts from the best stumblers. We need, as Psalm 119:89 says, “a word established in the heavens.” We need someone from above to show us what we can’t see down here. We need God himself to pull back the veil.
