My sermon last Sunday (which I’ll post soon) was on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:17-20. This passage includes these words from verse 18: “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” In my sermon, I reflected on the meaning of the inspiration of scripture. I said the following:
Now, when Jesus refers to the “Law and the Prophets” in verse 17, or even “the Law” in verse 18, Bible scholars tells us that this is shorthand for saying, “the entire Bible”—which at the time was what we would call the Old Testament.
And he’s saying two very important things about the Bible.
First, he’s saying that the Bible—every word of it—is given to us by God. And every word of it matters. That’s what Jesus believed. Why do I say that? Well, notice Jesus refers to “an iota” and a “dot.” Jesus would have been referring to tiny strokes in letters of the Hebrew alphabet. But for us that “iota or dot” would be similar to the crossing of a “t” or the dotting of “i” in our own alphabet—or putting an apostrophe or a punctuation mark in the right place. Or distinguishing a lowercase “q” from a lowercase “g” by adding a curl to the end of the stem. That’s the level of detail that Jesus is talking about. And he’s saying, in so many words, that God cared about each of those details in the Word that he gave us.
The end result of all this, as New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said, is that God ensured that we the Church have exactly the Bible that God wanted us to have.
From here, I talked about recent controversies surrounding Andy Stanley’s words about the Virgin Birth and Adam Hamilton’s “three bucket” approach to scripture. In my view, neither of their viewpoints is compatible with Jesus’ own view of the inspiration of scripture.
Or Paul’s…
I’m starting a Bible study tonight on Galatians, and I was reminded that Paul’s argument in Galatians 3:15-18 depends on a close reading of two verses in Genesis. Unless we believe that Paul was wrong, and such a reading was unwarranted, then what does that say about our view of inspiration?
The ESV Study Bible commentary on v. 16 puts it like this:
Gal. 3:16 God spoke promises to Abraham on several occasions, but probably Gen. 13:15 and 17:8 are particularly in view. And to your offspring. Paul knows that the singular (Hb. zera‘) can be used as a collective singular that has a plural sense (he interprets it in a plural sense in Rom. 4:18). But it also can have a singular meaning, and here Paul, knowing that only in Christ would the promised blessings come to the Gentiles, sees that the most true and ultimate fulfillment of these OT promises comes to one “offspring,” namely, Christ. Paul’s willingness to make an argument using a singular noun in distinction from its plural form (which occurs in other OT verses) indicates a high level of confidence in the trustworthiness of the small details of the OT text.