2 Peter 1:21

2 Peter 1:21

An Inspired Definition of Inspiration.

It is a definition of inspiration, a definition simple, precise, exhaustive. "Men spoke" spoke without ceasing (even for the moment of speaking) to be men; spoke with all those characteristics of phrase and style, of thought and mind, of position and history, which mark and make the man; yet "spoke from God," with a message and mission, under an influence and an impulse, a control and a suggestion, which gave to the word spoken a force and a fire, a touch and a contact, a sight and an insight, unlike other utterances because of a breath of God in it, the God of the spirits of all flesh.

I. No testimony could be more explicit to the inspiration of the Bible than this. It is the testimony of the New Testament to the Old. And it is the Old Testament which needs the testimony. Christians have no difficulty in accepting the New Testament. They understand that the Saviour spoke the words of God by an inspiration direct and self-evidencing. "We speak," He said, "that we do know, and testify that we have seen." They understand, on the strength of His own promise, that the Apostles were inspired by a direct gift of insight into truth, whether of fact or faith. For the inspiration of the Old Testament they can only look to the New. The treatment of it by our Lord, His constant appeal to it in controversy, His constant reference to it as fulfilled in Himself, the express assertion of its inspiration by St. Paul and St. Peter, are the grounds on which we, who were never under the Law, believe the earlier and larger half of the Bible to be, in some true sense, an integral part of the inspired word of God. "Men spake" in it also "from God."

II. "Men spake." "Human beings," St. Peter says; the "men" is emphatic. Men spake. And does not St. Peter as good as say, And remained men in the speaking? Where is the authority for supposing that the inspiring Spirit levelled the intellects, obliterated the characteristics, overwhelmed the peculiarities, of the several writers, so that St. Paul, St. John, St. James, St. Peter, might be mistaken one for the other in the finished work? These are the glosses, the fancies, the inventions, with which prejudice and fanaticism have overlaid the subject, and given great advantage by doing so to the caviller and the sceptic. Men spake, and in speaking were men still. Even their message, even the thing they were sent to tell, must be expressed in terms of human speech, through a medium therefore of adaptation and accommodation. St. Paul himself expresses this thought when he says, "At present we see by a mirror, in riddle" see but the reflection of the very thing that is, hear but in enigma the absolute truth "then" in "that world" then at last "face to face."

III. The two halves of the text are dependent upon each other. Men spake, not angels; that is one thought: not machines; that is another. Not angels, or they had no sympathetic, no audible, voice for man; not machines, or speech (which is by definition intelligence in communication) had been a contradiction in terms. These human beings spake from God. For He had something to say, and to say to man. There is something which God only can say. There is something which reason cannot say, nor experience, nor discovery, nor the deepest insight, nor the happiest guessing, nor the most sagacious foresight. There is a world of heaven, which flesh and blood cannot penetrate. There is a world of spirit, impervious even to mind. There is a world beyond death, between which and the living there is an impassable gulf fixed. More than this, there is a world of cause and consequence, which no moralist can connect or piece together. There is a world of providence, which gives no account of itself to the observer. There is a world of Divine dealing with lives, with souls, with nations, with ages of which even the inspired man must say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me; it is high; I cannot attain to it."

C. J. Vaughan, Restful Thoughts in Restless Times,p. 315.