Does the Bible simply give to us the assorted collection of insights or the wisdom of a primitive Jewish people?

Or do we have here a written document whose author is actually God?

Growing up outside of the church, I did assume that the Bible was merely a collection of wisdom, mythology and rules written by men.

I was unaware that it claimed to be the very words of God Himself.

I'm Nathan W. Bingham and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

Knowing that the Bible, unlike all other books, is inspired by God, Al-Kreata, who knows us better than we know ourselves,

changes everything and changes how we view the Scriptures.

All week, our C. Sprawl is helping us to see the Bible correctly,

is responding to critics and explaining how it is that we receive the collection of books contained in the Bible.

But today, he considers the Bible's claim that all Scripture is inspired by God. Here's Dr. Sprawl.

In our first session in our study of the authority of Scripture, we spent some time going over the historical background for the crisis of authority that we face in the church, and also in the world today.

You recall, I made mention of the fact that Luther coined the phrase,

sola scriptura by the Scriptures alone, which became one of the battle cries of the Protestant Reformation.

And as time was running out in that first segment, we were discussing the meaning of the term authority, and I defined the word authority at that time briefly by saying the right to impose obligation.

For example, at the episode of the encounter Jesus had with the Centurion, who knew what it meant to be under authority, to be able to say,

go and people would go and so on.

Now, I want us to notice here something of irony in this word authority.

We have an expression in our culture that we call the golden rule.

And the facetious definition of the golden rule is that the golden rule says, whoever owns the gold rules.

I remember Carl Marx made the observation that whoever owns the means of production controls the world.

I understood that long before I ever studied anything of Carl Marx. I understood it as a kid when we were playing ball on the street in the sand lots around Pittsburgh.

And we didn't have the opportunity or the privilege to have umpires monitoring and acting as armors in our disputes.

...