Steve in Nashville writes in with today's question.

Pastor John, thank you for your ministry.

To your knowledge, were any writers of the Bible

self-consciously aware that they were being inspired

by the Holy Spirit as they wrote?

What would you say, Pastor John?

Let me answer by pointing to three authors of scripture,

or at least three kinds of writing in scripture,

even though we're not given a window

onto the very moment when the Old Testament prophets

put their oral prophecies into writing.

I think it's fair to infer that since they knew God was giving them

words of his very own to speak orally,

he would also take care to help them preserve those words when they

or others came to write them down.

If you look up in a concordance,

how many times in the Old Testament the phrase

thus says the Lord occurs, you will find in the ESV

that it occurs 417 times.

Wow.

That's incredible.

351 of those.

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