06.04. It Is An Inspired Book

4. IT IS AN INSPIRED BOOK

"Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." "All scripture is given by inspiration of God." The Bible is an inspired book. Dr. Adam Clarke said, "Good men could not have written the Bible if they would, and bad men would not have written it if they could." His argument was this, that again and again in the Bible there are claims to inspiration, and for good men to claim their writings were inspired when they were not would be lying, and good men do not lie, therefore good men could not have written it if they would. And the Bible speaks so plainly against sin that bad men would not have written it if they could, for bad men do not write thus plainly about themselves. Man is only the stenographer, the Bible is the word of God. The hand of God is seen in the fact that the writings of the Bible cover a period of fifteen hundred years, written by more than thirty-five different authors, in at least three languages, men from different walks of life, rich and poor, learned and unlearned. And yet when their writings are brought together they fit into one great volume of sixty-six books without a friction or a jar, and when we read it we find it is a love story, the story of God’s love for our poor wayward race.

If I did not believe that God had written this book I would not want it around my home.

More than twenty-seven hundred times you will find in the Bible a claim to inspiration, and if it be not the word of God, then there are more than twenty-seven hundred lies within its pages, and I would not want a book in my home fostering so many falsehoods. But these statements are not false, they are true. The Bible is God’s book, I do not believe it contains the word of God, I believe it is the Word of God.