The Bible has a way of ‘talking to itself’. We often find that one part of the Bible sheds light on another part—even when the two parts are a long way apart, or seem at face value to be unconnected.
The Bible is Inspired
This feature is good evidence for what’s called the ‘inspiration’ of the Bible. Inspiration was the way in which the Bible came to be written. Using His special power, which the Bible calls ‘the Holy Spirit’, God influenced chosen men so that the words they wrote were the words that God wanted to be written. (Whilst we don’t always know precisely how this happened, the Bible says quite a lot about it.) This means that the words of the Bible were produced not by men, but by God.
Here’s one example of how the Bible itself puts this (taken from a letter written by Peter, one of Jesus’ twelve apostles):
‘No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Peter 1:20–21).
This means that the Bible is unique. There’s no other book in the world that has been produced this way, so there’s no other book that can make the claims that the Bible makes about itself.
When we’re reading the Bible, we’re not reading words of human origin; we’re reading God’s words. In fact, God was so intimately involved in the writing of the Bible that we can say that He ‘spoke’ the very words that we read. Here’s how the Apostle Paul explains this important teaching, in a letter to the younger disciple Timothy:
‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
God Speaking to Us
This is a remarkable thing—and something that has huge implications for us as readers of the Bible. When we read the words printed on the page, we’re actually hearing God speaking to us! This is how we should approach the reading of the Bible. (We’ll come back to 2 Timothy 3 later.)
Try to imagine how you would feel if you were listening to God literally speaking to you.
(I don’t mean this disrespectfully; there were times in history when this happened to people—for instance, when Moses received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, which you can read about in Exodus 19.)
You would certainly pay attention to what was being said! You would have great respect for the words you were hearing, and you would want to understand exactly what the words meant—in case there was something important that you needed to do about them.
Well, this is precisely how we should be when we read the Bible. The Bible is not just words printed in ink on paper; it’s God ‘breathing out’ words to us. So yes, we need to have total respect for what we’re ‘hearing’; yes, we do need to pay attention, not reading carelessly or too hastily; and we need to try to understand what the words mean, because almost certainly there’s going to be something important that we need to do. Because the Bible is written by God, its words are unique. It can do things for us that no human book can do—indeed, this is exactly why God has given us the Bible in the way He has, as we’ll see shortly.
A Book With a Job to Do
I began this article by saying that sometimes the Bible seems to ‘talk to itself’. (Perhaps this idea makes more sense now that we’ve thought about the way the Bible was produced. There is one mind—God’s mind—behind it all, despite the fact that the 66 books of the Bible were penned by different men at different times and in different places.) I was reminded of this recently when I was reading Isaiah 55.
Here’s the first section of the passage in question:
‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:8–9).
The words are God’s, communicated through His ‘spokesman’ the Jewish prophet Isaiah, who was sent by God to speak to the nation of Judah in Old Testament times, about 700 years before the birth of Jesus Christ. At this time God’s people were ruled by kings. Some of the kings were good, trying to follow God’s ways, and some were terrible, leading God’s people into sin and disobedience.
The two verses quoted above are part of an appeal by God to His people, the Jews, to turn back to Him. He is a merciful and compassionate God, He says through the prophet, so they will have their sins forgiven if they repent and turn back to Him sincerely. God’s thoughts are ‘higher’ than human thoughts because He can see into human hearts and know what people (we!) are really like.
Then, to reassure Isaiah’s readers of His willingness and His power to do this, God continues:
‘For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (vs. 10–11).
I think what God is speaking about here is what we call the “water cycle”. In this cycle, rain and snow come down from above to provide moisture for the earth. This causes plants to grow, which in turn produce the food that we need to eat to stay alive. Then the moisture ‘returns’ to God (via the evaporation of rivers and seas) and the whole cycle begins again.
But the most important part of this is that God sends this rain for a purpose: to provide for humankind. And, because He is God, that purpose cannot fail. When God does something, it never fails. What God intends to do, He always accomplishes. There’s a reason why He sends the rain from above in this way, and the rain does its job. It does exactly what God sends it to do—always.
Allowing the Bible to Do its Job
Reading these words, I was struck by how similar they are to the verses from 2 Timothy 3 we saw earlier. Let me quote those verses again, and this time see if you spot the similarity with the words of Isaiah 55:
‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
What do the two passages have in common? Did you notice it? They both talk about something being sent from God to accomplish what He wants. In Isaiah, it’s the rain being sent from God so that people can have enough to eat. In 2 Timothy, it’s God’s Word being ‘spoken’ so that people can be ‘equipped for every good work’—so that they will have everything they need to be able to behave in ways that God wants. The rain can’t fail to do its job, and God’s Word can’t fail to do its job either (if we take notice of it), because both are sent by God. (I hope you can see what I mean about the Bible ‘talking to itself’—the words in one passage help to explain the words in another passage.)
The lesson I learned from this comparison was a very powerful one: if I read it carefully and respond in the right way, then God’s Word can have exactly the effect on me that God intends: ‘equipping me for every good work’. In the same passage, Paul tells Timothy, ‘the sacred writings… are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (v. 15). The ‘sacred writings’ are in the Bible. So, I know there’s nothing flawed or faulty about the Bible. It really can make me the kind of person that God wants me to be, behaving as He wants me to behave. And if I don’t achieve that, then it’s not the Bible’s fault.
But for this to happen, I have to let it! I have to read it—regularly and carefully, listening to God ‘speaking’ to me as I do so. I have to try and understand what God is saying. Then I have to decide to do what God teaches me in the Bible, becoming His ‘child’ and following the example of the Lord Jesus Christ. I know the Bible is capable of doing all this—like the rain that God sends, it really can accomplish what God wants.
But will I let it do that? Will you? We can only decide for ourselves. Let’s make every effort to listen to God ‘speaking’ to us in the Bible. If we will allow it to have its effect on us, it really can change us in the way that God wants.
JEREMY THOMAS