Great Doctrines of the Bible—God the Father, God the Son/ Martyn Lloyd Jones

3. The Authority of the Bible 

Revelation and inspiration are not the same: “Revelation means God's unfolding of Himself"; inspiration “means that the writer has been controlled by the Holy Spirit of God in such a way that he cannot be guilty of error in what he writes” (24). Therefore, “Everything that is in the Bible is not revelation but everything in the Bible is inspired” (23). 

The crucial passage from the Bible is this: “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 complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3: 16). The Bible is God-breathed: “God breathed these messages into men and through them, and these Scriptures are the result of that divine action”; in other words, it means everything in the Bible is “given by God to man” (24). One thing essential is this: verbal inspiration. It “means that the Holy spirit has thus overruled and controlled and guided these men, even in the choice of particular words, in such a way as to prevent any error, and above all to produce the result that was originally intended by God” (25). There are a great many passages in the Bible tell that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself “obviously accepted the Old Testament in toto as authoritative, final and supreme” (31). Therefore, one thing needs to be affirmed is that the Bible is infallible and inerrant. However, “you cannot prove to anyone that the Bible is uniquely and divinely inspired” because “people have to be enlightened by the Holy Spirit” (32).