Carried Along

Everyone gasped, just as he expected. The ranger had been building to this dramatic moment ever since we left the September sunshine and followed him down into the cave. Deeper and deeper we went, until our tour group huddled in one of the cave’s interior rooms, and we watched him flip the switch that controlled the electric lighting. I have been in many caves over the years, but never cease to be disoriented by that sudden envelopment in total darkness. After about thirty seconds of our nervous murmuring and shuffling, the ranger turned on a pen-sized flashlight. It immediately illuminated the large room, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. If he had not restored the main lights a few minutes later, we would have all attached ourselves to him and to this tiny beam of light, until he had led us all the way back to the earth’s surface.

That’s how Peter has just told us to treat the Scriptures of the Old Testament (and the New Testament; see his comments about Paul’s writings also being Scripture in 3:16). We are to pay attention to them as to a lamp shining in a dark and dangerous place. Stick close to your Bible! Let its truth illumine every step you take through this world, until Jesus himself appears, and floods the whole earth, and your heart, with his truth.

But why? Why should we attend to our Bibles with such seriousness? Why go to the trouble of memorizing little bits of it? Why follow reading-plans that lead us straight through it? Or sit through those endless Bible sermons? Or study books of the Bible like you are doing with the help of this little booklet right now? Why pay such careful attention to the Bible? As Peter explains in 1:20–21, it’s because when you read the Bible, you aren’t just reading the words of Isaiah, or Moses, or of David. These are the very words of God: “knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interoperation. 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.”

It’s true, of course, that human beings wrote the Scriptures. Our Bibles did not drop down out of heaven. Real people, like those prophets I mentioned, wrote its words. They did so at particular times and in particular places. They engaged their own intellects as they wrote, and the end products reflect their own individual backgrounds, personalities, and circumstances. That’s why Jeremiah sounds like Jeremiah, you can hear the voice of John in all of his writings, and Peter has his own unique style.

But there is also more going on. These biblical writers did not simply decide one day that they were going to produce prophecy, and then sat down and did it. They are not merely offering up the very best insights their wisdom can muster. No, God got involved. The Holy Spirit moved upon them. It is not that God audibly dictated the book of Romans to Paul, word-by-word. But the Spirit did provoke these authors, and he guided them, and he called things to mind. So that even as the human writers did their work, the Spirit of God was “carrying them along.” And when they laid down their pens, they had said exactly what God wished them to say. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s why Paul says that all Scripture is “breathed out by God (2 Tim 3:16).” It’s why the twentieth-century theologian B. B. Warfield said simply: “when Scripture speaks, God speaks.” And it’s why we should pay more careful attention to it.

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Article by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church