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The Supremacy of Scripture
The genre of Christian literature encompasses a wide range of book titles, topics, and subgenres, including fictional love stories, financial guides, diet and exercise plans, and leadership. We can be helped by books written by Christian authors when based on a biblical model.
The genre of Christian literature encompasses a wide range of book titles, topics, and subgenres, including fictional love stories, financial guides, diet and exercise plans, and leadership. We can be helped by books written by Christian authors when based on a biblical model.
Regardless of how well books are written or how gifted the author, the words on the page are not infallible. It is good and right to read all books with a skeptical eye, expecting the author to back up conjecture with well-reasoned logic and thinking. The author may be inspired, but the ideas he or she communicates are not infallible.
It is impossible to separate influence from the writer’s pen. The life of the reader is changed by the words they read and internalize. The style may be poetic or it may tell a story, but regardless of the form the words take, readers are shaped by what they read. Ideology travels on the wings of paragraphs and sentences.
The Bible is the Spirit of God in writing. This unique quality of Scripture is what makes it infallible. The apostle Paul said all Scripture is “breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16).[1] This gives us insight into the relationship between the Word of God and the Spirit of God. When the Spirit of God was given in Acts 2, the Bible says there was “a sound from heaven as a rushing mighty wind” (v. 2), and “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (v. 4). The word the translators interpreted as Spirit comes from the Greek word pneuma, meaning “the breathing out of air.”[2] Jesus used the word pneuma for both “wind” and “Spirit” when he told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).
The fundamental nature of God is that he is Spirit. The Holy Spirit fell upon people with the promise that his presence is for everyone (Acts 2:39). His Spirit moving upon men is also what produced the Scriptures. The Bible is not just good literature or motivational monologue. It is the Holy Spirit in a book, God-breathed words that will transform every life. The apostle Peter writes,
Knowing this first of all, that 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)
The Holy Spirit moved and produced the Bible through the pen and parchment of holy men. Jesus said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). His Word is the vehicle through which his Spirit travels. The Word of God and the Spirit of God are beautifully intertwined and often indistinguishable.
This is the reason the Bible is supreme over all other writings. It has intrinsic value built into its origin. It is God himself in a book. Everything the Bible declares is true and right and just, and anything ever spoken or written must align with Scripture if we are to consider it truth. It is a book full of inexhaustible revelation. We spend a lifetime reading the same Scriptures repeatedly and never exhaust their revelation declaring the glory of God. There is no limit to the depth of the glory and grace of Jesus Christ.
We know the Scriptures are true because our obedience to them is authenticated by a life full of faith and joy. As we read the Scriptures and allow them to become part of us, they earn our trust. The Savior we find in the Bible is the same God we encounter in prayer and in our daily walk. We read the story of redemption and it harmonizes with the story of our own redemption through Jesus Christ. His faithfulness throughout the Scriptures is consistent with his faithfulness to us. The Word of God is alive, self-revealing, and self-authenticating.
[1] The Greek word the apostle penned was theopneustos. It is the only time this word is used in the New Testament. It is a combination of the word theos (meaning God) and a derivative of the word pneo (meaning breathe or breeze).
[2] Walter Bauer et al., eds., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Frederick William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 832.