"Inspired Of God" (2 Tim. 3:16)

"God, who gave the message, chose and prepared His messengers, and by His almighty power, using the faculties of His messengers, produced statements of absolute truthfulness. In combining His divine power in perfect union with the exercise of man's faculties, God was surely able to effect results accurate in every detail in spite of natural fallibility. The divine ray, while using the human medium through which it passed, yet retained its own purity.

To suppose that words and cases are convertible, that tenses have no absolute meaning, that forms of expression are accidental, is to abjure the fundamental principles on which all intercourse between men is based. A disbelief in the exactness of language is the prelude to all philosophical scepticism. And it will probably be found that the tendency of mind which discredits the fullest meaning of words leads, however little we may see it, to the disparagement of all outward revelation." (Westcott)

unknown | May 1975
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