In II Timothy 3:16, it is stated that "all Scripture is inspired by God." The Greek word , translated here "inspired by God," literally means "God-breathed." That is, the Scriptures are a product of the creative activity of the divine breath. As Alan Stibbs has observed, this "indicates that Scripture has in its origin this distinctive hallmark, that it owes its very existence to the direct creative activity of God himself."1 It is this same divine breath that brought about the creation of the heavens: "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth" (Psalm 33:6). God's breath is "the irresistible outflow of His power."2 The divine breath also brought about the creation of man: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2:7).
The divine origin of the Scriptures is reiterated in II Peter 1:20,21, which states that "no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophets' own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." B. B. Warfield wrote as follows with respect to this passage:
But there is more here than a simple assertion of the Divine origin of Scripture. We are advanced somewhat in our understanding of how God has produced the Scriptures. It was through the instrumentality of men who "spake from him." More specifically, it was through an operation of the Holy Ghost on these men which is described as "bearing" them. The term here used is a very specific one. It is not to be confounded with guiding, directing, or controlling, or even leading in the full sense of that word. It goes beyond all such terms, in assigning the effect produced specifically to the active agent. What is "borne" is taken up by the "bearer," and conveyed by the "bearer's" power, not its own, to the "bearer's" goal, not its own. The men who spoke from God are here declared, therefore, to have been taken up by the Holy Spirit and brought by His power to the goal of His choosing. The things which they spoke under this operation of the Spirit were therefore His things, not theirs.3
Geisler and Nix have suggested, as a working definition of inspiration, that it is "that mysterious process by which the divine causality worked through the human prophets without destroying their individual personalities and styles, to produce divinely authoritative writings."4 In other words, the Scriptures are of divine origin, but they are also of human origin. That is to say, God used human beings with all of their inevitable imperfections to provide us with a divinely determined body of literature. It is in keeping with the character of God that He would demonstrate his omnipotence by accomplishing both. It is beyond human ability to comprehend how the imperfect could be used in the creation of that which is perfect, or how fallible people could be used to write an infallible body of literature, but this is nothing more than a specific example of the fact that the doctrines of divine predestination and human free will are equally valid simultaneously. How both could be true at the same time is an unfathomable mystery.
The mystery of inspiration has often been compared to the mystery of the incarnation. Just as Jesus is both divine and human, so the Scriptures are both divine and human. To emphasize one at the expense of the other is to fall into heresy.
1 Alan M. Stibbs, "The Witness of Scripture to Its Inspiration," in Carl F. H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1958), p. 109.
2 Benjamin B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1970), p. 133.
3 Ibid., p. 137.
4 Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1968), p. 29.
