Bible Study - How God Inspired the Bible

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ll of us have been inspired sometime in our life. When I was a young man, I was inspired to write poems. I had deep feelings about nature around me, my priestly calling and God, and I them in poetry. You too may have had deep feelings about some experiences in life, and, if you have an artistic temperament, you may have expressed these feelings in a song, a painting or a sculpture.

All the persons who wrote the 73 books of the Bible were inspired like me or you. They were inspired to write the stories, poems, letters and sayings in the Bible. However, unlike us, their deep feelings to write the Bible were not just their own. God inspired those feelings, that is, guided their minds and hearts in writing the Bible!

God guided the writers of the Bible so much so that all that they wrote in the Bible expressed, as it were, the “mind and heart” of God. When we read the Bible, it’s just like reading a personal letter from one’s loving father and mother, though they may have asked someone else to inscribe it for them. The writers of the Bible wrote no more than and no less than what God inspired them to write. We can rightly say then that besides these human authors, God too is an author of the Bible!


The human writers of the Bible, however, were not slaves whose minds and hearts were completely controlled by someone else. The human writers had complete freedom in writing the Bible. While allowing themselves to be guided by God, they used their own language, way of thinking and style of writing to express what God wanted them to write. In other words, God and the human authors had a wonderful cooperation in producing the Bible. Thus, we can say, the Bible is the Word of God written in human words!


In the next lesson, we’ll discuss what the Bible teaches. Does the Bible teach Science? Economics? Art? In the meantime, pick up your Bible and read the following passages about biblical inspiration and the uniqueness of the Bible:



1. Isaiah 55:10-11.
2. 2 Timothy 3:16-17.
3. Hebrews 4:12.
4. 2 Peter 1:20-21.