‘This is the word of the Lord’
At the end of a Bible reading we routinely say, “This is the word of the Lord.” It can become mere routine, and we may rarely think about what we are saying, but this is actually an important statement about Scripture. So what does it mean?
Simply put, we are saying that the words we have just read are the actual words of God, whichever part of the Bible they come from and whoever else was writing or speaking them. It is not merely that God breathes life into the Scriptures, still less that he ‘inspires’ the authors as they write. Rather, God breathes out his words via the human authors. When NIV translates 2 Timothy 3:16 as “All Scripture is God-breathed”, that is what it is saying (ESV has “breathed out by God”).
Think about it this way. It is not as if God had nothing to do with the writing of Scripture until the last minute, when pen was being put to parchment, and he suddenly inspired the writing. It is much more than that. First, God created the authors themselves, giving them the character, personality and skills he wanted each to have. Then he put them in the circumstances and gave them the experiences that would shape them into precisely the kind of people who would write what they did. Truly, the Bible is both a divine book and a human book, but it is divine and human in different ways: it is a word from God through human authors (although that may be a little cumbersome to say every time).