Flipbooks

12 10 Digging Deeper God's Word Is Inspired We believe the Bible is inspired by God. What does that mean? Read 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:21. What does the Bible say about who wrote it? Write your thoughts below. It may be hard to understand, but the Bible teaches that God breathed through His prophets in the Old Testament and through the apostles in the New Testament. These people wrote down God's Word on scrolls. Every word they wrote flowed from God. At the same time, God used the human skills and personalities of the writers to record His Word. In the end, the Bible is truly from God, but through it we also get to know the human writers who recorded it. God's Word Is Inerrant In addition to being inspired, we believe that the Bible is inerrant. The word inerrant means "without error." This means that it contains no mistakes and is always reliable as God's Word. We trust what it says and know that it will never lead us astray. Why do we need the truth so much today? What lies do Satan, the world, and our sinful flesh throw at us every day? Write your thoughts here. God's Word Has Authority We believe the Bible is authoritative. What does that mean? Read Isaiah 55:10–11. What does the Bible say about what God's Word does? Because God's Word has power and God uses it to do His work, we can have full confi- dence that it does what God says it does. The most important thing that it does is to show us our sin (the Law) and show us our Savior (the Gospel). Trust God's Word; it works! A Word about Variations Over the centuries, as scribes made copies of scrolls or books, occasionally they made variations to the text, usually leaving out a word or misspelling a word. Thousands of scholars have collected thousands upon thousands of fragments of these copies, and by the grace of God and the care of the scribes, there are very few of these textual variations. God's Word is inerrant, but sometimes scribes made mistakes. The central teachings of God's Word don't change, haven't changed, and never will change. Find a footnote (a little line under the main text) in a Bible that records one of these varia- tions. Does the variation affect the meaning of the text? Why or why not? Think about It . . . Imagine you're talking to someone in your school or family about the Bible, and the person says the Bible is just a book. In your own words, summarize or paraphrase what you've learned about the Bible's inspiration, inerrancy, and authority, and why that matters. Textual variants are an important thing to talk about, especially when your learners will be confronted with so many lies through- out their lives. Take the time to look up several footnotes that show textual variants. Use this as an opportunity to talk, not about the unre- liable nature of Scripture (which it isn't), but about the reliable nature of Scripture. Talk about how all this at- tention to detail, even over small fragments, shows just how open, honest, and transparent Bible scholars are when looking at the history of the text. Again, emphasize that the doc- trine of God's Word hasn't changed even with small variations over the millennia due to slight copy errors. Be sensitive to learners who are new to reading the Bible or have trouble reading. Either help these learners find the Bible pas- sages (extra practice after the last lesson) or listen to the Bible on an app. For specifics and more on this, refer to Luther's Small Catechism with Explanation (2017 edition), Question 8.

• Cover