Read: Psalms 19
Last month I showed that all the words in the Bible are God’s words, and that to disbelieve or disobey any word in Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God. All the words in Scripture are completely true and without error in any part. God’s words are the ultimate standard in truth (John 17:17). It is the characteristic of God’s speech even when spoken through sinful humans beings that it is never false and that it never affirms error.
Based off this information we can now define biblical inerrancy: Inerrancy of Scripture means that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact. This definition simply means that the Bible always tells the truth, and that it always tells the truth concerning everything it talks about. This definition does not mean that the Bible tells us every fact there is to know about any one subject, but it affirms that what it does say about any subject is true.
There are some who will challenge the inerrancy of the Bible. Listed are some of the objections:
1) The Bible is only authoritative for “Faith and Practice:
The Bible repeatedly affirms that all Scripture is profitable for us (2 Timothy 3:16), and that all of it is “God-breathed”. The New Testament contains further affirmation of the reliability of all parts of Scripture: in Acts 24:14, Paul says that he worships God, “Believing everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets.”
It seems that the New Testament authors are willing to cite and affirm as true every detail of the Old Testament. The New Testament gives us the following: David ate the bread of the Presence (Matthew 12:3-4); Jonah was in the whale (Matthew 12:40); the men of Nineveh repented (Matthew 12:41); Elijah was sent to the widow of Zerephath (Luke 4:25-26); the day Lot left Sodom fire and brimstone rained from the heaven (Luke 17:29 and verse 32 reference to Lots wife who turned to salt; Abraham gave a tenth of everything to Melchizedek (Hebrews 7:1-2). There is just too many more to list them all.
2) We have no inerrant manuscripts, therefor an inerrant Bible is misleading.
People who make this objection point to the fact that inerrancy has always been claimed for the first or original copies of the Biblical documents, yet none of them survive, we only have copies of copies.
A response to this is it may be stated that for over 99 percent of the words of the Bible, we know what the original manuscripts said. In the small percentage of cases where there is uncertainty about what the original text said, the general sense of the sentence is usually quite clear from the context. The current published scholarly texts of the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament are the same as the original manuscripts.
3) There are some clear errors in the Bible.
The first answer that should be made to this objection is to ask where such errors are. In which specific verse or verses do these errors occur? You will find it surprising how frequently one finds that this objection is made by people who have little or no idea where the specific errors are, but only believe that there are errors because someone else told them.
In other cases people will mention one or more specific passage where they claim there is a false statement. It is important that we look at the biblical text itself, and look very closely. If we believe that the Bible is indeed inerrant, we should be eager and not afraid to inspect these texts in detail. There will be times when knowledge of Hebrew or Greek might be necessary, but if you do not have access to this knowledge, you may need to get answers from a more technical commentary or by asking someone who does have this training.
Finally, if we begin to deny the inerrancy of the Bible, this leads to serious problems. If we deny inerrancy, a serious moral problem confronts us. Ephesians 5:1 tells us to be imitators of God. A denial of inerrancy that still claims that the words of Scripture are God=breathed words necessarily implies that God intentionally spoke false to us. If we begin to deny inerrancy of the Bible, we will begin to wonder if we can really trust God in anything he says. If we deny Biblical inerrancy, we make our own minds a higher standard of truth than that of God’s Word itself.