The first set is made and written by God himself, but Moses breaks them in anger because of the idolatry of the people (Exodus 32:19). Therefore, Moses goes up the mountain alone and receives the two tablets (Exodus 31:18 32:15–16).
Here God speaks directly from the mountain, but the people cannot bear it (Exodus 20:19–21). Soon after the fight with Amalek, Israel arrives at Mount Sinai. The future leader is to be formed by the word of God from its very beginning. An interesting detail is that already this first Scripture is to be recited to Joshua. The first command to record God’s words in a book comes in order that this book would become a memorial, a testimony, to the acts of God and the fulfilment of his promises. It is after this fight that God speaks to Moses (the text does not tell us how) and commands him to write down what God’s ultimate judgment over Amalek will be as a memorial. Amalek had come out to fight Israel, and Moses commanded Joshua to lead the army while Moses would lift up the staff of God. Immediately after the exodus, and still before the giving of the law at Mount Sinai, God tells Moses to start writing God’s words down (Exodus 17:14). Of all the named authors in the Bible, Moses is the first. And the Scriptures themselves testify to their formation. God shows his character even in the diverse ways that he used to form the Scriptures. There are many ways in which God spoke his word, and there are many ways in which it was written down. And we find the responses by the apostles to various situations within the churches, as well as positive teaching about the salvation that Jesus brought about. In the New Testament, we have the records of how the apostles taught about Jesus and about what Jesus himself taught (the four Gospels). And this in addition to the book of Proverbs, a collection of divinely crafted wisdom. We find personal reflections on the futility of life under the sun (Ecclesiastes), which is also part of God speaking to his people.
God speaks through the inspired recording of the history of his people, and through his prophets who heard his word - sometimes directly, but also through visions and dreams. God spoke directly to Moses from a burning bush (Exodus 3:2), and immediately after the exodus to the whole people from a burning mountain (Exodus 19:18). And since we are talking about an infinite God, it should not surprise us that he uses an array of ways to communicate with his creatures. From God’s Breath to Israel’s Booksīecause the Bible is the word of God, it naturally starts with God speaking, both in practice, as in Genesis 1:3 (“And God said, let there be light”), as well as logically, as in John 1:1 (“In the beginning was the Word”). But it may be more effective if we understand the larger narrative of the history of the Bible. We could talk about ten reasons why to trust the Bible. And by understanding what God had done over the ages, we will see that it is reasonable and justified to trust that the Bible in our hands is a translation of the trustworthy words of Scripture. But the way in which God brought about the Bible is the story of his providence in history, played out over thousands of years.
What happened to the Bible between the earliest times and the twenty-first century? How did God bring his word to us? The reverse of this question - how he brought us to his word - is part of our individual testimony. In what follows, we will think about what has gone before that moment when we open Scripture and read it. We believe that we are reading the actual words that God spoke. In either case, we trust that the word has not been corrupted and that the message of the Bible we hold in our hands was not changed or lost altogether. In practice, this means picking up a physical book and opening it to a specific page, or opening up an app on our phones and scrolling to a specific location. Reading Scripture is the most immediate exposure to the word of God.
We all know on reflection, though, that the real power does not rest in humans but in God’s word itself. Since human beings tend to look at the outside and not at the inside, we often attribute the power of this transformative teaching to the preacher.
After thousands of years, the Scripture that began with the breath of God now comes to us in the Book that is worthy of our supreme trust.įor our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Dirk Jongkind, senior research fellow in New Testament text and language at Tyndale House, to tell the story of how we got our Bibles.Ĭountless lives are changed by the preaching of the word of God. When God spoke, he ensured that it would be preserved through a process of writing, collecting, copying, translating, and printing. ABSTRACT: Behind the storyline of Scripture is the story of how God, in his providence, gave his words to us.