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Inspiration and Inerrancy Essay Living in a Fallen world, people tend to search for answers to life’s questions in places they should not be looking. This causes them to belittle the actual source of answers God has provided for us, the Bible. I find it hard to explain God’s authority to an unbelieving individual talk less of the Bible’s authority. If a person doesn’t believe the bible, it can be a task to convince them that it has any authority. It is easy to explain the authority of the government or police, because these are authorities they are subject to and they can see, but when to comes to the authority of God and the bible, it is a different perspective. God has given us the Bible as a gift of love for us His children to follow until He comes back. It is the divine truth to all of humanity. The Bible is God’s revelation in written form to man. That is where the authority of the Bible comes from, the divine revelation of God Himself. Biblical inspiration is the doctrine in Christian theology concerned with the divine origin of the bible and what it teaches. Compared to the modern definition of inspiration, which is the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something especially to do something creative, biblical inspiration is God breathed, divine influence of the Holy spirit. God revealed Himself to selected people whom he had inspired to write the books of the Bible. In 2 Peter 1:21 the bible says for prophecy never had it’s origin in the human will, but prophets, thou humans spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Inerrancy states that the Bible’s word is accurate, authoritative and free of error. There are four separate arguments for validating that the Bible is error free: Slippery Slope, Epistemological, Historical and Biblical. The slippery Slope Argument is the least important of the four. One of the foundational principles that is a slipping slope is confession of sins. Many scholars have argued whether we need to repent of our sins even after we’ve been saved. Read more: Inspirational Essay About Life New teaching state that we do not need to repent of our sins once we are saved. This is diabolical to what the bible says in 1 John 1:9 that if we confess our sin, he is faithful and just and He will forgive us of our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. The Epistemological Argument says that we shouldn’t trust that the whole bible is error free, that we cannot tell what parts are accurate and what parts aren’t. Some who deny inerrancy say that the presence of errors does not mean we cannot trust it, because we trust our teachers in school even though we know that they are not perfect and theta the make mistakes. The Historical Argument suggests that there is a long lasting organization from Christian forefathers who believed in the Bible’s inerrancy. Princeton theologians made up the Bible’s inerrancy in the 19th century and Feinburg disproved the notion. Lastly, the Biblical Argument, which is the strongest of the four, simply states that we can trust the Scriptures simple because the scripture tell us to. In Titus 1:2, the bible says that God does not lie. In Isaiah 61:1, Isaiah wrote God’s plan for redeeming man under the Inspiration of God and in Luke 4:18, Jesus who had been inspired by the same spirit as His Father quoted the same plan as His Father. With over a millennium between the time of Isaiah and Jesus, we know that the redemption plan is true and inspired by God. This is the relationship between inspiration and inerrancy. Also the fact that God said that it would happen and it did shows that the Bible is true. In the process of explaining to my inquisitive jogger, I would let him or her know about my testimony and the numerous things God has done in my life. Also, I would try and explain some of the other teaching of the bible about confession and how when we confess the things from the Bible, they come to pass if we have faith. People tend to be more convinced when they can relate to you on a personal level. In the way that I live my life, I believe that the word of God is real and infallible. It is the truth and has authority. God breathe and inspired people to write. They wrote things and the things came to pass in due time. The bible instructs us to be faithful to His Great commission and to live our life in a way that pleases Him. These with the other things that He has spoken and have come to pass, I have enough reason to believe Him. Bibliography Elwell, Walter A Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001) Holy Bible NIV, (Copyright Biblica, Inc. 2011, Grand Rapids MI. Zondervan 2011) Towns, Elmer L. Theology for Today, (Cengage Learning, 2008, 2002)