Beyond defending the Bible to encountering the God who speaks through it
I have long wondered whether our modern conversation about biblical inerrancy sometimes asks too small a question. “Is Scripture without error?” is certainly a legitimate theological question. But answering it does not, by itself, tell us what Scripture is for – or what kind of book it is. We can affirm its inspiration and still approach the Bible primarily as a repository of correct information, theological propositions, or moral teachings.
Maybe a higher view of Scripture begins somewhere else: not with Scripture as an object to defend, but with Scripture as the living, God-breathed means through which God encounters his people. Hebrews says that “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12). Paul describes Scripture as theopneustos – “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). And Jesus can speak of an ancient text as something God is saying to people in the present (Matthew 22:31–32). The words were written long ago, but the voice is still heard.
That perspective also helps explain something distinctive about the Bible itself. God did not give us a neat theological textbook. He gave us four Gospels, each with its own emphases. He gave us Samuel and Kings alongside Chronicles. He gave us Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Psalms – voices that sometimes seem to conflict with one another. He gave us lament alongside praise, questions alongside answers, and people who argue with God. Scripture contains tension, poetry, ambiguity, memory, story, wisdom, prayer, and mystery.
Maybe mystery is not a defect in revelation. It may be one of its main characteristics. Biblical truth is not always something we can reduce to a tidy system. Scripture can be clear and mysterious at the same time. We can know something truly without being able to explain it exhaustively. The fact that Scripture sometimes leaves us wrestling may be part of how it forms us.1
This is why we want to distinguish between a text’s meaning and its continuing significance. Psalm 23 had a historical and literary meaning for ancient Israel. But when someone reads “The LORD is my shepherd” beside the bed of a dying spouse, the significance of those words can become almost unimaginably larger. The words have not changed, and their original meaning has not disappeared. Rather, the living God has brought an ancient word into a new moment, a new circumstance, and a new human heart.
So when we say that God continues to speak through Scripture, we do not mean that God keeps changing what Scripture means or that we can make the text say whatever we want. The words remain. Their meaning matters. But the Spirit who inspired Scripture also illumines it. Scripture can address us, confront us, comfort us, unsettle us, and transform us in ways that cannot be reduced to extracting information from the page.
Perhaps the irony is that a genuinely high view of Scripture may make us less anxious about defending it. If the Bible’s authority depends upon our ability to resolve every apparent difficulty, we may feel compelled to protect it. But if Scripture is the living, God-breathed word through which God encounters his people, we can afford to sit with it. We can allow Job to remain uncomfortable, Ecclesiastes to unsettle us, the Psalms to teach us how to lament, and the Gospel writers to emphasize different things. We can even say, “I don’t know,” without believing that Scripture has failed.
The real question, then, may not simply be, “What does the Bible say?” That question is essential. But alongside it is another: “What is God saying to us through what the Bible says?” The second question must never be detached from the first. Yet the first alone can reduce Scripture to information.
And perhaps this is the deepest point: the goal of Scripture is ultimately not Scripture. The goal is God. Jesus told people who searched the Scriptures diligently that those very Scriptures testify about him (John 5:39). The Bible is not ultimately a book designed to make us better at knowing the Bible. It is a book through which we come to know the One to whom the Bible points.
A high view of Scripture may not be one that makes Scripture smaller, neater, and easier to control – but one that allows it to remain alive, mysterious, and capable of speaking into every generation.
1 Jacob had to wrestle with God to know God and to understand himself, and mostly his own limitations (Genesis 32). It’s also possible that our “wrestling with Scripture” is what we need to encounter God and to come to terms with our own (mental, philosophical, intellectual, spiritual) limitations. (Offered by Kevin Thomas, September 2026)
Note: I wrote this a couple of months ago. It seemed fitting to publish it in light of Jesus and the Law.
