What's So Amazing About Scripture?Paraugs

The Breath of God

Scripture is amazing: it describes itself as a river. It’s also the breath of God. 

What is our voice? It is our breathing out through our vocal cords. We may think about the Bible as ancient peoples’ ideas about God. But no, “all Scripture is God-breathed.” (2 Timothy 3:16) Scripture is not merely God breathing upon human writings. It is God breathing out through human writers as they wrote, and continuing to breath through their writings now.

This explains the unity of Scripture. Athenagoras (born in AD 133) wrote, “Moses, Isaiah and the other prophets wrote things with which they were inspired, the Spirit making use of them as a flute-player breathes into a flute.” Yet even this beautiful analogy overlooks the variety of instruments that make up the Scriptures. The Bible in fact is a symphony, in which each human author is a different instrument in the divine orchestra. One is a violin, another a horn, another a snare drum. Yet somehow, one heavenly conductor guides each of them in harmonized unity, across multiple centuries and continents, collectively creating something so wondrous and momentous that only a divine composer could have conceived of it in the first place.

This also explains the Bible’s unparalleled power to awaken us, and to startle us to life as it were. The reason is that the Author of Life is present with us as we read his words—breathing new life upon us as we do so. His Word is still able to do in our lives what it did in Sarah’s barren womb: “to give life to the dead and call into being things that were not.” (Romans 4:17) Or, as Jesus said, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life.” (John 6:63) 

The Bible’s words are alive and they connect us to a Living God. A popular story circulates on my continent. It tells of an African woman who carried her Bible with her wherever she went. When people would ask her why, with so many other books to read, she answered, “It’s the only book that reads me.”