In today’s weekly email there was a quote that I submitted:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven\u2026The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> This was an example of poor history and scholarship that is out there and was popularized by Dan Brown. \u00a0It wasn’t earmarked as such in the weekly email and it should have been.<\/p>\n If you want to know a more biblical view, here’s one from JI Packer, writing of those who believe that a revelation delivered by sinful and ignorant human beings must itself be imperfect he states: <\/p>\n
\n\u2015 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code<\/em><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
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\nBut this is to deny the biblical doctrine of providence, according to which God \u2018worketh all things after the counsel of his own will\u2019. The Bible excludes the idea of a frustrated Deity. \u2018Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, and in earth\u2019. He was well able to prepare, equip and overrule human writers so that they wrote nothing but what He intended; and the Scripture tells us that this is what in fact he did. We are to think of the Spirit\u2019s inspiring activity, and, for that matter, of all His regular operations in and upon human personality, as (to use an old but valuable technical term)\u00a0concursive; that is, as exercised in, through and by means of the writers\u2019 own activity, in such a way that their thinking and writing was both free and spontaneous on their part and divinely elicited and controlled, and what they wrote was not only their own work but also God\u2019s work.<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n