BIBLE RECORDS | 124 MIRACLES (124)

1. What are "Miracles"?

a) Miracles are those acts that only God can perform; usually superseding natural laws. Baker’s Dictionary of the Bible defines a miracle as “an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God.” It goes on to add that a miracle occurs to show that the power behind it is not limited to the laws of matter or mind as it interrupts fixed natural laws. So the term supernatural applies quite accurately.

b) Miracles are also known as Signs and Wonders.

c) Here we have one of the 124 miracles recorded in the Bible.

2. Miracle 124: DIVINE INSPIRATION of Scripture (Word of God).

a) Scripture.

i) This word used in the New Testament always denotes that definite collection of sacred books, regarded as given by inspiration of God, which we usually call the Old Testament (2 Timothy 3:15, 16; John 20:9; Galatians 3:22; 2 Peter 1:20). It was God's purpose thus to perpetuate his revealed will. From time to time he raised up men to commit to writing in an infallible record the revelation he gave. The “Scripture,” or collection of sacred writings, was thus enlarged from time to time as God saw necessary. We have now a completed “Scripture,” consisting of the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament canon in the time of our Lord was precisely the same as that which we now possess under that name. He placed the seal of his own authority on this collection of writings, as all equally given by inspiration (Matthew 5:17; 7:12; 22:40; Luke 16:29, 31).  

b) Inspiration.

i) Inspiration is that extraordinary or supernatural divine influence vouchsafed to those who wrote the Holy Scriptures, rendering their writings infallible.

ii) “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (Revised Version, “Every scripture inspired of God”), 2 Timothy 3:16. This is true of all the “sacred writings,” not in the sense of their being works of genius or of supernatural insight, but as “theopneustic,” i.e., “breathed into by God” in such a sense that the writers were supernaturally guided to express exactly what God intended them to express as a revelation of his mind and will.

iii) The testimony of the sacred writers themselves abundantly demonstrates this truth; and if they are infallible as teachers of doctrine, then the doctrine of plenary inspiration must be accepted. There are no errors in the Bible as it came from God, none have been proved to exist.

iv) Difficulties and phenomena we cannot explain are not errors. All these books of the Old and New Testaments are inspired. We do not say that they contain, but that they are, the Word of God. The gift of inspiration rendered the writers the organs of God, for the infallible communication of his mind and will, in the very manner and words in which it was originally given.

v) As to the nature of inspiration, we have no information. This only we know, it rendered the writers infallible. They were all equally inspired, and are all equally infallible. The inspiration of the sacred writers did not change their characters. They retained all their individual peculiarities as thinkers or writers.