Inspired

‘Inspire’ means to ‘breathe into’. When God created human beings, He ‘breathed into’ them the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). When Jesus instructed His disciples to receive the Holy Spirit, He breathed on them to show that the Spirit of God would regenerate their lives, just as it had brought Adam life in the beginning. The picture is that God breathes His Holy Spirit into a person to bring them life.  However, the most common use of the term ‘inspired’ is to describe the word of God. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us that the Scriptures are God-breathed - they are inspired. This means that the human authors of Scripture had the Holy Spirit breathed into them to enable them to write down the very words of God. It is this ‘inspiration’ by the Holy Spirit that is the foundation for the doctrines of the Inerrancy and Infallibility of the Scriptures. Because God wrote the Bible by His Holy Spirit, through human authors, we can be absolutely confident that it is trustworthy, true, and useful for us in all matters of faith and practice. We can also be sure that to disobey the Scriptures is to disobey God Himself. (see Bible, Inerrancy, Infallibility)