We use the word inspiration quite loosely. A sunset is inspiring. So is a piece of music, or a speech that moves a crowd. Something stirs us, and we call it inspiring. If that is all Christians meant by an inspired Bible, it would be one emotionally moving book among many.

Paul meant something far stronger:

2 Timothy 3:16 (NKJV)

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,

The Greek word Paul uses is theopneustos. It joins the word for God to the word for breathed: God-breathed.

“Inspiration” comes from a Latin word meaning to breathe into, so people picture God stirring something inside a man and the man writing out of it. Men did write it, in their own words. But those words did not begin in them. They began in God.

Two things had to happen before there was a Bible. First God had to make Himself known. That is what Christians mean by revelation: God showing us who He is.

Some of that is there for everybody. The world He made declares plainly that He is there and that He is powerful, so that no one has an excuse (Romans 1:20). But creation will not tell you that He is three Persons, or that He saves sinners through His Son, or where history is heading. Men do not reason their way to any of that. God has to say it, or nobody knows it — this is revelation.

Then the second thing. Inspiration. God did not tell these things to men and then leave them to write it up as best they could remember. He saw to the words. Every sentence they wrote was the sentence He intended — written in their own vocabulary, out of their own study and their own circumstances, and still exactly His. He did not need to bypass the men to do it. He had made them, and He had spent their whole lives preparing them for the pages they would write. Paul says God set him apart from his mother's womb (Galatians 1:15). By the time Paul picked up a pen, the man holding it was already God's instrument.

So was it dictation? Did the writers take God down like a secretary at a desk? Sometimes it was exactly that. God told Jeremiah what to say.

Jeremiah 1:9 (NKJV)

Then the LORD put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me: “Behold, I have put My words in your mouth.”

Most of Scripture did not come that way, and it did not need to. God had already made these men. He gave them their language. He walked them through the experiences that shaped how they saw the world. A God who has done all that does not need to dictate to get the words He wants.

Luke writes polished Greek and opens his Gospel like a historian, explaining that he investigated everything from the beginning before setting it down in order for Theophilus (Luke 1:1–4). Mark writes fast and plain, hurrying from one scene to the next. John uses a small vocabulary and short sentences. Amos kept sheep and tended sycamore trees before God called him, and his illustrations come off the farm. Dictation would have left us sixty-six books in one voice.

Peter expresses it this way:

2 Peter 1:21 (NKJV)

for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

“Moved” translates a word meaning carried along like a ship driven by the wind. Each writer wrote in his own words, and what reached the page was exactly what God intended.

Christians call this verbal plenary inspiration. Verbal: the words are from God, not only the general ideas. Plenary: all of Scripture, not only the parts that strike us as spiritual.

Plenary is the half people quietly drop. It means the genealogies are God-breathed. So is the census in Numbers. This does not mean every verse will feed you on a Tuesday morning; a list of names in Chronicles will not do for your soul what Psalm 23 does. But every verse came from the same place, and no part of it is the writer's own opinion that the reader may set aside.

Finally, words we read are only as reliable as the person speaking them. You trust a friend's account of an accident because you know the friend. Likewise, God cannot lie (Titus 1:2), and Scripture is God speaking. So what Scripture says is true — about salvation, and true about everything else it touches. That is what Christians mean when they call the Bible inerrant.

That word describes Scripture as God gave it to the writers, which was then faithfully passed down through generations. The Bible is not forty men's best thoughts about God. It is God's own words about Himself, written by men He had been preparing all their lives to write them.