What Can We Do About Attacks?

What Can We Do About Attacks On Inerrancy?

“I am Your servant; give me discernment that I may understand Your statutes. It is time for You to act, O Lord; Your Law is being broken. Because I love Your commands more than ... pure gold, and because I consider all Your precepts right, I hate every wrong path.”
Psalm 119:125-128

Attacks upon the inerrancy of the Bible occur every day. We expect them from those who don’t believe the Bible at all. They often refer to God’s Word as nothing more than a history book or a story book. These obvious attacks bother the believer, but God tells us simply to “have nothing to do with them” (2 Tim. 3:5). The really dangerous attacks are the subtle ones that come from so-called Bible scholars who claim greater understanding because of all their study. Their attacks most often take one of four forms.

The most subtle of these is the classification of the Bible’s contents as either revealed or cultural. What’s implied is that while the revealed is inerrant, the cultural is not, because it is always changing. Then there are those who say that only the Old Testament prophecy pertaining to Christ and the New Testament are inerrant. A third group argues that only the Gospels are truly God’s inerrant Word, while the Epistles are man’s effort to interpret gospel truth for the Church. Finally, there are the “red letterists” who claim as inerrant only the actual words of Jesus Himself.

In the face of these attempts to limit, diminish, fracture or cast doubt upon the inerrancy of God’s Word, what can we do? Psalm 119:125-128, quoted above, suggests a plan of action: If we come as a “servant,” the Lord will give us “discernment” to “understand” His Word, to love it “more than pure gold,” to “consider” all of it “right,” to realize it’s always “being broken” by someone, and to “hate every wrong path” while calling upon Him to “act” against them.

By Larry Ondrejack