Saturday-Origin

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:20,21

Whenever I look at something, I try to figure out where it came from. Everything, and I mean everything, came from something. I can’t say it’s never happened, but to me it seems like no one comes up with something out of the blue. They always take an idea and add something to it.

• When faced with a problem for a new ride, Disney Imagineer Mark Sumner went up into his attic and built a model from an old Erector Set that showed how the Soarin’[1] ride could be built.

• Thomas Edison didn’t invent the electric lightbulb, that happened long before he drove down the cost by making a low-cost, long lasting filament, improving the vacuum, and making electricity practical.

• Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile, but he did make them affordable by building them faster and cheaper than anyone else thought possible through an automated manufacturing process.

• Elon Musk didn’t invent rockets, but his SpaceX company has changed the game through simplification of the rockets themselves, making them reusable, through faster testing, failure, learning, and trying again approach.

But when God speaks, he doesn’t need to do this. He never needs to build on what someone has already thought of. He doesn’t borrow thoughts or ideas and makes them his. He never needs to freshen up or update an idea or thought. He also never needs to “walk back” something he’s said by correcting it.

Since God is eternal and never changes, his thoughts and words are just like him. They never change. They don’t become old or out of date. They remain the same. His truths are like him, eternal.

This is why we have so much trouble with God’s word. We’re constantly changing. We think things are getting better and better. What was new last year is now ancient. Today’s new ideas are better than yesterday’s. New theories and philosophies are big improvements on anything someone thought of in the past. God used two people for this.

• Holy men of God. These are people that have decided to live for eternal things and not stuff in this world.

• Holy Spirit. He is fully God from eternity past, an equal person in the Trinity along with God the Father and God the Son.

But Peter’s telling us something very important here. Whenever God speaks to a prophet, it’s God’s words and not the persons. Yes, the person wrote the words but they were given by God. God may have spoken to them through words, pictures, or dreams, but the fact is that God spoke.

And how can we know this? What’s the test that we can use to check out whether they are a true prophet or not? Well, it’s really pretty simple. They have to be right 100% of the time[2].. That’s it. Period. Just like God is perfect, here’s no room for error. If they were wrong once, that’s it. They are not a prophet of God. They never were and never will be. But it’s more serious than that. False prophets are to be taken out and killed[3].

Now that we have God’s word, understand it is the next step. You need to approach and personally interact with God’s word. Think about interpretating God’s word like untying a shoe. If all you do is look at it, it’s never going to untie itself. Shoes stay tied until someone takes action.

To untie a shoe, you needed practice. You didn’t just wake up one morning with the ability to tie and untie your shoes. It took your eyes, mind, hands, and fingers to actively approach and interact with the shoelaces. To untie your shoes, the very first thing you need to do is to take hold of the shoelace at the right place. In the right way. Then you need to gently pull so that the knot slips apart.

One unwritten rule about untying shoes is that you have to do it each and every time. There’s no way to untie shoes in advance. You can’t untie your shoe five times today and take that credit for the future.

It’s the same way with understanding what God’s saying. There’s no future credit for doing it a lot today and not tomorrow. Like untying your shoes, you have to do it each and every time. No one ties and unties your shoes for you. You have to do it for yourself.

God himself claims to be the author of his word. He’s not shy about it. He says that the Bible’s origin is with him and him alone. Like him, it’s complete and doesn’t lack anything. This should make it extremely valuable to us. Something that we take a lot of time and energy reading so that we can know the God of the universe better and better.

Noodling Questions

• Describe something that you made through building on what someone else did.

• How do you identify holy men and women today? Explain.

• List three things that keeps you from “uniting” God’s word for yourself.

[1] https://youtu.be/fZ1J7IilpO4?si=TsqoptMtrqB2px_D&t=50

[2] Deuteronomy 18:22

[3] Deuteronomy 13:5