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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

God designed them to be, and that God then fully uses all their human faculties in the
process of thinking and writing. Within the broad field of organic inspiration, there can
then still be notable variations. Luke writes like a careful historian. John, the author of
Revelation, receives spectacular visions. Abraham Kuyper, observing some of the
diversity, classifies inspiration into four "forms," lyric, chokmatic, prophetic, and apostolic,
corresponding roughly to what happens with Psalms, Proverbs, OT prophetic books, and
NT epistles.

We could if we wished refine and further subdivide.

The Ten Commandments as model

Without denying this variety, let us consider a more fundamental issue. Can we

rightly conceive of the Bible and biblical interpretation in the way that puts divine
authorship at the center rather than at the periphery? Consider the first record of a
canonical deposit, namely the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments were first
delivered by the audible voice of God from Mount Sinai (Exodus 19-20). Then God wrote
them with his own finger on stone (Exod 32:16; 34:1). The people could not bear to hear
the audible voice, so God made Moses a mediator of his word (Exod 20:18-21; Deut 5:22-
33). God later told Moses to write many other words and these were placed beside the ark
(Deut 31:24-46). The Ten Commandments had already been placed inside the ark (Exod
25:16). Thus we have provision for the nucleus of a growing canon.

Technically speaking, for the Ten Commandments there is no human author. For

the oral delivery of the Ten Commandments to Israel, we have simply the direct divine
voice. With respect to the written form, the finger of God produced the writing on stone.
So what becomes of the typical formula that we are supposed to focus only on the human
author? Clearly it does not work. Focusing on the human author alone violates the
essential character of the Ten Commandments.

But of course the Ten Commandments as we now have them are written down as

part of the larger scrolls of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and these do involve a human hand.
Does the presence of the human hand negate the presence of God? Clearly not, if we look
carefully at the exposition in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Moses is placed as an
intermediary, but that does not interfere with the power or authority of God to address the
people of Israel and to require complete obedience. The original Ten Commandments, far
from being a wild exception, become the original model for understanding what will
happen later through Moses. And the instruction in Deuteronomy anticipates that after
Moses God will raise up further prophets (Deut 18:15-18). Thus the prophets, and by
implication all later scriptural writers, enter into a pattern already established with Moses.

Now all this should be fairly obvious. But what are the implications? Ultimately,

we know that Moses's mediatorial role is only a type. The final mediator of the divine
voice is Christ himself, the final prophet (Acts 3:22-26; Heb 1:1-3), God and man in one
Person. Therefore it is legitimate to use the analogy with the person of Christ in order to
show how we can think about the relation of divine and human authors. Orthodoxy says
that the Second Person of the Trinity became man, not by changing his divine nature, but
by assumption of human nature. Remaining what he was, he became what he was not.
Similarly, God speaks to human beings by remaining God, and speaking through human

2 Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 520-44.
3 See Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 27-44.