Thoughts on Numbers 36 & 3 John

Today’s reading: Numbers 36; 3 John

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the Scriptures were transmitted to us, an how a flimsy view of that makes the Bible incredibly vulnerable to criticism, and I feel like both of the passages today are good examples in this discussion.

A lot of Christians today have this view of the Scriptures as though God simply downloaded His Word directly into the mind of a prophet or scribe and they wrote down exactly what God dictated to them, or maybe that they went into a trance of some sort and when they came out of it a passage of the Bible was in front of them. What counts as Scripture then is only and exactly what God dictated to these authors. But this view of inspiration doesn’t even hold up to the Bible itself.

How many times do we see a situation where the prophet that is the namesake of the book dies before the book is over? If Moses is the sole author of Deuteronomy, how does it include his death? Or if Joshua is the sole author of Joshua, how does it include his death? Or even worse for Samuel, if he is the sole author of the books that bear his name, how is it that he dies halfway through 1 Samuel and we still have all of 2 Samuel to go long after he’s dead?? Or what about the countless times, especially in the Pentateuch, that we read a place name followed by an editorial comment telling us that the place is still there to this day, or that it is now called something different? If Moses was the sole author, is he really going to include the note that the city they took or the monument they raised is still there to this day a year after the fact? Or what about the fact that Jeremiah, in dictating his prophetic ministry to Baruch the scribe explicitly includes different content when they have to do it a second time?

My point here is not to undermine the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, but to call us to think rightly about it and approach it in the same way the Bible itself approaches it. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, but it did not come about by God supernaturally taking over someone’s body and making them write something they themselves may not have understood. It happened by God choosing the people who would write His Scriptures, ordaining some of the circumstances which shaped them into the people He needed them to be for the task, and then working through them and, at least in some places, future editors, to bring the text of Scripture to the place where He ultimately desired it to be.

And while this is a much bigger topic than I am going to cover effectively in a single morning’s blog post, as I mentioned at the start, I feel like both of today’s passages are good examples of this.

Numbers 36

In Numbers 36 we see the evolution of case law in Israel. Previously, when laws for inheritance were first introduced, the daughters of Zelophad came to Moses because they had no brothers, but they didn’t want their father to lose out on his inheritance, and so Moses declared, from the Lord, that in the absence of a son, a man’s inheritance would pass to his daughters. Now, as that verdict has had time to simmer, some of their clansmen have realized a potential negative implication of this that they want to address before it becomes a problem. What if one of these women marries outside their tribe, taking their inheritance with them, and thus removing it from their tribal allotment permanently? This is a legitimate concern and so Moses declares, again from the Lord, that a woman in such a situation must marry within her tribe so that the inheritance is not lost.

And what does any of that have to do with the inspiration of Scripture? If God had just downloaded all of the laws Israel would ultimately need into Moses’ head, why would this be divided up? Why would this case not come up until it was raised by the men of Zelophad’s tribe? Or, for that matter, why would the ruling for Zelophad’s daughters not come up until they went to Moses about their inheritance? 

The fact of the matter is that the laws and regulations we see throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were not just dropped into Moses’ head so he could mindlessly write them out of a scroll somewhere, but these are realtime case laws that came up to address realtime scenarios as the Lord spoke and worked through Moses to lead His people and prepare them for ongoing life as His nation, even after Moses is gone.

3 John

3 John exemplifies this idea differently than Numbers 36. In Numbers we see the development of laws and regulations over time, which would seem inconsistent with a supernatural data-dump from God to His Scripture writers, but in 3 John the piece of it, in this regard, that sticks out to me, is all the missing context.

John is writing this letter to Gaius, with whom he clearly has a relationship and with whom he clearly shares some important context. While we can piece together some aspects of what might be going on that John is addressing, we can only really conjecture about much of it, but John clearly expects Gaius to understand what he is talking about. I don’t think anybody would find it a shocking statement for me to point out that this is a personal letter, and yet, what does that say about how it is inspired Scripture?

If we assume the Scripture writers enter a trance of sorts and come out having written Scripture, or just receive a data-dump that they write down exactly as they received it, are we saying that God wrote a personal letter to Gaius? If that was what was going on, wouldn’t it have made sense for God to include a little more detail or context clues, not necessarily for Gaius, but for us? God would know that we would be reading this letter 2000 years later and not have the same context as John and Gaius had, and so you would think He could have included some info for us. But if this is John writing a letter to encourage his friend, then it would make a lot more sense that he doesn’t think it’s important to add some context clues for a potential remote audience a couple thousand years removed.

All of scripture is God breathed, but that does not mean that He did not work in and through His human imagers to do this work. God knew what He wanted of the Scriptures delivered to us, and He used His chosen people to bring it about. He used Moses to declare the ruling in Numbers 36, but He also used the men that brought the issue up in the first place so that it could be addressed in Scripture. He used John, even though in this case, every indication seems to be that John didn’t know this short personal letter was going to make it into the Bible at all.

I know I’m probably mostly just ranting in this post this morning, but it really is so important that our view of inspiration be consistent with the Bible’s own view of inspiration, which seems like such an obvious thing to say, but this is something I feel like is sorely lacking in much of the church today.