HOS-01 An Introduction to Hosea

How did the Holy Spirit inspire biblical writers like Hosea to write down what he wanted them to say?

How should we understand inspiration and the way it works? In other words, how does the leading of the Holy Spirit and the possible contribution of the actual author, how do those things relate, and do they relate? Well, I think the best answer to that is a term that has been called “organic inspiration.” This means that the Holy Spirit most certainly led the biblical authors to write what they wrote and superintended all that they did write, ensuring that it is the very truth of God. But at the same time, as he did this, he did not bypass the individuals who were writing. Therefore, what we find is the education, the personalities, the language of choice, and the situations to which the authors are writing, all of these things come through in our biblical text. So for example, Ezekiel the prophet inspired by God, and Hosea the prophet inspired by God, they sound a little bit different… The role of the Holy Spirit and the role of the human author, they are not in tension with one another but they coalesce organically, as the term goes, to create what we call “organic inspiration.”

One of the things that we wrestle with when we think about the Holy Spirit inspiring Scripture is, well, how exactly did he do this? Really, in many respects, it’s a mystery, but there are some things we can say he didn’t do. One of the things we know he didn’t do is he did not dictate the words to these authors. The Holy Spirit was not looking for good stenographers, but holy men to write Scripture. How do we know that? Well, you can compare the Hebrew, say for example, of Isaiah and Hosea. Isaiah is kind of like the Shakespeare of the Old Testament. Some have estimated that he had a vocabulary of something approaching thirty thousand words. That’s just unbelievable. Hosea, vocabulary of maybe five hundred words. I mean, these are wide differences in the variety of how they wrote… These authors used their own personalities fully in the writing of Scripture. They used their own skills in writing… The author is involved in the learning that God has taken him through for years, and you don’t have these authors writing down what God is dictating, except of very few occasions like when Moses wrote down the Ten Commandments. But they’re using their personalities, their gifts, their talents, their backgrounds, their language skills, their research skills. When they write the gospels, they’re not sitting down in a room saying, “Okay, Spirit of God, tell me what Jesus did, and I’ll just copy down what you tell me.” That’s not at all what happened.