| The Pure Word July 18, 2010 "Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that
put their trust in him." (Proverbs 30:5) When the inspired writer of Proverbs testified here that God’s Word
was "pure," he did not use the usual word for, say, moral purity or
metallic purity. Instead, he asserted in effect that every Word of
God had been refined and purified, as it were in a spiritual furnace,
so that any and all contaminants had been purged out, leaving
only the pure element. The same truth is found in the great psalm of the Scriptures
(Psalm 119). "Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant
loveth it" (Psalm 119:140). David used the same word in another
psalm, where it is translated "tried" in the sense of "tested for
purity." "As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD
is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust in him"
(Psalm 18:30). The word for "buckler" in this verse is the same as
for "shield" in our text. Thus God equips with a perfect shield against
the weapons of any foe, because "His way is perfect" and "every
word" in Scripture has been made "pure" before the Spirit of God
approved its use by the human writer. This surely tells us that the human writer of Scripture (that is, Moses or
David or John or whomever), with all his human proneness to mistakes
or other inadequacies, was so controlled by the Holy Spirit that whatever
he actually wrote had been purged of any such deficiencies. Thus his final
written text had been made perfectly "pure," free from any defects.
This control applies to "every word," so that we can legitimately refer to
the Scriptures as verbally inspired and inerrant throughout. As the apostle Paul stressed, our spiritual armor in the battle against evil
is "the shield of faith" and "the sword of the Spirit, which is the
word of God" (Ephesians 6:16-17). HMM |
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