How did God guide the thoughts of His servants?
“For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). The apostle Paul also tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all Scripture is “inspired” (literally “God-breathed”). Consider his choice of words. Paul described Scripture using the Greek term theopneustos. The first part of the word, Theo, means “God.” The second part is pneustos—meaning “breathed.” So the apostle says, as some translations put it, “All Scripture is God-breathed,” meaning it came directly from the mouth of God. Clearly our Creator directly inspired the divine message revealed by both the apostles and the prophets (compare 2 Peter 3:2). As we will show by many scriptures, God made known His divine message to man through the patriarchs and prophets of old as well as through the New Testament apostles. In fact, Peter ranks Paul’s epistles with “the rest of the Scriptures” —the latter primarily referring to the Old Testament (2 Peter 3:15-16). In 1 Timoth
