Home Topics Index Download
Transcript 328C
How Do We Read of Unseen Events in the Bible?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Good evening. In the Gospel of Luke, he gives us quite a descriptive account of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He was crucified. And he describes Him lying prone in prayer to God, and talks about Him going back to the inner circle and asking them to pray with Him, and of course they fell asleep. And also he describes Jesus sweating drops of blood. And the question came to my mind that this was so very descriptive of everything that was going on there that evening. And yet it would appear that no one was really sitting up with Jesus. So how would this account be able to be put down in so precise a manner as Luke wrote? Would it be by divine revelation by God, or do you think that Jesus had a chance to speak to them, His disciples, before He was crucified? Or just exactly what is your comment on that?
HC: A very good question has been raised. There are account of events in the Bible where no eye, no human eye, was present. And yet these are very descriptive accounts. The example was given of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane The three disciples who went with Him had fallen asleep, and yet we have a very descriptive account of what is going on in the Garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus is sweating great drops of blood into the ground, and He is crying out to God, "Oh Father, is it possible for this cup to pass from Me?" and so on.
We must remember that the Bible is written by God Himself. "All scripture," the Bible says, "is given by inspiration of God." When anyone wrote in the Bible, they wrote out of their own human knowledge, and their own environment, and their own personality. But when they finally formed their words and their sentences, it was precisely what God wanted.
Now if any human being, no matter how intelligent he might be or how knowledgeable he might be, writes an article about an historical event, he is not going to be absolutely accurate, because he can't know everything. He's going to misjudge motive, or he's going to misjudge many things. He's going to write to the best of his ability, and even though he may have been an eye witness and intimately acquainted with all the particulars, nevertheless what he writes is not going to be absolutely accurate. Someone else could come along and question, "But wait a minute. Are you sure that he said it quite that way?" or whatever.
But when anything was written in the Bible, you can rest assured that what was written was absolutely accurate, not because the human being who wrote it was that intelligent or that accurate, but because God the Holy Spirit was the author. He guided that man so that what he wrote was absolutely accurate.
Now in certain cases we have statements in the Bible which were written down by the human scribe, whether it was the physician Luke, or whether it was the prophet Amos, or the prophet Isaiah, or whoever. And they wrote without realizing the import of what they wrote. You can read many of the prophecies of the Old Testament concerning the coming Messiah, and those prophets did not really understand what they wrote. They simply wrote as God dictated to them, as God put it into their minds, what they were to put down in black and white.
The same therefore would be true of the experience in the Garden of Gethsemane. God gave the physician Luke the words to put down. And certainly Jesus might have talked about it. There's no indication that He did, however. The more likely situation is that the Holy Spirit simply guided Luke to fill in the missing blanks, so that it would be exactly what God wanted.
We can see that the same thing would be true of Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5. How did Moses, who is the one who finally put it down in the writing as we have it in our Bible, know about creation, which had occurred some 9,500 years earlier, thousands of years before the invention of writing? How could he detail what happened in the Garden of Eden? How would he know what Eve said, right to the very words? The only way he could know this is because God gave him the words to write down, so that what we have is absolutely trustworthy.
Thank you for that good question.