When they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. | Acts 4:13

If someone asked you:

Who wrote the Bible?

What would you say?

God, right?

But wait…is that true?

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I’ve always appreciated how nearly everyone in the Bible is portrayed as imperfect and mistake-prone. Even the “good guys” (Abraham, David, Peter, etc.) had flaws, just like us, and the Bible honestly describes those.

That’s so encouraging.

It shows that God works through fallible human beings. If you want to live a fruitful Christian life, you don’t have to be perfect.

But think about this: even in the creation of the Bible, God collaborated with biased, sinful, limited human beings.

Think about the people God inspired to write the scriptures:

• Moses? Not very eloquent.
• David? An adulterer and murderer.
• Solomon? Worldly and depressed.
• Peter? Mistake-prone.
• Paul? Hard to understand.

Yet God still enlisted these guys and others like them to write his messages to the world.

Isn’t that remarkable?

God didn’t have to do it that way. He could have written the Bible all by himself, as he did the old law. He could have dropped it directly out of the sky like a heavenly telegraph. Or surely Jesus could have written it!

But that’s not what happened. God chose to include imperfect people in the process.

I think that’s one of the most underappreciated facts of Christianity.

For whatever reason, God likes to work and communicate through men and women, like you and me. He chooses to involve humans in the process.

We know for a fact that Moses, Solomon, Paul, etc. were not omniscient. Like us, they did not understand everything. So some of the things they wrote seem, well, very human.

• Moses thought the sky was a solid canopy / firmament.
• The author of Chronicles thought the earth did not move.
• David thought his kidneys could think.
• Solomon thought life was vain.
• Paul thought Cretans were always lazy and gluttonous.

Stuff like this is simply evidence that the authors of the Bible were human, like us. They did not understand the world perfectly, and neither do we. God inspired people—not angels or superheroes—to write the scriptures.

Their human limitations did not prevent God from working / communicating through them.

Again, that’s encouraging.

Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. | Romans 15:4

So next time you feel inadequate and disqualified to handle something God calls you to, take heart! God is very much in the business of working through obviously flawed people to accomplish marvelous things.

If God can collaborate with depressed, mistake-prone, fallible human beings to create the Bible, then he can certainly use you and me to minister to lost and hurting people around us.