Adapted from “The Holy Scriptures: God’s Word, Written in Human Words,” an updated version of Herman Bavinck, Our Reasonable Faith, trans. Henry Zylstra (Eerdmans, 1956), chapter 7.

Where does our knowledge of God’s revelation actually come from? Whether we’re thinking of the general revelation God gives to all people or the special revelation he gave to his people, the answer is the same: it comes to us from the Holy Scriptures.

That raises a question worth slowing down for. Are revelation and Scripture simply the same thing? Or is the Bible something separate, a report about revelation written after the fact by people who were left to get on with it as best they could? How we answer shapes the way we open our Bibles every day.

Revelation Came First

Let’s start with an honest admission. There is a real and important difference between revelation and Scripture.

For one thing, revelation often came a long way ahead of anyone writing it down. There certainly was revelation before Moses, but there was no Scripture. And the revelation God gave often contained much more than was later recorded. Take a prophet like Amos. His book is often but a short summary of what he spoke to the people of his own day by word of mouth.

In fact, many prophets of the Old Testament and many apostles of the New, every one of them a channel of special revelation, left no written record behind at all. We are even told plainly that Jesus did many other signs, so many that if every one were written down, the world itself could not contain the books (John 20:30; 21:25).

The traffic runs the other way too. God may have revealed things to his prophets and apostles in the very act of writing, things they had not known before and so could not have preached to anyone beforehand. That seems to be true, at least in part, of the revelation John received on Patmos concerning the future.

So Scripture is not the original revelation itself. It is the description, the record, from which that revelation can be known.

Distinct, but Never Divided

Here, though, we need to watch our step. Calling Scripture “the record of revelation” can lead us straight into a different error.

Some people don’t just distinguish revelation from Scripture; they separate the two altogether. They are happy to say that God was active in a special way in the revelation that came before the Bible. But the recording of that revelation, they argue, was left entirely to the people writing it, quite outside the reach of God’s special providence. On this view Scripture is still a record of revelation, but an incidental and defective one.

Where does that leave the ordinary reader? Probing the Bible at great cost and difficulty, trying to work out which parts belong to special revelation and which do not. It is a view that drives a big wedge between the Word of God and the Holy Scriptures, and it ends with the familiar slogan that the Holy Scripture is not the Word of God, but that the Word of God is contained in the Holy Scripture.

Scripture is not a human, incidental, arbitrary and defective supplement to revelation. It is itself a component part of revelation – the way it comes to us in writing.

Why God’s Word Needed Writing

Even on its own terms, that view is very unlikely. Not only does it treat the relationship between the spoken word and Scripture in a very mechanical way, it also forgets something important.

When God gave his special revelation, a revelation which, in the seed of Abraham, was appointed for all mankind in Christ, he also had to take special steps to preserve it in its pure state and to make it generally available. And that is exactly what writing does.

Think about the difference between a spoken word and a written one. The spoken word dies upon the air, but the written word lives on. Oral traditions are open to falsification, but the written word is protected against it. Speech is limited to the few people who hear it, but writing can spread out to all peoples and to all lands.

Put simply, writing makes the spoken word permanent, protects it against falsification, and carries it far and wide. If God appointed his revelation for all mankind, is it really likely that he would leave its written form to chance?

What Scripture Says About Itself

Still, we don’t need to linger on human argument. The idea that special revelation is from God, while Scripture came into being apart from his special care, runs directly against the testimony of Scripture itself. Repeatedly and emphatically, the Bible declares that it is, as Scripture also, the Word of God.

So yes, we distinguish Scripture from the revelation that came before it. But we don’t separate it from that revelation. The Bible is not an afterthought tacked on to revelation by well-meaning but unreliable writers. It is itself part of the revelation.

More than that, Scripture is the rounding out and the fulfilment of revelation, its cornerstone and its capstone. When you open your Bible, you are not leafing through a patchy report of where God once spoke. You are holding the completion of his revelation, preserved so that it would not fade away, would not be falsified, and would reach every people and every land.