All that the LORD speaks, that I must do.
No prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, … holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Numbers 23:26; 2 Peter 1:20.21.
The belief that the interpretation and application of Holy Scripture is a personal matter is widespread; yet nothing could be further from the truth. The apostle Peter made this abundantly clear in the above verses taken from his second epistle. The entire Bible is the Word of God and expresses the wisdom that He wished to communicate to mankind. Any human wisdom that seeks to explain Scripture in any other way than God intended can only be a distortion of the truth.
Even that wicked man Balaam, who had yielded to king Balak’s bribery to curse Israel, was forced to admit his inability to utter anything other than what God had revealed to him, as our verse from Number states. This should suffice to convince us of the futility of using the Word of God tendentiously in order to promote our own ideas.
In His prayer in John 17 the Lord Jesus Christ stated that He, the Son of God who had ever been with the Father in eternity past, had given His followers God’s Word and that His Word was truth. Truth can be neither altered nor adapted. This emphasizes the necessity of accepting and believing what God has said and applying it to our own life.
Like Balaam, we feel compelled to pass on the message of Holy Scripture as unalterable truth. We would urge our readers to heed the message: eternal salvation is not something to be played with or ignored. Nor are the last judgment and hell the product of man’s imagination; they are confirmed in the Word of God as realities.
Image: By Peter Paul Rubens – originally uploaded on en.wikipedia by Wlkernan (talk · contribs) at 14 May 2005. Filename was Pope-peter pprubens.jpg., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=303203