In my experience, some Bible students are concerned that the worldview disconnection between us and the ancient biblical writers means that the Bible can’t speak to issues of our time. That isn’t the case. While the Bible is a premodern and prescientific book, the truths it asserts are timeless.
We need to trust God’s wisdom in inspiration. If God had wanted to inspire Scripture in a modern age, he could have done so. It was God who decided to prepare men living between the second millennium BC and the first century AD to produce the books of the Bible. It was God who decided that they were ready for the task, despite cultural attitudes that we would deem backward. It was God who didn’t require the writers to have advanced scientific and technological knowledge to write everlasting truth. These were God’s choices.
God’s choices were good choices. God is not incompetent. God intended Scripture to be applicable to people who would live well beyond the first century. He also intended Scripture to be understood by the people who received it originally. Since God is omniscient, he could have given writers living thousands of years ago advanced knowledge without their knowing it. But that knowledge could not have been understood by anyone reading the text until millennia later. Millions of people living prior to our time would have had no hope of understanding their Bible. That would have defeated the communicative purpose of the Bible. The “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) would not have been comprehensible, which undermines inspiration’s purpose (2 Tim. 3:17).
God in his wisdom prepared ancient people to express truths that are independent of the knowledge base of one particular time. Ancient people were entirely capable of communicating fundamentally significant ideas that are absolutely relevant today—that God is creator, that people were created in his image, that human life is sacred, that people cannot provide their own salvation from sin, that there is good and evil, and so on.
As we’ll see later, this perspective is important for understanding what the Bible says in certain places. It’s also critical for apologetics. Hostile critics of Scripture often belittle it for being premodern. But this criticism only has weight if the Bible was intended to contain modern knowledge but falls short. Nothing about inspiration presumes this, and so the criticism amounts to being angry with the Bible for not being what it was never intended to be. That’s deeply flawed logic. But we play into the hands of the antagonist when we try to make the Bible something it isn’t. We must honor God’s wise choice to inspire it in the time and place he did.