He enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing. That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt. — Deuteronomy 10:18-18
I grew up believing that “divinely inspired” meant that God controlled the writing hand of the biblical writer. He could be snacking on a sandwich in the other hand, while the Lord infallibly, inerrantly wrote with his other.
Of course that’s mistaken, but somehow still held up by fundamentalists who claim that every comma was put there and shall not be moved.
And of course, there are a lot better ways to understand divine inspiration, not the least of which is to read the Bible with an open mind and a searching heart, and you’ll encounter God.
But the older I get, the more I see a bit of an objective way of understanding divine inspiration. It’s in the Scripture quoted above. Throughout the entire Bible, spanning over 1000 years of civilizations rising and falling, there is one thread holding things together: be kind and just, especially to the weak, marginalized, oppressed, and needy. It’s a theme found throughout the Bible, highlighted in Jesus.
So, how in the world could this divine mandate to help the poor–in biblical books written against the backdrop of human history characterized by violence and hatred–survive? Because God wanted to get that message across. God had a hand in it. That’s the same reason the Golden Rule, loving your neighbor as yourself, is found also in the texts of other religious. In a bloodthirsty homo sapiens race, as our poor history shows, God simply had to intervene to remind us of why we were created in the first place.
I like to think that when we do love as we’re told to love in the Bible, God smiles a big smile. All that divine inspiration work was worth it.