The written Word of God is inerrant and infallible, but not in the way that most believers contend. Most believers maintain that because holy men of God wrote the Received Text, then the written Word has to be entirely inerrant and infallible. Acts 1:16; II Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 3:7; II Peter 1:21. For this reason, these believers try to defend the written Word against every charge by its critics that it contains contradictions. These believers attempt to explain every contradiction as being no contradiction at all. In some cases, these believers succeed in explaining how some contradictions do not exist. Mostly, these believers succeed where the critics charge contradictions in areas where they cannot understand the doctrines of the written Word. But these critics also indicate some contradictions where believers have great difficulty in explaining them away.
One such difficult contradiction occurs in Proverbs 26:4-5. The critics contend that God Himself, if He exists, had to have put this blatant contradiction into His own Word. The critics correctly assert that God put this contradiction into His Word, but this contradiction exists only for unbelievers. Believers rightly contend that one must be guided by the Spirit when applying one or the other of these scriptures in knowing when or when not to answer a fool. The believers' explanation correctly explains the contradiction for believers, but not for unbelievers. Unbelievers, not guided by the Spirit, still correctly read a blatant contradiction in these scriptures.
Believers could safely ignore these critics' charges if they would simply come to understand that the Truth of the written Word of God can only be imparted to the believer by the inerrant and infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit. II Peter 1:19-21; John 6:63. God wrote His Word in such an ingenious way that believers will find the inerrant Truth in it, but also so that unbelievers will rightly find contradictions in it. Jesus revealed this very truth in His sermon to believers and unbelievers in John 6:41-71. In John 6:52, the unbelievers rightly understood the deliberate contradictions that Jesus put into His sermon. John 6:64-66 informs us that Jesus deliberately drove these unbelievers away from Him because He did not want them to be His disciples. In John 6:67-69, Peter and ten of the other disciples remained with Jesus because the Holy Spirit had imparted to them the Truth that Jesus had taught them in John 6:61-63. In John 6:70-71, Jesus revealed that one unbeliever remained because he had been put there by the Devil.
The Church has partly misunderstood God's purpose for the preaching of the gospel. God desires that sinners become spiritually saved through the preaching of the gospel, but God also desires that unbelievers be driven away from Him. Isaiah 6:9-10. For this reason, Jesus often used parables in His preaching so that believers would diligently search for the truth in them while unbelievers would reject them as being nonsensical. The Spirit reveals the inerrant Truth to devoted searchers, not to the shallow minded. God despises unbelief and the lukewarmness of believers. Matthew 6:6-12; Revelation 3:14-19. Christ would rather His believers be cold rather than lukewarm because when one is cold, he will sooner or later realize it and either put on more clothes or turn up the heat, but the lukewarm will just continue on in their comfortable unbelief. God does not want unbelievers in His churches. They only cause trouble. Many churches have severely diluted sound doctrine because they have accepted too many unbelievers. Just as Jesus had to put up with one unbeliever sent by the Devil, so the churches have to endure some unbelievers. For this reason, churches that preach the true gospel should not be sad when known unbelievers walk away.
The Bible often teaches as much by what it does not say as by what it does say. The Word of God does not state in Proverbs 26:4-5 that one must rely on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to realize how to use its contradiction, but that truth becomes obvious to the believer. When the rich young ruler confronted Jesus in Mark 10, Jesus quoted only the commandments that he had kept and remained silent about those he had violated. Jesus wanted him to realize for himself as guided by the Spirit that he was a hopeless sinner in need of Jesus' salvation. God knows that the lessons we hear from the Spirit are the ones we learn the best. For this reason, when a sinner hears the gospel and the Holy Spirit convinces him that he is a sinner in need of a Savior, God leaves the decision to the sinner as to whether he will accept or reject the Truth that he hears. In Exodus 19:3-8, God did not directly tell the Israelites that He had already saved them by His grace, and therefore, they needed no laws. But because they did not realize this amazing fact for themselves, they demanded that God give them laws to keep so that they could make themselves good enough to be saved. So God gave them a huge set of intricate laws that He knew they could not keep so that, sooner or later, some of them would come to realize that they were hopeless sinners in need of God's grace. Many other such examples exist in God's scriptures.
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