For 400 years, Israel hadn’t had a message from God and then, all of a sudden, 30-year-old John the Baptist came on the scene as the man preparing the way for the Messiah.

With the arrival of John, Israel was given a brand-new opportunity—their prophesied kingdom was within grasp.

“Prior to John, all there was as revelation from God was the law and the prophets,” explains Jordan. “John never actually offers the kingdom to Israel, rather he says, ‘The kingdom is at hand—look at the king.’ John points the king out because before they can receive the kingdom, who do they have to have? The king.”

What’s so revealing about John the Baptist is that even though he was a Levitical priest, he dressed in camel's hair and a leather girdle, eating locusts and wild honey. This is the exact same thing the prophet Elijah did!

Like Elijah, John is the voice—the preacher, the proclaimer—and he’s purposely separated out from the apostate Israel and is in the wilderness.

“He’s not up there with the apostate, idolatrous, polluted priesthood,” says Jordan. “He’s outside the camp and he’s calling unto himself those who would believe; those who would repent—those who would recognize the idolatrous condition of the nation, change their minds about worshipping the idols and be identified together as that ‘believing remnant’ looking forward to the kingdom that’s coming.

“. . . John was a priest. His daddy was a priest. He was a Levite. At his age, he should have been down at the temple, being ordained into the priesthood. The kind of clothing he was to wear was definitely not camel’s hair or a leather girdle!

“You go back into the book of Leviticus and you see the tremendously beautiful garments Israel’s priests would wear. In Leviticus, the priests ate of the meat that was sacrificed on the altar and they had the priest’s portion. But John is eating bugs and honey. Yech! You read that and you say, ‘Who is that?!’ and then you go back into the Old Testament and see that it’s Elijah! He’s wearing the exact same garments and eating the exact same stuff!”

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Several times in the gospel accounts, Jesus Christ refers to the leaders of Israel with, “O generation of vipers.” They were the root of the nation’s problems.

“These people were born; they were generated of vipers,” says Jordan. “The viper in Scripture is Satan. He’s the old serpent. In John 8, Jesus tells these same people, ‘Ye are of your father the devil.’ ”

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From Proverbs 25:1 (“These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out”), we know that Hezekiah probably compiled the book of Proverbs.

Chapter 31 of Proverbs starts by informing, “The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.” Lemuel means “to god” and is a name for Solomon. The chapter consists of words Bathsheeba taught her son about what makes for a good wife.

Jordan says, “In Proverbs, all this stuff is compiled together and what I’m trying to say to you is that inspiration doesn’t mean (the writers) can’t take that stuff and put it in the Scripture and it be inspired. You read passages like that and you don’t have to be tripped out about it.”

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Starting in the 1950s, modernists came up with the term “mechanical dictation” to ridicule the idea of verbal inspiration, saying that God dictated the words onto the page and the writers were simply glorified stenographers.

“What they mean by ‘mechanical dictation’ is you, as the author, go into a coma or a trance and God picks up your hand in a mechanical sense rather than using your personality and thoughts and so forth,” says Jordan. “Let me repeat, inspiration does not overwhelm the personality of the human author. And men who believe in ‘mechanical dictation,’ and what’s called ‘dynamic inspiration,’ and all those other types of inspiration . . . they do so in order to ridicule the idea that God selected the very words. You see, they believe in other types of inspiration—thoughts, concepts, that type of thing.

“It’s sad sometimes that men who actually believe in verbal inspiration will recoil at the term ‘mechanical dictation’ but they’ll be shy about it. Folks, that’s exactly what the modernists want you to do! They want you to back off of plenary, verbal inspiration so they give it an unkind sounding name and respond to that straw dummy they’ve set up.

“Dictate (by itself) is a good word. Calvin uses it, the church fathers use it. Verbal inspiration and dictation of the Scripture are the same thing. Dictate is from the Latin dictatus. The past part of dictare. And it comes from dicery, which means ‘to say’ in Latin. That’s the definition of Webster’s International Dictionary.

“To dictate is to say something. Now, did God say the things written down in the Bible? Are they ‘every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’? Yeah, so then God dictated them.

“Inspiration is what’s written on the page. It doesn’t mean that the author didn’t gain the information that God gleaned out of his mind from other places, but God reached into the library of his vocabulary and brought out the very words that God intended for the man to be able to say.

“Sometimes the man had them there already from different sources. Sometimes the man, like Daniel, didn’t know where they came from or what they meant after he wrote them down.”

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Most of the information in the Bible was commonly known from the oral traditions of the time, including oral preaching and teaching.

Jordan says, “The book of Luke was that way. He says, ‘A lot of people have been trying to write this stuff down in order, and I went and got good information of it, and here it is.’

“And yet it turns out to be what God was doing. There are things in the book of Luke that he couldn’t have gotten by eyewitness accounts necessarily. Take, for example, the thing there where it says (Christ) prayed and angels ministered to Him. Everybody there was asleep but Christ. Either it would have had to been reported by eyewitness accounts to them, which is not very likely, or Luke got that by information directly.”

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Plenary, verbal inspiration assures us that God included all the necessary things He wanted us to know and excluded everything else.

“Everything you need is in the Bible and what isn’t in it, you didn’t need,” says Jordan. “If God wrote the very words down, then you can be sure and confident that everything He wanted written down is there and everything that’s excluded is unnecessary.

“The verse on that is II Timothy 3:16: ‘All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.’ ”