Man
of old who received and reported God’s revelations to them and to their people were,
like us, sinful, fallible men. Consequently they often failed to grasp the
whole meaning of God’s word to them. Later, when they set down in writing their
reports of the revelations they had received, their expressions of their understanding—though
often exalted and marvelous—were still human and sometimes ambiguous or even
misleading. In view of these human limitations and sometimes ambiguous or even
misleading. In view of these human limitations Jeremiha’s description of his
own writing takes on deep significance, both concerning that book and
concerning the Bible as a whole. He wrote “The words of Jeremiah. . . to whom
the word of the LORD came” (Jer. 1:1-2). The Bible is literally the words of
men seeking to express the word of God which had come to them. (L. Harold
DeWolf, “The Word of God,” in The Interpreter’s One-Volume Commentary on the
Bible [Nashville: Abingdon, 1971], 995, in Van Hale, Mormon Miscellaneous
Note Cards, 3 vols. [Sandy, Utah: Mormon Miscellaneous, 1985], 1:93)