It is so crazy to think about Paul writing Romans and NOT KNOWING how it’s going to turn out. He is dictating, and he could go back and revise stuff, but just like a sermon that is preached rather than read, the guy preaching it doesn’t know exactly where all it’s going to go before he gets to the end. He might have some milestones to pass, but the details of the trip aren’t necessarily all clear.
Isn’t it just like God to include the way the prophet feels in his message?! Like all the prophets, and even the Gospels, God didn’t just dictate and the writer got out of the way and wrote the stuff God said. You can see that real men were writing these things, and at the same time you can see that God’s hand was on them as they wrote it. I read somewhere that the Bible is not written in a way that shows the great effort of men to compose the most beautiful work of literature. Other holy books are written in such a way that they sound very lofty and poetic, but they say nothing. The Bible is written in simple, street-language, and says everything. (that’s from wherever I read that quote.)
The Bible is as real as the people that turned it into words.