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“They had perfect knowledge…”
Last week we studied what scripture says about God’s truthfulness and it’s own errorless nature. Today I wanted to share an interesting quote in the same thought-neighborhood as that study.
It’s from Irenaeus,a Christian and church leader who lived in the 2nd century AD (that is, the 100s), and has some important writings that have survived the centuries. Here he gives us insight into what Christians who lived mere decades after the time of the Apostles believed about how God inspired the New Testament to be written.
We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.
For it is unlawful to assert that they preached before they possessed “perfect knowledge,” as some do even venture to say, boasting themselves as improvers of the apostles.
For, after our Lord rose from the dead, [the apostles] were invested with power from on high when the Holy Spirit came down [upon them], were filled from all [His gifts], and had perfect knowledge: they departed to the ends of the earth, preaching the glad tidings of the good things [sent] from God to us, and proclaiming the peace of heaven to men, who indeed do all equally and individually possess the Gospel of God. Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.
If you want to read the work this was taken from, you can find it here.
Art, Beauty, and Holiness
“Nothing we can do in life is outside the reach of God’s sovereign hand, even in the often secularized realm of art. In life, we can choose either to serve order or disorder, God or the Adversary. Who will you serve with your creativity?” So writes Dave Marcucci, who’s part of our Arts Fellowship community group. A few weeks ago Dave gave me a written meditation on the nature of beauty and art from a biblical perspective called “Art, Beauty, and Holiness.” I thought it was a great thing to share here. It includes this look at every day beauty:
There are many examples of beauty foreordained by God in his sovereignty.
The following works of art are faithful to God’s design for them:
TED.com recently published a video introducing a formula for intelligence. One simple formula can make a computer identify a task and purpose on its own and then go about satisfying it. That’s beauty.
In heredity, many traits can be passed on to offspring, but all of them are translated through strands of DNA that are made up of combinations of only four different bases. That’s beauty.
Millions of songs have been made throughout history, but only eight notes are in a scale. That’s beauty.
Many colors exist of many shades and hues, but all of them stem from just three base colors: red, blue, and yellow. That’s beauty.
All of us are sinners, but God loved us anyway and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins on the cross. One day all whom the LORD has saved will stand before him and worship him face to face, of their own will, in full appreciation of the things he has done for them. That’s our ultimate purpose, and it was God’s objective from the beginning.
That’s beauty.
You can read the whole thing here.
What freedom is and is not.
Is it too much to say that our generation suffers from and undefined and inaccurate view of freedom? Here’s an interested meditation on the nature of true freedom as described in the bible, and especially how it meshes with our work:
To see work in our “DNA”, our design, is part of what it means to grasp the distinct Christian understanding of freedom.
Modern people like to see freedom as the complete absence of any constraints.
But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality its nature. The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.
So the commands of God in the Bible are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be.
Cars work well when you follow the owner’s manual and honor the design of the car. If you fail to change the oil, no one will fine you or take you to jail; your car will simply break down because you violate its nature. You suffer a natural consequence.
In the same way, human life works properly only when it is conducted in line with the owner’s manual, ” the commandments of God. If you dishonor God, you are actually acting against your own nature as God designed you. When God speaks to disobedient Israel in Isaiah chapter 48, he says, “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea.” (Isaiah 48:17-18)
–Tim Keller
Can I share personally for a second? More and more, I am seeing the simplicity of God’s commands and the clear reality of relating to God by trust and obedience–it’s the only way to truly live. It’s at once the most simple and the most profound way to exist. It’s simple because it’s not hard to figure out, or esoteric, or hidden. It’s profound because it’s truly in touch with what is Real (what Is), and therefore it offers all the depth, complexity, and opportunity for exploration that true reality offers. You can explore a 3-D game world with a controller and screen, or you can step out your front door and explore the planet. Which offers more depth, variety, and experience? It’s the same way with knowing God and following Christ. We live when we obey in simple trust. We shrink and die when we seek for other ways.
When God Speaks, He Can Be Trusted (Notes from last night)
Here’s the notes from last night, finishing up our studies about the nature of scripture and how God speaks to us in it.
Set Up:
Week 1: We saw that When God speaks, it can be written down.
- Sometimes he literally audibly spoke
- Sometimes he worked within authors so that what they wrote was what he wanted write
This is what the authors of the bible claim is the case for what they wrote.
In other words: there is nothing about the bible that prevents it from being the actual word of God from him to us. Humanity did not mess up the divinity.
Claim: The Bible is God’s word. When we read it, it is his speech to us.
Week 2: When God speaks, he can be understood.
Though there are some difficult parts of the Bible, and though there are some disagreements about what some things mean, nevertheless, the bible is clear about what we must believe and how we must obey. There is nothing that prohibits God form communicating clearly and effectively to us, and the bible indicates this is exactly what he did.
This week: When God speaks, he can be trusted.
Assertion: The bible reveals a God who…
- Is able to communicate to us.
- Has shown a desire and a decision to communicate with us
- Actually has communicated with us, throughout history
- Has shown that he communicates clearly and effectively
- Has shown himself to be perfectly, faithful and trustworthy, at all times.
…Therefore, since the bible is communication from this God, and since nothing about the medium or the authors presents any barrier to this God communicating, this bible must be totally trustworthy, faithful, and true at all times.
Definitions of Inerrancy:
“Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.” (CSBI)
“Inerrancy means that when all facts are know, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences.” (Feinberg)
“Scripture is inerrant because the personal word of God cannot be anything other than true. When he gives us propositional information—and he certainly does—that information is reliable, though expressed in ordinary, not technical, language. The written Word, further, is just as inerrant as the oral message of the prophets and apostles. And their word is just as inerrant as the divine voice itself.” (Frame)
Scriptures:
Ps 12:6, Ps 19:7-11, Ps 119:142, 151, 119:160, Pr 30:5, Mt 5:17-18, Mt 12:38-42, Mt 19:4-5, John 17:17
Responses to some common objections:
- Scripture never claims to be “inerrant.” True: in the sense that there is no Greek or Hebrew sentence that could be translated “The scripture is without any error.” But then, the bible also never anywhere says, “The Bible has mistakes.” It never says, “You will one day find that some of the things which are reported as true in here didn’t actually happen, or they’re actually are not from God, but just people doing their best, so you’ll have to use your knowledge you’ve gained from other places in order to discern what is really true and what’s not.” And, the bible never says, “Once Jesus came, he showed us that a lot of the things that we thought were from God were actually not. So use what you think he meant to see what is really from God and what is just human.” In other words, you can’t use the “the bible never says” argument here. Instead, you have to just see what the bible actually says, and see what the authors of scripture (and the Holy Spirit through them) actually said about what they were writing. And what they say is that a God who is totally faithful, all, knowing, unlimited in ability, and completely without sin or mistake, communicated to or through them. In other words, what they wrote is the words of God, and those words have the same qualities God has.
- To say the bible has no errors is to ignore the actual issues scripture has. In other words, the bible has issues—errors, contradictions, inconsistencies, issues with science, and moral problems. The only way to reply to this in short is to say that any and all of these issues that are brought up have been thought through and answered by Christians over the last 2000 years. And they have all been answered again at a modern academic level in the last few generations. There is nothing new that catches Christians off guard. In other words, the only issues people ever bring up are issues which have great explanations.
- But what about all the copying and mistakes over the years? Christians only ever claim that the text of the original manuscripts are without error. But any faithful copy which reproduced the text of the original would also be without error. So there’s no problem with copies just because they’re copies. And now, 2000 years later, even though we do have different manuscripts which differ in some things, we have a situation where we have thousands of those documents, and are able to tell where the mistakes are. And none of the major or minor teachings of scripture are affected by any of the differences. In other words, we might not know what the exact word order of a verse was, but we do know exactly what happened and exactly what message the writers were trying to convey.
- We don’t need the bible to be without error. We can know God anyway. Maybe, but do we have any indication in scripture that God would have done things this way? Do we have any reason to believe he left errors for us to discover, and left it to us to figure out what they were? This objection ignores the fact that without a totally reliable witness to the things God has said and done, we have to either give up the ability to really have confidence in what we can know about God, or we have to give something other than the bible the status of inerrant. We have to say that our minds have the power to know what is true, and that we can trust our own thoughts. We have to pick some final authority. The scripture claims to be that final authority.
- It’s not about the bible, it’s about Jesus. We all understand the sentiment. Jesus saves us, not the bible. But this also assumes that there is some kind of conflict between Jesus and the bible. It assumes that Jesus saves us apart from the bible. And it assumes that Jesus would agree with that statement. But in fact, the only record of Jesus thought we have, the New Testament, shows us that Jesus did not have this attitude towards the bible. He saw himself as fulfilling it, obedient to it, and totally in line with it. In other words, what the Bible says, Jesus says. Jesus and the bible are an inseparable team.
Application: Not discouraging thought or questioning, but encouraging confidence, boldness, and action.
Mt 7:24-27, Rev 22:7-20.
The aim: Confidence in God’s character as totally trustworthy, coupled with confidence in the word of God as totally reliable, leading to confidence that obeying his commands leads to experiencing his promises, leading to an excitement and ability to resist temptation, risk persecution, make sacrifices, and step out in bold faith and do things for God.
When God Speaks, He can be understood (Notes from two monday nights ago…)
So I never got to post the notes from last weeks study on the idea that because God inspired the bible, we’re able to know what it means. Here they are:
Intro: Last week we saw that when God speaks, it can be written down. This goes for times when God literally audibly spoke and told people to write down what he said, and for the times when God indwelt people and worked in such a way that they wrote their own words, but those words were exactly what God was saying in that situation.
This week: When we say that the bible is God’s word, we also say that we can read it, know what God has to say to us, and report what he says to others. In other words, we claim to be able to understand what God says to us, and that we can help others understand too. But in our day this immediately raises some objections:
The Objections:
1. Isn’t God too big to be put in a box?
2. Aren’t there some things that are hard to understand?
3. So many different interpretations: how can we really know what the bible says?
Important to understand: this is not just a problem with the bible, but with all writing, and all communication. If you don’t think the bible can be understood, do you think written communication is possible at all?
Answers to objections:
1. Isn’t God too big to be put in a box?
Of course. But if we say we can’t understand the things he’s said, we’ve actually just put him in a box: the box that keeps him from communicating to us. (We’ve also claimed that we clearly understand something about God—that he’s not able to be understood.) Saying that we can understand the bible doesn’t put God in a box, it admits that he’s frees to communicate.
Everywhere in the bible it is assumed that God is an effective communicator. It is assumed that God speaks, and that when he wants to communicate, he is able to. What he communicates are things that we can understand, and therefore things that create obligations for us—they are things we must either believe, or things we must do—mostly, they are always both. What we say about how possible it is to understand scripture is what we say about God’s own ability to communicate.
- God expects us to obey what he tells us. In other words, his word clearly commands things that obligate us to obey. See Deuteronomy 6:1-7
- Jesus assumed the scriptures could be understood, and that they settled matters. Mark 10:4-9
- God is always able to accomplish his purpose by what he speaks: Isaiah 55:10-11
“The clarity of scripture is that quality of the biblical text that, as God’s communicative act, ensures its meaning is accessible to all who come to it in faith.” (Mark Thompson)
2. Aren’t there some things that are hard to understand?
Yes, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t understand anything. Just that not all things are as easy to understand as others. “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.” (Westminster Confession of Faith)
- Peter admitted that some things were hard to understand: 2 Peter 3:15-16
- Even children can understand scripture: Deut 6:7
- God tells us that the way he speaks is something we can grasp: Deut 30:11-14
- By reading and explanation, we can understand the meaning: “So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.” – Nehemiah 8:8, see also 2 Tim 2:7: “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.”
3. So many different interpretations: how can we really know what the bible says?
This disagreement is exaggerated. There are a set of teachings in the bible that are not in dispute by anyone in the broad stream of Christianity:
- There is one God
- He made everything
- Humans are made in his image
- Humans fell through sin
- God sent Jesus who lived a perfect life and died in our place.
- Jesus rose from the dead.
- We must believe in Jesus for forgiveness of sin.
- Jesus is returning to rule.
These are the plainest things, the most clearly communicated things in scripture, and they are the things which must be believed in order to be saved.
“Scripture is always clear enough for us to carry out our present responsibilities before God. It is clear enough for a six-year-old to understand what God expects of him. It is also clear enough for a mature theologian to understand what God expects of him. But the clarity of Scripture, is person-relative, person-specific. Scripture is not exhaustively clear to anyone. It is not clear enough to satisfy anyone who merely wants to gain a speculative knowledge of divine things. It is, rather, morally sufficient, practically sufficient, sufficient for each person to know what God desires of him.” (John Frame)
“In one part there are whirlpools; and not in another, why then are you bent on drowning yourself in the depths?” (Chrysostom)
So, why are there any disagreements at all?
- Human deficiencies: Lack of understanding, over emphasizing one part at the expense of another, limited/different perspectives, sin. This is probably the most common reason why there are different views of scripture.
- God may have left some things in scripture less clear than others. Why would he do that? So that we’d have to focus on, and unite around, the most important things. Also, he wants us to have to help each other, and to exercise love, even in our reading of scripture. He wants us to be humble about things that are less clear, and bold about things that are most clear.
The things that God wanted us to know and believe to be saved are the clearest, most easily understood truths: see Romans 10:5-13
Conclusion: Do you want to know? John 7:17
Top Things to Avoid… (Being Christian in College, Movie 5)
When we’re about to embark on a journey, or even when we’re in the middle of it, it’s often helpful hear from someone who has gone through it already. That’s the heart behind our series of short videos, Being Christian in College. It’s also right at the heart of this installment of the series, What should Christians Avoid While at College?
Enjoy…
Videos in this Series:
Series introduction:
Recently we had several friends from CC Philly who are finishing up their fourth year of school stop by to discuss college life with us. They brought a few more friends with them, people they had met and bonded with at school.
They agreed to let us film them discussing their experiences, so that we could share them with all of you who are currently in, or about to enter, a college or university.
Two of them were unsaved when they began school, and they talk about their experience meeting Christians and beginning to walk with Christ. The others entered school as Christians, and they share thoughts on going through school and actually making a difference for Christ on campus.
Being Christian in College
1. What Surprised You Most about College?
2. What Should Christians Do Together on Campus?
3. What Should Christian Do Before They Go To College?
4. How Did Christians Help You Come to Know Christ at College?
5. What should Christians Avoid While at College?
Problems, Problems with the Bible!
What do you do when you encounter things in the bible that seem to be problems? Worse, what should we think when people with degrees or books to their name tell us about all kinds of issues the bible has (which we never heard before!) that show it shouldn’t really be taken seriously?
The answers to those questions have to do with a whole lifetime of reading, praying, obeying, trusting–basically, living out the life of faith–as well as serious studying, if we care to verify our claims to know truth. But there are many, many people who have given their lives to do exactly that, and devote some or all of their time to showing how these problems tend to disappear when we examine them with open minds and trusting hearts. For instance, the other day I ran across this passage from John Frame’s book The Doctrine of the Word of God which addresses these things in very clear and encouraging way:
Once we come to faith, problems look different.
Problems test our faith, but they do not carry anywhere near the weight of God’s self-witness. That was true for Abraham, even though he had only a few individual encounters with God.
We have had far more than that: three thousand years of history in which God has spoken to his people and attested his word (by Divine voice, prophetic-apostolic proclamation, and written Word, and of course through his Son Jesus Christ) as true. Those revelations have led to the formation of a Christian way of thinking, a Christian mind. To that mind, attacks on Scripture are never credible because they must overcome a vast weight of God’s own testimony.
This is a great line of thinking. Isn’t the bible the record of God revealing himself and demonstrating his desire to communicate to us? Hasn’t he showed himself to be faithful and trustworthy? And, even more than that, haven’t we personally met him, and hasn’t he shown us individually that he is to be trusted?
Despite all this, Frame says,
sometimes believers think like unbelievers. Often believers will ascribe authority to liberal scholarship–scholarship committed, as have seen, to read the Bible like any human book. Such scholarship regularly assumed that the biblical worldview cannot be true: that miracles cannot occur, that predictive prophecy is impossible, that God cannot speak words and sentences to human beings.
The would-be autonomous kind of scholarship is often arrogant in its claims. In the past, such scholars have often spoken of the “assured results of modern scholarship.” One does not hear that phrase so much these days; most all these “assured results” have been questioned. But on stands amazed at how easily modern scholars can claim that this portion of a verse in Genesis must have been written by a different author from that one, or that this sentence ascribed to Jesus in one of the Gospels must have originated in a setting different from that set forth in the Gospel itself. In reply to Rudolf Bultmann’s claim that the personality of Jesus was unimportant to Paul and John, C.S. Lewis, himself a scholar of ancient literature replies:
“Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see?”
And then:
“These men ask me to believe that they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”
The difference between liberal Bible critics and believing Christians is not merely academic, a difference in point of view; nor is it merely a difference in presupposition (though it is certainly that). It is a moral difference. The liberal reads the text with an incredible exalted view of his own competence to understand ancient cultures and writers in finest detail. Christians should remember that our faith divides us from the liberal tradition in the most profound way. We are often tempted to reply to their arrogance with more arrogance. We should avoid that temptation, by God’s grace. Often, as we will see, this means that [initially] we respond to Bible problems with an honest “I don’t know.”
Repost for tonight: Is it naive to say we can simply read and understand the bible?
Here is a repost of an excellent book and lecture series giving an in depth look at the topic we’ll address: Can we really understand scripture when we read it? Enjoy…
I’m almost finished an excellent little book (153 pages of reading) on another essential issue for Christians in today’s world. The book is A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture and it addresses this question: Is the Bible a book that can be read and understood by most people, or is it instead an obscure ancient text which only formally trained scholars can understand? Or do we need to admit that no one, really, can claim to have an understanding of it?
For many of us, our common sense may seem to tell us that we can read the Bible and know what God says, but then we may face a couple things that start to erode our confidence in our ability to understand the Bible. First, we all have the experience of reading and not immediately understanding what the Bible is talking about. In fact, that may be what we experience most of the time, except for a few of our favorite “go-to” verses. Second, we may start hearing people who claim a higher knowledge of the Bible tell us that it’s uninformed to think you can simply read and understand any text, much less one that’s old and obscure, like the Bible.
What do we say to these things? Is our failure to understand scripture an indication that the Bible is, in fact, unintelligible? Are modern scholars right when they say we only think we can understand it because we just don’t know any better? And what about all the different interpretations of the Bible that float around out there? If it’s so easy to understand, why doesn’t everyone just read it and agree?
A Clear and Present Word is a patient, thorough examination of these challenges. Here is a sample from the book, which gives the heart of his argument:
Christian doctrine is not essentially rational, mechanistic or impersonal, but is relational at its very core because God in his eternal being is relational and determines all reality. A Christian doctrine of Scripture must speak of Scripture as it is related to God, and this will of necessity draw attention to the person, work and words of Jesus Christ, the one who is genuinely and without reduction both God and human. Scripture exists by and within the purpose of God to be known by men and women, those he is determined to rescue for himself. It is properly understood as an integral part of the purposeful communicative activity of God.
Here are the beginnings of an answer to the suggestion that God as transcendent mystery challenges any notion of Scripture’s clarity, for the transcendent God who cannot be contained by our thoughts and words lovingly chooses to be known. He has spoken in many and various ways through the prophets and in the last days through his Son. The transcendence of God should not be played off against this determination on God’s part to be known and to use the capacity for language that he has given us as a vehicle for a true knowledge of him. If God chooses to speak to us personally, in his Son and through those he has commissioned and enabled to write his words for us, then it is no transgression of his majesty to take him at his word.
Here too, as we have seen, is an answer to the charge that human language, spoken or written, is inadequate to express in a direct way the truth about God, since language, like humanity itself, is a fragile creature of the dust. God is the primeval speaker, the originator not just of language in some vague or celestial sense, but of language addressed to and understood by human beings. It is his gift to us, a means of relationship that he is the first to use, not something alien that he commandeers or appropriates for this purpose. Furthermore, the transition from oral to written word is not something done in his absence but at his direction, and, like Joshua, faithful men and women today are called to read and meditate on the written word in the presence of God.
Yet to say all this is to raise the stakes enormously when it comes to the issue of Scripture’s clarity, for the lines of connection run both ways. If Scripture is not clear, not generally accessible to faithful men and women who prayerfully read, seeking to know the mind of God, what are we then saying about God? As one contemporary writer asks, “What kind of God would reveal his love and redemption in terms so technical and concepts so profound that only an elite corps of professional scholars could understand them?” If communication is generally possible between human beings, as common experience confirms, then what kind of arrogance (Luther would say blasphemy) will suggest that this is beyond God? Of course there is more to be said. We need to examine Scripture’s own testimony about its clarity and indeed those instances where clarity is hard won. We need to respond to the challenges thrown up by contemporary hermeneutics.
But let this truth stand over all those attempts: the living God is an effective communicator.
If you’d like to read more for free, you can download the first 45 pages of the book for free here.
If you’d like to listen to the book, these lectures are essentially the author reading the book before it was published. Here are the links for the mp3s:
A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture
by Mark Thompson
1. Oh sweet obscurity: the absurdity of claiming clarity today
2. The effective communicator: God as the guarantor of scriptural clarity
3. It is not beyond you: The accessible word of the living God
4. Engaging the hermeneutical challenge
5. The sharp double-edged sword: Restating the clarity of Scripture today
When God speaks, it can be written down. (Notes from Monday night.)
On Monday night we began a few weeks of looking at now we can know that the Bible is truly God’s word (his speech) to us. Here are the notes:
1. God speaks, and it can be written down. (Verbal inspiration)
Exodus 23:3-4 Moses wrote all the words of the Lord.
Deuteronomy 30:10 The voice of the lord is written in the book See also: Isa 8:1; Jer 30:2; Jer 36:6; Hosea 1:1, 4:1, 8:12; Hab 2:2; John 20:30-31
Daniel 9:11 These words are considered the voice of the Lord.
Revelation 1:19 Jesus told John to write (Rev 21:5, 22:6-7,18-19)
2. God also speaks through human words: (Indwelling Inspiration):
How it works:
Not by God speaking audibly, but by the Holy Spirit revealing truth to a person in their heart and mind. And then by the Holy Spirit ensuring that what the person writes down is exactly what he wants written down. He doesn’t do it by taking a person over, but by working in and with the person so that what they write is what God writes. There is a match between their words and God’s words. It is their words, and it is God’s words too.
2 Peter 1:19-21 & 3:15-16 – The holy men of God wrote what they spoke as they were borne along and Paul is part of the same process
1 Corinthians 2:6-13 & 14:37 – The Spirit reveals the truth. The words Paul writes are then God’s command.
Ephesians 3:2-5 – God revealed certain truths to Paul. When we read the letter he wrote, we can understand his knowledge
1 Thessalonians 4:1-8 Rejecting Paul’s letter is rejecting God.
Implications:
We never have to regard the bible with mistrust, as if it somehow stands between us and God. We never have to let its human authors, its human language, or the fact that it’s in a book lead us to think it can’t be God’s word. We never have to worry that we have something less than if God himself stood and spoke to us audibly. In fact, the people who God did speak to audibly also received instructions or the inner prompting to write—which means that God himself chose writing and collecting writings in a book as the best way to preserve what he said for future generations. (See also 2 Peter 1:12)
The simple logic is this:
If the God of the Bible exists at all, he can talk.
If he can talk, he knows how to communicate in ways we can understand, and he can direct those words to be written down.
If he made us in his image, he is fully capable of working in us so that our writing matches what he wants to say.
3. Application: 2 Timothy 3:14-16 — Because it’s inspired, it’s what you need.
“profitable” = “yields a practical benefit”
- Doctrine – what should I believe? What should I think? What is true?
- Reproof – where am I going wrong? Where am I messing up?
- Correction – How can I fix things?
- Instruction in righteousness – How should I live my life in a way that pleases God?
Why won’t we get a “second chance” after we die?
Though people sometimes disagree with the idea, the fact is that the Bible teaches that the eternal state of someone’s soul is determined in this life, before a person dies physically. The question that is often posed in these discussions is, “Why?” Why would God only give us a chance in this life? Isn’t he the God of second chances? Doesn’t he want as many people as possible to be saved?
I found some great thoughts on this in an unexpected place the other day–in a commentary on the Book of Proverbs by Bruce Waltke. He’s writing about Proverbs 1:24-29, which read like this:
24 Because I have called and you refused, I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
25 Because you disdained all my counsel, And would have none of my rebuke,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your terror comes,
27 When your terror comes like a storm, And your destruction comes like a whirlwind, When distress and anguish come upon you.
28 “Then they will call on me, but I will not answer; They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the LORD,
30 They would have none of my counsel And despised my every rebuke.
31 Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way, And be filled to the full with their own fancies.
32 For the turning away of the simple will slay them, And the complacency of fools will destroy them…
Waltke applies the “calamity” and “destruction” spoken about in verses 26 and 27 to eternal things–he sees them as representing, not just consequences of poor choices in this life, but the final consequences someone faces after this life is over. Here are his observations about why Wisdom, personified as a great woman here in Proverbs, refuses to come to the aid of the person who, having spent their life rejecting Wisdom (the “fool” which Proverbs speaks about), has now died and faces eternity:
Fools, seeing no need for “the fear of the Lord,” do not carefully select it as their way of life. In fact, they decide against it and sanction other lifestyles. Theological reflection suggests several reasons why wisdom disengages herself at the time of final judgment, offering fools no second chance after this life.
First, human choices before judgment would amount to no more than preliminary decisions before a real choice was made beyond death.
Second, this life would be preempted of its true dignity if choices made now had no eternal consequence.
Third, fools would be confirmed in treating this life with careless complacency.
Fourth, the disciples of wisdom would be made to look foolish if sensual pleasure could be had without responsibility and accountability.
People deny the doctrine of final judgment because they do not want to give this life such dignity that decisions now affect an eternal future in a decisive and definite way.
What a great, biblical point! The people who say God should give a second chance after death are really asking for a life that’s not real, a life that doesn’t count, like a sports team that only ever plays pre-season games. But God has given us a real life to live, where we do real things, and can make real impact on the world, even for eternity, for good or evil.
It all counts, and it all matters.
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