One Sacred Source The Doctrine of Scripture Know That You Know Godly Doctrine Fueling Godly Deeds December 13, 2009 AM Main Sermon Idea: The Bible perfectly reveals Jesus to all of humanity. Introduction This series on doctrine will touch the very heart of the Gospel message. It is fitting that we start the series in the defense of the Bible, God s authoritative, inerrant, and infallible message to all of humanity concerning His will and Person. The Bible brings the revelation of God and all other things to our minds and hearts, so that we might know God. For our relationships with Him, we have the Bible to thank. I love books! I have properly called myself a bibliophile, which in Greek means lover of books. I love the feel of a book, the turning of the page. But more than the love of the material of a book, I love what each book teaches me, helps me to understand, and provides. The Bible is like no other book. Today, I want to show you why I love the Bible above every book on earth! I. The Bible brings revelation. A. The magnitude of God s Word shows its uniqueness among books. 1.Its sheer origin and composition boggle the mind. a. The Bible was written over a span of about 1,500 years, composed with about 40 different human authors. Even with the variety and diversity of their backgrounds, the Bible contains a singular focus and unity. b. Illustration: We know how well a message survives through multiple communications. This morning I can practically guarantee that if I said something in the ear of the person closest to me, and had them transmit that same message to the next person in a chain, I would still hear a different message with the last person! The message tends to degrade through multiple communications, but not so with the Bible! God has maintained His word despite its many human authors. c. The Bible maintains a coherence unlike any other compilation of books. The books reference one another and explain each other. From Old Testament to New, the Bible comments on itself throughout the different authors. 1
d. The linking of understanding has no equal in any other work of its kind. The Bible also uses a diversity of genres and communication styles to convey one singular message. 2.Its ability to speak to every situation in life changes the heart. a. Not only is the structure and literary nature of the Bible top notch, but the content of the Bible also has no rival. Throughout Old and New Testaments, humans are challenged by the message. b. The Bible is a living book in that it lays down principles that apply to every situation regardless of differing cultures and times. The Bible speaks to people on an individual basis and also on a corporate basis. c. The writer of Hebrews claims about the Word of God that it even cuts between soul and spirit, of which the closeness is extreme, between bones and the marrow that makes bones. It leaves no one without being exposed to God (Hebrews 4:12-13)! d. Application: Whenever you need to hear from God, you can go to the Bible. In it, you will find that He will convict you and encourage you, comfort you and challenge you! There is nothing in you that the Bible does not weigh and work on. You can rest assured even when turning to a familiar passage that God will speak to you through the words of His Word! You will find the Living Word Jesus in these pages and the Holy Spirit will breath the life of God into your life! B. The overarching story of redemption does not waver in the Word. 1.God s story does not falter between books in the Bible. a. From each book to the next, it seems that a Divine Writer is speaking into the human hands of those who write. We believe in something called verbal plenary inspiration. b. This big long phrase means that we believe the Holy Spirit led the human writers, without overriding their personalities, to faithfully commit to text the complete message of God even to the word. c. This is not the same as divine dictation, for the writer s own personalities come out in the text. You can tell when you re reading from John s writings or from Paul s or from Isaiah s, or even Moses! d. Throughout the Bible, people claim to hear and speak the words of God. Phrases such as, Thus says the Lord are common in the Bible and people often tell that the Lord told them to write these things down, as John in the Revelation. 2
e. Even with the large expanse of experiences and situations in the Bible from book to book, God s story seems to unite all of the diversities that surround the separate books. It is a collection of many books with one story! f. Application: This book of books has God s fingerprints all over it. What human being can make such correlations with ease and perfection! What person can integrate such wide experiences and subject matter and then make one giant story out of the whole thing that maintains coherence! The Bible even goes farther. It is a story with one point, the point of God s presence with us. 2.The written Word introduces us to the Living Word. a. The most important and wonderful thing about the Bible is that it introduces us to our Savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus is shown by John to be the Word. b. Through the written word, we get to meet Jesus the Living Word. As He speaks through the Bible, His words penetrate our hearts and feed our souls! c. Application: It is through illumination that we can experience the Bible for ourselves. The word tells us to taste and see that the Lord is good. We do that by reading and experiencing the change God is doing in us. Through the Word, the Spirit of the Living Word Jesus, the Holy Spirit, lightens up our understanding of His Word to us. The Holy Spirit sheds light to the reader and then applies the word to our lives! II. The Bible teaches truth. A. When the Bible speaks to an issue, it contains no errors. 1.As revelation, the Bible perfectly describes its subject matter. a. Different books are written with different purposes in mind. The Bible is written as revelation of God to humanity. Now this means that the whole Bible is written in that frame of reference. b. Revelation is a process of bringing to light and understanding the character and will of God to human beings through the passing of time. God will even use events to illustrate Himself to people. c. When the Bible speaks to science or mathematics, or any other area of expertise, it speaks with the level of understanding within the time and culture of its day. d. For instance, when the Bible talks about the sun moving through the sky, it is from a pre-space human point of view and is not in error. 3
e. The Bible also does not use technical terms most of the time, but rather common evreryday ways of communicating ideas. But its primary communication is not about science, math, or anything other than revealing God to us through His dialogue and deeds. f. Illustration: Science books almost never talk about why something is the way it is. Science is not meant to explain the why s of life. It is meant to explain the how s. It does not talk of the ethics or morality of anything, but rather how we would go about producing something. Science books aren t meant to explain everything. No book is meant to do that. So the Bible also has a particular bent when it speaks. It speaks to spiritual realities amidst physical realities. 2.The original autographs of the Bible remain perfect. a. The autographs are the original documents that the Bible was written on. Throughout history, many copies have been made of these originals, especially in the New Testament. b. There are over 5,700 New Testament manuscripts available to us so far today! And there are about 3 fully maintained manuscripts of the Old Testament. c. When the Old Testament was written, it was so zealously maintained that there is virtually no challenge to its accuracy today by anyone. Illustration: Even when a group of people called the Masoretes added in vowels so you knew how to pronounce the Hebrew words, they put the vowels around the consonants so as to not change anything! d. In the New Testament, those 5,700 manuscripts can confirm errors made in one another. They actually help us to prove to 99.7%, according to Bruce Metzger, the world s leading textual critic, accuracy of the New Testament as it stands today. The other 0.3% is misspellings and improper grammar use! Not a single doctrinal statement is in question! e. Application: The Bible as we have it today has been preserved by a loving and good God who left nothing out of His revelation that we do not already see in His word! Not having the originals actually keeps us from corruption! If someone had the original, they could change something more easily because it would be centralized, but so many copies makes it virtually impossible to get it wrong! God is so good to us! Over 3,000 years and His word is still all we ever need! B. The Bible perfectly relays God s message to the world. 4
1.The exactness of the Bible is unparalleled in other books. a. Even down to the very word, we can see the exact message God is speaking to us. Greek itself uses 6 different verbal tenses (English has 3) so that we know exactly what s going on. b. The Bible led the ways of thinking when it was being written with brand new spiritual and religious ideas that ruled their day and still challenge the human condition. c. There is no place where any contradiction exists. Even where scholars have argued about contradictions, these contradictions were from human misunderstandings and interpretations, not from the text of the Bible. d. Illustration: Many times we assume things before we look at a situation. We see someone walking around with a gunny sack on a stick and dirty, smelly clothes and we think that they are homeless, not that they work in a coal mine and are taking their lunch home after a hard day s work! When people come to the Bible, they bring their own presuppositions to it as well. They assume certain things that sometimes make contradictions when they read what the Bible actually says. We call this reading with colored lenses. 2.The truthfulness and trustworthiness of Scripture cannot be denied. a. Inerrant means that the Bible is completely true in everything it says and to everything it speaks. It does not lie, mislead, or deceive. Everything written in the Bible is true. b. Infallible points to the Bible s trustworthiness, that it is reliable in every situation and that it speaks to everything in life. It applies truthfully to each situation to bring about the wisest course of action. c. The writers of the Bible claim to be speaking the words of God. They even call each other s work Scripture, both in the Old and the New Testaments. d. Peter puts Paul s writings on par with the Old Testament scriptures in 2 Peter 3:16. Jesus confirms that the Old Testament is Scripture when He refers to it, and also to His own teachings! e. Application: It is just like our good God to give us a word for every situation in life, for every need, for every joy! He teaches us not just how to get out of a bind, but how to live life to its full! This is indeed the good word of a great God who loves us so much that He wrote down for us the things we would need to remember and read over and over again. III. The Bible remains forever. 5
A. God s Word has endured throughout time. 1.Every passage illuminates the heart and soul of its reader. a. The Bible is effective not just in the time and culture it was written in, but in its dealing with the unchanging human condition and heart. b. Although times have changed, technology changes, cultures are diverse, yet the Word of God still speaks to the very basic needs of every human being. c. It is not just a word that encourages us, but also exhorts us, reproofs us, calls us out on sin, and leads us into God s presence. It was Paul who wrote that the Scriptures are literally Godbreathed, confirming their authority in God. He who spoke creation into existence also spoke the right word for the right time all the time! d. Scripture has many uses because it is so effective in not only diagnosing the human condition, but also providing the solutions and answers we need. e. Application: I challenge you to find a time when Scriptuer given to you did not bring light to your situation, did not encourage your heart in tough times, did not reproof you for sins you were committing, did not encourage you to walk in the ways of God! This is the very best thing that Scripture does in interacting with us so that we might be people who please the Lord! 2.The Bible challenges every person in every culture in every age. a. Sometimes we thrive under the comfort and encouragement we receive from the Word of God. We go to the prophets or to the Gospels or even to the epistles and are encouraged. b. But when we go to those same places, we also are reproved and scolded for our sins and falling short of God s plan for our lives. Form this same book come all of the things that we need. c. The Bible goes beyond time, beyond personality, beyond culture, beyond bias. It challenges every social convention that we can come up with. d. The God of the Bible knows us so well because He made us. And when He speaks to us, it cuts to our heart, to the fiber of our being, but not maliciously. He cuts us so that we grow stronger in Him! B. Even through adversity, God s Word remains unchanged. 1.Despite numerous attempts to eradicate the Scriptures, they have stood bold to every test. 6
a. Throughout the centuries since the Bible s completion, there have been heretical challenges to the Bible, political challenges to the Bible, even military challenges to the Bible. b. Numerous heresies arose even from the second generation of Christians in the second century. Theology was composed in times of trial for the church, based off of the written word to avoid heresy. c. Several regimes have attempted to eradicate Scripture from their lands. Illustration: Most recently are the strong and thriving underground church of China and the Russian Orthodox Church, both of which suffered at the hands of godless and atheistic communist dictators. These dictators repeatedly tried to quench the hope of God by removing the Bible from their lands. But the underground churches thrived off of what little bit of Scripture they could get their hands on! How surprised we were when these countries are opening up their borders to missionaries! d. Throughout the test of time, God s Word still stands unchanged and unwavering. It is still the rule of faith for every believer in Jesus across the globe. God has made His word stand up to time. 2.Trial has strengthened Scripture rather than weakened it. a. It is through trial that the Bible has become stronger. It is through those atheist communist dictators that the Word has been spread. b. Christianity in its futile stages was attacked by Rome. Many Christians were put to death even in coliseums during the games. But Christianity spread like wildfire under such persecution. c. It was Tertullian of the fourth century who said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. But that Church is helped by the everlasting strength of the message of God s Word. d. Even with all of the heresy, God s Word has still come through. Even with the burning of Bibles and the endless tries to destroy the manuscripts, God s Word remains stronger and more accurate than anyone could have imagined. e. Application: When you open your Bible, you are opening a word that has not changed despite the amazing challenges that have come to it throughout time. It is thousands of years old in the strongest form of communication available. You can be sure that you read the very words of God that were spoken to others who have gone before us, saints who encountered God in these pages. So I invite you to spend the rest of your life tasting and seeing from the Word of God that God is indeed good! 7
Conclusion As we have talked about the importance of the Word this morning, I want to lay just one caution upon our fervor for this wonderful book. There is a problem in some places of our culture in worshipping the Bible. It has been popularly termed Bibliolatry, taken in the sense that worshipping the Bible is neglecting the God of the Bible. While the Bible is sacred to us for the reasons I have given in this message, and others we don t have time to speak of today, we must never forget that the Bible is indeed the perfect rule of revelation and faith for every believer. However, the Bible is so wonderful because it functions as revelation of the great God who composed it through human means! The Bible is so wonderful because it leads us to a special relationship with Jesus! The written Word brings us to the Living Word! No other book can do that, and that is why we love the Bible so much. We do not worship it. We worship the God it leads us to! The Bible is a firm foundation to place our anchor upon. When we stand on the Word of God, we are standing up to the mountains of trials in our way and calling on the God we know because of His Word to bring His power into our situation. Standing on the Word of God, not giving any credence or ground to any other book or belief, gives us the edge in this world to be victors with Christ in the end! Praise God for His Word! 8