Confirmation Lesson II: The Holy Scriptures

As Christians, we base our worldview on the Bible, as the only document on Earth to be secured by Providence to display God’s character and His plan for the salvation of mankind. To understand what this means, we need to know what the Bible says about itself. What is the biblical view of the Bible? The character of God’s words are set forward in Hebrews 6:18, where it says that “it is impossible for God to lie.” God is truth, and so the words He inspires must be true. Isaiah 55:11, furthermore, tells us that God’s Word cannot fail to produce results: “11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: It shall not return unto me void, But it shall accomplish that which I please, And it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.” God cannot lie, and God has authored His word to us for a purpose. What was the means by which God authored Scripture? We learn this in 2 Peter 1:21, which tells us this: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” We discussed last time that the Holy Spirit, as the third Person of the Trinity, is fully God. This means that God’s own Spirit inspired the words written in the 66 books found in Scripture, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. Now, of course, the Holy Spirit used the character, inclinations, and aptitudes of each author. God used Matthew’s training as a tax collector to inspire his writing of the Gospel, for example, and Luke’s expertise as a physician for his. He used the philosophical gifts of the minds of Solomon and the Apostle Paul for the writing of their profound works. He even used the guilt of King David over his sins as a flawed human to inspire beautiful Psalms to help us deal with dark nights of the soul. The Holy Spirit guided the insights, information, research, and reports of the authors of Scripture, so that the personality of each writer was allowed to be represented, but also so that the truths they set down would be reliable. Jesus taught that we should look at Scripture not simply as a means of learning information but as the fundamental way that we nourish ourselves as Christians: Matthew 4:4 “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” This teaching from Christ makes it a serious need for us as Christians to take in some Scripture every day. You wouldn’t eat once a week, and Jesus says we should look at the Bible as a resource as essential as food. It’s also worth noting that Scripture emphasizes what reading it is for, and how much of it we should read: 2 Timothy 3:16-17 “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” That means that the Scriptures we don’t like, the Scriptures that confuse us, the Scriptures that make us uncomfortable or even scare us are still the Word of God. Some Christians are uncomfortable with the Old Testament, but Paul said “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God,” not just the New Testament. According to Paul here, scripture is the source of our doctrine, what we believe as Christians, for reproof and for correction if we are believing things we shouldn’t or doing things we are not supposed to do, and for instruction in righteousness, meaning it tells us how to live. Most importantly, the purpose of Scripture is to tell us the means of salvation through Christ, but in telling us that it also tells us many practical things about how to live in communion with God and with each other.So that is the Christian worldview, and if one is a Christian, this is the biblical perspective to have about trusting in the Bible. But what do we say to those who are not Christians, or when we are ourselves having doubts about the authority of the Word? What if the Bible is just something written by humans as secular people might assert? Tonight I am going to share with you a reflection which I first had when I was about fourteen years old. I wanted to believe not because I was told to believe, but because it was true. So was God real or was atheism true? I thought about this question, and my first instinct was to pray for insight. This made me laugh – I was praying to know whether God existed. Although kind of funny, something I realized in that moment was that prayer was a real instinct in me. If prayer was a real instinct, the way drinking water comes as instinct for when we are thirsty, then I had to consider that that instinct was pointed to something real. So I prayed for insight for how to understand why I believe in God, and this is what unfolded in my mind, a chain of reasoning I called my Belief Tree, which considered the fundamental dichotomies about decisions one had to make concerning what kind of universe it is we live in.

First, is the universe caused either by something or nothing? My immediate, honest belief, the strongest intuition I have, was that it was caused by something. Second, was this universe’s existence caused by something chance and random or something purposeful and rational? While apparently random things may seem to happen in the universe, there are too many factors which have to be exactly the way they are for me to believe this awesome world came to be by accident. So a caused, purposeful, and rational universe seemed the immediate answer, and if it was to have an orderly purpose, the force which had the power to create the universe would have to have intelligence and also great power: that is to say, it would be God. So was God personal or impersonal? I could see no reasonability in the deistic notion of a God who made a world he didn’t care about – the very act of creation seemed antithetical to deism. So would this God have communicated with us as rational beings He created or be utterly silent towards them? Believing that God could not be personal and incommunicative, it followed that he must have communicated. Would he have given numerous, inconsistent revelations of himself or one consistent one that revealed his nature? Given that he created a universe where reality behaves according to sufficiently reliable laws so that scientific inquiry could be possible, I decided that it made the most sense to believe that his communication would take place in a manner consistent with his own nature and be at least as reliable, and probably more reliable, than the natural world. Would this document be fallible or infallible? Surely the being with the creative powers involved in bringing together the universe would find it light work to secure his revelation, and so God had the means to perfectly reveal his will to man. What religion best suits humanity? For this I must consult the comparative characters of God and humanity. Is God good or evil? Surely good, because to be evil is to fail, and such a being as God could have no failure within him. Is humanity good or evil? Certainly evil, in the sense that we all have failure within us, that is to say, we all have sin. Would God leave His creatures, whom He made with the purpose of loving them, in a state of such wickedness or would he provide a means for rescue? Given the double reality of his nature as a Creator and a Communicator, it followed that he would provide such a means, and that the means would be able to circumvent the wickedness of the human heart by virtue of the goodness of God. While I do not have time to delve into specifics, I should say that while other religions do have some aspects of these criteria, they do not all meet the criteria of preserving God’s perfect holiness and the total dependence of man upon God for their salvation which is unique to Christianity. The revelation which suited God would report this complete state of affairs, and this is precisely the answer of the Bible: that God as Creator is good, man is sinful, that God has shone the light of a perfect revelation to us in the person of His Son Jesus Christ whose nature, life, and ministry is set out in Two reliable Testaments of Scripture, that he is taking a personal interest in our lives, that he has a plan for our doing away with our evil, and that as Creator he can also be a recreator of us within our sin natures. Amen.