The content of the Bible is revelation. The process by which that content was written down is called inspiration. Men were in the process, but it didn't come from their desire and their will. They were used as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit and enabled to speak from God. Welcome to Grace to You with the Bible teaching of John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You know the amazing transformation a caterpillar undergoes, cocooning itself and then becoming a beautiful butterfly. But imagine that same process, only this time the caterpillar is dead. If it still becomes a graceful butterfly, that's more than a transformation, that's a miracle.
Well, today John MacArthur shows you how you can experience an even more profound miracle in your own life, as John launches a study called The Transforming Power of Scripture.
Now, as you hear the title of this study, maybe you're wondering what kind of transformation is John talking about? Here's how he answered that question.
Well, we're talking about spiritual transformation. Not psychological transformation, not emotional transformation, not turning over a new leaf in your life or making New Year's resolutions or. Deciding to go another direction, like you might do when you go on a diet or decide to be nice to your spouse. When we talk about the power of the Word of God to change a life, we're talking about a new life. We're talking about regeneration.
We're talking about whatever you are dying and a brand new person being born. That is the transforming power of Scripture. It makes People knew. The Bible talks about the death of the old and the life that is new. Jesus said to Nicodemus in John 3, You must be born again.
You must be born from above. You need to start all over again. It's as if you can't fix what you are. You can't make adjustments and become what God demands that you be. You have to be born all over again.
And the Word of God does that. The Word of God brings that regenerating power, and then the Word of God continues that transformation so that that new person is consistently conformed. To the character of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the process of sanctification. We're going to look at that, the transforming power of Scripture, at its infallibility, inerrancy, authority, its effectiveness.
We're going to look at why the Word of God is so powerful. We're going to see that it is the Word of God and how it impacts your life. Keep your Bible handy. Be ready to take some notes and don't miss a single installment. That's right, friend, there is a lot of helpful teaching ahead in this study.
So what effects can you expect the more you read and meditate on and memorize God's Word? What kind of effects do you expect on your relationships, your career, your usefulness for ministry? Find out as John begins his look at the transforming power of Scripture. I would like to draw you back to 2 Timothy chapter 3 as At least a starting point. Verses 16 and 17, which says, All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate.
fully equipped for every good work. All Scripture is inspired by God. I hope you have an appreciation for the scripture. I hope you have an appreciation for it, not as a fetish, but because it is the greatest treasure apart from God Himself that we have. It is His very word, His very self-revelation.
When people ask me why it is that I systematically teach through book after book, why it is that I pay so much attention to detail and to every verse and every phrase and touch all the words, it's because I understand them to be the words of God revealed to us. From him. And I would not second guess the necessity of those words being then. presented, taught, and understood by all of us. God has revealed himself in his book.
And when you read the words of your Bible, you're reading the words out of the mouth of God. That is a tremendous reality. That gives confidence to everything we do. It also binds us to obedience and submission to everything the scripture teaches. Let's talk a little bit about what it means that all scripture or every scripture is inspired by God.
Just what is inherent in that thought. Let me see if I can't take you to a couple of scriptures to maybe enrich that and then launch into some other things that are on my heart to share with you. Turn in your Bible to Hebrews chapter 1. And let's look at the first part of the second verse. Hebrews chapter 1.
It begins like this: God. after he spoke long ago to the fathers by the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in his son.
Now that's the statement I want you to focus on. I don't intend to exhaust all of the ramifications of that statement, but in its simplicity, it is abundantly clear and deeply profound. It's giving us the essence of revelation. Mark that word. Revelation in its simple sense means to reveal.
to reveal, to make something known that prior was not known. to make something understood that was not Understood. to disclose truth never before known. God Has revealed himself. And here you have a statement with regard to Revelation.
God spoke. Long ago, and God has spoken in these last days. The writer of Hebrews is in effect saying God spoke on two occasions. He spoke once long ago, He speaks in these last days by His Son.
Now, I believe that we are fair in assessing the fact that he has in mind here Old Testament Revelation and New Testament revelation. God spoke long ago to the Jewish fathers. Those were the Old Testament prophets, those who received God's word long ago under the Old Covenant. He spoke to those fathers by means of the prophets. In many portions, polymeros, many books, many sections, and you know that.
There is the Pentateuch, and there are the prophetic books, and the historical books. And there are the books of poetry in many, many portions and in many books. God spoke. He spoke to the Jewish fathers. He spoke by means of the prophets.
He also spoke, it says, in many ways. Palutropos. That means through vision and prophecy and parable and type and symbol and ceremony and theophany and sometimes audible voice, and he even wrote with his finger on stone. There were many ways in which God spoke many things, collected in many texts, put into many books. And he spoke to those of old by means of the prophets.
That is a statement with reference to the fact that the Old Testament is God speaking.
Now, let me make it as clear as I can to you. The Old Testament is not a collection of the wisdom of ancient men. The Old Testament is not a collection of the best of religious thinking. The Old Testament is not a collection of the good musings of godly people. The Old Testament is the word of God.
It's not the thinking of any men, good men, godly men, or ancient men. In and of themselves, it is the Word of God. And the writer of Hebrews says God spoke. God spoke. The Old Testament was God speaking.
to the fathers by means of the prophets.
So the Old Testament is God speaking and revealing himself. The New Testament is God speaking and revealing his Son. The Old Testament is God's self-revelation, and that is the theme of the Old Testament. From Genesis to the very end of the Old Testament to Malachi, and all in between, the main character is God. It is the revelation of God, who He is, what are His attributes, what are His attitudes, how does He react to every possible given human situation.
What is he like? What does he do? That's the Old Testament. It is the revelation of God. It is not the story of man, it is not the story of Israel.
Those stories are there, but it is the revelation of God. And we see God revealed through man, through history, through Israel, through all that happens. God's attributes are sometimes listed very clearly, as in the Psalms. On the other hand, sometimes we see his attributes very clearly and he's not even mentioned, such as in the book of Esther where no mention of God is made and yet he is the dominant force and dominant character throughout the entire book. In these last days, since the coming of Christ, he has spoken again.
And he has spoken in the sun. The Gospels record God speaking through his Son, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The book of Acts, God... Speaking through the extension of the proclamation of the message of his son. The epistles, God speaking through the deep and profound understanding of the meaning of the life and ministry of the Son.
And even revelation, the consummation when the sun comes back in glory, the consummation of God's communication to this world. The New Testament writers wrote down the word of God. Jesus promised, I will bring all things to your remembrance. I will teach you all things. I will lead you into all truth.
I will show you things to come. And in so promising, gave those apostles and, along with them, the other writers of the New Testament, the promise of divine inspiration. That they, like the Old Testament prophets, would write the word of God. The Old Testament is the revelation of God to show men what God is like, who God is. What God tolerates and does not tolerate.
How God desires holiness and punishes sin. The New Testament is God revealed by His Son. In the life of his son, in the message of his son, in the understanding of the work of his son, and in the culmination in the coming of his son to establish his eternal kingdom. But in either case, Old Testament, New Testament, God spoke. And what we have is indeed the word of God.
This is not the word of man. And so, what we have in our hands, beloved, is not the word of man. It's not the word of religious men. It's not the word of wise and godly men. It is the word of God.
The Word of God.
So Hebrews 1, 1 and 2 talks about revelation, the revealing of God. What process then did God use to reveal Himself? Let's look at another text, 2 Peter chapter 1. And now we go to the process God used to reveal himself, and that has come to be known as inspiration. Inspiration.
In 2 Peter 1, verse 20, it says, Know this first. First of all, That no message the word prophecy here has a very generic sense, not meaning some kind of prediction of the future, but message, no telling forth, no message of Scripture. A matter. of ones Own Interpretation. Epileus.
Now notice this. No message of Scripture. Is a matter of one's own epilepsis.
Now, what does that mean? It could mean releasing, and that might be the truest essence of the term. No. Message from scripture is of one's own releasing.
Some have suggested that the best way to translate it would be inspiration, because that's what it's intending to say. No message of scripture is a matter of one's own inspiration. That is to say, scripture does not come out of inspired men. In the sense that some men are inspired because of some level of religious genius. The genitive case here suggests that Peter has in mind source or origin of Scripture, and that he's really not talking about interpreting the Bible in the sense that you would describe what it means, but he's talking about the origin so that it could say this.
No prophecy of Scripture is a matter of origination in one's own mind. No message of scripture comes out of any human source. That's the idea. 4 verse 21 says, No message was ever made by an act of human will. Scripture is not the product of men.
It is not the product of the will of men. But men Moved by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. Very clear and very vital. No message was ever made, eras, passive, indicative. The verb is pharaoh, means to bear, carry along, convey, produce, bring forth, bring along.
No message was ever conveyed, borne, carried along, produced, brought forth. By an act of human will. But men, same verb, Pharaoh, were borne along, carried along, conveyed, brought forth by the Holy Spirit to speak from God. The Holy Spirit filled them. The idea is like putting your winds, your sails to the wind on a ship and being borne along by the breeze.
The Spirit of God moved them along, blew them along. And that tells us the process. The content of the Bible is revelation. The process by which that content was written down is called inspiration. And it wasn't a high level of human activity.
It wasn't even a high level of religious human activity. Men were in the process, but it didn't originate with them. And it didn't come from their desire and their will. They were used as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit and enabled to speak from God. They spoke divine words.
God used them. It was their personality. It was their background.
Some of their insights. Their experiences, their perceptions, But every word was the word of God. That's the miracle of inspiration. Men They were used, carried along by the Holy Spirit, spoke from God. That's what the scripture says.
So when you pick up your Bible, you're not reading the word of men. You're reading the word of God that was written down by men who were moved along in the process by the power of the Holy Spirit. Not apart from their personalities and not apart from their experiences and not apart from their vocabulary and not apart from their heart passion and compulsion, but integrating all of that into the power of the Spirit of God and never compromising the truth that every word came from God. A great and glorious miracle.
So vital. Jeremiah is a good illustration of this process. Jeremiah, called by God from before he was born, the word of the Lord came to me, verse 4 of chapter 1, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.
Then I said, Alas, Lord God, I do not know how to speak because I am a youth. Verse 9, and the Lord stretched out his hand, touched my mouth. The Lord said to me, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. What a tremendous statement. I have put my words in your mouth.
That was the promise. for the writers of scripture. All scripture is God-breathed. All holy writing comes from God.
So God spoke in the Old Testament. to the fathers by the prophets in many ways. and in many portions. And God has spoken in the New Testament. By his son in the Gospels?
And then about his son and the rest of the New Testament. The process by which God gave us that revelation, His inspiration, and inspiration was God putting His revelation in, as it were, the hands of men to be written down, first to be spoken and proclaimed, and then written down as they were energized, carried along by the Holy Spirit. Men were used. And yet no word of God was ever violated. The totality of scripture, pasa graphhe, all scripture, every scripture is thea penustas.
God breathed. It is the breath of God. The writing of scripture. The totality of it, according to Romans 3.2, is called the oracles of God. When Paul is talking about the benefit of Israel, what is it that they had that set them apart from other nations?
He has reference to the Old Testament, which he calls the oracles of God. The speeches of God, the words of God. We recognize that. We recognize the divine uniqueness of Scripture. The early church recognized it, even though it wasn't until 393, 397, the Council of Hippo, the Council of Carthage about that time, that the church sort of officially established the canon of scripture comprehensively.
It didn't take that long for people to recognize it. The church didn't invent the canon of Scripture any more than Newton invented the law of gravity. Newton discovered gravity, which God invented, and the church from the very earliest discovered inspired documents which God himself wrote. And though there was some time before some official church laid down some official label on all of it, it was. Eminently clear to the early church.
What was the Word of God and what was not the Word of God? And there are all kinds of Erroneous books that have been left out. But what was the word of God was the word of God. God is the author of scripture. In fact, in the scriptures, frequently God and the term scripture are used interchangeably.
in Galatians and the scripture Foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, All the nations shall be blessed in you. The scripture says, All the nations shall be blessed in you. If you go back to Genesis 12, you see that God said that. God said, Scripture said, same thing. What scripture says, God says.
What Scripture says, God says. In Acts chapter 13, there's a most interesting note in the sermon of the Apostle Paul. He says in verse 32, we preach to you the good news of the promise made to the fathers, that God has fulfilled this promise to our children and that he raised up Jesus, as it is written in the second Psalm: Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee. Then, and as for the fact that he raised him up from the dead, no more to return to decay, he has spoken in this way: I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David. Therefore, he says also in another Psalm, Thou wilt not allow thine holy one to undergo decay.
In other words, God is speaking in the Psalms, and that's exactly what the apostle is affirming. When the Psalms speak, God speaks. In Romans I was thinking just a moment ago of chapter 9, verse 17. The scripture says to Pharaoh, for this very purpose I raised you up, and so forth. The scripture didn't say that in the Old Testament.
God said it. But when God speaks, that's scripture. When scripture speaks, that's God.
So you find such terminology interchanged.
Now, let me talk about it from a negative viewpoint just to illustrate the major thrust. And what I want to point out is that when we talk about the Bible being inspired, we're not saying that there were some men who had a high level of human ability.
some kind of religious geniuses. The world is full of people like that. There have been geniuses in music who were prolific, who were profound, who were way beyond the common people and maybe way beyond even the best of men. There were geniuses in our geniuses in literature, geniuses in prose and geniuses in poetry, great men and women of monumental capability that we would say were inspired poets, inspired musicians, inspired writers, inspired thinkers or whatever. But when we talk about Bible inspiration, we're not talking about some high level of human achievement.
Not so. We're not talking about men, as I said, who could, because of their religious genius, write scripture anytime they wanted to. No. None of them could do that. Only when God gave them what He wanted, said or written, could they do it, and under the work of the Spirit of God.
They said they wrote for God and they never seemed to be self-conscious about it. I mean, you basically look at the Bible writers, and for the most part, they are unlearned and common men. And yet they're supremely confident that they write the Word of God. In fact, about 4,000 times in the Bible, the writers claim to be writing the Word of God. And they're never self-conscious about it.
I mean, you would imagine that somewhere along the way they would say, and this is the word of God.
Now, I know you find that hard to believe. That I'm giving you the exact word of God, but you got to understand this is really true, guys. I mean, I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, I'm not woofing you. This is really true. There's none of that.
There's none of that. I don't know why you ought to believe this, but I'm telling you, this is really the Lord. He told me to tell you this. There's no sense of self-justification. There's no sense of self-defense.
And even though most of them had no extensive education and were in no earthly position to be in a role of a literary genius, particularly. They wrote this profound, far-reaching, supernatural wisdom. Prophecies of the future things to come to pass that were absolutely accurate. They wrote on the nature and character of God. They wrote on God's divine purposes unfolding in the world.
They were right about every single thing they ever said, and they all claimed that it came from God, and yet they were never self-conscious about such a claim. Amazing. They're authoritative. Paul said the law of God was holy, just, and good. And he had in mind that revealed law of God, the Old Testament.
New Testament writers, yes, affirmed they wrote the Word of God just as Old Testament writers had. There are about. 320 direct quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament, about a thousand inferences. The New Testament writers clearly believed the Old Testament was inspired. They also clearly believed their own New Testament was inspired.
They knew they were writing the word of God. And it wasn't just some high level of human genius. They were moved by the Spirit of God to do what they otherwise could never do. Never. God breathed into them, and they wrote it down, word by word, what God breathed into them.
It was more than dictation. They weren't just listening to some voice and writing mechanically every word. It was flowing through their heart, and their soul, and their mind, and their emotions, and their experiences, but it came out every word, the Word of God. As God breathed into them the message, and they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. They said it and some of them wrote it down.
Miraculous, supernatural, inexplicable process that yields to us the Word of God. Let's pray together. Every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. What a statement. Father.
How thrilled we are to know that that's what our Bible is: words that have proceeded out of the mouth of God. Help us to love your word. to honor your word. To believe your word, to study your word. to defend your word, to proclaim your word.
Make us people of the book. Who, while we're feeding ourselves all the rest of the things in this life, do not forget. that we really lived By every word that comes out of your mouth. Father, help us to make the commitments. that we each need to make to refresh our devotion to your word.
For in it you're revealed. And we long so to know you, may we realize that knowing you comes through your word. And through those trials and experiences of life, in which we apply that word. Meet every need of every heart in Christ's name. Ap.
You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. John's current study is called The Transforming Power of Scripture.
Now, friend, you won't want to miss a day as John continues this series. Let me also recommend getting it for yourself or perhaps sending it to a friend or a family member. It's free. You can just go online and download all the messages for the transforming power of Scripture. You can do it today.
Our website is gty.org. And again, every lesson from John's series, The Transforming Power of Scripture, is free to download in MP3 and transcript format at our website. In fact, all of John's sermons from more than 56 years of his pulpit ministry are free to download at gty.org. And friend, as you tune in to this broadcast on your local radio station, let me remind you that Grace to You is heard every day by countless people on radio stations just like this one across the globe. And it is the generous support of friends like you that makes that possible.
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Now, for the entire Grace to U staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for joining us today and be here tomorrow as John MacArthur continues to show you the transforming power of Scripture. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth. one verse at a time. On Grace to You.
