Rediscovering God's Word

Today, on Renewing Your Mind. We want you to hear from Dr. Burke Parsons, who is senior pastor at St. Andrew's Chapel. He's also a Ligonier teaching fellow and our chief publishing officer, and he delivered this message at one of our monthly online staff devotional gatherings to encourage us in our work.

But it's also a message we hope encourages you. I'd like to read a portion of 2 Kings chapter 22, and we're going to pick up at verse 11. But before we read that, I want to just give you a little background very quickly. King Josiah asked for the temple to be cleared, to go and find the monies that were there in the Lord's house. When his servants were clearing the temple, they discovered something. They discovered something that had been lost. They discovered the word of God.

They discovered the book of God's law. And so we pick up in verse 11 of 2 Kings 22. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book to do according to all that is written concerning us. So Hilkiah the priest and Hicam and Akbar and Shaphan and Asaiah went to Huldah, the prophetess of the wife of Shulam, the son of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe.

Now she lived in Jerusalem in the second quarter, and they talked with her. And she said to them, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, Tell the man you sent to me. Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will bring disaster upon this place and upon its inhabitants all the words of the book that the king Judah has read, because they have forsaken me and have made offerings to other gods, that they might provoke me to anger with all the work of their hands. Therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched. But to the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the Lord, Thus shall you say to him, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, regarding the words that you have heard, because your heart was penitent and you humbled yourself before the Lord. When you heard how I spoke against this place and against its inhabitants, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and you have torn your clothes and wept before me, I also have heard you, declares the Lord.

Therefore, behold, I will gather you to your fathers, and you shall be gathered to your grave in peace, and your eyes shall not see all the disaster that I will bring upon this place. And they brought back word to the king. Then the king sent, and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him. And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and the prophets and all the people, both small and great. And he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant that had been found in the house of the Lord. And the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and with all his soul to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant. Now, if you're like me, not having grown up in the church, whenever I hear an Old Testament text like this read, I immediately begin to get a little lost. When I begin to hear ancient Hebrew names like the ones we've read and some of this language, I immediately begin to wander off because I don't understand all that I'm reading.

But simply put, here's what's going on. They rediscovered the law of the Lord, the book of the law in the temple. As soon as the king heard the book of the law read to him, he tore his clothes. That means that he humbled himself and his heart was broken and contrite and he was truly penitent. He was truly sorry for his sins and the sins of the fathers of Israel. Then they took the law of the Lord and they brought it to the people of the Lord. And Josiah led the people of Israel in a covenant with the Lord that they would be a people who would return to God's word.

That they as a nation would be a people to return to God's word, to reform their ways, to walk in the Lord's laws and statutes according to the way of the Lord with all their hearts that God might be glorified and that God's people might be once again obedient to Him. I want to ask you a question. Do you ever get tired of hearing about the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century? When you hear that language used or when you hear about Martin Luther and you hear about his 95 theses or when you hear about what Luther did in Calvin, did you ever just get a little tired of it? Say, I've heard this, I've read this, I keep hearing about it. It's just a constant drum that I hear where I work.

Well, I have to be honest with you. In part, I get a little tired of hearing about it too. Because when you look at the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when you look at Martin Luther, when you look at John Calvin, when you look at many of the other reformers, the reality of it is, is that fundamentally they weren't about the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Fundamentally, foundationally, what they were about is about not a reformation, but actually the formation or what was formed. What was formed by the word of God, understood by the church of God and written about in the theology, in the biblical commentary and in the entire way of life for Christians in the church from the beginning. Putting it simply, what the reformers were about was not themselves, was not about anything new that they were doing. It was about drawing people's attentions back to that which was originally formed. You see, for there to be a reform of anything, a reformation of anything, that means that there has to be that which was formed.

And so the reformers were not fundamentally about the reformation. They were about that which had already been formed, that which already existed, but which had been corrupted, eclipsed, put aside. Now, I realize that most of us have a Bible and numerous Bibles and even different study Bibles in our homes, don't we? And it seems absolutely impossible for us to envision a time when people didn't have the Bible and didn't know the Bible. Not only could many people not read and not read the Bible, there was nowhere they could go to hear the Bible. The Bible had not just been chained to the pulpits of the medieval churches. The Bible had been largely eclipsed, and it had been eclipsed by and large by the church who had risen up and had basically taken over as the supreme authority, unquestionable authority, for the entirety of global Christianity. You don't need the Bible. What you need is us telling you what the Bible says according to our own interpretation of the Bible.

I realize this seems kind of crazy and hard for us to imagine, but that was what was happening. Now, when we look at the 14th century and consider Wycliffe, and when we look at the later 14th and early 15th century and consider John Huss, two very important, and even Luther would rightly say that they were more foundational, more significant, because of what they saw in the corruptions of the church, in the supreme authority of the church over the word of God, as they themselves were persecuted, martyred. Jerome of Prague and many others preceding the Reformation, they were saying by and large many of the same things that Luther said at the outset. Now, at the beginning of the 15th century, something else was happening that was very significant. Namely, it was a rise in humanism from the Renaissance, and when you hear humanism, you think, well, that's not good.

Well, simply put, humanism isn't good. However, what was happening through that time in the post-Renaissance period is that many of these writers and philosophers who were Christians were going back to look at the fathers, going back to look at the original sources, going back not just several decades, not just a century or two, but they were going back to read what the ancients were saying, what the church fathers were saying, what Augustine was saying. And Erasmus of Rotterdam published numerous works, and he was this humanist, and he was a Christian. In the early 1500s, he wrote a book on militant Christianity, which really just meant true Christianity. And it's there and in other places where you begin to see a call among these humanists to go back to the original sources. You've perhaps heard the Latin phrase ad fontis, which means to the sources. Well, that was essentially the cry of these humanists, philosophers, and many of them theologians in their own right at that time.

And so Christian scholars, Christian theologians and academics began to hear this cry to go back to the sources. And then Erasmus of Rotterdam did something that had never been done before. He published a new translation of the New Testament in the original Greek language with Greek notes, and it was translated as well into Latin. Now, this is significant because the church had the Bible only in Latin from the Vulgate of the 13th century.

That's all they had. And so now Erasmus brought to them the New Testament in Greek, the original language, with notes to help people understand it. And listen to what Erasmus said to the pope at that time. Rightly, rightly writing this letter, this introduction, this epistle to his new translation in the Greek, Erasmus said that we can now go to the fount, and we no longer have to go to or drink from the muddy pools and rivulets. Now, here's what's so significant about those words in that one epistle in the introduction to Erasmus' Greek New Testament. What Erasmus had done is not just direct the church to the fathers in all matters, but he had directed the church to the word of God, to that ultimate source, that ultimate fount. And a fountain, as we know, gives forth and overwhelms with fresh, pure water. What Erasmus was doing, saying, isn't this wonderful, pope?

But he knew exactly what he was doing. Isn't this wonderful that we now have the New Testament in the original language, we no longer have to go to the muddy waters and the muddy pools and the rivulets of what we have been given throughout the Middle Ages over the past few hundred years? We can now go to the original source. We can now go to the word of God. And friends, that fundamentally was what the Reformation was all about. Now, if I were to go throughout the room this morning and I were to ask you all, what is the Reformation and what was it all about? I would imagine that many of us would say, well, the Reformation was about the gospel. Or some of you might say, well, I know that justification by faith and faith alone was fundamental to the Reformation. Or you might say it was about the solas of the Reformation, sola scriptura, scripture alone, sola gratia, grace alone, sola fide, faith alone. But fundamentally, that wasn't what the Reformation was about. The foundational or what later theologians called the formal cause of the Reformation was the issue of authority. What is our authority for faith and life? The pope, to a large degree, for hundreds of years, had placed the burden on people's backs and the constantly developing, constantly changing laws and dictates from the popes.

They placed the burden on people's backs that the final authority for faith and life, the unquestionable, infallible authority for faith and life is the church. You don't need to read the Bible. You don't need to go to the Bible.

Just trust us. We'll tell you what the Bible says and we'll interpret it in the way that you can understand it because most of you can't read and you're uneducated anyway, so just do what we say. And they developed just countless systems that developed into an all-encompassing life religion that could not be identified as biblical. So when Johann Tetzel, the seller of indulgences, came around through the high, rainish region of Germany and Europe and began to sell his indulgences in order to get the poor people to give, to get the souls of their loved ones out of purgatory, get them a lesser time out of purgatory in order to build St. Peter's Basilica, that was one of the triggers that caused that Augustinian monk and theologian at Wittenberg to say, this is in opposition to our only infallible source. Now Luther would not have developed it at that level at that time.

He himself was studying the Word of God and preaching through the Word of God and now for the first time with the New Testament in Greek in hand. And what Luther and the other Reformers did, we said, we as the church have to do exactly what Erasmus, what Wycliffe, what Hus, what they've been doing all along. We need to challenge ourselves because at that point it wasn't Luther against anyone. It was Luther as a part of the church saying, we need to go back to the sources and we need to go back ultimately to the ultimate source, the Word of God. We need to look to the Word of God as the Reformers would later understand and develop and see that what they were saying was, is that the Bible is our only infallible authority for faith and life. It is the only authority that doesn't change and it is the only authority that is unquestioned. It is the only authority that can really ultimately dictate how the entirety of our lives should be lived. And so what they were doing is really rediscovering and reforming the church from within to go back to the Bible.

That's it. And so what flowed from that? The gospel was rediscovered.

And when I say rediscovered, I mean discovered for the first time in a long time. Because anyone who had dared attempt to preach the plain and simple, pure gospel of Christ was executed. Because the pure, plain, simple preaching of the Word of God and the gospel of God contradicted the mass of duties and responsibilities and requirements that the medieval church had placed upon people in order to be right with the church and thus to be right with God. And so that's why Luther and the Reformers said it's by faith.

It's right there in Romans 1. The just shall live by faith. And what that meant for Luther was not just the Christian life is about faith. Everyone believed that to some degree. But that the whole of one's Christian life was lived by faith.

That the whole of the Christian life was a life lived by faith, trusting the Lord, depending upon the Lord, looking to his statutes and to his laws and to his truths, looking to the gospel, looking to his grace, looking to the way in which God had demanded his people worship him. That's why what we read in 2 Kings 23 is Josiah now introducing the Passover again to Israel. Do you realize there was a time in Israel's history where by and large they had forgotten and they didn't know? Because their fathers had left the Word of God aside and it had become eclipsed by all the other cult and pagan and idolatrous worship of Israel. And so they had to bring Passover back to God's people because that is the way God demanded he should be worshiped. So at the time of the Reformation, it wasn't just the gospel that was rediscovered. It wasn't just the way worship was rediscovered, because when we hear worship, what do we think of?

We think about just worshiping on Sundays in a sanctuary. And it meant that in part for the Reformers and for the church. But to most Christians throughout all of history, our worship to God meant our entire life service to God that culminated in our Lord's Day gathered worship of singing and praising him. But that as we left our Sunday Lord's Day worship, we went out to continue to worship and serve God with all of life.

That's why Josiah was insistent in this covenant that it wasn't just about how this was going to change or rediscover our temple worship, but that it would inform the entirety of our lives. The reason we are so passionate about the Reformation is not because we're so passionate about the Reformation. It's because we're passionate about what the Reformation was trying to bring back to the church. And what the Reformation and the Reformers were trying to do is to bring back to the church the word of God.

So that the church would not have to go and drink from muddy pools. One of the reasons we are so passionate about the teachings of the Reformation is because we do not want to be responsible in our generation and for our lives to have the wrath of God come upon our descendants years from now, if not hundreds of years from now. And so the reason we do what we do, the reason we work with churches throughout the world, the reason we serve churches throughout the world, the reason we come under churches throughout the world and listen to them is to determine how we might help them, what resources we might provide them, what books we might author, teaching series, conferences, subjects of all sorts. One of the reasons we do what we do is so that people would understand that they need to be constantly going back, constantly fighting error from without and from within, constantly fighting the error that might be creeping into the church subtly. So that we might constantly help God's people go back to the original form to the word of God. So that's why we talk about Reformation. That's why we talk about being reformed. That's why we talk about before the face of God.

That's why we talk about right now counts forever. That's why we talk about Renewing Your Mind because our minds are renewed by the Spirit through the word of God. All of these things fit together, and it's all about helping God's people continually go back to the word of God. And you're listening to Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Burke Parsons there reminding us why R.C.

Sproul named this program Renewing Your Mind when it first went on the air more than 25 years ago. What we just heard there is a message Dr. Parsons delivered to the staff here at Ligonier Ministries recently, but we realize that we all need to hear this, especially now. We all need to be reminded why we press into God's Word and why we continue to engage the culture with its truth. I'm glad you've joined us today, and I wanted to let you know that our listener offer is a Bible Study Basics collection of several series from Dr. Sproul designed to aid you in your study. For a donation of any amount, you'll receive R.C. 's video series, including Knowing Scripture, Knowing Christ, The Parables of Jesus, and Psalm 51. We'll also send you four complete audio series, including one on the life of Joseph.

So request the R.C. Sproul teaching collection when you call us at 800-435-4343 or when you visit us online at renewingyourmind.org. As Dr. Parsons said in today's message, everything that we do here at Ligonier Ministries is centered on God's Word. We're carrying on Dr. Sproul's legacy. He had a laser focus on Scripture and preaching the gospel and standing for the essential truths of the gospel. He understood that if we fail to get the gospel right, we have no hope in this world or in the world to come. So when you stand with us with your financial gifts, you ensure that this mission continues. We're grateful. R.C. loved sharing the gospel with anyone and everyone, including children. He knew the power of story, and his children's books give parents a great opportunity to introduce deep truths to their children. So join us beginning Monday as we share some of those books with you here on Renewing Your Mind. .