Why We Trust the Bible. That's next on Renewing Your Mind. We trust the Bible to point us to God's plan of redemption. Can we trust the Bible?
Without a doubt. Here's Ligonier teaching fellow, Dr. Stephen Nichols. Probably like you, I have become addicted to my GPS, and I was supposed to speak somewhere in some evening, and I was traveling. It was dark, of course, and it was raining, and one of our sons was in the back seat, and I had pressed the button to scroll through to see that to get to this destination that I wanted to get to, there were quite a few turns, quite a few exits, quite a few routes, and as we were making one of those exits onto a road, all of a sudden the GPS screen just went blank. It just shut off, and I had just merged onto a highway.
Turned out what happened was my late model car, the cigarette lighter no longer worked, and many minutes ago the thing had switched over to battery, and eventually the battery died out. So there I was, on a highway, in the dark, trying to get somewhere, having no idea where I was supposed to go. My GPS was just gone. If you stop and think about it, living without the concept of revelation is like that all the time. Imagine this. Imagine if you didn't have God's Word. Imagine if you didn't know of the concept of revelation. You would never have a map.
You would never have that genius instrument that is chock full of thousands of maps and streets and engineers just loaded it. You wouldn't have any of that. You'd be on your own. You'd be in the dark. You wouldn't be sure where you were going, and you would have no idea how to get there. Without the doctrine of revelation, we really would have no hope.
We'd have no hope at all. There's a great saying. It goes back to Calvin's day. It sort of reflects the reformation in Geneva. The English translation is, after darkness, light. That light of God's Word revealed that penetrates and overcomes the darkness. But think about that darkness for a moment.
Think about living in darkness. That's what living without revelation really means. Well, we're going to talk about the doctrine of revelation and this session together, and we're going to use that as our starting point to talk about the doctrine of Scripture. And we're going to see how we understand some basic ideas about revelation, how we can sort of unpack that as we move along to get at one of the bedrock, core, foundational doctrines of our faith, the doctrine of Scripture. So before we go any further, let's look to Scripture.
And I'd like to look at two texts. We could pick any number of passages from the Bible if we wanted to, but I want to look at two texts with you that will serve as sort of a frame for our discussion together. The first text is from Paul in 1 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 13. Now, we'll be talking later about interpretation, and one of the things that we will talk about when we get to interpretation is context is king.
We should always be paying attention to the context in which a verse is found. And the context here, of course, is Paul's relationship with the church at Thessalonica. And in chapter 2, he's sort of reminiscing a little bit.
You can imagine Paul. He had a great ministry there at Thessalonica among the Thessalonians. And now that he's separated from them, he's writing this letter directly to them. And of course, he's writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and so this letter to the Thessalonians becomes a letter to us as well. But Paul's remembering particularly the good time that he had there at that church. And we know from just even a basic understanding of Paul's ministry that not every city was a similar experience for Paul, was it?
So I imagine this was a joyful reminiscence for him, and you can almost picture him sort of smiling fondly as he writes this. But as he remembers his time there, this is where he focuses and what he is thankful mostly for in 1 Thessalonians 2.13. And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it, not as the Word of men, but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you believers.
Now let's just unpack this for a little bit. First of all, this is the Word that was preached. So we see right away how preaching and proclamation, the speaking of God's Word, is crucial. The second thing we see, and this is most important, Paul calls it what it is, doesn't he? This isn't the Word of men. This isn't the dialogues of Plato. This isn't the thoughts of Seneca, the Roman political philosopher.
These aren't the ideas of Aristotle. These aren't the words of men. These words of men, these eloquent and thoughtful and poetic words of men that Paul was very familiar with in the first century, these aren't the words of men. This is the Word of God.
And we need to remember that right off the bat. What's also fascinating here is what Paul says this Word does. It's at work in you.
It's at work in you. The Word here is formation, is actually the Word, or maybe the biblical idea is better of transformation. But, you know, you've seen these canyons, you've seen waterfalls, you've seen riverbeds as the forces of nature, as the flowing of water, as the winds do their work. They cut off the edges.
They smooth out a path. That's what God's Word does. It comes into us. It takes root in us like a seed, and it grows and it works.
Sometimes that formation is hard, isn't it? The smoothing off of the rough. Luther made a comment once that God's Word sort of cuts us like a knife. It assaults us, is what Luther says. But then he says God's Word also comforts us. So when we're talking about Scripture, we have to remember these three very fundamental things that the Word of God has communicated, it's preached, it's proclaimed, that the Word of God is in fact the Word of God. It's God's Word.
It's top-down. And thirdly, this isn't just some interesting book to read. This isn't just some fascinating piece of literature.
It works in us. It works on us, and it transforms us into the image of Christ, which is what all of us are destined to be. So we see this in 1 Thessalonians 2. We'll come back to this verse probably, but at least we get an initial glimpse at it. The next verse I want to take you to is John chapter 6.
Now, here too, we'll go to the end of this chapter. It's a very long chapter, 66 to 69. This is one of those chapters when you're doing your reading through the Bible, and you have to read four or five chapters a day to do it, and you come across a chapter with 70-some verses, and you think, oh, this is going to take me a while.
This is a very packed chapter. It covers just two days in Christ's life, fascinating days. The first day is the feeding of the 5,000.
The second day, not so many people are there. In fact, Christ's teaching that they have to eat of Him starts sending people away literally in droves. See, Christ never read the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
He missed some of those PR cues. But we get to verse 66, and this should strike you. After this, well, the this is all this hard teaching that Jesus is giving, that you have to eat of Him.
And then He sort of even ups the ante when He says, by the way, you can't come to Me unless the Father draws you to Me. They couldn't handle this. The crowds liked the show of Jesus, but they couldn't handle this teaching. So after this, many of His disciples went away. They left. They no longer walked with Him.
And so Jesus said to the twelve, do the math, 5,000 to 12, do you want to go away as well? Simon Peter answered Him. Now, we knew Simon Peter would speak up, right? We knew that. Simon Peter is one of those characters. We know how he's going to act. So if the twelve are there, Simon Peter is likely going to speak for them.
Here, though, he is right on the money. Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Just stop and think about that for a little bit. Let's go back to our scenario with asking the question about revelation.
If someone is not going to accept this as God's Word and our culture is riddled with that, human history is full of examples of those who did not see legitimacy and credibility in this book, what are they going to do? They're going to have to go somewhere. They're going to go after this guru, or they're going to seek this experience, or they're going to try out this philosophy, or they're going to go this route.
Peter sort of puts it right on the line, doesn't he? Where are we going to go? Why would we go there? Why would we go there? You have the words of eternal life.
Where else are we going to go? So I'm going to use these two texts as a frame to talk about this doctrine of Scripture. To sort of jump in a little bit here, we'll get right into the point of revelation. Now, theologians tend to divide revelation into two categories. Theologians love categories. They like to organize things and make sense of things. That's actually helpful for us because after all, there's a lot of information in that book, isn't there? There's 66 books in that Bible, and there's a lot of teaching.
So to organize it and categorize it can be pretty helpful. So theologians give us this doctrine of revelation, which comes from the Greek word, literally means to lift the cover off of, to reveal. We have the word apocalypse, and when we think of the apocalypse, we think of something out of George Lucas. The sky is raining down with fire, and there's some sort of cosmic battle. Apocalypse literally means to take off the cover. This is when something's cooking on the stove.
You know it smells really good, and you just want to take a look. And so you pull the lid off the pot, and there it is, and you see it. That's all revelation means. Now, we divide revelation into these two categories, general and special. And general revelation is essentially the cosmos, the world that God made.
But we could look at this in terms of some particular ideas, and I like to sketch this maybe in terms of four different particular ways we can understand general revelation. One is just the world itself, the world of nature. We can all find these beautiful spots that we can see. We can all see the beauty of nature somewhere around us in our environment, and so we have nature.
But we also have God revealed in nature's laws, the laws that govern nature. Here's Newton sitting under the tree, and the apple falls on his head, and he makes a startling observation. The apple is always falling down.
For some reason, apples don't fall up. So we have these laws that sort of govern nature, and we have seasons. Well, maybe in some places we don't always have seasons. Where I live, we actually have seasons. There's winter, and then there's spring, and there's summer, and there's fall, and usually they go in that order.
Usually a season doesn't get skipped over, right? There's order in nature, and those laws that govern nature reveal that there is, in fact, a Creator behind what we see. So we've got nature itself. We've got these laws that govern nature, and so we can say, well God both creates and He sustains. But then we also see special revelation and humanity.
And here, too, we could see this. Just our physical makeup. Think of the ear, the intricate parts, microscopic parts that construct our ear, and all of those parts working in harmony so that we can hear a sound.
Think of the human eye. These are revelations, again, of a Creator. And then there's not only our physical, but there's that sort of psychological piece to us. And then there's that sort of psychological piece to us. Okay, so we can talk about the physical part of human nature. We could talk about that, maybe, as someone committed to an evolutionary worldview would like to have us. They could try to explain, well here's how these physical characteristics develop. But how do we explain what is more than physical to us? How do we explain the complexity? How do we explain the full complexity of who we are? So these are parts of general revelation, and we call it general because it is in fact universal.
It is open to all. We also call it general because it is a general revelation of God as Creator. Now, we see this in Scripture itself.
You can track down some of these texts on your own, but we see this in Psalm 19 where we have a discussion of nature in the first six or seven verses of Psalm 19. We see it in Romans chapter 1 where Paul talks about both the cosmos and our conscience. So there he is catching that idea of the world itself and also being human as a revelation of God. We see Paul in Acts chapter 17 using an argument from general revelation to show that God is in fact the Creator. So we see instances of creation as revelation that God is, that He exists, and that He has created all things and that He upholds them by His hand.
So that's all general revelation. Special revelation, or sometimes we call it particular revelation, is where God specifically speaks and directly speaks. Now, we see different instances of this in Scripture. We see how God speaks directly through visions to the prophets.
We see how God even uses a donkey, right, at one point in the story to convey His revelation. But what we have now, here we are in 2012, we have special revelation as contained for us in God's Word, the 66 books of the Bible. And in these 66 books of the Bible, in this special revelation, it's all pointing us to the center of what is this revelation, and that center is Christ. Now to further help us get a handle on this idea of special revelation, or even just revelation in general, theologians have come up with attributes of revelation. Now, sometimes these are spoken of in terms of attributes of Scripture, like we have the attributes of God, we have the attributes of Scripture. But in reality, these attributes are attributes of revelation, if we understand that they are an attribute of revelation in terms of what that revelation was intended to communicate. So, the attributes are, first, the necessity.
And we'll just put them all up here and go over them. First is the necessity. Two is the authority. Three is the clarity. Or some like to say perspicuity, which is an unclear word that means clear as perspicuity. Four is sufficiency. Now there's a fifth one that most theologians don't add, but I like to add, and we'll talk about this one.
Beauty. But first, necessity. The necessity of Scripture. Here we are back on the road, all ready for a GPS to get us to where we need to go, and the GPS goes blank.
I am lost without directions, especially if it's a place I've never been, and it's dark, and there's lots of roads between me and where I need to get to. So, we absolutely need it. We need revelation. We need nature to point us to nature's God, and we need Scripture to point us to God as the Redeemer. So, the first attribute of Scripture, it is not a luxury item.
It is not something that's nice to have. It's something that there is no hope without. We are lost in darkness.
We are lost in darkness. And then we speak of authority. Now, to get at authority, we're going to use two sessions to do this, our next two sessions. To get at authority, theologians use the terms inspiration and inerrancy. But the idea of authority of Scripture is quite simple. The authority of Scripture is linked up with the author.
The author is linked up with the author. The author of Scripture is linked up with the author of Scripture. In fact, even the authority of revelation. Nature is truthful because it is a revelation of God.
Scripture is truthful because it is a revelation of God. And as such, it stands over us. Now, that's a difficult concept for us to grasp. We don't like authority, do we? We buck it, right? And what we need to do is submit to it.
Well, we'll explore that. Then we have clarity. Scripture, revelation, is clear. Paul even says this about nature. He says that what has been revealed about God is clear to us so that we are without excuse. In Romans 1, Paul teaches that nature is clear. And so is Scripture, clearly focused on presenting to us the gospel of Christ. Now, just because Scripture is clear doesn't mean everything in there we can always understand, but we'll deal with that in a later session. And then sufficiency. We'll say this a couple of times, but this is where the rubber meets the road in the doctrine of Scripture. We can affirm inerrancy. We can affirm that it's authoritative, but do we live like it? Do we say that this is really sufficient for my life?
So we'll talk about sufficiency. And then we won't talk about this in a particular session, but it is something to remember. The beauty of revelation, both the beauty of natural revelation and the beauty of the Bible, both the beauty of natural revelation, but also the beauty of Scripture. We forget this sometimes, don't we?
This is beautiful poetry, beautiful narrative, well-constructed narratives with fascinating characters. You know, if God wanted to, He could have given us bullet points, right? But He didn't. He gave us what we have. So that's our doctrine of revelation, this thing that we would be totally lost without. And we'll explore it a little bit more in our next sessions together. And we will look forward to that tomorrow.
I hope you'll join us. That's Dr. Stephen Nichols with a message from his series, Why We Trust the Bible. Thank you for joining us on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb, and this teaching is needed now more than ever. In a recent State of Theology survey, we found that 53 percent of millennials who claim to be evangelical Christians do not believe that the Bible is literally true. As Dr. R.C. Sproul once said, God's people are starved for truth.
There is so much work still to be done. That is our continuing mission here at Ligonier Ministries, and this video series by Dr. Nichols is a great place to begin, perhaps in your Sunday school class at church or a small group meeting in your home. We'd be glad to send you this full series, six lectures on a single DVD, for your gift of any amount.
You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. I'd like to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of you ministry partners who are joining us today. Last year alone, Ligonier Ministries reached more than 56 million people around the world.
That's twice as many as the year before. And if you are one of our ministry partners, please know that we could not have done that without you. Dr. Sproul called you the backbone of this ministry. That's because you commit to pray for us monthly and give a gift of $25 or more. If you're not a ministry partner but see the value in what we're doing and you would like to know more, please mention it while you're on the phone with us.
Thank you for your support. Well, as Dr. Nichols explained today, the Bible is a divine book. Its origin is God.
It is breathed out from God, but God used human instruments in the recording and writing down of His Word. He'll explain why we can trust not only the Bible's inspiration but its authority as well. I hope you'll join us Tuesday for Renewing Your Mind. I'll see you in the next video.
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