Jesus and the Word of God

Now if Jesus walked in this room tonight, ladies and gentlemen, and said, look, that book is inspired by God the Holy Spirit. It is the Word of my Father.

My Father never errs. It is altogether infallible, altogether inerrant. Would you be convinced? I can't imagine anybody then standing up and saying, oh, surely Jesus, though I receive you as the Lord of my life and the Lord of the church, I must demur on this point, and I have to correct you. You've bought into an outmoded, unsophisticated view of Scripture. Well, beloved, strange as it may seem, that is exactly what has happened and is continuing to happen in the church. In the debates among scholars surrounding the Bible, is it truly the Word of God?

Does it contain any errors? We must ask the question, what did Jesus teach about the Bible? And as you'll hear today, to disagree with Jesus in this matter is to call into question whether He really is the Savior of sinners. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind as we conclude this week-long study on the authority of the Bible. So far, we've considered the authority and source of the Bible, how the 27 books of the New Testament were collected, and what it means that the Bible is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God. Well, today R.C. Sproul turns to the words of Jesus, His views on Scripture, and the tragic outcome if we believe anything less than what Jesus believed.

Here's Dr. Sproul. In our last session on our study of the authority of Scripture, I made reference to the historic convention that took place in 1978, where a group of international scholars came together for a summit meeting to give definition to the classical expression of the inerrancy of the Bible. A few years prior to that event, Ligonier Ministries sponsored a much smaller conference on the same subject in western Pennsylvania, where six or seven scholars from around the world were gathered to address the same issue concerning the authority and inerrancy of sacred Scripture. And I can assure you there was no collusion among the contributing scholars, and the papers that were read at that event became the nucleus of a book that was consequently published by Bethany Fellowship entitled God's Inerrant Word that was edited by the Lutheran scholar John Warwick Montgomery. But what fascinated me about that event was that those scholars came from every part of the nation and from Europe to that event to discuss the question of the inerrancy of Scripture without any prior conversation. Each one of them that came to that forum came to press the point that in the final analysis the question of the authority of the Bible is a question of Christology.

Now you may wonder how in the world that could be the case, but the issue was not so much in the final analysis do we put our confidence in the Bible, but what kind of confidence do we have of the truthfulness and the authority of Christ Himself. Now a story I like to tell, and some of you in other lectures may have already heard it, is a telling incident that occurred to me a few years ago in Philadelphia. I happened to be speaking on this subject of the authority of the Bible in a large church in downtown Philadelphia, and at the end of that event I was delighted and shocked to see a very close college friend of mine rushing up the center aisle to greet me after the service, and I hadn't seen this fellow in over 20 years. In fact, when we were in college we lived in the same rooming house, and every single night we met together for an hour, a half an hour for study the Scripture, and the second half an hour was for prayer, and so we were very close, and he was a year ahead of me in school and graduated before I did, and after college I went on to seminary, but after college he went to the mission field as a missionary for a three-year term, and after he completed that three-year term he went to a different seminary, and I went to Europe and I lost track of him and didn't see him all these years.

Well, it was so neat to see my friend, you know, I just dropped there and he said, let's go out to dinner, let's get caught up. Well, you know, you married, you have any children and so on, and we went out to the restaurant and when we sat down he was a little bit nervous, and he said, R.C., he said, before we talk about anything, he said, there's something I have to tell you, and I said, what? He said, I heard your address tonight in which you again affirmed your confidence in the infallibility of Scripture and so on, he said, and I just wanted to tell you that I don't believe that anymore. He said, after being exposed to other religions in foreign culture and then coming back and going to Union Theological Seminary in New York and being immersed in skeptical, critical studies of the Scripture, he said, I no longer hold to the old-fashioned position of the inerrancy of Scripture. And I said to him, well, is there anything that you still do believe? And he smiled and he said, oh yes, he said, I still believe that Jesus is my Savior and my Lord. And I was certainly, of course, delighted to hear that, but I said to him, I said, well, you say that he's your Lord, how does he exercise lordship over your life?

He said, what do you mean? I said, well, a Lord is somebody who issues commands. I said, how does Christ command or rule your life?

If it's not through the Scripture, where do you hear the marching orders of your Lord? And he thought for a minute and he said, well, I hear the Word of God, I hear what you're saying. He said, I hear that in the teaching of the church. And I said, oh, the church? I said, which church? The Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church. He said, oh, no, the Presbyterian Church. I said, which Presbyterian Church?

The one in St. Louis, the one in Boston, the one in Pittsburgh? He said, well, no, he's in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. And I said, well, which General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, the one that voted this way on a particular issue last year and completely reversed itself this year, which was the mind of God? And he said, well, I guess I have a problem, don't I?

And I said, yes. I said, you have a Lord who has no vehicle through which He can express His Lordship. And the next issue is what is the Lord's view of Scripture? I said, if Jesus came in this room tonight, and we said, Jesus, we've been exposed to all kinds of critical theories about the origins and development and trustworthiness of Scripture. We've been in endless disputes about infallibility and inerrancy and inspiration and all that sort of thing. Would you tell us, please, is this Bible the Word of God? Is it inerrant, or is it not? Now, if Jesus walked in this room tonight, ladies and gentlemen, and said to you, friends, the Bible's a good historical book, but it's certainly not inerrant.

That's just an exaggerated view of orthodox people. I would certainly abandon inerrancy and heartbeat if Jesus came in here and told me that it wasn't so. But suppose you weren't sure, or suppose you took the view that it wasn't an inerrant document in its original form. It wasn't an inerrant document in its original manuscripts. No one's pleading for the inerrancy of translations, of course.

I hope we understand that. But rather in the original versions, and you weren't sure, or you were doubting it, and Jesus came in the room and said, look, that book is inspired by God the Holy Spirit. It is the Word of my Father.

My Father never errs. It is altogether infallible, altogether inerrant. Would you be convinced? Would the matter be settled for you if you didn't just have to listen to Sproul or some other theologian or a conciliar statement by an institution, but if Christ Himself walked in here and said, that book, the Bible, is inerrant, would that settle the dispute for you?

It would for me. I can't imagine anybody then standing up and saying, oh, surely Jesus, though I receive you as the Lord of my life and the Lord of the church, I must demur on this point, and I have to correct you. You've bought into an outmoded, unsophisticated view of Scripture. Can you imagine anyone with the audacity of trying to correct Christ on an issue like that? Well, beloved, strange as it may seem, that is exactly what has happened and is continuing to happen in the twentieth-century church.

And I want to take some time to explain this, and it gets a little bit complicated. But the first instance we want to see, can we discern if possible what Jesus' view of Scripture was? Now, in order to discover what Jesus thought of the Bible, where do we have to go to find that out?

We have to go to the Bible, of course. Now, the Bible says that Jesus says the Bible is the Word of God. What's the problem there? It would appear that here we are faced with the most vicious dilemma, the dilemma of the vicious circle, the problem of question begging, question begging, you know, and begging in a most vociferous way.

If the only way we know about Jesus is from the Bible, and the only way we know what Jesus said about the Bible is from reading the Bible, how could it possibly be relevant to us what Jesus in the Bible says about the Bible? Do you feel the weight of that problem? And people would say to argue in this way would be to argue in a circle. You never get out of that circle. You never get out of the starting point.

Now, I'm going to suggest that we think very carefully here, that the way we actually proceed here is not circular, but linear and progressive. First thing we want to start with is does the Bible give us any reason to conclude that it is of any historical value? I don't think we'd get an argument from any serious scholar on that point. They may argue as to the degree of the historical validity of Scripture, but I don't know of any critical scholar who would say it is absolutely valueless in terms of its historical content.

To get to the next stage is a little more cumbersome. I would say, well, do we have any evidence that the Bible is basically reliable in what it teaches? Not infallible, not inerrant, not inspired, but just as other human documents from the past go, how does the Bible stack up? Well, let me jump ahead of myself here, friends, and just say to you that there is no book from the ancient world, no literary source from the ancient world that has been submitted to the most rigorous scientific scrutiny and analysis as the New Testament and the Old Testament have been exposed. In fact, there is no work from the ancient world that is within one ten-thousandth of careful research as the New Testament has been.

We have many writings from the ancient world that have survived. I've already mentioned some of the ancient historians, Thucydides, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, and so on, Suetonius, and the rest, and efforts to validate scientifically the historical reports of ancient writers is not an easy task. For example, if Luke says to us that an angel appeared to Zacharias in the temple in Jerusalem, how is archaeological science, for example, going to verify or falsify that claim?

Unless you dug up petrified angel wings, it'd be pretty tough to show one way or the other. Well, that's not how historical verification proceeds in science, but rather through the science, for example, of archaeology, and we reconstruct the geography, the customs, and so on of ancient people and ancient cities, and we test that knowledge against what is reported by the other historians through what is verified indubitably through the spade or the shovel of archaeology, for example, in a simple way. If Luke says that so and so was the ethnarch of such and such a place at such and such a time in history, and then next week we dig up documents from that town that indicate that the very person that Luke named was in fact called the ethnarch at that time in history, we have at least verified conclusively that Luke was right on that minor historical detail.

Do you see what I'm saying? If, however, we turn over the spade and the spade says that he wasn't an ethnarch, he was a sex dark, and that his name was something else and that, you know, then Luke's in trouble as a historian, you see. There is no historian from the ancient world that comes anywhere close to the scientific validation of historical accuracy as, for example, the author of the Gospel of Luke. Ladies and gentlemen, secular, unreligious people have concluded that Luke is the finest historian of the ancient world.

Now, I'm laboring that point for a reason. I think it'd be utterly irresponsible to say in light of the evidence of history and of science that as history the New Testament is basically unreliable. I took this case to Pittsburgh Seminary when I lectured to the faculty in the student body there several years ago, and I said the first point I want to establish is the basic reliability of the New Testament documents. Now, again, if I were talking to a pagan audience, I would have to labor this point further, but I was speaking at this point to a church audience, to a seminary, and I said if you don't accept this premise that the Bible is basically reliable, just generally reliable, then you have no rational justification for a seminary. You're going to say that as professing Christian people that the primary historical source upon which all of Christianity is established is basically unreliable, let's close, let's go home.

But the issue wasn't basic reliability, the issue was inerrancy, infallibility. And I said now suppose on the basis of this just generally reliable historical document we read it and we can become persuaded, legitimately persuaded that there was a man by the name of Jesus who did extraordinary things, had extraordinary wisdom and insight, and was at least recognizable as a prophet. It doesn't take infallibility of the Bible or inerrancy of the Bible to come to the conclusion that Jesus was a prophet.

See, we're moving in steps here. And so then we become convinced or persuaded, I don't have time to give you the evidence for this, but if we became in fact persuaded that Jesus were at least a prophet, then we would become interested in knowing what this prophet taught about the Scripture. Because to be a prophet one has to be a little better than generally reliable. In the Old Testament, if an Old Testament prophet, you know, was just generally reliable in his prophecies, but sometimes unreliable, he'd be stoned to death because he'd be a false prophet. If he uttered a prophecy that was not true. Now, can we learn what Jesus, this prophet, taught about the Scriptures?

Well, again, to save time. New Testament critics look back at the different portions of the Bible and they sort of take it apart with scissors and paste and they say, well, we think this was written later in the second century and inserted back in the text and so on and so on. And they will question the historical originality of certain portions of the Bible. And one of the oddities, ladies and gentlemen, that even in the realm of skepticism and criticism, one segment of the New Testament that has the highest level of historical validation happens to be those sections that include Jesus' teaching about the Bible. So there's no serious debate at all among biblical scholars about what Jesus of Nazareth taught and believed about the Bible. It's very clear that Jesus of Nazareth accepted, embraced, and taught the prevailing view of the Bible that was held among the Jews, namely that it was the Word of God, that it was inspired of God, that it was infallible. Jesus settled his theological disputes with his contemporaries by an appeal to a single word in Scripture. He said that man doesn't live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. He made this comment regarding Scripture. He said, oh God, Thy word is truth. Now some people don't like the term verbal inspiration.

They think it gets down to too much of the small points. They say, well, maybe in general there's inspiration, but not down to the very words. Jesus said that not a single jot nor a tittle of the law shall pass away until all is fulfilled. Jesus' view of inspiration can be called jot and tittle inspiration, down to the commas, the periods, the crossing the t's, and the dotting of the i's. And again, among those who dispute the doctrine of inerrancy, they do not dispute that that's what Jesus taught. People like Barth, like Bruner, Joachim Ermias, C. H. Dodd, to name a few, have all written in the 20th century to say they are convinced that Jesus held the view of Scripture, that the Scripture was infallible. Yet at the same time these people have gone on to say, but He was wrong. Now before you become aghast at that, they have a very significant theological justification for correcting Jesus at this point.

They say, remember that Jesus had a divine nature, and Jesus had a human nature. And being human, Jesus' knowledge in His humanity was limited. I wrote an essay a year or so ago for table talk in which I raised the question, did Jesus, when He was in the crib, know that the world was round? Did the baby Jesus know the world was round? I don't think He did. In His divine nature He did because He made it.

He knew what shape it was. But touching His human nature, touching His human nature, He didn't know it because, you know, in the New Testament, the disciples come to Jesus and they ask Him about the end times and when He would return, and He said, you know, of the day and the hour knows no man, not even the Son. In that statement, Jesus, if you can bear this, ladies and gentlemen, told His disciples that there was something He did not know. I know some theologians have bent over backwards and know all kinds of contortions and gymnastics to try to explain that away, say Jesus really did know, but that the answer was too deep or too holy to be able to communicate to other people. But the fact of the matter is He said, I don't know. These theologians acknowledge what every Protestant theologian should acknowledge, that touching His human nature, Jesus was not omniscient.

He didn't know everything. Omniscience, the knowledge of everything, beloved, is an attribute of God. It's an attribute of the divine nature. Just like God is a spirit, He doesn't have a body. Jesus' human nature has a body. The divine nature doesn't have a body. The divine nature resides within the human body and so on, but you understand that, that when Jesus was hungry, that that was not a manifestation of the divine nature because God doesn't get hungry. That was a manifestation of the human nature. So when Jesus said, I don't know, that's certainly not a manifestation of the knowledge of the divine nature. The divine nature knows everything.

The human nature didn't. And so these theologians say, well, since He didn't know everything, Jesus could certainly have been mistaken. How was He supposed to know that the prevailing Jewish view of the Scripture was wrong? How could Jesus be faulted when He said, Moses wrote of me, when Valhausen hadn't even lived yet, and Jesus wasn't aware of the fact that Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible that they were written by J, E, D, and B?

See? How could He be faulted for saying, Abraham, rejoice to see my day, and Jesus, how would He know that Abraham was a myth and didn't even live? Can't fault Jesus for that.

Yes, we can. The critical point, ladies and gentlemen, is that Jesus did not have to be omniscient in His human nature to save us from our sins. But He most certainly had to be sinless to qualify as our Savior. And for somebody, anybody, to pretend or proclaim or declare that they have more knowledge than they in fact do have is a sin. And the Bible's standards of the teacher's responsibility, it's somber, isn't it? Don't let many become teachers, for with teaching comes the greater judgment.

To lead somebody astray is seen as, you know, better for that person never to have been born of a millstone around their neck to lead some of the little ones astray. Now suppose I came into you and I said, tonight I want you to listen to my lecture because when R.C. Sproul speaks, truth happens.

And then you found me making a mistake. How much credibility would I have with you? Do you realize that Jesus said, I teach nothing on my own authority but only that which God has given me the authorization to say. And then He goes and says, I am the truth. Now if a teacher claimed to teach nothing but what was given to Him by the Father and to claim to be truth incarnate and then taught erroneous information, then His claims would be falsified. And that would be a sin. And Jesus would not qualify to save Himself, let alone us, in the issue of the authority of Christ. It is because we are convinced and persuaded that Christ is the Lord of the church, the teacher par excellence, the supreme authority and head over the church that we so vociferously fight for and defend the claims of Scripture to be the Word of God.

Because what is at stake here is not the reputation of Isaiah or Jeremiah, but nothing less than the authority, the lordship, and the Saviourhood of Christ. And what a great place to end this week's study with R.C. Sproul reminding us what is truly at stake in this debate.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. Today is the final day that we'll be hearing messages from Dr. Sproul's series, Hath God Said? And it's also the final day we're offering the complete series for your donation of any amount. Add this series to your library or use it for an upcoming Bible study when you request your copy at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to the DVD set, you'll receive the digital study guide so you can go deeper into the Bible and read the Bible study guide so you can go deeper in your study and to help you retain everything that you learn. We'll also add the digital messages to your learning library for convenient streaming and the free Ligonier app. So visit renewingyourmind.org or give us a call at 800-435-4343.

And to remind you again, this offer ends today. This week we have heard about some of the attacks theological liberals have made against the Bible. Well, a hundred years ago this year, one man wrote a book drawing a line in the sand and making the case that liberalism was not Christianity at all. Ligonier teaching fellow Stephen Nichols joins us next week to walk us through J. Gresham Machen's classic book, Christianity and liberalism. That's beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind.