827. God Wrote a Book

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones, Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from the University Chapel platform. Today's message will be preached by Dr. Nathan Crockett, Director of Ministry Training at Bob Jones University. Please turn to Psalm 19.

Psalm 19. Yesterday was a big day for our family. My oldest son, Shepherd, turned five years old. A few months ago when he was still four, he and Lillian had helped me on a Saturday, so I wanted to thank them for their help. I told them I would take him out to dinner to any restaurant they wanted.

I knew that they were not aware of Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and restaurants like that, so they chose Golden Corral. On our way to Golden Corral, in the back of the car, Shepherd asked me, he said, Daddy, do you know what eagle eyes are? And I said, you mean eagle eyes?

He said, no, eagle eyes. There's this girl in my class, we'll call her Sally to protect her identity. She's a five-year-old girl in my class, and she has eagle eyes, which means she can see through anything. She can see through brick walls. It's like super x-ray vision, like a superhero.

It's really cool. She has eagle eyes, and I'm telling the truth. I did not want my son to be deceived by every wind of doctrine and the sleight of man and cunning craftiness. So I told him, I said, Shepherd, she doesn't actually have eagle eyes, but, Dad, she does. I said, Shepherd, this is the same girl that tells you she has a pet dinosaur at home. He said, I know it. She has eagle eyes and a pet dinosaur. She's like a superhero.

It's amazing. And I said, Shepherd, how do you know that? And he said, she's five years old, and five-year-olds know everything. I said, Shepherd, I'm 35 years old. She doesn't have eagle eyes, and she doesn't have a pet dinosaur. And he thought about it, and he said, Daddy, I think you're wrong. My teacher said she has eagle eyes, and my teacher's older than you are. He has a wonderful teacher, and she is older than I am. And I said, Shepherd, I think your teacher probably said she has eagle eyes.

She probably has really good eyesight, but she can't see through walls. We'd been in the Golden Crowell parking lot for a couple minutes at this point, Lillian chiming in her support for Shepherd, though she doesn't know who this girl is. And I thought the conversation was over.

About a week ago, I'm sitting on the couch with Shepherd. We're talking about something, and I think dinosaurs came up or something. He's like, Dad, I've been meaning to tell you. You were right. Sally doesn't have eagle eyes. And I said, how'd you find out? And he said, we were playing this game where we were blindfolded, and you had to pin the tail on an animal, and she kept putting it in all the wrong spots. And I realized if she had eagle eyes, she could see right through the blindfold, so she doesn't. And he said, she also doesn't have a pet dinosaur. And I said, how'd you find out? He said, well, you kept telling me to have her bring it to show and tell, and she never could. And someone also told me all the dinosaurs are dead, so I don't think she has a pet dinosaur. So I was proud of my son for seeing through the five-year-old fraud in his class.

And then he said, but Dad, she really does have a pet bear. How do you know who you can trust? How do you know who you can trust? Dr. Pettit has asked me this morning to talk about divine revelation. I've had you turn to Psalm 19, where we read, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.

There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. The eighth Psalm, when I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him? Revelation is God pulling back the curtain. It's like this morning if I'd taken a big framed picture and I had it covered with a blanket, if we were at a camp I would maybe have done this, and I had it sitting up here, and at this point in the sermon I ripped off the blanket and you saw a big picture of my family, my wife and my three kids. What did I do? I revealed that picture to you. I didn't stand up here and create the picture.

I didn't paint the picture. The picture was there all along. I just pulled back the curtain. And revelation, whether it's general revelation or special revelation, is God choosing to pull back the curtain.

He's showing us something that was there all along. Now when theologians refer to general revelation and special revelation, they're talking about two specific categories. General revelation very simply is general in its audience. Everybody gets it. Everyone who's ever lived is born with a conscience.

They're born inside of creation. Special revelation is very specific. It's specialized in its audience. Not everybody has had the Bible translated in their language. Not everyone saw the incarnate Jesus Christ.

And it's also special in its content. There are things about God that you wouldn't know just by looking at a sunset or the sky or a tree. General revelation points us towards special revelation where we find the gospel of Jesus Christ. So God's given us different types of revelation. General revelation, everybody gets it. Special revelation, certain people have his word in their hands and praise God for that.

And this is part of the need for Bible translators to extend this so that every tongue and tribe and nation could read the special word from God. Now where do you go for information? I've asked this to students before. If you wanted to know the capital of a certain state or the year that Charles Dickens wrote a book, almost inevitably the place you go for information is Google. You just Google it, right?

But there are certain things that you maybe wouldn't find in Google. Maybe some of you young ladies are going in a couple months to an artist series with a young man and maybe this is your first artist series because you turn down all the other guys who are constantly asking you out and you are going this time to this artist series and you're wondering, do I bring a gift? I mean if I bring a gift and he doesn't, I'm going to look desperate. But if I don't bring a gift and he does, I'm going to look ungrateful.

What do I do? I doubt you're going to Google it. What does a Bob Jones University girl do on her first date in an artist series?

Maybe someone wrote a blog about that. But probably you'll talk to a friend. Maybe a senior roommate who's engaged to a really nice looking guy. She did it right. She figured it out.

She knows the answers. I'm going to talk to a friend. What if you go on several dates with that guy and things are progressing hopefully somewhere pretty quickly along the line. You're not just going to be talking to friends. You're going to be talking to whom? To your parents, to your family. Sometimes we get information from our family. Sometimes, and I don't know if any of you have done this before, but there is actually this building on campus near our seminary that's called a library. It's full of thousands of books. In the digital age, we seldom think of actually going to a library and pulling a book off a shelf, but we find information from books. Your average American gets a great deal of their information from the media. They come home from a long day of work.

They sit down on the couch and they turn on the TV. But all of these sources of information are flawed, right? They sometimes give misinformation. Is everything on the internet true? No. Do your friends ever give you bad advice?

Yes. I had a family member, this was decades ago, who went to Bob Jones and had some less than kind roommates. One time they knew he was listening in and apparently if I understood his story correctly, at that point there were these trash chutes at the end of the halls where you would put your trash and it would slide down the chute into a big dumpster, but he didn't know what they were there for. These guys decided to have a trick with my relative and they started talking and they said, you know, the girls at Bob Jones are incredible.

I mean, they are so thoughtful. I can't believe they do our laundry for us. The other guy says, yeah, all you have to do is take your dirty clothes and put it in a trash bag and put your name and room number on it. You put it in those laundry chutes at the end of the hall. Somehow it goes to the other side of campus. They wash them, they dry them, they fold them, and two days later they're sitting outside your room folded and clean.

It's awesome. My relative thought, this is great. Almost all my clothes are dirty. So he takes them all, puts them in a garbage bag, ties it up, puts his name and room number on it, and throws it in the trash chute.

Several days later realizes he didn't have any clothes left. You can't always trust your friends. Even your parents, and as reliable as the information we get from our family tends to be, even your parents would be the first to tell you they're not perfect. Books sometimes have misinformation.

The media seems like it has more misinformation than accurate information most of the time. There's one place in the world where you can go to find the mind of God and it's always perfect and that's God's word. His special revelation to you. God's word. Second Peter 1, 20 and 21 says this, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man.

How did we get it? Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. God used holy men to write the very words he wanted to reveal to us. God pulled back the curtain in writing his word. Now I've got three main points today and they're very simple and they build on each other. First one is this, God wrote a book. And you say, Nathan, I've known that all my life. I mean, I think my three-year-old daughter, Lillian, she knows that the Bible is God's word, but isn't that remarkable? Don't just glibly pass over that.

This is incredible. God wrote a book. I don't know who your favorite author is, who you enjoy reading. Leo Tolstoy wrote an epic book about struggle, the irrationality of human motives, the search for meaning, leadership, loss, death, searching for meaning in life. I recently talked to one of my students who told me that if it were not for reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, he would not be studying for the ministry. That book uncovered to him the depth of human emotion. Leo Tolstoy wrote a book. Stephen Covey uncovered seven habits of highly effective people and wrote a bestseller about it.

Stephen Covey wrote a book. Rick Warren, as a pastor of a large church out west, wanted to please God by living a purpose-driven life. Rick Warren wrote a book. Dale Carnegie found some insight into how to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie wrote a book.

Joanne Rowling returned home to her native United Kingdom after a divorce, and at Edinburgh, she wrote the first book in her series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and kids and adults all around the world couldn't get enough of her seven-part Harry Potter series, JK Rowling wrote a book. The infinite God created the world with His words. He created everything you've ever seen and everything you ever will see.

He spake the Word and it came to be. The one and only, the true and all-powerful God. I mean, He is infinite in His power. That's why we call Him omnipotent, omnipotent. He's infinite in His wisdom. He's omniscient. He's infinite in regard to space. He's omnipresent. God wrote a book.

And I think it's fascinating not only that God wrote a book, but that God would choose to write a book. He knew about all the technology that would be coming our way. He knew about Blu-ray players. He knew about the Sony PlayStation 4. In 1831, Joseph Henry created the first telegraph by sending an electric pulse more than half a mile to strike a bell over a series of wire. 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, with the help of Thomas Watson, invented the telephone. 1923, Vladimir Zorkin creates the cathode ray tube, which would be used in early television sets.

1969, the precursor to the internet was created. God knew about all of that, but God chose to write a book. But my second point is this. Not only did God write a book, but God wrote a book about Himself. It's almost like His autobiography. If you study the divine composition of Scripture, you're going to find out that it's 66 separate books written by about 40 different human authors over a period of about 1,500 years in three different languages. Now how many of you like to read?

For those of you that don't have your hand raised, I hope you do okay because this is college. You do a lot of reading, right? If you like to read and someone comes to you and they say, I know you're a reader, and let's say you knew nothing about the Bible, and they say, I have this book I want you to read. By the way, it's actually 66 separate books. It's written by 40 different authors over a period of 1,500 years in three different languages. What would you expect that book to be like?

Long, boring, archaic, ancient, disjointed, confusing, contradictory. You would never expect it to become far and away the world's best seller. Other books, they number in the millions. The Bible, they number in the billions. No other book comes remotely close.

Why? Because it's a book that God wrote. This is a book that God wrote about himself.

More than 100 years ago, Dr. James Allen Francis penned these words. He called it one solitary life. He never owned a home. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put his foot inside a big city. He never traveled 200 miles from the place he was born.

He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away.

One of them denied him. He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While he was dying, his executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had left on earth, his coat.

When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today he's the centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress. I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life. And the Bible presents him to us. If you've taken New Testament messages, you realize that the Old Testament reveals our need for a perfect prophet, a perfect priest, a perfect king. None of the Old Testament heroes were good enough.

They all fell short. In fact, the last word in your Old Testament is the word curse. Who's going to save us? The Old Testament foreshadows the coming Messiah, and you turn past those blank pages in your Bible, 400 silent years, and you turn to Matthew's Gospel, and the very first verse you read this, the book of the generation of Jesus Christ. That's who the Bible's about.

He's our perfect prophet, our perfect priest, our perfect king. The Bible is not ultimately about facts. Some of you may be a math major and you love the facts. You're like Thomas Gradgrind and Charles Dickens' Hard Times.

Just the facts, just the facts, just the facts. The Bible has lots of facts, but it's not written so that you can win Bible jeopardy. The Bible's not primarily about events. There are a number of events recorded in the Bible. Lots of you love parties. You love events.

My wife's an events coordinator. She loves those kinds of things, but the Bible's not primarily about events. The Bible's not just about platitudes.

It's not a collection of magnets to put on your refrigerator. There are many wonderful proverbs and verses in the Bible, but it's not just about platitudes. The Bible is not just a giant rule book.

There are commands. There are rules in the Bible, but the Bible is not a 3,000-page rule book. The Bible is not primarily about facts or events or platitudes or rules. The Bible's about a person.

It's about Jesus. God wrote a book about himself. We often read the Bible looking to meet our felt needs, and we miss the point that God is our need, that he wrote a book about himself. But not only did God write a book, and not only did God write a book about himself, but thirdly, God wrote a book about himself for us. God wrote a book about himself for us.

Listen to 2 Timothy 3. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. And Paul goes on to write four things that Scripture is profitable for. God wrote a book about himself for us. Scripture is the greatest story ever told. It's an incredible epic. It's the metanarrative.

Scripture narrates for us creation, fall, redemption, restoration. If you're familiar at all with fiction, you're very familiar with Narnia and Middle Earth, perhaps the two most famous fictional worlds created, and it's very possible those worlds would not exist for us if two people did not meet, J.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis at a faculty meeting at Oxford in 1926. They became very good friends.

You're probably aware of that. Though Tolkien was a Catholic, he was a firm believer in God and in the veracity of Scripture, and on one famous walk with C.S. Lewis, who at the time was an unbeliever, Tolkien told Lewis that the Bible is the true myth, in the sense that it's not actually a myth at all. He said it's the great story that all the other stories in the world foreshadow.

And Lewis would later come to faith in Christ. And some of you think, Dr. Crockett, I know the Bible is this incredible, huge, marvelous, overarching epic, but that's my problem. It talks about the great things, but what about little old me sitting in my chapel seat right here? How's a book like that, the world's bestseller, a world that transformed lives, how does a book like that intersect with me? Well, God wrote a book about himself for you. God wrote a book about himself for the 80-year-old widow who spends two hours a day on her knees. God wrote a book about himself for the successful businessman investing his money for kingdom purposes. God wrote a book about himself for the young mother of four who was just diagnosed with cancer. God wrote a book about himself for the college student who has no earthly idea how she's going to ever pay for even this semester, for the university professor who's wondering if his contributions have any level of significance at all, for the four-year-old child not yet able to read but who believes in simple childlike faith that there really is a creator. God wrote a book about himself for the young lady in Iran whose faith in Jesus puts her in a life-threatening situation on a daily basis, or for a line of Christian men on their knees about to be headed by ISIS animal terrorists. God wrote a book about himself for you.

Do you realize that what we believe affects our behavior? I was thinking about appropriate application for a message like this, and I think the application is fairly obvious, that this is a book that we should read, that we should treasure, that we should meditate upon. Look at John chapter 6. I love this passage. Jesus has told his disciples some hard things.

You see it there on the screen. Jesus said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me except that we're given him unto the Father. From that time, many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him. Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.

Where else would you go? Do you think you'll find the words of eternal life from Buddha or Muhammad or Confucius or from secular atheism or from communism or fascism or from money or from pleasure or if you pursue fame with your life, to whom shall we go? You have the words of life.

Do you believe that God wrote a book about himself for you? This Friday when you were playing in the snow, I was speaking at a conference in Minneapolis to a couple of hundred high school students. Great conference. I enjoyed my time.

Dr. Bobby Wood was also speaking there. We had a great time together. But I knew that school was canceled and my wife was texting me all this stuff about having fun playing in the snow with my kids. And my flight back Friday night got canceled, of course. And so there I am Saturday having great fellowship with Dr. Wood but really wanting to be home as well. Finally got a flight back late Saturday night. Wanted to witness on my flight there, there was about a 380-pound man sitting in the seat next to me asleep and halfway in my seat sleeping as well.

So I didn't get a chance to witness to him. But load the plane. There had been ice out there. A lady in her 20s had fallen in her high heels. A couple of people behind her ran over, asked her if she needed help. She said, no, I'm fine. But when the stewardess got there and said, are you okay?

She said, not at all and was threatening to sue. And all the stewardesses and stuff were working with her. And there was a lady next to me who had come in on a wheelchair. There was an empty seat and then her on the aisle. I was at the window seat and she was trying to flag down a stewardess who were all worried about getting sued because of the fall. And she needed water because she couldn't find her water bottle and she had heart medication she needed to take. So we were able to get a stewardess and she was going to take her two heart pills and she dropped one of them and couldn't find it anywhere.

So I was down by her seat trying to find this little pill for this elderly lady and we found it and she took her heart medicine and then she went to sleep. And I was thinking, if she wakes up, I really need to witness to her. But I was also thinking, I have a chapel sermon I really need to work on and I don't have a closing illustration. I'm going back and forth so I try to think of a closing illustration or witness this lady.

I didn't know that she was going to be my closing illustration. When they came with drinks and she woke up and I got my Sprite, I started talking to her. I started talking about the Lord and what I do and the conference I'd just been at and she got this radiant smile on her face. She accepted Christ as a young child and spent her whole life serving the Lord.

She's sung in churches all over the US. She's 88 years old. I would have guessed her to be in her early to mid 70s.

88 years old. I asked her what she was doing. She's had major problems with her leg, potentially facing amputation.

Her name's Phyllis. I told her I'd ask you guys to pray for her and she's praying for me right now. She'd found out she has major heart issues and not long to live and she was flying to Charlotte. Her daughter who lived in Greensboro was going to pick her up and take her home to take her to Greensboro so she could spend, she was trying to spend a little bit of time with each of her kids before the Lord took her home.

And we just talked for the rest of the flight. She told me about all the songs she loved to sing. One of them was, I'd rather have Jesus. I didn't even know we'd be singing that today. And she talked about the sufficiency of God's word in her life, including the time that her third child, a little daughter, was born crippled and died as a four month old.

And through tears she just told me, Nathan, every morning after she died for the next several months I would wake up and the Holy Spirit would give me a song to sing and he would lead me to exactly the right passage in his word and it would minister to me. And I sat there on that plane and I just thought, it really doesn't matter if you're a 21 year old at Bob Jones and you have no idea what the future holds for you. Or you're an 18 year old freshman and you don't even know how you got here or what you're doing.

Or you're a 35 year old professor who really wants to get home to see his wife and kids. Or you're an 88 year old who's walked with God almost your entire life and you're about to walk the valley of the shadow of death. God wrote a book about himself for you. Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, there's not going to be any lightning bolt. There's not going to be a loud speaker from heaven telling you that you have to open up the Bible. There's not going to be an email from communications saying that if you don't read the Bible this morning you'll get expelled from Bob Jones. No heavenly anvil waiting above your room ready to drop on your head if you don't crack the scriptures.

No neon signs or flashing lights. Just a Bible on a desk or on your shelf. But if you realize that God wrote a book about himself for you, then where else would you go? Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word. That it reveals to us who you are. That it shows us your son, Jesus Christ. How desperately we need him.

He is our great need. It shows us who Jesus is and why he came and what he did and what he will do in the future and what each of us need to do about that. And Father, this morning we come to you with hearts full of praise for how incredibly good you've been to us and will be for the rest of our lives. We thank you that you wrote a book about yourself for us. And Father, we just echo the words of Peter.

We think where else would we go? For you have the words of life. We thank you for this and we pray in Christ's name. Amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Nathan Crockett, Director of Ministry Training at Bob Jones University. Thanks again for listening and we look forward to the next time as we study God's word together on The Daily Platform.