The Finality of the Apostles #1

The revelation which was given through apostles by God has ceased.

The spigot has been turned off. And what God has left us with instead are the 66 books of the Bible. And that is the means by which God communicates to us today.

We'll talk about that more in a few moments. Are there apostles today? If someone claims to be one, what's a Christian to think? Pastor Don Green will answer those questions today on the Truth Pulpit as he continues in his ministry of teaching God's people God's Word.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. We're moving further into our series, The Holy Spirit Today, with a message titled, The Finality of the Apostles. And Don, why is that finality so significant? Well, Bill, this is a really strategic aspect of biblical theology and being able to understand discernment in the church today. You know, the Bible points to its own sufficiency and its own finality in passages like 2 Timothy 3, Psalm 19, about the perfection of Scripture. If we needed more than what we have in the Bible, Scripture would not be enough.

And that's just not true. God's Word is sufficient for every spiritual need that we have in evangelism and in sanctification. We're going to develop that theme more today on the Truth Pulpit.

Thank you, Don. And friend, let's get started right now in the Truth Pulpit. We have the reality of salvation only because we find these things revealed in God's written Word in the 66 books of the Bible. And that makes the Word of God the most valuable thing in the universe in terms of a tangible thing that we could hold in our hands. And that makes the Word of God something that we must be careful to protect and proclaim and to undergird our understanding of why the Word of God has a unique authority that is shared with nothing else and with no one else. These things must be abundantly clear in our minds if we are to hold on to the treasure of the gospel and if we are to hold it and pass it on to the next generation, untainted by the fact that it has in one way or another passed through our hands along the way. The Word of God is unique.

The Word of God is alone authoritative. And it is essential for us to remember that as we come to today's message. We are in the midst of a series that we've titled The Holy Spirit Today.

And for the benefit of those of you who haven't been with us, let me just give you a little brief review that will benefit all of us. Basically what we're doing, we're building toward a consideration of the sign gifts, the so-called sign gifts today and whether they are continuing today or whether they have ceased. Tongues and prophecy and miracles. What people don't often grasp or practice is this, is that you have to put those considerations into the context of biblical theology. You need to discuss those in a context through which and from which they came. And so we're wanting to lay a foundation here in this series that would give us the context to be able to discuss the sign gifts in an intelligent way. And so we haven't jumped into the deep end of the pool on those controversial matters that people love to fight over in our day and age. Rather what we have done is we've stepped back and said let's consider broader themes that would help us understand the context in which we should view those things.

And I want to thank God that I have so many friends and brothers and sisters like you that are willing to spend the time to consider these things, to think on them and to not be in a hurry as we do so. I understand that that's not the popular spirit of our age. In our spiritually weak times, not simply in the world but within the professing evangelical church, in our spiritually weak times, people are not patient. They are not careful to think through the significance of the things that we are considering. They just want to get to an answer right away without thinking through what reasons lead us to answers and how we are to discern and think. People do not want to take the time for these things. You know, it's a five-second window of attention span that the marketers tell us that we're dealing with.

Very narrow, very quick. Well, look, in biblical thinking it doesn't work that way. We are not to be in a hurry. We must be different from the spirit of our age, and I'm thankful for every one of you that embrace the time that it takes to think through these things. You know, the apostle Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 5 verse 21, he said, Examine everything carefully.

Examine everything carefully. Now whether we're doing it well enough or whether we're doing it carefully enough, we'll let God and someone else judge that. I just want you to know that the reason this is taking time is because that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to be careful so that when we get to the discussion of the signed gifts eventually, and I promise you that it's coming soon, that we'll have a context of reference points that we'll be able to go back to corporately and individually to say, Oh yes, I remember how that discussion about the Holy Spirit, that discussion about the apostles, now I see how it applies as I consider these individual matters. And so what have we done so far in this series? Well, we started by considering the real work of the Holy Spirit today, His work in salvation and in sanctification. The Holy Spirit today works in the salvation and sanctification of believers in the church through His works of regeneration, indwelling, sanctification, empowerment, instruction, filling, and by the unity that He produces among true believers. We looked at all of that. We have gone on since then to consider a topic that might seem to be a little bit of a diversion, but it's not. We went on to consider the qualifications to be an apostle of Jesus Christ.

And what we said was this is very, very foundational and very, very critical. An apostle of Jesus Christ was one who had the legal authority to represent him because he had been personally commissioned by Christ himself while on earth in order to do just that. The apostles were the unique vessels of God's revelation after Christ ascended back to heaven. Either the apostles or those in their immediate circle whom the apostles could approve.

And what were the qualifications to be an apostle? They were personally chosen by Jesus. They were eyewitnesses of the resurrection with their physical eyes. And they were accompanied by signs and wonders. What we said was that those signs had a purpose.

They weren't signs just for the sake of putting on a display of, you know, just spontaneously putting on a fireworks show when it wasn't the Fourth of July, so to speak. The signs attested them as true messengers of God. The fact that the apostles at the hands of the apostles, signs and wonders and miracles occurred that could not naturally be done, the natural realm had been invaded by the supernatural that gave visible affirmation of the truth of the invisible things of which they spoke. And as they interpreted the life and the death and the resurrection of Christ, the signs verified their authenticity and verified the accuracy of what they had to say. As we considered the signs and wonders from a biblical history perspective, that the apostles doing signs and wonders was following a biblical pattern that had been established over 1,500 years going back to the time of Moses through the prophets and in the ministry of Jesus. And these miracles attested to the fact that these men were true spokesmen for God.

Not everybody did signs and wonders. God verified his true spokesmen, his true prophets, his true mouthpieces with signs and wonders that distinguished them from everyone else. And they were doing this when there was not yet a completed canon of Scripture as we have today.

But last time as we ended, on a somewhat unexpected note, we saw something really, really critical. We saw that there was a change that takes place even within the context of the New Testament as the Bible, as the apostle Paul, as the Spirit who spoke through the apostle Paul prepared the church for the days after the apostles were gone. The question becomes, how are we going to recognize spiritual leaders in a biblical sense now, today, after the apostles are gone?

And what we saw was something vital, something very critical and important that just sheds a spotlight on the darkness that tends to envelop so-called Christian thinking today. The New Testament changes the pattern. The New Testament does not call upon us to look for signs and wonders to authenticate spiritual leaders in the church today. Instead, in 1 Timothy chapter 3 and in Titus 1, God's Word says that spiritual leaders in a Christian church will be recognized by something different.

There's a different focus. Not that these other men in biblical times lacked it, but this is to be the distinguishing, authenticating mark of those who truly speak for God today. Not signs and wonders, but character, being above reproach, being truly in Christ, a proven character that is shown over time, that is manifested within the home and within the world, and that spiritual leaders will have an ability to teach the Word of God, to teach it in a way that edifies the people of God, and also contradicts and refutes those who stand opposed to the Word of God and who contradict the doctrine of the Word of God.

This is vital to understand. You see, the unspoken presupposition in all of the goofy shows that are done in the name of Christ today is the fact that we can put on a show that we can do things that look like signs and look like wonders. The unspoken message is that God is with us because of what you see. And what the full reading of the New Testament says, that was not to be the pattern going forward after the apostolic era ended.

It was not signs and wonders. If leaders were to be identified by signs and wonders, they would have been prominent in those passages in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, where the qualifications for church leadership are laid out. The fact that they are absent tells us that they are not relevant, that they are not the point any longer, that there has been a change in the recognizing factors that establish men as spiritual leaders.

Now, all of that was just by way of review to prepare us for the time here now. As we study God's Word together, as we go through these things carefully, and we examine them carefully as God's Word tells us to do, there's a growing awareness that comes upon us as we look at these things. There's a growing awareness that the apostles performed a unique function, a non-repeatable function, as vessels of God's revelation.

And stay with me here. This is really, really vital, really, really crucial, because with one of the reasons that we recognize that there was a unique function not to be repeated today, that there are not vessels of ongoing new revelation from God today, is one of the reasons that we see that so clearly is that their authenticating credentials cannot possibly be replicated today. The apostles had to be, as we saw, they had to be physical eyewitnesses of the physical resurrected Christ.

No one can do that today. No one meets that qualification today, because Christ is now physically in heaven. He ascended outside the realm of human sight, and therefore there is no one who qualifies as an apostle today.

No matter how many men might apply that title to themselves, they have arrogated, they have taken, they have usurped a title to which they are not entitled. By the biblical standards of an apostle. They cannot possibly be eyewitnesses of the resurrection. They did not walk with Christ. Christ did not affirm them or appoint them while he was physically on earth. And contrary to what they proclaim, what they think, what they try to pretend, the signs, air quotes, the signs that they're doing that they try to persuade people with today are not the true signs of an apostle. And this will be undeniable when we get to that. I'm just making a general point right now that the apostolic credentials cannot be duplicated today, therefore there are not possibly any apostles, and therefore the revelation which was given through apostles by God has ceased.

The spigot has been turned off. And what God has left us with instead are the 66 books of the Bible, and that is the means by which God communicates to us today. We'll talk about that more in a few moments. The apostolic credentials cannot be duplicated. Scripture qualifies spiritual leadership differently today, and so we start to say something's different in this realm in which we live. And in this age, now that the apostles are gone, there's a change that has taken place. And we need to recognize the reality of that change. Now, let me just say, my assessment of this, whether people are directly conscious of this or not, I know that that's not a popular position to take.

I'm convinced that it's the biblical position. But I realize that it's not popular. I'm not swayed by that. That doesn't affect me.

That doesn't change my view on these things. There is something perhaps uniquely American that mitigates against people receiving that as it should be because we love to talk about our democracy, and everybody's equal. And so everybody wants to be equal to everybody else, which means that there can't be a unique, exclusive group who had privileges that aren't given to us. Under that presupposition of, you know, we've got to be democratic here, then we should be just like the apostles, and therefore we should do what the apostles did, and we should have all the privileges and have all of the same kind of access and avenues that the apostles had.

God didn't do it that way. We are not apostles. And so we recognize that God gave a prerogative, God gave a gift to those select circle of men that He didn't give to us, and that's His prerogative to do that. These apostles were given privileges that were not given to us.

We were given other things, we were given different things, we've been greatly blessed, but what was given to the apostles was not given to us. And along with that, in the spirit of our age, in the spirit of the so-called professing evangelical church, people want their own experiences. They want their private revelations. They want their private pipeline to God that is unique and exclusive to them. And there's just a sense of pride that we have to point out to that and say, if that's not what God has appointed, you shouldn't be seeking it. You shouldn't be seeking first what you want. You should be asking first, what has God given?

What do I respond to? Where is it that God has revealed Himself? And as we go on in this study over the next weeks, you'll find that God has done you a great blessing by not making your faulty, demented, distorted, sinful mind as the place where He deposits His revelation. It is a blessing from God that we don't have to depend on our fallible minds to discern direct revelation from Him.

Instead, He has placed it outside of that in unchanging truth. And so we recognize the spirit of the age. We see a little bit of why they would want to do that, but ultimately it comes back to, is this word final or not? And that is related to the finality of the apostolic office, the finality of the apostles, and that's what I want to speak on just briefly in our remaining time here today. Here's what I want you to see, beloved. There's no points to this message, no structure in the notes.

There's a lot of, I'm making a lot of points, I hope, but not points of headings for your notes. I just want you to see the finality of the apostles and what we're about to see. And turn to Matthew chapter 19, and now we pivot into new material for today. Matthew chapter 19, beginning in verse 27. You know, simple things like being able to count help you understand the finality of revelation.

Simple things like arithmetic that first graders can understand inform our understanding of this. This is part of the humbling that we take is the simplicity of these things, and we realize that the simplicity of these is to speak to a finality that we accept and even rejoice in. Matthew chapter 19, verse 27. Peter said to Jesus, Behold, we have left everything and followed you. What then will there be for us as the disciples are gathered around Jesus? And Jesus said to them, look at verse 28, Truly I say to you that you who have followed me in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on his glorious throne, you will also sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve thrones for twelve apostles.

There's not room for others there. There was a set number of twelve apostles with only one later addition, Paul, who was the apostle to the Gentiles, as he often said, the twelve men who walked with Jesus' apostles to the Jews. Now, Scripture goes on and explains to us the significance of this. If you look at Ephesians chapter 2, I believe we've turned there a time or two in the course of these things. Ephesians chapter 2, after the book of Acts, after Romans, after Corinthians, after Galatians, you come to Ephesians chapter 2, and we're pulling together different strands of biblical thought in order to make this one great point about the finality of the apostles. Paul speaks in verse 19 and says, So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household.

Jews and Gentiles alike, he says, you all belong to this single household of God. Verse 20, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. What is the nature, I ask you, beloved, what is the nature of a foundation of a building?

You pour it once, and then you build on top of it. You don't keep building new foundations for the same building. You build on the one single foundation. It is fixed, it is final, and everything is built on top of that.

A building only has one foundation. It is final, it is unique, and the ministry of the apostles is compared to a foundation upon which everything else rests. Now, the apostle Paul asserts this idea of finality in a different way. Go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. 1 Corinthians chapter 15. As Paul is talking about, the appearances of Christ after his resurrection.

The appearances of Christ after his resurrection. And he says in verse 5, speaking of Christ, he says that Christ appeared to Cephas, that is, Peter, and then to the 12 as a group. After that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep, meaning that they were alive at the time that Paul was writing to the Corinthian church here. Then, verse 7, he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, as he made different appearances at different times. And then he says this, and this is the point here for verse 8, and last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also. He says, Jesus appeared to me last of all. On the road to Damascus, you saw Christ appearing to Paul, and Paul says, I was the last one that he appeared to in this way.

I was the last one to see him in his resurrected body. I was the final one. Paul was final. There are no more. And so, if Paul was not the last one, if there was the idea that there were going to be continuing visions of Christ in his resurrected form that would form the basis of future apostleships, he never could have said that he was the last. The reason that he was last was because the apostles are final. Their office is over.

There are no more. Well, we'll have to pause there for today, but Pastor Don Green will present Part 2 of his message, The Finality of the Apostles, on our next broadcast as he continues our series, The Holy Spirit Today. Join us then here on The Truth Pulpit. But first, here's Don with some closing thoughts. Well, I hope that The Truth Pulpit is a source of strength to you as you live for Christ. And if it is, would you do us a favor? Would you return the blessing by dropping us a note at thetruthpulpit.com?

Look for the Contact Us link in the upper right-hand corner. Your brief greeting can assure that we keep the broadcast on this outlet as we continue to minister to you. Thank you so much, and God bless you. Thank you, Don. And friend, don't forget to visit thetruthpulpit.com where you can learn more about podcasts and free CDs of Don's teaching. That's all at thetruthpulpit.com. And now for Don Green, I'm Bill Wright. We'll see you next time for more from The Truth Pulpit where we teach God's people God's Word.