Sola Scriptura #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in the Truth Pulpit. Last year, in the month of October in 2017, we honored the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with a series that was titled, The Bible in Roman Catholicism.

That turned in to be about a 10-message series, but it occurred to me that that maybe was a good tradition to kind of build upon. Maybe every October to take an opportunity to focus on something related to the Reformation or Reformation theology in order to keep us grounded and to have a regular commitment where we are reviewing the things that make, broadly speaking, Protestant theology distinct. We need to know these things and not just assume them.

We need to be able to transmit them to our children. We need to have them anchored in such a way that anyone who is reasonably regular in attendance at Truth Community Church could articulate the basic principles of what makes us distinct from Catholics, stated differently, what is the essence of biblical Christianity, and to be able to articulate those things and to understand them. One of the quickest ways to lose the truth that you hold dear, one of the ways that churches drift and seminaries drift over time, is by the fact that they start to assume the things that were believed in the past rather than repeating them and articulating them and holding them up and keeping them fresh in the minds of everyone who is associated with them. And so we don't want to go down that path if we can avoid it, and so this year to honor the Reformation, the 501st anniversary of the Reformation, I want to cover what have come to be known as the five solas of the Reformation. Sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria. And back in August you may remember that I did a single overview message of all five of them in a message titled Five Solas, One Faith. We have copies of this out on the table. I'd encourage you to pick one up if you didn't get a copy of that message, and what we want to do now is over this week and over the next four weeks is to just develop those, each of those individual themes in their own right. And I think it's a privilege for us to be able to do this.

Of course I think it's a privilege every time we come together like this to open God's Word and study it together. The various forms of sola that are expressed in those five solas are from the Latin term meaning alone. If you think about the word, the English word solitary, it means something that stands alone, something that is by itself. And sola scriptura tells us that we base our faith on scripture alone. Sola scriptura means that we do not accept or recognize other claims to revelation. And brothers and sisters, that is a most significant principle for us to understand and to embrace. Because as soon as you understand and embrace that principle, you have knocked out Roman Catholicism completely. As soon as you understand and embrace that principle, you are guarded against all of the wacky errors of charismatic theology today.

This determines what it is that we build our faith on, and it gives us the strength, it gives us the discernment to be able to say no to what other claims of revelation are made. Scripture is exclusive. Scripture stands alone. Scripture is by itself. And when I say scripture, I like to say this, I say this an awfully lot.

It's because after I'm gone, I want you to remember things like this. When we talk about scripture, we mean the 66 books of the Bible, 66 and no more. And when we say that, we are excluding the apocrypha from consideration as being inspired scripture and other forms and other claims to revelation.

This is all just so very, very important. When we talk about sola scriptura, we are talking about the doctrine that frames all of the other debates about theology. What is our source for revealed truth? Where do we find that which tells us the truth about the nature of God and the nature of salvation?

And the answer in that is sola scriptura, in scripture alone. Let me quote a couple of paragraphs from the 1689 confession which we use as our confession of faith here at Truth Community Church. In paragraph 1.6, it says this, and I quote, the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the spirit or traditions of men, end quote. That's paragraph 1.6 of the 1689 confession, which would parallel what is stated in the Westminster Confession of a few decades earlier.

Listen to paragraph 1.10 of our confession. It says, the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of counsels, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Scripture delivered by the spirit into which Scripture so delivered our faith is finally resolved, end quote. In other words, what it is saying to summarize it in today's language would be to say this, is that everything that we are to believe and to obey is found in the four corners of Scripture, and we are not to look outside of them. That means that when a flashy preacher, male or female, stands up and says, let me tell you about what God told me today, and the vision that God has given me for this or that, we immediately reject that, because we hold to sola scriptura, because we say that there is nothing to be added at any time to the 66 books of the Bible.

When Catholics come and say, well, we want to talk about our tradition, we say, no thank you. We believe in sola scriptura. There is nothing that is equal to the Bible. When sometimes an uninformed, perhaps well-meaning person says, God's spoke to me and told me such and such. We say, God didn't talk to you that way.

God did not reveal something new to you. Everything that God has said is contained in the Bible and in the Bible alone. Now, as I said when we were doing this series in that message from a few months ago, Five Solas, One Faith, that I alluded to earlier, one of the things that I said was that the battle on these five solas is not about scripture per se, it's not about grace per se, or faith per se, or Christ per se, or the glory of God per se, because lots of religions would pay heed or give lip service to the Bible. Lots of people would say nice things about Jesus.

Oh, I believe he was a great man or a great prophet or they'll say, yes, we need God's grace. But what they won't say, the step that they won't take is when you say alone, because when you say scripture alone, you are making an implicit denial of all other claims to revelation. And all of a sudden when you're saying scripture alone, all of a sudden you are opening yourself up to an accusation that you are a narrow-minded bigot, that you think truth belongs to you alone, that you are arrogant.

That may be your opinion, but my opinion is equally valid, people will say. You see, people object to the word alone because it closes off the door to the pride of man, to the works of man, to other forms of revelation, and so this word alone is so very critical. And that's what we want to kind of look at here this evening is this doctrine of scripture alone, sola scriptura. And we're going to break this down and help you, hopefully be able to help you and others who hear this in the future by just kind of building this concept around two basic principles of scripture. The authority of scripture and the sufficiency of scripture.

Both of those aspects of the doctrine of the Bible are implied by this term sola scriptura. And so let's look first at the authority of scripture and why we would believe in the authority of scripture alone, okay? The authority of scripture for your first heading if you're taking notes here this evening.

What is authority? Well, we've even preached on that concept over time, but authority, by authority we mean in this context that, oh, this is so basic and so very important. You know, it's when you get tired of the basics that you're vulnerable to spiritual error. When you get tired of the basics, you're vulnerable to doctrinal error. When you get tired of the basics, you are vulnerable to sin in your life.

You know, that we are meant to go back, just as you drink water or you have some kind of liquid refreshment, day by day by day, you go back to these things and you drink from them repeatedly again and again, because just as liquid water is necessary for the health of your body, so things like this are necessary for the regular intake for the health of your soul. Authority in this context means this. The Bible alone is the standard by which all truth claims are measured. The Bible alone is the standard by which all truth claims are measured. And so, when we say the authority of Scripture, what we mean is this. Scripture alone is to determine what we believe and what we do. Scripture alone determines what we believe and what we do. We believe everything that Scripture says, we do not go beyond it. Why would we be so dogmatic about that? As I told you recently, you know, people have challenged me on that point. What makes you think that you could call yourself truth, community church?

On what basis would you say those kinds of things and name yourself by that? Well, beloved, what we need to understand and recognize is this, is that we are building our doctrine and what we teach and what we believe, we root that in Scripture. It's not our own idea. We are responding to, we are explaining something that is outside of us, something that is given to us, something that is independent of our minds, of our thinking, something that existed and that was true before you and I were born, something that will exist and will be true after we are gone if the Lord tarries. We are talking about things that transcend time and that are independent of our own opinion. And so, the authority of Scripture, what we want to understand is this, is that it derives from its own very nature. It is independent of the judgment of men.

How can we say something like that? Well, it's the Bible's own claim. And here we've got a couple of sub-points that I want to make. The authority of Scripture is based on this fact, that Scripture is inspired.

Scripture is inspired. Now, we've talked about these things often over the course of time, but let's ask and answer the question once again. You know, I pause on these things because these kinds of questions are so fundamental. Get this right and you set the right trajectory.

You understand that. If a plane gets off course by just five degrees, the immediate difference isn't too great, but as you go along, it's further and further off course until it's nowhere near its intended destination. But if you set the trajectory true and right from the beginning, then you're going to end up at the proper destination. Here, the proper destination is to arrive at truth as God has revealed it, to believe it and to obey it, to believe the truth about Christ so that our souls are safe and secure in Him rather than believing in falsehoods that cannot save our soul, trusting ourselves to things that are not true and finding that we are damned in the end.

That's not a good outcome for life. And when we say things and ask questions like where did the Bible come from, what is its source, we are asking fundamental questions that put us in the right direction. With all of those things said, turn in your Bible to 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16. 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16. And as you're turning there, I would just make the happy observation that once again God's providence is serving us well. The timing of these messages coincides unintentionally with our series that we're doing on the Holy Spirit on Sunday mornings.

And these things fit together like a hand in a glove, and they mutually reinforce each other even though we're really not repeating much from Sunday to Tuesday in the things that we'll be saying here over the next several weeks. 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 says this in the New American Standard Version, which we use as our pulpit Bible. 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16 says, all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.

We want to zero in on that word inspired. The Greek term is theopneustos. It means God breathed. The Bible originated from a divine activity. It is not the doctrine of Scripture that men wrote words of their own ability and of their own insight, and then God came along and breathed a divine quality into them after the fact. That is not the biblical doctrine of inspiration. It has the idea that God breathed out Scripture from within his own essence, from within his own knowledge, from within his own perfect intention. He breathed out what Scripture was to say. The Bible proceeds from God, from inside God and out, you might say, and therefore we rightly call it the Word of God.

Let me expand on this a little bit. To say that the Bible is inspired in this way is infinitely more than saying that the human authors were poetically gifted, or that they had unique insight into the state of human affairs. You'll hear people who are artistically inclined saying something like, saying things like this, oh, I was positively inspired as I wrote that poem. We should not talk that way as Christians, because it confuses the issue. When the word is used like that in the human realm, it's talking about human insight or human emotion, human elevation, and that is not what we are talking about in Scripture. What we are saying when Scripture alone, in sola Scriptura, about the inspiration of Scripture is this, is that God initiated Scripture. God so worked through the human authors of Scripture that the Bible says exactly what God wanted it to say, and he did this in a voluntary act of self-disclosure. God, in other words, who is spirit, God who is invisible, God who is unknowable by the fallen human mind, except in a very basic way that you can observe his power somewhat in nature, to know him as the saving God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ is outside human comprehension. We are blind and we are dead to those things. We cannot discover them on their own, because they are spiritually discerned, and we in our unsaved state are spiritually dead.

Spiritually dead, lifeless, undiscerning, unable to know these things. And so the inspiration of Scripture is the means by which God revealed himself in the written Word of God. How did that happen?

What was that process like? Look over at 2 Peter chapter 1. 2 Peter chapter 1.

And here we have another very key text that helps us understand the doctrine of Scripture. 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 20 says this, it says, Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will. No writing of Scripture ever came as a result of human intention originating in the human will, he says, but by contrast men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. What the Bible says about itself is that the writers of Scripture were moved by the Holy Spirit.

A power from God outside of them, outside of their own ability, outside of their own and beyond their own will. A power from God came upon them and moved them in the writing of Scripture so that what they wrote was the very Word of God. Now this word moved, the men were moved by the Holy Spirit is the same verb that describes a ship being carried along by the wind. You can see this in the book of Acts chapter 27, if you want to turn back there with me for just a moment, keep your finger in 2 Peter. In Acts chapter 27 verse 15, the same verb, although it's translated differently in English, is used to describe a ship. And in Acts chapter 27 verse 15 it says, when the ship was caught in it and could not face the wind, we gave way to it and let ourselves be driven along.

The idea is that the ship was now subject to a power that was greater than itself. Its direction was being determined by the wind. It went where the wind drove it.

The wind was driving it by its own power. Beloved, that physical picture gives us a sense of the spiritual dynamic that was going on when men were writing the words of Scripture. As they wrote the Word of God, as they were writing the letters of Scripture and the prophecies of Scripture, they were being carried along by the Holy Spirit as they wrote. The Holy Spirit was directing their thoughts, was directing their words, was directing them in a way so that what they recorded was exactly, precisely and no more than exactly what God wanted them to say.

They were under a power from God that transcended their human abilities. Okay? Now, one of the things, one of the objections that is raised against this doctrine of inerrancy, the inerrancy of Scripture, is this, and it sounds superficially plausible. It sounds superficially like a serious objection.

It's not, but if you haven't thought it through, at first it sounds like it. They'll start with this premise. All men are fallible, right? Men are subject to error, right? Right. The Bible was written by men, right? True.

Right. There were human authors to the Scripture. And they think when they lay out that little logical progression, they think they've got you.

Well, you see it, don't you? All men are fallible. Scripture was written by men, therefore Scripture itself is fallible. Scripture itself is subject and full of errors and therefore you cannot trust it, you cannot believe it in an absolute sense. What's our response to that?

How do we think through that? Well, we come back to this doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture and we say, no, you're leaving out the most important aspect of the nature of Scripture. Scripture is inspired by God. God is omnipotent.

The Holy Spirit is omnipotent. And the Holy Spirit came upon these men in a way that directed what they wrote so that what they wrote was the very word of God. And what you're forgetting, my objecting, unbelieving friend is this, is that God the Holy Spirit has the power to override the fallibility of men so that they produce what God wanted them to produce, what God wanted them to write. There is a supernatural dimension to the authorship of Scripture that preserved it from error in a way that a merely human production could not claim. The Bible says over and over again, claims that it is the word of God, that it is perfect. You know, thus saith the Lord is the predominant voice that comes out of the 66 books of the Bible. This book, metaphorically speaking, steps up and speaks out, thus saith the Lord and bears witness to its own divine authority. How does it do that?

Why does it do that? It's because the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of Scripture in a way that preserved it from all error. It carried these men into safe harbor, you might say, so that they did not write error. The determinative final influence in the final product of Scripture was not the mind of man but the mind of God directed by the Holy Spirit. That's what we mean when we say that Scripture is inspired. This is what the Bible claims for itself.

Now, look, it's just very important for us to repeat and to remember what we said. This exists outside of our opinion. We believe it, yes, we respect it, we proclaim it, we assert it, but we are asserting something that is independent that is outside of ourselves. We are merely repeating what God Himself has said about Scripture. We are thinking God's thoughts after Him when we say these things about the Bible. And that's what gives it its truth, not our opinion, but what God Himself has said about His Word. It came from the Spirit of God.

Now, that has implications. God is a God of truth. Scripture says in Titus chapter 1 verse 2 that it is impossible for God to lie. He is omniscient, He does not make mistakes, He is perfect in every way, and that has implications for the kind of book that He would produce. And that leads us to our second aspect of the authority of Scripture, and we say this, we say that Scripture is inerrant.

Scripture is inerrant. And as I say so often, it's only because I feel this way when I preach. It is a great privilege for me to stand and declare these things and to defend them and to give my life over to the defense of these things, over against those who would mock it or dispute it. I don't care.

I don't care what anybody else thinks. My mind, my heart belongs to this book, and it always will until the day I die. Now secondly, as we say, Scripture is inerrant. We want to say this, we want to help you understand this and the progression of this. Because God is the God of truth, because it is impossible for God to lie, because the Bible is inspired by God in the way in which we have described earlier, because the Bible has been supervised down to its very words by the God of truth, we can be confident that it is free from error, that there are not mistakes in the true teaching of Scripture, that there are not factual errors.

As we've pointed out in the past, there's so many different directions you could go on this. As we've looked at Scripture in the past, we have seen that Jesus Christ, who is Lord, who is the supreme authority in the universe, affirmed the Old Testament and pre-authenticated, you might say, the New Testament. All of the Bible comes under the authority and the affirmation of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Christ himself is the ultimate guarantor of the truth of Scripture.

Now, and I'm glad you young people are listening, I can tell that you're listening and I love you for it, and I just pray that God would seal these things deep into your heart and that you would become lions for the kinds of truth that we're talking about here tonight and in the days to come, that you would roar, as it were, on behalf of Scripture, roar on behalf of the God of this word, even when it is unpopular to do so. Jesus said in John chapter 17, verse 17, he said as he was praying for his people, he said, to sanctify them in the truth, thy word is truth. It is truth. In other words, Scripture says things and declares things the way that they really are. Scripture tells us what really is, the way things actually happen, what is really true, and what will really happen in the end. From beginning to end, from Genesis 1-1 to Revelation 22, verse 20, you have that which is true, that which is accurate, that which is the way that things really are, and that is rooted in the fact that Scripture is inspired by God and God is a God of truth. These things go together.

They are welded together in a perfect, unbreakable harmony, and there can be no divorce put between the attributes of God and the attributes of Scripture. That is vital for you to understand. We build our lives on that basic truth, and therefore what does that mean? It means that Scripture, the 66 books of the Bible, see, I just repeat the same things over and over again.

I'm like the guy at a party that only has like five jokes that he just cycles through, but if you hang around long enough, you start to hear the same things over and over again. Well, that's kind of some of what we do, and we realize that Scripture itself speaks this way. Peter said, Peter said, I want to stir you up by way of reminder. Even the writers of Scripture were conscious of the fact that they were repeating things again to their readers. Well, if the inspired writers needed to do that for the first century audience, how much more should a 21st century pastor repeat things so that they are embedded deeply into the fabric of your soul, the fabric of your thinking, so that your worldview does not have room for any contrary thought to that which Scripture compels us to believe and do? Now, what does that mean when we say Scripture is inerrant? Scripture never affirms anything that is contrary to fact. Scripture never affirms a falsehood. Whether it is speaking to spiritual realities concerning the nature of God and the nature of sin and the nature of Christ and the nature of salvation, whether it is speaking in the moral realm, whether it is speaking to facts of history, whether it is speaking to facts of science, wherever Scripture speaks on these issues, wherever it touches on matters of scientific or historical fact, Scripture is correct. Scripture is right. Scripture is true.

It never affirms anything that is contrary to fact. The theologian Robert Raymond says it this way, Scripture is incapable of teaching error. Now, sometimes Scripture will record men who are speaking lies. Scripture will record men who are saying inaccurate things, but Scripture is not affirming what those men said.

Rather, it is simply accurately reporting what they said. And so we've distinguished between what Scripture actually affirms and what it merely records in the course of the human history that it describes. Scripture is without error. Scripture is trustworthy in whole. Scripture is trustworthy in all of its parts.

The 66 books of the Bible originated with God, and he used a process according to his infinite power, his infinite ability, his infinite knowledge, his infinite understanding that guaranteed the final absolute accuracy of Scripture. No exceptions. No exceptions. None. Zero.

Nada. That's Don Green here on The Truth Pulpit. And here's Don again with some closing thoughts. Well, my friend, just before we close today's broadcast, I just wanted to give a special word of greeting and thanks to the many people that listen to our podcast internationally.

It's remarkable to me. The last report that I saw listed 83 different countries that in one way or another are listening to us. And I just want to send a special word of greeting to those of you that are in lands that are distant from my own home here in the United States. You know, we've seen people from every continent except maybe Antarctica and people from countries like Ireland and Australia and Singapore, Canada, the UK, India.

I have friends in all of those countries. And whether you've met me face to face or whether you only know me as a voice through your favorite device, I just want to say God bless you. Thank you for your interest in the word of God. And may the Spirit of God work deeply in your heart as you continue to study God's word. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for your prayers. God bless you. My prayers and love are with you as well. And we'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's word.