Year after year, the Bible remains the number one bestselling book of all time.
How is this possible for a book that was written thousands of years ago? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains what the Bible is, who wrote it, and why it's a book like no other. I invite you to turn now with me to the New Testament, to 2 Timothy chapter 3, and the instruction that Paul gives to Timothy as his young understudy in pastoral ministry at a time where paganism attacks the church from outside and confusion assails it from within. And in verse 14 of 2 Timothy 3, Paul writes to him as follows, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it. And how from infancy you've known the holy Scriptures which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Now, you may want to hold that before you, although I'll mention a couple of references as we go along. And if you don't normally take notes, today would be a good day to take notes. I say that just because there are so many different things that I have to say that are informational rather than inspirational. And you will be aided in the information by making note of them, I'm sure.
I'll try and be clear in delineating the points as I go along. If you've been attending Parkside for any length of time at all, you will be familiar with the steady drumbeat of biblical exposition. You know that it doesn't matter who is standing behind this pulpit, but in each and every instance it will be apparent to all that the Bible is afforded a central place in all we do. And indeed, some who, when they initially visit, are surprised by this and find themselves asking the question, Why does the Bible have such a central place in all that you do at Parkside? Well, because we suggest it is important.
But, says the individual, is it really as important as you seem to suggest? You may have heard of the group of individuals who organized a pickup game of football at a local field. They all got together, and having assembled, somebody said, We don't have a ball.
And one of the group replied, Forget the ball. Let's get on with the game. And in many cases, that is exactly how it goes in a church service. Forget the Bible.
Let's get on with the service. And you can worship in a variety of places where it very quickly becomes apparent that the Bible is not being read, it is perhaps not even being referred to at all, and if so, only tangentially. And some are actually asking, Why bother with the Bible at all?
Indeed, that may be the question that's on the lips of some of you who are here today. Why do we even bother with the Bible? You have acquiesced to the notion that we spend time with it, that you come routinely, but if someone were to say to you, Why do you actually spend so much time on the Bible in that place? I mean, you seem to spend longer with the Bible than you do with any other part of the time in the room together.
Why is it that you do that? Well, I thought that we would address this question briefly. I make no apology for the simplicity of our study, for the fact that my target audience is probably the intelligent eighth grader rather than some vast intellect, working on the assumption that the vast intellect will be more than able to cope with the information supplied to an intelligent eighth grader.
But if we address it in the other way around, it may be difficult for some to follow. So before we address this fundamental question, why bother with the Bible, I have a number of general questions with which I want to begin. And the number one is the most basic of all. What is the Bible? Well, of course, everybody immediately says, Well, I know what the Bible is. Well, I'd like to hear your answer. Probably some would say, Well, the Bible is… Well, the Bible is… Yes, exactly.
Okay, so let me help you out. First of all, the Bible is a library. It is a collection of books. It is one book, but it is one book encompassing sixty-six other books. Anybody who takes a Bible and opens it up will notice that it is apparently broken into two disproportionate pieces. There is a part which in the table of contents is called the Old Testament, which goes from Genesis to Malachi, and then there is the New Testament, which goes from Matthew through to Revelation. The Old Testament is made up of the books of the prophets and of the law and of the psalms.
And when Paul talks about the advantage in Romans 3 of being from a Jewish heritage, he says that one of the advantages is simply that they have been entrusted with the very words of God. And he is making reference there to the Old Testament Scriptures. In the New Testament, we have the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John, and then we have the Acts of the Apostles, the minute book of the early church, or its history book. Then we have the letters written by different individuals to different gatherings of God's people. And then we have the book of Revelation—not the revelations, plural, as it is sometimes mistakenly referred to, but rather the revelation, the apocalypse, the insight into a realm yet experienced that was granted to the apostle John.
Now, when you think about the Bible in this way, something I hope will cross your mind. It came home to me forcibly just a couple of weeks ago when in Dublin I went to Trinity College Library, a place I've wanted to go to for all of my life but never visited. And there I had the opportunity of seeing the book of Kells. Some of you will have been there, and you will know about it. Those of you who don't can go on the internet and find out all about it. It's not my purpose to tell you this morning, except to let you know that in an ancient time, around the eighth and ninth century, monks penned their Gospels and illustrated them in such a beautiful fashion that they have been preserved through the years, and pieces of them are there in the Trinity College Library.
And as I stood looking at them, it suddenly dawned on me. What did the ordinary people do for a Bible in the ninth century? Or the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century?
No pastor in any of these centuries ever admonished his congregation to make sure that they were reading their Bibles every day. He couldn't, because they couldn't, because they didn't have a Bible. And not until the Reformation and the great triumphant statements of Luther, Here I take my stand, I can do no other, suggesting to the Roman church that the future of the church is to be found in the people having the Bible in their own tongue in a way that they can understand—which, of course, was an anathema to the pope at that time. Luther stands and does this, the printing presses get alongside him, and all of a sudden, the ordinary Christian is able to take up this library and read it for themselves. Sixty-six books, written in a variety of languages, mainly in Hebrew and Greek, over a period of more than a thousand years, originating in places as far apart as Babylon and Rome and penned by as many as forty different individuals.
Well, that's what the Bible is. It's a library. It's a compendium. But it's not only that, it is also a book like no other book.
Oh, it is sold more than any other book and continues to sell as the best-selling book always all the time, but that isn't what makes it unique. It's an interesting book. It's a book that you can almost read from the back to the front, because we might even refer to it as a book with the answers in the back—that if you start at the back and read forward, it sometimes is a little easier. Alec Matias suggests that perhaps if you think of it in terms of an Agatha Christie novel, you'll begin to get a flavor of what's going on.
If you read Agatha Christie at all, you remember, they're all on the train or they're all in the one room. All these different characters, nobody really knows as they begin to read the book how they all fit together—who did what, when, and where—but gradually, as the story unfolds, all of these various themes begin to weave together, and suddenly, in a denouement, it becomes apparent just what this thing is all about. The Bible is a wee bit like that when you read it. At first you say, Well, I don't understand how Moses fits in here with Abram and what Abram's doing with Isaiah and what was Jeremiah on about, and frankly, the whole thing's a mystery to me.
And also, we've spoken of it frequently as being like a two-act play, where you need the first act, to give the foundation for all that follows, and you need the second act, to give the completion for all that the first act has introduced us to. And ultimately, it is a book like no other book, because it is a book about Jesus. If you lose your way around the Bible, always take your eyes back to Jesus.
Always look for Jesus, and it will gradually bring you back to an even keel. I've made almost a mantra here, or I have tried to, my own Sunday school instruction, so that you would have it as well if you didn't get it when you were small, that in the Old Testament Jesus is predicted, that in the Gospels he is revealed, that in the Acts of the apostles he is preached, that in the Epistles he is explained, and in the book of Revelation he is expected. And it is also a book like no other book inasmuch as it is a book that understands us. We're familiar with being given books all the way through school.
The teacher says, I want you to take this book and go home and read it and see if you can't understand it and write a paper on it. And of course, there is a real sense in which that's what we do with the Bible. We take it home, and we seek to understand it. But in seeking to understand it, we make this amazing discovery that it seems to understand us. That when you're reading its pages, sometimes you feel as though it's a description of you.
Sometimes you feel as though someone actually had looked inside your mind before you even read that section. You were feeling peculiarly downcast, and the Bible came and brought a word of encouragement. You were thinking of making a run for it, and you read a section in the Bible that said, you know, the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord. The man's heart devises his way, but the Lord directs his steps. And you put the Bible down at your table with your coffee, and you said, you know, this is not like any other book I know. This book apparently understands me. Well, that's the first question.
What is it? Second question is, who wrote it? Who wrote it? And the answer to that is that Scripture has a dual authorship.
A dual authorship. On the one hand, God wrote it. On the other hand, men wrote it. Or if you like, God spoke and men spoke. We read here in 2 Timothy 3 this great statement in verse 16, All Scripture is God-breathed. The word that Paul uses there is a unique word, but he's conveying a familiar idea—the idea of the breath of God expressing the power and authority of God. You find it not only in relationship to the Scriptures but also in relationship to his work of creation. In Psalm 33 and in verse 6, the psalmist says, By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, they are starry hosts by the breath of his mouth. Now, he's not saying two things there.
He's saying one thing. It's what we refer to as Hebrew parallelism. The Hebraic writer takes one truth and says it two different ways in order to reinforce it. I want you to notice, By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, by the breath of his mouth were the starry host was set in place. Now, it is this same notion which is then conveyed by Paul to Timothy. And what he's saying is that God breathed out the Scriptures—not in some strange way but in a very natural way, in the way in which you and I have made words this morning.
What has happened? How did you make intelligible sounds today? Presumably, you have made some intelligible sounds today, but you did so by the passage of air over your larynx, your voice box, resulting in intelligible communication. And what the Bible says is that God has breathed out the holy Scriptures, and it is this which provides Scripture with its reliability and with its authority—that God has spoken, revealing truth, and at the same time preserving the human authors from error, and doing so in such a way so as not to violate their personalities. So it's accurate then to say that God spoke but also that men spoke. And men spoke using their faculties freely and doing so without distorting the message.
Did you get those two points? That God uses human personality without violating it and keeping men from error, and men, using their own human faculties, write things down without distorting the message. Now, there's perhaps one classic reference to this. It's in 2 Peter 1, 21, and there, speaking of the work of God in Scripture, it says in verse 21, "…for prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." Now, the Greek word is an interesting word. It's ferumenoi.
I'm not sure that you're particularly interested in that, but it is. It is the word which means to be carried. The verb, it's in the present continuous tense, to be carried along. If you read in Acts chapter 27 for homework the story there of the shipwreck involving Paul and the others, you will discover that this same verb is used to describe what was happening to their vessel in the midst of the storm. And twice, in verse 15, and then again in verse 17, Luke records that as a result of the power of the storm, their vessel was simply driven along. It was driven along as a result of the influence and power of the wind.
That is exactly the picture, the metaphor, that is used here by Peter. He says that men were driven along. In other words, as they raised the sails, the Holy Spirit filled their sails. And the Scriptures did not originate in their will. It wasn't that one of them came down for breakfast and said, I think I'll write the Bible today. But they wrote to their issues, they wrote to their time, they wrote to their culture, and they were driven, they were moved by the Spirit of God. The process wasn't mechanical. They weren't like word processors, sitting, as it were, like inanimate objects, and then all of a sudden, something happening to them, zapping them, and they're like, and then all of a sudden it stops, and then that's Isaiah chapter 1, you know, and then, and then it does Isaiah chapter 2.
There is no sense in which this was a mechanical process. The individuals wrote according to their own personalities, according to their own styles, according to their own circumstances. Now, if you research—and you'll see that that's obvious—you take Amos. You read Amos. It's got a real edge to it, Amos.
You bald-headed rascals, he says, dark days and shaved heads, and I'm coming to get you, you know. Must have been an interesting character, Amos. And it's no surprise that he is the prophet of God's justice. But when you read Hosea, the story's much lighter, it's warmer, it's softer, it's more tender. No wonder, when you read the life story of Hosea, that he would be the prophet of God's love. Or Isaiah would be the one who spoke of the kingly sovereignty of God, and he will reign forever and ever, Isaiah standing over the panorama of time, looking forward and declaring God's kingly rule.
When you go into the New Testament, you find the same is true. Paul is the apostle of grace and faith. James, the apostle who addresses the issue of works. John, the apostle of love.
And Peter, not surprisingly, the one who concentrates so much on hope. So who wrote this Bible? Well, ultimately, God wrote the Bible. But men wrote the Bible.
B. B. Warfield, in a very helpful quote, says, if God wishes to give the people a series of letters like Paul's, he prepares a Paul to write them. And the Paul he brought to the task was a Paul who could spontaneously write such letters.
But here's the issue. The church did not write the Bible. The church did not write the Bible. Prophets and apostles wrote the Word to the people of God. And the reliability of what they wrote lies in the fact that behind them is the work of the Holy Spirit. And this is the reason why the church has no right to rewrite what God has written. The church has no right to rewrite what God has written.
You must always be careful of anybody telling you, Oh, no, but that doesn't matter now. You know, we have superseded that now. That was a long time ago. That was six hundred years BC. Or that was the first century. That's what they believed about women in the first century, but it's irrelevant in the twenty-first century. That's what they believed about human sexuality then.
But this is way different now. This is after the splitting of the atom and so on, as if somehow or another the Word of God that was given then is irrelevant now. Listen carefully. In the Scriptures, God was and is speaking to us. He was speaking, and he is speaking. If you want to listen to God, open your Bible. The safest way to hear God speak is to read your Bible and beware of every other notion about how you're going to hear from God. The mystical ideas that have come out of the dark centuries, understandably so, when they didn't have a Bible to guard them and to keep them.
They came up with all kinds of notions. The trivial ideas of contemporary modern writing, which seem to suggest that somehow or another we can hear from God absent what he has said in his Word. Again, Luther helps us. What more can he say than to you he has said, to you who to Jesus for refuge have fled? I warrant you that some of the craziest people you will ever meet are the people who have decided that the Bible is insufficient for them when it comes to hearing from God. And some of the bypass meadows of contemporary evangelicalism are directly related to a willingness to listen to books, no matter how influential the author may be, which suggests that the answer to your quest is to be found over here in a corner somewhere, listening for something, finding out where God is going, finding out what God is doing.
My dear friends, if you want to know where he's going and what he's doing, read your Bibles. You see why this is so important? And this, incidentally, is the importance of the sermon, is it not? Some of you are saying, Well, I'm sure you were building to this to justify your employment or something. I mean, you have to say that, don't you? I mean, why would we ever come?
I mean, we knew you were working. No, not at all. There is no… Who wants to come and listen to somebody pontificate? Somebody give you his ten cents' worth of information that he's gleaned, a few ideas, a couple of jokes, an illustration on how do you do? What's the point in that? I have no interest in that.
I have no interest in being a servant to that kind of objective. But to be made the vehicle of God's truth through the Bible, to be simply its servant, to be underneath it, to be holding it in one's hand, to be offering it afresh, that's something very different. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible so you have clarity about God's truth as he's given it to us in his Word. If you'd like to learn more about a specific topic or from a particular book of the Bible, visit our website or our mobile app and click on the Sermons tab.
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That's twenty four books in a year's time. Today we're recommending The Basics of the Christian Faith. This is a discipleship course. It's a companion study guide to our current series and it's designed to help you and a friend or a small group consider the foundational teaching of Christianity. The study guide is yours by request when you become a Truth Partner or when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. Thanks for studying God's Word with us this week. Hope you have a great weekend and are able to worship with your local church. On Monday we'll learn how to properly understand and interpret the Bible. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.
