God hasn’t left us alone! He loves us massively and has given us His Word – the Bible – as our companion and guide to how the world works, what He wants, how He’s designed us to live. ‘People do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God!’ (Matthew 4:4).
STARTER: But when someone asks why you trust the Bible anyway, what do you say?
The first thing to grasp is that the Bible is high explosive! Jesus said `The words I have given you are Spirit and they are life!` (John 6:63). Not just information – they are the presence of God, and the life of God! Feeding on God’s Word the Bible gives us —
• `Roots` for a radical discipleship, amid the unbelievably powerful brainwashing we face. Will you be a disciple in 20 years time? Feeding on God’s Word is vital if you want to be! (Read Psalm 1:1-4.)
• Vision that releases our potential, enabling us to be God’s prophets in the world. Look at how God prepares Isaiah and Moses to be His prophets with the vision of His glory in Isaiah 6 and Exodus 3. The prime place where He gives us that vision is the Bible; and, if we’re feeding on it, people will sense that as His messengers we’re talking about a God we know!
• Power within us that transcends this world’s decay (read 1 Peter 1:23-25).
• Above all, a growing relationship with God who loves us and therefore wants to be with us (read Mark 3:14). Imagine you had the wonderful chance each morning to meet with and hear from the person you most deeply respect. With your Bible, you can – the trustworthy Word and embodied presence of the eternal God himself!
But then the obvious question is: How do we know it really is God’s 100% trustworthy Word?
Because we have videos of Jesus teaching it, or of the miracles it describes? No.
Because the latest three TV documentaries were in our favour? No. That would be surprising – there’s a spiritual war on, and Jesus warned us not to expect the `world` to like us or share our beliefs (read John 15:18-20). Sometimes the balance of academic fashion swings towards us, sometimes away from us; we can’t ground our faith on where that fashion stands at this particular moment.
Because, despite all the enmity it’s faced through history, no one’s been able to prove a genuine, definite biblical contradiction? That’s very striking too, but it’s not the main thing.
(But by the way if there are any such things that are really bothering you, drop me a message – we have lots of resources on those issues here.)
Or is it because we see the wonderfully accurate way Scripture has prophesied future events? That’s indeed very significant, but it’s still not the main reason.
We have joyful faith in the Bible above all because we’ve come to see that Jesus is God. (And we don’t need to believe first that the Bible’s 100% reliable [although obviously I do!!] to come to that as the only logical, historical, scientific conclusion.) But once God shows us that Jesus is God, and we become His disciples, then it becomes our passion to live seeing things as He does. And that decides our view of the Bible…
WHAT JESUS AFFIRMED ABOUT SCRIPTURE
What then of the Bible? As we read it we see that, if the gospels are even vaguely reliable, Jesus clearly treated Scripture as absolutely trustworthy and authoritative. So therefore must we!
It’s very striking. Jesus overthrew many things in human religion. In the Sermon on the Mount He drastically restates the Jewish religious traditions (look at Matthew 5:21-39); He rewrites the Pharisees’ sabbath regulations, He blasts the religious authorities. Messiah, God come to earth, He’s unafraid to challenge anything in human religion – but one thing He never challenges, the Scriptures. Our Master challenges much else, but He totally affirms the Bible:
• Bible ethics (read Matthew 5:18-19)
• Bible prophecies (read Matthew 26:52-54, Luke 22:36-37, 24:25-27,44). For Him these prophecies aren’t products of a bygone culture that might be mistaken. He’s God come to earth, but Bible prophecy determines what He does; for Him it’s 100% trustworthy.
• Bible history – even (deliberately?) the `embarrassing` bits!: Noah, Abel, Jonah, Sodom (read Matthew 24:37, 23:35, 12:40, 11:23-24). And look how He quotes the words of Genesis as the words of God Himself in Matthew 19:5; for Jesus, what Scripture says, God has said!
And over and over again in debate He points to the Scriptures as the final authority: `Have you not read…?’ (Matthew 12:3,5; 19:4-6; 21:16,42; Mark 12:24-27). For Him they are 100% true, authoritative, inspired: `The Scripture cannot be broken` (John 10:35)!
So because we follow Jesus, we live by the Bible like He did. No doubt Jesus saw, as we do, that as the Word of God it was written by humans, but they wrote as they were fully inspired by the Spirit of God. Different Bible writers wrote with different personalities – Amos is obviously very different from David, and David from Moses – but each was led by the Spirit to produce something 100% trustworthy. And Jesus promised very clearly that after His resurrection God the Holy Spirit would work through His disciples to give us a new testament ensuring we knew what He said, how He wanted us to live, and much, much more (`all truth`: John 15:26, 16:13).
To Jesus, then, the teaching of the Scriptures was 100% the Word of the living God. To Him, what Scripture says, God says, 100%. If we are truly His disciples, we can’t take a lesser view; that has to be the foundational commitment of our own lives too!
QUESTION THEN: WHY IS THIS SO LIFEGIVING?
We can’t overstate the goodness that comes into our lives from this conviction.
• We’re confident that our feet are now on solid rock
• We know we’re feeding confidently on `Spirit and life` (read John 6:63)
• We know the gospel we preach and depend on really does save people (and ourselves) from hell; it’s not just our own opinion
• We know when we’re called to radical, distinctive lifestyle, that it’s not just based on our own or the church’s or a bygone culture’s hunches, but it’s a calling from heaven!
But there’s a war on about all this, and we’ve got to be committed in our deepest hearts to Jesus’ loyalty to the Bible if we want to grow. Sometimes parts of the church get blown off course. It happened here in the late 19th century, and Britain paid a huge price. It could well be happening again widely now. So we’ve got to be clear! This is why we’re `evangelical`. To be an `evangelical Christian` is ultimately to be committed to correcting our current opinions by the Bible, God’s trustworthy Word, whenever necessary. (In contrast, a `liberal` is someone who makes the opposite choice: someone willing to correct the Bible by our current thought-fashions.) It’s also why it’s wise to ensure that, every year or so, every teacher or leader in our church reaffirms a statement of faith wholeheartedly upholding Scripture’s full reliability and supreme authority, like Jesus did. Titus 1:9 tells us that an elder must `hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it…`
`Everyone who hears these words of Mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock` (Jesus’ words in Matt 7:24-25).
ABSORB TIME: Consider prayerfully how well you know the Bible, and how much you feed on it and also put it into practice. You’re following Jesus; does this mean there needs to be a change? If so, plan specifically what you’ll do, starting straightaway, and bring it now to God in prayer for His empowering!
