2024 Baptist Faith and Message Series

The Baptist Faith and Message

I. We are people of the Book. We believe that the Bible is the Word of God. We believe the Scriptures.

“The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.

Scripture to Memorize:

“All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every goo work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

God’s Revelation

Two Kinds of Revelation: General and Special Revelation

General or Natural: God makes Himself (His Nature and Purpose) known through nature and history. Creation points to the Creator. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of His hands.” (Psalm 19:1) The conscience bears witness; the Moral Law bears witness (Romans 1).

Special: God makes His Nature and Purpose known in and through the written Word (Bible) and His Only Begotten Son.

Written Special Revelation: We are talking about 66 books divided into the Old and New Testaments. The Bible is God’s Revelation of Himself to humanity, and God is rightly known as the Author of all Scripture.

1. “Written by men, inspired by God.” What does this mean? We are not saying that people were inspired in the same way as William Shakespeare was inspired or that artists are inspired to paint.

a. What is not meant: God did not inspire the ideas in the Bible. God did not just simply inspire the author’s ideas. God did not turn the authors into robots so that they could not use human expression.

b. Human expression/types of literature/genre – Human language, using hyperbole, written in historical form, poetry, song; there is wisdom literature, prayers, parables, letters, and apocalyptic literature (Revelation, etc). All of these are found in the Bible and the expressions, types of literature, or genre must be understood in context.

2. What is meant by “inspired?” The Biblical word is “God-Breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). The Holy Spirit breathed out this revelation through human authors divinely chosen for the task of writing it out. The Spirit worked in and through them without mixing error with truth.

a. No prophecy ever came by the will of man; instead, moved by the Holy Spirit, men spoke from God (2 Peter 1:21). Whatever was written was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope (Romans 15:4). Faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). My words will not pass away (Matthew 24:35). The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword… (Hebrews 4:12-14). Man will not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35).

3. The Bible is what the Christian uses to live by. The Bible is faithful, trustworthy, and true. The Bible is inerrant, infallible, and it is sufficient for the Christian to be saved and to live a life of faithfulness to God. We walk by it, live by it, and one day we will die by it. Our assurance and confidence comes from through the Word alone.

*What does inerrant mean? There are no errors in Scripture. The historical statement is that Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to the fact. The Bible always tells the truth. The Bible does not tell us every fact there is to know, but what it does say about any subject is true.

a. The Bible student studies the original languages, in the context in which it was written in, using good methods of interpretation in order to understand what God is saying through the text of Scripture. We as students may get the interpretation wrong, but the Scripture will remain to be true.

*What does infallible mean? The Bible will not fail because God will not fail. We can trust that the Bible will always accomplish God’s purposes. It is the strongest weapon in the hands of a believer. Human wisdom will fail, as will human witnesses. Times will change. God’s Word will never fail and will never change.

*What does sufficient mean? We are not to add or take away from the Bible. Our minds are to be captive to the Word of God, deciding all issues from biblical wisdom. Scripture contains all we need for salvation, for trusting Him perfectly, and for obeying Him perfectly.

Quote: “If you read the Old Testament, you will find phrases like ‘the Word of the Lord’ or the ‘Word of God’ used over 3,000 times, If the Bible is not the Word of God, it is the biggest bundle of lies that has ever come to planet Earth.” – Adrian Rogers

a. The Christian loves the Word of God and demonstrates love by studying it and obeying it, because the Christian loves the Person Who gave it.

*Main Purposes of Scripture: To point us to Jesus Christ. To show us how to be saved. To teach us, rebuke us, correct us, train us in righteousness, and equip us for every good work.

How did we get the Bible?

1. Big Answer: God ordained it. God preserved His Word.

2. How did God go about it using people? God’s people wrote down what God said and what God did. Scribes copied it and passed it down. The people of God acknowledged that certain texts were Holy Scripture, without creating or mandating them. The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and the New Testament was originally written in Greek. Both were copied and translated by faithful scribes, preserving the inspired text for us today.

a. The original manuscripts and their languages: The original languages of the original manuscripts are Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. We do not have the original manuscripts that were written by the original authors.

b. What do we have? Thousands of manuscripts that have been copied since the originals, and the earliest of these copies can be found within a few decades of the originals.

c. Textual Criticism is used as students look at these copies. Simply stated, textual criticism is a method used to determine what the original manuscripts of the Bible said. What we have is tens of thousands of copies of the original manuscripts dating from the 1st to the 15th centuries A.D. (for the New Testament) and dating from the 4th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. (for the Old Testament). In these manuscripts, there are many minor and a few significant differences. Textual criticism is the study of these manuscripts in an attempt to determine what the original reading actually was.

- The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian.

The Old Testament:

The Old Testament is a combination of historical books, prophetic writings, and poetry, centered on ancient Israel. The Pentateuch, starting with the book of Genesis, was initially written sometime between the 15th and the 13th centuries BC. The book of Malachi was written in the 5th century, marking the close of the Old Testament period. The rest of the Old Testament was developed between the Pentateuch and the book of Malachi, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The Old Testament was canonized before Christ was born. The “canon” of Scripture is the list of all the books that belong in the Bible. The Apocrypha has never been called Scripture, even though it was included within a section of the Bible for many years and it was possibly seen as helpful or useful, but it was never on the same level as Scripture. The Jews never accepted the Apocrypha as Scripture. However, the Roman Catholic Church declared the Apocrypha to be part of the canon at the Council of Trent in 1546. The protestants began taking the Apocrypha out of Bibles in the 1800’s.

The Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals were written primarily in the time between the Old and New Testaments. The books of the Apocrypha include 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, Prayer of Manasseh, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees, as well as additions to the books of Esther and Daniel. Not all of these books are included in Catholic Bibles.

The New Testament:

In the early years of the Christian church, the apostles, living witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection and bearers of divine authority, traveled among the churches, teaching and exhorting Christ’s followers to live consistently with their faith (Acts 1:21–22). As the church expanded, the apostles began to write letters to the churches, which carried the same authority as their spoken word. These letters were read aloud and circulated among the churches, so that everyone could benefit from the apostolic teaching. Early on, some people within the apostolic community recorded the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, writings that became the four Gospels we have today. Near the end of the first century, the apostle John received a revelation from Jesus Christ, which he recorded in a massive letter to seven churches. This work, known today as Revelation, marked the end of the apostolic era and the close of the New Testament canon.

*Canon – “To set a standard.” Those apostolic writings, which make up the New Testament, are by far the earliest Christian documents in existence, dating from about 50 to 70 AD, with John’s works a bit later, from the 80s and 90s AD.

Apostolic authorship. Jesus commissioned his apostles to testify about his life, teaching, death and resurrection. Alongside the Old Testament, the teaching and writing of the apostles was foundational to the creation of the church and the spread of the Gospel. Paul described the church as “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20). To qualify as Scripture, a document had to be written by an apostle or a close associate who received his teaching directly from an apostle.

- The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian.

*Now we can look at all of these manuscripts, look at the oldest, and the majority… and compare. What do we see? We see the authoritative, inerrant, infallible, and sufficient Word of God. There is nothing else like it on the planet.

*God preserved His Word in this way.

About two thousand years ago, Paul told Timothy that the “Holy Scriptures” were “able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 3:14–15). Those same Scriptures are available to you today. Pick up a good translation in your native language, in a language you can understand, and start reading it!

Christians, Baptists, live by the Word of God. This is what we do, because this is what we believe.