Sola Scriptura
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And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
The Protestant Reformation was a call for the church to return to the tenets upon which she was built. The Reformers felt that the church had drifted from the basic beliefs of the Bible and so had lost some very simple - yet very important - Biblical ideals.
The tenets the Reformers wanted a return to, are historically summarized by the “Five Solae of the Reformation”:
Sola Scriptura
Solus Christus
Sola Fide
Sola Gratia
Soli Deo Gloria
Scripture alone, Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, the glory of God alone.
But how can you have five principles that go together, and have each of them “alone”?
Well, each of the “alones” are a different alone. The Reformers believed that salvation was by grace alone, through faith alone; that that faith had to be in Christ alone, that this was according to Scripture alone, all for the glory of God alone.
The ultimate purpose of all of this was that last one - this is all for the glory of God alone, and no other reason.
But the ground of it all was Sola Scriptura - Scripture alone. That all the church was, all she believed, and all she did was according to the Bible alone.
At the core of the dispute, was that the Reformers felt the church had abandoned the Bible she is built upon. All the Reformers believed - about salvation and about Christ’s work - was rooted in the Bible, its authority, and its sufficiency.
I think the church at large today needs a return to this grounding principle.
Welcome
Continuing preaching through the statement of faith the elders have adopted
Last week, we started with what we believe about God. Because He is always the starting point. That’s why the Bible begins “in the beginning, God...” That’s why we have to begin with Him.
This week, we will consider how we know what we know about God. We know Who God is, because God has revealed Himself to us.
Just like, He was in the beginning, and the first thing He does is speak.
God speaks, brothers and sisters. He tells us about Himself.
Like, as we saw last week, He revealed Himself to Moses. He met Him where he was to communicate with Him and show Him His holiness and grace, to reveal Himself as multiple Persons in one Godhead, to show His great love, and all to reveal Himself as the one and only Savior.
Ultimately, God did that when He came as one of us.
He came to reveal Himself to men - He met us where we are by entering into time and into finitude and into suffering. And He showed us His holiness and His grace, He revealed Himself as Triune, He showed us His great love by going to the cross, and most of all, He revealed Himself to be the one and only Savior of the world.
All this was done in the person of Jesus Christ.
But God continues to reveal Himself. Through those who saw Christ - who spoke with Him, ate with Him, fellowshipped with Him, ministered with Him. God used those very people to reveal Him through the New Testament.
But He didn’t just leave it up to them, did He? No, He came and made His home within them by His Holy Spirit. He came and breathed out the words of Scripture, like He did with the Old Testament. He carried these men along so that they didn’t write according to their own will, but His perfect will.
It’s like I said last week: God is here. He is always right here.
And He is always right here, in the pages of the Bible. A perfect, divinely human collection of writings that reveal God as He is.
He continues to reveal Himself through His Word.
So today we will discuss what we believe about this revelation of God:
2. We believe that Almighty God has revealed all that is necessary to life and salvation in the sixty-six books of Holy Scripture, which are the Word of God. The Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, being God-breathed, are infallible and inerrant in all their parts and are, therefore, when rightly interpreted, trustworthy in all that they affirm concerning history, doctrine, ethics, religious practice, or any other topic. The authority of the Bible is derived from its Author and not from the opinions of men. While we believe in the ongoing power and ministry of the Holy Spirit in regenerating, equipping, illuminating, leading, and teaching God’s people, we also believe in the final authority and sufficiency of the Bible over all areas of faith and practice.
That’s a mouthful.
But there is really so much more that could be said about this precious book. As I said, this book is the reason we know all we do about God. This is how we know He is holy and eternal and dependent on none. It is how we know He is loving and faithful and merciful.
It is how we know God.
And I know what some of you are thinking. You want to know where the Holy Spirit comes in. You want to know where our relationship with God comes in. And what about prayer - where we speak to God?
Well, we’ll get to all that as we go through the full statement of faith. Because it all works together. But realize, we only know that these all work together because it’s revealed in the pages of Scripture. Otherwise, we couldn’t know.
This is the foundation of all we believe and all we know about God.
So let’s break this down a little. What are we saying with this statement about the Bible?
Well, first:
We believe that Almighty God has revealed all that is necessary to life and salvation
in the pages of the Bible.
Once again, we have to start with God. Because, remember, He has all the power. All of it. And that’s why, what we believe about the Bible is really a matter of what we believe about God.
To say that the Bible can’t be inspired or infallible or sufficient or authoritative is to say something about God.
That He is incapable of communicating what He wants to.
That He lacks the power to give to man an understandable revelation of Himself.
That He Himself is not perfect.
That He Himself is not sufficient.
That He doesn’t have ultimate authority.
If you say any of these things about the Bible, you are saying them about God.
It’s no surprise that a world that so desperately doesn’t want to believe there is a power higher than them or an authority higher than them, refuses to believe that the Bible has any power or any authority over them.
But it does. Because God does. And this is His Word. This is the Word of a God Whose Word is so powerful that He can say “let there be light” and there is light simply because He said it.
And if we believe that God does have that power, than we have to believe that His Word reveals exactly what God wants it to reveal, and that it reveals all that is necessary to life and salvation.
And this is important… let me switch the emphasis here: through the Bible, God reveals all that is necessary to life and salvation.
This is what the Bible claims to communicate. This is what God intended to communicate. All that is necessary to life and salvation.
Atheist Sam Harris has said that he can’t believe the Bible is actually from a transcendent being, because it isn’t helpful in any practical way. In particular, he talks about how it doesn’t talk about how to care for infectious disease. It doesn’t explain how to set up a successful human government.
To him, these are the important things.
And if you believe this world is all there is, I can understand that. But that’s really begging the question. Because that means you don’t believe in a transcendent being to begin with.
But that is a misunderstanding of the Bible at a very basic level. Because the reason God gave us the Bible is because there is more than this world. There is much more than what we see. There is more than physical health and more than human society.
There is a God that transcends these things, who offers life that transcends these things.
Ironic that atheists don’t believe there is a transcendent being, because that being doesn’t address enough of the earthly, isn’t it?
We need to take the Bible on its own terms. We can’t expect it to be something God doesn’t say it is.
It is not a scientific book. This is often a charge by unbelievers. That the Bible is scientifically inaccurate.
But, there are things we humans used to think we knew scientifically that we no longer believe is true, because new scientific research has disproven the conclusions we drew based on previous research.
And that’s how science works. That’s why science is so awesome. Because we are always learning more and more about God’s great creation. We are always fine tuning what we know about the world.
In other words: scientific knowledge changes. So God, in His infinite wisdom, did not try to communicate quantum physics to a society of people who believed the stars were gods and the sea was the gateway to hell.
No, what God communicated was what never changes. The way to life and salvation. These were the same at the Exodus as they are today as they will be in another 3,000 years should Christ wait to come back.
Once again, God reveals Himself in the Bible, and He never changes. And He is the way to life. He is the one and only Savior. And that will never change no matter how much better humanity gets at doing science, or medicine, or philosophy, or psychology.
All that to say, we need to understand the purpose of the Bible. It isn’t to teach us science. It isn’t to reveal the physical realities of the heavenly bodies. It isn’t to teach us how to eat right and exercise. It isn’t to teach us how to treat diseases of the body. It isn’t a handbook on running a human government.
It is to show us the way to life and salvation.
This is what the Word of God does. Because this is what it says it does.
The Bible says:
The Word which we received - in which we stand - is the word by which we are being saved if we hold fast to it.
The Word of God - when we obey it by putting away all wickedness and receiving it with meekness - this Word is implanted in us and is able to save our souls.
The Word - to those who are being saved - it is the very power of God.
This is what the Bible tells us about itself. We need to take it on its own terms.
And it is about life and salvation, because it is where we find Jesus Christ. The One Who has the words of eternal life. The One Who said that eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ Who He sent for us.
The One Who prayed for the ongoing salvation of those the Father gave Him by praying:
Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
This is why “we believe that Almighty God has revealed all that is necessary to life and salvation” in the pages of the Bible.
Because those pages reveal salvation in Christ.
All of those pages.
Because we believe, according to our statement:
that Almighty God has revealed all that is necessary to life and salvation in the sixty-six books of Holy Scripture, which are the Word of God. The Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments...
As Christ said to the Jews who confronted Him:
You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
Jesus said that all they needed for life and salvation is in the Scriptures, because they bear witness to Him. And the Scriptures He was talking about here, are the Old Testament Scriptures.
That’s why after He was resurrected and He walked with those two disciples on the road to Emmaus He begins with Moses and all the prophets to show them what the Scriptures say about Him.
And yet, so many modern Christians think of the Old Testament as just a very long forward to the Bible. You know, when you read a novel, you skip the forward. It’s written by someone other than the author of the book, and you know it’s going to talk about how good or valuable the book is.
That’s how many Christians see the Old Testament.
But it is one, unified whole, from Genesis to Revelation.
Please, I implore you, don’t exclude 2/3 of the Bible God gave us. The Old Testament is not a forward. It is not a prequel that you can take or leave.
Let me ask you a question, how many of you saw the last Lord of the Rings movie “Return of the King?” How many watched it without seeing the first two? How many of you have seen Return of the Jedi but not the first two Star Wars movies?
How many of you poor people have only seen the Godfather 3?
It doesn’t work when you omit the first 2/3 of the story. Because then you don’t get the story.
The whole Bible is the history of God’s redemption in Jesus Christ from the moment humanity fell into sin.
And it was written down for us. So that those on this side of the cross could know the fullness of God’s redemption.
Paul told the Romans:
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
Paul spoke of the history of Israel and told the Corinthians:
Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.
Some of the last words Paul wrote were this:
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
And the Scripture Paul was referring to was the Old Testament.
I am convinced that misunderstandings of the New Testament are mostly a result of not knowing the Old Testament. Because the writers of the New Testament were writing with the worldview the Old Testament establishes, and were basing their theology - even of the cross - on the theology established by the Old Testament.
The New Testament was written by the Old Testament community of believers.
Because Christ is the fulfillment of the promises of God. But those promises are contained in the Old Testament. You want a stronger faith, know what Christ came to fulfill.
You need to know all God has communicated to us.
Because we believe that:
The Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, being God-breathed, are infallible and inerrant in all their parts and are, therefore, when rightly interpreted, trustworthy in all that they affirm concerning history, doctrine, ethics, religious practice, or any other topic.
The Bible is infallible and inerrant. It cannot and does not contain mistakes. Why? Because God doesn’t make mistakes, and He cannot make mistakes and still be God.
But notice the explanation here.
The Bible is infallible and inerrant when rightly interpreted.
That means, interpretations of men can be wrong. If I interpret something one way, and you another, we can both be wrong, but we can’t both be right.
It also means, if you think you have found a mistake in the Bible - that you have found something false, contradictory, or mistaken - the problem isn’t the Bible, but your interpretation.
How can we be sure?
Because the Bible reveals God - not exhaustively, like I said last week - but God is able to reveal Himself so that we can know all those things about Him that we considered. And if He is all-knowing and never changes and has all the power, then He certainly can be trusted to communicate what He wants us to know without error.
So since, as we saw last week, God is trustworthy, so too, we believe the Bible is trustworthy.
But it is trustworthy - and this is important - in “all it affirms concerning history, doctrine, ethics, religious practice, or any other topics.”
But wait, didn’t you say God communicated what was necessary for life and salvation and we can’t expect the Bible to teach things like science?
Yes. Because the Bible doesn’t claim to teach science.
But the Bible itself claims to be recording history. A majority of the Bible is history.
It claims to be teaching doctrine, and ethics, and it claims to prescribe proper religious practice.
What the Bible intends to address, it does so infallibly and without error.
What it doesn’t claim to address, we need to be careful about, because the Bible uses allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, and a whole host of literary words I can’t pronounce.
It meets people where they are and communicated to them in ways they could understand at the time each writing.
It uses different genres and different authors, each who have different styles of writing.
It records lies, and sins, and false religious practices that occurred, though is does not prescribe them nor approve of them.
Take the Bible for what it claims to be.
And do not forget, just like we saw last week that the two tablets of the Law didn't fall from the sky, neither did the Bible. God used humans to write the Bible. It is a divinely human book.
Because God wanted to communicate to humans, in a human way, what He wanted to infallibly communicate about the transcendent.
So read history like history.
Read allegory like allegory.
Read poetry like poetry.
He used men to write these things so men could understand them.
As we heard Eliazer read earlier:
no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Men didn’t write according to their own will, but men did write. They wrote like men write, as the Spirit carried them along to write exactly according to the will of God.
And this is how we can know that the Scriptures are “infallible and inerrant in all their parts and are, therefore, when rightly interpreted, trustworthy in all that they affirm concerning history, doctrine, ethics, religious practice, or any other topic.”
Because:
The authority of the Bible is derived from its Author and not from the opinions of men.
The authority doesn’t come from the Apostles or the Prophets, but from the God Who commissioned them and carried them along as they wrote the Bible.
This is why in one of his earliest letters, Paul praises the Thessalonians for understanding this:
And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.
We saw last week - God has all the authority. That’s why the Bible has ultimate authority.
And it has ultimate authority, period, full stop. As I said a few weeks ago, forget the old adage: “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” No. As R.C. Sproul said, that middle part has nothing to do with it. The Bible says it, that settles it.
But as I said, the world doesn’t submit to the authority of the Bible. And we shouldn’t expect those of the world to.
God does. And everyone will have to answer for whether or not they submit to that authority.
Everyone.
That includes us, brothers and sister. We will have to answer one day for how we submit to the authority of the word.
Listen, I love theology. I love reading it. I love talking about it. I love debating it. And that’s all well and good.
But if I don’t love living it, then I am missing the entire point of it.
The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard tells the parable of the King’s Decree.
A King issues a decree. But instead of doing what the King says, his people begin to interpret it. One person publishes an interpretation. Then another person publishes a different one. Then another. Every day new interpretations are debated - some things people agree one, some they don’t: ‘I think this is what the King meant’; ‘I think that’; And so no-one acts so as to do what the King commands. And the decree itself is ignored.
We can’t let that happen to us.
It’s easy to talk about where we disagree. It’s even fun. So it’s easy to do what the people in the story did. We can get caught up endlessly debating the finer points of theology.
We can endlessly discuss some of the hard to understand passages in the Bible.
But just imagine: if every Christian just obeyed the clear teachings on life and salvation and doctrine and ethics and religious practice. Oh what power the church would have!! How bright our light would shine!
Don’t forget where we began last week.
God is:
truthful
trustworthy
righteous
holy
good
loving
merciful
long-suffering
gracious
But don’t forget that God is also sovereign. And He is all-powerful.
So what He clearly and inerrantly communicates, we have an obligation to believe. The whole world does.
And we who do believe have an obligation to mold our lives around His Word, and never the other way around.
That doesn’t mean this is a rulebook. That’s the opposite mistake: thinking that God is only interested in us checking the boxes on His holy to-do list and adhering to a set of rules.
This book is about life and salvation, not rules.
That’s why it all reveals Jesus Christ. So we could know God as the One Who came for us. As the One Who took on humanity and followed all the rules for us.
As the One Who stepped into our life - a life broken by sin. Where there is pain and suffering and physical and emotional brokenness.
And He took our pain. And He was broken in our place.
And He left us the perfect, infallible record of all He did. All He has done for His people since the dawn of time.
And He has called us - He has saved us - so we could live out the great salvation and the abundant life that is found in the pages of the Bible.
So we could live for the One Who died for us.
So we could find the blessing of living under the authority of the Author of life and salvation.
Now that is contrary from the world. That is contrary from everything we hear from the world. But it’s what we find in the Bible.
We need to find it in our churches.
We live in a culture where everyone has their say, where I can press the interactive buttons and register my view on television, where I can set up a blog and proclaim my views on anything and everything to the world, where the most friendly thing [the church] can say in welcoming newcomers is, ‘We want to know what you think.’ But—dare I say it—God does not want to know what we think. He wants us to know what he thinks.
Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching
And He has told us. Will we live like we believe that?
Again, taking all we’ve said already about the Bible - how it is from the all-powerful God so we could know His salvation and the life He offers, how it is inerrant and infallible in all it asserts about anything it claims to assert, how the One Who gave it to us has ultimate authority...
...the rest of the statement follows perfectly:
While we believe in the ongoing power and ministry of the Holy Spirit in regenerating, equipping, illuminating, leading, and teaching God’s people, we also believe in the final authority and sufficiency of the Bible over all areas of faith and practice.
How good is God that He has the authority to tell us how to live, then dies for us so we could know how to live, and yet still dwells within us to help us live that way?
How good is He that He does the work of regenerating us - of making us into new creatures who both want to and are able to live for Him?
How good is He that He gives us gifts to use for Him and the power to use those gifts - that He gives us commands and then gives us everything we need to obey them?
That just as He carried along the writers of Scripture to reveal exactly what He wanted to reveal by giving them the Holy Spirit, He gives us the same Spirit to open our minds and hearts to what He Himself communicated?
That God Himself leads us into holiness and obedience and understanding?
God is good!
But He doesn’t leave this to each of us to figure out. He doesn’t make recognizing the work the Holy Spirit does in us a fine art.
Did you ever hear the old saying “I can’t define art but I know it when I see it?”
God doesn’t intend for the work of the Holy Spirit to fall under that category.
The Holy Spirit’s work is clearly defined in the pages of Scripture.
He will give us understanding of the Bible.
He will bear witness to us - not of Himself - but of Christ.
He will lead us into holiness.
He will gift and empower us to serve - to be the church.
He will preserve us unto the day of our final salvation.
And He will do this all according to what is clearly communicated in the Bible.
The Holy Spirit will never lead you contrary to Scriptures He inspired. He will only ever lead you according to them.
As I often say: If you want to hear the Holy Spirit speak, read the Bible out loud.
Because the Bible - not any internal impressions of what the Holy Spirit might want, not the strange circumstances that might lead us in a certain direction, not that thing my friend said that I was kinda already thinking and so it must be of the Spirit - the Bible has the final authority over how we live.
And it is sufficient to be final word in all areas of faith and practice.
It is sufficient to lead the church in these things.
Because if you have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
The church is built on the Apostles and Prophets - on the Bible.
The cornerstone is the One Who the Bible reveals - Jesus Christ.
And when we rest on our foundation and our cornerstone, then the Spirit is with us. And we will be built up by Him, more and more into His dwelling place as we grow in holiness and as souls are saved into the holy household of God.
We are the Temple of God - all of us together.
All according to the Bible which is sufficient for these things.
But we ourselves are the Temple of God - each of us.
The Spirit dwells in each of us to do all those things the Bible says He does.
Which means, the Spirit will only lead you according to the Bible. If you want to be “in the Spirit” - be in the Word and be molded to it.
Be in the Word and let the Spirit grow your faith through it.
Because faith and practice… go together.
This comes down to how much we believe what the Bible reveals.
This comes down to faith.
Not only what we believe. It is that, but really, when it comes to the essentials, we all believe the same things or we would not be Christians.
So this also comes down to how much we believe it.
Do we believe it enough to live it? Are we believing it enough, so that we are living it?
Because, brothers and sisters:
we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
We have the Word. We need to heed this all-sufficient, all-authoritative, perfect and infallible Word of God.
Then our lights will shine into the darkness that souls would be saved.
Then we will be preserved until the day of Christ’s return.
And we can know this because this Word comes from an all-sufficient, all-authoritative, perfect and infallible God Who wants us to know Him.
A God Who will complete what He has begun in us. Who has promised that He will.
A God that can be found in the pages of the Scriptures He has given to us.
A God Who gave Himself for us, that we might give ourselves to Him.
And we do that, by knowing what He has said.
By believing what He has said.
And by living what He has said.
We believe that Almighty God has revealed all that is necessary to life and salvation in the sixty-six books of Holy Scripture, which are the Word of God. The Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments, being God-breathed, are infallible and inerrant in all their parts and are, therefore, when rightly interpreted, trustworthy in all that they affirm concerning history, doctrine, ethics, religious practice, or any other topic. The authority of the Bible is derived from its Author and not from the opinions of men. While we believe in the ongoing power and ministry of the Holy Spirit in regenerating, equipping, illuminating, leading, and teaching God’s people, we also believe in the final authority and sufficiency of the Bible over all areas of faith and practice.
Let us end by praying the final stanza of Psalm 119 together:
Let my cry come before you, O Lord; give me understanding according to your word! Let my plea come before you; deliver me according to your word. My lips will pour forth praise, for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right. Let your hand be ready to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight. Let my soul live and praise you, and let your rules help me. I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.
