The Bible: From God or From Man? (Rom. 3:1-2)

Romans 3:2 NKJV

Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God.

The Bible:

From God, Or From Man?

Rom. 3:1-2

In the third chapter of Romans, in what seems almost to be an incidental reference, the apostle uses a term for the Bible that ascribes to it the highest possible authority.

In the New International Version the term is rendered in English as “the very words” of God. The King James Version has the word oracles.

In Greek this important word is logia. It was the possession of these logia, or oracles, that constituted the chief advantage of a person’s having been born a Jew, according to Paul’s teaching.1

1 James Montgomery Boice, Romans: Justification by Faith, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991–), 273.

Last week we looked at these verses with an evangelistic tilt to the sermon. We mentioned the paralytic in John 9 and how he put himself in the right place to be seen by God.

This week lets look at it from an apologetic perspective. We are not apologizing for the bible, but we are going to defend it from theological liberalism. Apologetics is defending the gospel.

See 1 Peter 3:15.

ἀπολογία, ας, ἡ defense; as a legal technical term, a speech in defense of oneself reply, verbal defense (2T 4:16); as a religious technical term defense of the gospel message from false teaching (PH 1:7)1

1 Timothy Friberg, Barbara Friberg, and Neva F. Miller, Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, Baker’s Greek New Testament Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 69.

ORACLE

logion (λόγιον, 3051), a diminutive of logos, “a word, narrative, statement,” denotes “a divine response or utterance, an oracle”; it is used of (a) the contents of the Mosaic Law, Acts 7:38; (b) all the written utterances of God through OT writers, Rom. 3:2; (c) the substance of Christian doctrine, Heb. 5:12; (d) the utterances of God through Christian teachers, 1 Pet. 4:11.¶

Note: Divine “oracles” were given by means of the breastplate of the high priest, in connection with the service of the tabernacle, and the Sept. uses the associated word logeion in Exod. 28:15, to describe the breastplate.1

1 W. E. Vine, Merrill F. Unger, and William White Jr., Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1996), 449.

  God’s Word or Man’s Word

The fact that Paul calls this the first or chief advantage of the Jew is in itself reason to study this further—more than we were able to do in the last study.

But I return to this now because of its bearing on one of the most important matters dividing today’s church. The issue is the nature of the Bible.

What is the Bible? Is it a divine book or a human book? Is it supernatural or natural?

Is it something that is binding upon our minds and morals, or is it simply a collection of noble thoughts, which we may use or neglect according to our own perception of the issues?

Let me clarify this division by saying that there are really only three basic positions that a person can hold in regard to the Bible.

Either: (1) the Bible is the Word of God, which is what this important term of Paul affirms; or

(2) the Bible is a collection of the ideas and words of mere men; or

(3) the Bible is a combination of the two.

The first is the classic, evangelical doctrine. That is, it is the view that has been held throughout church history.

Thus, even when there were debates about the nature of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, justification by faith, and other theological issues, it was always the Bible to which those disagreeing on these matters appealed.

Even heretics regarded the Bible as the Word of God. They disagreed with what the church taught, thinking the church to be wrong in its interpretation.

They themselves had to be corrected in the course of things. But everyone understood that the Bible is God’s Word and is therefore entirely without error and authoritative in all it teaches.

It is only in recent years that this position has been questioned.

IRENAEUS Second-century ad church father and bishop of Lyons in Gaul. One of the foremost early Christian theologians. Defended the orthodoxy of Christian doctrine. who lived and wrote in Lyons, France, in the early years of the second century, said that we should be “most properly assured that the Scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and his Spirit.”

Martin Luther said, “Scripture, although also written of men, is not of men nor from men, but from God.”2

John Calvin wrote:

This is the principle that distinguishes our religion from all others, that we know that God has spoken to us and are fully convinced that the prophets did not speak of themselves, but, as organs of the Holy Spirit, uttered only that which they had been commissioned from heaven to declare.

All those who wish to profit from the Scriptures must first accept this as a settled principle, that the Law and the prophets are not teachings handled on at the pleasure of men or produced by men’s minds as their source, but they were move by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet. 1:21)

When we speak of the Bible as the Word of God, we do not deny that the message of the Bible is also expressed in human language, the point Luther was making in the words I quoted.

We must stress this, because some have fallen into thinking that the words of the Bible were made known to the human writers in a mechanical way so that they were mere scribes, thereby bypassing their own vocabularies and thought processes.

But, of course, this is not the evangelical view. Each of the writers I have quoted understood that.

When we speak of the classic church view—that the Bible is the very Word of God—we mean that by the process known as inspiration, which we freely admit we do not fully understand, God so guided the human authors that the result, in the whole and in the parts, is what God desired to be expressed.

The Bible is expressed in human words; but it is also the Word of God from beginning to end, and it is entirely truthful because God is truthful.

The second view, that the Bible is the words of mere men, is the view of liberalism and neoorthodoxy, though many of the neoorthodox theologians were willing to listen to the Bible carefully. Karl Barth is a chief example.

Neoorthodoxy held that God is so transcendent, so far above us, so separated from where we are, that he does not actually speak in human words but rather reveals himself in ways that we cannot even talk about.

So what we have in the Bible is men testifying in their own words to what they believed God said in this nonverbal fashion.

Of course, classic liberalism is a step below this. Liberalism sees the Bible only as a collection of human writings—

inspiring at times, perhaps even embodying the highest thoughts, ethics, and aspirations of the human race, but nevertheless only a human book and therefore without any absolute authority.

To the liberal, the Bible can, in principle, be rejected utterly.

The third position is the one the evangelical church is particularly wrestling with today.

It is the view that the Bible is the Word of God and the words of men combined—not in the sense that God has spoken infallibly through the human authors, the classic view, but in this sense:

When you read the Bible you find things there that have certainly come to us from God and are therefore truthful.

But we also have to admit (so the argument goes) that when we read the Bible we also find things that are not truthful, things we know to be in error.

Because we know that God does not speak that which is untruthful, these things must come from mere human beings, from human beings alone.

Therefore the Bible is a mixture of human words and divine words, and it is the task of scholarship to separate the two, extracting the kernels of divine truth from the human chaff.

Of course, what happens in this framework is that the scholar becomes God so far as the revelation is concerned.

That is, the scholar becomes the authority who tells us what is true and what is not true, what is of God and what is not of God, what we are to believe and what we are not to believe.

And the danger is that, because we are sinners (which includes the scholars who, perhaps at this point, are even greater sinners than the rest of us), we try to weed out the things we do not want to hear and so refashion the divine revelation to suit our own desires or notions.

Thus the powerful, reforming voice of God in the church is forgotten.1

1 James Montgomery Boice, Romans: Justification by Faith, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991–), 275–276.

  “The Oracles of God”

Romans 3:2 has bearing on this controversy, as I said. And the reason is that it uses a word for the Scriptures that identifies them in the whole and in their parts as God’s very words.

The term (logia) occurs in three other passages (Acts 7:38; Heb. 5:12, and 1 Peter 4:11), and in each case the word indicates that the Old Testament Scriptures, to which these New Testament verses refer, were regarded by the New Testament authors as “oracular.”

No one has written more effectively on the full authority of the Bible, nor has anyone more carefully analyzed these and other key terms, than Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, Professor of Didactic and Polemic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1887 to 1921.

During those years the full storm of German liberalism was breaking over the American churches, and Warfield set out to counter it academically, thereby producing a remarkable collection of carefully reasoned studies of the Bible’s words for itself and its teaching.

These have been brought together in a volume entitled The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, which is in my opinion still the most important single work on the nature and authority of the Bible in the English (and probably any) language.

In the chapter of this work dealing with the term logia, Warfield explores four separate bodies of literature.

First, he looks at the word in the classical Greek authors, that is, as it was used by such writers as Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, and others.

His conclusion is that: “In logion [the singular form of logia] we have a term expressive, in common usage at least, of the simple notion of divine revelation, an oracle.

This is the meaning of logion in the mass of profane Greek literature.”

Next Warfield examined the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made between 250 and 150 b.c., and found that in this translation logia was regularly used as a rendering of ʾmerah, which means “utterances,” particularly the utterances of God.

Third, Warfield examined the works of the Philo, the Hebrew-Christian philosopher of Alexandria. Philo used logia to express whatever in the highest sense was a word from God, that is, an oracle from heaven.

Moreover, he identified those words with what is recorded in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

Says Warfield, “To Philo all that is in Scripture is oracular, every passage is a logion, of whatever character or length;

The last body of material examined by Warfield was the writings of the early Christian fathers: Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Ignatius.

Here again he found usage consistent with what had gone before. Warfield then gives this summary of the use of logia and logion:

“No lower sense can be attached to it in these instances than which it bears uniformly in its classical and Hellenistic usage: it means, not “words” barely, simple “utterances,” but distinctively “oracular utterances,” divinely authoritative communications, before which men stand in awe and to which they bow in humility: and this high meaning is not merely implicit, but is explicit in the term. It would seem clear again that there are no implications of brevity in the term: it means not short, pithy, pregnant sayings, but high, authoritative, sacred utterances.… It characterizes the utterances to which it is applied as emanations from God.

Why is it that “believers grow and discipleship deepens” when the Bible is proclaimed as God’s inerrant revelation?

It is because of what God does through it. Let me list a few of the things God does.

1. Unsaved men and women are born again by the work of the Holy Spirit operating through the Bible.

That is why Peter tells Christians, “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:23),

Nothing else will save a lost sinner—not philosophy, not history, not science. Jesus says, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:6).

If we are to experience divine life, we must experience it in the only way it can come—through the Bible as the Holy Spirit works through it.

2. Christians are convicted of sin and enabled to turn from it by the power of the Holy Spirit

speaking through the Bible.

Paul speaks of this in 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

Scripture teaches us in a general way, of course. But it also rebukes our sin, corrects us, and then leads us in righteousness.

3. Christians are sanctified, or made holy, through the Bible.

Jesus spoke of this when he prayed to his Father in that great intercessory prayer for the church recorded in John 17: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth” (v. 17).

To be sanctified means to be “set apart” for God and his purposes; it is what every Christian should be. Jesus says that we attain this commitment or orientation by our study of and obedience to God’s Word.

4. Christians learn the will of God through the Bible, and it is through the Bible that they are

given wisdom to apply the details of Scripture to their daily lives.

The Bible does not give us magical instructions for making the many thousands of decisions we need to make in life. But it does give sound principles to guide us in our choices.

As we read and study the Bible, God speaks to us by means of these principles and leads us in the ways of truth and righteousness.

  This World’s Most Precious Possession

The end of this study is in the form of questions, and they are these:

When you hold a copy of the Word of God in your hands, do you recognize what the Bible truly is? Do you see it as God’s Book? Do you thank God for it?

Do you prize it above all earthly possessions? Do you make it your chief goal in life to know it and live by it?

Let me tell you what John Wesley, that great evangelist of the eighteenth century, wrote about the Bible:

I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God and returning to God, just hovering over the great gulf ’till, a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing—the way to heaven, how to land safe on that happy shore.

God himself has condescended to teach me the way. For this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it:

Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book]. Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone. Only God is here.

In his presence I open, I read his book—for this end, to find the way to heaven. Is there a doubt concerning the meaning of what I read? Does anything appear dark or intricate?

I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights: “Lord, is it not thy word, ‘If any man lacks wisdom, let him ask of God’? Thou hast said, ‘If any be willing to do thy will, he shall know.’ I am willing to do, let me know thy will.”

That should be the cry of your heart if you know the Bible to be what it truly is: “the very words of God.”

Only the Spirit of God working through that book, the Bible, will bring you to spiritual life and save your soul.

Only that book and the Spirit of God working through it will sanctify you, making you like Jesus.

Only that working will avert that great downward spiral of sin, both personal and cultural, which is described in Romans.