Doctrine of Scripture
Selected Scriptures
This series, I think, is going to be very helpful. There are certain categories of theology, certain categories into which the truth of the Bible can be divided. All of the truth of Scripture can fit into about ten categories. And you'll be learning those categories and following through this series I trust really be able to study your Bible with a greater amount of effectiveness as you understand where things fit. In fact, one of the most helpful things you can do as a student of Scripture is that when you learn a truth, identify it in a category. If you have a notebook as you go through this series with us, you might begin to identify these categories, bibliology, theology proper--which is the study of God, hamartiology--the study of sin, anthropology--the study of man, soteriology--the study of salvation, ecclesiology--the church, angelology--the angels, eschatology--the last things, and so forth.
But as you go through all of these various doctrines, as you study the Word of God, fit the scriptures that you're learning and the principles you're learning into the theological categories and it will help you really systematize the truth that you're learning in your study of the Word of God.
What I'm going to do tonight is not preach a sermon at you but this is going to be a lot like a classroom in a Bible college or a seminary, so hang in there. But I want to share with you on the doctrine of Scripture.
And just to call your attention to two passages to begin with and you want to write these down because these are the key passages in the Bible on this subject. Second Timothy 2..well, let me give you three scriptures...2 Timothy 2 verse 15 is the first one that I would point to you. "Study or be diligent to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth." Now there's a very important statement about Scripture, it is called...what?...the Word of...what?...truth...the Word of truth. It is the Word of God but it's called in that verse the Word of truth.
Now what does that say about it? It says it's...what?...good, class. It's true. And that is the basic substance of what bibliology sets out to prove...that the Bible is true. And believe it or not, for some people it is the word of doubt or the word of confusion or the word of semi-truth or the word of experience. But for us it is the word of truth. And that is a great title for it.
And you might compare with that another scripture, John 17:17...John 17:17. Does anybody know what that says? Thy Word is...what?...what does that tell us about the Bible?...good, you're getting it, that's terrific. The Bible is true. And that's very very basic and very essential to our view of holy Scripture, it is the truth.
Now I want to call your attention to another passage of Scripture, 2 Timothy 3:16, going forward. And it says here, and this is why the Bible is true, 2 Timothy 3:16, "All Scripture is God breathed," pasa graphe theopneustos in Greek, all writing, God breathed...all Scripture is breathed out by God and thus is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness.
So, Paul says that this is the Word of truth. Jesus said it is the Word of truth. And then Paul tells us that the reason it is true is because it is...what?...God breathed. Now that is the priority claim that the Bible makes for itself. It is true and it is God breathed.
Just to identify one other essential passage on this subject that you'd want to have in your preliminary thinking, in that 2 Peter. And it says in verse 20 that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private origin, that's really what it means rather than interpretation. Scripture is not from private origin and that is it isn't the result of some individual dreaming it up or postulating it or whatever. So 2 Peter says that Scripture does not come out of a private origination.
Verse 21, "For the prophecy...that's speaking of that which came forth, that which came out of God's mouth...came not at any time by the will of man." So the Scripture is true, it is true because God breathed it, it did not come from any private origination, it did not come at any time by the will of man, "But holy men of God spoke as they were moved along by the Holy Spirit." It's the word used for a ship moved along with the wind in the water. As they were moved along by the Holy Spirit. Now that basically gives you a summation of the basic biblical doctrine of inspiration. It is true, it is true because God breathed it and He breathed it into men who were moved along by the Holy Spirit to write the very breath of God, not something of their own origination.
Now let me give you a basic definition of the doctrine of biblical authority or inspiration. Just listen to it and then if you want to jot it down I'll repeat it again. Here is how we can sum up the basic doctrine. God superintending human authors so that using their own individual personalities, experiences, thought processes and vocabulary they composed and recorded without error His revelation in the original copies of Scripture. Now I'm going to say that again cause I didn't think you got it all. Okay? Now think it through. God superintending human authors so that using their own individual personalities, experiences, thought processes and vocabulary they composed and recorded without error His revelation in the original copies of Scripture.
Now what that is saying is very simple. God spoke through men without violating their own thought processes and their own vocabulary and yet they were able to produce the Scripture without violating His truth. Now there is a good analogy of this to help you understand it. How could God use human agents without getting a corrupt product? Right? Some people say, "Well, He'd have to dictate it." In other words, He dictated every single word to those guys and they wrote down the dictation. But that does not account for the distinctiveness of the books because each book say Paul or Peter or John or you go to the Old Testament, any writer in the Old Testament, the books carries distinctiveness. They talk about their own experience. They talk even about their own feeling. They use their own vocabulary. If you read say Amos the herdsman of Tekoa, you get a whole different flavor in the writing. You get the flavor of one who is a man of the earth. Whereas if you read the writer of the book of Hebrews you get this very erudite religious highly intense ceremonial sort of sacerdotal approach. If you read Paul, you get a very logical flow. Whereas if you read Peter you get a very impassioned appeal.
And so you see the personality there but if it isn't dictation, how then can God use these human authors without adulterating His Word. And the perfect analogy to that is the virgin birth because in the virgin birth you have God and God is the agency by which the Lord Jesus Christ is born, right? But God brought Christ to earth through Mary, right? Was Mary a sinner? Of course she was a sinner. And yet she gave birth to the Son of God and none of her sinfulness tainted Him whatsoever. And yet He was her child, right? She carried Him in her womb for ninth months, she gave birth to that child. He was in human terms the flesh of Mary. And so you have that as an analogy to the Scripture, whereas God plants the seed in Mary and Mary fully womaned gives birth to that child, fully her child, that child yet is not touched with any of the sinfulness or frailty of Mary...and so the Word of God. God using a human author produces a perfect Scripture untainted by the human instrument He uses, see. And that's basically what we believe to be true about Scripture. And that is in the case of its original copies. Through the years as has been copied and recopied and recopied and recopied and so forth, we know where the copyists have brought into the situation certain errors. Those, by the way, are obvious because of the other utter divine character of Scripture we can pinpoint for the most part where men have wrongly written a word or something like that. So we know that the original autographs were inspired by God.
Let me just add as a footnote to that that God has also marvelously preserved the Scripture with very few errors. But like anything else that man uses, it will bear the mark of man eventually. And yet it's maintained its purity. And one of the great proofs of that was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which dated from before the time of Christ and show that the existing Bibles that we have today have not changed at all since then. So God has truly superintended His Word.
Now let me just give you three things, three terms to keep in mind whenever you look at Scripture. One is revelation, the other is inspiration, and the other is illumination. And I don't want to get too bogged down in all of this but I would like to give you those terms.
The first term is revelation. That is the body of truth that God wants to communicate. That's the message. That is God's truth that He desires to communicate. The second word is inspiration, that is the method by which He communicates it. You got that? The third is illumination and that is the method by which you understand it. So God has a body of truth, that's His revelation, the revealing of Himself, that's the message. Inspiration is how He communicates it. He breathes it out through human authors. Illumination is how you understand it. And whom do you depend upon in illumination? The Holy Spirit...the Holy Spirit. And who is the agent by which inspiration took place? The Holy Spirit. So uniquely the Holy Spirit is the agent in the revelation being transmitted to us and illumined to us as we study Scripture.
Now those are just some basic thoughts as we get started. The Word is true. It is true because it is breathed out from God and it is not of any private origin, it is not a result of the will of man. That's basic. It is God superintending human authors so that using their own individual personalities, experiences, thought processes and vocabulary they compose and recorded without error His revelation in the original copies of Scripture. Revelation is the body of truth, inspiration is the process by which its communicated and illumination is the manner in which we understand it.
Now it's important at the beginning of any study of theology to start with the Bible because if you don't have the Bible you don't have anything else, right? If you deny the truth of the Bible, what do you have left? Absolutely nothing. And there are always people who come along and say, "Well, part of the Bible isn't true." The current fad is to say that the Bible is true when it speaks on spiritual issues, but not true when it speaks on historical or geographical issues...which I have a problem with basically because why should we believe the Bible to be true when we can't verify it in the spiritual dimension if it isn't true where we can verify it in the geographical/historical dimension? And why should we argue that way when it has been verified historically and geographically and in every other way anyway? And we'll see that in a minute.
All right, I want to basically share with you several points. Point number one, that was just kind of an introduction, number one, the claims of Scripture...the claims of Scripture. Now if we're going to understand the Bible to be the Word of God, how we going to do that? First of all, we're going to have to hear what it says about itself. Does it make that claim? You know, there are Jehovah's Witnesses who have said for years, along with others, that Jesus never claimed to be God. They say that, that He did not claim to be God. And there are those who would say that the Scripture does not make a legitimate claim to be God's inerrant Word, that that's pushing the point too far. Well, let's find out.
Here's what the Bible claims. First of all, it claims to be infallible. And that's another word you might want to write down, infallible. What does that mean? Makes no mistakes, right? Errorless. Let's call it...let's say it's errorless in total. Infallible speaks of the total. And there are many passages that refer to this. For example, "Thy Word is very pure. Thy law is truth. All Thy commandments are truth. The sum of Thy Word is truth." And that's a marked one. The sum of Thy Word is truth. The total of it. "And every one of the righteous ordinances endures forever for all of Thy commandments are righteous." Now that's just out of Psalm 19, Psalm 119. There's one key verse in Psalm 19:7 and it sums it up and says this, "The law of the Lord is...what?...perfect...perfect." And the law being a term for the total of God's self-disclosure and revelation.
Paul in Romans 7 verse 12 says, "The law is holy, righteous and good." And again a sweeping statement of the infallibility of Scripture. In Matthew chapter 5 verses 18 and 19, verse 17 Jesus said He came to fulfill the whole law and He said there wouldn't be one part of the law altered at all, till all was fulfilled. And in John 10:35 He says the Scripture can't be broken. So...and that's a sample of literally myriads of verses that make the same claim. The Bible says it is infallible. That is what it claims.
Secondly, it claims to be inerrant. And if infallible speaks of the totality, inerrant speaks of the parts. It is infallible as the old reformers used to say as a rule of faith and practice. It is also inerrant in every several part so that it is not only, watch now, infallible in the truth it conveys, but is inerrant in every word. And that means it is without error.
Proverbs 30 verse 5 says, "Every word of God is flawless." Now you can't get much more specific than that. Every word of God is flawless. Back in 1978 in October I had the privilege of being on the committee of what was known as the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. Some of you may know about them because in March...is it March?...yes...May? or March?...March they're going to be having a congress in San Diego and it's going to be a monumental event, part of a ten-year plan to bring the church across America and around the world to the awakening of the fact that the scriptures are authoritative, infallible and inerrant. And they're bringing in devout inerrantists and those who hold to the truthfulness of Scripture to that conference. And that really is the result of the congress we had in 1978 in Chicago in which a statement was made by these great men basically affirming the inerrancy of Scripture. And one part of that particular statement that we drafted at that summit says this, "Infallible signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being mislead and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that holy Scripture is a sure, safe and reliable rule and guide in all matters. Similarly, inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and safeguards the truth that holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions."
That's hard sometimes to distinguish those two terms. But one means it's a reliable guide and the other says that's because every word is true. So in totality it can be trusted because every individual part is utterly true. And we could take those two words, infallible and inerrant, and sum them up into one word, true. It's true. That's simply it.
Now why is it true? Because it is breathed out by God. And the Bible says that God cannot...what?...lie. If Scripture emphasizes anything, it emphasizes the truthfulness of God. And the reason I emphasize this to you is because it is behind the truthfulness of Scripture. And if you let go of the truthfulness of Scripture, you have abandoned the truthfulness of God. You say, "Oh no, no, God could still be true but man could corrupt His truthfulness." All right, then you've got an impotent God who can't communicate a true message through a human instrument. So you either come up with God as not true or as impotent. And is either of those the case? Of course not. You've altered God.
The third claim the Bible makes for itself, and I think this an important one, is that it is authoritative...that it is authoritative. And by that we simply mean that the Bible affirms that it is to be heard. And Isaiah says, "Hear O heavens and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken." It's like that commercial, when God speaks, everybody listens. It is authoritative. And it makes that claim for itself. In fact, in Revelation 19:9 it says, "These are the true sayings of God." And in Revelation 21:5, "These words are true and faithful." They reflect again that truthfulness of God and they are authoritative. If it is infallible, if it is inerrant, then it must be authoritative.
So many times, you know, you read in the New Testament, "The Spirit of the Lord spoke to me," and you read in the Old Testament, "The Word of the Lord came unto so-and-so and he spoke," and this is just all over the Scripture. Even the tiniest part, I think of God's Word, the tiniest part, the jot and the tittle cannot be removed, right? Why? James says it in James 2:10, "For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is...what?...guilty of violating all of it." Every minute part is true.
A fourth thing the Bible claims for itself is that it is complete...it is complete. Deuteronomy 4:2 says this, "Ye shall not add unto the Word which I commanded you, neither shall you take away from it." You shall not add to it, you shall not take away from it. And you know what it says, don't you, at the end of Revelation? Verses 18 and 19 of the last chapter, chapter 22, "I testify unto every man that hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in the book and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of the prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life in the holy city the things written in the book." You can't add, you can't take away. That's not just Revelation 22:18, that's Deuteronomy 4:2, that is a comment that appears in the Old Testament and the New Testament. It is not to be added to, it is not to be diminished. It is complete. There's no scripture running around loose.
I always remember the lady down in Australia who had received all the visions and she kept them stacked beside her. And when anybody in her cult asked