Chapter 1 

 

Scripture: The Foundation of Our Profession

 

The Bible is the only source of the knowledge of God necessary for salvation from sin and death through the Lord Jesus Christ.  It must be the starting point for Christian faith.  The knowledge of its Author and message is a matter of eternal life and death.  Scripture  is the essential bedrock and foundation of our profession.

 

The Authority of Scripture

 

We must first ask the question of ultimate authority.  Whose word will we trust, man's word or God's word? Romans 1:25; Isaiah 8:20

 

Shorter Catechism

Q.#2  What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?  A.  The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.

Q.#3   What do the scriptures principally teach?  A.  The scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.

 

You will encounter at least seven different views of the Bible's authority in the world today.

1.  Humanist - Man's word is the ultimate authority.  The Bible is merely a human document.  This view is usually assumed in college courses such as "The Bible as Literature" or "Comparative Religions."  Advocates will even refer to the Bible as "inspired literature."  This, however, refers to human inspiration on the order of Shakespeare.

2. Liberal Protestant - Christ's ethical teachings in the Bible are the ultimate authority.  Christ was a great moral teacher.  Perhaps the greatest moral teacher.  The miraculous is the naive worldview of a pre-scientific age.  This view is really humanism in Christian garb.

3.  Neo-orthodox Protestantism - God's word as we experience it in the Bible is the ultimate authority.  This a reaction against Liberalism.  However, it is radically subjective.  The written word is not God's word.  Portions of it may become God's word as we read them in faith.  God is too transcendent to reveal his mind in human words.  The Bible, therefore, is not God's word, but simply the place we most often encounter Him.  This is a mixture of humanism and Christianity or Neo-liberalism.

4.   Neo-Gnostic Protestantism - God's word is in the texts of all religions.  The New Age movement has revived ancient gnosticism within mainline Liberalism.  This Monism (all is one, Pantheism) views all reality as essentially one.  It seeks to connect with the "spiritual" world in order to realize the god ("divine spark") within everyone.  Man's religious consciousness is the final authority.  This emerging view is well suited to the soil of modern relativism, multi-culturalism and inclusivism.  This is the Postmodern spirit.

5.  Roman Catholicism - The Bible is an ultimate authority alongside apostolic oral tradition and ex cathedra statements of the Pope.  Furthermore, the Bible is authoritatively interpreted by the church.  This resembles the late Judaic use of the Old Testament.  Cults also add their own revelations.  The Mormons add the Book of Mormon, the Jehovah’s Witnesses add the Watchtower publications.

6. Fundamentalism - God's word is identical with the Bible.  However, many Fundamentalists ignore parts of Scripture, such as the teaching on God's sovereignty.  In other areas, such as total abstinence from alcoholic beverages, they add rules as if they were God's requirements.  The humanistic element of Arminianism weakens this view.

7.  Reformed Protestantism - The entire Bible (Tota Scriptura) and nothing but the Bible (Sola Scriptura) is God's word.  It is the infallible guide for the whole person in the whole of life.  "All which [the 66 books] are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life" (WCF I.2).

The Bible, which is God's Special Revelation, interprets all of life and reality, which is God's General Revelation in his created works.  The Scriptures are the corrective lenses (Calvin "spectacles") through which we may view reality clearly.  All other religious teachings and writings of men represent men inventing gods to their own liking.  God's Word, on the other hand, represents God revealing Himself to men the way He truly is.

When we say that the Bible is authoritative we mean that it is God's very word.  While it is written through the instrumentality of men, the primary author is the Holy Spirit.  The Bible resounds from beginning to end with "Thus saith the Lord."  It is "holy" because it is unique.  "Holy" means "set apart."  There is no other book that is God's word.  Thus both its origin and content are utterly unique (sui generis). 

The means by which the writings which make up the Bible received their authority is by their being "inspired" by God Himself.  The word "inspired" does not mean that they are the work of genius, such as the works of Shakespeare.  "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (1 Tim. 3:16).  The word "inspiration" (Gr. theopneustos) means "God-breathed."  "Holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (1 Pet. 1:21).  "Moved" is literally "born along" as in a boat.  In this process, however, the secondary authors are not automatons, which the "dictation theory" (a paper tiger of Liberalism and Neo-orthodoxy) maintains.  Though certain things, like the ten commandments, were given verbatim, the vast majority of the text of the Bible was written taking into full account the personality, background, education and intelligence of the secondary authors.  The Bible is God's message through men to men.  God in his sovereignty prepared each author in every respect to produce His word for a particular purpose at a particular point in history.  Incidentally, not everything written by an author of the Bible is inspired.  For example, Paul wrote several letters to the Corinthians which have not been passed down to us.  If they were found they would not become part of the Bible, because God also caused the church to recognize and preserve all and only inspired writings (WCF I.8). 

The Bible is written because it is a covenant document.  In this respect it is similar to other covenant documents.  Real estate ownership requires a written deed.  Mortgages are written agreements.  So are marriage licenses.  Important documents are written to prevent the corruption of agreements and contracts.  Neo-orthodoxy underestimates the value of the written word.  The more important an established relationship is the more critical is its being written.  What John wrote at the end of Revelation applies to all inspired writings: "If anyone adds to these things (i.e. written in this book), God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things that are written in this book" (Rev. 22:18,19; cf. Deut. 4:2; WCF I.1).

The product of this divine activity of inspiration is a Book that is infallible in all of its parts.  All of Scripture is precisely what God wants to say to fallen man in order to reveal Himself, His salvation and His will for our lives.  Jesus said, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets.  I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.  For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled" (Matt. 5:17,18).  The "jot" is the smallest Hebrew letter "yod" and the tittle is the small nib on the upper right hand corner of the "daleth".  Paul says, "These things we also speak, not in wisdom which man's wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual" (1 Cor. 2:13).  Here the "things" are the words which house the ideas of God Himself.

Because we do not have the original documents penned by the authors of Scripture, called the autographa, we have to engage in textual criticism to determine, through studying the thousands of ancient copies in our possession, what the originals said.  No ancient text has more corroboration than the Bible.  We may have great confidence that what we hold in our hands is God's word.  The text in the original languages must be faithfully translated into the languages of the people (WCF I.8).

Modern man likes to make a distinction between history and religion and science and religion as if there were two separate kinds of truth.  In fact, while the Bible is not a book of science or history in the modern sense, it is historically accurate.  The Bible is the story of God's covenant with His people and is set in history and in the world which science explores.  The parting of the Red Sea, the swallowing of Jonah and the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place in space and time.  The God of the Bible is the Creator and the sovereign Lord of history.

 

How do we know that the Bible is God's Word?

 

There is a three-fold testimony which answers this crucial question.

First of all, because the Bible asserts itself to be God's word (Isa. 8:20; John 10:35; Matt. 4:3-10; Matt. 26:54; Heb. 1:5ff; 2 Tim. 3:15,16; 2 Pet. 1:19-21). It is self-authenticating and self-attesting.  By its nature there can be no higher authority or else it is not God's word.  Any standard or canon outside or above God's word by which it might be judged becomes the final authority.  The Bible is the "canon" (lit. measuring reed) by which all else is judged.  Even the church does not determine (as Roman Catholics believe) what God's word is, it only recognizes that the Bible is what it claims to be.  The church by spiritual discernment knows the difference between "fools'" gold and the genuine article.  God's people respond to the inherent authority of God's Word, and submit to it as His Word.  Peter equated the letter of Paul with Holy Scripture (2 Pet. 3:15,16).  "The authority of the holy scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, (who is truth itself) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received because it is the word of God" (WCF I.4, cf. 1 Jn. 5:9).  "For this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe" (1 Thess. 2:13).

This divine quality is reflected in certain attributes of Scripture.  The Westminster Confession gives a compelling summary of these "excellencies": "the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, (which is to give all glory to God) the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies..." (WCF I.5).  Add to this the multitude of fulfilled prophecies (e.g. Micah 5:2 and Matthew 2:6) and the detailed confirmations of archeology and history and you have a compelling testimony that "whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God" (WCF I.5).

However, without the testimony of the Holy Spirit, these excellencies will not be recognized or appreciated and will even be denied.  "But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned" (1 Cor. 2:14).  Only the Author of the Bible can convince men that it is His word.  This is called illumination.  The Spirit of God enlightens the minds of the blind and foolish.  The sheep hear the voice of the Good Shepherd.  As The Westminster Confession says: "our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof [Scripture], is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts" (WCF I.5).

The Westminster Confession lists the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments (WCF I.2), because the Apocrypha is not inspired and has therefore not been recognized by the church historically as Scripture (WCF I.3).  Furthermore, the canon of Scripture has been closed since the end of the first century, because Jesus Christ is God's final revelation of Himself to mankind.  "God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son..." (Heb. 1:1,2).  The Lord promised that His Spirit would come after His resurrection and ascension to remind His apostles of His teaching and lead them into all truth (John 14:26).  The writings of the New Testament were completed in the Apostolic era under Apostolic supervision (Eph. 2:20).  After John wrote his work in the final years of the first century the writing of Scripture ceased. 

This means that any claims to continuing revelation are bogus.  As The Westminster Confession so tersely states: "those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased" (WCF I.1).  Nothing may or needs to be added to this revelation either by "new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men" (WCF I.6).

 

The Sufficiency of Scripture

 

Is there any other source of wisdom we need to live the Christian life?

 

Scripture itself declares its own sufficiency to give us all we need to know in matters of faith and practice.  "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Tim. 3:16,17). "The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture"  (WCF I.6).

 

The Clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture

 

How do we explain the difficulty of understanding certain parts of Scripture?

 

There are many parts of Scripture which are not as clear as the rest.  There are also varying abilities among God's people to understand these passages.  Some passages are clear to some and yet not so to others (WCF I.7).  If Scripture was completely easy for all to understand it would foster pride as well as doubt that such a book could be the word of an all wise God (Deut. 30:11-14).  "The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; the statutes of the LORD are right rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes;" (Ps. 19:7,8).

However, because of His condescending compassion God has made those things that are necessary for our salvation clear.  This is the perspicuity of Scripture.  "All things are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them" (WCF I.7).  While the Bible is not an easy book, its central message is absolutely clear.  It is God addressing fallen mankind through His grace in the gospel.

Because the message of the Bible is clear we need to keep a very important principle in mind when we study the Bible.  The clear passages are to interpret the unclear.  We always begin with what we know for sure.  The Scripture is self interpreting (WCF VII.9).  Therefore,  it never contradicts itself.  Difficult passages interpreted out of the context of the whole Bible become a source of dangerous error, and this explains why so many weird and unhealthy things have been done with the Bible.

Furthermore each passage has a single meaning according to the intention of the original Author the Holy Spirit.  The meaning of any passage "is not manifold but one" (WCF VII.9).  Its implications may be profound and manifold, but the meaning is one.  This is especially important in light of the "Deconstructionist" movement in modern literary circles, which attributes the primary meaning of a text to the reader.  The reader brings meaning to the text, much like Neo-orthodoxy and Neo-gnosticism.  Imagine if we read wills and deeds this way.  The Bible is God's objective communication to man.  The meaning is His alone.  Otherwise we are adrift in a sea of hopeless subjectivity.

 

The Necessity of Scripture

 

Is the Bible absolutely essential?  After all Adam and Abraham didn't have a Bible.

While Adam did not have a written Word of God, even before he fell God's word was essential to his life as God's servant in the Garden of Eden.  Genesis 2:16 indicates that Adam communed regularly with God.  God clearly communicated the terms of his covenant to his people in their paradise state.  Because man is made in God's image, in fact he is God's image, he needs God's Word.

In his fallen state man especially needs God's word.  Without the word of the covenant of grace he is hopelessly lost in sin.  "For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe" (1 Cor. 1:21).  Paul reminded Timothy that from his youth he had "known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 3:15).  Because man is a sinner he needs God's Word.

Since the message was relatively short in the Adamic and Patriarchal ages, and because memory is keen and accurate in an oral culture the written Word of God was not a necessity until the Mosaic covenant was given.  The sheer volume of communication that came from Mount Sinai demanded a written document.  "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law" (Deut. 29:29).

Thus the Bible is absolutely necessary for the believer.

 

The Unity of Scripture

 

Is the Bible one book or two?  How are we to understand the difference between the Old and New Testaments?

 

The Bible is an authoritative unit.  It is one book in two parts, Old and New Testaments.  It is one Covenant of Grace in two administrations (Like 24:25ff; 2 Tim. 3:16; Heb. 1:1,2).  "There are not therefore two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations" (WCF VII.6).

The revelation of the Bible should be understood progressively or historically.  Each epoch or covenantal era reveals more of God and His salvation, culminating in the supreme and final revelation of the Messiah, Jesus Christ.  He is concealed in the Old Covenant and revealed in the New Covenant.  Like a tulip the Old Testament shows the growth of the plant through various stages of development up to the appearance of the bud in the latter prophets (major and minor); the New Testament is that plant in full bloom.

 

The Confession and Scripture

 

Do written statements of faith and doctrine like The Westminster Confession threaten the authority of the Bible?

 

No, they summarize the essential teachings of the Bible in a topical way.  Confessions are just like road maps are to roads.  They give us the big picture so we can find our way around more easily without getting lost.

Confessions are manmade and therefore fallible.  However, just like maps they are perfected over time so that they are reliable guides.  No-one would confuse a map with the actual roads.  Traveling the roads verifies the accuracy of the map.  God's Word is always primary.  But unless you want to start out drawing your own map it is wise to have great respect for maps that have stood the test of time.

"No creed but Christ. No book but the Bible" is a half truth.  Everyone has a system of doctrine which answers the basic question: "What does the Bible teach about such and such?"  The real question is: "Is your system what the Bible teaches?"  American individualism reinforces the pride of private interpretation.  In defending the value of Bible commentaries Spurgeon said that it is amazing that those who think so much of what the Holy Spirit has taught them can think so little of what he has taught others.

The church has a history that we need to study and appreciate as we grow in the knowledge of God's word.  Not only will this help us better understand Scripture, but it will keep us from error, as we learn from the church's past mistakes.

The Roman Catholic Church puts its confessions as well as oral tradition and the ex cathedra statements of the Papal See on a plane with Scripture.  We see our Confession as based on Scripture.  In fact, The Westminster Confession begins with Scripture for just that reason.  All manmade doctrinal statements are to be judged by Scripture, "the supreme Judge" (WCF VII.10).

The first confession in the New Testament was given infallibly through the Apostle Peter when asked by our Lord: "Whom do men say that I am?" - "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matt. 16:16).  What we confess is a matter of eternal life and death.  "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (Rom. 10:9).  If the incarnate Word depended on Scripture to resist the three-fold temptation of the Devil (Matt. 4:1-11), we who are but sinful mortals must certainly depend on God's infallible Word alone in all matters of faith and life.

 

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