“We confess that this Word of God was not sent nor delivered “by human will,” but that “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God,” as Peter says. Afterward our God—with special care for us and our salvation—commanded His servants, the prophets and apostles, to commit this revealed word to writing. God, with His own finger wrote the two tables of the law. Therefore, we call such writings holy and divine Scriptures.”
About 75% of Americans consider the Bible to be the word of God. Now what those 75% Americans mean by the phrase “the word of God,” varies greatly. Some think that the Bible is the word of God not in the sense that much of it happened but in the sense that these stories tell us something about God. Some think the Bible is the word of God in the sense that it’s one of group of humanity’s best attempt to tell us about God. Some think that the Bible is the word of God in the sense that while some parts aren’t from God, other parts truly are. Now we as a church are a group of people who refer to the Bible as the word of God. What do we mean when we say that the Bible is the word of God?
Article 3 of the Belgic Confession explains what we mean. It states what we, as a church, believe about the Bible. It is what we believe on paper. It’s right in front of us. What matters is whether we believe it in practice.
We will study what we mean by the word of God in three points. First: the word of God through men. Second: the written word of God. Third: the authority of this word of God.
First: the word of God through men. When we say that the Bible is the word of God, we mean that the Bible is a completely divine book—meaning that every single word of it is from God. Jesus believed that too. He believed that every letter of every word of the Old Testament was from God. You can see that assumption in his words, “I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”
We believe it is all from God. This means we believe that any person can know the mind of God simply by reading this book. The command in Exodus 20:15, “you shall not steal,” is not the results of years of trial and error over which people realized that stealing is unwise. It is God’s mind on the matter. The words of Exodus 20:16, “you shall not give false testimony against your neighbor,” don’t simply mean that twisting your wife’s words will give you trouble with your wife. They mean that twisting you wife’s words will give you trouble with your wife and with God.
We believe that we can know what God thinks about how we use our words, our bodies, our resources, our time, and that these thoughts can be known by way of this book. These are not merely human thoughts draped with God’s authority. Therefore, to disagree with the Bible is to disagree with God. A husband who thinks that the Bible’s word about him laying down his life for his wife is ridiculous is saying God’s word to husbands is ridiculous. A woman who is unwilling to show respect to her husband is saying God’s word to wives is unreasonable. That’s what we mean when we say that the Bible is the word of God.
I’m just copying Peter here. He told the early church, “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.” Scripture doesn’t originate with people trying to figure life out. It originates with God. This means that it doesn’t carry merely human authority. It carries God’s authority.
So, Scripture originates with God. God wrote it through humans like you and me. These people retained their personalities as they wrote. It’s not as if Paul fell into a trance and woke up to find the letter to the Colossians in front of him. Paul was fully Paul as he wrote that letter, but he also speaking with God’s authority.
Now considering that many different men wrote the Bible, we should expect different writing styles in the Bible and that is what we find. We find a lot of medical jargon in the books of Luke and Acts because their author Luke was a doctor. Paul wrote sentences that were incredibly dense. That’s why it takes preachers longer to work their way through his letters. The prophet Amos was punchy. John wrote sentences that make you ponder.
That’s how the Bible works. The books of Moses are in his voice. You can’t read David’s psalms the same way you read Asaph’s psalms. Trying to read the book of Revelation as if it were just like the book of 2 Kings will leave you utterly bewildered. The entirety of the Bible is the word of God because God inspired it all, but we shouldn’t expect each part of it to be the same because the authors were different and wrote with different purposes.
Now since God inspired it through human authors, it is that author’s intention that determines what those words mean. Think about it in terms of the Constitution. It doesn’t matter what “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” means to this Senator or that Congressman. It matters what it meant to the original authors when they wrote “the right to assemble.” It doesn’t matter what Paul’s words “I can do all things through him who strengthens me,” means to me. What matters is what Paul meant when he wrote it. It means that and nothing else. The words, “judge not lest thee be judged,” mean what Jesus meant by them when he said them and nothing else. The words “The third angel poured out his bowl into the rivers and the springs of water, and they became blood,” mean what John meant by them and nothing else. That’s what we mean when we say that the Bible is God’s word. We treat it as if we can know the mind of the Lord but only by way of the intention of the original author.
This means that you—one person living on a bit of land called Northwest, Iowa in a continent called North America—can know the mind of God Himself. You—who are alive for this brief span of days—can know what the eternal God thinks. You truly can. You don’t need to live by public opinion. You don’t need to live by your own opinion. You can have God’s word on a host of matters.
Now we see what it means for this word to be written down. That’s our second point: the written word of God. Many scholars think that the first written word of God was written by God Himself. Deuteronomy 9:10, “the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all the words that the Lord had spoken with you on the mountain out of the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly.” We record God’s word because we see it all on par with what God Himself recorded it in written form.
Writing preserves the word of God. We saw this when we studied Jeremiah; ‘The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Write in a book all the words that I have spoken to you.”’ Writing preserves words. Imagine a husband and wife have an in-depth conversation that heals some of the hurts in their marriage. It becomes a turning point in their lives. Now unless they write down what was said and what it meant, that conversation is lost to history. Their grandchildren won’t know what was said or even that it happened. Those words—as important as they were—die with them. The words of God through Moses didn’t die with him. He wrote them down. That’s why we still talk about what Moses said or Jesus said or Paul said. We still talk about what they said because what they said was written down for us.
Writing preserves the word of God. That was God’s plan. As Article 3 put it, “Afterward our God—with special care for us and our salvation—commanded His servants, the prophets and apostles, to commit this revealed word to writing.”
We wouldn’t know anything about God’s grace were it not for the fact that the men who received revelation from God wrote that revelation down. We wouldn’t know much if anything about God’s grace were it not for the fact that these writings were later translated into Dutch or English. This word came to us through history. God is involved in all of this. God was involved in the inspiration of Scripture. He is involved in the preservation of Scripture. He is involved in the spreading of Scripture.
There are currently 7,378 languages in the world. Only 717 of them have a full Bible. You have one of those 717 in front of you. Take that as a kindness of God. Take that also with a healthy dose of obligation. To whom more is given, more will be expected. Know God’s word which can make you wise unto salvation. That’s why it was written. That’s why it was translated into your language. Our Bibles do us no good on the shelf. Spurgeon was right to say that “a Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.” It is God’s will that this word is spread.
The apostles expected that this written word of God would be read and studied. Paul would be very pleased to see our read through the Bible board. God is pleased to see it. He expects the Scriptures to be read. The authors through whom God spoke expected them to be read. That’s why they were written. As Peter told the church, “Count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.”
There might be some portions of this word that you find difficult to understand. Peter said that some of Paul’s writings were hard to understand, but he didn’t say that their difficulty was a reason not to read them. That’s a reason to ask what they meant. That’s a reason to get a study Bible like we give for profession of faith. That’s a reason to be part of Bible studies that dig into the Bible. That’s a reason to listen to sermons that work their way through books of the Bible. If we believe this is how God speaks to us, then we should do everything we can to hear. This written word is what we as a church have to offer the world. People don’t need what we as a church, in our strength, can offer. They can get that from the world. They need God and so we offer Him.
This word speaks for God. That’s our final point: the authority of this word of God. There is a sense of reverence for the Bible. If you went to the Empire Mall with the novel Twilight and the Bible and offered people $20 to rip out all the pages of Twilight and $20 more dollars to rip out all the pages of the Bible, I dare say more people would be willing to rip the pages out of Twilight than out of the Bible. There is a sense of reverence for this book.
I remember when my high school Bible fell apart. The binding was done for. Pages were coming out. I was uneasy about throwing it out because, after all, it’s a Bible so I asked my dad to throw it out. I knew it wasn’t sinful to throw away a Bible that was falling apart, but that doesn’t mean it seemed right. Now there was some superstition at work in me there. It would certainly be wrong to deface a Bible as a sign of disrespect for God, but that’s not what was going on. What I’m getting at here is that we tend to treat this book as if it were made of holy materials.
It’s not the material that makes a Bible holy. This book is holy in the sense that it is God speaking. That’s what Article 3 means when it says, “we call such writings holy and divine Scriptures.”
You can treat this physical book with great respect while disrespecting the reason it was written. Years ago, I went to a funeral in a church with high liturgy. The priest came in with the Bible held high. There was a musical fanfare. He patted the Bible as he walked to the front. He set it down with great reverence, and then never referred to God’s word or opened it once during the entire funeral service. I can’t imagine Paul saying, “good. That man treated that book with great respect.” He treated it as a relic.
You treat the Bible with respect by using it as it is supposed to be used. Think about some of Paul’s final words to Timothy. He wrote, “All Scripture is breathed out by God…” He didn’t follow that up by saying, “therefore, make sure you prominently display it on your bookshelf.” He didn’t follow the words, “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” with the words, “therefore, make sure you read it every day because you are supposed to.” He followed, “All Scripture is breathed out by God,” by saying that this makes it, “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” You treat the Bible with respect by being willing to hear what it means—that’s teaching. You treat it with respect by putting it into practice—that requires training.
Think of it in terms of right now. Right now over half of American adults think that the Bible contains everything a person needs to live a meaningful life. That’s quite high, but only a quarter of American adults read it with any real frequency. This means that a lot of Americans who apparently think that the Bible is meaningful to life but don’t read it. The fact is that you can’t truly believe the Bible is meaningful contains everything you need to know and then not read it. Your behavior shows what you truly believe.
We’ve talked about what we as a church believe about the Bible, “We confess that this Word of God was not sent nor delivered “by human will,” but that “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God,” as Peter says. Afterward our God—with special care for us and our salvation—commanded His servants, the prophets and apostles, to commit this revealed word to writing. God, with His own finger wrote the two tables of the law. Therefore, we call such writings holy and divine Scriptures.” What matters is what I believe as shown in practice. What matters is what you believe as shown by your practice.
Psalm 119 shows us the practice to move toward. This is the practice that will change a life. This is the practice that revives a church. “With my whole heart I seek You; let me not wander from Your commandments!” “In the way of Your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches.” “Deal bountifully with Your servant, that I may live and keep Your word. Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Your law. I am a sojourner on the earth; hide not Your commandments from me!”
What does it mean for you to say that the Bible is the word of God? How would you answer? Would a friend agree that this answer you just gave in your head is your honest belief? Would your kids? Would God who gave this word agree? He gave us this word not so that we could have a holy book—a sacred relic. He gave us this word so that we could know Him and trust Him. He gave us this word so that we would teach others to do the same. Amen.