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Doctrine of Scripture
Thus far, we have seen how Scripture is sufficient for salvation, clear for us to understand, and authoritative. In this study, we will see how it is necessary. God has chosen to reveal to us His mystery of salvation, and His revelation is out of His love for us.
We are saying something profound about Scripture when we say that it is authoritative. We confess that Scripture trumps all other sources when it comes to being the source of spiritual truth and revelation. There is nothing above the Scripture that can explain it, or tell us definitively why we exist, or why life has meaning. In this view, yes (gasp) even modern science is subject to the Scripture. This is why some people think Christianity can be dangerous —we seem to reject modern scienceor what some consider to be healthy societal norms. The authority of Scripture means that the Bible is our final rule for faith and practice.
And the God who has spoken demands that we submit to the authority of His Word.
God’s word is clear and understandable. This does not mean that no effort is required, and not that it’ss all easy to understand, but that the plan of salvation in Christ revealed in Scripture can be understood plainly without additional intervention or interpretation.
What good is Scripture? What good is the Old Testament for us today? Does it help us with important life decisions?
This is the first of our new series on the Doctrine of Scripture. Through this series, we hope to see Scripture says about itself, that God’s Word is sufficient, clear, authoritative and necessary.
This is the last study in our Doctrine of Scripture series. We started our series with a speaking God, and we went through some of the attributes of Scripture — sufficient, clear, authoritative and necessary. Then we studied about the Canon of the Bible, how we have the set of books in our bibles today. Last week, we spoke about how Scripture cannot be broken. And we come to this week, where we want to trace the storyline of the Bible, because we know that what God says will come to pass!
In this study, we will see what Jesus Himself thinks about Scripture! In this series on the Doctrine of Scripture, we’ve been spending so much time reading the Bible and understanding its characteristics, thus seeing what Jesus Himself has to say will also help us to understand the importance of Scripture too.
We’ve been seeing how Scripture sufficient, clear, authoritative and necessary. Since Scripture is this perfect word, how do we know that what we have in the Bible matches that standard? What then are the recognised books? That is what we will be looking at today.
In the past four studies, we’ve seen how the Bible presents God as a God who speaks. From beginning to end, He is a God who relates with human beings and acts for them using words. We’ve looked at the kinds of words God uses and some of the qualities of those words – the sufficiency, clarity and authority of Scripture.
In this study, we look at a fourth quality – the necessity of Scripture. His words are necessary; we cannot do without it. The purposes for those words cannot be achieved without those words. They are needed and we desperately need them.
The topic of the “authority” of Scripture raises questions about who has the right to tell us about ultimate reality, and how life ought to be lived. A good place for us to begin is to take reference from Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, and to see how He views the Bible. Seeing how He views the Bible, and how He responds to it should help us form our expectations about the Bible’s authority. Even more fascinatingly, the passage we’ll look at sees Him engaging with Satan, a competing authoritative source and how the Bible, for Jesus, was clarifyingly authoritative.
The clarity, or pespecuity of Scripture is something that we either take for granted or we accept as something that cannot be achieved. The latter could be a product of what our society tells us, that language is a construct and meaning is what we want it to be. Either way, these are norms that most of us live with. We have come to a place in our world where we accept that maybe God spoke, and maybe it has a meaning for my parents or friends etc, but we may not know if it has relevance for me today.
When we say the Bible is sufficient, we don’t mean that it is the bare minimum we need to get by. Rather, we are to think of sufficiency to mean that Scripture is all that we need to know God, for His purposes.
But, what is it sufficient for? We can’t just speak of the sufficiency of Scripture in a vaccum! Hence, we need to see the purpose of Scripture, and also examine how Scripture is sufficient for this purpose.
In this series, we’re going to focus on why and how we can trust Scripture to be reliable and trustworthy. We’ll examine what Scripture says about itself, but today, we’re going to begin by looking at the God of Scripture. Our goal in this series is not to get more information but to learn about what Christians through the ages have believed about God and His word!
