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. In our world, popular religions and philosophies compete for the right to do so and each make some claim to “the truth” or an enlightened or right way of living. A close examination of these “authorities” reveal that when they make truth claims about what is really good and right, they actually differ and contradict one another, and are actually “exclusive” to one another. All human beings live with some reference to authority, and our decisions and choices are based on a source, which we trust to have the right to tell us what truth is.
Our global mood views “authority” with suspicion because we have seen how the people who have that right to tell us what truth is have vastly disappointed us with how they use they use that authority. The news frequently reports on the poor leadership of governments with their alleged corruption, dishonesty and abuse. Religious leaders are not exempt from this either, nor parents, who are the closer form of authority we have. In the church, some of us may personally have had pastors, teachers, cell group leaders, mentors and other authority figures that have let us down, which has led to personal hurt. Thus when we see the abuse of authority, we are prone to distrust it.
But human beings cannot live without authority. Authority and authority structures do bring about security, protection, approval and validation. We appeal to it when we complain, lament injustice, and we continually make our own claims to authority as well. More personally, we cannot escape taking reference from an authority that tells us what is true or false, good or bad. Even when we say we make our choices by ourselves – we are appointing ourselves as authoritative. and hurt. What authorities are your life choices based upon?
The Bible tells us that whether the positive yearning for good authority, or the dissatisfaction with bad authorities, it is God who is the source of all our expectations about Authority and He has revealed Himself to us as a Good King, a Fair Legislator, Righteous Judge, and Loving Father. Authority thus is not merely a human construct co-opted by religion to control the masses. Rather it proceeds from the very Person of God who is the source of all good authority.
Christians believe that when this kind of a God speaks, His word carries the same authority He does. Thus the Bible is our foundational and final authority because it is “God’s word to us”. This is what Christians mean by the idea of “God’s Word”. The Christian faith stands or falls upon this foundation since until we know what God has said to us, we cannot know God Himself and what He desires of us, what He wants for us, and how He wants to relate to us. In this study we’ll look at what authority the Bible claims to have, and how we know we can trust it.
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.
(B) The Authority of Scripture means that it is the highest arbiter (Luke 4:1-13)
We know these verses as the temptation of Jesus (Luke 4:1-13). Jesus’ chief adversary, Satan, makes three challenges to Jesus: to turn a stone into bread as He had been fasting for days, to worship him (Satan) instead of God as a show of allegiance and loyalty, and to throw Himself from a high place (Temple Mount) and see if God would keep His promises to protect Jesus. These three tests would test Jesus in three ways: hunger and personal needs, His desire for ambition, power and glory, and security and safety.
Where would you go for answers to these big life questions? What choices will you make to be satisfied in these three ways? Notice Jesus’ response: each time, He quotes Scripture, actually from Deut 6-8 in the Old Testament. Each time, Jesus says I am not going to appeal to my own wit, ingenuity and original thought even. I will take Scripture, make it my guide, and expose the counterfeit lies of my enemy, a false authority. In fact, His answer to each is profound.
First, man’s truest need is not material, it is to live satisfied by the words of the God who speaks.
Second, true glory and power does not come from worshipping a false God, it comes from worshipping and serving the only true God, the LORD.
Third, true safety and security comes not from God validating Himself on my terms, but trusting Him on His.
This is consistent with Jesus’ ongoing pattern – He has a high view of Scripture and respects it to the uttermost. In teaching His disciples, and eventually, Luke the writer of this gospel, Jesus made it very clear to His followers that He appealed to Scripture. In Matt 5:17, Jesus claims that His whole life and teaching was not about denying or improving upon the OT Scripture, or contradicting God’s Law revealed there, but obeying, explaining, clarifying and fulfilling it. In saying that He had come to fulfil the Law, Jesus was affirming all that had been said in the Scriptures about Himself. Even as the omniscient Son of God, He was stating that the Scriptures were not to be contradicted. Think about that – He did not nitpick, challenge, counter-propose, restate or disagree with Scripture.
Jesus saw the Scriptures as the source of His own wisdom, and He viewed it useful for daily life, and effective against powerful temptation. In Jn 17:17 we read of how Jesus calls Scripture, God’s own “word is truth”. Like the Psalmist in Ps 119:160, Jesus was agreeing that “the sum of [God’s words] are truth”. There was simply no other source, teaching, philosophy, or reference material that propped it, made it clearer, supported it, illustrated it, or even measured up to it. With Satan, the word of God was used as a sword, like the “sword of the Spirit” that Paul calls is in Eph 6:17, used to do battle with the enemy who lies. The Bible simply is the highest arbiter for truth – it sorts out what is real from false, and when thrown into a competing series of truth claims, it emerges as ultimate.
(B) The Authority of Scripture means that it is true and trustworthy (Jn 17:17)
This is even more important for us to remember when we recognize that Jesus is the One to whom all authority has been given, “all authority in heaven and on earth” according to Matt 28:18. He models for us how even with all His divine authority, He stressed the authority of Scripture, so how could we do any less? This authority was given to Him by the Father (Jn 17:1-2), and as the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jn 14:6), He stressed to Pilate in His trial that “everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (Jn 18:37). If we take these words seriously, we who have chosen to submit to Jesus as Christians, recognizing His authority as the God-Man and Risen King over all must also submit to His view of Scripture. To fail to do so would reveal, according to Jesus, that we are not of the truth.
But how do we know that Scripture is trustworthy? At this point, we could answer this question using the methods of apologetics and rational argument to lay out historical, philosophical, textual, linguistic and other arguments to prove that a trustworthy word from God is not only plausible and logical, but ultimately, the only possible conclusion.
However, let us consider a slightly different answer: the trustworthiness of Scripture is ultimately proven in the trustworthiness of Jesus our crucified Messiah. Note that Jesus, in His treatment and application of Scripture as the authoritative word of God believed it without discount or embellishment. He wholeheartedly believed that He was a recipient of God’s word, like the prophets of old, speaking the “Word of Lord”. But for Jesus, Scripture was more than just a tome of ancient wisdom. It was marching orders, an authoritative direction for how Messiah was to come, live and die. This was so much the case that as we read in Matt 5:17, Jesus said He came not to contradict it, but to fulfil it. Thus His whole life (and death) would bear witness to the truthfulness and trustworthiness of a speaking God in Scripture (Jn 10:17-18). By looking at His life, you would be able to see that God really has spoken, and that He is worthy of trust, as Jesus Himself did when He gave His life over this Scripture. Ultimately, this culminated in His death on the Roman Cross, a cruel criminal’s crucifixion – the greatest proof of all that Scripture was trustworthy.
A possible objection: but lots of people have died for their faith and their deaths don’t make their claims authoritative? Just because Jesus died doesn’t make the Bible “God’s word”! In the case of Jesus, one big difference stands out: as Jesus died in obedience to Scripture’s authority, God Himself, being pleased with His perfect obedience, validated Him by raising Him from the dead (c.f. Acts 17:30-31). So Jesus’ testimony is not just true, but it is validated as true in the resurrection of Jesus. That Jesus was resurrected from the dead is the greatest reason why we can consider His entire person and belief system trustworthy because in the Living Person of Jesus Christ, all Scripture said was fulfilled, and proven to be trustworthy. The death and resurrection of Jesus bears witness to the truth and trustworthiness of Scripture.
(C) The practical outworking of the Authority of Scripture is our obedience (Lk 6:46-49)
On a practical level, could a Christian still be a Christian and disregard the supposed “authority” of Scripture? In other words, can I be a Christian while still having doubts about Scripture’s trustworthiness? If we haven’t embraced the fact that the Bible is true and trustworthy, and we don’t view it as authoritative, there really is not way to say that we trust Jesus Himself since we make Him out to be a liar, don’t we? If He is trustworthy, His word must be trustworthy. And vice versa. The great joy of Scripture is that we can trust it because we can trust One who died on the Cross for us.
This is a profound reality. If you’re a Christian struggling to obey Jesus, perhaps it is because you do not find His words true and trustworthy. Instead, other arbiters of truth, like culture, our peers, or our own feelings might be more true and trustworthy “authorities” for making life choices. What they promise to be satisfying and meaningful drowns out what Jesus says because we simply believe them more than Him. If we haven't grappled with the nature of Jesus' words - that is thinking about whether they are true and trustworthy - then it will show in very practical ways.
Luke 6:47-49 shows us how to respond to God’s word. Submitting to God’s Word and obeying it is equivalent to putting a deep and secure foundation in place that will hold us in the greatest storms. Trust and obedience is a key theme in the Bible from beginning to the end. From Adam all the way to the Patriarchs, man struggles to receive God’s Word as a true and trusted authority, and it shows in the response we live out. Hearing God’s Word and commands requires a response of trust from us. Do we submit to it over our own desires and autonomy to seek our own good, or will we reject it? We cannot stand idly by or remain neutral.
What does obedience to an authoritative, true and trustworthy Scripture look like for our lives? Here are some suggestions to start of with as you think about how it can be applied for you!
It must govern:
Our knowledge of God (cf. Ex 34:6-7)
Where are we looking at to find out more about God? God has already revealed Himself in His book. The ultimate authority about who God is has to be His word as He has shown. Do you read His word?Our knowledge of salvation (cf. Rom 10:9-11)
Scripture contains God’s indictment of a fallen world, and his special revelation of the means of salvation in Jesus Christ. The temptation is always to think or act as though we can save ourselves, or that by accumulating charitable deeds, we can make something meaningful of our lives. The authority of Scripture in regard to salvation is singular.Our sanctification (cf. 2 Tim 3:16-17)
As God’s revealed will for us, it is both His desire and design that His people be set apart for His glory. What does this look like practically? Well, when faced with a moral quandary or when standing at the crossroads of life, where do you turn to for direction? What do you appeal to?The gathered Church (cf. 1 Cor 14:26-33)
The word of God, in revealing the Person and the work of Christ, must be at the very centre of everything the church does, because it is His church. Scripture contains God’s commands for how His people are to gather and worship. Therefore the gathering of believers must be regulated by what has been set out in Scripture as normative. It must not be dictated by appeals to culture or tradition. As Christ’s body, the church’s authority is also not derived from or bestowed by councils made up of wise men; it does not have any authority of its own except that which is from Christ and found in his word. It also shapes what the church does when she gathers!Our experience of faith (cf. 1 Cor 10:11)
Faith in Jesus Christ is meant to be experienced and empowered by the Holy Spirit. It is not gnostic, or some secret ability that needs unlocking. God’s word is constant in time – it was counter-cultural then and it is counter-cultural today. Because it is eternal, our life circumstances are actually what is to be contextualised in light of God’s word, not the other way round. We are to bring everything under the scrutiny of Scripture. It has been said that when we read the Bible, we realise very quickly that the Bible is actually reading us!
As we wrap up this study, are there areas in your life where you struggle to submit to God’s word? Why is that so? How does the Person of Jesus Christ enable you to trust in God’s word?