In this series, we’re going to focus on why and how we can trust Scripture to be God’s reliable and trustworthy words. We will go on to examine external evidence for the trustworthiness of Scripture, but today, we begin with what Scripture says about itself. We are starting here because, as Packer says, we do not want to “accept the witness of [Scripture] to other truths, yet sit loose to its witness to itself”. If we trust what our Bible tells us about Christ, and life, and faith, and hope, and love - then it only makes sense for us to trust what it tells us about itself.
Would you like to hear God’s voice? Many of you here tonight have come carrying this question with you. It is good to note who we are speaking of - He is the eternal god of the Bible who is infinite. He is beyond time. He was and is and is to come. And if He is infinite, He is incomprehensible. We cannot wrap our minds fully around Him because there is just too much God. But not just quantity - God is different from us in kind. He is the Creator God, and we His creation. And we are caught in our little square of space and time craning our ears to the universe. What hope do we have of hearing God’s voice?
Our minds are too small. Our hands outstretched do not reach the heavens. So our only hope is that God would act. This book tells us: He has. It tells us that in the beginning, God spoke.
(A) Origin: God speaks, and the words of Scripture are God’s words – God’s promises, commandments and self-revelation
Creating our world
In Genesis 1, the first chapter of the Bible, the phrase “and God said” is repeated over and over again. What is happening here as a result of God’s speech? Creation! This is what happens in Genesis 1. God spoke, and the world was created. Now we’re not saying that:
God is all talk, no action
God only uses words, not miracles
We are simply saying that right at the very start of the story, we find a God who speaks. In fact, we see in Genesis 1 that much like how a king speaks, God’s words happen. God speaks with the authority of an imperial edict - what is said is done. This is how Scripture begins. This is how our world begins. God shapes and fashions our world with His words. From the 1st book of Scripture, from the start of the story, all of creation rests on - begins with - God’s words.
Creating a people
It’s not just the creation of the world that we see in Scripture - as we journey along in the story, from Left to Right, from book 1 (Genesis) to book 2 (Exodus), we see that God is doing more than world-making with His words. God is people-making with His words.
In Exodus 3, God chooses a leader to free a people from Egyptian slavery. Some of us will be familiar with this passage - it is the one about the burning bush. But what’s really special is not the flames. It is that from this unimpressive bush, the voice of God sounded forth:
in v4: God called to Moses out of the bush
in v7: then the LORD said"
Here, the LORD, the covenantal God, spoke to Moses. He introduces Himself as the God of Moses’ ancestors, and as the God who made the world in Genesis 1. God is disclosing His identity as YHWH. God is also disclosing His purpose - He has seen and heard the cries of the Israelites, and He will deliver His people. So we often think of it as a flaming, speaking bush - when it should be a flaming, speaking bush. God’s self-disclosure is what begins the story of deliverance for a people under slavery.
Sixteen chapters on, after the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, we find a people listening attentively in Exodus 19. And the speaking God speaks: He calls to Moses out of the mountain, and confirms not just to Moses but to all of Israel that they shall be His treasured possession among all peoples. They finally belong. In verse 18, we even see an echo of Exodus 3, as the LORD descends in fire. It is majestic, it is eye-catching - but we are to see again that the fire, however amazing, is not the focus. If the LORD is not there, then a fiery mountain is just a volcano. If the LORD is there, but does not speak, then it is marvellous but also endlessly mysterious. It is the words of God that bring precious clarity and comfort to a people looking for somewhere to belong and someone to belong to.
What do God’s people do with the words of a speaking God? They repeat them! God spoke to Moses, Moses spoke to the people, and the people were to teach it and pass it on to the next generations in stories, and in writing (Exodus 24:4). Moses wrote down God’s word, and the written word is passed on. This pattern repeats for the rest of the Old Testament - God’s people write down God’s words. Some are kings. Some are prophets, people who start their letters with “The word of the LORD came to… “. Whoever they were, the pattern is clear: God Speaks, they Hear, they Write. This is the foundation for the history of Israel (Judaism), for the prophets of Israel, and for the kings and the people of Israel. The entire Old Testament - all 39 books - sits on the written words of a speaking God.
The New Testament
The NT also speaks of God’s word in a similar way. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul writes to Timothy and describes Scripture as being “breathed out by God”. What this verse says about your Bible is that the more you look at every bit of it, as you zoom in and zoom out, the more you find that the words are God-breathed. They come from God, and they are marked by God. Every word is God revealing himself to us. Not only the bits we read in Genesis or Exodus, not only the prophets who said ‘and the word of the Lord came’. From first to last, Scripture is God’s word written down.
Scripture itself claims divine origin. The words are not formed and birthed first in the minds of men, but in the mind of God. This is what God wants to say. What does this mean for us? If you want to hear God’s voice, we don’t have to look far. The good news is that God has spoken, and His words have been recorded down.
While this sounds like a bold claim, it is actually something that we all assume when we read Scripture. Take John 3:16 for instance:
“For God so loved the world” - this is not just our private view on God’s love, or John’s best guess. We understand that behind this self-disclosure about God’s love stands God Himself.
“that He gave His only son” - I believe in the gift of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, because God said it. God stands behind the gift.
“would have eternal life” - this is a promise. And we are used to broken promises. Sometimes it seems like broken promises are all we have. But this is not a human promise, even if John is the one whose pen or quill is writing the words down. It is God’s promise. And God’s promises are anchored in His steadfast love and faithfulness.
This is the question: Who ultimately stands behind each promise, each command, each piece of self-revelation? When you push on it with your questions, doubts, culture - who does it give way to? Origin is everything because the precious truths in the Bible are truths that no man can reveal to us, or promise to us. If we trace trace trace it back - the source of the words must be the infinite, eternal, self-disclosing God. We know God not because of our powers of discovery, but because God speaks for Himself in His Word.
(B) Authorship: the Holy Spirit speaks through human authors
God speaks, but what is the role of human authors? We come here to the dual authorship of Scripture. In 2 Peter 2:19-21, we are taught that no prophecy came from a person’s interpretation, by the will of men, but that men spoke from God as they were carried by the Holy Spirit. We’ll look at 2 examples of how this was explained in the Bible.
Firstly, in Acts 1:15-16, Peter is telling the church that Psalm 109, though written by David, were words “which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David”. Acts 1 does not deny David’s role. But it adds to Psalm 109 a previously unseen piece of the puzzle - that the Holy Spirit spoke. Peter makes it clear that David wrote the psalm, but the Holy Spirit was also involved. Who speaks? David. Who speaks? The Holy Spirit. Both statements are true.
We see another example in Acts 28:25-26. Paul recognizes that the Holy Spirit speaks through the prophet Isaiah (“The Holy Spirit was right in speaking to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet”), making a reference to Isa 6:9-10. Both Isaiah and God are speaking, and these people who wrote the words of Scripture with ink were carried along by the Holy Spirit so that every word on every page is just what God intended. So when we ask the question: Who is speaking? Man or God? The answer of Scripture is that both are. These are men, carried along - sustained, helped, taught, infallibly guided - by the Holy Spirit.
Now we know that throughout Scripture, the styles, the personalities and the skills of the authors shine through. The word for this is ‘organic’ inspiration, which means that the Holy Spirit prepared his writers. They were not like Neo in the Matrix, plugged into a machine and imagining the whole thing. He employed their whole personality and person as his instrument. We see this as the styles of the writers shine through. Paul’s lawyerly flair is different from Luke’s analytical way of speaking. Likewise for John the fisherman, or David the poet! This is what is meant, that the Holy Spirit “speaks by their mouth”. What that means for us is that human participation doesn’t sully and ruin God’s Word. Ordinary humans and their messy lives, far from being excluded, are included and made serviceable to the words and thoughts of God! There is something precious about this broken world that God is seeking and saving, making His own and mending. Rather than have the participation of messy humans drag God down, God’s redemption includes and restores even broken humans. Dual authorship means that from start to finish, God does not let the pen stumble.
But knowing that you can trust Scripture is different from actually trusting. We didn’t come tonight just to be informed and to go away feeling smarter. Friends, we are saturated with information in this day and age. In this COVID era that has disrupted our lives and left many of us working from home, many of us find ourselves in a stupor. We feel bored and drained. Dear Christian, if you struggle to study Scripture, there can be many reasons for this. Some of us think that studying the Bible is really for “other people” and only “those people” — teachers, pastors — can do it. Studying the Bible often feels hard and we feel like we are reading the same stories and sections again.
One reason for this is that Scripture, from the first page, begins with God. The Bible isn’t a book that diagnoses our personalities or tells us how to be the best version of ourselves (like an enneagram, horoscope or MBTI / DISC test). It is not about us. The Bible is about God. We struggle with this because we live in an attention economy. People are making money off our attention. We are so used to being entertained, and we approach Scripture with the same mindset, hunting for something dramatic or eye-catching. That’s not what we need. We don’t need something new or novel - we need something true. We know what it’s like to go from one Instagram story to the next, or to allow Youtube to autoplay videos to entertain us. But these don’t fill us with more joy! They are like chips — a nice burst of flavour in the beginning, but it doesn’t satisfy the hunger and nourish us. If we are hungry, we need real food. We need to look for bread and water. If we come to this book looking for potato chips, we won’t find it!
(C) Where our destination lies: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
So what should we look for when we open scripture?
Jesus says in John 5:37-40 to the Jews, who had the OT and who read it diligently:
"And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me . His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me."
These short verses tell us 2 things. First, Jesus confirms that God speaks - God ‘bears witness’. But more importantly, Jesus says: you can search and search and search the words on the page, but if you do not search them looking for me, if you search them looking for eternal life apart from me, wisdom apart from me, morality apart from me, good living apart from me - you find nothing. His voice you have never heard.
This is the sobering message of John 5. There are those who seek, and do not find. If you are looking at this book without looking for Jesus, you do not hear God’s words and you have not heard God’s voice.
And there are those who are found.
When we get to Luke 24, Jesus’ death had left his followers confused and despondent. Everything they had hoped for seemed lost. One of them, walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, puts it this way: "we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel”. They had left everything and followed Jesus, and now their hopes for their nation under Roman rule were dashed. Their hopes for themselves were gone. With a dead leader and a lost cause, they grew increasingly afraid. Then in Luke 24:19, Jesus approaches the disappointed disciples. And He interpreted Scripture - He spoke and explained it - to them, beginning with Moses and then all the prophets.
Where does Jesus go to offer hope to people whose hope has died? To the Scriptures. To God’s words, written down.
Who does Jesus point to? Himself. Because Jesus is who all of God’s Word is speaking about. He offers no comfort apart from Himself, and offers all the comfort that can be found in Him.
As the late J.I. Packer puts it, “The written word of God leads us to the living Lord of the Word.” This is the destination of the Word of God. When God speaks, He reveals Jesus Christ.
What this means is this: please do not not think that God speaks primarily when your eyes are squeezed shut and your hands are clasped in prayer. "God, are you there? Are you?" God does not meet our deepest longings for HIs voice with just private, vague impressions that leaves us guessing if it is Him or our own thoughts. He meets us clearly in His holy, inspired, unfailing word that points to His Son, the bread of life and living water, Jesus Christ. The anointed one who saves. So we find Him, not when we close our eyes, but with eyes wide opened when we open and look at this book! God has given us Christ not that we might skip over Him lightly. He has spoken so that we might see Jesus, and learn to love the old, true words.
If you are here ‘finding God’, our message is that while you were finding, you have first been found by Him in and through the Bible. God speaks. His initiative. His gift. If you would hear Him speak, here are His words. Friends, when we plead with you, we are often afraid and our words small. But when we read from this book, we do so with utmost confidence. Because behind each word - origin - is not a flawed, fallible person who fumbles, but a God who does not. So we plead with you standing on these words: be reconciled to God.
We are sinners saved by Jesus Christ! We teach because we love the word, and we love the word because we want to hear God’s voice. We need to hear God’s voice. It is water to our souls that dry up so easily and it is food for our souls that hunger and are tempted to go to all sorts of places to fill that hunger. If you are looking and longing, here it is - true water and real bread for our dusty souls. Eat and drink your fill.
That’s what this entire series is about. Sufficient, Clear, Authoritative, Necessary.
We want you to know that when you look at the label, when you look at the ingredients and fine print of this book, you will find that when Scripture speaks, God Himself speaks. You can place not just a little bit of trust for a little bit of life, but all of your trust for all of life, secure in this Holy Scripture, each word breathed out by the one, the eternal, the almighty God. Do not harden your hearts if today you hear His voice.