Sermon from July 18, 2004

In The Da Vinci Code Sir Leigh Teabing serves as the protagonist for leading ideas that author Dan Brown wants to get across. At one point he says this about the Bible. “The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions” (p. 231).

It might surprise you if I said how much of that statement I agree with. The Bible certainly did not fall from the clouds. Man did produce it under pressure of tumultuous events in Jewish history. The book that we know came into existence over a period of 1500 years, so there were countless additions and revisions. The Church has nothing to lose by acknowledging and even delighting in these and other human characteristics of the Bible. The Bible is the word of man.

But then, decisively, we part company with Dan Brown. For example, we would ask, “How do you know the Bible is nothing but a human invention?” “If there is a God, do you mean to tell us that, if He wanted to, He could not communicate with His human creation?” To say He couldn’t sounds like obscurantist dogma, not openness to the truth.

But let’s be constructive. The place to start is where we started last Sunday. The durability and wisdom of the Bible and its ability to give us a vantage point outside our sometimes suffocating place in time are realities millions of us Christians have experienced. Our first-hand experience verifies the power of the Bible. But where does the power come from? That requires an explanation. What follows today and next Sunday is a Christian explanation for the Bible’s power. It takes away none of the Bible’s human characteristics, but it takes us “behind the scenes” to the super-human characteristics that produced the Bible. The Bible is the word of God.

If God Wanted to Say Something to Us ...
Some thoughtful people say that God is unknowable. Christians respond properly by saying, “There will always be more mystery about God than we can ever fathom, but He has made it possible for us to know Him enough to conform our lives to His purposes.” That in turn raises the following question. How did God do that? The answer has two parts. We’ll consider one part today and the other next Sunday. We begin today with Hebrews 1:1-2.

In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

God spoke. Simply stunning! It is as if, after a performance of Macbeth, Shakespeare, whom we thought long dead, should step out from behind the final curtain and address the audience directly. Only, it is not Shakespeare; it is the Creator of heaven and earth who has spoken to us.

God spoke, and not just once, but in the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways. Right away, we have a major clue as to how God would speak to us humans – through the prophets. Of course, that undermines my clever analogy of Shakespeare’s stepping out from behind the final curtain to address the audience directly. To speak through the prophets is more like Shakespeare, speaking through the characters of his plays.

But that is no small thing. Moses, David, Isaiah and the rest speak, and in their memorable lines we hear not only their own voices but also the voice of God beginning to unveil Himself to mankind. As is the case with any play or movie we see only bits and pieces of a larger story. But each prophet helps us to hear the voice of God more distinctly until the grand moment arrives, and the Author Himself speaks directly.

Hebrews 1:2: In these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Author of all things puts in a personal appearance. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him (John 1:18). Jesus said in John 14:9, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.

Just a little further down in Hebrews 1:3 the writer says, The Son (Jesus) is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. To hear Jesus speak and to watch Him act is to hear and watch God speak and act under terrestrial conditions.

The conviction of the Church is that God has communicated with His human creation through the prophets and by his Son. God has spoken so that man could hear.

Listen to the way the Apostle Peter expressed this conviction in 2 Peter 1:21. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Listen to the way the Apostle Paul expressed this conviction in 2 Timothy 3:16-17. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

By the way, some people down through the years have had the idea that God dictated the Bible to the writers the way one person might dictate a letter to a secretary. That is not the case, and the language of 2 Peter and 2 Timothy suggest otherwise.

All Scripture is God-breathed, says 2 Timothy 3:16. Doesn’t that sound more like the way we talk, when we say that a great artist is inspired? The 2 Peter passage says that the prophets were carried along by the Holy Spirit. If you have written a poem or composed a piece of music or solved a difficult problem, haven’t there been moments when you just saw or felt or knew what you had to do?

When God communicated to man, it was more like that than anything else we experience. God left the unique personalities and idiosyncracies of the prophets intact. It was their emotions, their habits of speech, but it was God’s mind finding expression in those human actions.

Preserving the Prophets
The 2 Timothy passage takes us the next step in the Church’s explanation of how God communicates with humanity. All Scripture is God-breathed, says the apostle. It was all well and good for Moses, David, Isaiah and the rest to speak the mind of God. It was all well and good for Jesus to show us what the unseen God was like, but it couldn’t stop there, could it? If God spoke through them, then it became imperative to preserve a record of what they said and did.

Fortunately, the prophets not only preached, they also wrote what they preached. The apostles not only taught, they also wrote what they taught. The apostles not only heard and saw Jesus, they also wrote what they heard and saw. And so, the written scriptures came into existence. Scripture and scripture alone provides us with access to what God said through the prophets and in Jesus. If you believe that, you can see why people treasure these sacred writings.

Let me show you an instructive sidebar to this discussion of the scripture’s value. Look at Jeremiah 36:2. God said, “Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now.” In other words Jeremiah was to produce some version of what we today call the book of Jeremiah.

Now, look down at verses 22-23. Jeremiah’s scroll was taken to the King of Judah. It was a message he needed to hear. Verses 22-23 tell what happened as Jeremiah’s prophecy was read. It was the ninth month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him. Whenever Jehudi (a servant of the king) had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe's knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire.

Finally, verse 32 tells the outcome of that ugly scene. Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, and as Jeremiah dictated, Baruch wrote on it all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them.

That episode bears witness to the power of the written word – the king wanted to destroy it, and Jeremiah and Baruch went to the trouble of producing another, expanded original. And Baruch produced it by writing it out longhand. For hundreds of years the writings of the apostles and prophets were painstakingly copied one word at a time, thousands of times. So precious were those written carriers of God’s word to mankind.

Symbols of Our Belief about the Bible
Two hundred years ago, powerful voices spoke out to discredit the Bible in the life of Europe. The battle over the Bible began in earnest. Both Protestant and Catholic writers made serious attempts to express the authority of scripture in formal theology. Let me read two concentrated, well-crafted examples of such theological expression.

The first comes from the doctrinal statement of my seminary, Dallas Seminary. “We believe that all ‘Scripture is given by inspiration of God,’ by which we understand the whole Bible is inspired in the sense that holy men of God ‘were moved by the Holy Spirit’ to write the very words of Scripture. We believe that this divine inspiration extends equally and fully to all parts of the writings – historical, poetical, doctrinal, and prophetical – as appeared in the original manuscripts. We believe that the whole Bible in the originals is therefore without error. We believe that all the Scriptures center about the Lord Jesus Christ in His person and work in His first and second coming, and hence that no portion, even of the Old Testament, is properly read, or understood, until it leads to Him. We also believe that all the Scriptures were designed for our practical instruction.

The second comes from the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. “‘Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 37).

Doctrinal statements like these have several purposes. First, they offer a brief summary of what a community believes about a certain topic, in this case the Bible. Second, they help to show how the Christian community is distinct from other communities. Like a fingerprint, doctrinal statements give a community of faith its unique identity. Third, doctrinal statements like these preserve truth so that the next generation can experience the truth behind these statements. So, doctrinal statements about the Bible point the next generation back to the power of the Bible, so that it can experience that power for itself. It is tempting to see doctrinal statements as nothing more than debating points, when in truth they are more like signs saying, “Follow this path if you want to experience God and know God.”

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
So, after all is said and done, what exactly is the Bible? It is an old book. Everything the Church receives as scripture had already been completed 1900 years ago. Parts of it may date back another 1500 years before that. But it doesn’t feel old; it has about it the vigor of youth and the wisdom of age. That is a remarkable achievement, and it accounts for another observation about what the Bible is.

The Bible is a bestseller. The appetite for this book grows within the human family with every passing year. A powerful indicator of this growing appetite is that the Bible has been translated into more than 1000 languages. People in remote areas can hear God speak in their local dialect. That too is a remarkable achievement, and it accounts for a third observation about what the Bible is.

The Bible gathers more dust than any other bestseller. Jeremiah and Baruch in their anguish had to start all over to preserve the great prophet’s preaching. Tired but diligent scribes copied this book with meticulous care line by line, generation by generation, so that the people of God could read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the words of God, spoken through His prophets and through His Son. We carry around multiple copies on our personal digital assistants and decorate coffee tables and book shelves and night stands with unopened copies of God’s written gift to mankind. I am persuaded better things of you.

In spite of the dust the Bible must be a dangerous book, because it is forbidden by law in different nations of the world. The king of Judah feared the writings of Jeremiah. Why should we be surprised that it has to be hand-written or smuggled in and circulated in the house churches of China and Vietnam, or that it is forbidden by the imams of the Middle East? It has an explosive power, and the tyrants of the earth fear it.

It offers examples that help people to live today. 1 Corinthians 10:11 says, these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. There is an eternal relevance to what God spoken through the prophets and in His Son.

In the meantime, what’s holding you back from experiencing the reality behind the doctrine? Pick up your Bible and begin to read it. If you come across something that seems difficult or unintelligible, skip it. Make it your aim to understand, as well as you can, what the writer is trying to say. Move on until God Himself encounters you in His Holy Word. You’ll find yourself there and a new way to look at your world.

And talk to each other about scripture. Bring your life and experiences to the table, and allow its powerful truth to mingle freely with your varied experience. There will be another Presence guiding you. The Church provides a protective context in which to think and experience scripture.