Text: 2 Timothy 3:14-16

Theme: What Scripture is

Preacher: David Strain

Date preached: 2004/8/29

Scripture # 1: Inspiration

Tonight we are going to begin a short series of what I hope will be three sermons looking at the teaching of 2 Timothy 3:14-16 regarding the inspiration and sufficiency of scripture.

But why should you be at all interested in such a subject? Isn’t it rather dry and doctrinaire? Or for that matter why should you be interested in the study of the bible at all? It is an ancient book that can hardly be expected to speak with a relevant voice to the dilemmas I face each day in the 21^st century isn’t it?

Well let me illustrate the importance of understanding and valuing and using the Bible with a story:

There was once an architect who had been commissioned to design and build the perfect city. He spent hours researching the sociology of urban living. He interviewed town planners and architects from around the world. He made sketches of broad avenues and tree lined boulevards. He dreamt of soaring towers and landscaped parklands. He saw low cost high standard housing and breathtaking mansions.

But the more he planned and dreamed and drew the further and further away actually coming up with the plans for the perfect city seemed to be. There were so many variables, so many alternatives, so many challenges. Years passed, and the commission given to him had become the labour of a lifetime. Meanwhile, the site selected for the perfect city began to be occupied. The tenants of the new city could no longer wait for its construction and began to erect ramshackle shelters. Eventually a city was built on that site. But it was not the perfect city that had been asked for. It was, as all the cities of men tend to be in the end, a rambling nightmare of concrete and glass.

As the architect lay on his death bed, old, grey and utterly disillusioned, his grandson was looking over his bookshelves. There, on the top shelf, under a pile of plans for the perfect city that never was, lay an old book, long forgotten and unused. The bindings cracked and dust rose from it in clouds as the little boy studied the curious volume, and then a look of amazement came over his young face. Its here! The plans have been made, long ago. The perfect city! Look grandpa, look!

But it was too late, the old architect had passed silently from this world in ignorance and grief, having learned to his cost that the perfect solution to the problem of his life could not be arrived at by any amount of personal research or study, he had forgotten that it was to be found instead, whole and entire, in this one ancient volume. All the while the architect spent himself in his relentless pursuit of a solution, the perfect answer to his life’s central dilemma was right there in that old book, languishing on a dusty top shelf.

Our neglect of the Bible, this dusty ancient volume languishing on our top shelf, is a tragedy. For in it are contained the plans of the master builder, the Lord Almighty, for the salvation of your soul. The central dilemma of your life and mine, ‘How can I know the true God?’ cannot be answered by our own investigations and research; it can only be discovered in the pages of Scripture, and we can spend our lives in the futile pursuit of answers, constantly inventing mechanisms for forgiveness, self justification, and spiritual satisfaction and at the end die disillusioned and empty, or blind and deceived. Never having found God’s own solution in His own sacred Word we will go to face him without any awareness of the only thing that can provide us with hope for time and eternity.

Understanding what the Bible is, and what the Bible does, is an issue of vital and eternal importance to every son and daughter of Adam in our fallen world.

So turn please to 2Timothy chapter 3.

Now the chapter is divided roughly into three sections. The first section is there in verses 1-9. Paul has sent Timothy to Ephesus as his representative and delegate to get the church there settled and established, and he reminds him that in the last days there will appear within the church some who will make a false profession of faith in Christ and who will attempt to lead others away with them. And in verses 1-5 Paul outlines their inner moral corruptions; they are lovers of themselves, of money, they are boastful, proud and so on. And then in verses 6-9 he outlines their wickedness as it manifests itself with reference to the lives of others. They prey on weak willed women, they are always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth, but instead they oppose the truth.

And then the second division of the chapter, in vs. 10-13, contrasts the first section with a reminder to Timothy of Paul’s own example. “You know”, vs. 10, “all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings”, and so on.

And then in verses 12-13 Paul sums up the two contrasting models for Timothy. “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.”

There are those who want to be godly and those who do not. The first group will endure the rejection and opposition of the world. The second group will descend into ever more profound moral and spiritual deception and sin.

And then the third division of the chapter, verses 14-16, focuses on Timothy himself. It’s as if Paul was saying to him, now these are the two routes open to you Timothy. Which way will you go?

And it is to encourage him to face resolutely the challenges of apostasy within the church and persecution from outside it, that Paul writes verses 14-16, and the famous statement they contain regarding the inspiration of the Bible.

And I want us to look at three aspects of Paul’s teaching here over the next three weeks:

Tonight we’ll consider the inspiration of the Scriptures, and ask what scripture is. Then next week we’ll look at the sufficiency of the scriptures and ask what scripture does. And then finally we’ll conclude our look at the sufficiency of scripture by asking how scripture is to be used.

So tonight, what scripture is

And the first thing we need to notice about the nature of scripture is that it is a fully and truly human book. Look first at verse 15, “how from infancy you have known the holy scriptures” and again in verse 16, “All scripture is God breathed”.

Now Paul uses here two quite different words for ‘Scripture’, but both point to a very obvious and very simple truth. The Bible is a book. It is writing. It did not fall out of the sky whole and complete. It is the product of human beings in all their fallenness and weakness sitting down and composing and writing. And let’s be clear this is not so much a point Paul goes out of his way to make in this passage, as it is a simple truth he assumes as obvious in the very words he selects to describe scripture.

The first word he uses, there in verse 15, ‘ta grammata’, refers specifically to letters. It’s a very physical way of speaking about the Bible. This is a confluence, a gathering together of text, of writing. Someone sat at a table somewhere and laboriously inscribed each character on a page. The second word Paul uses is the more usual word for sacred texts, ‘pasa graphe’, all scripture, literally all writings.

Both words are not uncommon names for the Bible, but that fact that they can be used for other books of merely human significance, and are used here for Holy Scripture, tells us something. Whatever else we may legitimately say of it, the Bible is a human book. The words Paul uses here, quite un-self-consciously as simply the normal words for the Bible, are words that point us first of all to the humanity of the text. And in our reformed and evangelical circles we need to understand better what that really means.

‘Ta grammata’, and, ‘pasa graphe’, remind us that the Bible is very much the product of human craftsmanship and skill. It is composed within the cultural milieu of its several authors over a period stretching from around 1450BC, for the earliest OT texts, through to 96 AD for the last NT texts. It embraces a variety of different styles and genres. It makes use of an amazing, and sometimes bewildering, array of rhetorical devices. It loves irony, and is full of dramatic narrative techniques that make our best novelists and movie directors appear novices in their ability to impact audiences with their theme.

It addresses the fullest range of human conditions; love is there, anger and hatred are there, despair and abandonment are there. Wars, famine, adultery, rape, murder are all there. But so too are sacrifice, hope, and deliverance. There is law and poetry, prophecies, spoken in apocalyptic metaphor, or scathingly simple prose. There are biographies and history books, theological treatises, and songs of love and loss.

The Bible is a very human book, and all the humanity, the language, the cultural norms, the linguistic conventions, of real human beings are there.

But sometimes we come to the Bible as if it were something different; a mere textbook of Divine answers, or even worse, mediated to us through a five minute, read it while on the tube, pop-psychology, daily devotional, we treat scripture like a kind of Christian horoscope that can be consulted for quick fix answers to life’s daily dilemmas. It’s only function in my life is to set me up for the day. Allow me to tick the relevant box in my head….quiet-time? Check!

But the problem with that kind of approach to the Bible is that, while it may alleviate our evangelical consciences (at least I’m having a quiet time) it nevertheless engenders in us real frustration when the portion of the Bible we happen to be reading simply does not want to tell us directly and plainly ‘do this’, ‘think that’, ‘live like this’.

The Bible refuses to fit into our fast food culture. You see we don’t really want a human text, whose narratives and love songs, histories and letters are written with all the pathos, and power, all the irony and beauty, all the joy and horror of the Bible, what we want is the “MacBible”. The macBible will tell us straight what we need to knw. It will list all the truths we need to believe and all the advice we need to hear in simple uncomplicated easy to digest propositions. But like all fast food the MacBible is high on convenience and low on nutrition.

To be sure it does do that that from time to time. But more often it wants to tell us stories, or sing to us, or argue with us, and that requires us to read, and listen, and devote time and attention to reflection and meditation. The very nature of the Biblical material calls us to develop sensitivity to its different ways of speaking into our lives. God’s truth is not measured out to us in nice clinical propositional doses, like scripture pills to be taken twice daily. God’s truth comes to us, just as it does in the Lord Jesus Christ himself, in human form, with all the colour and variety and poetry and artistry conceivable.

God’s truth is deliberately communicated, not just in the meanings of Bible texts, but in the methods that the Bible uses.

It uses more than logical argument and legal codes to get God’s point over. It moves us, and scares us, and challenges us. It makes us think and it disturbs our assumptions. And it does it while telling us all about the sordid affairs of David and the disastrous home life of Abraham.

The Bible is a human book. And that is troubling for a fast food generation seeking quick fixes, who’d much prefer the MacBible to consume on the run. And that is where we see God’s great wisdom at work. He has given us a Bible that is composed in such a way that if we hope to understand and grow in our faith, we will be forced to slow down and plan to read it. We will be required to think slowly and carefully about what it is saying in order to understand its narratives, songs, prophesies, letters and laws.

And more, the Lord has given to us a bible that is as diverse and varied and complex as human beings are, so that there is always a way to get the message across to every type and class of people. Some of us respond better to logic than others, and so there are the epistles full of close argument and debate. Others grasp the truth when it harnesses our imaginations, and so we are given glorious visions of apocalyptic grandeur or parables full of amazing lucidity. Others of us need concrete examples and understand truths when we see them worked out in real people’s lives and so we have the histories of the patriarchs and the Kings, the disciples and the early church. And so, on and on. God, in giving us a book that arises out of, and in harmony with, the humanity of its authors has given us a wonderful book that can speak to fallen human beings across cultures, times, and even personalities.

So firs the Bible is a human book. Then secondly, and along side of that truth, is the fact that the Bible is a Divine book. Like the Lord Jesus himself, who being the eternal Son of God became man and so was and continues to be both God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever, so Holy Scripture is both fully and entirely human and entirely and fully divine. Look at verse 16.

“ All scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righreousness.”

All scripture is God breathed. Theopneustos. Exhaled by God. Here are these ancient writings, these incredibly human books, and they are described as having been breathed out by God. The very words of scripture, for all that they were freely chosen and used by human writers, are also, simultaneously, the precise and exact verbal breathings of God Himself! The point Paul is making, and this is vital, is not that some men wrote some books at some point in the past, and later God breathed some vague new status of ‘inspired’ into them so that their books would be privileged above those of other men. Paul’s point, rather, is that these writings of men are the results of the out breathing of God. This book is God exhaled scripture!

God is not a typist! He did not take the Bible’s human authors and keyboard-like simply type through them, in some mechanical way, his precise words. Keyboards do not bring anything of themsleves to the message typed on them. But the Bible is everywhere filled with the character, thoughts, personalities of its authors. No, God took these men, and moulded them, and by the work of his Spirit so ensured that what they freely chose and wrote and selected and composed, would infallibly and at every point coincide with his divine word.

That’s what the Apostle Peter makes plain in 2Peter 1:20-21 “No prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. 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.”

Men spoke from God as the Holy Spirit carried them along. As my old Systematic theology professor likes to say of this verse, making a pun on the gk word for ‘carried’ (phero) , men spoke from God as the Holy Spirit ferried them along.

The Spirit of God ferried along these men as they wrote, so that the direction of their thought and that of God’s thought coincided exactly.

And the implications of that fact are clear. First, the Bible is the infallible Word of God. Whatever it says, God says. And, to somewhat understate the case, that makes it a vitally important book, and a miracle of the most astonishing nature. You can hold in your hands, brothers and sisters, the voice of God written and recorded. You have access, whenever you wish it, to what John Knox, in the introduction to the 1560 Scots Confession, called the Mouth of God. That is a breathtaking privilege.

How do you use this book? Do you read it as the most astonishing miracle? Do you study it understanding that it is the very word of God to you? or is it old, passé, boring?

Secondly it is reliable. If whatever the Bible says, God says, and there were errors in scripture, then logically that means either God can err, or worse, God can lie. To claim that all scripture is breathed out by God, and then to be shown that some portion of the text is simply wrong historically or linguistically, means that God cannot mean what he says here in 2 Timothy 3:16.

This verse is a prime example of what our confession of faith means when it speaks of Holy Scripture as “abundantly evidencing itself to be the word of God.” WCF I: V. Here is a bold and clear declaration that holy scripture is the inspired and authoritative word of God and is to be believed simply and plainly because God says so. Scripture in other words is self-authenticating. You can trust it and stake your soul upon it because of the character of the One who speaks in it.

And finally, since scripture is not only human, but divine, the word of man, and the Word of God, it is Holy. Scripture is human. Scripture is Divine. Scripture is holy.

Let’s not pass too quickly over that little adjective there in verse 15. You have known the holy Scriptures. They are scriptures, they are human writings, but they are holy.

And here I speak to my own heart also; since God speaks in scripture, how ought you to reverence his word? Let us ask ourselves with all the honesty we can muster, do we revere the living word of God, such that we listen whenever it speaks, we obey whatever it commands, and we rejoice at whatever it promises?

Since whatever Scripture says, God says, calling scripture holy is not difficult for the Biblical writers. It is the voice of God, its words are his words, and that means that the Bible is as holy as God is holy.

Were the Lord to appear this moment in blazing majesty and burning holiness we would all tremble and bow down? But his word is as holy as he is. It is his own voice to you. Do you not owe to the Word of God the reverence you owe should the Lord appear and speak directly to you? And that of course has all kinds of implications for how we live and we can get at some of them by asking some simple questions of ourselves;

1. How central is scripture to my daily routine? What place does Bible reading take in my life each day? What attempts do I make not only to read it but understand it?

2. How do I prepare to listen to God’s word preached? Do I cultivate any disciplines that will help me stay attentive and apply what I am learning and live it out?

3. Do I study to bring portions of God’s word into every situation, and meditate upon them? Am I memorising scripture and do I make use of those portions of scripture I know already day by day?

4. Do I pray scripture? Do I turn the lessons of God’s word into prayer and praise for myself and others?

5. Do I earnestly look for truth about God and his glory in scripture? Is my thirst growing for a deeper knowledge of Jesus Christ every time I come to His word? Do I delight to see and think of God the Father Son and Holy Spirit as he is presented to me in scripture, and dwell on Him and his glory, words and works, for his own sake without regard to practical truths for daily living? Do I find myself more an more contemplating God revealed in Christ as I find Him in the Bible, as the great object of my life?

This is how to revere scripture. This is what it means to understand and live in the light of the holiness of God that infuses scripture. Let us labour, depending on the grace of God to take every though captive to the word of God, to bend every attitude till it fits the demands of scripture, to make scripture spring unbidden into our minds in every circumstance so that we are always ready to give a reason to those who ask us for the hope that we have with gentleness and respect.

Scripture is human. Scripture is Divine. And scripture is Holy.

Amen