November 16

November 16, 2008

Learning to Trust the Bible
a sermon on Deut. 8.1-3; Isaiah 55.10-11; and 2 Tim. 3.14-17
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

If you asked the question, “Why should I believe?” in the church of my childhood, the answer always came back the same: “Because the Bible says so.” If you asked, “And why should I believe the Bible?” the answer would be “Because it is God’s Word.” If you asked, “How do I know it is God’s Word?” the answer was “Because it says it is. Because it is perfect and free from any hint of error.” The absolute, unquestionable truth of the Bible was the axiom of our faith. If you remember high school geometry, an axiom is something assumed to be true. It is where you start in order to prove everything else. You don’t try to prove an axiom, you just state it and take it as true.

The church of my childhood was not alone. The truth of scripture is where the Protestant Reformers started. Look at the Westminster Confession, that profound summary of Christian faith that for centuries was the definition of what Presbyterians believe. The very first article is about what? Not God. Scripture! If you can get people to believe the Bible is true, everything else about the Christian faith falls neatly into place. All you have to do is show it comes from scripture.

This was a winning strategy. Critics of Christianity had been attacking the Bible for two hundred years. In the middle class suburbs of Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1970s and 80s, however, most people still felt the Bible to be holy. It wasn’t just the Bible; it was the Holy Bible. Even folks who never darkened the door of a church felt a residual reverence for scripture. When Billy Graham thundered, “The Bible says …” it was enough to make them listen.

I don’t think that works anymore. I don’t think we can assume the unquestionable truth of the Bible as our axiom and build everything on it. I want you to listen to me carefully. I am not saying the Bible isn’t true. I am not saying it is less than God’s Word. Instead I am saying we can’t expect people to start from that belief. These days, people have to learn to trust the Bible. And that is what this sermon is about, learning to trust the Bible.

Why do I say this? Because I think the answers I was taught as a child aren’t good enough for most people. You say, “The Bible says …” and they say, “So what?” You say, “The Bible is God’s Word,” and they say, “Yeah, right.” Not only are people ignorant of what’s in the Bible, they also don’t trust it. This is true not only of people in general; it is even true within the church.

“Nonsense!” you say, “Of course we in the church believe in the Bible.” Do we? Our denomination regularly battles over issues about which scripture could not speak more clearly. “Oh, those are liberals,” you say, “We’re different.” ... Are we? … Do you read the Bible regularly? Do you study it? We have many opportunities for study in our church: an adult class on Sunday morning, Kerygma, women’s circles—this year we had a six-month study on Wednesday nights of the central teachings of the Bible. A surprisingly small percentage of the membership participates. Why? If you really believed the Bible is a message from Almighty God, your Creator, to you, you would devour it. If you believed the Bible has answers to your problems, you would search it. If you tried but found it difficult to understand, you would come to classes.

My hunch is, it is not just the people “out there” who need to learn to trust the Bible. We do too. I speak now from experience. The answers I was taught as a child were not good enough for me once I began to explore the world and study seriously. I came to see that if your axiom is the perfect truth of scripture, you end up spending a lot of time and energy defending your axiom. You have to discredit any scientific idea that doesn’t square with Genesis 1 & 2. You have to ignore many findings of archaeology. For the most part archeology confirms the accuracy of the Biblical witness, sometimes dramatically. But some findings are less supportive. Scripture says Moses and the Israelites passed certain towns, but archeologists are certain those towns did not yet exist at the time of Moses. Does that trouble my faith? Not in the least. But if I had to defend the absolute perfection of scripture in every detail, it might.

Then there’s the whole question of the Biblical text. We don’t have any original writings. We have copies and copies of copies. We have lots of them. We have an embarrassment of wealth of evidence. And it’s generally easy to establish what the original text said. Despite the ravings of a few scholars with an anti-Christian agenda to push, we can be confident that the texts we have are faithful to the originals. Nevertheless, these days you have to bother to prove that. Unless you know Greek and understand the manuscript traditions, you pretty much have to take someone’s word for it.

And, there is always the problem of harmonizing what the Bible says. I’ll give you one example: how many angels were at the empty tomb on Easter Sunday? Matthew and Mark say one; Luke and John say two. How do you square that? One of my professors called things like this “little landmines” hidden in the text waiting for someone to step on them. Should they blow apart your faith? No, absolutely not. But you do have to figure out what’s going on. And, once you understand what scripture is and what it’s trying to say, you have to learn to trust it, as I did.

One final part of the problem: We are Americans, and Americans habitually stand over scripture in judgment. Rather than let scripture tell us what to believe, we tell it what it ought to say. “Jesus didn’t say that,” we think, “He couldn’t have.” Or, “I don’t like that/I don’t want to do that, so … bah!” Or, “God couldn’t be like that. Those ancient Hebrews must have got it wrong.” We pick and choose what we want to believe, each of us a little Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson went through the New Testament with a pair of scissors cutting out everything miraculous. He didn’t believe in miracles, so snip-snip. He printed what he had left. It’s a lovely set of rules that unfortunately don’t work in real life. We need, therefore, to learn to trust scripture enough to put ourselves under it, not over it. You don’t believe scripture is the Word of God if you constantly stand over it, because you cannot possibly stand over God.

How do we learn to trust scripture? Where do we start? We start by understanding what scripture is. (1) Scripture is a record of God’s revelation. Christianity claims God has made himself known though his actions in our world—not only creation, but also in the history of Israel and above all in Jesus of Nazareth. When you read the Bible, what do you find? Very little of it is rules for living, and none of it is systematic theology. Instead, the Bible is full of stories. A quick note: When I say stories, I do not mean they are not true, that someone made them up. An earlier generation used the word story that way, but I use it to mean a narrative: this happened, then this. I use it the way you do when you talk about your family story or the story of America. The Bible is mostly stories; it’s history. God has done amazing things, and the Bible is his people’s record of those things. It is the story of God as told by those close to the events.

(2) The Bible is inspired by God. At its most basic, this simply means those who recorded God’s awesome deeds got it right. They rightly understood what happened and what it means. We can trust what they say. Yet there is more. Just as Christians believe Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, we think of scripture the same way. Scripture is 100% the work of human beings and 100% the Word of God. I know that sounds odd, so let me give you an analogy. My wife is Canadian. I am American. Our sons are both Canadian and American. They are not half Canadian and half American, with half the rights of each nationality. They are as Canadian as any other Canadian, as Canadian as the Prime Minster himself. At the same time, they are as American as any other American, even the President. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

Scripture is both a human document and the Word of God. This means we can study scripture profitably the way we study other historical documents. We can question scripture. We can pick it apart and look inside. And yet, because it is God’s Word, we have to then acknowledge its authority. If you struggle to understand how a book can be written by human beings and be God’s Word at the same time, your understanding of God is too small. God can work through the authors, even while letting them be themselves, so that their work is both their work and his. We call this inspiration.

(3) Above all, scripture is the authoritative witness to Jesus Christ. This is so important; I don’t want you to miss it. The point of Christianity is not believing the Bible or believing certain doctrines about the Bible. The point of Christianity is knowing Jesus—knowing about him, yes, but also knowing him personally. We get to know him through scripture as it tells us about him and as he, through the Holy Spirit, meets us there. Scripture is “the authoritative witness” to Jesus for two reasons: The Old Testament is because Jesus used it to define and explain himself. The New Testament is because these are the original source documents for Jesus and the movement he started. Everything else is later and derivative. To know anyone or anything you always go back to the sources. That’s what the New Testament gives us.

Now … what does scripture say about itself? I do not want to reason in a circle here. “The Bible is true because it says it is.” That’s not helpful because, really, how many writings claim to be false. Nevertheless, God’s people have been aware from the very beginning that God speaks, and they have thought about what we should do with his Word. I chose three brief passages that do not try to prove the truth of God’s Word but rather tell us what we ought to do with it once we’ve found it.

Jesus quoted the Deuteronomy passage when he was hungry and tempted to turn stones into bread. “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” The Word of God gives life. I don’t think this means, “Scripture feeds the soul the way bread feeds the body.” It’s more profound than that. Our whole being—body, soul, and mind; our place in the world and all our relationships—live and thrive on God’s Word. What are we creatures if we are cut off from our Creator? Miserable shells of our true selves, mere shadows of who we were destined to be. What changes this? God speaks to us his Word of promise and life.

The Isaiah 55 passage highlights the power of God’s Word to accomplish his purposes. I’m a smart-alek. Sometimes I can’t help myself. Once I was mailing a Bible as a gift. The postal clerk asked me, “Does this contain anything fragile, liquid or perishable?” “No.” “Anything dangerous?” I was sorely tempted to say, “Yes.” After all, the Bible has brought down kings and changed the course of history. It has transformed lives, communities, and even nations. If it isn’t dangerous, why have various governments banned it? I resisted the temptation because in this post-9/11 world, it doesn’t pay to joke about security. Yet I consider few things more dangerous than a Bible. God’s Word accomplishes his purposes. I always preach that God has a call for you. If you even suspect I am right, you ought to look into it. And what about our church? What does God want for Westminster? The Bible will not tell us what we ought to do specifically in terms of mission and outreach, but it will show us the kind of congregation God wants us to be. If we are that kind of congregation, God can use us; and if he can use us, he will. That’s what I believe, anyway. Do you?

The Timothy passage tells you what scripture is for. The Bible may not answer all your questions, but it does what it is supposed to do. It gives you enough for you to trust God, to know Christ, to know who you are and who God wants you to be. That’s what it’s for, and that’s what it does. You hear God’s call and know how to answer.

So that’s what the Bible is and what it says about itself. How do we learn to trust it? I offer three ways. This is not an exhaustive list, but a good start. They were enough for me.

1. We trust scripture because of its explanatory power. That is, the teachings of scripture explain life, the world, and our own experience better than alternative explanations. Or to put it simply, scripture has better answers to life’s big questions.

This is the approach Francis Schaeffer made famous. The first time he met a young man who would later become his son-in-law, the young man, not knowing Schaeffer was a pastor and missionary, said to him, “I don’t think Christianity has an intellectual leg to stand on, do you?” Wow, talk about opening yourself up to a lengthy discussion. But here’s the interesting part. Schaeffer didn’t sit down and try to defend the Bible point-by-point starting from Genesis 1. He started by explaining the picture the Bible paints about the human condition. Here is who scripture says we are: personal beings created by a personal God; created in the image of God, yet fallen; and so on. Then he defended this picture. For example, how could personal beings just emerge from an impersonal material universe? That would be like water rising above its source. If we are persons, we have a personal origin.

You learn to trust the Bible as its teachings are confirmed in your life. In the Bible, the difference between right and wrong matters. God says, “Thou shalt …” and “Thou shalt not …” And the difference isn’t arbitrary. Sin is what destroys persons and community. Deep down, you know the difference between right and wrong matters. It’s just one more reason to take the Bible seriously and to trust it.

2. We trust scripture because we believe in Jesus. This is how I came to trust scripture again. It is an approach William Lane Craig takes in his book Reasonable Faith. N.T. Wright also goes this route, I think, in his many books. You start by treating the Bible as a set of documents from the ancient world. Whatever else they are, they are that. Everyone, even die-hard atheists, can agree on this. Next you show that they contain historically trustworthy information. They don’t have to be perfect. They only have to contain some accurate information. Then based on that information, you make a credible historical case for Jesus. His resurrection is the key. Obviously if Jesus rose from the dead, there’s something to Christianity.

I have preached before about the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. Those sermons are available if you like, along with articles and books I recommend. We don’t have time for that here, but that’s OK. Most of us trust Jesus. We believe in him. What we need to do is make the leap from trusting him to trusting scripture. The Old Testament was his Bible. The New Testament is about him. It contains the original sources we have about him. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to believe in Jesus and hold scripture at arm’s length. It doesn’t make sense to call him “Lord,” but refuse to submit to the authority of scripture.

3. We trust scripture because we meet Jesus in it and because we hear God through it. This is a subjective reason, which means it is the most powerful one if you have had the experience but the weakest if you are trying to convince someone else.

You sit down. You open your Bible. You read. And suddenly it is not about people who lived a long time ago. It is about you. And the person speaking to you from the page is not an ancient prophet but the Living God. You are comforted … or you are challenged … by God himself.

The figure I associate with this approach is Charles Spurgeon. He said scripture is like a tiger in a cage. I could bring in a caged tiger and lecture to you about how fierce it is, how sharp its teeth are, why you should fear this tiger, and so on. You might agree with me. Or, I could simply let the tiger out of the cage. At that point the tiger’s fierceness becomes self-authenticating. Suddenly everyone’s a believer.

When you study scripture and live by its teachings, you are letting the tiger out of the cage. Because scripture really is the Word of God by which we live … and it really is powerful … and it really is useful, it will prove itself trustworthy as you live by it. In other words, we learn to trust the Bible as we put it into practice and find it trustworthy.

If everyone believed the Bible is true, my job would be so easy. I could just say, “The Bible says ..” and there you go. But I know people outside the church don’t trust the Bible. I suspect even within the church many people, despite what they say, need to learn to trust the Bible. If you are one of them, do not miss what God is saying to you. You don’t have to start by assuming the Bible is God’s Word, but you ought to end up there. Amen.

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