Chapter 4
The Uniqueness of the Bible
A serious problem - how can we recognize what is canonical?
If God wants to be clearly known, shouldn’t He plainly tell us just what writings in the world are His revelation? Alas, God seems to be amazingly negligent in this respect. He has strictly warned us against adding to His words, but He has nowhere explicitly stated just what words are His among the many that men have written. But because we are not permitted to add to His words, where else can we learn just which ones are His (Proverbs 30:6)?
The way to clear up doubtful questions like this is to pay attention to what is already clear. One point is easy - establishing a canon of Holy Scripture amounts to separating light from darkness. So what does the Bible says about how God separates light from darkness?
The Bible surely teaches that deciding what belongs in the Bible is not the place to start. Jesus, in particular, never got into an argument about what was canonical. He always worked within his listener's canon, whoever the listener was, not because he agreed with it, but because he knew that God is everywhere. No one can escape His reach (Psalm 139:7-11), and His word comes with Him (John 1:1). Error concerning what is authoritative is rooted in our flight from God’s truth. Wherever people run from God, our job is to discern God’s truth sitting there and awaiting their arrival. The first step in determining what is authoritative is to realize that in a way it doesn’t matter, because it is not possible to live in God’s creation and escape His truth. Once we realize the truth of Psalm 139 - we just can’t get away, and no one else can either - determining what is authoritative becomes much easier.
Consider how Jesus handled this issue in practice. In the days of his flesh, the Pharisees acknowledged all of the present-day Hebrew Scriptures, but the Sadducees trusted only Moses.
Based mostly on the Prophets and the Psalms, the Pharisees believed that the dead will be raised. The Sadducees denied this, claiming that the resurrection was not taught in Moses, and that the writings the Pharisees used to teach the resurrection were not the word of God.
To the Sadducees, it seemed clear that Moses ruled out resurrection from the dead by his statute requiring a man to marry the wife of his dead brother, because if the dead were raised, this statute seemingly would not square with the commandment against adultery. The question was impossible for the opponents to settle because they could not agree on a common authority.
In discussions with Pharisees, Jesus relied on the writings they considered canonical. But when the Sadducees gave Jesus their best shot against the resurrection, Jesus surprised them. He subjected himself to the subset of God's revelation that they accepted, and he answered them from within it (Matt. 22:23-32).
From Moses he demonstrated that the dead are raised. Since Moses actually teaches the resurrection far more plainly elsewhere, maybe Jesus was saving the best for later, as he generally does (John 2:10). By answering the Sadducees from within their canon instead of arguing with them about it, Jesus undermined their error by removing its power to justify their false doctrine.
In the common people, Jesus recognized a thing of great practical importance to us - they really had two canons of God's word. Their “religious” canon was roughly the present-day Hebrew Scriptures. But their canon of daily life, the word of God they really knew and lived by, was the revelation of God in the things of daily life - wheat, sheep, fathers and sons, fish, and such like. So Jesus reached their daily lives, instead of just their religious lives, by teaching them mostly from these things.
Another serious problem - the word of God made into a lie
To Jeremiah, the word of God was "like fire, and like a hammer which
shatters a rock" (Jeremiah
Jeremiah explained this as follows: "How can you say, 'We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us?' But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie" (Jeremiah 8:8).
With this in mind, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus documented in precise detail how the scribes had poisoned the Law. The multitudes were astonished because Jesus was teaching with authority and not as their scribes. After hearing the Bible all their lives, but made into a lie by the scribes, they were for the first time actually hearing the word of God!
Jesus had authority because he first actually heard God's word as it really
is, from God. He certainly took his own advice and became a doer of his
Father's word (Matthew
Why couldn't the scribes teach with authority? The only way to teach
God's word is to have learned it from God, and that is not how they did
it. They learned it by figuring it out themselves or stealing it from one
another, thereby setting God Himself against them (Jeremiah
Now why exactly was God against them as Jeremiah said? Did God object to their hearing from one another and studying the works of other people? Not likely, for we read in Malachi, “Then those that feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the Lord gave attention and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who fear the Lord and esteem His name” (Mal. 3:16). Then too, I thought I should write this, and you think you should read it!
The problem was that they learned from men so as not remain helpless and ignorant in the event that God failed to show up. They used one another like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Their authority proceeded not from having been with God and hearing from Him, but by conforming to all the great authorities and theologians that they all looked up to, instead of insisting on hearing what God had to say. They taught as mere men because they only knew what mere men had to say. Like Jeroboam the son of Nebat, they manufactured their doctrine instead of receiving it from God.
Isn't that pretty much what we see today? When preachers want to find out what the Bible says, they run quickly to commentaries, applying rules of interpretation found nowhere in the Bible - tradition learned, but not from Scripture, and resting on the unstated assumption that God is as silent to us as a graven image.
Few indeed go to God and insist upon getting what He has to say even when it might disagree with everyone else, although the Scripture says, "Let God be found true, though every man a liar" (Romans 3.4), and again, "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways" (Isaiah 55:8). For this reason, our teachers more often remind us and the world of the scribes than they do of Jesus.
I am not at all saying as some do that we should pay no attention to
others. We need to listen to others carefully, just as Jesus in the
temple "was listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke
When
James did not write, "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him confer with other men and look at commentaries," but, "If any of you lacks wisdom, let Him ask of God" (James 1:5). "Any of you" means everybody. None of us, no matter how unlearned, is denied the right - and the obligation - to elbow past all the great authorities and put his questions to God Himself, getting his answers from the Same.
Someone will now object, "So if I ask God, how can I recognize His answer?"
Well, if God is the source of wisdom, is He powerless to give the wisdom needed to recognize His word when it comes? If He reveals these things to babes, is it by great understanding that these babes are supposed to discern them when they're revealed? Not at all, because it is written, "Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yes, our God is compassionate. The Lord preserves the simple" (Psalm 116:5-6).
Concerning the means that we devise to discover truth, "Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, 'I know,' he cannot discover" (Ecclesiastes 8:17). So we see that failure to discover the truth has to do with saying, "I know," prematurely, that is, by reasoning away or otherwise stifling our doubts and willfully ignoring weaknesses in our present understanding.
When I clean a paintbrush, I know it's clean when the rinse water comes clear. I clean the brush by working the water through it, searching for undisturbed places where paint remains.
I know I've heard from God when all my doubts have been resolved. I resolve doubts by talking over with God everything that I don't understand, and by listening to anyone else who questions my thinking.
I don't clean the brush by trying to keep it from making the rinse water dirty, and I don't get rid of my doubts by stifling them and making sure that nothing disturbs my assurance.
The God who commands us to do His commandments also says, "If the trumpet produces an indistinct sound, who will prepare Himself for battle" (1 Corinthians 14:8)? Therefore, so that His word can accomplish His purpose (Isaiah 55:11), God will certainly speak distinctly to anyone who wants to do His will. For this reason, Jesus said, "If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from myself" (John 7:17).
When we clearly know, being freed from doubts by the power of God and not by our own reasonings, we become able to act on what we know. Our confidence in the truth then enables us to do what we could not imagine being able to do before. In this way, we and others who see us come to know for sure that the word of God is at work, and this leads to further obedience to the truth. In this way the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written.
To understand why the people of God are effectively without the Bible today, why not think over how the Bible says this happens? The people Jesus ministered to had effectively lost the Bible, even though their scribes taught it incessantly, because the lying pen of those scribes had turned it into a lie. Since it had been made into a lie, the people were deprived of anything true to believe.
Their scribes had turned it into a lie because they were stealing the word of God from one another and relying on the wisdom of man in order to understand it, just as their successors do today. If our doctrine has little effect, like that of the scribes, is it not because we arrive at it just as they did?
The cure for this is not to look further, like that dachshund I described in the last chapter, for another way to explain why God does not work in power for us as He did for Jesus. We need to acknowledge that we have followed the example of the scribes instead of Jesus, and we need to come to our senses. Only after we do that - not before - we may consider other explanations without further deceiving ourselves. Then we may find the word of God no harder to find than a light in the dark, which brings me to my next point.
The word of God stands out from all else as light stands apart from darkness
Genesis 1:4 says, "God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness." Since we are to imitate God, as beloved children (Ephesians 5:1), it makes sense to think that we need to separate the light from the darkness in the same manner. Because the word of God is good in every way - trustworthy, accurate, gentle in the right places, tough in the right places, filled with power like nothing else - we should be able to distinguish it from the darkness.
Sure enough, the Bible plainly says we can. Psalm 34:8 says, "O taste and see that the Lord is good," which is to say that tasting for ourselves that the Lord is good opens our eyes to see that He is good. We recognize the word of God because, when we taste it, our eyes are opened, resulting in life for ourselves and other people, whereas other stuff doesn't work that way.
Jesus put it plainly in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew
Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorns, nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit; but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits.
Job testified, "He has inscribed a circle on the surface of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness" (Job 26:10). Observe that God does not inscribe a circle on the surface of the waters in order to establish a boundary, as men do when they select a certain set of writings to be regarded as holy. He inscribes the circle where the boundary already is. In the same way, the boundary between the word of God and everything else is there already.
It has never been the church's job to usurp God's authority by arbitrarily deciding exactly what His word is. In fact we have not succeeded in clearly doing so, in that Protestants hold one canon, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics another, and the Egyptian Coptic Church yet another. Our job is only to recognize the very clear boundary between the word of God and everything else - using the simple standards laid down by Jesus and by the prophets before Him, which people everywhere apply in the matters of daily life.
The Bible itself is to be judged by the principles it lays down. When Jesus said, "You shall know them by their fruits," He was not speaking just of everyone else, as the hypocrites do. He was telling His hearers how to know Him, and us too.
How does the Bible measure up?
An exhaustive defense of the Bible is not my purpose here, although to convincingly set forth the truth it teaches is the purpose of my life. But any reader who has accompanied the Bible and me this far surely deserves to know why it has my confidence, so consider here a little of the evidence which has caused me, who once despised the Bible, to know that it is true.
Fulfilled prophecies - three examples
When someone describes in detail events far in the future, I'm impressed!
Daniel
Daniel was so precise concerning the events of the Hellenistic period that those who reject the Bible find it necessary to consider Daniel a fraud, really written about 175 BC - although Daniel was included in the Septuagint, which was largely translated 100 years before that. [1]
To be included in the Septuagint as Holy Scripture, Daniel couldn't have been written the day before the translators of the Septuagint began to work. Daniel had already been in general use for some time, and of proven quality. So its prophecies must be acknowledged by an honest person to have been written quite some time before the events took place.
Isaiah
Isaiah named Cyrus 150 years before his time (Isaiah 45), so those who approach the Bible in a condescending way find it necessary to invent two or three Isaiahs in order to ascribe these words to someone who lived 150 years after Isaiah the son of Amoz. Many of these call themselves Christians, even as they despise the apostle John's testimony that the same man wrote it all (John 12:38-41, ascribing Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 6 to the same Isaiah)!
They must confess nonetheless that Isaiah 53 was written at least 500 years before all the things described there happened to Jesus of Nazareth. 500 years beforehand, we are told, God gave the details of the death of Jesus to a deceiver, one pretending to be a prophet who had written 150 years before himself!
If they can believe that, why stagger at the thought that God could give the name of Cyrus a mere 150 years beforehand to a man of truth? In some cases, maybe, this reveals the small importance such teachers ascribe to uprightness of character.
In fact, Isaiah 40 and following is plainly God's comforting response to Isaiah's distress - first concerning the bad news he had to bring Hezekiah concerning the captivity, and moreover that even Hezekiah didn't care. Isaiah 39-40 is one of those places in Scripture which taught Jesus, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."
Noah
Having drunk too much wine, Noah awoke and said (Genesis
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let
God revealed Himself especially to the descendants of Shem, specifically the Hebrews. Who indeed in all the earth has heard from God Himself as did the Hebrew prophets?
When
It remained for Japheth to enslave the Canaanites. The sons of
Japheth, including Javan, populated the northern and
western countries, as seen from the land of Israel - the interested reader may
see Genesis 10:2-5 and trace their names through the Bible. In
particular, Joel refers to the Greeks as the sons of Javan
(Joel 3:6), and Javan is the name Daniel always uses
for
The Greeks led by Alexander the Great destroyed
Finally, when Paul, under compulsion (Acts 16:6-10), went first to Greece and then to Rome preaching Jesus Christ, Japheth came to live in the tents of Shem through Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Shem.
Does any man wake up with a hangover and speak this way by means of human understanding?
The Bible, although it never changes, is always new, and the knowledge it teaches results in humility
One thing you notice with disciples of Jesus is that we're always reading the Bible. There is not that much there to read. If it were any other book, I would have squeezed it dry by now, having read it every day for over 30 years.
As it is, though, I regularly see things I never saw before. What's more important, things I once understood disintegrate in perplexity, so that God can now teach me something. Although knowledge puffs up, as Paul said and the whole world knows, real knowledge of the Bible actually leads to humility. As the Bible deprives us of our man-made certainties, we progressively abandon our belief in the inerrancy of our own understanding. The end result in the Messiah, which will happen in us too if we follow him wherever he goes, is summed up by Isaiah as follows (Isaiah 11:3-4):
He will delight in the fear of the Lord, and He will not judge by what His eyes see, nor make a decision by what His ears hear; but with righteousness He will judge the poor, and decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth.
Confidence in our own understanding of what we see and hear is truly incompatible with justice and equity. If we don't believe that about ourselves, at least we know it applies to others when we feel on our own hides their superficial understandings. We begin to see where Jesus was coming from when He said, "Do not judge lest you be judged."
We resist the life-giving doubts and perplexity engendered by the Bible by cobbling explanations together with human wisdom instead of turning to God and asking Him for understanding. That's how the scribes and Pharisees became blind men. The twelve also had this problem - how often we find them uselessly reasoning together about something Jesus has said instead of asking him - and he's standing right there!
Maybe you say to yourself, "Thank you, Lord, that I'm not as stupid as those disciples. If I could be with Jesus, I wouldn't act like that."
If you're fool enough to kid yourself that way, can you learn anything from the foolishness of the twelve? If he is near to anyone who calls on him, why, if you're wiser than the twelve, do you yourself often try to understand his words without asking him? On the other hand, if we ask him all kinds of questions, the way little kids do, it's amazing how understanding comes.
Don't laugh until you've tried it for a while! Just as Jesus said, his Father has hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to babies. Outside of the Bible, I have seen nothing written that so consistently works humility into the reader in this way. Have you?
The closer you look, the better it gets
When Jesus made water into wine at
Proverbs
Addictions always start out wonderful and end in misery. The first weeks of an immoral sexual relationship are certainly more fun than its end. Those who do drugs find that in time the drugs do them. A cult always puts its best foot forward; its initiates get acquainted later with its more nasty features. The Nazi regime looked a lot better to most Germans in 1933 than it did in 1945.
Even things in the world that are not bad lose their fizz in this way.
The new car looks a lot better when you drive it out of the lot than it does
five years later. The tenth trip to
When John Lindsay was elected mayor of
On the contrary, the wisdom of God often gives a bad first impression. But, as Jesus said, if you abide in His word, you come to know the truth and the truth sets you free. "Abide" means that this is not a one-time thing but a process that takes place over time, as Proverbs 4:18 says.
In short, a big reason I know that the Bible comes from above and not from under the sun is that it doesn't grow old and fade like everything else in the world - on the contrary, it's new every day, as I've been proving for many years.
This is true in more than a personal sense. As new information comes to light, the Bible doesn't grow quaint or absurd, although man-made notions supposedly founded on it often do. The discoveries of archeology and astronomy, especially, are often found to have been in the Bible all along.
A final word about the canon of Holy Scripture
Many Christians find it self-evident that the traditional canon of Scripture is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, the apostolic faith was being preached long before there was a New Testament canon. Since the gospel was already unchangeable when Paul was writing to the Galatians (Galatians 1:6-9), while the New Testament was taking shape, it is clear that the unchanging faith is more basic than any precise canon of Holy Scripture.
Consider also that the ancient creeds of the post-apostolic church, when they set forth the essentials of the faith, never included among these essentials a particular canon of Scripture.
God has arranged things so that the only way to know what belongs in the Bible is that there is nothing else like it. But how often Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, "It is written in your law!" The way we know that the word of God has become our word is that it is not obviously different in our mouth and life than the ways and thoughts of other men - we do not have a mouth and wisdom that none of our adversaries can resist or refute.
When that happens we have in the end two choices: we admit that we are at fault and pursue God until He shows us the lies which we have smeared on His word to rob it of its power; or we affirm that we're doing fine and that the problem is somewhere else.
Once we so justify ourselves, we come quickly to another fork in the road: we can conclude that the problem is in the Bible, since we ourselves are wise men; or we can find our opponents at fault and start shouting - just as the pagans shouted in Ephesus, "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!"
If instead we learn to reason together with God (Isaiah
How is the precious distinguished from the worthless? Of course it's
worthless if it's a lie, but the Bible also agrees with daily life that truth not
practiced is pretty worthless too (James 1:25-27,
We are called to be imitators of God, as beloved children (Eph. 5:1).
It follows that if we do not see God actually doing anything, then we're going
to have trouble becoming doers of His word ourselves. Like Jesus, we are
unable to do more than what we see our Father doing (John
To teach that God has spoken in the Bible but no longer really acts as he once did destroys the church's life by leading us to act likewise - talking about God but not actually doing the deeds of His kingdom. The next chapter examines how we who do profess that God still acts in power are failing to persuade the world, and even much of the church, that this is so.
Notes
1. Some assert that the Septuagint was not translated until after 200 BC, but
this view has problems. In particular, the evidence is quite conclusive
that the translation was done with the cooperation of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who reigned from 285 to 247 BC. Sidney Jellicoe, The Septuagint
and Modern Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 48, 55.