5-Minute Christianity

God told us everything we need to know to live as Christians. But what if the Bible doesn’t mention a particular topic? When we don't have clear instructions in the Bible, Christians we use principles from the Bible to make decisions. Let me give an example. The Bible doesn’t have a command telling us what day the church should gather. However, in the Bible, the first Christians gathered on The Lord’s Day or Sunday. Based on that example, the church I’m part of meets on Sunday. It’s not a sin to meet on another day because the Bible doesn’t give a command to meet on Sunday. But we’ve made a decision based on a principle that we find in the Bible.

The Bible contains everything we need to know to have and maintain a relationship with God. The theological term to describe that is “sufficiency”. Or the sufficiency of Scripture. Based on this belief, if we want to know what God thinks about something, we search the Bible to find out. Not everything that humans could possibly know is in the Bible. My son Chad can’t read the Bible for sports predictions. The Bible doesn’t tell us everything about math or science or history. But everything God wanted us to know about becoming and living as a Christian is in the Bible, and nowhere else. It gives us all the guidance we need to know God and live obediently.

The purpose of the Bible was for God to reveal himself and his plan of redemption to us. Everything that we need to know about having a relationship with God is given to us in the Bible. That's why the Bible is so important. To take this thought one step further, we would say that without the Bible, we could not how to have a relationship with God. We would invent our own ideas those ideas would look nothing like what God has actually said. The only place to find the truth about God is in the Bible. People who seek to lead or teach others about God need to base that teaching on the Bible and not on opinion.  Paul told us in Romans 10 that faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of God.

Episode 7 discussed disagreements over how to understand or interpret a passage of scripture. I want to pick up on that theme again today. It's very difficult to approach reading or studying the Bible without preconceived ideas of what it says. That often leads to wrong conclusions. Another problem is that we encounter passages we don't like or that we don't want to obey. We're tempted to look for a way of thinking about that passage that gets us off the hook. Properly understanding what the Bible says requires that we approach it wanting to know what God has communicated. So we read the Bible carefully and prayerfully, seeking to know exactly what it is that God wants to say, and what he wants us to do as a result.

Over the years I've read hundreds of books and heard thousands of messages about the Bible. Like me, you've probably noticed that people disagree regarding what the Bible teaches. People interpret passages from the Bible differently and draw different conclusions. One key truth to keep in mind is that when those disagreements occur, the problem is not with the Bible. Disagreement over how to understand the Bible doesn’t make the Bible untrue. When people have contradictory conclusions about what the Bible says or means, someone is wrong and the answer is to keep reading and studying. Keep in mind that God wants us to know Him. Portions of the Bible might seem hard to understand, but they can be understood over time with study.

Is the Bible accurate? The short answer is yes. I don't want to waiver in that answer, but it does require a little bit of explanation. The purpose of the Bible is to present to us God's story of redemption and how it is that we can enter into a relationship with Him. The Bible wasn't written as a science textbook or even a complete history of the world. But, if the Bible presents something as true, then it’s true. For example, if the Bible presents an event as having happened, then that event happened. The Bible is true in what it declares to be true. It doesn't tell us everything, but what it does tell us is factual. So, is the Bible true? The answer is yes, everything the Bible presents as true is true.

One criticism of the Christian belief that the Bible is God’s Word is that we ultimately have to rely on the Bible itself to support the claim. It’s in the Bible that God tells us that He’s responsible for the content of the Bible. We can look to other types of evidence to verify the accuracy of the Bible, but ultimately, the Bible is its own authority. However for Christians, another factor comes into play, and that’s conviction. Those who embrace the Bible as true will often talk about the fact that the Bible is unlike any other book, and that as they read it, they come to believe it. The Bible teaches that the Holy Spirit makes the words of Scripture come alive in the hearts of those with faith to believe.

Hebrews 1 tells us that God spoke to the prophets in many ways. The human authors who wrote the books of the Bible received the content in different ways. Sometimes God spoke directly or gave a vision to the human author, and he wrote down what he saw or heard. Sometimes an author conducted eye-witness interviews, did research and put together an account like a journalist would do. And of course, some authors were themselves, an eyewitness to the things they wrote down. But here’s the important thing. No matter how the words came to the author, they are the exact words that God wanted to be written. We see in each biblical author a unique personality and style, but God is responsible for the content.

Last time, I was talking about the Bible being God’s Word. I quoted 2 Timothy 3:16 where Paul said that “all scripture is breathed out by God.” When Paul wrote that, the New Testament was being written, so Paul would have been thinking of Scripture as the Old Testament. But Christians also understand the New Testament to be God’s Word. One example of where we see this is in something that Peter wrote in 2 Peter 3:16. Peter referred to the writings of Paul, and then he said that Paul’s writing was in the same category as all the other scriptures. In other words, Peter considered what Paul wrote to be equal in status to the Old Testament. That’s one example of why we consider Paul’s writings to be God’s Word.

Christians believe that God is responsible for the content of the Bible. In fact, the Bible is sometimes called the Word of God. I’ll cover how the Bible came to be written in future podcasts, but God inspired the human authors to write what God wanted written. Sometimes the Bible makes this clear. For example, Jeremiah tells us in Jeremiah 1:9 that God gave him the words that he spoke and wrote. But even when the Bible doesn’t cite God as the person being quoted, we consider it God’s Word. Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:16 that all scripture is breathed out by God. Now, there’s a practical reason why this is important. It means that whenever we believe and obey the Bible, we are believing and obeying God.