Faith Presbyterian Church (PCA, Tacoma, WA) Sermon Texts

Inerrancy

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Scripture Series
referring to: Psalm 12:6

We have so far considered in this short series 1) the nature of the Bible as the “Word of God written” and 2) its authority as the voice of the Almighty, no matter that it is also so self-consciously a product of human authorship. Tonight I want to consider what is not only an inevitable implication of those first two assertions that we have made about the Bible but a unmistakably a claim the Bible explicitly makes for itself. If the Bible has come out of God’s mouth, as Paul says it did; if men wrote from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, as Peter said they did; if Scripture is the very Word of God as the Bible says it is thousands upon thousands of times, then, in the nature of the case, it is true. As we read in Psalm 12:6:

“…the words of the Lord are flawless, like silver refined in a furnace of clay, purified seven times.”

As Jesus put it, “Scripture cannot be broken.” In other words, it doesn’t make mistakes! There is not a word in it that is not the Word of the Lord that endures forever. That is, I say, not only the teaching of the Bible but the inevitable implication of the very nature of the Bible as God’s own word, his speaking through men. God, who is truth itself, who cannot lie, would not speak falsehood, even inadvertently; he would not permit his Word to contain them.

But, as you may be aware, over the past century and a half some evangelical Christians and many more non-evangelicals have thought it an advance to argue that the Bible is not inerrant, that it does contain mistakes, it asserts things that we now know not to be true, and, further, that this should not trouble believers at all. An errant Bible became necessary, of course, when in certain circles of biblical scholarship conclusions were reached that could not be reconciled with the factual assertions made in Holy Scripture. If the books of the Pentateuch – at least in their original form – were in fact written many centuries after the date the Bible assigns to them, then we know the Bible to be incorrect in that particular. If, as a number of archaeologists claim, there is no evidence that Canaan was invaded by the Israelites in the 14th century B.C., then the Bible’s report of that invasion is obviously in error as a matter of historical record. If Isaiah is, in fact, the product of two or even three authors, then to represent it as the production of a single pen is not accurate. Similarly, if Daniel is supposed to have received visions in the 6th century B.C. concerning events that happened in the 2nd century and we know that those visions were, in fact, written after not before the fact, then Daniel is not the 6th century book it is represented in the Bible to be. If Peter did not, in fact, write 2 Peter, the Bible’s claim that he did is not factually accurate, and so on. Even among some evangelicals, some of whom would still support a Pentateuch written by Moses, a 14th century conquest of Canaan, and a 6th century B.C. date for Daniel, it became popular to argue that nothing hangs on the inerrancy of the Bible. Often these evangelicals said that they believed in the infallibility of the Bible, not its inerrancy, and meant by the distinction they drew between two words that are in fact synonyms that, while the Bible might contain historical errors, it was entirely trustworthy and without error with respect to its true purpose, viz. to reveal the way of salvation and the knowledge of God.

In making this argument they often did what we did last time and likened the nature of the Bible to the nature of the incarnate Christ, both being both divine and human. But they used the divine/human character of the Bible to argue that among the human marks of the Bible was the fact that it was written by fallible men who, for one reason or another, didn’t get everything right. (Let me say at this point that this argument has always seemed to be particularly specious. If, as we did last time, we compare the nature of the Bible as at one and the same time a divine and human work to the incarnation of God the Son, Christ being man and God at one and the same time, the comparison would seem to require the inerrancy of the Bible. In becoming a man Jesus did not become a sinful man but a perfect man. And in being a human composition as well as a divine one, the Bible did not for that reason become defective. If you are going to compare Christ and the Bible as both embodying the incarnational principle, the conclusion should be that the Bible is as perfect as Christ’s manhood was perfect.)

But, be that as it may, when it became fashionable for supposed Bible-believers to argue that the Bible was not inerrant as the Word of God it became necessary, especially for those evangelicals who accepted the existence of errors in the Bible to argue that the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible itself was an innovation and not the historic teaching of the church. It is always more difficult to make a claim among Bible believers that the church has been wrong about something as basic as the Bible all these 2000 years. It is important, therefore, to get church history on one’s side. Indeed, the claim was actually made that the belief in the inerrancy of the Bible was the invention of Old Princeton in the 19th century and especially of two of her stalwart professors, Benjamin Warfield and Archibald Alexander Hodge. These two men together published a famous essay in 1881 asserting that the original autographs of Scripture were absolutely without error in everything they affirmed. They, to be sure, also argued that this conviction about the Bible was the unquestioned and universal belief of Christendom throughout its history.

Liberal scholarship had no difficulty believing that the church had long thought that the Bible was inerrant. They thought the church was wrong but they accepted that she had always believed in an inerrant Bible. They didn’t, but the church had. It was only the evangelicals who wanted to continue to be accepted as evangelicals who needed to buttress their claim that there was nothing so wrong with a Bible that contained falsehoods in it. And the best way to do that was to argue that the church had never thought the Bible was inerrant and never thought that the Bible needed to be inerrant to accomplish its purpose or perform its intended function. There were several books written that purported to demonstrate this, the most influential of which was published in 1979 by two Presbyterians of the old Northern Presbyterian Church (UPCUSA), J.B. Rogers and Donald McKim. Those books were rather easily exposed for their special pleading and for their attempt to concoct an argument out of statements here and there in various authors through the centuries that were far from explicit admissions that the Bible had errors in it. Nor did they canvas the great deal of evidence that was supportive of the opposite conclusion, that representative churchmen through the ages believed in an inerrant Bible. The fact is it was quite easy to demonstrate that whether or not the inerrancy of the Bible was explicitly taught – and it often wasn’t taught because it was so universally assumed – it was universally the conviction of the church: Roman Catholic and Protestant alike. And it was explicitly taught often enough.

Clement of Rome, who is so early that he may have written before the last book of the New Testament was written, expressed the conviction that in “the Holy Scriptures which are given through the Holy Spirit…nothing iniquitous or falsified is written.” [Cited in Packer, NDT, 337]

Augustine, expressing the same conviction, wrote of the four Gospels,

“The evangelists are free from all falsehood, both from that which proceeds from deliberate deceit…and that which is the result of forgetfulness.” [De Consensu Evangelistarum Libri, II, 12]

And so Luther:

“I have learned to ascribe the honor of infallibility only to those books that are accepted as canonical. I am profoundly convinced that none of the writers have erred. All other writers, however they may have distinguished themselves in holiness or in doctrine, I read in this way. I evaluate what they say, not on the basis that they themselves believe that a thing is true, but only insofar as they are able to convince me by the authority of the canonical books or by clear reason.” [Contra malignum Kohannis Eccii Judicium…Martini Lutheri Defensio, Weimar Ed., II, 618]

When John Wyclif in 1380 referred to the Bible as the “infallible rule of truth,” when the Belgic Confession of 1561 referred to the Bible as an “infallible” rule, when the Westminster Confession of 1647 referred to the Bible’s “infallible truth,” they were giving expression to a conviction that was universal in Christendom and not in dispute even when so many other doctrines were.

Warfield and Hodge, to be sure, put the doctrine of the errorlessness or inerrancy of Holy Scripture on a firmer footing – in the history of Christian theology most doctrines have been finally and clearly articulated and defended only in response to attacks made upon them and it wasn’t until the mid- and later 19th century that the authority of the Bible came under direct attack in the church herself – but their doctrine, it was quite easy to demonstrate had been the church’s doctrine from the beginning.

The evangelicals who denied the inerrancy of the Bible – a watershed was reached in 1972 when the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary removed a commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible from the seminary’s statement of faith – still claimed to believe that the Bible is infallible in matters of faith and practice – it may make mistakes of history, but never of doctrine – but very soon it became clear, as anyone with a historical sense could have predicted, that the teaching of an error-filled Bible could be contradicted at any point. A Fuller professor, Paul Jewett, published in 1975 a book on the Bible’s view of men and women in which he argued that Paul was simply incorrect in his teaching about the headship of men in home and church. That clearly was a matter of faith and practice but the Bible, in Jewett’s view, was not infallible. It would not be the last time the teaching of the Bible would be abandoned, particularly where and when that teaching contradicted the orthodoxies and mores of modern Western culture.

In 1977 a group of evangelical scholars under the leadership of James Montgomery Boice created the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The “International” in the name was due to the fact that one member of the council, J.I. Packer, was English and was then still living in England. After ten years of conferences and papers it was disbanded, its job judged to have been done. Most importantly, it produced in 1978 what was called “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.” That statement is the most sophisticated expression and defense of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy ever produced and is very helpful in stating both what is meant by inerrancy and what is not meant by it. For example, it leaves the Bible free to express its teaching in terms appropriate to the time and place of its writing, to provide varying accounts of the same Gospel episode for perfectly good reasons, and so on. Here is a selection of its articles, in the form of affirmations and denials.

Article XI

We affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses.

We deny that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated.

Article XII

We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

Article XIII

We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

I could go on, but that is enough to give you an impression. To sum up: 1) its own inerrancy or infallibility is the teaching of Holy Scripture itself; 2) it is the inevitable consequence of the Bible being the very Word of God in which the words of Scripture are co-extensive and identical with the words of God himself; 3) the inerrancy of the Bible cannot be denied without undermining the authority of Holy Scripture at any and every point, as both reason and historical observation demonstrate; and 4) the errorlessness of Scripture has in fact been the settled and nearly universal conviction of the Christian church throughout its history. Finally, to deny inerrancy lands us in the utterly impossible position of not knowing what to believe in the Bible.

Now I could stop here and leave you nodding your heads. But it is important, in my view, that you know that this doctrine, like any other doctrine of the Bible, has its difficulties and its mysteries. It is not altogether simple to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. There are reasons why even Bible-believers have doubted the Bible’s infallibility. Many of those reasons are frankly insubstantial and should worry none of you. It is not the case that Genesis 1-11 are obviously mythology and not history. It is not the case that God’s prophets cannot predict the future. It is not the case that the evidence indicates that Isaiah has three authors or that Daniel was written in the 2nd century B.C. not the 6th, it is not at all the case that we know that Peter did not write 2 Peter. It is the case that the Gospel writers organized their material according to principles other than simple chronology, that there are any number of perfectly understandable reasons why the same account should be reported in slightly different ways from one Gospel to another. You are perhaps aware that many assertions of biblical errors have now had to be withdrawn because of new information. In the mid-19th century, German higher critics argued that Moses couldn’t have been the author of the Pentateuch because writing hadn’t been invented by that time. Archaeology has provided us with literature of various kinds and even bi-lingual dictionaries written more than a millennium before Moses was born. They also once thought that the Hittites were a biblical invention. Now there are so many Hittite documents that translating them has been for years a major project of ANE scholarship. They scorned Luke as a historian because he claimed there was a Roman proconsul in Cyprus, but now there is known to have been one. And on and on it goes.

But all of that is not to say that there are no outstanding difficulties. I want you to know that and to hold your conviction concerning the errorlessness of the Bible with intelligence and sophistication. I don’t want you to hear of the problems and the challenges first from some skeptic. We are happy to face these problems squarely. We are even willing to admit that we cannot as of yet resolve all the problems. That should not terribly surprise us when the Bible was written as much as 3,500 years ago and the form of it we have is copies many times removed from the autographs, the originals. Let me illustrate the problem in respect to biblical numbers.

A well-known British biblical scholar – and upholder of inerrancy – J. W. Wenham began a well-known article on this subject by saying: “It is notorious that the Old Testament in many places records numbers which seem impossibly large.” [“Large Numbers in the Old Testament,” Tyndale Bulletin 18 (1967)] Critics of the Bible, including those within the church, have often fastened on this fact as a primary method of disproving the accuracy and historical integrity of the Bible.

But others, including even scholars who by no means believe the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God, take note of the fact that the numbers are absurdly large and would have been known to be so by anyone who read them at the time. As Wenham puts it, “No one in his senses would…invent the story of a bus crash in which all 16,000 passengers were killed.” The more absurd the figures the less likely that they were invented. Rather, it appears that someone was trying to transmit the numbers accurately but either they have been corrupted in transmission or we are misunderstanding them.

Let me give you two illustrations of the problem; there are more but these two will suffice.

First, there is the size of the Israelite population as it left Egypt at the Exodus. We are told that Jacob’s household numbered 70 souls when the family moved to Egypt. We are told that 42,000 Jews returned to the Promised Land from exile in Babylon. These numbers certainly seem to be regarded as literal, being itemized in detail. But what of the numbers in between?

How many years were the Israelites in Egypt? Exodus 12:40 seems to say 430 years, though a later copy of the Pentateuch agrees with Galatians 3:17 that the 430 covers the time in Canaan and in Egypt. In Gen. 15:16 the Lord promised Abraham both that his descendants would be mistreated in a land not their own for 400 years and that his descendants would return to the Promised Land “in the fourth generation.” It is not a simple matter to reconcile all these different statements. Obviously a population is likely to grow larger over time. How much time in this case? That is the question? Then there is the further information that before the exodus the entire people of Israel seemed to be served by only two mid-wives and that it could be seriously considered by the Egyptians to throw all of their male babies into the Nile. Further, in the wilderness – certainly a very dry area – for most of the time there was sufficient water for the community without miraculous supply as there needed to be for food. Then, still more, though Israel is described in the wilderness as a great and populous nation, we read that they were confronted in Canaan with seven nations greater and mightier than they (Deut. 26:5; 1:28; 4:38; 7:1). The impression of all of this data, and other evidence that might be mentioned, is of a large migration, numbering thousands, certainly tens of thousands, but not millions. In other words, the numbers reported in Exodus and Numbers have either been misunderstood or corrupted in transmission.

Second, consider the size of the nation as reported in David’s census. To begin with 2 Sam. 24:9 tells us that there were 800,000 men who drew the sword in Israel and another 500,000 in Judah. 1 Chron. 21:5 gives the same census figures as 1,100,000 and 470,000, 300,000 higher in the first case and 30,000 lower in the other. The variance is almost certainly due to corruption during the copying of manuscripts.

Those figures, even the smaller ones given in 2 Samuel are too high. 1,300,000 men of military age would imply a total population of 5 million, producing a population density nearly twice the most thickly populated countries of modern Europe. In the Roman era the population of Palestine was approximately 1 million. The current population of the nation of Israel is 7.2 million of which 5.4 million are Jews, but the entire population of the area, as of the world, is vastly larger now than in pre-Christian times. Remember, the non-Israelite peoples were conquered but had not been absorbed and they also continued to live in the land in substantial numbers in David’s day. One scholar I read – who holds to the inerrancy of the Bible – points out that studies that purport to estimate the size of Israelite settlements in the first millennium B.C. based on either estimates of available supplies of water or the size of the known urban area and estimates of population density indicate that the population of Jerusalem in David’s time was probably not much greater than 5,000 inhabitants, though it may have grown to some 20,000 by Josiah’s time. [D. Fouts, “The Incredible Numbers of the Hebrew Kings,” Giving the Sense, 283-299] If the capital were a city of 5,000 souls, the nation did not contain 5 million! Most scholars think a Jewish population of half a million is more likely in David’s day, c. 1000 B.C.

Three possible explanations have been offered for these large numbers, each of which may account for some cases and not for others.

Faulty transmission of numbers.

It is a fact of life, as easily demonstrated in our day as in former days, that numbers are the hardest information to copy and transmit accurately. Miriam Shelden told me the other day of receiving a bill for Rosemary’s violin lessons this spring from the University of Puget Sound in the amount of $34,162.50. This resulted from their calculation that Rosie would have 911 lessons this spring!

There are clearly problems of this type with the numbers that we have in the Hebrew part of the Bible. For example, in 2 Samuel 10:18 we read that David’s army killed 700 Aramean charioteers. But in the parallel account in 1 Chronicles 19:18 we read that 7,000 charioteers were killed. A zero has been added. I don’t mean they used zero as a number; only that this is the effect of the error. In 1 Kings 4:26 we read that Solomon had 40,000 stalls for his chariot horses. The parallel in 2 Chronicles 9:25 reads 4,000. Again a zero has been added or lost. 2 Samuel 15:7, depending upon what text you read indicates that Absalom took 4 years to develop his plan for a coup, or 40 years. 2 Kings 24:8 reports that Johoiachin was 18 years old when he began to reign; 2 Chronicles 36:9 says that he was 8 years of age. 1 Samuel 13:1 says that Saul was a year old when he became king; some LXX manuscripts of 1 Samuel have 30 years old. It’s even more complicated than this. Sometimes the item being counted isn’t the same from one text to another. 2 Samuel 10:18 speaks of 40,000 horsemen and 1 Chron. 19:18 of 40,000 footmen (the NIV has adjusted the Samuel text to match that in Chronicles, but the ESV reports what the Hebrew actually reads). 2 Samuel 10:6 has 20,000 footmen and 12,000 men which becomes in 1 Chronicles 19:7 32,000 chariots. 1 Kings 7:26 gives the capacity of the huge water tank, the “sea” in front of Solomon’s temple, as 2,000 baths. 2 Chronicles 4:5 gives it as 3,000. The list of such numerical inconsistencies is quite long.

All of this suggests not the inaccurate reporting of numbers – the intention seems to be to report the right numbers – but their faulty transmission. If we had the original manuscripts the numbers would agree. Our copies have errors in them. Hebrew letters were used in absence of numbers and in earlier stages of the language some of those letters were easily confused with one another. In fact, there is no certainty yet among scholars of the history of the Hebrew language precisely how numbers were written and represented in earlier years.

Misunderstanding of terms

There are several terms, significant to the numbers of the OT, including the word that is translated “thousand” in the English versions of the Old Testament (אלף), that scholars continue to debate the meaning of. Most of the very large numbers reported in the Hebrew Bible are in thousands, usually round numbers of thousands, and so the meaning of that word obviously matters a great deal. Besides its literal use as “one thousand,” it is used as a general term for large numbers, but it seems also to be used for a social unit – family or clan – and perhaps as well for a military unit of some size. It may also refer to individuals, including military men such as chieftans or captains. For example, in Judges 20:2 were there 400,000 men on foot that drew the sword, or 400 fully armed soldiers? In other words does אלף refer to “thousand” or to a particular type of soldier. And were the losses reported later in the chapter 22 men or 22,000 men on the first day; 18 or 18,000 men on the second day, and was the ambush set by 10 soldiers or 10,000 (Is it likely that the narrator supposed that 10,000 men could have been hidden in ambush near the small village of Gibeah?). The numbers frankly make much more sense in the narrative not taking the אלף as an actual number but as a reference to a type of soldier. Interestingly, this term survives today in compounds to designate some of the higher ranks in the Israeli army.

There is a great deal of complicated scholarship back and forth on all such questions. I’m simply indicating the various directions taken in discussions concerning the large numbers.

The convention of hyperbole with numbers

Some others have argued that the large numbers are simply hyperbole, a standard convention of ancient Near Eastern writing. We have, for example, the Lord’s promise that he would multiply Abraham’s seed until they were as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, literally speaking impossibly large numbers. But in Joshua 11:4, for example, the size of the army of Canaanite peoples that came against the Israelites is said to have been “as numerous as the sand on the seashore,” the same phrase. It is hyperbole, exaggeration for effect. In the same way, some scholars conclude that the 5 million or so we are told inhabited Israel in David’s day was a “sand on the seashore” type of number.

The fact is holding to the inerrancy of the Bible doesn’t prevent us from employing any or all of these explanations for the large numbers we encounter in the OT. Inerrancy still requires us rightly to understand what the Bible is actually saying and to understand it in the terms in which it was written.

What I want to say is that we have every reason to believe that the Bible is the Word of God – those reasons we take up next time – and, therefore, as the Word of God to believe it to be without error. But, like every other doctrine of Holy Scripture, this too has its difficulties and we must carefully work them out. This doctrine requires faith and confidence in the Lord as does every other. The Bible has been confirmed in its accuracy many times when it had been doubted; I have no doubt that it will continue to be confirmed. But some questions may never be answered and certainly cannot be answered in the present state of our knowledge. Nevertheless, we do not doubt that what the biblical writer wrote, as he was carried along by the Holy Spirit, was precisely what God intended to say, and therefore is true. If there are problems they are apparent problems only and the Bible will be proved true at the last. [cf. Warfield, Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 215]

Think of it carefully,
Study it prayerfully,
Deep in your heart
Let its oracles dwell
Ponder its mystery,
Slight not its history,
For none ever loved it
Too fondly or well.

Jesus is God

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Mark Series
referring to: Mark 12:35-37

The last encounter between Jesus and representatives of the religious leadership had resulted in their abandoning the field. They had been defeated and they knew it. The Lord now turns the tables and asks his adversaries a question. It is a theological question so it is addressed to the scribes, the teachers of the law, the theologians of the people, or, if not directly to them it is addressed to their teaching. Mark seems to indicate that the previous questions had been asked on the same day. If so, as one commentator sums up: “After a day of questions comes the question of the day.” [Ralph Martin in Edwards, 375] He asked a loaded question about prevailing opinions about the Messiah.

Text Comment

v.35

Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Messiah; both words in their respective languages mean “anointed one,” that is “the one anointed to be king.” The Jews expected the Messiah to be a descendant of David and a royal personage befitting that pedigree. Bartimaeus, the blind man outside Jericho, remember had addressed Jesus as “Son of David” in Mark 10:47. The crowds greeted him as he made his way into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with that same title, as we read in 11:10. “Son of David” was a popular equivalent for “Messiah,” the long awaited “King of the Jews.” But here Jesus suggested that there was something inadequate, incomplete in the profile of the Messiah if all he was understood to be was a royal descendant of King David. It is not enough to say that the Messiah is the Son of David. By the way, it is a very interesting piece of history that in the first two centuries after Jesus the rabbis avoided identifying the Messiah as the Son of David, though they had made that identification as a matter of course up to the time of Jesus. They were well aware of the claims that had been made for Jesus as the Messiah and did their best to undercut those claims. Only later, when the rift between synagogue and church was complete did the Jewish rabbis once again offer messianic interpretations of Psalm 110 and make the obvious point that the Messiah would be and had been prophesied to be the son of David.

v.36

The Lord prefaced his citation by reminding his hearers that this is what God himself says, and also that David, because he was speaking by the Holy Spirit, spoke these words as a prophet. Whatever is said here about the Messiah to come, God himself said. Some measure of the importance of this text from Psalm 110 is that it is the most frequently quoted OT text in the NT. Psalm 110 is quoted or alluded to fully 33 times in the NT.

In the original Hebrew the first “Lord” in the first verse of Psalm 110 is the name Yahweh. The second “Lord” is the general title adonai. The first Lord refers to God, the second to the king. In any case, David, speaking about his descendant, the Messiah, confesses that he is a personage greater than he. Remember, everyone to whom Jesus was speaking that day understood Psalm 110:1 as a reference to the Messiah.

v.37

There are three points of distinction here. The first is that David himself calls the Messiah his Lord. People do not usually call their sons, “my Lord.” The Messiah would be no mere successor to David; he would be a personage higher and greater than David. The second is that this personage would sit at God’s right hand, the place of supreme honor. The third is that all of God’s enemies would be placed under his feet. How then can a person of such exalted status be David’s son? And Mark expects his readers here in the seventh decade of the first century to know the answer to that question: however much Jesus was truly was David’s descendant, he was in fact also God’s Son.

The Jews thought far too ordinary thoughts about the Messiah. They saw him as another David, a King David redivivus, alive again. They expected him to be the remarkably successful warrior that David had been and lead them in conquest of their enemies. This is a principal reason why they did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. He did not meet their expectations, he didn’t do what the Messiah was supposed to do in their view. His ministry, dramatic and wonderful as it had been, was not what they were expecting and it would become still less what they were expecting when he went to the cross. That is the reason why Jesus did not refer to himself as the Son of David: the term was loaded with the popular misunderstanding of the person and work of the Messiah. The Messiah was the son of David, to be sure, a point often enough stressed in the NT, but he was much more than the son of David.

The question Jesus asked was enigmatic, all the more so because he didn’t answer his own question. It is left hanging in the air. [France, 483] And there is something very typical about this. I suppose that almost every thoughtful reader of the Gospels has at one time or another wondered why Jesus didn’t just come out and say that he was God. Why didn’t he stand up before the great crowds in those temple porches or, for that matter, why didn’t he simply tell his disciples that he was in fact, no one less than the Maker of heaven and earth? Why didn’t he tell them that he was the Second Person of the Triune God now having taken to himself a human nature in order to save his people from their sins? Why didn’t he explain himself in perfectly unmistakable terms? Wouldn’t it have spared the church a great deal of confusion and difficulty and made it easier for the church to get its doctrine right in subsequent centuries if Jesus had been more explicit?

In respect to its indirectness, this rhetorical question that Jesus asked is entirely typical. He asked a question: “Why is it that, if the Messiah is supposed to be a descendant of David, as the OT prophets so clearly say, does David himself refer to the Messiah as his Lord?” In that text from Psalm 110 the part about putting enemies under the feet applies to the Messiah when he comes, the coming deliverer who would establish the kingdom of God in the world. But the one to whom this applies in Psalm 110:1 David calls his Lord and Master. Fathers are not accustomed to calling their sons “Lord,” and yet David addresses one who was to be his descendant as his Lord.

All very well. But the Lord drops the matter at the key moment. He asked his question in v. 37 and leaves it at that! Why did he not go on to say the obvious: “I am not only David’s descendant, I am David’s Lord? I am the Son of God now come in the flesh.” Why didn’t he say about himself something like what Paul said about him in Romans 1: namely that according to his human nature he was a descendant of David, but as to his divine nature he was the Son of God?

The fact that Jesus cited this text and used it to make this point accounts for the fact that the apostles came to see Psalm 110:1 as one of the most important texts concerning the Messiah in the Old Testament. But Jesus did not himself draw out the implications of that statement. He left it for others to do. Why was that? And why here in particular?

We have seen in our studies in the Gospels and the Gospel of Mark in particular on any number of occasions that Jesus kept his identity as the Messiah under wraps as it were – or at least did not trumpet that identity – so as not to provoke a confrontation with the religious leadership before the proper time. This is the famous “messianic secret” that Jesus not only practiced himself but ordered his disciples to practice and others who had come to the realization that he was, in fact, the Messiah. He would tell them not to tell anyone, though sometimes they did just the opposite. Keeping that secret was more than most people could do. Knowing human nature I’ll bet you a lot of them left Jesus having been miraculously healed and said sotto voce, “Now don’t tell anybody about this but….”

But the time for secrecy had now passed. We noticed at the beginning of the Passion Week that Jesus was now throwing his previous caution to the wind. He allowed the great crowds on Palm Sunday to acknowledge him as the Son of David, to shout their hosannas to the one who comes in the name of the Lord. But if the gloves had come off and Jesus was throwing down the gauntlet, why did he not make more explicit, why did he not stand up and say publicly and once for all that he was God now present in human nature? Why didn’t he tell the people in the temple that day “I’m the one David was talking about; I am David’s Lord, and I am your Lord as well, the Lord of heaven and earth”?

It is not as though no one figured out that this is precisely what had to be said about Jesus of Nazareth: that he was the Son of God, not in the sense that all believers are sons of God, but that Jesus was God himself, God the Son. We have that confession made on several occasions in the Gospels as the truth dawned on one man or woman or another. “My Lord and my God” Thomas would say to Jesus a week after the resurrection: an extraordinary confession to come out of the mouth of a monotheist Jew concerning a human being he had known for several years.

And no wonder. If Jesus did not come out and tell people that he was God the Son, that though his human nature was only some 30 years old, his divine nature was eternal and that he had, in fact, himself created heaven and earth, I say if Jesus did not say such things explicitly about himself, he did say many things that a thoughtful, intelligent reader and hearer would take to be virtually a claim to be one with God.

He claimed the right and the authority to judge mankind on the last day. That was an extraordinary thing for an amateur rabbi from Galilee to say. That he would pass judgment on mankind at the great day. That is God’s work and God’s work alone as the Bible clearly says.
What is more striking still, Jesus claimed the authority to forgive sins. “You sins are forgiven,” he said to any number of those who came to him in faith. But only God can forgive the sins that have been committed against him.
Still more Jesus claimed for himself the right to bestow eternal life and, what is more, to bestow it on those who followed him, because they followed him. As many have pointed out through the ages, that is either the voice of God or of a megalomaniac.
And there is much, much more of this kind of evidence. He said on several occasions that the eternal destiny of human beings depended upon their response to him. He said of himself that he was greater than the temple and greater than Jonah and that he existed before Abraham. He identified actions toward himself with actions toward God. He taught the truth on his own authority. More than 70 times he introduced his teaching by saying, “Truly I say to you…” For many assertions he offered no proof other than that of his own word. He performed miracles also in his own name. His disciples performed them in his name, but he performed them in his own. He exercised divine power, that is, in his own name. A failure to give glory to God for a miracle performed was Moses’ sin in the desert for which he was not granted entrance into the Promised Land, but Jesus was not faulted for a similar sin. He wielded divine power in his own name. He received worship. He never told those who fell at his feet to get up because he was merely a man as his disciples and apostles would later do when people fell at their feet. In the NT no one successfully falls down and does homage before any human being except before Jesus Christ. We read of demons acknowledging him as the Son of God, of his ordering them to be silent, and of their obeying him. And, finally, he applied to himself OT texts that referred to or applied to God himself.

There was so much of this that we can understand why, on one occasion, the Jews took up stones to stone him because he, a mere man, claimed to be God. But, as many different lines of evidence as converge to prove that Jesus was God, knew himself to be God, and was unafraid of speaking and acting as God, still he did not state the fact openly, unequivocally, and then explain it by reference to the Triune nature of God and the incarnation of the Second Person of the Godhead. Why was he not more explicit?

This is a question every Christian should ponder and know the answer to because what makes this question so pressing is the fact that Christ’s deity, his being God, is what utterly sets him apart from every other human being who has ever lived and what makes him supremely important to every human being on the face of the earth. The fact that Jesus of Nazareth was and is Almighty God is the single fact that unlocks the secret of your existence and the existence of every human being. It is the single reason why we have every right to say that every human being must become a Christian, a follower of Christ. It is for this reason that Jesus, the first century man, has no rivals and no successors. His life is unique and it is final. Make the crucial discovery that Jesus is God and you cannot avoid the conclusion that Islam, which regards him only as a prophet and not even the greatest prophet, that Islam or for that matter Judaism or Buddhism or any other human religion or philosophy, is wrong at the key point. They may be right about many things but they are wrong at the essential point. It is the fact that Jesus is God that makes the Christian faith true and all other religions and philosophies false at the bottom.

I am a comparatively well-educated and modern man. I am a modern person as you are. I am a man of this modern, scientific world as you are. I know very well the difference between fact and fiction and I am all too well aware of how much fiction has been passed off as fact in the name of religion. If Jesus were a mere man, I accept that the New Testament accounts of his life and work and particularly of his importance to you and me cannot be believed. What is more, if Jesus were a mere man, I think it a virtual certainty we would never have heard of him and he would have left no mark on our world.

But, if Jesus was, as the New Testament claims and as the Gospels show him to be, the living God, the Second Person of the Triune God, the Maker of heaven and earth, now come in human nature, well then, it is no wonder:

that his birth was different than that of any other human being;
that he should do and say things more remarkable than any human being has ever done;
that his death should be the salvation of the world;
that he should rise from the dead;
and that his life and work should have such momentous consequence for every single human being who has ever lived, lives now, or ever shall live in the world.

That there is mystery here, no one can doubt. Indeed, there are two mysteries for the price of one: the plurality of persons within the unity of the Godhead (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) and the union of the Godhead and manhood in the person of Jesus. But mysterious as all this may be, the logic is clear and irresistible: if Jesus is God and died for men, then obviously that and that only is the way of salvation. And, for someone who has embraced Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, the fact that he is both God and man makes him unquestionably deserving of my absolute and unquestioning loyalty.

So, back to our original question: why did Jesus not say that he was God; say it and say it again; say it until everyone understood precisely what he was saying? Why did he leave the question of v. 37 unanswered? I will suggest four reasons.

First it is certainly fair to say that Jesus knew better than anyone what people would and could understand. There was a spiritual blindness and ignorance that was almost invincible among the people of Jesus’ day as it is almost invincible among the people of our day. Even the Lord’s disciples who witnessed all his miracles did not fully grasp who Jesus was until after his resurrection. They got glimpses and from time to time the mists would clear, but their confusion was still great and the bitter death of Jesus drove all that they had learned about him right out of their minds. It was not until after his resurrection that it all became clear to them and they fully understood that Jesus was both God and man. Until the resurrection it was simply too much for people to take in. They knew Jesus as a man; he was a man in every way; they simply couldn’t understand how a man could be the living God. The resurrection proved to be the key that unlocked the puzzle.

Second, it is surely also right to say that the Lord did not make his deity as explicit as he might have because it is his will that his followers live by faith and not by sight. The truth about Jesus was there for any honest heart to grasp – and honest hearts grasped it at the time – and the truth is there in the Gospels for any honest heart to grasp today, but the Lord requires that it be received by faith. Faith sees what unbelief will not and it is the beauty and glory of faith and it is the value of faith in God’s sight that it does not require all the demonstrations that unbelief asks for and demands. “Show us a sign,” the Pharisees demanded. But Jesus refused. Their hearts were not sincere. They did not want to believe in him and they had no intention of worshipping him. And the same things might be said about the demonstration of Christ’s deity. We may well wonder, we often do I think, why the Lord has made so much to depend on faith and why he shows us so little and makes us believe so much. We will someday see all of this demonstrated beyond doubt, but now we have to believe it. He could demonstrate all of these things to us until no questions were left; he will one day do just that, but he has ordered by we should live and be saved by faith.

He could have demonstrated his deity to people then. In fact it was demonstrated once to three of his disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. Peter, James and John saw Jesus Christ for a few minutes that night with the divine glory upon him, but only then and only once. Why not fifteen times, twenty times? Why not to all the disciples? Why not to thousands upon thousands of people? His divine glory was also demonstrated in his resurrection from the dead. But even then that demonstration was given to those who believed and not to others. And here, I think, we come to the third, not simply the priority and importance of faith, but the third reason why Christ did not publish and demonstrate his deity to everyone and why he didn’t carry out his argument from Psalm 110:1 to its end on this occasion.

The third reason is his glory was withheld from them in judgment for their unbelief. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So that text Romans 3:23 reads in most of the English versions. The New English Bible reads that same verse, “All have sinned and have been deprived of God’s glory.” Man loses his right to the glory of God by his sin and his rebellion. Remember unbelieving Israel in the wilderness. Moses would speak to God in the tabernacle, he would get some revelation, some communication from God to his people there in the tabernacle meeting with him as it were face to face, and when he come out of the tent of meeting his face would be radiating the divine glory that he had just now been in the presence of. Moses would tell the Israelites what it was that God had given him to say to them and then he would put a veil over his face so that Israel could not behold the glory of God that was shining on Moses’ face. She didn’t deserve that privilege because she didn’t believe, she didn’t love God, and she had no heart to serve him. She saw the glory briefly while Moses was speaking, but then it was veiled and hidden from her as a judgment on her unbelief. Paul talks about that episode in 2 Corinthians 3 and then speaks of people in his day whose hearts were still veiled, whose unbelief still keeps them from beholding the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

The glory of God was standing before the people in the temple that day. It had been demonstrated to them through three long years of the most remarkable ministry. But Jesus wouldn’t let them see it simply to satisfy their curiosity or to entertain them. They had lost their right to that privilege. Showing his divine glory to them would have been nothing more than a stunt.

And, finally, in the fourth place, to be unrecognized as the Son of God, the Creator of heaven and earth was part of his humiliation, part of the sacrifice, part of his suffering for our sin.

The greatest single fact in all the world – that God had come into the world as a man to save us from our sin and give eternal life to those who trust in him– remained undiscovered by so many in Jesus’ own day and by so many in our day it continues to be undiscovered because of the pride and sinfulness of their hearts. But to others, it became the foundation of all their hopes and the keystone of their understanding of all reality.

To which group do you belong? That is the question of all questions. If you can answer that question rightly, you have answered all questions. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose – for the sake of illustration only – suppose that you discovered that there never was a Christ, at least not the Christ described in the Gospels. There never was a God-man who came into the world to save sinners; never a Christ who could forgive sins and who would someday judge the world, a Christ who determined the eternal destiny of every human being according to that person’s response to him. Suppose you had sent out spies who had explored the entire universe, its height and its depth, the visible and the invisible, and returned to report to you that they had found no one who answers the description of Jesus in the Gospels and the New Testament. No one who is both the living God and true man at one and the same time.

What would your response be? Would that report in fact be a great relief to you as no doubt it would be to multitudes of people? Would you breathe more easily after hearing that? Would you confess to your spies that you had been hoping for such a report because the thought of meeting Christ at the last judgment had always been a fearful, unhappy and unpleasant thought to you? Would you say to your spies, “Let me take you to dinner and let’s celebrate the news that there is no Christ and no judgment seat of Christ and no books to be opened at the last day and no account to be given to him of our lives in this world. It is a relief finally to know for sure that we don’t have to follow Jesus; we don’t have to be religious fanatics, that if there is such a thing as peace with God we can obtain it and find it ourselves? How much better off the world will be to know that there never was a Jesus Christ both God and man?” Is that the kind of thing you would think and say? Many would.

Or, on the contrary, would you say that the report of your spies had cast you into despondency and despair. Would you feel that all the hope and all the joy of your life had been dashed and ruined by their report that Jesus Christ as the incarnate Son of God was the figment of some ancient person’s overeager imagination? There was nothing you had counted on more, nothing you had invested in more than that the Son of God, having loved his people enough to enter the world as a man for them and to die for them, would not fail to save you and grant you eternal life. Would you weep to think that what you took to be your great calling in life, this noble and high calling – to follow and to serve Jesus Christ the Son of God – was a charade, play-acting after all? Just the way many people think it is. Would you despair to think that all the long, noble line of Christian faith and love and godliness in the world was in fact a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing?

By putting the question to ourselves in this way, we are able better to read our deepest thoughts and our truest convictions. Before he became a follower of Christ, in the time of his unbelief, John Bunyan admitted that he never thought so much as whether there was a Christ or not. No doubt there are many today who are just like that. They never think about Jesus Christ, about whether he was God and Man or not. They never think about who he is, about what he has done. [the above from Alexander Whyte, “What Think Ye of Christ?” With Mercy and With Judgment, 111-115]

But that must not be the case with us. Never the case with us. For the fact is, tell me what you think of Jesus Christ, what you really think about who he is and what he has done, and I will tell you what your future will be. Tell me your thoughts about Jesus Christ and your beliefs about him and your commitments concerning him, and I will tell you what is to become of you when you die and, what is more, what kind of life you will live until you die.

And why is that? Why must that be? Because Jesus was not only David’s descendant, he was David’s Lord and God.

The Authority of the Bible

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Scripture Series
referring to: 2 Peter 1:20-21

Last time we considered in some detail Paul’s statement about the origin and nature of the Bible in 2 Timothy 3:14-17. Tonight I want to consider the related statement, this from 2 Peter 1:20-21:

“Above all, you must understand that 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.”

In 2 Timothy 3:16 Paul makes a point of saying that “all Scripture is God-breathed,” that is, it comes out of God’s mouth, it is the very Word, the speech, of God. Peter here says the same thing but makes more explicit the divine and human partnership that lies behind Holy Scripture and that brought it into being. It is that that I want to reflect on this evening. And I want to do so with respect to the issue of the Bible’s authority; how because it is the Word of God, it is the absolutely unqualified rule of our faith and life.

There are two supreme differences between Islam and Christianity, and from these two differences all other differences come in train. The first is the triunity of God – the triple personality in the unity of God – from which comes not only the Christian understanding of God, but our understanding of the nature of man, as man in relationship, the nature of man’s fellowship with God as a communion of persons in relationship with one another, and all the rest. In Islam one does not “know” God. God is far removed and far above mere creatures. In Christianity, God is far above, but still may be known and it was from the beginning his intention that human beings know him, know him in a way analogous to the way in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit know one another. Christianity is a personalist worldview in a way Islam cannot be because it does not know God as a God of persons in relationship, of persons bound together by mighty love. The second distinctive of Christianity, and it flows from the first and is made possible through it, is that of the incarnation. That God should come into the world as a man to be known by men is inconceivable in Islam and a blasphemous idea, unworthy of the high God. But the Triune God’s relationship with his creation, according to the Bible, is as intensely personal as that, shaped by his love for his creation and for his people, a love that caused him to empty himself for their salvation. There is, of course, no incarnation in Islam; there cannot be and that is why there can be no reconciliation between the two religious impulses and principles of these two faiths, these two worldviews, these two philosophies of life. They answer fundamental questions about God and man in completely different ways and in fact in irreconcilable ways.

I mention this because these principles bear mightily on the difference between the Koran and the Bible. The doctrine of Islam is that the Koran was dictated directly to Muhammad by the Archangel Gabriel. In this way, it is the word of God entirely and only and is in no respect also the word of Muhammad. The Muslims do not think that Muhammad had anything to do with the nature and character of the Koran. He simply took the dictation down as a stenographer would, directly from heaven. Muhammad was not the author of the Koran in Islamic understanding. But, as is obvious, that is not the understanding of the Bible in Christianity or for that matter in the Bible itself. The Bible has human authors; every part of the Bible. What is more, there is no effort to hide this at all. It is a fact celebrated in the Bible. Think of it: the Law of God in the Bible is often called the Law of Moses. The letters that make up a substantial part of the New Testament are the letters of Paul, of Peter, of John, of Jude, and of James. Most books of the Bible are immediately recognizable as the product of a particular writer. Further, there is no doubt that the individual writer has left his mark on what he wrote. Moses employs the literary conventions of his day and expresses himself according to the thought-world of his time; so does Paul but his were very different literary conventions and a very different thought-world, living as he did almost a millennium and a half after Moses. Moses and other OT writers speak of God placing boundaries around the waters, of bringing order from chaos, of standing above the floods, of God having his own mountain – all commonplaces of ANE Semitic cosmology – but Paul doesn’t express himself in the same terms. He describes creation in terms much more in keeping with the philosophical mind of his own day, the first century Greco-Roman world. Then, even among those who lived at the same time, Paul does not write like Peter, neither of them writes at all like John. Luke has a different literary style than Matthew or John. Still more, the various authors of the Bible are in many discernable ways the products of not only their age and their historical situation, but their personal circumstances. Luke knew Greek a lot better than John knew Greek, which is why everybody starts out learning Greek from John not Luke. John’s Greek is easy Greek, good for a novice. Tyros want to read the Greek of somebody who didn’t know Greek very well either because he is much easier to read. Luke and the author of the epistle to the Hebrews write the most elegant Greek of the NT, which makes it also the most difficult. Some biblical authors were sons of the ancient Near East, others were also sons of the Greco-Roman civilization. Some were peasants or at least working men into their adulthood before ever they were summoned to be the penman of the Holy Spirit. Others were seminary trained intellectuals and able to wield all the intellectual weaponry of their day in the cause of the Lord Jesus Christ. And their personal experiences were very different one from another. As one author recently put it:

“Revelation comes to us, accordingly, through the inner anguish of Jeremiah, the soaring minds of John and Isaiah, the probing questions of Job and Habakkuk, the near despair of Qoheleth (the author of Ecclesiastes), the structured poetry of David, the disappointments of Jonah, the struggles of Nehemiah, the mystic raptures of Ezekiel, the slow, patient scholarship of Ezra, the careful narrative style of Mark, the historical investigations of Luke, and that pounding mill, the ponderous mind of Paul.” [Patrick Henry Reardon, “The Word Through Us,” Touchstone (March 2008) 3]

That is the Bible and that is how the Bible comes to us. It is Paul’s writing, and Luke’s and Isaiah’s. These writings are, for that reason however no less the Word of God. As we saw last time, the Scripture as it was written by these various authors was “ex-pired” or “breathed out by God.” It never had its origin in the will of man, says our text for this evening [2 Peter 1:21], but “men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Again and again we are told that what the Scripture says, whoever the author of that particular part of the Scripture may be, that God himself says; and what God says, in reverse, the Scripture says. This is the Bible’s own teaching about itself and it is explicitly demonstrated on every page. By one count that I read the phrases “the Lord said,” “the Lord spoke,” and “the word of Lord came” occur 3,808 times in the Old Testament! [Lloyd-Jones, Authority, 50]

There is an incarnational principle in divine revelation, in other words: here too God stooped down to enter the world and the circumstances of human life. God’s Spirit came among men and exalted and dignified the human mind and heart, even the arts of human beings. Men who were by their own confession small and sinful in many ways nevertheless were used by the Spirit of God to reveal his truth to the world. There is cooperation between God and man in producing the revelation that is Holy Scripture. In this too there is no other book remotely like the Bible in the world.

The nature of the Bible as a work of God and man is one remarkably important instance of that feature of divine providence that theologians call concursus. Providence, you know, is the word theologians use to refer to God’s control of the world, his ordering what happens, and his making sure that everything happens according to his will, that history, in matters great and small, moves inexorably forward along the course he has set for it. Concursus means that the will of God and the will of man concur, not that man recognizes this, but so that a particular event may said to be, both man’s will and God’s. In a famous example, God sent Joseph ahead of his brothers to Egypt in order to save the family of Jacob when danger came in the years of famine. The brothers sent Joseph into Egypt to get rid of a rival. The same event, two actors, and two completely different purposes – that is concursus. Though man’s will is done, God’s will is accomplished. Even, as in that case, the sinful acts of man accomplish the pure and perfect will of God. That is how completely God takes up man’s will into his perfect plan for the world. Well it is the same with the Bible – concursus. Paul writing a letter to the church in Corinth or Rome – a letter that comes out of his own experience, his own assessment of what the Roman Christians or Corinthian Christians need to hear, his own reflection on the gospel, his own reading of the Bible, his own experience of preaching the word – and God speaking through all of that making Paul’s writing his own word. That is akin to what happened in the incarnation, both divine and human at once in the person of Jesus Christ. So the Bible: both divine and human at one and the same time.

Now the notion of divine authority is not a difficult one to understand. Almost everyone gets it, even if he or she doesn’t accept it. If your maker, the one who gave you life, tells you to do something, obviously you are duty bound to do it. If the Almighty God who is truth itself tells you to believe something, you are duty bound to believe it no matter what you think. If God, who, though infinitely offended by your sin, nevertheless summons you to accept his salvation and summons you to new life in Jesus Christ, you are duty bound to accept that gift and to answer that summons. God has intrinsic authority, an essential authority, before which his creatures must bow. That is not hard to understand. If the judge of all the earth, the omnipotent God, threatens you with judgment should you rebel against his will, your protests and complaints notwithstanding, you will not succeed in throwing off his authority. You will do what he commands, like it or not. If you will not take his salvation, you will suffer his judgment. To deny that the living God can and will enforce his will is not the courage of one’s convictions, it is the folly of insanity, akin to the poor man who jumps out a window confident that he can fly.

That is clear enough. But there is a temptation that arises out of the incarnational character of the Bible, a temptation to which Christians have succumbed from the very beginning. That temptation is to see the Bible’s authority, its divine authority, as in some way lessened or as in some way narrowed because of the human authorship of the Bible. When we come to consider the unity of the Bible I will take note of the fact that even Islam, with its dictational idea of inspiration, does not escape this problem, but it is a particular temptation for Christians who are taught, rightly, to see the Bible as the product of both God and man.

Now, as we said last time, and as I have already mentioned again this evening, the Bible itself is entirely clear that the involvement of men in its creation does not in any way diminish its authority as the Word of God. If an ambassador conveys to a foreign government the very message he has been charged to convey from his president or prime minister, no one doubts that the message thus conveyed is the message of that government, not the personal opinion of the ambassador himself. He is simply communicating what his government wishes to say; and so with the prophets and the apostles. They were the ambassadors of a king. It is amazing really that so high and great a king would deign to convey his message through the personality, the life circumstances, and the intellectual engagement of his ambassadors, lowly men that they were, but that is what he did. What makes the Bible so important, finally, is not that it is a human book. It is that; in some respects it is like every other book in the world. But what makes the Bible so utterly unique and so incomparably important is that it is at one and the same time a divine book, the Word of God.

But sinful men have a rebellious streak; even Christians still have some of the rebel in them, and divine authority often pinches. It does. It always has and it always will until we are at last free from sin and able to find our perfect freedom in complete and unquestioning obedience. But meantime there is that in the Bible that we do not like and the fact that it is a human book has made it easier for us to dispense with what we do not like. If humans wrote it; humans can un-write it, as it were. Whether or not anyone says this to himself, it is, I believe, the principle that is at work. It works itself out in different ways.

For example, in Roman Catholic theology the divine authority of the Bible is compromised by addition. Another authority, that of the church, is set beside it. The Bible didn’t say all that men wanted it to say, and so they added the parts that were left out. They wanted a technology of salvation, easier to manipulate and control, and so they came up with the sacrifice of the mass, prayers to the saints, the treasury of merits, purgatory, indulgences, auricular confession, and so on; none of which appears in the Bible. None of this leaves its mark anywhere on the Bible’s understanding of the Christian life, of faith in God in Christ, of the way of the soul in the world. It is well to ask ourselves if such ideas would ever have surfaced in Christian circles if the Bible had not been such a human book and if, for that reason, the temptation so real to think of men as bearers of the voice and word of God. Indeed, in the Bible, the Word of God comes white hot out of the biblical authors’ own mind. Well then, more revelation can come from other minds, perhaps. Would there have been any possibility of such additions to divine revelation if, as in Islam, the Bible were thought to be uncreated and simply a copy of the writing that is in heaven, as Muslims believe the Koran to be? Or if the Bible had first been written on golden tablets in some magic language and translated with the help of an angel, would we think the same way about adding to it? I think not.
But more interesting for our purposes is the way in which in the modern age the authority of the Word of God has been compromised by diminishment, rather than addition; but again by diminishment accomplished by pitting the human authorship against the divine. This is done in many ways, of course. Some take the Bible to be the Word of God only in the sense in which it is the testimony of certain men to their own personal encounter with God. In that way the Bible is separated by degrees from God himself and is no longer simply God’s Word to man but is much more man’s word about God. There has been a lot of that thinking over the last few centuries. It is this kind of thinking that lurks behind the criticism one still hears from time to time that people who believe in the absolute authority of the Bible are bibliolaters; they have made an idol of the Bible. They worship the Bible instead of God or instead of Christ. Christian people who ought to know better have been saying this now for two-hundred years. Here is the Scot pastor Alexander Moody Stuart addressing this charge way back in the 19th century.
“In these days many good and able men count it a great discovery and a grand principle that the authority on which we are to trust is not the Bible but Christ, and so they have no scruple in making the Bible one of the least trustworthy of all books; yet we know nothing of Christ except what we read in the Bible, and when it is discredited men can have no Christ except by their own conception.” [A. Moody Stuart, 202] That same point has been made a thousand times and it is incontrovertible. We know no God, no Christ, and no salvation but that which is given us in the Bible. What is more, it is simply incoherent to attempt to separate a man from his thoughts and from his words. You never do this. If someone is speaking to you and you laugh out loud at his words, at his argument, at his opinion, you mock it, you make fun of it but then tell him “I’m not making fun of you, I’m only making fun of your words,” see how well that sits. The words are the people. They are the expression of his or her mind and heart. To revere his words is to revere him. To love her words is to love her. Words are how we know people. Words are the expression of the self and the way by which we know the self. It is by words that any relationship is created, deepened, and sustained. The other person is known to us by what he says. You cannot drive a wedge between God or Christ and the Bible. The Bible will not allow you to do so. If you try, the wedge will be driven not between Christ and the Bible but between you and Christ! Or, as Spurgeon tartly put it:
“Unless we receive Christ’s words, we cannot receive Christ; and unless we receive the apostles’ words, we do not receive Christ; [as] John himself says, “…whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.” [Cited in Murray, Spurgeon and Hyper-Calvinism, 9]
It has also been said countless times in answer to those who try to make a separation between God and the Bible that this is precisely what the Bible is at pains to forbid you to do. It is always emphasizing the union, even the identity of God and the Word of God, as we saw last time. Nevertheless, and here is my point this evening, could such a charge be made -- that we are bibliolaters and that we are worshipping the Bible instead of God or Christ – could such a charge be made apart from the fact that the Bible is such a human book? Surely writings that are so human, and, indeed, in some respects, are so like other writings of other men from the same historical period, surely we cannot simply accept them to be the very word of God! It is very like the problem men had in recognizing Jesus as the Son of God. “Is he not the carpenter’s son?” they said. “Do we not know where he came from and where he grew up and his brothers and sisters?” It is absurd to believe that this thirty-year old man, nondescript in so many ways, a tradesman after all, could be the Son of God and the Messiah!” And in the same way, people have said “Surely a book so human, even so ordinary in some respects, surely that book cannot be the very Word of God.”

So, what happens when the teaching of the Bible crosses a Christian’s will? Well there is an immediate temptation to find a way to remove that particular teaching or that particular commandment from the Word of God or to marginalize it or to silence it in some way. And the way that is found usually depends in some way upon the humanity of the Bible. Let me give you some examples.

Modern feminism has posed a challenge to biblical authority in a variety of ways. Take, for example, Paul’s prohibition against women teaching or exercising authority over men in l Timothy 2. That has become in our age teaching that is embarrassing to an increasing number of Christians. It sounds so old-fashioned, out-dated, unsophisticated. I remember a PCA pastor who was establishing a church among young urban professionals in one of our great cities saying early on that he hoped to goodness that a number of these young adults became Christians before they found out that the Presbyterian Church in America did not ordain women to the eldership or the ministry. What are we to do with this teaching in a world of working women, of women managers and bosses, and in a society that has made sexual egalitarianism a first principle of its ethics? What are we to do with Paul? It is hardly a viewpoint unique to Paul, but that is the first thing that is likely to be said. Well, it’s only Paul. He had a problem with women. He was unmarried, a bachelor, we expect that. It’s only one man in the Bible. Jesus never said what Paul says in 1 Timothy 2:11-15. It’s one man against another, in other words. And we can pick and choose. If you think the argument is more sophisticated than that, just read the articles and read the books.

Indeed, it is often more direct than that. Nowadays, among the so-called Christian feminists, really evangelical believers, we are likely to hear that Paul was a good man and he said many important things – indeed, gave us in many respects the Word of God – but he didn’t get everything right. Sometimes he didn’t even see clearly the implications of his own gospel. He said in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is no longer male or female. But he didn’t entirely free himself from the patriarchal baggage of his upbringing and his culture. When he spoke of women not exercising authority over men, he was simply being a man of his own day and time. We can forgive him for that; but we don’t have to follow him in his mistake. You see again how the humanity of the Bible tempts people to reject its authority at points where they are offended by what the Bible teaches or at points where they don’t want its teaching to be true.

And the same sort of thing happens when the subject is not sex-roles in marriage or church or society, but is instead the doctrine of divine judgment and hell, or the Bible’s teaching that there is no way of salvation apart from that of faith in Jesus Christ. Sometimes one biblical writer will be pitted against another because they didn’t say the same thing in the same way; sometimes what the prophet or apostle wrote will be marginalized as simply the thinking of his time, needing to be updated by the deeper insights that we have gained observing life with the Bible in our hands. But in many cases it is simply the repudiation of the teaching of Holy Scripture because after all it is just a man who wrote those words however long ago. In any case, it is never said that the God-part of the Bible needs to be changed; it is always the man-part of the Bible, as if it were possible to separate the two.

Before moving on, however, let me say just a word to folk who have such struggles with the Bible’s teaching, especially those struggles where the Bible seems to contradict what seems self-evident to modern minds.

The first thing to remember is that what seems self-evident to you did not seem self-evident to generations before you, does not seem self-evident to billions of people in the world today, and in all likelihood will not seem self-evident to generations following you. The Western world’s view of sex and of the relationship between men and women – a novelty of the very last few years of human civilization – is, in its best features, a product of the biblical teaching about the equality of men and women in the heart of God and of them being equally the objects of his love and salvation. But, of course, the modern view of men and women and their relationship to one another has had horrific consequences as well. Women have suffered a great deal recently from the way in which their place in the world has been changed. Men, by almost all accounts, have been diminished in this culture, made less admirable, less worthy, less reliable. Children have suffered the most in a culture that prizes self-authentication, self-development and self-achievement first and foremost. Women may make more money and more decisions, but there is very little evidence that they are happier and there is no evidence that the children are happier in our culture because of the new thinking about men and women. Further many good people around the world today look at the West and its sexual philosophy and what has become of the Western family and shake their heads in bewilderment and wonder how intelligent people can think this is the right way to live. So I say, begin to think your way through the things that trouble you in the teaching of the Bible by practicing a bit of humility. Recognize that the feminist culture and the pornography culture in which we all live and which has shaped us in many ways may not be the last word about all of these important subjects.
Then in the second place before you go very far in the offense you take in the teaching of the Bible remember what the Bible is all about. It is about the knowledge of the living God and his gracious stooping down to embrace sinful, rebellious human beings. You don’t suppose, do you, you wouldn’t have supposed had you thought about this, would you – that coming to know God after a lifetime of rebellion against him or at least with a heart and a nature that needs to be remade, recreated, reborn so that you might know God – you don’t suppose that you aren’t going to have to adjust your thinking in quite a number of ways. Begin at the beginning, with God the Maker of heaven and earth, with Jesus Christ his Son, with the Lord’s death and resurrection. Then, when you move to the various commandments of the Bible you may find that you are quite ready to think new thoughts. After all, God will have his own mind about all these things and the modern West has certainly not been consulting God’s will in coming up with its view of life, of human beings, and of right and wrong.
Finally, to be challenged and corrected in your thinking is, don’t you think, the inevitable result of having a personal relationship with God. You don’t imagine, I’m sure, that you think just the way God thinks about everything. It is part of the wonder of gospel that you, in the reality of your person, your own tiny self, can know the living God, the Almighty, as a person; but the consequence of that is certainly that you are going to be contradicted from time to time. You may remember the movie The Stepford Wives. It was remade recently, apparently, but the remake was a flop, but both movies told the same story. The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut turned their wives into robots. The upside was that their wives never disagreed with them; always did what their husbands wanted them to do. A Stepford wife was beautiful, compliant, and agreeable. But she wasn’t a person and the marriage was not personal. There can be no intimacy with a robot. A personal relationship is risky; a personal relationship with God is particularly risky. The living God is not your complaint partner. You are his subject and servant. But the upside is that you are finally in touch with the Truth; you know the one who rules the world, you are loved by the one who is capable of bringing your life into its intended fullness. You should expect some change in your thinking when you meet God. But his authority, speaking as he does in Holy Scripture, is your assurance that you are finally thinking and living according to what is real. [Cf. Tim Keller, The Reason for God, 113-114] The fact that everyone around you may still be living in their own dream need not keep you from living in the light of reality.

Now all of that was an aside. What I am concerned to say is that the divine authority of Holy Scripture, by the Bible’s express testimony, is unchanged by the fact that the Bible is also and at the same time such a profoundly human book. As we pointed out last week, the fact that a hymn came out of David’s experience, like Psalm 51, or that a statement of the way of salvation was crafted by Paul from his reflection on various OT texts does not make it any less the word, the voice, the speech of God when they write the hymn or the reflection down. The Holy Spirit was entirely able to use men to write the words he wanted written just as he perfectly accomplishes his will through every single thought freely thought, every word freely spoken or written, and every deed freely performed by every human being.

And the practical consequence of that is not only that what the Bible says, God says; but that what the Bible says is true, what it commands is law, end of discussion. Once it is accepted that the Bible is the Word of God, then it is in the nature of the case an unquestioned rule for faith and practice that now rests in our hand. I remember a prominent man in early PCA circles saying years ago that for a time he had come under the influence of the charismatic movement and had begun to speak in tongues. He was quite thrilled about the charismatic experiences that he had had. Then, he said, he studied the Bible and came to believe that Christians don’t speak in tongues today and so he stopped. Now, whether or not you think that is what the Bible teaches, the principle should not be questioned by anyone. It matters not what you think, what you want, what your experience may have been, what you prefer, God has spoken. If he were to speak orally to you, in the cloud and fire as he did to Moses, you certainly wouldn’t say, “Well, God, I’m not sure about that; I’ll have to think that one over.”

I have told some of you before of a friend of ours in the church we attended in Aberdeen in the mid-1970s. He was a newspaperman and an avid fan of Formula One auto-racing, the open-wheel cars that race through European city streets. He was really a fan. He went to the races, followed the races, knew all the drivers and their history. Then Formula One made a decision to move its main races from Saturday to Sunday. Well, said my friend, that was that. I couldn’t watch the races any longer, because that would conflict with my keeping the Lord Day holy, as the Lord commands me to do, so I gave up being a fan of that sport. I quit following it and I haven’t followed it since. So simple; so uncomplicated. The Bible says it; I believe it; I am under authority to obey it; that settles it. No matter the sacrifice, no matter the difficulty, God has spoken to me. Can I divorce my spouse or must I remain in an unhappy marriage? Can I employ that business practice or must I place myself in a competitive disadvantage in my industry? Can I sleep with someone to whom I am not married or use pornography or must I struggle every day with desires that I have so much difficulty controlling and that threaten to make my life a misery? Can I stretch the truth in that way? Can I be an elder if I am a woman? The questions go on and on. Every human life has them, every culture has them, every historical era and period has them. And then all the matters of doctrine? Must I believe that God judges the wicked in the world to come when it seems to me that that is not fair? Must I believe that there is but one road that leads to God and one savior of sinners when that exclusivity is so troubling to me?

This is what we mean by authority: the right to exercise control, the right to command thought and behavior. God alone has that ultimate right and he has spoken in his Word. It matters not that he has used men to communicate his word. That he did so is surpassingly wonderful and mysterious and in doing so God has paid a great compliment to man, and he has given us an extraordinary book that speaks to us in the ordinary language and circumstances of our life. It is still God’s Word, it is still God’s voice, it is still God’s mind, God’s will, and God’s truth that is expressed in the words of the Bible. And that being so, it remains and must always remain true, as God himself says,

“This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and
trembles at my word.”

Moody Stuart said of John Duncan, the famous Rabbi Duncan of 19th century Scottish Presbyterianism, “More than any man I ever knew, he trusted every word, reverenced every word, and loved every word in the book of God.” [Just a Talker, xxxiv] That is what every Christian should aspire to be and what everyone will aspire to be who really accepts that the Bible is the Word of God. If so, then I want to know it, I want to understand it, I want to believe it, and I want to obey it: every single word of it.

Think of it carefully,
Study it prayerfully,
Deep in your heart
Let its oracles dwell.
Ponder its mystery,
Slight not its history,
For none ever loved it
Too fondly or well.

The Kingdom of Love

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by: Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
from: Mark Series
referring to: Mark 12:28-34

Remember now, we are in the midst of a series of test questions arranged by various members of the Sanhedrin to try to catch Jesus in some embarrassing or controversial reply. Now the scribes, or teachers of the law, take their turn, though in this case, it is an individual, not a group, and the conversation appears to be somewhat more cordial. Jesus even concludes it by commending the scribe who asked him the question.

Text Comment

v.28: The scribes and the rabbis thought a great deal about this question: which is the weightiest commandment or which one summarizes all the others? That may be one reason why it was asked. There would be those who disagreed with virtually any answer Jesus gave. Given that there were, by the rabbis’ count, some 613 commandments in the Torah it was inevitable that people should ask which of them were the most important, or whether there was a single principle from which all the separate commandments sprang. Twenty years before Jesus, Rabbi Hillel had answered a similar question with a negative version of the Golden Rule: “What you would not want done to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah, everything else is interpretation.” A century after Jesus, Rabbi Akiba answered the question with Lev. 19:8: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Still later rabbis answered the question with “In all your ways acknowledge God and he will make your paths straight,” or even “The righteous will live by faith.” [Edwards, 370-371]
v.30: These two verses, cited from Deut. 6:4-5, are known as the shema and would have been recited morning and evening by pious Jews. In the Deuteronomy text there are three sources of this love: heart, soul, and strength. Jesus here adds a fourth, the mind, just as he added another commandment to the ten commandments in 10:19. This appears to be another evidence of the Lord’s authority, that he can make his own additions to Holy Scripture!
v.31: The scribe had asked for one commandment, but Jesus gave him two! It takes these two commandments, Jesus said, to realize the will of God. So far as we know, no one before Jesus ever put these two commandments together as the sum and substance of the Law. Anyway, I never read this without thinking of the perceptive comment of John Duncan, the eccentric Scottish missionary and professor: “How good God is! He bids everybody love me!” [Just a Talker, 76]
v.33: Very like the similar statement in Hosea 6:6, the scribe is not saying that sacrificial worship is not important but only that the love of God and man is more fundamental still.
v.34: In another demonstration of his authority, Jesus pronounces on the spiritual situation of this man, his nearness to the kingdom of God. He was a potential recruit and we can’t help wonder whether or not he finally believed and followed Jesus. [France, 482] He was, alas, one of only a few of his class at that time who were so open to the truth. In vv. 38-40 of this same chapter, we are given a description of the scribes as a class and it is not nearly so complementary. In any case, the series of questions had confirmed Jesus’ wisdom and made his interrogators look foolish, so this line of attack was given up.

Among all the religions and philosophies of mankind, the Christian faith is unique and stands utterly by itself at many crucial points. Her most fundamental principles are not only different but often the reverse of the world’s other religious thinking. And so here. Among the foremost of those uniquenesses, of that distinctiveness is that it is from the bottom up and from the inside out a religion of love. Love is its first principle, its soul, its center, and love is the engine that makes it go. Love for others: first God, then other people.

It begins, of course, in the very nature of God who is not only love itself, but consists of three persons who are bound together by the purest love. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are united as one in an infinite, incomprehensible, mutual, and eternal love. As John says it in his first letter, “love is from God” and “God is love.” But love is something that in the nature of the case must have an object. There is an important clue to the existence of the triune God in that human beings should be made for the love of others; that they crave such love. Where does that come from except from a God who is himself and in his very existence a God of love, of love given and love received?

As C.S. Lewis famously expressed this point in Mere Christianity:

“All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, he was not love.”

Have you ever stopped to ask why virtually every song on the radio is about love; why the stories – whether written or on film – that captivate our attention are almost always stories about love; why human beings of virtually all ages daydream about love? Love – the love of man and woman, the love of parents for children, the love of friends for friends, the love a man for his country, or, for that matter, his football or baseball team, this love, this passion of attraction and delight and fulfillment, makes the world go round. Human beings are one vast need for love. The prim and proper matron understands this as surely as does the rock star prancing before the multitude on the stage. The ghetto dweller and the super-rich; the working man and the professional; the inhabitants of American, China, and India alike; the Christian and the Muslim; all need love, all want love desperately, all seek it anxiously and eagerly. All the real tragedies of life are tragedies of love: the man or woman who lives without love, who had it but lost it, the person who obtains everything else but love and finds life hollow because he or she remains yet unloved. In nothing are we so different from all the other creatures than in this wonderful and terrible capacity to love and the need both to love and to be loved.

Why is that? The love that is experienced in this world, the love that is sought by human beings who have not found it, the supreme joy in love that is the truest ecstasy of human life, all of this is the overflow of the love that first exists and has existed forever in the life of the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are made for love because God our maker is love. Love is the richness of our life because it was first the richness of his. It is an entirely appropriate and accurate paraphrase of Augustine’s famous remark to say “God made us for love and our hearts are restless until they love in thee!” That is why love, in the words of Benjamin Warfield, “is the great enlarger [of persons]. It is love which stretches the intellect. He who is not filled with love is necessarily small, withered, shriveled in his outlook on life and things.”

No wonder then the Bible’s entire message of salvation is dominated by this same principle of love. The entire history of salvation is from its beginning the history of a great love. The Scripture teaches us that before the world was made God had set his love upon his people. “In love God predestined us to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Then it was that same love that moved the Father to send his Son into the world to suffer and die for our salvation. “For God so loved the world that he have his one and only son…” And then, it was that same love that caused him to send the Holy Spirit into our hearts, to awaken us to our need of Jesus, to cause us to believe in him that we might be saved. “…because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ even when we were dead in our sins…” And it is that same love that has accompanied us every step of the way on our pilgrimage through this world. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And where will this saving love of God finally take us: to heaven, which is where love will fill every heart and dominate every relationship. In one of Jonathan Edwards’ great works, Charity and its Fruits, he concludes with a chapter entitled “Heaven, a World of Love” that some Edwards’ scholars regard as some of the great man’s most elevated and beautiful writing. In the same way Dante finishes his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy and its final part, Paradise, with a vision of heaven as the place where the soul is consumed and ravished by love.

My power now faltered that phantasy sublime:
My will and my desire were both revolved,
As a wheel in even motion driven,
By love, which moves the sun and other stars.

And then, what is the response that man is to make to this extraordinary love that God has lavished upon him? Well, it is nothing but love itself. “We love him because he first loved us.” God’s love for us makes us lovers of God. From the beginning it was made clear in the Bible that all the various commandments of God’s law were nothing but a working out of love for God. It is why Paul can say in one place “A curse on all who do not love the Lord Jesus Christ.” Such love is the mark of a Christian.

When you love someone, you instinctively want to please that person, to demonstrate your affection. Lovers love to give one another gifts. Parents love birthdays and Christmas because it is a delight for them to shower gifts upon their children and to make them happy in that way. That is what love is and what love does. And so with the love of God. One wishes to demonstrate his or her love and what better way to demonstrate love to a lover who is pleased by nothing so much as goodness than to live in goodness before him? And, not surprisingly, a large part of that goodness is the love of others. John puts it this way: “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.” And Jesus went further to say that God’s love, being so great and being lavished on unworthy people such as ourselves, people who were God’s enemies in fact, we should love even our enemies. We should love everyone, in other words. We should love others not only because God desires this and we love God, but because love is self-authenticating, it commends itself to those who experience it. God’s love makes us love love all the more and want to practice it as he practiced it toward us. One of the very interesting things about love is that one cannot have too much of it and one always wants more of it. We are sated with too much of other things but not love. No one who loves, really loves, does not realize that it would be better to love still more. But what can give us and bring from us such love? God’s love for us and in us. That is Christianity’s uniquely splendid answer to that most basic question of human life and experience.

And so it has been through the ages. Those who have experienced and felt God’s love, those who have come to know the omnipotent affection of the living God, have been transformed by that love, and have changed, by degrees, from being the self-centered and selfish people they were by nature, into those who principal ambition in life is to love: to love God and to love others in his name. “My how those Christians love one another,” Tertullian in the early 3rd century says was the begrudging confession of the Roman world as it beheld the life of the fledgling church.

The point of the Lord’s teaching here is that everything else that might be said about the Christian life, every other virtue, and every duty can be reduced very simply and without any diminishment to love. Take for example the list of the fruit of the Holy Spirit as Paul gives it in Gal. 5:22-23, the list of the various virtues that the Spirit of God produces in those who walk with Jesus Christ. The first is love, which a number of interpreters point out is mentioned first not simply because it is one among the others but because it is the principle of each of the others. “Joy” is love singing, said one Bible teacher. “Peace” is love resting. “Patience” is love enduring. “Kindness” is love’s self-forgetfulness. “Goodness” is love’s character. “Faithfulness” is love’s habit. “Gentleness” is love’s true touch. And “self-control” is love holding the reins.

But here the Lord emphasizes not the relationship between love and the fruit of the Spirit but between love and the commandments of God, between love and an obedient life, between love and duty. We live in a time when many have been led to feel that there is an inevitable conflict between love and duty, between love and law. We think of love as the free response of the heart, of love as emotion and feeling. We think of law as an outward constraint, a regulation that imposes itself upon us from outside. We think, in our sentimental age, that love is instinctive; it cannot be commanded; that love cannot be a law.

But it is not so. Love, as Paul says, is the fulfillment of the law as Jesus said it was here. Both are as much as saying that the law is love’s eyes; it helps us to see how to love God and others. We have, in our family, had something to do over these past years with four engagement rings. My son’s summer employment last year was primarily devoted to one purpose: to earn enough money to purchase an engagement ring so that he could propose marriage. He carefully investigated diamonds and their settings. He consulted with others. He learned the ins and outs of purchasing rings. And he accumulated money, a lot of money because diamond engagement rings cost a lot of money. Now we might think a young couple starting out could use that money for more important things than a piece of jewelry. They could pay off college expenses or save for graduate school; they could buy a car or even put a down-payment on a house. But no; he must buy a ring because there is a law that man who proposes to a woman in our culture must give her a diamond ring. But does anyone think that law is in conflict with love? Doesn’t everyone recognize that this obligation is nothing else but an obligation to express love in a meaningful, visible, tangible way? The law of the engagement ring is a law of love and keeping that law is simply genuinely to love.

Well, in the same way when Jesus says that if we love him we will keep his commandments, he as much as says that to obey him is the way to love him because it pleases and honors him. So far from love being in conflict with the law, without the law we would not know how to love and we would certainly not know how best to love.

The Lord makes a point of this, I think, by drawing these two commandments together: the commandment to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. That is to say, you cannot really love another human being – not as that person ought to be loved – if you do not first love God. And you cannot love God without loving others in the radical way in which God commands you love them, the same radical way in which he loved you. The love of your neighbor flows from and is empowered by your love for God and the love of God is demonstrated and practiced in your love for you neighbor because that is what pleases him most.

There is no asceticism here, as if one should go off into the desert by oneself to love God. Nor is there humanism here as if one’s neighbor could ever be truly and faithfully loved without reference to God’s love and without his love for you becoming the principle of your love for your neighbor. God’s love for you was eminently practical and this-worldly: it involved the incarnation, the suffering, and the death of his son for you and your sins. And in the same way, those schooled in that love and those moved and inspired by that love will want to love both God and others in the same eminently practical and worldly way: the way of sympathy, care, help, generosity, and sacrifice.

There is an interesting question here that is raised by the Lord’s arresting remark to the scribe as their conversation comes to an end. Why is this man near to the kingdom? What about his response in vv. 32 and 33 made Jesus think that this man really understood and was on the cusp of salvation? Well, rather obviously, it was because he understood that God was love, that the obligation of man was love, and that the true measure of a human life was nothing other than love. Not only did he grasp what God desires in man, but he understood what man would have to achieve to please God. He understood that love comes from deep within a man and is radical in the demands that it makes upon the self: to love God with all the heart, soul, strength, and mind; to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves (and we really love ourselves; we are head over heels in love with ourselves; every thoughtful person knows that!).

This scribe was an expert in the law, but he understood that the principle of all the various commandments was this love for God and others. But it is just there that man comes face to face with his failure and his need for forgiveness. A man who genuinely understands the summons to love is the man who knows how comprehensively he has fallen short of God’s will. How lovely these commandments sound: love God with everything you are and your neighbor as yourself. But those beautiful words as much as toll the death knell for us all. So far are we from keeping these commandments that we must wonder if in all of our lives we have ever kept either of them even once! Have we ever loved God so completely and so passionately? Have we ever loved anyone else as much as we love ourselves? To selfish, small-minded people like ourselves, these commandments, more than any others, prove how much we need a Redeemer who would die for our sins, how much we need the forgiveness of God, and how much we need a new heart, a heart capable of such love as this. Surely this is one of if not the main reason this man was so near the kingdom of God. He was near to realizing he couldn’t please God by his own effort. The standard was set far too high for him. He needed what he could not supply. Everyone who knows that is near to the kingdom of God.

But for Christians who have found the Redeemer, have obtained the forgiveness of their sins, and have been given a new heart with new powers, what are we to take away from these mighty words our Savior spoke in the last few days of his ministry? Christian! Listen to me! What is the vision of life, of service that rises before your eyes as you live your life from day to day? What do you aspire to be and to do as a follower of Jesus Christ? Is it first and foremost, as Jesus said here it should be, to be a lover of God and of men. Radically to love God and to love men. Do you see every other duty of your life as a form of, as the practice of this love? Do you reduce every obligation finally to love? We can very easily forget to do this. We can think about so many things having to do with our Christian life and never get round to thinking of them in terms of love for God and love for others. Love can become just one thing among others instead of the be all and end all of our lives. And we can lose our clear focus for that reason. We don’t see everything we should do as nothing other than loving God and loving man. We don’t see our days and nights as opportunities to love God and others in his name. It is a very simplifying and clarifying way to consider your life. You just have to do two things, that is all. Just two! Love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself. Do that, you do all. Or, as Augustine put it: “Love and do whatever you wish.” [“Ama et quod vis fac.”] That is, if you are really acting in love – love for God and love for your neighbor – you will do right in every other way.

I read the other day something that fascinated me about Johann Sebastian Bach. It stuck in my mind because Bach’s birthday, March 23rd, was just two weeks ago. Whether you listen to classical music or not, you know Bach. You would recognize more of his compositions than you probably realize. You have heard them all your life: in church, at home, at school, in movie scores, even if you have never heard Bach played in a concert or symphony hall as many of us have. He is unquestionably the greatest or, at least, one of the two or three greatest composers of music in the history of the world. When the biologist Lewis Thomas of the Sloan-Kettering Institute was asked – as many influential intellectuals were at the time – what message he thought we should send to other possible civilizations in outer space in that rocket we fired up there some years ago with various artifacts of our civilization stored in its cone, he replied, “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Then he paused and said, “But that would be boasting.”

Anyway, what arrested my attention was this. When Bach was alive he was almost unnoticed as a composer. He was well known as an instrumentalist, a virtuoso at the harpsichord and the organ, but not as a composer. When he died, one of his biographers notes, there were something on the order of ninety obituaries that were written and that have survived. Of those ninety obituaries, only three mentioned him as a composer. “This is tantamount to remembering Shakespeare as a great actor.” [W.F. Buckley, Happy Days Were Here Again, 444] Perhaps the greatest composer in all of human history and only 3 of 90 of his obituarists even thought to mention that he was a composer!

My thought is: what a perfect reminder that is of how easy it is for human beings to miss the obvious, to concentrate and reflect and consider and all the while remain oblivious to the main thing, the great thing, the most important thing. We can think about our lives in so many different ways, we can think about what we need to do or to have done for us, we can worry about this or that defect that we are attempting to overcome or to compensate for, we can dream of this or that coming to pass, and all the while never think of love, of God’s love, of our love for God, of our love for others, which our Savior said is the main thing, the thing that draws everything else up into itself. Love and one does all. Love and one fulfills the entire law. Love and one lives as God would have a man or woman live. Love and Christ is pleased. Love and the great purposes of your life will be fulfilled, no matter what comes. Love and because God is love you will find yourself at one with God and with reality itself.

Thinking of what our Savior said to this scribe pray and pray again these lines from an ancient prayer:

Lord, Do thou turn me all into love,
And all my love into obedience,
And let my obedience be without interruption.