By scripture alone

II Peter 1: 1 – 21

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 06 Jan, 2008

OVER the rest of this month -- with the exception of 20 January when I will be away -- I want to review some basic Reformation doctrines, so we will know where we stand as Baptists.

George K. was a very serious and intense Anglican. When I went to Outward Bound after I left school, he and I were in the same team. He had to leave us for several days to sit for a deferred examination at University, and he was keen to take his turn at leading the group on our hikes when he came back, to bear his responsibility in the group.

Unfortunately, George had no sense of direction. He got lost on cross country runs when there was a white arrow every 15 m to make sure we got back. You couldn’t put a map and compass in his hands, because then he dreamt he was a real navigator. It was safer to let him guide by the sun or the lichen on tree trunks. Anything so he wouldn't feel too secure!

A lesson I learnt from him was that it is never safe to start walking until you know where you are.

That’s what I want us to get straight during the year. I want us to be clear where we are so we will be clear about where we are heading.

This is our year of evangelism. This is our year of reaching out. We need to know who we are, where we stand, and where we are going.

May God bless us on our journey!

The important thing I want us to take away from today is the centrality of scripture. This is a major debate between Protestant churches on the one hand and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on the other hand.

We will look at a bit of the history of the conflict, we will look at some of the scriptures on the Baptist position, and we will think about what these things all mean for us today as we consider what it means to begin the ultimate relationship with God through Jesus our Lord.

History

Even to understand how we got to the Reformation, we have to go back to the earliest days. A good starting point is in Turkey around the year 155AD.

A group arose known as The Montanists. They emphasised prophecy, and that caused a problem for the rest of the church. Was this genuine prophecy? Should it be treated the same as the New Testament? Some said. “Yes.” Others said, “No.” The Montanists were generally bolder than your average Christian. Maybe God was really doing something new.

Imagine if someone here — say, Joyce — got up one day and said, “This is what God says: unless you all repent, Australia will be besieged by enemies and suffer greatly.”

What should we do with that? Do we ignore it? But what if it were truly from God? Should we add The Epistle of Saint Joyce of Berala to the Bible, somewhere near III John and Jude? Should we tell the people at Earlwood? Or do we keep it to ourselves?

This was the exact problem the early Christians faced.

If God speaks through one of us, isn’t it only for us? Unless,of course, we discover that God has revealed the same prophecy in many places at the same time. Even so, we don’t add it to the Bible, because the Bible is our pattern–book, our paradigm. If any prophecy \follows what the Bible says it is worth respecting and listening to; if any prophecy doesn’t follow the Bible, we must reject it.

But the early Christians reacted differently. They said, “We will only recognise what the Bishops or Church Councils authorise.”

You can see what that does. It ultimately lets the Bishops or Councils have the final say.

So a Bishop says something, and the people follow him, because he has God’s authority. And, even if the Bishop contradicts the Bible, he is a Bishop, so he speaks with God’s authority. That way, error is added to error alongside occasional bits of truth.

Someone got the idea of Purgatory. Where does the Bible teach Purgatory? But the Bishops said it exists, so Purgatory appeared alongside Heaven and Hell.

Others taught that you get to heaven by believing in Jesus, by being baptised and by doing good works. Jesus came a long way down the list by the time you got to the end.

They taught that one good work is making big donations. And that was added to the list. Jesus came even further down the list.

That was how you found Tetzel roaming around Wittenberg, asking people to pay to get out of years in purgatory.

There was absolutely no Biblical teaching behind it, but the Bishops and Councils agreed to it, so it had to be true. And the most important bishop was the Pope, so if the Pope said it, it had to be true.

The list grew. Purgatory, indulgences, worshipping saints, whipping yourself to show how spiritual you were, doctrines like the perpetual virginity of Mary... it was almost impossible to find the end of all the extras tacked onto a substructure of the Bible.

When Martin Luther and others like him were forced to read the Bible in Greek or Hebrew, something hardly any Western Christian had done for 1000 years, it was like scales falling from their eyes. They had seen the truth, and the truth was setting them free!

The Reformers had no intention of allowing the Church to drift back to where it was. Sola Scriptura! was their cry: by Scripture alone!

The Bible

And that brings us to what the Bible says about itself.

All through, the Bible shows that God is a speaking God.

In Genesis 1, we read,

And God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light.

In Deuteronomy 5:27, Moses reminds the Israelites that they said to him,

“... ²⁷ Go near and listen to all that the LORD our God says. Then tell us whatever the LORD our God tells you. We will listen and obey.”

The Israelites expected to hear from God, in this case through Moses. Clearly, God can speak through humans.

We see this in 2 Chronicles, where a prophet named Micaiah is brought to the king, and we read,

 ^{2CHR 18:12} The messenger who had gone to summon Micaiah said to him, “Look, as one man the other prophets are predicting success for the king. Let your word agree with theirs, and speak favourably.”

¹³ But Micaiah said, “As surely as the LORD lives, I can tell him only what my God says.”

The Psalmist reports God’s words:

  ^{PS 50:16} But to the wicked, God says:
 “What right have you to recite my laws
  or take my covenant on your lips?

When the disciples were perplexed about Jesus’ teachings, he said to them,

  ^{JN 14:9b} ...Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father’? ¹⁰ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.

And in our passage this morning, we read,

   ^{2PE 1:19} And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. ²⁰ Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. ²¹ 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.

There is a consistent view throughout the Bible that the words of prophets, the words of Jesus, the words of the Bible, are the words of God. We must pay careful attention to them.

We could read other passages, but that will do. God has spoken by the prophets; he has spoken by the apostles, and the primary way that he communicates with us is by the record of their words in the Bible.

Look at the logic. We can really only find out the facts about Jesus through the Bible. Where else do we find out? We have only the briefest mentions of him in other historical texts. We could find out that he died during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, and that Nero had tried to blame the fires on followers of Christ, but there's not a lot else. To know what Jesus is like, you have to go to the Bible.

We are saved through Christ, the person, not through the written word. We Christians do not idolise the Bible in the way that many Muslims seem to idolise the Koran.

But we know that there is one source of information about God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and we had better keep our minds filled with that word of God.

Of course, God still speaks today.

In Acts 2, we read the promise,

...I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
 Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
  your young men will see visions,
  your old men will dream dreams.

 ¹⁸ Even on my servants, both men and women,
  I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
  and they will prophesy.

We live in the Last Days, in the Biblical sense. They began on the Day of Pentecost, and will continue until Jesus comes again.

And these are days of the Spirit, these are days of prophecy, these are days of visions and dreams.

But these are not the days of adding to the written word of God, because there is only one definitive word, and that is the word we have written, that is our primary source.

I know that this becomes very difficult. You hear the Bible preached by me. Sometimes you hear it preached by others. Sometimes what I preach and what they preach are a little different. We do get to know the Bible through human interpretation. That is the only way we can get to know it.

But that takes us back to the cry of the Reformers. You must go back to the Bible itself. Sola scriptura! By scripture alone!

At one time we had a few people in the church who disapproved of some of the ways I interpreted the Bible. I knew that. I saw the scowls from up in the pulpit.

But I always said,

“Look, I know some of you don’t agree with me. All I can do is preach as closely to the meaning of the word as I can go, and I have to keep in mind that, if my theology and the Bible disagree, it's my theology that has to change. And that principle applies to all of us.”

I will tell you all this same thing. We must constantly refer back to the scriptures, and search them daily to see if what is taught us is actually so.

Implications

This all means that every Evangelical Christian, every Baptist, must be alert to the Bible, and ready to challenge every teaching on the basis of what the Bible actually teaches. That’s what being radical Christians means.

Only make sure you don’t unconsciously read things into the Bible that aren’t there.

For centuries, people read infant baptism into the Bible. When they saw the word, baptism, they assumed it was about baptising babies. Yet that doctrine just isn’t there.

The Bible doesn’t teach ordination as we practice it. Many people assume that it does, but it doesn’t.

The Bible doesn’t teach Creation Science. Creation Science may be a way of explaining what the Bible teaches, but it is not the only way. I think it is far from the best way. But the Bible doesn’t teach any particular interpretation of Genesis. So Christians who fight over these matters or disfellowship each other about their differences dishonour God’s Word.

The same applies to various theories about the Second Coming of Jesus. The Bible is clear that he will come again. But pre– or a–millennialism, pre- or post–tribulationism, they are interpretations.

With all these things, we can generally rule out the very worst interpretations, but we often can only wait until we see if further information comes up.

I also want us to remember how important the Bible itself is.

To learn about Jesus, that is where you go.

The first church I attended was very fundamentalist. Nice people, but super fundo.

Eventually, I broke free, and I’m glad I did.

But there is one thing I have to give those pastors credit for. Not all were fundamentalists of course. There is one thing I must thank Albin Betteridge, A.H Hawley, Ed Drummond, Alan Johnson, Mr Smith and several others for, and that is their insistence on the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture. If there was ever a question about what Christians should do or believe, they always pointed back to the Word of God, back to the Bible.

And I want to point you back to the Bible myself. You might one day decide to disagree with what you heard from me, and that is alright. But disagree with me because you have studied the Bible and have found the answer in there for why you disagree.

And never hand your will over to some human authority who adds to the Bible, or subsitutes something else for it. Such a person will eventually lead you far, far astray!

Conclusion

If it were not for the Reformation’s insistence on Scripture alone, we would all be following cleverly crafted fables.

When the Reformation liberated the Bible, in effect it also brought Jesus back to the fore, because again he was seen as the sole source of salvation, as the supreme revelation of God, and as the loving mediator between God and humankind.

The mediaeval Catholic Church meditated on the wounds of Jesus, but lost sight of the love which took him to the cross. The mediaeval Catholic Church proclaimed poverty in Jesus’ name, but lived in obscene luxury while peasants starved. The mediaeval Catholic Church was obsessed with social acceptability, but forgot the Christ who was outcast and rejected in his own world.

We have been freed to start over. But the Reformers also said we must be semper reformata, semper reformanda — a church always reformed, always being reformed.

Keep to the Bible, and never turn back!

There you will find a Saviour who died for you. There you will find a God who raised him from the dead. There you will find a life based on faith. And there you will find a salvation which endures forever and ever. Never lose sight of the treasure which is ours through the Bible God gave us!

Let’s give thanks to God for his marvellous gift to us.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)