Christ and the Bible - Conclusion

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus

Before reading this conclusion, I would request you all to first please spend some time to read the prior sessions (Part I, Part II, Part III & Part IV). Now to sum up, we believe the Scriptures because of Christ. He endorsed the Old Testament, and he made provision for the writing of the New Testament by giving to the apostles His authority. We therefore receive the Bible from the hand of Jesus Christ. It is He who has invested it with His own authority.And since we are determined to submit to Him, we are determined to submit to it. Our doctrine of Scripture is bound up with our loyalty to Jesus Christ. If he is our Teacher and our Lord, we have no liberty to disagree with Him. Our view of Scripture must be Him.

At this point some people raise an understandable objection. "The Scriptures bear witness to Christ and Christ bears witness to the Scriptures," they say, accurately summarizing what we have been studying. "But surely," they continue, "this reciprocal testimony, each bearing witness to the other, is a circular argument? Does it not assume the very truth you are wanting to prove? That is, in order to demonstrate the inspiration of the Scripture you appeal to the teaching of Jesus, but you believe the teaching of Jesus only because of the inspired Scriptures. Isn't that a circular argument, and therefore invalid?" This is an important objection to face. But actually our argument has been misstated, for it is linear and not circular reasoning.

Let me put it in this way: When we first listen to the biblical witness to Christ, we read our New Testament with no preconceived doctrine of inspiration. We simply accept it as a collection of first-century historical documents, which indeed it is. Through this historical testimony, however, quite apart from any theory of biblical inspiration, the Holy Spirit brings us to faith in Jesus. Then this Jesus, in whom we have come to believe, sends us back to the Bible and gives us in His teaching a doctrine of Scripture which we did not have when we started our reading. For now He tells us that His historical testimony is also divine testimony, and that through the human agency of prophets and apostles His Father is bearing witness to Him.

Whenever you read the Bible, please do remember its major purpose. Scripture is the Father's testimony to the Son. It points to Him. It says to us, "Go to Him in order to find life - abundant life - in Him." Therefore any preoccupation with the biblical text which does not lead to a stronger commitment to Jesus Christ, in faith, love, worship and obedience, is seriously perverted. It brings us under the rebuke of Jesus. "You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me [to whom they bear witness] that you may have life."

Scripture, as Luther used to say, is the manger or cradle in which the infant Jesus lies. Don't let us inspect the cradle and forget to worship the Baby. Scripture, we might say, is the star which still leads wise people to Jesus. Don't let us allow our astronomical curiosity to so preoccupy us that we miss the house to which it is leading, and within it the Christ-child Himself. Or, we might say, Scripture is the box in which the jewel of Jesus Christ is displayed. Don't let us admire the box and overlook the jewel.

Dr. Christopher Chavasse, formerly Bishop of Rochester, once put the matter admirably. He said:

The Bible is the portrait of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospels are the Figure itself in the portrait. The Old Testament is the background leading up to the divine Figure pointing towards it and absolutely necessary to the composition as a whole. The Epistles serve as the dress and accoutrements of the Figure, explaining and describing it. Then while by our Bible reading we study the portrait as a great whole, the miracle happens, the Figure comes to life, and stepping down from the canvas of the written word the everlasting Christ of the Emmaus story becomes Himself our Bible teacher, to interpret to us in all the Scriptures the thing concerning Himself.

It is not enough to possess a Bible, to read the Bible, love the Bible, study the Bible, know the Bible. We need to ask ourselves, Is the Christ of the Bible the center of our lives? If not, all our Bible reading has been futile, for this is the end to which the Bible is intended to be the means.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus, some of you believe that with all my previous writings I am leaning towards the Sola Scriptura theory, but I would say otherwise. The Bible as a book came to be formed in the 3rd century and it was widely made available to the lay people after the typewriter was invented. My meaning for the writings are that the prophets and the apostles wrote the Word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the church believes that the Word initially was passed on through the word of mouth and writings. But now since we do have a written Bible in our hands, it should not be kept n the closet, but it should be taken out daily and the Word of God should speak to you and you should make it a point to understand it.

Hope you enjoy reading this post and I await more responses from all my readers.

Your Brother in Christ Jesus

Jobin George

P.S. The Bible - John R. W. Stott

Christ and the Bible - Part IV

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus

First and foremost, wishing you a blessed and a happy new year to all of you. I really would like to apologize to be out of the blogs for such a long time. I was facing a issue called writer's block. I really would like to continue with the blogs where I had left off. But most importantly, I would like to thanks each and everyone of you for keeping me in your prayers. Your prayers are most needed for me to continue writing.

Now coming back to where I had left off in the last portion, i.e. Part III (Please click on the word to go to the relevant post to read in entirety) I was saying about how Jesus bears witness to the Old Testament.We saw how Jesus endorsed the Old Testament scriptures. he reverently submitted to the Old Testament writings, for He was submitting to His Father's Word. He also made the Old Testament His ground for appeal in all his arguments with the religious teachers of His day. Through this we, who look towards Jesus as his Teacher and Lord should have a lower view of the Old Testament, and should also follow the Old Testament teachings. His view of the Scripture must become ours. Since He believed Scripture, so must we. Since He obeyed Scripture, so must we.

2. Jesus made provision for the writing of the New Testament. Just as God called the prophets in the Old Testament to record and interpret what He was doing and then sent them to teach the children of Israel, so Jesus called the apostles to record and interpret what He was doing and saying, and then He sent them to teach the church and, indeed, the world. This is the meaning of the word apostolos, a person "sent" on a mission with a message.

This parallel between the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles was deliberate. Jesus chose twelve in order that they might be with him - to hear His words, see His works, and then bear witness out of what they had seen and heard (compare Mk. 3:14; Jn. 15:27). Next He promised them the Holy Spirit in order to remind them his teaching and to supplement it, leading them to all the truth (Jn. 14:25-26; 16:12-13). This explains why Jesus could then say to the apostles, "He who listens to you listens to me; he who receives you receives me; he who rejects you rejects me" (Mt. 10:40; Lk. 10:16; Jn. 13:20). In other words, He invested them with His authority so that people's attitude to their teaching would mirror their attitude to His. Later Jesus added Paul and maybe couple others to the apostolic band, investing them with the same apostolic authority.

The apostles themselves recognized the unique authority they had been given as the teachers of the church. They did not hesitate on occasion to put themselves o a par with the Old Testament prophets, since they too were bearers of the Word of God (1 Thess. 2:13). They spoke and wrote in the name and with the authority of Jesus Christ. They issues commandments and expected obedience (e.g. 2 Thess. 3). They even gave instructions that their letters should be read in the public assembly when Christians were gathered together for worship, thus placing them alongside the Old Testament Scriptures (see Col. 4:16; 1 Thess. 5:27). This is the origin of the practice, which continues to this day, of having an Old Testament and a New Testament lesson read in the church.

A striking example of Paul's self-conscious apostolic authority occurs in his letter to the Galatians. He had climbed over the Taurus mountains on to the Galatian plateau to visit them, and he had arrived a sick man. He mentions some disfigurement, which had perhaps affected his eyesight (Gal. 4:13-15), and goes on to say; "You did no scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus" (v. 14). Not only had they welcomed him as God's "angel", or messenger, but they had actually listened to him as if he were Jesus Christ himself. Notice that he does not rebuke them for this. He does not say, "What on earth were you thinking about, that you should have given me the deference that you would give to Christ?" No, he applauds them for thee way they had treated him. It was not merely Christian courtesy which had motivated them to welcome a stranger. It was more than that. They had recognized him as a divine messenger, an apostle, who had come to them in the name and with the authority of Christ. So they had received him as if he were Christ.

Not only did the apostles understand the teaching authority they had been given, but the early church understood it also. As soon as all the apostles had died, church leaders knew they had moved into a new post-apostolic era. There was now no longer anybody in the church with the authority of a Paul or a Peter or a John. Bishop Ignatius of Antioch is perhaps the earliest clear example of this he dies about A.D. 110, which was very soon after John, the last surviving apostle had died. On his way to Rome to be executed, Ignatius wrote a number of letters to the Ephesians, the Romans, the Trallians and others. Several times in these he wrote: "I do not, like Peter or Paul, issue with commands. For I am not an apostle, but a condemned man." Now Ignatius was a bishop in the church. He is, in fact, one of the earliest witnesses to the rise of the episcopate. But, although he was a bishop, he knew he was not an apostle, and he therefore did not have an apostle's authority.

The early church clearly understood this difference. When the time came to fix the New Testament canon in the third century A.D., the test of canonicity was apostolicity. The essential questions to be asked of a disputed book were these:

Had it been written by an apostle?

If not, did it come from the circle of the apostles?

Did it contain the teaching of the apostles?

Did it have the imprimatur of the apostles? If in one of these ways it could be shown to be apostolic, then it was admitted into the canon of the New Testament Scripture.

It is extremely important to recover today this understanding of the unique authority of Christ's apostles. For there are no apostles in the contemporary church. To be sure, there are missionaries and church leaders of different kinds who may be described as having an apostolic ministry. But there are no apostles like the Twelve and Paul who were eyewitnesses of the risen Lord (Acts 1:21-26; 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8-10) and who had received a special commission and inspiration from Him. We have no right, therefore, to dismiss their teaching as if it were merely their own opinion. They were not speaking or writing in their own names, but in Christ's.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus, I thank you deeply for reading my posts. I would really love to know your thoughts and views on the same. Please be free to reach me on the below email address. May the love of God, the Father, the grace of Jesus Christ and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all now and forever more. In the next session, I intend to conclude the series on Christ and the Bible.

P.S. The above post has been taken from the book "The Bible" - John R. W. Stott

Your brother in Jesus 

Jobin George

jobin.george2012@gmail.com