READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Jeremiah 23:16-29
Romans 8:12-17
- St. Matthew 7:15-23
Grace to you all and Peace from God our Father and our Lord
Jesus, the Christ.
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“Beware of false
prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves”
Beware of the false prophets who, will take one look at
God’s Word and say, “That’s not what God meant” and then proceed to tell you
what God meant. A very interesting fact, along this line of thinking, is the
American Sign Language’s sign for Bible, for the deaf. It goes like this…
Why this is interesting is because it literally means,
“Jesus book”. As in, you will find nothing else but Jesus in this, His own
words, written for us. Thus, a false prophet will work his hardest to find
something, anything other than Jesus in His own Book.
And the Lord has made it so that it is only in the words of
the Prophets and the Apostles that we find and hear the true and revealed
knowledge of God. And those words are the only infallible authority for faith
and for life. Almighty God has thusly appointed these words to be His Word and
we have termed this written, revealed knowledge of God as the 66 books of the
Bible.
Now, that is just what we call them, not as if we put them
together or we gave them their “power” simply because we “believe in them”. The
Bible is something that we received. It was something that put itself together
even before we thought of it. We do not define it. It is defined for us,
therefore it is our duty to faithfully and clearly confess what the Bible is.
If only because our Lord presents us with many problems that
could come from an unclear confession of the Bible, in all three of our
Scripture readings today. In Jeremiah, we hear of prophets who ran and spoke,
though they were not sent or commanded to run or speak. Our problem lies in how
we are to know whom God sent? Even if its Jeremiah speaking, are we so certain
about his words?
We also hear about dreams and dreamers. Dreams can be very
powerful and very real to us. So it makes sense that when we encounter a
dreamer, we tend to side with him in awe of his “gift”. So mysterious! So
insightful! I wish I could dream dreams.
Then there is the problem of the Spirit in our Epistle
reading. Which spirit and Who’s is He? A matter of grave importance, once we
start talking about “death” and our bodies, don’t you think? Many false
religions have taken this quite literally and have committed mass suicides, in
the name of their “holy writings”.
And finally, the false prophets, good and bad trees, and the
“many mighty works” that do not get us into heaven, from the Gospel. What are
those actually like and who’s to say which gain us recognition in front of God
or not?
Repent! We don’t really work too hard in the “getting things
from God right” department and usually we don’t care, in our sin. We side with
the world when it comes to where our stance is on the Bible. Why? Because, they
say, its divisive, its intolerant, and its ancient.
And we don’t want to offend anyone by talking about politics
or religion, so the Bible just becomes a bed-side book. A book we read in our
closets or when there is nothing better to do, if we read it at all.
So what is to resolve this for us? Do not be ashamed just
because you have been told that the Bible is a book written by men. Everyone
has a “book” in their lives that is holy to them and dictates their beliefs and
values. Your decision to trust the Bible is no different than theirs, at least in
that respect.
However, Jesus’s book is different from all others. Then the
question comes down to, why the Bible. These are all questions that the Bible
resolves for us, if we believe what God wants us to believe about His book, or
we should say books, 66 of them, because people also try to discredit it by
saying one book can’t say its true and we believe it.
But there are 66 books that have been inspired by God and
they all have 7 attributes that we believe in.
Our first trustworthy attribute of the Bible is Inspired,
that the Holy Spirit has given the thoughts and the words expressed by the chosen
men who wrote our Scriptures. They are God-breathed, says 2 Timothy (3:16) and
they are God-taught (1 Thess 4:9). They are no mere books of men.
Second, the words spoken and recorded in Jesus’s Book are
Inerrant, meaning they do not wander from the Truth, Who is Jesus Christ. St.
John 17:17 says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth”. On
top of that, thirdly, our Scriptures are Infallible, that since it is God
speaking, He does not lie. He is the Person Who speaks the Inerrant Words and
so, from St. John 10, “Scripture cannot be broken” (v.35).
These first three terms combined, then, give us the
Sufficiency of Scripture, in the fourth place. That in them we have everything
we need for life and godliness. It is not a textbook for every single topic we
can dream up of studying, but it is the textbook on Salvation. “even if we
or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we
preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8), therefore there is one
Lord, one Faith, one Gospel.
Clarity, is fifth. The Lord is clear on this, in His
revealed Word. There are no secret puzzles to unravel in order to achieve what
the Lord has given us to achieve and what He wants to achieve as well. “Thy
Word is a Lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path” (Ps 119:105). It does
not conceal, but gives light. It is clear on the Way of Salvation.
Sixth, Scriptures are Efficacious, they do what they say.
Man’s words can only describe reality, Jesus’s Words create reality. If He says
you are free from guilt and shame, then you are free. “it is the power of
God for salvation to everyone who believes…For in it the righteousness of God
is revealed from faith for faith” (Rom 1:16-17).
It is what blesses us and what works in the world for us. “Blessed
is the man who’s…delight is in the law of the Lord” (Psalm 1:1-2). For lack
of a better word, Seventh, the Scriptures are Awesome. Not awesome in a
cowabunga way, but in the fullest and proper sense of the word: it inspires
authentic awe in all who hear it. We don’t just want to read it, but we want to
meditate on it and delight in it.
Again, we are not treasuring this Book to be Worshipped. We
will not be setting the Bible up on the Altar, instead of Jesus. That is not
the purpose of the Jesus Book. The Purpose of the Jesus Book is to hand over
Jesus to us. Plain and simple. Every verse. Every chapter. Every iota.
In fact, I tell my catechism students to write in their
Bibles, at the top of the beginning of every book, Jesus's words from John
5:39, “these speak of me”. So, we learn these seven truths about God’s
Word, not so that we can be right, but so that we can believe them and live in
them. It’s one thing to speak rightly about the Scriptures, but another thing
to rejoice in the great truths of them.
And our rejoicing stems from and centers on the God-man Who
gave us His Word in the first place. And He has 7 purposes for His Book to
fulfill:
That He "(1) convey to the understanding of men the
truths and precepts of holy Writ, (2) convert the unregenerate, 3) preserve and
strengthen the faith of the regenerate, (4) rear them in holiness of life, (5)
give them consolation in their afflictions, (6) furnish weapons of offense and
defense, to combat error and falsehood conflicting with God's Truth, and (7)
all this for the glory of God and man's eternal salvation."
The Jesus Book, our Jesus Book, is now a dogma of Faith,
that is you cannot be a Christian and not cling to, delight in, and meditate on
it. If only because the words of that Book have broken through into the flesh.
The Word made Flesh is Jesus, both God and man, leaping out of the text and
accomplishing exactly what He said.
All of what we have mentioned today works us to that point:
to confess that Jesus came in the flesh for us poor miserable sinners. That He
came to give us new things to live for, such as His Life and His Truth. For the
world has battled, since time began, to replace the Word. But the world will
pass away. The Word of the Lord endures forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment