The God Who Speaks (2018) | Full Movie | Alistair Begg | Darrell Bock | D.A. Carson

if god could speak what would he say what would he tell us about the world what would he tell us about himself if god could speak how would he speak would he tell us everything at once would he have an angel bring heavenly books to earth if god could speak would we understand would his language be so far beyond us would his intention be impossible to see when god speaks what does he say [Music] the bible's the revelation of the character and the will of god it tells us who he is and how we can live in a relationship with him that's the primary thrust i think of the bible it's interesting the bible starts in eden and it ends in eden so it's all about living a relationship with him and what that looks like when we ask the question what the bible is the best way to say it is the bible is god's written revelation to his people now god reveals himself in all kinds of ways and he actually speaks in ways outside the bible and days of old to prophets and to the people of god and so you would hear the voice of the lord and call it the word of the lord but over time that became inscriptionated became written down into his word and over time we've collected the books that contain those words into 66 smaller books that collectively we call the bible the bible is a collection of divinely inspired texts that document not only what god has done throughout history but also what that means so it interprets what those events mean you have a book written by 40 some authors or over 1500 plus years on dozens of different topics that have absolute unity most of the people didn't know each other who wrote it so it has amazing unity within great diversity which is best accounted for by deity but here we have this grant's narrative that is meant to bring us back into fellowship with him to bring us into a harmonious fellowship with one another where we live together in reflecting his character and ultimately a redeemed humanity in a new heaven and a new earth here is the one who made us addressing us about how life should be lived and how we should approach life it's full of wisdom it's full of discernment it's full of direction and guidance in some cases correction and so i think to get a good look at who we really are as people the image and metaphor that's used about the bible is a good mirror it helps us to see things as they really are i often tell people that one of the ways that i know that the bible is true is the way that it diagnoses my sin i'm i'm often reading through a passage and i'm thinking this was written 3000 years ago and yet it perfectly diagnoses the state of the sin of my heart how could human beings have been able to do that and the only way that can happen is if my creator is actually the author of the book we read books so that we might understand them but when we read the bible we realize that it is describing who we are and what we are it's also unique in that it provides the only satisfying answer to the question of our human existence it tells us why we're here and where we're going and why it matters you need god specifically in propositional language telling us certain facts about reality including himself uh you can get some of those facts from nature but you can't get all of them you can't get that god is triune you can't get the plan of salvation from the stars you can only get it from special revelation so if we're going to be saved and sanctified we need the scriptures the study of the word of god at any level is the study of god himself there's some kind of identity between god and his word and yet to say that the study of the word as words and propositions on a page um is not an end in itself because it's to drive us to christ to god himself in the upper room in the great intercessory prayer jesus prayed for the sanctification of his disciples and he said sanctify them by thy word that's the means by which we are sanctified then he went on to say thy word is truth so the scriptures should dominate everything that the church does it shouldn't be an aside to what the church does the foundation of what the church should do should be about advancing the message of scripture where you find a healthy biblical church by definition you're going to find a church happily faithfully living under the authority of that word understanding that the most historic formula for the christian church has been this when the scripture speaks god speaks and if you understand that rightly then everything else simply falls into place language is an incredible mystery really what is it that makes human beings able to communicate in word personally i think that is the image of god in us because god speaks right at the beginning of the bible god spoke the world into existence you know you think about words and whether or not they're important and we realize we can't even have a conversation without words what's really interesting is that we can't even think to ourselves uh without words we can't explain ourselves to ourselves without words now that's either an accident of evolutionary biology and development uh or it is evidence of the fact that god made us in his image and so here the bible tells us that that we are god's creatures made in his image and what distinguishes us from other creatures at least in part the use of words and because he's making himself accessible through speaking to us and through the display of his character in what he's made he's made himself accessible that means that truth also is accessible now that includes ordinary truths like two plus two is equal to four but it also includes the truths about who god is that he's everlasting that he's all-powerful that he's supremely good so for god to speak is for god to engage in self-revelation we only know god because god has condescended to speak to us so one of the first things we say about god is that he is a speaking god we would not know him except that he speaks to us and the beautiful thing really what makes life worth living and gives us the ability to with hope with joy with tenacity make it through the valleys of life is the fact that the eternal god who created us can be personally known he's with us and according to one passage of scripture in hebrews chapter 13 if we will commit our lives to him he will never never leave us or forsake us the bible is essentially god's self-revelation and god doesn't just reveal himself in terms of what you must do that is the consequence of who he is and the way in which he wants us to understand his world if god created us then he sets the terms of his revelation what we know when we know it how it is revealed it's all dependent on him but it seems so strange an eternal god tying himself to human history illustrating his character in law prophecy and wisdom what happens when he appears when he steps down into history and speaks you know the question that always exists in people's mind is simply this what is god like and are there many gods or is there one god of course left on our own all of these are mysteries what you have at sinai is very remarkable you find for example that the people were to stand back god said stand back no animal was even to touch the mountain if an animal touched the mountain it was to be put to death but not directly with the human hand it was to be shot with an arrow because god says i'm coming stand back get out of the way what god was revealing there was his holiness so when we think of the ten commandments they were not simply given for a certain point in time they really are let me use the word amna temporal by that i mean they exist as the basic law of god throughout all eras and god is really saying in the ten commandments this is what i'm like and so there's no other words like him in all of scripture jesus speaks in the new testament god but nowhere else does god thunder words to the entire congregation of the people of god these obviously are of fundamental importance to god's covenant with these people god speaks in an audible voice to the people but then he writes it down in the ten commandments in written form it was written the first time by the very finger of god god himself did the writing that's hammering home the fact that this original writing was the very word of god and had the authority of the same god who spoke in thunder and fire in mount sinai but that written form of the ten commandments was the first piece of what we call canon that is it's the body of things that god set aside of his own word for in permanent form there are some things that god said that he said to particular people and they weren't recorded in written form for posterity that's okay there are many things for instance in jesus earthly life that he taught not all of those have been written down it would be overwhelming if we had all of those but god purposed that there would be a selection of those things that would be there in permanent form if god wrote a book would it be a history book the transcendent being interacting with creatures who are separated by sin distanced by unbelief what would he write about these people would he paint grand pictures would he hide the embarrassing details this human experience beyond him it's been said that the bible is not a book that man would write if he could write or could write if he would write every now and then i'll be in a debate at a university and someone will say well the old testament is merely pro-israeli zionistic propaganda it's just the jewish people were trying to feel good about who they were but that claim falls apart upon closer look at the the content because look you've got one of the greatest kings of israel david was an adulterer abraham twice lied about the identity of his wife so one of the things that bears the ring of truth is the thing that we probably would have excluded had the bible been a merely human invention the the sin the foibles the the failures of many of the bible's great figures we probably would have left out the bible's appeal to prophecy and fulfillment before and after all of that depends on historical progress on continuity on on sequence of time so god himself doubtless inhabits eternity and it is in some sense above space and time in that sense he's transcendent that's what we mean by transcendent not limited by space and time yet at the same time he discloses himself to us in space and time that is to say in history now one of the things to understand about the bible is that it talks about god's plan through the ages and call it redemptive history and the bible is intrinsically connected to that in two ways one is that it gives a lot of intention to explaining how god was dealing with the human race from creation onwards the fall into sin and then various periods of redemption so it talks about redemptive history but the second way is that it's given progressively in history god didn't have it just dropped from heaven at one point in times there's some people who practically treat it as if it was that way it is a book from god but it's a book where he addresses people where they are in history and he doesn't reveal everything all at once his plan of redemption keeps pace with his speaking about redemption redemptive history moves forward through prophets priests and kings to an ultimate prophet priest and king but people need proof how can we be confident that jesus is the fulfillment how do we see it the way his earliest followers would see it when jesus came and the disciples preached there wasn't a new testament to appeal to they were dealing with promises that were coming out of the old testament tied to the great covenants the covenant of abraham that god was going to bless the world through abraham's family the covenant to david that there would be a king and a line of kings that would represent the way of god and then finally the new covenant the idea that god was going to write his law on our hearts put his spirit within us and that we were going to do that in the context of having our sins forgiven and the story of jesus steps into those promises made centuries before uh and addresses really the reconnecting of god to us you know in what had been a broken relationship you know the the very first book of the new testament matthew opens with the genealogy of jesus and the purpose of that genealogy is to affirm that jesus is the fulfillment of the whole old testament story it's crafted very we could go into detail but there's another time very carefully crafted to show that he fulfills the whole history of israel the whole story of the old testament as we look through the new testament and he he fulfills everything in the old testament he is the revelation of god that fulfills god's revelation in moses and brings it to its completion he is the the lamb slain from the foundation of the world the lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world that fulfills all the old sacrificial system in the old testament i would imagine that jesus probably knew the whole old testament off by heart so that when he then in the synagogue in nazareth says you know this is about me uh he's able to say this is about me because he knows what this is about and that the prophecy of isaiah was revealing who and what the messiah truly is i would talk about these prophecies they a professor would say well i don't believe this ever happened i don't think these prophecies in the old testament were written down to jesus was born and then they were written out so they would coincide with his life i said wow that's amazing that sounds pretty good unless you want to think i would say look if you say there's not a 500-year gap minimum from the completion of the old testament the time of christ i said you got a problem with a septuagint the greek translation of the hebrew old testament documented history was initiated right around 250 years before christ well first of all the septuagint is the ancient translation of the hebrew scriptures into greek it was probably the first translation made of the hebrew scriptures it was begun in the 3rd century before christ with the pentateuch being translated probably in alexandria egypt tradition has it that there were about 70 translators so it was the bible of greek speaking judaism before christ came and because greek was the lingua franca of the mediterranean world when the apostles go out to preach the gospel they naturally preach in greek because their language aramaic probably wasn't widely used outside of first century palestine if the old testament is composed of 39 books written across hundreds of years from a diversity of authors how do we know that these are the books that god intended would jesus even recognize the old testament we hold in our hands the books that were being discussed is possibly a part of the old testament canon by the time we get to the first century are books like lamentations song of songs ecclesiastes works like that and maybe a few other works that end up showing up in what we call the apocrypha wisdom sirac those kinds of works but the works that everyone recognizes were seen as inspired and a part of the jewish scripture at the time include the torah of the first five books proverbs psalms your major prophets most of your minor prophets and so if we don't know the exact limits of the old testament canon in the first century which is possible it may be that it was already decided by then that's also conceivable that which is being excluded doesn't really represent any significant portion of the text that the new testament's interacting with we all know now that if we have catholic friends their bibles will generally be a bit bigger than ours because they contain a number of books in the old testament a book of maccabees for example that protestant books exclude and they're excluded by and large on the grounds that they we don't find them in the hebrew they don't seem to to have the kind of long-standing universal acceptance within the church prior to say the council of trent that one expects from canonical books one of the primary reasons we don't use those books or don't view those script books of scripture is because jesus and the apostles did not use those books or view those books of scripture it's a very basic way of putting it if those books indeed was viewed as scripture and that people were using them widely as scripture and they were they were considered part of the old testament canon we would have expected jesus and the apostles somewhere sometime at least once using one of those books as scripture and the fact is we don't see that even a single time they were respected and utilized because they were regarded as helpful jewish sources of material and information particularly about what was called the maccabean war in the case of the historical apocryphal books which is a very traumatic period in israel's history when she was almost wiped out by antiochus epiphanes and had the jews not won the maccabean war we may not have judaism today it might have been extinguished from the earth it's true that some of the apocryphal books are found bound within some of the biblical manuscripts but not all of them and not in every codex and i don't think that that necessarily entails that they must be canonical if you look at our bibles today uh we've got between the covers called the holy bible we've got essays we've got maps we've got indices we've got reader resources we've got study notes on the bottom of the page there's lots of material in our modern bibles that none of us would consider canonical or inspired uh it's noteworthy for example that jesus disagrees with the pharisees and sadducees over a number of different issues theologically and doctrinally they debate all kinds of things all throughout the pages of the gospels but one of the things that's noteworthy is that they never debate about which books belong on the canon and which books do not belong in the canon jesus refers to the scripture and the pharisees seem to understand what books he's talking about jesus refers to the old testament writings sadducees seem to be fairly content that we all agree on which books are in and which books are out there's no uh oddity of them saying well you're quoting from a book that's not in the canon and jesus never says that to a pharisee or sadducee and there seems to be every good reason to think that that issue was relatively settled in the time of jesus you know of course one of the most favorite verses in all the bible is john 1 1 where it says in the beginning was the word the greek word is logos we could say in the beginning was logic and why is that word used and applied to jesus as john later says in verse 14 the word became flesh first of all because the word had a great meaning in those days and there's some debate as to whether or not it's based on the greek or other meanings but here's the idea jesus is the logic and the intelligibility of god the word signifies god's self-disclosure the word is god's self-revelation it's how god makes himself known so it's profound and immensely significant and actually quite logical that christ would be called the word made flesh because now visibly before our eyes we have the revelation of god himself as much as i love the book of hebrews if i were marooned on a desert island and could only have one biblical book it would be one of the gospels because it's there we meet jesus it's there that the narrative the story the account of the actual incarnation of the son of god takes place so he sent his son as the god man just as much man as he'd never been god and just as much god as if he'd never been man so that we could see and hear in a way that we could comprehend the truth of god's very uh heart and mind in order that you might know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins i say to you get up and walk he does something that you can see and links it to something you can't see you can't see forgiveness of sins you can see someone being healed and if that guy gets up and walks his walk talks and it says the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins and then the context for that remark is but no one can forgive sins but god and words are cheap i mean they i can utter it and you know then you're left with the choice of whether to believe it or not but if i can show it if i can compellingly demonstrate that what i'm claiming might have you know some avenue to the truth and be reflective of what's going on that's a more powerful way to do it so the bible calls the miracles that jesus does things like signs or powers those are the words that are used to describe the miracles and the miracles are really what i call power points they're audio visuals to a truth about who jesus is that shows his power and authority [Music] i love the beginning of the gospel of mark where jesus stands forward and he says the time is fulfilled the kingdom of god is at hand repent and believe the good news because there had been 400 years essentially of silence in the inter-testamental period john the baptist had stepped forward and he was pointing the way and it was all pregnant for the appearing of this one and the very fact that mark begins by jesus reaching into the old in order to put himself in the present is so wonderfully helpful for him to unroll the isaiah's scroll and explain today this is fulfilled in your hearing speaks of a sense of his own messianic identity and mission but also suggests that he had studied the scriptures someone had taught them to him and he saw fit to announce his own mission and ministry with a reference to the bible if anyone could have just announced it's me you don't need to read that dusty book anymore that old scroll it would have been jesus but he never did that because he understood that his ministry was an extension and a fulfilling but never an abolishing or an eradicating i remember when i was in bible college i said to myself i can believe in the new testament but it's hard for me to believe in the old testament and then i realized something i can't believe less than jesus believed and he had absolute confidence in the old testament there's no debate about what his view of scripture was he says you know his word is true thy word is truth he said that not one jot or tittle will pass away to all this for he got john tittle inspiration as what he taught he never set scripture aside what he did was to make very clear that he perfectly fulfilled scripture and of course he went beyond even the old testament law in the sermon on the mount saying you've heard it said and he never reverses it he never minimizes it instead he goes even beyond it you've heard it said you shall not commit adultery i will tell you that if you've lusted in your heart you have already committed adultery our popular evangelical understanding of jesus and the pharisees is this we think that jesus big message to the pharisees is oh come on guys don't be so nitpicky you will never once find jesus in the gospels saying to the pharisees you care too much about the law invariably jesus will say you have added to the law and thus contradicted it or he'll say you guys make a whole lot about the law but you don't really follow it over and over watch him make that move those are what he says and what is that flowing out of a rock solid commitment to the sole final authority and sufficiency of the word of god what does jesus want to see the word of god as the sole final authority for faith and practice in the life of believers and he's saying pharisees for all the bells and whistles that you attach to your teaching on the law you undermine it so every evidence is that that jesus knew our old testament the books that we have that he affirmed them as holy scripture along with the other other jewish people of his day and that from beginning to end he interpreted and understood his own life in that way he is the messiah he is the fulfillment of the history of god's people in the old testament so yes jesus jesus very much affirmed the authority of the old testament so if you deny it you have to disagree with jesus [Music] the new testament needed to be written because the old testament hadn't completed the story that the timeline and the arc of god's redemptive purposes reached a point where everybody if you like was standing on their tiptoes to see how the thing would finish and so in the way that uh the writer to the hebrew says that god you know has spoken in the past in various ways and by different prophets and so on it anticipates the fact that that that story will then come to completion and it's the new testament that does that for us in the old testament jesus is uh anticipated and in the gospels jesus is revealed in the acts he's preached in the epistles he's explained so in other words everything is just pointing forward to that great fulfillment which comes in jesus you have to understand the early jews were not looking for a crucified messiah they did not expect a crucified messiah even isaiah 53 the great old testament text that's thought to refer to this right early jesus didn't interpret that as a crucified messiah for one thing my servant israel was assumed to be the nation of israel suffering for the sins of the world not a particular individual so on the one hand they had to explain this to the world on the other hand they had to explain this to themselves because they were not expecting this was this was an unexpected outcome and let's be clear if crucifixion was the end of jesus story there is really no good historical explanation for why we have the gospels or the rest of the new testament at all there had to be a reversal of that final judgment when you think about where the new testament came from it came out of judaism why would these jewish believers who thought they were god's chosen people why would they invent a resurrected jesus what motivation would they have for that why would they invent this it makes no sense at all i mean if one of them said hey we're going to start a new religion and one of the others said we are yeah well what's it going to get us well first of all we're going to get kicked out of the synagogue and then we're going to get beaten tortured and killed you think the other guy's going to go hey great idea sign me up no he's not going to say that right there's no motivation for jews to invent a resurrected jesus in fact let me put it this way because i hear some people out there thinking that the new testament writers invented the resurrection no the new testament writers did not invent or create the resurrection the resurrection created the new testament writers there would be no new testament unless there was a resurrection the resurrection is god's amen to christ's atoning work it is the signal evidence that what jesus has accomplished has been if you like ratified by the father that that what god the father if you like has planned that god the son has procured and the resurrection is the signal to the entire world that the mission upon which jesus has embarked has actually been accomplished so we're not just talking about a reversal of death we're talking about a whole new kind of life that he gets by means of resurrection and that's what the earliest writers about jesus were trying to make clear is this is not just a kindness or a mercy of god on jesus no this is a vindication of who he was and of his claims and uh you need to pay attention now the first corinthians 15 i mean that is a a text that has a robust resurrection theology where paul says on multiple occasions that jesus died and was raised according to the scriptures according to the scriptures according to the scriptures and he he suggests that there was a real physical bodily resurrection of jesus christ from the dead and without that there is no christian faith in my view it is theological insanity and an exegetical suicide to argue that there is no real resurrection of jesus from the dead is something spiritual jesus lives in the heart of his people that belief does not save anybody [Music] if jesus's bible only consisted of the old testament why do we need the new when was the story written down why was the story written down at all how do sinful people write the undefiled words of transcendence if memories fade people exaggerate and events get misinterpreted if the new testament is true how could we know there's a difference between what happened two days ago which was just a benign event and what we call psychologically an impact event an impact event is something that impacts you so dramatically you'll never forget what happened like for example where were you when the second plane hit the tower right right now as we record this that was 15 years ago but i can remember what happened exactly i remember who i was talking to and what i was saying and what he was saying to me and the question is do you think a resurrection would have been an impact event do you think if jesus really rose from the dead that would have had an impact on the people that saw him after he had resurrected yeah they would have remembered that till their grave so i don't have any doubt that even if the eyewitnesses wrote it down 20 years later or 30 years later it doesn't matter they remembered it the reason to not just rely on oral tradition and to actually write down a gospel like the earliest gospel probably the gospel of mark the reason to do that is because you're losing the living voice you're losing the eyewitnesses so there is this huge impetus in the second half of the first century a.d to produce documents that would allow us to not lose the memory of what jesus was like what he did what he said and what his earliest followers were like as well that's really the impetus behind the writing in the new testament and when they got busy with it they got busy with it between about 49 and about 100 all 27 documents of the new testament seemed to have been written [Music] when we think in terms of authorship of the bible we have essentially a dual authorship so it's true to say that paul wrote romans is equally true to say that god wrote romans and the great wonder of it is that without any violation of paul's personality or his intellect god through the instrumentation of the holy spirit both provided paul and enabled paul to write as he wrote and that would be true for all the bible authors when david writes psalm 23 it's not as if he came in after a hard day's work and was about to fall asleep when a voice spoke to him out of the gloom and said not yet david pick up your stylist i've got some dictation for you and then god said um the lord the lord is my is my shepherd shepherd i shall lack nothing i shall act there's no way in god's green earth psalm 23 was was written that way and it was spoken out of the fullness of david's experience both as a believer and as a shepherd and he thought about these things turn them over in his mind and he picked up his stylus and he wrote nevertheless scripture insists that god so worked through such forms of inspiration that the result was nonetheless the word of god i think on the other end of that spectrum perhaps we also can't get too loose between the text of scripture and the meaning of scripture that those words really are there for a reason and they're not dictated but that doesn't mean that we can just kind of loosely paraphrase or understand the text that we do have to respect what the biblical authors actually wrote of course the christian claim from the start is that this is a supernatural event we don't believe that that it just happened to work out that human beings wrote down perfect words or that they just tried a lot and eventually got it right or something like this you know we believe that god superintended the whole process by his holy spirit and and this is why a common complaint by by uh non-christians and by critics of christianity often misses the point the people would say well you can't believe the bible is the word of god because it was written by men but of course that presumes the non-christian view of the way it happened that's not the christian claim the christian claim is it wasn't just that it was written by man our claim that it was written by men who were carried along by the holy spirit and it's that second step that's so key behind your doctrine of scripture is a doctrine of god and behind the the product of scripture is the activity of god the the scripture is the product of god the holy spirit which is why god the holy spirit uses it in conversion and in sanctification so what we believe about the bible is based on what we believe about its source and because we believe god to be the author of the bible we talk about the quality of the bible as inspired or god breathed paul's letters were written somewhere between about 49 and maybe 63 or 64 a.d not a big timeline but that's almost half the new testament 13 of the documents of the new testament are attributed to paul and they are by consensus the earliest new testament documents so we don't have any documents that are today part of the new testament from before about 49. even the atheists admit that that paul is writing first corinthians in about 55 a.d and we can date that from an archaeological discovery in in this in delphi in greece and we can date all of paul's missionary journeys from that archaeological inscription and we're almost certain that paul is writing first corinthians in either 55 or 56 a.d i think colin hemmer's work who is a roman historian i don't even think he was a christian he wrote a book called back in the late 80s called acts in the setting of hellenistic history in which he makes in my view a very persuasive case that acts the book of acts had to be written by 62 a.d in fact he gives number a number of reasons in the book if ax is 62 a.d that means luke has to be prior to acts because acts is luke's second work and then if luke is written say sometime in the 50s it appears that luke maybe maybe one of his sources is mark which means mark is prior to luke so you're very early now you're in the early 50s maybe 40s so the bulk of the new testament is said to be written from the end of the 40s 49 thereabouts all the way up to the last decade of the first century and you're dealing with a period of about 50 years from start to finish i would say that mark is our earliest gospel that yes matthew and luke used the vast majority of mark there's 95 of mark is in matthew's gospel but matthew was not just copying mark he added another 50 to his document from various other sources so he was using a variety of sources to produce this document and under the inspiration of god each one wanted to present a slightly different portrait of jesus it's not as if let's say matthew says that jesus is the king in the line of david he emphasizes that even in the beginning of his gospel is that incompatible with john who emphasizes that jesus is the revelation of god the father well no they're both true right but they're complementary what's hard for people to remember is is that when you wrote a gospel and you did it on a on a on a running scroll of papyrus if you want to think of it that way there's a certain length that oftentimes is a maximum that you can deal with and particularly when we get into matthew luke and john our longer gospels they're running up into those limits and so that impacts how much detail they communicate about the stories that they present still another issue is in recorded speech because some people expect that a recorded speech will be verbatim accurate it will be like the court stenographer who just takes down every word exactly if we did most preaching classes and used the sermon on the mount as an example most of our church services would be very short because you can read through the sermon on the mount in five to seven minutes what we know is that jesus spoke to people all day and you know when you bring a crowd out from the city to come sit in the fields and listen to a teacher he isn't speaking for just five to seven minutes so there are cases where you may not be getting always the exact words of jesus you may be getting a summary of something that he actually spent much longer time talking about and you may be getting snippets of that or a summary of that that's boiled down into a you know into a packageable length given everything else that's going on in the gospel we need to stop thinking about the gospels as if they were like modern photographs they're not they're like portraits and portraits are inherently interpretive they're not just history they are interpreted history history from a particular theological and ethical angle and this is true of all four gospels not just true about john which is highly theological all four gospels provide us with a theological interpretation of the historical figure jesus and we may be thankful to have four of them that have differences of angles of incidents and yet recognizably it's the same person remember ancient biographies their issue was characterization who is this person as revealed by his words and deeds that's what they're trying to get at [Music] one of the big challenges in biblical studies today is the very subtle suggestion that well it's the theological teachings of the bible that are inspired and whether any of those historical narratives that the teachings come out of whether they ever happened or not it really doesn't matter i want to argue that's absolutely wrong it does matter the the the fundamental divide on the issue of inspiration is whether it is subjective or objective when i was a first-year phd student in edinburgh scotland the very first debate that i witnessed at the university of edinburgh was debate on the topic of the inspiration of the old testament and and a liberal old testament scholar and an evangelical were going to have a debate and the moderator's first question to both of them was how do you define inspiration and dr all said well i believe that the bible is inspired because it inspires me now that is a classic subjective definition of inspiration in other words whatever inspiration is doesn't reside in scripture itself it resides in its effect on or in me whereas the bible claims an objective inspiration listen again to paul's words all scripture is god breathe it's not something that has put been put into scripture it's not something that scripture does to me it is something that is inherent in scripture because of where it comes from peter in particular draws this contrast between myths just stories fables legends versus eyewitness accounts he says we saw this we didn't make up a story to make you feel better we're not just giving you uh you know the spirit of christmas or the inspiration of easter i was on the mountain i saw jesus christ transfigured in glory these are things we saw with our eyes we heard with our ears they happened you can count on them and that sets the bible apart from almost everything else in the ancient world and its religious pantheon of gods and goddesses because this good news is rooted in history something that happened and based on a future that we know then will happen one of the remarkable things about the gospels that we have in our new testament as well as the whole bible is that the bible subjects itself to historical verification it puts itself at risk of inquiry unlike the gospel of thomas unlike the quran unlike the bhagavad-gita or the teachings of the compassionate buddha that are talking head theology the bible says jesus did this at a certain place here's the guy's name whom he healed or here's the house where he did that like in mark 2 when you had these four men who lift parts of the thatched roof at peter's house and they dropped this paralyzed man right in front of jesus and he heals the man and he walks out i've been to peter's house it's it's in capernaum on the shore of the sea of galilee you can see the very place where jesus stood when he was lecturing to this crowd that was packed and the actual door that this man walked out of that's historically verifiable stuff you don't have that in these other documents a faith rooted in history a revelation coming through human instruments a religion spreading through the entire region and beyond but we wonder who wrote these books how did they spread can we be confident they are the actual words that god meant for us to have the question of authorship is a common one if we're going to rely on these books we want to know who wrote them we want to know when they were written and whether we should listen to the person whose names are attached to them many people doubt whether we can know those things i i don't think those things are out of the range of knowing in fact uh we have a tremendously uh good amount of evidence about the authors of these books and there's all kinds of ways we know who wrote these books certainly the titles attached to these books are a key part of that evidence they go back very very early when we look at the gospels themselves for for example we know those titles were attached probably by the end of the first century if not the early second century there's an uh second century impulse that begins that says add the name of apostle to a book to make sure that we know that it really is by that person those kinds of things we see in these apocryphal books the gospel of thomas the gospel philip of mary of judas all these works ascribe authorship in the text not as a title above it but actually in the text the new testament gospels don't do that they were originally anonymous i believe the ancient church fathers were unanimous that mark got his gospel from the apostle peter now mark was a follower of paul an associate of paul's to start with but he got his gospel from peter if you have this apostolic authorship impulse why isn't the gospel of mark ever ever called the gospel of peter it isn't so that apostolic authorship impulse is not something that's intrinsic to the new testament it's intrinsic to pseudepigrapha apocryphal books books that came later and guys like bart ehrman who wrote this book forged about the books that were not really written by the people that we think they were he tries to argue for this apostolic authorship impulse in the first century if that's the case why don't we have it for the gospel of mark did jesus change over the first 300 years of the church uh the depiction of jesus and when you look at people who followed the apostles clement papias irenaeus these types of individuals uh justin martyr these folks when you look at their writings you see they're given the same basic data that the new testament writers gave so you have this chain of custody going through the first three centuries of the church before we we have say the first full copy of say the new testament or the old testament [Music] early christianity was basically an evangelistic movement which is distinctive in early judaism the other early jewish movements like the qumran community or john the baptizer they were not evangelistic in the sense that they were going out and getting recruits that were non-jews this is something pretty distinctive about early christianity is a was a missionary movement and b it went after gentiles deliberately by intention so in that kind of environment they needed some tools to do a better job of evangelizing and teaching in those kind of environments and so the the impetus to generate sources of important material to convince both jews and gentiles about jesus was paramount when it comes to the new testament writings authors not only had to write a book and then people read that book but eventually that book had to be copied and then transmitted over time obviously this was before the printing press this is before you go down to your copy machine and run off a few copies and so if people wanted their book to be spread far and wide if people wanted their book to be published so to speak that book had to be copied i would reckon it would take somebody oh a good three or four hours to just take dictation for a document like romans and then on top of that you'd have to produce a fair hand copy that's the one that would be given so from the start there would be two copies the one that the describe and the author retained and the one that was sent to whoever the recipients of the document are it is a laborious process you know if it would me my hand would have fallen off about halfway through the job at best um they and they had to be clear because without punctuation and division of words the the capital letters had to be absolutely clear as to what they are and somebody knew where to divide the words right so it's an expensive process the longest usable scroll that was still wieldy of some sort would be no more than about 35 feet long and would take the average sized lettering what that means is it could only contain one gospel the gospel of luke the book of acts would be right around 28 feet long by those estimates you couldn't put luke and another gospel in there just just luke or just acts this is why luke himself wrote both of these books as separate volumes they almost surely were written at the same time but because of the material that was used namely papyrus scrolls they couldn't be bound together as a single book the number two manuscript authority in history is the iliad by homer more manuscripts are being discovered of homer than any other classical work and right now we have about a thousand see the moment i make this statement it's obsolete a thousand eight hundred and twenty some manuscripts of the iliad by homer but when it comes to this bible now and this is incredible it's hard to grasp i can now document 66 000 manuscripts and scrolls of the bible 66 000. manuscripts are divided between two different groups those that are written in the original language greek and those that are written in other languages or translations of the the greek into other languages and those are typically called versions the vast majority of these are not complete new testaments we only have about 60 that are complete new testament manuscripts but the vast majority of them also are very large the average greek new testament manuscript is more than 450 pages long so they're they're they're they're big texts and we have well over two million pages of greek manuscripts handwritten manuscripts from before the time of the printing press and they come pretty early on starting in the second century we have as many as a dozen manuscripts the earliest to date is still considered p-52 which is at manchester university in manchester england p-52 still stands today is one of our earliest new testament manuscripts maybe even still the earliest dated around 100 to 125 a.d uh and it's a little fragment of john 18. once that manuscript was discovered they realized that the dating of john had to be much earlier than even that manuscript which ended up putting the dating well into the first century so it's just a small fragment it's about the size of a credit card but it proves that the gospel of john existed before that time and for almost a hundred years up until then there was european scholarship that argued that the gospel of john could not have been written before 160 and should have been written at about 170 when this scrap of papyrus was discovered in 1934 at manchester university it sent two tons of german scholarship to the flames here was an ounce of evidence that proved a pound of presumption dead wrong and that's what christians have is we have lots and lots of ounces of evidence [Music] we have to recognize a problem the original autographs written by the apostles are gone lost to time what we have are the thousands of copies that survive but is that enough can we really rely on the bible if we don't even have the very first copies one of the most common questions i receive is what good is a belief in inerrancy if an errancy only applies the original autographs and we don't have the original autograph so how can we believe in inerrancy but i think that objection makes a fundamental mistake it assumes that when we talk about the original text thinks of it as only a physical object as if we have to have the actual autographs in order to have access to the original text and since those physical objects are lost therefore we don't have access to the original text but the text itself the words of god themselves aren't necessarily a physical object that you can put in a museum the words of god can be preserved in other ways beyond just the autographs and we think that's happened you see the more manuscripts or scrolls that you have the easier it is to reconstruct the original called the autographa autographa the autographer the original and check out any errors or discrepancies and you try through the bibliographical test to create what is called a pure text what percentage of the original text do you know for sure today what percentage is a pure text the problem is the way i like to describe it is is that we have 105 of the text we have the text as it was and then we have the variations that have been introduced to the text and text criticism is the job of trying to pair off that 105 percent down to the to what we originally had and the places where we're not sure are noted i tell people you actually have the opportunity to be a little bit of a textual critic because in some places in your bible in the margin though it will say or or some manuscripts say and that's telling you those places that are really the most discussed a lot of people out there talking about these things now give the impression that every word is questioned and that's just simply not true at any level it's not true 99 of the text is sure there are yes there are some places in the greek text where we scratch our heads and go i don't hm i'm not sure which one it is they're called c ratings uh in our bibles so things like spellings is it gadarenes or gergazines is it bethsaidia bessatha or bethesda is the form of the verb sd or s-tin is there an n sound on the end doesn't affect the meaning at all but you know we can't really tell a lot of that is that's what makes up that one percent 99 of the text were very comfortable with this is what was originally said and just as importantly that one percent that we're not sure doesn't bring any major creation doctrine into question there there is simply is no major and i don't even think any minor doctrine that's raised in the question i mean not many of us are going to go to heaven or hell based on whether scatterings or garrick's seeds of the hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we actually have the smallest group are those that are both meaningful and viable it's less than one-fifth of one percent of all textual variants and yet these are the ones that christians and non-christians always hear about the ones that skeptics talk about the ones that make the news because they're so interesting and they seem to destroy the christian faith or uphold the christian faith it's a very small fraction well you get textual variants of all kinds perhaps the two most discussed in relationship to the gospels is the pericope where the woman's caught in adultery in the middle of john john last part of seven and eight and then the ending to the gospel of mark the only thing that is different about that passage is that it is a longer one most sexual variants are a word or two whereas this is a whole unit in both of those cases i would argue pretty strongly that those units were not part of the original given by god um but if you think that they are nothing much depends on it if you think that they're not nothing much depends on it either the message of the bible is secure in any case when skeptics talk about how we can't get back to the original text because we don't have the original manuscripts they typically have never examined the texts of greco-roman literature if they're right that we can't get back to the new testament then we might as well kiss the ancient world goodbye and the middle ages would still be the dark ages we would never have the renaissance because we can't possibly tell what these ancients said if we're going to be skeptical about the new testament on average we should be a thousand times more skeptical about greco-roman writings the textual richness of what is found in the new testament and now in the old testament where the discovery of the dead sea scrolls is really very remarkable it's utterly unique from from documentation from the ancient world so god in his providence has been wonderful in providing so much we would be at fault if we criticized him for not providing infallible copies with new miracles every time somebody picked up a pen how did the church come to embrace these new testament books were they chosen out of a list did a council determine their worth as the church grows and the religion formalizes what is the god who gives authority to the bible a perception again out there in the in the world today whether in popular literature or on the internet that there were votes that took place in councils and that people picked these books and that there was some shady deal going on in a smoke-filled room where one book barely got in by a vote and some books got out and i can tell you all that is is a misunderstanding of the way things happened in the early church the fact of the matter is when it comes to most of the books of the new testament again probably 22 23 out of the 27 there was never any real discussion about them there was never any real debate about them there was never any sense that you had to decide on which books these were these were the books that were simply handed down to the early church in fact that language handed down we see used numerous places throughout the second century where early church fathers refer to these books as the as the books that were passed down to them that were given to them by the apostles that were ones that the church had always known you have these documents produced in the first century a.d by the second century a.d we had a collection of the four canonical gospels and a collection of paul's letters this we know in the second century these were already considered sacred texts and you already have house churches where people are saying bishops are saying we're not going to read from any text from the lectern or at the meeting except our sacred text or the sacred text of the old testament there were criteria that the church used to recognize these and these criteria are essentially three apostolicity which means the book is either written by an apostle or an associative apostle that's the most important criterion secondly is orthonoxy does the book conform to what we know to be true from the other books that we know to be inspired the gospels were the very first ones almost surely to be accepted uh we don't have any any period when there was a time where there's any hint that they were not accepted and then the third criterion is catholicity it doesn't mean roman catholic it means accepted by the the majority of the churches now there's some that would be considered orthodox like the epistle of barnabas and that may be a first century document late first century document but the church recognized early on that the epistle of barnabas was not written by barnabas any time the church recognized that a book was not written by the name that it claims to be written by automatically it got rejected when it was discovered that some deacon had produced the letter to the laodiceans the bishop said not only are we not reading these in church we're defrocking you for producing false documents and the first person to name the books that make up our new testament was athanasius and he did it in 367 a.d in a letter on easter that was written in that year irenaeus writing long before athanasius talks about four gospels he talks about acts he talks about the pauline epistles he talks about first john and first peter that's the bulk of your new testament clearly being seen and utilized is inspired and valuable to the church at the end of the second century but what's interesting is if you go a little earlier if you go to the first part of the second century or the middle part of the second century and you read what's written there what you see are writers who may have one gospel access to one gospel or two they may have access to one two or three of the pauline epistles but they aren't they aren't thinking of the new testament the way we think about it because they only had exposure and access to some of the works they had the works hadn't circulated across the church yet when you look at the state of the canon in the early church there's two important facts to get right about it one is to recognize that very early there was a core collection of books that the church recognized almost out of the gate what that means is by the second century we've got 22 maybe 23 out of the 27 books already there that's one thing to recognize but there's a second thing to recognize and that is that there were some books that were disputed we have some books that you know we can call the books around the edges or the peripheral books the smaller books that there was some more controversy about and these would be books like second peter and james and jude and second and third john and there was some controversy about some of these books there was discussion about them the the kind of books that typically were disputed were little books and this is noteworthy small books for obvious reasons were were not as impactful in the literature of the day they weren't read as often they weren't as widely known they were cited less so that they weren't familiar across different geographical regions so it would take more time to recognize these books you can understand why they might be disputed more than others but here's what's interesting despite occasional challenges here and there once the church had reached a consensus on these 27 books that consensus has been wide and long-standing and i think that's an encouraging truth for us as christians we can look at the church through the ages with a great deal of unanimity around these books not not absolute anonymity where there's never an objection from any quarter but a predominant unity which i think is evidence of the spirit's work and the church to receive these 27 books in just these 27 books why don't we include some of these other books like the gospel of thomas or philip or mary or third corinthians or paul's letter to the laodiceans or the acts of paul or the revelation of john there's a second revelation of john besides the one that's in the new testament or the revelation of peter why don't we include these books in the new testament there's a fundamental reason why none of those are included and that is they are not first century documents so they could not have been written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle that right there excludes all of these documents what makes thomas such an interesting work we think it's a second century work of some kind is that it seems to have one element of sources feeding into it that do come from jesus and another set of materials that are that is coming from somewhere else what i call a hybrid gospel and that's why i didn't make it into the canon is because what is represented by the hybrid is not a representation of the kind of orthodox christianity the other gospels reflect most scholars think that the gospel of thomas while it contains some earlier material was not assembled until the second century a.d and the reason they assume that is because it seems to know all four canonical gospels well where could a person have been to have had access to all four canonical gospels together at one time that surely didn't happen before the second century a.d the gospel of thomas has in its last login or last saying something that scholars are embarrassed by those who want it to go into our new testament they're embarrassed or they really should be embarrassed by it peter starts out by saying let mary namely mary magdalene go out from us because women are not worthy of the life and the jesus responds he says look i'm going to change her into a male so she'll look like you guys so that she can make it into heaven so just like you guys because any woman who makes herself into a male is going to get saved that really is that how we should view this let me tell you how the canon the new testament was not produced it was not produced by the emperor constantine the supposed bad guy getting a bunch of people together and saying you need to get your act together tell me what are the sacred texts y'all decide right here at the council and i see it and we're done the da vinci code myth about how the new testament was created is just that it's a myth it's not historical fiction it's hysterical fiction one main misconception is that the council of nicea was where they chose the books of the new testament canon and in my field i hear that all the time that no one knew what books to read and finally with constantine's help we we got it figured out and i see it as patently false there's no evidence at all that the new testament canada was a topic of conversation i see and so there's no reason to think and i see it really has anything to do with what books we're reading now the council of nicaea was was about how to best articulate the divinity of jesus and the humanity of jesus so that when we did articulate it we we made sense and and got it right and reflected the truth reasons of scripture and didn't contradict ourselves when it comes to the question of the canon of the new testament or what books belong in the new testament there are two broad views within christendom one is that it's an authoritative list of books the other is that it's a list of authoritative books if it's an authoritative list of books then that means there is some authority over the new testament that it establishes what the new testament is that's the catholic view that's the greek orthodox view if it's a list of authoritative books then there is no authority over the new testament that establishes the new testament as our final authority instead it's the final authority you know i think the very first thing to recognize about the authority of scripture is that the word author is right there in the center of the word authority so the foundation for the authority of scripture can never be scripture and it can never be the church even as the believing community receiving scripture it goes back by the very word to the author the ultimate author of scripture being god himself the bible has authority in the sense that it is the word of god and therefore the authority is not so much in the black and white letters that we are seeing in that book but in the god who has communicated with us [Music] if you remember when jesus was being tempted by satan in the wilderness the in the very first temptation satan says look jesus i know you're hungry you've been out here fasting for 40 days and 40 nights and i know that you have the power to turn those stones into bread and to sate your hunger and jesus responds to satan by quoting moses from deuteronomy man shall not live by bread alone but by what every word that proceeds from the mouth of god and i think that when paul says all scripture god breathed just listen to that every word that comes from the mouth of god i think paul has jesus and moses in his mind when he says that so there you see moses view of biblical authority jesus view of biblical authority paul's view of biblical authority in three greek words if the bible is reliable the questions of the canon answered the means of inspiration understood how do we interpret it are there true interpretations or is there just a sea of opinions is the bible a book locked in mystery only open to the religious elite or can an ordinary person sit down and know what the living god has to say to them before the reformation came a church service would have been very pedantic it would have been ritualistic and unfortunately often not understood you must understand that in catholic theology the idea is that the ritual itself the mass itself has validity and therefore people don't even have to understand what is going on that's why the mass was done in latin it didn't matter if you understood it as long as you were there as long as you were participating as long as somehow you were spiritually connected you did not need to know what the words were that were being spoken the catholic church's attitude to the scriptures in the run-up to the 16th century and during the 16th century is quite intriguing certainly the intellectual hierarchy of the church regarded the scriptures as important one of the reasons they weren't keen on lay people reading the scriptures was they regarded them as important and had a concern that the scriptures would be abused if they fell into the hands of of lay people on the other hand however the the catholic church i think at a a demotic level at a grassroots level did not have a high view of the scriptures the scriptures did not feature highly in the piety of your typical parish priest didn't feature highly in the liturgical practices of the church there were of course very low literacy rates in europe at that time so no book functioned particularly significantly in the life of ordinary people one of the chief things the reformers wanted to recover about the bible was the sense of its clarity it's perspicuity there really wasn't a debate that the bible was authoritative everyone in christendom understood that it was inspired and and it was infallible or they would view some some term similar to that but it was often the clarity do we have to rely on priests on a magisterium on church tradition and we don't we don't throw out those things we don't come to the scripture by ourselves we we do want to stand on the shoulders of giants to understand it but of course god wouldn't be god and he wouldn't be good if he didn't communicate with us in a way that we could understand since language is his idea anyways and since he saw fit to communicate and make himself known in language he wants to be understood and the doctrine of the clarity of scripture asserts that if god wants to be understood he is able to be understood now there are areas of the bible that are harder for us to grapple with you know peter peter says the same of paul's writings he says you know some of the stuff that he writes is not just real obvious well that's very helpful to me i'm glad he felt that way we studied daniel recently and daniel you know the half of the second half of daniel it was a great encouragement to me to realize that daniel when he was on the receiving end of some of these revelations actually fell on the floor and then went to bed for two weeks because he was so overwhelmed by it and he couldn't really figure it all out now that would be alarming if we were dealing with main things and plain things but there are certain things that are even secrets to god as deuteronomy 29 29 tells us you know the things that have been revealed are there and with some work with some hard work with some dependence upon the spirit of god with some help from those who are brighter than ourselves we'll be able to get to this because the bible actually is clear oh there are many many wrong approaches to scripture many individual examples for example people sometimes cite philippians 4 i can do all things through christ who strengthens me which warrants them to do anything they really want to do or a pastor can use it um we would like you to teach such-and-such a sunday school class oh i can't do that oh you can't say can't you can do all things through christ who strengthens you and the fact is no you can't i can't sing and you know i just can't sing that's not a gift that god gave me and i can't say i mean a silly example but i can't do all things through christ strengthens me but the all things is pointing back to what paul just said and paul just said i am content in all circumstances good times and bad persecutions and and not in having money not having money i can do all these things is what it really says i can do all these things through christ strengthens me so paul's not just carte blanche saying christians can do anything they want but christians can learn to be content in all circumstances we can't make one part of scripture say something that contradicts the rest of scripture therefore if we are having difficulty with this section then perhaps we don't know the totality of scripture well enough to be able to place this properly and then to interpret it accurately we can say dogmatically god loves the world we we can say that without fear of being contradicted we may not know everything that we could know should know would like to know about the word god or even the word loves or even the word world but but nevertheless the proposition god loves the world is is a faithful interpretation of of john 3 and many other passages we have to make clear the difference between meaning and significance sometimes people have tried to point out well look you can you know hear 10 different sermons about jesus encounter with the woman at the well and one preacher will make the text about evangelism another one about apologetics another about confronting sin another about how to befriend strangers and someone will say look nobody can agree on the meaning well no the issue there is really significance that the text of scripture will never be fully exhausted and any good preacher is going to find ways to apply it in a number of different avenues but the meaning nevertheless is is fixed that the meaning of the text is what the author intended to communicate by that text which dealing with scripture uniquely means there is both the intention of the human author and sometimes even superseding that in ways they may not have fully understood is the intention of the divine author [Music] sis [Music] we work on the basis of evidence not on the basis of speculation or weird ideas or philosophy and whenever you argue with somebody who is not a believer they almost always bring in non-evidence well god would not have done this or this is really what i think happened and it's just on speculation let's look at what the evidence says our faith is rooted in history and uh and and consequently we need to use the evidence and never be afraid of it half the battle of dealing with the trustworthiness or reliable of the bible is to know what are the subjects of the bible and the subjects of the bible are really pretty simple history theology and ethics the three major subjects of the bible are history because we have a historical god who intervenes in human history it's about theology the character of god and the character of his people and it's about ethics how should we behave in response to all of that it's very sad in our culture that we've seen the body of christ called charged mandated to proclaim and even defend the faith but in many quarters the church has denied questioned the faith we're we're not to spin it nuance it change it undermine it we're called to proclaim it the church of jesus christ always faces a tremendous temptation and that is to deviate from the word of god and when we do that what happens first of all we may get wrong doctrine because we no longer see the clarity of the deity of jesus christ and the issues of salvation the other thing that's going to happen almost immediately is there is going to be a devaluation of moral teaching and pretty soon we begin to reason based on our own notions based on our own desires and the word of god is there but it is not believed it is not preached and it is not lived often a contemporary jeff drifting church is very comfortable what is preached may sound very orthodox but it doesn't challenge anybody it doesn't call them back to the gospel where they are drifting this saying is attributed to martin luther so many pungent sayings are i'm not sure if it comes from him or not but it's a true saying if you preach the gospel at every point except where the gospel is being challenged you're not preaching the gospel at all if you preach the gospel to a church at every point except the place where they need it or they place they need to be called back to obedience to god you're not preaching the gospel at all if you can get people to doubt the bible then you will get them sooner or later to deny but you have to doubt first before you're going to deny then as they deny then you're going to get them to disobey and that's worked so well since the garden of eden he hasn't had to change his tactics he still uses it god made us for himself he has made us for his own glory he communicates with us telling us how we ought to live through his word he has given us an entire library there to fit into quite a lot of the various ways in which we think and all that is authoritative so we don't go to the bible wanting to judge the scriptures we go to the bible with a sense of submission wanting to hear what the living god has to say to us and that's crucial i have a good friend who is famous for saying i love the word of god he loves and he does he truly loves the bible we were talking about it one day and i said i have a question for you you love the bible don't you you love the word of god don't you yes i do i said do you love its author and you know that there's a difference and he just went blank it had never occurred to him that there was something beyond bible study i've read from genesis to revelation in the bible and not once does anyone ever have an encounter with the true and living god and come away and say who's kind of boring and irrelevant he said people encounter god and die they encounter god and they are paralyzed with fear they encounter god and they're overwhelmed with joy they encounter god and they cry because all their hopes are realized but nobody ever encounters god and says that was boring and irrelevant well when people say that about the bible it just says to me they've not encountered the god of the bible if you think the bible is boring then either you don't realize what you need or you've never met the god that the bible talks about and and very frankly i do think there are a lot of people that are preachers by profession that have never met god or they'd never say his word is boring and irrelevant i love the way psalm 119 unfolds it's the longest chapter in the bible and it's all about the word and you see there what the word produces it produces delight it produces desire for god it produces obedience so sometimes it's helpful to look at a text like psalm 119 and say what does what does it look like and feel like what's the experience of the person of the heart of the soul that's been captivated by the word of god and you see there they're singing the word they're storing up the word they're treasuring god's word they have the greatest sense of delight in it they are pained when people don't follow it it's their greatest longing to obey it they see god's character and smile in it that that's what we want that's why having the right view of scripture matters because with without it we're going to come to not only wrong conclusions about god and the gospel in ourselves but we won't think rightly we won't feel rightly we won't be the sort of human beings that god made us to be if we don't take him at his word and understand all that he means for us to know about himself [Music] so [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Christian Movies

Views: 1,397,267

Rating: 4.8749809 out of 5

Keywords: Films, Movies, Entertainment, christian movies, christian films, faith based films, new religious movies, religious movies, Feature Films, The God Who Speaks movie, The God Who Speaks full movie, The God Who Speaks feature film, The God Who Speaks, documentary, Alistair Begg, Darrell Bock, D.A. Carson, M.D. Perkins, biblical authority, evidence, bible, archeology, theology

Id: MmJrRx663hg

Length: 91min 48sec (5508 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020