If you read your bulletin, you saw that Max was going to be out of town today and I was going to preach or teach this class in his place. It wouldn't be reasonable to try to continue in Galatians following Max. because that's his study and so what we're going to do today is to introduce, sort of, introduce a series of lessons that we plan to do sometime in the near future. I don't know, it may be as soon as Max finishes Galatians, I don't know, but we're going do a series of lessons on the Bible itself. In fact, Greg tells me that he plans, he's planning a conference on the Bible later in the, maybe next spring. I don't know when that is supposed to do. So we want to, what we want to do is to introduce, just introduce this series today. Let me tell you in advance, as I tell you every time it's my turn to teach, that my intention each time is dialogue. I taught school for nine years and it took me about five of those first five years to realize that I was putting people to sleep with my grand lectures. So we started a different method. And so we've used dialogue and interaction ever since. So don't be afraid to interrupt and don't be afraid to ask. And if I don't know the answer, Philip Perry is sitting back there and he'll answer all of your questions for you. So we'll get the questions answered. So understand that this is not necessarily a lecture. We want, and another objective we have in this lesson today is to demonstrate that God can be known without scripture. Have you ever thought about that? Paul tells us that in the first chapter of Romans. He said, the only reason you don't know God, if you say there's no God, the only reason you don't know is because you suppress the knowledge. It's there, you know there's God, whether you know the scripture or not. So, and we're gonna try to demonstrate that. And then we want to demonstrate too that scripture is essential to knowing God and to knowing the condition of man and to knowing salvation. That's, it's absolutely, essential for that. First let's talk a little bit, let's talk some about the Word itself. If you remember the prologue to the Gospel of John, I want to read that prologue, listen to it. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him were not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Let me say this unequivocally to start with. that prologue does is to declare the divinity of Jesus, period. That's what that's for. And if you go down on to the 14th verse, you can say, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And that word that he's talking about is Jesus himself, who is divine, and not created. And it's very important to get that out of the prologue. And so I don't want to miss that. That's not what we're talking about today. But I don't want you to think that we're, that this is about anything, about other things, or primarily about other things. What I do want to emphasize for the purpose of this, just this class today, is the fact that he was called the word. Now, why do you suppose he was called the word? in the beginning was the word. Where did that come from? And why? What does it mean? If you were to read Calvin's commentary, I happen to have two or three copies of Calvin's commentary on the Gospel of John, and Calvin says that that actually the term is mistranslated in most of the Bibles we have for reasons that he won't quite understand. But he said if you correctly translated the Greek word, the way it's translated everywhere else in the Bible, that that word would be speech. So that you could read that correctly by saying, in the beginning was speech. How about that? In the beginning was speech. Speech itself is eternal with God. Language itself is eternal with God. In fact, the very first sentence of the Bible, what does the first sentence of the Bible say? In the beginning, God said, and he spoke words. I don't know whether he spoke them out loud, and I don't know what language, I don't know how that worked, any of that. But I do know that in the beginning, God said, let there be light. Now, do we have any mechanical geniuses in here? There's a mechanical engineer. Can you tell us what light is? And it's fundamental to all matter, isn't it? It's fundamental to all matter, why it is. And do you understand, can you visualize the fact that God in his wisdom had to conceptualize in words how the universe was supposed to work? before anything ever existed. And if you're a mechanical guy, you know that you have to visualize how this thing is going to work before you can put it together. Is that right? Well, God had to visualize in words how the whole universe was going to work before a single thing ever existed. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, he saw everything all at once. That's right. Saw it all at once. Infinite wisdom. But the point I'm making is that, of course, that. It is infinite wisdom. But the fact is, God had to visualize all this. And we assume he had to visualize it in language, in words. because he says so. In the beginning was the word. Yes, sir. I didn't say life. I said light. Light. It's your hearing. No, I know all matter doesn't have life. No. Yeah. Well, light is there, everything. Without light, no matter would exist. That does not exist. That's correct. So, language is the wisdom of God. God talked within the Godhead even. You know, they decided. things in the Godhead. And God himself is identified and expressed in words. Words are very powerful things, right? It's important to me. A lot of this is just things that bang around in my head, but it's important to me to see that when God spoke a word, powerful, powerful things happened. God said, let there be light, and there was light. God said, let the animal, whatever, you know, all of the creation story. It was God saying these things and things happened as God said them. And one of the things that you see when you go through scripture and read scripture is that the idea of the voice of God is everywhere. I've got just a couple of references, Psalm 95-7, that tells us that his voice is heard everywhere. Psalm 33-6 is a, interesting, let me see if I can see it. It says here, by the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth, all their host he gathers, and the waters of the sea in a heap. And he puts the deeps into storehouses. That's all by his word. So I say his voice is heard everywhere. Revelation says, Today, if you hear his voice, he says, I stand at the door and up. If anyone hears my voice, opens the door, I'll come in and eat with him and he with me. When the scripture says I'll come in and eat with you and you with me, what do you suppose? that has reference to. You think you sit down to a steak, with God to have a steak dinner? Is that what he's talking about? I doubt that, don't you? I think what that's talking about is communication. I think he's talking about feeding your soul with words. If you hear his voice, I'll come in and eat with you. You feed your soul with words. So anyway, if we're made in the image of God, then we also have a voice and a language. And you just have to know how unique and different, that is, from every other created thing. Do you have a dog? Does he have a voice? Mine does, too. Can you give that dog any instructions? Occasionally. Can he give you any instructions? Yes, he tries to. How does that work? It doesn't. That's right. One of the things that no animal... I don't care how many anthropologists try to find... This is what they've been doing ever since Darwin. They've been trying to find an animal that actually communicates ideas. You know, they think an ape is communicating an idea by taking a stick and poking at an ant bed. You ever seen that? Yeah. That's the closest thing to an idea that anybody can find in the animal world. And yet, here we are. None of us are really smart. You know, I guess. We may have some brilliant people here. I don't. But we're not really smart. But we communicate in great ideas with each other. Cognitive thinking in words. This never happens anywhere in this universe without this eternal language thing that God is from the beginning of time. This is just extremely important. All of our thinking is in words, isn't it? We talk to ourselves. Did anybody ever notice how much time you spend talking to yourself? There's a constant. Do you realize that you say more words to yourself than you do to any other human ever? Do you realize that you talk faster to yourself than you do than you can speak? but you're talking to yourself all the time. You have to talk, you have to visualize in words. If you see a painting, you see the picture, but the picture has to be, the wiser the human is, the better able he is, say, to describe. say a photograph or a painting in words. Isn't that right? That's the wise human is the one that can use the words best. The smartest human that's lived on this continent so far is probably Jonathan Edwards. Has anybody ever read any of Jonathan Edwards' How about it? Is it easy reading? Does it seem wise to you? Yeah, you can't do it once. That's exactly right. You can't do it once. I don't know anybody that can. I sure can't. I've read a good bit of his stuff, and I'm telling you, it is extremely difficult to follow, but the reasoning is absolutely spot on. The fact that he uses those words makes him identified as the smartest theologian and the smartest philosopher that's ever lived on this planet, I mean, on this continent. Any of you ever read John Calvin's Institutes? How many people have read? You've read the Institutes. Have you read the Institute? Tell me what it's like to read John Calvin's Institutes. Exactly. Owens, you can barely follow. Way, yeah, yeah. Now, Calvin's Institutes, to me, was the easiest reading that I've ever done in theology. Not that it is brilliant, it's the most brilliant book I've ever read, as a matter of fact. But it's written in such a way as to is to flow so beautifully that you say, wow, how did he think of that? But he's thinking in words. That's the point I'm trying to make. We do all of our planning, advanced planning, and that's another thing that is one of the attributes of God that we share with God is that we see We can see a little bit into the future, so we can plan things ahead, but we plan in words. We have to plan in words. Like I say, there's nothing like that in the animal world. There's nothing that approximates speech. We can give our animals commands. I just gave my little old dog a command. That little old one-eyed dog, if I say whoa to him, he stops in his tracks. Well, I don't know how he knows to do that, but he does. But that's about the best he could do, and he can't go any farther. By the way, there's no gene for speech. There's a section of the brain that is the speech center of the brain, but there's no gene for it. Little two-year-olds, for some reason that nobody understands, begins to speak just all of a sudden. Sometimes it's slow, How does a two-year-old learn to speak the language? Nobody understands those things. Anyway, speech is not physical. It's not a physical attribute like a bone or any of those things. It's more of a philosophical thing actually. The philosophers will tell you that the evolutionist cannot account for speech in evolution. That's one of the reasons that you're not allowed to talk about evolution in universities because they don't have an answer for most things. Anyway, there are all kinds of problems. There's no answer. But one of the big ones is that there's no answer for speech. Do you realize? I mean, think about it a minute. During the Revolutionary War, you know what the average height of American male was? during the Revolutionary War? Something like that. I think John Adams was 5'4". George Washington was a giant, and he was, what, 6'1"? I think he was 6'1". Well, here I am standing up here 6'4", and when I was a kid, I was the tallest basketball player in the district, nearly, really. Well, now half the people I meet are over six feet. And if you're not six feet tall now, what happened? How did we all get to be so big? Either we ate better or something, but we're bigger now than we were just during the Revolutionary War. But what about our language? What's happened? Is there a single, does anybody think that they're, as brilliant in the use of the language as John Adams was? No. And you can back up. Go back to Calvin. That's the 1500s. Are we anywhere? Can we even approach that ability to use language that Calvin did. Back up further, go back to the apostles. Is there one person anywhere on the face of this earth that can use a language like, say, the apostle Paul did or Peter or any of them? No. You can back up, you go farther back if you want to go to Chaucer. or Shakespeare. That's not far in the back, though, is it? But you can go as far back as you want to. Go back to Moses, if you please. And language doesn't evolve, does it? It may devolve, I don't know. Language is different. It's altogether different. It's philosophically different. And so you cannot associate language with any physical characteristic. That's the point I'm trying to make. The tongue is an unruly evil, isn't it? James goes to all kinds of, and with the tongue, you can set a forest on fire. With a tongue, you can change the course of nature with the tongue, just words. How many wars have been fought just because somebody said something? Yeah, they all are, all of them, yeah. Just somebody says something, and the world's in flame with war, just on the basis of a word. But as we said, the tongue is an essential part of God's nature. And since we're made in the image of God, it's an essential part of our nature, too. So let's ask ourselves. Yes, sir? One idea about learning linguistics that we're injecting here is that the more primitive the people, the more complex the language. So that as you become a more civilized society, your language that. No, I didn't know. I sure didn't know. I hadn't thought about anything like that. Oh, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Hebrew is one of the most complex languages, too. By the way, just the Somewhere when the New Testament was being written, the Jews decided that Hebrew was the divine language so that they don't accept anything in the Old Testament that's not written in Hebrew. Anyway, and that's a complex language too. So we're talking about words, just words. Knowing that, how does God, the infinite God, communicate with man? What? By words. All of them are by words. That's correct. But he communicates in all kinds of different ways, doesn't he? Sometimes it's direct. For example, he and Adam sat down and talked with each other in the garden, and he talked apparently directly to Abraham. And there are occasions all through the Bible where he speaks directly, but it's very, very uncommon, isn't it, for God to speak directly to anybody, ever. We used to have guys that, have you ever heard anybody say God said. You tend not to believe that, do you, because it's so rare and uncommon. It's not that it can't happen, but But it's so rare and uncommon that the first thing you do is say, wait, well, hold it. If God actually said it, then it has at least as much weight to disobey it would be like disobeying scripture. You can't do that. And so he communicates sometime directly with humans, but that's rare. That's rare. How else does he communicate? Yeah, you know God by his creation. That's, and we talked about that earlier. By his creation, you know him. You know he's there, and you know he is, but he still, he communicates, he actually communicates with man. Sometimes directly, sometimes how? through scripture, we're getting to scripture for sure. For what? If that's a communication, you have to figure providence out. I mean, you don't really know for sure. We've seen providential things just this last week, amazing providential things. But you really do have to figure those out. Then you have to say, well, maybe. At least that's the way providence works in my head. Yeah. Now, that is very important concept that we are going to get to when you get to scripture. Because Jesus says clearly, my sheep hear my voice. And I believe that's what he's talking about. And we're going to get to that in just a minute. One of the ways he has communicated all through time is through the prophets. You remember the way the book of Hebrews starts. Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. And you remember when you read the prophets, if you read say Ezekiel, he's constantly saying, Yeah, thus says the Son of Man. God says, thus says the Lord, Son of Man, do this or do that. Son of Man, do this or do that. I don't know how Ezekiel heard that, whether that was an utterance of voice that was heard or whether it was heard in his spirit. I don't know how that happened. But that's the way all the way. Isaiah, he talked directly to Isaiah in some way. We don't know whether it was direct, audible voice or in his spirit. But that's how he, that's another way that he spoke to it is through the prophets. If he spoke through the prophets and you disobeyed the prophet, or disbelieve the prophet, what happened? It was exactly the same as disbelieving God, wasn't it? God himself. So be careful with the prophet. We had a prophet that came in today, spring, several years ago. And at least he came in and told us he was a prophet. We were young and immature, and we didn't know whether he was a prophet or not because, you know, during those days, there was an awful lot of charismatic things going on. This guy told us he was a prophet, and so he began to tell us that the end was near and that in order to survive the Holocaust, we needed to begin to accumulate you know, foodstuff and hide it away so that we'd be able to survive the Holocaust. And, you know, it didn't take very long for us to realize that. And so we said, son, I'm afraid we have to inform you that you're not a prophet. And from this point on, we don't want to hear any more about it. So he left. Do you know where he went? I'm not absolutely certain, but I'm almost certain that he went to that Branch Davidian thing. I know that's where he came from, and I think he went to the Branch, and I'm pretty sure that he was lost in that Holocaust at that Branch Davidian fire. So be careful, be careful with prophets. But if they actually come from God, to not listen and obey is the same as not listening and obeying God. He has spoken to us by his Son. In these last days, he's spoken to us by his Son. Now, here's the question that we ask. When the scripture says, he's spoken to us by his Son, what exactly does that mean? In these last days, he's spoken to us by his Son. Visualize and personalize and whatever it takes and tell me what it means that God spoke to us by his son. He became a man. Exactly. The word became flesh. That's right. All right. How does it work? When Jesus spoke, God spoke. Exactly. What else? When the apostles spoke, they were speaking through Jesus exactly, precisely, yes. And whatever the apostles said had the same weight as Jesus. What else? Well, he sent the Spirit, yeah. Jesus said very clearly, my sheep hear my voice. His voice is here, and my sheep hear his voice. Now, where is his voice? What? From the Holy God, that's correct. Yes, that's his voice. That's his voice. There you go. Now, we've come to the Holy Scripture, haven't we? When you want to hear the voice of Jesus, his voice is in his word. That's why we've built all of this stuff up about words, about concepts, about reason. His voice is his word. Because whatever the apostles wrote, we have to believe. And the apostles wrote, Whatever the prophets wrote, we have to believe. They're there. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is going to work out. Here's what I thought you had reference to. Back during the Reformation, you know, what was the established church was terribly threatened. In fact, if you'd given the Reformation a little more time, they would have completely wiped out the established church. So in the Council of Trent, the established church said that church tradition has as much authority as scripture does. Well, church tradition doesn't have that kind of authority. That's what I thought you were referring to that. But yeah, all of that, the communication among saints, the love of the brotherhood, all of that, that's the voice of the Lord. The voice of the Lord is his word, is his scripture. Yeah. Exactly. You have to call that a capital letter, Apostles, by definition. prophet speaks falsely, he is to be killed. Yeah, so I suppose God took that false prophet I was telling you about, took him out. Now, like I say, What I've been trying to do is to establish the importance of the word. You know the culture that we're in right now. Everybody says the Bible is just another book. Actually, in the seminaries, I believe those, when they get up to begin a service and read, they say, for God's Word. Do you remember Jackson telling us that? They had to get up and read. Jackson and David in seminary wouldn't do that because, and they'd get up and say, listen to God's Word. This is God's Word. And it has all the power and all the authority and all of the, language is supposed to have, divine language is supposed to have is hearing this word. I'm not trying to make it more than it is. In other words, I'm not trying to attach some kind of idolatrous thing to the Bible. But this is the word of God, and it's extremely important to know. So what about the Bible? I can say we're going to spend I don't know how many weeks talking about all the hermeneutics and systematic theology and all of the ways to understand the Bible. We're going to do that later. We're just kind of introducing that today. But this Bible has been perhaps the most important, I wouldn't say perhaps, I'd say it has been the most important written document in the history of the world. It was the very first book ever printed on movable press. Remember the Gutenberg Bible was the first book ever printed, mainly caused, that movable press mainly caused the Reformation. But since that first Gutenberg Bible was printed, there's been five billion of them sold. How many people are there in the world? Two billion, two and a half? Are there seven? Seven, well, there's almost, not quite, but there's almost one for each human. But five billion have been sold. There are 100 million of them sold every year. And like I say, it's the most influential book that's ever been written. have a reference that I want to, if I can find it, I just happened to run into it and I wanted to read it. If I can find it, here it is. In terms of the importance of the Bible, this was written by a guy named John Riches. He is the professor of divinity and biblical criticism at the University of Glasgow. And this is a view that it says, this is John Ritchie's. It has inspired some of the great monuments of human thought literature, and art. It has equally fueled some of the world's excesses of human savagery, self-interest, and narrow-mindedness. It has inspired men and women to acts of great service and courage, to fight for liberation and human development. It has provided the ideological fuel for societies which have enslaved their fellow human beings and reduced them to abject poverty. It has perhaps above all provided a source of religious and moral norms which have enabled communities to hold together to care for and to protect one another, yet precisely this strong sense of belonging has in turn fueled ethnic, racial, and international tension and conflict. That's pretty much what we have to live with today in terms of what the Bible is. The people that are supposed to know better tend to think that it has done great harm to the human race. The day spring, the Bible has been central and important from the very beginning of this church. There's never been a time that we haven't done expository preaching from the very first day that this church was established. Preaching was expository. As a matter of fact, The first series of lessons that Jackson taught was on the Book of Romans. And at the time, you know, Jackson had just come out of, I think he'd been replaced as an associate pastor of an Assembly of God church and was, at the time, was director of the Christian radio station here and had a program on a Christian radio station. And so he was not only somewhat charismatic, a little bit, not greatly some, but he was very Armenian, very deeply Armenian. Barbara had a little bit more sense. And so she kept, she kept goading Jackson about his Arminianism. You know how they could fight with each other. It's kind of tender, but still. But Jackson started preaching expositional sermons through the Book of Romans. He got to about the, what was it, Benalinda, about the third chapter? Something like that. He could not. proceed. He couldn't do it. He said, because it was against everything that he believed and he could see it. He read, here's an example of my sheep hear my voice and he couldn't do it. So, he and Barbara got on a plane and flew to Philadelphia and to the What was it called? I believe it was called the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology. And all of the great minds in the Reformation and the Reformed theology were there. There were five or six of them there. James Boyce and all of them. Jackson and Barber managed to get all five of those guys together in one room. And Jackson said to him, look, he said, I think I'm becoming a Calvinist. Am I wrong? Have I gone overboard?" Those guys started there and taught him the gospel more perfectly. He came back and his expositional sermons on Romans took a big turn, didn't they, And they were magnificent sermons. And it didn't take two weeks for all of us to be Calvinist. But that's what I'm saying. how important the fact that God speaks powerful things through his word. It's incredibly important to know his word and to study it. The very first scripture ever written was written by... Try again. Yeah, the very first scripture ever written. What was written by? God. It was, remember? Yeah. Moses is up on the mountain and God wrote the Ten Commandments himself on tablets of stone. It is incredibly important to know that the Word of God is written. In written form, God himself wrote the first scripture. Moses, of course, wrote, and he commanded Moses to start from there and write the law. And anybody to add or subtract from it, it's kind of unusual that Joshua came along and started writing more. God moved him to start writing some scripture. And of course, Samuel wrote, remember, Samuel introduced the whole of the Israeli nation to kings, what a king would be. And we had all of that history of kings and then all of the prophets and the minor prophets. All of those minor prophets were finished by about 435 or somewhere along in there, 450 BC. The last one was written. And not a single, from that point on, there was not a single writing that anybody felt like came from God, not one, for four or five hundred years. And these people, you know, they had prophets right up to Malachi, and so they were looking what seems to be God's Word, and nothing came up. that apocrypha that Catholics added to the Bible was written during that period, and not one of them thought that was a message from God to be counted as scripture. Not one of them. The reason, by the way, that the Catholics put it in there is because it sort of promotes salvation by grace through faith and works, too. Anyway, the Old Testament was finished. We're going to talk about all of that as we go along. The New Testament was written mainly by the apostles, but there were a few that were not apostles, but were obviously approved by the apostles. Mark, Luke, Acts, you know, Luke and his two books, and Jude. They were all approved by the apostles, so they have to be counted as having the same authority as if God had written them himself. We're going to talk as we go about the characteristics of scripture and all the established biblical inerrancy and all of the things that are troublesome today, we're going to do that as we go along. But for now, we need to get our coffee and get prepared for worship. Does anybody have anything you want to add or any questions you want to ask? Yeah. Good. Oh, I wish you'd, I wish you'd have brought that up. Over and over again. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. In fact, I meant to, I meant to mention that and Psalm 19. Oh, how I love it. That's the attitude that we want to establish, it really is. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this day, and we thank you for your mercy, and we thank you, O Lord, for your word, and we pray, O God, that you would bless your word to our hearts. We pray, O God, that you would help us to hear your word, hear your voice, help us, O Lord, to obey it. Thank you, O Lord, for this time of worship, and we pray, O Lord, that you would bless us. in our worship to honor you. In the name of Jesus, our Savior.