Happy fall semester.
Beautiful Sunday morning out for us to gather together.
I'm glad it's raining.
All the gardeners, gardeners, you're all glad it's raining.
The rest of you are miserable.
Thank you for the preaching break that I got to receive.
Thank you for the preaching team that filled in while I was gone.
While I was gone, my wife Christy actually became ill right in the middle of that time.
And so she had a virus attack her vestibular nerve and her inner ear.
And so she got really, the doctor said, gnarly vertigo, medical term gnarly, was used.
Which meant we were in the hospital for a little bit and then we're back home.
It's been about three weeks.
She's about halfway back.
And some of you are aware of that.
So thank you for your prayers and texts, emails, calls.
Thank you for the food you brought.
We had a pound cake show up at our house that it changed my life.
I was like, I think it's gonna be our new communion bread.
I'm like, this is really, really important.
For the next five weeks of this semester, we're gonna ask the question like what like what makes what makes this Bible so important?
Why do we keep coming back to it?
Why is the Bible unique?
In biblical times, uh from ages five to ten, their West Side Elementary or Due West Elementary or whatever elementary school it is, it was called Betzefer, House of the Book.
And on the first day of school, that little five-year-old kindergartner, that version of it, would sit down, and the rabbi teacher would give them a slate.
And on the slate, the rabbi would pour honey all over it.
It was this incredibly rare luxury to have.
This was imagery from Ezekiel, Ezekiel 3, 1 through 3, and he said to me, Son of man, eat whatever you find here, eat this scroll, and go speak to the house of Israel.
So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat, and he said to me, Son of man, feed your belly with the scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.
Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.
So that rabbi teacher would spread that honey on that slate, and he would say to these children at age five, these children would know this, age five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, may the words of God be like honey to your soul.
May they be that sweet, that good.
So when we read the New Testament and Jesus or Paul or somebody else is referring to the Old Testament and God's word, they are speaking with such respect and affection.
It's this good.
Now, when I was a kid and a young teenager, and I would hear the Bible read, or maybe I read it, or I ended up at some sort of Sunday school or something, it felt so distant.
I would hear it or I'd read it, and I didn't care.
I just didn't care.
It was like a phone book to me.
It didn't mean anything.
And then as a teenager, I gave my life to Christ, gave up into Jesus by God's grace, that I needed a savior, forgiveness and righteousness outside of me, God's love to me.
And then I went home and I started to read the Bible, and something happened.
Because what used to mean nothing, all of a sudden started to mean something.
Maybe that's happened to you.
Now the Bible's not always easy, but what I want to say this morning is the Bible is unique.
Here's what Paul says to Timothy.
So this is a mentor to mentee, 2 Timothy 3, 14 through 17.
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it.
So he's saying, like, hey, the stuff I've been teaching you, like, pay attention to that, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
Point number one is this the Bible is written by many people, yet the Bible is God revealing himself.
So the human authors wrote out of their own personalities, out of their own experiences.
That's why James sounds so different than Paul.
And the gospel writers, they were not modern journalists, but they were historians by ancient standards.
It's unfair for us to look at the Gospels and the writers of the Gospels and take our modern journalism ethics and put them on top of an ancient practice.
But by the ancient practices of history keeping, these guys did it right.
The commentary on this passage worded it this way: inspiration communicates the sense that these human authors were carried along by the Holy Spirit as they wrote.
And that the Holy Spirit breathed into them in a way that ensured that their words would be God's words.
So remember, Paul is a Jewish boy, so all scriptures God breathes is what he said in that 2 Timothy.
Now, what's interesting in that is he extends that, he kind of connects it back to his teaching.
He says, like whom you believe it.
Well, you've been learning whom you believe it, like my teaching and the sacred writing.
So he doesn't call his writings scripture, but he gets a little close here.
Now, Jesus validates the Old Testament.
So if we believe in Jesus and Christ and the Christ's resurrection, the objective reality of that and history, and then he treats Scripture of the Old Testament, that validates the Old Testament, but the New Testament didn't exist in the time of Jesus.
So hundreds of years go by, and books and letters are circulating through churches, through the Christian church.
And the Bible is forming, not by a group of men suddenly at a certain year and a certain time just putting together a bunch of books.
The Bible is forming over time as the early church accepts and denies letters and books.
That's how the scriptures came to be.
And then a group of people got together and said, like, this is this is the canon, this is the Bible, this is the set of books.
A few years ago we had a brick grill island built outside of our side door, kind of on our back deck, and the brick mason showed up and he dug that foundation, he put in a foundation, and then he starts to lay the bricks row by row.
And every row he would set a plumb line.
Here's a picture of a plumb line.
The plumb line is that white level line.
Now, the Mason and the brick, neither of them get to determine what level is.
Level is a truth outside of them that they have to adjust to.
That's what the plumb line is.
The brick doesn't know what level is, the plumb line declares what is true.
The plumb line is true and the brick adjusts to it.
That's what canon means.
We get all these words for the Bible.
The Bible, God's Word, Scripture, canon.
Those are the main four.
That word canon is a standard, a measuring read.
It is true and we adjust to it.
Now, our Bible has 27 New Testament books.
It has 39 Old Testament books.
It is written over 1,500 years by different people and different cultures, and yet everybody is telling the same story of Jesus.
So over hundreds of years, those early writings and letters are circulating through the church.
And the church is dismissing writings that are not by eyewitnesses of Jesus or by disciples of those eyewitnesses.
And by the mid-second century, early church leaders have recognized a core New Testament canon.
All this Old Testament is pointing to Jesus, and now we have Jesus, and now the writings from Jesus and his disciples are forming the New Testament canon.
Those selections were made on three dynamics.
Number one, apostolic origin.
Who did they come from?
An eyewitness or a disciple of an eyewitness?
Second, Orthodox teaching.
So everybody is saying this, but this dude is saying this.
So we're not going to accept this other.
The Orthodox teaching is forming and then widespread use.
What has the church accepted?
Alright, so let's nerd out.
Bible nerds, you'll be very happy this next section.
Here's what we have in this book.
Let's look at this.
I'm going to read most of this.
We have unity of authors.
40 plus authors, 1,500 plus years, three languages, one story.
Unity of narrative is existing in this diverse range.
We have unity of authors.
We have textual preservation.
Here's what I mean by that.
We have 25,000 plus New Testament manuscripts.
Remarkable consistency.
Ancient Jewish culture had a strong oral tradition, emphasizing accurate memorization and the recitation of that.
So scribal precision.
There's no tape recorders, there's no computers, there's no iPhones.
The way that they passed history and information down was a strong oral tradition.
The retelling and the retelling and the retelling of the same story and then scribal precision of that story.
We see this in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
So the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves in Qumran, just by the Dead Sea in Israel.
This is the Qumran Caves, a whole bunch of those caves.
Inside those caves, a shepherd in 1947, in that cave one, he found the first scroll.
Archaeologists later uncovered thousands of fragments of around 900 manuscripts, including copies of the Old Testament dating as far back as 250 years before Jesus BC.
The Dead Sea scrolls, what they give to us as Christians, is they show the reliability of the Old Testament by showing that its texts are accurately preserved in that process that the Jewish people use for scribal precision.
Over thousands of years.
Over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament exist, far more than any other ancient text.
So if you're gonna love an ancient text, you need to give the Bible a look.
Some dates all the way back to 150 years from Jesus, which is unusually close for ancient literature.
So we have unity of authors, we have textual preservation.
Third, what is so unique about this is we have prophecies fulfilled, meaning we have a whole series of prophecies in the Old Testament, hundreds, thousands of years before, coming true in the New Testament.
The chances of this happening are extremely low.
Extremely low.
Now, maybe you still don't believe the Bible.
I can't argue you into the Bible, believing the Bible.
It just won't work.
But maybe, maybe, you at least can recognize that it's quite unique and it is worth your investigation.
Now, if you like to nerd out, Dr.
Michael Kruger is RTS president, reformed theological president.
He has given his life to the canon, the Bible, how was the Bible formed, who decided the canon, who decided the Bible, why should I trust that?
He all the information you would ever want.
Here are three great books by him Canon Revisited, The Question of Canon, Surviving Religion 101, all of which, all of which you can dive deep.
Point number two the Bible gives us what God thinks.
We don't always need an extra word.
Twenty-five years ago, I was in a college ministry.
I'd had a Pentecostal charismatic band, and on one ends one Wednesday evening, we're in leadership meeting before the main service.
And so there's like 50 of us, a big college ministry, 50 of us on this leadership, and we're in a chapel and we're praying.
We're praying for God to move, God do something, change people's lives.
I mean, we are in it.
We are, you know, we're college students, we're praying, God's gonna move, and you know, let's be passionate.
We're like, we're going for it, going for it, going for it.
We're praying, praying, praying.
I'm praying, my head's bowed, I'm praying, and then I hear somebody pop over here, they'll speaking in tongues.
And I'm like, I didn't grow up that way.
If you've ever been in that setting and you didn't grow up that way, immediately you're like, whoa, what is and I'm like, huh?
Who is that?
And what's going on?
Like, and then somebody else pops up, and somebody else pops up, and everything in me is somebody didn't grow up that way.
I'm like, I don't know about that, and I'm like, you know, God, I'm a jerk, you know, God help me, forgive me, you know, help me be open, help me be open to your move, you know, I'm doing all that.
And I and as I'm feeling just all my cynicism and all my jerkiness is just like coming up inside of me.
I it's like, okay, I'm just gonna read the word.
I open up to a psalm.
And as I'm reading the psalm, a friend of mine, one row up, he pops up to interpret the tongues because in a setting, this is what happens when he speaks in tongues, and somebody else interprets it, so he pops up, he interprets the tongues.
And what he says is almost verbatim what I was reading at the same time in the book of Psalms, of which cynical rust is like, why don't we just read Psalms?
Okay, here's my point before everybody who's charismatic has a problem with me.
Here's my point.
My point is this we love to look for something else.
Now, tongues is not my thing, but you put me in a mountain valley standing in a river, I hear God saying all sorts of stuff.
And maybe it's you reading Tim Keller or Valley of Vision, and you hear God say, whatever it is, we have to take it and go back to the scripture, to the source.
We don't always need a new word.
We have the word.
And any new word of encouragement from the Holy Spirit, which we should be open to in your heart through a friend, maybe speaking in tongues in your private setting, I don't know.
Amazing, have it.
Thank you, Holy Spirit, that you still speak.
We're gonna be open to that.
But we take it back to the source, to the scriptures.
And that word from the Spirit will always be confirmed by the Scriptures, or else it is not a true word.
And you have to accept it.
That's that person's problem.
And if you're not hearing the Spirit, a word from the Spirit.
What I hate about those settings, oh, what I hate about those settings, and probably I overreact, is I hate the feeling like, oh, if you're not doing this, you're not a mature Christian.
I mean, I hate that.
I hated it then, I hate it now.
Like when we say Jesus is enough, like we actually really believe Jesus is enough, no matter how your gifts are working out.
So, like, the idea, like, well, I'm not hearing a word from the Spirit, that's fine.
You know what?
Read the Bible.
Like, you'll hear from the Spirit because the Spirit will speak through what is already written that the Bible gives us what God thinks.
The word for us.
Point number three.
Because the Bible is powerful, we approach it to receive.
We're always approaching it to receive.
That's the tone here from Paul to Timothy, verse 14 and 15.
But as for you, continue what you've learned and firmly believe, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood has been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you.
They will make you.
See, we're receiving, make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
Paul tells Timothy, be loyal to all that that you've learned.
And then verse 16 the purpose of the scripture is to be useful, helpful, build you up.
And it's gonna correct you and challenge you and convict you, but it's gonna comfort you and heal you.
And most of all, the story of the promise of Jesus over you.
Like we say, you're more broken than the originally thought.
We're more sinful than originally, but all of our sin is put upon Jesus on the cross, and his righteousness is given to us, and that's all we need.
And that's not just a sentence, that's scripture.
You should take, when we say that, take it back to the scripture, see if it's true.
Twenty-seven years ago, when I was in college and I was a college sophomore, I lived at 123 Easy Street in Athens, Georgia.
That's a real address, and I lived there, I lived in the back bedroom.
Two things happened, two things happened in that back bedroom.
The first thing is I fell in love with the Seinfeld TV show, 10 o'clock on TBS.
Anybody old enough to remember that?
10 o'clock on TBS every single night pre-Netflix, way before Next Place.
I'm still doing that every night about 10 o'clock.
I'm still watching the Seinfeld.
That happened in that back bedroom, first conversion.
Second conversion is the book of Romans came alive to me.
I had probably heard that read before.
Didn't mean that much.
Something happened, though.
And all of a sudden, something that didn't mean anything started to mean something.
Because I couldn't get my act together.
Like, even as a Christian, I couldn't, I wasn't quite the Christian I wanted to be.
And then Romans 7 explained me.
Like it explained me to myself.
Listen to it, just see if it explains you.
Romans 7, 15 through 20.
For I do not understand my own actions.
For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.
Now if I I do what I do not want, I agree with the law.
That is good.
So now that it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me.
For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh.
For I have the desire to do what's right, but not the ability to carry it out.
Or I do not do the good I want.
But the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
That's me.
That's me when I was 20.
That's me at 46.
It's gonna be me at 80.
Now Paul keeps the story going.
Praise God, verse 24 and 25.
Paul says, Wretched man that I am.
Like, oh, this is so true about me.
I can't quite get it all together.
I'm a sinner.
Who will deliver me from the body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Thanks be.
Who's gonna deliver me?
Who will deliver you?
Jesus.
God's one-way love to you in Jesus, not your performance or your record or your record after you become a Christian.
A one-way provision of forgiveness and righteousness in Christ alone.
A few months ago we were traveling and we went into a gas station.
Now I grew up in a family that when you went to the gas station, you stayed in the car.
You were not allowed out of the car.
Dad gassed up, dad paid.
I had no idea that there were families in that gas station getting snacks, having a great time.
Right?
There's two kinds of families.
There's there's stay in the car family, and there are gas station snack families.
Gas station snack families?
You out there?
Y'all are having a great time.
I'll be honest.
Y'all are it's it's more fun.
It's more fun.
And I didn't know this.
I did not know this until I got married, and I discovered because I married a woman from a gas station snack family.
And I mean, they're spending 20 bucks a pop, but they're having a great, great time.
Three months ago, we walk into a gas station and Christy looks at our girls and says, Hey, uh, you know, grab something you want.
And I'm like, you know, okay, we're doing that.
There's 20 bucks.
Well, I might as well get in.
I'm gonna get in on it if we're doing that.
We're gonna get so I start looking around and I see this bag of candy.
I haven't noticed this bag of candy for 30 something years.
Werther's original.
Right?
Nobody under 70 eats this candy, I think.
I grew up with my grandpa having Werther's original in his pocket, and he would, gramps would give you one.
And it was just such a sweet moment.
So I saw these in that gas station, and I got a bag.
I've I now have a bag in my car, I have a bag in my backpack.
I got them all over, right?
They're amazing.
If you had one, just like they're it's like a buttery caramel with like creamy, like it.
It's it's like the best grandfather in the world has come and just given you like a hug, a reassuring hug.
It's gonna be okay.
That's what that candy says to you.
It's like, I'm okay, it's gonna be okay.
Okay, that's what the rabbi was saying with honey.
That's what he was saying.
This this comfort, this love, this luxury that's more than you can imagine.
Right?
And what did he say?
May the words of God be like honey to your soul.
Like a like a warm grandpa hug.
My prayer for us is this in the next few weeks we're gonna study the uniqueness of the Bible is that we would just love it more.
That we would just dive in more.
And anything else we read that is so good and so amazing that we'd be taking it back to the Bible.
Any other word we get from the Spirit, from a friend, we'd be taking it back to the Bible.
And we allow it to speak life and love, the provision of Jesus for us.
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, thank you for your spirit that still speaks.
May we always take a new word back to your word.
May your word be the foundation of our hearts and lives and minds.
It is enough to be helpful to us.
Thank you that you are our helper.
You are all that we need.
And no matter how we are feeling this morning, that in Jesus we are doing just fine.
And thank you that you do not love us or approve of us or forgive us or say we're righteous based on our performance, but only on the work of Jesus on the cross, your grace to us, one way love in which we take comfort and we heal and we grow.
In Christ's name we pray.
Amen.