How Should We Think About the Bible

Encourage you to grab your favorite seat. My name is Mike Barry. I'm one of the pastors here at Cornerstone. It's my privilege to bring the word this morning.

Pastor Milton is back in town. but somehow I drew the card. This Sunday, I'm not sure how that happened. I noticed that when Pastor Milton was up here, he looked very tall, and that was because the pulpit was situated for me.

So I thought he had grown a little bit. Anyway, last week, we talked about the subject or we asked this question, what does a child need? And we answered that question that a child needs Christ, a child needs a family, and a child needs the church. but this morning, I want to ask another question, and that is, how are children to learn about Christ and know Christ?

A child can be in a family, but what is that family to teach? what are they to talk about on the way or when they rise up or when they lay down? People can go to churches all over the world, but what are churches to teach? What are pastors to teach children and teach, families?

When I was a young person, I was living with my dad and stepmom in Anaheim. I came to live with them when I was about 8 years old. And my sisters and I, we ran off, I think our first two live-in babysitters. Because of our excellent behavior.

And my dad finally decided I need to find a more mature gal that can bring some discipline while I'm at work and And so he offered this job to a lady named Judy whom we began to call Mammer, and she said that she would take the job under the condition that she could teach the children about God. And he said, that's fine, just, don't bother me with it, but you can talk to the children. And so she began to take us outside and would show us at night the moon and the stars and the glory of the sun.

Show us all the variations of plants and animals.

God's creation took us down to the beach, and as I went boogie boarding would show us just the beauty of the beach. And by looking at God's creation and general revelation, I fell on my knees and repented of my sins and embraced Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Now, did that really happen? No, I didn't.

No, Mammer began to teach us the Bible. She began to take us through the book of John. In the book of First John, and I can remember when the lights first started coming on in my little brain, hearing about Jesus and hearing about light and darkness as it was spoken of in the book of First John and beginning to comprehend. My sin, beginning to comprehend my need for Christ.

And it wasn't just that Mammer taught us the Bible. She didn't just teach us the Bible as one of many religious texts or as a good moral storybook. She didn't teach us that the Bible was just a record of what ancient Jews and Christians believed before the Enlightenment or the rise of modern science. So he didn't just teach us the Bible as a mysterious book that's very difficult to interpret.

She taught us that the Bible is from God. And that the Bible can be understood. And the Bible is worthy of our trust and that the Bible has history, it's historical, and by the way, the Bible is authoritative for our lives. That's the way we were taught the Bible.

we can teach the Bible to children. We can teach the Bible at church and with our families. And yet we can teach it in the wrong way. We can come at people with the Bible and have the wrong way of understanding and thinking about the Bible.

And here at Cornerstone, we could teach the Bible a certain way and yet you could hear it wrongly. You could be disposed to not hear the Bible preach the way we're intending it to be preached. So what should be our thoughts as we think about the Bible? And that's what we're going to examine this morning.

How should we think about the Bible? if children really need Christ and they need families that will teach the word and they need churches that will teach the word, how should we then think about the Bible and how should we teach it? How should we hear it? And we're gonna basically suggest five ways that we should think about the Bible, this morning.

First, The Bible is from God. The Bible's from God Not in the sense that the Mormon Church received the Book of Mormon. God didn't lower it down on golden plates and give Pastor Milton special glasses to read the golden plates behind a curtain and then interpret them for 12 elders behind the curtain. That's not the way the Bible came to us.

The Bible didn't come to us the way Gabriel allegedly revealed information to Muhammad, giving him the miraculous ability to read and then dictating the Quran. That's not the way we received the Bible. We received the Bible through what we speak of as prophecy or revelation. That God was pleased to disperse his word through prophets over the ages.

In fact, over 1500 years, we have over 40 different authors that took prophecy and put it into scripture, and that scripture, was passed down to us to this day. In the Old Testament, we see the phrase, thus says the Lord or some equivalent over 2000 times. And so the Bible clearly purports to be from the Lord. The Old Testament says thus says the Lord, Jesus comes along in the New Testament and quotes the Old Testament all over the place as authoritative.

And so we have this concept of revelation. Open up in your Bible to 2 Peter 1:20. 2 Peter 1:20, it's gonna be your hard copy or your electronic copy on your devices. Which I'm still getting used to.

I look out there and I'll see these pads and people with phones and I'm like, What are they doing? Are they paying attention? No, they're just looking at their Bible on their phone, right? That's what I assume you're doing.

So 2 Peter 1:20. Peter says this about the concept of prophecy and revelation, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture. Comes, comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

So how is it that prophecy came to us? people just, it wasn't that somebody in the past, Isaiah or Moses stood up and said, hey, I've got a great idea. We're gonna do this thing. Moses says, I'm gonna do this thing called the 10 Commandments.

Just been thinking and mulling it over and in my studies in Egypt. I think we should all have 10 Commandments. No, Peter tells us how revelation came to us. It wasn't by the will of man.

men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. This term, the Greek behind carried along is the same idea that you have of a ship that's carried along by the wind on the sea. And so God has chosen to reveal Himself through the prophets, and the prophets wrote scripture, and we have received our Bibles. And so the Bible comes from God.

Look at 2 Timothy 3:16. 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17. Many of the prophecies were put into Scripture. Paul tells us in 2 Timothy that all scripture is God breathed.

Some of your translations say inspired, which that word in today's modern English has been devalued. We think of an inspired poet, an inspired rapper, an inspired musician. the idea here is that scripture has been breathed out by God Himself. He breathed out through the author onto the page and the original page of scripture is what we would call God-breathed or inspired.

We can define it this way, the scriptures are inspired or authored from God and that God moved through the personality and abilities of biblical writers in such a way. That what they wrote was without error. Incorrect in everything that it addressed, addressed. God picked up Paul, picked up Peter, picked up Isaiah, and breathed through them.

Without violating their particular, word choices and vocabulary and approach, God got exactly what he wanted accomplished through the human vessel. It's part of what we call the dual authorship, theory of inspiration. That God got exactly what he wanted out onto the page through various human authors. Now, there's two, if you want, if you're taking notes, there's two subpoints underneath this point.

The Bible's from God, and so we say it's, it's breathed out from God. But how is it, in what respect is it breathed out from God? Is it just the concepts are breathed out from God? Is it just certain parts of the Bible that are breathed out from God?

No, we would argue that every word is breathed out from God. Every word has been breathed out. By God through the authors onto the page of scripture. We call this the verbal aspect of inspiration.

You can write that word down, verbal, verbal inspiration. One of the evidences of verbal inspiration would come from, this is just one passage. There's many examples of this, but in Mark 12, around verse 26 and following, Jesus says this to the Pharisees, he says, but concerning the dead, the Sadducees, concerning the dead. That they rise.

Have you not read in the Book of Moses? So Jesus is going to make a point from Moses's writings. And he says, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Abram of Jacob. So Jesus, he's having this debate with the Sadducees.

He quotes Moses in the Old Testament. Now he's gonna bring the application. Here it is, verse 27. He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.

You are therefore greatly mistaken. How did Jesus arrive at this interpretation that God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living? He gets there from the present tense. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Jesus makes a big deal about the present tense of a verb. Therefore, affirming the fact that in the Old Testament, we have verbal inspiration, that the very tense of a verb is inspired, breathed out by God, and Jesus makes this point. So we have verbal inspiration. Well, maybe just certain parts of the Bible are verbally inspired, but other parts have crept in there that that didn't, weren't meant to be in there.

Well, Paul tells us that all scripture is God breathed. All scripture, we call this plenary inspiration or all full inspiration, verbal plenary inspiration. Raise your hand if you've heard that term, verbal plenary inspiration. Good.

Verbal, meaning every word, plenary means all of its parts. Every single part of the Bible is breathed out by God. Remember, a church that I attended when I was younger. There was a gentleman that came into the pastor's office and he had two stacks of cards.

One stack of cards, he said, these are all of the portions of scripture that I agree with. Another stack card, these are all the portions of scripture that I disagree with, and I don't believe really come from the Lord. And so he had a whole stack of cards that he believed were just man's opinions or Paul's view, and then a whole stack of cards that he affirmed. It just so happened that all the cards that he thought were of God were the things that he agreed with, and all the things he disagreed with were the ones that he said were not from God.

like the Jesus seminar does, right? the Bible makes no restrictions of the kinds of subjects to which it speaks. Truthfully, it's all scripture. the Bible will repeatedly, the New Testament will repeatedly refer to various Old Testament passages, refer to Jonah in the belly of the whale, just as Christ is 3 days and 3 nights in the earth.

It'll speak of the flood, it will speak of, Adam and Eve, his historical figures, and so on and so forth. And so we argue that the Bible comes from God. And so as we are giving Christ to our children, as we are giving Christ through our family devotions, and as we are teaching Christ, here at this church, we come with the assumption, and you hear this every Sunday, that Pastor Milton, as he's preaching, we assume, we presume that the Bible is from God. if you want more on this and some of the apologetical reasons as to why we accept the Bible from God, you can come take our apologetics class or theology class or whatnot, talk to me afterwards.

there's lots of reasons, both biblically and extra-biblically as to why we take the Bible as the word of God, but we, we assume that we get up every Sunday with the basic presupposition that the Bible is from God. And that God has revealed Himself to us. It's breathed out by God. Every word is breathed out by God.

Every part is breathed out by God. Secondly, how should we think about the Bible? the Bible can be understood. The Bible can be understood.

This was a huge debate during the Reformation. the Roman Catholic Church had convinced people pre-Reformation that the Bible could not be understood by the people. That it was so mysterious and so spiritual that you needed, the interpretation of the priest and the church itself to get at, the actual and sometimes secret meaning behind the text. That a Christian with their Bible or in community with other Christians could not sit down and study the Bible and arrive at a right interpretation.

we would argue, and I would commend to you that the Bible can be understood. And we get this from the Bible itself, the way it speaks about itself. Deuteronomy 6:6, you don't have to turn there. This is in the great Shama passage, Hero Israel, da da da.

Teach them diligently to your children. Teach these commands to your children. What does that imply? It implies that these commands can be understood.

And obeyed, right? You as parents can understand them. You can teach them to their children and they can understand them. Psalm 19:7 says about the word of the Lord that it makes wise the simple.

A person who is uninformed, lacking knowledge can be made wise by the Bible, which implies that we can understand it. Psalm 119:130 imparts understanding to the simple. 2 Corinthians 1:13, Paul says, for we do not write to you anything you cannot read or understand. Paul's saying I'm writing to you because I'm assuming you can understand it.

You, you never see Jesus say something like this. I see how the problem arose. The scriptures just aren't very clear on that subject. That's why you guys are all confused about the resurrection.

He never says anything of the like. even though it, during the times of the New Testament, the people whom Jesus is speaking to are far removed from the happenings of the Old Testament, right? As he's talking to, various people in the first century, these people are living. hundreds, even millennia, beyond the times of Abraham and so on and so forth and David and Jesus assumes that they can understand what the text is saying even though it's a very different culture and so on and so forth.

also, just notice that most of the New Testament epistles were written to the entire, congregation, children included. The epistles are not primarily just written to, they're not written just to scholars, just to the experts. The Bible is written out to churches and the assumption is that husbands and wives and children would be in the congregation. So Ephesians 5 and 6, Paul addresses husbands, he addresses wives, he addresses children.

so the assumption is, is that the Bible can be understood. And so the scriptures are written to common believers, not just to experts. And so why do we say this? Why do we emphasize that the Bible can be understood?

one of the reasons why we need to have this in our thinking is because it, this has been a common practice throughout the age of the church, but you hear it even today is when people find a teaching in the Bible that they don't prefer or contradicts their theology or it contradicts what's going on in the culture, a very common tactic is just to say, it's just so hard to understand. There's so many views. I just don't know. what, what, what does the Bible teach about sexuality?

I don't know. Is homosexuality a sin? Is it not? I don't know.

There's so many different views. What does the Bible say in Genesis 1 through 11? there's so many different views. How are we to understand the Book of Revelation?

There's just so many different views and it's so confusing. Pastoril. Yeah, just ask Pastor Milton. There you go.

Then you got the answer, right? There you go. Now, let me add a qualifier. This is not to say that there are no difficulties.

We talked about that the Bible can be understood. We're saying that the basic core message of the Bible is clear enough for us to understand and that even the passage where there's disagreement that we can come together and speak the truth and love and try to arrive at unity. The vast majority of doctrines that are, are, taught in the Bible are agreed upon by believers, true believers around the world. And yet we have Peter saying there are some things that Paul speaks of that are hard to understand, right?

And, and there are things that we bring our own agenda to, right? We come in with our own philosophy of what must be and sometimes it's hard for us to set aside that agenda, right? There's passages in the Bible, brothers and sisters, that I think the straightforward meaning is pretty clear if we just take a normal approach to the passage. But at the, it is hard to lay a light, lay aside our allegiances and just let passages speak.

To lay aside our American Western Christianity and look at what the Bible says and say this is what the Bible's teaching systematically. Let's believe this. Now, of course, you've got to be a believer. And so when we're teaching our children who do not yet know Christ, we're teaching natural men, spiritual things, right?

So we're waiting for the Lord to do His work. we're waiting for the Lord to take away the veil from people's eyes as we're teaching. the Bible And we all must come ready as John 7:17 says, with a heart that's willing to obey to really get the true understanding. And we should come and ask God for help.

And so when we talk about the clarity of scripture that the Bible can be understood, what we mean is that the Bible is written in such a way that its teachings are able to be understood by all who will read it, seeking God's help and willing to follow. Are we willing to seek God's help and follow? And just read the Bible in a normal way, what we call a normal, normal hermeneutic. Herman who?

Hermeneutic. Hermeneutics is the idea of just the rule of interpretations, how should we read the Bible? And the Bible, by and large, should be read like any other piece of literature asking God for help to understand it. It has poetry.

There's historical narrative, there's letters, there's gospels, and so on and so forth. If you take our, theology class or, we've, we've done, a hermeneutics class a few different times. The basic principle is we just understand, what, the Holy Spirit breathes out his word to an original author onto the text of scripture which is given to an original audience. We try to understand the original audience in the context which then comes to us.

And we try to understand all of those things. We don't just say it's the Holy Spirit's word to me. It's the Holy Spirit's word through the author to an original on to a text, original audience, and then to me. And A straightforward reading of scripture, asking God for help in community, we can understand it.

And so, these are two of the principles, God. the Bible comes from, from God. And that principle basically is, I, I forgot to use Pastor Milton's analogy. I apologize.

he talks about this egg, you just break open the egg and everything else falls, falls from out from under it. So the egg is the Bible comes from God, then you open it up, and then everything else comes out. All these other principles. I, I forgot to mention that.

I wanted to do that. the, the Bible. So the second thing, you open up the egg, the Bible can be understood. Thirdly, the Bible is trustworthy.

It comes from God. It is therefore trustworthy. the Bible itself tells us that, that we hope, an eternal life which God who cannot lie promised before time began. God promised this thing called eternal life before time began, and he cannot lie.

He is a God who cannot lie. And he has given us his word that he tells us, here's what he says about his word, Psalm 19:7 and following. The law of the Lord is perfect. The testimony of the Lord is, sure, the statutes of the Lord are right.

The commandment of the Lord is pure, the fear of the Lord is clean, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. That whole section of scripture, all of those are synonyms for the Word of God. The Word of God is trustworthy, the Word of God is pure and right. And the big theological term that you can write down in your notes if you want to impress your friends is inerrancy.

The Word of God is inerrant. It is without error. The Bible never affirms anything contrary to fact. Josh McDowell says that inerrancy means that when all the facts are known, the scriptures in their original writings properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything they affirm.

Whether this has to do with doctrine, morality or with social, physical, or life sciences. If we look at the Bible, We look at what the scripture says, we consider the original writings that have been transferred to us today. And we interpret the Bible for interpreting it properly. We understand that the Bible is trustworthy, whatever it says.

If it says this about history, it's trustworthy. If it says this about morals, it's trustworthy. If it says such and such about science, it is trustworthy. God never said anything accidentally.

All his words have a purpose, and this is proved by the prohibitions that say do not add to or take away, right? If God's saying do not add to or take away, he likes where his word is at at that particular point in the history of redemption. He has the authority to add to a takeaway. We do not, right?

And so God's word is, it's trustworthy. It can be depended upon. It is inerrant, which takes us to our fourth point. That is That the Bible is historical.

So the Bible comes from God. It's breathed out by God. The Bible can be understood. We're not living in an era where we're depending upon the priest to tell us the secret meaning behind the text, right?

The Bible is trustworthy. It comes from a God who cannot lie. And he himself tells us it is trustworthy. In the Bible, fourthly, is historical.

I want you guys to open back to Genesis 5:1. Pastor Milton, is gonna get us back into Genesis next week, really looking forward to that message. Genesis, he'll be getting into Genesis 6. In fact, maybe if I get done early, we'll just have Pastor Milton come right up and start us in on Genesis 6.

What do you think? He's ready. He's locked and loaded. So look at Genesis 5.

Let, let me ask you this question before we read, reread a couple of these verses. How do fairy tales begin? Once upon a time in a land far, far away, right? And you begin to read a fairy tale and you can see some of the elements of fairy tales, right?

You see things that just strike you as fanciful or that's a little odd. How did that happen? Let's just read the first couple of verses again in Genesis 5. This is the book.

The genealogy of Adam, or as Milton said last week, the family history of Adam. And the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female. And blessed them and called them mankind in the day they were created.

Adam and Eve, or Adam lived 130 years, got a son in his own likeness after his image, named him Seth. Now does this read, does Moses give this to us? Does it read like he's telling us? Just a moral story.

Or a fairy tale. Just a, just a good religious ancient text. Well, you could look at the 130 years and say, yeah, this is That, that's ridiculous. I've never known anybody who lived 130 years.

And then had a child So you could look at that. Pastor Milton discussed that last couple of weeks, the ages of of the people in the genealogy. It is interesting that Moses just states this, never offers any apologetic for it whatsoever. Just says, yeah, this person lived 800 years and then they died and this person lived 900 years.

You would think that he would offer some apologetic, right, if his original audience was like, this is ridiculous. Offers no apologetic whatsoever as if the audience would have known, oh yeah, yeah, we, we're aware of that. There's nothing to me that seems to read here of a fairy tale or just a moral story. As Pastor Milton said a couple of weeks ago, and I, I wanna quote him at, at length.

I thought this was really well said. there's nothing primitive or I'll, I'll add mythical about Genesis. this is a historical recounting at its finest by a man of great learning and deep intellect. We know from scripture that Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians and that he was a man of power and words.

So we should not be surprised to see that Genesis bears the marks of literary genius and historical precision. Pastor Milton goes on and says the most important fact about Genesis is that it is inspired scripture. Jesus himself quotes from Genesis 1 and 2, and he treats those quotes as factual. That's a high endorsement People render themselves a great disservice when they don't consult with Genesis to learn of human origins or when they do come to Genesis, but they come as a last resort, having already decided that Genesis, what Genesis can and cannot mean.

We come to Genesis, we've already decided this is what it can mean, this is what it can't mean, and so we're going to paint it into a corner. Pastor Milton goes on to say, finally, if you want to know the history of the human race, you can put the divinely inspired genius of Genesis up against any modern scientist with his theories or any modern archaeologist with his artifacts. Seriously, when you read Genesis, you're reading something that is in and of itself an archaeological artifact.

This book is a document that was written 3500 years ago, and it is literature and historical recounting at its finest.

On top of that, our New Testament tells us that it was inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Yeah, it's very well put. We are reading an ancient artifact, artifact that purports to be historical. And if you come at the text laying presuppositions aside, I want to propose to you, and we'll see this more and more as we move through Genesis.

There really is no reason to look at these words and, and, and come to the conclusion as some have that we're just looking at poetry. Or we're just looking at good moral stories. No, whether you agree with Moses or not, he believes he is writing history. And it seems that Jesus believed him.

He quotes from Genesis 123. And forward speaks of the flood and so on and so forth. What we're talking about here is the difference between what we would call history and what the German theologians began to speak of as geschichte. Bless you.

Yeah. Can everybody say gashika. Gshika is just the German word for story. And the reason that this word was not invented but like it was typed as a particular theological term is because there were honestly, there were honest German theological people who were looking at the attacks against the Bible and feeling like that intellectually, academically, they could not withstand these attacks.

That there were just frankly embarrassing things in the Bible. Things like people living to 800 years old. Things like a worldwide flood. Things like the sun standing still and various stories in the Old Testament.

But if, if we could understand these things in the Old Testament as merely just stories, that whether they really happen or not isn't really the, the point. The point is, is that God wants us to us to get a message that will help us spiritually, then we can bypass the attacks on the Old Testament. You see, you see the logic of that? There's a tax on the Old Testament and the New Testament, by the way, and, and if we can just say, it, it doesn't really matter if these things happen in history.

What matters is that God has a message for mankind. And if God wants to tell us a good story about a boat and 8 people and birds in a flood, if it helps us spiritually, that's the true import. So it's, is it history or is it Gshikta? Well, brothers and sisters, we believe at Cornerstone that the Bible is, when it purports history, it is historical.

It is not merely gashika. And there are many, many good reasons to believe that the Bible is historical, just by virtue of the fact when the Bible says it's historical, if you, if you just sit down and read Genesis 6 through 9. Brothers and sisters, it is almost impossible to come to any other conclusion that, that Moses thought and believed that this is, he's just given history. when you look at the, the, the writings and the gospels of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, and being raised from the dead, though that contradicts all known laws of science, that a man would be raised from the dead.

If there's anything that would be ridiculous from an enlightenment scientific viewpoint, it'd be the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And many have rejected the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just a story, a gashika, to just teach us a nice moral lesson because they can't get by the fact that the resurrection is miraculous. In fact, Thomas Jefferson left out the resurrection in his, translation of the New Testament because he got rid of all miracles because he was enlightenment, an enlightenment thinker, right?

but the Bible purports itself to be historical.

Read the first couple of verses in Acts. Just what we've been covering here in Genesis 1 to 5. if we let the Bible speak for itself, The Bible definitely purports to be historical, but it doesn't just purport to be historical, but we have archaeological evidence that the Bible is historical. It used to be that people would make fun of the Bible for speaking of this guy named Pilate, that there was no evidence of Pilate outside of the New Testament and then around the 1940s, discovered a throne that had the word Pilate on it.

And then a coin that had Pilate's emblem on it. And so now all secular historians believe in Pilate. Well, it was the Bible that spoke of Pilate before anybody believed it., Luke, in Luke 17, he, he speaks of, in every city in, in the, in the Greco-Roman area, their leadership had a different name depending on the city. So, like in, in our cities in the United States, if you want to speak of the city leadership, you would say what?

The city council, right? And that's pretty unified. throughout the United States we would speak of the city council. As you went through the Greco-Roman period or the Greco-Roman era, during the first century, that was not true.

Not everybody had the city council. They all called it something different. In the, in the city of Thessalonica, it was called the Plutarchs. you can look this up in Acts 17, I think it's around verse 17.

It doesn't say Plutarch's there. It says like the leaders or various translations say, say a little something different. The only place that we knew of in history where that specific term was used of the city council in Thessalonica was in Luke's writings, until the ear, I think it was the early 20th century. There were discoveries made that used the word lutarchs in reference to the city council in Thessalonica.

You have evidence like this that pops up all the time. It used to be that scholars would laugh at the idea of Nineveh, then we discovered Nineveh, they would laugh at the idea of the Hittites, then we discovered the Hittites. It's like, what else do we have to do to establish the historicity of the Bible. But when you approach the Bible from purely a certain presupposition, That says the world is only materialistic, that we can have no supernatural, then of course you're going to reject various aspects of scripture.

If you say the supernatural cannot happen. Then you're gonna look at the Bible and say the flood could not happen. You're gonna look at the New Testament and say the resurrection could not happen. But when we approach the Bible based upon its own presupposition that there is a God who created all things, who is, by the way, all powerful, then things begin to fit together.

The puzzle pieces come together. And so the Bible is historical and we are unapologetic in approaching the Bible as a historical document. And as archaeological artifacts in and of themselves. And so, When we are teaching the Bible to our children in family context or church context, we come at it from the idea that the Bible has come from God.

It's breathed out by God. It can be understood. It is trustworthy, and it is historical. And lastly, that everything really leads up to this point, and that is that the Bible's authoritative.

The Bible has an authority in and of itself. Regardless of outside evidences. And the Bible has the authority because it comes from God to dictate our thought processes and our decisions. We base everything on the authority of the Bible.

And I want you to open up to Hebrews 6 as we start this train of thought. Hebrews chapter 6. If you could just track with me. Here The writer of Hebrews says, starting in verse 13, for when God made a promise to Abraham, Because he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself.

So God is making a promise to Abraham to bless Abraham, right? I'm gonna give you a land, I'm gonna, you're gonna have great, great family that comes out from under you. I'm gonna bless you, right? And then God decides to swear.

And so God's looking around the universe to see who shall I swear by, who is greater than me. And so he swears by himself. Verse 14, saying, surely blessing, I will bless you and multiplying, I will multiply you. Verse 15 and so after he had patiently endured.

He that is Abraham obtained the promise, for men indeed swear by the greater, and an oath for the confirmation is for them an end of all disputes. Thus God determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise, the immutability of his counsel confirmed it by an oath that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, he might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us. I want to just go back to verse 13 and, and make a couple of points here.

That God is engaged with speaking to Abraham.

And he's giving promises to Abraham and he didn't have to swear an oath, but he does swear an oath. And so God swears by the greatest, most authoritative being in the universe, which is himself. And we could. Logically, ask God, God, isn't that circular reasoning?

You're swearing by yourself to affirm that you are the most powerful. How can the most powerful one swear by himself to prove that he's the most powerful one? Don't you have to prove you're the most powerful one from outside of yourself? To which God would reply, if I appealed outside of myself, I would not be the most powerful one.

Right? Does that make sense? If God were to swear by any other person other than himself, he would not be the highest authority in the universe, correct? So he has to swear by himself because he is the highest authority.

All arguments for ultimate authority essentially must appeal to themselves as a starting point. Does this make sense? If God indeed is the highest authority, then he cannot swear by anyone other than himself. So is it reasonable for God to swear by himself?

Yes, it is. Why? Because he is the highest authority in the universe. Is it reasonable for me to swear by myself?

No. Why? Because I am not the highest authority in the universe. I cannot swear by myself.

The Bible is the word of God. Because it says it is. Let me say that again. The Bible is the word of God because it says it is.

And if we think that we have to appeal outside of the Bible to establish its own authority, we cut ourselves off at the knees. As soon as you appeal to another authority outside of the Bible, you've acknowledged that there is another authority higher than the Bible. The Bible is the word of God. Because it says it is.

And we follow up with this statement, and it allows us to make sense of the world. If our presupposition is correct, that the Bible is the highest authority, and we start and stop with the Bible itself because it's the highest authority, then as we begin to look out into the world through the glasses of the Bible, it will make the best sense of the world. And that, and, and never And yet, we do not use that as the authority to uphold the Bible. Just because the Bible makes sense of the world, and we see that it works logically and reasonably.

That's not what upholds the Bible. What upholds the Bible is the fact that it's from God Himself. That he is the authority. And so let me finish with just a short treatise on what we mean by the authority of scripture.

We talk about the authority of Scripture, we, I'll just quote from Wayne Gruden, his definition, the authority of Scripture means that all the words in Scripture are God's words. Let me say it again, you can write it down. All the words in Scripture are whose words? God's words in such a way that to disbelieve or disobey any word of Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God Himself.

If God, if the Lord Jesus Christ stood right here next to me and ushered a command from his own lips, that command would not be any more authoritative than what you get from the Bible. Because the Bible is the word of God. And it has authority to command. To rebuke, to teach.

And it's because of this that we, we argue that the words of scripture are self-attesting. The words of scripture are self-attesting. You can see this concept, go back and, and do your homework. Those of you guys have done your little catechisms with your kids and stuff like that.

Go back and look at the Westminster Confession of Faith. Go back and look at the Reformed Baptist Confession of Faith. Go back and read your theologies. What do we mean?

The words of Scripture are self-testing. This is what we mean. The words of scripture cannot be proved to be God's word by any appeal to any higher authority. For if an appeal to some higher authority, say, historical accuracy or logical consistency, were used to prove that the Bible's God's word, Then the Bible itself would not be the highest or absolute authority.

It would be subordinate in authority to the thing to which we appeal to prove it to be God's word. Does that make sense? Does that mean that we never go to historical accuracy or logical consistency to bolster up our argument from self attest the scripture being self attesting? No, we start with the self attesting nature of the scripture.

And then as we look out into the world with our glasses of the Bible, we see, yes, it is, it is so. The Bible is historically accurate. The Bible is logically consistent, but when the world and other thinkers come back to us and say, no, no, no, no, no, Daniel really didn't prophesy these things. Daniel's prophecies were actually made in the 2nd century.

They weren't prophecies. He's recording stuff from the past. That's what they say, right? The prophecies of Matthew, that all of it discourse of Jerusalem being destroyed in 70 AD, those didn't, those weren't written before 70 AD.

Those were written after 70 AD. What proof do they have for that? None. Nothing other than the fact that they deny the the possibility of prophecy.

And so when people are sitting in your Bible classes or people are trying to teach you various things to contradict and, and, and go against the Bible, don't automatically say, oh no, my confidence in the Bible has been destroyed because somebody brought up some historical thing that undercuts the Bible. The Bible itself is the authority and is self-attesting. all arguments for an absolute authority must, ultimately appeal to that authority for proof. Otherwise, that authority is not the highest authority.

Everyone, everyone in this room, everyone on the planet, either implicitly or explicitly uses some circular argument when defending his or her, ultimate authority of belief. Let me demonstrate that and then we'll, we'll bring this to a close. Let's say that you're in this room and you're like, Mike, that's poppycock. You believe that the Bible is the ultimate authority and you can use the Bible to prove the Bible.

That's circular reasoning. And I say to you, OK, what do you think the ultimate authority is? And they say, reason, reason is the ultimate authority. OK, prove to me that reason is the ultimate authority.

How do that? Answer, because it's the most reasonable choice. And then I talked to somebody over here. Frieda's over here and I say, Frieda says, wait, wait, wait, wait a second, logical consistency is the ultimate authority.

The Bible is not the ultimate authority, it's logical consistency. Well, Frieda, how do that? It's logical. What has she just done?

Circular reasoning. Someone else says, it's my senses, it's taste, touch, smell. it's the five senses that are the ultimate authority. Well, how authority, how do that?

Because my senses have never discovered another one. Someone else says there can be no ultimate authority. There is no ultimate authority. And you say, well, how do that?

Because I don't know of any such authority. Everybody must appeal for starting points to this place, the starting point. We start with what God says about Himself in Hebrew 6. God says about himself, when he was going to swear, there was nobody hired to swear by.

So he swore by himself. The ultimate authority in the universe. And brothers and sisters, when you come to God's Word, and you depend upon God's Word and say, God's Word is my ultimate authority, you are doing nothing other than what God did himself. And so you are standing on solid ground.

Solid ground to follow God Himself and say the Bible is my ultimate authority. And so, when we teach our children, Christ, when we are gathering together for family devotions, when we come here at Cornerstone and many other churches around our country and around our world, there are at least, I've only presented 5, but there are 5 basic things that we are thinking about when we bring the Bible to bear. We understand that the Bible comes from God Himself. So it's not just a moral storybook.

This is not just ancient literature of ancient Israeli tribe. This is breathed out by God and preserved for us to this day. And as we open up that eggshell, we recognize that God's word's understandable. God has given us a word that's not just for scholars, but it's for children.

It's for people like you and me, we can understand it. And we can trust it. It's without error because God does not lie. And he has given us a word that is, is perfect, makes wise the simple.

And he has given us a word that is historical. We're not just closing our eyes to history and just pretending like we're reading a bunch of stories. We are reading history. And we look at our Bible, we preach the Bible and teach the Bible.

We are teaching something that has the highest authority in the universe because it comes from God Himself, who swears by Himself, because there is no higher authority. Brothers and sisters, as we head into this year in, in September. We have chosen a curriculum K through 12, K through adults that follows these five principles. That these are, these are 5 of the principles that are the basis of the curriculum that we're going to go through this next year.

It's called Answers Bible Curriculum. And one of their hallmarks is that we can trust all of God's word beginning in Genesis. God's attributes are displayed throughout the Bible. The Bible presents true history.

We must carefully and accurately interpret the Bible. We're gonna talk about hermeneutics. We're gonna teach hermeneutics from K through adults. God's plan of redemption is woven throughout the scripture.

God's, the gospel is not just in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It's in Genesis. It's in Revelation. we must be ready to give a defense for what we believe.

We're going to teach apologetics throughout the year. And we are to live in light of what the Bible teaches. We're gonna not just teach the concepts, but how do we live? How does the Bible change our lives?

this, these are the bases of this particular curriculum. We're very excited about it. So the, again, the curriculums answers Bible curriculum, Miriam Pascarello, who is our, children's Sunday school director will be over at a table right here if you guys see the sign that says Kids Sunday School. She's gonna actually be taking signups for teachers, teacher's assistants, and substitutes.

And so we've got a, several of our teachers already in place, but we are looking for a few other. people who can handle it. Who can really handle the truth and, and come help us with our, our, teaching of our kids. You can also sign up at Cornerstone Bible.org.

If you go to Cornerstone Bible.org, you look in the upper left hand corner of the website, you're gonna see, kids Sunday school, Cornerstone Kids Sunday School. You can click on that and you can sign up. You can say, hey, here's the ages I'm interested in, or I can only substitute teach, or I could teach anything. And so either way, you can see Miriam or you can go online and sign up.

but we really, as you can tell, we, our, our, our pastoral staff and our staff in general has been putting a lot of prayer and thought into our overall Sunday school and particularly children's ministry. We're very excited about what's going to be happening this year. And we would really love to see who the Lord is gonna raise up to lead these children this year in the principles we've just been talking about. The Bible comes from the Word of God, it's understandable, it's trustworthy, it's historical and it's authoritative.

This curriculum is a chronological, it starts with Genesis and you move all the way through Revelation in a 3-year period. We're just going through the whole Bible. And, and making the appropriate applications. If you guys have any questions, you can talk to myself, Miriam.

Let's go ahead and have our ushers come forward. And pray for the offering and just pray. That the spirit would seal the word to our hearts. Lord, we thank you so much for this opportunity for us just to look at your word together and to examine these concepts of how we should think about your word, how we should interpret it, how we should apply it.

we ask God that you would raise up the teachers, that, Lord, that would be able to really bring your word, to our kids and that we would see children grow in you, that we'd see children come to know Christ. We have, Lord, the various needs and we wanna put the right people in those places and so we ask you to guide us and that your spirit would move. We pray, Father, that You would help us to have a greater understanding of your word, a greater trust. in your word.

And a greater handling of your word. thank you, Lord, for this, your Holy Spirit that illumines your word. I pray that you just bring greater unity to the, the whole body of Christ as we continue to study your word and speak the truth and love. Lord, we just thank you so much for just the, the blessing of being here.

We ask as we give our offerings as a part of our worship. Lord, that you would use this money to cause the gospel to go out, to flourish, that we'd see people come to Christ, that people be built up in the faith. And Lord, that you'd prosper this particular body and its people. This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior.

And all God's people said, Amen.