Sunday March 7, 2021 PM

Ahead and get started. Go ahead and get your Bibles out. We are continuing our study titled Coming to the Bible. Essentially we are trying to ask basic questions about the Bible that many people ask and have asked.

The best place to answer those questions is the Bible itself. The question we are asking right now is why these books, we have 66 books in the Bible, and many times the very first thing that happens when trying to answer why these 66 books, and especially many times talking about the New Testament, why these books and not others, many times the very first thing that folks do is go start answering that question from historical references, talking archaeology, discussing the science of textual transmission, and so on and so forth.

But in fact, we need to first begin answering the question from the Bible. The other investigations are useful, but we need to begin answering that question from the Bible itself. And so why these books?

Well, last time we were together, we began to answer that by beginning with the Bible's self-attestation, that the Bible declares that this is the word of the Lord. Now in and of itself, I mean, any, you know, some false prophet could say, oh, I have the word of the Lord too.

And yet there's an awareness of that throughout the Scripture and very clear guidance shown, how do you know a false prophet from a true prophet? And the people of God are encouraged time and again to make that evaluation, and the Bible shows evidence of doing that itself.

And so we have the assertions of the prophets saying, the say of the Lord, we have the assertions of the apostles saying, this is the word of God. And ultimately, it's about that which agrees with God's anointed, Jesus Christ.

The Bible's Self-Attestation and Prophetic Authority

Why is this the word of God? Because this is what was breathed out by God's Holy Spirit through holy men who spoke of Christ. Jesus himself told the religious leaders of his day, who are very concerned with the Scriptures, with the word of God, very concerned that those things be observed and so on, that they were deaf to the word of God.

They were deaf to the Scriptures. They were not discovering the eternal life that was promised in the Scriptures precisely because they rejected him. And that's what the Scriptures are about. He said, if you believe Moses, you should believe me.

He said that in the parable as well. If they won't listen to Moses, then they won't listen to me, because it's Christ that Moses wrote about. Also, we have the self-arbitration. Not only does the Bible attest to itself, but it shows actual moments where false prophets, false teaching is confronted and refuted so that the people of God know truth from falsehood.

And one of the models for that in a good fashion, in a positive fashion, when Paul went to preach Jesus to the Bereans, the Jews in the Bereans, he went to the synagogue, and this is one of the times when he went to a synagogue and preached the gospel and was well-received.

Well-received. For these Jews were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they searched the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so. And so, how are they evaluating this Paul?

Paul, the apostle, obviously, you know, highly educated, knows his way around the Word, and he's preaching Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Well, let's go look in the Scriptures and see if that's the case.

And they found it to be so. Well, that's how you authenticate whether or not something is true. And in this case, Paul was preaching the gospel and it shows that the Old Testament is agreeing with the New.

We also talked about the removal of false teachers and the response to false gospels and looked at 1 John 2 when we closed last time. This time we're going to talk about the Bible's self-affirmation.

The Bible Quoting Itself Across the Old and New Testaments

In other words, there are Scriptures that, quote, allude to, affirm earlier Scriptures. So, the Bible quotes itself all over the place. The Bible just quotes itself all the time. One part of the Bible is saying, and the Lord said, back over here, the Bible quoting itself, different holy men moved by the Holy Spirit, quoting the Scripture from earlier times from other places.

Now, we see this with later or latter Old Testament passages citing the former Old Testament passages. We often think about the New Testament citing the Old Testament. I mean, some translations make a good point of showing that in the cross-references, like, ah, this is a quote from the Old Testament.

Well, the Old Testament quotes the Old Testament a bunch. And we have latter prophets quoting the earlier prophets, the latter psalms drawing upon the former psalms, even the book Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy means second law.

Moses is bringing forward a bunch of stuff from Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and giving it again. And these things are cited and quoted and alluded to. And so, the Bible is affirming itself. And so, it's agreeing with itself.

So, we're seeing the books of the Bible agree, and they quote each other, and they depend upon each other. The New Testament, of course, does cite the Old Testament directly well over 280 times. The New Testament quotes the Old Testament, but that doesn't count thousands of allusions and snippets that the New Testament has.

Revelation itself has 400 different quotes and allusions to the Old Testament, which means that Revelation has more quotes and allusions to the Old Testament than it has verses. So, we see that the Bible cites itself, it quotes itself, it's affirming itself.

Also interesting is that the New Testament cites the New Testament as the Word of God. That's a little less common since the New Testament was written in such a short period of time. It was a blaze of Holy Spirit activity when the New Testament was written.

So, it happened very fast, happened very quickly. But we do have a couple of places that we can look at. So, let's turn on our Bibles to 1 Timothy 5 and verse 18. For context, we start reading in verse 17 as Paul is instructing Timothy in the ways of the church.

He says, Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and doctrine. For the Scripture says, You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.

If you have a cross-reference there, a footnote, it's going to say Deuteronomy 25, Deuteronomy 25 verse 4. Does anybody have that? Yeah. That's the quote from Deuteronomy. But then it says,. And for the Scripture says, what?

You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads the grain. And what else does the Scripture say? The laborer is worthy of his wages. And that's a quote from where? Luke chapter 10 verse 7. Now, so Paul is quoting his companion's work.

Luke, the physician. Paul is quoting the writings of Luke as Luke is writing the gospel. And he's quoting that, says,. The Scripture says this. Here's the New Testament, quoting the New Testament as the word of God.

And again, you have the more well-known passage in 2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 16, Peter talking about our beloved brother Paul. And in verse 16, he says,. As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of things in which are some things hard to understand.

Now watch this, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. So what does Peter say of Paul's writings? Well, untaught, unstable people twist them as they do the other Scriptures.

He's calling them Scriptures. He's putting them, these are holy writings. These are God-breathed, holy Scripture. So these are a couple of places in the New Testament where you see the New Testament affirming the New Testament is indeed Scripture.

So that's a helpful thing to see later Scriptures affirming the earlier, and that's part of the Bible's self-affirmation. The other is that the apostles being received as the prophets were. So Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, these prophets of God, the apostles were received ever as much as the prophets were as those who God used to bring his word in written form to his people, that they were seen as the same kind of servant of God through whom he gave us the holy Scriptures.

Let's look at some of these passages, 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 10 through 12. Of this salvation, the prophets have inquired and searched carefully who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.

You follow the pronouns. Christ is in the prophets, and they are prophesying of the grace that would come, but he is the one indicating, testifying through them beforehand of his coming suffering. So you pick up the word of God, and you turn to Deuteronomy, and yes, you're reading the words that God gave to us through Moses, but you're also reading the words of Christ, for through his Spirit, he was prophesying through Moses, which is, you know, bring up the word of God.

Well, this is the word of Christ. He is the word. He is the one mediator between God and man. He's the one who reveals the truth of God to us, and he has done so through his prophets and apostles by his Holy Spirit.

And so this is how it worked with the Old Testament prophets, okay? Christ, through his prophets, gave us the truth of God. Well, this is what he did through his apostles, right? He did the very same thing with his apostles.

He opened their minds to understand the scriptures. He gave them his Holy Spirit, and through his special work through them, he gave us the scriptures. And we have those who are closely connected to the apostles, such as Mark and Luke, you know, James, the brother of Jesus, and Jude, and so on.

There's several that are right there with the apostles, so the apostles stand for, but there are other holy men of God, even as you see David as a prophet. He's also a king, but God used all sorts of holy men to write his word.

But we're seeing that the New Testament is in the similar fashion as the Old Testament brought to the people of God. In Luke chapter 24, and this is a helpful connection to what we read in 1 Peter 1, in Luke chapter 24, verses 44 through 49, he's talking to his apostles, and he said to them, these are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms concerning me.

And he opened their understanding that they might comprehend the scriptures. How do you understand the scriptures? They're written concerning Christ, that's how we understand the scriptures. Then he said to them, thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name to all nations beginning at Jerusalem, and you are witnesses of these things.

And then notice, behold, I send the promise of my father upon you, but tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high. They are witnesses of these things. And so, what is the content of the New Testament but showing that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament in all these important ways?

How do the promises of God become yes in Christ and to what degree? And that's what we have in the New Testament concerning the Old. And again, we have the centrality of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit to bring about the word that the Father knows his children need.

Well, this is a companion passage to that in Acts chapter 1 verses 1 through 8. The former account I made O Theophilus of all that Jesus began both to do and to teach until the day in which he was taken up after he through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles whom he had chosen, to whom he also presented himself alive after his suffering by many infallible proofs being seen by them during 40 days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.

And being assembled together with them, he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, you have heard from me. For John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit, not many days from now.

Therefore, when they had come together, they asked him, saying, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? And he said to them, it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in his own authority, but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses to me in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

The Prophets, the Apostles, and the Completion of Scripture

So, it's helpful then to when you have that background, when you have that background, the Spirit of Christ in the prophets declaring of himself the things that were going to happen in his sufferings, his death, and his resurrection.

Jesus saying to his apostles in Luke 24, what is the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Kethuvim? What is the law and the prophets and the writings except that which is about me? This is the scriptures and it's about me, and I'm giving you my Holy Spirit so you'll be witnesses of that to all nations.

Affirmed again in Acts 1. And then what do we see Peter doing as soon as the gift of the Holy Spirit is accorded to them just as Christ had promised? Filled with the Holy Spirit, the church begins to proclaim the gospel in all these different languages, and Peter begins to preach Christ from Joel and the Psalms and Isaiah.

And he begins to say, this is Christ, this is Christ. And so because we have that expectation, we should further put with that that the believers like Simeon, believers like Zacharias, believers like John, John the Baptist, there was a clear expectation that the story in the Old Testament, the story in the scriptures, was not finished.

It wasn't finished. And they were expecting this story to be completed. They lived in a time when they were expecting more scripture to be written. They were waiting for it. They were living in that expectation of more scripture to come, the completion of the story.

And just to bring this home, we need to turn to the last book of the Old Testament in the Tanakh, which is 2 Chronicles. For whatever reason, a very historical book is not placed with 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings that are located in the prophets in the section of the Tanakh.

But in the Kethuvim section of the Old Testament, in the way that the Hebrew Bible was organized, in the way that the Hebrew scrolls were laid together, the last two scrolls in the organization of what we now call the Old Testament for the Jews was 1 and 2 Chronicles.

The first scroll and the second scroll of Chronicles, because it was so much, you can't put it on one scroll. So you roll all the way to the end of the second scroll of Chronicles, and what do you hear?

In verse 22 of 2 Chronicles 36, now in the first year of Cyrus, the king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled. The Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing, saying, thus says Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of heaven has given me, and he has commanded me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.

Who is among you of all his people? May the Lord his God be with him and let him go up. Now, that's not exactly the way you would end an amazing story. Not exactly, because there's still more story here, isn't there?

There's more story to be told. Well, I guess that temple's got to be built. I guess the people of God, wherever they are, need to go up to that temple, go up to that Jerusalem and build that temple. That temple's got to be built, and the people have got to be gathered there.

But that's where it ends. That's where it stops. And then you have the, and so that's the, well, what happens now? And there's several, several prophecies in the Old Testament about the Messiah. And they were just waiting and waiting and waiting.

The calendar that Daniel gave was ticking down, and they're waiting and waiting until finally things start happening. And so there was this great expectation that something else would be written. And it makes sense that Matthew was given the first place in the New Testament.

He writes, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, or the book of the beginnings of Jesus Christ, or the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ, is where we get the word genesis from, is the Greek word that Matthew chooses here, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

And so Matthew's like, here's a new genesis. That sounds like John 1, in the beginning, was the word, and the word was with God. What did the apostles understand? It's a new beginning. It's a new creation.

And it's beginning with a new Adam. And they are seeing not only the fulfillment of the Old Testament, but they understand this is the beginning of the New Testament. This was expectations of an unfinished store, but they knew it was going to be finished with the Messiah.

And there's some interesting passages in Daniel 9, Zechariah 12 through 13, but I don't have time to confuse you. So that's one of the things I barely have a handle on myself. But I did want to share this one passage with you because I think it's very encouraging.

The New Covenant as a Written Testament in 2 Corinthians 3

So let's go to 2 Corinthians chapter 3. 2 Corinthians chapter 3. There was an awareness when the New Testament is being written, while churches are being planted, while the gospel is going forward to these different regions in the Roman Empire, there was an awareness in those decades immediately following Christ's resurrection and ascension.

There was an awareness that we are in, there's a new covenant. There's a New Testament. You know, the language of the New Testament isn't new. It's been around since the New Testament was being written.

They knew it was a New Testament, and they said so. In 2 Corinthians chapter 3, we have Paul trying to explain what's going on in this unique time when the old covenant is, as Hebrew says, obsolete and ready to pass away, but it wasn't completely gone yet.

And the New Covenant had come in Christ and was just getting started. You know, so you have this overlap, kind of like John the Baptist and Christ. There was this overlap in between. What does he write?

So in verse 4 he says, and we have such trust through Christ toward God, not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the New Covenant.

You see that? The Greek word is adiētheke, and it is easily translated as testament. But notice how he says, it's not of the letter but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. So he's saying this is not in a dead letter.

It's not in the dead letter. This is from the Holy Spirit that we have this New Covenant. But if the ministry of death written and engraved on stones was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?

For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. In other words, the ministry of condemnation is the law as a schoolmaster to lead us to Christ, who is our righteousness.

We don't get righteousness from the law, keeping the law. The law shows us that we have a need of righteousness, which we find in Christ. This is very similar to what he's writing in Galatians. Verse 10, for even if what was made glorious had no glory in this respect because of the glory that excels, for if what is passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious.

What is he talking about? The Old Covenant. It's in the process of passing away. Same thing as the writer of Hebrews, in the process of going away. But what remains is much more glorious. What we have now is far better than the...

Well, Jesus said that John the Baptist was the greatest of all the prophets, but the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than him. Therefore, if we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech.

Unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away, again, the Old Covenant is passing away, but their minds were blinded.

For until this day, the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament. What do you have in translation? Old Covenant. It's the same word as earlier. Dei theke. Testament. Covenant. Either way, it's the same word.

The veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament because the veil is taken away in Christ. Now, we've been reading that already. When did Jesus open up the minds of his apostles to understand the scriptures?

How did Christ lift the veil for them to understand the Old Testament? When he said, this was written about me, right? It's not that, well, you can interpret the Bible several different ways. There is one right way to interpret the Bible, and Jesus shows us what it is, and he's the one who tells us how to interpret the Bible.

It's not that there's a lot of valid different ways. No, there's one way, and Jesus showed us it. So, what's going on? Paul is, look, they read, look, in the reading of the Old Covenant, or in other words, in the reading of the Old Testament.

So, there was glory there, but that is passing away, but what remains is still glorious. When the veil is taken off and you can see that the Old Testament is about Christ. So, he's saying that the covenant is something you read.

The covenant is something you read. So close is the relationship between the covenant and the written documentation of that covenant. The Old Testament authors frequently equated the two. For example, Exodus 24 7, then he took the book of the covenant and read it.

Second Kings 23 2, and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of the covenant. He declared to you his covenant, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets, Deuteronomy 4 13.

Exodus 34 28, he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant. Deuteronomy 29 21, the covenant is written in this book. So, this is showing that the way in which Paul is familiar with the term and how he's using that language, it shows us that the covenants were largely conceived of as something that was written, something that could be read, something in a book, which is why there was instructions about, don't change the text of the covenant.

Don't change the words in the covenant because that's something you could do. You could make a copy and change it, and they were instructed not to. And there were concerns about where you store the covenant.

Where are you going to put it at? The covenant was something you could put somewhere. Best keep it in the right spot. So then, what do we make of Paul's statement in 2 Corinthians 3 6? Look back there at verse 6.

Our sufficiency is from God. Look, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant? So, given what Paul just said about a covenant being something that you could read, something that would be written, and that's the natural use of the term, in order to use an expression like Old Testament, Paul is engaging with a concept called the New Testament.

He's aware that they're writing Scripture. He's aware that they're writing down a New Testament. A new covenant in written form is the New Testament. The Old Testament had several books, the New Testament the same.

So, I think that's a helpful look at just how aware were the apostles? It is fashionable to say they had no idea what they were doing, and we've just imputed all kinds of importance to notes that they sent somewhere, but the Bible affirms itself that this is what is going on.

So, that's a helpful thought, and again, Paul is emphasizing here. I don't think he's emphasizing in the text that when he says that the new covenant is not of the letter, but of the Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

I don't think he's saying the new covenant has no words written down anywhere, because that would be going against his use of the term, but he's saying, well, what was significant in the new covenant?

What was the sign that the new covenant had come? What was the big day of the new covenant? The Pentecost, and the Spirit came. So, I think that's what he's referring to here. Of course, it could be read differently and say, well, it's not really about anything written down, but I don't think that's what Paul is after.

I think he's saying, we have been made ministers of a new covenant, and in the Holy Spirit, we are writing the things that pertain to Christ, and so on. Next time, we'll talk about the Bible's self-authentication and talk about how the Word of God is proven to be the Word of God by the power that it has in the lives of people and in the world today.

But for now, let's go ahead and close by singing the doxology together.