God-Breathed Words

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the

Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Casson, Chris Kiesler, and Andrew Hudson.

We do have a question for you listeners, but before we read the correct question, I'm gonna take everybody off guard here and since it's

October and it's Pastor Appreciation Month, we're gonna say one thing that we're thankful for, at least one thing that we're thankful for, for Pastor Michael.

Dave, you're going first. I am very thankful for the spirit of discussion that you allow for in our church.

I've mentioned this to you a couple of times, but something that I mentioned to visitors when they come here is that you don't have to be in lockstep with our pastor, with Michael.

You're allowed to disagree, you know, do it substantially, do it respectfully, and you can have discussions.

I've been in churches where that's not allowed, or if you disagree, you're immediately being divisive, and you don't take it that way.

You've even come up to me and thanked me for a piercing question that I might have asked that other people would take offense to.

You always welcome that, and that's something that I think visitors appreciate, especially if they've been burned in other churches.

So I just want to say thank you for allowing me to ask those kinds of questions and creating that spirit of open discussion around the

Word of God. So thank you. Pastor Lord. In the same vein, I'm thankful for just the commitment to the freedom we have in Christ and modeling what that looks like when you have people of various convictions, doctrines, things they're working through, they're reading and trying to figure out.

And I know I was on the fence about a couple of issues when I came here, and it wasn't a hard light in the sand.

You just said, this is the way I see it, but your convictions are a real thing, and you follow your conviction, and you've got the freedom to do that.

It's not worth fighting over. But then that just allowed for a great amount of freedom to work through it, to let the

Spirit work. And I was very grateful for that, so I appreciate that. Well, first off,

I'm grateful to God for Michael and that he's a beloved brother in many different ways.

But as pastor, as my elder brother and shepherd,

I see every which way I look, his dedication to actually shepherding in word and in deed,

I could think of no other way to honor him than to say that he is truly my pastor.

Amen. So one thing I've been really thankful for, having not been really injected into church life elsewhere for very long as a

Christian, or even growing up, I would say that we have a lot of agreement around the table.

Something that has been discussed in the questions that have been given us to podcasts is there's not a lot of disagreement, there's a lot of unity, there's a lot of connection between you guys.

Yes, there's that. But one of the things I like to do is I like to watch men in crisis mode or stressful situations.

And I would say over the past five or six years, however long we've been here now, there's been some difficult times, whether it's been here at the church or with your family.

And you have kept the exact same focus and frame throughout.

I've seen in other churches where pastors will wilt to one side or the other. And I do know that this is mostly a thing where the

Lord, by his Spirit, allows you to keep that frame, to keep that focus on Christ.

And it's something I haven't seen elsewhere. And I think that has been the most refreshing and emboldening and encouraging thing to see in a leader.

Because it's easy to lead when the things are going well and everything's going well.

It's very difficult to lead when things are in crisis mode. It's very hard to keep the frame of not reacting improperly or not playing the man when times are difficult.

And I know you have that posted somewhere in the office, play the man, Mr. Ridley. I do think you have taken that.

And as we all have points in Christian history that we really enjoy,

I think the Lord has done a wonderful work in you to keep you there and to sustain you there on playing the man, come what may, with our body and our church.

And I think it creates a unity. I think it creates a strong core for families to remember is here, that their pastor and their elders, with one mind, they all play the man and they follow their

Savior in that. So that's what I'm extremely thankful for. There's a lot of things that we're all thankful for, but I know those are just a few things that that we want to be thankful for during this

Pastor Appreciation Month. But without further ado, and since I dropped that unexpectedly on everybody, we'll get to the question.

This question, it's one question but with many considerations. The first one being out of, they're quoting 2

Timothy 3 16, but I'm gonna go ahead and read 17 as well. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Now the questioner says he knows people that struggle with this verse for the following reasons.

The first being a perspective is that men who wrote the Bible were sinners, and if so, how can we be sure that all the writings of theirs were

God -breathed? Secondly, a struggle for many is what does the word all include for 2nd

Timothy 3 16? Catholicism has extra books or a different canon, the

Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. Did we forget something or is there more? The third consideration, a thought is if, a thought is if 1st

Corinthians 1 18 says the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, and we have the

Holy Spirit interpret the Word of God to us, then does God communicate to us through the Holy Spirit outside of Scripture, and if so, are we to take that as credible?

The bottom line question, where should we draw the line on what communications should come to us as the

Word of God or Scripture? And I think they're saying like THE Word of God or capital

S or Scripture. So, Michael, you want to start us off? Sure. So, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the question, and it's a great one to to give space and opportunity to fully work out, because very often when you're talking with someone and you're in disagreement about one particular issue or another, sometimes you're talking past each other already, and then you have to, if you have the opportunity, you've got to back up and get to an earlier discussion point, and this is usually one of those earlier ones.

How do we know what is the Word of God, and how is that defined?

How are we to trust it? And what if somebody says, well,

I have a Word of God that's different than yours? What is ultimately a question of authority?

You know, by what standard is it? It's a fine question to ask, and then when you say what your standard is, then the follow -up question of that is, by what standard is that the standard?

Okay, so that's essentially what this question is about, and the question is broken up into these three different considerations, but I want to just note the frame.

I know where the questioner says, I know people who struggle with this verse for the following reasons. Okay, so the first concern is that men who wrote the

Bible were sinners. I would be curious to find out, how do you know that those men were sinners, all of them?

Probably because the Bible tells you they are, and I'm not being flippant here, but just recognizing the fact of how dependent we are upon the

Scriptures already, and the idea is, if we know that the men who wrote the

Bible are sinners because the Bible tells us so, the Bible is also telling us why that's a problem, right?

That sinners are going to get things wrong, and they're going to be errant in their thinking and in their ways from God, because God is the ultimate righteous standard.

But again, how do we know that? We know that because of the

Scriptures. Already you can tell the quandary that you're in, but I don't think that the question is wrong.

I think that it needs to be asked. If the fact of the matter is that the over 40 different authors who wrote these

Scriptures over a 1 ,500 -year time period in three different languages on three different continents, how can we be sure that ultimately what we have is true, accurate, that there are no errors?

Can we really affirm the inerrancy and infallibility of inspiration?

The basic argument is, since the Bible says it is God -breathed and inspired by God, as 2

Peter 1 says, holy men were moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along, borne along by the

Holy Spirit, the idea is that everything that they wrote down, even though they themselves are fallible, even though the men themselves are sinners, that the

Holy Spirit moved these holy men. 2 Timothy chapter 1. 2

Peter chapter 1. That they were moved by the Holy Spirit so that what they wrote, the idea is that everything that they wrote is that God's truth is superintended in everything that they write, exactly as it should be.

And this is where Jesus argues about the jot and the tittle of the law, the smallest stroke, the smallest letter of the law is precise.

Jesus made his arguments to the Sadducees based on the tense of the verb, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Paul made his argument for Christ based on the number of seed, singular, not plural.

And so the Bible itself, in dealing with Scripture, is concerned down to the smallest stroke that all of it is true, that it was brought forward by God, and therefore if it's

God's Word and that there was a true working through men, it's a fully human book, yes, but it's also a fully divine book.

And that the humanity of the work by no means takes away from the divinity of the work, and so that we can trust that it is indeed without error, and is unfailing, and that it is full of truth.

When we read in 2 Timothy 3 .16, I can see how people would struggle with that verse if they're thinking, well, you know,

Paul probably got some things wrong, Paul wasn't perfect, Paul had some errors in his thinking at some point, so how do we know that that doesn't seep in?

Well, it would be because we have a testimony of the Scriptures concerning the

Scriptures, that they're without error. Well, that's circular reasoning. So, well, what's the basis of your, what's the basis of your authority?

And that's why we're getting back to the the nuts and bolts of the question, it's about authority. By what standard, but then, by what standard is your standard the standard?

The questioner continues, a struggle for many is, what does the word all?

All Scripture is God breathed. In 2 Timothy 3 .16, yes, Catholicism has extra books in, so if you pick up a

New Jerusalem Bible, you're gonna find more books than 66 in there. There's going to be books from the

Apocrypha that are in there. When they mentioned Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, they're gonna say, well, there are books there that were preserved that were not of the

Old Testament canon. For that, you're gonna have to do probably a little bit more study to understand how it is that we ended up with these books.

In Judaism, well, let's just say in the preservation of the

Old Testament by the scribes, they recognized 22, a 22 book canon, and later rejected other writings as uninspired.

So, but there was the Tanakh, so you think about the Pentateuch, that the law, okay, there was the law, and then there were the writings, and then the prophets.

So the law, the Torah, the prophets, the Nevi 'im, and then the writings, the Kethuvim. We think of the minor prophets, that was, they called it the

Book of the Twelve. It's all one, you know. So they consolidated, you know, these things. Some of those books were consolidated, where we say 1st and 2nd

Samuel, that's because they were just, they had to have two scrolls, you know. So the way that they counted it up, but it's important to see that when they brought all their scrolls together, they recognized that there were other books written.

But people like Philo and Josephus recognized, these are the ones that are Scripture, and the other ones are not.

You have early church fathers who separated the Apocrypha from canonical books.

You can think of Melito Sardis, you can think of different church councils, and they would say, this is what

Scripture is, but these are non -scriptural books, good for edification. Now, again, if you take that argument, what are you doing?

You're looking back at tradition, you're looking back at history, and you're deriving your argument based from records, you know, maybe archaeology, and so on, and trying to make an argument from that.

But one of my questions, maybe to you guys, you can chime in here, is, isn't there a danger if you make tradition and archaeology the standard by which your standard stands?

Well, that's the argument of the Roman Catholic Church. They say, it's the church that gave us the Bible, how can you still a scriptural people claim that when it's actually by church authority and church recognition, and the special authority given through the successor of Peter and the

Magisterium itself to help us recognize what these books are, thus making them the standard versus the

Word of God the standard, which is the irony of it. And what they're saying is, the Roman Catholic Church is the one that gave us the

Bible, right? They're not, yeah, so, like, they're not saying, like, it's preserved through believers, which we would agree with, right?

Like, through the church Catholic, we agree that it has been preserved. Lowercase c. Yes, correct.

But yeah, the argument they make is the Roman Catholic Church, the Magisterium, and the authority given to the successor of Peter, that's their standard.

Yeah. So, because of that, you'll find developed throughout a

Protestant thought, the internal defense of the Scriptures. How do we know that these 66 books are the

Word of God? Well, one way that we can observe that is when we are reading the

Scriptures, and we can, through several readings on our own, we're going to detect that there's a difference between these books and others.

We're going to detect that in two ways. One of them is going to be, if obviously the most important one, is that the witness of the

Holy Spirit, okay? Now, some people will find that a dissatisfying answer. However, it's an actual answer.

It sounds so charismatic, doesn't it? I mean, what about the burning in my heart? I mean, isn't that how

I determine truth? Right. So, there's going to be...so, but then there's a confusion between...right,

but there's going to be somewhat a confusion between inability to necessarily distinguish between emotions and the assurance of the

Spirit, because there's going to be a lot of conflation of those things in modern parlance, and in modern evangelicalism, even, not just charismatic movements.

There's going to be a confusion of emotion and the work of the Holy Spirit, and that assurance.

But throughout the...it has been the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives as Christians is the reason why we have the books that we have.

And this could go back, and you could see the early Christians who were dying for their faith, willing to protect certain books, but not others, and under persecution.

And again, that's not an argument from history. It's just an acknowledgment that Christians recognize by the

Holy Spirit. In general, I'm saying that this is part of how we identify the Bible, is that the

Holy Spirit gives witness to the truth in the Scripture, that there's an amen in our lives, in our hearts, to the truth of Scripture.

That's not all we're saying, but I think it's an important acknowledgment to have.

That they are self -authenticating? Yes, but not necessarily, like, in terms of, like, maybe an evidentiary argument that, you know, simply by observing the data, it proves itself.

Because the way that the Bible is described, in terms of being God -breathed, that holy men moved by the

Holy Spirit brought us this, and that the Scriptures are inspired, and that the Holy Spirit indwells

Christians, we have the living God, Holy Spirit himself, bringing the amen to us, that these are the words of God.

One other way we recognize that these are the Scriptures, and the reason why some of the books that, you know, you mentioned from the

Apocrypha are left out, is because of their harmony and their agreement, and then there are books that are obviously full of falsehoods and lies, go against the message of the

Scriptures at large, even are self -contradictory, and by definition, none of that can be the

Word of God. Yeah, well, and even in the question, I think the first part of it talked about all of the writings of the

Apostles, or all of the writings. Well, we don't even use all of the writing of the Apostles, because in 1

Corinthians, Paul says, my previous letter.

Sure. Well, that's not considered Scripture, so we're not saying everything they wrote was infallible or inspired by God, but the things that are in Scripture are the things that are, that God wanted preserved.

So we do have something in Scripture that tells us that we do have the ability to discern truth and error.

We have 1 John 2 .27, which does say, but the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you, but as his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it taught you, abide in him.

The idea being that John, as their teacher, is telling them that they don't need a teacher.

That doesn't mean that we don't have pastors, so we don't have teachers and elders and stuff, because so much of other Scripture says that we do.

They're actually God given to us. They are blessings from the Lord to us. What John is getting at here is that they have the ability to say, look, you don't need these teachers coming in to give you this new stuff.

You have the ability, because you have the Holy Spirit, to discern truth from error. You don't need these people coming in.

So you see that, see it in context, but 1 John is telling you that you have the ability to know truth and error, so I think that's in the same vein as knowing what is

Scripture and what it's not. And one of the interesting things about that passage in 1

John 2 and in 2 Peter 1 and in 2 Timothy chapter 3 or John 5, in many of the places that we would look where Scripture is being defined, affirmed, and declared to be our authority, the subject matter at hand is the clarity of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

So right before 2 Timothy 3 .16 we have 3 .15,

Paul is saying, these are the Scriptures that are sufficient to make you wise into salvation.

Salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ. 2 Peter chapter 1 says, we did not follow, verse 16, we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ, but we are eyewitnesses of his majesty, for he received from God the

Father honor and glory when such a voice came to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you would do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place.

So where should we look? To the word, to the Scriptures, to the prophetic word that is fulfilled.

All the promises of God in Christ are yes. In 1 John chapter 2 the question is, you know, how do you know what's true and what's false?

Well, you have an anointing, but what was the subject matter at hand there in the second half of 1 John 2? He's talking about knowing what is

Antichrist. Yeah. Who's defining who is Antichrist. Yeah, defining Antichrist. Antichrist is the one who denies the true person of Jesus Christ.

So when we're thinking about that, when we're thinking about the prophecies of Scripture and so on, that's why

Peter says, knowing that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the

Holy Spirit. Who is the Holy Spirit? He is the Spirit of Christ. I'm glad you brought it back to that because it reminds me of the kind of metaphorical explanation that Christ has for this, where he says,

I am the Good Shepherd and my sheep hear my voice. Yes. Right, like they know my word because they know who

I am. Yes. So this is where when Jesus was talking to the

Jews, you search the Scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life, right? So they're saying, okay, these are the words of God, they're set apart, these are special, and we're going to go find all the codes for living there.

We're going to find everything we need for life there. This is where we're going to find the secrets that we need.

And many people have that attitude about the Bible, right? And they have that same concept from the movie in the

Book of Eli, you know, it's like, you got to have the book, you got to have the power book, right? You know, it's all superstitious.

It's all superstitious. Why is the Bible so full of authority and life and light?

Because the Bible is so full of Christ. That's why. These other books that are left out are left out because they're not about Christ.

They're not full of Christ. They're not exalting him. They're not... Everywhere in the

Scriptures, the Father speaks of the Son by the Spirit. That's why it's all authoritative.

That's why it's all bright. That's why it's all true. That's why it's all coherent. Even somebody as pagan as Jordan Peterson comments about the

Bible is massively... it's like, to borrow an anachronism, is the most hyperlinked document in all of human history, to a degree that it's impossible for any human to ever engineer it.

Why is it so integrated and so harmonious and so... because it's about...

it's all about Jesus Christ. So that's where you're going to have to recognize why some books are not other books.

Well, it's not about a church council. It's about Jesus Christ. Why is there the internal witness of the

Spirit amening Habakkuk, but not 2nd

Esdras or something? Why not? Because here we have the glories of Christ.

And this is what the Spirit magnifies. He magnifies Christ in the

Scriptures, warming that to us, and we respond as we are being remade in his image.

And yes, of course, the questioner is correct to draw attention to the fact that it is the

Holy Spirit who has to open our eyes, right? I mean,

Paul laments his countrymen who read the Scriptures with a veil over their face, but the veil is lifted in Christ.

And so it is true that if we're outside of Christ and without the

Holy Spirit, we're going to lack a lot of assurance and clarity about what is

Holy Scripture and what is not Holy Scripture. Now there are...

I appreciate you starting there, because that's not where I went initially.

I went to evidence and I went to, here's the data and here's all the cross -references, and that is useless without the foundation that you just laid.

This question has a lot of good sub -sections to it.

He references the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those, if you're not familiar what those are, those were discovered in 1947 in Qumran by the

Essenenes. They were this Jewish apocalyptic cult that basically died out right after the temple was destroyed.

But a lot of their writings were preserved and found in caves in Qumran, and then they've translated a lot of them, and one of them was a copper scroll of Isaiah that showed that it was even more reliable than the

Masoretic text that we have. I think Andrew knows more about that. But it just showed the reliability of a lot of the writings that we have, but of course they included other ones that were just off the wall.

You have another group of texts, the Nag Hammadi Codex, written, they were

Coptic translations of Gnostic texts, and a lot of the

Gnostic Gospels that we have today came from that Nag Hammadi. There was a Codex, which means a book versus a scroll, found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

I actually wrote a paper on that, and how you have all these

Gnostic Gospels, and then you have the four Gospels that we have, and they're called the

Lost Gospels, and people like Bart Urban and others are saying, hey, these are just as valid.

Read them for yourself, and they are not. I mean, they're mutually exclusive. They both can't be correct.

Then you have all sorts of theories about Constantine. Well, these are the books that he chose.

One, read them for yourself, and you can see the difference in character. So the picture of Christ that the

Gnostics paint is so mystical. I think there's one, I don't know if it's the Gospel of Thomas or the

Gospel of Peter, where the Gnostics had a low view of women, and at one point they said, how will this woman be saved?

He says, oh, don't worry, in the afterlife she'll become a man, and then that's how she's going to be saved. You know, it's just ludicrous.

And the scriptures, the Christian scriptures that we have, the Bible doesn't speak about women like that. They're created exactly as they are in the image of God.

So I appreciate you bringing up Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Codex, or of Nag Hammadi, or these others.

I wrote the Deuterocanical books, Bell and the Dragon, I mean, others. Holding these up side -by -side with the canon that we have, there is a night -and -day difference, just in the character of the writing itself.

They have to be mutually exclusive. You can't say, well, you know, there's a little bit of truth in both. No, they're actually mutually exclusive for each other.

If you want to get into some of the history and some of the data, Michael Kruger has written a number of books on the canon.

Vodie Bauckham has this amazing quote on why he says, this is why

I trust the Bible. And he goes through it, and it's really amazing. There's YouTube videos of him doing it, and breaks down each one of those statements.

So there is data that you can go and look at that will help you. But if you're like Bart Ehrman, or Walter Bauer, who's called the

Bauer thesis, that there were geographical areas where certain texts won out over others, and the ones that we have today are just the most powerful, if you don't believe the

Scriptures from the start, then you're going to gravitate towards that. He's an apostate.

That's what he is. But Michael is correct that the starting point is, it's actually having the

Holy Spirit in you. And taking on this question, what we're trying to do is build your confidence in the

Scriptures. We're trying to build up your faith in the Word of God. We're trying to remind you that if you're filled with the

Spirit, you hear the Shepherd's voice. One of the things I'm like, then bringing up the questioner, bringing up Dead Sea Scrolls, other bodies of text.

We have a Protestant set of base texts that we use to translate our

Bible. Catholics have. Is that what they're trying to ask in this question? Are they trying to ask, why would we use a different base text than Catholicism?

Or the variations that may be used for...? Well, I think the questioner is moving towards, of course, their bottom line.

So their bottom line is, where should we draw the line on what communication should come to us as the

Word of God or Scripture? And this, again, I think that the setup questions are, the people who wrote the

Bible were sinners. Well, so are we. And we recognize that the

Protestants say, this many books. The Catholics say, more books. And then, as you point out,

David, there are other books that people say got left out, that not even the Catholics would say were good.

But others say they should be included. To me, this questioner is moving towards this bottom line.

Why are we saying that the Word of God is contained by any canon?

Why isn't the Word of God broader than the biblical canon?

Why can it be that the Word of God comes by the Holy Spirit to a sinner like me, and I can have direct, special revelation like the prophets and the apostles of old?

I think that's really where the question is going. Okay, so it's not... I had it a little mixed up because they threw that in there, and I had in my head that...

Because even in the books that Catholics and Protestants agree on, they're using different base texts to translate into your

English version or your Spanish version or whatever. Can you define that? What do you mean by base texts? Well, I mean, like, depending upon what the translating committee views as what they want to use as their...

as the group of texts that they want to use to translate from, right? Like, because you have all the different schools, you know, you have either the

Masoretic text, or text from Alexandria, or, you know, so that's what I'm saying, like...

Families? Yes, families. So you have different manuscript families, and we don't agree even with Catholics on all that across the table, or the

Orthodox for that matter, you know? Like, so that's what I was asking, but you're saying that the question's going in a different direction, as in, it has canon stopped, basically, or...

And I'm sure, and again, the question's not even going to... Probably it's not prejudiced against a canon per se, but if canon means the

Holy Spirit does not speak God's Word to me anymore, then, you know, then one of my...

Then all these... There are a lot of people out there that, you know, God told me this, and God told me that, and I woke up this morning, and God told me this, and so that's how

I'm gonna live my life now. And God gave me this project, I'm gonna work on that for the next two months. I'm being led and directed by God.

I'm trying to obey God. God gives me His Word, I obey. Sometimes He gives me the Word through a feeling, through a verse, just kind of out of the blue, sometimes through a conversation that somebody drops some sort of line in my life.

Through a stone and a hat. Well, you know, but there's a lot of...

Yeah, yeah. But seriously, there's... When we think about things in history, about how certain people got started on their divergence away from the

Bible, we reckon... We look at that, but there's a whole lot of people who...

I mean, they love the Bible, but they also... Part of their living and active Christian experience is believing that God is speaking to me directly to go do this and go do that, and then

I follow through on that. Well, and that can be very difficult when you don't know. Like, I can't move until I get a word.

Yeah, there could be... For pastoral, from a pastoral perspective, that can be extremely burdensome, especially if somebody comes to you and says that they have a word of the

Lord and you believe it, all of a sudden you're under obligations and burdens that you shouldn't be, or you're waiting around for the

Word to move and you can't, or you got the wrong idea, and then you're overly burdening yourself about things that Jesus never put on you.

And this is why I'm saying that when we think about the completeness of the Word of God...

I mean, what did Paul say to Timothy? And Timothy's a young man, okay? He's in pastoral ministry.

What does Paul affirm to him? All Scripture is God -breathed, profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, training, and righteousness.

Meaning, it's good to tell you what's true, where you're wrong, how to get right, how to live God's way.

And then he says in verse 17, like, I appreciate, Dylan, you read in verse 17, that the

Scripture, this all -sufficient Scripture, it trains you completely.

Everything you need. Complete everything you need for godliness. There's an expression, you know, everything we need for faith and faith and practice that we find in the

Scriptures. It doesn't tell you how to mow your... it doesn't tell you how to repair your lawnmower, but it does tell you what kind of mindset and attitude and, you know, everything, how you should be thinking and praising and so on while you mow your lawn.

And so it's as... Don't run over your neighbor's cat. Yeah. And you and others have done unto you.

Yeah. And if you do, repay him fourfold, give him four cats. Be biblical.

Be biblical. Touché. But the completeness of the Word of God in our lives is like, do we need a word outside of Scripture?

According to Scripture, we don't. So this is where you have your dividing line, right? So Scripture says, everything you need to follow

Jesus is right here in the Scriptures. And then if you say, I think I need more, then you're in disagreement with the

Scriptures. Do you see where you're at? There's a quandary there. Additionally, then you say, okay, fine,

I'll grant you that, but then how do we know which is which? But again, it comes back to what are the

Scriptures that testify of Christ? The last book in the Bible says, don't out or take away.

There is a completeness to the Scriptures. Even Daniel 9, it talks about the sealing up of all prophecy and everything being tied off by the end of the judgment that takes away the

Old Covenant. So all of Scripture was written, the New Testament was written before the cessation of the Old Covenant, and it was there to talk to us about how

Christ is the satisfying fulfillment of everything that has been written, right? He says, these that testify of me,

Moses, the Law, and the Prophets, the writings, they're all about me. All of God's promises are yes in Christ.

And this is what we've got to remember. The reason why God came to the Prophets, the reason why God came to the Apostles, and the reason why all this special direct revelation came to them, and all these really neat cool stories in the

Scriptures, is ultimately because it was all about glorifying and magnifying Christ and giving to, giving to the saints all that we need to worship

Christ and follow Him. Now, am I deprived?

Am I living a lesser Christian experience if I don't have direct special revelation from God through a vision or a dream?

No, I'm not. I'm actually in a far better place than the Prophets were.

I'm in a far better place than the Apostles were. I've been given something greater than they ever had, because none of them ever sat there with a complete leather -bound, oilskin translation with a couple of thousand years of editing refinement so that I could read it easily with cross references.

They never had that, but I have it. I don't feel deprived. Yeah. When we originally listened to the question,

I thought it was going a different direction as well. I thought it was going into kind of picking apart the canon.

How can we trust the books that are in there? And then, separately, the ones that are, how can we trust that those are correct?

Yeah. Yeah, because at the end, I was reading, like, I was reading the Word of God, the Scriptures, like, so, like, what set of texts is the

Word of God? That's what I had in my head, but I think it actually makes more sense the way... Some of the, some of the arguments

I've heard thrown out, like, when questioning the Scriptures, like, how can we know that they're true as far as, like, being passed down over time?

So, one of the issues I heard people throw out is, like, it's like the telephone game.

If you ever play a telephone game, it was given to one person, but when they try to give it to the next one, and by the time you get to the end of the game, it doesn't even sound the same.

That's like Scripture. But that falls apart because, one, it's a game, and teenage kids are apt to have fun with it, so things get changed intentionally because that's the point of the game, versus people who were wanting to shout this, not whisper it, shout it from the rooftops and being willing to die for it, making copies of it.

It's not just oral, it's copies of it, multiple copies of it. And then the idea that it could be changed, you would have to find every single copy and change all the copies.

Or, like, I believe with the Quran, where they gathered the copies, burned them, and then started from scratch. And so you can't verify what was actually written before that, because there aren't many copies.

Are you saying it's impossible to defraud the public ledger? Yes. Decentralized.

I don't think God allows his sheep to play the telephone game. Right. That's our presupposition, is that the telephone game doesn't work because, at the outset, we don't think that's allowed.

Yeah. Deception is not part of the Christian tradition in passing down scriptures to your children or family or church members.

Yeah. But I would say part of this is the underlining apologetic. What do you do if you're a follower of Christ, you're a

Christian, but you also have perhaps a charismatic background? So you're just very, very accustomed to people talking about how

God speaks to me directly to live this way or think this way or feel this way. Then someone comes to you and challenges the reliability of the

Bible. What if there's mistakes? You know, these guys were obviously, you know, not perfect.

You're not saying that they're perfect. You're saying that they were sinners. Obviously, they can get stuff wrong in the scriptures.

Can you really, really trust this? And what about all these other books? What about the Catholics? What about the other writings?

A defense, an apologetic for a charismatic Christian would be, I don't have to worry about that.

It's not like God has stopped speaking. Okay? All right? So if the claim comes then to the charismatic

Christian says, well, actually, God does not directly give special revelation like that anymore.

It's capped off with the scriptures. Then you're thrown back into this need to defend the scripture, the reliability of the scriptures.

How do I know that that's actually the Word of God? And why isn't it the fact that he still speaks this way today?

Why can't it be that way? Well, the scripture doesn't testify to that. The scripture expects a culminating completion themselves.

And so you're just gonna have to read that for yourself. You're gonna have to read the scriptures themselves and see whether or not this is the case.

This is so. But it adds another problem to it.

Okay? We are given in the scriptures the tests to see whether or not something is truly of God.

The test of true prophecy in Deuteronomy 18. Whether it comes true. Whether it comes true.

Okay? And whether it's in agreement with everything else that God has said. Because he does say someone could give a sign that comes to pass, but then they say, worship

Baal. And that's not in agreement with what actually says in the scriptures. So when we're given the test what true prophecy is, it tells us what?

That it has to be something that's already said in the Bible. And it can't be something that fails to come to pass.

All right? What's the old saying then? Are you saying that these words of Lord that are coming to you are basically something that's already in the

Bible? Then why do you need it? And if it's something in disagreement with the scriptures, then

I don't need it. Yeah. That's kind of where we're at, right? There is a place for the scholarship.

This is how we got the Bible, how it was transmitted. And I think

Bockham, and Kruger, and others address that the common critique of the telephone game, this is not like one person told one person told one person told words in a circle.

That's not historically accurate. They had one person told ten people, and then those ten people told ten people, and it wasn't just told, it was written.

So you have the ability to look at each of those ten, compare them with each other, and then compare the other ten of each of those tens, and then you have this exponential, just this explosion of these texts that can be compared with each other, and it's called textual criticism, and you can see where those, oh, this guy missed a line here, or this is a number transposed, because 90 % of them say this, and there's this small section, oh, that's an obvious error.

That's very different in character from a, quote -unquote, telephone game that you play audibly around a circle.

You can still disagree, that it's, say, hey, whether or not it's true, but what you can't say is whether or not it hasn't been reliably transmitted.

That can't be the argument, because that is historically inaccurate. And that's how,

I think, some of those books that talk about the canon and how we got it can be useful.

It's not going to give you faith, but if you have faith, and you are a Christian, and you're looking for some help in shoring up your trust in the

Scriptures that we have in our hands today, some of those resources, I think, can be very helpful to you.

Yeah. And again, I think it's kind of the practical engagements that all kinds of people are going to have at their workplace, with family members, and so on.

My son talked about how things came up. Everyone could tell that he wasn't profane, and he wasn't perverted.

So they're like, what, you go to church? He's working with a bunch of electricians. And so stuff comes up about church, religion, or the

Bible, and of course, they start talking about the Book of Enoch. Really? Like, right, yeah.

Because, I mean, you watch the Noah film, right? It's about stone giants and really cool stuff in the

Book of Enoch, you know? The Philemon. It's like, why are you talking about the Book of Enoch? He's like, well, what about the

Book of Enoch? That got left out of the Bible, you know? The reason why they're talking about the Book of Enoch is because they don't want to talk about the

Bible. It's like, they would prefer to talk about the Book of Enoch than to know what was in the

Scriptures and to read the Scriptures for what they are. It's a wonderful red herring. So just something to keep in mind.

It's like, when people want to talk about books outside the Bible, it's like, I think probably the best thing to do is to actually read the

Bible before you start talking about so -called books that were left out. Because, as we say, the comparison, you can tell why once you know them both.

A lot of their arguments today on why books were left out of the, say, the New Testament or the Gnostic Gospels come more from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code than from good scholarship or a legitimate argument.

That wasn't real? Did you see the movie, Tom Hanks? I read the book. I did too.

I really did. I really did read the book. It is a compelling read, which I started to look at it.

And at that time, I hadn't been a Christian more in a couple of years, and I was like, okay,

I'm going to dive into this. I really want to know how the canon came about. And my own brother, who

I love dearly, who is not a believer in the Bible, brought up Constantine.

I don't know if I ever told you guys this, he brought up Constantine, and that's why we have the

Bible that we have. So when I wrote my thesis, I wrote it for my brother, who still hasn't read it.

It's been 15 years. But I wrote it for him in answer to his question on how you would know some kind of test between the

Gnostic scriptures and the New Testament canon. Just see the difference.

How would you really know? As it turns out, you've got about 100, 150 years of difference between the two of them.

There are no Gnostic scriptures from the first century. Yeah, weren't those the days when you had a nicely packaged controversy one at a time?

They were so streamlined back then. I loved it. It's like, here comes Dan Brown and the

Shaq. It was so nice, one major thing at a time.

The timeline happened in years and not seconds. Yeah, it does. I really appreciated that. I don't know what, something happened to the algorithm, man.

AI. AI heresy. Oh, gosh. Well, I think we have said what we planned to say on that subject for the time being, unless there's more questions.

Because this was actually a pretty wide -ranging, especially with the different things that were said about it.

What do you want to say? I did have one more point. We talked about the witness of the Holy Spirit. But then also, several times,

Old Testament and New Testament, they talked about the testimony of two witnesses. And you have places where the apostles are affirming each other as writing

Scripture. That's through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, some of the things

Paul writes are hard, but they're Scripture. And then you've got other places where they're attesting to writing

Scripture. And then also, the fact that the apostles themselves were working miracles.

In one place, it says it's the sign of the apostles who were working miracles.

But like you said, it was always pointing back to Christ. When you go through, I did a study on it, because people are saying,

I have to speak in tongues or I have to work miracles. When I looked at the instances of miracles happening, either a message was given about Christ, and then he did miracles to verify, or he would do miracles and crowd together, and then there'd be a message about Christ and who

Christ was. It was always pointing to who he was, what he was doing, and that was the purpose of the miracles, to verify that what they were saying was coming from God.

Yeah, there's a difference between signs and then God not being bound by the laws of his own universe.

I know that the Holy Spirit can still prompt and convict—in fact, that's the ministry of the

Holy Spirit—and to bring to mind the things that Jesus has said. And so I can be prompted by the

Holy Spirit. I'm not saying that God doesn't actively work in our lives. I still believe that God heals.

I pray for healing in all manner of situations. I think God still heals and still befuddles doctors. I still think that God does all kinds of things like that.

I'm not saying that God no longer is active in our world when we're answering this question.

What we're saying is, these miracles, these were signs authenticating the apostles as the authorized, sent -out ones from Christ, bringing forth

Holy Scripture, and that this was anticipated. So again, I would encourage more reading, more study, especially books by Michael Kruger, going to be super interesting and helpful.

But there was an expectation for the canon to be completed in the ministry of the Messiah. And he is, again, the satisfying fulfillment of everything that God has said about who he is and what the world's all about.

What else do we need outside of him? Do we want to have an argument on the earlier or the late date of Revelation?

Well, I don't think it's much of an argument. I think we should end it there.

But like I said, whoever the questioner is, if you have other things that you heard from us, or you go out and you see some of these, or you pick up some of these resources that we were throwing out earlier, and you have other questions, toss them our way.

This is actually a topic that we like to really dig into, because we do find that this should be very edifying to all the saints out there that listen.

But we're going to move on to what our recommendation is. Our recommendation is a book called The Great Exchange by Jerry Bridges and Bob Bethington.

And this will take you through a good chunk of the

New Testament. And you're going to find passage after passage talking about the nature of the atonement.

They're going to give you a few chapters of background and summary.

And then after that, they're going to walk you through the epistles.

So after giving you some summary of the Gospels and Acts and the Prophets about the Great Exchange, Christ for us in our place and for our sake, the whole idea of sacrifice, they're going to walk you through every passage that talks about that Great Exchange throughout all the different books of the

New Testament from Romans to Revelation. Okay. So they give you some summaries of the other passages and talk about other biblical works that have done that well.

And they say, you know, here is something lacking. We want to take you through all the passages, Romans through Revelation, where it talks about that Great Exchange, Jesus for us, his blood for us, his sacrifice for us.

And what I like about it is that you can read it devotionally. So read their commentary on one passage for that day, and then come back the next day and read the next one.

And so I think it's a very effective, devotional, and encouraging work. And I think it fits a little bit with our topic today, because it will bring to mind how central the gospel of Jesus Christ is for the message of the whole

Scripture. It's everywhere. Does that go into different theories of the atonement, or is it pretty much penal substitution?

I think they may. It's been a while since I've read it. I think they go over some of the broader themes of that.

However, just surveying the texts, you can't...

I mean, if you just read it for yourself, you can't end up anywhere other than penal substitutionary atonement. I mean, it may be disgusting to you, but you have to walk away and say, that's the message of the

Bible. I mean, it's fairly evident. Dave? Earlier this week,

I had the privilege of teaching on Psalm 118. I pulled a book off my shelf by a man called

George Zemeck. Dr. Zemeck was an elder at the church

I went to years ago in Little Rock, the Bible Church of Little Rock. Dr. Z taught at the

Master's Seminary. He was one of the early professors there. The joke was, everybody said, oh, you've got to take

Dr. Z's class. You have to. Anything he teaches, oh, what does he teach on? Well, everything.

He was just an amazing guy, an incredible man. I had the privilege of being in one of his Sunday school classes, and of course, they sold his books in their bookstore.

He was just a really gifted man. One of the books that he wrote is called Roadmaps for the

Psalms, inductive preaching outlines based on the Hebrew text. So the outline that I put up was largely his.

I mean, I adapted it a little bit. I changed some of the words, just kind of shortened things.

I added a few things, but 90 % of it was his. And as I was flipping through the

Psalms, outlines just helped me. They said, okay, that's the basic flow.

Oh, I'm seeing the change in tone. Oh, this is the basic idea.

And when you're reading text like this, this ancient literature, having kind of a roadmap in front of you is helpful.

So Roadmap for the Psalms by George Zemeck, if you are going to teach through that or just read through the

Psalms yourself or you're, you know, say, oh, this one's a little foreign to me.

You can pull out this book, gives you this, okay, now I can dive in into the details because I have the basic flow,

I have the basic context, and I always found that to be very helpful. Chris? I've been up to my ears with blue cheese, so I don't have any recommends.

How's the house, man? It's there. It's still standing. So. All right.

Der Judenstaat was written by Theodor Herzl. There's been a lot of newsworthy events happening in Palestine.

And so a lot of things get said about the situation. And I thought

I would rather go to the source of the modern state of Israel and what they say about what that place is supposed to be.

And I found it very edifying to understand what it means to be a Jewish state and who it's for and why it was brought about.

Even the corporate structure of Israel is outlined in his pamphlet that was produced in 1896.

You can find it probably under the title, The Jewish State or The Jew's State or The Jew's State.

But yeah, a lot of things are still as they were then, as far as corporate structure, things have changed.

But it's very helpful to understand what Israel is.

What was the name of the author again? Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism.

Fun fact, the institute that brought the Moscow guys over to Israel recently is the

Herzl Institute. So when they made their trip over there, they were invited and brought over by the

Herzl Institute. And that was like who they had connections with to get over. Man, I'm envious.

You're... Wait, it's supposed to work the other direction. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. Deep cuts, deep cuts.

So my recommendation for this week is the Old Glory Club podcast, but specifically their podcast,

I guess what you would call a segment or kind of like a break -off subject is called

American Spirits. It goes through histories of America and they're trying to answer the question, what is an

American? So books that they go through are Albion Seed, Semagog, The American Language, Creating the

Commonwealth, The Flowering of New England, The Frontier in American History. And I think they're up to like 14 episodes or something like that right now.

They went through the Articles of Confederation too, which if you aren't aware of that history, that is extremely interesting.

And they're really not... What I appreciate about the podcast is they're not trying to take sides of any one issue that comes up because there have been vehement disagreements and fights that were already played out over these things in the past.

And what they're doing is they're trying to get the key players what their reasonings were, the context in which all this is happening, the people groups that they're having to deal with.

It's kind of like a drama that they're laying out. And they give the added context to books that they've read about it as well.

And they've got a native Oklahoman on the podcast regularly. His name is Ryan Turnipseed.

He works... Or he had some connections with the... What's the economic institute at Auburn?

Dave, help me out. Dr. Justin Marchegiani. Mises? Adam Antler. The Mises Institute. Thank you. I should have remembered that. He has some connections with them, but he has a pretty good depth of knowledge as a young man for with American history.

And it's really fun to go through it. And you may be knowing what side you...

You may go into it knowing what side you would have been on. And then a lot of the added context you're like, maybe not.

I don't know now. So knowing the background, knowing the history, knowing the reasons why certain issues were brought up is very helpful.

But the What is American series by American Spirits is what I would specifically recommend. And you get that through the

Old Glory Club podcast on YouTube. So why don't we go on to what we're thankful for,

Michael? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Well, I appreciate the way y 'all opened up the podcast.

But I'm thankful for my fellow elders here at Sunnyside Baptist Church.

I do not pastor alone. Thankful for Ryan and Ken and thankful for Randy and Brian.

We would have done something for them too, but they just didn't show up. Well, Ryan showed up, but he refuses to sit behind the mic. So no appreciation for that.

But I'm thankful. I'm thankful for these men. I do not pastor alone. And I could not be a good pastor here without them.

So there's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes that nobody sees.

I'm always getting put in front of everybody. But there's a lot that happens, and we do it together.

So I'm very thankful for them. Amen. Dave? So you really have on your office wall, play the man,

Mr. Ridley? Dr. Justin Marchegiani Be of good courage, Mr. Ridley, and play the man. I have that written.

You know how the football teams, they go running out, and they have the banner over their door, and they hit it?

Yeah, I got that. That's what's over my head. You do that? Every time you go into your—getting ready to preach?

Boom! Preach like a champion. I'll tell you through 2019 through 2021,

I did. Nice. That's why it was up there. Everything from the

Wokies to the government -mandated shutdowns, I was smacking that sign on my way out to the pulpit. Well, this will date the podcast, but today is

October 16th. And October 16th, 1555, that is when

Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned to the stake for their belief.

I mention that because I wanted to be thankful for men like that who helped give us the

Bible that we have today and stood strong for the truth that is in the

Scriptures, and played the man, and stood up for the truth against those who would try to silence it, keep the

Bible out of the English language, and tried to maintain a political hold using religion as the cudgel.

So I am very thankful for those men and women who came before us.

You could read about them in works like Fox's Book of Martyrs. So anyway,

I wanted to be very thankful for the heritage that we have. And not just a political hold, but a spiritual hold as well. Amen.

Yeah. Amen. Definitely that as well. Chris? I'm thankful for a body of believers from various churches that I can rely on as we go through just the growth of the family, different stages of life, as we get into having teenagers and then also young ones, and just that there are other families with children that have gone ahead, and I know that they're praying for me, and the wisdom that they have.

I'm grateful that God has instituted things in such a way that this is how

His world works, and that it's not every man for himself, and you've got to just figure it out on your own.

But you're born into a family, and you get that knowledge and wisdom from your parents, hopefully, and then as you grow up, there are other families who are in it with you, and there are other families that have gone before.

And they're there, you know, especially if they're like -minded and they're in the church, they're willing to help and willing to pray.

And I think that that is such a big help to know that they're coming before the throne room on your behalf for the things that you're going through, because they know what it's like.

So, I'm grateful for God's provision in families. Let me keep going down that lane.

My mother -in -law is in town with us visiting, and reflecting on faithfulness, it might be a strange thing to say, but I'm actually, my father -in -law, who has divorced his wife and set her aside,

I'm thankful for him in the sense that back when my wife was a child, and he was still with my mother -in -law, his wife,

I'm thankful for him and his faithfulness at that point in time. It might be a strange thing to think about, but the

Lord was preserving and gracious to Joyce and Emily during that time frame, and their kids, and he trained up his children in the way they should go.

They have not departed from it. And even if he has, I can be thankful for that, his faithfulness, and really the hand of the

Lord during that time frame. Praise the Lord for that. Yes. Amen. I've been thinking about reconciliation quite a bit recently, and how the

Lord gives us that, and how that does not happen in a vacuum, but it happens with the help, counsel, and wisdom of those who have reconciled with others before, or been part of reconciling brothers together.

But the end result of being able to reconcile and walk together in one mind, and being unified, especially when the goal is to magnify and glorify

Christ amongst his people, and to minister and help to those people as well.

If you have brothers at odds within a congregation, that work doesn't get done as easily.

It may get done, but it may be by others who are already reconciled. And those issues obviously need to be brought up and dealt with because you need brothers reconciled.

But there's second and third order effects that I was thinking about as I was thinking about reconciliation.

And without reconciliation, you start walking in quicksand. When you're trying to get the work done, you're not on asphalt anymore.

You're not riding on a bike or driving a truck and getting the work done. You're carrying the load in quicksand, trying to get it done, just turning your feet and getting nowhere.

So I'm extremely thankful for how reconciliation happens and how it practically works out within a body with counsel from elders, counsel from elder men, peers, and other brothers in Christ.

Because while we can do our best on our own from the scriptures, he's given us other means to help us.

And I'm very thankful for, one, reconciliation between brothers, but also the men that he surrounds us with in order to have that ministry of reconciliation be acted out for us.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Have You Not Read?