16 - Biblical Authority, Part 2

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

I am Andrew Rappaport. I will be your instructor today and you can get all kinds of information about striving for eternity at the website, strivingforeternity .org.

We're glad to have you with us. We welcome all of our new students, those who are watching for the first time maybe.

Well, you really want to start in the earlier classes just to get context, just saying. But this is our school of world religions.

In this school, we're focusing on the major western religions. This is going to be a, basically we've been doing a systematic theology through the major western religions.

This is starting now part two, which is a Christian response to the different religions.

In that, we are seeing in this particular lesson is

Christian authority. What is the authority that Christians have? When we look at things, where do we as Christians find the authority to say, thus says the

Lord? That's really what we want to get to, right? We want to get to the point of saying, when we say something, we can say it authoritatively.

We can say it because thus says the Lord. When we look at what

Christianity teaches versus the other world religions, we need to have a way to be able to examine and compare what they are teaching compared to what we believe and know where the difference is.

That's what we want to do. We want to be able to do that. With that in mind, we're going to look into this lesson.

We hope that you have a syllabus. You can pick up a copy of the syllabus, which is a student copy of the study of western religions at our store at store .strivingforeternity

.org. You can pick up a syllabus there, and with that, you'd be able to follow along.

There's a lot of notes that are in the syllabus that I will not go over. There's a lot more there that's also where you can take some notes.

You'll see we'll talk about filling in the blanks. That's what we're going to talk about when we talk about filling in the blanks because there's going to be some things where we're going to be just giving you things that we really want to encourage you to focus on trying to remember.

With that, let's do a real quick review because this is part two. Let's look at what we were looking at last class, which was the doctrine of revelation.

We were looking at the doctrine of revelation, and we looked at two. We looked at natural revelation, and in natural revelation, we were talking specifically about creation and the conscience.

Then we talked about what's called special revelation. In special revelation, we were focusing on things like the

Bible primarily. Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of God in a supernatural way, but we looked at those things which are supernatural, outside of nature.

We looked specifically at the Bible, and that's what we're going to focus on because, well, though Jesus Christ is still alive,

He doesn't walk among us today for us to be able to ask Him questions directly in the way that His disciples could when

He walked the earth. For that sake, we're going to look at what we have as an authority, which is the

Scriptures, the Bible. We want to focus in there because this is going to be how we come to the conclusions that Christianity is right and the other religions are not.

Remember, we saw with the other religions, when it comes to their authority, even if they accept

God's Word, the Bible, it's the Bible plus something. Always plus something.

And that something is always the works or words of men. In fact, I just was listening to someone who is a convert from Islam to Christianity, and he said what brought him to the realization was when he realized that his belief system was not based on the

Koran, what he thought was the Word of God, but it was based on tradition.

He realized that the Koran is really, he's believing in the tradition of Islam because even though they have the

Koran, and the Koran would say they have the Bible, but it's really the Koran and the

Hadiths that become the ultimate authority. And remember, we had said if something becomes an authority that you have to use to interpret a different authority, then the thing that is the interpreter is the greater authority.

This is why with the Roman Catholic Church, because they say that you need the church to be the authority or the watchtower or Jehovah's Witnesses, you need the

Imams in Islam. Because you need these people to interpret

God's Word, what that ends up meaning is that you can't know God's Word without that final authority.

So God's Word isn't enough. You need that final authority to tell you what God's Word means.

When you have that, then that authority that is used to interpret God's Word is a greater authority than God's Word.

This is the reason why within Christianity, we hold to God's Word alone as the ultimate authority, and nothing is greater than it.

So if someone disagrees with me, what am I going to do? I'm going to turn to the Bible, I'm going to turn to Scripture and say, let's look at what the

Scripture says. You and I may have a differing view. There's a lot of areas where Christians disagree, infant baptism, end times, a lot of different doctrines that you see

Christians disagreeing on. The way to approach that is this, it's not that we disagree, therefore we have to bash each other.

No. The issue is, how do you come to the interpretation that you come?

But what is known is that for Christians, the ultimate authority that we have to test the spirits, as John would say in 1

John, is the Bible, the Word of God. Now some people, it's an inner feeling.

They will say it's the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit will never contradict His Word. So when someone says, well

I have this inner feeling, or the Holy Spirit's telling me, well we should always be able to go back to God's Word as the authority.

That's the only thing, the only objective standard that Christians hold to is the

Bible as the standard. Okay? Why? Why would we say the

Bible is the only standard? Well now, let us get into the start of today's lesson in the topic of inspiration.

Inspiration. What does inspiration mean? This is a term that's misused in our culture.

People sit there, they listen to a song and say, that inspired me. In other words, that made me feel good.

Or maybe someone that wrote the song says, I was inspired to write this. In other words, I had this feeling when writing it.

It flowed, it felt like it fit together. Notice, the way that our culture often refers to inspiration is a feeling.

That's not what we will see as a definition of inspiration theologically.

So let's take a look at it. In your syllabus, if you're looking under Roman numeral two, all scripture, and that's their first blank there is all, all scripture is inspired by God.

We're going to define inspiration in a moment. But it's important to know that all the scriptures, that which is part of what we're going to call the canon,

I'm going to explain that in a minute too. One of the reasons I sometimes throw out these terms like canon or inspiration, and I'm going to define them later.

Sometimes people can just define the terms without ever using them, and you may hear the term and not realize what that term means.

I'm giving you these terms and then defining them. So if you know what the term inspiration means, hey, fine, move on.

If you know what the canon is, hey, great. But if this is the first time you're hearing these terms, we want to help you understand the meaning.

So when you hear it again, ah, I know what canon is. The canon is a measure. That's what the canon is.

So the canon was that first, when we look at what is the Bible, the canon was that which was accepted as being inspired.

That being from God. What does it mean? We're going to get to that now. So all scriptures is inspired by God.

This means that all the scriptures are breathed out by God. So inspiration is a

Greek compound word, which means God breathed. God breathed.

That's your next blank. God breathed. So all scripture is the breathed or spoken from the mouth of God to mankind.

It is the writing and not the writers that were inspired. Okay, important note.

So let me first deal with God breathed. I'm going to give you a longer, a more technical definition in a moment. But the idea when we breathe, when

I'm breathing, what am I doing? I'm pushing air. I'm speaking and when I speak, I'm pushing air out.

That's the idea of spoken. We speak, we're pushing air and it makes a sound.

The idea God breathed is this idea that it's God's spoken. As he speaks, he breathes it out.

Now he didn't literally speak it, he wrote it. We understand that. But this term means that idea, that concept of being breathed out by God.

Now when I say that it is the writings and not the writers, this becomes important. Because say for example, the

Roman Catholic Church would say that the writers were inspired and that they wrote through dictation.

Now the issue there is if the writers are inspired, then everything they wrote would have been inspired.

Now in the case of Paul, we know for a fact that he wrote at least one and maybe

I think two other letters to the Corinthians. If you read 1st and 2nd Corinthians, those are letters to the

Corinthians, Paul references other letters that he wrote to them.

We don't hold those as inspired. They were not part of the canon, they weren't accepted as part of Scripture, but Paul still wrote them.

Now if Paul was inspired, then everything he wrote would have been inspired. That would be the difference.

So we believe that the writings themselves were inspired. So let me give you a technical definition.

This is where if you have a syllabus, you have the advantage. Because in the syllabus, the syllabus is going to have this definition so you can follow along.

One of the advantages of the syllabus. So, I'm going to give you this technical definition for inspiration, and we're going to break it down and explain it.

Inspiration identifies that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in which he super intended super intended, big fancy word for controlled or directed, in which the

Holy Spirit super intended the reception, that means to the writers, and the communication, that means to the hearers or readers, of the divine message of mankind such that the product, in other words its original writing, is verbally, every word, and plurinary, completely, both inerrant, that means without error, and authoritative.

So let me give you this without the explanations and then we're going to break it down. Inspiration identifies the supernatural work of the

Holy Spirit in which he super intended the reception and communication of the divine message to mankind such that the product is verbally and plurinary, both inerrant and authoritative.

So the idea there is super intended means this idea that God works through the person so that everything that they do of their own choice is exactly as God intended it to be.

The fact that it's to the writers and to the receivers, okay, so it was the writing not the authors, that's the point of emphasis there, okay, it's a divine message, it's from God to mankind in its original, in other words what we have is manuscripts, we have copies, we do not have that we know of the originals, okay.

So in its original though it was without error, every word, and completely.

So whether you look at the individual words or you look at the whole book, the whole Bible, it's completely without error and it's completely authoritative in its original.

Why do I emphasize in the original? Because we know that there's different people that made copies of the originals and in those copies we have people that, well, they made spelling errors, maybe they're writing a line, copying a line, they skipped an entire line.

We see that. We see people that made copying errors. We have lots of different manuscripts.

We have other classes where we discuss those manuscripts and how that helps us to assure us that we have a good handle that no doctrine was edited or changed at all because we have so many different copies, all right.

So let's take a look at a passage of Scripture if we have 2 Timothy 3.

So 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 says this, that all

Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

So you see here that it's saying all Scripture is inspired, is breathed out by God. So God spoke in His written word in the product of a dual authorship.

So we could say Paul wrote Romans, but we could say the Holy Spirit wrote Romans. So the Holy Spirit superintended, remember that term now,

He superintended the human authors that though the individual personalities and different styles of the human authors in their writing style, they composed a record of God's word to man without error, in the whole, or in part.

Okay, whether you take it the whole thing or in part, it's all God's word. The Scripture is completely and totally sufficient for every part of life and godliness.

Okay, let's take a look at 2 Peter 1, 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21.

And what you see here, it says, Peter says, knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture 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 this is the idea of, you see the carried along, that's the superintended.

But this isn't men who give you an interpretation of Scripture and then they write it down and say that's inspired.

The Scriptures are not the interpretations of men like the Quran. The Quran is the interpretation of Muhammad.

You have things, that's not the way we have the Scriptures. This is something that is the product of God through men.

Prophecy comes through the Holy Spirit as He moved or carried men along.

So by virtue that the Scriptures are inspired by God, they were part of the canon.

Remember I said the canon is this idea of a measuring rod. It was something that they said, if it fit these qualifications, it's

God's Word. And if it doesn't, then it's not. Now, what were some of those things?

We're not going to go into all of them in detail. We have another class on that in our classes on systematic theology. We talked about bibliology, the study of the

Bible. But basically it's that those books were widely accepted as being

Scripture at the time of their writing, not hundreds of years later, not decades later.

At the time of their writing, they were accepted as Scripture. They didn't contradict other

Scriptures. That's important. So there were four basic principles, not going to go into all of them here, but basically that's the general gist.

They were accepted at the time. By virtue that it's God's Word though, God spoke it, it is by definition going to be the canon or Scripture.

Now, men only recognized, that's your blank there and that's important, men only recognized the canonical books.

They did not inspire them, nor did they declare them inspired.

They were inspired whether mankind recognized it or not. This goes in contradiction to the

Roman Catholic belief that the Catholic Church gave us the

Bible. The Bible is the Bible because God breathed it out.

God spoke it. God inspired it. And because He did that, by very definition of Him doing that, therefore it is canonical which means it's part of the canon, part of the books that are

Scripture. Okay? So it's not, we as men recognized what

God already did. It was Scripture. Even if no men, if there was a book of the

Bible that men never recognized was part of the Bible and God decided

He didn't want to reveal to people that this book was part of the Bible, it's still part of the

Bible. It's still God's Word because God breathed it out.

It is not because the Church identifies it. That's an important note because this is an area where a lot of people get into thinking that the

Church gave us the Bible 300 years after Christ. No, that's not the way it worked.

The Bible was accepted, when they talk about these councils where they discussed the

Bible in the 300s, what you see them discussing is not the books we accept as the

Bible but some of these other books that people were using that were not canonical.

Those were the ones that were discussed. So really what it was was pushing out books that were, these are the ones that had already been accepted as the

Scriptures and these are questionable and they examined those and said no, they're not. Okay?

Now inerrancy has an idea in it that because I said down to the singular word in its part, not just the whole of the

Bible, but individual words are without error. That means that we see that sometimes, you know, the words or the tenses of a word or maybe the singular versus plural sense of a word is without error and there are occasions where we see in the

Scriptures arguments being made over singular versus plural. For example,

I don't know, do we have John 10? Okay, we don't have those. Okay, John 10, 34 and 35, you can look this up, but it says,

Jesus answered them, is it not written in your law that I said you are gods, plural.

If he called them gods, plural, to whom the word of God came and the

Scripture cannot be broken. Now when you look at the context there, the issue of the plurality, he makes an argument versus plurality in singular.

We see this with Paul as well in Galatians 3 .16. In Galatians 3 .16, he makes the difference between seed, singular, rather than seeds, plural.

Paul says this, now to Abraham and his seed, singular, were the promises made.

He did not say and to seeds, plural, as of many, but as of one, and to your seed, who is

Christ. You see, he's making an argument there over a plural word versus a singular.

You know, John makes the same thing in tenses. This becomes an important thing when you talk about whether you can lose your salvation or not.

John 5 .13, if every word including its tense is inspired, then

John says he's using this term of eternal life having been past tense.

Not that we will have eternal life, but that we already have eternal life.

It's already been obtained. John says this, these things I have written to you who believe, you already believe, in the name of the

Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. And that you may continue to believe in his name.

You see, the fact that we have eternal life is the argument that is then made that we already have it, not that we're going to attain it.

So, eternal life is not living with Christ forever. Eternal life is actually knowing

God. That's what John says in John 17, yeah, 14, sorry, 14.

He says, and this is eternal life that you may know God and the one whom he sent.

So, knowing God is to have eternal life. You see? And this is why we have to realize when

Matthew, in Matthew 5 .18, it says, for assuredly I say to you that till heaven and earth pass away not one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law until it's fulfilled.

So, the word of God is inerrant. It's not going to pass away. A jot and a tittle, a jot in our

English. Think of a jot as that dot over the I or, you know, that the smallest part of a letter.

A tittle would be that little change in a letter that makes it a different letter.

For example, if you have capital F and capital E, that little line at the bottom of the

E, removing that, that would be the tittle. That's the, you know, this is the idea of the smallest part of the word that could change it, right?

So, whether it be the smallest part of the word, okay, or the smallest letter even, it's all inspired.

Now, the reason I say this is because there is a word, there is a letter in Hebrew, okay, that would, that uses a word and what we would have is an

S sound versus an SH sound, okay? And what it is, is there's a little marking, a little dot on the right side or the left side and that defines which one of those two letters it is.

That's this idea. Even to that point, to that dot that could be on either side, that is without error.

That's exactly as God intended it, okay? That's the idea there. Now, what is this, how does this end up playing out?

We said that if it's God's word, that then means that it is, because God breathed it out, it's inspired.

Why? Because that's the definition of inspiration, right? God breathed out, God spoke it and the process of how

He did it is that He superintended through the Holy Spirit so He controlled men so that even though they wrote with their own personalities, they wrote exactly as God intended it to be so that it was without error in its parts and in its whole, okay?

That's the process. But by definition, because something is inspired, it's authoritative.

Why? Well, duh, God said it, right? It's that when you were kids and your parents would tell you, you are going to accept this because I told you.

You're going to go clean your room because I told you, right? The rule of the parent. As being the parent, they get to demand this is what you're going to do.

And the thing there that you see is that they are saying, because they are the authority, they have the right to make a demand on you that you're going to do certain things, okay?

And so what you look at there is you look at this notion that we have a case where God being

God because He speaks it, it is authoritative. Now, one of the other things that comes along with it being authoritative means that it is also sufficient.

So let's talk about the sufficiency of the Bible. Now, this idea of sufficient, the

Word of God is completely and totally sufficient. That's your blank there.

For the Word of God is completely and totally sufficient for the believer in every area of life and godliness.

Now, this doesn't mean that the Bible is going to answer all the questions you have about science and history.

No, it's about life and specifically eternal life.

It's about how you should be living in a God honoring way.

That's the major focus. All right? Uses a whole bunch of different types of ways of doing it, stories, history, instruction, prophecy, all these different things to point us to how we should be living our life.

It is sufficient. In other words, we don't need the world to tell us how we are to live.

We don't need the world to say, oh, you need to live this way. Not needed.

Why? Because the Bible is sufficient. This is the reason I believe that pastors, if you are studying the

Bible, you should be qualified and equipped to handle most counseling situations.

And if you're a mature believer and you're studying the Bible, you should be equipped to handle most counseling situations.

Why? Because the Bible is sufficient. That's why.

The scriptures are all that is necessary for the completing and maturing of the man of God.

Remember that first we looked at in 1 Timothy, where it said, sorry, in 2 Timothy, where it said all scripture is breathed out by God, right?

And then what does it say in verse 17? That the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work.

That's why we have the scriptures. We have the scriptures so that we would be equipped for every good work so that we're ready.

So we have everything we need to do good works. Those good works come after we're regenerate because that's when the

Holy Spirit will work through us so that we're going to do those good works. But God is going to use his word as the tool to instruct us.

Even though we have the Holy Spirit, we're going to talk about that in a few minutes and what his role is. There is absolutely no human reasoning.

That's your blank there, reasoning. There is absolutely no human reasoning that needs to be added to or replace scripture to meet the needs of the believer for life and living.

I'm trying to really emphasize this because there's so many people that think, well, you pastor, you just read the

Bible. I need real counseling. What? The Bible is all you need to know how we are supposed to live in a

God honoring way. Go to the Bible. It's the authority.

It's sufficient. God commands that no part, no matter how small, should ever be added to nor subtracted from the

Bible. Let's look at some passages here. First one is in Deuteronomy chapter four and you go, Deuteronomy four.

Well, this is interesting because in Deuteronomy four, it says, you shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it that you may keep the commandments of the

Lord, your God that I command you. And you go, well, uh, we got a problem then don't we? Deuteronomy four, we have a lot of scripture was written after Deuteronomy four.

I mean, by the time Deuteronomy was written, that was maybe the fifth or sixth book that was written.

And yeah, we got like 61 other books that were written after that, you know?

Well, how do you answer that? Because what he's saying is don't add to God's word.

In other words, don't add human words to God's word. God can add to his word because it's still his word and he's just giving you more revelation, but it's still his word.

Humans shouldn't add to it. Let's look at another one that we have. The next one is Deuteronomy 12 verse 31.

Everything that I shall command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take away from it.

Proverbs 30 verse six says, do not add to his words, least he rebuke you and you'd be found a liar.

Then we have in Jeremiah 26 too, thus says the

Lord, stand in the court of the Lord's house and speak to the cities of Judah that come to worship in the house of the

Lord. All the words that I have commanded you to speak to them, do not hold back a word.

And then lastly, in Revelation 22, 18 and 19, I warn everyone who hears these words of the prophecy of this book.

If anyone adds to them, God will add to them the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of this prophecy,

God will take away his share in the tree of life that in the holy city there, which are described in this book.

So you see in all of these passages, we see God's making it really clear. We are not to add human reasoning to God's word.

The thing that's the authority is God's word. This is why I have such an issue when you have groups,

Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, Islam, Roman Catholicism, all these people that say, okay, we have

God's word. Let's add to it. Even Judaism, because they add things to it. What you have is they're adding other authorities, human reasoning, as equal in authority to God's word.

And like I said, when you do that, what you actually do is diminish God's word and lift up man's word.

That's what you end up doing. And we shouldn't be doing that. Okay. God's word is the authority.

All right. So according to 2 Peter 1, 16 -19, the scriptures are a more certain determiner of truth than hearing a voice of God and definitely more than the voice of any person.

So let's look at this. For we do not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our

Lord Jesus Christ. But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the

Father, and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved

Son in whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven.

For when we were with him on the holy mountain, and we have the prophetic word fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention to, as a lamp shineth in dark places until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

So therefore, what he's saying, what Peter is saying is that more important than hearing a voice from God or hearing others speak of God is

God's word itself. Therefore, it is the scripture alone that is to be our ultimate basis of authority for determining what is right and wrong.

Okay. This is crucial. Especially because we have so many people now that are giving these accounts.

They've heard a voice of God. They've heard from God. God spoke to them in a dream. They died and went to heaven.

They came back and they have a message. And that message doesn't line up with scripture. They're wrong.

I mean, that's it. They're wrong. You know, this is the reality. You know, someone comes and they say they heard a voice of God.

Their hearing a voice is not more authoritative than what we already have in God's word.

What God has already revealed to us is the standard. And if someone says they heard a voice from God, people ask me all the time because there's so many

Muslims in the Middle East that they're having these dreams and visions and people keep asking me, what do you think about that? I say,

I don't know. I can't answer for someone's experience. What I do know is there's many of these accounts where people say they see a vision of Christ and he tells them things that are in line with scripture and they seem to be living a regenerate lifestyle and doing the works of that seem to have the fruit of repentance.

And so I look at their life and I look at what they're saying and it compares with scripture and it's consistent.

Maybe they did. But if they tell me they saw a dream and it's something that doesn't align with scripture, their dream is wrong, not scripture.

We don't want to make God the liar. We can't. He doesn't lie. But when we say that we had a dream where God said something that God's word does not say, ultimately we're calling

God a liar when he says this is what his word is and we're claiming, no, no, no,

I have a more authoritative word. Really? You think you have something more authoritative than what

God has spoken? Yikes. Scary. Okay. All right.

Let's move on to the last part of this class and that is the interpretation.

This is number four in your syllabus. Interpretation. Excuse me.

So the scriptures were written to be understood.

That's your blank there. Understood. The scriptures are not some hidden meaning book where you got to look, you got to find the meaning.

Okay. You know, I remember a book called, you know, based on the Lord of the

Rings, Finding the Gospel in the Lord of the Rings. If you have to write a book to explain how to find it, maybe it wasn't there.

You know, maybe you're reading into it. Maybe Lord of the Rings was just a book written by a

Christian man that he enjoyed writing and this was a monumental work of his life.

Maybe it wasn't meant to be a picture of the gospel, right? I mean, but the

Bible was meant to be understood. That's why even children can understand it. It is not in all of its detail.

There's things where we study for years so we get a better understanding of things and the more we study the

Bible, the more we're going to learn and know. But in its basic doctrines, it's written to be understood.

One of the ministries, though, of the Holy Spirit, if you remember our classes in Systematic Theology, if you took those, we had lessons on the study of the

Holy Spirit and we saw that His ministry is to illuminate Scripture to the mind of the

Christian. Illumination is this idea where He brings to light its meaning and its application.

And so the Holy Spirit who indwells every believer, He therefore, true

Christians do not need a priest to interpret the Bible for them.

They have the priest. This is in Jeremiah 31, 31 and following or in Ezekiel 36, 25 and following.

You see this idea that the promise of the New Covenant to the Jewish people was that the

Holy Spirit would indwell each person. We wouldn't need a man to tell us God's word because the

Spirit will indwell us and He will tell us His word Himself. That's what the

Jews look forward to. As Christians, we often take for granted. But we do not need a priest to tell us

God's word. They are priests, sorry, the priests are those who have the

Holy Spirit indwelling them. This is what we call the term the priesthood of the believer.

In other words, a priest, the role of the priest is to communicate God's word to men.

To other men. But we have a priesthood as individuals. When we become a believer, we have the

Holy Spirit indwelling us. And by the virtue of the Holy Spirit indwelling us, it's called the priesthood of believers because as a believer, we have the priesthood.

We know God's word. We can understand God's word. We don't need some special gifting.

All right. Now, this doesn't mean that we don't need a pastor. We don't need to go to church. We don't need to learn from others.

You see, there is homework that has to be done. I don't know how many of you have the time to put 30 hours of work into a sermon.

That's really what it takes if you're going to do it right. 20 to 30 hours. Why? Well, because you got to do, you got to put yourself back in the mindset of the time it was written.

We got to do all that interpretation work. If you took our class on biblical hermeneutics, you know how much work it goes into to really properly interpret the word of God.

It's a lot of work. And so we need men who are going to take the time to study and diligently examine it.

That doesn't mean we can't. It means that they're going to spend more time doing it so that we would hope they're going to be spending the time to be more accurate.

But the Holy Spirit indwells every one of us. So if you're going to disagree with me, the thing I'm going to say is, well, give me the scriptures.

Tell me how you interpret this. And I'm going to look at what you're saying and say, is that consistent with what

God's word says? I'm not going to reject it out of hand just because I have a seminary degree or I've been a pastor or I do these teaching, these classes.

No. If you have the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit could reveal something to you that I'm blinded to and I'm not seeing the proper meaning because I'm reading into it something.

That could be. All right. So we have the priesthood of the believers. And so because of this, okay, it is the role of the

Christian to diligently study, to show themselves approved unto God. That's 2 Timothy 2, 15,

Acts 17, 11. Okay, we were to diligently study to be approved unto

God and the Holy Spirit will reveal the meaning of the scriptures to us.

This is 1 Corinthians 2, 4. Do we have that one? Good.

And my speech and my message are not plausible words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the

Spirit and of power. You see there that the idea is the

Spirit is the one who is giving the understanding. Since the

Bible is progressive revelation, what I mean by that is the Bible wasn't written at one time. Here we go.

It's all done. No, it was progressive. We have things. We had Genesis written and then

Exodus and then Numbers. And you look at the first five books, we get more information through some of the historical books, more information through the prophets, much more information through the

New Testament. It was progressive and it's important to interpret the Bible in the progression of revelation that they had at the time.

So the progression of revelation has to come into account for proper interpretation.

Not all of the Bible applies to us today. There are things that apply to the nation of Israel because it was written to them as a nation and it doesn't apply to us today in the church.

We must interpret it in an understanding of what it meant when it was written to know the principles that carry over to today.

If you don't understand what the Bible meant to its original hearers from the original author, you're not going to have a proper understanding.

So this is what we call authorial intent. We need to get back to what did the author mean by what he wrote?

That's what we want to do. What did he mean? When he wrote, what did he mean by what he wrote?

Now this becomes really important because any cult and false religion pretty much are going to teach, they will teach that an individual member cannot, that's your blank, that an individual member cannot interpret scripture without some leader or chief member of the organization.

In Roman Catholicism, you have the magistrates, you have the pope, you cannot have what's called private interpretation.

I'm going to get to that in a moment. But you can't interpret the scripture on your own. The Catholic Church does it for you. If you're a

Jehovah Witness, the Watchtower does it for you. If you're a Latter -day

Saint, you're going to have to go to your living apostles, prophets. You need to go to others that are going to tell you the interpretation of God's word.

You can't do that on your own. You know why? Because if you look at the Bible on your own and compare it to what they're teaching, you can see the error.

That's the thing. This is what makes Christianity, again, it makes it unique because we say

God's word and you compare what they say to God's word. We had so many people, as we were going through the classes on world religions, what ended up happening is so many people kept telling us, you're hating people.

You're so wrong because you're judging people. And I'm saying, what are we saying that's an error? I mean, we're telling people what these different groups actually believe.

And then all we're doing is comparing that to what the scripture says. Are we saying something that they don't believe?

And that's the irony. After thousands and thousands of people commenting on the classes and yet all these people, they have yet to come up with one thing that we said these religions believe that's inaccurate.

That's the issue. If we're accurately describing what they believe and we're actually accurately describing what the scripture says, we're just comparing those two.

And if they are saying something and we're accurate about it, that accurately doesn't apply to scripture or consists of scripture, then there's a contradiction.

They're wrong, not the scriptures. But what every one of these cults will do is say the Bible is wrong and the organization is right.

The Bible is the authority, but within a cult, they make the organization the authority and they become the ones that define what the

Bible means. It's one of the traits of every cult. I mentioned this idea of private interpretation.

This is a big thing with Martin Luther. This is where this doctrine of priesthood of the believer came about because the importance of the priesthood of the believer is the fact, as Martin Luther argued, that we can have a private interpretation of scripture.

In other words, I can interpret the scriptures on my own. I do not need a church or organization to tell me the meaning of the text.

The argument against this is that people would wrongly interpret scriptures. The Catholic Church argued at the time, if you allow for private interpretation, you're going to have so many people having differing views.

And Luther said, you're right. Let it be. So let it be. It's the responsibility of the believer to study to make sure they are accountable to God, not to the church.

It's not the church that's going to do it. Because here's the problem. When the church says they're the authority and only they can be the ones to tell you

God's word, if they disagree with God's word, what happens?

They're the authority. So it makes the scriptures wrong or your interpretation of the scriptures that are wrong.

Their interpretation can't be wrong. That's what ends up happening. But if you accept private interpretation, because the

Holy Spirit indwells every believer and therefore he will help them in the understanding of it, we study to show ourselves approved.

And the only means of interpreting the Bible is in a normal, grammatical, historical interpretation of scripture, which affirms the belief from the opening chapters of Genesis, presented in Genesis, all the way through the infallible rule of faith and practice as we see throughout the book of Revelation.

And so the idea here is that we have to interpret the scriptures using the rules of interpretation, using the grammatical.

What does it say? What does the text say grammatically? What's its historical context?

Its cultural context? We have a whole class. We go into all of that detail. All right. And so as we look at those things, we want to examine those.

All right. So with this being said, we want to encourage you, if you have any questions, next class we're going to look at the doctrine of God.

What is the Christian view of the Trinity? If you have any questions about this or anything else, please email us at academy at striving for eternity dot org.

Academy at striving for eternity dot org. If you want to get our syllabus, you can go to our store at store dot striving for eternity dot org.

There you can also pick up my book, What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions, which much of the first part of this class was based on.

Also, we'd like to encourage you to maybe talk to your church or group about hosting one of our

Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminars. We are talking about the interpretation of scriptures here today.

It is one of the most important things to do is to know how to rightly interpret God's Word. Consider hosting one of those seminars at your church so that you could learn how to interpret

God's Word. And until next class, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.