The Living Word (Hebrews 4:12-13)

Kootenai Church

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When we turn now to the book of Hebrews chapter 4, we read together verses 9 through verse 13,

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Hebrews chapter 4. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered his rest has himself also rested from his works as God did from his.

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Therefore, let us be diligent to enter that rest so that no one will fall through following the same example of disobedience.

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For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two -edged sword and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit of both joints and marrow and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

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And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

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Let's pray together before we begin. Father, you make our hearts sing through your word.

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And we pray that you would accomplish all the concerns us today through the preaching of your word, that you would sanctify us as your people with the truth and by the truth for the glory of Christ, who is the living truth.

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Be honored today through all that is said and done here, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. Well, I have a couple of corrections that I need to make from last week's message.

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First, some of you observed that I had mentioned that there was somebody here in our church that is attending the

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University of Washington. And though I would have sworn I said University of Idaho, from the testimony of multiple people, two or three witnesses, they all said

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I said the University of Washington. I don't know why I said that because in my mind, I was certainly thinking Idaho, though I was in Washington at the time that I had a conversation with this person who for the moment shall remain nameless.

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So I intended to say the University of Idaho. And I have to say that because there are some of you who are wondering, who is the

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Judas among us, who rose up speaking perverse things to draw away people after himself and went to the

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University of Washington instead of Idaho, who went out from us, who was not among us, but went out so that he could display that he was not of us.

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So it was the University of Idaho and not Washington. And I also have to say that some of you are ready to resign your church membership even right now over the fact that I confused those two.

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I in no way intended to offend. The second thing that I needed to clarify, and this was another correction from last week, is that I said that Are You My Mother, that book that the youth pastor preached from, was written by Dr.

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Seuss and it was not. It was written by P .D. Eastman. Some of you are nodding your heads as if you know this already.

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It was written by P .D. Eastman and not Dr. Seuss. So I was misinformed by Bryce who told me that.

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He put Are You My Mother into the Dr. Seuss canon and it does not belong there. It does not belong in the canon of Seuss literature.

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It is an apocryphal work. It's a pseudepigraphal work. It's one of those things that we can read and we can learn from, but it's not part of the inspired

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Seuss canon, which helps me to realize why it is that I didn't recognize, I didn't honor that as part of the

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Seuss canon. So that was P .D. Eastman. Look, there's a cat in the hat on the outside of the book.

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It's the same illustrators, the same style of writing. It's published with Dr. Seuss stuff, so I should have checked my source and not just trusted what

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Bryce said. So it's his fault. Now on to better things. Speaking of inspired canons, on to better things.

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We're looking today at Hebrews chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, and actually just a little bit of Hebrews chapter 4.

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We started into this last week and we're taking the opportunity here to consider with some depth and some seriousness what

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Scripture says about itself. And the statement in chapter 4, verse 12 regarding the

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Word of God gives us the opportunity to kind of slow down a little bit and really give some thought and consideration to Scripture's testimony regarding Scripture and how it is that we should hold

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Scripture in our hearts, what it is that we should think about Scripture and how we should honor Scripture and what we should do with Scripture and why it should be central to the life of every believer and central to the life of anything that would call itself a church.

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So that's what we're giving some consideration to now. And last week, we just kind of introduced it and I dropped on you something that for many of you was probably a very relatively new concept, and that is that the phrase for the

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Word of God is a reference in the mind of the author of Hebrews to primarily probably the

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Lord Jesus Christ and not just to written Scripture alone. So we gave some consideration and some time to thinking through John Owen, the

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Puritan pastor from the 1600s, through his arguments that in the mind of the author of Hebrews, the

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Word of God is the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and not necessarily the inspired Word.

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Now what is true of Christ is true of the inspired Word because Christ is the incarnation of the revelation of God and the author of Hebrews mentions that at the beginning of the book.

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But it is going to serve us and our interest here to just remember that we are going to be approaching this with a dual focus and recognizing that what we are saying about the

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Word of God is also true of the Son of God. What we say in this context about the Son of God is also true of the

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Word of God. I don't think we can say that the author is intending to speak of either one to the exclusion of the other.

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I think that he intends for us to understand both of these. I certainly, based upon the text, could not argue that this is only speaking of Christ and not the

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Word of God or that it is only speaking of the Word of God and not of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we are going to be approaching it with sort of that dual emphasis.

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We saw last week in chapter 4, verse 12, that he says, for the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two -edged sword.

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We considered what it was that the Word of God is referring to and now as we work our way through this, we are just going to look today at what it means that the

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Word of God is living because there is a lot of stuff that is attached to that idea that the Word of God is living. We want to make sure that we understand what we mean by that and what we don't mean by that.

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So in keeping with our dual focus, I am going to first explain how the word living applies and describes the

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Lord Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word. And then we will talk about how the word living describes the written

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Word of God, the inspired Word, and why it is, how it is that Scripture is living and what we mean by that.

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So first of all, when you read in your English translation, for the Word of God is living, that word living is back there quite a ways in the verse.

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In the original text, in the original Greek language, the word living is the very first verse of the verse.

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And that was in Greek literature oftentimes the way that a Greek writer writing in Greek would emphasize a certain aspect of it.

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So if you were reading this in Greek, it would say living for the Word of God is. So the emphasis is there on the living quality and I think that stands out first of all in the verse.

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He mentions that first of all because if the Word of God is not living in the way that the author describes it here, if the

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Word of God is not living, it cannot do anything else that is mentioned in the passage. If it's not living, then it's not active.

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Have you ever seen something that is not living, but is active? Walk into a corpse or a funeral home, see a bunch of things that are not living, but they're very active.

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No, you don't. If it is not living, then the Word of God is not active. Neither is it sharp, nor can it cut to the soul of your being to joints and marrow.

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Neither can the Word of God discern and critique and judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The Word of God is not living.

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It can't do anything else in the passage. So right at the very outset, living is the Word of God. That is how the author emphasizes that aspect of it.

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It is living. Now, how does this apply to the Lord Jesus Christ? We gave some attention to John Owen's arguments regarding this passage, speaking of Christ, the incarnate

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Word last week. One of his primary arguments in the passage is that the term living, first and foremost, primarily above all else, has to describe the

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Lord Jesus Christ, primarily in its ultimate sense. Secondarily, the

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Word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the written Word, and here's why. We cannot say that the

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Word of God has life in itself in the sense that it is the beginning, the source, and the fountain of life.

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The Word of God has life because of what it is, because of its source, because of who gives it its life, because God has purposed and decreed to work through the

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Word. So because it comes from God and has God as its source, therefore, the Word of God is living and it cannot be otherwise.

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But we cannot say of either the gospel or the written Word of God that it itself is a source of life unto itself, apart from God, as if there is some living quality to the arrangement of the words and the phrases or the arrangement of the books in the book that we have that we call the

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Bible. It's not living because it has this quality by itself. If God did not exist, this would not be living.

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Of course, we wouldn't exist either. You understand that. But if God did not exist, apart from God, if he had ceased to imbue this

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Word with his power, with his energy, with his life, then the Word itself would stop living.

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But God can never stop living. So Owen makes the argument that first and foremost, this has to describe the Lord Jesus Christ.

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He has life in himself. And we can describe the Lord Jesus Christ as one who has life in himself.

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And we can describe that appropriately. Jesus said that in John chapter 5. He said, just as the Father has life in self, so he, the

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Father, gave to the Son also to have life in himself. In other words, the Father is the source of life.

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And because the Son shares the same and very nature of the Father, the Son has life in himself as well.

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John 1 verse 4 says, in him that is in Christ, the Word incarnate was life, and that life was the light of men.

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Remember all of the I Am statements when we went through the Gospel of John, all the different ways that the Lord Jesus Christ described himself, and so many of them were related to the issue and the idea of life.

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John 6, 48, I am the bread of life. John 8 verse 12, even describing himself as the light of the world, he said, he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.

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John 11, 25, I am the resurrection and the life. John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Over and over, the

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Lord Jesus Christ described this. Why? Because he has life apart from the Father? No, because he has the same, very same divine life that the

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Father had. So ultimately, we say it's the Lord Jesus Christ who is the living one. He is the one who has life.

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He is the resurrected one. In Revelation chapter 1, verses 17 and 18, where John describes the vision that he saw of the

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Lord Jesus Christ on the Isle of Patmos, John says that Jesus spoke and said, do not be afraid, I am the first and the last, and the living one.

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I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades. And in Acts chapter 3, verse 15,

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Peter described Jesus as the prince of life. Life is what characterizes the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the source.

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He is the fountain. He is the beginning of all life. Everything that lives and has breath, lives and has breath because he wills it, and because he gives both physical life and spiritual life to anything that is living.

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And consequently, anything that dies, dies at his command. It's perfect time.

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He is the source and the beginning of all life. And because he is divine, he shares the same life that the father has.

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That is why 1 Timothy chapter 4, verse 10, Paul says, we fixed our hope on the living God. God is a living God. He is alive, and he is living, and because he has that nature, the

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Lord Jesus Christ shares that. So he, the word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ is, first and foremost, living.

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He has life in himself. Even Hebrews chapter 3, verse 12, says that we are warned against falling away from the living

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God. Hebrews 10, verse 31, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living

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God. Now, both of those, Hebrews 3, 12 and Hebrews 10, 31, are both warning passages. They're judgment passages where judgment for disobedience and unbelief is warned about.

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And in both of those passages, the author of Hebrew warns us and reminds us that we ought to fear and enter into this rest because the

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Lord Jesus Christ is the living God. He is the living one. Scripture is living because it comes from the one who has life in himself and is the fountain and source of all life.

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Now, the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is living is something in itself of a two -edged sword, to borrow the analogy.

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It portends two things. For those who believe, it is a source of tremendous comfort, tremendous grace, and tremendous promise.

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To those who believe, the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is alive is a promise to us of life to come.

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To those who do not believe and will not believe, who remain hardened and unrepentant in their sin, the fact that Jesus Christ is alive is a portending of a judgment that is to come.

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Let me cash out both of those. For the believer, we look at Christ and we see He is the living God, and because He is the living one and He is the source of all life, the life that I have, which is eternal life,

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I share with Him. I receive that life from Him. It is His life that He gives to me. He shares it with me, and so I shall live, even though this body may perish,

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I shall live again. I know we can confess, as Job says, that though this body will be eaten by worms, we know that we shall stand in our flesh and we shall behold

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God with our eyes and not the eyes of another. We shall see Him with our own eyes. We shall be raised again.

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That is the promise. Of all who come to the Father, the Son will give them eternal life, and He will raise them up on the last day.

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So for us believers, the reality that Jesus Christ is alive is a promise of our life to come.

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It is guaranteed. It cannot be otherwise. But to the unbeliever, the fact that Jesus Christ is the living

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God and the living Word, that is a guarantee that you will be judged for your sin. Here's how

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Paul describes it in Acts chapter 17 in Athens, when he said, God has overlooked the times of ignorance previously, but He has commanded now all men everywhere to repent because He has fixed a day on which

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He will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom He has furnished, but through a man whom

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He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead. Jesus Christ is the appointed judge, and the fact that He is living is a promise of a judgment to come.

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Now this statement that Jesus Christ, the written Word or the living Word, that the

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Word of God is a living Word of God, that fact here stated in Hebrews chapter 3 is in a warning passage.

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Don't let that escape your notice. He is warning that those who do not find their rest in Jesus Christ will face the one who is the living

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God. It is an ominous tone of judgment that rings through this entire warning passage. If you reject and you do not respond to the gospel of grace, if you reject this one who is the living one, who offers you rest today, be assured of this, that this

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Word of God who offers you rest is also the living God who will judge you on the final day.

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Either find your rest in Him or be judged by Him. Those are the two options. All men will either find their rest in Him or they will face judgment by Him.

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The fact that He is the living God is a promise of the judgment that is to come. And this is the lesson to the unbeliever.

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You will not escape. Most certainly. Why? Because the one who is the

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Word of God, He's living. That's it. Period. Full stop. Because He lives,

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He can search out the motives and intents of man's heart. Because He lives, He knows every thought, every motive, every deed.

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Because He lives, He remembers and knows it all. And because He lives, no purpose of His can be thwarted. Because He lives, there is a judgment to come.

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Because He lives, He will return again. And because He lives, He will raise all men, some to eternal life and some to eternal damnation.

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That is a promise to those who believe of life to come and is a certain promise of a judgment to come to those who will not believe.

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So it is a reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. Enter that rest or face the living Word of God as your judge.

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It is also a reference to Scripture. And this is part of our dual focus, right? We say that the

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Lord Jesus Christ is living. We can also say this of the Word of God. And it's important that we understand why the Word of God is living, how the

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Word of God is living, and what that means for us. And so that's what we're going to be talking about. Some of this, for those of you who study theology and love theology, is going to be something of a

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But we're going to cover here a couple of doctrines that we mentioned last week, starting with the doctrine of inspiration. What does it mean when we say that the

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Word of God is given by inspiration, that it is inspired? There's some confusion about what the doctrine of inspiration means.

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And we go back to the doctrine of inspiration because it comes from God. That is what makes it living.

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So we're analyzing now, what is it that makes Scripture unique? What is it that makes it a living Word and not a dead

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Word? What sets Scripture apart from all other documents by other authors through all of human history? One of the things that sets it apart is the fact that it is given by inspiration of God.

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What does inspiration mean? There's some confusion about it because the word inspiration is sometimes abused and misused.

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And we use the term inspiration to describe all kinds of things that have nothing to do with what we mean when we talk about Scripture being inspired.

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For instance, we might say that I had a moment of inspiration. I was writing a letter to my dying aunt, and I just felt the words flow out of my hand and right through the pen.

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And I just felt so inspired while I was writing that. Or that song or that movie or that poem really inspired me and lifted up my heart.

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Is that what we mean by inspiration, that Scripture is inspired? See how we use that term wrongly all the time to describe things that have nothing to do with what we're talking about with Scripture?

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It doesn't mean that our hearts are warmed by it or that Scripture simply came out because somebody just felt real freedom to write or anything like that.

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What we mean by inspiration, we are describing a process and not the Bible itself. And this is important to remember.

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The Bible is not inspiration. Scripture is not inspiration. Scripture is given by inspiration.

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Inspiration describes the process by which God delivered to us authoritative, divine, and living revelation of truth.

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Inspiration describes the process, not the product. So we don't say that the Bible is inspiration.

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Because if we say that, then it communicates that when I read the Bible, my heart is warmed and I can kind of snuggle up next to the

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Bible if I want to feel a little bit of its inspiration. See how perverse that thinking is? So inspiration doesn't describe the product.

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Inspiration describes the process. From the book Biblical Doctrine, here is a good definition of inspiration.

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Quote, it describes the process of divine causation behind the authorship of Scripture. It refers to the direct act of God on the human author that resulted in the creation of perfectly written revelation.

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It conveys the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, whereby He used the individual personality, language, style, and historical context of each writer to produce divinely authoritative writings.

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Close quote. I just want to emphasize that last sentence and I'll read it again. It conveys, the word inspiration conveys the mysterious work of the

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Holy Spirit, whereby He used the individual personality, language, style, and historical context of each writer to produce divinely authoritative writings.

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So we can affirm of Scripture, of the Word of God, the 66 books which we have in our Old and New Testaments, we can affirm these two things.

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It is a human product in the sense that God used human authors to inscripturate and to write out

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His Word. It is a divine product as well. It is both a human writing and a divine writing.

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Paul's writings are uniquely Pauline. John's writings are uniquely Johannian. Peter's writings are uniquely

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Petrine. Those are all the beautiful flowery words that they use to describe the language, the grammar, the syntax of each individual author.

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Not everybody writes like Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Can we all recognize that and be thankful for that, right? Not everybody wrote like that in Scripture.

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Every author had his unique context, his unique motivation, his unique concerns that he expressed in a very unique way.

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So the Bible is a human product in the sense that it is the compilation of books written by men over hundreds of years, over three different continents in various languages,

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Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, over a long period of time, different men from different backgrounds, each book being just unique in its own way.

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It is a divine product in the sense that behind all of those men superintending and directing the process is the

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Spirit of God Himself who put into writing through those instruments exactly what the Spirit of God wanted, so that we would have a divinely authoritative, inspired, living revelation of who

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God is and what God demands. Make sense? So it is both a divine book and a human book, which is why

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Peter can say in 2 Peter 1, no prophecy was ever made by a human will, but men moved by the

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Holy Spirit, like wind blows in a sail, men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

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2 Timothy 3 .16, all Scripture is God -breathed. We memorize that with the word inspired.

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Inspired is a horrible word because it doesn't mean to breathe into something, it means to breathe out something. God breathed out Scripture through human authors so that we could have the living breath of God in the pages of Scripture.

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And so it is inspired by God or breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof for correction, training, and righteousness.

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So the product is the Word of God, which is a living book. Now, here's what we do not mean by inspiration. What we do not mean is sometimes what is called a dictation view.

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As if an author sat down with pen in hand and paper before him and heard a word or a phrase and wrote down the word of the phrase and listened, heard another word or phrase and wrote that down and listened.

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That's not how they did it. Heard another word or phrase. No, maybe not. Not certain about that one. I guess

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I'll go back to washing dishes. No, heard another word, but write that one down. That's not how inspiration was given. It's not the dictation view.

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There are times in Scripture when they quote God and they say, God has spoken this and they heard the Word of God and they put quotations around that.

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But not all of Scripture is direct quotations from a voice of God, which they audibly heard. Some of it is, but most of it is not.

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That's not what we mean. Not that men heard a voice and dictated and everything was spoken audibly and they transcribed it.

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When we talk about the Word of God, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about inspiration. That's not what we're talking about. Not the dictation view. Second, not a conceptual view.

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That is that God sort of inspired the ideas as if God sort of tried to put it on Isaiah's heart to write something really warm and fuzzy about God.

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And so Isaiah woke up one day and just felt, you know, I just feel some general concepts about God that I want to share with others.

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So I'm going to sort of sketch out what I think and what I'm feeling, the general concepts. Some people say that's inspiration, that the ideas or concepts behind Scripture, that there is a

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God, that He's great, that He loves us all, that He's in control. Those concepts are kind of inspired, but the authors themselves were left up to the individual words or ideas that they wanted to put into Scripture.

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And so it could be authored and it could be filled with different errors that you find in Scripture and different authors said it different ways.

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And sometimes Paul got it wrong, you know, concerning the roles of women in the church and human sexuality and marriage.

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Paul didn't quite get that right. But the idea that God is really good, Paul got that right. That's the conceptual view. That's not what we mean.

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Nor do we mean the natural view of divine inspiration. Natural view is that God chose men who were really pious and really wise to share with us the deep human insights that they had from what they observed from humanity.

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So that what we have today is a collection of words shared by the great sages of the ages.

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And it's shared with us in the pages of Scripture so that God just chose these men and they wrote whatever they wanted to write.

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But we have the best of the best of a collection of these writings, which is the collection of wisdom over the ages.

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By that view, in a couple hundred years, we might as well throw the U .S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Shakespeare's works into the canon as well, because that's what you're going to get with that kind of a view.

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No, what we mean is that the Word of God itself is the Word of God. That God breathed out

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His Word through human instruments, different occasions and different times to give us exactly what it is that He wanted. Because it is the breath of God, it is living.

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It cannot be otherwise. We'll talk about this in the next week or two. When God speaks, it is always divine.

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It is always authoritative. It is always inspired. It is always living. It cannot be otherwise.

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It cannot be otherwise because of its source, because it comes from God. It is always anything that comes from Him that He speaks is

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His Word in that sense. Now, a related doctrine to that, to inspiration, is inerrancy.

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And I mentioned this last week. I was talking about inerrancy while I made all of the mistakes that I corrected at the beginning of this message. Inerrancy means that it is without error.

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And we say that it is without error in its original autographs. We recognize that there are individual copies in manuscript traditions that contain scribal errors.

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We can identify these. We know where they're at, textual variants, misspellings, mispronunciation, etc., contractions, and things like that that are in there.

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They're inconsequential in terms of the meaning of it. And because we can identify textual variants, we can come to a conclusion as to exactly what the original manuscript said.

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Inerrancy is something that is conveyed to the original autographs. It is the piece of paper that the Apostle Paul wrote is exactly inspired and it is inerrant.

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The copies are not inerrant or without error, but we can compare copies to copies and we can get back with almost 100 % accuracy exactly what the authors wrote.

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And there's no doctrine, there's no will of God, there's no revelation of God, no major doctrine of theology that is at stake with the various manuscript traditions or the various copyist errors in the copies.

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So we're not talking about that when we're talking about inerrancy. In the original autographs, it is without error. Absolutely perfect, exactly as God gave it.

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What we have today is an accurate and true and faithful and 100 % certain representation of what was written back then.

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So that's inerrancy. Related to that is infallibility. Infallibility means that God's word cannot fail to accomplish what he has purposed to accomplish.

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If God has willed to reveal himself and his truth and his will through scripture, the scriptures cannot fail to do what

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God sends it to do. God's word cannot fail to accomplish the purposes that he has purposed for it.

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So this is an important doctrine because there are some who say that the Bible is fallible, or there are some who suggest that over the course of time, the

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Bible has been corrupted by men, by the freewill decisions of men, and men who inserted things into it and changed things in inspired scripture.

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Or they lost, cut out certain books, so they threw in books that really weren't intended to be there. Listen, if God intends for his word to do something, namely to be available to us and accurate and living for us in our day, his word cannot fail to accomplish what he, in eternity past, determined and decreed that his word would do.

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So in that sense, it is absolutely infallible. Not only does it not contain any errors, his word cannot err.

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All error rests with us, the recipients, but his word itself cannot err. And related to infallibility is preservation.

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So we've gone through inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility, and now preservation. Preservation is related to all of this. All of this is the logical,

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I'm just building for you a logical case of what scripture says regarding itself. Because God is a God of truth, he cannot err.

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Because God speaks what he speaks, his word is incapable of committing an error. And because God is who he is, he must and he will preserve his word.

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And this is simply just the next logical step in the process. God himself has promised to give his word to his people and to preserve his word for his people.

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That's God's promise. Now, if you deny that scripture has been preserved for us exactly as God gave it, if you deny that, then you must call

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God a liar. Because scripture says that that is God's intention. God has intended to preserve his word for us.

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And to deny that he has is to say that God is a liar. He is the one who sovereignly has preserved his word against corruption.

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It's nonsensical, inane, and rank stupidity to suggest that God who gave his word and moved so powerfully in and through those men to write down what he wanted for us is then over the course of time, unable to preserve it or to keep it from human corruption or perversion.

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To suggest that God can do that and he can do everything else, but he cannot preserve or keep his word over time.

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That is just rank stupidity to suggest that. The God of the person who thinks that way is not the

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God of the Bible. He's not. The God of the Bible is able to give his word and to preserve it perfectly and to keep it.

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No purpose of his can be thwarted. And if God says, my intention is that this word would stand forever, it will stand forever.

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Because no purpose of his can be thwarted. No man can stand against him. No man can corrupt what God wants to preserve.

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Because the minute he tries to do it, God would strike him dead. He has the power to do that. If he has the power to give his word, he has the power to preserve his word.

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And this is what scripture says, Psalm 119, forever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven. Your faithfulness continues through all generations.

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You establish the earth and it stands. They stand, that is the earth and God's word, they stand this day according to your ordinances for all things are your servants.

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In other words, the Psalmist is saying, everything that is created serves God's purposes. So God created the earth, he established it and it stands.

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God gave his word and it is forever settled in the heavens and it cannot be perverted.

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They, the earth and God's word stand and are established and forever settled because everything serves his purpose and there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can change his purpose.

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Psalm 119 verse 152, of old I have known your testimonies that you have founded them forever.

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Psalm 119 verse 160, the sum of your word is truth and every one of your righteous ordinances is everlasting.

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Isaiah 40 verse eight, the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Jesus said,

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Matthew 5 18, truly I say to you, heaven and earth pass away, but not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the law until it is all accomplished.

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Matthew 24 35, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. And first Peter 1 25 says, the word of the

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Lord endures forever. And this is the word which was preached to you. The testimony of scripture, old Testament, new Testament from all the divines and saints, the testimony of scripture consistently is that the word of God is settled in heaven.

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It stands forever. It is unalterable and at God's purposes cannot be thwarted. So this is the time of year shortly after Christmas or shortly around Christmas that you're going to start seeing all the documentaries and the news stories about the lost books of the

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Bible. Now, since I was talking about stupidity earlier, let me add this stupidity to this rank stupidity, the idea that there is a lost book of the

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Bible or such a thing. And they want to point to the gospel of Barnabas and the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Mary and the gospel of stupid.

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And they want to say that these things were intended to be in the Bible, but they're not for some reason and that they were lost to history and that we just stumbled upon them in a, in a, in a cave in Israel somewhere.

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And you have actually the gospel of Peter written by Peter and signed and autographed by Peter. I mean, it's got his

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DNA on it and we can prove that it came from Peter and this was intended to be in the church, in the, in the canon of scripture, but somehow it got lost out.

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It got forgotten and lost to history. There's no such thing as a lost book of the Bible. It does not and cannot exist. There's no such thing as a lost book of the

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Bible. That's just stupidity. To say that is to suggest that God himself was not, was able to give that book, but not able to make sure that it got in the canon for us.

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And the 2000 years of Christians have been without something that we desperately need. It's impossible to deny the preservation of scriptures to suggest that Jesus was a liar, that God is impotent, that God cannot fulfill his purposes and that man can thwart

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God's will, God's designs and eternal decrees. God's word is a living word given by inspiration, breathed out by him, inherent, infallible, preserved for us, settled forever in the heavens.

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And we have it, you have it, multiple copies sitting in your lap, on your phone, on your shelf, by your bed.

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What an amazing testimony to the gospel of grace and to the grace of God that he would give us and preserve for us something so amazing.

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And it is living. And here's what we mean by when we say that scripture is living. It has a living quality about it. Acts chapter seven, verse 38, when

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Stephen, right before Stephen was stoned, he made reference to those who were, he says, this is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness together with the angel who was speaking to him on Mount Sinai and who's with our fathers.

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And he received the living oracles to pass on to you. Speaking of the word of God that came to Moses, he, Moses received living oracles.

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That's the law. The living oracles of God, the old Testament is the living word of God, just as the new

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Testament is. In John six, verse 63, Jesus said, it's the spirit who gives life. The flesh profits nothing.

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The words that I speak to you and spoken to you, these are spirit and life. There's a living quality about the word of God.

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Scripture does a life giving work. In James one 18, it says in the exercise of his will, God's will, he brought us forth by the word of truth.

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What is it that gives life to God's elect? It's his word. It is when the chosen one hears the word of God preached and proclaimed and the spirit of God does that quickening work in the heart of that individual to open their eyes and to replace the heart of stone with the heart of flesh and opens their eyes and opens their heart so that they would heed the things which are spoken in the word.

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The word of God does this. The word of God has a quality and ability to bring life to God's people, to those whom

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God loves and to those whom God came to save. First Peter one 23 says, you have been born again, not of seed, which is perishable, but imperishable that is through the living and enduring word of God.

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What is it that causes us to be born again? It's the word of God. This is why it is so essential to use the word of God in evangelism and in the life and ministry of the church, because scripture is the means of bringing the spiritually dead to spiritual life.

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The gospel that is contained in scripture is the means by which the unbeliever sees his need, sees the judgment that is to come, sees his desperate condition, and sees that there is a

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Christ who came to remedy all that he is plagued by and to remedy his eternal damnation.

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It's in scripture that all that is revealed. And when the unbeliever hears those words, it has the power to give them life.

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But here's what scripture does not mean when we say that the word of God is living. We speak of the word of God being living. We don't mean this.

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We don't mean that it is living in the same sense that people speak of a living constitution. Now, when people speak of a living constitution, what do they mean?

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What they mean is that we need to have nine unelected men in black robes who hold a perpetual constitutional convention and rewrite our founding documents every day according to the whims of society.

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That's what they mean. What they mean is that it needs to change constantly and evolve with the times, and it means something different every day.

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You wake up on Tuesday, it means something different than it did yesterday. Yesterday, you woke up, you had a right to free speech and a right to bear arms.

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Today you wake up and, hey, nine guys rewrote that. You don't have a right to free speech and right to bear arms anymore. Why? Because it's a living document, and so its meaning changes over time.

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That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about the meaning of scripture changing. The meaning of scripture never changes.

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It means today what it meant 2 ,000 years ago, and it meant 2 ,000 years ago what it meant 3 ,000 years ago.

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It never changes. If scripture's meaning changes, it means nothing. If it means whatever we want it to mean, then it doesn't mean anything.

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It doesn't change over time. It's not living in that sense. It's not living in the sense that it evolves with the times, that 2 ,000 years ago it was good and fashionable and right and true to say that there were gender distinctions in the church and the women had certain roles, men had certain roles.

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That was good, but today, hey, it's a living document. It's a living word. It doesn't mean that anymore. That's not what we mean when we say it's living, nor do we mean that it's living in the sense that something just continues to be good.

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Like we might say of a movie, it has a living and enduring quality to it, right? It's a wonderful life. It's a living movie.

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It's inspired in that sense too. It has this certain inspiring quality that you watch. It's a wonderful life, and it almost belongs in the canon of Seuss.

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It's so good. And so it has this living and enduring quality where it speaks to your heart every year, and because it has lasted so long, we say it has a living legacy or a living and enduring quality to it.

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That's not words. I'm not just describing scripture's age when we say it is living. I'm describing something else about it.

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Nor do we mean that it is living in the sense that it has some power that we can tap into if we use the right words or we speak the right mantra or we find some way of saying the words in such a way as to sort of crack open its power and use it for our own ends.

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If we could just sort of tap into that power source. That's not what we're describing. Here's what it does mean.

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It means the scripture, the 66 books that you have in your Bible, even the genealogies, even

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Leviticus, even Numbers, even Ecclesiastes is the word of God, breathed out by him for our prophet.

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It is alive because of its source, because of who it comes from and who gave it to us. It is living because God works in and through his word.

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God has joined. He has chosen to join his eternal purposes, his eternal decrees, which he issued before the foundation of the world, his power, his life -saving and redeeming work.

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He has united this to his word, which he breathed out to us. And he works in and through the word that is written alongside the spirit of God and the

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Lord Jesus Christ. They use the triune God, uses his word to accomplish his purposes in this earth.

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And he does it through what he has spoken and what he has written and what he has breathed out and preserved for us.

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God has so united himself, his truth, and his name to his word that it shares his life because it comes from him.

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That's what we mean when we speak of it being a living book. And if it's not living, then it's not powerful, and it's not able to do anything.

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And when youth pastors stand up and preach from Dr. Seuss or P .D. Eastman, the apocryphal children's books, they're recognizing, they're acknowledging that they do not believe that it is living or that it is powerful or that it is able to do anything.

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They honestly believe that their skits, their drama, and their sermon illustrations, and their stories, and their jokes, and their video clips, and all of that other nonsense has just as much power to change the life and sanctify the believer and lead people to Christ as the word of God does.

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I just got into a Twitter exchange because Justin is always getting in trouble on Twitter, and he's over in Israel.

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And so some guy chimed in and was taking Justin to task for suggesting that the guy who claims he spent 23 minutes in hell was a little off base.

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And Justin, to say he was a little off base, he is really off base. And so this guy chimes in and he says, well, God can use that just because some people don't listen to scripture, and they need testimonies like this to show them what is really true.

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Justin was really quiet, and I thought, okay, I'll take the bait. So I jumped in and I said, even if someone rises from the dead, they will not believe them.

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They have Moses and the prophets. And even if someone rises from the dead, they will not believe.

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Let them have Moses and the prophets. You honestly believe that these other things, testimonies, and stories, and anecdotes, and quips, and video clips, have even one centella, one millionth of the power of the word of God.

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Those things are dead compared to the word of God. They're powerless. Spurgeon said this, there is a style of majesty about God's word, and with this majesty, a vividness never found elsewhere.

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No other writing has within it a heavenly life whereby its works, miracles, and even imparts life to its reader.

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It is a living and incorruptible seed. It moves, it stirs itself, it lives, it communes with living men as a living word.

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Have you ever known what this means? Why this book has wrestled with me. The book has smitten me.

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The book has comforted me. The book has smiled on me. The book has frowned on me. The book has clasped my hand. The book has warmed my heart.

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The book weeps with me and sings with me. It whispers to me and it preaches to me. It maps my way and holds my goings.

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It was to me the young man's best friend and companion, and it still is my morning and evening chaplain. It's a living book and all alive from its first chapter to its last word.

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It is full of a strange mystic vitality which makes it have preeminence over every other writing for every living child of God."

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It's perfectly stated. Let me give you three observations from this.

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We're out of time, so these will be quick. First, this living quality that the Word of God has is something that only the living can discern.

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It's something that only the living can discern. Sometimes I run across atheists who say or write online, and I see these statements, that the

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Bible is a Bronze Age book for a Bronze Age people filled with all these old stories that are meaningless and purposeless today, without purpose for today.

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It's just a Bronze Age book. I don't expect a spiritually dead person to be able to assess a living document.

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So I expect an atheist to not be able to recognize this. I expect an atheist to not know this.

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An atheist, somebody who rejects this, an unbeliever, Scripture says they are hardened in their heart, they're blinded in their eyes, they do not have ears to see or eyes to see, they have no spiritual ability to perceive the truth of the

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Word of God at all. It is a Bronze Age book to them. To us, it is the living

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Word of God. This is something that only believers and only the living can discern about Scripture.

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Second, believers, true believers, do not need to be convinced of this. A true believer does not need an apologetic for the living

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Word of God. A true believer does not need everything that I just presented to you to convince him that this is what

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Scripture says to us. We didn't need that to convince us of that. You knew that coming in here. You knew that from the moment that you were saved.

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For when you were saved, your eyes were opened and you saw Scripture for what it is, the living and enduring Word of God, forever settled in heaven, that lives and breathes and communes with you.

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And as I said last week, when you read Scripture, you get the feeling that you're not reading it, that it is reading you.

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It knows you and it is communing with you and it is speaking with you because it is a living Word. It is God's voice and the believer recognizes that.

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Before I was a believer, I hated the Word of God. I thought it was the most boring and stupid and inane and useless thing on the face of the planet.

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I had no interest in it. The book was dead to me. That's what I thought. But the truth is that I was dead to the book.

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The book was living. It was me who was dead. I was the dead one, unable to perceive that truth or to recognize that truth or even to love that truth.

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But the believer knows it and recognizes it. For at the moment of genuine faith, the believer knows what

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Scripture is. It is the living and enduring Word of God. And the one who denies these truths, you have every reason to question the genuineness and the legitimacy of their salvation.

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A true believer, the sheep, know what is true about Scripture. And the third observation

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I'd make is this. This is why the Word of God must be central in the life of anything that calls itself a church.

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So many churches and so many organizations say they exist for the purpose of bringing in unbelievers and then sharing with them the life -changing message of the

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Word of God. And then they take the Word of God and they put it under a table and cover it up and hide it, lest it offend anybody or drive off the unbeliever.

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This is the very thing they need. And to suggest that you can reach an unbeliever or to suggest that you can accomplish the work of God by minimizing the role of the

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Word of God, or by hiding it, or being ashamed of it, or trying to just trickle it out to people in little doses.

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We don't want to give them too much too soon. It's the exact opposite of what is true and what the unbeliever needs.

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We need the Word of God. Why? Because it is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, preserved Word of the living God. And it lives.

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The believer knows this. The unbeliever needs to know this. And the unbeliever needs the Word of God so that he too may have life.

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Let's pray. Father, we are thankful for your Word. You have been so gracious and good and kind to your people to give us this living

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Word of truth, which is your revelation to us. And by it, you quicken our hearts.

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You open our eyes. You change us into your children. You mold us and shape us and sanctify us by the living

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Word of God, that revelation of the truth. We thank you for the mercy that you have shown us and may be honored and glorified as we obey it and love it and cherish it.

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Dig these truths deep into our hearts that we may respond with faith and love and obedience to the one who is the living