Do I Only Need My Bible? | Theocast

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I'm sure if you're watching this video, you've probably heard this phrase, no creed but Christ, no confession, but the

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Bible. It's one I used to use and I understand the sentiment and I understand what they're meaning.

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And what we're trying to say is we believe in the sole authority of the word of God, that God's word is sufficient and that what can be known about God, we don't need any outside sources, extra documents to tell us what

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God's word is. The plain meaning of the text can tell us what it is. And I agree with that.

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I believe that the sole authority of God's word rests within his word, but it's only resting in his word if it's rightly understood.

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If we do not translate God's word correctly and we don't interpret correctly, then the power has, there is no power.

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It's lost its purpose. It's lost its meaning. So the correct and proper interpretation of scripture is the most important thing when we are studying the word of God.

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And the question is, how do we get to that point? And are we sufficient in our understanding to do so?

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So this rejection I get, there's been so many people and so many denominations and so much writing that has swayed people from different directions, teaching wrong doctrine, that it's almost like you want the noise to go away.

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You want to remove the clutter and let's get back to the simplicity of the word of God and let's just read it.

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If you're listening so far, I'm sure I've probably spoken, I've hit a tone with some of you and I grew up in that way.

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I was taught that all I needed was a certain translation of the Bible and I had just be able to read it.

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And that was sufficient for me to be able to interpret it. It was on a second grade reading level and there'd be no problem with me interpreting it.

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And I should be able to understand God's word plainly. Well, the problem with this idea is that even though we may think the

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Bible is super simple and what can be known about God and the salvation of God is simple, Paul makes that very clear, that the way to salvation is very simple.

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There's no confusion within scripture, but there's more in the Bible that helps bolster that and helps build it.

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And we learn about the nature of God and the nature of man. We learn about the nature of the church and the nature of humanity. There's a lot that's in there and that isn't as simple.

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I mean, Peter even says some of Paul's writings can be complicated at times. And they're hard to read. And if any theologian who's ever studied the

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Bible could agree with that statement, that there are times that things have been written and because of language barriers, because of the different cultures and different time, and we're talking about thousands of years that are separated between what we're reading and what was written, it could be complicated.

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So I want us to step back and maybe think about looking at scripture and allowing scripture to help us dictate and understand maybe how we should engage it.

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And that to simply say, all I need to know is the English language and have an English translation, and I can come to the true meaning of the text, might be a little bit of an overstatement.

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And I'll explain what I mean in just a minute. I think this is a wise statement and a very helpful statement.

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I heard it recently. It's from Charles Spurgeon. Most people know who he is. And in his day, he was dealing with the same issue where people wanted to just toss aside any history, anything that was written beforehand, and just look at the text by itself.

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And there was a rejection of creeds and confessions even in his day. And he said this, I quote,

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I find it odd that he who thinks so highly of what the Holy Spirit teaches him thinks so little of what the

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Holy Spirit teaches others also. It is interesting, right? We do believe in the illumination of the spirit.

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That is, the spirit comes in, opens, gives us life, opens up our spiritual eyes.

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And when we can see the gospel, we can believe the gospel, and we can see the truth of scripture. And yet we're not the only ones who've had our eyes open.

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There have been others before us and at the same time as us. And yet we deem our interpretation more valid because it's by the illumination of the spirit than we do other people's illumination of the spirit.

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And I have, as a pastor, been asked this question a lot. John, if the Holy Spirit lives within us and opens our eyes, then why is there so much disagreement about the

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Bible, which is a great question. And there's a lot of answers to that, and there's a lot of theories to that, but sin still resides in our heart and sin can cloud our minds, it can cloud our judgment, and we're always progressing in our knowledge about the

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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Paul tells us that in Ephesians 4, that we are constantly growing in our knowledge and we are constantly learning more and more and being grounded more and more in Christ.

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And as we do that, we're weeding out bad doctrine or wrong thoughts, wrong emotions and wrong actions. And so there is a progression in our knowledge as far as knowing the scripture.

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This is why churches should be faithful to not only preach the word of God, to persuade their heart to trust in Christ, but also teach the word of God, and then to center around and build one another up by singing and using scripture for the sake of application with one another.

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So the whole Christian life should be centered around God's word. But we need to do our best to try and figure out, have we really translated it right?

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And somehow in modern context, we think we're the only ones who've got it right and everybody else in history has got it wrong.

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And we are going to make the same mistakes and we are making the same mistakes as people have done in the past.

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It's almost like to say, we have the internet and so we don't need any medical books and we don't need anything from the past.

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We're just going to move forward with what we have now and rejecting anything or any knowledge or any mistakes that's been done.

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We're going to make the same mistakes again. And I don't think we want to do that because this isn't just talking about medical issues.

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We're talking about spiritual issues and we don't want to make those mistakes. Sometimes people reject creeds and confessions because they assume those are authoritative in themselves.

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I know that's how I used to think about it. I used to think that, oh, well, the Roman Catholic church does that and they hold the wrong authority over people in the word of God.

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So I don't want anything to do with creeds and confessions because the only source of my authority is the

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Bible. Well, that's not what creeds and confessions are. And ultimately what this is called historically, it's called biblicism.

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It means that you are going to look at the text in isolation and you won't allow even sometimes the context of another passage or the

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Bible at large to influence your understanding of the text. And you won't allow history or confessions to help guide you so that you don't make the same heretical mistakes that other people have made in the past.

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And that's what biblicism is. It's actually not a good word. It's a bad word. If someone says I'm a biblicist, that's not a good thing.

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It's a bad word. It's a bad concept. And we'll look more into that in a moment.

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But when we isolate the Bible and we try and read it as if we think we have a blank slate, we're not putting anything into the text, our intentions, our minds, and our brain is clean and clear of any wrong intentions.

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Reading the text is in some ways naive.

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For instance, most people that I engage with that haven't gone to Bible college or even have or gone to seminary, they are going to struggle to defend and theologically or be able to go to Scripture and prove from Scripture the doctrine of the

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Trinity. Most people did not learn the doctrine of the Trinity from their Bible reading.

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They've learned it if they've grown up in a good solid church, they learned it from a church, from their doctrinal statement or from a

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Sunday school class or from a Sunday school teacher or a faithful pastor. That right there goes to show you that you didn't go to the

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Scripture while you were a young Christian and all of a sudden developed this theology called

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Trinity or Trinitarian theology because the word's not even in there. If you say, yes,

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I believe in the Trinity, you're using extra biblical language. That's another thing about biblicism that says, if it's not a biblical word,

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I don't want to use it and I don't believe in it. Well, there's a lot of extra biblical words that we use that help summarize the

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Bible. And that's all we're trying to do is bring down into a summary this mass of work that's been given to us.

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When someone says to me, what do you believe about the Bible? And if you just say the Bible, that actually I can't test that.

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I don't even know what that means. And the reason why it matters is that so many people have got things wrong about the

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Bible and they defend it. Here's a great example from history. Both Athanasius and Arius defended their position about the

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Trinity from the Bible. So this is one of the earliest debates about the Trinity, why the

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Athanasian creed even exists and why it matters and even why we're Trinitarians today. And why we use the word

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Trinitarian is because Arius was trying to say that Jesus was a created being and he was using scripture first to do that, that he is begotten of the

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Father. And that word begotten became very hard in translating. What did it mean? And then Athanasius is presenting to the

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Christians and the councils of those churches that are gathering together to examine this. He's saying, if you believe this, you are denying our salvation.

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You are denying the very promise of our salvation because if Jesus is just another human being, he could not pay for our sins and he would not have the capacity to then earn for us our righteousness.

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And it would go against scripture where it says, I and the Father are one and that Jesus is God. He is the

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Lord. There's so many passages that let us know that Christ is equal with the Father and that he is

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God. He is not a God. We don't believe in tritheism where there's three gods. We believe in one God.

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So probably, most likely, you didn't come up with your theology of the Trinity that was given to you.

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And it's a good thing because you can go in now and verify it in the Bible and you would have a greater depth of knowledge to be able to do that.

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But when people say they reject it, yet they call themselves Trinitarian, you probably didn't learn that on your own.

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And there's more about scripture that most likely you haven't learned on your own either. And I think it would be helpful for us to use things that have come before us.

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Let me just read to you the Lennon Baptist Confession. This is an old document. It's very helpful in guiding us and directing us and in staying away from heresy.

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It's very similar to what was written and taken from what's called the Westminster. So these are old theological doctrines that the church has been examining for hundreds of years now.

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Theology that's been handed down to us, that has been formulated as we look at church history and we look at the doctrines.

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And when it says we believe the Catholic faith, what it means is the universal faith, that faith that which the church universally, meaning throughout every age, every age of the church has embraced these truths.

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The opening statement of the confession, for those of you that think that confession claims authority, listen to what it says.

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The Holy Scriptures are the only sufficient, certain and infallible standard of all saving knowledge, faith and obedience.

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There's nothing more valuable when the document itself says, do not think this document is authoritative.

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The scripture is authoritative. And then they're going to then walk through what the church has affirmed so that we don't run off the rails.

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Most people don't understand the Christian confessions always come out of controversy. Someone ran off the theological rail and they grabbed people with them and either enslaved them into legalism or became heretics.

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And we don't want that. Just like we have warning signs around shark bins when we're driving because someone most likely ran off the road.

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These are warning signs to make sure that the direction we're going in the word, we're doing it in such a way that we won't fall into the same traps that people have fallen into before.

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Again, remember the word of God is still the only authority, but our creeds and confessions are the guides.

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They help not only accelerate our knowledge, but also make sure that we're not running off the road.

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Obviously, we always want to use scripture as our final authority and not just read the confessions absent from scripture, but we read them hand in hand as a guide, as a preacher and a teacher would do.

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These are godly men and shepherds that wrote these, and so we can allow them, as Spurgeon said, that we can use what was written before, those who are illuminated by the

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Holy Spirit to guide and shepherd us that we may not make the same mistakes as they have in the past.

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So we don't want to be a biblicist. And here's a good example of why I think the Bible is actually written knowing you're going to use outside sources for its interpretation.

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You have to have outside sources in order to interpret the Bible, and if you refuse to have outside sources, you will not be able to interpret the

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Bible. A good example of that is you have to have what's called general revelation. So there's general revelation and special revelation.

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So general revelation is the creation of God. We learn this from Psalms. Behold, the covens declare the glory of God.

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We also learn from Romans that the knowledge of who God is comes from his creation.

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There's a general sense of that, and the Bible uses that general sense for us to understand what was written.

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So if someone has no knowledge of creation and no knowledge of the human nature and no knowledge of animals and how system and money works and all of that, if you don't have that knowledge, you're not going to be able to fully understand what's in the text.

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If someone is born today but has the capacity to read tomorrow but has no cognitive ability of just life, they are not going to be able to interpret the

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Bible. They have to know what ants and animals are and water and pain and suffering and what a city is and what a nation is and what a king is.

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These are all information that we're going to have to gather from outside of the

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Bible. We then use that general revelation to help us interpret because it doesn't necessarily explain what a horse looks like.

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We gather that it's got a mouth and we could put a bridle in it, but even when it says to go to the ant, it assumes you know what an ant is.

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Go to the ant, you sluggard. It assumes you know what an ant is or the donkey talked. It assumes you know what a donkey is.

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It doesn't explain it's got four legs and a tail and it makes a certain noise and it kind of looks like a horse.

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It assumes this knowledge. So the Bible in itself assumes you have to have outside knowledge in order to understand it.

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That being said, we're also two to four or five thousand years removed from some of the things that were written.

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And they were written and they're culturally involved where there's landscape and there's traditions, the language of covenants and how covenants work and how we dress and how they talked.

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And sometimes the Bible will reference those. And if we don't understand some of the cultural normalities of the day, we're going to have a hard time understanding kind of what was meant by some of those statements.

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So to reject this idea that we can use geography and we can use history and we can use culture to help us understand the

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Bible more, we just need the English text. I don't think the Bible itself demands that rule.

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It should never alter the text. It should never change the text, but it can help us come to a clear understanding of the text so that we are more faithful to understand what it is that God has given us.

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That being said, there are those who have wrestled with these questions before. And if we reject those and we remove those, we're most likely going to fall into the same traps.

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Let me give you an example of people who've done this. A lot of false religions today are people who rejected any kind of outside creed or confession and decided they were going to come up with their own understanding of scripture.

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Famous people such as Joseph Smith is a good example of this. He even determined the

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Bible was full of errors, that there needed to be another handbook to add to it, or Mary Baker Eddy. You could just keep going down these false religions who rejected church history, who rejected and became biblicists, and their biblicism led them to actually be anti -Trinitarian and anti -gospel and anti -Jesus.

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So we need to be very careful that we don't fall into those same traps and maybe step back and say, we're not the only wise ones.

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There are those who have gone before us, not sinlessly, but we can use the broader context of all to help us make those decisions.

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So if you're in a church or you don't have a confession, there's a really interesting quote recently that I read from Karl Truman, and he had a really good point.

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In his book, when he was talking about rediscovering and bringing these up,

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I'll put the link down below, but rediscovering the creeds and confessions and the imperative, the creedal imperative that we have, he was saying, if someone says,

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I just believe the Bible and we don't have a way to examine it, there's no way for us to know that what they believe is true and right, because there needs to be a way for us to publicly scrutinize their claim to the

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Bible. This is why many people throughout history would say that they're a

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Christian. I am a Christian that would hold the title, but then you have to say, but what does it mean to be a

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Christian? And if they would say, well, I just believe the Bible, they're still not telling you what the

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Bible says. There's no way to identify it. So early on, this is why confessions were made.

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We confess so that publicly people who want to identify or want to be able to examine, am

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I going to join a congregation? Am I going to join a church that is teaching the faithful word of God?

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What are you teaching? And so when they say, well, we teach the scriptures and this is what we teach and here's the document, that's what the confessions are.

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Same thing about the creeds. What do you believe about Jesus? Well, we believe that he is part of the Trinity. We believe the

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Trinity is true, that there is the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, that he was born of a virgin, that he rose and he died and he rose.

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I mean, these are important pieces of the Bible that you should be able to examine and know what it is that we're teaching.

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And they are there for our use. So someone who is anti -confessional, anti -credo, but basically what they're saying is,

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I don't want you to be able to examine my faith. I don't want you to be able to examine my doctrine to see if it's true.

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And a church that does not hold to a confession and does not hold to the creeds, what they're basically saying is we are kind of free to wander theologically wherever the lead pastor, whoever's teaching, wants to go.

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If he wants to go down this road, he can do that. If he wants to go down this road, he can do that. And there's no one there to stop him.

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There's no one there to say what you're doing is wrong. So creeds and confession have been there not to govern the church, not as the authority of the church, but to guide the church and to help protect the church from itself and from wandering off in it.

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So just some thoughts about biblicism. Just some thoughts about how we use the word of God. Hopefully this was helpful.

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And if you have any questions or comments, please engage with us down below. I'll put a couple of podcasts that we've done in the past about biblicism.