8 - Lesson 3: The Bible

The Bible as God’s Revelation for Discipleship

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Discipling. This is our introduction to discipling where we are using a book called Growing in Grace as a tool that we're using to basically teach you how to disciple others and we're giving you this as a tool that you can use to just really facilitate discipling.

And so we encourage you, you can always, if you don't have a copy, which I would hope you would, but maybe you're new to the class, you could pick it up at our store and pick up your own copy, which is at wherever that is down there, store at strivingforeternity .org.

You could pick up your copy of the book. You could pick up multiple copies if you want to use it for homeschooling, with your children, with your Sunday school class, with anyone that's new to your church that you're discipling, with someone that you just met who's on the street and they are professing to be believers, whoever, but it's a beginner's thing.

Now I do want to say that the last two lessons we've had on prayer, some people have contacted us and told us that that was the first they really had an understanding of what prayer is. One person said that he's read the Lord's Prayer many times and never saw it in the light of the way that we had explained it.

And I say I'm bringing this up because though these lessons are really, we would think, basic principles of Christian belief, it's also for some who have not been well discipled. Many churches don't disciple at all.

Once someone gets saved, it's just sit in a pew, serve in church, learn from a pulpit. We don't do proper discipleship in many churches anymore. And so for that reason, some of this stuff is new, even to people who grew up in the church, who've been in the church for a long time.

You could be a missionary's child, a pastor's child, someone who went to Bible college. I know someone who went to a Bible college and went through these lessons with him and there were things he was learning.

So don't think that just because it's kind of discipleship that it's so elementary that we can't learn things. We've always got to be looking to learn things. I want to try and teach you how to teach others.

And that's what these lessons are for. So if you're new to the class, we welcome you. We want to do an overview from last class. We'll put that up there. There you go. Why do we have the background we got?

That's what I want to know. All right. So, but if you look at that, you'll see that we have, we basically have an outline to, Oh, that was neat. That was quick. All right. So there, the background is now covered.

Nice. Okay. So this is a review from last class and what you have there is kind of, if you were, if you paid attention in the last class, you see where this was going, but we talked about how we, when should we pray, how we should pray, does God answer our prayers, and then what should I pray for?

Now your homework for last week was to memorize Philippians 4, 6, and 7. So I'm going to ask for you guys to say that aloud right now. We're waiting, waiting. I'm sure you guys are all doing it. All right.

For those of you who didn't, let's do it together because I know you were waiting anyway. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

And so that is that verse you want to encourage the person, your discipling to recite that. In whichever translation they feel most comfortable. Don't get on them if it's not word for word, okay? We could try to do that, we want to do that, but you know, keep in mind, you always want to be keeping in mind when you're discipling someone, where is that person at spiritually?

The younger they are, the more grace you want to show to them. You also want to see that they have a prayer list. Now I'm going to ask for those of you who are taking this class online, if you go into our Facebook group, the Striving for Eternity group in Facebook, post your prayer list there as long as it doesn't have anything that should not be known publicly.

But if you want, you could do that, just like we did with the lesson on salvation. People are posting their homework up there. If you are taking the class, you should be penciling in answers to the fill in the blanks on your own before class, and then when we come to the class, I'm going to give you some possible answers, because sometimes there's more than one for each lesson.

And so I'm going to give you some answers that would be right, and then you can fill it in with pencil or pen if you want, but I want to just go through, give you not only the answers, but explaining how to disciple other people through this.

Natural Revelation, Jesus Christ, and the Written Word

So let us look now, we are in lesson number three. Lesson number three, the Bible, the revelation about our Lord. A look at that, and we see here in the book, if we have it, it says, and I'm going to read a little bit from the book, so if you don't have your Growing in Grace book, you want to order one.

All right. So God has taken the initiative in arranging for fellowship with men by revealing himself in three ways. Now, there's three different ways that God has revealed himself over time. The first one is through creation.

Through creation, we see this in Psalm 19, the first four verses. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun. What you see here is that the heavens declare the glory of God.

So one way in which that we see God speaking to us is in what we call natural revelation. Natural revelation. In creation. In that which we see around us. A second way, and the most specific way that God has revealed himself is through his son, Jesus Christ.

Jesus said to them, this is John 14, 19. Jesus said to them, have I been with you so long and you do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the father. How do you say show us the father? And so what you see there is that Philip wanted to see the father, and Jesus said if you've seen me, you have seen the father.

So the second way, and I think the clearest way is through the son. Now, we still have creation to look at. We can still look at creation, and there are certain things that creation teaches us. You can look in Romans 1, which we're going to look at in a moment, and you can see that there are certain things creation will teach us, but it doesn't teach us enough.

Jesus Christ has the most to teach us as far as God's revelation, but he's not among us right now. He was for 33 years, but he's not walking among us anymore. So the third way that God reveals himself, and the way that we have that is the most authoritative in our life right now, is through the written word, the Bible.

The written word, the Bible. Second Peter 1, 21 says, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so that talks a little bit about how we got the Word of God.

Now, creation, if you look in your book there, creation can only teach us about, well, let's take a look at that passage before we fill it in. Let's look at it. Romans 1, 20. For the invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, are clearly perceived.

Ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made so that they are without excuse. And so what we have here is that creation can only teach us about God's attributes, that's your first blank, God's attributes, and his eternal power.

That's your next blank there, eternal power. So that's, creation is limited in what it can teach us. It can show us something about his attributes. We see he's a great designer. We can see, when we look at the vastness of creation, we can see how grand he is, how awesome he is.

We can look at a small part of a cell and see the same amazement. Now his son, as I said, is the fullest revelation of himself that is possible. We see that in Colossians 1, 19. Let's not go there for the sake of time, but you can see that there.

During this age, however, Christ is not physically present to teach us anymore the objective truth. We can't go to Jesus the way we go to someone else that we might meet on the street and talk to them.

Can't go to Jesus and ask him questions. So what has he left us with? He thus has given us his word, the Bible, and sent us the Spirit to guide us in all truth. 1 John 2, 27. Let's put that one up if we can.

But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, that you have no need that anyone should teach you. But that his anointed teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as he taught you, abide in him.

So what you have there is you have a case where we see there. We can also look in John 16, 13 that the Holy Spirit will guide us in all truth. That was basically part of the passage that I just preached this weekend at a conference on the Holy Spirit and his convicting work.

But one of the things the Holy Spirit does is he illuminates our mind as believers to the truths of his word. So it's of his word that he teaches us. Now we receive communication from God today through his word, the Bible.

And it's the Holy Spirit who takes the Bible and illuminates our mind to it. So the Bible is God's authority for faith and practice. So if we want to know how we should do things in church, how we should do things in our life, we're going to go to the Bible.

So when we are going to teach someone, especially someone that's a new believer, this is really important because most people do not understand the Bible. Now we did a whole class, 20 lessons, on how to interpret the Bible.

That's in our School of Biblical Hermeneutics. And we started that class with explaining some things about the Bible. We've also done a Systematic Theology class, our School of Systematic Theology. And we have the class there.

We're going to get to the one there where we have a class on Bibliology, the study of the Bible. And we'll see in there some of the same things we're going to look at very briefly here. We'll look at those in more detail.

But we want to give a student, a new believer especially, kind of an overview just so they have a little bit of a handling of the Word of God and understanding how we got it. Because our culture attacks this issue very much.

Our culture really tries to show that we are, basically that we don't have a book written by God. We have a book written just by men. So let us start with that. Let's start with the Doctrine of Inspiration, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

We're going to start here and we'll look at this and start with this. Letter A in your book is that it was inspired by God. That's your blank there. That the Scriptures were inspired by God. Let's take a look at a passage of Scripture.

We'll read just verse 16 here. I put 16 and 17 because we're going to get to that later. But all Scripture is breathed out. Now that word breathed out in some of your translations is the word inspired.

If you have a King James or a New King James, they'll say all Scripture is inspired. But when you inspire something it means, we're going to get to it. But the word here is actually to breathe out. All Scripture is breathed out by God.

And that's the point that I want to focus on, just that. That all Scripture is breathed out by God. The word inspired means to exhale, to breathe out. And that's what we do when we talk. We breathe out our words.

We exhale the words. And so the idea of inspiration is that it's God's spoken word. Okay, now God doesn't speak with sound coming out of His vocal cords the way we do. But He breathes it out. It is an act.

If you look in your book, it is an act that takes place when one is speaking. All Scripture from Genesis to Revelation should be red letters. Now if you really want a red letter Bible, the whole thing is what Jesus said.

It is breathed out from the mouth of God. The Bible is the product of God's spoken words. That's why we call it God's word. Because God has spoken it out. Let it be there in your syllabus. And we're going to come back to 2nd Corinthians, sorry, 2nd Timothy in just a moment, 2nd Timothy 3.

So I'm going to hold off on the rest of that passage. But let it be there. Men were directed by the Holy Spirit. That's your blanks there. The Holy Spirit to write the Bible. We already looked at 2nd Peter 1 .21, that men were moved by the Holy Spirit.

Okay, now here's some things about the Bible. I have just a couple paragraphs there just for you to understand. And the reason this is important is because if you look at any of the other world religions, you usually have one religious leader who writes down their authoritative work.

And when they do so, they do it and it is, even within that, you have contradictions within what they write. And then they try to fix those contradictions over time as people point them out. And so it's important to realize that if you have one person who over many, many years can't keep his story straight.

If I take 10 people in a room and say, describe to me in detail about God, you're probably going to get 12 different stories. So why is that important? Because look what we say, the men were directed, or what's actually the theological term, super intended.

It means God, the Holy Spirit working through the people. So even though they wrote exactly as they chose, they wrote exactly as God intended. He worked through them in that way. But it says, we have here, the Bible was written by about 40 men over a period of 1 ,500 years.

Now that's the point. Remember, one man can't keep his story straight for 30, 40 years. Here you got 40 men keeping a story straight for 1 ,500 years. Men who never knew each other. And these men included fishermen such as Peter, James, John, Andrew.

Scholars like Paul. Poets like David and Solomon. Prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others. Shepherds like Amos and David. Kings like David and Solomon. See, wide walks of life from those that are noble to those who are paupers.

And everything in between. What you see is that the scriptures are quite clear that what we have is we have a case that this was written by many men over a long period of time. Different walks of life and there's no disagreement in what they say about who God is.

And while the Bible was written by men, it was the Spirit of God who used each of these men's personalities and surroundings to record all that is written. So that we may be assured that the scripture is God's Word without error.

In other words, it means that when we look at God's Word, we can trust it. It's an authority. It's something that we don't have to wonder. It is the only authority in a world of relativism. In a world that wants to teach that there's nothing that's absolute.

Here we have an absolute authority. God's Word. We can trust it. Why? Because it's the product of God. So that's the thing we want to remember about it. This is God's Word speaking to us. All right. And so it's important to think about that to understand that.

So even though God used men, yes he did. Paul wrote Romans, but God wrote Romans. Because God worked through Paul to write Romans. Now that's a hard concept for us to understand and you want to let your disciple know that.

Yes, that's hard to understand, but what it means is that we can trust that every word is exactly as God intended it even though men wrote it. Okay. And that's important because we know we can trust it.

The Importance of Scripture for Salvation, Assurance, Growth, and Spiritual Warfare

So let us look at the importance of scripture. Okay. The importance of scripture. So this is Roman numeral number two here and by answering the questions below in your book, a student in scripture may see exactly how important the Word of God is.

So we're going to take a look at these and I'm going to ask the questions and I'm going to give you some of the answers that you could have and if you have different answers than what I put or what I say, please just type them into the chat room.

Shoot in your answers. Actually, you could probably do that now if you're watching live. Just shoot your answers into the chat room and that way if you do that with each of these just put like a period and then your answer and that way I can see what they are tell you if they're you have some right or wrong from you know, if there's or if another answer is close enough that it would work as well.

I say to do that now because there's a slight delay from watching live and so you'll by the time I get there you'll have put it in such. All right. So the first one letter A says, what does the apostle say is the power unto salvation?

This is in Romans 1 and remember you always want your student to read the verses. So I'm going to ask you guys to read this out loud while I read it out loud even though people at your work may think you're crazy.

But it says here, for I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So this is letter A would be the gospel. Now more specifically it's it would also be fair to say the gospel of Christ as some translations say and you could also say the scriptures.

The reason that I'm making a distinction of scriptures is because that is separate from the gospel we know from the scripture and this is different than creation. There are some people that try to argue that you can be saved by looking at nature.

You cannot. Nature itself, natural revelation does not provide enough information and we're going We need the gospel and the gospel comes from special revelation or what's called supernatural revelation, right?

So we have natural and special or sorry general and special. General revelation being nature, special revelation being the Bible or natural revelation being creation, supernatural revelation being the Bible, okay?

So the gospel of Christ or the gospel is the answer to your first one. Letter B, which I haven't seen anyone answer in the chat room up there. I do see one. That's right, okay. Letter B here, what does the Bible say we can know for certain?

What can we know for certain? That's 1 John 5 13. I write these things to you who believe in my name, in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. So what is it that we may know?

That we can know that we have eternal life, all right? And that's what we can know for certain. So the scriptures are important because from them we can know that we have eternal life. And so that seems to be the answer that everyone else has.

So letter C, what did the rich man's brother or brothers need to believe in order to escape hell? This is out of Luke 16. The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky proclaims his handiwork. That is not the right one.

Thank you, that's better. Luke 16, not Psalm 19. But Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets let them here. And this is the context, the rich man says, send Lazarus back from the dead and my brothers will believe.

And Abraham said, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them. And he said, no father Abraham, but if someone goes back from the dead, they will repent. And he said, if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should come back from the dead.

So the answer to this would technically be Moses and the prophets. What did they need? They needed Moses and the prophets. But if you look, I say there, Moses and the prophets is one of the Jewish names for the scriptures.

So if you put the word of God, scriptures, or Moses and the prophets for letter C, all of those are good answers. Okay, either of those will work. That is that when you see Moses and the prophets, Moses is the first five books of the Bible and the prophets would be the end of the book.

So it's basically all inclusive of the Jewish writings. So sometimes you'll see Moses and the prophets, sometimes you'll see Moses, the prophets, and the writings. The writings are the historical works.

Okay, and so that is the way that we would see that. Okay, that that's referring to scripture. So basically what he's saying is in this parable, I believe it's a parable. We can, if you have questions on why, you can talk to me about, you can ask us about it.

But in that parable, what Abraham is saying is that they need the word of God, not someone coming back from the dead. Someone coming back from the dead is not enough to convince someone. When you say, why not?

That'd be some pretty incredible proof. Jesus Christ rose from the dead and people did not believe him. Okay, so someone who walked among them came back from the dead and they didn't believe Jesus. If they don't believe, if someone doesn't believe the Bible, they're not going to believe even if someone like Jesus comes back from the dead.

So let's look at letter D. Letter D here says, Job considered the word of God more necessary than food. Look at this one. I have not departed from the commandments of his lips. I have treasured the words of his mouth more than the portion of my food.

And so some say daily food, which is fine, but it's basically the idea of your daily food, your food, having bread, having a regular portion. So is the word of God more important to you than what you eat?

Ray Comfort says it this way, you know, that you should read your Bible every day. No food or I'm trying to remember how exactly words sound like. No Bible, no breakfast. It sounds like that. But no physical food, no physical food until spiritual food.

And so now that's not saying you have to have, you know, your breakfast first thing in the morning, you know, before breakfast, you have to have your prayers first thing in the morning. You can have your devotions anytime.

But the idea is that you want to have a regular time of being in God's word. Alright, letter E. We should consider the word of God so that we may grow, 1 Peter 2 .2, that we may grow like newborn infants long for pure spiritual milk, that they may grow up into salvation.

And so what you have here in letter E is the idea grow. That would be the blank there. So what you have is if you take a newborn and you just give that newborn nothing but milk, I know someone that adopted a child who this child was I think seven or eight years old and had still been eating out of a bottle, had nothing but milk, still on formula, was not properly developed.

He had at seven or eight years old had the body of a two-year-old, two and a half-year-old, very, very small, like a child, couldn't walk, just that's we would call abnormal. Once he was in a good household, taken care of, it took some time, but he's eating real food, eating, walking, learning how to talk, he's now caught up.

But until then, if you feed a child just baby food, as it grows, it would be abnormal. And the same is true for a Christian. And we want to take the person we're discipling and explain that to them. If you do not continue to grow, if you do not take the Word of God on a daily basis, you will develop abnormally as a Christian, okay?

You will not grow the way you're intended to grow, okay? So we need to be in God's Word regularly. Next, let us look at letter F. What along with prayer is our defense against spiritual warfare? Let's look at this in Ephesians.

Ephesians 6, 17, and we take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is what? Because what we're saying here, what do we take along with prayer? It is the Word of God. So your blank there would be God's Word, the Word of God, the Bible, any of those for F, the scriptures, they work fine, all right?

So for letter F, it's the Word of God that we take with us. What did Christ use to defeat Satan? Look at that in Ephesians 4. We got a couple verses here. And we see, and here it's, you're not going to see it directly in there for letter G in Matthew 4.

You're not going to see the, you know, but you're going to see what He uses. What does He use? By, but He answered, it is written, and then He quotes scripture. Man shall not live by every word, by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Another temptation comes, and Jesus said to him again, it is written, you shall not, and it quotes scripture, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Again, there's another temptation. Then Jesus said to him, be gone, Satan, for it is written.

He gives another quotation from scripture. You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. And so what you see here is three times Christ used God's Word. And that, again, you could use God's Word, scripture, the Word of God, the Bible, the Old Testament Bible is what He used.

But you see, in each one of those temptations, Jesus used scripture to answer Satan. Now remember, scripture is inspired by God. It's God breathed. So everything Jesus said was scripture, okay? And that's why we end up having a case where everything is going to be that, you know, like I jokingly say, if you want a red letter Bible, then it's the whole Bible, Old and New Testament, all in red lettering, okay?

Because it's all spoken by God, all right? There's nothing more special about the words that Jesus said while He walked the earth than the words He said through other human beings and having them record what He wanted, okay?

So letter H. Again, this is all in the importance. I hope you're seeing the importance of it. We're going to review it as we get done. I'm going to review all of them again. What effect will the Word of God have upon one's life?

What effect, and you can go to Psalm 119, the whole Psalm, which is the longest Psalm in the Bible. It's all about the Word of God. Find that interesting that the longest Psalm in all the Bible, longest chapter of any chapter in the Bible, and the whole thing is all about the Word of God.

But it says there in verse 9, how can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to your word. So when we ask the question, what effect will the Word of God have on one's life? Well, obedience.

These are some possible answers. Obedience, prevention of sin, protection, keeping from sin. Put that up there just for a second because it says, yeah, the purity. Purity. How to keep one man's way pure.

So any of these will work. Obedience, because it depends on the translation that you have. But obedience, prevention of sin, protection, purity. Any of those work. Let's see what we have in the chat room for letter H.

Purity and not sinning, good. Yeah, so it looks like, yeah, that's what we're getting. Keeping from sin, keeping from sinning. Those are the answers for H. So those are good. So it could be, the idea is really the purity, okay, the protection, keeping from sin.

So that's the idea of that one. And lastly, God's Word is more powerful than what according to Hebrews 4. Oh, I didn't do, okay. Sorry, I didn't do verse 11 on the previous one. So let me put both up.

All right. So we read 119 .9. 119 .11 says, I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. So when you look at both of those, you see the idea of the protection and not sinning.

Okay. So let's go to Hebrews 4 .12 and see what God's Word is more powerful than. For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of the soul and spirit, of the joints and of the marrow, and discerning the thoughts and the intentions of the heart.

Now, I know many people think of this as this big two-handed sword. And that's not actually what, you know, this word is. This word is the idea of more like a little scalpel, something that's used for precision.

And if you see the context there, it's for getting in and like a surgeon would have and cutting between the bone and the marrow, you know, kind of scraping away at a bone. The idea there, it's a very specific tool, not something like a sword like we think of, you know, with this big, you know, two-handed sword that we're going to chop people down with.

But it's more of the idea of something that's going to be for precision, a two-edged sword that's going to go in and cut that you're going to use maybe for surgery or something. All right. So, that's more the idea of it, more what we would think of today as a scalpel.

Think of it that way. So, what is the importance? Well, if we look at this now, let's review this kind of quickly. And we'll finish up the rest next class because I just don't think that it would be, even though if you've gone through the School of Harmonetics, basically it's going to be a review of everything that we had.

But we want to, we don't want to rush anything here. I want, I'm trying to go through teaching you some, giving you some more information for you to be able to give to your discipler, the person you're teaching.

All right. So, let's, you know, let's review these. And this is, at this point would be a good time. What I typically do when I go through this is I ask someone to summarize now each of these. All right.

We just went through nine different things, nine different questions that show the importance of Scripture. And I would say, can you summarize what is important about Scripture? What does it do? I mean, the Scriptures are where we learn about salvation.

It's where we get the Gospel from, where we can learn about the Gospel. The Scriptures are important because it is what we can know for certain. It's how we know about eternal life, and we can know it with certainty.

It is what will teach us more than any supernatural thing. And this is important also for those that say, we need to have signs and wonders for people to know the Gospel. Luke 16 proves that's wrong. We need God's Word.

If they don't have God's Word, they're not going to believe signs and wonders. So, those who argue we have to have signs and wonders before we can present the Gospel, for them to believe, that's not true.

And so, what we see here is that we see that God's Word is sufficient in teaching people about God. It's more necessary than food. It is what will help us to grow. It is, along with prayer, a defense in spiritual warfare.

And it is what Christ Himself used to defeat Satan when He came to attack. It offers us protection and purity. And it is something that is more powerful than a two-handed sword. Now, you could think of a two-handed sword, whether you think of it as a big sword, something that someone's going to hack someone up with, it's stronger than that.

But it's also stronger than that small sword that people are going to use for a more precision cut. So, let's take a look. We do have some time. So, let's see if we could wrap this up. Next three is going to be investigation into Scripture.

Studying Scripture Carefully and Systematically

The investigation into Scripture. Why should we study it? Why should we study the Scriptures? And this is really a recap to what we taught previously. And we'll teach it again because it's important to...

Repetition is fine. You'll learn more. We just had someone that is retaking the classes on biblical harmonetics. And they said they're learning things they didn't see the first time through. And you may not be aware of this, but the way I try to teach is at many different levels.

So, if you do re-watch these again, you'll pick up more that you may not have picked up the first time. I try to purposely do that in a way that I'm teaching at multiple levels. But at the same time, not leaving anyone behind so that people don't realize that there's more that they might have been able to pick up.

Keep watching and you're going to keep learning and pick those things up. So, why should we study it? Number one, we should desire the sincere milk of the Word of God that we may grow. Okay, we already looked at this previously.