God-Breathed Words

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Casson, Chris Kiesler, and Andrew Hudson. We do have a question for you listeners, but before we read the correct question, I'm gonna take everybody off guard here and since it's October and it's Pastor Appreciation Month, we're gonna say one thing that we're thankful for, at least one thing that we're thankful for, for.

Pastor Michael. Dave, you're going first. I am very thankful for the spirit of discussion that you allow for in in our church. I've mentioned this to you a couple of times, but something that I mentioned to visitors when they come here is that you don't have to be in lockstep with our pastor, with Michael.

You're allowed to disagree, you know, do it substantially, do it respectfully, and you can have discussions. I've been in churches where that's not allowed, or if you disagree, you're immediately being divisive, and you don't take it that way.

You've even come up to me and thanked me for a piercing question that I might have asked that other people would take offense to. You always welcome that, and that's something that I think visitors appreciate, especially if they've been burned in other churches.

So I just want to say thank you for allowing me to ask those kinds of questions and creating that spirit of open discussion around the Word of God. So thank you. Pastor Lord. In the same vein, I'm.

Thankful for just the commitment to the freedom we have in Christ and modeling what that looks like when you have people of various convictions, doctrines, things they're working through, they're reading and trying to figure out, and I know I was on the fence about a couple of issues when I came here, and it wasn't a hard light in the sand.

You just said, this is the way I see it, but you convictions are a real thing, and you follow your conviction, and you've got the freedom to do that. It's not worth fighting over. But then that just allowed for a great amount of freedom to work through it, to let the Spirit work, and I was very grateful for that.

So I appreciate that. Well, first off, I'm.

Grateful to God for Michael, and that he's a beloved brother in many different ways, but as pastor, as my elder brother and shepherd, I see every which way I look, his dedication to actually shepherding in Word and in deed.

I could think of no other way to honor him than to say that he is truly my pastor. Amen. So one thing I've been really thankful for, having not been really injected into church life elsewhere for very long as a Christian, or even growing up, I would say that we have a lot of agreement around the table.

Something that has been discussed in the questions that have been given us to podcasts is there's not a lot of disagreement, there's a lot of unity, there's a lot of connection between you guys. Yes, there's that, but one of the things I like to do is I like to watch men in crisis mode or stressful situations, and I would say over the past five or six years, however long we've been here now, we've had some... there's been some difficult times, whether it's been here at the church or with your family, and you have kept the exact same focus and frame throughout.

I've seen in other churches where pastors will wilt to one side or the other, and I do know that this is mostly a thing where the Lord, by his Spirit, allows you to keep that frame, to keep that focus on Christ, and it's something I haven't seen elsewhere, and I think that has been the most refreshing and emboldening and encouraging thing to see in a leader, because it's easy to lead when the things are going well and everything's going well.

It's very difficult to lead when things are in crisis mode. It's very hard to keep the frame of not reacting improperly or not playing the man when times are difficult, and I know you have that posted somewhere in the office, play the man, Mr. Ridley.

I do think you have taken that, and as we all have, like, points in Christian history that we really enjoy, I think the Lord has done a wonderful work in you to keep you there and to sustain you there on playing the man, what come what may, with our body and our church, and I think it creates a unity.

I think it creates a strong core for families to remember is here, that their pastor and their elders, with one mind, they all play the man, and they follow their Savior in that. So that's what I'm extremely thankful for.

There's a lot of things that we're all thankful for, but I know those are just a few things that we want to be thankful for during this Pastor Appreciation Month. But without further ado, and since I dropped that unexpectedly on everybody, we'll get to the question.

This question, it's one question, but with many considerations. The first one being out of, they're quoting 2 Timothy 3 .16, but I'm going to go ahead and read 17 as well. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Now the questioner says he knows people that struggle with this verse for the following reasons. The first being, a perspective is that men who wrote the Bible were sinners, and if so, how can we be sure that all the writings of theirs were God breathed?

Secondly, a struggle for many is what does the word all include for 2 Timothy 3 .16? Catholicism has extra books, or a different canon, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. Did we forget something, or is there more?

The third consideration, a thought is if 1 Corinthians 1 .18 says, the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, and we have the Holy Spirit interpret the Word of God to us. Then, does God communicate to us through the Holy Spirit outside of Scripture, and if so, are we to take that as credible?

The bottom line question, where should we draw the line on what communications should come to us as the Word of God or Scripture? And I think they're saying like THE Word of God or capital S Scripture.

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

How do we know what is the Word of God, and how is that defined? How are we to trust it, and what if somebody says, well, I have a Word of God that's different than yours? It's ultimately a question of authority, you know, by what standard?

It's a fine question to ask, and then when you say what your standard is, then the follow-up question of that is, by what standard is that the standard? Okay, so that's essentially what this question is about, and the question is broken up into these three different considerations, but I want to just note the frame.

I know where the questioner says, I know people who struggle with this verse for the following reasons. Okay, so the first concern is that men who wrote the Bible were sinners. I would be curious to find out, how do you know that those men were sinners, all of them?

Probably because the Bible tells you they are, and I'm not being flippant here, but just recognizing the fact of how dependent we are upon the Scriptures already, and the idea is, if we know that the men who wrote the Bible are sinners, because the Bible tells us so, the Bible is also telling us why that's a problem, right?

That sinners are going to get things wrong, and they're going to be errant in their thinking and in their ways from God, because God is the ultimate righteous standard. But again, how do we know that?

We know that because of the Scriptures. Already you can tell the quandary that you're in, but I don't think that the question is wrong. I think that it needs to be asked. If the fact of the matter is that the over 40 different authors who wrote the Scriptures over a 1 ,500 year time period in three different languages on three different continents, how can we be sure that ultimately what we have is true, accurate, that there are no errors?

Can we really affirm the inerrancy and infallibility of inspiration? The basic argument is, since the Bible says it is God breathed and inspired by God, as 2 Peter chapter 1 says, holy men were moved by the Holy Spirit, carried along, born along by the Holy Spirit.

The idea is that everything that they wrote down, even though they themselves are fallible, even though the men themselves are sinners, that the Holy Spirit moved these holy men, 2 Peter chapter 1, that they were moved by the Holy Spirit so that what they wrote, the idea is that everything that they wrote is that God's truth is superintended in everything that they write, exactly as it should be.

And this is where Jesus argues about the jot in the title of the law, the smallest stroke, the smallest letter of the law is precise. Jesus made his arguments to the Sadducees based on the tense of the verb, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Paul made his argument for Christ based on the number of seed, singular, not plural. And so the Bible itself, in dealing with Scripture, is concerned down to the smallest stroke, that all of it is true, that it was brought forward by God, and therefore, if it's God's Word and that there was a true working through men, that's a fully human book, yes, but it's also a fully divine book, and that the humanity of the work by no means takes away from the divinity of the work, and so that we can trust that it is indeed without error, and it's unfailing, and it is full of truth.

When we read in 2 Timothy 3 .16, yeah, I can see how people would struggle with that verse if they're thinking, well, you know, Paul probably got some things wrong. Paul wasn't perfect. Paul had some errors in his thinking at some point, so how do we know that that doesn't seep in?

Well, it would be because we have a testimony of the Scriptures concerning the Scriptures that they're without error. Well, that's circular reasoning. Well, what's the basis of your... what's the basis of your authority?

And that's why we're getting back to the nuts and bolts of the question. It's about authority. By what standard, but then, by what standard is your standard the standard? The questioner continues, a struggle for many is what does the word all.

All Scripture is God breathed, 2 Timothy 3 .16. Yes, Catholicism has extra books in... if you pick up a New Jerusalem Bible, you're going to find more books than 66 in there. There's going to be books from the Apocrypha that are in there.

When they mentioned Dead Sea Scrolls, you know, they're gonna say, well, there are books there that were preserved that were not of the Old Testament canon. For that, you're gonna have to do probably a little bit more study to understand how it is that we ended up with these books.

In Judaism, well, let's just say in the preservation of the Old Testament by the scribes, they recognized 22, a 22 book canon, and later rejected other writings as uninspired. So there was the Tanakh, so you think about the Pentateuch, the Law, okay, there was the Law, and then there were the Writings, and then there were the Prophets.

So the Law, the Torah, the Prophets, the Nevi 'im, and then the Writings, the Kethubim. We think of the Minor Prophets, that was... they called it the Book of the Twelve. It's all one, you know. So they consolidated, you know, these things.

Some of those books were consolidated. When we say 1st and 2nd Samuel, that's because they were just... they had to have two scrolls, you know, so the way that they counted it up. But it's important to see that when they brought all their scrolls together, they recognized that there were other books written.

But people like Philo and Josephus recognized these are the ones that our Scripture and the other ones are not. You have early church fathers who separated the Apocrypha from canonical books. You can think of Melito Sardis, you can think of different church councils, and they would say, this is what Scripture is, but these are non-scriptural books, good for edification.

Now, again, if you take that argument, what are you doing? You're looking back at tradition, you're looking back at history, and you're deriving your argument based from records, you know, maybe archaeology, and so on, and trying to make an argument from that.

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

Standard stands? Well, that's the argument of the Roman Catholic Church. They say, it's the church that gave us the Bible, how can you still a scriptural people claim that when it's actually by church authority and church recognition and the special authority given through the successor of Peter and the Magisterium itself to help us recognize what these books are, thus making them the standard versus the Word of God the standard, which is the irony of it.

And.

What they're saying is the Roman Catholic Church is the one that gave us the Bible, right? Yeah. So, like, they're not saying, like, it's preserved through believers, which we would agree with, right?

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

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

Standard. Yeah. So, because of that, you'll find developed throughout a Protestant thought the internal defense of the Scriptures. How do we know that these 66 books are the Word of God? Well, one way that we can observe that is when we are reading the Scriptures and we can, through several readings on our own, we're going to detect that there's a difference between these books and others.

We're going to detect that in two ways. One of them is going to be, if obvious, the most important one is that the witness of the Holy Spirit, okay? Now, some people will find that a dissatisfying answer.

However, it's an.

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

Right. So, there's going to be, so, but then there's a confusion between, right, but there's going to be somewhat a confusion between inability to necessarily distinguish between emotions and the assurance of the Spirit, because there's going to be a lot of conflation of those things in modern parlance and in modern evangelicalism, even, not just charismatic movements.

There's going to be a confusion of emotion and the work of the Holy Spirit and that assurance. But throughout the, it has been the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives as Christians is the reason why we have the books that we have.

And this could go back, and you could see the early Christians who were dying for their faith willing to protect certain books, but not others, and under persecution. And again, that's not an argument from history.

It's just an acknowledgement that Christians recognize by the Holy Spirit. In general, I'm saying that this is part of how we identify the Bible, is that the Holy Spirit gives witness to the truth in the Scripture, that there's an amen in our lives, in our hearts, to the truth of Scripture.

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

That they are self-authenticating? Yes, but not necessarily, like, in.

Terms of, like, maybe an evidentiary argument that, you know, simply by observing the data, it proves itself. Because the way that the Bible is described, in terms of being God-breathed, that holy men moved by the Holy Spirit brought us this, and that the Scriptures are inspired, and that the Holy Spirit indwells Christians, we have the living God, Holy Spirit Himself, bringing the amen to us, that these are the words of God.

One other way we recognize that these are the Scriptures, and the reason why some of the books that, you know, you mentioned from the Apocrypha are left out, is because of their harmony and their agreement, and then there are books that are obviously full of falsehoods and lies, go against the message of the Scriptures at large, even are self-contradictory, and by definition, none.

Of that can be the Word of God. Yeah, and even in the question, I think the first part of it, talked about all of the writings of the Apostles, or all of the writings. Well, we don't even use all of the writing of the Apostles, because in 1 Corinthians, Paul says, my previous letter.

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

That God wanted preserved. So, we do have something in Scripture that tells us that we do have the ability to discern truth and error. We have 1 John 2 27, which does say, but the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you, but as his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie, just as it taught you, abide in him.

The idea being that John, as their teacher, is telling them that they don't need a teacher. That doesn't mean that we don't have pastors, and we don't have teachers and elders and stuff, because so much of other Scripture says that we do.

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

You have the ability, because you have the Holy Spirit, to discern truth from error. You don't need these people coming in. So, see it in context, but 1 John is telling you that you have the ability to know truth and error, so I think that's in the same vein as knowing what is Scripture.

And what it's not. One of the interesting things about that passage in 1 John 2 and in 2 Peter 1 and in 2 Timothy chapter 3 or John 5, in many of the places that we would look where Scripture is being defined, affirmed, and declared to be our authority, the subject matter at hand is the clarity of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

So, right before 2 Timothy 3 .16, we have 3 .15, Paul is saying, these are the Scriptures that are sufficient to make you wise into salvation. Salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ. 2 Peter chapter 1 says, we did not follow, verse 16, we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we are eyewitnesses of his majesty, for he received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

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

So, where should we look? To the word, to the Scriptures, to the prophetic word that is fulfilled. All of the promises of God in Christ are yes. In 1 John chapter 2, the question is, how do you know what's true and what's false?

Well, you have an anointing, but what was the subject matter at hand there in the second half.

Of 1 John 2? He's talking about knowing what is Antichrist.

Yeah, who's defining who is Antichrist. Antichrist is the one who denies the true person of Jesus Christ. So, when we're thinking about that, when we're thinking about the prophecies of Scripture and so on, that's why Peter says, knowing that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.

For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Who is the Holy Spirit? He is the Spirit of Christ. I'm glad you brought it back to that because it reminds me of the kind of metaphorical explanation that Christ has for this, where he says, I am the Good Shepherd and my sheep hear my voice.

They know my word because they know who I am. Yes. So, this is where, when Jesus was talking to the Jews, he was like, you search the Scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life. So, they're saying, okay, these are the words of God.

They are set apart. These are special, and we're gonna go find all the codes for living there. We're gonna find everything we need for life there. This is where we're gonna find the secrets that we need.

And many people have that attitude about the Bible. They have that same concept from the movie The Book of Eli. It's like, you gotta have the book. You gotta have the power book. It's all superstitious.

It's all superstitious. Why is the Bible so full of authority and life and light? Because the Bible is so full of Christ. That's why. These other books that are left out are left out because they're not about Christ.

They're not full of Christ. They're not exalting him. They're not... Everywhere in the Scriptures, the Father speaks of the Son by the Spirit. That's why it's all authoritative. That's why it's all bright.

That's why it's all true. That's why it's all coherent. Even somebody as pagan as Jordan Peterson comments that the Bible is massively... it's like, to borrow an anachronism, is the most hyperlinked document in all of human history, to a degree that it's impossible for any human to ever engineer it.

Why is it so integrated and so harmonious and so... because it's about... it's all about Jesus Christ. So that's where you're going to have to recognize why some books are not other books. Well, it's not about a church council.

It's about Jesus Christ. Why is there the internal witness of the Spirit amening, you know, Habakkuk, but not, you know, 2nd Esdras or something? Why not? Because here we have the glories of Christ, and this is what the Spirit magnifies.

He magnifies Christ in the Scriptures, warming that to us, and we respond as we are being remade in his image. And yes, of course, the questioner is correct to draw attention to the fact that it is the Holy Spirit who has to open our eyes, right?

I mean, Paul laments his countrymen who read the Scriptures with a veil over their face, but the veil is lifted in Christ. And so it is true that if we're outside of Christ and without the Holy Spirit, we're going to lack a lot of assurance and clarity about what is Holy Scripture and what is not Holy Scripture.

Now there.

Are... I appreciate you starting there, because that's not where I went initially. I went to evidence, and I went to here's the data, and here's all the cross-references, and that is useless without the foundation that you just laid.

This question has a lot of good sub-sections to it. He references the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you're not familiar with what those are, those were discovered in 1947 in Qumran by the Esnines. They were this Jewish apocalyptic cult that basically died out right after the temple was destroyed.

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

I think Andrew knows more about that. But it just showed the reliability of a lot of the writings that we have. But of course, they included other ones that were just off the wall. You have another group of texts, the Nag Hammadi Codex.

They were Coptic translations of Gnostic texts, and a lot of the Gnostic Gospels that we have today came from that Nag Hammadi Codex, which means a book versus a scroll, found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.

I actually wrote a paper on that, and how you have all these Gnostic Gospels, and then you have the four Gospels that we have, and they're called the Lost Gospels. And people like Bart Urban and others are saying, hey, these are just as valid.

Read them for yourself, and they're not. I mean, they're mutually exclusive. They both can't be correct as well. Then you have all sorts of theories about Constantine. Well, these are the books that he chose.

One, read them for yourself, and you can see the difference in character. So the picture of Christ that the Gnostics paint is so mystical. I think there's one, I don't know if it's the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter, where the Gnostics had a low view of women, and at one point they said, you know, how will this woman be saved?

And it says, oh, don't worry, in the afterlife, she'll become a man, and then that's how she's going to be saved. You know, it's just ludicrous. And the Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures that we have, the Bible doesn't speak about women like that.

They're created exactly as they are in the image of God. So I appreciate you bringing up Dead Sea Scrolls, or the Codex, or Ibn Akhmadi, or these others. I wrote the Deuterocanical books, Bell and the Dragon, I mean, others.

This is holding these up side-by-side with the canon that we have, there is a night-and-day difference, just in the character of the writing itself. They have to be mutually exclusive. You can't say, well, you know, there's a little bit of truth in both.

No, they're actually mutually exclusive for each other. If you want to get into some of the history and some of the data, Michael Kruger has written a number of books on the canon. Vody Bauckham has this amazing quote on why he says, this is why I trust the Bible, and he goes through it, and it's really amazing.

There's YouTube videos of him doing it, and breaks down each one of those statements. So there is data that you can go and look at that will help you, but if you're like Bart Ehrman, or Walter Bauer, who's called the Bauer thesis, that there were geographical areas where certain texts won out over others, and the ones that we have today are just the most powerful, if you don't believe the Scriptures from the start, then you're going to gravitate towards that.

He's an apostate. That's what he is. But Michael is correct that the starting point is, if it's actually having the Holy.

Spirit in you. And taking on this question, what we're trying to do is build your confidence in the Scriptures. We're trying to build up your faith in the Word of God. We're trying to remind you that if you're filled with the Spirit, you hear the Shepherd's voice.

One of the things I'm like, then bringing up the question, or bringing up Dead Sea Scrolls, other bodies of text, like we have a Protestant set of base texts that we use to translate our Bible, Catholics have, is that what they're trying to ask in this question?

Are they trying to ask, why would we use a different base text than Catholicism, or like the variations that may be used for... Well, I think the question, I think the questioner is moving towards, of course, their bottom line.

So their bottom line is, where should we draw the line on what communication should come to us as the Word of God or Scripture? And this, again, I think that the setup questions are, the people who wrote the Bible were sinners.

Well, so are we. And we recognize that the Protestants say, this many books. The Catholics say, more books. And then, as you point out, David, there are other books that people say got left out, that not even the Catholics would say were good, but others say they should be included.

To me, this questioner is like moving towards this bottom line, is, why are we saying that the Word of God is contained by any canon? Why isn't it, why isn't the Word of God broader than the biblical canon?

Why can't it be that the Word of God comes by the Holy Spirit to a sinner like me, and I can have direct, special revelation like the prophets and the apostles of old? I think that's really where the question is going.

Okay, so it's not... I had it a little mixed up because they threw that in there, and I had in my head that... Because even in the books that Catholics and Protestants agree on, they're using different base texts to translate into your English version or your Spanish version or whatever.

Can you define that? What do you mean by base texts? Well, I mean, like, depending upon what the translating committee views as what they want to use as their... as the group of texts that they want to use to translate from, right?

Like, because you have all the different schools, you know, you have either the Masoretic text or text from Alexandria or, you know, so that's what I'm saying, like... Families. Yes, families. So you have different manuscript families, and we don't agree even with Catholics on all that across the table, or the Orthodox for that matter, you know?

Like, so that's what I was asking, but you're saying that the question is going in a different direction, as in, it has canon stopped basically, or... And I'm sure, and again, the question's not even going to...

Probably it's not prejudiced against a canon per se, but if canon means the Holy Spirit does not speak God's Word to me anymore, then, you know, then one of my... Then all these... There's a lot of people out there that, you know, God told me this and God told me that, and I woke up this morning and God told me this, and so that's how I'm gonna live my life now.

And God gave me this project, I'm gonna work on that for the next two months. I'm being led and directed by God. I'm trying to obey God. God gives me His Word, I obey. Sometimes He gives me the Word through a feeling, through a verse, just kind of out of the blue.

Sometimes through a conversation that somebody drops some sort of line in my life. Through a stone and a hat. Well, you know, but there's a lot of... Yeah. Yeah. But seriously, there's... When we think about things in history, about how certain people got started on their divergence away from the Bible, we reckon...

We look at that, but there's a whole lot of people who... I mean, they love the Bible, but they also... Part of their living and active Christian experience is believing that God is speaking to me directly to go do this and go do that, and then I follow through on that.

Well, and that can be very.

Difficult when you don't know. Like, I can't move until I get a word. Yeah, there.

Could be... For pastoral, from a pastoral perspective, that can be extreme, and it could be extremely burdensome, especially if somebody comes to you and says they have a word of the Lord, and you believe it, all of a sudden you're under obligations and burdens that you shouldn't be, or you're waiting around for the Word to move and you can't, or you got the wrong idea, and then you're overly burdening yourself about things that Jesus never put on you.

And this is why I'm saying that when we think about the completeness of the Word of God... I mean, what did Paul say to Timothy? And Timothy's a young man, okay? He's in pastoral ministry. What does Paul affirm to him?

All Scripture is God-breathed, profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, training, and righteousness. Meaning, it's good to tell you what's true, where you're wrong, how to get right, how to live God's way.

And then he says in verse 17, like, I appreciate, Dylan, you read in verse 17, that the Scripture, this all-sufficient Scripture, it trains you completely. Everything you need, complete everything you need for godliness.

And there's an expression, you need for faith and faith and practice that we find in the Scriptures. It doesn't tell you how to mow your, it doesn't tell you how to repair your lawnmower, but it does tell you what kind of mindset and attitude and, you know, everything, how you should be thinking and praising and so on while you mow your.

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

Have done unto you. Yeah. And if you do, repay him for a forgiven forecast. Be biblical. Be biblical. Touche. But the completeness of the Word of God in our lives is like, do we need a word outside of Scripture?

According to Scripture, we don't. So this is where you have your dividing line, right? So Scripture says, everything you need to follow Jesus is right here in the Scriptures. And then if you say, I think I need more, then you're in disagreement with the Scriptures.

Do you see where you're at? There's a quandary there. Additionally, then you say, okay, fine, I'll grant you that, but then how do we know which is which? But again, it comes back to what are the Scriptures that testify of Christ?

The last book in the Bible says, don't out or take away. There is a completeness to the Scriptures. Even Daniel 9, it talks about the sealing up of all prophecy and everything being tied off by the end of the judgment that takes away the Old Covenant.

So all of Scripture was written, the New Testament was written before the cessation of the Old Covenant, and it was there to talk to us about how Christ is the satisfying fulfillment of everything that has been written, right?

He says, these that testify of me, Moses, the law and the prophets, the writings, they're all about me. All of God's promises are yes in Christ, and this is what we've got to remember. The reason why God came to the prophets, the reason why God came to the apostles, and the reason why all this special direct revelation came to them, and all these really neat, cool stories in the Scriptures, it's ultimately because it was all about glorifying and magnifying Christ and giving to, giving to the saints all that we need to worship Christ and follow Him.