What is the Inspiration of Scripture? - What We Believe, Part 2

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Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well welcome to The Wrap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, with my trusty sidekick, Bud the Wiser. How are you, Bud? I am excellent, sir. How are you today? I feel like we are in the Bud Zone. Oh wait, that's a different podcast.

That's your new podcast. I'm sorry. Welcome to the Bud Zone. Yeah. So you got that nice deep voice when you do that, though. You had a really good episode, your recent one, got part two, which I guess is turning into part three with your guest.

You know, I have an exciting number of plans coming up and thankful for the guests that have come on. But yeah, we're going to have a special episode.

Oh, is that when I get finally invited on to the Bud Zone?

See, I'm dealing with you every week. We can't reverse roles here. Oh, sure we could.

I'm just sitting back. That's fine. I've reversed roles on many. I don't know if you remember, but I reversed roles on Chris Arnzen on his own radio show. That is right. I tried to do it without him knowing, and that didn't work so well.

But there was an Iron Sharpens Iron where we were down at G3 and I interviewed him. I reversed roles with Dwayne Atkinson on the Bar podcast, where I interviewed him for his own podcast. It's interesting because when we've done that, people have gotten a lot of feedback because they listen to podcasters that do interviews asking the questions, never answering them.

And so those seem to be the ones that people really appreciate a lot because they get to know the host that they've been listening to for a while. So it's kind of neat, but we have gotten some feedback, bud.

We got a five-star review from Greg. This one's going to be a long one to read. So just hold on. It says, great podcast. It was very informative. It got right to the point. And I like that. See, he just said great, and he has an exclamation point.

Michelle gave us some feedback as well. This is one's kind of nice. It's kind of touching. So here we go. It says, five stars, by the way, the rap report is fantastic. Andrew is very knowledgeable about the Bible and his delivery of content is engaging.

I love that I can listen with my daughter and never and not ever be concerned about what she may hear. The content in the rap report has led me to grow in my spiritual walk or Christian walk. So that's kind of a nice one.

So Michelle, thank you very much for that. And hello to your daughter who's listening. That is something, bud, that has always amazed me with my teachings. We have this Striving Fraternity Academy. I'm always amazed how many people listen or watch it with kids and whatnot, and the kids love it.

Yeah. And so it wasn't written or designed for them. And so it really is kind of neat to me to just know that the bracket or age range, both spiritually and physically, I mean, those courses were not meant for pastors, yet there's a lot of pastors who watch those courses and get a lot out of them.

What I've been blown away is how many homeschoolers use them. And they say the same thing, their kids are engaged with the material. It's not about my quirky humor, I guess, keeps them engaged. And I don't know, my facial expressions, I mean, I got a weird looking face.

What can I say? But it helps them. And that's always surprised me, the age range of people that are engaged and enjoy the show. So we welcome feedback. If you would like to leave us a review, which we would like, you can go to lovethepodcast .com slash rap report that's wrapped with two Ps.

And that is a way you can leave us some feedback. We love to hear the feedback because that's how we actually know what you guys are thinking about what we're doing, because otherwise we don't know. And so we would greatly appreciate feedback.

We'd also if you like this show, please share it with others to follow it. That's actually the way people don't understand this. But the way that I hear so many podcasters go, oh, write us a review so we get higher rankings in iTunes or now Apple podcast.

No, it doesn't. That does nothing. Feedback, when you give reviews, that helps us know how we're doing. Okay. Another way you could leave us feedback is email us at info at striving for eternity .org.

Info at striving for eternity .org. That's another way to leave feedback that just tells us how we're doing so we can hear from you.

And it is important for everybody listening. If you want to send feedback, please do that, because I can tell you there is a hierarchy of importance on feedback, because I give Andrew feedback all the time and it never goes anywhere.

You guys send something in, it goes to the top of the heap. So please do that.

For the record, I have read one of your feedbacks before on air, and you actually wrote it as a joke thinking that no one was going to read it, and you were surprised then that I read it on air. Yes. I remember that.

I remember that. I dismember that. I can go find it. But the way to actually get ranking in Apple Podcasts or the others is the number of followers. So when you hit what used to be subscribe, but when you hit follow, you follow the podcast, the more people that do that, the higher we rank.

We actually, I think we dropped, I should go look this up. See if I can find it real quick. We actually dropped ranking in the charts. I think we dropped down to like 200 and something that we were, but I can't find it.

So let's

We'll be first, don't worry about it.

Ministry Reach, Rankings, and the In the News Segment

So but speaking of that, actually, let me give you some ideas. Folks don't always know with Striving Fraternity how, because we target smaller churches to minister to. We go to small churches to try to come in, do weekend seminars, help them out to get them discipling their own people, get them making an impact on their community.

Most ministries ignore the small churches and yet the majority of churches are smaller. And therefore, we don't get known as much as some of the bigger ministries. But when you look at the internet and look at the influence we have with not just our materials online and the courses that we have with the Striving Fraternity Academy, which you can go to strivingfraternity .org and see those, our podcast community, Christian podcast community, all these different things, we actually have a broad reach when it comes to the internet.

And when you think of the 8 billion internet or what's called domains, those are like internet sites that you might think of, you know, when you go to like strivingfraternity .org, that's a domain. There's 8 million of them out there.

And we are ranked in the world 169 ,000 in the world and say, okay, that doesn't sound too good. We actually were higher. We've been in the 90 thousands. In the United States, we're ranked 33 ,000. You say, well, that doesn't sound so big.

But when you compare to say, let's, if I compare to like Grace To You, Grace To You is 142 ,000 in the world. So we're a little bit behind 147 to 169. We're a little bit behind them in the world right now.

But when it comes to the United States, they're 47 ,000 in the world, or sorry, in the United States and we're 33. So we actually rank higher than Grace To You, which is the ministry of John MacArthur here in the United States.

That may surprise folks because they probably don't realize how many people are coming to Striving Fraternity, reading through the articles. It's not a matter of just going there and bouncing on, bouncing off.

It's the fact that people come in through search engines or whatever, get the material they want and keep reading. And so that's a blessing that we have as part of Striving Fraternity just to be, I mean, that's one of the things I end up checking every once in a while and it's going, wow, okay, I didn't realize that.

So, but hopefully we're helping you make an impact in your local church, however big or small it is that we're training you up so that you're ready to go and conquer your community, your world, to be able to share the gospel, know how to defend the gospel, know how to interpret the word of God.

And that's what we're going to talk about tonight or today, the word of God. Before we do bud, let's get to our in the news section. You know, we did a podcast some time ago, national security, their position of dealing with domestic terrorism and Biden's view of domestic terrorists.

We dealt with that. And you and I went through an article that the Biden administration put out. And we explained that this is going to be an attempt of where the government will go after people like Christians and call them a violent domestic terrorist, violent just because you disagree with the vaccine policy, you use an encrypted email or an encrypted social media platform, or, I mean, those were the things that define you as a violent domestic terrorist.

The word violence is strange in those categories, but they say that those things are going to lead you to that. And we explained that we think that this was something that he was doing that was more of a power grab, that he's using things like private companies and things like that.

Well, he's recently come out and done a great power grab and saying that he knows that and this is the pattern we see with him. He says, well, I don't think I have the authority to prevent people from evicting people that don't pay rent.

And then he just makes a not, he hasn't legislated, he just makes a executive order, which is different than going through the legislature. This is the problem that I do have with presidencies where they don't go through legislation.

We don't have much that the legislature has done. We don't have new laws since Biden, but we have a whole lot of changes. Where are they coming from? Executive order. That's like a king. That's not how this, executive orders were never meant to be done that way.

So he's done an executive order mandating mask wearing again. He's extending that till January on public travel. He's mandating vaccines. And what he's doing is he's putting pressure on companies. Now they've already admitted that we were right when we said that they're basically forcing Facebook and others to, because his press secretary said they're telling Facebook posts to take down.

Well, that's not their business. I mean, there's supposed to be that separation. But here's what I saw in the news today. Biden wants to monitor American's banking account blasted as violating the fourth amendment.

But here's the thing. He doesn't care if it violates it. He knows that the things he's doing are illegal. I think what it is, is he's just shooting so many things that they, because the courts, it takes time and it slows it up.

These things get implemented. And so it's, then it's, you can't undo it. And so by going after, by the way, the headline is probably wrong because I think that should be the 14th amendment. But the, because the 14th amendment protects our freedoms and their want to get access to your bank account.

The government should have no say in your bank account.

Is this being posited as some sort of plank in his attack on domestic terrorism? Is that why he's, I haven't seen this.

Well, several, right? Because you have that domestic terrorism tax evasion. So he's giving different reasons for it. And but essentially what it is, is really what this is going to do is they're going to be going after cryptocurrency as well.

Why? Cryptocurrency, and maybe one day we could explain some what cryptocurrency is to folks, because it is something I think Christians should take a look at as a way to protecting their money, because it is something separate from the, from the government, you know, the United States fiat, or, you know, the money that we think of, the US dollar.

When inflation hits and the US dollar becomes worthless, well, we have other means in cryptocurrency to protect that because we were not based on a gold standard anymore, unfortunately. And so just different ideas.

So that is too far off gone. We're let's get, let's get to our topic then. All right, so today, what we want to do is what we've been doing is a series on the word of God. And in this series, what we're doing is, more broadly, we're looking at the doctrinal statement at strivingforeturning .org, and you can get there by going to strivingforeturning .org.

Under the About section, look at what we believe. And in there, you're going to see this is, it has a whole lot of things. A lot of people use this as quick reference for theology, just looking something up.

You can listen to last week's episode to get a good idea why it's important to know theology and check any church that you're going to go visit or attend on their theology. But people can use this, you can just click the plus sign and open any section.

There's seven sections there. We're in the first section on the Holy Scriptures. We are going to deal with paragraph two today. We're going to go slowly through this. And so, Bud, would you do me a favor and read the entire section there for Holy Scriptures?

So the entire section.

We're going to focus on paragraph two, but maybe we'll get to paragraph three. Who knows?

I thought we were on sentence two of paragraph one, but I'm, you know, I'm just here to help. Okay, the Holy Scriptures. The Bible is God's special self-revelation, which is limited in space and time and are directed to various designated individuals.

Second Peter 121. The accepted writings that make up the Bible are the 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books without any of the additional writings commonly known as the Apocrypha. The Bible provides the only inerrant and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

Inspiration, Superintending, and Dual Authorship

Paragraph two. The Bible is inspired by God. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in which he superintended, controlled and directed, the reception to the writers and communication to the hearers and readers of the divine message to mankind such that the product, the original writing, is verbally every word and plenary completely, both inerrant without error and authoritative.

Second Timothy 316. God spoke in his written word by a process of dual authorship. The Holy Spirit so superintended the human authors that through their individual personalities and different styles of writing, they composed and recorded God's word to man.

That's Second Peter 120 and 21. They did this without error in the whole or in the part. Matthew 518 and Second Timothy 316. Thus making scriptures completely and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

Paragraph three. The only means of interpreting scripture is a literal, grammatical and historical interpretation which affirms the belief that the opening chapters of Genesis present creation in six literal days.

Genesis 131 and Exodus 31 17 and seeing a distinction between Israel and the church. The Bible constitutes the only infallible rule of faith and practice. Get numerous verses there. Whereas there may be many applications of any given passage of scripture, there is but one true interpretation according to God.

The meaning of scripture is to be found as one diligently applies the literal, grammatical, historical method of interpretation under the illuminating of the Holy Spirit. And some other verses to support that.

It is the responsibility of believers to ascertain carefully the true intent and meaning of scripture, recognizing that proper application is binding on all generations. Yet the truth of scripture stands in judgment of men.

Never do men stand in judgment of it.

Yeah, and now there's some things in there that we can agree, and we'll get to this next week, that you and I even don't agree on, right? There's some things with... Well, nuanced, but yeah. We want the distinction of Israel and the church, and we'll look at that next week.

That'll be one that a lot of people are going to have, a lot of covenant theologians would disagree with, and we'll discuss those. And where we differ, and why we differ, and things like that. But this week, we want to deal with the section that deals with the Bible, and this is really dealing with how we got the Bible, how it came together.

This becomes important because for many people, they don't think so much about how we have the Bible that we have, that sits in our hands. How did that come to us? We have this Word of God, and this Word of God that we call the Word of God, we said last week, God reveals it to us.

So this is something that we wouldn't know unless He told us. And how did it come together? Did God dictate it? Did He speak to the different people? And, you know, okay, there's Paul, and Paul write this down.

Because we know Paul did that. Paul dictated to people who wrote down. And yet we call it Paul's words, even though he didn't physically do the writing. And we call it God's Word, and he doesn't physically do that writing.

So when we look at that, go, okay, is that how it happened? That's a dictation method. Now, that becomes a method that many will hold to and say that that explains the difference of why Paul can write three to four letters to the Corinthians, but not all of them are Scripture.

Because God didn't dictate those other ones to him, only what we call 1 and 2 Corinthians. Well, another view that people have is that the person themselves are inspired. So Paul's inspired. Well, that presents a problem because Paul wrote other letters to the Corinthians.

We don't have those. See, if Paul's inspired, then everything he wrote should be inspired. And so this really deals with that. Now, what do we mean by inspired? We get it from 2 Timothy 3 .16. And this is a word that Paul created.

It didn't appear in any Greek writings in history prior to that. And it's literally, the translation would be God breathed. That's the idea of how you and I, when we speak, when we have words, what am I doing?

What am I doing right now? What you're hearing right now is the vibrations of my voice as I'm speaking, the vibrations, the waves, the radio waves are going through, bouncing through, going through the microphone, and you're hearing me breathing.

That's really what I'm doing. Every time I speak, I'm breathing out. That is my breath. Well, that's what the idea of this is that when we talk of scripture, it's inspired. The Bible is inspired by God.

That's that first sentence. God breathed, that what he did was he actually spoke it into existence. And that's different than when people say that we speak things into existence, but he actually did. He's God.

He does that. We don't. Okay. But we do speak. And what is that speaking? It's breathing out words. And you hear me because of you're hearing my breath as I'm pushing and pushing out my breath. And you hear the vibration.

That's the idea of it's inspired. And what this paragraph is going to get into is dig a little bit deeper in how that happens. Because this is going to answer the question, did God inspire the writer?

I'm going to say no. Did he dictate to the writer? I'm going to say no. So how is that? Well, let's look at what the next sentence says. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in which he super intended, which means controlled and directed, the recipient, that's to the writers, and communication, that's to the hearers or readers, of the divine message to mankind, such that the product, which is the original writing, is verbally, meaning every word, and plenary, meaning completely, both inerrant, which means without error, and authoritative.

Okay. Now there's a lot there to unpack. So let's unpack this a bit. Each of those words are very, very significant and take some explaining. But what that sentence is doing is defining what we mean by inspiration.

So first off, we are saying it's a supernatural work. This is not natural. This is work, as we said last week, only God can reveal himself. And so that's what he's doing. He's revealing himself to us.

This is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. Now you say, but wait a minute, isn't Jesus the word? Well, he is. All the Godhead is involved in what we would call the writing of scripture, but it's specifically the work of the Holy Spirit that we see that works through the writers to do this work of inspiration.

And so what do we have? The first word, it says, in which he super intended. This is a very important doctrine. This doctrine affects a lot of things and is one that, unfortunately, not enough people study and research, because it would resolve many of the debates that we have within Christianity.

And so I want to camp out on this one just a little while, hopefully not too long, because otherwise we'll never finish the paragraph, which will be fine if we don't, as long as you guys are getting a good education and learning this stuff.

That's the important thing. Super intended. Now I put it in that statement, it means the control and direction, right? So this is the idea, the doctrine of super intending is the doctrine that the Holy Spirit works within us in such a way that everything that is done is exactly as God intended it to be.

So when we're talking about the inspiration of scripture, Paul wrote, John wrote, Peter wrote, very different styles. Okay. And though they each have a different style, every letter is exactly as God intended it to be.

Now, how does he do that? Well, he indwells a person in a sense or fills a person. That'd be the proper terminology is to fill them, to control them. And Old and New Testament saints, he'd control them in such a way that even though they have their own personal choices, their own style, their own language, and even writing personal things like Peter, Paul's going to say to Timothy or to Titus, say, bring my cloak.

It's going to be cold this winter or bring my books. Those are personal things. John is going to write to his beloved. He's going to write to specific people. You're going to have things like this. They're personal in nature.

And yet every single piece of that, every letter is exactly as God intended it because the Holy Spirit was working through those writers to write in such a way that even though they chose those words, God chose it through them so that the final product is God's word.

So who do we give credit for writing the first five books of the Bible? Not Moses. God. How about Romans? God. How about Ephesians? God. Any book of the Bible. In other words, when you get a red letter Bible, the whole Bible should be red letter.

It's all God. It's all what God has written. This is the thing that we see. This doctrine is very important to understand. And we understand it usually in the doctrine of inspiration, but it's the idea that God works through the human authors in such a way that every choice they made is exactly as God intended it to be.

Can we fully comprehend that? No, we don't know how that works. Did Paul choose his words? Yes, but yet God gets all the credit. Now, why do I spend the time to explain this? Well, let's go into a different area of theology.

We'll get there later when we get to the doctrine of salvation called soteriology. But after we get regenerated, we start a process of sanctification. Now, many confuse these two. Both are referred to as salvation, because salvation is a general term.

You have past, present, future. Past is regeneration. Present, for those of us who know Christ, is sanctification. Future is glorification. So, regeneration, the time we go from being an enemy of God to a child of God, that starts the process of sanctification, which continues until the point we die, where we're made more and more in the image of Christ.

Once we die, we're glorified. That is when we have a glorified body. When we no longer have sin, we're in that permanent state. They're all referred to as salvation. But what almost every works-based system does, every cult, every man-made religion that uses the Bible, confuses regeneration and sanctification.

And they look at the works that are talked about in sanctification. Are there works in regeneration? No, and it's clear in Scripture. Are there works in sanctification? Yes, and it's clear. But when you call them both salvation, you get confused, because people often think of salvation just as regeneration.

And yet the Bible will say, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. That's sanctification. James will say that your faith without works is dead. He's speaking of sanctification. And what you end up seeing is that groups that will confuse those two have major problems.

How do we rectify that? How do we answer the question, how do we as believers do good works? This is where this doctrine of superintending comes in again. Do we do good works? Well, yes. Really? No, because Scripture says God does them in us.

This is the same doctrine of superintending. Even though we choose to do a work, we choose to do something that is a good work, it's actually the Holy Spirit who indwells us that is doing that work through us.

So he gets 100 of the credit. Now, I hope that this has helped you to understand this doctrine of superintending when it comes to inspiration and sanctification. Many people accept this doctrine in those two.

So let me take it to one where many Christians battle. Again, in the area of the doctrine of soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, many people battle. Maybe you hear the terms Calvinism versus Arminianism.

Which one's right? Well, the answer is yes. Does that surprise you? The reason is because people are doing the same thing with those doctrines as I just explained with doctrine of salvation. They take this broad thing and instead of being precise, they're taking the broad terminology and then applying it to both.

That's a fallacy of equivocation. So what we see is that the Holy Spirit has a ministry where he works through people in such a way that the choices they make are exactly as God intended them to be. So when it comes to our regeneration, we saw it in inspiration, we saw it in our sanctification, I see it also in our regeneration.

And it solves the dilemma that so many people have. What do we do with Romans 1? God chose you. Sorry, Romans 9. God chose you. And Romans 10, you chose God. They're back-to-back. And you see this often back-to-back in Scripture, where it seems to be saying, who's making the choice?

Well, the answer is God superintended it. So God works through the person. So experientially, I chose God. Theologically, God chose me. Which is right? Both. Because the Holy Spirit works through us to superintend that choice.

So the choice to receive Christ is a choice that can only be made when God works through us to make that choice. We can't make that choice on our own. If we could, there'd be no need for the cross. We'd just dare to make that choice if it's just a choice thing.

It was a choice that chose Adam, that chose to eat of the fruit and brought the curse of sin into the universe, actually. The sin was already there through Satan. But the curse of sin on mankind and the universe, according to Romans 8, didn't occur until Adam partook of the fruit.

Not Eve, Adam. And so what you end up seeing there is he made a choice. So we could say, hey, I make a choice to reverse that curse. That's not how God works. God ends up dying on the cross as a payment of our sin.

What that does is that when we look at this, we cannot repay the debt we owe. We have to receive that. But can we receive that on our own? No. According to Philippians 1 .29, it has been granted to you not only to believe but to suffer for his sake.

Our belief is granted by God. That word for granted there means to be forgiven. So it's God who forgives us that belief. So this is something that so many people struggle with. And when I explain the doctrine of superintending, bud, I've had countless people.

We have an article on StrivingforTrinity .org that deals with Romans 9 and 10. God's sovereignty and human responsibility is how it's worded, because I avoid the whole Calvinism and Arminianism labels and just deal with the issues.

God's sovereignty, Romans 9. Man's responsibility, Romans 10. Put together, they're both there. A lot of people find that very helpful to understand, because we understand what we experience. So many people go by their experience, and yet we look at our theology and go, well, no, what we experienced is wrong.

No, it wasn't wrong. There's a way to marry them together. It's not an either or. And many people think of it and treat it as either or. I think when we understand the doctrine of superintending, we see that this big challenge that so many people debate can easily be resolved.

We see that the Holy Spirit works this way in inspiration, sanctification, not hard to see it in regeneration.

Any thoughts, Bud? No, I think it's profoundly important to grasp this for soteriology, certainly for the revelation, God's special revelation in the Word, how that came about. I also think that it's important to understand superintending, not merely in those categories, but also in how the Lord is orchestrating history.

I mean, I Am the Alpha and the Omega is such a profound and reassuring name of Christ. Well, it doesn't mean that He's the beginning and the end and the middle is just sort of left to chance. There is no chance.

He's orchestrating all of that. He's superintending all of that. He's doing that by what we call providence. So every single thing is being orchestrated towards a final end. But with regards to soteriology that you spoke to, you go to Romans 3, where it says, no one seeks after God.

Well, wait a minute. People do seek after God. What does that mean? Oh, well, wait a minute. You don't actually seek after God until you've found God. How did you find God? He found you. And that's the work of the Holy Spirit.

The other thing I might mention is that with regards to the term, when you sort of discreetly distinguish these elements of what broadly is called salvation, understand that regeneration is talking about a forensic maneuver that occurs by God's grace in heaven that has to do with your justification.

So that is distinct from your sanctification. Same thing, but kind of a synonymous word. You can't do anything to become justified before God. Christ had to do that. However, you are told, as you pointed out, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

That's the sanctification. That's what we would call a synergistic response. We cooperate with the Holy Spirit because now we can. He's brought us to a justified position before God. He's indwelt us. We're clothed in Christ's righteousness, even though we're in a Roman 7 situation where we battle with sin or we don't battle with sin.

We obey or we don't obey, however you want to interpret that. But we do pursue holiness. You know, be holy as I'm holy. Well, I'm glad you brought up Roman 7. You don't blame your good. You don't take credit for your good stuff.

You give that to the Holy Spirit.

See, I'm glad you brought up Roman 7. That's a perfect example of what we're talking about because some people, because of their experience, they think that's dealing with sanctification when it's actually dealing with regeneration.

Because people experience it, they misinterpret that passage. You go and study Roman 7 and you'll see that it changes from present tense to past tense. I'm arguing that I will argue Paul is talking about his coming to Christ in that passage.

Now, if you want to turn to 1 Peter 2, verse 11, that describes what you were just talking about in sanctification, the warring against the flesh. But some people are going to ask, like, what are we dealing with this?

We're talking about the Holy Scriptures. Why are we bringing soteriology into this? Well, there's a reason we're talking about the doctrine of salvation here. Theology overlaps. When you have a good understanding of theology, you're going to see how it connects everywhere else in the theological systems.

One part affects another. You have it as a complete package sort of thing. When we get to the attributes of God, you're going to see how that's going to influence every other doctrine that comes after it.

We will see that throughout theology, that there's parts that affect other things. So, what am I doing? I'm taking this idea of superintending, which is crucial to understanding how we got the Scriptures and seeing that that doctrine plays out in our soteriology.

This explains some of the battles that people have had in that area. So, let's move on to some of the others. So, this is how the Holy Spirit does this. He works through. And what does He do in this superintending?

He's controlling and directing the person and the writing. Okay. So, how are we saying it? Well, He superintended the recip... Sorry, the recipitation. I can't speak today. Reception. Reception. Kind of like a wedding.

Y 'all come on in. Yeah. What is with me this morning? But the reception and communication. So, what's the reception? This is going to be to the writers, the people actually writing it. So, He controls and directs to the writers what was written.

He also controls and directs the communication. That's to the hearers and readers. So, what this means is that when we read Scripture, the Holy Spirit's ministry does not end with what Paul wrote and Matthew wrote and Moses wrote and Samuel wrote.

It doesn't end there. Yes, He worked through them in writing that down, but the Holy Spirit also has a role. And we'll look at this more when we look at the doctrine of God and specifically noumenology, which is a study of the Holy Spirit.

When we look at that, we end up seeing that the Holy Spirit has a ministry unto us where He illuminates His Word to our understanding. What does that mean? He brings it to light. He gives us an understanding and an application of His Word.

So, this is the thing with the New Covenant is we don't need a priest to interpret God's Word for us or to tell us how to apply it like they did in the Old Testament. The Holy Spirit indwells us so when we open God's Word, we can, with study, understand His Word.