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Thank God for an Inspired Bible
The following message is by pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. The portion of God's truth will be spending time in this evening is taken from Romans chapter 16 and verses 17-23. I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught, avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive. For your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise as to what is good, and innocent as to what is evil. For the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Timothy, my fellow worker, Grichu, so delicious, and Jason, and so Zapata, my kinsman. I, Teretus, who wrote this letter, "Greet you in the Lord, Gaius, who is host to me, under the whole church, Grichu, harassed us, the city treasure, and our brother Cordus, Greet you, amen." Let's pray. Lord, my great longing for us in this service is that we might better grasp the inspiration and authority and preciousness of the Bible, and that we might embrace it, and that we might live under it every part of our lives, coming under its scrutiny and transformation. And I pray that there would be a great love affair between your people at Bethlehem and the Word of God. Under yourself, the gift of your Son, nothing is more precious than your Word. And I pray that those who consider it or feel it to be a marginal thing, a small thing, will be changed. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Now you have a right to wonder why I chose this title and focus given the text that was just read to you, especially verses 21 to 23, which is the ones we're going to focus on. How in the world do I hit upon talking about the inspiration of the Scriptures by meditating upon verses 21 to 23 of Romans 16? And here's the sequence of my thought. As I pondered what the most striking, provocative, unusual thing was in this text, it was to me the intrusion of the voice of Tertius, the secretary who's taking down this letter. God jolts me, verse 22, Paul's writing along, verse 21, "Timothy, my fellow, worker greets you. So do Lucius, and so Cipater, Jason, so Cipater, my kinsman, the my there is Paul." And his voice, all through this letter, it's Paul's voice, but in verse 22 abruptly, we hear another voice, "I, Tertius, who wrote this letter greet you in the Lord." Then you go back to Paul's voice, "Gaius, who is host to me," that's Paul, "and to the whole church greets you," and so on, "to the end." This is really unusual, nowhere else in all of his 13 letters does the stenographer speak. So here are five observations about that which led me to talk about the inspiration of the Bible tonight. Observation number one, Paul regularly may be always used as secretary. Scholars call him an amanuensis, somebody who wrote while he talked, he's sitting in a cell and they let him have a helper and he dictates Romans. That's incredible, makes that all the more amazing. We know this because there are four letters which end with him saying something like, notice what large letters I am greeting you with at the end. This is my hand. You know my hand. I have a characteristic sign off. When I take the pen in my hand, it looks like this. He says that four times, verse Corinthians, Galatians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. Second observation, nevertheless though someone else is pinning it, this is Paul's voice. Paul's thought, Paul's words which is why he can say in every letter something like Paul to the church of God in Corinth, Paul to the churches of Galatia, Paul to the saints and faithful brothers at Colossae, Paul to all those in Rome who are loved by God. So in Paul's mind that he's using a secretary does not mean it's not his words or not his thought. That's my second observation. Here's my third observation. When Tertius wrote verse 22, I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord, it doesn't mean that somehow he broke free against Paul's will and inserts himself in the letter. It wouldn't have to mean that at all would it? Here's one possible scenario. Paul is dictating along, "Timothy, my fellow worker greets you," Paul is letting him write this, "so delicious and Jason and so sippeter, my kinsman," Tertius is writing this letter greets you, pause, smile, stop, eye connection, why don't you make that personal from you? So he writes, "I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greets you in the Lord." If that happened, if something like that happened, that would be totally Paul's design. Paul's will, Paul's intention, that it be said just that way. So I don't draw any conclusion here like, "Whoa," Tertius budded in, did something bad, took over. There's no reason we would want to draw a conclusion like that and notice that we have to. Fourth observation, in fact, I'm not so sure. Now this is risky. I hardly ever do this in a sermon. I'm not so sure that all the translations are right in the word order in verse 22. It goes, the word order, a little background, this is what I never do, this is really stupid and dangerous to do. In Greek, word order is not decisive in deciding what words modify what words, not usually and not in most constructions. Little endings help you decide what's modifying what. So word order isn't at stake in the Greek language in deciding what modifies what. Here's the Greek word order in verse 22, just as literal as I can make it, it still makes sense. I greet you, I Tertius, the one who wrote this letter in the Lord, very interesting. So why do all the translations say I greet you in the Lord when at least if you just let the word order stand the way it is, I wrote this letter in the Lord. So noticing that, I went back and looked up all the in the Lords in chapter 16 and all the in Christ's in chapter 16 and in verse 2, 3, 8, 9, 10 and 13 in the Lord or in Christ modify something other than I greet you. In other words, if I took it to mean I Tertius who greet you, the one who wrote this letter in the Lord, it would fit with at least six other verses without any, there's nothing in the grammar that would hinder it. I looked at the commentaries, they don't argue. So I'm not going to be dogmatic about this since I'm against all the translations here. But I am going to suggest that it may well be that when Paul said, why don't you make that personal? Why don't you put that in your own words, make your own greeting, come from your heart? He knew he was doing something that this all, this hugely authoritative apostle, which is a little different here. This is different. We never do this, Paul. I never have a voice in this. I don't want a voice in this letter. You are the apostle. I am a nobody. I don't want to intrude in this authoritative word to the book in Romans. And so he says, I wrote this in the Lord. Meaning, this is not a mere human thing going on here. This is not mere, this letter here does not emerge out of my will or his will. This is in the Lord sustained by the Lord. The Lord is over. The Lord is behind. This is in the Lord. We are working here. Even my little intrusion here is in the Lord, a wonder. That's observation number four. Observation number five is that all of this led me to ponder our doctrine of inspiration because it seems to me that it's fair to say that in Bethlehem's understanding of the inspiration of the Bible in the elder affirmation of faith where it's expressed most decisively for the leadership of the church, in it Paul's relationship to Tertius is not unlike God's relationship to Paul. Not that they're identical, but this much of an analogy. Just as even though Tertius is doing the writing, the words and thoughts are Paul's. So even though Paul is doing the dictating the words and thoughts are God's. I don't mean to say that the only way that God inspires the Bible is by word for word dictation. I don't mean to say that. I think he does in places and that he guides in other ways, in other places. But you can see why after a few hours of reflection on these things, I would be inclined to notice two things and go the direction I'm going. Here are the two things I noticed. Number one, it's the Sunday before Thanksgiving. And I thought we should be thankful for something. And number two, it's been a long time, I think, since for the church as a whole, I stepped back and provided the foundation for our belief in the inspiration of the Bible. I teach a seminar on it every two years and spend five hours going to spend twenty minutes doing now. So I just think every now and then a church ought to step back and take a deep breath and say, "Now, why do we hear this book every Sunday? Why do we put such a big stock in this book? Why do we talk about this book as though it's the word of God? Why do we obey this book? Why do we give this book this amazing place of authority in this church?" And that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. So for the next little while, I'm going to leave Romans and go to Jesus and Peter and then to Paul branching out to Old Testament and provide a summary foundation for why we believe what we believe about the Bible and then close with an expression of how deeply thankful we should be for this book. That's where we're going. First of all, let's talk about Jesus. I'm probably going to go too quickly from text to text for me to pause and have you look up all the verses I'm going to refer to. But this manuscript will be online by Monday night and so you can just get it off the web and see everything I said as well as hear it, watch it, amazing what we can do today, right? Unbelievable. You are accountable for everything you say in every expression on your face for the whole world to criticize, which is a good thing. Jesus believed, taught that the Hebrew Bible, we call it the Old Testament, was infallible and inspired. He understood or taught that if you rightly understand the Old Testament, it will never, it will never lead you astray, it will never cause you to go wrong. When the Sadducees approached him, wanted to entangle him in their disbelief in the resurrection by tripping him up about this woman who had seven husbands whose husband which he'd be in the resurrection, they didn't believe in the resurrection. He said to them in Matthew 22, 29, you are wrong, you are because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. In other words, if you knew the scriptures, you wouldn't go wrong on this doctrine. You're wrong because you don't know the Bible. The Bible is the arrow, it's the measuring rule, it'll keep you right and you don't know it. Now why is that? Why is it that if you know the Bible as it means to be known, you won't go wrong? And the reason is because the Bible cannot be broken because it's the Word of God. John 10, 34, Jesus said, the scripture cannot be broken. You don't break any of them, they're all solid, none of them break, none of them fall. At the beginning of his ministry, Matthew 5, 17, he said, do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets, I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them for, truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an Iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished. If it's there, it's going to happen. At the end of his ministry, he said, Luke 24, 44, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. What's this must talk? It's the talk of divine inspiration. If God said it, it must be. His words cannot fail. Here's a little small, it's the small thing sometime that tip you off what a person really believes. You know, if you only look at their big planned formal statements, you might think in their looser moments, they don't really believe it. So sometimes the little things Jesus says indicate a big commitment. Here's a little one. The Pharisees came to him and tried to trip him up, testing him about divorce. So they say, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" Now Jesus' answer to that takes them back to Genesis 2.24. Now Moses wrote Genesis 2.24 and nowhere in the context does it say that he's quoting God. He's not quoting God, he's writing inspired mosaic talk. Moses is saying Genesis 2.24, it goes like this, "A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they should become one flesh." So here's the way Jesus answers the Pharisees. Have you not read that he who created them? No, that's God. He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, "Stop." Who said he who created them male and female said, and then he quotes verse 24. Very, very interesting. God didn't. It does not say, "Thus saith the Lord in the Old Testament." It's just Moses writing. And Jesus says, "God said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two should become one." Which means Jesus can take any random word in the Pentateuch. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, pick it and say, "God said that whether it's Moses talking or God being quoted." Because it's all in his understanding inspired by God, led by God, guided by God. That's why the Scripture cannot be broken. So there's a summary of Jesus' understanding of Old Testament authority and inspiration. Now, here's the next thing which is shocking for us before we become Christians. He takes to himself that very same authority, even bumped up a level. He attributes the whole Old Testament to God, and then he claims an equal authority for himself. He says things like the John 14, 10, "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, the words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works." Or John 828, "I speak as the Father has taught me," or John 1249, "the Father who sent me as himself given me a commandment what to say and what to speak." Which is why, repeatedly, say in Matthew 5, when he is criticizing the erroneous and yet presumably authoritative teaching of the scribes and Pharisees concerning the Old Testament, he doesn't say something negotiating like, "Nah, I'm a teacher, you're a teacher." Here's my suggestion of what the Old Testament text meant. You're getting the text wrong. It's not what he says. He says, "You have heard that it was said," is what I say. He puts his own word above all the authorities of his day as the word that settles the issue. Now, take it a step further. Not only does Jesus look back to the Old Testament and say, "God's word," and look into his own calling and identity and say, "God's word," he now knows that he is about to found by his blood and righteousness and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a people call the church who will be his faithful witnesses until he comes again. He knows that's about to happen. How will they live, what will be their charter? How will they hear his voice? He will be in heaven. For three years he's been speaking and he's going to go away. He won't be speaking that way anymore. How will he be speaking? How can he be the head of his church? How can he be the Lord of his people? How can he guide them and commune with them? His answer is, "Just as God inspired books in the past, just as God is inspiring me now, I will see to it that there are inspired books as the foundation of the church." He says things, therefore, like this, "The helper, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you, you twelve, all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said." That kind of talk was intended to help us not fret, that they're going to be forgetful and they can't get it right because they're not going to have a good enough memory to get it right. They will really understand and they're going to try to write Scripture and mess it up. That's what these verses are in the Bible for to say. He's not going to let that happen. Or John 16, 13, "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will declare to you the things that are to come." Now, if that's so, if that's what Jesus promised would happen, then we would expect that when we go over to the apostles' writings, we're going to find some echo that that really happened, which is exactly what we find in Peter and in Paul. I want to focus on Paul because we're concerned about Romans and Tertia's here. I want to focus on Paul, but I'm going to let Peter first bear witness to Paul and then we'll let Paul bear witness to Paul and his experience of what Jesus promised was going to happen, namely that the Holy Spirit was going to be his guide and enable him to write authoritative church foundational material after which there would be no more authoritative writing. So here's what we find in Peter's second letter. You find Peter describing first, I say this first just because I want you to hear what he says about Paul in his proper context, first Peter talks about his understanding of the Old Testament prophecy, the Old Testament authoritative scripture. Second Peter, 121, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Now, that's Peter's way of saying that the Old Testament was not a humanly wrought instrument. It was a divinely produced instrument. It was a book that God brought into being and shepherded through so that it would be his word. That's 2 Peter 121. Now, when you get to 2 Peter chapter 3, he says something amazing about Paul. Goes like this. This is 2 Peter 3, 15 and 16. Our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given to him as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, amen, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other scriptures. So Peter with no hesitation puts the letters of Paul in the category of the other scriptures which men of God wrote being carried by the Holy Spirit. So there you have an apostolic testimony about another apostle's writings, namely that they are scripture. Just like Jesus said, "I look back and I bless and ordain that this scripture be authoritative. I'm authoritative and I'm going to see to it that the Holy Spirit produces scripture authority in the future so that the church can be grounded in it." Now, if that's the case about Paul, how does he talk about himself? Does he have a sense that existentially Jesus promises coming true in his life and what Peter said about him is true and he does indeed. He's conscious not only of inspiration, he's conscious of amazing authority. If Paul did not have a humble assessment of himself as a Jesus fulfilling inspired apostle, he would be one of those arrogant men imaginable because of what he says about himself. So here's two passages. He says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 verses 12 and 13, "Now we have received not the Spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us by God and we impart them. We impart this in words taught not by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual." That's about his clearest statement of inspiration from an apostle as you're going to get. We are not speaking, we are native in using words that are taught by human wisdom and he was a very wise man. He's claiming that when he teaches the church in his letters, he is speaking words just like Jesus prophesied that are taught by the Holy Spirit which is why he says things atrociously like this to the Corinthians in chapter 14 verses 37 and 38, "If anyone thinks that he's a prophet or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized." In other words, he spoke with absolute authority in the church. Nobody could come alongside Paul. I'm a spiritual too. I'm a prophet too and Paul would say, "If you're a prophet, you'll agree with me." I won't talk like that, I hope, but Paul did and it wasn't arrogance. It was love for the church. If he didn't hold fast to what God was doing in his life and speak the word of God that God was speaking in his life as the inspired apostle and the foundation of the church, he would not have done a faithful loving humble servant of Jesus Christ and his church. So back to Romans 60. When Paul thinks out the train of thought in the book of Romans and he gives those thoughts words and tortious writes those words down. The thoughts and the wisdom are not of this world. They are a wisdom from above and the words Paul says are not taught by the wisdom of man. They are taught by the spirit of God and therefore to use the words of tortious, however he meant them, this was happening in the Lord. In the power of the Lord, in the guardianship of the Lord, in the blessing of the Lord, in the fulfillment of the Lord's promise, this book, this precious and most powerful of all letters that has ever been written was being written in the Lord, even the sentence where Paul authorizes tortious to say, "I too greet you. I'm the one who's writing this in the Lord." Last Thursday, I was in Washington, D.C., giving a talk to a group on William Tyndale. William Tyndale translated the New Testament from Greek into English for the first time. But that there was no English before that, but Wycliffe's efforts 130 years earlier were from the Latin Vulgate. For the first time, William Tyndale, writing for the common man, put the Greek Testament in English in 1526, and he was killed for doing it. They strangled him, and then they burned him to death. I mean, they burned him after he was strangled. Now, as I was given this talk, I had no intention whatsoever of being emotionally worked up about this. I mean, of getting teary, misty-eyed, but there was this little point where I did get unusually moved, and it was this point in the talk. I was listing all the places that I had found. I mean, that's not true. All the places I had taken the time to write down, there are hundreds of them, and I only give about 12. I was listing all these phrases in the English standard version, which is in the pew there, the Bible we use as a church, which comes straight from Tyndale, exact words that he chose 500 years ago, tracing them back through the revised standard version, the American standard version, the King James version, the Geneva Bible, the Coverdale Great Bible to the words of William Tyndale himself, the very words winding up in our Bible, hundreds and hundreds of phrases and verses. And I came to the one in number six and realized, I use this almost every Sunday to close the service. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace, and realized every single word with two tiny exceptions, we use the, we use now you, and he used merciful where we use gracious. So let's just do it Tyndale's way. The Lord bless you and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee and be merciful to thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace. Most William Tyndale verbatim from 500 years ago, and he was burned for saying, I really paused and thought, what price, what price has been paid to preserve this book for us. Thousands of people have died, and they're still dying, they're dying so that other peoples can have it in their own language, they're paying their lives so that this most precious of all gifts under Christ himself would be given. So think of the layers of preciousness this Thanksgiving. When you come to Thanksgiving, here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to go home and come Monday, which is my day off, to get ready for Thursday when I think my whole family is going to be together, it doesn't happen very often, coming from far and wide. I'm going to write down about eight or ten reasons why the Bible is precious, and we're going to read them to each other on Thanksgiving. That's just where I am this year, and I commend to you to think through, among all the things you're thankful for, put near the top of the list this Thanksgiving that it is inspired by God, which means it's His Word, your Maker, your Redeemer has written to you in understandable language that you may not be confused about who He is or what He's done or what His plans are or how to be saved and get right with Him, and so many other things in life. Jesus Himself paid for it with His own blood so that as sinners we could understand it and embrace it and be saved through it, and then William Tyndale and a thousand like Him have suffered in order that it might reach us across these many centuries whole and faithful and understandable. It is a very, very precious Thanksgiving gift, and I commend it to you for your gratitude on Thursday. Let's pray. So Father in heaven, we want so much now to grow in our understanding of the Word and to grow in our love for the Word and appreciation for the Word and allegiance to the Word and submission to the Word and obedience to the Word and display an explanation of the Word. Oh, God, make us a Bible, loving, Bible, obedient, Bible-saturated people for the glory of Christ. Let's do this. Your Word is a lamp to our feet, light to our path. Let's walk it. Help us to walk it up right now in Jesus' name, amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God Online at www.desiringgod.org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts, and much more, all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio, and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is www.desiringgod.org, or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God 20601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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