Not Of This World Pt. 14
Otherworldly Scripture
2 Peter 1:16-21
Orchard Church | Pastor Jim Jackson
Otherworldly Scripture | Not Of This World Ep. 14
We are in 2nd Peter chapter 1, and we're going to start in verse 16 and we're live all over the world coming to you from sunny, beautiful Southern California. And we're glad that you are here to study God's Word with us as we look at 2nd Peter today. 2nd Peter chapter 1 verse 16. "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths." Wow, underlined cleverly devised myths. When we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses, circle eyewitnesses of His majesty. For when He, Jesus, received honor and glory from God the Father. And the voice was said to Him by the majestic glory, "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." We ourselves heard this very voice from heaven. Underline the rest of this phrase, "For we were with Him on the holy mountain, and we have the prophetic word, circle prophetic word, more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention, underlined pay attention, as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts." This is just a metaphor for God coming alive inside of your dead heart. Underline all of verse 20 and 21. This is huge. Knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture, which is what I'm reading right now, no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man. In other words, it wasn't just made up by random guys that wanted to write something. But men spoke from God, underlined spoke from God, as they were carried along, circle carried by the Holy Spirit. Hey, look at me. This morning's going to be a little bit heady. As with all my sermons, there's not many fluffy bunnies in it. I usually kill them all. So it's going to be a little bit heady. So I need you to walk with me. I'm going to try to pull you along with me, but we're going to walk into the land of how do you know you can trust the Bible. Here's the reason I'm going to do that. Ready? We've had movies played. We've had Netflix videos. We've had TikTok videos and people talking about like, oh, the Bible is just kind of slammed together by a bunch of people. The Catholics and the 300s by with Constantine or whatever. We don't really even know what's supposed to be in here. We don't even know if there's really God's word. It could be just made up. How do we even know? Which is a great question. And I'm going to answer that today. And the reason I'm going to take you down this road, not only because Peter talks about it, but for this reason, how do you know you're actually walking with God this morning? Answer it in your own mind. Think about it. Answer to yourself. How do I know I'm actually walking with God this morning? For many of us, the answer to that question is this, because I feel God. You have to be very careful when you start talking about the F word. Your feelings. Because when you start talking about your feelings, your feelings can come and go. You have great days. This is the best day ever. Oh my gosh. The Vikings are playing. It's like, this is the pinnacle of humanity. And then just literally later that day you're like, this is the worst day I've ever had. I can't believe I have to live through another day. And then the next day I was like, this is great. I want to die. So, ready? Your feet, watch this. You cannot found your faith on your feelings. You have to found your faith on God. So how do I know what God wants for me? How do I know where to found my life? From God's word. Because God, who gave us God's word, will let me know what God's will is for God in my life. So regardless if I'm having a great day or a horrible day, this is the best day I've ever had or a day I wish I was dead. It doesn't matter in my emotional state because God is my foundation. And my faith now is in my God through his word, not in my feelings. Ready? Here we go. All the way through this. I hope for the rest of your life you can have confidence in God's word that you're actually hearing from God and not something somebody randomly put together. Everybody with me? 17 people are excited about this sermon. Okay, here we go. All 17 of us ready? Pull your notes out. They should be inside your bulletin if you came on campus. If you're online with us at the top of the comment section on Facebook, you'll see a link. If you're on YouTube with us below the video in the description, you'll see a link. Click on that and my notes will come up. Number one. In other worldly witness. The reason scripture matters to you and it matters to me in our walk with God is that there's an other worldly witness about God in the world. It's not just my, I didn't make it up. I'm not just randomly coming up with stuff. It's like God spoke into the world and here's what, here's how those people that witness that wrote it down. Being in prison and knowing he'll be executed soon. Peter, who wrote Second Peter and right hand man of Jesus. Peter recalls his experience of seeing Jesus exalted at his transfiguration. That's what Peter's talking about in verses 16 through 18. Second Peter one, 16 through 18. He's talking about the transfiguration of Jesus. As only he, James and John were there, they witnessed a once in history event as Jesus was glorified by God the Father. On the mountain, the disciples saw the majesty of Jesus as he shone like the son and he talked with Moses and Elijah. Moses represented the law which was given by God at Mount Sinai. And then Elijah represented the prophets of the law and the prophets. The whole Old Testament is represented at the transfiguration between Moses and Elijah as they talked with Jesus. And they heard God speak from the cloud above of his love for his son as he did at the beginning of Jesus' ministry when he was baptized. So pay attention, we're going to go into deep, heady waters today. Ready, here we go. Jesus is with his twelve disciples. He's training them, teaching them at a place called Caesarea Philippi. And then he's going to leave them and only bring three of his disciples with him. It's basically the inner circle of the disciples. The disciples were a very specific group. Imagine of all the men in the world, God chose twelve. And then out of that twelve, God chose three as his inner circle of the guys he's going to disciple among the disciples. So he brings them up on the mountain and here this amazing thing happens, which is what Peter's talking about here in the beginning of our passage. Here's a map of Israel. And here is where this event took place. So you see the Sea of Galilee, those of you guys that went with me to Israel last year, we went to the Sea of Galilee. This is where Jesus walked on water, and he had a house in Capernaum there, which is northern Sea of Galilee. And so he's been teaching them, training them around Sea of Galilee. Now they're going to leave and go north. And they go all the way up to Caesarea Philippi. This is the extreme north of Israel's territory. To put it in context, if we were to go below this map, like down towards where the floor is and below that, it would be where Jerusalem is down here, if we go even south from there, like if this church had a basement and we went into the basement of this graphic, down there would be like the Gaza Strip down here where the war is happening right now. So this is in the extreme north of Israel. And you see that Mount there, Mount Hermon, is the mountain where the transfiguration took place. So he leaves the disciples at Caesarea Philippi, it takes three of them and goes up on the mountain. So you can go visit it today if you wanted to go up there. And this is what it looks like if you're down in the valley. If you're looking up towards it, you'll see it's a real legit mountain in Israel. It's the highest point in the land of Israel. What's really interesting about how God developed the land of Israel is. There's two tectonic plates that slam into each other right there. It's very similar to our area in California here, which is why we have earthquakes and tremors, because we have plates that are sliding by each other right here by the San Andreas Fault. So same thing in Israel. There's a plate that's slamming into one and part of it drops. It creates this massive depression, which is where the Dead Sea is. The Dead Sea is actually lower than the ocean level. If you got rid of the land in between, literally the ocean would just cover this area. So the Sea of Galilee flows all the way down into the Dead Sea and because there's nothing lower, it's just the water just stays there, which why it's called the Dead Sea. There's nothing lives there because it's become very salinated over the years from evaporation. So watch, if you move from the Dead Sea all the way up to Galilee, this rift starts moving up and it shoots straight up where here at the northern part of this rift, the land has slammed vertically rather than going down and it created Mount Herman. What's interesting is that God allowed this mountain to be created where it's the only place in Israel that gets consistent snowfall and there's its water source. So God stuck this like, "I'm going to stick a mountain here to make sure my people get water." And it flows from Mount Herman down into the Sea of Galilee and from Sea of Galilee all the way down the Jordan River to the Dead Sea. So it provides water, this mountain that just randomly just popped out of nowhere in Israel, it provides water to the land of Israel. So you can actually go skiing there. So if you're Jewish or you're of Norwegian, you can strap your skays on, practice your Hebrew, and go skiing with some people. So the only place in the whole nation that you can do something like that, and so here's what I'm telling you, is up on this mountain somewhere is where the transfiguration took place. And Peter's referencing that when he goes, "You wouldn't even believe I was at a once-in-a-lifetime thing where the transfiguration of Jesus took place." And this was the most emotional moment of my life. Imagine being there. Imagine being up on this mountain, Mount Herman, and all of a sudden you're just walking up there with Jesus. You're like, "Man, Jesus is like, 'Let's go for a hike.'" [laughter] And so the three boys, you know, they're like filling up their, you know, Stanley water balls or whatever. They're just like, they're 78 dollar water bottle. And they're like, "Okay, let's go for a hike." Like, they're trekking up this legit mountain. And all of a sudden Jesus goes, "Hang out right here." And all of a sudden, boom, this cloud descends on the mountain. And it says Jesus becomes like white lightning. So bright, you couldn't even look at it. And all of a sudden while that's happening, Moses and Elijah show up. And I don't know how they figured out because Moses and Elijah were there because they were dead. They died like 1,500 years beforehand. But Peter's like, "What's going on?" And we see that right here in Matthew 17. Here's actually the story of the transfiguration, so you have an idea. Matthew 17, 1 through 9, and after six days, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, his brother, and led them up into a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. And his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them, Moses and Elijah talking with him. And Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." Peter, just shut up. Nobody needs tents for guys that are dead. Verse 5, "While he was still speaking, behold," so they're not even, Jesus didn't even pay attention to Jesus. I don't even know what you just said, please stop. As he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him." When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, "Rise and have no fear." And when they lifted the rise, they saw no one, but Jesus only. And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, "Tell no one this vision until the Son of Man was raised from the dead." And so here's our first point. God the Father glorifies and loves his Son. God the Father glorifies and loves his Son. And you're like, "What does this have to do with me? I'm going to tell you what this has to do with you." And you might not even recognize it when you read it. God, throughout the whole testament, says this, "I will never give my glory to another ever. I'm the Lord God Almighty. We just got done singing about it. I share my glory with no one. There's not a man or woman allowed in the history of humanity to have the glory of God given to him." But you know what happens here? God the Father glorifies the Son. So you know what that means? That means if God will never glorify a human with his own glory, because he's God. But if he does it to a person on the Earth, that means that person's God. So God the Father shares his glory with God the Son. So it's one of the areas of Scripture we realize Jesus is really God. It's a subversive way of knowing the divinity of Jesus. So when somebody goes, "Jesus never thought he was God or never the blah blah blah." You hear that sometimes we're like, "Man, dude, do you ever read the Bible?" Because you can tell from even this passage that when Peter, who was a Jew, saw Jesus getting the glory of God, he realized, "This is no mere man. This is no prophet. This is no guy that just teaches really well. This is actually God in the flesh because God never shares his glory with anyone, but he's doing it for Jesus." And so that literally must mean Jesus is God's Son. The first century Greco-Roman world, which is when this book was written, was filled with myths and legends centered around people, places, or deities that never existed or were just embellished. Think of all the deities of the Greco-Roman world, Zeus, Mars. There's a lot, yes. You've had God for everything, God for your sex life, God for the rain, God for the fertility with your animals. They just stuck a God on everything. Hey, there's a God. They don't exist. They're just made up. They're just legends and fairy tales. So Peter says this. I know there's a bunch of fairy tales and legends about people and deities that didn't exist in our culture when he's speaking to the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish-Roman world of first century, but he goes, "We have Jesus as the glorified God, and I was there to witness it." So I know, I tell you, as a eyewitness, this isn't myths and fairy tales about Jesus. Like, it literally happened and it's a once-in-a-history thing, and I'm telling you about it in the passage that we read today. The disciples were allowed to experience this event so they would know that Jesus' life wasn't based on myths, legends, fairy tales, or falsehoods, but on fact. And here's our principle. God came into history so we could discern fact from fiction about God. That's huge. Hey, listen, the reason we trust Jesus is because he was a literal historical figure that acted in the world and the people that were closest to him bore witness about the fact of all the miracles he did, and obviously he's going to come back from the dead, which is what we celebrate at Easter next year. But even in this story, he was transfigured like no one else in history. Not like Buddha, not like Muhammad, not like anybody in Taoism. Like, there's nobody like Jesus is Peter's point. Not a Caesar, not a president, not a general. There's nobody of all the great men that have walked this earth. There's nobody like Jesus. That's what Peter's saying. He's trying to get the readers to understand this isn't Mr. fairy tales. I was there. I saw the greatness of Jesus, and here's what this immediately means. Look at me. Here's how you know when you trust Jesus, you're not believing in a religion, but you're actually having a relationship with God because you're knowing God through Jesus. What this means is this. If it's true about Jesus, then it means all other belief systems and religions are wrong. Unless they point to the divinity of Jesus and his mission in the world, which is I'm the only savory of the world. Anything or anybody that says different about his divinity or his mission is heretical and wrong. Which is why Quran has written 600 years after Jesus. We don't accept the Quran, which is why Joseph Smith, when he theoretically got a revelation from Moroni in the woods, we don't accept any of the books of Mormon or the Doctrine and Covenants because they say something different about the Jesus of the Bible. They don't say Jesus has been eternally God. They don't say his mission was to die on the cross for the sins of the world as the only salvation for humanity. So immediately when you know the truth about Jesus, you know what's actually wrong about everything else. Look at this. Number one, other worldly witness. And number two, other worldly word, W-O-R-D. So here's where we get to Scripture. Peter and I witness of the greatness of Christ. Now he's going to write Scripture for us, and what does that mean for us? Though having apostolic authority, Peter establishes that after he dies, believers don't need a living apostle to know and do God's will. Woo, this is huge. Don't tap out of me. Drink some Red Bull. Stay with me. Hey, we're going to the deep waters for a second. Ready? Peter says this. I was at the most emotional moment in history. God spoke. I saw Jesus transfigured. Moses in Elijah's there. And imagine the emotional ecstasy of that moment. You're like, oh my gosh, I just, I, I just, I, let's build some tents for everybody. What? And here's the thing. Many times we rely on our feelings to tell us if God's near. You hear it all the time. Our culture is saturated with our feelings. How do you feel right now? What's, what's your feelers going, I'm up in my feelings about it. Your feelings are the absolute worst barometer of your walk with God. Because you could be feeling really great and be living in wickedness against God. The, the opposite's also true. I could have a great relationship with God and be going through a tough time emotionally right now too. So my emotions are not a good barometer of the truth of God. God is God, my feelings are not God. I let my feelings find their basis in walking with God. So all my ups and downs, God is stable and consistent. And I watch this and I know Him through God's Word. I don't know God through my feelings. I know God through my faith in God's Word. That's huge. That's massive because it'll keep you from being schizophrenic spiritually. No, I can read God's Word. I know God loves me regardless of how I feel. Using this transfiguration is the ultimate example of having an experience with God. Peter says believers can be more sure about their relationship with God than even being at that event. How can we know? By knowing God's Word. And here's our principle. My faith is founded on God's Word, not on our feelings. I love that Peter put this in there because many of us think this. Many of us think this. If I could have been at the transfiguration, man, that would have just been the best part of my whole life. But Peter doesn't say that. He goes, I was there and it was awesome. But you know what you can be more sure about in your walk with God is God's Word. Wow. Wait a second. It's better to have God's Word in my life than be at the transfiguration where God spoke and Jesus shined like the Son. Yeah. Because that moment ended. But this will never end. God didn't, and here we go, I'm going to show you how the Scripture was put together and give you confidence in God's Word. Sometimes I'll hear this. I wish God would just speak to me. God. Please, just speak to me, should I be living with my boyfriend? Should I just keep on drinking? Should I get a cat? You knew it was coming. Like we just see God and we go, God just speak to me. Speak out of the clouds. I swear if you just tell me something, I'm going to do it. Just like the transfiguration. Just show up and go crazy. Well guess what? There is a way you can know God's will. And it's not screaming from the clouds. I love this meme because it's like perfectly describes all of our lives with God. I wish God would just speak to me. Oh, I don't know. He already did. It's called the Bible, not your feelers. You don't need something like lightning from the sky to figure out about God. God's already spoken into the world and all you got to do is study God's word and you'll know God. Here it is. God didn't deliver a completed book from heaven. He didn't just drop some gold plates out of the sky and go, "Here's my word. All done." God didn't deliver a completed book from heaven but revealed his will over time using human means by these three things. Here we go. I'm going to get deep for a second. Do not tap out on me. This is massive. I'm going to teach you why you can trust God's word and that this is the true words of God. Here it is. Here's how you know we got what we were supposed to have from God. By inspiration, which is from the Holy Spirit, which you got done talking about here in the passage, generation, which means how was it generated? How was it made? One was orally, which was you tell somebody else, you faithfully tell somebody else, scripture they tell somebody else until somebody writes it down. So it's oral and written. That's how scripture is generated in the world. And then preservation. And this is huge. How do we know what, okay, I can admit maybe God spoke in the world, Peter and some of the apostles wrote stuff down. But how do we know people didn't just like add some stuff in there that wasn't supposed to be in there? Or how do we know even worse? How do we know that the Catholic Church of the 300s, with Constantine or something, when they were getting together, they were like, oh, keep that book out. I like these ones. Let's all put these books together. We'll call it God's word because these are the things that we like and the other things that we kept out. We've got movies about that. You've heard that kind of thing, like we don't even know. Some guy just slammed this stuff together. We have no idea if this is even true. Is this even the Bible we're supposed to have? Like somebody I'm just going to, what if I just wrote Pastor Jim, book a Pastor Jim? And we're just going to slide it in behind Revelation where your maps are. We're just going to glue it in there. Like, how do we know some dude didn't just throw somebody, his own book in there? I'm going to show you right now. Because that's preservation. How do we know God's words have been preserved for us all the way down to literally right now as I'm speaking it? That's huge. How do we know it hasn't been messed with? This means that the original autographs, which is the first documents, we don't have the original letters that Peter wrote or Paul wrote or John wrote. And here's the reason why. Look at me. God didn't preserve the original letter, the original ink. And you know what I'm kind of glad he didn't. Because imagine if we had the first letter of Paul or whatever, it would be in a museum and people would worship it. So here's what happened in the first century. There's no copying machines. There's no like, take it to the... You know what Dad did in the first century? They had to make hand copies. Imagine hand copying the Bible. It was so vital to the first century people that they copied. We have just right now 24,000 either full manuscripts or fragments of the Bible. Okay? There is nothing in history that was hand copied as much as the Bible. Not Caesar's histories, not any wars, it's incredible that first century people would spend money to buy the vellum or buy the leather or buy whatever and they would copy the Bible. Here's the reason they did that. Because they realized when God's word was actually delivered to an apostle, he wrote it down or whatever, they would go, do we need to get this copy? Because if this original is destroyed, it's gone. So they would take the original and people would just copy it and as the letter circulated around the churches around the world, they would copy it. And so it turned out to be tens of thousands, this is just the copies we know of today. But there could be 100,000 copies out there over the next hundred years as they discover more. It is the most hand copied book in the history of the world until we got to modern copying. This is actually the first book that was printed on Gutenberg's printing press. So this is the most valuable book in the history of humanity, it's not even close. Because people valued this book so much, they said we've got to make sure we get this copied. So if these copies, other things get destroyed, we have God's word with us. This means the original autographs were breathed out by God to the apostles. And inerrant, which means without errors, the Bible does not have errors in it, the original autographs didn't have errors in them because God is perfect, it means what he gave people is perfect and infallible, which means it's incapable of mistakes. It's inerrant and infallible. The Holy Spirit didn't dictate to the authors, but he carried the authors using their personality and culture to give his verbal, which means spoken directly from God and plenary, which means it's full or all of it will. He gave us the verbal and plenary will of God. So that means this, after the last apostle, which was John, pay attention, look at me, most of the apostles died in the first century. John, though, who wrote the book of John, died at the end of the first century, died about 85, 90, maybe 95 AD. The earliest copy we have of the Bible in fragment form is 120 to 150 AD. So it's just beyond John's lifetime. So what it means is this, as apostles were writing scripture, they had the authority because they walked and talked with Jesus and it got circulated around to all the churches. They would recognize this came from an authorized person to write this, which is why by the time the second and third century came around with the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, all the Gospel of Judas, all these other gospels, they weren't contemporaneous with the people that walked and talked with Jesus. So the churches automatically go, "This is a forgery. This isn't even real. This isn't even authoritative." They would get rid of those books. So the church in and of themselves removed those, the churches in the New Testament world didn't read those books or they removed those books, but they started to collect the books that all of them knew were from a validating authoritative apostle. And that became the Bible over the time that they went through all the books and the letters that made sure, "Man, this is from an actual person that walked and talked with Jesus." If it wasn't a person that walked and talked to Jesus, they rejected it, which is why all those books didn't make it in descriptor. And here's the principle, we have all of God's will and God and the word that God wanted us to have. We have all of God's will and word that God wanted us to have. So if anybody ever comes along and says, "I have something that needs to go in the Bible," you know that's a cult, you know that's heresy, say far away from those places where it goes. We have extra revelation. Somebody got some extra revelation, or, "Hey, I'm a prophet too." If you're ever at a church where they start talking prophet and prophetesses, run, run, run. Okay? The prophets and the apostles ended with the last apostle of John. Okay? What was their job was to write Scripture for us. So their ministry to the church was, "Write Scripture my job now after John died for the last 2,000 years is pastors are to teach God's word so that you understand God's word and live a godly life." That's how that works. You don't need a living apostle on earth to tell you what God wants because God's already told us. That's why we don't need a pope. We don't need a God's official on earth to let us know what God wants. We already know what God wants, which is through his word. When you study and know God's word, you know God and you're able to live for God. You don't need a guy from God to let you know what's going on because once the apostles died, they weren't replaced. They just let them die and that was it because they gave us Scripture to read. Here's a graphic of what I'm talking about. Take your $1,000 phone out that you just watch cat videos with and actually take a picture of this. This is a massive thing that I can't go into. This is literally, people literally give their lives to do textural criticism. I'm not going to go into it. I'm just going to go over it. If you enjoy this kind of thing, you're welcome to look it up for yourself. But here it is. This is how you know we have God's word. This is why it's so huge. This is why when you go to a church, they should just teach you God's word. They shouldn't just talk about God's word. They should actually teach you God's word. That's what...here it is, inspiration. The inspiration that Scripture was given from the Holy Spirit is inerrant. It's without errors and infallible. It can't make mistakes because it's from God. The generation of how Scripture came about was oral and written, which Peter wrote this down for us. Preservation. Here it is, faithfully copied and transmitted to retain the original writings. Today, we've got 24,000 copies and some date to 120. And here actually is a picture of the earliest we have, which is a gospel of John fragment that's in the museum in Europe. And this is copied in Greek. And this is when Jesus is going to the cross. This is almost to the...they dated this almost to the time of John. So Pauli Karp, who is John's disciple, actually could have seen this or read this, maybe even wrote it as far as copying it goes. And so we have a faithful rendition of what God wanted us to have preserved for us all the way throughout. So here's...let me...you'll straighten for you like this. As the letters were being passed around to all the churches, they would go, is this from an authorized person that knew Jesus? Yes or no? If it was yes, they would keep it. As other letters came around, they would start making a collection of them as the first and second century went on. Here's the way we do this, and this is why that Codex matters. The closer we can get to the original writings, the more true you would think that legends think can't be made up because it's so close to the original when people were living, you can trust what we've got. That fragment of John is way back here almost to the time of the writing of Scripture, which is significant because now we know as we start putting fragments together and whole manuscripts together that we are...God has preserved His Word literally right down to our day. So you can know I am teaching you God's Word that was faithfully handed down without error. And seven people care. Here we go. Let me finish this up. Ready? Look at this. The Bible was written and compiled over 1,600 years from Moses all the way to John in the first century by 40 authors from three different continents yet spoke of the same God ultimately culminating in Jesus' life. Men of God wrote the words of God so the people of God could know and love God. And I want to make this point to you. Ready? Look at me. This is huge. People watch. People didn't collect a bunch of letters and authorize them. Men didn't give authority to the books they collected. What they did was they recognized what was already authoritative and put the authoritative letters together. Put this up because this is massive. People didn't authorize what was discovered for God. People discovered what was authorized by God. So this is huge. The Catholics did not put the Bible together. When you hear that, stop, stop them and go, men didn't put the Bible together and then authorize it, men saw what was already authorized and put it together. So it's the letters that are authorized from God, not men giving authority to what they just slammed together. And that's a huge point, which means this, you have the words of God. You have what God wants you to have. You can live a godly life because God has given us his word and expects us to live that way. So when you hear it, put it in your heart and live it out and God will bless your life. And that's literally the Christian life. From God to God's word to our hearts and that we live a life that honors God and invites