‘Behold, the Lamb of God’
ide o amnos tou
theou
College Study
6th teaching
8.2.2012
“the Divine Attributes of Holy
Scripture”
PART II — Capability and
Efficiency
Bibliology Part III
Here’s our list of seven divine attributes, the
fingerprints of God upon His Word:
1. The Holiness of the Bible
2. The Authority of the Bible
3. The Immortality of the Bible
This was what we covered last week. This week we’ll cover
the next two on the list:
4. The Capability of the Bible
5. The Efficiency of the Bible
6. The Prophecy of the Bible
7. The Inerrancy of the Bible
IV. The Capability
of the Bible
Thus far we’ve learned a lot about what the Bible is. It is
immortal. It is holy. It is God-breathed. And we know about what the Bible has:
it’s got 66 books, 40 authors, it took 1600 years to write, it has tremendous
unity, it has authority.
But what does the Bible do? The Holy Book says of itself
that it is living and powerful, presently so. But how so?
God, the ultimate reasonable and purposeful Being, did not
write a book without a purpose. The Bible is so divinely designed that it has
function in a person’s life, more than just reading a book.
There are many ways in which the Bible has a unique effect
in someone’s life. But for the sake of time, let me give you five. These are five
effects that Bible has in someone’s life that make it more than just words on
paper. To better understand these, let’s use analogies. What is the Bible like that produces similar effects?
a. The Bible is like Water
Ephesians 5:25-26,
“Husbands, love you wives, just as Christ
also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and
cleanse her with the washing of water by the word.”
This is a commandment for husbands, but it tells us that
Jesus Christ is a husbands example of how to love his wife (as Jesus loves the
church). It tells us that Christ gave Himself for her to purify her and to wash
her with the water by the word. Meaning, the Word of God has a cleansing effect
upon a believer, just like the effect a bath has upon a dirty body.
Check out Psalm
119:9, “How can a young man cleanse
his way? By taking heed according to Your word.” Psalm 119:11, “Your word have
I hid in my heart that I might not sin against You.”
The Bible is necessary to live a morally pure life. It has
the effect of washing you and cleansing you.
I personally believe this to be especially true of the
mind. Our minds are like playgrounds. The worst ideas that we would never talk
about run rampant up there. The worst sins and debauchery that we might never
enact in our society can have a field day there.
I have known the Bible to have this cleansing effect, a
focusing effect. If you want to focus on God and get your mind out of the
gutter, you can do nothing better than to read God’s word and let the Bible
work to purify you.
Water, next to oxygen, is the most precious commodity in
the universe because it is necessary for life as we know it. The Bible,
similarly, is the most precious book you can own. It is necessary not for
biological life, but for a pure life. Note not a perfect one. We’ll never be
perfect until the other side, but the Bible is a source of washing like water.
b. The Bible is like a Mirror
James 1:22-25, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers
only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a
doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes
himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who
looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a
forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he
does.”
Let’s say I go to the mirror and I discover a whopping,
half-inch zit protruding from my forehead. That mirror is telling me I look
bad. I know I should do something about it. But then I walk away from the
mirror and eventually forget before I leave the house. Now people are laughing
and pointing where ever I go: stoplights, the mall, the dmv, work, school, so
on.
The Bible is like that mirror. When we read it, we see
ourselves in its descriptions of both what a sinner is like and what a believer
should do. The Bible however is greater than just a mirror, in that a mirror
cannot tell you what to fix. A mirror couldn’t tell me to get rid of that ugly
zit. But the Bible does tell us to “cast
off the works of darkness…” Romans
13:12, to “love your neighbor as
yourself” Mark 12:31 and to “you also be holy in all your conduct” I Peter 1:15.
The key is, when you read the Bible and see who you are in
God’s description, don’t forget. Don’t forget what you see in God’s mirror and
so make the changes in your life.
c.
The Bible is like a Sword
This is a very famous picture of the Bible, the
Scripture as a sword, and rightfully it should be famous. I’m sure most of you
have heard this verse:
Hebrews 4:12, “For the word of God is living and powerful,
and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and
spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and
intents of the heart.”
That’s a huge statement. Of what other book could you say
‘this is living’ or ‘this is powerful’ in the sense that it can discern and
divide and speak into a certain situation exactly and precisely.
The Bible has incredible precision. If you have listened to
more than a few testimonies, you’ll begin to pick up on recurring themes. One
thing that a lot of folks, not everyone but a lot, mention when they tell the
story of their salvation is that they were sitting there in church, or
listening to someone share about God, and what they were saying and sharing
sounded like it was speaking right to them and to their own unique situation.
That’s nothing short of a miracle. It’s a miracle that you
can have an incredibly diverse group of any size OR a small group of people
with more similar backgrounds, a group of any language or history or ethnicity,
and yet the Bible can single out the one person furthest from God and speak
exactly what needs to be said into their situational life.
Or let’s think about it in a different way: how often do
you make tough decisions?
We’ve reached a point in our lives as young men and women,
no longer children, where we have to make important life decisions. Where are
we going to live? How are we going to live? What are we going to do? Who are we
going to marry? Where will we go to school? Will we go to school? What’s God’s
calling upon my life personally?
All these questions and more must have answers. And the Bible
ought to be the primary place that we look for those answers alongside prayer;
we let God communicate to us, and we communicate to God.
Because the Bible is a discerner and it gives discernment.
The Bible can help you see the intentions of your heart even, which you
yourself may not know.
You won’t find every answer here, but you will find most of
them. For the others, God may be given you the freedom to choose, or the faith
to wait for His answer.
This leads us to the next point:
d. The Bible is like a Lamp
Fourthly, check out Psalm
119:105, “Your word is a lamp to my
feet and a light to my path.”
We live in a dark world. That’s true morally. We live in a
world where you can be shot to death in a movie theatre. Where people are
starving, tortured, beaten. Where people lie and deceive.
It’s also true that our world is dark in that our world can
be confusing, more often than not. You may not know where to go next in your
life. I haven’t really, REALLY known that for some time now.
And where shall we turn for answers to our deep, important
questions? There are hundreds of thousands of self-help columns, articles,
magazines out there. There are millions how-to books. But you won’t find a book
that’s how-to-live-your-life. That book only came from the mind of God, which
we know as the Holy Bible.
God’s word is a lamp for feet that are wandering. God’s
word is a light down a dark road through confusion.
Are you confused about what to do? Are you unsure of God’s
will for you personally? Then you and I need to seek ought the lamp of the word
and let the light illuminate our path.
e. The Bible is like Food
Two verses on this: I
Peter 2:2 and Hebrews 5:14.
I Peter 2:2, “As newborn babies, desire the pure milk of
the word, that you may grow thereby.”
The apostle Peter uses the imagery of a newborn baby needed
the nourishment of its mother’s milk to grow healthy and strong. He uses this
imagery of the Bible.
For those of us here who grew up in the church, we knew
from a young age the common Bible stories and the famous characters. We had
heard many times that Jesus died for you and I. We were given the basics of
Christianity as a child, we were given milk as a child, because that’s what
young Christians need, the basics.
The next verse uses a different image:
Hebrews 5:13-14,
“For everyone who partakes only of milk
is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a baby. But solid food
belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have
their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
The writer of Hebrews was addressing a group of people who
should have been mature Christians by the time he wrote to them. They should
have matured in their faith and their relationship with God and their knowledge
of the truth. They should have been capable of teaching others at that point.
But the truth was that they still needed someone to teach
them all over again the basics, the first principles. They weren’t ready for
the solid food that a mature human can eat; they still needed milk like
newborns.
You can gauge your own Christian growth in just this way.
How are you handling this material we’re going through? I’m not talking about
things that may be too abstract or too philosophical or intellectual. I’m
talking about the basis of the truths we’re going through.
Are you grasping them as solid food, as deeper truths to
the basics you always knew? Are you able to chew on what we’re going through?
Or do we need coloring books and colorful stories and crafts and snacks?
It is time to grow up in the Lord even as we grow up in our
societies. Our current struggle is to find our place as adults. But as we
mature physically we must mature spiritually.
Are you growing in the Lord? Do you search for the deeper
truths in His word? Are you able to think about and chew on the fundamentals of
the faith that we’re talking about?
If not, I don’t mean to discourage. No, rather, search and
dig and study and learn all the more. It’s time we made this book a priority in
our lives.
We who search for meaning and truth and direction and
guidance and answers and happiness have all of those things right here in front
of us, if we just take the time to search it out in God’s Word.
The great preacher Charles Spurgeon said: “We are walkers through the city of this world, and we are
often called to go out into its darkness; let us never venture there without
the light-giving word, lest we slip with our feet. Each man should use the word
of God personally, practically, and habitually, that he may see his way and see
what lies in it.”
We have a small group here, a great
resource. Such a small group once changed the course of history. They were the
apostles. We have a small group, let’s use it. I want to challenge you to study
the Bible on your own AND to communicate with others during the week to see how
their study is doing. We’re not spying. We’re helping.
Keep in contact with someone here
between these studies and encourage them to study the Bible on their own, to
search out the answers, to grab a hold of the solid food of the Word. Let’s
encourage each other in this way to use the Word of God personally, practically
and habitually. I know I need encouragement in this area, and I can guess that
many of you do too.
The Bible is our spiritual food. We
need it to survive spiritually.
V.
the Efficiency of the Bible
Quickly, we’ll kind of look at this
point in light of what we’ve already studied tonight.
We now know a few things that the
Bible does. It accomplishes cleansing. It is capable of speaking into a person’s
unique situation. It nourishes and it guides. The Bible is like water, like a
mirror, like a lamp, like a sword, like our food.
We know what the Bible does. Now know
also that the Bible is totally efficient at what it does.
Isaiah
55:10-11, “For as the rain comes down
and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth and make
it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the
eater, so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to
Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the
things for which I sent it.”
God is saying that just as rain comes
from heaven and accomplishes what it was designed to accomplish on earth, so
too God’s Word will accomplish what it was designed to do.
This is a guarantee. All the things
that the Bible does which we just studied are sure things. The Bible will
accomplish what God designed it to do BOTH in those who accept it and those who
do not.
Next week: the Prophecy of the
Bible.
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