First Reading: Genesis 32:22-30
22The same night {Jacob} arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. 24And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. 25When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” 29Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”
Psalm 121
1I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? 2My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. 3He will not let your foot be moved and he who watches over you will not fall asleep. 4Behold, he who keeps watch over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep; 5The Lord himself watches over you; the Lord is your shade at your right hand, 6So that the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. 7The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; it is he who shall keep you safe. 8The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, from this time forth forevermore.
Second Reading: 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
314As for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it 15and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
41I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: 2preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. 3For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. 5As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.
Gospel: Luke 18:1-8
1{Jesus} told {his disciples} a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. 2He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. 3And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ 4For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” 6And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. 7And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? 8I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
The Bible is God’s Word
On occasion, our readings affords us the opportunity to look deeply into what we confess and believe. I like to call these occasions catechetical opportunities. Today is one of those occasions. In our Second Lesson for today, St. Paul made an amazing statement. It’s a statement that many recognize, yet few truly understand: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). All scripture. Not most, not some, not just the Old Testament, or the New Testament, but all scripture is God inspired. The Bible is God’s word to us. At times we’re called to struggle to understand the difficult parts, but we can never ignore or dismiss any of it.
When St. Paul wrote his letter to St. Timothy, the only scripture that was available to the early church was the Hebrew Bible and perhaps a few of Paul’s letters. Depending on the year, some of the first century believers might have had access to St. Mark or St. Matthew’s gospels, but without the printing press, there would have been very few copies in circulation. It would be 3 more centuries before the first full Bible would be bound, but this collection of writings forms the basis of everything we talk about every week.
So, “Why this book? What makes the Bible so special? How did we get it? Why should we trust it? How did some books get in and some books not, and who made the decision?” Many people think that these decisions were made by some kind of elected church council who basically selected these books on their own personal whim. Others believe these books just happened to be collected without any special qualification by which they would be judged worthy to be included in scripture. Neither of those ideas would be correct. Thus, the question remains, “Why this book?” Why these 66 works within this book? How did these 66 make the cut and who decided they made the cut?
Now without going into excruciating detail, suffice it to say that, led by the Holy Spirit, in 325 AD, the council of Nicaea not only established the very strict criteria for what could be considered an inspired work of God, but they also went to work applying that criteria to hundreds of letters. Every work considered had a message, but not every book could be included in the canon. The word “canon” comes from a Greek word which literally means, “reed” (r-e-e-d).
Back in biblical days, a reed was used like a straight ruler is used today. It was used to measure something. So a canon denotes a straight rod, or a rule, or the criteria by which something can be measured to see whether or not it fits certain criteria. The Bible is of course a collection of books and letters gathered into a single cannon which is why we call it the Bible. The English word “Bible” comes from the Greek word biblion or papyrus or the paper that was used for making scrolls and books. It also comes from the Greek word biblos meaning book. But the question still remains, “Why should this book, these 66 works, be the Bible?
The first answer comes from our Epistle text for today, “All scripture is God breathed.” The Bible is God’s truth revealed to us and received by the church. Our second response comes from what the Lutheran church confesses and believes. This we find in the Solid Declaration in the Book of Concord which states, “The Word of God is and should remain the sole rule and norm of all doctrine” (FC SD, Rule and Norm, 9). “We pledge ourselves to the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments as the pure and clear fountain of Israel, which is the only true norm according to which all teachers and teachings are to be judged” (FC SD, Rule and Norm, 3).
This is the spirit in which our great Lutheran Confessions speak. Everything we need to believe and do as Christians is told us in the Scriptures. Just as our Lord Jesus was a man of one Book and drew all His teaching from that one divine source and submitted Himself to it utterly in all He said and did, so we too who are His disciples today place ourselves joyfully under that prophetic and apostolic Word. And with our Lutheran Confessions we say: “No human being’s writings dare be put on a par with it, but … everything must be subjected to it” (FC SD, Rule and Norm, 9). From this statement we get the phrase Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone.
So when someone asks us why we believe that the Bible is authoritative, we can point to our Epistle passage and our church writings to begin our explanation. But that’s only the beginning, we must understand more. That said, I believe we must be able to explain three things. The first I’ve already touched on, what is the Bible.
As I ‘ve already stated, the Bible is a collection of 66 books united by a common theme. The amazing thing about the Bible is, it was written over a period of 1500 years, by more than 40 different authors, living on 3 different continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and that these books should be collected, agreed upon, and accepted as the Word of God is something only God himself could have done. That’s why there’s one thing anybody can agree on – there is no other book in the world like the Bible. That’s why it remains the best-selling book of all time.
We divide the Bible into two parts – the Old Testament and the New Testament. The word “testament” means “covenant” and in the Bible, a covenant refers to a divine promise. Even though they are distinct, they are not contradictory. Contrary to popular opinion there is no difference between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God. We must understand this, because the Old Testament isn’t out of date and the New Testament isn’t Plan B. I teach that you cannot really understand the New Testament until you study the Old.
The Old and New Testaments can be seen as two sides of the same coin. They are like two halves of a sentence – they both go together. Someone made a statement that’s helpful, “The New is in the Old concealed, The Old is in the New revealed.” By reading the New Testament, we see Jesus revealed in the Old Testament. The Bible is how God reveals Himself to us. There’s more. The Bible isn’t a history book, yet it does contain information of historical importance.
First, the 66 books in our current Bible are not arranged in chronological order. For example, the books of Job and Ruth predate the books of Kings and Chronicles. However, the first and last books, Genesis and Revelation, are placed exactly where they need to be, because one talks about how everything began, (with God) and the latter talks about how everything is going to end (in God). Additionally, they were not all written in the same language. Most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and most of the New Testament was written in Greek, but some of the Bible was written in Aramaic.
We also need to recognize that not all the books of the Bible are the same kind of work. Some are history, some are law, or legal books, and others are poetry. The Psalms were actually set to music, while others are straight forward teaching. Some books, like the Gospels, are biographical. Much of the New Testament is letters written from an individual to a church, and parts, or all, of some books are prophecy.
In their original form, the books had no chapter or verse divisions. These slowly evolved over a period of about 700 years, and the first complete Bible to have chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible published in 1560. Next comes the question of where did the Bible come from?
Because there are two testaments, we must deal with how we got both of them. When it comes to the Old Testament, from the biblical evidence, we believe that Moses wrote, or oversaw the writing of, the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy. By the time of Moses, human writing was highly developed. Archeologists have discovered writings on stone called “inscriptions” and on clay tablets using a wedge-form of writing called “cuneiform.” By revelation, God spoke to Moses, and Moses recorded what he received. In Exodus 24:4 we read, “And Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24:4). Moses then brought these writings and delivered them to the people who preserved them.
In the Book of Deuteronomy we read, “When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, ‘Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there for a witness against you’” (Deuteronomy 31: 24-26).
As Israel’s history continued, additional books were added to the Pentateuch. The writing of Old Testament would not be completed until about 420 BC with the book of Malachi. Then there was 400 silent years until the incarnation of Jesus. But as one would expect, the materials used for the original writings wore out so the role of scribes was instituted to faithfully recopy and preserve the Hebrew Bible. Of course, some question if these copies are faithful copies of the originals. To ensure faithful transcription, the scribes had specific rules in place to prevent mistakes from occurring. For example, they were so careful to copy the words exactly they even devised a special means to count the number of words on a single panel to determine if the text had been copied accurately.
And what did they do with the originals when they finished copying them? No one had the authority to destroy them, because they believed it was the Word of God, so their solution was to place the manuscripts in clay jars and then bury them. Most of us have heard that in 1947, a clay jar containing the oldest copies of the Hebrew text were discovered that were about 1000 years old. What’s amazing is the entire Book of Isaiah was found in those manuscripts and when it was compared to the English version we have today, it’s 99% accurate. Furthermore, any time Jesus referred to the Old Testament, He used that same threefold division. Jesus “said to them, ‘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’” (Luke 24:44). Since Jesus testified to the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures, we should accept them as well. Okay, that establishes the authority of the Old Testament, but what about the New?
There is a contrast between the amount of time it took to write the Old Testament and the time it took to write the New Testament. It required nearly 1000 years for the Old Testament to be completed. It took less than 50 years for the New Testament writings to be completed. It was the Apostle John, somewhere around 90 A.D. who completed the final books of the New Testament. Furthermore, the central figure, as well as the theme of the entire New Testament, is Jesus. The first four books, the Gospels, contain the written accounts of Jesus’ life, teaching and ministry. All the rest of the books interpret His life, teaching and ministry, and explain how we apply it to our daily lives.
In the same way that the Old Testament stories were originally passed along orally, so was the stories of Jesus and His teachings for some 20 years. These stories and teachings were passed along by the Apostles and those who accompanied the disciples all the time that Jesus ministered, from His baptism until His ascension (Acts 1:21-22). These were the first to pass on the stories, teachings, miracles, and events that took place, the eyewitnesses of the ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Additionally, there are Jewish writers, such as Josephus, that verify parts of what is written as well. These were the ones who would share in and ensure that the writings contained in the New Testament were written accurately for our benefit. Eyewitnesses, inspired by the Holy Spirt, ensured you and I have an accurate account of Jesus’ incarnation, life, ministry, works, death, resurrection, and return to the Father.
However, the writings we have in our Bibles today were among many that were being circulated by the beginning of the second century. So the early church had a dilemma, which of the many letters in circulation were genuine, and which were suspect. Over time representatives of the early church developed criteria to test these letters to determine whether they should be recognized as scripture. There were three criteria these books had to meet before they would be affirmed as a part of God’s Word. The first is called apostolicity. This means the letter or book was either written by, or written during the age of the Apostles, that is before the last of the Apostles died. Therefore, no book in the New Testament is more than one person removed from either an Apostle or an authoritative eyewitness. That’s why we read in Acts 2:42 that the early church, “Devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). The second criteria is what we will call “catholicity”.
Catholicity has nothing to do with the Roman Catholic Church. “catholic” simply means “universal.” The books that were accepted into the New Testament were only those books that believers throughout the various parts of the world, where Christianity had spread, were in agreement on the inspiration and the authority of those books and recognized them as divinely authoritative. The last criteria was “orthodoxy.” In other words, every book had to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus and of the Apostles. They had to be in keeping with the apostolic faith and they had to be doctrinally sound.
Part of their guide to determining soundness was the Old Testament, because the early church believed that the 27 books included in the New Testament were the documents that best exhibited the continuity between the prophetic role of the Old Testament and their fulfillment in the life of Jesus in the New Testament. Therefore, the books in the Bible are not to be considered authoritative, simply because they’re included in the Bible. They’re included in the Bible because they are God’s word to us and therefore, they are authoritative.
Although it was a long process that took many years, the Bible we have was completed and deemed canonical around 367 A.D. And when you think about the entire process, the fact that the Bible, a book of books written over 1500 years, in just 1800 years, came together as one book that has now been accepted for over 2000 years. So why is the Bible important, and why does it matter to us today?
If the Bible is just another book, it doesn’t matter. However, it does matter because of two words, revelation and inspiration. Revelation comes from a Latin word which means to “draw back the curtain.” The authors of the Bible believed and said their writings were God revealing Himself and the truth about Himself, which otherwise we would never know. The second word is the word “inspiration.”
This brings us back to the verse we read at the very beginning where Paul said, “All scripture is inspired by God.” We believe that God used people to write these books, and God used people to collect these books, but in these books we have exactly the books God wants us to have, and they contain exactly the information He wants us to know. As one of the Apostles, St. Peter said, “Knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:20-21). Another way of saying this is, God revealed the truth. Humans recorded the truth. The church recognized the truth.
The Bible was divinely communicated, providentially collected, and spiritually commended. To this very day whenever a British Sovereign is crowned, as the Bible is place in his or her hands these words are uttered, “This book is the most valuable thing the world affords” and it really is, because it was signed, sealed, and delivered by God Himself.
Amen