God-Breathed

2 Timothy 3:10-17

July 9, 2017 • Mount Pleasant UMC

A little over a week ago, I had a conversation with a person about a social issue that they were very concerned about and over which we disagreed. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned some passages in the Bible to this person, and their response was, “Well, I interpret those verses differently.” We then talked about how people tend to pick and choose passages of Scripture that they like or that back up their viewpoint, but as we continued to talk, I realized the issue was deeper than that. This person was wiling to dismiss portions of the Bible, or maybe even the whole Bible itself, in favor of their feelings, their thoughts and their sense of what should be right and wrong. And they are not alone. There are a lot of people in this camp. Now, the particular issue we were discussing on that day is really irrelevant because the deeper problem was whether or not this Bible, this book of sacred Scripture handed down to us through the centuries, has any authority or any relevance for us today. Some today will say we’re beyond this ancient book of myths and fairy tales—and isn’t much of what is written in these pages made up or at least exaggerated anyway? Is there any use in continuing to base our lives on this ancient collection of writings?

Every fall on Facebook, I ask you what sorts of topics you’d like to hear sermons about, or (more importantly) what sorts of sermons you’d invite your friends to come hear. What are the sorts of things your friends are asking about God, faith, and life? And out of that informal poll, every year, we put together the sermon schedule for the year. So last fall, included in the responses were several questions, deep questions, none of which really demanded a whole series but were important to explore. So we’ve taken several of those questions and put them together in this summer series we’re calling “Trending.” In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be tackling questions like: how do we deal with and interact with other religions, how good do we have to be to get into heaven, and can you be depressed and still be a Christian? This morning, though, we’re going to start with a rather basic question that needs to be answered before we even attempt to answer the other ones: can I trust the Bible? As the conversation I had a week or so ago proves, that’s not an easy question to answer today. The Bible has been under serious attack for several decades now, and many in our culture have decided that while the Bible might contain interesting literature to read or even study, the words in this book don’t really have anything to do with our lives. It’s a history book, and for some, it’s considered speculative history at best. As Christians, however, we affirm reliance on the Bible; the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, wanted to be known as a “man of one book.” Even though Wesley read widely, for him everything came back to be measured against the Scriptures. Our denomination’s Book of Discipline puts it this way: “Scripture is the primary source and criterion for Christian doctrine.” 

That’s not a new idea. In the first century, a man named Saul had grown up reading the Scriptures—which, for him, meant the books we call the Old Testament. He had likely learned the Scriptures at his mother’s knee; it was said that Jewish children learned the Scriptures in their diapers and drank it in with their mother’s milk. They would rather, it was said, forget their own name than forget the Law of God (cf. Barclay, The Letters to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, pg. 199). This same young man, when he grew a bit older, studied under one of the most well-known rabbis in the world at that time, Gamaliel, a conservative teacher from the school of the Pharisees. This young man, as he grew into adulthood, became so passionate about the Scriptures that he chased after and arrested people whom he thought were breaking God’s law and worshipping some human teacher named Jesus. In fact, he was so zealous he quickly became the main persecutor of the fledgling Christian church—until Jesus himself knocked this man down to the ground and confronted him with the truth. Now convinced that Jesus was indeed the Son of God and the savior of the world, this Saul, known as Paul in the Roman world, began to use his zeal and passion to preach about Jesus and start new churches all across Asia. As he established churches, he would train others who would become their pastors; one of the young men he trained was named Timothy.

Timothy had grown up in a religiously divided household. His mother and grandmother were Christians; his father was a Greek, a pagan. But early on, Paul had taken this young man under his wing and sought to fan his faith into flame. When the time was right, Paul put Pastor Timothy in charge of the church at Ephesus. Now, we don’t have any of Timothy’s church records to know exactly what the issues were he was facing, but for our purposes this morning, that’s really irrelevant anyway. Whatever the conflicts and struggles the church at Ephesus was facing, Paul says the solution is the same: hold true to what you have been taught. Paul puts it this way: “Continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of…” (3:14). Don’t vary, don’t waver—hold onto what you learned in the Scriptures even from a very young age because it’s only in the Scriptures, Paul says, that you will find a true word from God.

Very quickly, then, Paul points out to Timothy what Scripture is good for. And let me pause here quickly to just remind us again that Paul is specifically taking about the Old Testament, the Scriptures he knew. When Paul is writing, there are no Gospels, no book of Acts or any of the rest of it. If you would have asked Paul if he thought one day his letters would be included in the Scriptures, I imagine he would have laughed at the idea. It was only through prayerful discernment that the early church fathers realized that the same inspiration found in what we know as the Old Testament was also found in the books and letters that make up what we now call the New Testament as well. So, even though Paul is talking about the Old Testament, as Christians we can make the same statements about all of Scripture, including the letters of Paul. They have been handed down to use through the centuries because they, too, are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (3:16).

So, we probably get the first one, that Scripture is useful for teaching. That’s the primary way we use Scripture in the church today. We preach from it, study it, lead classes around particular books or topics, and so on. One main purpose the Scriptures is to help us learn the truth. A second purpose is “rebuking.” I said a couple of weeks ago that “rebuke” is not a word we use often, but let me give you my translation. To be rebuked is to be “smacked upside the head.” It happens when you’ve had a fight with your wife and then you open the Bible and read, “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them” (Colossians 3:19). Not that that has happened to me! Or it’s when you’re angry with someone and plotting your revenge and then you open your Bible and read, “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:15). Get the picture? There are times Scripture smacks us upside the head, but that then leads to the next purpose of the Bible: correction. It’s not enough to just “feel bad” about what we have done or what we have said. Scripture also shows us the way to change. As we study, we learn what “loving our wives” is all about, and we find out what it means to forgive and the power that can come from that. That, then, leads us to the fourth thing Scripture does for us and in us: it trains us in righteousness. In other words, it helps us live a life that pleases God. Scripture calls us and pulls us and points us toward a relationship with our heavenly Father, our Creator, the one who loves us more than we can imagine. When Paul talks about being “trained in righteousness,” he’s not talking about learning to follow a list of rules. It’s more like athletic training. Yes, when you are first learning to play a sport, you have to learn the rules, but the goal is to so internalize the sport that you don’t even have to think about it. You don’t have to keep getting the rule book out. You can do what you need to do and live how you need to live without any thought. You’ve been trained. Or, these days, I’m thinking about it this way. I’ve been making some dietary adjustments for both health and personal choice reasons, and I’m still in that phase where I’m learning what I can and can’t eat, what I should and shouldn’t do. I have to think about it, I have to be challenged and sometimes rebuked by my doctor. But my goal, the plan, is to get to the place where I don’t even have to think about the choices I’ve made. They become second nature. When that happens, I will be trained. Scripture can train us so that living the Christian life, having a deep relationship with God, becomes second nature—or, hopefully, our first nature.

Those four things—teaching, rebuking, correcting and training—are the purposes of the Bible. Now, Paul must have been in some of Ann Handschu’s leadership training, because Ann is always pushing us to think about the “so that.” In other words, why are we doing what we do? What’s the “so that”? Paul makes it clear in verse 17: all of this happens “so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” We allow Scripture to work in our lives so that we can do what God has called us to and be who God calls us to be. Anyone who fails to allow the Scriptures to work in that way will never be the Christian or the person God wants them to be.

But before we’re willing to allow Scripture to be that deeply involved in our lives, we have to come back to the question that started everything this morning: can I trust the Bible? How do I know it’s not just all made up? And, more to the point, what does Paul mean when he says the Scriptures are “God-breathed” (3:16)? The word there is a compound Greek word: theo-pneustos. Some of your translations may say “inspired,” but the problem with that word today is that it really has lost all meaning. Hallmark movies are inspiring. A cute video on YouTube is said to be inspiring. A powerful story can be inspiring. And in all of those (and more) instances, we may feel good for a while, but rarely are we moved to do anything with that inspiration. Theopneustos is more than what we think of as “inspiration.” It literally means “God-breathed.” Theos—God. Pneuma—Spirit or breath. The Scriptures, Paul says, are more than inspiring. They are breathed into existence by God. It’s a reference to creation, when God breathed and God spoke and creation came to be. But we have to think more deeply about that phrase because one thing it doesn’t mean is that we should worship the Bible. We are not “Bibleians.” We are Christians—we worship Jesus Christ, who is, as John 1 says, the Word of God. When we call the Bible by that title, it’s a recognition that the words in these pages point us to the one who is the real Word of God. This book, compiled over thousands of years by many different human authors, has one story and one goal: to help us know Jesus better. It’s a collection of words to help us know the Word made flesh. As the great scholar F. F. Bruce noted, “The Bible is not simply an anthology; there is a unity which binds the whole together.”

Sixty-six books, written by forty authors who were separated by time and space—how in the world does the Bible come to tell one story from start to finish? It’s because it’s God-breathed. God was involved in the process. Now by that we don’t mean God took over the human authors, suppressed their personalities or abilities and dictated the whole thing. You can tell that’s not true by reading the books themselves. Matthew writes differently than Mark. Revelation is not the same sort of book as the Psalms. John’s description of Jesus is much more lofty and intellectual than Luke’s. And Paul’s personality comes out all over the place in his letters. What we mean by “God-breathed” is that God himself, through the Holy Spirit, worked with the human authors and guided the process of writing. God worked through the church to preserve the books that we needed. And God continues to breathe into these words so that they become more than ink on the page. When we cooperate with the Spirit, when we read prayerfully, these words become life-giving because they are God-breathed.

But what about that word “inerrancy”? We hear that tossed around a lot, and maybe we’ve even described the Scriptures in that way without even really knowing what it means. The word means “incapable of being wrong.” I’ve known some people who think they are inerrant! Here’s the problem with using that word to describe the Scriptures: first, they could only apply to the original texts, and none of those still exist. We have very early copies (and I’ll say more about that in a minute), but we don’t have Paul’s original letter to the Romans, or Mark’s original manuscript for his Gospel. Those have been lost to time. Scholars will point out that there are differences between some of the texts we do have, so they work very hard to determine which variation is correct, but the fact is we don’t always know because the originals have been lost. The other problem with the word inerrant is that there are simply times when the text doesn’t match what we know to be true. At the beginning of Matthew, for instance, we know the genealogy is condensed. Matthew leaves out some people so as to make a point and make everything even (which probably proves Matthew was a little OCD). That’s not a mistake; Matthew did it on purpose to make a point, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but it can also be said to be “wrong.” There are other similar situations, which I don’t have time to discuss. If by “inerrant,” we mean “absolutely without error,” we’re going to have problems proving that to our friends and neighbors. But here’s what we need to remember: the Bible doesn’t set out to be a science textbook or a political digest or even a religious guidebook. The Bible sets out to tell us about Jesus. God breathed this book into existence so that we would know how to come back into relationship with him, and so this book is absolutely sufficient in giving us everything God needs us to know. Paul says it makes us “wise for salvation” (3:15). When we have a right understanding of what the Bible is and claims to be, we don’t have to fear history or science or philosophical discussions. Rather, we can interact with those spheres with confidence because the Scriptures can more than hold their own. They are “God-breathed.”

Now, real quickly, let me share three areas where I have found my confidence in the reliability of the Bible to be strengthened, and the first is archaeology. When we were in Israel, I led the team to archaeological site after archaeological site because that’s what I love. We walked through ruins and looked at reconstructions and we were reminded that every time, the Biblical record of what happened has been supported. There is a burn level at Jericho where “Joshua fit the battle.” There are stables at Megiddo where King Ahab kept his horses and chariots, ready for battle in that strategic location. There is a spring right where the Bible says Gideon separated his men out based on whether they drank from their hands or lapped from the stream. And there is a dungeon under the house of the high priest in Jerusalem, where Jesus would have been held before his trial. Over and over again, we were reminded that this faith of ours isn’t just some “pie in the sky” faith. Our faith is rooted in history. These things, these stories, these events really happened and they can be verified by archaeology.

Closely related to that is the affirmation of history. These pages talk about real people in real places who lived in real historical situations. Pilate was actually a governor in Israel; that can be verified. Herod was a king who was insane with power, and I tried not to take it personally when Pastor Rick, while we were in Israel, said Herod’s ego was about as big as a senior pastor’s! Now, when it comes to Herod, we know he died about 4 B.C. and so some used to say that proved the unreliability of the Scriptures. Actually, what it proves is that our current calendar system, developed during the middle ages, is off by four years or so. We even have historical evidence for King David, and most certainly for Jesus. Some folks try to say Jesus was made up, but several well-respected ancient historians mention him. No serious historian today will say Jesus did not live and work as a Jewish teacher. Christians, of course, claim that he was more than that, but history verifies at least that he did live and that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar (cf. McDowell & Sterrett, Is the Bible True…Really?, Kindle edition, loc. 1012). These people are actual, historical persons.

The third thing that, for me, tells me I can trust the Bible is a field called textual criticism. Basically, this discipline looks at the number of copies of a text that we have from ancient times and how close that copy is to the time the book was originally written. The theory is that the closer in time the copy is to the original, the more accurate it is. Makes sense, right? Today, there are thousands upon thousands of copies of Biblical texts still in existence, especially of the New Testament books. Other books that we take for granted, like the works of Aristotle, have less than a hundred copies that exist, and those are from a time nearly 1,400 years after the books were originally written. One of the books we all “enjoyed” reading in high school or college English classes, the Iliad by Homer, only has 643 copies still in existence. The New Testament, by contrast, has some 24,000 copies still in existence, some of which date back to the early second or late first century—incredibly close to the original. One scholar puts it this way: “The quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity.” One of the places we visited while in Israel was Qumran, a site where a group of hermits once lived. These hermits were waiting for the coming of the savior about the same time Jesus was preaching, and one of the things they did while they lived there was to copy the Scriptures. When it was clear that Rome was going to wipe out the nation of Israel due to a rebellion happening in Jerusalem, these hermits hid all of their texts in nearby caves. That was in about 70 AD, and those texts, mostly Old Testament texts, stayed there until they were discovered by a shepherd in 1946. These are the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, and they are among the oldest copies of the Old Testament we have. What’s more, they prove that copies made of the texts are incredibly accurate. Yes, in both New and Old Testament texts there are some variations, but those are in the category of what might be called “typos.” There is no single major doctrinal matter that is impacted by any of these variations. The bottom line is this: we can trust that this text contains what God wanted us to know when he breathed it into existence (cf. McDowell & Sterrett, Chapter 13).

This is why what Andrew and Kelly Wheaton are doing in Chile with Wycliffe and Letra is so vital and important. They are working in Bible translation, helping those who have never heard be able to read the Scriptures in their own heart language. We take having this book so for granted that sometimes we just ignore it. What if it were taken away suddenly? What would shape your faith then? I can give you all the reasons in the world to trust the text of this book, to allow it to lead you to the Word behind the words, but all of my words are useless if you don’t get into this word and plant it deep in your heart. The psalmist asks the question we all should be asking: “How can a young person stay on the path of purity? By living according to your word” (Psalm 119:9). If we do not engage in reading and study of this Scripture, we cannot know what God expects or how to be in a real relationship with our heavenly Father. It scares me to death every Sunday that the only Scripture some of you may hear this week is what I’ve read to you, or that you rely on my study and not engage in your own. And even more than reading it and studying it on your own, it’s vital that you get involved in studying the Scriptures together. We sharpen each other when we do that (cf. Proverbs 27:17). When we fail to do that, we find that it’s easy to twist what is said in these pages to our own liking. We need each other. If you are not currently involved in a small group, studying the Scriptures and doing life together, please let us know. We would love nothing more than to help you get into this word so that it can change you and make you more like Jesus.

So I’ve thought a lot about the conversation I started with this morning, and being an introvert, I often come up with things later that I wished I had said. The conversation made me think of one of my favorite seminary professors, Dr. John Oswalt, who taught Old Testament classes. His were among the hardest classes I had in seminary, but I don’t know that I learned more from anyone else. Even with his classes being hard, I signed up for electives with him (classes I didn’t have to take!) because I learned so much. In every class, Dr. Oswalt would hand out the syllabus, and that document contained twenty questions. Ten of those questions were for the midterm and ten were for the final. He would choose two or three of those essay questions to make up each exam, but we didn’t know until test day which ones he would choose. The point is this: he gave us everything we needed to be successful if we just followed the syllabus and studied accordingly. He did not, however, give us room to negotiate. We didn’t get to pick the questions; he did. We didn’t get to choose the standards by which we would pass or fail; he did. And it occurred to me that the Bible is sort of like that. God has given us, has breathed to us, everything we need to live life the way he intended it to be lived. We don’t get to pick and choose what we will live by. We don’t get to leave behind verses just because we don’t like them or have decided we are “beyond” those. As in Dr. Oswalt’s Old Testament classes, we either do the course the way the professor designed it or we will fail the class. And when it comes to the Scriptures, the consequences are a lot more serious and eternal than just a bad grade on a transcript. In my life, I have found that I can trust the Bible; I pray you will find that to be true as well.

This morning, in obedience to the Biblical commands, we’re going to share in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Jesus instituted this practice the last time he was with his disciples; he gave it to them as a way to remember his sacrifice, to help them become “wise for salvation.” Paul was the first one to write about it, and he told the believers in Corinth to do this in remembrance of Jesus, proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). Like them, centuries after them, in obedience to the command, we gather at this table today and we share in the bread and in the cup, symbols that promise not only our salvation but the hope of salvation for the world. I invite you, then, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, to come to the table, to taste and see that the Lord is good, and to know that he is with you even now. Let’s prayerfully prepare our hearts for holy communion.