Has God left it up to me to figure out how to love him and obey him? Is homespun wisdom enough for us to please God? What is the role of our religious traditions, either in the family or in the church? We, even within the church, are terribly guilty of looking to sources other than the Bible for wisdom. We look to the culture and try to baptize and mimic it. We look to what other “successful” people, or churches are doing. We listen to the latest pop-psychology rather than the Spirit speaking through the Word. We believe that insight of experience is more authoritative than the Scriptures. We say we believe the Bible, but then we spend such little time in the Word that it has little practical impact on our lives and decision making. What if you questioned yourself about every decision you make for a while? What if you asked, “How can I be certain that I am loving God?”, or “Am I sure this pleases God?” We ought to be able to point to the Bible and say, “God says in his Word…” or “The Scripture says…”
Q: Where do you learn how to love and obey God?
A: In the Bible alone.
(Job 11:7; Psalm 119:104; Isaiah 8:20; Matthew 22:29; 2 Timothy 3:15–17)
Our first Scripture in this study comes from Job 11:7. Here we have what happens so often in the book of Job. One of his friends, Zophar in this case, says something true, but uses the truth in the wrong way. He assumes he knows what God is doing, and at the same time tells Job that Job himself cannot understand God. His assumptions about God’s work might have been wrong, but his assessment of our capacity to grasp God on our own are spot on. When he questions, “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?” he is right about human capacity. We, by our own reason, cannot search God out. We can neither plumb the depth nor measure the breadth of who he is on our own. This is why the Bible is so important. In it, God reveals himself to us. While we are still limited creatures, and can never know God exhaustively, because he has spoken in his word, we can know him truly.
This goes for knowing what God requires of us. We are not able to figure it out on our own. As Psalm 119:104 makes clear, it is by God’s word that we gain understanding. As we gain in this understanding through the Scriptures, we come to hate sin more. Trying to obey God without starting from the Scriptures would be worse than trying to put together a 1,000-piece puzzle, but there are 10,000 pieces in the box. To make matters worse, there is no picture to tell you what it is supposed to look like. We need the picture from the maker, and we need the Scripture to know what obedience to God looks like.
But, you ask, “What about experience?” Can’t I learn just as much from religious experience as from the Bible? Not according to the prophet Isaiah. When he directed the people to inquire of God, rather than mediums, he says, “To the teaching and to the testimony! (Isaiah 8:20). The emotional high that you may get during some religious experience is not authoritative. People in false religions all over the world have religious experiences too.
In one such religion, Mormonism, adherents claim to have felt a “burning in the bosom” and that’s how they knew Mormonism to be true. Surely you can see the problem. If I claim that Christianity is true, and a Mormon claims that Mormonism is true, we can’t both be right because they are opposed to one another. We can’t just refer back to our individual experiences, because we both have religious experiences that would confirm our belief. So, which one is true, Christianity or Mormonism? The one that conforms to what God has revealed in the Bible. How do I know which is true? I go “To the teaching and to the testimony” and search the Scriptures.
This is what the Lord Jesus himself believed and taught. When it came time to settle religious disputes Jesus points to the Bible. Jesus could have said, “Look guys, I’m God. I am the Creator and Sustainer of all things, take my word for it.” He didn’t though. When the Sadducees attempted to trap him in a question about the resurrection, though they themselves did not believe in the resurrection, his first response is, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” They had both a low view of God, and an ignorance of the Scripture. There was a whole religious and political party that existed in Jesus’ day that was at least partly identified as not believing in the resurrection. This ought to warn us, just because lots of people have believed it, doesn’t make it true.
Related to this is the truth that just because it is a religious tradition, doesn’t make it true. This time the dispute is over a tradition that the people believed came down to them from Moses, but it wasn’t in the Scriptures. Jesus tells them by accepting this tradition, and so failing to do what the Scriptures command that they made “void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13). Let us be careful to never leave off the Word of God because a tradition that we received.
I could write a whole post on our last passage alone, but I will attempt to be brief. 2 Timothy 3:15-17 is pivotal for our understanding of the role of the Scriptures in the life of the believer.
First, they are able to make one wise for salvation. Being saved does not require gimmicks, emotional highs, or alluring presentation. God has given us all that we need for salvation through faith in Christ in the Scripture. Anyone who has ever been saved, or is saved today, is saved because they believe what the Bible says about Jesus. If someone believes something about salvation that is different that what the Scriptures teach, they have not been made wise for salvation. They are not saved if they do not believe what the Bible teaches about our sin, and our need for the Savior. No prayer for forgiveness is met that is not accompanied with trust in the once for all work of Jesus. This ought to inform our evangelism. We must be careful to say what the Bible says, because it is able to make one wise for salvation. If we say more or less, we are in danger of distorting the message of the Scripture and giving people a message that cannot save.
Second, through the God-breathed Scriptures the man (or by extension woman) of God “may be complete, equipped for every good work.” That is to say, everything that you can do, say, or believe that is pleasing to God, can be found in the Scripture. There is no other source that can tell you that you must do something to please God.
I am a pastor. I preach, I teach, and I write. I use catechisms such as this one, and I agree with a particular statement of faith. But, my preaching, my teaching, my writing, the catechisms I use, and the statement of faith I adhere to, are only true and authoritative insofar as they agree with and rightly teach the Scriptures. The same is true with every teacher. Even the Apostle Paul and his teaching were at one time placed under the scrutiny of the Scriptures. The Jews in Berea heard Paul’s teaching readily, but they were also “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
Let us all take care then. We must be sure that what we believe about what it means to love God comes from the Scriptures. Further, we must be sure that what we believe about obedience to God, also comes from the Scriptures.
Yours in Christ,