Sunday School | Bibliology - The Doctrine of The Bible (God's Word Was Collected Through Time)

We are in the middle of a series that's going to take forever—we're walking through basically every major Christian doctrine. We started with the doctrine of God, theology proper, doctrine of the Father, and then we did Christology and pneumatology, sound in the Spirit, and then last we just finished up our series on anthropology, the doctrine of man or humankind. Does anybody know where that puts us? What's next now? God, Christ, Spirit, man, don't I guess? Oh, Michael, okay, that's actually a pretty good guess, but it's not right. It could be next, but it's not what I'm doing next. We're going to do Bible now, then we'll get to sin, and then we'll get to salvation and we'll go on from there.

Bibliology: The Doctrine of Scripture

So bibliology—we're going to be studying the Scriptures. It's funny because on the one hand we begin with God, but we also could have began with the Scriptures because the Scriptures are one of the principle ways that we learn about God, but it's not the only way. So we're going to be studying for the next several weeks what we think about this book that God has given us, and it is pretty core Christian doctrine.

Christians believe that God has spoken into creation. He didn't just leave us on our own to figure stuff out and make stuff up, but he wanted us to know, and so he spoke. C.S. Lewis has this great illustration. He says, "If Shakespeare and Hamlet were ever to meet, it would have to be Shakespeare's doing." Does that make sense? If Shakespeare and Hamlet were ever to meet, it would have to be Shakespeare's doing. If Hamlet somehow became a sentient being, it would be impossible for him to look off the page and see his Creator, but it would be relatively effortless for Shakespeare to write himself as a character into one of his own plays, right?

He could write a character who would describe himself. He could write in a character who said, "Hey, did you know that we're actually a play and we're written in like 1600s England?" Or he could write himself into the play. Christians believe that God did that—that God wrote himself as a character into the play. He revealed himself and he did it in a lot of different ways. Over the centuries he did what Hebrews says:

In the past, God spoke to us through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he spoke unto us by his Son. — Hebrews 1:1-2

So we think that when God chooses to speak to us, one, he does send messages to prophets. He's done different things to reveal to us. He also, at one particular moment in time, wrote himself quite literally as a character into the play—he became a human being and came to reveal things to us. We also think that he wrote the stories, the story of the world in such a way that we'd have to conclude, "Look at this, somebody made this." You may not know who he is, but I think it's relatively obvious from creation that God has done something.

The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they display knowledge. — Psalm 19:1-2

That's all language terms, right—creation speaks. So we know, we believe, God has spoken to prophets. God wrote himself as a character into the play. There is an enormous amount of information revealed in nature itself. Maybe we would say that of all of those things, the fullest revelation of himself is the incarnation—Christ, the man who has come to live in us. But whatever we gather from nature and whatever we have from this supreme blessing that God was incarnated and became a human being, all of those things, as wonderful and necessary as they are, are in some manner—and you've got to be careful when you're comparing anything to Jesus—but in some measure, the most detailed, the most repeatable, the most thorough revealing of information that God wants us to know is found in his written word.

Scripture is awesome. We're lost without the Son as a person, and the things that a prophet might speak are really helpful. But he gave us a book and that book is ours to treasure. I've said it a thousand times: it is filled with treasure and you can find it. What we're going to talk about for the next several weeks is the nature of this book that he gave us.

The first thing that I want you to reckon with and just kind of consider is that when I make this statement that he gave us a book viewed from a particular lens, it's not actually a true statement. He didn't really give us a book, and this is my favorite game again, so strap in. What did he do besides giving us a completed bound book? Do you know how this works? Do you know how this thing came to be? It's not just word of mouth.

There wasn't a day that there was no Bible, and then a second day where there was a 66-book bound collection of Bible, right? If I give you a book, I'm going to literally give you a book. You don't have it. Here it is, right? This is not how it worked.

Have you guys ever played Ultimate Frisbee? Some of you played Ultimate Frisbee? Have you ever played Ultimate Cabbage? This is a real game. It's exactly like Ultimate Frisbee, but you play with the head of cabbage. You actually have to start the game with several heads of cabbage. It's the exact same rules. I'm here, I want to advance the ball, I'm going to throw it to Charlie, but instead of a disc that's going to float through the air, I'm just going to whip a head of cabbage at him.

Can you guess what happens to the cabbage during the game? It just comes apart and it comes apart until you've got whatever the core of a cabbage is, and then you throw it away and get a new head of cabbage and continue the game. Because the cabbage isn't a unit—it's a collection of leaves that have all been bound together by nature and nature's God. We're just going to take it apart on accident as the game goes.

Ultimate Cabbage is an acting of the reverse of the way the Scriptures were formed. It wasn't just a book that was lowered out of heaven, but it was built page by page by page by page over a span of centuries. It was collected, it was compiled, it was added to.

What I want to do today, because we have a tendency to think of the book as just a book, I want to try to show you within the Scriptures something you may not have seen before. I think it's pretty fascinating to watch the development of the Word of God over a span of centuries. Once we've kind of built that framework and understand how this thing came to be, then over the next couple of weeks we'll take a look more at what we can understand about it.

The First Written Records

Here's a fun game: Early as time in the Scriptures, the Scriptures record the recording of the Scriptures. Where is the first—and there's a couple of candidates for this—but what's the center of the cabbage? When does the idea first come: "Hey, write this down, and let's start a collection"?

The Ten Commandments is very, very, very close to the very beginning of this thing. What's interesting about the Ten Commandments in terms of written language? God did it with his finger, right?

I think there's something that's just a wee bit earlier, but it's extremely close. Exodus 20 is the Ten Commandments, and we'll see that in our collection. There's something that happens—this is super obscure knowledge—but do you know what's prior to that? Prior to the Ten Commandments?

Job is actually probably earlier than the Ten Commandments. Job is about an event that happened in the middle of Genesis, so it fits into that time, but we don't necessarily have a record of it. The earliest thing I've honestly found is obscure. Go to Exodus 17.

I think—and maybe I'm wrong, if you prove me wrong next week, I will yield—but the earliest thing I have found is Exodus 17:8.

The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim, and Moses said to Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands." — Exodus 17:8-9

So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went onto the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but when he lowered his hands, because he got tired, the Amalekites were winning. So they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up, one on one side, one on the other, so that his hands remained steady until sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword. — Exodus 17:10-13

That's almost like a Sunday school lesson—a child gets that, that's a very vivid thing. We're running, we're losing, okay, but look at the next verse. Verse 14 is the first time I have found in the Scriptures where this happens.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered, and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven." — Exodus 17:14

That's when it starts. Now maybe I'm wrong, and maybe there's some instruction to write something down prior to that. That could be the case. But there's this idea of, "Hey, hey, hey, write this down. It happened. It's been observed. It was meaningful." And He's saying, "I want people to learn about this. Make sure you tell Joshua, right?" So it starts there.

And then listen to this—I want you to see the head of cabbage being built. Go to Exodus 24, verse 3:

When Moses went and told the people all of the Lord's words and laws, they responded with one voice, "Everything the Lord has said we will do." — Exodus 24:3

And then look at verse 4:

Moses then wrote down everything the Lord had said, and he got up early the next morning, built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. — Exodus 24:4

God gave a verbal message to Moses, he relayed that verbal message, and then he said, "Okay, we're going to write this down. We're going to keep this. People have poor memories." Having it in writing does, apparently, very little to guarantee obedience, right? And then look at Exodus 31:18:

When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. — Exodus 31:18

These stone tablets would be harder to work into a scroll, right? So one might presume that they made a copy onto some kind of parchment or something. Here's a few more. Exodus 34:27:

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel." — Exodus 34:27

And we're accumulating this, we're just adding to it. And then later, in Numbers 33:2:

At the Lord's command, Moses recorded the stages in their journey. — Numbers 33:2

Once again, the Lord has commanded Moses, "Write this down." Now, this is where it starts to feel like, "Did you have to write that part down?" Some of the stuff that shows up in Numbers is where you're going through your annual Bible and you're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But God wanted things recorded so that a hundred years later, a thousand years later, three thousand years later, we'd still have access to it.

There's a written record. We can keep adding to it, adding to it. We function with a very clear sense that the canon is closed, right? And if I were to write something, "Hey, add this to your Bible, staple this to the back," you would quite reasonably say, "Wait, what? I don't know about that." I had a friend in college who thought we should add C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity to every New Testament that's ever printed. I think he was wrong, but it's still phenomenal. We have that sense of closure. But these guys didn't function with that at all. There's an eager addition to the collection, this thirst for what God is going to reveal. And it begins—you can tell—it's all narrative so far. Maybe that's not obvious. It's all like a record of what is happening. It's narrative, right? There's going to be other things that are going to get added before we're done.

Look at Deuteronomy 31:22:

So Moses wrote down this song that day and taught it to the Israelites. — Deuteronomy 31:22

Do you feel the change? It's all been narrative so far—this is what happened, then this happened, then this happened. What are we adding to it now? Music, okay? Do we have any other portions of the Bible that are recorded songs? The entire Psalter is recorded songs, which is interesting. So you might think, as this book is beginning, "Okay, I get it. God wants to have this infallible record of stuff that happened." And that's true. But apparently He's also interested in recording things that we would now call the book of wisdom.

We're going to add to it art, we're going to add to it things that are not necessarily didactic statements of what has transpired, but things that are meant to inspire our hearts, things that give insight into more of our lives than just what happened, right? If I were the guy writing the Bible, there probably wouldn't be any songs in it, right? Because I'm just too stupid at that, but by the mercies of God, this book is going to be unlike a normal book, right? It's not just this record of things, it's not just this list of rules, it's going to be this collection of very, very human art, this expression of things, and it's just getting layered and layered. It's fascinating.

I mean, we're not thought about this, Robin? How our brains—so many people's brains hold on to things is with music, with little children, each of them with music. And I just think it's really neat that you bring that up because God needs us. Yes, absolutely. I mean, music is magic, when you know this, right? You could read lyrics to a song and think, okay, and then you could hear it, you'd be like, okay, something, there's something else going on here. It taps into a different part of who we are, right? In our brain, right? It would memorize things, there's this lilting rhythm and whatnot, okay? So that's something that has developed, something has changed here.

Now how about this? So what we're seeing, there's this narrative of things, we're now going to start adding to it apparently songs. What's going on here? Listen to this one, go to Deuteronomy 31:24.

After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, "Take this book of the law and place it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. There it will remain a witness against you." — Deuteronomy 31:24

Now, "there it will remain a witness against you"—that's not the part that I want you to notice, although that's meaningful. What's happening now, something that's another change of state, Susan, sit again. Okay, so we've got history of what has been done, and now we're going to have this collection of rules. Now we did have the Ten Commandments, so there's a portion of this. The Ten Commandments are about the record of what God has said in a list of rules, so that's what we've seen getting a little bit more codified.

What's happening here? "After Moses finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, he gave this command to the Levites who carried the Ark, 'Take it with you, place it beside the Ark of the Covenant.' There it will remain." Say it again, okay? Yes, so there's something here. It's like now I want to keep this, put this in a special place. This might have begun like post-it notes, jot this down, right? It's on the back of an envelope. But now we've got this thing, it's like, "No, no, no, everybody, everybody, write this, write this, right?" And keep it at the Ark, in the temple, in the tabernacle, we're elevating this, right?

We're going to find out later, not until we get to the Psalms, that God has exalted above all things his name and his word. This thing that might begin to appear like back of an envelope is about to be like this—like, "No, this is a super big deal." So that's huge, okay?

One of the things that's happening in this passage, and it's prior to the exaltation of it—say again? Yeah, that's it. Putting it all together, this is change, compile it, okay? Now get all, collect all the scraps of paper and start in the beginning and just put it all in order. So what had started is like, "Hey, write this down, write this down, write this down," is now hitting on "Compile it. Let's start bringing this all together. Record all the history. Make sure you're including this portion of like the Ten Commandments. We'll write that on paper. Let's add in this. Let's have a place we're going to collect the Psalms." Compile it. And now it's becoming more ordered. Do you feel this changing? And as it becomes this coherent whole stored in a special place, because this is not just some little side project we're doing, we're going somewhere with this. You with me? Alright, then take a look at this.

And Joshua recorded these things in the book of the law of God. — Joshua 24:26

It's no longer "write this down," it's "add this to that compilation." And so now not only is it a compilation, but it's also not closed. We're allowed to add things to it. And so we're going to add a page to the end of the notebook, you see this?

So Joshua recorded these things in the book of the law of God, then he took a large stone and set it up there under the oak near the holy place of the Lord. Moses, up till this point, Moses is the guy, but as Joshua 1 says, "Moses, my servant, is dead," and so this is interesting that somebody else—there's a new author, right? Moses wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The book of the law was the Pentateuch, right, this is what we have. And now we're going to start adding other stuff to it.

Then check this out: 1 Samuel. We're going to flash forward a little bit, but not that far. 1 Samuel chapter 10. More time has passed, more things have happened. Samuel explained to the people the regulations of the kingship. The reason we're not getting rules about the kingship until now is there wasn't a kingship until now. And so we have this sense throughout the scriptures of progressive revelation. As time is moving, more stuff is being revealed, we're learning things.

If all we had was the Pentateuch, that would be great. In fact, gosh, if all we had was Genesis, we would have so absolutely very much—it's astonishing what is in Genesis. But we wouldn't have everything. There's more that's going to be added, more that's going to be developed and revealed.

Samuel explains to the people the regulations of the kingship, and he wrote them down on a scroll and deposited it before the Lord. Then Samuel dismissed the people, each to his own home. And now Samuel is getting to add—we have more authors. It's an unusual book. It's got a lot of people contributing to it.

Several hundred years later, in 1 Chronicles 29, listen to this:

As for the events of King David's reign, from beginning to end, they are written in the records of Samuel the Seer, the records of Nathan the prophet, and the records of Gad the Seer. — 1 Chronicles 29

We see this all the time in Samuel, Chronicles, and Kings. They're constantly referencing source material. I mean, all the time. They're saying we have a reliable record. I know what we ultimately get in 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles—this is the definitive, divinely inspired record of these times of the kings of Judah and the kings of Israel. And they were just as Luke did research—we'll get to that in a little bit—as Luke's doing research on the life of Christ, these guys, the chronicler, he's basically giving us his bibliographies. As I'm writing this down, I'm drawing from trustworthy sources to get all this right. And we're adding to it. And now we're adding this massive section of history.

God's Command to Write It Down

Final thing I want to show you from the Old Testament: as this is being developed, it's clear—many, many times—I'll just give this one more as a punch to this—this wasn't man's idea. Over and over again, the Lord is saying, "Write this down. Write this down. Compile it in a book. Add this to it. Put it some place that nobody loses it."

In Jeremiah chapter 30, verse 2, it says this:

This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you. — Jeremiah 30:2

So how did Jeremiah get added to this compilation? His writings—why? Because God told him to. Write it down. Write it down because there's stuff in there that I want people to know, and they're not gonna be alive for like 2,000 years, 2,700 years. So write it down because I want people to read this a long time from now.

In fact, Paul is going to say:

Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance and encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. — Romans 15:4

When God told Jeremiah, "Write it down," He was thinking of you. Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance and encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. He knew a long, long time ago that there would be days that you would need hope. And in anticipation of that day, He'd tell these guys, "Write it down. Out of page, put it in a secure place, because this thing's gotta last forever. His word is eternal. It's a big, big deal."

How we doing? Does this make sense? Add to it, add to it, add to it.

Okay, I'm gonna show you the New Testament's version of this in just a second. But real quick—are there any fellows in the room right now? Current fellows? Not current, past fellows. I don't know if I did this week guys last year. How many? 39 books in the Old Testament. Did you know this? 39 books. Genesis to Malachi. You only need 11 of them if you want to capture the storyline. This would just be useful to know. I'm gonna do a couple of things over the next several weeks to kind of give you some categories to store this stuff in.

Does anybody know offhand the 11 that you need if you want to get the chronology of the Old Testament? That was excellent. So I'm going to give it to you in a way that's going to be easy to remember.

Here's what I want you to remember. It's really simple. I want to have Jen on the front end and Ben on the back end and in the middle, JJ SSKK.

Jen, JJ SSKK, Ben.

Say Jen. Say JJ SSKK. Say Ben.

Here's what you just memorized. Jen (with a G, by the way) is Genesis, Exodus, Numbers. Say Genesis, Exodus, Numbers.

Your JJ SSKK is Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings.

Now Ben is a little trickier because I'm cheating. B and Ben stands for Babylon, which is not a book, but just stay with me. Babylon, E is Ezra, and N is Nehemiah.

Those 11 books—because B is not a book, there is no like chronology of the time in Babylon, but a lot of stuff happens then. Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Samuel, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, Babylon, Ezra, Nehemiah. Those 11—that's the chronology of the Old Testament. If you wanted to read through the whole testament but you don't really want to read the whole thing, you can read those 11. That is going to give you the storyline of what happens. Everything else is either redundant to or supplemental to that paradigm.

Genesis, Exodus, Numbers—Deuteronomy is a recap and Leviticus is basically a particularization of Exodus. Joshua, Judges—that's all there. Ruth fits under the time of the judges. Everything else fits underneath something else.

When you get into the Chronicles and stuff—Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings—First Chronicles recapitulates the time period of one book and Second Chronicles recapitulates the time period of two books. First Chronicles duplicates Second Samuel, Second Chronicles duplicates the time of both of the King books. That's how they kind of organize up. And then the prophets all hang under stuff and Psalms hangs under stuff. I can show you this. I'll actually send you a document that shows you this.

But for today, all I want you to remember is: say it—Jen? JJ. Yes. KK? Ben.

Say it all: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Samuel, Kings, Kings, Babylon, Ezra, Nehemiah.

The Babylonian Captivity and Daniel

When we say Babylon, there's this period of time that the Israelites are captive under Babylon. After they come—so we come back to Samuel, Samuel. First Samuel is pretty much about Saul. Second Samuel is pretty much about David. And then Kings is pretty much about Solomon and all these other loser kings that come after him. And after we're done with all the kings, the nation splits. And as a judgment under Assyria, then there's a judgment under Babylon. And for 70 years—for 70 years—Judah is captive in Babylon.

And there is no historic record of this. There's no third Chronicles that kind of records that. The closest you get to a narrative of the time in Babylon is Daniel, right? About the first six chapters of Daniel, we could put Daniel there. If you prefer that, I could say like Jen, JJ, SS, KK, Den. But I moved Daniel out of that into the prophets because he's different. But if that helps you, I don't care. That's great.

So Daniel is the closest we get to a record of Babylon. But there's other stuff that happens. There's other prophetic writings that would hang under that. It's just not a good straight chronology. Six chapters of Daniel is the best that we get on that.

The Silence and The Incarnation

At this point in the game, we've built this head of cabbage pretty well, right? This stuff starts in maybe Exodus 17. We start adding things to it. Things are getting recorded. And now we've got this thing. And then it shuts down for 400 years.

The last thing—the last leaf added to this compilation—is Malachi. And then silence for 400 years. And maybe forever, maybe we're done here. Maybe it's all over.

Except we're not.

Because not only does God speak out of the void, but now, finally, now is where God writes himself as an honest-to-goodness character in the play. And there is an incarnation. And as you might expect, when he comes, the writing ramps back up. And what we're going to find in the New Testament is that this record of what has been said and done, the things that Jesus taught, the things that he said—Jesus basically says, get out your pens, boys, because we're going to start adding to the collection.

And so listen to this. In John 14:26, it says:

But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. — John 14:26

Not only that, but in John 16:13:

But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own. He will speak only what he hears. And he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking what is mine and making it known to you. — John 16:13

If they had, as this begins, as the church begins and Jesus is gone, it says very early in Acts 2:42, that they devoted themselves to four things. Do you recall what the first one was?

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and to prayer. — Acts 2:42

When they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, that was the verbal pre-New Testament, right? The apostles sit down and they're like, "Hey, so Jesus told a story once about a Samaritan man." They're just telling the stories that they heard Jesus tell. They're recording the things that they saw him do. They're saying, "Well, we have this conversation with him and this is it." There is the apostles' teaching—they would sit down and tell the stories, but then they began to write them down. And of course they did, right? They're going to imitate exactly Moses. Like, "Hey, this is a big one. Write this one down." And so Matthew starts to write and Mark starts to write and Luke starts to write. Luke is not one of the twelve, but he carefully researches everything. He's interviewing people. You can see it's just so obvious in his birth narrative that he met Mary and he's having conversations with Mary. He's recording things that nobody but Mary knew. And these things are all getting written down.

Eventually, John is going to see all of their work and be like, "You know what? There's a few other stories that I want to add. I want to add another leaf." And so the gospel writers are recording chiefly the things that Jesus said and did so that we would have a record.

But then something else happens. And this is new, you guys. This is really different. Most of the time, most of these writings were explicit. Like, "Thus says the Lord, go do this. Go tell this. I'm telling you. Now write it down so that you can tell somebody else." But then something changes. We have the Gospels, we have Acts. But then the early church leaders, this is just different. Early church leaders begin writing letters to the early churches to say, "Hey, hey, you're messing this up." Or, "Hey, hey, you're worried about things you don't need to be worried about." Or, "Hey, hey, hey, somebody's been lying to you. Here's what's true."

And those letters themselves are so exceptional, so necessary, so filled with treasure and truth that they start writing them down. They start copying them down. Did you get Paul's letter? We made a copy. Here it is. Take this back to your city. And very early, these letters from Paul, these letters from Peter, letters from John, start getting duplicated, collected, bound, treasured. Because they're beginning to realize, "Okay, hang on a second. We've got to start gluing this to the back of the Old Testament. This is what happens."

And what's fascinating is we can even see as this is starting to happen that the various New Testament authors are affirming the legitimacy of, the credibility of—and here this is really important—the divinity of these additional letters that were written. It's a new genre, right? There's songs, and there's history, and there's laws. We're adding a whole new genre of epistle, of letter to this collection.

And so, things like this will happen. In 1 Timothy 5:18, this is one of the letters. Listen to this. This is really interesting:

For the Scripture says, "Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain." — 1 Timothy 5:18

And the Scripture does say that, which is to say the writings of Moses say that. He's quoting the Pentateuch. But then Paul says:

The worker deserves his wages.

That does not occur anywhere in the Old Testament, but it does occur in Luke. And what Paul is saying in 1 Timothy is Luke's letter, Luke's history, Luke's record of the life of Christ—he quotes it, and he calls it Scripture. He's putting it on the level of the writings of Moses. He's putting it on the level of the writings of Isaiah. He is saying, "Luke, add it. It counts. It's in." Because in Luke 10:7, it says:

Stay in that house, eating and drinking. Whatever they give you for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. — Luke 10:7

The worker deserves wages. And Paul is quoting Luke as authoritative divine Scripture. That's a big freaking deal, okay?

Not only that, Peter is going to do the same thing about Paul's letters, right? So Paul affirms the gospel.

Peter affirms Paul, which is so fascinating because Paul and Peter kind of got into it sometimes. Listen to this.

Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation. Just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters. Speaking in them of these matters, his letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do the other scriptures to their own destruction. — 2 Peter 3:15

You can't talk about other scriptures if you're not affirming that what Paul has written is scripture. Does this make sense?

And so now, this is crazy. We've got this canon, we've got this collection of writings that seem to have stopped around 400 BC. Nothing new is added. And Jesus shows up and everybody's like, "Well, this is new. This has changed." We start making a record of his life. We acknowledge that record is not just a man-made history, but it is on the level of this. Also, the letters are these apostles, this record of these teachings. And this is how this book has come to be, layer by layer, page by page, compiling things that the Lord has explicitly instructed to do. And then other things, really in the New Testament, as people are carried along, has given wisdom from God.

And now we have what I think is complete. Could it be that God would ever add something to it? I mean, I guess so. I don't think so. I don't anticipate that. And I would be very leery if anybody claims so. But we weren't given a book. We were given page after page after page that we've compiled into a book. And now, I think the smart money is, we're done here.

The Value of Scripture Study

And it is our duty, it is our privilege to mine this thing for gold because it is absolutely filled with treasure and it rewards diligent study. It rewards diligent study, right? If we are willing to say, Lord, you wanted this written down. Everything was written in the past to teach us, well, then maybe it would be beneficial for me to know it. Maybe it would honor you if I would study what you've said. Maybe there's something I'm facing right now, an opportunity before me that I'm going to miss, that I'm going to misunderstand, that I'm going to fail to execute on, if I don't know as much as you have revealed that you wanted us to know.

This is a book worth studying. It is worth saying, I'm going to spend the rest of my life every day. I don't know if it's 10 minutes a day or an hour a day. I don't know what other resources you might bring to bear. But you guys, this thing is a big deal. And it is worth doing the work to become an expert in it.

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Dan: When did the accountability become human rights? In other words, was it when they gave it, when they put it in the tabernacle, when did our accountability towards all of this story?

Tim: Okay, so Dan's question is when do we become accountable to this book? I think very, very early. I mean, Adam was accountable to what God revealed before anything was written down, right? So when he's like, don't eat from the tree, they weren't allowed to eat from the tree, even though it wasn't written. So when God spoke, he was directly accountable. But then as the community grows larger, and as the circumstances become more complex, I think he gives us a growing canon. But I think the responsibility, the accountability is extremely early.

Now Paul will say in Romans 5 that before the law was given, death was still in the world, right? And he's explaining that people died from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not break a commandment because there was no written record, right? So certainly, certainly by the time that Moses shows up and records this, we are accountable to the written word. Prior to that, Paul would argue we are nevertheless held accountable because of our relationship to Adam. That's a much more complicated argument for the last 30 seconds of this conversation. But certainly by the time Moses writes, then for sure, but even prior to that, we are still held accountable. I mean, certainly in our lifetime, there was never a day that we're not held under judgment for what God has revealed.

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Catherine: I'm just keep thinking about how Jesus firm the Scriptures. He always called them Scripture. So in the Old Testament, it almost ties him with what you were just saying, that he was telling you what do the Scriptures say?

Tim: Yeah, I mean, Catherine just observing Jesus himself has an incredibly high view of the Scriptures, right? He refers to it constantly. And he says he's not come to put it aside, but to fulfill it. And it's best for us, I would just suggest, if we know what it says, it is filled with treasure. And you can find it. And it's worth developing the skills to do so.

Okay, we'll talk more about this funny book that's been collected, but that hopefully gives you a little bit of a more vivid ability to imagine how this thing came to be what it is.

Good enough. All right. See you next week.