"Spoken Through the Prophets" 2 Peter 1:21 Sunday Evening Worship Service

2 Peter chapter 1.

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

As we continue our series in the Nicene Creed, Jesse graciously asked if I would step in and speak on this one phrase, one short phrase in the Nicene Creed, who spoke through the prophets, speaking of the Holy Spirit.

And so we'll talk quite a bit about that particular doctrine that's embedded in there, but we'll also look at this passage at some length, 2 Peter chapter 1, verses 16 to 21.

2 Peter 1:16–21

Let me read it for us.

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, we ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention, as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

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.

So reads the word of the living God.

How do you know that the Bible is not just another book of myths?

In the second century, a wealthy shipmaker named Marcion tried to buy his way into influence in the church and peddled his doctrine around the ancient world, teaching that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was not the same as the loving God of the New Testament.

So he chopped up his Bible until basically he just had parts of Luke left.

And he claimed that the rest were all myths.

In that same century, a Christian philosopher named Justin Martyr wrote a defense of Christianity against the repeated claim that the apostles invented their myth by borrowing from the Roman pantheon.

That they just looked at Jupiter and his consorts and his children, the sons of Jupiter, and put together basically a picture of Jesus off of those Greek and Roman myths.

In the same century, Methodius of Olympus was forced to rebuke a heretical Judaizing group known as the Ebionites, who were teaching that the prophets of the Old Testament spoke myths from their own minds and not from the Holy Spirit.

In the very next century, a series of sermons is published and attributed to Clement of Rome.

It wasn't actually written by him.

They call them pseudo-Clementines, which is like not oranges.

Which taught that the Old Testament prophets had been corrupted, that large swaths of the Old Testament were just mythical, added, and not from the Holy Spirit.

And really the only prophet that you could trust was the true prophet Jesus.

Bother walking through that to remind you what you already know, that the Bible has been regarded as a myth for a long time.

It's not something new in our century and our day.

It's not just today that preachers and so-called prophets and so-called theologians and scholars have been discrediting the Bible and discarding it as myth.

But certainly that is the case today.

Prominent pastors have told their congregations to unhitch themselves from the Old Testament.

Theologians are saying that Christianity depends not on the Bible, goodness no, but on the resurrection.

New Testament scholars are questioning whether Jesus of Nazareth ever lived.

We gotta go on a quest to find the historical, the real Jesus, not the one in the Bible, but the one who's like behind the Bible.

And others have been making the claim that the biblical gospel is essentially stolen goods swiped from the Egyptians.

They mentioned that Horus, too, was born of a virgin, did you know?

And Horus was hailed by a star, worshipped by three kings.

And did you know that they celebrate his birthday on December 25th?

Therefore, Christianity, a myth.

All a myth.

Nothing new.

2,000 years of church history and the Bible is still being dismissed as an influential but nonetheless fabricated book of mythical stories, really no better than Aesop's fables.

And I imagine you've encountered this in your own life, whether family members or friends or coworkers, you've had conversations.

At some point, they've said something like, Well, you don't actually believe the Bible, do you?

The whole thing?

All of it?

All the like the weird parts?

You believe that?

What makes your holy book so special?

Have you heard that?

The Mormons have theirs.

Jehovah's Witnesses, well, they've got their own translation at least.

The Muslims, they have their book.

The Hindus, the Bhagavad Gita, everyone's got their own.

What makes yours so special?

What makes it any different?

Aren't they all just variations on the same core mythical figures and ideas, all just about humanity, wrongdoing, salvation, and the afterlife?

How do you know that the Bible isn't a myth?

And there really is only one answer to that question.

And it is the doctrine of inspiration.

The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.

In summary, because God wrote the Bible.

Because it's God's book, it's God's word.

That's the answer to that question.

In point of fact, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments constitute the only volume that God has written, the only holy text inspired by God Almighty.

That was Peter's answer in the first century.

That was the answer at the Council of Constantinople in 381, from which we get this particular line in the Nicene Creed, who spoke through the prophets.

And so I would submit it's still the answer today.

You can know that the Bible is true because God wrote it.

It's God's word.

Let God be true, and every man a liar.

So I've been assigned this little phrase from the Nicene Creed, technically the Nicene Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, whatever.

Who spoke through the prophets.

Who spoke through the prophets?

In the context, in the creed, as we looked at last week, this is speaking about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, the Who is the Holy Spirit.

And in its original context, I think the inclusion of this phrase was probably there for a number of reasons, but at least as a kind of additional argument for the deity of the Holy Spirit.

In their day and in their time, this is after the Nicene Creed of 325, and in between when they added this phrase in, there was a man named Macedonius, who together with some of his followers constituted what they ended up calling the pneumatomacheans.

I probably pronounced that wrong.

The people who were fighting against the Holy Spirit because they denied the deity of the Holy Spirit, and they'd gained quite a following.

And so several church fathers got together and argued against that and for the deity of the Holy Spirit.

And this is just one more evidence of that.

Listen, if the Bible is God's word and the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible, ergo the Holy Spirit is God.

Do you see the logic there?

That was the argument they were making.

However, I think this phrase also functioned to ward off the prevailing influence of some of these myths from the second and third centuries, these ideas that Christianity was just another mythical tale like Jason and the Argonauts, like Theseus and the Minotaur.

What was the difference between King David and the Odyssey, really?

Well, because the Bible was written by God.

The Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets.

So the bishops who met in Constantinople in 381 to hammer out this lengthy Holy Spirit section included this short little phrase who spoke through the prophets as a kind of footnote, in a way.

Essentially, this is them citing their sources.

This is them saying, You want to know where all the rest of the creed comes from?

Here.

The Holy Spirit speaking through the prophets.

If you don't have that, you don't have a creed.

Because you have to have a divine source for this information, right?

Otherwise, where would you get it from?

The one who spoke through the prophets.

You see, during different eras of theological strife, there have always been two theaters of war.

Whenever there's some major theological battle, there's at least two fronts on which the battle is waged.

There is the substance of the argument, and there is the source of the argument.

The substance of the debate is whatever they're explicitly fighting about.

So, the Council of Nicaea, it's about the deity of Christ largely to begin with.

Or during the time of the Reformation, justification by faith alone.

Or perhaps today, maybe for you when you go sit down at a Thanksgiving meal later this month, it will be sexual ethics from the Bible with some of your family members.

That seems to be the area of debate these days.

But the substance is really not the entirety of the argument.

It's usually the thing that people are talking about, but underneath it is the source argument.

And the source of the debate is the understanding of whatever authority people are arguing from, whether it's their own experience, whether it's scripture, whether it's another holy book, whether it's someone on TV.

The nature of that authority, which is often scripture itself, is the source part of the debate.

And what I mean to say by that is that in some way, every theological debate is about the Bible.

Every theological debate has its root in a bibliological debate.

What do we have to do with Scripture?

How does Scripture work?

And often that's where those conversations lead, isn't it?

You've had these conversations, I'm sure, with your friends and your family and your coworkers.

You have these conversations.

Where does it eventually go?

Well, I believe the Bible.

Well, I don't.

Okay, well, at least we know what we're talking about now.

Different authorities.

You don't actually believe in that ancient bigotry, do you?

Those primitive, warlike, hate-mongering, patriarchal, unscientific, neolithic myths about where the world came from and how to please the flying spaghetti monster and rewards in the afterlife?

You don't believe any of that, do you?

That's where it goes.

It's the Bible, really, that's under attack.

So for the Orthodox bishops who met and crafted this phrase, they knew that it was not sufficient to simply say, here is the doctrine, but they also needed to secure the source of the doctrine.

Where did it come from and why and how?

Hence this phrase, who spoke through the prophets, which is a summary way of talking about the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.

And if you think about it for a minute, you'll understand why this is so important.

Because Scripture itself is God interpreting his own actions in human history.

If God had not spoken through the prophets and through the apostles, then we would really have no sure understanding of God's acts in human history, would we?

Think about it this way, as an illustration.

If you were to have never heard of Christianity and you wandered into a church on a Sunday morning, and you witnessed a baptism, but nobody said anything.

No words, just actions, what would your interpretation of that event be?

You might think, well, maybe this person really needed a shower, so the church is just kind of helping them out.

They really needed a bath.

And you might think, well, this seems like it's more than that because this person's up front and other people are watching them.

So maybe it has to do with like an initiatory rite into their group or something like that.

Maybe you could even get to the point of thinking, well, it's kind of like someone dying almost, like going under and coming up.

Maybe you could get there.

You know what you couldn't get to?

That this is someone who is publicly identifying their faith in a crucified and risen first century Jewish Messiah.

Simply by blunk.

Could you?

If you had no other information, how would you interpret those acts?

So it is with God in history.

God does, and then God speaks about what he does.

He interprets his own acts.

That's what the Bible is there for.

They must be interpreted and interpreted with words.

So God spoke not only to give us a record of what he has done, but also why he has done it.

That's why in the passage that we looked in last week, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, he says the Spirit is revealing the thoughts of God.

1 Corinthians 2 · chapter mention

And then later on we have the mind of Christ.

How would you ever get access to the mind of God through wordless acts?

The Bible, therefore, is God's interpretation of God's acts for God's people.

That's why this doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture is so critical and why they included it in the creed, I think.

So what I'd like to do this evening is to rise in defense of the source of all spiritual truth, God's interpretation of God in the words of men found in the Holy Scriptures, and reassert with the Nicene Creed the glorious doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture.

And we'll do that in two parts.

Part number one, an explanation of inspiration, and part number two, an exposition of inspiration.

And my my goal with this is that you would walk away with utter confidence that you are standing on the solid rock of Jesus Christ and Him crucified because it's inspired by God.

That this word is utterly trustworthy.

With all the church, with the Nicenes, with Peter, that you would know that this book in your lap is no man-made myth, but it is God-breathed truth, and you can bet your life on it.

So, first, an explanation of inspiration.

The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture, in the most simple sense, is just that God wrote a book.

If you had to say it in the simplest way, it's that God wrote a book.

And when I say book, I mean really a collection of books, 66 of them in the biblical canon, that were written by men whom God inspired such that the words of those books and all of them are the very words of God Himself.

We'll look at the very succinct way that Peter says this, 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 21.

2 Peter 1:21

He says, Men spoke from God.

So who was it?

Men or God?

Yes.

Men spoke from God.

When Moses wrote Deuteronomy, Moses' words were also God's words.

When Paul asked Timothy to remember his coat of all the mundane, strange things to include in a collection like this, that's God's words.

When Isaiah wrote, Thus saith the Lord, that was God's words.

And when Isaiah wrote, Here I am, Lord, those are God's words.

Through the reference of the speakers being different, all of those words were scribed by God.

This is what is usually called by theologians verbal plenary inspiration.

That's the technical language they use for it.

Verbal just means the words.

The words themselves are inspired.

Plenary means all of it.

And it has been the teaching of the church from its very beginning.

I just want to show you a couple quotes just to prove to you, I'm not making that up.

This is the teaching of the church from the very beginning.

Clement of Rome, talking in the first century, he says, Let us act according accordingly to that which is written.

For the Holy Spirit saith, Not, let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, but look carefully into the scriptures which are the true utterances of the Holy Spirit.

Justin Martyr, second century.

But when you hear the utterances of the prophets spoken, as it were personally, you must not suppose that they are spoken by the inspired men themselves, but the divine word who moves them.

Irenaeus, the scriptures are indeed perfect, since they were spoken by the Word of God and his Spirit.

Also notice in all of these quotes, it's the Spirit who is attributed as the one writing Scripture.

We'll see other instances where other persons of the Trinity are involved in this process, but always attributed to the Spirit.

Augustine, both testaments have been written by the one God.

Let them know that everything, both in the Old as well as the New Testament, was written by the Holy Spirit.

And because it was just Reformation Day, here's John Calvin, the apostles were sure and genuine penmen of the Holy Spirit, and their writings are therefore to be considered oracles of God.

So, all of church history, this has been the normative view of the Orthodox Church.

However, that does not mean that everyone has agreed on what they mean by the word inspiration.

Inspiration has taken on different flavors over the years and according to different writers and authors.

Several theories of inspiration have been suggested over the centuries.

So I'm going to put up a slide that has a handful of, I would say, incorrect theories of interpretation and then one correct one.

And we'll look at all these in their parts.

So the correct one, just to jump to the conclusion, is the bottom, concursive.

I'll get there, I'll explain that.

But there are several other theories of inspiration that have been speculated over the years, and it's worth walking through them, not because you're going to be tested on this or anything like that.

But so that you can understand by knowing what it's not, what it is.

Does that make sense?

When you can clearly articulate the negative, then presumably you can also say the positive.

So what isn't the way that the Bible was inspired?

How did not God write the book of Scripture?

And so one of the incorrect theories of inspiration would be the dictated theory of inspiration.

This is the idea that God essentially possessed the human authors, and apparently the lights.

That God possessed the human authors in some way that such that they would write without actually even being conscious of what they were writing in some cases, or just having really no idea what they were writing.

So one of the main proponents of this early on was a guy named Philo, and he said this no pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own.

He is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances.

When knowing not what he does, he is filled with inspiration as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citizens.

Of the soul to a new visitor and tenant, the divine spirit, which plays upon the vocal organism and dictates words which clearly express its prophetic message.

What a picture that is.

So essentially, the human author is just an instrument, like a pipe or a guitar.

They're just played.

And they really are just there to be used as a conduit.

They have no cognitive function in the thing apart from just being a vessel for whatever the Holy Spirit is saying.

To some degree, this is like how Muslims understand the Quran to work.

And it would be a convenient way to argue for how we got the Bible and to emphasize the divinity of Scripture if it weren't for all those pesky human things about the Bible.

Like in Matthew 22, where Jesus says, David wrote in the Spirit.

Hmm.

Apparently David had something to do with it, didn't he?

Or when the law is attributed not only to God, but to Moses.

Or when Paul says, which has caused no small consternation in 1 Corinthians 7, not the Lord but I say.

Which is not him saying that part of Scripture is not interpreted.

He's just saying this wasn't from a previous text of Scripture.

So there are countless reasons really why we can't ignore the humanity of the Bible.

It's quite a human book, isn't it?

It's not simply divine, though it is, but it has also got the marks of the authors all over it.

So that won't work.

How about conceptual inspiration?

That's the one in the middle there.

This is the idea that it's sort of part human and part divine.

Nicholas Wolsersorf said it this way.

However, these books came about.

The crucial fact is that God appropriates that discourse in such a way that those speaking now mediate God's speaking.

So we attribute the main point to God, this is he's talking about Psalm 93, and discard the psalmist's particular way of making the point as of purely human significance.

So this is essentially the normal way that we talk about the word inspire, but maybe with like a little additional supernatural edge to it.

That God really inspired the authors.

He gave them an idea, a thought, a concept, a feeling, maybe.

There's different ways that different people talk about it.

And God's action in the person is the work of inspiration, and the words themselves not inspired.

The words are just sort of what came out of the person feeling the feeling that they felt, or knowing the thing that God wanted them to know, the general idea, the concept.

And this would also be a handy way of dealing with inspiration if you wanted to just take some parts of the scriptures as divine, namely the parts that you like, and then the other parts that are really too just gross and unlikable, and shuffle them underneath the rug.

If you wanted to do that, this would be a great way to argue for inspiration.

But again, the Bible won't let us do that.

Because Jesus says in Matthew 5, not one jot or tittle, not one little letter from the law is going to pass away.

Heaven and earth can pass away, but not my word.

It's not the ideas that won't pass away, but the words themselves.

This is why we argue for verbal inspiration.

It's not just concepts that were inspired.

It was the words of Scripture themselves.

This is how the authors of Scripture even interpret previous passages of Scripture.

They pay attention not just to the ideas, but to the language, to the words.

Paul says, not offsprings, but offspring.

Cares about the plural.

Because not just the ideas matter, but also the words that communicate those ideas.

So in the most precise sense, the authors of Scripture aren't inspired, but Scripture is inspired, the words.

Another incorrect concept of inspiration would be natural inspiration.

And that that would be to say essentially, God did stuff and then people wrote a book.

There's nothing really going on supernatural inside of the person.

Man is just responding to whatever God is doing and writes a book.

And it's fascinating.

It's real bestseller because God does some incredible stuff.

But it's not God's book.

The words, the concepts, those aren't from God.

The subject matter may be about God, but not the book itself.

Here's John Goldingay on this topic.

He says, quote, the expression word of God refers to particular divine promises, commands, or messages, oral or written, and in the Second Testament, characteristically to the gospel message itself, but it is not a scriptural term for Scripture itself.

So in this concept, it might be the case that when you're quoting God, that part might actually be the Word of God because you're just quoting something that He maybe said out loud to Isaiah.

But the second that you get outside of the quotation marks, no longer the Word of God.

That's the closest you could get to this being divine.

This also won't work because the scriptures claim throughout to be God's word.

One of the most famous passages on this, of course, is 2 Timothy 3, verse 16.

2 Timothy 3:16

All scripture is breathed out by God.

So there's plenary, all, all scripture, verbal scripture, it's a word for writings with words.

And inspiration, theopanustos, that it was breathed out by God.

And B.B.

Warfield, in his famous work on the inspiration and authority of scripture, makes the airtight case that that word cannot mean anything but that this is the product of God.

That's what that word is there for.

That's why Paul wrote it.

That it's not that he breathed into words, it's that he breathed them out.

And he makes the case really, inspired is not precisely the right word to describe that.

Expired really is.

That he breathed out these words.

These are the very words of God.

Or you get instances like Hebrews chapter 3, verse 7, where the author of Hebrews is quoting from Psalm 95, and he says, The Holy Spirit said, Today if you hear his voice, don't harden your hearts.

Hebrews 3:7

There's a lot of reference going on there.

What's happening is in inspired scripture, the author is quoting inspired scripture, attributing it to the Holy Spirit, who then takes the voice of a human author and says, if you hear the Holy Spirit's voice.

Do you see what's going on?

Very explicitly calling this God's word.

So what's a biblical understanding then?

Theologians have called it concursive inspiration.

Basically, what they mean by that, and I've tried to capture this as best I could in my diagram, what they mean by that is that you can't separate it out and say this is like part human, part divine, or it's all divine, or it's all human.

It's a both and.

This is a totally human book.

And it is a totally divine book.

It has to be both.

Here's how A.A.

Hodge and B.B.

Warfield said this.

The inspiration of Scripture is God's continued work of superintendence, by which his providential, gracious, and supernatural contributions, having been presupposed, he's talking about providence here, that uh he would say later, when God wanted a Paul to write something, he made a Paul and raised a Paul to be the Paul he wanted to be, so that he would write like a Paul.

He presided over the sacred writers in their entire work of writing with the design and effect of rendering that writing an errorless record of the matters he designed them to communicate, and hence constituting the entire volume in all its parts, the word of God to us.

Or here's Augustine saying it far more simply.

God speaks in a human manner through a human being.

That's it.

And you can appreciate the language that people have tried to use over the years to describe this spiritual action of inspiration.

We're just grasping, aren't we?

God overshadowed the authors.

God spoke through the authors.

It's sort of a metaphor.

God superintended, that's one of the words they tend to use.

Superintended the authors.

It's a good one.

But really, all of it is us trying to name a mystery, isn't it?

All of it is us trying to say, here's how God can speak what a human is speaking.

And when the human is speaking, it's a total free thought from the human.

It's not coerced by God.

God didn't wrestle him down and say, no, no, no, don't say that word.

Say this word.

No, he said the word that he intended to say, it was from his own mind.

And yet it was also directly from God's mind.

That's why theologians over the years have often compared the inspiration of Scripture or the Bible itself to the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Because you've got a fully divine and fully human person.

And you ask, how can that be?

And our answer has to be, I don't really know.

I just know it's true.

And you know why?

Because the Bible says so.

And so I have to accept the mystery that's handed to me rather than trying to wrestle it into the categories that work for my brain.

I'm not God, so I don't know how all that works, but that's how he said it works, so I believe him.

Both are true.

It is a divine and a human book.

That is why we accept an understanding of inspiration that flies in the face of all our reason.

You appreciate why it is that so many people went to all these other extremes in their understanding of inspiration.

It's because it made sense to them.

Like I can get my mind around a book that God wrote.

I can get my mind around a book that a guy wrote.

I got a real hard time figuring out how God wrote a book through men.

And yet it is.

Because the inspired text tells us that it works that way.

And so it's too then that text that we need to attend in order to see an exposition of inspiration from the scriptures.

If we believe in the doctrine of inspiration that this book is God's book, well then we have to be able to get it from the book itself.

Where does it say that?

And before I even go to the texts, I'm appreciating that I'm making an argument from the Bible about the Bible.

I'm saying, yes, the Bible's inspired because the Bible says so.

And the second you do that, and I'm sure again you've had this conversation before, the second you do this in a conversation with a non-believer, they're like, I'm sorry, red flag, not allowed to do that.

If they do, let me offer this response.

Why not?

Who says that we have to play by your rules?

Your rules are that I can't appeal to the Bible to talk about the Bible.

Why not?

In fact, if the Bible is God speaking and God is the ultimate authority in the universe, were I to appeal to something else to justify the authority of Scripture, I would thereby undermine God's own authority in his word.

So, no, I'm not going to play by those rules.

I'm going to play by God's rules, which says I have to go to the Bible to justify the Bible.

And so that's what we do.

We don't want to undermine Scripture's authority, but instead we stand on it.

We don't reason to it, we reason from it.

So I'm going to put a bunch of verses on the screen.

We're not going to look at all of them for sure.

But I just wanted to give you a sense for, this is not exhaustive, but just the scope of the doctrine of inspiration in Scripture, all the different ways that it's talked about in the prophets, many of them begin with the word of Yahweh came to ex-prophet.

So often the word of God spoken out loud to man or just called the word of God.

Psalm 119, the word of God on every single verse, some synonym.

The book of Matthew, of course, just chock full of Old Testament quotations about the Word of God, attributing it to the Holy Spirit or to God Himself.

The one of these that I'd like to walk through briefly with you is in Acts.

Would you turn to just Acts chapter 1?

Acts 1 · chapter mention

I just want to show you.

This would just be maybe a helpful way.

If you have a friend who's concerned and is like, I don't know that I buy the whole inspiration of scripture thing.

I don't think this is God's book.

This would just be a way, a place that you could turn to where you could quickly show them a number of passages that make this claim.

Acts chapter 1, verse 16.

Acts 1:16

Peter says, Brothers, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David concerning Judas.

So there you've got, it's called the Scriptures, talking about the Old Testament.

The Holy Spirit spoke it, and he did it by the mouth of David.

How about Acts chapter 2, verse 16?

Acts 2:16

Peter says, but this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel.

What a significant preposition that is.

And it's the very same that's used in the Nicene Creed, through the prophets.

So the prophets in some way are involved, but they're not the source of the whole thing.

God is.

Isaiah 3 · chapter mention

Chapter 3, this is Acts chapter 3, verse 18.

Acts 3:18

But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.

So God is the one speaking in the scriptures, and the prophets are the ones with the mouth who says it.

Or Acts chapter 3, verse 21.

Acts 3:21

So God's the one speaking, and the prophets are the one speaking.

Or Acts chapter 4, verse 25, who through the mouth of our Father, David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit.

Acts 4:25

Interesting here.

They're praying to God the Father, and they say, You said through David by the Holy Spirit.

So now we've got multiple persons of the Trinity involved in the speaking of Scripture.

Or at the very end of the book of Acts, Acts chapter 28, end of Paul's journeys here in the book of Acts, he finds himself in Rome, and he quotes at length a passage from Isaiah.

Acts 28 · chapter mention

Acts chapter 28, verse 25.

Acts 28:25

He says, And disagreeing among themselves, they departed after Paul had made one statement, the Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet.

So this is just what the whole Bible's like.

I'm just using Acts as a test case here, but the whole Bible is like this, where it says, God said, the Holy Spirit said, and the prophet said.

It's a both end.

All over the place.

But would you turn then back to 2 Peter chapter 1?

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

And this is where we'll spend the rest of our time.

2 Peter chapter 1, and I want to show you here how Peter himself reasons for the legitimacy of his own beliefs, particularly about the second coming of Christ, on the basis of the inspiration of Scripture.

2 Peter 1 · chapter mention

So 2 Peter chapter 1, verse 16.

2 Peter 1:16

He begins, for we did not follow cleverly devised myths.

The word cleverly devised, it's a word for wisdom.

But if put in a certain context, it can be using wisdom in a sort of a shrewd or a cunning way in order to trick people.

And that's certainly the idea here.

The claim by the false teachers that Peter is trying to counter is that Jesus isn't coming back.

This whole idea of the second coming, that is just a farce.

It is a fairy tale.

It is a myth.

And it's cunning.

It's a clever one, I'll give you that.

You looked at a whole bunch of passages in the Old Testament and tried to conjure up some idea about this, but really it's nothing more than a myth.

Your whole worldview, this whole eternal life, judgment of the living and the dead, the resurrection, all that, it's a farce.

How is it that Peter can say, no, that's not the case?

He says, Well, we didn't follow cleverly devised myths.

When we made known to you, when we preached, we the apostles, so he's talking here like New Testament, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He's talking about the second coming there, the second coming of Christ.

Why is it that he knows for sure that the second coming of Christ is not a myth?

Because he says we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

When was that?

When did you see the second coming majesty of Jesus Christ?

I wonder if we've been studying something about that, like in the mornings recently.

For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased, we ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

The transfiguration to Peter is the proof that Jesus is coming back.

Because he says, I saw the second coming glory in like a preview.

I got the trailer.

And what I saw was just a glimpse of what will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

I saw it, I heard it.

This testimony direct from God rang in my own ears.

And I'm telling that to you, which is what we have in the New Testament, isn't it?

So what about the Old Testament then?

Yeah, that's fine about the New Testament.

Sure, sure, they saw Jesus, they saw his second coming glory.

But what about the Old Testament?

Well, verse 19.

And we have the prophetic word, which there is kind of a summary statement for the whole of the Old Testament.

We have the prophetic word more fully confirmed.

More fully confirmed.

Here, I don't think he's pitting his own experience against the Old Testament.

Like, Bible's better than experience.

I don't think that's what he's doing.

What I think he's doing is that he's saying, I saw the second coming glory of Jesus that the Old Testament was already talking about.

So you have that much more reason to believe your Old Testament because I already saw what it was talking about.

Namely, the second coming of Christ, the glory that he'll have on that day.

That Daniel 7, Son of Man coming in the clouds, glory.

I already saw it.

Remember, there was a cloud there and everything.

To which, he says, you will do well to pay attention.

This is what we've got right now, is we've got the inspired word of God that we need to pay attention to.

Why?

Because it's like, he says, here's his illustration, a lamp shining in a dark place.

The dark place, that's now.

That's the world.

Covered in sin, ruled by Satan.

It's a dark place.

He even uses a kind of pungent word for the word dark there.

It's a gloomy, depressing place.

And what do we do when we're wandering around in this gloom and doom?

He says, We have a lamp.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

Scripture, while we're still in the dark, while it's still nighttime, scripture lights the way for you so that you can see where you're going.

Until, he says, the day dawns.

That's the second coming in the kingdom that's ushered in this world of light and truth.

This light imagery that he's using here, it's a metaphor for truth.

Until the day of truth dawns and all is revealed and known, and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Fascinating word here for morning star.

It's the word phosphorus.

And it is a reference to Venus, the third brightest orb in our sky.

Also called the morning star, because 200 some days out of the year it appears right before dawn.

Of course, this is something that the ancients knew well.

We have no Idea because of, you know, light pollution.

But it does happen, it still does happen.

Right before dawn, Venus will rise as a sort of herald of the coming of day.

And that's a representation here of Christ.

And we know that that's the case because this concept of the morning star is used also in Revelation 22 and applied to Jesus.

So Jesus will be the first light at the second coming, and then the whole day will break open.

He says, in your hearts, and in such a way that your heart on that day will finally know and have no more doubts.

We will know as we have been fully known.

And then just to defend the fact that you can count on this lamp until then, he says in verse 20, knowing this first of all, which I think is just kind of a preacher move.

He says the same thing in chapter 3 about the scoffers, knowing this first of all, also.

So it's not like first.

He's just saying it's important.

This is really important.

Pay attention.

Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

There's two ways, ironically, to interpret this passage.

One would be that it's talking about our present work of interpretation, and the conclusion, the way of rendering this would then be: it is wrong for you to read the Bible and interpret it in a way that is contrary to apostolic interpretation.

Or Roman Catholics have used this as a sort of justification for the one right interpretation of Scripture from Holy Mother Church.

I don't think that's the right way to understand this passage because it doesn't say no interpretation comes, but no prophecy comes.

It says no prophecy comes from someone's own interpretation.

What he's saying here is when God worked in the ancient world, he didn't just say, All right, Isaiah, figure this out and write a book about it.

Like I I showed you a vision.

Now I want you to put your words to it.

You interpret this.

But instead, when God acted, he also provided the interpretation.

He said, This is what this means.

The Old Testament prophecies can be trusted not only because they have been confirmed by the apostles, but because they are simply not only men-made documents.

They are written by men, but they are not only written by men.

This isn't God doing something, Samuel sitting on it for a while and then blogging about his own interpretation of whatever God was doing.

This is God speaking when the prophets speak.

It's not just their interpretation, simply the product of a human mind.

And he explains that, makes it very clear in verse 21.

Because no prophecy of Scripture was ever produced by the will of man.

Just a side note here: interesting that he says the will of man.

He doesn't just say it wasn't produced by man.

That's because all writing, all communication is at its core an act of the will.

It's a choice.

You choose which words to put down on a page or to speak out loud.

And so he goes all the way to the core of the thing and says, it was never produced by the will of a human being only.

That's not all that was there.

There's certainly that was there.

But he says, men spoke from God.

If you want the most succinct, clear, powerful description of the inspiration of Scripture in Scripture itself, that's it.

Men spoke from God.

Men were speaking, and they really were.

Peter actually was thinking.

He used his own vocabulary, the language that he grew up with, the dialect that he had.

All of that is across the page.

And yet he did it from God.

The idea is God is the source.

And then he emphasizes it here as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit inspiring this work.

Now there's one thing that is hard to observe in this text that is obscured by our translations.

It is that there is a word that is used five times, or at least a root, that's used five times in this text.

And it is the word for bearing.

If you know someone with the name Christopher, the Pharaoh part of that name, that's bearing, bringing something, Christbearer.

And that word shows up five times in this text.

Verse 17, the voice was born to him by the majestic glory.

We ourselves heard this very voice, born from heaven.

The word morning star, phosphorus, the light bearer.

No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, born by the will of man, as they were carried, born by the Holy Spirit, all the same root word.

Why is that significant?

Because Peter is connecting all of these dots.

And I hope you hear what he's saying.

It is so profound.

He is saying that when you read your Bible, which was written by men who were born by the Holy Spirit, you are hearing the very same voice of God that was born on the mount of transfiguration, and you are seeing the truth of the light of that day which will be born when Jesus Himself returns.

Meaning, when you do your devotions in the morning, you're on the mountain.

You're seeing the glory of Jesus, just like Peter did, but through words now.

You're seeing the second coming of Christ, but on a page.

This is the astounding reality about the inspiration of Scripture.

This is nothing less than God and God Himself speaking to us.

How astounding is that?

And one day God will speak to you, and you'll hear it with your ears.

In the meantime, Luther said, You want to hear God speak, just read the Bible out loud.

God has spoken, and so you can have utter confidence.

This is no myth.

Christ is coming.

If I had to encourage you in one way with this truth, it would be this: please do not be embarrassed about the Bible.

Don't be embarrassed to open it up and quote it.

To say, thus saith the Lord, but you know, probably less archaic.

Don't be embarrassed to stand on this word.

You have nothing to be embarrassed about.

This is the voice of the Almighty that one day will be heard by every ear.

And on that day, all the reproach will be taken away and be replaced with light and truth everlasting.

And so until that day, give yourself to the truth of this book.

Open it in the mornings, open it at night, open it in your mind through the day.

It is the voice of God on earth until the day when you hear the voice of God in heaven.

Here's how Luther said it.

A man's word is a little sound that flies in the air and soon vanishes, but the word of God is greater than heaven and earth.

Yea, greater than death and hell, for it forms part of the power of God and endures everlastingly.

We should therefore diligently study God's word and assuredly believe that God Himself speaks to us.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, what wonder this is that you would bend so low as to, as Calvin said, lisp in our ears, that you would condescend to human language, that you would so work in the authors of Scripture as to communicate your very mind.

Eternal, unchanging, all-powerful, all-knowing and true.

God, may we give ourselves wholly and unreservedly to your word.

May we be men and women of the book.

Like Spurgeon said of Bunyan, that we might bleed Bible.

There is no voice, Father, on earth or in heaven more significant than this.

So may we hear your voice.

May we attend to your word.

May we believe it.

Give us the strength and the courage to stand on it.

Like so many have before.

Keep Emmanuel Bible Church a church of the Bible.

And do it for your name's sake and glory, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, iBc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to tms.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.