The Bible is like a love letter from God, the words of a loving Father
telling us about our relationship with him.
Recently I
read in the newspaper about an American soldier who became separated
from a daughter he fathered in the Vietnam War. The mother, a
Vietnamese woman, had died, and the father fled the country as the Viet
Cong overtook Saigon.
He had lost
all hope of ever seeing his daughter again when, much to his surprise,
he saw her in a photograph, along with other Vietnamese Eurasian
children, in a national magazine. The girl, now a teenager, looked just
like him. So he wrote to her and, after two years of diplomatic
negotiating, they were reunited.
When I
heard this story I thought about what it must have been like the first
time the girl received a letter from her father. Imagine the love,
affection, and reassurance he must have poured into it and the many
letters that followed. And think of what went through her mind. She
had known about his existence for years, but now she began learning
about the kind of person he was.
With each
new letter from the Untied States she learned more about her father.
I’m sure he also included photographs. I doubt she codified every
letter, memorizing facts about her father (“he’s six feet tall, blue
eyes, an engineer…”) – though if asked she could rattle off every fact
that one could glean from the letters. No, loving relationships don’t
work like legal contracts. I imagine she experienced his love and
concern for her through his words, and in doing so in a small way she
came to know him. She also learned about her father’s purpose for her:
to bring her to America so they could be together.
Love
Letters
The Bible
is analogous to that father’s letters. It isn’t merely a collection of
“facts” about God, a celestial computer manual. It is the words of a
loving Father, telling us about our relationship with him and his
purpose for us.
Of course,
for the girl to experience her father’s love personally she had actually
to meet him. The letters sustained her until she came to America, but
what she got from the letters could never be compared to her later
personal acquaintance with her father.
Scripture
functions in a similar manner to the father’s letters. The Bible is a
series of letters from our heavenly Father to his children, telling us
how much he loves us and how his goal is that we know him personally
through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Revelation
Think of
our situation this way: we’re like orphans living in a far-off land,
rejected by all and without hope, except for the slim possibility of
being contacted by our father and rescued from captivity. But there is
nothing we can do to contact him; he must find us, communicate with us,
and save us. We are totally dependent on him.
Now do you
understand why Christianity is called a revealed religion? The term
“revelation” refers to God’s self-disclosure to men and women. It is
translated from a Greek noun that means the drawing back of a veil to
reveal hidden things. That’s what the God of the Bible does: he
reveals himself to us so that we may know him and be redeemed by him,
and so that we may love and serve him.
The Bible
scholar Leon Morris offers this helpful definition of revelation: it
“is knowledge that comes to us from outside ourselves and [that is]
beyond our own ability to discover.” How can finite minds penetrate the
nature of an infinite God? How can the pot of clay understand the mind
of its Potter? Clearly the only way we know anything about God is
because he first graciously chooses to reveal himself to us.
Divine
Carrot
The Bible
says that all men and women receive “general” revelation, and it is
sufficient to make us aware that there is a God (Ps. 19:1-2; Rom.
1:18-20). Nature itself and something in every human being cries out,
“There is a God.”
But there
is a problem with general revelation, for while it is a powerful witness
of God’s presence, it fails to reveal enough of God for us to know him
personally. In other words, it is a limited self-disclosure of
God, a sort of divine carrot that draws us along a path toward Jesus
Christ. There’s just enough awareness of him to assure us that there is
a God, but there isn’t enough knowledge of him to know who he is.
General
revelation prepares us for a fuller revelation, one that is rooted in
the Bible and communicated through the Holy Spirit in which God
reveals who he is and how we may have communion with him.
Theologians call this latter type of revelation “special revelation.”
It’s humbling for me to realize that I can know God only if he
chooses to make himself known to me! The fact that he chooses me,
reveals himself, and initiates relationship continues to astound me.
The Person
of Jesus Christ is the heart and apex of God’s revelation (John 1:1, 14,
18). He is the “Word” who has come in the flesh, and only those who
acknowledge him as such can be saved (1 John 4:2).
Jesus was a
real, historic figure who performed many signs and wonders that
authenticated his claims, among them that he came from the Father, which
was an implicit claim to deity (John 20:30-31; Matt. 11:2-6). Do you
want to know the heavenly Father? Then look at his Son, Jesus Christ,
because he came to reveal his Father’s nature to us (John 14:9).
Written Record
Most
Christians automatically associate the Word of God with the Bible, the
Old and New Testaments. Well they should, for the written record
reveals the incarnate Word of God. To reach all men and women, God
provided a written record of his Son.
How else
could succeeding generations know about Jesus Christ? He wanted to
ensure an accurate historical record and authentic interpretation of his
acts, so there could be no misunderstanding about his nature and how to
know him. God did this in the Bible, and through it all men and women
may learn about and benefit from God’s dealing with Israel and also from
the life of Christ.
So if you
want to know the heavenly Father, you have to know his Son. And, if you
want to know who the Son is and his will, you must know what the Bible
says.
I’m making
a high claim for the authority of Scripture, so it’s worth asking what
makes it such a special book. This raises the question of how we got
the Bible.
Inspiration
Theologians
say the Bible was given by inspiration, which means it is
“God-breathed.” But the biblical doctrine of inspiration should not be
confused with the writer’s inspiration.
The Bible
is not merely inspiring, like the writings of Dante or Shakespeare. It
is inspired. The very words of the Old and New Testaments are the
product of divine activity. The writings of the Bible are of divine
origin because the authors were inspired by God; God worked through men
who cooperated with him.
Peter says,
“Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about
by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin
in the will of man but men spoke from God as they were carried along by
the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet.
1:20-21). Paul wrote, “This is what we speak, not in words
taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing
spiritual truths in spiritual words” (1 Cor. 2:13). Both of these
passages refer to the prophets and apostles speaking by inspiration, but
this also includes the message that they wrote.
The
Whole Bible
A common
analogy for how inspiration works is a sailboat and the wind. The Holy
Spirit, like the wind, filled the sails of the writers. Without the
wind, the boat could go nowhere. However, like all analogies, this one
breaks down when pushed too far. For example, a sailboat is an
impersonal, inanimate object; human beings are intensely personal, flesh
and blood agents of revelation.
God didn’t
merely dictate the Bible to writer-secretaries, as though human authors
had no more a part in producing Scripture than the computer on which I
write this article. No, the Bible is the Word of God spoken through
human writers, and as such it bears the marks of humanity: God’s truth
communicated in the authors’ unique language and culture. This dynamic
is captured in 2 Samuel 23:2: “The Spirit of the Lord spoke through me;
his word was on my tongue.”
Both the
Holy Spirit and human beings were involved in writing Scripture.
Nevertheless, the critical element was the Holy Spirit; his presence
ensured that what was written was wholly true – true in the ways of
God’s choosing and not in the ways always acceptable to modern men and
women.
Many people
find it difficult to accept the whole Bible as the Word of God. Some
believe parts of the Bible are in error; they retain the right to pick
and choose only those passages that they agree with. Thomas Jefferson
removed every verse form his Bible that referred to the supernatural!
Others believe the Bible “contains” the Word of God and that it is the
Word of God only to the extent that we experience God in reading it.
This article was originally published
Equipping
the Saints, Vol. 3, No. 1 Winter 1989 a magazine of
Vineyard USA.
