Foundations of the Christian Life Chapter 3 - The Bible as a Foundational Authority

Foundations of the Christian Life.
Chapter 3. The Bible as a Foundational Authority.


We have said that the life of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago - his birth, life, death and resurrection – are the revelation of God to man, and hence are the foundation of Christian belief. However the event of Christ happened in history 2000 years ago – and its meaning is not evidently clear when you look at it from a natural viewpoint. We need help in both knowing what happened and in interpreting those events to see what they mean. This is where the Bible comes in.

Christ is the Word, the message God has for mankind (John 1:1-4), and the record of this Word is the Bible. The Bible itself is not the revelation of God, Christ is, but the Bible records this revelation and gives us the essential interpretation of it.

The Bible is the record of the Christ event. It includes these revelations (amongst others) that God wants us to know:
* The reasons for and preparations for Christ’s coming.
* His life and work, including his death and resurrection.
* The meaning of these events for us.

Hence, just as Christ is our foundation, so too is the Bible. It is the official record of the events and the official interpretation of the events. So in that sense the Bible is a given – it is objective - we receive it as it is. We cannot add to it or change it.


THE BIBLE IS GOD’S WORD TO MAN.

2 Timothy 3: 16-17.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”


“All Scripture is inspired/God-breathed.”

Three ideas we need to consider here.

1. The words of the Bible are inspired by God.
2. Because they are God’s words they have power.
3. Because they are God’s words they have authority.

1. The Bible is Inspired by God.

This means that in some way, which we wont go into now, God inspired the men who wrote the words down in such a way that the words were actually God’s.

This means that the Bible comes from God – it is given by God. It is not just the writings of man but it is the words of God, the communication God made to man.

However we do not mean by this that every word in the Bible is a word of God. Some are the words of men; some are the words of the Devil. What we mean when we say, “The Bible is the Word of God” is that the Bible, taken as a whole, contains the message God wants us to have. In it the truth about God is revealed. But other things are also revealed – the truth about man, sin, Satan, God’s plan of redemption, and so on.

However inspiration is not automation – the minds and personalities of the different writers of the Bible were not obliterated in the process, rather they were enhanced - inspired. Yet, in some mysterious way, through their personality God caused his message to be written so that that the words are both fully God’s words and fully the writer’s words. In one sense this parallels the nature of Jesus – he is both fully God and fully man at the same time. Hence we can see that the words of the Bible are both fully God’s words and yet they are fully the words of the men who wrote them.

2. The Bible has power.

The Bible is the “breath of God”. When we speak we also breath out – the same is true of God. When he speaks he emits breath.

There is something we need to know about God’s breath. In both the OT Hebrew and the NT Greek the same word is used to mean breath, wind or spirit.
The Breath of God is the Spirit of God, just as the Word of God is Christ. God does nothing except by speaking and so he does nothing unless all three members of the Trinity are involved – God the Father as Source, The Son as Word and the Spirit as Activator.

Genesis 1:1-3
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.”

* “The Spirit of God” (Hebrew literally) “the breath of God”. God’s breath is his Spirit and the Spirit of God has creative power.
* We see here in Genesis 1 how nothing happened until God spoke – His Word came forth. Then the Spirit – his breath – leapt into action and performed what God said. The Father, the Word and the Spirit worked together to create something out of nothing.

The Word of God, the Bible, that we have now is just like that. It is God’s word and is infused with Spiritual power and has the power to perform that which it says.

Isaiah 55:11
“… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”


3 The Bible is Our Authority.

One of the facts of life is that we all have authorities. Authorities are people whose word we accept as being true simply because they say it. In fact most of what we believe we believe because someone told us it was so – whether they were right or not doesn’t enter our heads because we accept their authority and believe them.

Usually we accept a person as an authority because of their relationship to us. The words of parents are more likely to be believed than those of a stranger. The words of friends will be accepted as being true more than someone with whom we only have a casual acquaintance.
As we grow up our parents are our first authorities; in fact we go through a stage where everything they say is “gospel” to us. But as our world expands so too do our range of authorities – teachers, Pastors, Bible class teachers and so on all become authorities for us.

As we grow we begin to find that different authorities in our lives come into conflict – they disagree with each other. E.g. what our teachers at school say may conflict with what our parents say. It is at this point that we are faced with a moment of decision. Which authority are we going to believe? This is a natural and vital part of our maturation process. To grow up – to become mature – we must move from acceptance of what we are told because of the person who told us and their relationship to us – to a new level of authority – we must believe things because we have chosen our authority for ourselves because of their expertise.

Notice I didn’t say, “We believe it because we have proved it for ourselves”. It is a fact of life that we personally cannot be authorities on everything – we simply do not have the intellectual capacity or the time to research everything for ourselves. And this is where it gets tricky – we have to not only prove some things for ourselves but we must also arrive at a set of criteria by which we evaluate the validity of experts, or authorities. We must choose which authorities we are going to believe. Maturity demands that we move from dependence on parental authority to acceptance of expert authority.

Everybody accepts some authorities or other – we cannot live rational lives if we don’t.
In life we accept different authorities for different areas of life.
e.g. mechanics, pilots, doctors and so on. We don’t expect an expert in one field to be an expert in another field. So too in religious knowledge – it is such a vast field that no one person can be an expert on every area of religious knowledge. And neither can we as individuals be authorities on everything ourselves. So we have to come up with a criteria by which we judge and accept authority. When we have “accepted an authority” we tend to believe everything they say without checking them out – because they are, after all, an authority.

What we have received from our “authorities” acts as a sort of grid by which we evaluate, or judge, everything else we hear. It is simply a fact of life that, at this very moment, you are automatically evaluating what is written here against what you already assume to be true. The basis of that evaluation is the “grid” of understanding you already have that you received from other people in the past.

The reality is that most of this “grid” which we use to evaluate everything else is itself not proven fact – it is simply assumed to be true because our “authorities” told us it was so. This “grid” is our worldview and so long as we continue to live in a culture that more or less agrees with our worldview we see no need to question it or prove it. It is only if we, e.g., shift countries that we may find our worldview comes into question when we meet other people who have a different way of understanding things. The usual tendency we have, as people, is to assume that our grid is “right” so any other grid is automatically “wrong”. The problem with this is twofold:
* The other person is judging our grid in exactly the same way as we are judging his and,
* It may well be that our grid is quite faulty – it may only “work” for us while we are in a culture where most people agree with us, in other words the fact that we are “all wrong together” makes it work for us to a degree. When we lose that peer support the fallacies in our way of thinking soon appear.

As we go through life we evaluate everything according to our grid, our worldview. Adopting Christian faith means that we are choosing a new authority. Being a Christian means that the grid through which we filter all our belief systems, by which we judge everything else, is the Bible. Becoming a Christian involves a whole new way of thinking and a whole new worldview.

This is an important question for Christians because we all have authorities on which we have built our lives up to the point where we became Christians – parents, teachers, culture, and so on. And a lot of what we have learned from them we have learned subconsciously – it is unexamined authority. And it is often in conflict with the Bible.

Spiritual growth demands that we come to that point of choosing: which authorities are we going to believe and build our lives on. And to grow as a Christian we must choose to let the Bible be our authority. Then we need to embark on a process of allowing God to change our minds so that we agree with him.

Romans 12:1,2.
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is - his good, pleasing and perfect will."

* What God wants from us is total commitment to him – Paul uses the picture of the burnt offering sacrifice which was totally consumed by the fire of the altar to get this across. Paul indicates that until we make this sort of total commitment we are not really worshipping God (and by implication we must be worshipping something else). To make ourselves a whole burnt offering is our “spiritual act of worship.” Worship doesn’t start until we have done this.
* Involved in this total commitment is a way of living. We are not to conform to the world’s way of living any longer but are to be “transformed”. Not conformed but transformed. The way we get transformed is by “renewing our minds”. The root problem in our lives, as far as God is concerned, is the way we think. What we think determines how we act. Our worldview is fundamental in this as we live out of out worldview without consciously thinking about it.
* When our minds are transformed we will know God’s will in a real experiential way. And we will find God’s will to be “good, pleasing and perfect.” What God wants for us is good, it will please us – and God. And we will judge it to be perfect. But it all hinges on thinking a new way.

Elsewhere this transformation is defined – we are to become “like Christ”.

Colossians 3:10.
“…and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its creator.”

* As Christians we have a “new self”.
* This “new self” is being "renewed", transformed.
* This process of transformation is brought about by “Knowledge”, i.e. it is in our minds primarily, but the Greek word includes relational, experiential knowledge, not just mental knowledge.
* When transformed it will be like the "image of its Creator", God.

Colossians 1:15.
“He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God…”

Christ is the pattern, the perfect image of God that we are being changed to be like. But it all happens in our minds in the first instance as we are renewed in our minds and allow God to change our way of thinking to agree with his.

As the only way we have of accessing Christ so that we can be transformed by him is through the Word of God, the Bible it follows that this mind transformation implies a coming to think like the Bible, making the Bible our authority.

This is a question a lot of Christians have never really thought about and often there are deep problems in their thinking because they have not come to a point of choice – “Which authority am I going to follow?”

The Position of the Protestant Evangelical Church world-wide has always been that:
The Word of God is the final authority for all matters of faith and practice.
Everything else is to be judged by that standard.

We believe the Bible is “God breathed”. It is God’s word and God is always true so the Bible is true. It is always right. This gives the Bible supreme authority.

The bottom line for then Christian must always boil down to this question: “What does the Bible say?” It is our authority.

If we don’t make this move from immature given authority to mature accepted authority three things can happen – and usually we suffer from them all to some degree:

1. We become spiritually proud – assuming that we can be an authority and judge the truth of any doctrine or idea that comes our way. But this is impossible. We have to learn humility and to accept the authority of others simply because they are experts and we are not. We simply cannot be an expert on everything. Sometimes in God to way to grow is simply to accept what those who know what they are talking about say and begin to walk in it. In doing so we prove the experts to be correct. But if we want to judge what they say and prove it for ourselves first we will find that our spiritual growth is stunted. It’s better to have a criteria for accepting the nature of the authority which we will accept and then move from there to acceptance of what that authority says than it is to try to prove the truth of everything ourselves before we will accept and walk in it.

2. The second result is that we can become spiritual “know it alls” – and how many of you have sat at the work lunch table with some moron who had an “expert” opinion on everything – yet was really not well thought out.

The result is we end up holding positions that are shallow and poorly thought out. And we become arrogant.
There is a world of difference between arrogance based on half thought out opinions and the confidence we can have by having studied and accepted the word of authorities.

3. Thirdly we can fail to become spiritually mature. God is asking of us to learn judgement in spiritual matters and if we don’t learn how to judge things we cannot grow up. In fact, to teach us this skill of discernment, God will allow our favourite teachers, our authorities, to be in error sometimes. And He will allow us to be wrong often.

Hebrews 5:11,12.
“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”

* There is a skill of discernment we need to learn – “to distinguish good from evil”.
* There is a way to learn that – we need “someone to teach” us.
* As we have various “someones” teaching us we will find that there are differences of opinion on some things because we all only “know in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9). No one teacher knows everything – nor can they know everything. As we work through the differences we learn discernment.
* Sometimes our favourite teacher, the one we hold in highest regard, to whom we give highest authority, will be obviously wrong. God allows this for two reasons:
(i) To keep the teacher humble and dependent on him.
(ii) So we learn not to be dependent on man and give man absolute authority in our minds, rather to depend on and give absolute authority only to God’s word.


THE ROLE OF TEACHERS IN CHURCH.

Acceptance of the Bible as your personal authority in spiritual matters does not, however, mean that you no longer have to accept the authority of other people who are Bible teachers and leaders. God does not give any single person a total understanding of his word; rather he gives a little to one, a little to another. As we learn to receive from others in humility the whole starts to become clear. Until we learn to receive from others we fall into the trap of thinking that “we can understand it all for ourselves” when in actual fact all we see is a small part of what is to be seen. But God gives no one a hot line to heaven whereby they can be independent of the rest of the body of Christ. Hence we still need to accept other people as authorities where it is evident God has gifted and equipped them with understanding.


A COMMON IDEA.

In matters of religion there is a view popular at the moment that goes something like this:
“One man’s view is as good as another man’s view because we can’t know for sure the truth about God. Therefore I can come to my own belief system about religion without recourse to authorities. The truth is “in me”.

In practice this usually means people pick and choose between ideas as they hear them and so end up with a sort of smorgasbord of ideas selected from different sources. The reality is no one has the time or ability to research all of these ideas out to see if they make sense. So what is really happening is that each person is doing two things:
(a) They are accepting the authority of some speaker or writer they heard to some degree and
(b) They are acting as their own authority. In other words they make up their minds on what they think - even if it is next to nothing.

Often ideas that are assimilated in this way are thinly held – very little to them. They are held firmly but often the only authority behind the belief is that, “I think so, so there!” Matters of religious belief are reduced to a matter of personal opinion or personal feeling – “What I feel is right.” The idea that there could be objective truth in religion is thus implicitly denied; religious truth is, by this definition, a subjective feeling.

The problem here is that there is objective truth in religion – particularly in Christianity where we centre on the historical events of Christ’s life and death. It is simply not true that matters of religion can be a matter of personal opinion or feeling. This is where we need to choose an authority to make sense of the confusing religious opinions.

This leads us to the fundamental problem of the “smorgasbord” approach to religious belief – “I can pick and choose from the variety of beliefs out there”. The problem is this:
Each of the world religions or major philosophical schools of thought has what is known as a “worldview”, a way of seeing and understanding reality that is unique to it. It is like a set of spectacles that filters everything the person hears and sees so that only what already “fits” with the worldview gets through to the conscious mind. Individual beliefs in each system integrate with other beliefs in the system and to some degree “make sense” if you adopt the whole system, but apart from the system often don’t make sense at all. So to choose ideas from one system and then ideas from another and so on and mix them all up results in a set of beliefs that have no coherence with each other.

Let’s illustrate:
* Christians believe that God created the universe, physical and spiritual. He created the physical universe in such a way that it has a real existence, independent of Himself. God and the universe are not the same thing. He established laws – physical and spiritual – by which the universe operates. He then created man with this same independence. Man was created both physical and spiritual. Each new conception of a human baby is also the creation of a completely new independent and real human personality – body, soul and spirit. Man was created by a personal God with the intent, on God’s part, that God and man would relate to each other personally. Thus individual human personality has the highest value in the universe. God created man to help rule the physical universe so he gave man free will and a real independence from God so he could make real and meaningful choices in his own right.
* The Secular humanist view is that this universe is purely physical and is the result of impersonal forces of nature which we can observe scientifically. This physical universe is all that there is. There is no spirit, no God. Man is “nothing but” an advanced chemical accident. By this definition as it is not physical and as such human personality has no ultimate value. The only value is the survival of the fittest. Because we are “nothing but” physical beings made up of chemical reactions and random electrical impulses we are governed by the law of cause and effect in the physical world so human personality is not “real” and the idea of free will is nonsense.
* The Hindu belief is that there is an eternal spirit that is the “essence” of everything. Creation, and mankind, are but “blips” on the surface of this eternal spirit, and as such we are “accidents”, we have no intrinsic value. Everything is thus essentially the eternal spirit – God and the universe are the same thing. The only value we can have as persons is to be absorbed into this eternal spirit and lose our personal identity as personal identity has no real meaning or value. Because we are essentially one with the eternal spirit anyway we have no real independence and the idea of free will is nonsense.


As you can see even at a basic level these three schools of thought are entirely different. But the real question has to be, “Which one of these schools most lines up with reality as we seem to experience it?”

The Christian argues that Christianity makes the most sense of reality as we find it, while the others do not. Take for instance the simple matter of free will. Do we feel in normal life that we have the power of making decisions in a free, undetermined way that can change our lives and events around us? The answer is obviously, “Yes.” We can choose to believe we have no choice in life but that in itself is a choice – because some other person will choose to believe he does have choice and will exercise it. Yet both Secular Humanism and Hinduism deny that possibility. Only Christianity affirms the nature of free will as we actually experience it, Secular humanism and Hinduism do not. Not only does Christianity affirm at this point reality as we actually experience it, it places a high, ultimate value on free will and the exercise of it.
The three views are fundamentally different on these and most other points. So to pick ideas out from each one that we like the “look” of and mix them together is to create a mix that is internally contradictory. However each of the worldviews in itself has a certain internal consistency which gives it credibility in isolation.

The question, as we have seen, is: when we try to match these alternate worldviews to life as we experience it do we find contradictions between them and reality? Does the religion/philosophy/worldview really account for reality as we experience it? On this point Christianity claims to give a better, more coherent and more consistent approach to understanding life as we experience it than do the other two views.

My point here is that it is impossible to mix ideas from one source with those from another. The philosophical underpinnings are so different and the resultant lifestyle so different that it is like trying to mix oil and water. They are different authorities, saying different things. They are not “all roads leading to God” – some don’t even believe there is a God (e.g. Buddhism and Secular Humanism).

Non Christians can see that for us Christians to have credibility we should believe Christian belief and act like Christians. They are not sure what that is but they are sure that what they see in Christians is usually not it. Generally when they see the real thing they respect it. But on the other hand they tend not to use the same measuring rod against their own belief systems and lifestyles. The reality is everyone is a hypocrite as everyone has a criteria of "what is right" and no one actually lives up to their own criteria.

Strangely enough it is Christians who seem to think that it is not important whether we believe Christian beliefs or not. Many Christians want to pick and choose what they want to believe from the Bible. When the non-Christian sees this sort of behaviour Christians automatically lose credibility in the eyes of the non-Christian and we are branded “Hypocrites”. And rightly so. It is all a question of authority.

The Point is this: To say we are Christians means we should believe Christian beliefs.
It is simply not justifiable to call ourselves Christians if we believe, for instance, Hindu or Buddhist beliefs. To be honest in those circumstances we would have to call ourselves a Hindu or a Buddhist. In other words the content of any belief system is a given. It is not something we can make up for ourselves. In the case of Christianity the belief system is given in the Bible. It is simply not honest to say, “I am a Christian” and then to believe ideas contrary to the Bible or live a lifestyle contrary to the Bible.

When Christians say: “We believe the Bible is the only guide for faith (worldview) and practice (lifestyle)” they are thus saying something about a choice of authority. Everyone must choose what authorities they believe. Christians are openly acknowledging this fact of life and are making a real decision on what authority they will adhere to – even though they acknowledge they will not be able to do so perfectly.
This is a decision of maturity. The child accepts and assumes authorities given to them by others to be true. Maturity demands that we choose our authorities intelligently for ourselves.

HOMEWORK:

You will need to set aside some time in a quiet place to do this.
Take a piece of paper and write down the following headings:
* What do I believe about God?
* What do I believe about Jesus?
* What do I believe about life after death?
* What do I believe about morals?
* Is there some external standard of right and wrong or is it just a matter of opinion?
* List some moral actions you are convinced are wrong.
* How did we get here?
* Where does evil come from?

1. Briefly write down what you think about each of these. You may want to add some other similar questions that touch on the deep things of life. There are no right or wrong answers; it is simply a matter of clarifying what you think.
2. When you have written down what you believe about these things ask yourself the following questions about each one:
a. Have I proven this for myself through study or experience or do I believe this because I received the idea from someone or some book/TV programme etc. that purported to be an authority?
b. Do I have any proof for the idea?
c. Where did I get the idea from? Identify the source of the idea in your thinking. You may have to sit quietly for several minutes for your mind to focus on this and provide the answer. Was this source actually an authority? Do they have credibility or was it just an idea they had?
3. Can you identify alternative points of view to the idea you hold?
4. Can you identify who or what your authorities are? Are they your parents, school-teachers, who?

You may be surprised at how little you believe that you have proven for yourself or that has a credible authority behind it.

5. Consider the root issue in this study: What Authority am I following? Can you identify what your authority is? Can you see that to be a Christian logically requires that one accepts the Bible as ones authority rather than other ideas?

6. Are you prepared to make a decision to accept the Bible as your final authority for all matters of faith (belief) and practice (lifestyle)? If so pray the Transformer prayer every day this week.

7. Remember to read out loud and pray the transformer verses and prayer every day this week.

TRANSFORMER VERSES:

2 Timothy 3: 16-17.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Isaiah 55:11
“… so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”


TRANSFORMER PRAYER:
Father God, I understand that to be a Christian and live fully a Christian life as you intend I need to be “transformed by the renewing of my mind.” I recognise that I have accepted ideas from many authorities in my life that are contrary to how you think, but you want me to “have the mind of Christ.” I see that you have given us your word, the Bible, so that we can be “renewed in knowledge in the image of you, my Creator.”
Father I make that commitment today to allow you to renew my mind. I choose to make the Bible my authority for all matters of faith and practice. I give to you my old mind – my old way of thinking, my old way of understanding things. I understand that there are many things in my mind that are not what you think and I don’t even know what they are at this point in time. I make a faith committal to allow you to renew my mind, to change my mind. I put my old mind on the Cross and receive from you the mind of Christ as a gift.

I receive your word and I thank you for the fact that your word is God breathed, it is filled with the power of your Spirit and so it will accomplish in my life what you purpose for it. Amen.