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Well, dear friends, please remain standing for the reading of God’s Word.
We continue our consideration of 2 Peter.
And my sermon text for this Lord’s Day evening is, again, 2 Peter 1, verses 19 through 21.
I’m going to begin reading at verse 16 to fill out the context a bit.
But again, you’ll find that on page 1207 in your Pew Bible.
Dear friends, hear the Word of our God.
2 Peter 1, beginning at verse 16.
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 born 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.
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God endures forever.
Let’s pray for God to bless the preaching of His Word.
Oh Lord and Father in heaven, we thank you for sending your Holy Spirit to carry along
the prophets and apostles who wrote the Scriptures.
And therefore, Lord, we can rest our confidence in this sure and certain Word.
We pray, Heavenly Father, that as we consider this portion of your God-breathed, inerrant,
infallible Word this evening, we pray that your Spirit would open our minds and our hearts
to behold wondrous things from your Word.
We ask that you would edify us, that you would instruct us, that you would challenge us if
necessary, rebuke us, Lord, but build us up in our most holy faith.
Build us up in holiness and sanctification through what we hear this evening.
Help us to embrace these truths, to chew upon them, and grant that the implications of these
truths would take root in our hearts and bear spiritual fruit unto holiness in our lives.
For your praise and honor and glory, we ask these things in Jesus’ name, and all of God’s
people said.
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
That’s it.
It’s completed.
The title of my sermon this evening is The Source and Origin of Scripture.
And there are five words you can listen for in my sermon tonight.
The words Scripture, Spirit, Origin, Inspiration, and Word.
Well, dear ones, on the last Lord’s Day, we began our study in consideration of this
passage of 2 Peter.
And we saw on the last Lord’s Day that in a time like ours, in a time when there is
so much confusion and so much uncertainty, especially about the big questions, the Scriptures
provide us with certainty and with clarity, with clearness.
They provide us with a certainty and clarity that counteracts the prevailing confusion
and uncertainty that saturate our contemporary secular world.
As an antidote to confusion and uncertainty, our text for this Lord’s Day evening points
us to the Holy Scriptures for such clarity and certainty.
Since after all, the prophetic word of the Scriptures, as the Scriptures are described
in verse 19, those Scriptures are the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God.
On the last Lord’s Day, we considered specifically what verse 19 teaches about the certainty
and the reliability or the trustworthiness of Holy Scripture.
Because the Bible is God’s Word, you and I can depend upon what it says.
And because it is God’s Word, it speaks with a basic clarity.
There are difficult portions and sections of the Bible, no doubt.
Not every part of Scripture is equally clear to all.
Nevertheless, when it comes to the basic thrust and message of the Bible, the Bible
was not written for academics.
The Bible was written by common men under the Spirit’s inspiration for common men and
women.
And so the Scriptures can be relied upon.
Because the Bible is God’s Word, we can depend upon what it says.
It is even more fully confirmed, as it says in verse 19, or even more certain as the NIV
translates it.
It is even more certain and more fully confirmed than the Apostle Peter’s eyewitness testimony
to the glorious transfiguration of Jesus, as important as that glorious and miraculous
historical event was.
We also saw that the Scriptures bring God’s saving light into our world of spiritual darkness.
So with all of this in mind, let us continue to work our way through this important passage.
We’ll be focusing especially on verses 20 and 21 as we consider the source and origin
of Holy Scripture, the source and origin of Holy Scripture.
As Peter describes the source and origin of Scripture, he tells us negatively what that
source is not, and then he tells us positively what that source is.
Again, look with me if you would at verse 20.
It says, 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 negatively speaking, the Holy Scriptures did not originate in the will of man.
The Lord employed men.
He used men in the writing and production of Holy Scripture.
Nevertheless, the Scriptures do not originate from the prophets’ will, from the will of
the prophets or apostles who penned the Scriptures.
And notice how Peter begins verse 20.
He says, knowing this first of all, or again as the NIV translates it, above all you must
understand.
See, in using this language, Peter is indicating that what he is about to say is obviously
something that is very important, something that he wants his readers to take to heart.
And this is what the Spirit wants us, the church, to take to heart.
Now there is a controversy about what exactly Peter means when he says that no prophecy
of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.
It’s my understanding that our Roman Catholic friends, if you run into a Roman Catholic
apologist or someone who knows the Catholic position and faith well, they’ll often point
to this passage, this verse, and they’ll often say, look you Protestants, you Protestants
believe in private interpretation.
You believe that all of God’s people should privately interpret the Scriptures apart from
the teaching magisterium of the church.
But verse 20 says, no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.
Well friends, in context here, it seems very clear that Peter is speaking here of the private
interpretation of the prophet.
After all, it’s clear from the context he is speaking to the issue not of our responsibility
to interpret the Scriptures responsibly, but rather he is speaking to the origin and
source of the Holy Scriptures.
Peter is speaking of the private interpretation of the prophet.
He is not speaking against our individual responsibility to read and interpret Scripture
according to the rules of the Word, contrary to what our Roman Catholic friends may say.
Now certainly it’s important for us to read the Scriptures in community with God’s people.
That’s why we believe in confessions and creeds and catechisms.
Sola Scriptura is not the same thing as Solo Scriptura.
It’s not the same thing as just me and Jesus and the Bible in my private prayer closet.
We need to read the Scriptures in the community of God’s people.
We are a community of interpretation, and the Scriptures were addressed to God’s people
corporately.
It has individual relevance, and we should read the Scriptures on our own and study them
on our own, but we read them in context of the community of Christ, in the context of
the church.
Nevertheless, the focus here is on the source and origin of Scripture.
Dr. James White, the Reformed Baptist apologist, has a very helpful book on the subject of
Sola Scriptura.
It’s called, surprise, surprise, Scripture Alone, and in that book he offers a helpful
explanation of what the Apostle Peter is getting at in this passage.
And to quote from Dr. White, Dr. White says that Peter is not talking about how people
interpret the words of prophecy, but about the certainty of the Scriptures themselves.
And he goes on to explain what Peter means here.
He says,
Those of you who’ve taken the inquirers class with me as we’ve gone through Calvin Cummings’s
little book, Confessing Christ, in the very first chapter of that book where he deals
with the Bible, one of the things that he points out is that the Bible bears God’s
signature.
And I think if I’m remembering the statistic correctly, the term, the phrase, thus saith
the Lord, or its equivalent phrase, occurs somewhere in the neighborhood of like 600
times in the Old Testament alone.
The Bible contains God’s signature.
It claims to be from the Lord.
It claims to originate from the Lord, and it backs that claim.
There are evidences within the Scripture of that claim itself.
So again, the Scriptures do not come from the will of man, including the will of the
Apostles and prophets who penned them.
Well then, where did it come from?
Well, positively speaking, it is from the Holy Spirit, and this is emphasized by the
language here that we read in verse 21.
It says, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God.
Now notice, men did speak.
God did employ real human beings.
He didn’t just turn the prophets and the apostles into robots.
He used them.
They spoke, but how did they speak?
They spoke from God.
But again, the origin is from God as they were what?
Carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Dr. Simon Kistermacher explains the imagery here.
He says this participle discloses the continual activity of the Holy Spirit who carried men
along in the work of writing Scripture.
The figure of speech is borrowed from the nautical vocabulary in the sense that a sailboat
is carried along by the wind.
Have you ever been sailing?
You know that if you’re in a sailboat that the sailboat is carried along by the wind.
The wind decides, I mean, obviously you can maneuver and manipulate, you can manipulate
it, but you depend upon the wind to carry it along, and that’s the imagery here.
We are carried along.
The prophets and apostles were carried along by the Holy Spirit so that what they wrote
was exactly what the Lord wanted them to write.
But immediately we would get an objection to this assertion, especially from the more
liberal quarters of the professing church.
Some would object by saying, well, then you Orthodox Presbyterians, you conservative Bible
believing Christians, what you’re saying then is that the Bible was dictated by God.
The so-called dictation theory.
That God completely erased the human personalities and the writing styles of the authors of Scripture
and they were basically like, you know, dictation machines.
God kind of grabbed their hands and made them write or what have you.
Well, is Peter here teaching the so-called dictation theory of inspiration?
Again, the answer is no.
To quote again from Dr. Kistermacher, he explains, he says, the Spirit used human beings with
their talents and insights, their peculiarities and characteristics, keeping them from sin
and error.
The Holy Spirit is in control of man.
Therefore, the text is clear on this point.
In the writing of Scripture, man is passive and the Spirit is active.
And again, as Dr. White says, men did speak.
Scripture is in human language.
It had human authors who were not mere mobile dictation machines.
They spoke in their tongue.
They spoke from their contexts.
They spoke within their cultures, but what they spoke, they spoke from God and only as
they were carried along or moved by the Spirit.
Here is the mysterious yet wondrous interface of the human and the divine in Scripture’s
origination.
While men are speaking, they are doing so under the power and direction of the Holy
Spirit so that the result of this divine miracle, inspiration is a divine miracle, the result
of this divine miracle is, as Paul puts it, God breathed.
It is not the men themselves who are, quote, inspired, but the Scriptures, the results
of this divine initiative in revelation.
The Scriptures are God breathed, Theopneustos, breathed out by God.
Now what are some of the implications of the Spirit’s inspiration of Holy Scripture?
We’ve considered tonight, we’ve considered the origin of Holy Scripture, that it comes
not from men, but it comes from the Lord.
This has so many profound implications for our lives as followers of Jesus Christ.
Let me just mention a couple implications this evening.
Dear friends, since the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, since they
originate from God the Holy Spirit, you can trust them fully and without hesitation.
Let me ask you this, does God ever lie?
Who is called the father of lies in Scripture?
It’s not God, it’s Satan, right?
The God of the Bible is the God of truth.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God said, what about himself?
He says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No man cometh unto the Father except by me.
God is the God of truth, Christ is the Christ, is the way, the truth, and the life.
He is the living truth of God, and the Spirit is revealed in Scripture to be the Spirit
of truth.
And so would it make any sense for the triune God who is the God of truth to communicate
his word through lies, inaccuracies?
No.
We can trust the Word of God.
Now again, that doesn’t mean that every part of Scripture is equally clear.
It doesn’t mean that there aren’t difficult interpretive questions and conundrums and
the passages that require a lot of study and research and where even good and godly Bible-believing
scholars may differ on how to properly interpret a given passage, but nevertheless, the Scriptures
themselves are breathed out by God, the God of truth.
And so in their original autograph, in their original autographs, they are without error,
and we can trust in them.
And we have faithful witness to those original autographs in the text of Scripture, for the
Scriptures are the Word of God.
So believer, since the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit and originate from God,
they are fully trustworthy, even as God himself is trustworthy.
Dear listener, are you trusting with full confidence in the absolute trustworthiness
of the inspired Word of God?
And are you doing so even in the face of a culture of uncertainty and confusion, a culture
which mocks at the Scriptures, a culture which holds them up to contempt, a culture where
many would sneer at you if you say, well, I’m a Bible-believing Christian.
I stake my life, my eternity on this book.
And by the way, this isn’t just a book.
This is a library of books.
This is the writings of the prophets and apostles who were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
It is the Word of God.
But many would mock you and say, oh, come on.
Come on.
You’re one of those, you’re one of those Jesus freaks.
You’re one of those nutty religious quacks.
Friends, this is the Word of God.
It claims to be the Word of God.
It demonstrates itself to be the Word of God.
And our challenge to an unbelieving world is to take up and read, read it, and to pray
that the Holy Spirit would open the eyes of the blind to see the light of the glory of
God in the face of Jesus Christ as he is revealed in the Gospel.
But again, are you, dear Christian, relying with full confidence in the Word of God?
Or has your confidence in the Word of God wavered?
Maybe you say tonight, well, Pastor, you know, I’m a Christian, I believe the Bible, but
I have questions.
And that’s okay to have questions.
It’s okay to have questions.
Jesus was very kind to, remember doubting Thomas?
He was a little bit skeptical.
He had been burned.
He had thought that, you know, thought that this, all this talk about the resurrection,
he didn’t want to believe it because he didn’t want to be disappointed.
And the Lord was very merciful to him.
Well, let us realize that it’s okay to ask questions, but realize that there are answers
out there.
This book is the most studied book in all of human history.
And I can guarantee you, any question about the Scriptures or about a certain passage
or a certain teaching of the Bible that unbelievers may throw in your face and say, explain this.
And have you ever been in a situation like that, you’re in a conversation with an unbeliever
and they throw an objection out to you and you realize, wow, I’ve never thought about
that before.
I don’t know off the top of my head how to answer that objection.
It’s okay to admit it.
But be assured there are answers to those questions.
God has raised up great theologians and Bible scholars and exegetes and pastors in the church
throughout its history who have studied the Scriptures.
There are answers out there.
And if you have trouble finding the answers, come and talk to me.
I’ll, you know, I’ll pull out my commentaries and I’ll give you a big pile of books to look
at if you’re wrestling with certain questions.
But there are answers.
So don’t lose heart.
Continue to trust in the Lord even if you don’t have all the answers.
The unbeliever wants to have all their questions answered before they will believe.
But the wiser advice is to follow the counsel of St. Augustine who said, what, I believe
in order that I might understand and not the other way around.
We trust the Word of God and as we trust in the Word and wait for God to give us more
light as we wrestle with the questions we may have, then our confidence in the Word
will be deepened and strengthened.
But understand too, another, and I close with this tonight, understand beloved that the
Lord Jesus Christ, He Himself is at the heart and center of all of Scripture.
The Old Testament prepares the world for the coming of the promised Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth,
and the New Testament reveals Him.
All of Scripture is centered upon our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Peter here describes the Scriptures in verse 19 again as what?
The prophetic Word.
The Old Testament in particular is what he had in mind, although what he says applies
to both Old and New Testaments.
The Old Testament though in particular is prophetic in that it anticipates and prophesies
and foreshadows and points forward to the saving work of Jesus, the promised Messiah.
And therefore this Spirit-inspired Word penned by holy men who were carried along by the
Holy Spirit confronts us with our sin and need for a Savior and reveals the good news
about Jesus Christ.
That is ultimately what the Bible is all about.
So as you read the Word and as you wrestle through difficult passages in the Word, don’t
lose sight of Jesus because He’s the ultimate central subject and theme of this book that
we call the Bible, this collection of books that we call the Bible, the Word of God.
And so friends, let me ask you, what will you do with the Christ who is revealed in
the Spirit-inspired Scriptures?
Will you reject Him or will you receive Him?
You might say, I think I’ll give that some thought and get back to you.
You can’t be neutral.
You’re either for Christ or against Christ.
You’re either pro-Christ or anti-Christ.
There’s no razor thin neutral ground that you can walk.
So if you go away from this place this evening or if you’re watching online, if you go away
and say, well, I’m not going to commit now, I still have to think it through, well, you’ve
already made your decision at this point.
May God turn your heart to Christ.
May you submit to Him in faith and repentance.
May you embrace His Word.
May you believe in order that you may understand.
For again, the Scriptures originate not from the will of man, but they originate from God
the Holy Spirit who carried along the holy men of God who spoke from God.
Amen.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank You, Lord, once again for the Scriptures.
We thank You that You’ve given us a sure and certain and trustworthy Word.
Help us, Lord, to grow in our knowledge of the Word.
Help us, Lord, to wrestle through the difficult parts and to see the richness and fullness
of the truth revealed therein.
We would ask, Lord, that we would be those whose minds and hearts and consciences are
saturated with Your God-breathed, inerrant, infallible Word.
A Word that is a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path, a guide to our way, and our
comfort in our journey to glory.
It is in Jesus’ name that we pray, and all of God’s people said, Amen.
As we respond to