Tim Ross’s talk on “The Bible - The word of people or the word of God ?”

The Bible is the Word of God, not the words of God.

The eternal Word of God inhabits and permeates the words of the Bible like a honeycomb soaked in honey. The Word of God is to the Bible what honey is to a honeycomb. The words of the Bible are the honeycomb that holds the eternal Word of God.

Because of this God speaks through the Bible in a distinctive way that cannot be found in any other book. Other books may be inspired by God, they may even contain prophetic messages from God, but they are not steeped in the eternal Word of God in the same way that the Bible is.

It is this that makes the Bible completely unique, and makes it something living, vital and authoritative. The actual words of the Bible in themselves were written by humans who wrote in their own language, culture and time, but the Bible is also alive with the Word of God.

Thinking of the Bible this way means that you cannot dismiss bits of it as irrelevant or no longer applicable for out time. Instead, we look at those passages and ask, what is the Word of God saying through these passages.

This view of the Bible sees the whole of the Bible as the Word of God, but it’s the honey we’re after, the creative and authoritative message, which permeates every verse. We just have to be careful that we don’t mistake the honeycomb for the honey.

“The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free... God's word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God's Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.” A.W. Tozer, preacher and writer.

So, how do you go about extracting the honey from the honeycomb?
He do we discover what it is that God wants to say to us through the Bible?

Light

This is where we need another illustration and the most helpful one is light. It’s John chapter one again:

“In him was life, and that life was the light of men.” John1:4
The Word of God is described as light. Just as Jesus was the Light of the World, so the written Word of God is described in the Bible as a light for our path.

The trouble is, we read the Bible through filtered eyes.

What we read is coloured by our own culture, our upbringing, the Christian teaching we have received, our own theology, the history of the Church etc. All these colour the way we understand what we are reading. This is why the same verse can mean different things to different people in different countries or times.

“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.” George Bernard Shaw

It is impossible to take away all the filters. Instead, we need better filters that will help us see the light more clearly. In fact, with light, if you only need three filters (red, green and blue) to reproduce white light when they are mixed together in the right way.

John Wesley realised this very point. He wanted to be sure that his theological ideas were scriptural, but he also knew that anyone can extract verses from the Bible to make it support their ideas. What he needed was a framework for answering his theological questions. The system he came up with came to be called

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Bible – The Word of God – the Light of God

At the heart of our theology. Wesley believed the Bible should be the primary authority for deciding whether we are understanding the Word of God right. But he also then looked to Tradition, Experience and Reason to support and bear out what thought the Bible was saying.

These three can act as the filters we need to help us “see the light”, so to speak.
To determine whether something is the Word of God we can ask:

(1) What does the whole Bible say about the matter?

(2) What has the church through two thousand years said?

(3) Does this make reasonable sense?

(4) Is it proven out in Christian experience.

• The book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church of America says this:
• “Wesley believed that the living core the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience and confirmed by reason.”

We do not look to tradition, reason, and experience as additional sources of truth to the Bible, but they bear it out and confirm what we believe it says to us.

Having said all that we need to keep in mind the verse from Hebrews chapter 4, which says that the Word of God is “living and active”. When we read the Bible, we do so not primarily as an intellectual exercise, but as a spiritual one. The purpose of reading the Bible is to encounter God in His word. There are times when we need to set aside all intellectual theorizing and just give room for God to speak to us.

• “Shift from your mind conquering the Bible, down into surrender to the Spirit of God who will whisper to you what He meant by what He wrote.” Martha Kilpatrick, spiritual writer.

“May the strength of God pilot us, may the wisdom of God instruct us, may the hand of God protect us, may the word of God direct us. May your salvation, O Lord, be always ours this day and for evermore.” St. Patrick

Further Reading:

The Living Word of God, Ben Witherington III.

Providentissimus Deus, Encyclical Of Pope Leo Xiii On The Study Of Holy Scripture
This can be found at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_18111893_providentissimus-deus_en.html

The Authority of the Bible Today is an article on a website put together for A-level RE students. It puts across the various view-points very well and without prejudice. It can be found here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rsposse/bibauth.htm