Chapter 6

Inerrancy and Christ’s Unbreakable Bible

Kevin DeYoung

My theme in this chapter is “Inerrancy and Christ’s Unbreakable Bible.” Any one of these big ideas would be big enough on its own. But I want you to see, not just how important any one of these topics is, but how important it is that they are all tied together.21

If we are to share the gospel with confidence and preach with authority, then we must be sure that the message we are proclaiming and the book that we are expounding are true. All true. All we have to offer the world is truth and grace. You cannot have one without the other. If you think that you can magnify grace by shrinking truth, you will find that you make people blind to both. When you teach your children about the creation of the world and Noah and the flood and Moses and the Red Sea and Jesus walking on water and Jesus casting out demons and Jesus coming back to life, when you share your faith with your skeptical neighbor, when you open the Bible to teach your hungry small group, when you stand behind the pulpit to preach the Word of God verse-by-verse, year-by-year, decade-by-decade, there is one question that towers above all others: Are you telling the truth? When you get up to preach or teach or lead your Bible study, are you telling the truth?

A Lesson in Telling (and Listening to) the Truth

Not too long ago our two oldest boys came in from the snow mired in a bit of controversy. I had barely walked into the house, just home from work, when my wife told me the tale.

“I’m so frustrated,” she exclaimed. “You need to talk to the boys. Ian and Jacob were playing with their friends outside, and now Jacob is crying because the side of his face is red and icy and bruised. Ian hit him in the head with a snowball.”

“Okay,” I tried to say calmly, “did you talk to Ian? What did he say?”

“Well, he claims that he didn’t do it. He says Jacob took a pile of snow and started rubbing it in his own face and that’s how his cheek got red and icy and bruised. It’s so frustrating. Why won’t he just tell the truth?”

When I found Ian—our oldest child, about ten at the time—I asked him what happened. He told the same story about his eight-year-old brother rubbing snow in his own face. I said, “Really? That’s hard to believe. You’re telling me you didn’t throw any snowballs out there?” To which Ian sheepishly replied, “I mean, I might have thrown one. But I didn’t hit Jacob. Maybe my snowball bounced off a tree and landed on him.”

Now I was frustrated. This was a far-fetched story. Snowballs don’t normally bounce off trees. I just wanted Ian to tell me the truth. So I thought, We are going straight to 1 John 1 for family devotions tonight. I read the passage: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (vv. 8–9). We talked about sin. We talked about the deception of sin and how we lie to cover our sin. We talked about how important it is to tell the truth and confess our sins so that we can be forgiven in Christ. I had everyone go around the table and confess a sin that wanted to be forgiven. After my youngest kids took a turn, we got to my oldest son.

“Anything you want to say, Ian?” I asked.

“Um, I guess I didn’t respond in a good way when Mom was upset with me because Jacob was hurt.”

“Okay, that’s good. Anything else you want to share?”

“No.”

I sighed a little under my breath and moved on to Jacob. “Anything you want to say?” And then in an instant my eight-year-old burst into tears and blurted out, “I took the snow and rubbed it in my face!” My wife and I didn’t know if we should laugh or cry. I rushed around the table and gave Jacob a big hug and told him I was proud of him for letting us know what really happened. We also told Ian we were sorry for not believing his story. Sometimes it can be hard to know what to believe. Sometimes the strangest stories are the truest. Sometimes you can’t trust your own instincts. We have to listen carefully for the truth.

Because we don’t have anything if we don’t have the truth. This isn’t about Christians claiming to have a monopoly on truth. Far from it. We want to put all the truth we have on Free Parking for anyone who wants it. We want to know the truth so we can share the truth. But how can we have the truth if we cannot trust the Scriptures? You may doubt whether you can trust a politician. You may not believe what you read on the Internet. (Good!) You may not even be sure you can trust yourself. But you can always trust the Bible. All of it. All the time, every verse, without fail, without exception, without end. Amen and Amen.

Following the Leader (and the Book He Followed)

My aim in this chapter is simple. I want us to see what Jesus believed about the Scriptures so that we can know what we should believe about the Scriptures. We will look at four passages from the Gospels. Let’s start with John 10:31–38.

The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?” The Jews answered him, “It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

The Jews want to stone Jesus because, in verse 30, he has just pronounced that, “I and the Father are one.” The crowds understand what some modern scholars refuse to understand. Namely, that Jesus believed himself to be divine. This makes them furious, which prompts Jesus to take them back to their own Scriptures. In particular, he quotes from Psalm 82, a little known chapter with an obscure verse about to serve an important purpose.

In order to understand what Jesus is saying, we need to understand the whole psalm.

A Psalm of Asaph. God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” They have neither knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken. I said, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.” Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!

This is a strange psalm and Jesus pulls from it a strange verse. He quotes the line “I said you are gods.” The Hebrew word there is elohim, which usually means God, but can mean gods. Here the psalmist is not thinking of divine beings per se. He uses the word in reference to kings or judges or magistrates. Jesus is not trying to prove his divinity from this one psalm, rather he is trying to puncture their pretentions. He says in effect, “Look, you’re hung up on the word ‘God,’ that I say I’m the Son of God. But don’t you remember in your own Law how these princes and these wicked rulers were called ‘gods.’” Jesus doesn’t think these rulers were divine beings, but they were in their positions by divine appointment and wielded divinely given authority. And if they can be called “gods” (in some sense of the word), why not the Christ?

The reason to spend time in Psalm 82 and take the effort to understand Jesus’ argument is so we can get to the comment he makes in John 10:35: “Scripture cannot be broken.” Jesus can make this remark almost as an aside because he knew it was uncontroversial. This was the common ground he shared with opponents. They may have debated the deity of Christ, but no Jew would have denied the utter trustworthiness of Scripture. It’s really remarkable what Jesus is doing. The divine Son of God has no hesitancy in arguing a point based on one word from a confusing verse in an out of the way psalm. Jesus is not quoting from one of the great passages in Exodus or one of the great servant songs in Isaiah. Jesus does not even bother to prove that this psalm or this verse or this word is authoritative. Its authority was unquestioned because it was a part of their Bible. As one commentator put it, “It was sufficient proof of the infallibility of any sentence or phrase or clause to show that it constituted a portion of what the Jews called the Scripture.”22

And Jesus said the Scripture cannot be broken. The Greek word is luo. It’s the same word we’ll see in a moment in Matthew 5:18–19 where Jesus warns against relaxing (luo) or annulling or breaking or loosing or nullifying or setting aside any little jot or tittle of Scripture. For Jesus, no word in his Bible could be falsified. No promise or threat could fall short of fulfillment. No statement could be found guilty of error.

The Scriptures could not be broken because they were the very words of God. And who would dare suggest that a word committed to writing by Almighty God could be an errant word, a wrong word, or a broken word? Such a thing would not have been a sign of enlightenment to Jesus, but a sign of blasphemy. There was no debate in Jesus’ day about the authority of Scripture. How could Scripture be broken if Scripture was God himself speaking?

It’s also worth noting that Jesus believed this unbreakable word was an understandable word. We all know this intuitively but we don’t often think of the implications. Dozens of times Jesus appeals to a text from the Old Testament thinking that such an appeal constitutes a strong argument on his side. He assumed that the Old Testament was not only authoritative, but that it possessed a shared, discernible meaning. Jesus often cites the Scriptures as evidence for his teaching. Other times he chides the Jews for not conforming to the Word of God. Six times Jesus says, “Have you not read?” suggesting that if they knew the Scriptures they would not be making the mistakes they were making. The apostles did the same thing—quoting from the Scriptures, reasoning from the Scriptures, alluding to the Scriptures—all with the assumption that these texts said what was true and the truth that they communicated could be understood. Reader response theory would have been very strange to Jesus. He believed that the Word of God—though it would take the illuminating work of the Spirit to really appropriate what it says—could be understood even by his opponents.

Are you familiar with the fable about the six blind men and the elephant? In this little doggerel you have six blind men groping around in the darkness trying to figure out what they are feeling. One of them touches the elephant’s side and says it’s a wall. One of them pulls on his tail and says it’s a rope. One of them pulls on his ear and says it’s a fan. And on and on. The point of the fable is that this is what we are all like in religion. We think we know God but we are just feeling our way in the darkness, all thinking that the part of the truth we’ve encountered gives the ability to pontificate about the whole thing. We all have our theories. We all have our interpretations. We all have our ideas. But in the end we are just blind men who can’t see the elephant.

It’s a nice analogy, but I hope you can see two colossal problems with the fable. One, the analogy is told from the position of omniscience. There is someone who knows the complete truth of the situation, enough to know that the elephant is really an elephant and the men are really blind. The story doesn’t work except in the context of absolute truth. The other problem is that the whole analogy breaks down if the elephant speaks. The elephant in the story doesn’t say anything. He just stands there silently as blind men try to figure out what they are feeling. But what if the elephant says, “Hello, I’m not a fan. I’m not a wall. I’m not a rope. I’m an elephant.” Then what? Should we call it a paradox? Or a cloud of unknowing? Or have a conference about what to make of these new sounds? If the elephant speaks, all our talk of chastened epistemology is less a sign of humility than a sign that we are hard of hearing. The Jesus we meet in John 10 is a Jesus utterly confident in the Scripture and utterly confident that the Scriptures communicate truth that humans can understand and should accept.

Pharisaic Legalism or Christlike Loyalty?

For our second text let’s look at Matthew 5:17–19. Jesus says Scripture cannot be broken in John 10, and he says much the same thing in this famed passage from the Sermon on the Mount.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

It’s important to note from the beginning that Jesus is talking about more than the kerygmatic event. In neo-orthodoxy the authority was in the Word of God, but it was the Word of God as it comes to us by the Spirit in preaching or through the proclamation of the gospel. Neo-orthodoxy tries to distance the locus of authority from the written text. But here Jesus clearly has in mind written Scripture. We know this is the case because he references an iota, the smallest letter in the alphabet, and a dot, the tiniest stroke of the pen. Jesus did not come to abolish or relax the smallest speck of Scripture, not the most miniscule marking.

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, especially in chapter 5, Jesus presses home the truest and fullest meaning of Scripture. To be sure, he will gladly undermine the false traditions of the scribes and Pharisees. He will even correct their false interpretations of Scripture. But he will never allow the Word of God to be circumvented by tradition or self-justifying circumlocutions. Every speck is true, unbreakable, and must be applied to our lives. As Donald Macleod puts it, “For Jesus, jot-and-tittle loyalty to Scripture is neither legalistic nor evasive. . . . Jot-and-tittle fulfillment of the law means avoiding anger as well as homicide; lust as well as fornication; swearing as well as perjury. It means turning the other cheek, going the extra mile, blowing no trumpets when we make donations for charity.”23

Do you remember what Jesus says in Matthew 23:23? He’s denouncing the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy; and in the midst of all these woes, Jesus criticizes the religious leaders for tithing their little spices but neglecting the weightier matters of the law like justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Sounds like something Jesus would say, except don’t miss exactly what Jesus communicates. He says, “These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” Jesus didn’t think that it was legalistic to obey the little details in the law. He wasn’t just interested in the big picture or the biggest commandments. He expected obedience to the spirit and to the letter of the law. Of course, there are redemptive historical things going on where elements of the Mosaic dispensation will find their fullest expression in Christ. Obedience to the law is transformed by the coming of Christ. But his coming never meant a “whatever” attitude toward the Scriptures. Jesus shows familiarity with every kind of Scripture and references it all as equally true, authoritative, and never to be ignored.

The Facts of History

Turn over a few more chapters to Matthew 12:38–42. This is our third of four passages I want us to look at.

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” But he answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here.”

Jesus consistently treats biblical history as a narrative of facts. He makes references to Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaac and Jacob, manna in the wilderness, the serpent in the wilderness, Moses, David, Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, Elijah, Elisha, the widow of Zarephath, Naaman, Jonah, and Zechariah, without ever questioning a single story, a single miracle, or a single historical claim. This story about Jonah is the one that is hardest for some people to swallow (pun intended). People will say, “Look, this is clearly just an allusion to a bit of Israel folklore. Jesus doesn’t think that an actual prophet lived in the belly of an actual fish. He’s simply referencing the story much like we might make a passing reference to Aslan breaking the Stone Table or to the orcs of Mordor. Jesus accepted the stories of the Old Testament, but that doesn’t mean he thought the stories were meant to be taken as literal history.”

This interpretation sounds plausible until you look more closely at the details. Jesus also mentions in this paragraph the Queen of Sheba, demonstrable a historical person. He then says that the men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment against Capernaum on the last day. How does this work if the story of Jonah is as historically accurate as Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox? Jesus must be talking about the real people of Nineveh. If I were to say to you, with a sense of dire warning, that you must repent lest the men of Gondor rise up against you, that might be a cool, nerdy thing to say, but it wouldn’t be taken seriously as a threat of judgment because the men of Gondor don’t really exist (sorry to break it to you). T. T. Perowne asks a good question about Jesus’ use of the Jonah story: “Are we to suppose him to say that imaginary persons who at the preaching of an imaginary prophet repented in imagination, shall rise up in that day and condemn the actual impenitence of those his actual hearers?”24 Isn’t it better to conclude that Jesus believed the story of Jonah actually happened in all its wonderful, miraculous detail?

If Jesus is right in his straightforward acceptance of Old Testament history, then boatloads—Titanic loads in fact—of modern biblical criticism must be wrong. For the past 150 to 200 years many modern scholars have argued that the Old Testament is far different than what it seems. The first five books were not written by Moses, but were the product of an elaborate combination of different sources, some of which are a thousand years later than Moses. Isaiah was not written by Isaiah but by two Isaiahs, or maybe three Isaiahs, whose stunning predictions were not actually predictions but after-the-fact pronouncements. If liberal scholars are right, the church misread Israel’s history for almost two millennia. Israel’s story was not about centuries of struggle to be faithful to the One True God and obey his law. What took place instead, they say, was a kind of evolutionary development. Israel moved from animism to polytheism to henotheism (worshiping one god among many existing gods) to monotheism, and finally to the triumph of priestly legalism. Books that claim to be from the Exodus are later than Ezekiel. First Samuel, which was thought to be written after the giving of the law, actually describes Israel before the law. The Pentateuch, instead of being the foundation for Israel’s life, actually came after the glory days were far behind her. This is part and parcel of what seems plain to so much modern scholarship and is not remotely connected to anything we see from Jesus in how he handled the Hebrew Scriptures.

Jesus believed Israel was, during its long history, under the tutelage of Yahweh. He believed that Moses gave a national covenant to live by, that the Pentateuch came at the beginning of their history, that the prophets rebuked and refined Israel for their failures. If the revisionist history is correct, Jesus was monumentally wrong in believing all this. This is not about carrying water for some newfangled doctrine of inerrancy invented by Old Princeton. If all of the liberal theories are right, we don’t just lose Hodge or Warfield, we’re going to lose Jesus. For Jesus did not realize that Leviticus was a betrayal of ethical monotheism. He was unaware of the composite authorship of the Pentateuch. He completely misread Israel’s history. The Son of God was taken in by a national myth no more plausible than that of Romulus and Remus.25

Is it not plausible to think—dare we say quite likely—that Jesus knew Jewish history better than nineteenth-century Germans? Isn’t it safer to side with Jesus and his supremely high view of inspiration and his straightforward understanding of history and chronology? Jesus not only believed the Scriptures could not be broken and that every jot and tittle were from God himself, but he approached the Scriptures believing the chronology was chronological, the history was historical, and the authors of the biblical books were who the Jews thought them to be.

The Greeks and Romans had lots of myths, and they didn’t particularly care whether Hercules was really the illegitimate son of Zeus. It was a fable, a tall tale. It was meant to explain the world. This is entirely different from Christianity and Judaism. In the Judeo-Christian worldview, history matters. Several years ago around Christmastime I wrote a blog about the importance of the virgin birth. Another minister, one who was a part of my denomination at the time, took issue with some of my points. He thought that we didn’t have to believe in the virgin birth. He believed Matthew and Isaiah may have been talking about a young woman, not a literal virgin. Finally, after going back and forth a bit, he landed his final blow:

Do I think the virgin birth is essential to our creed as Christians? That’s not really mine to say, is it? As you say, it has been confessed for centuries and thus, I need to take it seriously and to wrestle with how I understand it. For my part, I take the statement to Mary “all things are possible with God” as more valuable to my faith than the statement “how can this be since I am still a virgin?” I don’t claim that you need to accept my understanding nor would I imagine that you would claim that I must necessarily accept your understanding.

To which I replied, as graciously as I could, “I do, in fact, think you need to accept my understanding of the virgin birth, not because it is my understanding but it is the record of the holy Gospel writers inspired by the Holy Spirit, and it has been the record of the church universal throughout the centuries.” The man’s words sounded humble, but they have no place among those who have been called to teach God’s Word. If you are a fifteen-year-old or a first-year seminary student and you are wrestling with the virgin birth, then by all means let us have remarkable patience. But James 3:1 says not many of you should be teachers for you will be judged more strictly. God doesn’t expect us simply to wrestle with what he says in the Bible or to take the truths of Scripture seriously. He expects us to believe them, and he expects ministers to preach them. If it’s so important to us that “all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27) why would we doubt that he can do seemingly impossible things like causing a virgin to conceive and give birth to our Messiah?

This cannot be stated too strongly: Christianity, from the very beginning, tied itself to history. The most important claims of Christianity are historical claims. And on this history, Christianity must rise or fall. If Jesus has not risen from the dead, Christianity is a great hoax and you are of all people most to be pitied. Pack it in. Sleep in. Enjoy football. Do something else on Sunday morning if the Gospels aren’t history. Because the New Testament tells us there was a man who began his life as a baby born of a woman in Bethlehem. Thousands of people saw him and knew him. He did miracles witnessed by multitudes. He died and rose again and appeared to more than five hundred witnesses at one time. Everyone knew the location of his tomb and could see for themselves that it was empty. Three disciples were eye-witnesses of his majesty on the mountain. They saw redemptive history unfold before their eyes and the Spirit inspired them to record it. We do not follow myths. We are not interested in stories with a nice moral to them. We are not helped by hoping in spiritual possibilities. These things in the Gospels happened. God predicted them. He fulfilled them. He inspired the written record of them. To discount history is to live in a different world than the ones that the biblical authors inhabited.

Scripture Says What God Says

Let’s look at one final passage, Matthew 19:3–6.

And Pharisees came up to him [that is, to Jesus] and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

In order to understand the monumental significance of Jesus’ assumption here, we need see what Genesis does and does not say. Jesus is quoting in verse 5 from Genesis 2:24. And who exactly is he quoting? Well, no one in particular. There is no specific author assigned to Genesis 2:24; it’s simply part of the narration. But notice what Jesus says in Matthew 19:4. The one who created the man and the woman is the one who uttered the statement about the two becoming one flesh. In other words, according to Christ, Genesis 2:24 was spoken by the Creator. Jesus understood, as any Jew would have, that to quote from a verse in Scripture was to quote from God himself.

Jesus has no problem referencing human authors like Moses, Isaiah, David, and Daniel. But they stand in the background. They are the sub-authors doing the work of the Divine Author who inspired their words. This is why Mark 12:36 refers to David speaking in the Holy Spirit; and Hebrews quotes from Scripture saying “the Holy Spirit says”; and Romans 9:17 quotes from God saying “the Scripture says to Pharaoh”; and Galatians 3:8 can say “the Scripture . . . preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham.” Jesus and the apostles do not hesitate to use “God” and “Scripture” interchangeably. Their authority is the same because God is the Author of Scripture and Scripture is the Word of God. Before we think it a mark of our sophistication to minimize or somehow weaken the authority of Scripture, we should remember that our Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect son of man and Son of God, when he was tempted by the devil, did not draw down on superpowers or shoot lightning bolts from his eyes. When confronted by temptation in the wilderness, three times he quoted Deuteronomy to the devil. “It is written” was sufficient for Jesus, and it should be enough for us.

For Jesus, Scripture is powerful, decisive, and authoritative because it is the voice of God. It is as true as God is true. I have little patience for those who want to pit the Word (Christ) against the Word (the Bible). God’s gracious self-disclosure comes to us through the Word made flesh and by the inscripturated Word of God. These two modes of revelation reveal to us one God, one truth, one way, and one coherent set of promises, threats, and commands. Of course, we do not identify the actual artifacts of ink and paper and binding as somehow being divine. But we must not seek to know the Word who is divine apart from the divine words of the Bible, and we ought not read the words of the Bible without an eye to the Word incarnate. When it comes to seeing God and his truth in Christ and in Holy Scripture, one is not more reliable, more trustworthy, or more relevant than the other. Scripture, because it is the breathed-out Word of God, possesses the same authority as the God-man Jesus Christ. Submission to the Scriptures is submission to God. Rebellion against the Scriptures is rebellion against God. The Bible can no more fail, falter, or err than God himself can fail, falter, or err. Scripture must be inerrant because Scripture is the Word of God and God is inerrant.

Inerrancy means the Word of God always stands over us and we never stand over the Word of God. When we reject inerrancy we put ourselves in judgment over God’s Word. We claim the right to determine which parts of God’s revelation can be trusted and which cannot. When we deny the complete trustworthiness of the Scriptures—in its genuine claims with regard to history, its teachings on the material world, its miracles, in the tiniest jots and tittles of all that it affirms—then we are forced to accept one of two conclusions. Either the Scripture is not all from God, or God is not always dependable. To make either statement is to affirm what is sub-Christian. These conclusions do not express a proper submission to the Father, do not work for our joy in Christ, and do not bring honor to the Spirit, who carried along the men to speak the prophetic word and author God’s holy book.

Finding a halfway house where some things in the Bible are true and other things (as we have judged them) are not is an impossibility. This kind of compromised Christianity, besides flying in the face of the Bible’s own self-understanding, does not satisfy the soul or present to the lost the sort of God they need to meet. How are we to believe in a God who can do the unimaginable and forgive our trespasses, conquer our sins, and give us hope in a dark world if we cannot believe that this God created the world out of nothing, gave the virgin a child, and raised his Son on the third day? “One cannot doubt the Bible,” J. I. Packer warns, “without far-reaching loss, both of fullness of truth and of fullness of life. If therefore we have at heart spiritual renewal for society, for churches and for our own lives, we shall make much of the entire trustworthiness—that is, the inerrancy—of Holy Scripture as the inspired and liberating Word of God.”26

We are sometimes told that the final authority for us as Christians should be Christ and not the Scriptures. It is suggested that Christ would have us accept only the portions of Scripture that comport with his life and teaching, that certain aspects of biblical history, chronology, and cosmology need not bother us because Christ would not have us be bothered by them. The idea put forward by many liberal Christians and not a few self-proclaimed evangelicals is that if we are to worship Christ and not the Scriptures, we must let Christ stand apart from Scripture and above it. “But who is this Christ, the Judge of Scripture?” Packer asks. “Not the Christ of the New Testament and of history. That Christ does not judge Scripture; He obeys it and fulfills it. By word and deed He endorses the authority of the whole of it.”27

Those with a high view of Scripture may be charged with idolatry for so deeply reverencing the Word of God. But the accusation is laid at the wrong feet. Packer observes,

A Christ who permits His followers to set Him up as the Judge of Scripture, one by whom its authority must be confirmed before it becomes binding and by whose adverse sentence it is in places annulled, is a Christ of human imagination, made in the theologian’s own image, One whose attitude to Scripture is the opposite of that of the Christ of history. If the construction of such a Christ is not a breach of the second commandment, it is hard to see what is.28

Jesus may have seen himself as the focal point of Scripture, but never as a judge of it. The only Jesus who stands above Scripture is the Jesus of our own invention.

Rubber, Say Hello to the Road

Here’s where things get most practical for those of us in full-time ministry. As you stand behind the pulpit to preach—verse by verse, year after year, decade after decade—what will your people sense is the final word? You or the Bible? Their experience or the Bible? Peer review journals or the Bible? Their sense of God’s own inner workings and their soul or the Bible? Biology or the Bible? Cultural acceptance or the Bible? What will you and your people trust completely and unreservedly? As the issue of sexuality continues to rage on in our culture, I’ve said to my people from time to time something like this: “You need to resolve in your own mind and heart right now, on this morning, in the relative safety of this place, surrounded by people you know and love, worshipping God together—you need to decide now whether you will stand on this Word or some other word. And you need to decide it now. Will you trust this Word? Do you believe this Word? Is this book true though every man call it a liar (or worse)?” In the pulpit and in the pew, we must not waver in our confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture.

Is everything in the Bible, taken in context and interpreted correctly, all true? If not, then you will need to correct, qualify, and come to the task of teaching and evangelism somewhat cowardly. But if it is all true, you can come with confidence. You can have boldness, which is not a personality type, or arrogance, or bravado. To be bold is to be clear in the face of fear. It is to say with confidence what people may not want to hear because you know that God has already said it.

Do you remember what happens at the end of the Sermon on the Mount? The crowds marveled at Jesus’ teaching. And why? Because he was so clever? Because he was really, really hilarious? Because he had multiple degrees? Because he had a large following? They marveled because Jesus, unlike the scribes and the Pharisees, spoke as one who had authority.

I own all seven volumes of Hughes Old’s magisterial series on The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church.29 At more than four thousand pages I haven’t read everything in every volume, but what I’ve read has been consistently edifying and fascinating. For the most part, Old finds something to like in most preachers. (It would be hard to write four thousand words if you disliked most of what you were reading and hearing.) But he does not like everything in the history of Christian preaching. On a sermon from Harry Emerson Fosdick, the liberal’s liberal, Old writes, “One can well imagine that his congregation was completely satisfied that their preacher had made the doctrine of the divinity of Christ personally relevant. Others, however, might wonder if the God who is totally other had in fact been totally ignored.”30 About Norman Vincent Peale, the popular preacher of positive thinking, Old says, “The embarrassing thing about his ministry is that he won such an enormous following preaching from the pulpit of such a historic church.”31 And later (and worse): “We know that Peale never made any attempt to expound a text of Scripture in his sermons.”32

Old is not a cheerleader for any and every kind of preaching. In general, he is most enthusiastic about expositional, evangelical preaching. Which is why his comments on John MacArthur are so curious and so illuminating at the same time. Old notices time and again how MacArthur never “has the least shadow of doubt but that these miracles took place exactly as they are recorded.” He comments, perceptively, that MacArthur has no interest in defending the accuracy of the Bible. “He simply assumes it is all quite reliable. This basic assumption that the text of Scripture is reliable is part of the foundation of his effectiveness as an interpreter.”33

One gets the impression that while listening to MacArthur’s sermons, Old is forced to wrestle with his own view of Scripture and the supernatural:

The place where I have always had the greatest trouble is the whole matter of exorcism. I really do not believe in Satan, demonic spirits, and demon possession. Maybe I ought to, but I don’t. I am willing to agree that I may have been too strongly influenced by the intellectual world in which I was brought up to fully grasp the full teaching of Scripture, but that is the way it is. What is more than clear to me after listening to these sermons is that those who can take the text the way it is seem to make a lot more sense of it than those who are always trying to second-guess it. Surely one of the greatest strengths of MacArthur’s preaching ministry is his complete confidence in the text.34

I was surprised and saddened by this paragraph, but I suppose Old is at least being honest. It’s safe to say MacArthur isn’t the ultimate example of preaching for Old, and yet he is mesmerized by his simple allegiance to the text and the sense of divine authority that comes as a result. When he comes to summarize MacArthur’s preaching, it’s as if he can only find one thing he likes about it.

Why do so many people listen to MacArthur, this product of all the wrong schools? How can he pack out a church on Sunday morning in an age in which church attendance has seriously lagged? Here is a preacher who has nothing in the way of a winning personality, good looks, or charm. Here is a preacher who offers us nothing in the way of sophisticated homiletical packaging. No one would suggest that he is a master of the art of oratory. What he seems to have is a witness to true authority. He recognizes in Scripture the Word of God, and when he preaches, it is Scripture that one hears. It is not that the words of John MacArthur are so interesting as it is that the Word of God is of surpassing interest. That is why one listens.35

And all the plain-looking, personally dull, oratorically deficient stick-to-the-Bible-and-nothing-but-the-Bible preachers said, “Amen.” Pastors, do you believe that the Word of God is sufficient to do the work of God? Do you really believe that? If you don’t, you will have gimmicks and gadgets and you will try to be clever and find tricks. Do you really know that you have nothing in your arsenal except for the Word of God and prayer? And if you know how to grow your church apart from the Word of God and prayer, then don’t bother growing it because it may not be a church you are growing. We have no gimmicks, no gadgets, no clever tricks. Nothing on our side except the Word of God and prayer. And it is more than enough.

Say It Like You Mean It, and Believe It Like Jesus

The world dislikes so much of what you have to say. It positively hates that you would be so sure about saying it. You can say almost anything you want, if it doesn’t seem like you mean it. You can say the hardest things, if everyone can tell you are hardly sure about anything you are saying. The challenge of evangelism and the challenge of preaching in our day are twofold: whether we dare to say what God’s Word says, and whether we dare to say this truth as if God himself has said it. The work of evangelism is grounded in the doctrine of inerrancy, which is rooted in Christ’s own commitment to the Scriptures.

Jesus held Scripture in the highest esteem. He knew his Bible intimately and loved it deeply. He often spoke with the language of Scripture. He easily alluded to Scripture. And in his moments of greatest trial and weakness—like being tempted by the devil or being crucified on a cross—he quoted Scripture. His mission was to fulfill Scripture. His teaching always upheld Scripture. He never disrespected, never disregarded, never disagreed with a single text of Scripture. He affirmed every bit of law, prophecy, narrative, and poetry. He never, for a moment, accepted the legitimacy of anyone, anywhere violating, ignoring, refining, or rejecting Scripture. He would not have re-tweeted them. He would have not have applauded them for being authentic, nor published their books, nor invited them to speak in an effort to further the conversation.

Jesus believed in the inspiration of Scripture, all of it. He accepted the chronology, the miracles, the authorial ascriptions. He believed in keeping the spirit of the law without ever minimizing the letter of the law. He affirmed the human authorship of Scripture while at the same time bearing witness to the divine authorship of Scripture. He treated the Bible as a necessary word, a sufficient word, a clear word, and the final word. It was never acceptable, in the mind of our Savior, to contradict Scripture or stand above Scripture.

He believed the Bible was all true, all edifying, all important, and all about him. He believed absolutely that the Bible was from God and absolutely free from error. What Scripture says, God says, and what God said has been recorded infallibly in Scripture.

Well, are we then just guilty of bibliolatry? Nonsense. It is impossible to revere the Scriptures more deeply or affirm them more completely than Jesus did. Jesus submitted his will to the Scriptures. He committed his brain to studying the Scriptures. He humbled his heart to obey the Scriptures. The Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, our Savior believed the Bible was the Word of God down to the sentences, to the phrases, to the words, to the smallest letter, to the tiniest speck. And that nothing in all those specks and in all those books, in all of his holy Bible, could ever be broken.

Thus he spoke, and so should we. With truth, with grace, with joy, and with utter confidence and unashamed hope.