Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (4 page)
Read Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set Online
Authors: Howard G. Hendricks,William D. Hendricks
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Spiritual Growth, #Biblical Reference, #General
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n the last chapter we saw six common reasons that people do not dive into a study of the Scriptures for themselves. Let me add a seventh: Nobody ever told them what they’d gain by it. What are the benefits of Bible study? What’s in it for me? If I invest my time in this manner, what’s the payoff? What difference will it make in my life?
I want to suggest three benefits you can expect when you invest in a study of God’s Word, which are available nowhere else. And frankly, they’re not luxuries, but necessities. Let’s look at three passages that conspire to build a convincing case for why we must study the Bible. It’s not an option—it’s an essential.
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The first passage is found in 1 Peter 2:2:
Like newborn babes, long for the pure milk of the word, that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.
Let me give you three words to unpack the truth contained here. Write them in the margin of your Bible, next to this verse. The first one is
attitude
. Peter is describing the attitude of a newborn baby. Just as the baby grabs for the bottle, so you grab for the Book. The baby has to have milk to sustain its life physically; you have to have the Scriptures to sustain your life spiritually.
Jeanne and I had four children, and when they were babies we learned early on that about every three or four hours a timer goes off inside an infant—and you’d better not ignore it. You’d better get a bottle of milk there fast. As soon as you do, there’s a great calm. Peter picks up that expressive figure and says that’s to be your attitude toward Scripture.
But he also says a word about your
appetite
for the Word. You should “long” for it, he says. You’re to crave the spiritual milk of God’s Word.
Now to be honest, that’s a cultivated taste. Every now and then somebody will say to me, “You know, Professor Hendricks, I’m really not getting very much out of the Bible.” But that’s a greater commentary on the person than it is on the Book.
Psalm 19:10 says that Scripture is sweeter than honey, but you’d never know that judging by some believers. You see, there are three basic kinds of Bible students. There is the “nasty medicine” type. To them the Word is bitter—
yech!
—but it’s good for what ails them. Then there is the “shredded wheat” kind. To them Scripture is nourishing but dry. It’s like eating a bale of hay.
But the third kind is what I call the “strawberries-and-cream” folks. They just can’t get enough of the stuff. How did they acquire that taste? By feasting on the Word. They’ve cultivated what Peter describes here—an insatiable appetite for spiritual truth. Which of these three types are you?
There’s a purpose to all of this, which brings us to the third word,
aim
. What is the aim of the Bible? The text tells us: in order that you might
grow
. Please note—it is not only that you may
know
. Certainly you can’t grow without knowing. But you can know and not grow. The Bible was written not to satisfy your curiosity but to help you conform to Christ’s image. Not to make you a smarter sinner but to make you like the Savior. Not to fill your head with a collection of biblical facts but to transform your life.
When our kids were youngsters growing up, we set up a growth chart on the back of a closet door. As they grew, they begged us to measure how tall
they had gotten and record it on the chart. It didn’t matter how small the increments were; they bounced up and down with excitement to see their progress.
One time after I measured one of my daughters, she asked me the sort of question you wish kids wouldn’t ask: “Daddy, why do big people stop growing?”
How could I explain that big people don’t stop growing—we just grow in a different direction. I don’t know what I told her, but to this day the Lord is still asking me, “Hendricks, are you growing old, or are you growing up?”
How about you? How long have you been a Christian? Nine months? Seven or eight years? Thirty-nine years? The real issue is, how much have you grown up? Step up to God’s growth chart and measure your progress. That’s what this passage is teaching.
So the first reason for studying Scripture is that it is a means of spiritual growth. There is none apart from the Word. It is God’s primary tool to develop you as an individual.
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The second passage we need to look at is Hebrews 5:11–14:
Concerning [Christ] we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.
This is an instructive passage in terms of studying Scripture. The writer says he’s got a lot to say, but it is “hard to explain.” Why? Is it the difficulty of the revelation? No, it’s the density of the reception. There’s a “learning disability.” Peter says, “You have become dull of hearing,” meaning you are slow to learn.
The key word in this passage is
time
. Underline it in your Bible. The writer tells his readers, when by virtue of the passing of time you ought to be entering college, you’ve got to go back to kindergarten and learn your ABC’s all over again. When you should be communicating the truth to others as teachers, you need to have someone communicate the truth to you.
In fact, he says, you still need milk, not solid food. Solid food is for the mature. Who are the mature? Are they the people who go to seminary? Who can whip anyone in a theological duel? Who know the most Bible verses?
No, the writer says you are mature if you’ve trained yourself through
constant use
of Scripture to distinguish good from evil. The mark of spiritual maturity is not how much you understand, but how much you use. In the spiritual realm, the opposite of ignorance is not knowledge but obedience.
So that is a second reason Bible study is essential. The Bible is the divine means of developing spiritual maturity. There is no other way.
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There’s a third passage, 2 Timothy 3:16–17. George alluded to it in
chapter 1
.
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.
“
All
Scripture.” That includes 2 Chronicles. I said that once to an audience, and a guy said, “I didn’t even know there was a first one.”
How about Deuteronomy? Can you even find it? Have you ever had your devotions in it? When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11), He defeated the devil three times by saying, “It is written.” All three responses are quotations from the book of Deuteronomy. I’ve often thought,
If my spiritual life depended on my knowledge of Deuteronomy, how would I make out?
Paul says all Scripture is profitable. But profitable for what? He mentions four things. First, for doctrine, or teaching. That is, it will structure your thinking. That’s crucial, because if you are not thinking correctly, you are not living correctly. What you believe will determine how you behave.
He also says the Bible is profitable for rebuke. That is, it will tell you
where you are out-of-bounds. It’s like an umpire who cries, “Out!” or, “Safe!” It tells you what is sin. It tells you what God wants for your life.
Third, it is profitable for correction. Do you have a closet where you put all the junk you can’t find room for anywhere else? You cram it in, and then one day you forget and open the door and—
whoosh!
—it all comes out. You say, “Good night, I’d better clean this thing up.” The Bible is like that. It opens up the doors in your life, and provides a purifying dynamic to help you clean out sin and learn to conform to God’s will.
A fourth advantage of the Bible is that it is profitable for training in righteous living. God uses it to show you how to live. Having corrected you on the negatives, He gives you positive guidelines to follow as you go through life.
What is the overall purpose? In order that you might be equipped for every good work. Have you ever said, “I wish my life were more effective for Jesus Christ”? If so, what have you done to prepare yourself? Bible study is a primary means to becoming an effective servant of Jesus Christ.
One time I asked a group of businessmen, “If you didn’t know any more about your business or profession than you know about Christianity after the same number of years of exposure, what would happen?”
One guy blurted out, “They’d fire me.”
I said, “Thank you, sir, for the honesty.”
He was right, you know. The reason God can’t use you more than He wants to may well be that you are not prepared. Maybe you’ve attended church for five, ten, or even twenty years, but you’ve never cracked open the Bible to prepare yourself for effectiveness as His instrument. You’ve been under the Word, but not in it for yourself.
Now the ball is in your court. God wants to communicate with you in the twenty-first century. He wrote His message in a Book. He asks you to come and study that Book for three compelling reasons: It’s essential to growth. It’s essential to maturity. It’s essential for equipping you, training you, so that you might be an available, clean, sharp instrument in His hands to accomplish His purposes.
So the real question confronting you now is: How can you afford
not
to be in God’s Word?
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fter captivating an audience at Yale University, the late novelist Ayn Rand was asked by a reporter, “What’s wrong with the modern world?”
Without a moment’s hesitation she replied, “Never before has the world been so desperately asking for answers to crucial questions, and never before has the world been so frantically committed to the idea that no answers are possible. To paraphrase the Bible, the modern attitude is, ‘Father, forgive us, for we know not what we are doing—and please don’t tell us!’ ”
That’s very perceptive for an acknowledged agnostic. Many of us want a word from God, but we don’t want the Word of God. We know enough to own a Bible but not enough for the Bible to own us. We pay the Bible lip service, but we fail to give it “life service.” In a world where the only absolute is that there are no absolutes, there is little room left for the authoritative Word of God as revealed in the Bible.
The question is, can we trust the Bible? Is it credible? Is it reliable? Is it determinative for life in our time? Consider what Scripture says about itself.
If you’ve ever studied some complex or controversial subject in depth, you know the frustration of trying to find two or three authorities who agree on any and all points. It basically never happens.
The Bible stands in marked contrast; it is unique in that its parts conspire to form a unified whole. You see, the Bible is not only one Book, it is sixty-six books collected in one volume. These sixty-six separate documents were written over a period of more than sixteen hundred years by more than forty human authors who came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Yet the Bible is a single unit, bound together by the theme of God and His relationship to humankind. Each book, section, paragraph, and verse works together with the others to reveal God’s truth. That’s why Scripture is best understood by relating its individual parts to the integrated whole.
The Bible presents itself as revealed truth from God. The word it uses for “revelation” actually means “unveiling,” like pulling back a curtain to show what is behind it. In Scripture, God has revealed things that would otherwise not be known at all. He has unveiled that which is absolutely true—not speculated, not conjectured, not hypothesized. It is truth that is entirely consistent—never controverted, compromised, or contradicted by other parts of the revelation.
The great theologian B. B. Warfield said, “The Bible is the Word of God in such a way that when the Bible speaks, God speaks.” That’s a good description of inspiration. The reason we call the Bible the Word of God is because it is indeed the very words that God wanted communicated.
Of course, some have a problem with this concept because the Bible was penned by human authors. If they were “inspired” it was only as great artists are “inspired” to produce great art.
But that’s not what the Bible means by inspiration. Remember 2 Timothy 3:16–17? “All Scripture is inspired by God.” The word translated “inspired” means “God-breathed.” It conveys the idea of God “breathing out” the Scriptures. And since the word for “breath” can also be translated “spirit,” we can easily see the work of the Holy Spirit as He superintended the writing.
So what part did the human authors play? God supernaturally used them to pen the words, without compromising the perfection, integrity, or purity of the finished product. It’s a case of dual authorship. As Charles Ryrie puts it, “God superintended the human authors so that, using their own individual personalities, they composed and recorded, without error, His revelation to man in the words of the original manuscripts.”
Peter used a brilliant word picture to describe this arrangement when he wrote that “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21). The word
moved
is the same word used to describe a ship moving along under the power of a blowing wind. The biblical writers were guided in their writing to go where God wanted them to go and to produce what God wanted them to produce. Without question, their personalities, writing styles, perspectives, and distinctives are reflected in their words. But their accounts are more than the words of men—they are the Word of God.
Have you heard of the Jesus Project? Certain scholars doubt the reliability of the words of Jesus recorded in the four gospels. So they meet annually to discuss those texts. For each statement ascribed to Christ, they vote on the relative merits of whether Jesus actually said the words or whether the New Testament writers put them in His mouth.
The vote can go one of four ways: The group may decide that Jesus’ words are “red,” indicating that He definitely spoke them. On the other hand, the scholars may label them “black” if they believe that He definitely did not say them. In the middle are “pink” (Jesus probably spoke them, though there is some question), and “gray” (Jesus probably did not speak them, though it is possible that He might have).
What is the purpose of this exercise? A spokesperson says the group wants to
strengthen people’s faith by letting them know what is reliable and what is not.
I don’t know how such a project strikes you, but it seems ludicrous to me—to say nothing of dangerous. How is it that a committee of doubters living two thousand years after the fact feels qualified to pass judgment on the authority of Scripture? 1 guess they hold to “inspiration by consensus.”
I prefer inspiration by the Holy Spirit. The text of the Bible is not the musings of men but a supernatural product, the very Word of God.
In order to be authoritative, the Bible must be true, that is, without error. As someone has noted, “Either the Bible is without error in all, or it is not without error at all.” There’s really no middle ground. A “partially inerrant” Bible is an errant Bible.
“Inerrancy” means without error—containing no mistakes or errors in the original writings, and having no errors in any area whatsoever. That’s a tough concept for our generation. We tend to be relativists, for whom nothing can be true in an absolute sense. Furthermore, our culture would have us believe that modern science has left the Bible far behind.
The reality is that Scripture has withstood the test of pure science. Indeed, many of the most eminent, learned scientists of our day are taking a “third” look at Scripture in light of recent developments and discoveries.
Believing in an error-free Bible does not mean that we take every statement in a wooden, rigidly literal way. As we’re going to see, Scripture often speaks in figurative language. Furthermore, we accept that there have been errors in transmission of the Bible from copy to copy, over the years (though surprisingly few).
Nevertheless, the Bible bears witness to its own inerrancy. The most powerful witness is the Lord Jesus Himself. In Matthew 4:1–11, He emphasizes that the actual written words of Scripture can be trusted, not just the ideas they contain. In Matthew 5:17–18, He extends the absolute reliability of the text all the way to individual letters, and even the parts of letters.
Throughout the gospels, Jesus referred to portions of Scripture questioned by some “authorities” today. There’s no hint that He regarded them as anything other than accurate, reliable, and true. (In Matthew alone, see 8:4; 10:15; 12:17, 40; 19:3–5; and 24:38–39.)
Inerrancy means that we have a Bible that is completely trustworthy, reliable, and without error in its original form. As we study it, we can eagerly anticipate answers to the questions that are essential.
