How can we know that the Bible is the Word of God?

2 Timothy 3:16-17
Psalm 1:1-3
In this past Sunday’s gospel lesson, we heard Jesus tell Nicodemus: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

What Jesus was saying is that when God’s Holy Spirit is on the loose in people, we can neither control the Spirit nor, usually, see what the Spirit has been up to until after He’s completed His work. Like the wind, we can’t see the Holy Spirit, we can only see the evidence of His activity in people’s lives.

This, I think, is a good place to start when examining our question for tonight, how can we know that the Bible is the Word of God?

Now, this question is a bit different from the ones asked and answered in books like Mere Christianity, The Case for Faith, The Case for Christ, or How We Got the Bible. They answer questions like

• Who was Jesus?
• How did He understand Himself?
• Is the Bible reliable, is faith logical? 
• Did Christ rise from the dead?

and others. They all demonstrate that the historical evidence and logical cohesion for believing in the truthfulness and reliability of the Bible are overwhelming.

But it’s possible for us to accept the historical truthfulness of Scripture and what it tells us about God and still not believe in Jesus, the Messiah-God to Whom the Bible points as “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

A man I knew once told his sister, “I believe that Jesus died and rose from the dead. So what?”

That man’s belief was no different from that of the devil’s. The devil absolutely believes that God exists. He knows what God has done. And, as his encounter with Jesus in the wilderness shows, he knows the Bible inside out.

But the devil lacks faith. And so did that man.

Faith is what happens when we pull down our shields--shields like self-sufficiency, egotism, fear of losing control over one’s life--to open ourselves to what God wants to give us and do in us, now and in eternity. Faith is about surrender to the God we meet in Jesus.

Second Timothy 3:16 says: “All Scripture is God-breathed…” Now, both the Old and New Testament words for breath--ruach in the Hebrew of the Old Testament and pneuma in the Greek of the New Testament--can also carry the meanings of wind or spirit.

What Paul was telling young Timothy is that while the Scriptures may look like nothing more than words on a page, they’re actually as infused with the life of God as Adam was when God breathed into dust and made the first human being; they’re as filled with the life or Spirit of God as the first Christian disciples were when, on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to them on the rush of a mighty wind.

When we are open to it, the Bible is a tornado that we can’t control, that can blow through our lives, tearing down old ways of thinking and living, and empowering us to have, in a phrase that Paul uses in his letter to the Philippian Christians, “the mind of Christ.”

Fine, you may say, the Bible is Spirit-inspired. How do I know that's all true?

We live in a condo. This past week, workers came to the development to clear away the branches that had blown down from the trees and, in at least one case, clear away an entire tree that had fallen, all because of the high winds we’d had a few days before that. Many of you will remember that particularly windy day. But you remember it not because you saw the wind in the same way that you could have seen rain or snow or a bright sun; what you saw was the evidence of the wind from what it was doing.

And this, I think, can point us to how we can know that the Bible is the Word of God: We can see the changed and changing lives of those who are being exposed to the Bible!

The changes wrought in believers by God’s Word in Scripture may happen slowly in some, or come with hurricane force through many aspects of life in others, or in fits and spurts in still others. But when we let the Bible immerse us in the truth God--as we read it on our own, as we receive it in, with, and under the bread and wine, as we hear it proclaimed or taught, as we place ourselves under it as God’s authoritative and life-giving Word for our lives--we see the evidence for the Bible being the Word of God. The Bible is the Word of God first and foremost, because it changes us.

This Word:

• assures us of God’s forgiving grace, 
• imparts God’s guidance for the living of each day, 
• helps us to forgive as we’ve been forgiven, 
• empowers us to live with hope and peace, and 
• sets us free to live as people confident of their Father’s love and certain of their Lord’s presence with them in the good and in the bad, all the way to eternity.

How does it do this?

By creating faith in Christ within us. Romans 10:17 tells us: “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ…”

The Bible can do this because it’s the instrument of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:3 says: “Therefore I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, ‘Jesus be cursed,’ and no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”

The Holy Spirit’s imprint is on every letter of Scripture to present the Word about Jesus so that people immersed in its truth have and are strengthened in their faith relationship with Jesus.

This underscores why we can say confidently that the Bible is the Word of God. We can do this when we consider what the Bible means when it talks about “the Word of God.”

For the Bible, the Word of God, ultimately is a Person and that Person is Jesus. John 1:1 tells us: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…”

The Word of God then, is Jesus. This is the Word let loose by God over chaos in Genesis 1 to say, “Let there be light” and there was light, “Let there be land” and there was land. “Let there be stars and sun, moons and planets, and human beings made in My image” and all those things and more came into being.

We can speak of the Bible as the Word of God because, from Genesis to Revelation, it points us to Jesus the Word of God.

The Word about Jesus that God so loved the world He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him will not be condemned for their sin, but live with God eternally, can be imparted in many ways: over coffee with a friend, in a locker room at school, during lunch with a co-worker, from a pulpit, in small groups studying God’s Word together.

And we will know when we’ve heard the Word of God when it conforms to all that God reveals about Himself in the Bible’s sixty-six books and when it challenges us or comforts us or stretches us to be remade by God to look more like Jesus Himself.

We know the Word of God is in the Bible when we see the impact it has on us or others, how it challenges us to turn from sin, how it incites us to trust in Jesus Christ, how it empowers us to pray, to witness, to serve, all because this Word from and about Jesus sets us free to live for the Savior Who lived and died for us.

The Word of God we find in the Bible is a mighty wind blowing away the old and dead and breathing life into the new and eternal.

The Bible is the Word of God. When we let it have its way with us, we won’t need evidence to prove that. The evidence will be found in what that Word does in us, to us, and for us.

Let the Word do its work in you. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This message was presented during the midweek Lenten service on Wednesday night.]

Reading God's Word (Part 3, Reaching Up, Reaching In, Reaching Out)

[This was shared during this evening's midweek Lenten devotional worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]

Psalm 1:1-3
Matthew 4:4

Have you ever thought about the title of this book?

We call it the Holy Bible.

The word holy means set apart for God’s purposes.

The word Bible comes from the Greek and means simply, book.

So the Bible is the book set apart from all other books by God to give us His Word.

Unlike other books that grow static or old-fashioned, the Bible always remains alive and relevant, always like a tweet or Instagram someone posted just this minute. “... the word of God is alive and active,” Hebrews 4:12 says.

There is actually just one thing that makes the Bible unlike any other book, the book set apart for us by God. It’s Jesus.

The whole book shows that the whole of human history, from the creation, through the call of Abraham and the life of Israel, through this very night, points to Jesus, the only One Who can save us from ourselves, from our sin and death.

We see Jesus in Genesis 3:15, where God promises a Savior Who would destroy the sin into which Adam, Eve, and the human race had just fallen.

We see it in Revelation, where the crucified, risen, and ascended Jesus is affirmed as “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last,” Who is returning to this fallen world and raising the dead, so that all who have believe in Him will have life with God for eternity, while those who have turned from Him will live with the eternal consequence of their choice, hell.

The Holy Spirit has guided the Church to recognize that the 66 books that make up the Bible speak God’s Word to us, pointing us to “the Word,” God the Son Jesus, as “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only way to life with God. Martin Luther explained: “Scripture is the manger in which the Christ lies…”

The Bible is holy, set apart by God, so that you and I can know Jesus and the new life that only He can bring. John could as well have been speaking for all the Biblical writers inspired by the Holy Spirit as for himself when he wrote near the end of his gospel: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

If there were a subtitle for the Bible, it might be, Why and How to Trust Jesus for Forgiveness and Everlasting Life with God.

Reading and taking the Bible in brings life to believers in Christ. This is why Jesus cited Deuteronomy 8:3, when confronted by the devil’s temptation to turn stones to bread: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

It’s essential then, for believers in Christ to steep themselves in God’s Word, studying it both privately and with trusted Christian friends, as I know many in this congregation do.

But the Bible is sometimes hard for us to understand.

How can we study it in ways that help its message permeate our lives, inform our decisions, give us guidance and hope?

How can we hear God’s voice speaking to us through the Bible?

Pastor Mike Foss, in a book we’ll be considering in our Tuesday studies after Easter, points to a three-step process Christians have used for centuries to let God speak to them through the Bible.

First: We find a quiet place and ask God to speak to us in the words we’re about to read from the Bible. Here we seek “not information, but the transformation” of our souls. We want life-knowledge, not head-knowledge.

Second: We read the passage we’ve decided to look at, stopping when it speaks to us or at the end of the passage. In this step, we ask ourselves a few questions: What does this tell me about God or life? How does it fit with what I know about Jesus? What lesson for my life is here?

Third: We pray that God will plant the words of this passage and the lesson it gives deeply into our lives.

What if a passage doesn’t speak to you? Keep reading until you hit upon something God uses to get your attention.

If a passage doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about it. You can discuss that later with a fellow Christian, even your pastor. (I love talking with people about sections of Scripture they struggle with. I may not always have the answers, but I can struggle and pray with you.)

You may see a danger in reading the Bible like this.

What if we’re wrong about what we see in the passages we read?

This was the very reason that the Church of Martin Luther’s day was so horrified that Luther wanted laypeople to have access to the Bible in their own languages.

Pastor Foss also points to three tests to ensure that we’re reading what we see in God’s Word rightly. Here, I quote him directly:

“First, how does what you hear lift your soul up to the majesty and wonder of God in the crucified and risen Christ? If it doesn’t, it is most likely your own thinking [and not God’s]...Second, how does what you hear move you to thoughts, attitudes, and actions that fit the person and work of Jesus?...[Third] how does what you hear move you to reconciliation [with God and with others]...” 

Psalm 1:1-3 tells us: “Blessed is the one...whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season…”

In this well known passage, the law of the Lord references the Torah, the way of life laid down for us by God in His Word.

As we root ourselves in God’s Word, we grow as disciples and our growth will impact not only our own lives, but the lives of those with whom we share Christ and those for whom we pray in the name of Christ.

Breathing in God’s powerful Word, drawing life from it, is an essential element of Christian discipleship, of reaching up, reaching in, and reaching out.