TRUTH

A few years ago, one of the best selling books for about a month was called A Million Little Pieces by James Frye.  It was in Oprah’s book club.  It was supposedly the story of this guy, a biography of his life.  Then all of a sudden people did a little checking and found out it was all a bunch of lies.  Just made up.  He had to go back on Oprah.  Oprah apologized and everybody was upset.  How dare this guy write fiction and call it fact!
     Yet at that same time no one seemed to be upset at Dan Brown and the Di Vinci Code?  He says it’s a novel.  But on the first page he says this novel is based on all these true facts.  The truth is every one of those facts is a lie.  They’ve been disproved.  There was a two hour documentary of it on the Discovery channel, not necessarily a Christian station, debunking every one of the things that Dan Brown said was fact.  But nobody seemed upset.  Why?  Because it’s ok to lie about Jesus in our culture.  It’s ok to lie about the Catholic Church.  It’s ok to lie about Mary Magdalene.  You can’t lie about other things but you can lie about Jesus.  Also implied in the books were doubts about the trustworthiness of Scripture and some “lost” books of the bible in the form of Gnostic gospels supposedly omitted from the canon.
     Why it is ok, to lie about these issues in our culture is certainly worth a lot of thought but not what I want to think about today.  I want to deal with the challenge that Dan Brown and others have made about the trustworthiness of the Bible.  This week as we continue the series “God-Talk”, I am going to be talking about the “doctrine of Revelation” how God has revealed Himself to us.  I think it is important to understand how God has revealed Himself to us in the Bible and why we can believe the Bible.  In the message we will look at external and internal evidence that shows the validity of our Bible.  How it is authoritative and inspired by the Holy Spirit.  I want to use this time to deal briefly and specifically with why we have the books in the bible or the canon of Scripture that God intended.
    The word canon means rule, or standard.  In a general sense it means list or series, so the canon of Scriptures means the list of books accepted as Scripture.  Our canon is divided into two sections—the Old Testament, and the New Testament.  So we have the books of the old covenant, and the books of the new covenant.  It was not until the end of the second century that either collection began to be defined and described.  This was not because nobody cold agree on them, it was just never necessary to pull them together.  Everyone knew which ones they were—so it didn’t need to be formalized.  The reason there was finally a need was because of heretical movements that challenged the accepted understanding of the unspoken canon or people came along who claimed new revelations that had nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, or even went against it.  So the canon became closed by the council of Jamnia in A.D. 90 for the Old Testament and 397 for the New Testament through the Council of Carthage.
     So, why those books and not others?  Well, we accept the books of the Old Testament because Jesus did.  The Old Testament was in a canonical form by the time of Jesus reference to it and use of it.  Jesus accepted the Scriptural status and inspiration of the Old Testament.  So if you go with Jesus, you go with the books we have for the Old Testament and you also go with the New Testament.  Jesus laid the foundation for the writings of the New Testament to be accepted as Scripture through the Apostles.  The word “apostle’ means ‘those who have been sent’ and Jesus set them on a mission of preaching and teaching.  They were men who spoke in Jesus name and carried His word to others. The apostles received a unique commission from Jesus Himself—never to be repeated—to assume a prophetic role and speak God’s word to the people by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said “He who receives you, receives me.”  So the mark of what would be included in the New Testament was simple: …was it written by, or based on, the teaching of Jesus or one of the apostles.”  That is why we read in Acts 2 that the early church devoted themselves to the apostles teaching.  The teaching of the apostles is the teaching of Christ.
     So we didn’t chose our canon, it wasn’t something the church just sat down one day and determined on its own, we didn’t create the canon, we received it.  We can have complete confidence, through Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit, that these sixty-six books are the sixty-six books we are to consider and have as Scripture.
     Which by the way is why Protestant Christians don’t embrace the Apocrypha—Jesus never quoted it or referred to it as Scripture.  They are historical books, largely from the inter-testamental period, meaning the time between Malachi and Matthew.  But the Jews never considered the apocrypha part of the Old Testament canon.  They are not in the Hebrew Bible.  Jesus or the apostles never referred to them.  So you have the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 of the New Testament.
     Which brings us to the supposed “lost” books of the Bible.  There is no such thing.  The writings that are often referred to as lost books have been dated no earlier than the middle of the second century and most much later than that—so they were removed from the actual life and ministry of Christ, the apostles and the formation of the church by decades.  They were also forgeries.  They may be new to us, but only because we did not find many of these manuscripts until an archeological dig outside of Nag Hammadi in Egypt in the 1940’s.  People knew about them when they first came out, and such works as the Gospel of Mary, along with such writings as the Gospel of Thomas, were rejected as false documents.  
     My point is that when you pick up your bible, don’t take it lightly.  You can read it with absolute confidence that this is God’s inspired, preserved and infallible word of truth to you.  What an amazing God we serve!
 
Pastor Scott
 
Sources
 
Christian Theology Millard Erickson
 
The Doctrine of Revelation James Emory White