1. "Boredom is almost always the fault of the person who is bored. When you tell me that your teacher is boring, I just want to be honest with you—I may not believe you. Often we're bored because of ourselves, our lack of interest in things."

2. "We can't assume that because something doesn't make sense to us, it doesn't make sense at all. We always have to ask, is there more knowledge of a situation that if I had it, things would look different?"

3. "In our fallen world, most knowledge is not self-evident. The mere fact that most of us have no idea what to do with vital matters that are happening in our own body and so we have to go to a specialist should teach us this. Our ignorance or misunderstanding is no argument against there being a real and significant pattern."

4. "You are not the world's best authority, even on your own life, because God made you in his image. He understands you better than you understand yourself."

5. "The Bible is enough. Many places in Scripture you can see this. Everything we need to know for saving faith and spiritual life is taught in the Bible. And that doesn't mean that our church's statement of faith or even sermons like this one don't help us. But we don't need them in the same way that we need Scripture itself."

6. "I don't mean that everything in the Bible is easy to understand. Paul said in Romans 11, 'Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.' And yet God has in Scripture searched them out for us and revealed them to us."

7. "You realize when this church building was built, probably every Protestant church on the hill believed largely the same stuff. But you realize now, 110 years later, we might be the only ones. We still believe what the Bible says. We think it's true."

8. "The Bible tells the true story of a God who knows exactly who you are, exactly what you're like, exactly what you've done, your deepest failures and your darkest secrets, and sending his own son to rescue you, save you, forgive you in a way no one else in this whole room knows and understands."

9. "Young people, it is very popular in your generation to think that something is better and cooler because it's older. That is one of Satan's oldest tricks. Don't fall for it."

10. "My fellow Christians, what can we do better with our time together every week than read this Bible, preach this Bible, sing it and pray from it, and share our delight in God that it tells us about?"

Observation Questions

1. In Romans 4:3a, why does Paul ask "What does the Scripture say?" rather than appealing to other sources?

2. How does Paul use Scripture in Romans 3:20-30 to establish his argument about justification by faith?

3. What specific example from Luke 24:27 shows Jesus's view of Scripture's authority?

4. According to Romans 9:17, how does Paul understand the relationship between Scripture speaking and God speaking?

5. In Deuteronomy 5:4, what comparison is made about how God speaks to His people?

6. Looking at 2 Timothy 3:16-17, what specific purposes does Paul list for Scripture?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why is it significant that Paul refers to "the Scripture" in the singular, even though he's drawing from multiple biblical books?

2. How does Jesus's use of Scripture during His temptation and ministry demonstrate its authority and sufficiency?

3. What does it mean for Scripture to be "clear" while also containing things that are "not alike plain in themselves"?

4. How does the sermon's analogy about boredom with golf help us understand why some people struggle with reading Scripture?

5. What is the relationship between Scripture's divine origin and its truthfulness?

Application Questions

1. When was the last time you encountered a passage of Scripture that seemed boring or irrelevant at first, but became meaningful as you understood it better?

2. How has your approach to difficult Bible passages changed as you've grown in your faith? What specific strategies do you use when encountering challenging texts?

3. In what ways might you be tempted to rely on human traditions or additional authorities alongside Scripture? How can you cultivate greater confidence in Scripture's sufficiency?

4. Think about your daily routine. Where could you create more intentional space for reading and meditating on God's Word?

5. The sermon describes Scripture as "delightful." What specific passages or promises in God's Word bring you the most joy? How can you share that delight with others?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Psalm 19:7-14 - Explores the perfection and trustworthiness of God's Word, complementing the sermon's emphasis on Scripture's sufficiency and delightfulness.

2. Hebrews 4:12-13 - Describes the living and active nature of God's Word, showing how Scripture penetrates our hearts and minds.

3. Isaiah 55:10-11 - Illustrates the effectiveness and purpose of God's Word, demonstrating why we can trust its authority and power.

4. Acts 17:10-12 - Provides an example of the Bereans' careful examination of Scripture, modeling how we should approach Bible study with both eagerness and discernment.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Danger of Boredom and the Need for Understanding

II. The Centrality of Scripture in Resolving Life’s Greatest Questions (Romans 4:3)

III. The Bible’s Unified Nature

IV. The Bible’s Divine Authority

V. The Bible’s Truthfulness

VI. The Bible’s Christ-Centered Message

VII. The Bible’s Clarity

VIII. The Bible’s Sufficiency

IX. The Bible’s Delightfulness

X. A Call to Trust and Delight in God’s Word

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Detailed Sermon Outline

• 1. Boredom with golf illustrates a lack of understanding.
• 1. Car mechanics analogy highlights dependency on expertise.

• 1. Boredom stems from a failure to grasp deeper meaning.
• 1. Importance of seeking knowledge to transform perspective.

• 1. Parallel drawn to ignorance of Scripture and salvation.
• 1. Appeal to non-believers: Questioning unbelief’s foundations.

• 1. Romans 3:20-30 establishes universal sin and justification by faith.
• 1. Anticipating objections about Abraham’s righteousness (Genesis 26:5).

• 1. Scripture as the ultimate authority for theological disputes.
• 1. Paul’s reliance on Scripture to refute works-based righteousness.

• 1. Referred to in the singular (“the Scripture”) despite multiple authors.
• 1. Old and New Testaments harmonize around Christ (Luke 24:27, 44).

• 1. Westminster Confession’s affirmation of biblical unity.
• 1. The Old Testament as “New Testament concealed”; the New as “Old revealed.”

• 1. Scripture equated with God’s speech (Romans 9:17; Deuteronomy 5:4).
• 1. The Holy Spirit’s role in inspiration (2 Timothy 3:16).

• 1. Corporate reliance on Scripture in worship, preaching, and study.
• 1. Church’s commitment to Scripture as God’s direct address.

• 1. Addressing doubts about translation, transmission, and historicity.
• 1. Evidence for manuscript reliability and historical accuracy.

• 1. Definition: “Wholly true in all it affirms” (B. B. Warfield).
• 1. Jesus’ use of Scripture as truth (John 19:28; Luke 24:44-47).

• 1. Christ’s resurrection validates Old Testament prophecies (Zechariah 13:7; Isaiah 53:12).
• 1. Luke 24:27: Jesus explaining Himself through Moses and the Prophets.

• 1. The Church’s mandate to center sermons on Christ.
• 1. Avoidance of moralism or abstract theology disconnected from the gospel.

• 1. Scripture’s plain meaning for salvation (Psalm 119:130; Deuteronomy 30:11-14).
• 1. Westminster Confession’s emphasis on “ordinary means” of understanding.

• 1. Encouragement to study Scripture personally and corporately.
• 1. Role of pastors in teaching, not replacing, individual engagement.

• 1. Rejection of extra-biblical authorities (Galatians 1:8-9).
• 1. Luther’s defiance of tradition conflicting with Scripture.

• 1. Critique of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and progressive theology.
• 1. 2 Timothy 3:16-17: Scripture equips believers for “every good work.”

• 1. Psalm 119:103: “Sweeter than honey to my mouth.”
• 1. Missionary John Paton’s story: Translating Scripture for the Aniwa people.

• 1. Promise of salvation, adoption, and renewal for believers.
• 1. Non-believers urged to find delight in the gospel’s offer of forgiveness.

• 1. Fathers encouraged to teach Scripture to their children.
• 1. Corporate commitment to Bible-centered worship and fellowship.

• 1. Thanksgiving for God’s revelation in Christ.
• 1. Appeal to non-believers: Embrace the Bible’s message of salvation.

I begin this morning with a confession, a small one.

I find golf boring.

I'm talking about watching it, not playing it. I mean, I know the courses are beautifully laid out usually, and the action is there, but friends, let's be honest, that action is so slow it could be called intermittent.

Even the clothes seem to let you know that this is going to be more of a, like attending a picnic than going into battle. I mean, you're not suited up like the NFL or stripped down like Olympic swimmers. No, you have on a polo and some khakis. It's like you're going to go meet your new boss.

But then I remember one time sitting with Scott Croft. And watching the British Open on TV. He wanted to watch it. I didn't. I was polite.

I was bored. But that boredom is almost always the fault of the person who is bored. And I was an example of that that day. Scott was enthralled by the Open. Unlike me.

And I have to tell you that I reminded myself of what a lot of kids have told me over the years, you know? Kids, when you tell me that your teacher is boring, I just want to be honest with you, I may not believe you. I mean, I know it's sometimes the case, but often friends, we're bored because of ourselves, our lack of interest in things. I remember one educator said, the test of a student is not how much he knows, but how much he wants to know. Anyway, that afternoon sitting there watching the British Open on TV, Scott would give a sudden appreciative chuckle or wince with a loud, no!

And as he explained it to me, the game began to make sense. I understood more of the judgments the players were making. I began to join Scott in cheering when their wise plans were beautifully executed. And experienced minor pain at their mistakes or mishaps when the ball failed to do what the player clearly intended and needed it to do. So within a few minutes of Scott's tutelage, golf became less boring to me.

Why? Because I understood what was going on. Ah, that's the little key right there that's gonna get us to Romans chapter four, verse three. But let me give you another example with another confession. When I open the hood of a car, what I see there looks to me as unintelligible and mysterious as a foreign language.

We know it's not because sometimes the car won't run because some specific part has failed. Some connection is broken, some fluid has leaked out, age has caused something to degrade, but that's where the knowledge of the overall design makes a difference. So if Pat Forrester is standing there with me, or Zach Rezue, or Dan Allen, well then they look and they understand what's going on and they know what to do. That world makes as much sense to them as Cambridge of the 1620s does to me.

Friends, we can't assume that because something doesn't make sense to us, It doesn't make sense at all. We always have to ask, is there more knowledge of a situation that if I had it, things would look different? I might even have a better understanding of something. Well, in our fallen world, most knowledge is not self-evident. The mere fact that most of us have no idea what to do with vital matters that are happening in our own body.

And so we have to go to a specialist to do some tests and then to guess at what's going on should teach us this. Our ignorance or misunderstanding is no argument against there being a real and significant pattern. Now, if you're here and you're not a believer, I hope you see that I'm feeling after your unbelief right now. I am planting little cognitive bombs to help you see how insecure your lack of trust in the Bible is. If you don't understand that I'm doing that, talk to me at the door afterwards.

I'll try to make it clear what I'm doing. I think the illustrations of this abound from golf to car mechanics. When we understand little, even the clearest signs mean nothing to us.

Is it surprising that it would be like that with what we read in the Bible? When it comes to the most important questions of life, we're faced with fundamental questions of trust. So in Paul's letter to the Romans that we've begun studying, we find Paul picking up this very theme of knowledge bringing understanding. Take your Bibles and open up to Paul's letter to the Romans. If you're using the Bibles provided, you'll see it begins there on page 900 and 39.

Open up the letter to the Romans. There Paul is setting out to end our ignorance about sin and about faith. In the opening chapters of Romans, Paul has shown that we're all naturally at war with our good God, a rebellion that we will lose terribly and forever, and that our only hope is in coming to understand enough of who God is and what God has done, that we will trust Him. Only by faith in God and His promises will we have a goodness, a righteousness that we have failed to acquire by our own. Just look at your last month.

Look at your last week and see that you do not have a righteousness good enough to appear before God. We'll have that goodness attributed to us, accounted to us by God today, so that at the time of transition from this earthly life of change to our final fixed life, life where we keep existing, but either in our sinful rebellion against Him and receiving the full weight of His disapproval and punishment forever, or We keep existing as we should, accurately and humbly trusting God and His promises, especially His promises we've been singing of, of love and forgiveness in Jesus Christ for all who believe in those promises. That's where we're graciously adopted by God, as we're forgiven of our sins, we're made one with Christ and indwelt by His very own Spirit, living in fellowship with him forever as the hymn says, just like a child at home. That's what we're brought in the good news of Jesus Christ. Friends, if you come here on this Lord's Day morning excited about the risen Lord, because he's the one who's brought you this forgiveness, this union, this adoption, this forever fellowship, then you know something of the joy that there is.

And hearing and understanding and believing the message of this book. That's the message that Paul's letter to the Romans was written to explain. Paul has argued exactly this in the first three chapters of Romans beautifully, powerfully. He's shown us the great truth in these chapters that we're all separated from God by our sin. We all need to be justified because we've all sinned.

And then the question is, How? If we're all in trouble, how do we get out of trouble? How will sinners ever use the word here, how will sinners ever be justified? If we've got a righteous God and unrighteous people, how will this God ever truly regard us as just? And in these chapters, climaxing in chapter 3, Paul showed us that no one will be justified by things we do.

Look in chapter 3, verse 20. If you're not used to looking at a Bible, the chapter numbers are the large numbers, the verse numbers are the small ones after it. Chapter 3, verse 20, By works of the Law no human being will be justified in his sight. Paul had said back in chapter 2 that justification will come for all those Jews or Gentiles who obey the Law, but the problem is that nobody obeys the Law.

Chapter 3 verse 9, All both Jews and Greeks are under sin. So the conclusion is that however one might get to heaven, it won't be this way. No one will be justified by the things they do. And then you have these glorious verses, chapter 3 verse 21 and following, We see one of the Bible's great but nows. As these two little words come to rescue us.

Like hostages being rescued from their fate. So here, delivered from our captivity. Look at chapter 3, verse 21. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. For all who believe.

Friends, that's what you wanna make sure you understand today. What does it mean to have faith in Jesus Christ? What does it mean to believe in him? For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.

It was to show his righteousness at the present so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of our boasting? It's excluded. By what kind of law? By law of works?

No. But by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. Or is God the God of the Jews only? Is He not the God of the Gentiles also?

Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one. Who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.

And by the law there he means the Old Testament. We uphold the Scriptures. We uphold what the Scriptures teach. Friends, this is the good news that he has for you today if you're here and you're not a believer. You can be forgiven for your sins because of what Jesus Christ has done, because of His death on the cross in the place of everyone who would ever turn from their sins and trust, rely on Him and His sacrifice.

Friends, that's the great hope there is for you in this message this morning. For everything else that I'm going to say to instruct Christians, there's nothing as important for you if you're not a Christian, to hear is what I'm saying right now. If you just want to just be on repeat, just reread those verses 21 to 30 for the next several minutes. Just look down and keep rereading those. Those are what you want to understand for your eternal salvation's sake.

Chapter 4, which is the object of our study this summer, comes at this very point because as soon as Paul says this, you know what many of his Jewish hearers would say. They would go, Hold on, what does this do with our father Abraham? Because friends, the favorite Bible verse of countless kids in vacation Torah school was Genesis 26:5, and in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws. So at the time, people thought, people who believed the Bible, the Old Testament, the Scriptures, people thought that Abraham was an example of being justified, being made right by God, by his obedience, by all the ways he had kept all the commands, all the statutes, all the ordinances, all the laws. And he was the father of the nation.

Well, by studying Paul's answer in verses one and two, when we were last in Romans four, we saw that everyone is lost, that no one has any ground of boasting before God. And Paul is about to prove it by citing a verse that's even earlier than Genesis 25, where that verse comes from. He's gonna show something that was true of Abraham before he obeyed. But that's our sermon next week. Because while we're here, and I'm kind of controlling what we study.

I just wanted to pause us in the middle of verse 3, so we would just take this first part to look at. Because Paul, in order to cite this verse, uses a little phrase here at the beginning of verse 3 that I think it is worth our time as a church just to stare at this morning. And, Lord willing, if we get next week, we'll come back and we'll go on into what the verse is that he's gonna cite. But I just want you to notice, as Paul's hand quickly moves to bring a Bible to prove his point, I just want you to notice Paul grabs his Bible to prove his point. That's all we're looking at this morning.

The fact that Paul, as it were, grabs his Bible. This is our text, Romans 43. A. I don't know if you've ever felt like a Bible scholar before, but to really feel like a Bible scholar after the number, just put a letter. Like, usually A or B. If you say C or D, people might get very confused.

But if you say Romans 4:3A, you mean the first part of verse 3. And that's our text for today. Here it is. For what does the Scripture say? I think we could memorize that text right now.

We could say it all together. For what does the Scripture say?

That's all we're looking at this morning. You think it's therefore going to be a short sermon.

Just talk to some of the members who've been here longer.

Paul shows that this world is not the boring nothingness that in our ignorance we may assume it is. We look around and we don't know golf, we don't know this world, it doesn't look like it has any meaning. It's not the confused, messy, meaningless car wreck of random events that atheism sees when it looks at life. No, this life is rich with meaning.

And Paul turns to where it is explained by God in his own words. Paul points to Scripture. Scripture is where life is explained by God. You are not the world's best authority even on your own life because God made you in his image. He understands you.

Better than you understand yourself. It's true with every one of us. So we study the Bible to see what God says about himself and about us. So this morning we want to notice Paul's complete trust in the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Bible, and we want to consider what this means for us. Then next week, Lord willing, we'll follow Paul into the verse from Moses that he cites and what we're taught in it.

But today we want to understand more about the Bible by understanding that the Bible is, number one, unified; number two, divine; number three, true; number four, about Christ; number five, clear; number six, enough; and finally, delightful.

Number one, unified; number two, divine; number three, true, number four, about Christ, number five, clear, number six, enough, and finally, delightful. And as we come to understand this, we come to understand why Paul read the Bible and trusted it as God's own Word and why we should do that too. First, the Bible is unified. You'll notice here Paul asks what the Scripture in the singular says. And Paul can do this because he's referring not only to the book of Genesis, but because the whole of the Old Testament was understood fundamentally as one book.

Even though the Bible, as our own statement of faith says, was written by men divinely inspired, many different men, yet behind those many men was one author. We'll come to that more in just a moment. I just want us to note here that Paul follows Jesus in ranging across the whole of the Old Testament. It's all taken together to be referred to by one noun in the singular, the Scripture, the Scripture. It's all true.

The parts you like, the parts you don't. They didn't have to have our liking something to get in. There's unity from the narratives revealed to and through Moses in Genesis to the prophecies to Malachi in the centuries before Paul. The authors themselves realized it. The Old Testament canon of Jesus and the Apostles had all the same books in it as are sitting in our Bibles right now.

The Bible of the first Christians was what we call the Old Testament, just like you see Paul calling it here, the Scripture. And then the inclusion of the 27 books of the New Testament was simply more of the same. It's interesting, Peter refers to Paul's writings, puts him in the category of Scripture. And we see the other early Christians adopting these same books that we do. And have always recognized.

B.B. Warfield summarized it well. He said, the early churches received as we receive into their New Testament all the books historically evinced to them as given by the apostles to the churches as their code of law. And we must not mistake the historical evidences of the slow circulation and authentication of these books over the widely extended church for evidence of slowness of canonization of books by the authority or the taste of the church itself. Many other early writings from Christians exist from the following centuries, but none other from the Apostles.

One of the things you'll find with the long study of Scripture is that the unity in the Bible between the Old and the New Testaments becomes more and more clear to you. It's not that Genesis on the one hand has one thing and Romans on the other has nothing to contribute, but there is a fitness of each to the whole. The whole Bible reveals one true God. You can tell they're a part of the same thing. Even in this fourth chapter of Romans, what is Paul doing?

Paul is staring at Genesis and the Psalms and helping us to understand them in light of Jesus having come and what Jesus taught. It's been well said that the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed and the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed. And it's all united around Jesus Christ. I hope as you hear the preaching here in this pulpit, you see Christ responsibly presented in every message, from the creation in Genesis to the consummation in Revelation. Whoever is preaching, this is because the Bible is unified.

That's number one. Number two, the Bible is divine. The Bible is divine. You'll see here in our verse that Paul fundamentally turned to the Scripture Why? Because the Scripture is the Word of God.

Friend, in some religions they wonder what will placate the volcano deity. Let's grab a young person and throw them in. Let's hope that will stop the rumbling. That's not the way the Christian religion is. God Himself has spoken to us.

He has told us what He's like. That's what we have in the Bible. So here when Paul says that the Scripture speaks, it's the same thing as saying God is speaking. This is a consistent pattern in the Bible. The text of the Old Testament is appealed to in the New as if God Himself is speaking.

You can tell because Old Testament Scriptures are spoken of as if they were God. I could give you lots of examples of this. But if you want to just write this down a little bit later in Romans chapter 9 verse 17. Romans 9:17, Paul writes, For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. Well, you look back in Exodus, it's God who's speaking to Pharaoh, but because it's recorded in Scripture and because Scripture is God's Word, the two things are so closely associated, Paul, with no fear of being misunderstood, can say the Scripture said to Pharaoh.

And you can find it going the other way too, where when you have other people speaking, not God, in the Old Testament, and it's being quoted in the New Testament, the writers in the New Testament can say, and God said, because it's in Scripture. It's representing His truth. It has God for its author, as our church's statement of faith puts it. In Scripture, God addresses us as our Creator and our Judge. As our Redeemer and our refashioner.

In his sovereignty, God uses the prophets and apostles to write down his very own words for his people to read. It is God's own spirit that inspired the Bible's authors from first to last, from Moses to John. When the Bible speaks, God speaks. It's like the description Moses gives in Deuteronomy 5:4 about the people of God meeting with the Lord at Mount Sinai. The Lord spoke with you face to face at the mountain out of the midst of the fire.

You look at our verse here in chapter four of Romans. Paul refers to the Scripture as speaking in the present tense. Friends, did you realize that's what was happening this morning when you opened up your Bible to read it? God was speaking to you. I mean, even if you weren't having an emotional experience, you weren't very engaged in that sense.

That's not what it means for God to speak. It's not you getting the tinglies. No, it's you to read and understand the words that God inspired. God is speaking to you in His Word. This is why we as a church put such an emphasis on the Word of God.

Have you noticed how it permeates our times together? A text of Scripture is on the COVID of the bulletin. Four Scripture references are right there in order on the service on page two. We began by singing, 'Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His Word, just to rest upon His promise, just to know, 'Thus saith the Lord.' We had Psalm 19 read to us. And then Jacob Hargrave plans to bring us a meditation on an answering passage tonight from the opposite Testament, Psalm 119:104, Through your precepts I get understanding.

Therefore, I hate every false way, which is a great text for Him to lead us in considering carefully before He goes off to Cambridge to do a PhD in theology. I hate every false way. Tonight we'll hope to sing Psalm 19 and also another song from Job 1925. So Scripture begins our time together and gives us encouragement after we confess our sins. Friends, we use our Bibles to understand our Bibles.

The center of our time together is the exposition of Scripture. It's what I'm doing right now in speaking, and you're doing right now in carefully listening. In fact, preparing this message takes up the largest single block of my time every week. What you guys pay me to do more than anything else is prepare this message. It takes up almost half of our time together here on Sunday morning.

Many of us calibrate our own private readings of God's Word around what we'll be hearing preached on Sunday morning. So this passage shapes our lunchtime discussions, family worship, small groups later in the week. Hundreds of us gather for midweek inductive Bible study through God's Word. Troy's going to have us in Jude this coming Wednesday night at seven. There are other Bible studies through the week and small groups that meet.

As we meet together, we feed each other God's Word. I wonder how you're planning to do that this week? How are you planning to stir one another up to love and good deeds by studying the Bible with somebody else this week? My friend, if you're here and you're not a Christian, I hope and pray that you come to Christ today because this Bible is God's Word and it's a word you need. And it's a word you will profit from in your soul.

Anytime we read, brothers and sisters, it's, and now a word from your heavenly Father, because it's God's Word. It's God's Word to us. Number three, the Bible is true. Notice that Paul assumes that in our text. Our statement of faith is very clear on the truthfulness of the Bible.

It calls it and truth without any mixture of error for its matter.

Now, of course, when somebody says, if they have questions about whether or not the Bible is true, they can mean a number of different things by that. Let me just mention four. Sometimes they may wonder, can we really translate it correctly? I hear it wasn't written originally in English. Wasn't it originally written in Greek and in Hebrew?

How do we know what we're reading is good? Well, it's certainly true that there are bad translations, but friends, there are scores of good translations of the Bible into English alone, hundreds into other languages, and you can compare them against each other and see that they're all teaching the same thing. This is why when Christians sometimes fight with each other about which translation to use, I get a little discouraged and I think, you must not understand that we really can translate. Billions of dollars of business deals are done every day through translation. I mean, we really trust translation.

It can be done. When we're not playing a game about it, we know that translation can be done and done very, very well. So the translation that we read, so here the ESV or any of the major committee translations, the CSB, the NIV, these are all excellent translations of God's Word. So yes, you can translate the Bible. But let's say that I convince you about that, so that's not your concern.

Okay, I understand we can translate it. But now I'm wondering what we're translating, those documents. A second kind of true. Have they been transmitted correctly? That is, what was written down 2,000 years ago, is that what we still have today to translate?

That's another good question. That's a different question. That's a question of do we have those manuscripts? And in fact, we don't have any of the autographs. We don't have any of the actual parchment that St. Mark would have written his gospel on.

But we do have documents closer to when that would have been than we do for any other book from the ancient world. And we have more of them in number, so much so that we can know what was written down pretty easily. And that's what many people's whole careers have been given to. So friends, we can tell, if we can tell anything at all in history, we can certainly tell what was written down in these books. And we have ancient manuscripts to corroborate them.

So they have been transmitted correctly. A third thing someone may wonder, okay, I understand it can be translated well and we've kept what we had originally, but my question was how trustworthy was the original thing? That is, is what Mark wrote down, Jesus said and did, what Jesus really said and did? Well, that's a good question. So then how do you figure that out?

Well, you just have to look and draw your own judgment. Just think, is this trustworthiness, is this historical accuracy something that seems to be borne out by the text? Now it just so happens for me, this was actually my professional life before I came here. I actually worked on historical texts. And I'll just tell you from my opinion anyway, particularly if we're thinking about the Gospels in the New Testament, we have some of the most authentic seeming texts you could have that discuss the faults of the people who were the big deals in the community at the time they were written.

Show how people were in situations that if you and I were making it up, we wouldn't put them in. We wouldn't record them. There's all kinds of things that are in the Gospels only because they happened that way. Otherwise you just wouldn't write them down. So I would just encourage you to look at that and see that they are trustworthy.

But then there's the most important question of all. Let's say you can translate correctly these documents that have been transmitted faithfully and that they were a trustworthy account of what was said and done. Now finally, you get to the question, is what was said true? So you know Jesus did actually say that. Great.

It's been translated, it was transmitted, it was written down accurately. But here's the question that really matters. Is it true? Friends, that's what you want to deal with. And what we Christians are convinced of is that the Bible is true.

I want to tell you about four books briefly in this unusual sermon so that you can get your own time to study if you want. The classic on this is by B.B. Warfield called the Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. It looks like a classic, doesn't it? Kind of old and worn.

The good news is these are eight separate articles, so you don't have to read them together. Just pick one that you're interested in. The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible by B.B. Warfield, if you want to do some serious lifting on that this summer. A second one much shorter is written by J.I.

Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God. This is a book I've used to read with many people over the years where Packer basically lays out, look, you're going to have some kind of authority, it's going to be reason, experience, tradition, or the Word. And he just asks, who's your final umpire? And why? It's a great short little treatment of that.

J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God. And Betsy, we might have this one on the bookstall? We do. Have this one on the bookstall, all right. Also, one of my favorites, John Wenham, W-E-N-H-A-M, Christ in the Bible.

This book basically says, We believe the Bible because Jesus did. So if we're following Jesus, we trust the Bible. Like he did. That's Christ in the Bible by John Winham. And if you want to save yourself time, you can like learn the lesson of my freshman year in college.

I spent my time with non-Christians trying to convince them the Bible was an errant. That was probably not a wise thing to do. You know, there's just so many ways you can come at that. And I realized in Acts chapter 2, Peter doesn't begin by trying to convince everybody the Bible's true. He tells them about Jesus.

And becoming convinced about Jesus, you then climb back around to the scripture. So if you wanna go that way, which I really think is the better way to go, Greg Gilbert's who is Jesus? is just a great little tool. I encourage you to get this, read this, who is Jesus? by Greg Gilbert.

Friends, whenever you have a teacher tell you that the Bible contradicts itself, why don't you just do your whole class a favor? And just raise your hand and ask them where.

Ask them what the contradiction is. I had the joy of studying in a very secular university and majoring in New Testament. I was in many lectures that I disagreed with and I had a perverse fun in watching carefully and listening and then deciding where just the right places to put up my hand. And just ask simple questions. Because very often assertions of unbelief go unchallenged, and a few simple questions are kind ways to help people think better.

My simple response is that the Bible doesn't contradict itself. In fact, I would say that my lifelong study of the Bible has increasingly borne the weight of my continuing faith. You know, early on I think I believed the Bible because I understood that its witness was true, because I believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and I wanted to trust him and follow him, very much like John Winham's argument in Christ and the Bible. It's a good argument. But I have to say, after decades of closely studying the Bible, I am all the more confident of its unerring truthfulness.

Its presentation of God is consistent over the varied human authors and their differing centuries and cultural contexts. Its presentation of humanity, of our nature being made in God's image, of our sin is consistent across the board. Most amazing of all, its central focus on Jesus Christ from beginning to end in a way that brings about just shock if somebody were just trying to make this up is so clear. Everything from the place of the Messiah's birth to the circumstances of his death are predicted in the scriptures written centuries before Jesus was born. The intricate agreements between countless details together bring a picture of brilliant precision and clarity that I find only more compelling each year I study the Bible.

Any apparent contradictions should be either further studied or just laid aside for a while while you learn more, or ask one of your pastors here about a particular concern that you have, and we'd be happy to help you. Paul referred to the Scripture here as he did because it was unerringly true, as we would expect of God's Word. Of course, our God is and would be only faithful and accurate in all he would say. The human authors were, of course, imperfect, but God sovereignly used them to write the books and letters that he wanted written. So his Spirit faithfully inspired them, even in the words they used, just like someone giving dictation to someone else.

Now, I'm not telling you that as an illustration of the method, but of the certainty of the outcome. I'm not trying to damp down the humanness and individuality of each of the authors, but I'm saying the result is such that it's exactly what God wanted written. Paul Feinberg has summarized inerrancy well. He said, inerrancy means that when all the facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality or with the social, physical, or life sciences. Friends, since the Bible is purely true, we can trust completely in it.

What the Bible says, God says. We can rest there. The Bible is true.

A fourth thing, the Bible is about Christ. The Bible is about Christ. Paul here is really following Jesus in how Jesus read the Bible. You know, Jesus quoted the Bible assuming it was true. You know, the first place we see Jesus using the Bible in the text of the Gospels, it's in the temptations.

And what did Jesus and Satan both do? They both grabbed the Bible and quoted at each other. Now why are they doing that? Because Satan knows that Jesus knows it's true. Now Satan isn't sharp enough that he doesn't realize that Jesus can see how Satan is misusing God's Word, which Satan has a long history of doing.

That's kind of the way he operates. But at least even there he knows he needs to use God's Word because that's where the truth is. And then Jesus deploys it correctly. This is the way we see Jesus working. Jesus especially showed this, that he assumed it was true like Paul was doing here when he used the scriptures to explain himself to the disciples.

So again and again Jesus taught about what was to come. He would look to the scriptures, referring to the coming days of vengeance in Luke 21, he taught that they would be to fulfill all that is written. That phrase he uses again and again. Jesus cites Psalm 41 at the Last Supper to explain that one of them would betray him, saying, the Scriptures will be fulfilled. For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him.

If the Scriptures had something written in them, Jesus taught that it was determined that it would be so. So Zechariah 137 says, Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. So after the disciples had celebrated the Passover together, they had sung a hymn, gone to the Mount of Olives, Jesus cited the Scripture saying, you, will all fall, for it is written. Again, citing Isaiah 53:12, Jesus taught that the Scripture must be fulfilled to me. He will be numbered with the transgressors.

Friends, I could go on and on. That last night was thick with these predictions. Jesus was using the Old Testament like a guide to explain and stop and put the background on everything that was happening that night. So that they would understand who he is. You see, sometimes the evangelists themselves will comment on something and say, this was to fulfill the Scriptures.

The disciples didn't understand it at the time, but later, after Jesus was raised, they understood this. How did they come to that understanding? Well, you look at the end of Luke's Gospel, Luke chapter 24 and verse 27. And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all in the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

The two disciples said that Jesus opened the Scriptures to them. Later that evening the risen Jesus taught them all this in Luke 2444-47. Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Friends, the Bible is true and the Bible is about Christ.

Jesus Himself used it to explain who He was. Number five, the Bible is clear. Paul assumes this in our verse. He's pointing to a verse knowing that when they read it, they'll see what he's saying. This is what our church's statement of faith means when it says that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us.

God has not kept ultimate reality cloaked in some world of Platonic forms or lost in Buddhist samsara. God gives us his word to be understood. The whole way that we have our Bibles with us when we come to church or that you look at one that we provide here in the pews shows the accessibility of the Bible to us. We offer this study not just for special initiates, but for any and all, for young and old, for members in non, for Christians in non. Friends, this is the way God's revelation of Himself is again and again.

You think of Him speaking through the prophet Isaiah in chapter 55 when He says, Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; he who has no money, come, buy and eat; come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me and eat what is good. The Bible again and again presents your ears as a kind of mouth for your soul. Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food.

I used to do something called theology breakfast, in which people would make fun of me for us having no food. But I was saying we're breaking our fast of theology. I'm getting that from Isaiah right here.

Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me, hear that your soul may live and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. Behold, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Behold, you shall call a nation that you do not know and a nation that did not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your God and of the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. Seek the Lord while he may be found.

Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord, that He may have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return there, but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the things for which I sent it. Friend, this powerfully drawing grace of God works through the words that God has spoken through His prophets that we can understand.

That's why we can have a public address like this. That's why so many of us here in this church spend our time teaching the Bible to ourselves and to our families and to each other. We want to know where to go to in the Bible to understand our own lives when we need consolation or we need challenge or we need rebuke or encouragement or instruction. Where do we go if we want to know about the righteousness of God through faith? Or about God's promises realized through faith?

Where can we learn how to persevere in following Christ? Or to endure in struggles in our local church? All of this and more can be found in the Bible. So brothers and sisters, study your Bible. Let it be your book.

We work here at CHBC to study it and understand it exactly because it is so understandable. Friend, if it were all mysterious to everybody, there wouldn't be this many people interested in it. We couldn't sustain our own study. But friends, we learn here how to read it ourselves and feed our own souls through the week. I don't mean that everything in the Bible is easy to understand.

No, Paul said in Romans 11, oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments, how inscrutable His ways. And yet, God has in Scripture searched them out for us and revealed them to us. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it beautifully when it says, All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other that not only the learned but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them. So brothers and sisters, I hope when you sit down with your Bible you have a joyful sense of hope.

It says, oh, I am about to read something from God that is God's Word. I'm gonna understand this. This is gonna be food for my soul. I'm gonna be sustained by what I'm about to get now in the next 10 or 20 minutes that I sit down and open God's Word. Give some time to it.

Try to find some quiet. Dads, on this Father's Day, wasn't a good way to celebrate Father's Day Be for you to give your wife some time alone with the Word and for you to be a dad and teach your kids the Scriptures. What a great way to celebrate Father's Day. Give your wife some time in the Word. Young people, spend time studying the Word.

Get started early on. Now I'm so thankful that God reached into my heart when I was a teenager so that I would start reading through the Bible from a young age. That has been such a help for me in my life. As a church, we are committed to teaching the Bible clearly. And we want to hold out even sharp, clear contrasts in the Bible, just like we're going to be seeing in Romans 4, the contrast between faith and works, between salvation by us doing things and salvation by what God has done.

God hasn't left us to guess about himself or us. Like the good father he is, he's given us his word. And it is clear. As we read in Psalm 119, you, word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. God's word is clear.

Number six, the Bible is enough.

Note when Paul hears this objection about, what about Abraham? He doesn't point to a bunch of different things. He doesn't say the rabbis say this and that. He just points to the Bible. The Bible's enough.

Again in our church's statement of faith we affirm that the Bible is sufficient. That's what's meant in that phrase, it's a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction. Heavenly instruction, just another way of saying it's God's Word. But the contribution that phrase makes is it is a perfect treasure, meaning it's complete. There's nothing we need to add to it.

That's why that statement draws the conclusion, therefore is and shall remain to the end of the world the true center of Christian union and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds and opinions should be tried. Friends, Scripture is our final court of appeal. There's no need for bishops or popes, no need for general assemblies or conventions to tell us about our opinions or our statements of faith, our conduct or our standards or requirements for cooperation. All of those are found sufficiently in the Bible itself. And so competent is it in its clarity that it has no need to be mediated to us by a protecting bodyguard of tradition.

So we welcome the history of great Christians and churches before us to help us in our reading the Bible. But any teaching that you must have the Bible and is suspect, whether that's the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, or the Bible and the Book of Mormon, or the Bible and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, or the Bible and the Pope of Rome, or the Bible and the writings of Freud, or the Bible and the writings of Calvin, be suspect. Anytime you're told you have to have something else. I know, young people, it is very popular in your generation to think that something is better and cooler because it's older. That is one of Satan's oldest tricks, don't fall for it.

You realize that some tradition may have been going on in the fourth century, But if you assume that's cooler than what we were doing in the 19th century, that's not a wise assumption. Because even before the 4th century, you know what there was? The 1st century. And you know what was happening in the 1st century? Messed up churches.

Every letter in the New Testament is written because of errors being made in churches. Friends, the fact that tradition is older, Rome may tell you that, the Eastern Orthodox friends may tell you that, they haven't thought well enough. No offense to Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox friends that are here today. Galatians 1 is sharper than Cyprian. Irenaeus and Cyprian will tell you, well, I don't know if Irenaeus, Ignatius maybe, and Cyprian will tell you where the bishop is, there the church is.

Bad thinking. Paul was a more complex thinker in Galatians 1. He knew that he as an apostle could come and give a different message. And if the message changed, he wasn't to be trusted. So as good Bible believing Christians, we not only want to ask about the teacher, we want to ask what the teacher teaches.

That's how you find the truth that you see in the New Testament, not just by tradition. This is the part in what the Reformers were celebrating in their famous solas, particularly the first one, sola scriptura, only Scripture. In 1538, Martin Luther was preaching through John's Gospel and at one point he said, I do not intend to condemn Benedict and others. But I do propose to take their books and carry them to Christ, and to His Word as a criterion for comparison, to submit St. Francis' rule to Christ's Gospel for a judgment. If their doctrine agrees with the Gospel, I shall accept it.

If not, I shall say, you, may be a holy man, but you will never subject me to your rule, for it's a human bauble. Therefore, let the devil adopt it. I do not want it. Luther was a good student of Paul in our passage. He understood that Paul was pointing to Scripture alone because Scripture was sufficient.

It was enough. Everything we need to know for saving faith and spiritual life is taught in the Bible. And that doesn't mean that our church's statement of faith or even sermons like this one don't help us, but we don't need them in the same way that we need Scripture itself. This is why the Lord was always so careful in teaching His people, do not add anything or subtract anything from what I tell you. Many places you can see this in Scripture.

Romans, I mean, Deuteronomy 4:2, you shall not add to the word that I command you nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you. Or you think of what Paul wrote to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for proof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Friends, the earliest Christians after the New Testament period knew this and they taught it. You can go read it in the letters of Clement of Alexandria, in the writings of Irenaeus. The Bible is enough.

But since those early days, many have come telling us that the Bible is not enough. Cults, Roman Catholicism, modern progressive Protestantism. So you realize when this church building was built, probably every Protestant church on the hill believed largely the same stuff. But you realize now 110 years later, we might be the only ones. We still believe what the Bible says.

We think it's true. Others are suggesting that the Bible is in fact not enough. But friends, we should resist them all because the Bible is enough. Friends, we could go on all day relishing the great gift God has given us in His Word. So let me just review what we've said so you make sure you've got it down right, all right?

The Bible is unified, so we read it together. It's our canon, our rule, our measure. The Bible is divine. We can come to know God through it. It's His revelation, it's His Word.

The Bible is true. We can trust it. It's inerrant. The Bible is about Christ. We can follow Jesus' example.

He knew it would all be fulfilled. The Bible is clear. We can understand it. It's perspicuous. That's why we have hope to study it.

The Bible is enough. We can rely on it fully. We don't need a bunch of other books.

It's sufficient. The final attribute I just want to leave you with that a sermon may not convey very well is that the Bible is delightful. The Bible is delightful. We can rejoice in it deeply and unendingly in this life. Just read Psalm 119 this afternoon.

How sweet are your words to my taste sweeter than honey to my mouth. God's word is It is pleasing to us. It is satisfying to our souls. Our statement of faith says it has our salvation for its end. What it's about is seeing us saved from the wrath of God that we've deserved.

Seeing us getting forgiveness for our sins. That's why the Bible is here. My non-Christian friend, the Bible tells the true story of God's wisdom and goodness overflowing in creation.

And His mercy and love overflowing in salvation. It tells a true story of a God who knows exactly who you are, exactly what you're like, exactly what you've done, your deepest failures, and your darkest secrets, and sending His own Son to rescue you. Save you. Forgive you. You.

In a way, no one else in this whole room knows and understands and to adopt you and to bless you. It tells the true story of a God who's going to make all things new and make everything right and wipe away every tear and bring about a reign of eternal, uninterrupted joy.

My fellow Christians, what can we do better with our time together every week? Then read this Bible, preach this Bible, sing it and pray from it, and share our delight in God that it tells us about. Believe this gospel and find this delight. It made me think of the story of missionary and translator John Paton when he was working in the 19th century in the Polynesian island of Aniwa in the South Pacific Ocean. He spent many years learning the language of the island and then working to create a written form of it and then to translate portions of it into it.

Peyton wrote, Namaki, the chief on the island, Namaki came to me morning after morning saying, Missy, is it done? Can it speak? At last I was able to answer, Yes. The old chief eagerly responded, Does it speak my words? I said, It does.

With rising interest, Namaki exclaimed, Make it speak to me, Missy, let me hear it speak. I read to him a part of the book and the old man fairly shouted in ecstasy of joy. It does speak, it speaks my own language too. Oh, give it to me. Prince NamakaI had that same sense about the Scripture that the Apostle Paul did when he was writing to those Christians in Rome in the first century.

He felt about it as we should, that the Scripture is God's word, true and clear, that it alone tells us the good news about Jesus, and that the entirety of it is filled with the same kind of satisfactions and pleasures that the believer finds in God Himself. As the psalmist said, you, law is my delight. Praise God for His Word. Let's pray together.

Lord God, we thank youk for every way youy provide for us in Christ. We thank youk especially for your Word, that Paul could turn to those who needed to be instructed and reach back to Genesis and show the truth of salvation by faith in youn even then. Thank youk for training us to trust yout Word even as we trust yout. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.