Do Words Matter

Do Words Matter to God?

Do words matter to God? Can we say that there is such a thing as the "Word of God"? This question has been debated since the Garden of Eden. Each era of human consciousness has varying responses to this question. Today, the very notion that words convey meaning is rejected and with it the Bible. It can even be considered ‘spiritual’ to disbelieve in the ability of words to communicate truth.

You cannot know God until you’ve stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you’ve already heard God. I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.

But my truth about God comes from You.

Who said so?

Others.

What others?

Leaders. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Books. The Bible, for heaven’s sake!

Those are not authoritative sources.

They aren’t?

No.

Then what is?

Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teacher, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.

The dialogue above is taken from the book Conversations with God, Book 1, (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996) by Neale Donald Walsch. This book claims to be the written conversation that Walsch had with God. The words in italics are the supposed words of God as communicated to Walsch through an experience of automatic writing. This is a top selling book that illustrates a growing attitude about truth among many people today. In these postmodern times we find many popularized spiritualities espousing that Truth does not come in words. To them it comes through experience and the inner voice within the human heart.

Notice how "God" tells Walsch that "words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth." This is in direct contradiction to what the God of Moses claims. He said,

Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law. They are not just idle words for you, they are your life.

The One God of Israel and the Church is the One who reveals Himself both in history and in the pages of the Bible. It is the Bible which records, preserves and transmits the revelation or message of this God to the world. Throughout the Old and New Testaments the phrase "the word of the Lord" or its equivalent occurs 372 times. Also, the expression "God spoke" or "God said" appears about 325 times. Upon their entrance to the Land of Canaan Moses said this about God:

He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:3 NIV)

This is the very passage which Christ quoted to Satan when he was tested in the wilderness. For Jesus, words were not only important, they were the only thing necessary for living. Jesus believed that these ‘words’ were of sufficient power and authority to thwart the words of Satan. It is this belief that has characterized the Christian faith at times of spiritual health. However, when the "words" of Scripture have diminished, the words of superstitions, myth, mysticism and falsehood have prevailed.

The Apostle Paul expressed the prevalent conviction of the Church about the nature of the Scriptures when he wrote this charge to Timothy:

But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage-- with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. (2 Timothy 3:13- 4:5 NIV)

Timothy was encouraged to continue to draw from his knowledge of Scripture, because through it comes the knowledge of salvation. The Scriptures are ‘breathed out of God,’ meaning that the written word itself is the product of God’s Spirit. They are more than enough to equip a minister for all that he is called to do. Timothy is to ‘preach the word.’ Paul must not have heard from Donald Walsch’s "God." In stark contrast, Paul believed that the very essence of Christian ministry and worship was the telling - the verbal communication - of the ‘word’ of God. Not only that, Paul warned Timothy that in his day (as now in ours) Christians would not put up with healthy words (doctrine) but would gather around teachers who told them things that were desirable to hear. Their desires would turn them away from the truth of the ‘word’ and move them to whole heartedly buy into myths. One never gets away from words; its only a matter of words which are true or words which deceive. Ironically, Neale Donald Walsch learned that "words cannot convey Truth" through the very words he claims that "God" dictated to him and which he wrote down for us to read. If words cannot convey Truth then stop using words to tell people they can't. If words can convey truth, then we must soberly consider the testimony of Scripture.

Scripture and the Reformation

"Water is always purest at its source." So said the leaders of the Renaissance. They authored the cry of Ad Fontes, which meant: "To the Sources." Their desire to return to the sources of Western culture led the way for those who in the Reformation would return to Scripture in its original languages, and to the Bible as the single source of Christian faith. The Reformation grew out of a return to the Bible, and that, in its original languages. By this a renewed attention was placed on Scripture’s authority for the Church. It was a study of Scripture in its original languages by Martin Luther which led to the rediscovery of the truth of justification by faith.

All Christians have to answer the questions: "From where do we get our information?" From where do we get the information which makes up the truth claims that distinguish the Christian faith from all others? The Reformers asserted that the Bible was THE authoritative source for all matters of faith and practice. Since Scripture is God’s revelation of Himself, all truth agrees with Scripture and no truth of either philosophy, science, or nature contradicts it.

This conviction of the Reformers lead them to coin the phrase Sola Scriptura which means "Scripture Only." The idea behind this slogan is that all the Church looks only to the Bible when a final authority is needed to decide matters of faith and Christian life. Any and all claims to truth which are not in harmony with Scripture are considered dubious at best and heretical at worst. Part of this is the rejection of the need to find religious truth in sources outside of the Bible. Any who claim a truth must clearly demonstrate that this truth is either given in Scripture or does not contradict the words of Scripture.

It has ever been the human pattern to claim truth directly from God by human intuition or through mystical experience. However strong or real these appear to be, they are subject to the final authority of the Bible.

What Does Sola Scripture Mean?

The Bible is divinely inspired. Inspired does not mean merely in the way a composer or artist is inspired to produce a work of art. The writers of the Bible used a special word. The word theopneutos which means "God-spirited" or God breathed. This expressed denotes the idea that the written word of Scripture is the product of God’s Spirit. As the prophets spoke as they were moved by the Spirit of God (2 Peter 1:16-21), so did God move on the writers of Scripture to produce the Bible.

The Bible is sufficient. The Bible is the "sole source of written divine revelation" and teaches all that is necessary for our salvation. One who holds to Scripture Alone must reject that the Holy Spirit speaks independently or contrary from the Bible. This means either by creed, council or by one single person who claims that "the Spirit told me". Direct communication with the Spirit apart from the Bible violates the heart of Sola Scriptura.

When one looks to communicate with the Spirit apart from the Word, the Word is removed from the place of sole authority and usually becomes neglected. Calvin warns: "When the fanatics boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they make room for their own falsehoods."

The battle of the Reformation was not strictly over whether the Bible was God’s Word. It was over whether the Bible was sufficient. The two aspects of this question were, 1) Is the Bible the final authority?, and, 2) Do we need to have an ‘infallible’ interpreter to understand what Scripture is saying? The Reformers insisted that Scripture alone was the final authority for the Church. Equally important, the Scripture was its own interpreter. This led to the belief that the Bible was clear enough to be understood and that the interpretation of Scripture was the job of the whole Church. Since the Bible is clear enough to be understood by all, then all of Scripture is open to all members of the Church for their reading and edification. This does not mean that everyone could properly interpret every part of the Bible. What it meant was that the principles of interpretation did lie within the mind of a special elite group, but within Scripture itself. Therefore, the meaning of Scripture was available to all who would read it.

This does not mean that everyone has a right to read the Bible in their own way. Scripture is interpreted to each one by the Holy Spirit. Each reader of Scripture must be aware that many others have read Scripture before them and seek to learn from those who have taught the meaning of the Bible before they came along. The understanding the Holy Spirit gives to one member of the Church should be compared with the understanding the Holy Spirit gives to another member.

The Bible Today

The Bible has held a high and sacred place in the consciousness of people in America and the Western world. This is the direct result of Protestantism and the Reformation. The fact that all Christians world wide look to the Bible as their primary source for their faith derives from Protestantism. As a result, even many non-Christian cultic groups want to co-op the Bible as one of their sources of authority.

The major issue for all of these groups is not whether the Bible contains authoritative truth. I believe that two of the Reformers’ assertion concerning Sola Scriptura are under attack within the Church. The first challenge is that the Bible is not clear enough to be understood by all. Someone must be more spiritual endowed in order to mediate interpretation for the less spiritual. Second, is whether the Bible reveals all the necessary truth in order for one to know God and His salvation. This is concerned with whether Christians need more and other inspired information beside that found in Scripture.

Crisis of Truth

The Church today is in a crisis of Truth much like the one at the time of the Reformation. Then, the ordinary Christian was mostly ignorant and largely alienated from the Bible. Bibles were confined to the precincts of the church building and the use of the priests. Rather than Bibles in the common vernacular, they were all in Latin. There was a pervasive ignorance about the content and message of Scripture. The ordinary Christian believed what he or she was taught by the priest. They mixed this knowledge with various folktales, superstitions, and mystical experiences. Today, a growing biblical illiteracy among Christians is creating a climate much like that prior to the Reformation.

Every Christian needs to read all of Scripture. This can be done through the use of a number of various Bible reading schedules that are available today. Most of these take the reader through the Bible in one year. Reading through the Bible can be done without a schedule by starting to read several chapters at the beginning of both the Old and New Testaments and then continuing this pattern until finished. The New Testament can be read twice while reading through the Old Testament once. I have read through the Bible many times and am just about finished again. One of the things that I have done is read through different translations both for the insight that each provides into the text and also to have a real knowledge of what that translation is like. This enables me to best know the quality of each first hand and how they compare with each other. Every person in the local church and every child in the family should be encourage to read the Bible completely through in one year. This experience alone is as beneficial as any devotional or educational plan that churches often follow.

Every Christian needs to be in Bible Study. Bible study should be that: the study of the Bible. Rather than a time to deal with topics, the latest idea in outreach, leadership, or church growth it should be a study of the text of Scripture. Nothing else can and will feed the people of the Lord than His written Word. Bible study is not "what the Bible says to me," nor is it the personal revelation of the teacher, nor the insight taken from a Christian magazine or radio preacher. It is the hard but wonderful work of looking closely at the text of Scripture to best understand what it says and what it means. The teacher of the Word needs to be trained in the study of God's Word. This means that one who was converted six months ago or the most willing person using an IVP study outline is not the ideal teacher of the Word. I believe one of the greatest mistake made in the church is to multiply unskilled and poorly trained teachers in the church. No wonder there are so many flawed and questionable teachings in the church. If a congregation does not have a seasoned, trained, educated, spiritually mature and experienced Bible teacher, then it is in serious trouble. First of all the pastor is to be a teacher of the Word (and not the leading expert on business management, leadership, or psychology). It really is the responsibility for each pastor to hear God's call to teach the Bible to their congregation. One of the most important things a church can do is pray for and provide the means for either their pastor or a member of their congregation to answer the call and be prepared to teach Scripture.

Need to attend worship and hear the preaching of the Gospel. One of most important reason for attending a Christian church is to hear God's Word - the Bible - read and preached in worship. That is why in our church we have Scripture readings from the Psalms, the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Epistles in every worship service. Why? Because we come to worship to hear from God and the Bible is God's Word to us. I am amazed at how many churches who hold strongly to the Bible as the Word of God and have little or no reading of Scripture in worship. They give announcements, tell jokes, worship "cheer lead", raise pledges, talk about church business, and have no sense that those things have no place in worship. Worship is for worship. We hear from God and respond to God's Word. Our worship is an Amen! to God's pronouncements. All of the other things should be done in a bulletin, business meeting or before worship begins. Otherwise sinners, children and all the rest of us see the Word of God and just another thing along with the humor of the pastor or an elder taking pledges.

Often the only reading of Scripture is the sermon text. And in many cases the preacher uses that text as a jumping off place, never taking the time to expound the meaning of that text. This just simple is wrong. The Bible should not be "used" to lend authority to the personal idea with which the preacher is inspired. In fact, the inspiration of the preacher ought to come from the Word alone. He is not his own messenger. He has no message in himself. He is God's messenger. He has not right to change it, add to it or omit parts which he thinks are offensive. The Bible should be read and studied by the preacher so that his inspiration will come directly from Scripture. Far too often, preachers look in the Bible to find a text they can use to back up what they "feel in their heart." This is so obviously fraught with danger. Eventually the preacher is the "word of God" and not the Bible. This leads the congregation to see the preacher as the sacrament - means of grace - and not the Scriptures. The greatest judgment of God is not all the things that many people fear in end-time prophecy - tribulation, persecution, mark of the beast, plagues, earthquakes, etc. The greatest judgment of God is a famine of His Word. As less and less of God's Word is declared the darkness grows and the light of the Gospel is put out. The safest way to protect the souls attending worship from the darkness of this world is to give them large healthy doses of the reading and exposition of text of Scripture every time they gather.

Otherwise, each will fall into his own deceptions, falsehoods, and private heresies far away from the Bread of Life. Word of God Incarnate, give us men who love and teach Your Word.