The truth of the Bible, part 2
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2011 · 9 January 2011
The Bible makes some startling claims for itself that set it apart from every other book in the world. Scripture says, for example, "The law of the Lord is perfect." It says, "All Your commandments are truth." "Scripture cannot be broken." "Every word of God is pure." "Not one jot or tittle shall pass from the law until all is fulfilled." In Isaiah 65:16 the Lord calls Himself, "The God of truth."
And the New Testament agrees with the Old Testament in calling God a God of truth. In John 3:33 it says, "God is truthful." John 17:3 says, "The only true God." First John 5:20 says, "He is the true God." And then there are several passages in the Old and New Testaments that tell us God cannot lie.
The writers of Scripture make over 2,000 direct claims to the fact that the Scripture is God speaking of Himself. Again and again they write phrases like, "The Spirit of the Lord has spoken to me," or, "The Word of God came to me," or "The Word of God said." And so, over and over again the Scripture reminds us that everything comes from God and is true.
That is precisely the message of our text. Let's go back to it, 2 Peter 1:19-21, “And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; 20 knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, 21 for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”
Now the readers to whom Peter writes were being besieged by false teachers just as we are besieged by false teachers right now. And one of those things those false teachers were doing was denying the truth of Scripture. Peter writes this epistle to expose these false teachers and to give us proof that the bible is true.
Peter gives us two lines of verification of that truth of Scripture. First, supernatural experience in verses 16 to 18 which we discussed and looked at last Sunday. Secondly, supernatural revelation in verses 19 to 21. Both supernatural experience and supernatural revelation attest to the validity of Scripture as the Word of God. Together they affirm that the Bible is true.
In the first proof, Peter is simply saying that you're not getting secondhand information, you're getting firsthand information from firsthand eyewitnesses. When we wrote to you and when the other Apostles wrote to you and spoke about the Second Coming, they were eyewitnesses of Second Coming glory on the mount of transfiguration.
The second proof follows in verses 19 to 21 and it is the theme for our study tonight and it is about supernatural revelation. Not only did they have these personal experiences which makes them eyewitnesses, but they were also given supernatural revelation. God did not just depend on their eyewitness account.
God, by means of the Holy Spirit, superintended the recording of all of their experiences and all of their writings so that they, in effect, were the revelation of God Himself. So now you have also firsthand eyewitnesses writing under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, which is supernatural revelation.
Someone might say, "Well, Peter but your experience can't be the standard for truth. Lots of people have lots of experiences, real and unreal. So, Peter, as wonderful as it must have been to have talked with Jesus, seen Him on the cross, seen Him after His resurrection, as great as it was to have seen His Second Coming glory glimpsed on the mount of transfiguration, there must be something better than just your experience.
And the answer is, yes, there is the Scripture. And so in verse 19 Peter writes, "And so we have the prophetic word confirmed." Literally the Greek order is this, "And we have the more sure prophetic word." More sure than what? More sure than experience, even the valid, genuine experience of the Apostles.
Some commentators have felt that this statement could be understood a different way. They indicated that Peter and the Apostles' experience made the Word more sure. The idea there would be that the prophetic word might be true but our experience has validated it.
But the literal interpretation of the text again reads, "And we have the prophetic word confirmed." And so the order confirms our interpretation which I gave you first of all. As good as our experience is, the prophetic word is more sure. It would be strange to say the opposite because it would be saying: as strong as the Word is, there's something even stronger and that is our experience. And we know that that is wrong.
God Himself has repeatedly emphasized that the Word is a sufficient source of truth, the Word is inerrant, the Word is infallible, truth never to be questioned, and never to be helped along or validated by experience.
The glory of Christ in His transfigured magnificence on the mountain was perhaps able to make His Second-Coming glory more understandable to them, but the Word was already as sure as it would ever be, the Word is always a sure word.
The purposes of verses 16 to 18 was not to show the greater source of truth is experience, but simply to show that the writers who spoke of Christ's coming were not writing fables that they had invented like the false teachers, but they were firsthand eyewitnesses.
Peter is saying that verse 19 is line of evidence number one, "We have the more sure word, the confirmed prophetic word." It is ascribing to the Word the surest place. The Word is a more reliable source than the experience of anybody, even the Apostles. It is more specific, it is more detailed, it is more exact and it is fuller than anyone's experience could ever be.
Peter is saying that the many prophecies that were fulfilled in Christ's first coming and recorded in the New Testament are the confirmation of the Old Testament prophecies. The New Testament writers confirmed the Old Testament prophecies so that the New Testament is the written sure Word, to reaffirm that the Second Coming will come.
And so whether it was the Word of Christ, or the word of the prophets, the Old Testament was confirmed not by experience but by the New Testament, the words of Christ and the words of the Apostles. And this fits the Jewish thinking about the supremacy of written revelation.
Peter is saying if you don't believe me, go to the Scripture. So look at it there in verse 19, "the prophetic word" refers to inspired Scripture. It was an expression used in Peter's time to embrace the Old Testament as a whole. The whole Old Testament was in one way or another anticipating the coming of the Messiah.
To illustrate that simply and directly, one need only turn, for example, to John 5: 39. Jesus said this, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life and it is these that bear witness of Me." Jesus says go through the Scriptures, they're all about Me. And He's referring to the Old Testament.
In Luke 24: 27, the road to Emmaus scene, “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets He expounded to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” And in verse 44 He said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you that all things which are written about Me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled."
“45 And then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” Genesis all the way to Malachi, the whole Old Testament speaks about Christ one way or another, He is the seen or the unseen subject. Jesus makes us confident as He marks out the Old Testament as a composite book of revelation pointing to the coming of the Messiah.
So Peter says this revealed body of truth is a more sure word even than our experience. And what Peter says here is not limited to the Old Testament. Any prophetic word from God is a more sure word than human experience. For the New Testament is an inspired record of the Old Testament being fulfilled in Christ in His first coming.
Back to verse 19. We have the more sure word, the prophetic word, "To which," that is to the word, which modifying word, "To which you do well to pay attention." Great statement. The word "well" is kalos, right, excellently. You do right, you do excellently, you better pay attention to this word.
Peter calls for a careful examination of Scripture. To make his point even more direct he offers a metaphor in verse 19, a very simple one. He says, "As to a lamp shining in a dark place." If you were wandering in a very dark place, you would desire a lamp to light your path. And so it is with the Word.
Psalm 119:105 says that Your Word is like a lamp to give light of truth and virtue to an ignorant and wicked world...a dark place. The Scripture is kind of a night light. And it shines only temporarily. Peter says we should pay attention to it as a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the Morning Star arises in your hearts.
His word picture here is beautiful and Peter is referring to the coming of Christ. When he says, "Until the day dawns," he means the return of Christ in all its splendor. Christ's coming will totally dissipate the darkness as the glory of His Kingdom arrives and banishes the night.
You know what the word "Morning Star" means? The Morning Star is Christ Himself. Numbers 24:17 says, "There shall come a star out of Jacob," that star is the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. And in Revelation 22:16 it says, "I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright Morning Star."
At the end of verse 19 Peter says, "The Morning Star will rise in your hearts." It will have not only an externally transforming impact on the world and the universe, it will have an internal transforming impact on those believers who are alive when Jesus comes. An outer transformation and an inner transformation both will occur at the same time then.
Then Peter says we must have complete confidence in Scripture because we know it is inspired by God Himself. So he says this in verses 20 and 21, "But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God."
In the Old Testament the evidence of a false teacher was that he spoke for himself. In Jeremiah 23:16 is written, "Thus says the Lord of host, do not listen to the words of the prophet who are prophesying to you, they're leading you into futility, they speak a vision of their own imagination." They made it up.
In Ezekiel 13:3 God says, "Woe to the foolish prophets who are following their own spirit and have seen nothing." They don't know anything. So Peter says, "No prophecy of Scripture comes into being, or originates, or comes into existence from one's own interpretation."
In some ways that's an unfortunate translation because it tends to make people think that it's talking about how you interpret Scripture when it's really talking about the very source of it. The genitive case in the Greek indicates source.
Peter is not talking about how you interpret Scripture, he's talking about where it came from, how it originated, what its source was. It isn't like the teaching of the false prophets. No prophecy of Scripture has originated in the prophet's own understanding.
The same God who spoke at the transfiguration about the deity and humanity of Christ, the same God who spoke of the perfection of His Son is the same God who authored Scripture. No prophecy was ever at any time made by an act of human will. The Bible is not the product of men.
1 Peter 1:10-11, "As to this salvation the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow."
Ask yourself what in the world that could possibly mean if they were inventing their own prophecies. They knew it was the Spirit of Christ within them predicting these things. And so they were looking at the very things they were writing and saying, "What does it mean? How can I understand it?"
From Moses to Malachi and even in the New Testament writers who wrote about the Second Coming of Christ there must have been some mystery. Even though God had revealed to them a future great redemptive deliverance to be brought by the Messiah, and they knew it was future and they knew it was coming, but they couldn't fully understand it.
It's important to note that all the authors of the sixty-six books from Scripture are men. And all those men were moved by the Holy Spirit, which means they were continually carried along. The same verb is used in Acts 27 twice, verses 15 and 17, of a sail ship that's blown along by the wind, just moved along.
The Holy Spirit then is the divine author, the producer of the prophetic word, not human thought, not human will, this is not a book written by men. This is a book recorded by men, but authored by God the Holy Spirit.
In the Old Testament alone, 3,808 times the writers refer to their words as the very words of God. The Holy Spirit inspired the writers and moved them along. Listen to 1 Corinthians 2:10-11, "For to us God revealed them through the Spirit for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God for whom among men know the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him, even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God."
So, Peter says...Look, I'm not a false prophet, I have never written a book before. First of all, I was an eyewitness of the majesty of Jesus Christ so I know what I speak of. But even more sure than that, I write as one moved along by the Holy Spirit like every other biblical writer and this comes directly from God. Let us pray.