“The Bible: What’s it all About?”
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
10/21/07
The other day while I was just surfing around on the
internet, I came to the Barnes and Noble web-page and noticed that for
just about any book you’re interested in, you can get a little
synopsis or summary of it before deciding to buy it. When you
look at a book in the store, most of them have this information written
on the cover somewhere. So, I clicked on a few books here and
there, checking out their synopses. And then I thought I’d
try this with the Bible. I wondered what kind of synopsis they
might write for it. I was greatly disappointed (but not too
surprised) to find out that what was written was no synopsis at
all. Rather, it was simply a description of what kind of Bible it
was. So it would tell you which translation it was, whether it
was King James, NIV, NRSV, etc. It would tell you whether or not
it had red lettering for the words of Jesus, or whether it was a large
print Bible, or whether it had notes, columns, or a concordance, or
whether it was soft or hard bound, with or without gold gilding.
And this is the kind of “synopsis” I got for every kind of
Bible I clicked on. In every case not one of them told what the
Bible was about. If I had been a first time Bible purchaser, I
would have had no idea what I was buying, unless I had been informed by
someone else.
The funny thing is that the Bible is the number one
best-selling book of all time. According to an article in a 2005
edition of The New Yorker magazine entitled “The Good Book
Business: Why Publishers Love the Bible,” the Bible is not
only the best-selling book of all time, but also the best-selling book
of the year, every year. The article states that in 2005
Americans alone purchased some 25 million Bibles, twice as many as the
Harry Potter book that year! And yet, when you go to Barnes and
Noble, you can’t even find out what it’s all about.
Sad to say, that’s the case even when you
speak to people who own Bibles (and not only those who own them, but
who have read them too) You ask them what the Bible is all about,
and they can’t tell you. That’s even the case with
many Christians, who attend church on a regular basis. Take a
survey sometime just for fun and ask people what the Bible is all
about, and see what kinds of responses you get. Some will tell
you it’s a handbook for how to live a good, moral life.
Others might say it’s a collection of inspirational stories that
give us hope. Still others might say the Bible gives you patterns
for successful living. It’s the ultimate Tony Robbins
book. It’s the ultimate Nostradamus predictions book.
It’s the ultimate 10-step program for how to overcome
addiction. It’s the ultimate guide for how to get into
heaven.
Unfortunately, all these synopses of the Bible miss
what the book is really all about. But today’s Epistle text
gives us the answer. If you could put a summary of the Bible on
its jacket cover, these words from the Apostle Paul to Pastor Timothy
would suit just fine. These sacred writings (i.e., the
Scriptures, the Bible) are writings that are able to make you wise for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus; they are breathed out by God;
they are profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for
training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be competent,
equipped for every good work.
First, the Bible is able to make you wise for
salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. What’s the story
of the Bible? What’s its plot? Who’s the main
character? All these questions are answered by this
statement. The Bible is about Jesus; He’s the main
character in both Old and New Testaments. Jesus says this
Himself, that all the Scriptures speak of Him. The story of the
Bible is about the salvation that He has worked for the world. It
begins with God creating the world, then continues with God’s
promise to redeem the world through Jesus, the Messiah, since our fall
into sin. The plot thickens as the blood-line through whom the
Messiah would come is traced through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then
Judah, Israel’s kings - David, Solomon, and their descendants,
until finally we arrive at Jesus, the Son of God, born of the virgin
Mary, a descendent of David herself. The Bible gives us previews
in lives of the O.T. saints, the prophets, and the people of Israel
themselves of who Jesus would be and what He would do. Look at
the sacrifice of Isaac and see Jesus there. Look at God’s
deliverance of His people from their slavery in Egypt and see Jesus
there. Look at Daniel in the lions’ den, Jonah and the
fish, or David and Goliath and you’ll see Jesus there. Look
at the account of the bronze serpent in the wilderness which God told
Moses to erect, so that all who looked at it when they were bitten by
poisonous snakes wouldn’t die, and then listen to what Jesus says
about Himself: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the
wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes
in Him may have eternal life.” The whole Bible makes you
wise for salvation by pointing you to Jesus, God’s Son, the
Messiah whom He promised to Abraham, who was crucified for your sins,
died, was buried, and rose again from the dead for your salvation, so
that through faith in Him you might not perish but have eternal
life. No other book, no other person, no other god can do
this. It’s just as the Apostle Peter says, “There is
salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given
among men by which we must be saved.”
Second, Paul names the source of the
Scriptures. He tells us that the words of the Bible are
God-breathed. They are not the words of men. Though men
wrote them down, they were given what to say by the Holy Spirit.
If the question is asked, “Who’s the author of the
Scriptures?” the answer is God. The Bible, then, is unlike
any other book, in that what it says carries God’s
authority. It’s words trump the words of all other
books. They trump our reason, our experience, our emotions, and
our own thoughts and expectations about God. Where they clash
with our understanding, the Scriptures must be given the benefit of the
doubt. Where they are difficult to comprehend, we must confess
that the problem lies with us and our sinfulness rather than with
God’s Word. Because the Bible is God’s Word, these
words are without error. Though many of the accounts recounted in
this book seem fantastic to us, they are telling us the truth.
And it’s not as if God is asking us to believe in fairy tales or
myths, but in actual historical events, recorded by reliable
eye-witnesses, who paid for their testimony with their own blood, so
that our faith might be founded on fact. One such factual account
is that of Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish. Some find this
unbelievable, and yet Jesus points to it as a sign of His own
resurrection from the dead. If you can’t believe that Jonah
was swallowed by a fish, how will you believe that Jesus rose again
bodily from the dead? And if you do believe that Jesus rose again
bodily from the dead, what’s so difficult about believing that a
man was swallowed by a fish? In the end, when you start to mess
with the Bible about what is or what is not true in it, you end up
making your reason the judge of God’s Word, and when that
happens, people pick and choose what they will or will not believe in
the Bible.
Next, Paul lists the uses of the Scriptures.
As God’s Word about our salvation in Jesus Christ, the Bible is
profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in
righteousness. The main reason why so many Christians are
ignorant of what the Bible is all about is that they haven’t been
taught. There are a number of reasons for this, either parents
have failed to teach their children the Scriptures, or the children
have closed their ears to their parents’ teaching, or both
parents and children fail to gather together around God’s Word
with His people at church, or Christians are listening to the
non-sense, false doctrine, and lies of the devil, the world, and the
false religions. The only way to combat all this is to open our
ears to the teaching of the Scriptures, to diligently read, mark,
learn, and inwardly digest them, so that the devil might not snatch
away the Word that is sown in our hearts, and so that we might not fall
away into despair or other great shame or vice when things like
suffering or the lusts and pleasures of the world come along to lure us
away from the Word.
The Scriptures are also profitable for reproof and
correction. Nobody likes to be corrected, much less reproved or
disciplined. But the Lord does this to you through His Word when
you sin and err, because He loves you, not wanting you to fall away
into unbelief and perish. As the author of Hebrews writes,
“The Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son
whom He receives.” When you are reproved or corrected by
the Word of God spoken through your pastor or a fellow believer in
Christ, receive it then as the Lord’s rebuke and discipline meant
to turn you back in repentance, so that you may again hear His words of
forgiveness in Jesus and amend your sinful ways.
Finally, the Scriptures are profitable for training
in righteousness. The Bible is not a manual or a 10-step program
for how to get righteous before God. Far from telling you that
you can get righteous before God if only you’d just try harder,
the Bible tells you that you can’t get righteous before God
yourself. You can’t even contribute towards it in any way,
as if God has done His 99% of the work and all you have to do is your
1%, whether it’s your faith or your good deeds. The Bible
makes it clear that you were dead in your trespasses and sins and an
enemy of God, and that while you were in such a state, Jesus came to
you and gave you life through Holy Baptism. Just as He raised
Lazarus from the dead without any help from him, so Jesus made you
alive through this washing of water with the Word and the proclamation
of the Gospel. As Paul writes elsewhere, “By grace you have
been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the
gift of God, not as a result of works, so that no one may
boast.” It is through faith in Jesus Christ alone, trusting
in God’s promise that for His sake your sins are forgiven, that
God has declared you righteous, holy, and blameless before Him.
When Paul here talks about the Scriptures being
profitable for training in righteousness, then, he’s not talking
about what you’re supposed to do to get yourself more righteous
before God. You have the righteousness of Christ, with which you
were clothed at your Baptism; you can’t improve on that
righteousness. But he is talking about how the Scriptures are
profitable for instructing you how to live towards your neighbor as a
righteous child of God that you are now in Christ. Both the
teaching, the reproof, the correction, and the training in
righteousness that the Word of God gives are all meant to make you a
competent Christian, equipped for every good work - competent in the
sense that you believe, teach, and confess the Christian faith as
you’ve been taught it from the Word of God, and equipped for
every good work in the sense that the Holy Spirit enables you by that
Word to live according to it in faith towards God and in fervent love
towards one another.
In an age, then, when people want to hear what their
itching ears want to hear, Christians are again encouraged and
admonished to continue to listen to and hold fast to the Word of God,
which makes you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus,
making you both competent hearers and competent doers of the Word, so
that you might be equipped for every good work, which includes not only
serving your neighbor through your various vocations in life, but also
the work of testifying to the truth of God’s Word, always being
ready to give an answer to those who ask you about the hope you have in
Jesus. And the next time someone asks you what the Bible’s
all about, you can tell them it’s about Jesus, crucified and
risen from the dead for us and for our salvation. Amen.