Imperishable Inheritance

The doc­trine of Scrip­ture is such a vital point of any reli­gion. With­out the author­ity of some means of Scrip­ture then they have noth­ing to point to in say­ing that “God said this…” In the amount of Scrip­tures I have read: The Book of Mor­mon, Qur’an, Bha­ga­vata, Tao Te Ching, and so on all prove to have no life in them; and it has led me to the pur­suit of God’s true Word.

Of all the Scrip­tures I’ve read I am con­sis­tently more and more con­vinced that the Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures are the true, author­i­ta­tive source of knowl­edge. I believe that we must rec­og­nize that there is truth out­side of the Bible, but the Bible serves as our ulti­mate source of author­ity, and rec­og­niz­ing that truth exists out­side of the Bible does not vio­late Sola Scrip­tura as John Frame elaborates:

‘Sola Scrip­tura, after all, does not require the exclu­sion of all extra­bib­li­cal data, even from the­ol­ogy. It sim­ply requires that in the­ol­ogy and in all other dis­ci­plines, the high­est author­ity, the supreme stan­dard, be Scrip­ture and Scrip­ture alone.‘
John Frame, Apolo­get­ics to the Glory of God (pg. 18)

Until recently I’ve never been con­vinced by argu­ments of the suf­fi­ciency of the Scrip­tures by rhetoric that fol­lows that line of argu­men­ta­tion, “the Bible speaks to me dif­fer­ently than any­thing else.” I had closed off my feel­ing of the Bible for the sake of knowl­edge. Wayne Gru­dem in his Sys­tem­atic The­ol­ogy gives this line of argu­men­ta­tion in his chap­ter on the doc­trine of Scripture.

It is one thing to affirm that the Bible claims to be the words of God. It is another thing to be con­vinced that those claims are true. Our ulti­mate con­vic­tion that the words of the Bible are God’s words comes only when the Holy Spirit speaks in and through the words of the Bible to our hearts and gives us an inner assur­ance that these are the words of our Cre­ator speak­ing to us.
Wayne Gru­dem, Sys­tem­atic The­ol­ogy (pg. 77)

Paul talks in 1 Corinthi­ans about the neces­sity of the Holy Spirit to illu­mi­nate spir­i­tual truths and how the nat­ural man will not accept spir­i­tual truths.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wis­dom, but in those taught by the Spirit, com­bin­ing spir­i­tual thoughts with spir­i­tual words. But a nat­ural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are fool­ish­ness to him; and he can­not under­stand them, because they are spir­i­tu­ally appraised.
1 Corinthi­ans 2:12–14

This is a writ­ing of appre­ci­a­tion for (1) the Spirit which leads us in dis­cov­er­ing truth and main­tain­ing our per­se­ver­ance and (2) the preser­va­tion of God’s Word so that we may have the words of our Cre­ator Him­self. They illu­mi­nate and give life to a dead spirit. I’m not sure of much, but I’m sure that when some­one reads the Bible eagerly seek­ing to know what it says it will change your life.

As a final point this is why we need to sup­port pro­grams like Wycliffe’s Vision 2025 which strives to have God’s Word avail­able in every lan­guage by 2025. The Great Com­mis­sion can never be fin­ished with­out this task being com­pleted. There are still 380 mil­lion peo­ple with­out any of God’s Word.