2 Peter 3 11 thru 18 - pub

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“The Scriptures,” 2 Peter 3:11-18 (August 14, 2016) 11

Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13 But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. 14

Therefore, beloved, since you are waiting for these, be diligent to be found by him without spot or blemish, and at peace. 15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. 17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. 18 But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. PRAY We finish today our sermon series on 2 Peter, and next week Lord willing we will begin looking at the Old Testament with a four week series on the book of Ruth. Today we will not cover the entire sermon passage. I usually try to cover most if not all of the verses that I take for a sermon, but that won’t happen today (I’m not going to expound the whole text today). Instead, I want to focus primarily on verses 15-16: “And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” The first thing I want you to do is take comfort from these verses, because Peter found Paul difficult to understand. Peter, the apostle; Peter, the Rock! He found Paul difficult to understand. If you’ve ever read Romans like I did in college when I was first trying to come to a mature understanding of the Bible and thought, “What in the world is Paul talking about here?” you’re in good company. But that’s not the main thing I want to talk about this morning. Peter says that Paul’s writings are, along with some other writings, the capital “S” Scriptures. I want to show you three things about the Scriptures: first, what are the Scriptures? Second, why should you trust the Scriptures? Third, what should you do with the Scriptures? Then we’ll take the Lord’s Supper. First, what are the Scriptures? In verse 16, the word used by Peter and translated in our Bibles as “Scriptures” is the Greek word graphe. Every time it is used in the New

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Testament (and it’s used fifty-one times) it refers to the Hebrew Bible, which we commonly call the Old Testament. But here’s the thing about the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew/Old Testament Scriptures – the Jewish people viewed those Scriptures as completely authoritative over their lives. They believed that the Scriptures ultimately had God has their author, that God inspired the writers of the Scriptures, so they were authoritative over their lives. But how were they inspired? The apostle Paul writes this in 2 Timothy: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17. These verses teach that the Old Testament writers were not inspired by God to write the Scriptures the way a poet gets inspiration to write a poem. Daniel wasn’t inspired by a walk along the River Euphrates in Babylon and then went back to his room and wrote his book. Rather, God breathed out, he expired, the words that the Moses and Samuel and David and all the other Old Testament greats wrote down as Scripture. Not that all words were dictated to the writers (though many were), but God directed the process of inspiration in such a way so as to guarantee each word of Scripture was exactly what God desired. Therefore, the Jews treated the Scriptures with tremendous respect. And that includes the Lord Jesus Christ. The Pharisees and Jesus disagreed on many, many subjects, so much so that the Pharisees worked to have Jesus killed, but one area where they were in full and complete agreement (along with everyone else in first century Judea) was on the matter of the authority of the Scriptures. Jesus was a man saturated in the Scriptures. If you cut Jesus, he bled Scripture. When he taught, he continually used the phrase “It is written,” quoting Scripture. One example of Jesus enormous respect and devotion to the Scriptures comes from Matthew 4 where Jesus goes into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And we read that Jesus responds to all three recorded temptations by quoting Scripture to the devil. But why does he bother with quoting the Bible? What Jesus himself says that has never been said before is the Word of God. It has the same authority as Scripture. So why doesn’t Jesus say something new? Why does he respond with three passages from Deuteronomy 6-8? The answer is: Jesus loves the Old Testament Scriptures. He affirms they are the Word of God. He wants to teach us that they are sufficient. Another example: in Luke 24, we read of one of the first post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Two disciples are walking along the road to Emmaus on the afternoon of the first Easter Sunday, and suddenly Jesus appears and walks with them, but they are kept from recognizing him. Obviously these two guys are deep in conversation, so Jesus asks, “What are you talking about?” And one of them, Cleopas, replies, “Are you the only

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person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know about all the events of this past week?” And Jesus plays dumb – he says, “What things?” So these two guys tell Jesus … about Jesus, about how they thought he was the Messiah, but then he was crucified, and so he couldn’t have been the Messiah, but then some of the female disciples claimed they had a vision that he was alive, and how they went to the tomb of Jesus but found it empty. How does Jesus reply? “And he said to them, ‘O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets [all the Scriptures, in other words], he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” Luke 24:25-27. Now here’s what I want you to see – Jesus could have done so many things on the day of his resurrection. If it had been me, I would have gone straight to Pilate’s house. “Pilate! We’ve got some unfinished business here.” Jesus doesn’t go to Pilate, he doesn’t go to the twelve disciples. He goes to two relatively unimportant followers, and he doesn’t even let them recognize him. Jesus doesn’t even point to himself, to the holes in hands and feet, to prove that the Messiah had to suffer. What does he do? He points to the Scriptures to prove it! In other words, Jesus has a Bible study with them! On the day of his resurrection, Jesus has a several hour-long Bible study with basically two nobodies where he covers the entire Old Testament. Why? Because Jesus believes the Scriptures are the Word of God, he believes the best way to know him is through the Scripture, and so Jesus means to teach that beyond a shadow of a doubt the Scriptures are sufficient. But notice what Peter says about Paul’s writings in 2 Peter 3:16b: “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” Do you see that? Peter is putting Paul’s writings on the same level as the Hebrew Bible. He calls the Old Testament “the other Scriptures,” obviously implying that Paul’s writings are also authoritative Scriptures. This is a very important text, because from it we see clearly that even in the lifetime of the first apostles, what we call the New Testament was viewed as “Scripture,” as the Word of God, as “God breathed,” in precisely the same way the Old Testament was. So, what are the Scriptures? They are the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments (39 in the Old, 27 in the New), they are all “expired” by God, breathed out by him, and since God is their author they are authoritative for all people (because God made all people) but especially for the church. As our church’s confession of faith puts it, they are a “perfect treasure of heavenly instruction, [and have] God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter …”

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Quickly, before go on to the second point, I want to address this question: how do we know those 66 books alone are the Scriptures? Weren’t there other books written around the same time that claimed to be Scripture? Didn’t Emperor Constantine call the Council of Nicea in 325 precisely to force Christians to accept the books he liked and reject the books he didn't so as to unify the church and the empire? The answer to that is: no, absolutely not. Christians accepted the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the book of Acts, and all the thirteen writings of Paul (in other words, the vast majority of what we call the New Testament) as Scripture long before Nicea. We have one list of New Testament books dating back to around 170 A.D., the Muratorian fragment. The first Christians read Paul’s writings and knew they were Scripture; no one forced those books on them. But that gets us to another question: how did they know those books alone are the Scriptures? And how can we? Second, why should you trust the Scriptures? Why should we believe what we call the Bible is in fact the authoritative Word of God? This is of course a question of immense importance. If the Bible is what it claims to be, what the church has claimed it to be for two thousand years, then you must listen to and obey it. You must give your life to it! What other choice do you have if it is in fact the Word of God? So how can you trust it? Because aren’t there other books that claim to be divinely authored? Doesn’t the Mormon church claim that for their sacred texts? Doesn’t Islam claim that for the Qur’an? Why should we believe the Bible is authoritative instead of those books? There are good evidentiary reasons for trusting the Bible. The accounts of Jesus are based on eyewitness evidence from the first century – I think the case for that is overwhelming. The Bible has been corroborated time and time again by finds in archaeology and other ancient documents. Not once has anything listed as fact in the Bible been disproven by any scientific or historical find. The Bible also provides the only answer for how the Christian church actually began. The beginning of the Christian church has had a huge impact on world history, and even secular historians admit that they can’t explain it apart from the account given in the Scriptures. There is also ample proof that what the prophets and apostles and gospel writers actually wrote has been accurately transmitted to us. So, those are good reasons for trusting the Bible, and you add them all up and no other book that claims God as its author comes close to having the same evidence for its trustworthiness. But as Christians, we don’t finally trust the Bible as authoritative in our lives because of any evidentiary reason. The Bible never says to trust it for those reasons, and neither did Jesus. Nor do we say, “Well, I believe in the Bible because my parents and my grandparents taught it to me; the church I grew up in taught it to me.” I’m thankful for faithful parents and churches, but that’s not the reason we trust the Bible, either.

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Why do we then? We get an idea from the Psalms. Psalm 119:105: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” The Scriptures are compared to a light. Psalm 19:10: “More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.” The Scriptures are compared to something that tastes good, sweet. What’s the Psalmist saying? He’s saying that as you read the Scriptures you experience something. You’re not just learning information about God (though certainly that happens). Rather, your spiritual eyes are being opened. You see things with the eyes of your heart that you could not previously see. Your spiritual tastes buds are being developed, and now you taste spiritual things (and they taste good) that previously you could not taste. One more passage – Ephesians 1:17-18 – Paul prays for the Ephesians “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints …” What’s happening? Through the Scriptures (and only through the Scriptures) God’s Holy Spirit works in your heart to prove to you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the Scriptures are true. And through those same Scriptures you meet God, and you find him good, you find him just, you find him lovely, you find him beautiful, you find him majestic. The Scriptures are, in the words of John Calvin, “self-authenticating.” And in a killer quote, Calvin writes this about the Bible: “Therefore, illumined by [the Holy Spirit’s] power, we believe neither by our own nor by anyone else’s judgment that Scripture is from God; but above human judgment we affirm with utter certainty (just as if we were gazing upon the majesty of God himself[!]) that it flowed to us from the very mouth of God by the ministry of men. We seek no proofs, no marks of genuineness upon which our judgment may lean…” Calvin, Institutes, 1.7.5. In other words, Calvin says that Christians have excellent evidentiary reasons from history and archaeology to believe the Bible. But at the end of the day we don’t need them, because once you read the Scriptures and through the testimony of the Holy Spirit on your heart meet God, then you know, you absolutely know, they the Scriptures are completely, fully, reliable and true. Friends, if you’re here this morning and you claim to be a Christian, I want to ask you: have you experienced that? Is that why you believe the Bible? Or do you just believe the Bible because your parents did? If that’s you, you’re like someone who has never been to the Grand Canyon at sunset but who has heard from many reputable people that the Grand Canyon at sunset is the most beautiful sight in the world. You believe them, but you’ve never been. What I want you to do is actually go – I want you to actually book

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the flight to Las Vegas and drive down to the Grand Canyon and see for yourself the beauty of it, because if you do you’ll be changed. “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” Psalm 34:8. And friends, if you’re here this morning and you are not a Christian, you do not think Jesus is your Lord and Savior, I know this second point isn’t convincing to you. You’re thinking, “OK, I’m ultimately supposed to become a Christian submit my life completely to the Scriptures ultimately because the Bible tells me so? Come on! That’s too big a demand being placed on my life with too little to back it up. I have a lot of problems with the what the Bible says, like what it teaches about six-day creation and Noah’s flood and how God commands the annihilation of all the people in Canaan and what it says about sex being only for marriage. I’m supposed to believe all that?” I want you to know that it’s easy to stand outside of Christianity and take potshots at the Bible on those issues and say, “See, I can’t believe the Bible.” That’s easy, college freshman do it every year, and frankly it can be a sign of intellectually laziness to do that. Do you know what would be hard? I’ll read a quote from a Christian I know – he said, “It would be easy to attack the ‘fortress’ of [the Bible] on many, many small-medium points, BUT TO CONSTRUCT AN ALTERNATE SYSTEM that would be able to withstand the same caliber of intellectual examination on as many fronts, I put well beyond the practical realm of feasibility.” Glenn Miller. Do you see what he’s saying? He’s saying that if you’re not a Christian, it’s easy to just lob grenades at the Bible and point out all the things you don’t like about it. What’s hard, what’s a challenge, what he says is impossible and I agree, is to come up with another way of looking at the world that makes as much sense of the world as the Bible, that has all the historical and archaeological and eyewitness evidence as the Bible, and that can withstand the same level of scrutiny you would apply to the Bible. So many skeptics just want to criticize faith and continue living their unexamined lives. If you’re here this morning and not a Christian, my plea to you is, “Don’t be that guy” – don’t be intellectually lazy. Come at the Bible with all your objections, but then own what you do actually believe and invite a thoughtful Christian into your life to point out all the flaws in your belief system, too. If you’re honest enough to do that, you might find one day that you trust the Scriptures as well. Third, once you come to trust the Scriptures, what should you do with them? Three things: first, study them to understand them. In 2 Peter 3:16 Peter says: “There are some things in them [Paul’s writings] that are hard to understand …” Is the Bible the easiest book in the world to understand? No, it’s not. It really does take effort to work your way through the Bible and learn the terminology and understand the arguments. So don’t be surprised if you pick up a Bible and turn to Romans and feel completely lost. Some of the Bible is hard to understand (some is easy, like John 3:16) but it’s not impossible to understand; it just takes effort. So you must make up your mind

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to read and understand the Bible. Read it for yourself, sit under preaching that actually explains the Bible, attend a Bible study, listen to sermons off the internet, get other books to help you understand the Scriptures, and over time you will understand. If you’re new to Christian things, you may feel totally lost now. That’s ok; keep at it – you won’t always feel lost. Sooner than you think, it will make sense to you. Second, when you understand the Scriptures, apply them overwhelmingly to yourself. Far too many Christians study the Scriptures and start understanding them and then misuse them. Instead of reading the Scriptures and applying it to themselves to see how they need to grow and change, how they need to repent, they overwhelmingly apply them to other people. They see how other people aren’t living up to the standards of the Bible, and use the Scriptures like a weapon with which they can attack the shortcomings in their lives. So, for example, Paul at one point in the book of Ephesians, writes this: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” I knew that verse from the very beginning of my marriage. And when Mimi and I would get in a fight I would basically look at her and say, “I know what your problem is. You just aren’t being submissive.” Wives love it when you do that, by the way. They respond so well to that. Now, was I wrong? Probably she wasn’t being submissive, but still I was totally wrong. There was no love in my use of the Scriptures. It was exactly what Jesus would get so furious at the Pharisees for. Instead of using the Scriptures as a scalpel to cut away all the sin in my life, I was using it as a mallet to crush someone else. For every one occasion you apply the Scriptures to someone else and their shortcomings, you need to have applied them to yourself one hundred times. That will fulfill Matthew 7:3-5: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Third, if you’ll use the Scriptures that way, you’ll be transformed. Years ago I read Walker Percy’s book, The Moviegoer. It’s set in New Orleans, in the Gentilly neighborhood, and I actually read it while Mimi and lived there for seminary. The main character in the book is Binx Bolling. Binx is smart, he’s cool, but he’s also a mess. He’s alienated from the world around him and just kind of drifts through life in a haze. He treats the people around him callously and carelessly. He goes to a lot of movies because he finds more meaning in them than he does in real life. And the reason I bring up The Moviegoer this morning is because of an article in The Atlantic another pastor pointed out to me entitled, “My Childish, Unhealthy, Joyous Obsession with The Moviegoer.” The author first read The Moviegoer as a sophomore in college, and he basically never stopped reading it. I think he’s about my age, forty or so, so he’s been reading it for twenty years. He loves the book; he says he’s worn out three

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paperback editions of the book. And he really identified with Binx Bolling – he wanted to be cool and smart and noncommittal like Binx Bolling. But this is what he wrote: “It didn’t work. It turned out to be a lousy strategy for … personal and interpersonal success. I took a Binxian approach to women, which is to say I told them lie after lie … as I … pursued them. I turned my lunch hour at work into two or three hours of drinking, and I thought Binx would have been proud … [But m]y girlfriends, unimpressed with the literary influences behind my … lies, dumped me. My bosses, with no use for an employee who disappeared for hours on end, fired me.” Just so you know, he’s better now – he has a job, a wife, children, and settled down. At the end of the article, he writes this: “I’ve crawled so deep into The Moviegoer over the years that it’s hard to tell where I start and where the novel begins … If you spend enough time with a book over enough years, you may start to think it belongs to you somehow. But what if it’s really the other way around?” Now, a lot of you know what it’s like to identify with a character in a book or a movie like that – you’ve had the experience of realizing you are behaving and you are thinking in certain ways because of influence of that character on you. But what if the book that you crawl deep into isn’t The Moviegoer or any other book, but the Scriptures, the Bible, God’s inerrant, infallible, expired, holy Word? If you do, I’ll tell you what will happen – first, you’ll be exposed. And it will hurt. You will see you are a sinner, you will see yourself in the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, you will see yourself in the early Peter denying Jesus, you will see yourself in the early Paul, a self-righteous know-it-all, you’ll see yourself in the people of Israel, continually chasing idols. You’ll know God isn’t pleased with you. But, second, you’ll see how much you’re loved by God. Rather than give you what you deserve for all your sins, he gave you his Son. He gave you Jesus, who died for your sins in your place to reconcile to God. And you’ll know that because you are counting on Jesus’ life to make you righteous and not your own, now in Christ God loves you. Then, third, the deeper you crawl into the Bible, you’ll become more like Jesus. Jesus says, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” John 15:7, 10. The more time you spend in the Bible, over years and years and years, the more you’ll think like Jesus, the more you’ll see the world like Jesus, the more you’ll react like Jesus, the more you’ll love like Jesus. What’s happened? The Scriptures don’t belong to you anymore; you belong to the Scriptures. You’ve crawled so deep into the Scriptures that it’s getting harder and harder to tell where you start and they end. And that’s a wonderful place to be. “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his

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excellent Word! What more can he say than to you he had said, to you who for refuge to Jesus hath fled?” Amen.

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