God is transcendent, mysterious, holy, and completely "other" than us. Because he is God — and not a human being — we are in a tough spot! Left to ourselves, we are incapable of grasping the truth about God's identity, not to mention the way we can come into a right relationship with Him.
It is true that, through something called "general revelation," we can know a little about God. We can know about him through, first, creation. Psalm 19:1 says that "the heavens declare the glory of God." The Bible makes it clear that the earth itself speaks to God's existence and creative power. We can know a bit about God, second, through our consciences. Romans 2:15-16 describes the consciences of even people who don't seek God as present and active.
While both creation and our consciences tell us a little about the God who made the world and us, these are merely like tiny cracks in a giant wall — a wall of sin that separates human beings from God. While we see tiny glimmers of God and his plan through these things, they are not enough to bring us to a saving knowledge of the God who made us.
You can probably see by this point that God's communication to us about Himself and His plan for us is not just a nice thing — it is a necessary thing. We need God to communicate to us, or we are completely lost. We need God to give us revelation.
The God of the universe…talks. David Helm puts it this way, "God has always mediated relationship with us through the agency of words." God's gracious practice — from the beginning of creation — is to use words to communicate himself to his people and all of creation.
Think back to the very beginning of the Bible. In Genesis 1, we read about God's creation of the world. How does each part of the creation narrative start? With the words: "and God said." God spoke the world into existence. Also, at the very end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation, the Apostle John has a vision of the end of the world. At the conclusion of the vision, he hears this, "These words are trustworthy and true" (22:6). John is called to trust the words of God. So, from creation to conclusion, God interacts with us and his world through the power of his word.
Even the gospel message itself is a "word." That good news about Jesus Christ — that he died for our sins, was buried, and rose again (1 Cor. 15:3-5) — is a message of words. Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be incomprehensible to us if it was not explained and applied to us through the agency of words. God speaks to human beings, and this is a blessing!
It is a challenge for many of us to understand how to make the mental leap from God talking to this book we hold in our hands. In any meeting of Christians there are probably four to five different versions of the Bible represented, and it is often hard for us to grasp just how we can understand a book to contain "God's Word." Why is it so important in Christian faith to go from "spoken word" to "written word"? Why would God need to put his communication with us into a book?
First, we do need to affirm that putting revelation into words and writing was indeed God's idea. We can see this from some of the earliest stories in Scripture. When Moses went to the top of the mountain, God wrote his commandments down on two tablets of stone. Many of the prophets of the Old Testament, including Habakkuk, were commanded by God to "write these words down." Even the whole people of God were commanded to not just hear God's words, but to "write them on their doorposts" (Deut. 6:9). God started this whole writing thing.
It might be helpful as well, though, to think about human experience as a way to understand the importance of words and writing things down. Imagine that you have a job in sales. You step into your boss's office to report on your day. "It was a great day," you say. "A client agreed to buy a truckload of our product, and we had a good firm handshake." What do you think your boss would say? Is a handshake good enough? "Put it in writing," he'd probably say (or yell!). He'd want you to get a contract with a signature. There is a certain strength that comes with putting things into writing.
As we consider the Bible itself, though, it is important to answer two big questions. First, how did it come into existence? Second, why was it necessary for it to be developed?
During the time of Jesus, the Bible was what we now call the Old Testament. It was accepted by God's people as God's written Word, and it was composed of the law, the prophets, and the writings. Followers of God viewed these Scriptures as authoritative for their lives.
The development of the New Testament canon is a bit more complicated. During the first and second centuries, believers in Jesus Christ began to collect letters written to the early churches by the apostles — Paul, Peter, and John especially. Early believers, from the earliest days of church life, viewed these apostolically authored letters as having God's authority behind them. They sought to obey them and structure personal and church life based on what they said.
Perhaps no individual had more to do with the formation of the New Testament canon than a man named Marcion. Around 140 AD, he began forming his own canon. He took out parts of letters that spoke of miracles, as well as anything that seemed too Jewish for him. He like the letters of Paul, but not many of the other letters. The church began to understand the need for the formation of a canon that could be agreed upon, followed, and obeyed by all followers of Jesus.
While the official church meeting (The Synod of Hippo) that established what we now know as the New Testament did not happen until 393 AD, it is clear that the canon was becoming obvious to the church even before then. Athanasius, for example, mentions the 27 books of the New Testament in his Easter Letter of 367 AD. Those who have studied in depth these years of canon formation describe the process as more the church acknowledging Scriptural texts rather than giving their approval to texts in order to make them Scriptural. The main criteria used in the evaluation of every text were these: apostolic authorship, theological agreement with the teachings of the church, and widespread acceptance by the early church.
As Christians, we ultimately believe that God wanted it to happen. He sovereignly ordained for his revelation to be put into writing. The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it this way:
[God saw fit] for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit [God's revelation] wholly unto writing, which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary, those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.
In other words, God ordained for the Bible to be put together:
Probably all of you have heard the Bible called "God's Word." We believe in something called inspiration — that the Bible is a book that is inspired by God. This belief comes mainly from a passage in 2 Timothy 3, which says that all Scripture is "God–breathed." Christians affirm that God inspired every part of the Bible — it is his breathed out Word. Within this belief, we acknowledge an important tension between two facts:
Because of this belief in the inspiration of the Bible, we refer to it commonly as God's Word. We believe that the Bible is God's Word in such a true sense that to disbelieve or disobey it is to disbelieve or disobey God himself.
In addition to inspiration, we also believe in inerrancy (that the Bible is without errors in its original form), infallibility (that the Bible does not assert anything that is not true), authority (that the Bible carries the weight of God himself behind it), and perspicuity (that the Bible is able to be understood — at a basic level — by any person of ordinary intelligence).
What does this mean to us? First, if God has really spoken and communicated Himself to human beings, we need to listen. We need to accept the authority of the Bible in our lives. We need to strive to believe and obey the written Word of God. More than this, we need to be praying that God would help us actually love his Word more! That only comes as we immerse ourselves in it, getting used to it, so that it becomes familiar to us. We should be taking advantage of the communication that the God of the universe has made available to us!
Second, though, we should be getting to know the God behind the Bible. We as Christians believe that the Bible is God's Word, but we do not worship the Bible itself, any more than we would worship a letter than we receive in the mail from someone we love. As we study, read, and learn the Bible, we need to have as our goal a growing relationship with God himself through Jesus Christ. There is a danger in great Bible knowledge; it is possible to have "all the right answers" and never open up our hearts to a real relationship with God through Jesus. God does not just reveal information in the Bible — he reveals Himself! It is an amazing thing that we can actually read God's written Word in the Bible. We need to believe it and let it lead us into a relationship with the God who made us and sent his Son Jesus to die for us.
