Writings

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tm. 2.5).

“For there is one God” – what a profound statement! All theology – all doctrine – begins with this fact. It is contained in the first of the Ten Commandments – “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” – because there is only one living and true God. To have other gods is to deny the one God, and He visited the sorest of His judgments upon idolaters. Idolatry is having any other god than the true God, or putting anything before the true God in our affections and our devotion. He is a jealous God and will not share His glory with another, for there is none other that has such glory.

That which Christ called the first and greatest commandment relates directly to our subject: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” Because there is no other God than Jehovah, therefore our hearts and our devotion should not be divided. All true religion flows from this greatest command, for true religion must be centered upon the adoration of the one holy God. Loving our neighbor is of utmost importance, but it is not to supplant our absolute submission to and worship of Jehovah.

“I AM,” the Lord called himself. Only He is eternal and self-existent. Only He can make such a statement or deserve such a name. He alone was in the beginning. He alone had no beginning. Only He could say, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” No other being transcends the ability of language to express His existence. Verb tenses fail when describing the one God, because only He is beyond and above time.

Because there is one God, there is one true religion – only one. It is the religion that He has instituted and commanded. To invent religion is to deny that He is the only God. For the worshipper to design his own mode of worship is to deny that the god he worships is truly God. Only the true God could have designed such a sublime religion. Jesus said that He is “the truth.” He is truth embodied; He spoke only truth; all truth is derived from what He is and what He spoke and did. True religion could have no other source, for the only true religion is that which is derived from and focuses upon the true God.

There is one God, and therefore only one hand to which we can look for comfort and deliverance. “Salvation is of the Lord,” Jonah learned. “Beside me there is no Saviour,” Isaiah taught us. To look for salvation in any other is to seek for disappointment, for there is only one God and therefore only one Savior.

If there is only one God – and there is – our eye should be single, i.e., focused solely and always upon Him. We should look to no other. We should focus our adoration upon no one else. He alone is God, and He alone is worthy to be praised.

Much knowledge may be gained from nature. Paul plainly states that all rational men are without excuse not to believe in the eternity and power of God. It does not take grace to conclude logically that that which has design manifests a Designer of great wisdom and power, so the wicked cannot plead ignorance for their atheism and idolatry.

Nature, however, is not sufficient to explain to us the wonderful works of God in the salvation of sinners. Men are blameworthy not to acknowledge an eternal and powerful God, but they cannot be blamed for not understanding the way of salvation if they have never had it explained to them. The eunuch made that plea: “How can I [understand], except some man should guide me?” If man were by his logic able to understand how men could be saved, then men might argue that we might have been God’s counselor in the matter of salvation; but Paul asked, “For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor?” (Rom. 11.34). No man could advise God in how to save sinners because no man knew how sinners could be saved; and, indeed, no man by nature had an interest in the subject.

If men were able by nature to understand how it is that men could be saved, then it would not be a mystery; but Paul called it a mystery. “Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh” (1 Tm. 3.16). Men were to be saved by the second Person of the Godhead taking unto Himself a pure and complete human nature, keeping the exacting rigors of the Mosaic law, and suffering the cruel death of crucifixion. No man ever would have arrived at that scheme of salvation.

The way of salvation is revealed fully in the Scriptures, and only in the Scriptures. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine” (1 Tm. 3.16). Doctrine is teaching. The Scriptures are profitable for the teaching of men, and in what greater subject do they instruct us than how sinners are saved? Nature teaches us that there is a God and somewhat of His nature, but man never could have learned about salvation from nature. Paul spoke of his wonderful “knowledge in the mystery of Christ” that God had revealed to him. The Christ was the anointed Savior, God manifest in the flesh, who saved His people from their sins. Paul said that this mystery “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” Nature could not reveal it, but God, through the inspiration of holy men to write the Scriptures, has revealed it to us.

There is only one self-existent being, and that is Jehovah God. The existence of all other beings is arbitrary, or a matter of will. All creation might or might not have existed. Theologians correctly say that God’s existence is “necessary,” that it must be. It is not possible that God could ever not have been. God himself expressed it this way: “I AM.” He gave that as His name, indicating His nature. We exist because God willed us to exist, because He chose to make us. God did not come to being because He willed himself to be, neither did any other being create Him.

“In the beginning God,” Moses tells us of the origin of things. God is the beginning or the origin of all creation, but He was not created. He did not have a beginning. He is “from everlasting to everlasting.” No one made Him to be; He did not make himself to be. God is: that is all we can say about it. “Without him was not anything made that was made,” the Bible teaches us of the Son of God. This is a direct teaching of the self-existence of God. Anything that was made, was made by God, and therefore He could not have been made, because it is an absurdity to say that anything could have made itself.

“Who only hath immortality,” Paul said of our Lord. He was not given immortality: He has it. He had it in the beginning. It is a part of His divine nature. Man is mortal. Mortality is the potential for death. That which was brought to life can have its life taken from it. That which was brought into existence by an infinite power could just as easily be taken out of existence by that same power. Our never-dying souls will not be snuffed out, but our security is in the will and power of God. God gave us life and brought us into existence, and He could just as easily dissolve our existence.

There is a reason for our existence. We were created because God chose to create us for His glory. However, there is no “reason” for God’s existence. No one could ever tell why God exists; we can only state that He does exist. How vast is the gulf between the nature of God and the nature of man! That infinite contrast should make us stand in awe and prostrate ourselves before the great I AM.

The nature of God is infinite in every regard. His being is without limit; his attributes are boundless. Given the fact that He is without bounds or limits upon His nature, it necessarily follows that He is incomprehensible to the limited mind of sinful man. We are so utterly bound by time and space, not to mention fettered by sin, that it is impossible that we should be able to grasp the vastness of the divine nature. Paul no doubt expressed somewhat of this when he spoke about God to Timothy: “Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1 Tm. 6.16). Not only are we utterly unable to comprehend the infinity of God because of our sinfulness; but even apart from that, man is of a different nature from God. He is infinite; we are finite. Even our non-corporeal parts – soul and spirit – cannot be said to be infinite. When my soul and spirit are transported to heaven after my death, I will then be there in those glorious mansions, and not here in this land of sin and sorrow. My being, even then, will be specific as to location. That cannot be said of God, whom even the heavens cannot contain.

The fact that God is infinitely greater in nature than we are ought to make us approach Him only with the greatest reverence. Though we can have great boldness because of the fact that we have a great high Priest who intercedes for us, we must at the same time realize to whom we are speaking. This is the Creator of heaven and earth, the incomprehensible I AM THAT I AM. It would be the greatest of presumption on our part to pray as though we were addressing a fellow creature.

Though God cannot be fully comprehended by us, it would be wrong for us to say that we can know nothing about Him. He has revealed much about Himself to us, enough to occupy the greatest of minds for a lifetime. Even a man as brilliant as John Gill was famously non-committal on many passages of Scripture, giving several possible interpretations of a passage, but not giving any firm opinion of his own, for a full understanding of them was beyond even his great mind.

How good our God is to have revealed anything of Himself to us! We ought to dedicate ourselves to a greater understanding of His nature, His works, and especially His great salvation.

“God is a Spirit,” our Lord declared to the woman at the well. That is His divine nature. A body was prepared in the womb of the virgin Mary which God the Son took into union with His divine Person; but that body, like our bodies, was not pre-existing. He was “made like unto his brethren,” and it is certain that we were made in our entire human natures. We should not think that God is like creation. Paul told the Athenians, “We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts. 17.29). God’s nature is infinite, and all of creation is finite; so in that respect, if there were no other, creation differs fundamentally from the Creator.

God is undivided, pure spirit. We are not to assume that the Persons in the Godhead are parts of God. That which has parts admits the possibility of division, and there is no division within the Godhead, nor can there be any. Besides, if the Son of God were but one part of God, and “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” what of that fullness is left for the other parts?

God is not a God of passions. It is true that He is portrayed in the Scriptures as having emotions, but we must understand that this is the usage of what theologians call “anthropapathic” language, or that which describes God as having man’s emotions so that our limited minds can have some understanding of His nature. Man has passions. Our anger, our love, our desire, our hatred – all of them ebb and flow. We are full of compassion one moment and unconcerned the next. God does not have changeable passions, but attributes. He is a God of love, and that love is absolute and unvarying. It does not change, and indeed cannot change. God’s holiness cannot grow, for it is already as perfect as it can be; it cannot decrease, for to decrease in holiness would be for God to become imperfect. For God to have changeable emotions would make Him the most fearful of beings, much as the heathen viewed their gods. Jupiter or Zeus might change, and that possibility kept their subjects in fear. The heathen gods had human-like passions, but to portray Jehovah as having the mutability of humanity is to make him like us, and God is as far above us as the heavens are above the earth. “God is” what He is. We cannot strictly say that He “was” or that He “will be,” nor can we say that His attributes ebb and flow.

God is immutable, which means that He does not and cannot change. “I am the Lord; I change not,” He declared in the book of Malachi. God cannot change because He is perfect. True and absolute perfection is inconsistent with change. If a being changed for the better, then he was not perfect before; and if he changed for the worse, then he was not perfect afterwards. Furthermore, circumstances do not alter God’s nature. Since He is the only self-existent being, He was perfect before anything else was created. He did not create the world because He was lacking in some regard. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit enjoyed perfect and infinite communion and unity in eternity, and stood in need of nothing. Creation did not change God.

God is immense or omnipresent, which is the theological way of saying that He cannot be limited with regard to space. At the dedication of the temple, Solomon said, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?” If the heaven of heavens cannot contain or hold God’s infinite nature, then it is clear that nothing else in creation can do so. God does not have to move from place to place, but is in all places at once. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, there art there”       (Ps. 139.8). The psalmist recognized that God’s vast nature fills all, whether with regard to this world or the next. It is true that the human nature of the Christ was as limited with regard to space as are we, but the divine nature of the Son was as infinite as the other Persons in the Godhead. This wonderful fact is illustrated by the statement of our Lord, “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” (Jn. 3.13). Even when the Son of man was here upon the earth, He retained in His divine nature all the perfection of the Godhead, including omnipresence.

God is eternal, which means that He has no limits with regard to time. The minutes do not tick off with God, for He has said that His name is I AM, which declares His eternal nature. His name is not “I Was” or “I Will  Be,” but I AM. It is in the present tense because the passage of time is of no consequence to God. Our Lord said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Grammatically that is incorrect, but the words of finite men cannot adequately express the infinity of God. The Son of God was the great I AM before the time of Abraham. Even in the past, He is, as hard as that is for us to comprehend. His infinite nature cannot be measured in terms of time any more than it can be measured in terms of space. Peter tells us that thousand years is to God as if it were a day (and he just as easily could have said a minute or a second).

Of all the attributes of God, the one that lends a glorious luster to all the rest is His holiness. God is holy in His power, holy in his wisdom, holy in His justice and holy in his knowledge. An absolute perfection is manifested in all His being and nature and in all His acts. His divine Person is so glorious that the four beasts of the Revelation proclaimed Him to be the thrice holy God: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.”

Consider the result if God were not holy in His attributes. Power without holiness might lead to cruel despotism. Love without holiness could proceed toward licentiousness. Wisdom without holiness might result in all sorts of mischievous inventions. How we ought to praise God, not just for what He has done, but for what He is! “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.” We cannot offer higher praise to God than to rehearse the glorious facets of his holy nature.

God is a God of wisdom. He knows all things. When the psalmist said, “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off,” he meant that God knows absolutely everything there is to be known about us. He created the universe, and so knows all those mysteries that confound the minds of the greatest scientists, whether they pertain to the vastness of space or the minuteness of sub-atomic particles. He not only knows all facts about what has been and will be, but He knows what might have been under different circumstances.

Seeing that His wisdom is infinite, ought not we poor sinners to resort to Him to seek the right way in every difficulty? How foolish it is to lean upon the frailty of man to guide us! A multitude of counselors may provide safety, but only by following the absolute wisdom of the almighty God can we be absolutely certain of being correct.

“And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mt. 7.28-29).

The sixty-six books of the Bible are the books we regard as being in the canon of Scripture. They constitute the word of God. They are holy writ. In them resides the absolute revealed authority of God to men. It is a grave mistake, however, to suppose that the authority of these books derives from their having been regarded by us as being in the Bible. They do not have authority because we say they have authority; we have recognized them as having authority because they already had it. Our saying they were the word of God did not make them the word of God. Their authority flows not from men or the opinions of men, but from God.

Jesus spoke in an entirely different manner than did the Jews. John Gill notes that the scribes “used to say, when they delivered anything to the people, ‘Our Rabbins, or our wise men say so and so:’ such as were on the side of Hillell made use of his name; and those who were on the side of Shammai made use of his name; scarce ever would they venture to say anything of themselves, but said, ‘The ancient doctors say thus and thus.’” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made some truly astonishing statements. In the fifth chapter of Matthew, He several times says, “Ye have heard that it hath been said,” and then quotes Old Testament texts. Then He comments upon those texts and says, “But I say unto you.” He places His own words right along side the Old Testament in authority, and even presumes to say what the meanings of those Scriptures were – but it was not presumption, for He really did have that authority since the words were His words, inspired by the Holy Ghost. Which of us would dare quote Scripture and then begin our remarks, “But I say unto you”? Christ was not contradicting the Old Testament, but He was correcting some misconceptions that were held concerning its meaning. In any case, His language very definitely contains a plain assertion of authority over the Scriptures. No scribe ever spoke with that kind of authority because no scribe had that authority.

There is a difference between giving our views on the Scriptures and giving the Scriptures themselves. Preachers stand before the Lord’s people and expound the Scriptures, but except when we are correctly reading or quoting the Bible, the views we give are our own. Hopefully they are correct, but we have no guarantee that they are correct, for we are but fallible men. The authority of the ministry lies only in the correct expounding of the Scriptures. When we teach the people what the Bible says, we can demand that they obey God’s word. When we give them our view of what the Bible means, our authority is limited by our correctness. IF we are correct in our views of what the Scriptures mean, then our hearers are obligated to give heed to us. However, in order to know if we are correct, they must go right back to the source, like the Bereans, and study the infallible Scriptures to know if what we have asserted regarding the meaning of the Bible is correct. The authority of the Bible lies not in our opinion of it, but in the fact that it is God’s word.

I will close with one of Pappy’s Proverbs: “You may tell me what you think the Bible means, and you might be wrong; but if you tell me what the Bible says, you will always be right, for the Bible is never wrong.”

Our Lord said, “The scripture cannot be broken,” and, “The scriptures must be fulfilled.”  The apostle Paul affirms that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God.” This sets the highest standard for that which may be termed scripture. If it is scripture, then it is infallible and absolutely may be trusted as a certain rule for faith, practice and moral instruction.

How do we know which writings of men may be counted as holy Scripture? When the apostle Paul and our Lord spoke of the Scriptures, they were speaking of the writings of the Old Testament. A confession of faith of the Waldenses dated in the year 1120 lists the books we now know as the 66 books of the King James translation of the Bible. John Gill says that the books we recognize as being in the Old Testament “entirely agree with Josephus’s account of them.” (Josephus was a Jewish historian.) A. A. Hodge, a noted Presbyterian theologian, wrote, “That the canon endorsed by Christ is the very canon we now possess we know to an absolute certainty – by the Septuagint translation, made nearly three hundred years before Christ; by the Hebrew Bible, jealously guarded by the Jews from the earliest ages to the present time; from the testimony of Philo and Josephus, the great Jewish writers of the first Christian century; and from the earliest Latin and Syriac translations.” Professor Robert Dick Wilson, perhaps the greatest Hebrew linguist who ever lived, said, “I can affirm that there is not a page of the Old Testament concerning which we need have any doubt. We can be absolutely certain that substantially we have the text of the Old Testament that Christ and the Apostles had, and which was in existence from the beginning.”

If the Old Testament books that Christ called “Scripture” were the same books that we now have in our Bibles, then we may be satisfied and assured that they are indeed worthy to be considered Scripture by us. If Jesus considered them as being Scripture, then that settles the matter.

What about the New Testament? How may we know that those 27 books are to be considered Scripture? Jesus told His apostles, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” What the apostles taught certainly would be important, but the fact that Jesus said, “I am with you alway,” teaches that the apostles had the full authority of the Master in their teaching. When the apostles spoke, Jesus spoke. He was fully “with them” in their teachings. If the apostles had the least regard for Christ, then they never would have represented as Scripture anything that Christ would not have approved as such. If they had represented as infallible that which could be “broken,” then they would have been guilty of perpetrating a fraud and would have been unworthy of the office that they held and certainly could not have claimed that the Lord was “with them.” Apostolic sanction, then, must be evidence of the validity of a book as Scripture.

Of the 27 books of the New Testament, ten were written by men who were chosen by Christ as His apostles, and we need have no doubt as to their authority since we have a direct transcript of Jesus’ words as He conveyed to them divine authority to complete the text of the Scriptures. (Most scholars I have read consider James and Jude to be included in this number.) Fourteen books were written by the apostle Paul. (I include Hebrews in that group.) How do we know that Paul’s writings are to be regarded as Scripture? The apostle Peter said that unlearned men wrested Paul’s writings “as they do also the other scriptures” (2 Pt. 3.16). This lets us know that Peter considered Paul’s writings to be Scripture, and if they were Scripture, then they were given “by inspiration of God.” That leaves only Mark, Luke and Acts (written by Luke) to be dealt with. Mark and Luke were closely associated with the apostles. The Gospel according to Mark was written by John Mark, whom the apostle Peter referred to as “my son” (1 Pt. 5.13). Luke traveled with the apostle Paul, who certainly would have known of his writings and would have rejected them as Scripture if there had been any doubt about them.