Why This Bible? (2 Peter 1:16-21) • Geoff Bradford

We are going to look together this morning at Second Peter chapter one, if you want to find that in a Bible, or you can follow along with me as I have this on the screen behind me. It's our custom to read God's word aloud together. If you would join your voices with mine as we read Second Peter one verses 16 through 21.

For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Instead, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the majestic glory, saying, "This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased." We ourselves heard this voice when it came from heaven, while we were with him on the Holy Mountain. We also have the prophetic word strongly confirmed, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a lamp shining in the dark place, until the day dawns and a morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you know this: no prophecy of scripture comes from the prophet's own interpretation because no prophecy ever came by the will of man. Instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. — 2 Peter 1:16-21

This is the word of the Lord, and we respond, thanks be to God.

Introducing the Series

Today, we're starting a new preaching series that we will continue off and on all this spring, called "No Bad Questions." It comes from a conviction of mine that there should be no bad questions in church—that you should be able to ask your questions as we talk about trying to know an infinite being, trying to understand God. You should be able to wrestle with the faith and try to understand it.

Unfortunately, often coming into a room like this, seated as we are, with a person like me speaking into a microphone, we give the very opposite impression. We communicate that this is a one-way conversation, that there's no time for Q and A, and it tells people that there are no questions allowed. The intent of this series is actually to engage and answer questions that many people have with regard to the faith.

Here's our schedule of topics: Why isn't God more obvious and provable? Why does God make such a big deal about sexuality? Is God fair? Isn't the cross child abuse? Why are Christians so jacked up? All these questions and lots more.

I hope you'll consider passing on some of these sermons. I hope you'll consider inviting somebody to come and participate. We also want to give an opportunity for you to ask questions. We have an email address: simplyquestions@ctkrally.org. I'm going to try to receive those during the week and answer one or two on social media. I know that I won't be able to get to all of them, but those will inform some of what I'm going to be preaching on. Mostly, I'm going to try to do those via social media to give at least some kind of dialogue.

In doing this series, I want to make sure you know I am not claiming to be the expert. I'm not the Bible answer guy. I simply want to create space where it's okay to wrestle and it's okay to ask your questions, and I think that should be normal. I'm hoping I'm giving permission for that.

I also want to give a nod to my friend Walter Hiniger, who's a pastor in Atlanta. I got the idea of doing this sermon series from him. I'm not stealing his material, but I did take a couple of the first questions from him.

Why This Bible?

Today we're going to start with this one, and it's a big one, and it's a foundational one. I feel like if we don't talk about this one first, it's really hard to talk about any of the rest of them. Why this Bible? Why this particular Bible? This book with 66 books written over a period of fifteen hundred years in three languages by dozens of authors.

It's such a difficult book, isn't it? If you've sought to read the Bible, if you've tried to study the Bible, it's complicated. It's hard. Why would God write a book this complicated?

The reality is this isn't the Bible that we want, is it? I think a lot of people would prefer sort of a Google version of the Bible where you could look up your questions, a Wikipedia Bible, or even a recipe book Bible—like "How to Have a Good Life"—that would be great. But this Bible? We want something that's much more accessible, something more clear, something that fits our categories of twenty-first century journalistic precision. And instead, this is what we get: this collection of narratives, Hebrew poetry, apocalyptic literature, gospels, and epistles—genres of reading that don't neatly fit into our modern categories of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, news. They don't, do they? And as such, it's hard.

One of the things that I find is that many times we feel like we're the first generation who's wrestled with this.

Generations of Christians before us have always wrestled with this. Abraham Kuiper, who was the prime minister of The Netherlands in the early nineteen hundreds, said this about Scripture: it seems like God has given us an artist, not a photographer. He's given us this impressionistic painting, not the kind of precision that we want.

So, this isn't the Bible we want, is it? Why this Bible? Why this particular Bible? If God could have done this anyway, God could have chosen any way to communicate who he is to us. Why this one?

I want to assume that there's something purposeful about the way that we get the Bible. I'm going to assume that God has some purpose in this way of revealing himself.

My Challenge for You

I'm going to show my cards at the beginning. Here's my challenge for you this morning: to read it, re-examine your own resistance to it, and let it read you.

First, read it. By that, I mean, let the Bible speak. Read the whole book. Examine it and wrestle with it. Question it. I find that some people who really wrestle with the claims the Bible have honestly never truly tried to study it. They've read the lives of Christians, and I know reading the lives of Christians is no good advertisement for Christianity. They've read the church and church history—again, not a great infomercial for Jesus. They've taken a class. They've talked to friends. They've heard other people's logical wrestling with the Bible. But if you don't do the homework yourself, you can't say you've actually thought about this. It's all second hand.

We have an election coming up this year, and I always, on the local and state level, have to go research. You know, figuring out who's running for county sheriff—I don't know any of these names, or county commissioner. You have to go do your homework and figure out who these people are and what they stand for, what their prior voting record is on major issues.

I want to encourage you to do the same with the Bible. Ask your questions and get into this book and let it speak for itself.

What Does the Bible Say About the Bible?

I want to ask: what does the Bible say about the Bible? Now, that may sound very circular to many of you. But there are things the Bible doesn't say about what it means, and there are things the Bible does say about what it means. So I want to let the Bible speak for itself.

This is just one of many passages—the part we read here from Second Peter chapter one. Peter, one of Jesus' disciples, writing to a group of people in the first century, talking about Jesus and Scripture. I want to listen to this, and I'm going to go through this by objections—several objections that people have to the Bible.

Objection Number One: Ancient Mythology vs. Reality

Objection number one is this: ancient people lived in a time when the lines between mythology and reality were much blurrier. You know this if you've studied your Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology. Did ancient people really understand what was true and what's not the way we do? Fact and fiction? They had ideas of chaos. Did they understand myth the same way we do?

Let's explore that for a bit. The word in Greek for myth is mythos, and it means simply a narrative or story without distinction of fact or fiction—a fictional narrative as opposed to the truth of history. What did the Bible's authors think about the category of myth?

Well, interestingly, that word is used all over the New Testament, and it's distinguished between what the Bible is communicating. For example, Paul tells his readers:

Have nothing to do with irrelevant and silly myths — 1 Timothy 4

And in another place:

There's a time coming when people will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths — 2 Timothy 4

And again:

No one should devote themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth — Titus 1

And then here we just read in Second Peter:

We didn't follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the story of Jesus — 2 Peter 1

In other words, the first century authors of the Bible were very aware of the distinction between mythology and fact, between what is a fictionalized account and what we would consider to be reality and truth. One of the problems for modern people—and C.S.

Lewis, an Oxford professor in the middle of the twentieth century, said one of the problems that every generation has is a type of chronological snobbery, where we look back on people before us and think we've advanced way further than they have. They were so foolish back then, so gullible, so easy to believe lots of made up things. He says, beware—this is my caution to us—beware your chronological snobbery. These people were operating in the same category as we were.

Objection Two: The Bible is Like a Game of Telephone

The second objection is this: the Bible is like a game of telephone. Did you ever play telephone growing up? It's a kid's game where one person whispers a phrase to somebody, and they whisper to the next person, and down the line it goes. At the end of the game, you find out how the message has been changed over time. The logic applied to the Bible is that much of this was oral history. Over time, the passing down of this led to all kinds of distortions to the point that we have no idea what this actually originally said. We've got version number 2,800 or whatever down the line.

So the question is: is that what's going on? Surely, yes, parts of the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch—the first part of the Bible—was oral history before it was written down. But there are lots of parts of the Bible that are not. There are lots of parts of the Bible that don't fit that category.

For example, we read here as Peter talks in 2 Peter 1, he uses language that we would use today when we talk about journalistic reporting. Verse 16, he says:

We were eyewitches.

Isn't this what hearing from frontline accounts of what's happening in Gaza? We want eyewitness stories. Verse 17:

We ourselves heard the voice.

What is that? That's first-person testimony. It's the same standard of journalistic reporting that we look for today. And that's not just one isolated event in the Bible.

In fact, if you go back and look at particularly the two books written by the Gospel writer Luke—Luke wrote the book of Luke, which is the account of Jesus' life, and the book of Acts, which is the account of the first days after Jesus' death and resurrection and the first years of the early church. Luke writes in the beginning of that: "I carefully researched this." He went around and did lots of interviews with people to get the material that he puts into the Gospel of Luke and into the book of Acts. Careful investigation is the word that he uses. And therefore, we have to again be really careful of saying they didn't know how to collect data. They didn't know what kind of standard of reporting people really need. No. The Bible stands up to that.

Objection Three: The Bible Contradicts Itself

The third objection is this: the Bible contradicts itself from the Old to the New Testament. Now, I looked this up. You can find all kinds of examples of this. You type in on Google "Bible contradictions," and you will get hundreds of pages. There are lots of people pointing out between the Old Testament and the New all kinds of discrepancies—like how it seems there was a change in thoughts about the Sabbath, the permanence of the earth, the importance of sacrifices, the power of God, seeing God, punishing crime, family relationships, the resurrection of the dead, the end of the world—all kinds of things.

But again, listen to what the Bible says about the Bible. Peter here says:

We also have the prophetic word strongly confirmed, and you will do well to pay attention to it.

This is one of the challenges of interpreting the Bible, isn't it? The Bible doesn't drop down for us from heaven in some monolithic whole. I wish that it did. There are other books—religious books—that are purported to be like that. For example, the Koran is claimed to have been written by one person at one time in history. Or, again, Joseph Smith's tablets dropped down from heaven. This is exactly how they're supposed to be. The Bible, though, was written by at least 40 authors over a period of fifteen hundred years. It is anything but a monolithic whole. It's all kinds of pieces brought together in one book. And that's really hard.

But the Bible knows that that's what it is. It's an unfolding document. It's an unfolding revelation of God over time in history. So all the parts—there are parts that preview other parts that are fulfilled in other parts. There's a beginning and an end; they tie together. It has a prophetic word confirmed on purpose. Again, this is purposeful.

Augustine said this in the fifth century: "The new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed." These two parts of the Bible speak to one another, and they form a whole.

Bible interpretation is really hard because it's not just looking at what God said like a Wikipedia article. It's what happened over and over across centuries, and the way that this unfolded. You have to let the Bible speak to other parts of the Bible. But this is for a purpose.

Why would God do it this way? Why not drop down and shrink-wrap one book, written at one point, dropped straight from the sky, hits the pavement, we got it. Why fifteen hundred years?

The Bible says that God is an invisible, eternal, omnipresent, omniscient being. The only way you are going to get to know an eternal, invisible, omnipresent, omniscient being is how God reveals himself over time. How his character is revealed over a long period of history. How he makes promises and fulfills promises. How he says, "This is what I'm going to do" and then how he does it. That character study over fifteen hundred years is extremely purposeful for us.

You can read the Bible and you're like, "Man, there's some really hard parts, there's some really upsetting parts," but God's character remains constant throughout, unfolding over centuries.

The Divine and Human Nature of Scripture

Objection number four: this book was written by humans, a fabrication of humans. Also followed by objection number five: this book is supposed to be divine. Peter answers both at the same time, so I'll answer both at the same time.

No prophecy of Scripture comes from the prophet's own interpretation because no prophecy ever came by the will of man. Instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Spirit. — 2 Peter 1:20-21

This is what the Bible is saying about itself. It is a human book, and it's a divine book. It's not a 50% human book and a 50% divine book. All of it is human and divine.

In Mark 5, for example, Jesus refers back to one of the Psalms of David in the Old Testament. And he says of David's psalm, he both attributes it to David, the man writing it, and to the Holy Spirit, and to God Himself writing it through David. Jesus says both of those things are true.

With every part of Scripture, this is what Scripture affirms about Scripture: it is divine and human. We ought to look for this in every part of Scripture without one eclipsing the other—co-authors. What God says doesn't cease to be what a person says, and what a person says doesn't cease to be what God says. Both are part of that.

Contextual and Condescending Revelation

That means two things. First, it means it's contextual, and second, it means it's condescending. That's not a nice word, but I'll explain it.

Contextual. This is purposeful. We don't get a book dropped from the sky because it is always contextual in every way. God wrote this book in three different languages to particular people in a particular time, in a particular place, in a context. It's written to them in language that they can understand.

Why would God write a book that way? Because that's how faith is. Faith is always contextual. God is always about speaking into, breaking into the lives of individual people where you live, in the language that you operate in, in the world that you operate in. Faith is always eternal and contextual.

It's also, though, a condescension. God always stoops. One writer says, "God lisps when He speaks to us." God stoops, so He accommodates humans at the level of understanding where they are in history. He doesn't speak to ancient people in astrophysics terms. So you read in the Bible of the sun rising and the sun setting. It doesn't speak of heliocentric galaxies or solar systems. It speaks in an ancient Near Eastern cosmogony in the way that people could understand how the world worked. God does this purposefully.

Now, that creates a lot of problems for us. We have to interpret, we have to update, we have to understand: What did this mean to them? What does this mean to us today? But think about this. If God came and spoke His word to us today, people living fifteen hundred years from now would be doing the same thing. They would be having to understand the world that we're in, the way we speak, our vernacular, the way that we think about the world, and I'm sure there are things that we don't know yet. God speaks in a very contextual way. God speaks in a condescending way on purpose.

Jesus as the Main Point

Now, of course, the greatest breaking-in of God, His revelation in this, is Jesus. And that's what's highlighted in this passage. Jesus is, as Peter says here, the main point of the Bible.

We did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Instead, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from the Father when the voice came to him from the majestic glory saying, "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased." — 2 Peter 1:16-17

We ourselves heard the voice when it came from heaven, when we were with him on the Holy Mountain. Now, he's referring to an event that he was an eyewitness to. Peter and John went up on a mountain in Mount Tabor in Northern Galilee, and they witnessed what's been called the transfiguration. Jesus looks normal in one moment, and the next minute, he sort of unveiled to be a divine being. And, at his right and left, speaking with him are two of the Old Testament leaders of Israel, Moses and Elijah.

And there's a voice that comes from heaven:

This is my beloved son, listen to him.

And Peter here is an eyewitness. Why would this be the thing that he highlights? He doesn't highlight the resurrection, doesn't highlight the baptism. This he's saying, this is Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God to people. God come in human flesh. And, that's why Moses is there, and why Elijah is there. They are representatives of the Old Testament prophetic system. He says, look, they are with Jesus, they're pointing to Him. They're saying, this is the guy.

I want you to think about this. You can learn a lot about God from nature. Lots of us love nature. We love going out on a cloudless, moonless night at the ocean or up in the mountains and staring up the stars. You can learn a lot under an electron microscope. You can learn a lot about who God is from His created world. Lots of His created world tells you God is real. We'll talk about more of this next week. But, you can only learn so much about God from this.

It'd be like an assignment if you were in an English class in high school, and your teacher says, I want you to read all the plays of Shakespeare and tell me everything that you could find out about the person William Shakespeare by reading his plays. That'd be a really hard assignment. You could walk through his plays and go like, seems like Shakespeare had a sense of humor. He lived in this kind of place and time and used this kind of language. He liked history. He had some sad stories. There's only so much you can learn about Shakespeare by reading Shakespeare, unless. Unless Shakespeare, in the story of Hamlet, wrote himself into the play, and he was a character in his own play.

This is what the God of the universe did. The God of the universe, of course, is revealed in His creation, in the physical universe, in the mathematical precision of this universe, in astrophysics, in all kinds of wonderful ways. But, God is most clearly seen because He wrote Himself into our history. He came in the person of Jesus, in flesh and blood, and you can study Him. You can learn about Him. You can learn about Him in the Bible.

So, again, why this Bible? Why not Wikipedia? Again, we're not the first generation to wrestle with these concerns. There are lots of frustrating parts. But, let me emphasize this. Don't confuse frustrating with random. The Bible is not random. Don't confuse difficult with impossible.

Instead, here's my challenge to you. Take a step toward it, open it up, and read it. And, particularly, read it looking for its main character, the person of Jesus. If this is what the Bible is all about, start with that part, or dig into it looking for Him. We have a great opportunity for this coming up in the next couple of weeks. Read it, wrestle with it.

Rethink Your Resistance

Second point, and these two points are much briefer. Rethink your resistance. Your posture toward the Bible is super important. Nobody comes at this book in an objective way. We have to be really honest about that. Nobody comes in an objective way. Every person has a predisposition. We have cultural lenses. We have ways we've heard about the Bible and what it means. Every person approaches this Bible before we even open up with some degree of resistance.

Most famously, a writer named Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World said this about the Bible and about Christianity, and I appreciate the honesty of this quote. Not a believer, but he's honest about his own resistance. He says this:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently, I assumed it had none, and I was able to find without any difficulty satisfying reasons for that assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with the problem of metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do whatever he wants, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern the way they want. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and otherwise. — Aldous Huxley

Let me boil that down. What's he saying? I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I didn't want the bible to have meaning or Christian theology, and therefore, I found it didn't have any. And that pretty much was self fulfilling.

I appreciate Huxley because he's saying, "I'm sincerely convinced of a worldview that excludes God." I think that's really helpful. To truly be open to the Bible is honestly terrifying. If you open yourself up to a book and say, there might be a real God behind this. And if there's a real God, He might be in control of all things. If there's a real God in control of all things, I might be breathing His air and my very existence may be caused by Him and He may have demands upon me. The intellectually honest person says, "Really, I'm not so sure. I'm not sure I want this."

Can you identify with that? There's something about us, deep down, that's agnostic. Even if you're a Christian, you're like, I sort of want this, sort of don't. On my best days I'm like, yeah, God's—we do this internal tug of war. Do you want a God who is real?

Being Read by the Bible

Finally, to be read by the Bible. Here's what I mean. Every Christian I know—and I'm going to take a hand count of this in just a second—has some experience of sitting in a service, or in a Bible study, or a class, or even their own study of the Bible, and feeling like somebody flipped a switch. It was like a hand reached through this book and grabbed you by the lapel and said, "You, I'm talking to you."

Can I have a raise of hands? Has anybody ever felt that before? The reason you felt that, if you're Christian, is because it's a living book. The spirit of God works through this book. God's word is alive in a way that other books are not.

So here's my dare to you: Would you open yourself up to allow God's word to grab you? To read you, to read your life?

Next Sunday night, if you're interested, we're going to do an intro to the book of Genesis. On Sunday night we start one-to-one Bible reading. If you want to read the Bible, we'll help you find somebody to partner up with, and you can start reading the Bible with that person. It's helpful to do that together because you're talking about what you're reading. This is a complicated book. This is a confusing book.

But I want to dare you, in this new year—whether you've been a Christian for thirty or fifty years, or you'd never call yourself a Christian—to open yourself up to this book.

One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure

Let me close with this. One man's trash is another man's treasure. There are lots of people who look at this book and have no desire. It might as well be thrown in the trash heap for them. But for many people, this is a treasure.

In 2001, a man named Larry Au, a maintenance worker at Milwaukee's Capital Court Mall, was cleaning up a storage room in the mall right before it was about to be demolished. He found in a trash pile a pair of old sneakers buried underneath some boxes. They were used and obviously showed signs of wear, but as he looked more closely, he recognized Michael Jordan's signature on it. The side of one of those size thirteen sneakers had the inscription: "My very best."

Turns out, they were an authentic pair of Air Jordans—Jordan ones that Jordan himself had worn for a while. Nike had loaned them to the store in Milwaukee to display in a store window. I guess somebody eventually forgot that they had been loaned, and they'd been there for twenty years in a storage closet. They were valued at about $20,000.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Take and read. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me? God, thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. I pray, Father, as we start off this new year, that your word would be something that we would want and be drawn to. And as we open it and read it, it would read us. Father, we thank you that you invite all kinds of questions. We pray, Father, that we would be a people who are open to asking hard questions of our faith and engaging one another. Father, we pray that you would help us to move towards you in 2024. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.