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| Jan. 28 | Fourth S. a. the Epiphany | Jer.
1:4-10 \\ (17-19) | Psalm 71:1-6 \\ (7-11) | 1 Cor.
12:31b—13:13 | !
Luke 4:31-44
|
Who has authority?
The author of life is the only One with authority.
God, who reveals himself in his intelligible Word, is also personally and powerfully present in his Word, either in creation or preservation, grace or judgment.
His Word defines and expresses his sovereign power and the dependence of everything else on his will.
All other authority is derivative and contingent, a right or permission conferred by God from the ultimate seat of power ("There is no authority except that which God has established," Rom 13:1).
Angels are divinely invested with whatever authority they exercise (Rev 18).
Satan's sphere of dominion is a temporary bestowal (Acts 26:18; Col 1:13).
As for Antichrist, even his power is granted to him (Rev 13:2, 4).
Civil government derives its authority from divine determination and is God's instrument of justice and order in a fallen society (Rom 13).
So Pilate wielded an authority he had not inherently but derivatively (John 19:11).
The forces of destruction in fallen nature and history are not inherent but derived (Rev 6:8, 9:3, 10, 19).
Even the authorization enabling forgiven sinners to enter God's kingdom comes from Jesus (John 1:12), who is divinely authorized and empowered to act (John 10:18) and endowed with authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:10).
God's Word alone has the final say, invariably carrying out his will and fulfilling his intentions: "So is my word that goes out from my mouth: it will not return to me empty, but shall accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it" (Isa 55:11).
God's Word has a transcendent supernatural force.
His prophecy carries inner assurance of historical fulfillment.
Even nature passes away, but Yahweh's Word endures: "The grass withers, and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isa 40:8).
What is really at issue in the Protestant principle is not the absolutizing or "divinizing" of the relative--whether of human beings, or of holy men, or of human words at their profoundest, or of human thought at its purest.
Rather, it is a matter solely of God speaking in his Word, supernaturally to and through chosen men, making his thoughts and message known to those who must otherwise have been strangers to them.
The struggle against the authority of the Bible is therefore inseparable from the struggle against divine authority, even as the struggle for the authority of the Bible is a struggle for transcendent authority and against any transcendent authority higher than God.
Indeed there would be no special revelation for us at all had not God chosen prophets and apostles and charged them to transmit his Word in the form not only of oral proclamation but of letter and book.
The rejection of the authority of revelation in the concrete form and content of Scripture therefore works against spirit and life rather than fostering them, as critics of the evangelical principle contend.
From his insistence that "authority in the absolute sense resides in the truth alone, or, in religious language, in the mind and will of God," C.H. Dodd proceeds to circumvent any self-subsistent external authority given in objective form, whether that form is the Scriptures or the teaching of Jesus.
The Bible "becomes" God's Word as man's spirit is moved to respond subjectively "to the Spirit that utters itself in the Scriptures."
[1] But one can hardly consider Dodd's own declaration "an entirely non-dogmatic statement which anyone might accept as a starting-point" (words with which he dismisses an alternative view) [2] when he states that the Spirit exists and sporadically "utters itself."
Indeed, Dodd concedes the circularity of his exposition of divine authority: "We look to the Bible for guidance toward religious truth; we recognize this truth by reference to our own religious standards."
[3]
Dodd's emphasis that the Spirit's witness centers in "a unity of experience in which 'subjective' and 'objective' are one" [4] is not as far removed as some may think from the more recent "new morality," which affirms that love possesses a homing instinct for doing the right thing in the absence of objectively revealed principles.
And situation ethics, in turn, offers no persuasive alternative to the notion of radical secularity that man himself defines the true and the good and postulates whatever gods or values express his individual distinctiveness.
That is surely not what Dodd intends.
But, speak as he will of biblical authority, his view of Scripture--reverently as he may handle it on many occasions--compels him finally to bracket the word "authority" when he speaks of the Bible [5] and to regard Scripture not as "the last word" but only as "the 'seminal word' out of which fresh apprehension of truth springs in the mind of man." [6] So what began as a defense of absolute truth in the mind of God alone [7] concludes without any objectively uttered and authoritatively apprehended Word of God.
There is, to be sure, but one absolute priority: the sovereign Creator and Lord of all.
In principle, the evangelical believer acknowledges no ultimate authority but the authority of the living God--authoritative even above human reasoning, scientific and theological opinion, ecclesiastical tradition, cultural consensus, empirical observation, and all else.
No book emphasizes as does the Bible that God is the true source and seat of authority.
When he speaks of God as supreme authority, the Christian means that he acknowledges as final only the authority of the living God, who has become incarnate in Jesus Christ, man's only Savior and Lord.
More specifically, the evangelical believer acknowledges the supreme authority solely of the living God, embodied in Jesus Christ, whom no man can confess as Lord except by the Holy Spirit, the divine communicator and superintendent of the prophetic-apostolic writings (John 14:26; 2 Tim 3:16).
The affirmation of the authority of Scripture represents a determination not to seek the Word of God elsewhere than in the Spirit-inspired, Christ-pledged, and God-intended source of the revelational Word.
Although he did not apply the principle elsewhere as fully as he might have and ought to have, Barth was quite right when he asserted that "Holy Scripture is the Word of God for the Church, that it is Jesus Christ for us ...
Through his revealed Word, reliably conveyed in Holy Scripture, God publishes the fact and direction of his authority over mankind.
In the OT era he exercised authority over Israel through prophets, priests, and kings as appointed agents or authorized representatives whose task included proclaiming his messages Jer 1:7 ff.), teaching his laws (Deut 31:11; Mal 3:7), and ruling accordingly (Deut 17:18 ff.).
The written Scriptures were the statute-book by which God instructed, warned, and judged his ancient people (Ps 119; cf. 2 Kings 22-23).
W.C.G.
Proctor does not put the matter too strongly when he writes, "It is through the Bible that Jesus Christ now exercises his divine authority, imparting authoritative truth, issuing authoritative commands, and imposing an authoritative norm by which all the arrangements or statements made by the church must be shaped and corrected."
[9] In this sense, it may be insisted that apostolic authority has not been delegated to others--church fathers, bishops, or an authoritative church or hierarchy--but that apostolic authority remains a reality through the authoritative NT writings through which the risen Lord himself holds sway over the church by the Spirit.
We speak meaningfully of the Bible as Holy Scripture only if we recognize it not simply as one of a number of the shaping forces of Christian life and experience, but rather as the one divinely given Word by which God intends to rule the Christian community and in which he presently confronts the church with a norm higher than her own consciousness.
In the Bible the church does not merely memorialize a divine Word once given to long-deceased prophets and apostles but no longer God's Word for us--a Word that could again be a living Word of God only if those special servants in generations past could be raised from the dead to speak their message afresh or only if in our own experience we duplicate and parallel the reception of revelation as it came to those chosen prophets and apostles.
For the Bible /is/ God's Word now.
It is his authoritative Word, in and through and by which the Spirit addresses us today.
The Spirit indeed alone imparts life.
But he does so only in and through and by the Word, and never without the Word.
The scriptural revelation is not simply a Word of God that was vital yesterday; it is the Word of God that is currently vigorous and active in grace or judgment.
It is the Word of God present and living in the form and content of Scripture, the Word identical with the words received and transmitted by chosen prophets and apostles, the Word God has spoken and still speaks authoritatively.
Divine revelation is Scripture's very own pulse beat, demanding our respectful hearing and the obedient conformity of our minds and ways to its requirements.
The authority of the Bible derives from God's speaking in these statements and words.
Scripture is indeed what God himself would have us know and would have us obey in the church as Word of God.
/C.
God's Word As Deliberately Written/
That the authoritative Word of God has the written form of Scripture is not a decision left to prophets or apostles, but one inherent in God's intention for special revelation from the very first.
There is for us no special revelational access to God that detours around Scripture, no other way open to the sinner that guarantees reliable conclusions about God's plan and purpose.
There is no way to another Word in which God speaks differently from the way he speaks in the Bible, no appeal to the Holy Spirit or even to Christ Jesus or to Elohim-Yahweh (the Maker and Lord of all) that will enable us to acquire some special revelation by which we will be able to "pick and choose" in Scripture between what is authentic or inauthentic.
Nor is there any private revelation that enables us to establish Scripture as "special revelation" written, nor any revered church tradition or religious consensus that equips us to discern the real sense of Scripture (as if it were obscure!) or to supplement Scripture (as if it were insufficient and incompletely
It is the Bible that is God's authoritative Word.
Whoever would speak of God as authoritative over human life, yet clouds the authority of the Bible, in effect obscures an authoritative God.
Those who appeal, in distinction from the Bible, to some Christ immediately knowable, or to a mystical relationship to the Holy Spirit on the margin of Scripture (even if rationalized as a confrontation the Bible allegedly witnesses to), or who arm themselves with an impressive consensus of contemporary theologians about the dangers of taking the Bible as literally true--these all end up by subordinating the Bible to speculation.
They abridge or amend its teaching by authorizing the fallible human self (the critical expert's included) to criticize infallibly the prophetic-apostolic disclosure of the Word of God.
Critics who compromise the authority of Scripture almost invariably correlate the authority of God with speculative notions of God's Word and its implications for man's answerability to God and duty to his fellow-men.
The church is not determinative of Scripture, but Scripture is authoritative over the church; whatever authority the church has, she has solely on the basis of the revelational prerogative of God.
That the prophetic-apostolic revelation is addressed in writing to the church challenges every effort by the church to regard herself as the source of revelation, or even of the given revelation's sure meaning.
For the church must always come to terms with what stands written.
Without the authoritative books, all the ancient traditions transmitted through the church may easily be misconceived as a message that comes from the church, and the church itself is more readily disposed to modify them.
But if Holy Scripture is divinely given, the possibility of reformation remains even for a church that has made itself the seat of divine authority.
Whatever churchmen may say about the Bible, so far as the modern church is concerned the Book is theonomously and independently "there," objectively voicing the divinely authoritative Word and repeatedly calling the church to reckon with what is written.
Geldenhuys summarizes as the evidence of the NT and of the early Christian writings this sequence in respect to divine authority: (1) the historical fact of the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus, (2) the fact of the unique authority given to and exercised by the Lord's chosen apostles to lay the foundations of the church once-for-all, (3) the early church's acknowledgment of the foregoing and its acceptance of the apostolic writings as authoritative, and (4) the inevitable consequence of a canonical NT clothed with the authority of the Lord and his apostles.
Throughout the NT, the source of all authority is God himself.
The entire NT breathes the air of a monotheistic, creationist, and revelational basis for life.
This is apparent as much in the record of our Lord's life as it is in the writers' perspectives.
The structure of both thought and language substantiates this.
The structure stems from the OT and is continuous with that revelation, with its promise climactically fulfilled in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.
The NT canon is more than biography or anthology, more than a collection of writings by the followers of Christ.
The canon is a hermeneutic (a way of interpretation).
Its essential criterion is a theology based on the teaching of Christ and the apostles in written form, identifying and preserving what was already accepted as relating to Christ as Lord and what was accepted as apostolic in the early church.
The NT writings orient the teachings of Christ in relation to the biblical authority of the OT.
Christ accepted the OT as authoritative and subjected himself to it, as all four Gospel traditions clearly state and imply (Matt 5:17, 18; 9:13; 15:1-4; Mark 7:9; 9:13; Luke 4:16-21; 18:31; John 5:39; 10:33-38).
Jesus declares the Scriptures to be authoritative, in contrast to religious traditions.
His life and death are presented as the fulfillment of Scripture.
His teachings are the very Word of God, brought from the Father, which truth is the foundation of apostolic faith (Mark 13:31; John 5:19, 38, 39; 6:63, 68; 12:48, 49; 17:8).
The world is locked in a battle unto death.
Some would have us believe that this life is all there is, that there is no eternity.
Others say that there is eternal life, but it’s in the hands of a capricious god who demands that we follow an agenda and maybe he’ll do something for us.
The Bible clearly teaches that every human being will live in eternity, but those who fail to believe in the God we worship today as Holy Trinity will live in a place of outer darkness.
But Christians have an astounding message to proclaim to the world, that a person who offers loving authority, and life after death in heaven, is alive and real.
His name is Jesus Christ, and He is the single source of all authority and power in this world and the next.
Luke Chapter 4 describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry after He had been baptized.
In this chapter, we have four vignettes that allow us to see Jesus as He who has been given authority by His Father.
First He is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness, where He spends 40 days being tempted by Satan.
This is a necessary first step because Jesus has entered Satan’s world.
In order for the Kingdom of God to enter into the world in Jesus, He must bind Satan, and He does so, using His very own Word against the evil one.
27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man.
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