Since the Bible is widely available, make it your book. Read it. Memorize it. Pray with it. Through the Bible, God speaks. As the church father John Chrysostom (c. 347-407) once said: “what the Scriptures utter, the Master has uttered.”
We do not have to listen to a church father to know this. When Hebrews 3:7 cites Psalm 95, the author writes, “Holy Spirit says.” Who speaks in Psalm 95? The Holy Spirit does. Note the present tense in Hebrews 3:7. The Word lives. And this is because the Bible is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword (Heb 4:12). It is not a dead word.
Chrysostom once said, ‘what the Scriptures utter, the Master has uttered.’
When Scripture speaks, God speaks.
Theologian John Webster calls the Bible a creature of God. I think he’s right to do so. After all, Hebrews 4:12 says, “the word of God is living.” Whatever lives is a creature of God, unless something lives that God did not create. Yet the Bible tells us, “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3). So the Bible must be a creature of God.
Make the Bible your book. It is alive. When the Bible speaks, God does. “For,” explains Chrysostom, “the master of the angels, the Lord of the dead and the living, himself has given the Scriptures their authority.” And he says. we should “consider the holy Scriptures the most trustworthy of all.” God speaks in the Bible, granting it his authority. The Bible has divine authority.
The apostle Peter tells us, “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:21). Now, since the Holy Spirit carried along men who “spoke from God,” we can see how Scripture receives its inspiration. The Holy Spirit speaks through men so that the Bible is “breathed out by God” (2 Tim 3:16). As spirit by analogy is like a breath, so God’s breath (the Spirit) spirates into Scripture.
Make the Bible your book. It is alive.
And as God “breathed into [Adam’s] nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7), so he breaths into the Bible, making it “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).
My point here is a narrow one. In Canada, we have the Bible readily available. God gave the Bible to us. He inspired it. It is authoritative because when the Bible speaks, God speaks. So make it your book. Read it. Pray with it. Hear God speak in it. Why not listen to the Lord of creation tell us his intent for creation? What better book might there be to read?
