10 Sept 2022

We have been looking at the “Holy War” and God’s plan of redemption and salvation – the eternal purpose to create through Jesus Christ (the second Adam) a new society and humanity. This eternal purpose of God is achieved and consummated by a continual conflict with evil, and the evil one. instead of a weak compromise with him.

We must know, without any doubt, that the Bible is God’s own witness to His work of redemption and salvation.
The Bible functions as our schoolmaster, teaching us the truth, operating as the rule of our teaching and speaking, a rule by which we may regulate all the thoughts of our minds (the renewal of our minds) and the words of our mouth (from out of the heart the mouth speaks).
More than that, says Calvin, “The Bible is not only our schoolmaster, the Bible is our spectacles.”

Calvin, who himself was short-sighted, says, in effect that the natural man, without the Scriptures, has no more than a smudgy awareness that there is something or a someone, but he does not know who that something or the someone is. So when we begin to study the Scriptures, he says, we begin to see clearly who it is whom before we had that unwelcome awareness. The Scriptures come to us as spectacles, enabling us to focus that awareness of God that we had before and showing us precisely who and what this God is. The Scriptures are our lifeline; they alone can guide us out of the labyrinth of ignorance.

So Calvin opposed any form of theology that sought to run apart from the Scriptures; he denounced it as speculation, saying that it is ungodly.

Consequently, he summons us to that humility which acknowledges need and is willing to be taught. The humility is one that bows before the Scriptures and accepts them as instruction from God; they are God preaching, God talking, God telling, God instructing, God setting before us the right way to think and the right way to talk concerning Him. The Scriptures are in reality God showing us Himself, God communicating to us who He is and what He had done so that we in the response of faith may truly know Him and live our lives in fellowship with Him.

We need to thank God for the Bible and recognise it as one of His greatest gifts of grace to us. If we do not have the Bible to lead us to the Son, we could never know the Son as our Saviour and could never come to know God as our Father. We must prize the Bible as God’s supreme gift of grace; thank God for it and value and prize it, not as a ‘souvenir’ to put on our shelf to gather dust, but as a living book and our lifeline from God.
We must study the Scriptures to show ourselves approved before God, such that we need not be ashamed, but instead are enabled to rightly divide the Word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15).