I’ve probably said it a thousand times in my sermons over the years: When Jesus differs from the culture, go with Jesus every single time.
What Jesus said about Himself: He is the Son of God and Son of Man. What Jesus said about His mission: He came to die on the cross in the place of sinners. What Jesus said about the only road that leads to heaven: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” What Jesus said about our mission: He came to make us fishers of men. What Jesus said about following Him: Deny yourself, take up your cross daily.
For our purposes in this issue of The Baptist Courier, here’s a critical fact about Jesus: He believed the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God that He, as the Living Word, came to fulfill. And because He did, we have two options: Accept both, or reject them. Those whom Paul in 1 Corinthians 1 called “the wise of this age” disagree.
Take, for example, the Jesus Seminar, a group of left-wing scholars who used to meet in California to vote on the words of Jesus in the Gospels, seeking to separate what they saw as His authentic words from the inauthentic. They would cast their ballots for each saying of Jesus — a red bead meant Jesus probably said it, a gray bead meant maybe, and a black bead signified “absolutely not.” These scholars placed black beads next to 80 percent of Jesus’s words.
Red Letters and OT Affirmation
But we as evangelicals believe the Bible is true, in part, because of Christ’s authority, His opinion of the Bible, which then was the Old Testament. First, it’s important to establish that Jesus — whom John 1 calls “the Word” — claimed to be God, and, as such, has supreme authority. Erwin Lutzer, in his helpful book, 7 Reasons Why You Can Trust the Bible, wrote: “If we’re willing to treat the New Testament with the same respect given to other ancient documents, we discover that they are reliable eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Christ. They confront us with a Christ who claimed to be God and had the credentials to prove it.”
I’ve talked to numerous people through the years who’ve essentially said, “I believe in Jesus, love Jesus, but I don’t believe the Bible, especially some of those crazy stories in the Old Testament like Adam as the first human and Jonah swallowed up by a big fish.” But here’s the problem: We don’t have that choice, because Jesus believed the Old Testament and all its “crazy stories.” Jesus and the Bible are inextricably bound. They stand or fall together.
In Luke 24, the account of our Lord’s appearance to two men on the Emmaus Road, Jesus affirmed His own fulfillment of the threefold division of the Hebrew Bible, which Luke calls “the Scriptures”: “… everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
Other examples that communicate clearly Jesus’s affirmation of God’s Word:
1. Jesus believed in the inspiration and inerrancy of the Old Testament, which, of course, were His Scriptures since the New Testament was yet to be written.
In John 10:34–36, Jesus made an offhand comment while disputing with the Pharisees about the Law of God, saying, “and the Scripture cannot be broken.” There, our Lord is referencing the entire OT, not just the preceding verse.
As another of many examples, consider Matthew 5:17–18, where Jesus says He didn’t come to abolish the Law or Prophets, but to fulfill them. “For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass away until all is accomplished.” Lutzer: “Jesus believed that the accuracy of the Old Testament extended to the smallest letter, which would be equivalent to the dot about the ‘i’ and the stroke that turns a P into an R.”
2. Jesus affirmed OT history (including the crazy stories).
I’ll limit myself to two examples. Some deny the existence of a created first man named Adam. Note Jesus said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’” — alluding to the Genesis account of creation in Matthew 19:4–5.
Jesus also believed Jonah lived as a real prophet who spent three nights inside the belly of a big fish. Our Lord also confirmed that revival broke out in Nineveh at Jonah’s preaching. In Matthew 12:39–41, Jesus spoke of His own death, burial, and resurrection in terms of Jonah’s three-day ocean tour inside and ejection from the big fish. He riffed on the repentance of the men of Nineveh, the power of Jonah’s preaching, and the condemnation their salvation would bring upon His present generation.
Time (and space) would fail me if we examined Jesus’s assessment of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot’s wife turning to a pillar of salt. Controversial as they are to the modern mind, Jesus believed them all. Christ accepted all the OT as God’s inspired, inerrant Word. If we truly love Jesus, we’ll accept it, too.
3. Jesus affirmed OT prophecies.
I will leave unpacking this item largely to the fine article my dear friend Peter Beck has contributed to this issue, but here are a few Scripture references: most of Luke 24, as earlier cited; Luke 22:37, where Jesus says, “That which is written must be fulfilled in me”; Matthew 26:24, “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him.”
4. Jesus approved of OT conduct (the Law).
Jesus unpacked the Law of God (sometimes called the Law of Moses to whom God gave His moral law as summarized in the Ten Commandments) in Matthew 5 at the outset of the Sermon on the Mount, giving its true meaning and application to show that following Him is a matter of changed hearts, not merely whitewashed externals. Jesus confirmed that He did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it (Matt. 5:17).
In Matthew 22:36, a lawyer asked Jesus to single out the greatest commandment in the Law. Jesus answered with a quote from the Old Testament (from Deuteronomy 6:5), summarizing the Law: “‘You shall love the Lord with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.” He continued, “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend all the Law and Prophets.” The Lord took the second great commandment from Leviticus 19:18.
No Bifurcation Possible
It’s impossible to accept Jesus as Savior/Lord and not also affirm God’s Word. The world tends to love some loosely defined Jesus, but that person is usually a Jesus fabricated in the human mind, a mere man who bears little resemblance to the unique God-man of Scripture. Only the Jesus spoken of in God’s Word, in the Gospels, in all the Law, Prophets, and Writings, can do helpless sinners good.
What audacious mercy that God gave us a Savior and an utterly trustworthy book telling us how we may know and love Him.