Journeys of a Former Firebrand

What does the real message that should be delivered to the church look like? Well, it should look…Christian…of course.

The center of this issue is a very important book. We often call it the Bible. Sometimes it’s called the gospel. Sometimes it’s called God’s Word. Sometimes it’s called “the oracles of God.” It all refers to the revelation of God’s mind through words we can understand so that we know the mind of God.

What is this message? Why is it important? Read on!

The Reason Why God Gave His Message — Revelation

Why did God give us the Bible? There are several answers to this question. Let’s look at the most important one. It’s explained in one word: revelation.

God intended to reveal Himself to the human race He had created. Not that He hadn’t already done so. We find shortly after God’s creation of the human race God speaks to Adam (Genesis 1-2). God immediately began communicating with His creation.

He said things like “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:22,28). He told Adam, the first man, to tend to the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15). He also communicated that Adam could eat of any tree but one (Genesis 2:16-17).

It’s clear God is a Being who loves to communicate with His creation. In these cases, He did so without a book or writing. He simply spoke these words to Adam.

What changed? Why did God “suddenly” communicate through written language? Why did God start revealing Himself in a completely different way to a creation He had already spoken to at the beginning?

We find the answer in Genesis 3. God created everything good (Genesis 1). However, we find in Genesis 3 discontent arising in Eve, the woman God had created as a companion for Adam (Genesis 2:22-23).

When tempted by Satan in the form of a serpent, Eve gave in, disobeyed God and ate the fruit God had commanded Adam not to eat. Adam ate also (Genesis 3:6). From that point, the situation between God and human beings was changed.

No longer did God communicate directly with man in the same way He did before that fall into sin. God chased Adam and Eve from their special place in Eden and placed flaming angels to guard the entrance (Genesis 3:24).

That holy God had to separate Himself from His now unholy creation. In that moment, the human race unknowingly separated itself from all regular communication with God. God put Himself under radio silence, and only He could break that silence.

He did so when He once more revealed Himself to a creation that was increasingly hostile to Him (Genesis 4). Although there were those who wanted to hear that message (Genesis 4:26), it didn’t take long for humanity to reject God and refuse to listen to Him (Genesis 6). In that moment, God reestablished relations with the human race through the act of revelation we find in His Word, the Bible.

Sometimes prophets brought the Word. Other times God spoke through poems, songs or history. Later, He raised up men called Apostles who brought the Word through preaching. All of it together is God’s revelation to us.

The Way God Gave His Message — Inspiration

He gave His message to us in actual words. This idea is enforced throughout the Bible where it refers to “the words of the Lord” (e.g. Psalm 12:6). In other words, God speaks to us in ways we can understand, with words, just like we communicate with each other.

This includes both divine communication and human communication. We find “thus says the Lord” 419 times in the NASB which shows God has communicated with His people. Yet, we also find that human authors wrote in their own style, with their own vocabulary and out of their own knowledge and experiences.

God wrote the Bible. Man wrote the Bible. Which is it? The answer is simple: both.

Some might protest to this and say that those two ideas are mutually exclusive. After all, they can’t possibly both exists in the same statement. Don’t they cancel out each other?

That isn’t the case.

Our human minds see contradictions where there are none. There is the possibility that God wrote the Bible and still used human beings to write the Bible, making both equally relevant to the process.

Does this mean God simply dictated the Bible and humans wrote the words? The answer is a decided no. This wouldn’t account for the differences in style and vocabulary from human author to human author.

Did God simply give vague ideas, and human beings wrote them down in their own words? Nope. This idea doesn’t account for “thus says the Lord” used so often in the Bible.

Peter puts the matter to rest for us. He doesn’t go into details, but he at least whets our appetite. He wrote this:

²⁰ But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, ²¹ for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” (2 Peter 1:20–21, NASB 95)

In other words, God didn’t ghost write the Bible. It orginated with Him even though He used human agents to do so.

Paul explains that God breathed it out (2 Timothy 3:16). When He did so, He used human beings to write His very words in their own style and vocabulary. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. They are both true, and the resolution remains a mystery to us.

This may not fully satisfy our appetite for how God did this. It certainly gives us what we need to understand how God gave us His revelation through inspiration. We need to simply leave it there.

The Central Theme of His Message — Salvation

Salvation is the goal of God’s revelation. However, the word “salvation” may not be the best way to describe what we’ll look at in this section. Salvation isn’t a theological concept. It’s a Person.

That Person is Jesus Christ.

Let me prove it to you. We’ve already seen that the message comes from God. It’s His very words breathed out and written down by human agents.

This all leads to a very important fact. The message finds its completion in Jesus Christ. That’s why John calls Him “The Word” (John 1:1). Just like a word expresses the fullness of its meaning, Jesus is the full embodiment of God (Colossians 2:9) and expresses God’s message perfectly.

In other words, He is the perfect messenger because He is the Author as well.

Even beyond this we find that the message itself is all about Him. This was Paul’s meaning when he wrote these words to the Corinthian church:

But we preach Christ crucified.” (1 Corinthians 1:23, NASB 95)

For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord.” (2 Corinthians 4:5, NASB 95)

The message is so inextricably tied to Jesus that Paul felt that if he preached Jesus, he preached the message.

In other words, every preacher should preach Christ every time he preaches. Why? Because Jesus is the message we should preach and hear. It’s the message Paul preached. It’s the message we should preach because it’s the only one that brings salvation (John 14:6).

Every message delivered to the church should be a christocentric message — a message focused on Jesus Christ.

So What?

Many in the church today haven’t heard doctrines like we just looked at. They don’t know that the purpose of God speaking is to reveal His own nature. They only see the Bible as a book of rules and regulations to make us good people.

Many have never understood the Bible as the very words of God that were given to us directly by God through human instrumentation. They simply see the Bible as a superior religious text.

Many have never heard a christocentric sermon. They embrace the Bible as a good luck charm or a message of hope but never see it for what it really is — a story about God’s salvation through one Person, Jesus Christ.

What is the reason for this deficiency in the church? Preachers aren’t preaching the Word correctly. Many times pastors in churches themselves don’t even understand these things. It’s tragic, and it’s deadly!

We need to get the church back on track and see the christocentric message as the only message. There are other issues that spawn from this. There are practical applications that flow from the text.

But to see the message of salvation as simply a “new and improved” message rather than God’s spoken revelation about His Son who came to die to save us misses the point.

Don’t miss the point. See the Bible for what it is: the revelation of God given through inspiration that leads to Christ who is our salvation.