Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at The Word of God P3 (02-10-21)
Synopsis
You cannot separate the word of God from the person of Jesus Christ. If you will not or cannot believe the word of God is absolutely true, then how are you going to know if any of it is true, including truth about Christ Jesus. So how can we ever rest in salvation in the one who came to save us if we are not certain the book that recorded that salvation is true. So if it is true as it relates to the person of Jesus Christ, it has to be true in regard to what Christ claimed about every word He held in His hand.
The entire testimony of the bible rests upon the author, and that is Christ Jesus. The credibility of the book rests in the credibility of the author. Jesus said the word is totally true. Listen now as Bob George reads eyewitness accounts of those who had been with Jesus when He walked on the earth. What testimony do we have from Jesus’ own words concerning the Old Testament scriptures He held in His hands? What importance did He place on the word of God, when He was tempted by the devil in the wilderness? Then read about what Jesus said to the masses in John 5:39-40, to the religious leaders in Matthew 21:42 and Luke 6:2-3, to tradition in Mark 7:9-13 and to the disciples in Matthew 24:35 and following His resurrection in Luke 24:44 and in Luke 24:25-32.
What conclusions can be drawn? When Christ said, “I did not come to abolish the law. I came to fulfill the law.”, that is very simply exactly what He did. He did that with His life. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and Christ fulfilled the law by walking in perfect love on this earth. What is the difference between Pharisees putting aside the word of God for their ideas and their brilliance, with their tradition, and today, in order to set aside the word of God for our brilliance? Putting aside the word of God is putting aside the word of God. It is saying it is not complete. So people are saying, “No, you are not complete. I got a tradition over here. I got a man-made system that is going to work far better than the completeness of the word of God.”
Transcript
We opened up our series in A Closer Look at the Word of God. We encourage our listeners to order the study guide to answer the questions in the booklet to study the word of God for yourself. I think it is one of the most important study guides you can go through because if we do not have this foundation as a condition as to why we believe the word of God, to be one hundred percent truth, then we will go through the rest of our lives on sinking sand.
You cannot separate the word of God from the person of Jesus Christ. If you will not or cannot believe the word of God is absolutely true, then how are you going to know if any of it is true, including truth about Christ Jesus. So how can we ever rest in salvation in the one who came to save us if we are not certain the book that recorded that salvation is true. So if it is true as it relates to the person of Jesus Christ, it has to be true in regard to what Christ claimed about every word He held in His hand.
We have been studying about Christ’ testimony as it concerned the Old Testament. It is not that Jesus did not like the New Testament. He did not have it yet. The only writings that He held in His hands were the writings of what we call today the Old Testament. If Jesus is God and God is totally true, and He claimed that the Old Testament was true, the written word that was in His hands at that time, then what is the only conclusion that we can make concerning the word of God? If He is God and He says it is true, then it is true. If it is not true, He ceases to be God, and therefore, we are to be pitied of all people because we are still dead in our sins. If we are still in our sins then what difference does it make whether the bible is true or not? We are going to die, not be in the presence of God, but be eternally damned as a result of our refusal to accept the life that was offered to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. So then the entire testimony of the bible rests upon the author, and that is Christ Jesus. The credibility of the book rests in the credibility of the author. Jesus said the word is totally true.
So we are going to talk about His testimony, first of all to Satan, and we talked about that, to the masses, to the religious leaders, to tradition and to the disciples. Let us pick up in John 5:39-40.
John 5:39-40
39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me [Jesus], 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.
The Pharisees and religious leaders of that day, although they were diligent students of the scriptures, they failed to realize that the purpose of scriptures was to point them to Him, yet when the living Word came, and appeared to them, who were the students and thought of themselves as the custodians of the interpretation of the written word, and the living Word came and stood in front of the interpreters of the written Word. He did not agree with their interpretation so they nailed Him to a cross. So they refused to come to the one that the bible is written about, who is Christ Jesus.
Now on another occasion, he approached them in this way, for they were talking about being students of the word, saying that they believe in Moses.
John 5:46-47
46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me.
In other words, He is saying, “No, you do not believe Moses. You say you do, but you do not believe Moses. If you believe Moses, you would believe me for he wrote about me. So how can you say ‘I believe Moses’ who wrote about me and deny me. In denying me, you are denying the person you say you believe, the person who wrote about me.”
John 5:47
47 But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”
That is very clear, isn’t it? How could Jesus be any more clear in His presentation to the religious leaders? I wish He was talking to them directly today. It is obvious that people are not reading the bible. People say “I believe the bible”. “No, you do not. If you believed the bible you would believe what the bible said about Me. But the fact that you do not believe the bible said about Me, it means you do not believe the bible you say you believe in. I believe the bible says ‘I am God’ and ‘I am truth’ and ‘there is no truth besides me’. You say there is truth besides me and then you say you believe the bible? That is a contradiction of terms. If you believed the bible, you would believe in my total sufficiency. The bible says, ‘I have given you everything you need for life and godliness.’ If you have been given everything you need for life and godliness, how can you say ‘I believe the bible’ when the bible says you have been given everything you need for life and godliness, and you say ‘there is more that you need’.”
Jesus is saying the same thing to the Pharisees. “If you believe Moses, you would believe me. He wrote about me. Since you do not believe what he wrote, why will you believe what I say.” The same is true today. “You do not believe what is written about me, so you do not believe what I am saying.”
Now, he is talking to the religious leaders, in regard to the law.
Matthew 5:17-18
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
“I did not come to abolish the law. I came to fulfill the law. I did not come to abolish the prophets, but I came to fulfill what they said.” What were the prophets doing? “Prophesying about Me. I just came to fulfill that. I just came to say, ‘Here I am. I am here’. I did not come to abolish, to negate what they said. What they said was totally true. The law was given to Moses until I came. I came to fulfill the law.”
Matthew 5:18
18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
It has been accomplished. That is why you and I are called complete in Christ. Everything has been accomplished. Everything that God was going to do for the redemption of man has been done. There is nothing else to do. That is why Jesus cried from the cross, “It is finished”. It is not just saying it is finished in regard to sins provided for, but the whole thing was provided for, because after the cross was the resurrection. He was not wondering if He was going to be resurrected or not. The resurrection provided life to you and me. That is what man needed, for what was lost in Adam was restored. Jesus came to give to man life that could not be destroyed by sin. Such was the case in Adam and in Jesus, when He became sin. He came to give us a new kind of life.
2 Corinthians 5:17
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
He did not come to say those things are not true. He did not come to abolish them. He came to fulfill them and He did.
Romans 13:8
8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.
Matthew 5:18
18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
That is why Paul said. Christ fulfilled the law. If Christ fulfilled the law, how much is here for you to fulfill? None. It has been fulfilled. He did His work so you and I can walk in newness of life.
Romans 8:3-4
3 For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Romans 6:4
4 We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
Jesus did not come to negate the law, but He came to fulfill it. In Luke 4:21, Jesus, quoting from the prophet Isaiah, said so.
Luke 4:21
21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
So, when we hear this, that scripture has been fulfilled in our own lives. Has Christ fulfilled the law? Yes, He has. If you were like me, I had never heard that before. Obviously no one had ever heard that before until they heard it. Yet, when you do hear that, that should have fulfilled it in your hearing. When Christ said, “I did not come to abolish the law. I came to fulfill the law.”, that is very simply exactly what He did. He did that with His life. Love is the fulfillment of the law, and Christ fulfilled the law by walking in perfect love on this earth.
Romans 13:10
10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
It is an interesting thing, as we talked about before, that in the gospels, Christ never talked about grace. He never mentioned the word grace. Grace is mentioned in the gospels three times, in John and one time in Luke, but that is in the description of Jesus. That is a writer looking back on Jesus and describing Him as a man full of grace and truth.
John 1:14
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
But Jesus never mentioned the word grace. He demonstrated it. He lived it. He did not have to talk about it. “Just watch Me and you will see what it is.” So in His life of love, He fulfilled the law for us who could never fulfill the law.
Then, of course, with our identification with Him, that the law has now been fulfilled in us, who do not live after the flesh but after the Spirit (Romans 8:3-4). In other words, a born again person.
So Jesus was talking about the fact that He is the fulfillment of this. Now we read about Jesus speaking again to the religious leaders in Luke 16.
Luke 16:29-31
29 “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’30 “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
31 “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
This is a story Jesus was telling in the story of Lazarus. He was talking about the fact that if you are not going to listen to Moses and the prophets, the ones who testified about me, then you are not going to be convinced even if that one they are talking about is raised from the dead. Is that not interesting! “You people, if you believe Moses, you would believe Me. I have come to tell you what salvation is from God’s vantage point. I have come to reveal the truth of God to you. You say you do not believe what I am saying. You do not believe Me. You say you believe Moses. I am saying Moses wrote about Me. If you believed Me, you would believe Moses. If you believed Moses, you would believe Me. The fact is that you do not believe Me is an indicator that you do not believe Moses because he wrote about Me.”
Then He gave this story. “If you are not going to believe Moses and the prophets, who wrote about Me, you will not believe even if someone rises from the dead.” Is that not a strange statement? If someone was raised from the dead, then maybe you would get a clue as to what He claimed to be, and therefore believe what He said about Himself. The answer to that is no. It did not happen then and it does not happen today. There is no explanation for an empty tomb, under the condition of the body that was put in there, except Jesus, being God, was raised from the dead. Yet, people still do not believe.
Nothing new under the sun. People did not believe then, even seeing the empty tomb. They would have walked up to it. The Pharisees, they saw the body put in it. They saw the stone rolled, the guards on it, and three days later they saw the stone rolled away, and the guards gone, lying about it, and the body gone. There is no explanation except the resurrection. Yet still refuse to believe.
As I said before it was job security that killed Jesus. Recall what the Pharisees had said.
John 11:48
48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
The same is true today. I will have to give up on my job. I might have to give up on whatever I have been saying. I might have to give up on my fun. We will come up with any excuse we can in order to say, “I do not believe.”
Again, we read about Jesus talking to the religious leaders in Matthew 21:42.
Matthew 21:42
42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures:
That would be something to say to someone who was a total student of the scriptures. Have you ever read these things? It looks like you are reading them, but have you ever read them?
Matthew 21:42
“‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’[Psalm 118:22-23]?
Have you ever read that scripture? He is quoting from the Old Testament. Have you ever read about the stone the builders rejected? Obviously pointing to the Pharisees as the builders. “That stone that you builders have rejected, has become the capstone, the cornerstone, and the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”
Luke 6:2-3
2 Some of the Pharisees asked, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”
Again, people always try to have a smokescreen. When someone is getting too close to truth, you try to attack their behavior some way, and see if you can cast a dispersion on them. So they were asking, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” Jesus
again answered from the word of God.
Luke 6:3-5
3 Jesus answered them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4 He entered the house of God, and taking the consecrated bread, he ate what is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” 5 Then Jesus said to them, “The
Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
You are supposed to remain spiritual and remain hungry. Jesus is saying, “Is the Sabbath made for you or you for the Sabbath? You missed the whole idea.” People today are still hung up on a day. They are still looking at a Sabbath day as a day of a week instead of the rest that God called us into as a Sabbath rest. The day of a week was the shadow just as all the rest of the law. It was a shadow, not the reality itself. The day was a shadow. The reality is Christ. The rest was on a day of the week. The rest is in the person of eternity. There is a world of difference in the two. Yet man will still want to hang on to their tradition and to their own little area of doctrine in order to deny the truth of what Christ Jesus came to say.
Doing something unlawful? The Pharisees had all kinds of laws on top of laws. As an example, on the Sabbath, you could not work. That is part of the Sabbath in their understanding. Still to this day, you go over to Israel and you try to catch a cab on Saturday and you are in tough shape. There is one working. They are still looking for that day.
Then they have all kinds of rules and regulations as to what it means to rest on the Sabbath and then develop all kinds of things to violate that and still be within the law. They had all kinds of things. You could not spit on the ground on the Sabbath because that would be construed as work. You can spit on a rock but not the ground. For if you spit on the ground and it would make mud and that would be constituted as work and therefore you would be in violation of the law. So if you spit, go find a rock.
Remember the day when Jesus went out and spit on the ground and made mud. He did not just spit and let it get there. He made mud out of it and put it on that blind man’s eyes and told him to wash that off and then he could see. Do you think mud made him see? Do you think that is how you heal the blind? No. Nothing at all to do with that. What was He doing? He was driving the Pharisees crazy. Here is the Sabbath and you are not allowed to spit on the Sabbath. Here is Jesus who spit on the Sabbath and not only that he stooped down and made mud. So it could not be called an accident. You could hear the apostles saying, “Lord. He is doing it again. Lord, could you not wait until tomorrow? Just one more day.” The Lord was showing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees on their tradition and of their law upon laws. Why? Because He was saying, “I am going to show you your hypocrisy to show you that you have no clue as to what the word is talking about. If you did, and you could put your blinders off in regard to all these rules and regulations that you are trying so desperately to be holy with, that you would see that this is pointing to Me, the one who is going to have to do for you that you could never do for yourself and that is to make yourself righteous.”
That is a terrific lesson for us today. He was speaking to people who are students of the Old Testament. So let us ask ourselves today. Can I literally say I believe in Jesus but say I do not believe in the Old Testament is true? No. How can you say “I really believe in Jesus” any more than you can say “I believe in Moses”. But He said, “No, you do not believe in Moses, for if you did, Moses wrote about Me. So if you believed Moses, then you would have to believe in Me. So how can you say ‘I believe in Jesus’ yet say that the Old Testament is a fairy tale, when Jesus quoted out of the Old Testament as absolute truth?” If Jesus is God and He said that the writings we hold today in our hands, known as the Old Testament is true, then it is true. If it is not true, then throw all of it out, including Jesus, because the Old Testament wrote about Jesus.
Jesus was talking about the law and now He is talking about man’s tradition. That is applicable today as it was back then.
Mark 7:9
9 And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!
Mark 7:13
13 Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”
The scripture says a little leaven spoils the whole loaf. It only takes a little error to spread into many things like that. It is like sin. If you do one, before long you have a couple of them. It multiplies itself, 2 becomes 4, 4 becomes 8 and 8 becomes 16. A person goes out and commits adultery. After that, he has to lie about it. After that, it could even end up, as in the case of King David, in murder. Sin multiplies. It does not go backwards. It multiplies. It is the same thing with the infiltration of error. Tradition is error. It is not something you can hang onto. Man tries to keep it, sustain it, and keep it active forever. That is my tradition. The mafia has a phenomenal tradition that they kept going for years. People so often worship at the feet of tradition.
But something equally important for us to see today. For when He said, “You nicely set aside the commandment of God”. If man is going to set aside the command of God, how is that different from setting anything from the word of God? What is the difference in setting aside the commandments and setting aside the word of Jesus Christ that is far deeper and more complex and fuller in its meaning than just the ten laws written on a stone? So setting aside the word of God, whether setting aside the commandments or setting aside the words of God, is setting aside the word of God.
It is man in his arrogance setting aside the truth of God and saying, “I got something traditional that I want to grab a hold of”. In this day and age could it be tradition? As an example, could tradition be put into a category of teaching that man is not sinful but that he is sick? Could that be a tradition that we get into? A tradition is something our mind just automatically flops back to. “This is the way we have always done it.“
So if I establish a habit pattern as “this is the way we have always done it“. Tradition is keeping the way in which you have always done it. So if I can teach long enough that man is not sinful, just sick, and that he just has syndromes, could I not build a tradition on that? If someone does something wrong then he is not sinful but sick, then we are going to deal with him as a sick person rather than dealing with sin? It seems that tradition will be in that same category.
What is the difference between Pharisees putting aside the word of God for their ideas and their brilliance and today, in order to set aside the word of God for our brilliance? Putting aside the word of God is putting aside the word of God. It is saying it is not complete.
Were the Pharisees saying the word of God is not true? No. They would have died for the fact this is God’s word. But they did not understand what it meant. But their tradition was so important to them that they were willing to set it aside. They were adding to the word of God. They were not subtracting from but adding to the word of God. We call people that do that as theological cults. But how often are we adding to the word of God in dealing with the heart problems of man? We are adding to it. We are setting aside the word of God, that it is not complete when God says you are complete. So people are saying, “No, you are not complete. I got a tradition over here. I got a man-made system that is going to work far better than the completeness of the word of God.”
