SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/31/2025 9:40 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-4
“The Inspired and Inerrant Scripture”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 2 Timothy
3:16-17
Message of the verses: “16 All Scripture is
inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for
training in righteousness; 17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped
for every good work.”
I
continue quoting from John MacArthur’s commentary relating to these two
wonderful verses. As mentioned this will
take me a fairly long time to get through this.
“Many
New Testament writers directly testified that they knew they were writing God’s
Word. Paul mentioned believers in
Corinth of a truth he doubtless had taught them many times in person when he
ministered there: ‘[These] things we
also speak,’ he said, ‘not in words taught by human wisdom, but in these taught
by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words’ (1 Cor. 2:13;
cf. 16). In his next letter to them he
defended his earnestness as well as his authority, saying, ‘We are not like
many, peddling the word of God, but as from sincerity, but as from God, we
speak in Christ in the sight of God’ (2 Cor. 2:17).
“Paul assured the churches in Galatia: ‘I would have you know brethren, that the
gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I
taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ …He who had
set me apart, even from my mother’s womb,…called me through His grace, [and]
was pleased to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles’
(Gal. 1:11-12, 15-15). He told the
church in Colossae, ‘Of this church I was made a minister according to the
stewardship from God bestowed on me for your benefit, that I might fully carry
out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which has been
hidden from the past ages and generations; but has now been manifested to His
saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of
this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ (Col.
1:25-27). And to the church at
Thessalonica he wrote ‘For this reason we also constantly thank God when you
received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of
men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work
in you who believe’ (1 Thess. 2:13).
“Peter
recognized that Paul, a fellow apostle, had been used by the Lord to write His
Word. Referring to Paul’s letters, Peter
wrote of ‘some things [in them that were] hard to understand, which the
untaught and unstable distort, as they do also rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction’ (2 Peter 3:16,
emphasis added). Jude attests that ‘the
words that were spoken beforehand by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ’ carried
the weight of Scripture, divinely warning that ‘in the last time there shall be
mockers, following after their own ungodly lusts’ (Jude 17-18).
“Now New Testament writer had a greater awareness that
he was recording God’s own Word than did the apostle John. That awareness is affirmed with particular
certainty in the book of Revelation, which begins, ‘The Revelation of Jesus
Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bond-servants, the things which must
shortly take place; and He sent and communicated it by His angel to His
bond-servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of
Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw’ (Rev. 1:1-2). A few verses later the apostle says, ‘I was
in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like the
sound of a trumpet, saying, ‘Write in a book what you see, and send it to the seven
churches’’ (vv. 10-11). At or near the
end of each message to those churches is the admonition He who has an ear, let
him hear what the Spirit says to the churches’ (2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13,
22). The apostle also makes clear in
many other parts of that book that he is writing God’s explicitly revealed
truth (se. e.g., 19:9; 21:5; 22:6).
“It
is both remarkable and significant that , although most, if not all, of
the human writers were aware they were
recording Scripture and sometimes were overwhelmed by the truths God revealed
to them, they exhibit a total lack of self-consciousness or apology, in the
common sense of that word. Together, the
biblical writers make some 4,000 claims to be writing God’s Word, yet they
offer no defense for being employed by God in such an elevated function. Despite their realization of their own
sinfulness and fallibility, they wrote with the utter confidence that they
spoke infallibly for God and that His revelation itself is its own best and
irrefutable defense. ‘For as the rain
and the snow come down from heaven,’ Isaiah proclaimed for God, and do not
return there without watering the earth, and making it bear and sprout, and furnishing
seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall My word be which goes forth
from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I
desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it’ (Isa.
55:10-11).”
Spiritual
Meaning for my Life Today: I am thankful that as I read the Words in the
Bible that I can be sure that I am reading the very Word of God, and because of
that I can know that what I am reading is true, and that I can trust what He
wrote, and that the Holy Spirit of God, the Author of Scripture who lives in me
can make sure that I understand what He is saying.
My
Steps of Faith for Today: I trust that the Lord is in charge of my
life, and in charge of my wife’s life and has a perfect plan for both of
us.
5/31/2025 10:18 AM
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