(Isaiah 55:6-13; 2 Timothy 3:10-4:5)

One of the most unfortunate theological terms out there is the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. “Perspicuity” basically means “clarity,” which is ironic, because that isn’t clear at all; the only advantage to the big word is that it makes you sound theological. The bad thing is, if you use big words like that without being careful, it’s easy to get snagged on the big word and lose track of the details; and here, that’s a real problem.

You see, the first people who unloaded this one on me were arguing that this doctrine means that everything in Scripture is clear, that all you have to do is just read it and it’s obvious what it says. And you know, that just put my back up, because it’s so clearly not true. I’ve been studying the Bible a while now, I’ve learned from some brilliant men and women, and there are things that I just don’t know what they mean and I don’t think anyone else really does either. Even granting human sinfulness, if everything in the Bible were perfectly clear all on its own, we’d have a lot fewer arguments in the church.

What I discovered later is that the classic doctrine of the clarity of Scripture—let’s just call it that, shall we?—is much more intelligent than that, and it has two parts. First, for example, take the Westminster Confession, one of the founding doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian tradition, which basically says this: not all Scriptures are equally obvious, nor does everyone understand them equally well, but those things which are essential for our salvation are so clearly stated and explained in Scripture that anyone who’s willing to read carefully and thoughtfully can understand them. God created everything and everyone, he is Lord over everything, and he doesn’t share his authority. Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and there is no way to be saved apart from him. On such matters, Scripture speaks far too clearly to be accidentally misunderstood; only willful misreading can confuse the issues.

But again, granting human sinfulness, that’s not enough; and granting the power and character of God, it doesn’t need to be. The Scriptures are not simply a book written by a bunch of really wise folk—wise for their time anyway, who need to be corrected at points where we just know better; the Scriptures are the word of God, inspired (which is to say, breathed into people) by the Spirit of God to accomplish the purposes of God. It is the Holy Spirit who instigated and shaped and perfected the books of the Bible—not dictating them to their human authors, but working through their personalities and characters to express the universal truth of God—and this is why we affirm them as the word of God, not just for us but for everyone. And it is the Holy Spirit who continues to speak through these words today, which is why we affirm their enduring power for salvation.

This is important to understand, and it’s a little tricky. When we declare the authority of Scripture, we aren’t just talking about words on a page—or on a screen, or carved in stone, or whatever. I’ve had a lot of folks ask me lately, “How can anyone who calls themselves a Christian believe something so obviously contradictory to Scripture?” The answer, I think, is that they mostly regard it as words on a page, as arbitrary squiggles of black ink—and words on a page, be they yesterday’s newspaper or the U. S. Constitution, are to some extent under your control. You can ignore them, you can argue with them, you can make up your mind for yourself what they mean, because they have no independent existence. They can’t argue back unless you let them. You are the authority; they are for your use as you see fit.

Scripture, however, is different. Scripture is inspired by God—not just was, is: he spoke it, and he continues to speak it. The authority of Scripture is not rooted in tradition or in who believes it or in the power of any human being to compel anyone to do anything, it is the authority of God whose voice speaks endlessly through it. To affirm the authority of Scripture truly is not to say, this is a book that we value, that has good rules for living, even that contains great truth; rather, to affirm the authority of Scripture is to acknowledge and bow before the authority of God in Scripture. It is to affirm that these are the words he has spoken to his people for all ages, through which he continues to speak in perfect truth, and thus that they are the necessary measure of everything else.

Now, as we say that, we need to say a few other things. First, this is not to say that the Holy Spirit only speaks through Scripture; Psalm 19 reminds us that he speaks through his creation as well, and as the Spirit fills each of us, he speaks truth through us to each other. If it were not so, I wouldn’t dare to be up here. But it is to say that the Spirit will never say anything which contradicts what he has already said, and the Scriptures are the only absolute word of God; anything else we may think is from God needs to be tested and corrected against their perfect witness, and anything which they contradict cannot be from God.

That said, second, the authority here is God, not us. The word of God is authoritative, but our own interpretations aren’t—they’re just our best efforts; sometimes, when we see a conflict, it may be that our understanding of Scripture is in error and needs to be corrected. In seeking to know and teach the truth of God, we must always proceed humbly, remembering that we are sinners like everyone else.

Third, this is why we can know God: because he has gone to considerable lengths to tell us and show us who he is and what he’s on about. It’s not about our smartness or anything else about us, it’s all his doing. If he hadn’t taken the initiative, it would be impossible for us to know anything at all about him with certainty; what we can know about him, we can know because he told us, and we can know him because he introduced himself to us. Our whole faith rests, as a practical matter, on this: that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to speak his truth and continues to use them to guide us into all truth today. Apart from him, we can do nothing.

Which means, it should be noted, that we must always remember that the purpose of the Scriptures is to point us to God; we may say we believe in them in that we believe that they are his word, his true and faithful witness to himself, but we don’t believe in the Bible in the same way that we believe in God—our faith is in him alone. It’s like my glasses. I’ve been trying to get back in the habit of wearing my contacts more, but these do fine: with them on, I can see you. If I take them off, I have some idea what I’m seeing, but none of it’s clear. Now, if I stand here and look at my glasses, I can study them—I can look at their design, how they’re put together, where the screws are, how they bend; I can see if the nosepads are loose, and that the lenses need cleaning again—but while that may give me interesting information about my glasses, it doesn’t help me see you. If I study my glasses, but I never put them on and look through them, they won’t do me any good at all.

In the same way, study of the Bible that’s all about the Bible and not about Jesus, faith that’s focused on the Bible and not on Christ, won’t do us any good at all—or anyone else, either. It is God who is their power, God who is their point, God who is their purpose: God the Father who spoke the word and created all things, Jesus Christ his Son, the Word made flesh, God with us—God for us—God one of us, and his Holy Spirit who inspired the written word by which we know all these things are true. The point of the Bible is that by the Holy Spirit, God is in every word in every line on every page. If we lose sight of that, we lose sight—period.

(Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:9-17, Galatians 2:17-21)

I said last week, briefly, that it’s only by the Holy Spirit that we see Jesus. The eyes of the world don’t see him, because we do not see everything obviously subject to him—we see a lot in this world that doesn’t look anything at all like Jesus, and a lot of people thumbing their noses at him; most of the time, he doesn’t make himself all that obvious. Most of the time, it takes the eyes of faith, seeing with the vision of the Spirit of God, to see Jesus present and at work in this world. That’s one reason why we understand that our salvation comes to us wholly by God’s work as his free gift, that even our faith is a gift from God through Jesus Christ, because it takes the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives to make that faith possible.

The Spirit’s work doesn’t stop there, however; nor is it just about miracles and speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit isn’t just for Pentecostals and charismatics; we reserved, decently-and-in-order Presbyterians live by the Spirit, and need to live by the Spirit, just as much as our chandelier-swinging brethren, whether we speak in tongues or not. I will admit, I think a few words of prophecy and the like would do most Presbyterian churches a world of good, but that’s not really the point here; the point is that living by the Spirit is the fundamental reality of our life as Christians. That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks talking about the Holy Spirit and his work, because it’s only by the Spirit of God that we are able to follow Christ at all. Without him, we’re nothing more than a pile of dry white bones in a dead brown land.

You see, while we tend to think of being Christian as a matter of living up to certain standards of behavior, doing good things and not sinning, that isn’t the heart of the matter. Indeed, matters of the heart are the heart of the matter—God cares about our behavior, but he cares more about the heart attitudes and thoughts that drive our behavior. We do not have a faith that can be defined on a checklist of “do this” and “don’t do that”; that’s religion, but it’s not the gospel—and it’s not enough for God, because that sort of religion leaves the heart untouched, and the sins hidden there to fester.

What God offers us, then, is not a set of rules or principles to follow, but a person to follow—Jesus Christ; and rather than leaving us to follow in our own strength, he gives us his strength. Indeed, he goes farther than that: he gives us his life. We have been united with Christ in his death, and in his resurrection—in his crucifixion, the people we used to be were crucified; in his resurrection, we were raised again to new life, in the life of Christ. Christ is in us, and we are in Christ; this is how we live, this is why we live. This is our salvation, and it’s how our salvation becomes real in our everyday lives, as we are transformed from the inside out. This is, incidentally, why we affirm that salvation is not a thing that we can lose; yes, we can resist this ongoing work of divine transformation in our lives, but it’s beyond our power to undo.

Now, obviously, to say that Christ is in you is not to say that if we were to cut you open, there would be a little Jesus in there somewhere. A number of folks in this congregation have had open-heart surgery since I got here, and the doctors haven’t found Jesus in any of them. Similarly, to say that we are in Christ is not to make a physical statement, since he’s in heaven and we’re here. This is a spiritual reality, the Holy Spirit’s work in us. It doesn’t mean that our individuality vanishes, that who we are disappears into Jesus like a drop of water into the ocean; but it means that our identity changes, and the source of our identity. We don’t define ourselves, and we don’t determine who we are; our identity, our whole being, comes from Jesus through his Spirit, who moves through us like our blood, bringing us life and carrying away the works of sin and death.

When I say that this is our salvation—that this is the Spirit’s saving work in us—I’m not exaggerating; the importance of understanding this cannot be overstated. The Christian counselor and writer Dr. David Powlison put it best, I think, when he wrote,

The Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside ourselves.

God accepts us in Christ, he accepts us as Christ is, and his Spirit bonds us to Christ and begins the work of setting us free from our false selves to be who we already are in Christ, and who Christ is in us. He sets us free from the desperate hunger and thirst that sin can never satisfy; in their place, he gives us the living water and the bread of life. He sets us free from our slavery to our desires, from the need to satisfy the demands of pride and wrath and lust that drives us to cling desperately to things and desires that can’t give us life, that only exhaust our energy and hollow out our souls; he gives us the ability to open our hands and stop striving, to stop hanging on and let ourselves fall into his care. We don’t have to make it all happen, we don’t have to make it all good enough, we don’t have to make it all work; he’s done that all for us. We don’t have to earn anything, because we’ve already been given everything.

Does this mean, then, that there’s no work for us to do? No; but it means that the work before us is different than we usually imagine. As emotionally and spiritually exhausting as our striving can be, it’s our default mode, and turning away from it is harder than it sounds. Our egos want to define salvation on our own terms and earn it by our own efforts, because then we can take credit and demand applause from God and others; giving that up is no easy task. As my friend Jared Wilson says,

it takes conscious effort to orient our stubborn selves around the gospel. Our flesh yearns for works, for the merits of self-righteousness, so it’s hard work to make ourselves rest in the finished work of Christ. It is a daily work, the labor of crucifying the flesh, taking up the cross, and faithfully following he who has finished the labor.

Our task is that of accepting and trusting that the life Christ has for us is truly ours by his Holy Spirit in us, and is truly better than anything we can come up with for ourselves, and thus to let go of anything in our lives that interferes with that—remembering that we aren’t the judge of that, he is—and let him clear it away.