Well, good morning. And welcome. We're going to be continuing our study through the Belgian Confession. We're going to be looking at Article 4. I know the handout says Part 5. That's because we had an introduction. So we're going to be off on the articles. But if you have a copy of the confessional statement, Article 4 starts on page 79. I think if you have the If it's in the back of the hymnal, I want to say it's in the 870s. 875, that's what I thought, yeah. But if you have your Bibles, I want to also, we'll start by looking at Hebrews chapter 1. But let's open up with a word of prayer before we begin. Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you for yet again the gift of another beautiful day. We're thankful, Lord, that we can gather here this morning in this building to learn from your word, to study our confessional statements that our forefathers in the faith have put together to summarize the teachings of your word we're thankful lord for all of those who have gone before us in the faith who have laid the foundation upon which we are building and lord we thank you that we can worship you that you've granted us this gift of one day and seven to gather together as your people and to fellowship with one another and to receive the means of grace from your merciful and gracious hands, Lord, as we remember this morning the death of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ through the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, thereby ensuring us, through his broken body and shed blood, the forgiveness of our sins. Guide our study this morning, Lord, and we pray that it is useful and edifying for the people gathered here this morning. We pray this all in Jesus' name, amen. Let me start with the scripture passage. We're not going to really expound on it. I just want to read it as sort of setting the stage for what we're going to look at, because the subject this morning is the canon of scripture. And we'll talk about that more, what that means and what it is and so on and so forth. But in Hebrews chapter 1, I'm just going to read the first four verses of Hebrews chapter 1. And I've read this before, and I've referenced this before, and you have probably heard this many, many times before. But Hebrews chapter 1, it's on page 1424 in my Bible, if that helps you at all. The author of Hebrews writes, God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by his Son, whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds. who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high, having become so much better than the angels, as he has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. The focus of that passage that I wanted to draw upon for this morning are those first two verses. Again, we've referenced this before in context of scripture, but it's the idea that God spoke. And God spoke in various times and in various manners to us through the prophets and how he has also spoken to us through his son, the more excellent and more full and more perfect revelation, which is through his son, which then, of course, the apostles of old collect his teachings and explain that. The whole idea of a canon is a collection, if you will, of the record of God speaking to his people. That's the point. So that's the point I wanna use in bringing it up, and we'll reference that a little bit later, because we're gonna talk about revelation, its progressive nature. But in Article IV of the Belgic Confession, not the Canons of Dort, Belgic Confession, There we go. Page 53 in the booklet here. Article 4 talks about the canonical books of Holy Scripture. So, so far we've looked at how we confess that there's only one God, one true and living God. We looked in Article Two how that one true and living God has made himself known unto us through two methods. One is through the book, if you will, of general revelation or the book of nature, and the other is through the Holy Scripture. So general revelation, special revelation, that's how God has made himself known to us. And then in Article 3, we look more closely at the written word of God, which talks about inspiration. In fact, the article actually quotes 2 Peter 1, verse 21, which talks about how the holy men of old wrote the scriptures. They were not of any human interpretation, but the holy men of old wrote as the Spirit carried them along to write exactly what the Spirit intended for them to write. So now the question that we need to answer is, well, if we believe that God reveals himself more fully and clearly through general revelation, and if we believe that we have a written record of that special revelation, then what constitutes the written record of that special revelation? That's where the canon comes in. So, article four, We believe that the Holy Scriptures are contained in two books, namely the Old and the New Testament, which are canonical, against which nothing can be alleged. These are thus named in the Church of God. And then it's going to go through the list of the books. The books of the Old Testament are the five books of Moses, two wit, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the book of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the two books of Samuel, the two books of the Kings, the two books of the Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, the Psalms, the three books of Solomon, namely the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, the four great prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the 12 lesser prophets, namely Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. By the way, it's not Haggai. I hear so many people say Haggai. It's Haggai. That drives me nuts, just saying. That's the free nickels worth of my opinion that you get here. Those of the New Testament are the four evangelists to it, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, the 13 epistles of the Apostle Paul, say that five times fast, epistles of the Apostle Paul, namely one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, one to the Ephesians, one to the Philippians, one to the Colossians, two to the Thessalonians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, one to Philemon, Hebrews, the seven epistles of the other apostles, namely one of James, two of Peter, three of John, one of Jude, and the revelation of the apostle John. Really, it should be the revelation of Jesus Christ, but we're not going to picket nets here. So that's Article 4 of the Belgic Confession. Now, again, just a brief review of Article 3. We looked at the doctrine of inspiration. So we, again, as I said earlier, we believe that the apostles wrote, the prophets of old wrote as they were moved along or carried along by the Holy Spirit. And the doctrine that we affirm, the doctrine that the Reformed Church and that most conservative evangelical churches affirm as far as inspiration goes is the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. And what that means is verbal, the very words of scripture, plenary, all of the words of scripture, and then inspiration. They were breathed out by God. We talked about how the Bible is infallible and inerrant. We hold to both of these. Some like to stress infallibility over inerrancy, but we hold to both of them. And we read an article from the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. If you want just a shorthand of what infallible means, infallible means that the Bible does not fail. It does not fail in its conclusions. It will lead you to the right choice. And then inerrant means that the Bible is without error. It does not err. So it does not fail. It does not err. And then we look briefly at the purpose and scope of Revelation. Why was Revelation given to us? And as we talk, well, it wasn't given to us so we can fix our combines when they break down, right? Revelation was not given to us so that we can figure out, you know, mathematics or chemistry or any of these things. Revelation was given to us for us and for our salvation. Right, and then we read some quotes from Calvin and Turretin and Berkhoff and so on. The idea of revelation, it is a record, a written record of the history of redemption. So as God is moving along in his plan to bring Jesus into the world to save his people from their sins, we have a written record of that. the chronicling all the way through from the very beginning, from the fall in Genesis when God made the promise that one would come that would crush the head of the serpent, all the way to the book of Revelation at the end where Jesus reigns eternally. So as we look at Article 4, we're going to look at, again, the topic of canonicity. We're going to be answering the question, if the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God, what writings should be considered canon? What should we look at? Because there's lots of writings out there that Others would say are inspired or should be part of the Bible. So what is the canon? Now, in a couple of weeks, Lord willing, when we look at Article 6, we're going to look at how the canonical books differ from the apocryphal books. And when we say the apocrypha, it's It's a general term that is being used specifically for a section or a selection of writings. The numbers vary. It's 12, 14, or 15, depending on how you break them down. But the Apocrypha were recognized by certain parts of the Roman Catholic Church. So you've got these, well, why do some Bibles have these books in between the Old and New Testaments? We'll look at that later. For this morning, we're gonna look at canon and what is the canon, the canonical books of the Holy Scripture. So I've got, in your outline, I've got three questions I'm gonna ask this morning. One is, what is canon? What is a canon? What does it mean? What does that word mean? And why does it matter? Then secondly, we're going to look at what makes a canon. And then thirdly, we're going to look at what is the canon. So what is canon? What makes up the canon? And what is the canon? So again, the word canon. Last time, Article 3, we talked about the written word of God and that lesson focused on inspiration. The scriptures are the word of God, but that word has been communicated to us as we saw in Hebrews various ways and at various times through the prophets and the apostles by the Holy Spirit. But as I said earlier, as I alluded to earlier, there are many written works that claim to be scripture. Many works that claim to be the word of God. How can we tell the true word of God, the true written word of God from the pretenders and impostors? Well, that is where canon comes in. So what is a canon? Well, the word canon is just, it's not like the thing that we have over there at the park, okay? That's two-end canon, okay? This is one-end canon. And it comes to us out of the Greek, it's just a word that is transliterated out of the Greek, kanon, which means agree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, canon. let us be of the same mind. So in other words, canon then is a measuring rod, something that determines what measures up and what doesn't. That's all the word canon means. Now later on again in Article 7, we're going to affirm the sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures to be the only rule of faith and practice in the church, or I should say the only infallible rule of faith and practice in the church. We confess that, that the Bible is the primary, the ultimate standard in the church. determine our practice, we determine our faith, our doctrine, based upon scripture, the ultimate standard, the primary standard. The confessions are subordinate, they're under scripture, and they summarize the teaching of scripture. But again, if we're looking at scriptures as the only infallible rule of faith and practice in the church, then we need to know what constitutes the stuff of scripture. How do we know what is scripture, what isn't scripture? So here, Article 4 confesses that the canonical books of Scripture are the 66 books of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and we'll look at those briefly a little bit later. But it's important here to keep in mind, excuse me, to keep in mind that the canon of scripture didn't drop out of heaven in its final form. That's why I read from the book of Hebrews. When God spoke, he didn't speak all 66 books of the Bible immediately to Moses or to anyone else. And it didn't fall out of heaven in its final form as is, right? So how do we know what is canon and what isn't? In fact, it isn't until the close of the canon that you begin to see concerted efforts to create formal lists of biblical canon. The ancient Israelites, of course, they would have readily accepted the writings of Moses, the Pentateuch or the Torah, and the prophets as being the word of God. And the early church, of course, accepted the four gospels very early on, and the writings of Paul very early on. So as you look through the history, particularly of the church, we know much more about early church history than we do about early ancient Israelite history, because pretty much what we have as far as ancient Israelite history comes to us through the scriptures themselves. But when you look at the early church and how these writings were going forth as Paul wrote his letters, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John composed their Gospels, we see very early on that they accepted these readily. The four Gospels have pretty much readily been accepted in the history of the church. The writings of Paul have been readily accepted in the history of the church. Some of the questions, as far as some books of the Bible that they may have had questions on, usually you get to like 2 Peter, Jude, Hebrews. Those are the ones that came late into the canon, if you will, in the sense because Hebrews, we weren't sure who the author was. Jude and second Peter because it looks like they were, there's a lot of material that overlaps in those two books. But again, the early church pretty much was working with an idea of canon before one was actually formally compiled. Now, if you remember a couple of weeks ago, when we talked about special revelation out of Article 2, of which scripture is the written record, we talked about how special revelation, God revealing himself to us more fully, more clearly, is both progressive and organic. I don't mean progressive like in the political sense. I mean progressive in that it occurs over time and that it's organic. In other words, what you have at any point in time through redemptive history is enough for the people of God to work with. So the progressive nature of the Old Testament is pretty evident when you look at the ordering of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament. Now, the Hebrew Old Testament orders the books a little differently than we do. They have a grouping called the, well, they group them, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, okay? And there's a fancy name for the Hebrew Old Testament, it's called the Tanakh. And you're like, well, what does that mean? Well, it's kind of like an abbreviation. It's like an acronym. The T in the Tanakh stands for Torah or law. The N in Tanakh stands for the Nevi'im or the prophets. And then the K in Tanakh stands for the Ketevim, which is the writing. So the law, prophets, and writings. Now, in The New Testament, we also see this progressive nature of revelation. You've got the gospels, you've got the epistles, and then you've got eventually the book of Revelation. And of course, all these books of the Bible, as we say, have been written over the course of 1,500 years. The Torah being the first written record of revelation occurs around the time of the Exodus, about 3,500 years ago. And then of course, the last writing of the New Testament being revelation occurred around the end of the first century. So you've got that 1,500 year period of time. Now again, as I said, organic means that scripture does not, or I should say, scripture comes to us not piecemeal, but it comes to us in a seed-plant type of development. So you have the seed that then eventually grows into a plant, but everything you need to make the plant is there in the seed. So it's not like you have pieces that once you get the whole thing together, now you've got the whole story. No. You have enough of the story and the seed to go on, and then eventually that seed will grow into a plant. So again, on a large scale, if you just look at all of the Bible on a large scale, you have the Old Testament is the seed, because the Old Testament tells us of the promise of the one who would come to crush the head of the serpent. It tells of the promise of the seed of Abraham. It tells us of the promise of the son of David. It tells us of the promise of the suffering servant. All these things you see in the Old Testament, yet it's not there yet. So the Old Testament is the seed that gives way then to the New Testament plant where Jesus Christ is born, as Paul says in Galatians 4, in the fullness of time. When the time was right, now the plant is ready to bloom and you've got Jesus Christ on there. So Old Testament seed, New Testament plant. Old Testament type, New Testament anti-type. Old Testament shadow, New Testament substance. on a smaller scale. So that's just looking at the Bible as a whole. But if you look at the Old Testament, you can see the organic nature of revelation here, or of the canon. Because the Torah, which was given first, forms the foundation of everything that comes after it. The Torah forms the foundation of the rest of the Old Testament. The history books, or what the Hebrews would call the prophets, Joshua and Judges, those are considered prophetic writings. They are considered by some in biblical scholarship, they call those the Deuteronomic history. What do you mean by Deuteronomic history? Well, the last book of the Torah is what? Deuteronomy. So everything that comes after that flows out of Deuteronomy. So the history books, Joshua through Kings, are considered Deuteronomic history. It's the history of the people of God after the covenant or the second reading of the law was given there on the plains of Moab. And then the prophets, the prophets come as covenant prosecutors, right? When Moses was relaying the second reading of the law on the plains of Moab, recorded in the book of Deuteronomy, near the end of that book in chapters 28 and 29, he pronounces blessings and curses, right? Blessings if you keep the covenant, curses if you don't keep the covenant. And what happened over the course of Israel's history, by the time you get to the end of the book of Kings, the curses start coming, right? The curses begin to come, and these prophets come warnings, like, if you do not change, you know, like the robot, right, in Lost in Space, warning, warning, Israel, you are about to go off the rails here. They come warnings, like, you are about to break the covenant, and guess what? Back in Deuteronomy, the Lord told you, if you break my covenant, these things will happen to you. So they come as prosecutors of the Mosaic covenant. You see the organic nature as well in the New Testament. The Gospels tell us what Jesus came and said and did, right? They're the biographies, if you will, of Jesus, how he came into this world, how he was born of a woman, how he was God incarnate. And they tell us what Jesus said and what Jesus did. Jesus gave a lot of teachings, Jesus told us the way of life and the way of death, and then Jesus gave his life as a ransom for many. The New Testament letters, what do they do? Well, they explain everything that Jesus said and did, right? I mean, they just flesh that out. They flesh out what Jesus, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension mean for us, and then how we should live in light of that. And of course then the revelation tells us about his return at the end of the age. So then this idea of canon is that it is a rule, it is a measuring rod, it is something that tells us what should be included in scripture and what should not be included in scripture. So then what makes a canon? So we're gonna look at our second question now. What makes a canon? We need to know now what are the criteria used to define the canon of scripture. Now when it comes to the Old Testament, We don't have as much information about what the ancient Israelites may have done or used, what kind of criteria they used to consider what writings were authoritative and what weren't. We do know this. We do know that the Torah or the law was always considered sacred, divine, and held in high esteem. So there's no questions about the canonicity of the Torah. In fact, the Torah, because the Torah is tied to the single most important event that occurred in the lives of the Israelite people, which is the Exodus, right? It is their great event of their salvation from slavery in Egypt, how God moved with a mighty hand, as he says, and an outstretched arm and pulled his people out of Egypt and brought them to the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. In fact, the Torah was considered so sacred that it was kept in the Ark of the Covenant. So if Indiana Jones had actually had a chance to open up the Ark of the Covenant, he would have seen Torah there. In fact, Deuteronomy chapter 31 verse 26 says, take this book of the law, the Torah, and put it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. You could say put it inside as well. Put it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God that it may be there as a witness against you. Of course, the Ark of the Covenant is meant to be God's footstool, right? It is the sort of the physical manifestation of God amongst his people, and right there is the law of God, that which would govern his people. Now, the Nevi'im, or the prophets, and the Ketuvim, the writings, while they were seen as secondary to the Torah, they are no less authoritative and no less canonical. So we don't know exactly when the Old Testament canon was closed. It wasn't like they had some kind of meeting back in the day to do this. Some believe that there was officially, the Old Testament canon was closed at a council. It was a Jewish council called the Council of Jamnia, which occurred actually in 90 AD. So I mean, many, many years after the final writing of the Old Testament. Now, when it comes to the New Testament, we have a little bit more to go on. And in the New Testament, what we see is an emphasis on apostolicity. In other words, something that is referenced to the apostles of Jesus Christ. And there were basically three main criteria for what was apostolic. First, the writing had to be written by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle. So we know that the writings, you know, the letters of Paul were written by Paul. We know that the Gospel of John was written by John, who was an apostle. We know that the Gospel of Matthew was written by Matthew, who was an apostle. Mark, not an apostle, but was a close associate of, do you know who Mark was close to? Begins with a P, ends with eater. Peter, he was a close associate of Peter and it's believed that Mark's gospel was essentially Peter's gospel. Luke, who was he a close associate of? Begins with P, ends with all. He was a close associate of the apostle. He was a traveling companion. In fact, if you read through the book of Acts, oftentimes you'll see the pronouns change. I don't mean like you see pronouns changing today. you'll see the perspective of the writing change. It will be from a third person perspective where Luke, the author of acts would say and then they went here and then they went there and then they did this and then sometimes you'll see and then we went here and then we went there and then we did this. That means Luke was there with Paul and his travels, so Luke was a close associate of the Apostle Paul. So we include those works as canonical because of their close association with the Apostles Peter, the Apostle Paul, and so on. The second criteria is a writing had to be used and accepted in the church as a whole. So there had to be this idea that not just that it was written by an apostle, because as we'll see, not this lesson, but when we look at the Apocrypha, there are a lot of writings that were written in the second, third century that come out and they'll say the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of the Apostle Peter, and you're like, oh, aren't those canonical? Well, put it this way, if you're in the second or third century and you're trying to sell a book and your name was Joe Schmo or whatever, do you think that book is gonna sell or do you think it'll sell if you put written by the Apostle Peter on there? So not everything that has Peter's name was written by Peter. So that's why we say a writing had to be used and accepted in the church as a whole. It had to be accepted within the church, had to be used within the church. And as I said early on, the gospels were readily accepted. The writings of Paul were readily accepted. And then, of course, there had to be agreement. The third criteria is a writing had to agree with other accepted writings in doctrine and practice, which is oftentimes why you see some books did not make it, because they did not agree, or we could not determine their authorship, or they were just not accepted in the church as a whole. Now an interesting little factoid in church history is that the first, if you want to call it, official canonical list that was produced was by a heretic. It was by the heretic Marcion. This comes out around 140 AD. Marcion was a heretic. Marcion was a a dualist, not like with a sword, but I mean he had a dualistic philosophy. He thought like a lot of ancient Greeks did that spirit is good, matter evil. And so he, when he was looking at the writings of the New Testament, he pretty much excluded everything that had a kind of an earthy Jewish feel. He believed that the God of the New Testament was the good God, the God of the Old Testament was the evil, mean, nasty God. So his canon included basically The Gospel of Luke and the writings of Paul. And that was his list. This is the Bible. And then other people in the church then were like, that doesn't sound right. It's like, we accept Matthew and Mark and John and we accept the writings of Peter and so on. So it was his approach to the canon that prompted Orthodox theologians, I don't mean like Eastern Orthodox, I mean right thinking theologians to seriously begin considering questions of canon. And then you'll see various lists of canon throughout the history of the church. You don't see a completed New Testament canon until around the end of the fourth century. That's when it's pretty much settled, if you will, in stone that the 27 books of the New Testament are canonical. So around the end of the fourth century. Now, contrary to popular opinion, you'll hear skeptics say this, they'll say that the canon was voted on. They have these little church councils and they'll say, all right, up for a vote is the gospel of Matthew, what do you say? And they'll do their thumbs up or whatever. All right, gospel of Thomas, no, no, no. It's like, no. That's not how the canon was determined. This is just something that the skeptics like to throw. It's basically a way to sell books and to introduce intrigue and conspiracy. I may have mentioned this last week, if you've either seen the movie or read the book, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, That's the theory that Dan Brown throws in there. It's like, oh, those evil, wicked, patriarchal church leaders, they don't like these other gospels because they go against their teaching and threaten their way of life. That's nonsense. Now, of course, any talk of canon would not be complete without mentioning the work of the Holy Spirit. We have these criteria, but these criteria are really something that human beings use to sort of consider these things, but we have to also include the role of the Holy Spirit because The Holy Spirit not only inspires the words of Scripture, but also preserves the Word of God and makes sure that the people of God will have the Word of God with them. Now again, skeptics will focus on the human end of the process. They'll focus on these criteria. They'll focus on other things. And they'll try to poke holes there and so on. But we, again, believe in a God who spoke, right? That's what the author of Hebrews says. God, in various times and in various ways, spoke to the fathers of old. And he has now spoken to us through his son. So we believe in a God who spoke to the fathers of old, the prophets, the apostles. So if it's not a stretch to believe that God went through all this trouble to speak to us, is it a stretch to believe that he would not also then preserve his written work? Right? What's more difficult? Trying to inspire people like Peter to write infallibly and inerrantly what God wanted him to write, or to preserve the writing of Peter for the history of the people of God? A couple of passages you might want to consider in this area are from John chapter 14 verse 26, two verses really from John's gospel. This is from his upper room discourse, and this is where Jesus is speaking to his apostles on the night in which he was betrayed. And he says in two separate occasions. He says in chapter 14 of verse, chapter 20, Okay, I can say this. John 14, 26. Jesus says to his disciples, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. And then again in verse 13 of chapter 16, However, when he, the Spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak, and he will tell you things to come. So here Jesus is promising to his disciples that the Holy Spirit is gonna come, this helper will come, and he's going to, now he's speaking directly to the 12, well, The 11, Judas is gone at this point. He's speaking directly to the 11 and saying, the Holy Spirit will guide you. He will bring to remembrance all that I said to you. Now, if the Holy Spirit is going to do that, will not the Holy Spirit also preserve these writings for us? I've got a couple of quotes there in your handout from Calvin. One from Calvin, one from Francis Turretin. Calvin, when writing about the canon, and this comes out of the institutes, if you want to know the actual reference, it's book 1, chapter 7, section 4 of the institutes. Calvin writes, But although we may maintain the sacred word of God against gainsayers, it does not follow that we shall forthwith implant the certainty which faith requires in their hearts. Profane men think that their religion rests only on opinion. and therefore that they may not believe foolishly or on slight grounds desire and assist to have it proved by reason that Moses and the prophets were divinely inspired. But I answer that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason. For as God alone can properly bear witness to his words, his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit. The same spirit therefore who spoke by the mouth of the prophets must penetrate our hearts in order to convince us that they faithfully delivered the message with which they were divinely entrusted. What Calvin is saying there is Skeptics, unbelievers will try to focus on reason. How do you know Moses was inspired? How do you know Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were inspired? How do you know? Give us the reasons. And John Calvin is saying, it's like, look, okay, we have reasons, but ultimately we rely on the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit bears witness in our hearts that he has spoken through these writings. So the same spirit who then spoke to the prophets will penetrate our hearts in order to convince us that what they wrote has been faithfully delivered to us. Francis Turretin, Next Generation, he wrote in the 1600s. This is from his Institutes of Elenctic Theology. The reference there is, I think it's, Item number two, question seven, section five. Turretin writes his book, it's more like questions and answers. Not like a catechism because the answers are very, very long and no one would ever remember any of these things. Turretin, in answering the question, has any canonical book perished? The question he's answering is, have we lost anything in the canon of scripture? Do we have the full canon? That's the question he's asking and answering. And his answer in part says, from the providence of God perpetually keeping watch for the safety of the church, which cannot be conceived to have allowed her to suffer so great a loss. Otherwise, what would become of the wisdom and goodness and power of God if he had not willed that such a precious treasure, the scriptures, should be shown to his church and then taken away, and that the body of scripture should exist at this day mutilated and defective. The point he's making there is that the very God who inspired these words is of course the same God who preserves his word and he's going to do everything he needs to do in order to preserve his word. So finally, and very briefly, we're going to look finally at what is the canon? Okay, so we looked at what is canon, what does it mean? We looked at what makes a canon, and now we're going to finally answer what is the canon? And there really isn't much to say because, you know, the article just gives you what is the canon. It's the 66 books of the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament. They list those as canonical. This means that any writing that does not measure up to the doctrine and practice of the 66 books of Holy Scripture is not to be considered binding in the church. So anything that is not included in the canon cannot be used to bind the conscience of a believer. I'm being very specific there because it doesn't mean that we cannot profit from reading non-canonical works. We all profit. I mean, has anybody read a book on Christian faith and theology or Christian living? Of course you have. Of course you have. They're not canonical, okay? They're not inspired. They're not infallible. They're not inerrant. But they can be useful. And of course, any writing that is written by a man that is not canonical has to be held to the standards of the canon, right? Even our own confessions, which we hold so dear, are written by men, right? These can be amended. If we find that something in here does not match with what's in here, we can, we have, in fact, we have the obligation to change what's in here. Now, we believe that these, what's here is a faithful summary of what's in here, but we don't recognize these as infallible and errant and inspired. So, Only the Bible, only the canon can bind our conscience, can bind the conscience of the believer. If I say to you, you have to stop doing X, or you need to start doing Y, and you say, give me a Bible verse for that, and I do, that binds your conscience. If I say, well, because John Piper says so, or because, you know, R.C. Sproul said so, well, you could say, well, okay, that's what R.C. Sproul says. But unless it matches what scripture says, then my conscience is not bound by that. In fact, that's the famous line that Martin Luther uttered, right? When he's there at the Diet, not the Diet of Worms, Diet of Vorms, okay, you gotta put that V sound in there because Diet of Worms sounds disgusting. Unless you're a bird, then you'd probably like a Diet of Worms. But at the Diet of Worms, when he was called there before the leaders of the church and before the princes of the land to recant his writings, And he's held there and he's like, are these your writings? And Martin Luther says, yes. And he says, do you recant that they go against the orthodox teaching and traditions of the church? And he says, I cannot. He says, my conscience is held captive. It's bound to the word of God. And he says, you know, my conscience is not held captive or bound to the decisions of popes and councils, which often do err and contradict one another. That's the problem when you elevate tradition to the level of scripture. He says, unless you, you know, unless you can bind my conscience through the word of God, I cannot and I will not recant. And of course, you know, he rides off into the sunset, right? Martin Luther does, so. And again, it doesn't mean that tradition or other non-canonical books cannot be useful or helpful. It only means that the only infallible rule of faith and practice in the church are the 66 books of Holy Scripture. As I close, I want you to please turn in your Bibles to Matthew 15. Ladies, if you were at our Bible study Wednesday, you know this passage because we went through it. I'm not going to go through all of chapter 15. I just want to look at the first six verses of Matthew 15. So, In Matthew 15, Jesus had just fed the 5,000. He had walked across the water. He had called Peter. Actually, Peter asks, can I come out to you? And Jesus says, sure, give it a try. And then he crosses to the other side of the sea, and then he heals a bunch of people. So as Jesus is doing all this, we see here in verse 1 of chapter 15, then the scribes and the Pharisees who were from Jerusalem. So they're coming from headquarters, right? They're coming from the mothership, if you will, of the Jewish religious tradition, Jerusalem. So they come from Jerusalem to Jesus and they say, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread." So they come up and they're challenging Jesus. They're getting up in Jesus' grill and they're saying, why are you breaking or transgressing our traditions? And Jesus does what every mother warns her son not to do, answers a question with a question. He says, why do you transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? He said, I'm gonna answer your question in a moment, but I'm gonna point out something you guys do. You guys violate the commandment of God because of your tradition. For God commanded, saying, honor your father and your mother, and he who curses father and mother, let him be put to death. But you say, whoever says to his father or mother, whatever profit you may have received from me is a gift to God, then he need not honor his father or mother, thus you have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition. And he goes on, hypocrites. So what is he saying there? It's like, your traditions have nullified or broken the commandment, is what Jesus is saying. It's like, you're talking about tradition of the elders, our age-old tradition of washing hands before we eat. And we're not talking about cleanliness, right? It's not like, you know, when you're out working and your hands are muddy and it's like, wash before you eat. It's not that kind of thing. This is a ritual thing, ritual cleanliness. He's like, you've got this tradition that whoever, if you have a gift, if you've designated anything as a gift of God, then you're, basically what you've done is you say, I don't need to honor my father and mother. That's what their tradition was. You can dedicate some land or some treasure and say, this is dedicated as a gift to God, sorry mom, sorry dad, I can't help you out. And Jesus is like, you're breaking the commandment. with your tradition. You've elevated tradition over the commandment of God. And as we'll see when we get, I think the next lesson looks at it, Article 5, that's what was happening in the Roman Catholic Church. That was what was happening in Rome. That's what the Belgic Confession often is speaking out against, is this idea of how the authority of scripture versus the authority of tradition. Traditions are good, and we have a tradition, but if your tradition trumps scripture, that's where Jesus is gonna have a big problem with you, as he did here with the Pharisees and the scribes. So as we wrap this up, if God has revealed himself more fully and clearly in special revelation, and if holy scripture is the written record of special revelation, then we must know what measures up as scripture, and that's where canon comes in. And while we can come up with criteria as to what is or is not canon, ultimately it comes down to the witness of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus says in John chapter 10, the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd. Through the work of the Spirit, the people of God recognize and hear the word of God as it is revealed to us in the scriptures. And while other writings have been considered as part of the canon, it has been widely received in the church that the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments are canonical. Now as we move on in the Belgic in coming weeks, next week we're gonna look at Article 5, the dignity and authority of Scripture. And then in two weeks, Lord willing, we're gonna look at the difference between canonical and apocryphal books. And then in three weeks, Lord willing, we will wrap up the Belgic Confessions, look at Scripture in Article 7, the sufficiency of Scripture.