You would. We'll jump into the scriptures here tonight. First, find 2 Peter, sorry, 2 Peter chapter 1. I started into here series on Sunday nights here concerning the word of God and really want to dive into, you know, what are our beliefs about the word of God are and why we have and why we hold those beliefs. And even to get into some things that may be a little bit more technical. I don't want to be I don't wanna get off into things that we don't understand, but I wanna take some time and really explain some concepts and some beliefs. And tonight, I really wanna do that here tonight, talk about some of the important attributes of the Word of God, things that we believe the Word of God is, that the Bible is, and it's essential to our beliefs about the Word of God. As we said last week, and we've said many times, the Bible is the authority of the church, and the Bible is the authority that we stand on as Christians, as believers, everything that we believe and everything that we hold to and everything that we do as Christians and as we do as a church together should have some biblical basis to it. We should be able to defend our position and defend our faith and say that the Bible clearly teaches us to do this or at least certainly the Bible does not forbid us from doing such and such thing. And the Bible doesn't have clear principles that we are violating in these areas. And so the Bible has to be our authority. And if that's the case, then we have to have some really strong beliefs about our Bible. And it is a matter of faith. I'm gonna say it is a matter of faith that we accept some of these things. because there is no empirical evidence that God exists. There is no, no, I can't, I can't say, well, this is, this is, this is, this is how I know God exists because he lives at such and such address and you can go there and you can visit him, you can meet him sometime, he's there. Right? We have an eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God who is all in all, right? And he's all powerful and no man has seen God. We can't say that God exists because I've seen him. No man has seen God at any time. But the Bible tells us who God is. The Bible tells us what we need to know about God. And we point to the Word of God and say, this is why we believe that God is, our God is the true God and is the only God and is the eternal God. And that all other gods are false gods and imitators at best and enemies against the true God, enemies against the true faith. And we have to say the same thing about His Word is that we can't, We can present a whole lot of evidence and a whole lot of facts and details and truths and things. But when it comes right down to it, we accept those things largely on faith. And we accept what the word of God says about itself as being true. And so that's a little bit of a circular reasoning. You're not supposed to, when you're having a logical argument, you're not supposed to use circular reasoning. We're not having a logical argument. We're not having a logical argument. We're not trying to convince somebody through facts and logic that God exists and the Bible is true. We are accepting this proposition of faith that God exists and that God, who is a good God, would not leave us without his word. God who is going to judge us according to his word, and God who says that man should not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, would not be a just God to not give us every word that we need to live by. And so it's a proposition that largely we have to accept to at least a degree on faith. And there's a lot of proof, a lot of evidence and a lot of verses that we're gonna look at and some other things that will come up in the course of this series. But in the end, it comes down to a matter of faith. Those who are inclined to believe are going to believe to an even greater degree that the Bible is the word of God. And those who are disinclined to believe are not going to accept any amount of evidence, any amount of proof, any amount of scripture, any of these other facts and details and logical conclusions, any of these things, because they have predetermined that they don't believe. And so it starts with, a matter of our own, of our own faith. Here in second Peter, this is an interesting passage here and we'll read it and we'll start, read a lot more than this, but we'll just start in verse 16 in second Peter one, in verse 16, it says there, for we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honor and glory when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. His voice which came from heaven we heard when we were with him in the Holy Mount. We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto you do well that you take heed as unto a light that shineth in a dark place until the day dawn and the day star rise in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And Peter writes this book on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and Peter writes this letter, it's called a general epistle, but written just kind of generally to Christians that were in different places, different parts. just to establish some doctrine. 2 Peter is really a letter written to refute and combat false teachers and really get into the book of 2 Peter. Really 2 Peter chapter 2 is just a description and a refutation and a an identification really, a way by means by which to identify who are false teachers and what to do with them. And the whole book is really written from that standpoint. And Peter starts with a premise here that the Bible has to be the authority and the Bible is a more sure word of prophecy, more sure word of prophecy than what? more sure word of prophecy than the very voice of God that he heard when he and James and John were on the Mount of Transfiguration and Peter opened his mouth and he said, Lord, it's good we were here. We should build a tabernacle, three tabernacles, one for Jesus, you Lord Jesus, and we should build one for Moses and one for Elijah. And then a bright light shone and they heard thunder and lightnings and all this. And then they heard a voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved son, hear ye him. This is one of a few different times where the Lord testified of Jesus from heaven. Another time was at his baptism, but the Lord spoke in different times from heaven saying, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. There were times where there was ample evidence and Peter and the other apostles were eyewitnesses of these different events. some of the apostles who would go on to become apostles were there at the baptism of Jesus Christ. We know that Andrew and John probably were there, maybe some others. We know that Peter, James, and John were there on the Mount of Transfiguration. We know that that all of the apostles, save Judas Iscariot, were eyewitnesses of the crucifixion and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ascension of Jesus Christ. They were eyewitnesses and were able to give eyewitness testimony of of the wonderful works and the powerful words of Jesus Christ. They spent time learning his doctrine and his spirit and his character. They spent all this time with Jesus Christ and they were eyewitnesses of these things. And yet Peter says here, for all of that, we have a more sure word of prophecy. And where unto you do well to take heed as unto light that shineth in dark place to the day dawn and the day star rise in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation for prophecy. came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And so it equates here prophecy and scripture as really one and the same thing. Not all prophecy became scripture, but all scripture is prophecy, came through the prophets. They weren't always prophets in the most clinical sense of the word, but they were prophets in that they spake the Word of God and God delivered the Word of God to them through divine revelation. And they spake and recorded the Word of God for posterity and for perpetuity. And so all scripture is prophecy and given by inspiration. We read those verses last week and second to me that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for proof, for correction and for instruction and righteousness. All scripture is given by that inspiration of God. And the Bible is the word of God. This prophecy that was recorded for us in scripture is the word of God. And it says that it came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Probably next week I'll go into more detail about it perhaps, but there really just are some logistical hindrances to the Bible being the work of man. just in the sheer scope and magnitude and time frame in which the Word of God was delivered, the entirety of the Word of God, the Scriptures were delivered to man, really it would be a feat nigh unto impossible if men just decided, we're going to do this. We're gonna come up with this and we're gonna put this all together. When there have been other so-called sacred religious texts that have been written, they've been written by one man or a small group of men, all in one time period, all in one place, all in a short period of time. And that is not how you would describe the scriptures at all. a span of over 1600 years and thousands, hundreds of thousands of square miles and 40 different human authors involved in the process in three different human languages that the scriptures were delivered in. To say just the very least about it. If this was the work of man, it could not have happened in the way that it did, and it never has before, and it never has since to any degree the way that it did. And so the Bible says here, the prophecy came on an old time by the will of man. This was not something that a man or a group of men decided to do, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And so the scriptures came through the moving of the Holy Ghost. We'll talk a little bit more about that here tonight. The Bible is the word of God. It is not the words of man about God. It does not simply contain words of God, but it is the word of God. It says all scripture is given by inspiration. It's funny that I didn't mean to do that necessarily, but our bulletin this week has that verse, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. All scripture is given by inspiration of God. It is the word of God. It is not words about God. It does not contain some of the words of God. And if we were to say, well, it contains some of the words of God, but not all of the words in the Bible are the words of God. Well, then how do we know which ones are which? Doesn't that just undercut the whole argument? And so we know, we believe the words that we like in the Bible are the words of God and the words we don't like in the Bible are not the words of God. I mean, isn't that what we would be prone to do? I said about the Ten Commandments on Wednesday, it says the Ten Commandments are a body of truth, it's not a buffet line. We can say, well, I like the first one, and the third one, and the fifth one, and I like all the odd number ones, I don't like any of the even number ones, and so I'm gonna follow the odd number commandments, I'm gonna ignore the even number commandments. Well, we can't do that, right? And if we start to say, well, you know, I don't think that commandment number seven was inspired by God, the other nine were. Well, that's just you saying so, right? If we start to undercut any of the scriptures, we've undercut all the scriptures. All scriptures given by inspiration of God. Yeah, even the genealogies. Yeah, those are tough reading, right? But there's actually some really interesting stuff in those. I was in Joshua here not too long ago and kind of the middle part of the book, you know, Joshua's like a lot of action and they're just conquering the land, right? Except for the whole middle of the book is just talking about the borders of the inheritances that the different tribes are gonna get. And I mean, you have to like, you have to really, you have to really enjoy Bible geography to care about that at all, right? Like, where is that city at? I don't know. It's all important, right? And it's all scripture. It's all given by inspiration of God. This means that the facts in the Bible are God's facts, not man's facts. This means that the instructions in the Bible are God's instructions, that the commandments are God's, that the promises are God's, the precepts are God's, the principles are God's. The words are God's, not man's. The Bible tells us not everything that can be known, but everything that needs to be known about God. and about God's purpose for us and the life that God has given to us. There's plenty of things that we've found and we've come to know and we can know those things or not know those things and get by in life. But everything we need to know about God and everything we need to know about the purpose of our lives and the meaning of our lives and the way to salvation, the way to be reconciled to God and have a relationship with God and to find God's purpose for us is found in the Word of God. You know, along the way, man figured out geometry, and you can get by without ever knowing any geometry. Now, you might be able to get by a little bit easier if you know some geometry, even on a rudimentary level, right? But you can get by without ever knowing geometry. The Bible doesn't have any geometry in it. Amen, right? You can get by without that. And that's something you can know. And that's something that can be known. And I like geometry. Most people don't. I'm weird like that. I like geometry. You can get by without ever knowing any geometry. But what we need to know is in the Word of God. Bible is the complete revelation of God to man. And God chose through the Israelites, the nation of Israel, the Hebrew people, people who are the faith of Abraham, part of the covenant promise that God made to Abraham to choose him and his family and the people that came out from him to be his chosen people. One of the things that was implicit in that was that God was going to deliver his word to the world through these people. They were going to bring forth the Messiah, but they were going to also bring forth the Word of God, the Word of God in every way that through the Hebrew people would come first and progressively the written Word of God and then ultimately the living Word of God, Jesus Christ. And we have the word of God, both in Old Testament and New Testament. God used men called the prophets, both in Old Testaments and New Testaments to record his word for mankind. But one of the things that we importantly, one of the attributes that's important for us to believe is that the word of God is eternal. We believe in the eternality of the word of God. That yes, there were times and places and men to which God delivered His Word in due time. That over a period of 1600 years, give or take, that the Word of God was progressively delivered until it was completed. But that the word of God always existed in Psalms 119, in verse 89, Psalms 119, of course, a chapter entirely focused on the importance of the word of God. But verse 89 says, forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. The word of God always has existed and always will exist. Jesus said in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mountain, Matthew 5, 18, "'Til heaven and earth pass one jot or one tittle, "'shall in no wise pass from the law "'till all be fulfilled.'" The Word of God is eternal. It's not going anywhere. There are still things yet to be fulfilled and accomplished in the Word of God. And until that's the case, the Word of God stands. And God's Word does stand. We believe that the Word of God has always existed. We believe the Word of God always will exist. We believe that the Word of God did not originate with men, but that it was delivered to man systematically and progressively until it was completed and the revelation was complete from the Lord. We believe in the inspiration of the scriptures. We read that there in the text in verse 21, where it says, Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Again, 2 Timothy 3.16 says, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And the inspiration of the scriptures, the inspiration and that word used in 2 Timothy 3.16 means that it was God breathed, that God spoke the word of God, that God breathed out the word of God, spoke the word of God to the prophets. God dictated his words to the prophets. There's an interesting example of this, and you may have never, really caught on to this before, and I just wanted to point out in Jeremiah chapter 36, kind of a unique place here, but God was actually, He had pronounced some judgment against the King of Israel. And so the Lord spoke some very specific that he would have written down and sent to the king. And this is kind of the story of that. And I'm just gonna read a few verses of it, but it kind of gives an interesting picture of the way that biblical inspiration would have worked. In Jeremiah 36 in verse one, it says, it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, the king of Judah, this word came unto Jeremiah from the Lord saying, take thee a roll of a book and write therein all the words that I've spoken unto thee against Israel and against Judah and against all the nations from the day I spake unto thee from the days of Josiah even to this day. And it may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them, that they may return every man from his evil ways. and that I may forgive their iniquity and their sins. And then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which he had spoken unto him upon a roll of a book. And so there's kind of a very interesting little picture of the process. We don't always get a look kind of behind the scenes in the process of inspiration, yet we kind of get a look at it here in Jeremiah chapter 36. God is speaking, verbally speaking to Jeremiah. God was speaking specific words to Jeremiah and saying, I want you to write all of this down, everything that I've said to you, I want you to write it down. And so Jeremiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, spoke those words and had a scribe there, a guy named Baruch, the son of Dariah, write those things down. And they took it directly to the king, just like God said. And so we say inspiration, God breathed the scriptures. We believe that he breathed and dictated the exact words to the prophets. There's some different views on inspiration, some that believe that the Holy Ghost did not give specific words, but that he gave ideas and impulses and, and, and thoughts and feelings. And the prophets just kind of followed their, their feelings and impulses, but that would kind of go against what the scriptures tell us here. God was, was specifically telling Jeremiah exactly what to write to the, to the king and in this letter, and, and he was speaking those words exactly to the scribe to write those things out. And the Holy Ghost did not just, as it says in 2 Peter, when He moved the Holy Ghost, they were moved by the Holy Ghost. They didn't just, they were not just moved with feelings or moved with ideas. They were literally moved with the exact things to write. Believe in the verbal inspiration of the Scripture. Believe in the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. And plenary is, again, a technical term, and I'll tell you what it means. Plenary means entirely. as we've kind of alluded to earlier, that every part of Scripture is inspired by God. There's no part that is not inspired, that it's not some of Scripture is inspired. Some modern versions, and we'll talk about those later, but some modern versions say that every Scripture that is inspired by God is profitable. Well, that really undercuts the inspiration of Scripture, and that really undercuts the Scripture as a whole, right? But that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says that all scripture is given by inspiration. Not that every scripture that is inspired is profitable, but that all scripture is given by inspiration and is profitable. That every part of the scriptures, every word of the scriptures is inspired and therefore is holy scripture and not anything less. There are no parts of scripture that are more scripture than other parts. No part of the Bible that is more inspired by God than other parts. And you say, well, there's more eternal truth in the gospel message than there is in the genealogies. Fair. But the genealogies are inspired scripture also. And they're there for a reason. And there's something to learn from that. And God put it there and recorded it in scripture for a reason. The scriptures are, for this, being inspired. This means that God breathed life into them. The same idea is when God breathed into man's nostrils, the breath of life and man became a living soul and God breathed life into the scriptures. Bible tells us in Hebrews 4.12, the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. The word quick doesn't mean that it's fast on its feet. It means it's alive. It means it's active. The word of God is a living book. Why is a book that the newest part of it is almost 2,000 years old? Why is it still relevant and applicable today to modern life? Because it's a living book. Why is it we can read Bible over and over and over again and there's something new and there's something fresh and there's something relevant to us for that moment? Why? Because it's a living book. It's not like other books, even important books and good books and necessary books even. It is alive, it is quick, it is powerful, it is active. And this is, of course, makes sense because Jesus is the living word and the Bible is the written word and Jesus, the fullness and the embodiment of the word of God himself and the word of God, a description of the life and the character and the nature of Jesus Christ, the will of the Lord. We serve a living God. and his word is alive and quick and powerful. We believe that the scriptures are inspired. We believe in the inerrancy of the word of God and inerrancy and also the infallibility. We talk about these two things and sometimes we use them interchangeably, but there is a little bit of a nuance and a reason to say both of them, that the inerrancy of the word of God means that the Bible is without error, without contradiction. that what the Bible says is true and it's completely true. The Bible does not command or teach anything that is false or displeasing to God. The Bible doesn't lead one into error. That in adhering to the word of God, you will not be led into error, into sin, into the displeasure of God. but also not that it's simply inerrant, but that it is infallible. And this is different. This is a higher level to the same concept. Not only does the Bible not contain error, but the Bible is incapable of containing errors. And this is something that can only be done by God. This speaks to the intentionality of scriptures in God's design of the scriptures. I heard it described this way one time. You could take a test and you could get every answer on the test correct. Good, maybe you did sometimes. In school, you got 100 percent on a spelling test, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't get an answer wrong on the test. It just means you didn't. I can take a test for short enough test, I can get 100 percent on that test. I can make no errors on that test. Now I could write a term paper and make no spelling errors, no grammatical errors. It'd be unlikely, but I could do it if I tried really hard. But that doesn't mean that I was incapable of it, right? But infallibility does. That's something that is not of man. Man might be able to make something that was flawless, but only God can make something that cannot be flawed, that has no capacity for error. And so when we talk about the inerrancy of the Word of God and the infallibility of the Word of God, we're talking about that the Word of God is without error, without contradiction, and it's in possibility of containing those errors that it is completely, for this, completely trustworthy and reliable. Inerrancy and infallibility are distinct in that infallibility refutes the possibility of containing error. I'm sorry, I said that already. The Bible says in Psalms 12, 6, And 12, 6, and 7 are together both important verses, but to this point, verse 6 is really important. It says, And the Lord doesn't use terms like pure, lightly. It doesn't mean that it's something that's pretty clean or pretty good. The Lord, when the Lord talks about purity, he talks about holiness, he talks about perfection, he talks about that that is completely free of error, of contradiction, of fault, of flaw. Another verse similar, he says in Proverbs 30 verse 5, it says, every word of God is pure. And these verses speak to these concepts, these attributes of the scriptures that we believe the scriptures are inerrant. We believe the scriptures are without error and without the capability of being in error. It's how strongly we believe in the, this, that the Bible is the word of God and being the word of God, it is eternal, that it is, it is inspired and breathed, breathed out by God and breathed into by God and made into a living word, not a closed up, dead, dried out, irrelevant word, but a living word. And that being a work of God, it is without error and without the possibility of it. And it's vital to our faith that we believe these things about the word of God. And we're going to look a little bit more deeply into these things over the next few weeks. But we'll use some of these, I'll use some of these terms again. And I just want you to, we talk about the inspiration of scripture and we talk about the inerrancy of scripture. We talk about the infallibility of scripture or the eternality of scripture. We want to have that foundation that we were all on the same page of what those terms mean. And I'll be given some more thoughts and terms and things like that. as we go forward in this, but it's important that our faith in the Word of God is sound and that we trust the Word of God, we trust the Bible that we hold in our hands, that it is the Word of God and that we have that faith because everything we base our lives on, everything we base our work and our ministry for the Lord on comes from the Word of God. And if the foundation be destroyed, what can the righteous do? If the foundation be destroyed, what can the righteous do? And so we'll close with that here tonight. Let's go to the Lord for a time of prayer here before we dismiss from the service tonight. And so here, if you join me with your heads bowed for prayer, we'll have the piano play and give us some time.