The Authority of Scripture

If you look at the time right now, you may realize that it is very early in the morning. I have lots of time this morning, and I thought that recording a meditation on Scripture would be useful before my quiet time. So this thought comes from book 1 chapter 7 in the Institutes.

In Ephesians 2:20 Paul speaks of the church as being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. In all my time thinking on this passage, I had never realized that this foundation of the apostles and prophets is scripture. In Old Testament times, Israel almost always had a prophet of God to help guide them back to God. You know these names, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Samuel, Moses, Jonah, Micah, Malachi and many more. They were almost always there, and many of them wrote scripture. However, something happened. After Malachi, there were no prophets until the time of Christ. This was about 350 - 400 years. My Bible has nothing in it that was written during this time period. I believe that this was the time appointed to "seal up vision and prophesy" in that Messianic prophesy of Daniel 9:24-27. [BTW: If you aren't familiar with these verses, read them, and then find some sort of commentary on them, because if you are anything like me, you will have no idea what they mean the first time you read them.] But this is where the difference between the Protestant and Catholic Bible lies. The Catholics have included Jewish writings from this gap in the prophetic line between Malachi and Christ. Wayne Grudem brings this point up briefly in Systematic Theology, but I don't know if I had ever understood its significance before.

However, despite Calvin's insight into that particular verse of Paul's, he still states that we have no clear natural proof that the Scriptures are indeed the word of God. We have that verse, 2 Timothy 3:16, but this is circular reasoning. If we can't be sure that that verse is the word of God, we can't be sure that it has any authority to say that any other verse is the word of God. So Calvin points out that the "Spirit is called an earnest and a seal to confirm the faith of the godly, for this very reason, that until he enlightens their [unbelievers] minds, they are tossed to and fro in a sea of doubts."

So in conclusion, there are many things that Scripture states about itself and about its own authority, however, ultimately the Spirit is required in a person to testify that these things are truly the words of the Lord. There may be apologetic proofs of some parts through archeology, or science or whatever, but ultimately the root of the belief lies with the Spirit testifying about the word. Sometimes this can be hard for my overly rational mind to accept.