Preserved for Us

God has worked a miracle in this world that is both visible and abundantly available to us today. It’s entirely possible that this miracle is visible to you from where you are sitting right now. I’m talking about the fact that we have God’s Word preserved for us in the Bible. Behind the presence of that book there is the marvelous story of how earthly forces conspired, on more than one occasion, to destroy it. It is only by the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit that this book has been preserved and is available to us today.

Our Wednesday evening church history class resumes this week with the story of how the books of the New Testament were acknowledged as Scripture and canonized. In the last module, we talked about how the New Testament was written and how New Testament Scripture faced threats from outside of the church. (In one particularly dramatic moment, the most powerful man in the world made it his personal mission to eradicate Christian Scripture forever. I don’t suppose I have to worry about spoiling the ending of that story.) We also talked about threats from within the church—unscrupulous heretics who sought to derail the church by adding false teaching to the clear teaching of Scripture.

This history highlights some of the reasons why it’s so important for us to know our Bible.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
2 Tm 3:16-17

First of all, Scripture is God’s revealed word about Himself, and about the way to salvation that he has provided for sinful humans like us. Paul states that knowing the Holy Scriptures is “able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ” (2 Tm 2:15). All of Scripture points to Jesus Christ and the salvation that comes from faith alone in Christ alone.

Second, Scripture not only tells us who God is, how we are saved, and what our relationship to Him is. It also tells us what we are to do. God expects us to “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (Js 1:22).

Third, if you don’t know for yourself what it says, you will not notice when clever distractors come into the church and attempt to twist its words to their own ends. The Bible is not a book of human wisdom and philosophy. As Peter tells us, “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pt 1:21).

Fourth, countless extremely flawed sinners, just like us, are part of the story of the preservation of the Bible. Believers long before us understood how important it was to make it available to everyone, and worked to make sure it would remain so. Saints died to put this book in our hands. Fellow Christians scrimped, saved, and sacrificed just to get a single hand-copied edition into their local church, where they would gather eagerly to hear someone read aloud from it. We are fabulously rich in our access to this book and should uphold the regard for it that its history and the holiness of its content demands.

Finally, knowing the story of how the Scriptures have been preserved arms us against the world’s ongoing and relentless attempts to undermine that story. You have probably heard accusations such as these: shadowy church officials picked certain books and buried other books; scribes snuck their own words into the Scriptures over the years; there are other scriptures that shed a whole different light on what God’s Word says. We’re going to debunk those lies in this class as well. We can rest in the assurance of the integrity of the truth of God’s word.

This fallen world is awash in bad news. At times it can seem extremely bleak, like that day when a Roman Emperor created a monument on the spot where he claimed the last Christian Scripture was burned. (That really happened!)

But we who know the Scriptures know the amazing work our God has done. We know that He has preserved His people and His Word. We know that He has kept His promises in the past, and that, even when faced with great opposition, he will continue to keep them. His will shall not be foiled. We know that He provided a way for us to be saved from the penalty of our sin through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ, who conquered death and lives today. And because his Word has been preserved for us, we know that He has promised that Christ will return, that He will make all things good, and that we will live with Him eternally.

I hope you’ll join us for this class. And I especially hope you’ll seek the truth of the Bible, written and preserved for us.