SOLA SCRIPTURA
A message given at True Life BPC, Reformation Sunday, 25 October 2015
Sola Scriptura means Scripture alone. It is a powerful Reformation dictum that calls for a return to the Bible as the believer’s sole, supreme and final authority of faith and practice.
In a very dark age when powerful men in religious garb controlled people by their superstitious inventions, the Reformation brought Gospel light and Christian liberty by pointing people back to the Bible. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that salvation comes not from the pope or the church, not any man or institution, but from Christ alone (Solus Christus). Salvation then is not by works, but by the grace of God alone (Sola Gratia) and through faith alone (Sola Fide).
We need to thank God for His powerful intervention in history to deliver His people out of darkness into His marvellous light. He did this in the 16th century Protestant Reformation. Church historian Philip Schaff called the Reformation the greatest revival the church had ever experienced, second only to Pentecost (Acts 2). In the Reformation, we see God’s power and faithfulness at work. We see that power at work in the way He got His Word out—the Bible back into the hands of His people so that they could read His Truth for themselves and be saved, for “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Rom 10:17).
History reveals that when God works, Satan also works. That is why Peter warned, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet 5:8). Satan seeks to destroy our faith by attacking the very basis of our faith, ie the Bible: “Yea, hath God said…?” (Gen 3:1). Adam’s disobedience to God’s Word plunged the whole of humanity into sin and death, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:… for the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Rom 5:12, 6:23).
Thank God for Jesus Christ who overcame Satan through the Word. When Satan tempted Jesus with “Yea, hath God said?”, our Lord was quick to counter with an absolute, “It is written!” “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” (Matt 4:4). Jesus quoted Scripture—Deuteronomy 8:3. What is more significant is that He prefaced His quote with “It is written”. “It is written” is one word in Greek—gegraptai (perfect passive indicative of grapho, “to write”). The Greek perfect has the idea of completed action with an emphasis on its enduring results. And that is why it is most excellently translated “It is written” and not “it has been written”. “It is written” teaches the perfect preservation of the Scriptures. When Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3 which was written 1400 years before, He was saying that it still stands written just like it was in the beginning. What was in the original was also in the copy of the Scriptures Jesus read from, and it remains so till this day. “It is written”, “it stands written”, “it stands perfectly written” at this time because of God’s extraordinary providence in preserving His inspired words.
The Bible is our sole, supreme and final authority of faith and practice because it is God’s Word, 100% inspired and 100% preserved, totally infallible and inerrant. There is no greater authority. Sola Scriptura! The promises of God are yes and amen to the glory of God (2 Cor 1:20). “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” (2 Tim 3:16-17). “God says it, that settles it, I believe it.”
In the 16th century, Martin Luther overcame the powerful Roman Catholic Church by standing on the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures. At the Diet of Worms in 1521, he stood firm against a most hostile assembly comprising the emperor, the dukes, the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the abbots. He refused to recant his faith in Christ and retract his criticisms of the Catholic Church for selling letters of indulgences (forgiveness tickets) and her many other unbiblical doctrines and practices. Luther declared boldly, “Unless, I am convinced by testimonies of the Scriptures or by clear arguments that I am in error—for popes and councils have often erred and contradicted themselves—I cannot withdraw, for I am subject to the Scriptures I have quoted; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. It is unsafe and dangerous to do anything against one’s conscience. Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise. So, help me God.”
John Calvin like Luther taught the doctrine of Sola Scriptura in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Thus, in order to enjoy the true light of religion, we must become a disciple of Scripture. All true wisdom comes only through a reverential embracing of this written testimony, which God has been pleased to deliver, concerning Himself, to us. We must come to His Word, the Holy Scriptures, in obedience, which is the source not only of a perfect faith, but of all right knowledge of God. … Since God does not speak to men in daily oracles. He has preserved His truth in the Scripture, and only in the Scripture, for us. The Scriptures have authority over the believers, and are to be received as the very words pronounced by God himself.”
The Roman Catholic Church did not take the Reformation appeal to Sola Scriptura sitting down. They launched a counterattack by accusing the Reformers of foolish faith. They claimed that the Scriptures as originally given in the Autographs were no longer existent, and that the Scriptures which the Reformers relied upon were full of mistakes and textual variations and hence could not be absolutely authoritative. To the Catholic Church, absolute authority does not reside in the Scriptures but in the pope. They say that the pope has infallible authority by virtue of apostolic succession, and the Scriptures become valid only upon his infallible pronouncements and interpretation when he speaks ex cathedra.
How did the Reformers’ respond to such a powerful offensive? Again, it is back to the Bible, back to what God says about His Word. In the Bible, God says most clearly that He would preserve His inspired Scriptures throughout the ages so that His people will always have “a more sure word of prophecy” (2 Pet 1:9). Psalm 12:6-7 says, “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.”
Francis Turretin (1623-87), pastor and professor of theology in the Church and Academy of Geneva, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology wrote, “Have the original texts of the Old and New Testaments come down to us pure and uncorrupted? We affirm against the papists.” He then went on to explain, “By the original texts, we do not mean the autographs written by the hand of Moses, of the prophets and the apostles, which certainly do not now exist. We mean their apographs which are so called because they set forth to us the word of God in the very words of those who wrote under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) affirmed the Verbal Plenary Inspiration and Verbal Plenary Preservation of the Scriptures, “The Old Testament in Hebrew … and the New Testament in Greek … being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.” Prof William F Orr of Western Theological Seminary wrote, “Now this affirms that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New which was known to the Westminster divines was immediately inspired by God because it was identical with the first text that God has kept pure in all the ages. The idea that there are mistakes in the Hebrew Masoretic texts or in the Textus Receptus of the New Testament was unknown to the authors of the Confession of Faith.”
The Reformation brought great unity and clarity concerning the identity and quality of the Scriptures believers have in their hands. However, this unity and clarity no longer exists because of the Deformation that arose in the 19th century when liberalism, rationalism, evolutionism, ecumenism etc and all kinds of false isms infiltrated the Protestant Church. In 1881, two liberal churchmen Westcott and Hort who were friends of Darwin and Freud introduced a new Greek text based on corrupt manuscripts, namely the Sinaiticus and the Vaticanus. This new Greek text excised 9970 words from the good old inspired and preserved Scriptures. From this new corrupt Greek text came all the modern versions or perversions of the Bible.
In those days, the Lord did raise up a voice in Dean J W Burgon. Burgon warned against the manuscripts Westcott and Hort used and showed that they were among the “most scandalously corrupt copies” in existence. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. That is why there is so much unbelief in the church today. Nevertheless, the Lord always has a faithful remnant who will affirm with the good Dean that “The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it, every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High! The Bible is none other than the Word of God: not some part of it more, some part of it less; but all alike, the utterance of Him who sitteth upon the Throne; faultless, unerring, supreme!”
The church at large today is so confused and divided. Why? It is because there are now so many different voices, all claiming to be God’s voice, that those who profess Christ do not know what to believe anymore. The sex and fraud in the Crossover Project of City Harvest Church is a case in point. Many Christians today are unable to distinguish between the godly and the worldly, they just cannot tell right from wrong, good from bad. In a postmodern age, anything goes. What is truth? Who cares? It is no wonder that many in the church today find the world so cosy and comfortable. It is no wonder that many find it so easy and convenient to deny the present infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures.
Is the Bible today, which is thousands of years old, still as pure as before? Is this believable? It all boils down to faith. Do you believe what God says about His inspired words and how He has preserved them? The only way to see God and understand His ways is through faith. “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:17). Know that the things of God are not scientifically but spiritually discerned (1 Cor 2:14).
For us who believe in a 100% perfect Bible without any mistake, we say, “Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.” (Jer 6:16). They will not walk therein, but we will, “For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.” (2 Cor 13:8). JK
