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Let’s ask for the Lord’s help. O Jesus, what a friend for sinners you are. We pray that we have not sung those words carelessly. What a strength in weakness. We come here and there are weak people. What a guide and a keeper. We are wayward people. Hallelujah, what a savior, we cry, for we are sinful people. And we come to You know asking You to speak, knowing that the sheep will hear Your voice. Give us grace to know You, see You, trust You, believe in You. I pray that You would help me, feeble and frail as I am, that I might be Your humble, faithful mouthpiece. We ask all of this in the name of our Good Shepherd, Christ. Amen.
Our scripture reading this morning comes from John, chapter 10, as we continue with our series through John’s Gospel and we come to the second half of John, chapter 10. I will be reading verses 22 through 42. John, chapter 10, beginning at verse 22. Hopefully, you’ll grab a Bible. You’ll open there. If you don’t have your own Bible, you can use one of the pew Bibles. If you don’t have a Bible of your very own, you can take one of those home. We would be glad for you to have a Bible. But you want to follow along, because what I have to say is not very important unless it’s what Jesus has to say, and what God is speaking through His Word.
Verse 22: “At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around Him and said to Him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.’ Jesus answered them, ‘I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.’ The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?’ The Jews answered him, ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God.’ Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands. He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. And many came to him. And they said, “John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true.” And many believed in him there.”
There are a lot of familiar themes in these verses, some big ideas that we’ve seen several times already in John’s Gospel. So this could be another sermon about sheep and shepherd, about eternal life, about bearing witness, or about the controversy that inevitably follows Jesus, or the opposition, or the division that He creates, faith and unbelief. It’s actually quite a fitting end. This is really the end of the first half of John’s Gospel, when we turn the page to chapter 11 we are now immediately turning our attention to Holy Week and to the cross and for the second half of the book, we will be more or less in that last week of Jesus’ earthly life. So it’s quite fitting that this opening half would end as we’ve seen so many times, with hostility, with some wanting to kill Him, and yet with others wanting to believe in Him.
But in the midst of all this, in the middle of all that we have already seen, in what may look like another repeat episode, oh, another sermon, we’ve seen all this from John, we find Jesus making two extraordinary claims. There is actually more than that, but at least two extraordinary claims. Two remarkable affirmations that form the foundation of orthodox Christianity. It’s no exaggeration to say that these two affirmations from Jesus are essential not only for Him, but for what it means to be a Christian.
Verse 30, here’s the first: “I and the Father are one.”
And then here’s the second of His extraordinary claims, in verse 35: “Scripture cannot be broken.”
I and the Father are one, Scripture cannot be broken.
These are essential truths for Jesus. You cannot understand Jesus unless you understand Him as the One sent from the Father, doing the work of the Father, in essential unity of purpose, will, and essence with the Father.
And you cannot understand how Jesus views the world unless you understand that He shared, with the rest of Judaism, an unshakeable confidence in the Scriptures. That was simply how He looked at the world.
Calvin famously called the Scriptures lenses, or spectacles. I’ve told you before I have terrible eyesight. I am legally blind. No longer am I legally blond, [laughter] though my kids on occasion when they’re feeling nice will say “daddy has blond hair,” that’s a nice euphemism for gray and getting older. Sometimes people look back at videos or sermons I did five or ten years ago and say “hmm, you’re sorta like one of those when Obama started as president and when he ended as president [laughter] sort of pictures.” Well, I blame you and my kids…
Spectacles. When I put these things on, they’re, they’re not much to look at, but I need them to look at everything else. The world is not as it should be if I don’t wear glasses. Only when I put these on do blurry things look clear. Now I, I can go around, I can see something, I can some shades, I can see some colors, but until I put these on, I am not seeing reality as God made it.
And so it is with the Scriptures. And Jesus Himself viewed the Scriptures in this way. These were essential truths, not just for Jesus, but they are essential for the entire Christian faith. Jesus Christ is the perfect image and representation of God, and the Scriptures are the perfect communication and word from God.
So if you do not have the unity of the Father and the Son, as one theological conviction, and the unbreakable Scriptures as another theological conviction, you do not have orthodox Christianity. Now you need much more than that, but you cannot have less than that. The Son and the Father are one, and that the Scriptures cannot be broken. If you don’t have that, whatever other foundation you build upon is going to be a mess and your building of faith will crumble. And if you have at least those two planks in your foundation, you are off to a very good start.
Let’s look at both of those affirmations.
First. I and the Father are one. Jesus says this, we read, in verse 22, “At the time the Feast of Dedication took place.” What was the Feast of Dedication? It’s not one of the Old Testament rituals and ceremonies laid out in Leviticus or Numbers, but it is owing its origins to the intertestamental period. In 167 B.C., so in between Malachi and John the Baptist, Antiochus Epiphanes overran the temple and set up a pagan altar, conducted that abomination that causes desolation, slaughtering pigs in the temple. He overran it for three years. In 164 B.C., under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus, the Jews recaptured the temple. And when they recaptured the temple from the foreign armies, they rededicated the temple on the 25th day of Kislev, which is the lunar Jewish month that usually falls in, well, it always falls in November or usually in December. They celebrated the rededication with an eight day festival that you probably know today as Hanukkah. It’s also called the Festival of Lights, or sometimes the Feast of Dedication in Kislev, because it adopted many of the rituals from the Feast of Tabernacles. Except the Feast of Dedication was celebrated at home, it was not a pilgrimage festival.
So that’s the setting here, in winter, in November or December, to give some sort of marker for what Jesus is doing.
They come and they ask Him a question. They gather ’round Him, verse 24, “how long will you keep us in suspense?”
Now you need to know that this is not an honest, seeking question. They are not looking for an answer so they can worship. They are looking for an answer so they can pounce, so they can attack. When are you going to tell us? Okay? Because we are ready. Because they already know in their minds, at least most of them, He’s not the Christ, they think, so they’re just ready. You gonna say it? You gonna say it? Because then we have reason to arrest you. Then we have reason to kill you. So say it plainly, come clean. Are you the Christ or not?
Jesus says, well, you should have known that already. I already told you.
Now He hadn’t told them explicitly, but what He means is “all of My words, My deeds, the signs, My teaching, everything has been testifying to My messianic identity.”
So the problem, Jesus says, is not that I have failed to be clear, but that you have failed to believe.
They’re looking for a reason not to believe.
Now there’s a little verse tucked away in Jude that says “have mercy on those who doubt.” So doubt is not an unforgivable sin. I don’t even think doubt, in the right circumstances, is a sin. We have to understand that doubt is a common experience of Christians throughout the centuries and many of you probably here this morning, various intellectual quandaries, or probably even more so, existential sort of angst. How, how can there be a good God and suffering, and how do I know that God really loves me when all these things are happening in my life.
Have mercy on those who doubt.
But there’s that sort of doubt, where you have honest questions looking for answers, and then there’s the kind of doubt where you have answers looking for more questions.
This is not the honest sort of doubt. This is the “I choose to remain in doubt.” This is “I’ve already decided whatever you tell me I already don’t believe.”
Have you had conversations with people like that? There is a difference, isn’t there? The, the brother or sister who’s just really struggling, “Could you give me a good book? I’m really wrestling with this. I want to try to get some answers.” You have all sorts of patience with those people.
But then you have people that already know. “Whatever you ask me to read, I won’t like it. Whatever answer you give me right now, I know it won’t be enough. Whatever Scripture you point to, it won’t work.”
There’s the doubt that looks for answers, and there’s the doubt that looks for more and more questions.
So they say “tell us, don’t keep us in suspense… Are you the Christ?”
Not so they can worship, but so that they can kill him.
Jesus says, “The only reason you don’t see it now is because you won’t believe. The works that I do bear witness about me.”
Verse 26: “But you do not believe because you are not among My sheep.”
And then Jesus goes in in the next few verses to give one of the most remarkable expressions of, to use the anachronistic term, Reformed theology you can find anywhere. Sometimes you’re tempted to say that Jesus was the first Calvinist, but that hardly, that’s getting things out of order. No, I prefer to say that if you really understand Reformed theology, you understand Jesus. Because Jesus is not trying to anticipate some later theology, He’s simply telling what is so.
And do you notice in here, the contours of what we now understand as Reformed theology, are laid down by Jesus Christ Himself.
Verse 26: Unconditional election. “But you do not believe because you are not among My sheep.” It’s those who are chosen who will hear. We’ve already seen this from Jesus in John chapter 6, and remember there that “you cannot come unless the Father draws you, but whoever comes to Me, I will never in no ways cast out.” So don’t hear this language of “election” or “choice” or “predestination” as, as somehow suggesting that you’re going to come to Jesus and Jesus is going to say “mm, mmm, sorry, you weren’t chosen.” No, when you come, it’s because you were chosen. When you hear, and you follow the Shepherd, it’s because God has already chosen you as His sheep.
And then look at verse 27: Irresistible grace. “My sheep hear My voice and I know them, and they follow Me.” There will be that moment when God is speaking and it goes from just listening to a man drone on from his notes… God is saying something to me. The sheep hear His voice. Jesus has a word for you this morning. Jesus has something to say to you this morning. Irresistibly so. His grace comes and those who are sheep, “that’s my Master, I must follow Him.”
And verse 28: The perseverance of the saints. “I give them eternal life,” there the present possession of it, “I give them eternal life, they will never perish, no one can snatch them out of My hand.”
And then, as if that were not secure enough, that no one can snatch the sheep away from the Good Shepherd, He says “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of my Father’s hand.”
You ever worry about eternal security? I’m not talking about a mechanical view of salvation that says “well, I prayed a prayer at some point in my life, and I signed a piece of paper and somebody put it on a cross and I threw my pinecone into the fire and I raised my hand.” No, we’re not talking about those sort of mechanical “I did that and therefore I can go and live my life however I want to, say whatever I want to say, believe whatever I want to believe, be whoever I want to be, because I signed the deal.”
No, that’s not real faith. But notice here, the great promise for those who have truly been joined to Christ. Now that may be real faith, but real faith proves itself over time. And the preservation, the promise and perseverance here, is that your position in Christ, those truly joined to Him, those truly justified, those truly believing, is so secure, doubly secure. You got to go through the Son and you gotta go through the Father.
And I’m gonna put my money down on our triune God and the Spirit who intercedes for us, that nobody ever is going to snatch anyone away from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The perseverance of the saints.
Calvin says the salvation of all the elect is not less certain than the power of God is invincible.
Is God’s power invincible? Yes.
Is the salvation of the elect certain? Equally yes.
And then in verse 30 He says “I and the Father are one.” We’ve seen this before, and we’ve seen hints of it, and we’ve seen the explicit declaration of it throughout John’s Gospel, this, this ontological unity. That’s just a fancy word for “being,” that the Son and the Father are of the same God-ness, same substance. The Word was with God and the Word was God. The only begotten Son. He has made the Father known.
Well, this may be about that same sort of essence, but perhaps even more so it’s about a shared purpose and will. The works Jesus does are the works of the Father. You cannot deny Jesus is the Son of God without rejecting God as His Father. The Son and the Father are one.
Now note, we have been in this sort of festival cycle since chapter 5. We’ve seen different festivals and there Jesus gives His declaration that like the manna from the wilderness, I am the bread of life, and like the light and the Feast of Tabernacles, I am the light of the world. And here now “I’m the Good Shepherd, I’m the gate for the sheep.”
Well, now at the final encounter in this festival cycle in chapters 5 through 10, we circle back to the initial objection that they had to Jesus. They have lots of objections, but this was the beginning one. You remember in John 5:18? This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. That’s what they’ve been upset about from the beginning, now they are even enraged once more.
And so they pick up stones in verse 31 to stone Him. And you see verse 33, “They claim you’re a blasphemer because you, being a man, make yourself God.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus is not making Himself God. If anything, the reverse is true. He has humbly accepted the incarnation and took upon Himself human flesh. If anything, though we’d want to new onset this theological language as well, God has made Himself man.
D. A. Carson says “Jesus, a mere mortal, claims to be God, lining Himself up on the other side of the unbridgeable chasm that separates the transcendent, infinite Creator from His infinite and fallen creatures.”
It’s an amazing thing that Jesus is doing, to set Himself up on this side.
You know when you were kids and you played Red Rover? I’m sure if that’s not banned, it should be. Lot of concussions, lots of people in concussion protocol after playing, playing that, and you know, grabbing arms and trying to wring through and getting hung out to dry. You divide up teams and see all the team over there and as your people don’t make it through, they end up over there, and if they break through, they take you back, until suddenly it’s you and your buddy, the last two people left. This unbridgeable chasm.
Or you remember on the playground and choosing sides for, for teams, or maybe for some assignment, and your teacher would say “I want the boys over here and I want the girls over here.” Or “we’re gonna have adults versus kids, we’re going to have dads versus sons.”
Two teams. Separate sides. There is no side through which there is a greater gulf and across which there is a greater chasm, than God, Creator and humans, creatures.
And if we were to take an informal poll, I hope it wouldn’t be a hard question to ask you this morning. Okay, we got God, and we got people. We got Creator, and we got creatures. Okay? Just want you to line up which side you think you’re one.
I’m hoping that’s an easy test, and nobody’s over there.
And Jesus has the audacity to say okay. I mean, of course it didn’t quite work like this, but you imagine Him just sort of [whistle], just walking over here. “Hey, Jesus, you’re a man.” True. “Why are you on the side of God? We’re Jews, remember? We have one God, and it’s not you.” Jesus says, “you’re right, there’s one God. And the Son is not the Father, and the Father is not the Son, but the Son and the Father are one. Thank you very much. And I’ll be over here. And I also go over here.”
To bridge what seemed to be this unbridgeable chasm.
Have you noticed something in John’s Gospel? This will send you scrambling over the lunchtime and maybe, is this really so? But just check this out: God, as God, sort of a character in the story, does not appear in John’s Gospel. Except in chapter 12:28, “A voice came from heaven, I have glorified it and I will glorify it again.” That’s, that’s the only time. You don’t have God speaking from heaven, you don’t have God as a character in the story, God in a sense does not appear in the fourth Gospel. Which means this book is not so much John telling Jesus’ story as it is Jesus telling God’s story.
Here’s the story of God, who He is, what He’s like, what He’s done. The story of Jesus is the story of God, and if you want to know this God, you need to know the story of Jesus. This is the wonderful and audacious message on every page of the Gospel. You can only truly know God by knowing Jesus, but you can truly know God simply by knowing Jesus. Isn’t that audacious? And isn’t that wonderful? “I and the Father are one.” It’s essential to Jesus identity, essential to His message, essential to Christianity.
And then there’s a second affirmation: The Scripture cannot be broken.
So they want to stone Him because He is making Himself equal with God. Jesus is going to puncture their pretension, and He does so by drawing attention to their shared authority, namely the Scripture.
You see in verse 34, what is written in your Law. In verse 35 it’s called Scripture. The two are used interchangeably. What is Jesus doing here? It’s a strange argument, but it’s quite significant.
Turn in your Bibles to Psalm 82. Jesus is quoting from Psalm 82. In the Greek, it is a direct quotation from the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. [Greek words] “I said you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”
Now what is the psalmist talking about? Well, there’s a lot of different arguments, but it seems on the face of it, the simplest explanation is the best, that He is speaking about judges or kings or magistrates.
Look at the beginning of Psalm 82: “God has taken his place in the divine council, in the midst of the gods he holds judgment: How long will you judge unjustly, show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”
He’s speaking, in other words, to those rulers in Israel, to those who have authority to judge and make right judgments. And in verse 6, they are called, in some sense, gods. The ESV rightly puts a lower case “g.” No Jew would have understood that they were making some claim of their divine essence or being, but insofar as they had been given divine authority to execute judgment, they are called by this language of gods.
Jesus says those to whom the Word of God came. That language is used throughout the Bible to describe those who are bearers of the Word of God.
Luke 3:2: The Word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah. So not just recipients of it, but then bearers and executors of it.
To those whom the Word of God came. It’s thinking of those rulers, those magistrates, judges, governing authorities. They’re given this word in Hebrew, Elohim.
Now Jesus is not trying to prove His divinity from this verse. Rather, He is trying to puncture their pretensions. So follow His argument. He’s saying “look, you are hung up on that word God, because I call myself the Son of God. But here, in Scripture, these men, who verse 7 says shall fall, they, too, were called gods.”
Jesus is not trying to make a complicated argument and He’s not saying well, they, too, were deity and I’m deity like them. No, He’s not making a complicated argument for His full deity, He’s making a simple argument why they should not be ready to kill Him simply for the designation He has given Himself.
The set apart one, the consecrated one, going back to John 10, is Jesus, who was sent by the Father into the world to fulfill His mission of death, resurrection, and glorification. So time out, I know you want to kill me, but go to our own Bibles and it uses this word. So don’t kill me for just using this word, that’s Jesus’ argument.
But what I want us to notice as we close, is that parenthetical statement in verse 35: And Scripture cannot be broken.
Notice, if you’ve taken a logic class you understand how minor premises, major premises, conclusions work, to quote from Scripture is to quote from a shared authority. They don’t recognize His authority, though He said “I bear witness and the Father bears witness,” they ought to but they don’t. So He goes to an authority He knows that both sides agree to, they both agree that the Law is authoritative. They both agree in the Scriptures. And so this is not a conclusion as much as a shared assumption. They all knew this. He doesn’t even have to prove it. This is the premise that will lead to His conclusion that they should not stone Him. The shared premise is we all know that Scripture cannot be broken.
One author says it was sufficient proof of the infallibility of any sentence or phrase or clause to show that it constituted a portion of what the Jews called Scripture.
And notice Jesus is making His argument, not from what we might think of as “well, the really important Scriptures, Isaiah, the 10 commandments.”
No, this is from an obscure Psalm, a bit of a strange Psalm that’s hard to interpret, and not only that, not just from one book of the Bible, or one chapter in the Bible, or one verse in the Bible, but one word in the Bible. If you’ve ever heard the language that we believe in verbal plenary inspiration, verbal means that the Bible’s inspired not just in sort of its basic overall message, but down to the words, and plenary means all of them. We have an example of it here from Jesus Himself. One word will do the trick, from Scripture, to prove my point, Jesus says.
Because we all know Scripture cannot be broken. It’s the word “luo” in Greek. It’s the same word used in Matthew 5:19, “Whoever relaxes,” or looses, or abolishes, “one of the least of these commandments is not fit for the kingdom of heaven.” The word means to break, to nullify, to annul, to set aside. Jesus says we all know the Scriptures cannot be set aside. They cannot be loosed. They cannot be broken.
Now, yes, they can be fulfilled, so that certain provisions are fulfilled in the shadow passes away to give way for the substance, but you can never point, Jesus says, to any portion or word in Scripture and say “that has been broken.” No word of Scripture, in Jesus’ mind, can be falsified. No promise or threat can fall short of fulfillment. No statement can be guilty of error.
Jesus Himself says it. Which is why we believe in inerrancy.
I remember one time years ago I was explaining why I didn’t go to a particular seminary, and I was explaining to one of my deacons, I said “well, that seminary wouldn’t affirm inerrancy.” The deacon said “what’s inerrancy?” I said “inerrancy just means that the Bible doesn’t have any errors.” And he said “I thought that’s just what Christians believed.” I said “well, it is, it should be, but it’s not.”
But we who follow Jesus ought to affirm loudly, plainly, clearly, happily, that not a single jot or tittle of Scripture can be broken. If we say “well, the Bible’s just right in its ethical stance,” or “the Bible’s just right in the New Testament,” or “the Bible’s just right in the big picture,” then we claim the right to determine which parts of God’s revelation can be trusted and which cannot. Then we become the ones exercising authority over the Bible, instead of the Bible authoritative over us.
Either the Scripture is not all from God, or God is not always dependable. To make either statement is to affirm what is sub-Christian.
Now if you listen carefully, sometimes people will say, and it sounds very spiritual, “well, no, the final authority for us as Christians should be Christ and not the Scriptures, right? We worship Jesus. We don’t, we don’t worship ink spots on a white page. We don’t worship a book.”
Well, right, but it’s suggested than that Christ would have us accept only portions of Scripture, that that maybe comport with His life and teaching. The idea put forward by many liberal Christians, and not a few self-proclaimed evangelicals, is that if we are to worship Christ and not the Bible, then we must let Christ stand apart from the Bible and somehow over the Bible.
J. I Packer says “But who is this Christ who judges Scripture? Not the Christ of the New Testament and of history. That Christ does not judge Scripture, He obeys it and fulfills it by word and deed. He endorses the authority of the whole of it.”
He’s right. There is no Christ in Scripture who sets Himself as a judge over Scripture. If that’s the Jesus that you’ve made, a Jesus who can set you free from uncomfortable things in the Bible, then that is a Jesus of your own making. It’s nothing short of a breach of the second commandment, making God in our own image.
We see here in the most remarkable juxtaposition, that on the one hand Christ is making such astounding claims for Himself, “I and the Father are one, I’m one with the Father, of will, of purpose, of mission, of essence.” He says that about Himself, and at the very same time, that Jesus, that Son, who is one with the Father, who is God in flesh, that Jesus declares “I believe everything in Scripture.” If anyone ever on the face of the earth, we would think might say “and I now stand and exercise judgment over the Scripture,” it would be this Jesus, and yet He does nothing of the sort. He affirms what they all believed and knew together: Yes, the Scriptures cannot be broken. And if I have to make my point that you shouldn’t kill Me right now, I can go to one word in Psalm 82 to make my point.
Jesus held Scripture in the highest possible esteem. He knew His Bible intimately. He loved it deeply. He spoke the language of Scripture. He alluded to Scripture. And in the moments of His greatest trial and weakness, He quoted Scripture.
Do you and I have Scripture in our heads and in our hearts for those moments? What did Jesus do when He is tempted by the devil in the wilderness? He quotes Deuteronomy to the devil. He didn’t call out lightning bolts. He says “you know what I have? I have my Bible.” What did He do when He comes to the cross? He quotes from Psalm 22. He has the Bible. His mission was to fulfill Scripture. His teaching always upheld Scripture. His power never disrespected, disregarded, and He Himself never disagreed with a single text of Scripture. Jesus believed in the inspiration of all of it; the chronology, the miracles, the authorial ascriptions, the straightforward facts of history. He believed in keeping the spirit of the Law without minimizing the letter of the Law. He affirmed the human authorship of Scripture while at the same time bearing witness to its ultimate divine authorship. He believed the Bible was all true, all edifying, all important, and what sets Him apart from us is He also believed that it was all about Him. He believed absolutely that the Bible was from God and was absolutely free from error, so that what Scripture says, God says, and what God said is recorded infallibly in Scripture.
Listen, it is possible for us to misinterpret the Bible. What is impossible is that we might revere the Bible more deeply than Jesus did. Jesus submitted His will to the Scriptures. He committed His brain to study the Scriptures. He humbled His heart to obey the Scriptures. The Lord, God’s Son, one with the Father, our Savior, He affirmed that everything in this book would be about Him and that all of its sentences, phrases, words down to the smallest letter and the tiniest speck, that nothing in all of those specks and in all of those books in all of the Bible, could ever be broken.
You do not understand Jesus unless you know that He is one with the Father, and that He believed the Scriptures could not be broken. And you and I do not begin to understand what Christianity is all about until we understand the very same thing.
Let’s pray. Our gracious heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word, the Word made flesh, to dwell among us, to die for our sins, to be raised again, and the Word inscripturated, Your perfect full and final revelation to us. Thank you for all that we see, all that we know, all that You have given us in Christ and in this book, in the Old Testament which He knew, and in the New Testament which He authorized and sent His spirit to inspire. May we be worshipers of this one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and may we be men, women and children of this one holy inerrant book. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
