No matter which way my mind turns these days, I cannot escape the

absolutely unique and essential role that the Bible plays in God’s
purpose for the universe, and for history, and for the church, and for
Christian schools, and for our personal lives, both now and in
eternity.

“Without rightly discerning what’s revealed only

in the Bible, we cannot know the most
important realities in life.”
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Our way of thinking and feeling and acting toward the Bible,
and with the Bible, and from the Bible is decisive in whether our lives,
schools, and churches conform to God’s saving, Christ-exalting
purposes for history and for all of creation.
Think of the staggering implications for the billions of people around
the world, including most of the highest and lowest educated, most of
the rich and most of the poor — people of every tongue and tribe and
nation, men and women, young and old, who virtually never orient
what they think or feel or do around what God has revealed in the
Bible.

Without the Bible

This is staggering because, without rightly discerning what is revealed
only in the Bible, we cannot know the most important realities in life.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the true nature of God and the
beauty of his holiness.

Without the Bible, we cannot know that magnifying God’s glory is the
ultimate purpose of the universe.

Without the Bible, we cannot know that the way God has appointed
for his glory to be most fully magnified is through a people who are
supremely and eternally happy in him.
Without the Bible, we cannot know the eternal divinity of Christ, the
Son of God, and that all things were made through him and for him.

Without the Bible, we cannot know that all things that exist — from
galaxies to molecules — are held in existence by the second person of
the Trinity, the Son of God.

Without the Bible, we cannot know that the Son of God became flesh
and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ.

“If we are embarrassed by parts of the Bible, the

love of human approval over God’s approval has
begun to take root.”
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Without the Bible, we cannot know the unsearchable riches of
Christ’s achievements on the cross — his propitiation of the wrath of
God, his enduring the curse of the law, his bearing the condemnation
of the elect, his becoming sin though he knew no sin, his bearing the
weight of the iniquities of all his people, his purchasing forgiveness,
acceptance, adoption, escape from hell, entrance into eternal life, and
God’s yes to all the promises of Scripture for his people.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the way of salvation by grace

through faith as a gift of God apart from works of the law.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the almighty power of the Holy
Spirit raising us from spiritual death, and granting us new birth, and
giving us new hearts, and sealing us for God’s possession through
faith, and preserving us to the day of Christ and forever.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the true path of holiness and how
the Holy Spirit by faith works in us the fruits of righteousness that
come through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the meaning of the church with
Christ as the head of the body, and all the hosts of heaven watching as
the wisdom of God is played out in the gathering of the redeemed
from all the peoples of the world.
Without the Bible, we cannot know the meaning of marriage as a
God-designed drama of the covenant love between Christ and his
church.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the meaning of our own physical
bodies as bought with Christ’s blood for the housing of the Spirit of
God.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the dimensions of literature and

art which approximate ultimate truth.

Without the Bible, we cannot know the source and goal of science.

And without the Bible, we cannot know how to love anyone fully —
that is, in a way that does them everlasting good.

We can know none of these things in a saving way — that is, in a way
that does anyone, ourselves or others, any lasting good — apart from
rightly discerning what is revealed in the Bible. And therefore, all the
aims of communication, apart from a right handling of the Bible,
come to naught.

Therefore, more and more, it has seemed to me that the future God-
glorifying faithfulness, and Spirit-dependent obedience, and Christ-
exalting fruitfulness in our churches, and in our schools and
institutions, and in our lives, depend on a certain way of thinking and
feeling about the Bible.

So my ten aspirations for Christian communicators, whether pastors,

preachers, writers, teachers, editors, parents, or friends, are all
formulated in relation to that — our thinking and our feeling about
the Bible.

Hearts That Hear

Someone may ask — indeed I ask — “But don’t deep heart realities of
humility, and spiritual life, and submission to God, and sensitivity to
spiritual reality precede and enable a right handling of the Bible? And
shouldn’t that be the goal of Christian schools and ministries — to
cultivate a kind of heart and mind that creates the humility and
submissiveness that then is yielded to everything the Bible teaches?”
“We cannot escape the absolutely unique and
essential role that the Bible plays in God’s
purpose for the universe.”
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Certainly, we should have a commitment to those deeper realities.
But here’s the catch: the only reason we know that such realities must
exist before the Bible can be known and loved and handled as it ought
to be is that the Bible teaches us that they must.

The Bible teaches us that something deeper than the Bible makes it
possible for the human heart to submit to the Bible. Therefore, how
will we ever articulate and justify the goal to pursue something in the
heart deeper than the Bible without using the Bible?

This means that among our aspirations for Christian writing and
preaching and teaching must be that we would handle the Bible in
ways that make it likely for us to find in the Bible everything we need
to find there in order to use the Bible rightly.

Ten Aspirations
So let me suggest ten aspirations, or aims, for Christian
communicators as they relate to how we think and feel and act
toward the Bible.

1. Embrace Inerrancy
Let us make it our aim that every pastor and teacher, every faculty
member and administrator, every writer and speaker will give joyful
and hearty assent to the complete truthfulness — that is, inerrancy —
of the Bible in all that it teaches.

2. Be Unashamed
Let us make it our aim that we will be unashamed of everything that
the Bible describes as the will of God as it was or is to be done when
God appointed for it to be done. For example, unashamed of God’s
command in the book of Joshua that all the Canaanites be killed.
Unashamed of his permission of polygamy and divorce and slavery in
the Old Testament. Unashamed of his command that Isaiah walk
around naked. Unashamed of the inspired writers’ holy hatred of
wicked people — in the Psalms, for example. Unashamed of the
creation of the world six thousand years ago, if that’s what the text
teaches. Unashamed of the command that spiritually qualified men,
rather than women, be the elders of churches and the heads of two-
parent families. Unashamed that there is only one way of salvation —
through knowing and believing the gospel of Christ. Unashamed of
the teaching that those who practice homosexuality or greed or
drunkenness or reviling or swindling, and are unrepentant, will suffer
eternally in hell.

For if we are embarrassed by parts of the Bible, the love of human

approval over God’s approval has begun to take root. And this root is
the source of much defection from biblical truth, especially in the
academic life (John 5:44).

3. Pursue the Authors’ Intentions

Let us aim to be committed to all the teaching of the Bible in such a
way that congregants and readers and students are equipped to pay
detailed attention to its words and phrases and clauses and logic, and
to penetrate through these human instruments to the authors’
mental, emotional, and behavioral intentions, and to the great
realities that they are trying to communicate.

4. Build a Biblical Vision of Reality

Let us aim to build teams that reflect so deeply on the realities of
Scripture in relationship to all other observations in all other
disciplines that students and readers are enabled to see the profound
relevance of the biblical vision of reality for everything they think and
study, so that there will be no embarrassment whatsoever that we
relate everything to Scripture, and test everything by Scripture,
because we have discovered that God’s revelation about the world can
never be superficial or irrelevant.

5. Speak with Precision

Let us aim to handle the Scriptures with such precision, and care, and
insight, and spiritual illumination, and experiential authenticity, that
we do not default to speaking in vague generalities about God’s will
and God’s way, but actually are able to point to specific verses in the
Bible where glorious reality is revealed and where the will of God and
the ways of God are made explicit, and can do so in such a way that
we happily cite the very words of Scripture with little concern
whether we are criticized of proof texting. In other words, let it stand
as a continual warning that for the last hundred years those who
reject the reality behind Scripture have done so while continuing to
use Christian language, but avoiding precise textual citations.

6. Love the Languages

Let us aim to put a high premium in our pastoral training on the
mastering of Greek and Hebrew to the extent that future preachers
have sufficient confidence that when they interpret the Greek and
Hebrew text of the Old and New Testaments, they are extracting the
author’s intention, and are in touch with the reality God is revealing
behind and through the text. Let us never allow the pragmatic
pressure for pastors to be more immediately helpful to diminish our
confidence that the teaching of Greek and Hebrew will, in fact, make
them even more helpful in the long run in the church of Christ.

7. Cultivate Habits of Heart

“The Bible teaches us that something deeper

than the Bible makes it possible for the heart to
submit to the Bible.”
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Let us aim to make the Bible so foundational and so pervasive in all
aspects of our college and seminary curricula that it is never seen to
be the purview of only one department, like biblical studies, rather
than being essential to every department, such that students really do
perceive that the serious study of Scripture deepens their capacities
in six habits of heart: observation, understanding, evaluation, feeling,
application, and expressing. Let us seek to make the Bible so
prominent and so pervasive and so profoundly relevant in dealing
with every kind of subject matter that students grow in their
confidence that what can be known only through the Bible enhances
and deepens and clarifies and empowers everything they learn from
other sources.

8. Celebrate the Relevance

Let us aim to handle the Bible in such a way that the Bible will always
stand out to those who read what we write, and hear what we say, as a
source of utterly timely, relevant, and indispensable divine revelation
concerning the world we live in. Let us never give the impression that
this Book is somehow dated, or passé, or irrelevant, but in fact is
brimming with the kind of human, historical, cultural, social,
psychological, relational wisdom that goes deeper, and lasts longer,
than the passing trends of all the humanities and social and physical
sciences.

9. Display Contagious Esteem

Let us aim to teach and explain the Bible in such a way, and live the
Bible in such a way, as to encourage and equip and empower future
pastors and teachers and writers to communicate in a way that those
who hear them will recognize their highest esteem for the authority
and wisdom and value of the Bible, and will be thankful, and even
amazed, at the treasures that they share from Scripture for the living
of the Christian life with all its joys and sorrows.

10. Pray Earnestly and Continually

Let us aim to cultivate an ethos of earnest and continual prayer for
the God-given humility and illumination that not only opens us to the
deepest and richest meaning of what the Bible teaches, but also
enables us to see the self-authenticating glory of God in and through
the text, which provides the foundation of our unshakable confidence
in the divine origin and authority and universal relevance of the
Bible.

If God would be pleased, in his mercy and power, to fulfill these aims
in the years to come, I believe that the God-glorifying faithfulness,
and Spirit-dependent obedience, and Christ-exalting fruitfulness of
our churches and ministries and academic institutions would exceed
all our expectations.