Well do please take a copy of the holy Scriptures in your hands and turn with me to 2 Peter, chapter 1. If you’re using one of our church Bibles, you can find that on page 1018. We conclude our consideration of this first chapter of the letter this morning and you will remember that Peter has been urging upon us the duty of growing in Christian maturity. Growing in Christian maturity.
And at the heart of Peter’s vision of how that takes place in our lives is an ever deepening knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, which in turn comes about through an ever deepening acquaintance with the Word of God. And that’s why, as we saw last time beginning in verses 12 through 18, Peter turns his attention at the end of this chapter to the nature and the authority and the reliability of the Bible. If the Bible is the key to knowing Jesus, and so growing in Christian maturity, then we need to know and trust and cherish and obey the Bible more and more. And so in verses 12 through 18, Peter demonstrated the authority of the apostolic Word now contained in the New Testament. It’s not a collection of cleverly devised myths, he told us. It is, rather, eyewitness testimony, reliably interpreted and applied by those who were there, firsthand, who saw and touched and heard and were changed by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
And now this time, as we turn our attention to verses 19 through 21, Peter is going to add to that earlier treatment of the authority of Scripture with an even fuller account of the character and the nature of the Word of God. And let me say, I’m not sure that it is really possible to overstate how important this passage is for getting our thinking straight about what kind of book the Bible is. We have to get this stuff bolted into place in our minds if we’re going to get the most out of the Word of God. So with that said, let’s look at the passage together just for a moment and I’ll try and outline Peter’s message in verses 19 through 21 so that we’ll have some sense of where we’re going. First of all in verse 19, I want you to see how Peter teaches us about the infallibility or the complete trustworthiness or the reliability of Scripture; the infallibility of Scripture. Then in 20 and 21, he addresses the inspiration of Scripture that stands underneath its infallibility. It is infallible because it is inspired. It is breathed out by God. And then finally we’ll go back to verse 19 and think about the implications of Scripture. If this is the kind of book that we have in our hands, so what? What should that do in our hearts and lives? So there’s our outline – the infallibility, the inspiration, and the implications of holy Scripture.
Before we unpack all of that together, let’s stop and pray and then we’ll read the passage. Let us pray.
Lord our God, we come crying out to You for Your help to give us understanding, to give us faith, to receive the truth, to meet with Christ Himself as He addresses us in His Word. We know that we wander in the darkness. Shine the lamp of Scripture light into the dark places and guide us back again to the Savior, for we ask this in His name. Amen.
Let’s begin our reading in the twelfth verse, though as I say, we will focus on verses 19 through 21. Second Peter chapter 1 at verse 12. This is the Word of God:
“Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. I think it right, as long as I am in this body, to stir you up by way of reminder, since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me. And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.
For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. 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.”
This is the Word of Almighty God.
The Infallibility of Scripture
Trust is thin on the ground these days, isn’t it? A 2019 Pew Research survey found that, “About half of Americans, 49%, link the decline in interpersonal trust to a belief that people are not as reliable as they used to be. Many ascribe shrinking trust to a political culture they believe is broken and spawns suspicion, even cynicism about the ability of others to distinguish fact from fiction.” According to the survey, “Some see fading trust as a sign of cultural sickness and national decline. Some also tie it to what they perceive to be increased loneliness and excessive individualism.” I think we all know instinctively, don’t we, that a society without trust is tragically broken and dangerously dysfunctional. We just can’t navigate life without trust.
And in our passage this morning, 2 Peter chapter 1:19-21, Peter actually is calling us as Christians to a life of trust, but it’s not a trust founded upon naive optimism about human nature or about political solutions. It is a life of trust founded upon the reliability of God’s Word to us in holy Scripture. Peter’s first readers, you will remember, were under siege by false teachers and false teaching. At the core of the false teachers’ strategy for leading his first readers astray was an attempt to undermine their trust in the Scriptures. “Don’t trust the Bible. Trust us!” That’s what they were saying. “The apostles, you know, they were peddling cleverly devised myths. The prophets, they got it wrong. Their words are merely a matter of their own interpretation. It’s speculative. You just can’t trust them.” That’s what the false prophets, the false teachers were saying. “It’s all just their own interpretation. Don’t follow them; follow us.”
And so here in the second half of chapter 1, Peter tackles that challenge head on. As we saw in verses 12 through 18, he reminded them that the apostolic message was reliable because it was the testimony of eyewitnesses who were there, whose testimony can be verified or falsified. And now in 19 through 21, he’s going to build on his defense of the Bible by teaching us more about its character. And the first thing, as I said, the first thing he insists upon is the infallibility of Scripture. Look at verse 19, please. “And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention.” Focus on the phrase, “the prophetic word more fully confirmed.” Do you see that phrase in the text in verse 19? It is referring, of course, to the prophetic word of the Old Testament scriptures that promised a coming Messiah, not only to be a conquering King but to be a suffering Savior too. These are the scriptures that spoke about Jesus in His divine and human natures. Born of a virgin; the root of Jesse. The Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. They spoke of Him as one whose appearance would be marred beyond recognition, upon whom the Lord would lay the iniquities of us all. He would be the one, the Scriptures said, who would cry, “My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me?” And yet, they would also say of Him that His bones would not see corruption in the grave. He would be a high priest in the order of Melchizedek. He would be the Son of David, the great King who would reign on David’s throne forever and of the increase of whose kingdom and of His government there would be no end. The Lord would have Him sit at His right hand until He makes His enemies a footstool for His feet. He would be a prophet like Moses who would bring the Word of the Lord to us.
And now, Peter is saying, now since we were with Jesus Christ in His first coming and we heard His words and we saw His deeds and we watched His ministry, we saw Him obey the will of God and submit to the horrors of the cross and die for our sin and rise on the third day, now, he says, “this ancient prophetic word we know at last has been fulfilled.” And so in the fulfillment of the prophetic word in the Lord Jesus Christ we have the Scriptures more fully confirmed. It’s not that he had no confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures before, you understand, but now that the stone has been rolled away and Jesus has risen and ascended to glory, now, now, Peter says we have an unshakable confirmation that God’s Word can be trusted. In fact, Peter is essentially validating the utter reliability of the whole Bible – both the Old and the New Testaments here, isn’t he? Both testaments. The Old Testament that pointed to and promised Christ’s coming and the New Testament in which Christ fulfilled the Old – each are confirmed, made sure, verified and validated by the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Augustine famously put it this way. He said, “The New is in the Old concealed and the Old is in the New revealed.” The New is in the Old concealed. The Old is in the New revealed. That’s Peter’s point. It means that each part of Scripture verifies and demonstrates the veracity of the other. I think Peter would, “Amen,” wholeheartedly these words from the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith which says of the Bible, “The heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts and the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies and the entire perfection, thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God.” Scripture, in other words, is self-attesting. It proves itself to be what it claims to be – the infallible, inerrant, reliable, trustworthy Word of the living God.
How do you know you can trust this book? How do you know you can trust it? Peter’s answer is because the virgin conceived and bore and Son and they called His name, “Jesus” as the prophets foretold because zeal for His Father’s house consumed Him as the Scriptures said, because the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world long prophesied has come at last. He was indeed pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that has brought us peace, and by His wounds we are healed. You can trust the Bible, Peter says, because in Jesus, the God who makes promises has kept them. In Jesus, He has kept His promises. All the promises of God are, “Yes” and “Amen” in Him. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is Peter’s apologetic defense of the total trustworthiness of holy Scripture. You can bank on it. The infallibility of Scripture.
The Inspiration of Scripture
And then secondly, and really providing the theological foundations for the infallibility of Scripture, Peter goes on to speak about the inspiration of Scripture. The infallibility. Now, the inspiration of Scripture. Look down at verse 20 and notice carefully how Peter begins verse 20. We are to pay attention to the Word, he says, “knowing this first of all.” Don’t skip over that phrase. Here, Peter is saying are the convictional lenses you must get in place through which we are to attend to the Scriptures. This is key; this is vital. This is what you need to know as supremely important. Know this first of all if you are going to get from the book what God has put in there for you.
If you’ve ever had to build a complicated Lego toy with your children, you’ll know how easy it is to miss a step or maybe to misread the diagram. It’s not always that clear. And you don’t realize you’ve done it until maybe five, six, ten steps further down the line when you’re trying to put the bigger pieces together and they don’t fit. Now you’ve got to back up and dismantle it and figure out where you went wrong along the way. It can be very frustrating. Peter is saying we mustn’t miss this step. We must get this building block firmly in place in our thinking about the Bible first of all. This is step one in the construction project of understanding Christian truth. And if you don’t have this in place, you’re going to run into all kinds of trouble as you seek to construct your understanding of what it means to be a child of God and a follower of Jesus Christ several steps later on. Know this first of all, he says. This is the first big piece that you need to get into place.
Well what is it that we are to know first of all? Notice how he makes his point negatively in verses 20 and 21. “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man.” The prophets who spoke about the coming of Messiah were not putting their own spin on things, you see. The words of Isaiah the prophet do not represent his own interpretation of his personal religious experiences and visions. The book of Jeremiah is not the record of the prophet’s private religious understanding of the times in which he lived. No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation, Peter says. And he is insistent on that point. Isn’t he? He restates it, doubles down on it again in verse 21. The origin of the prophetic word now recorded in Scripture cannot be located, he says, in the will of the prophet himself. “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man.”
So Daniel – think about Daniel in Babylon – he did not yawn and stretch as he climbed out of his bed one Saturday morning in Babylon and think to himself over, you know, coffee and bagels, “What will I do today? Let me see…I know, a spot of prophecy will really do the trick.” That’s not how it went down. The Bible is much more than a collection of aspirational and philosophical musings arising in the fertile soil of the Hebrew religious imagination.
No, the Bible is something else altogether. Look at verse 21. “No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” They were carried along, or even driven along by the Holy Spirit. He governed and directed them in the words they said in the sentences that they wrote. The Greek verb, “that carried along,” is “phero.” Now the English word, “ferry,” is Germanic; it’s not Greek in its origin. There is no etymological connection between them at all, but I like the similarity of the sound – “phero” and “ferry” – even the similarity of meaning, because I think it actually, rather helpfully, illustrates and depicts what Peter is saying here. Peter is saying the authors of Scripture were carried like cars on a ferry across a sea. They were carried along. “Phero” – ferried along so that God, the Holy Spirit, brought them in every word that they wrote, infallibly and certainly, to His desired destination.
The structure of the Greek sentence here also is helpful and the emphasis falls on some interesting places. Let me venture a very wooden translation that I hope will convey the point. Look at the end of verse 21. Peter says literally, “by the Holy Spirit carried along spoke from God men.” Now I know it sounds a bit like Yoda with the verb in the wrong place and the subjects and the objects all mixed up, but that’s the original order of the Greek sentence. And seeing that actually helps you capture the balance and the coherence of the Biblical teaching about the inspiration of Scripture. On the one hand, there is the insistence that it is a message whose origin is solely in God. Men spoke from God and they did so under the governance and superintendence of the Holy Spirit. They were driven to this, carried to this, ferried inexorably to this destination; shut up to these words in that moment by the Spirit of God.
And yet somehow, Peter says, throughout that process they were never reduced to mere automata, as if their humanity was somehow suspended and they were rendered little better than mindless meat machines, you know, on which the Holy Spirit pounded out His message to the world. Not at all. “By the Holy Spirit carried along spoke from God men.” There’s an emphasis on their real, true humanity so that when you read their words you can identify the unique style and cadence of each individual author. Peter doesn’t sound like John. James didn’t write like Paul. You can see the distinctions and differences of each individual mind at work, their logic giving direction in composition in the selection of their sources. In the development of their arguments, the language and the customs and the cultures of people from different moments in time, from Abraham to Isaiah, from Malachi to Matthew, each producing different literary genres, addressing different questions and needs. All of them find a place in this amazing collection of 66 books. Peter is teaching us that every word selected, every editorial decision that is made, every argument that is advanced on every page of every book of the whole Bible was so governed by the Spirit of God that what is truly the word of men, human authors, is also and at the same time exactly and unerringly the very Word of God Himself. So that with confidence we can say with the apostle Paul about the 66 books of the Scriptures in the words of 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is breathed out by God.” It is the Word of God.
And that glorious fact, that unshakable foundation, provides the unshakable foundation on which our confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture rests. Titus 1 verse 2 says very simply, “God never lies.” God never lies. And so here are the only options when it comes to the Bible. First, either this is God’s Word but God is a liar and that’s why this book is full of errors. That’s a monstrous idea. Or secondly, this book is full of errors and is not God’s Word. But Peter would ask very quickly, “How do you account for the Lord Jesus Christ, for His life and death, His ministry, His resurrection, the empty tomb – how do you account for that?” Or finally and thirdly, this book is what it claims to be; what the life, death and resurrection of Jesus proves it to be – the utterly reliable Word of God for all people in all places. Those are really the only choices with regards to this book. And the last option of the three, brothers and sisters, is the only one that makes any sense of the facts and is itself the teaching of the Scriptures regarding itself. This is the book of God and its every word is the Word of God.
The Implications of Scripture
The infallibility of Scripture and the inspiration of Scripture, and now finally, look back at verse 19 and let’s consider the implications of Scripture. If it is what it claims to be, what we know it to be as Christians, well then so what? Look at verse 19. “We have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” What should you do with this book if it is both inspired and infallible? If it is the Word of God and utterly reliable, what should you do with it? What does Peter say? He says you should pay attention to it. “Pay attention,” he says.
How many hours do we spend riveted to Facebook and Twitter, Fox News or CNN or ESPN? We hang on every word, don’t we? We know baseball stats and football trivia, we know who put which ball through which apparatus using what implement on which day – going back years. And yet in these pages, the God who hung the stars is addressing us. He’s talking to us. And we can’t keep our eyes open. We can’t keep our mind engaged for more than a few minutes at a time. There are whole sections of this book, I suspect, which for many of us are no-go areas. We just don’t know what to do with them. We never read them; we don’t strive to understand them. Listen, God Himself is revealed here. He speaks to us here. He invites us to know Him here. He brings Jesus to us here. Here, He cleanses our consciences, He comforts our fears, He counsels our minds, He strengthens our faith, He guides our steps, He equips us for service, He imparts His grace to us in this book. And we neglect it as too hard, too complicated, too dull. “You would do well to pay attention”, Peter says. Listen, anything less is a scandal. Isn’t it? What hurt we do our own souls by our neglect of the book of God.
Don’t forget what a gift you are holding in your hand. It is, as Peter says, “a lamp in a dark place.” Isn’t that a beautiful metaphor? How many times have you gotten up in the middle of the night, parents, and you whack your toe on a chair leg, or worse, you stand on a child’s toy that lights up and flashes and starts squawking and wakes everyone in the house up? That is life without the Word, Peter is saying – bumbling around in the dark, crashing into things, tripping over things, stumbling and falling again and again. And God has a flashlight to lighten your way. Why in the world wouldn’t you use it? Psalm 119:105, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” It is a lamp shining in a dark place. Do you want to fall? Really? Do you want to fall? Keep the Book closed. But if you want to know the way of life and walk in it, here is the only lamp that will illuminate your steps. “O for a closer walk with God,” Cowper sang. Remember, “O for a closer walk with God, a calm and heavenly frame; a light that shines upon the road that leads me to the Lamb.” If God were to answer that prayer, that cry of your heart, where would the light shine from that leads you back to Jesus, that restores your soul? Only here. Only here. Pay attention to the Word. Do not neglect the Word.
Not only will it give you light, Peter says – look at what else he says in verse 19. It will preserve you and keep you till Jesus comes. Isn’t that amazing? That’s what this Book will do! It will keep you and preserve you till Jesus comes – “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” The morning star, you might know, is Venus. It shines brightest just before the dawn. The morning star presages – you know when you see the morning star, sunrise is just around the corner; it’s coming. The night is over at long last. The Word of God, Peter says, makes the morning star of spiritual confidence and assurance and hope shine brightly in our hearts while we wait for the full light of the coming dawn of the return of Jesus Christ our Lord.
The dawn of the day that he is speaking of is the dawn of new creation. The dawn of happiness and sinlessness and unending delight in the presence of the exalted Jesus as take our places in the great congregation of the redeemed with bodies made new and fitted for eternity. The bright dawn of that day is coming soon, Peter is saying. How will you hang on until it dawns? You do it by paying attention to the Word. You do it by looking where the lamp shines in the darkness points you. You hang on by hearing Christ speak grace into your heart in the Scriptures. What place does the Bible have in your daily routine, really? How neglectful have you been of the Word of God? Are you bumbling around in the dark? Open the Book. God Himself will meet you here.
The infallibility of Scripture. It’s true, utterly reliable. We know it because Jesus rose from the dead as the prophets said that He would. You can trust this Book. Do you trust this Book? And in the infallibility and the inspiration of Scripture upon which it rests. God is talking in this Book. And so the implications – we would do well to pay attention to it, wouldn’t we? It shows us the way, after all. It illumines our sin-darkened understanding. It keeps us from falling. It preserves us till the promised dawn arrives at last. Brothers and sisters, may God help us, may God help us love the Bible because in it He speaks and we love to hear His voice. May God make it so. Let’s pray together.
Our Father, we bow before You and we ask for Your forgiveness for our neglect of Your Word. How foolish it seems to us in light of the passage we’ve been studying, how much harm we do to ourselves, hurting ourselves by its neglect. Show us the wonder that we hold in our hands. Give us some sense of electricity as we hear the voice of God who said, “Let there be light,” shining into our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Help us, please, O God, in repentance now today, to pay attention to Your Word, not only in this moment but in the days and weeks and years ahead till the day dawns and the shadows flee away. For Jesus’ sake, amen.