Holy Scripture

Good Morning!

I want to thank you for your kind words after last week’s sermon. It has been an interesting week. As you may remember, our son Andrew came in for a visit and vacation time. On Monday, we traveled to Morgantown so he could purchase a new car. The air conditioning was out in the salesman’s end of the building. And, as sometimes happened, the car Andy wanted and the car he could afford were at odds, so we left to return to Parkersburg. Traveling through Clarksburg at dusk, we found out why God had denied Andy the new car. I was in the lead and Andy was following me a few hundred yards back. There was a flurry of traffic, a couple cars came flying and weaving through traffic past me, I dodged, and eventually got free. About that time, we got a call from Andy – “I’m okay and the lady is also okay.”

It seems Andy had been in the left lane, she had merged on, and then decided to merge left again, but Andy was in her blind spot. She bounced off him, and gave his blue car some white racing stripes and a bit of a crease. She was nice, we were nice, and the Clarksburg policeman was nice. We made a couple of new friends. Thanks to God, the damage was to Andy’s old car rather than to a brand new car. God knows best, doesn’t He?

But the week was a good time with Andy. We played chess, talked books and we talked scripture. And it reminded me of when I was 6 years old, and my mother took me to the town library in St. Marys.

At that time, the library was on the third floor of the old Illar theater. You walked up two very long flights of wooden steps and then into a fantastic room. The floor was polished hardwood, with the wax of fifty years thick on the planks. You were greeted by Mrs Klein, a thin ancient woman who must have been around 50 at the time. She later became my second grade teacher for a while. And around you, there were books, and books, and more books. Here were wondrous stories. Here was the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of centuries. Here we were on the third floor of an old, rickety wooden building with a single exit in a room filled with dry fuel ready to catch fire from the open bulbs hanging from the ceiling!

That’s why the county moved the library a couple of years later to a nice new brick-and-glass one-story building. And I continued to visit the library once every week or two. I remember checking out one book in 1966 or so. The book was called, “1970” and it had predictions of the great things that we’d have in 1970, like video telephones. Over the years, I’d remember that prediction over and over until it finally became true in the last five years as our smart phones have allowed us finally to see the person we’re talking to.

Eventually, I went to the University in Morgantown and had the chance to explore the literally millions of books in that grand library’s stacks. You know, what is amazing to me is that each and every book written took up several months at least of a man or a woman’s time. The authors thought it was so important to spend all that time writing or typing a story, or a set of instructions, or telling a history. And so you ended up after those months with “The Wizard of Oz”, the first full book I ever read other than Dick and Jane and Doctor Seuss. Or a man would write “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Or another would write “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Or still another person would decide to write “The 1987 Ford F150 Repair Guide.” At least we’ve had typewriters and word processors and computers, and cheap paper and ink and printing presses and printers to help us write and publish books over the last hundred or so years.

It wasn’t that way back in Biblical times. At the time of Jesus, to make the parchment that would be written on, you began with a calf. The calf was killed and skinned, and the thin, smooth, white leather of the underbelly was stretched and dried, then soaked in water and stretched and dried a few more times. Usually, this was a six-month process before the leather parchment was ready for ink. And the ink was expensive, hand-made usually by the scribe. Furthermore, there were highly paid professional scribes employed by the authors, for mistakes were very expensive. In general, the material and labor to produce a book the size of our Bible was at least the equivalent of $100-150 thousand of today’s dollars. One…single…copy. And this remained the price until the printing press arrived in the late fourteen hundreds.

And because of this, authors were very, very careful what they had written for them, for extra words were expensive to write, expensive in the space they took up, and expensive to copy. And so, when Matthew authored his Gospel, he thought very carefully about what he wanted to say before having that scribe come over to put pen to parchment. You can be sure that Matthew thought and prayed diligently, asking the Holy Spirit to advise him in everything said. Then Matthew told the scribe what to put onto the parchment. And after some time, the parchment was rolled up into a scroll. And that is how the original documents we call Holy Scripture were produced, with the Old Testament almost totally written in Hebrew with a bit of Aramaic, and the New Testament written in Greek.

As near as we can tell, all of the writers of the New Testament were men who originally came from the lands between modern day Israel up through Turkey. The individual letters and Gospels were written in that area and Greece between the late 30’s and roughly the year 95, beginning with Galatians and finishing up with Revelation. Then, people began to carefully hand-copy them. We have a fragment of the Gospel of John that dates from around the year 110, and several complete books of the New Testament from before 150. We have two almost complete Bibles that date from 250 AD, and thousands of fragments, individual scrolls, and sermons from the time. In fact, it has been estimated that the complete Bible could be recreated just from the sermons and sermon fragments we have from this time.

Around 1530, the reformers of Western Europe, such as Martin Luther and John Wycliff, began to translate the Bible into local languages, such as German and English. And today, we have dozens of English language translations, all of which have their advantages and their disadvantages. That’s why I’ll sometimes use one translation and sometimes use another translation. All have their advantages and all have their disadvantages. If I really want to see what a New Testament passage means, I’ll go back and check the Greek version.

Now with all of this in mind, knowing what was going to happen, Jesus was speaking at the shore of the lake of Galilee, a freshwater lake about 6 miles across located in northern Israel. The crowds were so large, Jesus climbed into a fishing boat and spoke from the boat and He told them this parable, this story: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. 4 As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. 6 But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. 9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

Now you might have listened to this that day and turned to your neighbor and said, “What’s He talking about?” So turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor!” “What’s He talking about?”

So Jesus explained it for us. He said 18 “Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: 19 When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. 20 The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. 21 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. 22 The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. 23 But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

So Jesus is talking about “the message about the kingdom”, which we can generalize and say that this is Holy Scripture. When people hear Holy Scripture, the condition of their heart and their personality largely determines how effective Holy Scripture is with us. We can be confused by the meaning – and so Satan encourages us to just forget it. We can receive it with joy, but if we are shallow people and don’t follow up, the Scripture has little lasting effect, with us returning to our old ways when tough times come. Or our focus upon our worries and our money will choke out the Scripture, making us forget it. But we can have an open, willing heart, having the self-discipline to follow up and practice what we find in Scripture, and then we will find that Scripture effects a mighty change in us for the better.

Scripture can change us for the better if we follow with it.

But what makes these 66 books of the Bible so much more powerful than all those other millions of books in our libraries?

Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16 and 17 that “16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

God-breathed. Some translations use the word “inspired”, which means “in spirited” In the ancient Greek, the word pneuma could be replaced by any of three

English words: Spirit, breath, or wind. The Greek did not distinguish between the words. Holy Spirit, Breath of God, or the Wind of God. They are all the same. You can swap the English phrases at will.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Now hold this thought about Scripture being God-breathed for a minute.

Today, there are essentially three ways that people look at the Bible. One view is that the Bible is just another old book, written by men a couple thousand or more years ago, and you take it just like any other collection of stories written at that time. Yet the Bible claims it is not just a book, but is THE Book.

At the other extreme are the people who believe that God wrote the Bible or dictated it word-for-word to the men who wrote it. Unfortunately, this word-for-word view leads us to questions about what we should do when we see the phrase “the sun set” and we know that the sun doesn’t really set but the earth rotates us away from the sun so the sun only APPEARS to set. Besides, what do we do with the style differences between different writers.

And then, in the middle, are those who take Paul at his word. All Scripture is inspired by God.

This does not mean that God dictated the Bible. Instead, the Holy Spirit nudged the writers, urging Matthew to tell this story and not that story, to emphasize one point and not another point. The Spirit whispered to John to write in a totally different style and cover different stories than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But each writer held to his own style. In some places, Paul even says explicitly, “I have no command from the Lord, but I say” do such-and-such, implying that Paul prayed but the Spirit did not give Paul advice on a particular issue.

We believe that the Holy Spirit inspired the original writings in the original languages using the idiom of the day, which may have changed by the time we translated the Scripture to English thousands of years later. So for example, at one point, Jesus refers to King Herod as a “fox”, and we might think that means Jesus thinks Herod is crafty, but in the idiom of the day, the way of speaking at the time Jesus spoke, a “fox” was considered to be a lot like we might think of a chihuahua – a little, noisy, irritating critter. Jesus was saying, in essence, tell King Herod, that little chihuahua such-and-such. And understanding this takes some study.

And so the 66 books of the Bible, which were written over a period of about 1700 years by a large number of different authors, in different places, all tell the same basic story. The story is of a God who loves us deeply but has integrity and standards He asks us to follow, a God who gives us many chances, a God who loved us so much that He sent His Son as a sacrifice for us that we might be able to come home to God’s love. This is what we find in Holy Scripture, and it is only because of the guidance of the Holy Spirit that this Scripture is so powerful a force for good change in our lives.

So, going back to how we receive Scripture and how we make sure that our heart has good soil to receive Scripture. The best ways I have found is to pray before reading or listening to Scripture, and I have put this prayer in our bulletin today. You might want to snip it out of your bulletin and put it into your Bible.

Holy Father, This is Your Word for my life at this time and in this place. Today I am a new creation in Christ, and I believe that He has a Purpose for my life. Open my heart to the working of Your Word and Your Holy Spirit, that I may be transformed into Your new creation. Amen

One final thing. When you choose a Bible, look most of all for a Bible that you can read and understand. You might find a study Bible is useful, for it has many extra notes that explain the idioms and the history and people of the Bible. Don’t be afraid to make notes in your Bible – just as well-worn hoes and rakes and wheelbarrows are the signs of a good garden, a well-worn and marked up Bible is a sign of a soul that is becoming cleaner and neater over the years as that scripture flows into our heart improving the soil like in a good garden.

Father, I pray for these people in these churches. Ancient Gardener, your holy word is planted in our hearts as good seed in fertile soil. So nurture us
that we may bear fruit abundantly. Pour down your grace and Holy Spirit upon all the people here, that they may do your will. May the soil of their hearts prove to be a wonderful and fertile place for your scripture, your word to take root and grow, becoming fruitful in their lives and the lives of those friends, neighbors, and family around them. I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Remember: Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. The seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”