True Believers Must Acknowledge the Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture
Since obedience is the foundation of all godly living and ministry, it is important that we as believers have a solid understanding of how God wants us to live our lives in order to bring glory and honor to Him.
We find truth in the pages of Scripture. Scripture is God’s story, and God’s law for mankind. It’s how He desires that we should live here on Earth, and how we should interact with Him and be His people.
Jesus put a tremendous emphasis on Scripture. He believed that it was perfect, He taught that it was perfect, and He lived a perfect life to fulfill it. When we call upon Jesus for salvation, we put our hope and trust in Him and hope with confidence that we will be with Him in Heaven at the end when He judges the world.
For this faith to be grounded in truth, we must have a view of Scripture that holds it as perfect and inerrant because Jesus held it as perfect and inerrant. If we’re going to be His disciples we need to think the way He thought and see Scripture the way He did.
Notes and Scripture Passages
Key Scripture Verses – Authority of Scripture
Additional Scriptures used in this session – Authority of Scripture
Excerpts from the book The Inerrant Word, by John MacArthur
“Jesus and his apostles never took a critical position toward the Old Testament, but accepted its teaching without any reservation or qualification—and not just its religious-ethical teaching! Jesus attributed Isaiah 6 to Isaiah (Matt. 13:14); Psalm 110 to David (Matt. 22:44); the prophecy cited in Matthew 24:15 to Daniel; and the law to Moses (John 5:46). He repeatedly cited and unconditionally believed the historical narratives of the Old Testament: the creation of human beings (Matt. 19:4–5), Abel’s murder (Matt. 23:35), the flood (Matt. 24:37–39), the history of the Patriarchs (Matt. 22:32; John 8:56), the destruction of Sodom (Matt. 11:23; Luke 17:28–33), the burning bush (Luke 20:37), the serpent in the wilderness (John 3:14), the manna (John 6:32), the histories of Elijah and Naaman (Luke 4:25–27), and the story of Jonah (Matt. 12:39–41). To Jesus, the absolute authority of Scripture embraced every single word, including dots and iotas (Matt. 5:18; Luke 16:17; John 10:35; Gal. 3:16). Of particular significance is Jesus’s unequivocal statement, “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:34–35). In this passage, Jesus is quoting from Psalm 82. We do not need to make a final judgment as to whom these “gods” were; they may have been Israel’s judges, angelic powers, or Israel at the time of the giving of the law. 12 What is abundantly clear is that the words “Scripture cannot be broken” mean, writes D. A. Carson, “that the Scripture cannot be annulled or set aside or proved false (cf. Mark 7:13). Conceptually, [this statement] complements ‘your law’: It is reprehensible [Carson is drawing out the substance of Jesus’s teaching] to set aside the authority of Scripture, the Scripture whose authority you yourselves accept, just because the text I have cited seems inconvenient to you at the moment.” 13 That is, not only is the Bible’s historical record accurate, but in prophecy, morality, theology, and every other teaching, the Scriptures cannot be contradicted or confounded. In Luke 24:25–27, Jesus rebuked his disciples for not believing all that “the prophets” had spoken (which he equated with “all the Scriptures”). So, in Jesus’s view, all Scripture is trustworthy and should be believed. Jesus constantly quoted Scripture as a basis for his own teaching about how to live, such as church discipline (Matt. 18:16), marriage (Matt. 19:3–9), God’s requirements for eternal life (Matt. 19:16–19), and the greatest commandment (Matt. 22:37–39). Furthermore, he used the Old Testament to justify cleansing the temple (Matt. 21:12–17) and picking grain on the Sabbath (Luke 6:3–4). He relied on Scripture, the sword of the Spirit (Eph. 6:17), to resist the temptations of Satan (Matt. 4:1–11). He stated unambiguously that the Old Testament supersedes all man-made traditions and ideas. No standard is higher than Scripture for what we are to believe and obey (Matt. 15:1–9; Mark 7:5–13). “
“Jesus’s submission to the Scriptures was complete, without hesitation, disputation, or compromise. He knew the Scriptures to be the Word of God, and because God cannot lie, his Word cannot be broken or annulled. There is, however, a question that is both generally interesting and theologically significant: How did Jesus come to embrace the absolute authority of God’s Word and willingly allow it to shape and style his whole life? If his humanity was a true humanity and he truly “became flesh,” we have to take seriously the ordinary mental and psychological processes by which any human being learns anything. We must guard against thinking that Jesus short-circuited the normal intellectual process of maturation. Luke tells us that Jesus “increased in wisdom” (2:52). The writer of Hebrews tells us that he “learned obedience” (Heb. 5:8). It is with this background that we can begin to understand Isaiah 50:4: “The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary.”
