BAB 062 Books of the Bible LBCF Chapter 1-2

Well, if you want to open your confession to chapter 1, so chapter 1, of course, is called Of the Holy Scriptures, and it's interesting, I think, to a lot of people when you first think about it, that the confession actually starts with the Scripture. It doesn't start with God. It doesn't start with salvation. It doesn't start with Jesus. It starts with the Scripture, and that's instructional in many ways, but one of the points is that that we only really know who God is because of the scripture.

We know there is a God through general revelation, but we can really know very little about God unless he tells us. Can you stop playing with your shoe, though? Because that makes noise, and I don't want that noise. Thank you. But so in the second paragraph, we have what I think most people would think is kind of a boring paragraph, maybe. some people might think, oh, it's hardly necessary, but let's look at it here.

Under the name of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God written, are now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments, which are these. And then it lists the books. It says, of the Old Testament. You guys can try to say them with me if you want. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

And then it says of the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Acts of the Apostles, Paul's epistle to the Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the Colossians, to 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, to Titus, to Philemon, the epistle to the Hebrews, the epistle of James, 1 and 2 epistles of Peter, 1, 2, 3 epistles of John, the epistle of Jude, the Revelation. Did I miss something there?

Did I get them? No, you didn't. We're in the modern English. Yeah. Oh, there we go. It doesn't have like two the.

Oh, okay. That's all. All of which are given by the inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life. So this is interesting because I think that this is the kind of thing that we would probably overlook in our Christianity. We'd say, well, we already know that that's the books of the Bible. and we would maybe not think it important to write them down this way and to make this list but there a few things that we can think about when we think about the fact that the guys who wrote this confession for us made this list So the first one is that it lists the books that are in the scripture for us.

Even though those books were already known, I think it's possible that you could end up in a situation where maybe you don't know what they are. You could receive a Bible from someone and the Bible could be missing something or the Bible could have something else in it that is not in this list. And so having this second reference could help you because someone could try to change the Bible.

The second thing is that when you look at these books, what you realize is these are the same books that were already the Bible for hundreds and hundreds of years. Michael Robert. Far away from him. And so this protects us from letting... Go sit over on the end of the row. The end, all the way.

This protects us from error. So there are people who actually say that they like the Bible, but maybe they just don't like one part of it. In fact, I think the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, in fact, struggled so much with some of the difficult verses in the book of James and how those verses had been abused by the Roman Catholic Church that he didn't want it in the scripture because he thought it didn't fit. and so there's also other people that try to say well maybe Peter didn't write first Peter maybe someone else wrote it or maybe Paul didn't write the letter to the Galatians it was somebody else and so some of the way these books are listed and even stated helps us to be reminded that there's going to be attacks on even the very truths in this chapter this seems like such an easy chapter who would deny just the books of the Bible?

Yet, that's one of the areas that Satan uses to try to attack the truth of the Word of God. Next, the whole Bible is given by the inspiration of God. We know that from 2 Timothy 3.16. All Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable. So one of the things that we gather from this list of the books is those books are not listed in order like, well, Romans is the most important, and then Hebrews, and then, well, whichever one Jeremy likes.

It doesn't work that way. They're just listed, and they're not necessarily in any kind of human order. They were ordered in the Old Testament in this way at one point, and so we inherit the order of them. But what's important, I think, to see is they're all just there. Obadiah is there, and yet I would guess that most of us haven't read Obadiah in a while. and a lot of us, if we have, it's something we just read once a year as part of a daily reading plan.

And, uh, if I asked you what it was about, unless you'd recently studied it, a lot of people wouldn't be able to tell you off the top of their head. Uh, yet God says it's part of his scripture and it just as important as you know the writings about Jesus life for example Um Now it may not have the same consequences to your daily living and there may be some harder texts in some of the books but they're all important, they're all part of the Scripture. The other thing is that you'll notice that there's exactly 66 books listed here, and they're the 66 books that are in our Bible.

There isn't more. so not only do we not acknowledge the apocrypha the catholic books that are listed in chapter three or paragraph three but there's other books people try to add to the bible all the time and sometimes it's obvious people say hey we have the gospel of thomas from the fourth century or it was discovered in the third century or whatever people want to make up the lost the lost writings of Peter. I mean, people come up with all sorts of things. And they try to say, well, this should be scripture because, well, you know, it was written by Peter, they'll try to say, right?

They'll try to give it authority. And we trust the process that God used to disseminate the Bible. And anybody who's willing to do a little bit of research will actually find how the Bible was put together. And it didn't happen by some random council in Nicaea in 325 AD. The Bible and the canon the list of Bible books was well established very, very early on in the second century after John died and finished all the writings of it that he had written.

And so there's no more books of the Bible, but also, and there's more paragraphs about this that will support this, but the Bible as written is already sufficient, too. Not only is there not going to be some lost book of Bartholomew that somebody finds that we realize, like, oh, we've been missing this important piece of scripture for 20 centuries. Not only is that not going to happen, but other books people write are in no way on par with scripture.

People write books all the time that try to tell people how to have a better life. Some of them try to tell people how to live morally. Some of them try to tell people even how to be godly from a very good Christian perspective. The 1689 itself is an extra-biblical book. We don't think of it as a book. We think of it as like a document or something.

But, you know, it's a book that somebody made. And this book does not have any equivalence with the Bible. This is a book that's outside the Bible. But there's also people that will give us books that are very wicked. And they will try to get you to think, well, this is the secret to your happy marriage. This is the secret to losing weight.

Well, I guess the Bible isn't necessarily about losing weight, but people come up with like the Daniel plan, right? And people will say, or do this thing here. Take this quiz and get your profile at the end and it'll tell you your spiritual gifts. Or it'll tell you what kind of personality you have and so what kind of life you should have. And a lot of it's just horoscopes repackaged in a different way.

And so the Bible is our source of faith and knowledge. And although knowledge is revealed in other ways You really distracting me sweetheart What Just wait quietly Doing that actually makes me not want to let you have a drink. Okay? So bring your water bottle next time. So the Bible is sufficient, though, and that's revealed throughout the rest of this chapter.

But so does that mean that we can't read a book that some man wrote? Well, of course not. Of course, it doesn't mean that. I want to make sure that was clear. Paul even said to bring parchments. We have been blessed abundantly by the books men have written over the years.

The London Baptist Confession of Faith, again, is an extra-biblical book. And if you think about it, even if you read old sermons by Spurgeon and all these guys, in some sense, you're just reading extra-biblical writings. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need to remember that our authority is Scripture. And that's what we appeal to when we try to work out matters in our life and in the church.

So what seems like a paragraph you could almost skim over, kind of like when you read some of the genealogies in the Bible, and it's almost like, okay, can I just get through this paragraph? And that's an attitude we sometimes have, and I've seen people have it. But if you really sit and think about why is this here? Why was this written? Why does it include what it includes? why doesn't it include what it excludes?

A lot of times you can gain some insight from that, and even more importantly, when you're reading genealogies and scripture, but even in the second paragraph of the first chapter of the London Baptist Confession of Faith. So does anybody have any comments or questions about that paragraph? Can everybody here name all the books of the Bible? You can? Good.

You can? Michael? Can you name all the books of the Bible? Yeah, we can sing them. That helps us. Jeremy, can you do it?

Not the old? See, I would recommend that that's something we should all practice learning. and not only as an example then for children but just for your own sake you should know them too and we should be encouraged to read it more you know even if you read a lot every day there's always more that we haven't read and plumbed the depths of and checked out I don't think I could name them either if it wasn't for the song but because I know a song about it it's easy to remember thank you for listening to Be A Berean with your host Michael Coughlin I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website michaelcoughlin.net you can contact me by emailing me michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.