Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

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.

• 2 Timothy 3:16-17

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.

• 1 Corinthians 2:14

“The Bible is the Word of God only to those who are born from above and who walk in the light. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and the Bible, the words of God, stand or fall together, they can never be separated without fatal results. A man’s attitude to our Lord determines his attitude to the Bible. The ‘sayings’ of God to a man not born from above are of no moment; to him the Bible is simply a remarkable compilation of literature-‘that it is, and nothing more’. All the confusion arises from not recognizing this.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (December 14, from The Discipline of Divine Guidance {Christian Discipline, volume 1})

Rev. Chambers speaks of two kinds of people, those who have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and those who do not.  That is all that really matters in the end.  Is your name written in the Book of Life or is it not written there?

But let’s divide those people into four groups, and somehow I will explain why along the way.

First, there are two groups of people who call themselves Christians.  There are those people with a life-giving relationship with God.  There are also those who maybe believe in an historic Jesus, but not a Jesus that affects their lives today.  There may be those people who claim a relationship with Jesus, but the “problems” in the Bible cause them to reject the Jesus of the Bible, or aspects of Jesus.

For that first group, it is like Rev. Chambers described.  The Bible is the conduit in which the Holy Spirit sustains us, nurtures us, and uplifts us.  If you believe in God, and trust in Jesus, but you do not open God’s Word…  Really?!  If you cannot read, I can understand that, but if you are reading this, you can read.  Even then, there are audible Bibles.  One profound thing that hit me in the year 2020 was when I drove from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to retrieve my wife, who had stayed down there from before the lockdown to babysit the grandchildren.  I listened to the Breathe Bible, a dramatized version of the Holman Christian Standard Bible (CSB), New Testament.  I listened to the last of the Pauline Epistles through the book of Jude while making the last leg of that journey, from Nashville to the Memphis area.  In this total immersion and the subjects of those books, that experience drove me to tears.  It fortified me in wanting to do the deep Bible Studies that come out each Thursday morning.

But what of the second group?  Since they only pick and choose what parts of the Bible suit their own personal agenda, do they even read the Bible at all?  What other documents do they have that fill the gap in their thinking?  Even if they can accept two-thirds of the Scriptures, is the Bible what Rev. Chambers describes?  Would it be a fatal event if they were torn from the Bible?

But now for those people who are not believers, but they do not mind someone calling the Bible the Word of God.  If someone came to them and read from the Bible, along with the Holy Spirit touching their hearts to make them receptive, would the acknowledgement that if God is real, this is His book…  Would that make a difference in them accepting Jesus into their hearts?

And then, that last group is definitely what Rev. Chambers refers to when he speaks of the Bible not being the Word of God to them.  They reject any thought that there is a God, thus a book called the Word of God is meaningless…

Until …

If God is ready to write your name into the Book of Life, God can make Himself known to the most hardened of atheists.  C.S. Lewis called himself the most reluctant convert ever.  Others have made similar claims.  But the key here is that God knows who will respond to such a movement of the Holy Spirit, and who will consider those horrible thoughts floating through their head to be the result of something they ate last night.

In the end, there is only one group of these four who has a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Two of these groups deny God’s existence or at least do not care one way or the other.  The third has invented their own false god, who happens to be called Jesus.

We, who have a saving knowledge of Jesus, know that the Bible is the true Word of God.  God reveals Himself to us as we live in faith and continue to read the Scriptures.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.