All the “parts” of Scripture hold together in one organic whole, in a way similar to how all the parts of creation hold together in one organic whole. The Trinitarian God—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—are true unity and diversity simultaneously, and all their works bear the imprint of their unity and diversity. Our thinking goes astray from God’s word to the degree that we set unity and diversity off against each other. 

“We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can be rightly affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.”
In 1985 The Jesus Seminar was founded by a number of biblical scholars who sought to “renew the quest for the historical Jesus.” That is, they sought to determine what parts of the Gospel accounts could actually be attributed to Jesus, and then to draw definitive conclusions regarding the true identity of the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels. Their conclusion? Only about 18% of the sayings and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospel accounts are authentic. Of course, one is completely valid in asking: By what standard did they draw these conclusions? By what beliefs did they analyze the Gospel accounts in order to sit in judgment of them in order to decide what was truly authentic to those accounts? How did they arrive at these beliefs that gave them the ability to decide which parts of the Gospel accounts are “authentic”?
Such questions not only highlight the presuppositional nature of thinking—that all thinking is dependent on or controlled by one’s most foundational beliefs that drive the rest of one’s thinking—but also reveal that one must choose by what authority one is going to sit in judgment of that text that claims to be the only word from the only living and true God.
Article six of the Chicago Statement reminds us that those who adopt the approach represented by the Jesus Seminar do so in direct violation of the authority of Scripture as The Truth from the only living and true God that is unavoidably united in all its “parts.” God’s written word is irreducibly complex because it is from the only living and true God who is Truth.
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It is the written text of Scripture and the ministry of God’s Spirit that alone bind the consciences of God’s people. The church is not the Holy Spirit. There is one Master, our Lord Jesus, to whom every Christian must answer and he is able to make all his servants stand (Romans 14:4).

Article two of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy reads: “We affirm that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture. We deny that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible.” This is an affirmation consistent with the Reformational doctrine of sola scriptura, or Scripture alone, and a denial of Roman Catholicism’s doctrine of Scripture and Tradition, and thereby a denial, in principle, of its doctrine of the Church. To understand the direction the implications of this statement take us, we need to unpack the features of the relationships expressed by the article. These relationships revolve around the word authority.
Given the anti-authoritarian age in which we live, it is no surprise that there is not only much confusion regarding what is meant by authority in any given matter in which the term and concept is used, but also an outright attempt to deny authority altogether. But this latter move is literally absurd. Authority is an essential aspect to life. One is certainly free to deny authority in principle, but that does precious little in doing away with it. Authority is to human living what oxygen is to it—a necessary and constituent aspect of it. This is not to say that everyone’s exercise of authority is always done rightly. Far from it. It is to say that anyone whose fundamental orientation to life is to live in rebellion against authority is going to find that they have a very rough go of it. You might as well try and walk by chopping off both your legs.
The term and concept of authority expresses both power and responsibility in some sphere. Article two fundamentally asserts that God’s written word is that rule and power by which God binds every human conscience. Since God’s church is made up of—you guessed it—people, God’s church has neither the power nor responsibility to bind the consciences of others. Therefore, the leaders of every congregation, denomination, or branch of God’s church should not presume to try and bind the conscience of anyone. God, through his Word and Spirit, binds and obligates all people, and we therefore are, ultimately, answerable to God for everything.
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A person genuinely converted from darkness to light, from the way of the world to the way of God, from unrighteousness to righteousness, repents and keeps on repenting of their sin. Their life is not marked by perpetual indifference to sin.

Our English term conversion is not often used in our translations of the Bible. But lest we commit a word-concept fallacy, we should not conclude from this that the concept captured by our term conversion is infrequently found in Scripture. Far from it. Peter in his sermon recorded in Acts 3 expresses the idea of what is meant in Christian theology by the term conversion. There we read that Peter told the men of Israel in v. 19, “Repent therefore, and turn, that your sins may be blotted out.” And again, in verse 26, Peter affirmed that God had sent his Son first to Israel in order that he might bless them “by turning” them from their wickedness. In other words, conversion to the Christian faith and life is about a decisive break from a life of sin, and turning to God so that one faithfully thinks and acts in accordance with God’s word.
Easy enough. Well, there’s actually nothing easy about this, other than perhaps stating it. In point of fact, what we are dealing with in conversion is a supernatural act of the living God whereby he replaces our sinful and stone-hardened heart with a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). God alone does this, but this does not nullify the human proclamation of the gospel calling people to repentance. It is why the summary of Jesus’ preaching (Mark 1:15), which was also a summary of John the Baptist’s preaching, was: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” The acts of repenting and believing are not envisioned here as once-for-all-time actions that never need repeating. On the contrary, the exact opposite is conveyed. Repenting and believing are ongoing, perpetual activities for the one genuinely converted. Which is another way of saying that one of the ways we can tell whether we or anyone else has truly been converted to the Christian faith and life is whether they demonstrate repentance from sin as a way of life.
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In Galatians 5:22-23, Paul gives us a list of the fruit of God’s Spirit. Notice that it is fruit and not fruits. In other words, all the moral character traits listed in those two verses are organically united to each other, and ought to be understood as aspects of each other in one organic whole. I would submit to you that one of the proper ways to read that list is to recognize that it is another way of Paul describing love. In other words, that we might as easily put a colon after love rather than a comma, and recognize that Paul is saying that the fruit of God’s Spirit is love and it manifests itself in joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

According to The Beatles, love is all you need. Of course, you won’t actually learn anything about love from their vapid lyrics, yet we need to learn about love, if we are to know God, and live glorifying him and blessing others.
Unquestionably, 1Corinthians 13 is the text that readily comes to mind when we think of love. There, Paul speaks of the preeminence of love as the greatest human character trait or virtue; greater than faith or hope. It should go without saying that for Paul faith, hope and love are understood in accordance with all of God’s written revelation. It is faith and hope in God, and the love of him of which Paul speaks. Along the way, he delineates what love is. It is patient and kind, does not envy or boast, is not arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own, is not irritable or resentful, does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth, as well as bears, believes, hopes and endures all things. These affirmations, however, have to be understood within other texts that Paul also wrote in Romans 13:8 and Galatians 5:22-23.
In Romans 13:8 we read, “Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” The law of which Paul wrote was the Ten Commandments and we know this because in the next verses Paul lists the commandments not to commit adultery, murder, theft and coveting. He concludes that section by writing, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Neither the Old Testament nor the New teach that obedience to God’s law is unnecessary, as if all that matter was our sincerity, or what we thought was a good effort at obeying God.
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Violating the third commandment, includes, but is not confined to, using “God” or “Jesus Christ” in our speech to utter exclamatory anger or excitement. No, to take the Lord’s name in vain is to not live in light of who God is and what He does and to invite and encourage others to do the same. But among those who truly know and call upon his name, they are enabled to revere and rely upon Yahweh, and thereby glorify his name, for He IS.

Names. We all have one, or two or three, maybe even four or five! Names identify us, don’t they? At least to some degree. Yet, we recognize that we are more than merely our name(s). My parents could have decided to name me by any other name besides David, and yet I would still be me. Our human names have a certain kind of arbitrary character to them. This truth tends to cause us to miss some of the truth about God’s third commandment which deals directly with God’s name. Unlike our names, God’s names (he actually has several) have nothing arbitrary about them.
When we recognize that God’s names reveal his character and conduct, or who he is and what he does, we are better able to understand what it means to take his name in vain, and, hopefully, avoid doing it.
In the third commandment, the Hebrew term that is generally translated take is most often in the Old Testament translated as lift, carry or bear. Another legitimate way to translate the first part of Exodus 20:7 would be: “You shall not lift the name of Yahweh, your God, to vanity or worthlessness.” Of course, one may still be left wondering: What precisely does this mean? It all revolves around the importance of the name Yahweh.
God first revealed his name Yahweh to Moses (Exod. 3:14), when he embarked on freeing His covenant people, Israel, from the Egyptians, because of His faithfulness to his covenant promise made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Exod. 2:23). Of course, Yahweh had called Abraham as fulfillment of His covenant blessing that he bestowed upon Noah, which was Yahweh’s continuance of his covenant relationship first established with Adam (Gen. 1:26-28; 6:18; 9:1-17; 12:1-3). In other words, Yahweh is the covenant making creator and redeemer. Indeed, he is the latter precisely because he is the former.
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The most important application that preachers can make is to show how the text demands a particular pattern of thought that is then to be applied amongst the innumerable variables of life. Of course, only the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom can apply God’s word to the soul transforming the mind of the hearer. But when he does, he will not only stir up love for God and his ways, but also enable biblical reasoning, right reason, that will lead to wise decisions.    

Your teen-age daughter wants to start dating a young man who is quite nice, very likeable, professes faith in Jesus for salvation, but his dad is an adulterer, even while remaining married, and is verbally abusive toward women. What do you say to her, and why? Someone on pastoral staff at your church, who is not the senior minister, has a spouse who routinely uses profane language. To whom do you go about the matter and why? One of your colleagues at work regular drinks alcohol while on the job in violation of company policy, and you are the only one who knows about it. Do you say anything? If so, to whom? What do you say, and why? The last I checked, none of these scenarios are explicitly addressed by Scripture.
In fact, what we discover when we read God’s word is that it does not explicitly address the vast majority of the scenarios in which we find ourselves. So much for the practicality of Scripture! Not only this, but God has only given us Ten Commandments for all of life, and Jesus went a step further and reduced them to two: Love God and love your neighbor. You do realize what God is telling us in all this, don’t you? God demands that we think! More specifically, God demands that we think his thoughts after him, or think in accordance with his word.
But it is perhaps safe to say that thinking scares many of us. How much easier it is just to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, when to do it, with whom to do it, with whom not to do it, etc. How much easier it is just to have our lives micromanaged for us; for someone to do our thinking for us. You know, for the government to tell you how to keep yourself safe in every situation in life.
Of course, we must implement this kind of micromanagement with the care of very young children.
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Just as our sovereign creator created from, or out of, his own being, and created all things for himself, so too has he redeemed, or saved a people for his own possession by making them alive in Christ.

Recently, while picking up my daughter from school I asked my customary question: “So, how was your day?” Normally, the response is brief, but this day was one of those exceptions. “History class was interesting. We had a discussion on predestination.” As it turned out, since they were studying the Renaissance and dealing with the precursors to the Reformation, the topic came up. Sadly, it came up for the first time in the lives of many of her classmates. I say sadly because it reveals they don’t understand the gospel very well at all, and maybe not at all. After all, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is about his and the Father and the Spirit’s sovereignty over all things and the exercising of it so that some sinners are saved from their sin and into the glorious freedom of God’s children.
As the creator, the Triune God brought his creation into being. In particular, Colossians 1:15-20 states the following regarding the Lord Jesus Christ:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
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