Narrow Way with Steve Phillips Word of the Word
The written Word of God was no pious prop to Jesus, the living Word of God. The Bible is not an accessory to lend credence to a clever charade. God does not dupe bigoted religious minds with legends to convince them to follow His wishes. It is not a means to an end: an ultimately disposable irrelevancy.
If the written Word has no lasting and final significance, then neither does the living Word, Christ Jesus Himself. Beware how you handle the Bible: what you reject or think lightly of in it, directly impacts the veracity and reality of the Word of the Word, both its testimony to Christ and Christ’s about it.
Observe, if the narrative of Jonah and the great fish is an adapted fable in order to convey a moral lesson, then it is actually a falsehood employed to lead to godliness: a means to an end. The modern church vomits the book of Jonah out of the Bible as the fish reportedly vomited Jonah out on dry land.
But what difference does it make whether that actually happened or not? We get the point that God can rescue people from problems. But, is that the point? Jesus said, “As Jonah was 3 days and 3 nights in the belly of the huge fish, so will the Son of Man be 3 days and 3 nights in the heart of the earth” –Matthew 12:40. Note it well, Jesus spoke of this event as actual historical reality: not as religious myth.
If Jonah is fake, so is Christ. If Jonah was not “resurrected,” neither was the Lord Jesus.
If the Bible reports a superstition regarding a worldwide flood in Noah’s day, then Christ’s second
coming is also religious fiction. “For the coming of the son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. Until the day that Noah entered the ark, they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be” –Matthew 24:37-39. Fake flood? Cancelled 2nd coming.
Jesus speaks of “the creation which God created” –Mark 13:19, not about the “natural” process of evolution. If the Genesis account is fabricated, then Jesus’ own Word is invalidated. He’s a deceiver.
If people were not actually saved from the deadly poison coursing through their veins by looking at the bronze serpent in Moses’ day [Numbers 21:5-9], then neither will any be saved by Christ. For Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him will have eternal life” –John 3:14,15. No actual serpent? No salvation.
It was Christ who said: “On the day that Lot went out from Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. It will be just the same in the day that the Son of Man is revealed” –Luke 17:29,30. If that was not real for Sodom, neither will there be any coming judgment to worry about.
But in the Word of the Word, Jesus does not present fiction as actual, myth as history, or error as truth. He is not a deceiver and neither is His written Word, the Scriptures. Both speak truth with integrity.
And so, if we imagine that the Bible contains error, mistakes, fabrications, and fables, we must say the same about Christ: for He refers to all of these things as truth, real events, and historical. And if man-made falsehood is found in the mouth of Christ as if it were actually the Word of God, He is a monster.
Jesus then is the world’s greatest scammer, a liar of gigantic proportions. Does Christ the Truth employ untruth to arrive at truth? Of course not! If so, He and everything He says is a sham, a fraud.
But He is not. “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My Word. He who does not love Me, does not keep My Words; and the Word which you hear is not Mine but the Father’s who sent Me” –John 14:23,24.
Do they contain error? No! Do they relate to Jesus’ oral teaching alone? No! If there is no reliable Word of the Word, how can anyone be charged to keep and obey His Word since there is no way to know what that is? Apart from the written Word, “believers” can adjust themselves to whatever oral tradition they like and consider that as “keeping” Christ’s Word: and no one could prove otherwise!
Yet when tempted by the adversary Satan, Jesus resorted to, not only a single reference to the Word of God, but its entirety in defeating that foe. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on EVERY Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” –Matthew 4:4. How could a fable from men counteract Satan?
If the written Word contains error, how could this overcome the father of lies himself? Why would Jesus cite a religious legend [the manna] as resisting a lie from this more sinister source? Impossible.
Jesus the living Word and the written Word are both “living and powerful” –Hebrews 4:12. “The Words that I have spoken to you, they are spirit and they are life” –John 6:63.
“Forever, Your Word is settled in heaven” –Psalm 119:89. “The sum of Your Word is TRUTH, and every one of Your righteous ordinances is everlasting” –Psalm 119:160. This is the Word of the Word.