Brothers & Sisters,

            One of the things that I have been wonderfully surprised by in our study through Deuteronomy is the relevance of God’s Word to our everyday lives. As a child of God wandering in the wilderness of this world, I have found it to be full of profound and practical instruction for my pursuit of Jesus today. To be sure, there are a number of significant discontinuities that we encounter, but there is also great continuity and relevance to us in the book. We are part of the one people of God who are stretched across time. Even as we hear Moses preach to Israel of Old, we can hear him point to Jesus, the hope of the New. All at the same time the book is distant and it is descriptive of our earthly experience in trusting God’s hand today.

This reminds me of what Stephen Nichols wrote about God’s Word in his excellent little book A Time for Confidence: Trusting God in a Post-Christian Society. He wrote:

Can God’s Word calm the anxieties of our time? Does it bring us peace now, in the complexities of our age? Many voices clamor for our attention in our time. We are surrounded by screens and devices. We are talked to all the time. These voices try to pull us away from the clear and certain voice of God. We are living in an age where God’s Word is continuously called into question. Where it is not only seen as unhelpful, but where it is also seen as a source of bigotry, intolerance, and narrow minded, obsolete thinking. Look forward, don’t look back, goes the mantra...These attacks from our culture come from confusing the Bible as merely some system of thought or some human ideology…When we open our Bibles, however, we are engaging something entirely different. We are not listening to the words of ancient men from some quaint faraway place and time. We are reading the very words of God. We can’t simply pass over – or flat out reject – the Bible because it is out of step with our day…the Bible belongs to every age. It is not simply the true Word for the first century. It is not simply the authoritative Word for the first century. It is not simply the necessary Word for the first century. It is not simply the sufficient Word for the first century…It is the true, authoritative, necessary, clear, and sufficient Word for all centuries, including the twenty-first.

[Stephen J. Nichols, A Time for Confidence: Trusting God in a Post-Christian Society (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust Publishing, A Division of Ligonier Ministries, 2016), 56-57, 60.]

If this is not true, if the Bible is not the true, authoritative, necessary, clear, and sufficient Word for all centuries, then we are wasting our time on Sunday mornings, and other mornings throughout the week as we open our Bibles to read and hear what God has said. Moreover, if this is not true, we are still dead in our sins and without hope in the world. But we know this is true. God’s Word is true, authoritative, necessary, clear, and sufficient for us.

The Bible speaks truly to our experience today. The Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts to the total truthfulness and trustworthiness of God’s Word. When we read of our Savior and his love for us our hearts soar with satisfaction in him. That is because we have a true Word from our true God concerning his true Son for his true children. Praise God for his wonderful Word. Take up and read God’s Word with full confidence knowing that he is addressing you today.

Warmly in Christ,

Mike