God's Word Alone---The Authority of Scripture: What the Reformers Taught...and Why It Still Matters (The Five Solas Series) by Matthew Barrett

Author:Matthew Barrett [Barrett, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2016-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

Jesus speaks, but his authority is from the Father who sent him. It is the Father who has told him “what to say and what to speak,” and the words he speaks are either life or death. They are eternal life for those who believe his words and eternal death and judgment for those who reject them. So synonymous are Jesus and his words that to reject the words of Jesus is to reject the Son, and not only the Son but the Father who sent him.

Some neo-orthodox theologians would say that Jesus is the Word, but Scripture itself is not. However, were we to be critical of Jesus’s words, then we would be inconsistent to then appeal beyond his words to his person, as if one can be had apart from the other. It is also illegitimate, notes John Frame, to “appeal to the substance or content of Jesus’s words, beyond the forms in which they are presented.”36 To do so is to fail to take Jesus’s words seriously. The importance of the words of Jesus is reiterated by Paul when he warns against anyone who “teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness” (1 Tim 6:3 ESV, emphasis added). If we truly love Christ, we will obey his words (John 14:15–23).37

The Spirit of Truth Comes with a Word of Truth

Third, the Father and Son sent the Spirit of truth with a word of truth. That there is a trinitarian nature to divine revelation is undeniable. We have learned that what the Father planned long ago, the Son brought to completion. However, we must not forget the Spirit. In John 14 Jesus says that though he will not be physically with his disciples any longer, he will send the Holy Spirit to be with them. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:16–17).

Jesus calls the advocate the “Spirit of truth” (cf. 15:26). Like the Father and the Son, the Spirit speaks, and when he speaks he does not lie, make mistakes, or speak falsely in his witness to Christ.38 His word is truth, just as the Father’s word is truth (17:17), because the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father. And not only is he the Spirit of the Father but the Spirit of the Son who is the way, the truth, and the life (14:6). If the Spirit were to speak falsely or incorrectly about Christ, it would compromise the character of all three—the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of truth, Jesus promised, would not only help the disciples remember what Jesus had taught them but assist them in comprehending its significance and meaning.39 As Jesus

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