If I had to pick a single favorite prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, today’s Collect would certainly be a top contender. This Collect was composed by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 and sums up a chief concern of the Reformers: the supreme authority of the Bible for faith and morals. We prayed:
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scripture to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
At the time of the Reformation, one of the first decrees in the English Church was that a large bible, in English, would be provided for every parish. God’s Word was to be read every time the people gathered for worship, in the language that they could understand. Now, these were the early days of the printing press. Books were still very much a luxury, though they were indeed becoming more widely available. And, by far, the most common book to be printed was indeed the Bible. In those early days, Bibles were so valuable and precious that these huge English parish Bibles had to be chained to the pulpits lest they be stolen! And in the decades leading up to the Reformation, the people were so hungry for the Word of God that illegal English translations were smuggled all over Europe at the risk of imprisonment or even execution. To this day we see the same thing in countries where totalitarian regimes suppress Christianity and Evangelism. In the last 50-100 years, millions of bibles have been smuggled into Communist countries, Muslim countries, and other hostile environments.
What a marked contrast to the Bible’s availability in our own country. I’ve bought numerous bibles at the local Barnes and Noble. In fact, my favorite bible is an in-house Barnes and Noble classic edition of the King James with Gustav Doré’s woodcut illustrations scattered throughout. I’ve seen bibles for sale in drug stores like CVS and Walgreens, big box general stores like Wal-Mart and Target, and even cheap paperback editions in the Dollar Stores! And that doesn’t even count for how many different editions of the Bible you can get on your phone or tablet at absolutely no cost.
With this wide availability, it can be easy to take such a precious gift for granted. Writing in the 1880’s about our Collect, Oxford Father John Keble said:
This prayer cannot be well said without due consideration, what Holy Scripture is. The Bible is now become a very cheap and common book; and the most part of us are apt to take it in hand too lightly. But here we are put in mind what it is: it is that which God Himself has caused to be written. This is a great, and an aweful thought. We are told concerning people in the East, whether Christians or unbelievers, that, on their receiving a letter from their sovereign lord, they reverently kiss the seal, and hold the letter to their forehead, in token of deep veneration and respect. So, and much more, ought we to mind well what we are about in our dealings with the message of the great God of heaven and earth. His message, His word, is Scripture. Every one of our Bibles, however we use it, is as truly and really His especial gift to us, as if, like the two Tables given by Moses, it were graven on stone by the very finger of God, and reached out unto us from the cloud on the top of Sinai. Did you ever really consider this? Did you ever look at your own Bible with this thought?
What is it that makes the Scriptures so special? As our Collect said and as Keble emphasized, the Scriptures are indeed God’s Word. They are God’s message to us. God himself caused them to be written. As we confess in the Creed, the Holy Spirit has spoken “through the Prophets.” That’s a direct allusion to the Scriptures, especially those of the Old Testament! This is also what our Epistle was specifically alluding to when St. Paul wrote, “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” Jesus and the Apostles affirmed that the Old Testament is the very Word of God. And we see the same Holy Spirit at work in the New Testament Scriptures, written by our Lord’s Apostles as a witness to Jesus’ life and teachings. So, the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, is the very word of God.
This approach to Scripture as the very Word of God, the approach that the Lord Jesus and the Apostles took, can be contrasted with the idea that the Bible merely contains the Word of God. This relatively modern idea says that the Word of God is mixed together with merely human teachings in the Bible. It says that we need to take the Scriptures apart and discover which parts are God’s Word and which parts are mere human teachings that have been colored or overly influenced by the ancient cultures and beliefs of the human authors. But when we take this approach to Scripture, we end up putting ourselves as judges over Scripture, using our own cultural prejudices to determine what seems like God would have said versus what people would have said on their own! In the end, how is this different than the Pharisees elevating their traditions above God’s Word? As we read in Mark 7,
[Jesus] answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. … Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. … Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition (vv 8, 9, 13).
Whether by lowering confidence in God’s Word with the Serpent’s “Did God really say?” Or elevating traditions to the same or greater status with God’s Word, the end result is the same: undermining the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as the Word of God and overstating man’s trustworthiness. I, for one would much rather trust God than man!
Since Scripture is God’s Word, since the Bible is God’s message to us, we can trust God to convey his message clearly and reliably. We can trust that God will indeed speak to us through the Scriptures if we approach them humbly, prayerfully, and carefully. You don’t need to be a bible scholar or an expert in ancient languages and customs to understand the Bible’s main Gospel message of God’s love, Christ’s life and death, and the call to salvation through him. You don’t need an advanced degree to see our moral duties in God’s Law. The basic teaching and message of Scripture is indeed clear. And this basic message is sufficient to bring us to salvation. It is sufficient to bring us to the Lord’s throne of grace. As the Psalmist wrote, “Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my paths” (119:105). Scripture is trustworthy, clear, and will lead us to God.
But this doesn’t mean that an individual and his or her bible is all one needs to live as Christian. No, God has given us each other as a community of faith. He has given the Scriptures to the Church. He has entrusted his message to the Church. The Church is under the Bible’s supreme authority, it is subject to correction and reform from the Bible, but it is also a witness and keeper of the Scriptures. So that gives the Church a solemn duty to rightly teach and preach the Bible. After all, while the Bible’s main message is clear, there are parts of the Bible that are harder than others. We can misinterpret the Bible if left to ourselves; everyone has assumptions and blind spots in our beliefs that can lead us astray. But by enlisting the help of the Church throughout the ages, we can better understand the more difficult parts or the parts that our assumptions blind us to. This is why the Church has given us Creeds and Confessions: these venerable documents of the Church show where some serious and important controversies happened, and how the Church came to understand what the Scriptures teach about them. As we read in Article XX:
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority In Controversies of Faith: and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.
The Church’s authority is real, but it is derivative, and always subject to Scripture.
Our Collect and our Epistle also speak of the comfort and hope that we get from Scripture. Last week the Wall Street Journal published an article that said that sales of the Bible are up 22% compared to the last few years, many of which are people buying a Bible for the first time. According to one of the folks interviewed for this article, the main reasons people are giving for buying these first-time Bibles are largely because they need hope, they need comfort. So much in our world seems scary and uncertain, so people want to know what God has to say.
One way the Bible gives us comfort is when we see that it does give us a single big story inspired by the Holy Spirit, despite being written over thousands of years by dozens of human authors. This tells us that God is in control, that he has a plan, and that we can trust him. This story tells us how much God loves us, simply because he is love. This story doesn’t sugar-coat the evils of the world. It doesn’t even sugar-coat the sins of its human heroes! The Bible is brutally honest about man’s wickedness, about suffering, and about evil supernatural forces. But the Bible shows that there is a bigger plot, guided and penned by God himself. Though there is suffering, there is meaning behind the suffering. In the end, God will make all things right. He will banish sin and death from the world, and bring heaven down to dwell with us.
The Bible also gives us the comfort of reassuring us that God is knowable, that the one in control of history has reached down to us so that we could know him. Despite his greatness and our smallness, he bridges the great difference between humanity and divinity to have fellowship with us. We could never reach him, so he reached us. And in our Lord Jesus Christ, God did this by taking on human flesh and forever becoming one of us. In exalting the Lord Jesus, God put one us, a human being, on his own throne. And that perfect Man, who is also fully and truly God, died for us, so that we could have perfect fellowship with him.
I’ve sometimes wondered why our Reformers chose to make one of our Advent Sundays into Bible Sunday with this Collect. Was it just because of the allusion to the Scriptures in the Epistle? Or is there something about Advent that makes it especially appropriate to focus on the Scriptures? As I reflected this week, I think it is because of the comfort that comes from the Bible. Advent is our season when we remember the Lord’s promised coming. We remember his first coming, foretold in the Scriptures. We expect his second coming, also foretold in the Scriptures. And the coming of the Lord is indeed something that should comfort us if we are his people. Just as the days have gotten colder and darker with the approach of winter, so the world gets colder and darker. But we have the comfort of Immanuel, God With Us. He came to redeem us. And he will return to finish that redemption. It may feel cold and look dark, but Jesus is coming! And he will make all things right. So, as our Collect says, embrace that blessed hope. Hold fast that blessed hope. Everlasting life is on the way! And be sure to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the trustworthy message of that hope; don’t take your Bible for granted.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
