A Text from God

Have you ever felt like God wrote part of the Bible just for you?

This morning, I read a verse that plunked me between the eyes. It felt like the Lord speaking directly to me, in the current moment of my heart. Maybe another time I will share the specifics of this verse and this moment, but right now I want to point to a larger principle: God speaks to us through his Word. We talk about and learn about this truth in the theological place called “the doctrine of Scripture.” The doctrine of Scripture has two perspectives, the external perspective and the internal perspective.

The External Perspective

God speaks and reveals himself and his will through the written words of the Bible. The words of the Bible are the words of God. The Bible itself uses the word “God-breathed”—“all Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16). “God-breathed” gives the picture of physical speech. A person can’t speak without exhaling or breathing out. “God-breathed” means that God speaks the words of the Bible. God spoke his Word through the writing of human authors “as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21). In a mysterious way, God used different men, with different personalities and writing styles to communicate perfectly and exactly what he wanted to communicate.

God’s Word is God Speaking, independent of us. God speaks in the Bible whether or not we read the Bible. The Bible is outside of or external to us. It speaks to all people, everywhere, on equal terms. Missionaries commit their lives to translating the Bible and teaching literacy for this very reason: so that everyone, everywhere can understand the Word of God. In this sense, every time you hear the Bible, read the Bible, or encounter the Bible (even on a bumper sticker or coffee mug), God is speaking. Most importantly, God speaks through his Word to his people as they gather as a local church and hear the preaching of the Word. Everyone can hear it, and God speaks to everyone equally in this external way.

The Internal Perspective

At some times, though, through specific verses, during certain sermons, God speaks to his people internally. The Spirit takes the Word and shoves it into a specific person’s heart. Whereas the external perspective relates to the Bible’s teaching about revelation, here we’re talking about illumination. God the Holy Spirit helps you hear and believe the Word, almost as if that verse, that phrase, that word were written specifically for you.

Jesus promised his apostles, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). The Spirit inspired the original Disciples (think, “Peter and John”) to write the inerrant Word of God, the Bible, guiding them into truth. The Spirit also illuminates current disciples (think, “you and me”), to hear and understand his Word, guiding us into truth. The external reality that God’s Word is God’s Speaking makes it possible for us to hear the Bible as God’s Speaking to us. The same God the Spirit who wrote the Bible helps us understand the Bible. As Charles Spurgeon said, “There is no college for holy education like that of the blessed Spirit, for he is an ever-present tutor, to whom we have only to bend the knee, and he is at our side, the great expositor of truth.”

Candidly, I had almost zero desire to open my Bible and read it this morning. I’m tired from a long weekend and the weekly “pastoral hangover” after Sunday worship. But in God’s grace, I did open my CSB Notetaking Bible. The fourth verse I read was like God sending me a text, a word for me, from a word written thirty centuries ago. The Bible proves itself over and again to be “living and effective” (Heb. 4:12). As Proverbs says, a timely word, spoken at the right moment, is good (15:23), like gold apples in silver settings (25:11). How much more when that timely word comes from God. And God delights to refresh us with his Word, “to sustain the weary with a word” (Is. 50:4).

So check your Bible. Maybe you, too, have a text from God today.