Lesson 4 April 18-24
The Role of the Bible
Sabbath Afternoon
Read for This Week’s Study: Lam. 3:22-23; 2 Tim. 3:15-17; John 17:17; Eph. 1:13; Ps. 119:11; 1 Cor. 2:14
Memory Text: “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12, NJKV).
The Bible. No doubt you own one copy or perhaps many. Throughout history, this precious book has been copied in secret, smuggled, and banned. It’s the most published book in the world, in any language, and also one of the oldest. Some have died so that the Bible could be preserved.
Where is the Bible in your life? Do you read it or does it sit beside your bed or on a bookcase gathering dust? Is life too busy for you to find time to really study the Word of God or do you feel too tired to open its pages?
God’s Word is living and powerful, and God is calling for you to let it speak to your heart, to encourage you, to challenge and change you, and to give you guidance and hope.
The Bible is not just an academic book or a collection of old stories. Instead, it is a beautiful, profound account of how the Creator of the universe seeks to draw us close to Him. If you have a desire to grow in your relationship with God, the best thing you can do is commit to spending quality time with Him daily praying, reading His inspired Word, and surrendering your will to what it teaches.
Study this week’s lesson to prepare for Sabbath, April 25.
The Most Powerful Weapon
Before we explore why the Bible is so valuable and how to dig deeper in our personal Bible study, we must understand something: One of the most significant attacks Satan can make on you is to stop you from spending time with God in His Word. Keeping people away from their Bibles through business, apathy, tiredness, or doubt is his number-one strategy. He knows that when we spend time with God in His Word, it revives our lives and nourishes our souls, so of course he would do everything to prevent this!
We are told that “Satan employs every possible device to prevent [people] from obtaining a knowledge of the Bible; for its plain utterances reveal his deceptions.”--Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 593. Satan knows that God’s powerful Word makes him powerless. Satan knows that prayer and Bible study are the most powerful weapons humanity can use against him (Eph. 6:17-18; Heb. 4:12), so he does everything he can to stop us from reading and praying. He knows that God’s words are powerful and that they not only spoke this world into existence (Ps. 33:6), but they can raise the dead (John 11:41-44) and give us strength to overcome (Matt. 4:1-11).
By keeping God’s people away from their Bibles, Satan affects not only our relationship with God but our relationships with others. Our marriages become strained, we yell at our kids, and we don’t have patience with our friends or coworkers. Life seems too busy; we feel stressed and burdened, with no escape route. And surprisingly, we don’t often pause long enough to realize what’s happening. We might think we’re close to God, but in reality, when days and weeks pass by without our ever opening God’s Word, we’re weakened more every day.
Even when we have an up-and-down and very inconsistent relationship with God, God is wonderfully constant, as Lamentations 3:22-23 tells us. What do you notice in these verses, and how do they compare with our human natures?
As the covering cherub before he fell (Ezek. 28:14-17), Lucifer heard God’s words and knew their incredible power. He now hates this truth, so it’s clear why our minds grow numb and our hearts grow dull when we don’t choose to hear and bring God’s words into our daily lives.
How wishy-washy or inconsistent are you in your devotional life? What should your answer tell you about making some changes, if needed?
Scripture, the Authority
The Bible’s authority and function are clearly declared within its pages. Read and copy out 2 Timothy 3:15-17. Take note of what these verses tell you about the function of the Bible.
When it comes to personal Bible study, we must be careful not to expect the Bible to serve our purposes or perspectives, which are not always the same as God’s. For example, we shouldn’t use the “close my eyes and point to a text” method, because this isn’t how God wants to communicate with us through His Word. God is not a puppet on a string, waiting to serve our needs and will. His ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours (Isa. 55:9), and so we should never try to control His words to us. Neither should we pick and choose only the parts of the Bible that feel comfortable to us. Instead, we should see the Bible as a whole package rather than reading the easy, familiar passages and leaving out the confronting or challenging ones. If we truly want God to speak into our lives, we must take the Bible as a whole and use sound methods when we engage in careful Bible study, trusting that God will reveal what we need to hear when we need to hear it.
Also, Jesus Himself tells us: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37, NKJV). That is, God doesn’t want us to ignore our minds; rather, He wants to inform our minds with His vast reaches of knowledge and understanding, which are revealed, in part, through His Word. We can read many biblical narratives in which God had discussions with such people as Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and Job, in addition to many conversations that Jesus had with people. God doesn’t bypass human reason but invites us to submit it to His Word and wisdom when “working out” our salvation.
Human reason, however, is still human--capable of error and deception. It’s never infallible. It's possible for human reason to push God aside to try to work things out on our own, which places self as equal to, or above, God when it comes to thinking. People can approach Scripture with an arrogant and critical spirit, thinking they’ve heard it all before and that there is nothing new. It’s when we feel important, confident, self-sufficient, and in need of nothing that we neglect our relationship with God and rely on our own limited knowledge and faulty reasoning.
Bible Truth
A trend among some liberal theologians in the 1960s was to write God out of the field of theology. In 2017, a cover story of Time magazine featured the headline “Is Truth Dead?” It’s interesting because this trend illustrates the position of our society today. The very idea of “truth” itself is decaying to such an extent that no one knows what truth is anymore. According to popular culture, there is no measuring stick, no foundation that remains constant and can be depended upon to endure the test of time. Contrary to this, Jesus said, “I am the … truth” (John 14:6). His Word testifies about Him as truth in complete purity.
Read the following three verses slowly, and then read them again a second time. What do you notice about these messages?
John 17:17
Prov. 30:5-6
Ps. 12:6
The Bible declares that basic truth, Jesus Himself, doesn’t change (Heb. 13:8). At the same time, as we read God’s Word, our understanding of God and His truth can grow. “There are mines of truth yet to be discovered by the earnest seeker.”--Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 5, p. 704. In speaking of “truth,” Ellen G. White always referred to truth as given by God through His Word. We can search for additional light in the Bible because the Bible never contradicts past truths, but instead builds on them.
Read 1 Thessalonians 2:13; Psalm 33:4-5; and Ephesians 1:13. What is the message there?
In the end, the Bible, and the Bible alone, must be the foundational source of what we understand as truth. All other sources must be tried and tested by the Word of God. Even what we deem “reason” needs to be tested by the Word of God.
Some people want to argue that there is no truth. Why is that statement self-contradictory? That is, why is making the claim that there is no truth an attempt to proclaim truth, and thus self-refuting?
Bible Claims
What might change in your home if you turned to the Bible when faced with a big decision, relationship problem, or challenge? What might change in your workplace or church if the words of the Bible truly became the lens through which people viewed the world and chose to live by?
The Bible authors knew how valuable the words of the Bible were. No other book can speak to your life as these words can. The words can sit on the page in your Bible, but how can you keep them in your heart?
What is David’s advice in Psalm 119:11, and how might you follow it? (See also Heb. 4:12.)
One of the claims the Bible makes about itself can be found in Hebrews 4:12. A two-edged sword is powerful and sharp, but the Bible can do what human tools cannot for the human soul. The Bible describes itself as being alive. Perhaps you’ve wondered how this could be, given that it was written thousands of years ago, but Jesus said, “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63, NKJV). If your heart is broken or your life is falling apart, God can speak His words into your world and change things around. The Old Testament also describes God’s words as being very active and not at all stagnant or passive (see Isa. 55:11). When David reflected on the impact of God’s words on his life, he wrote, “This is my comfort in my affliction, for Your word has given me life” (Ps. 119:50, NKJV).
Perhaps you’ve experienced severe hunger at some point in your life, or maybe you’ve fasted or gone on a diet. Doesn’t food taste good after you’ve been hungry? In a spiritual sense, the Bible is food for our souls.
If your soul is empty and hungry, open the living Word. Read Jeremiah 15:16, 1 Peter 2:2, and Matthew 4:4.
God’s words taste good to the mind and heart, and when we read them, they will fill us and sustain us as promised.
The messages in God’s word, the Bible, have come from God Himself. God sent them specifically for us and for every other person who has sought Him. When we read them with a prayerful, open heart, those words won’t be wasted.
How much time do you spend daily in the Bible, and how do you spend that time? What can you do to make that time the most spiritually profitable?
State of the Heart
Our ability to receive instruction from God’s Word (Job 22:22) depends largely on what the state of our heart is like when we come to the Bible. How does 1 Corinthians 2:14 explain this?
To have spiritual discernment means to have spiritual insight and understanding. It makes sense, then, that a spiritually open-minded person will have very different takeaways in reading the Bible than a spiritually closed-minded person. Someone who thinks the Bible is foolish won’t look for truth in its pages.
So, both our attitude toward the Bible and the way we approach reading it are very important when it comes to growing in a relationship with God. How does Paul explain this in 1 Thessalonians 2:13?
God’s Word works in us when we believe. When you open your Bible and believe that God has something to say to you through the words on the pages, He will indeed speak to you and work in your life. But so much depends on your faith and your expectations. The good news is that if your faith is small, God can help it to grow (Mark 9:24), even if it’s tiny like a mustard seed (Luke 17:6).
One of the great purposes of the Bible is to speak truth into our lives about the condition of our relationship with God and how to strengthen it. If your heart is open to the Holy Spirit, if you approach the Word with humility, you will always come away changed, although one might not always immediately recognize this day by day, because such change and growth is often incremental. But if we cling to our apathy and sin and are not willing to change, Bible reading can avail us little good. The Holy Spirit prompts us to move closer to Jesus Christ. Do we want to step closer? If so, we become “wise unto salvation” (2 Tim. 3:15), and we’ll see things we never even imagined.
What is the state of my heart and mind as I approach the Bible? Am I just bringing my opinions to the Bible with the goal of trying to justify them, or am I coming with an open mind and heart, ready with childlike faith to see what God wants to tell me today? Why is that answer so important?
Further Thought: If you consider the words that you’ve spoken during the past 24 hours, how would you evaluate them? Were they loving, kind, joyful, uplifting, frustrated, tired, anxious, angry, gossipy, or malicious? The Bible says, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34, NKJV). When we have junk in our hearts, it comes out in our words.
We’ve all experienced feeling frustrated, tired, or stressed, and that state of mind changes what comes out of our mouths (often words we later regret). In contrast, when our heart is bursting with love for someone, it flows through our words.
In the same way, God’s Word speaks of His heart and His intentions toward us. It’s amazing to think that these very words, straight from the heart of God, are in our possession in the Bible. It’s truly incredible to see the power God’s words have held throughout history. “It is one thing to treat the Bible as a book of good moral instruction, to be heeded so far as is consistent with the spirit of the times and our position in the world; it is another thing to regard it as it really is--the word of the living God, the word that is our life, the word that is to mold our actions, our words, and our thoughts. To hold God’s word as anything less than this is to reject it. And this rejection by those who profess to believe it, is foremost among the causes of skepticism and infidelity in the youth.”--Ellen G. White, Education, p. 260.
Discussion Questions:
- What are all the logical and rational reasons you have for your faith? Probably a whole lot more than you realize.
- How can you make sure that Bible study and prayer are the foundation of your relationship with God? How can you have a relationship with God without both prayer and Bible study?
- If someone wanted to deepen their relationship with God, where would you advise them to start reading?
- How can you live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord? (Deut. 8:3). What might that really look like in your life?
- What do the following passages tell us about God’s words? Heb. 11:3; Ps. 33:6; Matt. 11:4-5; 1 Thess. 4:16; Eph. 6:17; James 1:21.
Summary: The Bible is living and powerful, and reading it is foundational to growing our relationship with God. Not only does it teach us about God’s wonderful character and His interactions with humanity throughout earth’s history--it also speaks to each of us today when we come to it in humility.
Jail Time
Carol de Oliveira
Can you imagine being thrust into a cold, dark prison cell for sharing Jesus? This is a common occurrence for Global Mission pioneers serving in a veiled country in the Southern Asia-Pacific Division.
Recently, Chong*, a pioneer, and Peter, the director of the local conference office, traveled to the northern part of this country to meet with members of a church plant.
While Chong and Peter enjoyed a sumptuous dinner with the members, they learned about three families who wanted to give their lives to Jesus. Chong was so excited when he learned they were ready to burn their spirit-worship items, He decided to visit them that night.
As Chong, Peter, and some of the church members trudged along the dark, narrow path to the families' homes, one of the members told Chong that he wanted his family to hear about Jesus. So, before the group reached the three families, they stopped at the member's home to share the good news.
Finally, the group arrived at the homes of the three families. It was late and chilly, but the people's beaming faces warmed Chong's heart, and their zeal energized his spirit. As they huddled around a fire, Peter introduced Chong and told the people he was there to help them make a full surrender to Jesus.
But the families didn't seem to need Chong's help. "We are ready to give our hearts to Jesus," the family elder said. "We will walk in the light with Jesus taking the lead; not the worldly spirits."
While Chong was talking with the families, a man suddenly burst into the room, demanding that Chong accompany him to the clan leader's home.
Later that evening, Peter and the church members returned to their place of worship to await news about Chong. As the hours dragged on, they became increasingly concerned about how long the meeting with the clan leader was taking. Finally, they received news that Chong was locked up in the clan leader's home.
During the night, the members prayed for Chong's protection while the leaders tried to negotiate his release. But nothing they tried was successful.
It was later confirmed that the head of the clan had conspired with the police to have Chong arrested. He had been transported to a detention center where he was kept during the initial investigation of the case.
Providentially, Chong was released four days later. Now, the village where he spent time in a cold, dark cell has more than 100 people who have become Seventh-day Adventist Christians! Rather than deterring Chong from sharing Jesus, jail time strengthened his resolve.
Despite fierce opposition, God's work continues to flourish in this veiled country. Please pray for our Global Mission pioneers who risk their safety to establish new churches for Jesus. Your faithfulness sustains their ministry.
*Names have been changed
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