Author: Christopher R Smith

The Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith is an an ordained minister, a writer, and a biblical scholar. He was active in parish and student ministry for twenty-five years. He was a consulting editor to the International Bible Society (now Biblica) for The Books of the Bible, an edition of the New International Version (NIV) that presents the biblical books according to their natural literary outlines, without chapters and verses. His Understanding the Books of the Bible study guide series is keyed to this format. He was also a consultant to Tyndale House for the Immerse Bible, an edition of the New Living Translation (NLT) that similarly presents the Scriptures in their natural literary forms, without chapters and verses or section headings. He has a B.A. from Harvard in English and American Literature and Language, a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell, and a Ph.D. in the History of Christian Life and Thought, with a minor concentration in Bible, from Boston College, in the joint program with Andover Newton Theological School.

Why did Jesus order his disciples not to tell anyone he was the Messiah?

Q. Matthew records in his gospel that after Peter declared, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Jesus “ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.” Why did Jesus do that?

I think that if Jesus’ disciples had started proclaiming at that point that he was the Messiah, people would have misunderstood what this meant. People would have thought that Jesus was the kind of Messiah they were expecting. As I say in this post, they would have been expecting a Messiah who would “see his primary role as that of meeting the physical needs of people” or who would “do dazzling daredevil feats that would win admiration and an audience” or who wold “try to achieve his purposes by obtaining political and military power.” The devil tried to tempt Jesus to see himself as the Messiah in these ways.

But after Jesus suffered, died, and rose from the dead, the disciples were not only free to proclaim that Jesus was the Messiah, they were commanded to do so. The fact that Jesus had willingly undergone these things showed what kind of Messiah he actually was, and so people would not have misunderstood the disciples to be proclaiming that he was a different type of Messiah, along the lines I have described. The fact that Jesus willingly underwent these things also showed what kind of Savior the world actually needed.

What was Rebekah’s reward for helping Jacob?

Q. Thank you for the extensive discussion in your post “Why didn’t God give Esau back the blessing that Jacob stole?” Please I want to know the reward of Rebekah, considering her dangerous role in reshaping the history of her children against the will of her husband Isaac.

I think a good case can be made from the Bible that Rebekah recognized that the future of her family depended on Jacob rather than Esau being the head of the next generation and that she worked to help Jacob at some risk to herself, since her husband Isaac favored Esau. At the end of some biblical stories, we are told what the rewards were for people who advanced God’s purposes. We are not told anything like this specifically about Rebekah. But perhaps we can come to some conclusions about it.

While Rebekah was still expecting her twin sons, “the babies jostled each other within her,” and “she went to inquire of the Lord” about why this was happening. The Lord revealed to her that her sons would be the patriarchs of “two nations” and that “the older will serve the younger.” The Bible does not say of Rebekah, as it does of Mary when God revealed things to her about the destiny of her son Jesus, that she “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” But we can certainly imagine that she did.

As the boys grew into young men, it became clear, as I say in the post you mention, that Jacob “was much better suited to assume the leadership of the Israelite family as it began growing rapidly into a group of tribes that would become a nation.” While Esau was the older of the two, “his responsibilities as the firstborn son weren’t important to him and he was likely to neglect them.” So Rebekah did, as you say, reshape the future of her descendants by helping Jacob to move into the position of leadership of the next generation.

However, she needed to overcome Isaac’s inclinations in order to do this. The Bible tells us that “Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob.” In other words, Isaac seems to have favored Esau because he brought him the kind of meals that he liked, and this led Isaac to overlook the faults in Esau’s character.

As I also say in the post you mentioned, even after Esau sold his birthright to Jacob, Jacob still needed to obtain the paternal blessing that went with it. When Rebekah saw that Isaac was about to give this blessing to Esau, she told Jacob to go to Isaac and trick him into thinking that he was Esau. Jacob initially resisted. He objected that if his father realized who he was, he would curse him rather than bless him. Rebekah replied, “Let the curse fall on me. Just do what I say.” This statement can be interpreted in a number of ways, but one of them is that Rebekah was willing to risk even the curse of the family patriarch in order to promote the son she recognized would be the right leader for the next generation.

Esau became so angry when he discovered that Jacob had stolen his blessing that he vowed to kill Jacob. To save Jacob’s life, Rebekah needed to send him far away to live with her brother. He was gone for 20 years. The Bible does not mention Rebekah after Jacob’s return to his homeland, and some interpreters speculate that she died while he was away. We don’t know that for sure, however, and we should not read too much into the text where it is silent. It would be nice to think that she was still alive when he returned and that she was able to witness the reunion and reconciliation of her two sons. Hopefully she also saw her many grandchildren and realized that she had every reason to expect a bright future for the coming generations of her family. The text allows for that just as much as it allows for other possibilities, and if that was the case, then this itself would probably have been all the reward that Rebekah would have asked for.

Is Richard Moulton’s literary analysis of the Bible still useful today?

Q. I notice that in your book The Beauty Behind the Mask you reference The Modern Reader’s Bible, edited by Richard Moulton, and you offer some criticism of his choice of book order and book titles. I own a copy of that book, as well as Moulton’s book The Literary Study of the Bible, both of which I purchased years ago at a used book store. He has other books about the Bible and literature that can now be found online. Moulton aimed to lay out the text of the Bible according to the literary structure—perhaps a forerunner of The Books of the Bible edition. Although I do not regularly read from The Modern Reader’s Bible, I do refer to it to notice how it lays out the poetic structure, and I notice that Moulton in his notes has an overarching system of the literary forms of the Bible, from simple to complex. My question is how valid and useful are his views, his literary theory of the Bible, and his Bible edition, all more than 100 years old, considered today? Did he have insight that is still valuable and been forgotten, or has modern scholarship rendered it obsolete?

The short answer to your question is that Moulton’s analysis, in my opinion, is still very valuable. While, as you noted, I differ with him about some details, overall he is asking the same questions and pursuing the same goals as we did in producing The Books of the Bible.

Now here is the long answer to your question.

God gave us his word in the Bible by using not only existing human languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—but also by using existing human literary forms: psalms (songs), epistles (letters), parables, proverbs, stories, visions (dreams), and so forth. If we really want to understand what God is saying to us through the Bible, we need to appreciate the Bible for what it is: a collection of literary compositions. That is what the Bible is made of.

Unfortunately, most people who engage the Bible treat it as if it were made of something else. One common way to engage the Bible is as if it were made up of “verses.” These are taken to be short doctrinal propositions or “precious promises” or “thoughts to live by.” Since Bible verses each seem to have their own indexing (e.g. John 3:16), and since published versions of the Bible number them right in the text (some editions even print each verse as a separate paragraph), they seem to be intentional divisions of the text—the basic building blocks of the Bible.

But as I point out in The Beauty Behind the Mask, chapters were only added to the Bible around the year 1200 and verses were only added around 1550. They are late, artificial divisions introduced for convenience of reference, most often for the sake of reference in the course of discussions and debates. It is not a coincidence that verses were added to the Bible around the time of the many theological debates of the Reformation. A friend of mine calls the chapter-and-verse Bible a “debater’s Bible.”

But that visual presentation suggests that the Bible is something that it is not. Suppose that all you had of Shakespeare was a collection of “famous quotations.” For example:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2.
“What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2.
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 5.
These are certainly interesting and valuable thoughts to consider and apply to life. But what Shakespeare wrote was drama for the theater. If you haven’t seen his plays acted on stage, you haven’t engaged his writings for what they are. Similarly, if you only reference “Bible verses,” you haven’t engaged the biblical writings for what they are.

Another way people engage the Bible is as if it consisted of short articles on various topics, like an encyclopedia. Printed editions of the Bible foster this understanding by separating the text into sections that each have their own headings. People tend to read section by section, and preachers often preach on one section at a time, so this is another answer people have implicitly in their heads to the question of what the Bible is made of. Just by looking at most Bibles published today, they can only conclude that it is made of “sections.”

But these sections do not do justice to the literary character of the compositions in the Bible. Translation committees and publishers create and label them not with a view toward literary structure but simply with a view towards subject matter or topic. These titled sections encourage “dipping in” rather than experiencing the biblical compositions as a whole. They also suggest an objective, distanced approach to the topics that are apparently taken up, as in an encyclopedia, rather than that the writers are immersed in the situations they are writing about, sometimes literally in a life-and-death struggle. So engaging the Bible through “sections” is also not engaging its writings for what they are.

Yet another way that people engage the Bible is as the subject of an academic discipline. This is what you were asking about specifically in terms of an assessment of Moulton’s analysis. It’s important to realize that when we engage the Bible, there is a “world behind the text,” a “world of the text,” and a “world in front of the text.” The world behind the text is the historical and cultural context in which the Bible was written. Much of academic study of the Bible deals with that. The world in front of the text is the reactions and responses to the text by all the people who are receiving it in various ways. In academic circles, this would be all of the scholars in the field of biblical studies and their various publications. Much of the remaining part of academic study of the Bible has to do with addressing what various other scholars have said about the Bible. Engaging the biblical works as literary compositions is often regarded as outside the scope of biblical studies, as something that falls within the realm of literary studies instead. (And indeed, courses on the Bible are a required part of many college literature majors, since the Bible is such a foundational influence on the literature of many languages and cultures.)

The structures of biblical books sometimes are discussed within the field of biblical studies, but my personal feeling is that this is not done in a progressive or cumulative way. In other words, I do not feel that we have come to understand these structures better and better as biblical studies has progressed over the years, so that anything Moulton might have written over a century ago must of course be obsolete by now. Rather—and again, this is a personal feeling—as biblical studies takes up various suggestions about structure in the course of its own conversation, different views come in and out of vogue as the conversation progresses.

So for myself, to assess Moulton’s contributions, I would instead ask how the people who, over time, have engaged the biblical books as literary compositions have seen them to be put together on their own terms. This question of literary structure is one (along with the questions of circumstances of composition, literary genre, and thematic development) that Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren encourage readers to address in their classic work How to Read a Book. It is also a question that various approaches to inductive Bible study encourage readers to pursue first, in light of an overall reading of a book: what are its major and minor divisions? Those are to be determined independently of chapters and verses and of any divisions that publishers have introduced.

When we approach the Bible this way, we find, as I show in The Beauty Behind the Mask, pp. 139–143, that the various people who, down through the years, have sought to offer literary-structural presentations of the biblical books have ended up identifying essentially the same outlines, even though these may differ in some smaller details. Richard Moulton is one of these people, and I would say that his overall approach is still one that we can learn much from today. We certainly saw him as someone who helped blaze the trail for The Books of the Bible. Indeed, we knew we were standing on his shoulders as we did our work, and we were and are grateful for his contributions.

Let me conclude, therefore, by quoting from his preface to The Modern Reader’s Bible: “The revelation which is the basis of our modern religion has been made in the form of literature: grasp of its literary structure is the true starting-point for spiritual interpretation.”

Do the blank lines of varying widths in The Books of the Bible signify book sections of varying sizes?

Q, I have a question about The Books of the Bible. I notice that there are blank lines between text, and that sometimes there is one blank line, sometimes two, and sometimes three.  Do these correspond with the structure used in Inductive Bible Study?  So do three blank lines separate the divisions, two blank lines the sections, and one blank line the segments?  I am looking at the Gospel of Matthew.  I notice that there is sometimes a blank line separating what I would call paragraphs, and not segments.  Thanks.

You are correct. The blank lines identify literary units of varying sizes. In the Gospel of Matthew, three blank lines (and a large capital letter) mark off the largest units. These units are described in the introduction to Matthew: “five thematic sections consisting of story plus teaching,” with a genealogy preceding and a narrative of Jesus’ sufferings, death, and resurrection following. I think you would call these largest units “divisions.”

Two blank lines mark off the next-largest units. Each thematic division begins with a story sequence, followed by a speech sequence (discourse) that elaborates on the theme of those stories. So two blank lines separate story from discourse within thematic units. I think you would call the story and discourse units “sections.”

Three blank lines mark off the smallest units, which are the episodes in the stories or the rhetorical passages in the discourses. For example, there are single blank lines between the episodes of Jesus’ birth, the preaching of John the Baptist, the baptism of Jesus, and the temptation of Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, there are single blank lines between Jesus’ discussions of fulfilling the law, the practice of piety (alms, prayer, fasting), and money. I think you would call these units “segments.”

In some cases an episode is brief, only one paragraph long, so in that case a single paragraph also constitutes a “segment.”

These divisions work bottom-up. If a biblical book has literary units on only two levels, then the edition will use only spaces of one and two lines. For example, in 2 John, there are two-line spaces between the opening, main body, and conclusion of the letter. The conventions of letter-writing in the opening and conclusion (sender’s name, addressee, blessing; travel plans, greetings) are separated by one-line spaces.

In The Books of the Bible, there is a brief introduction to each book, and it discusses, among other things, the literary structure that this edition uses blank lines to mark in that book.

I hope this is helpful. Enjoy your reading!

Is it blasphemy to throw a Bible in anger?

Q. If a person is angry and throws the Bible, would God consider that a form of blasphemy? If He would, then am I to assume this person is going to hell?

God takes extenuating circumstances into account. We know this because Jesus himself said on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Anger is an extenuating circumstance. When people become very angry, they say and do things that they don’t really mean. God would recognize that a person who threw a Bible in anger was not making a definitive choice to reject him or his word. People go to hell for choosing—consciously, deliberately, and definitively—against God. They don’t go to hell for losing their temper.

Jesus also said, “People will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” It’s important to understand what Jesus meant by both parts of this statement.

As for “blasphemy against the Spirit,” as I say in this post, that phrase refers to “the act of attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan. The reason this sin ‘can’t be forgiven’ is not because the person has done something so bad that it’s beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness. The Bible stresses that Jesus’ death on the cross is sufficient for the forgiveness of any and all sins that any human being might commit. Rather, if we attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan, then this will make us resist the work of the Holy Spirit, and His gracious influences will not be able to bring us to repentance and salvation. In other words, Jesus isn’t saying that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. He’s saying that it can not be forgiven, because it separates us from the very influence that’s meant to lead us to forgiveness.” I don’t feel that this describes a person who throws a Bible in anger.

The other part of Jesus’ statement, about “speaking a word against the Son of Man,” refers to people, both in his time and in later times, who don’t realize at first who Jesus is and so deny that the is the Savior. Jesus is saying that he will not hold this (or any other word or deed of disrespect) against them. Instead, he will always seek to draw them to himself as the Savior. I think there is a valid analogy here. If blasphemy against the living Word of God, Jesus, can be forgiven, then words or deeds against the written word of God, the Bible, can also be forgiven. So there is not a danger here of an “unpardonable sin” that would inevitably make a person go to hell.

The Bible does say further, however, “Be angry but do not sin.” Anger, in and of itself, is simply an emotion. There are many good reasons to become angry (at injustice, for example), and the powerful emotion of anger can serve as motivation to help us make changes in the world and in our own lives. (People sometimes say, “I got good and mad at myself and finally did something about it.”) So the real issue is what we do with our anger. If we “lose our temper” (that is, we let our anger get out of control) and we say and do things that we don’t really mean and that we regret afterwards, then that is probably the kind of anger that the Bible considers sinful. That is certainly the case if we say or do things that are hurtful or harmful to other people.

But there is a remedy for sin. The Bible promises us, “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” So I would encourage someone who had thrown a Bible in anger to apologize to God and ask forgiveness. That person could be confident of God’s forgiveness based on the promise I just quoted. It would then be good to ask “how did this happen?” and try to establish new patterns in life that would keep anger from getting out of control.

One final observation. As a wise person once told me, when it comes to human expressions of emotions toward God, “God can take it.” God isn’t going to overreact to his own creatures’ blustering. In fact, God wants us to express our emotions to him, across the entire range. The Scriptures themselves provide us with many examples of this, particularly in the Psalms. David says at the start Psalm 13, for example, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” He is certainly expressing frustration and disappointment, and perhaps impatience and even anger. Yet the Bible presents his prayer to us as a model for our own prayers to God. So those should be honest, heart-felt, and yes, emotional. God already knows what we are feeling. So there’s no reason why our prayers shouldn’t reflect and express those feelings.

But our prayers should be respectful. One “fruit of the Spirit” in the life of believers is self-control. While we should feel what we feel and express what we feel, we should also look to God to build the character of Christ in our lives so that we don’t lose control of our emotions. So I guess I would say to a person who had thrown a Bible in anger that there is both a promise of forgiveness for genuine repentance and an opportunity for spiritual growth that the episode is pointing to.

If humans are made in the image of God, how are they “lower than the angels”?

Q. David says in Psalm 8:5 that God has made humans “a little lower than the angels.” Does this mean that angels higher than humans? If so, in what way are they higher than humans? Are angels, like humans, made in the image of God? If not, wouldn’t that make humans higher than angels? But then, if that is the case, I am not sure how to reconcile the view that humans are higher than angels with Psalm 8:5. I would very much appreciate your help with answering these questions.

I think the reference in Psalm 8 is to the position of humans within creation, rather than to status and dignity of humans as creatures made in the image of God. David does say, “You have made them a little lower than the angels.” But he then says, in parallel, “You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.” He goes on to specify, in beautiful poetry, that this means “all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.” This is the three-part division that we see in the creation account in Genesis: land, sky, and sea. So David means “over all the rest of creation.”

In other words, “a little lower than the angels,” who inhabit the heavenly realm, actually means “higher than any other creature in the earthly realm.” Once again, this has to do with position, not status and dignity. People are God’s vice-regents on earth. That is, they have the role of ruling the earth as God’s authorized representatives. This is a great privilege, but also a great responsibility. We are to be wise and careful stewards of the earth and its creatures.

As for the specific relationship between people and angels, the book of Hebrews says that angels are “ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation.” In the vision that the apostle John reports in the book of Revelation, at one point he wanted to fall down and worship one of the angels he was seeing. But the angel told him, “Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers and sisters who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!”

So it is clear that people are not inferior to angels, not if angels are their fellow servants and even serve them. In addition, Paul wrote to the Corinthians that believers will one day “judge angels.” He did not specify what this meant, and it would probably not be useful to speculate about it. But this also shows that people are not inferior to angels.

(And while the Bible also does not specify in what way angels serve as “ministering spirits” who are sent to help us, and it would also not be useful to speculate about that, we can certainly be grateful for whatever it involves!)

Is it accurate to translate Deuteronomy 32:8 as making reference to the “sons of God”?

Q. In your 3-part posting about the ‘sons of God,’ you reference Deut. 32:8 and quote it as concluding with ‘according to the number of the sons of God,’ as the ESV translates it. While I like that translation, and am intrigued with Dr. Heiser’s thoughts on the divine council, could you help me understand how the ESV translators arrived at that translation? Every resource I have traces those Hebrew words to the word ‘Israel.’ I want to agree with Heiser and the ESV’s translation and view, as it supports the divine council concept, but not being a Hebrew scholar, I don’t know how anyone arrived at ‘the sons of God.’ Thank you for any input you may have, and God bless you!

The difference is because of a textual variation. While the Masoretic Text, the traditional Hebrew text, reads “the sons of Israel,” the reading “the sons of God” is found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Old Testament that predates the Masoretic Text) reads “the angels of God,” which seems to be an interpretive translation of an original reading “the sons of God.”

The ESV is not the only English version that uses the reading from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint rather than the reading from the Masoretic Text. Here are some other examples.
NET according to the number of the heavenly assembly
NIRV based on the number of the angels in his heavenly court
CEV He assigned a guardian angel to each of them
GNT He assigned to each nation a heavenly being
NABRE after the number of the divine beings
NLT according to the number in his heavenly court
NRSV according to the number of the gods

Dr. Heiser, who sadly passed away last year, addressed the textual issue in detail in an article that Liberty University, the institution where he taught, has kindly made available online. You can read it here:

Heiser, Michael, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God” (2001). LBTS Faculty Publications and Presentations 279.

I hope this information is helpful.

Can a person with a hardened heart come back to God?

Q. Is it possible for a person whose heart has become hardened, and been hardened even further by God, to come back to God?

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by God hardening someone’s heart even further. We do have a record in the Bible of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. But that was for a specific purpose. Pharaoh had already set himself up against God, as became clear from his first answer to Moses: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.” So this was a matter of God confirming Pharaoh in choices that he had already made, but that was for the purpose of God showing who he was to all the world through what he did to what was then the greatest empire in the world. We know that this made an impression on all the surrounding peoples, because later one of them told the Israelites how they had heard of what God had done to the Egyptians, and as a result, they knew that “the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.”

But I would say that, apart from such extraordinary purposes within God’s historical plan of redemption, God would not harden the heart of an individual so as to make it harder for that individual to repent and return. Sometimes God will confirm us in our choices in the sense of allowing us to experience the consequences of those choices. But God does that specifically so that we will realize that they were the wrong choices and repent.

So my essential answer to your question is yes, a person whose heart has become hardened can indeed return to God. Specifically if you are asking about yourself, the very fact that you are asking shows that your heart has begun to soften. You want to know if there is a way back to God. And there always is, for anyone who desires to return. The door is always open on God’s side. As the Bible says, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them.” God is eager to forgive and to restore us to relationship to him. So if you are asking about yourself, I would encourage you that the way is genuinely open for you to return to God.

And even if you are asking about someone else, the fact that God has put this person on your heart and you are wondering if there is still hope suggests to me that God, through his Holy Spirit, is reaching out to the person through you, wanting you to pray and intercede for that person. So I would encourage you to do that. See your concern for the person as something that God has given you because God is concerned and knows that you will pray and perhaps be someone who is able to encourage and help the person to return.

Only God truly knows what is in a person’s heart. Even if it might appear to us that someone has become so hardened against God that they would never return, we do not know what is going on inside that person. Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. That is what we do know. If someone seems lost, then he or she is precisely the kind of person whom Jesus came to save.

Do we need Bible studies, or can the church tell us what to believe?

Q, I recently engaged in a discussion with someone I know, though not well. We began exchanging our religious backgrounds and spiritual journeys. This led to some theological themes which, for me, seemed to go around in circles until I realized that his belief, as a Roman Catholic, was that the Roman Catholic church was the one true church of God. His reasoning was that Christ left His church to His followers with Peter as its head and that church is what we call the Roman Catholic Church. For him, having Bible studies simply led to “Christian chaos.” We don’t need them because we can just know what the truth is by what Christ left behind namely, the [Roman Catholic] Church, His church. How do you respond to this?

I can see why you found yourself going around in circles with your friend. Your differences arose from fundamentally different presuppositions that you each held, so there was no way to resolve them through conversation.

These presuppositions had to do with doctrinal authority. I gather from the wording of your question that you consider the Scriptures to be the ultimate authority on matters of faith and practice for Christians. Your friend considers church teaching to be the ultimate authority. These are simply different premises, and so those who hold them will inevitably come to different conclusions. Still, let me make a couple of observations that I hope will be helpful.

First, I think a good case can be made that Scripture itself teaches that Scripture is the ultimate authority for believers. The Roman Catholic church teaches that the books of the New Testament should be accepted as canonical (that is, recognized as inspired) because they were written by Christ’s apostles and their companions. In one place, Luke, a companion of the apostle Paul, wrote that the people who came to believe in Jesus in the city of Berea were “noble” because they “examined the Scriptures every day to see whether what Paul said was true.” In other words, here we have a companion of an apostle calling believers “noble” not because they received apostolic teaching but because they tested it against the Scriptures. This is just one incident, but it is illustrative of the apostles’ approach generally. Everywhere in those New Testament books that the Roman Catholic church considers inspired because they are apostolic, what we see is the apostles appealing to Scripture as the authority for their statements. They do not say, “Now you need to believe this because we are saying it, and we are apostles.”

However, even this would not convince a person for whom church teaching was the ultimate authority that Scripture should be the ultimate authority. That person would just respond, “But the church has interpreted all those texts, using its authority, and from its interpretation, the church has declared that it is the ultimate authority.” Nevertheless, a person for whom Scripture is the ultimate authority may recognize that commitment to be consistent with Scripture itself.

The other point I’d like to make is that I sympathize with your friend’s concern about “Christian chaos” in Bible studies. That’s what happens when we read a portion of Scripture out loud and then go around the room and have everybody say what they think it means—or how it makes them feel. Our understanding of the Bible does need to be grounded in and guided by the church’s teaching. But personally I would see that teaching embodied in people whom God has gifted, called, and trained to be teachers and in the wonderful treasury of biblical and theological references and resources that have been created over the centuries within the church. We need to use those resources in our Bible studies, and we need to have good teachers.

In other words, church teaching is a necessary authority that guides and informs our understanding. A Bible study is not supposed to be the blind leading the blind. Nevertheless, church teaching is still a secondary authority. Scripture is primary.

What does the Bible say about decision-making?

Q. What does the Bible say about decision-making?

One of the most significant things the Bible says about this is that when we have an important decision to make, we should seek the counsel and advice of wise friends. “In a multitude of counselors there is safety.” The Bible teaches us that all of us, as individual people, are limited in our knowledge, experience, and perspective. We need others to help us see things from further perspectives; to consider things we would not have considered otherwise; and to learn from the experiences, both good and bad, that others have had as a result of the decisions they have made in comparable situations.

I think that if we went to people and said, “I have an important decision to make and I’d like to ask your advice about it,” the kind of people whose counsel would be valuable would be very happy to listen and help. So think about who those people are in your life.

But those whose counsel we are to consider include not only those who are alive with us today but also those who have gone before us. “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.”

“Ask the former generation
    and find out what their ancestors learned,
for we were born only yesterday and know nothing,
    and our days on earth are but a shadow.
Will they not instruct you and tell you?
    Will they not bring forth words from their understanding?”

The Bible itself is a repository of the ancient wisdom of godly people, and so reading and studying it regularly puts this type of counsel at our disposal.

It is important to stress that our counselors and advisors must be godly people. “Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge.” Here and in many similar contexts, the Bible uses the word “fool” to mean not someone who lacks intelligence or education, but someone who lives without regard for God. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The word “fear,” for its part, refers not to being afraid of God, but to not daring to do anything that we know God would disapprove of. “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding.” “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.”

This all points to a second significant thing that the Bible teaches us about decision-making. Often we face a decision between two courses of action; one of which seems like a shortcut or expedient, but involves some sense of moral compromise, while the other seems longer and more difficult, but also has a clean, honest feel to it. In such cases, we should always choose the latter option. I recall a conversation in which a friend brought up a decision that she needed to make. One person there suggested that she could expedite the process in view by saying a certain thing that didn’t happen to be true. “But that would be lying,” I observed. “Well,” this person responded, “if you’re not prepared to help yourself out like that, then I guess you’ll have to take the long way around.” This friend did take “the long way around,” and she was much better off for doing so.

Sometimes “making a decision” is actually a matter of seeking and receiving guidance from God. We come to a crossroads, and there is a specific road that God wants us to take forward. In such situations, understanding God’s guidance is, as I say in this post, typically the result of a convergence of factors: “the teaching of Scripture, the advice of trusted counselors, the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, what the circumstances permit, the God-given desires of our hearts, etc.” (We might also mention other factors such as whether we have peace about a possible path and whether pursuing it would require faith.)

But at other times, “making a decision” means determining what a wise course of action would be in a situation where God is not necessarily guiding us forward in one direction or another. We just need to make a wise choice about our present circumstances. In such cases, what I have said about cultivating godly wisdom and seeking godly advice would certainly apply.

And there is a third possibility: In many circumstances, we may simply be free to make a choice. I believe that God loves to see his creatures develop into their fullness. Parents, by analogy, don’t want to have to keep telling their children what to do; they want them to develop into mature individuals who can make good choices for themselves. At a certain point, for example, parents stop dressing their children and instead have them decide what to wear each day.

I think it’s the same thing with God. Suppose you are going to host some friends for dinner. I’m not sure that God would ordinarily send you divine guidance from heaven about what to serve. I think God would be delighted to see you plan a great meal and pull it off. I do think that in such circumstances, we could ask God to help us have good ideas. But in the end, we will probably feel, with gratitude to God, that that was just what happened: We had a good idea.