Authority of the Bible

Here is what we did on tuesday for our doctrine study. We started with the authority of Scripture.

the authority of Scripture- all the words in Scripture are God’s word in such a way that to disbelieve or to disobey any word of Scripture is to disbelieve or disobey God.

“Thus says the LORD” – Old Testament saying that meant that the following message are words of God. A prophet would be speaking but for God. It is inferring that the words are verbatim God’s. Ezekiel 2:7 Jeremiah 23:16
False prophets would be those who spoke saying that it was from God, but it not be.
Jer. 23:17 & Duet. 18:20

God speaks through prophets. There is no “Thus says the Lord” but what the prophet is saying is what God wants the people to hear. Deut. 18:18&19, 1 Sam. 13:13-14, Jer. 37:2, 1 Kings 14:18.

Both carry the authority just as if God was speaking Himself, so we can have assurance that when we see a true prophet speaking or “Thus says the Lord” that there is the authority of God behind what is written, but what about the rest of the O.T.? We need to see the entire O.T. (and N.T.) as if God was saying it Himself for it to have any authority for us. Ex. 24:7

To find that the O.T. is entirely the words of God we look to the N.T. Specifically in
2 Timothy 3:16. In the NIV the phrase “God breathed” is used. This is a figure of speech to say that God spoke, so we can be assured that the O.T. is entirely the words of God.
Was Paul also talking about the N.T. when he wrote this? Did Paul think that what he was writing would be Scripture?

So from Paul’s letter we can see that the entirety of the O.T. is the words of God. Anywhere in the O.T. is just as authoritative as another part. Another reference that parallels with 2 Timothy 3:16 is 2 Peter 1:20&21.

How does 2 Timothy 3:16 apply to the N.T. if Paul was referring to the O.T.? Lets look at the N.T. to see what it says about it self. 2 Peter 3:15-16 Here Peter affirms that Paul’s letters are Scripture. He puts them both together as one. 1 Timothy 5:18 Here Paul quotes from the Deut. 25:4 then he quotes from Luke 10:7, so he considers Luke’s gospel as Scripture. 1 Corinthians 14:37 Here Paul says that what he is writing is a command from God, but whether or not he is affirming it as Scripture is questionable. The reason being that Paul is an Apostle, which carry one of the main characteristics of a prophet of the O.T., being a messenger of God, but that being so prophets are the authors of the O.T. so if Paul is like a prophet then maybe he knew that he would be writing Scripture. What we can see from this though is that the some of the authors of the N.T. understood that there were going to be additions to Scripture that would be considered and carry just as mush authority as O.T. scripture, so we can then say that the N.T. is “God breathed,” especially since Paul was saying that it was ALL Scripture.
More evidence – 2 Peter 3:2,