How do we know what’s true about God and about Jesus?
Google? Smart people? Parents? University Lecturers?
Robbie and I recently finished preparing a kids spot for our church on Acts 17:10-15, where the gospel goes to the city of Berea. It can be viewed online via the Marrickville Road Church’s livestream for 24 October, or here on YouTube.
In this passage, Paul visits the Jewish synagogue and tells the people there about Jesus. The Berean Jews eagerly examine the Old Testament scriptures to see if Paul’s message is true, and as a result, many of them believe his message about Jesus.
Our application was, how do we know what’s true about God and about Jesus? We read the Bible – that’s how we know what’s true. And we looked at this from various angles, as the video will show.
In this post I wanted to reflect on this application.
As we were creating a kids spot, it was necessary to create a simple and clear message. And I think our application was good and right – the Bible is indeed our highest authority when it comes to knowing what’s true about God and about Jesus, and our children need to know this and to value its authority.
However, as we prepared the kids spot, it also occurred to me that our culture can misinterpret this message by taking it to the extreme. That is, we can often think that all we need as Christians is just me and the Bible and the Holy Spirit guiding me. Our Australian culture is highly individualistic, and it is all too easy for us to devalue reading the Bible in community. For more on this topic, see Robbie’s video review of Tim Ward’s book, ‘Words of Life’.
But in fact, for a thriving christian faith, we cannot afford to treat Christian community like a consumable thing that we can take or leave. As Christians we read the Bible in community – in the community of other local believers in the present, and in the community of Christians in the past – particularly those of the early church. To refuse to do this is to either stagnate in our faith, or to risk going astray. Examples of the former abound with people who have stopped going to church (is it any wonder that the writer to the Hebrews exhorts his readers to not give up meeting together? Hebrews 10:25), and examples of the latter include the modern day Jehovah’s Witness movement, who stray from the testimony of the early church and deny the divinity of Jesus, even mistranslating parts of the Bible to fit with their theology.
So let us teach our children to indeed value the Bible as the highest authority and to cultivate an investigative spirit like the noble Bereans. But let us also encourage them to value reading the Bible in community with other Christians – both locally present and past.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 