And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban”’ (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.” (Mark 7:9-13)
Ever since I finished my five-and-a-half-month journey through a book of false teachings about God’s word, I have been amazed and delighted by how often Jesus spoke of the Scriptures as the word of God.
One reason this is so important is that the false teachers speaking against God’s word are as prolific as Jesus and the apostles warned. Many people who are snared by their clever reasonings miss the fact that both the teachers and their followers are confirming scripture as the word of God since God said that there would be many deceivers and many people deceived by them!
I want to elaborate on how Jesus affirmed the scriptures as the word of God simply to encourage everyone that we who trust in God’s word will not be the ones who are ashamed in the judgment. It will be those who cry out in horror that they taught or followed teachings against the word of God who will be ashamed that they rejected the authoritative word of God in the scriptures.
The reason Isaiah’s prophecy is affirmed as God’s word is because the Jewish understanding of the genuine prophets was that they were speaking for God. For Jesus to quote Isaiah and declare his writing as prophecy is to make him a spokesman for God and his book the word of God.
If we follow how Jesus and the gospels addressed “as it is written,” we will see that it is the written word that is treated as the word of God. That written word is what we now have in the Old Testament part of our Bibles.
The quote from Isaiah is Isaiah quoting Yahweh, the name of God in the Old Testament. To quote Yahweh (know by the Jews of Jesus’ time as Adonai), is declaring the word of God, and the dominos of this quote being in Isaiah, being “what is written”, and being in “the scriptures” amplifies the declaration that we are dealing with the word of God.
When Jesus taught something from the scriptures and called it “the commandment of God”, he was declaring it to be the word of God, but also emphasizing that it is authoritative over God’s people, as are the scriptures to this day.
What we call the books of Moses are the first five books of the Bible. They are greatly under attack because the history they reveal is foundational to understanding the whole of scripture. When Jesus used Moses as his authority, he was affirming that what Moses wrote was God’s word. It should serve as a warning to the many people who are tampering with it to suit their agendas.
I smiled when I saw that Jesus used the very phrase “the word of God” when summarizing all he had said about scripture, Isaiah, Moses, and what is written. The scriptures are the word of God, and this now includes everything we have in the New Testament scriptures.
So many times in my journey through that book of false teachings I came back to the way Jesus replied to Satan in the wilderness: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). When we add to this that, “everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith” (I John 5:4), and, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17), we must always “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).
And I love to share testimonies of how “the word of God” in the scriptures we have in the Bible speaks to me every day and builds up my faith to not only live by every word that comes from the mouth of God, but to encourage you to do so as well!
© 2024 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
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