In the sermon titled 'Hezekiah's Prophetic Task,' Peter Allison explores the authority, inerrancy, and infallibility of the Bible. The sermon begins with a reading from Proverbs chapter 25, focusing on the role of Hezekiah's men in copying Solomon's proverbs. Allison addresses the common criticisms surrounding the Bible's authority, such as the notion that church councils or victories of certain sects determined the biblical canon, likening these ideas to the 'Da Vinci Code' theory. He argues against these views by emphasizing that the Bible itself, as the Word of God, provides the criteria for its own canonicity. The sermon highlights the prophetic nature of all scripture, with both Old and New Testament texts being referred to as prophecy. Through numerous biblical references, Allison demonstrates how the scriptures themselves affirm their canonicity and interconnectedness. He discusses the process of canon formation, showing how books were added and recognized as canonical upon their writing. The sermon emphasizes that God's authority, rather than human decisions or councils, has determined the content of the Bible. Allison concludes with a prayer, thanking God for the preservation of His Word.

Our scripture reading this morning is Proverbs chapter 25. My apologies I did not get a note, a message out To everyone that we would be going back. We'll be looking at the first verse this morning, but I'd like to read just a little bit more to give us a little context. This opens a new part in the Book of Proverbs, part 5. These Also are Proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, king of Judah, copied.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search out a matter. As the heavens for height and the earth for depth, so the heart of kings is unsearchable. Take away the dross from silver and it will go to the silversmith for jewelry. Take away the wicked from before the king and his throne will be established in righteousness. Do not exalt yourself in the presence of the king, and do not stand in the place of the great, for it is better that he say to you, come up here, than that you should be put lower in the presence of the prince whom your eyes have seen.

Do not go hastily to court, for what will you do in the end when your neighbor has put you to shame? Debate your case with your neighbor and do not disclose the secret to another, lest he who hears it expose your shame and your reputation be ruined. A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in the settings of silver, like an earring of gold and an ornament of fine gold is a wise rebuke to an obedient ear. Like the cold of snow in time of harvest, is a faithful messenger to those who send him, for he refreshes the soul of his master. May these righteous judgments move us to give him thanks.

Almighty Father in Heaven, your word is pure, refined, as it were seven times. Sanctify us this morning by your word. May it be mixed with faith. May you instruct us this morning out of it. May enable us to concentrate upon your word this morning.

Please remove the distractions that would Detract from our hearing and understanding and applying your word and I ask Lord that you would preserve me from error and Sanctify these lips through Jesus Christ. Amen. Did you ever wonder how a book of the Bible becomes a book of the Bible? Many people who don't believe the Bible have tried to attack the authority and the inerrancy and infallibility right on this very point. Where did the Bible come from?

They ask. How do you know that it is inerrant? How do you know that it is inerrant? How do you know that it is the Word of God? How do you know you can stake your life upon what it says?

And sadly there are many errors today on this very point. One such error is that the Bible is not the Word of God, but it's simply words from God. They might say only Jesus Christ is the Word of God. And this text, This book is just words from God. Another error is that the church decided what was in the Bible and essentially gave us the Bible.

So they answer, How do you know what's in the Bible? Well, the church decided that at some time in the past, and now we have it. Another error is that some council decided what was in the Bible at some point in time. And we hope they got it right. But what if they didn't?

The critic asks. What if they made a mistake? How do you know they got it right? How do you know that counsel wasn't making an error in leaving something out that should have been in, or putting something in that should have been left out. The typical position of the unbelieving apostate or apostate Bible scholar today is what we might call the Da Vinci Code version.

You remember that book? The Da Vinci Code version of how the canon came into existence. That you had all these various sects that all had different ideas about the Bible and they all are battling for supremacy and who is going to win out whose way was going to carry the day who is going to whose idea of the Bible was going to prevail and that's what we have today is just the sect that happened to be victorious. You know, the victors write the history books. And so, there are all these different sects all duking it out, battling, having their arguments and debates, and while just the privileged ones, the ones that had some advantage over the others, you know, they're able to shut everybody else up, they were able to ban everybody else and get them branded as heretics and burned And that's how we have the Bible.

Because we just burned and exiled everybody else that had a different opinion. That's what they believe. It's just the victor's version of history. But even evangelical scholars, while rejecting The notion that the church or a church council decides what's in the canon don't believe that the scriptures themselves say much, if anything, about canonicity and how the Bible came to being. And so they want to look to some extra biblical criteria for deciding what's in the Bible and what's not in the Bible.

Like Were the authors eye witnesses to the events they wrote about? Or were they taught about them directly by the apostles who were eye witnesses? Or we could look at each book and say, is the book's teaching consistent with church practice and with the tradition of the Apostles? Or we could say, well, was each book in general use by the church and accepted as the Word of God? But those are really just circular questions, ultimately, that get back to the church at some point decided what was in the Bible.

You see, typically what somebody will say, what some people will say, even evangelical people will say something like this, that the earliest indications of the Old Testament canon came from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, and This process was begun sometime around the Babylonian captivity with the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. But the process wasn't complete for several more centuries after that. And then deciding which books were in and out was the work of some priest somewhere in that time. The New Testament came together in a similar way, somewhere in the first or second century. But discussion continued on it for another couple hundred years.

And then people will say, well, then it was canonized at some point in time. But the problem with all these ideas is, I think, pretty obvious when you think about it. They put people. They put you and I. Or some criteria that we decide, which is the same as putting you and I over the authority of the Word of God if The church is deciding Or some criteria We come up with some criteria that decide what's in the Bible, then we're the ones that are in authority over the Bible.

How can we trust that? How can we stake our eternal salvation on that? How can we stake our life on that? I don't think you can. Or at least not with any wisdom.

This really undermines the inerrancy and the infallibility of the Word of God. Inerrancy meaning being without error and infallible meaning not able to have an error. So you can have different combinations of those. I guess if it's infallible then it has to be inerrant logically. See that's not what the Bible teaches.

I think you have to realize pretty quickly that God alone can determine what is in His Word and what is not in His Word. It's a good question to ask. If you've asked that question, It's a good question to ask. If you've asked that question, it's a good question to ask. Just go to the Bible to get your answer.

If the Bible is the infallible and inerrant word of God, then only God can answer the question of what is in His Word and what is not in His Word. And since the only prophecy that is the Word of God, the only Word of God that we have today is the Bible, then only the Bible can answer what is in the Bible and what is not in the Bible. And we know that the Bible is sufficient for this, because Paul said that the Bible is sufficient for doctrine, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that we may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. So that means this Bible is sufficient for even this question. And that's what we want to look at this morning, because that's what this verse is about.

These Proverbs of Solomon that he wrote were collected and ordered by Hezekiah, or the men of Hezekiah scribes working under his direction. We'll see then that this king had a prophetic task, that of ordering and in some cases authoring the Word of God. No prophecy, prophecy is the Word of God. No prophecy originates by private interpretation. But the scriptures were written by holy men who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

The Lord used their own personalities, their own gifts. What they were writing, they were writing out of their own humanity, out of their ability with language. And you can read some of the books of the Bible are written very eloquently, and others are written in very common language. Many are written with incredible sophistication in terms of the structure of the book. But all these things were written through the minds of these men, but the Lord was moving and directing through them what went into His Word.

So the canon then is the Word of God. Now that may seem obvious, the canon is the word of God, but we need to remember that, or we will miss the many, many, many self-referential statements in the Scriptures concerning the Scriptures. And we might come away thinking that, as some have said, the Bible really doesn't have much to say about the process by which the Scriptures became the Scriptures. But I hope after this morning that you'll be overwhelmed with how much the Bible has to say about the process of how the Bible became the Bible. Through the work of men like Hezekiah and Solomon, writing the Bible, collecting these writings, organizing these writings, and editing these writings to put them into the final form that we have today, a process that was done by many people over many hundreds of years.

What I want to look at this morning is just to see just how amazing this process was, just how intricately all of the books of the Bible are connected in their authorship and how they dovetail into each other. So the scriptures, first thing we want to see this morning is that the scripture, all scripture is prophecy. All scripture is the word of God. In speaking with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus called all the Old Testament books. He called them what the prophets have spoken.

Then He said to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and entered into his glory and beginning with Moses Moses he's that that's the law and all the prophets he expounded unto them in all the scriptures and members scriptures means writings he expounded unto these two disciples all the writings and the things that were in them in those writings concerning Himself. Matthew speaks of the Old Testament as well as the writings of the prophets. That was in Luke 24. You can read about the disciples on their way to Emmaus. Matthew 26.

Jesus refers to all the Old Testament passages about Himself as written by the prophets. Paul calls all the New Testament books the prophetic scriptures in Romans 16, 26. We're going to have a lot of scriptures, a lot of scriptures. If you want a copy afterwards, I probably can get something to you. But Romans 16 26, the mystery kept secret since the world began, but now made manifest, and through the prophetic scriptures, The prophetic writings made known to all the nations Paul is calling the scriptures Prophecy the Word of God all the scriptures are prophecy prophecy isn't in the way the Bible uses this word, prophecy isn't just something in the book of Revelation.

But the Bible is saying all the scriptures are prophetic. They are speaking the Word of God. Secondly, in the Bible, the Word of God is called the Book. The Book. The word Bible simply comes from the Greek word for book, biblos or biblion, a little book and a big book.

So we can think of the little books as the books in the Bible and the Biblos as the Bible itself, this collection of all these sub-books. The Bible is called the Book. The Book of the Law, or the Book of the Lord. Psalm 47, Then I said, Behold, I come in the scroll of the Book. It is written of me.

Jesus is referring to the Scriptures there as the book. Deuteronomy 28-58. If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in this book, speaking of that Deuteronomy. And there are about seven more references between between deuteronomy 27 28 29 and 30 about seven more references to The Bible or the book the word of God being the book Joshua 1 8 the book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it, for then you will make your way prosperous and then you will have good success. The book of the law, as Joshua calls it.

Isaiah 34, 16, search from the book of the Lord, Isaiah says. He calls his prophecy the book of the Lord. And there is continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament in how they reference the Bible. Nehemiah 8.3, then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the water gate from morning until midday, before all the men and women who could understand in the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law." He's reading the Bible. It's called the book of the law.

Galatians 3, 10, quotes from Deuteronomy calling the Bible the book of the law. Paul in the New Testament uses that same language to refer to the scriptures as the book of the law. Now thirdly, the scriptures refer to other scriptures as canonical. One scripture, one prophetic word, refers to another prophetic word as prophetic word. 2 Chronicles 36 verse 21 quotes Jeremiah 25 verse 11 as authoritative.

And as authoritative. 2 Chronicles 36-21 says, "...the captivity was to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah." to fulfill the Word of the Lord, the Scriptures. So there's one Scripture saying the other Scripture is the Word of God. Daniel 2, verse 9 quotes the same passage as being One of the books of the Bible. Daniel 9.2 says, In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books, the Bible, the number of years specified by the word of the Lord through Jeremiah.

Daniel, the Word of God, is saying that Jeremiah is the Word of God and that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolation of Jerusalem. Jeremiah 26, 18, quotes Micah 3, 12. Micah of Morisheth prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah and spoke to all the people of Judah saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts, Zion shall be ploughed like a field, Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins, and the mountain of the temple like the bare hills of the forest." Jeremiah quoting Micah, calling it The Word of the Lord. Referring to earlier prophets, Zechariah says that the people did not listen to the law and the prophets. That's how The New Testament often refers to the Old Testament scriptures as the law and the prophets.

It says, yes, they made their hearts like flint, refusing to hear the law and the words which the Lord of hosts had sent by His Spirit through the former prophets." The Scriptures refer to the other Scriptures as canonical. The Scriptures, moreover, were canonized as they were written. Revelation opens, Blessed is he who reads, and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and five times in the last chapter of Revelation, in 22, Revelation is referred to as the words of prophecy. The words of prophecy. Prophecy is the word of God.

In Exodus 17, 14, when Israel defeats Amalek, God instructs Moses to write it for a memorial in the book. Moses write this in the book. God is there canonizing what Moses wrote, saying, Moses, you write this in the Bible. A little later in Exodus 24, it says, Moses wrote all the words of the Lord. In Exodus 34, then the Lord said to Moses, write these words, for according to the attenuer of these words, I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.

And relating to all the journeys that Israel, remember they went on for that 40 years, they traveled to over 40 different sites in that time. And God told Moses, write these words for according... Sorry, Moses wrote Down the starting point of their journeys at the command of the Lord Moses wrote These down at the command of the Lord And after prophesying to the nations concerning God's wrath on them, Isaiah tells the nations, and we'll look at that one a little bit later, to search the Bible, the Book of the Lord, If they wanted to know if it if this what he was speaking was the word of God Did you get that? He said he said to the people he was prophesying to if you want to know if what I'm saying is the word of God Then search the word of God Search the very word. I am writing to see if it is true.

Now fifthly, as Moses wrote the Pentateuch, he wrote new material into the book. So you think of this revelation, this prophecy, this word of God is a growing prophecy. And as Moses is writing it, he is writing these words that God's telling him to write, write them into the book. Make them a part then of the Bible. As Moses added more words by God's inspiration and command, he is said to be writing them into the book.

And then we looked at some of those commands where God said write this for a memorial in the book. In other words, add these words to the Bible. Canonize them, Moses. Write this, he says, for a memorial in the book and recount it in the hearing of Joshua. Later he wrote more words in Exodus 24.

Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the judgments, and all the people answered with one voice and said, all the words which the Lord had said we will do. And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord. And he wrote still more words in Exodus 34 and more words in Numbers 33. And he wrote an extended portion in Deuteronomy 31 and He added a song in Deuteronomy 31, verse 22. And in each stage, the Bible says, He wrote all the words of the Lord.

You see, these words that He was writing were seen as canonical, they were seen as prophetic, They were seen as the Word of God from the moment that Moses wrote them The Bible was canonized line by line as it was written This growing book of the Word of the of the Word of God was called various things the book of the Covenant It's called the book of the law It was continued to be called the Book of the Covenant and the Book of the Law, not just in Moses' day, but in the subsequent generations, long after Moses died. It was also called the Book of Moses, the Book of the Law of the Lord, the Book of the Law of Moses, the Book of the Law of God, or simply the Book. Like we call it today, We just call it the book, the Bible. The Bible means the book. So we see then that this same word is used to refer to the entire Scriptures.

The book was used to refer to the books of Genesis, Exodus, the Viticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy as they were being written. And the church has always recognized the Pentateuch as canonical from the moment it was written. Moses wrote the Pentateuch of God at God's command and Moses expected the people to recognize it as the Word of God as soon as it was written. He told them in Deuteronomy 29, 29 in that well-known verse, the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed to us belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. And here's what the people said, to recognize that this was canonical.

That what Moses had just written in the book of Deuteronomy was canonical. They didn't have to wait for somebody down the road to decide, well I think Moses, what he wrote was canonical. God told them it was and Moses expected the people to believe it And they did they said All the words which the Lord had said we will do They recognize they didn't make it canonical they but they recognize that what Moses had written the time that he wrote it was the Word of God. It was canonical. They didn't have to wait for some Jewish priest centuries later to decide that.

Now, as we move forward, we see the same thing is true of each book. And we also begin to see an amazing tie. Of one prophet tying his prophetic word into the previous prophets work and some sometimes in amazing ways as a prophet of God Joshua was directed by the Lord to make the book of Joshua canonical while he was writing it. Joshua 24-26 says, then Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God. We saw earlier that the book of the law was a reference to the entire Pentateuch that Moses had written.

Now Joshua is writing into that same book the words of God. Joshua is canonizing what he wrote as a prophet. That was his call, calling to declare the Word of God. Joshua wrote his words into the existing canon, and the moment he wrote them, they became the canon by the Word of God. How do we know that?

Because the Word of God tells us that. Each historical book, it turns out, is written into the previous one. So Moses wrote Genesis 1-1, and I wish I had a Nice chart to show you all, but Genesis, Moses wrote the Pentateuch starting from Genesis 1 1 to Deuteronomy 33. Joshua then wrote Deuteronomy 34 which counts the death of Moses. And then he wrote, writes to Joshua, the book of Joshua, up to chapter 24 verse 8.

He wrote those words into the book of the law. He didn't have to wait for anybody to canonize it. That was his role as a prophet. Samuel then, as the author of, remember, if you know the books of the Bible, it's Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua. And what comes after Joshua?

Judges. So Joshua writes the book of Joshua up through 24 verse 8. And then Samuel, the author of Judges and probably Ruth, wrote the last five verses of Joshua, giving an account of Joshua's death. And he writes the book of Samuel through Samuel, 1 Samuel 24, when he dies. And the Bible tells us that the history of David was written by Gad the seer and Nathan the prophet and Samuel.

Those three people the Bible tells us according to first Chronicles 29 29 These were the three prophets who wrote the history of David. And the genealogies of David were added then to the end of Ruth after David became king. So, Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Joshua writes the book of Joshua, but he tied his book into Deuteronomy. Samuel then ties his finishes, Joshua writes Judges and Ruth, and the first part is Samuel. And then Gad and Nathan complete the work of Samuel.

Or the book we call Samuel. Now, this is where there's a very, very, very, I think, cool tie-in. The book of Samuel, and first and second Samuel is one book. We split it into two but it's one book in the Hebrew Bible, Samuel. And The connection between Samuel and Kings bears the unmistakable imprint of the Holy Spirit's plan behind the very details of these book in the seamless connection between these little books that are in the big book.

See, Samuel has a really clear, obvious chiasm, and we've seen a lot of chiasms in Proverbs. So you all remember what that is, right? It's where you have a symmetrical passage, where the beginning and the end have something in common. We call that A. And then the second paragraph and the second to the last paragraph have something in common and we call that B.

And the third paragraph and the third from the last have something in common called that C And then whatever is in the middle is what that main point is it's different from the way we write we write We're taught put your main point at and the first sentence in the paragraph and then explain it But they didn't write that way They put the main point in the middle and built up to it and then let away from it. And so there's this chiastic structure in the book of Samuel. It starts out with the transfer of leadership from Eli to Samuel. Then it has the fall of Eli, then it has the rise of Samuel, then it has the transfer of leadership from Samuel to Saul, Then it has the fall of Saul and the rise of David. Then you have the transfer of leadership from Saul to David.

Then you have the fall of David. But the book ends with the end of the chiasm missing. Remember we opened up with the transfer of leadership from Eli to Samuel. The book ends with just boom, there's no transfer there. If you had a chiasm, you would have the first and the last would be the same.

They would be the same theme. There would be some connection like the transfer of leadership. That's how Samuel opens. Well, turns out, if you put the first two chapters of 1 Kings into that, then you've got the perfect completion of this chiasm with the transfer of leadership from David to Solomon. And there's more, there's a lot more we don't have time to look into that makes that chiasm just incredibly crystal clear, obvious.

There's comparisons between Hannah's sacrifice and lament and David's sacrifice there at the end as well. Where they and the other things. But you see how the writer of Kings, Jeremiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, completes in a very seamless way and continues the canon by providing the finish to Samuel and continuing the history in a very seamless way. You can read right through those books, and it's as if there was one author. The structure is the same, and yet There's two completely different authors writing at different times.

The last four verses of Kings, 2 Kings 25, verse 27 to 30, is identical with the last four verses of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 52, 31-34. Read it sometimes. They're identical. They had the same author.

The last two verses of 2 Chronicles and the first three of Ezra are also nearly identical because Ezra wrote Chronicles and Ezra And Psalm 119 You see these This tightly knit integration of the books would be impossible if these books were just random books that were written And then somebody later on decided well, I think that one looks good and that one looks good, so Put them in the cannon no God Himself canonized His Word and gave it to His church as His Word from the very beginning. But it's even more dramatic in that the canon is developed verse by verse, line by line. I alluded earlier here to this command by Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 34. It's a prophecy to the nations, And he's calling them to, he's saying that your land is going to be inherited by a bunch of wild animals. He says it's to the nations in general.

Talks about all the people that are going to be slain in the stench that will arise from their corpses. The heavens will be rolled up like a scroll. The hosts will fall down like a leaf. There will be a great slaughter. The land will be soaked in blood.

Its streams turned into pitch. The land will become burning pitch. From generation to generation, as Isaiah said, this land is going to lie waste. It shall not be quenched. It is going to burn continually.

Its smoke will ascend forever. No one shall pass by it. The pelican and the porcupine will possess it, the owl and the raven will dwell in it. Thorns shall come into its palaces, nettles and brambles into its fortresses. It will be an habitation of jackals, a courtyard for ostriches.

The wild beasts of the desert will meet with the jackals and the wild goat will bleat to his companions and the night creature will rest there and the arrow snake will make her nest and lay eggs." This is a pretty dramatic prophecy. Just imagine somebody coming and saying, well, you know, Houston's just going to be overrun with brambles and be wild animals running around in it, snakes and nobody's going to live there. It's going to be a smoldering. And so Isaiah says, how do you know this is gonna be true? Verse 16, search from the book of the Lord.

You know what the book is, right? That's the Bible, the prophecy, the canon. Search the canon. What canon is he telling them to search? Well, his own prophecy that he's giving.

Search, he says, none of these things will fail, for my mouth has commanded it and the Holy Spirit has gathered them." Is there any means to determining if what I am saying is true? Yes there is. He says search this writing. And they would be able to compare the prophecy with its fulfillment and see that all came to pass. The men are commanded to read the writing that is found in the book.

As Professor Young said, the immediate reference is to this particular prophecy in commanding the men to search the writings that he desires that they look at what he has just written to see whether this prophecy is true. Isaiah appeals to the written word of God as the authority by which men are to judge the truthfulness of God, and as the authority by which men are to judge the truthfulness of the message How do we know What's in the Bible by what God tells us in his word is in the Bible? And we see this same thing in the New Testament. The New Testament recognizes the Old Testament as the prophetic word of God. The New Testament refers to the Old Testament as a fixed collection comprised of the law, the writings, and the prophets.

Matthew 5, 17, Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets, I have not come to destroy but to fulfill. Matthew 11, 13, For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. Matthew 22, 40, On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. That's how Jesus referred, the New Testament refers to the Old Testament scriptures. Luke 24 in that passage where he was with the disciples on their way to Emmaus.

He said to them, These are the words which I spoke to you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the Psalms concerning me. That's how we refer to the Old Testament as the law of Moses and the prophets. Referring to the Old Testament, Paul told Romans that God promised Jesus before through his prophets in the holy scriptures. And what are the scriptures? The writings.

Paul is referring to the Old Testament as canonical, as the Word of God. That's how we know the Word of God is the Word of God. God sent His prophets to Every city, Acts 20, 23 says, to testify to the mystery of Christ. Paul said to the Ephesians, If indeed you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me for you, how that by revelation he made known to me the mystery, as I've briefly written already, by which when you read you may understand the knowledge, my knowledge, and the mystery of Christ, which in other ages was not made known to the Son of Man. I've been given new revelation, he's saying, that it wasn't known before.

As it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets, that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ through the Gospel, which I have become a minister." He's referring there to the New Testament, something that wasn't given before. Paul treats Luke 10 verse 17 and Matthew 10 verse 10 as the Scriptures. He says, those passages say that the labor is worthy of his reward or his wages. And Paul quotes them telling Timothy that this is scripture. He says, for the scripture says, Yehoshua, Moshe, and Oxfam, it treads out the grain.

He's quoting the Old Testament there. And the laborer is worthy of his wages. He's quoting the New Testament there and he's calling them the scriptures the writing of God. Peter includes all of Paul's letters as a part of the scriptures when he writes in 2nd Peter 3 15 and Consider the long suffering of our Lord that the long suffering of our Lord is salvation as Also our beloved brother Paul according to the wisdom given to him as he has written to you as in all his epistles all the things that Paul pistols he wrote speaking in them of these things in which are some things hard to understand which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction as they do the rest of scriptures. Peter is saying what Paul wrote is the scriptures.

And some of what he wrote is hard to understand, and the unlearned and the unstable twist what Paul wrote, just like they twist the rest of the Scriptures. See how he's putting what Paul wrote right into the Scriptures. Paul called his first epistle to the Thessalonians the Word of the Lord in 1 Thessalonians 4.15. And he commended the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 2.13 for recognizing His Word as the Word of the Lord. The church in Paul's day recognized that God's Word, that they had the canon, God's Word.

He says, for this reason we also thank God without ceasing, because when you receive the Word of God, which you heard from us, you welcome that not as the words of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God, which effectively works in those who believe. The New Testament churches read the New Testament scriptures as the Word of God. They read these scriptures during the days of the apostles and recognized them as the Word of God. They didn't have to wait for hundreds of years for some people to figure it out. 1st Thessalonians 5.27 I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read to all the holy brethren.

Galatians 4.16 now when this epistle is read among you, see that it is read also in the church of the Laodiceans and that you likewise read the epistle from Laodicea. Blessed is he who reads, and those in Revelation 1.3 says, and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep the things that are written in it. This is how the Word of God is treated. James cautions us about hearing the Word of God and not keeping it. Pastor Kaiser, to whom I'm much indebted for his work in this area and for much of some of the things we've looked at this morning, says the Old Testament prophets self-consciously realized that the Scriptures were being written for the generation to come and that the people that shall be created shall praise the Lord.

In other words, God was selecting books for the canon based on the needs of the New Covenant community, not just the needs of the Old Covenant community. Peter says, to them it was revealed that not to themselves, but to us they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel This means that the canon was developed to give the kingdom Generations that's us the kingdom generations all the information they would need until eternity. Paul said, now all these things are written for our admonition on whom the ends of the ages have come. Though the Old Testament saints were commanded to live by the progressively unfolding scriptures as well as the other revelation that they had from God. God always had in mind His purpose for a completed canon when he inspired and gave scripture.

If God excluded and included details within books with deliberate purpose, and if that purpose is for our present kingdom generation on whom the ends of the ages have come, then it logically follows that God must preserve every book in the canon and do so in every age. His purpose is for the canon to succeed. And this rules out the discovery of any newly found apocryphal gospels. It rules out the additions of the books to the canon by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent." The order even of the Hebrew Bible is implied in the scriptures. Jesus refers to the blood of Abel and that all the righteous blood shed on the earth from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barakaiah whom you murdered, would come on Israel.

Well, where is the murder of Abel recorded? The book of Genesis, the first book. Where is the book of, where is the murder of Zechariah recorded? Now it doesn't say Barakaiah there and that can be confusing. But we know that many times people have different names in the Bible.

So where is that recorded? Well, it's recorded in Chronicles, which is the last book in the Hebrew Bible. So what Jesus was saying was just from the beginning to the end, from A to Z, what we would say from Genesis to Revelation. Jesus was giving to those people what was the first and last book of the Bible. So even the border of the books is implied.

Now here's the next thing that we see. To get back to our text, and I realize we've covered a lot around it, but to get back to it, the Word of God comes to us through copies made by uninspired men. You see that? These are the Proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah, King of Judah, copied. We don't have any of the original autographs.

We don't have the tablets of stone on which God wrote with His finger. In fact, Moses destroyed those. Even they only had a copy. Right from the beginning, we see that God intended for His Word to be reproduced and distributed Right from the very beginning. The first word that God wrote was destroyed before the people even saw it.

Moses broke them in his anger. And the original of each canonical book was stored beside the Ark of the Covenant in Deuteronomy 31-26. It says, but copies were distributed throughout the land. So it was when Moses had completed writing the words of this law in a book, when they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, who bore the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, saying, Take this book of the law, and put it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there as a witness. The king in Deuteronomy 17 is commanded to make accurate copies of the of the Bible And it shall be when he sits on the throne of his kingdom Deuteronomy 17 18 that he shall write for himself a copy of the law in a book from one from the one before the priests he was God is commanding copies the Bible to be made God preserves his word infallibly and inherently through copies made by fallible people and even uninspired authors.

There's nobody inspired today anymore. There have been no canonical books since 70 AD and yet we've had many many many copies. But we see that the authority to do that, that was God's intent in the Scriptures. It was to be verified by the copy that the priest had. It was to be an accurate copy, but it was a copy.

God wanted every believer to live out the whole Word of God. So he ensured that copies were scattered among all the people and that was one of the blessings of the reformation is it restored the copies of God's Word to his people just like Israel had in the days of Moses because the Bible says that Moses was preached every week throughout all Israel. The original copy of Jeremiah was burned by the king, but God preserved this prophecy of the portion of his word with a copy. The same power that breathes out the word of God preserves the word, such that we can say that, God says, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever through copies, through copies. We can trust that the copy that we have is that we have today in this age an inherent and infallible copy of the Word of God.

Why does he do that? I don't know. Maybe it's because he knows that we might be too prone to make an idol out of paper and ink if we had the original autograph. But lastly, the canon was edited and ordered by the Old Testament prophets. See Solomon not only wrote many Proverbs, not all of which are canonical, but he also edited many ones.

Ecclesiastes 12.9 says that Solomon pondered and sought out and set in order many other Proverbs. And our text indicates that Hezekiah did further ordering and arranging of the book of Proverbs. It says Hezekiah copied. Now that word copied can mean moved. He edited it.

He moved it around. He rearranged them. That's what it means to set an order. There is also another way that Hezekiah's work is recorded and that is he put a trigametron, three Hebrew letters at the end of all of those books that he edited up and so he that was there until it our English Bibles don't translate it but it's apparently in the Hebrew Bible And and so the people who continued that Ezra and so on they continued that practice of adding a slightly expanded version and that's in that is at the end of all the books of the Old Testament except for the five that are called the festival scrolls or the Megaloth that's song of songs Ruth lamentations Ecclesiastes and Esther But all the others have this ending, so they are sealed, signed, as it were, by God's prophet. Brothers and sisters, we today have the infallible and inerrant word of God and how do we know that?

Because God tells us that in His word. That's the only way that we could have an infallible and an errant word today. Let's pray. Heavenly Father we thank you that we can have your word today and that we can know that it is your word because your word is true. Your Word is true.

There is no error in it. It is righteous. It is refined seven times. We ask, Lord, that you would increase our love of you and our love for your word. We may more and more be able to say with the psalmist that it is your word that we meditate upon day and night.

It is your word that we meditate upon day and night It is your word that we think of in the night watches It is your word that is on our lips as this in the morning as we rise and at night as we retire. And it is Your Word that is in us, such that we can speak to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing, making melody in our heart to you, such that we can stake our life, our very life, upon the truth of your word, because by your omnipotent power You have preserved it We ask Lord that you would Clear our doubts Restore our confidence and our boldness to proclaim this your word. In Jesus' name, Amen.