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Jim Osman examines 2 Peter 1:19-21 to reveal why Scripture stands as a sure word for believers. Building on the Protestant Reformation principle of Sola Scriptura, Osman demonstrates that Scripture's authority rests not on human interpretation or church tradition, but on its divine origin through the Holy Spirit. The exposition shows that Scripture's meaning is determined by God Himself, not by individual readers or ecclesiastical authorities. Peter contrasts true prophetic revelation with false prophecy, emphasizing that no prophecy came by human will but by men moved by the Holy Spirit who spoke from God. This ensures Scripture is inspired, inerrant, and authoritative.
Unlike modern charismatic movements that claim to teach prophetic skills, true biblical prophecy originated entirely from God's initiative, not human desire or training. Osman challenges believers to recognize Scripture as a sure word—God's living voice speaking directly to them today. The passage affirms that what God intended to communicate through the prophets is precisely what was written, making Scripture trustworthy, dependable, and sufficient for life and godliness.
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Creators and Guests
What is Kootenai Church Morning Worship?
The expository preaching ministry of Kootenai Community Church by Pastors/Elders Jim Osman, Jess Whetsel, Dave Rich, and Cornel Rasor. This podcast feed contains the weekly sermons preached from the pulpit on Sunday mornings at Kootenai Church.
The Elders/Teachers of Kootenai Church exposit verse-by-verse through whole books of the Bible. These sermons can be found within their own podcast series by visiting the KCC Audio Archive.
Well, by God's good providence, we are at a time of year when we are remembering the Protestant Reformation. On October thirty-first of 1517, a German monk by the name of Martin Luther nailed ninety-five debatable theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, and though he did not intend to launch any kind of a Protestant separation from the Roman Catholic Church at the time, that was the result of what Luther did. He simply wanted to debate these theological and doctrinal abuses that he saw as evident within what was at the time the Catholic or Roman Catholic Church. And I say that this is providential because last week and today we are looking at a passage that talks about the authority and the sufficiency and the supremacy of the Word of God. And the nature and authority of Scripture is the doctrine that is at the very heart, at the very foundation, of the Protestant Reformation.
Sola scriptura, which is the first of the five solas of the Reformation, is called the formal principle of the Reformation. In theological terms, a formal principle is a source of authority that gives shape or form to everything else. It is the truth, it is the doctrine, it is the dogma, it is the thing that gives shape and form to the other parts of the Reformation. It is the formative principle. In terms of the Reformation, we say that Scripture and Scripture alone is the authoritative source that is to form and shape all doctrine, all belief, all practice, both of the individual Christian as well as the Christian church which Christ has purchased with His own blood.
The material principle of the Reformation is the doctrine of justification by faith. So there's the formal principle, the principle of the Reformation that gives form to the material principle, which is the substance of the debate between Roman Catholics and Protestants—that is, how a man is justified or made right in the sight of God. The Protestant church, the Protestant faith, the Reformed faith, says man is justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone. Those are the other four solas of the Reformation. The material principle is that a man is justified by faith alone and not works.
So how do we determine then if Protestants are right in asserting that a man is justified or made righteous on the basis of faith alone, or if Roman Catholics and every other works-based religion on the planet is right in saying that a man can be justified or made right in the sight of God on the basis of faith plus something, anything else, works, or that a man is made right in the sight of God on the basis of what he does, works he does in righteousness. What is to settle the debate? How is a man made right before God? All of my sin, how is it taken out of the way? Is it faith alone or is it faith plus works? Faith plus merit? Faith plus the work of a saint? Faith plus something else? Something has to settle that debate.
So what is it that is to form Christian dogma, Christian doctrine? We need a formative principle. That's sola scriptura. Protestants say that all of that is formed and we know this, that what settles the debate is the clear testimony of Scripture, not popes, not teaching magisteriums, not church leaders, not tradition, not any other man-made authority, but Scripture and Scripture alone.
Now that principle stood in opposition to the prevailing view of the Roman Catholic Church at the time. The Catholic Church taught, and still teaches by the way, that the church tradition and the authority of the pope and the teaching magisterium, that these are all equal to and in some cases above the authority of Scripture. So if we are going to reform doctrine, that is going to require some authority that is outside of the things that need to be reformed.
In other words, how do you correct a pope if the pope can appeal to himself as an authority equal to Scripture? Does that make sense? How do you correct the pope if the pope simply says, “Well, yeah, Scripture says that, but on the authority of the pope, which is me, I'm here to tell you that it means X, Y, and Z.” How do you correct errant theological doctrine and how do you correct false doctrine if the church that teaches the false doctrine claims to have and is an authority equal to or over Scripture? If they have the market on telling you what doctrine is, because they are the sole authoritative interpreter of Scripture, then you can never form doctrine by anything outside of that authority, which is the church or the teaching magisterium. How do you correct or critique church tradition if tradition is as authoritative as Scripture?
You see the problem? There must be some principle, some truth, some objective outside of us, outside of this realm, some authority that alone forms and shapes our doctrine, our practice, our life, and the conduct of both individual Christians as well as the church. And Protestants point to Scripture as being that formative or formal principle.
So the Reformers held that Scripture and Scripture alone is the ultimate and final authority for Christian doctrine, Christian faith, and practice. Well, where would the Reformers get such an idea? Well, one such place, one of many such places, is the passage that we're looking at in 2 Peter 1, which tells us what Scripture is. And if Scripture is what Peter says that it is here, the Word of God, then that and that alone must shape and form everything else.
So we're looking at verses 19–21. And just to review, Peter, in this passage, beginning at verse 16 and going through the end of the chapter, is refuting the unstated but clear claim of the false teachers who denied the return of Christ. So he says in verse 16, “We did not make known to you the power and coming [that is, the second coming] of our Lord Jesus Christ, following cleverly devised myths [or fables].” Peter then gives two arguments for the teaching or the doctrine of the return of Christ. Number one, his own eyewitness testimony on the Mount of Transfiguration. That's verses 16–18. And then verses 19–21, a second line of argument is that the second coming of Christ was predicted by the prophets. That's verses 19–21.
So let's read those three verses. We covered verse 19 last week, and we’re looking at verses 20–21 today. Verse 19:
19 And we have as more sure the prophetic word, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.
20 Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes by one's own interpretation.
21 For no prophecy was ever made by the will of man, but men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (LSB)
Now Peter is describing here the written prophetic revelation of God. Primarily he has in mind here the Old Testament. That is what he is appealing to, though if what he says about Old Testament Scripture is true, then it applies also to any New Testament revelation that we have. But Peter, just to be clear, has in mind and is speaking of the Old Testament prophetic text. You see “Scripture” or “prophetic word” mentioned in verse 19 and in verse 20 and in verse 21. In verse 19, prophetic word, in verse 20, prophecy of Scripture, and in verse 21, prophecy. He's describing here the written revelation of the Old Testament.
And we see in this passage three reasons that we must give heed to Scripture. We looked at the first one last week in verse 19, because its testimony is dependable. We have it as the sure and certain Word of God. Now today, in verse 20, we're going to see a second reason, that its meaning is determined, and then a third reason in verse 21, because its origin is divine. So first for today, Scripture's meaning is determined. Verse 20: “Know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes by one's own interpretation.”
Now verse 20 and 21 go together. There's an argument that you have to see how these two verses are connected before we can understand what Peter is describing in verse 20 by “one's own [private] interpretation.” Verse 21 describes the source of Scripture: “Men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” It originates through the Holy Spirit. That's verse 21. In verse 20, he is describing the source of Scripture's meaning, and in verse 21, the source of Scripture as a written text. Verse 20, the source of the Scripture's meaning—the meaning of Scripture is determined in verse 20. The source is divine in verse 21.
Now ironically, in verse 20 there is some question about the proper interpretation of this passage that mentions interpretation. That's kind of ironic, isn't it? What does Peter mean when he says that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation? Your translation may vary there depending on your mileage of whatever translation that you're using, but there are really only sort of two categories of ways of looking at Peter's meaning here. First, either Peter is talking about our interpretation of Scripture, or Peter is talking about the interpretation that the prophets gave to Scripture. It's one of those two things. “No prophecy of Scripture comes by one's own interpretation” (v. 21).
The word interpretation here is the word that means explaining or unraveling, to unpack something, to explain something. It's used of what Jesus did in Mark 4:34 when it says Jesus “was not speaking to them without a parable; but He was explaining [that's the word, interpreting or unraveling] everything privately to His own disciples.” No prophecy of Scripture comes by the means of one's own unraveling or interpreting or explaining. In other words—this is what Peter is describing here—it is not our personal take on Scripture that is important. It is the intended meaning of the text, which comes because the author of Scripture is God Himself. That's verse 21.
So the two ways of looking at verse 20: Number one, some have suggested that we aren't supposed to interpret Scripture on our own. Peter's saying Scripture is not a matter of your own interpretation. In other words, according to some sects of Christianity, you have no business interpreting Scripture apart from the authoritative structure of the church. This is the Roman Catholic view of Scripture. The Roman Catholics would say it's not a matter of your interpretation. You need to trust the authoritative teaching magisterium of the church—the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the church itself. That is the sole authoritative interpreter of Scripture. It's not a matter of individual interpretation.
In fact, prior to the Reformation and after the Reformation and still today, Catholics will argue that if Scripture is to be interpreted by all of us individually, if we can just read the Bible and interpret it ourselves, imagine the chaos that would ensue from that, that Mark has an interpretation, Lanny has an interpretation, Shepley has an interpretation, Jade has an interpretation. And probably amongst the four of them, there are five different interpretations. Imagine the chaos and the division and the pandemonium that would ensue if everybody was open to interpreting the Scripture on their own. So, the Catholic church says, it's not up to you to interpret Scripture. You have to trust what the church says that the Scripture means and how the Scripture applies.
And in fact, this is the reason why for hundreds of years before the Reformation and for hundreds of years after the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church worked like a borrowed mule to keep the Scriptures out of the hands of the common man. They didn't want the people to have the Word of God. Imagine the chaos of that. Everybody reading Scripture for themselves, are you kidding? You could never have a church consisting in that kind of environment, right?
So that's the first possible interpretation. Obviously, I reject that, not just because I'm a Protestant but because verse 21 really tells us what he has in mind. It is not the interpretation of the prophet, it's not the interpretation of the interpreter. The meaning of the text is derived because of the source, the origin, of Scripture.
So what Peter is saying then is that the interpretation of God's truth doesn't originate with the prophet. It doesn't come with the prophet. Now God may have—here's the objection that you can kind of hear, and I've heard this mentioned by neo-Orthodox, pagan, New Age, sort of liberal Christian circles in our own day. People will say that though Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel may have seen a vision, they may have seen something or heard a voice, when they wrote it down, they didn't necessarily get it right. They had to interpret what they saw, and what they wrote down was the interpretation of the vision that they saw. So God revealed truth, but how do we know that the prophet got it right when he wrote it down? So therefore, Paul kind of has his own take on who God is and what God is doing. Peter has his take. James has his take. Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Moses, Abraham, they all kind of had their own take on God. They saw things revealed. They saw visions. They heard revelation. But then in the writing of it down, what came out of them was their personal interpretation of what they saw, and there might have been something lost in the translation. That's how the argument goes.
Now you can hear Peter's answer to that. The interpretation of Scripture does not originate and does not depend upon the prophet, the one who heard the revelation. The God who spoke is able to ensure that the message that He speaks gets through loud and clear to what is written down, and that's what Peter's addressing in verse 21.
Or you can hear sometimes the objection that Scripture is really man interpreting things about God. It's up to us to sort of take our experiences of God, what we observe about God, and write them down. And so the New Age, the skeptic, the neo-Orthodox, liberal Christian denomination will take Scripture and kind of look at it as sort of like a chicken soup for the soul. This chapter's really good, this chapter not so much. This chapter's fantastic. This chapter was helpful last week but not this week. And they kind of pick and choose and henpeck their way through Scripture, sort of taking these observations of who God is, offered up by spiritual men for thousands of years, some of them right, some of them wrong. That's their perspective.
And Peter is answering that by saying no prophetic Scripture was a matter of the prophet or the writer's own interpretation of the revelation. But instead, God moved, by the Holy Spirit, to ensure that those men spoke from God. And therefore, it was inerrant and it was authoritative.
The meaning of the text of Scripture and the meaning of the text of every Scripture is determined by the author of Scripture. And who, according to verse 21, is the author of the Scriptures? It's the Holy Spirit. Therefore God fixes the meaning of the text.
And it is not up to the Bible reader to come up with some novel interpretation of Scripture, some novel take on a passage, that nobody has ever heard before, nobody has ever seen before, but you think applies to your heart and you kind of hear this speaking to you in this way. That is not our role. The meaning of the passage is fixed, and it is our role as Bible readers and Bible students to read that passage and try to figure out what the intended meaning of the Holy Spirit is in that passage because no other meaning matters. No other meaning matters. It doesn't matter what it means to you. We don't have SYI (share your ignorance) Bible studies where we all come together and we pool our ignorance into the middle of this room. I think it means this. I think it means that. Let's try and find a happy medium. Let's find a meaning that we can all agree on. That must be the meaning of Scripture. We have probably three hundred people here, four hundred people here. If we have four hundred different interpretations of a passage but none of them are the interpretation or meaning of the passage that was intended by the Holy Spirit, we just have four hundred people who are dead wrong about it. And it doesn't matter what any of us believe.
The meaning of Scripture is fixed by the one who wrote it. If you wrote me a letter and I took that letter and I read it and I said, “Well, yeah, it might mean that, you know, in the plain sense of the language, but let me tell you what they're really saying. To me, this means they're going to give me everything when they die. I'm going to inherit it all.” And to you, it's just like, “Hey, would you like to have lunch next Wednesday?” And I read that and I say, “Well, to me that means that the lunch is symbolic of, you know, their entire estate and they're saying, ‘Hey, I'm planning to die. Would you like to have my entire estate next Wednesday?’ To me it means that.” If I did that to something that you wrote to me, you would be deeply offended, and rightly so, because the meaning of that letter is not fixed by the personal response of the reader. The meaning of the communication is fixed by the one who is communicating it. And we are not at liberty to change that or to guess at it.
We have to do the work of using the tools to figure out what it is that God means in a passage of Scripture. Now, sometimes that's easy. John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” No mystery. You don't have to be an exegete, you know. No seminary training necessary to get to the bottom of that. There are other passages of Scripture which are not so clear. It's not as obvious. It takes a little bit.
But here's the good news. All of us have the ability to read and understand Scripture, especially all of the clear stuff. We all have that ability. I don't have a Rosetta stone decoder ring in my office that I open up and it glows and I put the ring on and it gives me the right interpretation of Scripture. I have to use the same tools that are available to everybody else to use. I have the text. I have the Holy Spirit. I have common sense. I understand language. I read the text. I do the work of thinking it through, meditating upon it, looking up the words, figuring out, making sure that it fits the context. I have to look at the history. I have to do all the stuff that you have to do. I have to do all of that work. And to understand the difficult text takes sometimes more work than understanding some of the simpler text, but we all can do it.
Scripture has a fixed meaning, and that is the first reason why we are to give heed to it. If Scripture means one thing on one occasion, another thing on another occasion, one thing to one person, another thing to another person, one thing in this circumstance, another thing in that circumstance, then Scripture has no meaning whatsoever. If it is just a rubber nose that you can twist and distort and make whatever shape you want to suit your purposes, then you're not paying heed to Scripture. You're making Scripture pay heed to you and to your whims and to your desires. That is why our goal as faithful Bible readers is to make sure that we are endeavoring to understand the meaning of the text.
Second, we are to give heed to Scripture not just because its meaning is determined but because its origin is divine. Verse 21: “No prophecy was ever made by the will of man, but men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” This describes the inspiration of Scripture. And while Peter is using different language, he's describing the same thing that Paul did in 2 Timothy 3:16 when he said, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” He's talking about God exhaling Scripture so that the result of God's work of inspiration, breathing out the Word of God, is exactly what God intends. Here, Peter describes it in different terms, that Scripture is, in fact, men writing on behalf of God, speaking for God.
Notice in verse 21 there is a negative aspect to verse 21 and a positive aspect. It did not come by the will of man, but (here's the positive side) it was men moved by the Holy Spirit who spoke from God. Revelation is God's self-disclosure. If God did not reveal Himself to us in the pages of written Scripture, all that we could know of God would be what we could discern about Him from creation. We could discern a little bit from our conscience; a lot of His moral precepts could be discerned if we were to reason through what our conscience tells us because the law of God is written on our hearts. And we would be able to look at creation and see only enough to damn us, to judge us, to hold us accountable for what we do with that general revelation. But we could never, in fact, know of the sweetness of God's goodness and grace and mercy and the work of Christ and resurrection or the future of His lovingkindness. None of that we could know just by observing creation. The salvation aspects of God's plan and character, those we can only know through the written revelation. And if God did not reveal those things to us through Scripture, we would not be able to know those things. And if God revealed nothing of Himself, we would remain in total darkness because man, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he thinks, no matter how much he gropes, if God did not will Himself to be known, man could never discover Him. We would live in darkness.
So Old Testament revelation is not men's thoughts about God. Old Testament revelation is God's Word about Himself and His works and His plan and His nature. So when Peter says, “No prophecy was ever made by the will of man,” listen carefully, it does not mean that men, when they wrote Scripture, wrote Scripture against their will, as if they were resisting and God was moving their hands and it was a struggle as God made sure that they wrote out exactly what He wanted. That's not what Peter is saying. It was through the will of man. Paul most willingly sat down and wrote all of his Epistles, for instance. But the origin of Scripture was not in the will of man. That's Peter's point. Men spoke from God, but no man sought to be a prophet and to be the vehicle of revelation. Revelation was not an act of human will. It was an act of divine will, which was accomplished through human will, but it did not originate with human will.
Positively, Peter says that “men being moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (v. 21). And the word moved there is a word that means to guide or direct or to lead, to bring along or to carry along. Interestingly, it is used in two places in the book of Acts to describe the ship that was carried along by the wind. That's how the word was used, like wind would fill the sails of a ship and push and drive that ship along in the direction that the wind was pushing it. That's the word that is used here. They were moved, directed, led by the Spirit of God. These men, so filled with the Spirit of God, were moved by the Holy Spirit to write out exactly what the Spirit wanted so that what resulted from it was, in fact, them speaking on behalf of God. It is not the men who were moving, it was God who was moving through them.
I think that there were times when those men—and this is my sanctified speculation—there were obvious times when those men knew that they were the vehicles of divine revelation. And I think there were also probably times when those men did not know that they were being the vehicles of divine revelation. When Paul wrote the book of Philemon, I'm not sure he thought, “I'm writing Scripture here.” It's a personal letter asking a buddy to take back a slave. It's just personal, but it's Scripture. I don't think Paul was thinking to himself, “I need to be real careful that I write this out because I'm writing here the Word of God for generations to come.” There are other times when Paul says, “Look, what I'm saying to you is the Word of the Lord. Make sure this is read and exposited in every church.” There were times when he knew he was doing this, times when he didn't know he was doing this, but the point is that the revelation did not originate in the will of man but in the will of God. Men spoke from God.
Now this is contrary to the false prophets of the Old Testament. I want to give you a couple of passages. Jeremiah 14:13–14. Listen to how Jeremiah describes the origin of false prophecy.
13 But, “Ah, Lord Yahweh,” I said, “Behold, the prophets are saying to them, ‘You will not see the sword nor will you have famine, but I will give you true peace in this place.’”
14 Then Yahweh said to me, “The prophets are prophesying lies in My name. I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoke to them; they are prophesying to you a vision of lies, divination, futility, and the deception of their own hearts.” (LSB)
That's the will of man. The origin of what false prophets said came out of their own hearts. And Jeremiah revealed that the Lord condemned those false prophets because of the source of their prophecy.
Ezekiel 13:
1 The word of Yahweh came to me saying,
2 “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who prophesy, and say to those who prophesy from their own heart, ‘Hear the word of Yahweh!
3 Thus says Lord Yahweh, “Woe to the wickedly foolish prophets who are walking after their own spirit and have seen nothing.
4 O Israel, your prophets have been like foxes among waste places.
5 You have not gone up into the breaches, nor did you build the wall around the house of Israel to stand in the battle on the day of Yahweh.
6 They behold worthlessness and lying divination who are saying, ‘Yahweh declares,’ when Yahweh has not sent them; yet they wait for the establishing of their word.
7 Did you not see a worthless vision and speak a lying divination when you said, ‘Yahweh declares,’ but it is not I who have spoken?”’” (Ezek. 13:1–7 LSB)
The false prophets say, “This is what Yahweh says.” They wait to see their word established. Out of their own hearts, out of their own minds, they invent this stuff. “Thus says the Lord.” “The Lord revealed to me.” And they give this nonsense, and then comes Yahweh, who says, “These people are going to be judged and judged severely because they have spoken things that I have not said.”
Jeremiah 23:16: “Thus says Yahweh of hosts, ‘Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into vanity; they speak a vision of their own heart, not from the mouth of Yahweh.’”
Jeremiah 23:21: “I did not send these prophets, but they ran. I did not speak to them, but they prophesied.”
Do you see how seriously God takes those claims, when people claim that they speak from God? He takes it very seriously. If I said that you said something to me that you never said, you'd be offended by that, wouldn't you? And rightly so. So is God with the prophets who claim to speak in His name when He has not sent them.
A false prophet speaks his own visions of his own mind; the true prophets spoke for God when the Holy Spirit moved upon them. Prophecy does not come by the will of man. Old Testament prophets were chosen by God. Old Testament prophets spoke for God, which is why you read over and over again in the Old Testament, “The word of the Lord came to Elijah,” “The word of the Lord came to Elisha,” “The word of the Lord came to Samuel,” “The word of the Lord came to Daniel,” “The word of the Lord came to Isaiah,” “The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah.” You get the pattern? It's the word of the Lord coming to them.
Prophecy did not come by the will of man. It is not an acquired skill, it was not a chosen occupation, it wasn't a gift you choose, it's not something you practice to get better at. Old Testament prophets did not need to learn how to prophesy. There was nothing to learn and there was nothing to practice because if God was speaking to them and He gave them a revelation, they received it. Nobody ever had to be taught how to hear the voice of God because if God is not speaking, then you're not going to hear Him no matter what discipline you've cultivated, no matter what skill you have acquired, no matter how silent you are. If He is not speaking, you're not going to hear Him. And if He is speaking, you can't miss it. That is the nature of revelation. So nobody ever had to be taught how to hear God. Nobody ever had to be taught how to prophesy. Prophets didn't go to school to learn how to prophesy or hear God better because prophecy was not an act of human will.
Now contrast that with modern examples from the Charismatic movement today. There is a School of the Spirit taught by Jennifer LeClaire. Did you know that you can become an apostle for an annual subscription of $348? Now you'll be able to hear from God as an apostle. But maybe being an apostle is not your thing and it's just prophecy. OK, then you would go to the Global Awakening school and take their prophetic track of instruction. And here's how that is described: “In a time of much mixture and many prophetic missteps, it is increasingly important to be trained in prophetic ministry. This set of courses will ground you biblically and historically in the operation of prophets and prophecy. Along with your fellow online learners, you'll get to know the scriptural and practical tools necessary to become an accurate, humble, and trustworthy prophetic voice.” You know, just like Daniel, Isaiah, and Elijah, right? Remember how they had to learn how to become a trustworthy, authoritative, prophetic voice? Did you catch that? Well, if you want to be a prophet, that course is a mere $350. It’s not annual. That's a one-time thing, so you're going to save money after the first year if you go that route.
Or if you want the super-duper course, then you would go to the Prophetic Company, run by Dan McCollam. Here's what they say on their website: “The Father expressed His dream [did you know that God has dreams?] for a prophetic community when He promised to pour out His Spirit on all flesh so that every son and daughter could prophesy. The healthiest prophetic people in the world are those who commit to communities where prophetic synergy, innovation, and accountability are available.” Remember Elijah talking about prophetic synergy, prophetic communities? Now this course is not just a mere prophet. This one's going to make you what they call an active certified trainer, an ACT. Like act, acts. Get it? Acts? The book of Acts today. An active certified trainer. Now that course used to be $4,997, but now you can get it for the low, low price of $3,750. But if you think you might be being ripped off, I'm here to encourage you that if you look at all the value that you get for that $3,700, I mean, it's the online courses, it's the books, it's the personal training, it's the coaching, it's the little certificate to hang on your wall. The value of all of that is $17,796. So you are getting all of that for just $3,700.
You know, just like the Old Testament prophets. Do you remember how the Old Testament prophets did that? By the way, these schools are turning out profits. You know what I mean? But not people who are hearing and speaking the word of God. Here is the Charismatic trick. Here's what they're doing. They will say to you, “What we're doing is the exact same thing that you find in Scripture. Old Testament prophets, New Testament prophets, we're in the same school, the same camp, doing the same thing, speaking in the same way as all the prophets of old ever spoke.” But then you don't even have to look very deeply and you realize this is not the same thing as what was going on there.
Now you might think to yourself, “Well, Jim, weren't there schools of the prophets in the Old Testament?” There were schools of the prophets in the Old Testament, but they weren't schools for learning how to prophesy. They were schools taught by the prophets. Some of the first schools in the nation of Israel to teach men and women the Word of God were taught by the prophets. The prophets gathered there and they spoke the Word of God. The schools of the prophets were not schools for the prophets, they were schools of the prophets. And so there were bands of prophets; there was a brotherhood of prophets.
How do I know that those schools were not teaching men how to prophesy? Because no prophecy of Scripture ever came by the will of man. The word of the Lord came to the prophet. The Spirit moved. The origin, the source, the energy behind it is the Spirit of God, not the will of man. The product therefore is the very Word of God Himself. That is the nature of Old Testament revelation; it is thus also the nature of New Testament revelation.
And what we can see is that there is no indication of anyone ever having to learn how to hear the voice of God. And no, Samuel hearing his name in the tabernacle or the temple is not an exception to that. Samuel heard exactly what God said. He didn't know who said it because it says, “Word from Yahweh was rare in those days” (1 Sam. 3:1). And Samuel was not learning how to hear the voice of God from Eli. You know how I know that? Because Eli wasn't hearing the voice of God either. Eli was a wicked man who was under judgment; his whole household was. So the word of God wasn't coming to Eli. Eli didn't know how to hear the voice of God, and he wasn't out there training Samuel how to hear the voice of God. Samuel came and said, “Hey, you called?” And Eli said, “No, I didn't. Go back to your room.” And he went back to his room, and Samuel came back. “You called?” “No, I didn't. Go back to your room.” He went back to his room and came back. “You called?” And Eli said, “No, I didn't. Go back to your room. But I suspect that you're not hearing my voice, but you're hearing somebody else's voice.” Samuel didn't need to learn how to hear the voice of God because no prophecy, no revelation, ever originated with men.
Little boys in Israel weren't sitting around eating their shawarma at their lunch break saying to themselves, “You know, someday I think I want to be a prophet. I want to grow up, and I want people to hate me, throw me into cisterns, not listen to a thing I say, mock me. I want to be the type of guy who has to lay on one side for a year as an object lesson to the nation of Israel and then flip over and lay on the other side for a year and a half as an object lesson to the nation of Judah. I just want the worst life possible. I want to have to stand up and run for my life everywhere because everybody hates me and everybody rejects me.” Nobody ever did that. But the word of the Lord would come to somebody and say, “You go tell the people this,” and the prophet would have to do it. They were obedient, holy men, but revelation did not originate with them.
God spoke through their personality. He did so without extinguishing their personalities, without changing their personalities. He allowed their personalities to shine through. Their circumstances in which the men lived had a bearing upon what they said and how they said it, the language that they used, but it was the Spirit of God moving through them. Those men were not automatons. They didn't write or prophesy against their will, and the result of what they did was the Word of God. God worked through them. He filled those men and moved them along so that the product is the inspired, inerrant, infallible, trustworthy, dependable, certain, and sure Word of Yahweh the living God.
And you have it in your language, in your lap, and in your home, and on your phone, and on your computer, and almost everywhere you turn. So I ask you this: do you give heed to it? Now I don't think that I have to convince you that everything I've said here about Scripture is true. I think probably 99 percent, if not all of you, are in this church because this church has a reputation for valuing these things, which we do in our doctrine, in our preaching, and in what we do. We value the Word of God. We take it seriously. We handle it well. So I don't need to convince you that what I've said about Scripture is true, but I am here to ask you, do you pay heed to it like a light shining in a dark place? Do you value it? Do you cherish it? Do you read it not just to check a box, but do you read it because it is the Word of the living God to you? Do you obey it as such? Do you value it as such? Do you walk in the light of it as such?
Does it shape your home, your hope, and your expectation for the future? Do you know what it says about the return of the Lord? Do you know what it says about the promise of His coming? Do you know what it says about the new creation, the coming kingdom, the promises yet to be fulfilled? Do you know what that Scripture says about you and your salvation, your eternal destiny? Are you convinced of those things?
And do you cherish the Word of God to you as His Word to you, knowing and trusting and believing with certainty that in this book He speaks to you, that this revelation, given hundreds and thousands of years ago, spoken to them, was spoken to them and for them, and when it was spoken to them and for them, it was also spoken to and for you? The same mind of God that spoke through those men to them in their circumstances speaks the same truth to you today in your circumstances. That is how magnificent the mind of God is, that this is anything but an outdated relic of a bronze age with a bunch of ignorant shepherds wandering around the desert, coughing up and choking up their observations about God. No, no, this is the Word of the living God Himself. And it was written for you. It was written to you, with your circumstances, with your questions, with your struggles, your trials, your afflictions, your difficulties, and your life in God's mind.
And it contains everything you need for life and for godliness. That is the promise of 2 Peter 1. This book is living and life-changing truth. It is not man's observations about God. It's not the product of man's will. It is not a record of how God spoke to men. It's not even just an example of how God speaks that we're supposed to mimic today. It is, in fact, the very Word of Yahweh Himself spoken for you, spoken to you. His living Word. It is His voice to you today.