God Must Reveal Himself

I'm reading a book called "9 Marks of a Healthy Church," and every time I pick up the book I chckle 'causs the author's name is Mark Dever. Get it? 9 "Marks"? Makes me laugh...

Anyways, I'm chewing on this thougt of his and I wanted to share it with you:

"Because we have seperated ourselves from God by our sin, God must speak if we are to know him... God will not be known if he does not speak, and we can not know him if he has not spoken a word that we can rely on. God must reveal himself. That's the point of the Bible. Because of our own sins, we could never know God otherwise. Either he speaks or we are forever lost in darkness of our own speculations. We see this clearly throughout the New Testament. Consider Romans 10:17 -Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the Word of Christ" (page 49).

I love it!

We didn't create God, nor do we create God. He reavealed himself to us. When I read the Bible, he reveals himself to me.

How come the book of Thomas didn't make it into the Bible? Who decided that n how do we no they were right?

So you saw the Da Vinci Code?

There are a lot of books that people would like to have included in the Bible –one of those is the “Gospel of Thomas.”  There are a number of reasons that this particular book is not a part of the Bible:

-It has internal discrepancies –have you read it?  It’s a joke!

-It is not at all in alignment with the rest of the Bible –both the Old and the New Testament.  Alignment with all of the Old Testament was one of the criteria that the early church used when considering what books could be a part of what we now call the New Testament.

-It claims to have been written by an eye witness (Thomas, Jesus’ Disciple), but the age of the writing seems to indicate that it was written far too late for the author to have been a contemporary of Jesus.

-One of the criteria that the early church used to decide what would be included in what we now call the New Testament was that it had to have been written by one of the Apostles or an eye witness and this “lost Gospel” does not meet this criteria.

Why is the bible not in chronological order?

There are 2 reasons that work together to create the order we find in the Bible:

 

1^st  -The Old Testament was written out on scrolls, not in nifty and compact little books.  If you put the entire Old Testament on a single scroll it would have been so big that no one could have unrolled it and read it… so a large book, like Isaiah got it’s own scroll.  But little books, like Jonah, Micah, and Habakkuk were all combined onto one scroll, even though they weren’t written at the same time.

 

2^nd –The books are grouped by genera of writing (or format of writing).  For instance, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recount the story of Jesus’ life (often called the Gospels) and Acts is the story of the spread of the gospel out into the world –they are all stories.  These stories are followed by a group of books called “Epistles.”  Epistle means “letter.”  These are letters that were sent to new churches that were being started as the gospel spread out into the world.  A letter reads very differently than a story… This format of grouping by genera doesn’t make much sense to us today, but it is traditionally how large groups of writings were categorized –think of the Dewey Decimal System at the library.

 

So the order of books that we find in the Bible today has more to do with tradition than anything else.

Does biblegateway.com have the reading plan of the bible in historical order?

Yes.

Go to  http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/readingplans/

And you want the "Chronological" reading plan.  It'll take you through all of the event of the Bible starting with the oldest and progressing forward.  Or if you'd rather print it out, go to  http://www.esv.org/assets/pdfs/rp.chronological.pdf

But, if you've never read through the Bible before, I wouldn't start there.

 

If this is your first time ever reading any part of the Bible, I'd encourage you to use the following reading plan that focus' on Jesus' life  http://www.tniv.com/Experience%20it/docs/plan_jesus_30.pdf

 

If you want to take on reading through the entire Bible for the first time, try this reading plan that gives you a little out of the Old Testament and a little out of the New Testament each day  http://www.esv.org/assets/pdfs/rp.through.the.bible.pdf

 

And if you want a little scripture texted to your phone every day, you sign up at  http://www.youversion.com/

 

You can do it!