The Helper – 2 Peter 1:19-21

Mark Smith preaching from 2 Peter 1:19-21 in our The Helper series.Connect with us here:Website: citychurchdublin.ieFacebook: facebook.com/CityChurchDublinYouTube: youtube.com/c/CityChurchDublinPlaylists of all the Sermon Series can be found on Spotify at City Church Playlists

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Second Peter chapter one from verses sixteen to twenty one. For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, and we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so reads God's word.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Please take a seat, everybody. If you uh uh could turn up that passage from 2 Peter that Colin read for us. Uh, if you don't have a uh have a Bible, you can look it up on your on your phone. If you don't have a Bible app, you can just Google search uh 2 Peter 1 E S V, and that will take you really uh to Bible Gateway, probably, and you'll be able to follow along in the translation that we're that we're using. Uh today is the is the first Sunday uh in Advent. Advent is a season of preparation, it's a season of waiting and anticipation for the arrival of uh of Jesus into human history and also where Christians look uh to his coming again for a for a second time. It's also a time culturally where people are getting ready for Christmas. Some of you might even have your Christmas tree up, you monsters. It's not December yet. Um, some of you may have already pulled that trigger maybe yesterday in time for the toy show. If you're uh not from Ireland, the toy show is this Friday night. It's a huge cultural moment. That's usually when people want to have their uh their trees up for. Uh, it happens less so now, but maybe uh over the next couple of weeks, something might start dropping through your mat, and people might be sending you uh Christmas cards. And uh the card drops there through the through the letterbox and you have a look at it, you see the postmark, you think, okay, has it come from overseas or has it come from here in Ireland? You're looking at the envelope, you might think, oh, I recognize that person's handwriting. I know where common sources you open it up, and even if the person hasn't signed it, you can almost tell who it's from. Because you recognize the hand that is written it, you recognize the the warmth, the affection that there is behind it, that heart that's reaching out to uh to yours. What you don't tend to do is open up the envelope and open up the card and go, hmm. I wonder if I analyze the grammar of this letter, will I be able to understand if it really did come from my granny, or if it came from some imposter pretending to be my granny or my great aunt, because those are the ones who are still sending Christmas cards. We don't tend to open the Christmas card and treat it with a great deal of suspicion. Who is this person and what do they want from me? Are they trying to control my emotions? Saint Augustine said that the Bible uh was like a Christmas card from heaven. He said that uh the scriptures were our letters from home. It's a beautiful way of thinking about the Bible, isn't it? That the Christian is somebody who is who's away from their heavenly home. Some of you are away from your earthly home, many of you, in fact. But all of us, as followers of the Lord Jesus, are away from our heavenly home. And Augustine says that the Bible is our letters from home. We read them and we recognize the heart behind them. We recognize something of the Father's heart. But that recognition doesn't come naturally to us, does it? Anytime I go and uh speak at a university campus, uh, one of uh the questions that is often asked is, how can we trust the Bible? How do we know that the Bible is reliable? Even those of us sitting here, we might struggle with parts of the Bible, we might struggle with questions of, well, can it, can it be trusted? Is it something that I can have confidence in as it as it leads me through my life, as it points me to Jesus? Those are very real, very legitimate questions that people that people come to. If it was written by by men, what does it also mean when we call it God's word? What does it mean for God to be the author of this book? Now, over these last weeks, we've been uh doing a series in the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. We called it the helper because that's who the Holy Spirit is. That's who Jesus describes him. He says, He's going to be a helper like me who will help you to understand more about who Jesus is and more of what it means to follow him. And today we come to a vital aspect of his ministry. How the Spirit gives us confidence in the Bible, in the scriptures, as the Word of God, because it is that same Spirit who caused the scriptures to be written. And the passage that we're going to look at that Colin read for us today, I want to draw out three key movements of the Spirit's work in relation to how he speaks to us and how he inspires God's word. And so the first, if you're taking notes, is they said the Spirit reveals Christ. The Spirit reveals Christ. Let's pick it up in uh verses 16 to 18. Peter writing, We do not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For we received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice borne to him by the majestic glory. This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven when we were with him on the mountain. Peter begins with this claim that the message of Jesus is not a myth, it's not a fairy tale, it's not a legend. He himself, uh, he calls himself an eyewitness. That's a uh that's an ancient legal term. So he said, I would be willing to give a legal deposition to what I have seen. And so you say, I'm an eyewitness, someone who is there, who saw, who perceived, who heard the events that he is now describing to his first readers and then to us. Indeed, this idea of the New Testament being a collection of eyewitness documents is something that the New Testament writers are really at pains to show us. The New Testament writers want to give us confidence in the scriptures by showing us that what is being given to us is not myth and legend, but something that was experienced by eyewitnesses. I don't know, the sidebar. The New Testament writings, you think particularly of the Gospels, let's start there, since that's the first four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written during the lifetime of the people who experienced those events. And so one of the things that you have to kind of bear in mind there is that not enough, not enough time has passed for uh the life of Jesus to be mythologized because it's too easy to debunk. You can actually just go and talk to the people if it wasn't true, and they'll go, no, that was that's a load of nonsense. Why are they saying that? The gospel writers themselves uh really want to give us confidence in the Bible. One of the things that we're gonna look at in uh in January is we're gonna do 14 weeks through Luke's gospel. Now, Luke was a uh was a medical doctor, uh, he had a very uh logical, uh methodical mind. And at the very start of his gospel, he says, we undertook to set out an orderly account of the things that had happened. He's like a detective going around interviewing these eyewitnesses and compiling it together into a collection that can be trusted by the person who had commissioned him to write, a guy called Theophilus, and by us. What about Mark's gospel? Mark's gospel has a number of little times where Mark, the writer, points to the fact that this is not just kind of mythology or legend, but eyewitness um documentation. Uh, let me give you just one from the end of the Gospel of Mark. From Mark chapter 15, uh, which is the chapter where Jesus is on his way to Colgotha, to the place of crucifixion. And we're told there that he's carrying his cross. And at one point during that journey to Colgotha's hill, uh, the cross is given over to another man. You might remember his name. His name was Simon of Cyrene. And in Mark's gospel, uh, he says, uh, Simon of Cyrene, who was the father of Alexander and Rufus. You kind of skim on over it kind of 2,000 years later, you kind of go, oh, that's nice. Good to know. Like he had uh two boys, and I'm sure that they were very happy. And you know, why why? Why does Mark tell us uh who Simon of Cyrene's sons were? What does it matter to you and I? Well, if you're somebody who perhaps is skeptical, who is investigating, one of the things that Mark is saying is actually, what you can do when you receive my gospel, if you're so inclined, if you're really a skeptic, you can head over to Cyrene and you can find Alexander and Rufus and you can say to him, Hey, was your dad in Jerusalem when they crucified the one that they called the Christ? And Alexander and Rufus would look at you and go, Yeah, that's right. Why do you ask? Do you see? Mark wants to give us confidence that the New Testament is uh is based on eyewitnesses. And Peter is saying the same thing. He's saying that he was an eyewitness of his majesty. Now he's referring to a specific event in Jesus' ministry called the transfiguration. Uh, that is a moment. You can read about it in places like Mark chapter 9, uh, where Jesus reveals his divine glory to his disciples, not just his human dignity. It's as though the kind of uh the curtain, the veil is kind of pulled back, and just for a few moments the disciples get to see who Jesus really is as the majestic divine son of God. And what happened during that time on the mountain was that the father spoke from heaven and said, This is my son, this is my beloved son. The father declares his love for Jesus. Now, if you read the gospel accounts of uh of this incident, uh each of the gospel writers uh basically kind of say, Peter's kind of dazed. He's not quite sure what's going on. Uh he proposes to build three tents uh for uh for Jesus and uh Moses and Elijah who appeared with him and because he's he's not really kind of in his right, he's kind of shocked because that would be a that would be a big day, right? Uh and so he's not understanding really the meaning of the event. And now this happens all the time in Jesus' ministry. People see the miracles of Jesus and they don't believe. You maybe hear some people kind of say, well, if Jesus showed up today, and if I saw a bona fide miracle, I'd believe. You read the gospels, that's not true at all. People see miracles all the time and don't believe and explain them away. It's one thing to physically see Jesus' wonders. It's quite a different thing to spiritually perceive the wondrous Jesus. For this, the Spirit must give us sight. The Spirit has to reveal Christ to us so that we see beyond the physical manifestation to the spiritual reality of what is being shown to us. Jesus says himself that that's what the Holy Spirit would will do. John 15, 26, the spirit of truth will bear witness about me. Remember, almost every week now we've been talking about the great statue of Cristo Redentor in Rio, uh, that great Arc Deco statue with his arms out overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And at the base of that statue are what? Spotlights, floodlights that are doing what? That are illuminating Jesus. That's what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is like a great floodlight that shows us more of who Jesus is. And that he must do that in order for our own darkened hearts that are naturally skeptical and hard and unbelieving to really see who Jesus is. It was the spirit that opened Peter's eyes to see Jesus as more than a preacher or prophet. It was the spirit that opened his ears to hear and to understand the voice of the Father on the mountain, declaring his love for his son. It was the spirit that opened his heart to grasp the meaning and the magnificence of that glory. We can read the Bible all the time as an academic text. It's one of the real dangers as a Christian, is it actually just becomes an academic text? It's one of the real dangers for uh for people like me and Andy in our sort of job. Because we're supposed to read the Bible all the time. We prepared sermons and talks and things like that. It's so easy for it just to become the tool that we use in our work. And to read it as something that is kind of cold and academic. We can listen to the gospels as interesting historical narratives. We can even admire the ethics of Jesus. But it is only by the spirit that we see Jesus for who he truly is, and bow to him as king, as Lord and Savior. It is by the Spirit that we adore him, it is by the Spirit that our affections are stirred for him. It is by the spirit that we see more of Jesus' beauty. And so our prayer, as we come to the Bible, as you come to the scriptures, maybe throughout this next week, is to say, Holy Spirit, show me more of Jesus. Be that great floodlight who helps me to see Jesus more clearly. And this brings us to the second movement in the passage: that if the Spirit revealed Christ to the apostles, then the same Spirit must also illuminate Christ to us in the scriptures. And that's what Peter uh turns to in verse 19. And he talks about this prophetic word as a lamp shining in the darkness. And so our second point, our second movement, is that the spirit illuminates our understanding. Let me read verse 19 for you again. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. At some point in the night, our youngest son will wake up. It is an inevitable day. The house will be dark, the timer lights will have clicked off. And for those of you who have children, you will know that the landing of your house is an obstacle course. It is a wardrobe. It is where yesterday's clothes often get left. It is also a toy box. It is particularly where the children like to store Lego. And so my youngest will wake up at two or three in the morning and the house will be in darkness. And I will inevitably greet a nice, skinny, sharp piece of Lego with the sole of my foot. The shadows of shoes and Lego bricks are difficult to perceive until I plug in the nightlight. So we keep a nightlight in our landing, not for the children on the way to the bathroom, but for dad and for his feet. Why? So that I can perceive something of what my path is. I need my path to be illuminated so I do not stumble in the darkness over the shoes that I told him to put away. The Old Testament, the first two-thirds of the Bible, is full of shadows, illusions of who this rescuing king would be that God would send, of where he would come, of what he would be like, of what he would do, prophecies that maybe made sense to the first readers, but which also carried a deeper, fuller, truer sense yet to be revealed. Well, think about those maybe over Christmas time. You think of uh Isaiah chapter seven and the promise of Emmanuel, the promise of God with us and a child born. When you read the chapters in uh in Isaiah, and a child is actually born then. But as you read on, what you begin to realize is that Isaiah, while it's being fulfilled there in his day, he's also glimpsing and looking ahead to a deeper, fuller, truer fulfillment when God will actually come and make his home with us. What Peter is saying here in verse 19 is that the revelation of Jesus as God's glorious forever King, it confirms, it explains, it illuminates more clearly those shadows that are there in the Old Testament, those pointers to Jesus. So that when we go back and read the Old Testament with our with our New Testament lenses on, we can say, oh, that's what it was pointing towards. That's what the lamb without spot or blemish was about in the sacrificial system. That's who the Passover lamb was. That's who the uh the high priest was, who who mediated our uh the relationship between God and humans. Jesus fulfills that. He is the king who will never break faith with God, his father, the king who is better than David, the murderer and adulterer, better than Solomon and his 700 wives and 300 concubines. But he is God's forever king. Peter is not saying that uh that with the coming of Jesus, that the Old Testament is replaced, rather, that it's reinforced. That the Old Testament pointed forward to the coming king. And Peter saw. Peter saw the king revealed in all of his majesty. And what he's saying is, because of that, because of the New Testament eyewitness, you can be more confident as you come to all of the scriptures, Old and New Testament. So that encourages us to pay attention to God's illuminated word, not just to read it, but to attend to it, to let it shape, to let it shape us, to shape our decision making, to shape our values, to shape our worldview. The Spirit opens our eyes to see by the lamp of God's word in the dark world that we inhabit. And so he says, as a lamp shining in a dark place. Dark here means not just physically dark, but kind of morally dark, kind of morally murky and corrupt. The lamp of the Spirit illuminates the truth in a world of lies so that we can walk rightly. Do you kind of want that? You can maybe kind of you get into those uh experiences, those seasons of life where you've got to make a decision between two good, legitimate things. It's easy to make a decision between something that's that's that's good and something that's bad, or something that's right and something that's wrong. Those are the kind of the clearer decisions, usually, right? It's much harder when actually you're sitting there thinking, oh, well, this would be good and God glorifying, and but but oh well, but but this would be good and God glorifying. And kind of what you want is you want God uh to shine a sufficient degree of light that you can kind of look down the kind of corridor of time and perceive both ends, because that would better inform your decision making, wouldn't it? And it's frustrating that he doesn't do that, does he? He gives you a lamp light, he lets you see just enough in front of your feet that you can continue to follow him and depend on him for the next step. That's a good thing. And all the while, in this darkness with this lamp onto our feet, as the Sama says, with the scriptures in our hands, the Spirit not just illuminates those immediate steps before us, Peter says that he lifts our eyes, he lifts our eyes to see the distant horizon of this world and to perceive something of the red glow of a new day dawning. You get up early. You don't even have to get up particularly early these mornings, you can get up at half past seven and perceive something of the first red light of dawn. Peter's saying that that's something else that the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit lifts our eyes to see the future that we are going to that day when Christ returns. He is our morning star. And all that we trusted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit will be gloriously fulfilled before us. The Spirit illuminated the minds and hearts of the apostles, just as Jesus promised he would, bringing to their minds all that he had taught them. Similarly, we too come to that same apostolic witness, their writings before us, and we find that our hearts and our minds are illuminated by that same spirit. You have that experience sometimes of reading parts of the Bible that you've read dozens of times. You see something new. That is the Spirit illuminating the word afresh to you. He is the one who gives understanding, who deepens faith, who stirs hearts, not just to know truths about God, but to experience his goodness, his beauty. And this brings us to Peter's final and perhaps for our purposes, most foundational insight. That we can trust the light of the scriptures, not just because Jesus fulfills them, and not only because the Spirit helps us to understand them, but because it was the Spirit Himself who caused the scriptures to be written in the first place. That they don't come simply from human impulse or imagination, but from the Holy Spirit. And so our final point, our final movement is that the Spirit inspired the Scriptures for our good. Something like a yacht or a schooner or something like that. And it unfurls its sails. How does it move? It moves when the wind comes and catches those sails and pushes the boat through the water. While the the sails may be unfurled, but while there's not a breath of air, it's not moving very far. The wind must come and take that boat and push it through the water. Both sail and wind are necessary. And so it is with the inspiration of the scriptures. That the authors, men with sails unfurled, caught the wind of the Spirit and were carried along by him as they wrote. And just as a boat cannot move without the wind, so too, the scriptures do not originate from human ingenuity or intellect alone. Verse 21: no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God. If God is to reveal himself, he must make the first move. He must be the one to initiate the process of disclosing himself so that we might know what he is truly like. C.S. Lewis had a very famous uh illustration where he said, imagine uh imagine Hamlet, you know, Shakespeare's famous uh character in the play by the same name of Hamlet, right? Um and he asked the question, he said, What awareness does Hamlet in the play have of Shakespeare, the writer? Answer, none. Hamlet is completely unaware of Shakespeare. He's got no way of knowing who Shakespeare is. Unless, unless Shakespeare were to write himself into the story. Shakespeare has to act. Shakespeare has to take the initiative to write himself into the play, into the story of Hamlet, so that Hamlet knows who Shakespeare is. And so C.S. Lewis says that's what God needs to do in order for us to know who he is. That we have no awareness in and of ourselves, he himself must act, and he has done so. He has done so by writing himself into the story of human history, by coming as a man, and he has done so by disclosing himself to the apostles and prophets, the writers of the scriptures. The author has revealed himself. How? Verse 21 again. Men spoke from God. On the one hand, you have the author writing, and at the very same time, you have God speaking through them. What does that mean? I actually think it's really wonderful. It's really beautiful. Because it's not just that the spirit kind of dropped in some divine thoughts into those human minds. It's not just that he kind of possessed them so that they, you know, you kind of imagine maybe like the prophets, just their eyes kind of roll in the back of their of their heads and they kind of trance out and then they start they start writing. No, it wasn't, it wasn't quite like that at all. It is rather that God, in his goodness and in his sovereignty, that he so shaped and uh and molded the authors with all of their experiences and personalities and vocabularies, that when they sat down to write with their own intent, with their own uh agency, with their own temperament and disposition, that they were at one and the same time writing the very word of God. So Moses writes like Moses, the word of God. David sings like David, the word of God. Isaiah dreams like Isaiah, the word of God. Luke investigates like a historian and writes the word of God. Paul argues like a lawyer and brings forth the word of God. Through all of it, God speaks. Men spoke, human voice, carried along by the Holy Spirit, divine origin. And so if you were to read something like the book of Hebrews, it's a wonderful little part in Hebrews chapter 3 where this is brought out to us, where Hebrews in chapter 3, verse 7 says, as the Holy Spirit says, and then he quotes David in Psalm 95. So you say, Well, who's the author? Is it David or is it the Holy Spirit? Answer, yes. Yeah. That's what the writer to the Hebrews is saying. The Bible is God's voice through human words. Or rather, you could switch it around, maybe that would be better. Is it's God's word spoken through a human voice. That God superintends not just their experience, but also their understanding of those experiences. And so Peter says in verse 20 that no prophecy of scripture came from someone's own interpretation, that the Holy Spirit helps the biblical author not just to kind of see the events, but to understand the meaning of the events. That's what Peter needed on the mind of transfiguration. He saw it, but he needed help to understand what it was that he was seeing. And so it's not just the events themselves, it's not just their personalities and temperaments, but it's the very interpretation of the things that they experience. So an example from the very early chapters of Jeremiah, Jeremiah sees a uh a great uh cooking pot, right? He sees this cooking pot that's boiling over from the north side of the pot. And God has to tell him what that means. Since that means that there's an attack coming from the north. So he has the experience, he has the vision, and the interpretation. But that comes from God as well. And so that can be trusted. So you see, the Bible is not just a collection written by men over 1400 years who are just musing on the divine. It's very popular in uh in certain kinds of theological or or or Christian circles. Kind of see that the Bible is just a it's just a collection of men's reflections and experiences uh through the world, and they're uh they're kind of philosophizing on the nature of the divine. No, it is much more than that. It's much richer, it's much fuller, it's much more beautiful than that. Nor is it a collection of disconnected, vaguely moral sayings and stories. No, because it has a supernatural author in the Holy Spirit, it is a unified, authoritative, trustworthy whole. No, only the Holy Spirit Himself can fully persuade you that the Bible really is God's word. But let me close by giving you some reasons why, if this is true, it's really good for you. Because if the origin of the scriptures is divine, we're not just dealing with ancient texts, we're dealing with God's living speech. And therefore, the scriptures, what you have in your phone, what you have here in front of you, is true. It's trustworthy that in a world of lies and people trying to deceive you and get one over on you, there is a source of truth. Not only that, it is powerful and effective, but it really does transform lives. It is life-giving. Jesus said that the day is coming when the dead, the spiritually dead, will hear the voice of the Son of God and they will live. If you've come to know the Lord Jesus, that's happened to you. That happened to Andy and his testimony, that happened to me. We heard by the power of the Holy Spirit the voice of the Son of God speaking to our dead soul, and we came back to life. But the scriptures are wisdom-giving. We spent a whole year nearly looking at Proverbs. And Proverbs saying that it makes wise the simple. You really want to grow, not be taken for a fool or gullible, or want to know how to live a godly, wise, upright, commendable, honorable life. The scriptures really can do that. But because the Holy Spirit inspired the scriptures, they are a source of deep joy. Read the Psalms. Psalms described the Psalm 119, describing the scriptures as sweeter than honey, as to be valued more than gold, very fine gold. They are something to be delighted in. They are our letters from home, and so we treasure them. Not because of the ink that is spilled upon them, or the thickness of the envelope contained, or the style of the pen. We treasure them because of who go who wrote it. That they are God's letters to his people. And when we hold the scriptures, when we read the scriptures, we hear his voice. Today is the first Sunday of Advent. It's a period of waiting and anticipation for God's people. You know, the Holy Spirit, when he finished inspiring the Old Testament, the last book, the book of Malachi, there was 400 years of silence, 400 years of waiting, 400 years of will God speak again until the world was made flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory. The glory is of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. God did not stay silent, he spoke through his prophets, he spoke through the apostles, he has spoken supremely through his son, and he speaks to us still through his word, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray. Father, build in our hearts by that same Spirit a resolute confidence in your word, as true, as trustworthy, as reliable, as joy-giving, as wisdom-giving, as life-enlivening, that it might be a guide, a lamp to our feet through all of the paths that we might walk, that we might keep in step with that same spirit and look to that far horizon and see that day when all that we hope for and all that the scriptures point to will come true. And we will see him and know him as we are fully known, and enjoy the pleasure of his presence forevermore. Be with us. Now we ask by that same spirit. Amen.