by Andy Sharples
Two well-dressed people knock on your front door and say they represent some church. You ask them, “What’s your message?” And they reach into their book bag and pull out a leaflet for you. “When you read this, you’ll know the truth.” But will you?
Thanks to the Reformation (which started about 1517 AD), we have the Latin expression Sola Scriptura. That is,the teaching of the Bible Alone is the complete and final authority about who God is and how we relate to God. So when someone hands you a leaflet or shows you a clip, it’s only true if it agrees with what the Bible teaches.
If Sola Scriptura is true, what about people who believe in other sources of truth?
- Catholics believe that tradition and the “papal magisterium” (when the pope makes decrees) are also God-given revelations of God and His will.
- Some people believe there are books missing from the Bible.
- What about The Book of Mormon, the Quran, etc?
- Doesn’t God visit us in our dreams?
- And where would we be today without our Study Bible notes?
Is the Bible sufficient or isn’t it? The Bible claims this for itself: “and you know that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:15-17).
If the Bible is inspired and inerrant (check out previous Theology Thursdays), then this inspired and inerrant verse says the Bible is also sufficient. The message of the Bible is all we need in order to know God and be equipped to do His will.
There are boundaries to the Bible’s sufficiency. The Bible doesn’t tell you who to marry or when. It doesn’t know how to change the spark plugs in your car. Other resources like YouTube and school textbooks explain how to use your phone, how chemical reactions work, and who the 30th president of the US was (Calvin Coolidge).
Sola Scriptura, the sufficiency of the Bible, means that we have a God-given, unchanging yardstick we use to measure whether a teaching is right or not.
So then what about those people at your front door, and the Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists and others who believe there are other divinely inspired sources of truth out there? We know they are mistaken because they have teachings that reject the teaching of the Bible.
So the bigger question is, Do you know the Bible well enough to recognize whether a teaching is true or not?
One final point. The Supreme Being, the God of the universe, didn’t have to reveal Himself to us. If it’s really true that He gifted humankind an inspired book that unlocks everything that can be known about Him and what He wants from us, what an amazing gift that is!
Reflection Questions
- Have you thought about what “sufficiency” means before? Is there anything in this article that is different from what you used to think? Can you put into words?
- Here’s a logic question: If God gifted us with a book that perfectly reveals Himself to us, shouldn’t we be immensely grateful for that gift? Take a moment to think about what a gift we have and tell Him.
- God gifted you His ultimate revelation, revealing who He is and what He requires from you. What will you do with that?
For Further Reading:
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/thoughts-on-the-sufficiency-of-scripture
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-sufficiency-of-scripture
In The Margins 
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