Who Is Speaking? God-Originated and Human-Originated Scripture

Every passage of the Bible has its own focus and purpose. The Bible is not one undivided mass of material. Not every sentence in it carries the same weight. Anyone who reads it as though every sentence did will end up teaching contradictory things about God and calling all of them the truth. So two questions must be asked of every passage. The first is about origin: who is speaking? The second is about function: what is the passage doing?

Who Took the Initiative?

The first question asks who initiated the teaching. Some teaching came from God directly, on His own initiative. Everything else was written by human beings. They wrote about human life, and they wrote about God as well. What they wrote about God records their own opinion, understanding and perception of Him, and at times even their distortion of Him. I call the first God-originated passages* (or God-ordained passages), and the second human-originated passages*.

The God-originated teaching came in three distinct phases of history, each time at God’s initiative.

The first is the Law, the Torah, given by God Himself.

The second is the Prophets. When the people rebelled against God’s Law, God raised up prophets to call them back to it. The prophets did not come of their own volition. God raised them up and sent them. He also sent them to encourage the righteous who suffered at the hands of the wicked: to persevere, because God would bring justice in His day. “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance” (Isaiah 35:4).

Among the Prophets, the Jews counted the historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. These books are human history, told from their writers’ own perspectives. What the prophets in them said is God-originated; the history around it is not. The book of Revelation is part God-originated and part human-originated. John writes as a human witness: “I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus” (Revelation 1:9). His narration of what he saw is his own. But the words he records from Jesus and from God are prophecy, “the revelation from Jesus Christ” and “the words of this prophecy” (Revelation 1:1–3). Those words belong with the Prophets, and they carry the same message to the suffering righteous: how long, and when will He judge? (Revelation 6:9–11).

The third is the teaching of Jesus. God stepped into history, not at our initiative but at His, and taught. Jesus does not merely claim that He is God. He proves that He is God (John 10:30, 37–38). And if He is God, whatever He says about God is true. Here God reveals God. So to understand who God is, we go to God, not to a person.

The Law, the Prophets and the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels are therefore the God-originated passages. Everything else, the Writings, Acts and the Epistles, is human-originated. It is perspective, history and opinion, and some of it was written with ulterior motives. The test is the origin of the teaching, not the book in which it has been bound.

The Law Establishes, the Prophets Re-establish

The Law and the Prophets have the same source. God gave the Law, and God raised up the prophets. No human being had any part in either, except as God’s mouthpiece. That was the role of Moses, and of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, Nathan and every other prophet. The message came directly from God. We say, “Moses taught this,” but Moses was not the author of the message. God was the author. Moses was His mouthpiece. In Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, God told Moses what to teach, and Moses did not adapt it. In Deuteronomy, Moses takes it upon himself to sum up what God had already taught. That is not invented theology. Where the two voices cannot be told apart, it does not matter, because the intent is God’s.

The message of the Law and the message of the Prophets hardly differ. Their purposes did. The Law was given so that a nation could be created. It was the constitution of an entire nation. It was the blueprint and the framework: not a foundation, but the foundation on which God would build the society He wanted. Until then, the Hebrews were held together by their language and their culture, not by a common philosophy of life. But a nation is not its ethnicity. A nation is its constitution, and through the Law, God gave them one. His aim was that the theocratic ideal in His mind, the Edenic ideal*, would become a reality. This nation would then be an example for every other nation to follow, until the whole world became theocratic.

Then Israel failed. God did not fail, and His plan did not fail. Israel as a nation failed. The nation that was meant to be so beautiful had crumbled, and the whole system with it. So God raised up prophets to say, “Come back to the Law. Come back to obedience.” Their message was not against the Law. It was not different from the Law. The Law had forbidden idolatry (Exodus 20:3–5) and oppression (Exodus 22:21–24). Those are exactly the two charges the prophets laid against the people. Their purpose was reformative. They admonished, corrected, warned and rebuked the people. They even pronounced judgement on them, so that they would return to the Law.

If the content of the Law and the Prophets had to be summed up in one word, the word would be obedience. Both ask the same thing of people: obey God’s commandments.

So the Law was given to establish, and the Prophets were sent to re-establish. That is the only difference between them: a difference of purpose. Otherwise they are the same. They stand on the same plane, because both originate in God Himself.

In the Law, God is the one speaking, so it must be taken as it is. When God gives a principle, we take it as it is. We do not tamper with it, we do not critique it, and we cannot say no to it. When the prophets tell the people what they must and must not do, they are speaking of the Law, and the same holds.

The Writings

The historical and poetical books are a different matter. The Jews called them the Ketuvim, the Writings: Esther, Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah and the rest. The devout Jews never considered them God-given, even before the Bible was compiled. By devout Jews I do not mean every Israelite, but those who truly followed God. For them, the Law and the Prophets were the rule book and the absolute truth. That was where they went to learn about God and about how to live. The Writings were relevant to the Israelites, but they were merely about their history, their culture and their literature. The Jews themselves did not place them on a par with God’s word, because they did not come from God. They were human perceptions of things.

The Jews kept this distinction even in the way they spoke of their books. Around 132 BC, the grandson of Jesus son of Sirach translated his grandfather’s book of wisdom from Hebrew into Greek in Egypt. In his prologue he names three groups separately. He speaks of the many great things “delivered unto us by the law and the prophets, and by others that have followed their steps”. He speaks of his grandfather’s reading of “the law, and the prophets, and other books of our fathers”. Later he speaks of “the law itself, and the prophets, and the rest of the books” (Sirach, Prologue). The Law and the Prophets are named. Everything else is simply “the rest”.

The historical books were never written for teaching. Books such as Chronicles and Esther were written by people who supported and glorified the monarchy, or by rebellious Jews who were “patriotic” about their nation. The kings wanted their “great accomplishments” recorded for posterity, and the records glorify them. Yet once the monarchy was established, the kings and the people turned away from God. God rebuked them again and again through the prophets, who told the rulers, in effect, “You have led My people astray” (Isaiah 3:12; 9:16). Then there were songs about how much they loved God. None of this was where the devout went to learn.

Jesus Himself pointed people to the Law and the Prophets: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12). The Law and the Prophets were given by God to reveal Him and to teach people how to live. The other books are human additions. They speak about God, and some of what they say is right and some of it is not. But even when they speak about God, they record human opinion and human understanding, not the truth about God. That is why they must be read through the Law and the Prophets. Whatever the Writings say about God must be measured against what God Himself has said. So we should not go to the Psalms to learn what God is like or how He wants us to live. These passages were not given by God, and that is exactly how every devout Jew regarded them.

History Is a Perception of Reality

This matters, because history is not reality. History† is a perception of reality, seen from the writer’s point of view. I could look at an event, and you could look at the same event, and we would write about it differently. Each has his own likes and dislikes, and if someone a writer favours is involved, he takes that person’s side. History is always someone’s take on things.

An Israelite would always present Israel’s history as great. Jacob was their great ancestor, the forefather without whom they would not exist. So they overlooked anything he did wrong, such as deceiving his father (Genesis 27:18–29), and justified everything he did. That is how history is written. The writers want their kings to look great, and they want themselves to look great. They even want God to look as though He has always been on their side. They run down the people they dislike, and they elevate the people they like.

The Law and the Prophets have no take of that kind. They carry no human perspective. They carry God’s perspective, and God’s perspective is objective.

What Revelation Is

We cannot know God except through Himself. We cannot know Him through our own experiences, nor through anyone else’s. We can know Him only through His revelation. He does not reveal Himself to each of us individually, through dreams, visions or some metaphysical experience. He reveals Himself through the God-originated passages.

What He reveals about Himself is theology†. Theology is usually defined as our understanding of God. I define it differently. Theology is not even the right understanding of God. It is the right knowledge of God. God has revealed Himself, and all that is left for us is to accept that knowledge as the truth. The truth about God is theology: that He is spirit, that He is good, that He is the Creator of the world, that He is just and wise, and that He is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We would never arrive at any of this on our own, because we cannot study God. We cannot know Him unless He reveals Himself. Other subjects are often added to the word: how we look at the Bible, at human beings, at sin, at salvation and at eternal life. By the strictest definition, these are not theology.

So to understand God, we do not go to a person who says something about God. We go to God, who says something about Himself. Suppose David says something about God. Before saying, “David has said that this is what God is like,” we must check it against what God has said directly. Am I saying, then, that we should discard these writings? No. What I am saying is that when it comes to God, it is always better to go to the source than to someone else’s take on the source. Then we can be sure that our understanding is the right understanding of God. Everything else is taken with a pinch of salt. More precisely, it is checked against the passages in which God has spoken about Himself, to see whether it agrees with what God has said.

“Revelation” is used very loosely today. People say, “That’s a new revelation,” when they mean a new insight, something they had never thought of before. In Scripture, revelation† is a restricted word. It is always about God: what we did not know about Him, and He has made known. When Jesus speaks of the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit, that is revelation. When Jesus explains something, that is explanation.

Three Kinds of Passage

The second question is about function: what does a passage do? By function, passages fall into three kinds.

The first are the revelatory passages*, in which God speaks about Himself and so reveals Himself.

The second are the prescriptive passages†, in which God tells us how to live. To see why these are needed, consider creation. Creation falls into two categories. The first is the non-sentient creation: the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the sun, the moon, the stars and everything else. Whatever God wanted them to be, they are. He created them in a particular way, and they do what He designed them to do. They cannot go against Him. The earth goes round the sun by the law He put in place. Even the changes that come over long periods were engineered and orchestrated by Him, and they fit into His grand plan. The second is the sentient creation: beings who can think, decide and choose, and see their decisions through. In Scripture, that means human beings. There are references here and there to angelic beings, but little is said about them, and there is no need to dwell on them.

Human beings are the wild card. We can choose to fit into the plan of God, or we can stand against it. From Genesis onwards, human beings have stood against God’s ideals: not every one of them, but the majority. The reason is selfishness. We do not consider the whole world, or creation, or other human beings as equal to us. Our own existence matters more to us than anything else, so we exploit people, nature and every resource around us. God gave human beings the role of ruling over the world (Genesis 1:28). That role was never to exploit the world for our own benefit. It was to oversee it, like a supervisor, and see to it that everything works as it should. Instead, we have made ourselves the gods, rather than accepting Him as God.

So God gives commandments. He does not give them to the plants and the trees, which already do what He designed them to do. He gives them to human beings, so that by following them we will make this world the world He wanted it to be. All His laws come down to one very simple principle: do not harm, but do good to God’s creation. Every law rests on that. I define sin† in the same terms: anything selfish that harms, or has the potential to harm, human beings in particular and God’s creation in general. Sin is so often misunderstood because we bring paganism into Christianity. We go about saying, “This is wrong, and that is wrong,” and when asked why, we answer, “Because God says so.” God never gives a commandment for no reason. Behind every commandment there is a beautiful reason. And the prescription must come from God, from the God-originated passages, where He Himself tells us how to live. It cannot come from human beings telling us how to live.

The third are the descriptive passages†. As the name says, they describe. Adam did this, Eve did that, Abraham did this, Moses did that. They record what people did and said, what they thought or felt about God, and even what they taught about God. A descriptive passage comes with no gauge. It does not say, “Abraham did this, and he should not have done it.” It comes with no scale and no measure by which to judge whether what someone did or said was right or wrong. So what has been described has not thereby been prescribed. That people did something does not mean that we are to do it.

Descriptive passages show us that there have been human beings just like us: godly and ungodly, obedient and rebellious. They are there as history. They are for knowledge, not for following. Knowing, in the sense of having information (this happened yesterday, in this place, at this time), is one thing. Living is another. The majority of the Bible is description of this kind. But the teaching matters far more: the revelation and the prescription. We look at what people did as well, and at times we critique it. To critique† is to study it objectively. We ask whether what someone did was right or wrong, and why. We ask whether the matter is too complicated for us to understand. And we ask whether the background was cultural, theological or social.

Two Distinctions, Not One

These two ways of dividing the Bible are not the same. One concerns where a passage came from: God or human beings. The other concerns what a passage does: reveal God, prescribe how we live, or describe what people did, said, thought or taught. A God-originated passage can still contain description, so the two sets of categories do not coincide.

“Prescriptive” and “descriptive” are not my terms. They are existing words in common use, and I use them in their ordinary sense. To prescribe is to lay down what must be done. To describe is only to tell what something is like. Description is not peculiar to the Bible. It is found in any book. A novelist writes a descriptive passage when he describes a flower, the sea, a sunset or someone walking in a desert. That is description, not prescription. A descriptive passage in the Bible works in exactly the same way. It tells us what happened. It does not tell us what to do.

“Revelatory passages”, “God-originated passages” and “human-originated passages” are terms I coined. I coined them because Christianity has no words for these distinctions. It has no words for them because Christians do not ask these questions. We have been so trained, even indoctrinated, to read the Bible in one way that the question of who is speaking never arises. I do not use these terms out of pride in having coined them. They exist only because the distinction needed a name. When people are willing to listen and to think the matter through, they accept the distinction.

Is It That Black and White?

Can one person argue that a passage is revelatory and another that it is prescriptive? The distinction does not allow it. It is clear-cut. If God is speaking, and He is speaking about Himself, the passage is revelatory. If God is speaking, and He is telling human beings how to live, the passage is prescriptive. The teachings of Jesus show this plainly. When Jesus teaches us how to live, the passage is prescriptive, because God is the one teaching. When He speaks of the Father or the Holy Spirit, the passage is revelatory, because He is God revealing what we could never otherwise know. Everything that is neither revelatory nor prescriptive is descriptive.

There is only one place where there is room for discussion. When God speaks, even about Himself, He is speaking to human beings. He must use human language to be understood. So He speaks of His hand, His arm and His eyes, though He is spirit. This is anthropic language*: God described in human terms so that human beings can understand Him. We may ask why He uses a particular kind of language, and whether something is the message itself or only the way in which the message has been given. Look beyond that device, and the principle is to be taken as it is. We cannot tamper with it, and we cannot critique it.

None of this means taking three coloured markers and colouring every word of the Bible in one of three colours. It means taking up a passage and asking whether anything in it is revelatory or prescriptive. If nothing is, it is descriptive, and whatever we learn from it must never contradict or override what God has taught or revealed. The Law is the one great body of material in the Bible in which God is speaking, and it must be taken at face value. Setting aside the devices God uses to make Himself understood, everything that comes from God we take as fact.

Relative Truth Is No Truth at All

If everyone may have a different understanding of God, there is no arriving at the truth at all. There is no absolute truth, and everything becomes relative. You have something to say, I have something to say, and someone else has something else to say. At one point in time this seems good; at another, that seems good. And if there is no absolute truth in the Bible, we are wasting our time. We could just as well spend it on something else. What is the point of learning, of gathering as a church and of reading the Scriptures, if what the Bible says is true for one generation, untrue for the next, and true again for the one after that?

So the question is this. If there is an absolute truth about God, where could reliable information about Him come from? If there is an absolute truth about how we are to live, where could it come from in a way that is authentic, credible and reliable? Could it come from human beings?

The trouble with Christianity is that we do not reconcile anything. One week I learn from a passage that God is like this. The next week another passage tells me that He is like that. And I never reconcile the two. This keeps happening in Christianity, and people do it all the time. If something is true, it must be reconciled with everything else that is true, because two different things cannot both be the truth. Either God is spirit or He is not. Either He is selfish or He is not. We cannot describe God in ways that contradict each other and then claim that all of it is the truth.

Take an example. A king claims that God established the monarchy, and that whatever he does is ordained by God. The royal psalm says exactly that: God has installed His king on Zion and declared him His son (Psalm 2:6–7). Set that beside 1 Samuel 8. There, God is against the monarchy. He is hurt, disappointed, angry and upset that the people have asked for a king (1 Samuel 8:6–8). Which am I to accept: God’s own perspective, or what these people say about God? Both speak about God. But what God says about Himself is not what they say about Him, and it is our responsibility to reconcile the two. When we cannot, the problem is plain. Take verses out of context and you can reconcile anything with anything. Read them in context, and some are not seeming contradictions at all, but real ones. To those who say we must learn about God from every part of the Bible, I put one question. If what you learn about God from these passages stands against what God has said about Himself, which will you choose? The two are obviously not the same.

Many Christians take every passage of the Bible as prescriptive, because they suffer from a kind of amnesia. What we read yesterday, we forget today. Yesterday it was something I learnt from God. Today it is a “new revelation” from God. Every message is a one-off, with no continuity and no connection. But they must agree with each other, and if they do not, they are not all from God. Yesterday that was true, today this is true, and tomorrow something else will be true. That is not absolute truth. It is relative truth, and relative truth is no truth at all.

Theology and Depiction

How do we tell when a narrator is exaggerating? And how do we know God’s real character? God speaks about Himself many times in the Law. He is good. He is long-suffering, which means patient (Exodus 34:6). He is wise. He is just. What God says about Himself is theology. What is narrated about Him is depiction. The depiction is a way of portraying Him. What He says about Himself is the truth.

When two statements about God differ, only one of them can be true. God is spirit, because that is how He describes Himself (John 4:24). A narrative speaks of the tablets of stone “inscribed by the finger of God” (Deuteronomy 9:10; Exodus 31:18). Both cannot be literally true. Either He has a body or He does not, and if He is spirit, a finger has no meaning. When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God let him see only His back (Exodus 33:18–23). That is depiction, a way of saying to so righteous a man, “You want to see Me? Very well; I will not disappoint you.” The reality is that God is spirit, and He is everywhere. Anything physical is limited, and He is not. Depiction is different from reality. Depiction is not theology, and we must never make it a theology. A depiction that contradicts what God has said about Himself is not to be taken literally.

Depiction is also clothed in the culture of the people who wrote it and heard it. A narrator speaks in the images his own people understood. That is why no book can be understood on our terms. We cannot ask Shakespeare why he wrote Romeo and Juliet or The Taming of the Shrew the way he did, and then complain that we cannot understand him. An author must always be understood on his own terms. We are separated from the Law by about 3,500 years, and from the Gospels by about 2,000. Today people speak of a culture gap, a culture shock or a cultural rift within a single generation. It would be most unfair to ask an ancient author why he did not write in a way we could understand. The people of his time understood him. That is all we need to know. So we read the depiction for what it meant to them, and we take what God has said about Himself as the truth.

“All Scripture Is God-Breathed”

The verse most often quoted to show that every part of the Bible is equally God’s word is Paul’s: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). From it, people conclude that every part of the Bible must carry the same weight. But is Paul speaking of the whole of what we now call the Bible? When he wrote, there was no Bible as we have it, with sixty-six books bound together. Even the word “Bible”, from the Greek biblia, “books”, is a later coinage.

Look at the verse before it. Paul tells Timothy, “from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures” (2 Timothy 3:15). Timothy was no longer a child when Paul wrote to him. He had joined Paul as a young disciple (Acts 16:1–3), and when Paul wrote to him he was a grown man. Paul could still tell him not to let anyone look down on him for being young (1 Timothy 4:12), since in that culture a man under forty was still counted young. Timothy was in his thirties or forties. That was the age at which a man was given responsibility over a church, and he was one of those who oversaw and taught a church. The Holy Scriptures he had known from infancy were what his Jewish mother Eunice and his grandmother Lois had taught him (2 Timothy 1:5; Acts 16:1). When Timothy was an infant, Paul’s letters did not exist. They came long afterwards. So the Holy Scriptures Timothy had known from infancy cannot include Paul’s writings, or Peter’s. When Paul speaks of all Scripture, he is not speaking of everything we now count as part of the Bible.

The apostles never raised themselves or their messages to the level of what God had said. In Paul’s mind, as in the mind of every devout Jew of his time, the Holy Scriptures were the teachings that came from God: the Law and the Prophets. When Jesus spoke of the Scriptures, He too meant the Law and the Prophets.

Then God stepped into history, and He was named Jesus, the Saviour. His ministry lasted more than two years: John’s Gospel records three Passovers (John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55), and if the unnamed festival of John 5:1 was also a Passover, it lasted more than three. His teachings are collected in the four Gospels. As a disciple of Jesus, Paul certainly regarded Him as God; otherwise, why follow Him? So the teachings of Jesus were regarded as the teachings of God. They take priority over everything. The Law, the Prophets and the Gospels stand on an entirely different plane from everything else.

When Paul wrote, however, the teachings of Jesus had not yet been written down as Gospels. Paul’s letters were written between about AD 50 and the mid-60s. Mark’s Gospel is dated to around AD 70, Matthew’s and Luke’s after it, and John’s to the 90s. So Paul’s letters, including those to Timothy, came before the Gospels. In their minds, the teachings of Jesus were Scripture in themselves, though they had not yet been written down. But when Paul speaks of Scripture, he means the written Scripture God had already given: the Law and the Prophets. And the Torah, in their minds, was not even the narrative of what the Israelites did in the wilderness. It was what God taught them as they travelled through it.

None of the writers of the Epistles ever imagined that their writings would be called Scripture. They always said that they passed on what they had received from Jesus, and they never claimed a revelation beyond His. At Lystra, when the crowd called Barnabas and Paul gods, they tore their clothes and protested that they were only human beings (Acts 14:11–15). They were humble and genuine people. Only an egoist would think of his own writing as Scripture. When Paul writes to Timothy, he is not thinking, “This letter will be considered Scripture.” He includes neither his own writings, nor his contemporaries’, nor anybody else’s, but only what God had directly given. False prophets have always considered their words equal to God’s. True prophets never did.

So someone may insist that we cannot set one passage of the Bible against another, and that Paul’s teaching must be given the same importance as the teachings of Jesus. The answer is that Paul himself would never have thought so. Today someone teaches from Proverbs and says, “This is what God says.” Someone else teaches from the Psalms and says, “This is what God says.” Someone else teaches from Paul and says, “This is what God says.” Where did we get the idea that every part of the Bible must be read in the same way?

What Happens When We Do Not Ask Who Is Speaking

Take the food laws. In Leviticus, God says, in effect, “Do not eat this; do not eat that” (Leviticus 11). Then Jesus is asked why His disciples eat without washing their hands (Mark 7:1–5). He answers, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (Mark 7:15). How do the two fit together?

We must always ask what principle lies behind a law. When God said, “Do not eat this,” was He saying that one food makes a person good and another makes him evil? It was not. He said it would defile them, and we read “defilement” with a pagan understanding, as something God abhors or hates. That is not the idea at all. God was saying: if you do this, you will destroy your body. At that time people had to be very cautious about what they ate. Food had to agree with the body, and the matter concerned not only the individual but the whole society. Even today, with all the advances of medical science, we must be careful. Pork can be eaten, but not undercooked, or it will give us tapeworm and other diseases (Leviticus 11:7). God told them not to touch the secretions of the human body (Leviticus 15), and science has since taught us about germs and contagion. Long after the Law was given, diseases carried by rats spread from one person to a whole community. Thousands upon thousands died, as in the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century and the Black Death in the fourteenth. The defilement was never “I dislike it”. It was “this will destroy your health, and the health of your community”. That was out of love and concern for them.

By the time of Jesus, the society was no longer a homogeneous society*, in which only Israelites lived. It was a heterogeneous society*. Israelites, Samaritans and Romans lived side by side, with different eating habits. Judaism had not understood the principle behind the food laws. Instead, it had turned it round and branded anyone who ate these things a sinner. That portrays God as whimsical, saying “Don’t eat this, don’t eat that” for no reason at all. The disciples had broken no commandment of God. They had broken only the tradition of the elders. So Jesus turned the accusation back on their accusers. He called them hypocrites, quoting Isaiah: “These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Mark 7:6–7; Isaiah 29:13). He showed them that they set aside the commandment of God in order to keep their own tradition. His example was “Corban”, by which a man could withhold support from his own father and mother (Mark 7:8–13). The accusers were the ones breaking God’s Law.

So the Law was not something inferior that Jesus came to sanctify or improve. God gave the Law, and the Law was pure and logical, with a beautiful principle behind it. In between, Judaism corrupted it. What was given for the welfare of the people was used to victimise them. When the God-originated passages are read for what they are, God says the same thing in the Law and in the teachings of Jesus, and the contradiction disappears.

Words We Coined

Over the centuries, many terms not found in the Bible have entered Christianity, and some of them are beneficial. “Trinity” is one. Jesus Himself taught the concept when He spoke of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). But Scripture has no single word for it. Christianity did well to coin one.

Other terms do no justice to God’s teaching. “Old Testament” and “New Testament” are among them. God never intended us to have these words. They are human creations, coming from a theology that holds that what Jesus did and taught was radically different from everything God had done before. So they cut the Scriptures into two parts, as though there were two eras and two different teachings. That a term has been coined, and has become part of Christianity, does not mean that we must accept it. We must look at it from God’s perspective. Did He make any distinction between what we call the Old Testament and what we call the New? He did not. When Jesus stepped into history, He always taught from the Law. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them” (Matthew 5:17). Everything He taught can be reconciled with what had already been taught. In between, the monarchy, the exile and the rabbinic Judaism that grew out of it had corrupted and distorted what God had given. Jesus took the people back to the Law, back to its intent, and made it universal. The writers of the Gospels and the Epistles saw no difference between what Jesus taught and what God had taught in the Law and the Prophets. Had they seen one, they would have had to say that the God of the Gospels was a different god altogether.

Even the word “testament” makes the point. A testament is a witness, a covenant, and the covenant† has always been the same: if you follow My commandments, you have a relationship with Me. God has taught this from the beginning, and Jesus taught the same: “If you love me, keep my commands” (John 14:15). The covenant has been made with different groups of people, the last of them being the disciples (Luke 22:20). So for us it is simply the latest covenant. It is not new. It has been made with people closer to us in time. Nothing is old, and nothing is new.

There are differences of context. Jesus taught in a different geopolitical and cultural setting. His ministry was mostly confined to the regions where the Jews lived, with visits to Tyre and Sidon, the Decapolis and Samaria. The Law and the Prophets speak to one nation, with one culture and one language: a homogeneous society. Jesus spoke into a heterogeneous society, a mixed world. But apart from that cultural and historical difference, which must not be given too much weight, God’s teachings are one. There is no division and no discrepancy, as though He said one thing here and another there. We may call certain writings narrative or poetry in order to study their genre and their literary devices, and that is perfectly all right. What we must not do is divide what God has given into categories, one higher than another.

The only distinction that does justice to the Bible is the distinction between God-originated and human-originated passages. What is called the Old Testament contains both: the Law and the Prophets, and the Writings. What is called the New Testament contains both as well: the teachings of Jesus, who is God, and what people wrote down. So when we read the Law, we are not doing a different kind of study from when we read the Gospels. The time in which God taught may differ. The people He taught, and the situations they were in, may differ, and there may be cultural nuances to work through. But the principles behind the teaching remain the same. The terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” continue to be used only for the sake of continuity, because everybody uses them.

Theology, Perspective and Principles

Wherever we look in God’s teaching, in the Law or in the teachings of Jesus, there are three things to concentrate on: theology, perspective and principles†.

The first is theology: not merely our understanding of God, but the reality of God, the truth about Him, His nature.

The second is perspective. As human beings we are deeply subjective. We see everything from our own point of view, with all our emotional attachments. And our point of view is not the right one, because we are selfish beings. Selfishness, together with the way we have been brought up, stands like a lens between us and whatever we look at. When we look through God’s eyes, that lens is removed. We see the world, people and everything else as God sees them. That is a change of perspective. Our understanding of ourselves, of creation, of God’s will and purpose, of other human beings, and of right and wrong becomes objective.

The third is principles: the principles we learn from His teaching, and the reason each one exists. Is God a megalomaniac, saying, “Because I created you, I will give you all these commandments, and you had better live by them or I will get very angry”? When a child asks a parent why, and the parent answers, “Because I said so,” that is megalomania: I have the authority, so you will listen. God does not operate like that. His principles are not selfish. They are for everyone’s benefit. So when we say that we do certain things to please God, these are really things we do to fit into His plan, and His plan is for the benefit of everyone.

So the commandments are given for three things. They are given so that people may understand God, which we call theology. They are given so that people may have a right way of looking at the world, which we call perspective. And they are given so that people may know how to live, which we call principles. That never changes, from the Law to the teachings of Jesus. And none of it was taught for information alone. Whatever God taught was for application: to change the people who heard it, and through them to change the society around them.

The Same God Throughout

This is what we find throughout the God-originated passages: right understanding of God, right way of life; wrong understanding of God, wrong way of life. The Prophets charge the people with two things: idolatry and oppression. Idolatry† is a misrepresentation of God, and the two charges belong together. Once God is misrepresented, right can be turned into wrong and wrong into right. The very purpose of distorting God is to justify wickedness, exploitation and oppression. The Law states the positive side: a right representation of God leads to a right way of life. The Prophets expose the negative side: a misrepresentation of God leads to misdeeds. Right understanding of God, right way of life; wrong understanding of God, wrong way of life. The core idea is the same throughout.

The Epistles do something similar. They too correct distortions: false teaching that gives rise to a false and wicked way of life, justified by a wrong representation of God. But the Epistles are not the Prophets. The prophets were raised up by God, and their message was God’s. The writers of the Epistles were human teachers writing to particular churches. They stand on a different plane.

The understanding we have in Jesus is fuller, since He revealed the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, but the commandments are still the same. God never changes. His plan, His will, His nature and His love for people never change. What changes is the way He speaks to people, because not everyone can be taught in the same way. Languages and cultures change, and the whole point of God’s communicating is that people should understand. So He uses communication devices. A device† is anything that enables something to happen. Culture, history, language and social norms all play their part, but behind them all God remains the same. So His revelation of Himself in one place will never contradict His revelation of Himself in another. If two passages contradict each other, only one of them can be true.

Testing Every Teaching

Most preaching still takes one verse from the Bible and then expands it with the preacher’s own analogies and ideas. Some modern “preaching” does not even bother with the verse. That is why the question must always be asked: is this coming from a God-originated passage or from a human-originated passage? Most people do not even know that the question exists.

For the follower of Jesus, the test is plain: is this what Jesus taught? His teaching is there in black and white in the Gospels. A red-letter Bible, which prints the words of Jesus in red, makes this test easier still. Online Bibles such as Bible Gateway can display the NIV text without verse numbers and headings, and with the words of Jesus in red. Each passage then reads as one continuous whole, free of divisions and headings supplied by someone else, and the teaching of Jesus stands out from everything around it. That teaching is what the mind must be filled with. Any preaching that deviates from it is not from Jesus. Nobody says, “Let us stand against God.” But to teach in His name what Jesus did not teach is to stand against Jesus, who is God. It gives people a false god whose name is Jesus. And God’s teaching never asks what God will do for you. It asks what you will do with the life, the world and the teaching He has already given you: are you going to obey? That is a simple mark of whether a teaching is from God.

The Law was the constitution of the Hebrew nation, so we read it with care. But its concepts are the same as the teaching of Jesus, because both come from the same God.

Nor should we build a teaching on one passage. When God says a thing many times, in many contexts, we know it is His teaching.

If there is to be any movement at all, let it not be named after me. Let it be this: we are followers of the Jesus of the Gospels.