Do we believe God speaks through the scriptures or not? If God even speaks sacramentally and regularly through scripture (as even Marcus Borg suggests), then the scriptures are to be heard, and heard as the Word of God. Billions of Christians would testify that God has spoken to their need, to their heart, to their deep desire, to their purpose through scripture. In other words, God speaks, and is not silent. For those who do not believe that scripture alone is our ultimate authority, the question then is does God speak in other places, and with the same power and authority? Even scripture says that the heavens are telling the glory of God. Romans 1:20 speaks of God revealing even His character in creation. But while God's voice in creation is useful, it is nebulous. There are the cute little bunnies but also the nasty buzzards. Whenever there is truth- theologians say, it is God's truth. But truth in science is also nebulous and cloudy. One minute progress tells us of nuclear energy and the next of nuclear bombs. One day the smallest particle is an atom, the next we know of many smaller particles (such as mesons). Science not only grows in knowledge, but it changes its mind.
If God speaks, we need to listen. There used to be a commercial in the 1980s that said, "When E.f. Hutton [the stockbroker] speaks, people listen." If God is known to speak through scripture and even tells us that He does so, we should be all ears. The scriptures, through whom He has been found to speak, tell us that God has commands for us that help us to live the way we are designed to live. To break these commands because we have a feeling or "knowledge" brought on by nebulous nature, nebulous science, or an untrustworthy human authority, would be to not listen to our own peril. Scripture has stood the test of time. It has been disobeyed by many, and disbelieved by many who want to go their own way. If we don't believe scripture whenever it comes into conflict with another authority- some expert in religion or science- then we are choosing to believe that expert's authority over the expertise of scripture that has proven itself time and again.
John Calvin: "In short, the sense is, that we do not esteem the law as it deserves, if we do not prefer it to all the riches of the world. If we are once brought thus highly to prize the law, it will serve effectually to deliver our hearts from an immoderate desire of gold and silver. To this esteem of the law there must be added love to it, and delight in it, so that it may not only subdue us to obedience by constraint, but also allure us by its sweetness; a thing which is impossible, unless, at the same time, we have mortified in us the love of carnal pleasures, with which it is not
wonderful to see us enticed and ensnared, so long as we reject, through a vitiated taste, the righteousness of God. From this we may again deduce another evidence, that David’s discourse is not to be understood simply of the commandments, and of the dead letter, but that he comprehends, at the same time, the promises by which the grace of God is offered to us. If the law did nothing else but command us, how could it be loved, since in commanding it terrifies us, because we all fail in keeping it? fa426 Certainly, if we separate the law from the hope of pardon, and from the Spirit of Christ, so far from tasting it to be sweet as honey, we will rather find in it a bitterness which kills our wretched souls." (Commentary on Psalm 19:10)
Prayer: Give me grace, Lord to listen to you more than want my own way. Give me grace to walk on the same narrow path that has been trod before me.
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