SCRIPTURE
Many churches focus on the New Testament. Jesus said unto the apostles as He “took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink you all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins’” (Mat 26:27-28).
Indeed, the New Testament is a covenant,
not replacing the old but finishing it. More on that shortly.
“New,” therein is a fresh
covenant, but the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenant were for perpetuity. Hence, the
New Testament refreshes the previous Covenants.
Paul wrote about a testament, “For
where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator”
(Heb 9:16). The testator of any will is a way of disposing of one’s own
affairs. Just who is the ‘Testator’ about whom Paul wrote? The New Testament is
essentially probating the Will of God. His ‘Estate’ is the heaven and the Earth,
so it should be expected that all of those from of the gens of God
should receive their portion of the Estate.
In His divine wisdom, God divided
the Estate into two: (1) those who are faithful to Him until the end are to receive
the Paradisical part of the Estate and (2) the unfaithful shall receive the ‘burning
swamp’ land, so to speak — Hades or Hell.
The last words of Jesus as He
probated the Estate was, “It is finished” (John 19:33). The Estate of God was
probated by the Son of God, Jesus. He died so that God’s Will be divided
fairly. As such, He signed and notarized the Will of God with His own blood. Jesus
appeased God by the propitiation of His own blood.
With that said, the New Testament
is the ‘codicil’ to the Will of God; “a legal instrument made to modify an
earlier will”
The Adamic, or Edenic, Covenant
was the first writing of the Will of God, to wit: “And I will put enmity
between you (the Serpent) and the woman, and between your seed (the Serpent’s) and
her seed; it shall bruise your head (the Serpent’s), and you shall bruise His
heel” (Gen 3:15).
‘Enmity’ is hostility of hatred. Thus,
the Serpent as the ‘Adversary’ (Satan) was the penalty for Eve’s kind. (Note
that by then Eve’s progeny was a new kind distinct from Adam’s kind.) As
the ‘mother of all living’ our kind is Eve’s kind and is a mutation
caused by the Wicked One. As such, we think of ourselves as mankind, but we are
all born in iniquity, just as David admitted (Psalm 51:5). We all are born depraved,
meaning that we “come short of the Glory of God” (Rom 3:23).
The latter part of the Adamic
Covenant was who would get theirs and who would not. The seed of both the woman
and the Serpent are their ‘seed,’ or genetics. The sons (genetics) of the
Serpent will be the ones stepped on, and the sons (genetics) of Eve’s kind
would do the stepping.
As it turned out that was a shadowy
picture of the death of Judas with Satan gushing out of Him and Jesus who was
harmed on the Cross. The Adamic Covenant was all about the Good Friday, AD 33
where it was finished!
We are not God’s children; we are
children of the Wicked One, just like Cain (1 John 3:12), but those who are
born again are engendered by God
Since Eve’s kind have already
been born, that re-gendering makes Christians ‘sons of God’ by adoption; “You
have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”
(Rom 8:15).
It is sad that I must be blunt,
but you are not a ‘child of God’ unless you have been born again. That you “must
be” (John 3:7) to be “saved” (Acts 4;12). Therefore, rebirth is the cause
and saved is the effect. They are not the same events but occurs in the
process of time just like life.
Now back to the Will of God.
The entire ‘Bible’ is the Will of
God; and it consists of the very Word of God written in some sort of tablet or
scroll.
A ‘Bible’ is nothing more than
the medium on which any text is written. The Bible could be written on
the skins of animals, on stone, on paper, or even written on the minds of men.
Jesus was the walking, talking ‘Bible’ since the Words in His Mind were the
very Word of God (John 1:1-14). Jesus was the true ‘Living Bible’ because His
very Words were God speaking His Mind to change our thoughts to His Thoughts.
Some people even smoke the ‘Bible.’
The paper is not important, but the Words written on it certainly are. So, for
the medium of exchange, the important thing is the message conveyed on the
paper or stone.
Now for a surprise: Scripture is not
the New Testament. All occasions of the word ‘scripture,’ refer to the Old
Testament from which the new is an appendage that does not change the original
intent but clarifies the intent of the Will of God. The best example is that the
Greatest Commandment clarifies the conditions that were an appendage to the older
Will of God — the Mosaic Covenant and its ‘Appendix’ — the stones on which the
Ten Words of God were written.
Although that ‘Bible’ is long
gone, the Words thereon are still preserved on paper. My point is that the
Bible can be destroyed in various ways — Moses shattered them — but the Words
are for perpetuity. As such, according to John, Jesus was the walking, talking
Word that quoted scripture form memory because the ‘finger of God’ that wrote
it on stone was Jesus (Deut 9:10).
The two tablets of stone made a
Bible made of stone, not the entire text but the ‘Appendix’ that wills so often
have.
The Words on those stones were
the Thoughts of Jesus. The ‘finger of God’ was dynamic; and it was the Spirit
of God that burned those Words onto stone. What was it that the Holy Spirit of
God wrote? Virtuous Words… good things that improve the defective
beings.
‘Virtue’ is ‘dynamis’ in
the Greek, and when God writes or otherwise speaks, it is divine Dynamics —
forces that keep things in motion during time.
Any of the Words of God written
anywhere in the Old Testament is scripture, “All scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16).
At all times, when the word, ‘scripture’
is used in the New Testament, it refers backward to the Old Testament: the Genesis,
the Law, the Psalms, the Proverbs and the prophets. All the words in those
writings are 'scripture.” (graphe in the Greek), or “things written down”
(ibid).
So far, the Bible is the ‘paper’
on which people wrote down the Thoughts of God because it was by the “inspiration
of God” as Paul wrote to Timothy.
The Old Testament is the Will of
God — His Thoughts — that have been written on the paper or other medium. The manuscripts
on which scripture was written was on the dried skins of animals, so animals
were Bibles. But the Words on them, in a manner, kept the Word of God alive.
Paul wrote about the whole armor
of God; to take “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God” (Ephes 6:17).
Therefore, scripture — the Word on some medium of exchange — acts like a sword
to ward off Satan and Sin. It is not the actual words that do that but the Holy
Spirit of God in our shape, called ‘Jesus.’
So, without scripture, even the
Christian is defenseless.
Scripture was the ‘weapon’ that
kept the wicked ones from the saintly in Old Testament times. The Old Testament
was the weapon of God that the patriarchs used to ward off evil, and so it is
to this day.
However, the New Testament is technically not ‘scripture’ because it did not exist in the times it was written. The Words of Jesus and the inspired words of the apostles and others were gathered long after they were written. Technically, they are not the scripture mentioned in the New Testament, but they were writings that were judged sacred.
The canon of the New
Testament is the set of books many modern Christians regard as divinely
inspired and constituting the New Testament of the Christian Bible. For
historical Christians, canonicalization was based on whether the material was
written by the apostles or their close associates, rather than claims of divine
inspiration.
Wikipedia writers determined that
they were not inspired rules but manmade rules or opinions. They neglect that
the apostles and the church fathers most often knew Jesus personally, even Paul
who knew Jesus after He had arisen.
In my opinion, canon is based on
the depositions of those who best knew Jesus personally. Each of the writers,
endangering their own lives, wrote the truth. Were there mistakes made in
writing. Not if they knew Jesus personally, but often they wrote about what
they heard and saw.
As with any depositions, the
court looks not so much that they all saw or heard the full story but that the
stories support one another, and one person’s deposition does not contradict others.
There are cases in the New
Testament where one writer might mention one blind man but another two. They remain
in agreement because each focused on what was most obvious in their line of
view. What they do not see or hear is called a ‘scotoma,’ sort of an unimportant
distraction that the writer failed to notice or thought to be insignificant.
The early Church used the best
criteria that they had to decide canon. That criterium was that only the
writings of those closest to Jesus would be accepted as divinely inspired
scripture.
Note the small difference:
scripture is the very Words of God that was captured in the Greek from the
Hebrew, and from there to the English. Scripture has some inadequacies in whatever
language, so, the reader must defer to the oldest known Hebrew copies. (I
believe the original writings were in archaic Hebrew, or possibly hieroglyphic Hebrew.)
English is not the very Word of
God but a version of the received text (textus receptus in the Latin).
It is scripture since it is the text of God’s Words. The actual Words of Jesus
in Greek scripture is directly textus receptus as received from the
mouth of God.
It is not just inspired by God,
but spoken by God, hence the red-letter edition. The red letters are more than
inspired like Old Testament Scripture, but actual Words, if in the
Greek. That makes the quoted Words of Jesus the very Words of God. With that
said, the New Testament is a codicil that explains God’s Will to clarify the
misconceptions, primarily that it was not by the Law that the Will of God would
be probated, but the intent of the heirs… Are they asking for their
share because of the legal requirements, or knowing they do not deserve
anything, ask for mercy.
The New Testament clarifies the
Law, just as Jesus said, “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the
prophets (Mat 22:4), referring to loving God and others. Essentially the will
of the inheritors must coincide with the will of the Testator.
As it turned out the Testator,
the ‘Word,’ just as Herod the Great before, came back from the dead to probate
his own Will.
Herod’s will was read after he
died, as if he was still alive, according to Josephus. Each of the writers of
the New Testament were testifying to the validity of the Will of God that was probated
by His only Son, Jesus.
Who will get what? All will get
theirs and the conditions were well explained by the witnesses to the Will of
God. The New Testament verifies who gets what and how fair it would be distributed.
Each person will indeed get theirs: some the badlands with methane gases that
burn continually wherein there is not water to quench their thirsts, and the faithful
heirs receive the Garden Paradise wherein the glorious shall dwell forever.
Hopefully, you might have learned
several things: (1) That the Bible is just ‘paper,’ (2) that scripture
is the Word of God written on Bible, (3) that both sets of papers is the Will
of God, (4) that the Old Testament is the full Will of God, (5) that the New
Testament is a ‘clarification’ of the misunderstanding of the original, (6)
that the Old Testament is the actual Word of God if in the original language,
(7) that the gospels contain the very Words of God and that they are as much
the Will of God as earlier scripture, (8) that the remainder of the New
Testament was inspired by God Jesus to His closest associates, and is canon,
(9) that the other writings of the New Testament are depositions that His close
associates left behind that validate the conditions for receiving an
inheritance, and lastly, (10) that the distribution of God’s Assets will be
divided fairly when each their time comes.
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