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The Bible
contains all the things a man needs to believe in order to be saved and all
the things we believers need to know in order to please God with all our
conduct, and all the predictions of future events that we need to know. |
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● In
order to be saved. First of all let’s take the writings of the New
Testament. Paul says to the Romans what a man must do in order to be saved.
Here are his words: “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord
Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the
dead, thou shalt be saved” (Romans 10:9). And in the New Testament there are
many references to the Lordship of Christ and to His resurrection from the
dead. Therefore, if a sinner opens a New Testament and reads the story of
Jesus of Nazareth (written either by Matthew or Luke or Mark or John) and
accepts it as it is written, he will be immediately saved by God. Even if he
reads just an epistle of Paul and confesses that Jesus is Lord and believes
in his heart that God rose Jesus from the dead he will be immediately saved
by God. And let us suppose that he has only the writings of the Old Testament,
can he be saved through them? Well, we say that even in this case he can be
saved, for the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets speak about Jesus of
Nazareth. For instance, in the Psalms and in the Prophets there are many
references to the sufferings that the Christ endured for our sins, and in the
sixteenth Psalm David speaks about the resurrection of the Christ; therefore
if anyone believes that those words were fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth, of
whom he has heard, he will be saved from his sins. Remember that the Eunuch,
when Philip heard him speaking, was reading a passage of the book of the
prophet Isaiah, and that Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and
preached Jesus to him and the eunuch was saved. Here is what Luke says in the
Acts: “And the [an] angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and
go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from |
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Now I must
say something about the mystery of Christ - which was kept secret since the
world began but was revealed and made known to the saints of the Lord in the
fullness of the time – that is, the fact that the Gentiles are heirs together
with the Jews, and members together of one body, because Christ on the cross
put to death the enmity which existed between men and God, and the enmity
which existed between the Jews and the Gentiles, as Paul says to the
Ephesians: “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down
the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the
enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in
himself of twain one new man, so making peace; And that he might reconcile
both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby” (Ephesians
2:14-16). For this mystery is strictly linked to the message of salvation,
because through the revelation of this mystery God has shown that He “wants
all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4 - NIV), that is, He wants to save not
only the Jews but also the Gentiles. It is evident that this mystery was kept
secret till Jesus died on the cross and the Holy Spirit revealed it to the
holy apostles and prophets. Of course, in the Scriptures of the Old Testament
there were many verses that predicted in various ways that one day the
Gentiles would become part of the people of God, thus God would not be
ashamed to call them His people, but those verses were covered with a veil,
so they could not be understood. However, when the Lord opened the minds of
His servants so that they might understand them, then things became clear in
the eyes of the Jews and of the Gentiles: God had decided to call the Gentiles
to become part of His people. And how was that prediction of God fulfilled?
It was fulfilled through the death of Jesus Christ. For, as I said before, by
His death on the cross He broke down the middle wall of partition, which consisted
of the Law of Moses and which separated both the Jews and the Gentiles from
God, and the Jews from the Gentiles. And God chose Paul of Tarsus to preach
that mystery; Paul speaks about it in his epistles. Therefore his epistles
are necessary in order to understand the glory of this mystery. So the plan
of salvation which God had formed according to His good pleasure before the
foundation of the world has been made known to all nations. |
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● In
order to please God. Paul says to Timothy: “All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be
perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy |
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● Knowledge
of future events. With regard to the events which must take place
before the coming of Christ, at His coming, and after His coming, the Bible contains
so many references to them that we can say that we don’t need to know other
things about the last events. We have come to this conclusion after we have
read the words concerning the last events spoken by Jesus on the Mount of
Olives before He was arrested, and on some other occasions; the words written
by Paul, Peter and John, and the words spoken by the prophets (Isaiah,
Ezekiel, Daniel, Joel, Zechariah, Malachi) centuries before the birth of
Jesus Christ. |
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Therefore,
if that’s how things are with regard to the Holy Writings, it is evident that
there was a time when the Holy Writings were incomplete, for the Writings of
the New Testament (which had to complete the Writings of the Old Testament) appeared
only in the first century after Christ. Therefore, we can affirm that the
Scriptures (I refer to the Scriptures of the Old Testament) needed the
Scriptures concerning the coming of Christ in order to become complete. So,
after Jesus Christ appeared and did the work of His Father, by speaking the
words of His Father and by dying on the cross for our sins and rising again
the third day (and His life and His teachings and His predictions were wrote
down), and His apostles wrote down by the will of God other useful teachings
and predictions, then the Scripture became complete. The Bible is the final
revelation of God to men. It does not need to be completed, because it is
already complete. Woe to those who add other writings to it; for Jesus Christ
said to John on the Isle of Patmos: “For I testify unto every man that
heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto
these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this
book” (Revelation 22:18). Someone may say that these words apply only to the Book
of Revelation, but that’s not true. For how could we affirm that it is lawful
to add something to the Bible as a whole (that is to say, to the other books
of the Bible), but not to the book of Revelation, just because those words of
Jesus are written at the end of that particular book of the Bible? Is it not
written: “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall
ye diminish ought from it ….” (Deuteronomy 4:2)? Therefore, the commandment
not to add anything, under pain of the punishment written in the book of
Revelation, applies also to the Bible as a whole and not only to the book of
Revelation. Furthermore, if anyone adds some words only to the Book of Revelation
he will implicitly add them to the Bible because the book of Revelation is
part of the Bible. |
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There is
no other book on the face of the earth that can be regarded as Holy Scripture;
all those who claim that they have some holy books (besides the Bible or in
place of the Bible) and call them Holy Scriptures have been deceived by the
old serpent and they deceive other people into believing a lie. |
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Some
people (such as the Mormons) attack the completeness of the Bible by saying
that in the past centuries many plain and precious parts were taken away from
the Bible. But that’s not true, because the many copies of the Old Testament
manuscripts which we now possess do vary in minor matters – such as the
spelling of words, the omission of a phrase here and there – but there is no
evidence whatsoever that any major sections of the Old Testament books have
been lost. Therefore, we can say that nowadays we possess the same Old
Testament books that were possessed by the Jews in the days of Jesus and the
apostles, and that no major sections of them are missing. What I have just
said is confirmed by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which took place
in 1947. The manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, generally dated
from about 200 to 50 before Christ, include portions of every Old Testament
book except Esther, and studies have revealed that these documents (older by
a thousand years than previously discovered Old Testament manuscripts) are
substantially identical to the text of the Old Testament which had been
previously handed down and that we possess in our Bibles. As for the New
Testament manuscripts (the oldest of which go back to the second century
after Christ), the situation is substantially the same. The variations that
are found in these manuscripts - which are copies of the originals or of
copies made from the originals – are of a relatively minor nature. Most of
the manuscript variations concern matters of spelling, word order, tense, and
the like; but there is no indication whatever that any large sections of
material found in the originals have been lost. Furthermore, the fundamental
doctrines of the Bible are not affected by these variations in any way. |
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What I have said in defence of the
Old and New Testaments, as we possess them today, is confirmed by the Vulgate,
the ancient Bible Version which dates back to the fourth century after Christ
and which is the Bible translated into Latin by Jerome at Bethlehem (it is
the Bible version that was adopted officially by the Roman Catholic Church at
the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century after Christ and which was
declared to be ‘authentical’ and the final authority in all theological
disputes); it did not omit any portions of these manuscripts nor did it fail
to reproduce any major sections of the Bible. It is true that in the Vulgate
we find some passages which were mistranslated by Jerome, yet in it ‘no plain
and precious things’ of the Bible are missing, so it cannot be considered a Bible
without some major sections or a ‘mutilated’ Bible which doesn’t contain all
the things men need to know in order to be saved. |