12-17-23-ENG.

"All Scripture is inspired by God. "

2 Timothy 3:16
KNOW ALL OF IT

Read It: 2 Peter 1:20-21
One of the tragedies of our day is people who twist the Scriptures to suit their private purposes. What's to keep people from doing that and trying to sell it as the pure Word of God? Well, we may not be able to keep people from going off on a tangent with the Bible, but Peter gives us a warrant for saying you can't do it any way you want. Verse 20 says you can't just pick out a few verses to bolster your cause. That's the way Satan used the Bible with Jesus in the temptation in the wilderness. He tried to get Jesus to jump off the temple on the biblical premise that God would keep Him from harm. I love what Jesus said. He didn't get into an interpretational argument with the Devil. He just said, "On the other hand," and brought up another subject that exposed Satan's scheme as illegitimate (Matthew 4:7). In other words, you need to know the whole Scripture, not just a few verses.

See, if Satan had tried quoting the Bible to some of us, we would have scratched our heads and said, "Well, sounds okay to me. I can't see anything wrong with that. After all, it's Bible." But you can't make up your own interpretation as you go, because the writers of Scripture didn't make this stuff up as they went along. They were carried along by the Holy Spirit, who protected them from error and guaranteed that what the Bible says is what God wanted it to say. We don't have the Bible today just because some men woke up one day and said, "Let's write a book." When someone says the Bible was written ten by human beings, that's only half right. The human authors of Scripture wrote as they were pushed along by the breath of the Holy Spirit, the way a sailboat is carried along by the wind. The point is, we have a sure Word from God. We have a Word you can stake your life on. That means even when you don't want to believe it, it's still true. Even when you don't want to obey it, it's still right. It's a sure and certain Word. Think About It Jesus' example reminds us how important it is to grow in our knowledge of God's Word. John 3:16 will get you to heaven, but you can't stop there.