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2 Peter 1:12-21Belgic Confession 3-7 (esp 7)“Steps on the Road of Life: Our Roadmap…”
Brothers and sisters in Christ,Two weeks ago we began with asimple statement of faith: we believe in a single and simplespiritual being whom we callGod.John Calvin believed that the firsthalf of true religion was knowingabout God and we look at thatquestion last week:
 How can we know about that single and simple spiritual being whom we call God?
We started by looking at whether or not we can find God by usingour minds – through the use of our reason. Then we moved on tolook at whether or not we can find God through what we see innature – by reading the book of creation. By the end of our conversation we saw that neither was sufficient for us to come to aknowledge of God by ourselves. And we learned that we needsomething else to point us in the right direction – we need aroadmap.Roadmaps are, of course, handy things to have. I’m sure that mostof us have at least one and probably more in our possession. Now being a pretty stereotypical guy it takes an awful lot for me toactually use one. But I do see the value of having one in my car.A good road map will show us where we are, where we’re going,and how we’re going to get there.
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Article 7
The Sufficiency of Scripture
We believe that this Holy Scripture contains the will of Godcompletely and that everything one must believe to be saved issufficiently taught in it.
For since the entire manner of service which God requires of usis described in it at great length, no one--even an apostle or anangel from heaven, as Paul says-- ought to teach other than whatthe Holy Scriptures have already taught us.
For since it is forbidden to add to or subtract from the Word of God,this plainly demonstrates that the teaching is perfect and complete inall respects.
Therefore we must not consider human writings-- no matter howholy their authors may have been-- equal to the divine writings;nor may we put custom, nor the majority, nor age, nor thepassage of time or persons, nor councils, decrees, or officialdecisions above the truth of God, for truth is above everythingelse.
For all human beings are liars by nature and more vain than vanityitself. Therefore we reject with all our hearts everything that does notagree with this infallible rule, as we are taught to do by the apostleswhen they say,
"Test the spirits to see if they are of God," and also, "If anyonecomes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive himinto your house."
 
A good road map will show us places of interest. Places to see andthings to do.A good road map can also help us when we are lost. Once we get past the fear of actually admitting that we are lost, we can turn toour roadmap in order to figure out where we went wrong and howwe can get back on track.A good road map is both reliable and useful.It is reliable in that the information that it has is up to date. Theroad names are correct, the landmarks are on the right streets, andit is relatively accurate in terms of scale—what is on the mapconforms to what exists on the ground.It is useful in that it has the information that you need. It shouldhave the streets that you’re going to travel on and it should be fromthe city that your actually going to travel in. A map of Pittsburghmight be reliable, but it’s absolutely useless when you get toMoose Jaw.A good road map is both reliable and useful. Now our confession from last week is that for Christians our roadmap is the Bible. It is our CAA approved guidebook for life.we hold it to be the gold standard of all roadmaps.We confess that it tells us where we were, where we are, wherewe’re going, and how to get there. It contains not only the roadsthat were meant to travel as believers, it also contains some of themajor landmarks of our Christian faith. And as we work throughthe Belgic Confession in the coming months we are going toexamine many of those points of faith.
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But before we do that we’re going to take a look at our roadmap.We’re going to look at our Bible and subject it to the same criteriathat we would subject any other roadmap. We are going to look atthe following two questions:
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Is our Bible reliable? and;2.Is our Bible useful?
I. So let’s get right into the discussion and talk about what it iswe are confessing about the Word of God…
The questions of Reliability and Utility are important questions for us to answer as we examine the core confessions of our belief. TheScriptures to any Christian who is a product of the Reformation iscentral to any discussion of faith that we have.And the strength of that conviction comes out of a time when theRoman Catholic church did not believe that the Bible was reliableon its own. Salvation required Scripture and the Church to be theinstruments of grace…Yet the church was corrupt and could not besuch an instrument…Which is why we find article seven of the Belgic confession thattells us that:
We believe that this Holy Scripture contains the will of Godcompletely and that everything one must believe to be saved issufficiently taught in it.
Hearing this in the context of history puts a statement like this inits proper place. The Reformers like Luther and Calvin and allthose within their movement argued that absolutely yes – the Bibleis reliable and what was revolutionary at the time was thatsalvation could be found through it without the Roman Catholicchurch.
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