03 - The Clarity, Necessity, and Sufficiency of the Bible

Can only Bible scholars understand the Bible rightly? For what purposes is the Bible necessary? Is the Bible enough for knowing what God wants us to think or do?

Since we affirmed in the introduction that systematic theology attempts to summarize the teaching of the whole Bible on various subjects, we are now explaining why we would focus exclusively on the Bible as God’s word. We turn from a discussion of the authority of Scripture in Lesson 02, to discuss here in Lesson 03 (1) the clarity of Scripture, (2) the necessity of Scripture, and (3) the sufficiency of Scripture.

With regard to the first characteristic, most Christians would agree that the Bible is our authority in some sense. But in exactly what sense does the Bible claim to be our authority? And how do we become persuaded that the claims of Scripture to be God’s Word are true? These are the questions addressed in this chapter.

This is Lesson 3, based on chapter 3 of Dr. Wayne Grudem’s “Bible Doctrine” – an abridged version of his longer work – “Systematic Theology”. There are recordings of Grudem teaching from his longer book available online, and as we would expect with someone of his expertise, his teaching is very extensive, even more so as he answers questions from his class. On the other hand, my purpose here is to offer a very concise version of his abridged book, focusing on the major topics he covers and especially highlighting the passages from the Bible that relate to each topic.

Anyone who reads the Bible on a regular basis has begun to develop a “theology” of who God is and what he has revealed of Himself to man down through history. But is it organized to the point where you can confidently say “this is what the Bible teaches” on a particular topic, or do you just base your beliefs on random verses that could well be misunderstood because they are taken out of context?

My confidence in going out to share the Gospel with strangers comes largely from my study of “Systematic Theology”, which I’ll define as learning what the whole Bible teaches us about a given topic. I’m confident that I’m not misrepresenting God as revealed in his Word, and I’m confident when people make unbiblical claims about God that challenge my own beliefs. I’m increasingly amazed by the consistency of the Bible, written by so many human authors but without contradiction, that I can only conclude it was written by divine inspiration.

I’ve gained so much personally from my systematic study of theology that I’m teaching a 34-week class on it at church, based on Dr. Wayne Grudem’s books “Systematic Theology” and “Bible Theology”. I’m excited to dig deeper personally as I prepare the outlines and lessons, and I want to take as many people along with me on this journey as possible. So I am recording the class and posting the videos to my YouTube channel, and making downloadable PDF chapter outlines and audio recordings available on a Google Drive folder as well.

Care to join me? Links to my YouTube channel and shared resources are as follows:
Video: YouTube.com/c/JeffReiman
Shared Resources folder: https://tinyurl.com/yxy2kb56