Day 56: Jesus is the Final and Full Word of God

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. HEBREWS 4:12 NIV

HI, MY NAME IS Lisa and I’m also a recovering Bible swinger. Here’s the deal: when I was growing up in church, the more engaging youth pastors I listened to used lots of volume while preaching and most of them swung great big Bibles around like Olympic hammer throwers when they were emphasizing pejorative points like: if you sip an alcoholic beverage, you’ll become intoxicated, which leads to hell; or if you skip youth group for a day at the beach, you’ll become backslidden, which leads to hell; or if you engage in HEAVY PETTING, you’ll become inflamed with lust, which leads to hell. Which by the way, this propelled me to run crying to the altar and confess my presumed sin at a youth conference when I was in middle school because I innocently thought the speaker was referring to rubbing your pet too hard and I was afraid I might’ve used a little too much pressure when stroking the fur of our sweet mutt Smokey after sampling Mountain Dew for the first time with my cousin. But that’s another story for another devotion.

Anyway, based on my early experience with spiritual leaders who gestured passionately with their leather-bound “swords,” I eventually drew the conclusion that gesturing passionately with a Bible while teaching from the Bible was required behavior for anyone who wanted to be an effective communicator of the Gospel. Which I instantly regretted one evening early in my career when I was the guest speaker at a “Women in the Word” event held in a lovely little Baptist church. I had gotten all worked up about a passage, and when I swung the personally engraved, NIV translation of Holy Writ that my mom gave me for Christmas when I was a senior in high school, the entire book of Genesis ripped free from the binding, shot over the altar, and struck an elderly woman on the front pew right in the chest.

My hope is that none of you have succumbed to any unnecessary Bible hurling, but my guess is that some of you could still use some realignment when it comes to handling God’s enscripturated Word, so let’s start with an old-fashioned “sword drill”:

The Word of God is sharper than a ____________________ .

If you said: a double-edged sword, you hit it right on the chest, ahem, I mean nose!

As for your answer for the last question, what specific verse did you derive your answer from? (book, chapter, and verse?) ______________

If you said: Hebrews 4:12, you are two-for-two!

What’s the overarching theme of the book of Hebrews?

If you said: the superiority of Jesus Christ to the Old Covenant and the sole sufficiency of His atonement for our salvation, you are cooking with gas, baby!

Who was the original audience that Hebrews was preached to before it was inscribed as an epistle?

If you said: first-century Jewish believers who were seriously considering apostacy because of the widespread oppression, abuse, and martyrdom they were experiencing in their polytheistic, largely pagan culture that was led by megalomaniac emperors who were paranoid about the possibility that Christianity could usurp their absolute power and control, you have hereby earned a pass from volunteering in the church nursery for at least a month!

When was Hebrews written?

If you said: between AD 60–70, and it couldn’t have been later than AD 70 because that’s when the temple was destroyed, which is featured prominently in the text, your name will be shouted from small group rooftops!

And does anyone have a clue when the Bible as we know it—with both Old and New Testaments—was canonized?

If you said: the first unofficial canon of New Testament Scripture was compiled by Marcion of Sinope around AD 140, but the first comprehensive and official canon of the Christian Bible didn’t exist until Athanasius compiled it in the fourth century, and it wasn’t formally canonized until the councils of Hippo and Carthage in AD 393 and AD 419, I will personally come to your house and rub your feet!

Here’s the point I’m trying to make, y’all—the author of Hebrews wasn’t simply talking about a leather-bound Bible when he preached that the “word of God” was living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword because the Christian Bible as we know it didn’t even exist back then! However, the original Greek word—logos—that’s translated “word of God” in Hebrews 4, is the exact same word used to describe Jesus in John 1, so in light of the historical context of Hebrews, chapter 4 verse 12 must be referring to the resurrected Messiah! The Word of God made flesh! Jesus is alive and active. He is sharper than any double-edged sword, able to penetrate even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow! He is the one able to judge the thoughts and attitudes of our hearts. And the fact that Jesus is the main subject here in Hebrews becomes all the more evident in light of the following verse: “No creature is hidden from him, but all things are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (v. 13, emphasis mine).

It goes without saying that the supernatural “melding” of the Bible and Jesus is a mystery that’s impossible to wrap our finite minds around. God chose enscripturated revelation as the main means through which to point humanity toward our Redeemer. He could’ve written His will in the sky with stardust; instead, He spelled it out in a sacred, readable Book of Life. But the thief on the cross didn’t have any Bible verses to quote in those last moments of life to justify himself; he only had a brand-new faith in a flesh-and-blood Messiah, the Word of God he was being crucified alongside. Yet his brief encounter and subsequent belief in Jesus was enough for him to gain entrance to Glory (Luke 23:43). Therefore, I think it’s important for passionate Bible bangers and would-be Bible swingers to recognize that sometimes the phrase “Word of God” in the New Testament refers to Jesus. For instance, when Paul tells Timothy to “preach the word” (2 Tim. 4:2), he’s not talking about expository preaching, he’s encouraging young Tim to keep Jesus at the center of every message he shares!

Frankly, I think one of the reasons we have such a high rate of biblical illiteracy among believers today is that we’ve segregated Jesus—Logos—from our leather-bound copies of God’s promises and parameters. But the good news is that when we stop framing the Word of God as merely truthful data to wrap our ethics around and begin to connect it to the work and person of JESUS CHRIST, we’ll quit beating people up with it and will become increasingly convinced that He loves us and them!

• ONE OF MY seminary professors, Dr. Don Payne, says: “If we think of Scripture primarily as an instruction manual, things are going to get toxic really quickly!” How would you synopsize his statement?
• WAS YOUR FIRST experience with the Bible more promissory or punitive?
• WHEN YOU HAVE a chunk of free time this week, marinate in Psalm 119. What lyrics about God’s precepts—His enscripturated promises and parameters—resonate most deeply with you?