by P.G. Mathew
Without the holy Scriptures, we can have no saving relationship with the living and true God. We cannot have any true knowledge of God, knowledge of salvation, and knowledge of the world around us without the Scripture. We would be lost forever.
If you are not a Christian, I beseech you and command you to repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ that you may be saved. You are not doing him a favor, he is doing you one if you repent and believe. Your repentance is by grace, your prayer is by grace, your faith is by grace, and your salvation is by grace.
If you are saved, you will hear and do the will of God as you read the holy Scriptures. So we read, “From infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). How necessary are the Scriptures? Paul writes, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. . . . ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Rom. 10:9, 13).
But then Paul asks, “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?” This is reasoning by the apostle Paul in a series of questions. “And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?” (Rom. 10:14–15). This demonstrates the necessity of the word. We must hear the word, believe the word, call upon the name of the Lord, and be saved. But where do we get the word? We do not have it unless God commissions and calls and sends a man who preaches it to us, and we hear and believe and are saved. That is the necessity of the word of God.
In John 6, when many disciples left him, Jesus asked Peter, “Why don’t you go also? Come on, go ahead. Everyone else is going away from me.” We read, “Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life’” (John 6:68). No one else has it. Everyone else lies. Kings and presidents and chief justices all lie. How true are Paul’s words: “Let God be true and all men liars.”
We need every word that is given to us in the canon of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).
What are the words of Scripture? They are not myths; they are truth from the mouth of God. Moses said: “They are not just idle words for you—they are your life. By them you will live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to possess” (Deut. 32:47). And they are our life. Jesus said, “My word is spirit and my word is life” (John 6:63).