Utumishi Blog

It was wonderful to be at the NCTC yesterday. So encouraging to see 250 teachers keen to grow and be equipped to minister in an incredibly important mission field. Great too to see loads of different ministries (KSCF, FOCUS, Trinity Fellowship, SU, YFC etc.) working in such close partnership,

I said I’d upload notes from the seminar and workshop so here they are:

• God’s Big Picture – The Bible as the story of the Marriage Banquet, The Two Men, The Two Exoduses…
• What is Bible exposition – Exposition as preaching where the Bible is boss, Christ is passionately preached, and so the Spirit speaks… (particularly looking at the NT letters)

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P.S. In the first seminar I was asked a question on the canon of the OT. Why do Protestants have 39 books and Roman Catholic Bibles 46? What are we to make of Tobit, Judith etc.? I didn’t make a good job of answering so here’s another attempt:

1. The apocryphal OT books (e.g. Judith, Tobit, Wisdom etc.) and additions to the canonical books (e.g. to Daniel and Esther) are different in nature to the 39 OT books. For one thing they were either originally written in Greek or only the Greek version now survives in contrast to the rest of the OT which is written in Hebrew (except for small portions in Aramaic which is also a Semitic script). Furthermore, the (Roman Catholic) New Jerusalem Study Bible notes in its introductions to these books that they were a) not accepted within the Hebrew canon; b) they were disputed within church history; c) they contain historical and geographical inaccuracies.
2. The 39 books of the Hebrew Scriptures (traditionally 24 books before the divisions of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and the Minor Prophets) all participate in the great storyline of the Bible. They all inter-relate and weave together into a beautiful, consistent whole – a portrait of Christ and salvation through faith in him.  While some apocryphal books could be taken as teaching Christ (esp. Wisdom), on the whole they don’t and, more importantly, they mix in praying to the dead, purgatory, the mediation of angels and dead saints, and salvation by works (e.g. Tobit 12; 2 Maccabees 12) – ideas contradicting salvation through faith in Christ alone (cf. 2 Tim. 3:15).
3. Most crucially, “Christ passed onto his followers, as Holy Scripture, the Bible which he had received, containing the same books as the Hebrew Bible today.” (R. T. Beckwith, ‘Canon of the OT’, NBD)  Jesus accepted the three-fold division of Law, Prophets, Writings (Luke 24:44), he frequently quoted these Scriptures as God’s Word (but never the apocryphal books), and his reference to “from Abel to Zechariah” (Luke 11:51) almost certainly is a reference to the first and last martyrs in the traditional Jewish ordering of the 24 books (G. Bahnsen, ‘Concept and Importance of Canonicity’).
4. Reformers like Calvin and the Cranmer did not completely discard the apocryphal books they just said that they are not part of God’s Word. They can be read and you can even be edified by them but read them in the way you read something by John C Maxwell or Joel Osteen or Rick Warren or whoever. Be discerning. There may be something helpful there but it’s not divinely inspired – there’ll almost certainly be error mixed in and when it contradicts the 66 books and the great story of Christ and salvation in Him then leave it. So we’re free to read Wisdom and Tobit… but why not just stick with the 66?