Of First Importance

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures…

1 Corinthians 15:3

As Christians, we have no right to views of Scripture which are different from the apostles' view of Scripture. The apostles, like our Lord, are our teachers. We are not theirs. Karl Barth wrote, We cannot stand and look over the apostles' shoulders, correcting their work. It is they who stand looking over our shoulders, correcting our work. The apostles declare that their authority is simply the Lord's authority. They rest the authority of their words squarely upon the authority of the Lord Jesus. This is not a fabricated message. It is not something borrowed from this philosophy, and that authority, and this way of thinking. It is not, Paul says, received from men at all.

The apostles are very conscious that the words of the message they preach are the words of God. Listen to Paul as he is writing to the Thessalonians: And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe (1 Thessalonians 2:13). Here is a clear declaration that he was conscious of speaking more than his own thoughts, more than his own ideas, more than his own theological concepts.

The apostles regarded each other's words in this same light. There is that striking passage where Peter says regarding Paul's letters, He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:16). Peter makes it clear that he accepted Paul's writings as Scripture, and the early church accepted these apostolic writings as the very words of the Lord Jesus from the beginning. In view of this, when a professor behind a desk in Chicago or London makes a pronouncement that differs from what Paul, Peter, James or John has said, then reject it. These men who lived in the 1st century and associated with the Lord Jesus, who heard his words, and who so ministered in power throughout the world of their day as to transform the generation in which they lived, knew far more about what God thought and said than any man studying theology today.

Father, I pray that your church would embrace your Word and so minister in such power that we would transform our own generation in which we live.