The Bible is a wonderful book! 2 Tim 3:15-17 says:
15 and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
From these verses we get the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture. The Bible won’t teach us how to fix our car, but it does teach us everything we need to know about God, salvation in Christ alone, living in response to that salvation. All of scripture is useful for this.
For many today, the relevance of some, or even all, of the Bible is not obvious. It was written centuries ago in a cultural context very different to our own. The temptation can be to only read the parts that are easier to understand, that we can relate to our own experience and never open the more obscure parts. 2 Tim 3 says that all of scripture are God’s words – if we only had 65 books of the Bible we could never be complete. Are we, over the course of our lives, seeking to understand what God is saying in the whole Bible?
Another application of the sufficiency of scripture is that the Bible tells us all we need to know about God and what he requires of us. So often we can insist our way is right when the Bible gives no clear command. Let’s be careful to understand what God requires of us and what are issues of wisdom before we insist that something must be done a certain way!
James Howlett