Listen to this.
He's saying that the Bible is an autobiography.
Jesus wrote his own story.
So this may sound strange to you,
but I want to propose
that you can be very serious about your use of the Bible
and be using the Bible unbiblically.
You can have a regular relationship
with the Word of God,
you can be serious about it,
and not be using the Bible
in the way it was intended to be used.
And so I'm going to look at this next section in 1 Peter
and ask the question,
What in the world is the Bible?
Let me read these verses to you.
"Concerning the salvation, the prophets who prophesied
about the grace that was to be yours
searched and inquired carefully,
inquiring what personal time
the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating
when he predicted the sufferings of Christ
and the subsequent glories.
It was revealed to them
that they were serving not themselves, but you,
and the things that have now been announced to you
through those who preached the good news to you
by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven,
things into which angels long to look."
Wow!
Peter is saying some radical things
about the Word of God
and how we've arrived at this book
that we now hold in our hands.
Pretend someone comes up to you on the street and says,
"What in the world is the Bible?"
How would you describe the Bible to them?
Is it a collection of real helpful moralistic stories?
Is it a collection of theological truths?
Is it a collection of wisdom principles for daily living?
What a different description of God's word
is in this passage.
The matter of fact is,
your Bible is essentially a story.
It's not a collection of stories,
it's one single story
with a lot of phases
and a lot of chapters.
The Bible is the story of redemption
and it has one single character - Jesus.
But I want you to get something in this passage.
It talks about the prophets inquiring what person
or what time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating
when he predicted the sufferings of Christ.
Listen to this.
He's saying that the Bible is an autobiography.
Jesus wrote his own story,
and it tells us that the prophets didn't understand it,
the angels looked into it.
Nobody was capable
of writing the story that we now have here,
the story of everything that was needed to lead up to Jesus.
Jesus' life,
Jesus' life interpreted for us,
and the final culmination of the work of Jesus,
no one was able to guide that story,
but the central character himself.
I'm holding the autobiography of the Savior in my hands.
He guided the writing
so that every element that was necessary
would be in his story,
so every explanation necessary would be in his story.
So we would understand beginnings and destiny.
So it would be in a story.
How exciting is that?
This is a story of Jesus.
Because the hope of the entire world
rested on a single shoulder.
History marched toward the incarnation of Jesus.
Jesus' life marched toward the cross and the resurrection.
The epistles look back on the work of Jesus.
Those who are on the other side in Revelation
celebrate the work of Jesus.
This is a story of Jesus.
There are not a whole lot of dramas
where the central character is the author,
but that's the case with the word of God.
And that's why it's trustworthy,
because the one who is the hope of the universe
guided his book, so we would have in that book,
everything that we need
for our life here and for life to come.