I Believe in our Need for the Scriptures

Do we need the Scriptures? If so, why do we need them? The Scriptures are necessary because they reveal the good news of Jesus and the ways we can follow Christ and God’s will.

We need the Scriptures to understand the gospel or the good news of Jesus Christ. Without them, we wouldn’t have any certainty of our salvation. Because God gave us written accounts, we know Christ is not just a legend passed on from one generation to the next. Each generation can go back to the apostles’ words and read of the God who became man to save us from our sins.

As Paul explains in Romans, the gospel is communicated through the word of Christ. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:13–17) The Scriptures are necessary because the gospel must be communicated through words, whether read or heard.

God also cares about how we live on this earth. Through Scripture, God teaches us the ways in which we are to follow Christ. He uses a universal metaphor—His words are as essential to spiritual life as food is to the physical life. When Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, He quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, saying, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). Just as we need to feed our physical bodies daily, we must feed our souls daily from the Scriptures.

Peter encouraged believers with a similar metaphor. He wrote, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation” (1 Peter 2:2). Infants do not question their need for milk. They demand milk because they know their life depends on it. Like nourishing milk, God’s Word helps us grow spiritually.

While creation communicates God’s existence and the heavens declare the glory of God, we know God’s will through the Scriptures. In Matthew 22, Jesus declared the first and second greatest commandments: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (v. 37). The Scriptures communicate to us that this is God’s will: love God, love people.

God has communicated His will to us through His Scriptures, but He has not revealed all things to us. Only the things we need. Deuteronomy 29:29 reads, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” God hasn’t revealed everything to us, but He has revealed enough for us to follow His will.