Please see the previous articles for background material. If you do not have copies of the articles, please ask someone where they can be found.
In previous articles, we have come to two conclusions:
Determining what God has said on any given subject is not particularly difficult, though what He has said may not be very easy to act upon. It is not that His commandments are difficult, for indeed they are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). Rather, in order to do what God has told us to do, we must surrender our own wisdom and set ourselves to the task of doing what we are told. It is this very failure that Paul lamented concerning his Jewish family and nation, in Romans 10:1ff.
We might say that we can only know what God has told us, but how He speaks to us is very important, too. Furthermore, it is not enough just to note that God has said something, for He may say different things to different people at different times in differing contexts. For example, Jesus told his disciples to prepare their nets for a draft of fish, but we do not misunderstand Him to be telling us to do the same. He spoke to His disciples about a particular need in their day. On the other hand, there may be things He said to His disciples that are equally applicable to us in our day.
In our day, we expect to find that God has spoken to us about matters that govern how we act in His service. We need only to look for what was said to those who lived at an earlier time, people who are quite like ourselves, yet are so very different from us. We ought not to expect to find that things that were peculiar to their day are imposed upon us in our day, yet there are things that are universally applicable, in spite of those peculiarities. We must then, distinguish between those specifics that show us what God expects all of us to do, and those matters that are secondary to what God expects us all to do, dependent on our peculiar circumstances.
God speaks to us in specific ways. In other ways, He tells us what He expects of us. He may do this by clearly commanding us to do something (consider Acts 10:48, Cornelius had no doubt about what God expected of him). On the other hand, God may simply state that something is true or that it pleases Him (consider Mark 16:16, where belief and baptism are both connected to salvation).
At other times, we may see what is pleasing to God by the lives and actions of those who are doing God’s will (see Acts 20:7, where the Troas disciples are doing something they are clearly approved in doing). Several years ago, brother W. L. Wharton (a friend of the Mountain View church of many years standing) wrote an important statement that is largely not appreciated by many today, when he said, "Examples do not bind. Authority binds" (Arlington Meeting, 1968). What he meant by that is that no example is, within itself, authoritative. Rather, authoritative examples must reflect something that God has specifically enjoined upon His people. In the example of Acts 20:7, there is no authority that resides within the example unless it can be shown that God authorized them to act. The example is not authoritative because they did something, but rather because they did what God told them to do. Yet, there is nothing in Acts 20:7 to clarify where God told them to do it. Do we therefore just ignore the example, or do we look elsewhere for the reasons why they did what they did? The answer is self-evident.
Still again, we may see certain things that God expects of us in the necessary conclusions that flow from what He has said. Of course, we must be careful that we do not confuse our conclusions with God’s conclusions, but we may still learn from what might not otherwise be evident to us. The use of unleavened bread in the eating of the Lord’s supper is a good example of this point. There is no place where God has told us to use unleavened bread, as He did Old Testaement Israel, concerning their Passover. There is nothing in the context of Acts 20:7 that imposes that obligation, except as might be gleaned from verse 26. But, even there it is clearly stated that the journey to Troas occurred "after the days of unleavened bread" (in other words, after the Passover).
One searches in vain for the command or clear example of unleavened bread, unless he is content to act as is demanded from the very origination of this simple memorial ceremony, as given in Matthew 26:26-29 (and parallel scriptures in Mark and Luke). There is no question that Jesus used unleavened bread, for it was the time of the Passover and no leavening was allowed in the house. When we use unleavened bread, as Jesus did, there is no question that we are doing what God allows and will approve.
These are the ways in which God speaks to us, specifically. We must learn what God has told us in those specific instructions, and we must not go beyond them (2 John 9-10). We must be content to do what He has said without altering His word or neglecting what He has said. Furthermore, we must do what He said, exactly what He said, nothing less than what He said, and nothing more than what He said.
Let us use baptism as an example:
As long as one does what God has said, it does not matter whether it is done in the same kind of water or in the same setting as the examples in the scripture. We know the Ethiopian eunuch was baptized in a body of water that was found in a desert, but we have no such indication of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:33). We know that Lydia and her household were baptized close to a river (Acts 16:13-15), but the place is not significant. What is significant is that we do what God has commanded, stated and/or necessarily implied: be baptized in water, confessing our faith in Christ, that we might be raised to walk in a new life.
Next week, Lord willing, we will examine the part that generic authority plays in doing what God has said. More later…