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Luke 24:44
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
Acknowledging the divine origin and authority of Scripture is essential for sound theology, since the Word of God is sufficient to equip the church and the individual Christian for every good work (2 Tim. 3:16–17). That leaves us with another question, however: How do we know which books constitute Scripture?
The list of the books that make up Scripture is known as the canon, and how we recognize the extent of the canon is an important question to address in systematic theology. At the outset, we must be clear that the canon exists apart from the church even before the church weighs in on the question. Divine inspiration, not the church’s approval, makes a book Scripture and therefore canonical (v. 16). As soon as a divinely inspired book is completed, it belongs to the canon of Scripture even if it might take the church some time to acknowledge it as part of the Bible. The church has an important role in recognizing the canon, but it does not create the canon or make something into Scripture. Only the Lord does that. Francis Turretin writes: “It is one thing to discern and to declare the canon of Scripture; quite another to establish the canon itself and to make it authentic. The church cannot do the latter (as this belongs to God alone, the author of Scripture), but it does only the former.”
In recognizing the canon of the Old Testament, we need go no further than Jesus and the Apostles themselves. Today’s passage refers to our Lord’s taking the travelers on the road to Emmaus through the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (Luke 24:44). That division reflects the traditional threefold Jewish division of the Scriptures, whose contents correspond to the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament canon. Furthermore, the New Testament never refers to any book outside those thirty-nine books as Scripture. Certainly, we want to have the same Old Testament canon as Jesus and His Apostles, and that is exactly what we have in the Protestant Old Testament canon.
Discerning the extent of the New Testament canon took some time. As the church considered the question, it received as canonical those books that could be traced back to an Apostle or a close associate of an Apostle, books that were read throughout the entire church and not only in a localized area, and books that taught the Apostolic faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
God established the canon of Scripture when He inspired the books of the Bible, and He established conditions by which the church could objectively evaluate whether a book was a part of Scripture. We can be confident that the church has rightly discerned which books of the Bible belong therein and that our thirty-nine-book Old Testament canon and our twenty- seven-book New Testament canon are complete.
For further study
- Nehemiah 8:1
- Daniel 9:2
- Acts 28:23
- 2 Peter 3:15–16
The bible in a year
- Exodus 1–3
- Matthew 15:21–39