Did some more thinking and something just struck me (and no it didn’t hurt). In a way I’m looking for something that isn’t going to be there. Nowhere in the Bible am I going to find “The End!”. Not gonna happen. So I look back at that passage from Romans 15. And I think about Paul. He was certainly writing “to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” and I believe that what Paul wrote was a revelation directly from God, inspired by the Holy Spirit. So there goes God committing revelation to writing.
I think that idea fits in really well with God. The Ten Commandments were written in stone. God instructed John to write Revelation. “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.” While God used a variety of means to communicate to people over the ages it always got written down, at least so far as we know. So given God’s penchant for either writing things himself or having others write it for him it certainly makes sense to me that he would commit the important bits to papyrus “for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan and of the world”. Does the Bible say that he did it for that reason? Not that I can explicitly find, at least not in such a way that indicates that that was his purpose for making sure that these particular 66 books survived until today, but I don’t think that that’s a stretch.
So I suppose the real question is, is God done revealing himself as he had in the past and can I find scriptural support for that? Well how did he reveal himself in the past? He did it in part through prophesy. Paul says that he wants folks to prophesy rather than speak in tongues. Peter tells us in the last days people will prophesy. Of course when those last days are isn’t precisely clear. There’s direct revelation which happens less often in the New Testament. Paul prays for it for the Corinthians. Then we have signs and miracles. Again, those things happened quite a bit in the New Testament. Of course just because someone does all of these things doesn’t make them a Christian or guarantee that the power comes from God.
In Hebrews we’re told that God distributes these things according to his will. That indicates to me that he could cease distributing these for a time. 1 Corinthians 13 seems to indicate at some point that some of these gifts will cease, though the when part falls into various camps, either when the scripture is complete or when we are, and possibly some third and even fourth options I’m not aware of. The second, though it goes against what I’ve been taught, would seem to make more sense. And of course we won’t be complete until the new Heaven and new Earth are.
Here’s the rub though. When you have a book that contains all that you need to know for the purposes of this life and our salvation, you have the Holy Spirit to help you interpret the book, and you haven’t experienced any of God’s former ways of communicating, what are you supposed to be left thinking? Most prophesies that I’m aware of that have been anything other than simply restating what’s in the Bible have fallen flat. Most tongue speaking I’ve been a party to has little or no relationship to what’s done in Acts. I’m unaware of any miracles that have happened, improper uses of that word aside. Just about all the “revelation” I’ve heard tell of has been incredibly suspect at least and resulted in cults in the worst cases. So in closing (for today anyway) while it is certainly possible that when the WCF says what it does, it may be making claims for the Bible that it doesn’t make for itself (setting aside for the moment that there are certainly things that most Christians believe that aren’t explicitly laid out therein), that doesn’t mean that what it says doesn’t have some weight. If God still does reveal himself in his former ways I’d like to hear some examples. Is that fair?