There is one word most of us say in church without ever hearing ourselves say it. Biblical.
It is a good word. It is meant to describe something: what a passage says, what the texts, read whole and in place, actually teach. Early in this series I said the word is honest only when the person hearing it can open the Bible and see the thing for himself. That is still the test.
But the word has another use, and most of us have watched it happen.
A members’ meeting is deciding whether to keep the Sunday evening service. There are good reasons on more than one side. Young families who can barely make the morning. Older members who have come on Sunday nights for forty years. Volunteers who are tired. Then someone stands up and says, “I just think we ought to do the biblical thing.”
The room goes quiet. Nobody has opened a Bible. Nobody has said which passage. The word was enough.
That is what a gavel does. It does not describe anything. It does not make a case. It comes down, and the matter is over.
This week I want to look at two scenes from Scripture that show the difference between a word that describes and a word that decides. In one, an apostle is careful about exactly where his words came from. In the other, the devil quotes a psalm.
What the Lord Said, and What He Didn’t
The church in Corinth had written Paul a letter full of questions, and a good many of them were about marriage. In the seventh chapter of his reply he takes them one at a time. Twice, within three verses, he stops to tell them where an answer is coming from.
“To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord)” (1 Corinthians 7:10 ESV).
On this question Jesus had already spoken. He had taught plainly about marriage and divorce, and Paul is handing that teaching on. The parenthesis tells the Corinthians: this one is not new from me. You have it from the Lord.
Two verses later, the parenthesis turns around.
“To the rest I say (I, not the Lord)” (1 Corinthians 7:12 ESV).
Now the Corinthians are asking about something Jesus had not addressed: a believer married to someone who does not believe. Paul answers it, and his answer is not weaker for that. He writes as an apostle. The Church has received these verses as the word of God from the beginning, and I am not suggesting anything less. The parenthesis tells the reader where the word came from. It does not tell him how much it weighs.
What I want you to notice is what Paul did not do. He had a saying of Jesus right there, about marriage, close to the question in front of him. It would have been easy to stretch it a little, to let the Lord’s words reach a case they were not spoken about, and so give a new answer the Lord’s name. He did not. Where the Lord’s teaching stopped, Paul said so, and then he spoke in his own office.
Most of us do not hold that office. We are not apostles. When the text stops short of our question, we have no apostle’s I to put in its place. What we have is I think. That is not nothing. It can be wise, and prayed over, and well worth hearing. But it is ours, and it ought to be offered as ours.
The Tempter’s Verse
The second scene is darker.
After forty days in the wilderness, the devil takes Jesus into the holy city and sets Him on the pinnacle of the temple. Then he says this.
“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you’” (Matthew 4:6 ESV).
He goes on to finish the lines from Psalm 91, and he quotes them accurately. That is worth sitting with. The words are Scripture. Nothing in them is invented.
So why quote them at all? Think about what the suggestion is without them. It is a dare. Jump, and see what happens. And the devil has no standing to dare the Son of God to do anything. On its own, his word carries nothing.
With it is written in front of it, the dare sounds like faith. Jumping sounds like trusting the promise. Refusing sounds like doubting it. That is what he wanted the verse to lend him: an authority he did not have. He borrowed it from a psalm that was never given to anyone as a dare.
Jesus does not argue about the psalm. He answers, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test’” (Matthew 4:7 ESV). He names what the dare was really asking for. Not trust. A test.
I am not saying that anyone who calls something biblical is doing the devil’s work. Most people who say it love the Bible and mean it well. But the mechanism is the same, and it helps to see it plainly. Said over a question the text does not settle, the word biblical lends a man’s preference an authority that belongs to the text. His reasons may be good ones. The word makes them sound like more than they are.
Contradicted or Silent
A few weeks ago, readers here started a conversation about two words. I have been turning it over ever since, and I want to pass it on, because it may be the most useful thing in this series.
The first word is unBiblical. It names what the texts, read whole and in place, contradict.
The second is a-biblical. It names what the texts are silent on.
Most of what a church argues about is the second kind. What time the evening service meets. Whether the class uses a workbook or works straight from the text. How the budget is laid out. How often the elders meet. Scripture gives us a great deal that bears on every one of these: love, wisdom, care for the weak, the good of the whole body. It does not give us the answer to any of them.
That is where the gavel does its damage. On a question the texts contradict, the word has real work to do, and you can open the page and show it. On a question the texts are silent on, the word has no work to do at all. Brought down there, it is not describing anything. It is deciding.
I will tell you when I am most tempted to reach for that word. It is not when the text is plain. It is when the text is silent and I am losing the argument. Saying “Scripture does not settle this” feels like giving ground, and the word is right there.
But saying it is not losing. It moves the argument to where it belongs. Now we can talk honestly about wisdom, and about love, and about what will serve these people in this place. Those are real conversations, and worth having in plain words. The young families and the Sunday-night faithful both deserve them.
Where the Hardest Word Belongs
Paul did have a gavel. He brought it down once, in the opening lines of his letter to the Galatians.
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8 ESV).
It is the strongest word he has, and look where he uses it. Not on a question of practice. Not on a matter of preference. On the gospel itself, the good news of Christ the Galatians were being talked out of.
And look at who stands under it first. Even if we. Paul does not aim the word only at the men troubling that church. He puts himself and his companions beneath it before anyone else.
That is how the hardest words are meant to work. The stronger the word, the more rarely it belongs, and the more it binds the one who says it.
Setting It Down
Biblical is still a good word. It only needs its own work back, which is describing. When the text says a thing, use the word, and be ready to open the page. When the text is silent, set the word down, and talk with your brothers and sisters as one of them, with your own reasons, prayed over and offered plainly.
Keep the word for what the text says, and say the rest in your own voice.
But there is someone else in every one of these rooms. Not the one who said the word. The one who heard it come down. And that person has more in hand than he may think.