It is not uncommon to come across arguments from professing Christians, especially on the internet, where people dismiss a particular command from an apostle because, “Jesus didn’t say that.” In other words, they are arguing that the only portion of Scripture that is ultimately important is the “red letters,” those passages where Christ himself is recorded as having spoken. Everything else is relegated to a lesser important status, something that can be taken or dismissed as one chooses. The problem is that this is a rejection that all of Scripture is literally the voice of God speaking. If the words of the apostles are denied to have authority, then Scripture has no authority whatsoever.

It is to be first understood that God communicates with men through human language. His first words to Adam and Eve were in their own words, something they could comprehend and act on. God condescends to man’s level to communicate his will and purposes to his people. He quite literally speaks to humanity in words. In the Old Testament, God most often communicated through his prophets to the people. “Thus says the Lord,” one of the most common refrains, conveyed that the words of the prophets were the very words of God. And God often commissioned the prophets to write down those words for the people, something seen very early on when God commanded Moses to write the law down for the people (see Ex. 34). To read the written words of the prophets was to read the words of God.

At the coming of Christ, God continues to communicate directly to his people, this time in the person of Jesus Christ, God the Son in human flesh. Christ is the very prophet Moses prophesied would come, the One who would teach them and to whom they were to listen (Deut. 18:15). He spoke and talked directly with the people of Israel, proclaiming the gospel of his coming to suffer and die for their sins. Christ would one day ascend into Heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father, but he would not leave his people without his word. To that end, while he was on the earth, Jesus commissioned his disciples (Mk. 3:13–19) whom he would send out into the world to testify of him (Matt. 28:18-20). But he would not leave them without the means to speak the words he intended; therefore, he sent them the Holy Spirit (John 14:16, 25). When the apostles speak, they speak the very words of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Like the prophets of old, Christ intended that his disciples would write his words for the church (see Rev 2; 3; 21:5). The written words of the apostles bear the same authority as their spoken words, their writings carrying the same divine power of the Old Testament (Matt. 16:19; Eph 2:19–21). Paul, the author of the majority of the New Testament, was specifically called by Christ as an apostle to the Gentiles (see Acts 9:1–17). He was fully aware that his writings were to be understood as the command of God, not his own meager opinions. He wrote with the authority that his words were to be obeyed as though they were spoken by Christ himself. This is evidenced in 1 Corinthians 7:10–16 when Paul writes:

To the married I give this charge (not I, but the Lord): the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, she should remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband), and the husband should not divorce his wife. (1 Cor. 7:10–11)

He then follows up with a second command in which he states:

To the rest I say (I, not the Lord) that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. (1 Cor. 7:12)

Paul is not simply speaking a suggestion in his second command, nor is it an opinion that can be accepted or disregarded. Paul is writing as an apostle of Christ who is authorized to speak on Christ’s behalf on a matter that had not been directly addressed while he was on the Earth. In other words, what Paul wrote was to be obeyed as though it came from the lips of Jesus himself.

This is confirmed by the apostle Peter when, in his second letter, he writes regarding Paul’s letters, “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). In other words, Peter is equating the writings of Paul with the Scripture of the Old Testament (and by extension, the writings of all the apostles). These are the same Scriptures Paul refers to in his letter to Timothy when he writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16–17). Therefore, the New Covenant writings of the apostles carry the same divine authority as the writings of the prophets of the Old Covenant. To disregard or disobey them carries the same penalty as rejecting the Old Testament.

The reason this is important today is that there are many people who will try to dismiss the writings of the apostles to justify certain sinful acts. They may try to claim that Jesus never spoke about such things as abortion, gay marriage, or women being ordained as pastors, that they might try to appeal to him over and above the apostles. However, as has been established, to try to separate the writings of the apostles from Christ is to try to divorce Christ from himself. All of Scripture is divinely inspired and commissioned by God that it might communicate his will to his people. One can no more reject the letters of Paul than they can reject the Ten Commandments penned by the finger of God. Those who attempt to do so have placed themselves above God as their own authority.

Christians should never fear those who attempt to dice up Scripture into portions so that they can decide what is or is not God’s word. The Bible is either all of God’s word or none of it is. If it is not God’s word, then there is no hope whatsoever for anyone, for it is the only message that tells people how they must be saved. However, if it is all God’s word, then it carries with it the divine blessings and curses that come with either obedience or defiance. Therefore, Christians can rely on the knowledge that they possess the very words of God contained in all the pages of Scripture and can rejoice that God has communicated his will to his people for all time.