Why we have the New Testament Scripture

"For the censers of these sinners have become holy at the cost of their lives. Make them into hammered plates as a covering for the altar, for they presented them before the Lord and they became holy." Numbers 16:38

    We hold as the supreme theory of history that "all things exist to the praise of [God's] glorious grace" (Eph. 1:5). Such grace would be unmanifested without sin. This is the mystery of the fall into which we dare not peer too deeply. But we know that God allows evil to work toward the subversion of it's own ends. Because of Pelagius we have Augustine, because of Erasmus and Eck we have Luther. Along these lines we may understand that because of the ubiquitous errors surrounding the proclamation of the Gospel in the first century, we have the matchless canon of the New Testament. Paradoxically we know this canon to be forever fixed in heaven, as the reformers declared, VERBUM DOMINI MANET IN AETURNUM ("Your Word is forever fixed in Heaven." - Psalm119:89b)

     Luther put it this way in his Epiphany sermon,

"That there was a necessity of writing books was in itself a great detriment and denotes an infirmity of the human spirit and does not arise out of the nature of the New Testament. For instead of pious preachers there came heretics and all kinds of errorists giving the sheep of Christ poison in the place of pasture. Hence, in order to rescue at least some of the sheep from the wolves it was necessary to write in harmony with the Scriptures, so that as much as possible the lambs of Christ might be fed and the Scriptures preserved in their purity, thereby enabling the sheep to protect themselves against the wolves and to be their own guides when their false shepherds would not lead them into the green pastures."

       So, in this sense the holy hammered plates comprising the altar of New Testament Scripture were produced first, not by the Apostlic authors, but by the heretics who incensed them!

        "O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements and how inscrutable His ways!" - Romans 11:33.