History books will tell you it wasn’t until the 4^th Century—with the Council of Ephesus—that the 27 books in the New Testament were determined to be Scripture.

The reality is that before the Apostle Paul died the whole New Testament had been written, collated together and authenticated.

Jordan confirms, “The saints before 70 AD had every book in their Bible you’ve got in your Bible. They had it in their language, of course, but they had the same book; the same text you’ve got. Just what do you think those New Testament prophets in those new churches were doing?!”

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God’s mechanism for putting the books together was through certain men He supernaturally empowered via the Spirit of God, giving them the capacity to identify one book as Scripture and another as not, then collating them together.

“One of the things the prophet did in the Bible from the very beginning (the first Bible prophet was Abraham) was speak for God,” explains Jordan. “They could say, ‘Thus sayeth the Lord.’

As Paul puts it in I Corinthians 14:37, “If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.”

Jordan says, “The prophets were able to gather the books together supernaturally and when the Bible was completed there was no longer a need for that ministry--the spiritual gifts passed off the scene.

“Everybody could now have their own personal copy of the Word of God and there was no need for just one or two people in an assembly to do (the communicating). Now every Believer had all the enablement on his own because he had the written Word of God.”

In Paul’s epistles, he sets up the model for what the true church was to be about; a classroom for the authoritative communication of sound doctrine.

“It’s not the preaching skills; it’s the doctrine done God’s way—Paul’s way,” says Jordan. “The model won’t work if the doctrine ain’t what motivates it, and without ‘right division’ we can’t get the doctrine.

“There’s a great word you ought to learn. It’s the Latin word habitus. It means ‘the orientation of the soul for the purpose of acquiring wisdom.’ You see the word habit in there? There are things that you learn and there are ways to learn wisdom; the Pauline edification.

“Habitus is to provide a structure for people to acquire to orient their soul so they have wisdom that they can go out and walk when the rule book runs out. That’s what the local church was; it was a classroom. Not just didactically, but in the life—trying to produce the habits of godliness in life. And that’s what Paul established and that’s what was there when Paul set up his model.”

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When Paul informs in his last written epistle (II Timothy) that “all they which are in Asia be turned away from me,” he’s saying, “They’ve turned away from me; they’re not following what I taught.”

Jordan explains, “Before the Apostle Paul is even off the scene, what happens to his model? Well, it gets corrupted. It doesn’t cease to exist because there are people who still follow it. But it gets to be corrupted.”

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It was during the Enlightenment period that the model took hold, “We’re going to find the truth and it’s going to be one unit. We’re going to develop one perfect body of knowledge that everybody can agree to and science is what’s going to help us do that because we believe all knowledge is a unit.

“That’s why theology is the queen of the sciences in the Enlightenment,” says Jordan. “They believed science would allow them to produce this general encyclopedia with all this knowledge united together, which would then allow them to produce a perfect man, a perfect society, and this is where the universities began.

“A university is a collection of colleges. Now when you got that idea, what’s going to happen? It’s gonna fail. Can you come to one perfect man, one perfect knowledge? No. The only place you can find that is where?

“This fails so what follows is Post-Modernism which says there is no perfect knowledge. It says, ‘We tried to find it and couldn’t, and the failure to obtain to a unity of knowledge means there isn’t any perfect knowledge. There can’t be one perfect knowledge. There can’t be what’s called one meta-narrative. There can’t be one narrative that explains everything.’

“Now, doesn’t Genesis 3 explain things? ‘Well, it can’t be that simple . . .’ So you have what’s called multi-culturalism, which is what naturally comes out of all that. It says, ‘Everybody’s story is as equally good as the other guy’s story because there is not one true over-arching truth.’

“Everything is fragmented so you have this endless array of micro-theologies and micro-truth and everything is just total division and there is no truth.”

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What can never be mentioned enough is the fact that every philosophy that’s ever been known to man has been found in book of Ecclesiastes.

Jordan says, “Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, all the big brains that everybody falls all over . . . When I was in college (Southern Baptist Mobile College) the head of the literature department thought the Greeks were the greatest things ever born.

“All of western civilization is built on the wisdom of the Greek philosophers and they stole everything they know out of Ecclesiastes and never gave God credit for any of it. They’re a bunch of shameless plagiarists. When I say that, people just yawn like it doesn’t make any difference to anybody and then they’re the ones who go around carping about the Bible.”

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Ecclesiastes, along with Proverbs, Psalms and Song of Solomon, came out of the early time period in Israel associated with David and Solomon and, like the others, is designed to keep the Believer’s heart through Israel’s history.

“There’s something going on especially important during this period of time—a little over 100 years,” says Jordan. “I remember the first time I ever thought of that years ago, it really impressed me. It’s sort of like God just stops everything He’s doing and says, ‘Okay Israel, I just want to take a minute here.’

“The day of the Lord is as a thousand years so 100 years would be more than a minute—it’d be, ‘Give me a few hours here of your time so I can try to teach you something very special about where your heart needs to be. Not just where your head is; where your heart needs to be.’ And then He records this stuff in Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon.

“We studied before how that Psalms is really an exposition of the covenant God makes with David. That’s why there are five books in the book of Psalms. Proverbs is David explaining to his son what wisdom will do for him and then he gives him a series of proverbs.

“The first nine chapters of the book of Proverbs is just an explanation of how wisdom will work; what it will do for you. And then (David) begins to give (Solomon) some proverbs and by the end of the book Solomon develops some of his own.

“Wisdom had taken root in Solomon and here are instructions for the ‘believing remnant’ in Israel about how to be wise and face the satanic policy of evil and not be deceived by it. Ecclesiastes is the wisdom of the world.

“In Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon you see the downward trend of Solomon’s life and ministry. You see that when apostasy sets in, it winds up participating in the satanic policy of rebellion just like Song of Solomon has Solomon doing.”