This will be short, but I think it is important. Watch out for teachers who attempt to show you they are clever in how they find meaning in things that the Bible does not declare. Watch out for your own temptation to find meaning in something that the Bible does not define.
Let me give an example. In a daily reading, I found myself in Luke 4, which begins with the temptation of Jesus immediately after his baptism. What caught my attention rather quickly was the fact that Luke and Matthew present the temptations in a different order. Matthew begins with the devil telling Jesus to turn stones to bread, continues with the devil calling Jesus to throw himself from the temple in front of people, and concludes with the devil calling for Jesus to worship him. Luke reverses the order of the latter two.
Natural human curiosity makes us wonder why. What was God up to there in his inspiration of the text? Is there a message there? And if you go read sermons or commentaries, you will surely find people who will give you an answer.
But here is my caution. God does not tell us why he inspired these authors in the way he did. There is no biblical context clue to tell us why Matthew and Luke have differing orders. There is no other biblical author that indicates to us what this might be about. And there is no guarantee that this is about anything at all. Thus, any answer any preacher or scholar gives is a guess. The guess may be accurate. The guess may be dead wrong. But it is a guess.
We are unwise, friends, to make anything like a real doctrine or even a real sermon point out of a guess. It seems clever. It scratches an itch to have our curiosity satisfied. We love to have something to say that others have not said before. But there is no real reason to do this. If Scripture does not tell us why something happened, if there is nothing like a context clue here to define it, we are just talking to talk at that point.
Let me remind us that the Scripture has a clarity to it that God intends we not lose. We have enough work cut out for us in understanding and applying clear doctrines, things that are taught but not easily accepted or understood, that we do not do ourselves any favors by finding doctrines in passages that make no claims to teach us something. Let the Scripture speak for itself. Do not give into the very understandable desire to be clever by teaching the reason that the two authors changed the order of the events when nothing else in Scripture tells us why they did so.
Pastor Travis Peterson 