This is a milestone today. This is the 150th episode of the Unapologetic podcast. For those who have been along for 150 episodes, thank you very much. I hope it's been helpful, and I appreciate your support. If you've joined recently, there's a lot of great content back on the archive on unapologeticpodcast.com or on iTunes or wherever you subscribe to the podcast.
So, we've done a lot, we've got a lot to do and a lot to cover in the future. And today we're actually going to talk about something that I think often gets confused and yet also somewhat overlooked. It's the difference in moral values and obligations.
Now it probably sounds really dry, but here's why this matters. One of the great arguments for God's existence actually comes from morality, and it goes something like this. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values do exist, therefore God exists. It's a fairly straightforward argument.
But as a part of it, it has this idea of objective moral values and duties. Those are separate things, and let's talk about those.
There is moral goodness, and we could say moral badness or something like that. Dishonesty would have the moral quality, the moral value of badness. And honesty might have the moral value of goodness. You'll see that there are certain things that are good and bad.
But what you may notice is I didn't say telling the truth is good or telling a lie is bad because those are examples actually of obligation, things you should do or you should not do. There can be goodness maybe as an idea, but that's separate from an obligation placed upon you to do the good thing. We would say that doing the good thing is itself good and doing bad things are bad. We've kind of got two questions here.
One would be: Can you have moral values if God does not exist? Now I think the answer is no. Where would objective goodness come from, something that's actually good, apart from how anyone thinks about it, in a non-Christian worldview? I don't think it fits. On a materialistic naturalistic worldview where the only things that exist came about through evolutionary causes and are material, there are no immaterial things, I don't think goodness and badness or evil actually fit in that worldview.
Now, non-Christians will act as though it does. Atheists will often act as though morality and moral values exist, but I don't think they can explain it. Now there are some non-Christians who will say that objective morality, objective moral values, exists, and they try to say that it's simply a feature of the universe, of creation. But they're left with asking why. Where did that come from? What grounds that? There aren't good answers to that, and we've talked about that in the past.
But I want to focus on the second question. The first question was: Can you have moral values if God does not exist? I don't think you can, and I don't think any proposed explanation is ultimately compelling, which is why most of the time people who are consistent in not being Christians will deny the objective reality of moral values. But the second question is perhaps the stronger question: Can you have moral obligations that are binding on us if God does not exist? You'll recall that's why the first line in the argument that we looked at earlier was, "If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties or obligations do not exist."
Because where would you get an obligation except that it would be placed on you by someone else? That's how we get obligations. I don't have an obligation to a tree because of the tree. If I have an obligation to something, it's because someone placed it on me. Then the question becomes, who has the just ability to place a claim on someone else? It can't just simply be that I have an obligation to be good to my neighbor because of my neighbor. Why does my neighbor have the right to say that I have to be good to him? We can accept maybe goodness exists apart from God. I don't think that makes any sense. But why would I need to be good? Where would that obligation come from if God does not exist? If my neighbor can say I have to do this thing for him, why can't I equally say, "No I don't"? We're on equal footing. My neighbor and I, we have no power or just claim over the other. That obligation to be good to my neighbor would have to come from someone higher than me. It can't just depend on how my neighbor feels. That's just a subjective grounding. What that means is there's nothing objective out in the world that actually says I have to be good to my neighbor.
In response to this, some people have said, "Well if you get enough neighbors together and you have a consensus or a society, and you make a kind of contract with each other, then it becomes binding.” But why? When you get enough people, why does might somehow make right, or now the will of the majority means I have to do something? I don't think that makes sense ultimately. That's actually how great evils have been perpetrated in the past oftentimes. We would say they're evil looking back, which means that simply having a majority doesn't mean the thing that was agreed upon was good. Good stands outside of consensus. Good is a feature of the world because good is ultimately grounded in God's character and nature, and in his person.
But, where would the obligation to be good come from if God does not exist? I don't think there can be a consistent grounding for it. In fact, the only reason it makes sense for us to do the good thing in a world that often does not promote or celebrate the good thing is because God has placed that obligation on us. If there is no creator, if there is no God over all, no one actually has the just claim to tell me what I should do. So yes, maybe honesty is good, but who has the ability to say that I need to be honest, that it is bad for me to not be honest? That would have to be someone with the sort of authority that none of us have. I can't do it for my neighbor. I can't get enough friends together to say my neighbor should do it. There isn't a group large enough to have that sort of authority not because it's a size type of consideration but because it's a quality type of consideration. I am not the type of creature who has the ability to put moral obligations on other people.
Now yes, we have obligations to each other, but those actually come from someone else. So I do actually need to be honest to my neighbor. I do need to not steal from my neighbor, but why? Because God has placed that obligation on me, not because my neighbor has. If my neighbor made up some obligation, it doesn't fit, it doesn't stand. I don't have to follow it. I follow obligations, moral obligations, because ultimately they are grounded in God's moral values, but more than that, because he's placed the obligation on me.
When we look at the New Testament, we actually see that the reason we submit to our government, which really just a bunch of neighbors, is because God has placed the obligation to submit to our government on us. It's not that government has that authority in and of itself. It's that God has the authority and he has said, "You submit to the governing and ruling authorities that are in place, to manmade institutions." We only submit because God has the authority to tell us to submit. They only have the authority they have because it's a delegated and derivative authority allowed and given to them by God.
But all of that to say, maybe someone can find some proposed explanation that is moderately compelling, though I don't think it's possible, for how goodness can exist apart from God. I don't think that works. Hear me on that. But, you will not find a sufficiently robust reason to believe that there are obligations placed on us where we should do certain things, where it's actually good or bad to do something that does not ultimately find its ground in God. God is the source for objective moral values and God is the source for objective moral duties or obligations, for things that are incumbent upon us to do, for things that we have to do.
There can't really just be goodness sitting out there somewhere. Goodness is the result of an action. Why should we do that action? Because of an obligation that is placed upon us by God.
Now for the Christian, yes, we have obligations to act in certain ways. That actually doesn't go away. Some people want to talk of the Christian life like there are no laws, there are no rules. In fact, I've seen recently where some people will say, "Religion's just a bunch of rules,"but that's not Christianity.” Actually, there are a lot of rules for the Christians. There are a lot of obligations for how we should live, but they are all summed up in the two greatest commandments: "Love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Both of those are actually obligations. Maybe we have a very negative connotation of the word obligation. I don't think it should be something that's burdensome necessarily, but it is something that we need and have to do, and we should do, and it's good for us to do. Both of those are placed on the Christian, and all people, by God. It can't come from anywhere else.
I hope this has been helpful, and I look forward to 150 more episodes with you on Unapologetic.
]]>Have you ever had to defend how we got our Bible and why the books we have are the right books, or who chose them or determined them, and that sort of thing? Well there's a lot there, and we've talked about some of it in the past. We've talked about the transmission of the text. “How did we go from the original manuscript, for instance, that Paul wrote, to what's in our Bible today?” But there's a parallel question, and it's: How did we get the books that are in our Bible?
Did some council or person decree that they were the right ones? How did we end up with what's called the canon, the list of books that are considered to be authoritative scripture? That's what we mean when we say canon. In this context we're not talking about the printers or the things that go boom. We're talking about the canon of scripture.
The first thing to point out is that there's this idea going around that some council, maybe at Nicaea, in the 4th century, in the 300 ADs, decreed what was in and would be in the Bible. This is just simply incorrect. The topic of debate at the Council of Nicaea was the deity of Christ. It wasn't what books should be in the Bible.
But there's a bigger problem here besides the factual error with Nicaea, and that's that no man can determine what the canon is or contains. Here's why. I think there's this view, like I've said, where people look back in history and they see that at certain times there were a different list of books, perhaps, if that's even true, that were affirmed as authoritative scripture. Therefore, the inference is that man created the canon. That is where the fundamental error lies.
Let's flip this around. I have a canon, actually. I have a list of books that are mine, that I have written. There's Unapologetic: A Guide For Defending Your Christian Convictions and there's Gender: A Conversation Guide. As soon as I wrote those books, I had a canon that I had created. I didn't have to do anything to create the canon besides write the works. It's actually exactly the same way with the Bible. God created a canon by inspiring certain works. For the letters Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, the ones that are inspired are a part of the canon because God wrote them too, there's a dual authorship to scripture, and the ones that were not inspired are not in the canon. Paul actually wrote four letters to the Corinthian church. Only two are in our canon because only two were inspired by God.
As soon as God inspired a document or a writer, that document is added to the canon of God's works. It's the same way for a human author. It's the same way for the Bible. So you see, there never was the ability for anyone to say if a certain thing should be in the canon or not because God alone determines what the canon is, because God alone writes things that are in his canon. And his canon is the Bible.
Now you may say, "Well how do we know which documents, how do we recognize the ones that are inspired so that the canon we recognize is actually the true canon, which is the one that contains all of the inspired documents by God?" That's a good question. We'll get to that.
There's a second area to this I want to tease out, and that's often what's said by the Roman Catholic Church is that the church created the canon. The church alone determines canonicity, if something should be in the canon. The problem with this is it's actually entirely backwards. It's the canon that created the church. The church did not create the canon. The church does not determine what scripture. Scripture actually creates the church. It's those documents, those kind of covenant documents, documents about God and his relationship to his people, that are the word that was shared that led people to faith and the Christ and that the church was then centered around. The church didn't create or determine, in that way, scripture. Scripture actually created the church.
This actually, if taken to an extreme, is very important. Because there are some who want to say that the church determined the canon, therefore the church can also tell you what the canon means. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church says we alone determine what is scripture, and we, authoritatively, only, tell you what it means. That's a problem. Because it is God who creates the canon and it's God, through scripture, who creates the church.
This is also an extension of that. If the church created the canon, the church stands over the canon. This is very much related to the discussion of sola scriptura that we looked at back in the fall, where since the scriptures are the only example of God breathed revelation in the possession of the church, they're the church's highest authority. Basically, since scripture is inspired, since it's the word of God, it's the highest authority for the Christian and for the church.
Well, on a Roman Catholic view, the church determined what is scripture. The church actually stands over scripture. The church is the higher authority when it comes to scripture because it tells you what is scripture and it tells you what it means. It's kind of like if you say, "What's the higher authority, the rules or the person who determines the rules?" Well, the person who determines the rules, obviously. Because they tell you what the rules are and they tell you what the rules mean. It's that exact way when it comes to scripture and the church. The church either stands under the rules and is governed by them and created by them, and exists in the space carved out by them, or it stands over the rules. The former is the Protestant way, and the latter is the Roman Catholic teaching.
I mentioned this earlier. We have to be very clear that God alone determines the canon. God alone, by inspiring certain authors and certain works, created a canon. The canon exists whether the church recognizes it or not. There's a little asterisk there because we'll come back to that.
But we're still left with the question of: How do we know what God's canon is? Knowing the canon versus how the canon exists are two separate questions. This might sound a little familiar, but the way we recognize the canon — because remember, the canon exists regardless of the church's thoughts about it, it exists because God created it — the way we recognize it is based on a few factors. It has certain divine qualities. It's clear and internally consistent. It tells a unified story.
Now, not everything that tells a unified story is true or scripture, but this is a pointer towards the fact that this is the canon that God created. There's also the corporate reception. That the church received these documents, and not others, by a huge margin points to it being scripture. It's interesting, you look back in the 2nd century, to 120, 130, 150, in that area, and you have people treating the gospels very differently from other early Christian works. This even tracks back earlier than that. Very early on, we see that scripture was recognized as scripture and not just as religious writing.
It's the same way with many of the New Testament documents too. The Old Testament was already established at the time of Jesus, so that's kind of off the table in terms of debate here. All of that to say, the corporate reception, the reception of the canon, of scripture by the church, points to it actually being scripture. Here's why.
Remember, the scripture creates the people of God, and since it creates them, those people actually recognize it by its divine qualities. You know it's very common for us to argue that the natural world proclaims the glory of God, that everyone, based on Romans 1 and Psalm 19 and things like that, should recognize the glory of God in nature, and should recognize that there actually is a God behind nature.
Well how much more true should that be for scripture itself? We have the book of God's works out in the world, out in the natural world, and it speaks, scripture says. But scripture is actually the words of God, like the linguistic words in grammar and sentence form. So how much more does that clearly convey that it's from God? Well much, much more.
This is kind of what we would refer to as scripture being self-authenticating. It carries the nature of the divine. It speaks that it is in fact the word of God, so it authenticates itself also. So, since the church is created by scripture, the church will actually recognize scripture.
I think this is made more clear by statements of Jesus. For instance, when he says, "My sheep hear my voice." He's not talking about decision-making there. He's talking about the fact that his people will hear when he speaks to them. That would be through scripture, that would be a call to salvation. I think those are both appropriate understandings of that.
But, as people who have the Holy Spirit, we will recognize scripture as the voice of God. We have God's spirit in us. It was God's spirit who inspired, spoke through, breathed through the human authors such that the words of scripture are both fully human and fully divine. Since we have that same spirit who was behind scripture, we recognize what scripture is. We don't confuse it for something else like a devotional or that sort of thing.
That's really important. That we recognize scripture. We don't determine it. We describe what it is but God alone created scripture. God alone created the canon. We recognize it, and we recognize it as a church, as a body looking back historically, this has been the case.
Now, some people will say, "At a very late point in time, the church defined what the canon was." There's this interesting dynamic in church history where oftentimes definitive, dogmatic statements are not made until someone starts challenging the position. For instance, early on we talked about how at Nicaea that the deity of Christ was affirmed, that he was of the same substance with the Father. Does this mean no one believed it before that time? No, it means it wasn't really challenged before that time. There wasn't a huge problem that needed to be addressed. It was same way with scripture. When we look at the practices of the early church, what they read as a part of a church service and what they didn't, what they quoted from and how, and what they didn't, we see that the books that we consider to be scripture today were in a class all by themselves practically speaking, almost as soon as they were written, and as soon as they were quoted from, as soon as they were read.
The church recognized the divine qualities in scripture in part because they're in the text, if you can see them and if you notice them. But also because the church had the Holy Spirit inside of them to authenticate that scripture and testify to their spirit that this was scripture. So scripture has certain divine qualities. It was received by the church corporately. But it also is of apostolic origin. The apostles are behind it.
For instance, Paul was an apostle, Peter was an apostle, John was an apostle. These are, among others, the people behind the New Testament, either because they directly wrote a document or because someone under their tutelage or their authority wrote for them or with them, or wrote their account. For instance, mark was not an apostle, but Peter was the one who sanctioned Mark, most likely, that Mark is writing Peter's account. Luke talks with eyewitnesses and was a traveling companion of the Paul. The fact that there are apostles, these people who were expressly given a commission by Jesus to start the church, that gives scripture authority. It further authenticates it. It's a pointer towards the fact that this is the canon that God created.
Remember, God creates the canon. We recognize the canon. We can do that because, in part, it has divine qualities, it was received corporately, it was of apostolic origin in many ways, and so we recognize what God has created. The church does not create the canon. The canon created the church. The church does not stand over scripture or over the canon. The church stands under it. Scripture stands over it as our sole, highest authority.
So, this should give us confidence, that as we have the Holy Spirit and we read scripture, which are the inspired words of the Spirit, we understand that they are, in fact, scripture. They testify to us in that way. The Spirit affirms that to us as we read it.
But I think it's important for us to be clear that at Nicaea, the issue was the deity of Christ. It was not what is scripture, what is the canon. But even if that had been the issue — and there were later councils that talked about scripture — if that had been the issue, the issue is still fundamentally one of recognizing what God has created, not creating something. Who stands over what is the fundamental issue. God alone creates the canon.
]]>Last week we talked about rights and how we often don't define our terms. So, we end up talking about different things. This happens in so many areas of life. It happens in the home, it happens in friendships, it happens in the workplace, where we end up talking past each other because we're using words in different ways, but using the same words.
This week, I want to talk a little more about words. I know that probably sounds boring, but I think these will be words that you've heard, and may have even used. I want to talk about words like "broken", and "brokenness", and "messy", and "mistakes", and things like that. In recent years, these are all words that have become more mainstream to describe a person's problem. If we're talking about what Jesus needed to do, why we need Jesus, or what a person's problem is apart from Jesus, oftentimes that gets expressed in terms of brokenness. “Well, you're a broken person. You need Jesus to make you whole. Or your life's messy. We need Jesus to bring order there. Or maybe that you're hurt or you're damaged, and so you need Jesus to bring healing. Or you've made mistakes.”
All of these things may be true. They may very well be true in some certain ways. But they're all also non-biblical terms for the problem a person has, apart from Jesus. In fact, what you might say is all of these are results or consequences of the fundamental problem a person has. Oftentimes, when we talk about the gospel, we elevate secondary or even non-biblical things to be the results of believing the gospel. We've talked about that in the past with the prosperity gospel, where people who try to couch the gospel, primarily in terms of bringing peach or happiness to someone. They're elevating what may or may not be secondary benefits to a primary place.
When it comes to talking about brokenness, and messiness, and mistakes, and hurt, and things like that, we're elevating secondary consequences over the person's primary problem. So what is the primary problem? If brokenness, messiness, and mistakes, and hurt, and those sorts of things aren't really biblical language for describing a person's problem apart from Christ, what is the problem? What is that language? This is not revolutionary, I assure you, but it's things like sin, and rebellion, and iniquity and lawlessness. We might even toss in treason, while that's not necessarily a biblical word, I definitely think that concept is picked up in Scripture.
Contrast sin, rebellion and iniquity to brokenness, messiness and mistakes. Broken is what a vase is when I knock it off of the table. Messy might very well describe my closet. But it's not an apt metaphor or term to describe a person in their relationship to God or the problem they have in their relationship to God. Others have also pointed out that you can't really repent of being broken. If you're broken, you need something to fix you. How can you repent of brokenness? You can repent of sin, things you did in rebellion to God (Rebellion, there's another word) so it's kind of hard to repent of mistakes. “I tried really hard. I gave it my all, and I just kind of tripped as I was crossing the finish line, so I didn't come in first.” That doesn't really sound like something you should repent of. But choosing, while knowing God's law, to not live in light of his law, that is something that needs repentance.
Often, non-biblical terms beget other non-biblical terms. Non-biblical ideas and concepts lead to believing and talking about other non-biblical concepts and ideas. Or at the very least, elevating secondary things, either benefits or consequences, over the primary benefit of consequence when it comes to talking about the gospel. Often, this language also leads to us focusing on ourselves. Who is broken? What is the primary problem if we're talking about a person's brokenness? Them. They're the thing that needs fixing, and not the fact that they've sinned against a holy God and have a sin debt that needs to be paid for. No, the issue is them.
Often, when we talk about brokenness, we're talking about sadness and loneliness and hurt, and things like that. Once again, the primary thing in view there is the person and what they need, not the fact that God has been sinned against. Hurt is a very real thing. We should care about that. It's just not the primary problem a person has apart from Christ. The same with messiness. If you're messy, you need to get your life in order, but once again, the focus is on you or the person you're talking with.
One of the interesting things about words is that words are an attempt to reflect reality. Our language, when we use it, is true only inasmuch as it corresponds to reality. If I say the wall is green, and it's actually yellow, I have not used words appropriately, or I have not expressed the truth because what I said does not actually match reality.
It's interesting, when we talk about a person's state apart from Christ, we can use words that either soften and downplay their condition. We can use words that make their condition seem more extreme than it is. We could use words that accurately represent their condition. Obviously, we should endeavor to do the third thing. We don't want to downplay, we don't want to make more extreme, we want to accurately represent.
The very first thing we should consider doing is using biblical terms. You can use a biblical term and use it a non-biblical way. The second thing we have to consider doing is using a biblical term, yes, but using it in the way that the bible uses it, because a person's problem, the fundamental issue that man has apart from Christ, has not actually changed since the day of Jesus. If the terms and the ideas were appropriate then, they're appropriate now. And actually appropriate is too weak of a word, because appropriate is kind of the idea of, "well, you could wear that outfit to the dinner. That would be an appropriate choice." No, I would actually say it's the best thing to use biblical terms in biblical ways, especially when we're describing the problem a sinner has apart from being reconciled to his holy God. Because once again, we talked about this a minute ago, brokenness and messiness, they aren't things that actually lead to a biblical type of response.
Biblically speaking, brokenness and messiness don't really seem like they fit with repentance and and faith. What do I need faith for if I'm broken? Why would that make sense? Why do I need a savior if my life is messy? No, I need an organizer or a therapist. But what those words don't make me seem like I need is a savior or a king, or they also don't make me seem like I'm accountable to a lord. And yet that fundamentally speaking, biblically speaking, is the major idea behind sin, and rebellion, and iniquity, and the lawlessness. All of these presuppose a moral law giver, a king, a sovereign of the universe to whom I am accountable, to whom the person I am talking with is accountable. If I use words, language as ordained by God, in that capacity that God has given me, to downplay the sinner's plight in front of him, woe be it for me to have done that. Shame on me, if I use words and language in a different way to make it seem like a person's condition is less severe than it is.
It would be kind of like coming and seeing a dying person and knowing they're dying, and knowing what the solution is to their death, their impending death, and not describing their situation accurately enough for them to actually see the situation, realize the problem and take that next step. That's what often we do, when we use words that soften, and obscure, and obfuscate a person's condition. There are consequences to a person's condition apart from Christ. If we use words like brokenness, messiness and mistake, the biblical language for the consequences don't seem like they fit. For instance, what would wrath, and punishment, and death, and atonement have to do with being messy? Those seem like far overreactions. Death for being messy? Needing to be atoned for or wrath exhibited towards me because I'm broken? Those seem like overreactions. Those biblical terms used in biblical ways seem like they don't fit when we use non-biblical language, like brokenness, and messiness, and mistake and hurt, and things like that.
But when we use words like sin, rebellion and iniquity, will wrath, punishment and justice actually seem more fitting, in terms of describing our plight? God's response towards sin, rebellion, iniquity and lawlessness fits with wrath, punishment, justice, death and the need for atonement. That last one is actually really key. If the way we describe a person's problem, understood in a biblical context from a biblical point of view, does not make it seem like that person's sin needs to be atoned for, then why would they see the need to place their trust in Jesus, who was the atoning sacrifice on the cross for what? For sin, not for brokenness.
All of this fits together. We talk about sin, and that necessitates talking about wrath, which necessitates talking about punishment, and justice, and death, and spiritual death, which ultimately leads us to talking about atonement. Jesus on the cross was not just a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the lamb of God, come to be the sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice, for sinners, not just broken people, not messy people, but for sinners.
The issue, also, is that we will be broken and messy in some ways, depending on how you define that term, the rest of our lives. The fundamental problem is not that, it's our separation from God. The cross at the atoning point, solves that problem. But we don't make that seem glorious and necessary if we use words that don't lead a person to see it as necessary and glorious. I think that's something we really need to consider and talk about.
There are hateful ways to talk about a person's position. You can be the person that seems like you're not just communicating the message that God punishes sinners in hell, you actually want to be the one to punish the sinner in hell. That is inappropriate. That is not the way we are shown in scripture to communicate these truths. We are the messengers making an appeal, Paul says, in Second Corinthians, to be reconciled to God. We have been given the message of reconciliation. Broken people don't need to be reconciled. People who are messy don't need to be reconciled. People who have sinned against a sovereign God need to be reconciled. That's where, once again, biblical terms and language come together to show us that in love, we appeal to people to be reconciled in Christ. Reconciliation implies there is a party who has a problem with you. That's important.
There are even evangelistic kind of programs or methods out there that use non-biblical language to describe a person's state apart from God, or to describe the reason that they should be a Christian. I think of the four spiritual laws. It actually starts out, "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life." Find me any sermon in the bible that says anything similar to that, and I'll post a retraction on, but that's just not in the Bible. Nowhere, even in the Book of Acts, through the sermons of Paul or Peter, do any of them say, "You should be a Christian because God loves you." No, the problem is you're a sinner and you need to repent, and be baptized, and change your mind about your behavior and your life, and place your trust in Christ. Those are biblical terms.
The three circles (which is a helpful and actually simple way that anyone can learn to use as a tool to share the gospel) presents a person's problem fundamentally as brokenness, and I think that that's an issue. Once again, that puts the focus on me, and how I feel. A person, a non-Christian, could very well not feel broken. I think there's some people out there who, from a secular point of view, are very successful. They might be wealthy, they might be healthy, they might have great relationships from their point of view, and so you could start talking to them about brokenness, and they're like, "Hey, buddy, I'm not broken. Things are excellent for me. I do not have problems." But when we use biblical language, everyone will realize they have done things that are wrong, even by their own conscience. That's Paul's argument in Romans two and three.
When we use terms like sin, rebellion, iniquity, they call for a response. They talk about the party who has been wronged, to God, and they ultimately lead us to being able to talk about the need for atonement, and that leads us to talk about Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross, and the trust that a person must place in him to be their sacrifice, because they cannot be that sacrifice. But all of this, in some very real ways, hinges on us talking in biblical ways, using biblical words.
I hope this has been helpful and I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Have you ever heard someone say "I have a right to ..." Or “It's my right to have this certain thing.” Or, perhaps that healthcare is a right, or as has been said in recent years, even internet access is deemed a right. Of course, there are those that would say that abortion is a right. This really should raise the question of, well, what is a right and how do I get one? Where do rights come from? So, today, we're going to talk about rights.
That may seem a little odd for a podcast that's on apologetics and giving an answer for our Christian convictions, but it's actually related to many of the cultural conversations we have today. Because people have said that abortion is a right. Or, that they have a right to be referred by the specific pronouns they choose, or to have certain surgeries, to reinforce their self-image of their gender. So, rights are actually at the forefront of many conversations that we're having right now was a nation.
Before we get too far into this, we need to define what a right is. So many people talk about them, but if you ask them to define what a right is, they probably don't have much to say. But, a right is a just claim. It's not just a claim to something. You don't just get to say "I should have that thing." The word "Just" is really important. A right is a just claim. It's not an improper claim. For instance, you could have two siblings and one of them might have a truck, and one of them might have a ball. Let's say the one with the ball says, "Give me your truck, I have a right to your truck." Well, if it's not his truck, he may be making a claim on the truck, but it is not a just claim. It's an inappropriate claim.
Now, he might take it, and now he might have it, but he took it inappropriately, because he never actually had a right to it. That's really important for us to understand, a right is a just claim. That means it's not arbitrary. So, we have to also ask the question what makes something just? In other words, what grounds the rightness or the wrongness of the claim? In other words, who says you have a right? And, also, by what right do they say that?
There are also two types of rights. If this is your only take away from today, then this would be fine. That would be great. There are positive rights and there are negative rights. Positive rights are not rights you like and negative rights are not rights you dislike. A negative right is a right to not have to do something or have something done to you. In other words, it's a right to be left alone. For instance, you have a right not to be murdered. What that means is someone cannot take your life. That's a God given right. We see that grounded in the Ten Commandments, for example, and many other places in scripture, that you have a right to your life. In other words, people have the responsibility to leave you alone, but you have a just claim to have your life not taken.
You also have a right to your property, to things that you own justly. So, “do not steal” is a command that hits at the negative right to not have your property taken from you. Now, what would a positive right be? A positive right is something that has to be given to you. A negative right is a right to be left alone, but a positive right is when someone has to be given something.
For instance, if someone were to say that healthcare is a right, then healthcare has to be given to them. That's not a right to be left alone. What you may notice, and this is extremely important for our conversation as a society today, is that if you have a positive right, it actually imposes an obligation on someone else. If there's a negative right for you not to be murdered, no one has to do anything for you not to be murdered. They just leave you alone. If you have a negative right to your possessions, that they should be stolen, no one has to provide you with something. But, if you have a positive right, someone has to give up something to give to you to fulfill that right. That's a very different kind of “right.”
Actually, what you may start to notice is that a positive right, a right where you have to be given something, could very well infringe on someone's negative right to be left alone. Here in lies a problem. The biblical worldview—and we see this with Israel as a nation in the Old Testament, and largely in the teaching's of Jesus, and Paul, and others in the New Testament—has a strong conception of negative rights. Now, there are some things people are told to provide to others, but that's the minority. It assumes this idea and presents this idea that negative rights are foundational rights. Negative rights are the way you build a society where people can live with each other and still disagree, because they don't have to provide things to each other. They just simply have to be left alone.
Now, the Ten Commandments was not necessarily intended to be a talk or a discourse on rights, but several of the things described in there are in the form of "Do not". Do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not give false testimony. Those all hit at negative rights. I have a right not to be murdered. I have a right to be left alone. I have a right not to have my property stolen. In other words, no one has to provide me with something, they just can't take it. Don't commit adultery is basically saying "I have a right to my spouse, someone else does not have a right to my spouse". I do not have a right to someone else’s spouse. There's more to it than that, but there's not less to it than that. Also, you shouldn't give false testimony. I have a right not to be lied about. Now, that doesn't mean people have to tell the truth about me, but it means if they speak, they should speak truthfully. In other words, I have a right not to have my reputation smeared or to be lied about.
So, negative rights are at the foundation of the Judaeo-Christian worldview, especially as it relates to society. Now, positive rights on the other hand, would say that someone has to give you something. So, let's talk about negative and positive rights with regards to same sex marriage.
Now, I'm going to stay away from the question of what's a marriage today. I've talked about that many times in the past, but right now, we're seeing the issue of where people are trying to force others to celebrate their same sex union. They're saying you don't have the right, notice that language, to not bake a cake for my same sex marriage or ceremony. Or, you don't have the right not to photograph my wedding. That sort of thing. “You have to do it.“
There was a case just recently before the Supreme Court about the Masterpiece Cake Shop where a man said "I don't make cakes for every ceremony, but I serve every type of customer", and he did not want to participate in a same sex ceremony by making a cake for it. He also didn't do adult-themed parties, but he would serve gay people. What's being told to him is "You do not have the right to decide what events you make a cake for". So, someone's saying "I have a positive right to have a cake made". What's that mean? Someone has the responsibility, the obligation to provide the cake. This right here explains so much of the tension in our culture right now. It's people are increasingly finding and discovering, and really, creating from nothing, "Positive rights", and enforcing them on other people, which give those other people an obligation.
Now, if we had a negative right view of commerce and the economy, people wouldn't have to provide services to other people. They could choose whom to provide services to, and the free market would sort that out. So, the person who doesn't make cakes for same sex ceremonies will in the end probably get less business, and that person's probably okay with that, but when anyone says "I have the right to have a cake made by you", it's infringing the cake baker's negative right not to make cakes for other people. In other words, simply, it's infringing his right to be left alone, and to choose how he conducts his business, and what types of deals he transacts.
What about transgenderism? Well, a simple example would be pronouns. There are people today who are biologically male, and want to be known as a female. They want you to call them by “she,” and “her.” Now, if they want to go around saying they're a woman, I'm going to say they're confused, they're wrong, they're not. But, if they want to do that, I'm not really going to go set out to stop them. I think there are other concerns there, and we've talked about those before. However, when you try to tell me that I have to participate in your incorrect thinking, you are infringing on my negative right. If someone says they have a positive right to have themselves called a certain pronoun, it's infringing on the negative right of someone else to speak in a way that they choose. And, whenever you bring the law in to enforce a positive right, you are trampling on the negative rights of other people.
We can also look at abortion like this. Women say they have a right to healthcare and somehow, that involves killing a baby. The unborn child is alive. It takes in nutrients, it expels waste, it grows, it adds cell to itself by cell division, and it's also human. It's genetically human. It's uniquely genetically human in that way. So, it's a human that's alive and people want to kill it, and they call it healthcare, and they say they have a right to it.
Now, this is in some ways a more complicated discussion, but I do think this aspect is rather simple. In other words, some people say "I have a right to not have my life inconvenienced By this unborn child, so I have the right to get rid of it. It's in my body." Well, what about the right of the unborn child? What about their right to be left alone? In other words, not to be killed? So yes, in some ways we would say that someone has a right, not an unconditional type of right, but a right to conduct their life in certain ways. To get certain medical procedures they choose and not to get others. But, when you're talking about another person involved in that, you do not have rights that terminate their life. That's another sort of issue.
So, there are actually two people at play there. In abortion, the positive right that's being put forth actually tramples on the negative right of the child.
Now, what about healthcare? We've talked about that a little and I'm going to try to stay not political on this question. Though, I do think scripture speaks to this. It's more complicated than we can tackle in the remaining two or three minutes here. The first thing I think to point is that insurance is not actually healthcare. Yes, that may be a slight oversimplification, because insurance often provides access to healthcare. So, maybe in a certain way, if you don't have insurance, you can't get healthcare. Although, that's not actually true. There are doctors and hospitals who will provide pro bono services. So, services for free. Or, services at a greatly reduced cost. There are many different options there that the media doesn't often talk about, but I'm not discounting the difficulty that may be present, just simply to point out healthcare and insurance are not synonymous, nor should they be.
But, if there is a right to healthcare, who says? Based on what? Who has the obligation to provide you healthcare, if there's somehow a right to it? Because, the claim to a right to healthcare is actually a positive right claim. It's not a right to be left alone. It's not a right to make your own medical decisions and engage the doctors you choose. No, it's a claim that someone has to provide you with healthcare, with health treatment. Where would that come from?
Who says you have to call me a certain pronoun? Who says that you have to bake this cake? Who says that I have the right to an abortion? Who says that you have the obligation to provide healthcare? Behind that is all of that question. What grounds our rights? The only type of actual rights, the only type of transcendent rights that are not just made up by us humans are God given rights. The God given rights we have are rights to be left alone. The right to bodily integrity that someone can't just take our life from us. The right to religion and practice of it, how we see fit. You could say that's a right to conscience and that sort of thing, that there shouldn't be compulsion for someone to be a Christian, but that the gospel should be freely preached before people, and they should make up their mind about it, and choose or not choose to follow Christ in that way. (Of course, the spirit is behind the scenes there playing a very strong role.)
But, all of that to say biblically speaking, rights are often negative sorts of things. They aren't these lists of obligations that people have to be provided. If we look at just the times in scripture, especially in the law, where things are said "Do not" versus "Do", it's so much more do not. Are there some kinds of positive rights in scripture? Possibly. I think you could look at things like that.
Like I mentioned earlier, I'm oversimplifying this to a degree, but I want to make sure we have this idea of positive and negative rights, because it's really important that we understand the claims that are made in society in light of this, and also think about the things that we believe. What sort of things do we believe are our right? Because today, what is often happening, and this isn't always the case, but what often is the case is that someone will see something they want, and they'll use rights language to get it.
So, they'll say "I have a right to that and now if you disagree, it sounds like you're being unjust", but really, often, what the case is, is they're unjust. They don't have a just claim to something. They just said they want it. So, often in the language of rights, clothed in that language, what we're seeing is people justifying greed and selfishness, because they're saying "I have a right to this other thing" and enough people agree, and now we end up trampling on other's negative rights with our positive made up rights at points.
Now, there's a great danger in saying all of that, and I've tried to keep much of it generic and simple. I do think Christians have a responsibility to help the poor in the body of Christ, and things like that. So, where do our positive rights and negative rights end there? I think that gets muddy, but often the exhortations in scripture about helping the poor are in the context of the covenant community, in the context of the church. I would also say that most people are far more wealthy today than anyone else in the world if we're looking at America, and then pretty much anyone else looking back in history, even the person we would consider poor today. So, often what we want to do is we want to say "I have a right to this other thing", so that someone has to provide it to me, when instead, I could have given up something else I had to get that thing that I may have thought I needed.
Just because something is a good idea, and just because it's an actual good thing like healthcare, doesn't necessarily mean we have the right to it. I think that's incredibly important. Something can be a good and not be something that someone has a right to. You might have the right to pursue it, that's a big difference. The right to pursue something versus the right to be given it, but the right to pursue something is a negative right. It's a right for someone to leave you alone so that you can pursue a good thing. A positive right would say someone has the obligation to give it to you, and often that plays to our sinful desires, and things like that.
Now, once again, I've given this caveat three or four times. This is an oversimplification at points, but I think it's a helpful one to start the conversation, and start forming our thinking as we think about rights and the issues that are at the forefront of culture, and the conversation today. I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Today we're going to talk about the prosperity gospel, but the new flavor of it, what some have called the soft prosperity gospel, though I'm not sure it's any less of a false gospel and less of a false prosperity gospel than the original, more traditional version.
Now, what am I talking about when I talk about the traditional prosperity gospel? The first thing would be that God wants you to be healthy and wealthy and successful. On its face, it comes right out and says that God's will for you it to be healthy and wealthy. Now, if you're any type of student of the Bible, hopefully you see that this does not actually fit with what we see talked of as the gospel. It also doesn't fit the life we see of the apostles. But it also doesn't fit what we see of Jesus. He certainly wasn't wealthy. He couldn't even pay his own temple tax. He went around and stayed with other people.
What about the whole health side of things? I think that's called into question by the floggings and the beatings and the crucifixion. The health and wealth gospel doesn't necessarily make good sense of Jesus being a person in the middle of God's will and it doesn't make sense of Paul and Peter and the other apostles either.
Some people over the last decade or so have come to see that the prosperity gospel is a bankrupt gospel. It actually doesn't make sense of scripture. That the gospel is not about having your best life now. Actually, it's about the fact that the best life is yet to come. If this earth is good as it gets, gosh, then what's the future hope for Christians? If this is good as it gets, it can't be better than this, right? It doesn't actually fit well with scripture or the true understanding of the gospel and why Jesus came. Jesus did not come so we could be wealthy millionaires that are very healthy.
But, over the last decade, in spite of the fact that some of the largest churches in the United States are what you would call prosperity gospel churches, there has been this second wave of prosperity teaching that's a little softer. It doesn't come right out and say that God's will for you is to be very wealthy. No, it's kind of a more soft version. It's a more friendly version that says something like, "God is for you. God wants you to be successful," those sorts of things. Or, as some have said recently, if you get into a situation, you can declare some purpose on it. You can declare that that is a gate through which something good will come. This teaching is actually really popular. It's actually popular in some surprising places.
One of the difficulties with the kind of newer "for you" theology is that it doesn't have really hard, defined edges on it. It isn't necessarily making claims like "God's will for you is to own a yacht. God's will for you is to live to 120 and never get sick." It isn't making those sorts of claims. It's making a more fill-in-the-blank sort of claim, where God's will for you is to be successful and you could define what success looks like. God wants your goals to be realized, those sorts of things. God wants you to be happy. Obviously, you fill in what that means for you.
It's a softer version, but there are deep problems with it. Because a lot of times in these prosperity gospel "for you" situations and churches, the gospel, the true gospel, is actually absent, displaced, or even redefined. Now some have said that maybe the prosperity gospel is simply elevating to primary level the things that are secondary outworkings of the gospel-success and blessings and things like that. But I think this is false too. Because the New Covenant is different than the Old Covenant, and this is incredibly important.
Under the Old Covenant, yes, one of the signs of God's blessings was material wealth and prosperity, having huge flocks, huge land, a lot of people under your control. That is certainly true. But the New Covenant is not like. The blessings in the New Covenant are spiritual blessings. In the Old Covenant, maybe you got a lot of cattle as a result of God blessing you. In the New Covenant, the blessing is God himself. The Spirit comes to commune with your spirit. You have hope of eternal communion with God in heaven, in a new heavens and a new earth when he finally comes back to judge the world in righteousness.
The point here is that the blessings of the New Covenant aren't somehow secondary and second tier. No, they're primary. They're of so much more importance than the ones in the Old Covenant but they are not material things. They're not worldly status sorts of things. If we take a step back and our conception of God's blessings somehow fits really well in a 21st century western culture, those are probably not the blessings of God. I don't know another way to say it. I think oftentimes the church today has adopted a view that has tacitly assumed that the blessings of God are the things that America was founded on and offer us in terms of wealth and prosperity and happiness and success and reputation.
When we start to cash it out that way, the soft prosperity gospel is not actually that soft. If the message that is proclaimed in the church to the people that come is "You are building your kingdom here and God is helping you," that is totally opposed to the true gospel message, which is that we bow the knee to Christ and he is building his kingdom through us, not ours. The Spirit didn't come so I could have a better western experience, an American dream.
The soft prosperity gospel also teaches often that we have the power to declare what our circumstances are or what they will be, and the way we think and what we say somehow can anoint a circumstance or has the power of God behind it such that what we say changes reality or forms the future. I would just simply say that this view does not square with the things Paul writes. Let's look at some examples. Instead of the ability to speak and change his circumstances, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians,
"so I would not become arrogant, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to trouble me so that I would not become arrogant."
God sent this thorn to Paul to keep him humble. He didn't actually speak his circumstances and get out of it. No, God gave this to him, actually for his sanctification, not for his worldly success.
He says that "I asked the lord three times about this, that it would depart from me, but God said to him, 'My grace is enough for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.'" "So," Paul says,
"I will boast gladly about my weakness so that the power of Christ may reside in me. Therefore, I am content with weakness and insults, with troubles, with persecution and difficulties, for the sake of Christ. For whenever I am weak, then I am strong."
Now what he's not saying is God gave him the Spirit to accomplish the things that he wanted in this world, worldly things, western, American things. No, what he's says is he is legitimately a weak person. God demonstrated in Paul the very thing that he said at Paul's conversion, which was that he would teach Paul what it was like to suffer for his name. In so doing, God would be glorified. That's what Paul's talking about here. That even in Paul's weakness he is accomplishing things for God because God is accomplishing those things for God's kingdom through Paul, not for Paul's kingdom. That difference is huge.
We never see Paul where he's somehow speaking reality into being. No, that sort of power, it's God's alone. He does not give it to us. We do not speak things into being. That is one of the marks of God and divinity.
Now what is interesting to me is this whole prosperity gospel-where God is for you, he wants you to have a good life and experience as often declared by western values-doesn't fit with what Paul writes to Timothy where he says that "all of those who want to live godly lives in Christ Jesus will be persecuted," not “will find themselves successful and having good reputations.” No, they'll be persecuted. Didn't Paul just say that? That he's "content with weakness, with insults, with troubles, with persecution and difficulties," not with cars and boats and prestige and power and reputation. No, the life of Paul actually looks the opposite of what "for you" theology and the new prosperity gospel teaches. They don't fit.
The greatest saint, in some ways, in the New Testament, Paul, responsible for so much of our New Testament and our theology and our understanding of the gospel, does not even look like what the prosperity gospel teaches a faithful Christian would look like. That's a huge problem. It doesn't fit with scripture.
Let's look at a little more of what Paul went through. He says that
“five times I received from the Jews 40 lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with a rod. Once I received a stoning, Three times I suffered shipwreck. A night and a day I spent adrift in the open sea. I have been on journeys many times in dangers from rivers, in dangers from robbers, in dangers from my own countrymen, in dangers from the Gentiles, in dangers in the city, in dangers in the wilderness, in dangers at sea, in dangers from false brothers, in hard work and trial through my sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, many times without food, in cold and without enough clothing. Apart from other things there is daily pressure on me for my anxious concern for all the churches."
Wow, I don't think any of us or many of us have gone through even one of those things Paul mentions there. He had more than enough suffering, in some ways, from our perspective, for many lifetimes. And yet, how does he end that list? He basically says, "Yes, there are all these material problems I've had, personal problems, suffering problems, but gosh, I'm anxious for the churches that I've been involved with." Isn't that just amazing? That in spite of the difficulty, or actually maybe because of the difficulty in Paul's life, he was softened to the things of the Spirit and even had an additional concern for the people of God that he had been entrusted over.
Now this list here of all the things that happened in his life, why didn't he just speak it to be different? Why didn't he say when he was shipwrecked, "I will not be shipwrecked," and then he suddenly wasn't shipwrecked? No, it doesn't work like that. Why when he was being beaten didn't he say, "Go away in the power of God. I declare it to be so," and people went away? No, because it doesn't work like that. Actually, what we see is exactly what Paul wrote earlier, that God's power was made perfect in Paul's weakness because God takes the credit for his work. I mean that in both senses. God takes the credit for God's work but God also takes the credit for Paul's work. God was the one working through Paul. Paul was the instrument.
When you go to a music concert and you listen to a violinist play a beautiful song, yes, you appreciate the violin. But it's the violinist who gets the credit. the violin is actually just an instrument. It's a thing through which the violinist is expressing beautiful music. It's, in many ways, the same with us. We are the instruments through which God is working. That's just a radical paradigm difference from the soft prosperity gospel. God is not a tool in our hands to accomplish our purposes. We are but a tool, a vessel, an instrument, in the hands of God to accomplish his purposes, not the things we wanted before him. If the things that we are being told in a church and via a false gospel to want are the same things we wanted before Christ, they are not fruit of the gospel.
I don't know another way to say it. If it's appealing to our materialistic impulses and urges and desires, it's not the gospel. If, on the other hand, it's encouraging us to lay down our desires, to boast in our weakness so that God's strength can be made seen, that sounds more like the gospel. If what I'm saying is the gospel is about me getting ahead in the world, it's probably not the gospel. If, on the other hand, I'm being persecuted and shunned and looked down on for my beliefs, it might be the gospel.
Now what is the gospel? We've talked about that before. I certainly think it's more than the teaching of Jesus' life, death, resurrection, and the hope that's found there, but it's certainly not less than that. We need to be clear on what that is. If we are clear on what the true gospel is, we will hopefully see right through the lies that are out there today.
If we're not the ones getting caught up, our friends or our family very well may be. Because a lot of times the churches that are peddling this sort of false gospel, they look attractive. The pastor is an attractive man. They've got great coffee and great lights. It's a young crowd. It's an energetic setting and people leave encouraged. How could you not be encouraged if you're being told that God is for you and what your endeavors are? Of course you'd be encouraged.
But what we don't need to be is encouraged in our sinful, non-Christian desires. We need to be told to confront those. We need to be presented with a new set of desires through the work of the Spirit and scripture. We have people that are getting caught up in this because it sounds good. It tickles the ear. It looks good. It may even feel good. But, that's just for a time.
So we need to be clear on what the true gospel is. We need to be able to demonstrate from scripture just clear case examples of how what it is teaching is actually opposed to what scripture teaches from the life of Jesus, from the life of Paul, from the teaching of Paul, from the teaching of Jesus. "Take up your cross and follow after me" is not "Take up your Porsche and follow after me." Not that having one is necessarily a bad thing, but it has to do with what the end is, the goal is, that Jesus came to accomplish and teach us to pursue after.
Is it things that fit very nicely in a western culture or is it a selfless pursuit of godliness? That is the question. Along the way we have to remember that the way God showed his blessing in the Old Testament is different than the New Testament. A lot of times these conversations go off the rails when we don't appreciate that the signs of the Old Covenant and blessing are different than the signs of the New Covenant and God's blessing.
I hope this has been helpful, and I will talk with you next week.
]]>This week we're going to address the question: Is there eyewitness testimony outside of the Bible? In other words, "Do we just have to believe what scripture says?" the non-Christian may ask. “Or, are there other people who are saying the same things?” On the face of it, this might sound reasonable, but here's the question I'm going to immediately follow this up with: Do you believe miracles are possible? They ask, "Is there eyewitness testimony outside of the Bible?" and I say, "Do you think miracles are possible?"
Here's where I'm going, because that probably seems totally unrelated. It's a non-sequitur to you. Here's the problem. Many people are using this question as a smokescreen, as a distraction from their main objection. Because even if we're going to be able to point to other people outside of scripture who say the same things and were eyewitnesses, this person most likely does not believe the supernatural exists and that miracles are possible. That's the biggest issue here. If we could/did point to extra-biblical eyewitness evidence, they're likely going to say, "Okay, but a resurrection? Really? I don't think that can happen." We have to be prepared to deal with that objection too, but this objection about eyewitness testimony outside of the Bible is really a distraction oftentimes. Now that might not be the case. Someone might say, "Yes, I think miracles are possible," and then I'll say, "Okay, let's address your eyewitness testimony question." But that's the more fundamental issue. Are miracles possible?
The next question I would ask the person is, "Why does the testimony need to be outside of the Bible? What is so special about the Bible that it gets disqualified from containing legitimate and trustworthy eyewitness testimony and evidence? Why these books?" Because we have to remember the Bible is not a book. It's not like a chapter book. It has a binding today but it contains 66 different documents. Really what they’re saying is they’re going to put these documents in a category, call it the Bible, and then disqualify it from being able to speak to actual history. That's what the non-Christian does oftentimes when they ask this sort of question.
Because what they're saying is, "Well I don't trust Matthew. I don't trust Mark. I don't trust Luke. I don't trust John. I don't trust Acts. I don't trust fill in the blank biblical document." Because all of the documents have been put in a category and called the Bible, and they’re in that category, at least in the New Testament, because they're written by people who were eyewitnesses of the truth they proclaimed. We have taken all of the people who were eyewitnesses and wrote about things that we have, and we've put them in a category and called them the Bible, and that is the category the non-Christian wants to reject. They've taken the sum total of all the extent eyewitness testimony and said, "I want something outside of that." That's kind of odd, isn't it? It's kind of an illegitimate request. It's kind of like going to a car dealer and saying, "I want the car that's for sale that's not on this lot that you have," when the lots contains all of the cars that are for sale. It's kind of like saying, "I want a non-relative who's my brother." That doesn't work either.
The Bible contains eyewitness testimony. It makes that claim. Luke records Peter saying this in Acts 2. "We were all eyewitnesses of his resurrection." Peter says this in epistle to, where he says that "we didn't make up these things. We were eyewitnesses of his majesty." The biblical documents claim to be written by eyewitnesses or people who interviewed eyewitnesses.
Now, why should we exclude them? Why is this person asking for evidence outside of the Bible? I think this betrays a bias on the part of the questioner. "Well, okay, those Christians, they're biased. They obviously believed Jesus rose from the dead. So where are the eyewitnesses who do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead?" Let's just step back and ask, practically speaking, if even a question like that is reasonable. I think this will be a fair question to point out to someone. What would you say about someone who claimed to be in New York City one block from the Twin Towers on September 11th and did not believe they fell, who was there, who claimed to see everything that was going on and yet said, "This did not happen." You would say, "That person is either crazy, a liar, or they weren't an eyewitness." Because to have been in that place on September 11th would have been to see the towers come down. You would have believed the towers came down. There's no other plausible explanation.
It's the same way with the claims that scripture makes. If you were an eyewitness to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, that pretty much guaranteed you would have been a believer, a Christian, a follower. What would make other sense to say that you saw a man rise from the dead and didn't believe he was the person he claimed to be? Biblically, that doesn't make much sense. Just common sense wise, that doesn't make much sense either.
Take any other extraordinary event that has happened, put a person there to see it, and then say, "Yeah, but you can't be a believer in that thing." That's really what someone is asking when it comes to scripture. We can make a generalization out of what's probably behind this question. Because when the person asks, "Is there evidence from eyewitnesses outside Bible?" they're saying we shouldn't believe what people write if they believe what wrote. Because the people in scripture claim to be Christians, they claim to believe the history they write, and they're being disqualified simply because of that. Or, they're being disqualified not because they believe what they wrote but because the person who's asking the question does not have a category in their worldview for miracles. It's one or the other. It's either “I can't believe the types of things they writ” or they're being disqualified because they believe what they write. There is no other option.
Honestly, I don't think the person asking the question would find the evidence credible, if there were any, from non-biblical sources who are eyewitnesses, if those sources said the same thing as the Bible did. What would we say about someone who saw a remarkable event, wrote down that they saw it, and was not moved or changed by it. We'd say, "You probably don't believe what you wrote." There are some atheists who say this about Christians today who don't evangelize. People have actually said, "If you don't try and convert me, I don't believe you actually believe what you're telling me you believe." In other words, our belief would motivate action if we actually believed what we claimed.
To find the category of non-believing eyewitness of the resurrection, that just doesn't make much sense. More than that, this question is really getting at what's acceptable proof. I think we can ask the person that sort of question. What type of proof for the things described in scripture would you believe? Often what you'll find when you push this and you question the answers is even if God appeared in front of them and said, "The Bible is trustworthy," they would not believe. They would check themselves into a mental hospital. People have even said this when they've been pushed.
I think what we have to remember, now we've talked about this before, is that worldview means so much in these conversations. If you don't have a category for the type of thing we're talking about, you're not going to believe it, even if evidence points to it. Because you're going to see it as a non-entity. You're having to convince someone that something they think doesn't exist exists, and that evidence actually points to it. That's a tall order.
From a different angle, spiritually speaking, we understand why this is. Man suppresses the knowledge of God that is plain to him, we see in Romans 1. Now the way God has ordained to address this problem is through the preaching of the Gospel, through doing apologetics. We talked about that last week, through giving an answer, through giving a defense. But, all of that to say, sometimes we have to be wise in how we do that. We've got to be tactical. After you've had some of these conversations, frequently you'll start to understand where they're going to lead. That takes us back to where we started today.
When the question was asked, "Is there eyewitness testimony outside of the Bible for the things that the Bible describes?" my next question was going to be, "Do you think miracles are possible?" The reason for that is I've had this conversation enough to know that's often where it ends up. So let's just start there. We can address the question if it's a legitimate question, but often it's not.
In conclusion, we should not disqualify something someone says simply because they believe it, and to be a Christian is to believe the things that are written in scripture. So no, no one else is going to really write those down as a eyewitness and not believe them. They're that large and magnificent of claims, like we pointed out with the 9/11 example. Then often, even if we give them the type of proof they want, it likely won’t be compelling because their worldview is going to dictate how they interpret that truth. A worldview is like glasses that we use to see the world. It accentuates some things; it filters out others. If you don't have a category for the miraculous, you will always find ways to explain away that evidence.
Now the work of the Spirit is certainly more powerful than the human suppression of the truth, and through the preaching of the Gospel, through apologetics, through the work of the Spirit, these things come together to be persuasive as the spirit changes people's hearts and changes their minds. We get to be a part of that process.
I hope you're a part of that process for someone this week. Have a conversation. Start a dialogue about some matter of faith or the Gospel or the Christianity, and try and steer it towards spiritual things. You might be surprised what happens. I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>It's been a while since we've actually talked about the name of this podcast, which is actually the name of a book I've also written too, Unapologetic: A Guide for Defending Your Christian Convictions. Apologetics is an area of Christian study that aims to give answers for why we believe the things we believe.
Why do you believe what you believe you believe? What are the reasons behind the things we teach and affirm as Christians? That's what apologetics does. It simply aims to give an answer. So unapologetic is obviously kind of a pun on that because a lot of times people actually seem to apologize for Christianity, and not in the “apologetic” sort of way. What some people seem to do is present their Christian beliefs only if asked, only if pressed, and they do it almost as if saying, "I'm almost sorry I believe this. I believe this but maybe I don't know if I should, or I don't know if you should."
They're just not confident, and it comes across actually like they're apologizing, like saying, "I’m sorry for," as opposed to apologizing by giving a defense. That word apologize actually has two meanings. We've kind of lost the meaning in popular conversation, that means to give a defense, but that’s what Christian apologetics is. It gives an answer. It gives a reason. It gives a defense for the things we believe as Christians, the things that are taught in Scripture, the gospel, those sorts of things. That's what apologetics is.
We haven’t talked about that in a while, but being unapologetic means to not say you’re sorry while giving an answer for the Christian faith.
So today, let’s talk about some bad reasons for apologetics. The good reasons should hopefully be somewhat self-explanatory. There are a lot of questions out there that need answering, so we should be prepared to answer them. That's the simplest way to say that, but I think there’s some bad reasons too that maybe come out of a good impulse, but nonetheless are negative.
The first bad reason for doing apologetics, for giving an answer, for being equipped to give an answer, is to justify ourselves. I am sure that I am not the only one who, when you are in any type of conversation or disagreement and someone thinks you’re wrong, someone thinks you’re stupid, or someone thinks you’re a bigot, you want to justify yourself. You want to prove yourself to be right, to be on the side of the correct view, to hold the moral position.
You want to justify yourself. That’s what that means, so a lot of times that actually flows over into doing apologetics. Maybe you've had an encounter where someone made you feel dumb in front of a large group of people because you couldn’t give a reason why someone should believe in the resurrection or why God exists, and so you studied. You didn't like getting licked in that conversation, in that argument, and you come back, and maybe the reason you’re doing this is because you didn't like to feel dumb. You didn’t like to feel stupid.
Now, I think sometimes we can find that we were ill-equipped for a conversation or a discussion, and that can drive us to study and be more equipped. That doesn’t have to be a negative thing, but sometimes there’s a turn that can be taken where it actually becones a way of us feeling better about ourselves than someone else, us showing that we, as the Christians, have all the right reasons, and the atheist or the non-Christian or whoever actually is the one that is irrational and that sort of thing. We do it from a position of pride, not a position of humility, and that can be a problem. When we seek to justify ourselves so that we're not thought of as stupid or bigoted, and that’s the primary goal that can be a problem.
Now, I do think there’s a place for wanting someone to not think Christians are bigoted. We should not want people to think Christians are bigoted, but here’s the thing. Even if we present the truth in the best possible way, many in society today are going to still think it’s bigoted. Christianity, correctly understood, is off-putting. We have to work through that and understand that while we should not add offense to the gospel. The gospel is offensive and so if we're simply trying to justify ourselves so that people think well of us, it’s ultimately not going to work either because in order to justify yourself and be found to be socially acceptable today, you will have to change the message.
That takes us to our second bad reason for apologetics, and that’s to make Christianity appealing or acceptable.
The first bad reason is to justify ourselves, and that kind of fits like the other side of a coin almost with making Christianity appealing or acceptable. The first thing I just want to say is you can’t make Christianity appealing or acceptable without changing it. It is fundamentally not able to happen and Scripture tells us why this is. The flesh is at war with the things of the Spirit. The cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but the message of the cross is life and salvation to those who are being saved.
So it’s the same message. It’s the same ideas, but to one group they’re totally acceptable and not just acceptable, they’re beautiful and esteemed and they are the power of God for salvation. For the other group, they're stupid and foolish and off-putting and bigoted. If to the non-Christian you want to make Christianity appealing, you will have to change the message. At that point, it is no longer Christianity. So to put some specifics on this, there are some examples that come to mind when I think of people doing apologetics, trying to make Christianity look appealing or be acceptable. There are rough edges in Scripture. There are things that grate against the non-Christian sensibilities, and honestly, sometimes the Christian sensibilities.
I don’t think either of these are good things, but sometimes let’s say there’s an issue of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility or freedom. Some people, some apologists (people who practice giving an answer for Christianity) will say that they choose their view because it’s easier to understand or it’s more palatable. That should never be a consideration when we choose a view. The degree to which it’s accepted by a non-Christian should not be any form of criteria we use to choose a view. In fact, I would actually say if it is, it should be a negative one. In other words, if this view was more acceptable to the non-Christian, it's probably more likely to be incorrect. I mean, think about it. If the message of the cross is foolishness and something makes Christianity seem less foolish, then perhaps, I’m not saying this is always true, but perhaps you’re going in the wrong direction.
Also, sometimes when it comes to how we talk about Scripture with non-Christians, we'll go to their level and talk about it like, "Well, it’s just historical documents, which could have errors." Some actual apologists will say things like, "Well, Paul and James disagree on justification, and Acts contradicts itself about Paul’s conversion," and things like that, “but it's still generally true.” We can still have confidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Well, whenever we accept the non-Christians premise that Scripture is not accurate, that it’s not the word of God, we're speaking about the word of God in a different way than God speaks about his own word.
I don’t want to speak differently of something than God does, because if I’m putting forth a different thought or a different belief than God has, I’m putting forth an incorrect thought. To believe something that’s true is to think God’s thoughts after him, and so whenever we present a view contrary to how God has presented a view, we're not doing something good. We're doing something bad. We're trying to make Christianity more acceptable by speaking of it differently than its founder spoke of it.
So that surfaces, like I mentioned, with issues of God’s sovereignty and freedom, it surfaces in how we talk about Scripture, and sometimes it surfaces in how we talk about hell. Some people will say when asked, "Is my aunt, who is not a Christian, going to hell?", "Well, God's not going to send someone to where they don’t want to go," and that’s an example of an answer that borders, in my opinion, on trying to make something acceptable at the risk of not presenting the true consideration, because the fact is, if you asked people, "Do you want to go to hell," the answer is no. If you ask people, "Do you want to go to heaven," and they believed it’s a place, they would say yes, but most people don’t think heaven and hell are real places, in spite I would say of sometimes what polls have shown. I think there’s some confounding factors there, but nonetheless, they don’t want to go to heaven on the terms that God has set for heaven.
They might not believe in the God who actually has spoken in Scripture and talked about heaven or has talked about hell. Both are places he has created, and so to say, "Well, people are going to go where they want to go," is not necessarily true. Now, yes, people will go where they go because of their choices and their sin, or because of the grace of God, that is certainly true, but when we talk about hell in such a way like that, I think we obscure some more-real truths behind the scenes.
I don’t think anyone wants to go to hell. Now, I don’t think anyone, apart from the work of the Spirit, wants God, but that’s not the same thing as saying they don’t want heaven. Everyone wants to live in a paradise. Not everyone wants to bow the knee to their creator and sovereign Lord. That’s the distinction when it comes to that sort of issue too.
Okay, so if those are bad reasons for apologetics, justifying ourselves, making Christianity appealing, and we looked at that in terms of maybe how we talk about Scripture or hell, or Christian exclusive claims, or sovereignty and things like that, if those are bad reasons, well what is the good reason for doing apologetics?
I would say that the aim of Christian apologetics is to glorify God in the presentation and defense of his truth, to glorify our sovereign creator and Savior in the presentation and defense of his truth. That's a responsibility he’s given us. We see that in First Peter 3:15. "Be prepared to give an answer." We've looked at that in previous weeks recently, that we should do that with gentleness and respect. Our manner and our message are both important. But if our understanding is that we are glorifying God and accurately representing what he said, not trying to justify ourselves, not trying to make Christianity look appealing, sometimes that will result in people rejecting our message, but we must realize that the degree to which God is glorified in our apologetics is not dependent on a person’s response.
We must have a category of God being glorified in the end because of a person’s rejection of a defense of the gospel, because of a rejection of the good news. This is not something we should take joy in, but the fact of the matter is, is that God is glorified both in the salvation of sinners and in the punishment and judgment of sinners. The more revelation someone has, Jesus tells us, the more responsible they will be, and so the more they are deserving of judgment, if God justly punishes them. Conversely, God is also glorified in the salvation of people who he would have otherwise justly punished. We must have that category, too.
Now, yes, our task is not to increase people’s judgment. Our task is to be faithful, to share the gospel. Romans 10, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news." We are sharing good news, but it is not up to us to bring fruit out of our faithfulness there. The Spirit alone is the one who brings salvation to people. We are simply responsible to be the messengers, but when someone rejects our message, that doesn’t necessarily mean we did it wrong, that doesn’t mean we said it wrong, that doesn’t mean we should have made it more acceptable or appealing. What it often means is that man’s heart is hard apart from the Spirit, that the person who is not a Christian thinks the message of the cross is foolishness.
We must remember that, and so if we understand that God is glorified in the accurate presentation of his truth in love for his glory, then while we might still be saddened and grieved by people’s eternal state, what we'll still realize is, is God is ultimately glorified in our act of sharing, in his act of salvation, and if he doesn’t save that person, in his act of judgment. The reformers had a phrase that the same son that melts the ice hardens the clay. We are the ones, in a way, sharing the message. We are bringing light to a darkness, but if God has not transformed that heart from clay to ice, that message will not necessarily melt that heart. It will not soften it, it will likely harden it, but that’s not our responsibility. We don’t know whose heart has been softened, whose heart is hard, what the Spirit is going to do.
No. We, kind of like the person who throws seed in the parable of the soils, just throw it indiscriminately. It will land where it lands. It will accomplish what God wants it to accomplish. We're not responsible for what that seed does, bu we are responsible to share that seed, to spread that seed for the glory of God. Yes, we should care how people respond to our message. Yes, we should care about how skilled we are to present the message, and what our character is while we deliver the message, but if we ever move from those considerations, which have the glory of God as their primary consideration, and move to justifying ourselves or trying to make Christianity appealing or acceptable, we have erred and we will most likely end up changing the message.
Our apologetics should never drive our theology, our apologetics should never drive our biblical interpretation. I should never come to hold a different belief simply because I will end up communicating that belief than if I were never to speak with someone about it. Now, obviously, we should share our beliefs here, but my point is, if the thought of sharing this belief makes me change it, I’m probably doing it wrong.
I'll end here with a recent example from someone I respect, Greg Koukl, who is an apologist. He’s done this for 25 or 30 years. He got a question recently on his radio show, and it was basically, "If God told you to kill all left-handed people, would you do it?" Now, obviously, the God we know would not command that. The God of the Bible would not command that.
This is one of those questions I think asked by non-Christians that really attempts to make the Christian look bad, and so Greg goes through a response to this showing that’s not the character of the God in the Bible. (Don’t judge his response off of my description here, you should listen to it on your own but just hear me for the summary I'm trying to give.) After he gives all reasonable caveats, he says, "Yes, if God actually commanded that, and I knew that, then it would actually be the good and right thing to do because God, the standard and ground of all morality, has told me to do something."
I really respect that answer because I think there are some who do apologetics today who would not give that answer, but as Martin Luther said when asked to recant his testimony about the gospel, he said, "Here I stand. I can do no other.”
I think that’s what we have to do as apologists. We have to be willing to say, "Yes, this Christian claim makes me look bad. It sounds bigoted. It strikes your ear wrong in 2018, but here I stand. I can do no other. I can’t make Christianity appealing or acceptable to you. That’s the job of the Spirit. My job is simply to communicate it as clearly and winsomely and kindly and accurately as possible." My prayer for us this year is that we would do that, that we would be encouraged from Scripture in how to do that more effectively with a better character and a better clarity. Well, I'll talk with you next week, on Unapologetic.
]]>Today we're going to talk about doubt. Now in the little bubble that is Twitter and the internet, in parts of it there has been a conversation occurring about doubt and how we should talk about it. Should we say that it's a sin? Should we comfort the doubters? All these things. I think in part, oftentimes we've been seeing half of the truth, half of the full response that's needed. Really what I want to try to do today is look at this from multiple angles.
I'm not someone who's unacquainted with doubt. I've shared my personal story in the past, but while I grew up in church, I went there two or three times a week, I was there for the services, I knew a good bit of my Bible. I would say looking back, I didn't necessarily know how it all fit together very well, but nonetheless, I had a better opportunity than most to come to understand and believe the truths of Christianity.
But by the time I got to college and was in college, I was basically dead in the water, spiritually speaking. If you'd asked me, and if I'd been honest in replying, if I thought God existed or if I thought he was good, I would have probably told you no I didn't. I didn't see how the existence of God made more sense than his nonexistence. I didn't see how, if he existed, he could possibly be good with what was revealed in the Bible, and I didn't think the resurrection made a lot of sense either. You could say I had some doubts at the very least. I'm not unacquainted with this.
On the flip side of that, as someone who worked through that by the grace of God, I'm very thankful for that, I now have walked with and walked with people who experience doubts. I want to talk today, to the person who is struggling with doubt, and also to the person who is working with those, and talking and walking with those who struggle with doubt. At points, it may seem like I'm saying contradictory things, but I'm not intending to. What I'm intending to do is address each person specifically and individually, and we'll come out with a view of what the whole outlook should be.
Now before we proceed, I think it's really important to define our terms, because oftentimes when we talk about doubt, different people mean different things. (I have a doubt as to if we are in fact talking about the same thing sometimes.) When I talk about doubt, I'm not just talking about questions. I think sometimes people will put questions in the category of doubt, and they could be, but I don't know that that's always the best and most direct way to talk about it. Because a question might be, "Well what did Paul mean when he spoke of women not prophesying with their head uncovered?" What does that mean? That's not a doubt, that's saying, "I don't know this thing." I think a doubt is more likely to be, "I'm not so sure that's true. I'm not so sure about that thing," or maybe a stronger version would be, "I don't think that's true. A little bit of me believes that, but I don't think that's true." That's more of a doubt.
I think oftentimes a doubt, more specifically is going to be in response to something that has been revealed. There are things we are not going to have certainty on, that have not been very well revealed to us. For example, there's one verse where Paul makes mention of baptism for the dead, and it's like okay, what is he talking about there? Is he saying we should do this? Is he saying people did do this? What on earth is happening? That's something we're not going to have nearly as much confidence in. We might doubt our understanding of more then something like the resurrection. But I think really it's not so much a doubt as it is a question. What does that mean? That's different than saying, "The Bible clearly teaches the resurrection of Jesus, and I'm not so sure about that." That's a doubt, the former is a question and there's a fuzzy overlap in the middle, but I hope walking through that maybe gives us a little bit of a framework to think through.
You know what's interesting? Some people have said multiple things about doubt. For instance: where there's certainty there's no room for faith, so doubt actually strengthens our faith. I think if that's the direction someone's coming at this from, that's dangerous because faith is not a way of knowing, faith is trust in what has been revealed or in the person who has revealed it, namely God in Christ, and so we can have certainty and strong faith.
Isn't it interesting that the apostles had what you might say is some of the strongest faith we've seen after the resurrection, and when they encountered the risen Lord, and they had certainty, they saw him, they touched him, they watched him eat fish, and that drove their conviction with their ministry, they had certainty and strong faith. There are people out there who will pit those things against each other. I don't think that's helpful. Some people also will say that, "Well if you didn't have faith, you wouldn't actually be doubting." I think that's dangerous. Jesus criticizes people for their lack of faith, and then goes on to say, "Why are you doubting?" In James, James is talking of the person who's going through trials and who would ask of God, and he says, "But he must ask in faith, without doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave on the sea, blown and tossed around by the wind." We actually have doubt and faith juxtaposed here, set in opposition to each other. These are not the same thing, they're opposite ends of a spectrum in some ways.
Now I think we can cash this out, where there's some nuance there. For instance, I may have some doubts, but I am still going to act in faith, in trust. But if I had much more trust, I would have less doubts. I think of a little child who's about to jump off of a table into her daddy's arms, and so does she have a doubt that he's going to catch her? No. Now she may, she may at some point be a little tentative, and she may still jump. She might have some doubt like, "Oh, this is uncomfortable, I'm not so sure," but she still acts in trust. The stronger your faith, the less doubts you have. They are on a continuum together. They are opposite ends in some way, of the continuum. The person who has massive doubt is not going to trust that thing that they're doubting.
When I come to an old bridge walking through the woods, and that thing looks if I stood on that, especially after my holiday eating, I'm might fall through, I'm not going to walk on the bridge. I've got doubts, I do not exhibit trust in the bridge. On the other hand, I might come to something in the woods and it's shiny and it's stainless steel. Gosh, that thing looks like you could drive a tank over it. I have no doubts and so I act in trust, not much trust, and I walk across the bridge.
All of this to say, the Bible nowhere presents doubt as a good thing. It doesn't. It never says, "You should doubt." It says in Jude, to rescue those who are doubting, to have mercy on those who doubt, to snatch others out of the fire, the fire of probably doubt and temptation and bad beliefs and things like that, but never does it commend doubt. Never does it commend skepticism. We shouldn't encourage people to doubt, and this should help those of us who currently do not struggle with doubt, and how we approach those who do. We do not need to encourage them in their doubts, we need to encourage them to work through them. We don't need to condemn that person, certainly not, and we'll talk a little bit about how Jesus and scripture talks to those who are doubting, but nonetheless, we have to start with the affirmation that doubt is not a good thing.
There are many things in life that are not good. That's not picking on someone. Some people in this conversation online about doubt right now, do not want to say doubt is bad because they don't want to alienate the doubter. Well what if we apply that same reasoning in other places? Should we not say to the person who's a murderer, "murdering is bad." Well we don't want to offend that person. See, that logic doesn't work. We can tell someone that, "What you're doing is bad, or what you're experiencing is not good, and let's help you work through it." In fact to say, "You know what? I've been there. I've been in that situation. I know that that situation feels horrible. I don't want you to go through what you're going through." But some people today actually encourage others to stay in their doubts. They think doubt and skepticism is a good place to live intellectually and emotionally. It's not. The Bible commends trust, active trust, being convinced. God revealed himself and his word so that we could know. In some ways, doubt is a refusal to believe what God has said.
Now is that always a conscious choice? Like, "Well God said this. Oh, i don't like that. I'm going to refuse to believe that." No, a lot of times, the thing we believe and do not believe aren't as much consciously chosen. We don't just see beliefs out there on a platter and say, "Oh, I like that one and that one, and I'm going to pass on that one." No, we don't so much choose our beliefs in that direct of a way, but we can choose our beliefs in some ways: We can work towards a belief in something. That's the question when we walk with someone who's doubting, how are we going to encourage them to work through their doubts? Or as Tim Keller has said, "Are we going to encourage them to doubt their doubts?” Are we going to help them work through their questions? We should not alienate the person who's doubting, not at all, but we must start from the affirmation that doubt is not a good thing.
Now to the person who's doubting, like I said, I've been there, I understand. It's interesting, when we look at Jesus talk with the doubters, more often than not, he's not affirming doubt's a good thing, he doesn't say, "Oh, you should be comfortable where you're at," but what he does is he has mercy on them. I think of Thomas. After the resurrection, Thomas basically says, "Unless I touch his hands and his feet and his side, and feel the holes, I'm not going to believe." Some have read this passage and said, "Well see, Jesus is good with doubt because he actually reveals himself and lets Thomas touch him." I think we have to be careful here because just because Jesus condescended and indulged Thomas in doubt, that doesn't mean the doubt was a good thing. What it means is Jesus is a merciful savior.
This actual application for both groups of people we're talking about today, those who are doubting and those who are working through their doubts is that Jesus is a merciful savior, Jesus understands how we are. He created us, he knows how sin has affected our minds, and ultimately I do think doubt can be sin. If God has revealed himself and we refuse to believe him at his word, that's sin, but you know what? There's forgiveness in Christ.
I think of all the examples of sinners who came to Christ, whether it was their doubt or their sexual sin or their theft, or all of those things, he had mercy on those people. There is repentance available for everything, but behind this is also this idea that sin is not always something that's consciously chosen. We have sinful desires that come out of us, that we don't immediately control, and yet they're still sinful. Scripture has no concept of for something to be sin, it must be consciously and willfully chosen.
We're guilty in Adam of sin that we didn't commit. Like I mentioned a minute ago, we have hate and anger and things that come out of us, that yes we're responsible for, but in the moment, we don't always choose. I think it's the same way with doubt. Due to living in a fallen world and being fallen people and all of those things, doubt can occur, but the question is how are we going to respond.
For the person who walks with the doubter, as Jude says, are you going to have mercy and walk with them, and snatch them from the fire? Because we realize that what people believe is actually really important. Your beliefs about Jesus and his work on the cross are the most important things you could have beliefs about. They're the most import things that you need to work through your doubts on. For those who are doubting, read the picture of Jesus in scripture. Understand how faith and doubt is talked about, and understand that the Lord who died on the cross, (which maybe something you're struggling with doubting, I've been there) but that same person can have mercy on you for your doubt.
But I've also been there like I said, and I know it's an uncomfortable place to live. In some ways, the existential pain, the angst of working through beliefs that seem to be crumbling, it's worse than physical suffering in some ways. Your whole framework for understanding the world might be breaking and falling apart, but don't stay there. Don't just wallow in that, and don't choose your beliefs based on what you like. Don't choose the direction you're going to set down based on what feels good, but sit done and try to find out what is true.
I had to do that. I had to stop living with the tension of teaching a Bible study, playing in the band at church, and yet believing that all of this stuff didn't make a lick of sense. I had to say, "I can't live like this," so I read non-Christians who made a case for their Atheism, and I read actual good, intellectual Christians who made a case for Christianity, and I realized that in spite of not liking things about Christianity (and I don't think that's a good thing to not like the truth) I came to determine that Christianity was true. I needed to be honest enough with myself and those around me to actually believe what was true in spite of how I felt.
That is what we need to encourage people to do if we're walking with the doubters. If we are the doubter, we need to take our doubt seriously. Why wouldn't we doubt our doubts too? Why wouldn't we look at what other people have had to say, and analyze the evidence? Do the due diligence that you deserve. As someone created in the image of God, what you believe is really important and your emotional and spiritual health is important, so do the work, read, study, find someone who will walk with you, maybe someone who's been through that before and has perspective and who 1), isn't going to coddle you and your doubt, but 2), is going to have mercy and walk with you in love on that.
Both responses are necessary, both understandings of doubt are necessary. One, it's not a good thing, but two, we should work through it and likely we'll need to be honest enough with ourselves to say that the things that our mind is struggling to believe perhaps, our heart doesn't like. Often that's where this starts. That's where it started for me. I didn't like certain things, and so they started to appear like they did not make sense. I think when we walk with people who doubt, we have to be in tune with that too.
But one last thing to the people who shepherd others and who walk with people who doubt. Questions are not necessarily doubts, and even of they are, we don't need to villainize people. I can't tell you how many people I've talked with who had questions in high school, and were shunned. "Oh well, you just need to believe. You just need to have faith." That sort of response is not helpful. I think of Jesus' response to Thomas, and this is someone who had walked with Jesus, so it's not this idea that just someone sight unseen said, "Well hmm, is that Jesus?" No, Thomas really wanted to touch him. I think that's an extreme standard of proof, and nonetheless, Jesus walked with him through that. We need to be willing to do the same. Don't demonize those who doubt. Have mercy on them, walk through them with love, just like the lord did.
Questions are something to be answered, not shunned. When someone says, "Well how does it make sense that science says the Earth is 4.54 billion years old, and yet Christians say it's 6000 years old? How does that make sense? Aren't we wrong?" Don't just shun that person, sit down. Maybe you need to do some research yourself, but walk with them through that. That's a discipleship opportunity for them, and honestly, for you.
In summary, wrapping this up, doubt's not a good thing, but we don't demonize those who doubt. Questions are different than doubt. Saying, "What does that mean?" Is different than saying, "I don't believe that," or, "I'm not so sure that's true." But be not mistaken, the more we're convinced, the stronger our trust will be, and so for the person who's struggling, work through that, you'll end up with a stronger trust in Jesus. For the person who's walking with someone, help them work through that, they'll end up with a stronger trust in Jesus.
]]>I'm someone who thinks about communication a fair amount. Now you might be unsurprised by that. I write, I speak, but I often sit in church and I think, "How are the words that are being said from the pulpit or the stage right now, how are they connecting with someone who's been a Christian for 30 years, not been a Christian at all, or is a new Christian?"
When I talk with other people I try to reflect on those conversations and say, "Now how did they seem to understand this point when I made it? Or how did they understand what this other person said?" All of this to hopefully further the cause of Christ, because I want to communicate as clearly as possible, and I hope you do too.
There are a few different aspects of communication. For communication to take place there must be two people, someone doing the speaking or communicating and the person then receiving the communication. But then there's the content of the communication. That's really important. Christianity has a definite content to our communication. We have the truths laid down in scripture, of the Gospel, and of our Christian worldview, and the things we've worked out from that also.
There's another aspect to communication, and that's what I want to talk about today. That's how we communicate, the tone with which we communicate. We talk all about content on this podcast, and we should. Oftentimes we as Christians are not as equipped in conversation as we should be to communicate the right content in response to the questions or objections of our non-Christian friends, neighbors, coworkers, or what have you. Let's talk about our tone and how we communicate today.
To do that we're going to go to what may be a familiar passage, 1 Peter 3:15, which says,
“Set Christ apart as lord in your hearts and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks about the hope you possess. Yet, do it with courtesy and respect, keeping a good conscience so that those who slander your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame when they accuse you. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if God wills it, than for doing evil. Because Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, to bring you to God."
There's a lot there. It doesn't just say “be prepared to give an answer.” That's often easy for some of us more left-brained people. It says do that with “courtesy and respect, keeping a good conscience.”
Now some of you may do better with the courtesy and respect part of things but not so much with the give an answer sort of things. But you see, this verse doesn't present those as two options for the choosing based on my preference. It says I'm supposed to have content to my communication. I'm supposed to communicate certain truths, certain answers when people ask about my hope in Christ. But I should do that in a certain way, in a certain manner. I should do it with courtesy and respect in a way that doesn't damage my conscience.
Some people have all the right answers to all of the questions that could ever be asked, let's say, and they answer those questions in such a way so that Christianity does not look beautiful and appealing, that Christ does not look like a perfect, pure savior. What they end up doing is making Christianity look ugly, because of how they communicate what should be beautiful truths. They do it in such a way that it tarnishes their message.
We should not want that to happen, so we should ask ourselves, when we're communicating, or when we reflect back on having communicated, did my communication there testify to the greatness and beauty of Christ or did it detract from it? Obviously, this is going to be sort of a sliding scale. You could do this better or worse.
Also, along with how we communicate—doing it with love and respect and courtesy and those sorts of things—we also need to try and be clear. We need to realize that the culture today is trying to look for any excuse in some areas to hop on Christians, to say that they're bigots or hateful or that sort of thing. We need to be careful in how we communicate. I also think it's fair to hold people to account for what we have said.
For example, there's a case in front of the Supreme Court about a baker's right to decide what events he makes certain cakes for. Now the other side has claimed that he is discriminating against gays because he won't make a wedding cake for their same-sex ceremony. And he's saying, "No, I serve gay customers all the time. I just don't make all cakes for every event." You see here, there's a nuance there that's important. Yes, he refused to serve gay customers in one case, but it wasn't because they were gay. It was because of the event the cake was for, the celebration of something he thought was sinful. It also happens that this guy, Jack, doesn't make cakes for adult-themed parties either.
He's consistent here in not making all cakes for every event, but he will serve every customer, every type of customer. That's important. We need to be able to communicate that in a clear way because often the offense that people are taking is an offense at something that is not actually present.
Now I do think people would still be offended, some of them, by his refusal to make a cake for a same-sex ceremony, but nonetheless, you can't actually say and be faithful and truthful to the evidence that he is refusing to serve gay customers. That is not true. But here is where the rub is for some people like myself, and maybe like you.
I have this default disposition to think if I simply explain something well enough, people will agree with me. My wife can testify to this. Sometimes she'll say, "You just said that," and I'm like yeah, and I have to realize, oh, I'm explaining it again because I think implicitly, if I just explained it well enough, people will agree with me. There's a certain pride, I think, and hubris there, or there can be. But often we have to realize that sometimes, no matter how well we communicate the truths of the Gospel, the truths of Christianity, they will not be appreciated by society.
In fact, there are some truths that you can never say palatably enough for them to be accepted. We must swallow that tough pill. We must be comfortable with that hard truth or we will shy away from those encounters or think we did something wrong. No, it just so happens that sometimes the ideas themselves are offensive, not just the manner that they could be communicated in, that they will be rejected.
For instance, we can articulate clearly about Jack and his Masterpiece Cake Shop, that he doesn't make cakes for every event, but he will serve every customer and every type of customer. That will not be enough for people even if they understand that distinction. Just to clarify, many people do not understand that distinction about Jack. But nonetheless, even if they did, it may still be off-putting.
For instance, the idea that God punishes people in hell for their sins is off-putting to people, so we could try and articulate that better. The reason God punishes people is not so much they don't believe in him but because of their sin. He's not obligated to offer them a pardon. In fact, if Jesus never came to earth, God would still have been just in punishing sin in hell. Like any just judge, it would actually be wrong for him not to punish crimes. We can try and articulate that well, but you know what? That's still going to be off-putting.
Here's another example. The concept of what an evangelical has been in the news a lot recently. Maybe it's just my social circles, but there has been a lot of conversation about it. Because we're told evangelicals elected Donald Trump, the person who has bragged about sexually assaulting women, the person who doesn't seem to have a moral compass, it's said. It's also said that 85% of evangelicals voted for Roy Moore. There was that whole controversy and scandal around him. The question becomes what are evangelicals and who gets to say?
I have, with some of my friends, tried to contend for what an evangelical should be, someone who is committed to the Gospel and the infallibility of scripture, and the necessity of the cross and these certain things, which historically, in one form or another, have defined evangelicals.
But you know what, there's another aspect to that. I've had to realize that it doesn't matter how well we can articulate this, it will still be offensive to some people. Now the fact of the matter is, defining what an evangelical is is actually a very hard task, and I don't think there's one definition. We may say that there's something it should mean or that it used to mean, but the fact of the matter is, it means something different today. Perhaps we'll talk more about that in the future.
What I had to realize is there are caricatures out there of what an evangelical is. What that doesn't mean is, if I just explained what we are well enough, that those people would somehow be okay with it. Because the people who are not Christians and are offended by Christians voting for someone like Roy Moore or Donald Trump would still be offended by the exclusive claim of the Gospel that there is salvation in no other name. They would still be offended by scripture's proclamation that correct sexual intercourse is only between one man and one woman for one lifetime. They would be offended because we affirm that God created everything, not a naturalistic, unguided process. The offense is still present. If it's not one thing it will be another. So we must communicate with grace and humility and courtesy and respect like the 1 Peter passage says, but we must also be prepared that no matter how well we communicate, it will not be accepted by our culture.
Tolerance and acceptance are culture’s highest virtues, and this often affects us as Christians implicitly. Kind of like a frog in a pot of slowly warming water, we become accustomed to this idea that we should be courteous and respectful of all ideas. But no! This verse says we should be courteous and respectful of all people. People deserve respect because they are created in the image of good. All people are equally valuable. But there are some really stupid ideas. The trouble for the Christian oftentimes is to take a stand on those ideas and communicate truth in a gracious way in the face of some ideas that are just utterly preposterous.
Now there are some ideas out there that we must grapple with, but nonetheless, how we communicate really matters. But what we communicate also really matters. We must have both of those.
As this passage says, it shouldn't surprise us when people disagree with us. Because, what is Peter saying here? "Do this communication with courtesy and respect. Keep a good conscience." Why? "So that those who slander your conduct in Christ may be put to shame." That shame may not come in this lifetime, by the way. That may be shame before the judgment seat of Christ. But nonetheless, he even says you can have the right answers, you can give an answer for the hope you possess, you can do it with courtesy and respect, you can keep a good conscience, but beware they will still slander your conduct in Christ. They will still accuse you. He goes on to say, "It's better to suffer for doing good." That's directly tied to this idea that even when we give an answer, even when we are courteous, even when we are loving, even when we are accepting of people, even if it's not ideas, we will still suffer for doing the good.
In 2018, we must be prepared for that. We must take account. We must count the costs of what fidelity to Christ may end up exacting from us, of the relationships that may be harmed. In spite of our loving nature and communication, the content may be offensive in and of itself. It may cost us a job. You may realize, I cannot work here, or you may be fired for your Christian convictions. Thankfully, in this country, still, the law is generally on the side of the Christian, though that's not as black and white as it used to be, when it comes to being fired for religious claims.
Nonetheless, we may pay intangible costs. We may be alienated in our neighborhood, all sorts of things. You may be ostracized at your school. You must count the costs because this time on earth will be brief. It really is. It seems like eternity to us but Paul says it is momentary. This affliction we feel now may feel heavy, but Paul says it is light. What he does say, also, is that eternity is long, and the weight of glory that is prepared for us, because of how we live now, if we live in fidelity to Christ, is great. It is weighty. Our suffering here is light, even if it's for doing good. Even if it's for communicating with courtesy and respect, our suffering, and suffering may still occur, is light.
When we have an eternal perspective, when we have a Gospel perspective on how we communicate and aren't naïve, thinking that if I just say it well enough, if I just say it nice enough, if I post it on Instagram with flowers around it, people will just accept it and they'll agree with me, or they won't be mean. No, that is likely not going to be the case. We still endeavor to communicate the grace that is found in the cross in a gracious way, but we do it understanding that the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians. The cross is a stumbling block. It is an offense.
Our job is to not add offense to it, to not add a stumbling block to it, to not make it seem more foolish to the world than it is. Be not mistaken, the cross is the wisdom of God. It just appears foolish to a world who has not has their eyes opened by the Spirit.
All of that to say, in 2018, let us count the costs of what fidelity to Christ may end up costing us. But for many of us, it might not cost us anything, yet. Let's still contend for the truthfulness of the Gospel, that content aspect, but let's do it with courtesy and respect. Let's keep a good conscience. Let's make the Gospel seem beautiful as it is. It doesn't need our help, but all too often we detract from the natural beauty and glory that it is seen to have when it's accurately presented through people who love God and are committed to lifting high his name and the Gospel.
I hope this has been encouraging to you. It's been encouraging to me. I need to be reminded of these things. It's easy for me to fall back into communicating truths and forgetting that there's a person on the other end of that. How we communicate is sometimes as important as the actual message we communicating.
I will talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>For this reason, I made a Chronological Bible Reading Plan Generator. You can choose how many days a week you want to read, how many chapters a day, and if you want to go through the NT along with the OT. Then, it will give you a PDF you can download or print with the schedule and boxes to check off as you go. You can use it below to make your own plan!
For some more encouragement on Bible reading, see this article "Marry the Bible" from Desiring God.
]]>The new year is almost upon us, and as often happens, people start thinking about how they're going to read their Bible in the new year. In this way I think new year's resolutions and those types of rhythms can be helpful if we look at them in terms of establishing long-term practices. If you're looking to say, "How can I read my Bible better in 2018?" and you didn't read it much in 2017, it would probably be wise not to choose a plan that has you reading the whole Bible in a year or that has you reading for 20 or 30 minutes a day. No, find something that's more approachable that you can actually fit into your life now and maybe grow over time.
Maybe your goal is to read five minutes a day in 2018, five days a week. Give yourself a two-day buffer. Maybe in 2019 you ratchet that up to 10 minutes a day, twice as much as you did in 2018. In other words, find something sustainable.
I also think when we read large chunks of scripture at a time and we're trying to make it through the Bible in a year, for instance, we're often not paying attention to, one, the details in the text that often have a lot of meaning, but two, often the overall arc of it. We're just moving so fast, we're not able to see how it all fits together.
To that end, I have actually designed a little Bible reading plan generator. You can say how many chapters you want to read a day from the Old Testament and from the New Testament and it will take you chronologically through the Bible at your own pace. You can say, "I don't want to read on Saturdays. I just want to read on weekdays and Sunday," or however that works out, and it will stretch it out.
For instance, you may come up with a chronological reading plan that takes you through three and a half years to accomplish, but it's probably much more easily able to be accomplished than if you tried to do it in a year. Your mileage may vary, but let's try and set reasonable goals that we can achieve in terms of our Bible reading for 2018.
Now, we're going to talk today, more to the point, about some ways we can have better conversations. The last four or five, maybe six, conversations I've had with someone who had questions about Christianity or wasn't a Christian, they had a fundamental issue, a kind of impasse that we came to that, if I hadn't identified, we would have continued to talk past one another.
Now I'm sure you understand what I mean by talking past one another. Often it happens even with two people who know each other well. One thinks that the other is talking about something different than they're actually talking about, and the conversation might go on for some time, and then each person's getting slightly more confused. Then at some point you realize we're not actually talking about the same thing.
This actually occurs in a certain way or two when we discuss religion and ethics and values and things like that. I was having a recent conversation over tacos late at night. It was interesting, we were talking about the existence of God and if he exists. This person said, "I don't think he does." I said, "We can demonstrate it this way___.” Then he said, "I don't think we can know." I said, "Which is it? Is it that you don't think there's a right answer or you don't think we can know what the answer is?"
The question took the guy back for a second. That's a really helpful question to ask because you don't know the type of person you're talking with today. Most people we are going to converse with don't have a formal philosophical framework of knowledge and how they know things. They're not going to be able to say, "Hey, I'm a moral objectivist," or something like that, (and we wouldn't expect them to because that'd be kind of weird, right?)
But people often have a hodgepodge of different beliefs about how they can actually believe things. They have different types of ways they think they can know or not know what's in the world, and we have to tease those out in conversation.
Because if I'm contending for the truth of the Gospel—that Jesus Christ was fully man and fully God, came to earth, lived a sinless life, went to the cross, and died for sinners—and this person doesn't think that that's true for everyone, then they'll be like, "Yeah, yeah, that's good, that's good, that's good," and they're thinking that's good for you. That's good for you, that's not good for me.
If there's not a right answer for everyone and I'm just arguing with this person in that way, then we're talking past each other. Now some people will think you can't know, but they'll just be saying, "Yeah, I don't think that happened,” and really behind that is this idea that they just don't think you can know. We have to get some answers to these questions. You know what? The last three people I've asked this question to, they haven't actually had a quick answer. They had to stop and think about it. When I asked them, "Do you think that there is a right answer or that there's not, and, do you think we can know or not know?" they had to stop and think and go, "Hmm, I'm not sure." They'd never considered that there could be a right answer to the question, one that is true for everyone and yet that they might not be able to know it.
Now when I say “not be able to know it,” I mean not be able to know it with what their current set of tools that provide them with knowledge. If your only tools in your toolbox are scientific tools, you will not be able to come to conclusions that science can't speak to. Science speaks to the natural world and things that are natural. It has no ability to speak directly to the supernatural. If you want to detect something supernatural, you can't use, on the face of it, a scientific tool. Science is very helpful for many things. But like if you try to plant plants with a hammer, you'll find it doesn't work too well because you're using the wrong tool for the job. It's the same way with tools of knowing and how we come to gain knowledge.
When I asked this person, "Do you think there's a right answer or not to questions of ethics and morals?" they said no. I said, "Okay, that's helpful." Then I said, "Are there any things that bother you about Christianity?" They said, "Yeah, it condemns gay people to hell." I said, "Well is there a right answer there? Is it actually always wrong to condemn gay people to hell? Because a minute ago you said there wasn't a right answer, and now you're talking like there is one that's true for everyone."
This took the person back and they had to think about it. What we'll often find, and this goes back to what I said a minute ago, is that people often have a hodgepodge of beliefs that don't fit together. On the one hand they may say there aren't right or wrong answers to moral questions, and then they'll say it's always wrong to condemn gay people to hell. (Christianity does not teach that gay people are condemned to hell by being gay (if by that we mean same-sex attracted). What it does teach is that our behaviors are indicative of our spiritual state. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 says a long list of types of people who engage in certain practices of behavior who will not inherit the kingdom of God. The Gospel is the same for the gay person as it is the straight person. There's not some special category there, and I don't think we articulate that very well. Maybe we'll think about it more in the future.)
But all of that to say, people often want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be able to say “no right answer,” and “these things are always wrong.” We've got to push them on that. We've got to identify that in the conversation because they probably have not identified that for themselves.
Now some people will say, "You know what? I guess there is a right answer." They might want to hold onto their intrinsic intuition that certain things are always right and always wrong. We want to encourage them to hold onto that, by the way. The right answer here is not that there isn't a right answer. The correct answer to the question is yes, there are certain things that are always right and certain things that are always wrong. That's something we know by being created in the image of God. Things are always right or always wrong because they're grounded in God's unchanging character. We want to encourage that type of intuition.
However, if the person says, "Well yes, there are things that are always right and always wrong. I just don't think we can know what they are," now we have a conversation about tools of knowledge, tools of learning. How would you determine if something was right and wrong? They might say, "Well, my feelings." We'll have to say, "Okay, have your feelings ever told you incorrectly about things? Or have your feelings told you something different than someone else's feelings?"
Now the fact that two things disagree doesn't mean that there isn't a right answer. It just means that we've gotten different pointers to what that answer might be. We have to evaluate those pointers on their merits. Just like if you interviewed two kids if there was a fight, and you said, "What happened here?" and one kid says, "Billy hit Johnny in the nose," and the other says, "Billy kicked Johnny in the knee," and we might say, "Okay, well, let's look at the evidence. Does Johnny's nose look red?" those types of things. Maybe the person that supposedly kicked him in the knee was actually in a wheelchair so he couldn't kick them in the knee. We have to evaluate claims based on their evidences.
So, are feelings a reliable pointer to truth. The answer there is often no. We can't just say homosexuality is wrong, for instance, or not wrong because we feel a certain way. Because many people have even changed their feelings over their lifetimes. There was a time in society when everyone agreed that it wasn't right. We're going to scratch off feelings as a good source of knowledge.
Then we can say, is it just something we all decide on? We've talked about this before numerous times on the podcast. I'm not going to rehearse it too much here. We're going to walk this person through the idea that it can't be consensus, because consensus changes over time. And also, if no one ever thought about rape, would rape still be wrong? If there was no consensus on rape, would rape still be wrong? The answer has to be yes, it would be.
Now how would we know that? We have to come back to this idea that God has revealed morality in two places. This will be objectionable to the non-Christian, and we just have to know that. But we also have to be able to point out that they're living inconsistently otherwise. They're going to affirm that there are objective moral truths, truths that are right or wrong regardless of how people think about them, and then they're going to deny, basically, any of the proposed options for how to ground those truths.
For instance, it can't be consensus, it can't be evolution. We've talked about that before. Survival of the fittest puts me first, not other people. It can't be any type of naturalistic grounding of morality and those sorts of things. What we have to come back to is that if you want to be a moral objectivist, if you want to think that moral claims are always right or always wrong for all people at all times to whom the claim applies, that claim must be grounded based on God's revealed standards of right or wrong. God has revealed those standards to us in the form of conscience. He has also revealed those standards to us in his word more accurately and fully and descriptively.
If you want to hold onto this idea that some things are always right and always wrong, the way that you come to know that cannot just be scientific. Science can't inform us about morality. It must take into account and be based on God's revealed word.
Let's quickly recap to get a bird's eye view of where we've been here, and then we'll draw it together.
We started out having a conversation about the existence of God, where a person said, "I don't think God exists." And we said, "Is there even a right answer to that question?" They had to think about it and they had to say, "No, I don't." I expanded that and said, "Do you think there are right answers to questions of God and religion and morality?" and they said no. And I said, "Now wait a second. Is it that there isn't a right answer or is it that we can't know?" They initially would probably say, "Well there isn't a right answer." Then we ask them some question that we're pretty sure we know how they'll answer, like, "Is it wrong to mistreat gay people?" "Well yes." "Well is that always wrong? Is there a right answer to that question?" They'll probably say yes. Now some people will say no, but most people will say yes, and they should.
We're going to say, "Wait a second, is the issue that there isn't a right answer or is the issue that we can't know?" Then they'll probably say, "I guess it's that we can't know." Then we have to evaluate the different ways we could know things and then ask them, how do they know the moral things they know. Why are they so convinced that mistreating a certain type of person is wrong?
When we evaluate all the options, consensus, evolution, my personal opinion, and those sorts of things, what we'll come up with is those don't work, so there must be something else that's objective such that the answer is always right and always wrong. Then we're going to have to say, "Have you considered that the ways you've been approaching learning about what is real might not show you all the options? If we're only looking at naturalistic explanations, we will not see the full picture."
Christianity actually gives you a baseline, a foundation for understanding how things could be always right and always wrong. God is the ground for morality and he does not change. It also tells us how we can know what is right and wrong. God has created in us this moral knowledge, this conscience. He's imprinted it on us. It's a feature of him creating us in his image. More than that, he's told us in his word. That word doesn't change. It is an objective source of knowing.
At the end of the day, we're still going to have to probably talk with this person more about the fact that they believe certain things are always right and always wrong, and yet they can't explain why that is. That should point them to the fact that they are created by God in his image, and that they're living in the world denying some ways that they actually know certain things. They're living in the world and kind of out of touch with it. They're assuming certain things are available to them in their worldview that if they were consistent would not be available to them.
However, they're available in the Christian worldview. They make sense in our worldview. And we can explain why they are there and how they make sense of them.
So, two questions to have in conversation: Is there a right answer to this question? Depending on how they answer, we know how to work with that. Is the issue that we can't know or is it that there isn't a right answer? Because those are different. Something could exist and us not know about it.
I hope you get off to a good start reading the Bible or whatever type of new spiritual discipline you want to commit to, if you do, in this new year. Thanks for listening to Unapologetic in 2017. I hope you continue on in 2018. Thanks for sending in your questions. Feel free to do that even more. That helps make the podcast tailored to the people who listen. I think everyone appreciates that.
I will talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Which virgin birth do you believe in? Atheism offers at least four, and Christianity offers one.
It's that time of year again. At Christmas, we remember and celebrate the incarnation, the taking on of flesh, by Jesus Christ, the adding of human nature to his divine nature in the incarnation. The virgin birth is a very important part of that. We'll talk about that a little at the end of the episode today.
It's interesting, society thinks that Christians are the only ones who believe in a virgin birth. While that may be true if we're talking about the virgin birth of a human being, atheism, at least in general, has a few different virgin births that it believes in, even if they would not describe it by that term.
I think it's helpful for us to be aware of how different people think about different things. We're going to talk about at least four different virgin births that atheism believes in and ascribes to.
The first one, and the most notable, is that atheism believes in the virgin birth of the universe. The whole universe came from nothing, for no cause, for no purpose, on atheism. The big bang theory, from a secular perspective, is that everything came from nothing, and nothing is not like a small something. It's the absence of anything. Everything came about with no cause, for no purpose, on atheism. That's a virgin birth of everything that exists. Christians get criticized for believing in the "supernatural" when it comes to the virgin birth of a human being. How could a human come from nowhere, from no father?
But atheism affirms that everything that exists came from nothing. They might try to explain this in terms of natural laws. In fact, Stephen Hawking has said, because of the laws of nature, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Let that sentence just ring and hang in the air a minute. Something can't create itself. It would have had to exist in order to create itself, but if it existed it wouldn't need to create itself. That doesn't work. It's philosophical nonsense.
But more than that, we can't have this idea that there are natural laws if there's no nature. And more than that, as many people, Christians and non-Christians have pointed out, a natural law isn't actually a law that prescribes how something must work. It's more of a description of how things have worked in the past. For the Christian, we understand that a natural law is simply a description of how God has sustained his creation in the past. Creation is not self-sustaining and self-actualizing. On the Christian worldview, God created everything. Now that idea of God is repugnant to many people, but isn't the alternative view, that everything came from nothing, isn't that just intellectual suicide?
Now non-Christians will say it's the Christian who creates intellectual suicide, but we at least can explain the cause of everything. If people ask about what caused God, that's a category error. Because God, by definition, is an uncreated being. If you don't have something like God in your belief system, you're left with an infinite number of causes. What caused the cause that caused the cause that caused the cause? All of that to stay there must be a first uncaused cause, an unmoved mover. God makes sense of that. I don't have to understand everything about God as we've talked about before, to be justified in believing that he exists, and more than that, that he created the universe.
Atheism affirms a virgin birth of a universe, which makes no sense, and Christianity affirms that God created the universe.
The second virgin birth of atheism is life. Life came about from non-life in an evolutionary worldview. No one can explain how this can happen adequately. This is actually called abiogenesis, from non-life, life. But how did this happen? We don't know. No one can actually demonstrate this, because if someone could demonstrate this in the lab, what they would not have shown is abiogenesis. They would have shown intelligent design. An intelligent scientist puts certain ingredients together and sets up certain conditions, and low and behold life comes. We've just demonstrated intelligent design.
Life comes about from non-life, complexity from non-complexity, on atheism, at least in general. This is a virgin birth of life.
But when Christians affirm the virgin birth of a single life, that's intellectually not credible, but the virgin birth of all life? Very credible, we're told. That's obviously a gross contradiction and inconsistency.
But there’s a third virgin birth on atheism, so not just virgin birth of the universe, not just the virgin birth of all life. Morality actually somehow comes about from nothing on atheism, but exists. This is where I do want to try and be fair to atheists. There are a wide variety of views on atheism about morality. Some people would say there is no morality. Some people would say we make our own morality. Some people would say there are actual objective right and wrongs on atheism. "Killing is wrong for all people at all times. It doesn't matter what culture they're in," some people would say on atheism. Now many atheists, if they've thought about their beliefs consistently, would not actually affirm that type of belief. They might say that evolution has created in us moral desires and moral intuitions. So it kind of came from nowhere, for no cause, once again.
Universally, we know and affirm that morality is best when we put other people first. To help someone at the sacrifice to yourself is seen to be morally good. To put yourself above others is seen and affirmed almost universally to be morally bad.
But what does evolution do? Does evolution create in animals a desire to put other people first? No, it creates in them a desire to put themselves first, because evolution-random mutation and natural selection-is about getting a single individual's genes into the next generation. It's about success in procreating. Putting other people first, as a rule, does not help someone, an organism or a human, procreate. Taking things, killing, those types of things are most effective at getting rid of obstacles to procreation, and yet we consider those types of behaviors and traits to be immoral, not moral.
Once again we're left with saying, what view best explains reality? The idea that somehow humans have this moral intuition and knowledge (which they often suppress or behave inconsistently with, and that just came from nowhere),That's view A, the atheism view. What about the Christian view, that God is the source and ground of morality, and that we are created in his image and therefore we're moral creatures. We have moral knowledge. We can discover and learn moral truths. We have moral intuitions and we have guilt when we behave immorally, as we should. If you're guilty, you should feel guilty.
Once again, we're left with the question of what best explains the world as we see it and experience it. Atheism either says morality's not real and objective or they would say, "We just decide for ourselves," which is not real morality. If it could change tomorrow by a vote, it's not actual morality. Or perhaps they'll say that it came about through evolution, which once again, where did it come from? How did that happen? How do we get immaterial obligations like “I have to be nice to someone” from a materialistic process like evolution? There isn't a satisfactory explanation for that. No, in other words, morality has a virgin birth in culture.
Now maybe I'm pushing that metaphor a little, but nonetheless, this is something that does not fit well in an atheistic worldview. Virgin birth of the universe, virgin birth of life, virgin birth of morality.
The last virgin birth we’ll talk about that doesn't fit in Christianity is that of human dignity. In fact, we have heard in recent years this new type of crime that's been spoken of called a crime against human dignity. It might be where you call someone a name or maybe where you refuse to serve them a cake because they want the cake for a certain type of event (like we've seen recently a case that went to the Supreme Court was over a Christian baker who refused to make cakes for same-sex ceremonies and adult-themed parties and different things like that. The people in this case have said that he harmed their dignity as humans.)
On atheism, broadly speaking, human dignity has a virgin birth. We can't explain why humans have it and other animals don't. Maybe it's because we're more complicated or advanced. That's just a decision we made. There's no actual dignity there on atheism. It's just a decision that's made corporately. Same idea with morality.
Multiple years ago when the case that went to the Supreme Court that legalized same-sex marriage, Obergefell, was being argued in oral arguments, what was said is that it was the government's goal and job to bestow dignity on its citizens and its couples by conferring on them the right to marriage. It was said same-sex couples suffered harm to their dignity because they weren't allowed to marry each other like heterosexuals were, they said.
Now I will say the law has never imposed a gay or straight test to see if you could marry. It has only said what types of people, what types of couples, were going to be created. Was the couple going to have two people of opposite sex ? That actually says nothing about their sexual orientation at all, so it did not discriminate based on orientation, it discriminated based on results and action. That's a separate conversation for a separate day. Nonetheless, in arguing that, it was said that not allowing these people to marry harmed their dignity.
We've also heard that people are denied dignity if they can't end their life when they want to end it perhaps they're going through some type of terminal condition and they don't want to let that condition take its course. They want to kill themselves now, either themselves or with the aid of a physician. What that's called is death with dignity, people say.
What this says is that to fight for life and to let life take its natural course is not dignified, and that dignity is something we can increase in ourselves or detract from ourselves or take away from other people. Because, on atheism, dignity is not conferred by God. In fact, the reason humans have dignity in a Christian worldview, and I think this makes most sense of everything we see and experience, is that God has created us in his image and therefore not by decision of a group or a vote, not by how I feel about myself-none of those things-I have dignity because my creator has ascribed dignity to me. I have dignity because I bear his image. As God has dignity, I bear his image, I have dignity also. I am worthy of respect not because of how I act, or my height, or my abilities, but because I'm created in the image of the holy almighty God.
Here's where I want us to step back and ask a question. People are searching for meaning. They seem to believe that life should be meaningful. They seem to believe that it's wrong to harm other people, in other words, morality exists. They seem to believe that people have dignity. Once again, that makes sense. Christianity makes better sense of all of those innate moral desires and intuitions than atheism. Christianity explains why we have them, because we were created in God's image. It explains why man actually is dignified, why man actually has this moral sense. It explains why we're here, and yet often the atheist is inconsistent and goes through life believing he has dignity, believing he can do moral things that are good and bad, and that moral things can be done to him that are good and bad. He believes life has a purpose and yet his worldview supports none of that. Because on atheism, you have to invent dignity. You have to invent morality. On atheism, life somehow came from non-life with no proposed explanation, and no reproducibility.
The universe, everything that exists, came from nothing. And yet Christians are the ones who are told that we're intellectually backwards for believing in miracles when atheism has so many things that it takes for granted that were just created out of thin air philosophically speaking.
I hope that's given you a snapshot of how atheism actually has several virgin births, so to speak. Some of those push the metaphor a little more than others. But nonetheless, things that came out of nowhere.
Let’s actually talk a little bit about the virgin birth of Jesus. It is Christmas, after all.
In Matthew 1 we see that an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
"Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit." We see here affirmed that Mary had a child conceived by the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere in Matthew we're told that she was a virgin when she conceived.
There have been Christians in recent years who have said, "You know what? The virgin birth is not that important. It's not distinctive of the faith." But the virgin birth is actually extremely closely tied to the Gospel, and here's what I mean. We can't just separate out the different miracles described in scripture like they're a grab bag. Because often they're attached to the overarching plan of redemption that God has been working from the garden all the way to the cross, and is still working today.
Here's what I mean. We see in Galatians 4 where Paul says,
"When the appropriate had come, God sent out his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might be adopted as sons with full rights."
Herein we see one of the ramifications of the Gospel is that we're adopted as sons. We have that right to be sons because Christ redeemed us. How did he do that? Because he was born and lived under the law perfectly. We needed a man, a full human man with a full human nature, to live under the law to be our representative to God the Father.
That's why Jesus was born of a woman. He was actually a man. He was truly man. But, he had to also be fully divine because no one else could have lived perfectly under the law. He could not have Adam's original corruption, which is why, while he's born of Mary, he's conceived by the Holy Spirit. There's a break in that line of passing on the original corruption that Adam suffered and passed on to all of his descendants, that they were born dead in sin. Jesus was not born dead in sin but he was truly man and he was truly God. That truth finds part of its source in the virgin birth.
Had there not begin a virgin birth, there would not have been a person like Jesus who was truly man and truly God.
If there is no man who's truly man and truly God, he can't go to the cross to be our redemption, and then we can't be adopted as sons. You see, the Gospel actually has as a part of it the idea of the virgin birth. We can't separate the person of Jesus from the work of Jesus. We can't separate those things from the Gospel and we can't separate the virgin birth from any of that either.
Christianity does affirm a virgin birth, a virgin birth of the savior who came to save men from their sins. We looked at that last week.
But atheism has several virgin births, several things that just pop into existence. Now the virgin birth of Jesus actually has a cause and someone who made it happen. We're told that God did that through the Holy Spirit. Atheism and the creation of the universe has no creator, no cause, no purpose, and actually everything came from no thing. That makes much less sense.
This Christmas, let's be prepared to talk about the virgin birth and why it's important, and let's understand how Christianity makes better sense of reality. That should just make us praise God all the more. Be prepared to articulate these truths with our non-Christian neighbors and coworkers, because people are open to hearing more about Jesus at this time than any other time of year. The best way to get people to understand the Gospel is not always through intellectual argument, though for many people that's an important part. It's also through arguments that touch their heart, and people's hearts at this time of year are often more open than at any other time of year to hearing about the Gospel. Let's be faith stewards with the opportunities God has given us.
]]>Christmastime is a great time to talk about evil.
I hope everyone is having a good and cheery and reflective advent and Christmas season. Merry Christmas to you!
I figured this season would be a good time to talk about evil because that makes sense, right? Presents and gifts and tinsel and a little baby in a manger, and... evil. They all fit together, right?
Well, actually, in a surprising way I think they do.
If you read the Christmas story, you are struck by the fact that even if it were a fictional story, it's an actual good story. There are heroes and villains, and there's suspense and drama because what we see in the Christmas story is that a ruler tried to prevent it from happening.
Herod, hearing of the birth of Jesus, whom the wise men wanted to go worship, sets out to actually kill all of the boys that would be the age of Jesus. So there's even evil in the Christmas story, the Christmas account. “Story” is an interested word because often stories are what we tell our children before bed, and they're fictitious. Now, we can also talk about true stories, but sometimes it's actually more helpful to use the word account, or to at least clarify when we're talking with someone that we think this thing that we're talking about from the Bible, this "Bible story" actually happened. It's an account, like you would read in some sort of testimony. It's recorded for us to understand events that actually took place in time.
So as a part of the Christmas account, or story, there's even evil in it. Evil is not far from Christmas, but there's a greater point to be made here. I actually think if someone raises the problem of evil around the Christmas season, it's fair to ask them, "What do you mean by evil?" In fact, we should ask this question all of the time when someone complains about evil in the world. There are a couple different paths we could go. We could actually talk about evil as a philosophical notion, what it is and how is it grounded?
What makes something evil, and the idea that evil is actually kind of the opposite of good and you can't have good without God. So to complain about evil actually presupposes the existence of God. We've talked about that numerous times before because the problem of evil is probably the most common objection to Christianity, both from Christians in their internal struggle with this, which is understandable, and from non-Christians.
But there's another way to talk about evil. I actually think we should, perhaps, do this more often than we talk about it abstractly when we're trying to get to the gospel in a conversation. Here's what I mean:
It's easy to talk about evil out in the world. Look at the wars in the Middle East, or look at genocides in Africa, or things like that. It's a totally different sort of thing, oftentimes, for a person to consider the evil that exists in their own heart. So I think it's fair to ask the person, "What is evil to you? Could you give me some examples also?" (Those are different questions.) Perhaps they give you examples like rape and murder, and genocide and things like that, but you could also ask about theft and lying. Have you done those things? Have you committed things that even on your own definition would be evil?
Of course, the person, if they're honest, will have to say, "Yes." Then, this is where we can point out that, "You know what? Evil is not just an out-there problem, is it? It's a problem in my heart. It's a problem actually in your heart by your own admission. We all have done evil things," and so the problem of evil is not an abstract problem. It's a very personal problem because it effects us all. This person probably believes evil should be punished, or they wouldn’t have brought the complaint is that God doesn't do something about evil. Well if God should do something about evil, then shouldn't God do something about the evil I have committed? If I have committed evil, that means I am guilty of committing evil.
What should happen to guilty people? Wouldn't it actually be an act of evil not to punish guilty people? The answer would have to be yes. If someone is a just judge, they punish crimes. They punish evil things. If you're an unjust judge, you let guilty people go free. That's what happens in corrupt countries where the judicial system and the legal system is corrupted as criminals run the counrty, because justice is not done and evil is not punished.
We all revolt and cry out against that when we hear of that sort of thing. It is an intrinsic reaction in the human heart that justice should be done. So when we're talking with someone who complains about evil, we can ask them, "Should evil be punished? Should people who hurt other people be punished? Should they be made to pay for their crimes?" I think the answer is going to be yes if they're honest. We need to also remember and point out that this means their crimes deserve to be punished. Our crimes deserve to be punished, and therein brings us to Christmas.
Here, we find our passage for today in Matthew 1:18, which says,
“Now, the birth of Jesus Christ happened this way. While his mother, Mary, was engaged to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Because Joseph, her husband, was a righteous man and because he didn't want to disgrace her, he intended to divorce her privately. When he had contemplated this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife because the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'"
This is key.
“’She will give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.'"
Isn't that interesting? In spite of the evil that was even done before the birth of Christ and after the birth of Christ in that Christmas narrative, what we see is that the reason Jesus came into the world is so closely tied with evil. He actually comes to save people from their sins. What is sin? Evil.Perhaps, a more personal term for evil.
It's easy to talk about evil as an abstract notion like we've talked about, but when we talk about it as sin, well sin seems more connected to a justly deserving punishment that's required for it. Sin is something I do. Sin is something you do. So right here, when the angel is cluing Joseph and Mary in on the birth of Jesus, he's telling them explicitly why Jesus came, and it's related to the problem of evil. So Christmas is a very important step in God's plan to do away with evil.
Easter, you could also say, is part of God's plan to do away with evil, so when people complain about evil, let's not just talk about it as this abstract notion. Let's talk about it and use it as a bridge to the gospel, to the Christian story of reality. In the Christmas story, right here, we're told what it all means, and why did this baby came and why we celebrate this season around December and December 25th? We're told that it is part of God's plan to do away with evil, to do away with sin, to save people from their sin because remember, evil is sin. Sin requires punishment because a just judge will punish evil, and only an unjust and evil judge doesn't punish evil.
So we, who have committed sin, justly deserve punishment from God, and yet this is where we have to go a little beyond the Christmas story, right? We have to actually go to Easter and what Paul tells us looking backwards about what happened there in terms of filling out the gospel, but that's when we have the opportunity to say, "Jesus came to save you from your sins." That implies you have sins that you need to be saved from, and here's how he did that:
He didn't just come at Christmas. He goes to the cross at Easter, and at Easter we celebrate the fullness of what Christ actually came to accomplish and started accomplishing here at Christmas. So this Christmas season, I would encourage you, if you're paying attention when people talk, and you're talking with non-Christians, and they talk about evil, use that as a bridge to the Christmas story. If people are talking about Christmas, and you know they are non-Christian, use that as a bridge to talk about evil to then talk about the gospel, and even Easter.
These things link together biblically and scripturally, and we should link them together in our conversation to show that the same baby who came in a manger was not just a baby. He was the King, but he's also a savior. He's the Savior of people who place their trust in him because all of us have a sin problem. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God in Jesus Christ— that baby who came in a manger—is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Everyone who calls on the name of that baby in a manger—who grew to be a man, who was truly God and truly man, who went to the cross and died for sin—will be saved.
That's the good news of Christmas. Not simply that a baby came. That's exciting, but it's that a baby came to die and save his people from their sins. If Easter hadn't happened, Christmas would be unimportant. It would be unimpressive. Another baby born, oh that's great. But this baby is important and special because from the very beginning, as we're told here in Matthew, he will save his people from their sins.
Let's not just talk about evil as something out in the world. Let's always make it personal for the person, and this season, connect it to Christmas. It's a great segue because Jesus came to deal with evil. If Jesus does not deal with your evil, you will have to deal for your evil. The punishment of sin is justly death from a just judge. People need to understand that, that Christmas is only a happy time, in some ways, for those who are in Christ.
For everyone else, it should remind us that the baby who came in the world is the King who will come back to judge the world in righteousness. We must present both of those. A gospel with only the happy parts is not the gospel. The good news is only good news if you understand the bad news. So let's make evil a personal thing in love, in kindness and out of concern for people, and out of worship and love for God, that more people would come to praise Him and appreciate what He came to do thousands of years ago in a manger and ultimately on a cross.
Well, I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Evangelicals have an interesting relationship with the concept of works, because on the one hand, we want to clearly and confidently affirm that a person is saved by grace through faith, and it's not of themselves, it's not from their works. Works, at least our works, do not contribute to our salvation; it is Christ's work and our faith in his work on the cross, and in him more specifically, that brings about salvation.
But then, on the other hand, how do we live after that? We would correctly affirm that our works after salvation are important, they do matter, not that we could lose our salvation if we didn't do them, but that we would show ourselves to never have had it if we don't live out our supposed faith.
All of this also has another dimension, because a lot of times, when it comes to evangelism, and the sharing of our faith and the gospel, some people put a very high emphasis on works. And actually, my point for today is that many people unknowingly, and perhaps unintentionally, are proclaiming a gospel of works by the way they live and by the way they approach sharing the gospel. I'll explain a little more about what I mean by that in a minute.
Along the way, we're going to have to answer some questions, like what does it even mean to share the gospel? What does it mean to witness or be a good witness? Can you love someone well, and not share the gospel with them? These are they types of things we're going to answer. But just so you understand right where I'm coming from:
If you're sharing the gospel only by how you live, you're not actually sharing the gospel at all.
If you're just sharing the gospel with only your works, you're actually proclaiming a gospel of works.
I'm not saying if you try and live in a godly way, and you also use words to communicate the gospel, that you're communicating a false gospel. No, hopefully we do live in such a way that our works are a testament to our message. But if the only message you're conveying is done via your works, and let's even say they're really good works, you're communicating a gospel of works, which in some ways is a false gospel. I'm not saying you're a heretic, or anything like that. I'm simply saying if we are doing that, we are not fulfilling what Christ expects of us and has revealed for us to do in scripture.
Let me try and support that point a little. The first thing I would say is that works are not self-interpreting. When you do something good for someone, they don't know why you're doing it. You could hold the door for someone so that you look good in front of your girlfriend. You could hold the door for someone because you have compassion on them because they're walking with a cane. The person doesn’t know why you're doing a good work. They don't know if you're holding the door for them out of compassion because you're a Christian, and Christ says we should have compassion on people.
When someone simply does good works, unless they open their mouth and use words to communicate, we don't know why they're doing the works, and that's really important. If we're going to talk about communicating the gospel—the good news of what Jesus came to do for sinners, and who God is and who we are, and our sin and depravity before him, and the necessity of Jesus coming to Earth and living a perfect life, and going to the cross, and dying and rising again, and paying for the sins of his people— you can't communicate that only through works. It doesn't matter how many works you do and how good they are. You can't communicate the gospel through works. If you're intending to, it's not the actual gospel you're communicating, it is something else, because works are not self-interpreting. They need words to put them in their context, so we understand why you did what you did, what was your intent, and that sort of thing.
Another point is that works are not distinctly Christian. There are almost no individual works that could be done in such a way to communicate the truth of Christianity, that someone that wasn't a Christian couldn't do. A non-Christian could hold the door for someone. A non-Christian could donate to charity. A non-Christian could be very kind. A non-Christian could never curse. A non-Christian could vote for all of the "right"--tongue-in-cheek--republican candidates.
I would challenge you to find an action a Christian can do, and then find a non-Christian who couldn't do it. What I'm getting at here is works are not distinctly Christian, in and of themselves. Even going to church, we might call a Christian work, but non-Christians can go to church. Non-Christians can take the Lord's supper, though they shouldn't. If we're just communicating, or trying to communicate the gospel with our works, we're left with something that is distinctly un-Christian, that a non-Christian can communicate, and in fact, that doesn't communicate Christ. Because if Christ didn't need to die and rise for your communication of the gospel, to communicate the truth of the gospel, it's not the gospel you're communicating.
It's been said before, of preachers, that if Jesus didn't need to die and rise from the dead, in order for your sermon to work, go back and start over. It's a bad sermon. If Jesus, in his crucifixion, and resurrection, and work on the cross, is not necessary for our story, then our story and what we're sharing is not Christian. If Christ is not in it, it's not Christian. Holding a door for someone, doing the best of actions for someone is not Christian distinctly, and it doesn't communicate the gospel on its own. I'm not saying works are bad--we'll get to that--but I am addressing an extreme here.
I think this is also evidenced by the fact that Mormons have a reputation, where” you can't out-nice a Mormon,” because they are known and regarded as some of the nicest, most kind people. But we have vastly different conceptions of the gospel. And yet if you just judge the truthfulness of religion on how people lived, you might come away thinking for some reason Mormonism is more true. But that's because we haven't actually evaluated what the religion teaches, what is the gospel of Mormonism versus the gospel of Christianity? Works are not self-interpreting and they're not distinctly Christian.
But more so, a works-only approach conveys that behavior is the most important thing and that people should simply try harder. If you're setting an example with your works only, what are you showing? That this is what Christianity looks like. What would you be communicating otherwise? If our works are the primary thing we are using to show our Christianity, we are showing that Christianity is primarily about works, which it is not, unless we're talking about Christ's work on the cross.
Kind of dovetailing off of that, a works-only approach can lead to despair. If your coworker sees that you are just so distinctly a good person, you do everything right, even your intentions seem right, and they know nothing of Jesus, this could very well lead them to despair, because they know that they are not a good person. They see you and they think, "I could never be like that." Instead of your message communicating hope, it actually leads the person to despair.
I'm reminded of a story that a professor I had in seminary told, that's very similar to this, where a man worked in an office, and he tried to be the best "witness" he could be through how he lived his life and through how he behaved at the office. He always thought about maybe sharing Jesus directly with his coworkers, but he never did. He thought his actions would do the talking for him.
One day, his coworker, a guy he's thought of before, and realized didn't know Jesus, this guy comes to him and says during lunch, "I would like to talk with you about Jesus. I actually just made Jesus lord of my life and I want to talk with you, that you might know him." And the man says, "I know him. I've been trying to communicate that with how I live." And the guy who just became a Christian said, "For the longest time, I didn't think I needed to be a Christian to be good. I saw you and I didn't know you were a Christian, and you seem to be so moral, so it didn't even seem like God was necessary."
What you see with this story is when the man only communicated or tried to communicate the gospel with his actions, he communicated a gospel of works that made it seem like Christ was not even necessary, so it had the opposite effect. A works-only approach can actually lead to despair or an opposite understanding of the gospel. But a works-only approach doesn't take seriously Paul's argument in Romans 10, that faith comes by hearing the good news of Christ, not by seeing the good works of Christians.
Good works may very lead someone to ask the question, ?why would someone behave like that?? But I'll be straight with you, and you probably already know this: what Christ considers a good work, society is more increasingly considering to be evil. Christ considers defending the unborn life, and its mother, a great good, because that life is created in his image, and yet society considers our opposition of abortion to be evil. Society considers contending for the traditional understanding of biblically rooted gender roles, and sexual orientation and marriage to be evil and oppressive, and harmful, and bigoted, and yet Christ would consider that to be a good action (obviously this depends on how that's done). The middle ground of overlap between what biblical Christianity says is good, and what culture will accept as good, is shrinking. There is even less of an opportunity to communicate what society considers as good for the Christian.
We cannot only rely on our works, because faith comes by hearing, not by seeing the good works of people. It comes by realizing that I can't justify myself, but that it is God who justifies the ungodly. Works have a place, we'll talk about that, but they can't be primary.
My last point is that you will never outlive your convictions. People will always aspire to more, believe more is right than they will ever actually live out. It should be this way for the Christian. In some ways, it’s lamentable , but it actually should be the case that we believe correct things and yet also one of those correct things we believe is that we will fall short in our actions of those correct things, this side of heaven. Because a correct Christian belief is that we are still sinners. We still need forgiveness on a daily basis, that we still need repentance on a daily basis. What that presupposes is that we are not living up to our convictions, but that means that our convictions are higher aspirationally than our actions. If we're only limiting ourselves to communicating the gospel with our actions, we're not even communicating the full extent of our beliefs, because we'll never live up or live out the extent of our beliefs.
You may have heard this phrase, "Share the gospel at all times, use words if necessary." That's a horrible phrase. That's kind of like saying, "Feed the poor at all times, and use food when necessary." Food is always necessary. Words are always necessary to share the gospel. Faith comes by hearing the preached word of Christ, not by seeing someone hold the door or do some even really good action.
I hope what you've been convinced of so far, is that if you're relying on your works to communicate the gospel, you shouldn't be. We must open our mouths. We must speak. But works do have a place. They should flow from a heart that's been changed, a heart that's been regenerated to beat for God, to live out and show obedience and love to him, through following his commands as revealed in scripture. And in fact, our works reveal our continual sanctification, as the spirit works to change our desires in our heart.
Our works can either be a credit or a detractor from our message, they can make or break our message. The reason for that is if I'm saying that Christianity is about a selfless God who came to Earth to die of his people, to atone for their sins, out of love for himself and for them, and yet I behave in a very selfish way consistently, I am a detractor from my message. I am tarnishing that message. I'm not saying that Christians won't be selfish, but what's the pattern there?
Do I defend my sin? I think that's a really important question for our point in time, when our personal defense and even corporate defense of some sins is at an all-time high. Once again, the question is not do I sin, because I should be clear when I communicate the gospel, that it communicates that that person is a sinner, and that I am still a sinner, and the main difference between the two of us is that Christ has forgiven me my sin, and he has not forgiven that person, because they have not yet placed their faith in him.
Part of our message, like I mentioned before, is that we communicate that we are still sinners, that we do things wrong, that we are not perfect. But our works and our pattern of works can either credit or detract from our message. As Christians, one of our works should be when we do sin, which we will, we ask forgiveness, even from the non-Christian. We shouldn't be trying to live so well, that we make it seem like we didn't make a mistake by not asking for forgiveness. We should be the first to ask for forgiveness, because it is our God who has forgiven us, and sets the pattern for what that looks like. We should be quick to forgive when we are offended. We should also be slow to be offended, which is a virtue in our society today, that is not often lived out.
So all of that to say, works cannot be the primary way we communicate the gospel. They aren't actually a way to communicate the gospel. They can either adorn our message or they can tarnish it, but they are not the message itself. The only work that is the message is the work of Christ on the cross in his sinless life and perfect atoning work for us, when our works could not even save us, they certainly cannot communicate what Christ did for him. That's why he has given us his word and the ministry to share his word. That people would be reconciled to him.
I hope this has been helpful at helping you think through the role of works in evangelism and how we live. I look forward to talking with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Why is God so hidden?
One of the questions that cuts across many different groups of people deals with the hiddenness of God. I don't think it's uncommon for someone to say or have thought or felt at some point in their life, "Where is God? Why is he so hidden? Why can I not easily discern his presence or his involvement in the world? Why does he not feel closer?" This isn't just an intellectual question; it often has an emotional component too, where at times of great distress and trial someone may say, "Where is God?" Even the non-Christian sometimes will say, "Where is God?"
So we need to be prepared to talk through this, and talk through it biblically. I don't always cover bad responses to these types of questions when we address them on the podcast, but I am going to address some of them today because I have heard some pretty bad responses to this issue. But let's first look at a more formal statement of the problem, since some people have actually formed this into a formal argument. It goes something like this.
So if God existed, he would be obviously existing. He is not obviously existing, therefore, he doesn't exist. That's what some people would say.
If that's true, if those first two premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows, but like so many arguments that are not sound, there are some issues with these premises. There are actually a lot of implicit assumptions behind the scenes here, and that's something that we need to be good at teasing out. When you hear someone making a point, try and ask yourself, what led that person to that point? Or perhaps even ask the person, "What led you to this point? What are your reasons for this?" But when we hear an argument like this, I think there are some things that we should be aware of that are happening behind the scenes.
First, it seems like the person believes that God has an obligation to make himself known to all people. If there really is the type of being that Christians are talking about when they talk about God, an all-sovereign, infinite, eternal, holy Being, why would he have to reveal himself to us? Especially on an evolutionary worldview where man is just a slightly more evolved animal. Does God also have to reveal himself to something less evolved than us like dolphins or apes?
So why would we think that God has the obligation to make himself known to people in general, but to all people? Doesn't this God, this all-powerful transcendent being, have some type of free will also? Doesn't he have the ability to choose who he reveals himself to? Why would we think he has to reveal himself to all people? And I don't know how the person you're talking about this question would answer that, but I think that's a fair question.
The second explicit assumption in this type of thinking is that God has an obligation to reveal himself to people in a way that people choose or appreciate. A lot of times when we get into the details on this question you can ask someone, "What types of actions on God's part would you take to be him revealing himself to you?" In other words, what types of evidence are sufficient in your mind to count for God revealing himself? Well, the person is going to perhaps have a set of criteria. Something we'll talk about in a little bit is how some people actually can't answer that question, which is interesting. But doesn't the questioner of God actually have the implicit view that God has to reveal himself on their playing field, according to their criteria? Why should we think God has to do that? If he is the sovereign one, if he is the type of God we say who is all-powerful, who does what he wills as we see in Scripture, why would he have to reveal himself according to my preferences and my presuppositions? You can probably tell where I'm going with this: he wouldn't and he doesn't have to. So that's another bad assumption.
The third bad assumption here is people can tell when God reveals himself in a conscious way at all points. I don't know that this is true. We'll look at some biblical data in a little bit that shows that man does not have an excuse when it comes to this question, but due to the environment we live in, due to the intellectual climate, due to the presuppositions that we hold and/or are taught to us, some people will see evidence of God, objective evidence of God, and say that that is not evidence of God. This is due to the effects of the fall and sin; man isn't always going to be able to tell at all points in his life when God has, in fact, revealed himself.
The question in the argument that we looked at assumes that they can. Well, why? Why should we expect that to be the case?
The fourth assumption is that people actually want to see God, that there are people out there who are seeking God, who if they just got enough evidence, they would believe. As we'll see when we look at the biblical data in a few minutes, that category of person doesn't actually exist.
So what I hope you've seen quickly here is that there are actually a lot of assumptions behind this argument that if God existed, he'd make himself known. He hasn't made himself known; therefore he doesn't exist. There are a lot of things that need to be proved in order for that to be true. I'm sure there are more assumptions there. Those are just some that quickly came to mind.
But let's look at some bad responses to this. I'm a little more sensitive to bad responses to this question than to some others because I've sat through talks and conferences where this topic's been addressed, and in my opinion has been addressed rather poorly. The reason people address this poorly is oftentimes, when they start with a philosophical response as opposed to a biblical or theological response. When we form our beliefs and when we answer questions, we want to first reason from Scripture to theology to apologetics. We don't want to do apologetics in a way that's most compelling and yet is theological malpractice.
So here's some bad responses I've heard to this type of question, dealing with the hiddenness of God.
God has made himself somewhat hidden so that people will search for him. It's this idea that only the worthy will find him. It's the idea that if you hide something of value, you find the truest, purest hearted people with the greatest work ethic, if you make it so they have to work to find that thing of value. But biblically, that's not a thing, biblically, that God has made himself hidden so that people will search for him. What we've seen biblically is God's not hidden and people don't search for him, so it's actually wrong on both points.
Another bad response is that he doesn't want to override people's free will by making his presence overwhelmingly obvious. The thinking here, as it's sometimes explained, is that if God wrote in the sky and if every cell said "designed by God. Yahweh, the God of the Bible, exists," then of course everyone would believe. So it almost takes away their free will, because it's said people believe that grass exists because they walk outside and they see grass everywhere. They believe they exist because they experience themselves and they're in tune with their thoughts and they see themselves in mirrors and reflections in water, all these types of thing.
So if God made it that obvious that he existed, it wouldn't actually have to be a choice for people. It would almost remove their free will. And Sometimes when we're dealing with apologetics questions, we can make an idol out of free will. The Bible says almost nothing positive about man’s will. It says it's a slave of sin, it can't submit to the will of God. It talks about the free will of God, but it does not spend much time saying positive things about the will of man. And yet oftentimes in our apologetics, we elevate the will of man over and above the sovereign will of God.
But this idea that God doesn't want to override the free will of man by making his presence overwhelmingly obvious does not find good support in Scripture. In fact, what we see in Scripture is God holds man accountable for knowing he exists. In other words, he thinks he has sufficiently revealed himself.
The third bad response to the hiddenness of God is that if God made it very obvious, people wouldn't need faith. What this presupposes is that faith and knowing are opposite ends of the spectrum, and if you know more than you need less faith. Biblically speaking, faith is trust. You can know a lot and not trust that thing. You can know a lot about how an airplane works and exhibit no faith, no trust in that airplane if you refuse to fly on it due to some irrational fear. People behave very irrationally. They can know the truth and not behave in light of it.
And another thing is, once again, God thinks he has sufficiently revealed himself in Scripture, and we'll see that. And so it can't be enough to say it's not obvious enough that people wouldn't need faith. Biblically speaking, faith comes from God, not from man. Faith is not something man summons up in himself. It's imparted to man by God. We see that in Ephesians 2:8-9. We covered that in our Reformation series, how man doesn't even generate the faith that's necessary to save him. That's a gift from God, lest we could boast.
So those are three bad reasons. But let's look at some biblical data to help actually form a correct view here. I've already alluded to some of the conclusions that would be drawn from this, but I think it's really important that we see where these conclusions are grounded in the text.
When it comes to the hiddenness of God and if he exists and if people can know it, we should go to Romans 1, perhaps first. This is what Paul writes under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit starting in Romans 1:18.
”For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people, who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness."
Now we're going to get one of the examples of those truths that are suppressed. Paul says,
“What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, his visible attributes - namely, his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse.”
Why are they without excuse? Because God says here he has given them plain evidence that he exists, that it has been clearly seen. So when we or the non-Christian or even a Christian apologist (someone who gives a defense of the faith) says, "It's not clear. It's not obvious that God exists." They disagree with God in his word. Right here, God is saying that it's clear. It's plain that God exists, for since the creation of the entire world, his invisible attributes have been on display in nature. And so when we disagree with that point, we disagree with God.
In fact, in this passage God says it is so clear that people are without excuse when they don't glorify him. He doesn't say - and this is important - that what is revealed in nature is sufficient to bring someone to salvation. No, it's sufficient for them to understand the condemnation for their sins and to understand that God exists. Paul will later say as part of his argument in Romans that unless there is the preaching and the teaching and the responding to the gospel, there is no salvation. But natural revelation—what we see about God in nature—is sufficient and clear for God to be able judge people for their sinful actions. So whatever we say, we must say at least that and nothing less than that.
Another thing we see in Romans is not just that God has revealed himself clearly, that he doesn't think he's hidden. I think that's an incredibly important point. But more than that, that no one seeks God.
That is the statement of Paul under the Holy Spirit in Romans 3:11. No one does good. No one seeks God. Everyone is futile in their thinking. That would be people apart from the giving of faith to that person, the calling and drawing of them to God. But the natural man, the non-regenerate person, the non-Christian, does not seek God. So this idea of the seeker who, if he just had more evidence, would believe, does not exist in the Bible. Once again, God says he has enough evidence, but more than that, this category of a neutral, unbiased seeker, does not exist.
There are other places in Scripture too that make it clear that God has revealed himself sufficiently for salvation. For instance, John writes his gospel, and at the end he tells us that Jesus performed many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples that he just hasn't recorded them in his book. He actually says there's not room to record all that Jesus did and said. He says, "But," in verse 31,
”these are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."
He wrote what he wrote, once again, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, sufficiently so that man would believe. He thinks, God thinks, that what's revealed just in the gospel of John is sufficient revelation of God such that he's not hidden. We don't just have to look at nature. He's given us his specific and his special revelation in the form of Scripture. He actually came to earth, and Jesus revealed the Father. Jesus revealed God. Not hidden. Walked on earth. And more than that, it was captured and preserved for posterity. So God's not hidden; he's revealed in Scripture.
But oftentimes the non-Christian making this objection about the hiddenness of God rejects Scripture. So once again, he's judging God on a standard that he has created. When God says that what he has revealed is sufficient, the non-Christian says, "No it's not. I want different evidence." To tell God his evidence is not good enough is certainly a form of sin and rebellion and idolatry, and so when we respond to someone, we don't want to say, "Yeah, you're right. God hasn't revealed himself enough." No, we want to say, "God has said he has, and you need to reckon with that. I plead with you to consider the evidence that God has given and that God said is sufficient, because God also says some things for the person who does not repent of their sin, who does not respond sufficiently to this revelation." But once again, in John, we see that these things that were written were written so that man would believe in the name of the Son of God and have eternal life in his name.
And once again, in Acts, Paul is speaking to some non-Christians of the day, some philosopher, and here's what he says in Acts 17:31.
“God has set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he designated, having provided proof to everyone by raising him from the dead."
Paul says God has proved that he is coming back to judge the world righteously, and he had proved it by raising Jesus from the dead. He thinks that's sufficient to hold men even more accountable than what was just revealed in natural revelation. Do we agree with God on that point?
So in wrapping this up, I hope what you've seen - and I haven't said it this bluntly so far - is that oftentimes, we are judging God with our own standards instead of the standards God said are sufficient to understand his revelation. We come with non-biblical, non-Christian presuppositions and then say, "There isn't enough evidence.” God has revealed himself supernaturally, and yet the non-Christian that said God is hidden will reject supernatural revelation.
A lot of times an atheist or a naturalist will say there is no such thing as the supernatural, so they discount even the possibility of surveying the evidence that exists in some forms. Scripture is not supernatural in its existence, although it was supernaturally inspired.
This shows that the Christian is actually more open-minded than the non-Christian. The Christian can look at so much more evidence because he doesn't artificially limit himself to just physical evidence. He also considers spiritual and supernatural evidence and supernatural causes, while the non-Christian is actually more narrow-minded in this case.
What we have to point out here is that the non-Christian, if he would look at all of the evidence, would actually see more evidence of God. But if he only wants to look at natural evidence, God says what's revealed in nature is sufficient. But more than that, we have to say theologically and biblically that the issue here is one of the heart. Man doesn't want God to exist apart from God's sovereign work in his life. It's not that he's just saying, "If I had a little more data...”
You know what's interesting? When you ask some non-Christians what would be sufficient evidence, they don't know. And in fact, when you get asked this question and get confronted with the issue that God is so hidden, ask the person, "What would be sufficient for God to reveal himself to you such that you would believe?" Because many non-Christians have said, "I guess if I heard God speaking to me, I would think I was crazy and I would check myself into an asylum. If I saw writing in the sky, I would assume that someone did it. If I saw - fill in the blank - I would assume ..." and they would assume some other physical explanation. And what this shows is due to their presuppositions, due to their sin that actually blinds us intellectually sometimes, that apart from the work of God, man can't appreciate the evidence that God has provided and that God says is sufficient.
Now yes, we present evidence. The same God that said faith is a gift, it's a work of his grace, also said, "Go into the world and preach the gospel." It's the same God who inspired John to say, "I wrote all of these things down such that you would believe in the name of the Son of God and have life." But the evidence God has provided is sufficient. He's not hidden by any means. Every leaf and tree and created thing proclaims his name, and in fact, the idea that we are the images of God, his representatives, in some ways we are evidence that God exists, and there's so much more we could tease out there.
But in closing, I am somewhat sympathetic to the person who says there's not enough evidence for God, and the reason I'm sympathetic is that I understand that person is dead in their sin oftentimes. And so what that means is I need to pray for that person, I need to walk with that person, but I do not need to compromise what God says, that he has sufficiently revealed himself. I need to help that person understand God's revelation, not make excuses for it or not to invent other reasons, but I need to help them understand the sufficient revelation of God that already exists.
I'll talk to you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>If you've lived for even a little while, you're acquainted with some form of sickness, pain, suffering, or evil. You can't live in this world and not experience that sort of thing. Now, of course, some people have worse experiences than others, and some amounts of evil, some kinds of sickness or suffering or pain are more severe or more acute than others, but nonetheless, we are all acquainted with the problem of evil, both in its human dimension—where people commit evil acts against us or others—and the natural dimension of evil, like sickness and natural disasters and illness and things like that, and we actually talked about that last week.
But this week, I want to talk about the importance of good theology during trials and suffering, and you might think, "Okay, those sound a little odd together, because trials and suffering are often very emotionally moving, very emotionally affective in that sort of way, and then theology sounds like this very stuffy, academic, intellectual thing, so what do they have to do with each other? Because I need comfort when I'm going through a trial, when I'm suffering. I don't need facts and books and the thoughts of 1,500 year old since-deceased men, so how do these things fit together?"
Well, the first point I want to make is that a trial may reveal good theology, but it rarely forms it. Good theology can help you get through a trial, but you will rarely come out of a trial with better theology than you went in with, and that's just a practical point. Is it impossible? No, but that's just basically what I see in people's lives, and read about how this often goes for people, because most likely, you will form bad theology from trials if you don't start with a good, solid foundation.
And I'm actually going to talk a little bit about, if I can, an experience my family and I had about two weeks ago. I had mentioned before that my daughter was born premature. We were in the NICU for a couple weeks, and then she was doing well, but about a week and a half ago, she started breathing really quickly. Her heart rate was high, she wasn't eating as well, so we took her to the ER. They didn't really know what was going on. We had an actually very rough experience in the ER. I'll save you the details there, and about 12-15 hours later, they determined that she had congestive heart failure.
And basically, we had seen a decline in her the whole time we'd been at the hospital, a very steep one actually, her heart was failing in real time, and she was dying. I can't say that I've ever had to be in a situation that was as hard as that, that was as emotionally trying. Now, part of that obviously is going for two days without sleep. But this was very difficult, and they ended up air-lifting her to a hospital about two and a half hours away, and we had to drive over, and she had surgery, and everything went pretty well. Now, she doesn't have a normal heart, but she's as healthy as she can be now, and she's doing well.
But that intermediate state, where things were uncertain, where we didn't know what was going on, and then when we did, the prognosis wasn't exactly happy and chipper. It's not like she just had a virus and she'll get over it. She needed heart surgery (and she actually may still need more in the future) and so it was interesting going through this and trying to be a little self aware of how I was thinking about things, and how I was talking with my wife, and how she was thinking about things, and really, I realized in the middle of this just how important good theology is in trials and in suffering, and when we're talking about life and death matters.
Because I also, in this situation, reflected back to the Brian who was in college, who didn't think God was good, even though he'd grown up in the church, who didn't even think God existed a good bit of the time, and I compare those two in my mind and say, "How would that Brian have responded in this circumstance? Would his heart have been softened to God, or would it have been hardened against God?"
And I think the answer is probably very clear. My heart would not have been softened to God by going through this situation, because at that time, I did not have a good theological foundation. I didn't believe God was good. I didn't believe He was sovereign over everything, that He works his loving purposes for His people. I didn't believe that Jesus on the cross paid for the sin of His people, but more than that, I didn't believe that, through His atonement, He actually set the foundation for God to make all things new one day, with a new heavens and a new earth, like we talked about last week. And so, because of not having good theology, I do not think that at that point in my life, things would have gone like they went two weeks ago.
Now, I'm very aware that I'm holding myself up as an example here, and I'm not necessarily a fan of that, or enthusiastic about it, because there are a lot of things I would do differently, and I definitely don't have all of this figured out, but I have paid attention to relatives and family members and people I know who have gone through hard times, and I have paid attention or tried to to myself, and so I do have a few things I want to talk about today in terms of good theology during suffering, or during trials.
You know, it's interesting. We've seen a change in the last several years in what is popular and acceptable with regards to sexual ethics. Several Christians who grew up as evangelicals, maybe who were even evangelical scholars and ethicists, who used to believe that marriage was a God-ordained union between one man and one woman for one lifetime, changed their mind. And you might say, "Well, what changed their mind?" For some of them, it was the fact that they had a family member who came out as gay, and so they actually changed their interpretation and their understanding of what scripture said to fit that situation. They actually did have good theology on the front end, and in spite of that, they came out with worse theology, and basically, on a side opposed to God and scripture, I would say.
Now, there's probably a noble impulse in the middle of there, out of concern and compassion for their child, but it's never actually compassionate to adopt a position that God is opposed to, and we've talked about this before, but just think what would it have gone like if those people did not come into the circumstance with good theology. Well, they most assuredly would have come out with a bad theological perspective, because trials don't really necessarily form better theology, but they do reveal it if it's there, and more likely, they'll actually break down your good theological convictions if you're not careful.
Really, what we're talking about here is the problem of evil, and so what theological convictions does someone need if they are going to endure a trial and come out perhaps even stronger on the other end? Well, I think the first conviction you need is a belief that God does exist, and so going through this very hard time with my wife, and my child, and the doctors, and all of this, I did not have a second though as to if God existed, because I'm convinced by scripture, and argument, and evidence, and philosophy, and all of these things undergird my confidence that God exists.
And I could also speak of more maybe subjective aspects too, but just at a baseline from objective type of criteria, I'm convinced, so I don't have a question. But if I did have a question if God existed, I think a trial would be automatically more difficult, because now I'm not just trying to understand the medical side of things as they're happening, and I'm now dealing with the emotional weight of that, I'm also dealing with this existential question of, does God exist? And how does that fit here?
But I think that even becomes more severe when you maybe have the question if God is good. If you go into a trial and you are not convinced, by examination of scripture and other arguments, that God is good, I think you may struggle in that trial, and that would be reasonable, because if you're not convinced, then wouldn't it be natural to ask the question, "Well, how could God possibly be good if someone is suffering this much?" Well, that would be a natural question if God is not good or you're not convinced that he is, but if you are convinced, that question may not even come to mind.
And so I hope what you're starting to see is our theological convictions are a hedge, they're a boundary, they're a safety net around taking us to areas where it would not be good to go. It's perfectly acceptable to ask questions of God, not that we'll necessarily get the answers we want this side of heaven, but it is not acceptable to question God. There's a difference there, in the same way that we can be angry express the fact that we are angry to God, but we should not be angry with God. It is a sin to be angry with God.
And so if we come into trials knowing these things, believing these things, having trained ourselves in these things, I think we will be stronger going through them, and instead of the trial breaking us down, maybe what it actually does is teach us some things about God and his character that we wouldn't have been able to know in quite the same way otherwise.
There are a few different kind of sayings that have become taboo, and I've seen multiple blog posts and articles and talks about how you shouldn't say some things when people are suffering or in trials, like you shouldn't say that “all things work together for good”, and you shouldn't say that “you can do all things through Christ.” “You shouldn't say those things. They're insensitive. People don't need to hear that."
While I think there are certainly insensitive ways to say those, here's my question: If we're going to cling to something in a trial, if something is going to be the bedrock, wouldn't we want that thing to be scripture? Why would we encourage someone to not cling to the promises of God during a very difficult time.
For instance, if someone is going through suffering, wouldn't it be important for them to understand and believe that God works all things together for the good, for His people, for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes? Wouldn't that be important, and wouldn't it be also important for them to understand what that good actually is? It's not some type of nebulous, subjectively defined, personally defined good thing. No, Paul tells us in Romans 8 that that good thing is the image of Christ, and as a Christian, especially as someone who hopefully is maturing in their faith, we need to understand this idea, but the most important thing for the Christian is to glorify God. One of the ways we do that is actually what God does through us, by conforming us to the image of his Son, and that happens through suffering.
If you think of a person kind of like a sculpture, consider that no sculpture has ever been made without some type of suffering being made to the material that the sculpture's out of. In order for the sculpture to be made, in order for a block of marble or granite to be turned into David or some other sculpture, a lot has to be removed with a chisel and a hammer and brute force, and if that marble could feel, I don't think it would say it feels very good. And it's the same way for the Christian.
If life is only ever easy and comfortable, I will almost guarantee you you are not being conformed to the image of Christ in the way you would be as if life were difficult. Now, does that mean we're masochistic and we go looking for suffering? No, but in some ways, and I think this is behind what Paul's saying when he says we should be joyous in all things, we understand that the testing of our faith produces endurance, and that trials are the way that God has ordained, the means He has ordained to conform us to the image of His son through the work of the spirit.
Someone should hear in a trial that God is working this in a way they can't understand necessarily, that I can't understand, in a way that we must trust that God is working this together for their good and their conformity to Christ. I know it doesn't feel good, but that's where trust and faith comes in, because God says He is doing it for good. That should be a comforting truth, not an off-putting truth.
Now, yes, it can be said in a glib way. "Man, I am so sorry things are hard, but you know, God works all things for good." That sounds very insensitive, but there is a more sensitive, appropriate way to say that, and it's the same way with, "I can do all things through Christ.”
So how does that verse come into play, let's just say, for me, dealing with this idea of maybe losing my daughter at seven weeks old?
I realize that in context, in Philippians 4, Paul is not talking about doing all things, like getting A’s on tests and becoming a millionaire or something like that. No, he's talking about actually being without, and that he's been content in plenty and in famine, and so he can even be without, because Christ is enough, and the question in a trial is, can we claim that? Can we say that for ourselves that, "You know what? Even if my aunt dies, even if my daughter dies, even if my business is in ruin, God and Christ is enough, and I can do this through Him, recognizing that the material things in this world and the relationships we have here are not ultimate." They're important. In some forms, they're necessary, but they're not ultimate.
That brings us back to trusting God that He is good. We're not going to form that belief in a trial if we don't already have it. Another phrase some people have said we shouldn't say is, "Well, what is God teaching you through this?" I have a friend who is good about asking that question appropriately and not insensitively, because on the one hand, it's conjecture. I don't know what God is actually teaching me. He alone knows that, and often, we can see that in hindsight, but when you ask someone, "What do you think God is trying to teach you through this," one, we are acknowledging that trials are a way of teaching and testing our faith and proving our endurance, and that's a biblical concept, but more than that, it causes us to be much less inwardly focused and consider the broader, more circumspect nature of what God is doing.
It reminds us that He's actually working these things together, that they're not arbitrary, they're not autonomous workings of natural laws. No, God is ultimately ordaining all that comes to pass, and so when we ask the question, "Well, what is God teaching you through this," it causes us to consider that God is actually in control of all of it, and for the Christian, that all of this is actually working together for our conformity to Christ, once again.
For example, I was talking with my wife on this drive over to the hospital while we were following the helicopter, and I was saying, "You know, it's interesting that I never really knew I could be moved emotionally and with so much love for someone else, much less someone that's never talked to me," referring to my daughter here. And I consider, as her father, just what I would not do for her, what door I would not break down, what I would not do to get her the treatment she needs, and then I consider that God in scripture has revealed Himself as father, as father of His people who He has redeemed for Himself, that He has adopted into his family, that have been grafted in, and you know what? If the amount of feeling and care I have for my daughter is overwhelming to me, and I am sinful and fallen and broken and imperfect and finite, well gosh, what must it be like for my heavenly Father to love His children, of which I am one?
And so, scripture doesn't just arbitrarily give us these examples and parallels between Christ and the church, and a husband and a wife, and God as the Father, and His people as His sons and daughters. No, I think they're there because actually the way we live our lives, and the events that are ordained in the structures that we have, if we pay attention, can teach us about the character of God. So when a father or a mother realizes how much they love their child and what they wouldn't do, they're discovering something imperfect and a shadow as it is, but about the character of God and just how much even more He loves His Son, and He loves His sons and daughters, and so we learn things in that way.
When we see how much Christ sacrificed for the church, and He's said to be the groom and the church is the bride, doesn't that set a very high bar for husbands to sacrifice for their wives? Because that parallel is made in Ephesians 5, and so we see that these biblical parallels and examples are actually there because our experiences in this world tie in with those parallels to teach us more about what God is like, and what he expects from us, in some cases.
So all that to say, if we don't spend the time now to form good theology, we very well may not end up with it when we need it most. I was giving a talk last night, and one of the people in the room mentioned that the problem of evil was a struggle for her, probably intellectually, and more so, experientially and personally. One thing I said was, "Don't wait until you get in the worst time of your life to try and sort out the existence of God, and if He's good, and if you can trust His word. Do that work now. You will serve yourself well." If we put that off, examining these things, building our confidence in the God of scripture, we will be broken down later instead of built up when a trial comes.
And so, for some people who are not prepared, the same light that melts the ice and makes them more sensitive to the things of God actually hardens the clay for others. In suffering, our theology should drive us to the God of scripture and the things found about him in scripture. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul says, "No trial has overtaken you that is not faced by others. And God is faithful: He will not let the trial endure beyond what you are able to bear, but with the trial will also provide a way out so that you may be able to endure it."
Yes, someone going through a trial needs that truth. There are appropriate ways to say that. There are glib and insensitive ways to say that, but if we're not finding solace and comfort in scripture and the God of scripture in our trial, we're doing it wrong, but more than that, we need to be prepared on the front end. We can't expect God to bring something out of us in a trial that we haven't had put in before, if that makes sense.
I hope this has been helpful. In future weeks, we will not talk as much about pain, sickness, trauma, death, and evil. We will talk about some other things, but I do look forward to talking with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Why is there sickness, pain, and suffering in the world?
When we talk about sickness, pain, and suffering and disease and those sorts of things and we try to reconcile that with the God of the Bible, what we're really doing is thinking through the problem of evil. This is a little different version of the problem of evil because often times when we talk about evil, we're talking about personal, human evil like murder and abuse and rape and theft, and those sorts of things. That's something very good to be able to talk through and reason through from Scripture, but today we're going talk about what you might call the natural problem of evil.
If you're not familiar with the problem of evil (I mean, of course you are familiar with evil), here's how we could state it formally: If God is all good and God is all powerful, then there would not be evil in the world. But there is evil in the world; therefore, God does not exist.
There are many different ways to talk about this. We've actually talked about this in the past multiple times like here, and here, but today I want to address how we should think through the existence of God with regards to natural evil. What might we put in that category? You could put in there sickness and disease and congenital heart defects and natural disasters and those types of things, which don't necessarily have a personal cause behind them.
Oftentimes when we talk about evil, people view God as the problem. How do we reconcile - and I even said it this way earlier - how do you reconcile evil with God? But here's the thing. God is not the problem that needs the answer here. In fact, if you get rid of God, you get rid of the only possible solution to the problem of evil, because if God does not exist, evil does not exist.
In order for there to be evil, there has to be good. In order for there to be good, there has to be God. God is the moral lawgiver. God is the standard of perfection. Evil is deviation from that. And so if there's not God, there's not evil. And I would also say, if there's not God and there is evil, there's no actual remedy for evil even if evil could exist, and I don't think it could.
First, before we talk through this from a biblical perspective, I want to talk about it from the perspective of someone who's not a Christian. Let's say you're an atheist and you have a view of the world that's called naturalism, where only natural, material things exist. There's no supernatural, so there's no God, there's no soul, there are no intangible sorts of things. Everything that exists is made of matter. This is a very old type of idea. It goes all the way back to ancient Greece.
Let's say you hold that view. Can you actually say there's this thing called natural evil in the world? I don't think you can. In fact, I think you can only make sense of this idea of natural evil inside of a Christian worldview. So when someone else complains about natural evil, they're borrowing from our worldview, our vocabulary, our way of organizing and making sense of reality, and here's why I think that.
On an evolutionary worldview, can you really call a disease evil? I don't think you can. If you're consistent and someone is dying of a disease, and they're suffering because of that, I think what you have to say is that person is less fit, and yes, that sounds horribly inconsiderate, but isn't that what we're talking about? A naturalistic worldview is built on this idea that evolution is true, the twin pillars of evolution being random mutation and natural selection. Natural selection is the process whereby the fittest individuals, by and large, survive and are equipped to pass on their genes and propagate such that over time, only the more and more fit survive.
And so, if someone is not surviving because of something that we might call natural evil, like a disease or heart defect or something like that, you can't actually call it evil. Actually what you should be able to say is that that's a “good” thing (and we'll talk about that because that's a very loaded term). But it's a good thing that that person did not survive to pass on that less-than-helpful genetic characteristic where they weren't able to survive as well as someone else. In other words, the terribly cold way of saying this is, in an evolutionary worldview, it would actually seem to be good that the weak die. It would be good that the weak do not survive, because the best thing for the species on an evolutionary worldview is that the fittest survive, and in fact, that's what evolution is said to be set up to do, to produce only the fittest people.
So if a flood hits a city and a lot of people die, can the non-Christian call that natural evil? I don't think they can if they're being consistent. I think they have to say the less fit people didn't survive. They didn't think ahead enough to evacuate. They weren't as strong of swimmers. They couldn't break down the doors of their houses. They weren't smart enough to live in community with people who can help them. Whatever. And yes, all of those things, I'm aware, sound entirely inconsiderate, and that's not my view. However, if you're being considerate on an evolutionary worldview, I think you would have to hold some perspective very similar to that, such that what we might be prone to call natural evil is actually nature's way of helping us out.
But I'm sure you don't know many people who hold that view, because most of the time, when someone holds a non-biblical worldview, that person can't actually live in that worldview. They will end up necessarily borrowing from the Christian worldview.
So that's the first point. If we're analyzing this as a non-Christian, this whole category of natural evil doesn't really make sense as it relates to human suffering, because it's actually helping to weed out the weaker people. But more than that, on a non-Christian worldview, on a naturalistic worldview, natural laws are governing our universe. Now, I don't think there are laws in this way that are prescriptive that set everything up. I actually think natural laws—from a Christian perspective—are descriptive of how God has chosen to sustain creation in the past, but that's a separate point.
What we're talking about here is how the non-Christian would look at this, and if all of creation, all of the universe, we'll say, is governed by natural laws, how could you say that something was evil? The laws were just governing the natural world in a rational, consistent way from moment to moment in time, such that things ran as things were supposed to run. The “billiard balls on the table” just happened to bounce in such a way that we as humans would say we don't like it. We might call it evil, but it isn't actually evil, is it?
The billiard balls just happened to bounce off of each other in a certain way that we didn't like, but nonetheless, that's just governed by natural laws. So that's not actually evil. That's just a preference item. "I don't like it" is the worst thing you could say on an evolutionary worldview. You can't call it evil. And in fact, I would go a step further and say you can't even really say that suffering is bad in an evolutionary worldview. This kind of dovetails with my first part about natural selection, how suffering, if it is weeding out weak individuals, then it would actually seem to necessarily be good.
But here's why I made a note on that term "good" earlier. "Good" is a loaded term. "Good" is a moral term. So in a non-Christian worldview, how would it actually be good that people survive? Where would you get that idea that it's good for the human race to survive? Where would that come from? Is that something we just decide as humans? It seems kind of odd and self-serving to decide that it's morally good that we survive, when we're the ones doing the deciding. So you can't even make sense of it being an actual good for human beings to survive—that human beings have an actual moral value to their life—in an evolutionary worldview. So if it's not good, and you can't sustain that idea, then how would suffering be bad? It wouldn't, once again.
So when we look at this from two or three different angles, natural evil, 1) is seen to not exist. And 2), it's seen to not be a problem. And 3), if it is, it's just seen to be a preference item based on an unsupportable standard of human value. What would ground the value of human life when we just came about from goo through the zoo to us? If evolution is true, we are just slightly more evolved animals who started out as stardust, and that's all we're actually made of now, so why does life have value on that worldview? It doesn't.
So that's the first point I wanted to look at. When we get this objection from a non-Christian, we can actually take the intellectual legs out from under them in their argument and show that they don't actually have the right in their worldview to make this objection against Christianity.
But many Christians are also struck with this. How do we make sense of disease and suffering in adults or in children, and things like that? Why does this happen? I think we have to say on the front end, no explanation is going to be utterly emotionally satisfying, but I think we can get some biblical perspective on this that leads to a correct, gospel-centered, biblically grounded hope.
So why is there evil in the world? And I don't mean for this answer to be a cop-out, but it's because of sin. Personal, human evil, like murder, is definitely a result of personal sin, and why do people sin? They sin because it's their nature, and why is it their nature? That goes all the way back to the fall in Genesis 3 when Adam, as our representative, sinned, and hence, all of his descendants inherited this, 1) sin guilt, but 2) a sin nature.
But what about natural evil? Where did that come from? Most of the time, disease and suffering and things like that, on a medical basis at least, aren't necessarily attributable to an individual. Sometimes they are, but most of the time they're not. We don't know why these things exist or come about. But you know, we can actually trace these back to a result of the fall also, because when Adam sinned, God cursed him and cursed the world. It was his penalty. That curse of the world has made it such that everything has been tainted and corrupted by sin. Nothing is actually as it should be.
Paul says in Romans 8 that "The whole creation groans and suffers together until now." Before that he says that "Creation was subjected to futility. Not willingly, but because of God, who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be set free from the bondage of decay into glorious freedom of God's children." And you see, this is interesting here, when the Bible is speaking to those who are in suffering, whether it's in Romans, whether it's in the minor prophets, God doesn't so much try to provide a rational and justification and itemized list of the reasons for why things are the way they are, but he points to a certain hope in the future: the fact that he will make everything right.
So why is there natural evil from a Christian, biblical perspective? Ultimately it traces itself back to the fall and God's punishment, his just punishment, of the fall. When Adam and Eve sinned, as Greg Koukl said in his book, "The Story of Reality," they broke the world. Ultimately that's also because of God's curse, his just punishment for his creatures, created to glorify him alone, instead glorifying themselves. He punished them and punished the world. But you know what? The world isn't totally bad, is it?
We still experience and give love and joy and happiness and deep-felt satisfaction and community and all these types of things. The world is not totally bad. But it is broken, and because it's broken, we are in a constant battle against its decay. Sometimes this is on a personal level. From the moment we are born, we are starting to die in some ways. Everything around us is actually tending toward disorder and decay. Even science says that. But Paul affirms this here. Creation is groaning. It's been subjected to futility. Not willingly. God has done this.
And you might say, "Why has God done this?" And I think there are two quick reasons. One we've already covered, is because it was a just punishment for man's sin. But more than that, because he will ultimately set it right and be seen to be glorious and just in doing so.
Paul says here, at the beginning of this section, which I didn't read, "For I consider that our present sufferings cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed to us." Isn't that just profound? He's about to go on to describe the subjection of the world to futility, how it's groaning, and it's awaiting a change for something new that's coming, and he's saying, "You know what? In spite of all this pain and suffering, the best that's coming is so much better than the worst is bad. The magnitudes don't even compare." And ultimately, later on, when he's talking maybe more on a personal level, he says that his affliction is light and momentary compared to the everlasting, eternal weight of glory that is coming. So for the Christian, God sets ahead of us this certain hope that he will set all things right.
Jesus is the way by which he does that. We often talk about the very personal, individualistic work that Christ did on the cross in paying for my sins. “He took my name.” I've said this before, and it's true, but we don't often talk about how redemption, both cosmic and personal, is found in Christ. That Christ, by his work on the cross, set the ability for God to make all things new by his atonement. And so in the same way that Adam was our representative in sin and man was credited with that guilt and all who are in Christ find their guilt forgiven, Adam also sinned, and as a result of that, the world was cursed. Well, also as a result of the work of Christ, that curse will be no more.
John, writing in Revelation chapters 21 and 22, gives us a detailed metaphorical picture of the new heavens and the new earth that God is going to create. A new earth where there is no pain, where there is no sickness, where there are no congenital problems, where there are no hurricanes and no natural disasters and things like that; where everything that was wrong because of Adam is set right because of Christ. And you know what? That's what we look forward to.
And so we don't always have the answers in the here and now as to why things are broken and why things are bad and why they're corrupted on a case-by-case basis, but we do have a hope built on confidence in Jesus Christ that God will set everything right. In the same way that our hope is in Christ for salvation, believing and trusting that he paid for our sins on the cross, we also place our hope in him that one day he will make every hurt right. He will wipe every tear, every body ailment will be healed, and we will be glorified together with him for eternity.
So I want to end with Paul's words here from Romans 8:18, where he says, "I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us." So at a base level, there is a glory that is coming that is better than the sufferings are bad. But more than that, he says that the glory will be revealed in us. God is transforming us through the sufferings of this world, both natural and manmade, into the image of Christ. And so while we shouldn't be pain-seekers, looking for things to hurt us so God can build us up, we should take stock and trust in him that the things that do come are ultimately conforming us, along with his work, to the image of his Son; that is why we can be, and should try to be, joyous in all things. Not that all things are easy, but because for the Christian, all things are actively worked together for our good and our holiness.
So in summing this up, naturalism/atheism, provides no answer, and no way to understand the problem of evil. Christianity explains why it exists and ultimately what God is doing and is going to do about it. It makes so much more sense of reality than any other view. I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Today, as we finish up our Reformation series, we're going to talk about the glory of God in salvation and in life. In October in 2017, and more specifically on October 31st, we remember the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, or at least the start of it, where it hearkens all the way back to when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses—95 points he wanted to discuss about the Roman Catholic practice of selling indulgences. And from there, one thing led to another and, as people went back to the scriptures and read them in their original languages, with their original intents, we had basically a return to Christianity, away from the idolatry, away from the sacramentalism and everything of Roman Catholicism and back to the authority of scripture over all other authorities.
And so from that, we've been talking about the SOLAs—the statements of something “alone”—that came out of the Reformation and, as we've talked about on previous episodes, salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and we know this because of scripture alone, and this is all for the glory of God alone, and that's what we're goning to talk about today.
For the glory of God alone, Soli Deo Gloria, that would be the Latin phrase for this SOLA: God's glory alone. In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which is set of questions and answers designed to teach people about Christianity and scripture, the question is asked, "what is the chief end of man?" (We can talk about this for so long, because I think it would provide so much clarity and peace for a world that is not living for its chief end and, as a result, does not have peace, does not have an actual sense of purpose.)
Well, the Westminster Shorter Catechism answers, "man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." And we find in scripture, that man, as an image bearer of God, is supposed to not reflect man's own glory, but to reflect God's glory. That's what it means to "bear another's image", not to bear our own image, not to live for ourselves, but to live to actively image the one who created us. And we see that this image was defaced, not erased, but defaced in the fall. Man does not live and reflect perfectly the image of God any more.
This image language gets picked up again in Romans, and many other places, but we see in Romans 8, at the end of the chapter, that Paul says, "everything works together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose." And he goes on to say that, no, this doesn't look like kittens and rainbows and big yachts and things like that. It looks like conformity to the image of Christ. And see, God is restoring us to better reflect the image of Himself because that was what we were created to do, to glorify Him, to image Him in this world and in His creation.
So let's talk about what the SOLAs we've looked at before—faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, scripture alone—have to do with the glory of God in salvation and otherwise, and then we'll also talk about the glory of God in everyday life.
Now with regards to salvation, we have said, and shown from scripture, that salvation is an act of the grace of God alone. It is the grace of God, not plus anything else, that brings the sinner to salvation. He doesn't start the process and take you half way, or nine-tenths of the way. No. Grace, that specific act of divine power, actually brings the dead sinner, like we see in Ephesians 2, to life. It is not in addition to works.
Now the mechanism, or you might say, the instrument of that sinner coming to life is actually faith, which is a gift given by God to the sinner, when he could not want it, which that person places in Christ. We are even given the faith in order to be saved and trust God. So faith is a gift of God and we add no works to that.
Grace is what is responsible for all of our salvation. From the beginning to the end, God accomplishes that salvation. And we saw in John 6, where Jesus says you can't come unless the Father gives you to the Son, everyone who's drawn comes, and Jesus raises them all up on the last day. There's a very tightly knit chain there, and no one is lost from the giving to the raising up.
Now what should we say about people who disagree with some of these SOLAs, or one of them? Well, a detraction from any SOLA actually detracts from the glory of God and allows man to share in that glory, even if in some small way. So the SOLAs very much were a reaction to Roman Catholic theology, where your works actually contribute to the merit that you are owed by God.
No one's saying grace isn't necessary, no one is saying faith isn't necessary, but your works can add to Christ's merit. And we have to ask ourselves, "if I can add merit to Christ's merit, and Christ is worthy of glory for His merit, wouldn't I be worthy of some glory for my merit?" Well, the consistent answer would have to be yes, and yet, couldn't we boast in that? I think we could.
And yet, in Ephesians 2:8 and 9, we see Paul saying that the work of grace of God—that He gave us the faith, He gave us the grace, He gave us the salvation—this is so man cannot boast. And he says, "it's not from works." And so, when we deny the sufficiency of the grace of God in salvation and the sufficiency of faith in salvation, what we are saying is there is something for man to boast in, because if God didn't accomplish salvation unilaterally on His own, and it was up to man to contribute something, well then man can boast in that and that detracts from the glory of God. Maybe just a little, but it still detracts from the glory of God.
Now why are we even talking about the glory of God and salvation? Well, Ephesians 1 is a great chapter, I would encourage you to read it. And in fact, the majority of the chapter is one long, about 12 or 13 verse, sentence. Paul just had one huge sentence there, like he couldn't stop, there was so much he wanted to say in a row. But what we see is that we were predestined, adopted, in additon to many other things God did for us. Now remember, as in Chapter 2, this was when we were dead in sin and could not want these things, but Paul tells us why this was. And he says twice in Ephesians 1, that this was done "to the praise of the glory of His grace.”
Why does God save sinners? Well, we often say it was because he loves us, because he cared about us, because we made a mistake. And those things are true, but that's not the answer Paul gives here, and I would also say that's not generally the answer given in scripture, even if those things are true. The primary answer is: God saves sinners for His own glory. He glorifies Himself in the saving of His people. We see this in Israel, time after time after time, He restores them, He takes them back, He disciplines them. He even, initially, brought them out of slavery, but all of this, so they would be His people and glorify Him.
Salvation primarily is about the glory of God. And so, since Paul states this in Ephesians 1, and goes on to support it in 2 and following chapters, we can rightly say that if man actually isn't dead in sin, he's just disabled or handicapped, or if man does contribute some works, then both of these would detract from His point in Chapter 1 (that salvation is for the glory of God). Man could share in that glory if man contributes. If man is able to save himself, well, man should share glory.
And going back to last week, when we talked about Christ alone being the mediator between God and man, if Mary can mediate between God and man, and she shares that office and some of that responsibility with Jesus, well, that would be role that would incur some glory. Right? But if Christ alone is mediator, Christ alone is glorified in that act. If Christ's merit alone is what merits salvation for the sinner, then Mary's merit doesn't come into play, because if it did, Mary would get glory. If man's merit contributes, like we've said before, many would get glory, (and so we can keep repeating this refrain).
I hope what you see is, if it's not faith alone, God's glory is detracted from. If it's not the gracious act of God alone that brings a sinner to salvation, then God's glory is detracted from. If it's shared with someone other than Christ, well, then God's glory is detracted from. And if it's a man-made authority over scripture, well then that authority is getting glory that alone is due to the God of scripture.
The glory of God is actually the chief end of man, that is what we should live for. And oftentimes, we hold beliefs that actually give ourselves far too much credit for our salvation.
I heard Albert Mohler this last week, talking about the Reformation, and he points out that when you ask someone "why are you saved?" that person almost always will talk about themselves first. They'll say, "well, I made this decision, I weighed the options, I considered this, I decided it was time to stop running from God.” I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me.
All of those things may be true, but see, that's a very "us" centered view and understanding of what happened there and scripture tells us what happened behind the scenes. What scripture says is that it is not an accident, it was not an act of my autonomous will that lead to my salvation. It was the fact that the Father, we see in John 6, gave me to the Son, the Son took my name to the cross and atoned for my sins, and the Holy Sprit later on applied that atonement and brought the dead person, like we see in Ephesians 2, to new life, not as a result of their works, not as a result of their autonomous will. Because, Paul has said in Romans 8, no one even wants God and they can't submit to the will of God.
So what we see here is scripture actually tells us God's side of the story. It tells us what God did to bring us to salvation. It tells us even why He did it, for the praise of the glory of His grace, or for His glory would be a shorter way to say that. And so we have to reframe how we even think and feel and remember about our salvation, in light of what scripture actually tells us happened, and that's a hard thing for us to do. Because I think inwardly, even if we know the right answer to this question, we all take more credit for our salvation than we should, and that detracts from the glory that alone is due to God.
So we've talked briefly about God's glory in salvation. There's so much more that could be said here, but let's talk about God's glory in every day life, because remember, that's why we were created. We were created to glorify God, and He saves us to glorify Him. But not just as one time act of Him being able to do something we couldn't do, but so that we can continue to live for Him which we could not have done had He not saved us.
Paul says, "whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory for God."
And isn't that interesting? He's basically saying you can eat a cheeseburger for the glory of God. And that probably sounds silly for such a serious topic, but isn't it interesting, that when he talks about the glory of God, he talks about eating or drinking or whatever you do. He doesn't just say pray for the glory of God, he doesn't just say love your neighbor for the glory of God. No, he thinks and has a view where everything he does should be for the glory of God.
And that's how we should intend to structure our lives. Will we meet that? Will we ever love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength, this side of heaven? No, we won't, but Christ did and we're credited with his perfect obedience in those areas. But nonetheless, that is the goal towards which we strive.
And so I would encourage you, as you think about, maybe it's your parenting, your media consumption, your time management, your conversations, your exercise, your eating, school, work, bible study, whatever it is, consider that you can do these things for the glory of God. There isn't this very defined separation of sacred, and secular, where sacred things can be done for the glory of God and secular things aren't. No, that's not true.
There's a Christian view on actually just about everything. You can eat for the glory of God or you can eat not for the glory of God. You can indulge in food and find your happiness and fulfillment there, or you can find those things in Christ. Exercise can be a good way of exerting dominion over your body and staying healthy. It can also be an unhealthy thing, even if you look great in the mirror, because your body can become your idol. So, once again, are you exercising for the glory of God, to be a good steward of the body, the resource he's given to you?
What about school? We can go through school with rote obedience, just trying to clock a time card, or we can understand that school and education is a great opportunity to learn more about the world God has created and we will never exhaust the depths of knowledge that can be gained about the magnificence of our Creator in understanding His creation, be it us, nature, society, music, the arts, humanities, whatever it is. So you see, there is a Christian view on everything actually. And we can live for God's glory in the mundane things or we can not. We can live for God's glory for the large things or we can not.
And in summary, our whole theological system, and how we understand salvation and life and the purpose of salvation can either glorify God or it can detract from it. If man adds to salvation, if God does not start and finish and do everything in between for salvation, well then man or someone else deserves some of that glory, but that is not a biblically available option because scripture alone is our highest authority, not man-made philosophy, not how I feel, not the words of a church or a counsel; it is scripture alone.
And so, in wrapping up this series, I hope you see that all these things fit together. They apply to our everyday life and, more than that, they help us understand our God and our Savior better.
So if you're just coming into the series now, I would encourage you to go back, listen to the five SOLA episodes and understand more fully God's gracious love and how He has redeemed a people for Himself and for His glory.
Well, I'll talk to you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>We are nearing our final week here in this Reformation series. We've been looking at the five solas of the Reformation, five statements of something “alone” in the Reformation. We started looking at Scripture alone, Sola Scriptura, how Scripture is the sole, infallible authority of the church for the Christian. There is no higher authority. And then we looked at Sola Fide, how salvation is through faith alone, and faith itself is actually given to us as a gift by God when we couldn't even desire it. And last week we looked at Sola Gratia, how salvation comes by a sovereign work of grace alone. Man does not contribute anything. Man was dead in sin and it took a decisive act of specific application of grace to make him alive and to have even desires for God. And then this week we will look at Solus Christus, how salvation is found in Christ alone.
There are actually many facets to this. We're not going to be able to get through all of them, and we're not honestly going to be able to look at any of this in as much detail as I would like to. But here we go, at least with the summary.
Here's what we're talking about today:
We are saved by Christ without any addition of our own works or merit, and without the addition of anyone else's works or merit, and that salvation is mediated by Jesus alone.
There's a lot there; we'll unpack it. And if some of this sounds familiar to the faith and the grace weeks, in some way it is. I hope what this points out to you is that theological topics never exist in isolation. They always exist as a network of interrelated topics of interrelated truths that all fit together nicely and neatly. In fact, if we ever hold a system of beliefs with things that contradict each other, one or more of those beliefs is false. So when we start out looking at Scripture, we build our beliefs from there, we are going to end up with an interconnected web of related beliefs and doctrines. And so let's look at Jesus' work today.
We are justified by Christ's work and his choice alone, not by our work and our choice. We have a fundamental problem, and we've talked about this in previous weeks: what accounts for one person believing the gospel and another person in the exact same set of circumstances with the same experiences not believing the gospel? Well, if God gets the glory alone, which is a sola we'll talk about next week, it cannot be something in that person that is determinative between one person coming to faith and another not coming to faith. The difference must belong solely in God.
I think it's fair and necessary to make a qualification here that at the time of the Reformation, and still today, the issue was not, “is faith required or is faith necessary?” Roman Catholics believed then and believe now that faith is necessary. The question wasn't is grace necessary? No, grace has always been seen to be necessary.
Here is the hinge point though. Is faith in Christ sufficient? Or is there something else that is necessary? Or did Christ, by his work on the cross, accomplish everything, all possible merit that was required for the sinner to be saved? And the answer, from the Protestant perspective, that came out of the Reformation—that was recaptured in terms of what has always been taught in Scripture—is that Christ's work is not just necessary; it is sufficient. You can't add anything to it. Because think about it: What would the infinite sacrifice of Christ on the cross possibly have that could be added to it? Nothing. And how would our acts even compare if we were looking to add on to something more than Christ's work? They couldn't. This is a very fundamental, important idea for us to understand, that faith in Christ is not just necessary; it's sufficient. The grace of God to bring the sinner to salvation doesn't need anything to cooperate with it. In fact, the sinful man, dead in his sin, cannot cooperate with it. Christ's work alone is necessary and also sufficient.
One of the differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is that in Roman Catholicism, you can grow in justification. You can become more justified over time. Your works actually contribute to your justification, to how God views you, to your standing before God, to the righteousness that you're seen to have by God. And yet this flies in the face of what we've looked at before and the week we looked at Sola Fide, how justification comes by faith, that gift of God, alone. But since you can grow in justification, what that actually means is you are contributing to what will make you saved. You are saved based on partially grace, but also partially works in the Roman Catholic system. And also in a Mormon system, by the way. So we're not just talking about Roman Catholicism here. But these beliefs stand in stark contrast to the fact that grace is the beginning, the middle, and the end, the entire work of salvation. Salvation itself is totally devoid of human merit.
We don't contribute anything. We looked at this last week in John 6, how the flesh is of no help; salvation depends on the Spirit. And really, when we go back to John 6, we see that the work of salvation is unilaterally God. The Father gives the people to the Son, the Son atones for and redeems those people on the cross, and the Holy Spirit brings that same group of people to new spiritual life at some future point in time.
When we have a view that works contribute to salvation, that it's not just the work of Christ, then you end up with something like purgatory in Roman Catholicism, where you have to pay the temporal punishment for the sins that have yet to be paid for when you die. So they would say Jesus paid for your eternal punishment, but you have some temporal punishment, some punishment that takes place in time in a definitive period of time, that you will have to pay.
That's why, in the Reformation, Martin Luther was railing against the Catholic Church's sale of indulgences, which were ways to get out of paying that temporal punishment in purgatory. And he said no. You can't say that there's still punishment for the Christian to undergo, because Christ paid for it all, which is how Paul can say “there's no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” not even temporal condemnation. And so that's really important for us to understand. If you have a view where works contribute, you may have to work off more of your sin in purgatory; you may have to contribute your own merit.
So that's a really important distinction for us to understand, and yes, that brings together some of the things we've looked at in previous weeks, but kind of from a new dimension. But there's another aspect to this idea that salvation is found in Christ alone, and that is who is the mediator between God and man?
A mediator is a go-between. You may have heard that there are sometimes legal disputes where two parties cannot agree, and sometimes what a judge will do is not make a determination and a judgment, but what he'll do is refer that case to mediation. What he's saying is, "I'm appointing some mutual third party to be the go-between for these two parties to help them arrive at peace in the situation."
Biblically speaking, there has always been a mediator. It used to be in the Old Covenant that the priests, the Levites, were the mediators between God and men. They offered sacrifices on their behalf. They interceded to God on behalf of the people, and that type of thing. Well, in Roman Catholicism, the church, in some ways, stands as the mediator between God and man, because Catholics believe that the church is a “second Christ.” They believe that Christ is incarnated in the church, and so the institution of the church is divine. Also, priests in Roman Catholicism are actually called “alter christus.” That's Latin for "another Christ." They believe they stand in the place of Christ. The pope is called the “vicar of Christ,” the image of Christ. And so you see, they have this very high view of the whole actual Roman Catholic system of the church—the pope, and the priests—where they actually stand in the place of Jesus. (I would love to say so much about that, but we simply don't have time.)
But here's why this is important, because it's not just the pope, the church, and priests that are seen kind of as go-betweens, where in Roman Catholicism you would confess your sins to a priest. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is seen to be a co-mediator with Jesus. She can mediate between the Father and us on our behalf. This is what the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church says in the Roman Catholic Catechism.
“Taken up to heaven, Mary did not lay aside this saving office that she possessed, but by her manifold intercession, continues to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation. Therefore, the blessed virgin is invoked in the church under the title of advocate, helper, benefactress, and mediatrix.”
A Mediatrix is a female mediator.
I think it's interesting that they do affirm that she continues to bring us salvation, so in some way our salvation is dependent on the work of Mary here, but more than that, the ongoing relationship of the Christian to God should have Mary in some way as a mediator, as a go-between. She was righteous enough on her own - that's what they believe - that she is able to commend us well to God the Father. And so when we want to be heard well, can pray to Mary, and then she could pray for us, talk to Jesus on our behalf, and that type of thing.
There's so much I want to say about that, but let's just say for he sake of argument she is a mediator along with Jesus. Under what circumstances would I ever want to pray to Mary if I could pray to Jesus? Why go to the mother of God when you can just go to God? Why go to the copilot when you could go to the pilot? This doesn't even make much sense on the face of it. But more than that, biblically speaking, there is no mediator besides Jesus. 1 Timothy 2:5 says,
”There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and man: the Man Jesus Christ."
Christ is the one (sole) mediator between God and man.
Now you may say this verse is very clear; why do Roman Catholics believe something different? Because the Vatican—the pope, Roman Catholicism—has declared as a matter of belief that you must believe if you are a Roman Catholic that Mary is a mediator. They've also declared that you must believe a lot of other things that are not found in Scripture. But the reason for this is that Roman Catholicism does not affirm Sola Scriptura. They actually believe the pope and the church can speak with the same authority as Scripture.
And as an aside, I would say they actually believe it has more authority than Scripture, because the church, on a Roman Catholic view, is the only thing that can tell you what is Scripture, and they've claimed the right to tell you authoritatively what Scripture means. So they actually stand over and above Scripture on their belief. But that's how you can end up with non-biblical beliefs, because like I said, 1 Timothy says there's one God and mediator; it's Jesus Christ. It's not Mary. It's not the other saints.
But Hebrews 7:25 says a lot about this, and honestly, I would encourage you to read through all of Hebrews, but specifically starting maybe around 6 and going through 10, just to understand how much it says about Jesus, and you'll see a lot of parallels to Roman Catholicism today in what the writer to the Hebrews is actually rejecting.
But here's what it says in chapter 7:25.
”So Jesus is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them."
Well, if Jesus is interceding for me, what could Mary possibly add? There's a parallel problem here if you remember. If God died for me in the person of Jesus on the Christ, what could I possibly add to that? I think the answer is obviously nothing, and we've looked at that through Scripture in previous weeks, but we're confronted with a similar question here. If Jesus is interceding for me, who could possibly add to that?
But we also see in Hebrews 9:15 that
“Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who were called may receive the internal inheritance he has promised. Since he died to set them free from the violations committed under the first covenant.”
Isn't that interesting? Right here, the writer to the Hebrews has linked several things. Jesus mediates for those for whom he died. There are some parallels here to what we looked at in John 6 last week. These people who were called - remember, you can only comes if Father draws/calls you, and everyone who is drawn will come to the Son - those people are the same ones that Christ is mediating for.
Once again, here we see Jesus is the mediator of the new covenant. There's not room for another mediator. If Jesus is the mediator, there is no need, nor is there room, for another, and this work of mediation is inextricably linked with the people that he also atoned for.
Doesn't that just make sense, that there would be harmony in the Trinity in salvation, such that the same people the Father gave the Son are the same ones he atoned for on the cross, are the same ones the Spirit brings to new life as a result of that atonement, are the same ones Jesus intercedes for later on after that regeneration? It just makes sense that there's harmony in the intention of the Father and who he gives to the Son, and the intention of the Son when he goes to the cross, and in the intention of the Spirit in bringing new life to people. It just makes sense that they all are participating with their unique roles in the one plan of salvation for the one people of God.
I hope what you see here in these scriptural passages, in the logic and reasoning we've worked through, is there's not room for another mediator. There is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, not Mary. She doesn't stand alongside Jesus. The whole idea that she would be righteous enough on her own to do so blatantly flies in the face of what Paul says in Romans, that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Yes, that would include Mary. And in Ephesians 2, that everyone was dead in their transgressions and sins; yes, even Mary. That God had to make alive any person who came to faith in Christ; yes, that would include even Mary.
Is it a great honor that God would choose Mary to be the earthly mother of the incarnate Christ? Yes, that is an amazing thing. But that doesn't mean that she's divine. That doesn't mean that she wasn't stained by initial sin, which the church also affirms that she was not actually guilty of original sin, nor did she ever sin. It doesn't mean those things because Scripture doesn't say those things.
But more than that, when we look at this doctrine of Solus Christus, we see that salvation is the work of God alone, is the work of Christ alone on the cross, that leads to us being justified. We can't add to that. But even more than that, the ongoing relationship for the Christian, it's not mediated by anyone but Jesus Christ. It's not mediated by Mary. And even if Mary were a mediatrix, as the Roman Catholics claim, would we really want her to mediate for us instead of Jesus? I think not.
This doesn't mean that we should bash on Catholics and things like that, and generally when I teach in Roman Catholicism I actually like to say what the Catholic church has to say about the Protestant views, because any disagreement we have with Roman Catholicism is also a disagreement the Roman Catholic church has with Protestants. That's a two-way street of disagreement, but it does no one any good when we're not clear on the differences, because there are differences. Rome has a very different view of the gospel than Protestants do, at least conservative Protestants, and that's important for us to understand. There are different gospels being talked about here. There are different gospels that are understood. It's not just a matter of liturgy and worship preference and some authority difference. There are very stark contrasts that get to the heart of what it means to get right with God. Justification is that doctrine by which we understand how man is made right with God. Roman Catholics say one thing; Protestants say another. They both can't be right, so the stakes are high. We must be very clear and take these items very seriously.
I hope this series has been helpful to you personally, maybe in your encounters with people with different faith backgrounds in your community, and next week we'll finish the series off talking about how salvation is for the glory of God alone, and it will bring together many of the different themes we've talked about thus far.
]]>A man is a man, regardless of if someone (including that person) believes the man to actually be a man. Just like an apple is an apple even if someone believes it to be a banana.
Watch the two videos below:
Here's the one from CNN
“Some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana.” #FactsFirst pic.twitter.com/LbmRKiGJe9
— CNN (@CNN) October 23, 2017
Based on that video, this one just makes sense...
]]>For the last two weeks, and for the next two weeks after this week, we will be talking about the solas of the Reformation, these statements of some “doctrine alone.” For instance, the first week we talked about sola scriptura, that scripture alone is the sole, infallible rule of faith for the church. Then we talked about sola fide, that salvation comes through faith alone, not by faith and works. We looked at Ephesians 2, a passage we'll go back to some this week, to establish that the actual faith through which salvation comes is itself a gift of God.
That leads us today to sola gratia, grace alone, that salvation is by the grace of God alone. Sola gratia, grace alone, simultaneously affirms two things. The first is man's inability to save himself or even to desire God. The second thing that's affirmed (because of the first) is that God needs to decisively and unilaterally make the sinner a new creation if he's going to be saved at all.
To use some biblical terminology, God needs to, by the Holy Spirit, take out the heart of stone and give the person a heart of flesh (Ez. 11:19) before they could even ever have desires for God. Sinful man does not desire the things of God (Rom. 3). Sinful man does not desire to please God. Sinful man does not desire to submit to God. Sola gratia explains how one actually comes to salvation.
Because, when it comes to salvation, one of the biggest practical questions we have to answer is: Why did I choose to believe the Gospel and commit my life to Christ when my neighbor, my friend, my coworker, who heard the same Gospel, chose to reject it? What differentiates one person from another when it comes to if they are a Christian or become a Christian or not?
Unless it's something decisive in God, then that means it lies in the person. Is it that a person is more moral, they were more desirous of the things of God, they understand the Gospel better, they cared more, they were more sensitive to the things of the Spirit? If it's any of those things, then the person, the sinner who comes to faith, has something to boast in. Then this detracts, ultimately, from God alone getting the glory, which is what we see one of the main purposes of salvation is in Ephesians 1. God did all these things to effect salvation for a people so that he would be praised for his grace, “to the praise of his glorious grace,” Paul says in Ephesians 1.
When we talk about this term of sola gratia, grace alone, at the least what we mean is that our salvation from the wrath of God is because of something good that God did, not because of something good we did. Let's look at a few passages. Because, if you remember, scripture alone is the highest authority for the Christian so we need to form our doctrines out of scripture. We're going to be back in Ephesians 2 today and also spend some time in John 6.
Ephesians 2 starts out,
“Though you were dead in your transgressions and sin,"
and Paul goes on to say some more, "dead in transgressions and sin," not sick, not handicapped, not slightly disabled. No. Dead. Spiritually you were dead. He gives us some more context here in verse four.
“But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even though we were dead in our transgressions, he made us alive together with Christ... By grace you have been saved!”
Paul basically interrupts himself to make that last point.
We have to ask and answer this question: What is the state of the sinner before salvation? Is he just somewhat of a blank slate? Can he make up his mind correctly with regards to God? Could he desire the things of God. Does he care but not as much as he should? Biblically speaking, that's not an option.
Paul says in Romans 8 that the person in the flesh, the non-Christian, does not submit to the law of God and cannot do so. He can't do anything pleasing to God (Rom. 8:7-8). In other words, he can't repent. He can't place his trust in God apart from God's gracious act that we'll talk about in a minute. He can't live for God. He can't even care about living for God, because he's not sick, he's dead in his sin. He has a heart of stone. A heart of stone does not have affections for God.
If we're going to take Paul and the biblical writers, and ultimately the Holy Spirit, speaking through them at their word and let terms have their natural meaning, “dead” is the worst state someone could be in. If we could imagine a worse spiritual state than dead, then that is what dead actually is. Let's not soften the spiritual imagery of stones, children of disobedience, sons of wrath, and being dead in sin. If you are dead, you cannot make yourself alive.
This leads us to why Paul interrupts himself in the middle of a sentence to say that we were “made alive together with Christ.” “By grace we have been saved.” It is God who via a sovereign decisive work takes out the heart of stone and puts in a heart of flesh. Because dead men don't even request to be saved. God must take that action by grace.
Paul goes on to say that
”He raised us up and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Jesus."
(As an aside, that's something that has happened. Paul is using the past tense here. You are already seated in the heavenly realms in Christ, positionally, if you are a Christian. That's just something that will blow our minds and we can think much more about at a later point!)
He continues that
“it is by grace you have been saved through faith. This is not from yourselves. It's the gift of God. It's not from works so that no one can boast.”
Paul is concerned here with removing the ability to boast. I'll return to where we started today. If man could say, "I had the opportunity to go either way. I had the capacity to choose God," then doesn't he have some type of glory that he could boast in? If I had this moral capacity, and wasn’t fully dead in sin, why couldn't I boast if that was the case? If I made a choice that someone else was fully able to make, that we all had the same capacity, and some of us made it and some of us didn't, boasting would not be excluded.
But Paul here, whatever he's saying, he intends it to exclude boasting. The most natural reading is that this grace that we have been saved by is a sovereign work of God. We talked last week about how grammatically grace, salvation, and faith in this sentence are all gifts of God.
I think there's this tendency for us often to have too anemic of a view of grace, where grace is kind of this abstract notion where we might define it as God's unmerited favor. “When it rains on the just and the unjust,” there's some common grace there.
But even the fact that we would call something common grace points to this idea that there is an uncommon, specific grace. When we come to salvation, we're not talking about an abstract kind of unmerited kindness where God made something available and someone could take advantage of it if they wanted. No, as Bright says, “Grace is a force in the spiritual order. It's not simply God's unmerited kindness in the abstract. No, it is such kindness in action as a movement of his Holy Spirit within the soul resulting from the incarnation and imparting to the will the affections in a new capacity of obedience and love.”
You see, after the fall it was not possible for man to not sin. But, that's because of his nature and his innate moral capacities, which are actually extremely damaged. He cannot not sin because he is dead in sin. He's a slave to sin. God has to set us free from that and give us new capacities, new desires such that we even want to live for him and obey him and love him. That's what Paul is saying here. When we were dead, God gave us those new capacities via specific application of grace, which is a force, not an abstract idea and concept but something that is actually effective at accomplishing its desired ends.
Before we move on here, I do want to clarify one thing. Paul does use the word “gift” here in Ephesians 2. I said last week we have a very western idea of a gift. The type of gift Paul has in mind here is not the type of gift that's on the table as an option that the child could ignore on Christmas day because it was overlooked. It's the type of gift where, while your family is on a vacation your friends come together, gut your house, and redo it with some type of “extreme home makeover.” You cannot choose to reject that gift. It has been done decisively. That's the type of gift God's grace is. Because there's a fundamental problem. The dead person in sin cannot want the gift of God because they don't see it as glorious.
I think this is what John is capturing in Jesus' words in John 3:3, where he says,
”I tell you the solemn truth. Unless a person is born from above, he can't see the kingdom of God.”
You can't see and understand and appreciate spiritual things unless you actually have been already born again.
This is what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 1:18, where he says
"the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. But to those who are being saved, it's the power of God."
There are only two groups, two groups in Romans 8: in the flesh, can't please God; in the spirit, can please God. 1 Corinthians 1:18 also has two groups: dead in sin, foolish, perishing, or those who are saved/being saved.
What accounts for someone not seeing the cross as foolishness? God has given them a new heart, new desires. Because if everyone who is not saved sees the cross as foolish, you have to answer the question: How does someone come to see the cross as not foolish? God has to change their mind, change their heart, and give them belief.
That's actually what Jesus is talking about further on in John 6. The disciples say,
”What must we do to accomplish the deeds God requires from us?"
They're thinking works here. Jesus requires,
”This is the deed: God requires to believe in the one whom he sent,"
to believe in Jesus. That's what is required for salvation from man's perspective and responsibility.
Then in verse 36 Jesus says,
“But I told you that you've seen me and still don't believe.”
So the question is why don't they believe? He's going to go on to make the point that they don't have the ability, apart from God's sovereign work of grace in their life. This is what he says in verse 37.
“Everyone whom the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never send away, for I've come down from heaven to do not my own will but the will of the one who sent me. Now this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should not lose any one person of everyone he has given me, but raise them all up on the last day."
He repeats,
“For this is the will of my Father. For everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him to have eternal life, and I'll raise him up on the last day."
What Jesus is saying here in response to the question of people not believing is that people have not been given the ability by God to believe, at least in this specific case he's looking at. I think this is a general point too. In order for someone to come to Jesus the Father specifically gives that person to Jesus. The specific people the Father gives to Jesus, by Jesus' own words here, will come to him and Jesus will lose none, and he will raise them all up on the last day.
He says that he is the “bread of life” who's “come down from heaven.” Then the Jews become hostile. Why? Because they haven't been granted the ability to believe. In verse 44 he says again,
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him [literally “the one coming”] up at the last day.”
If you are coming to Jesus it is because the Father has given you, and if you are coming, you will continue to come and you will be raised up to glory on the last day.
In verse 61 in the same passage Jesus asks the disciples,
“Does this cause you to be offended?"
Another way to translate that would be, "Or does this cause you to no longer believe?" He basically saying “If me saying I have come down from heaven and I'm the bread of life is causing you not to believe,” he then asks in verse 62,
“Then what will you do when you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?"
In other words, the cross is going to be an even bigger stumbling block than the claims Jesus made before the cross.
Then he says this in response to this idea that people may not believe. In verse 63 he says,
“It's the spirit who is the one who gives life. Human nature is of no help. It does not contribute.”
The same idea is in Ephesians 2. The grace, the faith, the salvation, all of it is a gift of God to the sinful person. It's effective at what it is intended to accomplish. It's not just Jesus tossing it out there on a hope and a prayer. No, as we see in verse 63,
“It's the spirit who gives life. Human nature does not help and contribute in that process.”
It can't because it's dead. It does not have affections for God.
Let's continue in verse 64 here.
“But there are some of you who do not believe. Jesus said this because he'd already known from the beginning who those were who did not believe and who is was who would betray him.”
He's not confused when people don't believe. When we read some passages and Jesus is astonished at disbelief, that doesn't mean he learned something he didn't already know or that he had a higher view of man than he was actually confronted with. (We could talk about that another day, but it can't mean that he didn't know.)
Jesus adds in verse 65,
“Because of this I already told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has allowed him to come,"
unless the Father has “given him to the Son” as he said previously. That's the only thing that makes sense. It can't be our works because we don't have the desire to do good things for God. If we did have the desire to do good things for our salvation, that would actually be a tainted type of desire because we're doing the things for salvation.
Even if you have a view where works contribute to salvation, they can't be perfectly good works because they're tainted by selfish impulses. But more than that, what we see is that, from Ephesians 2, from Jesus' words here, that man, apart from the sovereign work of specific application of grace—not grace in the abstract but grace in the specific—man cannot come to God.
The reason for this, at least in part, and I think there are several, is that God alone gets the glory for this. Remember, in Ephesians 2, Paul, whatever you think he's saying, at the end of this paragraph is saying that man does not get the glory, cannot boast for his salvation. But if man contributes even just a little bit, even the last 10th of a percent, he would have something to boast in.
In the same way that a bunch of people who participate in a relay or a marathon could boast because all participated, even if one only did the last two steps—he's on the team, he gets a trophy for it. Now he probably gets less glory than the person who maybe ran 10 miles, as it should be, but he still gets some. But that is not how it is with salvation. Salvation is from the Lord. It is a work of specific application of grace that brings the sinner to repentance, that gives them the faith that they place in God. That is how a man dead in sin can come to new spiritual life, by the work of God and good things in him, not by the work of man and anything in him. The result of this is as Paul says in Ephesians 1, that we praise God “for the glory of his grace.”
I hope that's where you find yourself. That this view and examination that we've looked at of the sovereign grace of God in salvation, that was recaptured in the Reformation and proclaimed to this day, and is taught by the biblical writers, that it actually encourages us to praise God, to have a larger view of him, to have a larger view of our sin and depravity, and to more greatly appreciate the work he actually did on the cross, where the Father had given a specific people to the Son, where the Son then atoned for those people, and later in time the Spirit applies that atonement and redemption such that dead people in their sins come to be made alive in Christ.
I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Last week we started what will be a series of podcast episodes for the month of October recognizing and in some ways, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. This is actually a really big deal, because those of us that are Protestants or Evangelicals today, are that in many ways because of what happened 500 years ago and because of the theology that came out of the reformation. One of those core theological truths was this doctrine of scripture alone, [sola scriptura and we talked about this last week.]
In fact, it's so important to understand that doctrine because all of the other doctrines that we're going to look at this month and really all of the other doctrines that ever could exist that are correct are found and grounded in scripture, and in scripture alone, because scripture is our highest authority. There is no authority above it. There is no authority we can use to confirm it because scripture is where God speaks. When God speaks, he does not err. Scripture is true and because it's spoken by the creator, holy, powerful, sovereign God of the universe, it's also authoritative.
One of the key doctrines that came out of the reformation—at least that was reclaimed then, it wasn't just created right then and there—was this doctrine of faith alone, sola fide.
What this means is that justification comes by faith alone. Now, what is justification? It's one of those big theological words. But this is actually really important because if you get justification wrong, you actually get the gospel wrong. In the Roman Catholic Church back in the time of the reformation and today, they got the gospel wrong. That might sound insensitive, but the Roman Catholic church actually says the same thing about Protestants. That's incredibly important for us to understand.
The Roman Catholic church actually condemns the view that Protestants hold. They say, "If you believe by faith alone the sinner is justified, let you be anathema." In other words, let the curse of God be upon you. This is what came out of the official proclamation of the Catholic church at the Council of Trent in 1546. They responded to what the reformers were saying about justification (how a person is declared righteous), and they said that it is not by faith alone only. No, you must have works also. If you say it's by faith alone, let the curse of God be upon you.
Let's be very clear on the lines. I'm not just picking on Roman Catholics. No, the Catholics have historically been very clear on the lines too. This line of justification has to do with if we get the gospel right or if we get the gospel wrong. In other words, can I contribute to my salvation or not?
What is justification? Tt's the doctrine that teaches that man is declared righteous by God. He's declared righteous in light of his faith, not because of his works, not in conjunction with his works. But by his faith alone, man is declared righteous.
Now, sometimes, people will say, "Justification is when we are declared not guilty," but that's only half of the story because it's not just that our sin is declared to be gone because of what Jesus did on the cross. There's another half, we're actually credited with the perfect righteousness, holiness and obedience of Jesus Christ. It's not just that we're left neutral because of what happened at the cross. No, we're credited with the same righteousness of Jesus. But this justification is actually a credit to our account. We are not actually made righteous people. We are not transformed instantly into righteous people. That's what sanctification is.
The word for this, the fancy theological word, is that Christ's righteousness is imputed to us. It is credited to our account. It is not infused into us. It is not imparted to us. We are not, in other words, created righteous. We are not transformed into righteous people. This is what Roman Catholics actually believed though, that you actually become a righteous person because of your works and your faith.
In Roman Catholicism, you can actually grow in justification. It's a process. What Protestants would call sanctification, Catholics would include in justification. But the problem is one of what scripture says. This is where we return to what we said last week: that scripture is our highest authority in faith and practice because scripture says that faith is not just necessary for salvation. Catholics believe that. Mormons believe that. Oftentimes, other people will believe that. It's not just necessary, however. Scripture says it's sufficient. It needs nothing else. It stands alone. It's a sola.
Let's look at some biblical support for this. Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, having been justified," in other words, declared righteous “by faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." We were declared righteous. We were justified and this was through faith. This leads to peace, which is something I wish we had much more time to talk about today: how correct doctrine influences how we feel, how we think, how we live, it leads to peace.
This passage continues.
“What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh has found? If Abraham was justified by his works, he has something to boast about but not before God. What does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Now, to the one who works, his wage isn't credited as a favor, but it's what's due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness.
I think this is incredibly important because then Paul goes on to say that “God credits righteousness apart from works,” not in addition to it, not alongside of it, not that works are necessary but faith is also necessary. No, it's apart from works. The example he gives here is incredibly clear. If you actually earn something, it's not grace to give it to you. It's not a credit to you. No, you earned it. It's a wage. It has to be given to you. It's not a favor. But Paul is saying the opposite of that.
In fact, what you have been given, your justification, is not something you could work for. It's something that only comes by faith. Now, you might say, but where did that faith come from? Was that a choice I made? Did I, in some way, in some incredibly small way merit the reception of this justification? Was I the one who flipped the switch that made this possible? Well, we'll talk about that in a minute.
Galatians 2:16 also says, "Since by the works of the law, no one will be justified." Now, by faith, we've seen you're justified but by the works of the law, you're not justified. It can't just be that it's faith and works.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says,
”For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. It's not from works, so that no one can boast."
Here is the central problem in some ways. If man contributes to his salvation—if man can work, do things, make choices that lead to salvation—in some way, that's meritorious, then he can boast about it. Just think of it. If someone made a choice, did an action that someone else didn't do and that action or choice resulted in salvation, well, then that person could rightly boast. Maybe just a little. Maybe they just did the last little half of a percent and Jesus did 99.5% of the work. But nonetheless, if they did something that someone else did not do that they chose to do, well, then they could boast in that.
Paul wants to be very clear that that's not actually possible for the Christian. The Christian cannot boast in their salvation. They can only boast in God. Now, why do I say all of these? Well, let's look back at this passage. This is one of those areas and there are not necessarily a lot of these, but where a correct understanding of a passage, actually in some ways depends on our ability or inability to read the original language. In this case, Ephesians is written in Greek and we lose a little of something when this verse is translated into English.
Not to get all “word nerdy” on you but you may have learned a foreign language in high school or since then and you may know that some words have gender in other languages. There can be masculine nouns or feminine nouns or neuter nouns (words that don't have a gender.) In this case, Paul says something very interesting, he says, "For by grace," which is a noun, "You are saved through faith and this is not of yourselves." Well, what does the "this" refer to? We should ask that question.
He goes on and says, "It is not from works." Well what is "it"? What is the "this"? What is the "it"? Well, interestingly enough, "this" and "it" are both neuter words. They don't have a gender. We may say, "Well, what's the neuter word that comes before, that this should correspond to?" Because that's how language works, a noun or a pronoun or something like that is going to refer back to a noun with the same gender and yet, we don't find any neuter words in this sentence. "Grace" isn't neuter. "Saved" isn't neuter. "Faith" isn't neuter and in fact, what we see here and this is one of the features of the Greek language is that when you have a neuter word and the previous words in the sentence are not neuter, that neuter word is referring to all of the previous things.
Paul's point here is not that faith is a gift, and something else is from works. No, his point is that the grace is a gift, that your salvation is a gift, that the very faith that brought you to salvation is a gift. What we see is that we can't even take credit for our faith. This verse allows us to peer behind the curtain to get a little more perspective on what we often thought was our decisive active of autonomous free will and come to realize that God actually gave us the very faith that we placed in him.
We'll talk about the other side of this, the other facet of this next week when we talk about grace alone, that salvation is by grace—God's sovereign, unmerited grace alone. Right now, we're talking about faith and faith is what man places in God and it's a trust. It's a trust in what you have good reason to believe is true but God is the one who gives us that faith. God is the one who imparts the faith to us that we then place in him and that's how we come to be saved.
Because we have to answer this question, “Why do some people place faith in God and others not?” Is it that they were more sensitive to the things of God? Well, that sounds meritorious. Someone who cares more about the things of God. Well, that sounds noteworthy. Were they simply more moral? Well, that sounds noteworthy too. Were they smarter? Were they in some way worthy of something that someone else wasn't? Did they have something intrinsic in them that led to them placing faith in God? The answer has to be no, because Paul has already said in this passage earlier in Chapter 2 that man is dead in his sin. Dead men do not choose God. They don't have the capacity to.
It's not necessarily that they can't, it's that they can't even want to, because men and humans in general act according to their nature and the nature of the unregenerate man is not to want the things of God. Paul in Romans 3 says that man doesn't please God. He doesn't seek God. He can't. Man can't even submit to the law of God. Well, the law of God is to repent. Man, apart from the gift of faith cannot even repent.
Paul in Romans 8 says that the unregenerate person lives according to the flesh. They cannot please God. Isn't repentance pleasing to God? Well, yes. So, how does unregenerate man repent? He can't on his own. God has to first regenerate him and then he repents. He understands and sees God as glorious and from that, he repents. God has given him the faith to trust God for salvation, and all of these flows from understanding that man is actually dead in sin. He's not sick. He doesn't just need a doctor. He is dead. He is Lazarus, dead and rotting in the tomb and God must do a miraculous act of sovereign work in his life to give him the very faith, as Paul says in Ephesians 2:8 and 9 to then cause him place that faith back in God. But that only happens because faith is a gift.
I think we have taken this word gift and westernized it, because in our minds, a gift is something you can accept or reject. In an eastern culture, that's not the case. It would have been incredibly rude to reject a gift. I think we read too much into this word gift sometimes and make it seem like, well, man can make an autonomous choice. Well, man does make a choice. He consistently does not choose God until God regenerates his nature, because he is dead in sin, cannot seek God, cannot please God, cannot even submit to the will of God or the word of God as Paul says in Romans.
We see this doctrine of faith alone doesn't mean that man contributes the faith. It means God contributes the faith, but certainly works are not necessary in conjunction with that faith, because God gives us everything we need in order to be saved. In fact, he brings us to salvation. He doesn't just take us halfway. He doesn't take us 99% of the way. He takes us all the way. Why is this important?
Well, very briefly, because I fear that many people say, "Yeah, faith is necessary for salvation." They might like this idea that salvation is by faith alone, but they think they mustered up the faith, that they made the autonomous choice to place faith in God and that actually robs God of his glory and doesn't fit with what scripture says.
This is an area that we have to be faithful to the biblical witness and that actually, if we get this wrong, it detracts from the glory of God and that's one of the other solas we'll get to, that we are saved to the glory of God alone. Because if I contribute, even the faith that makes my salvation necessary, I should get a little bit of that glory.
Now, obviously, everyone would say, "No, that's not the case." But if I contribute at something, shouldn't I get at least a proportional part of the credit? Well, I think that makes sense.
There's so much more I want to say but I briefly want to point out where we started, that Roman Catholicism still gets this wrong. By its official doctrine of the church, it actually totally rejects this idea that salvation is by faith alone.
Mormonism gets this doctrine wrong. Mormons believe you are saved after all you can do. If you go back to a sin you have previously repented of you, basically, destroy the grace that brought you to salvation. It's a very works based religion there too. Cultural Christianity often thinks it can work its way to heaven, that it's going to cooperate with grace and in addition to faith, and that is not true.
Now, this faith alone view is subject to abuse. But as Calvin said, "The faith that saves is never alone even though we are saved by faith alone." True saving faith, which is a gift of God, not a work of man or a willing of man, will produce good fruit, because it's God who works through us to produce the fruit. As Paul says, "God created good works that we would walk in them.” We don't even to take credit necessarily for the good works that we do because it's the spirit working it out through us.
Now, I wish I would have left time to talk about James too and this idea that faith apart from works is dead and how does this fit with sola fide and all of that, but I'll simply link to some previous podcasts above where we've talked about this before and some other podcasts where we've looked in more detail at what the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church is. But I hope what you've seen today is that the very faith we have is a gift of God that he did for us when we couldn't even want it, couldn't even desire, couldn't even repent on our own and that should drive us to praise him and be incredibly grateful for what he did when we couldn't even desire it.
I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>I don't know if you know this, but this October, specifically October 31, marks the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Now, there may be a lot there that seems a little foreign to you, because if you're anything like me, I didn't grow up in a Christian context that talked much about Christian history. I think that's fairly common in some circles, sadly. A lot of people don't realize that Christians have a long, rich tradition and heritage of robust thought and reflection about pretty much everything that religion talks about and pretty much everything outside of what we would explicitly consider religion.
So there's a long history of Christians thinking about science and how to do science for the glory of God, and how to do sociology and psychology and geology and archeology and all the “ologies” from a Christian worldview. But we don't often know that. We don't often consider, and we're not informed about how God’s people have been thinking through the issues of life and reality from a consistently Biblical point of view for pretty much as long as there has been time.
We often come to things like the Protestant Reformation, and we might not even know what it is or why it's significant. So for this month, we're going talk about the Reformation, and we're going talk about a doctrine, a teaching, that came out of that Reformation each week.
Today we're gonna talk about Sola Scriptura, but before we talk about that specifically, I want to talk a little bit about what the Reformation was and what these solas are. When Martin Luther, who was a monk, nailed his famous 95 Theses to the castle church door, he wasn't intending to start a revolution. He wasn't intending to break away from the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted to reform it. He had some grievances that he wanted to debate publicly, and that is how you did that. You nailed or you posted a list of concerns and items for discussion, and then hopefully a formal debate, or at least a public debate, would follow.
He wasn't intending to break away from the church of Rome, but the more he studied and the more other people went back to the Bible and not just to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, he began to realize that there are huge differences between what Scripture teaches and what the church was at least officially teaching as God's view at that time.
One of the principles that came out of all of this study and reformation was called Sola Scriptura. That's a Latin phrase, and what it means is "scripture alone." The theology of the Reformation is often characterized by five solas, five statements of something “alone.” And so we have Sola Scriptura; we have Sola Fide, which would be faith alone is how man is justified before God; there's Sola Gratia, grace alone is what brings the sinner to salvation; there's Solus Christus, we are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by anything in addition to that like works; we are also saved Soli Deo Gloria, to the glory of God alone. We'll unpack these in future weeks, and if this sounds stuffy, I would encourage you just to give it a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. This is actually really important stuff.
Now, this is an apologetics podcast, so we often talk about apologetics-related things, like the age of the earth and gender and sexuality and the textual evidence for the New Testament and things like that. Those are all really important, but I would contend we don't often talk enough about gospel-related apologetic concerns, and all five of these solas touch on gospel-related apologetic concerns. We need to be able to defend that Scripture is our highest authority. We need to be able to certainly contend for the truth that justification happens by faith alone. If you get that wrong, you've got the gospel wrong. And all of this is done for the glory of God alone, which is something that's often also missed. If man contributes to his salvation, then shouldn't he get at least a little teeny bit of the glory? If it's not the decisive work by God's sovereign grace alone, then yes, I think he should.
So all of these fit together, and they're incredibly pertinent for today. This isn't just some stuffy 16th century debate. No, the Reformation needs to continue, in part because there's still a Roman Catholic Church, but also because every non-Christian religion and cult runs afoul with at least one of these solas. So in learning these solas, we'll be more equipped to speak with many different groups of people.
Right before we dive in, I'd like to ask you a question. Are you a protestant, are you an evangelical based on preference or conviction? I think that's a really important question. Many of us were raised in a specific faith tradition and we just continued on in it. So if you were to ask someone why they're not Catholic, they might say, "I like the music at my local nondenominational church better." If you ask someone why they are Catholic, "Why did you convert from Protestantism to Catholicism?" They might say, "Well, I liked the tradition and I liked the liturgy and sense of authority that the church has and conveys." Those are preferences, a lot of times. Some people change for convictions, and that's perhaps a better reason even if it's a bad change, but many change based on preference and not conviction. For example, it could be that you like liturgy, and liturgy is just flat sinful. (which is not actually the case.) But my point is preference doesn't actually reflect truth. What we like and what we feel is not an accurate indicator of what is biblical or true. So are you a protestant or evangelical based on preference or conviction? I hope, maybe over the course of this month, if you are in more of the preference category, hopefully you move a little more to the conviction category.
So let's talk about one of the core convictions that a protestant should hold based on Scripture, this idea of Sola Scriptura. And you might say, "Okay, what is that again? This Latin phrase?" Well, Scripture alone. And whenever we say that, the question that should come to your mind is, "Scripture alone is what?" Scripture alone is the highest authority for the Christian. We kind of have a complicated way of saying that, and so I'll give you the full-orbed version.
Because the Scriptures are the only example of God-breathed revelation in the possession of the church, they form the only infallible rule of faith for the church.
To simplify that, because the Scriptures are the only example of where God speaks, they're the highest authority. Because God said it, you can't appeal to anything else outside of it to affirm it or contradict it. It is the highest authority.
Our court system is kind of based on a hierarchy of authorities. A lower court may give a ruling or a verdict, and someone could appeal it to another court, and then to another court, and to another court. But at some point in the United States, you are going to go to the Supreme Court if they agree to hear your case and you keep appealing, and based on the verdict there, you will have reached the highest authority. There is no further authority by which to appeal. A lower court can't overturn that decision, because you can't overturn the decision of a higher court based on what a lower court says.
It's the same way, or at least similar, with Scripture. When Scripture speaks, God speaks. And because of that, we can't say that it's true because of something outside of the Word of God. It's true because God said it, and God himself is truth. And we can't say it's wrong because of something outside of Scripture, because we would be appealing to another lesser authority to contradict a higher, more truthful authority. So the Word of God, because it is God-breathed, is the highest authority on everything it talks about.
Now, it's not the only authority. I think that's really important. The Bible doesn't tell us how to build a rocket, so in attempting to undermine the authority of Scripture at points, some theological liberals have said, "If I want to get to the moon, I'm not gonna open the Bible." Well, sure. That'd be kind of odd for you to say, "The Bible's going to tell me how to build a rocket and hit escape velocity and escape the earth's atmosphere." It doesn't talk about those types of things. It might instruct you on how to pray if you're the one strapped to the rocket! But my point here is there are other authorities, there are other sources of knowledge. The Bible is not the only way we know things. But on everything it speaks to, it's the highest authority. That's really important. It's the only source of God's special revelation for us today.
Now, there is general revelation outside of Scripture. Paul talks about this in Romans 1; Psalm 19 speaks to the fact that the heavens declare the glory of God. Paul says that man is without excuse in terms of his idolatry and sin because God has made his presence known through nature, so in spite of the fact that there are no words in nature, it is proclaiming the glory of God and God's existence. So actually, even though there are no words, man has no excuse when he denies the existence of God. But when it comes to specific content about God, we find that in Scripture. We find how he wants us to live and what he expects, and what he has done for us in Scripture.
Now, this idea of Scripture being the highest authority for the Christian is inextricably tied up in the fact that the Scriptures are where God speaks. If the Scripture were not the Word of God, it would not be the highest authority. If there was a council or a man on earth today who spoke with God's words such that everything they said or he said were also the words of God, well then that would be a high authority too. But the fact is that the Scriptures are the only example of God-breathed revelation in the possession of the church today. This is such an important principle.
Martin Luther, one of the Reformers, said, "My conscience is captive to the Word of God." He realized that he would not bend his conscience to the words of a man if he could not find scriptural support for whatever was being said.
I want us to look at a couple passages today. In 2 Timothy 3, starting in verse 14, it says,
“You know who taught you, and how from infancy you have known the holy writings which are able to give you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus."
So where do we get wisdom for salvation? Where do we become wise in God's eyes? From Scripture.
But then we continue on.
“Every Scripture is inspired.”
We've talked about this before. That word actually obscures something that's incredibly profound. That word "inspired" is a word Paul made up in the Greek, and he combined two words to make this new word. He combined the word for "God" and the word for "breathed," and Paul is literally saying that all Scripture is breathed out by God. That is profound. If you are close enough to someone to feel their breath, as I've said before, it's either a very awkward encounter or a very intimate encounter. When it comes to Scripture, it's a very intimate thing that the God of the universe, transcendent as he is, would condescend in the use of finite human language and reveal himself to us.
And so the Scriptures are God-breathed. They are his words. Yes, they were written by men, but they were as much written by God. There is a dual authorship to Scripture. That's incredibly important. These men weren't just writing about what they saw as revelation; everything they wrote was actually revelation. It was the very word of God. They weren't writing about God's Word; they were writing God's Word. Because, as Paul continues on,
“[This God-breathed revelation] is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training and righteousness that the person who is dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work.”
And herein we find two principles. One, the inspiration of Scripture, that Scripture is the very Word of God, but secondly, that it makes one capable and equipped for everything God expects from us—for every good work.
We don't need an outside human institution like the pope or the magisterium of the Catholic church to speak and give us additional content so we can do what God expects for us. No, Scripture itself is sufficient. I fear today that the word "sufficient" has a negative connotation, kind of like if you had a meal and it was not your favorite food. In fact, let's say you didn't like it, but it met your nutritional needs for the day. What might you say? "That was a sufficient meal." In our western culture, when we have such abundance and extravagance, I think the word "sufficient" has lost the power that it should have.
It means: perfect. Lacking nothing. Complete. Fulfilled.
That's what Scripture is for the Christian. It fulfills what God has expected us to need to live the life he expects us to live.
But there's another passage we should look at before we close today. 2 Peter 1:20-21.
“No prophecy of Scripture ever comes about by the prophet's own imagination, for no prophecy was ever born of human impulse."
It's not like men sat down to say, "Hmm, what can I make up?"
“No, rather, men were carried along by the Holy Spirit and they spoke from God."
Once again, we see Peter saying that those words of Scripture are the words of God. And as we've looked at before in Matthew 22, Jesus says,
“Have you not read what was spoken to you by God?"
This is when he's answering a question asked by the Sadducees. He refers to the Old Testament Scriptures and says that yes, they were written, but that writing was the very speech of God.
Once again, there is this thread throughout all of Scripture that Scripture itself is the highest authority. It is the Word of God. And so for us to submit Scripture to the authority of our feelings or to the authority of our pastor or to the authority of a church or a council or a pope or some modern-day so-called prophet is to profane and denigrate the mighty gift God has given us in His Word.
That the God, transcendent as he is, of the universe who came to earth and took on flesh and condescended in that way, would also condescend to reveal himself in Scripture is something that makes him even more praiseworthy and worthy of worship than had he not done those things.
So as we wrap this up, let me just encourage you to think this week on the concept of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures are the highest authority. They're higher than science. They're higher than sociology. They're higher than my feelings. They're higher than my theology book. They are higher than anything else. Nothing can contradict Scripture because nothing is higher than Scripture when it comes to truthfulness or authority. But there are other sources of authorities that God has instituted. There are other sources of knowledge that often can help us better understand Scripture.
But be not mistaken. If we use some other source of authority or truth and we end up overturning something that Scripture itself teaches, we've actually erred. We've made a mistake. And so let's always have our ordering of authorities right, such that we can actually come to know what is good and true in the world, and what God expects. And let us also not strain and search for more revelation from God that's not in Scripture, because remember, he's given us everything he expects us to have to live the life he expects us to live.
I'll talk with you next week as we continue this series on Reformation theology on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
]]>Before we dive in today, I'd just like to say that the reason we didn't have an episode last week was because my wife unexpectedly delivered our first child. There were some unexpected health complications, so she actually had a C-section at 34 weeks. But our daughter is doing great. She's just needs to gain some weight and learn to regulate her temperature on her own, and then she'll be able to come home. So that's kind of what's been going on with me the last few weeks and still today.
Let's talk about media and entertainment. I think this is a really important topic, because it's like the water that we swim in, if we were fish. It's been said, if you want to know what water is, don't ask a fish. They don't know. It's like air to us. If you'd ask someone before we were scientifically advanced enough what was air, they wouldn't have known. It's like, okay, well, I don't see it. I can't really feel it perhaps, except maybe wind, but I'm not that aware of it. Media is like that for us.
Here is why I think media is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. It's the thing we take for granted. It's the thing we don't evaluate. In fact, it's often the thing we go to escape from and not think critically about the world around us. So if you've had a hard day, what do you do? Lots of times people will plop down on the couch in front of the TV, and they want to do something they don't have to think about, they don't have to work at. Well, that presents an interesting collision of circumstances, because you are now coming to media, to entertainment, uncritically. You don't want to put much thought into it, and hey, I understand. The day is tiresome. But there's a whole group of people and a whole industry that is dedicated to teaching you things, to getting you to believe things at a time when you are not thinking critically.
Now, this might just have to do with getting you to buy a product. You're tired, it's the end of the day, you don't have a lot of willpower. Advertisers know this, and they're marketing you in such a way that they hope to move you and sway you to purchase their product or to think favorably of their brand. But it's actually more than that, because the very media we're watching in between the commercial breaks is also trying to sell us on something, to change our mind, and yet we're coming to this encounter where someone's being very intentional, and we're coming to it when we're not at our best and we're coming to it when we've almost intentionally lowered our guard.
But this obviously doesn't only happen when we're sitting down after a long day. It also happens when we're just listening to a song in our car. It happens when we pay to go to the movies and take our families and watch a movie. You’ve probably noticed that people that are involved in the arts tend to be more liberal politically, morally, religiously, all of those things. And so they're the ones that are making most of the media that we take in.
Just right off the bat, that should make us a little cautious of the things we're hearing and learning and the way they're presented. I don't think there is a more powerful medium than perhaps a movie today, or the arts. Scientists have routinely presented findings that the best way to encourage someone to learn is to present whatever you're presenting by engaging as many senses as possible. So if you're teaching a lesson, don't just talk; have PowerPoint slides. Don't just talk and have PowerPoint slides, but have something tactile that they can touch and where they're actually engaged with their hands. Doing is perhaps better than seeing, which is perhaps better than hearing. So the more senses we can engage, the better.
But movies also engage our emotions. They engage our hearts, and in fact, we don't want to go to the movie theater to simply watch a historical documentary. (Most of us don’t.) We don't want to just see facts. We want to be moved. We want to be encouraged. We want to feel lows and highs, and we want to see a struggle. Our whole person is engaged, but we're not engaged critically, and we need to be, and here's why. Because the biggest danger in media today is not individual words. It's not foul language. In fact, it's more than that. It's worldview. It's not words; it's worldview.
Yet how many of us evaluate movies that way? I'm not inclined to. My default when you say, "What's this movie like? Should I take someone to go see it?" Is to evaluate it in terms of sex and nudity, which I think is an important consideration. I think many times we're far more tolerant in that area than we should be with sex/nudity, but that's a topic for another time. So we evaluate it in terms of sex and nudity, we probably also evaluate it in terms of violence, and then we evaluate it in terms of language. How many curse words are used, and that type of thing. Which, by the way, is kind of an odd standard by which to evaluate media.
As a friend recently observed, if you say the F word once, it's a PG-13 movie, but if you say it more than that, it can't be PG-13. So once is okay. Well, is twice worse if I watch two PG-13 movies and I hear two F words? Is that worse than one R movie? I don't know. So I think this show is kind of the arbitrariness of some of these rating scales for movies.
But nonetheless, in my experience growing up, both in my own home and looking at my friends and hearing people talk today, many parents are more concerned about the words in a movie than the worldview the movie puts forth and often glorifies.
Now what are we talking about when we talk about worldview? Well, it's the way we look at and understand reality. It tells us what God is like, if he even exists. It tells us what man is like. What are human beings like? Are they basically good? Are they basically bad? Are they basically just a more complicated and complex and intelligent animals, or are they something fundamentally different? It also tells you what right and wrong is like and where it comes from.
Obviously, almost everyone has a view on these topics. It's not always coherent; it's not always well thought ought; it's not always internally consistent; but almost everyone has a view on these issues. The people making our media have views on these issues, and those views come out in their art. Many Disney movies, in fact, present a view of God that we can call pantheism, where everything is God. Or where God is in everything, That would be a view called pantheism. I don't want to get too complicated with the terms today, but this whole idea that there's a life energy in everything and that everything kind of controls everything. That's a view called pantheism. It's an eastern religious idea. It's a very different idea than the fact that there are inanimate, non-God objects, that there are animate, non-God objects like animals and you and I, and then there's God, and God is fundamentally different. He's not an animating life force in that way.
You know what's interesting, when God is everything, then everything is God, and that's a very different view than the view that the Bible presents.
I was a big Star Wars fan growing up, and I still am to a little bit of a lesser degree, but it's interesting when you look at Star Wars. Star Wars is kind of a mix of different eastern religious ideas, and perhaps most notable in Star Wars is this idea of the Force. It's this energy that is in everything, and you can learn to control this, but how do you do it? What does the movie in the Star Wars series teach you in terms of how you actually commune with this energy and control it for your own purposes? You let go and you trust your feelings. Is that actually what we need to be pushing into people's minds today? I don't think so. I think that's a very dangerous idea. Not much good happens when you let go of your rational capabilities and simply trust your feelings. Feelings are deceptive, the heart is deceitful above all things, our feelings, left to our own devices, do not create goodness and righteousness.
It's a movie, you might say. Yeah, it is, but what if you watch a lot of movies? What if the movies and the entertainment you watch and your family consume kind of become the water that you all swim in, and you don't question it, and you don't use those anti-Christian worldview ideas as a springboard for conversation, but they go unchallenged? I think that's where the struggle is. So my view here isn't that we shelter ourselves and our children, necessarily, from the movies with bad worldview or bad language. That is all over the place, and in fact, it's not just in movies, right? It's when you have a conversation with your neighbor, and you should be having conversations with your neighbor. The point though is that we need to be aware of what's implicitly taught so that we can address it explicitly. We need to be aware of what's being implicitly taught in our media that our family, and our children, and ourselves, are listening to and watching, and then we can address it explicitly.
My wife and I have been watching a series that was popular quite a while ago, and it's interesting seeing where we are as a society today in terms of our moral values and seeing what was, at the time, a moderately edgy show, and how it led the way. The things that were glorified in that show are now just core secular values, like a woman wouldn't change her last name when she got married because she's independent, and it's kind of this feminist idea. The idea that you don't have to be married to sleep together, that you don't need to be married to have kids. Media led the way in these areas. It's actually that way now.
I don't know if you've noticed, but the media has made LGBT considerations seem like they're the largest concern our nation has, and yet percentage-wise, it's just one to maybe three or four percent that fall into that LGBT bucket. But why, you may ask, are so many businesses putting little rainbows in their Twitter profiles, and why are people taking sides and saying, "You know what? My whole sports franchise is not going to play in your state because of laws that concern LGBT people." Why is this happening? Because the media has chosen to make that a huge consideration. And so now all of us implicitly feel like it's a really, really big deal. But it's a big deal because the media has crafted that type of situation and scenario based on how much coverage they've given, how they talk about it.
It's often been asked, "Why do Christians talk about homosexuality so much?" And the answer is, culture has been the one that has started that conversation. Often it's Christians, when they go on a radio or TV show, who are the ones being asked about it. They don't even bring the topic up. Now, yes, we obviously are talking and teaching about this as a response to a cultural revolution, but nonetheless, it's the fact that the media has crafted oftentimes this idea that these are the largest considerations people need to be concerned about. And yet we should take a step back and say, is that actually the case?
But back to some specific examples from movies. I hope what you're seeing here is that in Star Wars, there's this idea that the Force is kind of like God and it's in everything. Avatar has eastern religious ideas woven all throughout it, and oftentimes it looks really cool to a kid to think that he/she could maybe learn to control this thing, or that's how God is.
And what about movies that downplay religious people and convictions? In fact, I don't think you could watch a movie that isn't produced by a Christian today that talks about Christianity and not see some type of straw-man, caricature, or distorted view of what Christians believe. I have not found a respected religious Christian figure in a piece of entertainment in a decade. You just haven't seen one that isn't made to look dumb or to have a blind faith. When was the last time in a movie you saw someone who had an informed, well-reasoned conviction in the deity of Christ and the trustworthiness of Christianity based on evidence? I've never seen it in a movie. The Christians are the wackos.
They're presented as doing different things intentionally than their convictions. It's not just that they're saying, "I'm a fallen person and I really tried." They're represented as blatantly hypocritical, and yet, what happens when we show our children these movies and we don't clean up there and say, "That's not what that person should have been like," or "I don't know if you noticed it, but in this movie, it kind of presented the idea that God is in everything, and that's not true. So we're watching this, we're gonna suspend some disbelief. It's gonna be a fun story, but let's remember" - this is kind of you addressing your family perhaps - "that God is actually not like that. God created everything; he's not in everything. He's separate from his creation. He stands over it, rules over it, lovingly controls and tends to it. He took on flesh and came down to the earth and died on a cross for sinners." Let's be clear and use popular movies and entertainment as springboards for conversation.
But that requires us as parents (yes, I'm a new one in that category; it sounds a little odd to say, and I won't be doing that with my two-week-old at this point) and even as single people to analyzing the things we would let into our mind uncritically.
There was a Disney movie recently that had what was said to be a very short gay scene, and everyone, it seemed like initially, was going be up in a tizzy, and then people realized, "Oh, it's not that bad." And as a friend of mine who I've had on the podcast before, Hunter Levine, pointed out, Christian parents were then saying, “Oh, it's not that bad now,” but didn't someone spend a lot of time and thought putting that in there? It was a really big deal most likely to the LGBT culture warriors, and people in media. What they're trying to do is slowly" - and we've seen this; if you look back, you will see it - "They're trying to slowly accommodate culture and Christians to more and more progressive ideas." And just like boiling a frog in water, you don't turn the temperature up all at once. You do it very, very slowly, one step at a time.
Does that mean we remove ourselves from media and entertainment? It actually may mean we remove ourselves from some types, but at the very least, it should mean that we become more discerning in what we're watching, and what we're letting our children watch, and we're not just looking for specific bad words. They're gonna hear those at school. That doesn't mean they should use them. But that's not the main concern here. The main concern is the worldview; what does the media and the entertainment we're watching communicate about God. About man? Is he good, is he bad, is he created in God's image? Is he just an animal? What does it communicate about right and wrong? Is it just up to individuals to determine? And what does it communicate about how we know right and wrong? Do we look inward, or has God spoken authoritatively? Do we just go by our feelings or is there some external standard? Worldview is incredibly important in entertainment.
I hope this episode has been helpful, and I hope to be able to speak with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>As far as Christianity goes, the listeners of this podcast are fairly diverse. We have people from many different denominations, some would not claim a denominational affiliation, some have very different spiritual backgrounds. Some are new Christians. Some have been Christians for a long period of time.
And so, when we talk about a topic like creeds, many of you, and myself included, are going to approach this from many different directions. So for instance, just to give you a little bit of my background to give you some context here: I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, a very traditional, typical if you will, Southern Baptist Church. We never recited a creed. We never read a creed. I never knew what a creed was in the church I grew up at (which is a shame as we'll get to).
Some of you have, for every Sunday that you can remember, recited the Apostle's Creed in church. Some others of you may be uncomfortable with creeds. You may think that they're an addition to scripture, that we don't need them. And some of others of you my just not know what they are, and so I think we've got people that span the whole gamut here that listen to this podcast.
So, I have a modest goal today. I want to cover what creeds are and some thoughts on how they've gotten to the place where they have in society and thought today in the church and how we should approach using them, if we should, as Christians.
Now, what is a creed? That's a question we should answer first off. The word creed in English comes from a Latin word which simply means “I believe.” A creed is a statement of belief. It is saying these are the things I, or more accurately, the things we, as a community of faith believe.
So, Christians have been writing creeds for almost the entire time there have been Christians. And in fact, one of the most popular and famous creeds is the Nicene Creed, and this came out of the Council of Nicaea which took place in 325 A.D., and it was added to later in 381 at the Council of Constantinople.
And so what we kind of quote and refer to oftentimes as the Nicene Creed is actually the creed that's a combination of Nicaea and Constantinople, and this is how it starts. This may sound familiar to you. It says, "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of all light, very God of very God, begotten and not made." And it goes on and on to say different things about Jesus and the Holy Spirit and about the kingdom and about the church and things like this.
Now, some of you may not have ever heard of that before as a statement of belief, but you very well may have heard it in a song. There have been several songs in the last few years that have come out that are basically a rendition of the creed put to music and melody and rhythm, and I think this is awesome. This is taking beliefs that the church has affirmed since the beginning and putting them in a way that's easier to remember. It's much easier for us to remember things when they have melody and rhyme and meter.
You very well may have sung a large part of the Nicene Creed, maybe the Apostle's Creed in church or in your car going down the road and not realized you were singing a creed. There's a song actually called I Believe, and it's basically singing a creed, which is pretty cool.
All of this to say: creeds take us all the way back to the very infancy of Christianity when very early on in the church people were affirming the same things we believe today. Beliefs like: there's one God who's the maker of heaven and earth. There's one Son who's fully God, that there's the Spirit who is fully God. That Jesus was crucified and buried and rose again and ascended to heaven, that He's coming again, that there's one church that's been sanctified by his blood. All of these types of things were affirmed in the creed, and they're still the things the believing church believes today.
So that's just a little bit of history. There have been multiple creeds. There have been multiple, what you might call confessions which are more detailed than creeds, but these are a way of helping people understand what we understand scripture to say.
Let me say that again. Creeds are a statement of what we believe scripture to be saying. They shouldn't be adding to scripture or anything like that. They're simply a way of putting into different words our understanding or interpretation of what scripture says. And for that reason, a creed should never be viewed as authoritative in and of itself.
There are people who will actually quote a creed sometimes before they'll quote scripture. I understand often what's happening. It's a shorthand to saying “this is my understanding of scripture, which is the authority, is the same as the creed,” and so they'll quote the creed. But I think over time what actually happens here is that people begin to view the creed as a de facto authority. I'm not picking on the Presbyterians here, I promise, but many Presbyterians hold to something called the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it's more detailed than a creed. It's a confession. It spells out lots of things in very fine detail. There's a ton of thought and intentionality that has gone into this very old confession.
But often, when people are writing or citing what they believe, they'll cite the confession instead of scripture.
Now, like I said, I think this is a shorthand way of saying what the creed says is what I understand scripture to be saying, so scripture is the authority, but nonetheless, I think we have to be careful when we talk and when we write and communicate that it is clear that scripture is the authority and not the creed.
And for that reason, creeds have historically been viewed as what makes someone orthodox, or said differently, if you hold to what the creed says, because that's what we understand scripture to be saying, you are orthodox / you hold correct Biblical beliefs. People often don't take kindly to you disagreeing with the creeds, and I think this is something that should be taken on very lightly, but just to clarify, the issue should not be that someone disagrees with the creed. The issue should be if you disagree with scripture. So make a scriptural argument. Don't make an argument based on a creed. I think creeds are helpful, and we'll talk about that in a minute, but when we compare understandings of Christianity and God and salvation and these things like this, let's build our views directly from scripture and make sure we can support what we affirm in a creed with what scripture says.
So that's kind of a corrective to what I see sometimes when people have used creeds a lot, but there are some of us who are uncomfortable maybe with creeds due to our upbringing. Like I mentioned, we never recited a creed when I was growing up. I grew up Southern Baptist, and in many circles, there's this pervasive way of thinking in Southern Baptist life and just in evangelicalism today that does not like creeds or maybe even know about them. But it has not always been this way. In the 1700s and 1800s, Baptists were big on creeds. They were big on saying, "What do you understand scripture to say? We understand it to be reflected in this creed or this confession. Do you hold to this?" Now the creed or the confession wasn't an authority in and of itself. It was simply their way of explaining what they understand scripture to be saying.
But this viewpoint has largely fallen by the wayside in many circles, and I think it’s to our detriment. What's really interesting to me is for us to take a brief snapshot of the history of one of our seminaries. You're probably thinking, “more history? We just talked about dates and Nicaea and stuff like that.” Yes, a little more history to make my point.
The first Southern Baptist Seminary started in the 1800s, when James Montgomery Boyce started the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and one of his three initial principles that he founded it on was that there needed to be a creed or a doctrinal statement that people who taught there would affirm. If you didn't affirm this, you couldn't teach there, and this was really important to him.
Now, over the years, as you progress through the 1800s, you get into the 1900s, the creed of Southern Seminary stopped being affirmed and held to by the people who taught there, and the seminary really dipped into liberalism where the Bible wasn't necessarily the word of God, where Jesus wasn't necessarily raised from the dead. These were beliefs that were held by faculty members at a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Why? Well one, it was a departure from biblical orthodoxy, and that's unquestionable, but it was because also the creed wasn't held to and affirmed. Now remember, a creed has a authority only in as much as it's correct with scripture, but it's easy for someone to say today, "Well I believe scripture. I hold that the Bible is an authority." Yeah, but the question is what do they understand it to be saying.
And this kind of takes us back to our topic from last week. Is there even a Biblical point of view on a topic? Well, there is, but there are obviously multiple interpretations, and a creed is a way of saying, "This is my interpretation."
So, someone may say, "I hold the Bible to be an authority." But then they'll say, “Marriage could be two women together." Well, if we spelled out our understanding of marriage in a creed, we could ask the person, "Do you agree that marriage is between one man and one woman?" And we might cite Matthew 19 and etc. And they would have to say no if they held the belief I just mentioned.
So a creed is a way of understanding and comparing beliefs, but Southern Seminary stopped holding to their creed, and it slid into liberalism.
Now, I think it's a remarkable story that the seminar recovered by the grace of God, and by Albert Mohler coming in and returning to holding to that initial confession and requiring people who were going to teach there to hold to biblically orthodox beliefs as were understood and explained in the creed of Southern Seminary called The Abstract of Principles.
So, the creed, in and of itself doesn't add to scripture, but what it does is show how people understand scripture to function and what it means, and so they're helpful in that way.
I also think creeds are helpful to recite in corporate worship together. Now there are a couple creeds I have some small issues with which puts me in a minority, and I'm not going to focus on those here, but nonetheless, I think in principle, creeds can be helpful because what we're doing when we're reciting a creed together in church on Sunday is we are the amassed and gathered body of Christ in a local setting who, in some ways, are joining arms with what the saints of God have believed and recited throughout the centuries, and we can find comfort and strength and confidence in that to know that when we recite that there is one God who created everything. There is one son who was created and rose from the dead. This isn't something new. That even though I may struggle with those truths in my heart in doubt throughout the week, you know what? I'm standing with 500, 75, whatever number of people in reciting this together. There's strength in that.
But then we also recall, you know what? This creed was written in the 300s, and people have been affirming these same things publicly without change for hundreds and thousands of years, and that's an awesome thing. So I think creeds have a place in public worship, in private worship, and in just understanding what the church has believed.
Now, one other point though when we come to creeds. They're a product of their time. Just like anything that's ever written, it's a product of its time. It's responding to concerns of the day. So some of these creeds were written to respond to new heresies, false ideas about God and the Bible that arose at that time. They might also be using terms or concepts in ways we don't use them today.
So for instance, the Apostle's Creed says that Jesus descended into hell, and some churches may not read that because they think Jesus did not go to hell, but when that was written, hell did not refer to this place of fiery punishment we think of today. It simply was referring to the grave, to the place where all dead people go regardless of if they're righteous or not righteous, and so we see that, and that sticks out to us as something that sounds very odd, and it should if it means what we understand it to mean today. However, when the creed was written, it didn't mean that.
Another thing in creeds you'll often see is “we believe in the holy Catholic and Apostolic church,” and you're thinking, "I'm a Protestant. I can't say that." Well, here's the thing, catholic means universal, and when these creeds were written in the 300s, the Catholic Church as it exists today with its sacramental system and its priesthood and its sacrifice of the mass and Pope and all of that did not exist in that time. So this is another word, catholic, that didn't refer what we think it refers to today.
So, I hope this has been a helpful little primer on creeds. They're simply statements of belief, and we should view them as authoritative only in as much as we can support what they say from scripture. They are not authorities in and of themselves, they're simply reflections of understandings of scripture.
Some of us could stand to use them more than we do and not be as weary of them as perhaps we are due to our upbringing or denominational context. Others of us may want to evaluate how much we think about what the creed says as opposed to how much we think about what scripture says.
And so I can't speak specifically to any circumstance there, but what I can say is we should always support our beliefs from scripture. If you can't defend a belief or a doctrine or any point in theology to me from scripture, and we only go to a creed or some other source, then you don't hold the sola scriptura, the view that scripture is the highest authority on matters of faith and practice for the church because it's the only inspired collection of works that the church has. If you're citing some other manmade authority, then you're doing that over and above scripture when it comes to theology and doctrine. So, we need to be very careful there that we don't bind people's consciences because of a creed over and above what scripture says.
So this has been a little different episode today. I do hope it's helpful for you to understand that Christians have believed and affirmed the same things we affirm today throughout the centuries, and yes, in some ways, creeds do draw lines. They do exclude people, but those people should be excluded not because they don't agree with the creed, but because they disagree with scripture. I think that's an important qualification.
People often say, "Well Christianity is about inclusion." Well, it's about inclusion around Christ, around truth. The Bible constantly makes lines and excludes people who affirm and believe false things. Just look at the process of church discipline that happens in 1 Corinthians 5. Look at the people who are constantly corrected by Paul, the people he tells to basically go castrate themselves because they believe and teach the wrong things (Galatians 5:12).
So Christians are line-drawing people. We want everyone to be able to come and repent and believe the Gospel, but at the same time, we have to be extremely clear about what the lines are and what the gospel is and what Christ actually requires. We do people no favors when we sacrifice our commitment to truth in the effort to include people.
So we can love and affirm truth all at the same time, even if society says we can't. Well, I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>It's fairly common today to hear religious conservatives say something like, "Where the Bible speaks, God speaks." They're affirming this idea that scripture is the word of God, that he breathed it out to us. We've looked at this before in Matthew 22, Jesus says, "Have you not read what God spoke?" Claiming scripture is the word of God. Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is God breathed." Or 2 Peter, "That men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God in scripture." There's this type of idea that where the Bible speaks, God speaks. And when we say something that we get out of the Bible, we say it's a biblical point of view. Now, this doesn't mean everyone agrees, and we'll talk about that in a minute.
So, that's that’s a common conservative view. Now, liberal Christians, often will say, "Well, there's no such thing as a biblical view. One interpretation is as good as another. There are multiple interpretations." And some people will say things like, "I wish folks would stop using the words biblical to distant themselves from the impact of their views. So you think same sex marriage is immoral? Then own it. Own the implications that has on people. Own the discrimination that'll come from that. You don't just get to say, ‘The Bible says.’ Because You're interpreting the Bible by reading it and your interpretation could very well have serious consequences. Anti-LGBT theology, feeds a tribal mindset. It feeds bullying, and it feeds teen suicide.”
I'm actually reading someones statement here, that said these things in response to people claiming that a pro-traditional marriage reading of scripture is a biblical view. That God only views as holy and God honoring a marriage between one man and one woman, for one lifetime, and these types of ideas. So in response to that, some people have said, "There isn't such a thing as a biblical view." Everyone's just interpreting scripture.
Let's talk about that. Like many things, there's a kernel of truth here. Yes it is true that what we're doing is comparing one interpretation to another interpretation, or at least hopefully that's what we're doing. But we also can reason from different perspectives here. As a conservative, I'm going to reason from the perspective that, where scripture speaks, God speaks. That scripture is the word of God. Jesus affirmed this. He constantly points people back to God speaking in the Old Testament. He speak authoritatively in the New Testament. So I'm going to start from the position that scripture is the word of God. But even if you don't start there, you could still potentially claim a view as biblical or not, or at least more biblical or less biblical.
I want to point something out in this statement I read. This person seems to be contrasting the view conservatives hold with saying, "That view leads to harm, therefore that view is wrong." That view leads to people having a negative self image. That view leads to people committing suicide or being depressed, so we can't hold that view.” I think that's an incorrect way to look at how we form views. I don't want to take away at all from the trauma that some people have experienced. From how damaging it could be to hear that God views your lifestyle as sinful; I don't want to downplay any of that. In fact, we'll speak about that in future weeks. But none of those things, the outcome from sharing a view, for instance, can be used to say that that view is not biblical. In fact you cannot even use that outcome to say the view is wrong.
Now, you might say it's a compelling reason to reject it, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Just because someone is harmed (let's just say for the sake of argument, that's true) by holding a view or by the propagation of a view, that doesn't mean that view is wrong. For instance, I think it's totally reasonable to assume that some people were given great anxiety by Jesus teaching about hell. In fact, he speaks more about hell than Heaven. Now, the fact that some people probably were freaking out, because of that, does that mean Jesus shouldn't have said it? Does that mean hell doesn't exist? No, it doesn't mean either of those things. It means someone was greatly bothered by that being the case.
Now, this isn't all things equal with the modern LGBT situation, but nonetheless we need to be able to say what logically necessitates a view being false, and what doesn't. Just because something comes from a view, that doesn't mean that view is inaccurate.
So, with that being said, let's talk about if there even is a biblical view of something. At a baseline, we do have to affirm that everyone is interpreting the Bible, hopefully. I don't think some people are. But let's just say that that's the noble goal; everyone is comparing they're interpretation of the scriptures with another interpretation. Does that mean we can't just say that there's a biblical view? No, it doesn't, because there are some interpretations that are better than others. There are some beliefs that are more accurate than others. There are some ideas that we should believe and some ideas that we shouldn't. It's not just an equal landscape out there where every view is just as equally valid as another. That's just totally false, in fact.
What makes a view biblical? Well, the question is, "What does the Bible say?" Not, "What do I make it say." But, "what does the Bible say?" Here's how we attempt to answer that question. We ask the question, What did the original author intend to communicate and how would the original audience have understood it when it was communicated?
We want to understand what was attempted to be communicated, when it was written by the person who wrote it. And that is the consideration that is all to often jettisoned today, or just not taken into account. If we come and we read a passage that says, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." And we say, "That means, that bananas rot by Thursday." That's not a biblical point of view. Maybe, that what's you think that verse is saying, but what evidence do you have for that? That would be the question.
How did you get that view—which seems like a non-sequitur—out of that passage. Well, no reasonable person is going to say that you got that there. Now if on the other hand, you read Paul's argument from Romans 7 and Romans 8, and he says, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ," and you say, "You know what that means is, when God looks at me as a Christian, someone who's been clothed in the righteousness of Christ, he doesn't see and hold my sin against me. In fact, he sees the perfect righteousness of his son." Well, that a biblical point of view, because it comes from the biblical argument and it takes seriously what Paul was attempting to communicate in Romans. Something can be more biblical or less biblical, but the question is Not “is it an interpretation”, because yes it is, but, "Is it a good interpretation?"
For instance, when it comes to LGBT concerns, Conservatives are going to say that Romans 1 condemns same-sex activity. In fact, in the passage Paul is saying men and women denied the truth in unrighteousness. And the example he gives of this is men exchanging their natural passions for unnatural ones, and becoming inflamed in their attractions and desires for each other. Men committed shameless acts with men. Some people are going to say, "If you say that that means, lesbianism and homosexuality is wrong, than your Anti-LGBT."
I had someone ask me once, "Are you Anti-LGBT?" I had to say, "I don't know what that means. Can you tell me what you mean by that?" I'm not against those people, I simply want them to understand what God says about their behavior. But even saying that would repulse, or at least turn off this person whose statement we're looking at today. Because they would say, "That's not what God says, that just what a man says."
Then, we have to ask the question, for those people who say there is no biblical view, "Do they believe that when scripture speaks, God speaks?" If we don't start there, we will almost necessarily come to different conclusions. Because I think the Bible is a book by God about his experience and his coveants and his interaction with people. Yes, it was pinned by men, but it was also inspired and breathed out by God. It has a dual authorship.
Many people, who are theological liberals today, are going to say the opposite, almost. That the Bible is man writing about his experience with God. Well, if that's the case, than man could get things wrong. Man could simply be a product of his time period and maybe he didn't understand same-sex orientation or attraction. Or maybe that would have changed what he would have written, if he had understood same-sex orientation and attraction. But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to Romans 1, the question isn't so much, "Did Paul understand sexual orientation?" It's, "What did he say?"
He's critiquing people who are inflamed in their desires for each other. What a pattern of desires? It's an orientation. It doesn't matter if Paul had the robust psychological understanding we do today of same-sex attraction, he's basically saying, "If you're a man, don't put a certain thing in another place." Not to be crude with it, but it's the action that he's condemning in 1 Corinthians 6, for instance, and in 1 Timothy 1, but he's also addressing the attraction aspect of things here. He talking about people who have unnatural attraction. Now, some people will say that's lust, but he's talking about people who burned in their attraction for each other; that's a pattern of desire.
It's a desire for someone who is not your spouse, your opposite sex spouse. Now, what does it need to be opposite sex? Let's look at Matthew 19, where Jesus affirms, "That from the beginning God's design for marriage was one man and one woman for one lifetime." That's when the Bible speaks for itself. When we try to pull out what the scriptures say. What did they mean in their original context when they were written, as opposed to saying, "What do I know now, and how can I read that into the Bible."
There is actually a common way today that people will nullify the word of God. They'll say something like, "Well, The Bible is just man writing about God. Man gets thing wrong, so it doesn't matter if the Bible said this, we know better today." That's not actually a biblical point of view, in fact, in that case we're not comparing our interpretation of the Bible with their interpretation. We're comparing their modern scientific/psychological/etc understanding with the biblical understanding that we have, or at least our interpretation of scripture.
So what's the source of our view? Scripture. What the source for their view? Not scripture. In fact, they're rejecting scripture, because of things they now understand. So it's not even always that we're comparing biblical interpretations, it's that we're comparing someone’s secular, non-biblical authority with a biblical authority; that's incredibly important for us to understand.
We must understand when we're talking with someone, what their source of authority is? Where are they reasoning from? I'm reasoning from the position that the scripture is the word of God, because it says it is, and because Jesus affirmed it. Someone else may very well be reasoning from some other source. They can very well say, "you don't have a biblical point of view, that's just your interpretation." I'm going to say, "What does the Bible say on this? Maybe you think the Bible's wrong, but what does it say?” That's the question we're asking here. What did the original author intend to communicate to his original audience and how would they have understood it.
We are trying to arrive at original intent. It would be the same way if you read Charles Darwin, and can we say there's a “Darwinist” understanding of a thing. What we mean is, how Charles Darwin in his book, On the origin and Species, presents something. Now, we might disagree with some part of that, but that doesn't mean that we can't say this isn't a Darwinist view. If we're attempting to understand what Darwin wrote and the way he wrote it, to the people he wrote, and we say, "This is what he's saying." That's a more valid way to reason than to say, "Well, I have this other authority and that just nullifies this. So you just have your opinion. I just have my opinion, and there's no correct answer here." That's not true.
If I can show you with good reason that this is what Darwin is communicating, and the language and grammar and context that he wrote in, at the time period he wrote, then that we can say is a Darwinist understanding. In the same way, if we read the Bible and we say, "This is what Paul is communicating, in the language and culture of the time," that's a biblical understanding.
I think this is really important for us to understand, and to be able to root out, in conversation: what is someone's primary authority. What are they reasoning from? And if you ever do get this objection, "Well, there's no such thing as a biblical point of view." We can ask the question, "Do you think some views are more biblical than others? Some are more faithful to the Bible than others?" I think the answer would have to be, "Yes." In the same way that saying, Romans 8, where is says, "There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, is not about bananas,” wouldn't we say it's more accurate to say this says something about salvation and justification, and maybe more accurate still to say that, "When the father looks at us, he sees the perfect righteousness of Jesus." Yes, we have just gone from not an accurate view to a slightly more accurate view, to a much more accurate view.
There are more accurate and less accurate views of things, but what makes something biblical is if we're pulling the original intent and meaning out of the text.
We won't do it perfectly, that's why we disagree on things, but I think it's also worth pointing out that for the last two thousand years of Christian history, the church has almost unanimously agreed on marriage and sexuality, and homosexuality. Then let's take that back further, in Judaism, where it was still viewed as wrong. This view, as a Supreme Court Justice mentioned—that same-sex marriage is good, and should be legal—It's not even as old as the cellphone. I think that should give us great pause, even just from a social experiment point of view.
The fact of the matter is, if you reason from non-biblical, non-godly presuppositions, you will arrive at non-biblical conclusions; almost assuredly. That's why some people look at the Bible and they come up with a totally different interpretation, because they're not trying to pull out the original meaning, they're trying to reason from some other authority and apply that over top of scripture to then say, "Whatever aligns with this other authority is true."
Friends, I just have to tell you, if your reasoning and your primary authority is something outside the Bible, you probably have not arrived at what God thinks on an issue; you've arrived at what you think, or what that authority thinks. May that never be true of us, and may we be more equipped to point that out, and root that out in conversation when we talk with others.
I'll talk with you next week, on Unapologetic.
]]>I don't know if you've noticed this, but the new sexual ethic in society today is not based on a biblical morality where God says such and such is wrong. What it's based on today is not even necessarily a legal declaration, although those often follow. What it's based on is consent.
Today sexual ethics and what's right and wrong have boiled down, at least in common society and thinking, to consent. In order to know if a certain sexual act was right or wrong, you don't have to know really anything about the two people. Are they of the same sex? Are they of the opposite sex? Well actually, was it more than two people? All you have to know is was it consensual, at least that's what people say. And the problem is, this is a standard that people can't even live by, that they don't even want to live by, but most haven't even thought of that. And I want to tease that out for you today.
So we're going to read an affirmation from the Liturgists Statement, which is a statement on LGBT and sex and marriage and things like that and we're going to talk about this, this sexual ethic based on a consent.
And here's what the statement says, "We believe that God is love and God is honored in all consenting relationships between adults, be they married or unmarried. Therefore all such relationships deserve honor and recognition by the church." In other words, it doesn't matter if you're married, it doesn't matter if you're the same sex or any of that, your relationship, as long as it's consensual and between two adults (well it doesn't actually limit it to two, so between adults) is honoring and the church should recognize and honor it too. In fact, it's God-honoring the statement says. And here's my question: How does that fit with scripture?
Now I've [written a post about this], and gone through the whole Liturgists Statement and responded to each of their articles and affirmations from Scripture, but we're going to focus on this one area today and expand on it, this idea that the only right or wrong a type of sexual act is one that's been consented or not consented to. And you know what that would include is adultery. Adultery is consensual. A married man who's, let's say, married to his wife and a married woman who's married to someone different, her husband, those two people could decide to have sex together and that would be consensual and that would be God-honoring we are told from this statement. And it's not just this statement, because maybe this statement changes. No, its society in general that often has this type of idea where consent is the only type of standard around sex. And if it's not, then they have all types of inconsistencies that would come from that unless they affirm a biblically-based moral view of human sexuality and behavior.
So it's interesting that people who have a sexual ethic based on consent probably would not think it holy and God-honoring if their spouse had sex with someone else. Now I think that's uncontroversial. How would that work? Would you sit the kids down and say, "I'm sorry mommy is leaving and that mommy has had a relationship with someone else, but it's God-honoring and it's holy, in fact. Now yes, she's leaving, yes, she broke her oath that we made on our wedding day, but hey, it was consensual." Are we really expected to believe that that's how people would respond if their spouse cheated on them? Of course not. And in fact, cheating makes it sound like something was wrong, but it can't be wrong if it's holy and God-honoring can it? No, we would have to say they ... Well I don't even know what you could say and that points to the problem: People can't live inside of this view.
If you can't live inside your worldview, if you end up affirming something different than how you live and think you have to live, then that's a major problem. And I want to clarify, I'm not just saying that you can't believe something and act differently, because that's everyone. My point is when you would behave differently then you say you should, in fact, you would probably feel differently intentionally then you would say you should based on your standard. So if you say it's holy if someone has a relationship that's consensual and then your wife cheats on you or your husband cheats on you, are you gonna say it's holy then? No, I think your emotions are going to tell you, your reason is going to tell you, the fact that that person committed to you until death do you part, the fact that that person is the mother or father of your children and has a responsibility to them, I think all of those things will correctly inform you that that relationship that was consensual is not holy and it's not God-honoring. In fact, it dishonors God, it dishonors the person that they used to be married to, and it dishonors their children, it dishonors themselves, it's sin through and through, it is anything but holy.
Now I know it's fashionable today to say, "Well, Paul didn't understand sexual orientation and Paul and Jesus and these people were just people of their time and those words about homosexuality that we translate that way today, those doesn't really mean homosexuality." I'm not going to focus on all of that. I've written about that in Unapologetic, we covered it on the podcast before, I'll try and link to those episodes. I want to focus on a clear case way biblically to disprove this ethic based on consent. And it's simply the fact that Jesus condemns adultery. In Matthew and in Mark he says that evil comes from the heart and defiles a person. This is in the context: they were thinking, "Well, you could touch something and be made defiled." He's saying, "No, it comes from your heart." And he lists adultery as one of the things that comes out of the heart and defiles a person, that makes them unclean. That means adultery, which is consensual, is a sin before God. That doesn't require us to translate a certain word a certain way to arrive at homosexuality being wrong, which it is, biblically speaking.
It's a very clear case example, the Old Testament law is clear, the New Testament is clear in multiple locations. And more than that, doesn't the Bible say lying is wrong and isn't that ultimately what adultery is too? It's breaking your word intentionally. You make wedding vows, adultery breaks those wedding vows. So consent, biblically speaking, is somewhat of a laughable sexual ethic and I think there are multiple factors that come together here to show this. The fact that the person themselves is not going to call their cheating spouse, and remember cheating is a word that points to something negative, they're not going to call their cheating spouse participating in a holy relationship or a God-honoring relationship. I don't think that you feel that way, their not going to explain it to their kids. "Well you know what? Mommy didn't do anything wrong. It was it was a sexual ethic based on consent." (I'm kind of parodying this, to make a point).
Most people are not going to sit their kids down and say that type of thing. But wouldn't they have to if they're gonna be consistent? It seems like a major problem to preach and publish statements that say that any type of consensual relationship is God-honoring and holy, but then at the same time not affirm that as holy in front of your kids or with your friends. And in fact, if something is holy, shouldn't we praise it? Shouldn't we say it's good? So wouldn't it be odd if your spouse had a relationship with someone else, not to say, "That's great! That's a holy thing!" And of course, of course, all of this sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? No one is going say these things but that's kind of my point: if you're going be consistent, you would have to say them. But people are not going to say these things because they're inconsistent and if your worldview and your actions are inconsistent (not just that you inconsistently lived them out, but that they will fundamentally be inconsistent and incompatible with each other) you have a bad worldview, you have a bad ethical standard.
A sexual ethic based on consent is biblically wrong, but more than that, it can't even fit the way we live. It's kind of like the people who will say, "There's no such thing as moral right and wrong." (Which I think the group that's behind this statement actually may affirm in some context) But they'll also get upset when you do something they don't like, like punch them or steal their stereo. "Hey! That's wrong. You shouldn't do that. Stop it." But if there's no such thing as right and wrong then you haven't actually done anything wrong, they're just saying words at you, they're not pointing to any reality outside of themselves, you didn't actually do anything wrong because wrong doesn't exist in their worldview. And yet, shouldn't it make us stop and think when we respond, when we claim certain things exist that don't actually have a place in our worldview? Like saying cheating is wrong or harmful and yet having to also affirm that based on our sexual ethic, it's holy. That seems like a major problem.
It's very common on college campuses and in the news and all of these things to hear about consent and consent is a sexual ethic. But another problem with that is people can't even tell you what it means to consent. How often do you have to consent? Do you have to consent before you take off a button? Before you touch someone? Before you tell them they look beautiful? At what point during your, let's just say 'time together', do you have to receive consent? What constitutes consent? Is it verbal? Can it be nonverbal? Those types of things. And all of this kind of points of the ridicularity of the situation when you reject a biblical sexual ethic, which is incredibly clear.
Sex is only appropriate in marriage. It's not just that Christians are picking on LGBT people. Any sex outside of marriage—which Jesus defines in Matthew 19 is between one man and one woman for one lifetime—is excluded. It's very clear. It's not murky, and I think we see the problem on college campuses today. This moral view people have can't work consistently because you can't even articulate clearly.
And so I think we've also seen this work out in other ways, honestly, where people have a standard they can't live by. Like saying, "You need to be inclusive and tolerant." And as soon as someone disagrees with you, you call them a bigot and try and shut them up. Well you're acting neither inclusive or tolerant. And so can’t you really live by this ideal that you hold. Now, like I said, people are going to be inconsistent. I'm gonna say, "I shouldn't sin." And yet I will. But here's the question: Do I defend that? Or have I ratified that dichotomy of, "I will sin and I will say sin is wrong” as a firm part of my worldview? Every Christian should endeavor to sin less and to call sin 'sin' and to call sin 'evil' and not to do it, while still acknowledging that before God glorifies us we will and we lament that. That's fundamentally different from having a view that simply says, for instance, that any acts between adults that are consensual sexually are holy and God-honoring and at the same time saying, "Well, I can't tell my kids that adultery or their mom stepping out on them is good." I think that should really point to a problem here.
Now just in closing, we haven't even touched the fact that a sexual ethic based on consent would allow polygamy, it would allow polyandry and polyamory, so multiple lovers, more than just one of multiple sexes, perhaps. And of course polygamy has been shown to be bad for women, especially young women, but this sexual ethic would allow that. It would also allow incest. And so what we see here is a sexual ethic based on consent just doesn't work, you can't actually consistently put it in place. And I think it's fair to ask a person who has this view these types of questions and situations. "Well are you in favor of this?" And if they say, "No." Well say, "That's what your system allows for, so your system has a problem."
It's like when people say, "Love is never wrong." Well really? Well what if a 50-year-old man loves his 8-year-old neighbor, is that wrong? Well then they'll bring in, "Well, it's based on consent." (Or it needs to be between adults) Well that's different and we're back at this set of problems. But the whole, "Love is love." And, "Love is never wrong" Thing doesn't work. Are they really going to say, "Well love is never wrong when it's your neighbor and your wife." Yeah, I'm going to say that's wrong.
And so once again, I think it's fair to push people to live with the consequences of their worldview, to think it through, and to say, "You know what? Here are some clear case examples you can't accept, which shows your standard is incorrect." And the only correct standard is a biblical one where God knows how he made us to work and so he knows how we're going to enjoy his creation the best. So Christians are in favor of a biblical sexual ethic, 1, out of fidelity to Christ, but 2, because they want their neighbor to flourish, because we love our neighbor and we want what's good for them and what God says is good is good for us and it's good for them.
]]>The Liturgists, an LGBT affirming group, put together a statement of their own in response. It is extremely liberal in the types of behaviors it permits as God-honoring, like incest, adultery, polygamy, etc. It also claims to know what is holy before God and honoring to him, but doesn’t even attempt to cite scripture for support of their historically novel view (For the record, the Nashville statement doesn’t currently include scriptural support either). Michael Gungor and Mike McHargue (Liturgist founders) seem to believe readers will just accept their assertions on God’s behalf as God’s own word without evidence. We are not told why we should believe their positions.
What follows is a brief, biblical refutation of the Liturgist statement. Quotes are given and then response is offered.
We believe that people of all sexual orientations and gender identities are holy before God, as they are.
God says “There is no one righteous, not even one.” So, no, people are not “all holy before God.” Only those who have trusted in Christ, who have put on Christ and his righteousness, are seen as holy. And if you are in Christ you will make “no provision for the flesh to arouse its desires.”
Passages: Romans 3, Romans 13:14
We believe all people have full autonomy over their bodies, sexual orientations, and gender identities, and the diversity of identities reflects the creative power of a loving God.
Far from having autonomy over one’s body, the Christian has been “bought with a price” and should “glorify God with [their] body.” This is the opposite of autonomy (self-law); it is submitting to the law of God. God even says that “you are not your own.” An ethic of personal autonomy is opposed to God’s revelation in scripture.
Passages: 1 Corinthians 6:19-20
We believe that God is love, and God is honored in any consenting relationship between adults, be they married or unmarried. Therefore, all such relationships deserve honor and recognition by the Church.
Paul, in 1 Corinthians 5 condemns a “consenting relationship between adults” by saying “It is actually reported that sexual immorality exists among you, the kind of immorality that is not permitted even among the Gentiles, so that someone is cohabiting with his father’s wife.“ A sexual ethic based on adult consent is arbitrary, lacking biblical foundation, and has no objective standard by which to oppose polygamy, polyandry, adultery, etc.
Jesus, in Matthew 15, says that people are defiled (sinful) because of their consenting relationships in the form of adultery. “But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things defile a person. 19 For out of the heart come evil ideas, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are the things that defile a person.”
Something tells me Gungor/McHargue wouldn’t consider it holy if their spouses had an affair (and I hope they don’t). And if you find yourself wanting others to behave differently than what you say is holy, then your position has a problem.
(Update: McHargue commented to say his ethic of autonomy excludes adultry. Please see his comment and my reply below.)
Summary: God’s word says that God is not honored by merely “consenting relationships.”
Passages: Matthew 19 (Jesus on divorce), 1 Corinthians 5-6 (Paul on sexual immorality, adults, homosexuality, and other consenting relationships), Matthew 15 (Adultery).
We believe that same-sex relationships and marriages are as holy before God as heterosexual marriages.
Jesus, in Matthew 19, says “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?”
The blueprint from God was based on creating people distinct as male or female, and that those complementary sexes (and only complementary sexes) would come together in a monogamous, sexual relationship.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 6, 1 Timothy 1, and Romans 1 excludes same-sex sexual relationships as biblical valid.
Passages: 1 Corinthians 5-6 , Matthew 19, 1 Timothy 1, Romans 1
We don't believe LGBTQ folks need our approval or affirmation–they are affirmed first and foremost by God. This statement acts as a concreted record of solidarity.
Sadly, all people—straight or otherwise—who refuse to submit to the law of God, will experience God’s wrath, not affirmation. “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, passive homosexual partners, practicing homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, the verbally abusive, and swindlers will not inherit the kingdom of God.“
Far from preaching life to people, the Liturgists preach a false gospel that leads people to experience God’s wrath, not affirmation.
BUT, there is hope for all, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or other sin of choice—LGBT persons are no more sinful than other persons. Paul’s next verse brings gospel hope for all who find themselves in sin without the righteousness of Christ: “Some of you once lived this way. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
Paul says that some used to do these things, but God washed them of those sinful actions. As John says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, forgiving us our sins and cleansing us from all unrighteousness.“
The Liturgist statement assumes it’s loving to affirm LGBT relationships, but based on scripture, nothing could be further from the truth. God’s love is expressed in salvation, obtained through repentance and faith, leading to self-denial, not the exertion of self-autonomy.
]]>How should we respond when atheists claim that Christians are atheists with regard to every other god except for one. They just take it one step further. We'll stay tuned to find out. An unapologetic.
There's a popular argument (or at least assertion) that atheists like to make. And it goes something like this.
"Well Christians are actually atheists with respect to every other god except for one."
So for every possible god out there Christians are atheists for that god except for one and the atheist is basically saying we're not so different. We actually just take it one step further. And the person might say "well you don't believe in Zeus. I don't believe in Zeus. You don't believe in RA (the Egyptian sun god), I don't believe in Ra. See, we basically are kind of the same. It's just you have one more god you need to get rid of to actually see things the right way." At least that's how the claim goes. And the question is how should we respond to this. And I think there are kind of two broad things we can say. First saying that Christians deny all other gods except for one (which is very close at least numerically and that point is important) to the atheist position doesn't actually mean that Christians are wrong.
It could so happen (and I believe it certainly is the case) that none of these other supposed gods exist. However the one God of christianity does exist so we can't just make a numerical argument actually to say that Christians are almost atheists. That's not true. OK just because there is a difference in one God between them doesn't mean they're basically the same thing. So Hinduism might have millions of gods. Christianity has one God and atheism has zero gods And so the thinking is is that when Christians are really close to atheists at least on this continuum of number of gods and purely from a numeric standpoint that's true but they're not actually close at all. The Christian is no closer to the atheist than he is to the Hindu and the Hindu is no closer to the Christian than he is to the atheist and we’ll tease this apart in a minute.
So I just first off what to make the point that simply saying there's only one God different between the two doesn't mean Christians are incorrect. Now let's also talk about this this idea of polytheism, meaning that there are multiple gods like in Hinduism and then atheism, the idea that there is no God and then theism, which Christians are theists. We believe there is one God. These worldviews are incredibly different and they're not just different in degree they're actually fundamentally different. And so let's talk about that some. When the atheist brings up all of these other gods throughout history (like I mentioned Zeus and Ra and in the list could go on and on and on) there's something fundamentally different between these supposed gods and the God of Christianity and how people related to these gods and thought of them and how they think of and have written of and conceive of the God of Christianity.
The first difference is that these ancient gods of let's say Greek mythology or Egyptian religion are almost more faddish in how people approach them. Like they didn't totally take them seriously. Now this varies by culture and this varies by time but nonetheless especially like Greek and Roman civilizations you would kind of tip your hat to the gods. You might go through some rituals but the gods weren't affirmed as as nearly important as the God of Christianity was. It's also just interesting as an aside that Christians were actually considered to be atheists in the first century and second century because the Romans just couldn't conceive of people who denied all of their gods and only worshiped one.
So they were basically seen as God deniers. They didn't totally understand Christianity back then. But I think this actually points out something interesting which is the Christian belief in one god was so fundamentally different from the polytheism and kind of nominal polytheism that was in Roman culture in Greek culture and things like that. The culture struggled to understand Christianity. They didn't have a category for it. It's not that it was simply less God's it's that it was actually fundamentally different. And some of these gods throughout history that people would would worship or tip their hat to or acknowledge or offer a sacrifice to might be like a god of rain or sun or of crops or of war or Fertility. These gods actually are a fundamentally different type of god because often in these mythological accounts the gods would have the same type of struggles that humans had.
They weren't that different they didn't get along with each other they had parental problems they had fights between them. They had their authority challenged and they were overthrown and all of these sorts of things. They're fundamentally different types of gods. And so the atheist when he makes the claim that Christians are atheist with regard to all of these other gods except for one. Yes we're using the word God there but the word isn't functioning in the same way. We're comparing fundamentally different types of gods with the one God of Christianity.
And I think that's really important. It is not an apples to apples type of comparison. And here is what is it totally different about the Christian worldview that says there is one God compared to the polytheistic worldview of Hinduism or the worldview of ancient Greek mythology or things like that. On the Christian worldview God is what we would call a necessary being. He cannot not exist. It is not possible for God not to have existed or we would not exist. In fact there's no possible way for us to exist if God does not exist. God is necessary for everything we see, for all that is and exists and that we know of and we don't know of it. God is necessary for that and that's totally different from how these other gods existed. They weren't necessary beings. They were what you would call contingent beings. They depended on something else.
I live in Florida, so if you make plans in the summer you need to have contingency plans. These are plans that depend on something else going a certain way. They're dependent on something else. Well in the same way you and I are what we would call contingent beings. We depend on something else for our existence. But God is not a dependent being he's not a contingent type of being he is a necessary being. Nothing can exist if God does not exist. In fact for anything to exist God must exist. So I could exist or not exist in the world would be pretty much the same. That is not the case with God. That's not the case with a necessary type of being.
If that being doesn't exist nothing else exists necessarily. So why do I say God is a necessary being? Why is it necessary that God exists for everything else to exist. Well this is exactly what Paul is getting at in Colossians 1 when he says "for by Jesus all things were created both in heaven and on earth visible and invisible whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through Him and for him, he is before all things and all things hold together in him." There's so much there. Let's briefly tease this apart and kind of go in order. He says that all things were created both in heaven and earth by Jesus. So Jesus actually created everything. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, they were created by Jesus which is kind of an awesome thought when you think about it.
Jesus's first act in the Bible is not seen in the Gospels; it's seen in the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible. Jesus created everything. These gods in ancient mythology weren't the type of necessary being that God is in Christianity because they were created. Oftentimes they had parents who created them, but the God in Christianity is not that way. He is eternal. He exists in and of himself. He is not created. There's never been a time when he did not exist and he brought everything else into existence. When there was nothing he created everything. Everything depends on him. Paul actually begins his argument here saying that Jesus created everything so we owe our existence to the fact that God created us, that Jesus created us.
These other gods and ancient religions don't fulfill that same type of necessary being requirement. They can't explain why everything is here but Paul continues. He says "all things visible, invisible, Thrones or dominions rulers or authorities all things have been created through Him and for him." And I think this speaks to the fact that as Christians we often find peace in the idea that we've been created for God, that there is a sense of purpose, that we find there that resonates at the core of who we are that we were created to be loved by our Creator and to love Him back and worship him. So Christianity actually satisfies one of the deep desires that many people have because it actually acknowledges and teaches that we were created for a purpose. It tells us what that purpose is and equips us to fulfill that purpose.
But more than that it's interesting that Paul says in verse 17 here that Jesus is "before all things and in Him all things hold together." It's not just that, as Thomas Jefferson and some of the founding fathers thought, God created the world and then stepped back and left it alone. He he wound up the clock so to speak and then was hands off. And it's basically a naturalistic materialistic game of pool after that—billiards, where balls are just bouncing off of each other and some type of preprogramed way. No. That's not what creation is. At every point God is sustaining his creation. If he withdrew his sustaining support everything would cease to exist and now maybe you're starting to understand what I was saying earlier about how God is a necessary being.
If he doesn't sustain creation, it doesn't continue to exist. The very fact that I can sit here and talk to you and have breath in my lungs is because God chooses to sustain my existence. And this is what the writer of the Hebrew says in Hebrews Chapter One that the Son is "the radiance of the Father's glory and the representation of his essence and he sustains all things by his powerful word." God is actively involved in creation. Wfe see this in the Bible so many times that God enters into creation does miraculous things shows and speaks of who he is. But more than that we're kind of told a little what's going on behind the scenes here that he's actually sustaining the world in its very existence. So there's not a molecule that is out of place in the whole universe.
There is nothing that is not where God wants it to be or how he wants it to be for his ultimate purposes. Now I think we have to be careful when we say something like that because the question might come well: what about evil? Is evil what God wants? And that's a really complicated question. And sadly we don't have time to get into that today. (Here’s a link to a podcast where we tease that out a little and talk about how God has two wills, and that God wills things that will be good for him to accomplish but are bad for man to do it.) I know that sounds kind of odd. But in order to be faithful to the totality of what Scripture says, we actually have to arrive at a view like that. And sadly we don't have time to dive into that today.
But I think it's sufficient to point out just clearly as Paul and the writer of the Hebrew say that God created everything. He is necessary. The Christian worldview affirms that everything came from nothing with a cause. The non-Christian worldview, that atheistic worldview we started out talking about, says that everything came from nothing with no cause for no purpose. That makes much less sense than the Christian worldview. So when the atheist gets rid of God, when he says "Hey Christian just be an atheist with regard to one more god" he actually gets rid of the solution to so many of his problems. He can now no longer explain why he is here. He can now no longer explain why the universe is here.
He can't actually explain where morality comes from any more if he gets rid of God. If there's no God if there's no moral law giver there is no moral law so there's no morality if God doesn't exist either. And we've talked about that a little before. I hope what you're starting to see is that these descriptions of God from scripture paint a fundamentally different picture than these ancient gods in mythological accounts. We're not comparing apples and apples here. And in fact, like I mentioned, when the atheist gets rid of God, when he says "well you're so numerically close it's just one less god" he gets rid of the very thing that makes so much more sense out of the world. He's left having to affirm silly things, honestly, that everything came from nothing with no purpose, that he has things he knows so intimately in his soul like the fact that rape is wrong and genocide is wrong and white supremacists should be condemned, but he can't explain why. And in fact if he's consistent he actually has to say "those things aren't really wrong. I just don't like them."
But the Christian worldview makes sense of the fact that racism is wrong. It makes sense of the fact that we're here. It makes sense of the fact that the world is knowable and that we can actually use reason to analyze the world around us because it's consistent because it's sustained by a consistent God. And this could go on and on. What I want to convey to you is that the difference between atheism and Christianity is not just numerically one. It's not that they're that close. They could not be more different. And the Christian worldview of one God compared to a polytheistic worldview of many gods could not be more different either. There is far away from each other as the Christian worldview is from the atheistic worldview.
So, we talked about a lot. I hope it's been helpful. On the face of it this objection doesn't actually prove anything. The atheist saying "well I'm just a atheist with regards to one more god than you" that doesn't actually prove Christianity is wrong. More than that, they're not comparing apples to apples. And finally God is actually a necessary being. If we get rid of God from our worldview, we are left without any explanation for the things we are most sure of in reality.
]]>I don't know about you, but I've heard this objection to God and Christianity several times, and it goes something like this: "Would God really punish someone who just grew up being taught the wrong things, who grew up being taught to believe the wrong things? Does God punish people for wrong beliefs?"
You may notice something about the way I said that. That's not actually an assertion, at least formally speaking; it's a bunch of questions. And there's a tendency today for many people who are espousing theologically liberal views to not so much come right out and say their view and make an assertion and defend it with arguments and evidence, but to just ask a lot of questions. In fact, I've kind of joked with some friends that you can generally tell - and this is not totally accurate - but how theologically liberal someone is by reading what they write about God and counting the number of question marks per sentence in the article. The higher the ratio, the more likely something's going on there. Now, that is not a surefire rule by any means. I say that pretty much just humorously. However, we should be suspicious when someone makes their points more with questions than with answers and with clarity. That's pretty much what I want to convey there.
So we're talking today about this assertion that God isn't going to punish people for just believing the wrong things; He's more concerned about us loving each other. That's the idea we're going to talk about today.
The first thing is, when anyone claims to say what God believes and what He's really like, the question you have to ask is, how do you know? How do you know that's what God believes, that's what God expects? The only consistent answer is if we go to His Word and we take Him at His Word and we understand what He has said in Scripture. And so let's look at some passages that talk about belief and how essential it is, or not, for Christian practice and for being right in God's eyes.
John 20:31 says, "These events were recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name."
I don't think John is endeavoring to write a very systematic, theological view of how salvation happens and the aspects of belief and faith and trust and action all here, but at a very minimal level, what we can say is that he strongly links believing with having life in Jesus' name, with becoming a new person, with becoming a Christian. I think that is very safe to say. It is by believing in the name of Jesus, trusting in that name, we could also say, that you become right with God. That's John 20:31.
Let's look at John 3:16.
"For this is the way God loved the world: He gave His one and only Son so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life."
Our belief here, once again in John, according to Jesus, is what allows us to have eternal life. Believing in Jesus is necessary to be a Christian, to have eternal life.
Let's look at John 3:18, which, of course, comes shortly after 3:16.
"The one who believes in Him," that would be Jesus, "is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God."
So this comes right after John tells us that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn it, but to save it. However, He needed to save it because it already stood condemned because people had not believed in the Son of God, had not believed in God. And so belief here, once again, is inextricably linked. You can't separate this from what is necessary to be right in God's eyes, to be a Christian. Belief does matter in God's eyes.
Another passage we can look at briefly would be Galatians 3:6, which says, quoting the Old Testament, "Just as Abraham believed God, it was credited to him as righteousness." So if we return to our initial assertion, really phrased in the form of a question, would God really punish people who believe the wrong things? Well, if we take God at His word in the Bible, the answer is yes. If you do not believe in God, that means you believe incorrect things, then you would be punished for those. Believing wrong things is actually a pretty big deal.
Now, that's not the only reason someone gets punished, and we don't have time here in this podcast to support the idea that the people actually are punished for their sins, that God justly extends His wrath toward people who break His law and are not found in Christ. (In fact, I'm trying to keep these episodes a little shorter because they've been creeping up from 14 minutes, and that's kind of my target, and of course, this digression hasn't helped that. So back to our topic.)
"Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Our beliefs are extremely important. Now, we may separate out belief a little more from action and from trust a little more than certain biblical authors do, and I do think that's important to remember. Belief is incredibly important.
So our first point when responding to this claim that God really wouldn't punish people for wrong beliefs; He's more concerned that we love each other. Our first point is that God says He actually is concerned with our beliefs, and there are correct and incorrect beliefs and they actually have eternal consequences. We should, as Christians, be very careful with what we believe. We should test everything against the Word of God, test our own understandings against the Word of God, test our own understanding of a given passage against another passage. Use Scripture to interpret Scripture. So we need to be very concerned with what we believe, but we also need to be very concerned with what others believe.
So parents, it's incredibly important that your children believe the right things about God, that we raise up our children - it's a little odd for me to say that; I'm getting used to this idea still that my daughter will be born at the end of October, so I need to start thinking more like a parent - but something that already stands out to me is how much the Bible holds parents accountable for teaching their children to believe the right things. We see this in Deuteronomy 6 with the Shema. "Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall worship the Lord your God." And he goes on to tell Israel, specifically fathers, but we can say family units, to teach their children to believe these things, to talk of them when they get up, when they go to sleep, when they walk on the road, when they're at the dinner table. Teach your children is the strong command of Scripture. Why? Because beliefs really matter.
So that's our first point: God says what we believe matters. And He's in the best position to tell us. But we can say a little more about that, and I think we can help reinforce this idea with some areas in life where people take this for granted. So the non-Christian making this claim that God doesn't really care about our beliefs doesn't actually live consistently with that idea that beliefs don't matter in pretty much every other area of life.
Here's an example: What you believe about your spouse really matters. If you don't believe they're your spouse, you won't act like it. I think this makes the very common sense point that our actions flow from our beliefs. We don't always act totally in accordance with what we would say we believe, but nonetheless, we act in accordance, in a pattern, with how we believe. So if I don't believe a woman is my spouse, I am not going to act towards her like she's my spouse or my wife. My belief really matters there. So if I'm not acting towards my wife like she's my wife, and let's say I actually try and marry another woman or I sleep with another woman and I don't think it's an affair because I don't think this other woman is my wife, well, I have actually done something wrong. I have sinned against this other person, and this person would justly, on the Bible's view, have grounds for a divorce.
"Why?" Someone could say. Well, what do my beliefs really matter? Well, my belief that this woman was not my wife actually influenced how I lived. It affects so much. It affects how I view where I live and who I live with and who I have obligations to. Our beliefs really matter.
Another interesting example of where beliefs matter is when it comes to believing in God, and specifically in God creating everything and denying evolution, and then trying to get a job in a secular university. There have been many studies and documentaries done to show the fact that these people have a remarkably hard time getting a job or keeping a job or getting tenure. Why? Because even liberals and evolutionists understand that beliefs matter. If this person is not convinced of evolution, they're not going to teach evolution. Their worldview is going to be different than an evolutionary worldview. And so they are excluded from the academic academy, because even non-Christians understand in every other area of life that beliefs are important.
They're important when we form our worldview. They're important with who we live with and who we love and who we marry. And they're certainly important on the most important question of life, which is, who is God? How has He revealed Himself? What do we need to do to be right with God? Or perhaps said more accurately, what has God done to make us right with Him? And how do we get on board with that?
So beliefs matter in other areas of life too, when it comes to marriage, when it comes to jobs, when it comes to paying your taxes. If you don't believe you have to pay your taxes, you probably won't pay them, and the IRS is not going to care about your belief. They're going to come and take their money. Because beliefs matter because beliefs impact how we act also.
I want to be clear here: I think beliefs matter in and of themselves. To not esteem God as God means that we esteem something else in His place, which is idolatry, and that will impact how we act in tangible ways. But incorrect belief in and of itself is also a problem.
So, first point: God says beliefs matter. Second point: We don't act like this in other areas of life; we act like beliefs matter in other areas. And our third point is gonna hone in on the second point of the assertion that was made, that God's simply more concerned with us loving each other. He's not concerned with our beliefs. To which I would reply: is that a belief? Is it a belief that God is more concerned with us just loving each other, and if it is, which it is, then is God concerned with that belief? And how can you say God's not concerned about our beliefs about God and other things but then say that God's concerned with our belief about loving people? It sure sounds like you're saying God's concerned with our beliefs. And indeed He is.
The non-Christian, when making this assertion, even if it's stated in the form of a question, cannot escape the fact that beliefs matter. Beliefs matter to the person making this assertion. They hope you believe what they're trying to tell you. And they're trying to convince you that God at least cares about one belief, which is loving each other. But how would you know that? You would have to say, "Where has God spoken? Where has God said He's more concerned with our love than our truthfulness and accuracy?" And the fact of the matter is that Scripture links standing firm in the faith and loving each other at many points. We don't have to reject holding firm to biblical doctrines and orthodox beliefs in order to love people. In fact, I would say, if we do reject those, we have not loved the person we are called to love most, who is God. Certainly if we hold incorrect views about God and what He expects, we won't actually objectively be loving our neighbor well because we'll be giving them something other than God's truth, which is ultimately not loving. Maybe it's soothing, maybe it comforts them, but it ultimately just comforts them on their way to hell, and that is not loving.
We don't have enough time here to talk about culture's redefinition of love and how it's actually wreaking havoc in the church and with individual Christians, but nonetheless, we can't separate this idea that faithfulness and devotion to God's truth is inextricably linked to how we love God's people and God's creation and everyone created in His image.
The need to love each other is itself a belief, and we're being told with this assertion that God's not so concerned with our beliefs. So there's a self-refuting nature with this objection.
Well, I hope this has been helpful. I have heard this claim a fair amount and I wonder if you have, too. Basically, it isn't wrong for God to punish people based on their beliefs because their actions also matter, but how we believe about God, what position He occupies in our mind, and how He orders our worldview and our desires and our directions and our actions is very important. We've looked at that from Scripture; we've given examples from marriage and even how secular universities hire and evaluate candidates, and we've also seen that the claim itself that love is more important to God is a belief that, at least from this person's point of view, God is concerned with.
So we can be more prepared to reason with this person, to walk them through this, and hopefully to show them that they need to be concerned with what they believe about God, because God is concerned with what they believe about Him.
]]>Have you ever heard someone say, "I can't believe in a God who is like this...,” or "I can't believe in a God who would do that"? We're going to talk about how to respond to that type of claim today on Unapologetic.
I keep a list of topics for this podcast, and depending on how I'm feeling or what's in the news, or things like that, I pick from them each week. This topic today has been in the queue for quite a while. I say that just simply to point out, if there's a topic you would like me to cover, if there's something that would be helpful to you as you talk with people about Christianity and your convictions, please send that to me. Use the contact form, shoot me an email, send me a message on Facebook. I'd love to cover things that are helpful to you and not just things I find interesting.
I think today's topic is something that we all need to be prepared to discuss and to address when it comes up. Because I often hear people say, "I can't believe in a God who would order Israel to kill all of the Canaanites," or perhaps more simply, "I can't believe in a God who would allow evil or suffering," or "I can't believe in a God who would kill an innocent person, his own son, for the crimes of other people. I can't believe in a God like that," or "I can't believe in a God who would create people just for the purpose of watching them suffer." Of course the list could go on. I'm sure if you think about it, and probably don't have to think hard, you have heard these types of claims.
The question is, how do we respond? I think there are a few steps that we could walk through in order that would be helpful in order to address this type of concern that the person is making. Now it's worth pointing out that some of these sample questions like the Canaanites, evil, punishing an innocent for the crimes of another, those types of things we've actually addressed on this podcast before in some form or flavor (see links above).
But today I want to address the tactical response to the claim, "I can't believe in a God who would..., or who is like..., or did this type of thing or that type of thing." Step one: get the details. What are they actually talking about? For the person who says, "I can't believe in a God who would order Israel to kill the Canaanites," Why? What is your objection to that? There are a few possible responses. “That's genocide. Or that's xenophobic (which is the fear of strangers.” We can address those claims; those are factual types of claims. But we need to understand what the person is saying first off. Why do they object to a God who would do this type of thing or that type of thing?
In some cases what we're going to find is we don't actually believe in the type of God they're rejecting either. I think that's incredibly important. For the person who says, "I can't believe in a God who would create people just for the purpose of watching them suffer," well hey, me either. (Well, I don't exactly want to say “me either” because I don't like how they start this claim with "I can't believe in ... “.) The fact of the matter, though, is "I don't believe in a God who created people just to watch them suffer." We'll talk about the "I can't" part in a minute, but I do want to make a distinction there.
But what we'll often find is that people are rejecting a caricature of our religion, of Christianity. Or they're rejecting a caricature of God. Some people will say, "I can't believe in the doctrine of the Trinity." Why not? "Well, this whole idea that it's three beings and one being. That's just ridiculous." Hey, you know what? I agree with you. That is a ridiculous idea. It just so happens that's not what I believe. I don't believe the Trinity's three beings in one being. The doctrine of the Trinity is that there's one being, there is one God who exists in three co-equal, co-eternal persons. This idea you're rejecting, I don't hold that either.
All too often people will reject a caricature, a misunderstanding of our beliefs. Now sometimes I think this is malicious, where they're actually intentionally making a straw man, a version of our belief that's easy to knock down, and they're criticizing that. But all too often I think it's just that people don't understand what we believe and they reject it.
For what it's worth, this also occurs in the church, in our internal discussions. When it comes to issues of salvation and maybe Calvinism or Arminianism, there are people who reject what is a misunderstanding of each side. I think we need to always strive to understand the view we're critiquing before we accept it or reject it.
The first step in our tactical plan today is to get the details. What is it they think they are rejecting? Why can't they believe in a god who would do fill in the blank. What's the objection? We might find that we don't actually believe what they're rejecting either.
The next question, though, is: what do you mean by believe? Because, on the face of it, isn't it somewhat of an odd type of statement to say, "I can't believe in something like this"? I find that to be odd. Or, "I can't believe in someone who would do this." What do they mean by believe? Do they mean trust? I can't trust if you do this sort of thing? I can't trust a God who would kill innocent people, if that were in fact the case (there is no one innocent). Is that what they're saying? Or are they saying, "I can't follow a God who would do this type of thing"? Or are they saying, "I can't believe that this type of God exists"?
I'll be honest with you. When I hear this objection, "I can't believe in a God who would do....” it sounds to me like they're saying, "I don't believe this type of God exists," or "I can't make myself believe this type of God exists." If that's the claim, that's a pretty poor way to think about reality, honestly. Our preferences don't determine truth. That's a point we can make. My preferences—what I like, what I don't, what I find acceptable, and what I find unacceptable—those don't determine the truth of the world.
The world exists whether I have a preference about it or not. God exists or doesn't, but he doesn't exist or not exist based on my preference. He exists whether anyone thinks about him or not. Because God's existence is an objective sort of thing. How we feel about God, or our siblings, or food, or Hitler, or North Korea, or... doesn't change whether those things exist or not. They exist independently of us and our thoughts about them.
If the person is using “believe” as in "This type of God can't exist because I just can't believe he would do that sort of thing," that's a very poor way to think. I think we can make that clear to them by saying, "What if someone didn't like gravity? What if gravity was hideous to someone, does that mean it doesn't exist? Would it be fair to say, 'I can't believe in gravity because it pulls things down'? Well, no."
Now they probably find the actions of God to be reprehensible, and I think we can defend God in that way, but what about Hitler? Is it fair to say, "I can't believe in a Nazi dictator who would do fill in the blank"? No, that's not a fair way to think. That's not an accurate way to approach reality. Because, remember, reality exists regardless of how we feel about it or what we think about it, or even if we think about it.
Now if they mean "I can't trust or follow a God who would do...,” and they've actually established that they have an accurate understanding of what God has done or is like, I think we can take a different trajectory here.
Now there's a very pragmatic consideration, and I just bring this up partly for food for thought. I don't know how well this would work in conversation. But, it may be worth pointing out, “if you believe God actually wiped everyone out because they bothered him or broke his law, wouldn't it be kind of dumb not to follow that God? Seriously, if he's going to destroy a whole group of people like the Canaanites because they broke his law, why do you think he'd be okay with you rejecting his law?: I think that's very fair. That is the ultimate problem man has—a rejection of God's authority in his life. That's what sin is. That's why we need to place our trust in Jesus and repent.
Often, though, what we're going to see with a person who says, "I can't believe in a God who would do fill in the blank," is that they're only looking at part of the Bible's revelation about God. That leads us to our third step here. We can ask the person, "Why do you choose only the parts you don't like to believe? Why is your view of God based on these things and not the full teaching of scripture?" That's incredibly fair to ask.
Because, in order for them to reject God, they're having to read part of the Bible, believe (or accept for the time) it's true, and then say, "I can't believe or follow or trust a God like that." What they're not doing is looking at the part where God says everyone is guilty of sin, not just the Canaanites, and that the ultimate punishment is actually hell. Now some people will say, "I can't believe in a God who would punish people in hell," but that's not all the Bible says. The Bible also says that God is our creator and he's holy, and we're accountable to him. We're not the same type of being. They're not counting that type of data in their evaluation here.
They're also not looking at the place where God sent his son, who voluntary went to the cross to die and take on the curse of our sin for us so that everyone who places their trust in him will be saved. They're not looking at that part either. They're picking out just a part of it.
Now they wouldn't like it if someone based their whole opinion of them on just a part of their character or one thing they did and not their entire person and their entire thoughts about things, but yet they'll do that with God. I think we can point that out. Let's judge God and Christianity based on everything, not a little slice that's taken out of context of the whole context of redemptive history in scripture. We need to look at all of the evidence and come to a conclusion.
So, we’ve started with this idea that we need to get the details on what they believe. That's step one. What do you mean by whatever this thing is they're rejecting? What do you mean by believe? That's our second question. We can point out the fact that preferences don't determine truth. How I feel has no impact on if something exists or not or if I should follow it.
I don't like parts of how the government acts but I have to follow them. We could also ask the person, "Do you like that Donald Trump is president?" (I’m not making a statement on that here. I'm just simply saying this person very well may say they do not.) You can say, "Does that mean you don't have to follow what he says or that he doesn't rule this country in the office of president," (obviously as part of the other two branches.)
Well no, the honest answer is no. This whole idea that Donald Trump is “not my president,” which people have said, is just ridiculous. Because he is their president. They might not like him but that doesn't change the fact that he's the President of the United States. That's actually a pretty good parallel for what I think is being said in our topic today. "I can't believe in a God who would do...” is similar to people's claims today, "Donald Trump is not my president." Now maybe they're just expressing the fact that they don't like it, but when it comes down to it, he very much is their president if they are a United States citizen.
What he says is binding for them just like it is for everyone else who likes Trump or doesn't like Trump. I think it's noteworthy at the least that this type of poor thinking is not just exhibited when it comes to Christianity and religion, but we're seeing it on a mass scale in culture today after the election that took place in 2017.
This brings us to our last point.
We need to make the point that ignoring reality has consequences. This goes back to the idea that the world exists as it is regardless of how we think about it, regardless of how we feel about it. My preferences don't determine reality. As Ben Shapiro has said, “facts don't care about your feelings.” I think that's a fair point to make. I don't know that I'd say it like that, but not liking something doesn't make it not true. That's incredibly important for people to understand today. I can't determine what is true based on my feelings.
Now from a Christian worldview, scripture speaks to this. The heart is deceptive above all things. Why would we think we could trust our heart when it's fallen, when it needs to be sanctified too? We shouldn't. But more than that, if you're an evolutionist, if you're an atheist in that type of way, why would you trust your thoughts and your feelings? Evolution has coded us for survival, not for truth. If evolution is true and your feelings and your thoughts are actually just predetermined, they're not telling you what's true, necessarily. You can't have confidence in them.
All you can say is evolution has selected for things that help us survive. But surviving and understanding truth are two very different things. There's kind of self-refuting nature to the evolutionary argument for where we came from when it comes to how we understand the world around us.
But, all of that to say, ignoring reality has consequences. Greg Koukl has this phrase "bumping into reality." I can pretend that certain things aren't true, but they're still going to affect me. I can pretend when I'm walking along the mountain that there's not a cliff there, but if I walk where the cliff is, I'm going to fall off regardless of if I believed it existed or not. We need to tell people that even if you decide that you can't believe in this God for X, Y, and Z reasons, that God is still going to hold you accountable. The wages of sin for everyone is death. Only the people found in Christ, as Paul says in Romans 5, will ultimately not pay for their sins because Jesus has paid for them.
This person needs to understand that. That is the Gospel, or at least part of it. We need to bring in this part which maybe they haven't considered, maybe they don't understand, but that they very well need to be confronted with. God does not take rebellion lightly. The irony here is this person is not just living their own life in spite of God says. They're actually critiquing him and rejecting him actively, which is a very dangerous place to be, especially for the type of God that people often think God is. If he's the God who wiped out people who did evil in the Old Testament, why do you think he would do any differently today? He's the same God. I think that's a fair point to make.
We need to help people understand that ignoring reality has consequences. It's kind of like men who won't go to the doctor. They just pretend they're going to be okay. It doesn't work out that way most of the time. If you're sick, pretending you're not isn't going to make it better. It's the same way for us. As sinners, pretending we're not is actually an affront to who God is, it's a further rejection of his revelation and he will ultimately punish that. Out of compassion for people and out of allegiance to God, we need to be clear with people that their sin has consequences, and ultimately, we can't reject God because we don't like who he is. That is just further rebellion.
I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>In college, my wife stayed with another family while she was in grad school. They were very giving to her, very welcoming, very warm. On occasion, they would try to pull her into conversations and playful disagreements. She liked both of them, and she refused to take sides. She said, "I'm Switzerland. I'm neutral." Of course, Switzerland as a country has historically been neutral. They don't take sides in things.
It's often today that we view neutrality as a good thing. “He doesn't take sides. He's not narrow-minded. He's neutral,” People may say. I think this sometimes flows over into how we think about theology and people and ideas and approaches, but in reality, there's no neutral approach from a religious perspective.
You can't evaluate Christianity from a neutral position because you're either going to reason from the idea and a conviction that God exists and the supernatural is possible, or you will reason from the idea that it's not possible. There's not a neutral ground. Either God exists and the supernatural is possible, or he doesn't and it's not. There's no middle ground there.
The presuppositions, the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence when we evaluate it has a lot to do with how compelling we're going to find the evidence. I think this goes without saying in some areas, but when we get to Christianity, we seem to often think that people can be neutral, that they can make value-free judgements, but no judgment is value-free. We all interpret evidence and make statements from inside of a world view. Because of these presuppositions, these pre-commitments, an Atheist and a Christian will interpret the same evidence differently. The same information gets seen differently because we have different lenses.
It's like if one friend has non-polarized sunglasses and another friend has polarized sunglasses. They're out on a boat. They're going to be seeing different things. Not totally different, but different in the details. The friend with the polarized glasses might be able to see the fish under the water, but the other friend might not be able to see it. The friend without the polarized glasses is much more likely to see glare and maybe not natural colors. The guy with the polarized glasses is going to see a more detailed and a more accurate picture. I hope this “lens” approach helps you understand that the lenses we use in terms of our worldviews are the pre-commitments we bring to the evidence and will greatly affect how we view it, but there is no neutral ground with regards to evaluating evidence because our pre-commitments influence how we see everything. More than that, man is not actually a morally neutral creature. Sometimes, people will talk like, "Well, man needs God, yes, but it's not like he's bad in his current state."
Well, the bible doesn't leave that as an option. In fact, Paul says that “the mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God. It does not submit to a God's law, nor can it do so.” This is in Romans eight. Here, he's making the point that the person in the flesh cannot please God. You're either in the flesh, which is not a Christian, or you're in the Spirit, which is someone who's been regenerated, who is a Christian. You'll notice there's no neutral ground there. You're either in the flesh, can't please God, or in the spirit, and you can please God. No neutral ground. One category or the other, but man isn't neutral even when he's not a Christian. He has a mind that is governed by the flesh. Paul says it's hostile to God. Not neutral with regards to God, hostile, because if you take a neutral position, something you might consider neutral with regard to God, God actually views that as hostility. He actually views it as rebellion. There is no middle ground with God.
You can't just say, "Well, I'm not going to intentionally disobey God, but I'm not going to live for him and submit to his law." That's not an option. That's rebellion. There's no neutrality when you're in a kingdom with regards to a king. You're either for him or against him. It's actually interesting that Jesus says this in Matthew. He says, "Whoever is not with me is against me," so if you're not with him, he doesn't say there are two other categories: neutrality and opposition, no. It's just if you're not with me, you're against me.
Now, when this comes up, some people will point out Revelation 3:16, which is in a passage where Jesus is writing a letter to the church at Laodicea. Here's what this verse says. You've probably heard sermons on it numerous times.
“Because you are lukewarm and neither hot or cold, I'm going to vomit you out of my mouth."
Some people will say, "Well, see? If you're not for God, if you're not hot or you're not cold, you're against God, you're a lukewarm, God just hates that, even more than if you were against him." I've heard that preached. “If you are neutral, you don't have a backbone or you don't take a side, you're just neutral. You're lukewarm. God hates that. He's going to vomit you out of his mouth.” I heard that growing up many times. It never quite sat well with me. Now, as I've studied these things more, it's amazing what comes to light and how we can make more sense of the scriptures when we read them in their context.
Now, we need to read this verse in the context of the passage, but more than that, if we don't know much about Laodicea, the city this letter was written to, we're not going to understand the letter. The fact to the matter is, is that Laodicea was a town that had no natural water supply of its own. In fact, any water it had, had to be piped in via aqueduct, which is a system of long pipes the Romans built to distribute water over the Roman empire. Laodicea had no natural water source. Every water source they had came in from somewhere else, and it always arrived lukewarm. Hence, unappealing. Hot water serves a purpose. Cold water serves a purpose. Nobody likes lukewarm water. In fact, I think sometimes, it actually smells weird. Anyways, there are two nearby towns. One is Hierapolis, and it had hot and medicinal springs. It had natural water sources that were hot. They're good for things. Then, there's Colosse. They had cold and refreshing water.
As the residents of Laodicea would be all too aware of, they had neither hot and medicinal water sources. They didn't have cold and refreshing water sources. Everything they had came from somewhere else. It arrived unappealing and lukewarm. Jesus isn't presenting three options here in this passage. He's not saying you're either hot in terms of for me, lukewarm, you don't take a position, or cold against me. He's saying, "You're not good. You're bad," just to make it overly simplistic. You're not hot and medicinal and have a purpose. You're not cold and refreshing, which in this passage is a good thing. Cold in Revelation three is a good thing. Cold water is a very good thing. I, perhaps, drink too much of it, but it's how I regulate my body temperature. Cold water is a great thing. Lukewarm in this passage actually refers to being against Jesus. It's the only not good source of water.
Additionally, I would point out this idea that hot and cold refer to good and bad things like being on fire or being like a cold shoulder. That's a modern convention. That isn't something that we know of that existed in the ancient world, so we're reading that back into the text, if we make hot out to be good and cold out to be bad. That's just not supported historically and contextually there. I think if we read this passage even more in its context, we'll realize that lukewarmness isn't good either.
Here's what Jesus says if we continue reading. "Because you were lukewarm and neither hot or cold, I'm going to vomit you out of my mouth because you say, 'I am rich and have acquired great wealth and need nothing,' but do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. Take my advice and buy gold from me, refined by fire, so you can become rich. Buy from me white clothing, so you can be clothed, and your shameful nakedness will not be exposed. Buy eye salve to put on your eyes so you can see all those I love, I rebuke and discipline, so be earnest and repent." Do people who need to repent fall into a category of neutrality? No. Do people who are rebuked by Jesus fall in a category of neutrality? No. Do people who need discipline fall in the category? You get the picture. No.
What's also interesting is these intervening verses between the, "I'll vomit you out of my mouth," and the last verse we read actually refer to a lot of the things Laodicea was famous for. They made an eye salve that actually was healing and helped people see. He's actually saying, "No, sorry. You're blind." They had a thriving economy and made great clothes, and he's saying, "No, you're naked." All of the things they took pride in, he's saying, "No, you're actually spiritually deficient in that area. You may have the physical things, but no. You're blind. You're naked. You're pitiful, and you're wretched and you're poor." They were rich. He's saying, "No, you're poor," because he's speaking spiritually. None of these condemnations by Jesus are terms we would apply to someone who is neutral. Biblically speaking, man is not neutral.
In fact, 1 Corinthians 1:18, going back to our initial point that there aren't even middle grounds when it comes to how we interpret the gospel says, "For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. To us who are being saved, it is the power of God." Two categories, “those who are perishing” and “those who are being saved,” so not Christians and Christians. The same message is interpreted one of two ways. No middle ground. It's either foolishness or it's the power of God. There's no one in the middle. There is no middle category when it comes to interpreting and understanding the gospel. Another passage that actually comes to mind is John 3:16 here. This is what it says.
”For this is the way God loved the world. He gave his one and only son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life, for God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him should be saved. The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the one and only son of God.
Did Jesus come here to condemn people? No. What's it say? They were already condemned. No neutral ground. People are condemned before Jesus. It's not that there's a neutral position. They hear the gospel. Then, if they accept it, they're on the positive side. If they reject it, they go to the negative side. No. Everyone is not neutral. In fact, they have a spiritual bent against God. Everyone is actually guilty of sin before God. That's not a position of Neutrality.
In Romans five, Paul says, "If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved by his life?" There's a nice little picture of the gospel here that he's now going to go and make a lot of parallels about, but I want to point out where he starts. "While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God." If you are not found in Christ, you are an enemy of God, not neutral. Then, a little while later in verse 18, Paul says, "Consequently, just as condemnation for all people came through one transgression," so when Adam sinned, we all become condemned, not neutral. "So too through the one righteous act came righteousness leading to life for all people." I believe in context here, he's saying all people who are found in Christ. He doesn't mean everyone, even people who rejected the gospel are going to be righteous. I think we have to read this in context.
Nonetheless, all who were found to be in Adam were condemned. All who were found to be in Christ are seen to be righteous. Not because of their works but because of Christ's work and the righteousness that they are clothed in. There's no neutral ground.
I think this is very important because it affects how we present the gospel. We realize that someone doesn't need just good advice. What they actually have is a spiritual rebellion even if they might not even have a mental category for it.
I was talking with a friend yesterday. We were talking about how there are some people who are really smart. You can present rock solid arguments for spiritual truths, and they'll reject them. Whenever people start acting irrationally, what you have to remember, especially with regard to Christianity and spiritual and religious things is, "Well, they're not neutral." They've got skin in the game. If they have to affirm this conclusion you're leading them to, it's going to mean a change for their life.
People aren't neutral with regard to changes for their life or things that infringe upon their life. When people make decisions that seem irrational to us with regards to the gospel and Christianity, that's because they're not neutral. They are pointed away from God. They're not an unbiased observer who can just evaluate the evidence without any presuppositions. No, they bring those to the table, and they affect how they look at the evidence. It's a spiritual rebellion. A rebellion at the core of who we are that causes us to not go where the evidence leads.
In fact, being a non-Christian, being an Atheist or anything else, is ultimately irrational. It doesn't make most sense of the way the world is, of the evidence in the world. In fact, sin is irrational. Especially for the Christian. After all we know about Christ, the gospel, forgiveness, right and wrong, we have no excuse when we sin, right? Yet we still do it. It's irrational. It doesn't make sense, but we're also not neutral people still.
Yes, we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ, but we have not been transformed to totally righteous people. That will happen one day when Jesus comes back and glorifies us and gives us a new nature. Until then, we still aren't neutral. Our desires aren't neutral. I would say most of the time, they're still pointed away from Christ, and that's the work of the Spirit to help to refine those desires and give us new ones as we transform our mind through scripture and the Spirit. Nonetheless, man isn't neutral.
This should give us patience with people when we present the gospel. It should help us understand that yes, if they reject it, that doesn't mean you said it wrong. That doesn't mean you presented it in the wrong way. It means people are not neutral evaluators of the evidence. More than that, I think we can take this a step further and use the fact that people aren't neutral to help them consider their bias they don't even realize they have. We'll talk about that another day. I hope this has been helpful, and I look forward to talking with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Do you have to have a conversion experience in order to be a Christian?
A couple of weeks ago I did a podcast on the fact that there's a heart behind every question, that often what seems to some, and often to me, as just an intellectual question, really has something that's deeply heartfelt behind it. The person perhaps asking about works, and salvation, or eternal security, or you fill in the blank, often isn't just trying to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. They have something that's troubling them emotionally, and existentially. Well, one of the examples I gave was of someone asking, "Do I have to have a moment? Do I have to have kind of a Damascus road experience where I was uniquely and powerfully aware of coming to Christ?"
Well, since that episode I've had some more conversations where that topic have come up and people have asked me to provide more details about that. I figured it'd be helpful for us to cover that today.
Do you have to have a moment? Do you have to have a time where you became distinctly, or let's say, powerfully aware of becoming a Christian? I'm going to say, no. You don't have to have such a moment. I want to establish a few things as we work towards an answer here. The first thing to point out is you're either a Christian or you're not. There's not a middle ground. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 1:18 Paul says, "That the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, it's the power of God." One message, two groups. There's no middle ground. You're either perishing or you are being saved.
In Paul's vernacular, that would be someone who's a Christian and who's ultimately being perfected unto the time they die, and are glorified, and are with Christ. You're either a Christian or you're not.
Romans 8 says people who are in the flesh cannot please God, but if you're in the Spirit, you can please God. No middle ground. Once again, you're in the flesh or you're in the Spirit. You can't please God or you can. No middle category. The reason I'm bringing this up is to show that there's not kind of like a,” you're an almost Christian, you're a kind of Christian.” You either have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit or you haven't been. God has either taken out that heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh or he hasn't. You're either dead in your sins or you're alive in Christ. There is the reality of the fact that at some point for everyone who becomes a Christian or is a Christian, there will be a time when you were not a Christian and in the next instant you are a Christian.
When the Holy Spirit does that wonderfully transformative, glorious work on your heart and in fact, your nature, and in so many other things, that happens at a specific point in time. It's not a gradual process, it's a decisive act of the sovereignty of God. However, in spite of the fact that that is a decisive act at a point in time, our knowledge of that, our apprehension of that, may not actually line up with that event. I see nothing in scripture that leads me to believe that the Christian should expect an experience in coming to Christ.
Now, yes, in Acts at that transitionary point when the Holy Spirit has come, new people are included in the covenant. That transition and the apprehension of the Holy Spirit is marked by a sign, the speaking of tongues, and miracles, and other things at that point, but there's nothing in the text that leads us to believe this should be the norm for the Christian today.
Often also, the conversions that are described in scripture are for adults when there is a conscious shift that happens from someone who is opposed to Christ in their thinking, to someone who makes a conscious decision to submit their life to Christ, to repent of their sin, to repent: to change their mind about who God is, who they are, and all those types of things, and to place their conscious trust for salvation in Jesus. For the adult, it's easier to point to a time, often times.
However, I don't think our knowledge of this event, our self knowledge, always lines up with the event. For many people, this is actually more troubling if they came to faith as a child. For the person who grew up in let's say a Christian home, a home where the gospel was preached and proclaimed, the scriptures were read, where Godly morality was taught, those types of things, such a person who grew up in that environment may not have a point where they had this decisive turning point. They may have always grown up believing the gospel is true. They may have always grown up believing that God exists.
I would say, honestly, that's an awesome thing. That's a gift by the grace of God. My point is, is that person may not know when the Holy Spirit took out that heart of stone and placed in them a heart of flesh. They had always been participating in a Christian lifestyle with Christian intellectual commitments and they may not be aware of when that event happened.
Now, the event happened, or they're not a Christian, but they may not be aware of that. I think we actually do damage to people and to some theological ideas, when we heavily insist that someone must know the date and the time. Because that really puts the emphasis on me and when I said a prayer—that's when I became a Christian. That's what it actually comes across as sometimes. Actually, theologically you couldn't have prayed the prayer unless you were a Christian. The person who's in the flesh can't please God. Repentance is pleasing to God.
Therefore, repentance as we see in the New Testament, is actually a gift. Just like faith is a gift. We repent after we have been regenerated, or as a part of that you might say those two things happen kind of coincidentally, but there is kind of a logical order there.
My point here is that many people will not be aware of the moment when this happened. When was their trust actually was saving trust. I think we should not push that point too far. Also, when we do push for a date and a time, we're kind of emphasizing this idea that just praying a prayer makes someone a Christian, and it doesn't.
I was asked one day at church Why we don't often give people a sample prayer to pray so that they could just become a Christian right then and there, because if we suggest that they go to the care room and talk with someone, well, some people won't go. One question I asked the person is, "So, are you saying that if they're serious enough to pray a prayer, but they're not serious enough to walk to the care room and talk with someone, that they actually want to be a Christian?"
That didn't make much sense to me. Beyond that, often times if we just give someone a prayer to pray, they don't understand what we would mean in that prayer. Like, what does it mean for God to be holy and creator? What does it mean for me to be made in his image and yet sinful and fallen? What did it actually mean for Jesus to die a substitutionary atoning death on the cross? Those phrases have meaning and often people who just want a prayer or are just told a prayer, don't understand what they're actually saying. The words aren't magic, and we shouldn't convey that they are. That's a concern there.
If you just prayed a prayer when you were younger, perhaps, does that mean you got saved then? Actually, I would say no, right? Though, you have have been. This goes back to our idea that our conscious knowledge of being a Christian or having prayed a prayer doesn't necessarily align with when we became a Christian.
Could you have been a Christian quite a while before you prayed a prayer? Yes, certainly. I do believe that's the case. I also think there are many people who have prayed a prayer and are not Christians. What we see often times is someone will say, "I prayed a prayer 20 years ago," and yet their lifestyle and the fruit, or lack thereof currently, looks like the type of lifestyle that Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 would say means you are not a Christian. I think that is something we have to contend with, that simply praying words, simply saying certain things, doesn't make you a Christian.
We have to have room in our theological systems for Matthew 7, where people will come to Jesus and say, "Lord, Lord, didn't we cast out demons in your name and do wonderful things in your name?" He's going to say to a certain type of person, "Go away from me, I never knew you." They were trusting Jesus, but they weren't actually Christians.
We've talked about this before, but I do think it's helpful for us to understand that our conscious knowledge of the fact that we have surrendered to Christ may actually come after the fact that we have surrendered to Christ. In fact, in order to pray a prayer of surrender to Christ, I would say you have had to already surrender to Christ. I think that's helpful for us to think about.
Some people might say, "Well, did I do it wrong? Did I pray the prayer wrong? I mean, I know so much more now and I think, 'Gosh, what was I actually saying or committing back then?'" I don't know that that's a helpful question. I think the current question is: are you currently trusting Jesus for your salvation? Not your works, not your heritage, not tradition. Are you trusting in Jesus alone for salvation? Do you repent of your sin?
It's been said that when the Holy Spirit pricks your heart, do you bleed repentance? That's a good indicator of whether someone is a Christian or not. When they're confronted with their sin from scripture, by the Holy Spirit, by a friend, or by the church, do they repent, or are they hardened against it? Now, that's not a surefire indicator, but it is a pointer for us. The New Testament doesn't aim to give anyone assurance of salvation who is not repenting of their sin. I mean, 1st through 3rd John makes that quite clear.
Why am I talking about this? Well, I think there is a group of people who have grown up going to church, in Christian households, and don't have a moment. They can't point to a date and a time where they became a Christian, but they would fall in that category of a person who trusts Jesus for salvation currently, not their works - no other God, not something in addition to Jesus. They repent of their sins, they care about those things. They care about living for the glory of God. That's a much better indicator of if someone is a Christian than if they prayed a prayer 30 years ago.
When we push for a prayer and a date, we actually do damage to some theological commitments, some Biblical teachings, where words don't have power, where faith is actually a gift, where repentance is a gift. It also kind of obscures the fact that people can claim the name of Jesus, but not be Christians. Matthew 7 talks to this. James speaks to this. This was the whole idea of people having an intellectual commitment or assent to who Jesus is, but James is saying that they don't have saving faith. The type of faith they have is not saving faith, because it isn't evidencing fruit and works. You're not saved by works, but saving faith does produce works. We have an order there that's important.
Nonetheless, I just think these types of things are important to think about and to speak clearly about. I have a friend who grew up and never had one of those experiences where he went away from God and the church and came back and that type of thing. That's an awesome type of thing.
That's actually my prayer for my daughter who's not even born yet, that she would grow up in a house where the gospel is modeled. That's a high level of responsibility for my wife and I. That she would grow up in that environment. That she would grow up believing that God exists, trusting Jesus is who he says he is, and at some point through all that process that she'll actually end up being a Christian. Now, will she know where that moment is? No, she very well may not and that's not a bad thing. What's important is that she grows up and that we all, wherever we are, whatever our stage of life, wherever on that process of sanctification or whatever we are, that we all trust in Christ for salvation alone. That's incredibly important.
Our conscious apprehension of that may very well differ from when the event happened, but that's not a bad thing. I hope this has been helpful.
I think many people will be surprised one day to learn they were actually Christians before they thought they were, long after they thought they were, or sadly, not at all.
I think for some people having clarity on this idea can bring peace. It should also influence how we talk about this, that having said a prayer doesn't make you a Christian. What makes you a Christian is God's decisive act of taking out the heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh. They're only two categories of people, you're one or the other; you're in the flesh or you're in the Spirit. You're either dead to sin or you're alive in Christ. It is God who does that work? Yes. Does that happen through repentance and faith and by an act of grace? Yes, it does, but we won't always be aware of when that happens.
I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Does Proverbs contain a blatant contradiction? It tells us to answer a fool according to his folly, and in the very next verse, not to answer a fool according to his folly. Stay tuned to find out on Unapologetic.
If you've had very many conversations about the Bible, you assuredly have heard someone say that it contains contradictions. Now, often when people say this, it's helpful to say, "Well can you show me one? Can you show me a contradiction?" Because it's really easy for someone to throw out a claim like that and have no idea if it's true or why it's true. You'll actually be surprised that, when people make that claim, they can't actually even show you one.
Now this is often true for people like Mormons and followers of the LDS faith. They'll say, "The Bible's been corrupted. You can't trust it." You can ask them, "Well what's a part that's been corrupted? What part don't you trust?" Often they can't actually point to anything. They don't have an idea. They've just heard that claim. This is true often with other non-Christians too, like atheists, who will say the Bible contains contradictions. Well where? Show me one. That should be our first reply. Our first response should not be to start defending the truthfulness of scripture. Make the other person prove their point. Show me a contradiction.
Now if they show you something that seems to be a contradiction, we can talk about that. Let's actually talk about one example today. In Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5, we read this:
“Don't answer a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own eyes."
Some people have said this appears to be a contradiction. One verse says to not answer a fool according to his folly and the next says to answer him according to his folly. Which is it? This seems like a blatant contradiction.
The first thing to point out is the more blatant the contradiction seems, the less likely it's a contradiction. Here's what I mean by that. If you were to read a newspaper article that seemed to contain an incredibly blatant contradiction, would you think the author was just too dumb to realize that? Or would you think maybe there's something else going on? Maybe I've misunderstood or maybe he's getting at something else.
When something is back to back like these two verses, they're verses 4 and 5, and they seem to say entirely opposite things, do we really think the writer was that dumb? That people didn't realize that? Are we really that advanced today? Well no, we're not. People weren't automatically just dumb back in the ancient world either. I think the first thing we can say here is obviously the author didn't think these were contradictory. They might seem contradictory on the face of it to us, but the fact that they're included back to back I think strongly points out the fact that whoever wrote this did not think it was contradictory.
Now we also need to deal with the fact that these are proverbs, so we need to interpret literature according to its genre. Not everything in the Bible is a set of scientific, propositional statements like, "This thing weighs this much exactly and is this color and this long." No, this is a proverb, which is a generally true wise saying. Proverbs are not laws; they're not spiritual laws; they're not laws of nature. So, they're not always true. It's always truthful wisdom, but that doesn't mean that everything a proverb says is always true.
For instance, "Train up your child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he won't depart from it," is not a promise. It is possible to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he may depart from it. The thing is, it's generally true that children who are well trained and raised and discipled do not depart from that. It's a generally true wise saying. It's a proverb.
Let's come back to our two proverbs here: "Answer a fool according to his folly," and, "Don't answer a fool according to his folly." The first thing to point out, I think, in addition to what we've said so far, is that we, today, have proverbs that seem contradictory, and we may use both of them in a given day. For instance, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And “if it's out of sight, it's out of mind.” On the face of it, these say contradictory things, and yet, don't we know they actually mean different things?
What we're addressing when we say that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is actually not the same type of situation we're addressing with "out of sight, out of mind." Absence makes the heart grow fonder when you're attracted to that thing, when you have affections for that thing. But, on the other hand, something you don't have attractions to or affections for, if it's out of sight, it's probably out of mind. You're not going to think about that. On the face of it, these seem to be contradictory, but they're not because we know they're talking about different types of things.
Another example from today would be, "Birds of a feather flock together." But, we also say, "Opposites attract." So which is it? Is it like things attract or is it opposite things attract? Well, it depends on the circumstance.
Life is messy. I think that's something we need to understand. Proverbs, even our proverbs today, that may seem contradictory, cover multiple facets of life. They express the full range of human experience. We find that in the Book of Proverbs too. It addresses so much, from happiness and bitterness, to wisdom and gluttony and sloth, and joy, and everything in between. It hits the full range of human emotion and of human experience. I think that's what we're seeing here also: that these two proverbs are expressing different things in different situations.
Really, that takes us to our second big point today. The first one was the author didn't think they were contradictory. They're back to back. That's kind of hard to miss. Two, each proverb helps us understand the other. I actually think it's less likely that we would understand one of the proverbs here if we didn't have both. Now you may be thinking, "Okay, but they seem contradictory, so how are we even understanding any of them?"
Well, let's use the fact that the author didn't think they were contradictory to encourage us to press in and ask some more questions of how to understand them. Really maybe we can say they're both true. Now what would they be saying? Since they're both true, how can we understand them? How does each one help us understand the other?
The first thing I think to point out is that they're talking about different facets of experience, different parts of human experience. There is a time when you should not answer a fool according to his folly. The proverb actually tells us what that is.
Don't answer a fool according to his folly, in the way that you'll be like him. The other proverb says we should answer a fool according to his folly. Why is that? When is that? When it's possible that if we don't, the fool will be wise in his own eyes. Maybe we would even say: in the eyes of other people. We don't want that to be the case.
I also think there's kind of an equivocation here, a use of the same word in different ways. "According to" I think is used differently. In the first example, "Don't answer a fool according to his folly lest you be like him." I think what that's saying is, don't answer a fool in the same way that he's foolish. Don't make the same foolish mistake in answering him that he made in requiring you to answer.
But the second one, "Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own eyes," I think "according to" there means we're responding to the act of foolishness. Our according to, the way we answer, is in response to the foolishness, but not like verse 4, it is not in the same way he was foolish. We're addressing the foolishness. We are not being foolish ourselves. We need to be careful of that.
I think when we put these proverbs back to back, we see that the author didn't think they were contradictory and that each one helps us understand the other. The first one is saying, "Don't get on the level of the fool when you answer him." The second one is saying, "But, when you answer the fool, and you should sometimes, do it in such a way and in the case where he's not looking wise in his own eyes, where he's not seeming wise in the eyes of perhaps other people who are watching."
Now how would this practically play out? I think some examples would be helpful. The first one for instance: if a fool is calling someone a name, they're saying, "You can't trust that guy. He's a horrible person," he's just calling names in this case. He hasn't actually made an argument. He hasn't provided evidence. What we should not do is say, "No, you're an idiot. You're not a good person." Once again, we've got on the level of the fool and replied, and not in a helpful way. He's drug us down into the mud with him.
I also think there's an aspect here of how this comes out when we defend scripture. Someone will say, oftentimes, "The Bible's not true. The Bible's not the word of God." We could say, "Okay, well I'll grant you that. How can we reason to get to a conclusion where scripture is true according to your worldview and your presuppositions?" What we've actually done now is we've adopted, for the sake of this argument at lest, the viewpoint of the fool who says there is no God, and said, "Okay, we'll try and figure this out on your playing field,” instead of on the ground that God has revealed in scripture.
We shouldn't reason according to how the fool reasons in order to prove the truthfulness of God and of scripture. God has revealed himself to us. That is the position from which we reason. We can't jettison those things that God has revealed in his world in order to hopefully make what would be a more persuasive case to the non-Christian.
"Don't answer a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself." Let's not get down on their level. Let's not call names or whatever it is. But, at the same time, the second verse says, "Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be wise in his own eyes." How do we do that? I think a great example would be when a non-Christian or an atheist complains about evil.
What they might say at two different times, or maybe in the same conversation, is, "The God of the Old Testament was immoral. He wiped everyone out at the flood. He demanded the destruction of the Canaanites. He asked Abraham, he commanded Abraham, to kill Isaac. He is a bloodthirsty monster." Then, if you start pushing them on their moral view, they'll say, "Morality doesn't exist. There's no such thing as right and wrong. We decide for ourselves. Abortion may be wrong for you. That's good. But it might be right for me. It's a subjective type of thing. We all decide for ourselves."
I hope you see those are contradictory views. Because, if morality is the type of thing we all decide for ourselves, then what God did in the Old Testament wasn't actually wrong; it was just something this person didn't like. You can't have it both ways.
I think what we can do is we can use the fool's folly here when they say, for instance, that God was evil in the Old Testament, to point out their other problems. Let's get in their worldview like it's a car and see if we can drive it somewhere. Where does this take us? At first glance, it shows us that they can't have this view that morality is subject. If what God did in the Old Testament was evil for God to do, then morality can't be the type of thing I just decide for myself. We've got to be consistent there.
More than that, if you're rejecting the idea of God and then saying there is a moral standard and God broke it in the Old Testament, if he existed, where do you get this idea of morality? Where do you get a moral law if there's not a moral law giver? You don't. You don't have laws without lawgivers, so there isn't such a thing as an ought—something we ought to do, that we should do, that is required of us—unless there's someone to put that obligation on us. There's not a law without a lawgiver. There's not a requirement in this way without a requirement giver.
This whole idea that there is morality in the world and that God did evil things in the Old Testament requires there to be a God. We've talked about this several times before. I think this is a fitting example of how you can answer a fool according to his folly. When the fool is assuming that things exist that don't fit in his worldview, we answer him according to his folly. We say, "You can't have that. You can't actually have morality in your worldview because you don't have the Christian God." That's important.
It also happens in other areas. Most atheists will assume the existence of morality, logic, and the consistency of natural laws. But those are very hard things to find places for in a non-Christian worldview. What is logic on a non-Christian worldview? How does someone analyze evidence and come to a conclusion if God doesn't exist? They don't, because there's not a “them.” There's just a big series of billiard balls running into each other. They're just determined. They're just a meat machine, you might say. If God does not exist, then we don't have souls and materials things don't exist. Yet, all too often, the atheist wants to make the claim that they've analyzed the evidence, they've made a decision, they have decided that God does not exist because there is not evidence, they would say.
What's a “they?” If their view is true, then everything is just the product of chemical reactions and molecules bouncing into each other, and random mutation and natural selection. There's no choice. There's no freedom of the will in an atheistic worldview. The phrase, "I evaluated the evidence. I made a decision," is ultimately meaningless on an atheistic worldview. We can point that out. We can answer the fool, the person who denies the existence of God, according to his folly lest he be continuing to think he's wise in his own wisdom. We do that when we point out that people are assuming things that don't actually fit in their worldview.
We've covered a lot today, but the first thing to point out is don't assume the Bible contains a gross contradiction. Let's give grace to the author just like we would to any other author, especially if the two verses that are supposed to be contradictory are back to back. Of course someone would have realized that.
In fact, what that points to is that each one helps us understand the other. We should not get on the fool's level. In his foolishness, we should not respond in that way, but we should, for his own sake and for the sake of people listening, point out where he is foolish (though do this winsomely) and explained that, oftentimes, lest he continue to think he's wise in his own eyes. Let's confront him or her with a biblically-based, truthful response that points to the Gospel, that points to the truthfulness of Christianity.
As an example, often this will occur when the non-Christian is assuming things that they can't actually have if their worldview is correct, like morality and logic and natural laws and the consistency of nature, and a soul, and a mind, and all these things.
I hope this was helpful, and I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Today's episode is largely for me. Now, of course, you can listen; I hope you do. I'm speaking to myself here more than I usually do. Usually, I'm speaking from something that I'm confident in, that I've researched, that I speak on, that I write on, those types of things, but today I'm speaking from more an area of weakness and something that I need to remind myself of: remembering that there is usually a heart behind the question.
Now, of course, everyone who asks a question has a heart, has a soul, that type of thing. What I mean, is that a lot of times the person asking the question isn't just wanting to bat around an intellectual idea. They're not looking for a stimulating academic conversation. A lot of times, there's something emotionally attached to the question they ask, and I often forget that, honestly. I don’t take that into account. That’s not my first response much of the time.
I think this is a liability that we need to be aware of as we seek to be more informed and as we seek to address issues and topics and culture that we often talk about on this podcast, because there are liabilities that comes when you have well thought-out views and you know exactly where you, stand and you're confident: that can come across as cold and heartless. It comes across as academic.
Now I think some of this is due to our unique cultural moment that we're in, where if someone speaks definitively about something, that they don’t pause and they don’t say "um" a lot, that it sometimes comes across as closed-minded or sterile at the least. When we get a question on salvation and, “Is Jesus the only way of salvation?” We might quickly reply “Yes, most assuredly. John 14:6 says, ‘Jesus is the way to truth and light. No one comes to the Father but through him.’ Paul makes it clear that there's no other name under heaven where men can be saved, these types of things.”
We can just launch into that and give a very thorough explanation, but the person may be thinking that their grandparents never actually had opportunity to hear the gospel. Maybe they have a relative or maybe they just can't bring themselves to believe that God exists or Jesus exists. They realize that on this view you're putting forth, that this means they will suffer in hell for eternity. There's something very real in terms of the consequences of the idea that’s involved in your answer. Yet, all too often (I’ll just speak for myself), I hop in and give the answer to the question, and I don’t even think of the heart behind it. Now I've gotten better at this over the years, but I still find myself surprised at how often I miss this point.
For instance, recently I was having a conversation and a question was asked, and I just thought it was kind of an intellectual curiosity: "Do you think people need to have a moment, kind of a Paul Damascus Road type of moment where they become distinctly aware of the fact that they're a Christian? Do you need to be able to cite when you became a Christian to the day?” I said, "No. You know, it's interesting. I've been doing some reading and there are people who think you should just have a child that grows up and they never know anything different than being a Christian." The person said, "Well, is this a good thing?" I said, "Yeah."
I go to move on, talk about something else (we're in a group of people), and I look back and this person is very emotional at this point. They look upset, and I’m thinking, "Oh, gosh, what did I say? What did I say this time?" It turns out that this person had been told throughout their life that they needed to have a “moment.” If you didn’t have a moment, then you probably weren't a Christian and that type of thing.
There's no Biblical foundation for that at all, and I think often this view that you have to have a moment or kind of a very noteworthy testimony is more prevalent sometimes, sadly, in Southern Baptist circles. I'm a Southern Baptist. I can say that. I've grown up hearing that.
This view that you have to have that isn't prevalent in other denominations a lot of times. This was a huge deal to the person I was talking with. They had been told something different for their whole life. They had guilt associated with this because they didn’t know their moment. But in that conversation, I just thought we were talking about an idea in passing, and I was sharing something I'd been thinking about and reading about, but, no, this was immensely personal.
This happens a lot, I think. I think this happens more than any of us realize, because when we ask questions, a lot of times we're pretty good about being emotionally guarded and we just present things as ideas, but that doesn’t mean that questions are only ideas. They have hearts and they have souls behind them that care about these things. The more prepared we are to give an answer for the hope we possess, the greater the liability that we'll do that without the thought of the heart and the emotional sensitivities behind it.
Some sample questions might be, someone might way, "Well, what's your view on homosexuality?" I had this conversation recently. I knew enough to ask, "Why do you ask? I'd be glad to talk with you, but where are you coming from?" If I had just launched into an answer that was correct and Biblically robust, I would have missed the fact that this person struggles with same-sex attraction. I need to talk with him as a person and understand where they're coming from first and foremost as a person before we talk about this. They need to know my heart towards that type of thing, because how I would write about the specifics of an issue is different than how I would talk to a person who's struggling with that. Now the truth claims are going to be the same, but how they're presented is going to be very different.
This is perhaps a more obvious example, but the person who asks if abortion should be against the law on our view, well, on the one hand, that question has a yes or no answer. Either it should be illegal or it shouldn’t be illegal, but likely, this person might have had an abortion in the past. They're wondering, "Do you think I should be in jail? Do you condemn me?“ Now I think we can work through this answer and the logic of the pro-life position with this person and reason from a Biblical worldview, but nonetheless, I need to be sensitive to that.
If the person who's asking a question about abortion is asking a factual question and yet they themselves have been affected by abortion, I need to talk about that first. I need to make sure they know my heart towards them and that issue before I go into something that’s cold and clinical. Not that sharing facts is only cold and clinical. I actually think it's a distinct act of love and caring to present the truth to someone in love, but there needs to be that love aspect, and that requires us to remember that there's a heart behind every question.
I think very commonly, the person who asks if someone could lose their salvation is probably the person who's questioning if they're saved, "Am I good enough? Did I actually believe in the past?" This is a personal type of thing. Now I often forget this because I talk with people who are in theological circles. We like to talk about the theology behind this, and that’s important. You have to know the theology behind this type of issue in order to give an accurate answer when asked, but you also have to remember, I have to remember that there's a heart that’s probably struggling with their security of salvation.
That’s the thing I need to talk about here. If I talk about the fact that, no, someone can't lose their salvation, but there are definitely people who think they are saved and are not. We could go look at Matthew 7 and multiple examples where the Bible tells us that if you do certain things you are not saved. Well, there are people today who do those things habitually. Well, Biblically speaking, they're not Christians.
We can talk about that logic, but I need to understand where this person is coming from. Why are you asking me this question? What's the place this comes from? Is this something that you question? Is this something that a loved-one questions? We need to be able to address that, because I could give an answer that’s factually correct and misses their particular nuance of it, or the thing they had in mind is not really what they asked, so they take my answer differently than I intended it.
Those are four different examples of different types of questions: views on homosexuality, views on abortion and salvation, and when did you become a Christian, those types of things, which have factual answers but often come from a heart-place that’s probably struggling, honestly. We need to be sensitive to that.
Now I did mention when I started out that there's a liability for those who have very well thought-out views, that they come across cold and calculated. I think that’s true, but I don’t think we should make our views seem more tentative just to be more culturally palatable. That’s not what I'm suggesting. I am suggesting that we present our views with humility, giving credit where credit's due, saying, "This is the view I have come to based on the clear teaching of scripture in this area," or, "You know what? This is a view that scripture doesn’t speak very clearly to and I could be wrong here." I think it's important to say we could be wrong wherever that could likely be the case. It presents humility, which, hopefully, is actually genuine. I try to do that more than not today.
I've become increasingly aware in conversations of talking past one another and missing the point that occurs, where both people leave a conversation and they think they’ve understood but they’ve actually misunderstood. I'm more aware of that, and I try to call that out more in conversations, whether that’s in ministry or in my profession or things like that. For instance "This is my takeaway. This is what I think we should do, but I could have misunderstood. I could be wrong here." I'm offering that up because it's true. I definitely could be wrong here. That type of humility goes a long way today. Obviously, this needs to be genuine. These aren't magic words.
I do think that can help soften the impact that’s often felt today from those who have well thought-out views, who present them succinctly and confidently. We need to do that on the thing sscripture speaks clearly to and convictionally to and confidently to. We need to speak clearly and convictionally and confidently. We don’t do the scriptures justice when we talk about issues differently than they do, even when our tone is.
I don’t think it's good that there are things that I actually lament that scripture teaches. I think it's fair for me to say that there are things i doesn’t like, but I shouldn’t present that like it's a good thing. Disagreeing with God on things, at least in how I feel, is not good. Part of the Christian life is bringing all my thoughts and my desires and my feelings into line with how God thinks and desires and feels.
All of that to say, remember when you're talking with people—I need to remember when I talk with people—that there is often a heart that is sensitive to the type of question that often comes across as just an intellectual question. That’s often not the case, though. There are hearts behind questions, and so it's very fair and I would encourage you to ask people, "Why do you ask that question? Where is that coming from? I'm glad to answer it." Make that clear, "I'm glad to talk about it, but I'd just like to understand where you're coming from. Why is this question important to you?"
Like I said, it's something I'm working on. It's something I fail in often, and this episode of this podcast comes from me being reminded of that in just the last couple of weeks.
I hope this is encouraging to you. It's helped me as I've talked through this more do this better in conversation, to remember the person who's asking the question and not just jump in and address the question and the details and the facts themselves, but to remember to stop and care about the person who's asking the question. Because honestly, that’s the only reason it's important to answer the question. It's for the benefit of the person, and I don’t want to hurt to them in the process of answering their question just because I forgot that.
I hope this is helpful, and I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>There's too much information for evolution to be true.
Now you might be thinking, "Aren't there tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of studies that show that evolution is true?" Well that all depends on several things. The first might be what you mean by evolution.
Anytime we talk about this topic we need to define our terms here. I was just having a conversation this last Sunday after small group with a PhD student that's in my small group. We were talking about evolution and we actually disagree on some things, but some of that is just related to the fact that we use the term in different ways at points. Many people do today. In fact this guy and I, we have pretty much the same perspective on the issue, the same biblical worldview, and yet we use the term differently at points. It's the same way with Christians and non-Christians.
We need to define our terms because evolution, at least one usage of the term, just simply means change over time. Then we could take that a little further, and sometimes people will use it to refer to small successive changes over time, and we might call that micro-evolution. Then others will use it, and what they're referring to is a mechanism that's able to generate a change in kinds over time. We would call that macro-evolution. That's pretty much the most common usage of the term today: this idea that life came about from a single celled organism, that over time reproduced more, and more, and more, and became sufficiently more and more complicated through the twin mechanism of natural selection and mutation.
As the genetic code is copied more and more as organisms reproduce, mutations occur—changes in that genetic code that are unintentional; they are a natural byproduct of this reproductive process. The changes that help the organism survive get “selected for,” and those organisms survive more, so they're more likely to pass on those helpful genetic changes. That's natural selection. This pair of processes has also been called the neo-Darwinian Synthesis—the ideas of Darwin that have kind of been improved on, and changed, over time.
That's the most common usage, but there are some usages even in between these, where some people might believe that evolution fits with an idea that God created life. Not that he used evolution to do it even, but that he used evolution to provide for the diversity of life within kinds after he created. That's not the view that's most common in secular institutions today, but that is a view of evolution. It is a valid usage of that term, but all of this goes to show that we need to define our terms.
Now when I talk about evolution, by and large, and in the rest of this episode, I'm going to be referring to that totally naturalistic, unguided process that you're most likely to hear about in a university biology department, the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. That life started as single cell organism and over time through random mutation and natural selection, became as complicated as it is today, with human beings, and the great diversity we see.
Now I started out this episode by saying there's too much information for evolution to be true. Here's what I mean by that. I don't mean that there are studies or aren't studies, what I mean is: our DNA, our genetic code is actually information. Information is the product of a mind. Information is what's conveyed by a certain structure or sequence of data, or things. That's actually what genetic code is.
Genetic code is information. It's a structured sequence that actually codes for the things it produces. Here's the kicker, information is the product of a mind. For instance, if you were just walking through the woods, and you saw a bunch of pine cones on each other, and they're not structured, and anything like that. It just looks like they fell out of a tree, that's not information, but if on the other hand you see one pine cone, and then two pine cones, and then three pine cones, and a group of four pine cones, and then a group of five pine cones, what you have seen is a structured sort of thing. It's information. That's the product of a mind. The chances of you walking through the wilderness and finding a progressively stacked numbers of pine cones together, is incredibly rare. It is much more likely that that's a product of a mind.
We actually see that same type of thing with the natural world. In fact, Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, starts out by saying that the natural world gives the impression of having been designed for a purpose. Then he's going to go on and tell us why that's not the case. An interesting facet of this argument to me is that he's saying “our intuitions make it seem like we were designed for a purpose, but I'm going to use my intuitions to tell you that that's not true.” We kind of have a battle of intuitions here. (We're really close to another argument against evolution, which we might talk on about another day.)
All of that to say, DNA is information. Information is the product of a mind. Information does not come about randomly. In the same way that if you walked into the kitchen and saw spelled on the dinning room table in Cheerios, "Hello mom," you're not going to think that happened randomly and without a purpose. You are going to rightfully understand that your child, instead of eating her food, spelled words with it. Which depending on her age might be impressive and something you would celebrate. All of that to say, that's information. That arrangement of Cheerios conveys something that's intelligible and achieves its purpose. It's a structured sort of thing and in an intentional way. That's information. (That example came from Koukl, to give attribution there.)
Just to make the broader point, that's exactly what DNA is. We have chunks of DNA that we understand code for the creation of the eye and that same chunk of DNA, every time, produces an eye when it's read and interpreted by the other natural processes and structures in the body. That's what's contained in that DNA.
We've heard of genetics, right? That you have this genetic code, and it codes for the creation of things, that's exactly what we've been talking about. There's actually something called epigenetics. What this talks about is how our genetic code actually gets expressed differently in different situations and in different environments.
The same genetic code in one environment may actually create something a certain way, but in another environment may create it differently. That's still coming from information. I also think there's a beauty here we have to appreciate. That some how, that it just knows what to do in this other environment. What would we call something that just knew what to do in different circumstances and made the best choice in either one? That sounds like an intelligent sort of thing. Now I'm not saying DNA is intelligent. What I am saying is it's the result of intelligence.
When something responds accordingly in different situations, well that's an intelligent type of thing. It's the product of a mind. More than that, some of the DNA that we use to think didn't do anything and was considered “junk DNA” actually seems to behave differently in different circumstances and environments. That's where epigenetics come into play.
Now, I am not a geneticist, I am not a biologist, I'm kind of an amateur in these things. I'm trying to keep things simple for our purposes today. What I hope you see is DNA is information, information comes from minds. Epigenetics is actually a way where that same information gets expressed differently in different contexts. That kind of contextual awareness, once again, seems to be the product of a mind, it makes more sense that it was designed that way than if it just randomly happened to do the right thing all the time in the right circumstances. That doesn't make as much sense.
Now, this is an example of a type of situation where some people are going to say that the evidence is compelling and others are going to say there's no evidence, or the evidence is not compelling. Really what it comes down to is not is there evidence or is there not evidence, but what do my presuppositions dictate about how I will interpret the evidence?
Some people are not going to agree with my conclusions here. That, for instance, epigenetics is the type of thing that's more explainable by the creation of a mind. They're going to say that because they think naturalistic processes can account for that type of different genetic expression. They're going to probably believe that because of their pre-commitment to naturalism, to this idea that there is not a supernatural, that there is not a creator.
Some people will say evolution is true, and you'll ask, "Why?" They'll say, "Because naturalistic processes can totally explain how things came about." You ask, “But what about this idea that information is the creation of minds." They say, "Well, I don't think there is such a thing as a mind, or there's not a divine mind, so it had to be naturalistic." What you'll often find is that people are reasoning, from the conclusion that there isn't a creator, and using the evidence to support that.
Now I do think it's fair to point out, Christians do the same thing in reverse, oftentimes. We reason from the biblical worldview perspective that there is a creator, and that influences interpret the evidence. I don't think we should reason differently than that. God has given us a worldview, a set of presuppositions. In 1 Peter 3:15, we're told to do apologetics, defending the faith under the lordship of Christ. That includes reasoning from a Christ centered worldview.
However, when we're talking with a non-Christian, let's put all the facts on the table, and ask the question, "Does your worldview make this seem more reasonable, or does my worldview? Which makes the evidence seem more probably and plausible? Which is the best explanation? Which set of presuppositions?"
I certainly think that it makes more sense that this very complicated process that has created a diversity and beauty of life is the result of a mind. Because, in part, information comes from minds. More than that, I see nothing that on its own gets more complicated without the infusion of information.
What we see in the fossil record is this period called the Cambrian explosion, where the majority of the types of organisms that exist today, all came into existence within about a 50 million year period, which is remarkably short of a period for evolution to be true. In fact this is a great argument against evolution, that there was such a new diversity and explosion of life, which is why we call it the Cambrian explosion, that this couldn't be accounted for by small successive changes over time.
We see there is an infusion of information. In the Cambrian explosion there was a large infusion of new genetic information, and that's why we see new types of organisms. The organisms are a product of the information that coded for them, which is the creation of a mind. That's compelling to me because of reasoning from a biblical worldview. You have a much harder time explaining that from a non-biblical worldview. This is a place where the biblical worldview and explanation makes much more sense of the evidence.
To wrap this up, we've looked at a lot, and we've looked at it briefly, but I just kind of want to plant some seeds so you're thinking about these types of ideas. Remember, information is the product of a mind; genetic material/DNA, is information. It's a structured sort of thing. It's a particularly ordered type of thing that creates something else. It's information. T
That information is even expressed and interpreted differently in different circumstances via this process of epigenetics, such that some things we use to think were junk DNA actually aren't. More than that, when we talk about these types of things, like the Cambrian explosion, and this genetic explosion of information on to the scene, non-Christians aren't necessarily going to find that to be compelling on its own, or on the face of it. That has to do with their presuppositions.
We need to be comfortable with that type of reaction and anticipate it, and not think, well, did I do it wrong? Worse yet, some people will actually respond to that by saying, "Well I guess there isn't evidence that God created everything." No, the issue is that we interpret the evidence differently. We need to encourage the non-Christianto step into our shoes, to look at the evidence through our worldview, with our set of assumptions and presuppositions, and say, "Does that make more sense of it?" It does. Every example of this type of situation we can come up with, when we're looking at the evidence from a non-Christian point of view or a Christian point of view, the Christian point of view has more explanatory power and makes more sense.
Now yes, it often requires adopting other beliefs and practices that people don't like, that confronts their sense of autonomy. Nonetheless, that doesn't make it not true. What we should encourage people to do is to be intellectually honest enough to look at the facts, reason from them, and follow the conclusion wherever it takes them.
Now some people are very aware that if you start looking at the evidence this way, and you go with the most reasonable conclusion, which is that God exists and created everything, that that has overtones and conclusions they don't like. Some scientists have even said, "We can't allow God to get a divine foot in the door.” Because if they admit that the best explanation is that God created everything, well that's probably going to mess with how they live.
Following Jesus is going to affect your life. It's going to be inconvenient to say the least. It's going to require a total orientation change, of taking up your cross and following him. All of that to say, we should encourage the non-Christan to take the evidence, consider it from a Christian point of view, and from their point of view, and say, "Which is the best account for the evidence?" Follow it wherever it leads and be intellectually honest enough with yourself, and with me, to not just reject what seems to be the explanation that makes the most sense, because you don't like where it leads. Christians shouldn't do that either. Oftentimes we come to conclusions because we like them, or reject conclusions because don't like them, and neither should be acceptable for, well, anyone, but especially to Christian.
]]>Here are my slides/notes, since many have asked.
I've got a question for you this morning. Do you trust the Bible? If so, why? In a group this size, on a day like today, I'm sure we have a full spectrum of answers to that question. All the way from, "Yeah, I'm all in. No questions," and maybe on the other extreme, "I don't think that's true at all." Many of us often fall in that middle ground, that middle category, where, "Yeah, I believe, but I have some doubts.”
We might struggle with doubts at points. Actually, that's my story. This isn't just an academic question for me. I grew up in church, I was there pretty much time the doors were opened it seemed. By the time I got to college and through those college years, I had amassed more questions than I thought possibly had answers. I was dead in the water with my faith, so to speak. If you'd have asked me if I thought God existed, and if He did, if He was good, I would have said no.
For that reason, my Christian walk was basically nonexistent, and so college was rough in that way. Now, you might all attribute that to the fact that I went to the University of Florida, and maybe there's something to that, I don't know. At a baseline though, my confidence in Scripture had been eroded, and so my faith was nonexistent.
So today, we're going to talk today about why we should trust the Bible. We're Bible people around here. We say that almost every week, and we've been going through the Gospel of Mark for the better part of this year, but in order for the gospel to be true, the Bible needs to be true. In order for us to have a leg to stand on when we talk about morality from the Bible, well, the Bible needs to be true, so we have to evaluate this question, “why should we believe the Bible?”
We're going to consider two different ways of looking at this question today. First we're going to talk about Jesus' view of Scripture. Second, we're going to look at five different lines of evidence for the reliability of the New Testament. Let's talk about Jesus' view of Scripture.
You know, it's interesting to me that there are many people who will trust Jesus for salvation, but kind of look down their nose, so to speak, at his view of Scripture. “Jesus, I believe you when it comes to what it takes to not go to Hell and to go to Heaven and that type of thing, but that whole idea about God creating people and evolution not being true and Jonah being the belly of a fish for three days, I'm not sure I'm with you on that. Some of that miracle stuff, I'm not sure I'm there.”
Well, at a baseline if miracles aren't true, then Jesus didn't rise from the dead, so I'm not sure what we're trusting Jesus for, but more than that, we often end up, whether intentionally or not, holding a different view of Scripture than Jesus even held. I would put forth to you that's not really a good idea.
Well, the first of our three points on this today is that Jesus taught that Scripture was actually about Him, that in fact all of the Old Testament points to him. We see this in Luke 24. Jesus says to His disciples,
“’How foolish and slow are you to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Wasn't it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?' Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted for them the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures."
There's this trend when Jesus answers questions and responds to people. He almost always says, "Haven't you read?” “Don't you know what Scripture said?" He expects the disciples to know that the Old Testament was about Him. He also expects us to know that too, and the New Testament is the same—it's about Him. Everything before the cross and the resurrection is leading up to the cross, and everything after it is in light of it. It's the focal point, the center point of Biblical history, but at a foundational level, Jesus teaches us that Scripture is about Him, but He also teaches us that Scripture is the Word of God.
It's interesting. We've been seeing this in Mark as we've gone through that gospel, but Jesus is constantly getting picked at and poked at and questioned by the religious leaders of the day. They're trying to find something to trip Him up. All too often, He responds to them with, "Haven't you read? Don't you know the Scripture?" He refers them back to that. Well, in Matthew 22, this has happened again. The Sadducees, one of the religious leader groups at the time, asks a question of Jesus about marriage after death. Here's how He responds in part. He says,
“Haven't you read what was spoken to you by God?"
He calls them back to the Scriptures, but isn't that kind of an odd question, actually? Haven't you read what was spoken? He doesn't say, "Haven't you read what was written?" And he doesn't say, "Haven't you heard what was spoken?" He says, "Haven't you read what was spoken?" What's He getting at here? Well, the idea that Scripture is the Word of God. It's His speech out to us, and if God has spoken something, it's most certainly true. God cannot lie, God cannot err, and since God's Word is the Bible, the Bible doesn't err. It doesn't contain mistakes.
Those problems I alluded to back when I was in college, those weren't problems with the Bible. Those were heart problems with myself and problems I had to work through. It was not an issue with Scripture. I hope what you see here is that while Jesus teaches us that Scripture's about Him, He also says it's His word. That's something Paul picks up in 2 Timothy 3:16. He says,
”All Scripture is inspired," [or your translation might say "God-breathed] "and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, and for training in righteousness so that the man of God may be complete and equipped for every good work."
Now, this is one of my favorite passages, and there's so much I'd like to say here, but we just don't have the time today. I want to focus on the beginning. “All Scripture is inspired by God.” Now, the Bible was not written in English. At least the New Testament was written in Greek, and the word that we translate as “inspired” is actually a word Paul made up. He took the word for “God” and he took the word for “breathed” and put them together. Paul's saying here that Scripture is God-breathed. Now, that sounds like an odd type of idea, but if you were to put your hand up to your mouth, you'd feel your breath. If you're close enough to someone to feel their breath, that's either a very awkward type of encounter or a very intimate type of encounter.
When it comes to Scripture, it's the latter. God created us in His image, breathed life into us, and then breathed out His word so we could know about Him. The God of the Bible isn't some distant, cosmic kind of puppet master pulling strings from afar. No. He came to earth in the person of Jesus and revealed Himself that way, but He also reveals Himself through His word, and that's an intimate type of thing. Now, some people today will say, "Yeah, I believe the Bible's inspired," but they don't mean God-breathed, and so I'm not actually a fan of the word inspired because I don't think it communicates very well. Sometimes people will use the word inspired and what they mean is, "Well, men were inspired by what they saw, so they wrote things down."
If Scripture is the Word of God, then it's not just man's word. Yes, it's fully the words of man, but it's also fully the words of God. There's a dual authorship to Scripture in that way. Jesus teaches us that the Bible is about Him, that it's His Word, and He also teaches us that it contains true history.
This, for some people, is where the friction comes in. For instance, when Jesus is telling what's going to happen with His death and resurrection, He says, "Just as Jonah was in the belly of a fish for three days, so too will I be. So too will the Son of Man be in the belly of the earth." He assumes that they know that Jonah was in a fish for three days, literally.
It's interesting, in Matthew 19, there’s another passage where Jesus has been questioned by the religious leaders, and let's look at His response. Well, once again He starts with, "Haven't you read?" And then He says, "'That he who created them in the beginning made them male and female,' and he also said, 'For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.'" He's quoting from Genesis here. He's saying, "Haven't you read, don't you know that Adam and Eve were real people?" That's what His answer is based on. Many people today will say, "Well, evolution is true; life and human life came about from goo through the zoo to you (so to speak),” but Jesus doesn't really leave that as an option, does He? No, “God created them male and female,” and he created them in His image.
That's a very, once again, intimate, personal type of situation. He affirms that was how Adam and Eve historically came about. Jesus does this time and time again if you read through the Gospels. I think it's also noteworthy that the second half of this passage is where Jesus affirms the sexual ethic we find in the Old Testament, that God's only acceptable sexual expression is one man and one woman together for one lifetime. It's not a popular idea today, either, but it was Jesus' view. Once again, the question becomes “are we going to hold different views of Scripture, morality, the world, than Jesus held?” I hope not. Our life and the Christian life is one of trying to bring ourselves, our thoughts, and even our desires in line with who God is and what He wants for us.
There's so much more we could say about Jesus' view of Scripture, but I think it's important to start with that when we talk about why we can trust the Bible. Well, Scripture's about Jesus. He tells us that. It's even His word, and it contains history that is true.
Now I want to transition a little and talk about five different lines of evidence for the reliability of the New Testament, and they all start with E. So, they should be easy to remember, hopefully.
The first is that there's early testimony for the Bible. The things that were written down were written down very early on, very shortly after the events they describe.
The second is that this testimony was written by eye witnesses. They were there. They saw the things they claimed to see. Then we'll also look at the fact that there's evidence from outside the Bible, extra-Biblical evidence. That's our third E. Oftentimes, the evidence that's in the Bible is embarrassing. I don't know if you've thought about that, but we'll look through that. Lastly, the evidence was often excruciating for the disciples to tell and other people. It costs them something. Social standing, friends, religious connections, and ultimately, even their lives. Those are the five Es we're going to look at today.
We're going to start with early testimony. There 5,800 or so full and partial copies of the Greek New Testament, and just to refresh you, the Bible was not written in English, it was written in Greek. An original was written, and then it would be sent off somewhere and then someone would copy it and send a copy off, and those copies would be copied, and this is how the documents spread around and ultimately were compiled with a binding, but these things were written down very early. In fact, we have parts of Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, and James, which date to AD 50 to AD 70. That's within 20 to 40 years of Jesus' life; we have things written down.
Now, that might sound like a long time, but consider this. For the person who wants to say that the New Testament is just a cleverly made up story, well, would people know today if someone was making up a lie about something that happened in the ‘90s that was as big of a deal as a resurrection? Yeah. These were things written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. Let’s look at a graph that shows something called the copy time gap.
That's simply the number of years between an original was written, and the earliest copy we have. For some parts of the New Testament, that's 25 years. Let's compare that to other ancient works.
Homer is the next closet at the bottom there with 500. It was 500 years between when Homer was written to the earliest copy we have, and it just goes up from there. When you look at Caesar and Plato, 1,000, 1,200 years. A lot can change in that time, but the New Testament documents that we have today, some of them date to within 20 to 40 years, and that's during the lifetime of people who were alive. So, this whole idea that somehow corruption came in and the documents have been changed over thousands of years is not true.
I was watching a clip of The View this week, and they tossed out a line that went something like, “The Bible's been translated and translated and translated over 65 times, so we can't trust it." No, we always go back to the original manuscripts, and some of them are remarkably early. So, there's early evidence.
More than that, there's a lot of evidence. Our next graph we're going to see is the number of manuscripts from the New Testament compared with some of those same ancient works.
What you're going to see is that Homer has about 1,800. Just with the second place, it's no contest with the amount of evidence we have in the New Testament at about 5,800 manuscripts and partial manuscripts. This idea that the Bible's a puzzle that's missing pieces just doesn't stand up under scrutiny. It only goes down from there when we look at Caesar and Plato. 210 copies that remember are over 1,000 years after their original penning. No contest, once again.
Now, that's 5,800 Greek manuscripts. It we include Latin and Coptic and Syriac, the number goes to 20,000 and even 30,000. That's a lot of evidence that's early, but it's also written by eyewitnesses, and that's our second E.
Luke says in Luke one of his gospel,
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word."
Luke understood that when he set out to write an orderly account, he needed to talk with the people who were there.
That's often our question when we hear that something happened. “Well, were you there? Did you see it?” Luke understood the need to talk to eyewitnesses. In Acts, another book that Luke wrote, he records Peter saying this.
“God has raised Jesus to life, and we were all witnesses of this fact."
Peter ultimately goes on to die for his conviction, something we'll talk about soon, but he was there. He saw what he claimed to see. Then in 2 Peter, Peter writes,
“We didn't follow cleverly invented stories...”
Kind of guessing at what people would say today, it seems like.
”We didn't follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eye witnesses of His majesty."
“We were there. I didn't get this secondhand. I saw it. I lived it. I walked with Him. I ran away after He died, in fact, and I came back because I saw Him resurrected.”
They were eyewitnesses. Now, you may ask, "Well, why should we believe them?" Right? I mean, the Bible says it, but why should I believe they're eyewitnesses? Well, I would return you to Jesus' view of Scripture, that it contains true history, that it's about Him and that it's His word, but we can also say more than that.
The New Testament writers give the earmarks of actually being eyewitnesses, so they correctly cite locations and dialects and who the emperor was and who the governor was and who the mayor was and all of these types of rulers at different places. They get roads right and how they connect. They get obscure and remote customs correct when they talk about them.
You're only going to get those things right if you're where you claim to be, when you claim to be there. So, they prove themselves as eyewitnesses based on the truthfulness of how they relate what they said to the broader context of history. F.F. Bruce, who's a noted biblical scholar says this:
"A writer who thus relates his story to the wider context of world history is courting for trouble if he isn't careful; he affords his critical readers so many opportunities for testing his accuracy. Luke takes this risk and stands the test admirably,"
Bruce is effectively saying that people don't make up lies that are specific because you'll get them wrong, and yet the claims in Scripture are very specific, and they're right.
Let's make a parallel example for this. Let's say you're a parent, and your son wants to go out to movies on a Friday night. You say, "Yeah, sure. Be home by 11. Just go to the movies and then come home.” Your son goes off. He leaves about 8:00, and you and your wife look at each other and you say, "What should we do tonight? I guess we'll go to the movies too."
Now, you're not intending to check up on your son, and you're expecting to just have a quiet night, just watching a movie, relaxing, just the two of you. But you find that some of the theaters have been flooded. I mean, it has rained a lot here. Okay, so that's not great, but the popcorn machine is broken, so no popcorn. (You can't go to the movies and not get popcorn, right?)
You go home, and you go to bed early. The next morning at breakfast, you're talking with your son and you say, "How was the movie?" He says, "Oh, it was great." You're a little suspicious. You say, "Okay, do they have any water damage?" Your son looks at your like you're crazy. "No." “Did you get popcorn and a drink?” “Yeah, of course. Who goes to the movies and doesn't get popcorn?” At this point you know something is wrong, right? He couldn't have not seen the water damage. The theaters were closed. He couldn't have gotten popcorn. The machine was broken. Your son was not at the movies, but how do you know that? Because he included details that he would have gotten right if he were there, but which he got wrong.
Like I said, when we tell a lie, which we shouldn't do, people often keep them generic, not specific. Just for example, there's a German scholar named Collin Hemer who has gone through Acts and in just the last 16 chapters has confirmed 84 facts. People, places, roads, customs, languages, those types of things. That's remarkable accuracy you only get from being where you claim to be when you claimed to be there.
There is early testimony and there is also eyewitness testimony for the Bible, but there's also evidence and testimony from outside of Scripture.
Now, do we need this? Do we need something outside of Scripture to verify Scripture? No, we don't, honestly. There's this view today where we can't trust what the Bible has to say, and you may ask a person who says that,
"Well, why not?"
“Because it's written by Christians, and they're biased.”
“Okay, well why are they biased?”
“They believe Jesus was God. They think Christianity was true. You can't trust what they say.”
We have to ask ourselves, can we apply that same argument to the non Christian? Can I say,
"You can't trust what non-Christians write about the Bible?"
“Well, why not?”
“They're biased. They don't think Christianity's true. They don't think God rose from the dead.”
It sounds a little more silly when you say it like that, doesn't it?
Really, you can even take it a step farther and say, "What such a person is saying is that you can't trust what people write if they believe what they write is true." That's just not a standard any of us should hold. The New Testament documents should be given the same benefit of the doubt that we give any other ancient work. It doesn't need to be corroborated with something else to be considered true on its own merits.
However, I do think it's important and helped to look at the other documents that were written about Jesus at the time of His life. Let's look at one. It's written by Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish historian who lived from about the years AD 37 to 100, and he wrote several works chronicling the history of the Jews.
One of them we're going to read from says this.
”[At the time of Pilate,] there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die, but those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders."
If you've never read that before, that might be striking. Now, it doesn't say Jesus was God. It doesn't say He rose from the dead. It doesn't say people saw Him after His death, but it does say people believed He rose from the dead, they didn't recant their testimony, they claimed to see Him after His death, and we have to ask the question what best accounts for that evidence?
As you're hearing these types of evidence and types of testimony this morning, ask yourself what's the best explanation? What makes most sense of this evidence? That it's just simply made up or that it's actually true? Regardless of my personal feelings on what Scripture says or my sense of autonomy, what's the best sense and explanation for the evidence?
In addition to Josephus, there are nine other known non-Christian authors who talk about Jesus within 150 years of His life. Now, only nine sources mention Tiberius Caesar, and if you include Christian sources, which you should, there are 43 different documents that talk about Jesus within 150 or so years of His life. Once again, this is no contest compared to any other ancient work or any other ancient figure.
From non-biblical sources, we know a lot. For instance, we know that Jesus lived during the time of Tiberius Caesar. So, the idea that lives in YouTube comment sections that Jesus never existed is demonstrably false based on even secular history. We know that Jesus lived a virtuous life, that He was acclaimed to be a wonder worker, that He had a brother named James (we'll talk about James in a minute), that He was acclaimed to be the Messiah, that He was crucified under Pontius Pilate on the eve of Jewish passover, that darkness and a earthquake occurred when He died. All of these are things we also find in Scripture, and they fit.
We also know that Jesus' disciples believed He rose from the dead, that they were willing to die for that conviction, and that they even denied the Roman gods, faced persecution, and worshiped Jesus alone. The question becomes, once again, what best accounts for that evidence?
There's early evidence by eyewitnesses. There's also extra-biblical evidence, but the evidence in the Bible is often embarrassing.
I'm going to teach you something we all kind of innately know this morning, and that's something historians call the principal of embarrassment, and it simply says this:
Details most embarrassing to an author are most likely to be true.
In other words, you don't make up stuff to make yourself look bad or get yourself killed. It's kind of like rule one of existing almost, right? You might tell a self-deprecating joke, but you're not going to write history that portrays you in a horrible light. You're not going to write history and try and convince others of things that actually include very embarrassing details about Jesus, who you're trying to portray as God. What type of embarrassing details are we talking about, you may ask?
Well, the authors of the Bible write about themselves in Scripture, and for instance, Jesus believes them to be dimwitted at times. They don't even understand what He's saying, so God tells you something, you don't get it repeatedly. He calls you a fool, and you write it down. I don't think I would write that down. More than that, they're uncaring. Before Jesus goes to the cross, He's in the garden of Gethsemane, and He's basically sweating blood and He tells His disciples, "Pray for me," and they fall asleep. Twice. They write it down and preserve it for us to know about.
Now, I'll admit to falling asleep praying on my bed in the morning, trying to do that whole quiet time thing (which was very quiet, far too early), but nonetheless, that's not Jesus standing in front of me before the cross telling me to pray, and I'm not writing it down. Put yourselves in the shoes of the disciples. Would you write these things down if they weren't true? No.
Perhaps most noteworthy, Peter's called Satan by Jesus. Could there be a worse name for God to call you than Satan? We actually looked at this passage last week in Mark. How would this have gone if the gospels are just made up, cleverly invented stories?
Mark and Peter are sitting around a campfire and Mark's writing this fictitious gospel, and he says, "Hey, Peter. There's a great plot twist. Now, it doesn't really matter what comes before it, but here's what Jesus is going to say to you: Get behind me, Satan." I imagine Peter's going to say, "What the heck? Have Him call you Satan! Why am I the one that gets the worst name God could ever call you applied to him in the gospel?" You're not going to write that unless it even happened, and even then, it's surprising that they wrote it.
The disciples also record that they're cowards and doubters. They run away after the crucifixion. They don't even believe that Jesus was who He claimed to be and taught them repeatedly, but they record that for us to see.
There's also embarrassing evidence about Jesus. In fact, He's considered to be out of His mind by His mother and His brothers. The people who know Him best basically want to Baker-Act Him. That's not a good start to an earthly ministry where you're presenting yourself as God. He's also called a drunkard. He has His feet wiped with the hair of a prostitute, in spite of the fact that could have been taken as a sexual advance. All this is recorded for us in the gospels.
Now, this next one doesn't necessarily resonate with us very well today, but He was hung on a cross and was considered to be under God's curse by the Jews. They believed anyone hung on a tree was under God's curse, and so if you're starting a religion and you're going to try and market it to Jews, you wouldn't make up the central point of your religion as something that's incredibly offensive and foolish to them.
Now, Paul actually does tell us in Galatians three that Jesus did become a curse for us. He took the curse for our sin in His body on the cross to pay for our punishment when we couldn't, so everyone who trusts in Him will be clothed in His righteousness and will be saved from the punishment of their sin. That's the gospel, but it does require Jesus actually taking on the curse of sin on the cross, which was a stumbling block to the Jews, which is embarrassing if you're making it up and it's not true.
More than that, He's even buried by a member of the group that sentenced Him to death. His own disciples don't bury Him, and they write this down for us to see. Another thing that culturally was revolutionary is the fact that Jesus first appears to women. At a time when their social standing was incredibly low, their testimony not admissible in court, He appears to women at the empty tomb and at other points. If you were making this up, you would not have made that part up. You would have had Him appear to men.
Now, that view of women is not God's view of women. That was an incorrect cultural view at the time, but nonetheless, if you're going to make up a story and start a religion, you're not going to have the first people that your religious figure appears to be women. There is a lot more of this type of evidence in Scripture. When you read with eyes to see things that are embarrassing, you'll be surprised at what you find. Then you'll have to ask yourself the question. Why would people make that up? If it's not true, why would they include it? Well, they wouldn't.
We've looked at the fact that the Bible contains embarrassing, early evidence by eyewitnesses and that there's also extra-biblical evidence, evidence from outside the Bible.
Our last E today is going to be excruciating evidence, that believing these things and saying these things they believed cost them dearly.
For instance, New Testament believers abandoned their long held sacred beliefs and adopted new ones. That probably doesn't sound revolutionary to us. I could have stopped at any of 15 churches it seems like on my way here this morning. It was not like that in the ancient world. You couldn't just swap out what you did for an hour and a half on Sunday. If you changed religions, your friends would probably disown you. Your family might too. You may not be able to buy or sell. The government at some point started persecuting and running them out of town, and more than that, they were often much more devout than we are today.
What could cause a Jew to go from “I have to keep the law, I have to keep the Sabbath, I have to be circumcised, I have to sacrifice animals for the forgiveness of sins” to “I don't need to keep the law of Moses in the same way, I don't need to worship on Saturday, I don't need to be circumcised, I don't need to sacrifice animals for the forgiveness of sins?” What accounts for such a striking religious change except for the resurrection of Jesus? I'm not going to take a gamble on the fate of my soul based on some guy that's still in the ground. I need to be convinced. Well, they were convinced, and that's why they changed religions in spite of the fact that it was so costly.
We can say more than that. They don't even deny their testimony under threat of death. History records and presents to us that all of the disciples and apostles were willing to suffer and die for their convictions. Let's just consider James.
James is one of the brothers who wanted to put Jesus away, who thought He was crazy. At the other end of His life, James is illegally stoned for His faith in His half-brother, confessing that He's the Son of God. How do you get from crazy to Son of God? Only seeing the post-resurrected Jesus. I'm not going to die for a brother who says he's God unless I'm convinced, right? You know your own family better than that.
Well, it's the same way with James. What accounts, what's the best explanation for the evidence of James' conversion? Seeing the post-resurrected Jesus. It's not just James. Peter and Paul, the same people who said, "We didn't follow cleverly invented stories," they go on to die for those factual stories. This is perhaps one of the most persuasive points for many people when it comes to why we should trust the Bible. People would die for their claims.
Now, often when I make this point, some people will either think or say, "Yeah, but there are religious extremists today who kill themselves for their claims or who will kill other people." Look at the Middle East. Isn't that what ISIS is doing? Aren't they so convinced they're willing to kill themselves and kill other people? Yes, that's true.
I do think it's important to point out that this is not all Muslims. Not all Muslims believe the same way in the same way that not all Christians believe the same way, but there's also a key difference. The apostles were willing to die for their claims. Religious extremists today often are willing to kill for their’. That's a noteworthy difference, but the crucial difference, the reason it's not even a fair comparison is that today's religious extremist is not in the position to know if his claims are true. Was he there in the 600s AD when Allah supposedly spoke through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad and revealed the Qur’an. He wasn't there. He didn't see the early life of Muhammad or insert your other religious figure here, but the gospel writers, even according to biblical and history secular were where they claimed to be, when they claimed to be there. They were there for Jesus' death, and they would have been there for His resurrection. They were in the position to know with complete certainty.
This leads us to a very helpful conclusion here:
Many people will die for something they believe to be the truth, but no one dies for something they know is a lie.
There are people today dying, believing that they're dying for the truth, but the disciples, contrary to them, were in a position to know with complete certainty. They didn't follow cleverly invented stories. They walked with Him. They ran after His death and they came back and were converted to a strong faith because of seeing Jesus after His resurrection. That's the best explanation for the evidence. Many people will die for something they believe to be true, but no one dies for something they know to be a lie.
Now, we've looked at a lot today, and I don't expect you all to remember this. I even have notes, right? Here's my prayer for today as I was preparing for this, that the person who thinks the Bible is just totally false would have something to consider, that you've been confronted with a hopefully compelling case of why you should trust Scripture. Maybe I've given you something to think about in that way. Don't just slough it off. Press into that. I think you have an intellectual responsibility if you think the Bible's not true and you've been confronted with evidence, to pursue that. You might not like where it takes you, but be intellectually honest enough to investigate that.
For the person who is on the other end of our spectrum who said, "Yep, I don't have any doubts," well, that's good. I think that's something to praise God for, but we can't just sit back and not equip other people. You might share the Gospel with someone and they're going to say, "Well, I don't think that's true." Well, why not? "Well, I don't think the Bible is true." Now we need to talk about needing to be able to show others why they should trust Scripture. Being able to defend the reliability of the New Testament and the Bible in general is a crucial part of evangelism. In order for the gospel to be true, the Bible has to be true. They're linked.
Now, like I said, most of us are probably in that middle category, not “I don't think it's true at all” and not “I have no doubts.” I hope your faith has been strengthened today. Like I mentioned, I had to work through these things personally in order to have a trust in Christ and the gospel. I had to repair my view of Scripture.
You may need to do the same. I don't expect this to answer everyone's questions. I do hope it's a doorway to increasing your trust in the Bible. We've looked at Jesus' view of Scripture, that it's about Him, and that's really why this is important at all. If it's just history, I'm not going to talk about that. I'm not going to share that with other people. I'm not going to fret about it, but the Bible is about Jesus—from His own mouth.
It's also His very word, that intimate encounter where He revealed Himself to us, and it contains history that is true. We should strive to have a view of Scripture that's the same as Jesus.
Then we've looked at the fact that the Bible itself contains embarrassing testimony that cost people their lives oftentimes, or at the very least, their social standing, physical comfort, material possessions, and social structures. It's also written by eyewitnesses, and it was written very early on. It's no contest when we compare it to any other ancient work.
I hope your faith has been strengthened this morning. I Hope you're a little more equipped to talk about the reliability of the Bible, and if you're not a Christian, I encourage you to investigate these claims. Push interest that. Don't just ignore it.
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The last week in June is typically filled with announcements of what the Supreme Court has decided in cases that it’s heard over its last term. Then the court goes on to take a summer break. You may recall that two years ago, the court came to a decision in the Obergefell case, which redefined marriage from a governments perspective. It no longer needed to be legally defined as one man and one woman. It could be two people of any sex. At the time, many people were saying this has profound religious liberty implications. It has profound sociological and societal changes and ramifications that we don't even understand right now and more than that, it fundamentally disconnects the purpose of marriage, which is to protect and promote the next generation from what the government recognizes: peoples happiness and felt and perceived dignity. But, that's another kind of conversation. I just simply want to remind you that at this time of year, the court is announcing its decisions and two years ago, one of them dealt with redefining marriage.
This year, the court is hearing and deciding on cases also they've announced that they will hear a case involving a cake baker and a state. That case is Masterpiece Cakeshop Limited vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. This is a case they will hear in their next term.
Basically, the case is not too unique. There have been many of these types of cases in lower courts over the last several years. Here's the gist of the case. A professional who works in a service industry that often will serve the wedding industry, refuses to make or participate in the celebration of a same sex union. For instance, this cake shop said, they do not want to make a cake for a same sex ceremony. Florists have said, "I don't want to make arrangements for your same sex ceremony." Photographers have said, "I don't want to capture your memories and help you celebrate in that way for your same sex ceremony," and the list goes on. These people have been routinely punished; lower courts have said they have to set aside their religious liberty convictions. Now, that sounds like trampling upon of the first amendment’s free exercise clause that says we should be left alone to exercise our religion as we see fit. Now the government is compelling people against their will to celebrate something they have a moral objection against.
In certain circles of the internet, this has come to a head again this last week due to the fact that the court announced that they will hear a case involving a baker and a same sex wedding, and the baker has refused to make the cake. Now, there are some important points that want to talk about. I want to equip you to talk about this case because this case and the issue in general, has two profound ramifications. One, is free speech. The cake is an act of self expression. When you make a cake, especially as a cake baker and you decorate it and you put words on it, you are expressing yourself. You're using your creative talents in a way that's self expression and historically that has been covered under the first amendment. But, it's also a religious rights issue. A free exercise. We're making people, or we're trying to at least, make people contribute and participate and celebrate something they actually have a profound moral objection to. That tramples on their free exercise of religion.
Some people will say today that, no, that's not actually the case, they're just discriminating against gay people. The photographers, the florists, the bakers, they're discriminating against gay people, but that's not actually true. This is a point we have to make continually in these dialogs: it's documented that these wedding professionals have and would be glad to serve gay people. That's not the issue. The issue is they don't want to participate in the same sex celebration. So, they would make the gay person a cake for their birthday. They have no problem with that. Or, they would make them flowers for a funeral or a birthday once again, or just an occasion but they don't want to participate in the celebration of something they have a moral objection to.
In a free society, people should not be compelled to participate in and celebrate things they find objectionable. But, the main point is that they're not objecting to providing services to gay people. That's not what's happening here. They've done it before, it's documented, in many of these cases, and they'd be glad to do it again. What's documented here is that their objection is to serving a same sex ceremony. It has nothing to do with the orientation of the person.
I think there's a helpful way to point this out because these wedding professional would likely object to two straight same-sex people who were getting married. The objection isn't to their sexual orientation. That is incidental to their objection. They would object to two straight people getting married, and yes, straight same-sex people have gotten married. I do think that profanes marriage also. That's an easy way to show that it's not about same sex orientation. They're not discriminating based on that. They're discriminating based on actions in terms of the ceremony. That's a very key distinction we have to make.
Sometimes, conservatives will try to support this point with an analogy or a parallel example and they'll say, "Would you make the Jewish cake shop owner make a cake that say Nazis are great?" Some people won't even answer that. This has been interesting to observe this week. They'll pivot and say, "No, no, no. The true question, the true parallel is ‘can the Nazi refuse to make a cake for the Jew?’ Because the Jew's a protected class”, they'll say, but they never answered your actual question. They never answered the question, ‘can the Jewish cake shop owner refuse to make a cake with a message that violates his conscience?’ I think he should be able to as an expression of his religion. What if someone wanted him to make a cake that said, "God is evil". Shouldn't he be able to refuse to participate in that? Yes, I think he should. One, due to his freedom of speech. He shouldn't be compelled to make speech that he disagrees with. More that that, it violates his religious conscience. That's the same thing that's happening here.
People like I said, want to turn that analogy around. They want to say, "Well, can the Nazi refuse to make a cake for the Jew?" (I actually kind of think he should be allowed to. I don't think people should have to serve me if they find my religion objectionable. That's the nice thing about a free society. People can say, "Well, we're not gonna serve you," and someone else will pop up and serve that class and make money off of it. That's how capitalism works in a fee market and a free society. But that's not so much my point today and you might disagree with that point, and that's okay. I think we can disagree on that, but that's the parallel example some people try to throw up to avoid answering the question of if the Jewish cake shop owner can avoid making a cake with a message they find objectionable. Back to the main point...)
Should the black cake shop owner be compelled to make a cake that says, "The Ku Klux Klan is great?” No, I don't think they should. Should they have to make a cake that uses the N word or disparages black people? No, I don't think they should and that's not even a religious objection. That's just a free market objection. That's a freedom of speech objection, but those objections get compounded when it comes to religious conviction. Now I also think the black cake shop owner should have a religious objection to celebrating the Klan and that type of derogatory language. I think that actually is a religious type of objection but all of that goes to show we should not let people side step this point. The issue is not, “should the Klan be able to refuse to make a cake for the black person.” It's “should anyone be compelled to provide a service against their sincerely held religious convictions.”
So, that's one issue we need to be prepared to talk about here.
But, there's another parallel concern. Some people will say that the Christians are inconsistent when we make the objection that “same sex marriage is against our moral convictions.” Because, wedding professionals don't make people fill out a survey and ask them “are you sleeping with the person you're about marry? Is this a result of a remarriage where you were inappropriately divorced from before?” Those are all things that Christianity morally condemns and God morally condemns and that's true. So they're gonna say, "Well since you're inconsistent, you can't make this other point." I don't think that's true because my inconsistency doesn't invalidate the point I'm making in this one case. It can be totally correct to say I should not be compelled to make a cake for someone who's getting “married” to another person, while at the same time, not question other people. That can be a totally right thing to do and my inconsistency doesn't invalidate that point. I think that's really important.
The difference is that one is an extremely clear cut example, the other is very murky at times and invasive. You can just ask the sexes or even the names of the two people that are going to be participating in the same sex union and make a determination. The other is you have to ask very personal questions. “Have you had sexual intercourse recently with this person? Well, okay. Is there a pattern of it? Were you divorced before? Well, yes. Why were you divorced?” As if you're trying to figure out if this was an appropriate divorce so that the marriage could be legitimate. All of that to say, the inconsistency here, if indeed there is one, does not invalidate the sincerely held religious conviction that someone does not want to participate in this other type of ceremony. I think that's really important. These have been the main objections that I've seen over the years and more recently when people discuss this case.
Now, you might say, why does all this matter? I think how we define marriage is really important. How we think about marriage is extremely important. Jesus talks about it Matthew 19. He affirms that God created us, male and female, all the way back quoting from Genesis and then goes on to say that the plan was for one man and one woman to live together in a permanent union. That they would leave their parents and cleave to each other. Jesus tells us about God's design for sexuality. So we should care about that too.
The other reason that we should care about it besides the religious moral truth is that when we live according to God's design, there is less pain and less brokenness. Because what same sex marriage institutionalizes, is a perversion of marriage that leads to children legally being able to be deprived of their right to a mother and a father. Children don't just need two parents, they actually need a mother, a female and a father, a male
Now we're getting to the place where those terms are getting redefined because people can choose their gender, but children are the losers in this. We're putting the erotic liberty and freedom and desires of adults above the rights and needs of children. That's also what's at stake here. That's not a religious argument. That's a practical argument that social science backs up, that children are better off when they grow up in households with a parent that is a male and a parent that is a female. In other words, a husband and a wife. A mother and a father.
So, we should care about it for that reason. We should also care about this case and how we talk about it because of the profound freedom of speech implications, because of the free exercise types of concerns that are here. Should I be able to refuse to participate in something? I think I should.
In fact, this country was founded on the idea of what are called negative rights. Rights to be left alone where I can't be compelled to do something, but the idea of a right nowadays, all the way from marriage to health care is what's called a positive right. Where someone has to provide you with something. You have a right to a service. That's a totally different definition of right than our country was founded upon. You know why it's different? Because, when you have a negative right, it doesn't infringe on someone else. You just have a right to be left alone, but when there's a positive right, someone now has an obligation to provide you with this thing that you supposedly have a right to. That leads to collisions all over the place.
So, when someone has a right to a cake, someone has an obligation to provide it. That's very different than saying, "I don't have to provide a cake. Someone else would be glad to make you that cake and actually make the money that I just passed up, but don't make me violate my conscience."
Also, the issue isn't if the persons conscience is correct. It's if they have a sincerely held belief. I think that's another thing. We shouldn't want people, even as Christians, to have to violate their conscience. You may disagree, maybe you're a more liberal type of Christian and you disagree with the baker in this case. You think he should bake the cake. Well, let me ask you this question. Would you make people violate their conscience? Isn't that exactly what Paul writes about time and time again in multiple letters? When it comes to eating meat sacrificed to idols and things like that, don't violate your conscience? So, why would we try to compel people to violate their consciences.
In summary, the wedding professionals aren’t discriminating against gays; they just don't want to participate in the event. They would most likely still refuse to bake the cake for two straight same-sex people getting married. But more than that, we've also talked about the fact that even if people are inconsistent here, it doesn't negate the validity of their point on this same sex marriage case. It's extremely clear cut there. It's less than clear cut otherwise. We don't let difficult cases make public policy. More than that, we should care about this issue because we care about people, we care about human flourishing, we care about children, and we actually care about the brokenness and the carnage that same sex marriage has left in its path, which is often, under or not reported at all.
]]>We've been going through the Gospel According to Mark here as a church for the better part of this year so far. From the very first verse in Mark, we're told that this contains the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of what Jesus has come to do for sinners, people like you, people like me. We've seen Jesus preaching that the kingdom of God has come with him. He's been authenticating this message with miracles, with healings, with exorcisms. Just last week in chapter six, we saw Jesus take a couple fish and a few loaves of bread, and multiply them to feed thousands of people. To top it off, he walked on water afterwards.
That brings us to today, where we're going to see the Pharisees, the religious leaders at that time, be remarkably picky about a small area of tradition with the guy who walked on water and has done miracles, and has basically beat them in every conversation they've had so far. Let's dive in and look at chapter seven.
The Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus. They observed that some of his disciples were eating bread with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands.
And then Mark is going to explain the significance of this for us, because his audience likely wouldn't have understood it either, just like we're likely not to. And he says,
for the Pharisees and all the Jews, do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, keeping the tradition of the elders.
When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they have washed. And there are many other customs they have received and keep, like the washing of cups, pitchers, kettles,
and my personal favorite, “dining couches.” Do you have one of those? I do at my house. It's just a normal couch that we eat dinner on. I think theirs was slightly different. But nonetheless, I love that that's included there.
So, the Pharisees and the scribes asked Jesus, why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders, instead of eating bread with ceremonially unclean hands?
This probably strikes us as a little bit silly. They're so concerned over if people are washing their hands? And why aren't Jesus' disciples washing their hands before they eat? Isn't that a little weird? My mother used to get onto me about that all the time as a kid.
Well, let's put this passage in its context, and more broadly speaking, against the backdrop of the Old Testament law. God, all the way back in Exodus, took his people, the Israelites, out from under Egyptian captivity. He said, you will be my people. I will be your God, and you will live this way. And he gave them his law. 613 individual things they needed to do. In spite of that being so detailed, it doesn't answer all the questions.
We have many more laws than that on the books today. I've heard that if you printed them out on paper, they'd stack this high. And yet, we still have questions of, is this legal, is this not? And that's why we have the courts. They interpret the law for us, or they're supposed to.
Well, back then, they had similar issues. They needed to interpret the law, and understand, what is meant by “don't work on the Sabbath.” What is work? What does it mean to do work? And so the religious leaders and the rabbis and the Pharisees had come up with traditions of how to understand what the law actually required. There's a second century collection of these traditions and law interpretations called the Mishnah. And what it says is, tradition is a fence around the law. Because the Jews took the law of God so seriously that they didn't want to break it. So, if the law is here, and we're not always sure where here is, let's make a fence so that we are sure. So that we never break the law.
Now, I think this started out as a well intended type of thing. But as we'll see in this passage, it definitely doesn't end up that way. But I do think there's something noteworthy here. Today, in our culture, we ask the opposite question. Instead of saying, how far can we stay away, we ask, how close to the line can I get? Instead of saying, let's build a fence so we don't break God's law, we say, no, where's that line? I want to come right up to it. Or at least, often, that's the question it seems like every dating couple asks. How close can I get?
And yet there is some wisdom in setting up some fences, but they took it too far, and we'll look at that. And what happens when the Pharisees took their personal interpretations and raised them to the level of rules that applied to everyone? Legalism. That is legalism. When we take our personal rules that are not in the Bible, and elevate them to the level of scripture, and say you have to follow these or you're not good with God, that is legalism. And that's one of the main issues in this passage today.
Let's see how Jesus replies to this rebuke this his disciples and he just got from the Pharisees. In verse 6, it says:
He answered them, Isiah prophesied correctly about you hypocrites, as it is written. This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrine human commands.
So, in spite of these fences the Pharisees had set up, Jesus has a stunning critique. Their hearts are actually far from him. He calls them hypocrites, and he explains what he means. They look like they're one thing, but on the inside, their hearts don't beat for God.
So, their actions actually made them look like they were the pillars of religious society,like when you want to know who's a holy person, look at the Pharisees. And what does Jesus say? No. It's not that their actions are wrong in and of themselves, it's that their hearts are far from God. And because of that, their worship is in vain. Now, both of those problems—hearts far from God and worshiping in vain—those are kind of personal issues. Now, they'll effect other people, but they tend towards being personal issues. His third critique here, I think, is his strongest. Because what he says is, they've elevated their own teaching to the level of God's command, and in so doing they have mislead many, many people.
Whenever we elevate our own personal interpretations or tradition to the level of God's command, we have erred. So, let's continue on and see how Jesus explains what he means, and how they've done this.
In verse 8 he says:
Abandoning the command of God, you hold on to human tradition. He also said to them, you have a fine way of invalidating God's command in order to set up your tradition. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother.
He's quoting from the ten commandments.
And whoever speaks evil of father and mother must be put to death,
Quoting from the Levitical law.
And he says, but you, you Pharisees, you say, if anyone tells his father or mother, whatever benefit you may have received from me is corban, you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God by your tradition that you've handed down.
And it's as if he's anticipating going another round. He says, and if that's not clear enough, I've got a list:
You do many other similar things.
This wasn't their only example of this problem.
So, Jesus says their hearts are far from him, they worship in vain, they've elevated their own doctrine to the level of scripture, and then he takes it a step further and says: And your own doctrine contradicts scripture. So, it's an even larger issue. They've invalidated God's command with their own traditions. And he quotes from the ten commandments here, saying honor your father and your mother. And he quotes from the Levitical law and saying, whoever speaks evil of father and mother should be put to death. Yes, that was a law that God gave his people. Which shows just how seriously he takes disrespecting, and not honoring, father and mother. Does that punishment apply today? No. Does the idea behind the law of how seriously God takes that still apply? Certainly.
I think it's important for us to remember, Jesus is not against the law. Jesus was not anti-law. He gave the law. The Jesus of the New Testament is the Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, who took his people out of slavery, said you'll be my people, I'll be your God, live this way, here's my law. He gave the law. And if Jesus hadn't lived under the law perfectly when he came to Earth, fully God, fully man, he couldn't have been the perfect sacrifice for sin on the cross. So, Jesus was not against the law. He affirms those laws here.
But then, he goes on to say that the Pharisees have basically weaseled out of keeping them. And so, let's talk about that word, “corban.” That probably struck you as an odd word. It's an odd word to me. It's a Hebrew word that refers to a possession that had been dedicated to God's service, but which was still in the possession of the person who originally owned it. And so, let's talk about how this worked. The ten commandments, the laws say you have a responsibility to honor your father and your mother. And clearly, Jesus is saying that requires taking care of them when they're older. I think that's something our generation today needs to understand.
And he's saying that they were basically behaving like this: “They would say, I can't take care of my parents.” “Well, why not?” “I don't have the resources.” “Don't you have this pile of resources over here?” “Yeah, but those are corban. They're dedicated to God.” “Don't you still have access to them?” “Well yeah, but they're dedicated to God.”
It's like the first accounting loophole, or something like that. They still own the things, they're still at their discretion, but they're able to say “yeah, I don't want to use them for that because they're dedicated to God's service.” They created this tradition that contradicted God's desire for people to care for their parents. And that is where he's getting on to them.
So, let's recap. Where did this start? Well, the Pharisees tried to pick a fight with Jesus and his disciples because they didn't wash their hands—a man made tradition, probably a healthy one, but a man made tradition. And then Jesus says, you've actually created a tradition that contradicts scripture. What's the bigger problem here? Well, the bigger problem isn't just the tradition, but the hardness of their hearts. I think that's important for us to remember. Because many of us today have this tendency to fall back on our routines, and our schedules, and our Christian actions, whatever those are. And think that they're the sum and substance of the Christian life. So, it's that if we do this list of things, we'll be good with God.
Maybe for you that looks like, well, if I just go to church three times a month, unless it rains too much, and I read my Bible some during the week, I'm good with God. Well, I think that's what the Pharisees said, only they would have said, “I’ll be at church every Sunday. I will read my scriptures, every day. I will pray multiple times during the day.” And we know that they did those things. And yet, Jesus says they worshiped in vain, because the issue wasn't what their actions were, so much, it was what their heart was. And Jesus is gonna make that clear as we read through this passage.
So, two points of clarification so far. It would be easy to read this and think, well, rules are bad. There's no place for a non-Biblical rule in a Christian life. And I would disagree with that. The issue here is legalism, not simply non-Biblical rules or practices. So, for instance, let's make this a little more clear. The Bible says, don't get drunk. It doesn't say, don't drink. So if we make a blanket rule that says, if you drink, it's a sin, we have erred. We have elevated a man made tradition to the level of scripture. However, there is probably a place for individual people saying, I am not going to drink. I am going to create a rule for myself, a fence around the law, not getting drunk, so that I don't sin.
So, if you're a recovering alcoholic, you should probably have one of those rules. If you struggle with drinking and getting drunk, the wise thing to do would be not to drink, or be in those situations, or have some people around you who will say, “you've probably had enough.” Right? Is that legalism? No, I'm not applying that to other people. I'm saying for me, if that's my struggle, this is the wise course of living.
Another example might be, maybe you and your girlfriend, whenever you're alone in a room with a bed, you have sex. Well, wisdom would dictate, don't be alone in a room with a bed, and you'll be less likely to have sex. Does it mean it's wrong to be alone in a room with a woman who is not your wife? No. Is it wise? No. Okay? So I hope you see there's a difference in legalism, when we create our own rules and apply them to everyone, and personal wisdom or discipline, saying what individual fences do I need for me to live a holy, Christian life?
The second clarification I want to give is how we, today, invalidate the scriptures. Now, there are religions, some of them even have the name “Christian” in their title, which elevate human tradition and human words to the level of scripture. I think that's a clear case example of something that is condemned by what Jesus is saying here. But, more than that, we have a more subtle, a more insidious way of doing that: with our feelings. How many times have we all probably heard people say, or said it ourself, “you know, I know scripture doesn't talk about this in a positive way. I know Jesus said we shouldn't do this. But I feel like God would be okay with it, because ... fill in the blank.“
What's that person just done? What have I just done if I say that? I have invalidated God's word with my own feelings, my own personal tradition. I think we have to be careful and look out for that. It's not so apparent as when there's a rule known by everyone, like the ceremonial washing rule, it's more subtle. And it may only happen in our hearts and our minds, and yet we often do the same thing.
So, we've looked at the first half of this passage. We've seen Jesus on the backdrop of doing miracles last week, get chastised this week for his disciples not washing their hands. He's made the point that they have hard hearts, they've invalidated the scripture, and as if to drive his point home more, he summons the crowd, who is probably standing back at a distance as the religious heavyweights duked it out. And so now he's going to make his final critique in front of the crowd, to make a point.
And here's what he says in verse 14:
Summoning the crowd, he told them, listen to me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that goes into a person from outside can defile him but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.
Well, thanks Jesus. You summoned us over here and said one sentence. And that's the end of his conversation with the crowd. At least, it seems that way. And I think it's important for us to remember when we read the gospels and read the New Testament, that we don't always get full transcripts. So, I fully believe Jesus said more than one sentence. But Mark gives us the important part. He gives us, probably, the important sentence in what Jesus said. Or maybe even a summary. For instance, in Acts, Luke will write down that Paul spoke from sunrise to sunset, and he only has two paragraphs written down for what he says. I don't think Paul spoke, like, one word every ten minutes. So, we have to remember that when we read our scripture. That's just a little thing that sometimes sticks out.
But, in order to understand what Jesus means here with this one sentence, which probably appears a little cryptic to us, a little difficult to understand, we need to keep reading. And we're going to see the scene change again. So, a conversation with the Pharisees, a conversation with the crowd. And now, Jesus is gonna retreat to a house with the disciples.
And he shares more information with each group, and he consistently, throughout his whole earthly ministry, shared more with the disciples than anyone else. And I think what this shows us is that God is under no obligation to reveal anything to anyone. He reveals consistently different things to different groups of people, and any revelation of God to us is an act of grace.
So, the fact that we have a Bible in our language is a profound act of grace and love by God, which we often take for granted, but which not everyone has around the world. I think it's something important to remember. But let's continue on, in verse 17, where Jesus is going to explain the “what comes from outside, what comes from inside” type of concept.
He went into the house, away from the crowd, and his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, are you also lacking in understanding? Don't you realize that nothing going into a person from the outside can defile him? For it doesn't enter his heart, but it goes into his stomach and is eliminated. For he said, whatever comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of peoples hearts, come evil thoughts. Sexual immoralities, theft, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and even foolishness. All of these things come from within and defile a person.
This is the main point of Mark's inclusion of this whole couple paragraphs in his gospel.
You don't become unclean before God of what you touch, or what you eat. You become unclean before God because of what comes out of your heart, or your mind, you might say. And this might seem somewhat common sense for us, right? How is it sinful to touch a fish, or something? Well, this was revolutionary back then. And we can kind of understand this, because the disciples don't understand it. You would think the people who had been with Jesus the longest would understand that sentence or two he told to the crowd, but they don't get it. Because it was fundamentally a different way of thinking for the Jew in the first century.
Because they had this view of sin, that it was like a virus. You could touch someone and contract it. So, if you touched a Gentile, you got this uncleanness. This unclean virus, or something like that. But they totally missed the point that the source of sin, of uncleanliness, is in the heart. So, they could wash their hands and their dining couches in case they had touched something that would make them unclean, but they neglected the state of their hearts and their minds. I like to think if the Pharisees had had Purell back then, that alcohol based hand sanitizer, they would have probably used it so much they would have decided to by stock in it. That's how seriously they took this whole washing thing.
We actually have recorded in an ancient document that there was a Pharisee who was arrested and imprisoned in Rome. And, like any prisoner, he would get a ration of food and water. And he almost died, because instead of drinking his water, he used it to wash his hands in the ceremonial way. That's how far this tradition was ingrained in their minds. And yet, what is Jesus getting at here? What's the most important point? It's not the touching of things, or the practice of unclean actions, as they viewed them, that makes you sinful. It's your heart. Food can't make you unclean, but disobedience can.
So, did God really, in the Old Testament, outlaw certain actions and certain foods? Yes. But was it the food that made you unclean? No. It was the disobedience before God that resulted in your uncleanliness, your sinfulness. And I think Jesus' teaching here is something our culture and our world desperately needs to understand.
Because if you were to poll people on the street, and this has been done, people think that mankind is basically good. We're basically good people who sometimes do less than good things. Right? Who make mistakes, who have “oops.” That's how we often talk about things we do wrong. Society is increasingly uncomfortable with moral language like wrong, and right, and evil, and holy. But we think, as a society, oftentimes, that we're basically good people.
I remember a news story from several years back. There was a school teacher who was being interviewed on the nightly news about vandalism that had occurred on her campus of the elementary school where she taught. And she said, “you know, it's not really their fault. They come from a low socio-economic neighborhood.” Well, is her view compelling? Does it have explanatory power? Does it make sense of the world? No. It doesn't explain why wealthy people vandalize things, and they do. It also doesn't explain how the society these children are in was bad. How do basically good people come together in a sufficiently large size and make a bad thing? Good people make a bad society? It doesn't much make sense.
But at the core, she has this view that people are basically good. Now, why does this matter? I think ultimately it matters because of how we talk about sin, and how we understand our world. And it also has ramifications for how we share the gospel.
Almost everyone will acknowledge that there's something wrong in the world. Everything's not as it should be, but we disagree about the source of that. And there's been this tendency in recent years to talk about man's problem before God as brokenness, or a lack of peace, or maybe that someone has a Jesus sized hole that only Jesus can fill in their heart. Well, none of that is actually Biblical language. And I would also suggest to you that it kind of misses the mark of how the Bible talks about sin.
A person may or may not feel broken when they don't know Jesus. Sin feels good. The Bible even acknowledges that, it feels good for a time. But nonetheless, there are plenty of people who do not have this subjective feeling of brokenness, such that they need Jesus to fix it. So, the good news of the gospel doesn't sound good if the bad news is, well, “maybe your life isn't what you want it to be.” What does the Bible say? It says that our problem is that we're sinful. That we've rebelled against a holy God, that we have hearts, which is where our actions come from, that are evil. I can't repent of brokenness, but I can repent of sin.
And so, how we talk about sin, I think, as Jesus discusses in this passage, is remarkably important for making the good news of the gospel actually seem good. In order for the light to seem brightest, like it is, the dark needs to be accurately portrayed as just as dark as it is. Because man has a heart problem. His heart doesn't naturally want the things of God. In Romans 8, Paul even tells us, it can't want to. It doesn't treasure God. So, it's not that we're basically good people. It's that we're basically bad people, who do basically bad things. So, yes we do sin. There are actions we take which are sinful. But we actually are sinful. We don't only have an action problem, we have a heart problem. We have a who we are problem.
In fact, the desire to do something evil is itself evil. Not to get all “Inception” on us so early on a Sunday morning, but murder is wrong, yes. And the desire to murder is wrong. And the desire to desire to murder is wrong. Evil actions come from evil desires. The desire for evil is, itself, evil. And where does Jesus tell us that this comes from? From our hearts. So, why is there so much evil in the world? Because we have hearts that are bent on evil. It's easy to blame other people, but we commit evil every day. Where does that come from? It comes from our hearts.
And yet, today, when we have this view that people are basically good, we arrive at the wrong solution to the problem people think is in the world. And it's kind of like how I used to pull weeds as a child.
So, I've been pulling weeds around my house recently. 'Tis the season for that, it seems like. And it reminds me of growing up in central Florida when I was a kid. So, summer break comes, and you're all excited, and then you live on three acres and your mom says, well you've got a summer full of chores to do. In the 90 degree, 100% humidity central Florida heat.
Well, one of those chores was pulling weeds. And we don't seem to have this type of weed up here, but in central Florida, New Smyrna Beach, where I grew up, we had these things called dollar weeds. Maybe you know about them. They're about the size of a silver dollar, and they have these white roots, which are really stringy, like spaghetti. And they go everywhere underground. You will never find the end of a dollar weed root, I promise you.
So, she would send me out there to get rid of these weeds. And I would finish the flowerbed in fifteen minutes, and I'd come back inside, and she knew something was wrong. One, at that point, I did not have a good work ethic, but two, that many weeds, that quickly? Not likely. Well, two days later, it was very obvious what had happened when all the weeds, somehow, were back. Because I had just broken the tops off. I hadn't dealt with the spaghetti of white roots underneath the ground. And therein lies a parable, I think, for how we look at sin, and sinfulness, and the wrongness in our world today.
We often take an approach that just says, someone needs behavior modification. Life isn't good, well go to church more. Read your Bible more. Well, if a person doesn't know Christ, if they haven't dealt with the root problem, they're just breaking the heads off of weeds. They still have the same problem that all of us had before salvation in Christ. They have a heart problem.
So, mankind's biggest problem, his biggest need, is not a superficial type of thing. You can't wash your hands and get rid of sin. It's not an external type of thing. We need a transformation at the heart of who we are. And that's what Jesus shows us, that we have an internal problem, and we can't change that on our own.
Now, you may be thinking, okay, that doesn't sound like good news. What's going on? Pastor Dean's out of town, this guy gets up here, not preaching the good news. Well, like I said before, in order for the good news of what Jesus did to actually seem like good news, the bad news needs to be accurately portrayed. And this doesn't sit well with us in our culture today, when we often are told that we should have a positive self image. Isn't that what the media constantly tells us? If you hurt someone's self image, well then, that's a very bad thing. But Biblically speaking, we should want to have an accurate self image. If we see ourselves in our condition any differently than God sees it, we have not understood who we are.
So, our goal should be to have an accurate, God informed self image. And God doesn't so much want us to feel good about ourselves, as he does want us to rejoice in him, in his salvation, in the glory of who he is and what he's done. And that leads us to what the good news is. So, the solution to our sin and our sinfulness is Jesus.
All the way back in the Old Testament, before Jesus came to Earth in human form, God told his people how he would solve their biggest problem. How he would solve their sinfulness problem. And we read this in Ezekiel 36:25.
I will cleanse you, God says, from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you. I will remove your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my spirit within you, and cause you to follow my statutes, and carefully obey my ordinances.
It is God that cleanses us, if we trust in him. Behavior modification won't do that. Washing our hands won't do that. Breaking the tops off of the weeds doesn't work.
So, what about our hearts that didn't want God? Well, thankfully God gives us a new heart. What about our inability to do the things that please God? Well, thankfully, he gives us his Spirit, that causes us to walk in his ways and do things that are pleasing to him. So, the good news of the gospel is not that we can fix ourself. That doesn't end well. You can never do enough good things to be good with God. Scripture says that all of our hard work, all of our righteousness, is like filthy rags before God.
The good news of the gospel is that it is God who fixes us, God who gives us a new heart, God who cleanses us, God who clothes us in his perfect righteousness. And why is that important? Because only perfect people go to Heaven. And none of us are perfect when we are not clothed in the perfect righteousness of Jesus. The only way to be seen as perfect in God's eyes is to trust in Jesus, not ourselves, for our salvation.
So, maybe you're here today, and you realize, you know what? I go to church on Sunday. I read my Bible, and sometimes even post it on Instagram. But I have a heart problem, my heart doesn't actually want to do things that are pleasing to God. I'm trying to skate by in God's eyes on my own made up traditions and actions. Well, today could be the day you change that. Today could be the day that you realize that Jesus is the solution to your sinfulness, and your sin, and that you believe that he was fully God, and fully man, and came to Earth and lived under the law, the law he gave, and was found to be perfect and blameless, and so when he went to the cross and died, that he actually paid for sin. And that everyone who trusts in him for salvation and not themselves, not their works, not their social setting or stature, will find him to be a perfect savior.
No one, no one has ever come to Jesus and been turned away when they repent of their sins and place their faith in him for salvation alone. So, if that sounds like you, I would encourage you to not just let that set. Do business with God today. There are people in our care room out through the lobby who would love to talk to you about this, to tell you more of what it looks like to have God take out that heart of stone, and put in a heart of flesh.
So, I think there are three quick takeaways we can have from this passage today. We've looked at a lot. We've looked at the issue of man made tradition and hearts that are far from God, and the elevation of our own traditions to the level of scripture, and worshiping in vain. But what does that, where does that leave us?
Well, I think one important takeaway is that right actions, done apart from a heart that beats for God, that loves God, ultimately amount to nothing. So, if you're not a Christian, and you're trusting your actions to make you look good to God, God says they won't. God says he's the only solution for that problem.
I think for the Christian, though, we also kind of fall back on this. It's easy for me to get into my routine of “I go to church, and I read my Bible when I think about it, or when I don't ignore the push notification on my phone.” And I think that these things make me good with God, but if my heart is not desiring to follow God, those are just empty actions. I think we need to remember that.
The second takeaway for today is, for the Christian, we need to speak clearly about the problem in the world. There are too many false, comforting lies out there today, for us to not be clear where scripture is clear. Man's problem is not his subjective feeling of life not being what he wants it to be, man's problem is that he is sinful at the core, just like everyone was, apart from Christ. We need to be clear about that.
The solution, the gospel, will not seem compelling unless the problem, sinfulness, is accurately presented. But I also think understanding that the problem is at the heart of things should drive our prayer life. It should drive us to, one, pray for God to give us more of a desire for him. To move our hearts to have affection for him more, to cause us to work more, and live out more, his commands. Not because we're trying to earn our salvation, but because he's already given it to us. As an act of love, we want to do these things for God.
And the other reason that understanding our sinful hearts is helpful is because it should give us patience with people. When you share the gospel with your neighbor, and it doesn't go anywhere, you realize, I need to be faithful here. I'm gonna keep sharing. But it's God alone who takes out the heart of stone and puts in a heart of flesh. And that should lead us to pray that God would do that. That he would soften our own affections, like I mentioned, but also that he would fundamentally transform the hearts of people who do not know him. Pray with me, please.
]]>What is penal substitutionary atonement and is it biblical?
Few things are as important to think about and understand and be prepared to defend as what Christ actually did on the cross. We can defend the truthfulness of the Christian worldview and that God exists and all of that, but if Christ didn't actually die to save sinners and accomplish that on the cross then all that other stuff really doesn't matter. What's Paul's declaration in I Corinthians 15? If Christ is not raised then we are still in our sins. Now, he kind of leaves out a step there because what he's saying is when Christ died and rose from the dead he actually paid for sin for sinners.
If that didn't happen, if Christ didn't do that work on the cross, then we're just wasting our time with all this other worldview stuff and with going to church and caring about how we live; we should just live for ourselves. We're to be pitied, in fact, he says. All of that hinges on what Christ did on the cross, and of course if the cross and the resurrection are actual historical events. But they're only important as historical events because of what happened on them and in them.
Let's talk about something called penal substitutionary atonement. That's a really big term. Often you'll hear it called the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement. That word theory is not used like, "Oh well, it's a guess." It's used in terms of saying it's a systematic understanding of the atonement and multiple aspects of it from a biblical point of view. It doesn't mean it's just an educated guess, it definitely has biblical support. That's what we're going to look at today.
First let's actually define what it is. Penal substitutionary atonement. We'll take that from the end. Atonement means to pay for sin, to atone for it, to take away wrath, those types of ideas. Substitutionary means in place of another, a substitution. It's kind of like on The Big Bang Theory when Sheldon and his friends go to the Chinese restaurant and the guy say, "No additions, no subtractions, no substitutions." No substitutions, you can't swap something for something else in that restaurant. That's what a substitution is, one thing in place of another.
So far we're talking about atoning for sin in the place of another and then we have penal. That word deals with punishment. For instance, Australia was a penal colony for Britain, that's where they sent prisoners. Penal substitutionary atonement refers to someone being the substitution to take the punishment for sin and turn away God's wrath. That is what we say Jesus did at the cross, he was our penal substitutionary atonement. That's a really big term and I'm trying not to use it too much but it's actually a really important thing to understand.
Now, some people say that God punishing an innocent person in the place of other people is actually immoral or it's cosmic child abuse. We've talked about that a little in the past. What I want to focus on today is actually how we can make the case for supporting penal substitutionary atonement from the Old Testament. Now, yes this is something we're talking about that happened in the New Testament. Jesus' work on the cross was definitely a New Testament work. I want to show you how it's actually supported, it's not a new type of thing because it happened in the Old Testament too.
Basically, fundamentally what we're looking at is two types of things. One is that God does judge sin. He has wrath towards sin; he has a punitive type of justice. Now, yes there are other facets to justice but some people today would even deny that there is a retributive aspect to God's justice, that he punishes sin and sinners yet what do we see in the Old Testament? You can't read the first three chapters and not see that God actually displays wrath and punishment towards sinners. What is the first divine judgment for sin? Death. That is what Adam and Eve are told. "If you eat from this tree you will surely die," and they do.
It's not an instant type of thing, in one way. In a very immediate sense, yes, they died spiritually when they ate from that tree and were severed from communing with God. They will ultimately go on to die too. Without God's divine intervention or grace in saving them they would die a third death in hell which is an everlasting type of death of eternal punishment. My point there is, death is actually a divine judgment for sin, God does judge sin in that way. We see all throughout the Old Testament this type of paradigm. For instance, in Numbers 16 we see a judicial execution of Cora and fellow rebels as a result of God's divine wrath. They sinned against God and he kills them.
In Deuteronomy 29 we see divine judgment fall on Sodom and Gomorrah because of God's holy wrath. That's a retributive type of justice, he punished them for their sin. According to Leviticus 17 the Old Testament requires blood for atonement. We see this when we read in verse 11, "For the life of the flesh is in the blood and I have given it to you on the alter to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement." To sum that up, it is blood from life that leads to atonement, to turning away God's wrath. That's extremely important, it required a blood sacrifice.
In Numbers 35 we see that blood pollutes the land and no expiation, which would be something that removes wrath, can be made for the land, for the blood that is shed on it except by blood of him who shed it. This is awkward syntax but it's basically saying that the murderer of someone in order to make atonement has to be killed himself so the punishment falls on the one who committed the crime. They're actually punished for it in a retributive sort of way. It's not just restorative, we don't just get back to neutral, no. It costs them something above and beyond for the crime they committed.
We see all the way back in Genesis 9 God instituted the death penalty and basically said, "When an image bearer of me is murdered, blood must be spilled from the person who murdered that person to pay for it. That's exactly what we see here in Numbers 35. No turning away of wrath can be made except by the one who committed the crime. Death of the murderer is made for atonement.
Then, Paul picks this type of thing up in Galatians 3:10. He cites Deuteronomy 27:16 and he talks of the curse falling upon those who trust their salvation tp their good works, which would be the works of the Law of Moses. The curse is plainly a punishment here. A curse is a punishment, that's kind of a common sense type of idea. It's a penalty for disobedience, in other words.
Galatians 3:13 further makes this clear where it says, "Christ purchased us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us." In other words, Christ was our substitute on the cross. He bore the punishment, the penalty for the curse of mankind's disobedience to the law, and that is penal substitutionary atonement. Christ bore a punishment for other people. You have a substitution, Christ instead of us. You have a penalty, what he paid on the cross which we deserved. You have an atonement, it turned away God's wrath. Well, that's penal substitutionary atonement. Paul was picking this up in Galatians from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy where this type of thing was already understood to take place.
We're going to keep going through a little bit of the Old Testament here because I think there's more to be made plain. Honestly, seeing how the bible fits together with these themes is incredibly important.
Let's talk about the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, in the Old Testament. The high priest would offer a sacrifice for the sins of the nation. In Leviticus 16 we see a description of the laying on of hands on the head of a goat. This depicted outwardly a transference of sins from Israel to the living goat. The goat was their substitute, in other words. It was then condemned to die in the wilderness isolated from Israel.
This was a scapegoat, it carried, "All of the iniquities” we see, in verse 22, "Of the Israelites." It was their substitute. The penalty for their sins was put upon the goat. We see in Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, penal substitutionary atonement. A penalty, which Israel deserved, was put on a substitute, the goat. By sending it away God's wrath was averted for that time.
Now, there's a big difference between Yom Kippur, the goat, and Jesus. Jesus perfects, we see in Hebrews 9, the people that his sacrifice is offered for; they don't have to continually represent it. That's very different from Old Testament sacrificial system where the sacrifices had to continually be presented. Christ's work was once for all, Old Testament sacrifices were not, but nonetheless they were still penal substitutionary atonements, punishment by a substitute that turned away wrath.
Perhaps the most clear Old Testament example is Isaiah 53. You may read this or hear this at Christmastime, in fact. I think it's an excellent passage for Easter and any other time of the year and so let's read through that. Tis is a prophecy about Christ. It says
He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness. People hid their faces from him, he was despised and we considered him insignificant. He was lifted up for our illnesses.
I do think that's a foreshadowing of being lifted up on the cross. As an aside, when the New Testament speaks of lifting up Jesus it's talking about crucifixion. When we say in church, "If Jesus is lifted up he'll draw everyone to himself," we're talking about the crucifixion there whether we realize it or not. Anyways...
He was lifted up for our illnesses, he carried our pain even though we thought he was being punished, attacked by God and afflicted for something he had done.
What's being said here? No, he wasn't attacked for what he had done; he was being attacked for what we had done. In verse five it continues,
He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, he was crushed because of our sins. He endured punishment that made us well. Because of his wounds we have been healed."
Well, that is substitution pure and simple right there. All of those things that the author says were due to us were put upon Christ. The punishment for us was put upon him. His wounds lead to our healing, they turned away God's wrath from us. Penal substitutionary atonement. Let's keep reading.
All of us had wandered off like sheep, each of us had strayed off on his own path. The Lord caused the sin of all of us to attack him."
Some translations might say, "Be laid upon him." It was our sin that was put upon him, not upon us, as a substitute. Verse seven:
He was treated harshly and afflicted but he didn't even open his mouth. Like a lamb lead to the slaughtering block, like a lamb silent before it shears, he didn't even open his mouth."
I think this lamb imagery is extremely helpful because what did we just see in the Old Testament about the date of atonement? It was a lamb who bore the sins of its people.
Jesus is referred to as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of his people, further emphasizing this atonement motif, this penal substitutionary atonement motif. It further goes on to say,
He was lead away after an unjust trial but who even cared? Indeed, he was cut off from the land of the living. Because of the rebellion of his own people he was wounded."
Once again, substitution.
”They intended to bury him with criminals but he ended up in a rich man's tomb because he had committed no violent deeds nor had he spoken deceitfully."
This punishment was not his; this is made clear. He was innocent. The punishment he got was because of us.
Though the Lord had desired to crush him and make him ill, once restitution is made he will see descendants and enjoy long life and the Lord's purpose will be accomplished through him. Having suffered, he will reflect on his work and he will be satisfied when he understands what he has done. My servant will equip many for he carried their sins.
There are many things here I want to point out. One, he will reflect on his work. Jesus knew he was doing a work in going to the cross. He wasn't conscripted, he wasn't forced or coerced, it was a choice to go to the cross. He did a work, that is why he came. It was not unjust for the father to punish him because he also was punished willingly.
What did it say here? "He carried their sins," their being our sins. It continues.
“I will assign him a portion with the multitude, he will divide the spoils of victory with the powerful because he willingly submitted to a death and was murdered with the rebels. When he lifted up the sin of many and intervened on behalf of the rebels.
That is a straightforward description of penal substitutionary atonement. So many times in there ... Substitute, he took on things that were not deserved by him but were deserved by us. He did that and turned away God's wrath. He took a punishment. All of that: penal substitutionary atonement.
That is how Paul can say in Galatians that Christ purchased us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. He was our substitute on that cross. That is why defending the resurrection is important, not because of history's sake, not because it proves Christianity true in that way or theism to be accurate but because of what he accomplished on the cross. The historical event doesn't do anything without Christ actually accomplishing what he did for sinners on the cross.
Just to quickly sum up, numerous times throughout the Old Testament we see that God actually punishes sinner, not just in a restorative type of way but in a retributive type of way. It is wrath poured out toward sin. In fact, death was the first divine punishment for sin. Then we see numerous times where God does this to people, justly, I would add. More than that, we also see that the sacrificial system was based on something being a substitute to turn away God's wrath and pay the punishment for their sin. The day of atonement just pictures this beautifully and we see that the lamb bore the sins of Israel and took them away. Christ does the same thing at the cross, he's our passover lamb in that way.
There are many parallels in the Old Testament and the New Testament we haven't even explored. My point is that penal substitutionary atonement is a biblical doctrine that we should praise God for, that he actually did that for us. That he purposed to come to earth to pay for our sin for us, to take our punishment. It wasn't a mistake, he didn't just somehow get captured and stuck on a cross just to show us how violent or brutal we are as some people would say. No, it was part of his plan from the very beginning and that's why we defend the truth of the resurrection and all of that. We ultimately want to get to talk about what Christ actually did in his work on the cross.
Well, I will talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Today we're going to talk about Bernie Sanders, religious pluralism, and condemnation. Stay tuned on Unapologetic.
Recently, as part of the Senate's responsibility to advise the president on his nominees, Bernie Sanders was interviewing, under oath, a presidential nominee, Russell Vought. This was Trump's nominee to the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.
Anyways, here was the controversy. Sanders was upset that this man had previously written the following statement: "Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Christ Jesus, his Son, and they stand condemned."
Now, this man was writing in defense of his alma mater, Wheaton, which is an Evangelical University, and he's saying this on the backdrop on the controversy that happened over a year ago, where there was a professor at Wheaton who had worn a hijab, a head covering prescribed in Islamic practice. She had also gone on to say that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, which they don't. Anyways, this led to a big controversy, and this man, Russell Vought, is writing in defense of that.
This makes Bernie Sanders irate, it seems like, that this man would say a whole religion is condemned and all of their followers. He called it Islamophobic. That means fear of Islam, and this man certainly doesn't seem to have a fear of Islam, so I think it's the wrong term. I think there's a lesson there for us that today, if you add “phobia” or “phobic” to the end of a term, it sounds really powerful and it can help shut people up even if that's not at all what it is. In fact, that is a psychological diagnosis. I don't think Bernie Sanders is a psychologist, so he's probably not fit to make that type of proclamation.
But anyways, it's not Islamaphobic, it's not Christianphobic, to say that Islam or Christianity is wrong, or that everyone who believes that religion is wrong. I want to talk about this today.
One, does Christianity say that everyone who follows Islam is condemned? And two, how should we address this question of religious pluralism, this idea that all religions are equally valid?
On the face of it, it seems like Bernie Sanders doesn't actually know very much about Christianity at all. Because, for 2,000 years, the church has taught that apart from saving faith in Jesus Christ, everyone is condemned. It's not just Muslims. I believe Russell Vought would affirm that, except in his context he was specifically writing about Islam and Muslims in particular.
But, Christianity doesn't single those out. It talks about every single person apart from Christ, so every person who's now a Christian, before they were a Christian, stood condemned before God. This man isn't condemning them. Christianity doesn't teach that we actually have the power to condemn people. No, we are simply God's messengers who relay and repeat and echo what he has already said.
Let's read a little in the Gospel of John about this whole subject of God's love and condemnation and things like that. I'd love to have more time to go into the context behind John 3, but we're going to start in verse 16, which is of course a very popular verse, perhaps the most popular verse in the Bible. But people often stopped there and don't keep reading.
Here's what it says:
”For this is the way God loved the world. He gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."
The thought keeps going; it doesn't stop there.
“For God did not send his Son in the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. The one who believes in him is not condemned."
So far, so good.
“The one who doesn't believe has been condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God."
I think that's extremely important. We often quote the first part. "God loved the world that he gave his Son so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life." Yes, that's true, but why is that necessary? Because everyone stood condemned before Christ came.
Now, I think we often read too much into this passage. While Jesus was on earth, when he came in that role, he did not come to condemn the world. He did not come to judge the world. But John 5:22 even says that the Father, in fact, judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son. It is Jesus who, at the end of all things, will judge everyone. Jesus actually is the ultimate judge. People often forget that when they say, "Well he just loved and said, 'Don't judge.’” Well, Jesus does love us, and he also loves himself more. I think we have to remember that. He does not take kindly to his perfect moral law being trampled, to people rebelling against him.
Furthermore, to say that God tells us not to judge each other, which we often take and interpret incorrectly, doesn't mean that God can't judge. We are not on the same plane as God. I think we have to be able to explain that to people.
Nonetheless, when Jesus came to his earth in his incarnational ministry, he did that not to condemn the world but he came on a saving mission. He was going to the cross to save sinners. However, he will ultimately be the judge at the end of time. We have to affirm both of those things.
But let's return to our more primary point. What Bernie Sanders does not understand and what we need to be able to communicate clearly is that apart from saving faith in Jesus Christ, everyone stands condemned because they don't believe in God. As the passage goes on to say, "Because they practice evil deeds. Because they hate the light that exposes their evil deeds." Everyone stands condemned. That's not a good message. That's not happy news. But in order for the good news of the Gospel to seem like the bright, glorious thing it is, the bad news needs to be accurately presented in all of its darkness and sinister character. “Because men love the darkness because their deeds were evil.” We've got to talk about that part.
Now, that's just Christian doctrine. We just basically read through John 3. That's been there for 2,000 years. More than that, the church has affirmed this for 2,000 years. It does seem like Bernie Sanders was very ignorant of what the majority religion in his country actually believes, which is somewhat ironic since he ended his speech with this very stumbling sentence, which basically went something like: “You're not what this country is about.”
This country was actually founded on the principle of religious freedom, not just freedom of thought but freedom of exercise of religion. More than that, the constitution says we can't use a religious test for office, which it seems like Bernie Sanders was doing. If anyone was at fault there, especially according to the law, it's Bernie Sanders. But that's another topic and I'm not a constitutional expert or anything like that.
More to the point, in spite of Sanders' ignorance, it should not be taken as surprising that one religion disagrees with another religion. I think this is the point we need to be more prepared to talk about. I've had several conversations over the last week about this as I've heard other people and seen other people talking about this. I've hopped in to understand where people are at on this.
What's been most surprising to me is even people who call themselves Christians seem very uncomfortable in some contexts with this man's statements. Well it's not our job to say who's condemned. We can't condemn all the Muslims. I can't condemn someone. God has not given me that power, but isn't John 3 pretty clear that if they don't believe in Jesus, they stand condemned? Well what if they've never heard about Jesus? Does it say that they have to hear about Jesus? No, it says that everyone was condemned even before Jesus came because they didn't believe in God and they didn't practice works of righteousness.
More than that, nowhere in scripture does it say you're only accountable for your sin if God has given you saving knowledge of Christ. Some Christians seem very uncomfortable talking about the fact that Muslims stand condemned before God, when in fact that's the most loving thing we could tell them. If you knew someone was headed off to the guillotine and they could just simply change their mind and walk the other way, wouldn't you need to tell them that in order to be loving? If there was impending destruction in someone's path unless they turned, isn't it loving to tell them that? Yes. Doesn't telling them that require telling them that they're wrong?
For another example, if someone's about to think they're eat ice cream but actually going to eat poison, is it loving to tell them, "Yeah, go ahead and eat that because you think it's ice cream?” No, you have to tell them, "You're wrong. That's not ice cream. That's poison." But implicit in sharing the Gospel with someone, especially a Muslim, is telling them they're wrong. But that's not hateful. That's such a redefinition of the term.
I actually asked someone this week, "Is it hateful to say that all Muslims are wrong in their beliefs?" The person said, "Yes, just as hateful as it is to say that all Christians are wrong." I wanted to point out the irony that he was saying I was wrong, which would be hateful according to his definition. But I just passed that up. Instead, I tried to point out the fact that it's not hateful to disagree on matters of fact. If Jesus didn't die on the cross and he wasn't buried and he didn't rise again, Christianity is false. We believe a religion that is falsifiable. It could be proved to be incorrect.
That's important. Christianity is either true or it's not. Some people, like this guy, want to put religion in a separate category where it could be true for you and not for someone else. The problem is religions make not just subjective, personal, emotional, experiential claims. They make claims about the real world. Islam teaches that Jesus did not die on the cross. If Jesus died on the cross, Islam at least teaches something wrong. If Jesus didn't die on the cross and raise again, then Christianity is false. They both can't be true. This is what I tried to point out to the man. Either Islam is true and Christianity's not, Christianity's true and Islam is not, or they're both wrong. What we can be assured of is, since they make contradictory claims, they both can't be right. We've got to be prepared to tell people that and walk them through it. It's not hateful for us to disagree on these things.
We could ask the question, "Would it be hateful for me to say that your belief in the flat earth is wrong?" Well they'd say, "Well, no." Why would it be wrong for me to tell you that your view of the supernatural is wrong? If that really exists, then how could that be hateful?
Another valid question would be, "How do you know my motives? How do you know that I have hate in my heart in sharing this with you?" I would actually like to tell you that I have love in my heart for you. Love tells someone they're wrong when they are. I think that's very important.
On this idea of religious pluralism where all religious views are equally valid, what's actually being said is the person who believes they're all equally valid is the only right one. Let's break that down. The person who believes that all religions are equally valid believes that Christianity on its own is wrong in saying that it's the only way. It's been interesting to me this week to point out to even people who claim to be Christians that Jesus said He is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but through him. Muslims deny Jesus is God, deny he is the path to God, so how could they be good with God? This just seems like bowing to political correctness.
More than that, if Christianity and its exclusive claims are wrong, then that means Islam and its exclusive claims are wrong. I actually have tried to point that out to people. It's not just that Christians say Muslims stand condemned. Actually, the greatest sin in Islam is ascribing anything to God besides oneness. Really, what we're doing is called shirk in Islam. We believe in God being three persons in one being. That's a trinity. We deny what they call tawhid, which is the oneness of God. So, we have committed their greatest sin, so we stand condemned. It's a two-way street. Christians think Muslims are condemned; Muslims think Christians are condemned. Neither of us is being hateful about it. We should respect when they're honest and open about that. But we can point that out to people. If Christianity is intolerant for its claims, then Islam is too. But for some reason, no one wants to say Islam is intolerant on these things.
More to the point, all of these religions we've talked about make exclusive claims. They claim they're the only right way. They're either right in that or they're wrong in that. It's the same type of claim as "Is Barrack Obama the President of the United States or not?" He's not anymore. You can be right or wrong about that, but what you can't say is, "He's the president for me." That's not a valid category. I'm the same way, Islam makes claims about the way the world is. It's either right or wrong. So does Christianity. It's based on historical facts. It's a historical religion. Either, like I said, Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't. That's an event in history. If he didn't, Christianity is false. We make exclusive claims.
I want to return to one thing. Isn't it interesting that the person who's the religious pluralist is actually saying everyone else is wrong? In attempting to be so open-minded and so inclusive, they actually condemn everyone else, at least their views. Because what they're saying is, "No, you're wrong. It's not exclusive. No, Muslim, you're wrong. It's not exclusive. No, Jew, you're wrong. It's not exclusive." What they're saying is everyone is wrong in thinking it's exclusive, and they are the only right ones in their view that it's inclusive.
This view of religious pluralism is actually an exclusive view where everyone else is wrong in their individual views. I think we can point that out to people and say, "You know, have you considered that in saying all of these religions are wrong to make exclusive truth claims, that you've just made an exclusive truth claim that everyone else is wrong?" I think that should be persuasive, if people will actually open their minds up to understand it, that is
In conclusion today, it's not Islamaphobic to say that Muslims stand condemned. Islam, accurately understood, says the same thing about Christians. More than that, the Bible supports this idea that apart from faith in Christ, everyone stands condemned. It doesn't single out Muslims. Every one of us before salvation stood condemned before God, and the only thing that could have changed that was the saving work of Jesus on the cross and placing our trust in him for our forgiveness.
I'll talk with next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Do you ever wonder why you can give a great explanation to someone and yet they still won't come to agree with your point?
I'm one of those people who has this kind of innate, implicit view that if I just explain something well enough, people will agree. They'll see it my way. There's a certain kind of pride that's behind that I think, that God's been working on my heart on over the years, to where I frequently now realize I don't see things the right way. I don't have the right answer all the time. That's important for all of us to recognize.
But even when I am convinced by scripture and multiple sources that I do have the correct belief on a certain issue, I still hold this view that if I just explain it well enough, people will agree. It doesn't work like that. You know this. I know this. We all know this, but sometimes we forget that in conversation.
Today what I want to do is spend a little bit of time talking about some possible reasons why, even in the face of a compelling explanation, sometimes people will still not agree. There are two categories we're going to look at today. One is that the presuppositions someone holds may prevent them from seeing the evidence the way you see the evidence. The other category we'll look at is simply hardness of heart. We'll talk about God's involvement with the heart and that aspect to.
First, presuppositions. What is a presupposition? It is a position you hold that comes before other positions you hold, hence the “pre” and “supposing,” presupposition. These are foundational beliefs. They're kind of like the things that are bedrock for how we see the rest of the world and understand evidence and interpret people's explanations and all of that.
I have the presupposition that gravity exists. Now that used to be a conclusion for me. At some point I had to be convinced that gravity existed, but now that I do, if you ever tell me that a person can just float or that gravity doesn't apply over here, I'm just going to reject that out of hand. I'm not going to go, get out of my chair, walk into the hallway to see someone who supposedly is defying the law of gravity.
Now maybe they're doing that from a hovercraft or some type of jet pack, but that doesn't suspend gravity; that's countering it. But if you were to tell me that gravity just doesn't exist over here in this place, I just wouldn't believe you.
In the same way that if you were to tell me that there's a square circle on this piece of paper across the room, I'm not going to get up. I'm not going to go look at it. My presuppositions about what it means to be circular and square, namely that you can't be both circular and square at the same time, just rule out the possibility of a square circle. It doesn't fit in my worldview. It doesn't accord with my presuppositions.
This happens when we talk about religion too. For instance, you may give great evidence for the resurrection. You may point to the fact that we have multiple sources that all independently give us details and tell us about the resurrection. You may say that it's the best explanation ever proposed, that all the other hypotheses fail, and that they're actually quite laughably silly when you analyze them. You might go through each individual step about how the church started out of the resurrection, how the tomb was empty, how people saw him after his death and were willing to die for that claim. You might go through all of that and the related embarrassing testimony about the resurrection. Someone will still say, "Yeah, but it didn't happen."
When you push a little more, you might get to a reason why. They might say, "It can't happen." When people start saying things can't happen, we're getting in the realm of presuppositions. If you keep pushing, this person will likely say resurrections are the types of things that can't happen. Behind this is the presupposition that there is not a supernatural realm. That there is not a miraculous type of event that could take place.
You see, that's a starting place for this person in the conversation. It's not a conclusion. They came in with this set of things that are possible and not possible in their mind. The resurrection, in spite of any evidence you could ever give them, just doesn't fit with their presuppositions. It is ruled out on the face of it.
We have to acknowledge that. Now are people's presuppositions able to be overcome sometimes by adequate evidence or an overwhelming amount of evidence? Yes. But they're never going to see your evidence until they change their presuppositions. I think that's important for us to understand. We're not on equal ground analyzing the same evidence. My presuppositions are going to cause me to see different things in the evidence than someone else's presuppositions.
This is right at home in the evolution debate. Some Christians will say that there's no evidence for evolution. Well there is evidence for evolution. Some people will say there's no evidence for intelligent design. There is evidence for intelligent design. I think we have to be clear on that. There are points on both sides of the ledger, so to speak. There are pros and cons to each view. The question is: which view has the most evidence and the best evidence and is most compelling and is most plausible.
You see, my presuppositions are going to affect how I evaluate the evidence for intelligent design and how I evaluate the evidence for evolution. In the same way, when a person who's not a Christian comes to look at the evidence for intelligent design, they're going to say, "Well there isn't this type of thing as a transcendent intelligence, so life cannot have been designed.”
"There can't have been a creator because that's a supernatural type of thing,” if they understand our position correctly. That matter came from something immaterial. That type of thing doesn't exist. “There is not an immaterial type of thing or substance out there.” They're not going to look at the evidence the same way because they don't think the type of thing we're talking about is even possible because of their presuppositions. That's why two people can look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions. It's because they have two different sets of presuppositions. They're not standing on equal ground.
This is also at play when we talk about homosexuality. Today's same-sex advocate has much better arguments than advocates in previous years or decades. They will often say, "Yes, the New Testament does not present homosexuality in a good light. In fact, it seems to say it's wrong." Oftentimes what they'll say, though, is, "But it's not talking about what we're talking about today. It's not talking about same-sex orientation. They didn't even have a category for that." Some people will even say, "Well Paul was just a man of his time." I've actually heard people say that if Paul were around today, he would agree that same-sex relationships can be holy because he just didn't know enough back then.
What's behind that? What is a presuppositions they hold that makes them come to that conclusion? I think behind this is the idea that the Bible is not the word of God. If we're saying Paul was too ignorant to address the true situation, what we're also saying is the Holy Spirit was either too ignorant or inept or maybe, more accurately, just didn't inspire the New Testament. That it's not God-breathed. A certain view of scripture is what's behind their conclusion on homosexuality.
Now that view of scripture is obviously a conclusion for them. They had to come to that. Now maybe they came to that in order to support their view of homosexuality. Maybe they held that view before. But nonetheless, in this conversation that is a pre-commitment they hold that is going to affect how they interpret the evidence.
Another example also on scripture might be for someone who holds that works are required for salvation. Now people come to this view oftentimes just by reading the Bible incompletely and incorrectly. But for some people they're going to say, "That's what the Catholic church teaches." If you say, "How do you know the church is right?" they'll say, "The church teaches me what the Bible says. The church is authoritative." What's behind a Catholic view of scripture is that it's only correct and only authoritative in as much as it's taught and interpreted by the church. The church is the authority there, not scripture. Or scripture at least has a derivative authority only because of the church.
That's definitely going to affect how we interpret scripture, how we talk about different concepts in the conversation. Because the church is viewed to be as infallible. Protestants view scripture as infallible and not the church. But the Roman Catholic church teaches that itself is infallible. That's a preconception that you'll have to deal with oftentimes with talking with Roman Catholics.
We've talked about the resurrection and evolution and homosexuality and works/scripture, but all of these oftentimes are conversations we get into and we're like, "Okay, why don't they agree? I've presented a compelling case, I think. It's compelled other people." The difference here is different preconceptions. We're not standing on equal ground in evaluating the evidence.
Now we all are created in the image of God. We can make arguments that are based on that. Maybe we'll talk about that another time, but nonetheless, we come into conversations with different lenses that are going to accentuate or even filter out different points of the evidence. That's the first category we were going to talk about today: presuppositions.
The last category is perhaps the more important category (but we're going to spend less time on it just so we can hit our 14-minute mark, which is what I strive for on this podcast.) Hardness of heart: that's our second category. Scripture tells us that the heart is deceptive above all things. We often forget this in our apologetics conversations, but there is a strong heart and spiritual component to what we believe, how we act, what we're willing to accept.
Oftentimes, for the person who's thought about these issues, they can't cave on their view of evolution because that would mean that there's a God. As some people have said, we can't allow God to get a divine foot in the door because they understand what it would mean. If God exists, some people rightly understand that man is accountable to him. “Well I don't want to be accountable to God,” some people have said in their heart or even out loud. “So we can't hold a view of the world and creation that lets God get a divine foot in the door.”
Jesus is constantly going back and forth with the Pharisees in the Gospels. He's explaining things and they don't get it. They just want to kill him all the more. His same message is interpreted differently by the Pharisees than the other people. Why?
As he constantly says, the hardness of their heart. I'm preparing to preach on Mark 7 this coming Sunday, and it's interesting, at the end of the first section in Mark chapter, Jesus says, "For from within and out of the heart come evil ideas, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, evil, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, and even folly," or foolishness or wickedness depending on how you understand and translate that term. "All of these evils come from within," Jesus says.
Why don't people believe the Gospel. Is it because they're not convinced by evidence? Well, from a certain perspective yes, but also because their heart doesn't want to. This is what Paul gets at in Romans 2, that no one's actually seeking after God on their own. Everyone has gone astray. They're like sheep without a shepherd. No one does good in that way. I think we have to remember that when we're talking with people. Apart from God giving someone a new heart, they won’t do what’s pleasing to him and believe. That needs to be in our minds as we share with people. We should be calm and patient with people, realizing that, one, from a human standpoint they have different preconceptions, presuppositions, about what is possible or not. We've got to work through those.
Two, there's a hardness of heart issue that only God can change the heart. In fact, in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel, when a prophecy is being made about the New Covenant, God tells people what he's going to do. He's going to take out their heart of stone and give them a new heart, and then give him his Spirit to cause them to walk in his way. Our problem is that we need a new heart.
When we're talking with a non-Christian about scripture, homosexuality, abortion, creation, the resurrection, yes, we need to convince them with well-reasoned arguments. Paul reasoned with people. But yes, that same Paul acknowledged that unless God gives them a new heart, nothing's ultimately going to change.
This is what's behind Paul's writing in 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 25. He's telling Timothy to correct opponents with gentleness. "And perhaps God will grant them repentance and then knowledge of the truth, and they will come to their senses and escape the devil's trap where they are held captive to do his will."
Paul obviously has this view that people are accountable for their accounts. I don't think anyone could read Paul and come away with this view that people aren't responsible. But he also affirms here and almost every time he writes that God has to grant repentance. The Holy Spirit has to regenerate people in order for them to follow him.
Paul in this passage is saying God needs to grant repentance and give them knowledge of the truth, and only then will they come to their senses and come out of their captivity to Satan and to sin and to self.
We should have patience, just like Paul says here. Have patience with people. Correct them with gentleness. Why? Because we understand the issue is a heart issue. Yes, we're reasoning with them. Paul even says here, "to correct them." This is written to Timothy in a specific pastoral context there, but nonetheless, I think there's something we can learn here and apply: we do this with gentleness and respect, as we see in 1 Peter 3:15. Here Paul's telling us to do it with gentleness once again, that we would have patience, realizing that it is God who affects salvation. It is God who gives that gift. It is God who takes out the heart of stone and puts in a heart of flesh.
Yes, he ordains that to happen through the preaching of his word, as Paul says in Romans 10. "How will people hear unless they are preached to, and how will people preach unless they are sent?" And on and on and on. "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news?" Why, because that's the means God has ordained for the sharing of the Gospel and for people coming to salvation. It's through the preaching of the Gospel. It's through reasoning through the scriptures. It's through those conversations that we have with people about Gospel matters.
Oftentimes that involves us countering people's presuppositions, being aware of the fact that they are there so we can call them out and talk about them. When someone rejects the resurrection, we might think the issue is about the resurrection. The issue oftentimes is their preconceptions. We also need to remember, though, that behind those presuppositions is often a hardness of heart, and that leads us to have patience with people and pray for them that God would grant them repentance so that they would come to a saving knowledge of him.
I will talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>What was Jesus's view of Scripture?
Today there are many different ways of looking at Scripture. Is it authoritative? Is it true? There are many different views on this, but you know what I find to be very interesting is that many people end up holding a view of Scripture that Jesus himself didn't even hold. They might be trusting in Jesus for salvation, that he's going to secure their place in the life after this one, and then they're going to go to heaven because of him, but his view of Scripture is not refined enough. It's not academic enough. It's not, well, true enough for them.
I want to spend some time looking at what Jesus believed and taught about the Scriptures. Now, I did title this episode How Did Jesus Read the Bible? It is true that Jesus didn't have the “Bible” as we have it today. I mean, some of the books weren't even written yet, and that's true, but I think this is not actually a problem when we dig into some of the reasons why we should trust Scripture. We can look at how Jesus looked at the Old Testament, at least today.
The first point we're going to look at is that Jesus taught that all of the Scripture pointed to him. It ultimately finds its fulfillment in him, and in the details of his life, death, and resurrection, and the gospel. Why do we think this? Well, it's interesting. We read in Luke when some of the disciples are on the road to Emmaus and they're complaining, they're downtrodden, their messiah just got killed, and they don't understand that he has risen from the dead. Jesus is walking in their midst, and they don't recognize him. He's concealing himself from them, and here's what he says to them after they're lamenting their situation. He says,
”You foolish people. How slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken,"
He's saying here that the prophets spoke things that they did not believe and understand. He's going to go on to explain what those things were.
He says,
”Wasn't it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory?"
Then Luke tells us,
“Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things written about himself in all the scriptures."
He interpreted the Old Testament to them in light of who he was and in light of the fact that it all points to him and finds its fulfillment in him. The Old Testament teaches us how the sacrificial system worked in God's eyes, and why do we need to know that? Well, because it ends up telling us what we should expect and how the sacrifice of Jesus worked.
Jesus was the last sacrifice of the old covenant. It so happens that he was the sacrifice that actually perfected the people it was offered for, unlike the sacrifices and blood of bulls and goats, but nonetheless, we see how God dealt with sacrifices and sin in the Old Testament, and that's exactly how we should understand that he does it in principle in the New Testament, except for Jesus is the new and better sacrifice. He actually perfects those the sacrifice was offered for.
The Old Testament in many ways points to Jesus. We see this in the prophets. We see this in Isaiah, where Isaiah tells of one who will be bruised for our iniquity and crushed for our sin, and the chastisement that will bring us peace will be upon him. That points to Jesus.
Now, that's a little obvious, but so much of the Old Testament points to Jesus. The law points to Jesus. The law as an unmeetable standard pointed to one who needed to be able to meet the standard so we could be credited with his righteousness. There are so many of these parallels, but when we read the Old Testament especially, which were the scriptures Jesus had at the time, with Jesus-centered lenses, we will start to see these parallels. When we read the New Testament against the backdrop of Jesus telling us that he's fulfilling the very things that the Old Testament pointed to, we'll start to see those too.
My point here is that Jesus is affirming the Old Testament. He's saying that it points to him. Those things written about him were true, and he fulfilled them. He had a high view of Scripture, and we'll look at that more as we go on today. What's more, a little later in this passage in verse 44 he says to them,
”These are my words that I've spoken to you while I was with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled."
He has fulfilled much of it. He is about to fulfill some more of it, and ultimately, when this new covenant finds its fulfillment when Jesus comes back, he will fulfill the rest of it, but what's he affirming? That what was written down was true and it's been accomplished in him.
That's huge. So the miracles he did oftentimes are fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies, so people who deny the miracles of Jesus are 1) disagreeing with what the gospels say, but 2) they're disagreeing with Jesus, who says those prophecies were legitimate and that he legitimately fulfilled them. Scripture points to Jesus. That's our first point, and so much more could be said about this.
Another passage I want to look at today is Matthew 22:31. There's a larger context here, but there's the one sentence I want to zoom in on, and it's where Jesus asks a question. He says,
“Have you not read to you what was spoken by God,"
And here he's referring to the Scriptures. Now, you might say on the face of it, "Okay, well have they not read?" Well, they have read. He's saying basically they didn't understand, but what I want to zoom in on is the second part of that sentence. "Have you not read what was spoken to you by God?" Isn't that a weird pairing of words? Reading what was spoken. Usually you would read what was written, or you would hear what was spoken, but no, Jesus says, "Have you not read what was spoken to you by God?"
What he's getting at is the Old Testament and Scripture in general is God-breathed revelation. It's His word to us that He speaks through Scripture to us under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. When the writers wrote down what they wrote, it was the very words of God. Scripture is totally of divine origin. It's also totally of human origin, so there's a parallel here between the incarnation of Jesus. Jesus was fully man, fully God. Scripture is fully the words of God and fully the words of man. There's a dual authorship to Scripture, but Jesus is saying that Scripture at this point, specifically the Old Testament, is the very word of God.
This is something that's picked up in 2 Timothy 3:16, where we see that every Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training, and righteousness, that the person dedicated to God may be capable and equipped for every good work. Now, your translation might say "inspired." “Every Scripture is inspired by God.” I'm not a big fan of that word inspired for a few reasons. One, people with a very low view of Scripture will still say that Scripture is inspired, and what they mean by this is not what the Bible means by this. It's not what the Greek term underlying that word inspired means by this, and it's not what conservatives mean by this either.
They mean inspired in the way of “I saw an athlete fall down in the Olympics and another athlete who was ahead of that person came back to help them across the finish line. They sacrificed their chance at glory to help someone else. That was so inspiring. Now I want to go help other people.: That is not what the word used there means when it says inspired. What it means is God-breathed. Literally that's what the Greek says, theopneustos, “theos” = God, “pneustos” = breathed. The breath of God is what Scripture is. It's His words breathed out to us. It doesn't mean it's an inspiring story in that way. That's very different.
I've avoided using the word inspired in recent years due to how people with a very low view of Scripture have corrupted and used that term, and often it kind of helps them sail under the radar where other people don't realize they have a low view of Scripture because they're still saying it's inspired. The real question is what do you mean by inspired when people use that term? My point here is what Jesus says in Matthew 22, "Have you not read what was spoken by God," is exactly the same idea as what's picked up in 2 Timothy, where every Scripture is God-breathed. It's his speech out to us. I think that's really important. Jesus affirmed that the Old Testament was the very word of God. It was spoken by Him. It's contained in our Bible in Scripture, and that's where we read it, but nonetheless it was spoken by God through the biblical authors.
So, the first point was Scripture points to Jesus. Our second point is Scripture is God-breathed. These are both things Jesus taught and believed.
The third point is Scripture contains true history. One of the places people like to take potshots at today when it comes to the Bible is its historicity. Is it true? Does it contain accurate history? Some people will say, "Well, we can't verify this claim," or, "There's no evidence for this, so we shouldn't believe it." Well, the question is why do we need extra biblical evidence, evidence from outside the Bible, to believe something written in the Bible? We don't. In fact, if you take that approach consistently, what that shows is the Bible is not your authority but some secular history is.
If the Bible is history, which it is at its root level, why shouldn't we trust it? Why shouldn't we give it the benefit of the doubt that we give other sources of history? Why does it need to be corroborated by some other source before it's actually trustworthy? We don't treat other documents that way. We shouldn't treat the Bible that way.
Jesus affirms that Jonah was swallowed by a fish. “Just as he was in the belly of a fish for three days, so the son of man will be in the belly of the earth,” so he'll be in the ground for three days. He affirms creation. He affirms that God created mankind, male and female. He affirms Genesis 1 and 2, which has profound implications for our sexual ethics, and how we live, and marriage, and monogamy, and that marriage is one man and one woman for one lifetime, and its implications to all of those things.
But Jesus at the root is affirming the accurate historical content of the Old Testament. At so many points he talks about the Exodus. He talks about Moses, and Abraham, and different prophets, and Adam and Eve by extension, who were real people. God created one man and one woman. There weren't people before them. There weren't 200 people out of which came humans today. Jesus affirms the history in the Old Testament.
So far we've seen that Scripture points to Jesus. Scripture is God-breathed. Scripture contains true history and our last and perhaps most important and foundational point is that Scripture is authoritative.
We see this with Jesus. He tells people that the Scriptures are authoritative. He holds them accountable to what's written in Scripture as opposed to what they add to it. For instance, in Mark 7, the Pharisees are upset that people aren't washing their hands before eating because they've made up this rule and are trying to apply it to people. Jesus says, You make up rules and follow them but you don't even follow the law when it comes to treating less fortunate people. So he affirms at every point the legitimacy of the law and its authority over all of mankind at that point.
He submitted to them. He kept the Sabbath. The only reason, and some people seem to forget this, the only reason that Christ's sacrifice on the cross is able to efficacious for people is because he kept the law to every jot and tittle to the nth degree, both in its letter and its spirit. That perfect obedience of him is credited to us.
Part of the law is to love God with all your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. I've never done that. I can't do that, but thanks to Jesus and his perfect obedience when he loved God with his whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, that obedience is credited to me. So I'm credited with the perfect righteousness and obedience of Jesus Christ.
That obedience was to the Scriptures, to God as His word was contained in the Scriptures, which means the Scriptures are authoritative to Jesus. He obeyed them. He cites from them. He teaches from them, and people are surprised. He teaches as one with authority. Well, when God teaches what God said, yeah it has authority and it's going to sound that way. But when we teach what God said without qualification, it still comes across as having authority today.
The question for us is: Will we hold the view of Scripture that Jesus held? Will we believe and read the Bible as though it all points to Jesus and finds its fulfillment in Jesus? Will we believe that Scripture is not just inspiring tales from men who had experiences with God, but will we believe that it's the very word of God breathed out to us? Will we believe that Scripture contains true history, all of its historical claims are true?
Will we believe that? Jesus believed that. Jesus affirmed that.
Will we trust him for our salvation but not trust his view of Scripture?
Lastly, will we affirm that Scripture is authoritative, that it has binding authority on our lives because it's the word of God? Will we trust that? Will we submit to that in a day and age when so many people want to say, "Yeah, but I feel ... Yeah, but God wouldn't do this," or, "I couldn't worship a God who would...”
I don't have to like it, and in fact, my dislike of what's in Scripture is sin, and I need to repent of that, and I need to submit to what Jesus has said. Will we do that? Will we contend for the truthfulness of Scripture based on how Jesus saw Scripture? I think that's a very big question today.
Sometimes people want to say, "The Bible's trustworthy because it sold a lot of copies and because it tells the same story." Well, there are fictional series that fit together better than the Bible does. Now, I'm not saying the Bible contradicts itself. I'm saying other stories are more crafted and cohesive, and there are other books that are bestsellers, but that doesn't make them true.
What we can bank on though is that Jesus's view of Scripture is trustworthy and accurate, and if Jesus believed it about Scripture, I'm going to believe it about Scripture. I need the Holy Spirit to work on my heart so that I fully feel and affirm these things that Jesus believed, but nonetheless, that's the standard, not something less than that.
Well, I hope this has been helpful, and I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have casualties.
Ideas have consequences. We're familiar with that phrase. But something I read this last week, and I wish I could remember where so I could cite the source, was that bad ideas have casualties. They actually have human fallout. People get hurt. This isn't that new of a concept, but I think it's just nice and succinctly put.
It's also been said that when words lose their meaning, people lose their lives. That sounds really dramatic, we might think, but it's true. I want to unpack that today.
Behind this is the idea that how we think influences how we live, even when it comes to Christian matters. J.I. Packer has said wrong ideas about God lead to wrong ideas about how to live. What is implicit and even explicit in this statement is that theology and life are not separate spheres. In fact, how we think about God, even if we don't realize it, will directly impact how we live our lives.
But it's not just thinking about God that will impact our lives; it's how we think about everything. A friend of mine who I've had on the podcast, Hunter Levine, made an interesting statement to me recently. He said that most parents, it seems like, are more concerned about the number of F words in a movie or a TV show their children may watch than the actual worldview behind the TV show.
You know what? I think he's right. I'm not saying that foul language and that type of thing isn't a concern, but what I am saying is perhaps what is much more dangerous are the actual ideas that are communicated to us through media and through culture and even through friendly conversations that we aren't aware of, that directly contradict a biblical worldview. Because, remember, these ideas are going to influence us, and bad ideas will have bad effects in our life.
Let's look at some examples of this. There has been a trend in recent years to change how suicide is talked about. It's not okay in some circles now to talk about someone killing themself. That sounds too explicit. That seems to make it seem like they did something wrong. We're softening that. "They ended their life." "They took their own life." In some circles, that's not even okay to say it like that.
What is this trying to do? It's trying to make suicide some more acceptable, when it shouldn't be. It should never be acceptable when someone gets to the place where, for some reason, they believe their best option is to kill themself. It's not okay. We don't do people a service when we make that seem more palatable. No, it should seem extremely unpalatable and we should have extreme concern and compassion for people who ever feel like that is an option for them. That's one small example: softening the language around suicide.
What about euthanasia, the killing of older people? Sometimes this is voluntary, where older people may say, "I don't want to keep living. I'm living in a lot of pain." A doctor will prescribe medicine or some other person will administer medicine that is given with the intent of killing the person. Sometimes it's also involuntary, where the person is killed against their wishes simply because they're old, they're taking too many resources, something like that.
In the middle here sometimes is this idea that dignity, when it comes to death, is "going out on your terms." This is the same idea that's behind the common arguments today for abortion, where it's "a woman's right to chose." We see with euthanasia it's my right to die on my terms. That's also somewhat implicit in the suicide conversation. With abortion: my body, my choice. Now it's not actually her body. It's not her body that's being killed; it's a separate body. That's another conversation for another day.
Behind all of these is the same actual argument. It's an argument from autonomy. That's a word we may not be too familiar with, but autonomy literally means self-law. It's from the Greek "autos nomos" - self-law. That we are the ones who make the law. I make the law for me. I am the decider of all things regarding and relating to me and what I do. No one else can tell me what is right. No one can tell me what I do.
Now people might not express it like that. They might not even know the term autonomy, but that is the highest moral value in our culture today I suggest to you. Look at the arguments and the pressing political issues. What is same-sex marriage about? I want to live the way I want, and I want the government to recognize, and I want other people to celebrate it. I don't want to stay with the established laws of the land, which had very good reasons behind them.
What's abortion about? Autonomy. I want to have sex the way I want to have sex outside of a man-woman committed monogamous relationship for life and I don't want to deal with the consequences. I want to do what I went to do with my life when I want to do it. That's what's behind abortion also.
Oftentimes when it comes to euthanasia, it's the same thing. I want to live my life and end my life on my terms. I am the decider.
I don't want to sound glib about these topics. It's interesting, I chose probably the three hardest examples out there to talk about. I am compassionate about this. The reason that you may not think that when you first hear it is I'm disagreeing with people in their hardest moments. But oftentimes what seems best to us, what appeals most to our innate desires, isn't actually the good option. Is it dignified to kill one's self? No, it's not. Only if you redefine dignity. This is where ideas have casualties. People are dying today or killing themselves because of bad ideas, where culture has taught us that the biggest, the best thing we can do in life is be true to our feelings.
That's what's behind the transgender conversation. You are how you feel. Who you are and your identity is not rooted in how you were designed or created. It's based on how you feel today. In fact, some gender advocates would say you could be one gender today, one gender tomorrow, and back again the next day. It's based on how you feel. It's not based in anything physical or else in reality.
That idea has a casualty. People are now going into this type of identity and lifestyle, and sometimes they're mutilating parts of their body in the process to chase this ideal that's based on a feeling instead of conforming a feeling to the physical reality of how they were designed to live.
You might say they don't believe they're designed in a certain way. That's an idea. The refusal to affirm that man and woman are designed by God is an idea. It's a bad idea and it has a casualty. Oftentimes it's the mental health of people. Oftentimes it's their physical health and their relationships. They rejected that part. I'm not saying that simply affirming God created you solves all your problems.
But you could even reject the creation aspect of things and still believe that men and women are two distinct types of beings. That there is a male type of being and a female type of being. We've rejected that idea too, and that idea has a casualty.
It's interesting, John Hopkins was one of the first hospitals to start doing transgender surgeries. They stopped doing them because they saw that the success ratio was much too low. It wasn't actually increasing the quality of life for the people who went through the surgery. As Christians, this shouldn't really surprise us. The problem is not a physical one. It's a spiritual and a mental and a psychological issue. I say that compassionately. These are people who our hearts should go out to. We should care about them. We shouldn't affirm them in what is honestly a delusion.
If you think you're a man when you're a woman, that's a delusional thinking. It's the same way as if I thought I were a rabbit when I'm a man. That's not correct. I'm not seeing reality the right way. I'm very off-base there. Once again, these are ideas that are bad ideas and have casualties.
There's another type of idea I'd like to talk about. That's something that we may have talked about before, but in school today, sometimes our children are being taught that there are no moral facts. If it's a moral point of view, it's an opinion. A fact is only something you can verify. A fact is something that the scientific method applies to. Everything else is an opinion.
What's interesting on that view is this idea that there are no moral facts is an opinion. You can't prove that scientifically. You can't demonstrate that empirically. It can't be verified in that way. This is a self-refuting type of statement. It would also teach really savvy students that the teacher couldn't actually say it was objectively wrong for them to cheat on a test because saying it's wrong to cheat is just her opinion, and why would that opinion be any better than her students' opinion, especially if this new tolerance idea is in play, where all opinions and views are equally valid. That's another topic for another day.
This idea that there are no moral facts has seeped into culture, and it's at play in all of these areas we've talked about previously to do. It's a view in the euthanasia conversation. There are no moral facts. It's my choice what I do with my body. There's no overriding moral standard. I can redefine dignity to mean killing myself instead of living and struggling and seeing the beauty and the fight for life and all of that. I understand death is sometimes very difficult. I've seen many loved ones die, sometimes after a very hard struggle with prolonged medical illness, and the trouble that that brought along for them and their family. I'm not insensitive to that point. But, my point is when words lose their meaning, people lose their lives. When we redefine the unborn as just a product of conception, we can kill it. At least some people would say so. If we redefine the unborn to be not a human being, we can kill it.
Some people have rightly recognized from a medical and scientific point of view that the unborn is a human being. It's certainly human. It's not like it's a dog or something. And it's a being. It's actually alive. It takes in nutrients. It expels wastes. It grows. It adds cells to itself. It has a distinct DNA and blood type, all of these things. It's not the mother's body. Some people have even affirmed this, and now they've said it's not a human person. We're still playing a word game here. This is a bad idea that has a casualty. Because of this bad idea, when this word person loses its meaning, people lose their lives. It's an artificial distinction often used in conversation to exclude a group of people so that we can kill them.
This has been done before with slaves. When person or human being lost its meaning in the context of the slavery debate, people lost their lives. They lost their freedom. Now you could probably think of other examples besides slavery and abortion and euthanasia and no moral facts and suicide, and these types of things. These are weighty topics, but isn't that kind of the point? That when we redefine terms that they affect the most important aspects of life. They really do.
We see this in the church. When blessing gets redefined to mean material prosperity and health and wealth, the Gospel is perverted. It's not the Gospel anymore. People miss the narrow door to salvation because they've been led astray by something that maybe uses biblical terms but in unbiblical ways. People lose their spiritual lives. Bad ideas have causalities. We see it in the church. We see it in the culture. We see it with end of life issues and we see it with beginning of life issues.
We need to pay attention to the ideas that we are letting in. I'm not saying we stick our heads in the sand, that we don't listen to what's being said. In fact, we need to listen to what's being said in culture so we can learn how to respond to it. But we should look at everything critically, including the movies we watch, including the TV shows, even animated shows we let our children watch. There is no better way to teach something than through visual and auditory mediums. In other words, TV and movie and theater. These are some of the most powerful ways to communicate ideas.
It's no coincidence that the better public speakers are the ones that engage more of our senses. They don't just engage our ears. They engage our eyes. Sometimes they don't just engage those two things but they actually engage our tactile senses. We actually are holding something and doing something. Studies have shown that the more senses that are involved in an action, the more we remember and the more we learn.
Well TV and movies engage our whole person. They engage our mind, they engage our intellect, they engage our hearts and our emotions and get all of us involved. They're doing this to teach us something. Very few filmmakers out there have a lack of a view to put forth. They are all trying to teach something. There is a worldview behind a movie in what it celebrates and in what it condemns. Often we don't pick up on that, but we need to. We need to realize the worldviews that are behind the news stories we read and that type of thing.
The last example I'll leave you with is of a book I'm currently reading. My wife is pregnant and we are expecting a baby later this year.
I'm reading a book for expectant fathers. It's interesting that in dealing with what could happen if the child has birth defects, the author says it's a very difficult conversation you're going to have to have. There are two options. One is to keep the baby. The other is to terminate the pregnancy. You know what he's done here? He's used words and redefined them to morally distance himself and potentially the reader from what is the killing and the murder of an unborn child. He talks about it like it's a baby if you keep it but it's just a pregnancy if you don't. Isn't that interesting morally distancing language when it comes to the killing of what was just a baby in the previous sentence? It's not suddenly a different thing based on how you feel about it. Our feelings don't determine that. Our autonomy, as strong as we may feel it and want to, doesn't actually change reality. It's still a baby whether you want it or not.
The way we talk about things betrays how we feel. The way we talk about things can also influence how we feel. We need to pay attention to how other people are talking at us and to us so that we don't come away with bad ideas that will have consequences and potentially casualties as they take root in society and in our minds.
I'll talk with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Today, we're going to talk about how to discuss God with Mormons.
It's common to hear confusion about the differences in Mormonism and Christianity. Some of this confusion even comes from Christians and Mormons. What you already may have noticed is that I'm making a distinction between Christianity and Mormonism, which is often part of the confusion. Is there actually a difference? Yes, there is,o and here's why.
When Mormons claim to be Christians, or even when Christians claim that Mormons are Christians, they're mistaking a fundamental fact, which is the very reason Joseph Smith started Mormonism. He was trying to find which religion was the true one, which denomination was the right one. What God the Father and Jesus Christ (Note: This is a correction. Originally, I had incorrectly said that “an angel from God” had appeared to Smith.) appeared and told him they were all an abomination. There are Christian denominations today with the same beliefs that also existed in the 1800s, when Joseph Smith started Mormonism. The same beliefs and the same Gospel and the same scriptures. It's disingenuous for someone to claim that Mormons and Christians are the same, because supposedly, we're an abomination. We hold beliefs that are corrupted fundamentally, such that Joseph Smith needed to start a new church. You can't have it both ways. It can’t be fundamentally corrupted and an abomination and also be the same thing. So I just wanted to address that at the beginning.
One of the major points of confusion when we talk about Christianity and Mormonism is that the two religions use the same terms. We'll use the term God and Trinity and God-head and Jesus, but all of these terms actually find rather different definitions in their two respective religions in how they're used. The one I want to talk about today is simply God.
Mormonism believes that there is more than one God. There is not just one being that is God and that's it. There are actually multiple Gods. In fact, there's this phrase that's kind of common as a summary of Mormon belief, from Mormons, in fact. It goes like this,
”As man now is, God once was, and as God now is, man may be."
That's kind of catchy, but let's run through it.
“As man now is, God once was,” so man is man now. He's human. That means, on their belief, that God used to be human. In fact, they think God the Father has a body of flesh and bones, not that he's just pure spirit like Christians do. So that's the first part. “As man now is, God once was,” so God used to be like us, which is very different from what we see in scripture, as we'll look at in a minute. Then, “as God now is, man may be.” So God is divine and exalted and glorified and deified and all of those things, and they're saying we may be able to be like that. Now, they would say that happens, in part, through the atonement of Jesus, who they actually believe is a separate being, not one being with God the Father. We'll get to that in a minute also. Nevertheless, do you see a difference here? That God, on their view, used to be a man, and man could become God, which implies that there's the possibility of multiple Gods.
But what does scripture say about that? Well, let's look at Isaiah 43:10, where Yahweh, the Lord, says to his people,
”Before Me, no god was formed, nor shall there be any after Me."
I think that's pretty straightforward. No god before Yahweh, no god after Yahweh. It's a done deal. But practically, in conversation, it's not going to end here, and there are a few ways this conversation might go. If you're talking with a Mormon and you say, "Hey, do you believe, like the Mormon church, that there are multiple Gods, that, in fact, you might become a God one day?" They'll most likely say yes, if they're being honest and if they've been educated in this. You can ask them, "Well, what about Isaiah 43:10? Yahweh says that, 'Before Me, there was no god formed, and there'll be none after me.'"
The conversation might take a couple forks here. One might be that they might pull out 1 Corinthians 8. A more educated Mormon might go to 1 Corinthians 8, and this is where Paul says,
”If, after all, there are so-called gods, whether in Heaven or in Earth (as there are many gods and many lords) yet, for us, there is one God."
It seems like, at least on a Mormon reading of this passage, that Paul was saying, “there are many gods, but for us, there is one,” but that's not what he's saying at all, in fact. In this context, he's talking about people who believe there to be other gods, who were actually worshiping idols. In fact, in verse five, he even says that they're “so-called gods”. In other words, not gods. They call them that, but that's not what they are.
He actually goes on to say something that I think directly contradicts the Mormons' point, which is, "Yet, for us, there is one God, the Father, from Whom are all things and for Whom we live, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through Whom are all things and through Whom we live." Paul has this really common habit of using certain prepositions, and he's not necessarily picky about what they are, for the Father and other prepositions for the Son to describe the same things. So, here, he says everything came from the Father, and he says everything came through the Son. Well, in Mormonism, Jesus is a created being. How did everything come through him if he's a thing? That doesn't work either.
What's interesting here is Paul is making the point that you can't separate the work of the Father and the Son. Everything came from the Father through the Son, and he's basically affirming what we would call “inseparable operations,” that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are all involved in a mutual work. They may have different roles, but you can't separate their actions from the action of God.
On Paul's view, there is one being of God, which is where we get our doctrine of the Trinity, which stands in contrast to the Mormon doctrine of the Trinity, which says that “there is God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Though distinct beings, they are unified in purpose and doctrine.” Well, that's very different from a Christian definition of the Trinity. That's another reason why that Mormonism and Christianity are different religions. We conceive of God fundamentally differently. We don't think the Son, the Father, and the Spirit are distinct beings that are only unified in purpose. We think there is one God, in fact. Not three Gods, one God. Exactly as Isaiah 43:10 says, "No God before Him, no God after Him." Same God.
John tells us that when Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, he actually saw Jesus. So Yahweh is the one that he saw. It's the same one that is speaking here in Isaiah 43:10, the same one who is Jesus, who is one with the Father. There is one God. None before, none after. This verse is very helpful in talking with Mormons.
Now, I mentioned that this conversation could take different tracks. One might be to go to 1 Corinthians 8, like we just did, where we actually see Paul is describing that you can't separate the Father and the Son. It's not like the Son is created and the Father isn't or that they came into being at different times. Everything came into existence by and through and from both of them. He's talking about so-called Gods. So that's the first track this conversation can take.
The second is for a Mormon to say, "Well, I mean, the Bible has been corrupted. It's been translated after translated after translated. We can't trust it." Well, we can demonstrate that that claim is false. First, it's a little interesting that the Mormons include the Bible along with their other books of scripture. Besides just the Bible, which Christians affirm is the sole source of God's inerrant, authoritative, inspired word, Mormons have the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and then also the Bible. So, four sacred books, not just one.
When the Mormon says, "You can't trust the Bible. It's been corrupted. It's been translated after translated after translated,” the first question to ask is, "Well, which parts don't you read? Which parts are corrupted? When you're reading the Bible, what parts do you skip?" Well, they don't know. There isn't an answer to that question. It's a claim they've been taught, but it's not a claim they can demonstrate, at least in my experience. I could be wrong on this. But I've never heard anyone have a good response to that, listening to interviews, and in personal conversations. They don't know. If you can't trust any of it, why do you point to part of it? If they're going to go to 1 Corinthians 8 in response to Isaiah 43, well, how do we know that's translated correctly? There's not a good answer to that question if they're consistent in their view. So that's the first question: “what parts don't you read? Which parts do you skip?” That type of thing.
The second point is when they say the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation, that's actually wrong. No one, when they endeavor to make a new Bible translation today, at least not any respectable publisher or scholarly group, goes to the previous English translation and says, "Let me translate based on that." Your current NIV is not a translation of the previous NIV, which is not a translation of the NASB, which is not a translation of the KJV, which is not a translation of the ASV. It doesn't work like that. At every point, we go back to the earliest and best manuscripts in the original language and translate from that, so the Bible is not a translation of a translation of a translation.
Their official documents, their official doctrine in Mormon belief is that the Bible is correct in as much as it is translated correctly, but when they describe it to you, what they're actually talking about is transmission of the text—how did manuscripts get copied—but that's not translation, that's transmission. That's another problem, which maybe we'll talk more about in the future.
The fact of the matter is that we always go back to the earliest and best manuscripts, and we've talked about this before. The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is excellent. We have over 5,800 partial Greek manuscripts for the New Testament, and if you include Latin and Coptic and Syriac, we have tens of thousands more, and many of them are written very close to the events they describe. More than that, the time from the writing of the manuscript to the copies we have is very short compared to any other ancient work in the ancient world. So the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is second to none.
More than that, I think it's interesting, because when they say it's been corrupted, they disagree with Jesus, who said not even a jot or tittle would be lost, that His words would not pass away. So in order to say the Bible has been corrupted, and if the Bible's the word of God, we have to say Jesus was wrong. His words have been corrupted. They have passed away in some part. That puts the Mormon at odds with Jesus. It also undercuts any claim the Mormon makes based on any Bible verse, which I think is important. If they can't trust it, why do they get to choose which verses they trust and which ones they don't? What's their consistent standard? Well, there isn't one.
So, to briefly recap how we can address the concern about the reliability of scripture, the first point is to ask, "Well, which parts don't you read?" What we're driving at here is you need a consistent standard. I don't think you have one. The second thing to point out is the Bible isn't translated after translated after translated. It's one step from the original language to our language. More than that, what they're describing is transmission, not translation, which would be another incorrect belief. The third and best point is simply that Jesus said His words would not pass away, so we can't disagree with Jesus on that. We can't claim to be on His side and disagree with His view on scripture. Why do I believe the Bible is the word of God? Why do I believe it's still correct today? Because Jesus believed that. It's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. Are there other supporting evidences? Yes, most certainly, and I don't think that should surprise us, either. Fundamentally, it's a claim based on what Jesus believed. That's how we can talk with Mormons about this.
How do we talk with Mormons about the fact that there's one God? Scripture says there's one God. There was none before him; there was none after him. This takes Mormon belief out at the knees, because it's based on this idea that “as man now is, God once was,” so God used to be a man. “As God now is, you may become,” which is a very unbiblical concept.
We've talked about Mormonism a little in the past and how its idea of with the Gospel is is not actually good news, that you're “saved after all you can do,” only then is Christ's sacrifice enough for you. Well, I can't do enough. Besides that, the Bible says that we're justified by faith, not in addition to works, but faith alone. We're justified by faith not of works, so that no man can boast.
So why do we talk about this stuff? Well, because the true Gospel, accurately presented, accurately understood, should be a breath of fresh air to Mormons. Does God need to open their eyes to His truth? Does He need to regenerate their heart, just like He does for anyone and everyone? Yes. Nevertheless, the correct Gospel, correctly described, is a breath of fresh air to them, as it should be to anyone. I think that's important. That's why we have these conversations. That's why we talk about beliefs of other religions and ideologies and worldviews, because as Paul said, we need to tear down ideologies and philosophies and everything that is raised up against the knowledge of Christ—The accurate, Biblically based knowledge of Christ.
So I hope this has been helpful in talking with your Mormon friends and neighbors about Christianity or the differences between it and Mormonism and how we can contend for the truthfulness of a Biblically-based view of God and of scripture in those conversations. I look forward to talking with you next week on unapologetic.
]]>People who argue against God are only able to do so because God exists.
Last week, we talked about how if God does not exist, morality does not exist. There's no such thing as a moral obligation or a moral value or duty if God does not exist. Moral laws require a moral law-giver.
At the same time, we also pointed out that a person can deny the existence of God and still do moral actions. Now, there wouldn't be such thing as a moral action if God didn't exist, but you can deny that God exists and still do moral actions. You could foreseeably, for instance, deny that authors exist but still read books. Where did the books come from? Who knows! You could still learn to read and read a book and deny the existence of authors. It's a bad position. It's inconsistent, but none the less, you could do it.
I want to talk about a broader instance of this type of problem today. I want to talk about how the person who argues against the existence of God or even says, "God does not exist," is only able to do that because God exists. Let's flesh that out together today.
The first thing to point out is we're not going to look at this situation the same way as a non-christian. We should not make ourselves look at this situation, look at the evidence as a non-christian would. Now, it's helpful to understand where they're coming from, but when we want to look at the situation as Christians, we know much more than the non-christian does. We have been given God's word which tells us about so many things we could not know otherwise. This is one of them.
We know from scripture that we were created to glorify God. Our bodies were created not to live for ourselves but to glorify him. Isn't it interesting that the person who is denying this existence of God is actually behaving contrary to how they were designed to be? They can only make that denial because of how God created them to be. He created us to have an intellectual sense. He created us to be able to make choices, different from animals do in that way. We're able to evaluate evidence and come to a well-reasoned conclusion and make a choice about what we're going to do. He created us with those faculties to use them for his glory, not our own. Isn't it interesting that the non-christian takes this gift, takes, in fact, how we were designed to act and flips it upside down, so instead of using it to glorify the creator, he uses it to glorify the creature, himself.
He's only able to do that because of how God created him. He takes the gift that God has given him, of all these attributes that come from being created in the image of God and uses them for an ignoble purpose, not a noble purpose. That's the first example. Our very selves were created to glorify God, and yet, we often don't do that. We flip it upside down, and we use it to glorify ourselves, not God.
The second thing that is true when a non-christian or atheist argues against the existence of God is they're doing it in God's universe. They wouldn't even be here if God hadn't created them. The very fact that they're able to argue against the existence of God is only because God has created them in this world. They're standing on God's ground, in God's solar system, in God's universe, breathing God's air and arguing against him with their very God-given breath. That is just so ironic, I think.
It also points out the fact that so much of who we are as people, apart from the regenerative work of Christ has been corrupted by sin. People often say, "Why isn't God more obvious?" Well, are you going to answer that as a Christian from a biblical point of view, or are you going to answer it from a non-christian point of view? Biblically speaking, God is incredibly obvious. Romans 1 says that He has used the natural world to make known his power and divine glory, that we can know he exists from creation.
The psalmist says in Psalm 19:1, "The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky displays his handiwork. Day after day, they pour forth speech.” The skies are speaking who God is and that he exists. Now, we can't know everything about him through nature which is why we have scripture, but nonetheless, scripture tells us from God's point of view, which is the only true point of view, that nature tells us that he exists, and yet what do people do? They use nature to argue against God.
Maybe it's by breathing his air, standing on his ground and arguing against him with their very God-given breath as we pointed out, or maybe it's by saying, "Well, look. We see these natural processes that God has created where animals can adapt to their environment." Then, maybe we extrapolate that out and say, "Well, that means that everything could have come from a single-celled organism. You know what? God's not necessary.’ We take what God has displayed in nature that actually displays his creative handiwork. Some people take it to an extreme and then argue against him based on his own creative handiwork and a theory that lacks much evidence. Nonetheless, isn't that interesting? We don't just use ourselves. We use God's world to argue against him. We'll say, "Well, we know how it works. There are these physical laws, so God's not necessary." That's the exact same argument we saw last week with morality. Just because you know that something works or even how it works, that doesn't tell you where it came from or why it's here.
We could say, "Well, there are these physical laws," (which actually aren't laws. They're just descriptions of how things usually work if all things are the same) and we understand this, so God's not necessary," but that's not true, right? Where did the law come? Laws require law-givers? Where did all this stuff come from? Once again, did everything come from nothing for no reason with no cause for no purpose? That makes no sense.
We don't just use our bodies and our minds. We use the physical world, often times, to argue against God. Once again, they can only do that because God exists, because he created them, and he created this world.
Just to briefly hit on what we hit on last week, a third way that people often argue against God, and they're only able to do that because he exists, is with regards to our moral intuitions. Everyone has moral intuitions. Everyone knows deeply that certain things are right and certain things are wrong. Now, they might relativize that and say, "Well, that's just my opinion," or "That's just because of society," but we've talked about these types of things in the past and how those arguments and those reasons ultimately lack explanatory power. They are not good explanations. They're the best you've got if you deny the existence of God, but nonetheless, when you look at them circumspectly from all angles, they're not the best explanations. As Christians, we know they're not true because God is the basis for morality. God has created people with moral knowledge because they're made in his image and as he says in Romans 2, the law is written on their hearts. How do they use that to argue against them? Well, in a few ways.
One is what we looked at last week, that people will say, "Well, I don't need God to be moral." Well, in a very philosophical sense, if God did not exist, you could not be moral, because there's no such thing as morality. That's what we hit on last week. However, people often take this a step further. They'll look at the acts of Israel and God and the Bible. For instance, God declaring and decreeing the destruction of the Canaanites. They'll see, "That was immoral.” So they're using the moral sense God has given them to analyze God's actions, and then say, "He is immoral." That is the height of rebellion and autonomy. That's flipping upside down the creator-creature distinction. It's thinking that God, somehow, for some reason, must play on the same field with the same rules that we do. That is not true.
What the creator can do justly and rightly is not necessarily, and we shouldn't expect it to be the same as what the creation/creature should be able to do. People take this moral impulse, this moral intuition they have and say, "I can be good without God.” They also analyze God's actions and say, "He was immoral." It's not just that they complain and degrade what God did in the Old Testament with decreeing the destruction of the Canaanites and things like that. No, they take it a step further sometimes and will say that, "if Christians are right, that there is a God who sent his son to die on the cross, that that is cosmic child abuse. What type of loving perfect good God sacrifices his own son, sent his son to die?" Well, you know what? In part, this is based on a feature of them being created in the image of God. They have a moral impulse. That's good.
We need to work with that when people show it to us, but a result of the fall is that our intellect, our mind, our impulses, our desires, our feelings and indeed, even our moral intuitions are corrupted. They've been tainted. They don't allow us to see correctly. They don't inform us well about the world. On the one hand, a father who kills his son, if that's all you know, yes, you'd probably be inclined to say, "That's not good," but that's not all we know. That's not all Christians say about the cross.
What they do say is so much more than that. Don't we say that the son who came was also God, that God came himself, that he didn't just conscript someone else to be the scapegoat, but he himself came to earth to die on that cross for our sin? What they see when they complain about God coming and sending his son to die on the cross is they don't understand the Trinitarian aspect of it. More than that, they miss the fact that it's God doing it himself, but even more than that, that this is love.
This is what the bible tells us, that we know love because of what happened at the cross. There are at least 10 to 15 places in the New Testament where the display of God's love is linked to what he did at the cross. Isn't this just the height of irony? The greatest irony of all the things we've looked at today is that this non-christian, this hypothetical person is arguing against God. They're saying he is immoral. He is unjust. They're criticizing and condemning him for the very act of the cross which he did to pay for their immorality, their rebellion which at that very moment, they are exhibiting. That is the height of irony. It's the height of depravity also. It exhibits man's autonomy and what happens when man lives apart from the law of God. These are just a few examples. We could keep going.
What we've looked at today is that we use ourselves. We use our body and our mind that—we only have because God created us—to argue against him. We argue against God from the physical world, often times. We also looked at the fact that the non-christian will use his moral intuition that God gave him and argue that God's own actions are immoral. More than that, it goes a step further when we look at the cross. We see that the non-christian often thinks the cross is immoral. The very means, the only hope they have of salvation, they condemn as immoral. That speaks to the fact that this is not an intellectual issue.
We looked at Romans 1 briefly where God says, "Men are without excuse because his existence can be known." We can't take a non-christian or a non-biblical view on this issue of God's existence and say that, "Well, I guess people do have an excuse. I guess it's not clear to everyone." No. God says it's clear, so it's clear, so man is without excuse.
If everyone can evaluate the evidence the same way, why don't we come to the same conclusions? Because we can't all evaluate the evidence the same way. We have different presuppositions intellectually, but if you even go down a layer further, if you want to think of it that way, our spiritual state influences how we think. Man has been corrupted because of the fall. He does not think correctly. He thinks of himself more than his creator. He sees his autonomy as the the highest good. Autonomy literally means self-law. Maybe we'll talk about that another week, but nonetheless, all of these things result in him not behaving in a rational way. It is rational to believe in God. It is irrational to deny his existence and say, "He is immoral," for all the reasons we've looked at today.
I hope all of these gives you a perspective on how we should think about ourselves, this body God has given us, this world he has placed us in, the moral intuitions he has given us. Let's make sure we, as Christians, first and foremost are using those for his glory and not using them for our own selfish gains. Let's not fall into the same type of rebellion that we've just been talking about the non-christian falling into. I think it's also fair to point out to the non-christian how they often use these things that they could only have if God exists to argue against him, When they pull the morality card, well, “where do you get morality if God doesn't exist?”
“You want to say that the physical world is an argument against God. Well, where did the physical world come from? You have a big problem there.” Everything from nothing? That's not something I would want to have to defend, but that's what the non-christian who makes such a claim has to defend. Let's push them on that. Let's make it clear that people can't just sit in God's lap in order to slap him in the face, as Cornelius Van Til has famously said. We did a podcast on that before. They're only able to be where they are because of who he has created them to be. They can only slap them in the face (argue against him) because of who he has created them to be. They use the very good gifts he's given them to argue against him.
I hope this has been helpful. I look forward to talking with you next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Do you know any smugglers? You're probably thinking, "That's kind of of weird. I don't know any smugglers." Right? Honestly, I don't know any either. In fact, when I think of smuggling, I think of Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, where Han Solo was a smuggler. He hides Princess Leia and Luke underneath the floorboard in his ship, where he used to hide the cargo or contraband that he'd hide from the Empire... because he was a smuggler.
That has really nothing to do with what we're talking about today. Today we're going to talk about people who smuggle in ideas, often undetected by us, in conversation. Here's what I mean. When we talk about morality, most often that's where this type of thing occurs. Someone might say, "I don't need God to be moral. I just do things that help other people." Or someone might even say, "I don't think morality exists. It's bad to force your moral views on people."
Both of these individuals who make statements like this have smuggled in a moral concept, and we need to be able to pick up on that. We need to catch on to the smuggling of morality into the conversation. Did you notice where it happened? Let's go back through it quickly and I'll point it out.
When someone says, "I don't need God to be moral. I just do what helps other people," they're implicitly saying that helping other people is a moral good. It's a good thing. In the second example, “morality doesn't exist; it's bad to force your moral views on people,” Where did this idea of bad come from? Isn't that a moral idea? They've smuggled in their moral views. In fact, I would suggest to you that no one can actually consistently live in this world and deny that morality exists, or say that it's just up to the individual. At some point they will try to apply their moral views to someone else. They will act like morality is not subjective, like it's not just up to me to decide, but they will act as though it's objective, a fact of reality, something that's true for everyone.
Let's talk about some problems with this view that “I don't need God to be moral. I just do what helps other people.” The first thing to point out is non-Christians can do moral things. They can. They can do good actions. They can hold the door for someone. They can hop on a grenade to save their comrades in war. They can do those types of things. But they can never be as moral as they should be because it is immoral to not worship God. Not worshiping is actually a sin. Not placing faith in God is a sin. You might think that sounds extreme. Well God has commanded us to worship him. He has commanded everyone to repent, so not doing that is sinful. Non-Christians cannot be as moral as they should be.
But, more than that, they can do moral actions. They can still do good things. We need to be clear on that. Denying the existence of God doesn't mean you won't end up doing moral things. You'll be inconsistent when you do it, which is something we'll get to in a minute, but nonetheless, everyone actually knows what morality is. Everyone knows morality exists, and in general, people all believe the same things, by and large, to be moral — at least the big ones. Breaking a trust is considered to be immoral. Murdering is considered to be immoral. Why? People just seem to innately know this, but the reason is actually because God has created us in his image and these things are written on our heart, Paul tells us in Romans. That's the first point: not worshiping God is immoral. However, the non-Christian can still do moral actions.
The second is that, as I've already pointed out, morality often gets smuggled into conversations. This is something we always have to be on the lookout for. Someone will be saying, "Well, morality doesn't exist. It's wrong when you do this." Where'd you get this idea of wrong? Where did you get this idea of bad? Where did you get this idea of evil? Look for moral terms in conversations and put the burden of proof back on the person making the statement. How do you ground this? Where does this come from? Why should I believe you that it's actually evil, moral, immoral, whatever, when someone does this type of action.
Don't just look for negative words. Don't just look for “evil” and “moral” and “bad.” Look for good things. Look for what they celebrate. Someone might say morality doesn't exist and say it was great today, that all of these people marched for LGBT equality. Really? Great? Was that good? Was it a good thing that they did this? Because that's a moral claim. If it's not a moral claim, then what is it? Just your feeling? Do you think there's any kind of transcendent quality to this thing you're saying is great or good? Or is it merely just your emotional opinion? Are you just emoting or is it actually true that it is great that people stood up for LGBT equality?
By extension, would it be not great, might it be bad for people to oppose LGBT equality? We can tease people out on this. We can draw them out and get them to see that you can't have it both ways. You can't say morality doesn't exist and make moral claims.
People cannot avoid making moral claims. It's just how we're made. It's fair to confront someone with that. We've just covered that smuggling in morality is something that often occurs. We've also mentioned that the non-Christian can behave morally. That's important. We also need to make a distinction between believing God exists and that being necessary for a grounding of morality, and saying God doesn't exist but still being able to act morally.
That brings us to our third point. Some people confuse the existence of morality—where does it come from, its source—with a knowledge of morality. It's common today for people to say, "I know this thing exists, so therefore I don't need God." "I know morality exists," some atheists will say, "so I don't need God. We can know this on our own as a society. Don't we just know that slavery is wrong?" Now as an aside, I would say we should just know slavery is wrong, and pretty much any argument against slavery is also an argument against abortion, so it's interesting when people are inconsistent on that. But that's a topic for another day.
People often confuse existence and the source of morality with the knowledge of it. They'll say, "Well I have a knowledge of it, so therefore God's not required." But no one should be making the argument that God is required to know morality. At least a conscious admission that God exists isn't required to know morality. What we are saying is God is required if there is to be something that is moral. God is the grounding for morality.
Now in a very strict and technical sense, God is also required for us to know morality. If God didn't exist, we wouldn't be able to know morality because morality wouldn't exist. But that's not really the point we're making. We're making the less nuanced point that if God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. If God doesn't exist, then there's no reason why I shouldn't murder someone else, shouldn't steal from someone else, or any of those things. There's no “ought” to it. An ought is a just claim, like where you have to do something, where it is wrong for you not to do that thing.
Now there might be societal reasons to behave morally. Society might make me hurt, might punish me if I don't do what it says. But that doesn't mean it's actually wrong to not do what society says. That simply means there might be a cost. What we're talking about here is objective morality, the type of thing that's true whether anyone thinks it's true, believes it's true, or anything like that.
So why is it true that morality doesn't exist if God doesn't exist, or said a little more easily to understand, why is God required in order for there to be moral values and duties? Simply put, a moral law requires a moral law giver. You don't get laws, you don't get obligations without someone to place those obligations upon you. If you lived in a country with no government and no other people there, there are no laws on you for that nation. It's the same way with us, in fact. We are members of God's creation, and hence, and only hence, and only as a result of that, we are bound by where requires of us. If there’s no God, there are no overriding, no transcendent requirements. I hope that's clear.
But this goes back to the point that the atheist is going to say, "No, but I can behave morally." You're going to say, “Yeah, we're not talking about how you behave, although we might another time. We're talking about why you think it's actually good to do this thing. Where does this idea of good come from? I know you know it exists, but can you tell me where it comes from? Because we can know things exist and not know their source.“
You could know that gravity exists and not know why. In fact, that's the exact state of modern science. It knows that gravity exists and it can't really tell you why. You can know, and I've used this example before, that your car has an engine that will bring you places, but you cannot know how it works. Those are two separate ideas.
Perhaps a better way to say this is an example I've picked up from Greg Koukl. Here's what he says: You can believe that books exist, you can believe that sentences and paragraphs and stories exist and say that authors do not exist. You can deny the existence of authors and still affirm that there are things that you can read.
Now where did those things come from? Someone had to write them, right? No, not at all. The words are just there. We can read them. Authors aren't necessary. That's exactly what the non-Christian/atheist is doing when he affirms that morality exists and denies that God is necessary for it, or that some type of transcendent source and grounding is necessary for morality. This concept of grounding is so important. Doesn't it just seem silly though to say, "Well, books are real and authors aren't"? That doesn't make sense. Things require a source and a grounding. What makes it right? What makes it wrong? In the atheist's view, nothing.
That's where we push. Those are the questions we ask. But it all starts, oftentimes, with realizing that someone has smuggled in a moral term. They've said that something was good, bad, not good, not bad, evil. They've praised something. They've complained about something. At the same time, maybe in a different statement or context or conversation, they've said morality doesn't exist. Those two things cannot coexist together.
Why? Why do we care about this? Is it just simply to prove someone else wrong? No. What we're trying to get to is this idea that in order for people to make sense of the world, they must believe in God. In fact, a belief in God makes the most sense of their basic, intrinsic intuitions. One of the things we know most deeply is that some things are objectively wrong and other things are objectively good. But what can best explain that?
In the past we've talked about this idea that evolution can't actually account for doing selfless deeds because evolution puts me first, and yet morality is commonly agreed to put others first. More than that, it can't just be something where we decide for ourselves. That doesn't work. I can't decide for you that you should do this thing for me. There must be an overriding kind of transcendent grounding for that. It can't just be society, because that's just a bunch of people agreeing and being arbitrary about deciding that something should apply to a bunch of other people.
Objective claims are true regardless if people agree with them, if they know them, or think about them. That's the type of morality we're talking about. But that's the same type of morality that people have an innate sense for even if they deny that God is a grounding for it.
We want to use that. We want to trade on that intuition to then argue for the existence of God and point out the fact that since they know things are wrong, God's going to hold them accountable for that. Let's not stop with just demonstrating that a theistic god exists. Let's take it all the way to saying you know certain things are right; you know certain things are wrong. The only reason that makes sense is that there is a God, and this God has revealed himself in scripture, and this God holds us accountable, holds me accountable, holds you accountable for the things we have done wrong. That's a problem. There is a all powerful God who's the grounding for morality who is holy and perfect, who holds us accountable for our actions. It is not going to end well.
In fact, he even says that the payoff for this sin, these wrong things we've done, is death. That's not good, but that's not where the story has to end for anyone. The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus when we repent of our sin and place faith for salvation in him, and trust that he died in our place.
We can use this with just a couple steps to get to the Gospel, to trade on this idea that people have innate moral notions even if they don't believe God exists, and to turn it around and say: You know what? This is an easy doorway to get to the Gospel in this conversation.
I hope you'll give that a try. If you do, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear how it goes. If you have questions, I'd be glad to address those, too. Lastly, if you haven't picked up the book on Gender: A Conversation Guide, specifically for parents and ministry leaders, but I think it's helpful for everyone, go get it on Amazon. I think it will help anyone who reads it. I will talk with you next week, on Unapologetic.
]]>This week, I am pleased to welcome my friend Hunter Leavine to the podcast; we have just written and have released a book on gender for parents (which you can get here). On the episode we discuss why we wrote the book along with some thoughts on why the church struggles to discuss these topics in our culture today.
Brian: Hunter, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who you are, what you do, how you got here?
Hunter: Yeah, absolutely. I'm the student director at City Church Tallahassee. I'm also married to the kids director at City Church as well, so my household's life kind of revolves around the next generation of people within the church.
Brian: Nice. How did you get involve with City Church?
Hunter: I actually got invited by a friend when I was 16 years old, so I didn't grow up in a church, necessarily. We were kind of in and out. My family moved around a little bit, and by the time I was in middle school, we had pretty much given up on going to church altogether. A friend reached out to me, and invited me at 16 years old. It was a church plant about 100 people, and I'd been there the past eight years. I’ve seen it grow too. We just had our Easter service last week, and that was about 5,000 people.
Brian: Awesome. So you came to the church, grew up in the church, and now you work at the church?
Hunter: Yes. It's kind of an interesting scenario too to be working youth ministry. I always joke and tell our parents that the youth ministry when I first got involved at City Church was actually me pretending to be a college student with two friends. We were the only high schoolers in a church plant, and now I'm married to a kids minister. It's kind of an interesting thing to be a part of now kind of in retrospect.
Brian: Nice. So you and I have written a book on gender and it's part of a series called "Building Foundations.” Could you tell us about the series and the book at a high level?
Hunter: Yeah, let's start off with the idea behind the series. Over the course of a child's life, it's important to build biblical foundations for them. That's what they're going to live off of the rest of their life, hopefully. So as parents are working with their children, the idea is to strategically teach them God's word as they grow up, and also be proactive.
If you think about the idea of a foundation, you want to be really proactive, you want to do it well the first time, because if you don't do well laying the foundation, then you have to go back to it, it's going to be costly, it's going to take time, it's going to be confusing. One of the things that we're really passionate about, especially at City Church (and this is a resource created for City Church first and foremost to help our families) is to help parents lay the best foundation they can as they disciple their children in God's word.
Brian: So how does the gender part of the series come into play with that?
Hunter: I think it's really an important topic. Obviously, it's starting to be talked about more and more on the news, and 30 years ago, it probably wasn't something that people even thought about, and I think that was because mostly culture would reinforce what scripture would say when it comes to gender. So parents, I don't think, had to be as proactive, they didn't think they had to be as intentional when it came to teaching their children about gender because what they were going to see on TV and what they were going to experience throughout their life and in the desk next to them is going to reinforce what the Bible teaches.
But now we live in a world where that's not necessarily the case. What they see on TV, and hear in music, and hear on the playground is going to be completely different in a lot of ways than what scripture teaches, and so we believe this is kind of an issue that's kind of new to our generation that we're having to tackle. There aren’t a lot of resources out there for families on this. This is something that's quickly growing. You hear about it on the news all the time. Legislations starting to talk more and more about it. We wanted to bring God's timeless truth to this current day issue and really try to help parents lead their children through it well.
Brian: That does seem to be an interesting challenge. As time goes on and we get further and further away from when scripture was written, we have more and more challenges. As you look back at church history, it's interesting that at certain points, the church started talking about things, and it's not like they were new, but it was a response to culture and changing traditions around them.
Parenting's a tough job today where there are constantly more ways that biblical foundations are being threatened in what you're trying to teach your children. So our goal here, I think it's fair to say, is to help give parents a resource. So, could you talk a little bit about how this is a resource but also talk about what it's not.
Hunter: First and foremost, this is not a book to tell parents how to parent. This is a book to help parents parent well. This is not us trying to be experts and tell parents how to do their job, this is us trying to be a supplement in a support to what they're doing in their homes. We work with hundreds of families at City Church.
You're busy running from one soccer practice to the ballet to an SGA meeting to make dinner, you're so busy, and you're doing the work of discipling your children, and you're spending a lot of time with them, but what we want to do is not come in and try to tell you how to be a parent, we just want to help you as you try to do that in your home.
So this book is a support; it's not some sort of manual on how to parent. It's also not some sort of encyclopedia on every single issue around gender. That would take multiple, multiple volumes. But what this is, is just a simple, quick read to help parents think through how are they going to teach their children about what God's word says about gender from the moment that they first start crawling around on the ground to the moment that they're wearing a graduation hat.
There are even some helpful resources too for parents as they interact in their world as adults on the topic of gender as well.
Brian: So the series is called "Building Foundations," and you and I have broken child's development from crawling around to graduation into three different foundational ages. Could you talk about what those three are?
Hunter: Yeah, the first foundation is basically what you could imagine leading up to elementary school. The second foundation is elementary school. There's a lot of things that happen. Like I said, my wife's a kids director and so she works with this entire spectrum, and there's so much that happens between first grade and fifth grade. It's just incredible, so that gets its own foundation. Then we have middle school and high school kind of lumped together. That's third foundation.
And then part two of the book is for adults, and that's just some helpful resources to think through how they're handling different things, whether they're sitting in a parent-teacher meeting or whether they're talking to someone in the bleacher next to them. How are they going to handle this issue as well?
We kind of break the foundations up that way, but we really encourage parents, no matter what age their children are, to read through it all the way and just to think about how they are going to make sure that this is laid in a way that is strategic, in a way that's helpful for their children to understand the more complex issues around it. So we start with the basics. Who is God? What has He done? How does His creation work? And then kind of build from there.
Brian: You weren't kidding when you said it's a quick read. This is a small book. Calling it a book might even push it a little, right? I mean, it's got a cover and pages and a binding, but it's more of a booklet. It's under a hundred pages. It's designed so that, let's say you've 10 minutes and you're waiting in line to pick up your kid at school. You can read a chapter. Or if it's between innings at a baseball game or at practice, you can read this book.
It's not designed for people who are prolific readers, it's designed for the everyday person, which goes back to as Hunter said, us wanting to equip everyday parents to do the very important everyday work of discipleship.
So, why did we write this book? Why this book? Why now?
Hunter: Well, one, I think it's an incredibly important topic that's coming up more and more today, so if you turned on the news this morning and you watched it longer for 30 minutes, there's a good chance that you heard something around this area, this idea of gender. You see a lot of things happening around legislation. You see a lot of talks on television about it. At the same time, although there are millions of millions of books on Amazon, there are not a lot of books out there on this topic, and there certainly aren't a lot of books to help parents on this topic.
This book is rooted in scripture, but it's a strategic approach to how to teach that scripture. So we felt like, man, this is a really important issue for students to understand, for children to understand, and at the same time, we felt like there's probably a huge need out there when it comes to parents trying to handle this because it wasn't, just like I said earlier, something they had to think about 30 years ago, really. It just kind of naturally happened. It was naturally taught and reinforced.
That's really why we chose to write this book, just to really try to help parents teach this well, and then also to think about the major issue isn't just an issue around gender, it's really an issue around scripture. When it comes down to it, there's not just this concern that your child might have a confused idea about what gender is and what scripture teaches, but actually a confused idea about what's scripture's role in their our life. Is scripture authoritative? Is scripture the place that we go to to understand things in this world? I believe yes, it is.
But as a parent, you have to understand, we have to understand together that we have to teach the way that scripture interacts and kind of shapes our lives. This is a huge example of basically where we're not just talking about gender, we're talking about scripture because God's word, especially if you read through the book, you can tell God's word is very clear what he believes about gender.
But at the same time, this is one of those areas that we have to make a stance and say are we going to go with God's word or are we going to go with what culture's telling us? That's kind of the bigger issue behind the book.
Brian: It was interesting to me in writing this that looking at our culture today, they make this issue of gender seem very complicated, right? You might not even have a perspective that's valid if you're a certain gender or you identify as a certain gender. You have feminists and transgender activists and then there's homosexuality, and everyone has their unique input on this, or so they say. A Christian can be left saying, "Okay, what's the truth? This seems really complicated. How do I address all these different concerns?"
While I wasn't gender confused coming into this, I did think, “gosh, how are we going to address all of this?” But what you said is exactly true. When you go to God's word, you see it's not complicated at all. This is actually remarkably simple. Now, how we take these truths and translate them into conversations with different parties, that may be somewhat difficult, but how we train our children up to believe the foundational principles in scripture is actually remarkably simple if we just take the time to do it.
Hunter: I love that. It's also kind of what you said. Look, hey, God's word's not complicated. What complicates it, oftentimes, is us and our lack of willingness to be obedient to it. As pressure continues to increase and increase and increase, I think there's more and more pressure to leave faithfulness to God's word, and so oftentimes, the complications has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with the sinful people reading it. I think this will be a helpful resource to navigate those waters in this topic.
Brian: I just want to underscore something you said a minute ago. From your and my perspective, the concern is not that most children are going to struggle with gender identity. Now I do think, most people will struggle with some form of identity issue, which we do kind of touch on in the book, but the issue isn't that they're going to be transgender, the issue is that this might be the issue that's the wedge between them and scripture.
It's interesting, we've seen this on homosexuality when a Christian child or even just person has a relationship with someone who, let's say is same-sex attracted, identifies that way, it's very easy for that relational component to sway them to change their mind about what the Bible says. Would you agree with that?
Hunter: Yeah, absolutely.
Brian: Okay.
Hunter: I couldn't agree with that more. Loving people doesn't mean always affirming what they're doing. I think that's one of the issues, too, that kind of makes all of this so challenging for parents, is that affirmation and love are not synonyms for one another.
You can love people, and at the same time, not affirm their thoughts, not affirm what they believe. I do think that for the Christian, they have to get to the place where they're willing to say, "Hey look, I love my friends and family who are struggling with this, but at the same time, I'm going to show them love, and I am going to love them. I'm not necessarily going to affirm everything they believe and everything they say." I think that's also kind of something to get thrown into that mix to think about and consider too.
Brian: Yeah, that's a great point, and speaking of love, you have said in the past, just us two sitting around talking, that you think the church lost the war around the word love. Could you talk about that?
Hunter: Yeah, so this really occurred to me last year at the Super Bowl when Coldplay did this huge, incredible halftime performance, and then they had this huge display in the stands that said "love.” A lot of times, in our culture, what's happened with the word love is that people have taken that to believe that you'll never disagree with people, that you'll just accept and affirm, everything they think and they say and they believe.
Now the exception would be if you disagree with them, right? Because if you disagree with them about something, then all of a sudden, you're hateful, you're bigoted, they don't like you, they think that you don't like them. But it’s this idea of love being this huge kind of catch-all: we're just going to accept and affirm everything.
I think a lot of times in the church we kind of act that way, too, where we haven't done a good job of explaining that sometimes, out of love, you have to stand firm in God's truth. Somewhere along the lines within the past few decades, I really think that we've lost touch in a lot of churches with that, that yes, Jesus loves you, yes “for God so loved the world.” Absolutely. But at the same time, Jesus was very firm in what God's word says. Jesus did offend people with the truth. One of the most loving things that you can do, if not the most loving thing that you can do to somebody, is to tell them the truth and point them to God.
So, I think somewhere along the way, we kind of caught up in this kind of “Super Bowl halftime” vague idea of love rather than the love that's shown in scripture, which is very truth-focused, is very Christ-centered, is very concerned about God Himself and not just about making people feel good about themselves. So, I think that's a big issue, too, that kind of plays into all of this.
Brian:So, you're saying that the church uses the word love, and doesn't define it well. Culture uses the word love, and so our student think, "Oh. They're saying the same thing. They're using the same words." Is that kind of the issue you're hitting on there?
Hunter: Yeah, absolutely, we have to define the term. As crazy as it sounds, everybody thinks they know what love means. The 12 year old buying his girlfriend a teddy bear, and the man married for 50 years; everyone thinks they know what love is, but a lot of people have different definitions for what love is, and they definitely have different ideas of what love lived out looks like. I think that's a huge component to the issue that we see here is that I think a lot of people are afraid that if they disagree, they're going to come off as unloving.
At the same time, we should disagree on things and try to seek to figure out what the real truth is. That seems like something that if I love someone and care for them and they love me and care for me, that we should both care that we get it right, that we understand it.
So that's definitely a big, kind of hot topic issue that's talked about throughout the book as well.
Brian: Okay. I want to highlight one thing you said as we wrap this up. You said a lot of times, even in the church, we don't have kind of a Christ-centered definition of love. What that brings us to is in this book where we're writing about gender and the concerns about it, we do make the point, and this is an incredibly important point, which oftentimes Christians probably miss at times, which is: any specific issue is not the biggest issue. A person's struggle with gender identity or same-sex attraction or lying or gossip is not the biggest issue. So what is the biggest issue and how do we address that in the book?
Hunter: Yeah, I think the biggest issue is the same no matter what you're struggling with that area. We are people who desperately need the gospel. We need to understand that we're not perfect people, that we do make mistakes, that we don't always get things right, that we have offended God, that we've rebelled against God, that we need Jesus to stand in our place with His perfection and to take on our punishment, and that we need to repent and believe and not just believe that Jesus loved us and not just believe that Jesus was the Savior, but believe that the work of God throughout all of history and redemption is true, and that He's given us His word for a purpose, and that purpose is so that we can better know Him, that we can better love and glorify Him.
I think that we need to make sure that we're understanding that if we're going to believe in Christ, if we're really going to live that out in our lives, that it is going to interfere with our lives. That's something that my pastor at City Church says all the time, that following Jesus interferes with our lives. The biggest issue is if we believe that Jesus is who He really says He is, we're going to be okay if our neighbor thinks differently of us. We're going to be okay with it if we're a little controversial on our view of gender. We're going to be okay if our relatives disagree with us. That's okay because of what we believe to be true in the gospel.
Once again, it's not confusing, it's not challenging because of what God's word says. It's not challenging because of our lack of understanding what it teaches. It's very clear. It's challenging because we're sinful people who struggle to follow Jesus in obedience. I think that, really, that's at the heart of my life and at the heart of every believer's life, that that's what we're wrestling with is okay, if I believe the gospel, that has demands in my life, and I'm going to live it out. Really, I think that's the heart of the issue.
Brian: Well Hunter, I just want to say in front of everyone who's listening, it was a pleasure working on this with you. I feel like the project is definitely better off for the two of us doing it together. We're looking to write more of these. We haven't totally settled on topics, but Building Foundations is going to be a series. But at least for now, the Gender Conversation Guide is out, so where can people get it?
Hunter: Yeah, you can get it on Amazon where all books are found.
Brian: And we've got it for print, and we've got it for Kindle. If you are a church or a ministry and you would like to bulk-order these to maybe to give to your parents or sell in your bookstore, feel free to drop us an email or use the contact form on my website, and we would love to work out those details with you.
We wrote this first and foremost, as Hunter said, to be a resource for our church, but also for "the" church. We hope you get the book. We hope it is helpful as you disciple your children. We hope it's helpful for you too as you navigate these conversations with perhaps people on your PTA board or sports teams.
It's been a great time talking with you Hunter. Thanks for coming on.
Hunter: Thanks Brian.
Brian: And I'll talk with you all next week on Unapologetic.
]]>Have you ever heard someone say that there are verses missing from the Bible? Perhaps this has even been someone in your church, and they might be comparing your NIV translation to their KJV. They're saying, "Look, these new Bible publishers, they're taking verses out of the Bible. They're distorting. They're corrupting God's word."
Is this true? You yourself might even have been looking at a passage that your pastor was preaching out of and you might have realized at some point, "I don't actually have that verse in my Bible." Or maybe you're reading around and you see where somewhere in your Bible it goes from verse 10 to verse 12, and the question is: Well where's verse 11?
All of these types of questions are related to something called textual criticism. That sounds really complicated, but we're just going to talk through this together to explain why different Bibles might have different verses in them. If you're able to get a Bible, I would suggest that you get one right now and turn to about Matthew 18. If you're in your car like so many people are that listen to podcasts, like I often am, you'll totally be fine with your Bible, but if you do have it, turn to Matthew 18. It will be helpful as we look at a couple of things.
We've talked about this before, but the Bible we have now is actually the result of a lot of work by a lot of people. Our Bible has a history. As Christians who affirm that the scriptures are the word of God, they're the very breath of God breathed out to us, we need to know their history. Part of that is what we're going to cover today. We certainly can't cover the whole history of the Bible in a 14-minute podcast, but we can cover part of it.
Initially, people like Paul wrote down on a manuscript, either personally or using a scribe or someone to write on their behalf, a letter, let's say, to the church in Galatia. That letter was sent to the church, and they found it to be helpful, and they copied it, and they sent it other places, and people borrowed it, and those people copied it. Copies were made of copies were made of copies were made of copies. Then this got translated into Latin. It also got translated into Syriac and different languages like that.
Then we came along and we said we needed an English translation. We took some Greek manuscripts and we translated into English. Today we do the same thing. Our English translation today, let's say the most recent version of the NIV, is not a translation of the previous NIV, which is not a translation of the RSV, which is not a translation of the KJV. It doesn't go back like that. It's not a telephone game in that way.
Every time we make a new translation, every time we want to try to faithfully take God's word and put it into modern language, we go back to the earliest and best manuscripts. What this speaks to is that there is a question as to which manuscripts we should use. We have over 5,800 copies of partial manuscripts or full books of the New Testament. We're always striving to go back to the oldest and best.
The reason for this is sometimes manuscripts got changed as they were copied. Now you may have noticed that, if you had to copy something, you may have inadvertently drifted your eyes down to a different line and written some words there, and then gone right back up. You might not have realized it, so you actually inserted something from a different place in the text.
Or perhaps, if you were copying something so frequently that you knew it so well, you might have included something from another part of the document in a previous part because it kind of fit.
Scribes did the same types of things. What we see is sometimes, in Matthew, a scribe accidentally, or maybe intentionally just trying to be helpful, included something from Mark that wasn't originally in Matthew. We actually see, when we look at old manuscripts of Matthew, some things are not there that are in later versions of Matthew. This doesn't mean the text was corrupted. It was simply a mistake or a helpful note.
The same thing happens with, for instance, Luke. Sometimes another scribe copying in Matthew might have included something from Luke. When the KJV was translated, we ended up with some verses in there that were from much later manuscripts. They did not reflect the earliest and best manuscripts, so these readings, these verses that were included in the KJV, were not original. They were not Holy Spirit-inspired scripture because they weren't in the originals. But our verse numbers in our Bibles today are the same verse numbers the KJV has.
I want to quickly just recap these two very important points: Copies were made of copies were made of copies, and sometimes these copies got changed. The verses we have in our Bible, at least the numbers, match how the verses were in the KJV.
What that means is when we go to make a new translation, to take the Bible and to put timeless truths into modern language, sometimes we'll come to a verse number that points to content that wasn't in the originals. We might get to a verse that got inserted into a later manuscript but it's not in the Bible; it's not in the originals, so we don't want to include it in our modern translation.
This leaves us with a question: What do we do with that number? If you're reading along in Matthew, and you're in Matthew 18, and you're reading verse 10, and verse 11 isn't actually a verse—it should never have been there but it had a number—what do we do with that? Do we just say what used to be verse 12 gets moved up to 11, and then everyone is off by a whole number? No, that wouldn't be good.
What scholars have come to as a consensus is that we just skip that number. If whatever used to be considered verse 11 isn't original, we just skip it. In Matthew 18, your Bible may very well go, verse 10 and then verse 12. You might not even notice this when you're reading, which would actually be a good thing. We don't want to necessarily call to attention to that. That shouldn't be a stumbling block. But you need to be aware that this type of thing happens.
It's not just Matthew 18:11. It also happens in Matthew 17:21. You might be reading along and it goes verse 20 and then verse 22. I'm Matthew 17:21, in the KJV it reads like this: "But this kind," (this kind of demon or evil spirit), "does not go out except by prayer and fasting."
This is assuredly not something Matthew originally wrote. What it actually seems like is the scribe copying this inserted the content from Mark where Matthew was saying the same thing. It's the same way in Matthew 18:11. This says, "For the son of man came to save the lost." That's certainly true, but that is not in the earliest and best manuscripts of Matthew. It's not original to Matthew. It seems like a scribe inserted it from Luke, because it was in the same sort of section where Luke was talking about the same thing. Your Bible probably skips these.
Now how would you know this? Some translations that are older actually include them in the text like they are original, and I would say that's not good. Other translations will have a footnote. Some translations may even put them in double square brackets, which is helpful, but that kind of puts them in the text where shouldn't be and can distract you when you're reading.
My favorite translation is the New English Translation. I know a lot about it. I've worked with the scholars who have translated that. I've been involved with the people who has managed that process over the years. Fair disclosure: I used to work for the Biblical Studies Foundation that makes the New English Translation. I think it's a very good translation.
But one of its most notable points is over 62,000 translator's notes on why they chose the readings they chose. Part of this involves why they chose to translate some verses and not others. Why is Matthew 17:21 not included? There's a note to tell you this. It says: because it's not in the earliest and best manuscripts or witnesses.
That can be a helpful thing for you to know. Often, your Bible, your study bible will have some pointers as to why this type of thing occurs. Now you might be wondering, how many verses is this true for? How many verses are not in my Bible?
The first thing is we need to change our thinking. They're not actually verses. They weren't original, so let's not refer to them like they should be in there and they got removed. There are about 19, give or take how you classify them, things that used to be considered verses in the Bible which we now know are most likely not original, so they are not included in modern translations. I'll include a link to a helpful little chart of how different translations handle these different verses. It will also have a list of the verses so you can see what we're talking about here. There are about 19 or 18 of these types of things. Those are full verses.
Now this type of concern, things getting added that we now know were added, it pertains to partial verses too. For instance, Matthew 18:15, in older translations, reads: "If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault." But you may notice your more modern translation says, "If your brother sins, go and show him his fault." Those are kind of different things. The first one only pertains to if my brother sins against me, but the second one is a general point: "If my brother go and sins, go and show him his fault."
What we see when we look at the manuscript evidence is that "against you" was only included in later manuscripts. It's most likely not original, so some translations won't include that. Once again, how would you know? There's probably a footnote that tells you this. This actually does have to do with the doctrinal point. How do we handle these things? I've discussed these things with pastors before and they'll say, "I don't think this is the type of situation where someone should go talk to them because Matthew 18:15 says, 'if they sin against you, and they haven't sinned against you.'"
I've mentioned, "Have you considered that older and better manuscripts don't actually include "against you"? We should probably look at this differently. The originals say, "If your brother sins ... " It's a general point. Sometimes these types of considerations do change how we understand scripture, but they're known.
The biggest point to take away from today is not that we can't have confidence in scripture because that are things that are different now than they used to be. The point is that we can know what was different that points to us knowing what the originals were. We don't physically have possession of the originals, but we're able to zero in on them through this process of textual criticism where we look at all the manuscripts and we come to understand, based on age and location and types of changes, what the originals said with extreme certainty.
That's the process called textual criticism. It basically just says, what are the manuscripts that are the best readings and how should we include and translate what we put into our Bible today?
Now I do want to address the one thing I mentioned earlier, which is some people will say, "Why has your Bible omitted or excluded this verse?" That's really the wrong verb. It's not that it was omitted or excluded; it's that it was included before and never should have been. Some translations actually will say, this verse is “empty.” There's nothing here because there was never actually something here. There never used to be something between the sentences of Matthew 18:10 and Matthew 18:12. In the originals there was nothing there. It got inserted later and now we're stuck with what you might call baggage of that verse number 11.
I hope that helps you understand how to understand your Bible better, some of the process behind how we got our Bible. Paul or Matthew or someone would write a document. It would get copied, it would get copied, it would get copied, and somewhere along the way, sometimes things got changed either accidentally or intentionally in terms of being helpful. I'm not saying people tried to corrupt the text to make it say Jesus wasn't God or something like that. In fact, there are no major differences between manuscripts that affect any of our doctrines, our core doctrines of the church. It's not like one of them says Jesus ascended to heaven and one of them said he just hung out and came back as a dog or something like that. That sounds silly, but there's nothing that is important at that level. They're minor wording differences.
The vast majority of changes are just punctuation and spelling errors or differences. Even though there are a lot of changes or what scholars would consider variants, different readings between manuscripts, that shouldn't concern us. Because the very fact that we know there are changes points to us knowing that there are original readings, and us having certainty in what they are. You can't know something has been changed if you don't know what it used to be. We can have certainty in the text in that way.
But more than that, it shouldn't be the number of changes that concern us; it should be the type of changes. As I mentioned, there are no changes that substantially change the meaning of the text, so we can have confidence in what the Bible says.
Also, we've talked about how the fact that translations always go back to the oldest and best manuscripts. They're not going to the previous English translation which was of the previous English translation which was of the previous English translation. That's just not the case. You'd be surprised at how many people who are critics of Christianity don't understand that. They think it's just a translation of a translation of a translation. It's not, it's clearly not.
I hope you're better equipped to talk about how we got our Bible and maybe understand why some verses are in there or not in there. Hopefully now you won’t get thrown back on your heels when someone bring up the fact that verses are "missing" from the Bible. You can point out they were never in there to start with, and we know that now.
I hope this has increased your confidence. I look forward to talking with you next week, where we have a special podcast where I'll be talking with the coauthor of a book that I've written on gender. It's for parents. It's a conversation guide. I look forward to you hearing about that, what's going on with that, and how you can get the book. It goes on sale April 25th. We'll be making a big push and we'll be talking about it that Thursday on the podcast. I look forward to talking with you then on Unapologetic.
]]>Easter is this coming Sunday. I hope you are excited about that, I hope you are looking forward to it, and I hope you're using this time - which is somewhat artificial; we put it on a calendar — to reflect on, in an intentional way, the life, death, and work of Jesus, and ultimately his resurrection. I hope you're taking advantage of this time and this season for your own personal spiritual growth and worship.
Today I want to talk some about the resurrection and Easter. I want to talk about this phenomenon that exists out there today in Christianity, in Christian culture, to sometimes distill down the necessary content of what we need to share with someone to just the resurrection, and the historical details of it more so. For instance, there are some today that say we can demonstrate the resurrection from history, and that's all we need. We don't need a "Bible tells me so" type of religion. We don't need a "Bible tells me so" type of evangelistic approach because people don't accept the authority of the Bible. We need to be able to point to history and other things like that in order to make our case. I want to talk about that some today.
You might think, what does this matter? I think it really matters how we talk about God, how we talk about scripture, how we present the Bible. Because sometimes the way we do this either betrays a strong confidence in the power of the Holy Spirit and of scripture or a weak confidence. How we talk about God really matters.
So, can it be demonstrated historically that Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified on a Roman cross? I believe it can be from a certain point of view. I believe you can rule out all of the other explanations, that you can show that all of the evidence we have, both in the Bible and outside of the Bible, is made most probable and makes the most sense by the explanation that Jesus rose from the dead.
However, that only gets you so far. Because now what we have is a man rose from the dead. That doesn't actually prove that he was God. Other people came back to life; they weren't God. Think of Lazarus and that type of situation.
History is not self-interpreting. That's an extremely important point. That is why multiple people can look back at events in the past and have different interpretations. Because, while they both might affirm that that event happened, the event itself and the details of its historical nature don't tell you what it means. When it comes to the resurrection, what it means is extremely important. It has a lot to do with everything about the Gospel.
It's interesting, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says this: "Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel that I preached to you, that you received and on which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message I preached to you, unless you believed in vain." Here's where he starts giving a summary of the content that he had previously taught them. I don't think this is by far everything Paul means to say is the Gospel, but this is a summary.
He says, "I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephus, and then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters." He goes on to list more people to whom Jesus appeared.
Now some people say, "See, he's talking about historical details: that Jesus died, that he raised, that he was buried, these types of things." But Paul doesn't separate these from the Bible. He says that "Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." Paul ties these events to scriptural foundations, and that they are fulfilling things that were in scripture. We can't separate our faith from the Bible. Are they separate things? Yes? Does the Bible contain history? It does. But we can't just separate out the historical details because we're left without their meaning.
In this 1 Corinthians 15 passage, which people often point to as purely historical content, it's clearly not just that. Because in that very first line, Paul says that "he passed on that Christ died for ... " what? For sins. That's not a historical detail. What Christ's death accomplished and what it was intended to do cannot be established historically. You only get that from the scriptures. Therein is the important point I want to focus on today.
If this seems obscure, bear with me. I don't think it actually is. I think it is very important for our understanding of everything that's happening and that we're celebrating this Easter week, and that Christians stand on 365 days a year. It matters what Christ did on the cross. It's not the historical event of the resurrection that we are placing our trust in. Should our Gospel presentation look like "You need to believe that Jesus rose from the dead?” Why? What is saving about that? Nothing. That's like saying that believing Lazarus rose from the dead is saving. It's not.
Because the belief in the historical event is not the important point. The belief that a miracle took place is not the important point. The important point is that Jesus died and rose for sin and for sinners. That's even in Paul's first point here, “that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture.” What he's basically saying, if we had to rephrase this for people who are not yet Christians, “Christ died for sin. If you repent, you will find Jesus to be a perfect savior.” All those who repent have their sins paid for by Jesus.
That is something you can't establish historically. You can't say what transpired in a spiritual sense at the cross. You can describe all of the physical outworkings and manifestations and historical details and not get right at all what it meant. It's what it means that's important. Jesus didn't come to just enact a miracle on the cross by dying and then rising from the dead three days later. He came to accomplish a mission, an atoning mission.
When we talk about the resurrection purely in historical terms, we gut it, we neuter it of its important atoning quality. If we don't focus on what Christ did at the cross, we're missing the importance of the cross. If we don't talk about what Christ did at the cross and we only focus on the historical details, we are missing the point of the cross. It is not primarily historical, though it certainly is that. It is a spiritual type of thing.
I want to look at some passages that bring this to light. In Galatians 2:20, Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ, and it's no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." This death Paul deserved for his sin, the price that his sin needed to warrant because a just God will punish sin, that price was paid by Christ on the cross. It's as if Paul was crucified with Jesus because Jesus was in Paul's place. That's what the atonement was. It was Christ dying in my place. He paid for my sin. Everyone that Christ paid for goes to heaven. Their sin has been paid. God isn't going to judge them a second time. That's Galatians 2:20: "I've been crucified with Christ."
What about 2 Corinthians 5:21? Paul says this: "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Right there is a description of the atonement and the justification that flows from it. God had Jesus who was not sinful, tak3 on our sin. It was credited to him. He paid for it. But why? So that we could simply be a blank slate, so that we could be not guilty? No, it was so that we could be credited with the righteousness of God.
We often don't talk enough about what happened at the atonement and the cross, which I've already mentioned. We often don't say enough when we do talk about it. We often think about it like “I’m declared not guilty because of what Jesus did.” That's true, but that doesn't say nearly enough. You are credited with the perfect righteousness of God. It's not just that you got back to a neutral point, you’re dug out of the hole. No, God credits you with the perfect righteousness of Jesus.
But why? Because of what he did at the cross. Because of him paying the punishment for our sin in our place, which is something you don't get as a historical fact. You only get that from the word of God. Some people like Andy Stanley have criticized Christians who have a "Bible tells me so" type of faith. He talks about how people will say, "Jesus loves me, this I know." How? "For the Bible tells me so." He talks about how when people go off to college, that type of faith collapses.
But here's the question for someone who makes that type of statement: How else do you know that God loves you? If it's not “for the Bible tells you so,” where else could you possibly ever learn that? Nowhere. That's the problem. If we take scripture out of the equation, we don't know about God's love. We don't know about what actually happened at the cross. The historical details are not enough. As a little aside, a lot of these people who like to critique the "Bible tells me so" type of position use the Bible to prove their point about history. They're still using the Bible. It's somewhat self-refuting. But that's a separate conversation.
My point is what the events mean is incredibly important. It's the same way with the virgin birth. When we talk about what things mean and why they're important, it's not the historical event of the virgin birth that is the most important thing when we think about it. Now yes, it's a historical event; it happened. What it means is what's important. Why is the virgin birth important, especially as we talk about Easter?
Because it shows that Jesus was born a man, a human being. Now why is that important? Because all of the rest of us, every other human being since Adam and Eve, have been born guilty and in sin. They've had a sin nature. They have also inherited the guilt of Adam. We needed to break that line. That's why God comes and Jesus is born of a virgin without a physical father. He is fully man and fully God. This ties into why it's important for Easter.
Because only a man could represent us to the Father. Adam sinned as our representative, and so we all paid the price for that. We needed another representative, another human, another man to represent us to God. Jesus is that person. But here's the problem: none of us could do it. No other human could actually be good enough. So it took God to be good enough to represent us to God. That's exactly what flows from the virgin birth.
Why is the virgin birth, why is Christmas important at Easter? Because it talks specifically about who Jesus was, and who he was—fully man, fully God—is fully important for understanding what the work he did on the cross is actually able to accomplish.
We've kind of come full circle here again to talking about other historical details and saying, yes, history matters, but what they mean is what's really important.
Going back to what Jesus accomplished on the cross, we looked at 2 Corinthians 5:21. "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that we could be credited with the righteousness of God." But 1 Peter 2 actually takes this even a step farther. He says, "Jesus bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we my die to sins and live for righteousness. By his wounds we have been healed."
There's another description in 1 Peter of Jesus dying in our place, taking on our very sin, paying for that sin. Someone's going to pay for their sin; it's either Jesus on the cross or that person in hell. For every one Jesus pays the price, they will not be punished in hell. But you don't get that from history; you only get that from the Bible.
I think sometimes in apologetics conversations we focus too much on evidence and history as opposed to the marriage of those with scripture, which tells us what they mean. Remember, history is not self-interpreting. We need a lens and a worldview, a set of instructions basically, through which to understand history. The Bible gives that to us as Christians. If God really told us how to understand the world and the events in history and we didn't use it, that would be rather foolish, wouldn't it? I think so.
When Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 15 that these events happened "according to the scriptures," I think in part he's referencing Isiah 53:5, which says, "He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities, for our sin. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed." Jesus' death on the cross, which is a historical fact, was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in Isiah.
Isiah even tells us what it means. It's not about only historical events. It includes the details that he was pierced for our transgression. But that's a historical fact, “the piercing.” What it means was that it was “for our sin.” He was crushed — that's a historical fact — for our iniquities, for our sin. Once again, that's something you can't establish from history. There was punishment, Isiah says — historical fact — but that punishment brought us “peace.” His wounds, which were historically attested to, are what bring our healing.
We see here again that the Bible does not separate out history and theology. When we talk about the historical details of the resurrection, we cannot divorce them from their theological meaning, where we neuter them of their importance and their power in our Gospel presentation. I would encourage you, as you talk about Easter, yes, talk about the historical details. But more than that, talk about what they mean. That Jesus didn't just die and rise, but that he did that to pay for sin, and everyone who places their trust for salvation in him and repents of their sin will find him to be a perfect savior. That is the message we have as Christians. This Easter, people are more open to hearing that than perhaps most other times of the year, so let's share that with them.
Now in closing, there's something I want to tell you. I have made available the two chapters in my book, Unapologetic: A Guide for Defending Your Christian Convictions, that deal with the resurrection, so two chapters on the resurrection. If you go to my website, BrianSeagraves.com, and click sign up at the top, the very top, and you add your email to the email list, I will send you those two chapters to your email box for free. I want to equip you this Easter to be able to talk with conviction about the truthfulness of the resurrection. Let's not forget when we do that to also talk about what it means.
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