The Devil Made Me Do It

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the.

Podcast. Thank you. I'm Dylan Hamilton and with me are Michael Durham, David Kasson, and Andrew Hudson. Our first question of the day is from our website and listeners. Are my thoughts my own or do they originate from either God or the devil?

Good thoughts coming from God and evil thoughts coming from the devil? And to dovetail that question, since the devil is the father of lies and sin originated with him, are the devil and sin one and the same?

Human Responsibility, Temptation, and James 1

You want to have a.

Shot at that first, Michael? Sure. So this question is getting at one's own responsibility, trying to determine the source of the thoughts that often swirl around in our inner persons. And I can imagine that folks will be kind of curious and sometimes even alarmed.

People who love Jesus and follow him and yet, terrible thoughts sometimes go through their head and linger too long for their liking in their hearts. Where do these thoughts come from and is every good and happy thought something from God or is every bad and sinful, deceitful thought from the devil?

So this gets at how has God made us in his image? What kind of responsibility do we have? What kind of capacity do we have for thinking our own thoughts? And of course, the answer to that question will have an impact on how we view the nature of sin, how we consider our relationship with God and the day-to-day experience that we have with him and a relationship with him, even our prayers to him.

So this is a rather large question. It has a massive impact on how we think about things. I thought of James chapter 1 when I saw this question, and James 1 tells us that basically that God is good and even when we go through tough times, we may always ask God for wisdom and for help and that we are asked in faith and that God would supply our needs.

Particularly, we are not to think to ourselves that when we go through tough times and we feel these temptations within to despair or get angry, to not endure or to blame God or blame others. Where do these temptations come from?

Why do I act this way? Why do I feel this way? Is it the devil? Is it God? Where are these things coming from? Well, James says in verse 13 of James chapter 1, Let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God.

For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone. Now the questioner, of course, didn't even consider this as a possibility that God would be putting evil thoughts into his or her mind, but was wondering if the temptations or the evil thoughts came from the devil.

And so this verse doesn't really answer their question, but it does help us to show us that God is not putting temptations into us or evil thoughts into us. But the next verse helps us out. Verse 14. Now you might be ready to hear that the devil is the one putting all the bad thoughts into our head, but verse 14 says something different.

But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.

So while the devil certainly is a deceiver, the father of lies, and we rightly, in agreement with Christ, trace deceptions and lies back to the devil, each one of us is responsible for what we think. Throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament, the saints are made responsible for what we believe.

In fact, this little verse, James 1 16, says, Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Meaning, it's our responsibility to not be deceived. So we're not like, as James says earlier, some small piece of driftwood tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine.

Can't help it whether bad thoughts come into our heads or good thoughts come into our heads, but in fact we are to be responsible for what we think and how we handle what goes on inside of us. We notice in the verse that each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed.

There are desires, there are lusts that are at work within us, and are working upon our wills before we ever become engaged, making decisions. And Scripture says a lot about the corruption that is in our hearts, the depravity that all humanity experiences being fallen in Adam.

Jeremiah at one point says, The heart is deceitfully wicked, and who can know it? And yet we are responsible for what we think and what we feel, and we are not to simply say to ourselves, Oh, this bad thought is from the devil, or this discouraging feeling that I have, or this doubt that I'm entertaining, or this lust that I'm struggling with, or this profanity or anger that is flooding through me.

We can't say, Oh, that's the devil. We must point the finger at ourselves, as James instructs us to do, and take responsibility for what is going on. Of course, that'll help us as we recognize and confess and agree with God that these feelings and thoughts are indeed sin, but God has made provision for our sin in his Son Jesus Christ that, as we confess our sins, God would forgive us and cleanse us.

So I think that although the Holy Spirit does prompt us and bring to our memories the things that Christ has taught throughout all of the scriptures, and yes, the devil is a liar and a deceiver and will make every play he can to deceive us through various agents, we're still responsible for the things we think and we feel.

Andrew, did you have a verse you wanted to share? I did, so I'm gonna do it in two different parts. So I'm gonna be reading from 1st and 2nd Corinthians. So in 1st Corinthians, I will start with verse 13 of chapter 2.

These things we also speak not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.

But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one, for who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. So I would ask this question, in what way is the mind of Christ active whenever it comes to our moral responsibility to not be deceived, as you put it?

Right, so Jesus, in a very telling way, in a encouraging and comforting way, speaks with his disciples in the Gospel of John in connection to his own departure, that he's not going to leave us orphans, but he's going to send us another Comforter, the Holy Spirit, and assures us, both in the Gospel of John and throughout the letter of 1st John, that we may abide with him.

And very often what this abiding entails is that what we have heard from the beginning, let that abide in you. And if what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you will abide in the Father and in the Son.

And this is the promise that he has promised us eternal life. Isn't that what Jesus said, that abiding with him and knowing him and knowing God, that this is eternal life? We're experiencing eternal life as we abide in him, as we are in agreement with things that he has said, meditating on what he has declared, what he has revealed.

And as we have that mind of Christ, as we are in agreement with him, saying the same things as he is, valuing the same things that he values, do we not also then follow the Lamb wherever he goes, obeying him and experiencing the joys of that obedience?

I think that this is what it means to have the mind of.

Christ. In the question, they call Satan the father of lies, which is correct. I mean, it's Jesus' words in that same passage in John 8 that they're pulling that from. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

And then just a short way down, Christ talks about abiding in his word. Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death. So they have the assurance that they will not see death by abiding in Christ's word, just as you mentioned earlier.

And that's from the exact same text that they're referencing in the question. So maybe sometimes embedded in our questions, if we read the context from where we're pulling, because that's true, right?

He's the father of lies. Yes, go find that and work from there, the context around it as well. Yeah, that's exactly where I was.

Where I was thinking to go. I think that's exactly right. I mean, they're referencing John 8 44. It says, you are of the father, the devil, and your will is to your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, did not stand the truth, there's no truth in him.

He is a liar and the father of lies. I mean, that is, they're taking that truth and then from there, they're applying it in a way that I don't think really the context supports. If you look at the verse itself, it says,.

And your will is to do your father's desires. And then, just a few verses later, whoever's of God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is you are not of God. The whole purpose of this passage is to contrast those who are of the devil and those who are of God.

Yes, the devil is the father of lies, but it goes a little bit too far to say that, well, he's the originator of sin that puts all of the sin on the devil and not on those who are doing the desires of the devil, those who are of Adam.

So did sin originate with the devil? I mean, you're looking at, you know, some very interesting passages in the first chapters of Genesis, but I would ask the question another way. Did the devil's sin originate Adam's sin or did Adam originate.

Adam's sin? Right. So even in that same text of John 8, you are of your father the devil and you want to do the desires of your father. You have agency here because you are desiring this in your heart to do exactly as your father wants and you want to please him, just as we want to please our father in heaven.

Does that match perfectly with the verses in James that Michael just quoted? In 1 Corinthians as well, the mind of Christ versus the, you know, mind of the.

World. And you're either in Christ or in Adam. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And good to mention Genesis chapter 3 where we see Jesus also in John 8 is in that same passage referring to the devil having lied and been a murderer from the beginning.

And we go back and we see how Satan murdered or attacked and killed the human race is through his deception and his lying. Eve, for her own part, when she believed the lie, it was her own thoughts that she rearranged, that she now saw things in a different way.

And she saw and she desired and she took and Adam with her. And then when God confronts them, he confronts them individually. He confronts Adam, then he confronts Eve, and then he confronts the devil.

But he doesn't bypass Adam and Eve and just make the devil responsible. Eve is fully responsible for what she did and as a consequence. Adam is fully responsible for what he did and as a consequence. So these are some guiding principles I think to help us parse this important question.

And it asks for kind.

Of a clarification of terms there at the end. Are the devil and sin one and the same? So do we want to take a shot at that follow-up? Well sin, correct me if I'm.

Wrong, I mean the Greek term sin means missing the mark. You have a perfect standard of holiness and anything that is not the perfect standard is sin. I mean you have a point of origin, you know, it's this absolute zero.

You can get hotter and hotter and hotter, that is further away from absolute zero, but absolute zero is the standard. So it's not that the devil and sin are one and the same, it's that God is holy and perfectly holy.

And anything that's away from God gets more and more sinful. So I think it's incorrect to say, well, you know, Satan is the father of lies, therefore Satan and sin are one and the same. No, you're dealing with two different categories.

You're dealing with someone who is sinful and that is in reference to the perfect holiness of God. And then you have Adam who is sinful in reference to the perfect holiness of God. So I think your starting point needs to be identified first and then from there you can define greater and greater degrees of sin.

Right, so the.

Most common word for sin is missing the mark. Another one is wandering, where we get our word planet from, because they saw the star. Some stars wandered, they didn't stay put. So that became a word for wandering off the path.

And then you have the word which means there's a line drawn in the sand. Clearly you get it, but you go ahead and you step over it anyway. So those are the three most common words for sin in the New Testament.

But sin is defined in 1st John chapter 3 verse 4 that everyone, he who commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. So sin is that which is against God's law. So that's what sin is. It's a breaking of God's law.

And of course God's law is the perfect expression of his character, manifested fully in Christ who is the end of the law, the fulfillment of the law. So that's what sin is. When theologians deal with sin they're very very careful never to attribute any kind of substance to sin, not to give it as some sort of existence.

It's very clear that God is creator of everything, and also he's not the author of sin. And he did not make sin, he did not create sin. Sin in and of itself, as we see with Jesus treating the devil the way that he does, sin in and of itself is a lie.

It is something that does not have its own existence, but insists that it does. And it is in the rebel heart of every sinner there's enthroned a lie, and that lie is what happened when Eve took from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where she says, I will define what is good and evil for myself.

And so it is all a big deception that we can write our own law, that we can be autonomous, self-governing, self-law. And that's what sin is. It is the rebellion against God's law. It's saying, I'm gonna follow my own law, rather than following God's law.

And that's what sin is. And of course the devil, does he sin? Oh yeah, boy howdy does he sin, but he's not the same thing as sin. The devil is presented to us in the Scriptures as a personal being who will be judged forever.

And that's quite a different thing than what we talk about.

Sin. You don't want to personify sin. I mean there's ways that the Bible treats sin as sin is crouching at the door and you must master it. I mean that's a different concept than actually giving sin a substance or an existence in and of itself.

It is not. It's a description of, as you said, lawlessness.

Or departing from the perfect law of God. Yeah, in the same sense, if we were going to say that sin and the devil are the same, then we would say that righteousness and God are the same, or something similar, you see.

But this is pantheism, when we are merging things together as one. And although we live in a world that's very pantheistic, we just have to be aware that the Bible does not.

Speak that way. Right, so like if we're talking about Satan, he has an ontological reality, or he's a being, whereas sin is not a being. And that's where you're talking about mixing the categories there.

So it makes a lot of sense. How do you define the term ontological? Ontology, the study of being.

Right. A true being. Yeah, so there is a distinction here where sin is something that one does, all right, it is not in and of itself a thing. It doesn't exist all on its own. So I hope that's been helpful in terms of answering that question.

And again, I think it's a very important question with that follow-up, and something that people need to think about. I mean, isn't it in a pop culture where you have the the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other, and the only thoughts that you're having are the ones that they're, you know, shouting in both sides of your ear, and then it's kind of like the one who's the most convincing wins the day in your life.

But the Bible makes us far more responsible, far more human than that. We do have this free agency. It's a cultural.

Reference for us to say, well, the devil made me do it. No, you did. Right. You.

Made you do it. So is that different for believers versus unbelievers? Using your same imagery, left shoulder versus right shoulder, there still is the idea that a chooser, some type of moral choosing faculty, is still at work to decide which shoulder to listen to.

Does that change your neutrality or responsibility for having those thoughts? Well, not according to the Scriptures. When we look at what brings upon people the judgment of God, what will bring upon them the wrath of God, all sorts of things are included, like very specific things.

And somebody who, for instance, Jesus said that those who rejected his preaching and his signs in Bethsaida and Chorazin and Capernaum were going to be judged way harder and suffer far more greatly than those who were of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The reason being is that Jesus said if the signs and wonders that he had done amongst these cities of Galilee had been done in Sodom and Gomorrah, they would have repented. Which shows you that, yes, okay, sinners all the way around, but still responsible for how they responded to the things that God brought to them.

So the greater the light.

They have, the greater the condemnation if they reject it? Yes, and that's what.

Paul says in Romans chapter 3 concerning the Jews, that in Romans 2 as well, that they received far greater information and revelation from God and thus were far more responsible in their failure to turn to Christ than otherwise.

All right,.

Well, I hope that wraps up that question, and if it doesn't, you are always welcome to ask follow-up questions and we'll be happy to answer. You can obviously tell that we love to talk about these types of things.

But we also received a suggestion or a request from another listener to clear up topics or clear up references or definitions of terms that we may be using and tossing around here a little too easily.

And we want to respect that request and try to define some terms on some subjects that we've talked about in the past. And it might take us a few episodes to lay out. So this is the parenthetical part of our episode here, where we are going to be discussing the topic of dispensationalism, specifically in the context of the book by C .I. Schofield that David's been diving into lately.

And if you want to, David, take it away with definitions and.

Let us know what we're dealing with here. Sure. The book that I chose to dive into over the last couple of weeks was C .I. Schofield's Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth. I had mentioned it on previous episodes and I've continued to go through it.

And I have been focusing on chapter 1 in particular, because the rest of the book does depend on chapter 1. But it's important to, before you embark on any kind of analysis of anyone's work, that you have to define the terms.

What terms are they using and how are they using them? The phrase, the word dispensation, means administration. That's what the word means. It is an attempt by Bible scholars to account for the differences in how God administers his rule in various time periods throughout history as recorded in the Bible.

That's what dispensationalism is. And depending on the flavor of it, those differences are very stark in each of the epochs. In classic dispensationalism that was popularized by Lewis Sperry Schaefer, who was discipled by C .I. Schofield in the early 1900s, that classic dispensationalism draws a very sharp line between the dispensation or the administration of God's rule over Israel and the dispensation of the Church Age.

Many people who were raised in churches that handled dispensationalism or adhere to this view just took it on, it was just a premise. It was just, the church in Israel is always different. But the root of that is this classic dispensationalism of Schofield and Lewis Sperry Schaefer.

So regardless of the flavor that you find, whether it's more of a reformed dispensationalism, progressive dispensationalism, or all the other offshoots from it, what you can kind of keep coming back to is there is a distinction between the people of God and the Old Testament Israel, and you have a different group, the church, the Bride of Christ, who is here for a short time, a parenthesis as it were, that is then taken away and you can have the focus put back on Israel so you can have the promises to Israel in the Old Testament kept in the way.

That they expected. Now David, I had a question. That last part I think is probably what I think most people who have been discipled in this way of reading the Bible, this interpretation, this hermeneutic, that the most important thing about this to most folks in the church is that God keeps his promises and the Bible is true.

Would you say. That's basically where most.

Folks are at with this? I would say absolutely. That was actually the motivation behind Schofield when he wrote these books. He was in a battleground for biblical inerrancy and he was writing books like this and the people that gravitated to him and to his disciples and to DTS were fighting against the liberalism of the early 1900s that did not take the Bible seriously.

What they were reading was not really what they were reading. It wasn't the Word of God, it wasn't breathed out by God, it wasn't the.

Very Word of God. Right, so this is something where they found a lot of confidence in this way of reading the Bible, saying, you know, hey it may sound confusing at first when you read the way that God deals with folks and does certain things throughout the Bible, but this is no contradiction.

This is just the way that God determined to deal with folks like Adam or Abraham or Israel or the church or so on, and if you read it this way you can see how all of God's promises are kept and all of God's Word is true.

Noble, noble goals. Yeah. And I.

Would say that's why those who are of the more dispensational bent, there is a huge amount of agreement. There's this ground that on which we can agree that says the Bible is true. That is their motivation and I think that's a noble motivation.

But as I read this book, what I was finding was that the way he worked that out, it didn't really accomplish the goal. Of affirming the.

Coherency and accuracy of God's Word, you certainly don't want to have a system that is to uphold the coherency and accuracy of God's Word, and then yet it grates against that and makes part of the Bible, or makes different passages in the Bible pitted against one another rather than in agreement with one another.

I would say that those who are coming out of Dallas Theological Seminary today, who are more dispensational in thought because they take the Bible seriously and that God keeps his promises and that what God's promise to Israel is going to come true, it seems to be contrasted with how he makes promises and keeps them to the church.

Although I may disagree with their reading of it, I still say that this is within the realm of orthodoxy. I wouldn't call this heresy. I certainly wouldn't call people coming out of DTS as heretics. These are brothers.

These are brothers. Before we go too far into the book itself, I think they do make a critical error in how they read the Bible versus how I think that we should, where you have later revelation interpreting early revelation, whether the Bible itself defines how those promises are kept.

Andrew, did you have a.

Question? Or, I mean, did you have a couple dozen questions? I think a short answer to that would be yes. You know, when I read from Hebrews about Abraham and I read from Galatians about Abraham, this type of distinction doesn't look biblical to me.

Is that what you've come away from, just your initial portion of.

Reading? What I saw and how Scofield wanted to account for these differences is he laid these verses about Israel and the church side by side. And he read one verse that says, well, you should eye for eye and tooth for tooth.

But Jesus said that you should love your enemies and forgive them. Here's another verse. If you will keep my law, you will have great blessing and your kingdom will grow. Otherwise, you'll be vomited out of the land.

You will be removed from this physical piece of ground that I've given you, and you will go to a nation you do not know. Versus, in the New Testament, well, the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.

You know, this is a spiritual focus. They have a physical focus. They have an earthly focus. This is a heavenly focus. So he laid these two verses next to each other. He said, oh, okay, they're the differences.

Very clear. He's like, well, you know, what do you do? Now you're going to take the Bible literally? I mean, it's sitting there, you decide. But in the New Testament, and you referenced it, Hebrews says, no.

When Abraham was looking, was in his land, looking for this Jerusalem, this heavenly, this country, he was actually looking for the heavenly country. He knew that this wasn't everything. But it was written in terms that he would kind of understand, but biblical writers looking back are saying, actually, heavenly country.

Did God keep his promises with a bunch of physical descendants for Abraham? Well, yes, but Paul clearly says those who are the faith of Abraham are his true descendants. That is the Bible defining the terms, defining how God keeps his promises.

Where I think Scofield went off the rails is when he had these verses side by side, one on the left, one on the right. He said, okay, I can see how God's going to keep his promises here. You know, it has to be in the land.

It has to have this new temple. We read Ezekiel, you have to have this new temple. Yes, he's going to keep his promises. Well, the only way he can do that is by taking the church out of the way. So take the focus, the time of Gentiles is over, and go to the Millennial Kingdom where Christ comes back physically and restores Israel to its place and gives it all of those physical promises that he promised to them.

He's trying to ensure that the Bible is taken seriously, but he imports his system in there and says this is how God's going to keep them, instead of allowing the New Testament itself to say this is how I am going to do so.

You need to submit to my rule. Ironically, he wants to submit to God's rule. He wants to submit to the Bible, but the way he's done it is he's ignored those passages that we just talked about. No, this is how I'm going to keep them.

It was a very interesting time in which he was writing. You had the rise of German higher criticism. He was infecting all of the seminaries in the United States. Princeton, which was this talking Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, stalwart of biblical orthodoxy.

And in the early 1900s, within a generation, it was just gone. J. Gresham Machen, writing in the same time period that Schofield writes, wrote Christianity and Liberalism. That's the new book. That's the one I'm going through right now.

So he's not dispensational, but he's fighting the battle of biblical inerrancy. So you don't have to become a dispensationalist to take the Bible seriously.

Machen didn't. I. E. F. B. A. a fundamentalist in the proper use of the term back then.

Yeah, and there's a great history on the five fundamentals, which is actually Presbyterian in origin. Some people didn't know that. But this book was published in 1888, went through 11 printings at least, and the version that I read was written in 1921.

It was actually the year that Schofield died. He was the protege of James Hooks, also a Presbyterian, and James Hooks learned dispensationalism from John Delson Darby in the 1800s. So you got Darby, Hooks, Schofield, Lewis Barry Schaeffer, Dallas Theological Seminary.

It's a straight line.

And don't forget Moody.

Yes. Where does Moody kind of fit into that?

Schofield, when he came over, because he was over in Great Britain, and it's where he met Darby and he was influenced by Darby and so on, but when he came over to the Americas, he was welcomed by Moody and was helped to be popularized by Moody, who was already very popular.

So there was the academic side of it, or the teaching, you know, very clearly installed these ideas and this hermeneutic into future generations of pastors and scholars, but then also there was the ground-level excitement of the people to better understand their Bibles.

And this is the genius of the C .I. Schofield Study Bible, to hand this hermeneutic in the study notes of the Bible so that they could read any biblical text and know what dispensation they were looking at and how it fit together into this puzzle that they probably always wondered about.

It was very, very popular. The statistic that I read is that after the 1894 Niagara Bible Conference, which was actually led by James Brooks, there was this oil baron named Lyman Stewart who donated a thousand dollars to the publication of the Schofield Reference Bible.

Within two years, it had sold two.

Million copies. And when we're talking about a thousand dollars then, right, so.

That's... What year was that? 1894. Oh my goodness, we're on the gold standard everywhere, aren't we? Yes, we are. When money was money. So we're talking about big money. That was actual money back then, my goodness.

But even today, selling two.

Million copies in two years, still. So you have that book, that Schofield Reference Bible, is permeated throughout all of these people who had, oh wow, a thousand dollars in 1894 is worth $32 ,691 today.

Really? Okay.

It's probably actually more. CPI is not what we think it is. Stealth.

Adjustments for hedonic quality measures. You don't have to spend a thousand dollars. As we were sitting here, I just downloaded myself a PDF copy of Brightly Dividing the Word of Truth by C .I. Schofield.

So you can download it for yourself and begin to look at how he lays out his distinctives in the first chapter. And what David says is a very good point to read that chapter to get started and to learn how does the man define his own terms.

That will help you understand the rest of what he says and then make an evaluation if he's being consistent with his own terms, with his own principles. And then how do those things actually shake out when, as we try to be wise Bereans, like those in Acts 17, and go search the scriptures to see if these things are so.

So very important, I would say, that we take a look at this, because it has been so influential in shaping expectations and directions of not only the North American Church, but indeed, missiology. So before we wrap up, we've defined some.

Terms. We've got a short history. Now where are we going from here? I do have a question on top of that, though, as we kind of dissect some of the specifics of the book. Afterward, are we going to be looking at some of the after-effects of this hermeneutic?

What does it do? How does it affect the church body itself? And how does it affect our daily lives as we interact in the world that God created for us when we read the Bible this way? And I'm hoping we're gonna flesh that out in a few episodes coming out of this one.

But what do you guys think? Where are we going with this from now on?

Well, I think it'll be important for us to define liberalism of the early 1900s. It'll be important for us to see what are the fundamentalists of the early 1900s. I think that even the term hermeneutic itself needs to be defined, plus the different flavors.