In Pursuit of God

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I want to welcome you all here tonight.
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We have gathered together to begin a new series of lessons.
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Many of you were a part of, or have been a part of, this Wednesday night group for a long time, and so you know that we go through different series of lessons.
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And our last series was on apologetics, making a defense for the faith.
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And in our last apologetic lesson, I made the point that really to be good apologists, you need to be good theologians.
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You need to know the scriptures and know what the Bible says about God if you're going to make a defense for the scriptures and the defense for the truths of God, and the overall truth of God.
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And so what I said was, really this is an extension of the apologetics course, but it's a deeper and broader extension of it, and we're going to be looking again at the subject of Christian theology and doctrine, giving an overview.
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I have a handout that I'm going to ask Cody to pass out for me.
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And as always, because I know it's so much fun for you all, I have a lot of blanks on the handout, so you'll be able to fill in the blanks as we go, and that will be for you to keep.
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And each week, you'll have a new handout, so if you want to get yourself a folder or a notebook of some kind and keep your handouts in the notebook, that could benefit you in the future, looking back at your notes and remembering what you learned.
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I also want to point out, this book is the course book that I am using.
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There are several really good systematic theology textbooks that I could have used.
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Wayne Grudem would have been good.
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The Abstract of Systematic Theology by James Boyce would have been great, but those books are very lengthy and somewhat difficult to plow through.
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So I've chosen a book that's a little bit more of an overview, and it's written for the layperson.
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It's called The Moody Handbook of Theology by Paul Innes.
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It's a book that I've had on my shelf now ever since I became a pastor.
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It's one of the first books that I bought, and I use it to make quick references to theological terms and things like that in my sermons.
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You don't need the book, but if you are interested in purchasing it, I think they sell it on Amazon for $15, and I think that's this one, and I think they have a paperback version that's even less expensive than that.
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But it's The Moody Handbook of Theology by Paul Innes, and I will be reading some from the book, but basically this is how I'm doing it, because the book actually looks at five different aspects of theology.
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Historical theology, systematic theology, dogmatic theology, historical theology, and I'm sorry, I guess it is just the four.
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So it's four different ways of looking at theology, and we're not going to do that.
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We are going to limit ourselves specifically to the study of a systematic view of theology.
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I'm going to talk a little bit about what the differences are tonight in our introduction.
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Does everyone have their handout and is ready to go? All right.
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Tonight's lesson is entitled In Pursuit of God.
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In Pursuit of God.
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Years ago, a term became very prominent in evangelical churches.
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Maybe you've heard this term.
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How many of you have ever heard the term seeker-sensitive? A few of you.
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The term seeker-sensitive was supposed to designate churches which were concerned with unconverted people who were seeking after God.
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And so they began to design their services and design, even model the sanctuaries of their churches around what was appealing to unbelievers.
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And you've probably seen a lot of churches that have popped up like that.
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They seek to appeal to the unconverted person.
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And they call themselves seeker-sensitive with the idea, well, these people are seeking God and we want to make them as comfortable as possible.
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One of the problems with that term is that it's not something that the Bible teaches.
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The Bible does not teach that the unconverted person or the unbeliever seeks after God.
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In fact, it teaches the exact opposite.
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In Romans chapter 3, the Bible says there is none who seeks for God.
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And so what do we do with the idea of the passages which says seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened to you.
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Well, those passages are speaking to the person who is on this side of their regeneration.
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They're on this side of being born again because once God regenerates our soul, we then do become seekers.
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We were not seekers before, we were being sought, but we weren't the seeker.
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But now that God saves us, now that God opens our heart to believe and He takes out the heart of stone and He replaces it with the heart of flesh and we become born again, when that happens we do seek God.
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God sought us first.
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Did not Jesus teach us that? You did not choose me, but I chose you.
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God sought us, but now because we have been found, we once were lost and now we're found, now we follow or pursue Him.
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We seek after Him.
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Every day is a daily pursuit of God.
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It's a daily pursuit of righteousness.
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It's a daily pursuit of holiness.
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It's a daily pursuit of that sanctification that we're promised in the Spirit.
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And so one of the primary ways that we pursue God, one of the primary ways that we seek for God is by diligently studying His Word.
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And we can study His Word in different ways.
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The primary way that we study His Word is in something called exposition.
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Exposition is the primary method of studying God's Word.
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When you come to church on Sunday morning, what do we do during the sermon? I give an exposition, right? We go to the Bible.
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How do I preach? Verse by verse, right? I open up the Bible and we've been now in 1 Corinthians.
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Now sometimes I'll do a series that's topical, but in general I preach through books of the Bible.
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Since becoming the pastor here, which was in 2006, I have preached through the Gospel of Luke, I've preached through the book of Hebrews, I've preached through the book of James, I've taught through the book of Romans, through the book of Jonah, several other books of the Old Testament, small, shorter books.
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Amos we did, I think, last year here on Wednesday night.
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That's expositional teaching.
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And the role of expositional teaching is to take the Bible piece by piece and examine its parts.
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That's exposition.
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The greatest expositor, I think, of our living day would probably be Dr.
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John MacArthur.
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He preached over 40 years, preached every verse of the New Testament Scriptures.
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Isn't that amazing that he was able to do, from all the books of the New Testament, he was able to preach every verse.
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That's exposition.
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And that's the primary way that we study God's Word is through exposition.
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That's why we do it on Sunday mornings.
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That's when everybody's here.
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That's when we have the majority of folks and so that's how we teach and we preach.
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But, there is also value in pursuing God through the systematic overview of the Scripture or the systematic approach to studying the Scripture.
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Let me read this again.
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I'll just read from my notes.
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There is value in pursuing God through a systematic approach to Scripture, marking out the various disciplines of theology and doctrine and seeking to find what the entire Bible says about those subjects.
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This is often called systematic theology.
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Exposition gives rise to systematic theology.
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You can't really do systematic theology without knowing what the Bible says and you know what the Bible says through exposition or seeking to understand the individual parts that make up the whole.
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But, systematic theology is different than exposition because it doesn't begin with the text, it begins with the subject.
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It begins with the subject first and then addresses what does the whole Bible say about this subject.
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If somebody asked me who is the greatest living systematic theologian, well I couldn't tell you today, but last year I would have said R.C.
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Sproul.
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But, now I can't say that because he is no longer living.
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But, R.C.
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Sproul was a systematic theologian par excellence.
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He was a man who was amazing at taking subjects and showing you what the Bible said about the subjects.
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He was a great preacher too and an expositor as well.
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But, again, these men were different in their preaching styles and Sproul made his life in the systematic approach to teaching the Bible.
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And so, that's what we are doing in this course.
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It's systematic theology.
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That doesn't mean it's not biblical.
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It is biblical.
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It's holy and completely biblical.
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Because, you might say, well, isn't there something called biblical theology? And yes, biblical theology is another way to say exposition.
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You could call exposition biblical theology because that's taking the bits and pieces and the parts.
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But, systematic theology looks at the whole.
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Oftentimes, where you find weaknesses in cult groups or those groups which are heretical in some area or another, it's almost always in the arena of systematic theology.
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Because, they're able to find a passage or a group of passages that agree with whatever it is they're teaching, whatever their false teaching is.
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They're able to find a passage that will agree with them, but what they're teaching doesn't agree with the whole.
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In fact, a lot of these false isms and things like that will argue, well, we shouldn't have creeds and confessions.
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See, I'm one who believes in creeds and confessions.
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Do you know why? Because creeds and confessions are simply systematic theologies.
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They're past history men who came together and produced written documents about what we believe about God, what we believe about the Trinity, what we believe about Jesus, what we believe about the Holy Spirit, what we believe about the church, and so on and so on.
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They were systematic theologies is what they were.
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That's all those creeds and confessions were.
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It was an explanation of why they believed what they believed in the Scripture.
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And you hear the modern cults and isms say, we don't need creeds and confessions.
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I know you don't want them because they will they will show you that you're not being honest with all of Scripture.
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In fact, you're being very dishonest by taking one passage from here and making it say something that it does not.
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Using it, as Martin Luther said, like a wax nose on the end of a face that can be twisted and contorted to look any way at once, changing the face with the wax nose.
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When the whole of Scripture is shown its light on a passage or teaching, you have to consider all of it to see if what you're saying is true.
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This is called the analogium scriptorum in Latin or the analogy of Scripture in English.
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It means that we compare the Bible with the Bible to know if something is true.
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If you read something and it doesn't agree with the rest of the Bible, either you're misunderstanding it or you're misunderstanding the other passages because the Bible doesn't contradict itself.
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And so if you read something over here and it doesn't agree with something over there, you're either wrong about one or the other or possibly both.
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Throughout this study, we're going to be taking a systematic approach to our pursuit of the knowledge of God.
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With each doctrine of theology we address, we're going to be seeking to look at various places throughout the Bible to demonstrate the position is clearly taught.
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And again, we could call this systematic theology.
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I didn't call it that because I was afraid y'all wouldn't show up.
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Not y'all, but honestly, if you if you say systematic theology, some guys like nerds like me will get really excited, you know, because I think that's great.
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But the general masses, you know, it's an overview of biblical theology and doctrine.
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That sounds better.
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But this is systematic theology.
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It's a it's a basic course, the same that you would take if you were going to a seminary.
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Like I said, we're looking at it.
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We have a course book.
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We have an out.
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We have outlines.
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And this is what we're going to be doing.
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As I said, I've already mentioned the course book is the Moody Handbook of Theology, and this is where our outline tonight comes from.
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And so I'll be making references to ends in his writing as we're going.
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If you have your handout, you look at the the first three blanks there.
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We're going to go over those now.
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And this will be the body of the lesson tonight.
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In the Moody Handbook of Theology, Paul ins describes to us the necessity of systematic theology in three ways.
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He says systematic theology is necessary for three reasons are necessary in three ways.
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One, it is necessary as an explanation of Christianity, as an explanation of Christianity.
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I want to read to you from the book, and then I'll make my comments.
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Systematic theology is necessary as a researched and studied explanation, as well as a systematic organization of the doctrines which are foundational and necessary to Christianity.
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As a result of systematic theology, Christians are able to have a clear understanding about the fundamental beliefs of the Christian faith.
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The Bible was not written as a doctrinal outline.
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Hence, it is important to systemize the parts of the Bible to understand the doctrinal emphasis of the entire Bible.
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That's the quote from the book.
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And I think the part that I underlined to make sure that I pointed out there is when he says the Bible was not written as a systematic theology textbook.
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And that's true.
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The Bible is written over a period of about 1500 years.
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It had somewhere in the vicinity of about 40 different authors.
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It's written in two primary languages with a little bit of Aramaic sprinkled in and a few parts.
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So we have a Bible that has mass amount of time and a mass amount of writers that contributed under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
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None of them sat down and said, okay, on the subject of theology proper, that's the doctrine of God and his nature.
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On the subject of theology proper, God is immutable.
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He is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.
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They didn't say that.
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In fact, those words aren't in the Bible, but those are words that we use in theology to describe things that are taught in the Bible.
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And so we have that language.
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It's not necessarily biblical language, but it's language.
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It's just like the word Trinity.
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If you ever talk to a Jehovah witness and you mentioned the Trinity, the first thing he's going to say is Trinity's not in the Bible.
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No, my answer always is neither is Jehovah.
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Not technically.
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There's no J in the Hebrew language.
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There's no J even in the Greek language.
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Jehovah is a Germanic adulteration of the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God.
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It's not in the Bible.
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So take that.
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But I mean, if you want to argue, the word's not there.
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Yes, the word Trinity is not there.
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The concept is there.
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The word omniscient is not there, but the concept is there.
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So we understand how that works.
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And that's the way that we have to be able to put these things into categories.
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Essentially, systematic theology is like the science of the scripture.
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You know what science is? You know what all science is? Taxonomy, categorization, putting things into groups.
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Think about how we categorize the animal kingdom and we separate this animal from that animal by categories.
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Because of this, this has this and this has that.
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So they're in two different categories, right? It's all categorization.
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Well, that's basically what systematic theology is.
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It's the science of the Bible.
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It's breaking things into categories and saying, okay, this is true and this is not because this is what the Bible tells us.
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And so what's the closest thing in the Bible we have to a systematic theology textbook? Anyone want to take a stab at that? I imagine some of you might want to guess.
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What book of the Bible is the closest to a systematic theology textbook? Well, I'm going to go with Romans.
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Hebrews is great.
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Hebrews is filled with good theology.
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Hebrews is points, hearkens back to a lot of the Old Testament, making the connection between the Old Testament and the New Testament, which is true.
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Romans though, does have sort of a systematic layout because the Apostle Paul begins by addressing the fact that the world is sinful in the Gentiles and the world of the Jews is sinful as well.
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That's Romans one and two.
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And then by chapter three, he says, all are under sin.
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As it is written, there's none good, no, not one.
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So his entire first three chapters are an exposition of the need of man, which is the need for justification.
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Then chapters four and five go over how man is justified by grace through faith.
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And that's the topic that he's dealing with.
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And then he gets from chapter six, seven, he's dealing with the subject of sanctification and on to chapter eight.
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Then in chapters nine, 10, 11, he deals with the issue of Israel and the church and the relationship between them, and also the subject of God and his election.
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Then he gets to chapter 12 and he deals from chapter 12 to chapter 16 with the issue of how are we to live out this theology that we have now learned.
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And like I said, if I said, if there's anything in the Bible, it's close to a systematic theology textbook, taking us from our greatest need, which is a savior to how we understand that savior, what he's going to do in our life and how he's going to change us and what our life's going to look like afterwards.
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I'd say, yeah, it's a book of Romans, but even the book of Romans is not a systematic theology textbook.
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There's no line that says, okay, now we're going to deal with ecclesiology, the doctrine of the church.
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It's not there.
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So again, this is science and the Bible, science of the Bible, if you will.
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All right.
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So systematic theology provides an explanation of Christianity.
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A quote often comes up and you may have heard this quote.
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People will say, I don't need doctrine.
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I just need Jesus.
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You ever heard that? I see it online a lot.
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People say, I don't need theology.
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I just need Jesus.
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I don't need doctrine.
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I just need Jesus.
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The problem is that to know the true Jesus of the scripture requires a knowledge of what the Bible says about him.
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And as soon as you begin to talk about what the Bible says about him, you're going into the subject of Christology, the theology of who is Christ.
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Another common phrase is no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.
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By the way, that's a creed.
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So it kind of knocks it out of the air when they say, I don't have a creed, no creed but Christ.
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That's a creed.
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That's not in the Bible.
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That's manmade.
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So I gotcha.
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But it's not a gotcha game.
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But the point is it sounds sanctified.
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But here's the question.
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Somebody says no creed but Christ.
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Which Christ? Is it the Christ of the Mormons, who is the spirit brother of Lucifer? How about the Christ of the Jehovah Witnesses, who is a incarnation of the archangel Michael? How about the Christ of Islam, who is a Rasul or prophet? See why theology matters? Which Bible? No book but the Bible.
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Which Bible? The Roman Catholics carry an additional set of books of history in their Old Testament called the Deuterocanonicals or the Apocrypha.
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That's spurious literature, but is it biblical? How about the Bible of Joseph Smith, the new New Testament? You ever seen the commercials for the Mormons? It's another testament of Jesus Christ.
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How about the New World Translation? New World Translation was translated by a committee for the Jehovah Witnesses intentionally, intentionally taking out references to the Trinity, specific references.
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Adds words where they're not necessary, takes away words where they are.
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If you ever see the New World Translation, that is not a standard, that's not like New American or the New International Bible or any of the New World Translations specifically produced by the Jehovah Witnesses.
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I got one, if you want to see it.
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I don't remember how I got it.
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I didn't steal it, but somebody gave it to me.
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I know I got it somehow, but it's a Bible.
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You say no book but the Bible.
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Which one? Is it necessary to ask that question? And is that a theological question? It is.
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It certainly is.
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Ultimately we stand upon God's Word.
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Systematic theology clarifies the stands that we take and it justifies why we take them.
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Why do we believe that Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation? And how is that true when the vast majority of human history was lived BC, before Christ? I talked about this on Sunday, that was in my sermon.
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How do we justify our answer? It's a theological question and it has a theological answer.
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And there is an answer and it's not a difficult one, but it does require looking at the whole of Scripture.
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So, number one, systematic theology is necessary as an explanation of Christianity.
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Number two, it is necessary as an apologetic for Christianity.
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As an apologetic for Christianity.
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Now you all remember from our last course, if you were here, apologetics does not mean I say I'm sorry.
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Apologetics means to make a defense.
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The word apologia was the court use or in the Greek world, the use of apologia was when a person stood to defend themselves in court they were making an apology or an apologia.
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We've changed that word in our modern day to mean to say remorse or to speak to sorry, but that's not how it was intentioned to be used.
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Thus, when we talk about Christian apologetics or you go back to the early church and you read the apologies of the early church fathers, that was their defense of the faith.
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Let me read, from our textbook.
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Systematic theology enables Christians to defend their beliefs rationally against opponents and antagonists of the faith.
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Early in the Christian church, believers used their systematic beliefs to address opponents and unbelievers.
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This is perhaps even more important today with the emergence of humanism, communism, cults, and Eastern religions.
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The systematized doctrines of the Christian faith must be researched, delineated, and presented as a defense of historic Christianity.
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How many of you guys know who Martin Lloyd-Jones is? Pastor Martin Lloyd-Jones, he said this, he said, whether we know it or not, our main trouble as Christians today is still a lack of understanding and knowledge.
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Not a lack of superficial knowledge of the Scriptures, but a lack of knowledge of the doctrine of Scripture.
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See, a lot of people know the stories.
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They know about Adam and Eve and that terrible fruit that they ate, and they know about Noah and the animals coming two by two, and they know about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and his twelve sons and Joseph and Potiphar's wife, and they know about Samson and Delilah, and they know about all of the myriads of stories of Saul and David and Solomon and Rehoboam and all these other guys.
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But do you know the theology that these teach us? Do you understand that Adam is a type of Christ? The New Testament says so.
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That in Adam all die, but in Christ all are made alive.
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What does that mean, and how do we understand that? That's where it helps with apologetics, because people will come up and say things about the Scripture that are just absolutely untrue.
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Oftentimes, I think with apologetics, we think apologetics is defending the Bible against atheists.
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You know how many people are atheists? Well, it's getting bigger, but it's really not that much.
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How many of you have heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson? Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, smart guy.
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He's sort of taken Carl Sagan's place as far as being the scientific voice of the popular culture.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson was recently on a podcast, and the podcast speaker was an atheist.
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He was talking to Tyson as an atheist, and he says, wait, I never said I was an atheist.
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Now, he's not a believer either.
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Don't think I'm saying that he's a Christian, but he's at least smart enough to say you can't know that.
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Atheism is a myth.
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Nobody's a true atheist.
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Nobody can say, I don't believe in God, but nobody can say, I know God doesn't exist.
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In fact, the Bible says every man knows God does exist.
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That's why we're going to be guilty before Him at judgment, because the Bible says that when we face God, we won't be able to have any excuses.
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I didn't know you were there.
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But the point I'm trying to make is that the chances of you running into an atheist and them really coming at you with some hard Bart Ehrman style questions, or who's a better, Richard Dawkins, you might get that if you go do evangelism on a community college campus or a university campus somewhere, you might get that.
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But if you go out with us to the fishing hole, where we go out to the county fair, and we go out and hand out tracks to those thousands of people that are out there riding their kids on the ponies and stuff, most of them aren't coming at you with that kind of questions.
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In fact, most of the people you talk to think that they're believers because they grew up in church.
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In fact, apologetics is often not even dealing with somebody who denies the faith.
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It's dealing with somebody who doesn't understand it.
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I have a shirt that says, do you understand the gospel? I gave one to Dale.
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You see him, he wears it all the time to church.
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Do you understand the gospel? That's my favorite question to ask people, because I've seen people grow up in church 30 years and can't articulate the gospel.
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The very foundation of the faith is an apologetic for the faith.
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But you have to know the faith to give that apologetic.
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And so systematic theology provides you with an apologetic for the vast majority of people you're going to talk to in evangelistic opportunities.
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To defend the faith, we have to know the faith.
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It's not just arguing the existence of God.
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It's arguing for the God of Scripture.
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In fact, I hate this, and I don't go too far off my notes because time is always limited.
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People will say, that guy's okay.
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He believes in God.
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So what? Everybody believes in God.
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I didn't say that.
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Romans 1 says that.
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Everybody knows God exists.
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He's okay.
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He believes in God.
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Has he bowed the knee to Jesus Christ? No.
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Then he ain't okay.
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Belief in God saves no one.
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Even the demons believe and shudder.
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That was the passage you just referenced.
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Convincing someone to believe in God, that's my problem with most apologetics.
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That's my problem with William Lane Craig.
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By the way, some of you who may know him, William Lane Craig is an apologist, and he really does a good job at some things.
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I don't think I'm beating up on anybody tonight.
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William Lane Craig does a good job at some things, but his biggest that drives me nuts is he's always trying to convince people to believe in God, and he convinced people to believe in the resurrection, but he doesn't try to encourage people to believe in the authority of Scripture.
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In fact, he says, I don't even start with that.
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He says, it's not a good place to start in apologetics.
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I disagree.
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I don't want to get into why, but the whole point is, I don't care whether somebody believes in God because that's natural.
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A belief in God is innate.
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I'm going to ask about their conscience.
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You've been there with me.
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You know what I'm saying.
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We asked somebody, when you face God, I don't believe in God.
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Okay, when you face God.
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I just told you I don't believe in God.
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When you face God.
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I don't believe you.
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No, I don't say I don't believe you, but I will say, have you ever told a lie? Yes.
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Have you only told one? No, I've told thousands of lies.
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What do you call people who tell lies? Liars.
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Okay.
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Have you ever stolen anything? Irregardless of the value? Yes, of course.
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Everybody steals things now and then.
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Okay, so you're a thief as well.
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Yeah, I swear it's biblical.
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To get them to see that they are guilty before God, and they need a savior.
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Ray Comfort said one of the most brilliant things.
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He said, if a man doesn't know why he needs to be saved, he's not ever going to want to be saved.
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If you go up to a man who's got a million dollars, and he's got, you know, nice homes and cars, and he's got a beautiful wife, and he's got all that he would ever want, creature, comfort wise, and you say, hey, I want you to believe in Jesus because he's going to make your life better.
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And the guy says, I'm doing good on my own.
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In fact, that's not the gospel.
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I would encourage you to never start a gospel conversation with, I want to tell you about Jesus because he'll make your life better.
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The opposite could be true.
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You could believe in Jesus and lose everything you have.
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That's what happened to the early apostles.
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They believed in Jesus, and they became outcasts.
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Jesus doesn't promise health, wealth, and prosperity in this life.
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So now I've gone a little off my notes.
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Let me get back so that I'm not keeping you here all night.
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So we said two things.
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Systematic theology is an explanation of the faith.
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It's an apologetic for the faith.
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It's also a means of maturity, a means of maturity for Christians, again from our textbook.
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Systematic theology is the assertion of Christian truth.
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These same truths are essential to the maturity of believers.
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Paul's writings makes it clear that doctrine is foundational to Christian maturity inasmuch as Paul normally builds a doctrinal foundation in his epistles before he exports them or encourages them, exhorts them to live correctly.
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Think about the book of Ephesians.
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The book of Ephesians is six chapters long.
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The first three chapters tell you this is what God is, has done, and will do.
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And the last three chapters say, and now this is what you should do as a result of what God is, has done, and will do.
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It's very easy.
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Your theology precedes your behavior.
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Many Christians have faithfully attended church services for decades and yet have little understanding of the major doctrines of the Christian faith, yet a knowledge of correct doctrine is important in Christian maturity.
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Moreover, it protects the believer from error.
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This is, again, just reading from the textbook.
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Honestly, growth comes when our faith is better understood.
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One might seek to grow without understanding the scripture, and I guess I would never deny that it's possible that someone could grow through personal disciplines and prayer, but both of those should make us hungry for the truth of the Word, and thus the personal discipline and prayer would lead us to want to know the Word more.
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The reality is the church has fostered a real sense of immaturity, especially recently.
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We're afraid people will leave, so we create a atmosphere that doesn't challenge.
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We're afraid people, hmm? Yeah, well, it's six flags over Jesus, you know, that's what we are.
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We have to have the biggest and best show.
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We have to have the most elaborate of stages and presence, and we have to present in such a way that it is not only good to the ear, but to the eye as well.
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I remember a few years ago, I watched a show.
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It was a reality show about a church that was starting in Mississippi or somewhere.
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This couple was a ministry team couple, and they started a church down in Tampa somewhere.
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It grew up pretty big, and now they were going to plant a church in some rural area in Mississippi somewhere.
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So they go, and they start reaching out to the community and trying to start.
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Bad theology from the beginning, by the way.
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If you watch the show, it's just atrocious theology.
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But I was watching it more just to see this train wreck, because I knew what was coming, so I couldn't turn away.
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And so I'm watching this thing on television, and I remember they were having a staff meeting with the pastor and the lady pastor team.
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We're meeting with the rest of the group, and church starts Sunday, right? This Sunday is our first Sunday, and we can't have church.
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And everybody's like, why? We got the building, we brought the music in, we've got everything ready to go, the chairs are set up, everything's ready to go.
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Can't have church because the new lights haven't arrived.
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All we have is fluorescent light, and if these people come in, and all they see is fluorescent light, they'll never come back.
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That was it.
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If these people come in, and all they see is fluorescent light, they're not going to feel comfortable, and they'll never come back.
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Now, I'm not a production person, and she may be right.
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And maybe that's what's kept people out of our church.
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Jack, I'm blaming us.
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I am sure.
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Now, and I'm going to say this, I'm going to blame you in putting our best foot forward when it comes to taking care of our building and, you know, having the yards cut.
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And even the sanctuary, you know, there's times sometimes where, you know, we can put a new coat of paint on or even do something nice.
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I'm not saying these things are necessarily bad, but I'm saying if these are intrinsic to your theology, this is why people come, this is why people stay.
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That's the problem.
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That's the maturity issue.
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And that's where systematic theology addresses that, because systematic theology is saying, no, to grow is not to remain immature and childlike, but it is to grow.
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It's to begin to see the important things and allow the unimportant things to be what they are, which is unimportant.
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Now, I do want to say this, and I have to clarify because this is always my goal is to not be unclear.
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Having right theology does not automatically make you mature.
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1 Corinthians 8, 1 says what? Knowledge puffs up.
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And there is a sense in which there are people who become more intelligent or rather more, more, they have more knowledge than their intelligence can take, you know, or their maturity can take.
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And so they, I met a guy like this once.
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I think I've told this story before, but just in case I haven't, I was, I was at the theology conferences, R.C.
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Sproul's conference down in Orlando, sitting there talking to this man.
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And he was just, he was berating people who were not reformed in their theology, meaning they didn't understand Calvin's five points and those things.
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And he was basically saying, you know, if you're not reformed, you're just ignorant.
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You just, you just don't know nothing, you know, but he's just going on and on and on about how ignorant people were if you didn't.
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And I said, how long have you been reformed? About six months.
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How long have you been a Christian? For years.
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So what you're saying is in six months you have become a bastion of theological truth, and you wonder why everybody else can't keep up.
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It's important that we grow, but pride goes before the fall.
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It's important that we grow, but it's also important that we remain humble enough to say we don't know everything.
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Oftentimes you guys will come to me with a theological question and I'll know the answer, but, but often other times you'll come and I'll say, I have no idea.
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I've never thought of that.
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And that's okay.
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I don't have to know that.
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I can't know everything.
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And neither can you.
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But our maturity and our growth and our understanding of the word do tend to go hand in hand.
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Like I said, sometimes people get, you know, they've read all of the Institutes, Calvin's Institutes, and now they know everything, but they don't know enough.
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We call them cage-stage Calvinists.
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There's a term for that.
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That means they, they've been a Calvinist for a hot minute and they want to tell everybody how ignorant they are because they're not Calvinists.
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And so we want to put them in a cage just long enough to let them mature a little bit before they can actually get out there and, and, and, and, and share.
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So that, that does happen.
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And some of the most immature acts perpetrated in the church have been done by people who have a lot of knowledge, but no maturity.
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A lot of knowledge, but no maturity.
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The Bible indicates the other side is also true.
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There's a lot of people that have no knowledge, but a lot of zeal.
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And that's dangerous too.
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So we have to find the balance, right? We have to say there is a balance here.
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We need to grow.
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We need to grow in our understanding of the scripture.
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We need to understand God more.
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We need to understand theology, be in pursuit of him, be seeking after him.
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And we do that and we're mature and humble about it.
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That's when we experience real growth.
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All right.
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I want to give you, we're about done.
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I'm just going to give you very quickly this, these answers on the bottom.
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That was the body of the lesson.
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This is sort of going to draw everything to a close because there are some requirements to systematic theology, and this will set us up for next week.
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The requirements of systematic theology are as follows.
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Number one, the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture, the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture.
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I'll never forget a man sitting on my couch wanting to argue with me about theology because he wasn't happy with what I was teaching.
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And halfway through the conversation, I said something about the Bible and he said, well, I don't believe the whole Bible.
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And I said, well, then the conversation is over.
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Actually, the first thing I said was you're in the wrong church because our church says in our statement of faith, we believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of the scriptures.
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I mean, you're in the wrong church, Bubba.
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But that, but that, mind you, right after that, I went on to say, we can't have a conversation about theology if you don't believe the Bible.
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I mean, we, I guess we can, but we're not going to get anywhere because I'm going to say the Bible says, and you're going to say, I don't believe it.
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So to have a right systematic theology begins with the inerrancy and inspiration of the scripture.
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If we don't have that, if we don't have a foundation to start from, then we don't really go anywhere.
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And by the way, this is why when you look at, there's like seven Protestant denominations, the seven largest Protestant denominations in the United States, United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, there's several, there's seven specific ones.
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All of their theology is, is horrible.
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It is because they've abandoned the inspiration of scripture long ago.
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And the result of that, in fact, some of them still hold to the confessions on paper.
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They'll say, oh yeah, we're Westminster Confession, you know, Presbyterian Church.
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But which one is the, it's the PCUSA is the liberal version because there's PCA, PCUSA.
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If you want to remember, liberals are longer, it's liberals, more liberal with their letters.
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So the longer letters is the more, the more liberal side.
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And so, but they have the, they still have the Westminster Confession, but they just don't believe it because they don't believe it's based on the scripture.
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They don't believe the scripture.
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They have guys like John Dominic Crossom who comes in to teach.
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John Dominic Crossom believes Jesus didn't raise him from the dead.
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He believes he died on a cross, but that he was buried in a shallow grave and his body was eaten by dogs.
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That's what he teaches.
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And that's what's taught in these churches.
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He is a member of the Jesus Seminar, a group that gathers together to try to determine what Jesus actually said from the scriptures.
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And you know how they gather together and do it? They're given little small marbles and they all gather together in a room and they drop a marble in whether Jesus really said it, whether he didn't say it, or whether he might have said it.
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That's the way they vote.
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It's very mysterious and weird, but so are they.
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But that's the Jesus Seminar.
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They just don't believe that Jesus said most of what's in the Bible.
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In fact, there's only a few things that they agree that he may have said.
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So if we don't have that, we have no foundation to start from.
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The second thing is the application of proper hermeneutical principles.
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Hermeneutical.
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H-E-R-M-E-N-E-U-T-I-C-A-L.
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Hermeneutics.
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H-E-R-M-E-N-E-U-T-I-C-A-L.
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Hermeneutics is the science of interpreting literature, or the science of interpreting written documents.
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I've said this before.
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I don't want to go into too long.
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Yes, go ahead.
46:07
Say it for me real quick.
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Oh, no, that's exegesis.
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I thought that was exegesis.
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Is it there too? Okay, the word? Yep.
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John 118.
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I know it.
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It slipped my mind.
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Come on, give it to me.
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You just said it.
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John 118.
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No one has seen God.
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The only God is at the Father's side.
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He has made him known.
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Yep.
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He has explained it.
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Explained him.
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Yeah.
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Okay, so the word hermeneutic is the science of or interpreting a document.
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I've said this before.
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The Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be a hermeneutical institution because their job is to interpret and apply the Constitution of the United States to the law.
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That's their job, is to interpret and apply the Constitution.
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They don't do that, but that's their job.
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Interpretation is hermeneutics, and so the proper requirement of systematic theology is application of proper hermeneutics.
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The proper applicational principles must be applied to any text.
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Number three, a scientific approach.
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A scientific approach, and I kind of explained that earlier, so I don't want to go back through that.
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Essentially, looking at things and categorizing things and not contradicting one thing with something else.
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That's huge.
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You know when a science project ends, when your data contradicts itself.
47:48
Learn that from Mythbusters.
47:49
No, I'm just kidding.
47:50
No, seriously though, if you do two science experiments on the same data and the results contradict each other, then you have to do another one.
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Well, you take the same approach to the Bible.
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If you're interpreting something and it's contradicting something else, then you're getting it wrong.
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Number four, objectivity.
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Objectivity.
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Yeah, exegesis.
48:19
Yeah, yeah.
48:21
No worries.
48:23
No worries.
48:24
Objectivity.
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When we approach the Bible, when we approach these subjects, we should come with an open mind, bowing to Scripture and allowing it to speak for itself.
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Not imposing upon it.
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That's where that word comes from, Richard.
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Exegesis.
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We need to be pulling out what it says, not imposing on it what we think it should say.
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Number five, progressive revelation.
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Progressive revelation.
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Now that word progressive has fallen on hard times because of the modern use of progressive and progressivism.
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Progressive revelation simply means this.
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As we work our way through the Scripture and as God was revealing Himself to man from Adam to the apostles, we see God becoming, His nature and truth becoming more clear as the Scriptures unfold.
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I talked about this in Sunday school.
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The Old Testament is the Word of God concealed.
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The New Testament is the Word of God revealed.
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The Old Testament is enfolded.
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The New Testament is unfolded.
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We know more about the nature of God as a Trinity than Israel did before the coming of Christ, because that progressive revelation had not been fully shown to them.
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They had signs and symbols and hints that pointed to those things, but we have the fuller progressive revelation.
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And that's important to understand.
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What that basically means in a nutshell is your New Testament is going to help you understand your Old Testament when you're doing systematic theology.
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Because your New Testament explains what the Old Testament was about.
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Number five, or number six, rather, illumination.
50:10
Illumination.
50:13
This one's a little hard to explain, but I'll simply say this.
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When you are studying the Scripture, no matter how, whether it's systematic theology, exposition, no matter how you're studying the Scripture, the Holy Spirit's working in your life and in your heart to help you understand and illuminate you to what it's saying.
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Charles Spurgeon, probably the best example of this, when he would go up to preach, he would pray to himself, I need the Holy Spirit, I need the Holy Spirit, I need the Holy Spirit.
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That was his, he would say that because he knew apart from the Holy Spirit, it wasn't going to have any power or any effect.
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So the illumination of the Spirit is necessary in the study.
51:05
The Bible says the natural man cannot understand the things of God.
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They are spiritually discerned, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verses 11 to 13.
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Last one, recognize human limitations.
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Recognize human limitations.
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We will never be able to totally comprehend God.
51:32
You can ask me to explain the doctrine of the Trinity.
51:34
I can explain the doctrine of the Trinity.
51:36
Ask me to explain the Trinity, and I will say no.
51:39
I can explain the doctrine.
51:41
I know what we're saying and what we're not saying, but how God is one being, eternally existent in three persons, those three persons are co-equal, co-eternal, and distinct, and yet all one God, and thus we are true monotheists, but at the same time we are Trinitarian monotheists, not Unitarian monotheists.
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I can say all those things, but to truly comprehend it, no.
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I can't even comprehend the fact that God's forever.
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I can kind of comprehend forever forward, because I'm looking forward to that one.
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But there was a time when I wasn't.
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Some of you were around then, and there was a time when you weren't, and your parents were around then, and there was a time when they weren't.
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A hundred years ago, none of us was, but we is.
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But there was never a time when God wasn't, and that's by itself.
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Sometimes I just sit in my chair and just am amazed at the eternity of God, because I can't understand it.
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I can't fathom it, and so I have to admit my own limitations.
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Last two things.
53:01
The sources of systematic theology.
53:03
Your primary sources.
53:06
Scripture is number one, but there's also the primary source of nature.
53:10
I'm going to talk about this more as we go through, but there is a sense in which nature tells us that God exists, and that's a mediator of knowledge to us that's primary.
53:21
It's from God.
53:22
He says, when we see the trees and we see the mountains, they declare the glory of God.
53:26
The Bible says, the sun, as it goes to the sky, is preaching God's truth in the sense of proclaiming his handiwork, and so we have a 24-hour cycle of preaching all the time as the sun is going around the world, declaring God, and so that's a primary source.
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Scripture, of course, primary first, and then the nature itself is a primary source.
53:48
Secondary sources.
53:49
Doctrinal confessions are a source of knowledge.
53:55
Very helpful.
53:57
They are not primary, though.
53:59
They are always subject to Scripture.
54:02
Tradition.
54:04
Man, don't we love us some tradition.
54:07
Some traditions are good.
54:11
Some are not good.
54:12
What did Jesus say? Don't teach the traditions of men as the doctrines of God.
54:19
That's valuable.
54:21
The last thing is reason.
54:23
We actually do possess reason.
54:25
Our reason was disrupted in the fall.
54:27
That's called the noetic effect of the fall or how the fall has affected the minds of men, and if you want to know what that looks like, watch Congress.
54:34
No, but that's the fall.
54:39
The noetic effect of the fall.
54:40
Our minds have been disrupted, but we do have reason.
54:43
We are able to reason, and one thing God is not, God is not unreasonable, which is why we can take a systematic and scientific approach to understanding who He is.
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In fact, there once was a time in the history of our great land where the greatest schools were not schools of engineering, but they were schools of theology, because theology was called the queen of the sciences.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for your truth.
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I pray that we in the weeks to come will grow as a result of this study of your word.
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In Christ's name, amen.