Sermon: Why Do We Believe?

Apologia Studios

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:20

It will try that, there we go, must have bumped it.

00:31

First Corinthians chapter eight. We will start here.

00:38

I don't want to be like those who quote a text and immediately depart there from, never to return again.

00:46

There are many sermons like that. First Corinthians chapter eight.

00:53

Let us ask the Lord to bless our time together before we begin. Father, now as we open your word, we ask that you would be with your people, that you would be with the one bringing the message.

01:06

Lord, this time is yours. Conform us. Bring glory to the name of Christ.

01:12

It is in his name that we pray. Amen. In first Corinthians chapter eight, you have

01:20

Paul dealing with a real problem, a difficulty in the church at Corinth.

01:25

Corinth seemed to have a lot of difficulties, as we can see in the fact that there are two fairly lengthy epistles that are sent to them.

01:34

And in early church history, one of the first letters that we have written by one church to another church rebuking that church is the epistle called

01:45

First Clement, written by the church at Rome to the church at Corinth that had just kicked all of its elders out.

01:53

And the church at Rome was saying, this is inappropriate, you need to bring these elders back and you're going against the way that God would have his church to be run.

02:03

So there continued to be problems in Corinth, even after an apostle has been at the church and has written to the church.

02:13

And there's good evidence that, in fact, there was a third epistle to the Corinthians that is not a part of the canon of scripture.

02:21

Just because an apostle wrote it does not mean that everything, you know, the apostle Paul's grocery list,

02:28

Timothy had to go down to the grocer. And so Paul writes him a grocery list. That doesn't mean that has to be in scripture.

02:34

There has to be a purpose. The spirit of God has to have a reason to include these things in the pages of scripture.

02:41

And so here you have a church and they have a problem. There is much idolatry around them, just as there is amongst us today.

02:52

And in that particular context, there are people who are struggling with the reality of the fact that if you wanted to buy meat, about the only meat you could get in the city of Corinth would be meat that had been offered in sacrifice to idols.

03:14

And many of the people in the church were former idol worshipers themselves.

03:22

And they knew exactly where that meat came from. They knew exactly what had been done in reference to it in its sacrifice.

03:29

And it caused a scandal to them. They did not want to participate in the evil that they once had been a part of themselves.

03:38

Fully understandable. And so, in his response, in his talking to the people and helping them to understand where Christian liberty is and exhorting those who had

03:52

Christian liberty to recognize the weaker brethren and what's a weaker brother, what's a stronger brother.

04:00

In the midst of this, we get this interesting section of scripture.

04:05

So look at verse one. Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge.

04:12

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone thinks that he has known anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know.

04:21

But if anyone loves God, he has been known by him. Therefore, concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world.

04:30

There is no God but one. For even if there are so -called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one

04:40

God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him. And one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him.

04:50

However, not all men have this knowledge. But some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrifice to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.

05:01

But food will not commend us to God. We neither lack if we do not eat nor abound if we do eat.

05:07

But see to it that this authority of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

05:13

For if someone sees you, who have knowledge, dining in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be built up to eat things sacrificed to idols?

05:22

For through your knowledge, he who is weak is ruined. The brother for whose sake Christ died.

05:28

And in that way, by sinning against the brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.

05:34

Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, ever, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.

05:43

So here is this portion of the discussion. Hopefully you can see that the idea, well, there are people who have knowledge.

05:52

Knowledge puffs up. Knowledge is necessary. But knowledge, if it is not joined with love, puffs up, makes us arrogant.

06:01

It causes, it divides us from one another. You need to have the knowledge, but need to have the love as well.

06:08

And so he's saying, yes, we can have the knowledge. There is no, the idols are nothing.

06:15

That idol does not actually exist. There is not a God that corresponds to that particular idol that is in this particular temple or that place or any place else that you might have once been involved in idolatrous worship.

06:29

You have that knowledge. In fact, we all have that knowledge. For example, in verse 7, however, not all men have this knowledge.

06:38

Who's he referring to? Those outside the church. We know, he says, yet for us there is one

06:43

God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for him. And so we have knowledge.

06:49

But Paul's exhortation is we need to join that knowledge with love. And so he says toward the end of the discussion, look,

06:59

I can have the knowledge that this meat is perfectly fine to eat. But if I'm going to ruin a brother, if I'm going to crush someone else by my use of my knowledge, but not in the context of love, then

07:16

I'll never eat meat again. Now, that's meant to be an exaggeration for a point.

07:23

His point is, look, if I am always in a situation where I have to make that decision,

07:28

I will always make the decision to build up, not simply to put myself in the position of exercising my rights.

07:37

Something that all of us should definitely keep in mind. But notice what happened in the middle of this.

07:45

And this happens so often. Now, look at verses four through six.

07:52

Now, many of you know this text because you deal with Mormons and you know that Mormonism uses this text as a proof text.

08:00

Joseph Smith used this text to say that there are many gods and many lords. But obviously, what

08:07

Paul is actually referring to is he's saying an idol is nothing in the world and there is no

08:12

God but one. The basic assumption of the teaching of the entirety of the

08:21

Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, the

08:26

Torah, the law, the Nevi 'im, the prophets, the Ketuvim, the writings. The Tanakh is that there is only one

08:32

God, Yahweh, the maker of heaven and earth. There is no other God but him.

08:38

There is no God before him. There will be no God after him. Everything exists, does so at his will. This is the absolute monotheism, the creative monotheism of the biblical testimony.

08:51

So Paul says, for even if there are so -called gods, notice so -called gods, it's literally those that are called gods.

09:00

So people give the name of God to something. Even if there are so -called gods, whether in heaven and earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords.

09:10

So they're so -called. There are all sorts of religions, all sorts of different cults and groups, and certainly they were incredibly popular in the

09:20

Roman Empire in that day. Yet for us, there is one

09:26

God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him. And one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him.

09:34

Now, for most of us, we could read verse 6, see it as sort of a basic summary statement.

09:44

But you might be surprised that any Jewish convert or any

09:52

Jewish person who would have read those words as Paul wrote them in the Greek language would have been stunned.

10:01

Would have been stunned. I grew up in the church. It was years after I was already witnessing to Mormons and doing things like that before I came to understand why, when you look at verse 6, you would be stunned.

10:19

Because in reality, when you look at the language that Paul uses, he is taking the prayer that defined the

10:29

Jewish people, and he is expanding it. Now, we all know the prayer defines the

10:35

Jewish people, right? It's called the Shema. Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh echad.

10:46

In Greek, the words for one and God and Lord are all being taken directly from the

10:56

Greek version of the Shema and are now being used in verse 6 to where you have one

11:03

God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him. And one

11:09

Lord, and that term kurios is used in the Greek septuagint for the name of Yahweh.

11:16

The name of Yahweh from Deuteronomy 6 .4. And one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him.

11:26

And so here the apostle takes the very prayer that defines the

11:33

Jewish people, and he expands it in light of the incarnation. He teaches us about how all things are from the

11:45

Father and exist for him, and all things are by the

11:50

Son, and we exist through him. Deep theology, deep teaching, and he uses it as an illustration, an illustration.

12:05

Think about Philippians chapter 2, the great Carmen Christi, what was that? It was a sermon illustration, it was a sermon illustration.

12:13

You see, the apostle can assume that his hearers are already trained in the fundamental foundational truths of the

12:25

Christian faith. He doesn't stop here and go, oh wait a minute, okay, I just said something that might confuse some of you. Let me explain to you the incarnation, let me explain to you the trinity, let me explain to you why

12:37

I can talk about the Spirit of God, and the Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit of the Lord, and just switch between them, and don't even give it a second thought.

12:47

He doesn't have to do that because he's already done that in his teaching when he was amongst these people.

12:53

And so what we get in the epistles are references, I've said many times, the only way you can understand the

12:59

New Testament is to recognize that the people who wrote it, and the people to whom it was written, were experiential

13:07

Trinitarians. Like Peter, Peter was an experiential

13:13

Trinitarian. He had walked with the Son, he had been in the presence of the

13:18

Father on the Mount of Transfiguration, he was now indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So he was an experiential

13:25

Trinitarian, and so they don't have to stop every time they make reference to the exalted nature of Father, Son, and Spirit, and go, oh let me, let me explain this to you, because it's already been explained to them.

13:38

It's Trinitarians written to, writing to Trinitarians, and that's why the New Testament looks the way that it does.

13:44

We'd like to have the first book of Trinitarianism, we'd like to have it more like a, well

13:50

I know they don't do this anymore, but I'm so old that when we got our first laser printer, who laughed at me?

14:04

Someone, oh I see somebody going, get him, get him, yeah. When we got our first laser printer, it came with a book that thick.

14:13

I don't know how many trees died just for that one printer manual. I know they all come as PDFs now, that's wonderful, the trees are very thankful to Adobe for PDFs, they really, really are.

14:25

But you, you know, if you wanted to look up, you know, changing the toner cartridge, you looked up the section on the toner cartridge, and let's be honest, very often we

14:39

Western thinking people, we wish that that was this, that this was more like that, you know. I mean,

14:45

I remember once in a Sunday school class when I was working in a television ministry at a church, we'd have the

14:51

Sunday school for the people that worked in the television ministry, and one day we were talking about the

14:56

Trinity, I was like 17, 18, somewhere around there, and we started talking about the

15:04

Trinity, and it's, and it's like, you know, where, where is that in the Bible? And we all started turning to concordance, so we're all, we're all turning back to the concordance,

15:13

T, T, T, and as you notice, we didn't find anything in the concordance, and we were troubled by this.

15:21

Why, why isn't that term in there? Because we want the New Testament to function that way.

15:27

You look to the index and you find the right chapter, right? That's not how scripture has ever functioned in God's people.

15:36

Instead, you have something like this. You have in -depth teaching about the relationship of the

15:43

Father and the Son and creation. You have this borrowing from the Shema, which tells you a great deal about what the early

15:53

Christians believed and why they believed it. Now, you and I, we are in a church that has a confession of faith, and there are certain sections of that confession of faith that we can turn to.

16:12

There's a section that will discuss the doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ and his mediatorship, and there's stuff about soteriology and justification and election and baptism and the

16:25

Lord's Supper, and it's all nice and neatly laid out. But why do we believe what's in there?

16:36

Why do we believe those words? Why do we pay close attention to those words?

16:44

What is the foundation of Christian belief? Until recently,

16:52

I thought all of us who called ourselves Reformed Baptists were on the same page on this issue.

17:03

Naive little me had taught in multiple seminaries and church contexts all over the

17:09

United States and literally all over the world. And I pretty much thought we were all on the same page on this.

17:16

So, when I would go into debates, and I would do one of the more than 30 debates that I've done with Roman Catholic apologists,

17:27

I would use a phrase, Semper Reformanda, always reforming.

17:36

And I would say, yes, actually, we have a confession of faith, and we believe that confession of faith accurately relates and defines for us a summary of biblical teaching, but it is not itself inspired.

17:52

It is a sub -standard. It is an inferior standard.

17:59

It does not exist over the Scriptures, and it cannot function as the lens through which we read the

18:08

Scriptures. And that's the danger, because when I'm debating a Roman Catholic, they don't believe what we believe about that.

18:15

They believe that the Scripture comes out of the church, and the church has ultimate authority, primarily seen in the teaching magisterium of the church and in Roman Catholicism, well, at least before Francis anyhow, in the infallible pronouncements of the

18:31

Pope himself. I sort of wonder if Francis actually believes almost any of that stuff, but we can't get into Francis today, and believe you me, most of my

18:40

Roman Catholic friends don't want to get into what Francis believes either. That's right.

18:46

But the issue is, what's the relationship? Because there would be many who would say, well, you can say that.

18:56

You can say Semper Reformanda. You can say that the confession has to be under the authority of Scripture and correctable by Scripture.

19:08

Rome rejects any idea like that. Her tradition is not reformable along those lines.

19:17

And she does believe that there is a tradition that's handed down outside of Scripture, an oral tradition accessible only to the bishops of the church, that can create a lens by which they now have looked at Scripture and found such things as the bodily assumption of Mary, the infallibility of the

19:42

Pope, purgatory, immaculate conception, perpetual virginity.

19:48

Seems to be a lot of stuff about Mary that you can just all of a sudden see when you have the right lenses to look through at the pages of Scripture.

19:56

And when we say, no, Sola Scriptura, they'll say, oh, you just mean that you can take your

20:04

Bible and go out under a tree someplace and you can ignore 2 ,000 years of church history.

20:12

You can ignore all the theologians who have translated and struggled.

20:18

And it's just you and your Bible and the Holy Spirit and you've got it all figured out. That's how they want to present it.

20:26

And that's not what our confession says. Our confession does say that the Scripture is the ultimate authority and the

20:32

Scripture is to be interpreted in light of the Scripture, not in light of the traditions of men, not in light of any system of theology that we develop from other sources.

20:49

But our confession does not say that it's me and my

20:55

Bible under a tree. God ordained the church and God has been building his church for 2 ,000 years.

21:04

And so we're not reinventing the wheel with every generation. We, every single one of us in this room, our religious language, the language that we use to speak to one another, to talk about the faith with one another, to communicate the faith to others.

21:28

In almost every instance, there is a long history of development that define the words that you use, though you may not know about it.

21:37

I have many times, when we went through the series on the

21:42

Lord's Supper here, I pointed out to you that to have an accurate knowledge of what our confession says about the

21:51

Supper, you need to understand what they are responding to. And they're responding to Rome's teachings on transubstantiation and the mass.

22:02

And so there is a background there. And we are not wise when we ignore those types of things.

22:10

And certainly, I am professor of church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

22:18

I love teaching church history. I think it's vitally important. We did at least two sermons in the baptism series on the history of the church and the subject of baptism, because Christ has been building his church.

22:35

And if the Spirit of God has been active for 2 ,000 years, aren't we incredibly arrogant if we go, don't need to worry about any of that?

22:49

Now, you see, I was raised in a context where that's exactly what we did, though we didn't know we were doing it.

22:58

I was raised in an independent fundamentalist Baptist context. And it is only a slight exaggeration to say the church history for us went back to Billy Graham.

23:11

That was ancient church history, okay? That's about as far back as you had to worry about. Because before then, they were all just a bunch of Catholics anyways, as if God had started the church and then went, yeah, we'll pick that up a little bit later.

23:27

We never really thought through any of that. If we did, we had a little, okay, how many of you have ever seen the little red booklet called

23:35

The Trail of Blood? Anybody seen The Trail of? Okay, now wait a minute. Wait a minute.

23:43

I got, I got, I got, thank you. I was starting to wonder if maybe I had been transported to another planet or something like that.

23:49

Got, got one over here, got a Trail of Blood over here, okay. Any other Trail of Blood folks? I'm not asking you to say, oh yeah,

23:55

I think it's great. No, no, no, no, wait a minute. It's not great. It's historically laughable.

24:01

But what we did is we, we felt the need to go, yeah,

24:07

Christ built his church. There's always been a true church here, but it was really, really teeny tiny. And it was hidden away in, in a, in a mountain pass someplace.

24:16

But there's, there's always been a true church, but it, it was really, really small. And the

24:21

Trail of Blood grabs hold of all sorts of wild groups that were anti -Trinitarian and didn't believe in the deity of Christ and were

24:30

Manichean dualists and just all sorts of wild stuff and throws them all together and say, there's they were because they didn't baptize their children.

24:39

And there's the true church. Okay. But you see, we felt the need to answer the question.

24:47

Well, yeah, okay. If, if, if Christ built, started building his church 2000 years ago, then we've got to do something about it.

24:56

We've got to deal with it in some way. At the same time, we as Baptists are faced with a real challenge.

25:10

And the challenge we're faced with is that we, to use the language of the

25:16

English Reformation, we are non -conformists. If you know anything about our history in England, you know, that we were looked down upon because we would not conform to the ways of worship, liturgy, preaching, forming the church that were accepted by the crown.

25:41

And that changed depending on who was king or queen or whatever at different points in time. But, but the

25:47

Baptists were non -conformists. And very frequently, that's why they ended up writing really long books in jail because they took that very, very seriously.

25:59

But what do we, would we not conform to? We would not conform to the majority perspective.

26:09

And when we look down through the, the, the mists of history, there are certain topics that we are in harmony with, those who came before us, and then certain topics that we are not.

26:28

Right now, amongst Reformed Baptists, there is a very odd and strange revival of interest in a man you may have heard of before called

26:39

Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas lived in the 13th century, died at 49 years of age.

26:48

Brilliant man. You may be aware that some of your favorite theologians were quite enamored with Thomas Aquinas.

27:00

For example, John Gerstner, R .C. Sproul's mentor, wrote an article back in the 90s for Table Talk magazine claiming that Thomas Aquinas was an early

27:15

Reformer who believed in justification by faith. Now, I can assure you that thesis has not gained any traction with anybody at all because it's just simply not true by any stretch of the imagination.

27:30

And R .C. himself loved Thomas Aquinas, said he was the greatest theologian in church history. And so there is a sudden real interest in Aquinas and his philosophy, which goes back to Aristotle, his doctrine of God especially, not so much what he believed about the mass because he was fully

27:54

Roman Catholic. And in fact, the Roman Catholic church made him a doctor of the church.

28:00

In fact, Francis was just at a major international symposium about a month ago and called all people come to Thomas, come to Thomas to learn.

28:13

Because the Council of Trent, it is said, set up two books in the midst of them when they did their counter -reformation anathemas, where they anathematized justification by faith alone and things like that.

28:29

Those two books were the Bible and the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. The Council of Trent was considered to be the very establishment of Thomas's theology, his theology of the church,

28:43

Roman Catholic, his theology of the sacraments, Roman Catholic, his theology of the gospel, Roman Catholic. And yet there is this sudden fascination with Thomas Aquinas and with his theological formulations in our day.

29:01

And along with it has come a phrase that you're going to start hearing from people. And I have to,

29:07

I feel like I have to tell our people about this because we are not the kind of church just sits around and doesn't talk to other people.

29:17

I'm not talking just about at the beginning of the service and we tend, we spend 15 minutes shaking each other's hands.

29:24

We have communication with other people outside of our circles. And that means you're going to run into these things because this is coming into our circles through Reformed Baptist seminaries and Reformed Baptist professors who are teaching these things.

29:43

And the phrase you're going to encounter is called the great tradition. The great tradition.

29:51

That is to be differentiated from the great tradition of Jeff Durbin's beard, who has now joined us.

29:57

And thank you very much for a little bit late here, dude. You know, you know, what can I say?

30:02

But of course, I wouldn't show up to church if I just driven as far as he has. But so it's very nice to have you with us.

30:09

God bless you. What else am I supposed to say? He got invited to the bonds and stuff.

30:17

I didn't. So I'm actually, you know, not sure I want to talk to him anyways. But anyhow, let's not talk about that now during the sermon.

30:23

Okay. The great tradition. And the great tradition is this.

30:32

This universally held body of Christian beliefs that is passed down through the centuries.

30:38

That sounds so wonderful, doesn't it? It sounds it sounds like something. Yeah, I, I want to I want to make sure that I'm in that great tradition.

30:47

There's a little bit of a problem. Any meaningful definition of the great tradition of the church is going to have to include such things as many more than two sacraments or ordinances, at least seven.

31:07

It's going to have to include a concept of baptismal regeneration.

31:13

Oh, were there people that didn't believe that? Yes, but we're talking about what becomes widely and generally accepted in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and everything else that even claims any type of connection to the

31:29

Christian faith. So our view of the church? Nope. Our view of the gospel?

31:35

Nope. Our view of the supper? Nope. Our view of many of these things?

31:42

No. Where do you find consistency? Well, 1

31:49

Corinthians 8, 4 through 6. Our belief in the deity of Christ, our belief in the

31:57

Trinity, our belief in the fundamental revelation of Scripture. There is one

32:02

God. He does not change. He does not evolve. He's not growing or diminishing.

32:09

He is eternal, the creator of all things. But those are all teachings of the

32:14

Bible. As you probably understand, once the message of the gospel went out beyond Israel, as soon as Paul starts going to the

32:30

Areopagus, he starts going to the Greeks, Christians had to start explaining what

32:39

God has done in Christ to people with very different worldviews than that which we find here in the pages of Scripture.

32:49

And in those early centuries, there is immediately a tension.

32:57

You have someone like Justin Martyr. Justin Martyr dies in the middle of the second century.

33:05

He is murdered for his faith in Christ. Now, I just want you to make sure his mommy didn't name him

33:11

Justin Martyr, okay? That came later, because that's how he died. But he did die for his faith.

33:22

And yet, he did not have access to the entirety of the New Testament. There are entire sections of the

33:28

New Testament he shows no knowledge of. He always wore the pallium of the philosopher.

33:35

And in many ways, he was far, far, far more influenced by Greek philosophy than he was by the

33:42

Apostle Paul. That's going to impact your theology. He thought that Greek philosophy was a means to understanding who

33:55

Jesus was. A little bit after him, you have Tertullian. And Tertullian was the one who came up with the phrase, what does

34:04

Jerusalem have to do with Athens? What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? Athens, the center of Greek philosophy.

34:12

Jerusalem, place where Jesus dies. And his idea is we can't we can't define the

34:18

Christian faith on the basis of Greek philosophy. And ever since then, there have been those two sides and everything in between in the

34:29

Christian church. And that's still the case today. Now, one thing is very, very clear.

34:37

The Reformers well understood the necessity of the supremacy of Scripture.

34:47

At the same time, someone that I have tremendous respect for, John Calvin, who would have never allowed me to live in Geneva, and I know that and I can still have respect for him.

35:02

You've got to learn how to do that if you're going to do anything with church history. You really do. John Calvin will say very clearly that our ultimate authority must be found in the

35:16

God -breathed word of Scripture. And yet his favorite person to quote was who?

35:24

Go ahead. Augustine. Augustine. And we

35:31

Reform folks, yay Augustine. How much reading have you actually done in Augustine?

35:39

Because Augustine was deeply influenced, deeply influenced by Neoplatonism and Platonic categories of Greek philosophy.

35:52

And in many ways, he expressed his theology within that category. And so how do we deal with that?

36:03

How do we deal with the fact that we have all these different perspectives that have come down through history?

36:09

And that on major big issues, we go, no, we don't go with the majority.

36:15

We go with this. Because that's what the Reformers were saying. We know what the majority of the medieval church believed.

36:25

And Luther said, no, that doesn't give you peace with God. We need to go back to the scriptures.

36:32

We need to go back to what it means to have peace with God because of the grace of God and justification. And what is it when you say, no, it needs to come from this.

36:45

And what does it mean to come from this? Does that mean it's only, it only is found in these words? And so I actually met one guy once.

36:52

He was a King James only guy who literally tried tried to only communicate by using words you could find in the

37:03

King James version of the Bible. Now, I'm not sure how that works at the drive -thru at McDonald's.

37:11

You know, I don't think quarter pounder appears anywhere in the

37:16

King James version of the Bible. Someone did suggest to me that you could say something like, lo, the second item written upon the sign.

37:31

Okay, maybe you could pull that off. But like I said,

37:38

I only met one. Up until recently, everybody in the

37:45

Reformed Baptist movement would have called themselves biblicists. And if you had someone called me a biblicist,

37:52

I'd go, amen, brother. I'll wear that proudly. What does that mean?

37:57

Does that mean I don't study church history? No. Does that mean I don't recognize that much of the language

38:04

I use has been developed over time through the various controversies in church?

38:09

No. What does it mean to be a biblicist then? It means to recognize there is something absolutely unique about what's between the covers of this book.

38:21

It is theanoustos, and it's the only thing we have that is. There is nothing.

38:27

This is God's speech. That's what Jesus taught us. In Matthew chapter 23, when he said, have you not read what

38:36

God spoke to you saying, he quoted something that had been written 1400 years earlier.

38:41

He held men accountable to the word of God as if God had stood in front of them and spoke it directly into their ears.

38:51

So this is unique. And as a Christian, I want to have the same view of scripture that Jesus had.

39:00

If I'm going to say my only hope is Christ, then I'm not going to be so wise as to say, but I think

39:08

I could have a better view of scripture than Jesus did. No, I want his view of scripture. And that's how we viewed this.

39:15

And so a biblicist is not a person who ignores church history. It's not a person who ignores the language that we use to answer certain questions has developed over time.

39:25

A biblicist is a person who says what defines the Christian faith must flow from the text of scripture itself.

39:37

And the way you know that is by using sound principles of interpretation.

39:48

Specifically, that you not follow origin, you not follow

39:54

Clement of Alexandria. You not follow, yes, even

40:00

Augustine in many places, read his commentary on the psalm sometime, where he comes up with stuff where you go, really?

40:09

Oh, okay. No connection to what the original author would have intended, what he was trying to say, what his audience would have understood.

40:19

No, you need to have consistent rules of interpretation that will allow you to handle all of scripture without flights of fancy and without bringing in external sources of authority that will fundamentally determine the outcome of your examination.

40:41

Now, I mentioned, for example, the debates I've done with Roman Catholics. I cannot tell you how many times when

40:48

I have gotten into a biblical text, Romans 5 .1, therefore I've been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

40:54

Lord Jesus Christ. In Roman Catholicism, you can be justified but not have peace with God because you can commit a mortal sin, lose the grace of justification, and be lost.

41:03

So we get into that text, and I'm talking about what Paul meant to communicate to the church at Rome when he wrote those words, when he dictated those words, and they were written on papyrus, and that scroll, that's not scroll, but well, it might have been a scroll, but probably a codex book or whatever, was taken to Rome and read in their service.

41:28

Paul wanted to communicate a particular truth in that sentence to the church at Rome.

41:38

That's what I want to know. I want to know what he wrote and what he wanted to communicate. Then I can make application.

41:46

Then I can put that together with what he wrote to the Galatians, what he wrote to the Philippians. We can go over there and now we can wrestle with James, but you've got to start with the text itself or you're just playing games.

41:58

You just, we can't use this like Lego building blocks. Back in my day, it was called tinker toys.

42:07

Anybody remember tinker toys? All the old people going, oh yeah, tinker toys, they're all great. You could do anything you want with them.

42:14

You could make planes and buildings and everything else. It didn't look really good, but you could do it.

42:21

That's not what this is supposed to be. We need to have a consistent methodology of interpretation, or if I stand up here and I don't use the same method of interpretation this week that I used last week, how can

42:35

I say, thus saith the Lord? If I am not trying to handle this word aright, then it's thus saith

42:45

James and nothing more. And that's not what you came to hear and it's, you shouldn't come to hear either.

42:54

So I thought it was a given and certainly in my debates with Roman Catholics, you get into the text at that point and at some point they're simply going to step back and go, you can't know what this text means without reference to external authority, without reference to what

43:17

Rome teaches. Now the problem is, Rome has never infallibly defined what Romans 5 .1

43:22

means. That's the funny thing. They can't even answer that question, but that's what they'll say.

43:31

And now in our own circles, we literally have people saying,

43:37

I listened to a professor at a Reformed Baptist seminary who only a week ago in a

43:46

Q &A at a large conference, at a conference I have preached at in the past, say during the

43:56

Q &A, that John Calvin had students who became non -Trinitarians because Calvin read the

44:08

Psalms too literally and not like Augustine read the

44:14

Psalms. Now again, I didn't bring any examples. I'm going to be putting together a list of them for other reasons, but Augustine would see things in the

44:25

Psalms where he would see a number and he would just make a connection over here to something like that. And what was the one that was just recently, someone was talking to me about it, they were talking about how somebody had figured out some numbers and it added up to the number of days between March 25th and December 25th, so that's when

44:48

Jesus was conceived was March 25th and was born December 25th and it's because you multiplied some numbers in the

44:54

Psalter and stuff like that. And when we see people doing that today, we all sort of go, really?

45:00

Are you on that channel between 20 and 22? What's going on there?

45:06

But that happened a lot in church history. And I literally heard a professor whose church

45:14

I've preached in, whose school I've taught at, saying Calvin had students who became non -Trinitarians because they read the

45:23

Psalms pretty much like Charles Haddon Spurgeon did, or like we do.

45:29

They need to be read in the allegorical way that Augustine learned from origin.

45:37

Now, I don't even know how that works. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I've defended the

45:43

Trinity in many, many, many different contexts, in many, many, many different places, and I never had to play games with the text of the

45:53

Psalms to do that. But this is what's happening. See, Calvin didn't follow the great tradition means of interpretation.

46:04

And so the question I'm asking us today is, why do we believe what we believe? Each one of us.

46:11

Now, for the church, the elders look at what the scriptures say, and we seek to give example each and every

46:25

Sunday as we're working through the scriptures. Here is how you consistently handle the word of God in such a way as to honor the original intention of the authors.

46:42

If we don't do that, then we're simply reading our desires into the scripture and saying, follow what we say.

46:51

That is a horrible way of doing things. It happens all the time. We seek to avoid it.

46:58

But each one of us as individuals, heads of families, men, moms, as you're teaching your children, we all have to keep in very clear focus the absolute supremacy of scripture above everything else.

47:22

Because the tendency of mankind down through the centuries is to develop human means of controlling what this says, especially so that they can develop ways, human means of controlling the grace of God itself.

47:45

That's what the entire sacramental system of Rome is all about. The entire sacramental system of Rome is all about control, controlling

47:54

God's grace, and controlling how that grace can be given to anyone.

48:00

That's what it's about. It's not biblical. You're not going to find five of those seven sacraments in scripture.

48:09

That wasn't the practice of the early church. That developed over time. The tendency of man is to find a way to control what

48:21

God can actually say. When you see those people, when you see,

48:27

I remember about 20 years ago, I happened to turn on again the channel between 20 and 22. I don't know why

48:33

I did it. I was feeling strange, you know, getting sick. I don't know. And there was

48:40

Paula White. Now, I didn't know that Paula White was going to become a big political lady, as she has.

48:47

But there was Paula White, and she was saying on the basis of Psalm 69 that you needed to send in $69 to her ministry.

49:02

There was some verse in there that she had figured out was a promise from God, and that if you send in $69 based upon Psalm 69, that you'd get this type of many -fold return from God, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

49:17

And as you watch this woman absolutely making a mockery of the psalmist, the original language, the context, the intention, everything.

49:31

We all see that and go, yeah, you ain't getting any of my money. That's not what

49:37

Psalm 69 is about, and we know it. Well, we recognize that, but on what basis do we recognize that?

49:47

It's on the fundamental conviction that God has given to us his word for a purpose.

49:59

That's why he's miraculously preserved it down through the ages, even when the entire Roman Empire tried to destroy it.

50:08

When the communists have burned it, banned it, killed those that memorized it.

50:16

When the Church of Rome did the same thing, when Wycliffe translated the Bible into English, and Rome said, you won't do that, it's a vulgar tongue.

50:27

But they did it anyways. The followers of Wycliffe, the Lawlords, would memorize entire books of Scripture, then they'd take the name of that book of Scripture, and when they would meet with other fellow believers in secret, they would bless those other believers by quoting from the book after which they were now named.

50:46

So how many here would be 3rd John? How many would be the

50:51

Psalms? Right? They love the word of God because it is

50:56

God speaking, and what we believe must flow from the right handling of what

51:09

God has said. Now have there been speculations that have taken place down through the centuries that go well beyond what the apostles have delivered to us?

51:22

Most certainly there have been. And can we examine those things, and read those authors, and maybe find some interesting insights?

51:32

Yes, but we always have to remember, once you get past where God has spoken, you are now in very dangerous, very dangerous territory.

51:48

I have often told the story of two of the most brilliant minds in the history of the church,

51:57

John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. If you've read either one, you know that they're absolutely brilliant in their ability to handle

52:08

Scripture, and to express divine truths, and to deal with difficult questions, all those things.

52:17

But the difference between the two was Edwards, even by his greatest fans, even by the people who have the greatest admiration for him, they recognized that Edwards attempted to answer some questions specifically about the nature of Adam's will before the fall.

52:38

How much biblical revelation do we have about the nature of Adam's will before the fall?

52:45

Not a whole lot, okay? We've got two chapters before the fall takes place, and much of that isn't talking about Adam, and there ain't much else any place else that says anything about it at all.

53:02

And so Edwards attempted to untie a very difficult knot regarding the nature of Adam's will and the concept of free will and the fallen will, but if Adam wasn't fallen, then how could the fall be certain?

53:22

And look, those are tough questions, but he ended up in a morass of self -contradiction because he went far beyond anything that Scripture could give us any kind of answers to.

53:39

I believe Calvin was just as much of a theological mind as Edwards was.

53:47

But he didn't go there. He didn't go there, because you know what he said, insofar as God makes an end of speaking, we must make an end of speaking.

54:01

Don't go beyond what God has revealed in Scripture. Oh, but there might be some really cool stuff out there.

54:12

Let me tell you something. No one has ever plumbed the depths of what he has given to us, and I'm really worried about people that have gotten bored with this and think there's other stuff to find outside of this.

54:30

That has always been the path to destruction. Has always been the path to destruction.

54:37

The secret things belong to the Lord our God. The things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, right? Are we willing to say that where God makes an end of speaking, so will

54:49

I, because I recognize that to do anything other than that is to show disrespect to God. Have great men who did great things in other areas, have they gone beyond?

55:02

Have they speculated upon things? Yes, they have. What you and I need to be willing to do is to say to anyone, well, you say that we need to believe that, but what evidence do you have that the apostles delivered that?

55:21

Jude said the ones for all delivered the saints faith. Was that true or false?

55:28

Because I heard a Baptist recently say that what you have is you have a beginning with the apostles, and then you have a process of development over time that reaches its final zenith and ultimate expression of truth about the doctrine of the

55:47

Trinity, 1200 years later in Thomas Aquinas. So Jude didn't know what

55:57

Thomas knew. Paul didn't know what Thomas knew. Now someone's immediately to say, well, hasn't there been development?

56:07

There's been development of language. As the gospel goes out into the world, as it encounters all sorts of worldviews outside of scripture, we've learned to try to communicate across languages and other barriers like that.

56:22

Yes, but anything we find in the London Baptist Confession of Faith, which thankfully was written in English, anything we find in there, the truthfulness of it is directly proportional to its faithfulness to inspired scripture.

56:43

Let me give you one other example, because I want to make sure I don't get anywhere near 94 minutes of length this week.

56:51

I really want to make sure. You're welcome. You all have heard the

57:00

Nicene Creed, right? If you come from a more liturgical church than ours, you may even be able to quote the

57:10

Nicene Creed. And I don't have any problem whatsoever quoting the Nicene Creed in a church service.

57:17

Apostles' Creed, it's a little bit simpler. Nicene Creed, a little bit fuller. The version we almost always use is normally a little bit more—it came from later.

57:28

I noticed on my phone, I went to my iReformed reference library, and there's the

57:35

Nicene Creed. And it's not overly long. We believe in one

57:42

God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and one Lord Jesus Christ, only begotten

57:48

Son of God, of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the

57:55

Father. What's that term, one substance, anyone? Homoousios.

58:01

That's the key of the Council of Nicaea. By whom all things were made, who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate by the

58:08

Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, was made man, was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to scriptures, and ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the

58:18

Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.

58:23

We believe in the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. This was all added later, Council of Constantinople, and afterwards, not in 325, and so on and so forth.

58:34

Now, it's a summary of the faith. Key elements of the faith. And that's what we had in 1

58:42

Corinthians 8. When Paul said to the Corinthians, well, you know, we know there's only one

58:48

God, the Father, one Lord, Jesus. It's a summary of the faith.

58:55

So if it was okay for Paul to do that, then it's okay to have summaries of the faith. But you see, the difference is, in 1

59:00

Corinthians 8, the Holy Spirit gave us that. Once you make what

59:05

I just read, the lens through which now I have to read this, then where did its authority come from?

59:16

Think with me. Because I'm hearing my fellow Reformed Baptists saying, yes, you need to read this through the lens of the

59:26

Nicene symbol, the Nicene Creed. Then where does the

59:33

Creed get its authority from? Because you can't say it comes from this anymore, because if you read this through the lens of that, then that's not getting its authority from this.

59:45

Where's the flow of truth going there? Inevitably, the only answer to that question is, there is a source of authority in church and in tradition that is actually superior to what you have here.

01:00:08

And that's what the Reformation was all about, first of all. That was one of the key issues that had to be dealt with.

01:00:16

Because the first argument thrown at Luther, when he's going, these indulgences, they're not from God, but the

01:00:21

Pope says they are. Well, then the Pope's wrong about that. Well, who are you to interpret the

01:00:27

Bible to say that? Luther came to understand the truth of justification before he came to understand the truth of Sola Scriptura.

01:00:35

He was forced to Sola Scriptura by a recognition that the gospel would be lost if you didn't believe it.

01:00:45

The same thing is true for us. You see, I'm still dealing with the reality.

01:00:52

I've said this all along. I have said this absolutely all along. Everything that is true in the

01:01:00

Council of Nicaea and what it said. Now, by the way, the Council of Nicaea didn't just say that.

01:01:08

It's very funny when I hear people saying, oh, yes, I accept everything the

01:01:13

Council of Nicaea said. And I go, have you read their canons and decrees? Their what? Well, they said a lot more than just the creed.

01:01:22

And in fact, if you're a Baptist, you don't believe a number of the things they said in their canons and decrees. Well, that's different.

01:01:29

OK, just as long as you know. But everything in the creed that we could quote together right now that is true is true because it reflects this, not the other way around.

01:01:47

Not the other way around. I had said that from the beginning of my ministry. I thought we all believed that.

01:01:53

I thought we were all on the same page in that. I've said that in debates with Mormons and Roman Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses and everybody else.

01:02:04

That the Nicene symbol, the Nicene creed has authority, but it is derived from scripture, its consistency and its harmony with scripture.

01:02:19

As soon as you invert that, you have created a source of authority.

01:02:26

You may not recognize that you've done it, but you've created a source of authority in your thinking.

01:02:33

And believe you me, there's lots of groups that will come along and say, hey, guess what?

01:02:39

We're that source of authority you've been using all along. We're that source of authority you've been using all along.

01:02:48

So we need to think these things through before those people come along.

01:02:53

And we need to think these things through because within our own circles, there is a fundamental downgrade taking place right now in the centrality of biblical authority.

01:03:07

And it only has one disastrous end to it. And I've seen it over and over and over again.

01:03:16

Keep in mind the flow of truth comes from scripture.

01:03:25

You handle scripture right. You come to understand. Use an example. I love to use this one because we've all struggled with it.

01:03:32

John chapter six. You listen to what Jesus says in John chapter six. You follow the argument and it's oh my goodness.

01:03:41

God sovereignly gives the divine people to the sun and the sun saves them perfectly. Reformed theology is right.

01:03:50

And we take that and we relate that to applying the same interpretation to Ephesians one and the same method of interpretation to Romans nine.

01:03:59

And we put these things together and our theology then stands upon the living words of scripture.

01:04:05

It doesn't come from some authority over here and we take it and we bring it over and we plop it down and say there it fits.

01:04:19

In my opinion the sheep of Christ hear his voice when we handle the word of God rightly.

01:04:31

And that's what gives foundation for your faith. That's what grounds your soul in the

01:04:41

Christian religion. Anything else is directing you away from the words of Christ to something that's lesser.

01:04:52

And we won't do it. We won't do it. So when you come here week in and week out and we open the word of God and we exegete passages of scripture we are seeking to give you the tools to do the same thing.

01:05:11

To do the same thing consistently and to hold us accountable to consistently doing the same thing lest we wander off the path ourselves.

01:05:24

But the truth fundamentally must be seen to come have its origin and source in God's speech in his word.

01:05:36

That takes the highest view of scripture and that's one of the reasons a lot of people can't come to that point. They don't have the highest view of scripture.

01:05:44

They view scripture as the speculations of men. If you start there you're never going to come to these conclusions.

01:05:51

But if you start with Jesus view of scripture you get wonderful harmony full authority.

01:05:58

And that's what we stand on here. And that's why we believe what we believe. Let's pray together.

01:06:07

Our gracious heavenly father we we have given thanks to you so many times before for your word.

01:06:18

And yet Lord we could never exhaust the thanks and praise that should be given to you for the fact that you have not left us in darkness.

01:06:34

You have given us your word that you've exalted above your name. You have preserved it.

01:06:40

You draw our hearts out to it by your spirit. Indeed our lord and savior specifically said that the scriptures are written by the spirit of God.

01:06:51

That's the spirit speaking in them. And so we thank you that we have such ready availability to it.

01:07:00

We ask your forgiveness for how often we take it for granted. Fill our hearts with that deep commitment to the scriptures as our sole source of authority.

01:07:15

Yes father we pray that you will always allow us to look back and to be thankful for the lives of those who you've used in your church to give us insight and understanding.

01:07:26

But never father allow us to invest in them an authority that should only be placed in the

01:07:35

God breathed scriptures. Keep us firm. Do not allow us to be distracted.

01:07:44

For when we understand your word we have an authority to proclaim to the world. Thus says the lord.