Revelation: God Makes Himself Known

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If you have a Bible with you, you can open it up to Psalm 19.
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This won't be the only passage that we look at tonight, but this will sort of set the foundation for our lesson.
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We're going to look at verses 1-6 just as an opening text for the study.
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Psalm 19, beginning at verse 1, it says, The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.
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Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
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There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.
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Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
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In them He has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
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Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them.
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And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
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And so ends the reading of God's inspired and infallible Word.
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I want to welcome everyone back tonight as we continue our study of apologetics.
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For those of you who haven't been here, we started in last year's Wednesday night services by looking at apologetics, and we looked at the introduction to apologetics and what apologetics is.
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And for those of you who don't remember, just by quick way of reminder, the word apologetics means to make a defense for something.
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And so Christian apologetics is making a defense for the faith, a defense of Christianity.
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We've talked about different ways to make a defense.
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There is the evidential method of apologetics.
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There is the classical method of apologetics, which uses more of a philosophical approach.
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And there is, of course, the presuppositional approach to apologetics.
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And we've explained the different ways that those are to be understood, and they are employed in different ways by different apologists, those who make it their mission to go out and not only share the faith, but defend the faith.
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And I made the point last week that in defending the faith, oftentimes what happens is it becomes a defense of the Bible.
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Because the very foundation of the Christian faith is the Bible.
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It's the Word of God.
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If there is a failure in the Word of God, there is a failure in the faith.
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And if the Word of God can be proven untrue, then the faith itself is untrue.
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In fact, very recently there was a very famous and very notable Christian pastor who came out and said, and I say Christian with the air quotes, because I have a lot of doubts about this man.
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He came out and he essentially said, we no longer need to trust in the Bible.
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It's okay if you don't believe in the Bible, just believe in the resurrection.
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And as long as you believe in the resurrection, everything is okay, because that will make you believe in Jesus.
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Now the problem is, where do we know about the resurrection? Where do we hear about the resurrection? Where do we get the information about the resurrection? Well, from the Bible.
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His entire argument was foolishness.
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He's saying you don't really need to believe the Bible.
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And yet, the Bible does need to be believed.
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And apart from it, the faith is, well, has no foundation.
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You could say the faith is founded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that is true.
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But how do we know that Christ is risen? We know that Christ is risen because God saw fit to give us His word, which tells us that He is risen indeed.
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The Christian faith is based on the writings contained in the Bible.
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The writings contained in the Bible is a collection of 66 books, written over a period of about 1,500 years by about 40 different authors, in three separate languages.
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And when it comes to the Bible as the foundation of the faith, and understanding and defending the Bible, I think that that's one of the most important parts of apologetics because the reality is, when we're sharing the faith, and I know this from evidence of experience, and I know experience is not always the best way to find evidence, but one of the ways that I have learned this is, when I'm out sharing my faith, or we're doing the fishing hole, or we're out open air preaching, I don't typically run into a lot of atheists.
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Now, there are some.
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When you go to a college campus, you might run into more atheists, or people who are denying the very existence of God.
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But what I tend to find more is not people who deny the existence of God, but rather people who say that they believe in God in a generic sense, but they don't believe what the Bible says about God.
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They believe there's something out there that they would call God, but they don't know if it's the God of the Bible.
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In fact, they would deny that it's the God of the Bible.
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Many of you have heard my Kmart story, but I like to tell this story because it illustrates the point very well.
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I was walking into a Kmart to get a pair of shoes, because I know this may be sad, but I was walking into a Kmart years ago to get a pair of shoes, and I handed a gospel track to a lady who was the greeter at the Kmart.
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I just walked in and handed her the track.
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I said, please read this when you get a chance, and I walked on.
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I was in the shoe section.
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I was sitting down in the little seat, and she walked over to me, and she forced it back to me, handed it back to me very forcefully.
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She said, I don't want this.
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And I said, okay, thank you, and I didn't engage her at all.
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I just took it back.
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I think I said, thank you for not tearing it up, because a lot of people, if they don't want it, will tear it up and throw it away.
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I said, thanks for not tearing it up, and I went back to fiddling with the shoes.
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And she said, she just stood there.
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She didn't leave.
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So I finally looked back up at her, and I said, is there something else? And she goes, well, don't you want to know why? I said, I'm pretty sure you're going to tell me.
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She said, I want you to know, I don't believe what that said, because my goddess would never send anyone to hell.
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I said, you're right.
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I said, because your goddess doesn't exist.
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She is a figment of your imagination.
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You have created an idol in your mind that will obey you.
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And that's what most people do when it comes to God.
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I said, so you're right.
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Your goddess won't send anyone to hell, because she doesn't exist.
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You know, that conversation went on for another 15 minutes, to the point that she, at the end of the conversation, she wasn't bowing down and receiving Jesus, but she was writing down Bible verses.
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Because I was pointing to the fact that the questions that she had are answered in the Bible.
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And the arguments that she was making are addressed in the Bible.
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And I use that example only to say, most of the time when we face people, they're not atheists, they just believe wrong about God.
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It's not that they deny that there's a God, they just don't know Him.
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And oftentimes, what we need to be able to present to them is the Word of God.
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And say, this is the God who is.
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This is the God who does exist.
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This is the God who created all things, including you.
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And you're responsible to Him.
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And using the Word of God is important.
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So last week I said, if we're going to talk about the Bible with people, if we're going to use the Bible to defend our faith, we need to ask the question, how did we get the Bible? How do we know the Bible is true? Why do we believe it? So I said, as part of our apologetic series, I'm going to do several weeks of study on the subject of how we got the Bible.
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Last week, I gave an eight-point outline.
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And I said, this is the eight things we're going to talk about over the next several weeks.
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And I don't know that we're going to have eight weeks.
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It might go sixteen weeks.
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Some of these might require more than one week.
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Huh? Yes.
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But here are the eight things.
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Revelation, inspiration, canonization, transmission, textual criticism, translation, interpretation, and application.
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That is the eight parts that you need to understand of how we got the Bible.
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Again, revelation, inspiration, canonization, transmission, textual criticism, translation, interpretation, and application.
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And tonight we're going to look at the subject of Revelation.
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Not the book of Revelation, but the subject of Revelation.
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And that is God making Himself known.
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So, you have your handout there.
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And hopefully this will be something you can follow along and write in the answers.
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And some of you I know keep a notebook and I appreciate that.
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And we're going to look tonight at the two categories of Revelation.
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The two categories of Revelation, these are the two major headings on your notes.
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The two categories of Revelation are simple.
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It's General Revelation.
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So under the capital I there, or the Roman numeral I, you have General.
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And then under Roman numeral II, what's the second one? What is it? Special.
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You have General Revelation and you have Special Revelation.
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General Revelation and Special Revelation.
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We're going to look first at General Revelation.
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General Revelation is called General Revelation because it is revelation that is given in a general sense to all people.
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And so, if you're looking at your outline, the notes, it says it's general in two ways.
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It's general in regard to its content and it's general in regard to its audience.
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It is general in regard to its content and it's general in regard to its audience.
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General Revelation will not tell you about the Trinity.
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General Revelation will not tell you about salvation.
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General Revelation won't tell you about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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General Revelation won't tell you many, many, many things.
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So in its content, it's very general.
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It doesn't tell you the specifics.
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And as far as the audience goes, it is general in that it's not limited to a specific group of people.
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It goes out to all men, everywhere, no matter where they be.
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And it is revealed in two ways.
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It is revealed, well that's first, I want to make sure you're getting the answer.
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So the first two answers are content and audience.
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So content and audience is the way it's general.
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But then after that, you have two more.
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Immediate and immediate revelation.
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General Revelation comes in immediate and immediate forms.
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Now when we think of the word immediate, we think of right now.
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When you think of immediate, if I say I want you here immediately, you're saying I want you here right now.
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That's not what this word means in this context.
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Immediate and immediate general revelation is that which comes through a mediator and that which does not come through a mediator.
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That's immediate and immediate revelation.
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Immediate revelation is found in Psalm 19, which we read as our opening text tonight.
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It says the heavens declare the glory of God.
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What do the heavens do? Well they declare something.
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What does the word declare mean? It means to say something.
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Now the heavens don't speak in the same way that I'm speaking right now.
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But the heavens are speaking in the sense of when you look out at the sky, you see something that gives information to you.
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And it becomes a mediator of that information.
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The information is coming to you through that vision that you're seeing.
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Immediate revelation is when you walk out and you see the stars.
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And I remember very clearly being about 19 years old.
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And I remember, and I know this is going to sound funny, I didn't grow up as a science kid.
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I don't ever remember even much about science projects in school and things like that.
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I wasn't super interested in those things.
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In fact, the only science project I ever did was on karate.
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I did a science project to prove whether or not a karate technique worked.
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And that was it.
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I didn't have a lot of interests scientifically.
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But I do remember one thing.
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I remember standing in the parking lot of Highlands Middle School and looking up into the heavens and seeing the stars.
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And for the first time in my life, about 19 years old, I had just taught a karate class.
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And I came outside and I'm standing outside and I look up and I see the immensity of the stars and the sense of how wide they went.
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And it seemed like there were stars in both directions as far as the eye could see.
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Some were big, some were small, some were bright, some were dim.
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But there were just stars everywhere.
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And I remember for the first time in my life, almost two decades of living, that I felt a sense of the awesomeness of the universe.
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And the minimal nature of my contribution to that universe.
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You ever thought about how small you are in the grand scheme of how big the universe really is? I never really thought about it.
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I mean, I wasn't obviously not a heavy thinker as a young man.
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It never really crossed my mind.
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But I remember that night because I stood there and I felt so little in a world and universe that was so big.
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You realize those stars are further away than our sun.
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Some of them.
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And that's why they look so small and our sun looks so big.
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And it was that moment that really...
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I know I got saved when I was 19.
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That happened before I got saved.
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That was one of the things that God used in drawing me to himself because it forced me to look outside myself and see the immensity of what he had created.
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And the vastness of his handiwork.
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And that's why Psalm 19 has always bore a special place in my heart.
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Because when it says, the heavens declare the glory of God.
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God preached a sermon through the stars to my heart that night.
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And I saw in that moment his immensity in my smallness.
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And I love this text and I don't have time to exegete the whole text.
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But it says, in this text, it says that essentially the sky preaches all the time.
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It says that there's no speech nor are there words whose voice is not heard.
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And their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the earth.
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It's talking about the sky.
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The words of the sky is proclaiming God's handiwork all the time.
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Every person gets to experience that general revelation all the time.
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And so, that's one example of general, immediate general revelation.
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Meaning it's coming through a mediator.
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Psalm 97 verse 6 says essentially the same thing.
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It says, the heavens proclaim his righteousness, which is interesting.
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You say, how do the heavens declare God's righteousness? I think that what that means is it declares that God is a God of order.
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Because when we see the universe, we see an orderly universe.
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And order is a part of God's righteousness.
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People ask sometimes, well, can God make a square pig fat and a round hole? People ask all these questions.
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And I say, God is not unreasonable.
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Neither is God illogical.
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The reason we have logic and the reason we have reason is because God is both reasonable and logical.
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And we see that in his universe.
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So his sky, the heavens are declaring his righteousness.
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It's declaring his order.
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And all the people see his glory.
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That's what it says in Psalm 97 verse 6.
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All the peoples see his glory.
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But the most important verse when it comes to immediate general revelation, I'm sorry, immediate general revelation, the first one, is in Romans 1.
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And most of you know this because I've cited Romans 1 several times in this study of apologetics.
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Because what did we say about apologetics? When we're talking to somebody, they know God exists.
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The one thing that you can know for sure is that even if somebody denies the existence of God, they know in their heart of hearts that God does exist because he has made it plain to them.
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You say, where does the Bible say that? It says it in Romans 1 beginning at verse 18.
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For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
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So what are ungodly men doing all the time? Suppressing the truth.
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For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
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That's important.
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How does he show it to them? Psalm 19, heavens declare.
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Psalm 97, the heavens declare.
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He's shown himself to them in his creation.
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And then verse 20, for his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
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So they, that being the ungodly, are without excuse.
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I tell you, I've heard many a person, I've heard them with my own ears.
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I've heard people say to me, when I get to heaven, when I die, if God is real, I'm going to tell him I didn't have enough evidence for your existence.
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No, not according to this.
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This passage says you are unapologetus.
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In the Greek, that means without a defense.
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It's the opposite of apologetics.
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You're without it.
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Verse 21, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.
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Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
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You ever wonder why men create idols? Men create idols because they know they're supposed to worship.
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They know there's something out there to worship and they don't want to worship the God who is.
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So they create a God that they themselves can have authority over.
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The whole idea behind an idol is that when I make the idol, I have at least some authority over the idol because I made it.
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When I create an idol, I never give up my authority.
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So that's immediate general revelation.
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That means revelation which comes through some type of immediate act or immediate event or immediate thing.
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Immediate revelation would be what? Immediate general revelation would be that which comes without a mediator.
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Immediate general revelation is somewhat, some people argue that there is no such thing, that all general revelation has a mediator, but I would argue at least in a sense that there's at least one thing that doesn't come through a mediator in the sense of something outside of us that we have to have that tells us God exists and that is our conscience.
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The conscience within us has been given the law of God according to scripture whereby we know God exists because of the law that's been put within us.
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I'll give you the text, Romans chapter 2 verses 12 to 16.
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Listen to this closely because of what it says.
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For all who have sinned without the law, meaning they don't have the written law.
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For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
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For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.
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For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves even though they do not have the law.
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They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when according to my gospel God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
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What he's saying is this.
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When you see men behaving in a way that is according to the moral law of God, that is evidence of God having given them a conscience.
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That conscience is evidence of God's existence in their own heart.
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I don't know a lot of people who are atheists.
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I know some.
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I have family members that deny the existence of God.
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But I have to wonder, and I do wonder, if in the darkness of their night time when they're laying down and they have nothing happening, and all they hear is the silence of maybe the air conditioning, air blowing through the vents or the fan blowing near their head, and they're in that moment of stillness and quiet that they can't hear their conscience that is at that moment testifying to them that God created them and they're responsible to him.
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I don't know that.
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Again, I speak in ignorance because I've never asked an atheist, hey, at night when you lay down by yourself, do you have this yearning? But I know this.
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I know even as a saved person, when I'm in the stillness and the quietness of my soul, it's almost like I can hear God in my heart.
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It's almost like I can hear my own conscience.
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I'm not schizophrenic.
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I'm not hearing voices, I promise.
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But it's as if though I can hear God, and I have to believe that in a sense that's what's being addressed here.
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Atheists all the time will say this.
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They'll say, well, you don't need God to behave morally and without even addressing the issue of presuppositions, without even addressing the issue of what they're assuming because they're having to assume that there is such a thing as morality without a standard bearer, without one who gives a standard of morality.
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They're assuming a lot by even saying that.
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But the issue is this.
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The whole reason they have a desire to live morally is because God placed that desire in their heart.
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And when man lives immorally, you know what he has to do to do that? He has to suppress the truth that is in his heart in unrighteousness.
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It's why I say what happens oftentimes is as we begin to get into our preteens, teens, and late teens, you know, later adolescent years, this is when things like alcohol and drugs become the most desirous because it's also the same time where we begin to understand our conscience and the guilt that we have over our sin.
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And what do we want to do with guilt? What did Adam and Eve want to do with guilt? Cover it up, suppress it, hide it, push it down.
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And what better way to do that than taking some type of a drug that's going to dull your senses or drinking something that's going to dull your mind or engaging in sexual activity that's going to inflame the passions for a moment and remove that sense of dread.
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And then what happens afterwards? They want it again.
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They need it again because now they have the shame of having engaged and now they want to fulfill it and it becomes an addiction and it's over and over and over.
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The conscience exists as, I believe, an example of immediate general revelation.
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It's God's direct intervention in the heart telling man that yes, indeed, he does exist.
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He doesn't have to look at the world and say, yeah, that world obviously has a creator.
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He has in his heart the knowledge of the creator and that's what we call general revelation.
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There's more that can be said on that but I need to move now to special revelation because really in a study of the Bible that's more so the focus is special revelation because we talk about general revelation, that's God giving revelation to all men everywhere.
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Not all men everywhere get the Bible.
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Not all men everywhere get special revelation.
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God has always chosen to give special revelation according to His sovereign will.
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He does not choose to give special revelation to everyone in the same way.
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So let's look very quickly.
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Let's answer the questions.
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It's special in audience and content.
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It involves a specific audience and it involves a specific content.
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In the same way that general revelation has a specific audience and a specific content, special revelation is the same.
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And it is seen in the Bible in various ways.
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If you turn to Hebrews chapter 1, Hebrews chapter 1 mentions this.
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Some of you probably can recite this from memory but if you want to just turn there to look at it very quickly, Hebrews chapter 1 and verse 1 says this.
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Hebrews 1.1 Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.
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But in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.
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So the key word there is the word many.
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It says long ago God spoke in many times and in many ways.
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Can you think of some of the ways that God spoke in the Old Testament? How did God make Himself known or His will known? Thank you.
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Yes, absolutely.
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I was hoping somebody would bring up the dreams and the visions because that one is often forgotten.
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But you realize in the Old Testament we have examples of God making Himself known through dreams.
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Now that can be dangerous because nowadays people get very much into dream interpretation and it can become almost a pseudoscience in and of itself.
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Somebody says, you know, well in my dream I was being chased and I had on red tennis shoes and the person chasing me had yellow tennis shoes and we got to a cliff and I fell and he didn't fall but then I ended up on top of the Empire State Building and I was wearing a pair of pajamas that didn't match my red tennis shoes.
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What does that mean? It means you shouldn't have had those burritos before you went to bed.
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That's what it means.
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But we do know that God used dreams as special revelation in the Old Testament.
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Can someone give me an example? The book of...
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Yeah, you have Joseph and the book of Genesis and also a similar account with Daniel in Daniel's prophecies as well.
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So there's two Old Testament prophets where God specifically used dreams in getting His will known to people.
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People ask me now, people have asked me several times, Pastor Keith, do you believe that God still uses dreams as special revelation? I tend to want to say no because I believe that special revelation for the church is found in Scripture and I tend to want to limit special revelation to Scripture.
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However, there have been some interesting things that I have heard that people have shared with me and particularly people who have gone overseas and talked to different people.
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I'll give you the example of Scott Phillips who was with us just a few weeks ago.
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You remember what he said? He said that the tribe, the Tao tribe, had never seen a white man and his father had had a dream about these pale people who were going to come and give this great message.
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And so when he came to give them the gospel, he was welcomed and not treated poorly or killed.
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So this dream was used in that sense to protect him and so he was able to come in and bring the gospel.
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That's hard to argue with and say well that just isn't God.
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I would have to say that is God but I don't know that that's the same type of revelation that God gave directly to Joseph and in that situation.
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But I certainly believe God was in that.
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So there is conversation to be had there.
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But certainly dreams and visions, you know Ezekiel had visions and those are two good examples.
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What are some other examples that we see in scripture? Outside of and we know the Bible is going to be special revelation but what are some other examples of special revelation? How about the lot? Not lot the man but the lot.
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Do you remember what the lot was? The lot was used to determine God's will.
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It was you cast the lot into the lap and it communicated what God wanted his people to do.
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We see it in Proverbs 16.33.
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It says the lot is cast into the lap but it's every turn is from the Lord which tells us that God was using that and directing his people and how was the 12th disciple chosen after Judas died? The 12 disciples came together and they cast lots between Matthias and Justice.
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By the way you may not know this you realize my son is named after the unchosen one.
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J.J.
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Justice that's his name and that's the disciple who the lot didn't fall to him.
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That's right and they had confidence I believe they had confidence in Proverbs 16.33 that wherever this falls it's God's will.
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Now I'm not saying we should have a fatalistic attitude and sometimes people do take that approach.
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Some people take that approach all the way to Las Vegas and they think well we're just going to roll the dice.
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But at the same time there was precedent in Scripture that God would make his will known through this thing called the lot.
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We don't know a ton about it but we do know that it was seen in Scripture.
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There was also something else called the Urim and the was that what you were going to say Don? The Urim and the Thummim.
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It was precious stones that were on the breastplate of the high priest.
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They were used to determine the will of God and you can see this in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and 1 Samuel.
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It's used throughout the Old Testament.
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There were also angels.
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Angels are seen in Old Testament and in New Testament.
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Jesus' very birth is announced by angels.
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So God's will is communicated.
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Do you know what the word angel means? It means messenger.
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In fact, euangelios, the Greek, that's where we get the word evangelism.
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Euangelios means good.
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That's the EU prefix.
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In Greek it means good.
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Like the word eulogy means good word.
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Say something good about somebody.
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Euangelios, angelos, angel.
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So euangelios, evangelism, is the word for good message.
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So we have angels who proclaimed God's message to the people, His will to the people.
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What was another way that God gave special revelation in the Old Testament? Miracles, thank you.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Burning bush, a cloud in the sky, a parting sea, ten plagues.
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This was a demonstration of God's will.
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You're going to let my people go.
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No, I'm not.
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Here come the frogs.
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This is a demonstration of God's will.
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But there's one more.
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I don't think we've necessarily forgotten them.
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I think we've at least overlooked them to this point.
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One more special revelation.
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That's a particular revelation from a prophet.
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And that's what I was getting to.
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It's the prophets of God.
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They were used to give special revelation.
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Moses being one, he gave the Ten Commandments.
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He gave special revelation from God as a mediator of God's revelation.
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You know the difference between the priest and the prophet, right? The prophet had the responsibility of speaking to the people on behalf of God.
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The priest had the responsibility of speaking to God on behalf of the people.
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This is why Jesus is called prophet and priest.
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He brought the message of God to the people, and he brought the sacrifice for sin to God on behalf of the people.
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So he's both prophet and priest.
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So was Moses.
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He was prophet and priest.
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And that's why he says there's going to come one like me when he was talking about Jesus in Deuteronomy.
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So we have all these examples of special revelation.
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Letter C on your notes, and we're going to start to draw.
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We're not ending, but we're going to start to draw that way.
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Letter C.
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We've said special revelation is seen in various ways, and it is contained for us in the Bible.
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The Bible serves as the most inclusive of all of the avenues of special revelation, for it encompasses the other avenues of special revelation.
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We wouldn't know about the miracles.
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We wouldn't know about the prophets.
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We wouldn't know about these things if it were not for the Bible.
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The Bible becomes to us the encapsulation of all of God's special revelation given to us in the written Word.
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As we talked about last week, the very written Word itself is miraculous, and God uses that written Word to communicate His truth.
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In a very real way, then, it can be said that now special revelation is to be restricted to the Bible.
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And like I said, if there's anyone who's claiming any type of special revelation from God today, we have to question whether or not what they're saying is in line with Scripture.
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What they're saying is true in accordance with Scripture.
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In fact, everything has to be compared with the Bible.
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Everything that we know has to be compared with what the Bible says.
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Have you ever heard the term analogia scriptorum? I've mentioned it before.
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Analogia scriptorum is the analogy of Scripture.
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It means that we have to compare the Scripture with the Scripture.
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If you read a Bible verse, and you make an interpretation, and your interpretation disagrees with the Bible in other places, then you've either misunderstood that passage, or you've misunderstood the other passages.
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You understand? Because the Bible doesn't contradict itself.
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And so, what is the test of interpretation? Does the way I'm interpreting this passage agree with the rest of the Bible? Well, that same thing is for all of life.
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Dr.
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R.C.
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Sproul talks about the fact that there has been arguments about general revelation, going back for a second to general revelation, arguments about whether or not general revelation is infallible.
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Because we believe that special revelation from God is infallible.
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The Word of God is infallible.
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But is general revelation infallible? I would say yes, but there's arguments about that.
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Here's why I would say yes, and I think Dr.
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Sproul would agree.
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General revelation is still from God.
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And all truth is God's truth.
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All truth belongs to God.
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But here's where we get in trouble.
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We have to interpret even general revelation through the lens of Scripture.
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Because which is more specific? General or special? Well, it's in the title.
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You have the general, and you have the special or specific.
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So we translate the general through the specific.
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And that leads to some difficulties sometimes.
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It leads to some difficulties in things like science.
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We've talked a lot about evolution.
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A lot of scientists today would argue that man evolved from a single cell over the last 4.5 billion years, that that single cell has, through the process of natural selection, created all the diversity of life that we now see on our planet.
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The Bible says God created the diversity of life that is on our planet.
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And I don't think that those two things are compatible.
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Now, there are people who do.
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There are people who argue for what's called theistic evolution.
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But I do think that argument is coming from a position of looking at the Bible through the lens of the argument of evolution and reading back into the Bible something that's not there.
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What's an issue that we would have with that? What is an issue that we would have with evolution as the mechanism for creating humans, human beings? Thank you.
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That's, yeah, I mean, you're right.
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But the specific issue is the Bible very clearly defines man as a special creation of God made in His image.
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The Imago Dei identifies man as different from all other created thing.
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There is no other thing in all creation that God said, that's my image.
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Man, mankind, that's God's image.
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We are the image bearers of God.
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That's what makes sin so ruggedly bad.
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Because it mars the image of God.
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God created us to bear His image.
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And when evolutionists say, no, man is not a special creation of God, but is an evolutionary byproduct, that runs in to what the Scripture teaches.
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So there is how we have to consider general and special revelation together.
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Can we look at special revelation and say, okay, general revelation can speak to this? Yeah, I think so.
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Because the Bible never talks about the shape of the earth.
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And for a long time, people thought the earth was flat.
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And then Galileo and Copernicus and these others came along and said, no, the earth is round, and the earth is not the center of this universe, but the sun is the center of the universe.
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And we're not geocentric, but heliocentric.
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We're actually going around the sun.
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The sun is not going around us.
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And some people said, no, that denies the Bible.
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It doesn't deny the Bible because the Bible doesn't address that.
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The Bible doesn't teach a geocentric universe.
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So we do allow for natural revelation to speak in the conversation.
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But the final word is given to God's inscripturated word, particularly when it comes to issues of salvation.
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Because guess what? No one is saved through general revelation.
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No one is saved because, like I was at 19, they look up and see the stars and realize how small they were.
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No one is saved because they realize how big God is.
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They're saved because they realize that they've sinned against that God and that God gave his son as a sacrifice for that sin.
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And that requires the gospel.
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The gospel is required for salvation.
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That's why we send missionaries.
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Because if a man could get saved just by looking at the stars, there'd be no reason to get on a plane or board a ship or take a train to bring him the gospel.
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We bring him the gospel because it's necessary.
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General revelation is just enough to get us lost.
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But it takes special revelation for us to be saved.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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Thank you for this time of study.
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I pray that it's been fruitful to your people and will be beneficial in them understanding even more, Lord, the importance of the revelation that you've provided for us in nature in general and in the Bible specifically.
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We thank you for it in Jesus' name.
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Amen.