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Can anybody see the news this week? What the Pope had to say about capital punishment? I thought it was apropos as we're talking about confessions of faith and the importance of having one as opposed to, you know, either church tradition or making it up as you go along.
And here we have the Pope saying that the death penalty, it's not just a sin, it's a mortal sin. And, you know, somebody rightly pointed out, not only does Romans 13 talk about capital punishment and the government using that, but Jesus, when he was correcting Peter, he said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.
Well, who's going to execute the die by the sword part? That's the government. It may have been. Yes. Is this being recorded? Sorry. Yeah, it it was. I don't know if it was an official statement. Well, it was an official statement.
I don't know if he was, you know, ex cathedraling it or not. What was the verb there? I don't know. But anyway, let's let's open our prayer. And we'll examine this more. Father, Lord, we come before you this morning just to praise you, to thank you for the great and wonderful God that you are so generous, so kind, so loving.
How you have provided all things for your children, father, and you have adopted us into your family to make us your children. And then you grant us all these good things. And father, we thank you for that.
And Lord, as we look to your word and what it says. Well, as we look to this confession, what it says about your word, what it says about your nature, what it should inform us, how it should inform our thinking and our living.
Father, we just pray that you bless each one here in Jesus name. Amen. Well, we've been talking about Scripture and about what the 1689 says about Scripture. And I just thought it was interesting in that, you know, if you look what Scripture says about the death penalty and you look what the Pope says about the death penalty, there are two different perspectives.
And if I have to choose between the Pope and Scripture. OK, that was too easy. So we talked about verbal plenary inspiration last week. We talked about that briefly. What do we mean when we say that it's inspired verbally?
And see, there's going to be a trick there. What do we mean by Scripture is inspired verbally? All of it is the plenary part. The verbal part means word for word. You know, you want to say each verb that is and that would be wrong.
The verbs are inspired. Yes. All of it is. Yes. Every single word. Now, is the New Testament more inspired than the Old Testament? After all, the New Testament has the red letters, the words of Jesus, the Old Testament.
Of course, the God of the Old Testament is very mean and very restrictive. Corey says, no way. OK. They're both equally inspired. In fact, Waldron says, the organic unity of both Testaments. Big words here.
The organic unity. To me, that just means it was like grown in a hydroponic system. I don't know what that means. The organic unity, it just means that they work together. There's no contradiction. Of both Testaments is the presupposition.
That is to say, what's a presupposition? In grade school, that would give you an F minus. What is a presupposition without using the word or the root of the word? It's an assertion assumed to be true.
In other words, it's something that you do not prove. We presuppose the truth of Scripture. Why do we do that? Because Scripture says that it's true. We presuppose the existence of God. In other words, we don't ever prove the existence of God.
Why is that? What's that? Conscience. OK. You can make that argument if you choose. Everybody has a conscience, and therefore they are aware of these things. But I'd like to go a little more basic even than that.
We're contingent beings, which is, you know, now we're getting philosophical. But that's a very, very good point. I see a hand in the back, and I know she's got the right answer. God doesn't prove He exists.
What are the first words of Scripture? Yeah. I mean, Moses doesn't say, let me just take a couple of chapters to prove why God exists. He just says God exists. You know, it's his presupposition. It's his foundation, in other words.
Foundational truth, something that does not need to be proven. Oh, see, the organic unity of both Testaments is the presupposition. In other words, the idea that they both go together is the foundational truth to the authority of the Old Testament and of allusion to it in which the New Testament abounds.
This fact of organic unity bears very directly upon the question of the inspiration of the New Testament. In other words, what he's arguing here is, if we can get to the point where we say, yes, the Old Testament is inspired, well, then we're stuck, stuck.
We're forced to acknowledge the fact that the New Testament is inspired because they're so integrated, you can't separate the two. For if, as we have found, the authoritative witness of the New Testament, that which forms an organic unit with the Old...
Anyway, when the implications of the organic unity are fully integrated, the idea that they're so integrated is fully appreciated, it becomes impossible to believe that the divinity of the New Testament can be on a lower plane than that of the Old Testament.
Surely, then, if the Old Testament, according to the testimony that is in this matter, has the greatest relevance or authority and is inerrant, the New Testament must also be. So, all that to say, Old Testament, New Testament are equally inspired and equally reliable and trustworthy.
Okay, now, was the Bible written by men or by the Holy Spirit? Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you for that, Pastor. You know, this is a very often cited criticism. What do unbelievers come at you with?
How can you believe the Bible because it was written by men? Okay, to which I can only say it is the most brilliant conspiracy of all time, that these 40 or so men could put together this book without the aid of computers, you know, so they could make sure there were no problems, and somehow get something that congeals together as a whole.
That was an amazing job that they did, and I'm kind of surprised that they were able to pull it off. Yeah, exactly. Corey says, you know, that as they were writing, they may not have had access to everything that other men had already written, and yet they don't contradict one another.
It's really amazing, and there's an answer for that, and the answer is, of course, it's inspired by the Holy Spirit. And we'll get to 1 Peter here in a moment. I like this answer, though. He says, The humanity of Christ, and it's going to sound like I'm answering another question, but hold on for a minute.
The humanity of Christ does not mitigate or negate His full deity with all its implications. So also, the humanity of the Bible does not mean that it is errant. In other words, because Jesus is fully man and fully God, He's no less God just because He's man.
And in the same way, just because the Bible is written by man and by the Holy Spirit, doesn't mean that it somehow gets errors into it just because there are human authors. He says, So the Bible is a human book without being errant or any less divine.
He calls that the reformed doctrine of organic inspiration. This view denies any mechanical or dictation view of inspiration in which the humanity of the human writer is suspended. In other words, the men did not cease to be men.
They did not cease to have personality. They did not cease to be constrained by their education, by their intellect. The Holy Spirit didn't make them smarter. It teaches the full humanity of the Bible, i .e., that the human writer's own personalities and freedoms were fully operational.
It also teaches the complete and detailed divinity of the Bible, i .e., that it is precisely God speaking without human distortion. God made these men's mouths through general providence and special grace, creating the precise instrument desired.
Organic inspiration assumes the Reformed and Biblical view that the same activity can be and is both divinely ordained and the product of free human agency. And this is the consistent testimony of Scripture.
And by the way, it's going to be part of what I'll be preaching about later. Always and, well, frequently in John, you see the fact that God is sovereign and man is responsible. And this is the same basic idea.
God inspires the Scripture, but men wrote the Scripture. Did men write something other than what God the Holy Spirit ordained or intended? The answer is no. Did the men write something other than what they intended?
No. So both are true, and that's okay. Any thoughts or questions about that? Okay. Back to 1689. They write, or it says, We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church of God to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures and the heaviness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation and many other incomparable excellencies and entire perfections thereof.
These are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God. Yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
What in the world does that say? Was anybody listening? Here's what it says. Even though the Church says that Scripture is Scripture, that it's inspired, and it is, and that's all true, and there are many great things in it and the efficacy of the doctrine and all that, he says, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority of Scripture is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
Let's go ahead and look at 1 Corinthians 2. And this is really a key verse for a lot of things. You know, if you're... I don't know if I've said this recently, so I'll say it now. Why do you suppose it is that I don't like to...
I typically don't like to debate doctrine with unbelievers. Why don't I do that? Okay, because they're unbelievers. I mean, it's like, duh, let's debate infant baptism with believer's baptism with an unbeliever.
Who cares what their opinion is, right? How about let's preach the Gospel to them and see if the Lord would change their heart. In the same way, I don't debate Scripture with them. I don't debate the meaning of Scripture.
I don't debate, you know, any of those kind of things. Well, why not? I declared Scripture to them. But the reason I don't debate Scripture with them is found in 1 Corinthians 2. And we'll just read verse 14.
If somebody wants to read verse 14, that'd be great. 1 Corinthians 2, 14. Okay. So the natural person being an unbeliever. It kind of makes you think, well, if a natural person is an unbeliever, then I must be a supernatural person.
Easy enough. But here's the... Well, I guess in some ways you are, right, if you've been regenerated. But it's interesting because he says they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them. This whole section here is about the work of the Holy Spirit in applying the Word of God to us, about revealing the truth of Scripture to us.
And apart from the Holy Spirit, the unbelieving man may be able to discern the meaning of the Scripture. Okay. He may be able to get it right. But he's not going to have the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit convicting him, you know, basically doing what Hebrews talks about, right?
It's not going to do the work of the two-edged sword on him. Why? Because he's immune to it. There's no Holy Spirit working on him. Until and unless he does. But the point is it's a waste of time to debate that with him.
And what they're saying here is Scripture is inspired. It's true. It's holy. It's all these things, but not because the church says so, but because the Holy Spirit presses that on the believer's heart and says these things are true.
The Holy Spirit bears testimony to your spirit that these things are of God. Questions or thoughts about that? Then Waldron goes on to say paragraph 5, that's this paragraph here, was aimed at Rome. Roman Catholicism affirms that the church is able to give an infallible attestation of the Bible.
In other words, it establishes the Bible is what they would say. Any view which invests the church with an infallible authority must be unacceptable to Protestants. Why would that be? Why is it unacceptable to Protestants to invest the church with infallible authority?
Yes, Andrew. I mean, if you have two competing infallible witnesses, you have a problem, right? There's a really basic reason. Okay, and that's on the right track here, Robert. The church needs Scripture more than Scripture needs the church.
Okay, there it is right there. The church is composed of fallible men. Infallible Scripture, fallible men. Who wins? According to Rome, fallible men win. I think that's problematic. The Reformers were faced with a dilemma.
If they rejected the opposite extreme, the radical Anabaptists and their claims to direct revelation, in what way could they authenticate the Bible? So his other point here is they didn't want to entirely reject the authority of a church or any church because they wanted to be able to authenticate the Bible.
But then they were also stuck with these Anabaptists who said, essentially, God told me, I have a revelation from the Lord, whatever. Scripture has to be the ultimate authority. If Scripture is not, then you've got the church on one end and you've got, I'll just say, charismatics on the other.
And part of the problem with extreme charismaticism, I don't even want to say it. I can't figure it out. The charismatic movement. There you go. The problem with that is sometimes these revelations can supplant or replace Scripture, or have a higher authority.
If God tells you something, and it's so funny, I was reading something about the Westminster Confession of Faith last night because one of the holes in Waldron's book, which we'll be getting to here, and he just says it right at the beginning of his chapter about the attributes of God.
He says, I'm not going to cover the attributes of God because they're written about somewhere else. And I'm like, okay. So anyway, I'm reading this book on the Westminster Confession of Faith as well.
And they said in this book, I'm going to lose my whole train of thought. Rome. It'll come back to me. I'll figure it out. Oh, yeah. We're talking about the Puritans and what they wrote about this whole matter.
And they said this. They said, shame on men who go around saying God to women. God told me that we're supposed to be together. And I'm like, think about it. That was going on 400 years ago, and it's still going on today.
The Lord told me, you know. Joseph Smith did that too. Hey, still going on today. Okay. Holy Spirit authenticates Scripture to believers. Scripture is the highest authority there is that we have, higher than the church, higher than any sort of alleged personal revelation.
Walter goes on. He says, while they recognize that the testimony of the church had a certain value, it was the divine excellencies of Scripture itself applied by the Holy Spirit to the heart, which were the genuine and effective authentication of Scripture.
They taught, therefore, the self-authentication of the Scriptures. Holy Spirit testifies to believers that what he wrote in Scripture is true. The Scripture testifies that it's true. It's self-authentication.
Who knows who Cornelius Ventile was? Cornelius Ventile. No, he didn't invent anything. You know, he sounds like he should be like, well, wasn't he a competitor of Thomas Edison? No. Or like a baron of industry?
No, he wasn't. Cornelius Ventile was a prof, Presbyterian prof at Westminster. I'm sure he was way after Princeton and went liberal. And he's the modern, I don't even want to say founder, but he popularized the idea of presuppositional apologetics.
Brilliant man. And he said this. He said, the most depraved of men cannot wholly escape the voice of God. Gets back to what you're saying. Their great wickedness is meaningless, except upon the assumption that they have sinned against the authority of God.
And we see this all the time. I saw a secular video about this. What makes murder wrong? God does. You know, it's interesting. Years ago I went to a, one of the last things I did before I retired from the sheriff's department, we had a so-called leadership training day.
Yeah, leadership. But it was funny because, you know, we'd now gotten into the beginnings of this really kind of egalitarian movement where it didn't matter, you know, there were secretaries there, there were captains there, you know, from all these different departments, and we're all in this great big room.
And so they separated us into little groups, and they said, well, we want you guys to discuss for about ten minutes in your little groups, and then we'll come together and we'll talk. Is this. What are the universal truths?
Universally true everywhere in the world. Okay? Universal rights and wrongs. So one group said, you know, cannibalism is always wrong. Not true. There are cultures in the world where they still do this.
Okay, they said murder is always wrong. Not true. You know, incest is always wrong. Not true. There are cultures where they still do this. You know, all these horrendous sins, and they're not true. There is nothing that if you go around the globe, you can't find some culture that doesn't say, well, that's okay.
It's just part of our culture. That's just what we do. What makes them wrong is the existence of God and God's word. If there's no established truth, then anything goes. And this makes atheists, of course, very uncomfortable, but it doesn't matter what they say.
And that's Van Til's point. He says, their greatest wickedness is meaningless, except upon the assumption that they have sinned against the authority of God. Thoughts and deeds of utmost perversity are themselves revelational.
That is, in their very abnormality, the natural man accuses or else excuses himself, because he has a conscience, only because his own utterly depraved consciousness continues to point back to the original natural state of affairs, which is to say sinlessness, which is to say perfection.
They know that they've gone astray, and the truth is they actually delight in it. The prodigal son can never forget the father's voice. It is the albatross forever about his neck. Let's look at Psalm 19, verses 1 to 5.
Psalm 19, verses 1 to 5. And would somebody read that, please? Psalm 19, verses 1 to 5. You know, the great thing about being in Sunday school is you don't have to walk the aisle to read the scripture.
You just have to raise your hand. I see that hand. I see that hand. That's all. Go ahead. Every time I hear that, like a strong man running his course with joy, I'm like, I want to go out running. Bad idea.
Here's what Waldron says. Psalm 19 asserts that creation has a voice. It was created by the word of God and now speaks a word to men. With its voice, it declares loudly, clearly, abundantly, ceaselessly, and universally the glory of the living God.
I mean, even pagans. I dare say if you go to their Facebook pages and you look at some landscape post that they put up, they go, isn't this ugly? Isn't this terrible? What an ugly, horrible world we live in.
You know, speaking of the physicality of it, of the organizational aspects of it, they would never say that. They think things are beautiful and they're right. But they want to attribute it to anything but God.
Romans 1 tells us why. Why do they suppress that truth and unrighteousness? Because they hate God, ultimately. Let's read Romans 1, 18 -20. I mean, these are some of the foundational passages that you really need to know when you're dealing, when you are engaging in apologetics, when you're engaging in evangelism.
You need to know 1 Corinthians 2 .14. Why? Because if you're talking to an unbeliever, they're going to twist or misunderstand or not be able to grasp the message of Scripture. If they want to talk about evolution and all this, well, you need to know Psalm 19.
You need to know Romans 1. Why? Because they're going to say, well, in spite of everything that we see, God does not exist. Certainly not the God of the Bible. The God I believe in is just too nice to send anybody to hell or anything else.
In Romans 1, 18 -20, please, would somebody read that? I mean, if you're going to have anything written on the inside of your hand when you go to do evangelism, Romans 1, 18 -20 is good. Yeah, go ahead.
Have you ever, that idea of suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, have you ever had, you know, if you get a flotation device, a lot of times you can, if you're strong enough, you can hold it underwater, right?
What if there's a flotation device that's just big enough that no matter how strong you are, you know, you push it underwater and it's like you can't hold it underwater, it just keeps coming up, keeps coming up, keeps coming up.
And you push it down and it keeps coming up and you're like, the harder you push, the more it just keeps coming back. That's the idea. Because they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, but they're not strong enough to suppress the truth because the truth is all around them.
It's a hopeless, hopeless endeavor, but that doesn't stop them from doing it. They're devoted to suppressing the truth and unrighteousness because to acknowledge the truth is to acknowledge God, and to acknowledge God is to condemn themselves, and therefore they suppress the truth and unrighteousness.
Waldron says, Thus the apostle can assert that men in a certain sense know God, know the law of God, and know the ordinance of God, that those who break the laws must die. Though they suppress the truth, they do possess the truth.
Now that's amazing, right? He says, Who break the laws must die. We didn't go on far enough in Romans 1 to get there, but that those who deserve to die, what do we do instead in our culture? We cheer them on.
I did see a little interesting nugget. I couldn't resist sending this to Mike last night. I think over the last four years, the girl's name, Caitlin, has gone from one of the most popular names to nobody names a kid that anymore, so I'm sorry for anybody who did.
I just thought, all because as a society we're so hateful we can't stand the idea of a man becoming less than a man, I guess. He's not a woman no matter what he wants to say, Bruce Jenner, Caitlin Jenner, whatever his name is.
But this is the wickedness of our society that somebody who a few years ago would have been hospitalized and heavily medicated, now is some kind of hero. They actually gave him an award, and I thought it was interesting.
I was reading an article a couple weeks ago about the people, the sports people, who were nominated the year that Bruce Jenner won that award, and it was like somebody who was a double amputee and yet had done a marathon and different things like that, and I'm like, okay.
So instead of giving somebody like that the award, they gave it to somebody who has a mental illness. Very, very odd. But that's the world we live in. They applaud those who are in great sin. Okay. Waldron goes on and he says, even in Acts 17, who knows what takes place in Acts 17 besides Bob?
No cheating. Acts 17, what is going on? I see that hand, John. Paul speaks on Mars Hill, also known as the Areopagus, which just means Mars Hill. And Waldron says, where Paul faces complete pagans, those Athenians, the existence and attributes of God are rather asserted, assumed, and declared than proved or argued.
So it would be fair to say that Paul, the Apostle Paul, was a presuppositionalist. Let's look at Acts 17, verses 22 to 31, and notice what he doesn't do while he's talking to them. I've seen people do this, you know, try to bring in the evidence to prove that God exists and everything else, and I'm like, I don't know why.
Paul doesn't really do that. He just supposes that He exists. Acts 17, verses 22 to 31. That's so long. Maybe I'll just, I don't want anybody else to run out of energy. Okay. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are religious, for as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God.
What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God in the hope that they may feel their way toward Him and find Him.
Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed His offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.
The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed, and of this He has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.
Well, He only raised one man from the dead, and that would be the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, did I say 32 or 31? 31, okay. So, I mean, there you have it. Paul is very clear that this God exists, and he never says, let me tell you how I know He exists.
He just says, basically, that He created Adam, that He created heaven and earth, He created everything, that He set the boundaries on the earth, He designed it all, which would tend to make us think that He's the owner of everything, and then He says, being God's offspring, in other words, we are God's creation, we ought not to think of the Divine Being being gold or anything else.
So, you know, just like in Isaiah, he's saying, listen, you know, people work and they build these idols and they fall down and worship them. How dopey is that? There's a God who exists. And by the way, He exists and He set a date in which He is going to judge every single person, and He's going to do that through the Lord Jesus Christ.
So, Waldron says this, he goes, if general revelation, that is to say the world again, is self-authenticating, how much more must special revelation, as it is inscripturated in the Bible, be self-authenticating?
Scripture testifies to itself. In general revelation, creation speaks to us of God. In special revelation, God Himself approaches us directly and personally speaks to us in words. So, general revelation, again, the idea being all of creation and everything around us, tells us there is a God, but it is not enough to save us.
We need the Word of God for that. Let me move on here. Scriptures are clearly self-authenticating. John Calvin said this, but with regard to the question, how shall we be persuaded of its divine origin unless we have recourse to the decree of the Church?
Again, this idea that the Church must authenticate Scripture for it to be Scripture. This is just as if anyone should inquire, how should we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter?
In other words, he's saying, do we need the Church to tell us what Scripture is and what not Scripture is? No, we don't need it any more than we need the Church to tell us what light and darkness are, what white and black are, what sweet and bitter are.
For the Scripture exhibits as clear evidence of its truth as white and black things do of their color or sweet or bitter things of their taste. The question may arise, however, this is Waldron again, if the Scriptures are self-authenticating, what is the need of the additional testimony of the Holy Spirit?
Further, if they are self-authenticating, what of the unbelief and denial by which they are met by so many? Well, of course, that brings us right back to the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Why do so many people see that Scripture is self-authenticating yet they don't believe?
Well, because they have not been worked on by the Holy Spirit, they have not been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. I've said many times, one of the most amazing things to me is that liberals, that is to say unbelievers, write so many books about Scripture.
When I was in seminary, I took a class on exegesis of Ephesians and we had to read two commentaries. One commentary was just excellent. The other commentary spent 50 pages explaining why Paul didn't write Ephesians.
That was really hard to read because it's like, you know, I, Paul, and he says it a few times during Ephesians. I think it's like in, obviously in chapter 1, and I think then again in chapter 3 or something like that, and you just go, okay, how do you explain away the clear words of Scripture without invalidating the whole thing?
And it's a bizarre thing. But this is, people do this, spend their whole lives trying to disprove the Bible. One of the most popular people nowadays is Bart Ehrman down in North Carolina who's on the faculty down there.
I think at the seminary actually, you know, they have a University of North Carolina School of Divinity, and he's, you know, teaching people why they shouldn't believe the Bible while he's preparing them for ministry.
So, for what that's worth. About external proofs of Scripture, external proofs of Scripture, Waldron says this, it is important to note in conclusion that the whole effort to discover some external attestation of the Bible is misguided, whether that attestation is brought in an infallible church or in an historical expert.
Why would he say that? Why is it a waste of time, is basically what he's saying. Why is it a waste of time to try to use external proofs to prove Scripture? Okay? Nothing else we have is infallible. And if we've already said that Scripture self-authenticates Scripture, Scripture declares that it's inspired, Scripture declares that it's true, Scripture declares that it's the source of our information about God, why would we think that external proofs are going to prove anything?
Besides that, here's the other problem. What does the Holy Spirit use to illumine the minds of men? Scripture. So, if we bring non-scriptural evidence to unbelievers and say, now you should believe in Scripture, they're going to go, yeah, no.
That's just more for me to hold down. That's it. Thank you for that. That's just more truth for me to hold down to suppress an unrighteousness. There are many examples. One example, though, the liberal scholars, and it's kind of a contradiction, but the liberal scholars said for many, many years that King David did not exist.
That he was like a compilation of different kings, but he didn't exist. And then they found something called the Teldan Stele. And stele is S-T-E-L-E, and basically what it was is when they won a battle in the ancient world, they would often put like a little monument, a placard, you know, whatever.
I want to call it a headstone. You know, that kind of thing to commemorate the battle, and they would leave it at a certain place. And Teldan is the city of Dan. And they found this stele at the city of Dan.
That's why it's called the Teldan Stele. Thank you. You learned something today. And it recounts the victory of King David over his enemies. And they're like, whoa, okay, well, maybe David does exist.
But, you know, that doesn't convert liberals into believers. And there's historic evidence after historic evidence that comes in that validates the Bible. You know, I forget even now. There are a variety of people that they say, even in the New Testament, didn't exist.
And then they find historical evidence that they did exist. And now, you know, do they become believers? No. Because nobody becomes a believer based on external evidence. They become a believer by yielding to the Word of God, to the Holy Spirit of God.
They become a believer by believing what God has said. Yes. Yes. And it doesn't convert the unbeliever. Now, for us, you know, for believers, it's certainly encouraging. I mean, you know, and all the more, I mean, maybe I should find, maybe there's some kind of like compilation of all the things that, you know, the experts said did not exist.
And then they, you know, like one of the more amazing things, I'll get to you in a second. When we went to Jerusalem, is a place that's only vaguely even talked about in scripture, and it's called Hezekiah's Tunnel, where they cut a channel through solid rock to get water into the city of Jerusalem because they were anticipating the siege.
And they can't even figure out how they did it way back then. They would have a hard time doing it now. Because, you know, it's so far underground of solid rock and all that stuff. But it's just, it's wild to see that even like things that are only slightly mentioned in scripture actually exist in the real world.
Barry, have I totally strobeled this? Yeah. For those of you who don't know what he's talking about, you can ask Barry after class. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Lee Strobel. So it's this whole evidentialist approach to scripture and to Jesus.
I'll just tell you, you know, I don't care if anybody sees the movie, it's fine. And it's probably a decent movie or whatever. The Case for Christ, though, was recently out. And it's this whole idea of Lee Strobel, journalist, skeptic, you know, starts investigating and becomes a believer.
I read the book. I did a book report. And one of the things that struck me the most was Lee Strobel went to a psychologist and asked him to profile Jesus and decide whether Jesus was in his right mind or not.
Thankfully, the psychologist decided he was. But in my review, I just thought, this is a bizarre idea. Tell me, Mr. Psychologist, is the creator of the universe in his right mind? That's just weird. So, you know, yeah, again, not very helpful from a salvific point of view.
But, you know, a list of all the things that they said couldn't possibly be and have been proven to be wrong would be very interesting. Okay. Okay, we'll just skip that and we'll get down. We'll start, well, next week we won't be here.
I'll be in Kansas, sorry. The week after that, we'll wrap this up about Scripture and then we'll start talking about the attributes of God even though Waldron doesn't do it. And then we'll be talking about God and the Holy Trinity.
And I was really hoping we'd get to this part. I'll just give you a preview because I want to mention it this morning. What does impassable mean? It's impassable. Charlie. Yes. The inability to disturb or perturb.
It basically means that God does not, I'll say suffer because I think that's what the dictionary term is, suffer human emotion. That he doesn't experience these things but we will see today that he does experience them in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ because he's fully human.
Okay, well, let's close in prayer. Father, we thank you for your sure word. Lord, the smartest of men assaulted, attack it and have for centuries really since, well, since creation. Once Satan had influence on Eve and then on Adam, mankind has doubted you.
Father, you have made yourself plain in your written word and we praise you for it. Father, we thank you even though the skeptics rail against your word. You have been proven right over and over again.
Father, we thank you that our faith does not, our faith is not dependent upon external evidence but that you have by your spirit so worked in our hearts that we readily accept and believe and love your word and we praise you for that.
Father, we thank you for the work of spirit, of your spirit in our lives that you would, your spirit would regenerate us, that he would give us new affections, new desires and an entirely new belief system, one that longs for truth and embraces the truth and loves the Lord Jesus Christ and it's in his name we pray.
Amen.