Unashamed of Inerrancy Pt. 1

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Unashamed of Inerrancy Pt. 2

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If you'll turn with me, please, in your Bibles to the Book of Matthew, the Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 26.
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The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 26. And before we look to the
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Word of God once again, let us ask Him to bless our time together. My gracious Heavenly Father, once again, as we open
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Your Word, we recognize that apart from Your Spirit, we can do nothing.
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We cannot handle that which is supernatural or right unless the Spirit of God comes to be with us.
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And so we pray, Lord, that You would gather with Your people for the blessing of Your people and to Your honor and glory.
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May we understand Your truth. May we be encouraged. May this time be a time wherein
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You are honored, Your name is glorified, and Your saints are edified. We pray in Christ's name.
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Amen. We live in a very strange day.
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This past week, some of you may be aware, some of us were exposed to a sermon given by a highly well -known minister of the
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Gospel. Down in Texas, they do everything big, at least that's what we're told anyways.
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That's what the advertisements say. And they've come up with an idea.
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I haven't suggested this to Pastor Fry yet. I have a feeling what kind of response it would get were
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I to do so. But the big thing down there are multi -campus churches.
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And what you do is you have one big old pastor. And then you use technology, which would require at least having a cell phone, technology to have that one guy preach at all these big, big campuses.
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And so you'll have praise bands and all the rest of this kind of stuff. And they'll sort of do their own thing.
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But they sort of sync it up so that when it's time for the big man, the popular guy, to preach, then they all sort of end at the same time.
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And up come the screens. And one guy will be preaching to thousands and thousands of people.
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In fact, this particular fellow, he's actually not down in Texas, now that I think about it, though this is where it's primarily popular. But it's elsewhere, too.
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This fellow's in the Georgia area. And 32 ,000 people.
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32 ,000 people. Not all in the same place, because it's not even that fellow that stole that basketball arena could get 32 ,000 people in there.
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So you do it at all these different campuses. And that sounds like quite the interesting way of doing things.
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Problem is, if the guy up front is sort of losing his grip on the truth of the
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Scriptures, now you get to instruct 32 ,000 people all at once to start losing their grip on the truth of the
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Scriptures, too. And so people who were once known for holding firmly to the inspiration of Scripture, well, in our day, there are certain pressures coming upon many well -known people to sort of back off just a little bit from that really narrow thought that, well, what you have is you have the very
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Word of God, and it can actually be known, and it can be understood, and it has a message to it.
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Don't you think that's just a little bit narrow? Don't you think that's just a little unloving? Would Jesus have been that way?
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Well, that's the kind of pressure that we've been saying for a long time is going to be coming upon the church, especially when you recognize what's going on in the field of our culture and the exaltation of one particular lifestyle to the highest good.
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This is the highest good. We must affirm, we must celebrate, and we're being told that if we dare believe that the
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Scriptures say otherwise, then we are bigoted and hateful, and we will not be able to participate in society, and indeed, society will punish us.
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And so this idea of the inspiration of Scripture, this idea that God has actually spoken, there are a lot of people that will say, oh, yes,
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God has spoken, but He's spoken in many, many different ways. And, of course, the Scriptures do say that God has spoken in what we call general revelation in the sense that God has revealed certain aspects of who
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He is by what He has created and the way in which He has created it and the way He has ordered it.
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And so we know in Romans 1 that there are certain things that God has revealed about who
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He is, His eternal power, His nature as the one true
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God. Yes, that is revealed in the creation around us. And so men actually are said to be suppressing or holding down that truth when they deny
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God and they deny that He can make Himself known. I mean, how foolish is it for creatures who are able to communicate with one another to think that the
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God that made them cannot communicate with those that He made, in fact, that He cannot communicate in such a way that would be effective for men of the ancient world and the modern world, men with and without cell phones, if you can believe that.
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What foolishness it is for man to think that this incredible capability that we have of speech and communication, that that same creature could then look at His Creator and go, but I really don't know that God would really be able to communicate
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Himself. We hold men accountable for the laws of the land, but evidently
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God can create us and yet He doesn't have the ability to communicate with us. Foolishness, it truly is.
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And yet, obviously we know there is a tremendous attack upon the idea that God has spoken.
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Well, there's so many books of Scripture. I mean, come on. You've got people driving trucks into crowded groups quoting from books of Scripture.
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And don't you realize you're just like them. If you think your book of Scripture is from God and they think their book of Scripture is from God, well, how is there any difference between the two of you?
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That's how man in our day thinks. Now, that's not really, obviously, decent thought. That would make as much sense as during World War II, someone arguing, well, the
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Germans have a constitution and we have a constitution, so we're just like the Germans. That doesn't make any sense, but unfortunately people don't think really well anymore.
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Especially the modern generation feels rather than thinks.
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And the idea of subjecting emotion to rational thought and to logic, well, even people in my generation are collapsing on that, because to be perfectly honest with you, it's a whole lot easier to go that direction.
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It takes a lot of effort to try to be consistent in forming a worldview and thinking about things and resisting the idea of just experiencing emotion.
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And I think, unfortunately, the Internet and the means by which a lot of us get our news anymore, there are only three or four people left in the valley that actually read a newspaper and two of them are in this congregation.
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And there's no moving pictures in the newspaper. It's all just words on a thin piece of paper.
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And you don't get videos of puppy dogs and kitties and things like that that just sort of help to turn your mind into mush while you're thinking about politics all at the same time.
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And the result is, well, the result is we're in a real mess. People just don't think clearly about things.
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And even within the church, I've said many, many times, I wish there was some way we could install back at that door back there, some device that whenever anybody walks through it, it just sucks the secular worldview right out of them.
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So when you come in here, you have a biblical worldview. You have the mind of Christ and you prioritize things in light of what the
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Word of God says. That would be wonderful, but it doesn't work that way. That's not how it happens.
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And so what's happening in the church is you're having more and more people who are coming in. And if you think that the function of the church is to just trick people to come in and entertain people and get them to make just a little bit of a commitment to Jesus or attack
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Jesus onto the rest of all their self -help methodologies, well, the result is the message you're going to preach is going to be extremely watered down.
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It's not going to challenge anybody. And it's going to be insufficient to create a biblical worldview in anyone's mind. And so when they come in, their secular worldview is not going to be being challenged by meaningful, full -throated, the whole counsel of God preaching.
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But instead, you're going to have to pat everybody and make them feel good when they leave and just give them a
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God who's just so happy that they bothered to show up for 45 minutes and sing a few songs and then they can go on and live their regular life without thinking about things like repentance or the lordship of Christ or anything like that at all.
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And so when it comes to the Word of God, all of a sudden, there are many people who used to be very firm in saying,
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I believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. And then in the modern day, there has been another term, and it's not that the concept is new at all.
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You'll hear people saying, oh, that term you all are talking about, there's one very famous British theologian today, very, very well known.
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If you want to get ahead, if you want to be considered to be cutting edge and be able to elevate your nose above other people, you follow after this particular guy.
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He calls it that silly American doctrine. And it's the one word that if you utter it and you say,
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I actually believe it, you are ending any possibilities you're ever going to have of getting ahead in the academy, of being considered truly scholarly in the
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Christian academy today. It's the dreaded word, inerrancy. Inerrancy.
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Now, in some denominations, you have to sign a piece of paper that says, I believe in what our confession says about inerrancy.
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If you're even going to teach in the seminaries, that's a nice thing, except when you don't really have a clear understanding of what that doctrine is, and you can find ways around what it means.
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And unfortunately, that's exactly what is happening in that particular denomination as well.
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And so, when we are challenged by the world around us, and if you're going to refer to the word of God, if you're going to say anything in the society, if you're going to stand for what is right, stand for the gospel, proclaim the gospel, give any type of authoritative word from God, eventually, it's going to come back to, well, where are you getting this stuff?
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Who do you think you are? Well, it's not me. It's what the word of God says. The word of God?
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Well, everybody knows that the Bible contains all sorts of errors and contradictions.
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This has been proven over and over and over again. No one really believes that stuff anymore.
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Unfortunately, many believers. Even if you've been exposed to the word of God, to where you have seen the word of God handled in such a way, not only to honor it, but to truly honor it.
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What I mean by that is the difficulties weren't glossed over. The tough passes weren't swept under the rug.
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That's what's happening in so many churches in our land today. Instead of preaching the whole counsel of God, you pick the little things that are going to make people feel good, and you sweep the tough stuff under the rug.
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Now, you may have noticed, unless you knew around here, we don't do that. Not only do we preach through, you know,
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Pastor Fry has preached through some of the minor prophets. Yes, we know they are in the Bible, and we actually think they're inspired too.
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And he's just having a grand old time, because it's so easy to do, to preach through Job. And I just finished preaching through some of the most interesting texts in the
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Old Testament, and the Old Testament law, and things like that. Before that, we did the easy breezy book of Hebrews.
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That's just around here, what, 11 years? Through the Synoptic Gospels, with a lot of stops and starts, but going parallel and looking at, oh my goodness.
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Well, why do we do that? Well, because we want to keep the congregation small. I mean, we only have room for another 40 people in here, so I mean, we've got to call a halt someplace, and we ain't doing that multi -campus thing,
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I can guarantee you. As long as he's around, that ain't going to happen. No, that's not why we do it.
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We do it because of what Paul said in Acts. I think Pastor Frey will agree,
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I didn't ask him about this, but we've sort of known each other for a little while now. I think when he gets to the end, when he stands up here for the last time,
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I think he's actually going to try to pull a Calvin on us, and we're going to have to drag him out of here and straight to the hospital, and that's it, and the next service will be a funeral service, and I think that's probably what he'd like to actually have happen.
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And that's not a bad way to do things either, but the reality is that that last time, we want to say what
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Paul said to the Ephesian elders in the book of Acts, because Paul could look them in the eye, and he could say,
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I am innocent of the blood of any man, because I did not hold back from you anything out of the whole counsel of God.
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I didn't edit things, I didn't fear the face of men, I didn't go, well, you know,
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I need to say such and so in this text, but George is down there, and he's a lot bigger than I am, and I don't think he's going to like what
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I'm going to say about that. No, we didn't do that. Didn't even run it through our minds.
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Because God has given us his revelation, and to honor it, you have to honor all of it, not just parts of it.
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If you start editing what someone has said, you're not showing respect for the person who sent the message.
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You think you're smarter than that person. I really shouldn't say that, and people aren't going to like this, so let's skip over that.
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That's really what people are doing when they edit out the tough stuff, and they basically demonstrate they really don't believe what the word of God says in its entirety.
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And so I'm unashamed to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy. I'm unashamed.
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I know that that turns me into an immediate troglodyte as far as many of the hooty snooty in the academy are concerned, and I'm never going to get to be in the big high places of academia, but that's okay.
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That's alright. I'll live with that. Because I don't see any other way to faithfully look at what the word of God says and to believe it than to believe that God is the author of it, and the fact of the matter is there are human beings that can produce inerrant documents.
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There are. I'll bet there are people in here that have produced inerrant documents in the past.
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You've taken spelling tests, even geography tests, and you've gotten 100%.
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You were inerrant. You did not commit an error in the production of that document. Well, it was probably a short document.
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It probably wasn't the most important thing in the world, but hey, you somehow pulled it off. Are you telling me
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God can't do that when he wants to reveal his truth to his people? Are you saying it's beyond his capacity for men to speak from God as they're carried along by the
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Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit can't carry men into the proper expression of words without...
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We don't believe that Peter and John and Paul were dictation machines and they just went into a trance and just started writing stuff and then woke up, whoa, look at that.
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That's awesome. We know that's not how it worked because we can tell the vocabulary and the style in John is different than the vocabulary and style in Paul and different than the vocabulary and style in Peter.
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Even in Peter's two letters, it's a completely different style between the two because he's using two different scribes and they're writing now what he said.
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We're not into the simplistic automatic writing type thing, but God is still big enough to make sure that the men he's created say the things he wants to say in the way he wants to say it using them as individuals in their experience.
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My God's big enough to do that. He sort of created the whole universe and when you look at the complexity of human life, you look at this incredible reality of how we're put together and the irreducible complexity of intelligent design that we now see so clearly that you have to just close your eyes and plug your ears to not see these things.
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That same God can't communicate himself to others? Does not make a lick of sense.
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It just seems so strange to me that people who would profess the name of Jesus would then turn around and say, but I know that Jesus said these things about the word of God, but did he really know all the stuff we know?
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Yeah. He created you and knows all things and so, yes, he did know.
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What did Jesus teach you things? Well, look with me at Matthew chapter 26. I just want to give you just an example.
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It was not Jesus' intention here to lay out a doctrine of scripture. My point is this, that in so many places, you find, especially in Jesus' teaching, you're able to determine what his belief on a certain topic was by how he handles objections or assertions that he himself is making.
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So in Matthew chapter 26, verse 51, Jesus is being arrested and behold, one of those who are with Jesus, that of course is
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Peter, reached and drew out his sword and struck the slave, the high priest, and cut off his ear.
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Then Jesus said to him, put your sword back into its place for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword or do you not know that I cannot appeal to my father and he will at once put at my disposal more than 12 legions of angels?
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How then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way?
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Now again, we're normally focused upon the picture of Peter doing his bravado thing and pulling out the sword and you put the rest of the story together and you know that Jesus heals
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Malchus' ear and Matthew doesn't record that part and we all want to go ask
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Matthew why he didn't and all the rest of that stuff and in the process, and this is frequently how it happens, in the process we sort of skip by a rather startling text.
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Verse 54, how then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way?
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And if you were raised in the church, you know the story, it's easy to just sort of gloss over the top of it without really thinking about what it is that Jesus has said but what are some of the preconditions for Jesus' words to make any sense?
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How then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way? Jesus is saying, now
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Peter, I'm still in charge here.
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This is, the scriptures said, this is what's going to happen. Remember Luke chapter 24, if you want to really delve into another aspect of this, remember after the resurrection, what's the first thing that Jesus does with the disciples?
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He opens their minds, understands the scriptures, he explains them starting at Moses all the way through all the prophets, they're all testifying of him and then we end up seeing how that works in the sermons and acts and the texts that obviously
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Jesus had gone over with them and their prophetic meaning and so on and so forth. It's a rich subject that we've talked about many times before.
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What he's saying to Peter is, I'm in charge and remember when the angel, the
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Lord, went through the camp of the Assyrians and hundreds of thousands, dead.
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Now, what do you think twelve legions of angels would do? And we're talking global, instant destruction without there being any defense.
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I don't care how many tanks you have or how strong your armor is or anything else, there is no known defense on man's part against angelic destruction.
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They don't shoot bullets, they're not of this realm, but evidently they still have the ability to take life.
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And so, if he appealed to his father that he would deliver him, he could put at his disposal more than twelve legions of angels.
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Peter, I could wipe this globe clean and you think you're pulling out your sword is going to accomplish something?
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Put it up. Why? Well, because that's not how it's supposed to happen.
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I'm accomplishing something here, Peter. Remember, it wasn't very long ago I said you'd get behind me,
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Satan, because you're minding the things of man and not of God and what did
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I just told you? It was necessary for me to go to Jerusalem and be betrayed in the hands of man and to be crucified and to be buried and rise again the third day.
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And you, Peter, your short and long term memory you're not doing real well. And that's exactly what
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Peter's doing again. But then the words of verse 54, How then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way?
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It is necessary, is the Greek term, it is necessary to take place thusly.
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Now, Jesus can expect that Peter shares with him certain presuppositions, certain assumptions, certain beliefs that will make these words understandable.
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Well, what would some of those presuppositions be? Well, first of all, when he says the scriptures, that Peter would understand there is such a thing as the scriptures.
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So many today, as soon as you raise the question of, well, the
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Bible says, well, I'll bet you, you've never read the Gospel of Thomas, have you? What about, how do you know you've got the right books in there?
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Because, you know, the Roman Catholic has got those apocryphal books, you know, and, you know, just because someone made up the choice to have only four
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Gospels, there are a lot more Gospels than that around, you know. And so, how do you really know?
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The first thing that Jesus can assume in speaking to Peter is that Peter knows what the scriptures are.
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Now, you and I might immediately say, but the New Testament, not a word of the New Testament was written this way.
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Yeah, that's right. But the Jewish people knew what the scriptures were.
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When Paul wrote to Timothy, he said, from a child, you've known the scriptures. He doesn't say, you guessed about the scriptures, or you've got a general, proximate idea of generally what the scriptures might be, you know, not so sure about this.
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No, there was no question. God had not left his people going, well, maybe, maybe not, let's flip a coin.
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It never happened. Never happened. And so, there was a recognition on Jesus' part and Peter's part that God had acted in time to reveal his word and to define what his word was.
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He didn't have to send down angels with golden tablets. He didn't have to write the canon in clouds across the sky.
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He didn't have to send a prophet with some extra canonical revelation that would then tell you that this is scripture, but then you've got to make that scripture, so there needs to be another angel with the thing that says that scripture.
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He didn't have to do any of those types of things. We know that 200 years before Christ, the books that we call the
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Old Testament were laid up in the temple, and they made the hands unclean to touch them because they were holy.
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200 years before Christ. The Jews had, and they count them as either 22 or 24 books.
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You go, wait a minute, we've got 39. Don't freak out. They counted the books differently.
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All the minor prophets were one book. And some of the smaller books were included in the larger books.
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So, Lamentations is included with Jeremiah, for example. And when you look at what they actually included in their 22 or 24, it's the 39 that we have.
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And so, there was an assumption on Jesus' part that God had done what
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He needed to do to reveal what scripture was. So, in other words, if God's going to make the effort to communicate and He has a purpose in His Word, He's also going to put out the effort for His people to understand what it is.
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And He wasn't dependent upon some pope. He wasn't dependent upon some council. All the stories about Constantine making up...
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All historically laughable. Didn't happen. God made sure that His Word would be in the possession of His people.
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Because Peter's response isn't, Really, Lord? What scriptures are those? It was a given.
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It was understood. Secondly, not only had God indicated what scripture was and was not, but He had also preserved that scripture.
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How then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way? Well, Lord, you know, there are some really smart rabbis down at Union Theological Seminary and I took a class on the scriptures from them and they proved to me these are really old books and they're passed down by handwriting and it's just really...
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Can you really know what Moses wrote? I mean, go over to Luke chapter 24.
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Beginning at Moses, going through all the prophets, they testified of me.
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How then will the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must happen this way? We have to know what they say. Not only the extent of them will be called the canon, but also the text of them.
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And so what is the enemy's constant approach today? Well, we can't really know what books were in and even if we sort of tell, okay, all right,
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Isaiah. All right, yeah, that's... Well, you got Deutero -Isaiah and Tritrio -Isaiah and all the rest of that kind of stuff, but yeah, okay,
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Isaiah, pretty popular. All right, we'll give you that one, but can we really know what
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Isaiah said? You know, maybe there's been major changes and we can't really figure out what the wording is or things like that.
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Jesus seems to believe that the scriptures have been not only given to us, made known to us, but preserved in such a way that in this same gospel, only a few chapters earlier,
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Jesus had said to the Sadducees, you are not knowing the scriptures or the power of God.
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And then to make his argument, he based his argument upon the tense of the verb in saying,
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I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not I was. Now, if you can make your argument based upon a tense of a verb, then you've got to have a pretty strong belief that what was communicated has been communicated accurately.
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And so Peter's response isn't, well, you know, Lord, those scriptures are really tough to understand and we don't really know what they originally said.
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I mean, Barticus Erminicus, a well -known Roman scholar, has made lots of money demonstrating to us that we, some of you didn't catch that, but that's okay.
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Barticus Erminicus, let that one slide by. See, there's been unbelievers in every age.
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And he's pretty much made a lot of money proving to us that, who knows?
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You know, there's just places we just don't know. That's not Jesus' assumption. That's not Peter's assumption. Even in this statement, very clearly from Jesus' perspective, there is the preservation of the words, and then there is the understandability of the words.
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For so many people today, you know, you, uh, you know what's wrong with you,
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Calvinists? I bet you you've heard a number of responses to that question, huh? You know what's wrong with you,
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Calvinists? You just don't have any place for mystery. I remember,
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I remember a good friend of mine that, I've only been a member of two churches in my adult life, and so, you can sort of guess who
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I was. I remember a good friend of mine, a great guy. We even went to seminary together. He was older than I was.
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Um, and I remember once he said to me, he said, James, you know, I just,
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I just can't go where you're going with that stuff because I, I just, I just think there's, you need to leave more room for mystery.
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And what he meant by that was, you're, you're coming to too firm conclusions.
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You need to let things be just a little less clear, a little more contradictory.
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You need to be a little more comfortable with tension in the text. That harmonization stuff, just, just, and I, and I realize that's not how, to get ahead in the academy.
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Uh, you really need to do the mystery thing, uh, a lot. But Peter's response wouldn't have been, well, you know, scriptures which say that it must happen this way, that assumes a level of clarity to the language and interpretation that, boy, just a lot of modern day scholars aren't comfortable with that.
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I mean, we, we've, we've got biblical theology now where you allow
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Paul to contradict Peter and, and this idea of a systematic theology or an overarching meaning of the text or things like that.
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No, no, no, no, that's just, that's, that's not, that's not going to cut it today.
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Not in the postmodern world, but that's not how
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Jesus spoke. As Jesus spoke, he could literally say, how then will it be fulfilled?
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The scriptures that thus it is necessary to happen. It's necessary to happen this way.
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The scriptures are clear enough to tell us this. Tell us this.
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So, Peter could possess the scriptures, could know the scriptures, and then there's something about the nature of the scriptures.
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It must happen this way. Well, why must it happen this way? I mean, it's just the reflections of men about God, right?
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And with all the contradictions, that's what we're told. That's how, that's where many theologians are, and that's why, you know,
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I've said many times, you go to a Christian bookstore, it's one of the most dangerous places you can go, spiritually speaking.
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Especially those commentaries. Because you read a commentary written by someone who's lost their confidence in the clarity and authority of the word of God, and they're not going to be here.
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They're going to be, well, okay. I mean, you want to know how this would be handled in most seminaries in the
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United States? I'm not talking about the good ones. I'm not talking about solid seminaries from Westminster, the other
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East or West, or the Reformed Theological Seminaries, or the Master's Seminary, or, you know, there's still good believing people out there.
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Don't get me wrong. But they're in the minority. They are in the minority. The majority of New Testament scholars today would look at what
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I'm saying here in this text and would just sort of go, preaching today, aren't you? Because, you see, this is just Matthew's understanding.
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And Matthew's writing, minimally, 40 years after Jesus, probably 55, 60.
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And he's writing from his community. And this isn't one of the apostles.
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He wasn't here to actually hear these things. The apostles would have been just illiterate bumpkins.
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And this person, obviously, is illiterate Greek. And so this is decades later. And it's someone pretending to be
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Matthew. And they're putting these words in Jesus' mouth. And he, at this point, he really doesn't have
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Mark to follow anymore. And so he's drawing from other traditions and stuff like that. And he's just putting this story together and saying, this really isn't what
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Jesus thought about this stuff. This isn't really what he said. And that's how they get around it.
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Now, from my perspective, I do not understand why anyone is a New Testament scholar that believes anything
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I just said. Because fundamentally, you don't know who Jesus is, and you don't know what he believed about anything.
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You can't have any promises from Jesus. You can't know anything about Jesus other than maybe, possibly, he died under Pontius Pilate.
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Why? For what reason? It's not a fulfillment of prophecy. I don't know why any of these people even bother with religion.
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I really don't. But they're there, and they're the majority. And you wonder, then, why you see things on television.
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You see denominations and things like that, and they're saying things that leave you just going, have they read the
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Bible? Yes, they have. But once you embrace the idea that it's just a bunch of men's thoughts, and it's an inaccurate recording of that, and it hasn't been transmitted accurately, et cetera, et cetera, can you wonder why there are so few who stand behind pulpits and proclaim anything with authority at all?
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Because they can't know that God has said anything. It is the most effective way of destroying the
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Christian faith. There's no question about it. And it has been quite effective in our land to infect the minds of those who will instruct the people of God with, well, can't help but pointing out, yea, hath
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God said? Goes back a long ways. It goes back a long ways.
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Smart folks. But you can only build so much upon an extremely flawed foundation before it all falls down.
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And if you don't have a foundation at all, you can't build anything at all. So I've never understood how some will say, oh,
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Jesus means the world to me. And what did Jesus say? Don't have a clue. Don't have any idea.
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But he means the world to me. You realize what that ends up, the end result of this is.
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If you don't know what Jesus said, but you say, Jesus means the world to me, you end up having to create your own
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Jesus to mean the world to you. And he ends up looking a whole lot like you want him to. And that's why the
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Jesus of modern theology generally looks a whole lot like whoever is writing the book about that Jesus.
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Ends up being a mirror image. He has the exact same interests in social justice that I do.
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It's sad to see, but it's, again, it's the majority. I hope you realize, if you're listening to me and you're tracking with me, you're the minority now.
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Not the majority. Now, of course, minority of what? Outwardly professing
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Christianity. Let a few years of persecution go by, we might be back in the majority. Who knows? It all depends on how you do the surveys, right?
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But truly, those who will actually stand with the word of God are going to be a much smaller group in the not too distant future.
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And so what do we see here? There is a consistency. One of the reasons that I would point out to the liberal theologian that his idea of what this text is talking about is ridiculous, is not only is there a consistency in the book of Matthew.
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I mean, Jesus' citation in scripture every single time. It's the final word.
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It's the final word. Once the scriptures say this, that's it. Remember when he's arguing with the
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Sadducees, just mentioned a little while ago, I'm the God of Abraham. Remember what he said beforehand? I've mentioned it to you many, many times before.
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Matthew chapter 22. Have you not read what God spoke to you, saying, holding men accountable in his day for what
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God said over a thousand years earlier, as if God had spoken it directly to them? That is the highest view of scripture.
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And that's consistent all the way through Matthew. Well, it's just Matthew. No, it's not. No, it's not.
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Every single writer of the New Testament, well, let's just say the Gospels, because there's not much about Jesus as far as what he said outside of the
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Gospels. Every single Gospel writer. Absolutely no question as to Jesus' view of scripture.
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None whatsoever. Let's go to John. What does he say to the
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Jews in John chapter 10, when he's quoting from Psalm 82? He called them gods.
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And who in the word of God came? He's talking about the judges in Psalm 82. And he says, and the scriptures cannot be broken.
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They cannot be loosed. They cannot be undone. There is an inherent authority in the scriptures.
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Why? Well, have you not read what God spoke to you? When God speaks, because he's
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God, his word is absolutely authoritative. It can admit of no higher level of proof.
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That's why there's a division amongst those of us who defend the faith as to how you're supposed to do it.
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Because there's a lot of folks that think you can prove that the Bible is the word of God by arguments and references to things outside of what
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God has said. The problem is, if I prove statement X by appealing to statement
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Y, statement Y has to have a higher authority than statement X. I can't prove this is true by appealing to something that has less authority.
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And so if I start propping the word of God up by reference to all these things out there, and they are not
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God's word, they are not theanoustos, God -breathed, the term Paul uses, then
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I am automatically, whether I realize I'm doing it or not doesn't matter, I am automatically making the authority of the word of God lesser to all these arguments
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I have around me. And if I happen to be proved wrong about one of those arguments, well, so much to the authority of God's word.
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You never find Jesus doing that. You never find the apostles doing that. That's not an apostolic approach.
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And so, when we look at what Jesus teaches, whether it's in Matthew, Luke, I've mentioned
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Luke 24 over and over again, Mark is the same, standing before the high priest.
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Why does he think quoting about the Son of Man from Psalm 110 and Daniel chapter 7, why does he think that's appropriate?
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Because he knows that these men recognize that God has spoken in these words, that is a commonality between us, and he uses that to demonstrate what they're doing is actually putting to death the very
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Son of God. There is no way that anyone can make, can even begin to make the argument that the gospel writers themselves, all of them together, and all the sources that they may have drawn from,
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Luke says he interviewed people. Even if you want to start talking about Q sources and everything else, it's all united.
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Jesus viewed the Bible as the very word of God, and who are you to question him?
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If you are going to trust your very soul to him on the day of salvation, how can you turn around and then say, yeah, but on these issues, he was just a man of his day.
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How do you make the distinction between the man of his day comments and the God incarnate
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I will save your soul comments? What's your rule for making a division between the two?
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I'd be interested in knowing. The fact of the matter is there is no consistent way of doing that, and yet that's exactly what modern unbelieving scholarship is left with.
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So I'm unashamed of inerrancy because inerrancy is just simply an admission that when God speaks, he doesn't stutter.
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He's actually able to communicate with clarity to his creatures so as to fulfill his own eternal purpose.
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We don't have to second guess God. I'm awful glad that that's true, and I hope
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I haven't bothered you by pointing out to you how many people there are that don't believe that's true.
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I think it's better for you to know that here and now and know the reasons than to be confused about it when you're talking to other
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Christians and you think you're tracking with them and then all of a sudden they just head off into the sunset someplace and you wonder what happened.
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Well, it's because you had a different starting point. You had a different beginning point.
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And I am unashamed to say I believe in inerrancy. This evening we'll actually take a little time to define what that means and to look at what our own confession says about it.
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We read it before Sunday school just a week before last or two weeks before last.
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But what do we mean by that? But I think we have to have a foundation first. Sometimes we end up talking about this and it just becomes, well, your interpretation, my interpretation.
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No. Now, this is the teaching of Scripture about itself. There is something about Scripture as Jesus himself said.
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This must happen because if it doesn't happen then God hasn't spoken truly and we know he has spoken truly.
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That was Jesus' own teaching. That is foundational and fundamental to understanding everything else that he said.
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And remember where he said it? While he's being betrayed. This isn't...
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When people make comments like this in such incredibly important context it demonstrates this is absolutely foundational.
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This is at the very bottom, the very base layer of what Jesus taught and believed.
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And what's going to happen to us if we don't believe what he believed? Our result in theology is going to be sub -Christian.
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We do not want to have a sub -Christian theology. Let's pray together.
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Our gracious Heavenly Father, we once again recognize our absolute dependence upon you.
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We recognize our absolute dependence upon your Spirit, upon the revelation you've given to us.
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We are thankful for the preservation of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture, and that your
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Spirit drives us into that very word. And we know that this is in harmony.
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In harmony with who we are in Christ, the fact the Spirit drives us to Christ, and we desire to be consistent with his teaching, consistent with his revelation.
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We would ask that as the world around us does everything in its power to diminish our faith,
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Lord, that you would build us up. Drive us into your word. May we memorize it. May we see its truthfulness in the world around us.
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May we have the mind of Christ. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.