Adult Sunday School - Epistemic Certainty Part 2

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning.

We ask that you would give us a clarity about the certainty that we can have in Jesus Christ.

And I pray that this would lead us to a greater zeal and a greater boldness about things of the faith.

In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, I apologize for coming in out of breath.

I really just can't sing that way.

All right, does anybody need a paper at this point? Everybody got one? So just to recap, epistemology is the study of knowledge.

This is about whether or not we can really be certain, not just relatively confident, you know, 99% certain about things of the faith, but whether or not we can really know surely and truly.

So let us continue where we're going through, and this is, yeah, hi.

I'm Conley, what's your name? Francisco.

Francisco, okay.

So this is not the usual format for our Sunday school, just so you know.

I, last week, last minute, I had to prepare something, and so I brought in a seminary paper I had written, and it was helpful, so we're going to continue going through it.

But yeah, usually things are prepared in a more digestible fashion, but we're going to just continue on reading through each paragraph here, and I'll explain it.

So does anybody remember the different types of revelation that we talked about? General revelation, yeah, and there were two kinds of special revelation.

What were they? So general revelation is God revealing things in nature.

Special revelation is Him revealing things in scripture.

Excuse me, it was two different kinds of general revelation.

There's general revelation that is revealed immediately to us, us having a sense of God being created with a sense of God in us.

Romans 2 talks about how the law is written on our heart.

You know, there's something we already know, even apart from examining the outside world that gives us that knowledgeable relationship with the Lord, that conscience.

And there is also mediated general revelation, where that revelation is coming through other things.

I'm going to stick these over here.

All right, now who remembers where exactly we left off? I think we got through certainty and immediate general revelation last time, and I think we're starting certainty and special revelation, is that right? Yeah.

Okay.

All right, so yeah, let's talk about special revelation.

So this is on page five of this article, and having discussed general revelation, special revelation deserves particular consideration.

As we have already stated, it is wrong to make such a clear divide between general revelation and special revelation so as to assert that general revelation cannot reveal with certainty and that special revelation can reveal with certainty.

Does anybody remember what that philosophy is called, that you can know things through the Bible with certainty, but you can't know anything through creation with certainty? Anybody remember? It's called scripturalism, scripturalism.

And so I'm rejecting that, I'm rejecting scripturalism here.

We can know things certainly through both general revelation and scriptural revelation.

I already described that one kind of general revelation God has given us, that sense of him, the law written on our heart.

People will be held accountable to that as something that they are obligated to know, right? It's not just, oh, well, it was a likely thing, therefore we're going to hold you obligated to know it.

We're obligated to this fact that there's a law and God is real.

No, it is something certain that God has embedded in man so that he will be held perfectly to account for all of his sins or his rejection of God.

All right, special revelation, or at least scriptural revelation.

Let me stop there again.

Why am I distinguishing between special revelation, scriptural revelation? Does anybody know what kind of, can anybody give me an example of special revelation that's not scriptural? Dreams? Yeah, right, so like Joseph's dreams in the Bible, that kind of thing.

Yeah, so God can communicate in ways that don't end up being recorded.

You know, there were lots of prophets in the time of the Old Testament and not all of their words got recorded, but they're all inspired by God.

They're all special revelation in that way.

They're beyond just what he reveals of himself in nature.

So at least scriptural revelation is not superior in the means it is presented.

It is not some magic incantation that catalyzes the work of the spirit, somehow producing real knowledge.

Instead, it is superior in its content.

That is, special revelation contains the gospel, that which is absent from any knowledge we may obtain by observing creation.

The significance of special revelation in the context of epistemology is that its explicit statements and saving power have the ability to defeat man's rejection of suppressible general revelation.

Now, that's not to deny that the spirit chooses specifically to work through scripture, but yeah, it is not, you see all kinds of things where people think that, oh, if you speak the words exactly, you know, they have some kind of special power then where if you, you know, you'll hear this kind of thing from King James only, right? It has to be like quoted exactly, or you know, I believe that if I paraphrase scripture, tell someone the gospel, the spirit can work through that just the same, right? It's not about the exact words, so the exact words are important for a different reason.

Anyway, the content of the gospel is what has the power to save, right? That is what the spirit is using.

Concerning certainty, there is a need to acknowledge differences in special revelation.

It cannot be said that all special revelation grants certainty in all applications.

Many read the Bible and do not understand it, even rejecting its claims.

However, we may say that some special revelation does grant certainty in all its applications, and in some acts of providence, God wishes to communicate to a subset of men with such clarity that he does communicate with certainty to all who hear.

Such instances of special revelation are composed entirely of extra-biblical revelation.

So there are times when God gives special revelation where everyone is expected to know and understand it.

There's sometimes where he gives special revelation that's not the case, right? We talked about the parables last week.

Jesus didn't tell the parables so that everyone would know and understand them.

In fact, he spoke in parables so that some people would not understand, okay? So his objective is not always maximal understanding, right? But sometimes God does speak in such a way that he intends his audience to know and be certain and not reject.

And this is, and that's not the case with the Bible because there are people who have rejected every part of scripture, right? For example, God's revelation to Paul on the Damascus Road, his revelation to Gideon through various signs, et cetera, were revelations designed so that they could not be denied.

Therefore, it is reasonable to say that, like general revelation, special revelation falls into two categories that delineate whether it is universally received or frequently rejected.

However, the difference here is not that sin gives people a reason to suppress one set of knowledge and not the other because that was the case in general revelation, right? Is there some kinds of knowledge God is revealing through general revelation that men suppress in their unrighteousness and other kind that they may reject but not out of sinfulness, right? If you have poor eyesight, you might reject it.

That's a large E at the top of the optometrist chart, but that has nothing to do with, I mean, it is a result of sin, but you are not morally culpable for not being able to read those letters.

So this difference isn't between sin versus not sin or moral suppression versus some other kind of corruption.

Instead, sin would give people a reason to suppress both sets.

So when it comes to special revelation, anything that's rejected is because of sin.

What distinguishes these is God's scope of purpose in the matter.

Some revelation is designed to communicate with certainty to 100% of its audience and some is not.

If biblical revelation reaches a wide audience, many of whom reject it, we must determine what may be said about the degree to which we may have certainty of that which is taught in the Bible.

Okay, so what I'm saying is, well, this is the common question that's raised.

Well, so many people have different interpretations of the Bible.

How can you even know what's being said? Which is, in some ways, usually you can tell where that person is coming from because they don't treat every other aspect of life that is questioned by people that way.

You know, it's only the Bible where they're just eager to question everything because there are some with different viewpoints.

Also, I have found that when I talk to people who think this way, often they have not read the Bible themselves.

And so, once you read the Bible yourself a few times, you start developing some serious opinions about what it says and you realize, oh, it's not that cryptic.

You know, there are some parts that are difficult, but it's not the mystery that you might have imagined before you actually started reading it.

All right, even for the believer, it is not the case that he has any guarantee that he will interpret every passage correctly.

We don't interpret every passage correctly, right? The Westminster Confession attempts to address this phenomenon by saying that not every scripture is plain, but every necessary doctrine is expressed clearly in some part of scripture so that even the least learned can understand.

So, this is saying that as far as the conclusions you need to arrive at, it is spoken of clearly in some part or another that this is kind of what I was pointing out at the beginning.

You know, a lot of people think of epistemology in some kind of foundational way where, okay, we can know these things to be true and then we build on top of those things.

But in Christianity, with God revealing knowledge, with knowledge being revelational, it's not just that he provides us a foundation.

There's also an end that he has given us confidence about, like that he wants to save men and therefore even though some may differ on certain passages, he has guaranteed that his people will understand the truth rightly enough.

And so, we have a pyramid that has a guarantee at the foundation and at the pinnacle that's tethered to heaven that even if we might be, you know, some of our building blocks in the middle might be off, right? So, that's what really makes revelation special in that way is that God has revealed not only the foundation of himself for knowledge, but also his purpose in revealing knowledge, which gives us a guarantee even when there may be faults in our knowledge along the way.

While this is true, that every necessary doctrine is expressed clearly in some part, et cetera, it might also be pointed out that even the clear parts of scripture can be misunderstood by the most learned.

The necessary doctrines of the faith are given clearly enough to all, to obligate all who read them and to understand and believe.

Consider the frequency with which Christ asked, have you not read? But this does not mean that all who read them will understand and believe.

Once again, we must rely on the knowledge God has given us of his purpose in giving revelation, the edification of his church.

If he gives scriptural revelation so that the church would be edified, for example, 1 Timothy 3, 16 through 17, then we have grounds, everybody know what that says? All scripture's given by God, et cetera.

I always, yeah, I always wonder if I always swap that between 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy so I feel the need to double check myself.

It is 2 Timothy, all right, I did get it wrong, thank you.

All right, yeah, 2 Timothy 3, 16 through 17, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

And I need to, let's see, I have a pen here, mark that in my notes.

All right, this knowledge is certain and not merely probable given the scriptural statements about this knowledge as certain.

The frequent commands to believe are not commands to have relative confidence but to have certain faith.

So this is probably a place I could have started in this article but didn't.

How do you, as a Christian, you know, what's a Christian view of knowledge? Can we have certainty? Well, the Bible commands us frequently to believe.

That means we can.

So you can't, this is what I said last week, you know, it's incompatible to be a Christian and say that things can't be known.

And either certainty is possible or Christianity is false because Christianity claims certainty is possible.

And one of the ways it claims that it's possible is by commanding belief.

It can be safely said that Jesus did not doubt that knowledge given to him through the words of scripture, and this is the standard we are held to.

You know, was Jesus 99% certain of the things that he read? No, and we're held up to the standard of Jesus.

You know, that discussion several weeks ago where the guy said 90%, I'd like to, you know, maybe a follow-up question I'll ask him at some point is like whether or not Jesus had the same, you know, relative confidence of, you know, 99% certain that Moses existed or something like that, right? No, Jesus believed the things perfectly held in scripture and we are expected to do the same.

Knowledge of salvation provides a clear example to be studied.

The Bible frequently gives us instruction on how to have assurance of salvation and commands us to have assurance.

So not just that certain things in the Bible are true, but even of our own salvation we are to have assurance.

First John was written to people so that they would know that they have life.

Yeah, these things are written to you who believe that you may know that you have eternal life.

That's 1 John 5, 13.

Many Christians read 1 John and fail to have assurance, but many others read and are granted assurance.

May we call this a certain assurance? Once again, the Westminster Confession.

You have, all right, you all forgot one, good.

This certainty is not a bare conjectural, and by the way, I keep quoting the Westminster Confession because I went to a Presbyterian seminary, but these passages I'm quoting are all almost word for word in the London Baptist Confession.

This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope, but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the spirit of adoption, witnessing with our spirits that we are children of God, which spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, the earnest being the down payment, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.

Okay, so yeah, you can have certainty.

By the way, what is this founded on? It's founded on the promises of Scripture.

Now, a lot of people read things like 1 John or other passages that talk about the importance of having certainty about your salvation, about having an assurance of faith, and they also see all the things that it demonstrates that someone's a believer or not a believer, and they often look to those things to decide whether or not they're saved, which is, it's understandable that you might do that because that, at first glance, seems to be what those passages are telling you to do, but if you are not, if you don't understand it in light of the rest of Scripture, you will end up judging your salvation based on your works, and our salvation is not based on our works, and so there's so many people who struggle with assurance because they are on that treadmill of works, and they're looking at the things Scripture says they're supposed to be and supposed to do, and they're not living up to it.

That is not how you produce assurance.

Yes, you should look to your works occasionally to make your calling and election sure, you know, to put into question.

Your works, looking to your works is a way of doubting your salvation, right? It is not a way of, it is not a way of building up your assurance, right? But if you look to Christ, that is the way to build up your assurance, right? If you are trusting in the promises of God, that is good.

Now, like I said, you know, there's every reason if someone's living a sinful life, and they're going around with some kind of brazen confidence that they're in the faith, that is a good thing to point them at, like the Bible says differently about what the Christian's life looks like.

But yeah, if you are struggling with assurance, and you wanna build it up, the way of doing that is not looking to your works and trying to do better, et cetera, right? It is looking to Christ and trusting in the promises of God.

Were you gonna ask a question? Yes, they were actually, after they were released from prison, yeah, God gives us many different signs along the way to encourage us, that's right.

Right, and we can see God working through us, but that's the question, you know, is looking at God working through us, not just looking at ourselves and our own faults, because that is just a way of doubting salvation.

Anything else on that? Let's keep going.

Our certainty is not based on fallible hope, yet some men who do not truly believe falsely arrive at assurance.

So yeah, so you can truly know that you are saved, but you can also falsely believe that you are saved, there are many people who do.

These two, and so how, if that is the case, right, well, some people believe falsely, how do you know that you're believing truly? You know, that's the question here.

That would be, yeah, that'd be one example.

There are many people who didn't necessarily grow up in a tradition where they're taught to say a prayer, et cetera, but they still have some other reason for other false foundation of their assurance, it's not Christ.

So how do you reconcile those two? How can you really have true assurance if people can have a false assurance? These two are reconciled by the work of the Spirit.

If someone comes to the conclusion of his salvation wrongly, it is his fallible reasoning that has landed him, or them, landed him at that position.

If someone rightly comes to the conclusion that he is saved, it is because the Spirit's work, testifying to the heart.

Therefore, this knowledge is not entirely mediated being outside of us and being discerned by a faulty chain of perception and reasoning, right? It's not, your assurance doesn't come from deduction, et cetera, it comes from the work of the Spirit, the Spirit of adoption that caused us to cry out, Abba, Father.

Once again, this is a revelational epistemology, God revealing through various means, some immediate, some immediate, some natural, some supernatural.

While means are used, this truth is eventually communicated to us immediately by the Holy Spirit's testimony to the heart.

If our assurance of salvation is merely relative confidence, then perfect love cannot perfectly drive out fear.

That's an allusion to 1 John 4.8, right? Love perfectly casts out fear.

How is that possible unless, unless you really can fully, perfectly know that love? Regarding matters beyond those which are absolutely necessary for salvation, so remember the Westminster Confession said, well, all the things you need to know are certain enough, so you at least have that.

What about things beyond those most important things that we need to know for our salvation? Those matters on which Christians differ, we may have justified knowledge similar to that justified knowledge of the world around us that has been previously described.

This knowledge is justified by positive testimony from Scripture and a lack of negative testimony by Scripture.

Through this, we develop a confidence that our doctrines are correct.

This knowledge we receive of doctrines through interpretation is analogous to the knowledge we receive of the text of Scripture through textual criticism.

So, what textual criticism is, is the Bible was recorded by hand.

You know, they didn't have printers or Xerox machines back then, and people would copy the manuscripts, and sometimes there are copyist errors and so you look at all the manuscripts and you try to figure out what the original text is by analyzing the various manuscripts and saying, okay, well, this one, it seems obvious that he had just skipped a line and missed a line or something like that, right? So, Van Til connects the two using an illustration of a bridge covered by water.

This is a long quote here.

We may perhaps illustrate the difference between a doctrine of scriptural inspiration that holds to this notion of general trustworthiness and the doctrine of Scripture which holds to the infallible inspiration of the autographa, that being the original scriptures, the original text written by Paul, et cetera.

Though it recognizes the fact that the autographa are not in our possession, by thinking of a river that sometimes overflows its banks, suppose that we are seeking to cross such a river while the flood has gone so high as to cover the bridge.

As far as the surface appearance is concerned, we cannot see whether there is a bridge.

We have to drive in the water even while we are driving on the bridge, yet if there were no bridge, we should certainly not be able to cross that river.

We can drive with comparative ease in water that is a few inches deep as long as we have a solid bottom under the water.

What the idea of general trustworthiness without infallible inspiration does in effect is to say that it really makes no difference whether there is a solid bottom under us in as much as we have to drive through water in any case.

But we have seen that man needs absolutely authoritative interpretation.

Hence, if the autographa were not infallibly inspired, it would mean that at some point, human interpretation would stand above divine interpretation.

It would mean that man were, after all, not certain that the facts and the interpretations given to the facts in Scripture are true.

Summing up then, we note that A, the human subject was created by God so that it could be by virtue of that fact, so that it could by virtue of that fact be and originally was the perfect medium of the revelation of God.

So men were created in order that God might reveal things to him.

God designed man to reveal.

Once again, you know, there is a telos here.

There is a purpose and revelation that guarantees us that we will know what we need to know.

And we can have certainty about that.

B, even after the entrance of sin, the human subject remained metaphysically accessible to God.

Metaphysics, speaking of knowledge and ontology and things like that, the nature of being.

So that God could, by virtue of the fact, insert an area of perfect interpretation into the world of false interpretation.

So in other words, yeah, the fact that sin has entered the world has not rendered the task of interpretation hopeless.

That's what he's saying.

God actually did insert such an infallible interpretation or there would be no true interpretation at all.

We are actually crossing the river of life on this bridge of infallible interpretation even though it be covered, one, objectively by the loss of the autographer and two, subjectively by the inability of any sinner to interpret the truth perfectly to himself.

So if you drive over a bridge with a little bit of water on it, you don't know where exactly the bridge is.

Is it one inch deep? Is it one and a half inches deep under that water? But you can still get across that bridge, right? And so the same thing goes for interpretation.

I know that I don't interpret scripture perfectly and there's a lot of areas where I get it wrong but I do know God's promises of his design and giving revelation so that men might be saved and I have an assurance that even though I have not interpreted every part perfectly, he has saved me.

I have that spirit testifying in my heart and he has purposed that his church will have everything it needs in order to cross that bridge of life.

Now, the analogy that's being made here to the nature of scripture itself, the words of scripture, this is a reason why I'm, there's kind of a, not a resurgence, I don't know how to describe it.

There's a group that says the Textus Receptus, which is the Greek manuscripts that the, or the Greek edition that the King James Bible is based on, is the exact autographer.

This is exactly what was written in every word.

There's nothing that we lack certainty on.

The reason why I think that that's just unnecessary, there's a lot of reasons, I think, to reject that, but they feel that it's necessary.

It's necessary to have every exact word precise because if you don't, then you lack everything, right? You don't have the word of God.

You can't be certain about any of it if each part individually is in question, right? But it's the same thing with interpretation, right? God did not decide to only communicate to us directly by the sense that Stephen taught us, right, by that sense of him that he wrote in our heart, that law written in our heart is described in Romans 2, but he decided to communicate to us in human language.

Language is, right, human language is intentionally, or not intentionally, it is inherently ambiguous, and it's not like a raw mathematics that is impossible to be misunderstood, right? It's easy to misunderstand language, and God did not design, he chose to speak to us in human language.

He chose that we would have to interpret his word and not always be able to get every single passage correct and interpreted correctly.

Why would we, if we are fine with that, and we're fine with translation being off and interpretation being not quite right and him being capable, and we acknowledge, God is capable of communicating to us despite our faulty interpretation, despite our faulty translation, why do we also require, or why would we then require, oh, but we need perfect transmission? I believe this is just the nature of human language, and God has chosen to communicate to us through human language, just like the incarnation, God becoming man, scripture itself being divine thoughts being put into human terms, this is how God has chosen to communicate, and I think that we, yeah, that we denigrate that when we require something more than what he has actually given, but anyway.

All right, section six here.

While we have touched on this issue at various points, it may be profitable to address the effect of redemption on certainty.

The one who has been changed by scripture's regenerating touch has begun to know the world as he ought.

Concerning the knowledge of God given through general revelation, the unbeliever always suppresses this knowledge though he possesses it.

The redeemed man, and that's Romans one, by the way, if you don't remember from last week, the redeemed man no longer suppresses this knowledge, at least not to a degree that would inhibit him from rendering due honor to the Lord.

Concerning the knowledge of the world, all men, both unbelieving and redeemed, are able to understand equally, that is, to the capacity afforded by their intellectual capabilities.

Each may be a successful scientist.

However, the redeemed man not only knows the world around him, but also recognizes the reason for its general uniformity, its consistent rules, and occasional change.

Thus, he has an explicit basis upon which to justify his knowledge of the world.

The unbeliever suppressing his knowledge of God is able to know that which is around him, but is never able to acknowledge the means by which he knows the things around himself.

He is trapped in an inconsistency that leads to the various dark philosophies of existentialism, skepticism, et cetera.

And I think we talked about this a little last week, but if you remember the problem of induction, right, the problem of induction was, well, how do you, okay, if you take the scientific method, you make a hypothesis, you test it, if it comes out to be true a bunch of times, then you can have confidence that your hypothesis is correct.

How do you know the scientific method works? Well, I had a hypothesis that the scientific method works.

I tried it out a bunch of times, and it ended up working out many times, so that gave me confidence.

So basically, science is justifying itself from the unbeliever's perspective.

From the believer's perspective, we know that God created the universe.

He created it to obey certain rules, and we expect that a scientific method like that would yield results, not because it itself is the foundation of truth, but because God is the foundation of truth.

And you consider anything in nature, you know, why does gravity work? Well, gravity works because, I don't know, there's weird gravitational fields, and then how do those gravitational fields work? I think recently they discovered, you know, the certain particles that operate in those fields some years ago.

But then how do those, where do those particles come from, et cetera? You keep going down, down, down, down, down, until finally, there has to be something at the base of that, and that is God.

God is the foundation of everything.

He has created all things.

And so those that don't have a foundation are left without a foundation, and end up, yeah, with existentialism, skepticism.

We talked about solipsism, right? Solipsism is the belief that I'm the only person that exists.

You know, I'm just in the matrix, and nothing else is real.

Everything is just a projection of my own thoughts, right? And why not? Like, if you are capable of hallucinating, if what you are experiencing right now is your brain processing the things around you, how do you know what the things around you are? Because it's just the processing that you're receiving, not the things around you, right? You have to have a foundation to believe something more.

That foundation, once again, is God.

Existentialism, anybody know what existentialism is? I want to define it.

Okay, existentialism is the idea that existence precedes essence, and essence is meaning, right? So, you know, I exist, and then I give my own life meaning by deciding I'm going to be a software engineer, and I'm going to do this, and this is an important thing, and we're gonna write the metanarratives of history, and essentialism is that things have a meaning, essence precedes existence, so things have a meaning prior even to their existence because God is the one who has it in his own mind and creates those things, right? So the Christian view is essentialist, the atheistic view, or many, I suppose even, I suppose there's even some theists who are existentialists, right? They don't think that the world has any inherent meaning, and so they need to provide that meaning.

So if you ever hear someone talk about an existential crisis or something like that, it's referring to the fact that they feel like nothing they are doing has any meaning, and they don't even know what the purpose of life is.

Concerning knowledge given through scripture, once again, we see that both the unbeliever and the redeemed is able to understand.

The unbeliever may not consider what is written to be wise, but he can understand it just as well, given equal capability of mind.

Now, this was maybe one of the parts that I struggled the hardest to articulate, is how do you explain the difference between what the believer is getting when he's reading scripture and what the unbeliever is getting when he's reading scripture? Because does the Holy Spirit give us a better ability to interpret scripture? Does not everyone who reads David slept with Bathsheba understand that that means that David slept with Bathsheba? What's the, how do you articulate the difference of what's going on when the believer reads scripture and the unbeliever? All right, this may not comport with the expectations of many Christians who would imagine that being given the mind of Christ grants one a superior ability to interpret scripture.

While the Christian is less inclined to suppress God's truth in his heart, he is not necessarily inclined to arrive at better interpretations.

Moises Silva addresses this phenomenon by presenting the human and divine aspects of the Bible, the reader being appropriately sensitive to each.

So he says, in short, whether we like to admit it or not, most of us who teach recognize that there is no predictable correspondence between a student's spirituality and his or her ability to understand a text and produce an accurate exegetical paper.

But of course, exegetical, meaning drawing the meaning out of the text.

But of course, the Bible is far more than a human book.

If God is the ultimate author of scripture and if his revelation is intended to lead us to a relationship with him, and if no one knows the mind of God except his own spirit, then surely we must receive the spirit and be sensitive to him.

In other words, we must be spiritual before we can hope to understand the scriptures in their ultimate and authentic sense.

So what he's getting at is, you know, you have, let's say you had a smart unbeliever and a less smart believer, and they try to interpret one of the harder passages of scripture.

One might, the unbeliever might actually be able to produce a more accurate paper saying these words mean these things, right? But that doesn't mean that their reception of the truth and the way that Moise Silva says it in the true authentic sense, which is not to suggest that, yeah, there's some like Gnostic hidden knowledge or whatever, but the way God has meant us to receive it, appreciating the beauty of the truth, you know, really, really experiencing its goodness.

These things are not had by the unbeliever the way the believer has them.

The difference being the believer and the unbeliever regarding scripture lies in the acceptance of the truth and the impressed immediacy of the truth, not strictly the interpretation of the truth.

And by immediacy, I mean, not just like having this knowledge out there as a proposition, but experiencing the goodness of it.

You know, if it talks about God's goodness, us being able to sense God's goodness through the Holy Spirit working in our heart that we might know that goodness.

While interpretation and acceptance may be interleaved, rejection leading to perverse interpretation, they are often independent.

Regardless, the believer receives the benefit of scripture actually being affected by its truth in his heart, while the unbeliever does not receive such benefits beyond those moralistic and historical gleanings he may acknowledge as truth.

All right, so the conclusion here.

Epistemic certainty is available to all through the revelation of God.

Not all facts may be known certainly, but given God's purpose in revealing himself, we can be certain that he is effective in communicating to man, and we may be kept from radical skepticism.

Furthermore, given God's revelation, we have a means by which to judge our uncertain beliefs and to justify our confidence in them.

So, yeah, I wrote this because I found this a very difficult topic to think through.

I still find this a very difficult topic to think through.

I come back and read my own writing occasionally because it was an effort in trying to piece together disparate thoughts, and yeah, I still find this helpful to go back to and try to wrap my mind around some of these things.

So I hope this is helpful for you.

This is a hard enough topic that if I've misstepped on some of this stuff, yeah, take it with a grain of salt, I guess, but yeah, I'm trying to present to you just an understanding of how we can be certain, especially after recently having, yeah, had that discussion where the one guy said that we couldn't be certain about whether or not Jesus existed.

Yeah, so for context, we hosted a debate here recently between a Christian and an atheist on whether or not Jesus really existed, and surprisingly, the Christian said that he was only 90% certain that Jesus existed.

So this is kind of a follow-up.

Can we be certain that Jesus exists? Yes, we can.

These things of the faith we can be certain about, and there are other things we can be less certain about, but we can still have some kind of relative confidence about them, and we have a means by which of judging that, et cetera.

All right, so any questions? We've got 15 minutes to go through questions here.

Yes? Did you talk with him? I did, yeah.

Um, yeah, I told him that was very, that puts him in a very odd position as a pastor, you know, that his, that his, yeah, his whole, you know, occupation is centered around something he's not even sure is true.

Only 90% sure.

Yeah, well, and then I had asked him, I had asked him a follow-up, too, which is, well, we're just talking about whether or not Jesus existed, like the, well, he said, oh, I'm just, and I'm just talking about, you know, the historical facts, right? And I gave him, I gave him an opportunity to say, do you just mean, like, if we're only looking at this on empirical grounds, it's 90%? You know, if we're only, if we're thinking about this in a way that's not through revelation.

And he didn't, he didn't take that.

He just said, he just said, no, I really mean 90%.

And then I asked him later, I said, that's, if that's just the possibility that Jesus existed, that would mean the possibility that he rose from the dead, et cetera, would be even less.

And he said, yeah, that's right.

Like, oh, man, like, he went to Westminster.

He went to the same place I'm getting a lot of my theology from, right? Van Til, that's Westminster.

He was one of the founding professors.

Yeah, and that's, and I had talked to him about these things and the fact that he came from Westminster was actually why I had, I had asked him to do this.

Anyway, if, if he ends up watching this video, still love you as a brother, but yeah, I think this needs some thinking through, yes.

I don't know.

I'm not sure what you would mean by that.

Well, because like, you were trying to, I guess you were trying to like.

Right, I'm trying to piece apart like each kind of revelation, each kind of confidence, yeah.

Yeah, you were trying to like, give him a chance, give him a little slow pitch.

Great.

But are you just looking at this by empirical means or are you talking about.

Right, yeah, maybe, maybe.

You know, if you are thinking about it from a neutral perspective that we're all coming from the same starting point and trying to figure out what's true.

Yeah, that's where you'll end because, you know, some people don't learn the truth, some people do, and you can't really know.

But if you believe that truth is coming through revelation and not just through our own observation and deductions, then that totally changes the nature of how knowledge works.

Outside of the involvement in this of denominational disputes.

And, but it's really interesting actually because when I read some of these scholars who are agnostic, they do kind of arrive at a better hermeneutical, exegetical conclusion than say, a dispensational preacher or scholar.

I was gonna say, none of them are gonna come up with the dispensational view of revelation.

Yeah, and it's when I read that, a lot of them, and so it's fascinating how you're.

Yeah.

But yeah, the confidence is that tell us, right, that God has this end in mind and yeah.

And it's, yeah, we will get things wrong and our hope is not on our ability to interpret everything exactly right.

Our hope is in him.

And we had a lot of questions last week.

You answered them all.

Yeah, apparently.

I think Miriam had a lot of the questions.

She were here again, she could ask more.

She had a lot of questions after too because she like ended up reading the rest of the paper.

So, yeah.

And I guess we could end really early, but last call.

All right, let's go ahead and end.

We should've done the singing at the end and I didn't have my breath to do it.

All right, let's pray.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the great confidence that you have given us through your spirit.

We thank you for the spirit of adoption, crying out in our hearts of the Father that we might know you as Father, that we might know you certainly and not just based on our own fallible rationality, our own fallible perceptions.

And we thank you for this and we ask that you would increase the psychological confidence we have, the feeling of certainty that we might be ever bolder and less hesitant when you call us to great and difficult things.

In Jesus' name, amen.