Knowledge Falsely So Called - 1 Timothy 6

Ordination Announcements, Psalm Singing, and the Theme of Knowledge Falsely So Called

All right, good Lord's Day, he is risen. So we have the ordination of Mr. Walker today to the office of deacon. We have, just to announce some stuff that's going on in the near future, we have Whiskey and the Word that will probably be here on 12 -5, and then we have our next stated council meeting on 12 -8.

For today, for singing of Psalms, we'll be singing Psalm 119T and 133. The teaching will be broken into kind of two components. I'm gonna be continuing in 1 Timothy chapter six. So 1 Timothy chapter six, just continuing with that idea of knowledge falsely so-called.

So last time we did the text of the end of the book, and what I wanted to do was to spend a little bit of time emphasizing to you some of the ways that we can't get knowledge in the strict sense, to again, have us to hold fast to the Word.

And so we'll be talking about that, knowledge falsely so-called. And then we'll spend a little bit of time on the doctrine of ordination as we deal with the ordination that's occurring. Okay, any other announcements that I'm missing?

Thank you, Exodus 13 is the reading. So you have to bear with me, I'm at the tail end of a cold. And then, I think that's everything. All right, so let's begin with a call to worship. Please stand for the reading of God's holy Word.

The Greatest Commandment and the Word Written on Heart, Hand, and House

Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four through nine. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. You may be seated. This text reminds us that the greatest commandment is to love God, that he is the highest good, that we possess him by knowing him, that we store up his Word in our hearts, and we should seek to teach all those under our authority at set times, and also as opportunity arises, and that we are to take the Word of God, and to bind it on our hand to govern how we act, and to take the Word of God, and bind it on our forehead in order to govern our thoughts, and so the Word of God is to be a sign on the doorpost to govern your household, and a sign on the gates to govern the public government, church, and state, and so we are reminded that the whole of creation is to be governed by God's holy Word.

Prayer for Worship, Health, and Obedience to God's Law

Let's pray. Father, we come before you now in this time of worship. We ask that you would bless us, that you would cause us to know you more deeply, to grow in the knowledge of you, that your name would be holy to us, that you would use the elements of worship to build up our souls, and to cause us to have a greater zeal for his readiness to enter into public service, and his willingness to go through training, and to be judged and tested by the officers, and by his fellow men in the congregation.

Father, we ask that you would bless him with boldness, and that you would cause him to gain good reputation in office. Father, we thank you that you would provide for us gospel officers. We ask that you would help us more and more to see all of the ordinances rightly ordered, and that you would give to us everything that we need to do our duties in all of our stations.

We ask that you would prosper our homes, that you would give to us good health, that you would heal those who are sick. I pray for my wife, that you would cause her to be healed in her throat. We pray that you would cause us to be able to have curse removed, and to see the truth advanced with bodies in good condition, with minds well ordered, with a zeal and rigor of action.

And so, Father, we pray that you would help us to do what your law commands, that more and more, we would be like the righteous angels in heaven, who promptly and sincerely obey you. Father, we pray that you would give to us everything needful for the performance of our duties, and that we would use it to your glory.

Father, we know that we are breakers of your law. We have sinned against you, broken the whole of your law. Help us to interpret things charitably, and to avoid even having to cover over an offense, but rather to look the better at our neighbor.

Father, we pray that you would help us to remove sources of temptation, and to order the space, and time, and resources around us, and use them well, and that you would subdue the power of evil in us.

Father, we pray all this, knowing that you have the authority and power to grant, and that you work all things for your glory, and for the good of your people. We know that delays in giving what we request or answers of no are ultimately for our good.

Father, we ask, knowing that we have offered up prayers that you have revealed into your Word that are right, we ask that you would give, that you, the God who is merciful and kind, who has forgiven us in Christ, that we ask you by the mediation of Jesus Christ, based upon His merits, that you would give us these things.

We pray all of this in the mighty name of Jesus, amen. Please open now your Bibles to the book of Exodus, chapter 13. Deacon Schaefer, please come forward. Please stand for the reading of God's Word.

Exodus 13 and the Sign of Redemption

Exodus chapter 13. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, consecrate to me all the firstborn, whatever opens the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and beast, it is mine. No bread shall be eaten seven days, and no leavened bread shall be seen among you, nor shall leaven be seen among you in all your quarters.

And you shall tell your son in that day, saying, this is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came up from Egypt. It shall be as a sign to you on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the Lord's law may be in your mouth.

For with a strong hand, the Lord has brought you out of Egypt. You shall, therefore, keep this ordinance in its season from year to year. And it shall be when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he swore to you and your fathers and gives it to you, that you shall set apart to the Lord all that open the womb, that is, every firstborn that comes from an animal which you have, the males shall be the Lord's.

But every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb. And if you will not redeem it, then you shall break its neck. And all the firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem. So it shall be when your son asks you in time to come, saying, what is this?

That you shall say to him, by strength of hand, the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. And it came to pass when Pharaoh was stubborn about letting us go, that the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of beast.

Therefore, I sacrifice to the Lord all males that open the womb. But all the firstborn of my sons I redeem. It shall be as a sign on your hand and as frontlets between your eyes, for by strength of hand, the Lord brought us out of Egypt.

Then it came to pass when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. For God said, lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.

So God led the people around by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea. And the children of Israel went up in orderly ranks out of the land of Egypt. And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had placed the children of Israel under Solomon saying, God will surely visit you and you shall carry up my bones from here with you.

So they took their journey from Succoth and camped in Etham at the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.

So as to go by day and night, he did not take away the pillar of cloud by day or the pillar of fire by night from before the people. Maybe see.

Psalm 119T and the Truth of God's Word

Please stand and open your Psalters to Psalm 119T. Think of my affliction and save, for I do not forget your law. Defend my cause, deliver me, revive according to your word. Salvation's far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statues.

How great your tender mercies, Lord. Save according to your judgments. Many persecute me as foes, yet from your law I do not shrink. I am grieved by the transgressors because they do not keep your word.

See how I love your precepts, Lord. Save according to your mercy. Oh, the whole of your word is truth. All your righteous judgments will stand.

Think on my affliction and save, for I do not forget your law. Defend my cause, deliver me, revive according to your word. Salvation's far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statues. How great your tender mercies, Lord.

Save according to your judgment. Many persecute me as foes, yet from your law I do not shrink. I am grieved by the transgressors because they do not keep your word. See how I love your precepts, Lord.

Save according to your mercy. Oh, the whole of your word is truth. Righteous judgments will stand.

Guarding the Apostolic Deposit Against Falsely So-Called Knowledge

Please now, either on the handout or in the scriptures, open up. And we're gonna read the very end of 1 Timothy again. 1 Timothy chapter six, verses 20 through 21. Oh, Timothy, guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

By professing it, some have strayed concerning the faith. Grace be with you, amen. You may be seated. All right, so last time I reviewed with you sort of the outline of 1 Timothy. We walked through, talked about that, the emphasis of doctrine and the dangers of heresy.

And at the end, we are reminded in these last few verses that we are to, officers especially, elders especially, hold onto the word of truth that was revealed, the apostolic deposit that was committed to your trust, to the trust of Timothy, to the officers, that apostolic deposit.

Now, the rest of this is gonna be a lot easier for you if you've got the handout. So just real quickly, raise your hand if you don't have a handout. Okay, if we can get one to the Nelson family and then anybody else?

Great, okay. So then, the handout, we're gonna be going through more of these things to consider alternate views. We're gonna be, thank you. We're gonna be dealing with alternate views in terms of the word of God being the authority.

We're gonna look at contrary or alternate views. But the word of God is what was given to be held onto by the church. And on the alternative side, we looked at this idea of avoiding profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

Okay, so profane babblings, remember, they're not holy. Profane is the opposite of holy. To be holy is to be focused on the glory of God. Now, to be idle is to be useless. Okay, to be useful, to be fruitful, to be helpful is to have things that are worth doing, to redeem the time.

Words that are useful, that are healthy, that are good, that build up souls, that cause life as opposed to death. We have profane babblings and there are idle babblings. And there's this ease with which we can drown out the holy words and the useful words with profane and useless speaking.

And then there's that which contradicts the scriptures and that contradicts itself. So much of the speaking that you hear in the public sphere is self-contradiction. How often do you hear the mainstream media supporting one position merely to contradict itself, pretending like this is always the way it was and to just have things put side by side, straight-faced, no acknowledgement, no recognition of the changing that occurs there, just this, we've always been at war with whomever.

We've always been friends with whomever. This classic Orwellian changing of the way things are lined up. This setting up of things in a way that is self-contradictory and there's a straight face just bluster to get past.

So the idea of the profane babblings, the idle babblings, and the self-contradictory mess, these are things that we use to evaluate if someone is holding onto the things that we're committed to the trust of the church.

The words of God are not profane or idle or contradictory. And so uselessness and profanation and contradiction are helpful markers for us to reject messages and messengers. If you look at the very back of the handout, just go to the very last page, you will see there, I've got for you the two texts from Deuteronomy with the tests for false prophets.

The first test, Deuteronomy 13, verses one to five, is this idea that if somebody tells you to go chase after another God, as opposed to the God that has already been revealed, they're contradicting the revelation that's come before.

Okay, so Deuteronomy 13, verses one to five, shows us that this is a test. A test for prophets is have they contradicted the revelation that's come before. And then there's also the Deuteronomy 18, 20 to 22 test, which is the test of presumption.

Do they prophesy something and it doesn't happen? Okay, so when we look at prophets, we have to deal with this idea of the revelation that's given is it something that contradicts prior revelation? Is it something that is presumptuous, that there's a prophecy and it doesn't happen?

So jump back with me, back to the front. I wanna remind you, this idea of contradiction as a hallmark of falsehood is not new to Paul. And we find it back written in what Moses wrote. And when Moses wrote, we're looking at about 1 ,400 years before Jesus.

People like to pretend like Aristotle, who wrote out the laws of logic in a textbook around the mid 300s, right? We look at that idea. Somewhere about 400 years before Jesus, we have Aristotle talking about it.

Moses gave the use of logic to test prophecy 1 ,000 years before Aristotle. We pretend sometimes like logic is an invention of men or something the philosophers came up with. Logic is the way God thinks.

Okay, so when we recognize that the scriptures cannot be broken, they are not self-contradictory, they are a coherent whole, they are systematic, you can draw things out of them. We see the way that the system of truth and its beauty is distinct from the human philosophies that we are so often bombarded with, that are profane and idle and self-contradictory.

So these tests are important. And there's a danger if we pick up the profane words of the world and the idle babblings, talk about useless things, and if we hold on to contradictory things. If you start to contradict yourself and you don't really care, what you're doing is you're erasing your sense of integrity.

People who don't care that they contradict themselves, there's a special name for them and it's technical. I want you to grab hold of this, okay? Here's the word, liars. I know it's a lot of syllables, they're liars.

When you contradict yourself and you don't care, that's a jar. You're erasing a concern for consistency, which is what integrity is. And so if we care about integrity, if we care about being men of integrity, women of integrity, if we care about this idea of holding firm to the word of truth, scriptures cannot be broken.

When you contradict yourself, you've shown yourself to be wrong. And so what you need to recognize is that when you find yourself in a contradictory mess, when you're saying things that contradict themselves, you have a duty to sort it out and to acknowledge that you're wrong about at least one of these things.

Maybe both. And so this willingness to go back and to search the scriptures and see if things are so, even what you're saying is so. And if we hold on to things that are profane, worldly ideas, and we hold on to just talking about useless things and restating the aphorisms of the world and things that are just sort of accepted because that's what's in the culture, even the self-contradictory elements of it, if we hold on to these things and we don't care to replace them with what the word of truth has to say, we will stray more and more concerning the faith.

And so holding tightly to the scriptures as the authority is the thing that allows you to be built up in integrity and to be built up in the knowledge of God and to be strong in the faith. So page two, we talked through some of this last time and I really think that 1 Corinthians chunk of text I'd really encourage you in your private studies to go look at that and also go look at my sermon series on 1 Corinthians chapters one and two.

Those chapters of 1 Corinthians deal so beautifully with human philosophy and with the idea of how we know truth. So we spent a lot of time on these. Now, what I want to do is to jump forward in the handout and I'd like to take you to page four.

I want to talk to you about knowledge falsely so-called compared to knowledge rightly so-called. Now, the knowledge that was committed to the trust of the church, we looked at last time those references to John and the idea of the apostolic deposit that the words of Christ were given to the apostles.

They were given them for the church that the Holy Spirit caused them to be brought to remembrance that we have the apostolic deposit in the scriptures now. And when we try to instead come forward with something else, there are only three places that ideas come from apart from God's mind.

Okay, so there's three. The only places that you can get ideas from apart from what God has revealed are your own mind, which the scriptures are not particularly complimentary of, right? The heart is deceitfully wicked.

Who can know it? The idea that man is incapable of doing any good apart from the regeneration coming from the Holy Spirit that all of his thoughts were evil continuously but that there is one light. The light is Christ and the light of Christ is something that is brought to us.

All right, we see Christ as light in the darkness, not light in a moderately well-lit in place. Our own ideas, our own ideas, if we come up with things, we find in the book of Romans that the tendency of man and not just the tendency but the constant tendency apart from the work of the Holy Spirit to give you spiritual life is to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

We suppress the truth in unrighteousness and the attributes of God and His law are in our hearts so as to make us inexcusable but we will not rightly come to the knowledge of God. We will not rightly come to an understanding of right and wrong apart from the word from God coming to us.

And the Holy Spirit illuminating us. And so your own ideas, these are any opinions that you invent or hypothesis that you come up with and you can't demonstrate it from some other source. These things are not things that you can have certainty about, things that you just make up are exactly that.

They are things you just make up. Some people love the ideas that they make up and want to defend them vigorously and they want to put them forward. And so we need to be aware of this tendency for people to put forward the ideas that they make up and to try to impose them on other people.

There is another source which is other human beings that came before you. Okay, this often gets called tradition, human tradition. We have a tradition in the Reformed faith, in the Protestant faith, there is an authoritative tradition.

It's called the apostolic tradition and it was captured in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. So human tradition, any opinions that come from other men that cannot be shown to be from a source beyond mere man.

Okay, that's one thing. So the world is a dark place with other men who are like unto you in every way including sin. Jesus Christ was like unto you in every way except without sin. But if we have the words of Jesus, we've just got God's words.

So we're gonna separate that out from just human tradition. Okay, so human tradition, you're gonna have other people who have the same problems as you. And then there are demonic doctrines. You might go, well, what about angelic doctrines?

Well, let me tell you the difference between an angel and a demon. They're both angels and the angels obey God and only carry messages that God told them to carry, God's word. The demons disobey God and they like to make up ideas and impose them on humans.

They find it very fun. They had a wonderful partnership with Joseph Smith. They wrote a best-selling book called The Book of Mormon. They had a really good and effective partnership with Muhammad and wrote a very good-selling book called The Quran.

Demons are very good at this making stuff up thing. And they are very good at getting human beings to become effective messengers of the doctrines of demons. And so the doctrines of demons are something that Americans with our modernist attitudes and our emphasis on physical and material things, we undervalue the terrifying reality of the supernatural.

Demonic doctrines bring about all sorts of horrific falsehood reigning in human society and cause people to waste their lives with very cleverly devised profane babblings, idle babblings, and self-contradictory things accompanied by powerful signs.

So these things, the stuff you make up, the stuff other people make up, and the stuff that demons make up, these are the alternate sources of ideas besides God's ideas. So Deuteronomy 4 verse two says, you shall not add to the word which I command you or take from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.

Isaiah 8 20, to the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. It does not say some light. It says no light. So here is one of the most common Christian efforts to try to say that there's a bunch of information we can get apart from the Scriptures.

They will go to the idea of general revelation, and they will try to say that general revelation gives you an enormous amount of stuff that you can infallibly know and say is certain and put it right next to the Bible and say here are two sources of the information.

Beloved, unless we already have the Bible, we're going to horrifically misinterpret the world which is often put forward. So a Christian worldview, we only interpret the world rightly with a Christian worldview.

And so without first having the Scriptures coming to a person to make you spiritually alive, you're not going to be able to go interpret the world in a proper way. General revelation in the Scriptures, if we look at what God has revealed in his holy word about the idea of general revelation, here's what general revelation is.

General revelation is the light, as we find that in the book of John. It talks about the light that lights the minds of all men. The light that lights the minds of all men. General revelation is the light that illuminates the minds of all men.

This light consists of reason and innate ideas. So in other words, the innate ideas, if you look at the book of Romans chapter one, especially Romans one verse 20, you're going to find that it says that there are certain things written in the heart of man.

These things are the eternal power and divine nature of God. His eternal power is one of his attributes. He's eternal, without beginning, without end. And he has power, he has all power. Those are some of his attributes.

And then it lists next to that, that depending on the translation, it'll say either the Godhead, his eternal power and Godhead, or it'll say divine nature. Those are both fine as translations. The idea of the Godhead is, what are the attributes that are shared by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?

The divine nature is the same thing. It's the listing out of the attributes that God possesses that are distinct from creatures. The Westminster Shorter Catechism does an amazing job of giving that as a summary list.

Here's the summary list. Question four of the Shorter Catechism, what is God? God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. That right there, question four of the Shorter Catechism does an amazing job of giving to us a list of those attributes of God that help him to be differentiated from creatures.

The three key ones there, okay? Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Think about this. God is infinite and no creature is. All creatures are finite. God is eternal and no creature is. All creatures are temporal, which means they change.

They're in time. Time is change. And then changeability is, of course, a working off of being eternal or temporal. So God is infinite. Creatures are finite. God is eternal. Creatures are temporal. God is unchangeable.

Creatures are changeable. These are things that are helpful for us to be able to understand the incommunicable attributes of God. God can't create something that's God. That would be to communicate his attributes.

It's not communicate as in like help us to understand it. He clearly communicates in his word by telling us what these things are. The issue is he can't give eternality to a creature because if you're created, you have a beginning, right?

He can't give that without making you God and God is uncreated. So it's a logical impossibility. God, by his very nature, is uncreated. And so we think about these attributes. These are the innate ideas, the ones that are talked about in Romans in man.

These innate ideas, when you talk to unbelievers, you can pull on that stuff that's in their heart. You can pull upon the attributes that exist there and show them that they have made idols in their hearts.

They've made the world eternal or they've made some other thing eternal. They've made something else that is infinite and given that attribute to it apart from God. And so everybody makes idols but only the Christian religion reveals the true God and yet this suppression of the truth and this self-contradictory garbage that we all invent up in our minds and put it forward and live our lives by that junk is the stuff that we believe apart from the Word of God coming to us and the Spirit of God giving us spiritual life.

Now, reason and these innate categories allow us to communicate with other people. Men are inexcusable before they form eyes in the womb. Men are inexcusable before their ears are capable of capturing sound.

Men are inexcusable before their tongues function or their noses function or they have the ability to feel. The moment of conception, David was conceived in iniquity. His eyes didn't function and his ears didn't function but he was suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.

That conceived in iniquity, look, there's the guilt of Adam but we have a corrupt nature where we suppress the glory of God in our minds. We do not believe what we ought to believe and we are idle factories and we need to understand that from our first moments after we are made, we are not glorifying God as we ought and our guilt is rooted there and our guilt is rooted in Adam's sin and every choice we make that's sinful out of that unbelief comes forth.

This is important for us to understand what we're really saved from. We're not just saved from sins or we've broken laws that are particular. We are saved from a condition of not purposefully glorifying God and you need to understand that sin makes life miserable in part because of the consequences of particular actions but beloved, you know that oftentimes your sins that you commit that you are ashamed of flow from being bored.

That boredom comes from the mind not enjoying the beauty and glory of God. If we were sinless, we would always be joyful in the glory of God. Our boredom, our inability to sit in a room by ourselves contemplating the glories of God, that is this thing where our minds are not focused on His glory.

Now I'm not saying you should just sit in a room and contemplate. We are called to go out, to exercise dominion, to build, to cut trees down and turn them into houses, to tear down mountains and turn them into plains.

We take the high places and we raise up the low places and we make these glorious things. We're called to go out and to fill the earth with culture, to build institutions, to have people working hard.

We display the glory of God with all of these things but that stuff comes out of minds that are already enthralled by the glory and beauty of God. The manifesting of external work that beautifies the world and glorifies God comes from a mind that rejoices in the glory of God.

And general revelation is not the thing that is used by God to make men have spiritual life. General revelation is used to hold men inexcusable. The human condition is that we are fallen and we use the light of general revelation to build and defend self-contradictory philosophies and to have profane babbling and to give idle talk.

We can make use of general revelation and show people by pulling upon the information that they can't deny things that they are guilty of. So I go to page five. Special revelation which is now contained entirely in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

God can, let me give you the definition here. The words from God given either immediately or through messengers, all which are now contained in the Bible as explicit statements or necessary inferences.

True knowledge is justified true belief. That's a technical phraseology. Here's the deal. People wanna talk about what's the difference between a true opinion versus knowledge. Here's the important difference.

A true opinion is something that you don't necessarily know why you believe it, but you believe it. Knowledge is when you have truth in your mind and you can show why it's true. So the ability to show the thing, to give a rational justification, to give a reason for the hope that's in you, an apologetic, a defense.

And so we want to know the scriptures and we want to know how we can show people that apart from scripture, they don't have a certain word. They don't have a foundation to rely upon. Now, the means of revelation.

This can occur through immediate divine illumination as with the prophets or through ordinary means accompanied by divine illumination. So in other words, think about this. We have the prophets received word from God.

Sometimes God spoke to them and they heard a noise, like they heard like a voice talking to them. Sometimes you might just give to them immediately in their mind what it is that they are supposed to write.

You have the example of John the Baptist when he was in the womb and Mary came in to visit Elizabeth. John the Baptist jumped for joy that he was in the presence of the mother of his savior. Right, this, how did he get that?

How did he know that? Because God gave it to him immediately. In the womb. Right, so this idea that God can plant information in your mind. He can give you information. And so we know that now that he has completed his scriptures so we don't have new prophecy, new prophets.

And so what we must rely upon is he has given us his word in a book. But not everybody who reads the book and not everybody who listens to the book being read or hears it being preached believes. Right, so remember, what's knowledge?

Knowledge is when you believe something and it's true and you've got a good reason for it. You can show it. So even if you hear the truth, it requires the work of God to illuminate your mind. As Calvinists, we typically, we're real quick to go, amen, hallelujah, praise the Lord, absolutely.

You gotta have irresistible grace for regeneration. Nobody's gonna believe apart from the Holy Spirit doing that, absolutely. But that's true for every new truth you come to know. It's this illuminating work.

That's true in terms of sanctification. It's not like God resurrects you and then all your sanctification comes from your own power. All the sanctification you have, all the growth you have in the faith is by the work of God too.

Christ is the author of our faith and he's the finisher of it. He builds it and he preserves it. It's work of illumination. So we look to God and his sovereign power over knowledge. He is the one who gives us knowledge and he gives it to us externally with the scriptures and internally, he brings powerfully his work to cause us to know.

Now, when we talk about this from an apologetics perspective, we have to basically come down to saying, well, how do I know the Bible is the word of God? And there's two basic approaches. I'm gonna take something else and I'm gonna use it to prove the Bible.

Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the Bible. I'm gonna prove the Bible from the thing. Okay, that's scenario one. Put whatever thing you want in there. Scenario two, there is no higher authority than the word of God.

What kind of a joke is this that you're asking me to prove the thing that is the highest authority? Were you listening? That's scenario two. The word of God is above everything else. So some people's response to that is to say, that's fideism.

Well, first of all, fideism is just a Latin word for faithism. So I would encourage you to put your faith in the word of God. But secondly, every philosophy has to start somewhere. Now, I would suggest to you that the label fideism is actually best applied when somebody says you should believe the Bible and I can't give you any reasons.

We can give a reason. We can give an argument. We can give a defense of the faith. But it's very different to give a defense of the faith than it is to try to prove the Bible from a higher authority. To give a defense of the faith is righteous and it's a commandment that God gives to us.

To seek to prove the Bible from some higher authority or to say that there's something more certain than the word of God is blasphemous. There is nothing more certain, more authoritative, higher than the word of God.

So here are, here's the thing about the first principle. Everybody has a first principle, whether they want to admit it or not. Here's why you have a first principle. If I ask you, what do you believe?

You go, I believe the Christian religion. I go, why do you believe that? Because the Bible says so. And you go, why do you believe the Bible? And you go, I don't believe the Bible. And you go, well, for these reasons.