Apologetics and Post Modernism

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In our last session together, I know you're all just sitting on pins and needles, whoo, post -modernism.
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That's exciting. It's not. I understand that.
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So let me try to excite you at least a little bit by saying I'm not going to sit here and talk about Jacques Derrida or anyone else like that,
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Michel Foucault or any of those other folks, because reading them puts me into a coma just like it does you.
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But what we do face is a very secularized world.
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And when I say secularized, you will recall on the first evening we talked about how fundamental the change has been, certainly in my lifetime, in the reality that we now live in a world where the majority of the people that we interact with do not view this world as having fundamental transcendental value.
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In other words, the only value that this world has is that which we assign to it.
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There is no God. There is no judgment. There is no purpose. Eventually, the entire universe dies of what's called heat death.
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Entropy gets us all, and that's it. And no one's going to care. No one's going to remember. We are all, in the words of that wonderful species from Star Trek, ugly bags of mostly water.
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We are just chemicals fizzing, and you may fizz beautifully in making music.
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I debated an atheist. He's one of the best -known atheists in the United States. He's the head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is an organization that just has like 47 ,000 lawyers on retainer.
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They just sue everybody for everything. They sue schools for having prayers before football games.
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They just hate God. Their head is Dan Barker, an apostate, a former
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Christian. I debated him a number of years ago.
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The one argument that I presented that night that I could really see grabbed him. He's done many, many debates, but the one that sort of stopped him up short is that he is a musician.
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He writes music. He is an excellent pianist. What I said to him,
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I said, Given your worldview, your music will not be beautiful after you die, because its beauty only exists in the fizzing of your brain anyways.
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When your brain stops fizzing, your music is no longer beautiful. It might be beautiful to somebody else as long as they're fizzing too, but it's only fizz.
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You could just see in his eyes that there was something in him that knew, that there was something lasting about the beauty of music that would still be beautiful even after he stopped fizzing.
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He could see that. He could not live consistently in his atheistic worldview, and nobody can.
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That's the connection point that we have. What connection point do we have with a person who does not share any of our beginning presuppositions?
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We believe words have meaning because there is an objective standard. There's an objective standard of moral and ethics.
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I debated an atheist. He's been both the vice president and president of American Atheists.
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He got kicked out over the Me Too movement, but anyway. I debated him, and I brought up Auschwitz.
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I said, when I stand at the gates of Auschwitz, I can proclaim this to be evil in any context.
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It's always evil. What about you? He knew he could not simply stand there and say that Auschwitz was evil in any type of objective fashion.
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He just can't do it. People can't live in that world, not consistently. They have to come up with ways of borrowing from our world.
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What is the point of connection? Let me start with this. A lot of Christian apologists function like this.
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They will say to the unbeliever, I'll tell you what. Let's carve out a neutral place.
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We'll meet here, and we'll just reason with one another. What is this neutral place?
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I won't have any Christian assumptions, and you don't have any atheistic assumptions. We'll just meet as two human beings, and in pure reason, we will just speak with one another and use our mighty intellects to come to an agreed -upon conclusion.
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The Christian believes that the truth will show this person that God exists, if they will just reason in this safe space.
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That's what a lot of Christian apologists would like to be able to do.
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Here's the problem. I suggest to you that if you believe what the
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Christian faith teaches, neutrality is a myth. There is no such thing as neutrality.
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There can't be. Think with me for a moment. Colossians chapter 1, speaking of Jesus Christ.
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Now, if that's true, how can anything be neutral to his claims?
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If Jesus Christ is the creator of all things, is there any fact that exists that he did not make as that fact?
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No, the answer is no. He is the creator and maker of all things.
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For me, as a Christian, to pretend that I can have a neutral place where the lordship of Christ isn't true, where you don't start with that reality, is to create some place that my own system says does not exist.
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If God made everything, then everything testifies to God.
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You see, sometimes we forget that the message of the Christian faith is incredibly radical.
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It is incredibly radical. For anyone in the world, what we believe is just nuts.
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It really is. Think about it. We are saying that the creator of the entire universe entered into his own creation and lived for a brief period of time in the backwaters of the
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Roman Empire, never wrote a book, didn't raise any armies, started a persecuted church, and died on a
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Roman cross, that we are actually telling the world that the person who died on a
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Roman cross was at the same time holding together the entire universe.
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There is a reason why 1 Corinthians 1 tells us that the preaching of the message of the cross is foolishness.
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It's foolishness. To whom? To those who are perishing. But we who are being saved, it is the power of God.
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You have the foolishness of God and the wisdom of God. And the problem is too many
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Christians attempt to remove the foolishness of the message and make it wise in the eyes of the world.
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We can't do it. It's only been about 100 years since we have known that those little puffy things in the sky, which you can only see in the darkest night, those little puffy things in the sky aren't just clouds of gas or something.
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They are actually galaxies. And we didn't even know, once we launched the
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Hubble Space Telescope, then we started getting a real good idea of just how massive this universe is.
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So our own galaxy, 100 billion stars. 100 billion is a hard number.
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In the United States, we are getting to the point where 100 billion, that's a small number. We're in debt so much.
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Just spend that money. Ooh, just got to print it up. It's great. It's wonderful. But still, we can't even begin to understand the size of that number, 100 billion.
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100 billion stars in our galaxy. And we now estimate there are at least 100 billion galaxies.
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100 billion galaxies. That's how vast this universe is. It's incredible.
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And we're actually saying that the one who holds all that together lived 2 ,000 years ago on this teeny tiny little speck.
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Because that's what the Earth is. The teeny tiny little speck. Now it just happens to be a really blessed teeny tiny little speck.
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And it happens to be the only place that we know there is actually the conditions for life and all sorts of fun stuff like that.
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But it's still a teeny tiny little speck. And we're telling the world the one who made all this entered into this creation.
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That is crazy. It's crazy. And so once you recognize how radical that claim is, then you start to realize you can't un -radicalize that.
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You cannot try to, in some way, if you're talking to a secular person and they think that their mind and their intellect is capable of just grasping everything, as long as they are standing in rebellion against God, they're going to find that to be absolute foolishness.
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That's why you have to depend. You must depend upon the Spirit of God in any evangelistic or apologetic situation.
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Unless the Spirit of God opens hearts and minds, all your arguments will never accomplish anything.
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We are dependent upon God in everything that we do. There's absolutely no way around this.
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So when you think about it, what is the connection then? If there is no morally neutral ground, no epistemologically neutral ground as far as knowledge, if everything is created by God and therefore testifies to God, then what's your connection to the unbeliever?
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It's real simple. They are made in the image of God. They're made in the image of God.
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The imago dei, image of God. That is the connection. So can't you just appeal to that?
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Why is it that you can take the same message and proclaim it to two people of similar backgrounds and similar education, one accepts it and one does not?
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Shouldn't it just be enough just to be very, very clear in what you say? There's obviously a spiritual element that must be understood.
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And so what I'd like to do, even though ha -ha at the beginning, I've already done the beginning, but I want to quickly, it will be far faster than I'm comfortable with, but I want to lay a few foundations out of Romans 1 that will help us to understand how we can, what we must think at the start in dealing with anyone in our society today.
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It doesn't matter what philosophical system they're following. If Scripture is Scripture and its description of mankind is accurate, then we will have an understanding of where someone's coming from if we have a basic understanding of what's called anthropology, the study of man.
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Romans 1 is one of the most amazing pieces of literature I've ever encountered.
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It's not just literature, it's revelation from God. And the fact that it remains true in every culture all across this globe is an amazing testimony to the inspiration of Scripture.
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And in Romans 1, Paul is clearly, it's his intention to lay out his gospel for the church there at Rome, knowing that it's going to spread from there all over the known world.
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So he wants to really establish a firm foundation there in the church at Rome.
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And you'll notice he doesn't get to the good news until after he's spent a whole lot of time on the bad news.
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We very often want to change that. We want to start with the good news because we want people to like us.
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But people who don't know the bad news aren't looking for good news. So you have to start where Paul started.
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So let's just quickly run through beginning of verse 18. Paul says, And then you have a descriptive phrase.
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Suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. So this is a descriptive, this is a description of anyone who is committing ungodliness and unrighteousness.
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Ungodly and unrighteous men, that's everybody. When they act in this fashion, they are doing something.
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They are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Now how do you suppress something?
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You have to possess it to be able to suppress it. When you try to suppress a cough, it's because you want to cough.
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It's already there. And I liken it, it's very similar to you're actively holding something down.
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So if you've been in a swimming pool and you get one of those beach balls and it's sort of fun to put it under the water and try to hold it down.
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Sometimes you can try to climb up on top of it, eventually it's going to pop up and you're going to be heading toward the bottom.
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But it takes effort on your part to suppress, to hold down that ball.
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If you stop for even a second, if you're distracted, up it comes. And so mankind is described as suppressing the truth.
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You can't suppress something you don't have. Keep this in mind, because what
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Paul's argument here in Romans 1 is going to be is that the truth is already present.
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It's already known. But there is a moral and spiritual component to mankind in rebellion against the
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Creator. We were created to know truth. We were created to have relationship with our
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Creator. But something has happened and now we're suppressing that truth. And that's why we engage in unrighteousness and ungodliness.
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We're suppressing that truth. Because he says in verse 19, Not for that which is knowable about God, but that which is known of God is manifest amongst them.
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Now, the phrase could be understood as either playing to them, but this could be in the community as a whole.
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So you're looking at the creation around us, the beauty of the stars, and the complexity of life.
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Or in them, as in each one of us individually, the existence of conscience, the existence of our understanding of who we are, our duties to others.
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The fact that the two -year -old, when he reaches for the cookie that he knows he's not supposed to have, looks around. You don't have to teach him to do that.
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That's a part of how we are made. But the point is, that which is known about God is manifest amongst them.
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For God manifested it them. He made it plain to them. He showed it to them.
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This is something God did. God has created the world in such a way that he is making a revelation of himself.
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Theologians call this general revelation. Revelation is found in creation rather than specific or special revelation, which is found in Scripture.
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But this point is, they have to suppress the truth because God's been busy making known his truth.
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He has revealed it to them. He has made it plain to them. Why? How does he do that?
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For what has been revealed? Verse 20. For the invisible things of him, that is, his divine power, his divine nature, has been from the creation of the world, been made known through what has been made.
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So God has acted in such a way that he has created and a certain aspect of his being is plainly seen in the creation.
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Now notice, it's limited. General revelation does not reveal the
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Trinity. I know there are some people that, well, if you look at this constellation and that constellation...
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Fine, I'm sorry, that's not Paul's point here. There is a limitation to the extent of general revelation.
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And specifically, it reveals his divine power and the
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King James used the old term, Godhead. But it's the divine nature.
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We know that God exists. We know that he's powerful. And we know that we should give thanks to him.
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Because that's what the next verse says. For even though they knew God, they did not glorify God or give thanks.
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So that's what general revelation reveals, is that we know we should glorify
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God. We know we should be thankful to him for the very gift of life. But we refuse to do that.
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We refuse to do that. So God has made these things plain.
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He has revealed these aspects of himself. And then notice the last phrase of verse 20.
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So that they are... Let me give you the original term and listen to it. Unapologetus.
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Apologetus. Where have you heard that before? Apologetics. Apologetus is a reasoned defense.
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So you put an alpha privative in front of it. And they are without a reasoned defense.
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Or as the translation is giving it, without excuse. But what it really means is, they cannot give a consistent reasoned defense of their rebellion against God.
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Why? Because they live in God's world. That's why. Now you say, well wait a minute.
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Atheists live to argue on Facebook. They are giving an apologetic all the time.
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But scripture says they can't do it consistently. They can't do it consistently.
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Why? Because they live in God's world and they're made in God's image. Must drive them crazy, but that's the reality. It does drive them crazy, as some of you saw recently in a debate that I did.
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They cannot do it consistently. They're constantly having to suppress that knowledge.
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And the real question is, do we believe this? Because if they are unapologetus, if they cannot come up with a consistent apologetic, then you start getting the idea of what we're supposed to do.
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If they're made in the image of God, they can't be consistent. What you and I need to do is, if they're holding that ball down under the water, what do we need to do?
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Do we need to come along and bring another beach ball? Say, here. Here's more truth about God.
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What are they going to do with it? What is the lost person going to do with any more truth than they're already suppressing?
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They're going to suppress it, too. They may not appreciate having to put out the extra effort, but they are going to suppress it.
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It's not that they are lacking in truth. They are suppressing truth.
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So if you give them more truth, they will suppress truth. So, if they're sitting there holding that big ball of truth down, then what
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I come along, what I do is I'm smiling. Hi, I'm your fellow creature.
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Been there. It's tough holding that down, isn't it? Oh yeah, it is. And while we're talking,
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I reach down, and I start prying their fingers off. Stop that! Stop that!
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No, no, believe me, I'm doing this out of love, brother. Really, I am. So let me show you where you're being inconsistent here.
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No, no, yes, yes, yes. That's what I've got to do. I've got to pry those fingers off.
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I've got to show them you're suppressing God's truth. Let me show you how you're doing it.
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Let me give you an illustration. Years ago, before I discovered coochies, because man,
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I would have worn one, because I was in Chicago. Has anybody ever been in Chicago in the winter, in Chicago, Illinois?
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Oh my goodness. The wind comes off the lake, and I don't care what you're wearing. You can wear steel, and that wind will slice right through whatever it is you're wearing.
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It's very, very cold. And I was invited to speak at a little college.
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I thought it was a Christian thing. So I was just sort of like, I'm going to talk to some young Christian people.
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I wasn't all that old myself at the time, so it was sort of cool. But I get there, and I see the flyer they've distributed around, and it says,
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Stump the chump. Do you like to argue? Free pizza.
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There you go. That's how you get college students to show up. And so right before it starts, in walks this guy.
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His name was Eric. And as I'm getting older, I don't remember.
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I'm pretty certain that Eric was wearing all red clothing with blue hair.
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But it could have been all blue clothing with red hair. I'm not 100 % certain one way or the other. But he was a sophomore philosophy student.
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Some of you are going, Oh, no. You all know what sophomore means, right?
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Sophos, wise. Moronos, moron. You didn't know that?
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That's what a sophomore is. Is a wise moron. Because by your second year, you think you know it all, and you actually don't know anything at all.
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And that's why you're a sophomore. So you're a wise fool. That's literally what it is. And if you think using the term moron is bad,
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Paul used it a lot in 1 Corinthians 1. It's all over the place. The word foolishness, that's moronos in Greek.
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So anyway. So he immediately has got his hand up as soon as I start.
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And he's arguing all these strange philosophical points. And basically what he's saying is,
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We can't know anything for sure. We don't really know. And so after it was all done, he came up to me.
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And someone gave me a slice of pizza. It sat there growing cold. I never got to touch it. I'm still sad to this day.
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It looked like very good pizza. But he and I start talking. And I'm just sort of letting him go.
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I'm just sort of asking sort of feeding, leading questions. You know, just getting him to go. Because I know this kid's made in the image of God.
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And at some point, he is going to say something. And I'll have him.
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And he did. At one point he said, I know I should do better. Gotcha. Grabbed the rope.
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And I stopped him. And I said, Eric, what did you just say? Well, I know
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I should do better. Really? I thought you didn't know anything at all. He had even made the statement during the public talk that he could not even prove that his jacket existed.
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He had this nice leather brown jacket. You needed a nice leather brown jacket in the winter in Chicago. And it was sitting on the chair between us.
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And I said, Eric, you told me that you don't even know whether your jacket exists.
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But you just told me that you know you should do better. You see, here's the problem, Eric. Eric, you're a thief.
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What? I said, you're a thief. You are a creature living in God's world.
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You will not acknowledge him. You will not worship him or glorify him. But you will steal from his world to hold yours together.
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And let me give you an illustration, Eric. You just told me that you don't even know that your jacket actually exists.
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But I can guarantee you something, Eric. When you leave, you're taking your jacket. You may not know it exists, but you do know it exists.
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And you know how cold it is outside. And you're not walking out there without this jacket. And I'll tell you what else,
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Eric. If you're walking back to your dorm room, you are not going to walk down the middle of the road to get there.
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You're going to walk on the sidewalk. Because you know the rules of physics actually do exist. And when that Mack truck runs over you, you will die.
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Now, all your philosophy will tell you that you may not really know that, but you're a smart kid. You're going to walk on the sidewalk.
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Or if you're driving, you're going to drive, and of course this is what the majority of the world does, on the right side of the road.
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Because that's the godly side. Because you also know the rules of physics exist.
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And that Mack truck is going to run into you if you're on the other side of the road. And you are going to borrow from my god's world to remain functional in this fantasy world you're creating for yourself.
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And here's my prayer for you, Eric. Every single time you borrow from my god's worldview,
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I'm going to pray that he's going to convict you that you are a thief. You should have seen the look on his face.
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He said, no one's ever talked to me like that. And this was before the snowflake generation too, by the way.
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This was actually when you could say to somebody, I'm offended, I need a safe space. And then go away.
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If you're offended in a safe space, you're about three years old mentally. You really need to grow up here, okay?
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But I said, well, I'm sorry we didn't tell you that earlier. But that's my prayer for you.
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Because you are stealing from my god to suppress your own rebellion.
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Now, I don't know what happened to Eric. But he did take his jacket. And my hope is every other day that he did things that were inconsistent in light of his own profession, that god convicted him of that.
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I would like to find that out someday. They're without excuse. They're without an apologetic.
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And so the connection point is, Eric's made in the image of god, I'm made in the image of god, he's not going to be able to be consistent.
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And so I'm going to pry that finger up. And that's what I was doing to Eric, because I was starting to pry those fingers up. Because he's suppressing, he's holding down.
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That's what we are told about mankind here in Romans chapter 1.
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For even though they knew god, do we believe that? I mean,
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I'm concerned that many of my apologist friends who are just extremely attracted to worldly systems of philosophy don't really believe what
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Romans 1 says here. They don't really believe what it says. When 1
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Corinthians chapter 1 talks about the foolishness of the cross in the eyes of the world, they don't like that.
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They want the message of the cross to be wise. They want a place at the table. We will never have a place at the table.
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Our ultimate authority is named Jesus Christ. And the world says we reject his lordship.
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We're not going to be sitting at the same table. But they're made in the image of god. And so even though they knew god, they did not glorify him as god or give thanks.
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What's going to happen if you're made in the image of god? You have made by god stamped wherever you want to stamp it.
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You are a pot formed by the potter. But you go,
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I'm not created by god. I'm going to suppress the knowledge that I have of him. Are you going to be unchanged by this?
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Is god going to be changed by this? No, god's not going to be changed by the foolishness of the pots. But the pot is going to be fundamentally altered by that act of rebellion.
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So if you will not do what you're designed to do, glorify god and give thanks, the result of this rebellion is, but they were made foolish in their reasoning, literally.
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There was an emptying out of their reasoning and their non -understanding hearts were darkened.
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So the very place of thinking, the very center of human experience and thought, experiences foolishness and darkening, confusion and darkening.
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You cannot be made in the image of god, suppress that knowledge and not be impacted by it.
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And the point of Romans 1, and by the way, this is the context of the illustration. We didn't get into this the first night.
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But this is the context of Paul's illustration down in verses 26 and 27 about homosexuality.
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The rebellion of mankind is so deep that even the most fundamental created desires of man can become twisted and turned.
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That's the illustration. That's why he raises homosexuality. He doesn't just put it in the list of vices later on in Romans 1.
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It's an illustration of the fact that if you suppress the knowledge of god, you are the one who becomes impacted by that and there is no aspect of the human being that is not impacted by that kind of rebellion.
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And what this is saying, this is massive heresy in our secular world because the ultimate place of freedom and now today autonomy is the mind of man.
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We are now actually putting it into our laws that if in your mind the biological reality of your body is other than what it actually is, all the rest of us have to learn a whole new list of pronouns to talk to you or we'll get thrown in jail.
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Insanity! But where does it come from? It comes from this idea of the autonomy of the human mind.
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And 2 ,000 years ago, Paul dictated to a scribe who wrote on a piece of papyrus words that ended up forming the very core of western civilization and law and morality and it was an understanding of the fact that mankind's heart is darkened when sin reigns in that heart.
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Do we accept that the thought processes of man are impacted by sin?
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If we do, then we cannot adopt worldly methods of evangelism that treat man as if he is a neutral moral agent that just needs to be given the right information and will accept it and will, oh, of course,
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I will accept that. We live in a day where that is being proven wrong over and over again and well, theology matters.
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You have to have the right theology to then have the right mechanism of both evangelism and apologetics.
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Their foolish hearts were darkened professing themselves to be wise.
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They were made, and yeah, it's the same root, morons. They were made foolish.
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They're professing their own wisdom. But once you have the hardness of heart, you have that darkening of the heart, what you consider to be wisdom is actually foolishness.
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And every day I turn on the news.
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It's like, yes, Lord, I know Romans 1 is true. Can we stop now, please?
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I mean, I'm watching the debates, the presidential debates, and here's an entire room full of people.
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And it's this verse, we are so wise, we need to protect this and that and the other thing, and it's such foolishness.
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Yes, Lord, we know Romans 1 is true. But that very same term, wise, saphoi, same term used in 1
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Corinthians 1, I'd highly recommend, I normally would spend more time and do 1
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Corinthians 1, Romans 1, Colossians 1, as a foundation for understanding this, but it's the same thing. The wise of the world, from God's perspective, foolish.
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It's foolishness. We once thought it was wise. What changed us?
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It wasn't because we are the smartest people in Melbourne here tonight. That's not what happened.
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It's not because you climbed the philosophical mountain and discovered the truth of Christianity. There had to be a spiritual regeneration, a removing of a heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh, and you did not do that to yourself.
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You did not do that to yourself. But then notice verse 23, they exchanged.
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There's two terms, well, it's always the same root, but there's a stronger form that's also used, but there is an exchanging.
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They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible
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God for the images of earthly things.
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You've got, and I think Paul's drawing here from the creation narrative in Romans 1, because he uses many of the same terms that are used in the
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Greek Septuagint in the creation narrative in Genesis 1. And so what he's saying is we drew from everything
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God made and we started replacing Him in idolatry.
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Because we're going to worship. We're going to worship. And so we're either going to worship the creation around us.
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I understand that Australia, that you have to get permits to cut down a tree, and that it's next to impossible.
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I mean, when I was in Sydney, the pastor said that he had gone to the council and the people before him was a homosexual couple.
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And the tree in their front yard was destroying the front of their house. I mean, it was literally destroying their house.
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And they were asking for permission to cut the tree down and they offered to plant five others in its place.
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The council said, no. That tree. When I say tree huggers, you know what
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I'm talking about. Mankind will worship the creation.
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Now, obviously, secular man tends to worship himself. We are part of the creation. This is all a part of the suppression.
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This is what the suppression looks like. Suppression can be done religiously. False religion is a suppression of God's truth.
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It can be done in apathy. It can be done in drugs. It can be done in alcohol. It can be done in sexual debauchery.
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It can be done by worshiping rugby and football and everything else.
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There are some people, oh my goodness, you know that their favorite team is their
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God. You know what I'm talking about. You've met those folks. You better feel sorry for them. It can be done in many different ways, but the result is an exchanging of the glory of the incorruptible
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God. Now, whatever they're going to worship is going to be corruptible. It's going to be corruptible, and hence it's not worthy of worship.
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It's not worthy of worship. Idolatry is at the very heart of the vast majority of human sin and human depravity.
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And because they worship these things, verse 24, God gave them over.
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It's the same root in the original language to the delivering up of Jesus in betrayal by Judas.
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God gave them over. And if you've got a problem with that, you've got a problem with the justice of God.
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If you create a creature that spits in your face, turns its back, and refuses to submit to you as a maker, even though you are providing everything to that creature, every breath you cause rain to fall and food to grow, and they are utterly thankless for that,
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God can do with His creation as He wishes. We Christians, we don't have any right.
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Did we read Job? Have we read almost any of the Psalter? And yet we import so much of our humanism that we bristle at the idea that God is absolutely just to use
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His creation to bring about His own glory. That's why Romans 9 knocks people upside the head. What do you mean?
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You mean God could really use the Egyptians to bring about His own glory? You mean the death of the firstborn?
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Pharaoh's army washing up their bloated bodies on the beach? My God would never do that.
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The same God that did that is the one who's behind the cross. If you don't have the one, you don't have the other, and you don't understand the relationship between the two of them.
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I've said many times, we Christians frequently have a completely emotional, sentimental view of the cross, rather than a biblical one.
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Because if you don't see the wrath of God against sin at the cross, you are not seeing the cross. The depth of the love that is seen there can only be seen against the background of the purity of God's hatred of sin.
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I don't want a wrathful God. Well, there's lots of religions to choose from.
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But if you don't recognize that Jesus Christ bore the wrath of God in your place, that's central to the understanding of the
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New Testament and the entire message. And so when you hear about God giving them over, that's a frightening thing.
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But he's just to do it. How many of us really believe that there was ever a
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Noah and a flood? How many of us just were honestly just sort of putting that off to the side?
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Just a few people left killed all the rest of them? Everyone?
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Jesus believed it. Jesus believed it. He used it as a sign of his own work.
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But a lot of us, we don't really, if we're honest with ourselves. It's right here.
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God gave them over in the desires of their heart unto uncleanness, to dishonor their bodies amongst themselves.
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For just as they exchanged the truth of God for the lie, they knew
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God exists. They exchanged that truth for a lie. And they worship and serve the creation rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
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Amen. We will never have a firm, full grasp on the gospel until we believe all of it and recognize
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God's righteousness in the punishment of sin. I am so concerned.
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I'll be honest with you. Because I see books come out from people today about the
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Old Testament judgments of God. And they're finding any way possible to get around what is plainly seen in the very words that Jesus called the word of God.
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I don't want to believe in a God that would do those things. I don't want to believe that God used the people of Israel to judge those nations.
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I know the Old Testament says that God was allowing their iniquity to come to a fullness and then he had them wiped out.
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It's one thing if God uses an earthquake or a tsunami or something like that.
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It's sort of like more impersonal to wipe people out. But I don't like the idea he used Israel to do that.
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I wouldn't like the idea of the firstborn being killed. Okay, so they weren't sinners?
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Well, yeah. So they're not under the wrath of God? Well, yeah. Didn't Paul start off, verse 18, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven right now, not just will be at the end.
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Yeah, but I'd just rather it all be at the end where, you know, we'll all be in heaven. We won't have to notice this stuff.
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No. It's easy to pick and choose.
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The point is there is an exchange. And when you're dealing with people who are willing to give away the truth, you can't approach them as a morally neutral person.
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Because you may have worked so hard to come up with the best arguments ever and you're so good at presenting them, but they're already exchanging the truth for a lie.
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When you give them more truth, what are they going to do with it? They're going to exchange it for more of a lie. We are dependent upon the
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Spirit of God and if we have a biblical anthropology, a biblical understanding of man, then we will approach him as the rebellious creature that he is, as fellow rebellious creatures who have had the rebellion taken out of us.
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So it's not a matter of, I'm better than you. I once suppressed.
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I once exchanged. And what you do is you pry up those fingers.
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You demonstrate this person is living in God's world. I don't see any other way to be consistent with Scripture.
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I really, really do not. It's not the natural way that we have frequently been taught in our day, but I think it's very consistent with the
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Apostle Paul's approach and how he himself practiced evangelism within the culture of the
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Greeks that automatically had a pushback against such things as resurrection. That's foolishness to them.
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How did Paul handle that? Did he try to find a morally neutral ground? No. He presented the
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God who would be the judge of all mankind, even though knowing, that's foolishness.
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Remember one last reference, 1 Corinthians 1. I don't know why I didn't just go there and do that too, but not enough time.
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Remember in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul said, Jews, they seek after signs, and the
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Greeks seek after wisdom. He knew what his audience wanted, and if it was up to them, he could have just given them what they wanted.
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But he said, I know what they're seeking after, but what do we do? We preach
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Christ crucified. To the Jews, the
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Greek term is skandalon, a scandal, a stumbling block. To the
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Greeks, moronic, foolishness. But to those who are called, whether Jews or Greeks, Christ, the power of God, Christ, the wisdom of God.
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Sounds like you're saying we're dependent upon God to change hearts. Bingo. That's exactly what
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I'm saying. Hey, look. Over my life,
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I've had lots of Christians come to me and say, hey, I've got this friend, and he's got involved with this, and I know if you could just talk to him.
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And I have to look at them and say, if I can argue them into something, someone else can come along and argue them back out.
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It's not my arguments. There has to be a fundamental spiritual reality, and the only power that's been given to the church that changes man's heart is called what?
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The gospel. The gospel. And if you subordinate that, my great fear of what many apologists do is that they make that a later issue down the line.
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I'm going to try to reason you a little bit closer, a little bit closer, a little bit closer, and eventually, gotcha! It doesn't work that way.
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It doesn't work that way. I remember this guy, who was the guy a number of years ago? He went from atheism to deism.
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Yay! They both send you to hell. Deism isn't going to get you saved.
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You don't know God. But oh, we got him! We moved him that far! I read the
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New Testament. You once served those which are by nature not gods. There was a radical change.
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That's what Christianity is. You once served those which are by nature not God, and now you serve them a little bit less.
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No! He said, then you didn't know God, but now you do know
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God, or rather have become known by God. Even Paul says, yeah, it's not you that came. It's God that revealed himself to you.
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God's the one that brought you to himself. So whatever system of epistemological goo has been poured into the poor minds of the next generation in the local university, the one thing they can't do is change the fact that they're made in the image of God.
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And so it can cause barriers. It can be difficult to work through the language.
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But the point is the contact point with them is they're made in the image of God. And if we understand what the scriptures say about what mankind's relationship is before Christ and after Christ, we have a solid foundation with which to enter into a discussion with them.
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All right, I think I'm right on time. So let's have a song and then do some questions.