Systematic Theology | Introduction (11/19/2000)

The Organ Update and the Move Into a New Study

Thank you very much. That was a good special. I take this opportunity, since my dad's not here, to talk about him a little bit. When he was at First Baptist Church in Mahea, the church had given him the authority to take care of their huge pipe organ that they have over there.

And many of you may know, my dad used to own a pipe organ company, a manufacturing company, that he founded and operated for, oh, several years, four or five years before he sold it to CBS Corporation.

And it was called Van Zoren Pipe Organ Company. Well, he had those guys come down and fix that organ up really great in Mahea. So I think that he's carried that authority over to our church, and he has helped us to get this nice little organ that we have over here.

Some of you may remember the one we had prior to this. This is a great advance over that one. But this is called a theater organ, and it's not really a church organ. And so my dad has come across a situation where he's found a church that has, this is a Rogers organ, they have a Rogers organ that's a church organ.

It's called a classic organ as opposed to a theater organ. And we have an opportunity to make practically an even trade because they want one like this. And really the classical organ is more fit for church.

It does a lot of better things to make it not sound so bassy. Sometimes this one gets a little bassy and muddled up in the bass. Well, a classical church organ, the bass has, I don't know, clear voice where you can hear it like someone's singing.

And sometimes that really helps the congregational singing and so forth. So it's a blessing that we have that. And my dad has just carried through with that. We haven't had any church meetings. We haven't voted on it.

But you're not going to have to pay anything for it. So I guess that's okay. But I just wanted to let you know what's going on there in case some of you see people coming in and out looking at this. It will be a better sounding organ than this.

This one is if you can believe that because I think this one is great. But it'll be a little more clear and a little bit better sounding instrument. So that's what that's all about in case some of you were wondering.

But that's been my dad's hobby through the years. And then of course for a while he actually got into the business of it. And it's a thrill to him to be able to do this for our church. And a lot of us don't understand the ins and outs of organs and pipe organs and different things.

And it doesn't mean as much to us as it does to him. But he'll get it done right and you'll be pleased with the sound. It doesn't have any pipes by the way. So don't be worried about that. But it will sound exactly like a pipe organ.

Okay. We may have to install one speaker right back there behind Jason so it'll keep him awake most Sundays. It'll probably be right back in that corner. And Paul can click one switch and it'll blow a trumpet.

Right when he wants it to happen. Turn with me if you would to 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 16. And I have felt led of the Lord in the last weeks. I knew that I was coming to an end of a study that we had been involved in.

That I had been involved in and needed to go to the next thing the Lord wanted us to do. And I felt impressed for many many weeks that what he would have us to do is take a look at what I call systematic theology and to take a doctrinal look at the whole Bible.

And I told a couple of my friends this week in a full well minute that the Lord could easily come back before we finish this study. Because it's just a way of preaching through the Bible. And I remember there was a couple of times when Dr. Criswell up at First Baptist Dallas preached through the Bible literally.

Starting in Genesis and went through Revelation. I don't remember how many years it took him to do it. But his church grew enormously during those times spiritually. And so this is just another way of preaching through the Bible.

Instead of starting in Genesis and going through the books, we're going to preach through the whole Bible from a doctrinal point of view. The great doctrines of the Bible and what they mean to us. And we'll try where we can to take a practical application.

In other words, why did God reveal this truth to us? Why did he give this to us? What is his purpose in our lives for giving us this information? If you really stop and think about it, most of what we know about God, you wouldn't know if you didn't have that book sitting in your lap this morning.

Oh, you could know he was there if you looked around and you just saw the trees and the sun and the clouds and the water and birds flying. Even the insects flying around like I saw one earlier today. I hope he stays lit somewhere.

If I see y 'all kind of going like this, I'll know. I know he's right behind me. But you know, you can know God's there, but you can't know God personally without the word of God and the Holy Spirit enlightening it for us.

And so we're going to take a systematic theological venture through the entire Bible. And maybe it may just take us on out of here if the Lord comes back soon. That'd be nice. Way to go, wouldn't it? But we'll see.

So this morning I just want to give you an introduction to it and get into a little bit of it. Let's look at 2 Timothy 3 .16 and follow along with me. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, so that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

If you take verse 17, if you could have that, if you could have what is given in verse 17, then that's all you need. And the Bible says in verse 16 that what God has given us in order to have that is this book.

This is a miraculous book and one of the things we'll study in systematic theology is the Bible itself. In fact, that's where we begin our study. So I'd like to first, though, give you some introduction to a study of theology.

Rationalism and Human Reason as the Measure of Truth

Let me give you some of the existing attitudes towards theology in the world today. Now I've got an outline I'm going to pass out, or I'll just put them up on the altar when we're through and you can come by and get one this morning.

There should be enough, one for each family anyway. And the first part of this message is in that so you don't have to take notes, you can just listen. But existing attitudes toward theology in fact, here they are right here.

Feel free to have one of those. I'm going to try to keep those going throughout this study so you can have a little outline to take home at the end of each message. The first attitude not in importance, but the first one we'll talk about attitudes towards theology is called rationalism.

There are two kinds of rationalism, extreme rationalism and moderate rationalism. You don't want to be either one of them. But extreme rationalism is a person who believes that there is no divine revelation whatsoever.

You would call that person an atheist or an agnostic. He's a person who just doesn't believe God has communicated with man or in extreme cases it's a person who doesn't even believe there is a God, which I'm not sure there really is a person touches that, but there are those who say that outwardly.

And so that's a person who does not believe there has ever been any divine revelation, any spiritual truth that's been given in a miraculous way to man. The moderate rationalist is a person and to me this person is more dangerous perhaps because he's not as easy to spot.

But he is a person who accepts some parts of the Bible, but only those parts which human reason approves of. For example, if you don't believe that it's reasonable that a God of love would create a hell and that people would go there for eternity, then you leave that part of the Bible out.

You just take some scissors and you clip it out and you say that can't be really true. But this part over here that says for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that I like and that makes sense to me so I'll leave that in.

So you use human reason to pick and choose what part of the Bible is true. That's the moderate. Now when you hear that in theological circles today, for example in the Southern Baptist world we're not a Southern Baptist church, but I grew up a Southern Baptist so I think I can speak until I was 24 years old, or actually 26 years old, that's what I was.

So I remember a lot about what was going on, but there's a big battle in the Southern Baptist circles among what they call conservatives and moderates, or some people call them fundamentalists and moderates.

They like to call them fundamentalists because then you picture the Ayatollah Khomeini and some crazy religious fanatic and really the fundamentalists are the ones who believe like we do they believe the Bible is God's word.

But the moderates, you see that's a word that sounds good to the ear, but remember that a moderate is a person who believes that he can choose which part of the Bible is real and which part he doesn't have to listen to.

Mysticism, False Revelation, and the Faith Once Delivered

The second existing attitude toward theology is called mysticism, and I want you to give me some real attention on this point because this is not just history, this is something that is probably the foremost in religious circles in the world today.

Mysticism, there are two kinds of mysticism. The first is called false mysticism and the second is genuine mysticism, and we'll discuss those a little bit. Let's talk about false mysticism for a moment.

Let me give you a quote about what mysticism is from Lewis Barry Schaeffer's book on systematic theology. He says, these are people that by self-effacement and devotion to God, they believe that individuals may attain to immediate, direct, and conscious realization of God and thus to all truth in Him.

Now let me just put that in common language. A person who is into false mysticism is a person that believes that God speaks to him in a special way, in a way that he does not speak to anyone else, and in a way that he has not even revealed in the Word of God yet.

This is a person who gets new revelation, and he wants to share that with all of us. And this would be a mystic. It is a form of false Christianity that's been around for a long time. In fact, every great world religion other than genuine biblical Christianity is a mystic type religion that was formed by usually one man or woman who believed that they were a mystic and believed they had special information that none of the rest of us had, and they created an entire religion out of it.

Persons such as Buddha or Muhammad. But you can bring it down really closer to home. People like David Koresh. Any of you guys from Waco? You wouldn't admit it anymore if you were, would you? David Koresh of the Branch Davidians.

He was a mystic. But let me bring it even closer to home. You've heard of the Quakers that came over to this country, and we think of them in a very positive light. The truth is they were mystics. They were called the Friends or the Quakers.

And they believed that God did two things, that he gave us his word but then he also continued to reveal himself through mystics who were given extra biblical revelations so that they could know more and more about God.

So they were in fact false. Others through time who were mystics that are kind of famous. Francis de Sales. Some of you may have heard of Thomas Akempis. Madame Guyon. Some I've heard preachers quote her before.

Archbishop Fenelon. Montanus who was in the second century. And then Tertullian who came along a little bit later. People like this believed that God revealed himself to people. And usually a part of this is that they would have to be involved in self effacement which means they beat themselves, they cut themselves, they got off and became a monk.

They totally separated themselves from anything that's happy or good or anything in this world, any people that would be friends. They totally withdraw and become alone with God. Believing that if they would do that, God would then give them special revelation of himself that no other people could have.

And that's a real sign to look for in people. People who are what I call hyper spiritual. They've got the tone, they've got the whole thing. They walk around like they're spiritual. They want to look spiritual.

They want to act spiritual. They want you to know that they have all kinds of discernment about God that you could never have and they want to help you. Watch those people because it's not just these great false religions of the world.

It's not just the cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses that's a mystical religion or the Mormons, that's a mystical religion. It's not just those people that have this problem. It also includes any form, listen to this, I'm going to quote Schaeffer again because I think he puts it so perfectly.

It includes any form of spiritual life teachings which impose upon the Christian a duty of self-crucifixion in place of recognition of the fact that self was and has already been crucified in Christ.

Do you see the subtle difference? So when you see people who are beating up on themselves, and you'll see this, listen, we've had them in our church many times. I'm not going to say right now whether I believe we have some people like that or not, but there are always some people that lean this direction even in a little church like ours.

May some of you sitting here right here today, this may help you an awful lot to hear what the Lord has to say about these things this morning because you might lean that direction. I've leaned this direction before.

All of us, I think, kind of go back and forth on this pendulum of, well, do I need to be beating up on myself because, well for instance, when Paul says that he beats down the flesh, does that mean I'm supposed to just be hard on myself and crucify myself every day so that I can be closer to God and He'll reveal Himself to me more?

Let me say this, God never reveals Himself or does anything to us on the basis of what we do. He doesn't do it by works, He does it by grace. He does not depend on us. He does not need us to come crawling up some steps on our knees or to walk across glass or to walk across embers to prove to Him anything before He'll just say, okay, now since you did that I'll reveal myself to you.

He's never operated that way. That is a false religion, it's a false form of theology called mysticism and it nearly always involves this self-crucifixion whereby works and by you see, it's so subtle you can miss it.

To you or to me, false crucifixion may be that it means, well, you know, I think this week that I'll just get in my car and go visit five people, five elderly people, maybe widows that just, it'll really help them and I'm just going to do that for the Lord and in the back of your mind there's a subtle voice saying, yeah, if you do that, He'll love you more and He'll reveal Himself to you more.

That's false. It does not work that way. Now I understand there are times when the Holy Spirit would lead you to go visit some people but it's so subtle, the difference of the motive behind why we do it and if the motive behind it is to be more spiritual, we just missed the boat.

Never think that you're going to go do anything to be more spiritual or closer to God. It does not work that way. He always works from the inside out, not from the outside in. It never draws God closer, there He went.

He's going, I wish He'd gone out there and messed with y 'all but not me. Stay up in that light or something. Who's got some raid? Or breath freshener spray, something I can hit Him with. Now y 'all don't even think about that, don't look at it anymore, okay?

Don't even let it go in your mind. Well, anyway, there are always people who feel like that they can strive to do something for God and it makes God. Did he just hit my head? Let's see. Tell you what, get Nathan to come sit right here with a book and when he lands on that table you slap him.

Might have to, I noticed he's awful energetic. Not Nathan but the bug. Let me give you a verse. Turn to Jude chapter 3. I wish you would give us a verse this morning. This is such an important thing, this false mysticism.

Do you know that it goes into the fastest growing religion in America today which I call the charismatic movement. Now not all charismatics are mystics. We tend, as Baptists, every group tends to look at the other group and look at the very worst things they have and say the whole group's that way.

I've learned here in the last day or two that that's not true. No, I've learned in the last few years that's not true. However, there are mystics among the charismatics and many of the books that you would find at the Christian bookstore written by people like Kenneth Copeland and different people like this, these men are mystics.

Who's the guy that is a foreign looking guy that dresses so sharp and he loses people and heals them? What's the guy? Benny Hinn. He's a mystic. If you ever want to get some good tapes on that, Dr. Rocky Freeman had some great tapes on some of these guys and I'm sure Pat could find them for you that literally goes in and takes quotes off of their tapes that they send out to their believers and followers and he puts those quotes on there and then gives scripture and shows where they're off.

The problem is mysticism. They really, and the charismatic, even some of the Pentecostals, some of the folks that there are even groups today that believe they're still apostles. Any group that believes they're still apostles, you got to watch them because what they do is they're giving them permission to be a mystic.

That's exactly what they're doing. They have a closer touch with God than anybody else and even goes beyond the revelation of the word of God and that is a false mysticism. Now let me talk to you about true mysticism and let's look at this Jude verse 3.

Follow along with me. It says, Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith.

Now I want you to look at that phrase the faith and I want you to realize that that's not just talking about getting saved by faith. That's talking about the faith which is the entire broad theological arena of true biblical Christianity.

That's the faith. The faith that Jesus gave us. The faith that the apostle Paul taught. The faith that all of the apostles taught. The true biblical Christian religion, I hate to even call it a religion, but the whole system of belief of the true biblical Christianity that's what is carried in this little two word phrase, the faith.

And he says that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. Now this little phrase once delivered means, first of all it's past tense. It means by the time Jude was penned, which was about close to 70 AD, most of the other books of the New Testament were already written besides the book of Revelation.

He's saying that the faith has already been delivered. Now think about that a minute. He didn't say which God is in the process of delivering. He said contend for the faith which was already and has been delivered once.

And we may look at the words in this a little later in the study. But it's been delivered unto the saints. And so true, what is true mysticism then? True mysticism is enlightenment by the Holy Spirit of the Scriptures.

So all of us should be in a way a mystic, but not a false mystic. We should understand that we don't just have a book with ink in it. That's what this was to you before you got saved. It was a book with ink in it.

Oh you revered it. I mean I used to remember when I was lost I thought well I'm going to read it once. So that if I meet God in the gates I can say I read your book and he'd let me in. That was my system of salvation before God revealed himself to me and really saved me.

That's what I used to think. And I tried it. I tried to read it two or three times all the way up into early college years. I got to about Leviticus and gave up. Man this doesn't mean anything to me. It was just ink on the pages.

But the fact is if you're born again this morning and you open this book it comes alive because the Holy Spirit quickens it right there in your hand and in your heart and in your mind and he enlightens the written word so that you can learn spiritual truth from it and that is true mysticism.

All of us should have that. If we don't have it then we're another false religion. We're just an old dead legalistic group of people. There's no life in us. So you see the fine line there and you have to keep your heart right and you have to stay in the scriptures lest we cross the line into false mysticism and think God's revealed something to us that no one else has.

Now you might learn a truth from a scripture that you've never seen before but that doesn't mean somebody 50 years ago didn't see it. It's probably written in a book somewhere. If you find an old commentary on that verse it probably says exactly what you think you just saw.

That it was new. But it was new to you. That's okay. As long as it's not a private interpretation which means you just made it mean something that it doesn't mean. So mysticism. Rationalism is one attitude toward theology.

Mysticism is another. A third one is called Romanism which has to do with Roman Catholicism and their doctrines where they believe that God is still revealing himself through the Pope which is false of course.

A fourth one we would call Orthodox Protestantism which is an existing attitude toward theology. It really comes pretty close to being right. As Baptists we don't consider ourselves to be Protestants but a lot of what they've done.

A lot of their studies and a lot of their theologians we revere highly because they were close to God. Walked with God and it helped in many ways to form a systematic theology. A systematic study of the whole Bible.

But the Orthodox position is this. Let me just give you a few points. Number one they believe the Bible is infallible. Number two now this is what they believed in the beginning. Today you got people running around and preaching in churches all over this country and Protestant churches that don't believe they're actually rationalists and they're moderates.

They believe the part of the Bible they want to believe and they preach what they think they should preach and they leave the rest off. You've got that everywhere. Baptists do it. Everybody does it. I mean if you've got guys among the Baptist camps who don't want to believe God is sovereign.

They don't want to believe in election then they'll just cut that out. What does that mean? That means they are rationalists since it doesn't make sense to their common sense they remove it from the Bible you'll never hear them speak about it.

Don't ever get involved with that. You need to be in a church where the whole Bible is preached. I mean it's all true. We may not can put it all together in a box because you can't put God in a box but we should preach the whole Bible.

So orthodox Protestantism originally they believed the Bible was infallible. That's why you can go back as recently as even 75 years ago and you can find a Methodist church and a Baptist church in a little town having a revival together with one man preaching this year it's the Methodist and next year it's the Baptist and it was fine.

Why? Because in that day 75 years ago at least everyone believed the Bible was infallible. Now most of the Baptists don't believe that. And there are very few Methodists left that believe it. If they do they have gray hair.

Secondly the orthodox Protestantism is they believe that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice. Now the Baptists were very strong on that position. And third they believe that human reason must be subject to the scriptures and not vice versa.

And fourth they believe there is no inner light and they use that phrase because in that day the Quakers believed in an inner light and this was a part of their false mysticism. So the Protestants have never believed that there was a quote inner light or added revelation ever given beyond what is contained in the Bible.

And fifth the Protestant position is that no authority relative to forming truth has ever been committed to the church or to men beyond the New Testament writers. So when the Apostles died we had the whole book.

We had the whole Bible. And that's what Protestants have always believed. Baptists believe the same thing. Now I'm going to list the great divisions of theology. And this will give a little outline of where we're headed.

And you can see how this could take quite some time. First is bibliology which is the study of the Bible itself. How to approach the Bible as a theologian. The second area of theology is called theology proper.

And what that means is it is the study of God not even the study of God's works but the study of His person only. The study of God. We call that theology proper because theology means the study of God.

But it's come to take on many more areas that involve other things in the Bible. So theology proper is literally the study of God. The Father Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit the Trinity and so forth. The third great area is called angelology.

It's a little bit hard to say. Just say angel and then sayology after it. Angelology. Alright let's all say that three times real fast. Ready? And that is the study of angels both fallen angels which would be the demons and Satan and the angels the good angels.

The fourth branch of theology is called anthropology which is the study of man which would also bring in the study of the total depravity of man and sin coming into the world and so forth. The fifth is called soteriology which means the study of salvation.

It literally studies the plan of salvation through the Bible. The sixth is called ecclesiology which is the study of how God says a church ought to be. That'll be interesting when we get to that. How a church ought to be.

And that's called ecclesiology. The seventh is called eschatology which we might just say that's the end times. And a literal theological meaning of eschatology is we would study anything that was predictive at the time it was written.

But we're not going to study it that way. We're going to study it from the point of view of what's predictive from our viewpoint right now. So we're not going to include in this study all the prophecies of the Old Testament that have already been fulfilled in the first advent.

We're going to study the ones about the second coming and the rapture and those types of things. The eighth great section is called Christology which is the study of Jesus Christ himself. The God man.

How can he be both God and man? And that's a very interesting study. Important study. And the ninth is called pneumatology which is the study of the Holy Spirit. And then after that a summary. So that's where we're headed.

And we probably won't get all that done before lunch today. Let me end the introduction with this quote. That gives you a little introduction of where we're headed with our theological studies. I want to give you a quote by a theologian named John Dick.

And he said this. To know this mighty being as far as he may be known is the noblest aim of the human understanding. To love him the most worthy exercise of our affections and to serve him the most honorable and delightful purpose to which we can devote our time and talents.

Isn't that beautiful? So we all need to be theologians. Now I want to go into the first great area just a little bit and I promise I'll stop when I see you start passing out. The first great section of theology is bibliology.

And that's where we're going to be. And we're going to take, each of these sections could take many, many Sundays. Bibliology is literally the study of the Bible. By way of introduction to this section, let me give you a couple of points.

The Bible as God-Breathed Revelation

First of all, the Bible must be studied as the very word of God. If you're ever fortunate enough to cross the path of a lost sheep and be able to give him the gospel, he or she the gospel, and they get saved before your eyes.

And now you have a new baby to disciple. God then gives you the responsibility to disciple that new Christian. The very first thing you teach that Christian is how to approach this book. That's where you start.

And the way you approach this book as the very word of God. This is not something men wrote. Men penned it, but they didn't author it. God is the author of this book. And so they must understand that it is the very word of God.

It surpasses all other books in authority, in antiquity, in literary value, and in popularity. Never been a book sold as many copies as the Bible. Secondly, we must understand that every Scripture is God-breathed.

I want to take you back to 2 Timothy 3 .16. It says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. And let's look at this word inspiration in the Greek language. It's a very significant and important word.

The word is theopneustos. It consists of two little words. The word theo, which means God, and the second word neustos, which means breathed. So when it says all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, it means all Scripture is breathed by God.

It is God-breathed. And that's how a new Christian, and all of us of course understand this, but a brand new Christian has got to grasp this or he'll learn nothing from the Scriptures. Or he'll pick and choose what he wants to learn from the Scriptures.

But if he understands it as God breathed and therefore it's given to us for a purpose and we have to have it, it makes a big difference in how he progresses and grows. The omnipotent, omniscient God caused the message to be formed as the precise reproduction of His Word.

You see, the Bible says it's an eternal book. It's always existed in the heavenlies in eternity past. And God gave it down to man through time through His prophets and through Jesus Christ and the apostles.

And even though He used the instrumentality of men to pin it, it came out to be in the exact form that it already existed in the heavenlies. Isn't that amazing? It's kind of like the opposite effect of the tabernacle being a picture of the true things in the heavenlies.

Well, the Bible is a copy of God's true Word. It is divine in origin. It is perfect in form. It is a supernatural book. It is not such a book that man would write if he could nor is it a book that he could write if he should.

He wouldn't write it if he could because he wouldn't want us to know how sinful man is. There's no way that if David wrote the Psalms that he would have written the parts in there about he and Bathsheba.

Do you understand what I'm saying? He would not have revealed that to us and that's how we know that David was merely a penman. God was the author. So it is not a book that man would write if he could because he wouldn't want us to know about himself.

Secondly, it's not a book that he could write if he would. Even if man wanted to, he couldn't do it because he doesn't know anything beyond his own experience. And so we can look at some things about this supernatural book that prove it.

One is that it is the word of God. It is not the word of man. When we read Jude or when we read any book that Paul penned or we read the book of John, it is not a book that John wrote. It is a book that John penned.

God is the author of it because in the book of John of all books, what a wonderful example to use for this. There are things written that John couldn't possibly have comprehended. Do you think that when the Apostle Paul went out in that desert for three years and God said something along the lines of, I have chosen you before the foundation of the world, that Paul could have understood how God could do that?

He didn't understand that. Do you think when God began to reveal himself as the Father and as coming to this earth in the form of Jesus Christ, a man who was all of the fullness of the Godhead bodily or in a body, that the writers could understand what they were even writing?

They didn't even know what they were writing. They just knew God said write it. Do you think that when John was out there on the Isle of Patmos writing the book of Revelation and he was seeing perhaps nuclear warfare and thermonuclear blasts and cruise missiles and Heinz helicopters, and those words were not in the vocabulary of man because those things hadn't been invented yet.

He didn't even have words to call them. So he calls them like a flying locust or something. He tries to put words in his mind there because God is telling him to write it and he doesn't even have the words to write it with.

He didn't understand all that stuff. It is God's word. Secondly, the monotheism of the Bible is outstanding. When you realize that in the ancient world nearly every other religion, in fact every other religion, believed in many, many gods like the Greek gods, the Roman gods, and so forth.

So it stands alone in that sense of being the monotheistic book. When you look at the information given to us about the creation in the Bible, there's no way that a man could have written that not having been there.