March 20, 2017 Show with Craig Biehl on “God the Reason: How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania,.

Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet Earth listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on this 20th day of March 2017.

I'm so delighted to have back on the program today Dr. Craig Beal, who'll be with us for the full two hours of the broadcast. Dr. Beal is the founder of Pilgrims Rock, a ministry which develops courses and other material to boost the believer's joy, comfort, and faith in Christ and scripture, and to nurture in believers and their children a God honoring an intellectually defensible worldview that can survive and thrive in the face of sophisticated attacks of unbelief, an instructor for the Unbreakable Faith course at the Lancaster Bible College Center for Urban Theological Studies in Philadelphia.

Today we are discussing Dr. Beal's book, God the Reason, How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. Craig Beal. Chris, it's a privilege to be here, thanks for having me back on.

And let me give our listeners our email address right away, it is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the good old USA.

And for our listeners who were not with us last time, if you could please describe Pilgrim's.

Rock. Pilgrim's Rock is about 15 years of teaching a particular apologetics course, and seeing the need for a very specific apologetic that zeroes in on the presuppositions of unbelief as well as belief.

And so, we decided to launch Pilgrim's Rock as a means of disseminating this particular approach. It's a Vantillian approach, Shefferian approach, with a lot of Jonathan Edwards thrown in, to children and parents, well actually high schoolers and parents, and then we broadened it for churches as well as, of course, I do teach it as an adjunct at different colleges at different times.

So that was the impetus for that, just to-it's a very particular method, but we think it's very, very powerful, and we simplified it so that we feel it can be taken out of the hallowed halls of academia and brought into the living rooms of anybody.

And that's our desiring.

Goal. And if you could, I'd like you to share with our listeners the prayer request that you had.

Pressing upon your heart today. Yes, thank you, Chris. Just before we came on the program, I received a call from a dear friend, and his wife had a knee replacement last week, devolved into a MRSA infection.

That's a, you know, a staph infection that's resistant to antibiotics, and so they put a direct link into an artery by the heart in order to pump in the antibiotics. And so we would just pray. Her name is Ellen, it's different for Sam and Ellen.

Yes, and I will continue to pray after the program is over as well, as I did pray with you privately before the show, and will continue to do so. And by the way, in your bio, you teach the Unbreakable Faith course at the Lancaster Bible College Center for Urban Theological Studies in Philadelphia.

Is that the organization that my old friend Carl Ellis was affiliated with? I believe so, that was... Okay. And this book that you've written that we are going to be discussing today, God the Reason How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith, that should be encouraging to everyone listening, because if everybody listening out there is anything like me, our faith very often seems anything but unbreakable.

We can have very fragile moments and dark trials, but let me read some of the commendations that this book has received from guests who have been on the Iron Sharpens Iron radio program. Dr. Peter Lilback, president of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, says, Craig Beal's God the Reason is a remarkable book.

It presents theology proper, the knowledge of God, in all of its transcendent importance and breadth. It does so in a way that is accessible, clear, and spiritually invigorating. If you are thirsting for a deeper and more personal knowledge of the Lord of the universe, drink deeply of this study.

The divine perfection celebrated here will bless your life, stir your reason, and ground your faith on an unmovable foundation. And Dr. Joel Beakey, president of Puritan Reform Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who has been on this program many times, he says, this thought-provoking work shows the emptiness of atheism from an angle not often taken.

Without indulging in technical terminology or obscure philosophical arguments, Craig Beal starts with the attributes of God revealed in scripture, builds a rational worldview upon them, and demonstrates convincingly that without such a God, life makes no sense at all.

And then we have someone who I haven't interviewed, who I would love to interview, Dr. John Frame, professor of Reform Theological Seminary. He says, Craig Beal's God the Reason is a very thorough, presuppositional, apologetic, arguing God's existence and his necessity for all reasoning, thinking, meaning, and therefore living.

The book is a continuous, orderly defense of the biblical worldview. Its arguments are clear and cogent. I hope it gains many readers, Christian and non-Christian alike. And then finally, Dr. Richard Gaffin, who I interviewed years ago on this program, right before a cruise he was speaking on.

He is professor emeritus at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And he says, this volume explores in a compelling manner how the truth of the being and primary attributes or perfections of God is essential for fundamental issues of faith and life.

Written for a wide audience, it will be read with considerable profit in our increasingly secularized times. Quite profound and powerful commendations that you've received. Well, let's start the program with a deeper explanation of the truth that God created and.

God’s Eternal Nature and the Dependence of All Things on Him

Sustains everything. Well, in the book, through each attribute, and then for each attribute, we expound on the apologetic implications. So it's not just a study of the attributes, it's a study of the implications or apologetics for our faith of the attribute.

And so God is eternal. God is uncreated. God has no beginning. And as an implication of that, and therefore, the universe depends on God for its existence for everything on an ongoing basis. So nothing could exist if God didn't exist, if God didn't order and sustain it every moment of every day.

And that includes what I'm called natural laws, but not natural laws per se. This is every quark and atom and molecule in the universe every moment of every day. So there's really no such thing as a natural law that exists in and of itself, organizing the universe.

And so because God is created and sustains everything, we depend on God for everything. We depend on him for life. We depend on him for true authority. It's something we don't always think about. And we depend upon him, of course, in addition, because he created all things, everything.

So God needs absolutely nothing. He's perfect, apart from his creation. And he didn't need to create us anything, but he did. And because he did, we owe him. So in addition to that, of course, of everything at every moment of every day, then everything in the universe displays his divine excellence.

So you could say that all things bear his thing, everything, and therefore excuse. Deep down, any unbeliever, we sharing the gospel, pointing to the infinite excellence of God, deep down in their soul and righteousness.

So those are some of the worldview apologetic implications of the fact that God created and sustains everything. Go from there through all of the attributes and each of them have significant implications of their own.

And as we go on, I just want to say this, probably going to be true because a lot of the implications of an attribute are implications of many attributes, because God, of course, undivided, divided them up as to what implication might be the most.

We have a listener in New York City, Tony, who asks, I don't know how.

Familiar your guest is with Gordon Clark, but could he, in summary form, give a comparison and contrast between Dr. Gordon H. Clark and Cornelius Van Till in regard to their apologetic?

Well, I knew somebody was going to ask that.

Are you a prophet?

And I can't believe it's the first question. Now, we need to ask about the book. But anyways, let me just say this, there's a chapter in Greg Bonson's book, Presuppositional Apologetics, it's the book that was published after his death.

He has a chapter in there where he goes through the arguments that ensued between Van Till and Gordon Clark. It's a complicated discussion. Maybe there was insufficient definition on both sides at times, and sometimes the language used may have been a little bit unclear on Gordon Clark, at least Clark in his early days.

They seem to diverge, matured in his thinking, or changed in his thinking. I really, I would be statements and get into the nuances of it, and has several sections in Van Till's Apologetic on this. And in that book, Presuppositional Apologetics, he has an entire chapter devoted to it.

And of course, there's no lack of arguments from both sides all further than this. And one accusation was that Van Till denied that, as God knows truth, or as Van Till would say, we can, and as Schaefer would say, we can know truth truly, but we can't know it in the way that God knows it, i .e. as an independent, sovereign, infinite God who knows everything the way God knows it, because Van Till was careful to try and maintain the truth.

There's aspects of that that I really don't want to share, it's a kind of debate, facted debate. And so I just, I just...

That's quite all right. And Tony, I don't know what date it will be, but God willing, I will be having an interview within the next several months, hopefully, with a Reformed Baptist who has written a book defending the Clarkian side of the, of apologetics.

So, and I will give more details when that interview gets closer to coming to fruition. And by the way, Tony, you have actually won a free copy of the book, God, the Reason, How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith, compliments of Carpenter Sun Publishing and our guest, Dr. Craig Beal.

And this will be shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CV for Cumberland Valley, bbs4biblebookservice .com. So keep an eye open in the mail for that. Not to belabor that question, but it is interesting how the Clarkian supporters who have contacted me, I don't want to broad brush my brethren who have that apologetic ideology, but the hostility that I have received from some of them is unusual, whereas the Vantillian supporters don't seem to have that hostility towards the other side.

And I mean that typically, I don't mean, obviously there could be.

Vantillians who are rabid anti-Clarkian individuals, but... We're just likable, lovable. You know, there's caged Clarkians and there's caged Vantillians. I think it's important for both sides to understand that.

It changed over time, but there's a lot of in-house debate where they were really... The debate is probably not commensurate with any level of differences between the two, far beyond what it's... You know, Vantill can slice things rather thinly and he can even what goes after Schaeffer and others for their inconsistencies, very...

And well, if you could.

Get into further depth on how the universe depends on God for everything. He spoke everything into.

Existence by his word, used that kind of language, because he didn't really speak the laws into existence. He spoke matter, energy into existence, and even time, because God transcends time. But the organization and the sustaining of the universe is an ongoing act.

So the minute God quits and what he created are separate, and God are separate. But that anything and everything depends upon his ongoing genius and power. So everything in the universe is dependent upon God for everything, and that goes all the way to epistemology when we get into God's creatures.

He's the source and sustainer of all truth. He knows everything perfectly. It hasn't even happened or haven't even existed. He knows anything and everything that's positive remarks about the nature of God and his universe when they don't have revelation to support it.

The nature of miracles, because when we think of miracles, oftentimes we think of God intervening into the universe. God's just doing something a little bit different in a particular place in the universe every moment of every day.

He's upholding it, ordering neutron in the Jonah in a whale for three plagues upon Egypt, or part the Red Sea, or bring manna from heaven, or you name it. If God isn't involved, what's the difficulty of any of God who's spoken orders of every day?

Evidence of God, you know, do a miracle, God. I need to see something supernatural. Supernatural, natural distinction. Everything in a sense is divine. Not divine in that it's equal or part of God. It's God doing something in the universe.

So somebody to look at a sunset, a sunrise, the stars in the sky, the birth of a baby, their eyes, ears, and senses, anything and everything in the universe, to see all that organized and upheld perfectly every day by God, and then ask, hey, you know, show me some proof of God by a miracle.

It's absurd, because they're drowning in a sea of evidence for God's existence, and they're asking for additional evidence when a sunrise and a sunset is just as big, if we can use the terminology, a miracle is God making the sun stand still in the sky.

So everything depends upon God at every moment of every day, has implications for a great many things that are sometimes attempted to be turned upon Christians, contradict, or when really, for all things, it's one of the part from God, order, and chance produces nothing of what we see in this universe from whatever we look at in a test tube to anything and everything that we can see examined through science in this universe is quite impossible apart from an infinite God of infinite genius,.

A little bit long. Well, I want you to be as long as you need to be, because we do have a two-hour program, and I want you to obviously be as detailed as we possibly can get. And I'm going to ask a question from one of our listeners before we go to the break, and you can answer it when we return from the break.

This will give you an opportunity to mull the question over, because he basically wants three arguments from you. Casey, who's originally from the Philippines, but now lives in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Casey asks, what are the top three arguments you hear from atheists, and how can you use presuppositional apologetics, and then evidence in apologetics, to refute those arguments?

And if you could mull that over while we go to a station break, and if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail dot com.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is Dr. Craig Beal, founder of Pilgrims Rock, a ministry which develops courses and other material to boost the believer's joy, comfort, and faith in Christ and Scripture, and to nurture in believers and their children a God-honoring, intellectually defensible worldview that can survive and thrive in the face of sophisticated attacks of unbelief.

And he's an instructor for the Unbreakable Faith course at the Lancaster Bible College Center for Urban Theological Studies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We are discussing his book, God the Reason, How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Before the break, we asked you, Dr. Beal, we posed to you the question from Casey in Kannapolis, North Carolina.

What are the top three arguments you hear from atheists, and how can you use presuppositional apologetics and then evidence in apologetics to refute those.

Arguments? And so we do in God the Reason as we start from in the beginning God and we work our way to infinite excellence and the unbeliever's worldview as rooted in and founded a blind faith, and unsupportable, and inconsistent with the nature of reality as we know it.

So in its approach to see any and every argument as founded upon these ultimate faith assumptions. So what we try not to do is make it a, okay, here's the argument, here's the answer, here's the argument, here's the answer.

What we do is we first try to establish, here's the issue, here's the approach, and it can be applied to anything. So I would highly recommend you pick up the book and maybe even the box, which the nature of all argumentation, all thinking, and knowledge.

So that is sort of an introductory caveat. That's what we try to do. Now, in answer to your question more specifically, it's an argument as it is a picture, reality, or logic, or anything, and it's the reason in science.

So the argument is you guys are believing in something that you can't prove scientifically, whereas we are scientific and reasonable, and we're looking at the universe that way and therefore drawing conclusions for this one.

But what you do is you show things apart from an ultimate authority. So if you were to ask the unbeliever, well, where is the nature of God, what he can do, what he can't do? And that's not by showing that everybody uses religion by faith in an ultimate authority.

It's not an issue of what to do, how to interpret the fact. No, we may both be looking at the same fact, but different object of faith and of redemption and part of his all-encompassing plan that everything in the universe is part of.

Ultimately, all you have to ask them is a couple questions, how do you know, how do you know? And basically, they are trusting their own personal perspective and interpretation of that fact. Therefore, their faith is in themselves, whereas we are placing our faith in the God who created it, sustains it, knows everything about it.

So it's not an issue of two people disagreeing and having, we're both reasonable and objective people. No, we both interpret reality according to a set of precepts. The unbeliever interpreting that fact according to their assumption that God doesn't exist and that they can know things apart from God and that their opinion and their perspective ultimately to the question or we're examining God in Scripture.

So the first thing that needs to be pointed out, it's a difference of authorities and not a difference of opinion. Secondly, we need to point out that their object of faith is their own personal opinion, ours is Scripture.

Thirdly, we need to point out that exclude them from being an ultimate authority and interpreter. This is in the box, if they don't know, if an unbeliever, and I don't know either, I don't know what's in my neighbor's garage unless I go inside and look at it.

The unbeliever can't know what's in their neighbor's garage without looking inside it. They are limited. They don't know, given their human limitations, how can they know how they can't do this? Some with Bent Hill called brute or they're just unrelated.

One of the many questions that philosophers haven't been able to answer apart from God until this day. So what we do is we show them that their object of faith can't deliver on the goods. Their object of faith cannot answer the question they claim to answer.

And it's not an issue of they have science and reason, it's an issue of their trusting in their interpretation, and their interpretation is by a limited person who doesn't know what's in their neighbor's garage, whereas we're trusting in the interpretation of the guy who created it.

Know that everything in the universe, time and chance, is inadequate for anything in the universe. So in that particular instance, it's asking what's in their neighbor's garage is trustworthy. Can we trust personal opinion?

I don't mean to deny God, they're asking me to trust in their view, and they don't know what's in my neighbor's garage. I mean, it's always boils down to an issue of faith. Third question, whose ultimate object of faith is reasonable and justified?

A God of infinite excellence who created everything, everything bears his fingerprints, all design, you know, implies a designer, etc. They don't know a whole lot. They're limited is adequate to explain.

So this idea that they use fans and we operate according to faith, according to faith, and answer no ultimate questions, science can only explain beyond that science, no science, because science relies upon as it did yesterday.

And that's in time and chance produces of infinite power. Can he do miracles? And they'll say, yeah, but he doesn't exist. So then the question becomes, well, what do you have to know to know that this answer is, they'd have to know everything about everything in the universe and beyond to know that this God does not exist.

So for them to make the statement, God doesn't exist, they're assuming omniscience. That's the underlying presupposition. The underlying assumption is they can know things that they can't possibly know.

Well, that's irrational. So if an infinite God can do miracles, and if it requires knowledge of everything in the universe and beyond to know that this infinite God doesn't exist, which is impossible for them to know, then they have no basis whatsoever to say that Jonah and a whale is irrational or unreasonable.

In a universe created and sustained by an infinite God, that's all compared to God, an atom and molecule. And so the miracles of scripture one, they throw that at us all the time. You guys believe in an arc.

How unscientific is that? Well, let me, let me just explore that a little bit with you when you be gracious and kind and loving to the unbeliever, but show them that for them to deny the miracles of scripture, they need to have the omniscience of the God they deny, which is in itself is a self-contradictory that they have, that they have to be the God they deny.

So number three would be the problem in the universe and beyond, including God's nature to know that somehow a God who is good is a reason that's beyond our limited understanding. And secondly, now are you telling me good God can exist in the same limited understanding that doesn't know what's in their neighbor's garage?

The ultimate standard of what God can and cannot be, or whether God can and cannot exist. So what they said, if I don't understand it, the believers handling the facilities out further question, and that is this.

Anytime we come to a great mystery, God in the nature of our own human limitations, you admit our human limitations with respect to a great many things, but somehow when it comes to God, we become immediately omniscient.

Well, uniting God is infinite. So what do we need to do as believers when we approach things like the problem of evil or sovereignty and human responsibility or preordination and human responsibility, and you name it, that I lay out in God the reason that I think are very helpful.

Number one is God's ways are perfect in every way and infinitely higher than our ways. So that's Isaiah 55. His ways are higher than our ways as the heavens are above the earth. We have to accept that.

If we're unwilling to accept that, good, and he's revealed to us that he's infinitely powerful, and he's revealed to us that the origin of evil resides in the will of created beings, and beyond that, we don't have a whole, we can't go very much further than that.

Number three, our limited understanding does not constitute the standard of truth of what can or cannot be true with God, or what God can and cannot do in his universe. Our limited understanding cannot determine such things, compromise any revealed attribute of God, or any necessary implication of an attribute of God.

At that point, we're making our own understanding higher than God's revelation, and we're just not allowed to do that. That's irreverent. Number five, the responsibility and guilt of sin are those who sin, including the four ordained acts of sinners, i .e. Acts 2.

And number six, and this is a very important key, that God has remedied evil at infinite cost, redeeming, in the redeeming work of Christ, perfect righteousness, and he's sufficiently revealed as perfect, in that he couldn't save a single soul without maintaining his perfect holiness and righteousness.

He couldn't even do a good act to sinners without maintaining his justice. This God goes the infinite extent of taking infinite wrath on his own soul in order to maintain his justice, to do rightly. And so he has revealed his perfect character sufficiently that we can fully trust his character in the face of mysteries and difficulties, things that we can't reconcile in our finite use of logic, our finite...

Okay, see, that's a great question, and I've gone a little long with the answer, but I think it's needful that we understand that this is not just a quick and easy fix in the beginning God,.

So it's a great question. And in fact, Casey, I think that you should take the recording of the answer from Iron Trump and Zion Radio's website tomorrow, which will be archived there, transcribe the answer, and hand it to Carpenter's Son Publishing for perhaps a booklet to be published with a summary of apologetics to atheists.

So I think that would make an excellent little booklet or track. But we are going to a break right now. In fact, I'm going to read another question for you before the break, brother, that you can answer when we return from the break.

Lou from Sharpsburg, Georgia says, can you give an example of how you put Proverbs 26, 4 -5 into practice? And let me read Proverbs 26, verses 4 -5. Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him.

Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes. Perhaps when we return from the break, you could answer Lou from Sharpsburg, Georgia's question regarding that proverb. If anybody else would like to join us on the air, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. Please give us your first name, city and state, and country of residence if you live outside the USA. And by the way, Casey, you have won a free copy of God, the Reason, How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith.

So keep your eye open for a package in the mail from Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com. CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com. And that should be arriving within a week or two.

And that's compliments of our friends at Carpenter Sun Publishing, compliments of our guest, Dr. Craig Beal, and compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who will be shipping that out to you at no cost to you or to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages with more of Dr. Craig Beal and God, the Reason, How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith. Don't go away. God willing, we will be right back after these messages.

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Upstore Christianity of doing church in a warehouse with all the trappings of a rock concert? Do you long for a more traditional and reverent style of worship? And how about the preaching? Perhaps you've begun to think that in-depth biblical exposition has vanished from Long Island.

Well, there's good news. Wedding River Baptist Church exists to provide believers with a meaningful and reverent worship experience featuring the systematic exposition of God's Word. And this loving congregation looks forward to meeting you.

Call them at 631 -929 -3512 for service times. 631 -929 -3512. Or check out their website at wrbc .us. That's wrbc .us.

731 -929 -3512. Or check out their website at wrbc .us. That's wrbc .us.

Sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year-round Bible conference and retreat center nestled on the Jersey Shore. Harvey Cedars offers a wide range of accommodations to suit groups up to 400. For generations, Christians have enjoyed gathering and growing at Harvey Cedars.