What If We Don't Understand the Bible?

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If there's things that don't make sense to us, and let's face it, there's things in the Bible that we don't understand. What do we do as Christians?

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Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. Lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your path straight.

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That's right. But what do we do? We try and repair that evidence to bring them back to a place where they're the judge over the evidence.

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And Christians don't think that way. Christians know this, but other

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Christians in universities are teaching them something different. Because here's the thing, we send missionaries to people in the deepest, darkest jungles of Africa.

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Why do we do that? If these people really don't know that God exists, we'd be removing their excuse. Sending missionaries would be wicked.

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But we send missionaries because they have sufficient knowledge of God for their condemnation. And we send missionaries to tell them about Jesus Christ, their only way out of the hell that each and every one of us deserve.

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All Christians know this, otherwise witnessing or praying for your family would be wicked, because we'd be removing their excuse.

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Yeah, and what we're not saying with this apologetic is that you don't use reason, and evidence, and logic.

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What we're saying is that you don't pretend neutrality as you do it, and you don't step into the unbeliever's position.

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That sounds familiar, something about a fence, you know, like he's for us, or... Yeah. He's not for us, he's against us.

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That's right, that's right. So, and what we're saying, just fundamentally, just take a single landing zone. You hear us say it a lot in Romans chapter 1.

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That is so descriptive of the position that we hold, and our condition as fallen human beings.

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It says in Romans chapter 1, it says, Listen closely, please, to this.

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Very humbly, I want to suggest this to you. That which is evident about God is, that which is known about God is evident within them, for God has shown it to them.

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God has made it evident to them. Now, when you look at a text like that, you think, wow, that's a, that's a pretty serious indictment upon humans, that they know this

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God. He's made himself evident to them. He's shown himself to them. He's put the knowledge of himself into them.

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And it says that they are actively suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. And then it says that they exchange the glory of the immortal

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God for an image, and they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. And it says, they don't want to know

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God. It says they don't want God in their knowledge. They don't want to know him.

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That's the condition of fallen humanity. So they know the true God, suppress the truth, they switch them, they worship the creature, and it says that they profess to be wise, and they become fools.

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They don't want God in their knowledge. That's the description of mankind according to Scripture.

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Now, question. When you see an approach of apologetic methodology that actually assumes the opposite about the unbeliever, that they just don't know, they just don't have enough evidence, that they're not suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, that maybe they really do want

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God in their knowledge, then you're literally going the inverse direction. That's literally the opposite perspective that Scripture takes of the person in front of you.

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So what's the goal? The aim is in the same text, Romans chapter 1. The gospel is the power of God for salvation.

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And what's the gospel? Well, it's the message that if you pray this prayer, you go to heaven one day. Nope. Nope. Do you go to heaven one day when you trust in Jesus Christ?

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Absolutely, forever and ever, as a gift, apart from any work, ever. It's all his righteousness and his work alone.

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But no, see, inside the gospel call is some truths, like Jesus is

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God, like Jesus is Lord of everything, like Jesus is sitting on his throne and he's ruling and making all enemies under his feet.

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And the gospel is the call to repent of your sin and come and submit to Christ as Savior and Lord.

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You see, that's the very different perspective in terms of apologetic methodology. And I would highly encourage—and I'll let Simon finish the thought here— if you really want to get a grasp on this,

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I would say you need to do this. Go and check out a debate, best debate in history, as far as I'm concerned, between a

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Christian and an atheist. It's Dr. Greg Bonson versus Gordon Stein, 1980s.

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Gordon Stein was a famous atheist and he was not ready. He was not ready! For Dr.

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Bonson, and it's about two and a half hours long or so, and it is— That's because Bonson's always ready. He's always ready.

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That's his book, by the way. So I encourage you to go listen to Dr. Gordon Stein, Dr. Greg Bonson.

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Listen to it 20 times. Seriously. I still get stuff out of it. Oh, yeah. Listen to it 20 times.

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Go ahead. No, I'm—we're saying, because one, the show is going to be— it's like the five -year anniversary and a few months since our debate with Andre.

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And what I said I likened a lot of the response of Andre is that he was also not prepared for this argumentation.

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And it was like with Dr. Stein and Dr. Bonson. When we first listened to it, we didn't know what happened because we'd never heard anything like that before.

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But we knew it was something different. And like I say, I probably listened to it 100 times. Yeah. And I still get stuff out of it.

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Oh, yeah. Dr. Bonson, I mean, he died at the age of 47 from heart ailments. But he was the most brilliant man

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I've ever heard speak. And the interesting thing in the debate with Dr. Stein, he knew Dr. Stein's position better than he did.

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So when he wasn't getting a sufficient refutation of his view, he would help Dr. Stein explain what he was trying to say.

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Yeah. I'd really encourage people to check that out. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm thankful for what

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Apologia does as well because when we started off at this, like I said, you could not find presuppositional.

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I can't even say it. You can't even say the apologetic methodology. But I found Gene Cook's podcast out in California.

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Now you can't swing a dead cat without hitting it. And I think that this has a lot to do with that. And I told you the story

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I shared with you recently. But there's a class clown. He's a missionary that attends the church that I'm going to now.

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And I gave him a copy of How to Answer the Fool. And he'd never heard of me, which I expect. But he handed it to his son, Otto. And Otto looked at the name.

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He says, this sounds familiar. They were missionaries in Ghana a few months before that. And he says, there's a missionary out there,

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Cristiano Morey, from Brazil in Ghana. And what's he watching? Apologia.

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Praise God. And he found How to Answer the Fool. And he told me beautiful witnessing encounters that he had in Ghana based on this presuppositionalism.

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And now he's back. And now he is translating How to Answer the Fool into Portuguese. Oh, yes. So I mean, just the connections and all over the place.

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I was just in church last week. And this fellow, a friend of mine, Hank Reitenbake.

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He's a policeman down there. I thought you were going to say Hanegraaff. No, but he comes up to me. And I want to talk about the stuff

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I do. What do they want to talk about? Jeff Durbin. Oh. No, I'm saying we're just tools.

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I mean, I know atheists love it when we say that. But he just really loves the work. And I really love the influence that you guys are having.

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And I love my association with you guys. Oh, we love it, too. I love the way you say Ghana, by the way. And I hope you move out here. How do you say it?

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Ghana. That's the same. No, you're like Ghana. Ghana. Ghana. How do

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I say about? About. About? No, you got just a little bit. Not a lot. Yeah. All right.

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By the way, speaking of how you say things, I cannot hear the word confidence now without going with faith.

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With faith. But you all know that I got that from Doug Wilson. Yeah. And you were fighting

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Jeff to say it, too. You guys have it in your archive somewhere where one of you gave Doug the phone and playing when

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I said it and Doug is watching and I'm standing over his shoulder. Talk about full circle. You guys have the video somewhere.

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Oh, yeah. That's right. Hey, Dan. Daniel. Dapper Dan. Dapper Dan. All of our boba just arrived.

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Could you bring some of those in? Thanks. I don't want it to melt. Thanks. Sorry, guys. Maybe not the most professional of things, but I don't want my boba to melt.

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You know what boba is? Boba. Anybody watching online right now love boba? We love boba.

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And we found the coolest. We have no connection with them, but the coolest boba place locally in Tempe.

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It's called Kung Fu Tea and they have the most crazy delicious strawberry cream boba.

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It's like little tapioca balls inside. It's amazing. It's disgusting. Somebody just asked if you support

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Reformed Baptist views or adopted more of the Calvinist position. That is the same.

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Hang on a second. That was probably directed at me. No, it was for Jeff. Hey, now that Marcus is gone, you have no presbyterians.

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I know. We need more presby. That's why you're going to move out so we have a presby in the studio constantly. You have to do something about that heat, though.

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Yeah, that's true. Although I love the temperature now. Now you know why people end up being tricked into moving here.

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People always invite people during this time and winter time and they're like, oh, it's the greatest place ever. How could you not want to live here?

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Hi, Daniel. Thank you, sir. I often tell the Bobby McCreary story. Oh, I miss

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Bobby, too. He got the tarot one. I got tarot. Thank you. This is Dapper Dan, y 'all.

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Dapper Dan. You guys know Dan. Terrible. Daniel. Thanks, bud. But Bobby McCreary was evangelizing out in Georgia and he was coming here for the

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Super Bowl and he looked on the news. He said people are dying from the heat. And he thought that was weird. I mean, he lives in Georgia, a hot state.

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And he comes out of here and he's out in the street. He said the first thought that crossed his mind was, I might die. That's my thought.

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That global warming, though. Well, I've been here for over 20 years and that's my thought every summer. Yeah. But people say that about the cold in Canada.

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You just adapt. Yeah. This summer wasn't actually that bad. It was hot. It wasn't.

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No, we didn't have, like, it wasn't treacherous. I don't even know if we hit 120 this year. Yeah.

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One year, I was 122 or 123. It was unbelievable.

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Well, I remember when Marcus first moved out here and you learn stuff that you don't know from other places, but he left a can of pop in his car.

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Or soda. I don't know what you guys say. Thank you. Thank you. Soda. I appreciate it. Soda. Pop. And the thing blew up and it was just all over his car.

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Oh, yeah. You don't know stuff like that. You learn to drive in Arizona without touching anything in your car.

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You can drive 30 miles without ever touching anything. With your mind. Just with your mind. That's why you need the Tesla, right?

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Yeah, that's right. You'd be amazed at what you can do when the wheel is 190 ,000 degrees.

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Yeah. Okay, so what we wanted to do today for today's show is we wanted to play sort of a throwback.

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We're going to go and play an episode that I think, I haven't checked the stats lately, but as far as I know, this is the most listened to episode of Apologia Radio in our history.

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The last time I checked, there was over half a million views of this one episode.

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And the interesting thing is I think it was like a month after the show, there was something like 350 ,000 listens.

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Right. So in a short period of time, it just went pretty crazy. Now, the cool thing about this show is we were downtown at the radio station,

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KPXQ. Cy joined us through Skype, I think. I think I was on the phone. Maybe he was on the phone, yeah.

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And so we're in the radio station. We had a local atheist who was – is he the president of the local atheist society at ASU?

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Yeah, something like that. Something like that. Or vice president. Skeptic society. Something like that, yeah. Something, yeah. So we invited him on the show.

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First hour, we had Cy on, and the show was called – what's the show?

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Answering the Fool. Answering the Fool with Cyton Bruggencate, yeah. You can still find it online. Oh, yeah, yeah. If you Google search

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Cyton Bruggencate, Jeff Durbin, and Andre, you'll see it come up. Answering the Fool with Cyton Bruggencate, Apologia Radio.

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That's the one. So we have Cy on. We first spent an hour talking with Cy, and then we actually had

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Andre in the studio. We talked a bit with Andre. The cool thing that happened, though, was when the official show ended,

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Andre was still on, Cy was still on, and our tech just kept recording. And we continued on with like a 45 -minute discussion,

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I think, afterwards off official radio, and all that's recorded for you, and you actually see some very interesting things happen that last 45 minutes in terms of Andre's admissions, his argumentation.

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He thought the radio show was over. So did I. Yeah. Actually, we all did. I asked you afterwards.

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I didn't. I was over there like – Well, I was there, and the thing that I said after is I said, please tell me that you recorded that.

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And the interesting thing, Andre was really upset that he didn't know it was being recorded. I didn't know either, but I wasn't upset.

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What I said to Andre was you were talking into a microphone in a radio station. Right. But the thing is it was the same with me, and I don't mind.

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Why did he mind? I think because sadly he understands how it went. And sadly, I think we were kind to him, but his worldview did not fare so well, but I think since then he was not so happy with us.

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I don't think it was the fact that we kept recording because that was a given, but I think it was the fact that his worldview did not fare well.

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Andre Saleh. I'll go ahead and play. Something happened to my system here. It crashed, and I pulled it back up, so we'll just try to start it at some point here.

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I have knowledge. So I'm not saying I'm denying it. I'm just asking you to explain it. So you have granted me the possible avenue to certainty there.

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No, no, no, not at all. I'm just asking you to explain it. I'm saying it's impossible, and if you're saying that it's possible, I want you to explain how that's possible.

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Okay. Well, I can't explain how that's possible. What I would like to interject into this conversation is that this, granted, based on my observation, which could very well be flawed,

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I will grant that assumption again, for lack of a better term, into the discussion. I do not have a choice in the matter from what

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I can observe as to whether or not I perceive the natural world in the way that I do.

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Are you certain that you don't have a choice, sir? I admitted that there is an assumption there. However, you do have the choice as to whether or not you will believe in a deity.

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The choice as to whether or not I see light isn't my decision. It happens whether I act upon it or not.

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Are you certain of that, sir? I can tell myself that I don't wish to see it. I can try to block it out and tell myself that the light isn't there, but I don't have any ability to manipulate the reality that I live in in such a way that it's different.

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So why do you do that? Well, I want to say, first of all, that I prefaced this with Andre. I said, look,

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I know that people accuse me of jumping in, but I said, if you make knowledge claims, because we basically exposed the fact that he could not have knowledge, and he admitted that.

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And I said, I don't want to appear like a jerk. I don't want to appear rude, which people often think that's the case. But when they make a knowledge claim,

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I don't want them to ramble on past that. I want to hold the mirror up to them and say, look, you have said that you can have knowledge.

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You admit that, and you make a knowledge claim. And it's not like I'm just jumping in. You'll hear if you listen earlier in the podcast that I said, look,

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I apologize, but if you make a knowledge claim, I'm going to jump in because that's inconsistent with your worldview. So let's make sure everyone hears that clearly.

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When Sai asked the question, are you certain about that? Just know this. It's not a word game.

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It's not just a tactic. It's a genuine challenge to the unbeliever who will grant

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I can't have certainty. No laws of logic are not like a real thing.

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It's just something happening in my brain. There's no meaning or no purpose to life. And then they go on making challenges to the

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Christian God. They make all these claims about knowledge and the world and themselves and even Sai.

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So when Sai challenges and says, are you certain about that? He's pressing on the unbeliever who has already given up knowledge and is now continuing to make knowledge claims.

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And the purpose, why? That's what I want to ask you. Why do that? Why continue to press? Are you trying to accomplish something?

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Well, you have shown this before as well. The analogy is that we're showing them what they're standing on.

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Yes. But the thing is, what we say is that we can't convert people. So we're not giving them the truth so that they'll repent.

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2 Timothy 2, 24 and 25 says, In the hope that God grants them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth.

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So we're not giving them the truth so that they'll repent. We're giving them the truth so that in the hopes that God grants them repentance and they have something to be converted to.

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And we hope that God opens their eyes to the folly of what they're saying. Because people often ask, how many people do you lead to Jesus Christ with this apologetic?

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We say each and every one of them. What they do with Him is up to them. But we show them that without Christ, they can't make sense of anything.

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Very good. It's not just like people have the analogy of the three -legged stool. If you just have Jesus Christ in that fourth leg, then your life will be better.

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They have nothing. And I'm not going to apologize for Jesus Christ and say, you just need Jesus and your life will be a little bit better.

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No, without Him you have nothing. You can't have that sentence that you just spoke to me. But you have to do it in love.