Philosophies Of God (part 3) - Selected Scriptures

Bethlehem Bible Church

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We continue this morning with our investigation of what

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I've called the philosophies of God, and by that I mean the philosophies that arise out of a proper view of God, that philosophy in the sense of worldview, which everyone has, that if you do not have a proper view of your

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Creator, nothing else lines up like it's supposed to line up. And so we've looked so far at the theory of being, questions like why are we here, why are we here, where are we going, what purpose do

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I have in life, we've looked at the question of morals, how do I behave towards each other, and also now we're going to look at epistemology, which is just a jawbreaker word that means the theory of knowledge, how do we know something, we say we know this, we know that, how do we know that, what is our grounds for knowledge, and the extension of the same question is how can we be certain of what we know, how do you know that the world around you is real.

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There are philosophies in this world, primarily Eastern philosophies in this world, that say that everything is an illusion, like the children's nursery rhyme, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream, there are people that really believe that, how do you know that what is here is really here, we're going to look at that, and I would offer to you the idea that we hear a lot these days about the generation gap, the generation gap is primarily a knowledge gap, it's primarily a different way of looking at knowledge that those that are the baby boom generation largely have, and so we've also talked about how we are surrounded by what

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Schaefer calls the particulars, everything that you see is a particular, that's a particular, these chairs are particulars, you are particulars, all these little particulars, but we require, we desperately crave and need universals that give the particulars meaning, and we've searched for those, and as an example, we use particulars all the time, and we use universals all the time, for example, if we're up here having a discussion, and I say

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I want to refer to apples as a type of fruit,

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I say the word apple, I don't stand up here and list off all of the several dozens or couple hundred,

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I don't know how many different types of apples there are, I just say the word apples, and that's a universal for all apples, all kinds of apples at the time, so we use this in our language, these are not ideas, you may not have put them in these terms before, but they're not things that are foreign to us, and so as we go through life, we search for universals, because they give meaning to the particulars, any of you that took physics either in high school or college, you are acquainted with the work of James Clerk Maxwell, who was a

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Christian by the way, Maxwell worked out a series of equations that unified electricity and magnetism, he showed the relationships between the two, and ever since then, the holy grail if you will of physics has been to find the unified field theory, men such as Albert Einstein worked on this, this is the kind of thought that they have, and they're looking for the unified field theory or the theory of everything, that would somehow a set of equations that would relate all physical phenomena in the world, they haven't found it yet, if you ever do find it, you get the

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Nobel Prize, I guarantee you, but that's the movement from the particulars to the universals, is the core substance of how we actually know something, how do we know this is a chair, well there's a universal called chairs, and all chairs fit into that, and there's a universal called mankind, and every one of you fit into that universal, every one of you are particular but you fit into that universal, and that's how we define something, the universal has to cover everything of that category, so that if you are part of mankind, if you're a man or a woman, you fit under the universal of what we call mankind, and another animal of a different kind is not a man, and that's how we know that, because he doesn't come under the universal that we have defined as man, and so we're looking for ultimate universals, as the philosopher

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Sartre put it, he said, any finite point is meaningless without an infinite reference point to tie it to, and as I said earlier,

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Sartre missed a lot of stuff, but that's one of the things that he got right, proving that a stop clock is right twice a day, so every now and then human thought intersects the truth, and that's one of the cases where it did, you require an infinite reference point, and as a little bit of rehearsal and going back and review this morning, as we have shown

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God, the creator God, what we have called the personal infinite

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God, becomes the universal infinite reference point for everything in the universe, and if we get rid of that, if we deny that he's there, if we act as if he is not there, then we have kicked out the foundation from all the rest of human activity, we have lost our reference point, we have no point to tie to anymore if we do that, so back to the movement from particulars to the universals, this is the core substance, this is the core substance of how we actually know something, it's the foundation for morals, we must have a universal that covers the particulars if we're to know what is right and what is wrong, a statistical average won't do, what has happened in modern society so much is we have replaced the idea that there are fixed absolute standards of right and wrong, we have replaced that with the idea that it's just a statistical average, we go out and we poll enough people, we're very big on polls now, we go out and we poll enough people, we average the data, and now we know what society likes and society doesn't like, and we have defined that whatever society happens to like at this moment in time is right, and that's right now and it's probably not going to be right in a year or 10 years or whenever, it's going to change, but that's the way we try to do business, except you can't do business that way, and the same thing fits into knowledge in general, we must have universals to cover the particulars if we're to know anything, if we're to know anything, as I said all the particulars in a given category of whatever we want to call it, whether we call it man, animals, fruit, you name it, that universal has to cover all the particulars, that's how we know what something is, it fits under this universal, it doesn't fit under that one, and so that raises the issue then, if we have to have universals, and men are constantly searching for universals, if we deny the existence of the universal, that is

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God, if we deny that, we immediately turn around and begin to look for universals somewhere else, because we have to have them, we can't live without them, and so what do we use them for, where do we get these statistical averages, we take polls today, we can do that, well the

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Greek philosophers, Plato for example, came up with the concept of the ideal, that you could imagine an ideal whatever it was, that was perfect, as an example, you could imagine an ideal chair, let's say we're going to have a universal category, we're going to call it chairs, and everything we can sit on fits into that universal, and we can imagine an ideal chair, that would be the highest thing that any chair could aspire to be, the trouble is, since man is thinking these things up, they're inadequate, they're finite, men are finite, we are inadequate, we are unsuited to come up with the infinite universal, the

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Greeks had the idea, I said everything is now a statistical average, well the Greeks thought the same thing, they called it basically the will of society, but that proved to be inadequate, because men are selfish, aren't they?

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And so then they said, well okay, then we'll have this thing we'll call the gods, and we'll invent gods, and they'll be our universals, the trouble is, the gods of Greek mythology, or Roman mythology, or Norse mythology, or whatever you want, all they are, they're just like human beings, except they're more powerful, they're super men, but they're still men, they still have all the jealousies, the little petty ways of behaving, except that when

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Thor throws a tantrum, look out, so that's inadequate as well, so the early philosophers, they understood the problem, but they couldn't come up with the answer, they couldn't come up with the answer, and so we're going to look for a little bit this morning, at the problem, the epistemological problem, that's a jawbreaker, basically it's the struggle between nature and grace, there are two things, we call them nature and grace, if you will, grace goes on the top, nature goes on the bottom, imagine a line between the two, and grace covers, includes

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God, the heavens, the heavenly things, the unseen, and it's influence over us, man's soul, all of these things come under grace, grace provides the universals, grace provides the universals, then you have nature, nature covers the created, what is created, it's the earth and earthly things, the visible, man, physical man, what man and his nature do on earth, man's physical body, man's desires, nature provides the particulars, so there we have it, grace and nature, and there's a struggle between those two, there's a tension between those two, in really early society,

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Byzantine thought, Eastern thought, there was a total emphasis on the heavenly, the earthly was bad, this is where you got the idea that, the spiritual is good, the earthly is bad, the soul is good, the body is bad, that kind of idea came out of this, and if you look at art, for example, it comes out of that period, you will see that the artist did not paint things as they were, they weren't real things, they were symbols, everything was symbolic, for example, if you were trying to paint, even in the early

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Christian era, if you were trying to paint, you didn't paint the

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Virgin Mary, you painted a symbol of the Virgin Mary, she wasn't a real person in these

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Byzantine pictures, or the apostles, or Jesus, or any of that, this was all symbolic, well, along comes a guy named

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Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Aquinas, he had the concept of a unity between nature and grace, that the soul was not more important than the body, that both were important, that the body was not inherently evil, in fact, the way he put it, is that all of God's creation is important, because God created it, the very fact that God created something, means that it is important in his economy, and this was a good change, some good things came out of this, you began to see effects in the world of art, and literature, and music, as pictures at this time began to become of real people, not little symbols, but Aquinas also had an error,

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Aquinas viewed things, he viewed first of all that the will of man was fallen, but that his intellect was not, he had an incomplete and erroneous view of the fall, so that he saw man's intellect as being autonomous, and as we will see, but I'll give you the last line on the last page right now, so that if we all go to heaven, you'll have gotten the end of the line, before the class is over, said, nothing, nothing can be autonomous from God, all of man's problems come out of his attempts, to stake out something, some area of his life that is autonomous from God, that's the bottom line, but this was

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Aquinas error, he failed to see that man's intellect was fallen too, he saw man's intellect as being autonomous, so while Aquinas had some good things to say, and made some positive contributions, his thought also gave rise to the idea of natural theology, a natural theology that was somehow independent of scripture, and this influenced all of the arts, particularly painting and literature, and led to an overemphasis on nature, because what happens when you exclude

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God, is that inevitably nature gobbles up grace, that's what happens, as soon as you take away

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God, nature gobbles up grace, it's inevitable, it always happens, and the particulars become autonomous, you lose your reference point, you lose your reference point, and it means the loss of universals in all areas, we see it first in the area of morals, that's where it's most obvious, but it affects all areas of human existence, that you lose the universals, you lose the point of reference, and so this was an inevitable drift, we started down towards modern man and cynicism at that time, and Leonardo da

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Vinci, the great Leonardo realized where this was going, even though he was a renaissance man, he was not a

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Christian that we know of, he was certainly a renaissance thinker, he saw clearly where this was going to go,

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Leonardo da Vinci was a genius, in case you didn't catch that, he saw ahead of his time where this was going, that if you begin with yourself, you will wind up as being simply part of a machine, that man cannot start within himself, and come up with a satisfactory universal, and he saw that, that what would happen is that everything would wind up being impersonal, and if everything is impersonal, there's no meaning to anything, and that man is dead, that man is dead in terms of meaning, nothing has meaning, of course, lest we praise these guys too much,

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I would point out again that Solomon, wrote all this down, 3500 years before Leonardo, in the book of Ecclesiastes, everything is vapor, is what

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Solomon had to say, and Solomon was absolutely right, that if he didn't express it in these terms, but he said, without God, nothing has any meaning, ultimately, he said,

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I've tried it all, nothing has any meaning, without God, and so, all of this leads to, the rise, for example, of what

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Schaeffer calls, the modern, modern, modern science, because science, science arose, because the early scientists, believed in a universe created by a reasonable

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God, which could be investigated by reason, many of the early scientists, the men who founded the scientific method, were in fact themselves

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Christians, but even the ones that were not, recognized this, as recently as the 1930s and 1940s, men like Einstein, and Oppenheimer, and another physicist by the name of Whitehead, all of these men, none of whom were

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Christians, they all recognized, that you need the Christian God, for science to even be possible, so it's interesting, these early men believed, that the universe was created by a reasonable

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God, and that you could investigate it by reason, and they presupposed, a uniformity of natural causes, in an open system, say that again, uniformity of natural causes, in an open system, what does that mean?

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that means, that I see the universe, as being created by a

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God of reason, it runs according to laws, that he has set down, that's the universality of natural causes, these causes came from a reasonable

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God, but the system is open, which means that God, can still affect it, and to some extent, man can affect it, man can affect his environment, in certain ways, just as God can come in from the outside, and affect his creation, because he created it, and he is over it, and therefore he can change it, as he sees fit, and as it is necessary, now that has been replaced, in modern times, by uniformity of natural causes, in a closed system, that's the point of view, of modern science, that's also the point of view, of modern society, is that everything is deterministic, this is truly, the clock's been wound up, and it's running, and there's nothing you can do to change it, now we can't answer the questions, about where did it come from, and what started it, we have a little trouble with that, but we see this, modern science, and modern man, if you will, sees the world, as being this big machine, that's running, don't know where it came from, don't know where it's going, but we know that it's a closed system, it's just a continuous loop, there's no way to get out of the loop, and we're just here, we're just going along, and we're the products, of an impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, and we're going to just disappear, and go into nothingness, and we die, but in the meantime, you all have a wonderful life, you know, ludicrous isn't it, but that is what society, is running about, right now, and why is this important for you to know this, why are we talking about this, in Sunday school class, it's because this is the world you work in, this is the world you exist in, you have to understand, that that's where, that's the environment that you're in, you know, that's where you are, and so, this idea of the completely closed to modification, everything is deterministic idea, and then, so they got to have a universal somewhere, so they cooked up an idea called positivism, and that's a theory of knowledge, that assumes that, you know with total objectivity, even though that's been proven over and over again, to be false, because the observer always affects what is observed, that has been shown repeatedly, over and over and over again, there is no such thing as a totally detached observer, the very fact that you're observing changes things, but as time goes on, we got to Rousseau in France, and Rousseau had total emphasis on nature, total emphasis on nature, he went from grace in nature to nature and freedom, the idea that man was to have no restraints of any kind, that there were to be no universals of any kind, and when you did that, you lost your ability to differentiate between what's real and what's not real, and you can take

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Rousseau, and all of his thinking, move it ahead to 1960, and you have the hippie generation, exactly, you know, you looked inside your head for reality, you know, and you take some sort of a control substance, to help you find this reality, you know, well, why did they do that?

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Always remember, things do not happen in a vacuum, there's a reason for everything, and so, what made these young people, go off into these directions, of taking drugs, and what have you, this constant search, and yes, we know, it's because man has fallen, and because they have rejected

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God, but within that overarching idea, what made them do that?

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They were searching for reality, they're searching for reality, because they have lost their ability to know what's real, they have destroyed the reference point, and if you have no reference point, it's just like, yeah,

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Bruce, exactly, what

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Bruce said, you know, is that the baby boom generation, we had things that our parents didn't have, by and large,

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Tom Brokaw, you know, referred to the generation that fought World War II, as the greatest generation, and he might absolutely be right, because the thing about that generation, was they were all products of the

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Great Depression, but they still, they had spiritual roots,

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I'm not saying they were all Christians, but they had spiritual roots, they had some idea that there was

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God there, you know, and they acted on that, when you get to the baby boom generation, you have this generation, that we started out in affluence, we started, the poorest of us, was in affluence, you know, and then, here we go, we're no longer going to church, we no longer have these spiritual roots, we're not acting as if God were there, whether we believed it or not, and the whole thing falls apart, we've lost our reference point, so we're doing all these things, some folks went off into materialism, stuff and things, other folks rejected every bit of that, you know,

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I'm not going to have anything, but it all wound up at the same point, this dehumanizing point, that we all wound up at, outside of the grace of God, and so, what's changing here, as we go through all of this area, we talked about Rousseau, touched on that, the way we think, is changing, the way men think is changing, now some names that you have probably heard, even if you don't know who they were, but you probably heard of Kant, and Hegel, and Kierkegaard, and some of those, these are the existential thinkers, that really drove us off this road, and off into never never land, because before those guys came along, most people thought in antithetical terms, they thought in terms of antithesis, which goes this way, this is classical logic, if A is true, non

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A is not true, we think in those terms, that's the antithetical thought, if A is true, not

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A is not true, and it's bipolar, it just goes this, that,

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A is A, and A is not non A, and that seems extremely basic, and it is extremely basic, but all of classical logic is based on that idea, and that's the way people thought, if something was true, the opposite was false, then along comes

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Hegel, and these other guys, and they come up with the idea, that no, no, no, it's not either or, it's a triangle, it's thesis, which is an idea,

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I make a proposition, that's a thesis, and then somebody says, no, no, no, that's not right, here's the antithesis to that, and then what do we do, we come out of that, we have synthesis, where we come up with a new idea, and now we loop back around to the beginning again, because the synthesis becomes the thesis, and now we're back in a loop, we're back in this closed loop idea, and so now, we don't know anything, nothing is fixed, nothing is fixed, we have changed the entire theory of knowing, nothing is certain, nothing is ever certain, as long as we're going around this triangle, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, thesis, you're never sure of anything, when you're doing that, what we have done, is we have destroyed the hope, even the hope of finding meaning, and see up to this point, even the

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Renaissance thinkers, who thought that they could start with man, and come up with a theory of everything, they thought they could really do it, they hadn't done it yet, and they hadn't gotten there, but they had the hope that, given enough time, we're going to lick this thing, and we're going to get it done, and what has happened now, is that now you have destroyed the hope, of ever finding out meaning to anything, and so you went from a generation, where everybody was an optimist, to now you're a generation, where everybody's a pessimist, and that leads to despair, and that's where we are today, that's how we got here, the particulars have no meaning, specifically man has no meaning, in effect man is dead, and so we have replaced knowledge, with a set of statistical averages, and man has now become a machine, totally determined, now we look at modern society, and we look at for example, some decisions that come out of the courts, and we wonder how could any reasonable person, possibly make this decision, well here is your answer, we have abandoned the idea, that we can know anything, and man is now completely deterministic, society is completely deterministic, you and everything about you, is just determined by the machine, and so naturally, you cannot be held responsible, for anything that happens to you, or for anything you do, because the machine, has simply dictated that this will happen, you see where this whole idea comes from, and so if you want to know, how we got where we are today, this is the path we went down, and frankly that's one of the reasons, why

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I admire Schaeffer so much, is that unlike anybody else I have ever read, he ties the whole thing together, and shows you how we got to where we are, and goes through the effects, and the amazing thing about him of course, is that he died in 1984, he did most of his writing in the 60s and 70s, and he was looking way far ahead, but now we're beginning to see, just how right he was, when he looked at this, and so back to this, man's a machine, man's totally determined, the spiritual world is a fantasy, it doesn't exist, man is isolated from God, man is isolated from others, man is isolated from himself, and does that not describe modern society, we're isolated, when

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God has created us, to have a vertical relationship, first and foremost with him, we are also designed to have a horizontal relationship, with our fellow human beings, the first thing in creation, the first time in creation, in the creation narrative, where God says something is not good, is that Adam doesn't have a mate suitable for him, he's surrounded by all these other living creatures, but none of them are like Adam, and why is it not suitable, because Adam is made to communicate, he's made to communicate to his own kind, and so God says,

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I'll create Eve, because man is made to have this horizontal relationship, as well as the vertical relationship, and yet we have destroyed the basis for both of those, which brings us to the

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Christian answer, the Christian answer, remember the Renaissance thought is, we can start with man, and if we start with man, we'll come up with some way to bind nature and grace together, haven't been able to do it, but we have that idea, that's what we can do,

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Reformation thought, with Reformation thought, we start with God, and if we start with God, the problem disappears, it's not that the

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Reformation thinkers were so smart, that they looked at this problem, and they came up with a solution, when you start with God, there is no problem, the problem is simply not there, how do you deal with grace and nature, it's simply not there, they start with God, and therefore they start with grace, they start there, and so we come back to the issue with propositional revelation, is there anyone there to speak, and the

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Reformation answer was, yes, yes, there is someone there to speak,

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God is there, and he has spoken to us, he has spoken to us propositionally about himself, he has spoken to us propositionally about history, he has spoken to us propositionally about the cosmos, about the universe around us, there has been a propositional verbalized revelation, about both nature and grace, there is unity, and more importantly there is a universal, that all the particulars fit into, we truly have a universal, and so is this position defendable, is it possible, is the biblical position, the

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Reformation position, is it possible, well, it depends on your presupposition, everybody starts with one of two presuppositions, first presupposition, which is the humanist one, as we said earlier, is that we propose, we presuppose uniformity of natural causes, in a closed system, in a closed system, the system is closed, now, revelation by its very definition, comes from outside, but if I have presupposed the closed system, there is no outside, so the whole idea of revelation is ludicrous, there is no place for it, so we have this totally dehumanizing effect, that we are now just all cogs in the machine, but the thing of it is, if you hold this presupposition, as most do in our modern society, you are denying what man knows about man, you have to deny what you know about yourself, to hold this position, but we do it all the time, first of all, if you happen to be a scientist or an engineer, you're denying the very proposition, that led to your field of study in the first place, the idea that there's a reasonable

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God up there, you get to the point, for example, modern secular anthropology, secular anthropology, how do they differentiate between what is man and what is non -man, we used to do it on the basis of whether or not you made tools, but then we came up with other animals that make tools, and so we use what

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I'm doing right now, speech, men speak, men verbalize, the other animals do not, the other animals communicate, they don't speak, and so within the secular world, that's the differentiator now, but nobody knows why, why does man speak, and nobody else, none of the other animals do,

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I don't know why, they're clueless as to why, we know why, it's because God created us to speak, so the humanist proposition fails to explain man, the humanist proposition also fails to explain the universe, where did it come from, and how does it run so magnificently well, the humanist proposition also fails to stand the test in the area of epistemology, how do we know what we know, it's unsatisfactory, the whole thing is unsatisfactory, because it fails to answer the fundamental questions, the questions of being, the questions of morals, the questions of epistemology, and yet we cling to it, desperately, against all reason, we cling to it, now why would we do that, well the

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Bible says, we will not have this man to rule over us, that's the bottom line, we will not have a creator

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God to rule over us, we want to be autonomous, that's where we go, now by contrast the

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Christian point of view, we propose uniformity of natural causes, but in an open system, and therefore we postulate that God is there, it's like Genesis 1 .1,

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you notice the Bible, nowhere in the Bible do they make arguments for the existence of God, they simply postulate, in the beginning

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God created the heavens and the earth, nowhere does it say anything about where God came from, his origins, any of that, it's just God, God created, everything else came from this creator

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God, so the God is there, we also postulate that God created man in his image, because the

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Bible tells us he did, let us make man in our image, he made them male and female, he made man as a verbalizing creature, he designed him to communicate, and why, why would he do that?

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Because God himself, the infinite personal God communicates, the three members of the

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Godhead were communicating among themselves in eternity past, communication has always existed, it pre -exists all of creation, man loves, even men who deny that love exists, they still love, why do they do that?

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Because God loves and we're made in his image, and there was love prior to creation, you have this

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Trinitarian God who is communicating, they are loving each other, all of this is going on before creation, and so it is not surprising that God communicates with the creatures that he has made in his image, and he communicates with us in the way that he designed us to communicate, he communicates with us propositionally, and in ancient times he communicated directly with various individuals by dreams and revelations and what have you, but it was still propositional revelation, now today we have it written down in the scripture, but it's still propositional revelation, that's the way he communicates, and this is not surprising because that's the way he is, and it is also not surprising for us to realize that when

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God communicates truth, it's true truth, it's reality, what

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God says is, is, even if there is evidence to the contrary, what

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God says is, really is, and so there is this correlation between the subject, what is to be known, and the object, the knower, us, that the natural man simply does not have, because we are starting from a fixed reference point, and the interesting thing is that the

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Christian's position is exactly in line with human experience, we have to live in the universe that God made, we must live and exist in the universe that God made, he built this world, he built this world, he made us, and he made us to live in the world that he had created, he formulated the atmosphere in a certain way, certain mixture of gases, and guess what, his creatures breathe that atmosphere, not some other atmosphere, he made us to fit in the world that he designed, and we know that, even when we deny it, we still know that, we have to live, the most atheistic or agnostic scientist ever created, would not try to go into space without carrying an oxygen supply with him, because he has to live in the universe that God created, even if he doesn't realize what he's doing, he says,

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I have to align myself with the universe that exists, I must live where God created me to be, and so, as I pointed out, men love, even men that deny that love exists, men still love, men have moral motions, what

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Schaefer calls moral motions, we tend to act in moral ways to each other, unless we're completely antisocial, without even realizing most of the time why we're doing that, but we act that way because that's an echo of the fact that we are created in God's image, and so men act as if there's a connection between the internal, between the spiritual and the external of the physical world, even if they deny the basis for that connection, we still act that way, and that's the thing about the

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Christian system, the Judeo -Christian system alone tells why that correlation exists, why does the correlation exist?

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Because we are created in God's image, we are specific creations of his, and we are created in his image, the rest of creation is not, the rest of the animal world is not created in God's image, we are, and that's why we do the things we do, imperfectly to be sure, but we still do them, and so Christians know, this goes all the way back to, now back to epistemology, how do we know something?

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We know something is there because God made it to be there, and it's true, it's an objective reality, it's not a vision, it's not an idea in our head, it's really there, so that when we go outside, we look at the tree, we know the tree is there, and we also know that if we try to walk through the tree, we're going to bunk our nose, because we can't do that, it's really there, it's not an illusion, and so we know that the observed, that which we observe and the observer, us, are both created by the same

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God, and that he made us all to go together, he made us fit, and we're not surprised by this, we're not surprised by this, we have a foundation for objective reality, so we don't look inside our heads, assisted, chemically assisted or not, for reality, we know that there's an objective reality, because God made it, and we have a basis for true knowledge, we don't have a basis for exhaustive knowledge, because we're finite creatures, we cannot know

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God, for example, exhaustively, for one thing, God is infinite, and you cannot exhaust the infinite, but we can know him truly, he has told us true knowledge about himself, he can't tell us everything about himself, because we can't handle it, but what he has told us is true, and we can have confidence in that, we can live in that world, we can live in the world

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God has made, because we fit it, we fit the world that is really there, God has created the universe,

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God has created me, and put me in his universe, God has correlated the categories of my mind, my mental processes to fit the universe that he created, and it's not surprising, it's not surprising that everything fits together, and God has provided me what

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I need to know, in his word, he teaches me in two ways, both ways are suited to man, he teaches me by didactic statements, and verbalizations, by propositional truth, and only men learn that way, you don't go and reason with your dog, if some of you are snickering,

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I think you probably tried, and Fido just sit there and looks at you, and then he goes off, and does exactly what he was going to do in the first place, you have to train an animal, but you can reason, men reason with each other, and God says the same thing in his word, doesn't he?

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Come now and let us what? Reason together, I'm a reasonable

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God, he says, and he also shows us the world that he has made, he says, see the universe around you, see the universe around you, this is me talking, so God reveals himself, and so the

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Christian mentality, the Christian mentality is the right mentality, it's not the best mentality, it's the right mentality, it's not one choice out of many, it's the only choice that works, that's right, and so God, and notice also that God basically works within the confines of the universe that he has made, most of what

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God does, he does in accordance with his universe, now there are miracles to be sure, but that's why we call the miracles, they're outside the normal realm of things, but most of the time

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God's working within the universe that he designed and that he built, the

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Christian world has objective reality, everything fits, now by contrast the natural man has lost any objective, any objective basis that he might have had for certainty of knowledge, and as an ultimate, where is this going to go?

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I don't know, but one thing I've seen, you can already see it, is that for example science, we've talked about science quite a bit, science is being manipulated, you see science being politicized and manipulated, you can only do this when you lose objective reality, and so that gets us back to the final issue, this is the bottom line, we're about done, half

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God said, Satan's great lie, half God said, every human problem arises from man's attempt to stake out something autonomous from God, as soon as anything is made autonomous from God, nature eats up grace, nothing is to be autonomous from God, nothing, not knowledge, not meaning, not values, not morals, not the external world, and unlike the natural man, the

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Christian has a starting point, the Christian has a starting point, but you have an advantage, even when you are dealing with non -Christians, because when you're dealing with a non -Christian, you know who that person is, he doesn't, but you know, because he is a human being created in God's image, even if he has denied that, that is still true, and you have a starting point, you know where to start from him, with him, while he is just often, who knows, never never land, the other big advantage that you have is that the

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Christian knows the difference between fantasy and reality, and so, all the creativity that flows out of the

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Christian experience, art, music, literature, all of those things, the fantasy world, and there's a place for the fantasy world, don't get me wrong, the fantasy world is not threatening to you, because you know the difference between what's real and what's not, you know, you're not like the little child who thinks there's somebody under the bed, you know, you know there's nobody under there, because you have a basis for objective reality, truth,

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God created you, God created you, you're made in his image, let's pray, our heavenly father, we admit that we must stand in awe, that you have created us, you have created us in your image, you have overshadowed us, you have guided us through our lives, you sent your son to die in our place

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Lord, while we were rebelling against you, and you have brought us to yourself, and you have given us the true foundation, for us to function in the world that you have created, we thank you and praise you for that Lord, we pray your blessing upon the service this morning, your blessing upon pastor

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Mike, as he opens the word to us, prepare our hearts to receive your message this morning, in Jesus name, amen.