Becoming Better Theologians (part 5) - Theology Proper - Names Of God

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Father, we come here this morning with thankful hearts, knowing that you have given us your word that we might know you.

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And even as we engage in this study about theology, Father, I pray that you would protect us from just the kind of dry thinking that this is some kind of boring subject.

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God, you are the most fascinating subject in all the universe, and I pray that you would use this time to just have us grow to love you more as we know you more.

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In Christ's name we pray, amen. Well, we are talking about theology, and you know,

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I was thinking, this is, this is, and you never want to say this when you start a message, this is really a difficult one.

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And people are just like, oh, great. No, it's difficult because, you know, I had to cut out a bunch of stuff and I'm, and I'm trimming as I go, and I'm just looking at this and I'm going, you know what?

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In some ways this could be a very dry exercise because some of these are just terms.

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It's just a, and it's not a list as you'll see, but some of these are terms that we hear from time to time and we just go,

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I don't even know what that means. Pastor Mike might say something. If we had Phil Johnson here, you would need a glossary, you know, to keep track of all the theological terms.

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And so I think it's helpful to us to, to really grasp what some of these things are and why they're important.

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I can say one word to you and if you understand it, it, it saves two or three minutes of explanation.

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And sometimes when you, if you listen to people like John MacArthur, you know,

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Phil Johnson, Mike Evendroth, sometimes they'll just throw out these words and you just really go, what does that mean?

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So we're in this systematic cult or theology with Culver and he says, well, let's just go to quiz number one as I move this envelope out of the way, true or false, the

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Protestant Reformation began in the 17th century? False is correct.

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And by the way, I'm feeling much better this morning because I have now the authorized version with me at all times.

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Feeling very much happier because I like the notes. All of them, most all of them, 99 .9%,

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but I digress. It started in the 16th century. And I really think it's important to just kind of grapple a little bit with why there was a reformation at all.

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Well, there was a reformation not because Martin Luther didn't like the

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Pope. There was a reformation not because, you know, everybody's got a rebel heart.

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Everyone's a rebel at heart. There was a reformation because the church in Rome had drifted away from the biblical gospel.

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They had corrupted the biblical gospel so that you were able to, for example, allegedly contribute money so that you could spring people out of purgatory.

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And this, it literally became a very works -oriented system rather than a gospel.

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Culver notes here, the godly wisdom of the reformers of the 16th century rejected most of the ultra -refined vocabulary, yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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A lot of these academics, even at this time during the reformation, not the reformers, they gave formal endorsement to the doctrines of grace.

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That is, salvation from start to finish is a free gift. Most of them claimed to follow this doctrine, but many of them didn't.

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Some of them followed legalism. Some of them were sacerdotalists, and these are the terms that we're going to be talking about this morning.

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But they were, basically, many of them said they were disciples of Augustine, but in actuality they were disciples of Pelagius.

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And question number two is, who is Pelagius? Who or what is Pelagius? What did I say?

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Pelagius was, oh, there we go. See, Pelagius was a little more nebulous, a little harder to figure out.

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Pelagius was, A, a large white horse with wings. Anybody want to pick that one?

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That was Pegasus, by the way, in case you're wondering. B, Augustine's best friend in high school, BFF. C, no one important, then what's he doing on the quiz?

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Or D, a heretic who has influenced countless false teachers even today. I'll give you five seconds to think that over.

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Obviously, the correct answer is D, a heretic who has influenced countless false teachers even today.

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You know, many of you know that I have a good friend named Tony Miano, Tony the Lawman, and he and I exchanged a couple of emails this week.

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And somebody actually sent me, without me saying anything, they sent me an email of a video that he did, or actually a video, sorry, that someone else did about him.

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And it's posted on the internet, and I'm going, wow, you know, Tony's like an all -star.

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And why is he an all -star? He's an all -star because this guy's locking and loading on him, you know, decrying this false gospel of Calvinism that Tony goes on street corners and proclaims all over the place.

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He doesn't say, follow Calvin. He says, follow Jesus. But this man said that Tony, here's

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Tony's mistake when he goes out and preaches the gospel. Tony says to the people that he's preaching to,

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I love you. And this guy says, okay, that's good.

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Here's the problem. The problem is Tony says, even though I have a sinful heart,

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I love you. Now why do you think the guy has a problem with that? Is it wrong to say,

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I have a sinful heart, I commit sin? This guy says it is.

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It says, Matthew 5, 48 says, be perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect.

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And therefore, after you are saved, you are perfect. You are forgiven of all the sins you've ever committed in the past and you have the ability to stop sinning.

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So you don't tell people you have a sinful heart because you no longer do. Then why is 1

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John 1, 9 say, if we say that we have no sin, we lie.

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The truth is not in us because we do sin. So this man's big complaint was getting right back to Pelagius.

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What was Pelagius's role in church history besides being the opponent for Augustine?

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He taught that there was no such thing as original sin and that God would not ask you to repent and believe if you did not have the inherent ability capacity to do that.

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Now why is that significant? Well, because the

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Bible teaches the opposite and that's what makes our good friend Pelagius a heretic of the first order. This is a passage that should be very familiar to us.

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Oh, and I just had the first fold in my authorized version. I just, that's just, man,

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I want it to remain pristine, immaculate. I shouldn't use that word. Romans 5, let's look at Romans 5 and verse 12.

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I mean, there are just some passages that as Christians, we should just, our minds should just focus like a laser beam on them.

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We should just have them like on speed dial. You know, everybody, how many of you can even remember, you know, five phone numbers other than your own, you know, these days?

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Because everybody's got everybody on speed dial. I mean, I can remember phone numbers that I called as a kid.

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You know, all my friends and stuff like that because, A, because numbers stick in my head, but B, because, you know, it's just a habit of,

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I know this is shocking, kids, but we had rotary phones, and guess what?

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You only had to dial seven numbers. Was really weird. But some things should just stick in our heads because they're just so vital.

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They're so central to the gospel. And this idea of original sin, you know, it may sound highfalutin, it may sound, you know, kind of seminary -ish, but the truth is, without this basic fact, without an understanding of this fundamental issue of the gospel, you'll go totally off on the wrong track.

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You might wind up like this guy trying to dog my friend Tony. And by the way, my friend Tony is undogable, so don't even try it.

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There. Romans 5. Let's have somebody read verses 12 and 13.

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Go ahead. Yeah. So what do we have here?

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What is Paul writing about without, you know, looking at the top here? Death in Adam, life in Christ.

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You know, the little section top there in the authorized version. What is

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Paul trying to communicate? That you're born in sin, and how does he do that?

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Pam. Okay, the existence of death proves the existence of sin.

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Listen again. Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, who is that one man? Adam.

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And death through sin, and so death spread to all men. And Pam's exactly right.

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Death is the greatest evidence that sin is in the world, because Adam and Eve, without sin, there was no death.

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Death is a punishment. Death is a reality, yes, but it is a punishment. And so he goes on to say, death spread to all men because all sinned.

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Well, Pelagius said, well, wait a minute. That's not fair.

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How is it possible that Adam made a mistake, and somehow we all have to pay the penalty for that?

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That's the pot telling the, you know, well, it's actually the kettle.

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No, it's the muffin telling the baker.

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No, it's the creative thing saying to the creator, you made a mistake.

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I'm sorry. This can't possibly mean what it says, I think it says, because that wouldn't be fair.

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That wouldn't be right. And my own standards won't allow that to be the case. Adam was responsible for what

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Adam did. I'm responsible for what I do. That's Pelagianism.

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The Bible says, Adam fell and all sinned because of him.

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So death spread to all men because all sinned. Not because we all were there and we all made that choice.

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But what? Because Adam was our representative head.

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Let's read verses 15 and following, and I'll figure out how far I want to read as I'm reading.

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But the free gift, talking about salvation, is not like the trespass, the sin.

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For if many died through one man's trespass, again, that original sin as we call it, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man,

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Jesus Christ, abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man's sin.

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For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, death, physical death eventually, but spiritual death as well.

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But the free gift following many trespasses brought justification or the declaration of righteousness.

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Listen to verse 17. For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man,

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Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men.

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For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous.

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Again, here's the idea. We're all represented by Adam. Adam fell.

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We all suffer the consequences of that. We're not in the Garden of Eden. We're born with bodies that physically decay.

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We're born into a world that is physically decaying, that is spiritually infected, as it were.

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We are born spiritually infected, and the only cure for our spiritual infection is the righteousness of the one man, the

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God -man, Jesus Christ. We call this federal headship. Adam was our representative, our federal head, and now in Jesus Christ, he is our federal head, our representative.

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But Pelagius said, again, that Adam's fall only impacted him.

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Some still believe that to this day. There was a strain of Wesley's theology of Methodism that said you can become perfect.

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That's a real problem. Wesley actually believed that you could get to a point where you stopped sinning.

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I don't care how old you are. You know what this reminds me of? I've mentioned this before. I was a

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Mormon, and one of the Articles of Faith of the Mormon Church is that we believe that Adam was responsible for his own transgression and that we are all responsible for our own, and that is full -blown

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Pelagianism. Semi -Pelagian.

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No relation to Pelagius. Not blood relative, anyway.

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It's this idea that we would call, it's commonly called Arminianism, and basically it has the idea that, yes,

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Adam fell. We all suffer the physical consequences of that. We all suffer some spiritual consequences from that, but those consequences aren't so severe that we can't somehow respond, that we can't believe on our own.

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And this is a vital issue in understanding theology, generally speaking.

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Roman Catholic Church taught what about Adam? That he fell.

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That his sin impacted all of us, and that, how do you get rid of original sin in the Catholic Church? Brian Casey.

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Baptism. Great stuff. Just by being sprinklers.

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I mean, if you want to know why some Roman Catholic nurses or whoever are panic -stricken, running around the hospitals baptizing babies, it's because they want to get rid of this original sin.

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They want these babies to be brought back into a state of grace, a state of neutrality towards God in case anything happens to them.

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All right, do we have wooden matches in the back? Okay. She says when the records are open on Judgment Day, your list of sins will be there, but your list of sins will not include

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Adam's original sin. And you know what? That is true. We had a quiz here in the Calvinism class a few weeks ago, and I like to be a little tricky on some of those questions.

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And I said, you know, we are all, how do I put it, like morally responsible for Adam's sin?

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Well, that's not correct. In other words, Pam's right. On Judgment Day, God's not going to go,

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Adam fell, boom, you're guilty. That's not the point. The point is we have a sin nature as a result of that, and we sin on our own.

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It's our own sin that is more than enough to send us to hell. Well, one sin would be enough.

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In fact, just getting back to this movie, this little film, I couldn't even watch all of it because the guy is just so bad.

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In fact, I have to tell you something else. He said, here's a really great page, website, you know, with all this good theology on it.

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And he goes, it's nothing like, you know, those really whacked out sites like monergism.

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And I'm going. So I go there, and it's got pictures of, you know,

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Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Augustine, Charles Finney.

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And I'm like, you know, it's like one of those logic tests that you used to have to take, you know, which one does not belong.

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And you go, Charles Finney does not belong in that group because he denied original sin.

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I don't even know how you put those guys on the same page unless it's like to say, you know, only one of these men is a true teacher.

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You pick them out. I mean, why not have Joseph Smith up there, Muhammad, you know,

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Charles Taze Russell, some other folks, great heroes of the faith. Okay, whatever.

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Anyway, Pelagianism, semi -Pelagianism, this idea that we would have some kind of capacity on our own to choose, and that's what the

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Roman Catholic Church taught, that you have as a result of, you know, baptism, an ability to then choose to believe.

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And this is just a false notion, and we'll get into this in just a second.

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But he mentions here legalism. You know, when we think of legalism, what do we think of?

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Enforcing laws that aren't there, okay? I mean, I tend to think, you know, it gets back to the old fundamentalist idea of you don't cuss, you don't chew, and you don't go with girls who do.

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You know, why don't you? Some people have never heard this, I guess. I don't know. Okay, it's an oldie but a goodie.

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You know, you can't go to, you know, even like if you went and saw Bambi at the movies, you know, shame on you because you're participating in the devil's, you know, workshop.

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I mean, it's that kind of worldview that just says, what, don't touch, don't taste, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

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The Bible doesn't say that. In other words, they're just extra biblical rules.

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But beyond that, what about legalism being, let's just refine that definition to basically salvation by rules.

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If you do this, you're saved. If you don't, you're damned.

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And it really can get excessive. So that would be the ultimate definition of legalism. Let's just, sacerdotalism, number three.

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True or false, sacerdotalism is a style of art like impressionism. If we weren't in Sunday school,

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I bet I could get some of you to say yes. I'm true to that. Sacerdotalism. Yeah, I think that's what that guy did, the

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Sistine Chapel. I think that was sacerdotal. No, that's false.

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It's not a style of art. What is sacerdotalism?

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Okay, salvation through priesthood, good. It's very good. Through sacraments, okay.

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Often has a church -state combination, true. This is how Culver, in his very short definition here, he just says, salvation mediated through sacred ceremonies.

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And usually that would mean through the priesthood. But what are some examples of sacerdotalism? What's that?

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Catholicism, but I mean individual. And we'll get to some non -Catholic sacerdotal issues here in a moment.

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But what are some issues of Catholicism and sacerdotalism? Baptism.

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Communion. Okay. And what do these things supposedly do?

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Infuse righteousness and grace to you, right. And, you know, so the idea being that by doing things, you are made more righteous.

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And some of these things are even, you know, instead of legalism, they are things talked about in the Bible. So they seem like, and they are good things.

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But mediated through sacred ceremonies. You know, what's interesting is, I don't know how many of you know this.

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Some of you will know this. But anybody know why R .C. Sproul Jr., not the father, but Jr.,

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was actually defrocked by his denomination? I don't know if he's back. I mean, he's teaching and stuff like that.

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But he was defrocked by his denomination, not for any kind of moral sin.

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Do you know what his big issue was? Bruce, do you know? He wanted to,

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I think maybe that was part of it. He wanted to baptize babies by immersion, not submersion.

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That would be really, you know, holding them down. Who was it?

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James. Paido communion. Give that man a platinum star.

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That is right. Well, and you know what? If you're going to baptize babies and thus bring them into the covenant, doesn't it make sense to give them the communion too?

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If they're members of the covenant family, shouldn't they be receiving the Lord's table? So, you know, you've got these little babies, and you're jamming the wafer down their throat.

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But it's consistent if you believe that communion is a means of grace, as some do,

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Lutherans, some Presbyterians, if you believe that it is a means of grace. In other words, that God somehow blesses you through the communion, through baptism.

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Now, you know, we could sit here and we could say, well, you know what, I'm blessed by communion, because I take the time then to really focus my life on where I am and try to analyze myself before the

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Lord, and I'm blessed by that. Okay. But that's not the same as saying the physical act of taking the wafer and the wine or the grape juice somehow brings grace to me, grace that is somehow outside of Christ, or, well, they wouldn't argue that it's outside of Christ.

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They would just say that Christ so works in these elements that you get additional grace.

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And I'm like, I don't understand that. Yes. That there is some efficacy in it, that there's some effect.

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And, you know, it depends on exactly the denomination about how much emphasis they will put on baptism and what it does.

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You know, no one would say that it washes away your original sin. No Protestant denomination would say that.

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But they would say that it brings you into the covenant, which made me think I was thinking about this morning. If you're in the new covenant, how do you get out of the new covenant?

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You don't get out of it. It's not like the old covenant. What does the Bible say about the new covenant?

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It's an everlasting covenant. That's a good question.

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You know, she asks what do they do with John 1, 13, where it says it's not of, you know, we're brought into the covenant not by the will, not by what we do, but by, you know, the grace of God kind of thing.

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And what do they do with that? I'm not really sure. Here's what I do know, is that they say that there is, that that brings you into the covenant family.

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You know, maybe you're not even in it. They basically compare it to circumcision and say, look, not all the people who were circumcised in Israel were actual believers in Jews.

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In the same way, not everybody who gets baptized is an actual believer in the new covenant. You just go, okay, so we have kind of a, what is that?

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Sounds like a conditional entrance in the new covenant. And the Bible just doesn't talk about it in that way.

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But sacerdotalism, that's the key issue I wanted to get in there today, just to kind of mention it, that this would be the idea that somehow, you know, baptism, communion, marriage, whatever, you know, these particular ordinances would have some kind of salvific effect, meaning they would bring some kind of grace, some kind of infusion of the grace of God into your life.

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Another term he uses is moralism, which

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I think is the favorite false gospel of Pastor Mike. What is moralism?

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In two words, be good. Salvation by being good.

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Yeah, there's an unrighteous, no, not one, yeah, there's a little problem. Be good.

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Anyway, just a few terms. And he goes on,

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Culver does, to say that, you know, these same people who said that they were agreed with Augustine, and yet they brought in all these, they had all these different streaks running with them, whether it was legalism, sacerdotalism, or moralism.

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They all mixed grace with human merit as necessary for salvation.

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That's what all those isms have together. If it's legalism, set of rules make you good and right before God.

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If it's sacerdotalism, it's doing the right, partaking in the right communion, partaking in the right ceremonies, make you right before God or help you get right with God.

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And then moralism, just being a good person. All mix grace with human merits.

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Reminds me of, you know, the thrust of Mormonism or how it defines grace as grace is.

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In fact, I even put it here. Oh, yeah, number four, true or false. No wonder it made me think of it because I was thinking about it when

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I wrote this quiz. True or false, the grace of God steps in to save you after you've done your best. What's wrong with that?

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You know, you run the race, and you can see the finish line, and you're just not going to make it, and God just kind of, that last 10, 15 yards.

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Okay, I'm running this direction now, last 10 to 15 yards. Well, Steve summarized my problem correctly.

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Because, yes, I'm running as hard as I possibly can towards the finish line. The problem is the finish line is hell.

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And God's grace doesn't carry me the last 10 or 15 yards I need to get over that finish line. It says, oh, whoa, takes me and puts me over here and then enables me to finish the race.

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All of its grace. So number four is false.

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Let's look at number five quickly. True or false, the Reformers were largely academics and did their best work in seminaries.

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They were exceedingly brainy fellows. Martin Luther was, true or false, an intelligent guy?

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True. Did he target,

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I guess would be another way of looking at this, Did Martin Luther target the seminarians, the leaders of the

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Roman Catholic Church? Was that his audience? No. No, certainly he wasn't going to turn down their support.

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But he was interested in reaching the common man. The first line of the Reformers, Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, knowledgeable, very scholarly.

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But their targets were the people in the church, leaders of the local church, not academia.

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And so they spoke and wrote in plain language. One scholar says this, Luther recognized the interrelationship and even identity of religious intellectualism and moralism.

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He shows that both are in opposition to the cross. In other words, there are a lot of smart people running around talking about the

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Bible just as there are today. But they didn't know

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Christ. Melanchthon was the author of the first Protestant manual of evangelical theology.

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He wrote, in other words, basically a systematic theology. And he said in the dedication of his book,

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Rightly oriented teachers are needed, therefore, to clarify and preserve the proper meaning of the words of the prophets, the

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Old Testament, and the apostles, the New Testament. And such true teachers, listen to this, do not invent new or peculiar doctrines about God.

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Somebody has a new doctrine about God, run for the exits. Instead, they stay close to the unadulterated meaning which

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God himself revealed through the words which are found in the writings of the prophets and apostles and in the creeds.

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Translation, God spoke. He's done speaking. All these signs that were up here a couple of years ago, you know,

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God is still speaking. Yes, he is. And everything he has to say is right here. And if somebody gets up and says,

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Thus saith the Lord, and they're not opening the Bible and reading it to you and explaining it from the scripture.

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If you can't look at the scripture and say, Oh, OK, I see where he's getting that. Then it's just wrong.

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Not to invent new or particular or peculiar doctrines. We have to guard the truth.

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He went on to say this. They stay close to the unadulterated meaning of the scripture, which

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God himself revealed through the words which are found in the writings of the prophets and apostles and in the creeds.

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And by the way, when he says creeds, he's not speaking of all creeds.

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He's talking about those that make matters clear rather than obscure.

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I mean, there's nothing really wrong with the apostles creed. There's just nothing particularly.

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It's not, you know, a complete in -depth analysis of what the Bible says. Calvin, in his introduction of the institutes of the

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Christian religion, addressing King Francis I of France, says now King Francis of France.

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Should have picked a different name. Calvin writes this. I undertook this labor writing this book, especially for our

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French countrymen, many, very many of whom I knew to be hungering and thirsting for Christ.

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Again, this idea these are not when we talk about these great theologians, they were theologians who wrote to the masses.

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Interesting. You know, here's a comparison. Institutes of the Christian religion and the purpose driven life.

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Same audience, different content. The book of the institutes itself witnesses that this was my intention adapted as it is to simple and you may say elementary form of teaching.

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We've gotten much smarter because now we can't even understand what the institutes say. And yet he wrote it for the common man in France 400 years ago.

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Culver again says as new or renewed controversies, errors and heresies have arisen.

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A few new terms of necessity have been borrowed or coined and some ancient vocabulary has reentered our discourse.

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So again, we're going to be talking about some more terms. Let me see where we are tonight. Oh yeah, okay.

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I know where we're getting. The Bible itself furnishes most of the terms of theology. I mean, what are some of the theological terms that we hear all the time that are actually in the

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Bible? Things where we just go, what does that mean? Brian.

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Imputes. Okay. Propitiation.

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What is that? There's a good word we hear all the time. What does it mean? Propitiation. Toman is really, really close.

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Would you say to assuage one's wrath is correct. So when we see propitiation, it gives us a clear picture that Christ was the sacrifice who propitiated or satisfied the wrath of God.

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Not the wrath of Satan as some false teachers would say, but the wrath of God. It was pleasing to the father to crush the son.

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Not because he did not like the son, but because he hated the sin that the son had become and needed to punish him.

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And he was pleased as the result of it. Why? Because then he was able to declare many sinners just.

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But there are a variety of those terms, and that's why we need to study the Bible. And by the way, there may be some versions of the

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Bible that are really easy to read. What's the easiest one that's almost close is the

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Living Bible or something. Then there's the Amplified Bible. And then as you get further and further out, you realize that these

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Bibles are more and more of a commentary. Just a word about why we choose the

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Bible versions we do, whether it's the NAS, the King James, the New King James, or the

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ESV, is because the translation philosophy is basically to get the words right, to be exact.

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And the further out you go, I would frame them this way. The top tier is

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King James, New King James, New American Standard, and the

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ESV. Then the second tier is the NIV because it's a thought -by -thought translation. In other words, they'll take a block of words and give you what it means as a block of words.

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And then you come to the third tier, whether it's the Living Bible or some other translations, which basically just kind of give you the sense of what you're reading.

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And then there are other translations where you just go, where did they get that? So there are some pastors who like to use as many as 14 or 15 versions of the same

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Bible during a sermon. And why do they do that?

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Because it's like... What's that, Peggy? Yeah, they look for a translation that says what they want to say.

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It's like a commentary, not a translation. Anyway, just as an aside.

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But some of those translations will actually edit out those words and kind of put in their own meaning for them.

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So it really is important to understand some of the terms that we're talking about. But we come to number six, true or false.

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The world today is not impacted by the philosophy of Kant, not to be confused with Bill Kant.

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Kant, Immanuel Kant. True or false? That's right, it's false.

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It is impacted. See, I confused myself. He discussed a whole bunch of things that we don't really need to talk about.

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But I wanted to just... A couple notes about Kant. Is he really...

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He said that... I don't know, somehow I cut this out.

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You know what happens when you cut and paste things? Oh, here you go. I hate when this happens.

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Oh, it's later on. But he had a bunch of unusual ideas that really...

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Well, let me just kind of skip ahead. Just to give you an idea. Kant maintained that one ought to think...

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Tell me this doesn't sound like today's world. One ought to think autonomously. That is, independently for yourself.

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Free of the dictates of external authority. Kant asserted that because of the limitations of argumentation and the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could possibly...

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Okay. Okay. Kant said that, listen, you can't really know whether there is a god.

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You can't really know whether there's an afterlife or not. You're free to believe in those things if you want to promote a better society, maybe morality or whatever.

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But you can't prove those things. There's just no way of knowing.

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And what he did, ultimately, was place the active, rational, human subject, our brain, as the center of the universe.

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Man, independently, is the repository of truth and what is right and what is wrong.

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Not God. Why would that be? Because in Kant's mind, God is not seen, and therefore, you can't know if he's real or not.

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All you can really rely on is what you know. So that is the thinking of Kant and really impacts the church even today because people will moan and groan over what...

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No, not true. But it impacts the church today because this idea of being able to know things certainly has infected the

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Christian academic world. And so the thinking of Kant, for example, has permeated the

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Jesus seminar. You know, here's what we know for sure. We know that there was a real historical person named

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Jesus. We know for sure that he had some followers. What we don't know for sure, according to this line of thinking, would be this whole thing about miracles.

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No. Impossible. This whole thing about, you know, talking to God.

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No. Didn't happen. So what you wind up doing is you just wind up cutting sections out of the

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Bible, and that's what they did. And they didn't just do this lately here. They started with the

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Old Testament. They came up with a bunch of intellectual theories about how it was written.

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But the underlying principle of Kant is you take God out of the equation.

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You take the supernatural out of the equation because you can't know if it exists anyway. Stick with what you know.

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Romans 1 says you do know. And so Kant is a liar.

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Well, true. But you know what? If you say things in intellectual enough language, if you make a forceful enough case, if you're a smart enough guy and you write in persuasive ways, you can impact a lot of people, especially those who are also, by the way, what did

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I say? I was talking to my nephews and nieces the other day, and I said I'm the world's leading pseudo -intellectual.

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If you, that just kind of popped in my head. If you say things in an intellectual enough way to appeal to the intellectual academics who don't believe in God anyway, you gain influence on them.

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And Kant was a formidable mind, certainly a smart guy. And that's why 200 years after he died, he's still impacting the world today and the way we look at things.

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We're going to call it there, but we're going to be getting into just briefly apologetics, what technically theology, biblical theology are, and then we're going to be talking about something that I find fascinating, mostly, and you're going to go,

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I don't really understand this, and this is why this class is really good. We're going to be talking about something called neo -orthodoxy.

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And you say, I don't know what that is. You will. And the reason you need to know what it is, because it started,

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I guess, early 20th century, and it builds on the ideas of Kant, and it has become very popular.

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In fact, the recently bankrupted Reverend Schuller, I love it when people, when something terrible happens to a false teacher, they can't wait to write me the e -mails.

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I've got a couple separate e -mails on this one. The Crystal Cathedral files from bankruptcy. I was like,

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I wrote back and I said, I'm heartbroken. Reverend Bob. But he represents, again, this strain of neo -orthodoxy, and we're going to talk about what that means, but just to give you a preview.

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Neo -orthodoxy, now think about this. The Bible contains the

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Word of God, but it does not become the Word of God until what? Not even until I believe it, but until I experience it.

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And this leads to all manner of heresy. And again, it's important when we look at the

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Bible, when we look at Scripture, when we look at theology, we need to, the Bible says this over and over again, we need to proclaim that which is right, we need to reject that which is wrong, and we need to bring it out, we need to understand it.

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And it is interesting to me that there, here's a popular book that Pastor Mike said burned here,

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I think, a year or so ago, and it was this Wild at Heart thing. So many of these books are based on this kind of neo -orthodoxy,

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I mean, they're not pseudo -intellectual, faux -intellectual books. Wild at Heart was really kind of a base thing, but this is the sort of thing that it leads to, all manner of error, all manner of danger, and it starts right there with Immanuel Kant, and it just kind of goes on.

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But anyway, we'll discuss this more, and then we'll actually get back to the Bible, which will be fun. All right, let's pray.

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Father, we this morning are humbled to just think that you would save us, that even as we described this morning, here we were running at a breakneck speed away from you, fleeing you, denying you, suppressing the truth that we could even see.

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But you and your grace stopped us, changed us, changed our desires, sovereign, holy, just, loving.

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Father, would you give us just a burning desire to know you, to know your word, to try to understand even things that seem difficult but are presented over and over again in your word, that we might know you, our creator and our savior.