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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.
It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 23rd day of February 2024.
And as always, I am thrilled to have back as a returning guest someone who has become one of my very favorite guests, as well as the very favorite guest of many in my audience in a growing number. I am speaking of David Reese, pastor of Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona, and CEO of armoredrepublic .com.
And we are going to be addressing today part one of a three-part series. Today is the first part, obviously, and we will be conducting, God willing, parts two and three on Friday, March 1st, and Friday, March 8th.
The theme of this three-part interview is an overview of the five solos of the Reformation and the Tulip as the Distinctives of the Reformed Faith. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese.
Brother, it's an honor to be here.
Thank you for having me on. I'm looking forward to discussing this and today focusing on, in particular, Scripture as the authority and Scripture as a sufficient source for knowledge and from which the other doctrines are drawn from.
So thanks for having me here, and I think this important subject will help everybody to have a deeper knowledge of some of the core truths of the biblical faith.
Amen. And if anybody wants to join us with a question of your own during this live discussion, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, and only remain anonymous if the question is personal and private.
Let's say you are a Roman Catholic, and you're beginning to question your religion's position against Sola Scriptura, and you are seeing more weight in biblical proof for the convictions of the Reformers and their heirs on Sola Scriptura, and you don't want to yet publicly identify yourself.
Perhaps you're just not sure. Or maybe you're even a Roman Catholic priest. I just heard the wonderful news recently of a Roman Catholic priest who, after developing a friendship with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Jason Wallace, an Orthodox Presbyterian pastor in Utah, this Roman Catholic priest became convicted of the Reform faith and left the priesthood.
So you never know who's going to be listening, but send in those questions to chrisorengin at gmail .com. And Pastor Reese, as always, if you could, especially for the sake of our listeners who haven't heard you on this show yet, tell our listeners about Puritan Reformed Church of Phoenix, Arizona.
Puritan Reformed Church is a church that is committed to the doctrines that are captured in the Scriptures and summarized in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the larger and shorter catechisms. And our desire is to very carefully teach the doctrine that is revealed in the Scriptures to do so in a thorough way, to do so that applies it.
And so most of our preaching is literally going verse by verse through Scripture. Sometimes we'll have a topical thing where we're pulling together what the teaching of Scripture is throughout, or maybe an emphasis on dealing with how do you connect certain topics or whatever.
But that's the emphasis is on exegetical preaching through a text. And so our desire is to see God worship as it is commanded in the Scriptures and to see government in the church properly ordered in submission to how Christ is appointed in his church.
And so we worship in the morning on the Lord's Day and also in the evening, 10 a .m. in the morning and 4 p .m. in the evening. And anybody who's in Phoenix, love to have you come check us out. And you can find where we're located by going to our website at puritanphx .com.
Great. And now tell us about Armored Republic. Armored Republic, we manufacture body armor, and we view body armor as a tool of liberty in the sense that it's a tool that people should use to resist tyrants and criminals to be able to defend their God-given rights to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And apparently there's been going around on the Internet, people have been talking about how now if you say that you believe that your rights come from God, apparently you're a Christian nationalist. So I guess we're all, I guess any of us that believe in the law of God is the thing that tells us what our rights are.
Now we're all Christian nationalists.
So oh well. Yes. You know, I've always have found it fascinating that leftists are abhorred and repulsed by the notion of Christian missionaries, or any Christian for that matter, evangelizing someone from another religion and culture in hopes that they convert to Christianity, and more importantly to convert to Christ.
But they see no problem at all with aggressively and passionately seeking to convert the world to their religion, and it's a religion whether they identify it as such or not. It is really the religion of Satan and the worship of humans.
But anyway, and of course the website for Armored Republic is armoredrepublic .com, and you will hear the commercials for both the church and Armored Republic throughout the broadcast today. Well, you have chosen to begin this three-part series, one of the most important aspects of the Reformation, one of the most important vital aspects that divides us from the Church of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, and that is sola scriptura.
And perhaps you should define that because there are many people who slander evangelical Protestants, and more specifically Reformed Christians, by totally defining sola scriptura in an erroneous and false way.
I think sometimes this is done out of ignorance, and sometimes this is done through intentional slander. But if you could, define what sola scriptura means, and perhaps even what it does not mean, as is popularly believed.
Absolutely. So the doctrine of sola scriptura is the doctrine that the Bible is the Word of God written, and furthermore, not only is it the Word of God written, but that it is the only authority in an ultimate sense for doctrine and for life.
So what that means is when we think about how we go about our lives, right, we do lots of things operating off of opinion, and this does not deny the usefulness of sense experience to make opinions, and to even have, you know, you might call professional opinions.
For example, you go to a doctor and you ask for a professional opinion. You go and you get that, and if you don't like the diagnosis or something like that, you might ask for a second opinion by going to another specialist or another doctor who can apply the state of the art to be able to figure out what it is that is going on with you and to try to help out.
But it's not knowledge in the strict sense. Knowledge in the strict sense is what is revealed by God, the propositions from his mind that he's given to us, the things that we can have certainty about.
And so sola scriptura teaches that the only thing that is infallible, available to man, is the revelation given to us, captured in the scriptures. And so that's an infallible authority. Nothing else is an infallible authority.
And that includes logic. Logic is a part of scripture. Logic is taught in scripture. You have, for example, the Lord Jesus Christ showing us that you can derive conclusions from premises in the scripture.
You see that with the Apostle Paul, that both of them, interestingly, seem to use logic frequently when arguing with people about the resurrection. So you'll find the Lord Jesus Christ arguing against the Sadducees, and he reasons from the text of the Torah and shows them that the resurrection is a doctrine that was derivable from the first five books of the Bible.
You also find the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 showing the conclusions that are absurd that must be reached if you deny the resurrection of the dead. So these examples show us that the scriptures include logic in them, how to reason properly.
And what we find is, for example, that you even have the laws of logic being laid out for us in the scripture text in things like the name of God. When you have in Exodus 3, Moses talking to God with the theophany of the burning bush, you have him say, I am who I am, which is the law of identity.
You have the Apostle Paul, for example, saying that the truth is not of a lie, which is the law of contradiction. And you have other places, for example, where you would say that Christ says you either for me or against me, and he's got the law of the excluded middle being demonstrated there.
So you have the laws of logic, you have the way reasoning works, you have mathematics, you have all the stuff that's necessary for us to reason properly laid out in the scriptures. So the scripture is that which is explicitly stated in the Bible and the necessary inferences thereof.
So we find that system of thought is the mind of Christ revealed to us. And that is the infallible source of knowledge. It is the inerrant source of knowledge. And everything else is either opinion that can be true or false, or if we don't have information at all, we're ignorant.
And so knowledge in terms of certainty that we can have is that which comes and is revealed from heaven.
And the two common accusations against those who believe in Sola Scriptura are that we believe that the Bible contains all truth. Now, we believe, of course, certainly that all things in the Bible are true, but we don't believe that the Bible contains all truth.
It doesn't contain the details on how to repair a Mercedes-Benz engine. It does not contain the information on how a brain surgeon is to remove a tumor from someone's brain. And we could go on and on, obviously, but isn't it true that what it means is that everything that is necessary to rightly obey God, govern His church, and to find salvation in Christ, those things are all in the Scriptures, and they must be obeyed and followed?
Absolutely. And when we think about the category of all truth, I mean, all truth, there's an infinite amount of truth because God is an infinite God. He knows all truth. He has all truth in His mind, but He has revealed to us some amount of truth.
That amount of truth is His counsel, and He's given to us His whole counsel, all that which He intends for man to have knowledge in the terms of certainty about in this life He has given to us in the Scriptures.
And that information in the Scriptures, it is sufficient to have the body of doctrine that we need for salvation, and salvation is broader than just what's necessary to not go to hell. What's necessary for salvation includes not only what's necessary for justification to be right before God, but also what we need for sanctification, what we need for a good life, what we need to glorify God in this life, what we need in order to make right decisions.
So there are principles in the Scripture that are sufficient for us to be able to make choices about everything. And so you'll find, even though there's nothing that says, go drive a car or drive a Mercedes, you do have things that demonstrate either by command or by necessary inference, including approved examples, you'll have the idea that transportation is a good work, that moving things from a place where they're less needed to a place where they're more needed is useful and good and is a part of dominion.
So you can demonstrate that. There are many passages of Scripture that help to demonstrate the utility of transportation, and in fact, you have all over the place some really interesting details about that.
And the funny thing is, even, for example, in the garden, God established the garden as this hill garden with four rivers that flowed out of it, right, north, south, east and west, there were rivers flowing out.
So that means, you know, water flows downhill, right? So there's this hill where you have the Garden of Eden, and you had these rivers flowing down out. And so those were set up, and what's listed, interestingly, when you read Genesis, the laying out of the things along the rivers, it lists out trade goods like gold and other such things that are useful to get along those rivers.
And so the point is, God laid out from Eden, for example, a system, a trade network, a system of rivers that would be highways, because historically, transportation has been very difficult on ground, but it's been very easy in water, because boats can carry a lot of weight with little effort.
And so the rivers, as a system for transportation, were given to us even in the very beginning of dominion, coming out of the garden, right? So we have that kind of thing. So you can look at, we are blind to so much of what the scriptures teach.
And so when we realize that the scriptures give us principles to understand what a good work is, and they give us an ability to make decisions, we then go out and we go experiment and tinker with the world that God has given us dominion over, and we can figure out how to make stuff.
And so that part, how we're to make the things, that's all not, that is technical capability, that's skill, as opposed to knowledge and certainty, what God has revealed. So that difference, I think, is an important thing for people to understand what's being said there.
And I mentioned medical things, for example, and technology is another great thing. We think about science, you know, science isn't the source of knowledge. We don't know how old the world is or what's right and what's wrong from science.
What we know is that science is a useful process for increasing our dominion, to manipulate the creation, and knowledge comes by revelation from heaven.
Amen. And to be a God-honoring auto mechanic and to be a God-honoring brain surgeon, those things are in the scriptures. And a scientist, in order for him to be God-honoring, he cannot teach things as fact that are denied by the scriptures.
Absolutely. And so we don't come to the scriptures with our experience or the scientific method as the authority over it. We come to the scriptures and we realize this is a word from heaven, it's the word of God, it is the truth itself.
God is the truth. And we must understand and believe what he has revealed, and we must interpret our experience and interpret the world through it. And you know, everybody wants to say, oh, you know, look at the ignorance of fundamentalist Christianity, trying to go and you take the Bible and apply it to science.
And they go, we're so sophisticated, you know, we can look at the Bible like this piece of mythology or whatever, and we use science and we understand the world so much better. The emperor has no clothes there, right?
What has happened now is it's become obvious to everybody that without the Bible, well, you end up with total chaos. People who pretend to be sophisticated and know science can't tell the difference now between a boy and a girl, right?
Their scientific capabilities are totally inept. And so without the Bible to tell us the nature of reality and what's good and what men ought to do and what we even should point science at, we don't have any way of trying to interpret reality.
This science deconstructs all meaning when you don't have a philosophy behind it. So the scriptures give to us a way of making good use of things. Knowing how the brain works is something that is a development of skill.
We don't have certainty or knowledge about it. We have opinions and we do procedures to try to help people and we try to see if it functions in that way and how to make a good machine like a motorcycle.
That's all technology. So historically, there's been a difference between what's called science and art or in Greek of agnosis and technē, the word technology. And so science is what you know with knowledge, it's what's certain.
And art is that which is a skill for the manipulation of the world. And so you used to get like, for example, a Bachelor of Science in theology and you get a Bachelor of Arts in something like physics.
And what's happened now in our universities is we say you get a Bachelor of Science in physics and you get a Bachelor of Arts in religion. And so we have switched what is knowable, because what we've done is we've denied that revelation from God, provisional revelation from God is a source of knowledge.
And instead, we've made the ability to look at the world with our sense experience into the source of knowledge. And so scripture being the authority, it's the authority in philosophy, it's the authority over what we do, it's how we interpret the world.
And so our ability to know even what we ought to do with science, rocket science or vehicle design or brain science, our ability to know what we ought to do with those things is dependent upon the scriptures.
And those are skills that are developed. So that idea technē or art versus science and knowledge, those things are distinct and we need to have a proper categorization there and not buy the propaganda of the false religion of the world that the people, the high priests in the white robes, the scientists, we need to not act like they're the ones with the secret knowledge that appear behind the veil.
We have been given the knowledge and it's not secret knowledge, it's public. It's revealed in the scriptures. And so that idea that we have a public word that is more sure than what the white robe high priesthood tells us.
Amen. And the other canard, the other false accusation about sola scriptura is that we are saying, those who adhere to that principle, that all we need is the Bible and we can go off into the woods, as the proverbial statement is, all by ourself and just read it and learn from it without the aid of any teachers in the church and without the aid of any kind of commentary or creed or confession or counsel.
Now, of course, those things can happen where somebody may be wandering through their grandfather's library, they pull a Bible out, start reading it, and they get saved. But the Bible does not in any way give the liberty to that person to remain in a state where they are a maverick or lone wolf and remain isolated from the church because we are commanded to be under the authority of elders and there are requirements for elders and teachers in the church.
Am I making sense here? Absolutely. And so, like you said, there are cases where you might have somebody engaging in a very ignorant way with the Bible and the Lord just sovereignly saves that person, right?
He gives the word to them and He illuminates their mind by His Holy Spirit, causes them to come to a saving knowledge. And at the same time, if they try to work through all the theology the church has already worked through in history without engaging at all with what the Lord has already done in the history of the world and in the work of the church, then that person is going to basically have to reinvent the wheel.
And so that's not good. In fact, what we find is that there is God gives, Christ gives to His church officers. Ephesians 4 says He gives apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastor teachers. And the pastor teacher is a continuing office.
The prophet, the apostle and the evangelist, those are revelatory offices that gave to us the scriptures and that gave to us propositional revelation that was from the mind of God. And that's been captured for us.
So now the way those offices bless the church now is in the scriptures. And so we have the completed scripture. And the pastor teacher's job is to understand and interpret the text, to explain it accurately, to draw doctrine by drawing it together and to give applications for people to be able to use it in their lives.
And so the office of pastor teacher is for people who have gifting and who have character qualification and who are seen by others to be fit for the office, others in the church. And so you have a process to nominate, test, elect and ordain these men.
And so that work of seeing men put into office is an acknowledgement of the gifts that Christ has given through his Holy Spirit to the church. And if you will not accept that there are those who are gifted, who have been given to the church for the purpose of helping to teach the church what is revealed in the word, you're rejecting the authority of Christ in the church.
You're rejecting his appointing and giving of officers and the gift that he's given through his Holy Spirit to have that be done. And so it's kind of like begrudging someone for making a path through the wilderness.
And instead of taking the path, you want to cut your own road right next to it. And so we need to acknowledge the work that's been done historically. One of the examples that was given to us for how this works is Acts 15 with the council in Jerusalem.
And so you have, for example, historically that working through issues, you have the local pastors working and over time you deal with new issues that come up. You have, for example, in the 300s, the issue of the doctrine of the Trinity and Athanasius' work.
And then ultimately that got captured at Nicaea. You find the discussion of the incarnation at Chalcedon. You find the discussion of the doctrine of grace at the Council of Orange. And you find that during the Reformation, you have a flurry of activity of people writing confessional documents to try to capture even more clear and more laid out understanding of those doctrines.
And so the doctrine of scripture gets taught more fully and more clearly over time as the Holy Spirit matures the church as is prophesied in Ephesians 4. And so that being the case, to reject that work that has been done by individual pastors and by the pastorate in general working together corporately in the church and gathering and maturing the church so that confessional standard can be advanced is to reject a great work there and to seek to kind of have your own technological revolution by restarting, figuring out how to make the wheel as opposed to going, I'm going to go learn everything that everybody else has figured out.
And I'm going to then seek to make sure that that's right, according to the scriptures, and I'm going to seek to build on it further and teach more. So that's an ordinance of God. We have officers and we have that public teaching ministry for a reason.
It's not an invention of men. It's a thing that was instituted by the Lord Jesus Christ. We find it in the Old Testament as well. And it's one of the blessings that the church has. And there's an interesting passage at the end of Isaiah.
In Isaiah 66, you find a prophecy that the Gentiles are going to be brought in and they're going to have their own priests and Levites. Well, it's not literal. The Gentiles aren't going to join the tribe of Levi.
What's being said is that the office of teaching, which the priests fulfilled, is going to continue. And the office of Levite, which the deacons fulfill, is going to be continued so they can deal with the material goods of the church.
And so we have the church going out. The nations are being brought into the temple, the church, and we find that deacons and elders are causing that prophecy to be fulfilled. And so we need to not reject that prophecy, not reject that fulfillment, not reject that gift, not reject that work.
And to despise all of that would be to despise a gift of Christ. And so the scripture is the authority. And we judge the teachers. We judge the pastors by the scripture alone.
Amen. And just like when a person who is lost is staying in a hotel, they open up the drawer of the nightstand, they find a Gideon Bible, they read it, and thanks be to God, they are saved by his grace and mercy, and they are enlightened through the scriptures.
But it would be the height of pride and arrogance for them to say, I do not need anything else or anyone else in order to live out my life as a Christian. I'm fine just with this Bible and my own discernment.
That would, even though the person was saved in that instance without the aid of, without the direct aid of a pastor or an elder and so on, of course, a Christian did leave that Bible there, but—. And a Christian translated it.
Yes, exactly. But it would be, it would be really nauseating pride that would lead somebody to say, I don't need, not only do I not need a local pastor or church, I don't need great men of God from the past, I don't need to be reading John Calvin, I don't need to be reading Charles Spurgeon, and we could go on and on.
Now, those things, obviously, are not essential to salvation, but as far as one's submission to local elders and membership in a church, that's essential for obedience, right?
Absolutely. And so you find that, you know, Luther was always really good at coming up with extreme examples, right? So he'd have like, okay, so you're stuck on an island by yourself. What do you do? Okay, well, you worship the Lord and hope to get off, right?
And then, okay, well, what if you got a bunch of people stuck on an island and none of them are officers? Okay, what do you do? Well, you spend time together, you meet together, you divide the work up for the church, and then you look to look for qualified people, and you set apart a person, you know, for public ministry.
And, you know, you set apart people as there's a revealing of that. So the reform position has always been that the essence of ordination is the setting apart of a man for the public service of that office.
And so you have this idea that that's, generally speaking, in America, you're going to be able to find a church that you can join in some sort of a drivable distance. If you're in a situation where that's not the case, consider moving to a place where you could.
And if, for some reason, you have duties that make it so you're stuck in a place, but you don't have a church that you can join in good conscience, then it becomes your duty to work with others to start one.
And so that idea of you need to be a part of a church, it's that serious. If there's not one, it needs to start. If there is one, you need to go. And if there's not one and you can't start one, you need to move to one.
Those are it. That's it. So that's the Christian life. And you've got a duty to serve others, and you've got a duty to seek to honor others that you can learn from. And so that life is the good life. The good life of a Christian is the life of working with others to glorify God.
That's what the scriptures are about. The scriptures are the book that tell us the knowledge of God so that he's glorified by our knowledge of him. And the knowledge of God, further, we have the knowledge of his will, what it is that he commands us to do.
And so how we glorify God is entirely in the scriptures. And so that's why it's so important to have the scriptures and to judge everything that's taught, right? If you're not the one teaching in the public worship, you better be judging it by the scriptures.
It's your duty to judge. And you need to live your life seeking to take every thought captive to the Lord Jesus Christ. And in the scriptures, we have the mind of Christ.
Amen. And it just reminded me of the famous story of the six men on a life raft after a boat sinks. There are two Roman Catholics, two Jews, and two Baptists who wind up on a deserted island. The two Roman Catholics build a cathedral.
The two Jews build a synagogue. And the two Baptists build First Baptist Church and Second Baptist Church. But we have to go to the first break right now. And once again, if anybody has a question, send it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.
Give us a first name at least, city and state and country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages.
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I'm Pastor Keith Allen of Linbrook Baptist Church, a Christ-centered, gospel-driven church looking to spread the gospel in the southwest portion of Long Island, New York, and play our role in fulfilling the Great Commission, supporting and sending for the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.
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That's royaldiadem .com, mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with David Reese, pastor of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona and CEO of armoredrepublic .com. And if you could pick up where we left off and just begin to give us every reason that this time will allow you to tell on why Sola Scriptura is such a vital battle cry and pillar of the Reformation and should be an essential part of every Christian's life.
Absolutely. So when we think about Sola Scriptura, Sola Scriptura makes it so that we can have a body of knowledge. There's not the play thing of the academics or the cleric class. It's also not this constantly shifting thing.
But instead, we have a consistent source of knowledge that we can systematically approach and that we can grow in maturity. And so when we think about the scriptures as a complete book, it is given to us by God, by his design across history.
That book provides for us a body of knowledge, which when you first hear that, it doesn't sound as impressive as I would like it to. The idea of a body of knowledge gives you stability, right? People are driven about throughout their lives by every wind of doctrine, but the Christian can have certainty.
And because of that, he can have something stable to build upon so that the waves come, the winds come, and the house doesn't fall down. You can spend your whole life chasing around, trying to figure something out, chasing an experience, chasing after expert opinion, looking for whatever.
But until you have the revealed word of God, you don't have stability. And so the stability that the scriptures provide makes it so that you can focus your life and make it so that you have something worthwhile to pursue, the goal of the glory of God.
And you know how to build so that we can rely upon the Lord to establish the work of our hands. So the scriptures tell us what is true, what is real, what is good. They tell us how to seek and get what is good.
And so it makes it so that we can build our lives. And furthermore, people talk about, you hear people say, you know, your babies don't come with instruction manuals. You know, you get a kid, you go home, and you don't know what you're supposed to do.
Well, they don't come with an instruction manual, but God did give one, right? Children aren't born and Bibles don't just pop into existence, but they're relatively cheaply printed now. And so that being the case, we do have instruction manuals of how to raise children.
And so the scriptures teach us that. So all of these places where people go, oh, what's marriage? What's love? Well, the scriptures tell you. All of the questions that we need answered are answered there.
And so they give us a way of having a stable life. And if you have something else, if it's the church tradition, if it's the authority of the church, if it's, you know, some super smart men, if it's all the different cultures being blended together or whatever, you end up with this impossibility of ever coming to a solid knowledge.
Whereas the scriptures as a closed system and with the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate our minds, we can actually have a stable knowledge. Now, I want to point out a passage of scripture that really is valuable for understanding this doctrine and that I think helps you to, as a Christian, be firmly rooted in.
And so 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17. Now, I'm going to read the verse and kind of walk through it and help us to understand it. And I want to point out what people normally pay attention to, but also where I think we fail to put the proper emphasis.
When you read 2 Timothy 3, verse 16, it says, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. Now, that idea there, right? All scripture, all of the holy scriptures are given to us. They're breathed out by God.
They're the words that God speaks. And it's profitable. And then it gives us four things it's profitable for. For doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness. So those things right there.
And people will typically read that and they'll go, all scripture is breathed out by God and it's useful. But then there's this last part. Verse 17 is what I want to get to as the emphasis. I want to explain a little bit more about 16, but I want to make sure everybody knows.
Verse 17 is a part that we need to emphasize as Protestants. It says, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. There's three universal assertions there. Complete, thoroughly, and every.
So we're going to talk about that. And so now that I've shown you where the emphasis is and where Protestants often forget, what happens is Protestants will take these two verses and they'll read them to a Romanist or to an Eastern Orthodox person or whatever.
And they all go, yeah, I agree with you. The scripture is inspired and they move on. And the Protestant kind of gets deflated and moves on too. But don't get deflated. Be careful to push here. So let me go back to verse 16.
And then we'll get to what you need to be pushing on when you're a Protestant looking at this text. But the verse 16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God and it's profitable for, and then we have these four uses.
So this means all scripture is not only breathed out by God, not only is it spoken by God, but all scripture has utility in teaching doctrine, teaching the knowledge that God has revealed. All scripture has utility value in reproving, or you know, J. Adams in his excellent book, how to help people change.
He talks about that term reproof there. And he says, this is about convicting people of sin, showing them what to put off, to rebuke, stop that. Don't do that anymore, right? So all scripture is useful to help people to understand what they ought not to do.
All scripture is useful for correction and correction. We hear correction and we go, oh, that's just another word for rebuke or for telling someone they're wrong. No, correction is when you put it right.
And so correction here is what to put on. So scripture is profitable. All scripture is profitable for knowing what's true, the doctrine, for showing what's bad, what to put off, the rebuke, and for correcting, showing what's good, what to put on.
And so lastly, it is useful for instruction in righteousness. And that word instruction there is a word that really means like training. So training in righteousness. And so instruction means training, but we often think of instruction as just like teaching.
Okay, like we almost hear instruction, we just think it's another word for teaching doctrine. But instruction is inclusive of sort of the idea of positive reward and negative discipline and showing an example.
And so there's sort of this process of you teach people, you tell them to stop doing the wrong stuff, you show them what they should be doing. And then you're giving them the example and you're walking with them in it and you give them the rewards and you give them the negative discipline.
So all that together, that's all captured there. And so the word of God is sufficient for that. It's profitable for that. And all scripture is profitable for doing that. And so when we think about that, we think about the scriptures are far more extensive and expansive than we might initially think.
And whenever we get a positive command, it's showing us what we ought to do. It's correcting us. It's showing the right thing to do, what to put on. But it's also by implication showing us what not to do.
A command to do something positive is a command to not do the negative, right? And the same with the reverse, right? So when God says don't murder, that's a negative, don't murder. Okay, that positively gives us a duty to see life preserved and defended.
And so the commandment to not steal, okay, that's negative. But the apostle Paul takes it and applies it, for example, in Ephesians. And he says, well, don't steal, but work with your hands that you might have something to give, to share.
And so there's the positive side of every command of God. There's a negative, don't do this. And there's a positive, what we ought to do. And the law of God is a systematic whole that shows us the good life by having those implications and connections.
And so when you, the Westminster Larger Catechism in question 99 is this awesome list of rules to apply when you read the law that help you to get more out of it. And it doesn't just like make this list up.
It's showing different places where the scripture shows how that works as well. So the proof text. So I'd encourage everybody listening to this show to go at the end of this, go look at question 99 in the Larger Catechism for rules about how to read the law all more profitably and see that.
But we've seen this first part, this idea that the scripture is inspired. All of the scripture is inspired. It's all breathed out by God. It's God's words. It's all profitable for teaching doctrine. It's all profitable for showing what not to do.
It's all profitable for showing what to do. And it's all profitable to train people to do what's righteous. And there's a goal. And the scriptures are sufficient for accomplishing the goal. What's the goal?
Verse 17, so that the man of God may be complete. Okay, so not incomplete, complete, right? There's nothing that makes him incomplete. There's nothing missing, right? There's not a need for holy tradition.
There's not a need for church authority. There's not a need for special gurus. There's not a need for anything to be a source of this. Not a familiar spirit. No, you know, inclinations of your own heart.
You know, the heart is deceitfully wicked. Who can know it? So what we need is the word from God. And the word that God has given to us, the scriptures are sufficient. The man of God may be complete. Now he's a complete and you might go, oh yeah, he's complete, but he doesn't have everything he needs.
No, he's thoroughly equipped. He's not partially equipped. He's not insufficiently equipped. He's thoroughly equipped. He's got all the gear in the scriptures. Amen. And it's not just some of the stuff he needs, and it's not for an incomplete man.
It's for every, every good work, not just some good works. So the scriptures are sufficient for the man of God to be made complete, to have all the gear and to do all of the jobs.
Amen. And so therefore you could respond to the Roman Catholic, for instance, who says, oh sure, I believe that the Bible's wonderful. It's helpful. It's beneficial. But we need a church tradition. Well, this text, the God-breathed text here in 2 Timothy 3, 17, as you've been repeating, is that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, all good works.
And you could ask the Catholic, how does the Bible furnish a man of God to venerate and adore Mary and the saints? And you could go on and on and on with things that they know they need their tradition to really wind up being superior to the scriptures in order for them to come to the conclusion that they need to do those things because that is, those are good works.
But obviously the good works that we are commanded to do are only in the holy scriptures. Absolutely. And you talked before, you know, so we go,.
Well, how does the Westminster Confession fit into that, for example, or the London Baptist Confession? How is it that there's any sort of a place here for the work of the church there? Isn't that just church authority or church tradition?
And it's, well, no, first of all, our reformed confessional standards explicitly say that scripture is the authority over them and that to be judged by the scriptures. And secondly, they are helps that are useful just like the office of ministry itself is a help.
And it's not the authority. It's a subordinate authority that is only authoritative if it's teaching what the scriptures teach. You have to judge it. And so you have, for example, in the Westminster Confession and it's the same chapter, chapter 16, in the London Baptist Confession, it says of good works, good works are only such as God has commanded in his holy word and not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men out of blind zeal or upon pretense of good intention.
And there's this desire to go, okay, look, we got, here's this old ancient thing. Here is this good intention that I've got. And she's like, no, is there a warrant from the word of God? Is it commanded in his word?
And the law of God is sufficient to show us the good works that we're to do. God didn't miss out on it. He didn't forget any of the stuff that we need to do. Oh yeah, right. Also, yeah, if you could do a pilgrimage and put something on that altar for Mary over there, that'd be fantastic.
But he didn't forget anything. And so he has his book. He wrote it. He's a better author and better thinker than men. And he didn't forget anything. And so all the good works that he wants us to do are revealed in the scriptures.
Amen. And the key difference of the reformers and Bible-believing Christians today between us in Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, we all believe in the necessity of scriptures, but only those who are Bible-believing Christians and evangelicals believe in the sufficiency.
Yes. And that word, that idea of the sufficiency of scripture is what makes the sola in sola scriptura proper, right? There's a scripture and scripture alone. There's not a need for anything else. And so you have all these subordinate doctrines like you might talk about, for example, cessationism, that there's not a continuing giving of revelation now.
It's sola scriptura now, but in the past, there would have been scripture plus the ongoing ministry of the prophets. You know, you have the idea that it's scripture and scripture alone, and scripture is the word of God written, and it's the rule of faith in life.
It's this idea of the regulative principle of doctrine or the sufficiency of scripture, the regulated principle of life, the regulated principle of worship and government are subordinate parts of that.
And so this idea that scripture is sufficient and it tells us not only what we should avoid in terms of, you know, here's negative doctrine, don't believe that, but it also tells us what we ought to positively believe.
So it teaches us what to believe, and it teaches us what to do. And what Christians often do when they're immature is they'll go, okay, yeah, I believe the scriptures, I believe the sufficiency of the scripture.
So I wanna go do what I wanna do now. And, you know, what things do I have to avoid? And it's like, no, no, no. If you listed out the stuff to avoid, that's a much longer list than what are we supposed to do?
The positive goal is to glorify God. How do we glorify God? By doing good works and by knowing him, okay? So we don't just need a list of a bunch of doctrines to not believe, we need the positive doctrine that we should believe.
We don't use the list of stuff we shouldn't do, we need a positive list of the stuff we ought to do. Now, the list of stuff we ought to do is called the law. And the list of stuff we're supposed to believe is called the gospel.
And so we believe the news, we believe the promises, and we are supposed to do the law. Now, we're not saved by law-keeping, unless you mean Jesus is law-keeping. We're saved because Jesus kept the law and we failed to keep the law.
But we are saved by the gospel, which is the news about what Jesus did by the power of the Holy Spirit causing us to believe it. And that's in order to put off the works of the flesh and put on the works of the Spirit, to put off darkness and to put on light.
Paul. We have to go to our midway break, so we'll just pick up where you left off there. Don't go away, folks, we'll be right back.
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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to David Reese. And that is chrisarnsen at gmail .com give us your first name at least city and state and country of residence. Right before the break, Pastor Reese, you are making it clear.
We are not saved by works of our own, but we are saved through the works of Jesus Christ. And if you want to pick that up. Absolutely. And I'm going to rudely jump past your question for just a second, because I want to point something out.
To Christian business owners that are listening to your show. And that is you're going to spend advertising dollars somewhere. I would greatly encourage Christian business owners to look to put advertising dollars to support shows like this and to find like minded customers.
It's an awesome joy to have Christian customers come to you because you're supporting that and to find people you can work with. And so I just I want to encourage Christian business owners to think about that because there is a real need for us to work with fellow Christians and to see us get value out of working together.
And as a Christian business owner, I think that I have found the more I have been able to find other Christian men to do business with and to build out those relationships and to be able to find ways to bless each other and work together, that it has made doing business more of a joy and helped me to be able to be around and interact with men that help to encourage me in godliness.
So I just I wanted to put that on the radar of Christian businessmen in a way in which that's beneficial. But sorry, so I'm going to jump back. I'm going to jump back to what you just asked, which was, you know, we're talking about the fact that we're saved from our sin by Christ, right?
Christ does good works to save us. But we're saved from our sin to do good works, right? We're saved from law breaking, not by our own law keeping, but by Christ's law keeping in our place and by his death in our place.
And so he perfectly obeys the law. He has perfect righteousness. He also is a full satisfaction in his death for our for our sin debt. But we're saved to good work. And that good work is defined by scripture.
And so the scriptures give us a fullness of understanding of what it is that we're supposed to do in terms of the good works. And, you know, I think when we think about the reality of the the sufficiency of scripture, one of the things that happens when people are attacking that position is they want to say things like, well, how do you really know what the real Bible is?
And one of the things that the scriptures teach is that not a jot or a tittle of them are going to pass away, not a jot or tittle disappears. We don't lose any of it. God preserves his word. And so God has historically preserved his word.
And it is the most well attested to in terms of evidence of any ancient book. But in addition to that, we have so many people having quoted it and put it into different things. You can basically reconstruct the Bible by quoting it from ancient authors.
And you can also have all these translations and all that kind of stuff. So people kind of treat the scripture text as though it is like a telephone game. They're like, well, you know, it was written and then somebody got that and they translate it into like, you know, Syriac and then somebody translated from Syriac into Latin and then from Latin into English.
And so, you know, how do we even really know? It's been it's passed through so many hands. No, we have not only do we have a bunch of translations, but we have the original language of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament.
And it's been preserved and we can have attestation to its preservation in terms of all sorts of evidence. But God promises to preserve it. And it's necessary if we're going to have knowledge of what God has revealed.
And so he does control history. He has preserved his word. And we have this, this attested to, again, from so much evidence from so many places. And so I want to point out the preservation of the text is essential to the idea of sola scriptura.
But there are other key doctrines there if we're going to have a certainty and a sureness about this. And I mentioned earlier on this idea of people trying to twist scripture or make it the play thing of the academics or make it the play thing of the clerics.
And I want to point out, you know, it is the historic reform position that the scriptures are clear. And that's sometimes called the perspicuity of the scriptures. And that doesn't mean every part of scripture is easy to understand.
But it means that when you study the scripture and compare scripture with scripture, you can figure out what it means. And so the Westminster Confession says, for example, the unlearned, not the learned, the unlearned in a due use of the ordinary means may attain into a sufficient understanding of the scriptures.
And so that idea that you can be an unlearned person. And if you apply the process of trying to understand the words of scripture, like you would try to understand any words, that you're going to be able to come to an understanding of them.
Now, that requires the Holy Spirit to illuminate your mind to understand and then ultimately to illuminate your mind to believe. But we need to not think of the scriptures as un-understandable.
OK, well, let me go to a listener in Queen Creek, Arizona, Bella. Bella says, every time I've had a conversation with a Roman Catholic over this issue, they ask me to point to them where it says in the Bible that scripture alone is our only infallible authority.
Yeah, so what we what we find is, first of all, we already went through Second Timothy chapter 3, verses 16 and 17, which shows us the sufficiency of scripture. If it's true that every good work is something that we're shown how to do, equipped for, and made complete for from scripture, then if there's any other good work, then the question is, OK, is that something that the scriptures also taught about?
So so logically speaking, the scriptures either cover it already or else it's not a good work. And so so the scriptures are sufficient. They teach us the doctrine. They teach us what to put off. They teach us what to put on and they train us so that we're complete, thoroughly furnished for every good work.
And so that means if there's some other source that teaches us a good work, it's only going to be agreeing with scripture. Now, if somebody wants to say there's another authority and it simply repeats the same things as scripture, OK, then the question becomes, does the scripture teach us the good work of acknowledging that other authority?
So if it's true that scripture teaches us all of the good works to do, then it's also going to give us the good work of honoring that legitimate authority. And it doesn't do that. And in fact, what you find is the scriptures repeatedly teach that the things that other people point to, like other prophets, it gives us tests to judge them.
So the scripture gives two tests for people who claim to be prophets. One, are there prophecies, things that come true? Two, is what they say consistent with past revelation. Now, anybody who claims to be a prophet now is inconsistent with past revelation.
This past revelation teaches us that there's a point in time at which the scriptures are complete. It teaches us that something about the ministry of Christ relates to the culmination of that. And furthermore, we are given a timeline in the book of Daniel for the completion of the canon, that prophet and vision will cease.
And that's something that's being prophesied in terms of a relationship to the future timeline. And it's given to us in a period that's less than 500 years for us to get to the Christ. And then we get to this idea of the destruction there, not less than 500, less than 600.
And so that idea that there's things that are given to us as markers. But furthermore, when we see tradition, Jesus rebukes the tradition of the elders, which is the tradition of the church. So when we find that Jesus is rebuking the idea that the tradition is an equal authority with the scriptures, that puts that away.
We also find Jesus dealing with legitimate officers who make illegitimate decisions. And so we have a church court, for example, condemning Christ. You know, the Sanhedrin was the highest church court in the Old Testament.
And so that idea that we find that there's a fallibility of church courts in the scriptures, that we ought to be God rather than men, that human tradition is rebuked as being not an authority in itself.
And we see that the scriptures are shown to us as the authority. We come to a place where it becomes obvious that any other authority is either going to be redundant and able to be judged by the scriptures, or else you're going to end up saying that there's extra good works outside of the Bible, which would make the Bible false, because it says that the scriptures.
Are sufficient to teach to make the man of God complete. They're really equipped for every good work. OK, I'll squeeze in one more question before we have you continue on your theme, especially since it's relevant to something you just said recently.
We have Orville in Canyon Rim, Utah. Who says, when you referred to the perspicuity of scripture earlier, many of its opponents will ask, why are there so many divisions amongst even Bible-believing Christians, and even within your own denomination, where people are not all in lockstep agreement, even sometimes on important issues?
Yeah, I think that the reason for that right now is because of a sinfulness and failure that has occurred historically in us. What we find in the history of the church is that there are sort of these rallying times where people gather around the church, and then you go through periods of declension.
And the periods of declension that we're going through right now come down to a failure of the teaching ministry to properly uphold and defend the scriptures against challenges that have come against us historically.
And so we're in a period of time, I think, I would argue that in the 1600s, what you started to have is a dual source of truth theory come into the Protestant Academy, when a lot of the Aristotelian and Thomist and medieval textbooks were used to deal with philosophy.
And that culminated in the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, where the fundamentalists were ultimately saying the Bible is the word of God, and it's the authority. And the modernists were saying that archaeology and science are the authority, or are either an equal authority, or are an authority that we ought to judge the Bible by.
And what happens when you adopt that dual source theory is you ultimately have to have one of them be the one that governs your interpretation of the other. And so I think that that's what has happened.
And what we are in the middle of right now is a lot of Christians are waking up to the reality that the scriptures are authoritative over the whole of life. And that being the case, what we're finding is we're waking up in nightmare land where everything is falling apart, and everything's awful.
And we're trying to make these islands where the word of God is being applied. And so that reality that the culture is collapsing is making us repent as Christians and go back to the sufficiency of scripture.
A lot of people don't like what the Bible has to say about a lot of things. And they make for themselves officers that will please their itching ears. And what we're going to see is a lot of that fake Christianity and nominal Christianity as we live in a world that is more and more negative to people who claim to believe the Bible.
That's going to largely fall away. And we're going to see, I think, a rebounding out of that. And I believe that the thing that's happened is there were some significant failures and we're going to see advances there.
So being able to argue from the word and deal with it. How many times have you gotten to an argument where you quote scripture to somebody and rather than actually discussing the meaning of that text, they just quote a different text or they go and just move on, right?
And it's, no, let's talk about this text. What does this text mean? Right. Let's interpret this text. And so that right there,.
When people actually care, they will talk to you about what that text means. Yes, and it's from the height of hypocrisy that Roman Catholics can dare mock the perspicuity of scripture and the need for our reliance upon their magisterium.
It's the height of hypocrisy. And if anything proves that is the existence of a man named Pope Francis. And you have, and it's easily provable, you have a much wider spectrum of disagreement, even radical disagreement amongst Roman Catholics than you do among Bible believing Christians.
And the Catholic will say, well, that's not fair that you're only including Bible believing Christians. Well, yes, it is, because you can't compare apples and oranges. The Church of Rome recognizes as valid members of that allegedly monolithic institution, people who are utterly apostate in their theological views, people who are pro homosexual, even pro abortion.
And we could go on and on with the theological differences. You have all the way from the ultra right traditionalist, the ultra left people that are still considered members of the Roman Catholic Church and are not disciplined or excommunicated.
So there is a difference. Wouldn't you agree with that? Absolutely. You know, the level of disunity inside of Rome is a joke. The inconsistency from Pope to Pope is a joke. This whole thing, you're absolutely right.
This is the height of hypocrisy. And their whole doctrine is the Scriptures aren't understandable. So you need intermediaries to interpret the Scriptures for you. You need authoritative interpreters. So they go, OK, the priest is authoritative over the congregation.
He can authoritatively interpret. OK, well, his bishop's authoritative over him. The Pope's authoritative over him. OK, so if I can't understand the Pope and his papal encyclicals that are from, you know, that are ex cathedra, if I can't understand them without a bishop to interpret or a priest to interpret, do I need someone to interpret them?
Like, why can't I understand them? Like, why can't I understand the local priest giving a homily in the papal dominion, but not understand the papal encyclical? And why couldn't I understand Peter's letters if he was a Pope?
And he wasn't. He was married, by the way, also. And so the idea that the papal dominion somehow has some sort of greater unity, the only unity they have is who gets the checks, right? The money flows to Rome, but that's the unity.
And so it's a system that is demonic. It is a system that teaches the doctrines of demons. It is contrary to the scriptures. And there is not a real desire to apply what the scriptures teach. There's no desire to have consistency with the scriptures.
The supposed doctrine of Rome is that the scriptures are authoritative, traditions authoritative, and the magisterium of the church is authoritative. The contradictions inside of the tradition and inside of the magisterium are, you know, are manifold.
And in addition to that, they contradict the scriptures. And so if the scripture is authoritative, then the other things can't be. They could all be wrong, but they can't all be right. They contradict each other.
And so if we say the scripture is authoritative, then the papacy and its contradictions on the doctrine of justification and on many other points and the tradition and its doctrines cannot be true if the scriptures are true.
Amen. And before I go to.
Josianne in South Dakota, Rapid City, South Dakota, why don't you pick up where you left off and begin another thread of this conversation? Absolutely. I want to, you know, in doubling down.
On this efficiency of scripture, one of the things that the larger, the Westminster Confession says, this is an excellent sentence. It says, the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the spirit or traditions of men.
And so that idea that we have the whole counsel of God there, that's a magnificent way of expressing it. Again, those express words or the necessary inferences. And that results in if the whole counsel of God is given in the scriptures, then what we need to do is to realize that the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined can be no other with the Holy Spirit speaking in the scriptures.
So that's where we need to go. And the way we have to, we talked about the need to defend the idea of the preservation of the text. But the other thing is we have to defend the idea that the scriptures are sufficient to interpret themselves.
So one of the things you'll hear people talk about now is, well, in order to understand the New Testament, you have to understand Second Temple Judaism and all the Talmudic things and blah, blah, blah.
That's not true. The scriptures interpret scripture. The infallible rule for the interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself. And therefore, when there's a question about the true and full sense of any scripture, which is not manifold, but one unlike Rome, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.
And so Second Peter, chapter one, verse 20, talks about how there's no prophecy of scripture that is of private unloosing. It's not privately given. It's a public word. And prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
So it's a public word, and it's a word that interprets itself. And so if we realize that there is a word that is the judge of all doctrine, and at the same time, this word is the very word of God and that God is wise enough to give us a sufficient word, and we realize.
That it interprets itself. Those are the things that I wanted to make sure that people have clearly in mind. Great. Well, let me go to that listener question. Josianne in Rapid City, South Dakota. Josianne says, I'm utterly baffled by the number of scholarly, brilliant reformed theologians in our day who are ecumenists with Rome.
I don't understand it because when they define what the true gospel is, they're right on target. But then at the same time, they seem to relegate the issue of the gospel to a lower rung of importance than other things like the Trinity that we share in common with Roman Catholics.
One vivid example of this is the late J .I. Packer, whose books have been an extraordinary benefit to me in my life and my growth in the Christian faith. And yet J .I. Packer has endorsed some horrifying books written by Catholics and others, which clearly deny the gospel.
Do you have any explanation for this?
I think that there's a real craving that people have to compromise for the sake of power and prestige and to be liked. Man-pleasing is a great fear of people. And people can also be darkened. And I think that there's two major errors that we need to deal with inside of Protestantism to avoid compromise with Rome or anybody else.
One is we act as though it's possible to believe things that are contradictory to man, that are irresolvably, apparently contradictory, and that somehow they're not contradictory to God. J .I. Packer, for example, in his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, simply says that human responsibility and divine sovereignty are irresolvable paradox.
And that's false. That's not true. The scriptures are coherent. There are no doctrines in the scripture that are irresolvably paradoxical.
Right. They may appear that way. But after further study, you will be revealed.
That that's not the case. Exactly. And so if it appears that way, for example, I mean, you literally have in the Bible, it says, you know, don't answer a man according to his folly, lest you be like him.
Do answer a man according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. Well, that looks like a contradiction. Right. But the point is, the verses are literally right next to each other in the book of Proverbs.
It's a rhetorical paradox, which means you have two things that sound like they contradict, but you're supposed to think about it for a little bit and figure out how they don't contradict. That's the idea there.
And so that to say that there's irresolvable contradiction or irresolvable paradox in the Bible is false. God's logic, he is the logos and he's made us in his image. And so the laws of logic, which are in the scriptures themselves are part of how God thinks.
And so that being the case, there's no scripture truth that contradicts any other scripture truth. The scripture cannot be broken. And so that's one thing. The second thing is that we define saving faith in such a way that sometimes we allow people to incorporate works or faithfulness or love or emotion or relationship into it.
Saving faith is understanding and believing the gospel. And the gospel is the doctrine of the scripture. And so when we believe the news that Jesus delivers, we are saved. Now that faith is even a gift, but nobody can believe the gospel unless the Holy Spirit brings it and that faith.
And at the same time, everyone who believes the gospel is saved. And what everybody wants to run to is immediately talking about, that's gonna result in fruit and all that. And that's true. But justifications by faith apart from works.
And so if we do anything to merge in works or any of the other fruit of salvation into faith itself, what we have done is we've swallowed a poison pill and we have made it so that our gospel is no longer different from Rome's.
And so anybody who's wavering on this, let me tell you what the apostle Paul says. He says, if we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel to you, then what we preach to you, let him be accursed.
That word accursed is anathema in the Greek, which means let him go to hell. Let him be cursed. Let him be damned. That's what it means. And as we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you, then what you have received, let him be accursed.
Now that that double that repetition in the scriptures, repetition means emphasis. And there are not many doctrines that have an apostolic anathema on it. That right there, the gospel, the denial of gospel does.
And so every preacher worth his salt has to stand his ground against Rome. And if you if you if you make alliance with the papal dominion, you are making an alliance with Antichrist, with an opposer of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so there must be.
No pact with Rome. Amen. And in fact, since you brought up anathema that the that Paul declared on the Judaizers and anybody else with another gospel, Rome's anathemas against Protestants are still binding, no matter what Pope Francis or anybody else says.
The Council of Trent declared dogmatic, according to them, truths, we don't view them as truths that must be believed by the faithful Catholic. And no matter what the modern Catholic says, because even the most conservative of Catholics in the 21st century says, oh, that doesn't mean you're a curse to hell.
It just means that you can't be a member in good standing of the Roman Catholic Church. That's baloney. That's why their own church burned those that opposed their dogma at the stake and tortured them in unbelievably gruesome and barbaric ways.
They didn't do that just because that person couldn't be a member in good standing of their denomination. They did it because that was an effort to get the person to repent before going to hell. So, I mean, it's just absurd when you get these conversations today where everything's being redefined.
Yeah, absolutely.
If you can make Trent into a document that doesn't condemn Protestants, then you can make anything.
Say anything. Yes. And I just want a quick quote one of my heroes, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the 19th century prince of preachers, that God predestines and that man is responsible are two things that few can see.
They are believed to be inconsistent and contradictory, but they are not. It is just the fault of our weak judgment. Two truths cannot be contradictory to each other. I just thought I'd throw that. Absolutely.
Amen. Spurgeon has so many fantastic things that he taught. Just if you're if anybody's looking for something to read, just go get something from Spurgeon. Like you will get all sorts of good stuff in there.
Amen. Well, we're going to our final break.
And if you have questions, send it immediately because we're wrapping. We're running out of time. Chris Arnzen at gmail .com. We'll be right back after these messages. James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here.
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We're now back with David Reese. And if you could move on to the next major point that you'd like to make in regard to the subject of Sola Scriptura. One thing I want to build on.
Is, you know, some someone had asked earlier, what are some of the places in scripture to point to, to help to build this case for the scripture and nothing else is the authority. And I want to kind of help people to think about open your eyes as you're reading the scriptures themselves, but what it says about the authority of the word and see how it deals with other claims to authority.
And you'll have a wide view there. But I also want to point out in Colossians, we're told that in Christ are hidden all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. In first Corinthians, we're told that we have the mind of Christ in the scriptures and the context there in first Corinthians chapter two, it's talking about this idea that, you know, you don't even know the mind of the guy sitting next to you.
Right. What makes you think you can force God to reveal his mind to you? But he has revealed his mind to us in the scriptures. And so if you listen to if you if you read through first and first Corinthians chapters one and two, in particular, it really does this thing where it's saying, you know, people, people want something like a sign.
They want some external, sensible thing to give them knowledge where they like the Greeks want some sort of rationalistic knowledge where they can sit in a Dutch oven is what R .C. Sproul would say, sit in a Dutch oven and come up with it.
Right. Just as you're sitting there in darkness and you can come up with some idea, it's not by reason alone. It's not by experience. It's eye has not seen or ear heard, nor is it entered into the mind of man.
But it's God prepared these things for us and he revealed them to us. Right. We so I have a sermon series on on first and second on first Corinthians and also second Corinthians, but first Corinthians and on chapters one and two in particular, I'd encourage people to go PuritanPHX .com and look for the sermon series on the first two chapters of first Corinthians.
I think considering how you deal with those texts, those texts really engage with the issue. And we don't get our knowledge from our feelings. We don't get knowledge from reason alone, apart from revelation.
We don't get our we don't get knowledge through our experience. Experience is interpreted by what we believe. We we interpret our experiences based upon our basic presuppositions. And so the scripture is the authority.
And these words from God are the mind of Christ. And so that idea that the logos, the word has been given to us in the scripture itself, that the mind of Christ is there. I want people to understand the scripture is not just a bunch of black squiggles on white pages.
The scripture is the thought content. And that thought content is communicated to us through the symbols of letters organized as words put into sentences. But there's it's translatable. The scriptures can be translated.
It's not, you know, some people sometimes you'll engage with Muslims who will say things like, you know, unless you can read the Koran in Arabic, you're not gonna really get it. I'll tell you what, you don't have to read the Hebrew or the Greek to get the ideas out of the Bible.
It is translatable. And so it's the information in the mind of God. And it's communicated to us through words. And every jot and tittle is given to us by God. But the information is communicable in other languages.
And so this idea that there's information, there's thought content, it's propositions, it's the thoughts of God's mind. It's the logos that's communicated to us. And so we get the reality of God communicated to us through the word.
And so the faith that the Holy Spirit gives us through the word is a possession of God himself. It's a possession of Christ. It's a possession of the truth. God is the truth. And the knowledge of the truth sets men free.
And so the scriptures are the truth communicated from God. It's the truth. It's the truth that we have. John 17, 17 says, Jesus is giving the high priestly prayer and he says, sanctify them by your truth.
Your word is truth. And it's the whole truth available to us in terms of knowledge. And so the other thing I want to communicate is why is knowledge so important? John 17, 3 says, this is everlasting life.
That they know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. The knowledge of God communicated in the scriptures is life. And if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you believe what he says.
You believe that he is who he said, that he did what he said. You believe he paid for your sins. If you believe that there's nothing else you have to do. It's just what Christ did. Then you possess everlasting life.
And that's communicated in the scriptures. That is life. And so the scriptures are key. And we must view the scriptures as that which is from God, that which is authoritative, that which has been preserved, that which interprets itself, that which governs what we ought to think and do, that we ought not to think beyond what is written, that we're to take every thought captive to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so the scriptures are the word of God written. And in them, we have life.
Amen. That's what I want you to do. Hallelujah. And remember, folks, the website for Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona is PuritanPHX .com, PuritanPHX .com, the website for Armored Republic, where my guest, Pastor David Reese, serves as the CEO, ArmoredRepublic .com, ArmoredRepublic .com.
Thank you so much, Pastor Reese, for being, as always, an extraordinary guest. I want to thank everybody who listened today. I want you always to remember that every weekend, I want you to have a blessed, happy, healthy, joyful weekend and Christ-honoring Lord's Day.
And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.