Becoming Better Theologians (part 7)

Our Father in heaven, we gather before you this morning as we begin this week known as Thanksgiving and our hearts are indeed filled with thanksgiving when we consider the wonders of your hands, all the things that you've created, all the things that you've blessed us with, and most of all your

Son Jesus Christ in whom we have been given so many gifts. Father, I pray as we look to what your word says about you and about the things surrounding you.

Father, I pray that you would bless our time and our discussion this morning. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Well, as you know,

I literally scour the world looking for bad theology so that you don't have to. Thank you.

Thank you very much. That's just part of my ministry to you. And I didn't have to go much further than my mailbox this week though, sadly.

I do scour the world but sometimes it just gets sent to me. Again, we have the

Praise the Lord Bulletin, a ministry of TBN. And I thought this was appropriate.

I, you know, I kept looking for examples of neo -orthodox, and I know I keep using this word and you're like, what does it mean?

Well, this morning we're gonna get to figure out what it means here. Neo -orthodox, a practical application of it.

So I get this in the mail this week. Another dream. I'd like you to open your

Bibles, first of all, to Psalm 22. Psalm 22. Anybody know off the top of their head what the overall context of this

Psalm is? What's that? Crucifixion?

It's good. How about this?

Psalm 22 talking about satellites. I'm just gonna throw it out there and then you...anybody

think it's satellites? Just curious. Okay. Psalm 22 verses 26 and 27.

Would somebody read that please? Brian. It's the end of this whole passage or towards the end of it, talking about crucifixion and everything like that.

Well, let me just tell you what one noted theologian, Paul Crouch, the owner of a

TBN. What he says here, he says, wow, dear partners, we are about to see another move by the hand of God in this glorious final harvest of souls.

Here's, you know, where things start to go awry, the second sentence. Yes, I had another dream, but before I tell you about it, hear the prophetic word of the

Lord. And then he reads Psalm...he lists Psalm 22 verse 27. And of course, as all good theologians do, he quotes from the

Living Bible. And I say that just as an aside, the

Living Bible really is not a translation, it's a commentary. And it says, the whole earth shall see it and return to the

Lord. The people of every nation shall worship him. And he says, well, gee, what do you think that has to do with?

Here's...he goes on, my dream is surely God's response to his awesome move in the Middle East. God makes an awesome move in the

Middle East and then he responds in Psalm 22 verse 27, according to him. He says, in fact, all of Europe and many other places where the

Arabic language is spoken. I don't know if you know this, but according to Paul Crouch, there's a huge revival in all of Europe and many places where the

Arabic language is spoken. And then he goes on to quote another well known theologian,

Joel Rosenberg. Anybody know who Joel Rosenberg is? It's okay if you know.

Who is he, Barbara? Yeah, he's a...but

he's basically, she says, an author and he kind of works on prophecy for Israel, but he really is a novelist.

He's kind of a Tom Clancy -esque sort of guy focused on the Middle East. I'll skip all the nasty details, but he says this.

He says, we have known through our Arabic language healing channel network that many are turning to Jesus.

We are told that governments hostile to the Christian faith often catch this material and destroy it, and so my dream.

In it, I saw precious souls walking aimlessly, seeking, searching for these materials.

They were saying, we need Bibles, we need literature, we are new Christians, but what shall we do? In this dream,

God made it clear to me that we must create an on -air Arabic language Bible school for the healing channel.

Yes, send it by satellite, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so we have commissioned

Dr. Rafat Girgis, an anointed Christian medical doctor from Egypt, to lead the way.

He is busily recruiting Arabic speaking Bible teachers and will begin with Basic Bible 101.

Now, there are just a few problems with this. First of all, you know,

I'll just start at the end. When you see TBN saying they're going to start teaching Basic Bible 101, TBN, of course, stands for Trinity Broadcasting Network, upon which you don't have to be a

Trinitarian, and you don't have to teach the Bible. Other than that, it's pretty good. You can be a

Roman Catholic, you can be a Oneness Pentecostal like T .D. Jakes, you can be an unbeliever, and it's all counted the same.

So Bible 101, well, from what standpoint? But anyway, the main thing is, you take a passage like Psalm 22, you have a dream, and you say, oh,

Psalm 22, verse 27, the whole earth shall see it. What shall they see? Well, the message that comes across their satellite television, and that's how you interpret the

Bible. That's just wrong. You don't interpret the

Bible based upon your experience. Listen to this. I found this on the internet, talking about Neil, Orthodox, one of our good friends.

Neil Orthodox and his brother, Neil. Neil Orthodoxy arose after World War I, which shattered the optimism of liberal theologians.

In other words, they thought the world was going to get better and better, and here you have this war in which millions were slaughtered.

And they note here that it dominates both Catholic and Protestant theology today.

Now, to just kind of put a final capstone on this before we get back to where we were, listen to this. Here's what

Neil Orthodoxy does. It places the religious experience of the interpreter, in other words, of the reader, at the center of understanding scripture.

The Bible is important for stimulating such an experience. When it does so, it becomes the word of God for that reader at that time.

Neo -Orthodox theologians are generally willing to accept the conclusions of the naturalistic theologians regarding errors in the

Bible. In other words, they take the word of unbelievers when it comes to saying there are many errors in the

Bible, but feel that these do not affect the reader's ability to encounter

God through it. For example, it doesn't really matter to a

Neo -Orthodox theologian. Ultimately, it's immaterial if Jesus rose from the dead or not, because if I read the text and I'm encouraged by it,

Jesus is risen in my heart, and so it doesn't matter if he physically rose or not. And this is the kind of nonsense that goes on, and so you wind up with the

Bible is God's word when it speaks to me, and I can apply it how I want. It's kind of that hodgepodge theology, and thus you get things like Psalm 22 -27 having to do with his dream.

I talked about this quote in our class on Thursday night. This is from a noted theologian who, by the way, is number 14 this week on the

CBD top seller list, Karl Barth. Though dead, he is still in the top 20.

He says here, now think about this phrase, and this is the kind of muddled mess that comes out of Neo -Orthodoxy.

Karl Barth said, all men are elect in Christ, and all men are reprobate in Christ.

Who wants to translate that for us? All men are elect in Christ, and all men are reprobate in Christ.

What does it mean that all men are elect in Christ? Yeah, if all men are chosen in God the

Father or by God the Father in Christ before the foundation of the world, then all men will surely go to heaven or universalism.

And yet, all men are reprobate in Christ. What does it mean to be reprobate? To not be chosen, to be passed over, to be condemned forever.

You're outside the affection and the love of the Father, so all men are elect and will be saved by God, and all men are condemned and will not be saved by God.

And this is insight. Exactly, I have to agree with that. It's absolutely insane.

Okay, so moving right along. We've been talking about various aspects of theology, really introducing a bunch of terms such as Neo -Orthodoxy, because we hear those terms thrown around all the time, and I'm not sure that we always understand what they mean.

And hopefully that gives you a little bit more insight into a very confusing topic.

We got to, and what I did with your quiz, by the way, in case you're wondering, is

I took the last three from our previous quiz and I just made them the first three on this one.

So I think we've talked a little bit about apologetics.

Well, or maybe we haven't. So let me just kind of give you, this is going to be brief.

But apologetics is not where you, and we've mentioned this before, it's not where you apologize for the

Christian faith. It is technically the division of theology that rationally answers attacks upon Christianity.

Someone wants to attack the Christian faith, you give a reason, a reasoned defense of it.

He mentions here that there are some debates about how much weight evidence has, and I've given my own view, which is that you can literally fill the entire sanctuary with evidence and it will not compel anyone to believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ. Why? It's the word that saves.

And we know, what do we know just by looking at the life of Jesus? What would be the best evidence ever?

You know, people say, if I could just see God, I would believe. And the answer is they did see

God. And did they believe? A few did. Most did not. They saw his miracles.

And what did they say? What's that? Give us more miracles or he's of the devil, right?

Those miracles couldn't have been done by the power of God. So they were done by Satan.

All manner of attacks. But apologetics can basically be said to seek to meet the enemy and defeat him at his point of attack.

Now that's kind of that's Culver's language. I don't know if we go into an apologetic encounter thinking the unbeliever is my enemy.

But in general, if you're in an apologetic situation, you want to, let's say you're evangelizing, you want to address the specific issue at hand.

If this person, if you listen to them talk about their own belief system in God and you think, well, he's close but he needs more information, then you're not going to start talking about something unrelated.

You're gonna go right to the specific point where they veer off. And that's his point.

Yes, Peggy. Yes, it's 1st

Peter 315. It's always being ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us.

That's what apologetics is. And that's what it means. It means an answer. That's what the

Greek word means. Okay, let's talk a little bit about faith and reason.

As you'll notice, question number one, true or false? Faith and reason are enemies. It is false.

But isn't this typically what you're attacked with? If you believe in the

Bible, do people say, well, that's reasonable. What do they say?

How can you believe that book? I'm sorry? Just because you were brought up that way.

Okay, I've heard that one too. How about this, even though I wasn't brought up that way, but how about this one?

If you believe in a literal six -day creation, you're an imbecile.

There was a politician running for president in 2008 who was asked about that and who said what?

Whether there was a literal six -day creation. And he said, I don't know.

I think the only problem with that was he was a Baptist pastor for 10 years. So I don't know what he was teaching during those 10 years.

I don't know. That's a pretty scary answer. But faith and reason are often portrayed as enemies, especially by those who have no faith.

Yeah. Yeah. Daniel notes it could be even worse that he's just afraid to say what he thinks because of what the world will say.

But it is commonly supposed, Culver notes, that faith represents one way of knowing God and reason another.

In other words, faith is just kind of a lack of knowledge.

You know, there are two ways of knowing God. One is a complete lack of knowledge and the other one would be some understanding of it.

But Culver says in biblical thought, each, that is faith and reason, has to do with the response to knowledge.

He says, faith is not the source of our knowledge of things of God or of anything else.

Faith is not the source of our knowledge of things of God or anything else. Why is that? Why would he say that?

Faith is not the source of our knowledge. Revelation is the source of our knowledge.

Faith is our ascent to that knowledge. Two kinds of, well let me just stay on track here, faith and reason are twins, not enemies.

If one does not use faith in response to God's Word, then our reason will oppose both

God and His Word. Our mental faculties will oppose God.

True faith and sound reason are steadfast friends.

The Bible does not even hint that one must be unreasonable in order to believe God's Word.

We talked about Soren Kierkegaard, a noted philosopher before, and he is someone who many hold up as a

Christian. And Kierkegaard said what about Christianity? He said that it required a leap of faith.

In other words, that it wasn't rational. And this is something that I think the unbelieving world still holds to be the case.

But the Bible presents truths in the form of facts and ideas, and it does so in a way where it creates a world of black and white, of true and false.

So you either believe or you don't believe, and when you don't believe, you turn completely against God.

But faith and reason are not enemies. Number two, true or false,

Scripture's undeniable diversity demonstrates rather than obliterates its profound unity.

True, diversity can be good, I guess. What does that statement mean, undeniable diversity?

How is the Bible diverse? Many authors over many centuries, many different situations?

Yeah, I mean, the number of situations it covers is really quite impressive. And so, if we look at the

Bible as a whole, it demonstrates its integrity, that is, its singular author, that is,

God, rather than demonstrates its incoherence, as the world would say, because it adheres, it sticks together.

It provides support for itself. It is not proven to be false.

And we get to the matter of systematic theology. What is systematic theology?

Why would we even want systematic theology? Some of you are sitting there going,

I don't know. Why would we want systematic theology? We were talking about this the other night.

Well, why do you suppose that, for example, Augustine never wrote a systematic theology that we...

I don't think he did. I mean, he has a lot of writings, but not a systematic theology. What would stop somebody like Augustine from writing a systematic theology?

And we were talking about it, and I think maybe the answer is a lack of resources.

If you don't have a bunch of printed resources, it becomes difficult to kind of pull everything together. The advantage of a systematic theology is you can kind of pull together all the different aspects of the

Bible, and then categorize. What does the Bible teach about angels?

What does it teach about mankind, or what we would call anthropology? I'm just kind of trying to go in alphabetical order here.

What would be the next A? You know, and you could just systematically go through and look through what the entire

Bible teaches about something and pull it all together, and why would that be handy? Why would a systematic theology be handy?

For understanding doctrine, it shows that Scripture doesn't contradict itself.

Carol? Okay. And it puts things into order, so you can see how each thing fits together.

Good. Very good. We would also see the logical coherence of the

Bible in this way. I mean, a systematic theology, if there were errors in the

Bible, we would see it. If there were contradictions, we would see them. And so when we study different parts of the

Bible, we're able to put it all together. Listen to what Robert Yarborough, an author, says.

He says, While contrasts and tensions exist within the Bible due to the differing circumstances and authors from which its components first sprang, a solidarity underlies them.

This solidarity is grounded in the oneness of God's identity and redemptive plan.

It is also rooted in humankind's sinful solidarity in the wake of Adam's fall. In other words, one author, and therefore it all sticks together.

It tells us the truth about God and man, as we've said on many occasions. What do theologians ultimately want to do?

What should we want to do when we go to the Bible? Should we want to take a verse here, like Psalm 22, 27, and figure out how we can make it apply to us, even if it has nothing to do with us?

Well, let's put it this way. Even if it has nothing to do with a specific situation that we're thinking about.

I mean, he could have done that same thing to almost any verse in the Bible. It's talking about satellites.

Is it really? It's talking about an Arabic language school.

Is it really? When we go to the

Bible, we want to understand what? Who God is, but how do we understand that?

By understanding what God has said. Not what we think he's saying, not what we would like him to say, but what he actually said.

We want to understand the original intent of the author. What did

I do with my quiz? I tossed it away or something. Oh, there it is. Okay, he poses a question here,

Culver does. He says, can mere men truly know God? Can mere men, oh, by the way, number three, true or false, is true.

That the Bible is consistent, gives testimony to its divine origin. True. Let me just comment on that briefly.

If, as many theorize, if different men over the ages had somehow conspired to write the

Bible or had just written it independently and then slapped it together, let's say, I don't know. Let's say they got together at some conference in 325

AD, which would be the

Council of Nicaea, for those of you who read the Da Vinci Code.

Would it be possible, theoretically, for a bunch of people to decide what should go in the Bible and then make sure that it doesn't contradict?

Do you think you could get hundreds of men together in a single place and get them to agree on what the

Bible should say? I don't think so. And then, even supposing that, if these three, however many men, got together in one place in 325

AD and decided, you know, this book's out, this book's in, da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da. Would we, looking at it centuries later ago, that's an amazingly coherent system?

I don't think so. Would we, centuries later, still not be able to find any manuscripts that contradict each other, you know, in a serious way?

I don't think we would be able to do that. In other words, if there were some editing going on in 325

AD, we would know about it. That's not what happened. But all these speculations continually are raised up against the

Word of God. Why? Because the objective is to discredit the

Word of God and to discredit the God of the Bible. Now, we get back to Culver's question, can mere men truly know

God? Talking about the knowledge of God, great answer, to the extent that he has revealed himself.

He goes on to say, if by knowledge of God one means exact information about measurable data relating to the holy spiritual being of eternal infinite

God, no one can possess it. What's a short way of saying that?

His ways or his being are above our, we cannot fully comprehend it.

God is not like us. We're going to develop that a little bit this morning as we go on.

Pam says,

I don't know why that's a problem because we can't exhaustively understand anything. Well, yeah, I mean, if you are married, do you exhaustively understand your spouse?

I doubt it, otherwise you guys would never have any conflict. And he even says that actually,

Culver does, in a measure the same is true of one's knowledge of all persons. See, there you go. But what's a fancy -schmancy word for how we know what we know?

Epistemology, which I think, did I put that in the quiz? True or false, epistemology has to do with small caliber weapons.

That is false. I guess we should go back and do number four and five.

True or false, we're trying to figure out what a particular passage means. The first priority must be what other Bible passages say on the same topic.

False. Now, that is not to say that that's not important.

What it is to say is that what I said here, the first priority must be, is false.

If you say that we need to understand John 6 in light of Mark 4, all these other things, well, that may be true.

But you first need to understand John 6 in light of what? John 6. And after you understand that, then you can start comparing and going, wait a minute, maybe

I have something wrong here. So that would be false.

Number five, true or false, while we can know God in a salvific sense, we cannot know all about Him. That's true. So we've kind of talked about that.

But the division of philosophy known as epistemology means how do we know what we know?

And the only reason I introduced that at all is just because he's going to use that word. It's a good word to know.

How do you know what you know? How do you know what, for example, chocolate cake tastes like?

Because you've had it before. If someone describes to you chocolate cake and they talk at length about chocolate cake and you look at chocolate cake, you still don't know what it tastes like until you taste it.

Okay, so how do we learn then? How do we get to know about God? We can't know all about Him, but we do know about Him.

And how do we get to know Him? Number seven, true or false, generally speaking, there are three ways we can learn about God.

Scripture, creation, and experience. Is that true or false?

Peggy says false. Other lesser theologians are saying true. Generally speaking, maybe

I shouldn't have put that there, you know. That's kind of sketchy. Three ways we can learn about God, Scripture, creation, and experience.

I'm going to say that's false. Because what's really, Daniel said two out of three, and I'm, yeah,

I'm going two out of three too. Scripture and experience. Oh, no, that's not right.

You know something about God from your conscience and from your experience.

That's true. Could be true.

You know, if you put too much emphasis on the general speaking, you know, you can give yourself credit for it.

Go home and have an extra piece of chocolate cake. How do we know about God through creation?

Romans 1 tells us that. What other passage of Scripture tells us about that? Psalm 19.

Psalm 19. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims

His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

In them He has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.

Its rising is from the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

How do we know about creation? Or how do we know about God by looking at creation?

Well, certainly when we look at all that He has done in creation, what do we think? That is a vastly powerful

God. In Romans 1, just by virtue of looking at creation, we know something about God.

I mean, certainly, what do we understand by looking at creation? What do we know about God automatically, besides He's powerful?

We're not in charge. There are things that are beyond us, but what do we know about God? Is God a

God of chaos? How do we know that by looking at creation? There's order in creation.

I mean, what are the odds that tomorrow morning, when you get up, the sun is going to rise in the west?

What are the odds when your cat goes to have kittens, that puppies are going to come out?

You can hope. Well, you know, it's a miracle! There is order to creation.

God is a God of order. What other things can we tell by just looking at creation?

What else can we tell about God? The wisdom of God.

How about His sustaining power? What else?

The wrath of God is revealed. That's right out of Romans 1. I mean, even as we look at creation, what are some of the evidences of the wrath of God?

Death. Yeah, graveyards. I mean, we can learn about God from creation.

That's often called natural light or general revelation.

Now, when we talk about specific revelation, that's when we talk about Scripture. And that's another way that we learn about God in a far more accurate way.

Why? Because it is, well, you know what? True or false? God has revealed

Himself to us in His Word and in His creation. True.

True. Let's see, how about this number?

Well, no, we're not ready for number eight yet. We have to get to the next section. So we're going to do that here. It's about, again, we're introducing terms that are really 25 cent terms because they will come up as we study through this.

But who knows what an anthropomorphism is? Who can spell it?

Chuck. There's a wise guy in every audience, and this morning it would be someone other than Chuck.

Chuck, what is an anthropomorphism? Okay. Yeah, it's an analogy through which we can understand something about God.

It is a thing that would be true of mankind, thus the anthro part of it, the anthropo, or anthropos, which means man in Greek, and morphe, or a form.

So we get a form of God to help us understand, or a form of man that's used to help us understand about God.

There are different kinds of anthropomorphisms. There is anthropoipoisis, per purposes.

I'll let you figure out how to say it. Let's see. And there are a couple other ones, and we're going to talk briefly about them.

But the answer to number eight, true or false, everything in the Bible should be taken literally. What do you think? False.

And we're going to show some evidence of that. And one of the things that would bear this out is anthropomorphism.

Let's look at Psalm 16 .2. And this is an indication of anthropoipoisis.

There we go. Don't ask me to say it again, or say it three times real fast. Proverbs 16 .2.

And when somebody has that, would you please raise your hand, and I will call on you, and we can read it. Go ahead,

Daniel. Okay.

So all the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, in other words, in his own evaluation, but the Lord weighs the spirit or the motives.

Now, does he literally weigh them? So that is an indication, or that's an example of this other term here, where it describes an action that we would take so that we can somehow understand the way that God does things.

In other words, God doesn't literally take our spirit or our actions and put them on a scale and go, hmm, that's about,

I won't tell you how much it weighs. He doesn't do that. But this is a way of understanding how

God does things, this way that it can be conveyed to us. What does it mean that God is, listen carefully, impassable?

Not impossible, but impassable. You might think that I'm impassable, but that would not be true.

It means that God is not bothered or disturbed by anything. In other words, nothing really brings him to what we typically, the kind of emotions that we typically experience.

But Scripture says what? That he's glad, sad, angry, etc.,

etc., etc. Well, that's another figure of speech, which is called, this is a little easier to say, anthropopathism.

See, a little bit easier. Anthropopathism, there we go.

And again, man being the heart of it, and then emotion or passion. For example,

Genesis 6, 6. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

So there we have two emotions, sorrow and grief. Sorry would indicate what?

Genesis 6, he looks at all the world and he sees that man's heart is sinful continually, always focused on sin.

And it then says that he's sorry that he made man. Well, was he really sorry? Only if he'd made a mistake, right?

Again, it's this anthropomorphic language where we look at things and we go, okay,

I get it, that God realized, or he didn't realize anything, but that God was going to change things.

He wasn't going to leave them exactly the same. God is also represented in Scripture as having body parts, like eyes, ears, nostrils, arms, hands.

And if we understand those things wrongly, what do we wind up doing? Creating an idol.

That's exactly right. So if I've made this analogy before.

There's a man on TV. I think he used to be a Las Vegas Lounge singer. I'm trying to think of his name. No. No, no.

He used to be a singer. He used to be a singer, and now he's a so -called evangelist.

Kenneth Copeland. And he's actually written a book in which he says that, you know, it says in the

Bible that God measures the heavens by the span of his hands. He says, no, a span of your hands is from the tip of your little finger to the tip of your thumb.

He goes, that's about seven inches. So knowing that, that God measures the heavens by the seven -inch span of his hand, we can therefore figure that God is about six feet tall.

And he goes on to make all these different pictures of God, and you wind up with what

Daniel said, which is an idol. In other words, the idea of this language is to give us some understanding of the power and the might of God, not to say, well,

God's just like us. True or false,

God is impassable is true. Number 10, we are made in the image of God so he can be said to have an image similar to ours.

That's false. Yeah. Yeah. What is true of us is not necessarily, you know, the reverse is not necessarily true.

What does it mean that we are created in God's image? And that's where you can wind up in all kinds of problems, because if we are in God's image in the same sense that he has, you know, hair and ears and fingers and all that, then that would be true.

But God is spirit, and those who will worship him will worship him in spirit and in truth.

Yes. How can

God be impassable and have wrath? Okay. Good question. Anybody want to answer that?

Impassable means not subject to change. Right.

But, I mean, not bothered by anything, not subject to change. Okay. He doesn't, let's put it this way.

It is both he cannot change and he is not subject to emotions like we are. I mean, it's all kind of, in the bigger context, it just means he doesn't change.

He's always hated sin. Pretty. Yeah, because the whole idea of reaction, even with wrath, the whole idea of reaction would be that somehow something changed with him.

The circumstances changed. God wasn't aware that things were going to change, and therefore, you know, he had to shift into a different gear.

God's constant, always the same, the same yesterday, today, forever. And because of that, we can rely on him not to change his mind about anything, which is a good thing.

But wrath is, let's put it this way. I would say that God's wrath has always been against sin.

It's just that until sin was activated, came about, first entered into creation,

God's wrath had no avenue for expression. Well, just as, you know, when we talk about God and the difference between God and us,

I mean, there are many differences we could give. But, for example, I either love someone,

I hate someone, or I'm neutral to someone. I like someone.

I don't like them. You know, there could be, I guess you could have several different gradations in between. But I'm going to be either or.

God is, can love someone enough to not judge them immediately and still hate someone.

He can express more than one emotion. I don't even want to say that.

He can exercise more than one attribute or more than one, what we would call, emotion at a time.

God can be wrathful with, was he wrathful with Israel over and over and over again?

And yet, did he deliver them over and over and over again? Why? Because God isn't like us.

He doesn't somehow change his mind. I mean, the picture that people have of him, unbelievers have of him, is there's this horrible, vengeful, mean -spirited

God who just goes through the Old Testament slaying everybody. It's not true. In fact, he's a very compassionate, patient, loving

God, as is evident in his relationship with unfaithful Israel all throughout the

Old Testament. Yes. Well, it is true because they see

God in time, whereas he sees the whole picture. But the bigger problem with unbelievers, of course, is they will pick and choose what they want to believe and what they want to be bothered with.

We're going to have to leave it there, but I think we're just about through this section. And so we will begin, kind of, there's a little bit more to go here, but then we'll begin next week kind of digging into a subject at a time and kind of going through more passages of Scripture.

But we did finish the quiz this morning, which is good. Very pleased. All right. Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for this time. I pray that this would not be merely an academic exercise, but when we get to think about you and how you are, how the

Scriptures present you, how men of unbelief assault you, how even these ideas have crept into the church over the centuries and been accepted by the church even today.

Father, I just pray that you would give us, as it were, the spiritual muscles, the strength, the will to look critically at everything that is taught, that is written, and to say, this is not true about you or this is true.

Father, to reject false teaching, to stand strong against it.

And as we come to know more about you, more about ourselves, and more about the work that you have accomplished on our behalf through your

Son, Jesus Christ, that we would praise you all the more, that we would love you all the more, that we would obey you all the more.