Interpreting God's Revelation

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Let's begin with prayer.
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Father, we thank you for the opportunity to be in this class and to study together, and we pray that we would glorify you in our conversation about your Word as we continue to discuss what is Revelation, to talk today about hermeneutics and the strengths and weaknesses of different positions.
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We pray, O Lord, that you would guide us and direct us and keep us from error.
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Me particularly, Lord, as the one who has been tasked to teach this lesson, knowing full well, Lord, that it is your Holy Spirit who is the real instructor.
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So let us, Lord, submit unto him, in Jesus' name, amen.
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All right, well, we are looking now, if you remember in your pages, we were at models of Revelation, and you'll remember there are five little side notes here, Revelation as doctrine, as historical, as inner experience, as dialectical presence, and as new awareness.
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And when you see the term at the top, basic hermeneutic, that's where we are, the one that says basic hermeneutic.
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A hermeneutic is a method by which we interpret something, and we are all familiar with hermeneutics.
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I've said before that the Supreme Court of the United States is essentially tasked with being a hermeneutical institution, because their job is to interpret the Constitution of the United States.
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Now they don't do that, at least especially recently with judicial activism and things like that.
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We've seen legislation from the bench, which is not supposed to happen, because the judge's job is not to create legislation.
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The judge's job is to interpret the event that has happened in light of the legislation and determine whether or not someone has broken the legislation or not.
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That's the job of the judge.
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And so when you see a judge creating law from the bench, essentially that's not his job.
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The job of the creation of laws in America is the Congress and the Senate come together and they create these laws, and the judges are supposed to determine whether or not someone has, in fact, broken the law.
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They're a hermeneutical institution because they're interpreting the Constitution.
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Well in biblical terms, the pastor, my role is a hermeneutical role, because my job is to interpret the Scripture and to tell you the interpretation and to give you an application based on a proper interpretation.
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Proper application must follow proper interpretation.
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If you got the wrong interpretation, it would be almost impossible to get the right application.
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Because if you don't know what it means, it's impossible to say what it means to you, how it would apply to you.
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So hermeneutics is that methodology by which we interpret the Scripture.
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And so you'll see here, there are various ways that hermeneutics are mentioned here.
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You have the inductive, or induction, and that is an objective form of interpretation.
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And we use what we call, and some of you have heard me talk about this before, we have what's called the historical grammatical method of interpretation, or the historical grammatical hermeneutic.
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And historical grammatical hermeneutic is basically this, that before you can interpret what Paul has said, you must first understand the context of history that he was in.
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If Paul uses the word cool, or we know that he doesn't mean hip, because that's what we would mean, but certainly that wasn't the context of Paul if he uses that word.
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And that's kind of a silly analogy, but you understand what I mean.
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And contextually, you have to begin with the history of the language.
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There are certain words that indicate to us, in fact, that Paul wrote these things when he did, because certain languages used at certain times.
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Historically, we can kind of trace back certain uses of terms and languages, and even theological constructs.
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We can say, well this is relatively early, or this is relatively late, and this period in this time.
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So, the context in history is very important.
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Grammatical is the grammar, okay? Context gives us a framework from which to work, but then the grammar creates, you know, what is this? And out of grammar, you have things like syntax, which is the structure of how, boy, I'm writing and how the words fit together.
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You know, if you say, John threw the ball, all right, John is the subject, threw is the verb.
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Well, John is the noun, but he's also the subject, and threw is the verb, you know? But if you say, the ball was thrown by John, it changes the subject.
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Now the subject is the ball, all right? And so, you can, when you're going into grammar, you have to start considering these things.
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What's Paul talking about? What's the subject predicate, or what's the nominative, the subject nominative, you know, all those things.
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And you begin to kind of construct how is he using language here.
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And this is why understanding at least a little bit of the Greek language is helpful, because you can have people tell you, well, this is what Paul meant, and be totally wrong.
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And some guys are very confident in their ignorance, and they're very proud of their ignorance.
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And they go around saying, well, this is what Paul said, this is what Paul meant.
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And it's not borne out by the grammar, and it's not borne out by the history.
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So we use what we call the historical grammatical principle.
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Other principles, like, if you're moving down, you'll see that these other ones are subjective.
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That's the difference between the top one, Revelationist doctrine, and the rest, you'll notice that under Revelationist historical, it says deduction, objective and subjective, inter-experience is eclecticism, which is subjective.
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What is it to me? Induction, subjective, it's still inductive, but now it's subjective, that's dialectical presence.
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And then the ultra-eclecticism, which is extremely subjective.
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And so really the difference between us and often the hermeneutic that comes out of other situations is it becomes very much individually applied, rather than saying there's a standard application, or a standard interpretation that all applications should flow from.
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There are those who would say, no, what it means to you is what it means to you, and that can mean something different than what it means to you.
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And this is a, and I have a lot of room to write up here, this is an important thing to put in your minds.
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There is only one right interpretation of any passage.
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Now, out of that can flow hundreds of applications from a passage, but if we don't have the proper interpretation of a passage, then the applications are secondary and thus can be flawed, can be a problem.
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For instance, when Jesus said, this is my body, that's a very simple sentence, right? He uses the pronoun, uses the verb, and then he uses the object, this is my body, this is my body, right? And so, what does that mean? Well, the Catholic would say, Jesus was making a statement about the substance of the bread, that in that moment the substance of the bread becomes literally his body, and thus they take the transubstantiation position, that the substance changes, the prefix trans means change, the substance is transubstantiation, there's a change of substance, though it maintains the quality of bread, in that what we see, the substance has changed into his body, likewise the cup into his blood.
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So, my question for you, is that what Jesus meant? Well, Luther thought so, Luther was a reformer, Luther pounded his fist on the table at the Marlborough Colloquy, and he pounded and he said, Hoc est corpus meum, this is my body, hoc est corpus meum, this is my body.
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That's where we get the term hocus pocus, by the way, hoc est corpus meum is the term which would later become hocus pocus, because what did they think the priest was doing? Magic, and thus it became magic words, it's hocus pocus.
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So, and he was pounding, Luther was arguing with Zwingli, who believed, as we do, that the bread maintains the substance of bread, and it's representational, or in memory of Jesus, but doesn't change substantially into the body of Jesus.
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Now, Calvin had sort of a different view, Calvin had what we call spiritual presence, and I don't have an issue with Calvin's view, really, I would maybe be a little different than he, but Calvin's view is that Christ is spiritually present in the sacrament, but that it's no substantial change, okay? And so you say, well, okay, I can deal with that, no problem there.
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We would say it's not, that the argument for presence is not the issue, the argument is for purpose, purpose is to remind us of what has been done, not having to be repeated.
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See, that's the killing thing, that's the killing stroke for me when it comes to Catholicism, because they believe it's a re-presentation of the sacrifice, that it's a re-, essentially a re-making of this sacrifice, where the priest is reaching up, pulling Christ down, sacrificing him again on the altar, that's what they believe.
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Yeah, it's not a reminder of the once for all, it's a re-presentation of that sacrifice, because it needs to be done again, because you sinned again, alright? So anyway, I'm using this as an example of interpretation methodology.
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Can it be said for absolute certain from a grammatical historical perspective that Jesus did not mean that this is literally my body? Well, men have divided over that issue, because of course the Roman Catholic would say he did mean this is my body literally, substantially, Luther said yes, but he denied trans-, Luther denied transubstantiation, but he believed in real presence, and there is a difference.
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Some people call it consubstantiation, with substance, but Luther never agreed with that term, he just believed in real presence, he didn't believe in transubstantiation, he believes in real presence, and it is true, real presence does precede transubstantiation as a theological construct, real presence has long been a part of the history of the church, but transubstantiation as a doctrine, that the sacrifice is being represented, is a 13th century thing, mid-1200s, so it's much later than the real presence doctrine, so Luther kind of held to a more historical perspective, at least for those who believed in that.
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But then you have the question though, can you from the passage prove, simply grammatically historically, that Jesus didn't say this is my body? Not really.
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What Jesus didn't mean, this literally is my body.
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Go ahead.
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You want to? So what did Luther think about the same definitive emphasis, you know, the rock, the bread, you know? Yeah, yeah, well, using a symbolic language, I don't think that that's an issue at all.
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I am going to sit.
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I don't normally do this, but I'm just, I don't feel well.
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Yeah, I think that's a reasonable point to say that Jesus did use, Jesus said, I am the door, but nobody expected him to have hinges in it and be made of wood, you know? I mean, that sounds silly, but Jesus did, you know, I am the vine, you know, so he uses language like that very regularly.
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But also, I think the other point that could be made is Jesus was there.
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If we're making an argument, but see, we've moved away from grammatics and historic context.
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Now we're moving to interpretation because grammatically, this is my body can certainly mean literally or figuratively, right? And we can show examples of where it could be used figuratively.
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I am the door.
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This is my body, both similar constructs, both meant to be figurative, not literal.
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But you'll hear people say, we always interpret the Bible literally.
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No, we don't, because here's an example where we're not, because if you want to give the literal card to someone, you give the literal card to the Catholics at this point, because they're being, what I would say, crass in their literalism.
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They're being, they're using a crass literalization of the passage to prove a doctrine, which I think is unsubstantiated in scripture.
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And that's the next point.
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The argument that I would make to make this particular theological, or make this particular argument from the text, would be one of theology.
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Okay, let's take your interpretation as true.
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This is my body.
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That's what it means.
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What is the theology that comes out of that? Well, if transubstantiation is your theology, that you're getting out of this, and that is denied in so many other places, particularly in Hebrews, which says this is a once for all sacrifice, not to be repeated, you know, those things, where are you supporting your interpretation from scripture? And that leads you to another point, and I didn't write it on the board, but what we call the analogy of scripture, the analogium scriptorum, the analogy of scripture, is that if scripture is true, it will agree with itself.
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And so if you are going to make an interpretation of a passage, then you should be able to substantiate that interpretation with the rest of scripture.
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That's the analogy of scripture.
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Or you've probably heard this, scripture interprets scripture, right? You've heard that before.
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So that is really where the objective point comes in, because honestly, if you take a subjective view of interpreting the Bible, you could have one verse say something that another verse contradicts, and it wouldn't matter because they're both subjective.
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But if you take an objective view of interpreting the Bible, then you have to say, okay, this has to agree with itself.
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Because it's not all about me.
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It's not about how I see it.
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It's not about subjective to Keith or Tiffany or to Roseanne or anyone else.
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It's not subjective.
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It's objective.
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This is why those Bible studies that begin with, well, what do you think it means? That's terrible.
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It's not about what you think it means, it's about what it means.
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Now, you may later say, well, how can this be applied to you? I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
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Okay, we know what it means.
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How do we apply it? Well, for me, as a married man of four children, it might apply differently in a sense than how it might appeal to Carly, who's a young lady who's not married.
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It might have a totally different way of applying the text, but in a way that would still be in keeping with the interpretation.
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The one that wouldn't be wrong or violating the interpretation of the text.
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So that's what, under this hermeneutic, the point I wanted to make today was the objective and subjective interpretation.
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If you begin with yourself as the standard, then you know that you're beginning in the wrong place.
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We begin with a historic, grammatical perspective, then we move to how does this interpretation fit with the rest of the Scripture? For instance, there are people who believe that James teaches that we're saved by grace through faith plus works.
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Because he says, you know, we're justified not by faith alone.
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In fact, the only place where the Bible says faith alone is when it says you're not justified by faith alone.
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And though we say we are justified by faith alone, so are we denying Scripture? No, we're looking at Scripture as a whole.
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And I believe, and I can prove from James, at least I think I can prove from James, that what James is talking about is not living genuine faith, but he's talking about the faith that is spoken, but not believed or lived, or the faith that doesn't change us, which is not a real faith.
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Jesus said, many will come unto me on that day and say, Lord, Lord, have we not done this? Have we not done that? You know, Jesus said, there are going to be people who said they knew me.
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And Jesus is going to look at them and say, what? Depart from me.
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I never knew you.
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Not I knew you for a time, but I never knew you.
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So we have the text in James that would seemingly be at odds with the text in Romans, where Paul explicitly says that, you know, blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven, who doesn't work, who hasn't worked.
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There's a passage, I'm not quoting it correctly, but in Romans 4, in fact, I'm going to get it because this is an important passage, in Romans chapter 4, the apostle Paul says something regarding the issue of works.
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And we, of course, we know Ephesians 2 and other places say this as well, but this one is so, so to me, such an important one.
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Blessed is the man.
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Wait a minute.
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That's not it.
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Yeah.
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Now to him who works, the wages are not counted as grace, but as debt.
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But to him who does not work, but who believes on him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted as righteousness.
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Just as David also describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputes righteousness apart from works.
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Our righteousness is imputed to us apart from our works.
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Now it produces a new heart that pushes us to do works, and Paul says that later, by grace you're saved through faith, that is not of yourselves, the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for what purpose? For good works.
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Right? We're created to do good works.
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We're not saved by good works.
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See, that's where the difference is.
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And that's why I think James says is that ultimately our good works are the byproduct of our salvation.
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And if we don't have them, we don't have the salvation.
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And thus, that's the way in which works justify our salvation, not in bringing about our salvation, but in demonstrating that it is actually a genuine faith.
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But it's still justification by faith in the work of Christ.
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You're not justified by what you do.
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Paul is so clear.
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Jesus is clear.
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Two men go to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.
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The Pharisee goes in and say, Lord, look at all I've done.
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I give a tithe of all my income.
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I do this, I do that.
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And I'm not like that Pharisee.
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I'm not like that tax collector over there.
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And Jesus said, the tax collector stood afar off.
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He beat his breast.
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He wouldn't even look up to heaven.
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And he said, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.
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And that man went away, what? Justified.
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Jesus used a very particular, specific, theologically rich term.
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He didn't go away saved.
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Of course, he was saved.
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But if we said he went away saved, that term is broad.
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Justified is narrow.
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He's justified of his sins because of faith.
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The other man wasn't justified because he was trusting in whom? In himself.
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He was trusting in himself.
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So works for simplicity or out of gratitude.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, yeah.
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What do we do? Why do we do what we do? And well, let's look quickly.
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We'll see.
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We've got a few minutes left here.
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The purported strengths and the purported weaknesses.
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I don't want to go through all these, but I do want to look at the one that relates specifically about what people would say about the position we're taking, which is the revelationist doctrine.
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The strength derives from the Bible's own testimony to itself.
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Well, that's that's important.
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We are believing what the Bible says about itself.
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It is the traditional view from the patristic fathers to the present.
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Yes, we hold the traditional view of revelation.
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Number three, it is distinctive by virtue of its internal coherence.
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That is huge.
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We believe the Bible is actually coherent.
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There are some people who, again, they believe the Bible contradicts itself.
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And they're fine with that.
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They don't have a problem with that.
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We believe in something called harmonization.
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And we're going to in a few weeks, we're going to look at this.
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If two passages seemingly do not agree, then we seek to harmonize them.
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For instance, there's a passage that talks about Jesus going to the land of Gennesaret and meeting a demoniac.
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Remember that? And the demoniac, he cast the demons into the herd of swine.
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Well, in another gospel, there are two.
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One gospel shows there's one, and another gospel says that there's two.
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And yet, why? Some people say, well, here's an obvious contradiction.
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But the one passage didn't say, the one text didn't say that there wasn't two.
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It didn't say that it wasn't two men.
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It talked about the prominent one.
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For instance, if I tell you the story, the other night I got tongue-tied while evangelizing.
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This is amazing.
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I don't easily, you know, get tongue-tied.
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I usually talk my way through things.
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But it happened.
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This young man came up to me, and I handed him a gospel tract.
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And he stopped, swearing his boots, and he looked at me dead in the face.
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What is this? And for whatever reason, I just went, I don't know what to say.
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I just, for a moment, I froze.
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It's a gospel tract.
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I don't know what it was.
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Maybe he had like, maybe, I don't know.
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Maybe he had the devil on him or something.
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I'm joking.
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But he just stopped me.
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And I was so like, I don't know what to say.
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It's about what happens when you die.
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That was about how I could get out.
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It was like spit out.
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It's about what happens when you die.
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And he just...
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The good thing is, it doesn't matter what you say.
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It's the Spirit that does it.
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Exactly.
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That's what my, that's what Cargier said, because I was telling him about, telling him to say he's a, you know, it's the Lord who's going to do.
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But I was just tongue-tied.
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Now, I want to ask you a question.
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Is that story true? Well, you don't know because you weren't there, but you believe me that the story is true? Okay.
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Well, there was also a second person.
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He had a girlfriend, or they were holding hands.
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I assume they were boyfriend and girlfriend.
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Uh, but the fact that I didn't mention her, does that make the first story untrue? Not at all.
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And that's the point that we have to understand with the scripture.
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If there's one text that mentions one and another that mentions two, it doesn't negate the truth of the first one.
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Because obviously there was something prominent about the man in the, in the first story that wasn't so prominent in the second man.
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And which is why the writer of one gospel chose to focus upon one and another on two.
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And that's such an easy thing to understand in this context.
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But you take that to people who want to discredit scripture.
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Oh, no, no.
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You can't do that.
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You can't seek to harmonize.
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Why not? Every time you tell any story, you always tell every single thing about that story.
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You have to.
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And you feel the necessity to always share every bit of information.
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People are like, well, I don't know what happened to Jesus between the ages of 12 and 30.
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Who cares that you don't know? Why does it matter that you don't know? When you hear stuff like that, you can just tell that they can't see.
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Oh, sure.
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Absolutely.
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Like their eyes, their ears don't hear and their eyes don't see.
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And that's what I'm saying is when we get to the part about comparing scripture with scripture, there are discrepancies that are difficult, but there's nothing that can't be harmonized.
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There's nothing that you can't say, well, this certainly could be that there were these two events or these two things.
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There are times where the question is, was there two cleansing of the temple or just one? Because John talks about cleansing of the temple early in Jesus's ministry and the other gospels talk about it during the Passion Week, during late in his ministry.
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And so one argument is, well, John's not in order of events.
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John is in an order of things in Jesus's life, but it's not necessarily chronological.
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So he tells this story early on, but it's actually something that happened later.
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I tend to think that there was two times that Jesus did it early in his ministry as an introduction to who he was and that there was a time that he did it right at the end of his ministry as a closing, sort of a bookend on his ministry.
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But does it matter? No, there's two different stories in scripture about this happening.
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You know, there was two feedings.
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Once he fed 5,000, once he fed 4,000.
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That's in one gospel, tells us both times.
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So Jesus did things more than once.
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So why have a problem with it? But, but those are types of questions that people would have.
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And those are things that at least as Bible students, we ought to understand how does harmonization work? And we're going to talk about that.
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But that's what this inner coherence thing is about.
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We, we believe that scripture, because it is authored by the divine mind of God, that it will be coherent, even if it has to be understood.
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It has to be, you know, we have to look at a few things and say, okay, well, this, this has to be this way, or it could be this way.
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The whole, the, the, the, the resurrection narrative.
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Sometimes either one angel, two angels.
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Well, what was it? Because different gospels express it in a different way, but that doesn't make one untrue.
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So we'll talk about that more in the weeks to come.
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But this last one is most important.
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And we're going to end with this because we're out of time.
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It provides the basis for consistent theology.
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That is why we would hold to this passage because we believe that revelation is doctrine because it provides the basis for our theology.
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If you believe that Christian doctrine or Christian scripture is subjective, then you have to also believe that doctrine is subjective and thus theology is subjective.
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And that's why people can say, well, I believe in a goddess who doesn't send anybody to hell.
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You believe in a goddess who doesn't send anybody to hell.
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Do you get that from the Bible? Oh, sure.
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I can just pull different passages out.
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There's, you know, they're, they're, they're, you know, I can turn that to say this or whatever.
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No, you can't, but you can try.
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And there are people who do, they take it like, like Luther said, like the wax nose that can be twisted and contorted.
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So, um, this is why, again, we would hold to revelation is doctrine.
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These four things I think are very important.
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It's testimony itself.
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The traditional perspective, it's distinct in that it has internal coherence and it provides a distinct, consistent theology.
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So, uh, next week, next time we come together, we're going to look at, uh, modes, uh, and theories of inspiration.
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How, how did the Bible, how was the Bible inspired when we say the Bible is an inspired book? How, uh, how do we believe that that actually occurred? So we'll talk about that next time.
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Let's pray.
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Lord, thank you for the study.
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Pray that you would continue to use this, uh, to help us to understand your word and to appreciate it and what it does in our life.
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In Christ's name, amen.