Theology and Apologetics Seminar Part 1

I've entitled the seminar, Theology and Apologetics, Study and Discussion.

I put the name that way for a specific reason. That is, theology and apologetics are obviously very closely related to one another.

But unfortunately, some folks create their apologetic system and then bend and twist their theology to meet how they defend the faith.

Obviously, that doesn't work. Apologetics, the Greek term apologia, refers to a defense.

And obviously, what you defend will determine how it is you're going to construct your defense.

If you, for example, are defending a city that's in a valley, you're going to defend it differently in warfare from a city that's on a mountain, or you're defending a bridge, you're going to defend that differently from an airport or something like that.

So obviously, the object of defense determines what type of defense you use. Well, it's the same thing here.

We cannot have an apologetic until we have discovered, until we have thought through, until we have wrestled with and have really solidified our theology.

And in fact, you will discover that your specific belief about theology, that is, who is

God, what is the nature of God, who is man, how does God relate to man, that will determine your apologetic.

My apologetic is completely and totally different than a Roman Catholic apologetic. For the simple reason that, for example,

Rome has what is called a natural theology. Rome believes that the fall of man did not totally affect the reason of man, and therefore,

Rome feels that man can, outside of God's revelation, come to a true knowledge of God, simply on the basis of reason.

Now, I, as a Protestant, don't believe that, because I believe that sin has affected all of man's being, including his reason.

And therefore, my method of reasoning with people outside of the faith is going to be different than that of a Roman Catholic.

And so we need to deal with theology first. We need to think through what it is to say,

I believe that there is a God that created all things. Many Christians will say that.

In fact, I know very few Christians who would not say that. But rarely do we have the opportunity, like I've had the opportunity, of being forced to think through the logical ramifications of Christian belief.

Now, I've had the opportunity, because of the fact I have encountered a number of atheists in various mediums, debating them on radio.

That's always an interesting way of doing it. Or debating them via the electronic medium on computers, or via mail, or things like that.

And a number of them have been rather intelligent individuals who have challenged me to truly think through what it means to say that God created all things.

Now, that's lucky for me, but not a whole lot of people get the opportunity of really doing that. So I'll get to do it for you.

I'll get to play that role, but fortunately, in a friendly and supportive manner, rather than the negative, destructive manner that is normally how we encounter atheism and things like that.

So before we can begin to attempt to communicate our faith to the world today, we first must find out what our faith is.

Then, once we have that down real well, then we can start dealing with, now, how does the world think?

And if I say this to a person who's coming from this perspective, how will they understand me? How will I be able to make the content of the

Christian message understood in a good way to this individual? First, we've got to think through our theology, and that's what we're going to do.

Now, I am assuming that everybody here this evening, aside from being a

Christian, agrees with me on the basic doctrines of the

Christian faith. I am not going to take the time to go through my whole basic Christian doctrines class, because that's not what

I designed this for. I'm not going to take the time to go through all the scriptural proofs of the

Trinity, go through all the scriptural passages that say there's one God, and all the rest of this stuff, because I am assuming that we have that as a common basis.

My goal is to attempt to go beyond that and say, OK, we've got those basics.

We understand those, but what does that mean? What does it mean to believe that there is only one true

God who created all things? That's what I'm going to try to get you to do. So I'm assuming that common basis, if that common basis doesn't exist, you and I are going to be talking on different wavelengths for a long time.

So I'm assuming that that's there, and so I'm not going to be trying to fill in all the gaps on these various ascendery doctrines.

So let's start with our theology. Normally, when I say the word theology,

I'm referring to the whole body of Christian doctrine. But sometimes

I will refer to theology proper. And theology proper is the doctrine of God, period, and nothing else.

Just like soteriology is a study of salvation, theology, in its most accurate sense, is the study of God.

And I think that's where we have to start. We really have to think about who

God is, what God is, how God exists, and how that affects everything else.

Because how we view ourselves is going to be determined in a large part by how we view our creator.

How we view ourselves as a creation, how we view ourselves as a finite being, is going to really be determined by how we look at God's infinite being.

So we all believe there is one God, and you've heard of many of the attributes of God. For example,

I have mentioned before in other classes, I'm going to go through some of the attributes of God, and I'm going to try to draw out some of the meaning in them.

You've heard of some of the natural attributes of God, such as spirituality, personality, and life. God is spiritual.

God is not corporeal. He is not physical in his essence, in his normal mode of being.

God was not once a man who lived on another planet, as our Mormon friends would tell us. Jesus said

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth. He is personal, and that is very, very important.

God is personal. God has personality. God is not inanimate. Pantheists will tell you, oh, yes,

I believe in God. But they believe that God is in the wall and the light fixture and you and me and the butterflies and the bees and everything else.

They believe that God is connected to the universe in an inextricable way.

He and the universe are parts of each other. God cannot exist outside of his creation.

The creation cannot exist outside of God. Therefore, there is really a connection and equation of the created universe and God.

That's what a pantheist would say. But the Bible says God is personal. God's personality, in fact, biblically, is the grounds of our own.

We will see later on that one of the big questions that the world's philosophies cannot answer is where did man's personality come from?

Why is man manly? What is this manishness about man that we cannot get away from?

Why do we have personalities? Why are we personal when animals are not personal? They do not understand the subject -object relationship.

They cannot visualize themselves as a single unit against all others.

They cannot communicate the way that we communicate. They cannot think abstractly the way we think abstractly. Why is that?

Well, the Christian says this is because we are created in the image of God. And in fact, the main image of God is our personality.

And that is the origin of our personality. And it could not have arisen by natural means, which is where the world's philosophies fall short.

But God is personal. And God is living. God is not simply the result of natural processes.

God is life. He gives life. He is the one who is the giver of life to all of us.

He is transcendent. That is what I was just mentioning when I talked about pantheism. God did not have to create.

God does not draw his existence from that which he has created. He is transcendent above creation.

But the ones that I really want to zero in on are the attributes that pertain to his infinity.

Now here, you're really going to have to dig in your spurs, because this is where we start laying some real deep roots for the discussions that will follow.

Number one, absoluteness. God is absolute.

I have never been able to say that with the meaning that I say it now.

God is absolute. Now, before I understood something about the world's system of thought, and don't take me wrong,

I grew up in the public school system. And I all the time find myself thinking in the forms of the world.

And I think one of the best things that could happen to you is if you learn to recognize that very thing for yourself.

I think we all do very frequently. Think on the basic assumptions and presuppositions of the world, rather than upon the assumptions and presuppositions of the

Bible. But before I really had an understanding of what the philosophies of the world were about, when

I would teach this section of this outline and talk about absoluteness, I didn't really know exactly what

I was saying. I said, yes, I was right in saying that God is absolute in the fact that God is absolute love.

And if you want to know what love is, you must refer it back to God to find out what love is. If you want to know what hate is, see how

God treats sin. If you want to know, God is the standard to which we must appeal.

But that has become so much more important to me because, folks, it is absolutely central to Christian theology that God is the central point to which everything else is related.

God is the central ground of being for all of us. God does not depend upon anyone else for his existence.

And you'll find out the first three of these attributes I'm going to talk about are so closely connected that it's next to impossible to attempt to divide them up and discuss them.

But God is absolute. He is the standard to which everything must be referred.

Now, the reason I'm emphasizing this is that in human systems of thought today, man is the absolute.

In fact, one of the part and parcel of sin, if you look at Romans chapter 1, is the removal of God as God as being absolute and replacing it with what?

The creature, which becomes man. This is part and parcel of man's sinful rebellion against God is instead of looking to God as the absolute, we look to ourselves as the absolute, and in fact, become so audacious as to ask

God to allow us to judge him. If you've read much of Vantillia, you'll see that one of his basic presuppositions is

God is absolute. All thoughts must be referred back to God. You cannot put

God on the examination block and put yourself up as the absolute judge and say, well, I'm just not sure about God here.

That's the opposite. It doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. So God is absolute.

He is the reference point to everything we will discuss.

And in fact, the fact that God is absolute is what gives Christian theism, that is the

Christian system of belief in God, its coherence. You see, there is no other thing to which you can root your system that lasts.

You see, all other philosophies that do not make a personal, self -existent

God the center of their philosophy will always run into this problem, relativism.

All human philosophies, at their basis, are relativistic. Why? Because they have no tether point.

They're like a ship in the sea with no anchor. They have nothing to which they can attach themselves. So therefore,

I recall on a BBS system called Apollo, oh, back during the summer, I was talking with this one lady.

And she has kept posting post after post, writing big long posts about the fact that, hey, you've got your truth.

I've got my truth. They're not the same truth, but I've got my truth. Truth is completely relative to the world.

And in fact, how many times have you heard someone say, well, just who do you think you are telling me that your truth is the right truth?

Well, there is no such thing as truth. If one person's truth is different than somebody else's truth, then the whole meaning of the word's gone in that situation.

It is only in Christian theism where you have God, who is self -contained, who is self -existent, who is absolute, who is the ground of all being.

Then everything else, because it has its being in him, has meaning. Since everything else is dependent upon God, then

God doesn't do anything that doesn't have meaning. When you look at the world's systems, you find very quickly that people are always complaining there is no meaning to life.

Well, that's the reason, is that when you dig right down to the very basics of these systems, they have no basic point upon which they can hold on to.

So when something new comes along, it just washes away. No foundation. God is absolute.

God is unique. God is unique. I think I've even gotten away from trying to say there is one

God and just simply saying, God is unique. There's nothing else like him. You can't compare him to anything. There's never been one like him.

There'll never be another one like him. He's unique. There is absolutely nothing else like him. He says that over and over again in scripture.

Who is like me, God says. There is not. Over and over in Isaiah, it says, to whom will you compare me?

There is no one like me. There are no little God -like ones running around out there. He is unique. He is absolute.

He is supreme or he is sovereign. Let me come back to that one.

Let me just mention the third one real quickly before I get to some of the others. Self -existence. Self -existence.

God does not depend upon anything. Anything. His ground of being cannot be found in anyone but himself.

God is self -existent. Everything else is dependent. God is independent. This is very, very important.

All these things come together and are very important in our understanding of God. Because when we start dealing with how

God relates to us, how God relates to the universe, these things will become extremely important.

And we will either have to sacrifice these teachings from scripture, or we are going to have to accept them and deal with the difficult situations that arise when you start emphasizing the self -existence of God, the supremacy of God.

God is self -existent. There's something important about this.

Let me throw it out to you now. When you say God is good, what do you mean?

What do you mean when you say God is good? If you're like me, you've made a fatal error in saying that if you think like I thought.

But you've got, you know, here's God, OK? And, you know, nice little three -letter word there.

And when I said God is good, what I meant was is there's some standard of goodness out here,

OK, to which God conforms. No.

There is nothing that exists outside of God to which God conforms. God's goodness is not his conforming to a standard outside of himself.

God's goodness is part of his innate nature. God is good because God says he's good.

Now, we don't like that because, you see, we always think of God in human terms.

And if a human being said I'm good because I say I'm good, we'd say, boy, you're a rather egotistical person.

But, you see, if God is all these things we're talking about, if God is absolute, if God is the ground of all being, if God is, as scripture presents him, omnipotent and eternal and all these other things we're going to talk about, then when you say

God is good, you are describing an aspect of God himself. You are not saying that God conforms to some outside standard that is above him.

There's nothing above God. He's absolute. He's supreme. So when we say

God is good, what we are saying is that our conception of good is derived from God himself.

In other words, what is good is good because God says it is good.

And what is evil is evil because God says that it is evil. And we cannot say anything other.

That's an important thing. It really is. And you'll see why it becomes more and more important as we start talking about, later on, something called theodicy.

Theodicy is the discussion of, the attempt of justification of God's rulership or God's providence.

In other words, why is there evil in the universe if God is good and God is sovereign? These things will come up when we discuss those issues.

OK, I skipped over one. Let me go back to it. Sovereignty, supremacy, there are so many of them we could hardly begin to look at them.

Isaiah chapter 43, verses 12 to 13, you are my witnesses, declares Yahweh, that I am God. Yes, and from ancient days

I am him, I am he. No one can deliver out of my hand. When I act, who can reverse it, he says.

In the 45th chapter, verse 7, listen to this. I form the light and create darkness.

I bring prosperity and create disaster. I, Yahweh, do all these things.

That's very nice of the NIV to say, I create disaster. That's not what it says.

You know what it says? Anyone got the King James Version at that point? Isaiah chapter 45, verse 7.

I bring prosperity and create disaster? No. Bah -rah -rah, I create evil.

Stick that one in your hat and think about it for a while. Right there in your own scripture, bah -rah -rah.

That's the two basic Hebrew words, bah -rah, to create. Bah -rah -bah -roh -shite, in the beginning,

God created. And rah, any first year Greek student, yeah, any first year

Hebrew student, that's one of the first words you learn, rah. What does that mean? Don't worry, we'll get to it. Isaiah chapter 46, verses 9 through 10.

Remember the former things, those of long ago. And I am God, there is no other. I am God, there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning.

From ancient times, what is still to come. I say my purpose will stand and I will do all that I please.

In the 135th Psalm, verse 6. Just to get your Bible fingers ready to go here, we're gonna run through a couple of them here because this is one of the most important aspects.

And boy, there sure are a lot of passages that teach this. Psalm 135, 6. Psalm 135, 6.

Psalm 135, 6 says, Yahweh does whatever pleases him in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depth.

Now, as we look at these passages, please remember that God's actions are not capricious. You understand what

I mean by capricious? Whimsical, just, well, I think I'll do this. Well, I think I'll do that. Because it sounds like, you know, if a human being said

Psalm 135, 6, we would say that person is capricious. But let me just throw something else out for you.

I'll do a lot of this. I don't believe an absolute being can be capricious. Not only that, since goodness, holiness, these are part of God's perfections, anything he does will be totally good.

Think about that. Anyways, I've got a bunch of passages here. Let me turn to them and let's run through a couple of these, okay?

Let's sort of start from the beginning of the Bible, Genesis chapter 20. Genesis chapter 20.

Verse six. This is a story of Abimelech and Abraham and Sarah and all.

And in Genesis chapter 20, verse six. Then God said to him in the dream, yes,

I know you did this with a clear conscience, so I have kept you from sinning against me.

That is why I did not let you touch her. Now the sinful attitudes or the natural attitudes of Abimelech's heart would have been to go in to Sarah, to engage in relations with her.

But God says, yeah, I know you didn't know. Abraham lied to you, you didn't know what was going on, so I have kept you from sinning against me.

Well, God, how'd you do that? I mean, God never keeps us from sinning, does he? I don't see what that says there.

Exodus chapter 34, verse 24. Exodus 34, 24. This one's fascinating.

Start at verse 22. Exodus 34, 22. Listen to this. Celebrate the feast of weeks with the first fruits of the wheat harvest and the feast of in -gathering at the turn of the year.

Three times a year, all your men are to appear before the sovereign Yahweh, the

God of Israel. Then listen to this. I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the

Lord, your God. Now, wait a minute. How can God control the very thoughts of the hearts of the pagan people surrounding the

Israelites so that he could promise them they won't even covet your land? Wow.

That's interesting. Look at Deuteronomy chapter two, verse 30. And believe me, this is an exceptionally surface listing of verses.

I mean, Deuteronomy chapter two, verse 30. Deuteronomy 2 .30.

But Sihon, king of Heshbon, refused to let us pass through for Yahweh, your

God, had made his spirit stubborn and his heart obstinate in order to give him into your hands as he has now done.

Now, what does that say? God did an action. That is, he made

Sihon, king of Heshbon's heart, obstinate, his spirit stubborn, for a specific purpose.

And what was that purpose? To give the land of the, I guess you'd call them the

Heshbonites, to the children of Israel. Is that not what it says?

That's what it says to me. Look at Joshua chapter 11. Joshua chapter 11, verses 19 and 20.

Except for the Hivites living in Gibeon, not one city made a treaty of peace with the Israelites who took them all in battle, for it was

Yahweh himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as Yahweh had commanded

Moses. And so what does he say? God had a purpose in mind.

God was going to give the land to the Israelites. But the way that he decided to do that was that he would wipe the people out of the land via warfare, and to do so, he hardened the hearts of the leaders of those people so that they would war, wage war with Israel, and he would be on Israel's side, and it says very clearly he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy.

So we see in these passages alone, and I have a number of others to throw at you here, God intervening in human affairs to work his will to the point of hardening people's hearts, stirring up their spirits.

In the book of Ezra, for example, look at Ezra. Sometimes it's for the good. If you look at the book of Ezra, chapter one, look at Ezra 1 .1.

Ezra 1 .1 says, in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of Yahweh spoken by Jeremiah, the, or excuse me,

Yahweh moved the heart of Cyrus, the king of Persia, to make a proclamation throughout his realm and put it in writing, and this is what

Cyrus, king of Persia, said. So notice what happens. Here, God moves the heart, and of course, in Hebrew, the heart is the very center of the will and emotion of man, of Cyrus, who is not even a

Hebrew, he's not even right with God, he's a pagan, so that, why?

To fulfill the word of Yahweh spoken by Jeremiah. God had spoken through Jeremiah, he had said, this is what's gonna happen, and we ask the question, did

Cyrus have much of a choice about this? Think about it. I mean, what if Cyrus had decided not to do it?

Remember, Isaiah prophesied, I believe it was Isaiah 45, that Cyrus would be the one who would release the

Jews 100 years before it ever happened. Now, what would happen if Cyrus had said, eh,

I don't want to? Can you imagine God being made a liar by a man? Who was sovereign in this situation?

God was. And God moved the heart of Cyrus, and Cyrus did what God wanted to do. Look at Ezra 727.

Ezra 727. Just a few of the little passages here that talk about these things.

Ezra 727 says, praise to Yahweh, the God of our fathers, who has put it into the king's heart to bring honor to the house of Yahweh in Jerusalem in this way.

He has put this into the king's heart. Well, how dare he do that? That violates the sovereignty of man.

Well, I've never seen much of a document of the sovereignty of man in Scripture. I've seen a lot on the sovereignty of God, but not a whole lot about the sovereignty of man.

I've seen a lot about man being a creature and a creation and things like that. Isaiah chapter 10. Let's go read a couple more, and then

I'll just throw a few references at you. Isaiah chapter 10, verses five through seven.

Now here you see God using an entire nation of people for his own purposes.

Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger and whose hand is the club of my wrath. So here he pictures

Assyria as a weapon that he is using. I send him, that is the

Assyrian, against a godless nation. I dispatch him against a people who anger me to seize loot and snatch plunder and to trample them down like mud in the street.

So he's saying, I'm gonna use Assyria, against the children of Israel and Judah.

Actually it was Israel that Assyria came against. Knows what happens. But this is not what he intends, verse seven.

Speaking of the Assyrian. This is not what he has in mind. His purpose is to destroy, to put an end to many nations.

This is interesting. Here we see two aspects. We see God saying, hey look, I'm in control of this and I'm gonna use

Assyria to punish Israel. Okay? But notice, the

Assyrians still have a purpose of their own. Remember what happened back in Genesis with Joseph and his brothers?

Remember what happened there? Selling him into slavery? In the 50th chapter of Genesis, after his father dies, his brothers come to Joseph and they're going, now he's gonna get us.

While Papa was alive, he was nice to us, but boy, this guy's got a lot of power now and now he's gonna get us what we did to him years ago.

What did Joseph say to them? Referring to that event, he said, you meant it for evil.

God meant it for good. So even though God used the sinful actions of the brothers, he did it with a pure motive.

That was, he brought about the saving of the entire family. The motivations of the hearts of those men were evil.

It's very important when we start talking about how God can utilize our actions, including sinful actions, think about the cross.

I mean, was it not wrong for people to have nailed Jesus to the cross? It certainly was, but the greatest good that ever came came out of that situation.

God can do that, and exactly how he works that out will obviously be a matter of discussion. Just a couple more in the book of Proverbs and we'll be done.

Proverbs chapter 16. Proverbs has a lot about this. Proverbs chapter 16, verse 33.

Proverbs 16, 33 says, the lot is cast into the lap, but it's every decision is from Yahweh.

Frequently decisions we've made when you couldn't decide what to do, cast the lot. And it says, every decision comes from Yahweh.

Look just a couple chapters over, 1921. 1921, many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is

Yahweh's purpose that prevails. That may be the basis of a little thing that R .C.

Sproul says in Chosen by God when he says, God is free, I am free. God is more free than I am.

When my freedom runs into God's freedom, I lose. That's sort of one way of putting what

Proverbs 1921 says. Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is Yahweh's purpose that prevails.

Look at chapter 20, verse 24, just across the page from me. A man's steps are directed by Yahweh.

How then can anyone understand his own way? I think what he means there is by understanding your own way without reference to God.

And that's gonna be the main discussion we talk about apologetics. The world can't understand itself or the reality around it without referring everything back to the absolute standard which is

God, which is God. So Proverbs 20, 24, a man's steps are directed by Yahweh.

How then can anyone understand his own way? Just one more, 21 .1, the king's heart is in the hand of Yahweh.

He directs it like a water course wherever he pleases. I could sit here and say you might also wanna look at Job 14 .5,

Psalms 65 .4, 139 .16, Proverbs 16 .3, I don't have to put those there. A number of passages here you might wanna look at, many in the

New Testament, things like that, relevant to this issue. It is all through Scripture.

It is so well attested that it is truly unbelievable. And yet it is not something you hear a whole lot about today for the simple reason that when we are faced with what the

Scriptures say concerning God's sovereignty, it is impossible for us to maintain our desired sovereignty over and against his.

So man does not like that. You won't find this too much in most of the philosophies of the world, I can guarantee you that.

I mean, it's part and parcel of the Old Testament story. You have God taking a group of sheep herders, slaves, in one of the most powerful nations on earth at the time and making them into his chosen people.

And look at all the things he does. He demonstrates his control of all nature in the plagues against the nation of Egypt.

He hardens Pharaoh's heart, even though it was pretty obvious. I mean, if God hadn't been involved, if Pharaoh had two brains to smack together, he would have let those people out of there long before Plague 10.

You know, I mean, there had to be some, something supernatural going on here. Same thing with the kings in the land of Canaan, man.

I mean, after they saw the folks walk around Jericho seven times, the wall fell down. It is not smart to fight against people who have that kind of power.

And yet they did anyways and were wiped out. Why? Well, the scriptures say, because God decided that's the way it was gonna be.

Fascinating, fascinating. So when I say God is sovereign, that he is supreme,

I am simply telling you that this is an absolutely necessary aspect of Christian theology.

You divorce this from Christian theology and you're no longer talking about God. You are talking about a

God. He is immutable. He does not change.

Psalm 102, 27, Malachi 3, 6, James 1, 17, that passage where we get the phrase that we use in that beautiful hymn,

Graze thy faithfulness. There is no shadow of turning in thee. God does not change. Let me run through these others really quickly to get down to the number eight, because we'll spend some time on that too.

God is a unity. One substance, one ujja. God is not split up into many different parts.

God's not even split up into three different parts. His actual being itself is not. That's what the trinity is, tri -unity.

He is perfect. He is not, there is a philosophy, a quote unquote theology going around today, very popularly in United Methodist circles, called process theology.

That pictures God as being in process. He is growing.

He is evolving. He is changing. When he created, he did not know that evil would exist. He has no coercive power.

All he has is persuasive power. He attempts to persuade the universe to go the best direction.

It is, definitely not. In fact, when my systematic theology professor went through it, he went through what they taught and all and went through some positive aspects of it, which

I sort of grinned at. And then when he got to the negative aspects, the first thing he said was, most negative thing is, is this obviously isn't the

God of the Bible. I said, yeah, good, all right, very good. But this is, that is, believe it or not, folks, the theology of Claremont Graduate School, which is the

United Methodist Graduate School that is producing United Methodist pastors today. Shocking, isn't it?

But it is. Let me get to this one. This is the one that I will refer back to as much as absoluteness, if not more.

Those of you old timers around here that have been here for a long time know what's coming. But this is vital.

For those listening on tape, I just drew a single line on the whiteboard behind me here.

I think in my study that one of the most absolutely important things to attempt to at least understand is the eternity of God.

God is eternal. I think there's a lot of misconception about that.

We get the idea that God has just simply existed for a long time and will exist for a long time out there. No. God is eternal.

What I have written on the board is meant to represent time. Time progresses from a beginning and goes to the end.

And despite all the fanciful things like Star Trek and Star Wars and all the rest of the stuff where you get to go through time and everything like that, we all go one direction.

So for purposes of illustration here, let's just call this the beginning over here and let's put

Moses right here. And we'll put the cross down here, which isn't exactly right, obviously.

It won't be really, really special here. And say we're down here and right close to the end of the timeline there for all of the pre -millennialists amongst us.

Little bit of a joke there. Time goes that way. Right now, my watch says it is nine minutes before eight o 'clock.

Now, unless something absolutely amazing happens and a 747 drops in the building or they bulldoze it and forget to tell us to leave or something like that, in nine minutes, it's gonna be eight o 'clock.

And guess what? We're all gonna get there at the same time. We're all gonna get there at the same time. Carol's watch will get there a little bit earlier than ours, but we're all gonna be there pretty much at the same time.

In other words, we experience a succession of events. We are locked into time.

Our entire language is built around time. Tenses, past, present, future, it's all time.

We think in time, and if we try to get out of thinking in a time way, we really get lost.

Why? Because we were created to exist within this realm. Right now.

It is true the scriptures say that God has placed eternalists in our hearts, but God has created us in the temporal realm.

When I say temporal, I mean the time realm, not in the eternal realm. Now, if you will look at the board again,

I wanna say some things that you're really gonna have to think about, but you're gonna have to grab onto these things.

If this is time, picture this entire board as God, the being of God.

If that is the case, then God exists equally and fully at every single point in that line, instantaneously.

Another way of saying this, all points in time are instantaneous to God.

Following me? God does not experience a succession of events.

Remember what he said in Isaiah, I am the one that declares the beginning from the end.

He is the one who talks about things that have not even been done yet. How can he do that?

We have frequently thought of God as walking along with us on the timeline, and somehow he has a little crystal ball.

And somehow he can see in the future. Well, how can he do that? How can God see in the future? God's in the future.

God sees all of time simultaneously. He experiences no succession of events.

That's why he doesn't change. Change, the very idea of change, suggests existence within time.

If God does not exist within time, if he is not limited to time, then how can he change?

Obviously he cannot. This concept and the relationship between the eternal and the temporal will come up over and over and over again in our discussion.

That is where, for us, when we get done building our whole system, it's like building a perfect circle and you get done, it's like this.

You made a boo -boo someplace. No, we only perceive it that way because we only exist here.

And we can't understand everything that's out here. We can't. We weren't created to.

God is eternal. He is the I am, not the I was, okay?

It's hard for us to figure out that he's still as much with Moses at the burning bush as he is with us.

That is outside of our realm of existence. And therefore, we're very uncomfortable with that.

But as Psalm 90, verse two says, before the mountains were brought forth, wherever thou hast formed, the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art

God. And you see, time is a part of God's creation. The only way we can measure the passing of time is by observing the creation of God.

So obviously, since God existed before, and of course, that's a bad word because that predicates time, before creation, then obviously, he is not walking down some timeline and doesn't know what the future is or is just looking at the future with a crystal ball.

That doesn't work. This is how God can prophesy. This is how he can inspire prophets to say, this is what's going to happen.

It's not because God looks into the future and knows what's gonna happen. All of time is a completed fact to God.

Think about that. If all of time is a completed fact to God, what does that mean? Think about the ramifications of what we're saying.

If all of time is a completed fact to God, there is nothing contingent at all.

See, God's word never says, I will triumph over evil if y 'all do a good job.

Ever noticed a passage like that? I haven't seen one of those. God says, I will triumph over evil, period, end of discussion.

He doesn't have to say if this happens or if this happens. Why? Because all of time is a reality of God.

It's completed. To God, guess what? Evil's already defeated. Thought about that?

You've ever wondered why, how it was in the third chapter of Romans? God says that the sacrifice of Christ is applied to those who sinned even before Christ, like Abraham and people like that.

Remember, he talks about the sins he had passed over. They can be justified in the blood of Christ, things like that. You ever wondered how?

Because see, to God, what's Jesus described as in scripture? The lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

See, from us, Jesus Christ was slain 2 ,000 years ago. Okay, I understand that, that's fine.

The scripture speaks in those terms frequently. You see, God, from God's viewpoint, he had always been, he had always been.

And so he could apply the merits of that sacrifice here just as well as he could down here.

God is an awfully fantastic person, an awfully fantastic being.

So far, that's why he says my ways are not your ways. My thoughts aren't your thoughts. As far as the heavens are above the earth are my ways above your ways.

We wouldn't know any of this if God hadn't revealed it to us. You would never know any of this outside of God's revelation.

God makes himself known. We never find him out. God makes himself known. It's an important aspect. This concept is radical for most

Christians today. I don't hear much about this.

The rest of you heard a lot about this? I haven't. Yeah, only in a negative way, yeah.

This is important. This is important. Now, you're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I'm seeing some ramifications here. How can I have any freedom of all if this is true? We're gonna talk about that.

How can, see, I don't, some of you, I don't know what your, quote unquote, soteriological viewpoint is, but you're gonna be challenged no matter what it is by these things.

That's what we're here to do. Now, if God is eternal, then he is obviously, notice how all these things about God fit together.

They fit together. You cannot parcel up God in these little subjects and say, talk about his absoluteness without talking about his eternity at the same time because they're just simply two ways of describing something that is the same.

Since God is eternal, since he does not change, since all of time is instantaneous to him, then obviously he's absolute.

And obviously, nothing that exists within here can be cut loose from God or have any meaning separated from God, and yet that's where the world is.

The person that you're talking to that has been steeped in the world's philosophies, which we will discuss later, is attempting to make sense of this by forgetting this.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It leaves a person floating out in the midst of a sea of relativism and meaninglessness because God isn't seen as the reference point to which everything must be referred to make sense.

Now, I think sin is the main reason that we do this. The sinful human being sets himself up as the absolute standard, gets very mad at you if you attempt to put any authority over him whatsoever.

Anyone ever notice that in talking to folks in the world? How dare you call me a sinner? I'm not a sinner.

I can't believe the number of times I've heard that. How dare you tell me that I have to believe in Jesus?

Who does he think he is? God. God, that's who he thinks he is.

Okay, let me just mention a couple of the attributes of God. You know of the omnis, such as omnipresence.

Psalm 139, seven through 10, Jeremiah 23, 23 to 24. Omniscience. You see how omniscience is tied in with this?

How can God be omniscient if he's not sovereign? You thought about that?

You thought about that? Think about a system that basically says, no, man is a sovereign being.

In other words, God does not know what man's gonna do. God has to wait on man's responses and actions.

God's sort of this cosmic person up there who's just waiting, and you know, he's not gonna do anything until someone asks him to, and someone asks, okay,

I'll do that, okay, I'll do that. You want me to do that? Okay, I'll do that. A servant up there in heaven, you're just responding to man and just, well, you know,

I'll keep everything going here. Such a God cannot be omniscient.

It's a logical impossibility. You cannot say God is sovereign if there is so much as one particle in the universe that is not under his control.

Because you could not guarantee that that one single renegade particle, which according to the

Bible, draws its own very being from God, so I'm not sure how God could not be in control of it, but that one singular particle that exists outside of God's control isn't gonna somehow interfere with what he's trying to do and mess the whole thing up.

You couldn't guarantee it, but God guarantees what I say is gonna happen. I will do what I please.

The only way he could do that without making an absolute fool of himself is if he has the ability to make that happen, which means he's in control.

So omniscience. He has all knowledge because there's nothing contingent. You hear me?

You may hear me, but you're gonna have to think about what I'm saying. Oh, it brings a lot of fun questions up.

There's nothing contingent to God because all of time is a created reality to him. Omnipotence, he has all power, obviously.

You see, we like to say, yeah, God can do everything. Oh, wait a minute. What do you mean God can do everything? Can God cease to be

God? Think about it. I mean, if we say just a blanket statement,

God can do everything, if you'll notice, like I suggested one of the books you might wanna pick up is

Schaeffer's, Birkhoff's Systematic Theology. If you'll notice in almost any systematic theology, when they discuss the omnipotence of God, which is normally what we associate with the idea that God can do anything, you will find a number of restrictions on that because God's word gives us restrictions.

God cannot lie because that would be untrue to his very being. Because God being true is not

God conforming to a standard of truth outside of himself. God's being is true. And therefore,

God cannot lie because it's against his being. So, there are a number of things

God cannot do, including ceasing being God. And to grant contingency, to grant sovereignty, to make something that is this.

And we're gonna talk a lot about this, especially when we get into Schaeffer. Autonomous.

Without law. To make something that is not under his control, would mean he's not eternal.

Because then you introduce the idea of contingency. He is not omniscient, and neither is he any longer sovereign.

So, the question you're really asking is, can God in his sovereignty cease being sovereign? The only answer

I can give you is I don't believe so. I certainly don't think his word says that he does. You see, the basis of the system of modern philosophy, the basis, folks, most of you that are my age, and I'm younger, the basis of the teachers that you had, and most definitely all of us who have children, the teachers that our children will have, is that man is that.

That is the basis of all secular philosophy at this time.

And in reality, it always has been. But it's just getting worse now. Man is autonomous.

Okay? Now, think with me a little bit. I mentioned right at the beginning of this evening,

I said, I'm telling you, you have to get your theology down before you get your apologetics down. You see, if your theology says that man is this, your apologetics are gonna be completely different than what

I'm talking about. See? Vital, vital.

Ever talk to someone who is an agnostic, an atheist, something like that, and you felt like you were banging your head up against the wall, you know why?

Because you're trying to argue with him on his basis. His presuppositions is, he's this. He's never gonna bow before God as long as he thinks he's this.

Now, everything else that we will discuss will flow back to or out of what we just talked about, relative to God.

It has to. It has to. When we talk about Van Til's presuppositional apologetics, basically, in a nutshell, what

Van Til is saying is, the world thinks it's this. That's a presupposition.

We think they ain't that. That's our presupposition. Our presupposition is God, and what you've gotta do is you've gotta get your presupposition straightened out before you even start talking.

Because if you don't deal with your basic assumptions that are underlying your whole system, you're never gonna make connections.

Can we clarify here? Contingent means that which is not known.

That which is dependent upon the capricious will of man.

Contingency is simply saying that God is not, this line is not completely known to God.

It's relative to something other than God. In other words, you have, instead of what

I've been pushing all night, you've got one central point, the self -contained

God, to which everything else relates. In a contingent system, you've got a whole mess of these things, and none of them relate to one another.

In other words, if there's anything that God is sort of waiting on, well, I don't know if this person's gonna do this or not, or this person's gonna do this or not, that's contingency.

The vast majority of Christians today believe that. You may still, that's fine,

I have no problem with that. It's taken me a long time to think through this stuff, folks. Long time.

And I normally have time during the day to think about it. Work an eight -hour -a -day job, you don't have as much time as I did, so it can take you a long time.

I have no problem with that. I have no problem with that at all. Don't think that I'm gonna be upset if you walk out here going,

I, you, and, and, and. Hey, as long as you know it's here, and as long as your heart's desire is, well,

I don't agree with him, but I have to admit, I didn't see some of that stuff before. I'm gonna have to think this through, and my ultimate priority is, hey, if God's word teaches that,

I'm gonna change my view to what God's word says, and not what somebody else says. As long as that's your desire, more power to you.

This is in the warp and woof of the Old Testament revelation, and we cannot ignore it.

And if we do ignore it, we will never be able to deal with the whole revelation that God has given to us.

We will always be dealing just with surface issues. Most quote -unquote preaching that you hear today bases its proclamation and its appeal to an individual that does not yet understand that they are not this.

In fact, much of gospel preaching today is aimed at and based upon the thought that man is this.

And you wonder why Christians 20 years later, when they finally run into this, after getting into the word far enough, go, whoa, wait a minute here.

What's going on? What's going on? I think that's part of the fact that the scriptures always present

Jesus Christ. When you hear a lot of popular preaching, what do you hear?

Except Jesus says you're what? Savior, savior. You know how it always is in scripture, every time?

Lord and savior. I submit to you, Jesus Christ cannot be the savior of the soul over whom he is not

Lord. And I think the confession of that deals with that.

Someone mentioned to me, while I was teaching my Romans class, they had the book chosen by God with them at the

Wednesday evening meal. And one of their friends from their

Bible study asked them, what's the book about? So she started talking to them a little bit. Her friends actually bowed and had a word of prayer that she be delivered from this heresy, right there in the

Wednesday evening meal. Yes. Okay.

So the vast majority of the Christian world today doesn't deal with this.

The book does. There are predominantly two, quote unquote, camps, shall we say.

And I am not including in this Roman Catholicism because I'll be perfectly honest with you, I'm not including Roman Catholicism within the pale of Christianity.

The Arminian position is the opposite of the, quote unquote,

Calvinistic position. But these two positions basically are summed up and believe me, it's just summed up in what are known as their five points.

The Arminian five points came first, but no one remembers what they are anymore, so who cares?

They don't spell tulip and that's why. Most of you know what the Calvinistic five points are.

Total depravity, that is the idea that sin has totally and completely affected every aspect of man's life.

It does not mean that man is as bad as he could be. It simply means that sin has affected all of man. That's what total depravity is.

Unconditional election. Now folks, oh no.

Folks, you believe this? You can't reject that, you can't.

It just doesn't work, it's illogical. How can God do anything in here conditioned upon what this in here does?

That didn't make any sense, did it? Well, that's the situation you're stuck in. Unconditional election means

God elects not on the basis of anything that the individual does. He elects on the basis of his own mercy and grace and that's it.

So this. This is the one where everybody goes, ah! This is why

I was a four -point calvinist for a long time. I was a twip. Limited atonement.

I'm not gonna get into this this time. The full discussion of predestination election is Saturday. Let me just mention, limited atonement means

Christ died in the place of and for the elect and the elect only. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

How can you believe that? Well, I'll explain later. Irresistible grace. This makes sense if you believe in total depravity because have you ever seen a dead person resist much?

I haven't. I'll tell you my stories about that anyways. And the last one is the perseverance of the saints or as I like it better, the preservation of the saints because that gives

God perseverance of the saints. That's the other way of saying eternal security. Which of course logically flows from the fact that if you were chosen by God from all eternity,

God normally does not mess up in that which he plans on doing. That's TULIP. And that was in response to the

Arminian contention that A, sin did not fully affect man in all areas, that man still had innate goodness and could choose the good.

B, that God elects only on the basis of the condition that man repents and da, da, da, da. So in other words,

God is not the one who causes a person to repent or anything like that, but man is. Universal atonement,

Christ died for everybody equally. I like asking the question, who died with Christ?

Good question. Irresistible grace, man can resist God's grace and God cannot do anything about that.

And of course, what I call eternal insecurity. Which is normally not how they say it, but I sort of like it that way myself.

So anyways, those were the responses and the folks who made up the Five Points of Calvinism were smart enough to make an acrostic so people remembered theirs, forgot the

Arminians, and won by default. So that's how that works. Always, you know, who can ever forget

IBM, you know? I mean, it's just, you know, that's the way it works. Make it that way and it works. So those are, what

I'm saying to you is, whether you're this or this, guess what?

You're apologetic will be completely different. Because guess what? This person agrees with the natural man about that, as does the

Roman Catholic, okay?

Now, you might say, Light, I dare you to make me a Calvinist.

And I can just hear it now, I dare you. Well, that's okay, I'm not gonna try to. It took

God a long time working on me. What I'm saying is, I did not realize fully at the time that I began thinking about apologetics,

I began straightening out my anthropology, that is my doctrine of man, how much the fact that I was completely this now, and I was, by the way,

I was made this by the word of God and not by anything else. Now, if you're not this, don't say I'm trying to slam you.

But there wasn't anybody running around pushing me into this. In fact, I was going against the tide to do this.

I mean, if anyone's gonna do that, you can go against the tide these days. This was after a lot of soul searching, because folks,

I was raised in the exact same place you were, and I had the same conceptions of, hey, it was just all up to me. God was just sort of going, well, hey, if you all wanna get saved, come on over.

And he's talking to a bunch of dead people. It's like, God is smarter than that. And I finally came to the conclusion after studying all this stuff, but it took me a lot of work to get here.

This person has a completely different apologetic than this person. You have to.

You have to. And we will see that as we begin discussing the subject of apologetics, because where you are here is gonna determine where you are in your apologetic.

It really, really will. Now, what we believe about man will obviously be dependent upon what we believe about God.

Unfortunately, in much of modern theology, our assumptions about man have determined what we teach about God.

In modern liberal theology today, humanistic assumptions about man being autonomous, about man being free from defect of sin, about man being able on the basis of his own reason to determine the truthfulness of anything without any reference to God, this type of philosophy and teaching has made the teaching of a sovereign

God almost unheard of, well, completely unheard of in secular universities other than, would you believe people once believed this?

Boy, were they in the dark ages. And has unfortunately made it somewhat scarce, in fact, unfortunately all too scarce in our own theological schools.

But we must go to God's word to determine what God's word says concerning the nature of man.

First thing that we understand of man is that man is finite.

Man is a creature. Man is limited. The limits are placed upon man by God.

Therefore, immediately, no matter what you think about free will, free will cannot mean autonomy.

It cannot mean the ability to do anything you want to do because God has created man for a specific purpose in a specific way.

You do not have the free will to fly without the use of an airplane. I cannot simply will to be somewhere else right now.

There are certain laws in this universe that simply tell me you can't do that. So my free will, quote unquote, is limited in that way.

Since man is a creature, then man is dependent upon his creator.

And therefore, if man does not have relationship with his creator, man will not function as man was designed to function.

And do we not see that all around us? Most definitely. This one's very interesting.

Since man is a creature and is finite, therefore man must receive revelation from God to have true knowledge of the universe around him.

Think about that. Man is meant to be a being that receives revelation from God.

If God is the ground of all being, including man's, then the only way that man can have a true and proper knowledge of the universe around him is through the revelation of God.

Even before sin, man depended upon supernatural revelation from God to know the limits in which his behavior was to be.

God told Adam and Eve before the fall, what? Don't eat of that tree. That was supernatural revelation.

They could not simply look at the tree and say, wow, I can see in that tree that God doesn't want us to eat it.

They could not receive that information from a natural source. Man was dependent upon revelation.

And therefore man is created to receive revelation, act on revelation, to quote unquote, think

God's thoughts after him. You can see how in every one of these, man being finite, being dependent, receiving revelation, what does sinful man do to every single one of them?

Perverts it. He claims that he is autonomous. He's not dependent and he doesn't need any revelation.

Sin is always just the opposite of that which God has created man to be. Man is created in the image of God.

What does that mean? What does image of God mean? Well, there have been reams written on that subject.

But I see the image of God predominantly being man's personality, as I mentioned earlier.

There is a manishness about us. There is a humanness that we cannot deny.

Maybe the best way I can bring this out is to explain some of the things we're gonna talk about a little later briefly. Most of modern thought is trending toward the idea that man is explainable completely upon natural processes, upon natural bases.

It is called what I consider to be the true enemy of Christianity today in all of its forms.

It is called naturalism. That all we see about us is explainable upon natural things.

In other words, do not refer anything back to God. It's the exact opposite of what

I've been saying we have to do, refer everything back to God. Naturalism says you refer everything back to nothing.

The result of this is that man is nothing more than the result of time plus chance.

As some modern writers have put it, man is just simply a roll of the dice.

Exactly, natural selection. Didn't have to happen that way, just happened to be that way.

No purpose, no meaning. Time and chance explains everything. That's naturalism, that's naturalism.

Therefore, people like B .F. Skinner, anyone familiar with B .F. Skinner? Very, very big in educational circles.

Very, very influential in educational circles. Simply says that all we are is sort of like a machine that is completely, all of our behavior, all of our thoughts, everything we are can be completely and totally explained upon genetic and environmental factors.

No personality, no innate worth. You're just simply the result of your environment and that's it.

You're Plato, you're Putty. Over against this,

I believe that man bears the image of God. Man knows that he transcends simply that which is this body.

We cannot live in this realm and that's what Schaeffer's gonna say over and over again.

When you read Schaeffer, the God who is there, he is gonna pound it into your brain. Everybody who believes that does not act on it.

They break down someplace. They break down someplace, they can't do it because they're trying to deny the personality of man and to do so, they have to deny their own self and they can't do it.

Some people try for a long time but some place they trip up and Schaeffer's awfully good at finding the places where they do.

Man has an intellect, he has a personality, he has something that transcends simply that which can be explained naturally.

Okay, what we cannot forget however is that the revelation of God tells us that we are not still in the same state as we were when we were originally created by God.

Sin has entered into the human experience. It is, in its essence, sin is a denial of God's being.

When Eve took of the fruit, she was in basic saying that though God claimed to be the absolute,

God claimed to be the one that had the right to say what had true meaning and what didn't,

Eve said, I'm going to usurp his position. I am going to decide for myself,

I am going to deny my creatureliness, I'm going to deny my dependence, I'm going to deny his revelation,

I'm going to deny that he is God and I am going to take his place. So sin is a rebellion, it is a denial of God's true being.

Some of the consequences of sin we know, for example, from Ezekiel 18 four and other places is death.

We find when we look at the classic passage in Romans chapter one, that man still lives in God's revelation all around us, but it's like we're living in it wearing blinders or we're blind men attempting to find something.

Paul tells us in Romans chapter one that we suppress the reality of God's revelation, we suppress that which is around and we attempt to, though we know

God exists, though we are faced with his revelation all around us, in our very bodies, Calvin liked to say, you can see the fact that God exists simply by looking at your hand.

We suppress it, we deny it. Oh no, no, no, no, that's not what it means, no, no, no. And the result is we become self -oriented.

We have to, we have to try to find some orientation point, so we attempt to put our anchor down in ourselves.

There is, we were never designed to be that and so it doesn't work. Another result of sin is found in Romans chapter three, verses 10 through 18.

Read Romans three, 10 through 18 sometime. If that isn't a classic passage on total depravity,

I don't know what it is. If you want the definition of total depravity, read Romans chapter three, verses 10 through 18, but I wanna specifically zero you into Romans chapter three, verse 11, where we read a passage that in Greek is, uka exeton tan theon, there is none who seek after God.

How much, how much of Christian preaching today is based upon the presupposition that all you gotta do is hey, just tell them, they're seeking after God.

They are. Paul says, there is not one who seeks after God.

I mean, that's what it says, very clear. Why is it that there is none who seeks after God?

In Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three, and Colossians chapter two, verses 13 through 14, we're introduced to a phrase on Paul's part that is vital to our understanding of this whole subject, and that is, we were dead in sin.

What does it mean to be dead in sin? Well, the New Testament gives us a lot of indications.

First of all, I do not believe that it effaces or gets rid of the image of God. Fallen man is still created in the image of God.

You may not be able to see it as clearly as you once could, but fallen man is still in the image of God. He still has personality.

Being dead in sin, it effects the entire being of God, including the mind and the knowledge. I like what

C .E .B. Cranfield said in his commentary on Romans, Romans chapter one. He talked about the fact that sin, when it's involved in our reasoning process, causes us to deflect the truth, or the truth is deflected by sin.

It's like attempting to shoot a bullet or an arrow or something straight ahead, but there's something in between that deflects it off away, like shooting an arrow through a bush or something like that.

You can probably get it through the bush if it's thin enough, but it's probably not gonna come out going the same direction it did when it went in. In the same way, being dead in sin, the scriptures tell us, effects everything, including our ability to reason.

You see, if we were not affected by sin, we should be able to reason from here to there and get to the truth.

But if you look at the world today, nobody does that. You can find a bunch of different people, all start from the same point, and guess where they end up?

At 175 different places. Starting from the same basis, they go, pew, all over the place, deflected.

Meaning, being dead in sin means that our will has been placed in bondage to sin.

Jesus said that those to whom he was speaking who were in Satan's grasp were of their father, the devil.

Paul talks about people being held captive by Satan, what? To do his will.

We'll get more into the will later. Being dead in sin means that man is morally unable to choose the good.

John 644, Jesus says, no man can come to me unless the father draws him.

John 665, he says, no man can come to me unless the father has enabled him.

Why, because dead people normally do not do a whole lot of things. Being dead in sin, according to the passages in 1

Corinthians, means the natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God, for they are spiritually discerned.

And if he is spiritually dead, those things that require spiritual discernment obviously are foolishness to him.

In fact, the whole last paragraph on the handout I gave you was a whole section of quotations from Paul's discussion of his apologetics that we will get to later on.

I think what I'd like to do is I'd like to stop here and take up the subject of anthropology the next time we get together, because we've already thrown so much at you in one night that I want to have some time left over for the discussion aspect.

I know it says study and discussion, but I don't want to study you right out of your mind.

Some of you undoubtedly are considering me a heretic, and that's okay, I don't mind that at all.

As long as you come back on Saturday, you just don't show up again and figure, you know, we're here for this. Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me a chance to talk about the whole thing and it'll be much better for me.

Well, what about it? I'd like some feedback. I'd like some feedback. How many have heard things they had not heard before tonight?

A couple of you? The rest of you? We'll teach the next class, okay? What about it?

Did you put your hand up? Okay. Okay.

Yes, yes. It's helped a lot of folks,

I know. That there's got to be reasons why they won't teach their people.

Well. Well, it is true, it is true that the natural man would find the

Roman Catholic position much more palatable and acceptable. So what you say, though meant in jest, is unfortunately true.

On a local BBS just recently, I've been talking to a man who originally called himself an agnostic, but when these subjects have come up, he has tended toward Roman Catholicism because they have the same presupposition.

Same presupposition. I can't answer that question. You'd have to ask each individual person. It is not true that all pastors know about this because just, for example, in the convention, not a part of the

Southern Baptist Convention, two -thirds of those pastors never went to college. Okay? And you're not gonna pick it up from most popular reading.

That's for sure. Those that did, a lot of the professors don't take this position, depending.

Only when weird people like me come along and cause the unrest, I suppose. But most pastors are so, most pastors are so busy with just simply the affairs of the church that most of them that I know have very little time to spend a whole lot of time simply in theological reflection and study.

And, and, the other thing is, the people who have written the most about this and have done the most research in it are people that are not exactly on your number one hit parade seller list at Berean Christian Bookstore.

Nothing personally is Berean. But, you know, how to, don't anyone take offense to this, but how to speak in tongues and heal your car sells a whole lot more than Calvin's Institutes do.

I'm serious. That they will tell you that their theology section is the slowest section in the store and the charismatic section is the fastest going section.

By far. I picked up two books by G .C. Burkhauer a couple days ago in there that have been sitting there for over a year.

Excellent works, excellent works. They can't keep some of that stuff stocked that teaches, you know, the

Copeland Hagen garbage, which it truly is garbage, it's heresy.

Pure and simple if you've listened to any of it, you know. But I don't, I'm very uncomfortable in saying, you know, well, people are specifically attempting to suppress this.

I don't think so. I think that a lot of people, you know, they, if they're brought up on the idea that, well, you know, you're the one that got yourself saved.

You know, God just sort of sat back and hoped you'd accept him. That becomes such a part of their thinking that anything that could possibly threaten them.

My dad once, when preaching in a Wednesday night sermon, was saying, said, you did not choose

God. God chose you. And a woman actually stood up in the service. It was a smaller church. Shrieked and said, oh, pastor, don't take that away from me.

I found God. And he said, my dear lady, you did not find

God. You weren't even searching for God before God sovereignly moved in your life. Well, I'll definitely admit that I think that this is one of the primary reasons that the church in the

United States is predominantly, predominantly, and I'm speaking of the visible church, the professing church, is predominantly impotent to change our culture or to address the issues that are now facing us that have never ever before faced the church.

The church has never had to answer the question, is it okay to genetically engineer your baby?