Interpreting Scripture, What We Believe, Part 3

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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What we're going to talk about today is interpreting Scripture. And this is essential for the

01:07

Christian. For the Christian, you need to know how to interpret

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Scripture. Your pastor's job is to do that, but it is also your job. One, two, three!

01:19

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

01:25

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

01:35

Well, welcome to The Rap Report. I am your host, Andrew Rapoport. Glad to be with you here.

01:42

And I am joined by my trusty sidekick, Bud the Wiser. How are you, Bud? Hello, Andrew.

01:48

How are you today? Good. Good. And, you know, it's always educational seeing what your shirts, you wear billboards on your chest because you're always trying to present a message.

01:59

So what's today's message? Today's message, actually, shout out to my brother Rashad, who made this shirt, the government is not

02:09

God. Rashad, the same one that you interviewed on your podcast,

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The Bud Zone? Yes. So if people listen to The Bud Zone, they would know. Oh, okay.

02:21

Well, before we get started, we do have to mention a new podcast on the

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Christian Podcast Community. And, you know, we are part of, we don't always mention this, but we are part of the

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Christian Podcast Community, and that's part of Ministry of Striving Fraternity, where this show comes from.

02:39

And we actually have a number of new podcasts coming up. I should mention that. But we have one called

02:48

One Little Candle, and it's actually a good show. I shouldn't say actually, it is a good show, because if it's on our podcast community, we're pretty critical.

02:59

You go back out there and correct yourself. Yeah. Except for The Bud Zone. We let that one slip in. But, you know, maybe

03:07

I'm just getting older, Bud, but you did one on nurturing the soul of your grandchild.

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And I didn't even think about some of the things of, you know, not that I'm a grandfather yet, but I'm getting to that age with married children.

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And it was something that got me thinking, like, you know, just preparing now, if I have grandchildren, some things to think about of how to nurture grandchildren.

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And that's one of the neat things about the Christian Podcast Community is we have such a wide variety of podcasts on there, from, you know, whether it's homeschooling or women's issues, whether theology, we have something for everything.

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And, you know, it gets me thinking all the time. So, you could just listen to, you know, if you subscribe to Christian Podcast Community feed, you get everybody who's hosted with the

03:56

Christian Podcast Community, or you can go to christianpodcastcommunity .org and check them all out. So, this week,

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Bud, we're continuing in our series on what we believe. This is from the website, from strivingforeternity .org,

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under the About section on what we believe. The reason we're doing this, as we said in the first episode of the series, is to go through theology.

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A lot of folks, we go to church, we don't really think about the theology of the church we're attending.

04:25

Why is it important? People read a doctrinal statement, maybe, that's on their church, and they don't really understand the significance of what are the issues trying to be raised by a doctrinal statement.

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And so, what we want to do is go through our doctrinal statement and dig into it, because not only is it hopefully educational, helpful for you guys in your thinking, but also look at why doctrinal statements are important, how much goes into it.

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There's a lot that goes into a doctrinal statement to try to get as concise as you can, but really answer a lot of different things at once.

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As you've seen, we're three weeks into this series and only on the third paragraph of the doctrinal statement.

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We could be at this a while. But we do have some exciting other episodes that will be coming up,

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I'll just tell you. Next week's episode, it'll be really neat to hear who we have on and how that discussion goes, but I'll save that for later.

05:26

So let's get into this, though, Mr. Budd. Yes, sir. So, we're in this section on the

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Scripture, the Holy Scriptures. Just for context, this one's the shortest of the sections, so the other sections we may not read the whole thing for context.

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But could you read what we have for under the Holy Scriptures? Sure. Okay, the

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Holy Scriptures. The Bible is God's special self -revelation, which is limited in space and time and are directed to various designated individuals, 2

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Peter 121. The accepted writings that make up the Bible are the 39 Old Testament books and 27

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New Testament books without any of the additional writings commonly known as the Apocrypha. The Bible provides the only inerrant and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

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The Bible is inspired by God. Inspiration is that supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in which

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He superintended, controlled and directed, the reception to the writers and communication to the hearers and the readers of the divine message to mankind such that the product, the original writing, is verbally, every word, and plenary, completely, both inerrant, without error, and authoritative, 2

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Timothy 3 .16. God spoke in His written Word by a process of dual authorship.

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The Holy Spirit so superintended the human authors that through their individual personalities and different styles of writing, they composed and recorded

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God's Word to man, 2 Peter 1, 20 and 21, without error in the whole or in the part,

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Matthew 5 .18, 2 Timothy 3 .16, thus making Scriptures completely and totally sufficient for life and godliness.

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The only means of interpreting Scripture is a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation which affirms the belief that the opening chapters of Genesis present creation in six literal days,

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Genesis 1 .31, Exodus 31 .17, and seeing a distinction between Israel and the

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Church. The Bible constitutes the only infallible rule of faith and practice with a number of scriptural citations there.

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Whereas there may be many applications of any given passage of Scripture, there is but one true interpretation according to God, except where Scripture makes it clear that God intended a dual meaning.

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The meaning of Scripture is to be found as one diligently applies the literal, grammatical, historical method of interpretation under the illuminating of the

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Holy Spirit, with some citations from Scripture there. It is the responsibility of believers to ascertain carefully the true intent and meaning of Scripture, recognizing that proper application is binding on all generations.

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Yet the truth of Scripture stands in judgment of men, never do men stand in judgment of it.

08:28

Sorry about that, because I was reading from a previously printed copy, just like overnight, so I didn't get the new edits.

08:34

That's right. So I did add an edit, and that's the thing. I mean, this is one of the things that we end up seeing when it comes to doctrinal statements is sometimes things need to be updated and clarified even more.

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And so we're going to get to that edit in a moment, because I thought that as I was preparing for the show and thinking through things,

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I realized, you know what, there is an area where I need to put more clarification. So let's start with this.

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What we're going to talk about today is interpreting Scripture, and this is essential for the

09:06

Christian. For the Christian, you need to know how to interpret

09:12

Scripture. Your pastor's job is to do that, but it is also your job. We do not pay our pastors to do the interpretation for us.

09:21

They will do a more diligent job, or at least they should, may I correct that, they should be doing a more diligent job and spending their weeks studying the

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Scriptures to properly interpret for you, to help you understand the

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Scriptures. But unfortunately, what most pastors end up doing, as many seminaries are teaching, is that it's all about the big idea.

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And so what they end up doing is teaching application, not interpretation. And people start to read the

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Scriptures with that kind of thinking of, what does this mean to me? It doesn't matter what the

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Scriptures mean to you, it matters what it meant when God wrote it.

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So what does it mean to God is the question we need to ask. What did God intend when he wrote it? And this is what we see as a problem with many churches.

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We are to interpret the Scriptures to rightly live before God. We don't handle

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God's Word right, we're in trouble. To quote John Calvin, let me change that because I don't speak that language, we'll paraphrase

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John Calvin because it'll be translated into English, but he basically had said that if you take God's Word out of context, you no longer have

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God's Word but man's Word. Think about that because it's true. If we take God's Word out of context and we give it a meaning that it never had, we don't have

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God's Word anymore. We have our Word, what we're creating it. Do you want to be known as twisting

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God's Word? You know there's someone else known for twisting God's Word. We saw that person twisting God's Word when it came to tempting

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Jesus. Do you want to be like Satan? No. No you don't. So we want to make sure we're accurate in this.

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That's why this episode is going to be so important. Now, I'm going to put in the show notes some other episodes we did.

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You could go to the Christian Podcast Community and just search Interpreting Scriptures and you'll see some previous episodes

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I've done. We'll dig into detail. There's an episode called Interpreting Scripture, another one for Rules of Interpreting Scripture.

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You could look through those and they will help you in more detail on how to do these things, but what we're going to do is talk the why today.

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And so let's look at this. The only means of interpreting scripture is a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation.

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So let me just stop there. There's reasons for those words. This is a method of interpreting that is going to focus in on the way language works.

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Now there are many different views that people have on how to interpret. When Bud and I did some episodes on the series on the church, we brought in a friend who has a different way of interpreting,

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Amelia Ramos, came on and explained his Christological approach.

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Now that's very different than the way we interpret. The way that we end up interpreting, or at least the way

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I'm interpreting, is a literal, grammatical, historical method. What's the difference?

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Well, there are going to be differences, and you're going to see that this is going to be, for those who know the term dispensational, that's what

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I would end up holding, this is where this gets known more of. It's the idea of a normal interpretation is how

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I word it, because when we say literal, there are those that go, oh, well, you don't take everything literal.

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No, of course not. There are things intended to be idioms. When you and I speak, there are things we say that we know that we are not to take it literally.

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I'm so hungry, I can eat a cow. You don't expect me to actually eat an entire cow in one sitting.

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But we understand behind that that's an idiom, a phrase of speech, a figure of speech, that is used to exaggerate something.

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Well, we understand exaggeration in language. That's not supposed to be taken absolutely literal, but it is a literal interpretation of that would be to understand that it is a phrase of speech not meant to be taken literal because it's an idiom.

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So we interpret idioms as idioms. So where this comes down is we have to understand that there is a literal meaning of the text.

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What is that contradicting? Well, that is in comparison to or in contradiction to those that would say everything is a spiritual meaning or a figurative meaning.

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You have many people that when they come to the scriptures and they read through the scriptures, they're going to do so where everything has some dual meaning.

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They're always looking for that hidden meaning and therefore what the scripture says, that's just what it says, but you got to, if you're really spiritual, you're going to understand the deeper spiritual meaning of things.

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There's others who will just look at things and see something and because they're saying that there's a different way of interpreting scripture than every other book, therefore when they come to things, they're going to say, well, we have to look

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Christologically. We have to find Christ in every verse of the scriptures. And therefore, we're going to look at Song of Solomon and say this must be about Christ in the church because what else does this have to do with?

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Well, I would say that that has to do with God being glorified in a godly marriage, in the beauty that you have within marriage, the love that you have in that marriage that Solomon had with his wife.

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Because if you make that about Christ in the church, be careful. Is Christ talking about making love to the church the way

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Solomon and his bride were? You're getting into some things that are not really too good.

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But see, when people are looking in a strictly Christological approach, then they want to see

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Christ in every verse. Now does everybody that holds to a Christological view hold to that? No, no.

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There are going to be extremes on either end. Are there people that take the Bible extremely literal or try to?

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Yeah, there are people that abuse it at that end too. Look at Flat Earthers. What's their whole argument?

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They're trying to be really literal. It's really kind of weird though, bud, because Flat Earthers, their big argument that the literal understanding of the text is that there's four corners of the earth, and therefore it has to be flat.

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I always find that funny because they believe it's a flat disk, and that's how they say that the scripture is also literal when it says it's round, and I go, well, wait, four corners requires it being like a rectangle or a square, and yet you don't hold to that.

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So they're not consistent with their own theory. No jettison, common sense, and reason as you're employing.

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Yes. It's not logical. You may be paradoxical, but... Yeah. And so grammatical is the fact that language has grammar.

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There's rules we follow to grammar. Now when we do that, there's going to be differences. A historical narrative is going to have different grammatical rules than, say, an epistle will.

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So we're going to interpret Genesis different than we will Romans. Why? Because Romans is instructional.

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It's going to teach us something where Genesis is historical narrative. Its main purpose is telling you what did happen, not necessarily what should happen.

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There's a difference there. So one of the things I always find so interesting is that most of the cults will spend most of their time in the

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Old Testament, and they don't look at the type of language something is. And they say, well, see, here it happened in the

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Old Testament, therefore we should do it. That's not the way historical narratives work. When we say historical, and historical can include cultural, the idea of historical is that we have to remember that the writing of Scripture came in a historical and a cultural context.

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And if we're going to rightly understand it, we need to understand that context. We need to know what it meant when it was written, not what does it mean 2 ,000 years later or 3 ,500 years later.

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We have to understand that culture to know what was the author meaning when he wrote it?

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This is what we call authorial intent. What did the author know when he wrote it? That's what we're trying to do in this style of interpretation is to get to what did the author mean?

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What did the original hearers understand? What were the issues that they were trying to address?

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In 1 Corinthians 11, there's talk of having your head covered if you're a woman.

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Should women wear hats today? Some interpret it that way. Some women will have a little doily in their hair to keep their head covered.

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And yet the text makes it quite clear what that head covering is. Hair. It says it right in the text several times.

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It says that it's a shame for men to have long hair and women should have hair.

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So what is that covering? Hair. Well, dig into the culture. What was going on at the time?

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Well, you know, in the 60s, women were burning bras for the equal rights agenda, you know, saying we're equal with men.

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They had the same thing in Corinth. It's just that they were shaving their heads. That's how they showed it. They could be like a man.

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They shaved their head. Symbolism was kind of similar in that sense. So what do you have? You have an issue that was, yes, it was cultural, but there was a further extension that does carry through today.

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The whole idea of headship that Paul was trying to get to. So you don't take that and say, well, we still have to wear a covering today.

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The way that would apply, maybe in the 50s, 60s, when people were burning bras, would be that they'd have to wear one.

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Why? Because the burning of it was the symbol of saying, I'm like a man, there's no difference, when

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God is saying there is a difference between the genders. And so that doesn't mean one is subordinate or less than the other, it's just God has ordained different roles.

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And so that principle, the general principle, still applies. See how I'm interpreting this?

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This is all interpretation and it leads to the application as well. But we have to be careful with application.

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We're going to get to that because some people jump right to application. If you don't do the work of interpretation, that's going to be a problem.

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So we're saying that we believe in a literal, grammatical, and historical interpretation. Now notice this.

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So why emphasize that? Because we live in a culture where that has to be qualified. That didn't have to be qualified 200 plus years ago.

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Everyone accepted a literal six -day creation. Well, actually, no, bud, they didn't. The Reformers didn't, and this may surprise people.

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People like John Calvin had a problem with six -literal -day creation. Does that surprise some of you?

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Yeah. The reason why they didn't is because they didn't have a problem with six -literal -day The reason he had a problem with a six -literal -day creation is because he thought, why would it take

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God so long? In other words, he thought God did it in less than six days. So, so much for that.

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Because I have heard people try to argue, well, Calvin didn't believe in a literal six -day creation. Yes, and he didn't believe that it took many years either.

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That's the irony of it. I love when I get an atheist who throws that out at me because it's like, quickly

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I go, oh, so you haven't read Calvin. You just read some atheist blog. So, the importance of this, though, is because culture has created an issue where we have to clarify this.

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But when we look at Scripture and apply a literal grammatical historical approach to it, we are going to see that it teaches a literal six -day creation.

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Let me stop there, bud, and see with any of that whether you have a comment. No, I absolutely agree with that. I think that's critical, particularly in the context in which we are contending for the faith because you've got such a heavy and tacitly accepted, you know,

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Darwinianism that, I mean, you find it even in church pews. Well, no, no.

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We've got an authoritative, inspired word of God that tells us how this happened.

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Now, we don't get all the details. It's not a thoroughly scientific manual, but we don't need that.

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But the other comment that I would make with regards to not merely the importance of grasping the six literal days, which is a doctrine that is maintained throughout all of Scripture, that no one wavers on that anywhere else in Scripture as that progressive revelation has unfolded to us.

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But the other thing that I would add is not only those literal days of creation, but you get the foundation of what

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God is establishing in the world throughout much of Genesis. You see the foundation of the family immediately, you know, the marriage as the preeminent foundational structure of society.

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You start seeing government. You start seeing how the Lord is going to orchestrate by His providence and by His covenants how

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He deals with men faithfully. So Genesis is critical. You really have to get that very important book that would buttress much of Orthodox Christianity.

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And when you don't grasp that, like you're saying, you don't get your hermeneutic and interpretation right.

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So much of that comes out of Genesis that buttresses the rest of doctrine that we see throughout the remainder of Scripture.

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So don't miss that point either. In fact, almost every doctrine that we see can be rooted in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

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Yeah. We see that foundation. It's the Genesis. It sets the foundation for the rest of our

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Christian faith. And so you're going to go back there all the time. And so that is the importance.

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Now there's something you mentioned that we should highlight, and that is progressive revelation. What does that mean?

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It means that what we have over time is that God kept revealing more of Himself.

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Go back to that first episode we did in this series. We talked about the fact that the only way we can know anything about God is if He reveals it to us.

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So the self -revelation of God, well, it continues to be in more detail over time.

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He gives us more and more. And as He does that, we're getting a difference throughout time.

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So now the amount of Scripture that Moses knew compared to how much David knew compared to how much you and I have, it's progressively more.

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Well, I would just qualify that and say I'm still trying to catch up with Paul, who knew more than me. You know, we can progress to our status here, but we really need to back up some and grasp some of what was going on in the

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New Testament. Yeah. Which has been jettisoned in the Church, largely. But if we think about it, even Paul, I mean, here's the thing to think about.

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We have more Scripture today than Paul had. Absolutely. And if we think about that, we go, what?

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Well, John didn't write his final writings by the time Paul died. So, you know, the reality that we have is that as we look at Scripture, it gives us more information.

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Now, the next section of this, we're going to get into something a little bit more detailed that I want to talk about, the progressive revelation.

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What we end up seeing is that throughout history, God has given not only more revelation, but also

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He has given us covenants. And with each of the covenants, there's rules, there's things to obey and of obedience and disobedience.

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There is a covenant between God and man. We have a covenant that He made with Adam.

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Adam had far less Scripture than we have, but yet he knew quite a bit, maybe more than we do because we don't know how much he had whereas he walked with God.

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But he had a covenant with God. Progressively, you have Noah and Noah has a covenant with God.

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And that then adds on top of what Adam has. So we see this new covenant that we have with the period of Noah.

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We see Moses come onto the picture and we see another covenant relation. We have Abraham, actually, before Noah.

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Then we have Noah. Some would see a covenant that was made with David, the divinite covenant. And then we have after Christ, what we call the new covenant.

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What we see in each of these progressively is that God continues to work and expand.

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Now, when I teach my class, I show this in a chart and just show how God started with one man,

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Adam, moves on from there to Noah, one family, to Abraham.

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Now he's talking one clan to Moses, one nation.

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So it's expanding to where now in the new covenant, it's all the nations. So you see that progressive where God is expanding it out as history continues in each of these covenants.

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And so as we see that progression, each of those, if you're a dispensationalist, would be what we call dispensation.

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So by the way, it is wrong to say dispensationalists don't believe in covenants. No, it is a covenant that defines each of those.

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But why is that important? That becomes important because one of the things that I see is that we have to see a distinction between Israel and the church.

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How much of a distinction? That's the dilemma. Right? So, Bud, you would be more of a covenant theologian.

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I would be more of a dispensationalist. People would think that we can't agree when we say seeing a distinction between Israel and the church.

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We do see this distinction. The question is how much. It's a question of continuity versus discontinuity.

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How similar are they versus how different are they? And we would end up seeing that there's going to be many things that are similar between Israel and the church.

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And then there's things that are different. For example, Bud, maybe you woke up this morning and had eggs and bacon.

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Do you ever eat bacon? No. Yes, I do eat bacon, but I never eat breakfast. Bacon would be something that...

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Why do you have bacon? Because you're under the new covenant. You're not under the Mosaic law anymore.

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So there was a change in the covenant that allowed for certain things that weren't allowed before.

27:35

Well, if we are Israel, the nation of Israel, then we've got to keep to the laws of Israel.

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And I do find it funny that those that are under a category of theonomists that want to hold to that we should be living under God's law from the

27:49

Old Testament because the church is Israel, I always find it funny that they want to exclude the holiness laws because that's what they were known as.

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The holiness laws to keep Israel, to keep people separate from the world like what you eat and what you wear, how you dress, things like that.

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Those were to keep you separated from the world. We still should be separated from the world. Right?

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But the difference that you end up seeing is that these are areas we see a distinction between the nation of Israel and the church.

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Now, are there similarities? We've dealt with this. Go back to our episodes on the church and we go through and explain this but it needs to be dealt with here.

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When we look at Israel and then refer to the church what I often find people do is a category error.

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What do I mean? When we speak of the church we speak of the visible and invisible church. The visible church is that local body you meet at.

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You go to church, you say. You go there, what do you do? You're worshiping

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God. There's believers there but there's also unbelievers sitting in those pews and we accept that.

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We don't know who they are and sometimes we do but we know that there's going to be believers and unbelievers in the pews in a local body.

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But in the universal or invisible church that is made up only of believers. So we make this distinction between the church, the believing church the invisible church everywhere where it's only believers and the local church that gathers that has believers and unbelievers.

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I think that what happens when we speak of Israel we don't think of Israel as the nation.

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We end up talking about it as spiritual Israel when we get into these things. So there's a difference between the nation of Israel and spiritual

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Israel. Let me use a similar language for the church. Invisible Israel and visible

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Israel. Visible Israel is the nation of Israel made up of believers and unbelievers. Invisible Israel or universal

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Israel would be the spiritual Israel made up only of believers. Now is there similarity between spiritual

29:59

Israel and the spiritual church or the invisible Israel and invisible church? Yes, there's a lot of similarities there because they're both

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God's special people. They're both saved the same way. They both have a relationship with God where God has redeemed them.

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So there's going to be that similarities. But are the laws the same for the visible

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Israel and the visible church? No, there's a distinction there. There's things for the nation of Israel that don't carry over into the local church.

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And there's where we have distinctions. And so now with this, what am

30:34

I saying? So can somebody, does someone have to hold to a dispensational perspective to hold to the doctrinal statement that I'm saying here?

30:42

No. Why? Because a covenant theologian can see that there is some distinction between Israel and the church.

30:48

But not everybody holds to that absolutely. That there has to be an absolute Israel is completely one in the church.

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And I don't think anyone, I don't know anybody who really practices a complete continuity between Israel and the church.

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There are some who try to keep kosher. There are some who put themselves back under the Old Testament law. Those might be the only ones.

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They're not doing it though. You see that in Hebrew roots. But they're not doing that with the idea that they're trying to show their distinction.

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They actually don't come from a covenant perspective, so it's kind of interesting. But the point that I want to make here is that we see that this is not something unique to dispensationalism.

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But as a covenant theologian, do you have a problem with the statement and seeing a distinction between Israel and the church?

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I don't have a problem with the statement. I have a problem with what I perceive might be an unnecessary effect of affirming it if someone doesn't do diligent work to study and understand the theology behind it.

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You and I have talked about this offline. I'm not in favor of that because what

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I fear that people would think is that that implies that God has two elect people.

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God has one elect people. Paul makes that clear in Romans. He makes that clear in Galatians.

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He makes that clear in Ephesians. There's one elect. And when you distinguish it this way,

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I fear that some people might think, okay, so there may be in a hyper -dispensational kind of view which you don't agree to,

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I wouldn't agree to that they were saved by the law in the Old Testament and now we're saved by grace. We're not under law, we're under grace.

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And they were. No, that's not a correct reading either. But a lot of that holdover from the early 150 years ago influence of dispensationalism when it really hit the

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U .S. That's kind of the theology of soteriology that was prevalent.

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We understand now, and you said it earlier, they were saved the same way we were. It's justification by faith.

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So that was my only concern with that. I don't have a problem distinguishing Israel and the church. I'm concerned about the implications that it might have for somebody who doesn't diligently study what do we need to understand and how do we need to understand this continuity.

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Yeah, because one of the things is that people, when they want to make an attack will use arguments.

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What you're bringing up is in Schofield's reference notes, he made a comment about two ways of salvation.

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The same criticism gets made falsely against covenant theologians because they refer to the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

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Same argument is made there. But the majority of people in both those camps don't hold to those things.

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So making an argument against the extreme is wrong. It's just not being honest with it.

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But notice what we're saying. I'm trying to be really clear in the explanation of this that we're talking about the nation of Israel compared to the local church.

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And so there are things that we're going to see. God dealt differently with the nation. Why? Because they were a nation.

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The church is not a nation. This is something the Roman Empire got wrong. They tried to recreate

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Israel within the empire and therefore it was the Holy Roman Empire.

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They were trying to create a nation of the church and expand that everywhere.

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That's what Islam tries to do. Take over nations and make that nation part of the religious nation.

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We're not a nation. Christianity has grown beyond and that's why

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I want to spend time with the progressive revelation because God progressively works through his covenants differently with people always expanding it.

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He's no longer dealing just with one nation. Was he always limiting himself to one nation?

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No, because he saved people outside of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament times. What we end up seeing now is it has expanded beyond a nation to the world.

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Now I'm going to say there's one more covenant coming, Romans chapter 8, where it's beyond the world but the entire universe where it says in Romans 8 that the universe is groaning waiting for the coming of Christ.

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There's a time he's going to come back and re -establish the entire universe is going to be put back into shape where God wanted it.

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Now he's going to deal with the entire universe. I think that's what you end up having with this constant expansion.

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He's no longer giving rules to a nation the way he did in the Old Testament. That's the importance of that.

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That's why we don't keep kosher. It's why the food is clean. Because Christ's coming brought in the new covenant.

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So I hope that's clarifying for folks. Hopefully that helps to bring some unity between two warring camps it seems, at least online.

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There's not as much You and I can still spar offline. Oh yeah.

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We can spar online too. But the thing is that there are a lot of people that have a lot of issues with this.

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There's not as much distinction as some make. No. We're not in competition with these two understandings.

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Let me back up to your other comment. The one thing I think is critical for us to think about, and we don't have time to discuss it now.

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Maybe it would be another episode. The first thing that Jesus preached when he began his preaching ministry was repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.

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In the church, in the new covenant, we are in the kingdom of God. Now the church is not synonymous with kingdom of God in a literal sense.

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But we think in kingdom terms. So very important spend some time studying what is the kingdom of God?

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What is the kingdom of heaven? And that will help illustrate even more of the progressive revelation that we see in Scripture as things develop.

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And will buttress what you're talking about as well. So don't miss that. Yeah, and there's going to be even distinctions within there what is meant by kingdom because within dispensationalism there's more discussion between dispensationalism and what's called progressive dispensationalism on the kingdom, the

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Davidic covenant, and are we a kingdom now or is that still coming?

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Is it for Israel? There's some overlap there that we get into. But let's look at, as we continue, the next sentence that says, the

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Bible constitutes the only infallible rule of faith and practice.

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Now we dealt with this last week. If you didn't listen, we dug in deep into this. The fact that the

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Bible is inerrant means it's without error. What does infallible mean? It's without flaw. In other words, the

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Bible is the only thing we look to for faith and practice. How do we live our faith out? How do we practice that?

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Why put this here? Well, in our day and age this does become important because there's a lot of people that look to a lot of other things for faith and practice.

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Now it used to be that back, oh, maybe 20 years or 30 years ago, the big thing that was an issue was psychology.

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People were saying, well, the Bible's fine when it comes to going to church, but if you want to know how to live, you've got to go to psychology to tell people.

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So you've got to have counseling. You can't go to a pastor because a pastor can just give you Bible. The Bible's not sufficient enough for how to live.

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But in our day and age, let's put this into practice. Are you woke? Are you practicing social justice?

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See, the Bible has an answer for how justice should be carried out. What we're seeing in a lot of churches right now is, no, no, no.

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So the Bible's not sufficient. Put it to the side. It's not sufficient for answering how justice should be done in our day and age.

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And therefore, we have woketitians that tell us they're the elites who know you like that term, huh?

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They're going to be the elites that tell us how we should live for faith and practice, how things should properly be done in the church.

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And you say, but that's not in the Bible. But that's right, because the Bible's insufficient. It's flawed when it comes to social justice.

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We have to go to woketitians to know that. Well, I'm sorry, but what the

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Scriptures say quite clearly is that it answers everything we need to know for faith and practice.

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Not everything we need to know, period. There's a distinction there. But it is without flaw with how we should live in faith and practice.

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So it's not going to answer things of how do we handle AIDS? Vaccines that may not deal with that.

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Why? There's principles we might be able to glean to help us in things. Why doesn't it answer that?

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Because it wasn't meant to answer everything. It's not a science textbook. It's not trying to be something it's not.

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It is designed to tell us how to live for faith and practice. Is it purely a history book? No, but it deals with history.

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Is it purely a science book? No, but it does deal with science. In the areas it deals with, it's focus, the focus of the

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Bible, and this is going to be, again, this is going to be a difference you're going to hear between covenant theologians and dispensationalists.

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Covenant theologian would say the purpose of Scripture is to point to Christ. It does, but not fully.

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As a dispensationalist, I would hold that the purpose of Scripture is doxological, means to God's glory.

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So we see everything in Scripture is bringing it back to God. The focus is on God to bring

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God glory. Does Christ bring God glory? Well, duh, yeah. So you're going to see a lot of that.

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I'm glad you qualified that. So, you know, but that becomes the thing.

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So when it comes to what is the Bible, it is to lead us to glorify

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God. Now, does it answer everything that we have in life? No, because there's things that we don't need to know about.

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God revealed what we need, and what we need in the Bible is without flaw.

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So if the Scripture says this is how we should live, that's how we should live. And it's not flawed because the culture changes.

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Just because women feel that they can preach better than men. They might. There's probably many women that can preach and teach better than me.

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That doesn't mean they have a right to preach and teach within the church. Why? Because God said otherwise. And that ends it.

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It doesn't matter whether culture has changed and sees that men and women are equal.

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By the way, that's from Scripture. But they're equal in many ways, but not in their function in the church.

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God made a distinction. Do I like it? It doesn't matter what I like. It matters what God said, what

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He revealed, and He's without flaw in doing so. So what do we practice? What the

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Scripture says. Okay? I hope that's helpful to see how that ends up applying.

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Let's move on or Bud will never get through with this. Okay. Whereas there are many applications to any given passage of Scripture, there is but one true interpretation according to God.

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Period. Oops, no. I added something. Except where Scripture makes it clear that God intended a dual meaning.

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The idea of this is and actually where this came up is I recently was going through the 1689

42:31

Confession, Baptist Confession, and I saw that in there and said, but wait, that's not accurate.

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And this is something that I've had in this doctrinal statement for years. It's something I have been taught in seminary, something as we talked off air

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MacArthur makes the statement, and I started to realize, but wait, there are passages you think about in Matthew where Matthew quotes from the

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Old Testament where he says, out of Egypt I call my son. What's he referring to?

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Well, Matthew is referring to Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Is that the interpretation from the

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Old Testament? No. That was the nation of Israel being called out of Egypt. Hosea, right.

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And so we have a distinction there, don't we? So which is the proper meaning? Was Hosea right or was

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Matthew right? Well, here is the case where we do see God had two meanings.

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What he meant for Hosea he knew was later going to mean for the Messiah. Now, I'm being clear in this edit that I've added that yes, there's one interpretation, multiple meanings.

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In other words, the idea there is God didn't have one interpretation for people in the 1500s and a different interpretation for us today.

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One interpretation. The interpretation is there. But we can apply it lots of different ways. So, the way we apply the headship of men over women in the

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Corinthian Church it was to not shave your head. In the 60s it was not to burn a bra.

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The application was different. The interpretation is the same. There's the headship of men over women that there is to be a divine order there, a role.

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And that distinction we see the one interpretation applied two different ways. Now, why am

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I making that distinction then with this clarification? I'm making the clarification because there are times where God has made it clear that there's dual meaning.

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Now, why make this issue? Why even address this? Because there are those who come to Scripture and they will reinterpret everything and say that everything is a spiritual meaning or they find a dual meaning.

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One of the worst characters of this, whenever I taught hermeneutics, which is the art and science of interpretation when

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I would teach how to interpret the Bible, I always used to use Harold Camping as the example of how to do it wrong.

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Because no matter what I said was a right way and a wrong way, Harold Camping always had examples of doing it wrong.

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So, I'm sorry. He just provided the perfect example if you like Harold Camping. I'm sorry.

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I used to love him until I started learning how to interpret the Bible and went, wait. But Harold Camping would always do this to a point where I remember calling up once just to see.

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I wanted to see what he would do. There's a passage, Leviticus, I think it's around chapter 14, where it talks about houses that can get leprosy.

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Leprosy is a disease on your flesh. Right? It actually affects the nerves.

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But a house can get a disease? Well, that's what Scripture says and it explains what to do if your house has leprosy.

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I asked him the meaning of that just to see because what was he going to do? Well, he does what he always does. He finds the word house.

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He jumped into the New Testament saying that the church is the house of God and then got into how there is a disease that can affect the church and be a false teaching and things like that that could be a disease on the church.

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That's not what Leviticus is saying. Nowhere in the interpretation is that even close to an idea.

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But why does he get to it? Because he finds a dual meaning to everything. That's what it meant back then but today, this is what

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God really meant by it. No, there's one interpretation is the idea of this. However, if God makes it clear there's a dual meaning, then there's a dual meaning.

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But this is where I practice for the covenant theologians out there. I practice the regulatory principle, just not in worship with scripture.

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The regulatory principle for those in reform theology is going to be where we would look at what can we do in the church?

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The regulatory principle says we only do what God prescribes. So in other words if God doesn't say we can do it if God doesn't say you can use drums then you can't use drums.

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That's the way the regulatory principle would view it. If it's not explicit in scripture we don't do it.

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The opposite to that is if scripture doesn't say you can't do it, then you're free to do it.

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So with the example of drums, if you're practicing the regulatory principle, you can have them. If you're not, you can have them because scripture doesn't say you can't have it.

47:19

So two different ways. Well, I practice it when it comes to scripture. If scripture makes it clear there's a dual meaning then

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I will accept the dual meaning because scripture says so and if not, then I don't.

47:31

What are your thoughts, bud? I know you're itching there. I have a number of thoughts which we may go offline with later. What I want to point out to people and you're saying this because I know you believe this that particular line where you're talking about God intended a dual meaning here's what is not intended by that.

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What is not intended by that is that that meaning you determine subjectively.

47:56

It is not going around the Southern Baptist Sunday School room saying what does this verse mean to you?

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That is not at all what this is talking about. What this is talking about is Analogia Scriptura, scripture compares to scripture, interpreting in light of scripture.

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There is an objective meaning and scripture reveals that objective meaning. It may not do it on the surface.

48:18

You may have to study the literal, grammatical, historical but it is not subjective and you frequently see you use that citation out of Egypt called my son, that's a very vivid one it's an obvious one, it's an easy one to wrap your head around but there are others and normally when you run into a citation of the

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Old Testament in the New Testament, stop and pause and you'll see some more of these things.

48:48

It doesn't mean that there is any conflict in scripture nothing is contradicting scripture what you see in the

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New Testament is perhaps a fuller, more expansive revelation of the implications of what

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God had revealed through the prophets or the earlier writings of the Old Testament but it is never subjective

49:09

Yeah and this is the thing we have to recognize because as we examine this, and we're going to get to this by the end of the paragraph here, is what we say at the end there is who's going to be the judge.

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That's really there are people that they want to dazzle you with their knowledge of what you didn't see in scripture.

49:31

I tell the story in my Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar. By the way, folks, if you ever want to have a

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Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar at your church, just go to strivingforturning .org and invite us out schedule a speaker and we will be happy to come out and do that seminar.

49:47

And one of the things I always talk about is a guy who on Resurrection Sunday I was at a church where the guy was getting up and talking about that Mary the ladies came before while it was still dark and he says this is talking about dark times in your lives where you might have financial strain or a car broke down or you're depressed but there's light at the end of the tunnel.

50:11

Just roll that stone away. Yeah, I mean and I'm just like cringing going and there's a guy in front of me, a pastor everyone's walking out the door and shaking hands with the pastor and the guy, two people in front of me is like, ah, pastor

50:24

I would never have seen that in the text and I'm just, I wanted to scream God wouldn't have seen that in the text because it's not in the text.

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Why was it dark? Because the sun didn't rise It even says the very next part of that passage, it was still early

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That's what darkness meant. It was dark Right? So this is the way you see some people that they'll find these things that just aren't in the text

50:48

And so we've got to be careful with that So when it comes to the meaning of scripture the meaning of scripture is to be found as one diligently applies the literal, grammatical, historical method of interpretation under the illuminating of the

51:07

Holy Spirit. So what are we saying? It is your job, Christian to be diligent in your study

51:12

You don't do, as unfortunately some do, and unfortunately even worse some pastors do, just I'm going to be led by the

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Spirit I'm just going to get up to a pulpit and the Spirit's going to lead me. There's no passage that says that the

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Spirit is going to lead you in an understanding of scripture. The only passage that people have to argue for that is that when you're brought before kings you're going to lose your life and they ask you to give a defense

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God will put the words in your mouth That's not that he's going to give you the interpretation. That means do not fear.

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God will be with you even in that time when you're standing before the judges and they're ready to kill you.

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God will be with you and put words in your mouth. That's not about interpretation. In fact, scripture makes it really clear.

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Study to show yourself approved. We have to be diligent in that study. Does it take hard work?

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Yes. It takes hard work because you and I are 2 ,000 years removed from the scriptures so it's going to take us time to really understand the scriptures to really know that history, that culture

52:16

A lot of people tell me the reason they really enjoy my preaching. Why? The one thing that people say with my preaching is because I bring so much of the culture of that time into it.

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Why? Because my goal in preaching is to give people an understanding of God's word so they know the meaning of it.

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I don't care as much about the application of it. I don't care about the great illustrations. I do care that people walk away with an understanding of what the text means.

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How are you going to do that? Well, you've got to bring all that culture and history in. Why do I do that? Because I want the people in my congregation to better handle

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God's word so that they know the meaning, so that they don't need me to tell them but they understand it.

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So, you are culturally relevant. You're just historically culturally relevant.

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If that means that I'm old and stuck in my ways, maybe. But the point here is that we have to be diligent, and yet does the

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Holy Spirit have no role? Yes, He has a role. He takes that diligent effort, that diligent work. When we are submissive to the

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Holy Spirit, He will bring that study. He will bring the proper meaning to us.

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Now, are there times where we can allow something of our presuppositions to affect the interpretation?

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Yes. Everyone comes to the Scripture with presuppositions. Unfortunately, far too many people allow their personal experience or the systematic theology or something like that to do the interpreting of Scripture.

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I've had people that say, they come to a text, they say, yes, I know that's what it says, but...

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There shouldn't be a but after that. If that's what it says, that's what it says. If your theological system disagrees with that, the problem is with your theological system, and that's what needs to change.

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Scripture informs our theology. Our theology does not inform Scripture. And too far too many people have it backwards.

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They interpret the Scripture based on their theological system. Your theological system may be wrong.

54:21

Your personal experience should not interpret Scripture. I don't care if you had some wild experience and you believe that Scripture must mean something because of the experience you had.

54:32

You speak in tongues, and therefore that experience means we speak in tongues today. Mormons spoke in tongues before.

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Before it was commonplace in Christianity, it was common in cults and occult. Does that mean they have the same experience from God?

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So that vindicates Mormonism. No! So your experience is what needs to be corrected.

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But you don't know what I experienced. You're right, and I can't exegete your experience. I don't know what it is.

54:59

Is it from the devil? I don't know. I've had someone challenge me with that. Well, I had this experience where I said something and it came true.

55:06

You're saying it's from the devil? I'm not saying anything. I'm saying I don't know. Could it be that as you've aged, you only remember parts of that prophecy you claim you had, and you forgot the part that didn't come true?

55:18

He was like, well, I don't remember the whole thing. Okay, then. How do you know because if it's a prophecy, it has to be 100%.

55:25

And the fact that there's different details that you remember, and the fact that you didn't even remember and someone else told it to you, could it have been an implanted memory?

55:34

Because that can happen. Actually, very easily, too. I've watched that. So people that know how to do that can do that.

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The point is that we have to be diligent and yet we submit to the Holy Spirit to do the work of illuminating or bringing to light the interpretation of meaning.

55:52

Let's get to the last two sentences. It is the responsibility of believers to ascertain carefully the true intent and meaning of Scripture.

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Recognizing the proper application is binding on all generations. So this is what

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I had been trying to say. Believer, Christian, you, you listening right now, it is your responsibility as much as it is mine to very diligently and carefully figure out the true intent of Scripture and its meaning.

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That is our job. Don't tell me you don't have time for that and yet you love God. Because if you truly love

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God, you want to know everything about Him. And you want to make sure you're accurate with Him. If you say you love your spouse, what do you do?

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You want to learn everything about her. When you're dating her, what were you doing? You wanted to learn everything that would please her. You wanted to know everything about her or Him.

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And then you want to make sure that you keep that learning, keep studying. And you want to make sure you're accurate.

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Well, if you love God, you say you love God, you've got to be even more so. Because He paid a fine we can never repay.

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So, do you love God? Then you take this responsibility seriously. Yet, the truth of Scripture stands in judgment of men.

57:06

Never do men stand in judgment of it. And we kind of addressed this already, but you mentioned this. But this is the idea, what

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I was saying with our, even our theological systems. Our theological systems do not judge the

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Scriptures. That's men. Men have come up with theological systems. No. Scripture stands in judgment of the men.

57:24

This applies a lot of different ways. It applies to coming to Scripture with our personal experience. I know

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I'm going to heaven, because I saw Jesus. He appeared to me. That's your experience.

57:36

Scripture says you get saved by grace through faith, not through a vision. Okay? That's what we have to see, is that men stand in judgment of God.

57:46

Okay? But what do you see so often is that people end up sitting there, and they take God's Word, and they're going to judge it.

57:52

How many people do you see that say, well, I don't like that in Scripture, so we're just going to reject that. We did a whole episode a long time ago on red -letter

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Christianity, where they don't quite like some of the things Paul said, so what do they do? We only look at the red -lettering, because that's from Jesus, failing to realize the entire

58:09

Bible is from Jesus. You know, it's all written by God, so it's all red letters.

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But what are they doing? They don't like what God said in His Word, because culturally it's not acceptable, so they want to stand in judgment of God's Word.

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Now, this was an interesting thing when I was in seminary. I was studying through and looking at the different people,

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Thomas Jefferson, you know, even Martin Luther, that wanted to throw out the book of James.

58:39

Jefferson wanted to, the Jefferson Bible, where he just cut out the things he didn't like. What you end up seeing is, as you look at that, you have plenty of people throughout history, they didn't like what the

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Scripture said. And so they'd say, that's not Scripture. And so I remember studying all these people that they would argue that well, this is inspired, but that's not inspired.

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So it's inspired when it speaks of salvation, but not other things. Then it's not inspired.

59:05

What are people doing when they do that? They are standing on as judge of God's Word. They're standing up to God's Word saying,

59:13

I'm the judge. I get to say, this is God's Word? That's not God's Word. Well, if the

59:20

Scriptures are written and you're sitting here and saying, well, it's correct when it speaks of our salvation, but not correct when it speaks of Genesis 1 being six literal days.

59:31

There it's not inspired. The question you then have to ask is, who are you to judge?

59:37

By what standard do we have to say that your standard is right? Because as we saw last week,

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God's saying it's all complete. Everything. It's all inspired. Well, if that's the case, how do you know and by what standard do you use to say that it's not?

59:53

Because if you reject any piece of Scripture and say that's not Scripture, by whatever standard you have, you can throw the rest of it out.

01:00:00

So when you have an Andy Stanley who says, well, we want to unhinge the Old Testament.

01:00:06

We're not of the Old Testament. Well, once you do that, what stops you from throwing out the

01:00:12

New Testament when you don't like what it says? What becomes the standard then you do?

01:00:17

Either your culture or whatever you're using to say we're going to get rid of that Scripture or say that's not needed.

01:00:24

Then what you have done is you have now set yourself up as judge over Scripture.

01:00:30

And that is a dangerous place to be because you don't want to be standing in the place where you are judging

01:00:36

God and His Word. Any comments you have on that? Amen.

01:00:42

That would be a comment. You don't want to do that. You can't do that. I mean, what arrogance you have.

01:00:48

But you see the arrogance in all kinds of cults. You see it in all kinds of sects of quote unquote

01:00:55

Christianity. You see it everywhere. Now, those who have eyes to see will recognize that this is flawed.

01:01:02

I was thinking when you were speaking of a quote from Voss who said that, you know, it's a well -known fact that every heresy begins with a partial truth.

01:01:14

So you can snag something out of Scripture and twist it and then reinterpret it based on your judgment.

01:01:21

And what is the product of that? It's heresy. I mean, this is how it always begins.

01:01:28

We don't have the authority to oversee Scripture. We are the creature.

01:01:34

God is the creator. We submit to Him. Yep. And this is the thing that people have to know their place.

01:01:41

And that's hard. I mean, I'll be honest with you. There's a lot of people that just they don't recognize that they're setting themselves up as judging

01:01:50

God's Word. And it's a place you don't want to be. And yet so many people do that unknowingly because of the fact that what they're doing is they are coming to God and saying, well,

01:02:02

I don't like this. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not. And you mentioned this earlier. I mean, this is one of the problems with, you know, with the way you do small group

01:02:10

Bible studies. They're all an S -Y -I meeting. You know what an S -Y -I is? Show your ignorance. Come to a study.

01:02:17

You read a text. What does this mean to you? Well, I haven't, I'm just thinking off the top of my head and I've got to say something so I'm going to say what

01:02:24

I think. I remember a great example of this was in a Sunday school where we were going through the book of James and it refers to the latter rain.

01:02:34

R -A -I -N. Rain, like what falls down from the sky. This guy gets into this whole discussion of rain.

01:02:43

R -E -I -G -N. Raining like a king. And he's like, well, the second rain is the second coming of Christ.

01:02:49

And he's going off on this whole tangent about how we have to be patient like a farmer waiting for the rain of Christ to come back and all this stuff.

01:03:00

And I said, you know, everything you said may be accurate to the idea of the second coming of Christ.

01:03:06

None of it has anything to do with this text. He says, yes it does. I said, rain sounds the same in English, not in Greek.

01:03:13

And the second rain is the fact that in Israel there's two rain seasons. The first rain and the latter rain.

01:03:20

That second rain season, in between farmers have no water. They have to be patient waiting for that rain because if that rain doesn't come, they lose their whole crop for the year.

01:03:30

When you understand the geography and the land of Israel, you understand the latter rain has nothing to do with a reigning king.

01:03:36

It has to do with water from the sky coming down for your crops. And look in the context.

01:03:42

It dealt with a farmer. Wow. Crazy idea. But people do this.

01:03:48

They go off on these tangents. And it's sound. They wax so eloquent. And what are they doing?

01:03:53

Showing their ignorance. Yeah. There's a difference. You know this. I know this. But there's a difference between the question what's on your mind?

01:04:03

And the question, what's on your mind? Are you saying a comma can make a difference?

01:04:12

No. Well, yes, of course. And I am a supporter of the Oxford comma. Just for the record.

01:04:18

Yeah. Come on. Pay attention to this stuff. If you're going to start talking about the

01:04:23

Oxford comma, I'm just going to tell you right now, you're going to put me to sleep. I'm not going to talk about it. You're mentioning that.

01:04:29

I might as well go get my pillow. Okay? Because you're going to put me right out like a light here if we're going to be discussing the

01:04:36

Oxford comma. Now would be a good time, since you're getting ready to put me to sleep, that we should talk about our supporters here at my pillow.

01:04:44

Because if you're going to talk Oxford comma, I need a good pillow to get a good sleep on that.

01:04:51

And therefore, I would go for my pillow. My pillow is produced right here in the

01:04:56

United States. And if you get it, not only do you get a great product, but you are also supporting

01:05:01

Striving for Eternity. So if you go to mypillow .com or call 1 -800 -873 -0176.

01:05:09

Again, 1 -800 -873 -0176. And use promo code

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SFE. You can get yourself a good night's sleep with an American made product and know that you're supporting this ministry going forward.

01:05:24

So I encourage you to go get a pillow. I am looking forward. I've tried out the pillows.

01:05:30

Loved them for years. Loved the mattress topper. I got the 3 -inch mattress topper. Great. I encourage you to get one of those.

01:05:37

It will radically change your sleep. And Bill, we need to Bill, don't think about how much a good night's sleep helps.

01:05:45

Now, the amount of time of sleep may differ with us. I think a good night's sleep is about 3 hours.

01:05:51

Some of you may think 8 hours. I don't get how you can stay in a bed that long. But I get 3 great hours of sleep.

01:05:59

Maybe you'd need less if you had a good mattress topper. I'm just saying. But I've tried the towels. Towels are great.

01:06:05

As winter's coming, bud, I'm going to try 2 new products. I'm going to try their MyPillow or actually they're called

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MySlippers. The MyPillow Slippers and their robe. I'm looking forward to that.

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And they have pajamas too. My wife has got the pajamas and she, because it's starting to get colder up here and she's using those and they're very soft.

01:06:25

I enjoy touching, you know, her legs when she's wearing them. I'm sure it has other things.

01:06:31

Let's just keep going. But no, they're really soft. I can't wait to get some and have them.

01:06:38

But if you go to MyPillow .com, use promo code SFE not only to get great discounts but also to support this show.

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We'd greatly appreciate them sponsoring. The Wrap Report, Apologetics Live and everything else

01:06:51

Striving for Eternity does. So thanks for that good plug in there for that, bud.

01:06:56

You made that helpful. Yeah, thanks. I'm glad I could be of service to you, sir. Well, you know what, bud, after talking about the

01:07:06

Oxford comma, there's only one thing I could think to say on that. Yes? Bud, that's a wrap.

01:07:11

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org

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