15 - Biblical Authority, Part 1

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy. We're welcome to have you with us. I am Andrew Rappaport.

This is a ministry of striving for eternity. You can get all the information about the ministry at strivingforeternity .com

or .org. Either one actually works. This is our school of world religions.

It is a school that we're going through different religions. This class specifically is an introduction to the major western religions.

Now we have been going through the different religions and now we're into part 2, a

Christian response. And in this today, we're going to start with authority.

What is a Christian's authority? We've been going through the six religions so far.

If you have a syllabus that you can pick up at our store at store .strivingforeternity .org.

You can pick up a syllabus. They're $25 each. They have more information than we usually have time to go over in class, but you have all of the information there useful for you.

What we've been going through though up until now is we've covered six major world religions.

We looked at Judaism. We looked at Roman Catholicism. We looked at Islam. We looked at Mormonism or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

Saints. We looked at Jehovah's Witnesses and then we ended last class on Christianity and we did an overview of Christianity and now what we're really going to do is in each one of those six religions, we looked at what's their authority, what's their view of God, specifically the

Trinity, what's their view of Jesus Christ, specifically his deity. What's their view of man's sinfulness?

What's their view of salvation? What's their view of end times? Now what we're going to do is take those six doctrines and look at what the

Bible says about those and dig in deep so that we would be able to answer as a response to these religions.

Now, as we looked at the major world religions, we did a little bit of comparison, very little of what they said compared to the

Bible and looked at where the Bible would disagree with some of the things that they were teaching. This now is going to be different.

Now is where we're going to dig into the Bible to see what the Bible says and this is valuable for this reason. You can spend a lifetime,

I've written a book on world religions, I actually covered those six religions that we talked about in my book,

What Do They Believe? It took me 14 years of research, going in and looking at from their documents what it is that these different groups believe and most people are not going to have that kind of time to invest into something like this.

So the question becomes, how do we get to have a handle on things so that no matter what new ism may come out, whether you have someone, a friend that's

Buddhist, well now you're going to start studying Buddhism, then you're going to have someone that's a Sikh, now you're going to start studying Sikhism, or you're going to have a

Muslim, you're going to start studying Islam, are you going to really have the time to study in depth all of those?

Well the answer is no. So what do you do? Well you do the same thing that the

Secret Service does in America. See the Secret Service in America, their job is, one of their jobs, most people think that their job is only to protect the

President of the United States, that's actually not what they were originally founded as. They were originally founded to protect the

American currency. And so what do they do? They are experts in identifying counterfeit money.

What do they do? Do they study all of the counterfeits that are out there? No. They study the truth, they identify what genuine money looks like, and then they can compare anything to the genuine and they know if it's a counterfeit.

That's what we're going to now do. If you delve in deep here, into the

Christian response, and you dig into what God's word, the truth says,

God's word is the truth because, well, God said it. But if we look at what

God's word, the Bible says, then we can compare anything to it and know if it stands up to being genuine.

That's the point. That's why we're going to spend so much time doing a Christian response. We have six more lessons.

It's going to take a little bit more than that because we'll probably spend, just like with the religions, we'll spend two weeks, we'll spend two lessons per, two classes per lesson to get through these.

But what we're going to try to do is now give the Christian response to those seven doctrines.

So with that, the first one, you could probably guess if you were paying attention, is not revelation.

Why is that one there? It should be authority. There we go. Thank you. I threw the engineer off, sorry.

The authority. So that is going to be where we are going to start. What is the authority that we should be holding to?

Now when we look at this, and remember, this is a Christian response. So we're here, are going to hold to the fact that God's word is the

Bible and is the authority. So the authority for the Christian is scripture alone.

That's your blank there. If you have a syllabus, the word alone. Why is alone important? Well, this was the issue that, if you remember when we looked at Roman Catholicism, you saw the difference.

So many of these different religions that we looked at do not hold to scripture alone.

Even the ones that claim to be Christian. Roman Catholic Church, it's scripture plus the tradition and the church.

In Mormonism, it's the scripture plus the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price.

In Jehovah's Witnesses, it's the scripture plus the Watchtower. You always have the addition.

Why? Because it's in the addition, whatever you add to scripture, that ultimately becomes the real authority.

The real authority becomes that thing that you add to scripture. We saw that with each one of those three that I just mentioned.

You saw how, over time, the scriptures became lessened and it was either the

Catholic Church or the Watchtower, they're the only ones that can interpret the scripture.

And therefore, once you get to that position, if only they could tell you the meaning of the scripture, then they become an authority over scripture.

For the Christian, the authority is scripture alone. Now, some people make accusations against our

Presbyterian brethren, and this usually comes from Baptists like myself, not that I make this argument, but is that there's creeds and confessions.

Many of our Presbyterian brethren would hold very tightly to things like the Westminster Confession and they would hold to certain creeds and they would look at those.

But here is the distinction that has to be made. When you look at a Presbyterian church, they may even preach through a

Westminster Confession, but they do not hold the confession up as equal in authority to the

Bible, to scripture. In other words, they don't think it's God's Word. They think that this is a document that very accurately, in their opinion, summarizes what scripture teaches and that it's not an authority per se in the same sense that the

Bible is the authority, but it is a guide. Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because, whether it be a

Reformed Baptist that would hold to, say, the London Confession of Faith, the

Baptist London Confession of Faith, or if it's a Presbyterian that holds to the Westminster Confession of Faith, they're not holding that as equal in authority to the scripture.

Now, there are some groups that do. That's few and far between, but what you have there is a group that is doing something beyond what is norm in Christianity.

So whether it's a Lutheran confessional, whether it's a Presbyterian confessional, Baptist confessional or creed, whichever, they're not being held as equal in authority to scripture.

We're saying that to say that the authority is scripture alone. Now, scripture alone is the authority.

These other documents are used to help facilitate an understanding of scripture. Big difference between those two, okay?

This is a crucial doctrine for Christianity because the only authority for life and godliness is scripture.

It's not men, it's not priests, it's not leaders, it's not a church, it's not counsel, it's not creeds.

You see the distinction. You see this is how this is distinct from other groups.

Now, I understand the Catholics and the Jehovah Witnesses will say, but when you open it up to private interpretation, how do you know what

God's word actually says? Well, that's where you take our class on the school of biblical hermeneutics where we teach people how to follow the rules of interpretation.

How do we know what God's word means? By following the rules of interpretation. That's how.

The Bible is God's special revelation, which is limited in space and time, is directed to various designated individuals, and we're going to look at that in more detail what that means.

The accepted books and writings that make up the Bible are the 39

Old Testament books and the 27 New Testament books without any additional writings commonly known as the

Apocrypha or Pseudepigrapha. Those are the ones that the Catholic Church would add. The Bible provides the only inerrant, that means without error, and absolutely authoritative propositional knowledge of God that exists.

It's without error in its original writings. We're going to get into this when we look at Inspiration, but in its original writings it was without error.

It is the only authoritative document that we have that is going to explain that God exists.

We can look at creation and know that there's a God, but we can't learn anything about God unless He reveals it to us.

The authority of Scripture is God's self -revelation of one who has the right and power to command compliance in thought and action upon His rational creatures.

The Scriptures are our ultimate basis of authority for determining what is and what is not the right way to live.

Therefore, the Bible supremely defines what we are to believe and how we are to conduct ourselves.

The Bible alone is the authority for faith and practice. We're going to look at these in different categories.

The first category when we look at our authority is going to be Revelation. With Revelation, this term we're using to refer to the divine act of communicating to man what man couldn't otherwise know.

It is God's self -disclosure to man. In other words, if God did not reveal this, there's no way we could know these things about God.

So, there are two reasons why Revelation is necessary. One, because God is.

God exists. God by nature is inaccessible to man.

We see this in Isaiah 55, verse 9. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are your ways higher than mine, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

This is the idea here, that God's thoughts and ways are beyond our ability to understand them unless he reveals them.

A second reason is because of the fall. One, because God is by nature inaccessible to man.

He's transcendent would be the word. He transcends beyond nature.

So, one is because of God's nature being transcendent. The second is because of the fall of man.

Mankind broke their fellowship with God in Genesis 3 .24. We can look at that.

He drove out the man and at the east of the garden he placed a cherubim with a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

So, what you have in this passage is you see that because of the fall, man was now separate spiritually from God and that caused a gap.

In studying the topic of Revelation, there are two broad categories in which our understanding of Revelation falls into.

The first in your syllabus is natural revelation. That's your blank, natural revelation.

The second is special or supernatural revelation. That's your second blank.

So, either natural and special or natural and supernatural, whichever one you prefer. The technical term that people refer to is natural and special.

Natural being the natural revelation. You can look at the stars. You can look at a cell. You can look at creation and know something about God.

Not great detail, but you know something about him. You know he exists. You understand something about his invisible attributes, but you can't know the details.

That takes special or, since one is natural, the other is supernatural revelation and that's really where we're going to focus.

Revelation is progressive with the final real manifestation of Revelation being seen in Jesus Christ.

Progressive meaning that we see throughout time that God has been revealing more and more and more about himself throughout the writings of the

Bible. It culminated when Christ came on the scene and then after that the writing of the

New Testament and now we have the culmination of this progressive revelation. Things that were given in more and more detail, more and more revelation, with that more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation, more and more revelation,

Looking at this now, we see the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaim

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

There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out through the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

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

Its rising is from the end of heavens, and its circuit to the end of them.

There is nothing hidden from its heat.

You see again, the focus is on nature. And what does nature do in verse 2?

It reveals knowledge. I think we see this even clearer in Romans chapter 1.

In Romans chapter 1, it says, this is verses 19 to 21,

For what could be known about God is plain to them. Notice the universal nature of this.

What could be known of God is plain to them. Now in context, this is speaking to all men.

What could be known of God is plain to all men, because God has shown it to them.

So the question, how has God shown it to them? We'll look at verse 20, For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse. For although they knew

God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

So you see there in Romans 1 very clearly, nature reveals enough about God so that every single person is without excuse.

It's inexcusable to argue that you don't believe God exists. Why? Because God has revealed enough about himself in nature that every person plainly or clearly perceives that God exists.

They can see something of his attributes. There is no such thing as atheism, and there is no such thing as agnosticism.

It is nothing more than, as it says in Romans 1, suppression of the truth.

That's all that is. There are many who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Why? Because they do not like the things of God.

And so they suppress that truth because of the fact that they do not want to have

God telling them what to do. That's what it comes down to. So what we end up seeing there is we have to keep in mind that when we look at nature, that nature reveals things about God so that every person is without excuse, so that no one can say,

I didn't know, God, you didn't tell me. No, God manifests himself through creation so that they can see these things, so that they can know he exists, so what they should do, the right response should be that they glorify

God in their actions, but they don't. Now what's that second thing? That second thing that I mentioned was the conscience.

The conscience convinces individuals of moral right and wrong thoughts and behaviors.

So let's take a look at this in, let's put up, do we have Romans 2?

Romans 2, 14 and 15 says this, speaking of the conscience remember, for when

Gentiles who do not have the law, now let me stop there and specify, the law there is the idea of the moral law written, the commandments that God wrote through Moses.

So these are Gentiles, the Gentiles didn't have God's word, but what does it say?

By nature, do what the law requires. So what do you have?

These Gentiles that don't have God's word, by nature do what law requires, they are a law unto themselves, it doesn't mean they get to make up the law, this means that the law is within them by nature.

Even though they do not have the law, verse 15 says, so they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or excuse them.

So in other words, what you have here is, what Paul is saying in Romans is these

Gentiles who did not have God's word, they're still not without excuse.

Sometimes you may get someone that goes, what about that pygmy in Africa, that person that never heard the gospel, or they never heard of Jesus Christ, you're going to say that God's going to send them to hell because they never heard?

They have enough information to know that there is a

God, they can look at nature, and naturally every person knows from their conscience right from wrong.

So their conscience, as that verse says, will either excuse them knowing they did right or accuse them because they did wrong.

In other words, their conscience is enough for them, it is enough to convict a person so that they are again without excuse.

God is not going to judge them for what they don't know, but He's provided for them enough information so that they're without excuse for what they do know.

Another is Romans 9 verses 1 and 2. Romans 9 verses 1 and 2.

I am speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying, my conscience bears me witness in the

Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow, unceasingly anguish in my heart. You see how the conscience again is something that's, this

I'm pointing out to show that the conscience shows the difference between right and wrong in our life.

Let's look at Romans 13. Therefore, one must be in subjection not only to avoid

God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. So again, the conscience is something that all men have that they can be excused or accused of.

1 Peter 2, 19, for this is a gracious thing, when mindful of God one endures sorrow while suffering unjustly.

This is the idea of how can an unbeliever know what's unjust? This is from the conscience.

Lastly, do we have, no, okay.

So that's the last we have there. So the other passages you could look at would be 2

Corinthians 1, 12, and also 4, 2. So the purpose of natural revelation though is to render man inexcusable.

That's your blank there. It is to render man inexcusable to the existence of God and prepares the way for special revelation.

Natural revelation is limited in its ability to inform individuals about, well, redemption.

We can't know about how to be saved, but we can know an awful lot about that there is a

God, that we're in a wrong state of living with that God, okay. So what you see is that revelation, natural revelation, what it does, what it provides is it provides so that man is without excuse.

So we can stand, this is why I say there's two presuppositions that I'm not willing to give up.

When people want to argue with me on the street, when you get some professing atheists, well, there's no

God, prove God exists. Two presuppositions

I hold to. God exists, He has spoken. The first one deals with the natural revelation.

The second one deals with supernatural or special revelation. Natural revelation is saying that there's enough information in the universe to know that God exists, that someone must have created all this.

And God provided a second thing naturally for every man that renders every man inexcusable, and that is their conscience.

Have you ever had someone that professes to be an atheist and yet they argue that we're wrong?

Excuse me, but in your worldview, how can you have a right and wrong that is universal?

You see, that's the problem. What they end up having to do is they have to argue for a subjective morality, whether it be defined by culture, or whether it be defined by the individual, or whether it be defined by who's ever in power.

That's basically the three that they're going to lean toward. It's going to be one of those.

Now, once you have someone that says, well, it's the society that decides. Really?

That was an argument that was made during the Nuremberg trials. Those of the

Nazi Germans argued that their culture said that this was right.

Because morality was relative and not universal, it was defined by their social structure.

And their social structure said this is okay to kill six million Jewish people.

The argument that was made during the Nuremberg trials is that morality is universal.

And therefore, what these German soldiers, these Nazi soldiers did was known to them to be wrong.

And therefore, they should be tried, found guilty, and punished.

Now, if someone is going to argue that culture defines morality, then they can't argue that what happened with Hitler was wrong.

In fact, if you live here in the United States, September 11th, you wouldn't be able to say that what the

Muslims did, or what Al -Qaeda did in blowing up our towers using our own planes, you can't say that's wrong.

Why? Because they felt it was right. You see, you lose all ability to define right and wrong because you remove the standard.

If you're going to argue that it's who's ever in charge because they're in charge, they get to make the rules, then you're really arguing that might makes right.

And you can never, in that case, ever argue against, well, say, rape. Because that's what rape is.

Rape is always a might makes right mentality. I would say rape, the act of rape is always wrong.

This is a question I will ask people that argue for relative morality. Is the act of rape always wrong?

They always say yes. I'll ask them why, and they say because it does harm to another person.

I always give the case that happened here in New Jersey where there was a dentist that put women, 26 women that it was known of, that it became known of, that he put them where they were asleep, they were unconscious, and he had sexual relations with them without their knowledge.

That is the definition of rape. Without them knowing it, therefore, by the definition that the atheist provides, that it does harm to another, well, these women suffered no harm.

They didn't even know it occurred. The thing that brought them harm was the knowledge that that occurred.

And they all of a sudden will have a problem because they know rape is wrong, but they just lost their argument for why it's wrong.

Why? Because if you have a subjective morality, not a universal one, then nothing can be said to be wrong because it's all subjective.

And anything you say is wrong today, it could be right tomorrow. But this relative morality is what we see in our culture because they want to remove

God. And the first thing that they did in Nazi Germany is to remove absolute morality.

They had to get rid of the Christians. Everyone tries to argue that Hitler was a Christian. Hitler redefined

Christianity and basically got rid of and killed genuine Christians and forced anyone else to cave in to his view of a subjective moral

Christianity that accepts evolution as an absolute doctrine because that's how he did everything he did is in a belief of evolution, that he was creating a superior race.

So when we argue here in this country that morality is relative and therefore no one should be able to say that, and some are actually pushing to say that it should be illegal to say that homosexuality is a sin, what they're trying to do is the same thing, is to push a relative morality against their own conscience.

Their conscience is what they're trying to get away from. Their conscience reveals that they're guilty. And people want to run away from that guilty conscience, but they can't.

And the thinking is if they make it subjective, then they can say it's right for me, wrong for you, but it's right for me, so all is okay.

That's not going to work when they stand before God. Why? Because God makes them, he puts the conscience in the mind so that they're without excuse.

This is the reason when we evangelize we say to use God's law, use the Ten Commandments, use that which appeals to the conscience because it's something that renders man inexcusable.

Now the second thing I said with natural revelation is it makes way for special revelation.

Special revelation. This is where we want to now focus with the rest of the remainder of time that we have in class today is special revelation.

This is what we're going to call God's Word, the Bible. This is the revelation which is an invention into natural course of things and which is supernatural both to the source, that's your first blank, to the source and the mode.

That's your second blank, mode. So it's supernatural both to the source and the mode. What do

I mean by that? Well, this is the source being the people who do the writing,

Paul, James, John, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, they're the ones actually doing the writing.

It's supernatural to them. It's supernatural to the mode, the actual writing that they produced.

Not everything that Paul wrote was inspired. We're going to look at that next class.

Not everything he wrote was inspired. He wrote at least three, I think four letters to the Corinthians of which we only have two that were part of God's Word.

So this becomes the thing. We end up having where when we look at revelation, we look at this and see that revelation is something, special revelation is something very unique.

Special revelation is a supernatural, propositional, and redemptive.

It's supernatural in the fact that God has to work outside. This is something that's beyond nature.

Men cannot produce God's Word. Men cannot produce the Bible. You take ten men in a room from even the same area.

If I take ten men from my state, from my town, and I say, tell me what

God is. Write a lengthy book about God and His revelation.

You'll probably get twelve different views of God. And yet we have forty writers over fifteen hundred years and no contradictions in their description of who

God is. That's what's supernatural because God worked through the writers so that what they wrote was special.

It was supernatural. And it leads us to a redemptive relationship with God.

Special revelation is uniquely of God and often misunderstood or twisted by different religions or cults or even those professing atheists, which

I would argue is a religion. The Bible is the form of special revelation that God uses today to communicate to people.

However, in the Bible, we see different things like theophanies and anthropomorphisms.

And we're going to try to cover those two quickly here in the time we have left.

So let's start with theophanies. Do I have a slide on that? I do see, look at that. Theophanies, this is

Theo. If you see the word there, Theo is God. Ophany is appearance.

So a God appearance. This is the appearance of God, where God reveals himself, usually in a human form.

So a theophany is a physical manifestation of God in some way. It could be a manifestation in nature.

We can look at Exodus 13 to 21.

We also have it audibly. Exodus 19, first three verses there, you hear

God's voice speaking. You hear that at the baptism of Jesus. You hear

God the Father speaking. Or bodily, Genesis 16,

Genesis 31, Joshua 5, all these, you see God bodily showing himself in the form of a body.

Many religious leaders claim to having theophanies.

However, there are two important things of a true theophany. You'll see this, you're going to see people, it's very popular today in writings.

People are saying they went to heaven, they saw God, or God came to them in a dream. One that I'm going to get to, a guy came and said he was shaving in a mirror, he wrote a book,

God came to him in the mirror. You know how I know that he didn't see God? He continued to shave.

If God comes to you, you don't keep shaving. Why? Letter A in your syllabus, the response of the person.

This is what's true of a true theophany. That's your blank there is the response of the person.

If God comes to a person, the Bible records examples of people experiencing theophanies, and the response of those people is one of awe and worship.

In other words, God comes to you when you're shaving in the mirror, you don't keep shaving. You fall in awe of God.

Isaiah says this, Isaiah 6, 5. He sees God, and he says,

Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. You see, it's also in Revelation.

When I saw him, this is John speaking, when I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his right hand on me, saying,

Fear not, I am the first and the last. So you see, the response of a person that sees a true theophany is they see their own sinfulness.

They don't have a splashing fight with Jesus in the Jordan River, as one person claimed. They don't keep shaving in the mirror.

They are in awe. They see how sinful they are. Anyone who sees or hears a theophany, their response is in a manner fitting of being in the presence of the most holy, supreme, divine

God of the universe. That's the response they're going to have. They're not going to have a response of splashing one another and playing games.

Being in the presence of the infinitely holy

God is not the place that a human wants to be, because it'll kill them.

That's why people, when they saw just a shadow of the glory of God or a theophany of God, they thought they'd be dead.

Because the response of a true theophany is awe of how great

God is. Anyone that tells you that they saw God and He's like them, they didn't see

God. They're committing blasphemy, okay? When someone sees a theophany, sees

God revealing Himself in some way, they are in awe. They are on their knees in worship.

A second is, letter B in your syllabus, the message of the person. The message of the person.

That's your blank there, message. The message of the person who sees or hears a true theophany is always consistent with Scripture and never contradicts it.

Let's look at 2 Corinthians 13 .8, for we can do nothing against the truth, but only for the truth.

You can look at Galatians. I don't have this one here, but in Galatians, Paul says, even if an angel from heaven comes to you with a different message, let that be accursed.

In other words, God is not going to give a theophany and reveal a message that's contrary to Scripture.

If someone says they got a theophany, take what they say, compare it to Scripture. This is exactly what we did with Joseph Smith when we looked at Mormonism.

He said he had a vision of God. We looked at the message he provided and what he provided is contradictory to Scripture.

Therefore, he did not see a true theophany. Did he see something?

I don't know. I don't know what he saw, but what I do know is whatever he claimed to see is not of God.

The message must be compared with the Scriptures for accuracy. We see this as the

Bereans in Acts 17 .11 did this with Paul. Now, the Jews who were more noble than these in Thessalonica, they received the word with all eagerness, examining the

Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. I mean, they took what

Paul said and they entrust what Paul said. They challenged Paul, comparing what Paul, the apostle, one who wrote much of the

New Testament, they compared what he said to Scripture. John says this in 1

John 4, 1 -3, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.

For every false prophet, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.

By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.

And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is from God. Is not from God.

This is the Spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming and now is already in the world.

Now, the interesting thing that John had to deal with, John was dealing with Gnosticism where they said that Jesus was

God, he wasn't human, that he didn't come in the flesh. That's what he was having to argue.

And so, he's saying anyone who doesn't say that Jesus came in the flesh, they're not, you test what they say to Scripture.

You test the spirits. You test what they say against Scripture. That's why often when people say what

God said, I stop them and say, book, chapter and verse please. Tell me where God said it.

The person who receives the true theophany would not be concerned if a person wants to compare the message that they say with Scripture.

However, if a leader expects explicit trust in them without questioning, then the message is not from God.

Because the leader is purporting themselves to be an authority and not the Scriptures.

In other words, when we had in like Jehovah Witnesses where they end up saying, trust the watchtower.

Only a watchtower could tell you what God's word means even if it doesn't seem to say that.

In other words, if you read it and it says one thing but the watchtower says something different, the authority becomes the watchtower.

Even if the watchtower is disagreeing with Scripture, it's the watchtower that becomes the authority and that's the problem.

Scripture is our authority and so we compare what they say to Scripture.

Lastly, let's look at anthropomorphisms and this will be the last that we will look at. Anthropomorphisms, anthro, man.

Pomorphisms is this idea, polymorph is to morph, is to form. So, it's in the form of man where God comes in the form of man and anthropomorphism is a figure of speech.

In your syllabus, I have that bolded to make sure you see that. It's a figure of speech. It doesn't mean

God is actually a man. This is the mistake that the Mormons make when they try to say, look at the way it speaks of God.

He must be a man. It is a figure of speech not to be understood literally but used by writers of Scripture in which human, that's your blank there, in which human physical characteristics are attributed to God for the sake of illustrating an important point.

For example, Scripture sometimes speaks of the face or the arm of God even though God is revealed to be a spirit and not limited to space and time by the constraints of a physical body.

But He's talked about having a face or arms. He doesn't have a physical body. Anthropomorphisms usually help to make an otherwise abstract truth about God more concrete.

The fact that God sees us. We cannot comprehend how God knows things. We can understand how we see.

So, we see things and we give that attribute to God that as He sees the way we see.

He knows things. It's a way to make something more concrete for us to understand something we can't understand about God.

God is not a physical being. He is a spirit, John 4 .24. It is an error to understand an anthropomorphism as literally assuming

God to have a physical body. It's a mistake the Mormons make. God the Father is not a man nor was

He one. To believe that based upon the anthropomorphisms that God is a man ignores the descriptions of God as an animal.

That's right. God is also described as having wings. That's your blank there.

Wings like a bird. Psalm 36 verse 7. 57 verse 1. 61 verse 4.

67 verse 7. And Psalm 91 verse 4.

All of those talk about God having animal like creatures. Wings like a bird.

That He gathers us under His wings like a hen. I guess this is the thing.

If the Mormons were going to be consistent then God must be a bird man. Right? Because He must have wings like an eagle or wings like a hen.

All right. If someone teaches that God has a physical body based on anthropomorphisms then to be consistent

God would also have to be a bird of some half bird half man type of creature.

Obviously they do not believe that. But this is the mistake that some make.

And this is where we have to understand what an anthropomorphism is. We see God revealing

Himself to men. This is a supernatural. This is not the Bible but it is one of the two ways outside of the

Bible that God has revealed Himself. That He reveals Himself through dreams in anthropomorphisms or theophanies.

Some argue this is happening in the Middle East today. Is it happening? I'm not sure.

But what you do see is that there are some people that have these visions of God and they recognize their sinfulness and they have a high view of God, a low view of man after it, and the message is consistent with the

Bible. Well, if those are the two responses, that's the right response and the right message, maybe they had a genuine theophany.

Can't speak to that. But what I could do is take what they say God said in this theophany, compare it to Scripture and know whether the message is correct.

That's what we do. All right. So, this is revelation, both natural, again, natural in the natural world.

We have creation, everything within creation, and we have the conscience. We have supernatural specifically and the

Bible ultimately is Jesus Christ. And two other ways that God reveals

Himself is through theophanies, God showing Himself in some way and then it could be in nature like the

Shekinah glory or in an anthropomorphism where God is described as having human -like or animal -like features.

All right. Next class, we're going to look at inspiration, the doctrine of inspiration.

We're going to look at the sufficiency and interpretation, all of that in our next class.

So, I don't want you to miss it. You want to make sure to pay attention for that. You can contact us about this or anything else at academy at strivingforeternity .org.

Again, you could pick up the syllabus at store .strivingforeternity .org. And while you're there, you could pick up my book,

What Do They Believe? Also, while you're there, if you want to have your church or homeschool group or local group, whatever, have a

Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar, you can do that as well. Contact us.

We'd love to come to your church or group and host one of those. It is coming upon, if you're watching live or close to live, it is

Christmas time. We want to encourage you to go to smile .amazon .com

and register to support Striving for Eternity. Basically, half a percent of everything that you buy, they will donate to us.

And we've been getting those checks and we're very appreciative. Someone is doing a lot of buying on Amazon. That's what

I could tell just based on the checks we're getting. But we are very grateful for that.

So, if you would go out there, that would be great. Until next class, remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.