June 9, 2015 ISI Radio Show with Phil Johnson discussing “Does God still guide His people through dreams, visions, divine voices, and appearances?”

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Phil Johnson, Executive Director of “Grace To You”, the TV, radio & publishing ministry of renowned Bible teacher, preacher, pastor & author JOHN MacARTHUR, was my guest to discuss: “DOES GOD STILL GUIDE HIS PEOPLE THROUGH DREAMS, VISIONS, DIVINE VOICES & APPEARANCES?” (& Alleged Visits to Heaven & Hell Examined). Subscribe to Iron Sharpens Iron on-demand / podcast:

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown
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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,
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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.
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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.
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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,
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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity on the planet Earth. This is
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Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, and I am so delighted that we have as a special guest today, returning to Iron Sharpens Iron, Phil Johnson, the
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Executive Director of Grace to You Ministries, the TV, radio, and publishing ministry of world -renowned pastor, preacher, author, and TV and radio
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Bible teacher John MacArthur. You can regularly read Phil's blogs and those of other like -minded
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Christians at teampyro .blogspot .com.
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That's team, T -E -A -M, pyro, P -Y -R -O, as in pyromaniacs .blogspot
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.com, and it is my honor and privilege to have you back on the show, Phil Johnson.
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Hey, thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's great to have you, and some people may be wondering how on earth could Phil be back as a guest when you only started last
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Monday, a week ago, and Phil was never on the lineup until today.
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Well, what I meant by that was back between 2006 and 2011, Phil Johnson was probably my most frequently interviewed guest, probably either right behind or neck and neck with David Wood of answeringmuslims .com,
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so I'm so delighted that you believe Iron Sharpens Iron is worthy of joining us for an interview.
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It's a privilege to be here. Today we're going to be discussing something that's, I believe, a very important subject because it has held the attention and captivated the imaginations and respect and adulation of Christians or those who profess to be crossing denominational lines, whether they be evangelical
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Roman Catholic or even folks of neither persuasion, but it is the issue of not only the two books that have come out recently, which are written by or co -authored by or written about young boys who apparently died or came near to death and made claims of visiting heaven.
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One is The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin and Alex Malarkey, and the other is
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Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo, and we're going to be addressing that issue, and even the broader subject of our program today, or the broader question,
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I should say, is does God continue to guide his people with dreams, visions, divine, audible voices, and appearances today?
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Well, let's first of all start out with the two books that I mentioned, The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin and Alex Malarkey, and Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo.
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Is there any reason why we should doubt the claims of either of these books?
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Yeah, I think there's every reason to doubt both books. Let's start with The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven by Kevin Malarkey, because that one's pretty much the easiest to answer.
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That book purports to be the story of the experiences of Kevin's son Alex, who was gravely injured in a terrible car accident when he,
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I think, was about six years old. He was a young boy. This was probably ten years ago or so.
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Alex is a quadriplegic. He's been under constant care of his mother pretty much ever since.
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And there were certain things in the book, the story of supposedly
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Alex's trip to heaven, what he saw and all that, that just were difficult to reconcile with scripture, didn't bear any resemblance to the biblical descriptions of heaven, and all of that.
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And so I had written an article questioning both of the books.
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The article we posted on our website at Grace to You was titled The Burpo Malarkey Doctrine, and I think it was published probably four years ago now, maybe three years ago.
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And it basically took quotations from both of those books and said, there's just no way anyone who believes the
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Bible can give credence to these stories. And the day that article was published, I was in a meeting, and I came out, and my secretary said to me, there's a woman who wants you to call her back.
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Her name is Beth Malarkey. And I thought, okay, she's going to be angry with me for questioning her son's account and all of that.
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And I called her, and she wasn't angry at all. She was very friendly and said, you know, thank you for your article on this.
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You're exactly right. The book is full of exaggerations. Alex himself has been trying to set the record straight for a long time.
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And that sort of launched me on a year -long project to help Alex and Beth Malarkey get the true story of Alex's experience out there in the media so that it would answer some of the exaggerated tales and stories that his father actually had written into this book.
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And I think with his book agents' encouragement and the publishers' encouragement, they had embellished the tales of Kevin's visions and experiences and all of that.
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And so what amazed me was how difficult it was to actually have people take a careful look at that book in light of Scripture.
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Alex himself, you know, a quadriplegic, confined to his home, to bed.
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Very difficult for him to get messages out on the internet, but he was doing his best to do that. And the publisher had set up a
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Facebook page to promote the book. Alex had gone on that Facebook page and said, this book is full of deceit and lies.
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And the response from the publisher or whoever ran that Facebook site was to ban
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Alex from commenting on this Facebook page that purportedly existed to promote the story of his experience.
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And things like that that went on for probably, I think, Beth Malarkey fought this battle for about two years.
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And you're quite certain that this is not just due to the vindictiveness of an ex -spouse who has manipulated her son into recanting the story or anything like that?
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Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, like I said, I questioned the story.
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It can't be reconciled with what Scripture said before I ever had any dealings at all with either
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Beth or Alex. Does Alex, to this very day, stand behind his recantation or refutation of this book?
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Yes. In fact, what happened finally to get the media to sort of sit up and take notice was
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Alex wrote a little bit more extensive recantation of the book and the stories in it, and basically explained that this wasn't really.
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And he said what happened was that he's a six -year -old boy confined to a hospital bed, newly paralyzed.
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In the tedium of hospital life, he discovered that adults would stay and listen to him and ask him questions about his experiences and all that.
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And as long as he made up fantastic tales about what happened to him while he was unconscious and what he saw and all of that, they would listen.
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It was an attention -getting sort of ploy on the part of a little boy who is paralyzed and in the hospital, and some adults got a hold of it and decided this would be a great money -making scheme, and they blew it into a story that actually did sell millions of books, made the publisher wealthy.
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Now, was this the book that became a movie with Greg Kinnear, who is actually one of my favorite actors, or was that the
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Todd Burpo book? That was the Todd Burpo book. So what can you tell us specifically about the books?
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First of all, the book by Kevin and Alex Malarkey, I guess I should say
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Kevin Malarkey, not really Alex Malarkey. Yeah, that was another thing. Alex was trying to get the word out that not only was he not co -author of the book, he really didn't have any control ultimately over what was put in the book and what it finally said, because he tried to straighten out and correct some of the exaggerations that found their way in there.
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There are other aspects of the tale that he says he never told anybody that the ghostwriter basically made up, and so he had asked the publisher to remove his name as a co -author.
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My understanding is that the contract made with the publisher by his father actually leaves
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Alex out of the term, so it's not like he was making money on it either. Other people making money on what was ostensibly the story of his experience.
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I'm going to give our email address if you have a question that you'd like Phil to answer on the air live.
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This is a live broadcast, so get us your email as quickly as possible at chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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That's chrisarnson, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.
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We already have an email from a listener in Northern Ireland that I'll read later on when it comes to that part of the interview that I'd like to ask him the question of our listener in Northern Ireland.
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What specifically in The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven did you immediately realize this is a bunch of malarkey?
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This is a fraud. Well, certain things in the big picture is simply the fact that all of these books, it fits into the pattern that all these books follow where what they talk about are incidental items and what heaven looks like, what people do there, and all of that.
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What they don't talk about is what the Bible always talks about. Whenever anyone experienced a real vision of heaven, it's always about the glory of God.
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That's the amazing thing. That's the centerpiece of heaven, and none of these books hardly mention it at all.
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But with the malarkey book in particular, one of the things that stood out to me, it's been a couple of years since I read it so I can't give you a complete catalog of all the things that, you know,
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I just couldn't be reconciled with scripture, but I'll give you at least one classic example. He says in there, for example, that there is a portal, a passageway from heaven directly to hell, which, you know, flatly contradicts what
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Jesus says in the parable he tells about Lazarus and the rich man, that there's a great gulf fixed and no one can pass from one to the other.
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So little things like that, that when you add them up and just compare what scripture says, and I don't mean to pick on the malarkey book either, it's been my experience, having read a number of these tales of people who say they saw heaven,
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I've yet to encounter one that actually jibes with what scripture says about heaven.
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Yeah, and I don't even know how on earth people would find great peace and comfort knowing that even if they get to heaven, there's going to be a portal there that leads directly into the gates of hell.
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Right. And so I understand that you actually confronted the Christian publisher of the boy who came to heaven, who came back from heaven,
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I should say? Yeah, well I tried for a couple of years by writing letters and emails and all of that.
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I didn't actually ever hear back from the publisher until after this thing blew into a kind of national news story in the secular media even sometime last year, and then one of the publicists from the publisher contacted me with a list of some inaccuracies that they claimed were in my account of what they'd done and all of that.
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I answered that email, I never heard back from them again. Are they still publishing the book?
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No, they withdrew the book, more or less had to with all the controversy.
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And has anybody got this book in print? Yeah, I think you could still buy it on Amazon, it's not still being published, but there were so many copies printed that I think it's still for sale in a lot of places.
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Anything uniquely different about Heaven is for Real by Todd Burpo? No, other than that, not only does it not reconcile with scripture, you can't reconcile these accounts with one another.
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They all describe totally different scenarios, and that's another problem with them.
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They cannot possibly all be true. My answer is, when you compare any of them with scripture,
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I haven't found one yet that even has the ring of truth. Is that book still being published, and is that young man that went to Heaven in that story, is he still standing by that story or that account of going to Heaven?
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Yes, in fact, he's been pretty emphatic about it. He's now a young adult, I think he's probably 16 or thereabout, and when the controversy over the
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Malarkey book was at its boiling point last year, he came out with a statement saying, you know, his story may not be true, but mine is.
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And in fact, all this happened about the time that movie with Greg Kinnear was released, so it was an inopportune time for the
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Burpos and their publisher and all that. But the fact is, that book by Todd Burpo is, as I understand it, the best -selling
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Christian book of the decade. It sold well over 10 million, and they have all kinds of spin -off products that go with it, books for children, coloring books, the movie, all of that stuff.
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It's made millions and millions of dollars, and it can't possibly be true if you believe the
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Bible. And how do you respond to people who basically would say that you're raining on everybody's parade, that, hey,
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I'm going to believe in that Burpo book because I'm finding peace in it, others have found peace in it, and I believe, since God is all -powerful, that he could give an experience like that to someone who has either come close to death or who has been resuscitated from actual death, clinical death.
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How do you respond to that? Well, there's several responses to just what you just said. Number one, the fact that something gives us a feeling of peace is no verification that it's true, and in fact, that's often how
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Satan tempts us by sort of telling us that we'll feel better, or we'll have more peace, or some conflict will end if we'll just commit this transgression, and that's how we fall into sin.
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So that's a really bad way of trying to do discernment. But also, it's true that God can do anything he wants to, but he's pretty clear that people don't go to heaven and come back.
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It says, I think, in John 3, that no one has come back from heaven other than the
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Son of Man who was sent from heaven. So that, to me, just rules out the possibility that these sorts of reports could possibly be true in all of Scripture.
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There are only four accounts of people who saw visions of heaven, and in a couple of cases, they were so real, like the
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Apostle Paul, who describes in 2 Corinthians 12 being caught up into the third heaven, and he says,
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I don't even know whether it was in the body or out of the body. What's remarkable about it is that he declines to say anything about it.
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The point Paul is making is to answer some critics of his who were questioning his apostolic credentials and saying they'd had more fantastic spiritual experiences than him and all that, and he basically is saying, no, they haven't.
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And he talks about being caught up into heaven, but then he immediately changes the subject without giving us a single detail of what he saw there or what happened there, what it was like.
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In fact, he says it's not lawful to speak of those things. Does he refer to himself in the third person?
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It seems like he's identifying another person who has experience. Yeah, that's right. In fact, that confused me as a young Christian, because people always refer to that as Paul's visit to heaven, but if you read it,
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Paul says, I know a man in Christ several years ago was caught up into heaven, and he starts out talking in the third person as if he's speaking about somebody else, because Paul was so loathe to boast about anything.
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He constantly says how much he hates to boast. He didn't want to come across as boasting, and so he began to tell that story as if it dealt with someone else, but then he immediately shifts into saying that the
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Lord gave him a thorn in the flesh because of the exceeding, surpassing greatness of these visions.
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So Paul is more or less subtly telling us, but clearly telling us that he is the man who was caught up into the third heaven, and he doesn't want to talk about it.
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And that's so different from all of these modern books of bestsellers, that all they want to do is talk about these experiences and constantly embellish them so that they become really fluid and changing stories.
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There's just nothing about it that's objective and trustworthy. Before we go to the broader question that I mentioned earlier, does
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God continue to guide his people with dreams, visions, divine audible voices and appearances today?
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What about the reverse of the alleged visits to heaven, the alleged visits to hell?
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If you set aside some of the lunatics that I've seen on some of the more overtly heretical charismatic television networks, and please
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I want my non -cessationist charismatic friends who are biblically sound not to think that I'm broad -brushing here, but the networks that seem to feed on the sensationalism of that kind of thing, if you put those aside, those that are clearly anti -biblical or unbiblical, could it be possible that someone, that God chooses to scare the living daylights out of them during a near -death or a resuscitated death experience, could they have visited or seen hell, gotten a glimpse of it?
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Yeah, two questions there. Again, it's kind of a two -pronged question. Could God use an experience like that to scare someone, to sort of awaken them out of a spiritual lethargy?
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And my response to that is, yeah. You know, Luther was nearly struck by lightning and that's what stopped him literally in his tracks and caused him to really take his obligation to serve
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God seriously. And, you know, the Lord has used things that scare people to sort of snap them out of the triviality of their lives in this world, so God could do that.
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But then the second part of the question is, do we regard, say, a scary dream as a real vision of heaven?
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Do we draw what we, our concept, a real vision of hell, rather? Do we draw our concept of hell from someone's dreams?
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And to that I say emphatically, no. God can providentially use the fact that we are frightened to bring us to the point of comfort where we find salvation in Christ, but that doesn't mean that the thing that frightened us was necessarily real or a revelation from God.
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I don't think he brings people into the kingdom by literally showing them a vision of hell.
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And in fact, I think if it was a real vision of hell, it would be so horrible that you'd never want to talk about it, and no one would really want to read about it.
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It's a sort of morbid curiosity, isn't it, that makes people buy books that describe supposedly the details of what hell is like and feast their minds on something like that.
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Well, what I find quite interesting is that even in the scriptures themselves, the account of Abraham having a conversation with the rich man who is in hell, and he's pleading with Abraham that his brothers may have a word from the afterlife, so that they may know that the path they're on is damning.
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And basically, Abraham is saying that even if one raises from the dead, if they don't have the law and the prophets, if they don't hear the law and the prophets, they're not going to believe even that person.
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Yeah, that's right. And one more time, I'm going to repeat our email address as chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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If you have a question, chrisarnson at gmail .com, the question for Phil Johnson.
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This is a very sensitive question that we're about to bring up. Does God continue to guide his people with dreams, visions, divine, audible voices, and appearances today?
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And this is something that you will hear anecdotal accounts from people spanning the denominational divisions.
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You don't only have non -cessationists or charismatic or Pentecostal people making anecdotal claims about having heard or seen messages from the afterlife, or from heaven, or appearances, and so on.
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Are these each up to their own individual examination in the light of Scripture, or should we discount each and every one of them?
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Well, I think we should look at each and every one of them with a great deal of skepticism to begin with, because there's just no encouragement in Scripture for us ever to listen for the voice of God outside of what he's recorded in Scripture.
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Now, there are stories in Scripture of incidents where God revealed things to people in dreams or direct prophecies or whatever, but if you even examine those stories in Scripture and sort of notice, you'll see that they are extremely rare, and they generally are associated with the giving of a new revelation that will become
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Scripture. So, you know, the question is, is
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God still speaking outside of Scripture? And if so, what authority do those messages have?
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And I don't know of any responsible person, any genuine believer, including my non -cessationist and charismatic friends who believe that, you know, whatever
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God brings to mind, they have to take seriously as if it were a prophecy. They'll even refer to it as prophecy.
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Still, all the sane ones want to make a distinction between that kind of subjective prophecy and the objective truth of Scripture, which is clearly authoritative and all that.
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Probably the most important proponent of modern prophecy is
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Wayne Grudem, who wrote a book now about two decades ago or longer called
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The Prophecy in the New Testament, something like that. Let me look up the title. But he's writing about...it's
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called The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today. And in there, he's very clear to stress the fact that he doesn't regard these modern prophecies as he calls it.
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I wish he wouldn't even use the word prophecy. And he himself says in one place in the book,
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I think it's page 109 of his book, he says he wishes that charismatics would stop calling these things a word from the
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Lord, because he says that label makes it sound exactly like the Bible in authority.
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Well, I say to call it prophecy does the same thing. If it's a message from God, if it's genuinely from God, it's infallible.
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But as I said, all the sane charismatics and non -cessationists will acknowledge that these messages...in
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fact, Wayne Grudem's definition of modern prophecy is it's something God brings to mind.
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So whatever comes to mind, if you regard it as a prophecy, it can't be fallible if it's genuinely a prophecy from God.
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But they acknowledge that these messages are fallible. And in fact, they're wrong numerically more often than they are right.
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And so my answer is for that reason, for that reason alone, they're worthless. If they're not reliable, then it shouldn't be deemed a message from God.
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Because if it's a message from God, it's reliable and true. If it's fallible, it's not a message from God.
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And in effect, I've said this many times, in effect, by acknowledging that these prophecies are fallible, they've actually conceded the cessationist argument.
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They're admitting that these are not messages from God that we are obliged to give credence to.
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And I'm assuming that you would certainly, after having heard what you said, you would certainly have people immediately reject any visions or voices of deceased loved ones that are allegedly appearing to people and speaking to people.
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Yeah, I mean, that's necromancy. And that's strictly forbidden in Scripture. That's simply spiritism.
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And honestly, I think that is one of the problems with the modern prophecy movement. It bears a very close resemblance to the kind of fortune -telling that these women in houses with neon lights do.
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It's not reliable. It's overtly subjective, and it's just a guess.
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You started by asking me, do you give any credence to these messages? You know, I think sometimes a person who thinks he's heard a message from God may actually have a right idea about something.
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But the fact that one of these thoughts that comes to mind is right and true, one of my intuitions might be true, that doesn't prove that I have the gift of prophecy.
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And in fact, according to Scripture, if one of my intuitions is wrong, that's proof that I don't have the gift of prophecy.
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And if I declare that wrong intuition as if it were a prophecy from God in the Old Testament, that was a capital crime.
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You could be stoned for that. Well, speaking of that, what do you make of the account in the
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Old Testament with Saul and the Witch of Narnia, or the medium? Did Samuel manifest himself from the grave?
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Because the account in the Old Testament never says this was a fraud of the medium.
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Right. Yeah, it was Endor, not Narnia. I'm sorry! That's a kind of Freudian slip that told me a lot about Scripture.
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Oh boy, that was funny. Sorry. Very serious question. Sorry for the bellow there. Yeah, no, that is one of the mysteries of the
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Old Testament. Scripture gives that account as if that was really Samuel talking from the dead.
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Now, if that happened, it's because God sovereignly, you know, permitted
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Samuel to actually appear and give this message. But before that ever happened,
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God himself was very clear that no one in Israel should be experimenting with that kind of necromancy.
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So that was a terrible sin for Saul to do it, to seek wisdom from a dead friend like that.
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And actually, it was over that and other issues like that that the kingdom was taken from him forever.
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And of course, even if God in his sovereignty permitted that to happen with Samuel, this is not something that we should seek after or repeat, and it's damnable.
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And even the context surrounding that account makes it clear. It doesn't discuss the question of whether this was really
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Samuel or not. It definitely gives us the impression that it was really Samuel.
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But nevertheless, the context makes it clear that for Saul, it was a grave sin.
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It was a serious sin, a sin that ruined his life for him to consult that medium in the first place.
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So there's no way Scripture is authorizing it. Even if God did sovereignly send Samuel back with a message, that doesn't denote
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God's approval of the process. Right, and I think that one of the most remarkable things that our listeners may have discovered today is that C .S.
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Lewis actually contributed to the canon of the Bible. We're going to be right back after these brief messages.
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If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Phil Johnson, it is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Phil Johnson, the Executive Director of Grace to You.
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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron.
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And if you've just tuned us in, our guest today is Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You, the
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TV, radio, and publishing ministry of world -renowned pastor, preacher, author, and TV and radio evangelist
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John MacArthur. We are discussing the question, does God continue to guide his people with dreams, visions, divine audible voices, and appearances today?
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And one of the things, you touched on it already, John, that one of the things that makes the issue cloudier or harder to really discern the answers to these questions is because you have men who are wonderful exegetes and even reformed who disagree with the cessationists on this issue.
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You just mentioned Wayne Grudem, for example, who you have a host of Christians who have been greatly helped by reading his works.
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And you even have people like John Piper, who's a modern -day hero to many reformed folk.
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How do you respond to that? Well, Piper admits that he's ambivalent and confused on some of these issues.
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So he's not like a dogmatic proponent of, you know, hearing directly from God.
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Like C. Samuel Storms would be one that would be more of a director. Yeah, and all of them, I think, are far too open on this issue, far too accepting of claims that God is still speaking, when
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I know for a fact that all of them are surrounded by people who have, at times, made the claim that they got a message from God, and it turned out to be a false message.
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So I don't understand the persistence. And in fact, Grudem even defines, I mentioned he defines prophecy as something
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God brings to mind. The more extensive quote is this. He says that prophecy is the speaking of merely human words to report something
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God brings to mind. Well, by giving it that definition, in my view, he's basically taken the heart out of the true definition of what prophecy is.
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If it's merely human words, and it's fallible, and it's subjective, and we know from experience it's usually wrong,
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I just don't understand why anyone would want to give any sort of emphasis whatsoever or encouragement to people to listen to those kinds of messages as if we could derive, you know, reliable revelation from God from, you know, someone's, basically someone's imagination.
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Scripture says the person who trusts his own heart is a fool. The person who thinks his own intuition is giving him reliable guidance is going to run into trouble.
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And would you say that this is heresy, that these people, even those who share our beloved
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Sovereign Grace teachings, Reform Theology, Calvinism, however you want to label it or nickname it?
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Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call them heretics, and I don't think this is heresy in the sense that it's a damnable idea.
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If you believe it, you're going to go to hell. But I do think it's a serious error, and it opens the door for heresies.
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I mean, you know, you and I both want to be very clear in dividing between these guys who are, you know, generally reliable in a lot of what they teach, and friends to us, in many ways, allies, theologically.
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We don't want to lump them together with the wackos you see on TV, on practically every charismatic television network, who seem to be driven by greed and, you know, some of them are just bald -faced liars.
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There is a spectrum in the charismatic world between these ultra -unreliable charlatans and guys like Wayne Grudem, John Piper, and all that, and I don't want to cloud that.
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But I do think what Grudem is teaching about prophecy and the ongoing nature of the gifts and all that actually gives support and credence to the wackos that they don't deserve.
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I think he's propping them up with his doctrine, and so while I wouldn't label him a heretic,
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I do think what he teaches gives aid and comfort to people who are heretics. And what is your assessment?
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I mean, obviously this could be a week -long series of messages on this one issue that I'm going to ask you, but what is your assessment on the
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Sovereign Grace Ministries movement? I mean, I know that even your employer and friend and brother,
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Dr. John MacArthur, sat on the platform on a number of speaking engagements with C .J.
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Mahaney. If he was not the founder, certainly the leader, one of the share our love for the doctrines of grace that are clearly charismatic.
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What is your assessment of that? Well, like you said, we share their love for the doctrines of grace. Beyond that, I don't think we'd support a lot of what they teach.
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So I wouldn't read too much into the fact that we would stand arm -in -arm with anyone who affirms the gospel without flinching, without compromise, but that doesn't mean we have to defend serious errors if those things come out in their teaching.
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Now, the Church of Rome clearly and openly admits, and more than admits, declares that the
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Protestant understanding of the sufficiency of scripture is a heresy because they believe that tradition is required.
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Would this be on the same level of seriousness, this belief in the continuation of visions, voices, and appearances with a denial of the sufficiency of scripture?
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Well, that's a very interesting question, and I keep going back to Wayne Grudem's book because I do think that book is the root of a lot of the difficulties we're dealing with.
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And in my view, the whole thing is kind of self -contradictory. There's an appendix in that book that is one of the finest defenses of sola scriptura and the sufficiency of scripture that I've ever read anywhere.
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So I don't question whether Wayne Grudem would affirm the sufficiency of scripture.
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I'm sure he would. He certainly gives verbal assent to it, and I know in his heart he thinks he believes that.
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I do think, however, that his view of prophecy undermines the principle of biblical sufficiency, and my advice to people is if you read his book, start with that appendix and then try to reconcile everything else he says in light of what he says about the sufficiency of scripture, and really, in my view, the appendix nullifies everything he's trying to accomplish in that book.
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I hope in his heart of hearts, if it came down to it, he would stand on the truth he affirms in that appendix and not the rest of the book.
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Now what do you make of the folks, I don't know if you've met them, I have in my travels, people that would be non -cessationists who believe in the perpetuity of the gift of tongues, and yet they separate that completely from modern day prophecy.
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They do not believe that their gift of tongues is new revelation from God.
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They believe it is specifically a prayer language for their private meditations and prayer, and some of them would even say that they don't even know what is being brought through them by the
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Holy Ghost, therefore it would not be revelation since it's a prayer language that only God and the angels can understand.
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How do you respond to that kind of a thing where there are people making a division who want to hold on to the modern day tongues but yet reject the prophecy or new revelation, extra -biblical revelation?
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Well I have several responses to that. Number one, if they're acknowledging that what's labeled tongues today is not the same thing we see in Acts 2, the gift of tongues, where men were speaking the truth of the gospel in languages they hadn't learned, and there were people in the crowd who understood the message because those were their native languages, so those tongues were translatable human languages, and if they're acknowledging that that doesn't happen today, in effect they're declaring themselves cessationists.
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That gift has ceased, they believe, because it's not occurring today. So I would say welcome to the cessationist camp.
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Now let's talk about your view of, you know, private prayer languages. That is based on some very thin -threaded deductions that are drawn from what
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Paul says about self -edification in 1 Corinthians, and you know,
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I think if you take what Paul says there in the context of everything Scripture says, you have to understand that when
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Paul says the person who speaks in tongues edifies himself, Paul is not saying that's a good thing.
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He's saying a person who stands up and speaks in tongues with no translator is simply calling attention to himself, building himself up, edifying himself.
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Spiritual gifts are not given to us to edify ourselves. Scripture is very clear that spiritual gifts are given to profit the body, everyone else.
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So if I'm using my spiritual gift for some kind of self -aggrandizement, then
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I'm misusing my spiritual gift. So if your private prayer language is what you conceive of as a spiritual gift from the
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Holy Spirit, and you're using it mainly to build yourself up, you're using it wrong.
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We're going to take our final break, and if you'd like to email us, this would be the time, because we're running out of time rapidly.
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We do have a couple of emails waiting for us to answer, and we thank you for your patience.
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But we're going to be taking our final break, and if you'd like to email us with a question for Phil Johnson, it is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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That's lynbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Arns and your host of Iron Sharpens Iron. Our guest has been today
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Phil Johnson of Grace to You Ministries, the TV and radio ministry of John MacArthur.
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Just kidding there, but we appreciate you supporting those who support us. I want to go to our listener in Northern Ireland who has a very interesting question that has been perplexing me personally as a cessationist in addition to some other close friends of mine who are
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Reformed and we have met and heard about the testimonies of many
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Muslims, many of whom are also Reformed, theologically, Calvinist, sovereign grace believing, and these people very often,
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I think even a very, very high percentage of Muslims who are known to have come to Christ or have made a profession of embracing
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Christianity and very often at great cost to them personally, they have experienced some kind of a dream, a vision, or an appearance of God.
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What do you make of this? And especially in regard to those who say that they function as cessationists after that, they don't continue to have dreams and visions, this was almost like an initiation that broke them from their disbelief of the
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Bible and their clinging to the Quran and the Hadith and so on. What do you make of that?
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Well I think, you know, God could use anything providentially to bring people to Christ.
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You know, like we said earlier, fear maybe inspired by a near -death experience or car accident or whatever has often turned people to thinking more seriously about life and death and, you know, that ultimately leads them to Christ.
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Other people have vivid dreams. We've all had vivid dreams that we wake up from and try to remember what they were or what they meant or figure it out.
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I just think it's wrong to look at those dreams as some kind of prophetic message from God.
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Even if you had a dream about Jesus and God used it providentially to get you to investigate the claims of Christ and ultimately you came to Christ, it's the
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Christ you encounter in Scripture who's the real Jesus, not the one who was in your dream. That's not the real
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Christ. And even if God uses such a dream providentially, if you begin to think of that image in your head as the real
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Jesus as opposed to the one in Scripture, then you're thinking wrong. There's nothing reliable about dreams like that and thank
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God that He uses all sorts of things. I mean, I've met people who, you know, heard something
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Benny Hinn said that got them looking at Scripture and they came to Christ and that doesn't validate the ministry of Benny Hinn and it doesn't validate the prophetic credentials of somebody's dream, even if God used that dream for good, because God uses all things for good.
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But Scripture's very clear about the problem we face in getting the gospel out to the world. Romans 10, how shall they hear without a preacher?
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If the answer to that question was, well, God regularly sends people dreams, you know, we don't have to worry about reaching the world.
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And that's my fear with all these tales about, you know, mass conversions in the Islamic world of people who are having dreams.
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I don't doubt that that has happened on occasion, that God providentially woke someone up through a dream and drew them to Christ.
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Again, I don't see that as prophecy. I don't think the dream should be regarded as divine revelation, but that's an act of God's providence that he used for good.
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But the fact that that happens doesn't diminish our responsibility to be evangelists and to take the gospel to people all over the world.
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And I think it's just a folly if people think, well, God has now changed the way he's converting Muslims. He's bringing them to Christ through their dreams.
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We want to thank Cecil from Northern Ireland for that question, and he has a follow -up question.
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Let me say one more thing about that, too. I think the frequency with which that sort of thing happens is grossly exaggerated by people who repeat these tales, because every time
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I hear from someone who has any connection to the Middle East a story like that, I say, can you put me in touch with that person or have them write to me?
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I'd like to hear a first -hand account of an experience like that. And I've yet to have anybody who could give me a first -hand connection of someone who's had that experience, which makes all these stories sort of take on the feel of urban legends, which always happen to people who
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I know, a friend of theirs. That's the way these stories are always told, but you can never track it back to the original source.
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And so I would say before you buy into that mythology, it would be good to actually do some serious investigation.
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Especially if it's going to cause you to shift your theology and become a charismatic, just because you heard someone had a dream.
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We have a follow -up question from Cecil in Northern Ireland. Grudem's definition of prophecy is in direct conflict with Peter's definition of prophecy, being holy men of God spake as they were moved by the
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Holy Spirit. Actually, that's just a comment, that's not a question. Maybe you could reply to that comment or give your thoughts.
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That's a very perceptive observation, and I think he's exactly right that when
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Scripture talks about prophecy or revelation or the process of inspiration, the emphasis of Scripture always is that it's not of any private interpretation.
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Men don't speak prophecies on their own initiatives, but they speak as they are moved along by the
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Holy Spirit. And that is in direct contrast with what Wayne Grudem is defining and explaining and calling prophecy today.
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We have an anonymous listener who asked the question, I saw a former
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Muslim who converted to Christianity speak at a church. He said the thing that convinced him most to convert to Christianity, even though his life would be at great risk, was a vision of Christ that appeared to him after he pled to God, Father, please show me who is truly the father of Abraham.
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And Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him, I am. My question is, is this a false apparition because of the fact that Jesus is the son of God, he is not the father in the
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Holy Trinity? Yeah, I mean, my assumption would be if that happened at all, it's a false apparition, or at least a product, a figment of the guy's imagination.
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And again, it's one of those things where I would like to say, you know, before you ask me to believe that tale, put me in touch with the guy it happened to.
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My questions would be for him, not for the person who's giving the story secondhand. Now what do you think about the specific theological question about the
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Trinity, about the vision of Christ that I am the father of Abraham, and yet Jesus is the son of God, or God the son, not
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God the father? Yeah, I mean, it's a kind of minor point, but I think it's an important one, that if the
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Jesus in his dream is using language and expressions that are not found in Scripture and actually seem to conflict with what is found in Scripture, that's just one more of many reasons to discount the validity of the vision.
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I would like you to comment on the aftermath of the Strange Fire conference that you were a participant in, along with Dr.
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MacArthur and some really wonderful speakers, including a dear friend of mine,
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Conrad Mbewe from Kabwata Baptist Church in Lusaka, Zambia, who has visited
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America many times, and I've gotten to meet and know him and interview him. But if you could give us a follow -up on the aftermath of that, especially in light of some very dear friends of mine who agreed with nearly everything that was said and taught, but who are simultaneously members of the charismatic movement or non -cessationist or continuous movement, they say that there was some broad brushing done.
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If you could respond to that and give us some updates on the aftermath of that. Yeah, let me say too,
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I love Conrad Mbewe as well, and he's a real gem and a bold man, and I appreciate his boldness and the stance he's taken, and yeah, you know, he
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I thought was one of the outstanding speakers at the Strange Fire conference. And if you haven't heard his message, you should look it up online and watch it, because he had some important and sort of chilling things to say about the negative impact of charismatic theology in Africa, especially.
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Yeah, especially since the anecdotal evidence you constantly hear from charismatics and Pentecostals about people being raised from the dead and those kind of spectacular things.
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It's always, it's happening in Africa. Right, now about broad brushing, the difficulty with the broad brush charge is it's impossible to answer in a soundbite, and broad brushing someone is also impossible to do in a three -day, rather impossible to avoid in a three -day conference.
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You're dealing with a charismatic movement over three days, and you know, in my case, I had, I think, two sessions, two general sessions to teach, and I said at the outset of my very first message, look,
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I know people are going to feel that some of what I say is broad brushing, and I want to avoid that as much as possible, but it's really difficult to talk about a movement as large and diverse as the charismatic movement and constantly be making these fine point distinctions and all of that.
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So I said at the outset, look, it should be understood by everybody that we wouldn't put, you know,
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Wayne Grudem, John Piper, Sam Storms, guys like that, in the same camp with the charismatic crazies.
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One of the concerns I have, however, though, is that guys like Sam Storms often put themselves in that camp.
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You know, he'll go on a television program with, you know, the Kansas City Prophets or, you know, some deal like that, and I just don't understand why these guys who are
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Reformed and I believe they do love Scripture, why they would put themselves in a position that makes the truth so ambiguous in an era when the ambiguity is one of the most, one of the biggest problems the church is suffering from right now anyway.
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And we're out of time, Phil. I really appreciate your spending the time with us today, and I definitely want to have you back.
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One other quickie. Sure. Do a Google search for my name and the words broad brush, and you'll see a lengthy blog post that I wrote after Strangefire answering the broad brush.
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Great. And I know that you could also read some of Phil's material at gty .org and the pyromaniac blog spot teampyro .blogspot
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.com. Thank you so much, Phil, for being a part of our show. Thank you everyone who listened, especially
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Cecil in Northern Ireland and our anonymous emailer. And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater