Hebrews
Lesson 52
May 4, 2006
NKJ Acts
We
are in a section of Hebrews. We are going to run through this briefly to
get all of our thinking back where we ended last time. As I pointed out
when we began last time, I really needed 3 solid uninterrupted hours to
communicate what I wanted to communicate. We get things broken up and
everybody goes about their business for another week then you come back and we
have to get everybody thinking these deep heavy thoughts.
The
writer of Hebrews is castigating his audience here because they have regressed
spiritually. As part of spiritual regression there is the loss of the
ability to think biblically. There is the loss of the ability to think
precisely and accurately about anything in your life. This has to
do with relationships. It has to do with work. It has to do with
thought. It has to do with the deeper elements of thought. We get
clouded because what happens is that our thinking becomes affected by
sin.
Peter
talks about the fact that it is the fleshly lusts that war against the
soul. So it is easy for us to think at one level about the fact that when
you get involved in extended carnality that obviously, living a sinful life has
an impact on our ability to think biblically and it retards any spiritual
growth. We begin to regress back into childhood. That’s what happens
here. It not only relates to the content of our thinking in terms of
thinking wrong kinds of thought where our thinking is dominated by mental
attitude sins of envy, anger, bitterness, resentment or whether our thinking is
affected by various lust patterns in terms of materialism lust, sexual lust,
chemical lust, or any of the other lust patterns. What we recognize is
that all of this occurs within a larger framework. That larger framework
is how we think. I have used the illustration of building a house. When
the Holy Spirit comes in and is renovating (Romans 12:2 where we have the
principle of not being conformed to the world but transforming our thinking)
the Holy Spirit is not only changing what we think about in terms of content;
but He is also going to change how we think. We no longer think as the
world thinks within a limited frame of reference rationalism or
empiricism.
All
of this kind of comes together because we have had questions in the last month
or so asking if there is a place to think about or utilize vocabulary related
to mysticism in the Christian life and how does thinking or the forms of
thinking affect us, because they do. I have used the illustration of
being transformed from the cultural norms and patterns and habits that we have
here in the United States and suddenly you are transformed and you end up in
some rural province of China and you are never going to see another American
for the rest of your life and you are never going to talk English for the rest
of your life that is to anybody that understands you. So you have to
overhaul everything in your thinking in order to live in the new culture.
That is not nearly as radical as the change that takes place when you are moved
from being spiritually dead to being spiritually alive from being child of
devil to a child of God in the royal family of God. Yet it is
this kind of thing that is so rarely taught or talked about in most churches
because it is rare to find people who want to have a view of the Christian life
or be challenged to move beyond a first grade level of understanding or
education in what the spiritual life is all about. So the writer of
Hebrews is challenging his readers because they have fallen back.
NKJ Hebrews
That
means if you are just taking in kindergarten level or first grade level
doctrine, then you will not have the skills necessary to advance to spiritual
maturity. He uses the word apeiros for the
word skilled which means someone who is ignorant of true doctrine, not
consistently putting it into practice.
Then
he goes on to say…
NKJ Hebrews
5:14 But solid food belongs to those
who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their
senses exercised to discern both good and evil.
That
is practice. This is the Greek word hexis
meaning someone who is skilled or has proficiency, someone who repeatedly and
successfully practices the spiritual skills. As part of the first basic
spiritual skills we come to doctrinal orientation. Doctrinal orientation means
that we are orienting our thinking to the Word of God and no loner orienting
our thinking to the human viewpoint modus operandi of the culture around
us. It takes practice. It takes time to think about how we think.
Solid
doctrine belongs to the mature, to those who by consistent practice and use
have their senses exercised to discern.
I
am going to skip to the word diakrisis meaning
the ability to distinguish or evaluate. What we are talking about here is
spiritual critical thinking skills. How do you learn to think critically
about anything in life? You think about whatever the field is that you
are in. If you went to college and studied history, English, education
you know that in your field there are different viewpoints. Only by
reading and studying do you learn to identify the different viewpoints that are
there and understand that this viewpoint has weaknesses over against this other
viewpoint. Something that is common to all of us is the arena of politics
and the arena of political theory - what you think about how the country should
be run. You know that there are two basic views of looking at government
and politics. You have the conservative view and liberal view.
Those grow out of an entire world view of how a person looks at everything in
life starting from God and working all the way down to man. Most people don’t
press it that far. They think because they are Americans, they think more
pragmatically. What works? Pragmatics as an American is one of the
human viewpoint norms and standards that you have in your soul. This is
typical of most Americans.
“Don’t
give me all that theory. Just tell me what to do.”
What
you do always flows out of a theory whether you know it or not. If you
are not aware of what the “theory” is that underlies it; then all you are doing
is practicing a theory called pragmatics - whatever works is okay. That
flows out and is consistent with moral relativism view of absolutes. We
have to think about our fundamental concepts of thought. We have to learn
to do this and it only comes by practice, by illustration and by example.
A
basic principle in any education theory is that sometimes we learn by
contrast. This is one thing. It’s not this. It’s not that.
You can understand various shades of the color red by comparing them and
contrasting them to green or to blue or something else. You learn to hone
in on what one thing is in contrast to things that are close to it. So we
compare and contrast in order to get a more focused view of what the Scripture
is teaching.
As
I went through this last time I have been teaching about the fact that as we
get into the spiritual life we have this problem with how we think.
Nobody wants to talk about it. On the one hand there is pressure from the
antinomian trend of the sin nature to give up any absolutes or rigorous logic
and thinking. That is called mysticism. We just have this intuitive
label insight into what is right and what is wrong and what God wants us to
do. We label it the Holy Spirit. That is what happens in
Christianity. It is really mysticism because this intuitive thing operates in a
way that is completely independent from Scripture. We talked about
that. Then we came back and talked about the other side. It is the
trend of the sin nature to give up any kind of logic. That is called
mysticism. And we label it the Holy Spirit. That’s what happens in
Christianity. It is really mysticism. in a way that is
completely independent from Scripture.
Then
we came back and talked about the other side. We have pressure from as
the sin nature trends toward legalism. It has a related view of knowledge
that ends up either in autonomous rationalism or empiricism. All of
this affects how we think about witnessing to people in the arena of
apologetics. Where a lot of this is hard to think through, it has a very
practical application in three areas.
First
of all it helps us think more precisely about how we are going to communicate
the truth of Christianity to unbelievers. There are a lot of unbelievers
that you are going to witness to that may not raise objections. They may
have never thought very deeply or profoundly about some things or maybe there
has been some pre-evangelism that has taken place where some of these questions
have already answered for them. You step in and give them the gospel and
they are ready to accept the gospel right then and there. But other times
you may be talking to somebody and all they have heard is a lot of the
objections to Christianity and you get involved in trying to help them
understand that Christianity is not putting your brain in neutral and
irrationally accepting a view of God or what the Scripture says. From
within the framework of Scripture it is rational and it is consistent and it is
not without validation.
Notice
I didn’t say proof. That is where we get into the real issues. Most
people make a strategic error because they try to go to something to prove the
truth of God. But in the very attempt to prove that God is true that
implies going to a higher standard than God, something over and above God,
which you are going to use to prove God. What is a higher authority than
God? Nothing. So you can’t act as if there is some autonomous
universal principle that hangs out there that you can appeal to that is equally
the same for believer and unbeliever. Now that is a quick summary and
what I want to do is go back to the nine points that I finished with last time
because they lay the foundation for our thinking in this area. Then we
will get to a little more practical application. The other thing we want to
come away with is an understanding of how to be a little more effective in
evangelism and our strategy of answering the questions that an unbeliever may
ask. We don’t want to commit the error that Proverbs warns about – not
answering a fool according to his folly. Just because they ask a question
doesn’t mean that it is a question that should be answered. So we have to
learn to think a little more consistently here.
The
second thing we are going to get out of this is we are going to develop
discernment. It all builds our ability to think critically about what we
are doing and about how we think.
And
for those of you who are parents and who have children the third thing is that
it will help be able to impart this to your children and kids in prep school so
that they can learn to think critically. We live in a world today where kids
and all of us bombarded all of the time with all kinds of human viewpoint
garbage. A lot of it sounds good. We absorb it and it becomes part
of our thinking and we don’t even know it. I sit around and talk to
Christians day in and day out and they make various statements thinking that it
is okay or it is divine viewpoint. But it is human viewpoint garbage. But
they don’t realize it because they have never been taught to think about things
in terms of systems. That is a deeper way to talk about it.
Let’s
go to a Scripture that we are very familiar with to review. When we
talk to an unbeliever our point of contact isn’t reason because the problem
with the unbeliever isn’t rationalism. It isn’t that the problem is
logic. The problem is sin. That is ultimately what has to be
exposed in any kind of gospel presentation situation.
NKJ Romans
In
other words the unbeliever knows that God exists. He may say it’s a
problem of logic, but that is just a smokescreen. He may say it’s a
problem of evidence, but that is just a smoke screen. The problem is that
in the arrogance of his fallen nature he wants to suppress the truth that God
exists. That’s verse 20.
NKJ Romans
NKJ Romans
The
unbeliever has enough data available to him so that he can be held
accountable.
NKJ Romans
So
you know three things when you are starting to communicate to an
unbeliever.
So
it’s not like you have to know every answer or be able to deal with every
issue; but you have to understand what the dynamics are. If you want to
use the analogy of football game, you have to understand what the rules of the
football games are so that you are playing within the right area of endeavor.
What
we are talking about is apologetics.
That
is the framework for looking at how we present the gospel.
There
are three systems of human viewpoint thinking - rationalism, empiricism,
mysticism. What they have in common is a starting point of faith in human
ability. Remember that I pointed out that this isn’t that there are three
systems of perception – empiricism, rationalism, and faith. That
juxtaposes faith to reason and may make faith non-rational. At the core
of all of these is a faith in human ability to properly interpret and
understand the data – whatever it is, whether it is starting with reason, starting
with experience or starting with his own intuition. The key word
under methodology is they all operate on something that is independent of what
God said.
The
divine viewpoint position is that we start with revelation. We can’t
start with revelation here and then cross over the gap between us and the
unbeliever and operate on his assumptions and to try to bring him back over
here. His assumptions are all flawed assumptions of a rebellious
creature. So we have to hold our ground. Often believers
think (these are different schools of apologetics) that the point of common
ground between the believer and unbeliever is rationalism. It is
usually expressed as logic or the law of non-contradiction. The law of
non contradiction means something can’t be both A and non-A at the same time in
the same way. In other words something can’t be blue and not blue at the
same time. Something can’t be tall and not tall at the same time. If you
are saying that contradicts itself logically then one statement or the other is
false. It assumes that you can prove truth on the basis of reason.
What this assumes is that reason for the unbeliever is the same as it is for
the believer.
I
am going to give you an example of that. I want to use as an example tonight
CS Lewis because two weeks ago we showed “The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe” here on family night in order to give people an opportunity to watch
a film based on the book that he wrote which he intended to be used as
pre-evangelism to utilize a lot of symbols and images that you find in
Christianity in order to communicate some broad Christian principles.
The
hero in the story is Aslan the lion. That comes from the fact that Jesus Christ
is said to be the Lion of Judah. The word Aslan comes from the Persian meaning
“lion”. So the lion is the hero who comes and he is the one that is going
to conquer winter that the evil witch has brought. The evil witch is
analogous to Satan. Under Satan’s rule, human history is dead. It is
white and everything is cold. There is no life. It is only after
Aslan dies and comes back to life that you have full spring coming
in. Only when he returns does he bring life. You have the
imagery of him going and breathing on these different people and animals that
have been turned into stone objects. It is a picture of the Holy Spirit,
breath. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings life. There are all
of these images in there. They have to go to battle and they win the
battle. Even after they win the first battle, there is an ongoing
battle. That is a picture of the Christian life – once you are saved
there is an ongoing battle afterwards. There are all of these images that
he uses that are quite good
One
that I found quite intriguing is one based on an argument that he is famous for
developing called the Lord, liar, lunatic argument. I have used that many
times. I am not saying that it is a wrong argument; it is how you use the
argument, not should you use the argument.
Before
I get into this I want to give you a little caveat here. I don’t want any
to think as I talk about Lewis and later on as I point out some of the flaws
that I am suggesting that you shouldn’t read Lewis. I think you
should. I think you would be making a mistake. I think his book “Mere
Christianity” is a good book. A lot of people have found it very
helpful. It is interesting that in the last month I have been aware of
two or three cases where unbelievers have read “Mere Christianity” (they were
new believers or struggling believers who have been given that book) and the
Lord has used that to get their attention and turn them around. In one
case I know of that plus the use of the foundation series that I did last year
a man and his wife and kids all came to know the Lord Jesus Christ as their
savior. These are good tools to use - Josh McDowell’s book
“Evidence that Demands a Verdict’. But what I am trying to do as I
go through this is give you (especially if you are a parent or a grandparent
and you are reading these things to your kids) a way you can think a little
more perceptively about what is going on.
At
one point in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (at the very beginning),
little Lucy goes off through the wardrobe into the
That
was important for Lewis because after WWI he became a materialist. He
went through this whole progression from an atheist to Platonism to idealism to
materialism. So he realized as he learned about the Bible and came to a
belief in God and then a belief in Jesus Christ that there was a greater
reality that existed beyond the senses. When you just have the autonomous
use of reason and empiricism, you have a limited reality. But when you
believe what God says about reality, it is a broader reality and it is
truth. That was a very important theme for Lewis in the book.
Lucy
comes back and she ends up going back to Narnia. She is followed by
her brother Edmund.
When
they come back, the other two siblings ask Edmund, “Well, did you go to
Narnia?”
He
said, “No, no. It is just make-believe.”
He
just lies about it.
The
three kids if you remember are living in this house with this elderly aged
professor who is roughly modeled on CS Lewis who opened his home to children
from
He
says as they are wondering what to do about Lucy and the tales she is telling
about Narnia, “Well, who is the more honest of the two? Edmund or
Lucy?”
Peter
says, “It is Lucy. Edmund frequently lies, but Lucy doesn’t lie.”
“Okay.
If Lucy is not a liar, has she lost her mind? Is she insane? Has she gone
crazy?”
“No,
there is no evidence whatsoever that Lucy has lost her mind.”
“Then
what she is telling you must be truth.”
That
is an illustration of his classic argument that when Jesus Christ came to the
earth He claimed to be identical with God. Either he was telling
the truth or He was lying. Does He give evidence of being a liar?
Is there evidence in anything that He taught or said that He was a deceptive
person? No, not at all. Well, we have dismissed that option.
Was He crazy? Was He a lunatic? Was He someone who believed He was
chopped liver? No not at all. There is no evidence in
anything that He says that He is insane or psychopathic or psychotic or
schizophrenic or anything else. Well, if he is not a liar and he is not
crazy then what He says must be true. Therefore He must be who He
claims to be. That is true God of true God, the Savior of the
universe.
It
is a wonderful argument for who Jesus Christ is. I have used it many
times and others have used it. CS Lewis is the one to first to set that
up. What has he done in that argument? That argument is built upon
a certain view of logic. Now it is a view of logic that I believe
everyone in this room shares. But if some post modernist came in here
that is intelligent and consistent with their supposition of pure relativism in
the universe, they aren’t going to buy that argument. They don’t have
to. At foundational level they reject that view of logic.
“That
is your logic and your reality; but that is not my logic and my reality.
In my reality I don’t have to accept those as the only options.”
Do
you see what I am saying?
What
you see here with Lewis is that he fits into the top category that he has a
view that ultimately the common ground between the believer and unbeliever has
to do with something in the area of reason.
There
is another group of apologists. This is where I put Josh McDowell. I have
used McDowell’s book “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”. I have given it
to a lot of shaky believers and a few unbelievers who were wresting with the
issue of evidence in the truth of Christianity. It is important to
say evidence. If there is a truth claim, then there are two things you
can do. You can either prove it by a higher authority or you can show
that if this is true then there is correlating, validating evidence. That is
the difference in how you are approaching it.
These
are folks that would say, “We can prove that the tomb was empty”.
You
can look at all of the historical data that we have in the gospels and in extra
biblical literature as the tomb was empty. Therefore if the tomb was
empty Jesus must be who He claimed to be because He rose from the dead.
What’s the problem?
The
problem is you have many unbelievers operating on post modern assumptions or
existential assumptions that say, “That’s true. But you know that there
are a lot of weird things that happen in life. Just the fact that the
tomb was empty is just another unexplained anomaly in history and I don’t have
to believe that.”
Once
again what they are doing is they are enveloping what you are saying in their
suppression agenda. They are just suppressing that truth in
unrighteousness
Flying
away and unanchored to anything is mysticism which produces a view of
apologetics called fideism for the Latin for faith. It’s not the kind of
faith that we talk about as a faith grounded in Scripture where there is
evidence of God’s work in space, time and creation. It is the ideas that
there may not be any validating data. We just believe it because we have
to have something to believe in. So we take a leap of faith. That
was evidenced by a Danish philosopher by the name of Kierkegaard. So what
we would say is that the most consistent approach is revelation. The
point of common ground between the believer and the unbeliever is his inherent
internal knowledge that God exists. It is within them. What we have
to avoid is having this situation where you have God on the left. Man is
down below; but he thinks of morality and reason and natural law and history as
having their own autonomous self-existent eternal existence that God is
answerable to the concepts of justice, reason, law, or these autonomous or
abstract principles. So, we appeal to them in neutrality with the
unbeliever. I want to show you by going to Lewis what I mean by that.
Lewis
was born in
He
served in the army in
He
was a member of an
Lewis
was a confirmed bachelor. He did marry at the age 60 to a divorced former
communist of Jewish heritage who was a believer. That marriage lasted
three years and she died of cancer. That is what the play and movie
“Shadow Lands” is based on. If you haven’t seen that I would recommend
that. He wrote all kinds of different works. The apologetic work
that he is most widely known for is “Mere Christianity”. But he also
wrote a book called “Miracles” which dealt with how to understand the fact that
God can perform miracles in history. That is a well done book.
He does a good job in his argument there. He also wrote a book
called “The Problem of Pain” where he dealt with the whole question of how can
a good loving God allow undeserved suffering to exist in history. He
wrote a number of children’s books. Not only did he write the Narnia
series, but he also wrote some science fiction for children. All of this
was somehow related to presenting a Christian world view within his
writing.
When
he was a young man after WWI he came out of Word War I as still an
atheist. He goes through various different schools of thought. He
was a materialist. A relative of a close friend was beginning to die. As
he observed his death, it caused Lewis to start rethinking his materialist
philosophy. He goes through a period of about 8 years when we would say
that he gradually shifts his views toward God finally coming to a saving
knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was through the influence of
several people. For example he read GK Chesterton who had become a
believer. He loved reading him. He also had as his best friend JRR Tolken
who influenced him. Tolken always was a Roman Catholic. He never
left the Roman Catholic Church so that was his view of Christianity.
It
came to the point towards the end of his 20’s that Lewis realized that most of
his friends including many of favorite authors such as Chesterton and Johnson
and Spencer and Milton were all Christians who held to a Christian world
view. He realized that he needed to rethink his view of
Christianity. By his late 20’s two paths were beginning to intersect in
his thinking. One was from a vantage point of reason. He was
beginning to realize that Christianity was rational. Let’s think about
that critically. What’s going on here? He is coming out of a very
rational background. As an unbeliever he was a Platonist. Platonism
always equates to rationalism. He was Darwinian. He never gave that
up. He always had this problem with reason being the ultimate
arbiter of truth. He never really subordinated reason into that triangle
we have for God. The problem is that morality, reason and natural law
have to be in God and not outside of God in a biblical world view. He
never quite got there.
He
became a believer when he was 33 years of age. That began his life as an
apology.
He
did a lot of positive things. Some of the books I mentioned earlier are
very good. He also wrote an article called “Faulting the Bible
Critics”. I have a reprint of it. Remember that Lewis in his career
was one of the greatest scholars of medieval English literature. He was a
professor of medieval and Renaissance English. That was his field.
That was his area of expertise. The reason I mention this particular
article because he is interacting what a number of so-called experts of the New
Testament claim about the New Testament. We are faced with the same kind
of thing today where people come along and say that Paul and James and John
really didn’t write the New Testament. It was really cobbled together by
different people. The New Testament was really written in the late or
early 1st century by people who weren’t even eyewitnesses of
Jesus. All of this talk about Jesus being God is just legend and myth
that grew up around Jesus and was then inserted into the gospels.
I
love the way he begins. He opens the article by saying…
“The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the
work of the divines engaged in New Testament criticism.”
He
recognizes that these are professional New Testament scholars. They are
not really believers though. They are operating on liberal
assumptions. What they claim is that the Bible is filled with legend and
romance. Lewis says in reaction or response to this….
“A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute
study of the New Testament text and of other people’s study of them whose
literary experiences of those texts lack any standard of comparison”
That’s
all they have done is study the New Testament so they don’t have any broader
understanding of literature.
“such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial
experience of literature in general is I should think very likely to miss the
obvious things about them. If he tells that something in a gospel is legend and
romance I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his
palate is trained in detecting them by their flavor not how many years he has
spent on that gospel. But I had better turn to some examples.”
That
was his basic thesis. These guys are claiming that this is legend here
and that is myth there. What is their experience with legend and
myth?
“I have spent my whole career in medieval English literature
studying legend and myth. I know legend and myth when I see it and it’s
not in the Bible.”
So
he has some great things to say. He wrote tremendous article in defense
of Christianity.
Let’s
look at some of the flaws. That is where we develop a little discernment.
In
his view of God, Lewis wrote…
“In all developed religions we find three strands or elements
and in Christianity one more.”
What
has he just done? Christianity adds something to everything else.
It is not categorically different from every other kind of religion. He
viewed it as more reasonable or more rational. Therefore it was
true. This is typical of British evangelicals. I know you will find
this hard to believe. I have always found this hard to factor it.
In American evangelicalism one of the foundational beliefs is the inerrancy and
infallibility of the Bible. We believe it is very Word of God without error.
This is foreign to British evangelicalism. It was foreign to Lewis.
So you see that his starting point is a weak view of Scripture and a high view
of human reason. Now if you really pressed him, if we got him in here and
sat him down and really pushed, he would probably stick with Scripture. But he
gave away too much in what he said at points. He had a view of God that
was a little weak as well.
According
to Lewis there was a common goal and norm between Christians and
non-Christians. It was morality. That was his common ground.
But when he comes to talk about God he says that there are certain ideas about
God that are common to believers and unbelievers and that is our point of
commonality. This is seen in his book in the “Wind and the Willows”.
I
have used this quote many times to get people to think a little more deeply
about what worship is. It is a great illustration of what worship
is. But it also reveals something a little weak in Lewis’ view of God
In
the “Wind of the Willows” the mole asks the rat, “Are you afraid?”
And
the rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love answers, “Afraid? Of
him? Oh never! Never! And yet o mole, I am afraid.”
There
is that sense that when we come into the presence of God that you can’t control
God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. That is
what Lewis is trying to communicate in that phraseology. If you read all
of Lewis, it is this idea of the dread that is what everybody (believer and
unbeliever) has of God and that is a point of commonality. So he is
already interpreting this view of nature and putting that in as his view of
common ground.
It
shows up in other ways as well. At the beginning of his book “Mere Christianity”
he says in talking about how a believer can relate to an unbeliever he talks
about the fact that everybody has this idea of what is right and what is good
versus what is wrong. He uses various examples. He says…
“He is appealing to some kind of standard or behavior which
he expects the other man to know about.”
In
other words when we say this is right or this is wrong or it shouldn’t be done
that way or it ought to be done another way we expect the other person to share
our values. And so he goes on to explain that this is a basic law of
human nature that we all share the same sense of right or wrong. He calls
this the law of nature.
“I know that some people say the idea of law of nature or
decent behavior known to all men is unsound because different civilizations in
different ages have quite different moralities. But this is not
true.”
That
is where I would challenge him.
“There have been differences between their moralities, but
these have never amounted to anything like a total difference.”
As
an illustration I talked about a film based on the book the “Peace Child” by
Don Richardson. Don Richardson was a missionary with New Tribes Missions
back in the 60’s. He and his wife were dropped off somewhere on a
beachhead somewhere in
So
I don’t leave you hanging on the story of the
What
Lewis does with the law of morality is that he talks about how this is
used. He says that it is the same thing as mathematics. Now what he
is doing strategically is he is saying mathematics, natural law, and morality
all exist abstractly. There are eternal principles. You appeal to
them. As a Christian nothing exists independently from God.
Everything comes from God. God is the source of reason. God is the
source of mathematics. If you really want to study that in interesting
detail listen to Charlie Clough’s Framework Series from about lesson 114 to
120. He develops a whole history of how the Greeks didn’t believe in
irrational numbers. We all loved irrational numbers when we were in junior
high and high school. So we have a math system that includes irrational
numbers but computers can’t do any computing with irrational numbers. So
we have a math system that somehow doesn’t fit reality. Ultimately we
have a lot of flaws in math. In fact he gives a lot of illustrations of
how they solve for various equations working square roots. You end up
with a negative number for speed. It’s not because you made a mistake in
your calculation, it’s that our concept of logic in math is based on empiricism.
Only when we derive it from the Godhead can we come to ultimate truth.
A
quote I used a couple of weeks ago was from a guy named Charles Elliot who was
a Unitarian President of Harvard who spoke to Summer School of Theology in 1909
and he gave this address speaking about the new religion that will dominate the
future,
“The new thought of God will be its most characteristic
element in the religion of the future. This idea will comprehend the idea
of a Jewish Jehovah, the Christian universal Father, the modern physicist
omnipresence exhaustless energy and the biological conception of a vital
force.”
In
other words, it is going to be like a Star Wars religion.
“The new religion God rejects absolutely the concept that God
is alienated from the world. It rejects also the entire conception of man
being a fallen being.”
The
idea that God is alienated from the world is what we would call the
creator-creature distinction. This is where Lewis broke down. He still
views God as being in the chain of being because he still has these Darwinian
presuppositions from his human viewpoint still lurking around in his post
salvation experience. .
Charles
Elliot goes on to say…
“In all its theory and in all its practice, the religion of
the future will be completely natural. It will place no reliance on any
sort of magic or miracle or other violation of or exception to the laws of
nature.”
What
he is saying is we are going to have this thing called natural law. Now
what Lewis was doing is saying that morality is natural law. This is the
common ground between the unbeliever and the believer.
If
you pushed Lewis to the extreme he would say, “Natural law is what I mean by
the character of God.”
But
that is not how he treated it. This is what happened strategically with
what sometimes these apologists will do.
They
say, “We will deal with that later. We will talk about natural law and
reason as autonomous concepts right now.”
But
the strategic error is that it allows the unbeliever to read into those terms
everything in his human viewpoint system.
I
know that this hasn’t been easy and you have hung in there through most of
it. At the very least I want you to think about how you think and come to
an understanding that we have to think on the presupposition and assumption of
a Trinitarian God who has spoken clearly to man and that His revelation is
going to address more than just salvation, more than your spiritual life and
how to live your life. What a narrow immature focus. His revelation
is going to tell us how to think about everything in life from the way we
interact with other people in terms of family and social structures, marriage,
family, employers and employees. It is also going to go on to talk about
how we interact with finances. Even deeper than that, the Word of God is
going to help us think about the very function of economics as an intellectual
discipline. And literature is a discipline and the very fact of
thinking as a discipline. This book that we talk about is so deep
and so profound. When we dig into this thing it will rip across
everything that we can possibly think about. We can study it for the next
million years and we won’t plumb its depths. That’s what so amazing about
this. That is why you can’t get any where by showing up in church on
Sunday morning. If this really is training ground to train and prepare us
and to build capacity for wisdom so that we can rule and reign with Christ in
the
Let’s
bow our heads in closing prayer.