Study God’s Word with R.C. Sproul

actions Edwards is talking about slander One of the most difficult pains there is to endure And how how do we endure it Somebody accuses us falsely Our natural instinct is to return in kind and to to retaliate in kind I talk to people all the time about this and I said there's there's a there's a way in which we are called to absorb an awful lot of sin against us But it's also also dangerous Vesta says that my personality is such in trying to live with me daily is that she said said here's what you do She said if I do something you don't like like you don't say anything about it You act like there's nothing wrong And then I do it again and I'm thinking this is no big deal because you don't say say anything It's fine And then I do it again You don't think it's fine And then somewhere down down the line line after you've held this inside all your time explosion that I don't understand And I said "That's my sin " Because I say "Okay I don't like this but I'm supposed to endure it and be patient and not be critical and all that kind of of thing But if I choose to absorb absorb it then I have to absorb it There not cannot be a point where the the the dam breaks breaks and all the water gushes down and floods everybody around

you So we have different ways ways of dealing with insults and and injuries of this kind But what we are called to be are patient patient and longsuffering not reacting in fury the first time somebody slights slights us Can't do that And it takes grace to be able to suffer suffer long in these things And and notice that what is connected with longsuffering here love Love is long-suffering and is kind kind let me to be a kind person is not to be a mean person To be a kind person is to be be patient to be friendly to not be nasty and mean and and bitter in one spirit One of the great privileges of my life earlier was uh uh in the early days of the beginning of the ministry of prison fellowship I was on the board of of directors and I was in a meeting one day with Chuck Coulson and we were talking about creating a logo for the ministry and we talked about different images and I finally suggested I said you know the thing that comes to my mind about this ministry and he said what I said that what we're trying to do in the ministry to prison inmates is not to beat up on

these people but to bring them the grace of God God because Jesus said a bruised reed would he not break and sure some of these people People are hardened criminals There's no quite We can't look at this through rosecolored glasses We understand that But many of these people are just broken human beings And And it was to those people that Jesus gave his ministry He went out looking for the bruised reed and he he kindly tenderly ministered to them Chuck said "That's it." And every time I see the pin of prison fellowship to this day which is a picture of a stock of wheat that is bent over in half as a a broken or bruised reed that is not yet quite broken off That's become the the logo for that ministry And that's what we're talking about here A love that is kind You see kind kind love never ever says "I told you so Because when we've been given given counsel and we ignore it and then the disaster comes the last thing we we want to hear is I told you so because we're very much aware that we were told not to do that But the kind person follows those words words and does not seek to break

the bruised re When When our next lecture we'll try to come to the end of 1 Corinthians 13 as we look at the rest of the descriptions that Paul gives gives gives Again We return now to our study of defending our faith through the science of apologetics And we've been looking at the four alternatives to reality as we we encounter it now We look first of all at the possibility that everything is an illusion and borrowing heavily heavily from the arguments of Renee Deart we eliminated that option Then we spent quite quite a bit of time looking at various theories of selfcreation All of which collapse by their own weight because they are at at at the center of their thinking irrational and anti-reason We got rid of that that one And we notice that the two that are left both contain the idea of self-existence And in our last uh study I pointed out that that if something exists now the idea of something that is self-existent is not only possible but rationally

necessary And then I made the distinction between between that which is rationally necessary and that which is ontologically necessary And I was saying that whatever it is that is the self-existent eternal eternal something must be not only rationally necessary but onlogically necessary as well And And I said that that squares with the Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God However I mentioned quite in passing that there are those those who agree that something must be self-existent and eternal but they argue argue that that self-existent eternal something is the universe and not God And I want to take a look at that uh uh briefly in our discussions today You know it's it's certainly not a law of of science It still remains a theory And the theories of origins of the universe tend to go go uh undergo changes and sometimes revolutionary upheavalss from time to time I mean even in my own lifetime uh we saw the advent of the big bang theory of the origin of the universe which was not not accepted at all when I was a high school student but now has pretty much won the day although there are alterations within the scientific community with respect ect to views regarding the so-called big bang But in simple terms and please don't respond with more sophisticated uh uh definitions

of that because I realize there are more sophisticated definitions of it But in simple terms what you you often hear uh in terms of describing the big bang is that there was a time in past history 15 18 18 billion years ago give or take a few billion that at that time all that exist exist existed was what is described by some as a point of singularity and this point of singularity involved the compact uh compaction of all matter and all energy that may currently be found in the universe that is all of the stuff of reality at least in its nent form form was compressed into this infantessimal point of singularity and that this point of singularity ity existed from all eternity in a state of organization that is it was compacted in a steady uh organized stable way and then at some point 15 to 18 billion years ago this this point of singularity for reasons unknown to us exploded and out of that explosion came the combining together of certain

gases and and elements and so on to form other gases and to form uh the material universe as we we know it today Some have tried to trace the origin of the universe back to the last nanocond existence going going right prior I mean just right after after uh the actual explosion itself and again the theory is that the universe now now is in a state where everything is moving from organization to disorganization disorganization or equilibrium just as when something explodes and things move out from the center they move away away from their point of compaction or condensation into a equal lirium state of disorganization That's why people say you know that the universe is wearing down and at some point will implode into some black hole or some such thing So So the idea here is that at one time whatever was was in a state of organization But now the the basic laws of thermodynamics indicate that everything is moving towards a state of disorganization Well that raises all kinds of questions The first question is is is if the state of nature is to move inherently towards

disorganization You have to ask the question how it became organized organized in the first place And we would have to say that if it is moving toward disorganization that that it is moving from organization and that organization was the original original state of things which is what the big bang suggests Then of course the other law that we have to wrestle with is the simple elementary law of of inertia And the law of inertia teaches that things things in motion tend to remain at motion unless acted upon by an outside force And things that are at rest tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force This for for example law of inertia is what makes golf so difficult and yet what makes golf possible It It makes it difficult because golfers every golfer I know always wants to find the secret where he can hit the ball further than he currently is able to hit it If he can hit it 200 200 yards off the tee he wants it at 220 If he hits a 220 wants it at 250 If he hits a 250 he wants to be able to hit 300 Well what happens is the ball ball begins at rest It's placed upon the tea and the golfer himself is at rest And then he walks up to to the ball and the first thing he does is address the ball He says "Good morning ball." And he takes his club and then he swings the

club He sets sets the club in motion And the club is in motion now And that which is in motion hits that which is at rest and propels it down the fairway But But while the ball is moving it is finding resistance from outside forces of the weight of the atmosphere the friction of air against it it it lands on the ground and it won't roll forever because the friction of the ground impedes the continued progress of the ball and so finally the ball ball comes to rest again Now fortunately there are these outside forces working against our efforts to keep the ball ball in motion because if there were no outside forces and and we set the golf ball in motion the drive would go forever and it'd be the end of the game You'd lose the ball and there'd be no way of scoring in the game game at all So there's a sense in which the outside forces even though they are frustrating our our efforts to hit the ball further nevertheless because they frustrate it to a finite degree makes it possible for the game to be played But the idea again is things at rest tend to remain at rest unless some outside force is applied to it or once it gets moving it's going to stay moving unless it is motion is [ __ ] by some other outside force Now the the $64 million question about the big bang is what caused the bang And I've heard uh

all all kinds of people say we don't need to answer that question That goes beyond science and that goes into the realm of philosophy or theology or or religion or whatever And I say "Wait a minute When you're going to give an explanation for all of of reality and you pin all of your hopes upon this concept of a big big bat Why don't you answer the question what causes the big bang Scientific theory is is innately concerned with matters of causality And this is the big question of causality on what what causes the big bang and it's a copout academically and intellectually to say I'm not going to go there If you're going to postulate this thesis for the origin of everything then you're begging the question what it is that is the outside force force that causes this monumental change in your little point of singularity that causes this to move to cause reality to change from the state of organiz towards this organization Biblical Christianity has the answer to that readily available that this is exactly what is involved in the doctrine of creation that we have have a self-existent eternal eternal being who has the power of motion who has the ability to move that which is not moving that's what Aristotle understood in all antiquity when

he talked about the unmoved mover that he understood that has to be an origin to motion and that which has the origin of motion must have the power of motion within itself just as it must have the power power of being within itself and that's why we attribute these attributes to God but again we've answered briefly that objection but what about the idea that this matter that is compacted there in the uh uh big bang point of singularity How about the matter itself or the energy itself being the self-exist eternal being being because this is really what's assumed in materialism materialism that the universe itself is not 15 to 18 billion years old only the present uh motion of the universe goes back to that point in in time but actually the ingredients or the stuff of reality isernal And I'll say well what is it in the the universe that is eternal Is it this piece of chalk in its individuated form Are my car keys in the individ form Is it the sun in its individ individuated form Is it me as a person in my indiv individuated form And of course materialists will will say don't be be ridiculous You know that those are all manufactured or

things that came into being that that previously did not exist No we're not saying saying that the sun is eternal We're not saying that you are eternal We're not saying that the chalk is eternal or that the car keys are eternal We know that And we know that in the material world the chief characteristic of matter is its mutability mutability that it changes and it changes from one state into another state so that it is not stable eternally eternally and therefore it is in process it is in a state of becoming and not in a state of pure being so anything that we find within the universe that is changing that manifests contingency that is dependent or derived from anything else cannot not be the ultimate core of being of the universe that we're describing here in terms of self-existent eternal something But here's here's what the materialists will say They will say "Okay we grant that this eraser or this piece of chalk is not the the eternal reality that is self-existent but it is is made up of elements that are generated by a self-existent eternal something But that this self-existent self-existent eternal something contrary to you religious

people is not transcendent transcendent but rather it is imminent that is you don't have to appeal appeal to something above and beyond this world to account for this world and I mean by the world the universe because because what Christianity teaches what Judaism teaches what Islam teaches is that outside of the whole realm of the creaturly universe stands this this self-existent eternal being that we call God who is the creator of all things and and in him all things live move and have their their being And so we say that one of the chief characteristics about God is that he transcends the universe Now Now the materialist comes along and says "Ah yes I understand that there has to be something that is self-existent and eternal that must have have the power of being within itself I don't want to retreat as many of my colleagues do to an idea of self-creation I grant that that's absurd So we have to have self-existent eternal something But I'm not going to grant to you oh Christian that this self-existent eternal something is God That he's a transcendent being Rather he is part part of the universe or it is part of the universe or the sum total of the universe But the sum total of the universe

is does that include this piece of of chalk Is this part of it Well if we're going to say it's the sum total universe then we have to include this piece of truck And we know this piece of truck is not self-existent and eternal because this piece of chalk can disintegrate I can break it in half I can reduce it I I can change it It goes through process Well you say right it's individuated particular existence right now is contingent in all that but but underlying it somehow is some universal or elemental pulsating force that is the cause cause of the existence that everything that is and this is this little as yet undiscovered or pulsating center of universe that is self-existent and eternal This is the part that accounts for the explosion of that point of of singularity and all of the power of being is compacted and compressed into this little little point and then everything else later on ultimately is generated through the power that comes from this pulsating heading source Now notice I use the word here generated That's why the first book of of the Old Testament is called Genesis coming from the Greek word ganawa which means to be to become or to happen to make

make something come into existence is to generate it to cause it to be So here we have this isolated hidden unknown unknown point within the universe that is the pulsating core of all reality that generates everything everything from the beginning And so the point is there is no God who lives outside the universe who's who's above and beyond the universe but that this self-existent eternal generating power is part of the universe itself That's That's the imminentistic view that's very popular in certain circles in science and in philosophy today that that yes there is a self-existent eternal power power without which there can be nothing But why do we say it has to be outside the universe That's the challenge they come to us Why do they say it has to transcend the universe Why can't it be a part of the verse verse itself And my answer to that is it can be a part of the the universe itself depending on how you define universe If you mean by universe by the word universe all that is And if God is then then God would be subsumed under the term universe because it describes all that is If you mean by universe the created created universe then obviously you can't subsume

God into the meaning of the term universe but you have to to distinguish between God and the universe And the distinction that we make in theology about God is that God transcends the the universe But what we we mean and this is critical that you get this what we mean by transcendence is not a description of of God's location Transcendence is is not a geographical description We're not saying that God is transcendent in the sense that he lives somewhat there there east of the sun and west of the moon What is is meant by transcendence in philosophy and theology is something is a higher order of being being that is rather than transcendence being a geographical description beloved it is an ontological ical description When we say that God is transcendent we mean to say simply he is a higher order of being being than we are He is a higher order of being being than this chalk is He's a higher order of being than the sun is He's a higher order order of being than pure energy is That's what we mean by transcendence That God is a higher order order of being We don't care

where he lives If you're saying saying that there is some unknown invisible immeasurable pulsating point or core within the boundary universe universe that is self-existent and eternal from which everything else is generated Ultimately what you are saying is that there is something here that transcends everything else out out here because you you must distinguish between this being and all the derivative dependent derived contingent things things that are generated by and from it Now we're just arguing over its name The name of it is is Ax or Yahweh But no matter how you slice it you're forced back back to a selfexistent eternal being from whose being and from whose power power all things come into existence Now many many Christians object at this point and will say to me okay we grant that philosophy and and written argues and demonstrates that you have to have a self-existent eternal

something But how do we get from that to the God of the Bible So far all we have have is Aristotle's unmoved mover All we have so far is an abstract idea of self-existent eternal eternal being You haven't come yet to the God of the the Bible And what is the connection it is raised And it's a legitimate question between the God of the Bible Bible and of the philosophers As you know most of what I've been saying saying in the last several lectures about this question of the existence of God has been based more on philosophy than on biblical exugesus and I grant that and my burden that I have now for the Christian community will be a burden I will address in our our next session about the relationship between the god of the philosophers and the god of the bible bible Do you ever Ever find it difficult to wait for

God Live your life on the the basis of trusting his promises This may sound sound trit to you but it is all the difference in the world between believing in God God and believing God True faith the Christian faith is not about believing that God exists but it has to do with with believing God living your life on the basis of trusting in the promises that he has has made because where the crunch comes in our life is where we seek our own happiness and our own satisfaction right here right now in ways that that deny our trust in God's way rather than wait for the promise of felicity felicity and joy that he gives to those who trust in him and who obey him We say "I can't see him Where is my God I will seek my own way for happiness and fulfillment I want it now I want it here I just can't for for it But the word of God says though it it tries wait for it That's what men and women

of faith do do thank you for listening Ultimately ultimately with RC Sproul is just one of many podcasts produced by Ligonier Ministries Check the show notes to find others you might enjoy or search for your ministries in your favorite favorite podcast app app As we continue continue our study on the basic themes of reformed theology You'll recall that in our last session looked at the the formal principle of the Protestant Reformation the doctrine of solar scriptorer And today today we're going to look at what the historians call the material cause of the Reformation the central controversy controversy

over which the whole debate raged which was the doctrine of soled and the term solid and it contains this sola again which means alone and feday is the word for faith coming from fidelis we remember the marine corps motto seeri or seerfidelis or the him aduste fidelis so come all ye faithful solid means faith alone and this was the central assertion of Martin Luther that provoked the serious controversy of the 16th century and he was speaking to the question how is is a person justified in the sight of God Now before we give a brief exposition of the doctrine justification by faith alone I want to take a few moments to recap for you the urgency that the magisterial reformers reformers felt about this issue They did not think that the debate over justification was an argument over over some fine point of theology whereby theologians get together together and nitpick over secondary issues and so on But they were convinced of not only the truth of of justification by s by faith

alone but also believe that it was of critical importance Luther said that justification by faith alone is the article upon which the church church stands or falls Now we could view that from the vantage point of the 20th century perhaps as an exaggeration or as an overstatement but I'm I'm just mentioning at this point that it was clearly Luther's conviction that this doctrine was so important because it touched the very heart and soul of the gospel itself And again it it is Luther's contention that justification is the the article upon which the church stands or falls And it's the article upon which we stand or fall fall because it is the article that we understand that reveals to us us how we are redeemed Calvin took a similar view of the importance of the doctrine He used a different metaphor He said that that justification by faith alone is the hinge upon which everything in the Christian life turns In our own own day Ji Packer in his preface to Buchanan's 19th century work on justification used another striking striking metaphor where he likened the doctrine of justification by faith alone to the mythological figure of

Atlas whose task it was to bear bear the world on his shoulders And what Dr Packer was saying with this analogy was just as Atlas required to hold up the world so the doctrine of justification by faith alone is that which holds everything else up Well the controversy as we know flared flared and ended in perhaps the most uh not perhaps but certainly the most serious fragmentation of Christendom in in the history of the church and became the most volatile controversy of all all time Now again before I get into an exposition of it I'd like to read a comment that Luther Luther a couple of comments from Luther First of all uh an expanded comment of his view of the importance of of it And then second a comment that referred in later years of Luther's life to his profound profound concern that the recovery of the biblical doctrine doctrine of justification by faith alone would be shortlived First his his expanded comment on the importance importance of it He says "This doctrine is the head and the the cornerstone It alone begets nourishes builds preserves and defends

the church of of God And without it the church of God cannot exist for one hour And again he said said the article of justification is the master and prince the lord the ruler and the judge judge over all kinds of doctrines It preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our conscience before before God Without this article the world is utter utter death and darkness No error is so mean so clumsy and so outworn outworn as not to be supremely pleasing to human reason and to seduce us if we are without the knowledge and the contemplation of this article and then as I said in his later life he made this observation observation there are few who know and understand this article and I treat it again and again again because I greatly fear that after we have laid our head to rest it will soon be forgotten forgotten and will again disappear And indeed we cannot grasp or exhaust Christ the eternal eternal righteousness with one sermon or thought For to learn to appreciate him is an everlasting lesson We shall not

be be able to finish massive in size Uh if if you would take a look at your living

room and look at your whole wall uh in terms of its width and height and and imagine that as one stone in a wall about four to six feet deep and thick Then you get an idea of these massive stones that were used for the construction of the walls of Jerusalem and of of the temple And so it's not surprising that these walls walls stood so firm uh against the attacks of the Romans Now of of course these stones that were hurled by the engines were not only hurled against the walls but they were also hurled hurled over the walls And there they did uh inflict considerable damage on the structures within the city city and even many casualties of people who who were wounded or killed by these stones Now uh in the fascinating uh uh uh uh barrage of stones that came as as the description of Josephus as hailstones They were white rocks Josephus gives this uh record He said that the Jews at first watched the the coming of the stones for they were of a white color and could therefore not only be perceived by by the great noises they made but they could be seen before they landed by their brightness Accordingly

watchmen that sat upon the T towers gave them notice was when the engine was let go and a stone came from it and cried out aloud aloud as a warning to those who were there "The stone cometh It's a simple warning The stone stone cometh So those that were in its way stood off and threw themselves down upon the ground by which means and by thus guarding guarding themselves the stone fell and did them no harm Now one scholar uncovered uncovered that there is a variant in the translation of this record record and that certain manuscripts read instead of the words the stoned the stone cometh cometh that the words that were used were the words the son cometh not s u n but s o n and there were those who believed that uh uh that this related to a tradition that had developed from earlier times according to uh one historian that the apostle James who was Christ's brother publicly testified in the temple quote that the son of man was about to come in clouds of heaven

heaven and he sealed this testimony with his own blood It seems highly probable one historian writes that the Jews in in their defiant and desperate blasphemy when they saw this white mass hurtling through the air raised the crop the sun is coming in mockery of the Christians who had predicted the return of Jesus So So you can take that for what it's worth There's certainly uh controversy about it But in addition to these details Josephus Josephus tells us of a severe famine that befell the inhabitants in which many people died in Jerusalem by starvation because of of the protracted siege Uh if you've ever been to Palestine perhaps you visited the Mount of Olives And the Mount of Olives was called the Mount of Olives where the Garden of Gethsemane was which is the garden of the Olive Press where Jesus went for his agony of prayer the night in which he was betrayed that that that whole slope uh across the valley from Jerusalem just on the other side of Bethany was a huge dense forest of these huge huge and massive olive trees that would go to be three or 400 years old If you go over there today You won't see a single olive tree on the Mount of Olives And that's because during the siege that lasted so long the R systematically systematically

cut down every single tree in on that hillside and used the wood for firewood firewood to keep warm And so that that's another one of the details that we learn from uh Josephus account But of of course when the famine became so severe people actually resorted to cannibalism And Josephus tells the story of one woman who was nursing her her baby and at the point of great starvation she roasted her own baby baby and ate it And uh and it was that kind of thing that he recorded as part of the atrocities that took took place But again perhaps the most most difficult problem we have faced already with the all of it discourse and its application to the destruction of Jerusalem Jerusalem were the predictions of Jesus with respect to signs in the sky astronomical astronomical perturbations And one of the fascinating parts of the historical record of what took place are found both in the writings of of Josephus as well as the writings writings of Tacitus Uh Tacitus tells us for example uh uh that uh there were were signs that occurred in the sky uh with respect to a comet that uh

that occurred uh earlier earlier uh uh in around the year 60 during the reign of Neero uh a comet was observed for some period of time in the sky and to the public at that time they saw this as an omen as an omen omen of a radical change that would soon take place in the political scene Tacitus says quote as if neero were already dethroned dethroned men began to ask who might be his successor." And Nero took the the Comet's th threat serious He took no chances As Swutonius also related all children of the condemned men were banished banished from Rome and starved to death or poisoned under Neero And Nero survived the comet by several years And then Haley's comet appeared in AD66 after which Nero committed suicide And many many historians have linked that appearance of Haley's comet to the suicide of uh uh uh Nero Now perhaps the strangest record of all that comes to us from the pen of of Josephus is in a paragraph that I'll conclude this series or this section with with by reading it to you because it is so

extraordinary Josephus writes these words Besides these things referring to the comets and so on a few days after that feast on the first and 20th day of the month of artus a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable were it not related related by those who saw it and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals for before the setting of the sun chariots chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about about among the cls and surrounding the cities Moreover at that feast which we call Pentecost as the priests were going by night into the the inner court of the temple as their custom was to perform their sacred ministrations They said that in the first place they felt a a quaking and they heard a great noise And after that they heard a sound of a a great multitude saying let us remove remove hence Now what Josephus reports there follows almost almost an identical pattern of what the prophet Elisha experienced at Dothan when his servants eyes were opened and

saw all the myriads of angels in the chariots of fire round about Elisha and and the judgments in Ezekiel and so on of the departure of the Holy Spirit from the city of Jerusalem and the judgment words of God icabad of leaving we are departing and what I find fascinating this brief report of Josephus is his own obvious reticence to report it because he senses that it is so extraordinary that people will think he's nuts for telling this story But as he says he was compelled to tell it for two reasons One because so many people uh bore witness to it and two because it was consistent with the seriousness seriousness of this historical moment And so he sees in the fall of Jerusalem and in the destruct of the the temple a divine act of vengeance on his own people people We

We continue continue now with our study of Moses and the burning bush that we find in the third chapter of Exodus And I'm going to continue in in this session looking at the manifestation of the glory of God in the Shikina that we looked at briefly in our last encounter Before I do that I'm going to relate a narrative of something that happened to me when I I was a sophomore in college I was a philosophy major and my my philosophy professor invited me to go to Philadelphia for a philosophical conference on a Dutch philosopher by the name of Herman Doy at Westminster Theological Seminary and this was in the old days when the original faculty that had come out of Princeton start that school uh were intact Russian Mason had already died but Cornelius Vantill John Murray EJ Young Ned Stonehouse and the uh uh other great stars of that faculty were there for that conference And when I went there and listened to the first session in in the morning the whole thing was so far over my head I had no idea what what was going on I didn't want to uh I felt very foolish and I didn't want to open my mouth and and reveal how I actually was So I kept my mouth shut and then then we had a lunch break and

I was sitting across from the professor of philosophy from the seminary seminary and I was eating the soup and he said to me "Young man," he said "Uh do you believe God is transcendent transcendent or imminent." And I literally spit the soup out of my mouth you than that because I didn't know what the word transcendent meant and I didn't know what the word imminent meant with respect to the things of God And And so here my ignorance was completely exposed to this learned professor and he had mercy on me and he began to answer answer the question for me and he said well the answer to the question is yes is god transcended or imminent yes because he is is both transcendent and imminent his transcendence refers to that sense in which god is above and beyond the the created order It refers to his exalted majesty the way in which he is other or different from all the things things that he creates And yet at the same time God is not just this remote remote deity who is exists somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon outside of our ken But God God also makes himself present with us He is also imminent He is imminent in his creation by virtue of of of his uh on the presence He's im

imminent imminent uh historically through through the person of Christ and he's also imminent through his visitation visitation to this planet in redemptive history We see this combination of transcendence and imminence in the the burning bush because because the glory the fire was a manifestation of the transcendent God of the creator What you don't don't normally find in bushes But here he is making himself known by maning his his presence here in this world by visiting Moses in this encounter in the desert Now in our last session we talked about theophony theophony and I want to explore a little bit more of that going beyond beyond the broad category of theophony to another term that we have called called Christophony A Christophony refers refers to a pre-incarnate manifestation of Christ That is is it addresses the question do we find Christ or the second person of the Trinity

anywhere manifested in in the Old Testament And there are several passages in the Old Testament that biblical scholars believe and I certainly believe believe indicate the presence of Christophony Let me go back for a moment first to Genesis This time to Genesis 14 where we read this this brief encounter that Abraham had with this mysterious person whose name was Melkisedc We read in 8 verse 18 of chapter 14 Then Melchisedc king of of Salem brought out bread and wine for he was the priest of the Godmost high And he bled Abraham Abraham and said "Blessed be Abram of God most high possessor of heaven and earth And blessed be God most most high who has delivered your enemies into your hands." And Abraham gave him a tithe of all all that he had." Now this mysterious figure figure is very important to the author of Hebrews in the New Testament Why Because the Bible teaches that that Jesus is not only our king after the line of David but he is now now entered into the heavenly holy of holies as our

great high priest And so people raised the question how can he be a king and a priest The devitic king has to come from the tribe of Judah And Jesus did come from the tribe of Judah but the priests priests came through what tribe The tribe of Levi and Aaron And so we speak of the Levitical priesthood priesthood or the ironic priesthood And since Jesus did not come from that line line quens were arising as how he could legitimately be called called the great high priest of his people Well as you know the author of Hebrews answers that question question by showing that Jesus is a priest not of the Levitical order not of the ironic ironic priesthood but a priest after the order of Melkisedc referring back to the passage that I just just read to you This MelkiseDC who's has no parents no genealogy And that that rags the question is a real historical character of flesh and blood or was something else going on here His name Melkisedc means means king Zedekiah of righteousness and he is called the king of Salem which means peace So this mysterious person is known in the Old Testament as the king

of of righteousness and as the king of peace Attributes that the New New Testament of course apply to Jesus And Abraham meets this mysterious priest priest of the most high God And he pays a tithe tithe to MelkiseDC and receives a blessing from Melkchazedc So the author of of Hebrews makes a lot out of this He says "Wait a minute The greater blesses the the lesser and the lesser pays tithe to to the greater So in Hebrew categories it's very plain here here that Melchisedc is greater than Abraham And in Hebrew categories the father is is greater than the son the son greater than the grandson and so on down the line And so the way the author of of Hebrews reasons he says "Levi is is lesser than Abraham lesser lesser than lesser than Jacob Now if Levi is subordinate to Abraham and Abraham is subordinate to to MelkiseDC What does that mean QED Levi is subordinate to to

Melkisedc So Melkisedc is the greater priesthood But again there are those who think that what we have here in this strange appearance of MelkiseDC in the Old Testament that this this is a preincarnation manifestation of Christ of the second person of the trinity Then you look in the book of uh Joshua another strange encounter that takes place where we read read in Joshua 5 this passage verse 13 It came to pass pass when Joshua was by Jericho that he lifted his eyes and he looked and behold a man and in my English transl may have man man spelled with a capital M Behold a man stood opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand And And Joshua went and said to him "Are you for us or for our adversaries?" I mean all of a sudden here's this apparently mighty mighty warrior who shows up that Joshua doesn't know He's never seen him before He He had no military intelligence of a of a warrior like this that would going to be fighting for the opponing forces And when he sees sees this warrior says "Who are you Are you with us

us or our enemies And you notice how the answer answer comes No No Now wait a minute You got to either be for us us or for them Who are you for No I'm not for either one of you but rather as as commander as the army of the Lord or captain of the Lord of Hosts I have now come I'm from God Joshua And what did Joshua do Joshua fell on his face face on the earth and worshiped and said "What does my Lord say to to hervant?" And then the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua "Take your sandal sandal off your foot For the place where you stand is is holy The same instructions that had been given to Moses at the the burning bush Take off your shoes throw off your feet for the ground were on your stand is holy holy ground And this we see as a christophony The second person of the Trinity appearing in history before the conquest

of the promised land Or let's look further if you will in the book of of Daniel chapter 3 3 Verse 19 Then Nebuchadnezzar was full of fury The expression of his face changed toward Shadrach Mach and Abednego He spoke and commanded that they heat the furnace seven times more than it was usually heated And he commanded certain mighty men of Valor valor who were in his army to bind bind Shadrach Meack and Abednego and cast them into the burning fiery fiery furnace So these men were bound in their coats their trousers their their turbans and their other garments and were cast into the midst of the burning fiery furnace Therefore because the king's command was was urgent and the furnace was exceedingly hot The flame of the fire killed those men who took up Shadrach Meshach and Abednego the ones who threw them into the fire But these three men Shadrach Meshach and Abednego fell down bound into the midst of the burning fiery

fiery furnace And then Nebuchadnezzar the king was was astonished And he rose in haste And he spoke saying to his counselor "Didn't we cast three men bound bound into the midst of this fire." And they answered and said to to him "True O king." And Nebuchadnezzar said 'Look I see four men loose in there walking around in the midst of the fire and they're not hurt And the form of the fourth is like the son of of God Christophony I I believe second person of the Trinity came into the fire fire for his servants Shadrach Meach and Abedneo and protected them from all harm In the Old Testament the kind of glory and the burning fire fire that manifested not only Christophony but back to Theophony Theophony occurs also in the episode of the translation of of Elijah into

heaven You remember when his servant Elisha went with him begging for a double portion of the spirit that had been upon him And And and he said "Well you come along with thee If you see me depart then you know well that will come to pass " And at the end of their journey behold a chariot of fire appeared in the heavens And And Elisha looked at him and he said to Elijah "My father my father the chariot of of God Again those that chariot of farm manifested the divine glory This was another another manifestation of Shakina that surrounded the presence of God Again the the chariot of fire was God's mobile throne His throne was not seen seen inert fixed stationary at some corner in heaven But his throne could go wherever he wanted it to to go And wherever his throne went his glory went And his glory burst burst out in radiance of light and of fire One last one of of those First chapter of Ezekiel one of the most

enigmatic chapters in in all of the Bible where Ezekiel speaks of his vision of of God It came to pass in the 30th year and the fourth month and the fifth day of the month as I was among the captives by the R Chibu Chibu that the heavens were opened opened and I saw visions of God Verse four I I looked and behold a whirlwind was coming out of the north A great cloud with raging fire engulfing itself itself and brightness was all around it and radiing out of its midst like the color of amber amber out of the midst of the fire the way workable workable the wheels within the wheels of Ezekiel again a vision vision of that throne chariot of God surrounded with the splendor of his glory The burning bush bush where Moses first glimpses the shikina is not the last episode episode throughout the book of ep of Exodus God appears again and again again as he leads the people of Israel through the wilderness

through the pillar of clouds by day and the pillar of fire by night Now the book of a Exodus ends after the tabernacle has has been built and established before it is beginning to be used for worship First the glory of God God comes and descends into the tabernacle So when the shakina is is there Moses knows that God is there and it is time for the people to to consecrate themselves for worship But here's the question I want to ask you We talk about this refulence this brilliant radiant blinding light that is so intense The magnitude of the light so bright that blinds people and causes fear and trembling to come on Now my question for you is this What causes this this light I said earlier that the glory of God comes from his inner inner being The shakina is the outward outward manifestation of the inward majesty of God But where does the light light come from What gives it its hue its

transcendent transcendent majestic refalgence Where does it come from The author of Hebrews answers that that question when it speaks of Christ Christ where he describes Christ as the brightness of his glory glory Christ is the visible possible manifestation of the eternal glory of God and his divine nature is the shikina He's the one who lights up the light who gives gives the fire and the flame to the glory of God That's an incredible thing You You can think about that for the rest of your days and never begin to get to the bottom of the depths of that That Christ is the brightness brightness of his glory That is to say the logical conclusion would would be if there is no Christ there's no second person of the trinity then there's only only darkness in God One last point quickly The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Pho of Alexandria Alexandria made

a connection not from a Christian viewpoint viewpoint but from a philosophical viewpoint between the Greek concept of the idea of the logos the logos was this transcendent principle that gave order and meaning and purpose to the universe in Greek philosophy and pho tied the concept of the logos to the shikina shikina and then you come to the new testament and the gospel of john in the beginning was the word word the word was with god the word was god God that the logos is the godness of God Very brightness of his glory 500 500 years years ago an obscure

Augustinian monk from the monastery in Urfort Germany had a crisis experience on this very very spot This is right across the street from the St John Lateran Lateran Church And this portion of the building houses the Scala SA that is the sacred sacred steps which were part of the journey that Jesus made during his interrogation and trial under Pontius Pilate Now in in 1511 when Luther came here like all the rest of the pilgrims he had to ascend the staircase on his knees knees until he got to the top of the stairs and in a wave of doubt he stood up and said aloud who knows if it is true Luther's visit to Rome was one of the most disappointing episodes episodes of his entire life He was overwhelmed by the obvious presence of of corruption among the clergy here in the city and uh all the attempts that he made to find peace with God through his work in the monastery were dashed into smitherreens with the disillusionment that he experienced here here

Thank you for you for joining us for this live event with Dr RC Sproul I'm Lee Webb host of Renewing Your Mind and I'm here with Dr Sproul and we forward to spending the next hour with you you and taking your questions along the way We have actually two audiences joining us One by phone phone and then another audience live on Facebook And we're glad to have you both with to establish

so far it may be argued is something akin to the God of the the philosophers an abstract concept of a self-existent eternal eternal being And that leaves us with two serious problems that we we have to uh look at briefly One is the relationship between this this philosophical concept and the God of the Bible And then of course the second question of how do we we get from a self-existent eternal being to a personal God And of course both of those are very important questions And we'll begin now with the first one In the early church the church father Tertullian Tertullian was the one who was famous for his crado I believe because it's absurd And Tertillian at that that point was trying to show the radical difference between the God of the Bible and the God of the Greek philosophers And he raised the question really rhetorically What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens And Tertillian would answer that question as I say since it was rhetorical nothing That there is no real point of contact between the the personal God of the Israelites and this vague abstract concept or or principle uh found in Greek philosophy Now

not only did we have that option raised early in the the church history by Tertillian But the objection was was raised aresh with a vengeance in the 19th century with the liberal school of theology theology where the liberal school of theology with people like uh uh the church historian Adolf von Harnack and uh the theologian uh ritual uh Albert ritual indicated that early on in church history the church was corrupted by the intrusion of Greek philosophy When you go as early as the 4th century to the the council of Nika in which the trinity was defined and it was said that God God is one in essence and three in person that the categories that were used therein to define the trinity and the two natures of Christ with the phrase homo that Christ is has the same essence as the father that this logical language of na was laden with Greek philosophical concepts and that we need need to break free of the strangle hold that Greek philosophy has had on the thinking of the

theologians over the ages This was one of the the uh concepts uh argued by the 19th century liberals Well that view of liberalism has made enormous enormous inroads into the evangelical church of the 20th and 21st century where we have this new sense of a rejection of systematic theology because it seeks to have a rational coherent understanding understanding of the whole scope of scripture rather than looking verse by verse bit by bit at the text of scripture and allowing the scripture to to speak for itself the charge is that systematicians impose a philosophical system on the Bible and try to squeeze ease everything to fit into the this preconceived system that is borrowed from Greek philosophy Uh Uh I'm a systematic theologian and of course I represent that remark in this sense that I hear this criticism all the time and of course the task of systematic theology is never to impose a foreign system on the scriptures and then force the scriptures to fit it like a procrustian bed but rather that what we try to do as systematicians is look at the whole scope of scripture and try to have a coherent understanding finding the system of thought that is in the Bible not that we impose on it Now that does presuppose that

when God God speaks he speaks coherently It does presuppose that God has given us minds to understand his his word in a coherent rational way not in an an absurd disjointed irrational manner And yet this uh this anti- systemic concept today today is linked in many cases and in many circles to this antipathy that people people have towards Greek philosophy Now one of the things that we have to understand is for better or worse like it or or not God the Holy Spirit chose the Greek language to have the New New Testament written And as as long as the New Testament was written in Greek the language of the Greeks is now with us forever in terms of our understanding understanding of the gospel Now that doesn't mean mean that you interpret the New Testament Greek in light strictly of Greek philosophy You can't do that You have to understand that even though the language language Greek the concepts came from the Hebrew world and they were simply communicated through the tool of the Greek Greek language And it's true that Hebrew Hebrew writing tends to be more imaginative more graphic in the sense of more pictures than than abstractions but it

would be an insult to the Jews to assume that the Greeks were were coherent and the Hebrews were incoherent or that God gave minds to the Greeks But he didn't give minds to the Hebrews Hebrew thought still is rational thinking and it still seeks to be coherent coherent and the mind is of supreme importance to the Jewish understanding of the things of God just as that would be the case with the Greeks But having said that we are still left with with this problem of the difference between the idea of God that one would find for example in Aristotle and the idea of of God that we find in Christianity Aerys for Aristotle he defined God as thought thinking thinking himself He defined God as the uh unmoved mover or the first cause cause of all things But the idea idea of Aristotle's God is that Aristotle's God does not create through a voluntary act of creation but creates as it were out out of necessity and he remains completely remote and is basically impersonal He remains removed from from the world that is generated from his being Whereas in Christianity the God God who we find in the Bible is in the first page introduced to us

indeed in the first verse of the Bible is introduced to us as the one who acts acts to create all that is and that he acts in a reasonable propulsive manner to bring things to pass and that that which he creates he sustains and commits himself to that the bible is the story of creation and redemption that God is intimately concerned with the affairs of history and with the activity in managing the universe that he he creates And so there are obviously sharp differences in the view of God that we find in Aristotle for example view of God God that we find in in uh in the scriptures We also find the concept in Greek philosophy of the logos or the word word or the logic which functions in Greek philosophy as an abstract idea that is necessary to give order and harmony to the world Whereas in biblical biblical Christianity the logos is the incarnate word of God and the logos a person person which is all the difference in the world from what you would find in stoicism or in Heraclitus both of whom employed the concept of logos in their Greek philosophy But what I want us to understand when

I hear Christians object to apologetics arguing for a f a a self-existent eternal being when they say say that all this does is get us to a first cause a self-existent eternal being And all it does does is bring us to the front door of the LysM the school that was founded by Aristotle And that all we've established is is Aristotle's God and not the God of the Bible And so people will then reject the whole approach approach to apologetics that I've been laboring since the beginning of this course And I remind people people that uh one of the first principles that we have in systematic theology when we're talking about the doctrine of God is the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God which means that none of us us will now or ever have a totally exhaustive comprehensive knowledge or understanding of God God is infinite in his excellence and we even in heaven will not have an infinite perspective to understand him We are finite We are creatures and by the virtue of our creaturliness our understanding of God is thereby limited Now Now when we say incomprehensible we do not mean that we have no

knowledge of God but it simply means that we don't have a complete and exhaustive knowledge of God Now what I hear from people objecting to our laborers to construct the self-existent eternal being is that that only gets us to the first cause and to the God of the philosophers and it doesn't get us to the God of the Bible Therefore the approach approach is false and what we come out with is false because it is not the complete picture It's only a part picture picture of the true God Now the question is this Do we have to have a a comprehensive knowledge of God in order to have true knowledge of God I go back to the first principle of our our theology If indeed we would have to have a total comprehensive picture of God in order to have a a true understanding of God then this would only mean if if this doctrine is correct that we have no true knowledge of God because we certainly don't have a comprehensive knowledge of God In other words what I'm saying is even if our knowledge of God is partial that does not mean that it's untrue It is true as far as it goes And even though we grant that what we've achieved so far in our reasoning process process is only to get

to a self-existent eternal being that that certainly is part of what the Bible reveals to us about the character of God Because whatever else the Bible reveals about the nature of God the Bible certainly teaches that he is eternal that he is self-existent and he is the one who is the creator of all things Now at that point Aristotle says "Yay and and amen." Is Aristotle wrong No And the fact that a pagan philosopher agrees that there has to be a self-existent self-existent eternal being does not visiate the truth of the Christian claim In fact it agrees with it and we're saying yes we agree with Aristotle in the sense that there has to be a first cause and that that first cause has to be self-existent self-existent and that that first cause has to be pure actuality and that that first cause has to be pure being and that that first cause has to be eternal I'm saying thank you very much Aristotle You agree with us We agree with you on this this cardinal point which is only a partial point of our knowledge of God but it is a crucial portion our knowledge of God because ladies and gentlemen it is precisely this aspect of the Christian understanding of God God that is constantly under attack by atheistic systems of thought where the atheist attacks

Christianity is at the point of creation at the point of there being a selfexistent transcendent self-existent eternal being and so I I think there's great value in establishing that not only faith but reason as well demonstrates the logical necessity of having a self-existent eternal being so that the battlefield over which the doctrine of god wages is now one where the christian emerges victorious rather than uh surrendering so much of his uh truth claims Now Now so what I'm saying again in shortorthhand is we grant that arguing for a self-existing eternal being does not get us to a full understanding or even even as much understanding of God as the Bible supplies But what it does is undergirds the most crucial development aspect of of the doctrine of God that the Bible does reveal reveal and that the Bible reveals not just Aristotle that God is self-existent and eternal And so we're not just playing playing philosophical games here We are defending crucial aspects of the biblical doctrine of God at this point But But again the question is how do you get from this self-existent eternal something to a personal God And that requires a little

bit more more uh complex and difficult investigation I mentioned earlier that one of the most famous arguments for the exist exist of God is the so-called teological argument The The teological argument is named because it comes from the Greek word pelos which is the Greek word for end purpose or goal goal and the teological argument is sometimes called the argument from from design Uh remember two of the greatest skeptics in history with respect to the traditional arguments of God Manuel Kant and David Hume And yet both of them felt that the strongest argument from history for the existence of God was found in the the teological argument Kant himself said said he cannot get be past two things The starry skies above and the moral law law within Because Kant was not just a philosopher Kant was also a scientist and he was overwhelmed by the manifest evidence of the presence of design in the world of nature and it's very difficult to attribute design in nature without begging the question of a designer and can you have design unintentionally that was the

question remember we talked about Anthony flu's parable of the explorers in the jungle who were going through uncharted territory cutting their way with machetes through this thick rainforest and they came in the middle of this this jungle to this beautiful man beautifully manicured garden rows and rows ky tilled everything laid out in perfect symmetry not a weed amongst the the plants that were growing there and they said well look there has to be a gardener around here and they looked around all trying to all test for a gardener couldn't find a gardener began to speculate whether the gardener was invisible immaterial and all the rest and finally at the end of flu's parable he says that god has died the death of a thousand qualifications when you start defining him as invisible and immaterial Nobody ever sees him and so on He says there's what's the difference between that God and no God at all And the obvious answer is the garden Still haven't accounted for for the obvious appearance of design in the garden This is the idea that the enlightenment philosophers philosophers couldn't get away from That's why they went from Christian theism to deism They couldn't avoid the implications implications of design They said the world operates like a perfectly constructed clock with its gears and internal internal mechanisms And nobody would find a clock and without assuming assuming that the clock

had a designer or a clock maker and you take the way the human eye function in the brain it is more intricate than any clock there is designed out there and to assume this kind of design and and and intelligent purpose without an intelligent designer you know begs the question enormously because going back to Aristotle again Aristotle said that the single most important characteristic for personality is is intention or what we call in later philosophy 19th century philosophy personalism intentionality and for something to act with intention requires mind and a faculty of choosing what the mind plans plans and what Aristotle said was that personality requires in intention Intention implies implies personality and the essence of intention is found in mind and will Impersonal forces have have no mind have no will and they cannot design design anything I think that what we what we do it's when we try to reduce God to the level of of a mere force that is

impersonal impersonal and unintelligent and nonvitional is to escape to escape judgment from the perspective of one who is intelligent and one who does operate by design That's our our clause to escape from moral indictment but we'll get to that later But in the meantime you cannot have purpose purpose accidentally You can't have intelligence unintelligently Impersonality cannot produce personality because that would be unintentional intention intention and you cannot have intention unintentionally That's the same concept that you have with with self creation Unintentional intentionality is an absurdity And so if we go and and look at design and look at these things more closely we'll see that if there is design in the universe then there self-existent eternal something something that is responsible for generating the universe as we find it must be a self-existent eternal intelligent intelligent being and if intelligent then personal and if personal now we've moved away from abstractions and have landed squarely on the pages of sacred scripture

scripture When we we entered into adolescence one of the most powerful driving forces in our lives was the desire to be be with We don't want to stand out or be thought of being weird or bizarre or strange strange or alien alien Be not conformed to this world but be transformed Now I want you to notice those two words that are crucial here in Romans 12 On the one hand there is is the word conform On the other there is the word transform Now they have the same root form form and form or morphology has to do with the structure of things How things are put together what they look like how they are shaped how they are built and so on But the difference in these two words is is the difference

in the prefix that is attached to the root In the first instance the prefix is is con Now you don't have to be a master of ancient languages to understand that You know what chili con carne is is beans with meat And so the prefix con means what With And Paul says to the people who are the believers in the Roman community do not be be conformed to this world Now that's a hard thing for us to to assimilate because when we were children and particularly when we entered into adolescence one of the most most powerful driving forces in our lives was the desire to be with it The worst judgment that could could befall us as young people would be to be considered out of it We don't want to stand out or be thought of being being weird or bizarre or strange or alien to whatever culture we find ourselves ourselves involved Paul says "Do not be conformed " And instead of conformity the Christian is called to being transformed Now what what does trans mean We have

transatlantic transcontinental transamerican and so on That prefix prefix means across or over That is we are called called to go to a higher structure a higher form Now the name name of this video program is taken from this text Renewing Your Mind Because what Paul says is the key key to the transformed life is through the renewing of your mind And that renewal of the mind means a mind that is learning the word of of God the things of God the values of God that we might be the people of God On the one hand we have city of man man which seeks to have us conform to the values the precepts and the business of this world world to be worldly And that is not our call We have been been consecrated and set apart to be a transformed people to live in a transformed society to be a transformed nation to be be a transformed city to be citizens of the city of of

God. Thanks for listening to Ultimately Ultimately with RC Sproul To hear more trusted teaching from Dr Sproul and other gifted teachers check out Renewing Your Mind another podcast from from Ligonier Ministries A new episode is available 7 days a week Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts podcasts podcasts In this this final session in this series we're going to be considering growing to maturity in our life First let's open with prayer Father we thank you that you have given us the unspeakable privilege by which which we can address you as father father by adopting us into thy family and giving us that Holy Spirit by which we cry by ABBA We know that we are children and yet we know that thou hast called us to grow grow

to adulthood in the kingdom Help us now as we consider what it means to be mature For we ask these things in the name of of Christ Amen We've seen throughout this series a close connection between between Paul's teaching of the fruit of the spirit in in his epistle to the Galatians and his exposition of the ramifications of of agape in the great love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13 We started by a little bit of uh consideration of 1 Corinthians 13 and then we moved over to an an examination of the list of the fruit of the spirit in Galatians And now in this this session I'd like to go back to 1 Corinthians 13 for a moment to the last portion of it Let me refresh your memory of what what it says there in beginning in verse 8 of chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians love love never fails Whether there be prophecies they shall fail Whether there be tongues they shall shall cease And whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away For we know in in part and we prophesy in part But when that which is perfect is come then than that which is in part shall be done away Now

this portion of the text indicates that we are moving in the direction of our final final escatological hope where the fruit of the spirit spirit will reach its fulfillment point We are justified as we've considered and justification is followed by by the process of sanctification which has been at center stage in these these lectures but sanctification has an ultimate terminal point in a con consuming work of grace which we call what glorification when all sin will be eradicated from our personality and that we will live lives totally and completely in conformity to the will of God God in perfect righteousness We in our redemption never expect to be deified but we do expect to be fully fully and finally sanctified Not in this life but in heaven the The completion of this process will take place when God will purify us Remember I mentioned early on on John's statement in his epistles Beloved what manner of behold what manner of love is this that we should be called the children children of God And we know

not yet what we shall shall be But what do we know We shall be like him for we we shall see him as he is And I talked about the relationship between looking at Christ and at God and and uh the prerequisite for that being being purity No man shall see God in this world Why Because God is so pure he can't even look at our sin But we are promised the beatotific vision We are promised the ultimate glory of looking at God face to face seeing him as he is And isn't it interesting that that that experience of the fulfillment of glory for us is linked to a moment of purification And I'm not sure about about the chicken and the egg here whether our glorification is accomplished by God so that then we are able look into his face and that seems to be the pattern that we find there or is it somehow that when we see him the very purity of the sight of him will be that final dose of sanctification just being there basking in the glory of Christ and of God will do the final cleansing cleansing of our souls But in the meantime the apostle tells us that we know know in part and that certain processes along the

way will pass away We know in part we prophesy in part but then that which is perfect has come then the partial will be done away away with And then in verse 11 we read the classic statement When I was a a child I spake as a child I understood as a a child I thought as a child But when I became a man I put put away childish things You see to think as a child to understand as a child to act as a as a child child is perfectly appropriate for children This morning before I came came over here to the study center my granddaughter came to the breakfast table and she said to me "Papap." And she put out her hand She She said "Come with me back to your study because I want you to see who I'm talking to." I said "Who's that?" And she said " Santa Claus." And I said "Santa Claus is in my study this morning?" She said "Yes come see." And so she took me by the hand and led led me down the hall and into my study." And there was this the sofa sitting against the bookshelves And there there was no one on the

sofa But my granddaughter said "See here's Santa Claus." And she started carrying on this very earnest conversation conversation with Santa Claus And then I was you know not I was sort of like uh uh excess baggage in this convers so enrapped with this dialogue with Santa Claus that I decided to sit down I sat down and all of a sudden sudden she got very upset She said "Move." I said "What's the matter?" You just sat on 10:00 The fantasy world of the the child I didn't rush out in alarm to call the psychiatrist You know her her behavior was appropriate But if you would have come to my house like that I would have had serious questions about your sanity because that's just not appropriate for an adult Paul says it very simp When I was a child I behaved like a child I thought like a child I understood like a child But when I became a a man I put away childish things Now there's a grave misunderstanding that is is throughout the Christian world about this very point We find people who have a builtin builtin allergy to serious and sober and diligent study of the world of God And the excuse is is given continuously I don't need to

study seriously the word of God because I want to preserve preserve a childlike spirit a childlike childlike faith I want to keep it simple That is not an expression of Christian Christian maturity But where does the misunderstanding come come in Bible does call us to be landmine here I didn't didn't know it was there." Well some

people have personalities and and character development in such a way that there are very few minds minds buried in their field You can walk through their field for years and years and years and never step on a mine There are other people and you know people that you need a a compass to to walk around them You walk around them like on eggshells because everywhere you you turn you're willingly to step on a mine because these people are easily easily provoked They're illtempered And And I remember frankly uh before my conversion I had a really bad temper I was a hothead And uh in my senior year in high school we had 10 baseball baseball games during the season I was thrown out of three of them for arguing with umpires The umpires were wrong but I I argued way too viciferously and had a seat on the bench and because I lost my temper I think the greatest change that I saw in my own behavior at my conversion was that that's where I felt the greatest amount amount of of uh uh conviction of sin and so much so that I just saw that as the supreme virtue uh as never to lose your cool never to get to blow up up and

blow your stack And of course my wife knew me before my conversion and she knew me after my conversion And we had been married 10 years And one one day we were having a disagreement in our kitchen and I had a glass of water in my hand and the disagreement began began began to be serious because I would say to her you know this is not fair because there's nobody in this world that can light my fuse like you can You know know all of those points where I'm vulnerable and stuff and and and at the same time there's nobody that I care about more in this world so that there's nobody that can upset me more than you can And so we're having this discussion and finally I got so mad I took that glass and threw it against the wall Glass water splatter shatter everywhere And Vesta looked at me and started laughing She She said she said "I never thought you'd do it."

She says "I've been trying for 10 years I've been pushing you testing you to see when when when you blow your stack." And you just did it And she laughed at me and I was embarrassed by that But uh but here I I thought that I had completely overcome that when in fact I hadn't But we are not not to be easily provoked I have pet peeves You have pet peeves I can't stand I can't stand dangerous dangerous drivers on the highway that seem to drive around with no regard for anybody else's life You know and they're flipping in and and out and all that stuff And um I blow my horn out of him best best said "I'm glad the kids kids aren't in this car she said because the first word they would learn is idiot So but so there's one place where I lose it But we we are not supposed to be like that you know hotheaded provocative but again patient with other people I've got to hurry hurry in order to finish this True love thinks no evil It's almost as if we're being being admonished to be naive What Paul is getting at here is that we are to give other people what is called called the judgment of charity Not that we're supposed to be naive We know that people people really

sin But what we t do is that we think that when somebody sins against us we look at that sin sin as if it's been motivated by the worst of all possible motivations Like that person stayed up at night thinking of ways that they could injure us us when that is rarely the case We're rarely the victims victims of people who have hurt us with malice of forethought and the judgment of charity casts that wound into the best of all possible lights Unfortunately we tend to reserve the judgment of charity for ourselves We give ourselves the benefit of every doubt doubt and we don't give our neighbor the benefit of doubt But that's what this is about That it doesn't think evil Obviously it's not it's more than not having evil thoughts But we don't think the worst of everybody around us We may be naive but would it is is better to er on the side of naive than on the side of slander Love Love not rejoice in iniquity but rejoices in the truth You know Paul tells us in Romans Romans 1 that not that our sin as human beings is not only that we commit sins but we encourage other people to join us and we in we rejoice when we see sins being committed because it somehow excuses us True love rejoices in the the truth not in

iniquity And finally Paul says that love bears all all things believes all things hopes all things and endures all all things Love is the substance that makes it possible for people to persevere for people to bear to continue continue to bear and endure things to continue in hope to continue in faith And he says "Love never fails Prophecies fail Tongues will cease Knowledge will vanish away But love does not fail Now we know in part then we will know fully even as we we are known And he finishes this by saying when I was a child I spoke as a a child I understood as a child I thought as a child but when I became a a man I put away childish things Now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face Now I know in part but then I shall know know just as I am also known he's calling us to maturity as a Christian I don't know how many times I hear people saying "God wants me to to have a childlike faith."

Well there's a sense in which that's true but so many people see that as meaning I don't have to grow I don't have to search search the scriptures I don't have to seek to become mature in my faith and in my understanding I can remain a milk drinker forever There's a difference between being childlike and childish Paul said "When I was a child I behaved like a child spoke like a child thought like a a child responded like a child Then I became a man When I became a man it was time to put away childish childish things And he's calling us to a mature manifestation of of love Finally he says "Faith "Faith now abide faith hope and love This classic Christian triad of virtues faith hope and love These these three But the greatest of these is love because this is gift This is is the fruit that most clearly reveals the character of God himself himself Today Today Today we're going to

start a brand new series of lectures and we're going to be focusing our attention in this series on the person of Christ We remember back to the occasion where Jesus met with his disciples at Cesaria Philippi and he asked his disciples the question who who do men say that I am and they gave the report of what the scuttlebutt around the countryside was about Jesus and then he turned to back to the disciples and said "Well who do you say say that I am?" And it was on that occasion that uh Peter gave what is called the great confession when he said "Thou art the Christ the son of the living God." But what we're going to be looking at in this course is not so much other people's views of Jesus but we're going to be asking the the question who did Jesus say that he was And in declaring his identity to to the people during his earthly ministry he used a very unusual unusual structure to identify characteristics of his person that are recorded for us These sayings are recorded for us in John's gospel and only in John's gospel And these sayings are called the I I ams of Jesus because he introduces these these statements by the words I am things like I am the bread of life I am the light of the world I am the good

shepherd I am the door And so on And so we'll be looking at each one of these statements of Jesus to see what they reveal to us about his own own self understanding understanding and the first one that we will look at today is the statement I am the bread of life which is found in John's gospel chapter 6 in verse 30 of the sixth chapter of John we read these words Therefore Therefore they said to him what sign will you perform then that we may see it and believe you What work will you you do Our fathers ate the mana in the desert As it is written he gave them bread from heaven heaven to eat Now in this discussion that Jesus is having with his contemporaries and they're discussing his identity and they're they're asking for some sign that will will prove to them the truth of the claims that he had been making about himself and they hearken back to the pages of the Old Testament Testament where God manifested his presence with the children of Israel by providing for them food to eat meet supernaturally It was the mana that God gave in the wilderness And so they're saying God gave the people of old a sign Now what sign going to give us us to indicate your identity And it's against

the backdrop backdrop of that question that Jesus answers by by saying "Most assuredly I say to to you Moses did not give you the bread from heaven but my father gives you the the true bread from heaven For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the the world And they said "Well Lord give us this bread bread always." And Jesus said to them "I am the bread of life and he who comes to me shall never hunger and he who who believes in me shall never thirst." So this is the first I am in which Jesus in the context of this discussion of mana from heaven says says to those who are around him I am the bread of life Now the thing that we notice that is extraordinary not only in this I am but in all of the I ams that are recorded for us in the gospel of John is the structure of Jesus statements and normally in the Greek when somebody wants to say I am am they use the word ego we get the English word ego which is our personality or our personal identity and so that word simply means in Greek I am but the Greek language has another uh verb form of the verb to be be that also can be translated by the English I am and that is the

word emi again in the Greek emi means I am now what is strange about this particular statement of Jesus that he doesn't say ago ago the bread of life I am the bread of life nor does he say ei the bread of life I am the bread of life but rather rather he puts these two verb forms together saying ego emy the bread of life life It sounds like a redundancy It sounds as if Jesus is stuttering because literally what he's saying here is "I am I am am the bread of life." Now what again what is so significant about this is that this structure structure of the verb is exceedingly rare But one of the most most important places where we find it elsewhere is in the Septuagen which is the Greek translation of the Old Old Testament And in the Greek translation of the Old Testament when the Greek translators came to chapter 3 of the book of of Exodus where God reveals his name to Moses in the burning bush when he he says "I am who I am." The way way in which that strange phrase that God uses to reveal himself is rendered in

the Greek is by this exact form ago ei So there's a thinly veiled reference back to the sacred name of God when when Jesus refers to himself with this language ego emi There's something else about the grammar in when this occurs when when I if I were to say I am the the bread of life uh I am would be the subject or I would be the subject and bread of life would be the predicate But when this occurs in the Greek language that's that's reversed So that really the literal translation would be the bread of life life is I or it is I so that he is the focal point of the affirmation rather than the concept of bread So in any case these statements in the gospel of John have been used historically to call attention to Jesus Jesus claims for deity deity that he self-consciously uses language that is usually associated with divine pronouncements and of course that was not missed uh by his contemporaries they were aware of that and that's what provoked such hostility on many occasions when he talked in this manner but apart from

the actual construction of the language what I want us to look at in the I ams is principally the content what is it that he is saying about himself and what do these things that he say says about himself indicate about his identity so let's go back to the text text then where Jesus said first of all that to his contemporaries in referring back to the of the Old Testament he reminds his hearers that the mana in Israel was not provided by Moses Moses was the mediator of the covenant people He was the leader at the time when the mana was given He announced the giving of the mana But But it wasn't Moses that provided the mana It was God who sent the mana The mana came not from earth It It didn't come from Moses It came from God It came from heaven And this critical to Jesus identification of self with this same kind of of provision that God had made in the Old Testament when he said "Moses did not give you the bread but my father gives you the true bread from heaven For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life life to the world So what is he saying here He's He's speaking about his own origin And this is a point that is critical for our

understanding of Jesus' self-consciousness self-consciousness that Jesus doesn't say "Hey I come from from Bethlehem or I come from Nazareth." Rather he I come from heaven I I am the one that the Father sent from heaven himself I am the true bread The bread that gives gives life to all who partake of it Now again the New Testament is very much concerned about about the exultation of Christ after his death and resurrection and about his entering into his glory and at the heart of that c of the exultation of Christ is his ascension into heaven And the word ascension does not simply mean mean going up somewhere Although there are times when the verb to ascend means to go go up simply people ascended to Jerusalem They went up to Jerusalem But when when the New Testament speaks about the ascension ascension of Jesus they're not talking simply about a uh a point uh that's elevated to which Jesus Jesus goes They're talking about his going to a a particular place for a particular reason So that his ascension is to go to the right right hand of the father where he then has his coronation as the king of the kings and as the lord of the lords lords and

where he enters into the heavenly sanctuary as our great high priest that's why Jesus can say no one ascends into heaven heaven Now when he says no one ascends into heaven he's not saying that his people will not follow him in the resurrection In fact we are are all promised that sometime we will go up to heaven at the time of our death and so on So when Jesus says no one ascends into heaven he doesn't mean no one else will go there He means that no one will ascend in this unique sense that he ascends to that place place of cosmic authority But But when he talks about the uniqueness of his ascension what does he say No one ascends into heaven except he who who has descended from heaven So that in Jesus understanding his ascension is linked to his prior prior descension When he ascends into heaven he's merely merely returning to the place from whence he came in the first place And so here in this discourse Jesus is calling attention to his heavenly origin that the place from which he has come is heaven itself So let's continue then with our examination of the text When he says the bread of God is he who who comes down

from heaven and gives life to the world they say Lord give us this bread And he said I am the bread of life He He who comes to me shall never hunger He who believes in me shall never thirst But I said to you that you have seen me And yet you do not believe All that the Father gives me will come to me And the one who comes to me by no means cast out For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me And this is the will of the Father who sent me that of all all that he has given me I should lose nothing but should raise it up at the last day And this is the will of him who sent me that everyone who sees sees the Son and believes in him may have everlasting life and I will raise him up at the last last day Now at this point the Jews begin to complain and they say uh he said "I am the bread which came down from heaven."

Isn't this Jesus the son of Joseph whose father and mother we know How is it then that he says "I have come down from from heaven." And so Jesus answers and says "Don't murmur No one can come to me unless the Father who sent sent me draws him and I will raise him up the last day." Now in the historic dispute between between Augustinian theology and Pelagian theology John chapter 6 has has uh has been a a focal point of the discussion with respect to the dependence of the believer upon the the grace of God for salvation In other words the sixth chapter of John in general and this passage in particular particular reeks of the doctrine of predestination And it's interesting to see how many commentators when they come to John chapter 6 dance all around this But at heart of these sayings that that Jesus makes here is his affirmation that he repeats in his high priestly prayer in John 17 17 is that there is a body of people that the New Testament calls the elect that the father father gives to the son and Jesus says here that all who the father gives to to him will do what will come to him

because God is determined that will have an inheritance We go back to Isaiah 53 where we hear the statements in chapter 53 of Isaiah that he will see the travail travail of his soul soul and be satisfied And so God the Father sends the Son into the world as the bread of life to to provide life for his people for the ones whom the father gives to him and every one of those persons that the father gives to the son comes to the son and all of those who come to the sun are in no wise cast out they receive their nourishment from the one whom the father sent in their behalf Now this this as well as his statement of his origin is provoking no small amount of discussion And so when Jesus says in verse 43 "Do not murmur among yourselves no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him."

Twice Twice in the sixth chapter of John Jesus speaks about man's natural ability to respond to Jesus on on their own And And elsewhere Jesus says "No one no man no one can come to me unless it is given to him him of the father Now we have the assumption assumption in our day that Jesus was sent into the world by God as a potential savior for everybody And And everybody in the world has the ability to come to Jesus or not come to Jesus And we struggle when Jesus himself says "Wait a a minute nobody is able to come to me unless Now that little word unless underscores what we would call a necessary condition A condition that must be met for a desired consequence to to occur And so Jesus reminds these people he said "You can't come to to me You won't come to me because you can't come to me Not because you don't have a will Not because you don't have a mind Not because you don't have a heart But you are dead in sin You are in in bondage to your sin And just like

the leopard that can't change his spots and the Ethiopian the color of his skin so you in your your natural state in your fallen corruption are powerless to come to me unless God does something Unless unless God gives it to you to come Unless God gives you a gift Now some people say that's true but God gives that gift gift to everybody But remember Jesus is saying all that the father gives to him comes to him And now he reinforces this statement statement in this segment of the text when he says "Again I say to you nobody can come to me me unless the Father draws him." I can't believe how much debate has gone on in church history history over the significance and meaning and application of the word that Jesus used here which is the the word to draw I've always been fascinated that that's even the English word that is chosen in most English English translations because the same word is used elsewhere elsewhere uh when people are thrown into prison and the theological dictionary of the New Testament translates the word draw as the word to compel When I think of drawing I think of enticing wooing you know trying to persuade people to come And And and we could interpret this by saying that Jesus is saying nobody can come to me unless the father

woos him unless he entices him unless he persuades him But the verb verb is much stronger than that The the the wooing if you will the drawing that God God does is effective when God the Holy Spirit actively draws draws a person to Jesus That person comes to Jesus Let me say it again The The person that God the Holy Spirit draws to Jesus comes to Jesus Not because he's raped not because he's coerced not because he's dragged kicking and screaming against his will but because God the Holy Spirit in that act of effectual drawing changes the heart of the person where that person previously was blind to the things of God Now the the the scales of the eyes have been removed and that which was unpleasant to the soul now is shown to be sweet attractive and something that is altogether altogether desirable So the heavenly drawing of God is one by which God changes the attitude or or the inner disposition of the soul of the person so that that when the father draws them to his son they come to his son and they eat this bread bread that gives them the spiritual life

that is forever No one can come to me unless unless the father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up the last day It is written in the prophets and they shall be taught by God Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me All that the Father Father teaches all that the Father opens as it were come to to Jesus Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who was from God he has seen the Father And most most assuredly I say to you he who believes in me has everlasting life I again I am the bread of life Your father sat the mana in the the wilderness and they are dead That is the mana in the wilderness sustained them from day day to day or from week to week but eventually they die This This bread is different This is the bread that comes down from heaven that one may eat of it and not not die I am the living bread which comes comes down from heaven And if anyone eats of this bread he will live forever And the bread that I shall give is my my flesh which I will give for the life of the world This is seen by

some some as in in obviously linked to the Lord's supper I don't think it was intended at that time but you can't help but draw draw parallels from this discourse on the bread of life to what Jesus teaches in the upper room when he said of his own body And when you use refers to the bread this is my body which is given for you Because the bread from heaven gives gives his flesh as a sacrifice for his sheep And those who partake of this heavenly heavenly bread those who partake of the bread of life of Jesus himself have life life everlasting So in summary Jesus is saying "I'm a a heavenly being I'm sent from the Father I come to nurture you to feed you to give you the life that is is eternal There is no other source for that anywhere under heaven than in Christ Christ himself himself the the second half of Isaiah and I've just written a book uh

called Strength for the Weary on the second half of Isaiah uh is set in a text of suffering and and trial and Israel is being threatened by Assyria and eventually will be threatened by Babylon And the way in which Isaiah brings comfort comfort is to remind us of God's covenant promises We find ourselves in different different circumstances and we're threatened by different things But at the end of the day our shortity our hope our security lies in the fact fact that God has made a covenant He's made a promise And God's promises can never be broken broken Earlier Earlier on on in our course on apologetics I mentioned the revolutionary impact of Emanuel Kant's critique of the traditional traditional arguments for the existence of God And that watershed work was in his publication called the critique of pure reason But even though Kant was was agnostic with respect to the ability of proving the existence of God through

theoretical thought He himself was a theist He believed in God He just didn't think he could prove the existence of God And he wrote another book called The Critique of Practical practical reason where he came at the question of God not from a theoretical perspective so much but rather from technical considerations and I I like to look at Kant this way and say that in the one hand uh on the one hand he he he impolitely uh ushered God outside the front door of the house and then ran around to the kitchen door and let him in the back door as kind of the way he pro progressed because in his practical reason he gave his famous moral moral argument for the existence of God which we're going to look at in a few moments But before I do do that I want to take a few moments to look at some of the considerations that we find in the New Testament with respect to the moral moral argument When Paul writes to the the Romans in the first chapter which we've already looked at in terms of his statement early in the chapter that the invisible things of God God are known through the things that are made But later on in chapter 1 in verse 28 when he's uh going through an indictment against the whole human race

in their fallen and corrupt state He says about human beings beings verse 28 and even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge God gave them over over to a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting Being filled with all all unrighteousness sexual immorality wickedness covetousness maliciousness full of of envy murder strife deceit evil-mindedness They are whisperers backbiters haters of of God violent proud boasters inventors of evil would suggest that what what Arnius is saying was that the

apocalyptic vision that John received took place during the reign of the mission and that obviously would have been after the fall of Jerusalem Now on the other hand Arrenaeus could be wrong He's not an inspired writer He could have his dates and times mixed up However there is a a grammatical and literary question about this translation and the question has to do with the anticedan of that that which again was seen almost in our day toward the end of the mission's reign Is he saying that John's vision was seen during the reign of the mission mission or is he saying saying that John who received the vision was seen as late as the reign of the mission Now again church history indicates that of all of the disciples of Jesus the one who lived the longest was was John In other words if you do a technical analysis of this statement the statement can mean either one Either that the vision John received took place during the reign of the mission or that John John was seen

during the the reign of the mission the one who could answer the question for us as to who was the antichrist Now if we look further at the writings of Ironius some other interesting facts emerge One is that Ireneus himself makes reference to quote ancient copies of the book of Revelation Uh you don't talk about something that was written in your own lifetime as an ancient ancient manuscript But had it been written written uh a hundred years earlier than he was writing then obviously that appellation could justly be be applied as he does here So he makes references elsewhere in his own writings to ancient uh copies of of the revelation Also Clement argued another very highly respected early church father that all of the the apostolic revelation that we received in the text of scripture ceased during the reign of Neero so that the external testimony of of Clement is that everything that is found in the canon of the New Testament and

all of the apostolic revelation which would include the book of of revelation had ceased by the death of Nero which means all of the New Testament documents were pleaded by the year year 68 which would make it prior to the fall fall of Jerusalem Now those are a couple of the key key points of external evidence There are other minor considerations and I won't go and take the time to go into them here I do give give more of that information in my book But not only that but uh Ken Gentry uh has written a magnificent book on this subject subject entitled Before Jerusalem Fell in which as part of his doctoral dissertation he researched all of this and uh tries the case and I think he makes a powerful case uh for the early dating of the book of revelation But let's turn turn our attention now at least for the meantime away from the external evidence and look at the the internal reence evidence because because that can be very important Now we've been concerned all along in this series with the time frame references of the New Testament And let me remind you you how the book of Revelation begins Chapter 1 verse 1 reads as follows The revelation revelation of Jesus Christ which

God gave him to show his servants things which must shortly shortly take place And he sent and and s signified it signified it by his angel to his servant John who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ to all things that he blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep those things which are written in it for the time is is near over and over again in the book of revelation we have references to time frames of nearness Let me just give you a quick summary As I've already mentioned those things which much shortly take place Chapter two Repent or I will come to you quickly Chapter 3 behold I come quickly Chapter 22 speaks of the things which mustly take place Uh chapter 22 surely I'm coming quickly Uh chapter 1 verse three the time is near Chapter 22 10 the time is at hand And And verse 119 write these things that are about to take place Chapter 3:10 the hour of trial which is about to come on the whole world Now the Greek terms that are used there to talk about soon near at hand All are timeframe references in in the language that have a very very short

time span It's It's really stretching it to say that the Bible says that we have a revelation here that is given about things that are near at hand hand and are going to take place shortly that you would expect a period of over 2,000 years to elapse after after those time frame references are given So the point is this that the contemporaries who received the first first edition of the book of revelation note the several references in it that point to the radical nearness of the fulfillment of the things that are being unfolded in this prophecy That is is to say there's a reason why the first generation of believers had this urgent sense of expectancy of the nearness of of the crisis that was at at hand because because of the language of the book of revelation itself which whenever it does speak in time frames speaks of a time frame of that which is coming soon Now in addition to that there are other internal uh references references uh that we pay attention to not the least of which which is that so much of the language of the symbols of the book of revelation uh uh is borrowed from the temple itself It's it's replete with temple illusions

illusions throughout the book And yet there's not the slightest hint anywhere in the book of Revelation Revelation that the temple is no longer standing Now this is an argument of silence but it's one one of those pregnant silences that certainly an event as catastrophic to Christian Jewish history as the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple would be mentioned by an apostolic writing that took place after the event And if Revelation was written in the '9s and if it was the only New Testament book that was written after 70 AD one would certainly expect some some statement about the destruction of Jerusalem had it been a past event But there's not not a word And the background the illustrative background that shapes the whole character and content of the book is of a present temple It's already there It's still there But again that's an argument from silence and is not something that would be absolutely conclusive but it certainly certainly is corroative to the theory of an earlier date Now uh uh in uh Revelation chapter 13 we have a section section that is uh uh I'm sorry chapter 17 uh

there is a segment of the text which is critical to pinpointing the dating and the timing of the book with respect to internal evidence And let me call your attention to chapter 17 where we read these words But the angel said to me why do you you marvel I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her which has the seven heads and the 10 horns The beast that you saw was was and is not and will ascend out of the bottomless pit and go to predition And those who dwell on the earth will marvel whose whose names are not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world when they see the beast that was and is not and yet is Here is the mind which has wisdom Now here we get an internal translation or explanation of the symbols The seven heads are seven mountains upon which the woman sits There are also seven seven kings Five have fallen one is and the other has not yet come And when he comes he must continue a short time And he goes on to describe the beast and so on Now the question two questions here First of all what is the city of seven hills It's possible that that is an obscure reference to

Jerusalem itself But in all of antiquity the the most famous nickname for Rome was the city on the seven hills And if the author of of Revelation is describing Rome here those goes on to speak of the kings of Rome and some some scholars object to that saying that the Romans didn't call their emperors kings They called them emperors rather than kings But in any case we we read here in the text that there are seven kings Five have fallen One is the other is not yet come And what does that tell you It tells you that the book is being written at the time of the the sixth king because five have have gone There's another one that is to come but the sixth is now That is there's a present reference to the sixth king king and presume and the sixth king who reigns over the city with the seven hills Now the question is who is the sixth king and we would ask that question by saying who is the sixth emperor of Rome Now we have a problem here Julius Caesar it's called Caesar did not not receive the title

emperor The first one to receive the formal formal title emperor was Caesar Augustus So if we start with Caesar Caesar Augustus he would be number one Tiberius would be number two Caliglia 3 Claudius 4 Nero 5 and and Galba be number six Remember Galba just lasted a short time and he was murdered But Galba died before the year 70 So if if Galba is the sixth king that is referred to here then obviously the book was written before 70 Now some people say that that because of the Civil War and the rapid elimination of Galba his successor AO and and Vitalius Uh that those three aren't included in the list They don't count So now beginning with with Augustus next if you skip Galbao and Vetalius would be vespatian who who also comes too early He's not into the '9s His reign finishes in the decade of the 70s Now there's there's a third option and that is that you start counting not with Augustine but you or with Augustus but you start with Julius Caesar who by the way in ancient Roman lists of rulers He is the George Washington He

really is the first Now and I might just add to you the other problem of calling them them kings You remember when the Jews were were interrogated about Jesus and so on and his political aspirations What did they say We have no no king but Caesar There's ample evidence to indicate that the Jewish people called the Roman Roman rulers kings So if we start with Julius Caesar Caesar as number one Augustus number two Tiberia 3 Ciglia 4 Claudius 5 who's who's six Nea would indicate that the book was written during during the reign of Neero which explains a ton of questions with respect to the internal uh significance of the content content of this this book I think that's a powerful internal reference to the dating of the book which any one of these options precludes a a writing after the year uh so at least during the reign of dimission also also in in conclusion the writer Clement has an interesting anecdote where he talks talks about the apostle John while in exile

chasing chasing an apostate and running down this apostate on a wild horseback chase kind of like a Rogers chase where you can see John galloping across the plane racing to catch this uh this bad guy Now let's assume that he was exiled during the reign of the mission That means that John would have chased this apostate down down on this vigorous horse race when John was well into his 90s 90s where that's really stretching it I mean it's possible I guess that a 90 some year old person could engage in that vigorous vigorous activity but it's unlikely and it's just one more illusion by the church church fathers that would place the writing well before the time of dimmission and prior to the destruction of Jerusalem In our next session we will examine the New Testament Testament content with respect to the Antichrist antichrist If you take the time to read Luther's 95

thesis you'll see in there that there's very little about the doctrine of justification But Luther's Luther's discussion that he wanted to have with the faculty over the thesis had to do with the whole system of doctrine associated with indulgences And initially Luther wasn't opposed to indulgences it in itself but the abuse of the selling of them that was being being carried out by Tetsel Now however when he began writing up his 95 thesis and if you read them you will see that he raises questions about the whole whole system that's tied to indulgences and to the Roman Catholic understanding of of justification and of the gospel And for us to understand as I've said the reformation concept I think the best way to do against the backdrop backdrop of the Roman Catholic view Now the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification was not set forth forth in all of its complexity overnight by Augustine or later by Gregory the Great Great or anything like that but rather the system of salvation within Rome took centuries and centuries develop develop uh with a layer at a time time upon another layer And from a theological perspective the Roman Catholic system of is called called sassidodalism meaning that salvation is wrought through the

ministrations ministrations of the church and of the priesthood And And it the doctrine of justification wasn't definitively defined until after the uh beginning of the reformation when we saw what was called the counterreformation The Roman Catholic Church responded to Protestantism Protestantism with a three-pronged counter move for the first was with the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition Inquisition in which people who uh embraced these heretical doctrines of the Protestants were subjected to severe forms of torture And secondly the the founding of the Jesuit order a special order of priests to deal with the intellectual issues of the day the Society of Jesus founded by Ignatius Leola Sometimes if you'll see writings by Jesuit scholars they'll you'll see their name and instead of after their name the initials PhD you'll see instead SJ Society of Jude of Jesus means they're Jesuits They're the they're the creme dec of the the academic uh priests in the Roman Catholic Church But the major element of the the Connorreformation was the calling of a an international ecumenical council like Vatican 2 Vatican 1 Constantinople Ephesus Chelidon those great councils of church history And this uh in the middle of the 16th 16th

century this council was called and began in Trento Italy and is called the Council of Trent Sometimes references to decisions of Trent are called Tridentines So if you hear that phrase from now and then the Tridentine view means those views views espoused and set down in concrete officially uh day Feed was at the council of Trent Now that council went through several sessions over several years but the most important one for consideration of justification justification was the sixth session of the Council of Trent in which the sixth session does two things In the first first part part of this of the session it defines the Roman Catholic view of justification The second part include these these 20ome canons which are pronouncements of judgment against heretical views views or uh anathemas You know if anyone says this let him be anathema let him be cursed or let let be damned And so it's still a debate which we can talk about a little later among contemporaries as to to how definitive Trent is But I'd just mention in passing that the decrees of the Council of Trent were reaffirmed reaffirmed in Toto in the Catholic Catechism of the 1990s and so

officially within the Roman church even though you'll find people in America and Canada and the western wing of the true who are loose on Trent the uh cury of the uh of the Latin wing of the church and the papacy still affirms unequivocably the decrees and cannons cannons of Trent So that's what we want to do to understand its view of justification Now before again I expound that so so often in the discussion and debate between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism both sides set up straw off persons and attack things that aren't true They slander each other You know I hear it's all the time well we believe in justification by faith Rome believes in justification by works as if faith wasn't significant or we believe in justification by grace Rome believes in justification by merit And that's a that's a a falsification an oversimplification Or some say we believe in justification by Christ They believe in justification by their own own uh activities That's not true Let's So let's ask the question what does Rome teach on this question question of justification Well in the sixth session it starts off this way by saying that that the first step in justification is is the sacrament of baptism which Rome defines as the

instrumental cause of justification The instrumental cause of justification When we say justification justification by we're using the instrumental data We're talking about the means by which something takes place That goes that that distinction of instrumental causality goes back to Aristotle's uh uh study of causes and some of you may be familiar with that where he he distinguished among the efficient cause the formal cause the final cause the material cause the instrumental cause and so on All these different different subtle distinctions about causality Well Rome believes that the instrument by which a person is justified justified initially is the sacrament of baptism What happens in that sacrament is the fusion or pouring into the soul of the person baptized the righteousness of Christ or what is also sometimes called justifying grace Now Now there's a debate there of subtleties with Roman theologians about their whole understanding of grace The language that they use use describes grace as some kind of substance or thing that is poured into the soul that has a habitus

it inhabits the soul we think we speak of grace of as being an activity of God a generous treatment of us that we don't deserve but we don't think in terms of grace in substantive language but again to understand the Roman view you have this grace infused or poured into the soul and that it affects what it intends to in in effect exopera operate that means through the working of the works they don't like to use the language automatic but really it is automatic If you are baptized you do receive this infusion of grace and are at that state in a state of of justification Now to continue in that state of justification justification you have to cooperate with that infused grace The language that they use at Trent Trent is the language cooperare atentare to cooperate with and ascent to this grace grace that has been infused into you so that when you cooperate with this grace and sent to this grace grace then the righteousness that has been infused is now inherent that is it's inherent in you so that you are righteous uh in the sight of God And the reason why you're righteous in

the sight of God is because because you really are righteous You've cooperated and ascended to this infused grace And so you're in a state of of justification until or unless you commit a mortal sin Now at that point uh Rome distinguishes between mortal sin and venial sin Venal sin is real sin and needs needs to be confessed and forgiven and all of that but it doesn't destroy your saving grace grace that inherits in your soul Mortal sin however is called mortal mortal sin because it kills the grace of justification that's in your soul Calvin you know opposed that by saying that all sins are mortal in the sense that they deserve death but no sin sin is mortal to the Christian that that would destroy your salvation But in the Roman view if you commit a mortal sin if you die in in mortal sin you go to hell Now f first thing you have to know here is that you can have real real faith Faith that is necessary for salvation salvation and have saving faith and still commit mortal sin So let me explain that for just a a second We distinguish

between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition If I want want to build a fire out in the woods I need some c certain amount of oxygen to have a fire occur Oxygen's a necessary condition under normal circumstances for fire to occur But it's not a sufficient condition If we're a sufficient condition it would mean all you need to have a fire is the presence of oxygen If that were the case then what the whole world would be on fire right right now because wherever there's oxygen there would be fire So you couldn't have oxygen without having fire Now the idea is you can't have fire without having having oxygen but you can have oxygen without having fire Now using that illustration between necessary and sufficient uh uh condition The Roman view of uh uh this faith is that faith is a necessary condition for justification justification but not a sufficient one you can have true faith and not be justified whereas in the Protestant view faith is not just a necessary condition for justification it's a sufficient condition for justification if you have true faith faith you have justification you can't have true faith and not have justification and you can't have justification

without having true faith am I going too fast All right Okay Now so again expanding on this mortal sin idea and on faith in in the sixth session of Trent Rome defines defines faith as having this function It has a threefold function with respect to to justification Rome calls faith the the enitium the fundamentum and the rodex of of justification Now to translate that into English faith Faith is the initiation the first step of our justification So when people say Rome build justification without without faith or just by works no no no You have to have faith as the initiating de element for your your justification It's also the fundamentum the foundation foundation upon which justification is established And thirdly it's the rodex the root or the core core of justification So justification is not some loose fitting option that you can have or not have in the Roman Roman Catholic thing It's a necessary condition for justification It's the the initiation the foundation and the root of justification But if you have that faith you can still commit mortal

sin And here's where the problem comes in If you commit mortal sin you lose your justification And if if you lose your justification you need what Rome calls a Trent the second plank of justification justification for those who make shipwreck of their souls Now the idea of of walking the plank or have a plank on a ship or different plank of a like the Republican program They have planks or they have uh positions that they take Well here Rome is is using the naval idea You lose your your you lose your salvation You end your justification by mortal sin Now the question is how can you get get rejustified Well you would think that the answer to that question would be well you just get baptized again But they say no you don't get get tised again There's an indelible mark that's given to you when your original baptism you never lose No matter even if you go to hell you'll have that de indelible mark And so you don't have to get rebaptized but you need another sacrament instead of the sacrament of baptism in order to be rejustified And that's the the sacrament of penance And that's at the core and center of the controversy here in the 16th century Why Well the elements of penance are these There's first of all

confession If you've committed mortal sin you confession You You got to confess that sin to the priest And that confession has to be genuine It can't merely be attrition Attrition is repenting out of a fear fear of punishment You know like the little kid when you catch him in his hand in the cookie jar and he said "Please don't spank me Please don't spank me." He's all very very sorry because he's going to get punished not because he's done something wrong But true contrition is like you would find in David's Psalm 51 where his heart is broken before God and he has this broken and contrite heart because he realizes he's sinned against a holy and righteous God So you come to confess and you say you know father I've done I've conf done this and and uh I'm confessing I'm repenting not only out of a fear of God's punishment but because I have have offended thee and so on in the prayer of confession The second part of the sacrament is priestly absolution Tay absolvo the priest says Now Protestants get all exercised about that They say "I don't have to go to confession by sin I don't need to go to a priest I go directly to God." You know at the same time we say say that you are supposed to confess your sins There's nothing wrong with confessing your sins to another person or to your pastor There's There's nothing wrong with the the pastor giving the assurance of pardon as we do regularly in our liturgy We're saying if you uh confess your sins God is is faithful and just to forgive you your

sins and to forgive you cleanse you of all unrighteous When the priest says "Tebsolvo I absolve you." He's not saying that I have the the inherent power to forgive sins Only God has that power But he is exercising a delegated delegated right He is exercising a power endowed with him when he goes through the sacrament of holy orders orders and he becomes consecrated as a priest Now part of being a priest priest is he has the authority to pronounce the forgiveness of God upon a penitent person So far no harm no no foul It's the third part of of uh the sacrament of penance that created all the stir And that's that's this in the third part after you have preede absolution to be fully restored to justification you must do works of satisfaction in order to be justified Here's where the works come in Works of satisfaction such such as saying so many Hail Marys so many Our Fathers giving alms doing some other good deed These are works that are required in order to be justified The reformed view is justification is by faith alone For the Roman Roman Catholic view it's faith plus works in order to be justified Now these works are called called works to disobey him Well if you say for no

reason that there was no prior inclination no prior desire or disposition Then you've described a choice that bring with them congruous

all You've denied the moral agency agency of the creature when you say he does it arbitrarily Some people look at the text of Genesis chapter 3 and and they will argue well they were coerced into sinning sinning by the power of Satan This is the old argument The devil devil made me do it This was the argument that Eve gave It was her the the odyssey Adam hitchhiked on that argument when he said to God "The "The one that you gave to me." As if God now had forced evil into Adam through through the irresistible power of the wife that God God provided for him Yes Lord You made her as my helpmate and she helped me right over the the cliff here into the fall See so the idea there is that we explain it away by demonic demonic coercion But if evil entered the garden through demonic

coercion If If it was real coercion then it would be excusable and it would not carry the moral judgment that it does does carry according to scripture It would excuse Adam and Eve because they would have been powerless to resist the the temptation of Satan That not only does not solve the problem philosophically but it also also violates the text of scripture The other is that Satan is described as as the most clever of all of the beasts of the field field and that he comes and seduces Eve by tricking her with his his gful arguments and basically fools her And so so Eve falls into sin out of ignorance And again we would say if that were the case if she really really had been ignorant with what we call invincible ignorance An ignorance that is impossible to overcome If that were the

case then she would be guiltless and God would be wicked in punishing her for that act Not Not only that but the appeal to the ignorance of Eve and or Adam also violates violates the text text because the text tells us that God spoke clearly to Adam and Eve and told them what they may not do and what the consequences would be if they did it At which point Satan Satan challenged the very premise of God when he says "Did God say you may not eat of any of the trees in the garden " Now he knew very well that that's not what God had said But Eve said "No Eve now becomes the world's first apologist She defends defends the integrity of God God didn't say that Mr Devil Mr Serpent he said "Of all the trees of the garden we may freely eat." But he he put this one area out of bounds saidth that we ate of that we would surely surely die." Now Satan saysYou will will not die." Now God created Adam and Eve Eve unfallen Their physical powers were greater than ours

because our bodies have been been ravaged by the consequences of sin But But not only that their foolish minds were not darkened had not been ruined by original sin and their ability to think think clearly far exceeds any Einstein or Aquinus or any other postfallen person If ever a human being would have instantly recognized a violation of the law of non-contradiction it would have been been Eve when the serpent said "You shall not die." Cuz she knew that her creator to whom she owed her very existence existence had said "If you do A B will necessarily necessarily follow." Instead Satan comes and says "If you do A nonB will follow." So that the serpent initially is subtle but then he gets rid of the subtlety and makes a direct assault assault on the integrity and truthfulness of of God And Eve buys it So she can't can't say "I didn't know the gun was loaded She can't appeal to ignorance ignorance for her sin And so the deception deception of

Satan of our human forefathers did not excuse them them because they were morally capable and culpable for recognizing the contradiction to the word of God and not to obey the lie rather than the truth So that explanation falls by its own own weight What are we left with You know the Swiss Swiss theologian theologian Carl Bard called the problem of evil the enmishite the The impossible possibility which is a contradictory statement It's a nonsense statement Well in that that case Bart was not just merely practicing his favorite tool of dialectical thinking or the use of paradox to make a a point He He understood that evil had to be possible or it couldn't have happened But we cannot find any way in in which it was possible It seems at least on the outside that was was impossible and yet it happened and that's why he calls it an impossible possibility That's his way as as a theologian to throw up his hands and say up I don't know Dr Gersonner would have said to Dr Bart "You "You haven't died

yet Carl Don't give up so easily." Or you're surrendering to the same arrogance that this kid in Pittsburgh has has suffered from well one of the most u fascinating theodysies ever produced on this question was produced by a German philos of linets linets and linets's famous theodysy goes something like this He distinguishes first of all all among three different kinds of evil There is metaphysical evil there's physical evil and there's moral evil Now you all know what physical evil is It's It's Katrina It's the earthquake It's disease that ravages you We say that's a bad thing The doctor gave us bad news today about our health That's physical evil That That physical evil is not moral evil Though biblically there is a connection What he means by by metaphysical evil is metaphysical imperfection The only perfect being being that exists is God He's perfect in all of his

his attributes God is self-existent eternal immutable omnisient all the the rest And even God cannot create another another God You say "Well God can do anything." " No God can't be God not be God at the same time Same relationship God can't build a rock so big that he can't move it Nor can God create another another God Why not Because the second God would would by definition be a creature He would not be be self-existent He would not be eternal But he would be eternally dependent upon the first God And so anything that God creates must by the nature of things be less than he is That's not big news I mean the Bible makes this absolute distinction between creator and creature But he's he's saying that God could have created the world in many many different ways But no matter how how he created the world the world would by definition have to be be imperfect metaphysically because it would fall short short of the being of God

himself You follow that And so linen says that that metaphysical evil gives rise rise to physical evil and together bring to pass moral moral evil It's a cleverly constructed argument but in the final analysis makes God by by necessity the author of evil and also gives gives the ultimate excuse for our sin What do you expect from me God to is human I'm finite I'm not you And since I am finite and conditioned and and derived I morally morally fall out of necessity The argument that we sin because we're finite is one one that not only Linets has given Paul Tillik fell back on it Uh process process philosophy uses it see it again and again in many different shapes and sizes and forms And it's one of the most most frequent answers that I get

from these people that write me letters and tell me that the reason why sin came into the world is because we're finite And if finite we not only are prone to sin but it is inevitable that we do sin And I try to point out to them If sin is a necessary consequence of being finite it's excusable How can God still find find fault It was Voltater who wrote the little book Candid in in which he wrote a satire in response to Linets's the Odyssey If you've ever read Candid you know of this character who's seen as kind of a bum fumbling guy by the name of of Dr Dr Panglos and Dr Pangloss is espousing the theory that this is the best of all possible world You can't be mad at God God did the best he could do This was written right after the Lisbon earthquake that's caused so much pain and suffering in in Portugal that in light of the fresh memory memory of this earthquake what so what Volaltater was trying to do was to reduce the theodysy of of Linets to to ridicule So I'm just saying this to say that that I am not persuaded of that argument argument

either So what do I say say about it Couple of things And what I'm about to say now might shock you you and could easily be misunderstood by you Before I say it I want to also say that the Bible makes it clear that it is a sin sin to call good good evil and it is a sin to call evil good And that's a sin that we commit every day when we we try to justify our own disobedience and our own moral sinfulness We try to turn it it around and make our evil actually look good Or when we despise the law of of God and hate the law of God which is good We say there's something wrong with that that law I'm not going to obey it because it's not good for me I'm calling good evil So we're not allowed allowed to call good evil or evil good That's actually Matic Now here's what I'm going to say Evil is not not good but it is good that there there is evil Evil is not good but it is good that there is

is evil otherwise it wouldn't be in a universe ruled by a perfect God God has his purpose for the entrance of of evil into this world And in a certain sense as Augustine said centuries centuries ago God even orained that evil come into the the world If he did not ordain it it wouldn't wouldn't be here because evil has no power to overcome the sovereign providential government of this universe Now the the favorite verse that is is annually voted by evangelical Christians as people's favorite verse in the Bible is Romans 8:28 All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and who are called according according to his purpose Now unless God has sovereign power over evil He will not be able to keep that that promise That promise that we cling to that promise we rely on that that promise that encourages us

that no matter how many bad things we suffer in this world it's not that God is saying that those bad things are good things but he's saying that they are are working for good I'm using it ultimately for for good Unless God has the power over good and evil he can't make make that promise Do you see that And so for purposes I don't know and I don't understand God as Augustine Augustine qualified in a certain sense ordained that evil come into this world not not naively so that you may experience the difference between good and evil My daddy used to say "You don't have to live in a garbage can to know that it stinks But for a redemptive purpose The classic example of that is the story of Joseph when he was killed by his his brothers after they they had so treacherously betrayed their brother sold him into slavery and and all the rest And when they discover that they're now talking to the prime minister of Egypt and it's his their long- lost lost brother They're terrified that he's going to bring the the wrath of Egypt down on their head And Joseph says "I'm not God." He said And I know what you did You know what you did And I know what you meant by

it I know what your intentionality was was as moral creatures You meant it for for evil but God meant it for for good That's one of the hardest concepts But if you want to understand it look at Good Good Friday Ultimately who delivered Jesus up to the Gentiles to be killed Ultimately who was was it who was pleased that he be punished It pleased the Lord to bruise him The blackest act in all of human history is celebrated now by what we call Good Friday Because though the motives and the intents intents of all of the actors that were engaged in the trial and the execution of our Lord Jesus Christ for which they are responsible God didn't force them to do it but his sovereign power trumped their mortal evil evil desires desires because it was through the coordination of God that Jesus was crucified This wasn't wasn't accident in history And so that God has this ability to order a universe in which he he uses evil for perfectly pure and holy purposes which we will see in the full

and final analysis only in glory One last point before my time time expires And for this I'm indebted to Augustine And I wanted to tie together what what I said earlier about evils having no onto ontological status or existence existence is that although we have a problem explaining the presence of evil The unbeliever unbeliever unbeliever's problem is greatly exacerbated over ours Again the only way you can can identify something as being evil is against the backdrop of the good and only if good exists exists does evil become a problem We say it again Only if good exists does evil become a a problem And so in a convoluted way indirectly the presence of evil evil points to the reality of the good It It becomes an argument not against God but for the existence of God And the pagan has two problems He not only only has to account for the entrance of evil to the world but he has to account for the existence of good without without an author

of goodness He has to say in the the final analysis as many pagans do today there is no such thing as evil There is no such thing as good only personal preferences That's what the relivist says says until you steal his wallet Then he suddenly abandons his his relativism and says that's not right and he calls the cop looking looking for justice So I've said all this to say I don't know But But I want you to understand why I don't know and why this question is such a thorny one and why it is is the mystery of iniquity But I leave you with this thought Though I don't know or or fully understand the origin of evil I do know know the future of it I do know that it has been overcome and that God God will rid this universe universe of all moral evil physical evil and metaphysical evil as we grow up

into the fullness of Christ and inhabit in a new heaven and a new earth and where there is no more crying crying no more death death shall be no more no more pain and no more sin sin which I will god willing speak about tomorrow Let's pray Thank you you Lord for the triumph of your grace over our wickedness Forgive us when we ascribe to you an evil evil action that excuses us For we know that even what you ordain does not excuse our acts of intention against you and against your beloved And though we wrestle with this question of evil we don't wrestle with the question of of good and we don't wrestle with the promise that you have given and demonstrated adequately in history history of your final triumph over our evil We thank you for this in the name of Christ Amen For for

freedom Christ has set us free Stand firm therefore and do not not submit again to the yoke of slavery I can hear Luther at at the diet of forms Here I stand Wasn't standing standing still He was standing firm for freedom Christ has set you you free and in your freedom and in your liberation and through the power of the gospel Stop Stop wavering Stand fast for the obvious purpose purpose by which we have been liberated from the curse of the law is for freedom and it is Jesus who sets us us free free As As we continue continue now with our study of

defending our faith the science of apologetics You recall that in our last session I looked briefly briefly at the moral argument for the existence of God that was set forth by the philosopher Emanuel Kant And I mentioned that he approached this question from a practical consideration coming to the conclusion that we must live live as if there were a god caunt from a rational scientific theoretical perspective was agnostic saying saying through our normal avenues of research and investigation we can't know that there is a God Yet practical practical purposes we must assume that there is a God in order for life to be meaningful for society to be possible And we looked at how he he constructed that practical argument from his uh awareness of this categorical imperative this moral imperative that is shared by people around around the world Now at the end of that lecture I mentioned that not everybody in the the philosophical realm agreed with Kant's conclusion that we must live live as if there is a god Some were what they might be called as hardcore cynics or skeptics And they said said just because the options to the existence of God are grim That is no

reason reason to believe in God That would be like falling into an Alice and Wonderland scenario where you take a a deep breath and close your eyes and wish with all of your might might that life is meaningful life is significant that somebody's home there who's going to make justice take place in the final analysis and have that as a ground ground for faith Well let let me say this uh before we continue that in the history of philosophy and of theoretical thought I think that we could certainly uh uh isolate and individuate at least a thousand different distinctive distinctive philosophies philosophical theories philosophical movements and so on But But there is a gamut that these philosophical systems run They tend to find themselves somewhere between two poles poles or two polar extremes On this side we we have what I call fullbodied theism And on this side of this poll would be be neihilism And Nehilism is not only only uh that there is no god but it also goes from that conclusion to the idea that there is no meaning no signance no

sense to human existence and all other philosophies find themselves situated situated somewhere along this continuum in between these two poles Now if you look at at historic Christianity and Judaism for that matter if you go to the Old Testament scriptures you see that the wisdom wisdom literature of the Old Testament wrestled with these two anithetical positions chiefly in the book of Ecclesiastes where two different perspectives are explored There is life as it is experienced under the the sun and life as there it is experienced under heaven Now Now if I could translate that and indeed transfer it into modern categories you go back to Kant and Kant's criticism of the the distinction between his numinal world the realm of God and the phenomenal world the the realm where we observe things in the scientific exploration of our senses And he saw this wall that existed between this world world and the transcendent world Now if we took Kant's Kant's theory and then moved it backwards into the Old Testament you could say that the distinction between the numinal world and the phenomenal world

world would be the distinction between life under heaven which is the numinal realm or life life under the sun which is the phenomenal realm and what was the the crux of the conflict that the uh uh the coal is speaking to in the book of ecclesiastes is this that life under the sun ends in the final analysis if there is no god if it is not under heaven but if life is restricted strictly to this this side under the sun to the phenomenal realm then the conclusion that the the philosopher of that day came to was found in the phrase vanity of vanity all all is vanity Now the expression vanity of of vanity is an expression of the superlative Take it over into the New Testament When Christ is is exalted by the New Testament scriptures and he is seen as the king He is called what The king King of Kings the Lord of Lords That's a Hebraic way to say say Supreme King the Supreme Lord because he's king of the king lord of the the lords And that's the same thought

that's in this idea of vanity Vanity of vanities It's an extreme extreme position to conclude that everything is vanity Now what is meant by the the term vanity here is not pride that is found in somebody we say is vain and narcissistic because they sit at vanity vanity uh in their uh makeup room and and apply all the their makeup and cosmetics because they are so vain That's not the significance or meaning of vanity vanity here Here the term vanity is a synonym for the word word futility So what the author of Ecclesiastes Ecclesiastes is saying from the vantage point of the phenomenal without reference to God if there is no God then of Of course in the final analysis what we encounter is futility of futility everything that we do is futile We are locked in a cycle a vicious circle that has no beginning and no purpose no no theology no uh significant end The sun rises the sun sets Then as Hemingway Hemingway described it the sun also rises again and it sets and and it's going nowhere That's That's

the basic underlying philosophy of nehilism It's you know that the poor player player struts his eye on the stage and is heard no more It's the tale you know uh told by by the idiot that is full of sound and fury that signifies thus needed the kneel nothing not a meaninglessness Now there are few philosophers who are willing to go go to that extreme Most philosophers in in history have who have rejected fullbodied theism have sought to develop a worldview or a philosophical system that exists somewhere between these two poles And so in a sense anywhere you find yourself on this continuum you are are borrowing capital from from one or the other I've always said character my immutable being And what I am

am dramatizing to you in this action Abraham is this If I ever fail to keep a promise to you I am am saying may I the immutable eternal self-existent being being suffer a mutation May I who am immortal become become mortal May I who cannot die perish I'm swearing by my deity deity and I'm saying that just as you have cut these animals in half if I ever lie to to you if I ever break a promise to you may I be cut in half and and destroyed One of the most poignant moments of my ministry was when I was a young teacher at at a seminary in Boston and got to know a man in the The administration has a dear friend whose name was Dee Ketchum And Dee got cancer that was terminal Died an inch at a a time And in the last weeks of his life he was alone in the hospital room and mass general there in in Boston I used to get down and visit him the hospital I remember I was with him the day he died And one of the

things that bothered me was that there was such so little I could do for this man He was emaciated He was weak He could hardly hardly speak It was a tender thing I could take the ice from the from the jar next to his bedside and take little pieces and fry of ice and put them on his his parched lips and his eyes would would speak to me of of appreciation But what Dee wanted more than anything else was for me to read to him from the scriptures And on the day he he died here's what I read to him Turn to the book of Hebrews Hebrews And I read read this I said "Dake here's where the word of God says For God is not unjust To forget your work and the love which you have shown shown toward his name in having ministered and in still ministering to the saints And we desire that each one of you show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope until until the end that you may not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promise for when God made the promise to to Abraham since he could swear by none greater he swore by himself In verse 16 for men swear by one greater than themselves and with

them an oath given as confirmation is an end of every dispute In the same way God desiring even more to to show the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of the purpose he interposed it with an oath in order that by two unchangeable unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to to lie We may have strong encouragement We who have fled for refuge refuge in laying hold of the hope that is set before us George Washington Washington could tell a lie but it's impossible for God to lie And And it is impossible for God to break a promise For he has taken an oath and he has sworn by himself himself himself I I study study God's

holiness not because I'm holy but because I'm not holy and I know it You see what God considers unholy we consider normal normal I wish I understood the holiness of God Really understood it I understand it a little little bit just a fraction And I would say that in my own life one of the strongest contring contring dimensions of my thinking has resulted from detailed detailed study of the holiness of God I study God's holiness not because I'm I'm holy but because I'm not holy and I know it And I know know that the more I understand about the character of God the easier it is for me to love love him the easier it is for me to understand understand that what this world embraces and tolerates is abhorrent to him You see what God considers unholy we consider

consider commonplace In fact the word we use for the unholy more than any other term is the word word normal What we call call normal God normally calls evil when judged against against the character of his holiness The The older I get the more I study theology the more I immerse myself in the scriptures the more transparent that becomes to me me that I need to understand the character of God his holiness It's not enough simply to say I believe in God some amorphous mysterious cloudy spirit up in the sky But the God we believe believe in is personal and the God that we believe in is moral He is ethical He is is holy And he gives commandments to his people And he gets exercised about whether we obey obey those commands. Thank you for listening to Ultimately with RC RC Sproul Dr Sproul founded Ligonier Ministries to proclaim the holiness of God in all its fullness to as many people as as possible To more about our holy God request a free booklet by Dr Sproul when you visit

ultimatelyodcast.com/holy Today Today we're going going to start a new series and we're going to focus in this series on the work of Christ Now in theology theology we make a distinction between the person of Christ and the work of Christ for various reasons But even though that distinction is important to make we must never let it become a separation separation because the person of Christ is intimately connected to his work and we understand his work largely in part from the perspect of who it was was who was doing that work and yet at the same time conversely the work of Jesus reveals to us a great deal deal about who he is So his person and his work

may be distinguished but never never separated Now when we start an examination examination of the work of Jesus usually people want to start with his birth his virgin virgin birth And yet we're not going to start at that point in this particular uh lecture series Instead the work of Jesus I believe begins much earlier than his birth In fact it begins in in eternity past in what we call in theology the covenant covenant of redemption redemption of people who listen to this radio program have told me many times times that just like they enjoy listening to Rush Limbbo rattling his papers on his desk so the people enjoyed the sound of the chalk scratching on the blackboard But we hear the word covenant a lot in the Bible We think about the covenant of creation We think about the covenant of works the covenant of grace We think about the covenant God makes with Abraham with Noah with David and even the New Covenant that we we call the New Testament But many people aren't at all familiar with what we consider to be the

very first first covenant or the covenant of redemption and that covenant is not a covenant that God makes with human beings Rather the covenant of redemption refers refers to a pact or an agreement that takes place in eternity within the Godhead We distinguish the persons of the Godhead as the Father the Son and the Holy Holy Spirit And we know when we look at the Old Testament record of creation that the entire Trinity the whole Godhead actively actively involved in bringing the universe into being But not only is creation a trinitarian trinitarian work but redemption is also a trinitarian work The father is the the one who initiates the concept of redeeming a creation that he knows those will be fallen And so it is the father who designs the plan of redemption It is the the son who is given the assignment by the father to accomplish that redemption and of course it is the work of the Holy Spirit to apply that work of redemption to us But we have to understand understand that this does not

represent a struggle within the Godhead itself but rather an eternal eternal agreement The son is sent by the father and the son is absolutely absolutely delighted to be sent and to carry carry out the mission that the father has given to him During his earthly sojour Jesus made a comment comment on one occasion where he said "No one ascends into heaven heaven except he who has descended from from heaven And so with respect to the ministry of Jesus in this world it begins with with desension as distinguished from the ascension The desension has to do do with his leaving his situation in glory with the father and the spirit and coming to this world by way of incarnation When the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans at at the very beginning of the epistle where he identifies himself as an apostle who's been called of God set apart for the gospel of God which he says was announced by the

Old Testament Testament prophets and it regards Jesus who is born of the seed seed of David And so when Paul announces the gospel and the work of Christ throughout the book of of Romans He begins in the very first chapter chapter with a reference to Jesus's having been born of a woman from from the seed of David according to the flesh And And when we speak of Jesus flesh that brings us immediately to the concept of incarnation What What we celebrate at Christmas is not so much the birth of a baby as important as that is but what's so significant about the birth of that particular baby baby is that in this birth we have the incarnation of God himself An incarnation means a coming in the flesh We know how John begins his gospel In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God So in that very very complicated introductory statement he distinguishes between the word and God And then the next next breath identifies the two The word was with God and the

word was God And then at the end of the prologue says "And the word became flesh and dwelt among us." Now in this in in fleshment if you will of Christ appearing on this planet It's not that God God suddenly changes through a metamorphosis into a man man so that the divine nature sort of passes out of existence or comes into a new form of sheeness No the incarnation is not so much a subtraction as it is an addition where the eternal second person person of the trinity takes upon himself a human nature and joins his divine nature to that human nature nature for the purpose of redemption Now I'd like to direct our attention this morning morning to a very important passage in Paul's letter to the Philippians in the second chapter chapter where in chapter 2 of Philippians beginning at verse 5 we have these words let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus who being in the

form of God did not consider it robbery to be equal with God but made himself of no reputation taking the form of a bondervant and coming in the the likeness of men and being found in the appearance as a man he he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even the death of the cross Therefore God also has highly highly exalted him and given him the name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of those in in heaven and those on earth and of those under the earth and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord Lord to the glory of the father Now this passage that I've just read is known in biblical circles as the the canotic hymn The idea idea being that the uh speculation is that this particular passage out of Paul's letter to the Philippians was a passage that was not composed by the apostle while he was writing the letter to the Philippians but rather Paul was making use of a widely widely used very early Christian hymn and we don't know know that for sure but it's certainly possible and that hymn celebrates the incarnation and it is is called the canotic hymn because

of a prominent Greek word that is found within this passage which is the the Greek word konosis which means literally an emptying and the focal point of this passage or him whichever the case may be is on the transition that Jesus underwent by coming from his exalted state in heaven and becoming incarnate as a man in this world and the pattern that is found here in this uh passage is a pattern that uh that we see frequently in the life life of Jesus which is a pattern of humiliation and exultation That is to say he begins in exaltation in glory in in heaven but he condescends to join us in our earthly predicament predicament in order to redeem us and by entering into into human flesh he undergoes a profound humiliation and And throughout his lifetime there seems to be a progression or regression where the humiation humiation

moves deeper and darker and worse and worse as it reaches its nater in the cross and then following the cross comes the resurrection and the exultation of Christ once again to glory Now that progression or that that pattern that I've just mentioned from humiliation to uh exaltation is not not absolute Uh several years ago I wrote a book entitled The Glory of Christ Christ because I was fascinated fascinated how that during certain moments of Jesus' earthly life in the very midst of the hiddenness hiddenness of his eternal identity In the very midst of the shroud of of incarnation there would be little bursts of glory that would break break through as if the incarnation itself was was incapable of totally submerging the glory of the second person of the trinity We see it for example in the the birth narratives of Jesus where we see so much of the literature there speaks of the arduous journey journey that Mary and Joseph take in order to

uh sign up for the tax in Bethlehem And they get there and there's no room in the inn And And so Jesus is born in ignaminious circumstances there in utter humiliation being wrapped in swaddling cloth and so so on But all the time we have this picture of humiliation right outside in the fields of of him The glory of God God burst through and the angelic chorus begins to sing glory to God in the highest highest and on earth peace good will to men So that's just one example but that throughout the life of Jesus we see see these episodes of glory that uh come through Nevertheless the basic pattern is one of humiliation humiliation to exaltation Again back in Romans 1 Paul speaks of his being being born of the seed of David according to the flesh but made known as the son of God through the the resurrection Now having said that let's look once more at this hymn hymn and analyze some of the aspects of it in Philippians 2 The way this is used is an an exhertation to that the apostle is making to Christians that Christians ought to emulate the humility of their savior Elsewhere the apostle tells us

"Unless we are willing to identify with with the humiliation of Jesus we will not be ever ever able to experience his exultation and even our very baptism has that that dual sign that in that baptism we are marked with the death of Jesus but we're also marked marked with the resurrection of Jesus You see that pattern humiliation and exultation Well the apostle using this says that Christ who being in the form of God did not consider it it robbery to be equal with God That's strange language there Other translators render it differently They will say that that he did not consider his equality with God a thing to be grasped In other words that Jesus did not not consider the glory that he enjoyed with the father and the spirit from all eternity as something something to be tenaciously held on to jealously guarded but rather he was willing willing to lay it aside He was willing to empty himself and make make himself

of no reputation In the 19th 19th century liberal scholars uh propounded a doctrine called the kotic theory of the incarnation And you may have heard it The idea being that when Jesus came to this earth he laid aside his divine attributes so that that the God man at least touching his deity no longer had the divine attributes of omniscience omnipotence and all the rest But of course that would totally deny deny the very nature of God who is immutable Even in the incarnation the divine nature nature does not lose his divine attributes He doesn't communicate them them to the human side He doesn't deify the human nature but in the mystery of the union between the divine and the and and the human natures of Jesus The human nature is truly human It's not omnisient It's not not omnipotent It's none of those things But at the same time the divine nature remains fully and completely divine BB Warfield the great scholar at Princeton in remarking on the kotic theory of his day said the only kosis uh uh that that theory proves is the kosis of the brains of the theologians who are

propagating it that they've emptied themselves of their common sense But in any case what is emptied is glory privilege exaltation Jesus Jesus in the incarnation makes himself of no reputation He allows his own own divine exalted standing to be subjected to human hostility and human criticism