Lesson 20
…move into that antichrist teaching. So if you’ll turn in 1 John to 5:19, we’re just going to review once again the argument of John. I’m doing this over and over and over because so many people come to this epistle looking at little chunks of it; and they don’t capture the flow. John has a flow to his argument. It’s a powerful argument that he’s making here; it’s just that you have to stop and think about and focus on it in order to pick of the argument. If you’ll look in the outline you’ll see that I’ve summarized these four steps. These four steps actually start referencing in 5:19. If you’ll turn in 1 John 5:19, we’ll pick up that part of the text. It’s out of order I know; but to construct the argument of John, I wanted to refer to that 5:19 passage.
(Opening prayer)
Okay, we’re going to follow those 4 steps in the outline. Step #1, John is placing the church in a situation. In military parlance what this means is situational awareness – knowing the situation that you’re facing. Point #1 there is the church lives within fallen creation that is now under limited control of the evil one. If you’ll look at verse 19 it says:
NKJ 1 John 5:19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.
The verb lie there is a passive word. The whole meaning of that word – it doesn’t say we exist. It says it lies. The cosmos lies under - lying down is a passive prone. It’s not you’re standing up. You’re lying down. This is John’s view of our situation. The church lives within fallen creation that is now under limited control of the evil one. There is control. The principalities and powers do have control. We’ll speak of that a little more clearly today; but it’s limited control in the sense that God is sovereign over them.
Then point #2, which is 1 John 2:15:
NKJ 1 John 2:15 Do not love the world …
We must understand that we constantly face a choice to either align ourselves with this evil order - and notice it’s not evil, it’s evil order. There’s an orderliness to evil. It’s thought out. It is coordinated. It’s not like – those of you who’ve seen Lone Survivor, one of the things that the trail pointed out was that these guys were hicks that they were up against; but they were well-trained hicks. They knew flanking maneuvers. They knew how to concentrate fire. They knew how to use their weapons. It was an orderly attack so we have to give credit where credit is due. Evil is orderly. Evil is thought out. Evil has a strategy. So we must understand that we are constantly facing a choice to either to align ourselves with the evil order or align ourselves with our Creator, Savior, Judge and Father. There is no neutral zone. That’s why at the end of point #2 on your outline it says there can only be one ultimate authority at a time.
We’re going to expand on that little point today because when we get into the teaching of the Antichrist, we are ultimately dealing with ultimate authority. Ultimate authority is not well understood today. Part of it is the way we’re trained in our school system. Our schools are good at telling us techniques – the coach doing the various techniques of the sport, the math teacher working with how to divide, multiply. Those are techniques. But nowhere in a secular education is there a conscious teaching of ultimate authority. So when you become a Christian and you’re facing a battle over ultimate authority, you’re basically disarmed because you’ve never been trained to even think about ultimate authorities. So we’re going to spend a little bit of time today dealing with ultimate authority. That’s point 2. There’s a choice that we face John says.
The problem, point #3, advancing to his argument now - if you follow in the handout point #3 is if we follow the evil order we invest our life in choices that have no eternally productive consequences. Said another way, we are wasting our time. We only have so many hours, so many days, so many years to live. Every time we are seduced to act according to the evil order it’s just a total waste. You might not as well not even breathe during that period of time. It’s a total waste of our time. So, it’s a wasting of life. That’s what John is saying.
He says in advancing the argument to point #4, to preserve our rewards we must not allow the evil order to seduce us. If you’ll turn to chapter 2, verse 28 of this epistle you’ll see how he words that because this verse 28 actually ends a major section in the epistle so we know that he is moving toward this. In verse 28 it says:
NKJ 1 John 2:28 And now, little children, abide in Him …
So there’s the admonition – abide in Him – but he attaches a consequence to abiding in Him. The abiding there - that’s the choice through time.
that when He appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him
There’s a consequence here. Either we have confidence or we’re going to be ashamed for all the wasted efforts, time a so forth because of bad choices. So that’s the thrust. That underlies everything that John is doing.
Now I want to spend some time today working with this problem of ultimate authority because John assumes we know that. Jewish people knew that because they knew the first and great commandment.
NKJ Mark 12:30 'And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind…
That’s the core of the Torah. It’s the core of Jewish belief. It is an expression of ultimate authority. It’s a submission. Authority is that to which we submit. That is the command to submit to that ultimate authority. Jewish people tended to know that. Gentiles conform to ultimate authority, but they do it thoughtlessly. Most of us in our American culture we do it thoughtlessly also. We want to become a little more acute, more conscious of what’s going on here.
So if we look at the next slide, we’re going to discuss this. Let’s look at the first…I’m going to take us on a little journey here for a few minutes. We’re going to go through certain complexities of questions that we face. The issue here is - how do you and I think about answering these kinds of questions. So as we look at the different kinds of questions, we’re going to handle those differently. That’s the difference and that’s why I want to show you this issue of ultimate authority. The first one is a simple question.
Somebody asks you what is the price of gasoline at the gas station down the street? It’s not a big philosophical problem. Why isn’t it a big philosophical problem? Well, think about it for a moment. It’s simple only because we all understand what the gas station is. We understand where it is. We understand that we can find out the price of the gas with our eyes looking at it. So it’s a simple question. However, if you were blind; how would you answer the question then? Somebody asks you what is the price of gas. You walk into the gas station. You are blind. Somebody has driven you there and they ask you, for the sake of this experiment; they ask you to find out what the price of gas is. There’s no Braille label on the gas pump. How now are you going to find answer to the simple question – what is the price of gas at the gas station? What are some ways you would find out? You’d have to ask somebody. Now when that person that you ask tells you the price of gas, what do you have to assume? They’re telling the truth.
Now if you weren’t blind and you could look at it yourself, you wouldn’t have to assume that. But you see what happens - under certain circumstances what first appeared to be a simple questions turn out not to be so simple. They require other tools that you have to bring into the discussion in order to get to the answer. We take it as a very simple question because none of us in this room at least are blind. We can go and simply see that.
Let’s take a more complicated question. Let’s take this question – what was the cause of the 911 destruction of the Trade Towers? Now there are all kinds of plot theories and everything else going on here. How do you answer this kind of a question? This is not going down to the gas station and asking and finding out the answer about how much the gas costs and you can find out for yourself. What are some of the things you have to do in order to answer this kind of a question? Anyone?
(Comment)
Okay, you listen to different theories.
(Comment)
Okay, interesting point - interesting point here.
There can be multiple explanations for the same data set. In other words I have a situation - the 911 destruction of the towers. I have photography of that event. I have data in other words. But the problem is that many different theories can be erected to explain the same data set. Now here’s what you’re not taught in any school. I have never seen this taught in any classroom in any public school anywhere at any time either in elementary, middle school, college or graduate school because the teachers themselves aren’t aware of this sort of thing.
The first thing to do is if you have multiple theories to explain the same data set, you can’t resolve it with simple empiricism. You’re taught from the time you are knee high to a grasshopper in school that the scientific method is we look at the data and we create hypothesis. We test the hypothesis and if the hypothesis is true then we believe it. It doesn’t work. You can have multiple hypotheses that explain the same data set and because it explains the same data set does not prove that that’s true. It’s inherent logical fallacy involved here. It’s when you say P implies Q you say Q then therefore you conclude P is true. It’s not true. That is a fallacy. Yet I’ve never heard it, never in any classroom any teacher ever deal with this question. It’s the kind of question that when we work with the framework for children, that’s what we’re going to teach our children to raise in the classroom.
“Well teacher, is creation or evolution true? They both explain the same data set. You’re teaching us in this classroom the simple empirical method. It doesn’t work in this kind of a question.”
In the 9-11 situation, there are different theories about it. All right, let’s think about the normal explanation and so forth - the bad guys. They took control and so forth. Where do you get that information?
(Comment)
The news media. We have to assume the news media are giving us the investigative reports. That can be checked to a reasonable degree.
We conclude, “Okay, that’s the story. That’s the narrative; and we go along with it.”
Now here’s the problem. This is not an abstract question. This led to two wars, didn’t it? Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a complicated question and the outcome of the question led to two wars. I happen to think it was proper at least for the Afghanistan war. You could say too in the Iraq war it was and it may have not been a failure of intelligence. That Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. What would be interesting is to see if when the Syrian arsenal is exposed whether that came from Baghdad. If that arsenal in Syria came from Baghdad, then the entire Iraq thing is totally justified.
Yes
(Question/comment) As I recall most of the world thought he did. It might appear that…They were all wrong because…
What I’m raising here folks is the fact that answering questions is not as simple as it first appears. Let’s go to the third level. Is evolution the cause of our present existence? Let’s think about that question. How do you answer that one? What do you have to use? What kind of tools do you have to answer that kind of a question?
(Question/comment)
Let me phrase it this way and see if this is what you mean. The word evolution is an ambiguous noun. Why is the word ambiguous or you equivocate when you use the word?
(Comment) There is macroevolution and there is microevolution.
People use the word evolution in all sorts of ways, don’t they? What happens in the argument is that it’s bait and switch. If you listen to the arguments of the evolutionist, they will sight microevolution. They will sight diversification. They will sight those observed things. Then all of a sudden they move over here and now we’re using that limited diversification to explain all of reality. No, that’s ambiguity. You’ve committed the sin of equivocation. You have not defined the nouns properly. This is how slippery the argument becomes when you can’t even define the words. This is something that you have to watch. There’s a logical fallacy called equivocation where you’re using the same word differently. Person A is using the word one-way; person B is using the word another way. You’re having an argument. What you’re doing is you’re talking by one another. You’re not arguing. You’re talking by one another because you’re using the words two different ways.
(Question/comment)
Oh, good idea.
(Comment)
Laura has brought up - going back to the second level. Look at the word cause. Now this you would think is a simple term. It’s not simple. First of all and David Hume brought this out 300 or 400 years ago - 200 years ago. David Hume made a very important observation that causation is never observed.
You say, “What?”
He says sequence is observed. All you observe empirically is this follows this. This happens to be simultaneous to this. That’s all you observe. You don’t observe causation. Well, how do you get causation? Where is that coming from? You, me. We build up mentally the concept of causation and we attribute causation to the fact that B follows A. But that’s not coming from any observation. That’s coming from our mental construction.
Now Laura brings up another problem. That is when you ask something like the cause of 911 – there are proximate causes and there are ultimate causes. In fact, there may be lots of causes here. What would be some of them? Is there a “the” cause? What would be examples of some of the different kinds of factors working into cause here?
(Question/comment)
Okay, first of all you have Islamic Jihadism promising salvation with 72 virgins if I kill myself for Allah. That works for men. I don’t know how it works for women. The point is that we have that as a cause. But what are some other arguments that can be used? That Islam feels persecuted by the West. So that’s a cause. So all I’m trying to argue here is – I’m not trying to do is make you aware of the fact that answering questions and dealing with situations in life is a lot more complicated than you’re taught in school. In school you are given very simple, very trivial ways of doing this. The curriculum doesn’t permit this. And there’s a reason for this by the way.
I’m writing a paper for the Pastor’s Conference and doing some research on this. I’ve puzzled at why - I’ve watched my son do battle with the gay lobby on twitter wars. I’ve watched him deal with the Pentagon on issues of homosexuality. I’ve watched him deal with a state senator in Virginia and what these are is I’m putting my son being a probe for me. That is in military terms you test your enemy - not in a frontal attack. You make a probe and watch his response. You make a probe over here and you watch the response. We’re studying the kind of responses we’re getting. What has struck me about this is the absolute inability to use words and reason. People react emotionally; but they’re not answering with an argument. I’ll give you an example. I myself have tested this with Senator McCulskie. We’ve had a discussion through email about why is it right to grant same sex marriage in Maryland and why is it right for Obamacare to require business people to violate their faith. The only answer I get from our senator is that we believe in the right of everybody to be treated equally. So what is invoked is the noun right - right, fairness. She doesn’t answer me. All she can do is throw out the word right and fair. Or if you ethically disagree with somebody it’s hate speech. But if you ethically disagree with somebody, that’s hate speech - then every parent that disagrees with their children is hate speech. Stupid argument! But they don’t engage the argument; they just fling a word out.
Let me give you a refutation of the use of right – why you can’t use right. Let’s consider a blind person. Do you believe that a blind person has the right to be treated just like a seeing person? We would appear to agree with that, correct? A blind person has as much right to be treated equally as a seeing person. They have the same rights. Do they? I see some shaking…
(Question/comment)
Exactly.
Okay. Right on, right on. Yes. The point is it is an allusion to talk about rights. The issue of a license plate can be settled without any discussion of a right. You can’t treat everybody the same way because of the situations in which they are involved. But if you’re trying to avoid that kind of discussion and you come over here, what you are doing is you’re retreating behind the banner “right.” But that’s all you’re doing. You’re not answering the issue. Furthermore we can decide to treat a seeing person over automobile driving versus a blind person automobile driving without any discussion whatever of right - simply discussing the situation, right? Do you see what’s happening here? What’s happening is there is a remarkable inability to deal substantively with thoughts. We hide behind this.
There’s a man who is considered now to be the leading social philosopher of the 20th century in America, Rawls - John Rawls, R-A-W-L-S. John Rawls says this and he has affected curriculum in education. He has affected even the courts and how they think.
Here is Rawl’s argument.
We live in a pluralistic society with multiple worldviews. There is nothing that reason can do to converge those worldviews toward some coherent truth.
This was the belief in the enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson once said that every person by the time they die will be a Unitarian. The reason Jefferson could say that is because Jefferson was a great believer that reason would eventually cause people to converge to the same truth. But we don’t believe that any more. Rawls says nobody believes that anymore. We’re too seriously aware of the limitations of reason so what we’ll do is this. We’re going to change the ground rules of political public discourse. Here’s the new ground rule. The new ground rule is we will not deal with worldview issues because if we do we divide society. Therefore we will keep the public discourse up here at this level so we can all talk about rights and fairness and so forth and so on. The problem is you can’t consistently do that. So ultimately what happens is the left is bringing in their views underneath the banner and the conservative on the right are bringing in our views into the banner. In spite of Rawls, we still have a division going on here. But, you have to be aware of this.
Why we Christians need to be aware of it is because we are dealing with unbelievers all the time. They have a worldview. The problem is what does Romans 1 tell us about the heart of sin? What does it want to do to the revelation of God? What does Paul say? All men do what? They accept the revelation of God? They suppress the revelation of God. So here the nature of the human fallen heart is to retreat from God’s revelation. What’s the first picture of suppression of God’s revelation we read in the Bible - back in the garden? What did Adam and Eve do 5 minutes after they fell? They fled. Does it make sense to flee from an omnipresent deity? What must have happened to their thinking to make the choice to flee? When they made the choice to hide, what had they already decided in their theology? That He was not omnipresent. So does sin affect the way you think? It sure does. And, the world doesn’t like to understand that. The world thinks that thinking is neutral. It doesn’t depend on the ethical state of my heart. Oh yes it does. So we differ – we differ. It is a tremendously complicated thing.
When John gets dealing with this Antichrist issue, you have to realize he’s going to give us some axioms of dealing with false doctrine. These are built on this kind of understanding.
I want to show you how else this works. Let’s turn to Luke 16 take. We’ll take the remaining time – we’ll scan some verses to see this issue of how do you know.
Luke 16:31 – does somebody want to take and read it?
NKJ Luke 16:31 "But he said to him, 'If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.'
Wow! Do you see what she said there? Is resurrection something that was empirically observed? Was Jesus empirically observed after He rose from the dead? What does Jesus say though in verse 31? What is His ultimate authority? Empirical? No, He says you have empirical evidence in the resurrection but if you don’t believe Moses and the prophets you’re not going to believe the empirical data. And the Jews didn’t. Why? Is this some narrow-minded bigotry? Some weird biblical epistemology? Not at all. The fact of the matter is if they believed Moses and the prophets their worldview was biblically friendly to interpreting the resurrection scenes as true. But if they did not share the Mosaic and Old Testament prophecy, they did not have a biblically friendly worldview. What did they do to all the evidence? They deny it. In fact the authorities did what to the guards after the resurrection occurred? What was the political maneuver? What did they do to the soldiers that were guarding the tomb? They bribed them. That’s their reaction to the data. So we’re not arguing over the data. The facts are there. The issue is my worldview controls how I interpret that data. That what’s Jesus is saying here.
Let’s look at another case in point. Let’s look at Romans 3. You can see the implications of this force us as Christians when we witness to so trust the Lord that this is a supernatural thing that has to happen. We have to be ready to give an answer undoubtedly because we have to head off at the pass these false... We have to be prepared to give evidence of the resurrection. We’re not arguing that. We have to. Joel’s given a whole course on this. But the point is even pointing that out, we have to pray that the Holy Spirit work in their hearts. The data alone doesn’t do it. There are all these complexities like these questions that are arising here. We can’t control all this stuff so we have to get at least a basis in our evidences, in our facts. But even after we’ve done that we still are utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit working.
Here in Romans 3:4. Look at verse 4 and can anyone apply verse 4 to the Gallup Poll? If you were given a Gallup Poll or the fact that our society believes such and such and such and such. Therefore you, Christian, you need to go along with the 80% of people believe this. Why aren’t you going along with everybody else is believing? What does verse 4 of Romans 3 address? Anybody catch it?
(Comment) The ultimate truth is the Word of God.
The ultimate truth is the Word of God not what a Gallup poll comes up with. What is a Gallup Poll anyway? It’s a statistic. Is it an ethic or is it a statistic? Anybody? Is a poll an ethic or a statistic?
(Comment) It’s both…talked about…ethics.
It involves ethics. Let’s put it this way. It’s a statistical picture of what people think is right and wrong. Here’s the problem. Are the minds that are polled in the Gallup poll finite or infinite? Finite! So the poll is polling the thoughts of finite and fallen minds as Jake points out. So if you’re going to control your life by the latest Gallup poll that tells you what 1,800 people who are fallen sinners are believing that doesn’t have ethical force with me. That’s what Paul is warning us about here in chapter 3, verse 4. I’m not influenced by the poll. Yeah.
(Comment)
Polls change with time. But, what is also true of polling by the way, the art of polling? How you ask the question. So keep Romans 3:4 in mind the next time you hear a poll because Romans 3:4 is an apostolic answer to the polling mentality.
All right let’s go to another – chapter 4 in Romans, verse 17.God is speaking to Abraham. Paul is narrating this.
NKJ Romans 4:17 (as it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations") in the presence of Him whom he believed -- God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did;
8 who, contrary to hope, in hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations, according to what was spoken, "So shall your descendants be."
And verse 19
19 And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old),
Sexual death here.
and the deadness of Sarah's womb.
Is verse 19 talking about empirical data? Is it something observed? Yeah. Here is a whole slug of empirical data. It’s the medical report on his body and her body. So that’s objective truth isn’t it? That’s empirical data. What does God do to set up a tension? Where is the tension that Abraham is going through right now in this passage? What are the two things he’s faced with here? On one hand God is saying something; the other hand the empirical data is saying something. Which way does he go? See what I’m getting at here as we go through this example after example after example? The idea of a simple empirical base of knowledge that you get in the 4th grade and it’s perpetuated in middle school, high school, college, and graduate school is wrong.
Let’s go to one other one, 2 Peter 1.
Anybody want to read verse 16 down through verse 21? Someone want to read that passage for us? Yes.
NKJ 2 Peter 1:16 For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.
17 For He received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to Him from the Excellent Glory: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
18 And we heard this voice which came from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain.
19 And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts;
20 knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation,
21 for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Okay, now two things Peter is doing in this passage. When he’s talking about the Mount of Transfiguration experience is he talking about empirically publicly observed objective data? Yes. But what else is he talking about in this passage? How does he conclude the passage? That Scripture comes from God. In the Mount of Transfiguration there was a confirmation of the Word of God; but it was the Word of God that was the primary authority. Had Peter not believed in the Word of God primarily as his ultimate authority the whole Mount of Transfiguration could have been a drug trip. I’m not saying that factiously. There are serious scholars in Israel that think that the Ten Commandments and the experience of Exodus 20 was the fact that Moses was out in the desert taking herbs that caused a drug problem. So you could explain visions and hallucinations with drugs. It happens all the time.
So the problem is how do you distinguish that kind of a thing from reality? You have to go back to your ultimate authority. So what we tried to do today is over and over again go through the ultimate authority. The ultimate authority boils down to only two things. Either God is speaking to us and we have this major component of our worldview that there’s a God who is utterly different, the Creator-creature distinction, and man and nature and they’re different; or we come over here to the basic idea that all reality is one. It doesn’t matter. You can change through these categories between man and nature, the gods and goddesses and so on. It’s all part of one chunk of reality. You gotta choose. In the West, in ancient mythology, in Eastern religions, Western philosophy, in modern theology are all over on that side of the fence. They all believe ultimately the same thing.
As they always say, “Follow the money.” Spiritually we say follow the agenda. Look at the agenda. If this is true, you and I have an ultimate responsibility to our Creator. That’s what John’s getting at here, verse 28. But if this is all true, our whole educational system, the whole Western world, Eastern religion is true; we are passive victims. We are just the results of collocation of atoms as Bertram Russell said.
Let’s conclude today by starting in 1 John. We’re finally getting into the Antichrist. We’ll just mention the first verse, 1 John 2:18. This is the next section in this epistle. He says in verse 18:
NKJ 1 John 2:18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour.
What’s the verb that he repeats twice? Yeah, that is but I was thinking of a another one – know, the verb know. Do you realize that the verb know occurs in this epistle over 30 different times? 30 times! Does that sort of give you the feeling that John is concerned about how we know things? Particularly here he is concerned about knowing something eschatologically. What does he say about them after the clause “the last hour”? What does the next clause say?
you have heard that the Antichrist is coming
What does that imply about eschatology and teaching? The data had already been taught. Well if they’d taught the Antichrist is coming, then why does John have to go back to that when he’s dealing with these antichrist teachers? They’ve already been taught this. But he comes back to it. Apparently they were being led away from the Bible teaching that they had been given. So he has to bring them back. That’s why he says, “Listen to you what was given from the beginning.” It hasn’t changed. Truth doesn’t change. So you don’t have to… that’s conservatism. The truth is conservative by nature. It doesn’t change. So what he’s going to say here is, “Little children, now that you hear these antichrist teachers, what can we conclude?” This is the last hour, the last age, the last time. We’re going clarify what hour means as John uses it.
Those of you who want to think ahead, go to a concordance look up hour – not time, but hour. Then look how many times the word hour occurs in John’s gospel. Then look at some of the instances where hour occurs in John’s gospel and see if you can figure out how he got this idea. John was young when he was with Jesus.
He heard Jesus saying, “Now is the hour.”
Remember in the wedding his mother gets ticked off at him and Jesus says, “Cool it,” because what has not yet come? The wedding. He says to his own mother.
NKJ John 2:4 Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come."
It means an event. It means a prophetic event. So now what John is saying is we are living in one sense in the Church Age; we are living in the age of the antichrist. So we have to pull that together next week.
(Closing prayer)