Clough John Lesson 16

The Doctrine of Justification – John 3:6-11

In John 2:12 through the end of chapter 3 John gives us the first Jerusalem trip of the Lord Jesus Christ. On this first trip to Jerusalem John presents Jesus Christ as confronting the ecclesiastical an political powers of the day. The issue that John is trying to show is that all leaders at all levels of government were presented with Christ and presented with the issue very, very clearly, such that if they did reject Christ on a national basis, they rejected Him not through ignorance but through willfulness. They knew better than to reject Christ the way they subsequently did. The cleansing of the temple incident which is the central feature of the second chapter, the cleansing of the temple was that one incident in the first Jerusalem trip that precipitated a feud; a feud that would last some three years, become violent at times and it would finally lead to Jesus own crucifixion; a feud between Jesus and the ecclesiastical powers of His time.

And now in John 3 on this first trip to Jerusalem Jesus meets one of the members of the power structure; He meets a member of the Sanhedrin by the name of Nicodemus. And in this discourse, so familiar to most of us, certainly if you are a new Christian somebody somewhere probably in the course of evangelizing, or at least acquainting you with the gospel issue, has given you some insight into John 3 and being born again. But this chapter has a lot more in it than just being born again and like so often happens John teaches us using three, triple and quadruple meanings to words; all of them true, not conflicting, but to lead us from the surface meaning down into the deeper meaning, without at all denying the validity of the surface meaning.

In the first five verses that we’ve been dealing with we see that Jesus Christ working on Nicodemus’ Pharisaism, for Nicodemus according to verse 1 was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees had, through their legalism, they had an entire religious system worked up. Legalism is where man tries to second guess God. A legalist is always a person who is involved in human viewpoint, he creates an ordered system of human good, of morality, of ethics, that does not line up with Scripture or exceeds Scripture. The legalists in Jerusalem today still operate; the latter day descendants of the Pharisees are called the Hasidim, and if you read the Jerusalem Post, the Hasidim are a group of people that have forced through, to cite one illustration of legalism, a dual restaurant structure throughout the city of Jerusalem. Every single restaurant in the city of Jerusalem must have two parts; one part where all the cooking utensils, all the silverware touch only the dairy products and the other one that touches only meat, but you cannot mix the dairy products, butter, cheese, milk, anything like that cannot be mixed in the other restaurant. Why? Thousands and thousands of dollars invested in making a half restaurant and another half, every time we have to make a restaurant in the city of Jerusalem. Why? Because back in the book of Deuteronomy it says thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother’s milk. And so out of this they’ve evolved the whole structure that cooking, that mixes the dairy with the meat products, is in violation of the Mosaic Law. Now that was not the intention of that particular provision of Deuteronomy but that’s what the legalists have done with that one provision.

Legalists down through history always like to do that. We have legalists in the fundamentalist circles who take the guidance principles on alcohol, given in Proverbs 30, Proverbs 31, given in 1 Timothy 3, given in 1 Timothy 4 and various parallel passages, take these passages and come out with a doctrine or prohibition and preach that in the name of spiritual Christianity, so that in many parts of the country the whole issue is whether you drink or don’t drink. That determines whether you are a Christian or not; nothing else, not what you believe, but whether you drink or whether you don’t drink. That’s the major issue. You can be an atheist and don’t drink and that somehow qualifies you as a high moral, ethical and deeply spiritual individual. This is the trivia that legalism has brought once great orthodox Christianity down to the level of the trivial.

Well in that day Jesus Christ encountered a man who was representative of the school of thought for legalism. But Jesus, when He answers Nicodemus, as John always so carefully shows, he has Jesus answering Nicodemus in such a way that Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus for all times for all church history sets forward the ultimate apologetic for the Christian faith. And as I prepared the study on John 3 I began to discover so many things about this chapter that probably what we do is after we finish Daniel in the morning series we’re going to have a short series just on the apologetic of Scripture, how does the Bible present itself as valid. Why is the Christian faith true? What are the reasons that you can give to show and prove that all answers outside of Scripture are self-refuting, contradictory and must fall as falsehood and that only Bible Christianity is the truth.

The apologetic is here and it’s in seed form in Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus. So this is why John 3 is so crucial. John, you would expect, would present this; after all, who is Jesus talking with but the key representative of apostate thought of the generation. So obviously then Jesus answer to this man would also be Jesus answer to every other man who uses that same method of thinking, autonomous human viewpoint.

We have seen so far that Jesus approaches Nicodemus using an illustration. He says, “the water and the spirit,” and we said that like in other passages of John Jesus picks some locally visible concrete illustration of a spiritual truth. In John 2 Jesus picked up the whole point of the temple, the physical naos, and Jesus said that naos, destroy it, three days I’ll raise it up. But Jesus didn’t mean the naos of Herod directly, what Jesus meant was His own body and so the naos, the temple, the sacred precinct of Herod in the second temple became a picture of Jesus Christ’s body. And then in chapter 4 when He deals with the woman at the well He uses the physical well and the physical water to depict salvation. So we’re not out of line to expect that in this passage, John 3, Jesus also must be referring to something that is empirically visible, right around both Him and Nicodemus.

Someone asked on a feedback card concerning the Gospel of John series, in John 3:5, why wasn’t the word “rain” used instead of “water” if this is the analogy Christ was referring to? I said last time that what Jesus is saying, the word for “spirit” is the same word for “wind,” and Jesus is saying “he who is born of the water and the wind, the same shall see the kingdom of God.” So He’s using something that was around them, and the question is why didn’t He use the word “rain” instead of “water.” For the simple reason He didn’t use the word “wind” either, instead of the word pneuma. John, when he is presenting this, always reports Jesus as using a word that is deliberately ambiguous. If He used the word “rain” he could only refer to the rain, but if He used the word “water” He could refer to both and rain and that for which water stood for. If He used the word pneuma, then He could also refer both to wind and to that that wind was a picture of. So Jesus uses these words that are ambiguous.

Again, to catch the place where this occurred we refer to Dr. Avi Yonah’s model of the city of Jerusalem. We want to go back to what this model looked like so that you can picture where this occurred. This is looking at the city of Jerusalem as it would have looked in Jesus time. There is the naos of Herod that we studied before; here is the fortress of Antonia, the four towers. That was on the northwest side of the temple. This is the west wall; here you have Herod’s great temple; it may be one of the places Jesus was tried. [He shows more slides].

So we want to look because though we’ve seen the temple place in John 2 we’ve got a good idea of where the temple cleansing occurred, but now we want to see where did the Nicodemus discourse occur. This is the corner of Herod’s temple, so that will locate it in terms of the previous picture. These are the upper class homes of the time of John’s Gospel. Presumably Jesus was teaching, talking to Nicodemus on one of these roofs; maybe down in one of the rooms, we don’t know, the Scripture doesn’t say. But Jerusalem is set on a hill; at night the wind would be moving, it would not be stagnant and so maybe at that time in the conversation there was just a slight gust of wind, just a gentle rushing and Jesus said “the water and the wind.”

Here again is the same area, this is the tower that you saw in the previous picture; now we’re looking south and it gives you an idea of the kinds of buildings that might have been in existence; based on what Dr. Avi Yonah has found in his archeological investigations. Looking over the wealthy section is in the west side of town, in the east is the poorer section of Jerusalem and the homes there are much smaller. Jesus knew that area well also. So somewhere in here, either in the southwest, very less likely in the southeast, did this conversation occur.

All right, Jesus then is looking at the water and the winds. He’s going to explain to Nicodemus the doctrine of justification by faith, the doctrine that Paul teaches and a doctrine that we must understand to see the collision between Jesus and Nicodemus at one level. We want to first see the doctrinal collision, the specific point that Jesus was driving into a head-on collision with the Pharisees, but then underneath that particular point we want to go deeper to see how Jesus answered Nicodemus and then next week we’ll expand how Jesus answered Nicodemus and we’ll get into the ultimate apologetic for the Christian faith.

What is the doctrine of justification by faith? This doctrine, as we have learned it, has three points; three topics. The doctrine of justification is that great doctrine that set Protestantism apart from Roman Catholicism; it is the doctrine that is forsaken today by most Protestants; most Protestants don’t even know what they mean by “justification by faith.”

The first point in the doctrine of justification is that justification is required by the creation and the fall. The doctrine of justification is a requirement of creation and the fall of man. Why? Because man was made to have fellowship with God and man, by the fall, acquired plus sin and minus R, that is, he acquired sin and he lost his chance to produce righteousness in history by his own works. Said in the very, very primitive yet very, very true agricultural imagery of Genesis 3, man was unable to produce out of the garden, all that came in his garden were thorns and thistles. The thorns and thistles are pictures of man’s sin, the lack of production is a picture of man’s lack of righteousness. Two things, and that is a key of defining justification. The lost man, the unsaved man, the non-Christian man cannot even diagnose his own problem correctly. It is wrong for the believer to assume that the non-Christian knows what is wrong with him; he only knows something is wrong but he doesn’t know what is wrong. The non-Christian cannot ask, apart from the Holy Spirit, even the correct question, leave alone getting the correct answer.

Said another way, non-Christian problematics are wrong; non-Christian problematics cannot be accepted when we preach the gospel; we cannot accept the non-Christian’s diagnosis of his sense of lostness, it’s not complete enough, it’s not oriented in the right direction. The non-Christian is a blind man who knows nothing and he must be told by the Word of God what his real problem is and only then can he be given the correct answer. And the correct question is not how do I attain forgiveness of my sin; that’s only part of the problem. The other part is how can I attain to perfection, moral perfection. I’ll say that again because I see some people looking at the lights and their girlfriend down the row, so we’ll just repeat.

The whole point is man has two problems; he has a problem of sin and the answer is going to be forgiveness. And he has a problem of lack of righteousness or lack of moral perfection. You can’t get that. So whatever justification does it’s got to do two things, not one thing. Put in bookkeeping terminology, our problem is not getting rid of the deficit, Jesus does not restore your books out of the red up to the zero line. What Jesus does in addition to restoring your backs up to the zero line is He gives you positive assets above the zero line. So there are two parts to justification that are required by creation and fall. You have not only the red ink but you have an absence of black ink. And both must be provided! Christ does not just forgive sin. And justification does not mean just-as-if-I’d never sinned. That is wrong. Justification means just-as-if-I’d never sinned and just-as-if I had perfectly obeyed, that’s what justification means. If you doubt that I refer you to the third framework pamphlet, you can go back to the Reformation creed, the Heidelberg catechism is there quoted and you’ll see exactly what I’ve just taught so that you won’t go out and say Charlie Clough just made it up. The Heidelberg Reformers made it up in 1563, a little before my time.

The second point of the doctrine of justification is that justification results solely…solely from the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Now watch it because here we go and here’s here the mud hit the fan at the end of the Middle Ages. People died over this second point of doctrine. And today we’re so brilliant we don’t even understand the second point of doctrine. Justification is a result of the imputation or crediting, the imputation of Christ’s +R, that is Christ’s perfect righteousness. My justification and your justification is a result of a legal crediting by God the Father of His Son’s complete moral perfection to your account. That’s what’s so fantastic about the Christian faith. Christ died for your sins, yes; but Jesus Christ also lived a perfect life including the act of obedience of going to the cross and that historically generated righteousness of Jesus Christ is credited to your account and credited to my account. So I have two problems solved, forgiveness of sins and my lack of moral perfection before God; both of those problems are solved and they are not solved by the Holy Spirit in your heart.

Now this second point of doctrine we have evangelicals in evangelistic organizations actually denying the doctrine of justification by faith. Now these people are born again and the Lord is using them; we’re not denying that, but I’m simply pointing out an error, which if it’s continued to be followed by these certain evangelistic organizations is going to result in the next 20 to 30 years of a clash of evangelism, and the error is intimating the I am saved on the basis of what the Holy Spirit does in my heart; you are not saved by the Holy Spirit does in your heart. Think of Martin Luther, he was a monk and he meditated on this, he knew the Holy Spirit was active in his heart but what was Luther’s problem. Every time He’d look at his heart He’d find the incompleteness of the Holy Spirit’s work in his heart. He’d say yeah, I know God the Holy Spirit is working in my heart, I know about regeneration, but that Holy Spirit’s work in my heart isn’t finished yet, it’s not perfect yet, and if it’s not perfect then how can God credit me with acceptance on the basis of a yet still incompleted work in my heart. And this nagged at Luther and nagged at Luther until finally through the study of the epistle to the Romans he came to the conclusion the answer is very simple; Luther, your acceptance with God doesn’t depend on the Holy Spirit’s work in complete [can’t understand word] in your heart; your acceptance with God depends on what’s happening in heaven, with Jesus Christ crediting His righteousness your account there. It’s not down here, it’s up there that’s the issue. And so where evangelicalism today concentrates on the human heart this, the human heart that, this and that, yes, Jesus indwells your heart, that’s a true statement, but even Jesus indwelling your heart is NOT the basis of your salvation. The basis of your salvation is Christ’s priesthood at the Father’s right hand in heaven; that’s the basis of our salvation.

Protestants who are true to the Word of God will always emphasize Christ’s work, finished work, being applied to your account at the Father’s right hand. Evangelicals who are wishy-washy who do not understand justification by faith are opening themselves up to future heresies will always stress Jesus in your heart. I recently came across a book that I’ve been looking for a long time, it was Isaac Watt’s, Divine Songs for Children. We’re going to start teaching our children the hymns from this book. Do you know what this book is; those of you who are unfamiliar with church history, Isaac Watts was a man who wrote many of the good hymns we sing and he wrote around the beginning of the 1700s. the book, Divine Songs for Children is the Puritan hymnal they used to teach their children in 1730 and when you read these hymns that the little Puritan children, 6, 7 and 8 years old would sing, it is fantastic. Nothing about feeling Jesus in your heart, it’s talking about the doctrine of eternal decrees with Jesus Christ as the God-man Savior at the Father’s right hand, it’s talking about that, it’s talking about the application of doctrine, there’s one hymn, giving God thanks for the ability to read so that I can read His Word. There’s another hymn about why children ought not to be lazy and diligent workers; applying the Word of God so they can be productive in their life before God with whom they have to do. You see, it is all objective; it is all solid theology. And then you come to the children’s hymns that are written today, Oh Love Jesus and this and that; children don’t know what it means to love Jesus, and how I feel about Jesus and I’ve got this feeling and on the basis of this feeling that makes me a saved individual—bologna! That is not the basis of our salvation.

So the doctrine of justification is very, very important, and I might add very neglected. Most evangelism today completely denies the doctrine of justification, just omits it completely, just plows right on as though it never existed, as though the Reformation never happened, as though Romans was never written, as though Abraham was never justified, and we go on winning people by Jesus in the heart, opening them up to the charismatic movement as we do and then wonder why it’s happened. Well, it’s happened because we’ve preached a deformed gospel, that’s what’s happened. This is, to pardon the expression, “the full gospel.”

The third point in the doctrine of justification is that justification is a lasting perfect work; see, it’s the conclusion, because of its true nature it is a lasting perfect work. See, it’s the basis of our security, it’s the basis for confidence in the Christian life, it is the basis for acceptance before God. If you’re the kind of person that gets all bent out of shape because somebody doesn’t like you the doctrine of justification is just made for you, because the doctrine of justification says that you are perfectly accepted before God. If some loud mouth doesn’t like you, that’s too bad, God the Father likes you and that’s what counts. So it’s a platform for stability, the lasting perfect faith.

Now this is the point Jesus is making to Nicodemus; he is saying, he’s going to use a completely different terminology, I’ve just used Paul’s terminology here; Paul, in Romans and so on, uses justification, that’s his way of indicating the truth and we’re more familiar with Paul’s terminology than this terminology. So here’s the doctrine that’s being taught as Paul would have taught it, using the terms Paul would have used, the doctrine of justification. In other words, again, to put it this way, Nicodemus, if you want +R you’re going to have to get it by justification; you can’t get your +R and then be justified on the basis of works. You’ve got to be given the righteousness in order to have the righteousness; you can’t work you way up and then qualify for it at the end.

Now the legalist always loves to do this. Christian circles in this part of the country are filled with this kind of legalism; you’d better be a good boy and you’d better not chew gum and smoke and all the rest of the stuff or you’re not going to make it to heaven, forgetting of course that one of the great evangelical preachers of the 19^th century, Spurgeon, smoked a cigar most of the time. So this narrow minded legalism that is unscriptural distorts the gospel. And actually drives many people away from Jesus Christ who ought never to have been driven away. If people want to drive away from Christ for a genuine issue, that’s fine, but not for this kind of stuff, this cheap trivial junk that the legalists always love to pull off. Well, you see Jesus collides with it right at the beginning of His ministry. And He goes right into the top legalist of the Sanhedrin and He makes the issue clear. So let’s look at the text to see how Jesus teaches that doctrine.

He says in John 3:5, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Unless a man be born of water and pneuma, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Now the Pharisees thought that if you would keep their rules over a long enough time then you would be good enough to qualify for the kingdom of God, and when you were qualified for the kingdom of God, then you would be called one as a child of God. So Jesus just simply takes the same Pharisaical words and He turns them around. He says Nicodemus, you’re going to have to become a child first, then you will see the kingdom of God. It is not gaining your righteousness so you can enter the kingdom; you’ve got to have your righteousness as a child before you can see the kingdom. So Jesus is in complete conflict here with Nicodemus and His Pharisaism.

Now John 3:6 and we’ll be studying verses 6-11. “That which is born of the flesh,” Jesus says, “is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” He is arguing about the two areas that the Scripture distinguish, the material and the immaterial. It goes back to Genesis 2:7, man is made with a body, God then breathes the spirit into the body, the spirit is identified with the breathe, the result is soul. Notice, please, if you are a Greek student the word “soul” in Scripture is not what Aristotle and Plato call psuche. The Bible concept of psuche is that the soul is both material and immaterial; psuche does not refer just to the immaterial as you get in your Greek [can’t understand word].

So, what Jesus is saying, now look Nicodemus, in the area of the flesh we are born physically. When we are born physically, the baby emerges from the woman’s body, takes its first breathe, it inhales spirit. At that time that baby becomes a soul. The baby, while it is in the womb of the mother, is not considered living as far as Scripture is concerned regardless of what modern anti-abortion laws say. It doesn’t mean the Bible is carte blanche on abortion but it does insist that you cannot murder a child that in the womb because it’s not a life to murder and you can only murder living things. Body and spirit join at the time the baby takes its first breath. When that baby takes its first breath it becomes a living person, but when that baby in this world, in the fallen world… here’s the point where it emerges from the mother, here is the first breath, and at that point it is born but it immediately dies spiritually because the human spirit is depraved. The body is depraved, and though the two are joined to become life they are not the kind of life that God is tolerating in His kingdom. They become less than that; the baby is not born with eternal life; he is born with natural life.

Now when that baby is born with natural life an issue is created later on in his existence, somewhere around four or five years old that baby begins to use language and when he uses language that means his thought processes have got to the point where he can make categories and he can have categorical type thinking. And he can understand things, and when he does he becomes God-conscious. He becomes world-conscious first, he becomes self-conscious and finally somewhere along in the early years of his life he becomes God-conscious. When that baby becomes God-conscious then the issue is whether he is going to accept or reject Jesus Christ. If he accepts Jesus Christ then God does certain things to him because first what happens is that God justifies that little baby, he makes that baby perfectly acceptable to Him and then because of justification that releases the Holy Spirit to do His work in the baby’s life. You see, the Holy Spirit cannot do His work, His redeeming work in the baby’s life until the Holy Spirit’s got authorization from the Father to go ahead and do the work. Justification precedes the work because that is the authorization from the Father to the Holy Spirit, okay, go ahead. And then the Holy Spirit can do the work. And so we have regeneration, we have the other things that occur when the person trusts the Lord.

So Jesus is arguing that here, Nicodemus, you are born naturally and you have to be born spiritually, you can’t just treat part of man. And in verse 7 he says, “Stop marveling that I have said unto you, Ye must be born again.” And here is where Jesus begins to assert His rabbinic authority against Rabbi Nicodemus. This is a collision of two rabbis, one with a degree, one without a degree; one who is a fallen creature, one who is an unfallen creature and Creator in the same person forever. So Jesus argues…probably He reads his mind. In verse 7 it’s very obvious that Nicodemus, this is totally beyond him, the idea that you have to have God’s righteousness given to you first in order to qualify; he marvels at it. And Jesus said well stop it, because this word is the kind of negative in the Greek that indicates that he has been marveling and he’d better stop it. So “you stop marveling that I said unto you, You must be born again.”

Then He gives this famous verse, John 3:8, and it’s this verse that is often misunderstood and therefore we have to be careful to understand it or we’re going to miss the whole point of verses 11, 12 and 13. However you interpret verse 8 it must logically flow into verses 11 and 12. “The wind blows where it wills,” the word “listeth” is “wish,” thelo, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound,” or “you hear the noise thereof, but you cannot tell where it is coming from , or where it is going; so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.” The word “born of the Spirit” is perfect tense, “one who has been born of the Spirit” with results which continue to the present time; it’s perfect.

Now let’s look at what the comparison is. He’s saying the one who is born again, or born from above… here’s the believer, the believer is compared to the wind. Now what is Jesus doing comparing the believers to the wind. The wind is this and so is everyone who is born of the Spirit. Why does Jesus use this? Jesus is going to use this illustration because He is developing the concept of the limits of man’s knowledge. Remember I said to you, when Jesus gets through with Nicodemus Jesus is not going to only refute legalism, He’s going to go much deeper than that and He is going to drive completely under all human viewpoint and expose it for what it is. So he begins his refutation of Nicodemus’ position by undermining the whole concept of human knowledge itself. He’s saying look, I will cite an example from the everyday world that lies on the boundary of your empirical perception. The wind is a turbulent phenomenon, it cannot be handled in the classic straightforward scientific way. It’s a statistical phenomenon at best and even that, any kind of turbulence or random motion stresses man’s system. There is no scientific tool that is capable of handling turbulent phenomenon today. This is why in meteorology you can’t predict the future; you’ve got the equations, you can get the equations to describe every point in the atmosphere; there’s only one problem, you can’t solve them; the equations as they stand are unsolvable. And the reason they are unsolvable is because we’re dealing with a physical phenomenon that lies just on the boundary of our mental ability to handle it. So Jesus cites something in the immediate domain of Nicodemus that is on the boundary of man’s knowledge, on the very edge of what we can handle with our systems of perception.

Let’s go back and remember something about man’s perception. Man is limited in his reason and he is limited in his experience. First let’s look at how man is limited in his experience. Man is limited in time; he’s limited in time because… well you can blink your eye and miss something, you have a certain lower limit; if something happens quicker than the wink of an eye you can’t observe it. You can improve with high speed photography but even that has a lower limit. So let’s set a lower limit here to what we can see, even with the best high speed camera and high speed film we’ve got. And then let’s set an upper bounds on the amount that we can know. What’s the most experience that you can know? The limit of your own lifetime. Well, you can extend that a little bit in the past by historic records but you can’t extend it in the future at all. So in time our knowledge, all human experience, lies between these two boundaries. I don’t care how many degrees you have, how many years you’ve been in school, you know no experience outside of those boundaries and you never will. All of your experience must be confined within those boundaries. Secondly, you’re confined in space; there are certain things that are so small they can’t be observed. You can take an electron microscope and go down further but let’s make a smaller lower bounds here; that’s the bound beyond which we can’t see, that’s the lowest limit in space that we can see. And then there’s the greatest object in space that we can view, and within this box of experience all human experience must sit.

So man is confined, any statement any man makes, believer or unbeliever must always be grounded on finite experience; he must always be speaking out of the box of this experience, no matter how brilliant he is, all of his statements, every sentence that comes out of his mouth must start out of this small box of limited experience. Furthermore, man is limited in his reason; this is more complicated, I refer to it in the second Framework pamphlet and that is it has been proven in theoretical math that man’s reasoning process is inherently limited, he can only deduce so far and then he runs out of gas. An analogy of it would be, and the way the argument goes, if you had a rule book and you said I want to play a football game by this rule book, this argument would state that somewhere in the game eventually you would encounter a situation in the field that would be not covered in your rule book and you’d to have to import a new rule or a new axiom into the system to cover that, and then you’d have to import another axiom into the system to cover that. In other words, man’s ability to reason from a set of axioms is limited inherently. So man then has a rational limit on his mind; he has an empirical limit on his mind. Wind is a turbulent phenomenon that has to do with one of these boundaries; it has to do with both man’s ability to reason and handle this thing and it has to do with his experience; how do you observe, for example, comprehensively turbulence.

Now Jesus cites the one breathe of air that happened to happen during this conversation with Nicodemus, He says Nicodemus, the wind that you just heard as it blew across the alley, that wind is something that you can hear. In Nicodemus primitive day of observation hearing, the audio, was the only input. But the principle would still hold even with more sophisticated forms of measurement. But the wind is a phenomenon everyone observes, but it’s a phenomenon that lies right on the boundary and stresses us in trying to handle it. It stresses our whole finite data gathering finite thinking machine; it stresses it. And Jesus picks that and He says Nicodemus, everyone who has been born from above has arrived into an area where unaided man with his finite experience and reasoning cannot totally comprehend. And so at this point, Jesus, in His ultimate apologetic discredits the unbeliever at his most weak and most vulnerable point, his finite being. Jesus says Nicodemus, your whole position is grounded on finite knowledge and finite know is limited and when we aer talking about a person in his relationship to God he’s out beyond the realm of your finite unaided mind. And we’re talking, Nicodemus, about things that are beyond your inherent capacity to understand.

Autonomous man, and that’s the whole spirit of the human viewpoint person, I will seek my own ways, I will decree what is right and what is wrong. This person is the unbeliever; it’s a source of human viewpoint and this person must be discredited at the very heart of his system, his initial starting point. And Jesus drives and discredits not only Nicodemus and his specific version of heresy but Jesus at the same time does every believer for twenty centuries a favor; he cuts down to the unbeliever’s very starting point itself and discredits that. And if you discredit a person’s starting point you topple every system that can be built on that starting point. So Jesus, by undermining completely the unbeliever’s starting point undermines at the same time every heresy that has ever been built on that starting point and topples every non-Christian system.

Now let’s go for details. He says, “The wind blows where it wills,” it’s turbulent, “you hear it,” that is one empirical input, but you can’t tell where it comes where it comes and where it goes.” You can’t specify, you can’t predict the turbulent phenomenon; you do not have comprehensive knowledge of this. And I believe this verse means that we will never have comprehensive knowledge of turbulent phenomenon, it is an unpredictable, inherently unpredictable phenomenon. So Jesus says “so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” Now [9] “Nicodemus answered, and said unto Him, How can these things be?” Nicodemus at this time is very, very threatened because Jesus has not only challenged the man’s religion but Jesus has challenged him so thoroughly, all the way down to the soles of his feet. And Jesus has undone the rug under Nicodemus.

And Nicodemus stands in complete amazement, “How can these things be?” Lord, you’re challenging the very methodology we use, what right do you have to do this? All the right in the world because what was Old Testament theology grounded on in the first place? Gentile human viewpoint or the divine viewpoint given by revelation at Mount Sinai. And so Jesus’ response is, [10] “Are you a master of Israel, and you don’t know these things?” Two-fold again, as so often in John. You are a master of Israel; What is unique to Israel versus non-Israel? Isn’t it the possession of divine viewpoint? Isn’t it the possession of a corpus of revelation from God. That’s what makes Israel unique among the nations; that’s why God chose Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeas, to form a divine viewpoint counter culture. And so you’re a master of Israel and you don’t even realize the whole methodology of this nation differs completely from the methodology of the world? Don’t you understand, Nicodemus, that every believer in history that represents Israel and Israel’s thoughts has always started with God and not with man? Don’t you know this? And then secondarily, of course, Jesus means Nicodemus, you ought to know this particular doctrine, the doctrine that man is saved by grace and not by works.

And then Jesus begins the answer in John 3:11 and we only have time tonight to start into the answer, to associate this answer with corollary Scripture and then move on. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have see; and you receive not our witness. [12] If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you heavenly things? [13] No man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.” Now look at that astounding claim, just look at that astounding claim in verse 13. Here Jesus is maybe on a rooftop in that southwestern portion of Jerusalem and He has the audacity to talk to one of the top rabbinic authorities in the city and says I am the Son of man and while I stand on this rooftop talking to you, I am in heaven. That’s what He’s saying, an astounding claim that Jesus made; and this claim that Jesus makes will now be the starting point of the believer.

And I hope tonight to just start us off on why the Christian faith is true, the real issue between human viewpoint and divine viewpoint that Jesus presents to Nicodemus. Every conflict, every argument, every problem that arises between the Christian and the non-Christian arises ultimately because of this one point. Now this doesn’t mean that you automatically have the key to solve all the problems because it takes a lot of work to work through the specific way this is happening, and show that this is indeed what is happening; that’s a whole other story, but at least here Jesus gives us the basis of what is the conflict. Nicodemus starts out with man; Jesus starts out “I say unto you,” and not just him as a lone individual, but He makes the claim to deity in verse 13, I am in heaven, and when I speak to you Nicodemus, and I say “truly, truly,” My words are self-attesting to you because my words come out from beyond the domain of your knowledge and when I speak into your finite history, then My words are automatically authoritative.

And so we get to the matter of the starting point; briefly it’s this question: I’m trying to say it another way. When you believe something is true, when your friend believes something is true, the question is, what is your final, final, final course of appeal? Now men have given different answers to that question. To some men they have given us the answer that our final, final, final court of appeal is facts that we see in front of our face, empirical facts. Now that has a role but that’s not the final, final court of appeal, as we’ll subsequently show. Some men say facts, “I appeal to the facts, that is my final court of appeal.” And Jesus says no, you appeal to Me, I am the final court of appeal. God’s Word takes precedence over every fact of history. If God Word says one thing and facts say another, God’s Word is correct; this is what Jesus is saying. The final, final, final court of appeal is what God’s mouth says, not man’s facts or perception of facts. The final starting point is the Word of God.

And some men have argued no, the final, final court of appeal is reason, we want to be rationalists and if the thing appears to us as logical then and only then will we take it as the truth. That’s our final, final court of appeal. And Jesus says no, I’m neither an empiricist nor a rationalist; the starting point is the Word of God, that is the final, final court of appeal.

Now let’s see and make sure this is [can’t understand word], then we’ll come back to Nicodemus; let’s make sure that it’s taught elsewhere in Scripture. Turn to Colossians 2, Paul writes against human viewpoint philosophy in Colossians, that’s the one epistle you always want to remember when you’re dealing with philosophical problems. There are two books in Scripture that handle philosophic problems directly, the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament and the book of Colossians in the New Testament. Colossians 2:3, Paul deals with Gnostic philosophy and like Jesus with Nicodemus, Paul not only answers the Gnostics but he answers all philosophy for all time. He says this, “In whom,” Christ, “In Christ are hid all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” That means, what Paul is arguing that 2 + 2 cannot be 4 unless it is true in Jesus Christ. The War of 1812 was fought at a certain place at a certain time, a fact of history, but not true apart from Jesus Christ. He does not argue in verse 3 that only religious truth is true in Jesus. He says “all the treasures of wisdom, and all knowledge” are “in Him.” That means there’s not one truth that anyone can know in any field of endeavor apart from Jesus Christ.

Now immediately I know what you’re thinking: but I know many unbelievers that know that 2 + 2 is 4 and they have nothing to do with Jesus. We’re going to answer that next week. But at this point I am saying that no man can know that 2 + 2 is 4 apart from Jesus Christ. No man can know the War of 1812 apart from Jesus Christ; “in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” and no unbeliever can claim knowledge of anything apart from presupposing Jesus Christ. That is the dynamics of the Christian faith. When you grasp what is being taught here it is a fantastic mind-blowing thing. At one blow the Word wipes out every non-Christian objection to itself. “In Christ are hid” everything, he is saying, therefore there is no truth corollary, there is no place outside of Christ where all knowledge and all wisdom is. Only in Christ does all this come together.

In Colossians 2:7-8 he says, “You are rooted and built up in Him, stabilized,” see, stability, “stabilized in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding with thanksgiving. [8] Beware lest any man rob you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments,” that we’re going to see, that is another word for presuppositions, “after the presuppositions of the world, and not after Christ.” What has Paul just taught us in verse 8? What is the final, final court of appeal? A presupposition about reason and fact of Jesus Christ? The final court of appeal is none other than Jesus Christ, the God-man Savior. He is the final court of appeal; He takes precedence even over reason itself, says Paul. Jesus Christ becomes the final court of appeal.

Now let’s turn, for a conflicting passage, Satan’s line of Genesis 3; what Satan insists is true in the area of thinking. We have seen what the Bible insists is true; what the divine viewpoint insists is true, now let us see Satan’s line of philosophic thought. Satan is a genius and Satan has developed philosophy for centuries; Satan is an expert, and Satan too has a most appealing philosophic position and this simple story of Genesis 3 tells us the position. “The serpent was more subtle” that is he was wiser, “than any beast of the field, which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, has God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” And then he says in verse 4, No, woman, go ahead and eat, “You shall not surely die.” Now let’s observe just what Satan’s position is. God has said to Eve, eat (cause) – thou shalt die (effect). God has just taught a cause/effect principle of history. Go ahead Eve, eat it and you’re going to die. That’s a certain cause/effect. Why is the cause/effect certain? Because God’s Word says it is certain, God has made the creation to operate in that way, the cause/effect relationship is decreed by the Word of God. God speaks it and God makes His creation function that way. Eve has no more chance of eating that fruit and surviving from her death than a Chinaman has of taking the shells of the bombardment of Panama, where the expression came from, the chance of a Chinaman. Eve has no chance; Eve has no chance of ever escaping the sovereignly decreed cause/effect of God. God has decreed it.

Now what is Satan’s attack? That there is no inherent cause/effect in history, all is chance Eve, don’t buy this cause/effect, God’s Word is not ultimately in control. Chance is ultimately in control, maybe you can eat it and maybe you can escape the effect. What’s that but Chance? We don’t have a law that functions, we don’t have a fixed cause/effect; Satan is always ultimately going back to the presupposition of Chance. That is Satanic argument because in so doing he undermines the character of God as an all-controlling speaking sovereign ruling Creator. And to get that out of the way Satan must replace God with something and the only thing He has to replace God with is ultimate Chance. And so Satan speaks to Eve, Eve, all is Chance, go ahead and eat because maybe you won’t die.

This is Satan’s position, let’s all sit down, let God sit over in this chair, I will sit in this chair, and Eve you sit in this chair, and let’s try an experiment Eve, eat the tree and see whether or not you die and you will learn, God will learn and I will learn. In other words, we face an ultimate background of Chance and we’ll all sit down to watch the experiment and together we will learn, God included, whether or not the universe operates on a cause/effect basis. So does Satan’s system permit God? Of course, watch this. Satanic thought doesn’t have to deny the existence of God. What does it do? It just makes God not a God. Here we have Chance and underneath Chance we have God, maybe the highest being, and Satan and man, but above God there is something else, it’s Chance. That’s what Satan wants. He doesn’t want to erase the word “God” from your mind, all he wants to do is remove God from the ultimate One in your mind; God and man together inhabit a bottomless ocean and a shoreless sea of Chance. God and man together aim their boat through the rough ocean; God’s boat may be very, very much bigger than man’s boat but both are boats on the shoreless ocean of Chance.

And so Satan wants to convince man that ultimately there is no cause/effect in history, you can get away with it because cause/effect isn’t there, it’s a fairy story invented by God Himself. God is on the big boat and you’re on the little boat and God on the big boat wants to keep you on the little boat following Him, He doesn’t want to lose you at sea but ultimately God is only on a boat, He’s not the sea itself. So He wants you to come with Him and He feeds you the line that there’s real cause/effect in history. There isn’t any and God knows it, and He hates to admit it, says Satan to Eve, you can get away with violating cause/effect.

So here is what we mean, maybe some have not caught this before; this is what we mean when we say human viewpoint is grounded on the basis of Chance. It is grounded on the denial of any cause/effect in the universe. All is Chance; maybe it could be, maybe, if we had 100 Eves and we lined them up in a statistical experiment, maybe 90 of the Eves would die if they ate the tree, but 10 wouldn’t because statistically there is no real cause/effect operating. Satan is always trying to put across the presupposition of ultimate Chance, not denying God at all. Not denying God’s existence at all, just making Him a boat on the ocean of Chance.

The second presupposition that Satan puts to Eve, when he says, [4] “you shall not surely die … [5] for God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then you eyes shall be opened…. [6] And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,” see, she wanted to be a philosopher and know all things, “she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

So the second great presupposition that Satan feeds unregenerate man is that man is to be ultimate judge of what is right and what is wrong. Eve, God tells you one thing and I tell you another, you be the judge. Eve has not that prerogative in this case to be the ultimate judge of what is right and wrong; Eve does not have the right to decide whether or not she is going to follow God or whether she is going to Satan; that is making her into a role that she was never designed to be; man was designed to respond to God’s Word, not judge whether or not it’s correct. That’s outside of Eve’s dominion; she accrued to herself authority that Eve did not have; Eve fell at this point and she fell because she accepted Satan’s second presupposition, that man is the ultimate judge of truth, that what is true is what man judges to be true, which leads to the third presupposition which we will mention, it’s very close to this, and that is that man legislates what is true.

Man is his own Mount Sinai, it is man that starts out of his finite knowledge what is and must be; man decides what the universe must be and what the universe must not be; we call that legislative reason…legislative reason, man legislates what must and must not be out of his own reason. The legislative use of reason is a satanic presupposition. We’ll see what the Biblical use of reason is for the Bible [can’t understand word] uses reason but it never uses reason legislatively; the Bible uses reason only as a creature dependent upon God but never does the Bible command reason as a legislative tool to decide what must and must not be about the universe.

Let’s turn to Proverbs 1:7, the heart of Biblical wisdom, the beginning of knowledge is not an axiom of revelation, the beginning of knowledge is not an axiom of empirical observation. The beginning of knowledge is a “Yes Sir,” to God; that’s the beginning of knowledge. And the Bible insists that unless you start by saying “Yes Sir” to the authority of God and His Word then you have no knowledge whatsoever, even of 2 + 2 is 4. You cannot know any fact of history correctly in any area of knowledge. You have just foiled yourself by a human viewpoint presupposition. “The beginning of knowledge is a fear,” the word “fear” doesn’t mean cowering fear, it means a respect for the authority of God Himself. That is the only starting point permitted in Scripture. Say it if you will, that it presupposes the truth of what we’re trying to prove; that’s not true but I’ll show why later it isn’t later. The Bible insists that you start not with an axiom of reason nor an axiom of observation, you start with a “Yes Sir” to God’s Word. As you have started at that point then only can you have knowledge of anything.

So here we have the two grand starting points; Satan starts with ultimate Chance, he starts with man as his own judge, he starts with man legislatively using his reason. And over here we have divine viewpoint starting with the reception, submission to God’s authoritative Word. Now let’s see how important this is; surely someone can say why, aren’t you arguing, then, there is a contradiction in your argument, aren’t you arguing that you can’t observe, that the data of normal reaction has no bearing whatsoever, it’s easy-believism, believe in spite of the data. Turn to Luke 16, imagine the case with the apologetic Christian, here’s a Christian who’s not really sure of himself, he gets this point, he gets all upset and he says surely you can’t mean that the Christian faith is divorced from fact. We haven’t said that, it may have sounded like that’s what we’ve said but we haven’t. But he gets all bent out of shape and says surely we must present the evidences for the Christian faith, if we could just present to the unbeliever positive evidence that Christ rose from the dead, surely then he would believe because if we could show that on the basis of the facts of history Christianity is the most rational option you can take.

Look what Jesus says here in Luke 16:31, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” If they do not hear My words all the empirical evidence in the world will not convince them. Here Jesus is arguing that behind the empirical observation that all of us do lies something even deeper. If we are hostile to God and His Word, we can be presented with evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence and to use what Van Til says, we take the pieces of evidence and throw them into a bottomless wastepaper basket, piece after piece after piece; you give me an evidence and I, as an unbeliever stand here with my presupposition, I will not, shall not and will never obey the Word of God, no matter how much empirical data you give to me, I take every piece of evidence you give me and I throw it over my head into the bottomless wastepaper basket. And you spent an infinite amount of time giving me an infinite array of facts to which I dump in my infinite wastepaper basket. That’s the teaching of Luke 16:31; faith with the presupposition I will not, shall not and cannot bow my knee before God’s authoritative Word, I will in the last final, final analysis be my own judge, I will look at reality and I will decide whether Satan or God is correct, I will marshal all the evidence and then I will scientifically arrive at the conclusion; that is my methodology. And Jesus says your methodology will wind you up in hell, it’s the wrong methodology, grounded on the wrong presupposition, leading you to a wrong door from which there is no exist.

So here in Luke 16 we have a complete and emphatic denial that the empirical data is ultimately persuasive of the Christian position. It plays a role, for God obviously considered it very important, but ultimately that is not the final court of appeal of the Christian. The data of the resurrection must be combined with some other factor, which we’ll discuss later, before it becomes a powerful evidence in the hands of a Christian. But the evidence of the resurrection, even if you had a motion picture of the event, suppose you did, suppose you had a sound track and today we could turn on the screen and I could you the tomb of Christ and I could show you a complete motion picture of the event of the resurrection.

Suppose we had that evidence. I, as an unbeliever, could sit here and say well, what has Satan taught me; that there really is ultimate cause/effect in the universe and since there is no ultimate cause/effect in the universe strange things do happen. And with that I have totally absorbed all your information and you haven’t persuaded me one bit; I’ve been able, like an amoeba slurps around its food and absorbs it within itself, altering not at all its internal structure, so I as an unbeliever have been able to take and enmesh all of your evidences for your faith into myself and I remain totally unchanged. And the reason is because you didn’t stab me at the center of my heart; you fed me the evidence the wrong way, and the result, I have won and you have lost. You must learn to use the razor sword of the Word in a different way, so we can strike at the heart of the unbeliever and not let our evidences be swallowed up like an amoeba, and we’ve lost another battle, and we retreat a hundred more yards. But Jesus is warning us, there is something that is besides the empirical evidence that is the ultimate deal in apologetics.

Now let’s come back to John and close with the last verse, John 3; we have much to study in verses 12-13 but I only point to you what Jesus says in the very, very first of verse 11, and I’ll leave it with you to see if you can see where we’re headed. Empirical evidence doesn’t solve the problem. If they receive not My words, then they will not believe, though one rise from the dead, says Jesus; then what is left for Jesus to confront Nicodemus with; He can’t confront Nicodemus with the evidences of a physical resurrection, if that evidence, of all evidences, is unpersuasive, then what must Jesus face Nicodemus with? The answer is, “I say unto thee,” that’s what He said, and that is the final court of appeal from which men are judged, for as it says in John 3:18-19, the judgment passage of the New Testament occurs in the third chapter of John, just after this whole discussion of the ultimate court of appeal; now isn’t that strange. Not at all. If God has told us what the ultimate, ultimate court of appeal is, then in that passage very, very quickly he’s going to get what happens when you violate the ultimate, ultimate court of appeal. So “He that believeth on Him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already,” the very act of unbelief is the condemnation, “because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son, [19] And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light; because their deeds were evil. [20] For everyone that doeth evil hates the light, neither comes to the light…[2] But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be manifest.”

What is Jesus’ final appeal? His own words; Jesus Christ says My words are self-authenticating. What I say is the truth, period. Now we can’t say that as Christian apologists because we’re not Christ, we can’t go out and say our words are the truth, so we’ll have to develop how we apply the principle. But the ultimate court of appeal is not reason and not facts; the ultimate court of appeal is the Word of God itself. Jesus said, “I say unto you.”