Clough John Lesson 17

Unbelief and Rejection – John 3:11-13

 

Turn to John 3; we are on the Nicodemus discourse and we’ll be on it for several weeks because of the importance of the principles that Jesus teaches Nicodemus.  Remember Jesus was on His first trip to Jerusalem, not His absolute first trip since He came to Jerusalem as a young boy but this is the first trip recorded in the Gospel of John.  He has collided with apostasy in Jerusalem by assaulting the religious grasp of Annas and his sons and in the temple [can’t understand word]. A feud has set in between Jesus, the rabbi from Galilee and the religious authorities in the city of Jerusalem, a feud which will culminate in his murder. 

 

In John 3 Jesus encounters a representative of the religious establishment and in His treatment of this representative we observed two points:  (1) Jesus confirmed that salvation by grace, by a miraculous new birth.  This is John’s report of how Jesus put it, instead of Paul’s teaching on the subject, Paul would use the word “justification by faith,” John uses a different approach, same doctrine, and that is salvation by grace through faith alone. 

 

Now that’s the surface issue; that’s the issue of immediate importance between Jesus and Nicodemus but underneath the collision between Jesus and Nicodemus is a greater issue, an issue that faces the Christian church in every generation.  It faces each one of us as we seek to witness for Jesus Christ against an unbelieving world, and that is the problem of truth itself.  What is the basis for the Christian claim?  How do we know that we really know?  How do we know that the whole thing hangs together?  How do we know it is true, in other words?  And so John 3 is devoted to clearing the ground out from under the religious façade, all the philosophic searches that men have done and getting back to the ground starting point. 

 

So in John 3 we are going to not just study Nicodemus and the salvation by grace theme, the new birth, in fact we’ve already finished that study in verse 5 and 6; we’re going to go further with the Christian claim and how it is true.  Often when you present (quote) “religious things” (end quote) and I hate that word, automatically it tends to demean the content of what you say.  I remember some smart aleck a few years back, who when he noticed that I was one of the sponsors of a creation seminar in the city, looked my name up in the phone book and found out I was a Reverend, and then went on and proceeded to try and dismiss the whole case for creationism because obviously no pastor was competent to judge the area.  And later on I happened to run into him over there and I said I’ll be glad to debate you any time any place, you name it and I’ll meet you.  And for some strange reason I haven’t yet heard from the man.  But the point remains that religious truth is always demeaned, it’s always somehow less than scientific and historic truth.  And this is the little word game that’s played in the public school system over evolution and creation, always labeling creation as a religious truth and evolution, of course, more certain because it’s scientific.  There is a discrimination, in other words, against religious truth. 

 

So we’re going to, and try to avoid the reaction most Christians have, and that is to back up, to immediately take the defense and start defending the Christian position.  The Christian position does not need defense, all it needs is some intelligent proponents, people who know what to say and when and how to say it.  Now Christianity does claim to be “the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Him.”  No man is ever saved apart from personal trust in Christ and that goes for the heathen in Africa.  No person is ever saved apart from a personal confrontation with the Lord Jesus Christ.  No person ever has been saved apart from the personal confrontation with Christ, even in the Old Testament, Daniel met Christ; that’s what the whole theophany is about.  So there is that exclusivism, and Jesus doesn’t avoid it, He meets it head on, and in the form of Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus we have all the principles we need to devise a strategy, an approach that all of us can use wherever we are.  You are an ambassador for Christ, if you have trusted in Him.  That means God has called you to be a witness, wherever you are, and that doesn’t mean sticking a bumper sticker on the back of your car that says “Honk if you love Jesus.”  That means being able to carry on an intelligent conversation with someone in your immediate vicinity.  It means that you have the commission to communicate doctrine, both by living illustrations and by verbal explanations.  And to do so means that you ought to think through how you are going to do this; anticipate situations that you’ll find yourself in and think through the whole nature of the conflict of witnessing and evangelism because basically this is what John 3 is all about, evangelism.

 

Now let’s look at what Jesus says; He says in John 3:10, after explaining the doctrine of salvation by grace, He says, “Are you a master of Israel, and you do not know these things?”  Jesus chides Nicodemus, that a man in his position ought to know that specific doctrine of justification by faith; that’s a point of doctrine that ought to be totally unambiguous to a man in Nicodemus’ position, just as it ought to be totally unambiguous to most fundamentalist pastors, and it isn’t because they’re filled with legalism.  But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

 

Now Jesus, from this point, changes the conversation and after verse 10 the issue is no longer salvation by faith or by grace, it’s bigger than that.  That issue hangs in there but behind that issue is something else; Jesus is going to come back to salvation in verse 14-15 when He talks about Moses and the serpent, which by the way is the sign of medicine, you know the little serpent that you see on the pole, which you see in hospitals and so on, the average nurse and average doctor doesn’t know where that comes from; we’re going to go into the whole meaning of that symbol when we get to verse 14.  It’s the symbol underlying the entire medical profession and yet most people in medicine don’t know hide nor hair of what’s going on.  Try it some time, ask your doctor if he knows where it came from.  I asked one one time and he thought it came from the Greeks.  Well, the Greeks are responsible for a lot of things but that wasn’t one of them. 

 

In John 3:11 Jesus continues the subject, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee,” now when Jesus uses “verily, verily,” it’s “amen, amen,” it’s the same word, that’s the it looks in the Greek, that’s the way it sounds in the Hebrew.  Amen, amen, it means surely, surely, and so it is an emphatic way the language has… it doesn’t have exclamation points in Hebrew, you can’t underline in Hebrew or Greek, you have to do it some other way so you do it by syntax.  So this is a signal, you’d better pay attention to what’s coming up because what I have to say now is extremely important.  So Jesus gives him notice.  “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have seen, and you receive not our witness.”  If you look carefully in verse 11 you’ll see that the subject and the object are both plural.  It’s not “I have said to you,” but “we say to you.”  It is not I have said this to Nicodemus but I have said it to you all, the entire group. 

 

What is John recording here in verse 11?  Well maybe He didn’t catch it when Jesus first said it but remember the Gospel of John is written years later, when John had many, many years to reflect on the words of Jesus and John is off in Ephesus now writing this Gospel, and what has John witnessed for decade after decade after decade?  He’s witnessed the collision of the Jewish unbelieving community with the Messianic Jew.  There has been tumult inside the Jewish community between those who believe in Christ and those who disbelieve and there’s been a collision, those who follow Jesus and those who follow the elders of the nation; one or the other but you can’t be in both camps.  And there is this entire butting together, this constant friction, the constant irritation, constant collision between the two factions.  And John looking back, he thinks and he remembers yes, in the Nicodemus…when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus what did He say: “We speak that which we do know,” to you, and you reject our witness.  The “we” refers to Jesus Christ plus all the prophets from all the past of Israel’s history and on down to the believing remnant of Jews in John’s day.  In other words, verse 11 originally looked at present and past and John sees now that it was pregnant with meaning as far as the whole church is concerned. 

 

“We speak,” and Jesus includes us in there, “We speak that which we do know, and testify to that which we have seen,” we “testify to that which we have seen” in that we draw attention to the physical historical evidences of the Christian faith.  Some reacted last time to what was said; it’s not an undermining of historical evidences, we’ll draw that together.  Turn to 1 John 1:1-3, you’ll see what John means.  “We testify to that which we have seen.”  John says I report that which is historically valid; I have something to report to you that is not just my subjective experience.  I have something I can tell you that is rooted in space/time history.  I have something that I can tell you that you can check on if you want to check on it. 

 

And so in the first epistle of John, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,” “That which was from the beginning” is arche, a very famous Greek word for philosophic starting point.  That which was from the first we have heard, we have seen, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.”  In other words John says this is empirical evidence before our eyes, and it’s that that we report to you, we do not give testimony to our individual Christian experiences.  Please notice the shift, you have not witnessed for Christ just to give your personal testimony.  A witness in Scripture means a witness to the historic root of the Christian faith.  That is a witness to the faith.  The other is fine, if you want to tell it, but that’s not the witness.  John did not witness to his own feelings, he witnessed to “what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and our hands have handled, [of the Word of life].  1 John 1:2, “Fro the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and we show unto you that eternal life,…” [3] “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you,” you see over and over the verb, what are those verbs but verbs of sensory perception; the five senses except taste isn’t listed here, you’ve got four senses.  Now John means, when he says I testify to “that which we have seen, which we have heard,” something that is historically real and objective. 

 

Now turn back to John.  Jesus uses the same words, He says to Nicodemus, I tell you something that is not off, far distant from you, I tell you something Nicodemus that is as real in history as you are standing there in the southwest portion of the city of Jerusalem in the first century; that’s how real it is. 

 

And then he goes on in John 3:12 to raise the issue that ought to have been raised before but now Jesus gets to it, because now the subject shifts, from the plural back to the singular.  Now the subject is off just the act of witnessing or the act of evangelizing, that’s verse 11, verse 11 describes evangelization.  So to verse 12 and 13 the issue behind the evangelization and to make it deeply personal Jesus gets off the “we” and goes to the “I”, he gets off the “you all” and gets to “you.”  It’s now back to the personal talk between Jesus and Nicodemus.  He says “If I have told you earthly things, and you all…” pardon me, this is still plural on the object, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”  There’s a lot of debate what the earthly things and what the heavenly things are, and we must find the interpretation of those if we’re gong to understand the passage. 

 

“The heavenly things” and “the earthly things,” what do those terms mean?  Fortunately we don’t have to go outside of Scripture because those terms are used in Scripture.  Turn to Proverbs 30:3, here is where we can pick up the meaning, those were the terms used in that day for knowledge, a certain kind of knowledge.  “I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the Holy,” a statement of the finite limitations of man, that man’s knowledge is limited.  And in Proverbs 30:4 the limitation of man’s knowledge is expressed in this vocabulary: “Who has ascended up into heaven, or descended?  Who has gathered the wind in his fists?  Who has bound the waters in a garment?  Who has established all the ends of the earth?  What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if you can tell?”  In other words, you can’t tell apart from divine revelation.  It’s a challenge to man’s finite limited knowledge.  And all the problems he cites, notice “the wind in his fists,” same concept Jesus is talking about with Nicodemus, the wind and the water, the same element appears in verse 4, it’s not baptism, it’s the natural elements in creation, both a turbulent phenomenon, and they stress man’s ability to rationally measure turbulent phenomenon, so it becomes a concerted illustration of the finite limitations of man.

 

There’s another passage, Deuteronomy 30:11-12, the same words are used, things in heaven, things in earth.  Moses has finished teaching the people the Word of God, the people with their finite limited understanding have received data from God’s infinite mind by revelation, it has come into their mind and been processed, and so now Moses finishes off with a description of what’s just happened.  “This commandment,” that’s the entire Law, it’s not one, it’s 613, “For this commandment which I am commanding thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it faith rest off.  [12] It is not in heaven, that thou should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?  [13] It is not beyond the sea, [that thou should say], Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it?  [14] But the word is very near unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that you may do it.” 

 

So don’t you see from this passage in Proverbs 30 it’s very clear what the heavens and the earth mean?  We don’t have to be in doubt what Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about; the heavenly things are the unrevealed things; the earthly things are those things which have been revealed.  Those things which have been revealed have been revealed in space/time history; they’re open to empirical verification because revelation is always that.  So therefore the earthly things are concerned with the things that have already happened.

 

Now turn back to John 3 and let’s look at that verse again.  Here’s the challenge and Jesus is driving underneath the whole point of evangelism.  We know verse 11 is evangelism, but verses 12-13 is the ground, the foundation that must be mastered if you are not to become a frustrated person in the area of evangelism.  You have to know this.  Jesus says, “If I have told you earthly things,” first class “if” in the Greek, and I have, I have told you earthly things, that is I have related to you things that were already revealed to you.  The whole point of the new birth that He has just got through talking to Nicodemus about is not a heavenly thing; that thing was revealed in the Old Testament; Ezekiel 36.  So included in the revealed things would be the doctrine of the new birth, doctrine of justification by faith, doctrine of salvation by grace, all the great doctrines of the Old Testament; those are the earthly things.  And Jesus said I have just got through going over the fact of Old Testament revelation; revelation that you had presented to your nation, revelation that could be checked, because two million people did hear God speaking at Mount Sinai, the miracles were authenticated in the Old Testament, they did have records of these apart from the Scriptures in this day and age, and Jesus said I have built my case so far just on the data of the past, just upon the facts of history that you already know Nicodemus, and you still don’t believe. 

 

Now Jesus raises the question, if you are in such a spiritual state that you cannot believe what is already present empirically, in front of your face, how do you ever expect to believe if I chose this moment to reveal something new to you, a mystery of the faith.  We can guess what the “heavenly things” Jesus has on His mind are because it’s a third class “if,” He says “if,” third class, maybe I will and maybe I won’t, it’s contingent.  The first “if” is a first class; I have told you earthly things.  So far Nicodemus My teaching has not differed one iota from that of the Old Testament.  It’s all [can’t understand word] things, known things, measurable things, checkable things and you still don’t believe, how are you possibly going to believe “if” and maybe I will and maybe I won’t go on to expand the body of revelation and tell you about the new mystery that’s about to come, the Church Age.  Suppose I were to go on and illuminate you further, now He’s later on going to do that through the apostle Paul, but He’s saying to Nicodemus, if I did that you wouldn’t believe that either. 

 

So now we have to get down to a point, a point often misunderstood and overlooked in evangelism, and Jesus picks this up, He stops the discussion right here, He cuts off His evangelism to deal with this point.  What is the point?  The point is this whole problem of “believe.”  How is the verb “believe” used?  Does it mean this: I believe that Jesus rose from the dead as a fact of history.  Or does it mean something more than just that?  Or thirdly, does the word “believe” just mean I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe, I’m going to believe because I want to?  That’s a view prevalent in a lot of religious circles, the third kind of belief.  That’s wrong because we know faith in the Bible is always anchored to history, always anchored to evidence, but does it just mean… does it just mean acceptance of physical facts.  No!  How was the word “faith” used in the context. 

 

Remember back in John 2:22, how was the word “faith… remember, we stopped there at the time and I said watch it, because here defines how the word “faith” is used and I said you want to be careful because John’s going to sneak one over on you if you’re not careful.  He’s not using the word “believe” like you think he’s using it because in verse 22 what does it say?  “When Jesus had risen from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this unto them; and they believed the Scripture,” and you remember what the Scripture said? It was Psalm 69 and Psalm 69 was the Psalm of the sufferer, the righteous sufferer, and what was it that Jesus had said as He smashed His way along the side of the temple wall?  He said, “The zeal of thy house will eat me up.”  Now the disciples heard that, they knew it was from Psalm 69; do you think they believed that that was the Word of God?  Yes, they believed that was the Word of God.  Then when it was said did they believe?  When Jesus said it, as He was smashing the people along the edge of the temple wall and they heard those words in their ears, did they recognize it was Psalm 69?  Undoubtedly they recognized it was Psalm 69.  Did they believe it was the Word of God then in the sense that it was part of the canonical Scripture.  Of course they believed.  Yet John insists that they didn’t believe.  So he must be using the word “believe” differently than we think he’s using it.

 

In other words, the disciples put it all together and had the perspective, the divine viewpoint perspective of Psalm 69 later, so the way John is using the word “believe” is not just belief in a historical fact, but to have, not only the fact but plus the divine interpretation of fact.  So when he said after the disciples believed the Scripture, it means they had the facts, the presence of Psalm 69 in their Bibles, they had that fact, but now they had the interpretation of the fact and they put the two together and then they believed.  So “belief” the way John is using it, has one dimension in the area of space/time fact but it has the other dimension in the area of perspective on fact. 

 

To illustrate more sharply what I’m talking about let’s think about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Let’s pretend you are witnessing to a non-Christian.  Let’s pretend you have spent several hours of discussion with this non-Christian and you have now trotted out all the historical evidences, reasons, substantiations, for the physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.  So now you’ve finally got this guy in a position where he is going to admit that if he were there with a Kodak camera he could have photographed Jesus Christ rising from the dead.  He believes that; that’s firmly believed that’s a historic fact.  Now is the person a Christian at the time he accepts the resurrection as a historic fact? 

 

Listen to this further illustration about it in the writings of Cornelius Van Til.  In this case the person you’re witnessing to is Mr. Black and I’ll read a few sentences to show you the dilemma that Jesus is trying to head off for you and keep you out of in your witnessing.  “Now as for accepting the resurrection of Jesus, continued Mr. Black, as thus properly separated from the traditional system of theology,” that means, in other words, just looking upon it as an isolated historic event, a man was buried and he rose from the dead, as “separated from the traditional system of theology, I do not in the least mind doing that.  To tell you the truth, I have accepted the resurrection as a fact now for some time; the evidence for it is overwhelming.  This is a strange universe, all kinds of miracles happen in it.  The universe is open, so why should there not be some resurrections here and there?  The resurrection of Jesus would be a fine item for Ripley’s Believe it or Not; why not send it in?” 

 

Now what have  you done?  Are you any closer to winning him to Christ at that point than you were when you started?  Something’s gone wrong; haven’t we argued that belief is grounded on historic fact, and haven’t we amassed our arsenal of guns and artillery and shown definitely the historic fact of the faith, and here we have the person, sure I believe the historicity of the resurrection, just one of those things that happened.  Now what’s missing?  You feel there’s something missing here, that’s not what’s supposed to happen after you do that.  But what Van Til is pointing out is that in order to believe there must not just be fact, but there must be interpretation of facts.  And what is just turned out is that person has, from you, obtained the facts of the resurrection, but he doesn’t share your perspective of it.  He doesn’t share the fact that that is a prophesied event out of the Old Testament, that that was one of the signs of the God-man Savior to the nation Israel.  All of that is interpretation, which he’s not interested in, he’s just interested in the fact, the fact of the resurrection. 

See, you can’t divorce fact and interpretation.  When the Bible uses the word “blind,” “men who have eyes and they see not,  men who have ears and they hear not,” the Bible is not talking about facts; it’s talking about the perspective on the facts.  The man, Mr. Black, to whom you were witnessing, did he have ears to hear?  Well, he heard the facts but he was spiritually blind because he wouldn’t hear the interpretation of the facts.  That’s the whole point.  Those of you who are working near creation/ evolution, you go to the fossil evidence, there’s the facts and there are two systems of interpretation and men can see that fossil but they are totally blind to the other interpretation of the fact.  Mr. Black saw the historic evidences for Christ and he said yes, I believe in the resurrection of Christ as just a manifestation of Chance.  And you say I believe in the resurrection of Christ because of the sovereign plan of God.  Now we both agree on the facts but we’ve got two radically imposed interpretations of the facts, and it’s the same thing with everything else.  You can go to fact after fact after fact after fact, and even agree with the unbeliever on the basis of fact and you’re still going in two opposite directions at the same time because of the interpretation of facts. 

 

So Jesus is warning, as we turn back to John 3, Jesus is warning Nicodemus, He says now look, I have told you earthly things, I have told you things that are open to testing, that you can check whether they factually happened but you haven’t believed.  What does that mean?  You haven’t got the divine perspective on the Old Testament.  You accept the history, Nicodemus, of the Exodus; you accept the miracles of the Exodus; you accept even the fact that Moses heard a voice on Mount Sinai; you accept all these things as facts.   Fine; but Nicodemus, you still don’t believe.  And Nicodemus, you’d better solve your problem because whether I give you any more revelation is contingent on whether you get straight on the basis of what you already have.  That’s the second “if” there, if Nicodemus, you would believe the earthly things, then I would give you some more, but I’m not going to give you any more revelation if you have turned your heart against Me over the area of revelation I’ve once given to you.  Don’t expect any more light, Nicodemus. 

 

And of course John depicts this as a type of a greater thing that’s going on.  Jesus is saying through Nicodemus to the entire nation, I as the God of the Old Testament gave you fact after fact after fact after fact after face, evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence after evidence of My trustworthiness.  And you insist always on interpreting it differently; you always run it through your human viewpoint grid and you always disbelieve Me.  And so God is saying all right, the whole point has come down in history whether I’m going to give you any more revelation or not and whether I do or whether I don’t is contingent, it waits upon, it depends upon whether you are going to accept and straighten your interpretation out of the facts. 

 

Then he goes on to say in John 3:13 something further that’s involved in this problem of inter­pretation.  If it were just the case… if it were just the case that you often meet in the sidewalk, well now you know, the Bible’s got a lot of strange things in it and one person has this interpretation and one person has that interpretation, it’s just all a matter of how you interpret it.  Now obviously if Nicodemus had been smart he would have pulled this one off next, and Jesus is a little smarter and so He heads this one off at the pass real quick, by making a statement that none of us could make, but He does in verse 13.  “And no man has ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven.”  What is He doing to Nicodemus here?  He’s boxing him in. 

Do you know what He said?  He said Nicodemus, if it were just the case that I was one Jewish rabbi and you were another Jewish rabbi and we were impartially discussing the facts, you would have your interpretation and I would have my interpretation and we’d sit here firing at each other over the facts.  But he says, Nicodemus, that isn’t the case, because in this case I have knowledge beyond finite understanding God, I am God, and My interpretation is self-authenticating.  When I testify to the interpretation My interpretation is true.  So the idea of two parties jointly giving their interpretation of a fact and having both interpretations just kind of mutually collide and neither one being correct, that’s valid if you both are finite people, but in the case of a finite authority and an infinite authority coming to the same fact, now whose interpretation is valid?  Obviously the One with omniscience.  So Jesus knocks out the collision, He knocks out this whole little exit that happens, well, that’s just your interpretation.  This is God’s interpretation. 

 

And so with this Jesus lays the basis…those of us who are interested in philosophic terms, here’s your epistemological base for the Christian faith.  Fact is that which is given in history, that which is visible in space/time history and interpretation of that fact is what is given by God, God in His omniscience.  So here we have man’s interpretation versus God’s interpretation.  So when we come to a fact we must always seek God’s interpretation of the fact or we don’t see the fact correctly.  When we come to the empty tomb, and the women who came there thought somebody stole the body, you remember, so the believers came to that tomb and they saw the fact of the empty tomb, but they didn’t have the correct interpretation of the fact and they had to be helped out, and finally they got the right interpretation of the fact and they had a message that turned the world upside down because they took the fact and the took the interpretation and they crammed it down the throat of everybody in the Roman Empire.  And with that they overturned the world.  So fact plus interpretation.

 

Now because we have got to this point in the Nicodemus discourse we are going to take kind of a break and go over and describe apologetic strategy for the Christian faith.  What are the principles that must accompany our program of evangelism if we are to adequately challenge modern man.  We cannot challenge him, Jesus warns us, by simply arguing, oh Nicodemus, here you are as one finite being; here are the facts and here we are as Christians over on the other side of the table and Nicodemus, we’re going to sit down and mutually discuss whether or not our interpretation is correct or your interpretation is correct. Is that the way Jesus deals with these religious authorities of His time.  Not at all; He has the arrogance and the audacity to say your interpretation is all screwed up; My interpretation is God’s interpretation.  How’s that for all due humility.  And Jesus could say that in all due humility because He happened to be God.  And we can say that in the sense that the content of our faith you didn’t think up and I didn’t think up.  The idea you’re fighting with, with your own soul, with Satan, with the people around you, isn’t your idea, it’s God’s and it didn’t come historically from some person just thought it up.  It came with adequate testimony.  So this is just an introductory note; that’s what Jesus is trying to get across. 

 

Now let’s go into apologetics per se and see what our principles are.  First let’s turn to 1 Peter 3:15, why bother.  I always have to do this when I start because there is always someone in the congregation that says well, I can’t see why you have to go through all that, why can’t you just preach the simple gospel.  Do you know why?  Because the gospel you’re thinking is simple isn’t simple to the modern man; that’s the problem.  It’s simple to you, but it’s not simple to somebody who’s having trouble picking his way through this. It’s very hairy so don’t have that stupid attitude to apologetics like so many believers do.  Well, I don’t see why you have to know all that.  Here’s your answer, and I didn’t write this either.  “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”  That says “be ready always to give an answer to every man,” it doesn’t say be ready always to give an answer just to your crowd; it says “to every man.” 

 

Now I wonder how many believers here are so sure of your position that you could honestly say I don’t care how brilliant the person is I am prepared tonight to give an answer to the most brilliant person, the most brilliant opponent of the Christian faith, I am prepared to give an answer for the “reason of the hope that is in” me.  Now if you can answer that you don’t have to listen any more.  If you can’t answer that then you’d better keep your mouth shut about why do we have to have all this?  Because 1 Peter 3:15 tells you so, that’s why.  That’s our orders, and as I say, I didn’t write the order, I got it as pastor-teacher so all I can do is say “Yes Sir” and try to train the congregation.  So that’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to go first by looking at the structure of human viewpoint. We’re not going to finish this tonight but we’re going to look at many, many verses of Scripture.  This is one of those nights when we’re going to go from Genesis to Revelation looking at verses, getting acquainted with the data of Scripture.

 

Two major passages exist in the Bible that outline wholly the structure of human viewpoint.  These two major passages ought to be known by every Christians so you can refer to them many, many, many times.  The first major passage is Romans 1:18-21. Romans 1:18, 19, 20 and 21 is the central passage; there’s another one but this is really the center, you’ve got to have this together or you just don’t go anywhere.  We’ve gone of this, most of you are familiar but let me again remind you of certain facts about the claim here.  Verse 18 says that “all men,” believers and unbelievers know the truth.  That’s the first thing that should blow your mind if you’re not acquainted with it.  This argues completely against the idea that men are born into the world ignorant, that somehow a baby has his mind like a blank slate and all you have to do is passively fill the slate up with material. 

 

This says all men “hold the truth,” and not only do they hold it but the word is to suppress the truth.  Men not only know certain truths but they suppress the truth.  What truth?  The details of doctrine; no, not all the details of doctrine but their own God-consciousness; their God-consciousness, their self-consciousness and their world-consciousness.  A baby usually gets it in this way, that’s the chronological order, but the logical order goes that way.   You learn it in the reverse order that it truly fits together.  A baby first becomes aware of the fact that there’s a world out there of different things; then it becomes aware of itself.  If you’ve had an interesting experience watch a very small baby when he discovers that the finger is his; he’ll sit there by the hour and look at it, turn it around and ahhh.  Why?  Because before that was part of the world out there, it was one of those things that moved around and then all of a sudden he discovered hey, I’ve got control over that, that’s part of me: self-conscious.  Then sometime and I believe it’s close to just after when your child learns language he becomes God-conscious.  He becomes conscious of the fact that God is there; he is not ignorant; no man is an agnostic, it simply isn’t true. 

 

Then it says, Romans 1:20, “the invisible things of him,” “the not seen things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by means of the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”  So what about the heathen who didn’t hear?  That’s your answer; God can send any person to hell because all persons have sufficient information on which to decide, they are “without excuse.”  Now we are concerned for the heathen, that’s why we send Christian missionaries out, to try to get them in a situation under God’s grace to repent, but they are without excuse and there’s no such thing as somebody who has an excuse; there are no people with an excuse, there are not people who, after death will say well God, I’m sorry, I didn’t even know that you existed.  It never dawned on me that you existed.  And God’s going to say well, you do now, you knew all the time, don’t come up with this stuff to me.

 

That’s the major passage, Romans 1:18-21.  A secondary passage is Ephesians 4:17-19, [“This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, [18] Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; [19] Who being past feeling, have given themselves over to lasciviousness, to work al uncleanness with greediness.”]

same concept, men distort their God-consciousness and it has intellectual results as well as other results.  How does rejecting God-consciousness screw people up.  Why does a mind get totally bent out of shape?  What happens? 

 

For simplified purposes we’ll just consider the fact that there are two levels, there are more, but we’ll just simplify things and think of two levels in the mind of two knowledge compartments.  One has to do with facts, every day facts and events, and up here we’ll have the ultimate meaning of events and facts, so there’s two things that we want to watch what happens, because Satan and sin together blind us two different ways in both these realms.  And you want to understand this because the person to whom you do your witnessing to is a blind person.  If you work with the physically blind people you have to have a little extra smarts working with these kind of people, you have to compensate for their weaknesses.  And so when you witness you have to understand what is going on in the heart of this person; I’ve seen Christians who know doctrine that proceed in their witnessing just as though they never ever heard of the doctrine of witnessing.  They act as though the non-Christian is supposed to know everything; they start throwing out divine viewpoint framework, blah, blah, blah, blah, like this, and then they wonder why they get a blank reply.  Look, the person is a non-Christian, he’s hardly aware of the person of Christ, leave alone divine viewpoint framework, what the heck is that?  You can’t assume this.

 

So let’s look at the unbeliever, how bad and how desperate the situation is, where but for the grace of God there we all go.  Let’s look at this; what is happening upstairs here in this ultimate meaning, in the area of what we’re talking about?  Satan and sin together work basically two contradictory absolutes up here.  In one you have Chance, or what we will call absolute irrationalism, that means everything is just Chance. Remember the illustration of Mr. Black and the resurrection of Christ, read a while ago?  What did Mr. Black say the resurrection was?  I’ll read that section again because here you have Mr. Black announcing and showing his irrationality. 

 

“To tell you the truth, I have accepted the resurrection as a fact now for some time; the evidence for it is overwhelming.  This is a strange universe; all kinds of miracles happen in it.  The universe is open so why should there not be a resurrection here and that.”  That’s Chance; all is contingent, there’s no basic order, no basic plan.  There are little pieces of plan but under the little pieces is a great bottomless ocean of Chance and pure contingency.  That’s what Satan sold Eve.  Somebody handed a feedback card and it said well, didn’t Satan say to Eve, you will surely not die.  Yeah, Satan made one claim and made the fact that you surely would die.  Now faced with two absolute claims what do you do?  See, Satan had to make an absolute claim to try to negate God’s absolute claim.  So God’s telling Eve, eat it Eve and you will certainly die.  And Satan says, eat it Eve and you certainly won’t die.  Now we have two dogmatic statements; how do you decide which one?  Only by watching how it turns out; maybe God is right and maybe Satan is right; they both can’t be right, something’s going to happen when she eats it, but she can’t tell until she eats it.  Nobody can tell until she eats it who is right; that’s Chance, that’s what we’re talking about.  We’re not talking about chance in the sense of mathematics and probability, we use the word “chance” here.  Just chaos is maybe a better word than chance, just chaos, out of the void of chaos. 

 

Those of you who remember your science text remember that a lot of the universe…where did the universe come from?  It was a physical mass, maybe the big bang theory, but it’s fundamentally chaotic.  It’s the same thing showing up again and again and again, a fundamental absolute chance and absolute irrationalism.  Yet on the other hand, Satan, because he has to hold all the pieces together finally, he has to build his house so it doesn’t fall apart, argues for perfect rationalism, and the fact that man can legislate what is there and what isn’t there.  Man surely knows the God of the Bible isn’t there.  That is an absolute certainty, never noticing the fact, how can you make a state­ment for absolute certainty to something that isn’t so when you’ve just got through telling me that all was fundamentally chance. If all is fundamentally chance and all is fundamentally chaotic there is no such thing as any certainty and yet we can’t have that, man can’t tolerate total uncertainty and total irrationalism.   To save himself he jumps over to this side and pulls on absolute rational­ism, so to hold the tension [can’t understand words] he has pure chance and chaos here and pure order over here; order and chaos, and they are the fundamental things that tear apart the unbeliever.  At the center of his whole system are two principles; Van Til would say he’s asking us to ride the same horse in opposite directions at the same time.  His position tears itself apart.

 

Now that’s what’s going on upstairs and he has a lot of other problems that you’ll see in the text of Scripture.  Downstairs in the area of facts what happens.  Downstairs in the area of facts most of the time unbeliever will accept facts you give him.  Sometimes he won’t even accept them; that’s when things are really bad and blind.  But sometimes he will; he just interprets them differently than you do.  You’ve had that happen to you in personal relationships with people.  Something happens in the relationship, one person puts one interpretation on it, another person puts another interpretation on it.  So you know from your own personal experience how it is.  The same thing can happen, two people can put two entirely different interpretations on that.  All right, now what’s so foreign about this idea that you can have a fact and put different interpretations on it.  All of us in our everyday life see this happen again and again. 

 

Now let’s look at some passages of Scripture that show both at the factual level and at the ultimate level things getting screwed up in human viewpoint.  Turn to Deuteronomy 4:19, this is the passage that teaches the destruction of all the world’s religion; this is the passage that condemns all the religions of the world apart from the religion of Israel because this is the passage that deals with Moses reflecting, by God’s grace, reflecting upon the call of Abraham from out of the nations and then subsequently the Exodus from out of Egypt.  And God tells what He’s done for this and He gives certain warnings.  He says in verse 19, “And lest thou,” that is Israel, “lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when you see [the fact of] the sun, and [the fact of] the moon, and [the fact of] the stars, and [the fact of] all the host of heaven, you will be driven to interpret them as gods, [should not be driven to worship them].  In other words, does Israel see the moon, just like the Egyptians?  Of course.  Do the people on earth see the same moon that the Jews see?  Yes.  Does Pharaoh sitting on the palace in the Nile see the same sun that the Hebrew kings see on Mount Zion in Jerusalem?  Yes.  Well then what’s this verse talking about, because God says without My word you cannot interpret facts correctly.  And that’s what’s wrong with all systems of thought that are apart from the Word of God.  You see the moon, you see the sun, you see the stars, but instead what’s happening is that man has God-consciousness, he has sort of a template in his soul that says there’s something here called sovereignty, there’s something, omnipotence, something omniscient.  And when he sees that he sees the sun and he sees that the sun gives him power, the sun makes things grow, the sun gives blessings, the sun causes the water to evaporate, form rain, give him rain and so on, he looks to the sun and he says the sun is my source and so he begins to take the fact of the sun, the fact, and unguided, in his spiritual blindness by his rejection of what God-consciousness he has, then the very God-consciousness which was supposed to be divorced from the sun is now linked with the sun.  His God-consciousness causes him to reinterpret the sun as God.

 

You see, if man… and this is a very fundamental point that is most powerful to use.  You see, one of the proofs of the Christian faith, in fact the proof of the Christian faith is that the non-Christian performs exactly the way we predict he will.  That’s one of the proofs; the non-Christian does exactly what he ought to do if what we’re saying is true, because if what we’re saying is true every man has God-consciousness and he’s going to be looking for God, all around, he’s going to be looking for God.  And we predict in his blindness, because he doesn’t really want to find God, yet he also wants to find God because he does and he doesn’t; he doesn’t want to go to the true God, but there’s something in his soul that craves to know God and so he’ll latch onto something and that becomes his God.  Now if our system were wrong, then the non-Christian would never deify anything.  You wouldn’t have this tendency on the part of man to make idols of things if men truly were just ignorant.  The very fact that man makes idols is proof that we’re right; exactly what a fallen man would do is take his God-consciousness and see it in the wrong place. 

 

So Deuteronomy 4:19 is that; it says God warns them; he says you … notice verse 14, here’s the context, “And the LORD commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgment,” teach you the Word of God, so that, verse 19, know the Word of God in your soul when you look up at the heavens and you see the facts of the sun and the facts of the moon and the facts of the stars, now with the Word in your soul you have the correct interpretation of the facts, and without the Word you’ll be all screwed up.  That’s what God is saying.  And that’s the whole concept of what’s happening here in spiritual blindness.  Every man must have the Word in order to know anything; that’s what we mean by that statement.  

 

You cannot interpret any fact correctly apart from the Word of God.  That includes 2 + 2 is 4.   It’s a statement of rationalism and you can’t put that in the right place unless you interpret it correctly in the light of the Word.  Not one course in school can ever be taught correctly apart from reliance on the Word of God.  Not one man  including every non-Christian man can ever know anything apart from presupposing the truth of the Christian faith.  The only way a scientist has a correct interpretation of anything because accidentally or not accidentally he has latched onto the divine viewpoint somewhere in his system.  He may have stolen it from us, he may have borrowed it, he may not even know where he got it from but if he has come up with a correct interpretation he has essentially come up with a stolen piece of the Christian system somewhere, and God in His grace is very gracious to give men, all men everywhere, common grace, an awareness of divine viewpoint.  So to some degree unbelievers do interpret reality at least halfway correctly.  If left to their own system they would interpret nothing correctly and then we’d have a problem.

 

Turn to Proverbs 1:22, the dynamics of knowing; these are just verses, we’re not trying to be systematic tonight, I’m just trying to expose you to the Scriptural data to let you see how much the Bible does have to say about human viewpoint. Wisdom is speaking, the personification of wisdom as a female.  Do you know why?  Because in Scripture the female, one of her fundamental roles is that she decorates the creation; all the adorning passages in the Bible have only to do with women, never men.  In the New Testament all the passages that have to do with adorning are addressed to women and not to men, ever.  The woman has a distinct role, she is always the finisher of creation.  Now man subdues the ground and then the woman comes in and she decorates it and brings it to completion.  And so here we have wisdom pictured as a female because she finishes off man, she makes man the cultured person that he is.  “How long, simple ones, will you love simplicity?  And the scorners delight in their scornings, and fool hate knowledge? [23] Turn you at my reproof; behold, I will pout our my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.” 

 

Proverbs 1:23, by the way, is the classic text for explaining this “pouring out of the Spirit,” you hear that in these charismatic circles, oh, the Spirit poured out, and you wonder where’d they pour Him.  And most people use that use that phrase don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about, not the slightest.  Now if you really want to know what pouring the Spirit out, here’s your text; it is a parallelism in the poetry and pouring out the spirit is a Hebrew idiom which means to reveal content and doctrine.  Just exactly opposite to the way it is used in the charismatic circles.  Well that figures. 

 

Proverbs 1:24, “Because I have called, and you have refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded, [25] But you have set at nought all my counsel, and would have none of my reproof,” see here’s the man in his rebellion, autonomous human viewpoint, [26] “I will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when fear comes.  [27] And when your fear comes as desolation, and your destruction comes as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish come upon you, [28] Then shall they call upon Me, but I will not answer.”  Now that is a very sobering point about education and true Biblical knowledge.  There is a time to learn and there is a time when you can no longer learn. That’s what the Scriptures say; there is a time when God gives you an opportunity to go on; you rebel against that opportunity and put it out of your mind, and wisdom says okay, when you call and you want the wisdom now to handle the situation, when you come across a new fact and you need the true interpretation of fact, I’m not going to be there.  Now that sounds cruel but it’s a principle: those who turn from the light they have will not receive any more light. That’s what Jesus said to Nicodemus, I have told you earthly things and you don’t believe, if you expect me to show you heavenly things you’d better start believing because future revelation is contingent upon your acceptance of the present revelation. 

 

Another passage of Scripture, Mark 7:8, this is one by Jesus, again a very, very sobering, sobering command about the dangers of spiritual blindness, about men misusing their minds and ruining their minds with this garbage of human viewpoint.  Jesus says to the people of His day, He says you have “laid aside the commandment of God,” notice how it always starts, not with innocent ignorance, it always starts with deliberate rejection of prior light.  Laying aside the commandment of God means rejecting the Word.  “…you hold the tradition of men, as the washing of pots and cups; and many other such things ye do.  [9] And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.”  And then he goes on to describe it.  What is he saying? Is that the moment… you can’t be neutral, the moment you reject the Word your soul is going to suck in human viewpoint, just like a vacuum cleaner.  It can’t help it, your soul is made for this kind of thing.  And this is the revelation of how to have spiritual hygiene in your soul; reject the Word and it’s the fastest way to become a spiritual sewer.  It will always work that way.

 

Now I can’t impress people enough, I’ve had some people come along and study the Word and study the Word and study the Word and finally they latch onto… you know, taking in the Word of God is a way of life.  One of our men in the congregation gets up at 5:00 o’clock in the morning to whip through a tape before he gets to work, and then studies a little bit on the noon hour.  It’s the kind of people like that that we’re going to build a congregation with, and the rest of the people that are kind of flaky types, that can’t just find…they’re so terribly busy that they just don’t have any time whatsoever for daily intake of the Word.  Well, you’re just losers, that’s all and you’re going to be the kind that’s going to get yourself in a jam or you’ll be the kind that just kind of slowly… like a slow leak in the tire, and then we replace you with a fresh one.  But that’s the way it is, that’s the cause/effect.

 

Let’s look at another passage, John 12, same Gospel that we’re studying, same use of the word “believe.”  It’s the halfway point in Jesus ministry, you can almost mark it in all the Gospels, the 12th chapter is usually a divider, before the 12th chapter Jesus is always outward positive, at the 12th chapter he just…forget it, and from the 12th chapter on Jesus retracts and just deals with the disciples.  John 12 is the boundary here, and in John 12:37 John says, “But though He had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on Him.”  They didn’t believe, now you see, “believe” there can’t mean that they didn’t believe that the miracles were historically valid, they saw them.  They believed the miracles were a historic fact, they didn’t have any trouble with that.  But they didn’t interpret those miracles in the divine viewpoint.  Their interpretation was wrong.

 

John 12:38, why? “That the saying of Isaiah the prophet, might be fulfilled, which he spoke, Lord, who has believed our report?  And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  [39] Therefore, they could not believe, because that Isaiah said again, [40] He has blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.”  Now it sounds like they couldn’t believe because Isaiah said, and that’s correct.  The reason is they had rejected the Old Testament.  Like Jesus said, Nicodemus, I have told you and told you and told you, truth after truth after truth after truth after truth, over and over and over and over and over and you haven’t believed, I’m not going to give you any more.  And this is Isaiah, same concept.  This is the Biblical justification for saying the hell with you.  Now this really means it, the hell with you.  Reject the Word and to hell with you.  That’s what the Word is saying, and it’s not just slang, it really means what it says.

 

Colossians 2:8, our final  passage for the evening.  This is one of the central passages in this whole area of understanding the structure of human viewpoint.  We had some of this last time but not verse 8 in particular, and we want to spend out time in closing on Colossians 2:8, we’re still studying the structure of human viewpoint and looking at verses pertaining to the structure of human viewpoint.  Paul says, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”  Now this is not a pitch against philosophy.  It says, “Beware lest any man spoil you,” sulagogeo in the Greek and it means to take captive and… you’d be in a battle or something, you’d take spoils, and you’d take them captive, and it’s a picture of the angelic conflict that’s going on; here are men in the world and what Paul says is look, you’d better beware because as Christians, remember he’s writing to Christians, you’d better beware as Christians if you take in doctrine and you get straightened out or you are going to be just put on the bench, you’re going to be carried off the field as spiritual POWs.  You’re going to be incapacitated, you’re not going to be an ambassador for anybody because you’ve just lost your ability to interpret facts correctly.  When things come up you can’t analyze them, you can’t put them in their proper perspective and the reason is, “beware lest any man spoil you,” make you a POW, “spoil you through,” by means of, “the philosophy” in the Greek, it has the article so it’s not talking about just philosophy in general, it’s talking about a particular kind of philosophy, “the philosophy,” (comma), “through vain deceit,”  now what does the “vain deceit” mean.  The “vain deceit” is autonomous thought, man seeking his own.  It’s that same old center of human viewpoint, “vain deceit.” 

 

What has Satan said to Eve?  Eve, God has made a statement and I make a statement, you decide who’s right.  Man doesn’t have the prerogative to decide who’s right in the matter of God.  Now if God and Satan were both equal in authority, just like if Nicodemus and Jesus were both human beings of finite limited knowledge, then we could sit down, we could discuss the question.  But to treat the question between God’s claim and man as though both are on man’s level itself is a denial of the whole thing from the very start.  Did you ever wonder why you start out with a big long calculation, you make a big thing up here, 2 + 2 is 5 and bang, I understand they use calculators now so you don’t do that unless you punch the wrong button.  But I can remember at MIT get some physics exams and we’d have about 15 parts to a problem; it used to make me so mad, you’d get the wrong answer, everything would be perfect but you made a mistake back here in step one.  Well, it’s the same concept here, you can make a wrong turn and everything else goes down the drain and the wrong turn is looking at Eve again with Satan here.  Here is the true situation, you have God and I’ll draw Him with an open box because He’s infinite; and you have Satan, I’ll draw him with a closed box.  God makes a claim and Satan makes a claim.  Now in that case obviously you go with God’s claim because God, by definition speaks truth.  But what Satan always tries to get you to do is make the situation appear like that’s not what’s happening but this is what’s happening; God and Satan both are making claims that have mutually the same authority.

 

Do you see what he does; he doesn’t erase God, he just quantifies…he makes Him smaller, and then the moment he can get you thinking “I will decide whether God or Satan is correct,” he’s already got you just exactly where he wants, because you’ve asked the question on his basis. We haven’t even got to the answer, you’ve asked the question exactly the way he wants it.  “Is Christianity true or not” is an absurd question.  God says it is and to ask the question “Is Christianity true or not” is to already capitulate to Satan’s autonomous thinking.  It’s already to argue that God makes one claim that is no better than Satan’s claim and therefore we must decide whether one is correct or the other.  It’s the same satanic line that he gave Eve and so Paul makes the same thing here.  “Beware, lest any man make you a POW through the philosophy and the vain deceit,” empty human viewpoint, and then he says, “according to the standard, kata, it’s the word for standard, “according to the standard,” and here comes a very important word, “according to the standard of the tradition of men,” (comma), “according to the standard of the tradition of men means he’s emphasizing its finite in its source, “the tradition of men,” (comma), “the rudiments of the world.”  Now I checked this word out and it’s a very interesting word.  It looks like this in the Greek, stoicheia, that’s plural neuter.  This word, stoicheia, if you check it out the way it was used in Paul’s day in philosophy, it is exactly the word for presupposition. 

 

In F. E. Peter’s book, Greek Philosophic Terms, page 181, speaking of stoicheia, he says:  “The reality behind the term is, of course, far more vulnerable; it is the object of the Mylesian quest,” these are the early Greeks, “It is the object of the Mylesian quest for the primary something [can’t understand word] of which the physical reality of the world is made, an attempt to trace the undeniable fact of change back to its starting point.  The Mylesian search for basic ingredients was resumed and [can’t understand who] himself took the lead and selected as the four basic bodies of this material world, earth, fire, air and water, the canonical four elements.”  And upon that which the philosophists thought to be the most basic, basic, basic, basic thing, they tried to build their whole system on those four elements. Everything came from the four elements.  And what were the four elements: the word used here.

 

So now reading Colossians 2:8 the way it would have been in that day what has Paul just told us?  Beware Christian, because he’s talking to believers, “Beware Christian, lest any man knock you ought of the fight by means of the philosophy and vain deceit according to the standards of the presupposition of the world system,” the word world is kosmos, “according to the presuppositions of the world system, not according to Christ.”  So he contrasts the presuppositions of the world system with Jesus Christ and makes Christ versus the presuppositions.  So again, let’s finish by thinking of the Nicodemus discourse.

 

Jesus is talking to a Jewish rabbi.  We have this Jesus, the fact, and we have this Nicodemus, the fact, and the fact is we have these two persons, and we are observers to this discussion that goes on between Nicodemus and Jesus.  One of us is over here in the human viewpoint box and one is over here in the divine viewpoint box; we both look at the same facts but both look at it through two different perspectives.  The person sitting here in the human viewpoint box sees it as a mere conversation between two men, two Jewish rabbis, exchanging mutually valid opinions.  And then we must impartially decide whether Nicodemus is right or whether Jesus is right.  But the person looking at the same facts on the divine viewpoint looks over here and he sees a finite sinful rebellious creature facing his Creator, the Son of man who is in heaven.  And he doesn’t even raise the question of who is right.  You see, the question you raise…the question you raise is where you get off the track to start with.  And how fast we try to witness and accept the unbeliever’s question as a valid question to begin with.  And then trot along 100 miles down the line and wonder why in the heck are we down here?  Because like suckers, and I’ve done this too, we have borrowed the non-Christian’s own question, treating it as though it were a right question to ask in the first place, never questioning that right to that question.  But rather sitting here as though we were observers to Nicodemus and Jesus and sitting down and saying well, you know, Jesus might be wrong because Jesus is only a man, he’s only finite, His claim is only the tradition of men.  Now we are intelligent beings so we must decide which tradition of men is correct.  And some believers  yes, yes, we must do this.  What are some evidences that we could persuade that Jesus’ finite opinion is correct instead of Nicodemus’ finite opinion.  And then we look around all our evidence books, we go to Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict and we see on page 304, oh, we’ve got a lot of evidences here that we can prove that Jesus’ finite opinion is better than Nicodemus’ finite opinion. 

 

In the last analysis we can never prove Christianity that way because we started at the wrong place; we started on the non-Christian’s own view of that conversation. We made a mistake, not when we turned to the evidence; we made our mistake when we took our first step.  We forgot, we forgot the non-Christian’s was wrong, he didn’t see it right to start with, he can’t even raise an intelligent question.  The non-Christian who sat there and watched Nicodemus and Jesus didn’t understand it, and we have to tell him that, that he doesn’t understand it.  He is so spiritually blind he can’t even ask the right question, we have to ask the question for him. 

 

And then after we raise the question we can answer it, but he can’t even raise an intelligent question.  Next week we’ll continue with this and we’ll go into Ephesians and some of the other passages that have to do with apologetics.  1 Corinthians 2 if you’d like to do some reading.