Clough John Lesson 68

Thomas: Faith and Evidences – John 20:24-31

In John 20 and into 21 we have the resurrection of the Word. These chapters show that history has ended in the person of Christ, that He is the vanguard of the end, and because He is resurrected He is beyond the time of testing and therefore He in His own person represents the guarantee that history will come to a literal conclusion along the lines that God said it would. That’s the significance cosmically of the resurrection of Christ. Tonight we are going to finish chapter 20 and in so doing encounter the problem of what is faith. John 21 is basically an epilogue in the Gospel of John, it deals with certain restoration problems with Peter. But chapter 20 concludes with one of the most key portions in Scripture on what faith is. There are a lot of questions going around, just what is faith? It’s a word that’s batted around and some people use the word with great timidity because it carries a connotation in some quarters that if you don’t know something for sure, then at least say that you believe it. In other words, it’s a second and third rate kind of knowledge. That’s the connotation of the word faith; if you really knew you wouldn’t say I believe I know; when you say I believe that I know something is true you somehow qualify it and make it sound weak. That’s the average man in the street’s idea of faith; it still is and has been for some time. But that’s not what the Scriptures say it is; it is not a lesser way of knowing.

The other thing that we have to clarify, and actually why we have to clarify faith is because when we witness, regardless to whom we’re witnessing, we are always, basically presenting the gospel in four points: we’re presenting the nature of God, the nature of sin, the nature of His grace and redemption and lastly, the nature of faith. So we ought to be clear, this is one fourth of the gospel, we ought to be clear on what we believe in our minds to be proper faith. Obviously there are a lot of pagan competitions today to what true faith is. And so as we pass through this passage we’ll look at certain elements in it and then toward the end we’ll pull it together and conclude with several propositions on the matter of faith and belief.

It begins in John 20:24 and continues to the end of the chapter. “But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. [25] The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. [26] And after eight days again His disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. [27] Then saith He to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold My hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into My side: and be not faithless, but believing. [28] And Thomas answered and said unto him, my Lord and my God. [29] Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. [30] And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: [31] But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.”

Thomas…Thomas was a believer who goes down in history as the “doubting Thomas.” And therefore, fortunately by a twist of Romans 8:28 doubting Thomas becomes a vehicle for Jesus Christ to show us what real faith is. Notice in verse 25 Thomas’ statement. He says I will never believe, the last part of verse 25, it’s a very, very strong negative, I will never believe unless I have certain conditions fulfilled, those conditions being the empirical evidence of Christ’s wounds, and if and only if that condition is fulfilled will I believe. Now the problem, obviously, is that there’s something inordinate about this request; something that Jesus slaps him with in verse 27 at the end when He says stop being faithless, Thomas. Obviously there’s something in this request that displeases Christ or He wouldn’t answer the way He does back to Thomas. So as we read verse 25 and think of this problem we’ve got to ask ourselves, what is inherently displeasing about asking for evidences of faith.

The first question we might ask, verse 25, and ask Jesus, if we had an occasion in the room with the discussion, well Lord, is Thomas wrong because he asked for evidences? And if we are good students of the Scripture we’ll know that that can’t be; it’s not wrong in Scripture to ask for evidences. Let’s be sure of this; it’s been some time since we’ve looked at this chain of references so let’s go back to Luke 1. Maybe some of you have come out of backgrounds where it was told you, many times perhaps by clergy, that you ought not to ask questions but only believe, and various other things. In this chain of references we’re going to examine what it is that Scripture says about evidences for faith. Are the clergymen right who say don’t ask questions, just believe. Is this biblical? Or is the person who in the great emotions of a conference some sort says don’t worry about the questions, we’ll answer the questions later, just right now come forward. Is this the proper biblical position. Let’s look at these evidences.

Luke 1:1-4, the introduction to the Gospel of Luke, “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,” notice the confidence. [2] “Even if they have delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; [3] It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, [4] That you might know the certainty of those things wherein thou hast been instructed.” Does that sound like Luke is asking Theophilus to believe just for the sake of believing? Or does it sound like Luke expects Theophilus to appreciate evidences, that Theophilus is to consider the facts before he believes. Quite obviously verse 4 is shouting to us loudly and clearly that biblical faith means content, it means facts, it doesn’t mean unscrewing your head when you walk through the door and leaving it in the lobby; it means coming to Christ with brain intact.

Let’s look at another reference. Turn to Acts 1:1-3, Luke’s other document, Luke again, same author, same recipient of his work; Acts is volume 2 of Luke’s two sets in his history of Christianity. “The former treatise” which is the Gospel of Luke, “have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, [2] Until the day in which He was taken up, after that He, through the Holy Spirit, had given commandments unto the apostles whom He had chosen. [3] To whom also He showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs, being seen by them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” Does that sound like Luke or even Jesus, for that matter, expect people to believe without evidence, without thought, without consideration? Not at all. Would Luke be the kind of man that would stimulate someone in sheer group emotional pressure to get a decision, quick, hurry up, tomorrow it might be too late or would he be the kind of man who would say yes, there will come a time when it may be too late, but right now your job is to consider the evidence of God’s revelation.

Let’s turn to another writer, 1 Corinthians 15:14 and Paul; just a brief survey, not all the verses by any means, but a brief survey of the many verses in the New Testament. Notice what Paul is saying; this is the famous chapter, we go to it time and time again because it’s so often forgotten in Christian circles. Verse 14, “And if Christ be not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain.” Now that verse may teach a lot of things but there’s one thing it surely teaches, that if the historical factuality of Christ’s resurrection does not exist, you can cancel out the entire Christian faith. Now isn’t that saying that our faith rests upon historic facts? Obviously. Paul is saying you just can’t believe because you want to believe or you can’t be like the Jehovah’s Witness who talks about spiritual resurrection, whatever that is. Or the liberal who talks about the moral influence of the empty tomb, whatever kind of a resurrection that’s supposed to be. Only a literal physical resurrection of Christ is tolerable and if it never came off, we’ve got a fake faith; that’s what Paul is saying, it’s phony to the core.

Let’s turn to Peter and see what Peter says, 2 Peter 1, spread around the evidence a little bit just to show you it wasn’t John who said all these things. In 2 Peter 1:16, the men of the early church did not demand that you believe ahead of your intelligence. “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.” He insists that he is a trustworthy observer; he didn’t get this third, fourth and fifth hand; he personally observed the Lord Jesus Christ, particularly in the Mount of Transfiguration and other places in the context here. Peter, the apostle, then insists upon the validity of the message. If it were just a spiritual thing, if it were just the idea of Christianity that redeems, who cares whether Peter is an eyewitness; who cares whether Jesus really rose from the dead or not. If it’s just a psychological trip then facts don’t make any difference.

Now that’s the point that we have to bear down so hard on because we’re dealing with people who are infatuated with trips, drug trips, Oriental religion trips, sex trips, the whole thing, it’s always a trip unrelated to factual objective content. So over and over it behooves you to go through this, when you read your Bibles as Christians take note, put a check in the margin when you read, when you see something that’s factually important, when you see something that’s historically valid or that can be falsified if somebody went back to check it. Do that, you’d accumulate these check marks in your Bible reading on your own over a year or so and then at the end of a year or so watch how many check marks you’ve accumulated in the margin of your Bible. You’ll be amazed at how often it is that the New Testament data impinges on history; it is not isolated in some sort of compartment to be presented with men as a great intellectual system; it is primarily a historical revelation and only secondarily an intellectual system.

And finally turn to 1 John 1:1, the emphasis again upon the historical data. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.” Now just look at that, “we have heard,” the sense of sound, “we have looked,” optical sensation, we have touched, the sense of touch, what more empirical evidences do you want, he is naming the channels of empirical perception and he is saying through the channels of empirical perceptions came God’s revelation.

So quite obviously Thomas cannot be faulted for asking for evidences. There must be something else that Jesus is faulting Thomas for so let’s turn back to John 20, to interpret it as asking for evidences is to run against the grain of the New Testament. That’s a wrong interpretation; our interpretation must be controlled by other Scripture. That can’t be the interpretation of this passage; Jesus can’t be mad at Thomas for asking for evidences. Well, what then is He mad at. The hint is given in verse 29, “Jesus said unto him, Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed; blessed,” however, “are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” That second class of people, that’s us. That second class of people who have not seen and yet believed, are not people that have believed in a factual vacuum; they’re people who have had evidence but it has not been direct evidence; it has been mediated to them through the apostles. You and I have never seen Jesus Christ historically; there’s not one person in this room that has seen Jesus Christ person to person. All of us have seen Christ only as He has come to us through the apostles. This is why we believe in the holy catholic and apostolic church which alone forgives sins because it is only by union with the apostles that we have a picture of Jesus Christ. The Christ that we know is known only through the apostles testimony, and so therefore we have not seen; we have seen only indirectly by eyewitnesses report. We’re not eyewitnesses; we have heard some eyewitnesses.

And that’s what Jesus is talking about in verse 29. He is saying Thomas, you now are declared to be an eyewitness. Back in verse 25 you had a chance to believe Thomas, but then you would have had to have believed having the data mediated to you, transmitted to you by an eyewitness, you yourself not being one. You would have had to have trusted the disciples message and trusting the message could have believed; now Thomas, stop being faithless, as he says in verse 27. Well, putting verse 25, verse 27 and verse 29 together we can find out why Jesus was mad at Thomas. He wasn’t mad at Thomas because Thomas asked for evidence. He was mad at Thomas because Thomas asked for unnecessary evidence. There’s a certain sufficient amount of evidence and beyond which it is sinful to ask God and therefore what Jesus is saying, Thomas the revelation you had available to you then was sufficient, and for you to demand from Me further evidence before you are going to believe is sin, and therefore Jesus cuts him off in verse 27, stop being so faithless Thomas.

Now people often say at this point that they don’t like the New Testament and they don’t like a lot of these pictures in the Bible for the reason of Thomas; they are the Thomas’s of our day; you’ve met them, I’m sure; maybe at times the little doubting Thomas in your sin nature has popped through in your life. Oh, if I could only see Jesus Christ directly. Or if you are discussing the question with someone, well I’d believe if God spoke to me like He spoke to those apostles, but I’m not going to believe that because good night, the last time God spoke in history was 20 centuries ago, it’s been a long time. So what! What the point is and the weakness of this whole thing, the fly in the ointment is that anyone who says to you that they will not believe unless they are direct eyewitnesses of something are people who are most inconsistent with that tenant. See, they say that they will not trust or accept anything unless they directly see it; that puts them in a most uncomfortable position because the first corollary that grows out of that particular canon, if they’re willing to apply it on other questions than Christianity, of course usually they’re not. Usually they just dream this thing up as a sort of filter to protect themselves from your presentation and so this is a good way of turning you off, by erecting this barrier.

But if you want to use it back on them just say well, that’s an interesting criteria you have of truth; the only truth that you will accept is truth that you immediately and directly perceive. Well friend, what do you do about history? Do you directly perceive George Washington? Have you directly perceived any of the major figures of history? Then what do you do with history? And so therefore that kind of canon rigorously applied would destroy history and if you’ve destroyed history you’ve destroyed law, for law comes out of legal tradition which itself is embedded in history, so therefore there is no law because after all, you weren’t there when it was codified; you weren’t there when the judge passed sentence, you weren’t there when that legal tradition developed, so that would undo all law and jurisprudence. It would undo all of history and interestingly, it would undo all of science, because a scientific experiment was something that was done in history, recorded in the past for future scientists; oh yes, the person could check it but just how many experiments can one do in one’s lifetime; obviously a very small number. And so therefore such a person is not serious, can’t be serious, and it’s your job as a Christian to show him that he can’t be serious and live with that kind of a canon of truth. Most truth that we obtain is obtained indirectly, not directly; it is obtained through other eyewitnesses of history, through records, through books, through memory. In fact, that canon that the person says I won’t believe unless I personally see it, could even be interpreted to cut off his memory because after all, right now he’s not seeing what he saw two seconds ago and therefore he can’t believe what he saw two seconds ago, he can only believe what is basically in the present, in which case he can never learn because he can never remember. So quite obviously that criteria breaks down somewhere and it breaks down because it’s a nonsense criteria.

Now that’s something that the sidewalk person will throw your way every once in a while when they want to blow smoke in your direction; the obvious counter response is blow harder and blow the smoke back in their eyes instead of yours. So Jesus Christ does not accept this demand for superior evidence from Thomas. Jesus expects Thomas to deal with the evidence that he has.

And then what happened? In John 20:26, “after eight days,” notice again it’s on a Sunday, notice how many of these times these events happen on a Sunday, as if the Holy Spirit is shouting to us loudly and clearly through the text, look Christians, here’s where it all started, here’s why Sunday, not Saturday is the day of worship now. This is why those people who want to worship on Saturday, as Arnold Fruchtenbaum said are just Gentiles trying to become Jews. The proper Christian celebration is not Saturday; it is Sunday, the evidence is this very shift you are observing here in verse 26, the key events are happening on Sunday.

And so when it happens John the Apostle is quite quick to point out to us the conditions. Notice he puts “the doors being shut;” the same thing as in verse 19, just so he sets the stage, there’s no possible way that Jesus could have gotten in that room; He didn’t crawl through the window, didn’t come through the keyhole. Jesus Christ came in some mysterious and miraculous way through His resurrection body. He filters out, in other words, all the human viewpoint explanations for the miracle.

And then the most amazing thing happens in verse 27, Jesus repeats the language of verse 25. But separating verse 25 and 27 is an eight day period. Furthermore what is separating verse 25 and 27 is the fact that Jesus wasn’t there, apparently, when verse 25 was stated. When Thomas stated verse 25 Thomas was alone, he thought, with all the disciples. Nobody was there to hear him, the room wasn’t bugged; then how is it that when Jesus suddenly appears in the room in verse 27 He says, Thomas, come here, got something for you. How did Jesus know that? Don’t you think that Thomas wasn’t stuck by that; good night, He knows my heart, the theme of the Gospel of John; Jesus has eyes that look inside men; men have eyes that only look on the outside. As it says in 1 Samuel 16, man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord on the inward appearance and here we have evidence of God’s striking omniscience. And that’s why, when Thomas responds in verse 28 the way he does, “my Kurios and my Theos,” “my Lord and my God.” That’s why he responds that way, he recognizes immediately omniscience is here, who knows me like that? Only God does.

Now that also gives a very exciting indication of how John expected people to recognize Christ. If we could take a time machine and go backwards across the centuries and walk in Palestine when Jesus was there, and walk up to Jesus and engage Jesus in a conversation, after reading John you can bet one thing at least about that conversation; after you got through talking with Christ you’d have this uncanny creepy feeling that He knows you better than you know yourself; He is too familiar with you, and that is the subjective sensation that omniscience is looking at you; not Big Brother, omniscience is looking at you, and it was to that that Thomas replied. He just surrendered right here, “my Kurios and my Theos,” “my Lord and my God,” a full confession of Christ’s deity. And please notice, nobody in the room said oops, shouldn’t have said that, Jesus is only a man, don’t worship Him as God. There’s no correction in the text; Jesus permitted this response to His full deity without any correction whatsoever; there’s the evidence of Christ’s divine nature. If Christ was a man, then He’s a blasphemer because He permitted this kind of response to happen without correction.

And then John the Apostle goes on to summarize. First verse 29, the Lord Jesus Christ then divides the human race into two categories, He says there are part and parcel of the human race of Christians, there’s a select group who are the eyewitnesses, a very small number of people in the church ever saw Jesus Christ face to face, a very small number indeed. These are the ones, like the Thomas’s, but all of us, the millions and millions of people who have trusted in Christ over the years, we fall in category two; we’ve never seen Him face to face, and therefore John leaves the conversation at the end of 29 and then proceeds immediately to his editorial note in verses 30-31, because obviously if you stopped with verse 29 you’d have the situation where Jesus says how are these people going to believe if there’s no eyewitnesses. If you are not an eyewitness, how do you get your data? Well, there has to be some method and that’s why verses 30-31 mention the method; the method is the New Testament Scripture.

That’s the method by which those who have seen and believe pass on to those who have not seen but yet must believe, and thus it reads: “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. [31] But these have been written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.” Notice the force of this; notice some of the implications. First in verse 30, it says that many other things Jesus did, but only these are written, and that shows you that inspiration of Scripture is a smaller circle than revelation. In other words, Jesus Christ revealed many things in history; after all, think of the number of hours the guys spent with Him. Do you realize that if you sum up all the data we’ve got in Christ’s life, we’ve only got about three weeks out of three years ministry; that’s all; that’s all we’ve got here. So obviously there had to be some filtering out and the Word of God preserved only part of the revelation given in history. That’s why Roman Catholics believe that they’re got this stuff out here that wasn’t put in the Scripture. We hold that that has just simply dropped out of history, that’s all, it’s just been forgotten, erased, buried, but regardless, the next verse is very comforting because in verse 31 it says these are sufficient “that you might believe,” that’s [can’t understand word], so what if you only have three weeks data on a three year ministry, the Holy Spirit insists that we have sufficient data in order to believe, that’s the point. There is available to every member of the human race sufficient data to believe.

Now let’s see if we can pull this together; some of you will be going to hear Frances Schaeffer in the spring, some of you have read his books and other books by C. S. Lewis, some have read books by Gordon Clark, others have read books by John Warwick Montgomery or Clark Pinnick and many of the other people writing, John McDowell and so forth. Now the question: all these men are dealing with evidences; some deal with the specific evidences; men for example like Montgomery, Pinnick and John McDowell, the specific things, the evidences for the empty tomb, the inscriptions that substantiate this portion, the archeological digs that substantiate this claim and so on; these are the pieces of data, the empirical historical evidences. There are men that emphasize those. And then there are the presuppositionalists, Van Till, Clark, Frances Schaeffer, who emphasize the assumptions one must make to interpret correctly those pieces of data and we have a tremendous controversy seesawing back and forth between these two wings in evangelical Christianity. You just ought to be aware of it.

Many of you will have, probably, in your private life no use for the details but still as informed Christians you ought to be aware there is this polarity of discussion between the men who emphasize the historic evidences and the men who emphasize the presupposition, that’s been going on since 1943 as far as the formal discussion and I presume it will go on for some more. So we want to look at this and see, where do we stand when we witness. After all, the whole point of John 20 is evangelistic and 9 out of 10 of us are going to be using the material in John’s Gospel in our lives in a witnessing context rather than a formal philosophic apologetic context. So we want t kind of get straight where we stand in all this. So let’s start by defining two words and maybe we can bring a little bit more order out of the discussion.

Let’s define the word “apologetic” and the word “evangelism.” These are two different areas for the Christian and they can’t be confused. To confuse them is often lethal in day to day experience. In apologetics we are speaking to systems of thought; apologetics is directed to human viewpoint systems; for example, Marxism, Hegel’s philosophy, the Cartesian concept, in the areas of psychology and the nature of man, behaviorism, Freudianism, systems and apologetics deals with systems not with people—systems. It’s therefore obviously intellectual; there’s no room in apologetics for the fact that isn’t this truth exciting; that’s a statement that has nothing to do with apologetics; it may have something to do with evangelism but not apologetics. Apologetics is a formal study, an intellectual study. In apologetics very often it isn’t even a study of volition, that is, compelling someone to believe; often it’s just a simple intellectual analysis of where systems lead. That’s apologetics.

Apologetics has two functions for the Christian and to a degree we all use this, even though many of us don’t even know one apologist, we’ve never read a book on the subject, we couldn’t even sit down for three minutes to introduce the subject to anyone, but nevertheless, we all benefit from apologetics in two ways. First, apologetics destroys our positional views to the Christian faith; it’s a destructive ministry; the apologist is a man who studies intellectual systems and he specializes in tearing them apart so they do not become obstacles to faith. In that sense apologetics is a negative, destructive thing; it is necessary in the war of ideas that go on between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. It’s aiming the artillery into the enemy’s camp to chatter his system. That’s the role of apologetics. Be glad that some men are doing this, that they have refuted the axioms of Marxism, that there are available systematic dismantling of practically every non-Christian position. Be thankful for the creationist for their dismantling of evolution. So we have men who destroy things.

For example, let’s take some illustrations so we can get an idea what it means to destroy something. Take the philosophy of cosmic evolution that everyone sort of subscribes to. Cosmic evolution says in essence that all things are evolving upward, whatever upward means. And the apologist comes along and he says you have some problems with your system as a non-Christian, problems which I as a Christian challenge you and as a Christian I challenge you on the basic point that if evolution is correct then it must mean man’s intellect has evolved along with the process and therefore you are speaking out of a finite mind which itself is embedded in the process of evolution. Darwin anticipated that in his book, The Dissent of Man, but he never did anything with it, he just made a cryptic remark that I sometimes wonder how a monkey’s brain can be trusted. And he wasn’t being facetious, he caught the whole point, that if evolution is correct it shatters what we call epistemology, it shatters man’s ability to know because man’s mind is itself is embedded in the changing process. How then can that mind get outside of the process to look at it. Other problems with cosmic evolution is that it collides with the second law of thermodynamics which says that everything is degrading, it’s not going upward, it’s going downward. All systems left to themselves, open or closed, go downward.

So then we have some other systems. When I was in college one of the favorite books on campus was A. J. Ayers work on logical positivism and everyone who had some technical background thought this was great because A. J. Ayer comes along and he says there are all sorts of statements, some meaningful, some meaningless, but the only statements that are meaningful are the statements that can be, what he called, verified, that is by looking in space/time history for evidences. And any other statement, such as “God is love,” and what he called metaphysical statements, are meaningless, we just flush them off the board. Only statements that can be empirically verified are meaningful, so said A.J. Ayer… until people began to work on logical positivism and they pointed out a very interesting flaw. How does that criterion itself verify; you say that only truth that can be verified in experience counts but how do I know that on the basis of experience. So logical positivism could never verify itself and therefore in recent years people have kind of calmed down; the air has been let out of the balloon a little bit. But it would never have, had not there been perceptive intellectual people committed to the destruction of the system and it’s exposure to contradiction.

Take, on a very sidewalk level, very informal level, everyday level, everyone of you has come across someone who said everything is relative; but be very quick to point out that that statement is the most dynamic absolute statement you could ever make. So that is what apologetics does, it unmasks, destroys and disintegrates the opponents to the Christian faith; their systems, not the people, the systems of thought. Two tests often used are what we call the internal consistency test, is a system consistent with itself, that’s Deuteronomy 13:1-4 for an application inside Israel, and then there’s a second test, does the system fit reality, that’s given in Deuteronomy 18:20-22. In other words, what I’m saying is the book of Deuteronomy was very knowledgeable; Moses was very knowledgeable about these two tests that existed back in his day.

That’s apologetics negative function; remember apologetics is to speak to systems, not people; it is used to destroy these systems as impediments to the Christian faith. By the way, an apologist doesn’t walk around with a gun, oh, there’s a good system, boom. That’s not the spirit of the apologist; the apologist is only concerned when that system becomes a block to man trusting in Christ, then he becomes concerned and then he deploys. But it must be a block to the Christian faith first, and be a demonstrated serious block to the Christian faith first.

But apologetics has a positive application for us as Christians and that is it demonstrates the intellectual foundations of Christianity. It demonstrates the intellectual foundations of the Christian faith; that you don’t have to be intellectually ashamed to be a Bible-believing Christian. You can be a graduate student, you can be on a college faculty and hold your head high in confidence that no one can undermine you intellectually; no one! No one has ever undermined the Christian faith intellectually. They’ve made attacks upon it but no one upon no one, over 20 centuries, has ever undermined the Christian faith. So apologetics has a positive function, to demonstrate the intellectual integrity of Christianity.

Just from what I’ve said here’s some practical things you can do. Any man who’s an apologist and you’re looking in a book store, you’re looking in the church library, why would you want to go to an apologist? Why would you want to pull Frances Schaeffer off the shelf? Why would you want to pull Cornelius Van Til off the shelf? You don’t know all there is to know about this; apologetics may be a foreign study to you. Maybe somebody’s kind of put a burr in your saddle about gee, I don’t know whether Christianity really stands up intellectually. All right, the place to go if that’s your problem is a Christian apologist; that’s their ministry to you. One member of the body of Christ to another member of the body of Christ; an apologist’s ministry to you.

But now let’s contrast that with evangelism. In evangelism we’re not speaking to a system; in evangelism we’re simply speaking to an unregenerate man whom we are seeking to win to Christ. So evangelism is people centered, not system centered. And obviously when we begin to talk to people then we’ve got the problem of the fact that people are inconsistent, and if people are inconsistent then we’ve got the additional problem of how do we work with the inconsistency. So evangelism speaks to people. Now it speaks to a particular part of people. The apologist deals only with intellect; that’s his major thing. That’s why people come away and they say gee, this didn’t spiritually stir me, I know the four fallacies of Hegel but that really doesn’t turn me on spiritually.

Well, the evangelist isn’t concerned with just touching the intellect of a person, he’s concerned with touching his conscience. Ultimately the evangelist is interested in bringing conviction for sin; that’s his ultimate goal; it’s not to dismantle the system; if he has to dismantle the system, fine, that may be necessary to get through but the major target where he wants to drop his bomb is on the conscience, not on the system, the point being that if someone came up to witness to Hegel, there’s a difference between Hegelianism and Hegel. Nobody’s a perfect Hegelian, even Hegel. And so therefore in talking personally to Hegel it’d be a little different than discussing Hegel’s system, because Hegel is a person. Hegel has emotions, Hegel has volition, Hegel has personal relationships with people around him; these are to be considered in the evangelistic process. You don’t treat Hegel like a book, you treat him like a person made in God’s image who has a conscience who ought to know right from wrong.

So we then have the problem of evangelism focusing on man and in particularly not just their intellect, but their conscience, to produce conviction over sin, that’s the issue; otherwise you can kiss off the gospel because if a person isn’t convicted of their sin of rebellion against God they’re not going to even give Jesus a second glance.

Now evangelism, examples of writings by intellectuals who are evangelists, would be the writings of C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis tends far more to be an evangelist than he does an apologist. And this is why, if you read C. S. Lewis the moral force of his text hits you. That’s because he’s not functioning as an apologist; he’s not erecting an elaborate system of apologetics; to a lesser degree Frances Schaeffer, in practice, in his conversation at L’Abri, functions as an evangelist, though in his writings he functions more as an apologist.

There’s the difference between apologetics and evangelism. Evangelism; we’ve looked a little bit at apologetics, it destroys the system, it tries to show that Christianity is positive, but now we want to concentrate a little bit more on evangelism to kind of set this off because most of us are interested in evangelism, not apologetics. Those who are interested in just theories will be interested in apologetics and what we can use that the apologists give us. But in most cases we’re going to be concerned with evangelism. So let’s proceed under some things about evangelism and how an evangelist stimulates, draws out, faith in the individual person. What are the proper ways, what are some things that ought to be known in the process of trying to lead someone to Jesus Christ?

Turn to Romans 2; an evangelist comes to the unsaved man with God’s revelation. God has spoken but that’s not the only part of God’s revelation. Think of it for a moment; if you have a close friend then that person reveals their character to you, not just by words by actions. So therefore God’s revelation, just like a person’s revelation, is words and acts, words and works, these two things. Let’s look at God’s revelation and let’s divide it into classical categories. The first category of God’s revelation is what men have called God’s general revelation; the second class is God’s special revelation. These are the two names for the whole full orb of revelation. Don’t be impatient because I’ve got a purpose in bringing all four of these to you, because we are making in some of our circles a very bad mistake; we’re not doing this and I’ll show you where we’re not doing it before we finish.

There are four parts to God’s revelation; each of these subdivides into two parts. God’s general revelation includes the way He makes man and the way He makes the universe, or nature. The nature of man itself is a revelation of God, even before we discuss the Bible. The nature of the universe itself is revelation of God. In our family training program our next section is on the Trinity and we’ll see how the Trinity is manifested in the created order. Then God’s special revelation, what’s that? The Bible and Jesus Christ. Together all four constitute God’s revelation, not just numbers 3 and 4 but numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4 together constitute God’s revelation. This is why we at Lubbock Bible Church try to do something and we are deliberately doing it, to bring in to your awareness, those slides for example, why do I bother and mess around with these slides when we teach a passage of Scripture. To show you that it’s not just the Bible, that’s category 2, here’s the universe, this is the way history really was, here’s the place where it happened. That’s why I’m using slides. Why from time to time I’ll play a tape from a non-Christian, you say why bother with that? Because those non-Christian men are functioning in God’s universe and interaction with them gives us an idea and appreciation for God’s revelation. This is why we have [can’t understand word, tape is poor] the publication in the foyer; to bring Christians to [can’t understand word] to make them sensitive to what’s going on in literature, politics and all other areas. We do not believe that the church is a place only for revelations 3 and 4, but also revelation 1 and 2, because only when you take all four together do you have a credible message. You can’t have a credible message just talking about the Bible. You’ve got to take the Bible outward into the universe and toward man or you have nothing, you’re just playing an intellectual game. And a lot of Bible teaching in our own generation, who’s teaching great doctrine, but the doctrine is being concentrated at those last two levels and the first two levels are never being touched and the people that come out of those kind of ministries can never open a conversation of meaning with a non-Christian who doesn’t have the vocabulary. They’re just isolating themselves into almost an occultic type environment; that’s why we bring all four areas of revelation into play and this is why we’ve encouraged, for example, the music; why is the choir practicing classical music and some of the difficult pieces? Because music is a field of expression in areas 1 and 2. And therefore that has something to say about God and His character.

Let’s look at some of these parts; we’ll only look at small sections because of our limited time. Romans 2:14-15, please notice, that we are following a presuppositional approach in that revelation of man and the universe I am deliberately interpreting in the light of the Bible. We’re not going and we’re not saying oh, let’s look at man and see, eenie, meenie, minie moe, what does he tells us. That’s not how we’re approaching it; we’re saying through the eyes of Scripture we look at man and this is what we see. Now let’s look through the eyes of Scripture at that first area of revelation. It says in verse 14-15 who have never been in contact with the Scripture, but please notice, and always remember, verses 14-15 is a Scripture statement; it’s looking at man through Scriptures eyes. “For when the Gentiles, who have not the law,” that means they have had no revelation number 3, they have had no Bible, absolutely no Bible. But yet even those people are said to have faced the revelation of God.

Observe: “who have not the law, do intuitively,” that’s what the force of the word means, they “do intuitively the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; [15] Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.” What are those verses saying? They’re saying that man, all men, I don’t care whether they’ve ever seen the gospel, I don’t care whether their mother, grandmother, grandfather, great-great-great grandfather ever heard of the gospel, it doesn’t matter. They could have been in cultural isolation for 15 million years and the Bible still says that they have a conscience, they are men in God’s universe who in their soul show God’s nature. Whether they see the Bible or not is irrelevant; it says in verses 14-15 that these men… this is the first divine institution, that’s all, the sense of responsibility; they have a sense of responsibility regardless of whether they have ever had any guidelines in Scripture.

If you want an example in history from this, a very graphic one? Think of Cain. Did God ever tell Cain not to kill his brother? Was the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill” given to Adam, to Eve, to Cain, to Abel? It was not. Then let me ask you a question: why is it that after Cain killed his brother he felt guilty? Where did he get the idea of guilt from? He did feel guilty, that’s clear in Genesis 4, tremendously guilty, as he slit his brother’s throat. Where did Cain get this guilt from? It was not from the Bible. Cain got it out of his innate conscience, that’s where he got his guilt from, uninformed by Scripture. It wasn’t the Lord either that spoke to him because later on the Lord comes to Cain, specifically in the Hebrew comes to Cain, talks to him; the guilt that Cain felt he felt before God came to him. So what was it inside Cain that tripped? It wasn’t stored doctrine because he didn’t have any doctrine about killing. So the only way we can say from verses 14-15 is that God has made man in such a way that man knows very well indeed that there is a God and he’s responsible to Him. Very well indeed! And it doesn’t make any difference, artists musicians, philosophers, dock worker, ditch digger, it doesn’t make any difference; every single person you come in contact with knows he is responsible before God, period, it doesn’t matter whether he has any doctrine.

Let’s take another passage, Romans 1:20-21; we’ve looked at one portion of revelation that men know that God is there, by general revelation; their souls are built in such a way they know; they know they’re responsible. That’s the problem of modern psychology; most psychological theories, because they don’t take the Scripture seriously, only wind up facing this big bundle of hairy guilt feelings, and everybody’s wondering what did I do? Freud’s looking around, he’s going to shoot the super ego, let me get it, bang! Because Freud didn’t know what to do, he knew that the conscience worked, he knew that somehow there was somebody looking over the ego and saying no, no, no; Freud knew that because he knew man. The problem with Freud is he didn’t have the Bible to interpret what he saw. Vast scientific findings but he had no clue, no handle to pull it together into a coherent picture. We have; Freud just came in contact with man’s conscience and his sin nature and he made some good observations about it. But the poor man had no Scriptural key to tie it together.

Now in Romans 1:20, the other portion of general revelation: “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,” now notice, “the invisible things of Him,” the emphasis isn’t on the created order, it’s on God’s character. Notice how the verse ends, example: “His eternal power and deity [Godhead],” God’s character Paul insists is known through the structure of the universe, and it’s known by all men so clearly they are without excuse. Now that’s the second part of general revelation.

So let’s pull it together so far as we go through the chart. We know enough from Scripture that every person to whom you are led to witness is fully aware of at least two things; he has a moral sense of responsibility and he even has, if you want, propositional truth, somewhere in his soul. How it got there we don’t know, but Cain obviously had a proposition in his soul that bothered him, “thou shalt not murder thy brother, Cain.” Where did he get that proposition from? He was born with it somehow, God-consciousness. But Cain also had another proposition in his soul and that’s this proposition of the universe; as he looked upon the creation it must have been wonderful in that day, less contaminated, mutations, physical catastrophes and so on, he looked at the environment and he could look with his brain, see it was far more developed than ours probably; he looked at animal structures, he looked at plant structures, and he looked at these things and these things communicate an awareness of God and don’t say they don’t, they do. The only thing is that apostate man twists and turns the data around and reinterprets it as something else. So the Marxist sees a progress in history and he attributes the progress and sees not God’s sovereignty but he attributes it to economic processes. But nevertheless he does observe this thing in history.

So God’s plan in the universe is known to all men. Now take advantage of this when you witness. Don’t feel like, gee, everything I say is going t be totally unrelated to the real person. No, if you’re doing your best to communicate the Word of God to this person you are communicating not only to him, to the guts of him, to the conscience of that person because in that conscience is still general revelation. You’ve got a fifth column going for you, use it in evangelism. So this shows you that all men do, in fact, have the truth; the problem is what they’re doing with it. They have propositions that are true, ahead of the Scriptures coming to them.

Luke 15:11, the parable of the prodigal son. In every case of witnessing the person is going to be somewhere along the path charted in this parable. Let’s look at the parable and look at some elements in it. We’ll just look at verses 11-24. Follow the text as I read it; just look for new things as you read through this. “A certain man had two sons: [12] And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me. And he divided unto them his living. [13] And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. [14] And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. [15] And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. [16] And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. [17] And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! [18] I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, [19] And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. [20] And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. [21] And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. [22] But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: [23] And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: [24] For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.”

Now let’s look at this process; notice in verse 12, this is the pilgrimage of a man who’s unsalvation to salvation. It is not a parable of restoration, of confession of sin. The reason is because of Luke’s system of teaching. It can be shown by looking back to Luke that when he uses this he is not talking about confession; the process applies to confession because oftentimes He has to take the Christian out to the pigpen too, before 1 John 1:9 is used. So it still can be used as an illustration of confession but the interpretation is salvation. Now it says in verse 12 that the Father, keep in mind now, this is a portrait of the unsaved man. “The younger said Father, give me the portion of goods,” so here is the unsaved man beginning at his father’s house. He begins from his father’s house with his father’s capital, which shows that the non-Christian begins as a creature made in God’s image, sustained by God whom he’s rejecting at the very same moment. The unsaved man operates on borrowed capital, as Cornelius Van Til puts it. The intellectual who rejects Christ is at the same time borrowing Christ’s grace in order to deny Christ. Said another way, the little boy has to sit on his father’s knee to slap his father’s face. So the atheist borrows capital from God in order to deny God. So we have the man starting with assets that he has a creature dependent upon his father.

Now in verses 13-16 the process of degeneration; he takes the capital that he has as a creature under his father and he spends it, and the result is that he destroys himself. Those of you who go to see Frances Schaeffer will see a very graphic demonstration that lasts 400 years of where western civilization has destroyed itself, living once on borrowed capital from the Reformation, has dissipated it left and right until nothing is left except bare naked humanism that’s falling apart all over the place. So here you have the son spending, spending, spending off his father’s capital. The result is his disobedience against his father results in destruction.

Now in verse 17-18 you have the crisis of conversion. Notice what happens at that crisis point; we’re not looking at apologetics, we’re looking now at the destruction of a man; his system isn’t being destroyed, he is. He is being taken down to whatever point is necessary, in this case all the way to the pig pen, for conversion to occur, and what happens when conversion occurs? Verse 17, notice features of the conversion. First notice in verse 17 where he sees the results of his sin. He says, “How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!” Prior to the crisis of conversion this unsaved man awakes to what he’s been doing with his life. He’s been kind of vaguely aware but seemed blind, and you could be sliding at 90 miles an hour down the roller coaster and never see the bottom because sin blinds; you never think you’re going to get there and then all of a sudden, crash, you just hit. So the man’s eyes are opened to what he has done with his life; there is despair over the results of sin. This is a feature in real conversion, despair over what he has done with his life.

Notice something else, in verse 17, he sees his father’s character; at the same time he sees his own smashed tubed out life he realizes hey, look at my father’s character, this wouldn’t have happened if I had been obedient to my father; my father isn’t the kind of father to let this happen to his son. And so the second thing about true conversion is awareness of God’s character. The son isn’t saying here, in other words in verse 17, gee, I have a bad feeling in my heart, I’ll think of my father, I’ll say father, father, father, father, father, father forty times and just that repetition will give me a sweet feeling and then I can kind of trip over the fence out into the farmyard and the pigpen. None of that, this is the real perception of his real father’s character.

Notice what else happens in verse 18, “I will arise and go to my father, and will say I have sinned,” and there is a perception of the necessity for acknowledging his rebellion. He’s not saying he sinned here, he sinned here, he sinned here, this is not the taboo list, that’s a different kind of thing. In verse 18 he recognizes his basic fundamental rebellion against his father. That is necessary to true conversion; true conversion can’t occur without that.

And then finally he sees in verse 19 the fourth thing, “I am no more worthy to be called thy son; just make me a hired servant,” his need for grace. He recognizes he has no claim any more on his sonship. And he appeals to his father to be gracious. So after he goes down and after he crashes we have these four elements of conversion, he comes back to his father and he’s restored. Now there’s the profile of the evangelistic process.

Now let’s just adapt it to every day sidewalk situations. In practice people are going to be somewhere along this line. In practice it is possible that a man may need to go all the way down; let’s put a scale here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, let’s say some people are going to have to go all the way to 1 before they convert, that’s the way it’s going to have to be and you can sit there and beat your gums from now until the rapture and nothing is going to happen, and the best thing you can do is Lord, grease their slide. They have to reach 1 but now other people don’t have to do that. Other people can go all the way down to 5 and because their consciences are tender and because they’re receptive they catch it; they say hey, wait a minute, this just doesn’t go, and they will recover and come on back. That’s why you have different depths in conversions of Christians, why some people can give this great glowing testimony of oh, it was such a phenomenal thing. And I mean the genuine stuff, I don’t mean… I mean somebody who really has a true bona fide conversion to Christ. Some people can go to point 5, some people can go to point 3 and it just varies with the individual; all men do not have to go to the pigpen but all men do have to go through the process of conversion and therefore in this process the evangelist will use various points of pressure to aid in the speeding up of that process we observed in the prodigal son. Sometimes the pressure he will use because the persons presuppositions are basically biblically will be sheer, just specific evidence. That’s all it takes, the person hasn’t deteriorated that much. On the other hand, there comes some people that you just have to try a complete bulldozing tactic before they will believe.

Such, then, is the way to faith. Faith, the Bible says, comes by hearing, hearing by the Word of God. There’s one thing in that parable of the prodigal son that the evangelist can’t do, you can’t do, I can’t do. And I don’t know one Christian worker who doesn’t wish he could do it but he can’t do it, and that is the little line, “the son came to himself.” You can’t do that, only the Holy Spirit can do that. All you can do is be there with information, somewhere; this particular prodigal son, somebody obviously, to use it as a model, had input, the data of his father’s character and the possibility of grace, so when he did crash and burn he knew it was available; he had that information. That’s what men need and in evangelism keep in mind the prodigal son.

Next week we’ll finish the Gospel of John.