Biblical Framework
Charles
Clough
Lesson 105
When we get into the life of Christ, we’ll
see that you can’t just walk into the life of Christ without Old Testament
background. One of the things I want to
emphasize as we go into Part V is we’re going to switch the methodology a
little bit. Just to review the
structure of what we’ve been doing, as we’ve gone through these events we have
looked at a sequence of what we call the key events in Scripture. They are key simply because if you look
where speeches are made, the great addresses are given in the Bible, and you
write down Joshua’s speeches, Stephen’s speech, Paul’s address to Athens, write
down the events these guys mention and you come up with this list. It’s not an arbitrary list; it’s one you can
build yourself if you go through the way these men when they spoke of history
what they emphasized.
We’ve been looking at each of these events
and linking them to doctrine, because it’s been my contention over the years,
I’ve seen this in my personal experience as well as just the study itself, that
knowledge of the event feeds your imagination with the content it needs to
think its way through these truths.
When we talk about God, man and nature, I don’t know how many times I’ve
fallen back on visualizing Genesis 2 and God creating man. I may be reading something about some
paleontological find about the bones of man or something, but to get my head
screwed on, what I always find myself doing is coming back to visualizing which
event picked up these doctrines. In
this case we learned a lot about the doctrine of man from creation. We also
learned a lot about the doctrine of man from the Noahic Covenant and the nature
of God, the nature of nature, etc.
Our methodology for three years has been to
point out an event and then we study the doctrine associated with that
event. We’ve come through the creation,
the fall, the flood and the covenants, and we noticed that the doctrines that
are emphasized in the New Testament, such as the doctrines of election,
justification and faith, when this is introduced in the New Testament you’ll
see that it’s introduced as a description of something that went on in the Old
Testament. The call of Abraham is used
by Paul in Romans 4. That’s why we
associate the doctrines of election, justification and faith with the call of
Abraham. It’s not arbitrary, it’s the
way the Holy Spirit has structured the Scripture. So when we’re talking about election it’s always helped me to think
about God calling Abraham out from Ur.
That’s election, that’s calling.
I think controversially God called Him out of that because God had a
plan for Abraham that He did not have for anybody else, it was a unique
plan. We did that with election, we did
it with judgment/salvation with the Exodus, the blood atonement, etc. We have looked at every one of these events
and we’ve looked at them with the eye toward seeing the doctrine associated
with the event.
We have also defended the literalness of these
events. These are not some myths that
men created, they’re not sweet little Sunday school stories that belong with
the fairy Godmother or something. These
are as much history as anything you study in school, in fact, they are more
important than anything you study in school. That’s why they’re not taught in
school. The fact of the matter is that
sacred history is the framework within which God builds everything else. These are the building blocks. We started with the call of Abraham, talking
about the Kingdom. We said that God is
building His Kingdom, and the Kingdom of God takes on characteristics, it takes
on content, so we know what we’re talking about when we talk about the Kingdom
of God. Are we talking about the
psychological experience inside of man or are we talking about that plus an
external, environmental, physical thing called the Kingdom of God. Obviously, the Kingdom as it goes on through
the Old Testament is not just an inner private psychological experience; it’s
an objective, historical, society-wide, geophysically based thing. Later in the Old Testament we talked about
the King’s discipline. The fact of the
matter is that the King has a certain character and He’s going to insist that
that character be characterized in His Kingdom. He wants a Kingdom but He wants a Kingdom of a certain kind, so
He disciplines in order to bring about that character.
When we come to the Lord Jesus Christ, now
we’re talking about the visit of the King.
The King comes to the place that has been prepared. The question now is, although we will have
doctrines associated with four things, we’re going to study four events in the
life of Christ. They are events in the
life of Christ just as all these were events in the history of Israel. In the history of Jesus here are the four
events: #1, His birth, #2, His life, #3 His death, and #4 His
resurrection. Those are the four things
we’re going to deal with. We’re going
to look at doctrines associated with those four just like we have here. The different methodology, however, is going
to be a slight new twist. This time
we’re going to look at Jesus’ life for what it revealed about the observers of
Jesus. Before what we were looking at
was what is God speaking through the event.
God’s speaking through the event in Jesus’ time too, but here God is
revealing certain truths He wants us to grasp so He’s revealing it
historically. But when we come to the
Lord Jesus Christ, God is not only revealing truth in His life, but He’s
revealing the hearts of men by their response to Jesus.
I want to start by turning to Mark 8. We’re going to deal with the response to the
King. That’s why I’ve entitled Part V the Confrontation with the King, because
the Lord Jesus Christ is the most pure form of revelation man has ever
seen. You could argue, how can you say
that, at Mount Sinai they heard God speaking, it was a very dramatic
thing. But the contention of the New
Testament is that Jesus Christ’s revelation, the revelation of God through
Jesus Christ is the Father’s final word to the human race. From this point on in history there is no
more added truths. When Christ gets
done and He rises from the dead, there are no more truths in the sense that man
needs to know more in order to be prepared for something else. Man has had enough to be prepared, now the
issue is what are men doing with the revelation they have received.
So it becomes critical in part V that we’re
not just looking at these events, but we’re also looking at what men do in
response to these events. We’re going
to deal with what do men do with the birth of Jesus Christ. It’s going to deal with the issue of the
hypostatic union, the God-man nature of Christ, what people down through church
history have done with this, how they’ve mutilated it, they’ve perverted it,
why the guys that are ringing your doorbells are just repeating the same old
heresies of the 2nd and 3rd century. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are nothing more
than the latter day Arminians, Arians rather.
You’ll see when you get back into church history that what we call the
cults are nothing more than regurgitation of stuff that has gone on and on,
nothing new under the sun, same old idea, and the answer to it is the same
answer the Church gave in 200-300 AD.
Nothing new, no new homework needed.
It’s just the same old heresy with the same old answer. But it has to do with a perverted response
to the truths of the birth of Christ.
When we get into the atonement, the death of
Christ, we have all kinds of liberal enactments of why did Jesus die on the
cross, and they’re all insufficient explanations of why Jesus died on the
cross. There’s a reason and a motive behind those and that is they’re trying to
avert confrontation with the King. They
want to turn aside; they do not want to see what He really did on the
cross. That’s why this is entitled the
confrontation of the King. I want to
start with Mark 8. At this point in the
Gospels Jesus has… if you diagram all four Gospels you come up with something
like this. They begin not with Jesus
but with John the Baptist. There’s a period early on in the Gospels where John
the Baptist introduces Christ. Nobody
who has been here should have a problem with that, because you all know if John
the Baptist is a prophet, what was one of the functions of a prophet in the Old
Testament? He made the king; he was
there to announce the king. So there’s
no mystery, the four Gospels just start the same way ad the Old Testament, there’s
nothing new about this. This is the Old
Testament motif that the prophet comes first and then the king. Satan knows that. Who comes first, false prophet, and what does he introduce? The antichrist. Even Satan follows the same protocol. Everybody has to have their media person. John the Baptist is, as it were, the Holy Spirit’s
media person for introducing Jesus Christ.
Then you go through the Gospels and Christ
begins to gain in popularity, He begins to evangelize and there’s a response to
Him. And then something happens; it’s a
truncation that occurs. Now there is
engendered a reaction, a vicious, concerted, negative attack the person of
Christ. It’s very interesting to
observe. It’s also interesting to
observe that once this happens in the life of Christ Jesus shifts gears in how
He teaches. It’s at this point when He
begins to use parables. He begins to
code His teaching. He begins to make it
a secret thing. He begins to pull back
and then He begins to minister to the disciples. Usually the second half of the Gospels are directed, not at the
public, but they are directed at the private group of people who have responded
correctly to the King. Now they, and
they alone, will be blessed with the insights.
These insights will not be given out to the public; this is casting
pearls before swine, so the truths in the second half of the Gospels are
reserved for those who have believed, those who have received the King in their
heart. Then there’s the death of Christ
and the resurrection.
This event half way through the Gospels is
the beginning of the road to the crucifixion.
At this point…, up to this point you could say it was theoretically
possible for Him to gain the crown. But
at that point in the ministry it becomes increasingly obvious the King is not
going to be accepted on the King’s terms. The people demand a King do certain things for them, and they don’t see Jesus doing
those things for them. The Jesus
concept of the Kingship doesn’t fit the public’s concept of Kingship, and they
resent this. So now begins counter
arguments. It’s at this point that Mark
8 happens. In the Gospel of Mark we’re
right about that point.
Let’s start at Mar, 8:1 and skim down through this point in the Gospel,
we’re not going to do a Bible study on this section, we’re just skimming it to
get to a section. He’s witnessing here,
and He’s talking about feeding, people have come, they’re hungry, the disciples
said in verse 4, “Where will anyone be able to find enough to satisfy these men
with bread here in a desolate place? [5] And He was asking them, How many loaves
do you have? And they said, Seven. [6] And He directed the multitude to sit
down on the ground; and taking the seven loaves, He gave thanks and broke them,
and began giving them to His disciples to serve them and they served them to
the multitude. [7] They also had a few small fish; and after He had blessed
them, He ordered these to be served as well. [8] And they ate and were
satisfied.” By the way, please notice
Jesus was not a vegetarian. [9] “And
about four thousand were there; and He sent them away.”
Notice, there’s a little fine point in the
text here. This is one of the neat
things when you look at some of the details of this, in verse 6, “He gave
thanks and broke them,” and then it says after He broke them He started “giving
them to His disciples,” meaning that He was giving them to His disciples over a
prolonged period of time. He “began to”
give them. It doesn’t say He gave them
to the disciples, He started the process.
The miracle was that they’d come back for more and He’d keep giving them
more, keep giving them more, keep giving them more. This little verb tense shows you a little bit about the
miracle. That’s one of the neat things
when you get into the text and you can really see, some of these events are
just mind blowing when you really get into the details of the text.
We want to proceed on to what happened. Mark 8:10, “And immediately He entered the
boat with His disciples, and came to” a particular district. [11] “And the Pharisees came out,” now
here’s the negative group. These people, the Pharisees were a combination of
theologian and lawyer. It’s not an
insult to the legal profession today to say, because there are many fine people
in the legal profession, but as a profession, the profession of law in the
sense of practicing, practicing court law, has become very very parallel in our time to the thinking
of the Pharisees. The emphasis in
argumentation in law today is technique; it spins on a technique, a small point
of the law. Increasingly you find the
departure from the common sense big ethic.
There were good Nazi lawyers in 1936 for
Adolph Hitler who could argue very precisely, very technically that everything
that the Furor did was correct. Why?
Because in 1933 what did he do? He got
everybody to give him an exemption to the whole constitution of Germany. So by definition everything that the Furor
did was correct, legally correct. No
problem. But we know ethically it was
wrong, because the ethics should be the ground of the law.
One of the classic instances that shows the
Pharisaical way of thinking and the parallel today is that incident when Jesus
was in the field on the sabbath day with His disciples, and He was flicking the
grain, and they were eating it. What
did the Pharisees say? You’ve violated
section 6.321 of the sabbatical law.
Back off a minute and think of the stupidity of that incident. Who is it that they’re accusing of breaking
the sabbatical law? The guy who gave
it. Think about that, here these Pharisees
have all the legal argumentation down to the third decimal place and they’re
using it against the guy that gave them the law. This gets back to something that’s very important. When you interpret law you must interpret it
according to a principle, and the principle is what was the intent of the one
who wrote the law, not what you think the intent was, or not how you think
you’re going to apply it to a modern case.
The issue is: what was the intent of the author of that particular
law.
Here Jesus was, who obviously, by allowing
His disciples to flick grain, authenticating the fact that whatever He has said
about work on the sabbath day, that wasn’t work. So by authorizing a behavior on the part of His disciples, He was
exegeting the sabbatical legislation right there. The depth of the perversion is shown in the fact that the
Pharisees have a very legally clean logic that appears to conflict with
Jesus. That’s the sort of thing you
encounter in the pages of the New Testament.
That’s the sort of thing that’s being hammered out today. This is why in
my opinion one of the most profound discussions that we have had in this
country for the last 20-30 years was something that most people just passed
over, and that was when Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for the Supreme Court, the
Bork hearings. The Senate judiciary
committee just pounced on Bork, Biden from Delaware and Kennedy from
Massachusetts just went after Bork. I
always have to laugh at that, here’s Kennedy a C student in law school telling
a professor of law how to interpret the law, that was a joke. The point was
that here Professor Bork was sitting there, taking all this flack for his
position on the law. These guys were
incensed that Reagan had dared to nominate this person, Bork. What were they saying? They were saying that if Bork got to be
Supreme Court Justice he would undo the key court decisions that the Supreme
Court had done, including 1964 the civil rights issue. They were thereby painting Bork as a white
supremacist, a guy that was against the black race, etc. Nothing of the sort.
Here’s the issue, this is what they were
afraid of. Bork believed that a judge
cannot make legislation surreptitiously.
Bork argued that all he could do as a judge was operate within the
constraints of the law that he has been given by the authors of the law. In the Supreme Court what is the law that
the Supreme Court deals with? It’s the
United States Constitution. Therefore, Bork argued, if I can’t deduce a
principle that fits this case out of the corpus of the Constitution I can’t
judge on it, I throw the case out, and I’m not going to pass judgment if it’s
not covered by the Constitution, it’s not part of this court. What infuriated them was that in 1964 when
that civil rights… and I’m not arguing against the intent of the civil rights
legislation, it was needed, believe me, I walked through the south, I saw the
black only bathrooms. What an insult.
There was something needed, but the way they solved the problem, because
of the liberal infusion of law, that Supreme Court decision was based on
sociology, what people thought about race.
It wasn’t based on what the Constitution said.
So Bork was what they call a strict
interpreter of the Constitution. The other guys were loose interpreters of the
Constitution. They knew very well if
you let Bork get into the courts, that’s what he’s going to do. What’s he going to do? He’s going to start shredding the crappy
structure that we’ve built up with these facetious interpretations of the
Constitution. He’s progressively going
to dismantle things. And if you’ve
built your house [with] vast amounts of other secondary and tertiary
legislation, court cases have all been built on this basis, and Bork comes
along and does this, what happens to the whole law structure that’s been built
up? It topples, it’s
revolutionary. That’s why they went
after Bork. They were smart men, Biden and Kennedy aren’t stupid, they realized
the implications of Bork. Bork was a
profound threat, a profound threat
to this because he stood for correction in direction of the interpretation of
law.
At this point the Pharisees are doing the
same thing. Here they are, they are to
be society’s experts, these are the Jewish experts of what the Torah really
meant. And when they argue with Jesus,
verse 11, who are they arguing with?
Keep that in mind. You’ve got to
visualize this confrontation, because we’re going to get to a verse and to get
the impact of that verse you’ve got to see what’s happened, you’ve got to see
the steam here. Here these guys with
their Phd’s in theology, they were experts on the Torah, they were experts on
the Mishnah, they knew the
Talmud, they know the text of the Old Testament, most of these guys could
memorize the Old Testament—put us to shame.
Verse 11, they “began to argue with Him,
seeking from Him a sign from heaven, to test Him.” My translation says [12] “And sighing deeply in His spirit,”
Jesus is pretty disgusted at this point, what are these creeps thinking now,
“Why does this generation seek for a sign? Truly I say to you, no sign shall be
given to this generation.” This is one
of those passages of the New Testament where you can see something about Jesus’
personality. There’s something else
we’ll note when we got into His life.
It’s been observed by scholars who have had enough sense to really pay
attention to the kind of personality the Lord Jesus Christ had that almost to a
man or a woman they will argue that Jesus, for all the pictures you get of this
meek and mild person, was extremely self-confident, to the point that if He
wasn’t who He claimed to be, He is one of the most arrogant people who has ever
walked this planet, because He had the audacity to say because I said it, it’s
truth. Who of us would dare claim that
we are self-authenticating? But Jesus
argued that He was self-authenticating, that because I say it, it is true.
So then He leaves them, and [13] “He again
embarked and went away to the other side. [14] And they had forgotten to take
bread; and did not have more than one loaf in the boat with them. [15] And He
was giving orders to them, saying, ‘Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the
Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.’”
Mark is thinking back on this, because he wasn’t there when it was going
on, he’s probably getting this through Peter.
In verse 11-12 the emphasis is on what the Pharisees are doing, a big
argument is raging, Jesus gets in a boat, and in verse 15 He keeps on talking
about the argument. But then Mark slips
in verse 14 to let us know that while this argument is going on, and Jesus is
carrying on about the discussion, the guys forgot the food. So now we have a juxtaposition, and a very
serious theological argument going on with somebody who’s forgot the lunch. Watch how the two come together.
Verse 16, “And they began to discuss with one
another the fact that they had no bread.”
Are they listening to the discussion?
No, they’re worried about who left the lunch behind. So now it becomes an issue in the boat. [17] “And Jesus, aware of this, said to them,
‘Why do you [keep] discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet see or understand?” Now here’s where Jesus, in the marvelous
providence of God, He takes a forgotten lunch and He’s going to clobber them
with it to let them see that they’re basically doing the same thing the
Pharisees just got through doing. Look
how He does it. He says “Why do you
discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened heart?’” Look at the verbs in those questions. What do you see, what parts of the
body? You see, the eyes; you
understand, the mind; you have a hardened heart.
Then He quotes the Old Testament text. Look what He’s done. The fact that He’s
talking about seeing and understanding, and hardening of heart, Jesus is
already thinking about an Old Testament passage, and then He quotes it
here. Who wrote the passage? Even if you didn’t have a reference, a cheat
sheet, a reference to the Old Testament text, you know that language, it’s Old
Testament prophets. What were the Old
Testament prophets arguing about?
Here’s where we have to start using what we’ve learned about the Old
Testament so we can appreciate the Lord Jesus Christ and what He’s doing
here. When the prophets wrote, they
were writing in this period, the kingdoms were in decline. What was going on in the kingdom in Israel
when it was declining? Were these people really learning the Word of God? Kings were all sitting there, and every 24
hours they were in the Torah? They
couldn’t even find the Torah, it had been lost. They had false prophets. What was Ahab doing, married to the
daughter of some Canaanite priest.
This is real stuff going on in the Old
Testament and it was at that point that God was going to lower the boom on the
nation. Remember what the prophet was,
he acted as a prosecutor. What did he do?
He brought God’s case for violation of the covenant to the people. And when this “having eyes do not see” what
they’re saying is that when you turn, rebel against God, it has a
self-destructive effect, namely it blinds you, it deafens you, and it hardens
your heart. And the prophets warned the
nation that at this point in time they were headed to the exile. That’s the Old Testament background.
Now come to the New Testament. What is Jesus now saying? By quoting that
Old Testament verse, what does this signal?
You’re sitting there, you listen to Him say this, you know enough about
your Old Testament to know that that’s a citation at a point when the nation
Israel was turning away from Jehovah and in danger of exile. What is the nation in Jesus’ day in danger
of if they reject Christ? What happened
to the Jews in 70 AD? Exiled, history
repeating itself. So here Jesus Christ
is operating completely in the Old Testament fame of reference, nothing new
here under the sun. This is exactly the
same thing, same hymn, second verse, that’s all it is.
Verse 18, “Having eyes, do you not see? And
having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember,” but who’s He applying
it to in verses 18-19. Is He applying
it to the Pharisees or is He applying it to the guys that forgot the
lunch? He’s applying it to the
disciples. This is a warning. He says, don’t you remember [19] “‘when I
broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many large baskets full of
broken pieces you picked up?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ [20] And when I broke
the seven for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of broken pieces did you
pick up?’ And they said to Him ‘Seven.’” By the way, verses 19-20 are put in
the text so the skeptics who say there were two different conflicting accounts
of Jesus feeding… well Jesus didn’t know there were two conflicting accounts,
He did both of them and He’s talking about both of them here, it’s just some
idiot that can’t read. This is two
events in the Scripture.
Verse 21, “And He was saying to them, ‘Do you
not yet understand?’” Notice how He
applies the text. The verb that He
uses, “do you not yet understand,” is the same verb of the prophetic text of
the Old Testament. The three verses,
“having eyes you don’t see” is an attack on their blindness; “having ears but
you don’t hear” but also if you look at the original text of the Old Testament
it’s also talking about a hardening heart that does not understand. So here’s how Jesus was so saturated with
the Scriptures, He had such perfect understanding of it, that He could think
around, through, and into an event like a forgotten lunch. Look at what triggered this discourse in the
boat. The guys are arguing about a lunch. But look how the Lord could take that simple
little discussion about a lunch and relate it to the whole situation of history
of the nation of Israel.
So He says, verse 21, “Don’t you yet
understand,” don’t you guys get it yet.
What is He after? The same thing
Isaiah was, do you see who God is in this covenant relationship and are you
going to respond to Him. Don’t you get it?
Verse 22, “…And they brought a blind man to Him, and entreated Him to
touch him. [23] And taking the blind man by the hand, He brought him out of the
village; and after spitting on his eyes, and laying His hands upon him, He
asked him, ‘Do you see anything?’ [24] And he looked up and said, ‘I see men,
for I am seeing them like trees, walking about.’” A doctor could comment about verse 24. Verse 25, “Then again He laid His hands upon his eyes; and he
looked intently and was restored, and began to see everything clearly. [26] And
He sent him to his home, saying, ‘Do not even enter the village.’”
Why do you suppose that event happened, in
the providence of God, the blind man just happened to be right after the other
discussion that went on? What is it a
picture of? What was the accusation in
the boat? You guys can’t see. By going out and literally [can’t understand
word] to a literally blind person, these guys should… you know, hey, this guy
gives sight. If they had caught the
point they ought to have turned to the Lord and said open my eyes, can You open
my spiritual eyes and my heart like You just opened this guy’s eyes. He did it by stages too.
It was a graphic illustration, so now in
verses 27-28 he whops it to them. Now
He challenges them. “And Jesus went
out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the
way” be began this conversation again, so He starts in drilling them
again. “He questioned His disciples,
saying, ‘Who do people say that I am?’”
And they give various opinions.
You can have all the opinions, He was John, He was Elijah, one of the
prophets. [28, “And they told Him,
saying, ‘John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but still others, one of the
prophets.’”]
Verse 29, “…But who do you say that I
am?’” Can you imagine this
conversation? What is Jesus getting at, why does He keep driving home this
point? Because they’ve got to perceive
who Jesus is or they can’t be His disciples.
It does no good to say I’m going to go out and love the world, I’m going
to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do this and that, I’m going to
obey the Lord, blah, blah blah. Jesus
doesn’t start with all that. He says do
you see who I am? Get a picture of who
I am, then we’ll discuss all this
other stuff. But you don’t start with
the other stuff; you start with Who is Jesus Christ? Because isn’t it true, and think of the situation from the lost
lunch to the Pharisees; what was the issue behind all that. If these guys had realized who Jesus was…
how many guys could be in the boat? Not
4,000, so if they had perceived who He was and it really clicked, they could
have said we’re out of food, we’re out here on the water, we’ve got nothing to
eat, but this is the guy who fed 5,000, He fed 4,000, this is a cinch, we could
all sit at one table here. So why can’t
He feed us?
It was a failure to see and appreciate Who
was with them. That’s our problem,
because we forget. Notice the word
“remember,” don’t you remember. Now we
see it, every once in a while we get in church and we see it, we hear it, and
it clicks with us for two and a half hours or something, then we forget, and we
fall back into a perceptive problem.
That’s one of the things we want to look at in the life of Christ, is to
see how insidious our flesh is, forgetting who Jesus Christ is. We’ve got to be
reminded, and reminded, and reminded, and reminded. Do you know what does the reminding? The teaching of the Word of God, not sweet stories, not all kinds
of hoopla, not programs on how to grow churches, it’s the Word of God. That’s where you find out who Jesus is. It doesn’t promise to be a lot people; the
church doesn’t necessarily grow numerically when the Word of God is
taught. How many did Jesus wind up
having, enthusiastic congregations at the foot of the cross? Did you count how many people were
there? A great testimony to His church
growth movement wasn’t it. The point is
that it’s the issue of who Christ is, that’s the issue. All the other issues
are peripheral to that.
Turn to John 3, now we want to get into the
implications of this. What we’re doing
tonight is just introducing an approach that we want to use on those four
events: His birth, His life, His death and His resurrection. But I want to get you aimed right. In John 3, the famous Nicodemus discourse. I was talking to a friend of mine when I was
speaking recently in Connecticut and he spent about six or seven weeks, he’s
teaching from the original Greek text this passage, and he’s doing a lot of
time on research, and he was telling me that what struck him on this passage
that he’s going through, was when he got to verse 7, that phrase when Jesus
turned to Nicodemus and he says, “Don’t marvel that I said to you that you must
be born again,” he says if you do a real careful word analysis of that verb
“marvel” it carries the connotation of why are you so amazed at this, it’s
condemnatory, it’s a condemning kind of thing.
Why are you amazed when you shouldn’t be, that’s the thrust of this
thing, you shouldn’t be marveling at this. Nicodemus knew his Old Testament,
and Jesus is rebuking him, He’s saying why are you marveling at this, you
should understand, this is Biblical thought I’m talking about here. Verse 8, “The wind blows where it lists,”
etc. and what Jesus is trying to say is it’s the sovereign work of the Holy
Spirit that does these things.
Nicodemus is kind of wandering around.
But the conclusion, verse 16, which we all
know, and that’s one of the things when we had the play here, I was talking to
the young fellow who played John the Apostle after the play and I said it’s
interesting that a young boy was picked to play John, because John lived till
about some 90 AD, so either he was a very old man or he was younger when Jesus
ministered. The thinking is that he was very young. And one of the things a teenager is usually impressed with is
that teenagers can have idols and they’ll talk to them, dress like them,
etc. One of the interesting things
about the way John writes is that in this particular narrative of John 3, try
to find out where Jesus stops talking, and John’s commentary on His speech. Scholars have tried and tried and it’s almost
impossible. I don’t know where it is,
I’d hate to be pinned down exactly where it happens. But Jesus starts off in chapter 3 talking, and by the time you
get down to the end it’s a Johannine commentary on what He said. So it appears
that John writes very much like Jesus probably sounded. Of all the disciples, who was closest to
Jesus? It was John the Apostle.
In John 3:16 we have the verse everyone
knows, but look what happens in verse 17, 18 and 19 that follow on to that
verse. “For God so loved the world,
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not
perish, but have eternal life. [17] For God did not send the Son into the world
to judge the world,” at least at the First Advent He didn’t, “but that the
world should be saved through Him. [18] He who believes in Him is not judged;
he who does not believe has been judged already,” past tense, “he who does not
believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the
only begotten Son of God.” How can that
be? Why is a person judged already
because they have not received Christ?
[19] And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world,
and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil.
[20] For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the
light, lest his deeds should be exposed. [21] But he who practices the truth
comes to the light, that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in
God.”
The argument John uses and he does it in his
first epistle and he does it several other places, is that if the light turns
on in the room, and you’re still groping around, and I’m still groping around,
is the problem with the light or is the problem with us? The problem is with the people who are still
groping around. The problem isn’t the
light. This is what we’re trying to
emphasize with the lift of Christ. The
problem isn’t that God’s revelation isn’t clear enough. If God only wrote a Bible today, you know,
He’s supposed to write a new Bible every century to satisfy the
contemporaries. The fact of the matter
is that the revelation is absolutely clear.
What people do with the revelation shows nothing about the revelation,
it shows something about the people looking at the revelation.
Men are condemned, John says, by their
response to Jesus, because Jesus is the light of the world. If you can’t see
that, the problem isn’t with the light of the world, the problem is with
you. This is 180 degrees opposite, you
often hear this argument non-Christians make, and maybe people in your family
have made it toward you if you’re a believer, well poor Mary so and so, she is
just a weak person, you know, weak people have to believe in God. You’ve all heard that kind of thing. Let’s turn this around 180 and watch what it
sounds like if we reverse it. Well poor
Joe, he doesn’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and we understand why, because
he’s a sinner fleeing from the wrath of God and he wants to feel safe, of
course you don’t want to believe in Christ, I understand that because if I were
in your shoes I would be fearful, and I don’t want to be fearful, so I’m
manufacturing an imaginary world in which I can be safe, safe for sinners. Two can play the psychology game.
In the Gospel of John it is reversed, and this point is that those who
do not believe reveal themselves not Jesus.
They reveal something about themselves, not something about Christ. That’s the emphasis on the New Testament;
we’re going to try to follow that motif, that man’s response to Christ is a
self-condemning response. We do not infer because X number of people disbelieve
that somehow God did a messy job revealing Himself. Rather, what we conclude when X number of people disbelieve is
that X number of people have a problem. That’s what we conclude.
Here’s an example that I warned you about
three years ago when we started this class.
Be careful that you don’t buy into a question. How many times did you beat your wife last week kind of
thing. You can’t answer it any other
way than to condemn yourself because you bought into the question. We warned you about the world view and
presuppositions. Now let’s watch what
happens here. We have a fact, the fact
is that [blank spot]
…people disbelieve because the revelation is
not clear, I mean, you’ve got to have fifteen and a half arguments to prove
God’s existence. I’ve got to have some
intellectual content here, that’s not enough to just simply believe the
Scriptures. Whereas if we think
Biblically we’ll say, well of course, X number of people don’t believe, and
it’s a miracle that the number isn’t larger because we’re all sinners, we’re
all fleeing from the wrath of He who is on the throne, we all have a deep
profound motive in our hearts to create an imaginary world safe for sin. So of course we’re going to feign
unbelief. We have this one event, two
different interpretations of the event.
Watch this, because when you get into a classroom situation, or you get
into a situation watching the media or something, you watch the spin that’s put
on the facts, the spin that’s put on an event.
Learn to discern. That’s one of
the things we want to see in the Lord Jesus Christ’s ministry.
Turn in the notes to page 4-5, we’re going to
skim over this, most of this is not new to you because we’ve gone through this
in the Old Testament. Turn to Gal. 4:4,
we want to remind ourselves of this timing.
The Lord Jesus Christ came into the world at a certain point in
time. It was not an accident. Jesus was perfectly timed, His entry into
the world had been planned from eternity past.
God knew about Greeks, He ordained history to flow in a certain
direction. He said Daniel, there’s
going to be four kingdoms, the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks and
the Romans. In the middle of that Roman
Empire I’m going to send My Son in, that’s going to be the time. Gal. 4:4 says why that happened that
way. Gal. 4:4 is a timer, it’s a peak
at the plan of God and why He chose the moment of history that He chose when
the Lord Jesus Christ came in. God
says, “When the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a
woman, born under the Law, [5] in order that He might redeem those who were
under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
If you look in the context of this passage,
notice verse 1 is talking about you were once children, “as long as the heir is
a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of
everything, [2] but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by
the father.” Then he says in verse 3,
“so also we, while we were children, were held in bondage under the elemental
things of the world,” or the stoicheia,
we studied that Col. 2. The fundamental
building blocks of the universe that are taken by unbelief, like atom, fire, water,
that kind of thing. Then he’s saying,
verse 8, “However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to
those which by nature are no gods. [9] But now that you have come to know God,
or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak
and worthless elemental things,” stoicheia,
“to which you desire to be enslaved all over again.”
So the picture is that all of the human race
was enslaved and yet something was being taught, it was, if we can say this,
teachers talk about pedagogy, and we design lesson plans and there’s a
pedagogical intent behind the construction of lessons, you put lesson 3 after
lesson 2, you do them in sequence because there’s a pedagogical sequence for
learning. Here’s a Biblical philosophy
of history; history is pedagogical.
Under God the sequence of historical events itself is pedagogical. This is why Paul says “in the fullness of
time,” meaning that certain things happened in history to teach, teach, teach,
teach, to ready the human race for the entry of the Son of God, that if Christ
had come at any other moment in history it would have been out of
sequence.
We want to review what the historical
sequence was prior to Jesus that led up and prepared men for the moment. On page 4, the “Historical preparation of
the Gentile (Pagan) World,” and then if you skip to page 7, the “Historical
preparation of the Jewish World.” I’m
going to divide the remaining time in two parts; we’re going to show quickly
how the pagan world was prepared for the arrival of the Son of God, and then
how the Jewish world was prepared for the arrival of the Son of God. We’ve gone through this; we’ve said that
“the civilization began by Noah on the ‘reconstructed’ planet after the flood
event departed the then-known Word of God.
God let Noahic civilization become paganized. The once simple monotheistic worship of El Elyon …gave way to
various idolatries of the fleshly mind.
… The pagan world spawned varied mythologies and many idols. The constellation and stars,” were
worshiped. “Fear of these idols’
non-existent powers was a confession of man’s physical limitations over against
inevitable sickness, death, and the various evils in nature itself (storms,
famines, earthquakes).”
In other words, men became acutely aware of
their physical limitations prior to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Societies, entire societies had become
fearful, realizing that they had no power over these things; they were
powerless to deal with these. There had to be that awareness and it had to be
emphasized again and again through disaster, through heartache, through
apostasy, through idolatry, whatever it was, to get through first, before
Christ, that we are physically limited, and we are therefore dependent
creatures.
We said that in 600 BC, in that era of the
exile you had a change, the pagan world was changed, it became more rational,
you had the four kingdoms, and that’s why on page 5 I have this great quote by
F. E. Peters, considered by Greek scholars to be one of the experts in Hellenic
thought. I think it’s very important we
look at this quote. This is the third
of the four kingdoms of Daniel. “The
rationalistic premise operative in much of Greek thought and life…was, at root,
the belief,” and here you want to underline it, this is F. E. Peters talking
now, the guy who is a specialist in this culture, underlying it was “the belief
that unaided human reason was an adequate instrument for both understanding and
action. Very few Greeks… denied the existence
of the gods…; what the rationalist premise did suggest was that the operation
of these gods was unnecessary for the acquisition of either truth by intellect
or good by will.” That’s autonomous man.
Van Til, I put him in because I want you to see,
here’s a guy who’s taking the fact of Greek culture and interpreting it
Biblically, don’t just take raw facts but interpret them Biblically, and here’s
a guy who’s interpreting it Biblically.
He says: “It is taken for
granted that the Greeks may fairly be compared to children who begin to wonder
about things around them.” That’s what you usually get in the textbook, but
notice the “but,” watch this. Here Van
Til is going to correct wrong thinking. “But this comparison would be fair only
if [the pagan notion of history] were true. The comparison” look at the word,
presupposes, “presupposes that the human race was for the first time emerging
into self-consciousness in the person of the Greeks. [It] takes for granted
that the human race had never been in close contact with a God who was closer
to them than the universe. [It] takes for granted that the physical facts would
naturally be knowable first, and that if God is to be known He must be known
later.”
See what Van Til is saying? He’s exposing the
root of pagan thought, and what I’ve tried to, and flying back from Denver
today I thought of a way of adding to this chart, who has the evil problem, and
what I’m trying to expose there is it’s the other way around, it’s the
unbeliever that’s got the evil problem. They often accuse us of a knowing
problem. Let me explain something that
happened here with the Greeks. This had to happen before Christ came because
the Lord Jesus Christ is going to say to Nicodemus, stop marveling at this
stuff. Who has the real knowing
problem? The unbeliever likes to think
that we Christians are the ones that have the knowing problem. Well, how can you prove God, this is the
thing you get thrown at you all the time.
What we’re going to show is that unless Christianity is true you can’t
know anything. Here’s why. The Christian position is built on the
Creator. The Creator has two things, He has His plan and He has providence. Everyone clear on what the difference
is. God has, from eternity past, a plan
that includes every molecule and every action of every molecule in history, for
all time and for all space. So
everything has a place in the plan of God.
It is a perfectly rational plan.
On the other hand, God shows us His plan as
He unrolls it in history. That’s called providence. The plan of God is the
basis for logic and reason in the Christian world view. Our logic and our reasoning machine works
only because God’s plan is there first, and rational. If God’s plan wasn’t there first and rational, the logic machine
would never work. So the logic and
reason of man is dependent upon the plan of God. Our experience, and the facts, and how they fit together, we
encounter the experience and the facts under the providence of God. It’s the providence of God that gives us experience;
it’s the providence of God that gives us the facts. So the facts and experience come out of the providence of God,
just as man’s reason and his logic come out of the plan of God.
Now you come down to this poor guy, here’s
Mr. Pagan. Let’s ask him what the basis
of his reason and logic is, and the basis of his experience and facts. Now you see you’ve got a little
problem. We see the Emperor had no
clothes, because here the pagan is with his finite reasoning… finite reasoning,
what do we mean finite reasoning? It’s limited. What does he inevitably do every time he opens his mouth? He’s making an absolute. Now herein is a wonder,
a finite reasoner talking about
absolutes. Every time he says ought,
true, this, this, he’s talking about absolutes. How can you talk about absolutes if you’re a finite
reasoner. I can talk about absolutes as
a finite reasoner because I know the Creator has a plan and the plan has
absolutes in it. I’ve got a basis, the
unbeliever doesn’t have a basis, he’s hanging in thin air here, yak, yak, yak
about reason and logic, reason and logic, but he doesn’t have any foundation
for his reason and logic. It’s a
serious problem; you don’t build a house without a foundation. Over here he keeps talking about the facts
that just happen, the experiences that just happen, they come out of a void,
and underneath that all he has is chance.
So on the side of experience and reason he has this great mystery called
fate or chance, and things just happen that way.
But here’s the final problem. Just as we said the unbeliever has this
problem of good and evil that maintains itself forever, look what he’s got
here. Now he’s got a war going on between
his left side and his right side. On
his left side he wants reason to hold so badly that he can make absolutes. On the right side he gets facts and
experiences that just jump about and happen by sheer chance. You can’t have both of these principles. They are at war with one another. His logic is at war with his facts. He can’t get the two together. That’s always been the dilemma of
philosophy. You can’t make a sentence,
you can’t make a predicate. If you say
this animal is a cow, that’s a predicative sentence. Now think of what I just said: this animal is a cow. Included in that sentence is the fact that I
classify, and I know exactly what the classification of all cows are, and that
presupposes that I know every cow? No.
But somehow up here in my logic machine I’ve got a set, a class
distinction called “cows.” That’s my
logic. There’s my finite reasoning
going about making classification. But
then the subject of the sentence is “this animal.” This animal just happened to walk in front of me. How do I know that tomorrow another animal
isn’t going to walk in front of me and then it’s going to blow away my
classification scheme? Suppose this cow
is half between an elephant and a cow?
Now what am I going to do to my classification scheme? It wipes
out. And I can’t tell that, because I’m
a finite experiencing it.
My point in showing you all this is this is
what had to happen in history before the Lord Jesus Christ came, because if it
hadn’t, people could still say, well, there’s another explanation for
this. But the fact is that the Greeks
already caught on to this problem.
Aristotle and Plato already knew about this thing, this is not something
I dreamed up on an airplane. This is
something that’s been true since Aristotle’s day. This was known, all this was known.
We want to show you one more thing the way
God prepared the Gentile world, that’s the last quote, and next time we’ll get
into the preparation of the Jewish world. Here is a picture in mythology of the
city of Rome. It’s a very important
story because in this story is depicted the character of what Rome stands
for.
“Two boys, abandoned twins, set out to find a
city. Romulus plowed a furrow as the
first wall around the planned city, with the trench as the moat, and the
overturned earth as the wall. His
brother, Remus, expressed his contempt for the wall and moat by leaping across
them into the City, whereupon Romulus killed him at once, declaring, ‘So perish
all who ever cross my walls!’ Rome thus began, first, with two boys abandoned
by their family, and, second, with the murder of a brother as its first
sacrifice. The priority of the City to
the family is emphatically set forth. But this is not all. Third, the first citizens were not members
of a common family or clan but neighboring shepherds, outlaws, and stateless
people. The City made them Romans, not
ties of family or of blood….”
Contrast that to Israel. What defined Israel? Families and blood. What defined Rome? An artificial contrivance
of political will. So the Kingdoms, all
this was tribes, and that’s why we conclude on page 6 that “Under Caesar
Augustus, Roman organization and unity reached its zenith,” but the point is
that every possible solution was tried.
And it was into a world in which all these solutions had already been
tried that Christ stepped and entered this world in that “fullness of
time.” We’ll study a little bit more
about that next time because we want to get the background, it’s necessary to
get the background because the first doctrine we’re going to deal with is how
can Jesus Christ be God and man, and the responses that people use is they try
to revert back to this [can’t understand word]. That’s what generates Arianismism, that’s what generates the
cults, etc.
-----------------------
Question asked: Clough replies: That’s a ripper of a question, very good,
well thought out question. The question
is that obviously the Old Testament ends 400 years prior to the Lord Jesus
Christ, so you’ve got four centuries of silence. Now the question we want to reflect on is why was there 400 years
of silence? Is it because the people’s hearts were hardened and therefore there
was no prophetic material willing and ready to receive the Word in order to
transmit it, or in fact, had God simply said it’s time to be quiet now, I’ve
spoken. The Scriptures really don’t, at
least I’m not aware of passages that would say one way or the other. It’s kind of an inference that God had
accomplished His purposes by revealing what He had…, He had partially brought
Israel back together. The nation is
profoundly aware that they don’t have speaking prophets, that’s why I quoted
that thing out of 2 Maccabees when they couldn’t figure out where to put the
names of the temple, etc. So there was
an awareness on the part of the nation.
It’s hard to believe that there wasn’t at least one or two people that
could have been used as prophets.
So I guess I kind of lean toward the fact
that God had spoken all He was going to speak, He had made it clear. Certainly
He didn’t need to keep on speaking to make anything clearer. I think that it is a precedent. Remember that partial restoration that we
see, because of what we know from Daniel the restoration is sort of a new thing
because the Bible in its simplistic earlier view of prophecy had Israel, exile,
then coming back from exile and that was going to be Kingdom. Then you kind of
have this time expansion, stretching that goes on. So that age in between the
time of the exile and the time of the Lord Jesus Christ, that period of time is
sort of something new to us, not new to God, and I think it is an adumbration
or a fore view of the presence age of silence, in that God has spoken through
the Lord Jesus Christ. He has sent His
Holy Spirit from the throne to earth; He has preserved the New Testament text,
what more is there for Him to say, because now the issue is what are we going
to do with what He’s already spoken. That’s the issue, and that’s what men are
judged for. That’s that John 3 passage; men are condemned because they haven’t
received what He’s already said.
People have written in the Protestant thing,
of course in the Catholic thing the Roman Catholic Church holds that it’s not
an age of silence; that in fact God still speaks through the [can’t understand
word] Peter’s, Peter the Pope. So you
have the Pope office as a conduit if God needs to speak to the Church. You’ll also see Mormons believe in a
restored church, meaning the prophetic line is active again through the Mormon
Church. It’s kind of typical that cults
will argue that God still speaks. Islam
is another religion that says that what God said in the Bible is incomplete and
therefore God needs to continue to speak and He did so through Mohammed.
The Protestant writers have generally argued
that for God now to speak, in addition to what He’s already said in the New Testament
denigrates the New Testament, because what it in effect implies is that the New
Testament isn’t sufficient by itself, that in needs continuing additions, and
for that to happen, that itself lowers the authority of the New Testament. The whole inter-advent age gets very
complicated.
The question you asked about the age between
the exile and the Lord Jesus is difficult; then you get into the problem of
after the Lord Jesus Christ is rejected by the chosen nation, then you’ve got a
new inter-advent age. Now the two, the
suffering Messiah and the glory Messiah are split apart and we have this
inter-advent age and that gets very complicated. That’s what we’re in now.
It’s hard to see the connection in a simple way to the Old Testament.
I think it would help if you remember as you
study history or you’re aware of the great figures of history is to always
remember, it helped me immeasurably to understand the New Testament to remember
that philosophy preceded the New Testament.
Philosophy had already begun three centuries prior to the New Testament,
so it’s not true, it’s NOT true that the New Testament doesn’t conceive of the
(quote) “great philosophic” problems.
The New Testament comes after the great philosophic problems have
already been laid out on the table. In
fact, many professors of philosophy argue that Plato, in his day, the first
great Greek philosopher, had already laid out all the great questions, and
nobody else has added to the questions, they just argued about the
answers. But the questions were all
neatly laid out by Plato. That helps
because it tells you that the New Testament says that it is sufficient unto
every good work, the sufficiency of Scripture.
So all of the great questions are potentially
answered in the Scripture. You don’t
have to hunt outside of the Scripture for these answers. The Scripture is sufficient. There are some
key tools here that we evangelicals need to understand. The Scriptures are sufficient, the
Scriptures are authoritative, and the Scriptures are clear, the perspicuity of
the Scriptures, Protestant principle.
It doesn’t mean there’s not heavy, hard to understand sections, it means
that in order to be saved and to lead a Christian life and to discern the will
of God, the Scriptures are clear. So
the perspicuity of Scripture, the authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of
Scripture; if we could just keep that in mind we’d be a lot more stable.
If there are no more questions, we’ll call it
quits.