Lesson 224

 

I was loaned this issue of Israel My Glory and on the front page of this was something interesting, kind of a good introduction as to why we need the framework.  I mentioned when I introduced [not sure of name] that was from a missionary group that worked with Muslims that he had been called by Time Magazine who wanted a scoop on his mission and he stonewalled them just like all the other Christian missions are stonewalling Time and stonewalling against talking to any of these people because we know exactly what they’re after, they want to come out with this issue hammering Christian missionaries as a great source of disturbing the peace in the Middle east.  The gospel is such a big threat; you know how it is so dangerous to people to hear those words.  But here is an example of the rising tide of anti-Christian, really quite stupid, foolish and unintel­ligent statements by people who ought to know better. 

 

Here is one who was the former director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.  “The day has long passed when we can afford to ignore the threat that is posed by individuals who believe they are subject only to the laws of their God and not those of our government.”  Now in context that might have been the Wacko’s from Waco but the point is that if this director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been well enough read and had been educated enough he would have noticed that the laws of the government are derivative of the laws of God.  I think this is a problem with the whole legal community. There is something missing in their preparation.  I don’t think they really study history very well.  If they do it’s probably some two and a half hour lecture in year one of law school or something.  But lawyers don’t seem to under­stand the basis of the very law they talk about all the time.  There’s no question that the basis of law comes out of the Word of God and the Ten Commandments, in the Western tradition.  Our laws are basically inherited from Great Britain; Great Britain’s laws are inherited from Christen­dom in Europe.  Come on, everybody knows this that studied history; this isn’t some controversial thing that we just thought up in some fundamentalist church last weekend.  This is something that any reputable historian knows very well. 

 

So for somebody to say that it’s a big threat for people to say that they are subject only to the laws of their God and not those of our government, well, I can understand where he might be coming from but you’ve got to be care.  The laws of the government, the right to make laws is derivative of the laws of God, period.  So if you don’t have laws of God as a standard, then laws that men make are only relative; they are only the product of a dictator who imposes his arbitrary rules on society or they are a product of the 51% who vote.  But the 51% aren’t always right, we know that from the Scriptures; 51% were wrong 95% of the time in ancient Israel.  The point is that 51% can be a tyranny also.  So what’s the absolute standard of reference?  It’s the Word of God, it’s the Ten Commandments.

 

We have the spectacle now, it’s going to be interesting to watch in the news of the judge in Alabama who, while he was a state judge had the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and the ACLU, of anything that smacks of God is anathema to the ACLU, so now on the state supreme court he’s actually created a monument to the Ten Commandments right in the state supreme court building. Well, you thought the ACLU was irritated when he was just a judge, you can imagine how they’re irritated now that he’s a state judge on the state supreme court of all things.  So the federal judge has ordered him to remove the statement and he has absolutely refused to do it.  This could potentially be very interesting because this sets up a conflict between the federal govern­ment and the state government, and you remember what happened back in the civil rights era when the Governor of Arkansas ordered the National Guard against the federal marshals in a confrontation between the federal and state authorities.  So this could unfold into a very interesting phenomenon here because here you have the judge of the Alabama Supreme Court who refuses to adhere to the judicial opinions of a Federal Court.  It involves state’s rights by the way; it’s a resurrection of the civil rights issue.  But apart from the confrontational point, the man is on solid historical grounds.  The basis of law is the Ten Commandments.  What is it?  It’s not Buddha.  What is the basis of our western tradition and our western law?  It’s the Ten Commandments.  So when you hear these kind of things coming from people, and for some reason it comes out of the legal community; of all the people that should know better, the very people that ought to be guiding us are the very fools that are coming out with this drivel, this anti-historical ignorance.  It’s really amazing to listen to this stuff.

 

Here’s another good quote.  This is Martin Marty who is a theologian, speaking in Newsweek.  “The problem isn’t with Bush’s sincerity but with his evident conviction that he’s doing God’s will.”  Isn’t that horrible to say, as though the environmentalists, the radical environmentalists didn’t think he was doing God’s will.  Did Martin Luther King think he was doing God’s will?  Do the black civil rights leaders think they’re doing God’s will?  Obviously they do, so it’s okay for them to think of themselves as doing God’s will but it’s wrong for President Bush to think he’s doing God’s will. Do you see that the arbitrariness of the accusation is silly?  Martin Marty has spent his career undermining the authority of Scripture anyway, so one would ask Martin Marty what do you expect Bush to do, your will?  What’s so great about your will?  In that sense that’s where the rejoinder… it’s kind of nasty to say this to somebody face to face but when it comes down to that arrogance that I want my will done, the good reply to that is well Jesus impresses me more than you do.  Let them deal with that rejoinder. 

 

Here’s one from a prominent person in the New York Times writing: “I tend to disagree with evangelicals on almost everything and I see no problem with aggressively pointing out the dismissal consequences of this increasing religious influence.”  It’s interesting, these people apparently feel that the evangelical crowd is increasing and apparently it is.  We must be having a political effect and I think we are compared to when I was young, you didn’t have any James Dobson on the radio effecting 30 million people every day so I think there has been a Christian influence and these people are threatened by that.  That’s why we find today it’s the New York Times, otherwise known as the Baghdad Times, that is very carefully assaulting Christians when we take a stand saying the Christian God is not the God of Islam.  So they’re defending Islam. 

 

Let’s think about that.  It’s interesting; would a civil libertarian atheist be free to articulate his atheism in any Muslim country you know?  And yet these are the people in our country who are advocating let’s beat down the evangelicals because as one person sarcastically wrote in the paper, you know these evangelicals have got to get going, they’re way behind the Muslims, we haven’t got suicide bombers yet, we haven’t got snipers, we haven’t gotten all the terrorist bombing, gee, it seems like the Christian threat has really got to get going, they’re not right there yet with the Muslims.  So that’s the atmosphere in which we live and it’s going to become increasingly hostil, as we’ve pointed out. 

 

It gets back to the framework and why I’ve tried over the years to put Bible doctrine together and we’ll review that framework.  Years ago I showed you this slide when we started the series.  This is actually a depiction of how in World War II the B-17 bombers used to protect each other against fighter aircraft, and the bombers were to fly in certain formation where their gunners would cover the other guy.  The whole point was that you didn’t fly in alone; you flew in those days with a lot of other friendly bombers by your side.  So while one guy was protecting your right side you could protect his left side and it was a teamwork effort.  You want to think about that when you think about the various truths of the Bible because one truth of the Bible cannot stand by itself.  You’ve got to have an interlocking structure like you have in the frame of a building. The beams have to mutually support each other and that’s the way you must think of the truths of Scripture.  You cannot sit out here and have some isolated truth of the Bible, some little pet theory, some pet point and keep pressing it because if you do you’re going to find that whole point is going to be completely surrounded and cut off. 

 

For example, let’s suppose you’re in some environment where people are assiduously assaulting the Scripture as trustworthy. So here you are with a group of folks who think the Bible is just a fairy tale.  And you believe in the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture.  How do you handle yourself if you believe in the inerrancy and inspiration authority of Scripture and you’re in a hostile environment in which they are laughing at the Scripture as an impossibility?  In order to defend the Scriptures you have to bring in the idea of man created by God in God’s image and therefore there’s no linguistic reason why God can’t talk to man.  So there’s a basis for this; the basis for the criticism of the Scripture is a low view of language.  It’s just an evolved grunt system that the monkeys used to use and that man has gradually developed.  Of course, monkeys don’t grunt to God so it’s silly to think that God can talk to man.  It’s silly to think that God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai because we all (quote) “know” that God can’t talk to man, there’s this big barrier of communication.

 

So in order to undercut their position, what you have to do, you have to say well, you have a very faulty view of language, you have a faulty view of man and you have a faulty view of the world. 

What you do is you spread out, you’re not convincing them yet but what you’re doing is you’re building a worldview like Paul did in Acts 17 so that they see that the disagreement isn’t just over this book; the disagreement is over the whole nature of the universe. The disagreement is over the nature of man; the disagreement is over what language is all about.  It’s a wide ranging disagree­ment and usually what happens if you have a halfway intelligent person on the other end of the conversation, by the time you start doing this they begin to back up and realize we’ve got a bigger question here, we can’t just be flippant about this; this is a profound difference that’s going on here.  So you want to keep this picture in mind because that’s how Bible doctrine protects Bible doctrine.  That’s how you argue with an integrated approach.

 

On the notes I summarized the Framework so let’s look at that last page and we’ll go through parts of that Framework.  This is not all the truth of the Scripture, obviously not.  But these are key events.  On the left side of the diagram those are the key acts of history.  On the right side are the doctrines and the truths that come from those events, that are revealed in and through those events.  The reason you want to look at this diagram with the left and the right columns together is it prevents you from thinking that if you deny the left side, if you deny the authenticity, for example, take Mt. Sinai and you look over to the right and see the concepts and truths of revelation, inspiration and canonicity are illustrated and revealed through that act of God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, and somebody comes along and says it doesn’t really matter whether Moses really spoke to God on Mount Sinai, it doesn’t really matter whether there was a Mount Sinai, I just believe the doctrine.  Well no, because then the doctrine has no base.  It’s got to have a contact point with history.  So you’ve got to keep the left and right side together.  If you release the left side you’re going to destroy the right side.  This should make you sensitive, then, to why when people start to undercut the historicity of Scripture, like you have Christians going around saying it really doesn’t matter what happened in Genesis 1 and 3, we can get along without that, that’s just a nice story.  Well just a minute, let’s look at the first two events, creation and fall.

 

            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Rapture of the Church                                       Pre-tribulationism

            Growth of the Church                                        Sanctification specific to the Body of Christ

            Emergence of the Church                                  Work of the Son

            Earthly Origin of the Church                              Person and work of the Holy Spirit

            Heavenly Origin of the Church               Judgment/salvation

            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Resurrection of the King                                    Glorification

            Death of the King                                              Substitutionary Blood Atonement

            Life of the King                                                 Kenosis, Impeccability, Infallibility

            Birth of the King                                               Hypostatic Union

            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            Restoration of a Remnant                                  Canonicity, Prayer

            Exile and End of the Kingdom                Sanctification and Separation

            Fall of the Kingdom                                           Sanctification and Chastening

            Decline of the Kingdom                         Sanctification and Chastening

            Golden Era of Solomon                          Sanctification and Culture

            Rise and Reign of David                                    Sanctification modeled by individual

            Conquest and Settlement                                    Sanctification modeled by war

            Mt. Sinai                                                           Revelation, Inspiration, Canonicity

            Exodus                                                 Judgment/Salvation w/sub-blood atonement

            Call of Abraham                                                Election, Justification, Faith

            -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

            (Noahic) Covenant                                            God, man, nature

            Flood                                                                Judgment/Salvation

            Fall                                                                   Evil, Suffering

            Creation                                                            God, man, nature

            -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

If those did not take place like the Scripture said, what doctrines, what major doctrinal areas are immediately affected?  The whole nature of God, the whole nature of man the nature of the universe and the whole issue in the problem of evil and suffering, which everybody says is a big obstacle to Christian, well I can’t believe God, God wouldn’t allow babies to die.  They always want to use the evil issue.  Well, yeah, you’ve got an evil issue if you don’t have the fall. So you’ve got to hold to Genesis 1, 2 and 3.  And it’s just simply stupidity, absolute stupidity, religious stupidity to say that I don’t care what Genesis 1-11 says, I just believe the rest of the Bible. Well why believe the rest of the Bible, why not throw it out.  Maybe I have problems with Genesis 32, so I’m going to toss that one.  So here we are, we’re back to whoever wants to accept or not accept whatever chapter of the Bible they’re looking at. 

 

All these truths hang together; you’ve got to see that point.  And then in this diagram you want to see that those truths not only hang together but those truths integrate with history, with real history.  That’s why Christian beliefs affect every area of knowledge.  You cannot become a Christian and believe the Word of God as the Word of God and not let it affect everything including your arithmetic.  If we had time I could show you that the Bible…, there’s not religious neutrality to arithmetic.  If there’s not religious neutrality in arithmetic, there isn’t religious neutrality in any other zone of human knowledge.  In every area the creation is revealing the glory of God.  We are confronted with our God everywhere we go.  He’s before us, behind us, in every area of the universe that we can explore He is there and His glory is there.  For us to deny that and to say there are these gray neutral zones where it really doesn’t matter what you believe is sheer nonsense.  We can’t accept that.  But that has affected the Christian community for a long, long time, this bizarre idea of a neutrality out there somewhere.

 

Let’s look at some other points that we have emphasized over the years.  This is the picture of faith as the non-Christian like to look at it and we unfortunately are fighting somewhat of an uphill battle here.  When you use the word “believe,” say in the phrase “I believe the Bible,” or “I believe the Lord Jesus Christ,” the problem is that that word today doesn’t mean what we mean by it.  Let’s look at the first statement.  Here’s a picture of the Dictionary of Philosophy, this is a standard work, every college university has this.  “Belief in something, even though there’s an absence of evidence for it,” there is the fountain head for the academia and their view of what faith is.  Is that the view of Scripture?  Let’s just back up a minute and think, if you were having a discussion with someone and that’s what they believed “believe” means, where would you go in Scripture?  Where would you go, there are several places, but where would you go to show them that that’s not a Biblical definition of faith? 

 

Can you think of a passage of Scripture?  Think of this last statement, “even though there’s an absence of evidence for it.”  Think through from your Bible where there’s a passage that talks about evidence or belief.  Turn to Luke 1.  Luke was written by Luke who was a doctor.   When you’re having a discussion with someone all you’re doing in the discussion is not defending you, get away from that.  You’re not defending you; you’re defending what the Bible says about itself.  That person is free to reject that; every person is free to reject that. There’s no pressure here, we’re not a bunch of Muslims that are threatening to execute every non-Christian.  That’s what they think they are but we believe in freedom of speech; liberty of conscience, you can reject Christ or you can accept Him.  We’re not arguing that.  All we’re saying is before you reject it, at least know what it is you’re rejecting. 

 

Luke says “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, [2] just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word have handed them down to us, [3] it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning to write it out for you in consecutive order… [4] so that you might know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.”  If Luke thinks that way, can he believe that “believe” is this?  If he really believed that believe was this he wouldn’t have bothered to do the research for the third Gospel.  You can think of John, “These are written that you may believe.”  If believe isn’t on evidence, there’s no sense in writing the fourth Gospel.  So just dismiss the third and fourth Gospels because they don’t fit that view of faith.  See where you get in trouble.  That’s why you want to know the Scripture well enough so when you encounter these ideas, even if you can’t open your mouth at that point because it may not be appropriate, at least in your mind you haven’t sucked in this chunk of bizarre falsehood and letting the flesh just take that piece of vanity and hot air and circulate it all through your soul.  You filter it out right from the start, that’s wrong.  And you find when you do this it produces a clarity of thinking.

 

I love these two statements because this shows you the trouble people get into.  Here’s Julian Huxley, one of the most famous anti-Christians of the 19th and 20th century.  “I believe firmly that the scientific method, although slow and never claiming to lead to complete truth is the only method which will give satisfactory foundations for belief.”  He’s used the word “belief” two ways there.  He’s saying I believe in science but if belief means no evidence then he’s saying there’s no evidence to believe in science; clearly he’s not saying that, but he’s using the word. So if Huxley uses the word “I believe firmly that the scientific method…” etc. and he uses it in that sentences, “I believe all of the Word of God, I believe all of the Scriptures are inerrant.”  It’s as just much of a statement connected to real fact as Huxley’s statement.  Then he turns right around after having said that, after saying that science never claims to lead to complete truth, what does he say in the next statement: “Quite assuredly at present we know nothing beyond this world and experience.”  How does he know that if science is tentative? 

 

Which gets back to a diagram, the one we go back to from time to time and that’s how we depict human knowledge; that if all human knowledge is trapped in that box because down at the x axis of this graph is time, and the y axis is space, all human knowledge is contained in that fuzzy area, in the center area.  And it obviously means that it’s limited, and therefore man, whatever he says, whatever he believes, whatever he asserts is true or whatever he says is false is coming out of this very limited data base.  And it’s all contingent.  If the Bible isn’t true and there is no truth pre-existing this experience of man, then everything is contingent on tomorrow because tomorrow we may find a fact added to that that will change everything we believe.  If you really believe that, that’s what you’d have to wind up with. All knowledge is contingent on the next minute.  So you have to hold your breathe until the next minute comes to make sure that what you believe today won’t change tomorrow because of new data.  Now you arrive at tomorrow and you’ve got the same problem, I can’t really know that I know because tomorrow they might discover something else.  It’s like all these health reports, first it’s high carbs, then it’s low carbs, now it’s breathing is hazardous to your health or something.  I mean there’s always something like this and you go nuts listening to this medical drivel that goes on day after day, week after week, millions of dollars spend on these profound conclusions.

 

That’s an example of the limits of empirical knowledge.  So if you get some smart aleck sometime that you feel like is really demeaning the Word of God you can prick the balloon with this little diagram, draw it on the back of a napkin and say do you have more knowledge than that or not.  You’ve got limited knowledge.  On what basis, then, can you know anything for sure?  Force them to ask questions.  Don’t be in the position of always giving answers to questions.  Make the other guy give answers to your questions; just sit back and ask questions.  That makes them think and it takes the heat off you.  Remember that, don’t be on the defensive all the time. 

Let’s think about some of these events.  Looking at that diagram, let’s take, for example, the last thing we did.  Let’s talk about the future; that’s a topic that’s kind of interesting to the person in the street, Tim LaHaye’s books, etc.  We’ve got a subject, we know a noun, your friends at work may not know this, if you want to be humorous about it say hey, let me spell you out a word and I’ll tell you what it means: eschatology.  Eschatology is the study of the future.  Everyone has an eschatology; everyone has an eschatology.  They have an opinion about what’s going on and if you doubt that, ask the person, if there’s a God how do you reconcile yourself to Him.  Usually they come up with this balance, good works and bad works or something, but that’s an escha­tology.  That’s a belief in a future judgment, a future evaluation based on works.  Most people believe that; most religions accept that. 

 

So everyone has an eschatology.  Do the communists have an eschatology?  Absolutely.  They believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat was going to come to pass and they believed that that was their nirvana, their social nirvana when the world would get better and better.  So everyone has an eschatology.  Now having said that, let’s go to the Scripture.  The question, well, I don’t believe in the Second Advent of Jesus, I mean that’s religious superstition.  Now the point is what is this eschatology built on in Scripture?  Let’s think about the basis of the claims that Christ will come again.  What’s involved?

 

Here’s the process, I’m going to go through the mental process that you go through.  You’re working with eschatology; you’re working with the credibility of eschatology, the credibility of the Second Advent of Jesus.  Where do you go in your head to put a foundation under that belief?  First of all you say, there are numerous ways, I’m just illustrating a few.  You say to yourself, well it’s the return of who, who is involved in this eschatology?  It’s a person called Jesus Christ; who was Jesus Christ?  Look on the chart; we have four events, the birth of the King, the life of the King, the death of the King, and the resurrection of the King.  Look at all the deep, deep truths that are linked to those four events: the hypostatic union, that Jesus Christ is undiminished deity united with true humanity united in one person without confusion forever.  That’s the person we’re talking about in our eschatology. 

 

So now all of a sudden the discussion about eschatology mush­rooms, it gets bigger and bigger because now we’ve got to deal with the God-man.  Then we deal with the kenosis, impeccability and infallibility, the substitutionary blood atonement, obviously with a rank unbeliever you’re not going to get into all that but I’m talking about what goes on in your head, not their head, your head because every question that you deal with is an exercise, spiritually, for you to grow.  Think of it as Satan just throwing the darts so you’re learning, even though you might not have to confront verbally the person doing that, you know the person behind the person that’s doing that.  So you use it as a strength-trainer.  So when this thing comes you say to yourself okay, how would I handle that if we had an open discussion right this moment.  So you would tie eschatology to the person around whom eschatology is built, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

 

You say but that itself has a basis because doctrine associated with the King is the hypostatic union, what does the hypostatic union involve?  God and man; where do we go to get knowledge about God and man?  Right back to creation again, so now we’ve linked the rapture of the Church, isolate one thing and have it defend itself.  It’s an integrated whole system and this is very difficult to master for us in our culture today, believe me because I worked with this for years and I know the struggle I’ve had to try to get my head into the systematics of the Bible.  It’s because some­where in our education, all of us have basically been educated after the 30’s and 40’s and the idea of a unified field of truth in our whole education system is gone, absolutely gone.  When you learned history, when you were a kid and you were learning history you learned it as a pile of facts; that’s all you learned it as, no purpose in history.  Can you remember in any of your history courses a discussion about the purpose of history?  I can’t; I’ve met very few people ever trained that way to think, so what you are trained to do is think about what happened in 1492, what happened in 1215, what happened in 1776, what happened here, what happened in 1812, what happened in 1865 and it’s all dates and marbles.  I’m not knocking the idea of dates; I’m just saying the way you were taught prevents us from thinking structurally and systematically. Very, very few people are trained to think systematically.  They just can’t think through issues. 

 

That’s where we as Christians, because we do have the truth of Scripture we ought to be able to think through issues.  Let’s take another contemporary issue, the issue that we’ve had discussing about the war; is the war moral or immoral.  That’s a discussion by itself, we’re not going to talk about Iraq being moral or immoral but let me talk about you would decide the question.  What is your standard for answering the question whether war is moral or immoral?  Where are you going to go for your answers?  Where is your ruler, where is your standard?  That has to be discussed so when you get into these questions, well what do you think about this, perhaps a way of backing off the conversation is say well wait a minute, that’s a great topic, but before we can talk about that we’ve got to talk about how we would solve that question.  What’s the method that we’re going to use to decide that question?  Now you’re getting into deeper questions.  You’ve got to do that because the gospel is a deep answer to a deep question; it’s not a trivial thing, it can’t be done in two and a half minutes.  It’s going to take time and in our day the gospel witnessing is a slow process because you’re dealing with so much crud, so much non-Biblical trash that you have to kind of paw through this stuff to get so we can even talk the right words that have the right meanings. 

 

Let’s go back to this war, whether it’s moral or immoral.  Let’s look at the Framework, where are you going to go in the Framework to get a standard for war.  First of all, people don’t like war. Who does?  The anti-war crowd always makes it look like the people, except for them, are all for war.  Name a person for war; nobody is for war.  Nobody likes war, least of all the people in the military because they’re the ones that get shot.  The people that are giving their opinions are sitting safely in some place, they’re not getting shot at, it’s the guys in the service that are getting shot at.  So when they say oh well they just like war—nonsense!  What a stupid statement, and challenge it. That is really a stupid statement to say somebody is for war.  Everybody is against war; the issue is how do we handle the situation that leads to war?  How do we get peace that’s real, that’s just, that’s the issue.

 

So what you have had in our country is not only have we lost the standard, we can’t even find the standard to decide the question.  A guy was writing in World Magazine, he was in a University out in Washington State and he mentioned the concept of just war.  Now anybody that’s studied history for any length of time that the idea of just war has been around since at least the time of Augustine in the 4th or 5th century.  So we have one of these academic nitwits on the campus who when they hear the concept “just war” think the guy meant oh, it’s just a war.  Wait a minute, that’s not what he said, he wasn’t minimizing it and saying it was just a war.  That’s what this girl thought, he was saying oh it’s a just a war—how can you say that, how can you say it’s just a war.  It’s a “just war” lady, listen to what I said, a just war, did you ever hear about it?  Go back and re-take your history course and get smart.  Just war comes out of Augustine’s treatment of Scripture.  Guess why Augustine dealt with it; think about it, why would Augustine discuss, as a Christian, just war.  What was going on in Augustine’s day?  You had Christians in the Roman army.  And the Christians in the Roman army were leaving the Roman army not because they were pacifists, they were leaving the Roman army because they had to swear allegiance to Caesar and that was idolatry to them.   It wasn’t that they were against war; it wasn’t that Christians couldn’t be warriors.  That’s another piece of bologna from church history.  There were Christians all through the Roman army.  In fact one legion was called the Thunder’s Legion, they had lots of Christians in it, and they’d kill the enemy just like anybody else would kill the enemy.  So obviously from the very beginning Christians were involved in authorized violence.

 

So the question then becomes how do you handle the question.  Go back to the Framework, the cause of war, why do we have wars in the first place.  Go back; we have something called the fall of man.  Come on, let’s get real, we had a real fall, we’re all dying, we’re all under the sentence of capital punishment. That’s another thing, capital punishment.  We’re all under capital punishment, are you dying right now?  Yes you are, you’re aging, look in the mirror. So if we are aging and we are dying we are under a sentence of capital punishment.  So what’s the big deal with capital punishment, you die early or die later, you’re still under capital punishment sentence.  And why are we all dying?  Point number 2 in the Framework; it goes back to the fall. 

 

Nobody likes war, but the sentimental crowd is offended by this and now you know the source of their offense.  These poor folks don’t understand depravity; they have no concept of evil, a very, very sloppy shallow idea of evil.  Anyone who is against the sword of state is basically a very naïve person who has no concept Biblically of evil.  Again, the basis is in the Framework and we ought to be able to think this through.  The fall goes on and on and on until the eternal state. There are going to be wars all the way down to the end.  Is Jesus going to use capital punishment in the Millennial Kingdom?  You bet He is; capital punishment isn’t going away until eternity begins. And when eternity begins why can capital punishment then go away?  Because everybody is death-proof, there can’t be any capital punishment then because good and evil are permanently separated.  What you have in that discussion is a total failure to perceive the truth of Scripture. 

 

Let’s take another idea that circulates around.  Well, I don’t believe that there’s only one way of salvation, I think that’s pretty bigoted and narrow minded, I think everybody can just chose their own way to God.  Of course the quick answer to that is I believe in freedom and choice, yes I do, everybody can go to hell in their own way, I agree with you.  Of course they don’t like it when you say that.  But one method you can use is to agree with the people but agree in such a way that you undermine their agreement.  It’s fun to watch because I love to watch their expression when people come on, and I agree with that, but you use the judo approach and you just take it further.  People are always saying can you accept a homosexual, I can accept fornicators and adulterers I might as well accept homosexuals, what’s the problem there, I have no problem.  The moment you say that you’ve agreed with them, did I say I accepted them?  Sure I did, along with everybody else.  The way you do that is you formally agree with them but the content of your agreement is totally against their position. 

 

In the Framework you come back to this situation of the exclusivity of the Word of God.  Where in the Framework do you pick that up?  Think about in history of God’s pedagogy, where did God draw a line between a social group.  It’s in the Old Testament; it’s where missions had to start because before this guy there was no missions, there didn’t have to be because God revealed Himself in every people’s group.  When did God stop revealing Himself in every people group and concentrate on one group?  The call of Abraham.  So you go back to the call of Abraham and then you look on the right side and you see ooh, there’s the basis for the exclusivity, the doctrine of election, God’s choosing, He decides how He’s going to run history.  He doesn’t cite a congressional committee to pass on whether they like this view of history or that view, it’s He calls the shots.  So anyone who is against exclusivity, the idea there’s one way of salvation, is secretly against a sovereign God.  See what’s happening here, you’re smoking out the basis, just like we do with the people who are against capital punishment and war, etc. they don’t understand evil.  The people who are against one way of salvation don’t understand the nature of God.  They can’t think of a God who is sovereign.

 

God has a right to choose however He chooses, without asking you or me or anyone else.  Now you’ve got a problem with that?  Too bad, that’s the way God is.  So exclusivity is related to election but it’s also related to something else.  It’s related to the second word on the right side, justification.  How is a sinner able to walk into the presence of a holy God, because often people will say oh, I just cannot believe in a God that would sent people to hell.  The rejoinder to that is I just cannot believe in a God who can send a sinner to heaven.  See what I mean, you can always take the sentence and reverse it.  You just have to be creative; I’m not fast on my feet so I have to think of these afterwards, so the third time I encounter them I’ll have them ready.  But what you do is you reverse the sentence to reflect Biblical truth.  Yes, I can’t believe in a God that sends sinners to heaven.  Well why can’t you?  Because He’s violating His righteous standard, how would you feel if somebody murdered your mother and the judge says that’s okay, the crime that this person did to your mother is so trivial we’re not going to even prosecute it.  Excuse me, what happened to justice just then; it’s lost somewhere, there’s no justice there.  So justification, it’s the holiness of God that has to be propitiated, it has to be met. 

 

You can go through any of these this way and work the Framework around them. That’s why I said all along this class is not a class in exegesis; we’re not going every word in a verse.  There’s a place for that and I’m a great proponent of that but that’s not what this class is about.  This class is about seeing the Framework as a totality and putting it together so you can go out there and use it. 

 

Another example that people would say is the hypocrite issue.  Oh, there are hypocrites in the church. Yeah, right, and do you know how you can reverse that?  There are some clever ways of reversing that.  A defensive approach is yeah, there’s fallen people, it gets back to the issue of evil; evil hasn’t been totally eradicated yet so yeah there’s going to be hypocrites in the church.  But you can also turn it around on a Romans 1 basis and an Acts 14 and Acts 17 basis and say well, there are probably more hypocrites outside of the church than are in. Oh, what do you mean by that?  People go around and say they don’t believe in God and then turn around and make moral judgments, that’s hypocritical.  If you don’t believe in God you have no basis telling me I’m wrong because I’m going to tell you that I don’t care what you think because you don’t count in my life, it’s I that count, period, I don’t care what you think.  So what are you going to do with that one?  You have to have an absolute standard of reference.  Here the same people who are denying that God exists, oh, I don’t believe in God, okay, but you’re acting as though God is there every time you make a moral judgment. 

 

Consider the statements I brought up before.  Here these guys are… here’s one from The Chicago Tribune, “Christian conservatives have declared war on civil libertarians for the soul of America.”  In other words, she’s complaining, not that they’re doing it but these guys are all complaining that this is wrong.  [blank spot]  Have you got a problem with that, what’s wrong with that, I don’t know what’s wrong with that and then force them to come up with some standard.  You know where they’re going to get the standard from is their conscience? Where did their conscience come from?  Because they’re made in God’s image, that’s why, they know it’s wrong, everybody knows it’s wrong, come on, and you know that God is behind what’s right and what’s wrong so let’s be big boys and girls and move on.  You’ve got to work with this, with people that do this to you. 

 

Let’s look at a few more examples of the Framework reference working here.  You’ll notice that on the right side there are lots of those key events that have to do with sanctification.  Those events are chiefly where, if you read devotional literature you’ll see that it comes out of that period of time.  For example, what’s the most famous devotional book of all the Bible, every body cites it we all identify with it?  The book of Psalms.  Who wrote most of the book of Psalms?  David.  If you look in the Framework, what is the doctrine that is being revealed through that period of time?  Sanctification.  So it’s almost like the Holy Spirit leads us into those Scriptures that fit what we need.   We have a hunger and a thirst for how do we grow in the Christian life, how do we manage in the Christian life, where do we go?  We go to those places.  Why is that? Because in that era, in those events that was what God was revealing. David was a guy in the center of the wisdom literature of the Bible who illustrated all these truths in his own personal life.  He illustrated sin, he illustrated grace, he illustrated the ability to trust God and move on, etc.  Again, it ties together the use of Scripture. 

 

We have some time left so I’m going to open it up for questions on the Framework so far, what we’ve done.  Are there any issues that you may want to see how they are linked into the Frame­work? 

 

Someone says with all due respect it sounds good when you talk about it theoretically but when you get someone into that they don’t give up so easy so could you go a little deeper into the banter back and forth that you ultimately get to the point where they would scratch their head and say I guess you’re right, I’ve got to think about this: Clough replies: But at that point you’ve done the job.  You can’t always get people to that stage.  Think about it, before we get guilty conscience on ourselves and our efforts, just kind of reward yourself with the idea, did Jesus convince every­body?  Did Jesus convince anyone in His own personal family other than His father and His mother?  I often quote this, He must not have been living the Christ life, He didn’t win his brothers to the Lord until after He died.  What do you make of that one?  These kids saw Him all grown up, why didn’t they believe?  Jesus wasn’t stupid; in Luke 2 at 12 years old He already knows the Scripture very well and already has a sense of His Messianic mission. 

 

So what’s the deal?  Well, the deal is Romans 1; people suppress the truth in unrighteousness.  The deal is what did Adam and Eve do in the Garden?  They fled to the bushes.  Why did they flee to the bushes?  To hide from God.  That’s why it’s volatile; it’s a volatile thing to bring up a spiritual issue because immediately when you bring up anything that smacks within a hundred miles of the gospel all of a sudden you’re going to engender all these suppression mechanisms.  And that’s what you’re dealing with.  There may be people that you can’t even read who have secretly in their heart listened to you.  You can’t tell that either; you can’t tell when you sow seed.  Sometimes when you think you haven’t sowed any seed and five years later it’s sprouting somewhere.  Do you remember back when you said that and I put you off?  I’ve seen that. 

 

So you can’t always judge a book by its cover, by the response that you get.  But what you’re saying is right; I’m just trying to give a comfort in the direction, the overall direction of not leaving the boat.  Imagine a person drowning, you’re trying to reach down to pull them out of the water; you’re a goner if you step out of the boat.  The point is you have to have a platform that you stay in while you’re reaching for them, and what I’m saying is you’ve got to stay inside the Biblical frame of reference while you’re doing all of this, whatever it is you’re doing, because the moment you step out into so-called neutral ground, you’re in the water with them.  You can’t do that, you’ve got to stay within the frame of Scripture, always.  Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes we don’t know, we get hit with something and we really don’t know. 

 

But think again, what have we said in church history.  That has happened to the Church; it’s not just happened to you personally, it’s happened to the Church.  The Church has been hit with heresies over the centuries and didn’t know what to do with it.  So what did the Church do?  Think about it historically.  We’ve gone through church history, I’ve summarized it a number of times.  What were some examples where the Church got hit with something and they didn’t know how to deal with it, but yet eventually they did?  The heresies about Jesus, the first 400 years.  What did the Church finally do?  They went back to the Scripture and they thought about it and they prayed about it and they had arguments about it until they discerned what the Scripture said.  So that’s going to have to be the response sometimes.  It’s happened to me many times.  I get hit with something and I’m not sure what the Scripture says about that, so I have to go back and rehash it and think about what is this, sometimes asking other Christians who worked in these areas. 

 

When I first became a Christian at MIT I got hit all the time. When you become a Christian in that kind of a hostile environment the shells start flying right away.  So what do you do?  You go talk to some older Christians that have been through the battle a little bit, taken a few hits.  And say hey, what do I do with this?  So you’re not always going to have an answer.  You may have the idea of the Framework but that doesn’t mean you know all the answers, it just means you know where to go to get the answers.  And you should have confidence there are answers, sufficient to this situation, whatever it is that you face.  But that doesn’t mean you know what that is right away, you’ve got to dig a little bit.  But don’t be ashamed of that, we all have to dig like that and the Church has been doing it for 2000 years so hey, so what if I take two months to think it through.  It took the Church 400 years to get Jesus straight, it took the church 1000 years to figure out what happened on the cross and get that straight.  So don’t be too hard on yourselves when those things happen, just always go back to the Scriptures and to back to men and women who have worked with this thing. That’s how the body of Christ works, we help one another and we’re not going to be experts, we can’t be experts in the whole thing.

 

The problem, going back to what you said, people want to hold on, in the final analysis, in the final analysis the problem is man wants to be his own God. That’s the final bottom line, ALWAYS!  We know our sin natures and the way to think is reflect on your own flesh, you’ve fought with your flesh ever since you’ve become a Christian and you know it.  And you know how in the flesh you act, you know how in the flesh you want to do it your way, even knowing what God wants I want to do it my way, period.  That’s how this other person’s thinking, I want to do it my way. 

 

So the battle is not necessarily an intellectual battle, it’s a spiritual battle.  That’s why often times it’s not even what you say.  In a local body, whatever church group you’re in, if you’ve been there long enough, this is my big gripe about people that float from church to church and don’t stay in one place for any length of time and I know there are legitimate reasons for moving around, but you see people move every six months, that’s what I’m talking about.  When they do that do you know what they do?  They miss out on the continuity of the Holy Spirit working in people’s lives.  The Holy Spirit does things slowly sometimes, He takes year to do this, to put it together and so they miss the big story and they don’t see how the Holy Spirit works sin these situations.  So you have to get back to watch how the Holy Spirit works and when you do you will see how actions which are done in gracious love often are the breakthrough. 

 

I think all of us can remember an event or two where it wasn’t what the people said; it was their reaction to what people did.  And that shocked them because the life goes along with the Word and the life is a three-dimensional, a four-dimensional as in time, it’s a four-dimensional projection whereas the Word is only audio.  So it’s not just arguing, it’s showing grace but it’s also showing the fact that we believe in truth and that’s a demonstration. And that’s what’s scaring people.  I really believe some of these articles, some of these statements, for example this one that I just read you, just think about this for a minute.  What does this person fear?  “Christian conserv­atives have declared war on civil libertarians for the soul of America?”  What do you think is on this person’s mind? 

 

What are they thinking about when they say that “Christian conservatives have declared on civil libertarians?”  That’s code words for what issues.  Think about the issues that are involved here.  What are the civil libertarians pushing that the Christian conservatives are against? [someone answers] Licentiousness, exactly, and the relaxing, the redefining of marriage, the well everybody has a right to whatever concept, and they’re the civil libertarians.  So the Christian conservatives declare on the civil libertarians.  Wait a minute, think about the dynamics here.  Who has declared war?  The civil libertarians were the ones that started the war, they’re the ones that wanted to go their own independent way and redefine reality according to the flesh.  So they’re the ones that have declared war; we can’t let them accuse us of declaring war, they are the ones that started the war.  We’re just holding to the standard that’s been there long before 1776 pal, the standards we’re talking about go back all the way to the time of Moses and before so we haven’t changed. Who’s changed?  Right there, you can’t even agree on the sentence, because we’re both loading that sentence with two different things. 

 

Last Sunday Dennis was doing a thing on the authority of Scripture and afterwards we were talking about language, etc. and he made this statement, and this is a beautiful way to kind of close out what I’m saying.  In John 11, think of what Caiaphas, the high priest says about Jesus, that it is better for one person to die than the whole country go down the tube.  Caiaphas said those words; John the apostle wrote the Gospel in which he quoted Caiaphas.  Here’s Caiaphas, here’s John, and they both say exactly the same sentence.  Do both of those men mean the same thing by the same words in the same sentence?  I don’t think so. What does Caiaphas mean?  It’s pragmatically useful to knock this guy off and get rid of the problems so that we don’t have the Romans coming in here.  What does John see that has just been said? That Jesus Christ will die for the sins of the world, it is better for one man to die than the whole of mankind go to…. Here we have two people using the Aramaic or Greek language, Koine Greek or whatever it was they spoke, both of them use the same vocabulary, they use the same subject, the same predicate and put the period in the same place in the sentence, and by golly, they totally disagree on what they just said. 

 

See how hard communication is; it’s extremely difficult because we’re in this spiritual battle where we can’t even use the words the same way.  When we use the word s-i-n that is misunder­stood today.  I doubt the average American would have a clue what we mean by s-i-n.  Not a clue.  So see how hard it is.  That’s why the gospel witnessing in our generation is getting harder and harder and harder to do.  I’ve had missionaries tell me that the stuff they’ve learned on the mission field they’re bringing back to this country because they’ve found in working with deeply pagan societies they’ve discovered ways of getting the gospel to them, and one way is they’ve found they have to go through something like the Framework. 

 

It’s amazing, in 1985, in the mid-80’s, a whole group of New Tribes missionaries realized this and they’ve changed the total approach of the way they translate the Bible, they’ve changed the whole approach of the way they evangelize villages based on this concept.  You’ve got to have the totality or you lose the pieces.  The natives will take a piece, and they don’t mean to do this, it’s all this syncretism, all the crud that’s in the flesh, and they just twist and turn and suppress it and the gospel never comes across.  People say oh gee, they’re supposed to be Christians, they’re acting like this, they never understood the gospel in the first place, that’s why.  It’s a struggle so these guys are telling me that you folks in the west, you’re encountering the problems that we’ve been dealing with in the jungles for decades.  So thankfully some people are getting their act together and rethinking how we do this. 

 

But the days of handing somebody a tract and in five minutes leading them to the Lord are pretty well gone.  You can do that if the Holy Spirit’s been working in their life and this is just the last of ten hundred events, yes you can do that.  But normally speaking that’s not how we are going to be leading people to the Lord.  It’s going to be a long arduous task to do that and it’s going to involve a lot of patience, a lot of clarification, but that’s the world we live in. 

 

Question asked: Clough replies:  That’s a good question, about the mystery of why God’s own people groomed for centuries, the channel through which we got the Bible, in the analysis of Jesus’ day only a minority believed, the totality didn’t.  The answer to that in a nutshell, we could spend hours answering that but in a nutshell the best Scripture that deals with that is Rom. 9, 10 and 11, that’s a center in Romans.  Paul has to deal with that because he’s a Jew and he’s getting frustrated because he’s going to fellow Jews trying to witness to them and gets rebuffed. So he has, thankfully, three whole chapters in which he outlines what God’s doing in that situation.  But the answer is in there, the blindness comes up on Israel.  It’s a special kind of blindness that God has allowed to happen and it gets involved but that’s the place to go for that answer.  There is an answer to that.

 

Something else said: Clough says:  Well, they’re stiffnecked, but the good news is that if you take four numbers, the total number of Jews that now believe in Jesus, the Messianic Jews, by the way there are a lot of them in Baltimore, the Messianic Jews and the bottom of your fraction put in the totality of the total world population of Jews so you get a ratio, you get a percent of the total population of Jews that believe in the Messiah, and then you take the big number of the totality of non-Jews, the Gentiles and take the number of professing Christians among the Gentiles, by the way, this was pointed out to me by a Messianic Jew, and guess which fraction is bigger.  It’s interesting that there are more percent of Jews that believe in the Messiah than Gentiles.  It’s rather shocking.  The reason why it comes out that way in the math is because there are that many more Gentiles, but it’s a sobering statistic.

 

We’ve got to close.