Hebrews Lesson 48 March 30, 2006
NKJ Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living
and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the
division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of
the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Hebrews 5
We have been in Hebrews 5:11 talking about the
sluggish believer for a couple of weeks and what makes a believer sluggish. The
short version is that what makes a believer sluggish is his sin nature. When we
get distracted by the sin nature and start walking by means of the flesh that
shuts down our spiritual growth, our spiritual advance.
NKJ Galatians 5:16 I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of
the flesh.
The Greek construction there is really important. It is a double negative (which you
don’t have in the English, but you do in the Greek) plus the subjunctive form
of the verb which is the strongest way to voice impossibility in the Greek language.
Walk by means of the Spirit and you will not (or it
will be impossible for you to) bring to completion the lusts of the flesh.
Then in the next verse we are told that the flesh
lusts against the Spirit and the Spirit lusts against the flesh. There is this
tug of war that takes place in the believer’s life. We are involved in a
spiritual warfare that involves three different enemies. Two of these enemies
are what we are focusing on in this study right now. That is the flesh which is our old sin nature which is the enemy within,
our internal enemy. Then what the Bible calls worldliness or the world system
based on the Greek word kosmos which
has to do with the structure of the culture, the pagan or human viewpoint
culture, that surrounds all of us. Ever since the fall of Adam as society developed
there has been this movement within culture to try to handle the pressures and
problems of life to explain existence apart from God – to look to other
sources of knowledge other than God. This is of course what got Eve into
trouble in the first place. Rather
than relying upon God’s revelation for her source of knowledge about the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, she went to an alternative source of
knowledge and listened to the serpent and his temptation.
As we look at this issue in Galatians 5:16. That’s really the background for
understanding the internal dynamics that create the sluggish believer that we
are talking about here, or the sluggish backslider of Hebrews 5. When the
believer begins to walk according to the flesh or the sin nature, at that point
he is no longer following the leadership of God the Holy Spirit. He is walking by the sin nature. The
sin nature is that internal enemy that has that has that attraction to the
external modes of the cosmic system.
The interesting thing is that the cosmic system - that culture within
which we develop that we are born into whether it is western civilization,
Western European civilization, American civilization, whether you are born in
the South or you are born in the North, whether you are born in the West,
whether you are born in the former Soviet Republic, whether you were born in
Asia everybody as the result of different things such as language and religious environment of the culture
around them - has norms and standards the history of those people have
different ways of looking at the world.
That is something we call a world
view. The Germans had a fancy word for it. They called it a velvenshaun(sp?).
It is a worldview. Every culture
has a worldview, a way of explaining everything in the world from ultimate
existence and causation, how the world came into being to how we come to know
the truth and what the truth is whether it is relative or absolute. All of
these things come into play in a worldview. Once you define what truth is then
that of course that impacts the whole concept of ethics and values. Ethics and values ultimately flow
from your concept of truth. Your concept of truth ultimately flows from your
view of ultimate reality in the universe.
So ultimate reality in the universe then develops into truth - how you
know what you know. Truth then affects your concepts of aesthetics, beauty,
art, architecture, music, and all of these things. The culture addresses all of
the aspects of life that we have around us. They influence us.
The job of a Christian and the job of the pastor as
well as the job of the individual believer is to come to understand the cosmic
system around us and how it contrasts with divine viewpoint world view.
NKJ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
It is real easy for you and I to sit here and think
about some Stone Age culture in New Guinea or some tribal culture deep in the
rain forests of Amazon and then think that if I am going to go there as their
missionary then I am going to have to learn their language. I have to learn
their history. I have to learn different things about their art and how that relates
to their religious beliefs. Who are the gods and goddesses that they worship?
What are their legends? What are their myths? We have to learn all of that. We
have to learn all about what is considered polite and impolite so that we don’t
say the wrong thing or eat with the wrong hand or whatever it may be. We have
to learn all of those different things so that as we go into that culture so we
can more accurately and effectively communicate the gospel. That is the end
result.
But you see we are as it were missionaries in a 21st
century post-modern American Southern Texas culture so we have to analyze all
of those things that are around us. That is really hard because most of us have
been involved that culture for so long that we think of that as normative. It
is like fish swimming in the water. They don’t know that they are in the water.
It is all around them. And so it is difficult to pick up on these things.
As you become a believer and you begin to grow and
advance and begin to learn the Word of God under the teaching ministry of God
the Holy Spirit, you walk by means of the Holy Spirit and you begin to grow
spiritually, and you begin to exchange human viewpoint garbage in your soul for
divine viewpoint truth. Then you begin to see more and more of a move away from
the culture around you to the point where at some point you are going to start
feeling uncomfortable. As you counter the culture around you and especially in
our situation where the culture is drifting at a rapid pace away from our historical
Judeo Christian roots, we watch things that happen on the news and things that
go on in Congress and we think that the world has gone absolutely crazy. We
can’t figure out why it is that they are doing the things they are doing. They
don’t see that certain things should be handled. You can’t understand why you
have foreign criminal immigrants coming into this country marching around
demonstrating in the streets waving their national flags. How absurd is this?
Do you think that you could go to their country and demonstrate against a
policy in their country and wave an American flag and get away with it? Not at
all! This is absurd. So why don’t we do anything about it? Are we just all
scared to death? Are we
intimidated by the fact that somebody may think that we are insensitive and not
modernist? How have we reached this point?
It all has to do with understanding worldview and
changing shifts of thought. The more we become biblical in our thinking the
more it sets us against the culture around us. So that gap occurs. And so what
happens to a lot of Christians is they reach a certain point where they sense
that gap that develops between them and the culture around them and they feel
that pressure of isolation. They have to reach a point whether they are going
to go all the way with the Word of God 100% and be a biblical thinking
Christian and living it out in their lives and really be at odds with the
culture around them or they are going to find ways of comfortable assimilation
with the cosmic system around them so that these differences don’t appear to be
that radical. They begin to compromise and jettison biblical truth in order to
go back in the culture around them.
Now this is the same kind of thing that was happening
to the recipients of the letter of Hebrews. You had believers, Jewish believers,
who were formerly priests. The majority of them were Levites. They had trusted
in Jesus as the Messiah from the Old Testament and they had separated
themselves from the practices of Judaism in the 1st century. Due to
a number of different things you had political pressure that was brought to
bear upon them. They weren’t really patriotic anymore. What is happening? This
is the early 60’s in the 1st century. What is happening is that the
problems with Rome are coming to a head. The pressure is building and so you
are either with us as the Sanhedrin leading the Jews or you are against us. So
this is a challenge to their patriotism at some level. So there is pressure
brought to bear. There is still a certain amount of persecution whether it is
overt persecution or just social ostracism. There is still persecution that is
being brought against these believers.
The temptation is that they will hit that point of
compromise and say, “Well this is fine but let’s go back and pick up our
traditional Judaist roots, be Jewish patriots, and go back into Judaism because
after all they rationalized that it is really all began with the Old Testament.
That is why in the first warning passage the writer
says,
NKJ Hebrews 2:1 Therefore we must give the more earnest heed to the things we have
heard, lest we drift away.
Where were they going to drift to? They weren’t going
to drift into Greek or Roman paganism. They were going to drift back into
Jewish legalism and ritualism away from the truth of God. They had obviously
already begun this drift. As I pointed out last time in the Christian life it
is an uphill battle and you are either in neutral or in drive and there is no
brake. You are either going forward or backward. There is no point of just
sitting and resting. They had obviously shifted into neutral and already begun
a regression in their spiritual life which is what the author brings out in
this reprimand that he began in verse 11.
Talking about Melchizedek, he says….
NKJ Hebrews 5:11 of whom we have much to say, and hard to explain,
since you have become dull of hearing.
Literal
Translation: About
whom (Melchizedek and the Melchizedekean priesthood) the message with reference
to us is great or much.
There is a tremendous lesson of application from
Melchizedek and the royal priesthood of Melchizedek and how that relates to the
royal priesthood of the Lord Jesus Christ and the impact on us. But you can’t
listen to it. The reason he is saying, “You can’t listen to them.” is because
they have become dull of hearing. It is hard to explain not because it is
difficult doctrine, but because they have become dull of hearing in their
spiritual regression.
So we started looking at this whole issue of the
characteristics of the sluggish backslider. I developed this chart that ended
with a discussion of cosmic degeneracy.
I am looking at this not from the viewpoint of the problems and
pressures that come from your sin nature.
Every one of us knows that we struggle with the sin nature. If you don’t
know that we can have a talk afterwards and I will engage in a little
counseling. We all have trouble with the sin nature. We have lust patterns. We
have arrogance. All of this plays in terms of this internal pressure that we all
have from the sin nature to live a life independent from God. The good news of
the gospel is that once we are saved the power, that tyranny of the sin nature
is truly broken so that we don’t have to follow it. We can make other
choices. We can choose to walk by
means of the Holy Spirit. So we have this very real problem of the internal
pressure of the sin nature. That internal pressure of the sin nature is like a
magnet that is inside of us that is attracted to the iron filings around us of
cosmic degeneracy. So that inner sin nature tends to drift in the same polar
directions as the sin nature towards either legalism or licentiousness.
So we developed this chart where if you move toward
licentiousness it develops into immoral degeneracy. This not only affects sin
and behavior and ethics, but it also affects your whole view of how you know
what you know or your view of knowing the truth.
Now some of the things that I am going to bring seem very
subtle to a lot of folks. It sort of makes your head spin a little bit.
So we have rationalism and mysticism. You can trace
mysticism and rationalism all the way back to at least
the Tower of Babel and the development of Babylonian mythology. It is the idea
that somehow man has internal impressions that give him insight into reality in
the universe - truth. He just
knows it. Ethically, morally this is governed by licentiousness. In a sense it
is throwing off any kind of guidelines or any kind of external structure
related to logic or reason.
That is one end of the human spectrum of how you know
things. I have been working on
this today, thinking this through. We have these different ways of knowing that
man has come up with down through the centuries – mysticism and then on
the other hand you have rationalism and empiricism.
In contrast to immoral degeneracy as we talked about
we have moral degeneracy. This is what happens when you may be morally correct
but you are still dominated by legalism and self
righteousness. It leads to
a different kind of degeneracy. You could almost say that Shurea
law in Islam is moral degeneracy. As Paul pointed out in Romans 7 and what he
is saying in Galatians 5 is that the more moral man tries to become is that
ultimately immorality peaks out from behind the covers. Ultimately you have to
deal with the 10th commandment that you shouldn’t covet anything
that your neighbor has – mental attitude sins. No matter how hard you try
because you are trying to do it yourself, arrogance always manifests itself in
the works of the flesh. Galatians 5:18
Just as immorality has a parallel in the realm of
knowledge, morality or this idea of building intense obsessive structures of
knowledge also has its parallel in the realm of epistemology and knowledge. So
you have man seeking to find truth on the basis of autonomous reason and
empiricism. They key word there is autonomous. This can lead ethically to
asceticism and self righteousness. Of course you have blends that go back
and forth but I am building the stark contrasts here. I know that you recognize
that people don’t always fit into tight categories. Most of us have moments
where we fit on one side of this and other moments when we are on the other
side.
Immorality produced in the ancient world the fertility
prosperity worshippers as a classic example of immoral degeneracy and the
Pharisees as a classic example of moral degeneracy.
Then we went through a chart that should be familiar
to many of you. There are basically four ways of knowing, not three systems of
perception, four ways of knowing truth. How do people know what they know? When
you make the statement, “I feel like God wants me to do X.” how do you know
that? How do you know it with 100% certainty? How do you know anything?
Now man apart from God has come up with basically 3
systems.
1. Rationalism starts with innate ideas. “I know certain assumptions.”
The under girding presupposition that is unstated (Descartes never talked about
it. Plato never talked about it.) is faith in human
ability to properly guide his logic. So the method in rationalism is always
rigorously logical based syllogisms, based on principles of logic and
reason.
God said, “You can eat from all of the trees except one.”
So you
see that you can’t understand all of the trees unless you understand the
relationship to the one. You can’t understand the one unless you understand its
relationship to all of the trees. You can understand a lot of other things
about them but that one fact that if you eat from the fruit
of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you will instantly die
spiritually. You can only learn one
way. God has to tell you. That is the fourth category that we call revelation. God has to specifically
inform us of those key elements that give us that one piece of knowledge that
enables us to truly interpret everything that is going
on in our life and everything that is going on in history. So it’s not that
rationalism and empiricism are wrong. It is that independent use, that
autonomous use that man on his own apart from any revelation
can come up with truth and knowledge.
I really got into a lot of study of this back in the
late 80’s when I was doing an investigation of the charismatic movement and
faith healers. Faith healers that
stand up in front of audiences and call people out saying, “I saw a blue light
hovering over people.” I went out to Southern California in 1988 or 1989 and
stayed with George Meissinger and went to a spiritual
warfare conference that was at the Vineyard Church. That was John Wimber’s church. That was the hot new thing in the
charismatic movement back then.
They had resurrected some old fossil from the healing revivals of the
late 40’s by the name of Paul Cain. This guy was really interesting. In a huge
auditorium in Anaheim where there were about 1500 people they had the lights
turned down rather low. He went into what they called worship time.
He would start saying, “There is someone over
here. God is telling me that you
are wrestling with some problem.”
It is the same technique that psychics use. You go to
a tarot card reader, palm reader, or any psychic. They really have empathetic
personalities. They are able to read people and non-verbal communicate.
They throw out generalities and the people don’t realize by the expression on
their face and in their eyes and mouth how much information they are giving away.
They are really fishing. They are
able to ask the right questions. They understand percentages.
I talked to a guy named Andre Cole who used to be with
Campus Crusade for Christ. In fact he wrote a book. I think it was called
“Psychic Powers” or something like that. He would talk about how a good psychic
or a good faith healer understands all of the percentages just like a good
poker player. He understands all the probabilities and all the degrees of
chance for drawing the next card no matter what he is holding. If they are
playing stud poker where the cards are visible, he can work his way through
that. That is the way these
psychics are. That is the way some of these faith healers are. That is what they are doing.
That particular night I didn’t see anything unusual
except he was calling out different people in the congregation. He was making
certain claims about their background, their problems.
“Somebody close to you is dealing with a problem
– alcohol or drugs or three or four other things.”
All of a sudden he would hit the right thing and a
face would light up.
They are sitting there thinking, “Who is he talking
about?”
They are going through their catalogue of five
brothers and sisters and their cousins and co-workers. People have a tendency
to want to be helpful so they don’t want to put the guy on the spot.
The next day I came to the meeting and they are all
excited because he talked about the fact that he saw blue lights come in and
hover over people. That is how he knew who to talk to.
So I factiously refer to them as blue light specials. Everybody was excited because when the blue light specials
came on it blew the power. That is what everybody was saying the next day.
I said, “I didn’t see the power go off last night. What
are they talking about?”
To this day they talk about it. I have read accounts
of it. I was there. I didn’t see any of that. This is mysticism. The thing is
that every one of us has certain impressions that we get of things. All through
our lives we get these impressions. We only remember the ones that are
validated. We don’t remember the 9,000 other ones that didn’t get validated
because nothing memorable or significant happened. We have this one impression
where we thought something was going to happen and it happened. We remember
that. That is part of what happens
here. People get involved in mysticism in the Christian life in divine guidance
and trying to relate that to the Holy Spirit. Mysticism is a way to try to
arrive at truth not on the basis of logic or reason, but on the basis of this
inner light or impressions that come from God.
In contrast to this Biblical truth has always argued
that God speaks externally and objectively. We have gone through studies of
this. Even when it is private, God
has always validated His revelation externally.
Now last time I concluded by pointing out that when we
talk about revelation we have to recognize that revelation falls into one of
two categories. It is either general or special. General revelation is
non-verbal and non-specific.
NKJ Psalm 19:1 To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David. The heavens declare the glory
of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork.
Revelation though is specific. Listen to what I am
saying here. By specific I don’t mean propositional where God says, “Thou shalt
not commit adultery.” That is propositional revelation. It is verbal but you
see there is also non-verbal revelation in the Old Testament. They had dreams
and visions. They saw things. Also you had the Urim and the Thummim that the
priests wore. They were two stones that were on the breastplate of the priest. We
don’t know precisely how they worked, whether one glowed or the other glowed or
they vibrated. This is the way that God would answer true or false or yes or no
questions related to divine guidance.
“Should I do this?”
Then one would glow or the other one would glow. One
would glow for yes. One would glow twice for no – or something like
that.
You see that is how a lot of people try to treat the
divine guidance of the Holy Spirit. It’s not biblical. It’s mystical.
If you think that you have decision making to go
through and God is going to answer you by giving you some kind of a vibration
or buzz and if it vibrates at a low frequency it is “yes” and if it vibrates at
a high frequency it is “no” or there is some sort of impression - that is still
special revelation. You are getting some kind of communication from God. Special
revelation either ceased or it didn’t cease. Once you cross this bridge that is
why it ultimately dominoes as it did historically into the charismatic
movement. You are starting to base knowledge on subjective experience. That is
an important thing to talk about.
What do we mean by experience? You have to be careful.
Let me tell you that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is an experience. Regeneration is an experience. The
filling of the Holy Spirit is an experience. Walking by the Holy Spirit is an
experience.
Everybody is looking at me like – huh? It
is.
Look up what experience means in the dictionary. It is
an event. That is one meaning of the word. Regeneration is an event. Everybody who is here who is a believer
in the Lord Jesus Christ has had that event in their
life. The word experience is also used to refer to the basis for knowledge. So
you have got to be careful because you will hear some people say in one
sentence a shift from one meaning to the other. What they have done is a con
job on the audience. It is a logical fallacy where they have shifted the
meaning of the word and used the word in one sense in one sentence and another
sense in another sentence. But, they didn’t tell they didn’t tell the
congregation they were shifting the semantic value of the term. When you look
at things like when Louis Sperry Chafer talks the indwelling of the Spirit as
an experience he is not saying knowledge is experiential. He was saying that it
is an event in the believer’s life. You have to be careful about these things. We
are not referring to the fact that these things are known experientially. They
are known through the study of the Word, but they are real experiences. You
don’t know then experientially, but they are events that happen in a person’s
life.
The problem that you get into with the top three is
that all paganism, all culture and all the worldliness around us operates on
one two or three of those systems of knowledge at some point or another.
Everybody around us that is pure pagan meaning someone operating on a
non-Biblical view of life is basing their ultimate view of reality, knowledge,
truth, values, morality, aesthetics, beauty, art, and music on rationalism,
empiricism, or mysticism. Everybody is doing that. And we were before we were
saved because we didn’t have any option.
Now that we are saved what we are trying to do is make
revelation the sole source of knowledge. That is hard for us because when we
get out of fellowship our default position is carnality. We default to whatever
makes us more comfortable depending on our culture. If you were in 18th
century enlightenment then your default position epistemologically goes toward
rationalism. If you came out of a New Age mystical home life and background
where your mom wore beads and had crystals hanging everywhere and came in and
told fortunes, then your default position when you get into carnality is going
to be what? Mysticism. Some of this has to do with personality. Some of this
has to do with a lot of different factors.
You have to be objective enough to evaluate yourself.
Just as you know your weaknesses in terms of sin, you have to know where your
weaknesses are in terms of epistemology. So there is always this pressure from
the world to conform one way or the other. As soon as you get out of fellowship, what happens? You start basing your decisions in life
on autonomous rationalism or empiricism or mysticism. What does that do? It erodes your knowledge of the
Scripture. It destroys your epistemological foundation in Biblical truth. And
what happens? You become dull of hearing. That is the process. It can happen to
every single one of us.
Now so far all I have done is address this one area which is the pressure from mysticism. But I ain’t done yet. (Good Texas
phrase!) We have to deal with how rationalism and empiricism put pressure
there.
But before we leave mysticism I want to raise a couple
of questions because there have been many well-meaning believers and many
theologians who have had a quasi-mystical view because at some point we get a
little bit infected with the world system.
So you have different people who say, “You really
can’t tell. If the Holy Spirit is
guiding you …”
You don’t have the word “guide” anywhere in the
Scripture. You have the term leading of the Spirit that is used twice. It is
used in similar context in Romans 8:14 and Galatians 5:17. The leading of the
Spirit is just another word or synonym for walking by the Spirit. If I am
walking by the Spirit what am I doing? I am following the Spirit. If I am following,
what are they doing? They are leading me. You see I can talk about walking
behind them or following them or leading them; but I am saying the same thing
three different ways. For example in Galatians 5:16…
NKJ Galatians 5:16 I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of
the flesh.
Part of the problem of the lust of the flesh that the
Galatians were dealing with was legalism.
Legalism and asceticism are part of the trends of the sin nature. Then Paul says that if you are
following the Spirit, if you are walking by the Spirit; then you are not under
the law. But if you aren’t following the Spirit, then you are going to put
yourself under the Law. That is all he is saying. He is not talking about divine guidance. He is not talking about figuring out
where you ought to go to college, who you ought to marry, whether you ought to
buy this house or that house, or have this job or that job. Neither
one of these passages in Romans 8 or Galatians 5 are talking about that.
Galatians was written first. These are the only two places this terminology is
used. He establishes the meaning of the leading of the Spirit in Galatians 5.
That is the same context. He is talking about the struggle between walking by
the Spirit and walking by the flesh in Romans 8.
Then when he says, “You - if are a son of God, an
adult son - you are what?”
You are led by the spirit. Yeah, you can’t get to adulthood in the spiritual life
unless you have been walking by the Spirit, following the Spirit and walking in
the Spirit’s footsteps which is Galatians 5:22 where it talks about marching in
step with the Holy Spirit or following in the Spirit’s footsteps which
indicates an objective trail.
Have you ever been on a campout or somewhere when you
were a kid where you were trying to walk in the footsteps of the person in
front of you? That’s an objective trail that is laid out. You can’t go wherever you want to if
you are going to follow their footsteps. You have to go precisely where they
tell you. It is objective knowledge. It is not internal heebie-jeebie liver
quiver pseudo Christian epistemology. You are following the leading of the
Spirit which is done through the Word of God.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that God the
Holy Spirit leads through these impressions. How do you know it’s the Holy
Spirit? How do you know it’s not the Holy Spirit? How do you know if you are
making a decision and you feel really certain on the inside that it’s the right
decision, how do you know that’s the Holy Spirit?
Unbelievers have the same thing. They go through the
decision making process and they say, “I just felt that it was the right thing
to do.”
If you as a believer are going to say that this
impression is it is the Holy Spirit?
You have to give criteria for how to know it’s the Holy Spirit or not
the Holy Spirit. If you can’t define why it’s not the Holy Spirit, then you can’t
say it is the Holy Spirit. That’s how it works. It is called logic.
But if you are a mystic you reject logic so you won’t
hear what I just said.
“You have got to know it. You have got to have that
inner feeling. You have got to have that impression. If you just experienced
what I have experienced you would know it was God.”
You have just declared that you are a subjective
impressionist. You are a mystic. You have rejected any external criterion
whatsoever. Just because you think it is God isn’t enough. Just because you
think it’s the Holy Spirit, just because it fits a preconceived notion isn’t
enough. So to claim in any sense that the Holy Spirit communicates to you
directly anything other than the assurance of your salvation
which is Romans 8…
NKJ Romans 8:16 The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children
of God,
He doesn’t bear witness to our spirit that we ought to
go to A&M rather than the University of Texas. He doesn’t bear witness with
our spirit that we ought to marry Mary instead of Sue or Joe instead of Bill.
He doesn’t bear witness with our spirit that we ought to work for Exxon instead
of Shell. See? It only says that His Spirit bears witness with our spirit that
we are a child of God, that we are saved.
Furthermore the next question we have to address is
how do you verify the guidance objectively? If you can’t verify that it is God, you can’t say that it
isn’t God. We are caught in that trap again.
How do you distinguish this sort of impression, this
vibration from special revelation?
You have to do that. If it
isn’t special revelation, what kind of revelation is it? There are only two categories.
It is this lack of objectivity that is inherent to the
subjective or mystical experience that is the major difficulty for any form of
mysticism to justify claims to knowledge. You just can’t do it. There is no
criterion. For the mystic there is
an implicit claim that inner non-rational impressions are the ultimate criterion.
You can’t argue it. That is the problem. You can’t discuss it. It substitutes
emotion or inner lightism for external truth. It also
confuses (this is really important) concepts of mysticism with
supernaturalism.
Remember that the spiritual life is a supernatural way
of life that demands a supernatural way of execution. The ministry of God the
Holy Spirit who indwells us who has made us a temple for the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit is such that He is teaching us His Word, He is illuminating our
minds to the truth of God’s word and He is bringing the doctrine in our souls
to bear in our minds when we have to make decisions and application. But it is
done in a covert way and not in an overt way.
But mysticism isn’t supernaturalism. People get
confused on that. People will say that I am arguing for rationalism. No, I am
not. I am arguing for supernaturalism – not rationalism, not mysticism,
not empiricism but supernaturalism based on revelation. Don’t muddy up the
water with pagan terminology.
Mysticism is a satanic counterpart to biblical
supernaturalism. It is a red herring to convince people who are more empathic
that that empathy is somehow the voice of God or the impression of God. And you
have had this down through history. You have had good and godly men coming out
of pietism. We talked about this
last time. We had the rise of pietism after the reformation. You had the
holiness movement in the 19th century. This impacted people like J.
Hudson Taylor, a great missionary.
He opened up China, but he had mystical tendencies. So did George
Mueller of Bristol. He is the one who had the orphanage. He had these elements
there. CT Stud is another one if you come out of a Baptist background. But that
was typical of that era as well. As Christians we are always struggling with
this pressure from soft mysticism on the one hand and what I will term soft
rationalism and empiricism on the other hand.
One thing that I want to point out from mysticism is
this tendency to want to interpret things like prophecy in a mystical
framework. What we want to do is
take the frame of reference that we developed from paganism and use that to
interpret what is going on in the Word of God.
So you will often hear people (and you really see it a
lot today) go in and look at something going on in the Scripture and say,
“That’s ecstatic.”
It is like the prophets in the worship of Apollo at
Delphi were doing. No, it isn’t. What they were doing is a counterfeit. It is
not the same thing. Now you will hear people say that prophecy in the Old
Testament was ecstatic.
Leon Wood who was a Baptist theologian at Grand Rapids
Baptist College in Grand Rapids, an excellent Old Testament scholar, wrote a
number of tremendous books – “Introduction to the Old Testament” and “Survey
of the Old Testament”. In a tremendous article that he wrote some years ago on
mysticism and prophecy, he argues that God never used pagan methodology to
communicate His Word. He writes concerning the fact that many people wanted to
think that what the prophets did was some kind of ecstatic frenzy as in
mysticism. He writes…
In
ecstatic frenzy the subject seeks to withdraw his mind from conscious
participation in the world so that it may be open to the reception of the divine
word.
In Hinduism they chant. Hmmmmm….. They focus on that until they get into
some other state. In some places they use drugs. The Hasidic Jews have their
version of it. Every world religion has their charismatic brand.
To
achieve this ecstatic state, poisonous gas may be employed
They discovered that there is some kind of outlet
under Delphi that the oracle would breathe the gas and speak in tongues and
have visions.
a rhythmic dance, or even narcotics. The desire is to
lose all rational contact with the world and so make possible a rapport with
spirit realm.
Already
before Israel’s conquest of Palestine, Moses calls himself a prophet and states
that a Prophet like himself would arise after him.
That is a reference to Jesus Christ.
He uses
the singular nabhi
in reference to this one, and so is correctly taken to mean Christ as supreme
Prophet thus to arise. But the
context shows that he has reference in a secondary sense also to prophets who
would appear in later history.
The point that he is making is that Moses spoke to
God, how?
God said, “I didn’t speak to you in veiled utterances,
but I spoke to you face-to-face and mouth-to-mouth.”
It wasn’t ecstatic utterance. So we see that the whole
idea here is that Moses the prophet par excellence in the Old Testament didn’t
operate on ecstatic frenzy. Mysticism was never the modus operandi of the Old
Testament prophets.
We are back to our two views here. Let’s go to the
other side. The soft mystics have been catching it the last few weeks. Now we
are going to go after the rationalists. Now rationalism is the idea that human
reason must judge the validity of Scripture and spiritual life must be
submitted to these autonomously derived categories of truth.
Now I will give you an example. I was thinking about
this today. It has to do with apologetics. This is another problem that
Christians have. We know logic and reason are good, but all of a sudden we tend
to do just like the pagans do. We elevate logic and reason to some ultimate
reality. The classic example of this is in apologetics.
One of the best papers I have ever read in
understanding this was written by Charlie Clough back in the late 70’s called
“Giving an Answer”. It is Framework Pamphlet #1 for those of you who are going
through that. Framework #1 is a study of the theoretical differences in different
models of apologetics. There are three different views of apologetics. For
those of you who don’t know this(this is going to go
way over some heads but I hope the illustration communicates something.), you
have three different views of apologetics. One is the pre-suppositional view which was held by a man name Cornelius Van Til who was a professor at Westminster Seminary. It was a tremendous
view of apologetics. Then you have a more rationalistic view. This was held
also by a reformed philosopher theologian named Gordon Clark and also held by
another excellent apology by the name of Norm Geisler.
We used to call him Stormin’ Norman. I have never
seen a man with more energy who could write more books. And Norm has done some
great stuff. In fact he was in
Houston a couple of weeks ago and I went to hear him. But you see for Norm Geisler and for Gordon Clark and some of these other guys
the ultimate point of contact between the unbeliever and the believer isn’t the
internal image of God that is being suppressed in unrighteousness. (Romans 1)
It is logic. It is the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity. This is
the point that you appeal to with the unbeliever. What you are showing is that
his position is illogical. Where did logic come from? Logic isn’t independent from God. Logic is within the
mentality of God. What that system does is inadvertently separate logic from
God and establishes it as an autonomous category.
This is a problem that we have to face also. We have a
tendency to make logic and reason independent from the revelation from God so
that we start and develop theological systems that are logically consistent. But
they aren’t biblical. They may start with a biblical point but they start
building conclusion upon conclusion that all follows from the original thesis. Somewhere
along the way you are no long anchoring anything in the revelation from God and
you get off base. That’s as wrong as mysticism on the other hand. Paganism
always pressures biblical thought to conform to its mode of thinking. We fight
it on every front every day. We have all heard pastors who have built intricate
edifices of theology.
We ask the question, “Where do we find that in the
Bible?”
It sounds logical. Calvinism the whole structure of convent theology is a
classical historical example of this.
But you start asking questions. You see all of the
proof texts there? But does that verse really teach that? No, it doesn’t. But
the system is powerful. It’s logically coherent. One reason Calvinism is so
popular today is that people living today in our post-modern random
relativistic world want a tight theological religious system that they can go
to for answers. But, it has got to be a biblical system. You see the Bible is
inherently consistent, a rationally coherent system. But stick to what texts
says. Don’t get away from it. That is what happens. You build these autonomous
systems. The Pharisaical system was great. It had all kinds of intricacies. You
could study forever. It was intellectually challenging. That is why it attracted
the Apostle Paul so much. But it wasn’t biblical. It had cut the anchor to
biblical exegesis. It was just an autonomous system. That is just as wrong
because you no longer have a relationship with God. You are having a
relationship with a bunch of propositions. That’s it. You just love the
intellectual intricacies of it and the intellectual stimulation that it gives
you.
The biblical path is as different from either one of
those as the creator-creature distinction that we keep gong back to. It is
supernatural. It is based on God’s work as a creator. There may be places where
it almost sounds like mysticism or it sounds like a logical system. So what
happens is you come from an external frame of reference and now you are wearing
those mystical glasses or you are wearing those rationalistic glasses of
Platonism which is what Augustine did in the middle ages. So what happens when
you put on those glasses of rationalistic Platonism? All of sudden, that is
what you see everywhere in the Bible. You take those off and put on mystical
glasses and everything you see is mystical. But what you have to do is get rid
of those world view glasses from the pagan culture
around you and look at the Bible in terms of what it says and not interpret it
in within this other framework. It causes so much confusion and disaster in the
life of the church.
So now the writer of Hebrews is going to say, “You
have let your whole system of knowledge be determined by this outside pressures
and now you have reversed course.”
NKJ Hebrews 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you
need someone to teach you again the
first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not
solid food.
Literally, the words of God. It is the plural of logos.
Does this ring a bell with anybody in terms of another
passage? It is very close in vocabulary to I Corinthians 3:1-3 that talks about
carnality.
It starts off with the verb opheilo. It is a present active
participle. It is a concessive participle. “For though you ought.” That is the
idea. You are not but you ought to
be. The word opheilo
indicates obligation. There is obligation in the Christian life. Some will say
that is legalism. No, you are obligated as a child of God, as a member of the
royal family of God to live according to the code of conduct set forth in the
Scripture for a member of the family. You know what it was like when you were
growing up and you did something that embarrassed your parents.
They said, “No child of mine is going to act like
that.”
You see you were acting like you were a member of
another family, not this family.
Now we are in the family of God and there is a code of
conduct for the royal family. That code of conduct is our “ought”. There is an
obligation there. It is not legalism. It is a responsibility to be who we are. We
have been bought with a price; therefore we are to live under the authority of
the One who purchased us.
This is your obligation, to be a teacher. The word
there for teacher is the Greek word didaskalos
meaning a teacher, instructor, and communicator of the Word. In this context he
is not talking about being a formal teacher or a pastor-teacher or a formal
teacher or instructor in the local church. Parents you ought to be able to
teach the Word of God to your children by this time. You can’t? Well, what’s
the matter? You are overloaded in
carnality and you are regressing. No, you ought to be able to teach your
children by this time. You ought to be able to teach your neighbors. Look at
Ananias and Sapphira as they opened up the Word of God and explained it to
Apollos. That is what we are talking about in this context. We are not talking
about a formal position in contrast to the way didaskalos is used in the Pastoral Epistles where it is talking
about the formal position of teaching in the church. This is talking to
everybody - all of these ex-Levitical priests. All of them ought to be
teachers. Not every one of them had the spiritual gift of pastor teacher. Not
every one of them would ever be in a formal position of teacher. But they ought
to be after a certain level of maturity able to explain what the Word of God
means to other people just because they have understood it.
It is a plural form of the pronoun there. He was clearly speaking with a southern
dialect there. Y’all ought to be teachers. But you need someone to teach you
again the first principles of the oracles of God. You have got to go back to
foundations. That is what I have been talking about the last three weeks when
we looked at the epistemology chart. That is so hard for people to
understand. It’s not easy.
I keep quoting Headon
Robinson who said, “It is hard to think but it is really hard to think about
how you think.”
That’s what this is. How you think about the
foundations? If you are thinking right things in wrong ways, it’s wrong. A right thing done in a wrong way is
wrong. If you do a right thing and
are thinking right thoughts (the individual thoughts inside your thinking are
right) but the structure of your thinking is autonomous rationalism, guess
what? You are wrong. If you are thinking right things but the house of your
thinking is mysticism, you may have right thoughts but they are in the wrong
house so it is wrong. That is really tough to handle. That means that part of
my job as a believer is not to just change the furniture out of the house which
is what most Christians want to do, it is that the Holy Spirit has got to tear
the whole house down. You have to rip out the foundation and start over. I have
to learn how to think about everything in life all over again.
“Because for 18 years, 25 years, 30 years or 50 years
I have been thinking about life wrong.
The structure of my thinking is wrong – not just the details, but
the structure.”
I can tell I have burned a lot of brain cells tonight.
It always does that because it is so hard to think about that.
How do you as a 21st century American
product of this culture or if you aren’t bicultural learn to think in terms of
another culture? Now that is a
really interesting study. If you take a kid, a baby, an infant or a 2-3 year
old and the parents are American, British or German and they go live Asia or
Mexico, then that child grows up bi-cultural. He is going to be able to think
within two different cultures, two different languages. If they live in three
different areas they can grow up they can grow up tri-cultural. If they grow up
speaking all three languages then they grow up with three totally different
worldviews. Just think if you know someone with an American parent and a
Japanese parent and grows up in Argentina or Peru. They
are going to learn an American worldview from one parent. They are gong to
learn a Japanese worldview from the other parent. How disjointed, how opposite
can you get? Then they are
going to have an Argentinean worldview from the culture that they are around. It
is so hard for us as an American to think like the Japanese.
But you see at the ripe old age of whatever you are,
you have to start thinking like a Christian and quite thinking like an American
pagan. That’s harder to do than suddenly trying to adopt a totally different
worldview and think like an Asian instead of a Western European. But we have
God the Holy Spirit that makes that possible. It is a supernatural thing. It is
not a mystical thing. It is not a rational thing. It is a supernatural thing
that God does in transforming us into His image.
Let’s close in prayer.