Hebrews Lesson 50
April 20, 2006
NKJ Psalm 119:11 Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not
sin against You!
Two problems we have been studying
the last three or four weeks have to do with how we think. It is very
difficult for people to think about thinking. This is not simple
stuff. Most of you are doing pretty good slugging your way through
this. I was thinking this week about a good illustration for this. The
only illustration that I could think of relates to the concept of foundation
because knowledge is our foundation for everything. What is the foundation for
your views on life? Everybody has a philosophy of life. You may not
have ever thought about it.
I remember having a conversation
with one old East Texas country boy about 30 years ago.
I made the comment, “That is your
philosophy.”
“I ain’t no philosopher.”
He may not be. He has an unthought-through philosophy of life. He
probably has an inconsistent philosophy of life. But, everybody has a philosophy
of life. It includes all of your values, your view of what is right and what is
wrong, your views on politics, your views on marriage, and your work
ethic. All of these things are part of your philosophy of life. Your
philosophy of life is grounded in some sense in what is true versus what you
think is false. So at the very root of everything are people’s ideas of
right and wrong, truth and error, that which is absolute and eternal and that
which is not absolute and eternal. Even if you believe there are no
absolutes you have a problem because you have a hidden absolute there that
there are no absolutes. So everybody has a philosophy of life. They
interpret whatever is going on in life through that grid. That is the
foundation on which we build that house that is our life.
Jesus used the illustration of a man
who can either build a house on quick sand and shifting sands or there are
those who build their house on solid rock. It is that foundation
idea. What are you building your house on? The house in that analogy
is your whole worldview - how you interact with everything in life. That
foundation has to do with your view of truth, your view of absolutes, and your view
of that which is eternal. You see by the time that most of us got saved
and even for those like me who got saved at an early age, you still have years
that go by where you are loading up that foundation with a lot of human viewpoint. It
is a foundation that is made with solid elements that are necessary to have
good solid rock concrete foundation. We all import into that a lot of stuff
that shouldn’t go in there. It produces a fairly crumbly foundation. Once
you are saved and you start the process of spiritual growth and sanctification,
what you really have to do is go in and not just tear down the house that is
built on that foundation, but you have to go in and tear down the
foundation. If the foundation is the cultural way of thinking about truth
that surrounds you, (That is either going to be empiricism, ultimate truth
sense knowledge or your cultural view is rationalism where everything is
ultimately determined by rigorous logic and reason or whether it is mysticism
whatever that worldview of foundation of truth is.) when you come in and you
try to build the Christian life on that foundation, what is going to
happen? When the storms of life come and they get really bad and you hit
Hurricane Katrina in your spiritual life, then that foundation that has
incorporated elements of autonomous rationalism or autonomous empiricism or
mysticism is going to crumble. That foundation that has incorporated elements
of autonomous rationalism, autonomous empiricism, or mysticism, then it is
going to crumble. This is sometimes very difficult to spot. I
personally believe that God sends certain storms into our lives because only
when certain storms hit your life do you begin to realize that there is some
element in that foundation underneath it that really isn’t as stable as you
thought it was. All of a sudden things start to come unglued and
unraveled. Sometimes no matter how long you have been a Christian you
might even start questioning the goodness of God, the plan of God, the
consistency of God. Like Job you are a mature believer, but there are
things that are going to be exposed by this storm that you need to deal with in
your own spiritual life. So that is why I am going through this.
Another reason I am going through
this is that we live in an era when there is a lot of fuzzy thinking about
this. I am always amazed at how few seminary trained pastors that come out
recently (I am including my own generation) … I look around sometimes and
one of my closer friends when I was at seminary has been a full board
charismatic for the last 20 years. I went back the other day and I was
reading someone in the late 19th century and they were talking about
how everything was falling apart culturally. So this deterioration has
been going on for at least 150 years, probably more. I would trace the
source to Emanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century. Whatever the
worldview is the culture around the church, the church always imitates
that. There is a simple explanation for that. Everybody in the church
comes out of that cesspool. So they come into the church dragging all of
that nasty baggage with them. It takes a while to get rid of it. Some
people never do quite get rid of it. It hangs on down through the
centuries.
Last time I pointed out that in the
early church you had two key figures—Origin and Augustine of Hippo who
was the Bishop of Hippo—who front loaded Christianity in that era even
though there were a lot of their contemporaries who rejected what they were
doing. They brought in all of this baggage from Platonism and neo-Platonism
that introduced a lot of mysticism to the church today. It stayed in the
church all through the Middle Ages and elements continue to plague the church
even today.
In fact I was doing some background
study on CS Lewis. I have never been a Lewis scholar. I knew several
people when I was in college that loved CS Lewis. They read everything
that CS Lewis wrote. I read the “Screw Tape Letters”. If you haven’t
read the “Screw Tape Letter” you ought to read it some time. He had a
great imagination. It is letters between an older demon to his charge who
is a young neophyte demon who is like a Class 1, just getting into the
business. He has got to tempt this Christian. He has got to cause him to
fail in his spiritual life. So the older demon is giving advice to this
young rookie as to how he can be successful. He has a lot of insights. I
read that the year before I went to seminary. I had to read books that he
wrote on miracles, “Mere Christianity”, and some other writings of his when I
took an apologetics class in seminary. That was fine but Lewis never
floated my boat. I like to read Josh McDowell and Cornelius Van Til and Francis Schafer. But Lewis
before he was saved (just like you see this paradigm) he was an idealist and a
Platonist. That element of his view of knowledge always impacted (very
subtlety but it is there) his view of apologetics, his view of reasoning and
his view of where that common ground was in communication between a believer
and an unbeliever. If you get these human viewpoint elements in your
foundation they do tend to bubble up at different times and expose certain
weaknesses in whatever you are building on top of this foundation.
Now I finished up with that last
week and I just want to start with this one slide so that you know why I am
doing this. The reason I am doing this is because there is this reference
in Hebrews 5:11 these advancing believers who had advanced had gone into regression
in the spiritual life. They were now lazy and dull of hearing. We are
going to take some time exploring this whole idea of how this happens in the
Christian life because you see all kinds of people who when they are young new
believers they are excited and they are learning and there is this tremendous
momentum. They are at Bible class two or three times a week and they are
listening to tapes the rest of the time. There is this hunger and then they
tend to reach this plateau. Then the next thing you know, they get married
(especially if they are young) and have kids and their jobs make demands on
them. The next thing you know the details of life begin to crowd out their
priority of the Word of God.
In the initial stages of the
Christian life so often we are often driven because we have questions that we
want answered. How do I know there is a God? How do I live the
Christian life? What do I need to do in the faith rest drill? How do
I handle this situation or that situation and all of these other things? But
once we get these questions answered, then that part of our motivation dries
up. We tend to coast a little bit and that is an important time in the
Christian life because we start switching motivation. The motivation is no
longer driven by intellectual curiosity. Now it needs to be driven more by
our desire to learn more about the Lord and to serve the Lord. That is
when we start going through those shifts that occur in spiritual
adolescence. A lot of folks hit that level and they start to coast. Other
things come into their lives and the next thing they know they are being
distracted by the details of life and they go into spiritual regression. Most
folks will talk to you about sin. That is what you will hear from most
preachers.
“It is sin in your life.”
There is a basis for that because
Peter talks about the fleshly lusts that war against the soul. Of course
the internal enemy of the believer is the sin nature. But what I am
pointing out is that there is something more insidious that can go on inside of
our souls making war against our spiritual life than simply propensity to sin
in the usual categories of sin that present themselves. That is within the
realm of our thinking. This is where the weakness in the foundation starts
to bubble up.
So we talked about cosmic degeneracy
that involves immoral degeneracy, overtly which has a complementary role in the
way we think. It produces irrationalism, mysticism, licentiousness. Mysticism
is basically anti-authoritarianism when applied to knowledge.
“Whatever I want to do.”
In other words it is a counterpart
to moral relativism and displayed by that phrase in Judges - everyone did what
is right in his own eyes. It is bubbling up from inside.
“Whatever I want to do is
right.”
That is mysticism in the
extreme.
On the other hand you have moral
degeneracy where you have this rigid authoritarianism that comes out of some
sort of moral or religious code or even a philosophical code. Many of the
ancient philosophies had rigorous procedures that you had to go through in
order to grow and advance in their goal towards the ultimate good or whatever
it was that was there in order to fulfill their spiritual selves. So it
produced asceticism or self-righteousness. This was typical in Platonism
and many forms of Gnosticism. All of that had consequent impacts on the
church. So we looked at the Bible and saw the two extremes indicated by the
fertility or the prosperity worshippers on the one hand illustrating immoral
degeneracy and the Pharisees on the other hand.
That is our backdrop. We are
looking at how the sin nature pressures us in these areas. I went back to CS Lewis a
minute ago. Last time I ended up and I want to go over it again this issue
of how we know truth comes into play is in the realm of apologetics when you as
a believer are trying to communicate the gospel to an unbeliever. You are
talking to an unbeliever. I am not talking about witnessing to a
child. This may come into play when children ask perceptive questions at
times. You are witnessing to someone who is a little more astute. They
are older perhaps and have heard all of these objections to Christianity. They
have legitimate questions.
It is always difficult when you are
witnessing to unbelievers to decide which questions are legitimate questions
and which questions are merely diversions. They are trying to throw a red
herring across the trail to change the conversation. And you can talk to
people who have been around awhile and have heard this objection to
Christianity, that objection to Christianity and this misrepresentation.
They think it is legitimate. For
them it is really an issue because they don’t want to put their brains in
neutral and accept some religious viewpoint or accept the Bible just because
somebody says so. They have significant questions about what the Bible
says. Many times they are coming from a wrong position. We need to
help them with those questions and answer them never getting diverted off the
course of focusing on the cross and the need for salvation. Sometimes you
have to lay that foundation and it takes time. You may be the one who is
planting the seed. Someone else comes along and provides a little
water. Somebody else comes along and provides some light. Then
eventually God is the one who makes it clear to them. God the Holy Spirit
makes it clear to them in salvation. In the process what we are doing is
we are talking to them about truth. We are talking to the other person about
how you know what is true. What is the criterion for evaluating a truth
claim? If I am going to say, “Jesus is God.” how do you know that? What
is your basis for saying that?
You are talking to someone who is an
unbeliever and they say, “What is the ultimate validation? How do you know
that Jesus is God? How do you know that that wasn’t something that the
church added because they were so impressed with the tradition that they started
talking about Jesus as God? He never made those claims.”
You have to know some things about
the Bible in order to go back and answer that.
Then they are going to ask the
question, “How do you really trust the Bible?’
Ultimately it comes back to this
foundational issue - how do we know truth? What is the ultimate criterion
for determining whether this is true or this is false? That is your
foundation. When you do that, when you answer that question, sometimes if
you are talking with someone who is really bright; you can really stub your toe
here. We have all done it. God is gracious enough so that often He
manages to use it anyway or get around their objection.
Let me give you an
illustration. I threw this chart up last week and I didn’t differentiate
things so I wanted to do that this time. Here is the believer. On the
other side is the unbeliever. They are trying to talk. Remember that the
believer is hopefully talking from a position of divine viewpoint and absolute
truth. So he has an accurate view of reality as defined by God and defined by
the Scripture. But he is talking to this unbeliever.
Here I am going to get very much
like CS Lewis. I thought I would throw this in since we are going to see
the film on Saturday night. CS Lewis emphasized that God defines the real. Throughout
his apologetics and philosophy was this idea that man in arrogance was living
in an unreal world. I think he is right about that. In arrogance we construct
our own view of reality. We try to live within that view of reality, but
it is not the way that God created the world. The unbeliever has generated
this castle in the sky that is his view of reality. The believer on the
other hand is in a rock solid biblical worldview. They are trying to talk
to each other. They can go this way and that way and completely miss each
other because they are talking from two completely different perspectives.
Now the pressure that is on you as a
believer is to try to step across the aisle as it were to help this guy to get
back to your side of the aisle. That is where you get into trouble. We
are struggling to find what our point of common ground is. Where is the
point that we can agree on something and build an understanding and discussion
so that I can bring him back over to divine viewpoint? We have to
struggle with this issue. You might not have thought about it quite this
way. If you have ever tried to witness to an unbeliever you have all
wrestled with this. It is almost as good as a conservative Republican
trying to talk to a liberal Democrat.
It is two completely different
constructs of reality. They are trying to figure out something they can
agree on. For the believer and the unbeliever the difference is more
extreme than that. So you have to ask the question - what is the common
ground? Now in doing that we can’t give away or commit a strategic
error. The unbeliever may be looking to reason as his ultimate authority
to determine truth and error.
We sit back and say, “The Bible is
rational.”
God of course is ultimate reason and
ultimate truth. God is logic. After all we call Jesus the Logos. Where
did we get the word logic if we didn’t get it from the Greek word logos? It is from the same
root. Reason is embedded in logos. We
believe that the Bible is ultimately rational. The Bible is only
ultimately rational if you don’t presuppose the Bible as true. If you don’t
presuppose the Bible as true and you are coming and reading the Bible as a
Hindu or agnostic or an atheist then it sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook to
you because you are coming from a false position. So we think that we can
go to logic and rationalism. This is an apologetic strategy.
There are a number of apologies that
use this kind of strategy. I have mentioned Gordon Clark in the past and
there are a number of others. Norm Geisler is another one. This is the main issue - to appeal to logic. There
is a way to appeal to logic within an apologetic strategy without out appealing
to autonomous logic. The unbeliever looks at reason as autonomous –
existing independent from the mind of God. But you as a believer are not
looking at reason as independent from the mind of God, are you? So you
aren’t looking at reason the same way. That is important.
That may
seem really abstract, and it is. Let’s say that you and I go outside and
we are talking with the head of the Biology or Botany Department at the
University of Houston. We are talking about a tree across the parking lot
in a green space. There are a lot of things we can agree on about that
tree – color, shape, size, kind, quality, genus, and species. But
you see for the unbeliever head of the Biology Department at the University of
Houston that tree is a product of raw chance. It is an accident. But for
you as a believer, that tree is not an accident. It is the result of the
planning and purpose of God. It is perfectly designed and it is always
going to produce (if it is an oak tree) acorns. In many ways you can agree
on a lot of different things; but ultimately your concept of a tree is not his
concept of a tree, is it? His concept of a tree is something of an
accident and yours isn’t. So there is a foundational area of
disagreement. That is what is going on here and what I am trying to show
in this chart. When we appeal to autonomous reason as that point of
contact then the believer comes in and he is going to have to argue. He
will walk across the aisle to the unbeliever’s concept of autonomous reason and
then on the basis of autonomous reason try to argue the guy back across the
aisle to a dependent concept of reason. Do you think that is going to
work? It works a lot of times only because people don’t think very
well. They are inconsistent. They don’t understand what is
happening. It is not methodologically consistent with Scripture.
The other way in which we often see
this done is the unbeliever views reality as historical evidence. It is
empiricism. He views history, that which is recorded, as objective
reality. That is your ultimate appeal for what is true. So when the
believer comes along and agrees with the unbeliever on empiricism then he is
looking at historical evidence. But, the believer is looking at historical
evidence coming out of what kind of history? You see the believer should
understand history as the out working of the plan of God, that it is guided and
directed by God foreseen and overseen from eternity past. So his view of history
is not the view of the unbeliever who sees history like Henry Ford who said, “One
damn thing after another.” It is just random events that have
happened. So ultimately when they are appealing to historical evidence,
they have completely different views of what that historical evidence is.
So you can’t go over as a believer
to an autonomous view of empiricism and try to argue the guy back to a
dependent view of empiricism. What is your ultimate criterion? If you
use his ultimate view of criterion then you have a problem.
Now the next view is
mysticism. The apologist’s strategy here is called fideism from the Latin
word fide meaning faith. It is
the idea of “just believe.” It doesn’t matter if the tomb was empty or
not. It doesn’t matter if Jesus was God or not. It doesn’t matter if
He died as a substitute for your sins or as an example of how to live. You
just have to have meaning and purpose in your life. So take that existential
leap of faith and believe. Now you will have meaning in your life. Don’t
use any reason or logic at all. It totally divorces itself from reason,
logic or history. That is a mystical approach. So you see how each
view of how you think about truth affects your strategy for how you are going to
communicate to the unbeliever.
I believe if you are going to be
consistently biblical and you are looking for that point of common ground with
the unbeliever - this is why what I think is very helpful for Christians. A lot
of times we get enmeshed in a lot of dialogue with unbelievers and the next
thing you know - I don’t know the answers to all of these questions and I feel
so inadequate. They are asking this and that and I don’t know the
answers. We feel overwhelmed because we have bought into either the
rationalist approach or the empirical approach. We think that we have to
be able to marshal all of this evidence to prove our point. You see the role
of evidence isn’t to prove. It isn’t the ultimate criterion. The role
of evidence simply validates. There is a difference between being ultimate
truth and simply being corroboration or validation. The ultimate issue is
revelation. God speaks.
Remember the chart that I put up
with the different views of knowledge. You have got rationalism, empiricism
and mysticism all out of autonomous human viewpoint. Then there is that
separate category - the difference between the creature and creation (that
important creator-creation distinction) is that God has spoken. In Romans
1:19-20 God tells us something. He tells us that dialoguing with that
unbeliever, that unbeliever has an inner knowledge of certainly about truth
already. We don’t have to go to history to prove that God exists. He already
knows that God exists. In other words the point of contact is in the image
of God that he has. As warped as it is by sin, we don’t have to go to the
five truths of Aquinas. Those arguments philosophically (this may blow you
away) never work. They have never been constructed in such a way that
doesn’t give away the boat. You have the argument and the anthropological
argument and the moral argument. My favorite was always the ontological
argument. That is what I wrote my master’s thesis on. But they don’t
work because they are never built on a biblical presupposition. They all
go over to the autonomous categories of the unbeliever, try to win him over by
the dependent categories of the Scripture.
NKJ Romans 1:19 because what may be known of God is manifest in them,
for God has shown it to them.
NKJ Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being
understood by the things that are made, even
His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,
It is in them. It is made clear
to them. The “them” here is unbelievers. Every unbeliever knows in
the core of his soul that God exists, that he has violated God’s righteousness,
and that there is accountability. What he has been going all along is
trying to suppress this knowledge.
You have to know the truth before
you can suppress it. To suppress it means to hold it down and reshape it
and reformulate it according to your own agenda. So from day one the
carnal mind of the unbeliever is trying to redefine reality in terms of its
independence from God.
It’s not fuzzy. At the Great
White Throne Judgment God is not going to accept from anybody the view that
“Well, it just wasn’t clear.”
God says, “It couldn’t have been
more clear and you know it.”
Now they are going to know it. They
will be there without excuse. That is what this says.
The word that I find there that is
so fascinating is the negative side. It is like unapologetic instead of
apologetic. Apologetic is a positive defense that is given in a courtroom
given for a defense.
Without excuse means that they are
without defense before the bar of God’s judgment. That is how clear God
says the evidence of His existence is. No matter how atheistic they claim
to be or no matter how agnostic they claim to be, in the core of their soul
they know that God exists and they know they are created in the image of
God. They know that they are sinners. Not only that, when we start
witnessing to them according to John 16 the Holy Spirit is taking the message
that we are communicating and He is using that to convict them in regard to
sin, righteousness, and judgment.
So when you are communicating to an
unbeliever, you have two things in your favor. Don’t ever be intimidated
by some PhD or smart aleck who thinks he knows all of this stuff. You have
got the reality of what God’s Word says that they know that God exists. They
are just suppressing it. The Holy Spirit is going to take what you say and He
is going to use it to peel back that suppressive camouflage that they are using
to expose it. That may really get them angry. They may resist. They
may reject. They may become hostile and they may continue to be hostile
toward Christianity and toward you because your use of the Word is exposing their
strategy of suppression. Just because they don’t believe doesn’t mean you
didn’t do your job. Our job is simply to explain the gospel as clearly as
we can and answer as Peter says in I Peter 3:15…
NKJ 1 Peter 3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that
is in you, with meekness and fear;
Try not to make strategic
errors in the way we present the gospel. God is always going to work around
whatever flaws we have. That is what is great. It gives us great
confidence that when we use this approach to apologetics and witnessing. It is
called the pre-suppositional approach because the presupposition is that they
already know that God exists. So we are operating on that
presupposition. We are not going to give up our beliefs. We are not
going to compromise our view of dependent reason and empiricism in order to
bring them over to our view. By doing this we are in a greater way relying
on God the Holy Spirit to make things very clear to them.
So Paul talks about that at the
beginning of Romans. This is how important it is to maintain the
foundation of truth.
Now I want to move to the next area
in the study we are doing. We have gone through mysticism. Then we
looked at rationalism. Now we have been looking at these examples of how
they affect our view of knowledge. How do we know what we should do? How
do we know what is right? There is one subject that comes up that is
related to our study in Genesis on Tuesday night related to divine
guidance. That is the subject of the leading of the Holy Spirit. How
do we know when God the Holy Spirit is leading? The big question is, is
the leading of the Spirit the same as divine guidance? The reason I ask
that question is because in common everyday fuzzy terminology we equate the
two. Good theologians do it. There are only two places in the
Scripture that talk about the leading of the Holy Spirit.
So what we have to do is look at how
those terms are used in those two passages and then after we understand how it
is used in those two passages then we come back and say, “Is this talking about
divine guidance?”
Now let me define divine
guidance. By divine guidance I am talking about God helping us,
communicating enabling us in the decision making process overly guiding us in
the course of our life.
So what is the leading of the Holy
Spirit? I am going to use a quote from Charles Ryrie. Charles Ryrie
makes a statement in the book “Basic Theology”. First let me read the core
verses to you that we are going to talk about. These are the only two
places that talk about the leading of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.
NKJ Romans 8:14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are
sons of God.
NKJ Galatians 5:18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under
the law.
Those are the only two passages that
talk about the leading of the Holy Spirit. Now what is interesting is that
if you read the surrounding context of both of these verses, what you discover
is that Paul is talking about the same thing. That is, the contrast
between the believer who is living his life in the filling of the Holy Spirit
on the basis of the Holy Spirit and in the light of the Holy Spirit versus the
believer who is living his life in the power of the sin nature, walking
according to the flesh. That is the context in both passages. Neither
passage is talking about how to make decisions. Neither passage is talking
about God’s special revelation or internal revelation or direction in
life. Neither of those passages is talking about the will of God in that
sense. Both of these passages are talking about the contrast the believers
who are living their life energized by God the Holy Spirit versus those who are
energized by the sin nature. It is important for us to understand this so
we get a grasp of what this is saying.
I hear this terminology from
believer after believer after believer that it is how a pastor is led to teach
or this person was led to be a missionary in Africa or that person is led to do
this. Where do they get this terminology? Is this biblical? I
don’t think it is. Words are important. Words reflect ideas. If
you start describing these things with the wrong words you end up going to the
wrong place in your thinking. So we have to do a little self-correction
here and look at how the Bible is using these words.
If you don’t get anything out of
sitting under my ministry when people start saying things, ask “Okay, where do
you get that from the Bible? Let’s look at the text. Let’s look at
what the Scripture says. Let’s not talk about what some theologian
said. Let’s not talk about what your favorite pastor said. Let’s not
talk about what Robby said. Let’s look at what the Scripture says. Go
through the Scripture.
I am not picking on Dr. Ryrie. Dr.
Ryrie was one of my favorite professors at Dallas Seminary. I spent time
in his office discussing different things with him. I remember at
different times going in and complaining about some other professors and poor
theology with Tommy Ice. We were trouble-makers from day 1.
We would go in and say, “Dr. Ryrie,
we can’t believe that they would let this guy teach this in seminary.”
We always had a receptive ear. But
I don’t agree with everything that Dr. Ryrie said. Just to give you a
little background. What happens when you are going through a good seminary
is you learn who is who and who says what and who teaches what. You learn
something about the strain of ideas that go through the history
Christianity. You don’t what just hear one person teaches that the Bible
says. You learn that none of us just popped up out a vacuum. We were
all influenced by various pastors, teachers, professors and parents all through
our life. You can trace out where these ideas come from. There are
some tremendous theologians within our heritage. Dr. Ryrie is one of
them. I remember when I was probably in college I read his book “A Survey
of Bible Doctrine”. I can’t tell you how many times I have used that and
referred to it when I have gone through basic series. I have used it as a
textbook on basic theology. It is tremendous. The work that Dr. Ryrie has done
especially in the field of the authority of Scripture and bibliology as well as
in dispensations is just tremendous.
I will never forget this. In my
first day of class sitting in a large lecture auditorium in Lamb Hall would
seat about 200 students sitting there about the fourth row back sitting
there.
I thought, “Pinch me. I am
sitting in a classroom and that is Dr Ryrie speaking. I get to sit in here two
days a week for a whole semester and listen to him teach. This is
just tremendous.”
He must have been about 50 at that
time. I think he is 81 or 82 now. He was frail. It looked like
if anyone breathed hard it would knock him down. He has had some real health
problems over the years. His theology while it is very good in a number of
places also had some areas that are not so good especially in the area of the
Christian life and the Holy Spirit. He has made several changes down
through the years.
I remember I was in a Bible class
over here at Spring Branch Community Church some 33 or 34 years ago. We
were reading “Balancing the Christian Life”.
I kept thinking, “There are things
in here that just don’t jive with what I have been taught.”
I didn’t realize until later on that
Ryrie at that time was the head of the Theology Department at Dallas Seminary
did not have the same view of the spiritual life that Dr. Chaffer had or that
Dr. Walvoord had. A lot of people don’t pick up on these differences.
Even within Dallas Seminary at that
time there were different ways and I believe conflicting ways professors viewed
how to live the Christian life and conflicting ways on how they taught the
filling of the Spirit, leading of the Spirit and walking by the Spirit. You
can go back through Dr. Ryrie’s writings and I can identify three distinct
positions over the years - different positions (not just refinements) that he
has taken with regard to some of these issues. In fact I ran across this
quote a few weeks ago and was stunned. As much as I have learned from Dr.
Ryrie on the whole issue of revelation, one of his (that is what I had him for
at Dallas – bibliology) several books dealing with bibliology - that
revelation has ceased. Yet he has made this extremely fuzzy statement. He
probably lifted it from an earlier book that was written on the doctrines of
the Holy Spirit. He quotes this in his chapter on the “Holy Spirit in
Basic Theology”. I still recommend Basic Theology.” It is a great
textbook and I encourage people if they are interested in studying theology
that they should read through this. You will find things that perhaps you
don’t agree with. That is fine. You will rarely find a work that you
agree with 100%. That helps you learn how to think. He begins this
paragraph on the leading of the Spirit by quoting our text here in Romans
8:14.
“For all
who are being led by the Spirit of God these are the sons of God.”
Leading is a confirmation of sonship, for sons are led. This work of
guidance is particularly the work of the Spirit.
Then he gives his biblical
support.
Romans
8:14 states it and the book of Acts amply illustrates it.
The
ministry of the Spirit is one of the most assuring ones for the
Christian. The child of God never needs to walk in the dark. He is
always free to ask and receive directions from the Spirit Himself.
Does the Spirit act independently
from the Scriptures to communicate this? He is not clear here. Ryrie
would say yes. I know that. This is just fuzzy terminology. There
are a couple of things that I want to point out so that maybe you will read a
little more intelligently when you read things.
Notice how he interprets this phrase
“the sons of God.”
He is equating sonship here to every
believer. That is an important exegetical decision. Is sonship in
Romans 8:14 a term that refers to every believer or is it a term that refers to
only certain kinds of believers? Now you don’t have to guess at
that. It is clear from the Greek. When you get over into John 1: 12…
NKJ John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right
to become children of God, to those who believe in His name:
It is the same phrase in the English
but there are different words in the Greek. In the Greek he used the word teknon over in John 1, which refers to a
child. In Romans 8:14 Paul uses the word huios, which refers to an adult or a mature son. There is a
difference.
There is an important
difference. If Romans 8:4 is talking about maturity and not just being a
member of the family, then we are talking about something quite
different. But that is not how he does it. The interesting thing is
that 3 or 4 pages later Ryrie points out the difference between a teknon and a huios. But he
didn’t make it clear here. It could have been because he drew this paragraph
out of a book he wrote on the Holy Spirit in the early 50’s and he may not have
clearly thought it through precisely then. The next statement, this word “guidance”
- what has he just done? He has just equated divine guidance with what this
passage is talking about. The question we are asking is if this passage talking
about divine guidance or is it talking about something else? What is
important for you to know (I like to give you these little insights in
history) is that we have these great icons in dispensational theology that
we love to read and honor - men like Scofield, Chafer, Walvoord, Ryrie, and
others. But, they didn’t always get it right.
Scofield in his Scofield Reference
Bible indicates that an Old Testament believer can be saved by keeping the law.
That is wrong. It led him to a number of erroneous statements in his study
notes related to the law.
Chaffer thought that when John the
Baptist baptized Jesus it was sprinkling. That is because Chafer was a
Presbyterian.
Did you know that? Most people
don’t. Walvoord was a Presbyterian. Guess what? John Walvoord
sprinkled his infant sons when they were babies because he was a
Presbyterian. These guys didn’t hold everything right.
When John Walvoord in the early 80’s
took on a project to abridge Dr. Chafer’s systematic theology, he abridged it
to 2 volumes. I think it was a horrendous mistake. I can understand
why they did it. Most people don’t know this.
Chafer looked at the 8 volumes and
he said, “Wow.”
And you start reading it and you
realize that on about every other page he quotes some other theologian. And
sometimes he will quote Shedd or Benjamin Warfield for 5 pages of fine print. Why
is he doing this? At the time he was writing his systematic theology as a
dispensationalist Presbyterian he was under attack from Presbyterians that dispensationalism
wasn’t orthodox. And so what he is doing in his systematic theology is as
he goes through theology proper Christology and pneumatology, he is quoting from all of these orthodox theologians (Shedd, Warfield,
Calvin) to show that as dispensationalists we don’t disagree with the
foundations of what these men are saying. We are not heretics. It is
an apologetic approach to systematic theology. That is why it is there. So
what Walvoord was doing was going in and getting rid of all of these quotes and
making it read smoothly. That would reduce the size of his systematic
theology by at least 2/3rds because it had so many quotes in it. That got in
the way for a lot of people. But Walvoord did something else.
At the time that he did this I was
in PhD studies in historical theology under John Hannah. John Hannah had
written his PhD dissertation on origins and the foundation of the Evangelical
Theological College which was the original name of Dallas Seminary. As
Walvoord was redoing this, Hannah read it. Hannah went into Walvoord and told
him that he had changed Walvoord in at least 70 different places.
“You the opposite of what he
originally said.”
Walvoord said, “That is because he
was wrong.”
Walvoord was probably as close a
student follower of Chaffer as you can be. You read Walvoord’s book on the Holy Spirit. It is
a thinly massaged redo of Chaffer’s book on the Holy Spirit. He just
changes the organization a little bit. It is so obvious that Chafer
mentored him. He is so close to Chafer. He hardly drifts at
all. But he disagreed with him in at least 70 different places. He
couldn’t go along. He had to change it. That isn’t the right thing to
do. If you are going to abridge something, abridge it. Don’t change
it. Don’t make them say something that they didn’t say originally. So
we have these men and they said some great and wonderful things and taught some
things. But they also have some things in their thinking that aren’t quite
kosher in our look at the word. So let’s look at these verses. Ryrie
says are support. I don’t want to hit all the verses; I just want to hit a
couple of them.
In Acts 8:28 Philip is to witness to
the Ethiopian eunuch. It was in the transition period of the early church
when miracles are still going on. It is probably in the early months of
Christianity. Phillip as one of the 6 to help the apostles is up in
Samaria when the Holy Spirit transports him just like we saw in Star
Trek. He gets transported from Samaria down to the southern part of Israel
right to the spot where the Ethiopian is on his way home. He stops his chariot
and takes a little break. He is thinking through the Scriptures. He
is reading Isaiah. The Holy Spirit moves him down there and says...
NKJ Acts 8:29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, "Go near and
overtake this chariot."
What do we have here? We have a
miraculous transportation number one. That doesn’t happen today. We
have the Holy Spirit giving specific special revelation and guidance. This
isn’t what we talked about in terms of this inner guidance of the leadership of
the Holy Spirit. This is special revelation.
NKJ Acts 10:19 While Peter thought about the vision, the Spirit said
to him, "Behold, three men are seeking you. 20 "Arise
therefore, go down and go with them, doubting nothing; for I have sent
them."
Peter is being told to go from the
men of Cornelius to take them the gospel and to officially take the gospel for
the first time to gentiles the Spirit said …
“Behold
three men are seeking you.”
This isn’t some sort of vibration,
liver quiver, sense or impression. This is special revelation. This is
specific revelation.
NKJ Acts 13:2 As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy
Spirit said, "Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I
have called them." 3 Then, having fasted and prayed, and laid
hands on them, they sent them away.
This is specific special
revelation. It may have been overt. It is audible voice from the Holy
Spirit that everybody in that group heard.
NKJ Acts 16:6 Now when they had gone through Phrygia and the region
of Galatia, they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia.
I don’t know how he did it because
that is all it says. Whether there was it was through overt revelation or circumstances
it is not clear. It seems to be another case of special revelation.
NKJ Acts 20:22 "And see, now I go bound in the spirit to
Jerusalem, not knowing the things that will happen to me there, 23 "except
that the Holy Spirit testifies in every city, saying that chains and
tribulations await me. 24 "But none of these things move me;
nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy,
and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel
of the grace of God.
Paul is talking on the way to
Jerusalem.
Prophecy was still active. If
you keep going to Jerusalem instead of Rome then the Holy Spirit is going to
have you arrested so you will get hauled off to Rome the hard way.
Paul in his stubbornness just kept
going. The point is that the Holy Spirit is testifying in every
city. That is special revelation. This isn’t some internal liver
quiver, impression movement, some sense of weightiness. It is none of
that. It is special revelation.
So our conclusion is that when Dr.
Ryrie gives all of these verses that it doesn’t fit what he is talking
about. If that is not talking about divine guidance of the Holy Spirit in
terms that we talk about divine guidance then what about Romans 8:14? Now
we have to understand what Romans 8:14 says. In order to do that, we
locate it in the context of Romans - two of the most important passages –
bedrock passages in the New Testament for understanding the spiritual
life. If you don’t interpret these chapters right you are going to be
hosed in your spiritual life. You will try to live life mystically,
morally, any way but on the basis of the supernatural means that God has
provided in terms of walking by the Holy Spirit.
Let us pray.