SPROUL: Those who have heard me speak usually, if
they’ve heard me speak three times, they’ve heard me at least quote once from Dr. John
Gerstner, my mentor in seminary, who I regard as the most Godly man I’ve ever met. And,
however, though he was -- is Godly as a person, as a professor, he was strictly diabolical
in his method of instruction, which he liked to call dialecture, which we called rigorous
cross-examination and interrogation as one would have in a prison camp. Well, he -- Gerstner
would put us on the spot frequently with difficult thorny theological questions and try, in a
Socratic method to draw the answers out from us and have us withstand the debate that he
would provoke in the classroom. And I’ll never forget one occasion where he said, "Today,
gentlemen, I am going to be a Mormon theologian, and you are going to be Orthodox Christians,
and you are going to have to enter into discussion and dialogue with me about some of the basic
concepts of the nature of God." And he said, "Now, as a Mormon theologian, my first declaration
is this, that God has a physical body. Because, after all, the Bible says that we are created
in the image and in the likeness of God, and the only way we could be created in the image
and the likeness of God would be if God Himself, in some way, looked like us, and therefore
has a body, not to mention the multitude of times in the Scriptures where the eyes of
God are mentioned, the feet of God are mentioned, the arm of God, and so on." He said, "So,
it would seem to be clear from Scripture that God has a body." And he said, "How would you
respond to that?" And then he looked at me, and he said, "Mr. Sproul, what would you say?"
And I said, "Well, I would take that person immediately to the New Testament, to the teaching
of Jesus, to the woman of Sychar. Where He had this discussion with the woman at the
well at a point in which He said to her, ‘God is a Spirit, and he who worships Him must
worship in spirit and in truth.’" And he said, "Well," he said, "that’s an interesting
observation," he said, "but just because the Bible says that God is a Spirit does not outlaw
the possibility that He also has a body, because I go back in Genesis, and it says that God
created man out of the dust, shaped him into a body, and man became a living soul. A nuffesh.
And that people are called spirits in the Bible because they have a spiritual aspect
to their identity and to their person, and so to be a spiritual being does not preclude
the possibility of also being a physical being. So all this quotation from John 4 that God
is a Spirit is not enough, Mr. Sproul." And I said, "But wait a minute, wait a minute,"
I said, "If we look at the context of this discussion, the whole issue is a question
of geography. The lady says to Jesus, ‘Our fathers worshiped God here in Mount Gerizim,
and the Jews worship God in Jerusalem, now which is proper, which is appropriate, where
is God?’" And that Jesus responds and says, "The hour has come and now is, where the true
believer doesn’t worship either in Gerizim or in Jerusalem, but God is a Spirit." And,
I said, "The whole point of that is that God cannot be restricted to one location. Why
He’s not restricted to one location is because He’s a Spirit," I said. "So the whole point
of Jesus’ argument here in John 4 is to demonstrate that God is not limited by physical
limits as we are." And Gerstner looked at me and he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, Mr.
Sproul, that won’t do." And he said, "Who else can answer this question?" So, for fifty
minutes everybody in the class is struggling with Gerstner trying to answer the question.
And we all fall at his feet. We lose. And we’re ready to go out and sign up and be
Mormons. And, so, finally you know, I raised my hand, and I said, "Dr. Gerstner. We failed,
and we failed miserably, and we acknowledge that. Now, will you please tell us what the
right answer is to that question and how we should answer in a debate like this?" And
he said, "Well, what you should do is go immediately to John, chapter 4. To the discussion with...
between Jesus and the woman at Sychar." I said, "Dr. Gerstner, that’s what I did."
He said, "Yes," he said, "and the man will come back and say, you know, people are spirits
too and they have bodies," and he said, "Then, what you have to show is that in the context
of Jesus’ remarks the only possible meaning of that text can be that God is only a Spirit
and does not have a body." I said, "But, that’s what I said, Dr. Gerstner." He said, "That’s
right, that’s what you said," he said, "and what did I say to you?" And I said, "You said
to me: ‘No, no, no, no, no. That’ll never do.’" And Dr. Gerstner looked at me, and
he said, "Is that an argument?" I said, "No." He said, "But you let me get away with it."
He said, "All I said was ‘No, no, no, no, no. That will never do.’ And went to somebody
else, and you let me off the hook." He said, "We could of had this thing all finished fifty-five
minutes ago, Sproul, if you would have just stuck to your guns, but instead, " he said,
"you surrendered without a peep of protest because I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no,
no.’" How many times have I seen that, again, in my life to see how we do that, if people
just keep talking, they think the argument continues when it was over long time ago.
But this whole point is clear to us in the Scriptures. Let me read a little bit of that
text that I was just referring to in the discussion, where the woman of Sychar said to, to Jesus,
"Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Now, our fathers worshiped in this mountain,
and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." And Jesus said
unto her, "Woman, believe me, the hour comes when you shall neither in this mountain nor
yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. You worship what you know not what. We know what we worship,
for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers
shall worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth for the Father seeks such to worship
Him. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship him in Spirit and in Truth."
Now, the Scriptures clearly and plainly declare that God is a Spirit, but our problem is,
what is a Spirit? We are as puzzled as Nicodemus was one chapter earlier here when Jesus was
talking to him about spiritual birth, and this theologian was scratching his head, and
said you know, "How can these things be?" And Jesus talked to him. He said, "It’s
like the wind. The wind blows where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t
know from whither it comes or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
But how do we conceive of Spirit? How did the Jews conceive of it? Sometimes it seems
as if the idea of Spirit is like a gaseous type of matter, that a spirit is sort of like
a cloud, or some kind of vapor, that though it is... doesn’t have the same kind of intensity
of substance that a solid piece of material has, nevertheless, it is still a form of matter.
But, we have to understand that when the Bible speaks about God’s Being a Spirit, what
He is saying is that God is not matter. He’s not gaseous matter. He’s not liquid matter.
He’s not solid matter. He is not a composite being made up of several parts added together.
And so this Spirit being that the Scriptures speak of is something that transcends our
ability to conceive of, because we have no real reference point for spiritual being.
We have an approximate analogy of spirit being in ourselves. Now, let me see if I can illustrate
this. I need somebody very, very bright here. I’m looking around the room. I need somebody
that I can depend on, somebody that I can -- I can’t waste a lot of time. I’m trying
hard, desperately to find somebody that I can, I can depend on. I’ll try you, Mr.
Fogerty. Tell, tell everybody where you live, Bruce. All right, I’m going to ask you a
few more questions here and they’ll be easy ones. You’ve heard his testimony. Right?
Lives in Dallas, Texas. Now, Mr. Fogerty, are you at this moment in Dallas Texas? You’re
not. At this moment, Mr. Fogerty, are you alive? Correct. I presume that means yes.
OK? All right. Now, I have one more question. If you tell us that you live in Dallas, and
you currently not in Dallas, how’s come you’re saying that you’re alive? Your
typical point of domicile happens to be what? Dallas. But, you’re not there now, so at
the present moment, you are not living in Dallas. Your home is in Dallas, but you’re
not in Dallas. Let me suggest to you that where you live is where you are. Does that
make sense to you? Ok. But we talk like this as a manner of speaking. We talk about where
our homes are, where our houses are, but actually where you live is where you are. The German
existentialist called, "Das Ein." That it’s a being there, because you cannot exist outside
right now, at least in this life, outside of the confines of your physical body. You
live inside your body. But are you your body? Are you your body? If your leg is amplitated
-- amputated, Steve, (amplitated sound like Richard Hostetler back), if your leg is amputated,
Steve, do you cease to be? No, you’ve lost a part of yourself, you’ve lost a part of
your body, the leg, and so on, but you as a person continue to live, right? Where do
you live, specifically? Wherever you are, and again, it’s inside
the body, but where does your life really unfold for you? Let me ask it another way,
how important is your mind to your personality? Just -- we’ve seen a tragedy in major league
baseball, just in this past week, where the manager of the, Kansas City Royals was diagnosed
as having a malignant brain tumor, frontal section, frontal lobe of his brain. I don’t
know anything about that other than that they say that this is supposedly the seat of the
emotions. And they describe some of the strange behavioral patterns that tipped off his friends
and family that something was wrong, because his life changed as a direct result of this
physical malady that affected his brain. Now, we live and our whole bodies are involved
in our life. But my consciousness of myself as a self takes place in my mind, in my thoughts,
in my feelings, in my motivations, in my drives. The body seems to be a mechanism that I as
a person use to get about and to do certain actions and respond to certain things. But
my consciousness of myself as a self is something that goes on in my mind, and the nature of
the mind is one of the most elusive realities of all of human investigation. There is no
philosopher and no scientist yet who has fully grasped the meaning of mind. There have been
those who have tried to reduce mind to matter. That is, to reduce the mind of a human being
to the brain and to its impulses and its mechanistic patterns. You remember B. F. Skinner’s famous
work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he talked about certain patterns of behavior
that are determined by fixed mechanical causes, physical impulses and reaction. Knee-jerk
reactions. And there have been those in the 20th century who have tried to reduce thinking
to matter, thereby destroying the very concept of personality as a myth. Now, what do you
say to somebody who argues that concepts like freedom and dignity are mythological and unnecessary
concepts because they are simply illusions? Because, face it. If your thinking is the
result of pure deterministic, mechanistic impulses of matter, you are not free. And
if you are not free, you have no dignity. The only thing that’s beyond freedom and
dignity, ladies and gentlemen, and slavery and indignity. But here is Skinner arguing
to the world that our thoughts are mere determined reactions. What’s wrong with the argument?
It’s not an argument. It self-destructs. Because you say to Skinner, "Why should I
listen to you? Are you trying to persuade me or something? Are you trying to give me
an argument that’s logical, cogent, that will make me change my mind? Why are you wasting
my time when you know that all of my thinking is simply a result of physiological impulses,
and your argument is simply the result of a deterministic series of causes of physical
impulses? There’s no such thing as rationality. And there’s no such thing as personality.
But, philosophers have understood, we don’t really know what the relationship is between
thought and the brain, between mind and the body. But we know that we are conscious of
ourselves as selves, and that’s where we live in our consciousness. And it’s that
dimension of man that defies reduction to pure material description. Now, we ask the
question, can that non-material dimension of human personality survive if something
happens to the body? Some people say, "No. Once the brain dies, the mind goes with it
and without a brain there can be no mind, and without a body there can be no soul."
The message of Christianity is this, your body dies, you still live. That there is a
continuity of personal consciousness and personal existence that goes beyond the grave. Do you
realize how important that concept is to life itself? I know people get cynical and skeptical
and they say, "Christians are back there in the pie in the sky." Hey, pie in the sky?
We’re talking about life here. We’re talking about people. We’re talking about the reality
of human personality. There’s no more serious question for us ever to discuss than that.
If a man dies shall he live again? Because, really, what we’re asking is, is there more
to humanity than matter? Because we understand if there is not, then we don’t matter. And
that’s unthinkable. Now, all I’m saying here is that we have an analogy that we as
human beings are spiritual persons. But we’re finite spirits who live in bodies. What the
Scriptures tell us about God is that He’s an infinite Spirit who is not bound by a body.
Now, there’s a distinction that we need to make that I think is important that we
understand, the difference between a spirit and a force. How many times have you heard
people talk about God like this: "Yes, I believe in God. I believe that God is some higher
power." May the force be with you. OK? What kind of force do I want to have with me? Gravity?
I mean, can you imagine being in a funeral home and turn around and being comforted by
gravity? No, I was, I spent a few days last week with a TENS unit. Do you know what that
is? How many of you know what a TENS unit is? What do you call it? Trans..., Vesta?
What do you call it, cutaneous, or I don’t know? Trans cutaneous electrical something
or other. It’s a little box with electricity. You electrocute yourself with it. If you have
pain problems, chronic pain problems, you can get this electrical box and stick the
electrodes and tape them to your back or to your neck or what’s ever bothering you,
and you turn up the juice. You know, just -- you’ve got to watch how far you turn
it up. Uh? And you turn up that juice, and it sends impulse to your brain and sort of
short circuits, is the theory, sort of short circuits the normal pain message center. It’s
like jamming radio frequencies so that you can go through a day without pain, and it’s
a great unit for people who have chronic pain. Right? Now, there, the force is with you.
And it’s comforting to have that force jolting your back or jolting your neck. It’s not
comfortable when those doggone electrodes fall off your neck and your natural impulse
is to do what? Grab them. Forgetting that the sensitivity in your fingers is a little
different than it is in your neck and oo! You get a hot one by holding on to that thing.
That’s the force being with you. But, the point of even with that TENS unit, I can’t
talk to it. I can’t pray with it. I can’t have a personal relationship of fellowship
with a box of electrical current. Force, sheer force, is the power unleashed by something
that is not sheer force. That in order for there to be force, something has to be producing
that force. Now, if these two terms are synonymous in your mind -- spirit and force. Let’s
try to -- that would mean that they are interchangeable, and to say that there’s a spiritual force
out there would be saying nothing different than the saying "there’s a force, force"
out there, or that there’s a power, power out there. But, when we talk about spiritual
power or spiritual force, ladies and gentlemen, we’re talking about personal power and personal
force. You can have impersonal force, but you can’t possibly have impersonal spirit,
because an impersonal spirit, by definition, is not a spirit. And what the Bible is saying
to us here, when it says that God is a Spirit, is that the Bible is saying that God relates
to us as a person. That God is conscious. That God wills. That God generates activity.
The only difference is He’s infinite and His power and force and personality is purely
spiritual without being closed in a body. Now, I mentioned in our last section that
the great problem that we have with an infinite God is the same problem we have with God as
a Spirit. He’s invisible. How do I relate to Him? It’s like the kid said, he wants
a God with skin on him. And that’s what we have, of course, in the incarnation where
the Word becomes flesh. It’s not that God stops being a Spirit and stops being infinite
and suddenly becomes finite and the eternal now becomes temporal, but rather, the Almighty
God of Heaven and earth, the infinite self-existent eternal Being takes upon Himself the frame
and the dust of a physical, biological person. He puts skin on. So that Jesus can say, "He
who has seen Me has seen the Father." The invisible becomes visible. Do you remember
the story of Elisha in the Old Testament? Where how this king of the Assyrians was planning
strategy in secret against the Jewish king and every time he would plot against the Jewish
king and set an ambush, the Jewish king would escape, and so the king, the bad king gets
all upset, and he calls all his lieutenants together and he says, "OK, where’s the leak?
Somebody is a traitor here, and there -- because every time we say a plan, the Jewish king
finds out." And, and his lieutenants said, "Hey. Nobody’s telling us. It’s that prophet
Elisha over there. The things that we say in secret, he goes in and whispers to the
Jewish king in his bedroom." And so they get the picture real fast, is that if we’re
going to take care of the Jewish king, first we’ve got to do away with his prophet. So
he sends his battalion or division or whatever it is, all these charioteers to this tiny
little town of Dothan, this little village, where Elisha’s all by himself there, with
-- except for his servant. Servant gets up in the morning, goes and throws open the windows,
and he looks out and he sees fifty thousand chariots in the east. Then he runs over to
the west, in he opens up, in he looks, and what does he see, another fifty thousand chariots.
Looks to the north, fifty thousand chariots. It’s like, it’s like the Lone Ranger and
Tonto, you know? What do you mean, "We, white man?" Right? And he’s panic stricken. And
he runs up, and he shakes Elisha and he says, "Elisha, wake up." he said. "We’re in big
trouble, we’re surrounded by these army guys." Elisha said, "Take it easy. Relax.
It’s OK. Don’t you understand that those who are with us are more than those who are
against us? And Elisha’s servant says, "Do you have a brain tumor? Is something wrong
with you?" He said, "You don’t understand. Look out there. This place is full of chariots
and full of soldiers. And there’s just you, and there’s just me. What do you mean those
that are with us are greater than those who are against us?" And then Elisha prayed, "Lord,
open his eyes. Lord let him see beyond that dimensional barrier. Let him see what you’ve
given me the blessedness to observe." And, behold. The servant’s eyes were opened,
and there round about Elisha were myriads and myriads of the Heavenly hosts. Do you
believe that? Do you know what it means to be a Christian, is to believe what God says
is real and is true. And what God says is that there is a transcendent supernatural
spiritual reality that is far more significant than anything we will ever taste or touch
with our hands, and that a Christian is one who lives his life on the conviction of the
reality of the spiritual realm. Now, we know, again, by way of analogy, that right as we’re
talking there may be in somebody’s body in this room, I made a joke about a brain
tumor, but brain tumors aren’t funny. And there may be somebody in this room right now
who has the nascent beginnings of a brain tumor developing in their head, and we don’t
know it. Somebody else may have an invisible to the naked eye invasion of a micro-body
that is going to bring to them a fatal disease. We know this, that enough about, about the
invisible world that’s invisible to the naked eye that if somebody sneezes right in
front of us we instinctively duck. Because we know that person who’s sneezing is letting
out into the air all kinds of germs. Can you see them? No. Can they kill us? Yes. And,
so we know that there are all kinds of invisible things that have a tremendous influence on
our lives. And somehow we think that when we get to the limits that our microscopes
and telescopes can perceive that somehow we’ve gotten the full picture of reality. But, there’s
no microscope that can penetrate the spiritual. There’s no telescope that can look into
the heart of God. There we are dependent upon God’s self revelation to speak to us from
that spiritual realm and give us an assurance that He is there and that He is here with
His Heavenly host all around us, that there is spiritual communion and spiritual fellowship.
Now, I don’t have time to develop this, but let me just close with this. And what
He wants is spiritual worship -- a worship that is in spirit and in truth. That means
a worship that comes out of the depths of our own personal being. Spiritual worship
is not, you know, magic. Spiritual worship is worship that comes from the soul, from
a heart that is inflamed with love for God. And it’s a worship that is to be according
to Spirit and according to Truth. We don’t care about how we worship God. But God cares
about how we worship God. And so what I want to look at in our next session is the truthfulness
of God and God’s commitment to Truth.
