This particular assignment that I have been
given is pretty formidable. To talk about the attacks on the Bible, that
is a massive subject, and I am not scholastic, I am a pastor and so I will confess to you
that I will approach this as a pastor would. And I hope that it will be a manageable look
at the vastness of this attack and at the same time you won’t get bogged in a lot
of detail. Let me start with a quote from Martin Luther. “If I profess with the loudest voice and
clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that point which the world and
the devil are at that moment attacking I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may
be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty
of the soldier is proved and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight
and disgrace if he flinches at that point.” This is not a place where we can flinch. As Patricia and I were driving in tonight
watching all of you flow in here, I said to her, I said, “The common motivation here
for all these people is the love of the truth.” That’s why you’re here. You want the truth. The battle for the Bible is the battle for
the truth. That’s what energizes me everyday of my
life. And the truth is under relentless and endless
assault, as we all know. And a good place I think to begin to look
at this, I am a Bible teacher primarily and so I always like to go to the text. Open your Bible to the third chapter of Genesis,
the third chapter of Genesis, and I want to talk a little bit about the first assault
on the Word -- when the war really began. Genesis chapter 3, a very familiar portion
of Scripture I know to all of us, but to just begin at this point is really critical. “The serpent was more crafty than any beast
of the field which the Lord God had made, and he said to the woman, “Indeed has God
said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?” And the woman said to the serpent, “From
the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but from the fruit of the tree, which
is in the middle of the garden, God has said you shall not eat from it or touch it, lest
you die.” And the serpent said to the woman, “You
surely shall not die. For God knows that in the day you eat from
it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” This is where Satan established the title
that he is given by our Lord in John 8:44, the father of lies. Here is the source of the first lie. And the first lie is that God didn’t tell
you the truth. Only in lying is Satan consistent. Everything else in him is inconsistent. Everything else in him is deception. And he begins with what sounds like an innocuous
and innocent question from sort of neutral interested observer concerned for Eve’s
well being. Soon however he says that he knows more than
God. God is wrong, and I am right. God said that you will die and I’ll tell
you, you won’t. This is essentially what happens here. God says one thing, and Satan says God is
a liar, and another thing is the truth. Let’s follow the strategy a little bit because
I think it‘s very instructive, at least picking it up in the middle of verse two,
he says to the woman, “Indeed has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the
Garden’?” This beginning is safe enough. He just asks a simple question. “Indeed has God said?” He chooses Elohim rather than Yahweh, the
emphasis on sovereign Lord. And here you have the first question in the
Bible. This is actually posing the first dilemma
in human history. There were no dilemmas until this one. And the question is designed to start Eve
on the path to doubting God’s Word. And doubting God’s Word is the essence of
sin. You could actually translate this, “So God
has said, has He?” And for the first time the most deadly spiritual
force was covertly smuggled into the world. Or was it the assumption that what God has
said is subject to human judgment? And then Satan repeated essentially what God
said, “You shall not eat from any tree of the Garden,” but he turns it from a positive
to a negative, perverting and inverting the emphasis on not eating to press the issue
of prohibition. And this is a set up for the main assault
that is to come from the Word of God, as we’ll see. The implication is a further step, God’s
Word can be, God’s Word should be evaluated, judged, questioned. And he picks the issue of the limitation that
God put on Adam and Eve -- just that one tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And his point is to get them to believe, beginning
with Eve, that God is unnecessarily restrictive, is unnecessarily narrow, limiting. There is something in God’s character he
implies that makes Him want to hold back something from you that you should have. He, for some reason, restrains your free will
and by restraining that, He is withholding some delight from you, some pleasure, some
joy, some level of satisfaction, some fulfillment. You know God, He wants to take away your choices. He wants to crimp your freedom, limit your
rights. You know what, underneath it all he may not
be that loving and caring. And maybe if that is the way He presents himself,
you just can’t trust Him. Satan is, of course, subtly at the same time
suggesting to Eve that he is more devoted to her well-being than God is because he wants
her to have full freedom to do whatever she wants and make whatever choice she wants to
make. He is the one who is concerned about her real
rights and her true happiness. So Satan has set in her mind the idea that
the one prohibition is evidence of some kind of divine character flaw, casting a suspicion
on God’s goodness and the viability of His Word or its trustworthiness. Not right now at this moment is Eve ready
to totally cave in, so in verse two the woman said to the servant, “Well from the fruit
of the garden we may eat, there is plenty more,” and she in a weak way sets out to
somewhat defend God. God has certainly put a limitation, but there
are plenty of other alternatives. It’s not a strong defense of God. She should have strongly defended Him. She knew God, she knew God’s goodness, she
knew His perfection, she knew His holiness, she knew He had given a crystal clear, unmistakable,
and unambiguous command, and she should have been suspicious of a talking snake. Really, she should have made an emphatic denial
of this attempt to question God or even to introduce the right for someone to question
God. Verse three, she says, “From the fruit of
the tree which is in the middle of the garden God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it
or touch it lest you die.’” Oh, now she is starting to feel, well maybe
God is limiting, and she adds a little touch there, didn’t she? The word touch. And so she is moving down that path, that
God is restrictive, and He says if you eat of that tree or touch it -- that isn’t recorded
that God said that. She’s starting to buy the restraint here. And as soon as one does not completely and
wholeheartedly and unreservedly trust in the Word of God as absolutely true and the source
of our highest joy and greatest good and deepest satisfaction and broadest pleasure and most
consummate fulfillment, then mistrust has gained a foothold of sin in the heart. And the fall happened there, it didn’t happen
when she ate it. It happened when she didn’t trust. She goes beyond what God said, “We can’t
even touch it.” And so she is adding this, “Yeah, it is
a restrictive thing.” The process is at work. God is unnecessarily restricting. That is when the fall happened, right there. What follows is just the evidence of it. Satan moves in for a full denial. He knows exactly what she is thinking because
he can hear what she says, and the serpent boldly, blatantly, flatly says to the woman,
“You surely shall not die, God told you – what? -- a lie”. You’re not going to die. It’s just that God wants to restrain you. He’s got this character flaw. He wants to mess with your liberty and impinge
on your freedom. You won’t die. God didn’t tell you the truth. You can’t trust His Word as revealed. It doesn’t have your best interest in mind. It isn’t the path to the truest fulfillment. She believed, ever so slightly, that God was
flawed, that God was deceptive, that God was needlessly limiting, that God was holding
back her joy, and she had actually believed that there was judgment, but God lied, there
is no judgment. Hey, you can do that even though He said not
to do it. You won’t die. God doesn’t tell you the truth, and particularly
He doesn’t tell you the truth about judgment. It’s your life, Eve. Live it the way you want. Don’t let God put these restraints on you,
holding some sword over your head, as if that, in fact, were the case. Hey, no boundaries, Ford Motor Company. No rules, Outback. No limits, no consequences, no judgment. That is the big lie, isn’t it? Live anyway you want. Furthermore, the God who will put those kind
of limits on you doesn’t really love you. He’s all law. I’m all love. Satan says, “Hey, you can do what you want. I’m all love. I won’t put any restraints on you. I’m love, not law. He’s law, not love.” Well, the question immediately pops into your
mind, well why would God be like this? Why would He be like this? Oh, Satan says in verse 5, because God knows
that in the day you eat from that tree, your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God,
knowing good and evil. There’s a bizarre twist here. God hates rivals. And He knows if you eat of that tree, you’re
going to be His equal. He’s envious. He’s jealous. He knows that if you do that, you will be
as free as He is because He’s free to do anything He wants. So do what you want and be as free as God. You will be God. So the father of lies, that little sequence
brought down the whole human race on the premise that God’s word can’t be trusted. He’s flawed. Contrast Jesus’ perfect trust in the Word
of God when Satan came after Him, and three times He repeats the Scriptures in answer
to the enemy. Without taking time to trace the full flow
of the satanic assault on the truth that began in the Garden of Eden, I’ll leave that to
you. That’s not my assignment tonight. The Scripture reveals in the history of redemption
as the Old Testament and the New Testament continued a flow to the book of Revelation,
this endless, relentless battle of error to destroy truth. There is in the Bible an almost endless litany
of false prophets, false teachers, liars, false apostles, deceivers from Genesis to
Revelation. And since the canon was closed and the word
of God once for all delivered to the Saints, the battle has not diminished at all. It was this very battle at the Reformation,
the battle for Sola Scriptura, wasn’t it? It defined everything. Jim Boice, whom we all miss, R.C. told me
when Jim Boice died it was God’s judgment on America. For 10 years we were involved with him in
the inerrancy battle, making forays into that particular dimension of Satan’s attacks. But it can’t be limited to that. The battle roars on so many fronts that it
is almost impossible for me to address them all. Let me see if I can’t give you some sense
of the nature of the current battle against the Bible, but I will say one thing first
that will cover the ground. Any attack on the truth from anywhere is an
attack on the Bible. Fair enough? I don’t care where it comes from. Any attack on the truth is an attack on the
Bible. So since we’re in the war now, you’ve
got to give me a little space, a little slack. I want to identify the issue as specifically
as I can, so I am going to give you some things that are in print. I’m not going to pick on people in private
conversations, but I want you to understand how effective this battle is and how vigilant
we have to be. What shocks me in the battle in the war on
the Word is how often we are hit by friendly fire. The 10th anniversary issue of a wonderful
periodical, Modern Reformation, an article written by a minister in the PCA -- in that
article called, “The Insufficiency of Scripture,” it suggests that Scripture is not a complete
guide to life as most Reformed people think it is. The author argues that the information given
to us in Scripture, for example, is not sufficient to tell us how to have successful marriages. He says, and I quote, “Whereas Scripture
teaches us that marriage is a life long commitment, Scripture is manifestly not sufficient to
teach people how to attain that end. Oh yes, Scripture contains some broad principles
such as those encountered in Ephesians 5 or in Proverbs 29, but for all the evangelical
talk about roles of men and women, such talk has obviously not produced happy or successful
marriages.” The author says 10 years ago he believed in
the full sufficiency of Scripture in harmony with the standard Reformed position on the
matter. Today, he suggests that those who drafted
the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith might have stated the case better
if they had changed their language, a little. In chapter 1, section 6, the Confession says,
that the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s
salvation, faith, and life is either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary
consequence may be deduced from Scripture. We all know that. The writer of this article said, “The entire
matter would have been better expressed had the divines articulated a more manifestly
covenantal statement indicating that the Scriptures are a sufficient guide to the various covenants
God has made with various covenant people.” In a vague way, he particularly suggests that
the expression faith and life ought to be interpreted only in the narrowest religious
sense. Now here’s the amazing part to me, what
made him, this author, back away from the unqualified affirmation that the Bible contains
all things necessary for God’s glory, man’s salvation, faith and life? What made him back away? He changed his mind about Biblical sufficiency
when he saw a survey. The survey says…. The survey indicated that the divorce rate
among evangelicals is about the same or worse than the divorce rate among unbelievers. Any of you hear about that? Here is what he writes, this author, “The
large practical matter that has influenced my thinking about the matter of the sufficiency
of Scripture has been the publication of findings that the evangelical divorce rate is roughly
the same as that of unbelievers. If we ask why evangelicals divorce at the
same rate as those who do not necessarily recognize the Bible as a source of authoritative
guidance, the answer must be something like this,” and then he goes on to quote what
I said that Scripture is manifestly not sufficient to teach people how to attain that end. Not even arguing that point, which I think
we would all argue -- two Spirit-filled people walking in Christ are probably going to get
along okay. The writer goes on to suggest that believing
in the sufficiency of Scripture probably will work against the success of your marriage. He writes, and I quote, “I would suggest
that part of the reason our unbelieving friends succeed as often in marriage as we do is that
they are never hoodwinked by any misunderstanding of the suffiency of the Scripture.” Where did he get this survey? Well, it came from the Barna Research group,
and it was released in December of ’99, with a press release titled, “Christians
are More Likely to Experience Divorce than Non-Christians.” The press release had the following statistics:
27% of born again Christians have been divorced compared to 24% of non-Christians who had
been divorced. If I may add a footnote, there was nothing
in the survey, because I went back through all of it, through all of their organization
to get this information. Nothing in the survey first of all indicated
whether these people had the divorce after or before they became Christians, so the statistic
is useless anyway. But let’s take it at face value. 27% of born again Christians have been divorced
compared to 24% of others. The survey also added that the divorce rate
of atheist and agnostics was only 21%. So they seem to have better ability to stay
married than born again people. And you know I began to follow this because
I was called by a newspaper and asked to respond to it when it came out and I said I don’t
believe it. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. I think that’s… that’s impossible, and
I have done a little research since that time. So I went back to find out how do you determine
who is born again, fair enough? And so I got their information off the Website,
two questions. Question number 1: Have you ever made a personal
commitment to Jesus Christ that is important in your life? If you answered yes to that, you moved to
question 2. Question 2: When I die I will go to heaven
because I have confessed my sins and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior. If they said yes to the first question and
chose that second answer out of several choices -- they could check a box off -- they were
categorized as born again. Obviously in a culture where language about
accepting Jesus Christ as personal Savior has become cliché, the answers to those two
questions certainly don’t give sufficient warrant to classify someone as genuinely born
again. In case you wonder about that, 45% of those
people who were born again agree that Satan is not a living being but only a symbol of
evil. So they don’t believe the Bible. 34% of those born again people believe that
if a person is good enough they can earn their place in heaven. 28% agree that while He lived on earth Jesus
committed sins just like everybody else. 15% of these born again people in the same
study claim that after He was crucified and died, Jesus Christ did not return to life
physically. 26% stated it doesn’t matter what faith
you follow because they all teach the same thing. I can understand the folly of the survey,
I can’t understand denying the sufficiency of Scripture and rewriting the Westminster
Confession off of that. Folks, that’s friendly fire, but that’s
deadly stuff. That’s deadly stuff. And I don’t care who it is. I don’t care if it’s Billy Graham or Robert
Schuller or whoever. When these guys get together and talk about
how God has a wider mercy than just the gospel and there are people who have never heard
the gospel, have never read the Bible, don’t know the name of Jesus, and they are going
to heaven. They may call themselves evangelical, and
well they may be, but that’s deadly friendly fire, devastating to the truth of God and
literally annihilates discernment. Now, let me just give you some categories
of attacks. I better look at a watch here. I’m just going to give you a few categories. You can fill in the blanks, okay? First, is the attacks from the critics. You know, the old journal liberalism, Graf
- Wellhausen higher criticism, all of that, and I honestly think that if… nobody in
the world would know those guys even lived if we just left them dead, but we have to
resurrect them. They’re better off buried deep. But you know all of that higher criticism
and how it poisoned all the wells of the churches in Europe and in America. You know, even though we won that battle,
I think we fought it and fought it and fought it and won, and I think the 10 years of the
inerrancy congress did a tremendous amount. You know, it hangs on the body like a plague. The contemporary version of it you saw on
ABC with Peter Jennings, the search for the real Jesus. He interviewed a whole lot of people who didn’t
know who He was or where He was. If you want to find Jesus, you don’t ask
a whole lot of people who don’t know Him. And then you follow the Jesus Seminar, that’s
the latest, the space in the silly religious sections of papers. The religious section of the LA Times you
need to read, so that you can see where you don’t want to go and what you don’t want
to believe. But the Jesus Seminar are 200 scholastic authorities
on Jesus, they are, of course, dead and blind to the truth, but they don’t know that,
and they make decisions about whether what Jesus said, according to Scripture, He really
said. And they have a curious polling procedure. By the way, I’m reading a little article,
I’m quoting me here, so bear with me. I know that’s an odd thing to do. It’s like the Baptist preacher, you know,
who preached such a great sermon that he autographed his own Bible. But I just want you to… I just go through it quicker if I read what
I wrote on this sometime back. Here’s the curious polling procedure to
determine whether what the Bible says Jesus said, He actually said. Each participant dropped a red bead, they
had these little beads different colors, a red bead into the ballot box for sayings that
he or she figured were probably authentic. Pink beads meant possibly authentic. Grey beads were used for sayings thought to
be altered by the disciples or early Christians. Black beads were an absolute no vote, used
for passages that were entirely fabricated and spoken by somebody other than Jesus. The results were only 31 of the more than
700 sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospel are certainly true, and 16 of those are duplicates
from parallel passages. All totaled the panel rejected 80% of the
words the Scripture attributes to Jesus. Among the ousted passages are Matthew 5:11,
“Blessed are you when men cast insults at you and persecute you and say all kinds of
evil against you falsely on account of me.” Mark 10:32-34, in which Jesus foretold his
crucifixion, all the apocalyptic sections and the entire book of John except verse 44
of chapter 4 which got one pink bead. That one says, a prophet has no honor in his
own country. Seminar founder Robert Funk, “reckons most
mainline scholars will agree with their dumping of John’s gospel because Jesus speaks regularly
in adages and aphorisms and parables and witticisms created as a rebuff or retort in the context
of dialog and debate. It is clear He didn’t speak in long monologues
of the type found in the gospel of John.” Really. It’s like, you know, where were you when
I created the world? And you know this…, Peter Jennings interviewed
all these people from the Jesus Seminar, so this decaying flotsam from the shipwreck of
liberalism continues to wash ashore, it just doesn’t go away, waves just keep bringing
it back. You keep that up I will sign my own Bible. So how do they determine what Jesus said or
didn’t say? Well, whatever is politically correct. The same people who were radical protestors
on university campuses in the 60’s are now middle managers in the university system. Their ideological creed has become the test
of orthodoxy in academic circles, and that’s the bottom line. They are just absolute, outright, godless,
skeptics. Egalitarianism, homosexuality is an alternative
lifestyle, environmental activism, animal rights, racial quotas, hard line anti-war
doctrine all of this endless stuff is got to be excised… if it’s violated by anything
in the Bible has got to be excised, and so they literally excise Jesus. Passages that call for repentance, affirm
Jesus deity, particularly passages that talk about judgment. They’re gone. And now they are not only working on the words
of Jesus, now they are working on the works of Jesus. They are going to remove the miracles. Please don’t get the idea that I think the
conclusions of the Jesus Seminar should be discarded lightly. On the contrary, I think they should be thrown
away with as much force as possible. I don’t know, Karl Barth may believe that
there are other faiths that are lesser lights in the constellation of the kingdom, and Paul
Tillich may believe there are Christians incognito, and Rahner may call some the anonymous Christians,
but these assaults just never seem to end, never seem to end. When I was on the Larry King program with
Rabbi Cushner and Deepak Chopra, I was having a good time. I enjoyed it. I don’t know how they were doing, but Larry
King and I had some great conversation off the camera, and I found him just a winsome
guy and… but at one point in the conversation, I said, “With all due respect, to Deepak
Chopra, you are not the authority. And neither is Rabbi Cushner.” And Larry King just in a flash looked at me
and said, “and you don’t believe you are either, do you?” And I said, “no, the Bible is.” And then he said real quick, “What Bible?”
and I said, “The Holy Bible”. I mean that’s fast stuff, you know. It’s like, it’s like rockets coming at
you from all over the place. And I don’t know if you’ve read, you’ve
probably read about new model evangelicalism. It really kind of got framed up in a brief
article in 1990, written by Robert Brow from the Queens University, Kingston, Ontario,
and he writes about the new model evangelicalism. New Model Evangelicalism prefers to picture
God as three persons held together in a relationship of love. “The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” he
writes, “made humans in their image with a view to bringing many children to glory.” So instead of being dragged trembling into
the law court before God, we are breathing in an atmosphere of family love. This is the new model evangelicalism. And the article goes on to blame Augustine
for bringing this, this courtroom motif into the Scripture. And then he blames Luther and Calvin for getting,
not moving away from the Augustinian view, but only sort of complicating things by adding
the idea that somehow in this courtroom motif, Christ can step in and offer a substitutionary
payment that could be credited to our account on the basis of faith. The article goes on to say, The New Model
Evangelicalism redefines key words, hell. New model evangelicalism says you don’t
go there because of judicial sentence. Faith, not a decision but a continual looking
that continually progressively justifies you. No different then Romanism. God as judge is replaced with God as the defender. Wrath is not angry punishment. It’s not a law court term, but it just expresses
bad consequences, and God warns because He wants you to have loving encouragement about
those bad consequences. And sin is not legal, a legal violation demanding
a just punishment, but it’s bad behavior that needs correction, and God’s purpose
is never to exclude a child from the house just to discipline them. And forgiveness is not dependent on Christ’s
sacrifice. The cross was not a judicial payment. And then the latest in evangelicalism is the
openness of God. We’ve been reading a lot about that, haven’t
we? But where do you go, this is just mind boggling
to me. These guys that write this, I don’t want
to get into this, but these guys that write this openness of God material, Sanders, Boyd,
Pinnock, they defend themselves against the charge of Socinianism by pointing out that
the classic Socinians denied the deity of Christ. And so far no modern open theist has gone
quite that far. May I make a suggestion to you? They’ve gone farther because they have denied
the deity of God. So if Christ is the incarnation of their God,
then He is not who He claimed to be. Any attack on the God of the Bible or the
Christ of the Bible is an attack on the Bible. Any attack on the truth of Scriptures is an
attack on Scripture. Well, there’s a second area. The first one was attacks from critics and
then attacks from the cultists. The Mormons, the JW’s, the Christian Science,
Theosophy, Unitarianism, you go all the way from the death cults, you know, the People’s
Temple cults of Jim Jones, the Branch Davidian cult of David Koresh, the bizarre Heaven’s
Gate cult of Marshall Applewhite, who thought they were going to be taken to heaven in the
Hale-Bopp comet. You know, their writings are filled with twisted
scripture and psuedo Christian imagery. Cults have extra revelation by some inspired
personality, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Patterson, Glover, Fry, she had a lot of husbands,
Annie Bezant, Judge Rutherford, Madame Blavatsky and on it goes. Singular authoritative interpretation by the
cult leader, they just relentlessly attack the truth of Scripture. And then I have to be really honest, thirdly
is the attacks from the Charismatics. What do you mean by that? I mean anytime you say that there is continuing
revelation, you have assaulted the Scriptures. If you haven’t read the current articles
in the latest Tabletalk, you need to read it carefully. It’s really very, very well done, very helpful. Very helpful. I’ve written a lot of things through the
years on this movement, and look I’m not saying that those people aren’t Christians. People say to me, do you think that Charismatics
will go to heaven? I say, I do, I think some of them will just
go flying on by, but I think there are many of them that are going to go there and stop
when they arrive, you know. But when you have your own private vision,
revelation, word of knowledge, word of wisdom from God, this is serious stuff. And when the Lord tells you this and the Lord
tells you that and Jesus showed you what that verse meant, when you take your own private
trip to heaven, and then you take a trip to hell, and hear voices from heaven, mystical
hyper subjectivity. I’ll tell you what, I don’t like to put
words in people’s mouths, least of all God’s. And then I’ll be honest, I tune into TBN. If Tetzel were alive today, he would be a
paragon of integrity. Some of you don’t get that, don’t worry
about it, it doesn’t matter, for those of you who did, enjoy. Fourth is the attacks from the culture. Am I doing what you wanted me to do, R.C.? Because I’ve been into this a long time. The attacks from the culture. You know, a 100 years ago the Bible was being
beset by modernism, and now it’s being beset by what? -- post modernism. Christianity and modernism were a fundamentally
antagonistic. Modernism is the world view that only science
can explain reality, and nothing supernatural is reality. Obviously, in great opposition to the supernatural
truth of Scripture. But you know what’s amazing, in the midst
of modernisms heyday, the Christian church rolled over and bought into it. It destroyed seminaries, still is, colleges,
denominations. Biblical Christianity survived the 20th century
assault of modernism. Now, it’s trying to survive the assault
of post-modernism. That’s the world view that insists there
is no such thing as universal truth. It either doesn’t exist or it can’t be
known. So you have your truth, I have my truth, and
the only thing that rules is tolerance. Tolerance matters. This is absolutely diametrically opposed to
the Bible, which is fundamentally intolerant. Yet it is has seeped into the church through
a huge tear in the fabric of the evangelical mind. Christians have become inclusive, and pragmatism
has greased the slide. Let me just give you a principle, Marvin Olasky
was hitting on this in a recent issue of World Magazine that I read. If you are going to engage an unconverted
person in a genuine presentation of gospel truth where there can be hope that in the
grace of God they can be regenerated, if you’re going to engage a person in that regard, it
is precisely at the point at which they do not believe the Bible that the engagement
has to take place. You know what he’s saying? You can’t go around the issue that offends. If you’re going to talk to a Jewish person
about the gospel and they are offended over the deity of Christ, they will be damned unless
they embrace that. If you’re going to talk to a Muslim and
they are offended about the deity of Christ or the trinity, they will never be saved until
they believe that. It is at that very point at which they must
submit. If you’re going to talk to a Roman Catholic
and sola fide or sola gratia offends them, you have to attack at that point because it
is only when they cease believing lies and believe the truth, that they can be redeemed. So what is all this waltzing around, avoiding
everything in the name of tolerance accomplishing, nothing. Nothing. People say if I can just find somebody’s
felt need, one book says, if I can find a person’s felt need, I can lead anybody to
Christ. First of all, I can’t lead anybody to Christ
on any circumstance, but apart from that, a better way to say it would be if I can find
where it is that a person will not submit to the Scripture, it’s at that point that
I must engage the battle. And then the new, one of our professors in
the Master’s Seminary gave me an article on the new hermeneutics called the Hermeneutics
of Humility. And in this post modern, tolerant environment,
the hermeneutics of humility, it’s actually, it’s actually… there are books on it. Here’s how it works, “oh, who am I to
ever suggest that my view of Scripture is the right one? I would never, I’m too humble, I would never.” Then, there’s the attack from the capricious. The capricious, people who don’t study,
you know, ignorance, lack of study, lack of hermeneutics. The worst one I hate is the Bible codes. If you’ve got any books on that, get rid
of them. Talk about putting words in God’s mouth. When Michael Drosnin wrote that Bible codes
book, so many people jumped on the band wagon. There’s been a series of books written by
the TBN people on that, and saying that, you know, the hidden message of the Bible is in
these little computer generated squares of letters with lines going all over like you
do in the airplane when your flying, you do those little puzzles. You know, that’s the real message. That’s frightening. That is frightening stuff. Because again, the end of the book of Revelation
says if you add anything to what’s written in this book, shall be added to you what? The plagues that are in here. How am I going to say this is the secret message,
the Bible is full of secret codes, and nobody could ever know them until the computers came
along? There is a certain document that I have that
I was looking over it two days ago. There is a certain document, that using codes
predicted in cryptic, acrostic codes the assassination specific day or month and the means by which
the following people were assassinated. Written long ago: Mahatma Ghandi, president
Moawad, the Lebanese who was bombed in his car, Leon Trotsky executed with an ice pick
on August 20th 1940, Martin Luther King shot with a gun, R.F. Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan,
specifically spelled out their names, I’ve seen them in that little scheme. John F. Kennedy shot in the head with a riffle
from a concealed place and all of that is in the lines. You have to jump a little and make turns,
but you can get there. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the
assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and then the last one, and there’s a whole little deal
on that, the death of Princess Diana. And where is all of that unbelievable prophesy
hidden? In Moby Dick. If you don’t think so, go to the public
domain text of Moby Dick on your computer. I think I have just one more. The attacks from carnal wisdom. The attacks from carnal wisdom. What do I mean by this? I mean, I can’t believe in creation, I can’t
believe in Genesis, it just doesn’t make sense with science. So really, science trumps God. I can’t believe in the doctrine of election. It’s not reasonable. I can’t believe in the doctrine of eternal
punishment. That’s not fair. Just keep following that, you’ll be an inclusive,
Arminian, evolutionary, universalist. And you will never come back to this conference. Enough is enough. So Luther said, “Where the battle rages,
there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battlefield besides
is mere flight and disgrace, if he flinches at that point.” Are you going to join us in the battle? That’s why you’re here, I’m sure. Father, thank you for the words of our Lord
Jesus, “Sanctify them by thy truth, thy word is truth.” We believe it, and we want to earnestly contend
for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Help us to be equipped to contend in these
wonderful days together, in our Savior’s name. Amen.
