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Let me start with the
objectives of what we’re trying to do.
It’s my prayer that this course will strengthen you spiritually,
that’s the whole point. We’re going to deal with some things you may think
are a little far out. Some of you
may think why do we cover pieces of geology, astronomy, history,
archeology, why are we doing all that?
The answer is quite simple: it’s because that’s the way God created
the universe, and those things deal with aspects of His universe. The problem we have as Christians is that
we read our Bibles and then we go off and live in the world as God created
it, and sometimes the two don’t go together too well. In other words, we tend to
compartmentalize, we tend to think of the Bible as just truth for our
religious life and that the Bible really doesn’t have much to contribute in
other areas. I hope that we’ll
undermine that thought, if you have it, before too many weeks go by. The
Bible is God’s Word, and as the Word of the living God, He doesn’t give us
textbooks on these areas, He’s relegated man to learn those things. However, when He has revealed His Word
and where it touches on these areas, it’s true, because God is a God of
truth.
The Bible has a lot to
say and in our own generation we have several problems, one of which is
that we tend to think of God as being too small. We tend to think small; our whole culture
teaches us that God is sort of a nice topic if it’s a non-threatening
environment, but otherwise let’s keep God kind of in the background of
things. What that habit does is to start to shape you intellectually; it
starts to create habits of thinking, so now God becomes unrelated to many,
many different areas of your life, and that way God becomes quite small in
your view.
Another objective of the
course is that I am trying to say that Jesus Christ is Lord over all,
including the intellect. A lot of
Christians give lip service to the idea that Jesus is Lord, then they go
about intellectually, particularly in their own area of specialization, as
though it didn’t matter, that He has nothing to say in this area. So we
don’t pay any attention to that, and our thoughts, the content, the way we
look at life and the conclusions we come to mirror the unbelieving
world. Now we have a problem—does
this mean that the revelation that God has given in Scripture is utterly
irrelevant to these areas, does it make a difference? I’m here to say it does make a difference. That’s why we’ve designed the course
the way we have.
Features of this course
to try to attain this goal: there
are three basic parts and you’ll see these interwoven. I’ve woven together three perspectives in
this particular approach to Scripture.
One is because that in the last 150 years the attacks on the
Scripture have largely come in the form of denying that the Scriptural
events actually took place as recorded.
In other words, creation is a nice, sweet little story; it tells us
great things to tell little kids.
Or, stories in the Old Testament were made up centuries later by
people who wanted to create a new interpretation of history, etc. So there’s been a downgrading of the
validity of the events of Scripture.
Therefore, we’re going to teach against that. We are going to emphasize the historicity
of the events of Scripture. We’re
going to concentrate as we go through key event to key event to key
event. That’s why this course is not
a substitute for regular Bible study. We go to a little different
perspective than your regular Bible study. Here we go from the event of
creation to the event of the fall, to the event of the flood of Noah, to
the event of the Noahic covenant and what that has to do with the origin of
what we now call civilization. Those
are four key events, and we will start by concentrating on creation. We’re
going to emphasize the historically valid events which Scripture claims
occurred.
The second feature is
that when God speaks and acts in history He reveals things about
Himself. We call that doctrine,
truth about God, things that He has revealed to us. But we often learn this as though the
pieces of truth are like marbles, they’re just rolling around. We don’t see that they are a web work,
that they are interconnected, that they are not just loose marbles. The Bible has a systematic approach. If you start altering a truth over here,
you’re going to quickly find you’ve messed up over there, and there, and
there, etc. You can’t manhandle one
area of Scripture and not have rather serious implications all across the
board.
So the second emphasis
we want to put on the course is that ALL Scriptural truth is
interrelated. What does that tell us
about God? It tells us that He’s
infinitely profound. God is a very
highly rational God and when He speaks His mind He speaks very
coherently. What He told Isaiah in
the sixth and seventh centuries, in that period of the prophets, He had on
His mind when He spoke to Abraham.
And what His thoughts were to the prophets are the same and
interrelated thoughts that He had to Abraham. It’s all part of a grand scheme, all the
way to the future when Jesus Christ returns to the planet and we have this
climax of history that the Bible says we are heading towards. At that point we’re going to see that a
lot of those little features, those “marbles,” those disconnected pieces of
truth, that they are all connected to what’s yet to take place. So there’s
an inner coherence of Scripture, and besides the validity of the historic
event it’s the coherence of Scripture that gives us the assurance of faith. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the
Word of God, and this is a tool to help you strengthen your faith.
Finally, the apologetic
strategy: we’re going to teach the
Bible against its opposite. The
Bible was not given into a vacuum; the Bible was given into a world hostile
to it. All men are sinners and fall
short of the glory of God. It is to
us as sinners that God speaks. That means He’s speaking to a potentially
hostile group. Frankly, He’s
speaking to a group of very messed up people. The Bible always has to be seen against
its environment. Years ago there was a famous professor at Harvard, G.
Ernest Wright, who was one of the founders that did a lot of work in the
United States on Old Testament archeology, and he wrote a book called The Old Testament Against Its Environment. When we look at Genesis 1 we’re going to
also look at a pagan text, written by pagans, in the same time in which
Genesis was written. And we’re going
to say okay, here’s the Word of God, here’s the pagan text, they were both
written at approximately the same time in history, let’s sit down and
compare.
Let’s not buy the idea
that “the Bible is just an ancient book and it was written by these old
people years ago that didn’t really have it together,” etc. We will look at actual texts from the period
to see what people contemporary to the time the Bible was written were
thinking. When you start to see the
difference between what was written in Scripture and what was thought about
in the centuries in which Scripture was written you see there’s a tremendous
difference. That difference is the difference of the Holy Spirit working in
history. When a scientist does an
experiment he likes to have a control, when you’re testing medicine you
have a control group, and then you administer the medicine to another group
and check the differences. We have a
control. We have the ancient texts. That’s the control in the sense that
that is what people would have thought about had God not interfered in
their thinking. The Scripture is
what man thinks about when God interferes.
By measuring and contrasting the Scripture with its environment, we
have a grand experiment that validates and shows the effect of the Holy
Spirit on our intellect and in our hearts.
We’re going to look at three things: the Bible as
historic events, the Bible as truth interrelated, and apologetic strategy.
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