open up with two verses, one from Psalm 11, verse three, it says, if the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? And Matthew 7, verses 24 and 25 says, therefore, whosoever hear these sayings of mine and do with them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock. and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, we rejoice today, Lord, to have your Word open before us. What an absolute privilege it is, Lord, to have the written Word of God. Lord, how critical it is and how essential it is for us to be in your Word and to ground ourselves upon that living Word of God. We pray that today's study would be helpful and beneficial to help us to understand the Christian worldview and to be able to defend it. I do ask, Lord, for grace for myself and pour it on my lips, Lord, that the words I speak would be edifying and glorifying and beneficial to the saints, Lord, and I pray that those who hear would be blessed enabled, Lord, to defend the truth of the word in a way that is pleasing to you and honoring to you. So we ask all these things, Lord, in the great name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. Today, we're going to consider the foundations of the biblical worldview. We looked last time in this series at the concept of a worldview. which we defined as a network of related presuppositions, in terms of which every aspect of man's knowledge and awareness are interpreted. A presupposition is a belief that is accepted without proof, such as the belief in the scientific method, or some intuitive sense that people have, or even like teachings of the Quran. All these other groups have their distinctive presuppositions, Even from the man digging a ditch to the philosopher in the university, everyone has their own worldview. People very rarely consider or question their own presuppositions. But as we just read, if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? Let us consider, therefore, the necessary and sufficient presuppositions of Christianity. We will do We will do this with a short historical survey of the creeds and confessions of the church. That is, to see what they make explicit and what, if anything, is presupposed. So before I embark on this, I wanna ask anyone who's listening to think about your own personal worldview, your own personal confession of faith. What would it begin with? How would it start? what would be the main and principal proposition of it? Think about that as we're going through. So we begin from the beginning, the Apostles' Creed, which doesn't have a date assigned to it, but it begins, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, and it continues, The Nicene Creed was written in 325 AD, and it confesses, it begins, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. That was 325. The Athanasian Creed, which also has no date, begins, now the Catholic faith is that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, another of the Holy Spirit. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal." Then jumping ahead quite some years, the Gallican Confession in the year 1559 was prepared by John Calvin and delivered by Theodore Beza to King Charles IX. This confession consists of 40 articles covering all aspects of the Christian religion, and article one is entitled, Of One God, and begins as follows. We believe and confess that there is but one God, who is one soul and simple essence, spiritual and eternal, invisible, immutable, infinite, incomprehensible, ineffable, omnipotent, who was all wise, all good, all just, and all merciful. One year later, the Scots Confession, which was created, written under the direction of the great reformer, John Knox, and was all written by six other men, all named John, called the Confession of the Six Johns, Seven Johns, this one has 25 chapters, and the first chapter is entitled God, like the other ones, and it begins like this. We confess and acknowledge one God alone, to whom alone we must cleave, whom alone we must serve, whom only we must worship, and whom alone we put our trust, who is eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, invisible, one in substance and yet distinct in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And then one more in this vein, we have the first London Baptist Confession of 1644. This confession consists of 53 articles, the first of which begins that God, as he is in himself, cannot be comprehended of any but himself, one dwelling in that inaccessible light that no eye can attain unto, whom never man saw nor can see, that there is but one God, one Christ, one spirit, one faith, one baptism, one rule of holiness and obedience for all saints at all times in all places to be observed. So these confessions, I think we would all say amen to them, right? agree with everything that's said there. And yet, in response to these great confessions of faith, I think it's absolutely fair for an unbeliever to ask, how do you know? And by what authority should I believe these things? So while therefore there may be a fair question whether a course in systematic theology should begin with investigations relative to the being and character of God as revealed, or with an inquiry what natural theology can teach, and then proceeding then to the doctrines of revelation, there can be no question that a confession of faith in revealed religion ought to begin with that revelation itself. This is the plan adopted by other confessions. They begin with the chapter on the Holy Scriptures, That was a quote from a man named Hetherington, who wrote the history of the Westminster Assembly. So the second foundation that is offered in the confessions is this, beginning with the second Helvetic, Helvetic means Swiss, confession, which was written by Bullinger following the death of Zwingli. This one contains 30 chapters, the first of which is called, Of the Holy Scripture Being the True Word of God, And it says, we believe and confess the canonical scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles of both testaments to be the true word of God and to have sufficient authority of themselves, not of men. For God himself spoke to the fathers, prophets, apostles, and still speaks to us through the holy scriptures. That's a different sort of beginning, don't you think? And then in 1615, the Irish articles of religion which were written by and influenced by the great Irish reformer, James Usher, whom you may know from the Usher chronology. These consist of 19 articles and begin with the first article of the Holy Scripture and the three creeds. The ground of our religion and the rule of faith and all saving truth is the word of God contained in the Holy Scripture. And by the name of Holy Scripture, we understand all the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, namely, and then they list out the 66 canonical books. And then finally, the next two examples I'll take together, because the language is identical, the Westminster Confession of 1646, and the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689, both begin with the words, The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience. And although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God as to leave men inexcusable, yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation? So the Westminster and the Second London Baptist Confessions, which are very, very good expressions of the reformed Christian worldview, they lay down the principle of the written divine revelation at the very outset as the foundation of the Christian worldview. This is a very different starting point than the earlier creeds and confessions, which began with the declaration of the existence and nature of God. In response to the question, how do you know about this God? Theologians and apologists must point to the Bible as the only sufficient, certain and infallible source of knowledge. So at this point, I wanna just like go back to what I said in the beginning, how many people in their own personal confession of faith that they thought in their own mind said, the scripture is the starting point. How many people said, yeah, I think God, is a starting point. But the unbeliever then will again press the question, like, how do you know that the Bible is the word of God? And they'll question the reformed Christian about his first principle. We're regularly confronted with such objections when sharing the gospel. Many people will say, oh, the scriptures are corrupted, or they're not true, or this and that, and many other things. And yet many people also have some regard and respect for the Bible, and yet don't necessarily consider it to be the Word of God. So there is not only a great deal of ignorance about the Bible, but also a great deal of ignorance about what the Bible says about itself. And I think that's our important starting point. This study is on the Christian worldview, and this foundational question that I posed in the beginning is, what is our worldview? What is the first principle of our worldview? Do we just begin with God and say, we know that God exists and that God is triune, and this and that? And then when someone says, how do you know? Then we'll say, well, the scriptures are the only place that I found that knowledge out. I can't discover from looking at the planets and the stars, and the world and the trees and the bees, we can't discover that God is triune and gracious and holy and righteous and all the things we can only discover in the scriptures. So here's our foundation, a proper statement of the principle foundation of the reformed Christian worldview is what we need at this point. And for that, I'm going to refer to a later statement, which was his Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which was produced in 1978 as the first systematically comprehensive, broadly based, scholarly creed-like statement on the inspiration and authority of scripture in the history of the church. So what do we, how do we say this, and what do we say about our first principle? Article one says, that the normative, that is the authority by which we know we are commanded to do things, the normative authority of Holy Scripture is the authority of God himself and is attested by Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Church. We deny the legitimacy of separating the authority of Christ from the authority of Scripture or of opposing the one to the other. We affirm that scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, and deceit. And we affirm that scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that far from misleading, it is true and reliable in every single matter that it addresses. And we affirm that inspiration was the work in which God, by his spirit, through human writers gave us his word. The origin of scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. And we affirm that scripture, strictly speaking, I'm sorry, we affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of scripture, that is, the original document, the original manuscripts that were written by the hand of the apostles, the autographs, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. So this is our foundation, the inerrancy of scripture. And it's absolutely critical, and I wanna just bring out a couple points about this, just to highlight some of the critical aspects of inerrancy. because there's more to it than meets the eye. So first of all, inspiration is that extraordinary supernatural influence exerted by the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit on the writers of our sacred books by which their words were rendered also the words of God and therefore perfectly infallible. In this definition, it is to be noted first that this influence is a supernatural one, something different from the inspiration of the poet or a man of genius. Luke's accuracy is not left by with only like the safeguards which a diligent and accurate historian would have, but rather it was an extraordinary influence, something different from the ordinary action of the spirit in conversion and sanctifying of believers. And Paul had some more prevalent safeguard against false teaching than Luther, or even the saintly Rutherford. And that such an influence as makes the words written under its guidance the very words of God, by which is meant to be affirmed an absolute infallibility, admitting no degrees whatsoever, extending to the very word, or as Christ said, to the jot and tittle smallest mark of a letter. Absolutely perfect in every way. The scriptures were written by men, obviously. Everything except for the Ten Commandments, which was written by the finger of God, was written by men. And every word indicted under the influence of inspiration was at one and the same time, think about this, consciously self-chosen word of the writer and the consciously self-chosen word of God. And so once you've grasped this idea and how impossible it is to separate in any measure, the divine and the human, it's all human, every word and all define every single word. The human characteristics are to be noted and exhibited the divine and the divine perfection and the inerrancy and infallibility, no less. That, believe it or not, is a long quote from B.B. Warfield. I think it's a valuable insight to note that the Word of God is fully divine and fully human. What does that remind us of, right? Christ, fully God and fully man, and His Word is also fully divine and fully human. The humanity of the Word is necessarily sanctified and set apart from all error. But the Word of God is first divine and then human, such that the will of the human author is said to concur with the perfect will of the divine author, the Holy Spirit. So now this view of inerrancy involves a view of the human will, which is utterly subordinate to God's will. And this, therefore, this idea of inerrancy is really, if you think about it, only consistent with Reformed theology, Because only in Reformed theology do you have this concept of the sovereignty of God and His absolute control over every single thing which takes place, including the actions of men. Think about the Arminian who believes in the free will of men. It has to be somewhat inconsistent to believe in the inerrancy of Scripture because God's will can't control. They believe that God's will can't control human will. And so therefore, they have no good reason to believe in inerrancy. But Reformed Christians, we have every reason because we believe in the sovereignty of God. He works all things, every single thing in detail, absolute perfect detail, according to the counsel of his own will. So this view of inerrancy as a presupposition is really only consistent with Reformed theology. So it's our presupposition. So only really, truly Reformed theology can say that scripture speaks with the authority of God. And that if you say that there could be some errors in there, then you say, well, that absolutely demolishes the authority of scripture and God. God couldn't preserve his word. He couldn't make it to be exactly what he wanted. But Reformed theology says this is the inerrant word of God. And scripture presupposes the triune God of scripture who has created all things and upholds all things by the word of his power and created man in his own image. Among the persons of the Trinity, in the eternal generation of the son, there was a communication of the divine essence. And in virtue of this communication, the son also has life in himself, as Christ said, for as the father has life in himself, even so gave he to the son also to have life in himself. For God giveth not the spirit by measure to him. This is the first communication. And the father also speaks to the son. The idea of this is that God is a God of communication. He's not a God of silence. The Father speaks to the Son, and we have signposts of their communication in Scripture. For example, in Psalm 2.7, it says, The Lord has said unto me, Thou art my Son. This day have I begotten thee. And in Hebrews 1, it says, And unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. This is the father speaking to the son. And in Psalm 110, it says, and the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool. Scripture reveals that God is triune and that God spoke in order to create. Scripture says, and God said, let there be light. And there was light. This God communicates among the divine person when he created man, he said, let us make man in our image. And scripture reveals that God communicated to Adam and Eve in the garden and gave them specific instructions and a commandment, a supernatural commandment not to eat of a specific tree. And now because of the fall, there is the absolute need of a divine revelation for salvation. There's no hint of grace in the fallen nature around us, right? We see nature red in tooth and claw. We don't see grace. We see savagery and brutality. That's what we see. But the same God who is absolutely sovereign over the affairs of men, who's able to produce an inerrant scripture through the works of men, has also preserved that same word throughout the course of history. For example, in Psalm 12, verses six and seven, it says, the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from this generation forever. So it can be seen, I think, that the presupposition of an inerrant scripture presupposes obviously the triune God who created and upholds all things, and so extends to the preservation of the written revelation through the generations. So this whole, this idea of the inerrancy of scripture, when you unpack it, there's a lot more there than meets the eye at first. It's not just saying barely, the scriptures are without error. But for that to be, we have to have a sovereign God who can work through the will of men to produce exactly correct word. And from that, we can also, therefore, deduce that God will preserve the word if it's absolutely so essential that his word is produced and inerrant, then it would be foolish for God to let it then disappear from the face of the earth. So we know, based on everything of the Christian worldview, that we have to expect that this word is preserved. It's inerrant and preserved. So here's our dilemma. So in fact, it appears that the argument for the scripture as the infallible revelation of God is, to all intents and purposes anyway, the same as the argument for the existence of God. Protestants are required by the most basic principle of their system to vindicate the existence of no other God than the one who has spoken in scripture. But this God cannot be proved to exist by any other method than the indirect one of presupposition. No proof for this God and for the truth of his revelation in scripture can be offered by an appeal to anything in human experience that has not itself already received its light from the God whose existence and whose revelation is supposed to prove. You can't prove God without already presupposing God because everything that you would prove already has God's stamp on it. And the scriptures are self-attesting, meaning they attest to themselves as God is self-attesting. Scripture attests to God and God attests to scripture. And a demonstration of the Bible's authority therefore requires an examination of what the Bible says about itself. That's a key point. If the Bible made no such claim about itself, it would be pointless for us to claim it on its behalf. So then how should we demonstrate the inspiration, the inerrancy, and the infallibility of the scriptures? It's hard to prove inerrancy in something because you're trying to prove a negative, like proving that there is no such thing means you need to examine every single possible verse compared with every other verse and show that there's no contradiction. That's impossible. But what's our argument then? It has to be presuppositional. So the way that I think we need to approach this is, well, presuppositionally, obviously, and through Christ. Because Christ is the eternally begotten Son of God, taking a human nature to himself, to be the incarnate God-man, the Word of God, is the primary subject of all scripture. And we can begin in the beginning of Genesis 3.15 and go all the way to the end. When we're in the Old Testament, we see the scriptures are pointing forward to Christ. In Genesis 3.15, we have the Proto-Evangelium, the first mention of the gospel, which says, I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. That's talking about Christ and his incarnation at the very beginning. And the scriptures continue on this way, pointing to Christ in many, many ways. In Isaiah 7.14, it talks about the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. And in Galatians, we read, when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a woman, made under the law to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And it goes on, there's so much that the scriptures are overwhelmingly just packed full of this. In Luke 24, 27, it says, in beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he, that is Christ, expound unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. And Paul wrote, and without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness. God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto Gentiles, and believed on in the world, and received up into glory. First Timothy 3.16. And finally, in Hebrews 1, verses 1 and 2, it says, God, who at sundry times and in diverse manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, he did speak hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. This is Christ, he's the subject of all of scripture. The Old Testament looks forward to him, and the New Testament looks back to him. Second, what does Christ teach about the Scriptures, and how does he deal with the Scriptures? And I think if we look through the Gospels, there's so much information. Christ treats the Scriptures as absolute, inerrant, and authoritative Word of God. and which is even more amazing because him being God in the flesh could have just said, I tell you this, I tell you that, I'm God, but he constantly, constantly referred to the scriptures. In Matthew 5, 18, he said, for verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. In Matthew 24, 35, he said, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. John 17, 17, he said, sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. And in John 19, 28, it says, after this, Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. And skipping around a bit in John 10, 35, he said, if he called them gods unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken. Then in Matthew 26, Jesus said, thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my father and he shall presently give me more than 12 legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled? that thus it must be. And finally in Luke 24, it says, Jesus said that he said unto them, these are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the Psalms concerning me. So this is the teaching of Christ. This is just a kind of a tip of the iceberg of Christ's teaching about the scriptures in the New Testament. Every question that came up, he resolved with the scriptures. When Satan confronted him, he answered him with the scriptures. When the Pharisees and the Sadducees confronted him, he answered them with the scriptures. So Christ's view of the scriptures is very high, and he treats them as absolutely authoritative and inerrant. And the scriptures testify of him. And so this is our answer when someone says, I don't believe the Bible. Well, Christ is God, and he believes the Bible, right? What can you say? Who knows better, you or Christ? He's God. Louis Gauss wrote in his really tremendous work called Theopneustia. Theopneustia is the Greek word that means God breathed. That's the name of his book. He says, we do not hesitate to say that when we hear the son of God quoting the scriptures, the question of their Theopneustia, their being God breathed is in our judgment settled. We want no further evidence. Sorry, I had to shut the door. He said, we want no further evidence. All the declarations of the Bible unquestionably are divine, but this example of the savior of the world at once tells us all. This proof does not require either long or learned researches. The hand of a child can grasp it as powerfully as that of a theologian. And that's the beauty of presuppositional apologetics. You don't need to be a philosopher or a theologian to use these methods because they're the simple and humble approaches that Christ used. The scriptures, we don't question them. We dare not. So the Old Testament, And also, this is really just the tip of the iceberg, because scripture itself, even beyond what Christ said about it, treats itself as divine. The Old Testament prophets claim to speak God's words. King David said, the spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue. Second Samuel 23.2. The phrase, thus saith the Lord, occurs over 400 times in scripture. The phrase, the word of the Lord came unto, blank, fill in a name, 150 times. And the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 2 Timothy 3.16. In this verse, Paul coins a new word, theopneustos, and he wrote that all scripture is theopneustos. Our version, King James Version, translated as all scripture is given by inspiration of God. But this doesn't really capture the strength of Paul's expression. The word is literally theos, pneustos. Theos is God, pneustos is breathe. That is, all scripture is God-breathed, which presupposes the work of the Holy Spirit operating in and through the consciousnesses of men. As Peter said, for the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Miguel. Hola. Hola. Sorry guys, we're having a shuffle here. See you, Greg. Don't go up, we're not supposed to use that door. Okay, sorry. So we come to this point, our presupposition of the inerrancy of scripture, and yet we come to people who don't believe it one bit. We even come to people in church who don't believe, many in the church don't believe that the scriptures are inerrant. But the confession says this, we may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church of God to an high and reverent esteem of the holy scriptures, and the heavenliness of the matter the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, and the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, and the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies and entire perfections thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God. notwithstanding our full persuasion and insurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts." What the confession is saying is that we have proof, we have so much evidence basically that the Word is the Word of God, And yet the proof of it, our full persuasion and assurance, is not by those things, but by the inward work of the Holy Spirit. So that's our situation that we are in. We have an inerrant word, which we are so privileged to have, and yet we don't, have the ability to prove to someone that it's the inerrant word of God, or even to prove that it is the word of God. And yet we have more than enough to silence those who object to it, and if not to convince them or persuade them of the truth, at least to get them to stop talking, to stop making their objection, because they won't be able to do it in the face of this information that we have. So what I want to do with the rest of our time, which is about 15 minutes, is to go through the answers to some specific objections that we do get from Muslims and all people out on the streets that we meet. So the Muslims will say their objection is the text of the New Testament has been corrupted. So I have four specific objections. The first one is that the text of the New Testament has been corrupted. To answer this, we need to understand a bit about how the New Testament has come down to us. Because our position, our starting point, is that the autographs, that is, the manuscripts that were originally written, are inerrant. However, we don't possess any of the autographs. What we do possess is a huge number of manuscripts, which are copies of those originals. Today, in Greek manuscripts, we have more than 5,600 handwritten New Testament manuscripts. Many of these are just fragments, of course, and especially the older ones, but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is almost 400 pages long. And altogether, there are more than two million pages of text, leaving hundreds of witnesses for every book of the New Testament. And it's not just the Greek manuscripts that we have. We also have, beginning in the second century, that the New Testament was translated into a variety of languages. Latin and Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, many, many languages. And there are about 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament. And there are between five and 10,000 of other languages as well. Altogether, roughly we have about 20,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament in other languages besides Greek. And then even if none of these documents existed, we would still not be left without a witness because collectively, we have the church fathers who wrote homilies and sermons and commentaries on the New Testament. So to date, we have about one million quotations in the New Testament from the church fathers. And if all the other sources for our knowledge of the New Testament were destroyed, we could reconstruct the New Testament just based on the quotations in the church fathers. So there are obviously, with so many different manuscripts, a lot of variations. And if you were to take and put all the variations for any specific passage, lay them side by side, you would see that most, in fact, the great majority of the variations are very, very simple errors, like a swapping of two letters or missing a word or something like that. It's a very, very simple thing, which are obviously not corruptions, but just a simple copyist oversight. Because if you try to copy a document, you'll see it's not that easy to your mind can skip a, your eyes can skip a word easily enough. And so these things are bound to happen. But the beauty of our argument is that first of all, we presuppose the sovereignty of God because we, we have an inerrant scripture in the autographs. That's our presupposition. And that God who was able to do that is absolutely able and guaranteed to preserve his word. And what we have in our, Possession is such a vast quantity of manuscripts that the originals are almost 99.9% reconstructible just based on them. John Owen said that the scriptures of the New Testament have come down to us in such a way that there is no possibility of corruption because of the great cloud of witnesses. John Owen said, he says, let me say, without offense, that this imagination asserted on deliberation, that is, that the New Testament has been corrupted, seems to me to border on atheism. Surely the promise of God for the preservation of his word, with his love and care of his church, of those whose faith and obedience are, the word is the only rule, requires better thoughts from us. So that's the answer to the New Testament is corrupted. No, it's not corrupted. It's impossible for the New Testament to be corrupted because it's such an enormous quantity of witnesses that they're impossible. What God has done is astonishing the way he preserved that word. Second objection, the text of the Old Testament has been corrupted. The textual background of the Old Testament is quite different from that of the New Testament The Masoretic text, what we call, the text that the R script, the King James is based on, the Masoretic text was compiled by the Masoretes, obviously, whatever that's worth. It's pretty relatively recent, actually, like from around 1000 AD. And this is the authoritative basis of the translation of the Old Testament into English and other languages. but given that the Old Testament canon was closed with the writing of Malachi, probably around 400 BC, and that most of the Old Testament, I mean, obviously all of the Old Testament was written before that, and some of it was written very ancient, like if you look at 1 Chronicles 4.22, it says that the records of these names that he was talking about were ancient, so that the compiler of Chronicles had ancient records that he was working off of, And so there's, I mean, there's roughly 2,000 years, I think, between, I'm sorry, 3,000 years between the time of David or Moses, between the time of Moses and the time when the Masoretic text from 2,000 BC to 1,000 AD, that's 3,000 years. So there's good question, like is the text, is it still correct after all that time? But what we have here is a different situation than with the New Testament, Because the Jewish scribes were absolutely fanatical in their devotion to copying the Word of God. They had a whole list of procedures that they had to follow. Every single word, every single letter, word, and paragraph had to be counted. And the document became invalid even if two letters touched each other. Every, they counted the, each line had a numeric value. They would add up the number value of each letter in Hebrew and sum it up. We do this today with documents called a checksum. And that way you're guaranteed if you add it and you get a different number than the original, that means you messed up somewhere. And so they would throw the document away and start over again. So here's our argument. In 1946, a shepherd boy discovered some scrolls inside a cave west of the Dead Sea. These manuscripts dated from between 300 BC and 100 AD. And over the next decade, more and more scrolls were found in caves, and the discovery became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every single book in the Old Testament was represented in this discovery except Esther. And numerous copies of each book were discovered, For example, there were 25 copies of Deuteronomy. And the most amazing thing is that the text that they discovered there were identical in almost every way with the text that they were working with for the Masoretic text. Just for one example, there was a tiny little scroll that was found. It was impossible even to unroll it because the paper had become so, so fragile or so aged, but what they managed to do, like what you do if you go to the doctor, you get a CT scan. They did a CT scan on this paper and they were able to determine the text and they showed that it was 100%, it was 100% identical to the version of the book of Leviticus. that we have in use today. One of the men, Emanuel Tov, who was a Hebrew scholar working, I said, this is quite amazing for us. He said, in 2000 years, the text has not changed. So again, here we insist on the sovereignty and the providential preservation of the Holy Scriptures. The same God who sovereignly breathed out his word through his prophets. will absolutely providentially preserve his word throughout all generations. And I have one more common objection that we hear. I'm sure everyone has heard this at one point or another in their life. Someone will tell you that the Bible is full of contradictions, right? I've heard it many times. I asked my mom what she would say if someone told her that the Bible was full of contradictions and she told me that she would say, that they obviously had not read the Bible, which I thought is a pretty good answer actually. So when someone tells you that the Bible is full of contradictions, we have to understand that this assertion directly contradicts the presupposition of the inerrancy of scripture. The stakes are very high because even a single actual contradiction would be sufficient to disprove inerrancy. But amazingly, in spite of being written over 2,000 years by about 35 different authors who didn't know each other and who didn't even know that they were writing on the same theme as others, possibly, and may not have even completely understood the things that they were writing, as Daniel said, nevertheless, there's absolutely no contradiction has ever been demonstrated or shown in the scripture. Now, To be clear, that doesn't mean that there aren't unresolved difficulties in the scriptures, because there are plenty. And there's things in the scriptures that are difficult to answer, no doubt about it. But there are no contradictions, because in each case, there is a potential solution, one or more potential solutions, which we may not be able to figure out which is which, which is correct, But as long as there's a potential, then there's no necessary contradiction there. And second, Gowson, the man who wrote the book Theopneustia, Gowson wrote, the objections when looked into are changed into subjects of admiration for in compelling us by a more attentive examination to lay bare the gems of Holy Scripture, their luster, has lit up new splendors, which have led us to fresh discoveries of more brilliant reflections of its divinity." And that's what's been my experience, and I'm sure many people as well. Someone will come to you and say, oh, I found a contradiction. And you look into it, and what do you discover? But something amazing, that the scriptures open up to you in a way that you hadn't known before. And there's not only no contradiction, but some glorious truth is actually lurking there. The quote of Gowson brings this to light, the marvel of biblical inerrancy. Just as our two eyes provide with slightly different information, which our brains are able to coalesce into a single vision with depth perception, so too do the multiple accounts in scripture of the same events provide depth for us. When we are given, as we are, For independent eyewitness accounts of the resurrection in the gospel accounts, the accounts each contain information not found in the others. For instance, comparing Mark 16.1 with Matthew 28.1, we note that both include Mary Magdalene and another Mary, but only Mark includes Salome. But does that mean that Matthew is Not telling the truth when he said that Mary Magdalene and another Mary went? No, he's not telling an untruth. He's just not, he didn't tell everything, but that doesn't make what he said untrue at all. And that most of the contradictions that you will come across are pretty simple like that. Like, oh, that's not hard to answer. So we also have to freely admit that as Peter wrote of Paul's writings that are in them are some things hard to be understood, which say that are unlearned and unstable rest, as they do also the other scriptures unto their own destruction. We know that this is the case. There's some things in scripture which are hard to understand. And unfortunately, the unstable, do they twist those things and they eat to their own destruction and also attempting to destroy others, like to destroy the faith of those who trust in the word of God. And they say, oh, I found the contradiction. And if someone were to believe them and say, yeah, wow, yeah, that undermines their faith. But we begin, we begin the Christian worldview with the inerrancy of the scriptures. And that's our faith commitment absolutely necessary one which is defensible absolutely because without the scriptures no one can say that anything true or false that they can just make up things out of their own minds or out of some other non authoritative source but the scriptures are authoritative because God is authoritative so our approach to dealing with these there's so many I just got a book yesterday that says 100 clear and obvious contradictions in the Bible, and I started going through them, and they're fun, actually. They're like little puzzles to go through. But I start, I'm fully persuaded in my mind that there is no contradiction in the scriptures. And so when I come to these, some supposed contradiction, I have, it's fun because you know that there's gonna be an answer. You know it's gonna be interesting because God's word is so rich and so deep. And when we think we found something, it seems like a problem or a difficulty to us, rejoice. Take a look and dig into it because you're gonna find a blessing there. As Galson wrote, the light of the scripture will light up new splendors for us. And so as Jesus said to the Sadducees, most people who come would say that they found a contradiction. It says, do you not therefore err because you know not the scriptures and neither the power of God. And that should be our answer as well because God's power is great and his control over the written word is perfect and he is a God of truth. There can be no errors in scripture. And so this is our starting point. Someone wants to, if you're standing and holding a sword in your hand and someone wants to attack your sword, You're not going to throw the sword down, right? They want to knock it. That's what they want. They want to knock it out of your hand, but wield that sword is the word of God. And even if they don't believe it, it doesn't mean it's not powerful. It is still in spite of their unbelief. It's still the word of God. So that's our presupposition. That's our starting point of the Christian worldview. And, and this is our, uh, This is a study for today about the Christian worldview, how we start, how we base our apologetic and how we proceed, how we even defend the scriptures presuppositionally. So, amen. That's the end of the study. If anyone has any questions or comments, please feel free. Anybody? Hey, Jim. Hey. It's Mark. I was just thinking about when you're evangelizing and people attack the Bible. I like your last point you made there. Most of the time, you could just use the Bible anyways. it's still gonna have an effect on them. Isn't that really the whole idea behind presuppositionalism, is that we're presupposing the Bible to be true, and therefore we use it as if it is because it is. Yes. Yeah, the Word of God is powerful whether someone believes it, whether they say they believe it or not. It doesn't change anything. Their unbelief doesn't negate the power of God, right? Right? Yeah, I was thinking too about the. The only argument I ever used on the street, which I think it's very helpful is the one you mentioned about when they say the Bible is corrupted. That. The. Can you still hear me? Yes. OK, I went into a tunnel actually the. If it was corrupted, then at some point it was not corrupted. That's what I argue with the Muslims. I say, well, if you're saying the Bible's been corrupted, then are you saying that at a certain point it was not corrupted? And I make them answer that. Because once they say, well, at a certain point it wasn't corrupted, then the Bible claims to preserve itself, so therefore it can't be corrupted if ever at a point it wasn't corrupted, because it claims. to be self-preserving. Nice, that's good. I like that. Yeah. In Van Til's book, he talks about... Sorry, I think I lost you. Are you still there? Can you hear me? Yeah, you're fading out a little bit. Go ahead, I can hear you. Okay. Van Til, in his book, he says, talking about defending the faith. He says, like, some people find the idea of defending the faith to be sort of offensive. Like, why should I defend the faith? Like, there's a tiger in the cage. Why not just let the tiger out to defend himself? There's a lot of truth to that, right? Like, I mean, God doesn't need me to defend him. He's God, right? And the scriptures don't need me to defend him. But we have a purpose, like we're trying to persuade men. And so just to say, like, you know, too bad for you, right? You don't believe the Bible, but it's too bad, right? It is God's word anyway. That's not a helpful approach. We need to try to find a way to answer their objection in a way that doesn't deny our theology and yet gives them something to hang on to or something that they may be affected by, if that makes sense. Or even sometimes the Catholics will argue that the, you'll only get this usually when you're talking to one of their false priests or somebody that is really entrenched in it, where they'll say that, um, they, um, the church has more authority than the scripture. And I found when they argue that the best thing to do with it is not even to address it, just use the scripture. Yeah. Yeah, because church tradition, Roman Catholic tradition... I'm sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I was going to say Roman Catholic tradition is a non-entity, right? Like, where is it? What is it? Who has it? There is none. It's just... It's an idea without any reality. Anyway, yeah, I agree. Just use the scriptures. Anything else? I would say, sorry, most people that we see in the street, I mean, I would say mostly depends upon what place you're going to. In my little experience, most people would not even object to the authority of the structure. Very rarely you'll see someone who want to argue about the, from their point of view, the errors in scripture, but most of them would really listen to what scripture has to say, especially in the places that we normally go to, to share the gospel. Yeah, no, I agree. I was trying to make the point at one place that most people do have a a regard for the Bible, they have some respect for it, but they don't consider it to be inerrant. And even like many pastors, like they have a reverence for the scriptures to some extent, but they don't consider it inerrant. They say, well, yeah, there's some small errors here and there, little things that don't really matter. But that gives up the whole game. As soon as you say that the scriptures has errors in it, then it loses its authority. Because how do you know who's then gonna tell which is true in the Bible and which is error? Me, you, someone, anyone? So that's where people, they think, yeah, I do have some respect for the Bible. And we use that, right? We use that to leverage it. But for us anyway, we have to have a higher view of scripture, the highest possible view. But you're right, most people don't object to it. Yeah, even if in their mind they have some kind of argument against the inerrancy of scripture, when they hear the scripture, the scripture is powerful. It is able to discern their thoughts and mind. And they will, I don't know if this is willingly or unwillingly, but they understand the authority of the scripture and they agree to what the scripture says. Not Muslims, right? Yeah. The people of other books, like the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses, they have to be dealt with in a different way. And they will definitely attack the scriptures, right? Yes, they do. The Mormons definitely do. They can't say that the Bible is sufficient because they need their other book as well. So it's fun. It's good to go out and to hear these objections and then go back to your house and think about how to answer them, because that's how a lot of growth takes place that way. And you make a lot of discoveries when you deal with people and try to answer their objections. Jim? Yes, sir. You know, when I was in Bible college, I asked one of my teachers, how does he interpret Acts 2.38? And he said that at certain points in the Bible, the writers are only recording what was said, but what was being said doesn't mean what was being said was necessarily true. How would you answer that? What was that, 38? Acts 2.38, where, you know, repent and be baptized for the mission of your sins. Acts 2.38. I mean, there's some sentences recorded in Scripture that are not true, like Job's friends. God told Job that what his friends said about him wasn't correct, right? So even though it's recorded in Scripture, it's not presented to us as God's truth, but presented to us as errors that other men said about God and are corrected in Scripture. So there's other cases like that, but that's a pretty easy one to understand. Right? But that would only be valid in a place in Scripture where it's stated that way. So God corrected them. And so it's obvious that that was the situation. But in Scripture where it's not, I would think where it's not specifically stated that way, that we would have to believe that it's true. Like Acts 2.38 is true. Right? Definitely. No question. Yeah, Scripture interprets Scripture, right? If something in the Bible says that something else in the Bible is not spoken correctly, then Scripture interprets Scripture, and that's it. But here, there's nothing that says that's not Acts 2.38. Goodness, how could that be not true? Right, right. There's no way Peter was mistaken when he was preaching it, and there's no way that Luke was mistaken when he recorded it. Impossible for it to be mistaken, because it's God's Word. The beauty of it I love it. Great. Anything else? Close? Should I close? Anybody else have any questions or comments or objections? Hey, President Jim, I have a question for you. Do you believe that somebody that's born again and they know they came in by calling an election, will come to these doctrines and stick with them. I do think so. I do think so because the more you think about it, the more you, how can you say that you have a Bible with errors in it and put some trust in it? That makes no sense. All these things go together, like the Christian worldview is a unified whole and all the things that go together with it include like the inerrancy of scripture, the sovereignty of God, and all these things. And I'm fairly confident that a born again person will arrive at them eventually, maybe not right away, but I wouldn't deny them along the way either, but may have questions for sure. How's that sound, good? Anything else? Okay, I guess not. I'll pray. Oh, Heavenly Father, you are a holy God and righteous. and so kind and so good, you've given us your word. Lord, how can we ever thank you enough for granting us the knowledge of you in your scriptures? Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for preserving it through the centuries down to us that we could even possess a copy of the word of God. What a privilege it is to have the very words of God. Help us to understand, help us to treasure it as a great mighty work of God and give us that desire to be in it, Lord, to give us a hunger for it, transform us, Lord, please, by the renewing of our minds as we read your scriptures and seek to go and reach the lost, Lord, give us grace, give us mercy, help us in our time of need, because you are a great and awesome God and worthy of all of our praise. We do thank you and praise you today in Christ's precious name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Have a good day. All right. Thanks everyone. Have a blessed day. All right. God bless you. Thank you.