is called presuppositionalism, which means I start with the confidence that the Word of God is true. I don't make a cumulative case to get to the Word of God. I just start with, this is my authority. I'm putting it on the table for you. I presuppose the inerrant Word of God before we're even gonna get started, to which the objection comes back, well, that's a circular argument. You can't do that. The Word of God is the Word of God because the Word of God says it's the Word of God. You can't do that. to which we must respond, we all do that. Once you are at your highest authority, there is no higher court of appeal to go to. So again, if the word of God is true because of archeological evidence in the ancient Near East that you find compelling, you have not placed your authority in the word of God. You have placed your authority in the inerrant work of archeologists. See how this works? All arguments to final authority are necessarily circular at the top. Well, my sense perception, science shows, trust the science. Well, science is dependable, why? Well, because empirically science has been dependable in the past. Science is the inerrant word of God. And to the degree that scripture conforms to it, I am willing to believe in scripture. All appeals to final authority are circular. And we are Christians, which means our final authority must be the Word of God. And so that also must be where we start. You just start there. This is the Word of God. Here's what the Word of God says. My final authority can account for everything in the universe, and yours cannot. So the greatest proof of Christianity is that without it, you couldn't prove anything at all. All contrary positions are impossible. They can't even get started. When we start with the inerrant Word of God, you get everything. You get science, you get beauty, you get art, you get all of human experience. And so we must start with the Word of God. And we don't get to pick and choose based on some higher arbitrary authority. We accept it as a complete package. This is the Word of God. This is the Word of God. And it's amazing, a few weeks ago, I don't remember if it was in Sunday School or in The Message, where I quoted the one father, I believe it was Clement, but Augustine uses the same argument, is that I believe in order to understand. Okay? We don't get full, perfect understanding and then prove our way to God and then we accept God. If you receive the word of God, it's amazing how you start to understand the world around you. Okay? Obedience is the great opener of eyes. And so we have to start with God. We have to start with scripture. And so this opening clause here in chapter 14 brings us right back to the beginning. Why does the confession of faith start with the word of God? Well, because we have to start somewhere, and we are going to start on the one thing that we have absolute certainty of, which is the Word of God. And so this is reminding us of that. We believe to be true everything in the Word. And I'm going to stop there. And I'm going to ask about our level of confidence in this. And if there's understanding of the way that if you can prove the Bible using something else, you have just made that something else your greatest authority. That's an important concept that we all must understand. If evidence is compelling, that means evidence is your God. If philosophy is compelling, philosophy is your God, and scripture is subservient to it, and we're Christians, so we say no to all of that. That's why I don't put great faith in evidential or classical apologetics. It's too weak, by far. You end up with probabilities. Well, it's 63% more likely that there's a theistic God in the universe than that there isn't. Say no. I am absolutely certain. that there is God, because the Bible says so. We're dealing with certainty here, not with probability, okay? Absolute rock solid certainty, Howard. Exactly, and that's, yeah, and that's the world we live in, right? My experience, my feelings, yep. Yep. That has been a great door to apostasy is my feelings, yep. Yep, but there's a lack of confidence in the word of God, right? Because in my experience, something meaningful has been experienced. Yep, yep. Amen, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Amen. Yeah, Jeremy brings up a great point of amount of transfiguration. We preached through it not that long ago as we've been working through Matthew. Peter sees it with his own eyes and he says, I know something more sure. The written Word of God is more sure than what I just saw with my own eyes. Okay? Experience is a liar. Experience is a liar. And further, No fact is meaningful, no experience is meaningful unless we interpret it. No historical fact even has any meaning apart from interpretation. I was once accused by a Christian leader of all people for interpreting history theologically. Yes, correct. You're interpreting it like a naturalist, but you're a Christian. We should be interpreting history, theologically, we must. We're Christians, right? Right? Right? We're Christian leaders, shouldn't we interpret history like Christians? But it's amazing how deep secularism has sunk its claws into us, and everything about historic Christianity pushes us in the opposite direction. There is no neutrality, there can't be. Anyone else on this point? Starting with the word of God, absolute confidence, absolute certainty, not probabilities. Right. So Keith is just mentioning, so if all arguments are circular, why not just pick a different starting point and work out from there? That's right. Yeah, exactly. We're not just saying you can't disprove my starting point. We're saying my starting point is the only one that can explain all of life. If you start with my starting assumptions of a triune God of Scripture, you get science, you get philosophy, you get human experience, you get emotion, you get law, you get beauty, you get commerce, you get it all. If you start with any of those sub-disciplines, you lose everything. You lose everything, including the thing you start with. and we all see how quickly a trust in science destroys science. Who saw in the last couple weeks the Canadian Cancer Society apologizing to women for talking about cervical cancer? That makes the very misogynistic assumption that only women have cervixes. This is so beyond parody. They apologized and referred instead to people with a front hole. Behold your God. It's hard to satirize our culture. And this is all in the name of science. If science becomes your God, you lose everything, including science. Yep, absolutely true. The current approach to education is to undermine the foundations, right, which means you can't start anywhere and you don't arrive anywhere either that way. Very true. Anything else on this? This is one of those things when I started to think in these terms, it was one of these things, the concept is so simple, And I've been doing like a deep dive on this for probably 10 years, and it feels like I'm always just on the verge of really catching on. I don't know if you ever have that experience of something, but the presuppositional approach to knowledge is so remarkably simple. Okay, just keep asking the by what standard question. What authority is being appealed to? And yet it's just rich in depth when you get into it. And so the main takeaway here is an absolute confidence in the word of God, not as a probable starting point, not as the most probable starting point, but as the only ground of certainty that exists in this cosmos. That's it. This is the only ground of certainty that we have, and by certainty we mean certainty, not 99.99% confidence. We mean absolute certainty. It cannot err, okay? Not only is it inerrant, it's also infallible. It does not err, it cannot err. So the Bible itself must form our interpretive grid for all of life. Because, as it says here in sentence one, it's recognizing it as the authority of God himself. It makes sense that the Bible would be that final authority because it's written by the mind who created all reality, right? There is one mind which knows all facts and all relationships between all facts, and that's God's mind. So if he has expressed his mind in a book, of course it's certain. Of course we're not dealing with probability. Of course we're not gonna say that it's 83% likely that God exists. It's absolutely certain. And if God did not exist, we couldn't even be having this conversation because language and logic would both be meaningless and arbitrary. Dr. Greg Bonson in his debate with Gordon Stein says, by showing up to this debate, Dr. Stein has proven my point that the triune God of Scripture is real. Because he's going to use logic. to try to make his case. And in Dr. Stein's worldview, logic is utterly meaningless. In a naturalistic universe, why would laws of thought exist? Those are your laws of thought, these are mine. Okay, science falls apart in that naturalistic worldview, so does the laws of logic. So Dr. Bonson's point was, he can either accept my arguments or I shoot him. And again, in Dr. Stein's worldview, there's nothing wrong with me shooting him. So I can win the debate by actually debating the points, which presupposes logic, which presupposes God, or I can just shoot him in the head. Either way, I win the debate tonight. Okay? The atheist cannot win this debate. The knowledge of God is certain knowledge. Certain, not probable, not likely, absolutely certain. You cannot get started without presupposing God. And this is a point that we just absolutely need rock-ribbed confidence in because that is the foundations of our approach today in our society is absolutely designed to erode the foundation of certainty. When we live his way? Yep. That's right. They're stealing from our worldview when they make any kind of moral claim, or even when they just use logic. When a scientist does science, he's stealing from the Christian worldview. His science is not autonomous. Howard. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and Dawkins is essentially saying the same thing. Yeah, I like that old English architecture. Only Christians could build a cathedral that beautiful. I kind of like it. Exactly. I like knowing that the judge isn't arbitrary. I like knowing that the cops are following a rule, right? And that all falls apart if you let go of the God of Scripture. So it is. There's also a telling moment, I think I've shared this before, maybe not. If you watch, it's on the Canon app. It's a documentary called Collision. And it's clips from a debate tour that Douglas Wilson did with Christopher Hitchens before he died, Christopher Hitchens being the atheist. And they were very good friends. And I'd say in terms of intellect and wit, rough equals. You could tell they liked each other's company quite a bit. And there's one very telling cab ride, right towards the end of the documentary, where Wilson says, if you had the chance, there's one Christian left on earth, and you could snuff him out, would you do it? And Hitchens thought for a really long time. And he said, I know my friend Dawkins would say yes, but I wouldn't do it. Wilson just said, why? And you could tell that was a very uncomfortable question for him. Here's this guy dedicating his academic career to destroying Christianity. And if someone gives him the opportunity to hit the easy button and wipe Christianity off the face of the earth, suddenly he's realized what hell would look like. And he himself says, I wouldn't do it. I want Christianity to exist. It's like, interesting. So you want the world to work properly, just You want to do what you want to do, but you want everyone else to follow the rules that make society workable. Interesting. I guess not surprising, though. So again, we want to be people of the word. We must start with scripture. We're dealing with certainty, not probability. The word of God interprets all of life. It must. We want all of Christ for all of life. I'm happy to leave it there. Let's carry on to the next clause. They also perceive that the Word is more excellent than every other writing and everything else in the world." And then we've got two psalms there. Who wants to take Psalm 27, 7 through 10? Who's got that? Psalm 27, Jeremy. And then who wants to take Psalm 119, 72? Who's got that? Phyllis. Psalm 27, whenever you're ready there, Jeremy. Thank you, and then Phyllis, Psalm 119. Okay, Psalm 119 is a whole big psalm on the law of God, and so the same thing. This is how we understand reality, is through the oracles of God, through the law of God. It says that we perceive that the Word is more excellent than every other writing and everything else in the world. And this whole section here is actually almost a direct quote. I mean, it's also from the Westminster Confession. But this is basically almost verbatim from Calvin's Institutes, the way he talks about not evidence for the Word of God, because we just proved you can't prove the Word of God, it's the standard by which all things are proved, but these are supporting supporting arguments that also show that the Word of God is what it says it is, is because it is more excellent. It is better, it is superior in every way. And so Keith brought up the point about other sacred texts, right? Why not start with the Quran? Why not start with the Bhagavad Gita? Why the Bible? Why not the Book of Mormon? Why not the Quran? Why can't we do this with any religious text? Why can't we? Very good. Yeah, Grant is right. To a large degree, these are corruptions of the word of God, right? The Quran most certainly presupposes the Old Testament, and then it corrupts it. The Book of Mormon does the same thing. And so one of the things that happens when you're dealing with the actual standard, the actual word of God, is that there's no internal contradictions and there's no lies. Let's say with the Quran, the Quran teaches false things about what Christians believe. There's lies in the Quran, which are self-evidently lies. The Quran does not understand the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It says that we have three gods. Well, that's just a lie. No Christian believes that we have three gods, right? The Quran has lies baked right into it. It can't be the word of God. It's not internally consistent. It tells lies about other people's religious system. It's a whole bed of lies. Yes. That's right, yep, yep, it's a counterfeit. Yep, yep, that's right. Anything else on this? Yes, Hugh. Okay, so Hugh's asking a good point. I love devil's advocates. The devil has enough advocates, but for a conversation like this, I like it, and it's good. So Hugh's just saying, okay, what about criticisms, if I'm understanding you correctly, that come our way? Matthew and Mark disagree on some details about the resurrection, so there goes your biblical inerrancy, Matt, right? You can't do what you're saying you can, because there's contradictions in the Bible, right? So what do we do with that? Well, and I would say, We need to understand, first of all, the distinction, and this is important, between an actual contradiction or two different eyewitness accounts which are emphasizing different things, right? I think we just talked about this two weeks ago in the triumphal entry. In Matthew, there's two blind men. In Mark, there's one guy named Bartimaeus. Contradiction? Well, if you're an opponent of the Bible, you might say yes. Contradiction. In one resurrection account, there's two angels at the tomb. In another one, there's one angel. I'm not gonna answer that. I'm gonna see how good you guys were listening. So I'm gonna turn it back. What do we do with that? Mark and Luke talk about Bartimaeus. Matthew says two blind men. Here, there's two angels at the tomb. Here, there's one, Audrey. You start there, yes, correct. And then, Howard and then Brooklyn. That's right. Yeah, that's right. There's no contradiction, right? There's a different accounting of facts to be sure, but they're not contradictory accounting of facts. Brooklyn, that's what you were going to say? Sorry to steal your thunder then. Okay? So we do not have contradictions in the Bible. We have different eyewitness accounts, and you see it especially in the Gospels, which are historical details. So that's where you'd expect the most difference. And on that front, I'd say several things are key is to understand what the different gospel writers are trying to do. We're working through Matthew. Well, what's Matthew doing? Matthew is providing an Old Testament theology of Jesus to a Jewish audience. He wants his audience to see this is Moses, this is David, this is Elijah, this is Jeremiah. He's talking with an audience that's very conversant in the Old Testament and showing them this is what your Old Testament all points to. is this man right here, right? So that's why Matthew is so heavy on prophecy, typology, Old Testament citations, because that's what he's trying to do. He's showing the continuity of the story with that. Luke is writing as a doctor and a historian, so Luke is more meticulous in providing kind of chronological details, right? John is basically just interested in Passion Week. The Gospel of John has almost nothing about the ministry of Jesus. He just gets right to the end. John is basically the Passion Week. And so there's, it's not contradictory, but they're looking at this from different angles. And I think that's perfectly legitimate. So I'm gonna ask this question. Here's a thought experiment. Who remembers 9-11? Okay. Did the towers fall because of gravity? Yeah. Yes. The towers fell because of gravity. No one can deny that. If you're going to say no, you've got some serious work to do. Both towers fell because of gravity. Is that a sufficient explanation for what happened that day? No. But it's absolutely true. Okay, it's absolutely true. Are there more angles than that to look at it? Yeah, many. But it's 100% true, whatever happened that day, gravity pulled both towers down. Fact, right? Well, and then now we have to start getting into interpreting facts and adding information about airplanes and so forth, right? But four gospel accounts, I think, again, undergird several things. One is, This is maybe getting into a bit of a technical debate. Who's heard of this hypothesis called Q about the Gospels? Has anyone heard of that hypothesis? Okay, Bible school kids, so I won't get too much into it. Basically, it's a conspiracy theory about the Bible. There's one Gospel source, it's called Q. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all just stole from it. That's why the Gospel accounts are so similar, because they're all stealing from a common source. to which every Orthodox Christian could say, well, maybe the reason there's so much similarity is because they're talking about the same events, throwing it out there. They're recording the same person and the same life, so we would expect a good degree of continuity. But then on the other side of people's mouths, so the Bible gets criticized, oh, they're too harmonious, and then the opposite criticism comes, well, there's too many points of difference, okay? You're a cop at a crime scene, and you talk to several eyewitnesses. If they all have exactly the same story told the same way, what do you know for sure is happening? They're all getting handcuffs. Because if every story is identical, that's collusion. They're lying. All of them are lying. If they're telling basically the same story, but one guy saw it from over there, and one guy saw it from up there, and one guy saw it from there, you're going to have harmony with difference. Okay? And if they're just wildly disjointed and contradictory, well, then this is a fabrication. You can't trust it. So the fact that the four Gospels tell the same story with different details actually undergirds the truthfulness and should be an aid to our confidence. It's the same story. John is interested in the deity of Jesus. He's interested in proving Jesus is the God-man. He's interested in the atonement. Matthew is interested in the Old Testament storyline unfolding. Luke is interested in history. Mark has his own audience that he's interested in. So it's exactly what we would expect, is how I would answer that. So we have differences, but we don't have contradictions ultimately. Does that answer the question you're asking, or did I miss what you're getting at? Okay, anyone else on this point? Grant. Yeah. And therefore, it's our knowledge and our looking to God and knowing factually the word is the truth that we don't understand. Yeah, and I think Grant has a great point. When non-Christians criticize Christianity in its current North American soft and effeminate form, they have a point. There's a great story about a British skeptic, David Hume, in the 1700s. David Hume hated Christianity. David Hume was a scientist who, interestingly enough, ended up losing all faith in science because of his scientism, but that's another story. David Hume hated Christianity. And one day, one of his friends saw him in a rush to go to an open field to go hear George Whitefield, the evangelist, preaching. And his friend said, you're not starting to believe that stuff, are you? And David Hume's answer was, no, but Whitefield believes it. His point was the soft, effeminate Anglican ministers, for which 1700s Britain was known for, They're a joke. They don't even believe themselves what they're saying. Why would I waste a Sunday morning to go hear some effeminate in his pink slippers talking about stuff he doesn't even believe in? Right? I want to go hear Whitfield. I don't buy any of it. But I want to see a man on fire who believes what he believes. Right? So David Hume was willing to listen to that. And I wonder if we got over the soft, compromised Christianity in our day, if we might actually get a bigger hearing. Not a lesser one, right? I believe this for real, like for real, for real. This is true truth. Dave, and then Bryson. Right, yeah, so maybe it's not all of church history that's marching out of step. Leave it as an option. If we disagree with all of church history, maybe the problem is us and not all of church history. Yeah, that's a fair comment. Bryson, you had your hand up. That's correct, yeah. So yeah, to be honest, we have to read the Quran the way they would understand it to me, the same way we want them to interpret Christianity according to an Orthodox lens. Here's the problem, and so your statement is correct. Here's the challenge, though. When you hear a secularized North American Muslim saying Islam is a religion of peace, And then you go to a Muslim who actually believes in Islam, and he says, that guy's compromised. We have the same thing. What does Christianity believe? Well, it depends. If you go ask Susan, the lesbian bishop of the United Methodist Church, she'll give you one answer. Dave Weeb might give you a different answer than Reverend Susan. So, I think. Okay, so what do we do with that? Okay, and I think this too is where understanding the history of interpretation, the history of doctrine is helpful because we know who stands in line with the orthodox understanding that has progressed through history. So when When you hear modern Muslims say that Islam is a religion of peace, that is their equivalent of Reverend Susan. It's not orthodox. It's not historic. Islam has never believed that. It's a repackaged secular lie that is interested in maintaining the cultural goods of the old country, same as what we have here. What Reverend Susan is selling you is not Christianity. It's a secular lie. But Reverend Susan likes the goods that Christianity imported into her world, so she wants to keep some kind of memory. And I've done a lot of thinking over the last year, several years. Why do people who have so clearly left the faith, why are they so adamant on saying this is just a different version of Christianity? I think I kind of understand it, and yet there's part of me that doesn't. Like, if you hate everything about Christianity, Just be honest and say you've left. You're not a Christian anymore. It's not against the law. No one's going to come hunt you. Just be honest. But why do they have to say, no, I've got the real message of Jesus? I think it is largely because of the cultural comfort. I have a low German last name. I've got all these fond memories of singing hymns and so forth. And there's something I want to keep. There's some fond memories, some respectability I want to keep. I just don't want to live that way. And you're correct, all religious traditions have the actual orthodox form and the secularized counterfeit. So I would want to talk, and this is where someone like James White is excellent, because he'll go debate actual Muslim imams who actually believe Islam. He's not strawmanning, let's have an actual debate. So he'll go to, you know, Eastern Africa, and he'll debate actual Muslim imams, and that's the way to do it, is not to strawman, but just lay it out on the table. Here's this worldview, here's this worldview. There is no harmonizing them. Okay? Which one makes sense of reality? So, but we have to be honest with that. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, so they're starting with presuppositions the same way we are so Clint's just asking would a Muslim if I'm understanding you correctly Would a Muslim start with the kind of same presuppositional confidence in the Quran that we have in the Bible? Well, I'd say they have to believe that because all of us have to start with presuppositions We can't help that everyone starts with their religious authority everyone you can't avoid that and What happens then is you have to work out their theology. So in Islam, if you're interpreting the Quran as a Muslim who believes that this is truly the word of God, you don't end up with a triune God. You end up with Allah, who is pure force. There's no personality in God, there's no personhood, and there's no community of persons like we have in the Trinity. So in Islam, you end up with God who is just sheer impersonal force. Allah just means will. That's all there is to God, is just an impersonal cold will. It turns into a kind of fate. Now, if you have that, you have no personal God, Muslims can hope to try for the best, that Allah will show them some mercy, but they can't ever know that they're forgiven. You also run into if in terms of trying to understand the world What philosophy is always concerned about is the one and the many and we won't go too much into that In Christianity, all philosophy can fall into place because the triune God gives you a category for oneness and manyness in creation, right? There's harmony, there's diversity and unity, which makes sense, because a triune God created the world. So you have oneness, so let's say man-ness as a concept is one, but there's many different instances of man in this room. There's Kenan, there's Mike, there's Keith, there's Kevin. So is man one or many? In Trinitarian Christianity, it makes sense. God is one in many. So you have this overall category with different variety within that category. Islam can't account for that kind of stuff, because God is just pure force, pure unity. There's no diversity in God. There's no personhood in God. So to start understanding the world beyond just pure force becomes the next challenge. And that's where, if I was debating a Muslim, that's where I would go, is to show is to show the internal inconsistency in any worldview that does not start with the Bible. That's, I think, the best path to apologetics isn't just proving what we believe is right, but showing on your starting point, on your starting presuppositions, here's the problems you're going to run into. There's these internal inconsistencies you can't get going. Okay, so that would be the approach I would take, is all non-biblical worldviews become arbitrary and inconsistent somewhere. And so your point, when talking to a friend, is just keep talking until you find those points where this is just arbitrary or inconsistent, or where they start stealing from the biblical worldview to make their case. And then you say, ah, you're not allowed to steal from the Bible. You have to prove your point using your starting presuppositions. There's one more hand here, we'll do one more, and then. Was there one more hand? Yep. If you ever get into somebody who is atheist but then also tries to point that, well, look at all these other religions. There is Islam, blah, blah, blah. As a Christian yeah, it's pretty commendable Mm-hmm Yeah. Nope, that's good. Grant. Amen. Yeah. Amen, Grant's pointing, and that's a good place to close it, Grant's pointing to the Holy Spirit. We won't persuade, and I would actually say it was, I'm gonna try to make sense of this. The presuppositional approach to apologetics is the logical outcome of trusting the Holy Spirit for our salvation from start to finish. If you have a Reformed or Calvinistic understanding of how you got saved, that God just did this, it forces you to this approach to apologetics. You must, because any other approach to apologetics says there's something more compelling than the Word of God, and we have to find those things to persuade unbelievers. If you have confidence the Holy Spirit will take out the heart of stone on his time, with his methods, his way, that means we also rely on the tools he's given us, which is scripture alone. So I would say this approach to apologetics is the necessary consequence of saying God saves, thou must save and thou alone, therefore I'm gonna use only the tools you have put in my hand. So that's a great point to leave, and that is the Holy Spirit's work. You carry water, the Holy Spirit will have to make them drink. But we need confidence in our approach that this is his means of doing it. They will not be compelled by our knowledge of rock layers and Greek philosophy. Let's close in prayer. Father God, thank you for your word. Thank you that your word is sufficient. Thank you that you have given it to us. You have not left us in the darkness, Lord. Think of the terrible place we would be if we did not have your mind on how to live our lives and how to know you and how to come to you in repentant faith. Lord, I pray that as we discuss these things, I pray that it would create a more settled confidence in each of us to keep going to your word for every question. Lord, that we would never become autonomous or self-sufficient in our thinking, or thinking that we have a better way to arrive at the truth, or that our thoughts are somehow more compelling than your thoughts. Lord, forgive us when we do that. Lord, and I pray that by your Spirit, as has been said, that you would soften our hearts, that you would give us an utter confidence in your word to speak to every issue. Lord, this is the only source of certainty. This is the only source of ultimate truth that comes from your mind directly. So I pray that we would submit ourselves to this word, that we would trust in this word, that we would live according to this word, and that by our speech and by our actions, that we would also make the beauty of this word compelling. to those who are new in their faith, or to those who do not know you. Lord, we trust your spirit to breathe life into dead corpses. Lord, you alone can do it, and I pray that we would trust in your methods. I pray that we would also trust in your methods this morning. Lord, prepare our hearts for corporate worship. We ask that your spirit would be with us, minister to us. Lord, be present with us, and I pray that you would be glorified in everything we do here this morning. I pray this all in the strong name of Jesus, and amen.