Okay, thank you. Well, tonight, as you know, we're going to spend some time on a subject that is extremely important to each and every Christian, the Bible. And to set your expectations here in the beginning, we won't be looking at how we got the Bible or how the books were decided upon or how each book fits together to make a whole book. or what the different translations are, nor will we be looking at specific passages or topics in the Bible, all of which are very good and helpful things. So what's left, you may ask? Well, we're going to be looking at how the church in America viewed the Bible 100 years ago and how it has treated the Bible over the last century. But first I want to make a disclaimer. I know you know this, but I am not a theologian or a trained pastor, so I don't want you to think that I'm teaching from that position. I've prepared this lesson from the point of view of a lay Christian making observations about what is going on in the world around us and asking lots and lots and lots of questions. Narrowing down to the most important questions and then allowing Dr. Machen to teach us how these same questions were being dealt with in his time. We won't be able to get answers to all the questions, so at the end of the lesson, I'll provide you with some excellent resources by theologians and pastors that will help you if you have further questions, which I'm pretty sure you will. So let's get started with the observations and questions. It should be obvious to all of you that in our day, there is an all-out assault on the foundational principles that our modern world has been built on. And the reality is that whether the world wants to acknowledge it or not, those principles, which are marriage and family, the work ethic, laws and punishment, are based to a very large extent on the Bible. So in today's diverse society, a reasonable question to start with is, are those foundational principles normative for all people and all times, or were they just preferences from a small nation in the Middle Eastern desert? It's a reasonable question in a diverse society. And even further, the question becomes, What authority do these so-called foundational principles of civilization have in order to influence the behavior of an individual or the overall culture? And then the question becomes even more stark in the rough lingo of our times, which is this. If I live in a free country, why can't I just live like I want to, regardless of what any patriarchal, racist, sexist, binary-based, backwards, religiously bigoted book says? I told you it was rough language. Now, you may not be consciously aware of it, but these cultural battles that are occurring across the entire planet, or all, and I mean every single one of them, an attack on those very same foundational biblical principles mentioned above in one way or another, some blatantly and some much more subtly, but each has at its very core the goal of discrediting those principles and ultimately the message of the Bible. from scientific naturalism and evolution, to radical feminism, to the LGBTQ movement, to BLM and critical race theory. I'm gonna go through a long list here. To redesigning the monetary system into a so-called digital world currency, to the use of robots and artificial intelligence in all areas of society, to the green movement and the efforts to remake energy industry and with outrageous and arbitrary economic incentives and penalties to the efforts of a worldwide ruling class to redefine and enforce compliance with an entirely new view of the life cycle of humanity, reducing the number of humans to an acceptable level accountable to that ruling class down to the smallest details of our lives, in the process, destroying the family as we have known it and decoupling men and women from their traditional roles, medically manipulating their genetic code and negating the biological realities that make them unique. What a mouthful. Now, I know that just sounds like, whoa, he's just talking current events here. But if you can't, well, I think if you think about each one of those, you can link it back to an attack on a specific biblical principle. And if you can't, we can talk about it afterwards. But that's what's going on in the world. Every one of those is attacking some point of the biblical principles. Things that used to be far-fetched warnings in futuristic science fiction and social writings are now openly and fully expressed in international forums that claim the backing of so-called objective science to ensure global acceptance. Now, with that disturbing look at the secular distortions of reality that are prevalent today, it becomes of supreme importance to know why we should believe the Bible instead of culture and science. And how does someone make that decision when the Bible and culture and science each claim the authority to order our lives? When much of the church seems to be trying to make the Bible fit into the scientific and cultural ethos or abandoning the Bible altogether, the question is this. Are we as Christians bound to take the Bible as our marching orders and let it define the oughtness of reality, meaning how things ought to be? regardless of how far the culture departs from it, or do we do, as many have done throughout history and continue to do still today, allow the culture to confuse us with questions and interpretations about how things ought to be, so that if the culture and science goes one way and the Bible goes the other, then the biblical teaching is redefined or discarded altogether in favor of promoting a spirit of harmony with the culture and obedience to the science. Now, if you're like me, This scenario will remind you of an earlier situation recorded for us in, you guessed it, the Bible. In Genesis chapter 3, the devil planted the seeds of doubt in the garden when he said to our first mother Eve, hath God said, or as the ESV translates it, did God actually say, dot, dot, dot. And in that one short portion of a single sentence, he was laying the groundwork for all future deceptions as he called into question our first parents' understanding of the plain words of God to them and then denied that God would punish them as he said. The fact that the devil planted confusion and doubt about God's words in our first parents from the very beginning should be a clear indication of where the primary battle is and how it has been waged throughout history. So, let's stop and take a breath for a minute. and realize that as important as it is to look around at these huge issues and understand the cosmic nature of the battle going on around us, we really should narrow our focus down to something that we discussed in an earlier lesson, excuse me, and begin asking and applying these big questions on our personal level. And the primary question is this, Is there really and truly a faith once and for all delivered to the saints, as Jude says in the Bible, that is the only way to find peace with God? That's the question. And the reason we ask that is that we see all around us, all that's going on in the world, and we hear that each other religion has their own gods, and we ask is Is the Bible just another attempt by an ancient people to write down their tribal myths? And aren't we, as modern humans, beyond the need for myths now? And aren't we now fully convinced of the mechanistic workings of the universe and the naturalistic laws of evolution so that we can get rid of the primitive ways of thinking about men and women and the planet? Aren't we now empowered to reject any attempt by a so-called deity to require obedience to a set of laws that we don't agree with. You can hear the world in every single part of that sentence. So let's bring it further down to our level and ask plainly, as we did in an earlier lesson, Does it really matter what we or our friends and loved ones hear from the pulpit? Does it really matter what we end up believing about Christianity? And I'm being specifically narrow here. I'm not asking if we believe in a creator or a supernatural God or even a moral universe or a spiritual realm. I'm asking, Does what we believe about Christianity, meaning sin, Christ, the cross, the resurrection, et cetera, does that really matter? Now, each of us, I assume, would say, of course it does. But now we need to ask a further question. I told you there were going to be lots of questions. I didn't promise to answer them all, but I promised to ask a lot of them. which is this, where do we find that faith once and for all delivered to the saints? And then if we answer the Bible, then we have to ask, can we truly rest the eternal fate of our souls upon what it says? Because What about all those leaders inside the church and even these huge denominations that say the Bible isn't infallible and it's not even trustworthy? It's just the work of men. It has errors and the meaning is up for grabs. I'm really not sure what to believe in that situation. Well, We, as believers, can understand how the world dismisses the church when the church has nothing specific or unique or divine to say about our souls when they get rid of the Bible. Now, we're going to ask one more question. How did we get to this point where the church mistrusts the very foundation upon which it was built? to help us answer and understand that, which will help us understand and answer all the previous questions we've been asking, we'll continue our study of Dr. Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism, written 100 years ago. Now, I'm gonna be saying that a lot because I want that to sink in. 100 years ago, a century ago, 10 decades, four, five, maybe generations ago. Dr. Machen was a very important figure in the battle for Orthodox Christianity in the early part of the 20th century. He was professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary and eventually left over the issues we are now discussing in order to establish Westminster Seminary. I encourage you to listen to the lesson about his life in order to get a glimpse of his faithfulness and all that was going on in the church during that period. So in this lesson, we will look specifically at the chapter on the Bible, and we'll do so under four headings. First, we'll review briefly what liberalism is and why it still matters. Second, we'll look at Dr. Machen's analysis of what liberalism said about the Bible 100 years ago. Third, we'll look at how the world and the church have treated the Bible in the last 100 years. And then fourth, we'll look at implications for ourselves and for our friends and loved ones that all absorb the attitude toward the Bible from their church or from the culture. So first, let's review what liberalism is. And I'm going to be reading some quotes. I'll try to do them in a way that engages, but put your thinking hats on. We're going to need to think kind of deeply about stuff here. To help us get reacquainted with his reasons for writing the book and understand what liberalism is, I will quote Dr. Machen in his introduction. Quote. The purpose of this book, and you need to know this is not a huge book. This is it right here, but it's monumental and what it's got in it. The purpose of this book is not to decide the religious issues of the present day, but merely to present the issue as sharply and clearly as possible in order that the reader may be aided in deciding it himself. He points out that, quote, in the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, The things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things least worth holding. The really important things are the things about which men will fight. He continues, the many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism. that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God as distinguished from the ordinary course of nature in connection with the origin of Christianity." In other words, all these religions, all these versions of religion back then were anti-supernatural religions, meaning no miracles, no incarnation, no resurrection. So as we begin our study, I want to provide you with an understanding not of just what the term liberalism means, but what it believes. And just as we did in the earlier lessons, we'll state that the term does not have to do with politics. Okay, so take that out of your brain. Liberalism, or modernism, or liberal theology, as it was also known, is defined as, quote, a movement that interprets Christian teaching by taking into consideration modern knowledge, science, and ethics. It emphasizes the importance of man's reason and his experience over doctrinal authority. Now, notice the absence of the Bible in that definition, but the claim to be able to interpret Christian teaching and to give man's reason and experience more weight than doctrine. Also note the inclusion of modern knowledge and science and ethics and realize that they all change constantly and depend on fallible, sinful man. And as I mentioned in previous lessons, I should make it clear that the people that held to this liberal theology weren't a few fringe extremists. They were the officers and thought leaders in the mainline denominations. They were the professors and the leaders of the leading seminaries in the U.S. and in Europe. And they were the pastors of the biggest churches in the largest cities in America. And they did not try to hide the man-centered, naturalistic definition I just quoted, but we're proud to publicly line up behind it. Taylor Matthews was a Baptist and the head of the University of Chicago Divinity School. And he was outspoken in his determination to provide a rationalistic scientific basis for the development of liberalism, which he called modernism. So here's his definition of liberalism slash modernism. Modernism is not a denomination or a theology. It is the use of the methods of modern science to find, state, and use the permanent and central values of inherited orthodoxy in meeting the needs of a modern world. The needs themselves point the way to formulas. Modernists endeavor to reach beliefs and their application in the same way that chemists or historians reach and apply their conclusions. They do not vote in convention and do not enforce beliefs by discipline. Modernism has no confession. Its theological affirmations are the formulation of results of investigation, both of human needs and the Christian religion," end quote. So that's a long definition, but did you hear the Bible in the air anywhere? No, not in his definition. He's head of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He was one of the prime movers of the whole theology. He and others in the liberal movement became more focused on human needs and human methods of meeting those needs in this present life and less and less concerned with what the Bible said about God's law and the reality of judgment and life after death. The liberals or modernists, whether they were Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, all embraced the naturalistic approach to the Bible and created a totally new religion. But here's the difficulty. They called it Christianity. This is where Dr. Machen draws our attention in his introduction 100 years ago. He says, quote, light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end. in the sphere of religion in particular, the present time is a time of conflict. The great redemptive religion, which has always been known as Christianity, is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. So, It's got the same words, they're redefined to mean totally different things. He goes on, quote, our principal concern just now is to show that the liberal attempt at reconciling Christianity with modern science has really relinquished everything distinctive of Christianity. so that what remains is in essentials only that same indefinite vague type of religious aspiration which was in the world before Christianity came on the scene. In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, In trying to bribe off the enemy with these concessions that the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend. Here, as in many other departments of life, it appears that the things that are sometimes thought to be the hardest to defend are also the things that are most worth defending." All right, that's our introduction to liberalism. Number two, we'll look at what was liberalism's attitude toward the Bible. So after the introduction, Dr. Machen then discusses liberalism's view of doctrine, God, and man, and we don't have time to go through those, so I encourage you to listen to the lessons on each of those topics in order to understand the damage done to those aspects of Christianity a hundred years ago and how the repercussions still exist in the church today. Dr. Machen then looks at liberalism's view of the Bible, which is where we're going to focus tonight. Dr. Machen reminds us that liberalism had, in his words, quote, lost sight of the two great presuppositions of the Christian faith. Number one, the living God. Number two, the fact of sin. End quote. That is a very gracious way, I think, of saying that liberalism had intentionally, and with malice aforethought, decided to ignore the biblical revelation of God and the undeniable fact of man's sin when they began to recraft their message. But even by throwing out the very concept of doctrine and dethroning God, redefining sin, and elevating man, as was explained in those first three lessons, the difficulty for liberalism was that there still existed this ancient book with very powerful, compelling, and specific claims about those fundamental issues. The way liberalism justified the rejection of those claims and removed the Bible from their definitions, as we saw, was by relying on the previous decades of higher criticism. of the text of the Bible by biblical scholars who had embraced the philosophy and worldview of the Enlightenment, which was based on rationalism, which is the dependence on the sufficiency of the human mind, and scientific naturalism that allows no supernatural entrance into the world. The Bible in their hands was deemed not to be the word of God. but they allowed that it may sometimes contain the word of God in certain places and under certain conditions that were, you guessed it, dependent upon whoever was reading it at the time. The historic Christian position, however, was that this book was not just full of ideas about God, but contained real communication and records of actions and results based upon what God said and did. It claimed to be full of factual history with claims of authority and to contain revelation of a kind to be found nowhere else. the historical facts of what God has done and how man can be right with him. And that is the absolute center of the issue, the reliability and authority of that message, not whether it sounds good to modern ears or has scientific veracity, but that it actually provides the truth revealed by God. Dr. Machen, he was very gracious in the way he words things. I'm gonna read how he puts the liberal objection to classical Christianity. And it gives a hint of the seductiveness of the liberal point of view. He says, An objection is sometimes offered against this view of the contents of the Bible, this view being the classical historic doctrine. Must we, says the liberal, depend upon what happened so long ago? Does salvation wait upon the examination of musty records? Is the trained student of Palestinian history the modern priest without whose gracious intervention no one can see God? Can we not find instead a salvation that is independent of history, a salvation that depends only on what is with us here and now? He continues the liberal position. quote, having a present experience of Christ in the heart, may we not, says the liberal, hold that experience no matter what history may tell us as to the events of the first Easter morning? May we not make ourselves altogether independent of the results of biblical criticism? No matter what sort of man history may tell us Jesus of Nazareth actually was, no matter what history may say about the meaning of his death or about the story of his alleged resurrection, may we not continue to experience the presence of Christ in our souls. That is liberalism's position. And I know as you're listening, alarm bells are going off. But notice in this quote two extremely subjective terms that we mentioned early on in the definition of liberalism, the modern or here and now thinking and the individual experience. The problem is that the subjective, what we have here and now, negates the objective historical facts, and the subjective individual experience negates the objective doctrinal meaning of those facts, both of which are contained only in the Bible. But Dr. Machen goes further by saying, and this is kind of a zinger, Quote, the trouble is that the experience thus maintained is not Christian experience. Religious experience it may be, but Christian experience it certainly is not, which makes you wonder what sort of religious experience is that? He says further, for Christian experience depends absolutely on an event. He then describes Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection and says, quote, if this, the cross and resurrection, has not been done, If I merely have an idea of its accomplishment, then I am of all men most miserable, for I am still in my sins. My Christian life then depends altogether on the truth of the New Testament records. Christian experience is rightly used when it confirms the documentary evidence, but it can never possibly provide a substitute for that documentary evidence. Now I wanna pause, and like I said, remind you that this was 100 years ago, that he was dealing with these issues. And those that claim the name of liberal were very many and very powerful. It was preached from the largest pulpits in the land. He was aware that he was not dealing with anything new and that it was the same objections learned by our first parents in the garden, but they were being manifested in a more scholarly way in his time. which brings us face to face with the multiple doctrines of inspiration, inerrancy, and infallibility that historic Christianity has affirmed over the centuries, and especially since the Reformation. Inspiration says that the Bible is not man's best thoughts about God, but God's actual revelation of himself to man. Inerrancy says that the Bible is free from error, and infallibility says that not only is it free from error, but it can't err. You've probably guessed by now that liberalism denies all three. of these doctrines for various reasons, but primarily because any one of the three will provide an anchor for the biblical objective truth to claim authority to bind men's consciences and require their obedience. I'll provide multiple resources at the end of the lesson that will help you understand these doctrines. Okay, we're not going to go into them now. But you need to start with Pastor Jerry's lessons on chapter 1 of our confession, which says in the very first sentence of the very first paragraph of the very first chapter that, quote, the Holy Scripture is the only. sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience." Now, that's where you need to start listening to Pastor Jerry's lessons on the confession. Now I'll provide a final summary of Dr. Machen's contrasting of the attitude of liberalism and historic Christianity toward the Bible before we move on to look at what has happened in the intervening 100 years. He mentioned several different ways that liberalism seems to respect the Bible, but actually does the opposite. I'm only gonna do one of these. One of them is this. Liberalism says, that we don't need to listen to the Bible. We only need to listen to Jesus. Now, you've probably heard that before. It's one of those things that sounds so wonderful that it's hard to say, no, Jesus never said enough in the New Testament for you to know all there is to know about God. And by the way, let me find the quote here. This is what Dr. Machen says. And the liberal scholar must finally admit that even the historical Jesus, as reconstructed by modern historians, said some things that are untrue. Now, that's what the liberals say. They say, but his life purpose was what is important. Dr. Machen says, if you truly say you're going to go back to just Jesus, a lot of the things that Jesus said are anathema to the modern liberal church. So I'm going to end there. I realize the time is getting on. But the liberal liberalism of that age was trying to get rid of the Bible and say we only need Jesus And Dr. Machen points out the fallacies in that. All right, now we're going to ask, how has the Bible fared in the last 100 years? As you might expect, based on the discussion at the beginning of the lesson of what's going on in the world, it has not been a century of returning to trust in the Bible. Let me list several things that have happened in the culture and in the church since Dr. Machen wrote his book so that we get an understanding of the things that were not in his thinking. World War II, atomic weapons. The church moves from liberalism into its brother, relativism. Since he wrote the book, there have been 81 new translations of the Bible. Maybe not full translations, but repackaging and reinterpreting of translations. the Jesus movement, the social gospel, the ecumenical movement, evangelicals and Catholics together, post-modernism, post-Christian culture, health and wealth and prosperity gospel, computer technology, internet, artificial intelligence, gender ideologies, DNA modification, and post-humanism. None of those were anywhere on his horizon. Think about how important it is for us as believers to have the Bible as the stable frame of reference when considering any one of those topics. Now realize the impact on the culture and the church and individuals of having a Bible decimated by liberalism as the starting point to understand them. Rather than going through them, we'll acknowledge that these are some of the big events and issues in the culture and in the church that have occurred since Dr. Machen wrote his book. And as we look over the past 100 years, we have to be thankful that a small but faithful minority of evangelical leaders were appalled at the continued drift of the culture and the continued departure of the church from the historical Christian faith. They saw the decline as a direct result of the lack of authority accorded to the Bible. I have a quote from Francis Schaeffer. I'll skip that and go to a quote from Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who was in the line of Ryle and Spurgeon in England and was not afraid to continuously warn the church to return to their first love and to stand firm when hard decisions had to be made about whether the Bible was to be the rule in the life of the Christian. Here's what he said in 1957. in his book, Authority, speaking in the chapter on the authority of the scriptures. Quote, the claim today is that the situation is now different. It is generally agreed that the old liberalism, the old modernism, the old rationalism, call it what you will, is more or less rejected. We are told that while we must not spend our time debating and arguing concerning the value of higher criticism, as men tended to do 40 or 50 years ago, we must nevertheless take the work of criticism for granted. He continues. So we are confronted by this modern outlook, which does not argue about sections and portions of verses any longer and is not exclusively interested in its own critical apparatus. It takes all that for granted and then goes on to declare, here we are confronted by a book in which there is much of great value, but that which is positive error and utterly valueless. Then he concludes this passage with, quote, in other words, the modern position amounts to this, that it is man's reason that decides. You and I come to the Bible and we have to make our decisions on this basis of certain standards, which are obviously in our own minds. We decide that one portion conforms to the message which we believe. and that another does not. In spite of all the talk about a new situation today, we are still left with the position that man's knowledge and man's understanding are the final arbiters of the final court of appeal. That was precisely, he said, the position of the old liberalism. And that was in 1957. 35 years after Dr. Machen wrote that. So you can see that the liberal poison, even though it's slow acting, is still continuing the decay in how the Bible is viewed. Now, as we move closer to the present day, we've come upon a great rift in the culture, a tearing of the fabric that, at least for America, had been a unifying social standard. the culture began to reject the morals that were based at least outwardly on the Bible. And as the new morality, as it was called, began to find its way from the 60s communes to the 70s courtrooms and the 80s boardrooms, even the wide open liberal view of the Bible was being disregarded by the culture and the church. Why? Because it was all relative. You decide what works for you. One of the few who saw the need of the hour was Dr. R.C. Sproul, a then fairly unknown theologian that had founded Ligonier Ministries in 1971. Understanding that the weakness of the church was due to the systematic teaching in the seminaries, that the Bible was not inspired, inerrant, and infallible, Dr. Sproul in 1973 invited several prominent evangelical scholars to present a series of papers on biblical inerrancy, which were edited and published in 1974 as God's Inerrant Word. Dr. Sproul's involvement in the efforts to bring the church back to the Bible continued in 1977, when he suggested expanding that work and it actually ended up becoming the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978. Several books about inerrancy were published as a result of the conference, but probably the most important document to come out of it was the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Dr. Sproul was on the committee that produced the statement. He also wrote brief commentaries on each article of the statement that are gathered together in one of the resources I promised to tell you about at the end of the lesson. It was hoped that this effort would convince many seminaries because they invited heads of seminaries and theologians. that would convince many seminaries to renounce their adherence to neo-orthodox or liberal views, and some actually did. But sadly, many blatantly refused to even acknowledge the issue. And just as Dr. Lloyd-Jones had mentioned 20 years earlier, liberalism by that time was taken for granted in its entirety. And a key part of liberalism, as we've seen, is dispensing with an authoritative Bible. To jump forward from liberalism to relativism and on to postmodernism in order to give a simple explanation of the current situation, it is this. The arguments faced by Dr. Machen haven't changed, but the discourse has been diverted from the issue of historical facts and the inerrancy of those facts, and therefore the authority of the Bible. It's all been diverted from that to the search for truth. truth and not inerrancy has become the issue. And that sounds like a reasonable discussion to have, but it stripped the Bible of authority because the postmodern definition of truth does not equate to objective reality and by definition can be determined by each and every individual. Therefore, there's no need for an authoritative Bible even in the church. So postmodernism and the willingness of the church to shift the discussion to the search for truth versus facts is what basically decimated the Bible in our time. In dealing with an irrelevant Bible, modern churches and denominations approach how they communicate their stance in two different ways. There may be more, but I'm just going to do two. The first is to ignore it or address it in a way that is extremely condescending and patronizing, such as this from the Presbyterian Missions Agency, quote, We believe that through it, the Bible, God speaks to us, that it is inspired. For some, that means the Bible is inerrant. For others, it means that even though the Bible is culturally conditioned and not necessarily factual or even always true, it still breathes with the life of God. Oh my goodness, is that condescending and arrogant of men to say? The other way is to state the doctrinal position for the denomination, but effectively ignore it and let the desire to be relevant to the culture prevail as seen in this research on Southern Baptists. that says, quote, the share of Southern Baptists, and I think they quoted this as a good thing, but I'm gonna let you decide. The share of Southern Baptists who say the Bible is the literal word of God, 61%, exceeds the share who hold this belief among all U.S. adults, 31%. So if I'm reading that right, it means that 40% don't believe the Bible is the word of God, and that's a good thing. So these numbers show that sometimes the documented position of a denomination may give a scent to inerrancy, and people may respond in line with the denominational position in the surveys, but the huge telling point And all of this is, regardless of what they put on their websites or how they respond, how do churches and individual Christians actually behave in today's world? We've all heard the statistics about divorce being the same in the church as it is in the world. And almost every denomination now has women pastors and homosexual pastors. And please realize this is not because theologians all of a sudden saw the clear teaching in the Bible that divorce was okay, and that women and homosexuals absolutely should be pastors, but because the culture wanted it that way, and the church, having stripped the Bible of authority, decided to go along with the culture to show how loving and relevant they are. There are a great many more recent examples of how far the church has fallen since liberalism began a formalized approach to destroying confidence in the Bible, but I don't want to subject your ears to them. It just isn't edifying. But you should realize, okay, the big problem that we all as sinful creatures have with the Bible is not that it says the world was created in six days instead of billions and billions of years, or that the timeline of the Book of Kings doesn't seem to add up, or that it claims that an axe head floated. The problem is, is that it tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves, and we can't do it and we don't want to do it, and our conscience condemns us, and we don't want or think we need a savior. Everything else is a smokescreen, okay, which leads us to our final section, and I realize we're getting close. The implications of our attitude toward the Bible, okay, for us, for our neighbors, for our friends, our loved ones. And this is gonna be some warnings, some exhortations, and some encouragement. Some of these points are obvious and we won't spend a lot of time on them, but each one of them, obvious or not, is worth meditating on to understand the implications in our own lives first, and then for others. Number one, We need to realize that just resisting cultural decay isn't the same thing as following Jesus. It can be just cultural conservatism. Not liking the way things are heading and seeing an added dose of religion to the culture is a way to stop the worst of it. Well, the Pharisees had some of that in them as they tried to halt the decay in their culture by adding more and more rules and looking down on those that didn't measure up to them. Working to stop abortions or human trafficking, et cetera, are good things to help address the symptoms of our problems, but we must understand that there is no hope for the ills caused by sin except to return to full belief in the Bible. And that, brothers and sisters, is the work of the Spirit of God poured out across the world as individual local churches preach the whole truth as presented in the Bible, regardless of what the culture or the degenerate church says. So when prioritizing your time, efforts, and money, focus primarily on the cure versus treating the symptoms. Number two. We can claim to believe that the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible, but if we don't read it, we are still open to being misled by the culture. I'm going to read a quote from the Christian Post. It's an online news thing. Quote, a new study from the theologians at the University of Leipzig finds that only 1.6% of the German population reads the Bible at least once a day. And I frankly am amazed at that number. And only 3.2% read it every week, despite half of its population identifying as Protestant or Catholic. The article continues. Why is this relevant to the LGBTQ plus dilemma within Christian teaching? Well, the article says, if you don't know what the Bible actually says, then those who have an agenda to pervert and divert the church, which we here in America call the deconstructionist, have a much easier time planting the original lie did God really say? Many Germans who claim to be Christians don't believe that the Bible is even relevant to their everyday lives. And if you don't believe the Bible and its teaching, how can you claim to be a Christian and why bother? Good question. Please consider this as a warning, not for your friends in Germany or for your neighbor, but for you. Number three, but even with an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible that we read every day, we still need a trustworthy guide because that very same Bible tells us we are sheep. I hope you remember the lesson we had last year where we went through the characteristics of sheep. Sheep need a shepherd, period. And when you find a trustworthy shepherd, one that reads, studies, understands, applies, and defends the Bible with all the gusto of great heart and pilgrim's progress, you stay with him. I know our pastor does this, and that is one of the reasons that we're here. We follow Pastor Jerry because we know that he followed our former faithful shepherd. It is amazing how dangerous it is to our souls because we are sheep and easily led astray when we try to sample all the teaching and preaching personalities out there, both current and historical. We are barely able to feed on the good pasture our shepherd has led us to, let alone identify and do battle with all the pathogens, diseases, and predators that may be lurking in the part of the pasture we wander into. because we are prone to wander. It is truly persevering grace from the Lord when any of us finishes our course without falling into the confusing distractions and lies of the world, our own flesh, and the devil. But when I hear of someone who rejects and breaks away from a trustworthy guide, I know that it is almost certainly due to their own pride and their willful blindness to the dangers they will face. Check your hearts, dear friends. Be Bereans, look for the old paths, and listen to your pastor. It is not a coincidence that you hear the same sources cited by him and Matt and Jesse and our visiting preachers. And realize that most of these sources that they refer to have finished their race and have proven the truthfulness of what they taught. It is of great comfort to me that I can trace the essence of the teaching we hear and the full dependence on the truth and authority of the Bible back along a thin thread from Sproul to Schaeffer to Lloyd-Jones to Machen to Warfield to Spurgeon to Ryle on back through Edwards, the authors of our confessions, John Bunyan, Calvin, Luther, and even to Augustine, who humbly confessed, quote, I most firmly believe that the authors of scripture were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript which he was given is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it." End quote. Dear brothers and sisters, I beg you to be aware that it is so easy to be led astray that even in that list of faithful warriors, there are things that each one of them taught that your pastor would need to caution you against fully adopting. We each need a faithful and trustworthy guide. Thank God we have one. Number four. Ideas are very powerful and I realize I'm one minute over, give me about three, four more minutes and we should be done. Ideas are very powerful. It may be intellectually stimulating to consider new ideas instead of the same old text from the Bible, but beware of the power of ideas. It's been said, quote, philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study can destroy a civilization. And we have seen how those ideas from liberal and postmodern professors in their studies have all but destroyed historic Christianity. But here's an important point. In our world today, so much that is being presented to the average man and woman by businesses, organizations, governments, and yes, even religions is just ideas without factual results. Thank God that the Bible is more than ideas. Yes, it provides us with ideas, marvelous ideas, but it also provides us with the proofs that the ideas work in objective historical reality. Jesus was literally raised from the dead, not just as an idea or an aspiration or a principle or a goal or an essence, but as a human. The Bible tells us in Romans 6, 9, quote, We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. And as Dr. John Duncan, one of my favorites, he was a missionary to the Jews and the chair of Hebrew languages at New College in Edinburgh, said so eloquently over 150 years ago, quote, The dust of the earth now sits on the throne of the majesty on high." This, end quote, this is presented in the Bible as real, not wishful thinking dependent on the philosophy of the world, not as a symbolic picture of human aspirations, but as the actual facts of reality. Number five, we're almost done. This is the last one. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, science, culture, philosophy, religion, each claim the right to tell us how to interpret the world and our responsibilities in it. Each has provided us with some worthwhile things, but each has also overstepped their boundaries sometimes and confused us with their claims. I want to list some things that science, culture, philosophy, and even creation don't show us that we as believers would not know without the Bible. Things the world doesn't know about or has chosen to ignore. Think about these things over the next several days and feel free to add to them and encourage each other with them. Number one, The Bible says that we should know that God is eternal, powerful, and divine by observing creation. But without the Bible, we wouldn't know that his word is so powerful it could bring everything there is, the entire cosmos, into existence in all its magnificent complexity in six days. We would not know that. Without the Bible, we would not know that God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son was born in the flesh as a man, just like us, but without sin. Without the Bible, we would not know that the purpose for creation is to glorify God, not to satisfy man. Without the Bible, we would not know that we were created in the very image of God to be God's stewards of the planet and to have dominion over it, to be fruitful and multiply and cultivate the earth and subdue it, not to be slaves to it. We would not know that God is merciful. and that His mercy would extend to saving rebels and sinners, sometimes even in the last hours of their lives. Other than the nagging of our conscience, which we can eventually silence, and the frustration when we are wronged by someone, we would not know that this is truly a moral universe, and there will certainly be a day of judgment for everyone. We would not know that the punishment for our rebellion and sin is being banished to a place called hell, and that it is so horrible that it seems inconceivable that any would risk going there. We would not know that repenting of our sins simply means coming to Jesus, trusting that he will do what he says he will do. Forgive me, take my sins and give me his righteousness. We would not know that Jesus will never turn a sinner away. We would not know that Jesus calls us brothers. We would not know that Jesus' sacrifice on our behalf was accepted. We would not know that Jesus is alive and reigns supreme. We would not know that this world is not our home. We would not know that all things work for good for those that love God. We would not know that there is a beginning and an end to history. We would not know that heaven exists and awaits forgiven sinners. We would not know that we will live forever and see God. Consider that every one of these things that we learn from the Bible is denied by the culture and science, which is replacing them with a God-dishonoring distortion. Rejoice that we have this revelation from God, and though it appears that neither the culture nor science will allow any religion that denies their authority to continue much longer, Pray that we will remain faithful to the truth and not fall victim to the ideas that continue to distract the world, no matter what the threat of punishment. 2 Timothy 4, 3 and 4 says, quote, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. Let us pray also for our friends and loved ones that the Lord will open their eyes and ears to hear the truth from this word. Brothers and sisters, final word. We have an inspired, inerrant, and infallible Bible that tells us everything we need to know about how to have peace with God. Let us not dishonor him by doubting his word whenever the world or science comes up with a new argument to add to their smokescreen. We should have Spurgeon's attitude when he said this about the attack on the Bible in his day, quote, when a lion is under attack, You don't have to defend it. You just open its cage. Amen. Thank you for your patience and your attention. David, you want to go ahead and give your recommendations for further reading? I will. Number one, 1689 Confession, Pastor Jerry's Lessons. Number two, Christianity and Liberalism. And I have to show you guys this. I have a first edition of that very book, Old, Old, Old, which I love. The next is Thy Word is Truth by Edward J. Young. He was actually a professor at Westminster not long after Machen died. Next is Scripture Alone by R.C. Sproul. This is the one I told you about. Contains the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy and a brief commentary on each of the points. The next is a really tiny book called Authority by Martin Lloyd-Jones. The next is The Sure Word of God by my friend Jeff Thomas. It's a small one, very good. The next one is A Deep Dive on the Sufficiency of Scripture by Noel Weeks. This is published by the Banner of Truth. Another little booklet, but this is a favorite, Why God Gave Us a Book by Jean Edward Veith. Very clear. Then this is a big monster, the Francis Schaeffer trilogy, three different books, but they all have to do with liberalism and its attack on the culture and the word. The Inerrant Word, edited by John MacArthur, a lot of contributors here. This is kind of an update of the Sproul look way back when. Inerrancy in Worldview by Vern Poythress, who is a professor at Westminster. Monster, it's evidence that demands a verdict. You've probably heard of this by Josh McDowell. It's got tons of information here. It's a real good resource. But then I got to show you one final one. That's one of my most wonderful books. This is Archibald Alexander, the very first president of Princeton. This is the book he wrote called Alexander's Evidences for Christianity, and this one was published back in 1840 or something like that. It's inscribed to someone at Nassau Hall in Princeton, but this is a marvelous book that looks in the early 1800s, before liberalism started, what were the evidences back then. So that's it. Thanks again for your patience.