Polemics, Liberalism
2 Timothy 3:16-17 · Randy Peterman · Jul 23, 2006
Polemics, No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826235717958

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

This is a bit tougher one for me because I know a lot of people who have slipped and slided their way into Christian liberalism. We're going to discuss what that is but the truth of the matter is that a lot of us probably know somebody by either proxy or just a relative or a friend who is or has become liberal theologically over time or that's how they started out. When I say Christian liberalism, I'm not referring to Christians who are politically liberal. I wanted to first start out by saying that we're not talking about politics, although it's probably more common for somebody to be liberal theologically and politically than it would be for somebody to be somewhere else.

Now, that being said, there are a lot of people who I would consider to be more moderate in the sense that they've grown up in our modern American first-world culture and they have various things that have influenced them politically and philosophically that are liberal that tends to bleed its way into their theology. I for one experienced that.

I went down the seminary and I just was shocked over and over and over again because they kept having us study God's Word and be consistent with our interpretation and I kept going WOW! That's the first time that that has ever made any sense to me. I remember one of the first Sundays that Jessica and I attended Tyndale's main church service and they had a question and answer time after the Sunday school and something about justice came up in our modern justice system with jail time and whatever else and I stuck my liberal hand up and I said something about you know well how does grace fit into that and he's like this has nothing to do with grace this is justice in our modern American justice system grace is from God, having to do with heavenly things, but when we come down to the earth we need to have a consistent standard by which we judge citizens. So there can be consistency. And I was like, wow, that's the first time I've ever heard that!

Because in my own brain I'd always thought, well how do I fit what I know of Christianity into my life? So that was an example in my own life where I had become... I had mixed things up and I'd become liberal theologically in various ways and politically and mix them together and didn't know that I had done so. But just because you're theologically liberal doesn't mean necessarily that you are politically liberal, although that's common.

There's a seat in the back if you want it. Do you need a handout, Gary? There you go. That's the last one. So anybody who comes later is going to be really sad. Oh, if you want to. Oh, okay. But let's take a look at some specific concepts that are common to Christian liberalism. And I've got a list here so we'll go down them.

This morning is going to be a slightly different format which will be a little bit of a bummer for people who are listening to the recording because I'm going to ask a lot more questions. I want to get some more feedback and get some thinking going on with this one. I will hopefully repeat the answers clearly so people can listen.

First concept here would be a rejection of absolute truth. Now, most of you were in the apologetics class and we talked about absolute truth. Rejecting absolute truth has some serious consequences, but you will see that the rejection of absolute truth is a foundation for pretty much everything that comes afterwards. So you're going to say, oh, I see how that connects. The second item on this list is an embracing of a higher criticism view of the Bible. Who can remember or is familiar with higher criticism? Anyone remember what that is briefly? J-E-D-P. Okay, how about a non-acronym answer?

I think great portions of the Old Testament are from different points of view, not necessarily those of the Lord. Okay. through a whole biographical dissection and they think there's certain literary tendencies by certain schools of thought and they come Yes. The general idea is that higher criticism sounds good, and we'll go into this in a little bit greater depth later on, but higher criticism is the idea that you're going to find out the original author or authors of the text, the time and the location, and you're going to get those things all figured out so that you can know where the text came from and learn more about it. The problem is that they take a hypercritical or supercritical look at the text and make some absolute statements, which is kind of funny, but they make absolute statements about where things came from. And we'll take an example where you look at Isaiah a little later on and see they don't think Isaiah was just one author. They think it was possibly three or more authors of Isaiah.

But we'll take a look at that in just a little bit. They reject a literal hermeneutic. Now we've talked about Bible interpretation before and there's an allegorical hermeneutic that we've found that various groups used so that they could maintain power or control in some cases or they could continue to be the authority of how you could know anything is true in Scripture is that we will use our allegorical interpretation and you have to come to us to get it because you never know if you've got it yourself. The problem with their rejection of the literal hermeneutic is instead of saying, you have to come to us to get it, they could say, anybody can get their own and it doesn't matter what it is.

Which is a problem. Number four, oh, that's cute. For those of you listening to the recording, I just saw a grandma walking by with her toddler granddaughter. Number four here, rejection of infallibility of the Bible. The Bible has errors in it, right? Well, actually, we don't hold to that view here at Holly Hills, and I think that we can prove that. But the infallibility of the Bible is a critical issue, and they don't believe that. So if the Bible has errors, where are they? How many of them are there?

And if one passage quotes another passage, and you're not sure about the reliability of that passage, then both passages are contaminated. So you start to have a spreading cancer of error, basically. I say cancer literally, I know that's a serious disease. I think this really is just as dangerous.

Yes? Rejection of the infallibility of the Bible is really sibling or just goes hand-in-hand with rejection of absolute truth. Oh, sure. Well, yeah. If you reject absolute truth, then it's okay to say that there is not a source of absolute truth. They have to work together.

Number five, non-orthodox views of God. Now I have an example of open theism, which we already had a class covering open theism, but there are all kinds of variations on how weak or strong God is, and none of them are wrong, because where's your source for God?

You determine your own path. One of the things that I came across as I was studying this is that there's consistently this idea that you need to find your own ideas about spirituality in the Bible. It has to become real to you and it's all your own. Well, yes, the Bible needs to be real to you as you study it. You need to really understand it. But, truth is singular and not everybody having their own.

Number six, broader views on what is required for salvation as well as universalism. And universalism is all are saved by virtue of Christ's death on the cross for the whole world. Or sometimes it's not even Christ's death for the whole world, it's just God loves everybody. I'm a Christian and God loves everybody and therefore everybody is saved. Which is really nice.

I've never met somebody who really holds to that that I could ask and get a positive answer about Hitler though. For some reason they still don't like Hitler. I'm like, well you can't pick everybody else to go to heaven except for Hitler. I mean that's not fair. What about Stalin?

Anyways, we won't go through that. Inclusive fellowship to reach out to those normally rejected by a more conservative view without emphasis on sin. So by rejecting various concepts of sin, they reach out to broader groups. There's a common theme to reaching out to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folks.

Sorry, I'm counting my fingers here. Which part of the acronym are they? So there's an outreach to those folks with a focus on rejecting the context of, for example, Paul writing, hey, that's sin. Such were some of you. No, no, we can't have that. It's not an issue now. It was cultural.

And we're going to take a look at how they play the culture card in a little bit. And last but not least, a willingness to embrace modern scientific theories about origin. So they'll try to reach to both sides and have a little bible stuff over here and a little science over here and bring it together. And what they end up coming up with has to reject something over here or something over there or sometimes a little bit of both. And what you end up coming up with is not something that's really strong intellectually or logistically. Sounds like Forrest Gump. Yeah, Forrest Gump. That's a little shallow in some areas.

But let's take a look specifically a little deeper at some of these things. The first thing I want to ask is what do you think are some consequences of rejecting absolute truth when it comes to looking at the Bible? You can look at my handout, but I think there's a lot of things that we could that I didn't cover in the handout that we can discuss. I mostly wanted to see, okay, in your own lives, when you look at the Bible, if you come in contact with somebody who doesn't take the Bible literally, and you were to bring up a scripture passage, how do they...

Is it on? Oh, it's fine. Oh, I was going to say, it says it's on. I was hoping it was recording. We were just checking the position of it. Oh, okay. Sorry for those of you on the recording, we're talking about you. You say like there's a greater outbreak of sin because there's no absolute truth and you can just do your own thing. Okay, that's one example of it. Without absolute truth, sin will increase because the concept of sin has been rejected. Okay, so morally you see there's a massive consequence. There's two handouts, but I don't know if there's two seats here. Here's a chair, which is strange to me. So. So for those of you. who are not sure about things.

For example, if we reject absolute truth, then how can you look at the Bible if you're not looking at it as a source of absolute truth? What would be alternative viewpoints of looking at the Bible? Myth and worthless. Okay, a myth or just completely worthless.

Those are two very, very common views. There's the sense that it's inspiring but not inspired. Okay, that's important. It's inspiring but not inspired. So you have the Bible next to Jane Austen and I liked them both and I found them both to be very wonderful. Tom?

More of a cafeteria sort of environment. I'll pick this bit of truth, you pick whatever you like. Yeah, a cafeteria viewpoint where you walk through and pick out what you want. That's where all the cults come from. They just do their own thing and let everyone believe. Yeah, the cults definitely do their own thing and the authority issue really comes to play there.

The example I've got here is Genesis 1.1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Alright. That, for believers, is a fundamental passage. It's the first verse in the Bible and it's the authority that everything else flows out from.

And so, if that is not absolutely true, then what do you come up with? What does it turn out to be? In the beginning, somebody thought, maybe it was Moses, but probably not. Somebody thought that there was a higher being, God seems like a bit of an overstatement, because we don't know for sure if God exists. And that higher being might have somehow implanted something somewhere so that matter came into existence. That's about as far as you could really go, if you're going to be skeptical, to try to connect with this passage and still hold on to your otherwise non-absolute truth view.

Or just the natural selection from evolution. Sure. Evolution is definitely one of the... and that's the last point, number 8 here. Evolution is definitely... The secular viewpoint, if you're going to reject God, you have to have some other method by which we came into existence. Most recently I was doing some reading and there are actually some scientists that are trying to push the idea that evolution and the Big Bang and everything has happened multiple times.

Because I think they realize that if you don't have an absolute beginning and absolute source, then what's to prevent it from having this cataclysmic beginning and a cataclysmic end, and then have it start over again? There's nothing wrong with that. That's what God said happened and will happen. What? It will start over again. It will burn up and we will get a new one.

Well yeah, but not endlessly cycling over and over again. No. It follows the theme somewhat. Oh yes, they are just copying Christianity. So you see that a rejection of absolute truth leads to some interesting slipping and sliding in various areas. The next one we want to look at is higher criticism and we talked about that briefly.

It attempts to determine the source of texts Okay, which the source is kind of one of those broad words because they don't always accept the idea that it was one author or even just one or two authors. Sometimes it's like there was this symposium of authors that came together to generate this document and so they'll reject a unified author theory on some books just on the basis that they, you know, well we see multiple writing styles and we'll take a look at Isaiah here in just a second where they say that.

It sounds like a good thing at first, because as believers, we would like to know who the authors of the books are. When you study a book, doesn't it impact your understanding of context? You go, oh, well this is Moses that wrote this. That's radically different than if Paul writes something.

One of the problems I have when I'm discussing theology or Christian ideas with my non-Christian friends is that They hear the Bible, and they have no context of Genesis versus Revelation. Some of them may know that one has to do with beginnings and one has to do with ends.

But without that context, they'll flip open some passage where God says to, hey, go wipe out the Canaanites. We're going to take the Canaanites out because they're living sinful lives. Well, all they find is this one verse that somebody pointed out to that says, God wants you to kill the Canaanites. And they go, see, God hates people. And what kind of God is this? You're like, wow, you have no context for this. Let's take a look. Oh, they were sacrificing their children and throwing them in fires. Yeah. Oh. Oh, well, that brings context.

Well, the higher critics bring into question dates. They bring into question authorship, location of the book. For example, when we take a look at the book of Revelation, there are a lot of eschatological debates having to do with the time that Revelation was written. Why? Can anybody remember or think of a reason why that would be pretty critical?

Well, prophecy is prophecy then. Yeah, prophecy ceases being prophecy if it's writing about something past tense in a figurative way. For example, the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 really would be some kind of allegorical connection for some people of the in-time destructive things that you read in Revelation. And they just say, listen, this is just an allegorical documentation of a historical fact. And it's like, no, no, no, no. So as soon as you start getting critical of the text and rejecting what is considered to be the normative or standard time frame and views, suddenly prophecy disappears.

Let's take a look at Isaiah briefly. There are several different reasons why liberal scholars have rejected a single author view. One is that prophecies could have not been made ahead of time and therefore ideas were inserted after the fact or the document was written after things happened. So when Isaiah prophesies about the Messiah, how do they handle that? I mean, they just say, well, that must have been written by another author, after Christ came, who inserted it into Isaiah. Which is crazy. Until you tell them, hey, wait a minute, look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, word for word, everything. Yeah, yeah.

But then they just, you know, they get lots of issues. Then they'll go to another prophecy. They'll go, OK, well he got lucky with that one, but there's this other prophecy about this king that came 70 years later. But it didn't really happen that way. So you have issues with that. Secondly, they'll look at linguistic changes. And this one's really harped on a lot in various texts. They'll say, oh, there's different linguistic styles that get thrown in this text. Well, how long did Isaiah's ministry last? Was it a two-year ministry? Was it a lifetime of ministry? Could his writing style change over a lifetime?

I know mine has. I'm glad. Yes, Tom. Well, when you look at, for example, Mark Twain's writing style. Yeah, Mark Twain. You could go treat that the same way. There must have been many others that did this. It wasn't just one person. Oh, yeah. In fact, there's been a lot of criticism of Mark Twain's writing for that reason because he does take on He was one of the first authors to take on linguistic stylings, for example, saying, OK, here's Jim, who's the slave in Huck Finn, or Tom Sawyer. And he has this language style, his dialect is way different from the white, well-educated Tom Orhuck, and so they go, oh, well, maybe he was a bigot, or they just say all kinds of things rather than saying, no, he was trying to document in a very real way the language style. Oh, no. In fact, in my class when we went over Tom Sawyer, the same higher criticism said that Tom and Jim were actually gay lovers.

Because they swam naked together in the river. So you can see that you're going to have some real serious issues when it comes to the Bible when you get these people looking at the text with that kind of an attitude. There's not reverence. There's not respect. It's absolute rejection. And if you're lucky, they may come up with a half nice thing to say about it. But they're already coming at it with a biased attitude instead of some neutrality which they try to claim they're staking.

So, higher criticism is a major issue and you've got to watch out for that. Now, we talked a little bit about hermeneutics earlier. By rejecting a literal hermeneutic, the liberal Christian opens up the scriptures for varying interpretation. What's wrong with us all coming together and opening up our Bibles and having different views on what is said in the Bible?

Well, it needs to be valid. It's all open to my opinion, how I want it to be. But you have an opinion, and I have an opinion. Everybody's got belly buttons. And we didn't write it, so in doing that, we're not looking at what did the author intend to say. Oh, but there's inspiring ideas in there, and so you just need to look for things that you like. What does it make you feel? Because feelings are what we have now.

But the thing is that when it starts impacting various areas of theology like the end times, how do you handle the end times? viewpoints being different, why don't you just say, listen, it doesn't really matter, it's your opinion. I've actually heard some people say, well what if it happens as you believe? So if you believe in a pre-millennial, pre-tribulational rapture, then it will happen that way for you, but for somebody else, it's going to happen. I am not kidding, I've heard people say that. Or another one that's common and really makes me want to throw up is the, I'm a pan-millennialist. It'll all pan out in the end.

So I'm not going to study it. And the thing is, it's really, really raunchy to me because when it comes down to it, it says, okay, God inspired the word. He gave this to the authors, but we don't know what it means. You can't really know what it means. There's no absolute truth, and you can't truly know what was intended. So God and Paul lied when Paul was inspired to write, so that you may know. Well, no, no, no. You're not understanding.

No, the truth of the matter is that there becomes severe issues if you take that literally, but they're not taking it literally. by not taking anything literally. Just the whole thing, take it and say, we really can't know what was really intended, we're just going to read it and hope that we feel good when we're done. Because hermeneutically, they cannot take it literally. The thing is that some people otherwise will reject this more liberal hermeneutic most of the time. but they'll come to places like Genesis where they have embraced a more modern scientific viewpoint on evolution and so they take a liberal hermeneutic there but they go to other places and they don't because they're going to be very serious about the gospel of Jesus Christ being literally and carefully written in first Corinthians 15 3 and 4 that you must believe that Christ died for your sins and was buried and resurrected on the third day. Oh well That they'll take literally, but there's scientific proof that evolution happened the way that the scientists say. Well, not really, but they've embraced that.

That's what they were taught. I went to school being taught every year, going to science class, they'd go to some biology section and they would talk about evolution and they would show the traditional drawings of the monkey man thing where you see the monkey progressing and developing more human-like features and You get taught that every year and then it's kind of hard when you go to Sunday school and your Sunday school teacher says, well that's a lie. And you're like, okay, I get to hear it five times that this is the way it is and once a week that it's a lie. And what you get at school dominates because in many homes the parents aren't as active communicating to their children what the scriptures teach. Or the parents may not be sure where they stand in the first place. So it becomes a problem.

Now, we talked about infallibility before. I've titled this section, Error, Error Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink. If the Bible is full of errors, what does that mean if Genesis 1-1 is not reliable, and all of Genesis is not really reliable because it's so old, and it was passed by word of mouth for so long, What does that mean for the New Testament or even the Old Testament that quotes Genesis? So when Christ quotes Genesis, what's he quoting?

Error. So if Christ was without error, then he could die as our Savior. But if there's error, then he didn't die as our Savior because he was just a fooled Jewish guy that happened to be really arrogant and deceived because he thought he was the Savior. And not only that, but he brought along a lot of people along with him. I mean really, the consequences of saying that there's lots of error are very severe.

How do you know that any of it is reliable? And that's why I said it's like a cancer because it's going to spread out Because as soon as you start to see there's a hole here, then it starts creeping out and it starts spreading. And it just eats away your theology until when you're done you just have an inspiring happy book maybe. And it really, that's why it's kind of hard for me to joke around because it's so sad and hopeless. And the word of God which I find such joy in becomes pretty flaky.

Yeah. You know what I've seen a lot of this Franklin comes out as near as I can see some of these theological seminaries. And they've got all those students in there trying to excel and be outstanding above anybody else in the class. So they get this looking around for some way in the scriptures to glorify themselves. Look how intellectual I am. And the first thing you know, they've made a national fool of themselves and they don't know it.

The seminaries have definitely propagated that. A lot of modern liberal theology actually came out of Germany. I'm German, but I hope you won't think negatively of me for that. At least partially German. They started developing these liberal ideas and they would teach it in their seminaries. It would get spread out in literature and lectures.

We're going to take a look at Rudolf Bultmann briefly taught towards the end of this section and he was a German liberal guy and he definitely taught. His purpose of using this liberal theology was to demythologize the Bible. We want to pull the myth out of it because it's full of myth and so we have to determine where the myths are so that we can actually cling on to anything that might be useful. So some people actually have used it for demythologizing the text and some people actually try to use it to prove that there's mythology in the text and that it's all mythology. So you've got varying views. It becomes really problematic. Like I said, it's like a cancer. It spreads. How far does it go?

Where do you end up having anything useful to read? The next one, we talked about liberal views on God. Briefly, open theism is one of them. God doesn't really have any knowledge of the future, or he doesn't have very much knowledge of the future, or he's not able to stop those bad things from happening to you. That's one of my favorites. Why do bad things happen?

Because God couldn't help it. God saw your car driving and that train going, and he just said, well, I can't stop the train and I can't stop the car. I recently heard a woman interviewed who lost a son in a tragic accident and the way she came to grips with things in her, quote, faith was that she decided that when Adam and Eve sinned and God threw them out of the garden, God lost all of his power. Oh, God lost all of his power.

Man, that is just sad. singular atoms because all that power has gone away. That's right, it says Christ has stained the world in various places and it's apparently not really happening. But I've got here, there's a pop song that was popular about six or seven years ago, What If God Was One of Us.

Do you remember that? Maybe some of you might have heard it as you were shopping through the stores and going, who writes this junk? But actually, you probably don't listen to music like I do. Jessica and I will go out shopping and I'll say, can you hear that song? And she's like, no, I'm looking at this blouse. And I'm like, if they're playing the Beatles, I'm fluting the accordion, you know, and what's happening? No one else hears it, but I'm like, what, what? So anyways. So we should go shopping together. Yeah, yeah. Yes. But this song, What if God was one of us? What if he's a slob like us? And all kinds of other negative things about God. The thing is, what she's trying to do, the intention of the song appears to be trying to...

Who is God? I don't know who God is. You can't be the God of the Bible, because that's ridiculous. She's rejected the Bible already. But we've got to figure out who God is. There's got to be a God, because we didn't come here for nothing, which is a little optimistic at least. And I've actually talked to Christians over and over again who've said, you know what? I think she's just trying to find out who God is and God understands that.

It's okay. No! What if God's a slob like one of us? What does that say? Here's the omnipotent, all-powerful, all-knowing God and he can't fold his laundry. You know, it just, phew! It's crazy. So, go ahead. Their son was killed by lightning in 7 Woodland Park, New Jersey. Oh wow.

He's 17 years old, but they're wonderful Christians. But in the paper it said that, you know, his best friend was talking about how he, well, he's still holding $20, but I'll just give it to him when I get to heaven. You know, and things like that. But still, Sibby and Chip, they didn't even want to talk to the news because they know that Andrew's in heaven. I mean, he was, what a way to die. He's only 17, but still, you know, it seems so tragic, and it is tragic. It's terribly tragic, but you have to look at those things like that, you know, but when you really believe that you're going to go to heaven, you are in heaven with the Lord. I mean, you can't be anywhere, and you can't be really sad for him. The Bible presents to us what I've called a 100 year plan, but the truth is it's an infinity plan. What are you going to be doing in 100 years? What are you going to be doing in 10,000 years? What are you going to be doing in a million years?

You're going to be, like we looked at in Ephesians, you're going to be gasping in awe and amazement at what the Lord is revealing to you, new that you didn't know seconds ago. His loving kindness and His character and who He was. the small stuff that we go through like how going through his cancer and to continue to get encouraging stories of him having contact with various non-christian people and sometimes possibly christian people in the hospital shocked and amazed as he opens God's word to them and says look at the hope I have here it's not about this life we have and how much pulse I've got it's about the Lord and he draws hope and he gives encouragement to people through that.

Why? If God can't do anything, if God's impotent and incapable, well then that's a pretty disappointing thing and you've just got to sit around and hope that maybe God isn't like one of us and maybe he can do something sometime. If he can at least fix half the problems, I'll be okay. What are you going to accept from a weak God? And it becomes a problem.

And I know I've killed a bunch of time here and I haven't asked enough questions. Yes. Because I'm running out of time, we're going to jump to the last item from that list, which is talking about the embracing liberal scientific views, which is called, it's on page 384, and it says, from matter to den, rather, in 10 to the 17th power seconds. 10 to the 17th power is about 5 billion years, which is at least one common estimate for the time of evolution to take. So we had matter that existed incongruously and just out there floating in space, apparently. And then the Big Bang happens, which is one of the more commonly held to beginning origin stories within science.

And then things slowly started to develop, and we have the Earth and the universe as it is today, in roughly 5 billion years, give or take a couple billion. Or a million. It's pretty loose, but no one was there to record it. Just like Genesis 1, no one was there to record it. God had to reveal it. I mean, Adam doesn't show up on the scene until day six.

So he's got to take God's word on one through five and everything on six that happened before he was there. So what they'll do is they'll embrace the liberal theology for the origins. Again, we talked about the references that the New Testament and the Old Testament both quote Genesis. Why do they quote the beginning of Genesis so much? Or for authority? Does anybody have an answer? It's the beginning. It states who God is from the first verse. It doesn't try to explain God's existence. It says, listen, God existed before you did, and this is how it all went down.

But they're going to reject that and say, okay, who's heard of Hugh Ross? Has anybody heard of Hugh Ross? Okay. Hugh Ross is a apparently Christian guy who I say apparently I don't know him. I can't say anything about his faith. I've not read his books, so I'll say that out in the open. But he says that...

Astrologer. No, he's an astronomer. He's an astronomer. Yeah. But... He says that let's take a look at what happened, yeah astrophysicists, take a look at the light coming from the stars and all these things that science has revealed to us and that does not line up with what I see Genesis saying so that's got to be figurative. What's one problem with the order of days recorded in Genesis in contrast to the evolutionary timeline.

You have plant life before the sun appears. The days were thousands of years. Yeah, you have all kinds of issues. Plants wouldn't survive for a thousand years before the sun. Yeah, you have a sequence issue that comes up. The days in Genesis don't line up with the evolutionary time scale.

We have a scripture proving that too. Oh yeah. A day is a thousand years. Oh, that's right. A thousand years is a day. There we go. But that's a different relationship completely. There's different meanings. Yeah, and the Hebrew language is definitely talking about a 24-hour time cycle.

But that given, you have a lot of issues that come in as these things... it starts eroding away your foundation. Because anything that literally quotes Genesis chapter 1 now is unreliable. And anything that quotes those or references those and the things around that becomes questionable. Because your foundation starts turning into a pile of sand, or quicksand is even worse. Let's take a look at some scripture passages briefly here as we come down to the last few minutes. Genesis 1, 26 and 27.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, Which, that's why Adam could fly. Remember that from Benny Hinn last week? No. Over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. Alright. What does that say about the character of God and the character of man? Formatting the image of God in the context of scripture makes it clear that it's not a literal, the human body form, it has to do with the character and the makeup of emotion, the makeup of will, and various things like that. Well, God is the creator and we are the created. Yeah, okay, so we're derivative, for sure.

But if this is taken not literally, what do we get? If you take it allegorically, how much can you contrive from this? Not much. It doesn't say much about who God is. Yeah, it belittles God and it belittles man, and so sooner or later we're just... They might agree that they feel like a lump of dirt, which isn't actually from this text here. It comes down to, the scripture says that God instilled importance in human beings.

He didn't say, hey I made the cows after my own image. He doesn't say I made the centipedes after my own image, or the birds, even as cool as a bald eagle might be, or a falcon. No, it's man that he made in his image. Not even tigers. I mean, they're cool. The truth of the matter is that we're, as human beings, made in God's image according to scripture. If you reject that, what you come up with is a really sad state of affairs. We're not made in God's image. We just happen to be here. Somehow we got a bunch of people that wrote this inspired book. I don't know why they did that. It's not really inspired, maybe.

That's an overstatement. Again, you have to second guess everything you say because if it's an absolute and it has a lot of authority, you're in trouble. Taking a look at the next passage I've got here, Luke 24, 25, and 27. I'm sorry, chapter 24, verses 25 and 27. And he said to them, O foolish men, Oh, this is Christ walking along on the road to Emmaus with two men that have been walking there. He says, O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.

Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, he, being Christ, explained to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures. So Christ walked with these people to Emmaus, starting in Genesis, going through the Prophets, going through the Psalms, going through the Scriptures with these men, explaining why the Messiah had to suffer. Because they had not understood that from the passages before. But He explained those things.

If those passages are in question, He wasted their time. It might have been a fun conversation. You're walking on the road, you've got nothing else to do. You know, you hope you don't get stuck behind a herd of donkeys or something, but you really, you don't have anything. What a waste of their time if he's going through all of the Old Testament and it's not reliable. It really becomes useless.

And for the believer today, let's take a look at 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. If all scripture is not inspired and is not reliable, then none of those statements are useful or true. Instead of correction of an exposed mindset through reproof. Okay? Reproof has to do with you revealing your mindset or your thoughts on a subject.

And an older believer or a theologically astute believer coming alongside and saying, well, let's take a look at what the scriptures say about that topic. Like my views on grace and justice. The pastor of the church said, well, Randy, let's take a look at what the Bible says. He came along beside me and he reproved me there in the congregation in a loving way enough that I was like, wow. This caused my head to spin and I had to do a lot of rethinking about my view on culture and justice.

But I had the scriptures there to guide me and direct me on what I needed to know. How about correction under a higher focus? Correction there is the idea of looking to the higher truth of scripture instead of the earthly corrupt thought we had looking to the higher heavenly truth that scripture reveals. Well, scripture doesn't reveal a higher heavenly truth if it's errant, not inspired, and is certainly not absolute truth. So this scripture has already become less valuable.

How about training in righteousness? Training or discipleship in righteousness? What is righteousness? How do you define righteousness? Righteousness outside of the context of scripture just means that we all agree that that's probably a better thing to do than something else.

You shouldn't kill me. That would be the righteous thing to do. Don't kill me. You know, looking out for ourselves. So you can't do that. Or, if this is true, we can be established in our adequacy in Christ and equipped for every good work. If the scripture is true, that as a believer I have hope that I'm gonna be conformed to the image of Christ.

Colossians 3.3, that I'm hidden in Christ in the heavenlies. That's hope. That's way more inspiring than just feeling happy thoughts about some Jewish guy that died two thousand years ago. Because he loved me, I hope. Maybe.

As you can see, you get really, really half-hearted about pretty much anything as soon as the truth and error merge together to be this wishy-washy theology. Are there any other questions? That was the last of the pages and I don't even think the bell has been rung yet, which is a record for me now. Any other questions, thoughts, experiences? Since experience is everything. I'm sorry, I said that out loud. I had an issue at my school.

My science teacher, she brought up the issue of looking at science and the Bible together. And that, you know, the Bible is 100% true, but we're not really sure how, but it will line up with science totally. And I got onto that subject and she believed that God started everything and then evolution took over from there. That's a pretty common view there. For those of you listening on the recording, John in class at a Christian school had a teacher that was teaching that God started everything and then evolution took over once God created the initial cells apparently. And actually I've heard lots of variations on that.

There are some that actually teach that God initiated the change in species, but he still did it in a natural way instead of the six-day progression. It's in our biological understanding of billions and billions of years. Again, the problem becomes the six-day sequence doesn't match up with the evolutionary theory. So if you're going to embrace If you're going to try to embrace both, you're going to come up with conflict.

And it just isn't going to be happy. A lot of atheist or agnostic scientists are critical of Christians that do that. They say, listen, you're knocking the foundation out from underneath yourselves. They won't even talk to people who want to do that. They're like, I'm not wasting my time with you. You're so illogical about your theology that there's no way you could be logical about science.

And that's secular people looking in on Christianity. So it's a big problem. And then of course there's Christians that are pretty critical that way too. We need to be gracious when we come in contact with people. The last thing I would say on this, and this really comes down to everything we've covered in the polemics class.

If you come into contact with somebody who is whatever ism or thing we're talking about, try to identify graciously where they're at and then find out if they're saved. You can be saved and be a Christian liberal because there's a lot of people that get saved, they understand the gospel, and then they go to their church that somebody brings them to, and get presented a lot of junk. And they don't know because they're babes. They don't know that they're drowning in poop. That it's bad theology and they're not growing. It's not fertilizer. It's junk.

So in the end, We need to graciously and lovingly, when we come in contact with somebody who is a Christian liberal, or likes televangelists, or is a Mormon, or goes to Church of Christ, or whatever they're part of, it's graciously and lovingly correcting, using the Scriptures like we looked at in 2 Timothy. To correct and reprove if they're believers. If they're not, let's go back to the Gospel. Some people you're not going to be able to hit the Gospel with, because they're going to reject Genesis 1.

So you need to go back there and be willing to patiently take them through what's there. That's why we need to be studying various areas as believers. I'm not spending huge amounts of time studying science, but I do keep my eye open for what's going on. Because somebody's going to come to me someday, maybe, and I can say maybe about that without feeling half-hearted, and discussing it.

Do you think a person can be saved and reject Genesis 1.1? I believe that someone can do that. It would be philosophically or illogically or logically inconsistent to do that, but I think that people will be able to do that, but they won't realize that they're cutting themselves off at the ankles, so to speak. I think that you could spend a long time discussing it with someone like that, and if they're truly believers and they're hungry about truth, they're going to come to a realization that they've done that.

But again, with people like Hugh Ross, and there's lots of Christians that have gathered around Hugh Ross, they've embraced what Hugh Ross has to say because it feels good to match up what you've learned in school all along, or what's being taught in schools. with the Bible, because you don't want to reject the Bible, because you like Christianity. You're fond of it, at least. And you feel like you can bring those things together. The problem is that you have to be inconsistent with your hermeneutics. So yes, I believe somebody could do that.

The gospel is the gospel. You believe the gospel. And some people only get a percent of the gospel at some point in time, and nobody's taken them through Genesis. You know, when you come up and you're in the airport and you're sitting next to somebody and the gospel message has an opportunity to be preached, you start in Genesis chapter 1 and then move to Exodus and then move to Leviticus and just go through the Bible until you get to the New Testament. You don't have time. So you hit them with the gospel. Let's talk about that. Do you sin? Yeah, I know. And they've just had a big fight with their whomever or whatever it is and they know that they've screwed up. They got caught for tax fraud or whatever. They know they sin. And then?

They respond to the gospel. And then they go back to their home in Southern California and they get hooked into some liberal church in Southern California. And I picked Southern California because there's some there that are prominent. Heidi and Helmut are sort of in that area, aren't they? See, there we go. There's some good people down there.

The thing is that they go back where they live and they get plugged into a church that teaches them a lot of junk and they don't know. Did they believe the gospel of Jesus Christ? Yes. Did they realize that what they're believing in Christ doesn't match up with what they're believing in the creation? Probably not.

So hopefully if you have a chance to share the gospel with somebody you'll exchange email addresses or phone numbers or addresses if they don't have any of those modern forms of communication. or you can get a homing pigeon, whatever, but you can interact with them, and you can discuss those things, and you can bring it up.

I've got a friend that I've had theological arguments with for about six years now, and in the last two weeks we finally had some good breakthroughs where we've been talking about things, and we just have to keep coming back to the issues and discussing it and finding the details where there's those various areas we disagree on, and discover what does the scripture say.

Because both of us have the scripture as our authority, we're able to embrace it. We can embrace one another, and we embrace the scriptures, and that's our source of truth. Let's close in prayer, because we're done, and then we can talk some more. Heavenly Father, we come before you, we're grateful for your word, we're grateful for your truth, and Lord, we're grateful for your mercy and your grace in our lives. We just praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.