The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, Lesson 36 continued
Mike Doyle · Nov 6, 2022
Holy Spirit (2021-23), No. 86
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261929958

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

Okay, we are in lesson 36. Did everybody get 37 and 38? Okay, we are in lesson 36. And we had made it through the first couple of questions. And this group of questions here has a lot to do with scripture and I was listening to an audio, video audio this week from Duluth, from the conference they have every year, and the pastor's conference was on dispensational theology, and the first guy up, Everybody know what the word hermeneutics means?

What's the word hermeneutics mean? You see, a guy that goes to seminary just can't talk about inspiration of God's Word. He's got to come up with his own word, hermeneutics. And there are guys around that use that word all the time, and it's one of those words like, I wonder what he's talking about kind of a word. What does hermeneutics mean?

It's how you interpret the Bible. It can be personal, it can be based on preconceived notions, it can be based on, well, I think I'm a dispensationalist, well, maybe I'm Reform, and my hermeneutics is based on what I think the word says. So, you know, no one's going to argue with us, or argue about the issue that no scripture is entitled to personal interpretation.

We trust the Spirit of God to reveal to us what He meant when He wrote it. And that one of the things that we're seeing here with what Rideout writes is how precise and how exact the Holy Spirit is. And some interesting questions I think we'll cover today.

So just quickly, We looked at 1 Timothy 4.1, talked about what the word expressi or explicit means. And then we answered the question, does the scripture contain the word of God plus other matters? And the answer to that was, yeah, it does. But it's precise in what God wants to reveal to us. So today we're going to start in question three. What does it mean, or what does Rideout say? What does it mean?

Scripture cannot be broken. It cannot be set aside. And we Those who are in one theological camp can look it up. People in another theological camp can say to them, well, you set some things aside, or you didn't, or you didn't. So what Rite Out says, a scripture cannot be broken or set aside. It's simply an obvious explanation, they might say, of no great importance, yet our Lord declares it cannot be ignored. It's part of a perfect whole. I like that. The Bible is a perfect whole. So he goes on to apply it to his own position. How much more was it true of him, capital H, whom the Father had sanctified and sent into the world?

Are there people that want to break the scriptures? In other words, they want to make them say something they don't say? Sure, all the time. The most obvious one is if you're not a believer and someone will say, well the Bible says that God helps those who help themselves. Really? Where does it say that? You know, it doesn't say that.

So, Charlie Clough used to talk about how the content of the Bible flies in formation, and he gave the example of the B-52 bomber and the flight formation that they took, and that each plane was necessary in keeping the whole connected and safe. And the moment one of those planes veered out of formation, it became subjected to greater danger, right? He said that's how the doctrines of scripture, and we could say the whole of the Bible, works. It works in formation.

The moment you dissect it and try to peel something off is the moment that your theology starts to break down, right? Yeah, and there's a ton of good examples in the military. If you're a guy in a platoon carrying a rifle, The idea is that you do what you're told and you probably will survive. If you wander off in your own mind or your own thinking that I'm going to go do this for whatever reason, you're probably going to die. My college roommate was, after graduation, he was a First Lieutenant in the Marine Corps and he had a combat unit and he went to Vietnam. And I was with him the night before they shipped out. We were in Las Vegas of all places.

And I said, what do you hope to accomplish? He said, I want to bring every one of them back alive. He said, they all hate me because I train them and train them and train them to where they just hate me. But I'm doing it because I know training, they can survive.

And when they came back, they had one wounded out of 76 guys. That's a Marine combat unit to go to Vietnam and come back after 13 months with only one casualty that didn't die is huge. But it was that training. And so the Air Force, airplane formation, the same kind of thing. The Word of God is like that. Every little piece of it fits where it fits.

Donna? What about the thought that, you know, like here we focus primarily on on what is written to us as believers. I'm not as much focused like on the Old Testament. What are your thoughts on that? If the Bible as a whole. As a whole. Yeah. I shouldn't answer your question with a question. What can I add on to that?

Because you know the other thing is Not only do we look at basically Paul's epistles as our direction. For me, I started John because that's the deity of Christ and go through. But the other is when you say it can't be broken. I think of, so, you know, same people look at the scripture and they have covenant theology. Same people look at it, reform theology.

The Baptists, you know, you have to be baptized to do this. Is that scripture being broken? We teach from that, not as much in the Old Testament, although I think going through the Old Testament to understand the New Testament, it's what the tutor was to point us to Christ. So all the previous is to point us to Christ, but now that we have Christ, we don't need the tutor anymore. we teach out of Paul's epistles. Yeah. Primarily. But, you know, what about reform? You know, all these ones.

Is that breaking the scripture? You know, it's interesting, because like in our Wednesday Night Bible Study, I don't know how we swerved into it, but we did Genesis and Exodus. And what we found was, we found incredible grace there that we didn't expect to find.

How gracious God was with all these slums. wanted him to do things like Abraham, those people lived under grace and promise. And so you see the continuity of God's temperament and demeanor in terms of what he wants, what is he trying to do. And it's consistent from the Old Testament into the New Testament. Now he may have changed principles But the object is still the same. And I'm more and more convinced that God created man to be with him for all eternity.

And he started out with Adam and created him in such a way that he could be with God. He could interact with him, he could walk in the cool of the day with him, and that eventually he would be wherever God was you know, going to be with him and there would be a fellowship between creator and creature. Loving fellowship. Well, you know, because Adam sinned now, that created, there was a cut off of that relationship.

Yet God is the one that went and found Adam in the garden and he's always the one that's pursuing because he still wants to do that. Then you get to the New Testament and you get to Paul's epistles and you learn these doctrines of identification and position and all. It's all designed for fellowship. That's what it's all designed for. The consistency about that goal has not changed from Genesis 1 to the end of Revelation. We've gone through Revelation a couple times and we're still going through it. It's the same issue.

The Lord Jesus said, I want you to be with me where I am. He even said to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise. Well, everybody focuses on the paradise part of it. and doesn't think about the with me part of it. With me is the whole point.

I think the other thing which I think surprised me until, you know, figuring out identification truths and other things is, you know, I still... It didn't make sense with Adam and God walking through the garden and He says, it's not good for you to be alone. And I always, how is that possible? You're sitting, you're walking with God in this Garden of Eden, but you're alone.

So He created woman to be the partner. But ultimately, it was to have now the fellowship we have now, which is one-to-one. I mean, we are In Christ, we have that same life. Yeah, which is not in the garden. It was the creator and creation. Right. And now we are in Christ and we have that intimacy of John 17 and, you know, share his glory with us and all those things. It's a great thing to where we are now versus even what Adam had walking in the garden. Way more, way better. It's so much better. Yeah. And that again shows his love for us. He wanted to have that, you know, one-on-one, same-life relationship. Right. So think about that for a minute.

He took Eve out of Adam, created another being, but the two were supposed to come together, right? So what he does now You see, he recreates each one of us in Christ. And when you go through something where Paul says, well, there's no male or female, bond or free, and he goes through that whole list of stuff, and you think, oh, yeah, in Christ, I'm none of those things. Well, what am I? Well, I'm now perfectly suited out by God to be one with Christ. Wow. Wow. And he's always been after that. And so back to the issue of the Old Testament, or I think a better issue may be legalism.

God gave the law to who? Well, the Bible says that he gave it to the nation of Israel and only them. Why did he do it? Does it tell you in the Bible why he did it? He wanted, again, why Israel? Why did he start this family of Jews with Abraham and then you get to Egypt and going through the Red Sea and out and Moses getting the law.

He's still trying to do the same thing. He wants a people that will live and function after him. They'll be representative of him because they know him. Right? So the Too many people look at the law as, well, if I do this or I don't do that, it's like a road sign where God was really saying to the Jews that you're going to be my people and here's how my people live. This is what they do. And this is what they don't do. That's really what the law is.

So you have a reformer in 2023 who wants to put us back under the law. Has he broken the scriptures? I think he has, because he hasn't rightly divided it. He doesn't understand that God didn't do something one way and didn't do something another way at a later time, still to carry out the principle he's always had.

If you know anything about spiritual growth, you know that primarily what it's designed to do is make us dependent on Him. Can I add something there? Go. I think it's interesting because if I understood Donna's question, Why do we spend so much time at Holly Hills in the New Testament and not so much in the Old? And the answer is that we do, right? But one of the things that we think about especially, I mean, having been involved in chronological teaching from an evangelical standpoint for years, doing it with the teens on Thursday night, in fact, most of our Monday night study is spent in the Old Testament with regards to who we are in the first Adam.

So what I'm saying is that there is a chronological progression and need for the understanding of the Old Testament in order to lead you to salvation. You have to know you're lost. What was the problem? You need to understand sin. You need to understand where sin came from, etc. But as we start to get more mature in our understanding of the scripture, we start to rely on Paul interpreting the Old Testament for us because that's what he does. He quotes the scripture in the Old Testament and then he explains how that functions in the church age, right?

And so we end up just gravitating towards that interpretation of the Old Testament because it's divine and it cannot be broken. But the value of having understood those core doctrinal truths and how those work together and they cannot be broken is a very important lesson. And it's something that we spent the majority of our kids' young lives teaching them the Old Testament doctrine of how the pieces of time fit together in terms of God's progressive revelation.

And if you don't go back, you're never going to understand God's progressive revelation. I agree. But they won't probably be spending their mature Christian life in the book of Hosea. I mean, they're going to be grasping onto Paul's understanding of spiritual growth.

And there's so much beauty in terms of what and how human these prophets were and relating with the stories. The stories are so rich and they can't be excluded. It's just that when we get to that place where we're really in need, we gravitate to Paul because that's what he was given to do. He was to explain who we are in Christ.

And that is a totally different perspective looking back than it is taking a chronological way of thinking and moving forward. I'm just going to build on this, the movie's going to eventually get to the theme, and the plot's going to thicken, and then boom. Anyway, just some thoughts there. No, that's a good thought. Those are good thoughts.

The viewpoint that the New Testament, especially Pauline epistles, are written to the believer in this dispensation, but all of the Bible's for him. But it's not all written to him. I was going to add, you know, the entirety of the Bible gives us the context for who we are in Christ. Even remembering that Christ is the seed going all the way back to Genesis 3.

That's who we're in, right? Well, and I really think that along with that line of thinking, again back to when we studied a couple of years ago Genesis and Exodus, we saw the gospel message in Genesis. It's there. Identification is there. Grace is certainly there. And so you see we're, you know, I was overwhelmed by the fact of how gracious God was and what a schmuck man was.

He would not respond to God. He wouldn't do it. Even the patriarchs are these bozos that can't get it right no matter what they do. Imagine God coming to you in your living room. I'll pick on Courtney. Here comes the Lord. He goes into Courtney's family room and he says, I'm going to make a great nation out of you, right? So what's the first thing Courtney does? He sells his wife to the king of Egypt. Not cool. But it seems so right. It seems so right. I got to tell you a funny story. Everyone was just listening to that. She was coloring on the bed. And then you said some of his wife in Egypt, she just burst out. So I mean, you look at these guys and you think, wow, and yet God is gracious.

I mean, they suffer consequences, but If they believe him, he stays with them right all the way to the end. And look what he does with Abraham by the time he gets to the end of his life. He said, I want you to take the son of promise up to the mountain and sacrifice him. And Abraham never questions God and off we go. And I think Isaac was probably 30 years old. 25 years old when this happened. I mean he wasn't a little boy who was tagging along with his dad, and he was in. Okay, let's go.

And then you get the wonderful guy Jacob. I mean, Jacob is a snake. He's always cheating people and lying to people and trying to manipulate the circumstances, yet God brings him all the way through. all the way through to where at the end of his life he's blessing that his 12 sons are the ones that are going to be the heads of the tribes of Israel. It's just amazing. That gives me hope and should give you hope that if you screw up, it isn't the end for you. Where if you're under a law system, it could be. Let's race over to question four.

Why are the most obscure incidentals in the Word so important? Rydoff says these might be called incidentals in no way necessary for the general accuracy of Scripture, but you will find there are no such things as incidentals in the Word of God. And, Courtney, you've been talking about what's the guy's name that you went and listened to him and said, Josh McDowell, how all of these latest discoveries of antiquity and scrolls and things all line up with God's Word. They don't refute it, they line up with it. And, you know, things that are just supportive information. Right out says, how all this accords with our theme, the literal inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Let's talk about that just for a second.

Why can somebody like me, or somebody like you, who your whole Biblical training is Sunday school, your own study of God's Word, books you've read, Bible studies you go to. Why can we trust God's Word, or why can we trust God to make sure that we get it right? Maybe a better question is, what is the element of learning Scripture that we really can put our trust in, in terms of I'm going to get this right. I'm going to know what it says. What's the one, I'm using the word element, what's the one element? The Holy Spirit. He's the one, number one that wrote it, knows what God's mind is about it, and the one who can reveal to you what he meant.

Now, and I think that's true for every single believer and the more I get involved with like the church and how it functions and my belief that God does everything out of the local church. He doesn't do things on a denominational level or a papal level or anything. He does it locally in a local church with just ordinary people.

And so we can trust Him about that. Can I trust that if I have a conversation with Donna in my living room some night, and we're ferreting out something one of us read in God's Word, or something somebody said about God's Word, that at the end of the day we'll come out with the truth? I think we can trust God for that. I really do. I think that we can. I'd even go less, more granular.

I think it's by the individual first, and then it's by the body, you know, the local body. That's where, you know, we had some friends over and they say about all, you know, the politics and where we're going, you know, and this and that. And, you know, they said God is judging our nation. It's like, does God judge our nation? No, it's individuals now. And so yes, we as a course, we may be as a nation based on individuals going downhill, but he deals with us on an individual basis. And I think that's the foundation. And then the local body has impact based on, you know, individuals that form the body here. And again, the body concept, legs, arms, fingers, toes. We're all different and and used in different ways, right?

But it starts with the individual and the Holy Spirit working on that individual, you know, and then then you know, I think kind of going back I still you know, how does how do you have we reconcile again the you know reformist the covenant the you know, the teaching or the you know, the Catholic Church and You know, and I, and I believe the basics are there that have belief in Christ and they're, they're going to be believers, but they just don't have the right teaching to grow. And, and, you know, the reformers may be, you know, doing this or the covenant that he's there, he or she's thinking that they've got all this, you know, we're going to get the land and we're going to get this and we're going to get that. And, you know, they aren't growing, you know, because are they rightly divining the word?

Yeah, and you know God allows that you know, that's the thing that's you know, it's like God allows it Why does why isn't identification true on every church? Why isn't it just broadcast? Why don't we have to make a church of? Identification why you know somehow he's allowed this and I just go back to he works on individuals first I and I think you're your metaphor of the body of Christ in each individual and has a certain function in the body of Christ and they're all different.

Notice, we don't have two hearts or four arms or stuff like that. So, we all contribute. Now, how much time do you have if you want to talk about how do you get air? And we'll talk as we go through, we'll talk more about air. Where does it come from? And I think What we've been studying in 2 Corinthians, you can see it right there.

That the body of Christ, which is as you've described, and through the door comes somebody who is a false teacher. And he's got all of the accoutrements of a worldly, likable, intelligent, capable person. And he doesn't directly attack, but he just bumps you a little. Just a little. And you can see it happening in Corinthians better than most other books, because in Galatians it's pretty obvious. You know, the guys that were legalists, they were banging on it. But in Corinthians it's way more subtle.

And especially when you have a society like the Greeks. One of the things I noticed in the Roman, we were there, the whole culture is designed to get you away from Christ under a religious umbrella. And the Romans had all, you know, every society has a deity or deities of some kind, but they admired worldly things.

They did not admire the God of the universe. And Paul the Apostle is the one who brings them the Word, but like we said, most of Paul's epistles are corrective. And what Paul is dealing with in 2 Corinthians, or has been dealing with, is that here's how you identify these guys that have come in, he calls them the super apostles. Here's how you identify them, and here's what they're saying, and here's why it doesn't line up with God's Word.

The subtlety of it is it becomes all about them. I was listening to a guy this week on a video audio. He was doing a great job, but about halfway through it I thought, you know, this speaker, it's all about him. It's not really about the Lord Jesus. It's all about how well he knows what's up.

You know, and, oh, I wrote, I got books coming out, and I mean, you know, and I'm thinking, why don't you just stick to what she said you were going to talk about in God's word and stay there. I don't care how many books you've written, and I'm not going to buy one. And I don't care if you've got nine degrees and you have a ministry here and another one over there. I don't care about that.

I'm listening. Because I thought when I started that you were a man that could expand my understanding of the Lord Jesus, and you didn't do it. It's about you. And I think you see that. You see it all over the place. I listened to a sermon from the Brave Church about two months ago. It's all about the guy, the sermon, the sermonizer. You know, I think people who go to churches like that And they're actually very, very resentful. They're too low to accept whatever they say. Presumably, they want to get in the banner and whatnot. And they're not looking for anything else except that. Yeah. And Paul's second letter to Timothy addresses people that are foolish like that.

The only reason I'm going to accept a lie is because I don't know what the truth is. I really don't know. If I don't really understand my salvation is based on my faith in the person and work of Christ only, and that it's grace, then when someone like John MacArthur comes along and says, you've got to also make Christ the Lord of your life, you're not settled on the first, you're going to buy was that J. Vernon McGee said, what's this saying? That if you don't believe something, you'll fall for anything?

Anyway, I just noticed the time. Well, we romped through two questions today. At this rate, JD's going to be old by the time we We were thinking that J. Vernon McGee's quote there was actually a country song. Well, I'm not surprised. All right, let's close here.

Father, how we thank you. We thank you for your word, we thank you for your spirit, and we thank you for, as you work diligently to keep us all pointed at the Lord Jesus Christ that we may grow in the knowledge and grace of him only. We pray in his precious name. Amen.