Assorted Attacks on the Bible

You even hear people today talk about, listen for the voice of God, listen and God will speak to you. Train yourself to hear the voice of God.

That is not only ridiculous but dangerous. If you want to hear the voice of God, open your Bible and read what God has said. The minister spoke about a survey on divorce rates that he had seen.

The survey showed that people who identify as Christians got divorced at least as often as unbelievers. The minister's conclusion, Scripture is not sufficient to deal with all of life's issues. Or to put it another way, the Bible is simply not enough to help us with modern problems. Well, when people question the Bible's relevance or authority or clarity or its historical accuracy, do you know what to say? Today's message on Grace to You can help you with that. John MacArthur is equipping you to stand up for God's Word in his current study called Making a Case for the Bible. So now, here's John with the lesson. Everything we need to know about God and about us and about salvation and about the future and time and eternity is contained in the Scripture because everything that we need is in the Scripture.

Because we are saved by the Word of Truth, because we are sanctified by the truth, the Word of God, because we find our hope of glory in the Word, because all instruction for living is contained here. This then becomes the point of the enemy's constant and relentless assault. Now let me just talk to you a little bit, I'll give you more of a classroom approach of some of the things that are assaulting the Scripture that you just need to know about. Where do the attacks come from? Number one, the attacks come from critics. There are those on the scholastic side who still continually assault the Scripture. It all comes out of German liberalism, the Graf, Wellhausen higher criticism theory, tied to a recovery in Bartian neo-orthodoxy, left a legacy that swept through the major denominations, swept through the colleges, universities and seminaries and just smashed and crushed biblical inspiration. This has been confronted, it has been dealt with for years and years and years, flat out overt denial of Scripture as from God true, inerrant, inspired and authoritative.

And it goes on even today in the most bizarre and foolish ways. Whenever you turn on your television and you see some examination of the Bible, you're going to hear from these critics. I was contacted recently by the History Channel and asked if I would be willing to be a regular expert and a regular contributor to discussions of the Bible. I couldn't say no fast enough because I don't want to be hacked up, cut up, edited and stuck in between all of those people who deny Scripture. Perhaps the leading group that are always, always polled and interviewed whenever there's a discussion about the Bible are those who belong to what's called the Jesus Seminar, have you heard of that? The Jesus Seminar, they've garnered space in the silly religion sections of newspapers which normally provide a list of places to be sure and avoid. These self-appointed dead and blind are a number over 200, over 200 pseudo-scholars professing to be wise, they are fools.

They claim to be the scholastic authorities on Jesus and on the Bible. And they make their decisions about the Bible based upon a majority vote. They have a curious way to do it. They take a section of the Bible and they vote on it. Each participant drops a red bead into a ballot box for sayings that he or she believe are probably authentic.

In other words, it probably is true. Pink beads mean possibly authentic. Gray beads were used for sayings that they think have been altered by the disciples or early Christians. Black beads are the strongest, that's a no vote, used for passages deemed entirely fabricated or spoken by someone other than who the Bible says spoke it.

The results are astonishing. The group decreed that only 31 of the more than 700 sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels are really authentic. And 16 of those 31 are duplicates from parallel passages. More than half the sayings of Jesus received the dreaded black bead. All totaled, the panel utterly rejected 80 percent of the words that Scripture attributes to Jesus. Among the ousted passages, Matthew 5, 11, blessed are you when men cast insults at you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely on account of Me. And also Mark 10, 32 to 34 in which Jesus foretold His crucifixion.

They rejected all the apocalyptic section that is all about the future. They rejected everything in the gospel of John except one verse, verse 44 of chapter 4 which got a pink vote. And what it says is a prophet has no honor in his country. The seminar founder, Robert Funk, reckons most mainline scholars will agree with their dumping of John's gospel because he says, Jesus speaks regularly in adages or aphorisms or in parables or in witticisms created as a rebuff or retort in the context of dialogue and debate. It is clear He did not speak in long monologues of the type found in the gospel of John," end quote.

John would wonder just exactly how in the world he knows that. Thus decaying flotsam from the shipwreck of liberal theology continues to wash ashore. By the way, that which I quoted you is something I wrote some time back and you know, you're in trouble when you start quoting yourself. That's as bad as preaching such a good sermon you autograph your own Bible. What you've got in the Jesus seminar, what you've got in liberal theology is the radical protesters on university campuses in the sixties. They are now in the middle management positions and ascending to the top management in the university system. Their ideological creed has become the test of orthodoxy in most academic circles. Scholars are expected to march lockstep behind them and anybody who doesn't basically can lose his job in the religion or philosophy department or sociology department in a university. And there are sacred dogmas to these liberals, equality for women, homosexuality as an alternate lifestyle, environmental activism, animal rights, racial quotas, hardline anti-war doctrine and so on. And they will censor anybody who challenges any of those, especially Jesus...especially Jesus. One merely needs to look at the panel's decisions to understand what their real agenda is. The parables of the Good Samaritan, the unjust steward, the mustard seed, passages that are critical of the rich, commands to love one's enemies and verses that treat disciples...that entreat disciples to love one another, get the red beads.

Any time you help the poor, the downcast and the lowly, they buy into that. Passages they call for repentance affirm Jesus' deity, make difficult demands of disciples, speak of the need of redemption and the new birth, they are literally blackballed and they're not finished yet. They're going to stay at it, assaulting the Word and propounding this at every point where they can find someone who will listen to them. This is just one illustration of this attack on the Bible that comes from liberals.

We could say a lot more about it, but let's move on a little bit. We could talk about the new perspective on Paul which assaults the New Testament understanding of the doctrine of justification. We could talk about the openness of God which attacks the very nature of God.

Perhaps I should say a word about that. Open theism is a new liberal agenda item that starts with the denial that God perfectly knows or controls the future. Open theism is the idea that God is open to the future. He has no idea what the future holds. He has no clue.

He's just like you and I. He's trying to react to what is going on and He has no more foreknowledge of anything than you or I do because it hasn't happened, therefore He can't know about it. He doesn't know what's going to happen until people make choices. He doesn't know what the choices will be and He's responding like a very, very adept chess player doing his best to accomplish his will in counter-response to the moves of all of us.

This is a very, very popular widespread developing viewpoint. It attacks the very nature of God Himself. It attacks the deity of God. God is not the God He claims to be.

He does not speak truly of Himself when He says He knows the end from the beginning, therefore God is a liar and it is a rehearsal of exactly what we saw in the Garden. Every assault by these critics that denies any portion of Scripture is a battle that has to be fought and a point at which we have to defend the authority of Scripture. But you have not only assaults from critics, you have assaults from cultists...cultists. And this is just...I'm not going to say a lot about this...Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, Theosophy, Unitarianism, all the way down the line to bizarre and strange smaller cults, these people who do not accept the Word of God and its accurate interpretation but want to add to the Word of God the writings of some person, some angel, whether it's Joseph Smith or whether it's Mary Baker, Eddie Patterson, Glover, Frye, she had a husband issue, obviously, in Christian Science, or whether it's Judge Rutherford or Annie Besant or anybody else that contributed to these cults and isms. They assault the Word of God relentlessly with these documents that twist and pervert Scripture authored by Satan himself. Then there are attacks when you say that the Bible is not the end of Revelation, this is not all that God has said, He's saying more, He's giving new revelations, new visions, voices from heaven, trips to heaven, trips to hell, mystical hyper subjectivity, intuitive, secretive, mystical interpretations, you are assaulting the Scripture...you are assaulting the Scripture. It is so critical for us to understand that we have no further revelation from God than that which is written in Scripture...no further revelation from God than that which is written in Scripture. You even hear people today talk about, listen for the voice of God, listen and God will speak to you, train yourself to hear the voice of God.

That is not only ridiculous but dangerous. If you want to hear the voice of God, open your Bible and read what God has said. There's a fourth attack that I would just mention to you, just to give you some idea of the landscape, the attack that comes from the culture, I was reading a book by one of the emerging church guys and he was asked the question, do you take homosexuals into your church? Do you allow homosexuals to be church members?

And his response was, sure, we also have people who are overweight and people who like chocolate. So you take homosexuality and put it at the level of being overweight and liking chocolate because you want to redefine the church and the Bible in terms that are acceptable to the culture. So there's always that attempt to twist, to subvert, to alter the Scripture because the culture is putting certain demands on us. And along that line, I just want to mention something to you that I went over with the men in the seminary and I even talked to the college kids about it last year, and that is in the new emerging church movement, the trend is to say, and this really accommodates the culture big time, that the Bible is not clear.

Boy, that is a really comfortable spot to land. Well, we believe the Bible, we love the Bible, but let's be honest, it's not clear. We can't really know what it means by what it says. We can't really be dogmatic, we can't really be sure that we can interpret it rightly. It's a really ancient book, there are all kinds of interpretations. It can say, well the Bible is true and God gave us the Bible, but we really haven't got any idea what the Bible means.

So you have people saying things like this. Here's another somewhat well-known evangelical who's changed his view and he says, quote, "'Certitude is often idolatrous, I have been forced to give up certitude.'" If there's a foundation in Christian theology, it's not found in Scripture. Theology must be a humble human attempt to hear God, never about rational approaches to texts. You can't go to the text and use your mind and get the truth.

You have to be much more humble than that. Theology is a humble human attempt. You can't find a foundation for Christian theology in the Scripture.

Why? Because it's not comprehensible. You have writers coming along writing prolific material about the Bible and basically coming up with new ways to understand everything as if everybody has always had it wrong until now, which causes one to ask, well if everybody else is wrong and through history they've always had it wrong, why would it be that you're right? Which feeds again the mentality that we can never quite get it straight. And when you think about the Word of God, you have to understand that the Bible claims for itself clarity...clarity.

Let me just give you some thoughts about that as we wrap up. Romans 1, if the sinner is held responsible for the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Law written in his heart and conscience, Romans 2, so that he is without excuse, that is if he is held responsible before God, culpable before God, guilty before God for rejecting that revelation which is manifest in creation and conscience, if he's without excuse at that point, then believe me, he is without excuse for rejecting that revelation which God has written down in his Word. The sinner is responsible. Scripture is clear. Scripture is necessarily plain because God its author, creator, redeemer and judge speaks plainly or he cannot accomplish his redemption. If he does not speak plainly, then people cannot know what they are to believe and how they are to respond. If he does not speak plainly, they cannot know of salvation. They cannot know of judgment to come. They cannot know of heaven and hell. They cannot know of sin and righteousness.

But they must know and they are held responsible to know. Scripture yields its meaning to ordinary reason and literal sense. There are no secret hidden implicit mystery meanings. It is everywhere called light. It is even light to those who reject it, John 3.

They hate the light and they run from the light because it is light. Scripture is clear, not only because it is manifestly clear in and of itself and clear to the reasonable mind, but because the Spirit of God illuminates it and by grace the Spirit makes what is incomprehensible comprehensible to the one upon whom the Spirit moves. To give you an illustration of the clarity of Scripture, I would only say this, the Old Testament Scripture which may seem to some people a bit unclear is in fact so clear that God holds people and has always held them responsible for what was revealed in the Old Testament. Jesus Himself, for example, in His teaching, in His conversations, in His dialogues and disputes and debates, never ever one time said to the Jews, I understand your confusion. The Old Testament is really hard, very difficult and often unclear.

He never says that...never. He is speaking to first century people. They are a thousand years from David, they are fifteen hundred years from Moses and they are two thousand years after Abraham. And Jesus still assumes that they're able to read and rightly interpret the Old Testament Scripture. If it were impossible to understand the Scriptures for some people who were removed a thousand years away, or two thousand years away, as they're telling us it is for those of us now removed two thousand years from the reviting of the New Testament, then we would expect that Jesus would say something like, I see how your problem arose.

But He never says that. And whether He is speaking to scholars, Pharisees and scribes, or to common people, He always assumes that they are to blame for their misunderstanding of any teaching in the Scripture. Again and again He says to them, have you not read? Have you never read? Have you never read the Scriptures? He says to them, you're wrong because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Your problem is you don't search the Scriptures, they are they which speak of Me.

Would you also go so far as to say this? It is even to be understood by uninitiated Gentiles. Paul writing to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 10 says the Old Testament Scriptures were given for our instruction even as Gentiles. And when the Lord was on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, He opened the Old Testament, the Law of the Prophets and the Holy Writings and He explained to them the things concerning Himself which they ought to have already understood. Think about the New Testament epistles. You say, well the New Testament is really hard.

Is that right? New Testament epistles were not written to theologians, they were not written to church leaders, they were not written to scholars, they were written to congregations, to the church of God at Corinth, to the churches of Galatia, to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi and so forth, always to the churches, to the lowest common denominator, the person who was a new believer in Jesus Christ. And Paul assumes in every letter and so does Peter and so does James and so does John, so does Jude that his hearers will understand exactly what he writes.

For example, in Colossians 4.16 Paul says, when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans and see that you read the letter from Laodicea, spread the letters around and read them all in every church. So you have to understand that first century Christians were held responsible for an understanding of the Scripture. First century Gentile Christians were held responsible for an understanding of New Testament Scripture based on Old Testament Scripture. The New Testament epistles are written to churches that had dominant Gentile converts with no Old Testament background, coming right out of paganism with no knowledge of the Old Testament whatsoever. And they had the responsibility to understand and to obey. And there are always attacks finally on the Scripture from carnal wisdom. People look at the Bible and they say, well, it's not reasonable, I don't like the doctrine of election, I don't like the doctrine of eternal punishment, I'm going to trump God.

The attacks from carnal wisdom, I can't accept that, dangerous stuff. We bow the knee completely to the Word of God. We stand in defense of it by lifting it up and letting it defend itself. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to get past all this negative attacks in which we sort of set the issues in view and we're going to look at how the Bible exalts its own authority.

Let's pray. Thank You for the Word, what can we say? We have been in it for years and years and years and years and it vindicates itself every time. It is alive and powerful and pure and true and penetrating. It is destructive to those who reject it.

It is constructive to those who accept it. It is the living Word. We thank You for Your Word. We rest all our hope in it.

All our faith is based upon its truth. May we be not just defenders but proclaimers of its glorious truth and may we be obedient to it. We thank You for the treasure that it is, that its treasury is inexhaustible, its riches are limitless and always available to those who will open its pages prayerfully, carefully, study it.

We thank You for it. We pray that in this day when so many are assaulting Your Word, there might be a great movement back to lifting it up. You've exalted Your Word, Psalm 138 2 says, even as high as Your own name, and we do the same, thankful for it, for in it we know all that You want us to know, all that we need to know so that we can give You glory.

For this we offer our praise in Christ's name, Amen. It's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, equipping you to give a defense for the veracity and authority of God's Word, Making a Case for the Bible. That's the title of John's current study here on Grace to You. Well today John talked about attacks on scripture that come from multiple directions, from liberalism or from cults and so on, and the point to keep in mind is this, the Bible's best defense is the Bible itself. And with that said, I'd like to remind you about our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible. The Study Bible explains virtually every passage of scripture. Each page includes the Bible text on top and explanatory notes on the bottom, about 25,000 study notes in all. The MacArthur Study Bible comes in multiple English and non-English translations. The latest English edition features the Legacy Standard text of scripture, it's a helpful refinement of the New American Standard Bible.

Whichever you choose, the MacArthur Study Bible is a great tool to help you become a capable student and a competent defender of God's Word. Order your copy when you contact us today. You can call us at 800-55-GRACE or order from our website, that address is gty.org. The MacArthur Study Bible comes in various covers from hardcover to premium goatskin. Prices are reasonable, shipping is free.

To see all of the options available to you and to place your order, visit gty.org or order when you call us at 800-55-GRACE. And remember, you can own John's current study, Making a Case for the Bible. It's a great complement to the MacArthur Study Bible and it's available for free. Find the lessons in MP3 format at our website, gty.org. Also transcripts of those messages are available at the website and they're also free of charge. In fact, all of John's sermons, over 3,600 messages, are free online and you can start downloading today.

Just log on to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for making this broadcast part of your day. Meet us again tomorrow as John MacArthur continues helping you defend scripture against the attacks of the world. It's another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.