In difference to Scripture is not a mark of regeneration. In difference to Scripture is not a mark of salvation.
In difference to Scripture is a mark of spiritual death. And I believe that in all generations, including this one, God's true church, the genuinely redeemed, are desperately hungry for the truth. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. If you're a Christian, the Word of God is an all-you-can-eat buffet of endless spiritual nutrition. It's the sustenance you need in order to know the will of God and grow to be more like Christ.
And with that said, let me ask a serious question. If Scripture is that important, what are you doing to proclaim it and defend it when it's challenged? And if you're indifferent to the Bible, what does that say about the state of your soul? Those two questions get to the core of John MacArthur's current series here on Grace to You.
It's a study he calls Making a Case for the Bible. I think you'll be spurred to action as John shows you the tragic example of a nation that failed to truly take hold of God's Word when God gave it to them. So follow along as John begins the lesson. What is true about the true believer is that he loves the Word of God. The true Christian loves the Word of God. In the New Testament we find this again and again indicated to us in the language of our Lord.
For example, in the eighth chapter of John, he says in verse 31, if you abide in My Word, if you find your place, your resting place, your living place, your dwelling place, your settling place in My Word, then you are truly disciples of Mine, real disciples, mathetes alethos, genuine disciples live and abide in the Word because it is their only spiritual food. In John 14 and verse 15, Jesus said, if you love Me, you will keep My commandments. There will not only be a love for the law of God, there will be obedience to that law from the heart with joy and eagerness. First John chapter 5, whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him. By this we know we love the children of God when we love God and do His commandments. How can you tell when you're a child of God? You love the law of God and you obey His commandments.
Contrast that with 2 Thessalonians. 2 Thessalonians reminds us that there are people who perish, verse 10 of chapter 2, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. Being saved is the equivalent of loving the truth.
If you are saved, you love the truth so that people are said to be damned because they do not love the truth. We are like babies, Peter says in 1 Peter 2, 1 to 3, who desire the pure milk of the Word the same way a baby desires milk. Babies do not have diverse appetites. All a baby wants is milk, milk, milk, milk, milk.
They don't want variety, they want milk. And we're the same way. True believers know that it is the Word of God and the Word of God alone that keeps them alive and strong and produces blessing and joy and power and strength and effectiveness. On one occasion in John chapter 6, a group of disciples abandoned Jesus after He had some hard things to say. And Jesus looked at those who remained and said, Will you also go away?
And Peter gave the great response, For those who remain, to whom shall we go? You and you alone have the words of life. We find our life in the Word of God. It is called the Word of life. And those who are spiritually alive love the Word.
They love to feed on the Word. They hunger for the Word of God because it alone provides the truth that brings them satisfaction. Indifference to Scripture is not a mark of regeneration. Indifference to Scripture is not a mark of salvation.
Indifference to Scripture is a mark of spiritual death. And I believe that in all generations, including this one, God's true church, the genuinely redeemed, are desperately hungry for the truth. They want the Word fed to them. They want the Word taught to them, preached to them. They want the Word explained to them with all its richness and depth.
But that's not what they get most of the time. Serious study of the Word of God, diligent, hard labor in the text of Scripture, in the original languages and racing throughout the analogia scriptura, the analogy of Scripture as it explains itself across the sixty-six books, the diligence required for that to bring up the rich treasure is not the interest of most pop Christian personalities. It was years ago that Jim Packer characterized evangelicalism in a way that I found to be exactly the way it could be characterized today.
Nothing much has changed in the several decades since he originally wrote this. This he wrote in the preface to a reprint of Richard Baxter's Christian Directory. This is what Packer said in characterizing evangelicalism. He said, it is egocentric, zany, simplistic, degenerate, half-magic spell casting which is all the world sees when it watches religious television or looks directly at the professed evangelical community. He further said this, our how-tos, how to have a wonderful family, great sex, financial success in a Christian way, how to cope with grief, life passages, crises, fears, frustrating relationships and what not else, give us formula to be followed by a series of supposedly simple actions on our part in the manner of painting by numbers. And he was saying all that because he was comparing it to this massive tome written by the Puritan Richard Baxter that is well beyond a million words, applying the Scripture to Christian living. He further said, Baxter's work is a high level of intelligent, Bible-based, theologically integrated wisdom with unfailing, unimpaired clarity that is dazzling to the mind. Where do people go today for teaching in the Word of God that is dazzling to the mind? Where do they go for teaching of the Word of God which is highly accurate, intelligent, challenging, theologically rich, sound, integrated, clear in its truthfulness?
R.C. Sproul suggests in a current issue of Table Talk that our culture is embedded in proud mediocrity. We're mediocre and we're proud of it. There are still hard-working scholars, hard-working scholastic minds in science and technology and research of various kinds. There are still those who are applied to very formidable tasks and problems and they make a tedious and long-term effort to solve whatever the problem is. But they're becoming more and more the exception. We're not producing those kinds of people at the rate we used to in our educational system because our culture has redefined education. The culture has in general settled for what is quick and what is cheap, junk music, junk art, junk literature, junk thinking.
Our culture is far too easily satisfied, far too easily entertained, excellence, truth and beauty which used to be the triad of human virtues have been replaced by funny, cool and cute. And we get mediocrity by the boatload because we want it. Having welcomed it with open arms, we don't just accept mediocrity, we crave it.
And accommodating the culture is the church. You want mediocrity? We'll package it for you. We'll give you mediocrity. We'll give you evangelical mediocrity. We'll eliminate the transcendent. We'll do away with the biblical. We'll remove the theological. We'll take away the profound demanding truth of Scripture and we will feed the mediocrity hungered masses with mediocrity. And in so doing, we will legitimize that mediocrity and that superficiality that defines our culture.
So you have people who don't take anything profound seriously. They have not only found a place in the culture, they have found a place in the church. Pastors now are more concerned about being funny and being cool and being okay. And they're committed to cleverness and creativity and style and not interested in the demanding rigors of searching the Word of God and proclaiming the depths of its glorious truths because they think the culture needs what the culture wants.
How far have we fallen? J. I. Packer wrote another introduction, he writes a lot of them. This one was an introduction to Puritan theology. He said this, it does not seem possible to deny that the Puritans were the strongest just where evangelical Christians today are the weakest. Here were men of outstanding intellectual power in whom the mental habits fostered by sober scholarship were linked with a flaming zeal for God and a minute acquaintance with a human heart.
All their work reveals this unique fusion of gifts and graces. Where the Puritans called for order, discipline, depth and thoroughness, our temper is one of casual haphazardness and restless impatience. We crave for stunts, novelties and entertainments. We've lost our taste for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplined meditation and unspectacular hard work in our study. Again where Puritanism had God and His glory as its unifying center, our thinking revolves around ourselves as if we were the hub of the universe. And so he writes, in evangelizing we preach the gospel without the law and faith without repentance, stressing the gift of salvation and glossing over the cost of discipleship.
No wonder so many professed conversions fall away. And then he writes, in teaching on the Christian life, our habit is to depict it as a path of thrilling feelings rather than of working faith and of supernatural interruptions rather than of rational righteousness. And in dealing with the Christian experience, we dwell constantly on joy, peace, happiness, satisfaction and rest with no balancing reference to the divine discontent of Romans 7, the fight of faith in Psalm 73, or any of the burdens of responsibility and providential chastenings that fall to the lot of the child of God. The spontaneous jollity of the carefree extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living and jolly extroverts in our churches are encouraged to become complacent in carnality while saintly souls of less sanguine temperament are driven almost crazy because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner," end quote.
We're in a very difficult state. Those people who profess to be Christians, who profess to be evangelists trying to reach this society are giving this culture the mediocrity it wants and turning away from the Word of God. Either they are not Christians, or they are the most carnal of carnal Christians. It's one thing to be carnal while studying the Word of God, it's another to have your carnality set the Bible aside. And I actually see this trend as a judgment from God. You remember that when God judges, one form of His judgment is to give people over to the sins that they choose and to let them live with the consequences of those choices. Romans 1, God gave them over, gave them over, gave them over, repeated three times. They didn't want His Word, they didn't want His truth and God gave them over to what they did want. This is the wrath of God's abandonment. And I think one of the forms of that is this, if people do not want the Word of God, then God will turn them over to the course that is inevitable for that rejection.
There's a great illustration of this. Turn back to the Old Testament in Amos chapter 8...Amos chapter 8. Amos started out as a very inconsequential shepherd from Tekoa. And by the call of God and some marvelous revelation, became formidable prophet. In the eighth chapter, verse 11, we read what is really a critical part of His message...critical part of His message to Israel. Verse 11, Amos 8, for behold, days are coming, declares the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread, or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. And people will stagger from sea to sea, from the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee to the Mediterranean, east to west, and from the north even to the east, and they will go to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord, but they will not find it. Boy, that is so relevant...a famine of the Word of the Lord. They will seek it and they will not find it. This is a divine judgment on people who refused to hear it when they had it. Eight centuries before Christ.
The northern kingdom, Israel, is confident, actually smug, feeling good. They shouldn't have, morals had crashed. Read the whole prophecy of Amos, it's all there.
Morals had crashed, honesty was gone, abuse of the poor was common, the upper class was vile, but money was plenty, prosperity was widespread and they were engaged in worship. But if you want to know what God thought about their worship, look at chapter 5, I hate, I reject your festivals, nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies. I don't like your worship. I don't like your meetings.
For though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them and I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings. Take away from Me the noise of your songs, I will not even listen to the sound of your harps. I don't like your worship. I don't like your songs. I don't like your music. I don't like your offerings.
I don't like any of it. Now the people of Israel thought that God was on their side. Prosperity deceived them in that regard.
They thought everything was fine. They were sinful, widespread sin and iniquity. But they kept up this superficial form of religion and they thought God was on their side until God dropped a bomb on Israel.
And that bomb had a name, Amos. He stormed into Samaria and he stormed into Samaria as a prophet of doom. And he started saying, God is going to judge you. God is going to judge you and He's going to judge you powerfully and He's going to judge you severely. Chapter 2 verse 6, thus says the Lord, for three transgressions of Israel and for four I will not revoke its punishment. Chapter 3 verse 1, hear this word which the Lord has spoken against you, sons of Israel, against the entire family which He brought up from the land of Egypt. You only have I chosen among all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.
Your privileges only intensify your judgment. In chapter 4 and verse 12, it's the same thing, therefore thus will I do to you, O Israel, because I shall do this to you, famous line, prepare to meet your God, O Israel. You are about to come face to face with God the Judge.
Get ready. This whole book is a pronouncement of divine judgment that was fulfilled when the Assyrians came in 722 B.C. and destroyed and took captive the northern kingdom from which the people never returned. It was the end of that northern generation. In chapter 5 and verse 27, Amos says, therefore I will make you go into exile beyond Damascus, the capital says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts.
It's over, it's over. But worst of all, in the intervening time as the judgment begins to roll, you're going to have a big problem and that takes us back to chapter 8. You're going to be staggering in a famine, not for bread or water, but a famine to hear from the Lord. And you're going to stagger all over the place and you're going to go to and fro trying to find a word from the Lord and you're not going to find it...you're not going to find it. How tragic is that? But that is a divine judgment when God says you wouldn't listen and now I will not any longer speak to you.
That happened and it's happening again. I fear that just like in Amos' day when people would not listen, there will come a time when they cannot find the truth. And what you have today even in our country, and I can't speak for God and just exactly when He's judging, but I will tell you this, that there are so many people claiming to speak for God that it is well nigh impossible for an unbeliever to know who in the world is really God's spokesman. The Word of God is becoming more scarce for this world of unbelievers as even those who believe the Word of God are afraid to speak it because it offends and they think that's bad strategy.
This society wants everything but the Scripture and the church is content seemingly to give them everything but the Scripture. And those who hold to the authority and the priority of Scripture, those who hold to the authority and priority of sound doctrine, those who are sober and serious and diligent students and preachers of divine revelation are ridiculed by the world, by the culture and by many in the church. Although I am convinced the true believers, the true believers long for and do all they can to find those who will feed them the truth.
That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study here on Grace to You is titled, Making a Case for the Bible. John, you talked today about having a desperate hunger for biblical truth, and I know there are some precious people who relate to that hunger, men and women who have been transformed by Scripture and want others to know the same blessing.
What do you want those faithful friends to know? Isn't it an interesting thing that there are so-called Christians, professing Christians, who no doubt some of them are genuine Christians, who don't seem to have any appetite for the Word of God? In a sense, partly because they've never been exposed to a meal, I mean a real meal that has biblical depth. You know, somebody once said that people are starving for the deep things of the Word of God, but they don't know it. They don't know it because they've never tasted it.
They don't know how good it is because they've never had the opportunity to devour it. But once you get a taste of biblical truth, your hunger will increase. Your passion for the truth, at its depth, will escalate. We're so thankful, I want you to know, for those of you who enable us to present the deep teaching of the Word of God, in particular to those folks who aren't used to it, who don't get it in their churches, who've never been exposed to it, who have a hunger excited in them that they've never experienced previously. And then we're there to just keep satisfying that hunger and to keep feeding those folks. I would say that maybe that's the greatest impact of this ministry. By means of radio and of course our internet, website, and all the resources, we find the hungry people around the world, all over the world, and we begin to whet their appetite for the Word of God. It's humbling for us to have you partners standing with us to receive your gifts and to realize your trust in putting your money to work in God's kingdom into our hands. You want to be involved in the lives of others around the world through the ministry of grace to you, and we thank you for that. We appreciate your love, your notes, your support, your email. Everything you do urges us to keep the ministry going. Yes, friend, your encouragement is so vital to the work we do, and as John said, your support helps us continue to take God's truth around the globe. To let us know you stand with us, contact us today. Let us know how Christ is using grace to you in your life when you write to us at Grace to You, P.O.
Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Or you can email us at letters at gty.org. Again, listeners like you play a critical role in everything we do here, so write to Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412, or email us at letters at gty.org to share your story and express your support. And if you'd like to hear today's lesson again, you can download it for free at gty.org. In fact, all of John's sermons from 56 years of his labors as a pastor, including the messages from this current study, Making a Case for the Bible, all of them are available free of charge at gty.org. So log on, tap into decades of verse-by-verse teaching from John MacArthur, and watch God's truth transform your life. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Remember to watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DIRECTV Channel 378, and join us again tomorrow as John continues showing you compelling reasons why you can believe the Bible is true. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
