You can't know the truth about eternity, you can't know the truth about origins, you can't know the truth about life. Well, John MacArthur's message today speaks directly to the person who elevates human reasoning above all else.
You'll get a helpful perspective on worldly thinking and you'll come away equipped to explain eternal truth that puts man's best thinking to shame, truth that is bound up in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. So follow along as John continues a series that's answering the all-important question, who is Jesus anyway? Very, very complex.
It's a complex world with almost uncountable options and it does seem maybe bizarre, maybe a little strange if not simplistic to say that Jesus Christ is the answer and He alone and He is the complete answer and there isn't anything else. Is it really that clear? Is it really that simple? Is it really that strange?
Is it straightforward? Well, that's exactly what the Bible says and that's exactly what Jesus claimed. I just read a survey that said the vast majority of people in America believe Jesus actually was God, more than three-fourths of them.
Well if they believe He was God, then they probably ought to take what He says as true. And what He said above all other things is that He's the only Savior. He is the answer and the only answer to the longing of every human heart. The Bible simply says, in Him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. It's all summed up in Him. In Him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is a statement that's really bold.
In fact, you might say in today's vernacular, that's over the top. Come on, all wisdom, all knowledge, all that wisdom and knowledge has to offer is found in Jesus Christ. You say, well, are we really supposed to accept that? Isn't that just a religious viewpoint? No, that's an authoritative statement in Scripture, that's in verse 3 of Colossians 2. And verse 4 says, I say this in order that no one may delude you with a persuasive argument.
Don't let anybody deceive you by trying to convince you that that is, in fact, not true. It is in Christ that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found. Everything that has value is summed up in Him. Everything that has to do with meaning in this life and the life to come. Everything related to life and death and eternity. And as we heard, everything related to joy and peace and fulfillment and putting your soul at rest, everything is found in Him. The writer of Hebrews in the New Testament says that He made perfect forever those who are set apart to Him. In the tenth verse of Colossians 2, it is said another way, in Him you have been made complete.
It's all wrapped up in Him. I suppose as a student in college I was fascinated by a lot of things. I have a very inquisitive mind.
It's a good thing because I have to keep searching up new material to give to you every week, year after year, and it suits me fine. But when I was in college, I was curious about a lot of things. And one of the things that I was very curious about was the development of human philosophy, or human thought, apart from the Bible and apart from God. And so I decided that I would take courses in advanced philosophy. I dug deeply into the foundations of western philosophy in particular and the flow of western philosophy.
It was very helpful to me to sort of be able to sort that out. Later on I became even more fascinated by it, read a very important book in philosophy written by a guy that I think is the most insightful and effective and impactful student of philosophy in its historical setting, a man by the name of Paul Johnson who wrote a book called The Intellectuals. And in that book I looked not only deeply into the thinking of the people who were the architects of western theology, but even more deeply into the life of these people and found them without exception to be base and immoral to the core.
And coming up with a kind of philosophy that accommodated their own personal immorality. So human philosophy from my vantage point didn't offer anything that moved me one inch from my biblical convictions. In fact, everything it had to offer only solidified me in those convictions. And I am very content to say that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all that really matters, all that has value, all that you would call a treasure is truly found in Christ.
And I found that to be true long ago. It was tested during those days of my education and here I am decades later telling you that it is still absolutely and unequivocally my conviction that I have found completeness in Christ. The Apostle Paul writing in the book of Ephesians put it another way. He said, you are blessed with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies, that is that come from God in Christ.
You have a lot of superlatives when you talk about what comes in Christ. The Apostle Paul again in Philippians chapter 3, and by the way, he was an educated man. Not only was he educated in Jewish theology, but he was educated in philosophy as well. And he says this in Philippians 3, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish. And he used a very gross word, one of the most gross words in the Greek language to describe all human knowledge and all false religion. He had been schooled and educated not only in Judaism as a Pharisee, he was educated to the max in Judaism, but he was also educated in the Gentile world where he had been raised. And he understood it all and he said it was all rubbish. Everything he ever knew could be set aside and counted loss compared to Christ.
These are really monumental statements. What the Christian gospel is is simply this, all the answers you need for time and eternity are in Christ. All the answers for your soul, all the answers for your sin, all the answers for your hope for the life to come, they're all in Christ and only in Christ.
There is no other authority in the Bible, there is no other Savior than Jesus Christ and you will find everything you could ever desire or need in Him. That's why, again, going back to Colossians 2 and verse 10, in Him you have been made complete...you have been made complete. We often think today that Christ is a part of our lives.
He's maybe an important part, but not all. We need Christ plus philosophy. We need Christ plus psychology. We need Christ plus ritual, Christ plus ceremony, Christ plus some miraculous experience, or Christ plus some mystical intuition, or Christ plus some bodily self-denial or immolation. We need to do something to hurt ourselves in order to gain merit with God, or we need to do something to transcend this world and have some kind of mystical experience to really know God, or something like that, or somehow we need to have an angelic visitation, or somehow we need to live a life of conformity to certain ceremony and certain ritual. But the Bible says it's all in Christ and it's all in knowing Christ.
This whole epistle really focuses on Him because if you go back to chapter 1 verse 13, it says, He delivered us from the domain of darkness...that is God did...and transferred us into the Kingdom of His beloved Son. Everybody lives in a Kingdom. Everybody has a King.
There are two possible terms, two possible Kings. You can live under King Satan, or King God. You can live in the Kingdom of darkness, or you can live in the Kingdom of light. You can live in the Kingdom of evil, or the Kingdom of righteousness. God by His grace delivers us from the Kingdom of darkness, the domain of darkness, into the Kingdom of His beloved Son. And when you come into the knowledge of Christ and He becomes your King, that's how you enter His Kingdom. And immediately the Bible says you have redemption, you are bought back from judgment, you are bought back from punishment, you're bought back from hell because Christ paid the price. You have the forgiveness of sins.
All the sins you have ever or would ever commit are forgiven because their penalty was paid by the death of Christ. Everything comes down to Christ...everything. It was through Him that sinners are reconciled to God. It was through Him that we are transformed and converted and regenerated and born again.
Born again. Everything comes through Him. Now let's look at chapter 2 for a minute and I just want to show you a few things that Paul directly speaks to that tend to clutter this simplicity in Christ. Paul wrote, you remember, to the Corinthians and he said, I'm worried about you.
I'm very concerned about you because false teachers were coming in and confusing them. And he says this, 2 Corinthians 11, 3, I'm afraid that in the same way that the serpent in the Garden deceived Eve by his cleverness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity that belongs to Christ. We're talking about something that is pure and simple. Christ is everything. And apart from Him, there are no answers either for time or eternity. There are four points that Paul wants to make in chapter 2 of Colossians that assault the simplicity of Christ and the sufficiency of Christ. Four of them, philosophy, legalism, mysticism and asceticism, and we'll talk about what those mean.
Let's talk first about philosophy. Verse 8, Colossians 2, in this context of saying that in Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, that you're complete in Him, that He is the One who is the image of the invisible God, as chapter 1 verse 15 says. He is the One by whom all things were created. He is the One who is the supreme authority. He is the One who is before all things and holds all things together. He is the One in whom all the fullness of the Father dwells. He is the One and He alone who reconciles all things to Himself, who made peace by the blood of His cross.
He is the everything. In response to that, Paul says in verse 8, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. Don't let anybody distract you from Christ. Don't let anybody take you captive and pull you away from the single commitment to Christ.
Verse 9, for in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form and in Him you've been made complete. Now this refers to whatever systems men invent, whatever ideologies, philosophies, psychologies, theories, religions. And they're innumerable, aren't they? Cults and isms and schisms abound all over everywhere. Everybody's got his own little hip pocket idea of God and truth and Christ and how the Bible fits in, etc., etc., etc. Philosophers, authors, playwrights, novelists, academicians, movie producers, talk show hosts, psychologists, sociologists, religious leaders ad infinitum ad nauseum, have their opinions about everything.
There's this endless verbosity, isn't there? Streaming across our radios and our screens and in the literature that we read from books all the way to newspapers and everybody has his view of life and everybody has his view of morality and no matter what view you espouse and you put it in a column in the newspaper, there's going to be a stack of letters to the editor and you're going to have at least fifteen people spinning their own thing in response to yours. No wonder people find it difficult to know where to land, to know what to believe in a world with so many opinions. And, of course, we now live in a post-modern world which means that there really is no truth, no true truth, no absolute truth. Everybody comes up with his own idea of what truth is and you've got your truth and you've got your truth.
That's great, I'm so glad you have your truth and I'm so glad I have my truth and it's just everywhere. And so Paul says, look, see to it that no one takes you captive. It's a rare word, sulegogon, it means to carry you off like plunder. Sula is the word booty, treasure.
Ago is to carry away. Don't let anybody haul you off, take you captive. It was used in later Greek writings, it's rare around the biblical times, but it was used in later Greek writings to refer to kidnapping, or plundering a house, or seducing a maid, or taking people captive in a war. Don't let anybody kidnap your mind, kidnap your soul, seduce or plunder you by philosophy, the study of wisdom, human reason. Don't let anybody move you away from Christ by viewpoints, worldviews, values, morality, principles that come from human wisdom. He says, this philosophy is empty deception.
You could read it this way, see to it that no one seduces you, plunders you, robs your soul through human wisdom, even empty deceit. Philosophy is empty deceit. It is an empty lie. It is a delusion because it sounds good, it attracts the mind, it seduces the mind, it has certain properties of rationality, but it has no spiritual value at all.
Why? Because verse 8 says, it is according to the tradition of men. It's human. If you want to know divine truth, if you want to know supernatural truth, don't go to a human source. It's that simple because all you're going to get out of a human source is human wisdom. And human wisdom does not transcend time and space.
It is just inadequate human thinking. And 1 Corinthians 2, 14 says, the natural man understands not the things of God, how can he know them? They're spiritual.
They're not in his dimensions. It's amazing how often people will say, well I think this about God and I think that about God. Well just why would I believe that what you think about God is authoritative? How did you, by the way, get out of your time, space, environment to say that about God and think that you actually knew the truth? We're talking about transcendent God, we're talking about a God who's outside our world.
I'm going to have to have information about God that He Himself has delivered. You know, we live in a box, time-space box. We bang around in here and we draw all kinds of conclusions. But nobody ever gets out. And God is on the outside. The only way we will ever know God is not that some of us can crawl through a hole somewhere and say, oh, you know, ah, there He is, it's not going to happen. The only way we could ever know is if God invaded the box from the outside, and He did. And He gave us a revelation in Scripture and then He gave us a revelation in human flesh, Jesus Christ.
And that's God bursting into our world. What are you going to find out of philosophy? I've often said this about philosophy. Philosophy is the search for the truth, but you never find it. If they ever found it, class would be over.
That would be over so you get a degree for looking. It's inadequate. You can't get there from here. It is, He says further, according to the elementary principles of the world. It's earthbound. It's just this system talking to itself. It's not transcendent. It's not from the outside.
Rudiments means ABCs, it's baby talk. It's amazing to think about that. But you talk about a philosopher and usually you're talking about the elite minds of any age or any society. Those who are the philosophers are usually considered to be the great brain trust, you know, the people who are off the chart on the IQ test, the geniuses who think in levels of complexity that stagger most of us. But the truth is, no matter how intelligent they are, no matter how capable they are of processing information and retaining it in their heads and sorting it through and drawing conclusions, they may stagger us with that, they're still in the box.
And it's nothing but the ABCs of the world. In a sense it's baby talk, the kind of thing you hear the mumbling, stumbling baby talk of one who hasn't the capability to make any connection with a rational world. They think they're advanced, they're not. They're primitive. They're not advanced.
It's just the opposite. They're retarded when it comes to truth. Human wisdom may be an exhibition of brain power but it has no ability to grasp the truth which is beyond human capability.
And so what happens is, it's proud about its baby talk and it is truthfully nothing more than the infantile musings of poverty-stricken minds. You can't know the truth about eternity. You can't know the truth about origins. You can't know the truth about consummation of the ages. You can't know the truth about heaven and hell. You can't know the truth about the will of God unless God comes and tells you and that's what this is, a supernatural book.
And He came not only in the truth written but in the truth incarnate in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Philosophy does not advance man, it goes the other way. It regresses him.
It keeps him ever increasingly infantile. So beware of philosophy. That's John MacArthur, pastor, author, and chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary in Southern California. John is equipping you with essential truth about the work of Christ in his current study on grace to you called, Who is Jesus Anyway? You said today, John, that in Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And I know one of your goals is to give people tools they can use to find and understand and benefit from that amazing wealth. Sometimes it seems daunting to folks, particularly new Christians, to imagine how they could absorb everything in the Scripture.
It's vast, that's for certain. But you have to start somewhere. If you don't start somewhere, you're never going to get anywhere. So let me suggest something to you. We have a three-volume series of devotional books, that's right, three volumes, titled Daily Readings from the Life of Christ. The rapid pace of life isn't very conducive to helping you slow down, read your Bible, pray, and meditate on God's Word, especially in a systematic way that builds your understanding of the Bible as a whole.
There's already too much in life that's scattered and random and disjointed. And so your time in the Word of God, even if brief, should and can be methodical and meaningful. That's why I want to offer you these three volumes of daily readings from God's Word, and each of them focusing on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the place to begin your serious, regular routine, indulging yourself in the Word of God.
Start with the person of Christ. They're designed to help you develop consistency in reading, consistency in meditating on the truths of Scripture, and more important, coming to know in a full sense the realities and the glories of our Savior. It doesn't take a long-time commitment to use these devotionals.
You can do that in a relatively brief way each day. But it's not lightweight reading. It will grip your heart and perhaps set your mind in motion to think deeply about those truths you read the rest of the day. Daily readings, devotionals, get you into the flow of the life of Christ, as detailed in Matthew and the Gospel of John. So commit yourself to getting into God's Word each day. Pick up a volume, or even better, all three volumes of daily readings from the life of Christ. Great tools for growing in your walk with God day by day, as always, affordably priced.
That's right. Thank you, John. Now, friend, is there anything more important to do every day than to meditate on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ? These books are great for focusing your thoughts on the One who is worthy of your constant worship. To order the daily readings from The Life of Christ devotional books, contact us today. You can order when you call us at 800-55-GRACE or when you go to our website, gty.org. Each volume of daily readings from The Life of Christ costs $11 and shipping is free.
You can order one or all three when you call 800-55-GRACE or you can shop online at gty.org. Also, while you're at our website, remember you can download John's current study titled, Who Is Jesus Anyway? Or you can choose any of John's more than 3,600 messages from the sermon archive, all of them free in MP3 and transcript format. You can also stream video from Grace to You television. You can read helpful blog articles from John and staff members and you can purchase John's books or New Testament commentaries and our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible.
Again, all of those resources are available to you at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to join us for Grace to You television this Sunday, Direct TV Channel 378, or you can watch anytime at gty.org. And then be back on Monday when John helps you understand how the sufficiency of Christ affects the decisions you make every day. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.
