What About Scripture?, Pt. 4 (Articles of Faith Series)

This is a multi-part episode. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so.

You did as well, Michael. You were looking for passages in the Bible that supported Mormon doctrine, right? And so I was looking for a passage because the lesson that I was teaching was on eternal progression. And I was looking for a passage from the Bible that would support that, right?

Support this idea that it's not audacious to think that we can become gods, right? So I grabbed that verse because on face value, it seemed to support the position, right? Well, Jesus didn't think it was robbery to be in the form of God and be equal with God.

Why does anybody else criticize Latter-day Saints for thinking that? And in the moment that I was delivering that lesson and using that verse, it struck me. As I was speaking the words of the verse, it struck me, no, that's not right. And I remember going home and looking at that verse in context and reading the rest of what it says about Jesus, right? But he made himself of no reputation and took upon himself the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men.

And it was like, wait a minute, he was, oh, he was not in the likeness of men. So to try to use verse six to argue that men can become God doesn't work, right? So moments like that where God was leading me little by little to see the Bible and to see it for what it was, to take the Mormon filters off that allow you to just kind of rip a verse out of context and try to make it apply. Those moments as well have brought me to the place of seeing the Bible as reliable.

So final question, and this is kind of like the money question, right? It's when we get to kind of speak to our audience. So for Latter-day Saints, the concept of continuing revelation is of paramount importance in their doctrine and church structure. They claim to have prophets and apostles with authority to speak God's word today. So as a Bible-only Christian, what would you say to the Latter-day Saint who argues that we need more of God's word, that the idea of God speaking anciently and not today would make God, quote, an absentee landlord who had once been engaged in earthly matters but was now preoccupied somewhere else in the universe? Michael, I'll let you tackle this one first. All right.

I don't even know where to start here. I think the first thing, well, I mean, one thing that comes to my mind right away is, you know, I think of scripture as being like a measuring stick, right? Just to judge all truth by. But what I see the LDS Church doing is not only are they lengthening the stick on one side by adding new revelation every time there's a conference, but I also see them shortening the other side because I see the apologists all the time trying to disqualify the words of Paul. You know, they're trying to say, well, Christ didn't say that. Well, if you go to Christ's words, he says the opposite. And it's like, well, Paul's words aren't Christ's words.

I mean, don't you agree with that? You know, how is that any different from what you claim that your prophet and apostles do? You know, they speak the words of Christ. I mean, you know, whether by my own voice or the voice of my servants, it is the same, right? I mean, that's the LDS teachings. But, you know, one thing that I would probably ask a Latter-day Saint first is, you know, do you believe that the parables that Christ gave in the New Testament are still valuable today?

And if yes, then they are timeless. And I would say the same thing is true of the rest of the Bible as well. I would say that it is a living scripture. You know, we don't need a living prophet because we have living scripture. And, you know, it's like I like that quote where it says, you know, the Bible's the only book that reads you. So, you know, if the Spirit is there and can help us understand the Bible as we're reading it, then we don't need more revelation. And I've asked Latter-day Saints, too, like, when's the last time you read the book of, you know, like, I'll just throw a random New Testament book out there or an Old Testament one that you don't see very often. Like, I don't even know how to pronounce it, but Habakkuk, have you guys read that one? When's the last time you read that one? And it's like, well, never. It's like, OK, so you're not even reading the scripture that you do have. So what's the point of getting new scripture if you haven't mastered the old scripture? So those are just some thoughts that I have. I don't know if I answered your question or not.

No, it's good. Yeah, very good. I like the method of asking them, you know, when the last time they read Habakkuk was. I studied Habakkuk in a Bible study shortly after becoming a Christian in the Sunday morning Bible studies. We were studying through each of the minor prophets. And so Habakkuk was up on the list.

I think I probably was surprised that there was a book called Habakkuk. So, yeah, I like that strategy. What about you, Matthew? What would you say to a Latter-day Saint who argues that we need more of God's word? I'm going to go back to something that Michael spoke about early, early on when we were discussing this. It's the idea of what is your authority? What do you consider to be true?

Just think about those things. How do you know truth and how do you know it's from God? And one argument against Protestant Christianity as a whole is, OK, you guys all claim to follow Sola Scriptura. But look at all the denominations and all the strife and all the confusion and you're trying to prove each other wrong, et cetera, et cetera.

But there's so many presuppositions there that need to be unraveled, that need to be deconstructed. Because, first of all, I'm a Reformed Baptist. I'm not trying to convert every Christian to become a Reformed Baptist. I want people to come to Christ, period. And if they feel that they read scripture and the particulars that I hold to in my denomination, they agree with and they want to come to my church. Great.

Awesome. If they want to go to a church that disagrees with me, but they still hold to the Bible's word of God, they believe in Christ alone as their savior. They trust in him alone for their salvation and their righteousness before God. And they have solid preaching there. Sure.

Go there. That's fine. I'm not trying to win anyone to my denomination. I want to win people to Christ. Of course, not through my efforts. I hope that God will use them as a means to bring them to Christ.

But it's not me. It's the work of the Spirit that has to do that. So I kind of wanted to mention that, is that we're not fighting each other to try to get each other to join each other's denomination. And when you look at a lot of the disagreement in Protestant Christianity, look at what their authority is. I think, honestly, one of the biggest issue is, in Protestant Christianity, is that we claim to hold the sola scriptura.

In actuality, we don't really do a very good job at doing that. And first of all, what is sola scriptura? It's kind of seen as like, well, you only need the Bible.

That's all you need and you're good. This kind of like me and my Bible under the tree. I think it's important to talk about this because we're talking about scripture. But that's not what sola scriptura is. Sola scriptura is that the Bible is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice for the church.

I say sole infallible because we have other authorities that are subordinate to and are fallible. They're subordinate to scripture and they are not infallible. So when we talk about the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Apostles' Creed, those are the three big ones, the ancient creeds that were accepted by historical Christianity.

You can take every one of those phrases and find where you can see that in the Bible. It's not an authority on its own. The only authority those creeds have is if they are in conformance to scripture. Scripture is the ultimate, final, sole infallible authority.

That's what sola scriptura means. We have other authorities. I have my elders at my church that I submit to. I believe that they do have an authority. Of course, if they deviate from scripture, you know, that's kind of they must hold to scripture just like I do.

And I must follow them as they preach faithfully to scripture. So those are things that really need to be understood by Latter-day Saints because I hear over and over and over again attacks on sola scriptura saying it's useless. And it doesn't make sense to have only the Bible because everybody interprets it differently.

But that's not what sola scriptura means. It's important to have these documents, you know, things like creeds and confessions that are historical that go back in time and are pointing to scripture. Because I think today that's kind of the view that a lot of Protestants sadly do have is that, okay, I don't need anybody to tell me what the Bible says. I can just read it on my own, come to my own conclusions. And that's good to an extent in the sense that you can read the Bible and you can come to know Jesus. You can know who God is. You can know that you are a sinner in need of salvation, that you are completely cut off from God in terms of your righteousness, that you need a savior. But I think it's dangerous when you just say, okay, well, I'm going to disregard what everybody said about the Bible before me. That's where you got Charles Taze Russell.

That's where you got Ellen G. White, Mary Baker Eddy. That's where you got all these people that said, okay, the truth was lost. I'm going to go back and say what it really said, what scripture really taught. Or I'm going to bring forth new revelation that fixes all this mess.

That didn't fix anything. It just caused more problems. So really what we need to do is we need to understand that we need to read scripture in light of what others have said before us, just as the reformers did. John Luther, Calvin Turretin, they all were concerned about, okay, am I interpreting scripture as somebody behind me, somebody within the church behind me?

Do they have similar views? They were really concerned about this because they didn't want to just come up with something completely off the wall, brand new. They were concerned that they were not just coming up with a brand new religion since we believe that Christ had built his church. He said in Matthew 16, I will build my church. And he had built his church and it's continued since then. So we need to have some level of continuity and we need to consider what godly men in the past have read about scripture. And so I think most of the issues that people, that Protestant Christianity has is not the use of sola scriptura, but the rejection of it and inserting another authority that is supplemental to, possibly superior to scripture, depending on the case. So I just wanted to bring that up.

And as far as single Latter-day Saints who say it's not enough or that we need more, I would ask you, what is it that the Bible doesn't teach that you need to know? Things that we need to know for certain. Who is God? Who is Jesus? Who are we? Why are we here? How did God create the world?

Where are we headed? What is God's plan for us? And how do we know the Lord Jesus in a saving, salvific relationship? How can we become united to Christ? All of these things that we absolutely need to know, they're all there. We don't need anything else. They're in scripture.

You just have to look for it. If you want to talk about secondary issues, like how should our church be operating? You know, should we perform baptism on adults who profess faith in Christ only or infants of believers also? Those are all secondary issues because I think you don't need baptism to be saved.

You can know Christ through faith, through the gift of faith and God's grace alone. So these secondary issues, they're things that Christians are trying to wrap their heads around, and we want to interpret scripture faithfully and consistently to arrive at an answer that is consistent with scripture and just glorifying God. But if we disagree on those things, that's okay. We have the unity in the essentials, and we've talked about that in another episode. Sorry, I'm going a little bit long.

Okay, one last thing. So this phrase, absentee landlord, this was spoken at the last general conference. And speaking of the Christian, God is an absentee landlord who had once been engaged in earthly matters, but was now preoccupied somewhere else in the universe. What I want to say about that is just because God is not operating the way that some of us may want him to operate today does not mean that God is not operating or active in the world whatsoever. We see, for example, we see God in creation the first six days God created the universe. He ended that creation. There was a definite time where that creation was supposed to take place and it was supposed to end. God is not creating things anymore in terms of how he created it in the creation.

That phase ended. God called prophets and made covenants with them, and many of those covenants were typological of and pointing to Christ and fulfilled in Christ. Those things were fulfilled in Jesus.

God has a plan for everything from the beginning. God did not give a continuous stream of revelation all the way from the beginning. There were periods of decades or over a hundred years where there were no prophets, and so they relied on what had already been given.

And before Christ there was about 450 years of no revelation. What did they use? They had the scriptures. They used those in their spiritual life. They read the Torah. They read all the Tanakh. That's the Old Testament. They read that in their worship services.

There were periods of whether they followed it well or not, but they had that scripture. And then when we see the New Testament with Christ, there's that new movement. We see every time there's something new going on or some new fulfillment, Christ setting up his church, setting up the apostles, sending them out through the world to preach the gospel not only to the Jews but to the Gentiles. We see God giving tongues and gifts and healings, and those are out in phases. God planned that out in phases. And towards the end of the apostolic age, we see less healings. We see less of these miraculous gifts being operative.

This was all planned out. And by the end of the first century, we see Revelation and the biblical canon being given. It was completed with the end of the writings of John. With that completion of canon, we have the church now, the scriptures to guide us into what we should do. And we still have God acting today.

He's still operative. He's working in the hearts of believers. He's illuminating our minds and hearts, as Paul said, to understand scripture. He's giving us understanding. He's sanctifying us, purifying us from our sins, and setting us apart from the world. God is definitely active. I don't think that just because there's no prophets giving brand new revelation every day that God isn't active.

He's active, but just not in that particular fashion. So, that's basically what I want to say. It's kind of a lot. I wish I could have condensed it more, but… No, it's great.

And I don't have anything to add to it. You did cover a lot there, but it was absolutely wonderful. I will just say to that, amen. Yep, me too. Amen.

Good stuff. Following each episode of the Outer Brightness Podcast, you hear the song, The Cross, by the band Adams Road. Micah Wilder, a founding member of that band and a former Latter-day Saint himself, often encourages Latter-day Saints to read the Bible with the eyes of a child. You've heard Matthew, Michael, and I discuss our experiences with scripture while we were still Mormons, while we transitioned, and now. For any Latter-day Saints who may be listening, doubting their belief in Mormonism, and wondering if it makes sense to believe the Bible and Jesus, I echo Micah's urging, read the Bible with the eyes of a child, as if you're seeing it for the first time. You heard Michael and me share some examples of Bible passages that we once read with Mormon filters, but when read in context, do not actually support LDS doctrine.

It can be difficult to set aside those filters. It means digging into the historical context of the Bible and allowing the Bible to interpret the Bible with the understanding that it is the consistent Word of God. May God bless you and your journey. We thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Outer Brightness Podcast. We'd like to hear from you. You're invited to visit the Outer Brightness Podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send a message there with comments or suggestions by clicking send a message at the top of the page, and we would appreciate it if you give the page a like. We also have an Outer Brightness Podcast group on Facebook where you can join and interact with us and others as we discuss the podcast, past episodes, suggestions for future episodes, etc.

We would love to hear from you and hope to speak with you soon. Stay bright, Fireflies! You can subscribe to the Outer Brightness Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Google Play, Cast Box, Podbean, Spotify, and Stitcher. If you like what you hear, give us a rating or review wherever you listen. Thank you, Fireflies! You can also connect with Michael the Ex-Mormon Apologist at FromWaterToWine.org where he blogs, and sometimes Paul and Matthew do as well.

Music for the Outer Brightness Podcast is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and by Adams Road. Learn more about Adams Road at www.adamsroadministry.com I was worthy of the blood that Jesus shed, but now I know that all the works I did were meaningless compared with Jesus' lonely death on the cross where he bore sin. And now I have the righteousness that is by faith in Jesus' name. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus for who's sake. I have lost all things because of the cross. On the cross Jesus took away the written code, the law of words that stood opposed and nailed it there for me.

Through the cross he put to death hostility, and in his body reconciled us to God and brought us peace. And I am crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but he lives in me. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus for who's sake.

I have lost all things. But when I gave Jesus it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross.

Some demand a sign and some seek to be wise, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling blood for son, the foolishness of God, but wiser than the wisest man the power of the cross. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord through which the world has been crucified to me. And I tell the world so I take up my cross and follow where Jesus leads. Oh, I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus for who's sake. I have lost all things. But when I gave Jesus it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Because of the cross.