You're entering Outer Brightness. Yeah, I think that's great that you – I focus almost entirely on external evidence, but really, like you said, it only really confirms the internal attestation of Scripture. If we had all the manuscripts in the world of the Bible, of the New Testament specifically, and it contradicted itself, it wouldn't matter, right? The external evidence, it would only show that you have a reliable contradictory text. So the internal consistency of being written, as you said, Michael, being written by many prophets over centuries, all speaking of the same God who's been working his plan all throughout the history of the world from creation to revelation and glory, we see that all working out, being the same God being preached and spoken of, that really – that internal consistency and the prophecies fulfilled in Christ, all that is – that's really – and of course, in conjunction with the witness of the Spirit into the heart of the person reading it, that's really what convinces people, I think. And the external evidence, I think, like you said, it just increases the confidence of the saints. But I don't personally, based on my views of soteriology, my views of salvation, I don't think that the external evidence alone can convert someone.
And obviously, God has to – God can use that evidence, but God must make – he must still make that word real to that person. He has to really work in the heart of that person reading the Bible to make it – to really witness to them that this is his word, that it's correct, it's true, all of that. Yeah, I agree with that, Matthew.
And you can read R.C. Sproul's scripture alone if you want, but the summary you just gave is basically a summary of that book, so you may not need to read the book. But yeah, it's – the internal consistency, the witness of the Holy Spirit, and Michael, to your experience, I praise God that we each have come to where we are in different ways, because one, it gives us some interesting things to discuss and kind of bounce off of each other. But two, as I was pointing out earlier when I teased out that one point, that God has brought us to where we are in various ways. And of course, the external evidence for me, because of the way I kind of lost my faith in Mormonism kind of beginning with the Book of Mormon as a historical text, the external evidence to me has been important, but the internal consistency of the book itself and experiences that I've had with the text of the Bible, as I've – as God has illumined my mind to see things differently, I've mentioned some in earlier episodes. One that just came to mind is Philippians 2, 6 through 11 talks about Jesus, and it says – verse 6 specifically – says, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, right? And I remember as a Latter-day Saint, I was teaching an elders quorum lesson and I was looking for, you know, as you've mentioned, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, 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, like 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. You know, 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. You know, if you go to Christ's words, he says the opposite. And it's like, well, Paul's words are 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, okay, 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, 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 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, okay, 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 Reformed Baptist, okay? 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 listen 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, 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, 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, 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, Martin Luther, Alvin 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 Singularity 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? 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 is glorifying to 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. 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 wanted 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 of 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.
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 was periods of whether they followed it well or not, but they had that scripture. 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 wanted 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. We thank you for tuning into this episode of the Outer Brightness Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Please visit the Outer Brightness Podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send us a message there with comments or questions 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 group on Facebook where you can join and interact with us and others as we discuss the podcast, past episodes and suggestions for future episodes, etc. You can also send us an email at Outer Brightness at gmail.com.
We hope to hear from you soon. You can subscribe to the Outer Brightness Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Cast Box, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, PodBeam, Spotify and Stitcher. Also, you can check out our new YouTube channel and if you like it, be sure to lay hands on that subscribe button and confirm it. If you like what you hear, please give us a rating and review wherever you listen and help spread the word. You can also connect with Michael the Ex-Mormon apologist at fromwater2wine.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 by visiting their ministry page at adamsroadministry.com. Stay Bright, Flyer Flies! The word made fresh, the risen Son Heaven and earth will pass away But the word of the Lord endures forever Where all this world is in decay But the word of our God through ages remains Music for the Outer Brightness Podcast is graciously provided by Adams Road Music for the Outer Brightness Podcast is graciously provided by Adams Road Heaven and earth will pass away But the word of the Lord endures forever Where all this world is in decay But the word of our God through ages remains As the rain falls down from heaven And waters he heard bringing it light So the word that goes out from your mouth Will not return empty but does what you desire Lord we hear your word and believe in you Heaven and earth will pass away But the word of the Lord endures forever Where all this world is in decay But the word of our God through ages remains The word of God remains
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