Apologetics

When your neighbor says to you, I have noticed that you are a Christian, Why are you a Christian? What is it that you believe? And you try to answer that question, and their next question to you is this. Why do you believe that? Are you ready to answer that question?

At any moment. at the drop of a hat. to tell people not only what you believe. But why it is That you Believe it. Why are you a Christian?

How would you answer that question? The Bible calls Christians to always be ready to give an answer when anyone asks us why we've put our faith in Christ. This means that we should give thought to what we might say and not wait until the question arises. Thank you for joining us on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Today, we'll hear a message from Dr.

R. C. Sproll's series on the book of 1 Peter, exploring the topic of apologetics. or the Christian discipline of giving a reasoned defense for our faith. Dr.

Sproll preached 34 messages on 1 and 2 Peter. and those sermons have been compiled and made available in the form of a hardcover commentary. You can receive this resource today when you donate at renewingyourmind.org. and thank you in advance for supporting this Bible teaching program. But now.

Here's Dr. Sprohl with today's message from 1 Peter. I'm going to read tonight from chapter 3 of 1 Peter. Verse 4. Mm-hmm.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. And always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you. A reason for the hope that is in you With meekness. And fear. Semicolon.

The word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Let's look at the beginning portion of the text. that says this, but sanctify The Lord God In your hearts. To sanctify means to set apart To consecrate In an act of devotion.

The Apostle Paul told us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice.

Now, The Apostle Peter is saying the first thing that you must do to grow in your faith. is to set your heart In devotion. To Jesus. That's the top priority. But after that admonition To consecrate your heart to the Lord God.

comes the next part of the text. And always be ready. To give a defense. To everyone who asks you a reason. For the hope that is in you With meekness And Fear.

Now We are told. Always? to be ready. In a sense, the motto of Peter here is as if he had joined the Boy Scouts because it is B Prepared. And that preparation.

is to Make you ready at any moment? To give this defence. And the reason for the hope that is within you. If you are dragged before magistrates, if you are on trial for your faith, that you are prepared to. to say why.

You believe What you believe. When your neighbor says to you, I noticed that you are a Christian. Why are you a Christian? What is it that you believe? And you try to answer that question, and their next question to you is this.

Why do you believe that? Are you ready to answer that question? At any moment. At the drop of a hat. to tell people not only what you believe.

But why it is That you Believe it. Now the classical and now too often politically correct. Cop out. that Christians use is I just Take it. On Faith.

And you hear the language that We are to take a leap of faith. Not basing our faith upon the credibility Or the rational character of the truth claims of the Bible, but. When we hear the summons of the gospel, we just Without any reason, Just take a leap of faith. As I say, That is a total cop-out. and is a complete violation of this text.

The only leap of faith you're to take is you're to jump out of the darkness and into the light. When you become a Christian, you don't park your mind in the parking lot and leave it there. We are called as Christians To think. and to think according to the word of God. to seek the mind of Christ.

To seek the understanding of those things that are set forth in sacred scripture. This is a big book. And every bit of it, I believe, has been inspired by God the Holy Spirit. and ultimately the author of this book Is God? But this book is given to us by God.

To be understood. And you can't understand it. If you close your mind. to the careful study of it.

Now here... Peter says that we are To stand ready. They give. What the English translation calls a defense. To everyone who asks for a reason for the hope that is within you.

The word here in the Greek that is translated defense. is the Greek word Apologia. Do you already catch? What English word might come from it? An apologia may be translated as an apology And so it says that every Christian is to be prepared to give an apology.

To all who hear us, But this does not mean apology in the sense that we say to people. Please excuse me for being a Christian. I'm sorry that I'm so illiterate and uh. Irrational. I just can't help it.

I've been jumping into the darkness through my leap of faith, and so please bear with me. That's not what the text or the word means. It means, indeed, to give a defence. And the whole science of apologetics Began. In the New Testament itself, When the Apostle Paul would go in every town that he visited in his missionary journeys.

And he would go first to the synagogue and also to the agora or the marketplace, and he would reason together with the people who were there, and he would declare the truths of Christianity and give a defense of them. The most clear example of that is when Paul came to Athens. And went to the meeting place of the philosophers at the Areopagus, and there disputed with the Stoics and the Epicureans, the philosophers of the day, and entered. into intellectual argument with them.

Now, St. Augustine labored to defend Christianity against pagan philosophers. And to show the intellectual superiority of Christianity over. Neoplatonism, Manichaeanism, and other philosophical rivals to Christianity. And in that defense Augustine talked.

about the role of reason. In the Christian Faith. And he said, for example. That God's revelation is completely unintelligible. unless it is understood by the mind.

Reason is part of the constituent makeup of human beings made in the image of God. God himself thinks And His creatures made in his image. also are called to think. And to think Clearly and to think rightly.

Now. Augustine did not believe that naked reason Had the power in and of itself. to climb up to eternal truths without the aid of God's revelation. And he said, That we are dependent upon God's revelation for all of our understanding of truth, whether it be biblical truth, theological truth, or scientific truth. Augustine argued that we are as dependent as human beings on understanding the truths of science, upon the revelation of God, as the eyes are dependent upon some source of light.

to see anything. We have been equipped with appropriate organs, optic nerves, and the like. to be able to see things. All that we need to see is built into our Human structure, but without the external manifestation of light. We won't be able to see anything.

Therefore Augustine said that the Christian ought to learn as much as he can. about as many things as he can. Because all truth is God's truth. And the God's revelation. Is not limited to the pages of Scripture because Scripture itself tells us.

That beyond Scripture, God reveals himself in and through nature. I would trick my students with a Question in the seminary when I would say, How many of you believe? that biblical revelation is infallible and they would raise their hand. And I say, how many of you believe that the revelation that God gives in nature is infallible. And they wouldn't raise their hand.

I'd say, wait a minute. This is God's revelation. How could his revelation Be fallible. It's not fallible when it comes through the medium of Scripture. It's not fallible if it comes through the medium of nature.

We're the ones that are fallible. Not God. And so that would provoke all kinds of questions and discussions about the relationship between natural science and biblical truth. But again, Augustine dealt with the fact that the New Testament speaks of faith In distinction from reason, And says, as the author of Hebrew says, says that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

So there is a distinction between faith and reason. But beloved Even that biblical text. Talks about faith. as being something of substance. The faith of which the scriptures speak is not empty.

It's not uh ephemeral. It's substantive. And it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. By faith we know that the worlds were made through the Word of God.

Now. Augustine looks at that. And he said, okay. There are certain things that we believe without having a complete knowledge about them. We don't have the total scientific evidence to know that the universe was created by the word of God.

We have the testimony of the scripture to that end. But none of us were eyewitnesses of creation. We don't have first-hand experience of those things, and so we take it on faith. That what the Bible says is true with respect to creation. Every day You have to Put face.

In sources of truth. that you cannot personally verify.

Now, the question is: when we put faith and trust into people who have demonstrated a track record. expertise Is that reasonable? Or is it an irrational leap in the dark? Augustine asked those questions in his day. He understood that people had to take on faith a lot of things.

that they didn't see. But the question is this. Is it reasonable? To trust God When he tells us about things that we do not see. This is critical.

to the Christian understanding of faith. There is nothing in my imagination more reasonable Than to trust. The integrity of God's revelation. I can't think of anything more irrational. Then to elevate your own sight as the final arbiter.

For what is true. God has demonstrated in His Word And in history, That he is eminently Trustworthy And to be trustworthy means To be worthy. Our Trust. And so Augustine says we trust things that we cannot see. It is a provisional acceptance unless or until these ideas.

are proven to be demonstrably false. But face Is that which is based upon Trustworthy evidence. John Calvin. In his classic work of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, gave his defence the Bible as being the Word of God. He spent a whole chapter Giving reasons why the church believes that the scriptures come from God.

These reasons that he advanced, he called in the Latin version. The indecia. Or the indications that something Maybe true, the word we use for that. is evidence. And then he goes on from there and says that the heart of man is so opposed to the truth of God.

That despite The overwhelming evidence of the truth of God. Fallen creatures still refuse to submit. Do it. And unless or until the Holy Spirit works with that evidence. And open your eyes to see.

This truth You will not Submit to it. But the point Calvin made is of vital importance. But he said, when the Spirit does. Change the disposition of your soul and change the darkness that holds you captive against the truth of God. You don't believe against the evidence.

Which is what a leap of faith would be. But Calvin said, You acquiesce. into the evidence.

So the Spirit causes us to submit to that which is objectively true. And Calvin made also another important distinction. Between proof and persuasion. Yeah. John Warwick Montgomery, the Lutheran apologist.

tells the story of a man by the name of Charlie, whose wife tries to rouse him from bed to go to work and Charlie won't get out of bed and She comes in and she said, Charlie, you got to get up or you're going to be late for work.

So come on, get out of that bed and go to work. And Charlie says, I can't go to work today. His wife said, why can't you? And Charlie said because. I'm dead.

And his wife said, Charlie, that's the most ridiculous excuse you've ever given to try not to go to work. You're perfectly well. You're perfectly alive.

Now get out of that bed and go to work because I can't. I'm dead. And no matter how she reasoned with him, she wasn't able to convince her husband that he was alive and well. He persisted. In saying that he was dead.

So She called the doctor. And the doctor came and listened to his heart and took his blood pressure, checked all of his vital signs, and said, Charlie, You're alive and well.

Now you need to get out of bed. and go to work. He said, I'm sorry, Doctor, your instruments are wrong. I'm dead. And I know it.

So the doctor thought and he thought, how can I Convince Charlie, that he's not dead. And he went on to say, Charlie, do you know? That what happens when a person dies, their heart stops beating. And when their heart stops beating, they no longer push blood through the blood vessels. And so dead people after they're dead don't bleed.

And uh He took Charlie down to the uh coroner's office and And he poked a needle into the cadavers that were there. and proved to Charlie that dead people Don't bleed. And so the doctor said, Now, Charlie, do you believe me that dead people don't believe? And he said, Yes, you've proven it to me.

So the doctor said, Come here, Charlie, give me your finger. And he took his thumb and he. pricked his thumb With a uh pen? And Charlie's thumb Began to bleed. Box said, What do you think now, Charlie?

Charlie looked at his bleeding thumb and he said, Well I'll be. Dead men bleed. Athero. That's what Calvin meant between the difference between proof and persuasion. The proof may objectively be compelling.

but because of the hardness of the heart, People will not submit. To it. But we notice here. Yeah. In the text, after we sanctify the Lord God in our hearts and we are to be ready.

to give an apologia of defense to everyone. Who asks you? A Reason. For the Hope Not a feeling. But a reason.

This issue has become so muddled in our day that some of our modern translators want to say that what we are to give is not a reason for the hope that is within us, but to give a word about it, to give a message about it, because the Greek word that is there is the word logos, and you're familiar with that. If you don't know any other Greek word, you know that one. In the beginning was the word, logos, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And so we have that word logos in such an elevated fashion in the Prologue to the Gospel according to Saint John. The word the Latin text used is rotionem.

Reason Give a reason. because one of the translations of Logos is reason. We get the word logic from the Greek word. Logos. Gordon Clark, Christian philosopher of the 20th century.

even went so far as to translate the preamble to the Gospel of John. This way. In the beginning was logic. And logic was with God. And logic was God.

Now he did that almost with his fingers crossed. Knowing that he would be accused of elevating reason. to the level of divinity. But what he was saying is that rationality comes from God himself. That God is a rational being.

And he relates to his people in a rational. Way. And to say That the word of God is irrational, contradictory, or absurd is to accuse the Holy Spirit of speaking with a forked tongue. As Peter himself says, we don't claim carefully conceived myths and fables. But we declare to you what we have seen with our eyes, what we have heard with our ears.

The sober truth. of the word of God which is intelligible. and reasonable. for any reasonable person. to embrace.

Our faith is reasonable. It's not based on myths or fairy tales, but it's rooted in history. The gospel message comes to us through the divinely inspired account of those who personally witnessed the gospel. The life death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for taking the time to join us today for Renewing Your Mind.

The message that you just heard is from doctor Sproll's sermon series on the book of First Peter. If you'd like to go deeper in your study, We'll send you the hardcover edition of Dr. Sproll's commentary on 1st and 2 Peter when you donate to Renewing Your Mind. simply go to renewingyourmind.org to give. 1 Peter chapter 3 tells us that the Lord Jesus preached to the spirits in prison.

What does this mean? Join us next week as Dr. Sproll continues his sermon series in 1 Peter by examining the various interpretations of this passage from church history. Join us here on Renewing Your Mind.