Who Is the Truth?

Christians need to understand that sense perception, the testimony of history, the testimony of archaeology, and the function of reason itself are tools that God has given His people to stabilize and solidify that faith and trust that we have in Him. Our faith in God is a reasonable faith.

It is not an irrational leap in the dark. Christians are to be a thinking people, not afraid of science, history, or reason, always seeking, as Romans 12, 2 says, to have our minds renewed and not being conformed to the skeptical thinking of our day. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and I'm thankful you're listening today. In a therapeutic age where feelings are elevated, for some, thinking is almost un-Christian, and the message from the world is that there's your truth and there's my truth. We need to be reminded of the importance of loving God with all of our minds. And this series, a blueprint for thinking, is such a reminder. That's why we'd love to give you lifetime digital access to it and send you Dr. Sproul's overview of philosophy on a special edition DVD when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Thank you for helping spread truth to the nations.

Well, here's a passionate message from R.C. Sproul that expresses his desire for Christians to think deeply, thinking about who God is as He is revealed in Scripture, the holy and sovereign God of the universe. When I was a seminary student in Pittsburgh a hundred years ago, I had a close personal friend whose name was Jim Tate. And Jimmy was one of those fellows that had a terribly difficult time coping with seminary education.

He was an athlete. He was bright, personable, and really one of the most spiritually oriented students at our institution. But he had to deal not only with the rigors of the academic life and the skepticism that was pervasive in that institution, but he also had personal tragedy to deal with. The first year we were together in seminary, his wife died suddenly from an ectopic pregnancy. And I remember Jimmy wrestling through his understanding of the character of God and the providence of God in the midst of that.

But he was determined to spend his life in obedience and devotion to God. And I remember an occasion at the beginning of our senior year where we were seated on the steps of the chapel of the seminary, and Jim was earnestly concerned about the fact that he had had a dream the night before, and that dream included images that were less than pure. And the discussion we had that afternoon was focused on this. He said, how can I learn to control the thoughts that go through my mind when I'm asleep? Surely God is going to hold me responsible for the cleanliness of my mind, not only when I'm awake, but when I'm asleep. And I'd never heard anybody raise that question before.

I'd never seen anybody that concerned about their personal sanctification that they would repent of thoughts that they had in their mind while they were asleep. But Jim was that sort of fellow. Almost at the end of our senior year, Jim became violently ill one night and was rushed to the hospital. I went to see him in the hospital room, and he had all the tubes and things inserted in him. He was bleeding internally, and the doctors diagnosed that he had a severely ulcerated colon. Two days later, Jimmy died right before we were to graduate. And I look back on that episode as one who survived the seminary experience and certainly trust the hand of providence in taking Jim from the church and from this planet, but humanly speaking, I couldn't help but conclude that the instrument of his death was the seminary classroom. Not a few of my friends, but many of my friends in seminary were during that experience being treated on a regular basis for all kinds of stomach ailments and ulcers and the like.

Why? Because that particular seminary had an atmosphere of cynicism and skepticism about the things of God. Many of the professors in that environment were openly hostile toward biblical, classical Christianity. And these were learned men, men from the continent of Europe, men who were far more educated than we were as students, and often they ridiculed our faith in Christ. And you imagine preparing for a life of ministry, entering into an institution that you think or assume is committed to grounding you and training you in the truth of your faith, only to find that to be the institution most skeptical of it.

That puts a man or a woman in an exceedingly difficult situation, and some of the students cracked underneath the pressure. I would have to say to you it was one of the three most difficult years of my life enduring that crucible of skepticism. But I survived, and I survived with my faith intact. And I saw some of my classmates survive with their faith intact, but they took a different approach to the issues in seminary from the one that I took.

And I always struggled with this because some of my friends, when they were facing the heat and the turmoil of the debate of the classroom, simply bowed out of the discussion. They fled into the security of their closet, and they answered all objections to the claims of Christianity by an appeal to sort of a mindless faith. They said, I believe it, and that settles it. And they just plugged their ears to the criticisms leveled by the scholars, and that's how they survived. But beloved, I was convinced that that was not an honest way to deal with skepticism. I didn't think that it was obedience to the biblical call to give an answer for those who inquire about the faith.

We are always prepared to give a reason for the hope that is within us. Now, I struggled in seminary, but I wasn't totally intimidated for this reason. I had been blessed by having been instructed in 36 hours in the science of philosophy as an undergraduate from an extremely brilliant professor who was a Christian. And he was also knowledgeable of the competing philosophies in the world that sought to undermine the truth claims of Christianity. And so as I would go into one classroom in the college where the professor was a skeptic and he would ridicule the Christian faith, I could turn around and run back to my professor and say, that professor said this, is there a cogent answer to this? And he would go through patiently the ground basis that supported the claims of Christianity against the critics and against the cynics. Now again, as a seminary student, it was obvious to me that the professors were far more knowledgeable than I was.

I couldn't debate a New Testament scholar on the basis of the technical points of his expertise in New Testament research. But the one thing that helped me through, humanly speaking, was that it was obvious to me when I would listen to these skeptics who were teaching New Testament and Old Testament and things like that, that they knew next to nothing about the science of epistemology. And I could see the glaring epistemological errors that were at the very foundation of their skepticism.

And that helped me make it through that crucible without having to rush into the corner and hide my eyes and cover my ears and plead blind faith as the basis for the hope that is within me. What I'm trying to say with that simple illustration, ladies and gentlemen, is that as Christians we need to be aware of epistemology. We need to be aware of the relationship between faith, which is real, and reason. See, what the skeptic and the critic of Christianity does is says this, that faith and reason are dichotomous things, never the twain shall meet, and they are willing to give you faith. But they claim reason for their side.

They claim science for their side. Ladies and gentlemen, it is manifestly irrational to deny the existence of God. And when a scientist speaks out and says that he is convinced scientifically that there is no God, he has stopped being a judicious scientist and has uttered the expression of the fool. He hasn't paid attention to the data he's supposed to master because the creation itself not only bears witness to the Creator, it screams of the Creator through the data. What I'm trying to say is that Christians need to understand that sense perception, the testimony of history, the testimony of archaeology, and the function of reason itself are tools that God has given His people to stabilize and solidify that faith and trust that we have in Him. Our faith in God is a reasonable faith. It is not an irrational leap in the dark, but we have been almost as a generation brainwashed into thinking, into thinking that we ought not to be thinking. We read the Scriptures which are addressed to our mind that are given to our understanding, and only as we are armed by the information that God gives to us and the clarity of it are we able to stand in an age of skepticism. It's an American tragedy that children are nurtured in the life of the church and then go off to a college and we see it repeated over and over and over again, go through a serious crisis of faith.

Why? We haven't grounded them in epistemology. We haven't grounded them in metaphysics. And so I'm pleading with you to take seriously those two steps of structuring a Christian life and worldview. The third element of the Christian worldview which really should be placed at the beginning in terms of the order of importance is our understanding of God, how a person understands the character of God. I think more than any other concept determines how we live.

That is the most foundational of all for the grid by which we interpret the significance of every aspect of our life. You know, Paul makes the statement in the New Testament that the person who is without Christ is without hope because that person experiences the pain, the suffering, and the perplexing mysteries of human existence without the benefit of the perspective of God incarnate. If God is not in your consciousness, if God is not in your mind, then how you interpret your job, your bank account, your recreation, your marriage, and everything will be reflected in that. Christianity is theocentric. That is to say, it is God-centered. Ladies and gentlemen, if God is the Creator of the whole world and has not simply been isolated by a power higher than Himself to have dominion and rule over one tiny corner of human life that we call religion, but if He's really the Creator of the universe and if He is the sovereign ruler over all things, then all things find their meaning and their significance as they are related to Him.

The late Professor Cornelius Van Til once said, there's no such thing as a brute fact and there's no such thing as a mute fact because every fact is tied to its Creator and find its meaning and its significance in its relationship to God. So if we're going to have a Christian life and worldview, the first thing we have to have, beloved, is a Christian God view because how we think about God will determine how we think about the world and how we think about our lives. But what I'm saying here is that we must think about God. I really don't think that the Christian community in general devotes a lot of thought to the character of God. Theology is not a favorite pastime among Christians.

In fact, many Christians express an antipathy to it and reveal an allergy to theology. I hear again and again and again from the students, I don't need to know any theology. All I need to know is Jesus.

I say, well, that's neat. Who is Jesus? And as soon as they begin to answer that question, they have been plunged immediately into theology. I wish I understood the holiness of God, really understood it.

I understand it a little bit, just a fraction. And I would say that in my own life, one of the strongest controlling dimensions of my thinking has resulted from detailed study of the holiness of God. I study God's holiness not because I'm holy, but because I'm not holy and I know it. And I know that the more I understand about the character of God, the easier it is for me to love Him, the easier it is for me to understand that what this world embraces and tolerates is abhorrent to Him. You see, what God considers unholy, we consider commonplace. In fact, the word we use for the unholy more than any other term is the word normal. What we call normal, God normally calls evil when judged against the character of His holiness. The older I get, the more I study theology, the more I immerse myself in the Scriptures, the more transparent that becomes to me. I need to understand the character of God, His holiness. It's not enough simply to say, I believe in God, some amorphous, mysterious, cloudy spirit up in the sky. But the God we believe in is personal, and the God that we believe in is moral.

He is ethical. He is holy, and He gives commandments to His people. And He gets exercised about whether we obey those commandments. The more I read of Scripture, the more I see the emphasis, not the tangential peripheral consideration, but the emphasis of Scripture on the sovereignty of God. I've said many times, I've never met a Christian who said to me, they don't believe that God is sovereign. Every Christian says they believe that God is sovereign. But let me be honest with you, when I begin to interrogate Christians about their understanding of the sovereignty of God, in about five minutes it becomes apparent that there is precious little sovereignty there.

Precious little. Most Christians salute the sovereignty of God, but believe in the sovereignty of man. They don't believe that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass because there's not a basal commitment to the sovereignty of God. When people tell me that they don't believe in predestination, I'm going to grab them by the throat and say, why not? The Bible teaches it. I say, enough of your humanistic concept of free will that's just foreign from the biblical doctrine of the bondage of sin in the heart that you can find. Never mind that the majority report of evangelicals is Arminian.

I'm not. And I think Arminianism is death to Christianity in the final analysis. At the heart of Reformed theology, at the heart of Luther's struggle, at the heart of Calvin's awakening, at the heart of Knox, at the heart of Edwards, were men who were awakened to the greatness, to the majesty, to the holiness, to the sovereignty of God. And finally, by contemplating the holiness of God and the sovereignty of God, they were driven to develop their doctrines of the grace of God. Because until you face a God who is holy and who is altogether sovereign, you don't know what grace means. See, most Christians really never get outside of that temple experience of the Pharisee who says, I thank you, I'm going to pray, God, and I thank you very much that I'm not like that miserable sinner over there.

The Pharisee prayed. He went to church, and he expressed his gratitude, acknowledging that to some degree and in some measure, he owed his righteousness to God. Thank you, I'm not like that miserable sinner over there, where the other man couldn't even lift his head to heaven.

Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner. And that man stood in the posture of utter dependency upon God's grace. There was no mixture of human merit, no mixture of human ability, adding dross to the pure gold of grace in that man's life. That man was amazed by grace. Evangelicals are never amazed by grace, because they don't understand grace, because they don't understand sovereignty, because they don't understand God. The greatest weakness, I'm convinced, in the evangelical church today, ladies and gentlemen, is sick, sicker than it's ever been in my judgment.

It's an honest judgment. If I didn't believe it, I wouldn't be speaking so strongly about it. It's in the evangelical world that people are saying that you don't have to believe in Christ's lordship to be saved. That you can be carnal in your life and still be a Christian. I had a pastor come to me recently and say that there was a young man he was ministering to who was involved in drugs regularly, even in the sale of them, and he was living illicitly with another woman, and the minister went to him and said, because the fellow claimed to be an evangelical Christian, he said, don't you realize that you must leave this style of living and repent of it to be right with God?

And the young man looked at her and said, oh, it's okay. He says, I'm a carnal Christian. That can only happen in evangelicalism that is bereft of an understanding of the character of God. We need a style and variety of Christianity that is not a religion, but it's a life and it's a worldview where at the heart of the foundational structure of it is a sound and deep biblical concept of the character of God.

Without it, it becomes simply another human religion. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his series A Blueprint for Thinking. Did today's message motivate you to take seriously the study of God's Word, to think deeply about the things of God? It certainly encouraged me, and you can request lifetime digital access to this series with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. And when you do, we'll also send you the very popular series from Dr. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas. Across 35 messages, he walks you through the beliefs and impact of Western philosophy. Some of those ideas, disastrous ideas, are still present today, and increasingly so. My family uses this material in our children's homeschool education, as do many others around the world. So request this resource package at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes. We'll continue this series, A Blueprint for Thinking, tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. A Blueprint for Thinking