The Testimony of Scripture

Just because a book claims to be the Word of God doesn't prove that it is the Word of God. So we have to have some criteria by which we distinguish a true claim to divine origin from a fraudulent or spurious claim to divine authority, and that's the task of apologetics. And that will be our focus this week here on Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Lee Webb, and I hope you'll make plans to join us each day as Dr. R.C. Sproul defends the inspiration, authority, and reliability of Scripture. There is no question that the Bible makes some rather astonishing claims, and one of those claims is that all Scripture is breathed out by God, that it's inspired. But how do we determine the truth of that and other claims in the Bible?

Let's find out. Here's R.C. As we continue now with our study in apologetics, we're going to move to a new subject today that is very important, and that is how we defend the church's confidence and belief in the authority and inspiration of the Bible. Now, before we do that, let me just make a couple of introductory remarks. Some apologists believe that the first step in apologetics should be the establishing of the foundation of the ultimate source of authority for Christian truth claims, namely the Bible, and that we should begin the study of the defense of faith by declaring the Bible, because once you establish the authority of the Bible, the rest is easy. The rest is then simply a matter of exegesis or gleaning from the teaching of the text of Scripture the truths that we are trying to defend. For example, if we can establish that Scripture is the Word of God, and then we can show that that Scripture teaches the deity of Christ, then we don't have to go into laborious philosophical or historical arguments to defend the truth claim of the deity of Jesus, because if the Bible teaches it and we've established that it's the Word of God, the task is finished. And so there are apologists who argue that the proper starting point in apologetics is the defense of sacred Scripture. Now, I agree, certainly, that establishing as foundational the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture is a top priority for Christian apologetics, but I don't think it's the initial point where we should begin.

That's why I didn't begin there in this course. I began by trying to establish the existence of God, because I think that's prior to establishing the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, because you can't know that something is the Word of God unless you first establish that there is a God whose Word may be discovered somewhere. Now, again, there are those who argue that no rational defense should be given to the Bible, but rather the Bible's authority along with the existence of God need to be presupposed as the dual starting point for all of Christian truth and all of Christian apologetics. Now, at that point, people argue that the Bible is self-authenticating, which means that the Bible, by virtue of what it is inherently, can be subjected to no higher court of appeal outside of itself. If it's the Word of God, the Word of God carries its own intrinsic authority and cannot be subjected to something higher because there is no higher authority than the Word of God.

Now, let me back up. We've all seen the bumper sticker, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it. Or they'll say, God says it, I believe it, that settles it.

And anybody who knows me knows that I object to that particular slogan because there is a middle term there that is not only irrelevant, but it's actually undercutting the idea that is trying to be communicated with the bumper sticker. What it should say is God says it, that settles it. Because if I acquiesce to what God says or not has nothing to do with the issues being settled, if the Lord God omnipotent opens His mouth on a particular subject, the issue is settled forever. There is no room left for debate from creatures whom He has made. And as it has been said by the Reformers, where God opens His holy mouth, that's the end of the dispute. But of course, from an apologetic viewpoint, what we're trying to deal with here is the question of whether not only is there a God, but has the God who exists revealed Himself in some kind of written manner? It's one thing to establish the existence of God.

It's another thing to demonstrate that the God who exists has spoken and that He has spoken in and through the written pages of holy writ. But again, those who argue for a self-authenticating Bible argue for that on the basis that there is no higher court of appeal to which the Bible should be tested or subjected. And if we come to the truth claims of the Bible and want to subject the Bible to tests of reason, rationality, or scientific empirical inquiry, that what we're doing is compromising the purity of the Christian faith by subjecting God to the tests of human scientific inquiry. Well, obviously that's not the desire of any apologist who sets out to argue for the trustworthiness of sacred Scripture. But the reason why I'm not satisfied with just declaring a self-authenticating text, actually there's more than one reason. The first reason is that the rationale for it is circular and therefore fallacious.

A circular argument falls by its own weight, and we can construct the self-authenticating argument in this way. The Bible is the Word of God. The Bible being the Word of God declares that it is the Word of God, therefore the Bible is the Word of God.

Or we could construct it another way. All that the Bible says is true. The Bible says it is the Word of God, therefore it is true that the Bible is the Word of God.

Do you see that in both of those constructions of syllogisms that the conclusion is present already in the premises, and it violates the principle of circular reasoning, which is a logical fallacy? So I don't like arguing self-authentication because it gets me into a process of thinking that is fallacious and which any pagan in America can spot as being fallacious. Second of all, to say that the Bible is self-authenticating runs us against this problem. The Bible claims to be the Word of God, but it is not the only book out there that makes that claim. The Book of Mormon makes that claim. The Koran makes that claim. And we know that the content, for example, of the Book of Mormon can't possibly, in my judgment, be reconciled with the teaching of the Holy Bible.

Now Mormons believe that the two are completely compatible. I think that's really impossible to reconcile them. But in any case, since there are other books that claim to be the Word of God, and we recognize that their claims are not authentic or genuine, and we also understand that just because a book claims to be the Word of God doesn't prove that it is the Word of God. So we have to have some criteria by which we distinguish a true claim to divine origin from a fraudulent or spurious claim to divine authority. And that's the task of apologetics at this point as we look at the truth claims of the Bible. Again, just because a book claims to be the Word of God doesn't make it the Word of God. Now again, my friends who want to argue for self-authenticating say, well, it's true that when the Book of Mormon claims to be the Word of God, it's not the Word of God because it's not the Word of God. But when the Bible claims to be the Word of God, that claim is true because it is the Word of God.

And so we're back into the first problem when we argue from that directive. The third reason why I'm not satisfied with self-authenticating truth at this point is that because in the Scripture themselves when God claims to speak, He, without subjecting Himself to a higher test of rationality, for example, nevertheless gives evidence and proof that He's the One who is speaking. And this is what He does in the Scriptures.

He authenticates that the message is from Him by means of the function of the miracle. We go back again to God's revelation of Himself to Moses in the book of Exodus. And God speaks to Moses out of the burning bush. And Moses asks some questions. You know, he said, how are the people in Israel going to believe it when I come to them and I say, I was talking to God and God told me to tell you people to go on strike against this most powerful ruler in the world. And these people are going to look at me and they're going to think I'm crazy.

How are they going to know that I am speaking Your Word, God, and not expressing something that caused me to have indigestion last night? And God answered Moses by saying, put your hand in your cloak. And so he puts his hand in his shirt. He said, pull it out.

It's leprous. And He said, okay, put your hand back in there. He puts his hand back in his shirt, pulls it out, and now it's clean. What is God doing here? He's empowering Moses to do miracles. He said, take your staff, throw it on the ground.

He throws it on the ground and it turns into a snake. And we know then that then Moses engages in a battle with the court magicians of Pharaoh, where the court magicians have their magic tricks, just like magicians have today, but in a very short period of time, going up against the authentically supernatural, their bag of tricks gets empty and Moses wins hands down. And then in order to convince Pharaoh, we go through all the plagues that are visited by the power of God on the people of Egypt until finally Pharaoh relents. In the New Testament, we have Jesus meeting with Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to Him and says, teacher, we know that you are a teacher sent from God because of the works that you do.

No one could do these things, said Nicodemus, unless God were with him. And our Lord Himself, echoing this sentiment of Nicodemus in speaking to his opponents in the first century, said, believe me, if not by my words, believe me because of the works that I do. And then we also see the claim in the New Testament that the authority of the apostles was established by the powers and wonders that they performed. The idea being is that people could recognize that God was speaking His Word through them because they, through the power of God and the help of God, could do things that only God can do.

Now let me just back up on that point for just a second. A lot of people have the idea that the miracles of Scripture prove the existence of God. But that's a weak position from an apologetical viewpoint because something cannot really be identified as a miracle, as something only God can do until you first establish there is a God. So it's the function of miracles is not to prove the existence of God. The function biblically of the miracle is to authenticate, give the outward credentials to those who claim to be speaking the Word of God.

Now I'm going to just skip over this point for the moment. I hope I'll have time to visit it before the course is over because one of the biggest points of controversy that the church has to deal with today in light of David Hume's criticism, for example, against miracles is the whole idea of supernatural events that are recorded in the Scripture. The impact of naturalistic philosophy has started out with their presupposition that there is no supernatural realm, and since there is no supernatural realm, there is no God, any alleged miracle then or now must be false, that the Bible must be mythological precisely because it declares the presence of miracles in it. And so for the modern naturalist, so far from miracles proving the truth claims of Christianity, the very fact that they claim miracle has been the reason why so many people in the modern centuries have rejected the message of Scripture. It's an irony, really, to see the flip-flop of the role of miracle here.

But I will come back to that, as I said, later. Right now, I'm trying to show you why it is I don't accept a self-authenticating defense of the Bible, and I've given you three reasons for that. But what I do, again, agree with is the urgent importance of establishing the trustworthiness of Scripture early on in the process of Christian apologetics. I mean, really, the two things we are obligated to defend in apologetics, the two most important things is, first of all, the existence of God, and second of all, the divine origin of Scripture.

That's where 98 percent of the burden of apologetics falls on those two issues. Now, so far in this course, we've had over 20 sessions where we've tried to establish the first premise, the existence of God. Now, we are moving away from that to the second most important premise, the Bible as the Word of God. Now, where we start with respect to the Bible is with the Bible's claim and with the Bible's self-testimony.

I'm not going to retreat to self-authentication, but one of the problems we have with the whole concept of biblical authority and inspiration is that the Bible claims to be the Word of God. Now, that suddenly elevates the stakes apologetically with respect to the truth claims of Christianity. Because let's take the rest of the truth claims of Christianity that are extraordinary, that Christ is the Son of God, that Christ was the second person of the Trinity who becomes incarnate.

That's an astonishing claim to supernatural reality. Let's take the central claim of the New Testament that on the cross we see not the death of a convicted criminal outside of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans, but we see an event of cosmic significance in that it is an atonement designed to reconcile fallen creatures to a just and holy God, which is how the New Testament understands and interprets the death of Jesus. In the Scripture, we read the astonishing assertion that this Jesus who was crucified on Good Friday came back out of the grave and was raised from the dead, which is the central tenet of Christian faith, the resurrection, and then ascended bodily into heaven and so on. These are all supernatural episodes that are at the very core of the New Testament message regarding Christ. That is, for better or for worse, the New Testament message is steeped in the supernatural.

And the Bible claims to be giving us this message on nothing less than the authority of God Himself. Now, suppose the claim that the Bible makes that it is inspired, that it is God's truth, that the prophets are speaking not under their own impetus or from the vantage point of their own human insights, but are speaking by divine inspiration so that they justly can say, thus saith the Lord. Suppose none of that is true. Is it possible, rationally, that the rest of the content could be true?

I would say yes. I could say that people who were eyewitnesses of Jesus could get it basically right that He was in fact dying as an atonement, that they saw Him come out of the tomb alive. They don't have to be inspired by the Holy Ghost to recognize a resurrection for what it is if they actually experienced that. And if they were standing on the Mount of Olives and watched Jesus visibly ascend into heaven, we don't have to have an inspired witness for that to be true. But again, remember, these are profoundly, astonishingly, supernatural events that are being recorded. And if our primary source, our primary witnesses to these extravagant and extraordinary events are wrong about their own authority, that casts a huge shadow over the veracity of their testimony. I mean, if I came into you today and I said I was just out at the cemetery, and I saw somebody come up out of a grave, now you would be hard pressed to give much credence to what I have just announced to you.

And then I say, but you have to believe me because my words are inspired by God Himself. And then you demonstrate that my report is filled with all kinds of contradictions, and you come to the conclusion that the details show that I'm less than an inerrant or infallible witness. Does that automatically disprove the fundamental claim I've made?

No. But it certainly would seem to indicate that I was hardly a trustworthy witness to base your complete commitment on for the rest of your life. You're going to want better evidence, I hope, than somebody who's walking around claiming to have authority that they do not have. So again, I say to you that the Bible claims to be inspired, in my judgment doesn't make it inspired, but it elevates the stakes.

It makes the issues all the more significant. And so we have to examine that truth claim of Scripture in terms of its claim to be inspired as we develop an apologetic for the Bible. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing over the next few days here on Renewing Your Mind. We are going to examine the truth claims of Scripture.

This is all part of Dr. R.C. Sproul's series on classical apologetics. It's titled Defending Your Faith. In 32 lessons, R.C.

surveys the history of apologetics and shows us how we can use logic and reason as allies in defending the faith. We'll add the full series to your online learning library when you give a donation of any amount to Ligetiore Ministries today. We'll also send you the 11 DVDs. So call us at 800-435-4343.

You can also make your request and give your gift online at renewingyourmind.org. Defending the faith can be an intimidating task to be sure, but do you need a seminary degree to be effective? R.C. 's firm conviction was no. He maintained that everyone is a theologian. The question is whether we're a good one or not. We do need to know and understand the fundamental truths found in Scripture.

And as Dr. Stephen Lawson pointed out at a Ligetiore conference, we need to remember that we're not alone. The Holy Spirit will come to expose the sin that is in the lives of unbelievers, and specifically the sin of unbelief, of rejecting the gospel and rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ. And this very same word was used earlier in the gospel of John, in John chapter 3 and in verse 20, for everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

That's the very word. It's used in Ephesians 5 verse 13, that we are to expose the deeds done in darkness. And this is the ministry of the Holy Spirit. As we defend the gospel, as we preach the gospel, it is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to bring heart conviction and to expose sin in the lives of unbelievers, and specifically, as we will see, the sin of unbelief. That's Dr. Stephen Lawson, and tomorrow we will continue Dr.

R.C. 's Sproul series, Defending Your Faith. He'll show us why we can trust the truth claims of the Bible. His message will point us to the authority of Scripture. We hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind.