Biblical Answers to Challenging Questions

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind… This week on Renewing Your Mind, we're bringing you messages from this year's Ligonier National Conference, where our theme was Upholding Christian Ethics. The conference helped us understand how we as Christians can live with integrity as we engage a world where God is hated and immorality celebrated. Today, we'll hear a very helpful Q&A session hosted by our President and CEO, Dr. Robert F. Kennedy. Chris Larson. Thank you all for these questions that you submitted.

We are going to get through as many as we possibly can. And so just right out of the gate, why did God form woman out of the rib of the man rather than create her separately? There's a very famous statement that Matthew Henry employs, but he's not the author of it. And I don't remember who the author of it, but he took the rib, not from his head that he might rule over her, and not from his feet that he might trample on her, but from his side and near to his heart that he might cherish her. Did I get that right?

Almost. Who was the original author of that statement? Matthew Henry was after my period, and the original author was before.

Lombard. It's in Peter Lombard, but he may not be the originator. Maybe Adam was the originator. You know, when the Bible doesn't tell us explicitly, we're left to trying to follow lines that it might suggest to us that might give us clues.

And we might say, because he hasn't told us explicitly, we just don't know. But we might also think that because of what the rest of the Bible does with that relationship and the way Paul reflects on it in Ephesians chapter 5, that it was a kind of creating, a clue in creation as to where he was going in redemption. And also a real indication that in the very creation of the first woman, he's never done this again, so he didn't do this with any of our wives. He did this only with one woman, that he was establishing in that one act of creation the pattern that would be experienced in all marriages, that the man and the woman would be one flesh. And that there would be, in a sense, the realization, which we have in married life, of unity that reflects both on the created order and is a reflection of the redemptive order of the relationship between Christ and his church.

This question comes from Ellie. She's 13 years old, and she asks, why is God called a jealous God in the Bible? And specifically mentions Deuteronomy 5, verse 9. Well, he's jealous because he will not share his glory with another, that he is to be the object of all glory that is given in worship, and it would be spiritual adultery for there to be someone or anything that would take the place of supremacy.

And so God rightly guards his own glory, and he is passionate for his own glory, and so I think the answer, in a simple way, lies there. What advice would you give to young couples today in their first year of marriage? What habits would you develop now that have blessed your marriage and family over the years? Learn to say, yes, ma'am. I was wrong, and you should have listened to your mother. We clearly need a panel of wives, of speakers one year to get the real story. Well, maybe I'll be the only serious one on the panel today.

I don't know. So that's been on my brain lately, just this idea of how important it is not just to be a prayerful person and not just to pray for your family or your church or the ministry that you know or the missionaries you serve, but to pray particularly for your spouse and particularly pray scripture for your spouse. So one advice I would give to any newly married couple is, I know it sounds like a cliché, but you need to be on your knees before God on behalf of your spouse for the Lord, asking him to bless their ministry, their character, their efforts, your marriage, their job, so many other things. I can't imagine a better thing to kick off a marriage than being in prayer like that. My mom thinks the Holy Spirit tells her things outside of Scripture.

Is that true? We don't know your mother, so it's hard to… There's a uniting of the Spirit and the Word, and Calvin was very clear on that. I think Scripture is very clear on that, that where the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, He is at work in partnership with the book that He is the author of. And so to say that the Spirit is speaking today apart from Scripture, I think is an incorrect position. I think the Spirit is at work in conjunction with the written Word of God, such that no one would ever be saved without the written Word of God. No one would be sanctified without the written Word of God, and in both instances of regeneration and sanctification, the Spirit would have to be at work with the Word. And 1 Peter 1, 25 to 27, I think it is, makes that very clear of the union of the Word and the Spirit.

Yes, I agree with all of that. I think we need to distinguish carefully between the Holy Spirit engaging in someone's mind on the level that we think of in terms of inspiration and the production of Scripture. And the Holy Spirit's affective ministry on our spirits and on our emotions and in the role that the Spirit might play in guidance in and with and through the written Word of God. But I don't want us to go in the opposite direction and completely stifle genuine ministry of the Holy Spirit witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God.

So I think I'd want to make that kind of distinction, the kind of distinction where the Puritans, for example, would have had, and I want to hear Sinclair on this, the Puritans view of the role of the Holy Spirit in day to day life. And what is the role of the Holy Spirit in guidance about something that the Scripture doesn't speak to directly? Well, yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with either of the things that have said, I mean, Word and Spirit work together. And lots of times when we talk about the Spirit moving in our lives, we need to probably understand that that's usually the Spirit helping us apply God's Word to whatever situation we're in. As far as, you know, ongoing revelation of the Spirit, I mean, I've dealt with this on the canon side and obviously would argue that that type of revelatory work of the Spirit is no longer happening today like it did with the apostles.

And so I'd want to affirm that, but I think Derek makes a good point. We'd want to leave room for the Spirit to still be at work, ministering to our spirits. I think we can use terms like, you know, encouraging us, the Spirit ministers to us, the Spirit blesses and helps us. So there's careful terminology there we'd want to use, making sure we don't speak of it as revelatory new information. Yeah, I think I'm right in saying that the New Testament uses the language of revelation to cover or in circumstances that would describe what we would call as inspired revelation, but also uses that language to describe what we would call illumination.

And I think it's important, and I think this is a point Mike is making, is it Mike? That we need to make that, especially today we need to make it, a distinction between the revelation that's given by Christ through the apostles for which He clearly prepared them, and emphasize the absolute sufficiency of that in terms of what Paul says at the end of 2 Timothy 3. But that the Spirit uses that revelation, and we experience it sometimes in ways that are so illuminating.

You know, we listen to an exposition and suddenly something becomes clear. And I think it is quite easy for Christians who are perhaps not as well instructed as we might want them to be to confuse those two things, and to think, you know, the Holy Spirit is revealing this to me. And I do think that that is why we wouldn't want to say all you do is read the Bible, all you do is follow the words. The words are going to be applied, and you need the same Spirit's help who was the instrument of giving the Scriptures in order to understand the Scriptures.

And often that comes in ways that do seem to people to be rather direct. I find one of the most helpful titles of a Puritan book that Derek was referring to there is a book entitled, Scripture Light, the Only Safe Light, Scripture Light, the Only Safe Light, and I think when we get that clear in our minds, we always bring what seem to us to be illuminating thoughts about a situation back to Scripture, to test whether these thoughts that we have, this interpretation that we have is really faithful to Scripture. And that way we keep together, which I think is what we're all trying to do, the balance between the fact that the Holy Spirit did something once and for all, but He hasn't gone back to heaven now.

He's continuing to use that. There is a passage in one of Professor Murray's essays, I think it's on divine guidance, and he was a very sober Scotsman, you know, reformed, seriously reformed. And he has this, I think, very helpful way of saying we shouldn't imagine that some of the hunches that we have are necessarily bizarre, because when our minds are immersed in the Scriptures, if that's not affecting the way we feel, the way we think, the way we have senses of things, then what God is doing is creating a kind of metallic robot and not a living person in communion with Him. And another thing I found helpful is what John Newton says in his letter on divine guidance, where he says eventually as the Christian grows, the Christian begins to have a sense of God's will in situations.

The way a pianist who has really been mastered by the score instinctively plays the music, apparently without thinking, apparently without thinking, but it's so into them, they become like, you know, the way to live is not always to be looking up your concordance, but to become biblical in the way you think, the way you feel, the way you respond, even down to the senses you have of people that you may not be able fully to explain, but are all part of the way in which the Word by the Spirit is impacting you to not only make you morally more like Christ, but have sensitivities like Christ, and that's a lifelong, it's like this answer, it's kind of lifelong. Can a Christian have a homosexual orientation? Well, if this is a question about self-identity, as it may well be, then no is the answer. Now, can Christians have homosexual desires? Yes, but those desires are sinful, that, to use the contemporary word, that concupiscence, that Augustine word, that the very desire itself, it's not sufficient to say it is sinful only if that desire is acted upon, but the desire itself is sinful, and I think that James 1 in the morphology of temptation explicitly says that, so I can't identify myself as though this is my identity, I'm a gay Christian, but that doesn't make any sense.

And for my part, I think that's an unbiblical direction to go. Can we go to the wedding of a heterosexual couple who claims to be believers but are sleeping together? Are we not to attend a homosexual wedding? Does attendance essentially make us a witness?

And if we are a witness at a wedding that dishonors God, is that a sin, and can it ever be biblically justified? So, a compound question there. I thought you told us in the back you were going to weed out all the hard questions.

Does that know? Well, and again, this is a really difficult question because there are probably circumstances that you can't cover in one answer. Certainly the policy at our church is that a heterosexual couple that want to be married in the church would have to receive marital counseling. Sadly, 95% of couples who ask for marriage are sleeping together, and they are told in no uncertain terms that they must stop sleeping together and one or other move out of wherever it is that they're living. And those would be the terms of being married in our church, right? And I don't think that the statistics of my current community are very different from other church communities, conservative communities. It's a very different day from 45 years ago when I got married in Wales. I think the percentage of heterosexuals who are sleeping together would have been very small.

But that cultural change has taken place. But I think we have to stand by biblical principles and to do so within the terms of premarital counseling, but to be insistent about it and to hold them accountable for it. So as part of the question, could you attend a homosexual wedding? I would say absolutely no, under any conditions.

I agree with that. The trickier question, and that's an easy question to answer from a conservative Christian biblical point of view. The more tricky question is what if a gay couple want to attend their parents Thanksgiving dinner? And I've certainly had that question asked and I think part of the answer then would be to lay down certain rules. They can't sleep together in my house, but do you want to answer that question in a manner that says we will not have any relationship at all ever again if I say no, you cannot attend? And that's a more difficult question to answer.

I think that it's possible under very difficult circumstances to still maintain a relationship with your son or your daughter, but to lay down and without compromising your own particular points of view, but make it clear what can and cannot happen in this relationship at my house at Thanksgiving and before my family. Now, mercifully I've not had to address this in my life, but I do know that increasingly Christians are facing this question and I would be cautious about simply saying no. Does Christ's prayer for unity in John 17 indicate that we should pursue the elimination of institutionally distinct denominations?

Oh, that's a history question. We should vigorously seek to end denominational distinctions and everyone should be Dutch Reformed. I personally believe in John 17 when Jesus prays that we should be one as He and the Father are one, that He's praying that we should be one with Him as He is one with the Father. So that the questions of ecclesiastical unity I think are secondary and derivative in the meaning of that text, personally, that's what I think. I see the New Testament guy glazing over. I do think we have an obligation as Christians to labor as vigorously as we can to be a united church with our brothers and sisters in Christ, but where brothers and sisters in Christ are intransigent on certain issues.

Don't encourage Him, because He's all wet. I'm not all wet and that's why I can't join one of Mr. Lawson's denominations. You know, I think the first obligation is that we seek as much as possible to show our unity as brothers and sisters in Christ and that we also continue to affirm the importance of doctrinal issues. So, the ecumenical movement that would say what divides us is unimportant, I don't think really reflects biblical truth. Biblical truth says truth is important, and to be sure there are primary doctrines and secondary doctrines and tertiary doctrines. We may have differences over which are which, but, you know, I think the only way forward with people who don't yet fully see the truth is to sit down with open Bibles and keep talking. There's no other way forward, and that's a wonderful thing when I sit and talk with Lutheran friends or Pentecostal friends or Baptist friends, acquaintances.

I only dare do this because we really are good friends. I always come away having learned something important by having heard their point of view. And even when I'm not persuaded and have not persuaded them, I hope we all come away drawing closer to the Word and determined to keep studying. We love Dr. Robert Gottfried, who is the chairman of our board here at Ligonier Ministries. We love all of our teaching fellows. We're grateful for their wisdom and their great sense of humor.

We hear many of these issues covered on the news and talk shows these days, but often we don't hear a biblical perspective. So refreshing to hear that today. Thanks for joining us for Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday.

I'm Lee Webb, and all week we are pleased to bring you sessions from our 2022 Ligonier National Conference. Our theme was Upholding Christian Ethics. I hope you're finding these programs helpful as you seek to stand for the truth and love your neighbors well. We can only do that through the knowledge of Scripture and putting it into practice. Dennis recently called us to thank us for producing resources that help growing Christians do just that. I think that Ligonier represents a very key and important ministry in our world today by offering such a broad spectrum, a comprehensive list of how the gospel can be presented and the teaching of the Bible can be given through print and audio and visual and other means, including in person. And I also think that especially as we see how even what appear to be solid evangelical churches are willing to compromise the basic foundational Orthodox truths of Christianity and the Bible, that Ligonier stands firm, remains firm, and is unwilling to compromise and go to the left at all, as it were, off the path, off the straight and narrow path of the truth of Scripture. If you've benefited from Ligonier's resources and see the importance of helping Christians know what they believe and why they believe it, I hope you'll contact us today with a gift to this ministry. Our conference is just one of many outreaches, and you'll support all of our teaching efforts, including the publication and distribution of the Reformation Study Bible and other printed material, along with video teaching series and, of course, this program.

You can give your donation online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. Well, as we watch the news each day, we see a clash of world views, and at the root of many issues that are covered is a question that must be answered. Is man basically good? I hope you'll join us for a message by Dr. Stephen Lawson tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .