God’s Basic Design (Part 1 of 2)

Do you believe the Bible has absolute authority? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why your answer to this question will significantly change every aspect of your faith and your life.

Alistair begins a series today titled God's Design for Women. Let's take our Bibles and turn to the book of Psalms. Psalm 139. Oh Lord, you've searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down. You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, oh Lord. You hem me in behind and before. You have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you're there. If I make my bed in the depths, you're there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful, I know that fool well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be." And then he says, how precious to me are your thoughts, oh God, how vast is the sum of them.

Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. And when I awake, I'm still with you. We thank God for his Word and we look to him to help us as we study it together. I want to be very honest. When I was thinking about this day, I was thinking about it in very different terms before I began to give myself to it properly. Last weekend, I was in Toledo and I had to address some issues there in relationship to men. And as I thought about what was going on in that context, and then imagined this week and looked forward to today, I was thinking, I think, really very badly and quite wrongly by way of confession, which is good for the soul. I think quite honestly, and this is a dreadful thing to admit, especially with you all here, but I mean, I might as well. I think I was thinking, you know, last week was, you know, male and a lot different in terms of the way that one would have to approach it.

And when I got to the more cozy opportunity of the women the following Saturday, I could relax a little more perhaps in preparation. I may be able to approach the material a little differently, after all, and so on and so on. And in the midst of all of that, I said to myself, no, you're just flat out wrong.

I mean, you're thinking completely wrongly. And so then after I walked around the room a few times and began to think as properly as I could, I determined that I would do what now I'm about to do. Now you're going to have to think. If you've left your brains anywhere outside, go out and get them and bring them back in, because I want to appeal very much to your minds and to encourage you to think along these lines. After all, the title that has been given to the event is pretty straightforward, God's Design for Women. So we know that it is to be about God, we know that it is to be about design, and we know that it is to be about women. And since it is about God in the first place, it is surely appropriate that our text for all of our deliberations should be God's word, the Bible.

And having read from the Bible and having made this statement by way of introduction, I want immediately to pause purposefully and talk to you about why it is that we would ever use the Bible as the source of our deliberations today, starting there purposefully and actually staying there directly. And the reason that we do so is because we believe that basic to all our understanding of Christian truth is God's revelation of himself and his will. In other words, the Bible speaks to us about the truths of Christianity, truths to which we come, not as a result of our human discovery of God, but truths to which we come as a result of God's disclosure of himself, a disclosure that he has made uniquely in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. God has made himself known in a number of ways. In our humanity, we have a sense of moral rightness and wrongness, which is the stamp of his handiwork. When we look at the leaves falling to the ground and recognize again that in every good opportunity, we recognize that in the order of creation, God has made himself known. But we may not have given much thought to the fact that here in the pages of Scripture, he has made himself known uniquely. Of course, he has made himself known ultimately, finally, savingly in the incarnation of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I come to you today to address the subject on the conviction that the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament is inspired by God.

The word actually means that God made breathed it out. And therefore, his words, in the same way that our words speak to who we are and what we believe and in measure our authority and our character, the word of God, as we have it in the Bible, speaks to his character. It is authoritative, it is permanent, and it is sufficient. And we believe that God knew in the putting together of the Bible all of the needs of men and women throughout all of the centuries, so that although we're in the twenty-first century and removed by a long way from the material that we're going to consider today, nevertheless, we discover that it has an immediate impact because of who the author is and because God made both the writings and the readers. Now, of course, there'll be some who are saying, well, I understand so far what you're saying, but isn't ultimately the acceptance of the authority of the Bible simply, in the last analysis, an act of faith?

And the answer is yes, it is. But it is an act of faith that is not contrary to reason. Oftentimes when people say, but that's just an act of faith, what they have in mind is that somehow or another, faith involves leaping into oblivion. Faith involves the disengaging of our thought processes. Faith involves some other mechanism in our lives.

But in point of fact, when the Bible speaks about faith, it speaks of it, not in antagonism to our rationality. And in the final analysis, when we think about the Bible itself, all of our authority for believing it is ultimately in the Lord Jesus Christ himself. That when God raised Jesus from the dead, he was, if you like, unconditionally validating who Jesus was, what Jesus did, and what Jesus said. And the remarkable thing about this Jesus is that although he is, if you like, outside of the Old Testament, still everything that he says references the word of God. He's constantly quoting the Bible, and he is validating retrospectively the Old Testament. And that's, of course, one of the things that an individual, when they begin to get serious about thinking about who Jesus is and why he came, one of the remarkable things is when you read the Old Testament and then you follow the life of Christ, you say, how in the world did an individual manage to approximate so closely to all these things that were written hundreds of years before he arrived?

And of course, he was also validating prospectively all that then would be written about him in the New Testament, in the gospels and in the story of the developing church and the act and the letters that were written in the first century or so, and finally, in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, looking forward to this Jesus. Now all of that to say this, Jesus is the grand theme of the Bible. He is, if you like, the focal point of the picture. I'm not very good at pictures. I'm not very good at art at all. In fact, perspective is something that passed me by.

I was absent on the day they gave out perspective in terms of those line drawings. But Sue's good at that and so she's able to say to me, no, no, no, no. If you look at it in this way, then you will see exactly what's going on. And if you look at your Bible, if you look at yourself, if you look at the issue of womanhood separate from Jesus, then it is impossible to get it right. And you may be here today and you're saying to yourself, that's the exact same thing. You know, I might as well close both my eyes when it comes to the Bible.

Leave one shut and leave one open and so on. But the amazing thing is this, that the very faith that is involved in accepting the authority of God's word comes by means of God's word. And the scriptures are described to us as being the word of Christ. Therefore, what the Bible says, the Lord Jesus as the head of the church says. The Lord Jesus speaks to us today, not by the contemporary utterances of inspired individuals, but he speaks to us by the teaching and application of the inspired scriptures.

Do you understand that distinction? So we don't run around looking for inspired men or inspired women. We actually would want to look for men and women who are committed to the inspired Bible. So that we then being sensible women would be able to examine the scriptures and see whether what is being said by the teacher is actually confirmed and ratified in the Bible. Whether that has to do with a picture of womanhood or whether it has to do with the nature of marriage or whether it has to do with our involvement in the local church, whatever it may be, our dependence is not on the utterances of inspired individuals, but our dependence is upon the instruction and application of the inspired scriptures.

Now, for those of you who are still with me and haven't already said in your mind, I should have had a second cup of coffee, let me try and explain to you why this is so very important. Until you accept the authority of the Bible, and I can't give you, this is not a conference on the authority and sufficiency of the Bible, but until you accept the authority of the Bible, you will not defer to it. You will not do what it says.

And so the issue of where are we starting from in addressing the subject is a crucial issue. So is this Bible authoritative? Is this word of Christ, the head of the church, to be obeyed? And are we to defer to it whether it is palatable or not? Are we to do what it says, whether we like it or not?

Are we to obey it when it runs absolutely contrary to contemporary culture? The Bible must always be given the last word on any subject. I would say, somebody, you know it's possible to misinterpret the Bible.

Yes, of course it is. We may misinterpret the Bible, frankly, because we're ignorant. We just don't know really anything about it at all. And so we say silly things about it. Or we may misinterpret the Bible because we just pick wee bits out of the Bible and we don't pay any attention to the context in which it's set. We may also misinterpret the Bible because of our own prejudices. We find in the Bible what we want to find in the Bible.

So we go to it and we find it and then we say it's there. And none of us are free from the potential for that. How then do we make sure that that doesn't happen? Well, I think if we study the Bible properly, we understand that there are certain things that are perfectly plain and clear. Those are the main things over which there is really no debate at all.

Nobody is concerned to argue about them. There are other things where the Bible is not as clear and is not as plain. So on the plain, clear things, we need to be plain and really clear. On the issues where there is not the same clarity, secondary issues, we need to make sure that we are not dogmatic and assertive and bombastic and domineering.

Did you understand that? God's design. How do we know about God in the Bible? How do we know about His design in the Bible? Well, I don't want to lose somebody in the very first 10 minutes to say, well, I don't frankly pay attention to the Bible at all.

If I'd known it was this, I wouldn't have come. I thought it was some kind of principles from out there, you know, Chopra or Chukra or whoever that character is. You know, some bright ideas, some insights. I need insights. I don't need the Bible.

Goodness gracious, if you could see the house out of which I'd come, you know I need 10 principles here. I need pointers. I need help. Help me.

I want to start this Bible stuff. Listen, ladies, if you stay with me, I, with God's help, I'm going to show you that this is exactly what we all need. This is exactly what we need. And it is an illusion to think that we can address the sense of need that we have by simply reaching out for practical pointers to be implemented until we are convicted and convinced that God has a legitimate right to rule, that God has a legitimate right to speak, that God has spoken within his Word, and therefore that he gets the last word on every subject. We will not be able to make the progress that we require. Now, we could go and illustrate this.

We won't take the time to do it. But for example, when Jesus in Mark chapter 10 is asked a question on the subject of divorce, you'll remember how he answers it. He answers it by going right back to Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2.

Do you not know, he says, that God made them in the beginning, male and female, that they became one flesh? So, we have the revelation of Scripture set over and against the investigation and the confusion of men and women. In the 1940s, a man by the name of Hendrick Van Loon, he wrote a book entitled The Story of Mankind, and he began his history of the world with these words. We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where did we come from? Whither are we bound? Slowly, but with persistent courage, we have been pushing this question mark farther and farther towards that distant line beyond the horizon where we hope to find our answer.

We have not gone very far. Now, whether we are male or female today, those ultimate questions are the questions. Are you just a bunch of chemicals in suspension?

Do you emerge from plankton soup? Because if you do, then frankly, the issues of how well I'm doing in my femininity, how well I'm doing in fulfilling the role of single woman or maternal provider, is marginal at best and probably totally irrelevant. So you see, until we address this most foundational issue about which the Psalmist writes in Psalm 139 about the very nature of our creation and what God has done, then the other questions, which are very important questions, are in need of being left on the sign. Now, you don't have to look far to find that there is a difference between the revelation of the Bible and the investigation of man. The New York Times, in its Health and Fitness section, actually in the Science Times, and then the subsection Health and Fitness, had a review entitled On Being Male, Female, Neither, or Both. And I can't read the article and just use it by way of illustration, but I'll give you one quote from it. Until the turn of the century, Dr. Miorowicz writes, gender was defined through a binary taxonomy of opposites, i.e., people were either male or female. Why didn't you just say that?

Because, you know, anyway, that's okay. That's quite a way. But in the late nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud, the German psychiatrist, Richard von Krafftebing and Wilhelm Fleiss, a German physician, began putting forth the notion that humans were inherently bisexual and that sexuality existed on a continuum between male and female. In 1910, a Berlin physician, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, published a pioneering work on transsexuality and articulated a relatively new modern definition of gender. Quotes, absolute representatives of their sex are, he wrote, only abstractions invented extremes. Okay? So, the idea of sexuality, as it is propounded here, and I'm going to show it to you in Genesis 1 and 2, and the notion that emerges out of the early days of the twentieth century in German psychiatry and which spills over the Atlantic into contemporary thought, these two notions could not be further apart. They are not bedfellows. They do not live together.

You cannot merge them. Okay? Which is why I'm saying to you what I'm saying.

Unless you are convinced of the authority of the Bible, then when you take your New York Times on a Tuesday morning and read this, you are going to be immediately at sea. You're going to be running down the street saying, Who am I? What am I? Where am I on the continuum? Am I male? Am I female?

What in the world am I? But if you have accepted the authority of the Bible and you believe that God gets the last word on every subject, then you don't disengage your brain. You interact with the material. You think it out in light of what you know as having been revealed by the Creator God.

And there's all the difference in the world. The right starting place, the right foundation for our walk with Jesus is to be convinced of the Bible's authority and sufficiency. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. You should know that at Truth for Life, we hear from listeners all across the globe, even from places that are hostile to the gospel. People tell us this program is a much needed source of strength and encouragement. When you sign up to be a Truth for Life Truth Partner to make a monthly gift to the ministry of Truth for Life, your giving goes directly to the distribution of Alistair's teaching. As a Truth Partner, your prayers and your giving help make a real difference in someone's life. You can sign up to become a Truth Partner at truthforlife.org slash truth partner or give us a call at 888-588-7884.

When you do, we'll say thank you each month by inviting you to request both of our featured books for no additional donation. Being a Truth Partner is a great way to share the gospel while building a wonderful library for yourself or your church or having books to give away to others. Today we are encouraging you to get a copy of Nancy Guthrie's book Saints and Scoundrels. This book takes an intriguing look at the encounters that people in the gospels had with Jesus.

You'll get a fresh look into what shaped and motivated people like John the Baptist, Judas, Barabbas and Stephen. Be sure to request Saints and Scoundrels when you sign up to become a Truth Partner. You can also request the book when you give a one-time donation. Just click the picture in the app or visit truthforlife.org slash donate. I'm Bob Lapine. We hope you enjoy your weekend and are able to worship with your local church. Be sure to listen Monday when we'll consider why your favorite uncle may resemble a certain animal at the zoo. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.