Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 83

A Book about the Bible That Makes You Want to Read It

I enjoyed Barry Cooper’s new book, Can I Really Trust the Bible? (from the same series as Sam Allberry’s Is God Anti-Gay?). The book covers the basics about the Bible—what it is, how it’s organized, etc.—and was written with both Christians and non-Christians in mind.

Cooper outlines the book’s approach this way in the introduction:

Does the Bible claim to be God’s word? What does it say on the outside of the jar? Does the Bible have anything to say about itself?
Does the Bible seem to be God’s word? What does it look like when we “take off the cover” and peer inside? Does the Bible look like something only God could have written?
Does the Bible prove to be God’s word? What does it taste like? Can we know, in our own personal experience, that the Bible really is God’s word?

The beauty of this little book (only 82 pages!) isn’t merely that it explains what the Bible is, but that it does so in a way that stirs up awe and a desire to immerse oneself in God’s powerful written words. Read it, and you can’t help but be moved to “taste and see” that those words are good.

From the book’s conclusion:

To help us grasp how powerful Scripture is, the biblical writers say it’s like fire. To express how penetrating it is, they describe it as being sharper than any double-edged sword. To explain how vital it is for life, they speak of it as bread and milk, food and water. To show how necessary it is for seeing clearly, they speak of it as a light, and as a mirror. To communicate how much we need it if we’re to be secure and grounded, it’s spoken of as an anchor, and as a rock. To underline how valuable it is, they speak of it as being more precious than thousands of pieces of silver and gold. To convey the fact that it creates life, it’s spoken of as being like a seed. And when it describes how satisfying it is, God’s word describes itself as being sweeter than the very sweetest honey.

Taste and see.

Challenge Response: Didn't Jesus Say He Wants Christians to Kill All Non-Believers?

Here's my response to this week's challenge: 

Educating the Deaf

Gallaudet University, the first university in the United States focusing on educating deaf people, was named in honor of the founder's father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

Thomas was born in Philadelphia in 1787. His father was George Washington's secretary when he was president. The family moved to Connecticut, and Gallaudet earned his masters degree at Yale University. He pursued theological studies in preparation to being a pastor.

In 1814, Gallaudet met a little girl named Alice Cogswell. She was deaf and Gallaudet was motivated to figure out how to teach her since there were no schools for the deaf in the U.S. He eventually learned sign language in France and returned to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Alice was one of the first students.

Gallaudet married one of the graduate of his school and they had eight children. The youngest, Edward Miner Gallaudet, established a national college for deaf students in Washington, D.C., receiving a charter from Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Another son, Thomas Gallaudet, became an Episcopal priest and also worked with deaf children.

Use Your Knowledge to Serve Others, Not Judge Them

I’ve learned over the years—both from my own experience early on and because of emails I’ve received asking for advice—that there’s a great temptation to get frustrated with the people in your church as you learn theology and apologetics. There’s a temptation to look down on them with a scornful attitude of “they should know what I know!”

This is a spiritually dangerous misunderstanding of how the body of Christ was created to function. It’s not by accident that the people in your church don’t know what you know, it’s by Christ’s design, who has given us all different gifts "for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ."

I came across a passage in Life in the Father’s House that sums up the situation well:

If you understand that any ability you have comes from a gracious God and that anything good you accomplish happens through His power alone, then you will less likely become arrogant as a result of your skills or successes. You will also be less condescending and critical toward others who have different gifts than your own, because you will remember that God Himself has organized the body according to His perfect plan, “just as He wills” (1 Cor. 12:11). If you are unhappy with some of the constituency of your local church and wish that they were more like you, then your problem is ultimately with God, who put them there and made them the way they are.

And now comes the crucial point:

Rather than complaining about their weaknesses, you should eagerly seek to use your gifts for their benefit and humbly receive the ministry God has designed for them to have in your life.

You’ve been given your gift for the sake of those who don’t have that gift, and their lack of that gift is a result of God’s design, not their failure. Their weakness is your opportunity for joyful service, just as your weakness (whatever it might be) is theirs. It doesn’t make sense to despise people in your church for lacking the very thing you were placed there to give them.

Your gift of theological and apologetic aptitude and knowledge is not the only important gift. (“If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?”) It’s given to you so you can get down in the trenches below the people you’re trying to help and lift them up, not so you can look down on them from above.

Your gift makes you a servant, not a master. Once I understood this, it changed everything.

Links Mentioned on the 8/05/14 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

New Atheism: A Survival Guide by Graham Veale
Saints and Sceptics – Website Graham Veale contributes to
"I can't say my mom is in Hell" – Challenge and Response
reTHINK Student Apologetics Conference – September 26-27
The Unevangelized Heathen by Greg Koukl
The Heathen and the Unknown God (CD/MP3) by Greg Koukl
Top 50 Questions Christians Can't Answer by REPuckett
Miracles and Unbelief ("Why won't God heal amputees?") by Brett Kunkle
Miracles by Craig Keener
Jehovah's Witness info from CARM
The Trinity Is Biblical by Greg Koukl
The Trinity: A Solution, Not a Problem (CD/MP3) by Greg Koukl

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Challenge: Didn't Jesus Say He Wants Christians to Kill All Non-Believers?

In “Top 50 Questions Christians Can’t Answer,” the author asks many questions about the problem of evil, sin, and hell, but since we’ve covered those things a few times before, I thought #25 would be an interesting one for you. It touches on a subject I don’t think we’ve practiced explaining in a challenge yet: hermeneutics:

25 – In the book of Luke chapter 19 verse 27, Jesus says, "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me." This seems pretty clear that Jesus would have Christians kill all non-believers. How do you explain this? Convert them or kill them, right?

If an atheist challenged you with this, could you explain how biblical interpretation works, along with your answer to his question? Tell us what you would say below, then we’ll hear Alan’s response on Thursday.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Is Science the Ultimate Tool to Gain Knowledge?

Alan explains that even though science is a tool for explaining the world, it is neither the only nor the best tool.

What Is Marriage from a Policy Perspective?

Ryan Anderson, co-author of What Is Marriage? is possibly the most clear and well-reasoned spokesman for man/woman marriage out there. His recent speech at Stanford (given amidst much controversy) covered three questions:

What is marriage?
Why does marriage matter?
What are the consequences of redefining it?

Here’s how he opened his remarks:

I’m not going to say anything about morality, anything about theology, or anything about tradition…. I’ll be making a philosophical argument, with some appeal to social science, largely to get at a public policy purpose of marriage. The question that I want to ask and then answer is, what is marriage from a policy perspective? What is the state’s interest in marriage? How does the state define marriage? How should the state define marriage, and why?

Below is the full speech, followed by a Q&A that was both challenging and refreshingly respectful. If you know someone who doesn’t understand the reasons for opposing a change in the definition of marriage, this is the lecture to share.

 

 

A summary from Anderson's response to the second question on why this matters:

What we know is that marriage is the institution that, when it’s stable, it protects children from poverty, it increases the likelihood [that] those children will experience social mobility, it protects children from committing crime, and it prevents the state from having to pick up the pieces in the form of a welfare program or a police program.

So more or less everything that you could care about (if you care about social justice and you care about limited government, if you care about the poor and you care about freedom) is better served by having a healthy marriage culture—a civil society institution that takes care of raising that next generation—than by having the government try to pick up the pieces of a broken marriage culture.

That’s why marriage matters.

How God Answers Our Prayers

Jon Bloom points out how we may be missing the answers to our prayers:

We can’t help but have unreal, romantic imaginations and expectations about what God’s answers to our prayers will be.

Therefore, we are often unprepared for the answers we receive from God. His answers frequently do not look at first like answers. They look like problems. They look like trouble. They look like loss, disappointment, affliction, conflict, sorrow, and increased selfishness. They cause deep soul-wrestling and expose sins and doubts and fears. They are not what we expect and we often do not see how they correspond to our prayers….

If we ask God for greater, deeper love for him, what should we expect to receive? Answers that give us a greater awareness of our deep and pervasive sinful depravity, because those who are forgiven much, love much, but those who are forgiven little, love little (Luke 7:47).

If we ask God to help us love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31), what should we expect to receive? Answers that force us to give unexpected attention to a neighbor (who we might not put in that category (Luke 10:29)), which are inconvenient and irritating….

If we ask God for a deeper experience of his grace, what should we expect to receive? Answers that oppose our pride and humble our hearts (James 4:6)….

If we ask God to help us “walk in a manner worthy of the Lord” (Colossians 1:10), what should we expect to receive? Answers that require more humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love (Ephesians 4:2) than we thought possible and might result in destitution, affliction, and mistreatment, like many saints throughout history, “of whom the world was not worthy” (Hebrews 11:38).

Etc., etc. Read the rest here.

We often forget that God “predestined [us] to become conformed to the image of His Son”—that He is working in our lives to achieve this, and that we can expect pain will be involved. As Hebrews 12 reminds us, “[Y]ou have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons”:

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines”…. He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. 

Wilberforce and Social Change

William Wilberforce is well-known for his decades-long persistence getting legislation passed to outlaw the slave trade in the British Empire. He and a group of Christians called the Clapham Sect (because that is where they were from) were motivated by their Biblical belief in human value and the value of God's creation to pursue other ways of solving other social ills. Their campaigns were carried out through a variety of organizations and legislation that they backed. Their goal was to “eliminate public corruption and promote religion in the hearts of the people.... The movement emphasized the worth of the human soul and...the individual," and their goal was to spark evangelical revival.

In 1787, the Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue punished drunkenness, vulgarity, gambling, and immoral books.

The Philanthropic Society tried to prevent crime by trying to deal with the secondary causes. London's streets were filled with huge numbers of homeless children who committed crimes. One quarter of the unmarried women in London were prostitutes, many were underage.

The Climbing Boys Society worked to outlaw the practice of children who were sold or kidnapped and forced to work as chimney sweeps, treated as property.

The Society for the Discharge and Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debt pursued prison reform. Early in the 19th century, 3/4 of prisoners were imprisoned for owing small amounts of money, and the conditions were horrible. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and The Reformation of Juvenile Offenders also attempted to improve these circumstances.

The Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor helped correct the abuses of the workhouses. It also introduced policies to improve the economy, hoping to improve conditions for the poor.

Wilberforce and the Clapham group also promoted Sunday School as a way to teach children how to read, to educate them in order to improve their conditions, and so they could read the Bible and learn moral virtue that would serve them well in leading good lives.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals worked to pass legislation to end cruel practices and sports. One example was a "sport" called "bull baiting." A bull would be tethered with a long enough rope to give him free movement. Dogs, bred for fighting, would be unleashed on the bull, and the animals would fight, each tearing the other to pieces.

Wilberforce and the Clapham sect were Christians. They believed salvation was through Jesus and good works did not earn God's forgiveness. But they believed in common grace – that society should promote the common good by pursuing objective virtues and morality. Not only are these goods in themselves, they also promote the inherent dignity and value of God's creation.