Answers in Genesis - Sunday School - Introduction and Review

, so let's go ahead and pray and then I'm gonna, kinda give you guys a little bit of an overview of what we're doing today and, and where we're going from here, but let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for this, this new season of Sunday school, both with adults and our young people. I pray that it be with all of our teachers today and all of the students. thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to study your word and study your word as families.

We ask you to fill us with your spirit and, guide us this year, and, we just thank you so much for your kindness and goodness to us each day in Christ's name we pray. Amen. So, if you don't, if you don't know me, my, my name is Mike Barry. I'm one of the pastors here at Cornerstone.

I've been a member of Cornerstone since 1993, I've been on staff since 1998. And, I met my wife here in 19993. Pastor Milton married us in 1995. And if you see some of those pictures, he looks like a teenager marrying another, like, I look like I'm in junior high.

And And so, yeah, we've been here for a while and the church sent me and my wife to seminary in '96, came back in '98 and finished up seminary from here. but we're very excited about this year. we'll be talking about this question a little bit later, how can God be both just and merciful? And let me just give you a little bit of an overview of what we're doing.

This is our adult Sunday school, 2016, 2017, whoop, whoop. And so we're starting back up. We've been doing our adult Sunday school. At times we've called it adult equiping school, for a long time, but this is, the second official year that we're going through our Answers Bible curriculum.

We used this class two years ago as like a beta class to see if that curriculum would work. We said yes, it did. And so we, we actually went through some of the same material to stay on, on pace with the kids. And so this year we're moving into all new material and So that's our adult equipping.

This is the basic purpose of our adult Sunday school. It's a para-family ministry designed to come alongside of our families in their journey from brokenness to wholeness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, we're here to come alongside you. We're not here to replace the family, replace family devotions.

we're, we're just seeing ourselves as, as come alongside of our families and our singles to, to be a supplement to what God is already doing in your guys' lives. we, in this particular curriculum that we're taking 4 years to cover, we're covering the seven seas of history. We're basically just going through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. And as we do so, where the theme is like the various periods of history as reported in the scripture.

We've got creation, we spent some time on that last year. God created the heavens and the earth before the fall, there was no death, disease, pain, suffering, so we spent a lot of time on that. We spent time on corruption. And we talked about both corruption in the Book of Genesis.

We also compared it to some of the things it says in the New Testament, talked about Adam and Eve in the fall. We talked about the Genesis 5 genealogies and the wick, the spread of wickedness. Then we talked last year about catastrophe, and that is what? The flood.

OK. So we spent quite a bit of time on the flood and looking at those particular texts. And if you guys have been here for a while, we, we've been overlapping our study in Sunday school with also the preaching of the word. So Milton preached through Genesis 6 through 9.

We covered Genesis 6 through 9 here, same basic material, but a little bit of a different look at it. And then confusion, Genesis 11, this is the Tower of Babel. So we talked about the spread of the different people groups, different languages. We talked about the fact that there really is no such thing as race in the Bible other than the race you run.

Right? Everybody comes from Adam and Eve, so we're all related. there's different nations. The Bible speaks of different nations, different ethnic groups, different languages, but never speaks of different races.

The idea of race really comes from evolution, comes from Darwin's Origin of Species, the subtitle of which is, or the Survival of the Preferred Races. And so we talked, and so what we're in right now is really the 4th C of biblical history, confusion. then later in our series, we'll be getting to Christ. When the fullness of time came, Paul says in Galatians, God sent forth His Son.

So we'll be getting to Christ. We'll talk about the cross. And then we will talk about the consummation, the return of Christ. So that, those are the seven C's.

We're in a current series. we're finishing up God is faithful. Last year, we hit all these different chapters with the flood, and, we, ended on Job's suffering if you guys were here, Dan Whittaker finished up there. And so we're in the, the 4th C confusion.

I'm hoping that it's not gonna be confusing. That's just the, the history, the part of history that we're in. And what we're gonna do in, is we're actually gonna just pick up, Pastor Milton's covered the Abrahamic covenant and Abraham and Isaac, if you guys wanna go back, and he, he's, he's gonna be also continuing on, Genesis. And so if you wanna listen to some of his lessons, you can go online.

We're gonna pick up two more lessons from this particular, quarter, and then we're moving on with where our young people are at. God is in control. So, today, we're hoping to hit Sodom and Gomorrah. If we don't get there, we'll pick it up next week.

I've actually got a lot of review material that I wanna lay out for all of us. and we'll see if we can get to Sodom and Gomorrah. And then we're also gonna hit the Ice Age cause we never got to that last week, last year. Joe especially wants to make sure we get the Ice Age.

And then from there, we'll be moving into God as a control, continuing through Genesis, Exodus, and so on. So that's where we're at. Clear as mud. Any questions, comments, criticisms, or concerns?

All right. so today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna do a review of the foundation from last year. We laid a foundation. And so I'm gonna take a little time to review some of the core concepts that we, we talked about last year, particularly in the area of bibliology, but I've, I've actually added a few things to it just to, to clarify, our core positions that really take us through this whole series.

Then we're gonna, Lord willing, we'll study Genesis 18 and 19, and we'll get in some application. If we don't get to all the Sodom and Gomorrah material, we will complete it next week. So, let's do some review together. Let's talk about some of the core commitments that we laid out last year.

And these were some of the foundational things that we covered. That really sets up the way we're approaching this whole Sunday school class. And really, it sets up the way that Cornerstone approaches the Bible. The way that we hope that you'll approach the Bible and the way that we would say like a lot of people in evangelical, I'd say most people in our circles approach the Bible this way.

However, there is confusion on how we should understand the authority of scripture and some of the other concepts we're gonna talk about. And so, that's why we want to review it and I'm hoping to call you. And challenge you to these commitments. And if you don't understand or if you don't agree with these commitments, this is a forum where we're hoping that you'll ask questions and that you'll, if there's something that we're talking about that you don't buy into or you don't understand, we're hoping that we can address those things for you.

So let's talk about first of all, one of our core commitments is this, the Bible is authoritative, being from God Himself. The Bible is authoritative being from God Himself. If the Bible were theoretically, if this was just, if this scripture was just from human beings, if I came in and I wrote you 2000 pages of stuff from Mike Berry, You could say that's from Mike Berry, that's not authoritative. if I brought you just a bunch of religious opinions from various people throughout history, you could say those are just religious opinions fromout history, that's not necessarily authoritative.

But the Bible claims to be the word of God. And in claiming to be the Word of God, God identifies Himself with his spoken word and with his written word. And so, therefore, it's our contention that the Bible is no less authoritative than if Jesus Christ himself were standing in this room speaking. So if Jesus Christ were to appear before us today, and we could verify that this is our Lord, His words that were coming that would come out of his mouth would be no more authoritative than what we have in the scriptures.

That's what we mean by the authority of the Word of God, is it is from God. And so therefore, the Bible needs no outside validation since it comes from God Himself. Let me say it again, the Bible needs no outside validation. Since it comes from God Himself.

There's nothing that we absolutely need from the Bible to prove the Bible because it is the highest source of authority. We use the Bible to judge all other truth claims in the universe, and when you have an ultimate truth claim, there is nothing to else to which you can appeal. Otherwise, it is not the ultimate truth claim, right? If I say that logical consistency is the ultimate truth claim, And then, you, I, somebody asked me, well, why do you believe logical consistency is the ultimate basis for truth?

I would say because it's logical. I'm gonna appeal to the highest form of authority in order to establish that authority because I must do so if it's the ultimate source of authority. If I say empiricism, my, my, my empirical abilities is my ultimate source of authority. And you say, well, how do that?

And I say, because that's what I see, taste and touch. That's what, to what else can I appeal? Otherwise, it's not my highest form of authority. Does that make sense?

And so if we say that the word of God is our highest form of authority, and then we appeal outside of the Bible to try to prove that the Bible is God's word, then we're appeal, we're appealing to something other than the highest authority. So we're, we're disproving our claim by going outside of the Bible. So let me say what we don't mean by that. This is different from saying it has no outside validation.

When we say that the Bible doesn't need outside validation, we're not saying that there is no outside validation. We're saying that the Bible doesn't need it. Is there outside validation that demonstrates that the Bible is the word of God? We would say certainly yes.

We're gonna talk about some of that today. There's outside validation. There's historical, the Bible comports with historical reality. But we need to be careful about that because there are historical interpretations of history that contradict the Bible.

There are people that look at history and interpret history in such a way to make sure that it contradicts the Bible. And so we need to make sure that we're not trying to go to outside history to prove the Bible. the Bible needs no outside validation, but there are outside validations. Does that make sense?

It doesn't need them, but they exist. So the Bible does report, it speaks of a person named Jesus Christ, and there's all kinds of evidence in the Bible for Jesus Christ. and when you go outside of the Bible, is there validation of the existence of Jesus Christ? The most certainly is.

But do we need that outside validation to demonstrate that the Bible is the Word of God? No, we don't. And so that's one of our core commitments. However, so however, the Bible needs no outside validation or it would not be the highest of authority.

So that's what we mean by the authority of the Bible. if the Bible says that God created the earth, he spoke and brought the whole universe into being. If the Bible says that there is a historical Adam and Eve, and we can demonstrate and as we're interpreting the Bible, a straightforward reading of the Bible would demonstrate that there really was a historical Adam and Eve. If we can demonstrate in a straightforward reading of the Bible that there really was a flood and a tower of Babel and and Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham was a historical person who married his wife and had Isaac and then Jacob, Joseph.

If aren't, if we're reading the Bible in a straightforward way and all these things seem to be straightforward from the Bible, then we would say they're true regardless whether or not we find outside validation. The Bible is its own authority. When we look outside of the Bible, the reality is, is there is very little archaeological evidence for most things in history. there's an archaeologist that I was reading, that I read in seminary that, that speaks of all of the things that have happened in, in, in history and how the archaeology gives us less than 2% of all of the things that we know of in history.

And so if we, if we think that we have to go to archaeology to prove the Bible, we're gonna be in trouble because there's a lot of things that have happened in history that just, there's no evidence for it anywhere outside of the Bible. And so we're gonna come back to that over and over and over again. And that's what, that's one of the core commitments is the Bible is authoritative. Second or next, Since the Bible is authoritative, we cannot lay it aside as we develop the Christian worldview and evaluate competing worldviews.

We dare not try to enter into this neutral zone. And try to pretend that we're gonna get into a boxing match with somebody else who says, hey, leave the Bible outside of the ring. And come into this neutral area with me, I'll leave my pre-commitments outside of the ring, and we'll try to enter into this discussion about worldview things. Where did we come from?

Why are we here? What's gone wrong with the world? How do we fix it? Those core worldview questions.

We cannot leave the Bible outside of the ring because the Bible is the very basis for our worldview and the person that you're going to speak with, they cannot leave their worldview outside of the ring either. They have pre-commitments, we have pre-commitments. We bring them into the ring and we admit our pre-commitments, and then we begin to have a discussion. So one of our foundational ideas is that there really is no neutral ground.

that doesn't mean that, That we don't Listen to attacks against the scripture? Yeah, we listen to attacks against the scripture. we listen to, that's part of the, the whole class is we're, we're, we're doing apologetics, as we hear what people are saying against the scriptures. But to try to jump into some neutral ground and pretend that your opponent or somebody else who's coming from a different worldview is also trying to be neutral is foolhardy.

There is no neutral ground. What we do is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10, for the weapons of warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, every thought in captivity to the obedience of Christ. That's part of what we're doing in this class and something that I, I, I wanna encourage you guys to do in your whole life is that when you are entering into your world, when you're asking some of the big questions, we have a lot of people in our church that are in the medical field and there's so many complexities these days.

And that involve medical decisions and, and as a Christian, how can I, what is my calling?

What am I supposed to do here? I remember back in, in Egypt, in the book of Exodus, the Pharaoh is dictating the death of all Jewish boys 2 years and younger. And so the nursemaids had to decide, are we going to obey this command or disobey this command, and how are we to make that decision? They can't lay aside God's word to try to make such a decision.

They have to bring every thought captive to Christ and say, what would Christ want me to do in this decision? I was sitting down with one of my children just this last week, and we've been talking about the issue of, of music. And, in my personal opinion, like we listen to a lot of Christian music, but I don't think that all secular music is absolutely wrong in every sense of the word. Like classical music written by unbelievers, that there's a lot of value to it.

I think people that are made in the image of God, if they're making good music and they've got some lyric content that's worth listening to, God uses unbelievers to produce incredible art. However, you have to bring every thought captive. And so, when I'm sitting down reading lyrics with my, one of my children, and we're reading point by point, some of the songs that they think aren't that big of a deal because they just listen to the beat. I'm like, well, let's evaluate this.

Would Jesus be OK singing these lyrics? would we be OK using some of these concepts at church, or, or is this, even if this is coming from an unbeliever, is this telling us something true about our world? Or is this trying to get us to not think about our world? when somebody says, well, I don't listen to the words, I just listen to the music, that's actually part of the problem right there.

We're called to bring every thought captive. And so the Bible is authoritative and it leads these conclusions. Hebrews 6:13 says, for when God made a promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself. OK, remember, so God makes a promise to Abraham.

And he doesn't have to swear, but he does make an oath, right? And so God's like, OK, I'm gonna make an oath by the highest authority in the universe. Let me see. What shall I swear by?

The highest authority in the universe, shall I swear by the sun? Shall I swear by logic? Shall I swear by empiricism? What shall I swear by?

And God says, I will swear by myself, my name. Why would God do that? There's no authority greater than God, but isn't this circular reasoning? Isn't it circular for God to swear by Himself?

OK, Brian says no because he's God. I would say yes because he's God. It is circular reasoning, but it's necessary circular reasoning. All arguments for final authority of necessity are circular.

Let me say that again. All arguments for ultimate authority are of necessity circular. Otherwise, if you try to appeal to another authority to demonstrate your ultimate authority, then you've undercut your ultimate authority. And so it's reasonable for God to swear by himself because he is the highest authority.

And this is to demonstrate that it is not ridiculous to say, I believe the Bible, and I prove the Bible from the Bible. And I hear this all the time from really, really good apologists that'll say something like this, you can't prove the Bible by appealing to the Bible. Stop using so many Bible verses to prove the Bible. And I, I think part of what they're trying to communicate, I agree with that does the Bible have outside evidence that helps corroborate our faith, our faith?

I would say yes. But do we have to appeal to outside evidence in order to establish a foundation for the Bible? I would say, no. Otherwise, you've undercut the concept of ultimate authority or final authorities.

And by the way, what I'm arguing for is not any different from what you're gonna hear from a secular philosopher who understands epistemology, epistemology, that is the idea of how do we know anything. Philosophers who understand epistemology realize that all of us have a starting point, and that starting point cannot be proven. It must be accepted. And this is the Christian starting point.

Yeah, Mitch. Because now They have another case, they can cite that case. Same thing OK, yeah. Yeah, so you have precedent.

Yeah, you have the idea of precedent. In precedent, you're still, so you're appealing back to a previous law, but then that law can appeal back to a present law, a pre, a law before then. Some people have this idea of, well, you, you've created infinite regress, which is true, but all of regress eventually goes back to a starting point of ultimate authority. And then you have to decide at some point, OK, my ultimate authority is either the Bible or it's logical consistency, or it's rationalism, or it's empiricism, or you end up in where a lot of people are today, and that is just postmodernism.

We have no idea what the truth is because we could never get there. And that actually, I think is, if you were, if you throw the Bible out and throw Christianity out, postmodernism makes a whole lot of sense. That there really is no way to get to truth and ultimate authority. Yeah.

So the Bible is authoritative. All that to say the Bible is authoritative. So, one of our core commitments throughout Sunday school is the Bible is authoritative because it's from God Himself. When Pastor Milton gets up and preaches, or one of the pastors gets up and preaches each Sunday, one of the assumptions every Sunday, even if it's unstated is the Bible's authoritative.

I'm preaching from the Bible, Milton's preaching from the Bible, and because the Bible says it, we assume it's true. Right? And yes, we can, we can appeal to outside authority to, to support the reasons why we think it's true. But we don't have to go outside of the Bible.

OK, next, the Bible is an errant being from a God who cannot lie. If the Bible really is from God and it's authoritative, it makes sense that it is also without error because it comes from a God who cannot lie. The Bible tells us that God cannot lie, and therefore, it is without error. So the scriptures, as they've been given out by God, and we would argue in the original manuscripts, we're not arguing that every single English translation is without error, but as God breathed out his word to the original writers onto the original manuscripts, which we're going to talk about later, has been preserved adequately for us today.

That those manuscripts are without error. So, does that mean that every single English translation is without air? Obviously not. One of my professors in seminary who worked on the Bangladesh translation of the New Testament, walked in one day with a fresh copy, the, the, his, the first hot off the press new translation of Bangladesh New Testament Bible, and he was holding it in his hands, just shaking like, I worked for 10 years on this translation.

Of the Bangladesh New Testament. Here it is. And, one of the things, the first things he said is he, he said, I am so nervous to find the first. Mistake.

And we're like, mistake. Wait a second, that's the Bible. Now what he was acknowledging is that he is a human translator of the original manuscripts. And translating it into another language, Bangladesh, and he's gonna find some mistakes.

And so we're not saying every single translation is without error, we're talking about the autographer, yep. Inherent, because you said the Bible is inherent being from the God we cannot lie, but if the Bible is So like Any Have ale. Yeah, so could any ultimate authority have error? We would say yes.

So if, so, if somebody says logical consistency is my ultimate authority, on one level, in a Christian worldview, we would say if, if he's thinking properly, logical consistency, then there would not be error. The problem has to do with now perception of logical consistency, perception of, empiricism, perception of rationalism, and so on and so forth. So, you're asking a really good question that's getting me to try to flesh out something that's more complicated. All these other authorities can be legitimate authority, authorities if they're subsumed underneath God's authority, his authoritative word.

And so, and so in that sense, they're not ultimate authorities, but we would say that logical consistency, rationality, empiricism, those are all good tools underneath the authority of God. If they're understood properly. So God Himself, who doesn't have the perception problems that you and I have or the sin problems, he's gonna be always be logically consistent. He's gonna be completely rational and his empirical observations are without error, right?

but he also is the word and he is the ultimate authority. So I don't know if that, if that makes sense. But we, so we said, when we, when we bring the Bible to bear, we're closest to the ultimate authority as, as, as, as we possibly can be. If we try to set the Bible aside and we try to just go with logical consistency, now we've got quote unquote, human logical consistency untethered from the authority of the Word of God, and that's where we run into trouble.

If that makes sense. What we won't get into is what Thomas Aquinas tries to say about going with natural theology, totally cut off from The Bible. We'll save that for another time. So that, so inerrancy, we would also argue in this class as a core foundation, the Bible has been preserved.

So we could say, oh, that's great, God's authoritative. He's given us the Bible, but it's, it's been completely corrupted like the Mormons argue. And so we have, we can have no trust in the Bible. That's why you need the Book of Mormon because the Book of Mormon was delivered to Joseph Smith behind the curtain.

With these 12 witnesses on the other side of the curtain, and he received direct find revelation with these golden plates. He was given special glasses to translate the heavenly language into, for some reason, Elizabethan English in the 1800s. And so he comes up with the Book of Mormon, which now is a fresh revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we can trust the Book of Mormon because it's, it's pure, whereas the King James translation of the Bible has been corrupted.

That's the Mormon argument. That's great that you think the Bible is authoritative, but it hasn't been preserved. We would argue that no, that, that God in His providence has preserved the scripture. He, and when you guys, if you guys remember this lesson, there's both a divine and human aspect of the doctrine of preservation.

God divinely preserves his word, but he also commands the church to protect his word. And so God is going to keep his bargain. But human beings and the church has to fulfill their part of the bargain in each given generation. So from God's perspective, the grace the grass withers, the flower flower fades, but the Word of God stands forever.

God has promised us that, that his, his word will stand forever. We looked at this when was it, King, was it Jeroboam, I forget which king was his name. He throws the, the, the scroll into the fire. Jehoiakim, OK.

And then God just gives fresh divine revelation to Jeremiah right after that and, and he gets the whole thing back. we looked at this with, The particular group of Christians that were up in the mountains, they had memorized the whole Bible. And so when they were being chased and copies of their Bibles were being burned, they just would recite it right back to each other and write it all out again. And so, God has chosen to preserve His word, even though there have been people throughout church history who've tried to destroy his word, and even people who have tried to change it, right, who have been uncomfortable with certain parts of scripture, and yet God has, has continually preserved his word.

When God, when pastors get up and preach the word faithfully, they're doing a part of their job is preserving the word of God. And so we would argue that the, that the Bible has providentially been preserved, but also we have a responsibility to preserve it in our own lives. We also suggested last week, last year that the Bible is sufficient. that the Bible is sufficient.

What do we mean by that? Gruden has a great definition in the systemic theology where he says, the sufficiency of scripture means that the scripture contained all the words of God. He intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly. And so when we talk about sufficiency, and we look at the different stages of the history of redemption, is God's people, on the other side of the Jordan had everything that they needed for that time in history.

And then God has the authority to add to his word. We don't, but he has the authority to raise up new prophets. And then, during the judge's period, during the king's period, during the, pre, exile, the post-exile period, you get to the New Testament, you have a rising up of new writings and new, prophecy. Each successive period, God has the authority to add new information for his people, but His word is sufficient for the people of that time.

And so what we have is the, is the sufficient word for this period of redemptive history in order for us to find out how do we get saved. How can we trust him and how can we obey Him? Is the Bible gonna teach you how to, how to fix your electrical problems in your house? No, that's not what it was designed for.

Is the Bible going to help you how to recover the information that was crashed on your computer or that I ran into some problems that Milton was talking about last week, just this week, where I didn't save a document, hit send, and all of a sudden it disappeared? No, the Bible doesn't help us with that, but does the Bible help us with the main questions of life, the worldview questions, where did you come from? Why are we here? What went wrong with the world?

How do we fix it? Does the Bible talk about marriage? Does the Bible talk about sexuality? Does the Bible talk about gender?

all these things, we would argue that the Bible is sufficient to answer such questions. And so part of what that implies is, is if you believe just the Bible, you've believed enough. And if somebody else comes up to you and says, no, you haven't heard the whole story, you need to also read this. You might read that, but you don't have to, and you can politely say, thank you.

I've, I've been studying the scripture on that particular issue and I, and I believe I have enough. You don't have to feel guilty, you don't, and, and at the same time, you don't need to press other people's consciences with stuff that's not in the Bible when it comes to these core issues of life. We have to be very careful about that, respecting other people's consciences when it comes to, does the Bible speak of this or does the Bible not speak of that? It's just a, a barrier opinion or is this something the Bible really speaks of.

As pastors, we have to be very careful. I might get up and make some applications on issues, but I have to be careful about not imposing on your conscience things that the Bible just doesn't speak of, right? And so the Bible is sufficient. When we study the Bible, we use a literal, historical, grammatical hermeneutic.

We talked about this last year a lot, just about every lesson that comes up. Hermeneutic, how do we interpret the Bible? There's lots of ways that people come to the Bible and, and they try to interpret it. And the thing that you hear in pop culture all the time is you'll, it's every week I'm opening up an article that says Something scoffs about some other pastor that reads the Bible literally.

They read the Bible, literally. How terrible is that? And what they mean by that, they have no idea what they're talking about. They just know that whoever reads the Bible literally must be a wacko, right?

When we say we talk about reading the Bible literally, here's what we mean. We approach the Bible in a literal way, not spiritualized meaning. Guys like the the early church father origin presented this idea of interpreting the Bible spiritually, and that's the highest form of interpretation. So if you're reading about, let's pick what we're gonna talk about a little bit later, Sodom and Gomorrah.

You could look at the literal reading, but that's just the fleshly reading. The highest reading is to figure out what does Lot symbolize, what does his wife symbolize, what does the fire symbolize, and they would just come up with all kinds of very interesting interpretations that could never be evaluated by anybody except for the teacher because they're so far removed from the text, spiritualized meaning. we would say that when we come to the Bible, You read the Bible like any other piece of literature.

If I open up the newspaper and I happen upon a poem, I read a poem like you would read.

Poetry, right? If I'm reading something in the A one section that purports to be news, I read it like news. If I open up the opinion section, I would read it like an opinion. And so the same thing with the Bible, when you, when you open up to something that seems to be reporting itself to be history, you read it like history.

You see a poem, you read it like poetry. You see apocalyptic literature, the Book of Revelation, there's different rules for reading apocalyptic literature. Letters from Paul, you read it like a Letter, right? You're not looking for spiritual meaning behind every word.

You're not counting all the letters in Hebrew and Greek to see the number correlations, what's the central letter to get some mystical interpretation for your life today in 9/11, 2016. You don't look up the numbers of 9/11, 2016 and see what the special message is for you today, like some people do. we read it literally, historical. What we mean by historical is not Gshika.

Anybody remember what Gshikta means for last year? Stories. So this idea of Geshikta is German, theologians who were embarrassed by some of the quote unquote embarrassing parts of scripture, would just argue that that's geeshikta, not history. It's just good moral spiritual stories never meant to be understood as real history.

So when we look at some of these embarrassing stories of the Old Testament, Or in the minds of many German theologians, these embarrassing stories of literal resurrection from the dead, those are just geshita. Whether that happened in real history doesn't matter. We could never really know that. What's important is that it has faith meaning to you.

There's a meaning for you today. No, we would say that the Bible is, is being presented to his people as history. and so when we're reading historical portions of scripture, we, we, we default to history rather than Gshika, unless there's something in the context that would really make it clear that maybe this is meant to be just a parable, like when Jesus says, let me tell you a parable, right? So if Jesus says, I'm gonna tell you a parable, then you would read it like a parable.

But if Jesus says, just as it was in the day of Noah, everybody was married and given in marriage, but then they, Moses got or Noah got in the ark, and then they were all destroyed. So it will be with the coming of the Son of Man. When Jesus says stuff like that, I tend to think that he's talking about history. That Noah and the flood, and a lot of people being destroyed is historical because he's connecting it to his own historical return in the future.

So that's history, not Gshita. So what do we mean by grammatical? Not just the ideas, but the words are inspired. Not just phrase by phrase, idea by idea, but the actual words.

That's what we call verbal plenary inspiration because I have read some of your theology of verbal plenary. Verbal is the words, plenary means the total. Every word, every total word is inspired, not just idea by idea. That's why many of our translations make a big deal about trying to translate the words properly and the grammar, not just idea by idea.

I'm not saying that the What, what's one of those like the Living Bible? Living Bible, that's not a bad book to have on your shelf. You just need to realize when you're reading the Living Bible, you're really reading a commentary, right? You're reading a commentary on the scriptures.

You're not reading a word for word translation. And so you need to keep that in mind when you're reading your living Bible. Where something like the NAS or the ESB or the New King James or stuff like that, these are, these are translations that are built upon the idea of verbal plenary inspiration. And so let's, let's talk about a couple of passes of scripture that demonstrate that.

Let's look at the grammatical. Jesus in Matthew 22 says this, Jesus answered and said to them, You are mistaken. Not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. The context here is people are asking him about marriage and, and remarriage and stuff like that.

They're trying to trick Jesus up in his words, right? And he says, but concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was spoken to you by God saying, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Jesus is building his argument on what?

OK, not just the scriptures, but what aspect of the scriptures. The tense of the verb to be. He's building an argument on the present tense of the verb am, right? So, so Jesus says, I, he, he's quoting, have you not read or spoken what was spoken to you by God saying, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. Based upon the present tense of the verb am, God is alive now, and Abraham is alive now, right? And so this is verbal plenary inspiration. It's not just idea by idea.

Jesus is making a very big theological point based upon the present tense of a verb. That's what we mean by grammatical. We're applying grammatical hermeneutics. What does the, what would the grammar of the various texts teach us about the meaning?

And Jesus provides the example for us. Let's talk about historical. Matthew 10:6, but from the beginning, Jesus says of creation, God made them male and female. This is the context where Jesus talking about divorce.

Jesus wants to demonstrate that divorce was not part of the intended plan. In order to make his argument, he goes back into history, and he says, from the beginning, so there was a start, from the start of creation, where do we find that? What book do we find that in? Genesis.

So, from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. So he's making an argument from history that there's a historical Adam and Eve, and, and Adam was male, and Eve was female, and God brought them together and did not intend for them to separate. Well, God has joined together let no man. Set asunder, right?

And so this is a historical argument. Then there's literal. Let's take a look here at what Jesus says. and as it was in the days of Noah, so will be in the days of the Son of Man, they ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark.

The flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, as it was also in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built, but on the day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them. Oh, even so, it will be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. How does this demonstrate a literal approach to the text?

Jesus is arguing that he is going to return. In history, literally, right? Do you guys agree with that? So Jesus is arguing, I'm gonna come back literally, and, and the conditions on the earth are gonna be very similar to other historical literal conditions that have happened in the past.

Noah, in his age, there were people married, giving in marriage, sharing gifts, and then they were all destroyed. There's this guy named Lot, lots of things going on, and then Sodom was destroyed. So, notice what Jesus doesn't do. He's not looking for the spiritualized meaning of Noah and the flood.

He's not saying, there's this fable or parable about Noah and the flood. There's this parable about law. He's taking this literally, and he's applying it to his own literal return. So, if we wanna try to turn Noah and Lot into symbols, you can go ahead and do that.

There's people that do it. There's people that say, Noah, this is just a nice story that's symbolic to teach moral lesson. There's symbolic lessons with Lot, but if you're going to make those symbols, then you better make the return of Christ a symbol as well. You better just make that.

Don't, don't try to interpret that literally if you're gonna deny the literal nature of Noah the flood and his generation and Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah, because that's just, it's just not consistent. And so that's, so that's the literal, historical grammatical hermeneutic. That we established last year. Therefore, in light of everything that we just talked about, authority, God's preservations, efficiency, our hermeneutic, when we study the Bible, we want to do exegesis.

As opposed to what? Isosis. What does exegesis mean? T.

From the text, right, we want to draw out of the text its intended meaning, not just try to insert into the text what we think it should mean. When we do exegesis, we wanna try to, we, we, in the back of our minds, we're saying there really is a Holy Spirit. Who has inspired original authors, who are writing to original audiences, and so we want to determine what was the Holy Spirit saying through those original authors to those original audiences that has been preserved for us today for my understanding and application.

So we want to do exegesis.

what we don't do is just say the Holy Spirit is speaking to me a special meaning from this text. Now, that does happen as God is using the original writer, original audience as God, obviously, he preserved his word for us today, right? To be an example and to be exhortation and encouragement. But it's not just you making an interpretation of the text totally independent of what it was intended in its original context for some special meaning.

I remember, a good friend of mine back in the day. And I've made the same types of errors, so I don't want to pick on him. Maybe I should pick on me. Let's see.

Well, I'll pick on him first. one of my buddies, I remember one time he was about ready to go down to RCC and take a, a math test, and he was claiming this verse in Proverbs that says that God will bless your remembrance. God will bless your remembrance. And he's like, I, I just believe God is, God's gonna bless my remembrance.

I'm gonna get in, take that math test, and I'm just gonna do a really good job. So he went and he took the math test and he got a D. And he's like, what happened? I thought God was gonna bless my remembrance.

Well, if, if you guys understand the context of that particular proverb, do you guys know what the context is? It's not he's gonna bless your memory, he's going to bless others' memory of you after you die, right? If you, if you live a life that is in the fear of the Lord, your remembrance will be blessed in the minds of other people. That's the context of the proverbs, but you could easily just yank that out and make it a, hey, help me study for this exam type of verse when that has, that's not what it means at all.

And we can, we can do that with all kinds of different passages. So But we, so we want to do exegesis. And so, let's, let me first of all just stop and see if there's questions. We got about 10 minutes and And so we, we could jump into.

Chapter 19, but let's see if there's questions, comments. Criticisms or concerns. Yes. Do you really want us to like start criticizing you?

I. Hey, if you have Yeah, if you, if you have certain criticisms, constructive criticisms, yeah, constructive criticisms, yeah, Bob. you think I'd look better with a tattoo? OK, cool.

We did have, one of our, one of our new elders came in with a fox tattoo. To the elders meeting last Thursday, a, a fake tattoo, it was cornerstone on his arm. I'll have to show you a picture. He was expecting to get hazed.

Instead, he hazed us and kinda It was pretty cool. Any questions? OK, so somebody just share with me what's one of the core commitments to this whole series. And really everything we do at Cornerstone, what's one of the core foundational ideas.

The Bible is authoritative. All right, so the Bible is authoritative, being from God Himself. Since the Bible is authoritative, does that mean that there's no outside evidences to corroborate our faith? No.

Yeah, of course not. We see it all over the place. We should expect, right? If God's word really is true, we should expect to see if we're, if we're looking at things the right way, we should expect to see all kinds of evidence out there.

In fact, we do. And I feel, I feel so bad for some of my Mormon friends who they have, they have a similar idea when it comes to the Book of Mormon. They say that it's God's word, we just need to believe it, you get the burning in the bosom. And they, they're not, they're not telling you to read the Bible and then see that it's true.

They just want you to go into a closet and feel the burn, and then you say it's true. But then when you look out at history, there is absolutely no corroboration whatsoever for the Book of Mormon in North American or South American history. You notice that there's biblical archaeology at secular universities, right? All over the place.

Other than BYU you ain't gonna find Book of Mormon archaeology anywhere. Cause there is no Book of Mormon archaeology. that would be a really tough place to be in. And And so if we were arguing for the authority of scripture and then we look out through our biblical lenses and see absolutely no corroboration whatsoever in the world that we're living in, then we should be concerned, but the fact is, is we see biblical corroboration all over the place.

OK, so authoritative. Any other concepts that you guys remember? I just wanna see if you guys heard anything I said or whether I'm Charlie Brown's teacher. OK, inerrancy.

OK, so we talked about that God's word is without error. Does that mean, That Mike Barry's translation of the Greek of First John, my first year of seminary is an arran. No, I made all kinds of mistakes in my first year of translation of Greek of First John. But we are saying is that the That the text behind First John is an error in its original manuscripts.

OK, any other things that you guys remember? Yup. OK, good. So all arguments for ultimate authority are of necessity circular.

So these are what we would call, another way to, to think about it from a different perspective, this is a priori. You have a priori and a pastori type of arguments. A priori arguments are arguments that we could make that they're, they just seem self-evident. and so that's not a perfect analogy, but it does get you towards that ultimate authority.

Stuff All right, good. Anything else? Yup, Kath. OK, good.

The Bible has been preserved. So the doctrine of the doctrine of preservation, God in His sovereignty preserves it, but also he gives a responsibility to human beings and to the church to preserve it. The church at different times has done a really good job, and other times the church has not done a good job. But God in His providence has still overruled sometimes our bad jobs in the preservation of Scripture.

Just one example is, sometimes the, scribes would get uncomfortable or embarrassed sometimes with certain things in scripture that they just feel like, Aren't, aren't right. Like there's a couple places in later manuscripts where Jesus will talk about prayer. And then like in, in some other books, he does match prayer and fasting. But once in a while, you'll see a scribe, an over scrupulous scribe will feel like fasting probably should have been put in here.

Maybe it's missing, and in the margin, they'll write and fasting. And you'll see some of that stuff once in a while in copies of manuscripts, not in the early manuscripts, but in copies. my son and I just this morning, we were listening to Genesis 19 on the way to church, and there's some crazy immoral stuff that happens in that book. Well, we're gonna end up talking about this next week, but I'll give you a preview.

You guys know it, right? These two angels, they, they're 331 is probably preincarnate Christ, and the two angels are talking to Abraham, then they go down to Sodom. And they come into the city, lots going through his typical eastern hospitality thing. Why don't you come into my house?

And in a lot of these ancient cultures, even to this day, if, if you're playing the polite role, you never just accept right away. So the two angels say, no, no, no, we'll stay in the, we'll stay out here in the, in the courtyard. He says, no, no, no, no, you must come in. Nah, we'll stay out here.

No, you must come in. That's just what you do. And then finally they say, oh, OK, we'll come in. And then what happens, all these crazy sexual perverts come to the house and say, and I love the way the NIB says it.

Well, I don't love it, it's, but it really portrays what's going on. these guys are pressing on the house and they say, let these men come out to us that we may have sex with them. Everybody is gathered around the house, and you're just like, this is crazy. And then lots like because of his high value of hospitality, he's like, no, no, no, no, don't do this.

Here's a couple of my daughters, take them. And you're just like, what in the world? And then later he's over trying to convince his son-in-law or the ones who are about ready to marry his daughters, hey, come with me out of the city. And there's just all this crazy immorality and Lot gets saved out of this whole deal, and you're like, why in the world does he get saved, right?

And it'd be very easy for a scribe to want to come along and try to clean this thing up or for an interpreter to say, this is nuts. How are we gonna preach the gospel through this? This is all symbols, right? That's what a lot of the early church fathers did is they said, this is all just symbolism.

Don't take this literally. But I wanna suggest to you that the way that the Bible reports this story demonstrates the authenticity of what is being reported. The Bible doesn't come along and, and try to clean things up for us. It reports what happened.

And this was a city that was so wicked. There's only a couple of places where God destroys all kinds of stuff, and, and one of them is obviously the floods. You can only imagine how wicked the world was for God to destroy the whole earth. But for God to say, I am going to destroy this city, what would you expect?

But to find that wickedness where God's patience has run out. And Lot gets rescued, not because of his righteousness. Abraham interceded for him in the previous chapter, and Lot was the most righteous of the bunch, and he's ultimately just saved by his faith, and even has to be picked up by the angels and put out of the city, right? And so it's one of those things where it's the way the Bible reports it, it fits so well with the culture of the time.

It fits, it fits the just gross perversity that you would expect for a city that's about ready to be destroyed. And the Bible doesn't try to clean it up for us at all. It just reports it. And so to me, it's one of the arguments actually in favor of a lot of passage of scripture where the Bible just reports to us like a newspaper, here's what happened.

And by the way, on top of that, Moses is reporting this information for the 2nd generation of Israel as they're about ready to come into the land and have to go to war against Lot's descendants. And so it's, it's also emphasizing the perverse origin of these peoples that they're about ready to fight. And so there's all kinds of things going on there. Yeah, question.

What about The stuff about snake handling and all that stuff. In the original Yeah. So the question is, is what do we say about the end of Mark, like chapter 16, that, that there's a few, there's some verses in there that aren't in some of the early manuscripts, but they show up in later manuscripts. There's debate about whether that's part of the original or not.

And some of what's in there is about stuff like you shall handle snakes and they shall bite you and, and you shall not die and things like that. yeah, there is genuine debate on that. I know that when Milton covered it back in the day when we went to Mark. He argued that while those verses are not in the original manuscripts and so that's why there's some asterisk in like NES ESB, things like that.

It still represents a very early tradition that that the church was understood very early, very early, and there, there is some debate. About that. And so, when you come to English translations, the, the scholars would argue that basically 99.5% of what we have in the text, there's really no question about and stuff that has of any significant doctrinal import, most scholars would argue that there's really no passive scripture where there's some big doctrinal issue that's being debated that's impacted by the manuscripts.

But there are some, what we, there are some manuscript issues we call it textual criticism, where you're trying to figure out what's the best reading of that particular, and maybe we could do that sometime, we're, I'm out of time right now, but maybe we could do a little, I do this little exercise with classes sometimes on textual criticism.

It basically, it's like you start in the first row and you have everybody, I recite some passages and, and these people all copy it. And then they recite it to the people behind them and they all copy it, and then they recite, and then you tear up the first few generations of that and try to figure out, could we figure out what the original reading was when we get to the back of the room. And the fact is, is you can, that you can trace when certain people make mistakes, which are, have nothing to do with the original, but it has to do with the copies, you can still go back and trace back what the original reading was in most cases.

That's, that's, that's what happens with textual criticism.

God has given us in His providence so many manuscripts that we with very, with incredible confidence can go back and reconstruct the original. Which is totally different from something like the Book of Mormon, where the Book of Mormon was given to one guy. You're trusting one guy with your whole faith, Joseph Smith. And if he's lying to you, then you're done.

Whereas the way God got his word out in, in his providence is nobody had a monopoly over the manuscripts of scripture. And so it was out there, spread spread out. And so even when like the Samaritans, for instance, tried to mess with the Pentateuch, they tried to change some things. It's called the Samaritan Pentateuch.

We can easily identify it because there were so many other copies of the Pentateuch that they had no control over. We can tell where the Samaritans were trying to mess with the text. And so, in his God in His wisdom, it was just amazing. So, let's go ahead and pray we're 3 minutes over.

I wanna respect you guys' time. Lord, we thank you so much for your word and its authority. we thank You, Lord, for its sufficiency, giving us a word without air and preserving it for us, even your wisdom and giving so many manuscripts, knowing the depravity of man, that there will be people out there that are trying to destroy and change things, and yet you've given us, so much. We pray that you just bless us this year as we, just march through the scriptures next week as we look at Genesis 18:19, as we look at, what your word tells us about, the world, as we, as we get the rest of Genesis and Exodus, we just pray that you guide us by your Spirit.

thank you for all the wonderful questions. We just pray that we would just grow in, in the study of the word, in Christ's name we pray. Amen.