cover article
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily.You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above.For more listening options, please see our Radio Page .
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, it’s great to have you with us. Coming up in today’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will resume their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “What is the Kingdom of Heaven?” In Religion in the News, “Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? No, it’s Jesus.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Is it okay to Paraphrase the Bible?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Is Faith Found Only in Foxholes?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. The subject for this first segment of today’s Search the Scriptures Daily, as it has been for a number of weeks, is Dave Hunt’s book, Seeking and Finding God, subtitled: In Search of the True Faith. Now Dave, as you point out in chapter 8, quite often people who avoid God all of their lives when a crisis takes place, they take a shot at seeking God, hoping that He, or it, or however they think of God, hoping He will bail them out. Now, we know that as the “faith in the foxhole” scenario, when the enemy is surrounding you, you know, you cry out to whoever might bail you out. Now of course we’re going to get into this, that doesn’t make sense, okay, which we are going to talk about hopefully. But you open the chapter with a scripture verse, this is Psalm 69:13, “But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord—“ Now, to begin with, how does that verse relate to the foxhole scenario?
Dave:
Well, apparently the person who is praying, My prayer is unto thee, O Lord, must have some acquaintance with God. It’s not just an emergency, I think this is an ongoing attitude of prayer. The Scripture says—
Tom:
According to the Psalmist.
Dave:
Right, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks. I think you have to know God to really fulfill that, and that doesn’t suddenly happen, you know. I sometimes use the illustration with children: Well, you’ve been disobedient to your mommy all year, I mean, you’ve done some terrible things, and you’ve been disrespectful, but oh it’s her birthday! Now she would really appreciate a birthday card, wouldn’t she? I don’t think so! You don’t buy mommy off with a birthday card when you’ve been misbehaving all year. So, for someone who has turned their back on God, they have not considered His Word, they have been in total disregard, suddenly: oh God, please help me! That doesn’t make sense. Now, I’m not saying that God will not honor that in some cases. Because I know there have been some fox hole conversions, but the Lord is being very gracious. But there must have been, I believe, a change of heart that really caused them to call out. Maybe they realize, O, I have forsaken God, I haven’t paid any attention, that could all be included in this foxhole prayer.
Tom:
Sure, but many times it’s—Well, I’ll never ask You for another thing, okay, just do this one thing for me. And again, who am I talking to? Does this person, this entity or whatever, do they have conditions, rules, standards, you know?
Dave:
Or, if you do this for me, God, here’s what I’ll do.
Tom:
Right. Yeah, make a pact.
Dave:
But David, the Psalmist, does say, I think it’s Psalm 66: “I will pay unto thee my vows, which I have uttered when I was in trouble.”
Tom:
Right, but there’s a problem with vows, isn’t it Dave, because who can really keep a vow? Well, again, chapter 8 of your book, Seeking and Finding God, you title it, “Concerning Prayer”, and Dave, I don’t know if we can get through all the issues related to prayer in this segment today, maybe we have to… but we’ll see what happens, but there’s a lot here. And that is, mainly misconceptions about prayer, what it is, not just in the world, and we’ll get to a few of those, but in the church as well, unbelievable! Now, it’s amazing how many forms of prayer there are that are really foreign and contradictory to what the Bible teaches about prayer. You start in your book here with those who try to drum up enough faith, imagining that the key to answered prayer is believing hard enough to make the answer come about.
Dave:
Well, that’s what a lot of people think faith is. If I can just believe that God will answer my prayer… For example, you get many false ideas and even occult ideas, …if I could just see that Cadillac I’m praying for…if I could just make it real…and if I could just really believe that this prayer will be answered. That’s not faith, that is mind power. So, if God does things for you just because you believe, you can talk yourself into it or you’ve taken a course, positive mental attitude, or something, that is not faith at all. You cannot manipulate God.
Tom:
Dave, the thing that, you know, when you just stop and think about these things or try to think them through, try to be reasonable about them, to whom is somebody who believes that they are the power here, well, what’s your concept of God, what’s their understanding of God? Is it a force, is it an impersonal mind, is it something we need we can manipulate, and so on?
Dave:
Well, Jeremiah, I think it’s 29:13, God says, “You will seek for me and find me when you seek for me with all your heart.” Now that’s a pretty strong requirement. Seek for me with all your heart? You know, it’s like Hebrews 11, I think it’s Verse 6, “He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” And Tom, I probably mentioned this before, but I can remember as a young believer, young earnest Christian thinking: Wow! Now that’s a verse, whatever you want, you seek God with all your heart and then you get your big house, or you get your good job, or you get your healing! No, He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. And if you are seeking God, and instead He gives you the whole world, that would be a bad bargain.
Tom:
And then the result of something like that would be well yeah, but what has He done for me lately? It’s like we could be satisfied with anything we ask for. It doesn’t work that way!
Dave:
Well, this is why, picking up from where I was, this is why Jesus said: What shall it profit a man, Matthew 16, and other places, what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? So, you could get the whole world. You see, that’s another little problem, I don’t want to get too far astray here, Tom, but that’s another little problem with Calvinism. Well, the Calvinist, and I won’t name some of them that I know, friends of mine, but of course there’s common grace and you can’t say that God doesn’t help these people. Well He does! The Bible says, He makes His sun to shine and the rain to fall on the good and on the evil. Well, wait a minute! If God gave me the whole world, but He has predestined me to hell, what kind of a deal is that? It doesn’t make sense!
Tom:
Right. Dave, there is so much about this that doesn’t make sense, and that’s why we are trying to explain a few things, hopefully we can explain them clearly. But the verses that you gave, Hebrews, God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Dave:
Diligently!
Tom:
Diligently seek Him, because the “Him” has to do with the knowledge of Him, getting to know Him. That’s why biblical Christianity, we don’t like to call it a religion because it has to do with a relationship with God, it has to do with knowing Him. We know Him, we come to know Him, we understand through His Word, what He has revealed to us through the Scriptures. So, that the part that in all of these errors related to faith, they come up with a different god, or a god that’s just absurd, a mindless force out there that we can manipulate?
Dave:
Yeah, the Bible doesn’t say, you will seek for a higher power and find it. When you seek for the higher power, and I cannot get out of my mind Al Gore’s words at a prayer breakfast. He said, “Belief in my opinion, in some higher power is essential by whatever name” Well, he was raised in a very fundamental narrow, I mean, they were biblical, and he’s left it all behind him, like Phil Jackson.
Tom:
This is also the god of AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
You know, a higher power. This is absurd, especially when we see the church, professing evangelicals bring this into the church and think it’s consistent with what the Bible teaches.
Dave:
You will seek for ME, God says, and find ME, when you seek for ME, with all your heart! And part of that seeking is, Lord, please reveal yourself to me.
Tom:
Right. Now Dave, in that light, you talk about in this chapter, positive affirmations for some people as a form of prayer. Now where did that come from, and how does it work, or how do they suppose it works?
Dave:
Well of course, this isn’t just Norman Vincent Peale or Robert Schuller, this is your Positive Mental Attitude. You could, PMA—
Tom:
Right, well, those ?? right, and every day in every way I am getting better and better. I mean, you have been going through some health struggles, and so have I. I mean, isn’t that our mantra, don’t we say that? No, we trust in the living God, the God who heals.
Dave:
Yeah, in everything we are subject to Him, and it is only according to is will. Okay, so what else do we say in this chapter about prayer?
Tom:
Well, positive affirmations, I mean, my question is, how is that supposed to work? Because there is a rational behind it, but I think it’s absurd. But anyway, let’s let our audience know.
Dave:
Well, if we are assuming that you don’t know a personal God—see, it’s like Religious Science or Science of Mind, and there’s a mind out there, this universal mind—
Tom:
Right, impersonal.
Dave:
Yeah, because it doesn’t have a mind of its own, and we can make it give us what we want by positive affirmations, and so forth. So, it’s witchcraft, Tom.
Tom:
It’s Hinduism, this is the view of Hinduism, everything is maya. And we can control and create the universe by our thoughts, right?
Dave:
Yeah, but they are not believing exactly that, but there is some mind out there that they can get to do what they want. In other words, this great mind of Religious Science or Science of Mind, the mind that you are believing in, it doesn’t have a mind of its own, that’s a little bit ridiculous, isn’t it?
Tom:
Yeah, but popular. The secular form we’ve seen promoted by Ophra Winfrey, Larry King live. On Larry King Live they had participants in this DVD called The Secret and this is all of what we are talking about affirmations, if you believe strong enough you can control this force out there, and so on, it’s just absurd!
Dave:
So it’s mind power.
Tom:
Yeah.
Dave:
If I could just affirm it, if I could just believe it, then it’s going to happen, and it has nothing to do with God.
Tom:
Right. Now, you point out in the book, if we indeed, as I said, this is really absurd, it’s irrational, it doesn’t work, but the concept is out there and people are buying into it. Now, let’s just assume that this did work. You say, chaos would reign. If everyone had the power to impose his or her will on everyone else, this would be a bad deal.
Dave:
Tom, I’ll confess to the audience, I have been through this sort of thing. I thought, well faith, if I can just believe it. I remember, we were in Europe, I think there were 80,000 unsold units, mostly single family dwellings in the Los Angeles area, and we had left with this house, and I remember one morning over there, this was in Switzerland, and I was on my knees and I’m just trying to get faith. If I could just believe, Lord, we’ve really got to sell this thing, otherwise we are in real trouble. I thought I really got that faith, and what do you know, here comes a letter from the realtor. Wow, my heart is jumping, this has got to be it, the answer to prayer. The letter said they were sorry to inform you but a man broke into the house the other night and they flooded this place with water, and the water has gone up the— You know, we had the very expensive wall paper, and this was a house that I had built to sell. Whoopee, that popped my bubble!
Tom:
The Lord will do that sometimes.
Dave:
But by the grace of God, it was—they wouldn’t cover vandalism, but they would cover water damage, and so the insurance did cover it all, but that was the mercy of God. But anyway, I learned a lesson there, I’ve learned a lot of lessons.
Tom:
Dave, you know, I appreciate your sharing that with me. I think we’ve all been through that. My mom was dying of pancreatic cancer, and I thought I had a word from the Lord. I was just going to confess it, and I was going to take it. Listen, we had written about this stuff. Okay, so folks out there, don’t think we are being judgmental here, or we’re trying to pick on somebody, these are things that we can fall into, and all we’re trying to do is explain what the Word of God says. But just because we’ve been tripped up by some of these things, as you confess, and I just confess, doesn’t mean we can’t turn back to what God’s Word says, do it His way, the right way.
Dave:
Well, we have to submit ourselves. There’s a book that we offer, I think, by Andrew Murray, called Absolute Surrender. That is one of the key concepts, I must surrender totally to the Lord. I have used the illustration many times: A young man is on his knees praying, “Oh God, give me the wife you have chosen for me to be my partner for life, but Lord, could you please let it be Jane?” Well, we’ve got a problem. He’s not looking for an answer from God, he wants God to give him what he wants to have, and God is not going to do that because He is smarter than we are, He knows what’s best, and if we’re trying to tell him what we think is the way it ought to go, we’re imposing our will upon the Lord. We’re not surrendering to Him, we are not submitted to His will. So that’s one of the key elements in prayer. Lord, please, whatever you want.
Tom:
But nevertheless, Dave, we keep looking for a better technique, a methodology, and so on. One of the things related to this that you point out is that people say, Well, what about praying in Jesus’ name? Where does that deviate from the Scripture, aren’t we to pray in Jesus’ name?
Dave:
Well, if you don’t know Jesus, it’s like those seven sons of Seva the Jew, went in to cast out a demon, and they said, In the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches—the guy just drove them out of there wounded, he beat them up! Well, in the name of Jesus whom Paul preaches? If you don’t know this Jesus, that’s not going to work. Tom, I’ve given the illustration, I’m sure several times probably, but I’ll do it again because when I was in the business world I was sort of the alter ego of a very wealthy man in Beverly Hills. We had powers of attorney that were registered in various states and various counties. I remember especially Las Vegas, we were building a lot of homes in Las Vegas in those days, and he had financed them. Well, you have the power of attorney, I could literally sign a check. I didn’t have to sign his name, I signed my name and it will be honored. I could write out a check for $100,000 to myself and sign it in my name, but a court of equity would not allow that because I had been given the power of attorney to act in his interest, not in my interest. So, people who think they can just tack in the name of Jesus oh, I can get what I want now.
Tom:
Hey, open sesame!
Dave:
Yeah, right. No, I mean, common sense if you think about it will tell you, that is not the way it works, and I wouldn’t want it to work that way.
Tom:
See, Dave, that’s an important point, and this is all we are asking our audience, who may be way ahead of us on this in understanding. There some that say well, I never heard that before, I never really thought it through. That’s what we are asking, think these things through and see how it lines up with the Scriptures, with the Word of God.
Dave:
Others would say, That’s heresy—according to TBN or Benny Hinn.
Tom:
Dave, what about those who promote the idea, you know, mention methodologies and techniques? But in the church, we wrote about this in The Seduction of Christianity almost 23 years ago, and it hasn’t gone away. But those who believe that faith belief works on the basis of laws. Okay, and you need to get it right from a law standpoint.
Dave:
Yeah, I remember a book by Pat Robertson, The Secret Kingdom, and the Secret Kingdom worked on eight laws, and one of the laws was the law of faith. Now, let me just quickly interject. The atheist, or the skeptic will say to you, oh you think that was a miracle. You just don’t understand, that’s physics, and you just don’t know the scientific laws. So, scientific basis, this was Mary Baker Eddy’s problem, Christian Science, Jesus Christ, First Church of Christ Scientist. So now, what is wrong with that? If it works by laws, you don’t have to be a Christian.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
Now, why would a Christian get—oh, now if I just understand the laws, and I know how to apply these laws—No, that’s not the way it works, it works by faith! But Pat Robertson even said, There is a Law of Miracles, and you’ve got to know the Law of Miracles to make miracles happen. And he literally said, If you know these rules and these techniques you can get whatever you want. Not true, not biblical, and it’s not even rational if you think about it.
Tom:
Dave, we’re out of time now, but I want to come back to this. You list four problems for the Christian with this idea. The other thing we want to talk about next week is, there are conditions for God to answer prayer. There are times when He won’t even hear your prayer. Well, we’ll get to that next week, the Lord willing.
Dave:
Amen.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily.You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above.For more listening options, please see our Radio Page .
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, it’s great to have you with us. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “What Kingdoms could Satan offer to Jesus?” In Religion in the News, “Not so Secret Problems with the Secret.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Were Jobs Counselors Good or Bad?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave return to their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Why is Prophecy a More Sure Word?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this first segment of our program we’ve been going through Dave Hunt’s book Seeking and Finding God, subtitled: In Search of the True Faith. Now it’s a small book, it’s about 150 pages, and Dave, we haven’t done this for a while but I think it might be informative for many in our audience who missed it, or haven’t been following the program very long. Would you give them the reason why you wrote Seeking and Finding God.
Dave:
Well, Tom, the main reason would be because I meet so many people, mainly on airplanes, often in cabs and what not, back and forth from the airport. I find many of them the Lord brings on my path are thinking and they are eager to understand why are they here? What is this life all about? and what happens when it ends? And we know it ends for everybody. I have the opportunity to talk to them, and those that I find are really interested, interested enough to say yeah,—I don’t carry this with me—to say, yeah, seeking and finding God? That sounds like a book I’d like to read. Then I have their name and address and I send it to them. In other words, Tom, it’s a kind of a follow-up to take a person the next step if they are really interested. You can lead a horse to water, as the old saying goes, you can’t make them drink. We can’t force someone to believe anything. But the Lord is working in many hearts and this book has been helpful to many.
Tom:
Well, I know, Dave, without a doubt it’s one of our most popular book, and it’s unique because it’s only 150 pages, Dave. That’s unique with regard to them to the books that you write. Last week, as you remember, we focused on prophecy as absolutely irrefutable proof that the Bible is not a concoction of man, but rather it is as it claims to be the words of the Creator of the universe, His specific communication to mankind. We know His creation speaks about His general, well, about His qualities, some of His attributes, but not specific knowledge about who He is, His plan for man, the state of our heart, things that we can’t come to know or really understand without His input.
Dave:
Tom, there are many arguments you could use, many people are arguing, does God exist? does He not exis? is the Bible His Word? they can tell you all of the manuscripts are accurate and the gospels were not written until centuries afterwards, that’s all baloney, and we can give them factual proof about that. But they just generally brush it off. I’ve mentioned this before, even when you read the creationist’s writings, listen to their talks, they are arguing back and forth with the evolutionists, the atheists from science. They don’t get anywhere, well, this is my science, yeah, that’s your science, that’s you interpretation, and so forth. Now when we come to prophecy you cannot argue, and I challenge anyone, there might be some obscure prophecies that you wouldn’t understand. Okay, forget it, we don’t need those. It takes some deeper insight into the Scriptures to understand that, but there are some that are so plain, no one can deny them.
Tom:
Right, and history supports it, certainly the Scriptures. We have the prophecy given and then in some cases, 4,000 years later. Later week we talked about Genesis 3:15, we’re going to go back to that in a minute, but let me give you some Scriptures that really make the claim. Let’s go to 2 Peter 1: 19-21. We have also a more sure word of prophecy—
Dave:
Let me interrupt here, Tom.
Tom:
Oh, sure, go ahead.
Dave:
Does that mean, Oh, we’ve got some prophecies that are more sure than others. No, prophecy is the more sure Word.
Tom:
Well, Peter is writing this and he’s relating it to his experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. Now, so he goes through this incredible experience, but then he says wait a minute, we have also a more sure word of prophecy, where unto a, do well that we take heed. In other words, he’s pointing to the Word as opposed to his experience, although his experience is a matter of Scripture.
Dave:
Let me give an example. John the Baptist is a perfect example. He was filled with the Holy Ghost, it says, from his mother’s womb. He was given signs, He who sent me to baptize with water said, Upon whom you see the Spirit descending like a dove, the same is He, and I saw and bear witness this is the Son of God. He had many other witnesses that he knew in his heart, this is the Son of God! He had proof like nobody else could want; and yet he was imprisoned, he sent two of his disciples to Jesus, this is in Luke 7, he’s asked them to ask Jesus, Art thou He that should come, or look we for another? So even, what Peter is saying, Look, you want to match experiences with me! I mean, we were on the Mount, we heard God speak with an audible voice, we saw Jesus transformed before us like He would be after the resurrection, here comes Moses and Elijah talking with Him! You want to try to match that? But there is something more sure, because people could say, you’re hallucinating, you know, it was a mistake—
Tom:
And something you had for dinner the night before.
Dave:
Right, but you cannot argue with prophecy, that’s the point we’re trying to make here, Tom.
Tom:
Yeah. So, 2 Peter 1: 19-21: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts. Verse 20: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Dave:
Amen.
Tom:
Amen. And of course we all know, hopefully most of our viewers, listeners know 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.” It’s God breathed.
Dave:
I can just hear the atheists, I could hear Christopher Hitchins for example, he attacks the Bible: “Oh it was written centuries later…”, so forth and so on. I mean, I can give you one that he attacks. “This occurred that it might be fulfilled which was written in the prophets, I have called my Son out of Egypt.” Well, Matthew tells you when Jesus was brought back as a baby. Well, but wait a minute—I mean, that’s not—there’s some other translations, and so forth. Okay, I will tell you, Tom, I have read their stuff, and I have never heard them attack—maybe we mentioned this last week, it wouldn’t hurt to mention it again, our members ought to remember it and use it themselves. You can’t argue with Jeremiah 23:7, God says, (this is in Jeremiah’s days), “The day is coming when they will no longer say, Blessed by the Lord who brought His people out of Egypt, but blessed be the Lord who brought His people back from all the nations whither He had scattered them.” Not any had been scattered when Jeremiah wrote that, they certainly hadn’t been brought back. Nobody could say, Oh, this was written after the fact, too much historical evidence when Jeremiah was written. Okay, now explain that one, Christopher Hitchins! I don’t find these things in his books because you can’t argue with this. This is not some obscure event, this is not some iffy fulfillment of a prophecy, and there are some that are more difficult to understand.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
But some are so plain, no one can argue with this.
Tom:
And Dave, we’re not talking about a handful of prophecies. As you mentioned last week, 28% of the Bible has to do with prophecy, that is, declaring future events in specific details. Now the time span, I sort of alluded to it before, well, it can vary from thousands of years to hundreds of years previous to the fulfillment. Last week we mentioned Genesis 3:15, I want to go to that later, but let me give some more verses with regard to God himself declaring how important this is. Isaiah 46:9-10, it says: “I am God and there is no other, I am God and there is none like me declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that are not yet done saying, My counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure.” And of course we have His challenge to those who, at the time were turning to idols. Isaiah 41:22-23, it says, “Let them, (that is, the idols of the nations) bring them forth and show us what shall happen, let them show the former things what they be that we may consider them and know the latter end of them were to declare us things for to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter that we may know that ye are God’s, Yea, do good or do evil that we may be dismayed and behold it together.” Obviously, these are dumb idols. Even though, Dave, I find it really interesting that Satan, God’s adversary in this, through things like mediums and fortune telling and all of that, there has definitely has been down through history an attempt to undermine the God of prophecy.
Dave:
Well, let me explain Satan’s prophetic abilities. He cannot prophecy anything that he doesn’t cause to happen. For example, Sirhan B. Sirhan, the police were astonished in his room and in his private diary they found, JFK must die! And it gave the date, this was automatic writing! How did it occur? Well, Sirhan B. Sirhan did the deed himself, and I knew some of these guys. For example, Rosie Greer, I mean, huge professional football player, and Rayford Johnson was with him.
Tom:
Decathlon champion.
Dave:
Right, and they said this guy had a glazed look in his eye. They couldn’t handle him, they needed help to handle this little guy because he was obviously demon possessed, he was fulfilling—
Tom:
Right, like the demoniac who was chained and broke his chains.
Dave:
Right, and he was fulfilling the prophecy that Satan gave through him. So, Satan can give you prophecy like that, and then he causes it to be fulfilled.
Tom:
And Dave, also he has a knowledge of things, I mean, he has his minions running to and fro and so on. I give you one other example. I grew up in Southern Ohio, and there was an incredible bridge collapse that some of the psychics had predicted. And you say well, how could that happen, they surely must know the future. Well, when they analyze what happened the main stays of the bridge were just lower than where the cars would travel past. And of course in Southern Ohio they used rock salt to break up the ice. Well, for years they discovered that this rock salt had been spilling over onto these cables and the cables deteriorated, that’s what caused the bridge. Now, could Satan figure that out, could his minions understand that? Now that’s on the one hand—
Dave:
Of course they could.
Tom:
Yeah, but they don’t know when.
Dave:
They are observing.
Tom:
Right, but here’s the point.
Dave:
Well, they can watch it and see, it’s about ready to go.
Tom:
Right. Now, let’s talk about accuracy. Dave, for all of these prophecies, there are more than 300 dealing with the coming of the Messiah and things that Jesus fulfilled, now what if one of them is wrong? I mean, these guys, what’s the average for the psychics, okay?
Dave:
They hardly get anything right.
Tom:
Yeah, right, every once in a while they do and people get excited about it, but suppose one prophecy is wrong, one biblical prophecy, what would that mean?
Dave:
It would mean that all of them are wrong. It’s not from God.
Tom:
Exactly. Let me quote Deuteronomy Chapter 18:22, it says: “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.” In other words there are false prophets out there obviously. So accuracy is the key isn’t it?
Dave:
Well, that’s one of the keys, but they can, as you were mentioning, make true prophecies. But the Scripture says in Deuteronomy 13, I think it is, if he gives a sign and it comes to pass, but he leads you astray after other gods. This is another sign of the false prophet, and these people follow other gods.
Tom:
Right. Dave, here’s a really good quote from a Bible scholar Dr. A. T. Pearson. He says: “Predictive prophecy is the foremost proof to which the Word of God appeals on its own behalf.”
Dave:
Amen.
Tom:
“It was the standing miracle by which God challenged faith in His inspired Word defying all the worshipers of other gods and their sages and seers to produce any such proofs that their gods were worthy of worship, or their prophet’s true representatives of a divine religion.”
Dave:
Amen. This is the proof God gives. He says I’ll tell you what’s going to happen before it happens. No one else can do it.
Tom:
Dave, along this line, we mentioned earlier before we started the program, you know, again, prophecy—somebody could just say well, it just kind of happened by chance, you know, it was like a good guess here or a good guess there, and so on. Now Peter Stoner—this is back in the 60’s—in Science Speaks, this is a Moody Press book, he says: “Applying probability to 8 prophecies we quote, (I’m quoting him), we find that the chance that any man might have lived down to the present time and fulfilled all 8 prophecies is one in 10 to the 17th power, or one followed by 17 zeros. Now he uses an example, an illustration of that. He says that if we take 10 to the 17th power of silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas it would cover all the state 2 feet deep. Okay? Now, if you would mark one of the silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly over the state and then a blind-folded man tell them to go as he can, travel wherever he wishes but he must pick up one silver dollar and say this is the right one. Well, what chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these 8 prophecies and having them all come true in any one man. Stoner says that the probability for 48 prophecies being fulfilled coincidentally by any one man would be 1 in 10 to the 157th power. Now Dave, he points out that the estimated number of electrons in the universe is around 10 to the 79th power. So, I mean, you can’t even go there with—well, it could have happened by chance, and maybe there was—
Dave:
Well, let’s put it like this, Tom, I like to do it this way. Now he says electron, does he?
Tom:
Yeah, electrons in the universe, there’s around 10 to the 79th power.
Dave:
Right, I thought it was 10 to the 80th, but anyway.
Tom:
Close enough, Dave.
Dave:
Yeah, okay. So let’s say, Tom, we are zooming through the universe at hyper speed and I reach out and I got an electron that has your initials on it, T.A.M! Wow! So, that’s one chance in one with—I’ll have to stick to my statistics.
Tom:
Okay.
Dave:
One chance in one with 80 zeros after it. All right, well, let’s make out of every electron we’ll make another universe. Now we’re zooming through all of these universes! What are the odds that you will reach out and by chance pick out the same electron? Well, the math kids out there know that when you multiply you add integers and an integer is a 10th up there or whatever the power is. So, it would be 1 to the 160th power, it would be one chance in 1 with 160 zeros after it. Now that’s not going to happen.
Tom:
Well, Dave, just before you—let me just underscore something here. We went from 8 prophecies to 48 prophecies, but there are more than 300 prophecies related to well, that Jesus fulfilled. Now, the question is, or not the question is, but the point I’m trying to make here, and (you help me with this), when does science throw in the towel and say hey, this is beyond chance, I mean, there’s no way this could possibly happen? It’s not something with 157 zeros, it’s not something with 80 zeros, when do they throw the towel in and say this couldn’t happen by chance?
Dave:
The atheist will not throw in the towel.
Tom:
Really?
Dave:
Yeah, unless the Lord speaks to their hearts.
Tom:
Right. Well Dave, I know that and there are going to be those who dig their heels in and so on. but I’m talking about a reasonable scientist. What number would they say this could not possibly say, the possibility is zero?
Dave:
Well, let me give you an example, Tom.
Tom:
Okay.
Dave:
We know the law of biogenesis, life only comes from life, okay.
Tom:
There’s never been an example where it happened otherwise.
Dave:
Well, Pasteur proved that, that’s why we pasteurize milk. That has been a law accepted by science, and here is George Wald, Nobel prize winner, Harvard University professor, and he says well, we know that life only comes from life, and we know a spontaneous generation couldn’t happen, it’s impossible. But if you don’t accept that, the only other alternative is a creative act by God, and we will not believe in God! So, well, here we are, I guess, by spontaneous generation. You can’t deal with this! They are not rational, they are not reasonable because they have already—Don’t confuse me with facts, Tom, my mind is made up—this is what they are saying.
Tom:
Dave, a number of years ago I was at JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I was talking to the #2 guy at the World Planetary Society which was Carl Sagan’s organization, and I asked him: You know, we’re got search for extraterrestrials and all this stuff that you are involved in, what would be the basis for it? He said: Well, there are, you know, as Carl Sagan says, There are billions and billions of stars so the probability of there being life on another planet was really great in his mind. Now, you know, I was afraid to ask him the next question because I would have been thrown out of there. Well, what’s the probability of life being formed by change? Zero. Absolute zero!
Dave:
What is life? They don’t know.
Tom:
Dave, again, we’ll close this with the point that Jesus fulfilled more than 300 Messianic prophecies right down to the letter, perfect in every way, and the prophecies that are to come, and we already had 1948, the restoration of Israel, the rebirth of Israel, and so on. But if it’s 100% accurate up to this point you can put your faith that all the other prophecies will be fulfilled.
Dave:
And you had better believe what else it says about the judgment to come. “It’s appointed unto man once to die, and after this the judgment.”
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily.You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above.For more listening options, please see our Radio Page .
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “Why did Satan quote Scripture?” In Religion in the News, “Celebrating Calvin’s birthday.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Can finite beings understand infinite truth?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave return to their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Can the Bible’s Claims be Substantiated?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re tuned in to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. If you’re new to the program, or haven’t tuned in for a few weeks, we’ve been going through Dave Hunt’s book Seeking and Finding God, subtitled, In Search of the True Faith. Over the last couple of weeks in this first segment of our program, we’ve been giving evidences to substantiate the claims that the Bible makes that it is the only true Word of God. And as we stated, only the Bible has features that really can substantiate its claim. Now, we’ve covered what? Historical accuracy, its scientific accuracy, it’s archeological support, it’s perfect continuity and harmony of content presented by 40 writers over a span of about 1600 years. Yet Dave, as miraculous, and I really have to say miraculous as all of that is, there is something else that is even more astounding in substantiating the claim that the Bible is indeed the only inspired Word of the one true God, and that’s prophecy.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Now, Dave, I know for some people prophecy say, I don’t want to go there, it’s too puzzling, it’s too confusing, it involves metaphors, similes, all these kinds of things, too many symbolism’s and all of that, so they avoid prophecy. But prophesy isn’t just predicting the future, I would say the Word of God, the entire Word of God is prophecy. It’s not only foretelling the future, but it’s foretelling what God wants us to know and understand.
Dave:
Tom, prophecy is neglected. It’s not preached in churches, it’s not understood and I don’t think I’ve mentioned, maybe I have, the book that I’m writing right now, and I have to read what the evolutionists say, what the creationists say, and I’ve listened to many debates and one thing that disappoints me greatly, the creationists they all argue science. That’s fine, I can do that too, never have I heard one of them refer to the Bible. This is the great proof that God is the author of this book and there is so much prophesy, and so—
Tom:
Yeah, but Dave, you know, for some people who don’t understand, as I mentioned, people avoid prophecy because it just seems too puzzling for many people. I can understand that. But why prophecy—you know, you say, Well, you can prove the Bible by prophecy. Now, let’s get very simple here, why do you say that? What would be something that would compel me to believe the Bible because of prophecy?
Dave:
Well, Tom, the Bible does say, The heavens declare the glory of God, it says, The invisible things of God from his creation are clearly seen by the things that he has made.
Tom:
So that’s general revelation, right?
Dave:
We get that so I’m not saying prophecy is the only way. Prophecy is the best way because when you get into these things the atheist can argue with you, the evolutionists can argue with you, well, what about this and what about that. When you come to prophecy, no arguments, they cannot argue, and am I allowed to give one example?
Tom:
Give me some examples.
Dave:
Okay, let’s take Jeremiah 23:7: “The day is coming, saith the Lord, when they will no longer say, blessed be the Lord who brought his people out of Egypt into the promised land. But blessed be the Lord who brought his people back from all the nations whither he had scattered them.” Okay, now that didn’t happen originally when they came out of Egypt, they weren’t even scattered, they were in the land for a long time. They were cast out because of their sin, their rebellion against God. But God said he is not going to cast them off forever, and one day He’s going to bring them back, and actually, it says it will be in the last days. One of the reasons we know we are in the last days. Now if you go to Israel today you find that they have come back from more than 100 nations! I would say that’s a fulfillment of prophecy.
Tom
Right, and very specific.
Dave:
Very specific.
Tom:
See, Dave, I think the thing that people forget is that it’s not just a matter of well, that was a good guess…. There are so many prophesies that have been fulfilled that the probability of this happening by chance, it just couldn’t have happened by chance, the mathematical probabilities are zero and beyond.
Dave:
Well, Tom, you just pile prophecy on prophecy. Let’s quickly go to Joel 3:2: God says, I am going to, in the last days again, I am going to bring all the nations of the world back to Jerusalem to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and I am going to punish them for two things: 1) they have scattered my people everywhere, which, of course, we know happened. 2) they have divided my land. And I won’t go into details about that. Britain was given the mandate to see that this became the homeland of the Jewish people scattered everywhere, slaughtered in the Holocaust. What did Britain do? They kept the Jews out, and they let the Arabs in for oil. So that Holocaust survivors in half-sinking ships, within sight of the Promised Land, driven back by the British Navy put into camps. And I could give you many other examples, but we don’t have time, but Britain lost its empire! I grew up in the days when Britannia rules the waves, you know.
Tom:
The sun never sets—and so on.
Dave:
Yeah, okay. So, here we are Joel 3:2: In the last days I’m going to punish all nations. People often say, Is the United States in prophecy? We just read it, all nations I think includes the USA as well. For two things we said: They have scattered my people everywhere. 2) They have divided my land. Now that is an amazing prophecy, because Israel has been conquered by may nations, but they never divided the land, none of them divided the land. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, they kept the whole thing plus a whole lot more, never a thought of dividing it up. Who would you give it to? Why would you divide it? The Babylonians, they didn’t divide the land. So, this is an amazing prophecy. First of all, and without going into any more details about Britain, what Britain did and so forth, UN Resolution 181 (Google it, there it is!) it’s called, The Partition of the Land, all the nations joined together to divide the land of Israel. And by the way, they gave Israel 13% of what the League of Nations in the Declaration of Principles in 1922 had said belonged to them. So, every proposal for peace since, including President Bush’s Roadmap to Peace, so-called. What is the basis of it, what’s the bottom line? Israel, give them more land, give them more land. And God says, I am angry and I am going to punish the nations of the world for doing this.
Tom:
Dave, I want to get even more basic about prophecy than that. Those are terrific prophecies, there are so many. But you know, I remember that a while back I was asked to, (this was a number of years ago) I was asked to speak at a prophecy conference. I mean, you had been speaking at prophecy conferences but now somebody asked me to speak, and I thought, what will I do? I mean, I really wasn’t up on prophecy, it wasn’t at the top of my list. As a matter of fact, I vaguely remember way back you mentioning that prophecy early on for you wasn’t, you know, wasn’t high on your list of really exploring prophecy and using it as you have in the last two or three decades.
Dave:
Well, because it seemed so complicated. How are you going to sort out all these beasts in Daniel, Revelation, lot of symbolism, as you mentioned.
Tom:
But Dave, with all of your time in the Bible, think about me. I mean, I couldn’t have been a Christian more than ten years, but now I have to speak at a prophecy conference. Well, what I had to do was, I thought how am I going to do this and really give those who came to the conference something that was valuable to them. So I did what I called, Prophecy 101. In other words, let’s just talk about prophecy, what it is, but let’s just go right up to the first coming of Christ. That’s a slam dunk, I mean, all these prophecies, as you well know, you can go to the Psalms, you can go to Isaiah, and you can basically lay out the scenario of the crucifixion in such detail, you know, and this was written what? 500 to 800 years prior to Jesus being crucified. So, but let’s take some basic things about Jesus. How about where He was born? How about going into Jerusalem on a donkey? I mean, there are so many verses from the Psalms and from the Prophets that lay this thing out very specifically.
Dave:
Well, Tom, it gives the very day that He would ride into Jerusalem. And in Judgment Day, I think I have a sub heading in one of my chapters: “How Many Candidates for Messiah?” Well, how would you qualify? The Bible lays it out, as you said, you have to be born in Bethlehem of a virgin but you’ve got to be born at a particular time.
Tom:
Would some characters down in history be able to control any of that? Because people said, Well, you know, Jesus manufactured some of these, could He decide where He was going to be born?
Dave:
Well, not if he is not God.
Tom:
Absolutely.
Dave:
But Daniel 9 says, It will be 69 weeks of years after the command to restore Jerusalem that the Messiah will ride into Jerusalem on that donkey you were talking about. He will be hailed by the people and 4 days later they will be crying, Away with Him, crucify Him. Now the day that he would ride into Jerusalem that’s very specific, and you can look it up. Here it is, 69 weeks of years from the command to restore, rebuild Jerusalem, that’s 483 years. Now go back and we can—I don’t know that we want to go into all these details, Tom, but if we go back we will find out Nehemiah Chapter 2, for example, Nehemiah is, I mean the Bible is so fantastic, he is in Babylon, Jerusalem has been destroyed but they have been given permission to go back to the land, but Nehemiah is still there. They’ve been given permission to rebuild the temple, and Nehemiah and a couple of friend come back, they’ve been in Jerusalem. He says, How are things going? And I say, Well, it’s sorry rebuilding of the temple, I mean, it doesn’t look anything like Solomon’s, and besides that the walls are broken down, the gates are burned with fire, it just sits there defenseless. And Nehemiah weeps. Now he has to go in, and he’s the king’s cup bearer, he has to go in before the king. And you know going in before the king you’re supposed to be, you know, Top of the morning to you, king! But he can’t, he dries his eyes, he tried, but he can’t hide the grief in his face. And the king says, I perceive that you have a great sorrow, what is it. He said, It’s my people. And then he explains, the walls are broken down, it’s Jerusalem, the walls are broken down, the gates are burned with fire. Well, what do you want from me, says the king? I think he must have had a great affection for Nehemiah and he must have been serving him very well. Nehemiah says, Would you give me the right to rebuild Jerusalem? So this is not rebuilding a temple, some people get confused. No, no, this is rebuilding Jerusalem. And the king said, Granted, and he writes out a letter. Now you don’t have to search the archeological records to see if you can’t find a letter that was dated back there so you get the date. We know that it was 69 weeks of years from the command to rebuild Jerusalem because Nehemiah tells you. Verse 2—It was in the month Nisan, and it was in the 20th year of Artaxerxes (Longimanus) who rose from 465 BC until 425 BC, he had a long rule. So, the 20th year of his reign would be 445 BC Nisan 1st, and you can sit down and calculate it. People have calculated it various ways, and they only come out about one year difference, depending on what year they start with. Some of them start with 444 BC, some with 445, but anyway, Tom, how would you qualify to be the Messiah? Then you’ve got to get yourself crucified, and then you’ve got to rise from the dead.
Tom:
Dave, well, if you just joined us, we’re going over how incredibly miraculous prophecy is, how it defies any sense that it could have happened by chance. And Dave, I want to go over a couple of verses just to show you God who calls himself the God of prophecy, what He thinks about this, what his view is on it. This is Isaiah 46, I’m going to read verse 9 and 10. “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from ancient beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.” Now let me give you another one, this is God’s challenge, this is Isaiah 41, verses 22 and 23. “Let them (that is the idols of the nations) bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and know the latter end of them, or declare us things for to come. Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods; yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed, and behold it together.” So, only God who is infinite, omniscient, transcended beyond time will know and declare what will take place before it happens, and Dave, that’s the proof that you have been arguing for. That’s the proof that many have lost in looking at the Bible or dealing with things such as atheism and agnosticism and all of these things.
Dave:
Well Tom, it impacts the gospel, because the gospel is preached from prophecy. They didn’t have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, they had the Old Testament. And Paul, when he went into the synagogue, Acts 17, he opened the Scriptures, he reasoned with them three Sabbath days out of their scriptures, it says, opening and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered these things and that this Jesus I preach unto you is Christ. See, that really bothered people. Well how—wait a minute, wait a minute—who’s going to follow a dead Christ? Well, he’s not dead, he’s risen. Look, He was rejected, he was despised by his own people, they said, Away with Him, Crucify Him! How can you fit that into the Messiah, and then he’s the Messiah? Well, it’s all foretold He would hated and rejected of men, and so forth.
Tom:
And Dave, you know you mentioned Acts 17, well let’s go to the verse that we use as our theme verse for The Berean Call. You have these Jews in the synagogue in the city of Berea, the Greek city of Berea, Paul has come to them. And why is he there? Just as you mentioned, he’s preaching that Jesus is the Messiah, the One that the prophets foretold. He didn’t use the New Testament, He went to the Old Tenauch, as the Jews would call it, the Old Testament.
Dave:
The New Testament wasn’t written.
Tom:
Right. So, and these Jews are commended. Why? Because, first of all, they listened to what the apostle Paul had to say, they were open minded, okay. But then, the real commendation comes because they listened to what he had to say, but then they searched the Scriptures daily. What Scriptures? The prophets, the Old Testament prophets!
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
To see if these things were so.
Dave:
So Tom, if you went to 1 Corinthians 15, Romans 1:16 says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes it…”, you’ve got to believe the gospel to be saved. Well, what about the gospel, what is the gospel? Well, the Bible doesn’t just lay it out A, B, C, in very many places, but one of the places where it certainly does that is 1Corinthians 15:1 - 4. And Paul says, “This is the gospel that I preached unto you, which you received, by which you were saved, wherein your stand, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.” Now if you preach the gospel, and I’m not trying to be critical, I’m trying to help myself as well as others, and you leave out “according to the scriptures” then you haven’t really preached the gospel according to Paul. “This is the gospel I preach, how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. That He was buried and that He rose the third day, according to the scriptures.” You see, the reason for that, Tom, is quite obvious. I just come around and I say, yeah, I knew this guy back there and he got crucified and I think, there have been witnesses that saw that he rose from the dead, and so forth. Wait a minute, I want to have something backing this up, and if there are specific prophecies saying that this is exactly what would happen, then I’ve got the proof, I’ve got the evidence. This is really essential for the gospel.
Tom:
And Dave, for those, maybe they have some young believers who have started reading the Bible for the first time, and we recommend that they just start in Genesis, work their way through, or if they want something from the New Testament, begin with the gospel of John, certainly that would be an encouragement. But I like going back to Genesis, Dave, because that’s really what lays it out. You have, first of all, the first prophecy, the first prophecy being Genesis 3:15. Now, can you comment on that?
Dave:
Well, now we wouldn’t want to offend our Catholic people, but it says that God is speaking to the serpent and he’s speaking to Adam and Eve, he’s rebuking all of them. And to the serpent He says, “…he seed of the woman will bruise your—you will bruise his heel.” We’re talking about the seed of the woman is the Messiah, this is a virgin birth, it doesn’t say seed of man and woman. The seed of the woman is coming and He is going to bruise your head, He’ll deal you a death blow and you will bruise His heel. Now, in Catholic Bibles, and I have a number of old Catholic Bibles, they’ve changed it now in the modern ones, because, I guess they were embarrassed.
Tom:
Right, to do away with old Bibles that would claim that this is Mary.
Dave:
Right, it doesn’t say the seed of the woman, it says the woman, and you know Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal—I don’t know whether, did you wear it?
Tom:
Of course.
Dave:
You wore the Miraculous medal?
Tom:
And the scapula, I did all that.
Dave:
Well, Mary allegedly appeared to Catherine LaBoullet, what was it? 1832 or something like that?
Tom:
Right 1830’s.
Dave:’
Yeah, in Paris, and she told her who she was, and she appeared actually with her foot, her heel on the head of the serpent.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
And she said, mint a medal with this image. So it’s not just—well, Tom, you could better explain it than I can, but many, would we dare say, most of the false doctrines comes from visions.
Tom:
Apparitions.
Dave:
Apparitions, right. So, here we have, not Jesus, not the seed of the woman, but the woman and this is why she is presented as co-mediatrix, co-redemptrix, and that she actually, by her pain, paid for our sins.
Tom:
Yeah. Dave, we’re out of time right now, but there is so much in Genesis that needs to be understood with regard to prophecy, God pointing to the Cross. We have tunics of skin in Genesis 3:21. These things were types of Christ pointing to Jesus the Messiah who would come and pay for the sins of the world, pay them in full. So, next week we will pick up with this.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could be here. This week we conclude our revisit to our very first radio series that was broadcast back in the fall of 1999. We hope you enjoy this re-presentation and we’ll have a special offer for you later in the program. We begin with this week’s cover article, the conclusion to our three-part series, The Seduction of Christianity. Dave and Tom examine just how the seduction of Christianity takes place, and how we can counter it. Now, along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. Dave, as we wrap up our revisiting the book we co-authored fifteen years ago, it’s only fitting that we discuss, what I think was the most controversial subject we addressed: the growing influence of psychology in the church. Now, people were shocked that we would include that as a part of the seduction taking place. After all, some of the rising stars in evangelical Christendom, from James Dobson, to Minereth and Myer, I mean, they were psychologists or psychiatrists. More pastors were turning to that field to assist them in their calling. Did we blow it on that one?
Dave:
You mean by saying that there was something unbiblical about so called Christian psychology?
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
No, I don’t think so. Maybe we should, at this point, Tom, mention something. After we wrote that book any number of talk show hosts, Christian talk show hosts, I think some secular ones as well, radio or television, approached those that we had mentioned in the book, approached them about coming on radio or television on their programs with me. Not one agreed. Well, I take that back, there was Jose Silva, the founder of Silva Mind Control, now called Silva Method, an outright occultist, he came on the John Ankerberg Show. Now, that includes all of the well known Christian psychologists. They were all asked: Would you come on? John Ankerberg asked them--others asked them: Would you come on and discuss these issues from the Scriptures? They wouldn’t do it, not one of them. Now, I find that unfortunate because I think that the church would benefit greatly from an open forum, an open discussion. We have raised some serious questions, not only we but other people like Martin and Deidre Bobgan and a number of others, have addressed this. There’s the issue of self esteem, the issue of self love and self acceptance and self image and so forth. And it wasn’t just the Christian psychologists but many leading pastors and others who had picked this up and were teaching the same thing. I think that the church would benefit if we could have an open forum, an open discussion. As you know, recently “Christianity Today”, frequently has not only ads but articles, and not too long ago they had an article written by a Christian psychologist specifically attacking me by name. Well, lets say, not attacking me, lets say, saying that Dave Hunt and John McArthur, he was also mentioned--
Tom:
For him, problems writing about the sufficiency of Christ.
Dave:
That right. And, saying that the Scripture is sufficient--we don’t need psychology--this is a Johnny-come-lately--this is something new, the church didn’t have it for nineteen hundred years--why do we need it now and so forth. I wrote what I thought was a good article in response. “Christianity Today” would not allow it. So, it’s been very difficult to bring this discussion into the public arena in the church.
Tom:
Dave, I just want to interject this because we are referring to the book, The Seduction of Christianity. Now, most of the complaints, at least initially--I won’t say most of the complaints, but we did have complaints for mentioning those who were in the Word Faith, for those who were into inner healing, for those who were into particular things that we at least, at the very least challenged them as to whether these things were biblical or not. But nothing created a furor. It’s almost as if one part of the church said, well, it’s okay to deal with these hyper faith guys, but now you are talking about highly visible, main stream evangelicals. Now there was a problem. As a matter of fact, as I remember it, for all of your speaking on this subject throughout the country, psychology, when you addressed that issue, you know, you’ve been asked not to come back. From what you would consider to be conservative evangelicals. Why is that?
Dave:
Well, Tom, you just said it. You said highly visible, you didn’t use the word “popular” but they are very popular, well accepted personalities. So people took offense at that. How dare you question this person or that person! I mean, he’s so highly respected. It wasn’t that they said: Now, wait a minute. Lets go to the Bible and lets check this out again. You’re disagreeing with the Bible. Nobody ever said that to me. They said: But this person is so highly respected. How could you possibly even entertain the idea that they might be wrong. Well, I don’t care how highly respected a person is, the issue is, is it biblical or is it not biblical? That’s what we have to decide. So, when you go to the Scriptures--
Tom:
Let’s go to 11 Timothy 3:1,2: “Know this also, that in the last days perilous times shall come for men shall be lovers of their own selves.” Lets look for an example or lets address an example: self esteem. That’s the cornerstone of most, “Christian psychology.” Is that biblical?
Dave:
No, it is not biblical.
Tom:
Well, it’s Biblical in the sense that it’s a problem which this Scripture just addressed.
Dave:
Nowhere does the Bible encourage us to think well about ourselves. Philippians 2:3 says: “...in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.” If you want to go to the examples in Scripture , go to Moses at the burning bush. Remember, God came down and said: Moses, I want you to go to Egypt and deliver my people. And, Moses said: Don’t ask me, I’m no good, I’m no deliverer, I can’t do anything. He apparently had very low self esteem. And, God didn’t say to him: Well, Moses, that’s your problem, you know--I’ll give you about six months of Christian psychological counseling and I’ll teach you how to, you know, feel good about yourself and have a high sense of self worth and self esteem and a good self image and so forth and then you will be fit to be a deliverer. No, God said, Moses, I have chosen you because you’re the meekest man on the face of the earth and I’m going to take the meekest man on the face of the earth and I’m going to use you to confront the mightiest emperor in his palace, on his turf, to deliver my people so that God will have the glory--no man will have the glory. Or you could go to Job. Job said: “I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear; now that I seeth thee, wherefore I hate myself, I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Christian psychologists say that’s horrible! Don’t let anybody feel that way about themselves. I mean, you have to have a sense of self worth. Otherwise, if we’re not worth anything, why would God love us? And, look at the Cross—why that shows the value, that’s how highly God values us. No, if you want to be honest with yourself you would have to say that the Cross would do anything but give you a sense of self esteem and of self worth. Because it was my sins that nailed Him there and it was because of my sin that He had to reach so deep into the depth of the muck and mire of evil that is in my heart. That’s what the Cross is all about--redeeming me from my sin and myself. It’s not a measure of my self worth. And, I cannot walk the golden streets one day and say Oh God, it’s wonderful about your grace and your love and how you died for me but after all, you did it because I was worth it, because I was of such great value to you. No. John the Baptist said: You say we’re Abraham’s seed (he’s talking to the Jews) God is able of these stones to raise up seed unto Abraham. So why am I of such great value? God doesn’t need me. It’s because of His love and love just doesn’t love those who are valuable or lovable. In fact, He loves us in spite of our unworthiness.
Tom:
The point I was trying to make is that in earlier shows we talked about how an erroneous teaching, call it a false doctrine or whatever, but something that’s taken from fallen finite humanity, some concept that’s developed. It’s introduced into the church and it might be a small thing that the church begins to build on--I’m not talking about psychologists, but some of the leading evangelists who have been the major promoters of the idea of self esteem being a doctrine of the church--that’s shocking. But what they don’t recognize is that when you start with a false idea, just as you laid out the development in terms of ideas related to self esteem, you end up changing or altering the character of God. Now, I’m worth so much that Christ went to the Cross because I was worth it. What does that tell us about God? Did He die for my sake, for my worth or because of who He is? You see, I’ve got a big problem there.
Dave:
Right. The Cross is about the vindication of God’s holy character and His justice and that He does not compromise. These people teach, for example, one of the leaders says, Christ died for us because we’re really somebodys and if we realize that He died for us then we realize that we’re somebodys. No, He didn’t die for somebodys. He died for sinners and that’s not going to build up my self esteem, it’s contrary. Tom, we could go on and on with this, but I would like to move to something else a little bit related to it, but just to put a closure on this topic--California, John Vasconcellos, the Assemblyman, started the Self Esteem Task Force. They worked for years. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars researching this and even the secular psychologist and psychiatrist came to the conclusion that self esteem is a false teaching. The idea was that it was low self esteem, a bad self image that was bringing about pornography and drugs and crime and poor grades in school and if you would build up their self esteem then everybody would act properly. Well, they found out it isn’t true and even some of the students said what’s the point of even trying. No matter what you do they praise you for it. Now, if you did something worthwhile, you worked hard and you got good grades then that might cause you to feel good about yourself although if you are a Christian you realize that’s pride. But to tell somebody how wonderful they are is not going to help them to do a good job. And so, when the graduating high students take exams around the world and they grade them all around the world, they find out that American students are Number One in self esteem. They think they are the best but they are down near the bottom with the third world countries as far as math, science and language. And so, academically we are near the bottom but they build up the self esteem. So now, even the secular psychologists and psychiatrists have been saying: This doesn’t work. What we need is self control, that’s what the Bible teaches. What we need is some motivation to work hard, not just to look in a mirror and say, I love you, I love you, I love you. But this is what the Bible has been saying all along. Now, where did this idea come from? Let me quote Bruce Narimore. Bruce Narimore is the nephew of Clyde Narimore, who I would call one of the godfathers of Christian psychology. You remember, here’s Clyde Narimore on CBN being interviewed by Pat Robertson. And Pat says: Dr. Narimore, what do you think about someone like Jay Adams? Now, Jay Adams says basically, if you are a Christian, you know the Word of God, you’re mature in the faith, you’re filled with the Spirit, you are competent to counsel. Well, Clyde Narimore gets a rather patronizing look on his face and says: Well, you understand, he doesn’t have a degree. He doesn’t have a degree? He was teaching at a seminary--he had several degrees but they are in theology, not psychology. So, what Clyde Narimore means is: you’re not competent to counsel from the Bible unless you have a degree in psychology. So, now we had a whole new concept that was unknown to people like Luther, and Calvin, and Wesley, and Whitfield, and Spurgeon, and so forth. Nobody ever had such an idea that you have to go back to school and you’ve got to get a degree in psychology in order to be competent to counsel from the Word of God, but these are now the real heroes. So, here’s Bruce Narimore now, the nephew of Clyde Narimore, and he says--these are not the words of Dave Hunt or Tom McMahon, this is Bruce Narimore--he says it was humanistic psychologists, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, who first made us aware of the need of self love and self esteem. Now you could read the writings of the Christians down through the centuries and go back to the Bible itself, you will never find that idea. Nobody ever got that idea out of the Bible. Where did it come from? This is the wisdom of the world which Paul says in 1 Corinthians is foolishness with God. This is the idea that the world came up with because they don’t believe in God and they are trying to explain human behavior on purely scientific basis without God, and without the soul, and without the spirit, and without the Word of God, and they came up with the idea--we need to love ourselves--we need to esteem ourselves. You know, that was Eric Fromm back there and Nietzsche before him--greatly inspired Hitler--they were the ones that came up with this idea. And now it’s in some of our finest pulpits, so again we’re talking about The Seduction of Christianity. How is it seduced? By these ideas that have come in from the world and then we want to be academically respected. Now Tom, I’m talking too much, but let me make it clear and plain. Whether a psychologist or a psychiatrist is a Christian or an atheist, please, anybody out there listening understand this: You have to take the same courses, you have to give the same answers on the same exams, you are licensed by the same licensing bureaus, okay, so whether you call yourself a Christian or not, there is no such thing as Christian psychology. Christian psychology you say oh, this is a Christian psychologist, we’ve got a lot of Christian psychologists, they talk about Christian psychology. Well, go to any library, go to any textbook, look it up and try to find the listing in the index and any psychology textbook for Christian psychology. It does not exist. Why? Because there is no Christian who is the founder of a school of psychology known as Christian psychology. You’ll find Freudian, Jungian, Rogerian, Humanistic, Behavioristics, Transpersonal, Existensional, all kinds of psychologies--not a listing for Christian psychology. So, what is Christian psychology? Well, it’s an attempt to take the wisdom of this world--the ideas are godless, anti--they are all anti-Christians from Freud to Jung, to Rogers, you name them, they are anti-Christians, they come up with these theories. Now, we’re going to take their theories and we’re going to integrate it with the Bible as though the Bible needs some help. And now we are going to improve the Scriptures by integrating psychology with theology and we have come up with a hybrid called, Christian psychology, that never existed. Now Tom, I’m just getting a little worked up here, I’m sorry. Let me keep at it.
Christian psychology, furthermore, and I’m just being logical, it didn’t exist until a very few years ago, okay? So, if it has anything of any value to offer--the church was without it for nineteen hundred years. Now, apparently God somehow, through ignorance or oversight--whoa, I hate to say that but how are you going to explain? He left out of the Manufacturer’s Handbook, the Scriptures, something that is really important. And this is what they say: How are you going to help people with their problems today because we need psychology? Well, but the Bible says that He’s given us all things that pertain unto life and godliness to the knowledge of him who has called us to glory and virtue. And, the whole secret of the Christian life is not me struggling in my flesh to live up to some standard that I couldn’t possibly live up to but it’s allowing Christ to live His life in me. Well, I don’t think Christ in me, who is my life the Scripture says, I don’t think Christ in me needs any help from Freud or Jung or Rogers or anybody calling themselves a Christian psychologist who has drawn from the wisdom of this world. What I need is to get back to the Word of God. But now, what Christian psychology has done--it has undermined our confidence in the Word of God and they will blatantly say that the Bible is not enough. I remember when Moody Monthly, and I’m not saying that Moody Monthly--that these are bad people. These are Christians, they love the Lord, but again, they have been seduced by these ideas. On the front cover, it was Sam, this woman, remember, who had some problems. She went to a Christian psychologist who regressed her into the past--we haven’t had time even to talk about all of that stuff, but anyway, these are occult techniques and Christians are using them now--regressed her into the past, came out with memories--these are false memories, a False Memory Syndrome we call it now. She came out with memories of having been sexually abused by her father and being involved in satanic rituals and so forth, SRA, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and then, after a couple more years of therapy, she began to manifest multiple personalities. I mean, this has gotten to such an extreme that now--I have twenty personalities in me and they only were able to leave nineteen of them to Jesus. Am I going to go to hell because one of my personalities--or they will make such statements such as: you should let the dominant personality rule, you know, and so forth. This was never heard of. But the point I’m trying to make is: Moody Monthly, tragically said in that article: “Now you couldn’t just leave a person like this to prayer and Bible study repentance. They’ve got to have professional help.” So that brings us back to Clyde Narrimore on the 700 Club when he says: He doesn’t have a degree. Jay Adams doesn’t have a degree in psychology. How can he possibly counsel from the Word of God? So, we have undermined confidence in the Word of God, we now have a new clergy class, in fact it’s a new priesthood in the church. They have degrees, Ph.D’s in something that Paul never heard of. You can’t be a Berean because the Bereans checked Paul out from the Scriptures. But they say that there’s another source of God’s truth, Freud, Jung and so forth and you don’t have a degree in that. So, Tom, I would have to say it is one of the major problems in the church. And I don’t know whether we mentioned it on another program or not but you remember, we had a lunch with J. Vernon McGee?
Tom:
Yes, we haven’t mentioned that.
Dave:
You remember one of the things that he said?
Tom:
I think he was in his mid-eighties and I think he just lived a couple of years after that ,but he was a distraught guy when we had lunch with him.
Dave:
It was even less than that. I think it was a number of months but in those days he was promoting The Seduction of Christianity wherever he went and he had just been removed from his time honored position at Moody Radio from his noon hour, to a much less desirable time, to put in Minereth and Meyer. He said-- this is J. Vernon McGee now, not Dave and Tom, this is J. Vernon McGee--he said this is symptomatic of the decreasing biblical and increasing the humanistic content that we’re getting from Christian radio and television and Christian pulpits and books and so forth. He said if this trend continues Christian psychology will be the destruction of the evangelical church! Now, that’s how strongly I feel about it. I’m very concerned. The problem is--it isn’t biblical. It wasn’t in the Bible. You won’t find it there. The church knew nothing about it and therefore, either the church was at a disadvantage for nineteen hundred years and now suddenly we have this new thing that’s going to help us and we ought to be a whole lot better than the apostles. I mean, read of the martyrs and so forth, how did they get along without Christian psychology? Well, I guess they were at a disadvantage but we should be a lot better or this is not what we need at all and what we need is to get back to God’s Word, plain and simple.
Tom:
You know, Dave, the Scriptures are not only clear that this is not biblical, it actually speaks against it. You know, we quoted earlier 11 Timothy 3:1-2: “Mark my words, in the last days perilous times will come, men will be lovers of themselves.” It talks about the last days. We’re referring to The Seduction of Christianity, Spiritual Discernment in the Last Days. We know that humanity has always had a problem with pride, self love, I mean, from the garden on we’ve had that problem. But try and point to a generation in which the problem is being offered as the solution in the church!
Dave:
Seminars, teaching you how to love yourself.
Tom:
Exactly. So, I mean, this is scary stuff on the one hand, but on the other hand the Lord is still in charge and what we want to do in this program and the programs to come is to continue to encourage people. Yes, there is a lot going on out there. We don’t have to be nit pickers about this and that but there are things that are being promoted that you have to ask the question: Where do we find this in the Word of God? Are the Scriptures sufficient? Can the Scriptures guide me through these things?
Dave:
Is the Bible our guide or isn’t it?
Tom:
Yes.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page.
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could tune in. This week we continue our revisit to our very first radio series that was broadcast back in the fall of 1999. We hope you enjoy this re-presentation and we’ll have a special offer for you later in the program. Our ministry offers many resources to help you in your Bible study, including a free monthly newsletter. Later in the program, we’ll provide ordering information, so please stay tuned. Now, this week’s cover article. In our inaugural program last week we launched a three-part series on The Seduction of Christianity. This controversial book by Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon was a call to discernment in these days of spiritual deception and false teaching. We now present part two of this discussion. Along with Dave Hunt, here’s Tom McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks Gary. In this, our second radio program of Search the Scriptures, we are re-visiting a book Dave and I co-authored fifteen years ago titled: The Seduction of Christianity, Spiritual Discernment in the Last Days. Now Dave, one of the things that surprises me today is that the book continues to be controversial. You know, as a young writer then, it was really a privilege to help you with it. I’m sure I thought that the book would turn things around—silly me, huh? Things are actually worse than ever but that’s what the scriptures indicate, isn’t it?
Dave:
Uh, huh, afraid so, last days, dangerous times will come and they will be lovers of themselves and we talk a lot about self-love. But Jesus himself in Luke 18:8 said:—when the Son of man returns, will he find the faith upon the earth? It didn’t sound like things were going to be very encouraging. It doesn’t sound like we are going to have a great last days revival like we hear a lot about and I would be certainly thrilled if that were the case. But Paul said, don’t let anybody (just to put it into our modern language) sweet talk you on this idea of the last days great revival. That day, that is, the day of the Lord, will not come except there come the falling away, the apostasy first. So, yes, unfortunately it has gotten considerably worse and I don’t know how bad the apostasy has to get.
Tom:
Well, I agree. As I said, as a young writer back then, really a young believer, I really didn’t understand the scriptures and I thought, you know, again, this was as bad as it’s going to get. I guess because I was so involved in researching so much of this information that I couldn’t see it, but it has. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Let me quote you from Acts 20:29-31, this is the apostle Paul: “For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. And of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears. Now, that’s stunning! From this perspective, Paul didn’t have to deal with Christian media, with unchecked doctrines, heresies coming at you every which way all the time, yet look at his heart here. That by the space of three years he ceased not to warn everyone night and day with tears.
Dave:
Sounds like a fanatic.
Tom:
More fanatical than you, Dave.
Dave:
Right. But obviously, he wasn’t and I often quote that and say, you know, I haven’t even begun to be concerned compared with Paul. Now, one of the things that I think is most needed in the church, and maybe that’s why after the initial excitement about, you know, a lot of people caught the message of Seduction of Christianity, and we got thousands of letters. Wow, I knew there was something wrong, I didn’t know what it was, you’ve explained it. There were pastors who warned their flock: Don’t you dare—they not only warned them, they told them not to read—this was a forbidden book—and people read it, sometimes because it was forbidden, unfortunately. Some of those pastors lost their church because people just left. They realized that what this man was teaching them, who was their pastor, was not according to the Word of God and in fact, that it was contrary to the Word of God although he had been manipulating the scriptures to make it seem that this is what was being taught.
But after the initial excitement, you could say, a lot of people awakened. We got letters from many people—You delivered me from this cult or that occult idea and false idea—we came to Christ, many of them through reading this. Lets say it settled down to kind of a complaint and that was: You’re too negative—why don’t you be positive and just give uplifting teaching and I think I give a lot of uplifting teaching if people followed me around. I think that—and I get this from scripture—one of the greatest, if not the greatest needs, certainly one of the greatest needs in the church today, is correction. The Bible—Paul says that scripture is given for correction and if you would read the prophets, I mean, was Jeremiah positive, you know? Why didn’t Jeremiah encourage the Jewish people more? He had, first of all, to indict them with their sin, with their error, their waywardness from God and from his Word and to try and bring them back to God. What about the prophets? What about Jesus? He was very gentle with the woman at the well, very loving and kind although he did bring her sin before her and brought her to repentance but when he dealt with the religious leaders, the rabbis, he was very sharp with them. You could say he left them bleeding from every pore. He just cut them to ribbons, even his own disciples sometimes because they didn’t heed the scriptures. On the road to Emmaus, for example, those two, He called them fools! He could just as well have said, you idiots! Why didn’t you pay attention to what the prophets have spoken? So, I believe, and Paul writes, all scripture, 11 Timothy 3:16: All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable, or to be used for doctrine—you don’t hear too much doctrine today. It’s all experiences, lets have some miracle, lets touch people and see them fall over or what not. I’m not opposed to miracles but they must come from God and they must be genuine, not something we just worked up in order to excite people. But he says the scripture is given for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness. In the next chapter, when he says to Timothy: Preach the word, he didn’t say, preach the word, be positive, build up their self-esteem, make them feel good about themselves, but he says, preach the word, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. So, if I’m going to preach the word, most of the epistles were written to bring correction, were they not? So, if I’m going to preach the word I’m going to have to be ready to bring reproof, to bring correction and Tom, I used to—
Tom:
Dave, I want to just interject this—these are not your own ideas. We are simply being obedient to the scriptures which were encouraging every one else to be. Why? Because we can prove ourselves right and somebody else wrong? No, it’s for their edification isn’t it? For their growth, for their encouragement in the things of God, not the things of men or the things that even seem to be of God but really have no biblical basis.
Dave:
Right. You know, Tom, I used to be in the business world and I’ve had hundreds of employees and I can tell you that if a person, as I evaluate this person, and I’m wasting my time trying to correct them, you know, it’s just useless, fire them because there is nothing you can do. Solomon said: A word to the wise is sufficient. Rebuke a wise man and he will be wiser, but you can grind a fool in a mortar and pestle, you know, his foolishness won’t depart. But if I find a person, an employee that I feel has some real potential and their heart is right, they want to do what’s right, they need some instruction, then you instruct them. Jesus himself said; as many as I love I rebuke and chasten. But we live in a day when to rebuke is, Wow, to chasten, you wouldn’t dare chasten your children. Don’t let anybody see you being too stern with your children in public, in a restaurant, they will take them away from you, you’re guilty of child abuse. Nobody wants to rebuke anyone for anything, lets just build up their self-esteem and help them feel good about themselves. That’s not what the Bible says. So, if I’m going to conscientiously stick to the word of God and I’m going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, who said as many as I love, I rebuke and chasten, then I must be willing to be rebuked myself. Please, you know, we have listeners out there, you think that what we are saying is not biblical, please let us know. We would be fools not to want to be corrected. I must be willing to be corrected myself. On the other hand, I can’t be so desirous of not offending anyone that I’m afraid to say anything that might be counter to what somebody believes. I’m afraid to reprove anyone or say anything that’s wrong because I want to be, you know, have everybody be my friend and just pat me on the back. No, I’ve got to be sensitive to criticism but I must be certain that it is valid criticism for the word of God. This is why we call our ministry, The Berean Call. The Bereans checked Paul out for the Word of God.
Tom:
And they were commended for doing so.
Dave:
Absolutely. So, I thing we should be checked out. I also think Kenneth Copeland and Hagin, or Billy Graham, or the Pope in Rome, or whoever you want to name, they all should be checked out.
Tom:
But you’re naming people. I mean, some people take offense at that. Why can’t we just deal with the doctrine or the teaching itself.
Dave:
Well Tom, there are a number of reasons. First of all, Matthew 18 says, if your brother offend you, go to him, you know. I haven’t been offended. I’m not offended by what Robert Schuller teaches.
Tom:
Well, we’re offended but we are not personally offended. This is not personal sin against us.
Dave:
Exactly. I am offended for the Lord. It’s not a personal thing although some of them have said some personal things but nevertheless, that’s not what we’re addressing. What we are addressing is publicly taught error, at least in our opinion, that doesn’t square with the Scriptures. Therefore, the only way you can correct it, and you know we have sat down in private with some of these people, as many as would allow us to talk with them and they will say one thing in private, but something else in public.
Tom:
That’s been the case, yes, time after time.
Dave:
I’ll never forget being on a panel with Walter Martin. This was in Denver and this was at a cult conference. On the panel I mentioned, I think somebody asked something about Robert Schuller and I mentioned that Robert Schuller had gone to at least, Summit Missouri Unity School of Christianity, one of the worst cults out there. They deny everything in the Bible, they are into yoga and hypnosis and New Age, deny the gospel of Jesus Christ. That Robert Schuller went there, not to correct them, but to commend them and to share his church growth principles with this horrible cult. And in the question/answer time one of them asked well, what’s the function of a minister in this New Age of which we are all a part, they said. We quoted this in The Seduction of Christianity, as you recall, and Robert Schuller didn’t skip a beat, he didn’t deny he was a part of the New Age. He said well, what we have to do is positivise religion. He said now that’s easy for you, being Unity ministers, ministers in training, you’re already very positive but you understand I deal with people you would call fundamentalists and they use terms like sin and guilt, repentance and redemption. What we have to do is positivise this. Walter Martin was sitting next to me and he said Dave, I don’t want to hear you say that again about Robert Schuller, because I went to him privately about this. I mean, he had, Robert Schuller, for example, had dedicated a Unity Temple in Warren, Michigan in spite of the Baptist pastor writing to him and telling him how horrible Unity is and he shouldn’t do it and so forth. Anyway, Walter Martin said Dave, I don’t want to hear you say that again about Robert Schuller, because I have gone to him personally about this in private and he has agreed that he is not going to be involved with Unity anymore now that he understands how bad it is. Well, I said to Walter, okay, you know, if that’s what he says. A few months later I’m driving in my car and I turn on The Bible Answer Man and it’s Walter Martin telling how Robert Schuller is back with Unity, speaking at their functions and so forth and Walter Martin says, and now he won’t return my phone calls and he won’t answer my letters. So, this is the experience that we’ve had. You talk to someone in private but it doesn’t benefit people out there who have been publicly taught things. Now, furthermore Tom, look, if I said something publicly, why should you have to rebuke me privately? If I’ve said something wrong that has led people astray, why wouldn’t I be willing to acknowledge this? I mean, if I have publicly taught something wrong, then by God’s grace let me have the grace to admit it publicly and to the benefit of those that I have led astray.
Tom:
Right. To do something about it—to change what you’ve written, to correct an error that you’ve promoted.
Dave:
Furthermore Tom, if these men that we’re quoting and we only quote, and I’m not going to, you know, grouse about it, but we’ve had so many—maybe I have more than you—I’ve had so many bad reviews of books, so many statements made about me without any documentation. We don’t make those kinds of statements. We simply quote what people say, what they have said publicly on radio, and their books, on TV. Now if they really believe what they have said publicly, then they should be happy that we quote them because we are just giving broader distribution to what they have said. Now if they are ashamed to be quoted, which I don’t understand, then maybe they have something to apologize for to the people to whom they have said these things. We’re concerned for truth. We’re concerned for the Word of God, for the integrity of the gospel of Jesus Christ because the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes it, and if you play games with the gospel and you present a false gospel, you compromise, you pervert or corrupt the Word of God, then you are in a dangerous business and furthermore, you are endangering souls for eternity and that is our only concern. Look, if we wanted to be popular we could take a different tact, I could tickle people’s ears. What I’m thinking of is eternity and one day all that matters is: What God is going to say to me? And I will be held accountable for the people to whom I have given a false gospel.
Tom:
You know, Dave, the objections to this from, particularly from evangelicals, is kind of shocking because there are so many examples. Most of the epistles were written for correction, or a large part of what’s found in the epistles were written for correction, and we have the example of the apostle Paul confronting the apostle Peter, you know, to his face before them all and then we have Peter not later saying, well, Paul just ruined my ministry. I mean, you know, he caused my donations to fall off and you know, so on and so forth. That doesn’t happen because Peter recognizes where he did drift away from what God would have him do and that correction—you know, he talks about his beloved Paul. That’s what Christianity needs, not this sort of false sense of ecumenism and, you know, kind of a sort of political or theological correctness, not to offend whatever. No, we just have to do what God’s Word tells us to do. We have to follow—Paul says follow me as I follow Christ. Do the things, you know, we’re not making it up, we’re just trying to be obedient and conform to what God has laid out there through his prophets to do.
Dave:
In His Word. I’ve been accused of causing division and people say— well, Romans 16:17 says: Mark them that cause division among you and avoid them. And I say, No, that’s not what it says, why don’t you go back and read it again. It says: Mark them which cause division among you, contrary to the doctrine you have received, and avoid them. You don’t cause division by standing for the truth, for sound doctrine. You cause division by introducing false doctrine and refusing to be corrected. Division comes as a natural consequence of something. Everywhere Christ went, and you read it four times in the gospel of John, it says there was a division among the Jews because of Him. Division comes because of the consequences of certain things. Number one, there is a distinction between the truth of God and the lie of Satan. Oh, lets not call it the lie of Satan, lets be a little more positive about it, lets just call it humanistic ideas of man, but they are still as bad. As long as Jesus said: I am the way, the truth, the life, no man comes to the Father but by me—that made a clear line of distinction and if you did not accept that, you were opposed to Him, therefore there was a division. The division existed simply because the truth is inflexible. Jesus Christ is inflexible. The Christians were the same thing. The Romans were very broad minded. They had a lot of gods. Remember on Mars Hill in Greece, for example, the whole Roman Empire was full of gods. If the Christians had simply said, well, Jesus is just another way, you know, there are a lot of ways, they would have never been thrown to the lions. And if Jesus had just tried to be positive and be ecumenical and work together with the rabbis and with everybody else and say, well, as long as you’re sincere that’s okay, he wouldn’t have even been crucified. He could have been very popular. It wasn’t God’s fault, it was not the fault of Jesus that the division. It’s the fault of those who refused to accept the truth! If we’re standing for the truth, we can’t expect to be popular. We can’t expect that we will not have people who will be upset, who will be angry. What we can expect is this: that there will be those who will recognize that truth matters. You can’t compromise because one day God has the final say. So, we’re only trying to stand for the truth of the Word of God and if what we are saying is not right, then, please, tell us and we will repent, but if what we are saying is right, then don’t let popularity, personalities or some other idea influence you, for time when what really counts is eternity.
Tom:
Right. You know, Dave, this doesn’t relate just to these leading or highly visible Christian leaders that some of whom we have been addressing, but it may be something in a Bible study or in a Sunday school where something is taught and you say, wait a minute. You know, it’s not like you have to be a thorn in everybody’s flesh about this or a nit picker on every element, but there are some things that are promoted that are not true to God’s Word and if you have a love for the person teaching, teaching comes with a very heavy responsibility and for those who are in a study with you or those you are associated with. You, at least I would think, would have to ask the question: But wait a minute, brother, you know, can you explain to me where this is in the scriptures so I can better understand it? I mean, you know, sometimes would it speak to love and truth and how we go about it is important, but that’s what we are trying to encourage here. Search the scriptures, be like the Bereans, encourage one another in the faith. Once and for all delivered unto the saints.
Dave:
Amen.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page.
RADIO BROADCAST #2408
Dave Hunt & T. A. McMahon
Welcome to a special edition of Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. This week we interrupt Dave and Tom’s series based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God, and pay a re-visit to our very first radio series that was broadcast back in the Fall of 1999. We hope you enjoy this re-presentation and will have a special offer for you later in the program. It has been a number of years since authors and Biblical apologists Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon collaborated on The Seduction of Christianity, published by Harvest House. The book had a major impact on our ministry, so in this first of our radio programs we’ll return to this controversial publication and take a look at what has transpired since its release. So now, with a re-visit to The Seduction to Christianity, along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. Dave, as you know, it’s been nearly 15 years since the first printing of The Seduction of Christianity, and this being our first series of Search the Scriptures Radio Programs, I thought we might give our listeners a little background about the book, about ourselves, and how the book relates to the ministry of The Berean Call, which produces this program. Now first of all, why write a book as some have said that has such a presumptuous title? I mean, was Seduction of Christianity presumptuous?
Dave:
I don’t think it was presumptuous, I think it was factual, and I think many people would agree with us. Christianity for a long time is in the process of being re-defined. A lot of things are being passed off as Christianity which are not. Who am I to say that? It’s not my opinion, we go to the Scriptures, very definitely in the name of God, in the name of the Bible. And Christianity has been manufactured in the United States and around the world, and that is definitely not biblical.
Tom:
Yeah, a little bit of background. You wrote a number of books before The Seduction of Christianity, a book and then the film at that time that I worked on, you wrote the book and I worked on the film Cult Explosion. After that, the book and the film came out, we received lots of letters from people who said, You know, the book, the film were about cults, but we see those teachings taking place in our church, and they were concerned. We received enough of those, enough of information, not only from that book and that film but from other places of people seeing cultic teachings show up in their evangelical churches.
Dave:
We’ve had contact, letters and phone calls and face-to-face contact with many people who would say something like this: "You know, I came to Christ out of the cults or out of the occult. I went to what I thought was recommended to me as a fine evangelical church, and I found the same thing going on there that I had just been delivered from. And I went to another one and the same thing, and I had a difficult time finding--" It’s not that these people were not Christians, not that they didn’t teach from the Word of God or attempt to, but there were practices and ideas and doctrines that had crept in that had somehow become intertwined with the teaching of Scripture. I guess, to improve it, or somehow it seemed to make things work better, whatever may have been the reason, and the Christians in those churches would not recognize it as such. But the people who had come out of the occult they saw it immediately, they said, "This is what we came from, this is what we were delivered from." Why is it in the church? And of course, as you’re intimating, some of these letters and contacts with people like that caused us to awaken ourselves perhaps a little bit more. I had, as you said, written a number of books. I had traveled to India, I had been really concerned about the New Age influences in the world, and talking about them and then I see them in the church, the same thing. So, we felt that this really needed to be addressed.
Tom:
Right, and there were some to us, some amazing objections. I remember, you know, us being blamed for creating this whole idea of the New Age and then putting it into a book to sell books. Obviously, it didn’t turn out that way, that is, people recognized that the New Age was not just the figment of Dave Hunt’s imagination.
Dave:
Yeah, in those days, actually Tom, as I recall, in Peace, Prosperity and the Coming Holocaust, we have a lot to say about the New Age, and in those days the so-called cult experts, the cult watchers, they said there was no such thing, they didn’t really exist and you know, you almost didn’t want to talk about the New Age after a while, because everybody, all the Christians began putting it in the title of their books as they awakened to this to somehow sell a book. But definitely, you would have to call it New Age. Now, a little background to that, there was something called, New Thought, that originated probably in the 1890’s. You could pretty much trace it to a place called, The Emerson School of Oratory. Out of The Emerson School of Oratory came Unity, School of Christianity--I mean, the influence that brought it about--Christian Science, Science of Mind, Religious Science, and so forth. And much of that is reflected in the Positive Confession Movement. It was called, New Thought, in those days, it was Emersonian ideas, you know, you create reality with your mind. Let me give a quick example here. Let’s say many Christians, probably most, but many Christians, when they pray they think faith is: if I can just believe that what I am praying for will happen, then it will happen, and they think that’s faith. Obviously, if things happen because you believe they will happen, that’s not faith that’s mind power. Faith is believing God will make it happen. Well, that brings another set of circumstances into the equation. Is it God’s will? If it’s not God’s will, it’s not God’s way, it’s not God’s time. You remember, we were criticized for what we said in The Seduction of Christianity. Now we talked about the occult influences in the church and we said, Occultism is any attempt to manipulate reality by mind-over-matter techniques. And I remember some of the staunch Christian cult watchers who said, Whoa, now that rules out prayer, that rules out God’s natural work, you know, it rules it out miracles. No, we’re talking about mind over matter, attempts to manipulate reality. And so if you can make things happen by believing they will happen, that is mind over matter, that’s positive thinking. Norman Vincent Peale--you can change your reality, you can change the universe by your thoughts. Now you begin to trust in these techniques that, by the way, are taught in the business world, they’re taught in public schools. I remember in those days we used to use this illustration: We would say, If a witch doctor came dancing down the isles of your church in his paint and feathers and fetishes and rattles, you would throw him out or you would at least try to convert him, but you wouldn’t let him teach your congregation. But when the witch doctor has put on a business suit and a tie, and he is using Christian words, but he’s teaching the same thing underneath the cover of these Christian words, unfortunately it isn’t recognized.
Tom:
Or if he has scientific credentials of some type, then it’s more than acceptable because of the source, right?
Dave:
He has a PhD in psychology perhaps.
Tom:
Dave, the example here, I mean, hopefully the audience understands what we are laying out here is that this was a seduction and it continues to be a seduction. Sometimes today you wonder because there is so much information out about it, but still, people are being seduced by this and, as you point out, the word, "faith teachers" here is an example of those who would claim to be evangelicals, who have adopted a methodology, techniques of occultism, developed or wrapped them in Christian terminology and presented them as faith. That’s what we are talking about, this is one example of the seduction that took place.
Dave:
Of course we had already written, as you mentioned, Cult Explosion, and numbers of people have written about the Mormon church. The heart of the Mormon church is the belief that we can become gods--well, men become gods, women become goddesses and have to continue to look forward to eternal pregnancy and so forth.
Tom:
Cranking out spirit babies.
Dave:
But a man becomes a god, that’s the whole idea. Brigham Young said the devil told the truth--I don’t blame mother Eve for eating the forbidden fruit, that’s how we become gods. So, Mormonism is literally founded upon the belief that the lie of the serpent is the gospel truth. So people could accept that--
Tom:
When you mean people could accept that--you mean they recognize that as Mormon heresy.
Dave:
Thank you, right, they understood it. When you spoke against the Mormon church and you pointed out the error of it they could accept that, they were willing to take that. But when we had people in the evangelical church who were talking about getting saved and believing in Jesus, and that Jesus died for our sins on a cross, but they’re saying, not that we are going to become gods, we already are gods, we are little gods. You have Paul Crouch on TBN putting out a newsletter from Trinity Broadcasting Network in which he said, If we are not little gods, I will apologize before ten thousand times ten thousand before the Crystal Sea. Well, it’s very simple from the Bible, I mean this is not our opinion, if he’s a little god he won’t be before the Crystal Sea because Jeremiah 10:10,11--God says, I am God, there’s no other god, and I am the God who created the heavens and the earth, nobody else has done that. And then this God, the true God of the Bible, the Creator says, You say to the gods who have not created the heavens and the earth, they will perish from under this heaven and from this earth, and that’s pretty clear. But you have Charles Capps, for example, writing in one of his books, he says, We are gods, but remember to spell it with a little g. Well, that’s incredible! But then the teaching follows. Because we are gods, little gods of course, we can speak the creative word, we can do what God does, and then they began to teach that everything is subject to laws. This is a more subtle form of Galatianism, that we are not under the law that was given to Moses, but we’re under some kind of natural laws that govern this entire universe, and in fact, God himself is subject to these laws, and it is because of His knowledge of these laws that He is able to speak forth a creative word. He can do it through visualizing, through positive speaking, that’s why they call it the Positive Confession Movement. You wouldn’t want to say, I’ve got a cold because that’s a negative confession and that would cause you to get one. But if you have a cold, your nose is running and so forth, you say, I don’t have a cold, that’s positive confession, and you keep confessing it and then your cold will go away. This is really just science--science of mind.
Tom:
Well, Dave, that’s interesting because, I mean, you bring up Mormonism, the idea that they promote, that we are gods or being exalted to godhood. As a cult you have the same problem with religious science, Christian Science that really we are deity, right? We have this innate deity about us and that we can create reality with our minds.
Dave:
Yeah, it comes from Hinduism, it’s called maya. The Hindu would say, It’s all an illusion, it’s only what you think. What you think creates the world that you live in. That’s a form of pantheism. They would say, the religious scientists, I mean practice in a religious science, science of mind would say, God is good and God is all, therefore all is good. And if you see something out there that looks like sin sickness suffering death, it doesn’t exist, you’ve been caught in a downward spiral of your negative thinking. Now there are a lot of people who wouldn’t go that far as Christians, but still they give some credence to the idea that if I say I am getting a cold I’ll get a cold, and if they can just, you know, make a positive confession then that will bring it about. And these men, Hagen, Copeland, and so forth, Fredrick Price, they literally teach, and Paul Crouch has taught on Trinity Broadcasting Network, they literally teach that we create with our words, and they say, That’s because we are little gods. And they would go to Genesis 1, where God said, and they will quote it, Genesis 1:3, God said, Let there be light; Genesis 1:6, 1:11, and so forth, God said, God said, and they say, See the power in words? No, it didn’t happen because God said it, it happened because it was God who said it. And he’s not subject to some boss, and there are not some laws out there that make it work. But Pat Robertson says, God never does a miracle except by the law of miracles.
Tom:
Now Dave, you wouldn’t expect, this just show how, not only subtle but how it moves in certain directions that you wouldn’t expect and it touches and affects people that you wouldn’t expect. No one that I know would say, Oh, certainly Pat Robertson is part of the whole word faith teaching. But he has written more extensively about these laws. I won’t say than most of these guys, but he has written extensively about it. So you would have to put h im in that category, not based on your opinion or my opinion, but just based on his works, correct?
Dave:
Based on what he says, Pat Robertson for example says that the Bible is not an impractical book of theology. But it’s a practical book of success, and it gives you techniques for success. Now somebody listening would say, Well, now you’re splitting hairs, I mean, these people are Christians and what is the point, what does it really matter? Well, the Bible puts great emphasis upon faith, it says: By grace are you saved through faith. We are saved by faith, we live by faith, we walk by faith, we’re justified by faith, everything that we have in Christ is through faith. Now, if we have a false view of faith, then we’re in real trouble. And when Normal Vincent Peale says, "positive thinking is just another word for faith." Wait a minute! You can be an atheist and teach positive thinking seminars. Now we are really being led astray, and I hope people will understand we are not just trying to be critical, what we are doing, Tom, and if not, please somebody correct us, what we are doing is following what Jude said: "Earnestly contend for THE faith, once for all delivered to the saints." And as soon as we begin to compromise, and we think, Well, we can manipulate it a little, or we can adjust it or--someone said it like this: "It’s certainly legitimate if you take the unchangeable truth of the Word of God and put it in modern language so that a modern person can understand it." Okay, I have no objection to that, but if you take the latest ideas of the world, or much less the occult, these mind manipulating techniques of the New Age, of the Human Potential Movement, and you dressed them up in biblical language and you passed this off as Christianity, you are literally taking people to hell who imagine that they are on their way to heaven. And that is why the Bible says, THE faith was once delivered to the saints, and we must earnestly contend for it. Not because we are narrow-minded, dogmatic fundamentalists and we just like to disagree with people, but because the eternal destiny of souls hangs in the balance, that’s what we are concerned about.
Tom:
Right, and those who do know the Lord, I mean really know the Lord but fall into this--are seduced into it, their whole view of God has to be changed. If the methodology relates to their Creator, to their God, and the methodology of how they relate to Him is bogus, I mean it is really wrong, their view of God is going to be wrong. When these things begin to break down and don’t work as they had hoped, their view of God changes. So, for a true believer, at the very least their walk of faith, their relationship with the Lord is going to be altered, I think, to a point of maybe having their faith shipwrecked, maybe destroying their faith.
Dave:
Well, Jesus said in John 17:3: "This is life eternal." Now we want to know what life eternal is. There’s a big difference between having life eternal and being lost eternally. And Jesus said: This is not my words, "this is life eternal that they might know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." It would be a horrible thing to stand before the Lord one day and He says: I never knew you! So, if you have a false god, even a false concept of God, you’re detracting from the truth about God. You are substituting--this is called idolatry--whatever kind of an idol you want to make, or even if you just make it in your mind, you don’t have to form it out of wood and clay, whatever this false god is, this is a false god. So, John, for example, in his first epistle in chapter 5, he says: "We know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding that we might know the true God, that we might know Him who is true." He says: "This is the true God, Jesus Christ. Little children keep yourselves from idols." So if we have a false concept of God, and I’m not trying to name names to say, well this person must not be a Christian then or his whole ministry is out. I’m not saying everything he’s done is wrong but when Robert Schuller, for example says; the greatest power in the world is possibility thinking-- What happened to God? What are we talking about? Where or when we liken God to some kind of a force like the Star Wars "force," well, that’s a very idea because "the force," being impersonal, isn’t going to hastle you with morals. The personal God of the Bible calls us to Himself and there are conditions for our knowing Him and walking with Him and we have to embrace Him as He is, not some false idea of God. Well, just so long as you believe in some higher power--No, God is not a higher power. He is the personal God who has revealed Himself in the person and in the work upon the cross of Jesus Christ to redeem us from our sins. So, as soon as I begin to use other terms that are popular in the world, that are understood in the world like a "force," a "higher power" and so forth, then I am no longer talking about the true God and I must be very, very careful about this. This is what we were contending for and we felt that, we call it The Seduction of Christianity, because it wasn’t that somebody was blatantly going about destroying Christianity. No, they were seducing people. Maybe they had been seduced themselves with false ideas that they thought were biblical but when you measure it up with the Bible it doesn’t stand the test.
Tom:
Right, and that’s our heart here in this program, Search the Scriptures. We want people to check things out, just as the Bereans did in Acts 17:11, and that’s our encouragement. Now, we’re going to pick up on this next week, Dave, continue to revisit The Seduction of Christianity, but our encouragement to our listeners is to have a heart for God’s Word, to check things out. This is what God wants. He wants you to know Him through His Word.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page . The transcript for this program is is follows:
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for joining us. Coming up in the next hour in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will resume their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “How could Satan tempt Jesus?” In Religion in the News: Praying Without the Name of Jesus. We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Why Do Dave and Tom Always Bring Bad News?” We hope you can stay tuned. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly Newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Why Is Christianity So Intolerant?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re tuned in to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this first segment of our program, we’re going through Dave Hunt’s book, Seeking and Finding God, subtitled, In Search of the True Faith. And last week we pointed out that being tolerant of everything is today’s supreme virtue and being intolerant of anything, especially anything religious, could land you in jail. Nevertheless, Dave, you state that the Bible declares itself to be the only inspired Word of the one true God, and that it is absolutely intolerant of all the world’s religions. Then you challenge anyone who is truly seeking after God and ultimate truth to start with the Bible, rather than attempting to search all the religions of the world, because only the Bible has features that make it possible to substantiate its claims.
Dave:
And the Bible says all the rest of them are wrong.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
So if we can prove the Bible is true, we’ve saved a lot of time.
Tom:
And you pointed out last week that Christianity is not a philosophy, It’s not a mystical experience or esoteric practice, which means it’s not in the realm of pure subjectivity, which these things, for the most part are. Now, here’s one of the things that we talked about last week that I think is worth going over. It’s central doctrine, the central doctrine of Christianity sets itself apart from every religious belief system. No other religion has a founder or a God who became a man, who paid the full penalty for the sins of mankind. So Dave, let’s talk about that just briefly. It seems to me, and you know, a friend of mine likes to put it this way: that there are only two religions, and we’re not…we’re only for the sake of comparison, we don’t believe that Biblical Christianity is a religion because religions primarily are man-made systems of belief, okay. But he says there’s divine accomplishment and human achievement. Human achievement, all the religions of the world there is something you need to do, it’s a religion of doing things.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Whereas Biblical Christianity is divine accomplishment. Christ did it all. There is nothing to do, it’s done, He did it all!
Dave:
Yeah, unless people get the wrong impression, which some people are very quick to do. There is much to do because…not for salvation—Ephesians 2:10 I think it is: We are created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. So we Christians ought to do more good deeds than anybody, but as I have often told Jehovah’s Witnesses—well, I don’t tell them very often because I think they have a mark on our house so they don’t come back. But I used to tell them, Look, I’ve knocked, probably knocked on more doors than you have in my younger days when I wasn’t traveling all over and writing and so forth. But I knocked on doors out of love and gratitude to please my Saviour because He paid the full penalty for my sins. You are knocking on doors in the hopes of earning your salvation, and you can’t even be sure. You have to pass a final test after Armageddon. But the Bible offers certainty, absolute certainty. John writes 1John 5:13: These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that you may know (that’s present knowledge) that you have (that’s present possession) eternal life. So we can know that we have eternal life. And just a word about eternal life, because I know that there are people out there who believe you can have eternal life and then lose it. It’s a strange kind of eternal life if you have it today, and then somehow you lost it and you don’t have it tomorrow, that wasn’t exactly eternal.
Tom:
Dave, another point here is that not just Jehovah’s Witnesses, but there some who people would put under the category of Christian that have the same idea, that there is something that you need to do for your salvation, whether it be baptism or the sacraments, and so on. But the thing that’s missing, and that’s the penalty, the penalty is an infinite penalty. Sin, the wages of sin is death, so the penalty is infinite, and none of these works have anything to do with paying that penalty. It’s separation from God forever!
Dave:
Well, if you tell the judge, he’s found you guilty of something, Well if you let me off this time I promise you I’ll never, ever, ever break the law again. The judge says, If you never break the law again you’re only doing what the law requires, you don’t get extra credit for that. But now what are we going to do about the fact you have already broke the law? And Tom, some people say, Well, it’s not just—you’re saying for some temporal sin, something that someone committed in their brief life…they will suffer eternally? Well, that’s another big subject that we can’t go back over. But, there’s no small sin, there’s no temporary sin. When Adam and Eve, all they did was take a—I don’t know…I don’t know what fruit it was, it could have been anything, the point was they rebelled against God.
Tom:
Mmhmm. Disobedience.
Dave:
God said, This is my universe, these are the rules! I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Now if you want to remain in my universe, I have given you life—God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of life, he became a living soul—if you want to continue to enjoy the life that I have given you, you are going to have to realize it comes on my terms, my conditions, and one of those is that you will love me, that you will obey me. This is a requirement! You can’t…so it’s not a small sin. Just taking of that—a bite even—of that forbidden fruit was rebellion against God! And I don’t think—I certainly don’t believe that I have—I don’t think any of us has a grasp of the horror of that sin. To rebel against the one true God, the living God!? You can’t take that lightly. And you have put yourself out of his universe forever unless you come back in on his terms, and that’s only through Jesus Christ. What he has done, not what you can do.
Tom:
Right. So here we have divine justice and perfection, everything God does is perfect, and then we have divine love, which offers this gift, as you mentioned earlier, this eternal life, this free gift of eternal life.
Dave:
And God himself became a man to pay the penalty for our sins so that he could make that offer on a righteous basis.
Tom:
Yeah. Dave, I have to emphasize this again: There is no belief system, no other belief system that offers this. And that’s what separates Biblical Christianity, again, from every other belief system, all the world’s religions.
Dave:
So then it all depends upon, is this Biblical Christianity true, and can we verify that, which we can, we have done it many times on this program.
Tom:
Well, we’re going to go through a number of items, Dave, for our listening, viewing audience. Let’s talk about the authorship of the authority of Christianity. We’re talking about, certainly it is divinely inspired, God breathed, but it went through about 40 different writers, all claiming to be inspired by the same supernatural source.
Dave:
Well, that’s a good insurance policy, you could say, because…are you going to be a Muslim? Well, then you go by the Qur’an. Where did the Qur’an come from? Well, Muhammad says he got it from the angel Gabriel who received it from Allah. Well, how can we be sure of that? There’s no prophecies, there’s no proof, there’s no evidence. And Muhammad, you have to trust him, he’s all alone. But for every Biblical author who claimed to be inspired of God, I think more than 60 times Ezekiel says, The Word of the Lord came unto me, he is saying Son of man, and so forth. You have 39 other witnesses, independent, most of them never knew one another, they lived in different cultures. They had no way of checking up on one another, and yet they are in complete agreement from Genesis to Revelation, and they follow certain themes. There’s no way that they could have done that. Now why, how did it happen? The one thing they have in common is they all claimed to be inspired by the one true God! So we’ve got 40 witnesses, 39 for every other one, and there is no way, there is no religion on this earth that has anything like this with the prophecies and proofs.
Tom:
Well let’s look at some details. You mentioned different occupations; there were kings, governors, priests, fishermen, a farmer, prophets, shepherds, a tax collector, a physician. Now, for the Bible to be so highly esteemed, as not just history, and this is the Word of God, but as literature, and so on. How does these men, a farmer, you know, shepherds, a physician, and so on, fisherman, the New Testament writers Peter and so on, these were untutored, untrained, they didn’t go to this school or that school, and so on.
Dave:
And how did they all write in agreement?
Tom:
Yeah.
Dave:
Now, of course there are critics, and we don’t have time for that, who would say, Oh well, there were three Isaiahs, and Peter didn’t really write Book of Peter, and Daniel didn’t really write the Book of Daniel, and now we can tell by the syntax or the way the sentence was structured here and over there, it had to be a different author. That’s pure nonsense, I mean it makes, it turns—look, Peter, in 2 Peter Chapter 1, he says: We have not followed cunningly devised fables, but we have made know unto you, and so forth. Well now, what these critics were saying is, Oh no, the whole thing is cunningly devised fables. Well then this guy who is pretending to be Peter is lying. Now how are you going to build the Bible on a pack of lies? It’s not reasonable! So, when they try to play games with the Bible they are committing a sin.
Tom:
Right. Dave, we mentioned this last week but the Bible was written over a period of about 15 or 1600 years, dating all the way back 3500 years—different ages! I mean, when you think of that time span, certainly there are going to be cultural difference, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but how can you maintain continuity and harmony of content over that length?
Dave:
Only if God truly inspired it.
Tom:
Yeah. Now as far as cultures go, this is fascinating to me. Moses writing around the year what, 1500 BC, right in that time span. Now here as a baby he is taken into the house of Pharaoh (the greatest ruler of that time in the world), he’s trained up, he is educated, and certainly some of the things that he learned, not all of them you could say are scientific. I’m sure there were some legends, mythologies, magic, I mean all kinds of things that he was probably tutored in.
Dave:
Phony remedies for this disease and that.
Tom:
Right, right. Now, do we find any Egyptian culture along the lines of what I have been saying, in the Bible?
Dave:
No, Tom, you’re making a good point because one of the things the critics often say is, Well, the Bible just reflects the culture and the ideas of its time. On the contrary, it does not! You can’t explain that away either.
Tom:
So, we have Moses. What about Daniel? As a young boy he is taken to Babylon, and then by God’s grace he becomes, basically a governor. You know, not the ruler, but a ruler in Babylon. Why don’t we find any of that in…the cultural influences in the Book of Daniel?
Dave:
Because he is not inspired by the culture of his day but by the one true God, as are all of the other writers in the Bible.
Tom:
You know Dave, it just made me think of going back to Moses, Acts 7:22, it says that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and deeds. So we have an affirmation that, yes, he was there and he learned, but again we don’t find that culture in the scriptures.
Dave:
Well, you would if the critics were true.
Tom:
Yeah, or if anyone else was writing. You’re a writer, but the stories that you talk about related to your culture, Dave, I mean, isn’t that what writers do?
Dave:
Yeah. So it does not appear in the Bible.
Tom:
Dave, other verifications of the Bible: science for example. Now we get into a little of, you know, you mentioned that Moses didn’t promote some of the so-called health ideas of the Egyptians, but he did write many things that have to do with hygiene. For example, I think there are what? 613 laws in the Bible, and out of the 613, about 213 have to do with health issues.
Dave:
Well, people are reluctant to eat kosher, for example. “Well, I’m not a Jew so I don’t have to eat kosher”—well, but there’s some good reasons for it. And there are many things, and Tom, I don’t know what you had in mind, but I’ll just mention one: circumcision. That has health benefits for male and female, and amazingly, the clotting factor in the blood is very low when the infant is born; it reaches a peak at the 8th day. That was the day God said you will circumcise them. Now of course that’s also of significance because the 8th day is the first day of a new week, the first day of a new creation, so it has some symbolic value as well. But there are many others, I mean, let me just give another one quickly, Tom. In the Middle Ages, one of the reasons for persecuting Jews was because they didn’t get the diseases. They didn’t get the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, and so forth, and so the people who were getting it said, Look, these Jews, they are the ones, this is a disease that they have aimed at us. No, the reason was because they didn’t have their gutters running with sewage, there wasn’t open sewage, and they washed their hands and they got rid of the feces and so forth. So, I mean, that was the reason why, but God gave that order to the Jews.
Tom:
Dave, also as you well know, in the 1800’s there was a Hungarian doctor, a Jewish doctor, his name was Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, I think is the way you pronounce it. Here’s a man recognizing that expectant mothers were dying at a rate of about 30% in their hospitals, and he also noticed that the interns that were ministering to them, they would go from, let’s say a cadaver, or a woman who had just died of that disease and then—
Dave:
Cutting them up to examine them.
Tom:
You’re right, and then examining another woman who would come in who was an expectant mother. Well, again, with his Jewish background, his understanding of the Bible, all he did was very simple, and that is had these interns wash their hands after working on a cadaver before they examined the expectant mother.
Dave:
And their instruments.
Tom:
Right, and the mortality rate dropped from 30% down to 1%. Now, you would think the world would have said, Wow, this is fantastic, but they practically drove the man insane, I mean, they had him put in a mental institution.
Dave:
Well they drove him out of the hospital.
Tom:
Right, right.
Dave:
He had one wing of the hospital and when they got rid of him, then the mortality rate went back up.
Tom:
Right. But this is the method today, obviously science then, so-called, came around to doing things as the Bible says, just this simple idea of washing your hands. Dave, how about archeology? What we’re talking about here are facts basically, that support the Bible for its accuracy, from a medical standpoint, although it’s not a book about medicine, you know, but all the things with regard to science that it deals with; these things are proven true.
Dave:
But Tom, as you know, the Book of Mormon is a story about some Hebrews who came over, supposedly, and they peopled…this was an empty place, North, South and Central America, they’re the Indians, native American Indians, and so forth. Well, a great story, very interesting, but you can’t find a pin, you can’t find any evidence whatsoever, and the Mormon church has spent millions of dollars, their archeology department, they are trying to build it up to make it very scientific and accepted, but they can’t find anything. Now, what about the Bible? The museums of the world, and I’ve visited quite a few of them here, there and everywhere in the world, they are literally filled with relics, proofs, evidence, and they keep digging up more! I’ll give you one specific example of the Hittites. I’m old enough to remember as a very young boy; Well, now the Hittites, I mean that obviously shows that the Bible is not true because there never were such a people. Well they were a huge nation, but the archeologists hadn’t found any evidence yet. Well, I have visited, my family and I, in fact, visited the huge Hittite museum in Onkar, Turkey. They’ve got a whole museum showing that the Hittites really did exist, and if you want to know where to dig to find an ancient well, or an ancient city that has long been buried, just follow the Bible.
Tom:
And Dave, this is attested to by the Smithsonian, certainly sources that you would say, well, this is not exactly a Christian organization, but the Bible is esteemed for its accuracy over and over again. You uh…discoveries are happening almost daily with regard to the support of the accuracy of the Bible.
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
Dave, again we’re talking about archeological accuracy. The Bible mentions 29 kings from 10 countries. And uh—
Dave:
For which we have monuments and evidence to verify. Of course it mentions more than 29.
Tom:
And certainly these kings are mentioned by secular writers of the time, historians of the time, but they got it messed up. The Bible has it accurately, each given it’s right place in time and history, complex names spelled correctly, and again, all verified by the archeological monuments.
Dave:
Well, you can make some comparisons and there’s nothing like that in the records back there. We have others who, historians who name them but they don’t get the spelling right, they don’t get the date in history right, and so forth, but we have been able to verify that the Bible is 100% accurate. Now that’s just a sample of its accuracy, and the Bible doesn’t make mistakes. Now they will maybe try to find some, but they are not there. So this is really a good example. In fact, Dr. Wilson of Princeton, he said, Take a look at this! I don’t know of anything in ancient history like that; the library at Alexandria or the library at here, or the writers who reported on these kings. Nowhere except in the Bible do you find them 100% accuracy. Now that kind of gives you some idea this is something we can verify, the accuracy of the Bible in every detail!
Tom:
And again, the point being that with only the Bible can you substantiate its claims, but you can’t do that with the Book of Mormon, as you mentioned, try the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur’an and so on, they don’t have this ability or characteristic of being substantiated.
Dave:
Absolutely.
Gary:
This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still ahead, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith. And in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will continue their discussion of God’s salvation. In addition to this radio program, we publish a monthly Newsletter which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books in print, e-book and audio book formats, CD’s, DVD’s and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials, or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, write to us PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708, call our toll free order number 1-800-937-6638, that’s 1-800-937-6638, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org. If you would like a copy of this broadcast on compact disk, ask for Program #2308, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. And if you would like to watch Dave and Tom, our weekly broadcast is available on DVD, ask about a subscription when you contact us. You can also download both audio and video podcast at our website.
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Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for tuning in. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew. And “Are You the Chaff, or the Wheat?” In Religion in the News, “Santeria Growing in Catholic Venezuela.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question: “Will the Rapture be Pre-Trib?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly Newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Is Tolerance Today’s Supreme Virtue?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. Last week we touched upon some things in Dave Hunt’s book: Seeking and Finding God, subtitled, In Search of the True Faith. Now, some things, Dave, that I think we should expand upon. For example, we noted being tolerant of everything is today’s supreme virtue and being intolerant of anything, especially anything religious, could land you in jail. Now, in the face of that, in view of that, you make some rather, might I say intolerant declarations in your book. Such as, “The beliefs of many religious people are little more than sanctified superstitions.” You state that the Bible declares itself to be the only inspired Word of the one true God, and that it claims that all of the world’s religions and their sacred scriptures are false. Then, you sort of bring it all to a head by challenging anyone who’s seeking after God and ultimate truth to start with the Bible rather than attempting to search all the religions of the world. And you give your primary reason for having somebody do that, if they start with the Bible, well, to start with the Bible because only It, you say, has features that make it possible to substantiate its claims.
Dave;
And furthermore, it says all the rest of them are wrong.
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
So if you can prove its right you’ve saved a lot of time.
Tom:
But Dave, before we get to that, how do you respond to those who say, Christianity can’t be the only true religion because number one, it’s a sect of Judaism, and both of which came much later than Hinduism and Buddhism.
Dave:
I wouldn’t say that the books of Moses came later than the Vedas. I don’t know, but the books of Moses talk about the beginning, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So you can’t get back farther than that, and the Vedas do not tell you that. Their superstitions, they’ve got all kinds of nonsense.
Tom:
Well, what about Christianity being a sect of Judaism?
Dave:
It’s not a sect of Judaism, it’s the fulfillment. But not of Judaism, but the fulfillment of the Old Testament its called, that was the first covenant, the old covenant. And the New Testament, the new covenant, talks about the old covenant being, not done away with, but it is fulfilled. And so there are so many prophecies, as we’ve talked about many times, in the old covenant that are fulfilled in the new covenant. So the Messiah, for example, He would established a new covenant, and Christ at the Last Supper when he took the bread and the wine. He said of the wine, and the bread, He said, This is my body, take it and eat it in remembrance of me, and the wine he said, This is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many. So it’s not a sect of Judaism, I don’t know where anyone would get that idea.
Tom:
Dave, they launch these ideas and it does trip up many Christians. I also think about the Book of Genesis. This is Moses, Moses writing the Book of Genesis, which was a time in history far earlier than when he was born, okay. Now, if you look at Genesis it has the gospel in it, Genesis Chapter 3, Verse15. So, what God had presented in Genesis, as you said, is certainly fulfilled ultimately in the New Testament.
Dave:
That’s right.
Tom:
So, for somebody to say, Well, this religion or that religion predates Christianity or Judaism or anything like that—it’s not the case! How much father back can you go than the creation of Adam and Eve, the first humans?!
Dave:
Well Tom, I know that Dawkins and people like that, they say, Oh, man’s been on this earth 250,000 years, and so forth. Well, look it up, Tom. I have tried to verify these things, I cannot find language more than 3500 BC, and that’s about when the Bible says. 4000 BC is when Adam came out of the garden. So, I don’t know about these claims, tens of thousands of years? Furthermore, and not to get off the subject here, Tom, which I know I’m an expert, I could probably win the Olympic event in this.
Tom:
But you do have a way of coming back. Your rabbit trails always end up back at the rabbit hole, so that’s good.
Dave:
(Laughs) Right, right. Tom, and again, I’m not getting into this, we deal with these things in Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny. But the fact of the matter is DNA, it does make mistakes, it is subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Now, the atheistic evolutionist used to say, Now wait a minute, 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, no, these are living things, you can’t apply that to living things. Well, we can, because it causes errors in the DNA, copying errors, although there are editing procedures that are built into it, but some of them sneak through. And if you want to calculate it scientifically, we couldn’t have been here any longer than what the Bible says, or our DNA would be so fouled up by now. And we’re not going to be here much longer because we are a deteriorating race of human beings, and of course, all the animals are deteriorating as well. So, anyway, all this talk about thousands and thousands of years ago…I just don’t buy it, you cannot prove it scientifically, in fact you’ve proved the opposite.
Tom:
Mmhmm. Well Dave, you’re starting to sound a little bit intolerant here of these things, and that’s what I want to go back to, okay.
Dave:
We want to be intolerant of error.
Tom:
I hope so. And I hope that although we’ve been mesmerized by this idea that you need to be tolerant of everything—
Dave:
Except Christianity.
Tom:
Well, yeah, but there are many other exceptions to it, Dave, yet we seem to gloss those over, not we, but certainly the world, the media is glossing those things over. Well, I want to go back to this idea, again I’ll restate it: your primary reason for having someone start with the Bible is because only it, you say, has features that make it possible to substantiate its claims.
Dave:
Mmhmm.
Tom:
I want to go over some of those features, okay. Because I am sure the people that fall in line with what you said, no religions—what you referred to with regard to other religions, that they are just superstitions, sanctified superstitions, and so on. Now is the opportunity to at least get them to think about something.
Dave:
All right.
Tom:
All right. So, you say, Christianity—to begin with, the Bible is about Christianity—is not a philosophy, a mystical experience, or esoteric practice. Will you just elaborate on that a bit?
Dave:
Well philosophies come from men, and Paul writes in Colossians Chapter 2, Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy. Now, I’m not opposed to philosophy, because men are thinking and they are trying to come up with ideas, and of course they disagree with one another. Philosophies change, but not the Bible, the Bible does not change, and it’s not a philosophy, it’s not proposing something.
Tom:
Or speculations.
Dave:
Right, it’s giving facts. This is it; facts of history; facts about God; facts about ourselves; facts about…how are you going to be saved? How will you get back in the right relationship with God. This is factual, it is not speculation.
Tom:
What about mystical experience? We see that’s large in the Evangelical church today. I mean, I had 30 years of it growing up Roman Catholic. But to see this come into the Evangelical church, which is, to me—the breath of fresh air was that it was word oriented, the Word of God oriented. But now, mystical experience has become a part of a major movement within Evangelical Christianity called The Emerging Church.
Dave:
Well, the mystical experiences, what are they? Well, something beyond your ability to comprehend, its feeling oriented, it involves experiences that you have, supposedly.
Tom:
Terribly subjective.
Dave:
Right. But you don’t find that in the Bible, that’s not the way to God. God says, and we’ve quoted these verses numerous times, and one of your favorites, Tom, Proverbs 4:7: Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: but with all thy getting get understanding. You see, one of the things the atheists, and I’ve listened to quite a few of them now, they always say, Well, faith, faith, well that’s just a leap in the dark, I mean, the idea of faith is that you don’t have any evidence, you don’t have any reason for it, you just believe something, and you can’t argue with someone if they say that’s my faith, okay, well then, that’s sacred ground and you can’t dispute it.
Tom:
No. You’d be intolerant.
Dave:
Right. But what does the Bible say? Well, God says in Jeremiah, we just fall back…I mean it’s all through the Bible, but certain verses we fall back upon. Jeremiah 9:24: Let him—Well, we have to go to 23: Let not the wise glory in his wisdom, the rich in his riches, the mighty in his might, but let him that glorieth glory in this: that he’s had a mystical experience of me—no, that he understandeth, it says, and knoweth, but it doesn’t even put knoweth first. That he understandeth and knoweth me. I am the true God, I execute righteousness, justice and truth upon the earth, and so forth. So, Jesus said, John 17:3, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” And you, Tom, you’ve given a number of times, I think it’s worth repeating. In Matthew 13, Jesus gives the parable of the sower who went forth to sow. The first seed fell by the wayside, the birds of the air came and took it away. The disciples said, What does that mean? Jesus said, When anyone hears the Word of the kingdom and he doesn’t get all goose bumpy and he doesn’t get mystical experiences, and so forth—No! Anyone who hears the Word of the kingdom, and that’s the gospel, and does not understand it…Satan comes and takes that right out of his heart. So the Bible over and over, I could give you many more verses, the Bible over and over emphasizes understanding, knowing the truth, okay, not a mystical experience.
Tom:
Right. So Dave, those who are telling us today, and it’s coming out of the woodwork, that, No, we are finite beings, God is infinite, we can’t understand God, we don’t have the capacity to understand God—they are basically calling God a liar. Isaiah: Come let us reason together, God says. So, can’t an infinite God do just exactly what he says, make these things understandable for us?
Dave:
Well, yeah. How does He make them understandable? He has given us the capacity to understand,
Tom:
Right.
Dave:
—and he brings it down to our level. But you—
Tom:
Seems simple to me, Dave.
Dave:
It is. You don’t have to be a genius, because the Bible is written to common people, so certainly. But it’s understanding, with all thy getting get understanding. And you will not get understanding in a mystical experience. And Tom, you’ve said it a number of times when we were discussing the Emergant Church, [or] Emerging Church. Well, they say, Well, homosexuality, that’s a little bit difficult subject, I think we need five years, and if we don’t quite come to an agreement at the end of five years, well, we’ll take another five years. And Tom, I’m not diverging too far, I know you warn me about that. I’m probably—(laughs)
Tom:
Yeah Dave, I put the fear of God in you, didn’t I? (Laughs)
Dave:
I’m probably the champion. But here are the Lutherans, top people in the Lutheran church, and the Catholic bishops and so forth—they studied, they dialogued for 30 years! Then they put out a document, you know, justification by faith, and so forth. Wow, we finally agree on it! Well, then you know, I like to be a little bit sarcastic, if people will allow me to do that. And so, here is the Philippian jailer, he cries out, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? Paul says, Do you have about 30 years? This is really a complicated subject and we may have to go into a few trances before we get to—
Tom:
Or seek other opinions from the psychologists, the sociologists, and scholars and so on.
Dave:
Right, right. The Bible is very straight forward. God wants us to know him. And he reveals himself, but, in Hinduism? No, you can’t know. In Islam? Allah is unknowable by very definition. Not the Bible.
Tom:
Right. Dave, the third part of this is, you say it’s not an esoteric practice. I think about for…so many things that are, that have come down the pike, now we have “The Secret” there are esoteric ideas and practices. There are these concepts that you need magic and ritual and incantations and all that stuff to really bring the truth out. That’s not what the Bible is about.
Dave:
Well, if you went back to—I love the Bible, Tom, you can’t get away from it. All you have to do is read the Bible, and let it speak to you. But if you went back to Isaiah 48:16, the one who is speaking, he says, Go back as far as you can to the beginning, there am I! Now that’s got to be God. And he says, I have not spoken in secret! It’s for everybody, okay? God says that. Wait a minute, who is this God? He says, The Lord God, and his Spirit, hath sent me. You’ve got the trinity right there, Isaiah 48:16, you can’t deny it. Here’s One who is God, he’s been there since the beginning, but the Lord God and his Spirit sent me. Okay, and He says, I have not spoken in secret. Now, Jesus…well, maybe they didn’t even get it. When He’s brought before the high priest, after His betrayal and there He is, He’s in chains, bound and they are going to judge Him. They say to Him, Well, tell us about your doctrine, and your disciples. Remember what He says? I have not spoken in secret, why don’t you ask those who heard me, Okay? This—
Tom:
He wasn’t referring to the scholars, and the priesthood. He’s was talking to…there was a mob there!
Dave:
This is not a secret…secret organization. But Jesus was saying, he was claiming to be this One who speaks from the beginning. So, esoteric? No.
Tom:
Well, go back over these. It’s not a philosophy, mystical experience, or an esoteric practice because if that were the case, then Dave, you’d be dead in the water. You couldn’t substantiate the claims that you are going to lay out for our audience.
Dave:
Of course. Right, right.
Tom:
Because this is all subjective, it’s speculative, you just can’t nail it down. These are men’s opinions.
Dave:
Esoteric: that’s a secret organization. Ah, isn’t that…Tom, why don’t we start a secret organization! I mean, people really love to join secret organizations. Like the Masons, they go through rituals, you can have passwords.
Tom:
Well, like the Dalai Lama. He’s initiating people into Kalachakra, Tantric yoga! And he tells the initiates that if you reveal any of these secrets, you’re going to end in hell. That’s not…I don’t think he got the Nobel Peace Prize for that, did he?
Dave:
Well, I guess he did. They must have known—
Tom:
(Laughs) Yeah, I guess he did.
Dave:
—what he believed. But Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the same: you went into to TM, you were initiated with a secret word, a secret mantra, only for you, and so forth, which was a lie!
Tom:
Okay, so you say it’s not philosophical, it’s not really a mystical experience, not esoteric. But it’s intricately tied into established history. It can be evaluated on the basis of evidence, that’s what Christianity is about. You say the Bible stands upon a fourfold foundation, every part of which can be examined and verified. This is what we are trying to encourage our listeners, our viewers, to get into the Bible, because it makes…it has evidence, and it can be substantiated, its claims can be substantiated. So what are these fourfold foundation? Prophecy, prophecy fulfilled, historical corroboration, factual data corroborated by archeology and science. Now we’re going to get into those, Dave, but generally that’s what the Bible offers. Do any of the other sacred books offer that? So-called sacred.
Dave:
Not that I know of. Certainly not the Qur’an. Which is…well it’s the largest denomination, now, they have exceeded the Catholics. They’re not more than all Christians put together. I think—
Tom:
Or professing Christians.
Dave:
Uh yeah, professing Christians, right. I think there must be 1.3 billion now? And there’s 1.1 billion Catholics. But that doesn’t make it right, of course. But they have no history, they have no real manuscripts even. But there’s no scientific basis, there’s no historical…because, well, we can give you the history, you want the history of Islam. Three of the first four successors to Muhammad, they were murdered by fellow Muslims! That’s a great start! How would you like the disciples of Jesus killing one another? And they killed one another by the hundreds of thousands as well as killed other people by the millions! Okay? We’ve got plenty of history abut Islam, but it doesn’t…there’s no verification of any doctrines, of any truth. Muhammad just says, Well, this is what the angel Gabriel told me he got from Allah. We just have to take his word for it. You cannot verify this, but you can verify the Bible.
Tom:
Dave, we only have about 3 minutes left, but it’s time to go over the very thing that separates Biblical Christianity, Christ himself, from every other religion: and that is its central doctrine. Did Buddha die for our sins? Confucius, any of these leaders? Many of them, in some of the religions were mythical. But for the historical figures…
Dave:
Well, it’s God becoming a man through a virgin birth. Nobody…that’s not in Hinduism, you know, although they have many avatars. But what are these avatars? Well, half man, half elephant: Ganesh.
Tom:
Hanuman the monkey god.
Dave:
Right. Oh, my gracious, the monkey god. But this is an avatar, this is Vishnu coming to this earth, not by a virgin birth, but by some mystical, who knows what, hocus pocus and here he is—no. But we have God becoming a man, doesn’t cease to be God, never ceased to be man, the one and only God/man—the unique and only begotten Son of God. And He comes and lives a perfect sinless life. He fulfills all the prophecies; the very day He would ride into Jerusalem; that He would be crucified (500 years before crucifixion was known); He would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver that would be thrown down in the temple, and they would buy a Potter’s Field to bury strangers in. I mean we can go down the list of the prophecies. No prophecies for Muhammad! No prophecies for any of these avatars. No prophecies for Buddha or Krishna, or any of them! But there are for Jesus Christ, and he fulfilled every one! And this is how Paul would preach the gospel. He went into—Acts 17, he went into the synagogue, he opened their scriptures, he said: Look what your prophets said about the Messiah, okay? A, B, C, D, right down the list—this is what it said! You cannot deny, these were contemporaries, you cannot deny this was all fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Now try to do that with Buddha or Confucius or Muhammad or anyone else, it can’t be done: the Bible is unique!
Tom:
Dave, next week, the Lord willing, I want to continue with this, at least to make the point that Biblical Christianity, Jesus Christ, God who became a man—(although we don’t consider Biblical Christianity to be religion), all the religions of the world have gods that you have to appease, that you have to do certain things for. Only Biblical Christianity presents a God who has done it for us. Not human achievement here, but divine accomplishment: He did it all for us. There’s nothing like that.
Dave:
Amen. And the saying that Christianity is not about what we must do, it’s what Christ has done.
Gary:
This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith. And in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will continue their discussion of God’s salvation. In addition to this radio program we publish a monthly Newsletter, which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books in print, e-book and audio book formats, CD’s, DVD’s and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials or to get a copy of today’s broadcast write to us at PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708, call us at our toll free order number, 800-937-6638, that’s 800-937-6638, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org. If you would like a copy of this broadcast on compact disk, ask for Program #2208, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. And if you would like to watch Dave and Tom, our weekly broadcast is available on DVD, ask about a subscription when you contact us. You can also download both audio and video podcast at our website. We’ll repeat this information at the end of the program.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page.
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, thanks for joining us. Coming up in this week’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew, and “How Can Jesus baptize with fire?” In Religion in the News: “Doggy Yoga.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “How Can We Help the Next Generation?” We hope you can stay tuned. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Do You Have An Impeccably Rational Basis For Your Faith?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. Dave, in our discussion last week of your book, Seeking and Finding God, we talked about the fact that when it comes down to where people are going to spend eternity many people fall back on religious ideas they’ve grown up with and they’ve never really scrutinized them and they couldn’t say whether they’re valid or not. Yet, you say there’s nothing more important, I’m quoting, than having an impeccably factual and rational basis for one’s faith. Now, I’m sure there’s some listeners out there, some viewers that probably don’t even believe that’s possible. So, how is it that you can say something like that, and I know you’re moving in the direction of biblical Christianity, you believe that qualifies as a factual, rational religion.
Dave:
Yeah, because we can prove the Bible is true, but—well, this is what the New Atheists—let’s take Richard Dawkins, faith, that’s not rational, that’s not factual. If you had evidence for it why would you call it faith? And we’ve discussed this a number of times, Tom, but maybe it’s some time since we have. Well, anyone would be a fool to believe and to put your faith and your trust, your confidence in something you aren’t sure is true. Are you just going to take somebody’s word for it? This is what the New Atheists says. Well, faith is just believing—in fact they say faith is believing without evidence. No, we have to have evidence. So, the Bible—Paul for example, he reasoned with the Jews in the synagogue in Acts 17, when he came to Thessalonica. He went into the marketplace, he reasoned, he disputed, he debated all the time. He’s not saying, Listen; now look, this is it, you just take this as the truth and you just follow me, follow whatever I say. Well, I don’t want to get off on the Catholics, but that’s pretty much what the Catholics must do because the Pope is infallible when he speaks (excathedra) and the counsels are infallible.
Tom:
But Dave, we even find them among evangelicals, among Protestants, that all of a sudden their beliefs are more traditional, and you find that ideas that they put together and you would say, well, where does it say that in the Scripture? Well, it’s a traditional idea. So they don’t think through their religion, their belief systems, it’s just a matter of, well, I’ll plug into it when I need it. But even then, if a person would call himself an evangelical, he doesn’t to the Scripture to support what he believes, or she believes.
Dave:
Jesus had really nothing good to say about tradition. In Matthew 15, He says, “…you have made void the Word of God by your tradition.” And you know as a long time Catholic, 30 years, you know that Catholicism has a lot of traditions that contradict the Bible.
Tom:
Right, although Catholics say, well, we believe in sacred Scripture, along with sacred Scripture there’s the tradition of the church, and of course the teachings of the magisterium of the church.
Dave:
And that turns out to be more authoritative that the Bible.
Tom:
These are the commandments of men, as Jesus said.
Dave:
Right, yeah, so Tom, I don’t care what the field is— Atheism is a faith, they believe. What do they believe? Well, they think they have some evidence for it, but that’s disputable. We have faith in God, Jesus says, Have faith in God. Now, I have to have a solid basis for my faith. The Bible never teaches: well now here’s what you believe, and now just jump in and take a leap into the dark and believe this because this is what the Bible says. Tom, I have dear friends, they have an old saying, I guess, “God said it, I believe it and that settles it.” Well, that would be true if we really know what God said, but how do we know what God said? Well, Allah, you know, Muhammad would tell you what God said, they call Allah, God. We have all kinds of false gods out there, so what do we mean when we say, but God said? Well, which God? How do you know what He said? Well, it’s written down in a book. Really! How do you know that book really factually reports what God said? How do you know these people are really in touch with God? So, Tom, we can’t get into that, it’s a whole matter of evidence. It involves manuscripts, it involves how the Bible proves itself, there are no contradictions. As you mentioned recently, 40 different authors over a period of 1600 years, they wrote these Scriptures. It doesn’t contradict, it builds—I mean, you can trace a theme from Genesis to Revelation. How could that happen? Well, they say they were all inspired by the one true God. Pretty hard to refute that because we can prove that what the Bible says is true, the prophecies especially. So, this is the foundation upon which our faith rests, and we’re not ashamed of having a foundation for faith. If you don’t, why do you believe what you believe? See, a Buddhist could say, well yeah, Buddha said it, or a Muslim could say, Muhammad said it, or a Hindu, I mean, they’ve got thousands of scriptures. A Hindu could say, well, so and so way back 2000 or 3000 years ago, he was a great yogi, and this is what he said. So that’s why we—yeah, but you’ve got all kinds of different sects that follow different gurus. Yeah, but we believe what our gurus said. But how do you know what your gurus said is true? How do you know that your guru has any authority? Where did he get this authority? Well, he’s talking about god. Which god? The God who created the universe? Well, I can take you to the Book that He wrote through 40 prophets He inspired over 1600 years. See, so Tom, for every author of the Bible we have 39 other witnesses who agree, though they lived at different times, never knew one another, came from different cultures. But what do we have with the Qur’an? Well, we have one man, we have Muhammad. We’ve got a lot of problems with Muhammad, and not necessarily the man you would want to have as your closest friend, because even a neighbor could be killed. You don’t follow what I say, you don’t go by what the Qur’an says—well, it’s the death penalty. Well, by what authority? I’ve said too much about that, Tom, but it is a problem, but faith must have a solid foundation.
Tom:
Now Dave, it’s not as though we’re looking for gurus, but when the atheists, militant atheists, as we are seeing today as you’ve been mentioning, when they castigate Christians for being stupid, for following this book, or for following these ideas, and again, them characterizing faith is just you believe whatever comes along, and no basis, no factual basis, it’s not rational and so on.
Dave:
Tom, in fact, they say this is what Christians believe, the less evidence, or if there is no evidence, that’s the stronger your faith is.
Tom:
Right, now as I said, we’re not looking for gurus to back us up, but in your book, Seeking and Finding God, you talk about Simon Greenleaf. Now this is the man who was the co-founder of the Harvard Graduate School of Law, and recognized—one Supreme Court Justice, for example, said that he was the highest authority on legal evidence cited in our courts. Now Dave, he didn’t believe Christianity until he was challenged, but then he investigated it with all the brilliance that he could bring to searching out the Scriptures. How did it turn out for him?
Dave:
Brilliance and legal know how. Well, Greenleaf was challenged by his students—Dr. Greenleaf, you are the greatest authority on legal evidence in America today. And there was no one who walked this earth who made such fantastic claims for himself as Jesus of Nazareth— Why don’t you apply your expertise to the claims of Jesus? Greenleaf said: Great idea never thought of it. So, he set out to do that, he spent several months investigating, and he reported back to his class something like this: He said, I have carefully examined the claims of Jesus of Nazareth just as I would examine evidence introduced into court, testimony introduced into court, and I can tell you on the basis of the evidence there is no doubt about it, Jesus was who he claimed to be. He is God, who came to this earth as a man. He never ceased to be God. He never ceased to be man. He is the one and only God/man. He died for my sins, paid the penalty on the cross for my sins.
Tom:
So he understood justification—the legal aspects of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross probably better than anybody of that era.
Dave:
Right. The epistle of Romans has been called, “The Courtroom Drama” and is studied in law schools, believe it or not, because of the brilliance of Paul in presenting his case. He brings the whole world before the throne of God and he finds the whole world guilty. And then he says there’s only one way that you can solve this problem; somehow the sinner has to be forgiven. Well, how is that going to come about righteously? Well here is how it happens.
Tom:
Yeah, Dave again, the reason I bring this up is, as you know and you’re documenting in the book you’re working on now—Dawkins and others who call themselves “The Brights”—they say they are smarter than everybody else, and there is no doubt that they are smart guys. But do you wonder whether that has sort of run over into stupidity here? Because they say no one but an idiot would follow a religion or get involved in a religion, and so on. Now, let me—
Dave:
Well, Tom, we can name many scientists who were brighter than these guys, how about Sir Isaac Newton?
Tom:
Well, Dave, in your book, again, Seeking and Finding God, we down the list and do you want to make a comment on these individuals? Johannes Kepler, certainly the founder of astronomy, Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, John Ray, the father of English natural history. You mentioned Sir Isaac Newton, Carolas Lenais, the father of biological taxonomy, Michael Faraday. I’ll just give you the names, Charles Babbage, John Dalton, the father of Atomic Theory who revolutionized chemistry. Dave, I could go on and on, Lord Calvin, Gregory Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Wernher von Braun, I mean, one and on and on. So, my point here is, we don’t need these guys to prove the Bible or support the Bible, but they are not stupid, and they came to Christ through the readings of the scripture.
Dave:
And Tom, these are some of the brightest of the brights that ever lived. Newton is called the most brilliant guy, his book on mathematics is still studied today, and yet he wrote more about the Bible than he wrote about mathematics. So, these Johnny-come-lately, New Atheists, they are going to overturn everything? But Tom, they have managed to take control of science.
Tom:
And the media, they are the darlings of the media, which is a sad comment, because what they are saying is wrong. Again, it’s not rational, neither is it factual, and that’s what really upsets me about them.
Dave:
Well, Tom, I don’t think we’ve ever given—I don’t have the website in front of me so I can’t give it, but they can Google evolution and those who are opposed to it, you’ve got hundreds, I think at the latest count, 800 scientists, not nobodies who are opposed to evolution for scientific reasons and they are signing up increasingly on the internet. So, for these guys to say, oh yeah, anybody that believes in God, or anybody that denies evolution they’ve got to be stupid. It’s simply overstating what they are trying to prove.
Tom:
Dave, last week we talked a bit about tolerance and intolerance, and I used to think those words, you know, they had some value, they were reasonable, and so on, but I’m not so sure anymore. Today if I have a conviction about something that somebody else disagrees with, especially regarding a religious belief, I’m accused of being intolerant, or worse than that I could actually be accused of committing a hate crime.
Dave:
But how come they are not accused of being intolerant for disagreeing with you?
Tom:
You wonder, wouldn’t you?
Dave:
That’s a good question. Well, Tom, you see, the issue is no longer truth, truth doesn’t matter, we just want to get along with one another, and we don’t want anyone to be offended, and we want everyone to feel free. So, to do their own thing, and not be contradicted, but wait a minute. We just had a demonstration probably a year or two ago by hundreds of Muslims in Washington D. C. demanding their rights. Now, how about let’s get even a dozen Christians in Pakistan or Afghanistan, much less Saudi Arabia, holding a demonstration demanding their rights! You’ve got no rights in Saudi Arabia, and I won’t go into that, but this thing gets pretty well mixed up.
Tom:
Yeah, but Dave, let’s just go across the border, up north here to Canada. We know, we have some friends in ministry up there that were forced to leave Canada because their ministry was a ministry of discernment, religious discernment, and they had some issued in terms of comparing biblical Christianity with Mormonism, with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the government comes along and says, no, you can’t do that, that’s intolerance. So you can’t even make a distinction between one group and another group. You know, it’s not like they were standing in front of, you know, the Mormon temple, and trying to burn it down or rushing into it and creating all kinds of destruction and havoc. They were just saying, look, what they believe is different from what we believe, here are the differences, you decide. You can’t do that anymore!
Dave:
Tom, I’m really frightened, I’m worried about the day when one scientist can say to the other scientist, Wait a minute, you’re contradicting me, that’s a hate crime, you are not honoring my opinion. We’ve got real problems.
Tom:
Well, Dave, how about a math teacher telling a student look,— I mean, let’s take it down to the second grade— 2+2=4, and the child puts down 5. You see, this is theatre of the absurd, but it’s being mandated by governments, not just Saudi Arabia, not just Pakistan and so on, but Canada, and it’s coming along in this country.
Dave:
Well, Tom, I don’t know of anything worse, because if I cannot express my faith in God, and if I cannot express why I have that faith, if I cannot quote the Bible, if I cannot quote the words of Jesus, “I am THE way, THE truth, THE life, no man cometh unto to Father but by me”—wait a minute! Jesus, didn’t you know that Muhammad would be coming along and you’re contradicting him, because he says that the Qur’an is the only truth out there!
Tom:
For the gurus are telling us there are many ways.
Dave:
Right. Well, you call it the theatre of the absurd, and it is in fact.
Tom:
Dave, when you quoted Jesus saying, “I am THE way, THE truth. THE life, no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” he also said, and I’d like you to talk about this for a minute. He also said, in Matthew chapter 7, verses 13 and 14, “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in there at. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
Dave:
Well, Tom, we’ve got some real problems here. Destruction, something leads to destruction? In one of the verses that you quote often there is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. But how can you say that, you’re being dogmatic now. Something is either right or wrong. You remember, how long ago since I quoted Allan Bloom?
Tom:
Probably a couple of weeks ago, and we could quote him every week, Dave, because of the wisdom that he is challenging us with.
Dave:
He wrote the book, The Closing of the American Mind, a brilliant title, and he said why would I say the American mind has been closed? Well, how did it get closed? Well, he says, In America the one virtue is openness to everything! You couldn’t say something is wrong, that would offend people. Well, says Dr Bloom, philosophy professor at the University of Chicago it just could be that their minds are closed! Well, they are open to everything except one thing, they are closed to the possibility maybe something is right and something else is wrong. Well, we had better examine that one, but you can’t because to say that anybody is wrong, that’s offensive.
Tom:
So, Dave, is this what Jesus meant when he said that because strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it? Is it because it’s so secretive or so obscure that you couldn’t find it, what is He getting at?
Dave:
No, because—well, for example, in the Old Testament, God through his prophet Jeremiah said, You will search for me and find me when you seek for me with all your heart. So, the people that don’t find it, they don’t want to find it, they want to take their own way.
Tom:
The broad way that leads to destruction.
Dave:
Right, because it’s more popular. Look, how many people are on this—this is the broad road that leads to destruction and the way to heaven is very narrow. I mean, you've got some very careful tolerances if you’re going to get your capsule to the moon, you’ve got some very narrow tolerances, and if you are going to get to heaven, you have some very tolerances, in fact, only through Jesus Christ.
Tom:
And Dave, all we need to do is be willing. That’s the issue here, not that I’m not bright enough, I’m not this or whatever, you need to be willing, that’s where the heart comes in, that’s the attitude, and God will direct you.
Dave:
Willing to know the true God and let him correct you of your false ideas.
This is a link to our weekly radio program Search the Scriptures Daily. You may listen to the program by clicking on the "mp3" link above. For more listening options, please see our Radio Page . The transcript for this program is as follows:
Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call, featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could be here. Coming up in this week’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Gospel of Matthew. And “What Happens to Unfruitful Trees?” In Religion in the News, “Ophra’s New Earth.” We’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question: “Why Are So Many Attracted To The Emerging Church?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly Newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program. Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their series of programs based on Dave’s book, Seeking and Finding God. This week we focus on the question, “Are You Prepared for Eternity?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.
Tom:
Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this first segment of our program, we’re discussing Dave Hunt’s book, Seeking and Finding God. A book that he wrote primarily as a follow-up to send to people that he met on airplanes or in other places where serious discussions, conversations really, about God, developed with those who seemed to be truly seeking after God. Now Dave, you write in Chapter 4, and I’ll quote: “It is astonishing how many millions of otherwise seemingly intelligent people are willing to risk their eternal destiny upon less evidence than they would require for buying a used car.” Is that the case?
Dave:
Well, most people, sometimes there are careless people, of course the used car salesman can talk him into things, tell you some lies and so forth, misrepresentations. I have a friend who just bought a business and somehow didn’t look carefully enough, and it was all misrepresented, and now he’s consulting a lawyer, trying to get out of it. But if you head into eternity, and you’ve been believing lies, I don’t know, there’s no lawyer out there that you can consult, in fact, it’s your fault. So, Tom, I meet people all the time like this. One of the arguments I would use with them is, Well, you’re a business man, you’re intelligent, you went to school, you planned your career, you took your major, you know and you took your training, and now you’re looking to advance in your career, and one day you’re heading for retirement, you hope. What have you done about when retirement ends in death? That’s an embarrassing question. Well, a silence, Well um, I haven’t looked that far ahead. Well, you might consider it because I can tell you better than most people I sit next to because I am so much older. It just goes—I don’t know where. Tom, you’ve got what? eighteen years to catch up on me, something like that, but I’m sure you would say, Where did it go?
Tom:
Sure.
Dave:
I can’t even remember, and it’s gone, it’s like a vapor, James says. Okay, so it’s amazing, going to spend eternity, it’s much longer than this life, and we can prove it. Why don’t people prepare for eternity? Good question.
Tom:
Yeah. Dave, you have Thomas Hobbes here, mathematician, philosopher of the seventeenth-century and you note that he spent his whole life looking at the social system, looking how man lives, and noticing the evil within man and trying to resolve some of those issues, but you have a quote here by him. He says: “Now I am about to take”—this is as death was approaching, he said, “Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”
Dave:
That’s a terrible way to go into eternity, Tom. Why would you—you wouldn’t take a leap in the dark on this earth.
Tom:
Mmhmm.
Dave:
I mean you would be very careful, say let’s get some lights on here, I’m not going to jump. I once was lost—well, I got lost because I was in a forest, heavy forest were a big storm had gone through there fifty years ago, uprooted the trees, these are huge pines and Douglas fir, and left holes where the roots had come out. And I made my way to the top, and I fell in a hole, and I must have hit my head because after I laboriously made my way to what I thought was the other side, the stream was running in the wrong direction. I had gone down the same way, okay. Well, I came to—and I had no flashlight—I came to the end of some logs and, I don’t know what’s down there, and I’m not going to take a leap. But here’s Thomas Hobbes, he’s leaping into eternity!
Tom:
And Dave, for some of our listeners, viewers, for the past, well the past number of weeks we went over the options. Some people say, Well, there’s nothing at the end, so who cares, it’s just when you’re dead you’re dead. Now we’ve dealt with those issues. But then I think we’ve established, Yes, there is an eternity in front of every living being. So, Dave what about people that say, Well, I’ve got my religion to fall back on. There are lots of religions, lots of ideas, everything from Valhalla, to the happy hunting ground, to nirvana, moksha, all these things.
Dave:
Well, how do you know that your religion is right, that’s the question. They contradict one another. Most religions do unless they are pretty close to Christianity, and then they are talking abut Catholicism for example. Now you were Catholic, you know that a Catholic doesn’t even know where he’s going, probably going to be purgatory.
Tom:
Well, that’s the hope. If indeed purgatory is a reality, which the scriptures don’t support.
Dave:
Right. But how can you be sure as a Catholic that you are not going to commit a mortal sin just before you die?
Tom:
You can’t, the pope couldn’t.
Dave:
Yeah.
Tom:
You know, we’ve talked about it, we have quotes from archbishops and so on. That’s the sin of presumption, at least it used to be.
Dave:
Well, I quoted in—I don’t know whether it’s in this book, probably not, in another one—I quoted Cardinal O’Connor from New York, now this was from the Wall Street Journal. And they quoted him as saying: I don’t know where I’m going when I die. The pope, that was John Paul II then, the pope doesn’t know, neither does mother Theresa know. Well, I would say if the pope doesn’t know where he is going, I mean, what about his followers? The pope was just here, the new pope, he did leave a blessing for peace and so forth—it’s not going to bring peace. Now if they don’t even know where they’re going when they die, how can you be sure?
Tom:
Well they know where they want to go, but there is no assurance. That’s the belief of Roman Catholicism.
Dave:
Right. The problem is they are trusting the church to get them there. And Jesus Christ said, I am the way, the truth, the life, no man comes to the Father but by me. Tom, I was sitting next to a couple of Catholics, husband and wife, on the plane. They got a little upset because they thought I was a priest studying the Bible and so forth. And I preached—
Tom:
Which, Dave, that doesn’t happen too often. Not that there aren’t exceptions, but they would be exceptions.
Dave:
Right. Well, maybe they didn’t look closely, they thought it was a prayer book. But they wanted to know, Are you a priest? Oh, you’re a pastor? No? What are you doing? Well, I’m doing some research and uh, I said, I can tell you are Catholics, and in fact, I have right here in my file a letter from a Catholic lady. Well, she had been married for 30 years, they had 5 children. Her husband divorced her and he got an annulment. And I said, You know, your church gives sixty some thousand annulments a year, now if they can’t even tell the difference between a divorce and an annulment, and they make exceptions for certain people, how can you be sure that they are right when they tell you how to get to heaven? And you could also say—and they were angry. Okay, we don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s like a person says, Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up. It’s a very uncomfortable subject, and death is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. Well then maybe we had better face it.
Tom:
Mmhmm. Well, Dave, we talked about Hobbes and a leap of faith into the dark, a leap into the dark, a leap of faith.
Dave:
Right, not a leap of faith though, because he had no faith, Tom, he didn’t know where he was going.
Tom:
Yeah, right. But for many who profess to be religious that is a—you know they say, Well my faith is going to get me there, but as you point out in the book, many people don’t really know what they believe. They have some ideas, but they’re sort of hanging on while avoiding really thinking about the last—their last breath, or where they will spend eternity.
Dave:
Well, but Tom, you know the contradictions for Catholics, for example. Because most Catholics, except for the ones you’ll find there Sunday morning, or whenever, and even many of them—they are not that conscientious. And when you or I tell them, Do you believe in indulgences? Do you believe that that’s the way to reduce time in purgatory, and so forth. Naa, I don’t believe that—I don’t go to confession, and so forth. Well, I say, You know, it’s pretty clear, the teaching. If you don’t follow the instructions, you don’t follow the rules, you are heading not for purgatory but for hell! Well, I’m not worried about that, I don’t believe that. Well, I say, Okay, if you will not have a little concern when your church tells you, you are going to hell, you apparently don’t think they know what they are talking about in that, why should you believe them when they tell you how to get to heaven? Good question—they don’t have an answer.
Tom:
Well, Dave, let’s push this beyond Catholicism. You say, unquestionably, there is nothing more important than having an impeccably factual and rational basis for one's faith. Now I’m sure, not just Catholics, as you’ve articulated, but you could take this to Evangelicals. Most people don’t believe that’s possible! Which is sad, because it is.
Dave:
Well, I’ve had many people say to me, Wait a minute, in fact I’m thinking now of a debate between Richard Dawkins, and John Lennox. Richard Dawkins, most people would know, he’s probably the leader of the new atheists. Oxford professor, John Lennox Oxford professor, and a Christian; Dawkins is just insisting that, well, Faith! I guess Lennox had said, Well, we want evidence before we believe something. And Dawkins says, Well then, what’s faith? If you have to have evidence for faith, then it’s not faith. And uh, Lennox said, Does your wife love you? Oh, of course. Do you have any evidence for that? Well, absolutely. Oops! Silence. And Dawkins says, Never mind about my wife, let’s get on with this. So, no, you would be a fool if you believed something that you have no evidence for. And, a lot of people think, Yeah, but that’s where faith comes in, so we don’t have to have any evidence, faith. Well, you’re trusting someone, you’re trusting your church, do you have any evidence to believe that your church knows what it’s talking about? No. Well, we need some evidence, and the Bible gives us all kinds of evidence. I guess that’s what we’re talking about in Chapter four here.
Tom:
Well certainly uh, there’s an idea that is so incredibly popular today that; Well you have your faith, I have my faith, you know, yeah, we’re not going to really get into a heated debate over it, your belief is going to carry you this way, my belief carries me this way, but we’re all going to be ending up in the same place, and so on, so what’s really to argue about?
Dave:
Yeah, the idea that if it’s a faith,
Tom:
Yeah.
Dave:
—then you can’t put that down, everybody has their faith. Well, they’re entitled to it. Bush talks about people of faith. Well, what do you mean by faith, what faith? I guess anyone is okay so long as you say, this is my faith. Tom, that makes no sense! A Buddhist—I guess he’s got faith. A Muslim, he could say, Well, I believe the Qur’an, I just have faith in the Qur’an. Well, yeah, but we can show you a lot of problems in the Qur’an, a lot of contradictions and things that aren’t true. And there are people like this who are Christians who when you say, Oh you got some contradictions in the Bible here, you’ve got some unscientific statements, let’s go over it. Well no, I don’t want to talk about it. A lot of Christians are afraid to even question, well is this true? If it’s not true, I tell people, Look, if the Bible is not one hundred percent true, and I mean one hundred percent true, if I’ve got to pick and choose; Well, I don’t think that that’s true, then you are not trusting the Bible. You know, if you go to a doctor, and I know it’s common to get a second opinion, or a third opinion, and the doctor probably won’t quibble about that, but they’re about to give you the anesthesia and to go under for an operation, and you say, Now wait a minute, Doc, I want to be sure that you really know what you are doing. Tell me about your education and where you went to medical school, and your practice, because one of the problems with doctors and lawyers is, they are still practicing you know. That makes no sense. You have put yourself in someone’s hands. You are going to have to trust them, because no one is able to know everything, and has done everything. I can’t be sure. My auto mechanic works on the engine, I can’t look over his shoulder, or the pilot flying the plane. Of course you can’t get in the cockpit anymore, but there was a day, a time when you could. Well, I can’t—Hey guys, I want to sit up here in the cockpit with you because I’d really like to be sure that you are doing the right thing. Well, I don’t know anything about flying an airplane, so how can I be sure? Well, you going to check up on your church? No, people don’t check up on their church because they call that faith; Now that’s my faith. No matter what it is that I believe, that’s my faith. And Dawkins, he jumps on this; Well, you see, faith is sacred, you don’t check that out. But that’s not biblical faith.
Tom:
Well Dave, well first of all, Dawkins is a man of faith, atheism is a belief system.
Dave:
Of course. Right.
Tom:
They can’t prove that there is no God, but he’s working at it, okay.
Dave:
Well he admits that there’s no evidence that God does not exist, I mean he can’t prove it. He thinks that there is evidence against God, but he cannot prove it.
Tom:
Right. Well Dave, going back to religions, in this age of tolerance, with all the religions out there wouldn’t it be clear to people when religions are contradictory to one another, that they all can’t be right?
Dave:
You would think so, Tom, but that seems to just pass right by people, or else they think, Yeah, but my religion is right.
Tom:
But based on—again we go back to this leap of faith. Somebody says, Well, I firmly believe, you know, I was born a Catholic, I’ll die a Catholic, I’m a Buddhist, I’m a Hindu, and so on, my religion is the correct religion, the right religion and so on. Now what we’re asking here—you know, the program is called, Search the Scriptures Daily—check things out. Don’t just buy into it because somebody says so, whether it’s Dave, myself, and whoever it might be. Let’s check it out, and there doesn’t seem to be—well, people are discouraged to do that because that seems to be intolerant.
Dave:
Tom, a little common sense would say, you want the police to be tolerant of crime? You want doctors to be tolerant of disease? There are some things that are right and wrong, some things that are deadly. But just because it’s your faith or your religion, you’d better check it out yourself. How do you know your church is right? Well, my parents and then my grandparents—yeah, but who are you trusting? Who is the one that is guiding you? How can you be sure? Now, before you are on your death bed and you’ve got 30 seconds to live you don’t have time to check anything out, you had better start, that’s all I’m appealing for in this book, Seeking and Finding God. Now Tom, we’ve said it often, why do we search the scriptures? Why do we go to the Bible? We can prove the Bible is true. For example; prophecies, hundreds of prophecies about Israel! Hundreds of prophecies about the Messiah; where He would be born, when He would ride—the very day He would ride into Jerusalem on that donkey; that He would be crucified five hundred years before crucifixion was even practiced; details of His life and ministry, and so forth. You cannot escape it, there’s nothing like that for Buddha or Zoroaster, or anybody else! And furthermore, there are no prophecies for Mary! I don’t want to just keep pounding on the Catholics, but where are the prophecies that give you; when Mary would be born, and how she would be born, and about here ministry, and that we should trust her because she knows—it doesn’t exist! And how about Muhammad, no prophecies for Muhammad, nothing that would give you trust or confidence in the Qur’an, which has many contradictions in it. So, we go with the Bible because we can prove it.
Tom:
Yeah, and you know, and somebody might be thinking, Well, prophecies, you know, what does that mean? Well, what it means is that God, the Creator of the universe, has declared certain things spoken forth that these things would take place, and the probability of these things, prophecies, as you mentioned, Dave—what, close to a third of the Bible is prophetic?
Dave:
Right.
Tom:
What’s the probability of men, 40 men, over how many…?
Dave:
Sixteen hundred years.
Tom:
Sixteen hundred years—that they could come up with these prophecies, and that they would be fulfilled. The probability is zero! This has to be a miraculous book.
Dave:
Right, the odds against it are astronomical, couldn’t happen. So Tom, even one prophecy, for example; that Israel would be divided by the nations,
Joel 3, Verse 2. It’s been conquered, but conquers don’t divide it up, that only happened in our day; that all the nations, (Zechariah 12:2), that all the nations around Israel would be united against her, determined to destroy her! Well they were always enemies of one another, they fought one another. How did they all get joined together? It happened that Israel would be the number one burden on the whole world?! It’s the number one problem for the United Nations. They’ve spent a third of their time debating and talking about Israel, a tiny nation with one one thousandth of the earth’s population!? And No, this couldn’t be by chance, and this is the evidence that we have in the Bible. Nothing like that in the Qur’an, the Hindu Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, you name them, sayings of Buddha, Confucius.
Tom:
But sadly Dave, what we are seeing in the Evangelical church is, we’re really being weaned off the Word of God. We’re seeing a popular church that is becoming shallow, superficial, especially in their trust in the Word of God.
Dave:
Tom, I never thought I’d live to see the day. Because when I grew up people believed the Bible, we knew the Bible. I can see myself as a little Sunday school child—
Tom:
And nothing has changed about the Bible, Dave.
Dave:
No, right. And we studied from the Bible, we were taught from the Bible in our Sunday school. And now you’ve got Sunday school material, you’ve got DVD’s and so forth that have watered it down. You don’t even have the Bible anymore, we’ve got The Message, and Tom, we’ve gone over this before. There is no foundation for the faith! And we need to get people to understand, they must know why they believe what they believe.
Gary:
This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith. And in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will continue their discussion of God’s salvation. In addition to this radio program we publish a monthly Newsletter, which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books in print, e-book and audio book formats, CD’s, DVD’s and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials, or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, write to us at PO Box 7019, Bend, Oregon 97708, call our toll free order number 877-882-4253, that’s 877-88Bible, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org. If you would like a copy of this broadcast on compact disk, ask for Program #2008, and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. And if you would like to watch Dave and Tom, our weekly broadcast is available on DVD, ask about a subscription when you contact us. You can also download both audio and video podcast at our website. We’ll repeat this information at the end of the program.
