Polemics, Mysticism

Alright, we're going to be talking about something that's philosophical and is the foundation for a lot of some of what I would consider the weirdness of Christendom today that is still considered somewhat evangelical in its categorization, but it's some of the philosophical foundation for that.

We're going to be talking about Christian existentialism and mysticism. How many of you are familiar with those terms at all? Who can give me a definition for existentialism? Fewer hands there. If I were to talk about existentialism, I would say existentialism is the idea that experience is the validator of truth. Whatever is true is what you can experience and you can prove. Now the Mormons, when you talk to them, you could argue all day long and disprove the Book of Mormon and prove that it was a made-up story and all kinds of other things, but their experience with the burning of the bosom validates their faith. The experience validates what they believe in. So that is one of the tenets of existentialism. The Christian existentialist idea was started by a guy named Soren Kierkegaard. I see my dad didn't search for that elemental sign for boron or whatever it is that they use for Soren.

It's got the line through it normally. I'm joking, I'm sorry. Kierkegaard was from 1813 through 1855. That's kind of interesting. His lifespan, for most people, you don't sit around and worry about their lifespan and say, well, that's unique. Except for, in Soren Kierkegaard's case, Well his father actually believed that all of his children would die by the age of 33 because his father had sinned and his father thought that as punishment for his sin that God was going to kill all of his children before they were 33. which is a little bit different. I hope that none of you as parents have ever thought that. That would be tough. But the truth of the matter is that this is the kind of home that Soren Kierkegaard grew up in.

It's a dad who just believed some things that were different and I think it surely influenced his theology because that's how he grew up. Let's take a look at two of the tenets of existentialism within a Christian perspective. First is that God is transcendent and holy other than man.

God is above and apart and separate like Allah. That would be different. But God is transcendent and different and separate from the world. And we can't relate with him because he is totally different from us in every way. So instead of being created in God's image like Genesis 1, 26 and 27 talk about, while that may be the case that died with sin or something, they'll have some excuse for why that's the case. So God is totally different and it's hard for us to relate to him.

But it keeps going, so we don't have to stop there. God's revelation of himself beyond any rationalistic human approach to knowing and understanding him requires a leap of faith. You just have to jump out and have faith that God exists and that you're going to have a relationship. Now that leap of faith is going to lead to something, and because this is existentialism, what do you think that is going to lead to? an experience. Tom did you have... Sometimes a negative experience. Sometimes a negative experience where God chastises you.

So Kierkegaard said that leap of faith was the sole means of making true contact with God and it would be verified by humans or on the human side by experience beyond those typical and mundane experiences that all humans have within the physical realm. So if you're walking in faith and you're being true in your belief, then you're going to have this experience, whatever it is. It could be unique for everybody. Now how many of you can think of more recent theological development in that realm where experience is critical to prove your salvation?

Well I would say maybe also like more of a Pentecostal or Assemblies of God where if you speak in tongues that validates your salvation. So you can see where there will be, this is much earlier than most, this is like 40 years earlier than more of the earlier parts of the Pentecostal movement. And that's from my memory so don't quote that date exactly please. It's earlier than that, but it's definitely a philosophical foundation for it, because you have this idea being propagated.

Now that's existentialism. Mysticism, on the other hand, has been around a lot longer within Christianity. It's very subjective, and that's very much similar to the existentialism. But mysticism brings in a lot of unbiblical things. Well, not that existentialism doesn't, but it seeks relationship with God outside of the truths of Scripture.

So the Scripture may be a nice thing to have, but it's more like a springboard. That's the way we've talked about it as I grew up. The Bible is a springboard. You just start here and then you go out to what God hasn't revealed and you explore with spirituality. The liberalism that we talked about last week, where the scriptures are not your ultimate authority necessarily. I just want to clarify that you were not taught at home that you should take the scriptures as a springboard. Oh yeah, they didn't teach me to do that. When we talked about mysticism, that was the reference. Wow, sorry, just in case that sounded like, well my mom and daddy told me we should go to the Bible. When their mom is in the Sunday school class it's hard to get away with some of these slips.

Mysticism often you'd see this kind of ideas in the monasteries because with the monastery they would adhere to one idea or ideal and they would obsess on it basically. It's like, okay, we're taking this oath of whatever it is, and they just focus on that oath, no matter whether it was biblical or not. They'd find somebody that they thought was a spiritual guru, and they'd all follow him. And that was it. So in the monasteries, there was a lot of that going on as well. people take vows of silence and stuff like that, which is weird. It's like, okay, we're supposed to be teaching the gospel of Christ.

What are you going to mime that? You know, pantomime it, you're doing this thing. It just doesn't work. I'm glad I didn't mime that too long. It's hard for the people listening to the recording. So with that, you've got two different ideas. You've got one that's based on experience validates truth, and one that says that we're just going to go out and experiment spiritually about truth, but it's not absolute. That's a theme in this class over in Oregon.

We talk about how truth is really secondary or non-existent in various scenarios. Yes? But you could say, well we don't know that it's not true, because God's infinite. everything about him isn't in the Bible. Sure, I mean there are things that God has not revealed in the Bible that we don't know that may be true, but the things that they're pursuing in these groups are outside of the spectrum of Scripture.

One common example, and this is not from the existential Well, we're going to go through some of these ideas. So when we get to the end of the class, if it doesn't seem clear specifically what some of those areas are, we can discuss it further. How about that? Because I don't want to jump through what we're already going to go through ahead of time.

The next section here, not so long ago in a hemisphere not so far away, the historical influences of Greek and Egyptian mysticism influenced by mystical philosophy and religion carried from Asia along with silk trade or the silk road trade had their influence in Christianity from its inception in the New Testament era. So the trade and the culture influenced those who were early believers. Is this a surprise? Does this happen today? A lot. We are surrounded all the time by think people telling us to buy this or do that or believe this or don't believe that.

Yesterday I was watching the news and I was waiting in the airport and Hezbollah, you're all familiar with the Israel Hezbollah thing, we should have been praying for them. The Hezbollah people or the group there has actually got a PR spin they're doing and they're inviting the Western journalists to come in And they're doing things, you know, taking them to specific locations and saying, this was where people lived and the Israelis bombed them. And they're not saying, and this happens to also be where our headquarters was or one of our stations was. Or an ambulance will fly by with the sirens blaring and there's nobody in it but the driver. But it's there to make it seem like, oh, those Israelis have bombed us and they're destroying us.

And it's PR, it's spin. It's influence. They want to influence the way the world looks at what's going on there. And the world wants to influence the way we look at our Christianity, just the same way. The influence there... Where do we go to check if the influence is a positive thing or a negative thing? We go to the Bible. We check it out. We double check. We go back and we look and we look and we look. So we had the training there.

How many of you are familiar with Gnosticism? If I say Gnosticism, that's one of the words on here. Frankly, it's one of those words that we just don't use a lot in conversation. Tom? It's kind of something that other groups drew on later. We got some stuff. Yeah, it could be a secret society. If you want to be in our club. If you're not in our club, we can't tell you.

The Gnostics, basically, if I were to really be terse about my description of them, matter is evil and the spirit is good. Just like the existentialist idea from Kierkegaard, God is transcendent and separate and spiritual and matter is completely separate and different. Because we're matter, We're separate, and we have this hard time relating with God. So Gnosticism definitely would influence Mysticism and Existentialism, because there's this idea of separation. And because there's separation, it's hard to know what you really know.

You gotta rely on something, and what would be that something again? So you see, experience is the critical linchpin, if you will, of everything that's going on. It's got to be experience. How do you validate the experience if the Bible isn't really all that accurate, or really not that much of a source of truth? You can't. It's very subjective, and that's of course where things go downhill.

Let's take a look at some scripture here. My dad's got it in line as we go through some of these ideas. One last point here before we jump into that scripture. The mysticism with the monasteries also led to asceticism. That's the idea of extreme self-denial. That's where you're not going to eat this, you're not going to wear that, you're not going to say this, or various other things.

Monasteries where Over in Asia, that are for other religions, there's one guy I saw who has for like 30 years raised his left hand. That's his spiritual glorification. He literally just raised his left hand like this and he has completely atrophied the muscles in his arm. He cannot move his arm anymore because all the muscles are locked up. So it's really not work after your muscles are all tightened up. You're going to have to go through rehab, I'm sure, for a little bit with your thumb. Here's this guy, he's just held his left hand up and my arm's getting sore after just a little bit. Maybe I should spend more time doing this so I can build up a tolerance.

So asceticism is extreme self-denial and that's often part of it. Because you want to make sure that you are conditioned emotionally and psychologically for the experience. You want to make sure that you haven't done anything on your part so that when your leap of faith goes on, God doesn't come at you from the other side. Or you want to make sure God comes at you from the other side. Because if he doesn't, that's a long fall or something. So you've got to make sure that you have a lot of self-denial to make sure that all the bad stuff's worked out.

Because we know salvation is by works, right? Sorry, for those of you listening on the recording, we don't actually believe that. Okay, Colossians 2, 6-8 and 20-23. How about somebody else read that? That's crazy, I never do that, but somebody else read, and it's just there on your handout, it's the last paragraph there on the first page and end of the second page.

Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of man, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees such as do not handle, do not taste, do not touch, which all refer to things destined to perish with use, in accordance with the commandments and teachings of men? These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

All right, so are there absolute statements there about what is true? Statements about reliability? Statements about law, maybe? That's the thing, is that if you have to do something or not do something to make sure that you're set up just right for your experience, is that law? Is that works? That works. It becomes a real big problem.

We actually see in Catholicism today certain dietary restrictions. What other religious groups, and we've been over a couple in this class, have dietary restrictions based purely on rules that they have set up that are not necessarily biblical? The Mormons do, Seventh-day Adventists. So there's lots of different groups that deal with dietary things. Do not touch certain things, do not taste certain things. Don't go to this location. You don't want to go there. That's a bad place to go to. We come up with all kinds of laws. It's easy to have laws. What's the truth?

1 Timothy 4, 1-5, and I'll go ahead and read this one. But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith. paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron, men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in those in by those who believe and know the truth for everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer okay now how many of those things match up with what you consider to be modern Catholicism abstaining from marriage if you're going to be in the priesthood no marriage that is certainly unacceptable or if you're going to be a nun Now there are liberal groups, if you will, within Catholicism where they do allow marriage. They also, if you're a minister in another religion and you come over and convert to Catholicism, you can be married. You can stay married if you happen to have already done it because they don't want to cause the divorce. Because of course they don't approve of that either. So that's good. But then also there's foods.

One of our favorite things is to go, we love to go to the zoo. here in Denver. There's an indoor enclosed section that has a pippi barra or something like that. It looks like a humongous hamster. That's the best way to describe it. It's bigger than this table or about the size of this table here. For those of you listening to the recording it's about two feet by four feet. It's giant and it happens to be a South American animal and it happens to be very common in the diet of those that live in the area where the animal was found.

And it just so happens that the Pope declared it was a fish so that they could eat it on Friday. It's very mammal. It's a what? A capybara? Yeah, that may be it. But it's, you know, It's a fish. It's a very mammal-like fish. It doesn't happen to swim. Isn't it technically classified as a rodent? It's a rodent, but it's a mammal. It's not much of a fish, but if you bend the rules for your dietary patterns, go for it.

A question about the meaning of the scripture here. Falling away from the faith. Those that fall away from the faith, do they ever have the faith? Um... Yeah, I mean, you don't fall away from it if you don't have it. I think you just thought you had it. Because there's some place...

Well, what's the faith? What are you having faith in? Are you having faith in 1 Corinthians 15, 3 and 4, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ? But there are people who hop from thing to thing to thing. It doesn't mean they're sold out internally and mentally to whatever it is. Yeah, but then are they having faith? The question is, where are they having faith in?

If they have faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, they're saved. If they didn't, then they're not, but then they weren't believers in the first place. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. So that would infer that through the word of God, we come to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ by faith. And I just wonder if those that fall away from faith actually ever had the faith. I believe that once you're saved, you're always saved.

I think that's the question. But the thing is that if If in my own life I have watched people become believers and have periods of time where they walk away from Christianity, if they died while they were walking in the flesh for an extended period of time, would they go to heaven or not? Yes. Okay. If they come back to the faith later on because the Lord spares them from death in that time of the flesh, Are they saved? Have they lost their salvation? Have they always had it?

We don't know. It's very difficult because from the outside as men, we want to be able to nail somebody to the wall and say, that's a Christian, that's not a Christian, and peg it every time. But that's not up to us, it's up to God. Someone could become a believer and get drawn into the Catholic Church somehow and get taught bad theology for years and years and die in the Catholic Church. Were they saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ or not? Did they believe the gospel?

The answer is yes. So I have a hard time taking this passage and trying to use it to say that somebody lost their salvation. That's for sure. But I also can't, it doesn't lead us to be able to make a judgment about what that falling away means. What they lost was their Christian walk. Yes, their walk was drastically impacted. But God was still right there. Yes, I would agree with that. They just turned away. Yeah, they walked away. They chose to walk in the flesh. That's why they were pursuing deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. It's hard for me to believe that they can actually be indwelled in the Holy Spirit and keep walking in the flesh. Oh, you can... You can turn off your conscience for a while. Yeah, but do you think... I don't know. I've just got a real burden for my youngest sister. She married a guy that's an atheist and she acts as if she's not involved at all. Sure, she's walking in the flesh instead of abiding.

But the truth of the matter is that that doesn't mean that the Lord can't bring around an event or a change of heart or something that causes her to turn her life back to the Lord. And the thing is that the atheist may one day be presented by the gospel and respond to it and then she'll go and she'll come back to life again so to speak and pursue her walk with the Lord again. She just sins for life. Anything that happens to her is God's fault. I mean that. Sure. Her son died at 27. It's God's fault. I call that negative Calvinism. It's God's sovereignty.

The truth is that we don't know her heart. The Lord knows her heart. And we all know people in similar circumstances. And I know we have family members that we have heard when they were children they accepted the Lord and you would never know it today. And we can only hope that in fact they did indeed believe when they were children and that they're sealed for eternity. But we don't know. We can't know because there's not a sign.

What it comes down to with this though is that Paul is warning people to look out for legalism in this passage. And legalism comes from the flesh every time. The source of the legalism from those who are teaching it, and the source of legalism for those who are drawn to it, is the flesh. It's not the Holy Spirit.

So when we're dealing with things like existentialism, which says it's all about experience, that's how we know if something's true or not, how does that fit in with God revealing his truth? They're really not compatible. It becomes problematic. If you deal with mysticism, where this is a springboard for me to grow, well, you have nothing to check it with.

In the modern day third wave movement, where they bark like dogs and do all the other things that are exciting for them, gold dust, various other things that happen, how do they validate that with scripture? They don't. Scripture is a springboard and they long time ago left to checking scripture with those things. It's not like the Bereans. It's like the rest of the people that aren't checking.

It's like, go back to scripture. Check it. Validate it. If the fruit of the Spirit is self-control, how does that fit in with me falling on the floor, unable to move, and I can't control myself? Well, is that a move of the Spirit or not? You know, you can check it by scripture. But if you have pushed scripture down as an authority, then you have other issues.

It's important to notice if you look on page 2 there's a really nice diagram from Wayne House. He's got several books of charts and diagrams and this is from that series I believe. There's a pendulum that seems to go on as far as trends within Christianity where we go from intellectual pursuit. The church in Ephesus was known for that. Intellectual pursuit.

We're going to pursue this intellectually. all the way over to the emotional side. Montanism, 2nd century, everybody remember about Montanism? Anything from the church history class if you took that? He was the early charismatic leader, right? Yeah, he had several prophetesses with him and they were very much into new signs and new revelation. and then it switched over to the Gnostics who said well all this experience has to do with matter that's no good it's all intellectual in our intellectual discovery of the spiritual nature of God and you switch back over to monasticism okay that's where they were looking for all kinds of signs in the monasteries and doing special things to themselves to make sure that they were holy and pure in their experience and then the scholars of scholasticism and mysticism and then reformation orthodoxy and then pietism and methodism with Charles Wesley and then liberalism with some of our favorite people we talked about last week and then Pentecostalism and charismatic things again and you'll see the pendulum seems to be moving faster there's actually starting to be more and more of a just splits and it's not The movements aren't dying down so much between the two sides.

They're starting to each have their own critical mass, it seems. But that's for another class. But the idea is to look and see how the intellectual and the experiential side of things come back and dominate. In my own life, I can definitely see that.

The church I went to as a young child or into my early teens was definitely intellectual. In fact the Holy Spirit was this mystery third part of the Trinity because we never talked about the spiritual side of things. It was all a lot of intellectual things in my Sunday school classes. I can't say that for the adults, I was never there.

With rare exceptions where I would complain about having a sore bottom from sitting in a seat so long. Then I got introduced to charismatic movement which was all about experience. I had my friend's dad tell me that I should speak in tongues so I could confirm that I was saved, which I couldn't do, which was a little disconcerting. So I started doing a lot more of the charismatic-y sort of things. At one point in time, I had somebody pray for me to have tongues, and that didn't happen either. I had somebody prophesy for me that I'd have broad shoulders.

I still haven't figured out what that means. But it was experience, and that's what I wanted. I truly believed that I had been slain in the spirit one time. It was an incredible emotional experience, but I didn't learn anything from it at all. I didn't grow from it, it was just really intense emotionally.

Kind of like riding the Dumbo's at Dindis Disney. Yeah, riding the roller coasters. The thing is not that those things are bad, but you can have the pendulum motion rather than what's wrong with either side of the pendulum. They're extreme. They're not the truth, necessarily. They may have parts of the truth. But the truth is absolute and singular. And either one of these polarized positions doesn't match up with that.

Our lives are not just intellectual. We don't just have to sit here and study God's word and fill our brains with it. The Holy Spirit works in us. Ephesians 2.10 says that God's got good works for us to plan. Those good works are going to be experiences, aren't they? On some level there will be experiences. But we don't sit around focusing on those experiences.

I had somebody tell me recently that I was heavily involved with them coming to know the Lord. That was the first time in my whole life somebody had ever said that I was involved with anybody coming to the Lord. But I don't sit around going, oh, that was the experience. What did I do to make that experience happen so I can make it happen again for somebody else? It's God. Exactly. And it's pretty critical. to grasp that concept.

In the more recent, we'll take a look at the last paragraph on page two there, Christian existentialism has had a voice in the last century through neo-orthodoxy with names such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and others. They will teach that the Scriptures are inspiring, but not inspired. That's where they get into a bit more of a springboard sort of a concept. It's inspiring. It makes me feel good and want to do good things.

It's a good experience, but it's not something to be baptized into, so to speak, as far as the truth of scripture. The approach to scripture among existentialists is often to speak of scripture as being spiritually true, but not necessarily historically true, or something having no substantial connection to history whatsoever. How do you take books like the written historical records in the Old Testament, or the Book of Acts? If those are not historical, what do you do with them?

Because I can tell you some of those books are really dry and I don't find a lot of inspiration in the dryness of it. But if it's true, if I can see how God was faithful through these generations, then I've got something. So the problem with what you get is you get a really thin Bible as far as useful texts are concerned. Because you don't have anything to do with it. He was like, well, I'm not reading Exodus again, my goodness. Or Deuteronomy, or whatever your Old Testament book is. I tried to teach a Bible study through Deuteronomy once, we never made it.

So anyways, the next page, or top of page 3, so what should a Christian think about all this? Would somebody mind going ahead and reading 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17? And you can skip the brackety parts. All scripture is inspired by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. Alright, we went over that last week some. Briefly, I think I screamed through it.

How does that fit in with, you're going to have an experience and that's going to validate your connection with this God that's really disconnected from the world? It doesn't. The problem though, is for us, we look at scripture and we seek it for truth, we search it for truth. For these people, that's just not how you operate.

If you grew up in a household where your dad thought you were going to die by the time you're 33, would you be sitting around reading or would you be out having a bunch of experiences because you know the end is coming you know that that's the kind of thing where if you if you have you heard those those questions I ask you know if you knew that you were going to die in one year what would you do or something like that and they try to yeah what would you do and they make movies about that periodically I think the most recent one that I've seen was or didn't see it but heard of was Queen Latifah's movie where She goes out and somehow they tied the food network into it and all kinds of other things and that was how I got exposed to it. But the idea is that she was going to die but it was a misdiagnosis. Suddenly in the romantic thing works out longer term.

But when your life is not subjected to the scripture, what do you do? How do you deal with spiritual growth if you can't quantify it? You don't have it. Exactly, you really don't have it from a biblical understanding. You may have new, more exciting spiritual experiences.

Isn't that good? That was the thing about my charismatic, when I thought I was slain in the spirit, is it was emotionally amazing. It was the most amazing emotional experience I've ever had. The problem is, how do you get a more intense emotional experience? If that was the best one I'd had at 13 or 14, how do you have a better one in a spiritual way? I could think of various other experiences since then that were intense, but that's different.

Let's take a look at 2 Peter 1, 20-21. But know this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." So we see that the Holy Spirit, let's see here, no prophecy of scripture is made of one's own interpretation, so that the prophet wasn't doing it subjectively or of their own will, it was coming from a third party so to speak, an outside source that was not the flesh. Randy, doesn't the word prophecy rather than mean future things here mean teaching?

Yeah, well in this case this could be doctrine but it could also be future things. The idea is it's revelation from from the Holy Spirit working in there. Because I think that revelation to the future also qualifies as doctrine. It just happens to be doctrine of future things.

For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. So that prophecy that's coming is coming from God. This is very, very clear. That there's truth involved, and it has a purpose. And it's a purpose from God, revealed by God, through man.

It doesn't line up with the experience side of things. The problem is that as you come in contact with people who are very experience-oriented, and let me tell you, my generation and the generations coming after me are very, very, very, very, very, very experience-oriented. Because they don't believe in truth anymore. They don't even validate life by experience. They just want new ones. And let me tell you that working any job when all you want is experience is a real pain in the honey. There's no value in work because that's not as fun and new and exciting experience.

Who wants to be working a cash register when you could be out skydiving or bungee jumping? or extreme rollerblading down a mountainside, or skiing, or municycling, or whatever your extreme sport is. I want to still try bungee jumping and street losing, but that's different. When you go through these...

Huh? Because I'm not going to validate truth by it. I'm just saying I'd like to try it. I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't want to break me. Yeah, it would be like, yeah, I am certainly mortal. But the truth of what's revealed there is not even on the radar. These people are seeking out experience without the concept of truth. And that is, what areas ethically could that be problematic? Tom? I'm not answering that. Okay, you got a different thing. But it was just a supplemental thought, and that was, gee, these guys are idea junkies. They may not be on drugs, but they're on, you know, let's try the next thing. They're like the Greeks. Yeah, with the adrenaline or ideas like the Greeks.

But what's problematic with having experience without truth as even trying to search out truth or validate truth? Experience keeps changing and each new experience you have changes the color that you cast on past experiences. There's no real ground. There's no real ground. There's no basis for beginning anything. You're just in a stream of experiences and that's all you've got.

Well how does this affect things like science? We can scientifically do mutations that breed humans and cows. They have already done that. They have already made mutations between humans and cows. And they just kill them before they become fully mature. What is ethically wrong with that? Well, if it was a new experience, and it was a new experiment, and we learned that you could do it, then how can that be invalid? Or, you know, cows and pigs and peoples and pigs.

You don't know if it's a mutation. That's not a mutation, though. That's a mixing. Well, it's a genetic mixing. Yeah, okay, I wouldn't call it a mutant, per se. A mutation will reproduce itself genetically. Yeah, no, but this would be a mixing. It's like most mules can't bear. Yeah. There was one once at Texas A&M that did. Yeah. In general, they don't. Yeah.

So I apologize for using the word mutant. But they are making these mixtures of things because they can. And there is no ethical problem with it. for a person without reality. I think it's ethical because a person has a living soul and spirit and a cow does not. Yeah, well I agree with you. I'm saying for them, for these people, it was a new experiment. And if you kill it on the way, you don't know what you've got. Whether you've got a son or not. Yeah, what you've got is a problem. But you also have issues, okay, how do we deal with trying new things?

Going into outer space, is a major thrust now for the private sector. Why? Because they know they can make a lot of money out of people who are willing to pay a lot of money for the experience of going in outer space. Because experience is what rules.

It's existentialism. We've got to experience this and that validates what is true. Let's take a look at some ideas about truth here. There's three bullet points, so let's take a look at those. In the three relatively short books known as the Pastoral Epistles, 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus, there are over 50 references to doctrine, teaching, instruction, etc. The doctrine, teaching, and instruction are not to be pursued just for the sake of academic and intellectual development, but are intended by God as the essentials for every believer's spiritual growth and maturity.

Which means intimacy with Christ. Yeah, the result of that will be deeper intimacy with Christ. But what should the result be for intellectual understanding growing? Not just knowledge, but intellectually you grasp a doctrine. What would be the result of that? You get spiritual growth. So you have spiritual growth. It's a good thing and it happens.

And how is that most often reflected? Is it in our attitude towards life? When the trials and sufferings come, if you've never been taught about trials and suffering, does it feel like a kick in the shin? Or that you've had your breath knocked out from you?

And then you grow in that brief time often, where the Lord says, okay, you're going to grow through this, because you're going to have to look at me. And you look at Him and you realize, oh, I should have been doing that all along. And that's often when you start digging into God's word to say, how do I deal with this? And you run into Hebrews and you say, wow, God's going to allow me to grow and He brings me to grow through trials and suffering.

Hal Malloy taught the trials and suffering class and then God brought him the cancer. And what has he done throughout this time with the cancer? He's been rejoicing. That's pretty awesome. That's way better than what most people are doing, which is why he's shocking the snot out of these psychologists and counselors and chaplains.

So the truth that are in the epistles, the idea that are given to Timothy and Titus is that, okay, you've got this truth, what are you going to do with it? You're going to pass it on, and the result of that is going to be that it also affects your life.

What did the Greeks do with knowledge? Does anybody remember from some of the philosophical discussions we've had? They would pursue theories and knowledge, but they would never test them. Because testing was manual labor, and the manual labor was considered an underling thing. So they would all just be intellectual. We're going to pursue the intellectual things. Church in Ephesus, hey, it's all intellectual.

So that's an issue. Let's take a look at the second bullet point. In the New Testament historical books of Acts, on into the epistles, we find repeated references to the faith as a specific set of apostolic teachings. And then there's a long list of verses that we won't read all of, but Acts 6, 7, 13, 8, 14, 22, 16, 5, 1 Corinthians 16, verse 13, and so forth. There's the faith. It's truth. It's doctrine. It's what they held to.

It wasn't experience. It wasn't just experience. It may have been experiences at times. There may be experiences. Are experiences bad or wrong? That's a question I need to ask. The answer is no. Yeah, how do you react to the experience or the stimuli, if you will? in the argument I had with a guy at a seminary intensive he was telling me that the music that I liked was wrong and so we got into a long discussion about experience and emotion and I said when you hear a hymn and you like that hymn does it cause you to be excited or feel good or something and he said yes I said is that wrong well no because it's a hymn I said, okay, so some experiences are okay, right? Well, yes. Okay. And then he went back to saying that the music I like wasn't correct and was fleshly and causing me to sin and stuff like that.

And I said, well, what experiences are good and what experiences are bad? And I finally came down to, I said, do you have sex with your wife? And he said, well, he was kind of embarrassed, but he said, yes. I said, do you enjoy it? And he said, yes. I said, so is that a bad experience or a good experience? Because you enjoy it.

The crux of his argument was that experiences you enjoy were fleshly. I said, if God has commanded sex with your wife, how are you going to deal with that? And he couldn't really win that argument, so we went on. Because otherwise he'd have to abstain, which is where some of the mystics go.

So you see the problem of experiences cannot be labeled as all bad. and neither can emotions. All of those things are not necessarily evil by themselves. The question is where do they come from and what do you do with them? Does it fit into what you understand from doctrine?

If it doesn't, what do you have to do? If the doctrine of the Bible doesn't cover driving, how do you deal with it? Do you not drive? Yeah, the Amish, do you not drive? Or do you abide in the Holy Spirit? You just don't drive on the freeway to the rush hour. You avoid walking in the flush by driving at rush hour. But the experience is not what validates truth. Experience is nifty for scientific validation of truth, isn't it?

Because you can test it over and over and over again. But spiritual things are revealed by God because can man in the darkness of our mind conjure up truth in and of itself that is spiritual? And not all truth is scientifically repeatable and therefore provable, I guess is what I would say.

I was just talking with Bob Eccle before class about creationism, briefly. And you cannot reproduce God's creation in six days, nor could you reproduce an evolutionary process. And so neither of those theories is a provable scientific theory. And so you have to have faith in one or the other. History is not repeatable in the sense of you can't just keep going back to the same point in time in changing a variable.

If Napoleon had this here, would he have gotten his heining kicked at Waterloo? If he had this, would that have changed? Would this be the same? Let's go back. Let's get in our time machine and go back in time and we'll move the cannon over here and see, oh, they missed that guy. Did they win the battle or not?

You can't do that. History is a one-off deal and that's all you get. I can't go back and fix the silly stuff I've said on these recordings. I can edit it out but I can't take back the fact that it was said. So truth is absolute but it's not always repeatable.

That's the problem with experiences validation of truth is that sometimes you have a one-time experience. What do you do with it? Sometimes we're glad we have a one-time experience. Sometimes we wish we'd had a zero-time experience. But the truth is that experience doesn't validate truth.

You'll see on your handout, at the bottom of page 3, the character of truth is revealed to us by God, about God. What God has told us is absolute truth, not revelation or variable. That's Proverbs 22, 20 and 21 in Hebrews 13, 8. What God has told us is not different from one person to the next. Experiences are, aren't they? How do you deal with that?

When I'm talking to somebody who's had problems in their marriage or something like that, and I'm thinking, well my marriage is pretty awesome, frankly, that my experience is different from theirs. But sometimes that's different. Some people have never had an argument for the first X number of months in their marriage. And I know that we had an argument in our marriage. Well, my experience was different. Are we not married because we had a different experience? No. But experience, it varies between people, but God's truth does not vary between people. It's absolutely true consistently. What God has told us is absolute truth, but not exhaustive truth.

And that, I think, was part of Marilyn's God is not revealed about driving. He has revealed about abiding in the Holy Spirit, which is how when we go down the road, if traffic is all moving 75 and the speed limit is 70, if you're going to be a legalist and go 70, you may cause an accident. So you have to, at that point in time, be abiding in the Holy Spirit and say, Lord, we're under grace and everybody else is going 70, I don't want to cause an accident. And God's not sitting up there going, man, every minute you drive 75 in the 70 zone is another minute in purgatory. He's not sitting up there, you better confess that in confession, or something like that. That's not the way God operates.

God's exhaustive truth is what he's going to be revealing to us in eternity. Like when my dad was teaching through Ephesians chapter 2, and he said, we're forever going to be going, huh, huh! That's what it's going to be. That's going to be God's exhaustive truth revealed. It's not going to be in scripture. Can you imagine having to carry your Bible if for some reason it managed to have exhaustive truth in it?

The thing is... If you read the Gospel of John, it's got to be one of my favorite passages regarding the life of Christ. If you'll turn there with me, you can, or you don't have to. the last verse of the last chapter 2125 and there were also many other things which Jesus did which if they were written in detail I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written okay that's just what would be written about the life of Christ here on this earth so God's exhaustive truth in book form forget it the universe can't contain God that's why he's outside of the time-space continuum unless you're an open theist The truth of the matter is that God's Word isn't exhaustive of every concept and idea. So how do we... Why do you think that is, practically, though? Why did God not tell us everything? We couldn't handle it. There's not enough space, as this says. Our minds aren't capable. It's not what we need, but the other thing is that Would we be able to deal with the relationship? God really wants relationship.

That's everything that he did throughout the history of the scriptures was about relationship. Even when Israel was wiping out the Canaanites, that was about relationship, wasn't it? I want you to be in that land so that we can focus on our relationship together. When David had Bathsheba's husband whacked off at the front of the battle lines and killed, David didn't repent for a while. When David did repent, it was because God sent the prophet saying, hey, I want a relationship with you. God's scripture is about truth, and that truth leads us to relationship, even if it's not exhaustive in its revelation of truth.

Did he just ring the bell again? All right, I'm out of time. I'm on page three going off on things that weren't even on the handout. I apologize. There's lots of stuff in this handout. Please go ahead and continue reading through it. Actually, I skipped way ahead to the end because everything that's on the last page is what we ended up talking about. I just didn't go to that reference.

But please go ahead and finish the rest of the handout. Let's close in prayer and we'll get into the main service to make sure we don't miss out on any specials or anything. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would allow us to come to grips in our own lives with how we deal with experiences and how they impact our walk with you. We ask that you would help us to grow in our understanding of your words so that we can bring those experiences in line with what you teach. We just thank you and we praise you in Jesus name. Amen.