Join us as we examine the consequences of misrepresenting God’s character and the vital role that church leaders play in faithfully conveying scriptural truths. Through contrasting historical perspectives and modern misconceptions, we challenge listeners to reconsider the prevalent moral relativism within Christianity today. This episode serves as a call to defend the righteousness of God and reject teachings that attribute evil to His divine plan.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and your live today. We’re getting into part two of my father’s sermon series, defending the goodness of God. What a fun topic it’s been. Let’s jump right into it. This is part two for part one, visit kgov.com and check out yesterday’s show. Now let’s jump right into it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Defending God’s goodness. This is a sequel to last week’s sermon. And in a few minutes, I will give a quick review of what we covered last week. But to start with, well, I’m going to do something that might scare some of you. I don’t blame you. I’m going to quote from this book right here. It’s a philosophy textbook. The History of Modern Philosophy. And that could get you in trouble, right? Well, man’s wisdom is often at odds with God’s wisdom. And also, it could put your audience to sleep. So they get in trouble in two ways. But first, before we do that, let’s turn to Paul’s writings in the New Testament in the book of Colossians. Colossians. I’m going to mention, this book we’ll mention, and we’ll talk a bit, just a little bit about indulgences. Who’s ever heard of the concept that the Catholic Church used to sell indulgences? Raise your hand if you’re familiar with that. Okay, more than half of the congregation. So we’ll talk about that, but first I want to read from Paul’s warning to us. He wrote to the Christians who lived in Turkey. Back then it wasn’t Turkey. We call it Asia Minor today in the city of Colossae. Colossians 2 and verse 8. Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit. according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. That word Godhead, it’s an unusual word even in Greek. It refers to the person of God, the Godhead, and that is the triune God as we know. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. All the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily because God the Son has become flesh. He is now a man. Yet He’s also God. And you are complete in Him who is the head of all principality and power. God is the chief authority in all of existence. Is that true? Amen. Is He the chief over nothing? No. He has all power, but that’s a figure of speech to some extent because God has delegated power and authority to angels and to human beings. So He is the head of all principality and power. He has created angels and powers and principalities and authorities and thrones and dominions and they have great power and great authority, but He is above all of it. And Paul says, don’t let anyone cheat you. God is the source of all wisdom, all authority, all life. Don’t let anyone rob you of what you could have from God and from His Word. They’ll bring you human philosophy and that will cheat you. It will rob you with empty deceit. You’ll be deceived and you will lose the riches that God has for you. So in this book, History of Modern Philosophy, there is a section about how Western civilization was really based on biblical concepts, at least superficially, for many centuries. But then humanism came in like a tsunami. And eventually, Western civilization arrived at the point where it’s at today, where it’s no longer Christian. It is now post-Christian, especially Europe, and America increasingly so. We like to remember that we’re a Christian nation and that many of our founding fathers were Christians. Many hated Jesus Christ, like Thomas Jefferson. Others loved him. But… Today, our institutions are increasingly godless. So our government schools, there should be no government schools, but our government schools are godless officially by their curriculum and their principles. And our government is increasingly godless. Our legal system is godless. If a state Supreme Court justice wants to have the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, he’ll lose his position. Because we are godless in our education system, in our legal system, officially godless. It’s devastating. Well, how did this all happen? Well, the author of this textbook on the history of modern philosophy, he discusses how this happened. And he says that, well, there was this period back in the 1200s, there was a man, the angelic doctor. Thomas Aquinas St. Thomas Aquinas he was a philosopher and he did a lot of writing and his ideas had tremendous influence in Europe’s last centuries the last seven centuries but he was committed not only to the Christian worldview but to the pagan Greek philosophical worldview of Aristotle. In fact, Thomas Aquinas wrote 12 commentaries, 12 commentaries on Aristotle. Aristotle’s a pagan. He’s a pagan. calvinists today they love to study plato aristotle plotinus they love it in fact i had a debate with a new testament professor from d james kennedy’s ministry it’s on the internet at theologyonline.com 250 pages and they teach that man is totally depraved that’s what they teach And yet Calvinists set up Christian universities where they teach Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as helpful, useful, and wise. And they teach total depravity and they defend their reliance on pagan Greek philosophy. Do you see that contradiction? This is a major contradiction. Man is totally depraved and we think Plato and Aristotle had a lot to offer to Christian theology. Wow, that’s a disconnect. That’s a massive disconnect. But anyway, Christianity was broken because of its commitment to Greek philosophy. And so Thomas Aquinas, he had all his followers, monks in the Catholic Church. And then there was another monk, John Duns Scotus. And he died in 1308. So that’s 700 years ago next year. Long time ago. Well, he started a brand new movement in the Catholic Church. And it was the chief school that opposed Thomas Aquinas. And in his teaching, so in the Catholic Church, which meant in Christianity in Europe, there was two schools of thought. Thomas Aquinas, he was the better one, and he was committed to pagan Greek philosophy, just like St. Augustine was. This other guy, John Duns Scotus, he created the alternative camp. You know what their foundational belief was? It was that God created the world by an arbitrary act of His will, and by that arbitrary act, He also brought about goodness, justice, and moral law, which are absolute simply because God declared them to be absolute. They are otherwise arbitrary. righteousness holiness goodness truth they could be otherwise they could be the opposite but god arbitrarily decides what is good and what is bad so god could have said if this monk was right he could have said that if if children hate their parents i will bless them and if you reject me and commit idolatry against me i will give you eternal life And if you hate one another, I will save you. See, that would be as though morality was not absolute. And God could make morality anything He wanted. But He cannot because righteousness is a description of His nature. God is good and everything that God does, all things that God does are consistent with the counsel of His will. So God’s decrees are not arbitrary. And so with this author, he’s not a Christian. What he put in his textbook, A History of Modern Philosophy, his name is Wright. Let me give you his full name. John Stephen Wright. What he put in here is that God could supersede the moral law if He chose. God says, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery. He condemns sexual immorality, homosexuality. Well, God could say, you know what? Now I want all that. Now do all that. So this monk said, this is why the church has the right to grant indulgences. The church could sell, they could sell certificates that would take away some of your punishment for your sin. And so the church can do that because it’s not really sin. It’s only sin because God said do not murder and do not steal. But God could have said murder and steal all you want. So therefore, the church has the authority to sell indulgences because right and wrong are not absolute. And then this author points out that when this monk introduced this concept, we would call it relativism. Moral relativism. when this monk introduced this concept he weakened the authority of Christianity and even the authority of God making God’s decrees purely arbitrary and what eventually happened is the Renaissance and humanist ideas came in to fill that void And they destroyed the Christian foundation of Western civilization. It’s not that Western civilization was real godly. But it’s that its intellectual underpinnings were fundamentally Christian concepts. And so this popular teaching came in that right and wrong is not absolute. It’s just whatever God decides to say it is. And that destroyed the moral authority of Christianity. Now, is there any remnant of that in the world today? I wouldn’t call it a remnant. I’d call it a flood. There are millions of Christians who are taught that when wicked and filthy things happen, that that is God’s will for God’s glory and His pleasure. And we should rebuke Christians when they say that. When filthy and perverse and evil things happen, we should not allow a Christian in our company to say that was God’s will for his purpose. That should be rebuked because God is good and holy and just. Now, in 1517, Pope Leo X, he offered indulgences to those who would give money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Cheryl and I have been there. Some of you have been there. What a dome. It’s just startling. Michelangelo was asked by the Pope, we want you to build a dome, but make it bigger and more beautiful than the one in Florence. And he said to the Pope, I could make it bigger, but I can’t make it more beautiful. And he made it big. And the Catholic Church, of course, has edifices around the world that cost millions of dollars. And so the Pope needed a lot of money to build St. Peter’s Basilica. In fact, they say the Apostle Peter is buried there. That’s what they say. We asked, where is his wife buried? That caused all kinds of trouble. And Martin Luther has remarked that 14 of the 12 apostles were buried in Rome. That was a good point. But at any rate, so he was offering indulgences. If you gave money for the building of the church at the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, you would get an indulgence. And what I’d like to do is I’d like to show you a slide of that indulgence, what it looked like. because this is not ancient history this is just a half a millennia ago 500 years ago and i don’t think you’ll be able to read it but let’s pull it up and you could uh you can make it even darker because we’ll be looking at slides for a few minutes now let’s look up okay uh denver bible church where the little church that could is that right jonathan let’s go to here’s the indulgence you would get a certificate if you gave money and you know it depends on who’s giving and how much you had to give but you would get this certificate and could anyone here read that okay Doug is working out a little bit of German here’s the translation by the authority of all the Saints in in mercy towards you I absolve you from all sins and misdeeds and remit all punishments for 10 days okay that’s actually to get time off from purgatory that’s what that is and is selling up indulgences was wrong it was sinful it brought shame to Christianity but it became so bad that about a half century later in 1567 another Pope Pius the fifth issued he issued a statement saying that no longer was the church allowed to sell indulgences no indulgence could be associated with any financial act okay now Also, it wasn’t only from this monk that the Catholic Church thought, hey, let’s sell indulgences. Let’s raise money by getting people out of purgatory early. That idea also came from what we call the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha are books from before the time of Christ. The Apocrypha is made up of Jewish books that we would call folklore, like George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, admitted what he did. We call that folklore. Well, the Jews, they had their holy scriptures, and then they had folklore. And when the Old Testament was translated into Greek 200 years before Christ, that translation was called the Septuagint. All the holy books that the Jews revered from the prophets as Scripture, they translated that so now Gentiles could also read the Scripture in Greek. That’s a great thing to do. At the same time, The librarian in Alexandria in Egypt, he said to the rabbis in Jerusalem, we don’t only want your holy books, we also want your other books. Those were the books of the Jews of their folklore. And so the translators translated the Jewish Bible and then also their folklore. Well, the New Testament quotes from the Bible of the Old Testament hundreds of times, specifically referencing the books of the Old Testament. It doesn’t do that with the Apocrypha because that was folklore. And the Catholic Church, very late in its history, said, you know, all those folklore books that were translated along with the Apocrypha, we’re going to put them in the Bible. We’re going to include them as though that is part of the Bible. And that was a terrible error. So even when the 1611 King James came out, I have a this is a photocopy from the Bible as it was translated 400 years ago. And in the middle between the Old and New Testaments, they put the books of the Apocrypha. And in one of those books, I’m going to show you, it’s in 2 Maccabees 12. There is a passage here that I’ll start reading to you and then we’ll blow up a few. Let’s see if I can read this Old English. I’m going to start in verse, I don’t know if you could see it, but verse 59, let’s see. Judas and his company came to take up the bodies of them that were slain. and to bury them with their kinsmen in their fathers graves now what we’re gonna read is that these men were killed and then this man this a different judas a hero in the story he gave money for the souls of the people who were dead to the temple in jerusalem to try to buy their way out of punishment from god so they they buried their bodies now under Under the coats of everyone that was slain, they found things consecrated to the idols which is forbidden by the Jews. So the men who were killed, they had amulets on their body. They had idols. And according to Catholic theology, there are two kinds of sins. Venial sins that are smaller and mortal sins. And if you die with a mortal sin on your soul, you go right to hell. You can’t go to purgatory. There’s no sense praying for those dead or giving money for them. Well, these men had idols on their bodies. They were idolaters. That would be a mortal sin. So even within Catholic theology, it’s a contradiction for them to think this. And when you accept books in your Bible that are not inspired by the Holy Spirit, then false teaching comes into your beliefs. So they had idols on their bodies. And all men, therefore… Let me see here. Let’s go to verse 43. And when… He had made a gathering throughout the company. Go ahead, bring in the blow up, Jonathan. He raised the sum of 2000 drachmas of silver. He sent it to Jerusalem to offer a sin offering, doing therein very well and honestly, and that he was mindful of the resurrection. For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. And also in that he perceived that there was great favor laid up for those that died godly. It was in holy and good thought whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead that they might be delivered from sin.” So now let’s put the lights on. Thank you, Jonathan. You notice what that said? He collected the sum of 2,000 drachmas of silver and he sent it as a sin offering to the church in Jerusalem for those who were slain because he believed that it would help deal with their sin and God would forgive them. Now, that is false. Each man’s sin is dealt with not by money, but by Christ’s blood shed for us if we humble ourselves before God and trust in Him. So when we rely on human philosophy, or when we are willing to accept as the Word of God the writings of men, that even contradict themselves then we begin to destroy the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s love for us becomes obscured and how do people know God when they listen to his children when they listen to us and we say oh that that child was kidnapped and tortured and murdered that was God’s will we don’t understand it but it was God’s will Millions hear that from Christians, from Christian radio and TV, and they reject Jesus Christ because God is misrepresented by the church. And they hear that people, and this is Catholics, not Protestants typically, but that people will pray for the dead. And they think what’s the benefit of that? They’re already dead. This is not truth from God. This is a make-believe religion that you’re following. So when people reject God, we want it to be because they hate God, not because we have deceived them. Do you understand that? If we warn people about their sin and to trust in a holy God, then their blood is not on our hands. But when we misrepresent God and people hate the God whom we have misrepresented, then we share in that guilt. But if we’re truly Christians, then God forgives us of that. But what a tragedy that others would hate God because of our lies. Because we have accepted lies about God and we have repeated them as fools. And then we’ve increased the hatred for God for no reason. So, if you recall last week, we talked about God defending His righteousness And what we need to realize is that people will attack the goodness of God, but it’s not only atheists and liberals and evolutionists. It’s even those within the church. In many instances, it’s even people who are truly saved, who are born again. And they have bought into some false teaching about God and they will attribute to God the filth and wickedness that only comes from those who hate God. And they will say this is all part of God’s plan. It’s for His glory. It’s for His pleasure. We don’t understand it. So that after 9-11, for example, Billy Graham, with the attention of the whole world… is at the National Cathedral, and he says, I wish I could tell you why these things happen. I don’t know why there’s evil. What a tragedy. Where here, this Christian leader could have said, there is evil because men rebel against God. That’s why there’s evil. And we suffer when we disobey God. And when we obey God, when we humble ourselves before Him, He can forgive us and reconcile us. But when we are in rebellion against Him, we bring suffering to the world. Wouldn’t that have been so easy? But Billy Graham, as a representative of the Gospel to the world, says, I can’t tell you why there’s evil. Why is he so confused? Hasn’t he read Genesis 3? The fall? That human beings rebelled against God? Lucifer rebelled against God. That’s why there’s evil. Why is it confusing? Because he has been taught that all this filth in our world is part of God’s plan. It’s for His pleasure and His glory. That’s why it confuses Christians. They don’t understand it. We have to become superstitious like reading tea leaves and chicken entrails. Well, what does this current wicked event mean? Why did God do this? So a Christian father gets a DUI and he’s in jail and he asks the chaplain, he says, why is God doing this to me? That’s the number one question when Christians go to jail. Why is God doing this to me? So last week we went through, it was quite a Bible study in the sermon, Romans 1. You know how Christ gives light to all men who comes into the world? And God said, they knew Me, but they rejected Me. They knew Me, but they rejected Me. And so, we have to recognize that God has reached out to the whole world. And it’s not God’s will that any should perish, but that all would come to salvation. Now you guys, if I asked you to find a verse in the Bible that said it is God’s will that all would be saved, you could probably find it, a lot of you, because you’ve studied the Bible. But then others would find a different verse, and they would say that God has predestined who will be saved or not, and the fact that God does all things based on His predestination. And so we say, oh look, we have two conflicting verses, some think. One says that God predestines who will be saved, and only a small number are saved, so He predestines the majority to go to hell. And the other, quote Paul in Romans, 1 Timothy 2.4, that it’s God’s will that all would be saved. And so how do we know? How do we know which to take literally and which verse we’re confused on? And the way you answer that is because you’re solid in the goodness of God. That we are to defend God’s goodness and righteousness. It is not arbitrary. God does not decree that people be evil for His glory. That is false teaching. And so when Paul says that it is the will of God that God desires all to be saved, 1 Timothy 2.4, that is His will. In Ephesians 1.11, when God works all things according to the counsel of His will, that doesn’t mean that God works all things so that when… a man destroys his family, that was God working it. What that means is everything that God does is not arbitrary. It’s not capricious. God does all things according to His will. That is, everything that God does is based on a plan. That we would have an inheritance in Christ, we who trust in Him. But do you see, if human philosophy… And if false teachings have come into your worldview, then you will present to the world a God who is not God. And you will bring about hatred for God that should have never come about by misrepresenting Him. So one of the things that Denver Bible Church has…
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time here on KLTT. If you want the rest of this broadcast, head to kgov.com. That’s K-G-O-V.com. Kgov.com.
Join us as we examine the consequences of misrepresenting God’s character and the vital role that church leaders play in faithfully conveying scriptural truths. Through contrasting historical perspectives and modern misconceptions, we challenge listeners to reconsider the prevalent moral relativism within Christianity today. This episode serves as a call to defend the righteousness of God and reject teachings that attribute evil to His divine plan.
