“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” 2 Timothy 4:3-5 ESV
What does the Scripture say?
This is the first and greatest question. It’s a quote of Romans 4:3 where Paul is considering the rather monumental issue of salvation by faith rather than works. From the first chapter of Romans through the end of the third he makes a powerful case. All men know the truth about God through the glory of creation (Romans 1:18-21) and their inner consciences bearing witness (Romans 2:14-15) of His transcendent moral law. The rejection of God is, therefore, deliberate, willful and, indeed, deadly (Romans 1:32). Neither humanistic philosophy (Romans 1:21-22) nor religion (Romans 3:9, 20) observances save anyone. All are under the power of sin (Romans 3:10).
To prove this all-important point of justification by faith alone (Romans 3:24) Paul makes sure we see the amazing continuity of the logic of Scripture. Sinful man is forever busy with the endeavor to justify himself. This crazed obsession takes him so far as to call God a liar. The idea that man can think unilaterally about life, that is, independent of God and His word/law, is sin’s hallmark. It’s why the mark of the Christian’s intellectual life, his ethics, family and business life…all…is “what does the Scripture say?” The final authority, the final standard of appeal is either God’s word or man’s.
Thus, all of life is epistemological. How do we know what we know? What’s the standard?
Paul does in Romans 4 what’s called dotting his i’s and crossing his theological t’s. He throws down the line of argumentation against the point he just made. Concerning justification by faith alone, not works, he says:
“What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”” Romans 4:1-3 ESV
Indeed! Paul issues the challenge and then lets the sound doctrine he’s been preaching to Timothy (2 Timothy 2:15) do it’s work. Scripture is and must always be logically coherent. To arrive at a contradiction is to arrive at falsehood. Logic is man’s governor, telling him what can’t be true via the law of contradiction. God’s word, on the other hand, is the light of man’s mind, telling him the truth about God, himself, and the world. What Paul does is say, “if Abraham was justified by works, not faith, then the gospel is contradictory.” But then he lets Scripture interpret Scripture in Romans 4:3 and proves the whole point by quoting Genesis 15:6 and how Abraham’s belief was counted to him as righteousness.
This brings us to a pressing point most of us don’t consider enough. I know I didn’t for much of my early Christian walk. Even now the enormity of it humbles and amazes me. Ready?
We can’t think of anything rightly, that is, in its proper context and direction, without first applying the principles of Scripture to it.
This is a hard thing to hear for those of us reared in an American culture where we’re told that our opinion is as precious as air. Scripture, on the other hand, teaches the exact opposite. Proverbs 3:5-6 and Jeremiah 17:9 are prime examples. A man or woman living on their own opinion is still back in the Garden talking with the serpent and munching on the fruit.
There was a movie with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day, wherein he continued to live the same day over and over again. Sin does this to the life and mind of the unregenerate. The point is that all “truth” outside of biblical truth is a “666.” It’s a clever deception. If this isn’t true, using Paul’s methodology, why does the Holy Spirit instruct us to live our new life of faith with a renewed mind? What’s the alternative? It’s to live in conformity with the world, which is to say in agreement with the spirit of the age.
The new life leads to the heavenly shores and the majestic peaks of God’s renewed world. The old way is the Groundhog Day life of repeating the same mistakes over and over until Judgment. The renewed mind is always asking, “what does the Scripture say about this or that?” The unregenerate mind is always asking what it thinks. The Christian mind is a disciplined one that’s trained to subordinate emotion and personal experience to the objective truth of living categorically before God rather than as god. The antithesis is living by one’s own word. This antithesis is stated plainly and perfectly in Psalm 1.
Silly myths are anything that opposes Scripture’s logic. Ah, but how are we to know that we aren’t cherry-picking verses and building our lives upon false doctrines? That’s the whole point of Paul’s letter to Timothy. Sound doctrine is exactly that which uses the principles of Scripture to identify, understand, and then properly operate within the categories of life. Our lives should and must be humble submission to Him and His word/law where we test all our thoughts and goals over against the categorical truths of the Bible. All ideas and actions are to be brought humbly before the throne of truth. We start with the knowledge of sin and the law of faith already detailed. To omit that is to run into the legalistic quagmire that ensures so easily. We are saved by faith, lest any of us should boast. This and only this starts the epistemic chain.
A quick tour of the world’s wisdom shows how horrifically vacuous it is.
Take for example a recent article in the New York Post detailing the story of a “Christian” porn star. Yes. I’m serious. A few quotes will suffice.
Courtney (well keep it at that) says, “God’s message has been abundantly clear: I’m here to be a porn star. This is my way of serving.”
Silly myths indeed! God’s message? Where? He speaks only to her apparently. So, we ask: by what standard? If he speaks privately to you and tells you one thing, but a different thing to me and another thing to someone else, what shall we say?
“I now reject any teaching or institutions that depicts God as an entity to be feared or to be judged by. God is loving, not fearful; and accepting, not judgmental,” she declared.
By what grounds does she reject them? We assume on the power of her personal experience and feelings. That means that feelings are divine. It means feelings are authoritative. But what if someone else’s feelings tell them to assault her…to murder her? She’ll say, of course, that those feelings are invalid and can’t be true, which, of course, gives up the con. Any objection to another person’s authoritative feelings about god and morals means that truth is objective, after all.
Naturally, the Bible teaches that we should fear God. Proverbs 1:7 comes out swinging with it and proclaims in no uncertain terms that unless this is our epistemological foundation and starting point that there’s no wisdom to be found. Poor Ms. Courtney, who calls herself a Christian and a porn star, is a sterling example. She’s running east looking for a sunset.
“We are not meant to suppress or deny things like our pleasure and sexual expression,” the kinky content creator added. ”Instead, we’re meant to enjoy and embody them fully, as God has intended.”
Again, the question begs: by what standard? Her standard of emotional theology we suppose. It’s never explicitly stated, nor do any of her ilk do so, because such is forbidden. It’s all the big truth-suppressing con. She calls God’s word a lie and sets herself up as His spokesman. Catch it? She preaches. She truly does. She says, “we’re meant to enjoy and embody…”. If I sent this blog to the Post they’d reject it on the grounds that they don’t run religious articles. But this is just another con. They do and Courtney’s sad theological rambles are proof. She gives her own set of commandments and the itching ears love it. And the Post, like the rest of the country’s media, isn’t neutral. They run her story, and others like them because they support the religion of humanism. Watch how it concludes:
Meanwhile, the beauty has been raking in considerable amounts of cash since she started her OnlyFans account, last year revealing that she’d made a million dollars since starting her sultry subscription page.
“I feel better than I ever have in my life,” she proudly professed. “I’ve changed my life financially. I’m changing the lives of other women. I’m happy just doing me.”
So, yes, the Post and Courtney are evangelical with their silly myths. And they’ve fallen for silly myths precisely because they’ve rejected God’s word as life’s highest authority and replaced it with their feelings. All these myths have this in common: man’s mind is the final standard of truth, not God’s word. This is exactly what makes them silly in that all attempts by man to reject God lead him to intellectual absurdity.
Do you know what else this means? It means that all non-Christian worldviews are and can be reduced to the silly myths they are. God is true though men are liars! There’s no way to make sense of life and its categories outside the special revelation of God (Romans 11:33-36). On that last Day, God will not say to anyone, “…oh, well…you sorta have a point there…I guess I’ll have to make an adjustment to your eternal punishment…maybe I’ll throw in a puppy or something.” Such foolishness! No. On that Day every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that Christ is Lord and that we’re without excuse. Christianity isn’t true in degrees anymore than God is God in varying degrees. He’s fully God and His word/law is fully authoritative. Period. End of story.
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