Well, please turn in your Bibles to Jeremiah chapter six, a word from our glorious God, Jeremiah six, beginning to read at verse 16. Thus says the Lord, stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths where the good way is and walk in it. Then you will find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk in it. Also, I sent watchmen over you, saying, listen to the sound of the trumpet. But they said, we will not listen. Therefore, hear, you nations, and know, O congregation, what is among them. Hear, O earth. Behold, I will certainly bring calamity on this people, the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not heeded my words nor my law, but rejected it. For what purpose to me comes frankincense from Sheba and sweet cane from a far country? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet to me. Father God, as we consider your word this morning, and as we are scattered in the scriptures throughout the Bible in this topical sermon, I pray my thoughts would not be scattered. but that you would help us to hone in to your purposes and the things you have laid upon my heart, and that the meditations of our heart and our worship would continue to be acceptable in your sight. Through Jesus we pray, amen. It was popular in some circles to preach a disputation on Reformation Day. A disputation is a topical sermon on the red-hot issues of the day that were basically calling people back to the old paths that Jeremiah 6 talks about. And so we're going to be engaging in a Reformation disputation today. About half of the sermon we're going to be focusing upon Reformation hermeneutics, but I'm going to be ranging through a whole bunch of areas in which the church of Jesus Christ has been deviating from the Reformation, and as Protestants we need to protest this downward drift. Before he passed away, R.C. Sproul Sr. made a statement, something to the effect that the church of today is in as much need of reformation as the church of Luther's day was, and he was speaking about the evangelical church in that context. I do not think he was exaggerating at all. Over the past several Reformation days, I have pointed out that the five solas really have been abandoned to a large degree in the evangelical church. They might affirm them outwardly. But when you look at sola scriptura, you see that there are many things that trump the scripture as the highest authority in people's lives. And the Reformers would all say, you know, that if they were to live today, it's the Scripture that is the highest, not science, not Dr. Fauci, not the woke movement, nothing else. It is the Scripture. And then there is the second sola, sola fide. that Gary mentioned earlier, that we are justified by faith alone, not by faith plus our efforts, and that we are saved by grace alone. We don't build the bridge partway out, and God built most of the bridge. No, any bridge we build is rotten timbers, right? It is grace alone. and that we are saved, it says, solus Christus, salvation by Christ alone, no other mediator, not Mary, not the saints, not the church, and that it all needs to be in our lives, soli deo gloria, to the glory of God alone, not building our own little empires. But there are many, many other things that were at the heart of the Reformation that have also been forgotten or lost. For example, I think the church has lost its passion for the small-c Catholic church. I really think that that has been lost. We recited in the Apostles' Creed—well, some people just stay silent. They say, I don't believe in the Catholic church, and that is so sad because they think saying I believe in the Catholic Church means I believe in the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rome abandoned, so did Eastern Orthodoxy, abandoned the true Catholic faith and it was really the Reformers, John Calvin and Luther and other Reformers who were trying to call the Church back to the Catholic faith, back to the historic faith. Now here is the point that I think people miss, the Church did not die and ceased to exist for 1,000 years, only to be resurrected at the time of the Reformation, as some evangelicals seem to think with their rhetoric. No, Jesus said, I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. The gates of hell did not prevail against the church for 1,000 years. Sorry, it did not. Now sadly, many evangelicals have no realization that God has indeed preserved the truth within the church in every age. And so this speaks to the importance of studying historical theology. It's different than systematic theology, but it's tracing the history of doctrine. Yes, there has been growth in doctrine. And yes, there has been development. In fact, Ephesians 4 anticipates that. It says there's coming a day when we'll no longer be tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. We'll be growing up into a mature man, right? But the cardinal doctrines have always been there. and are still there and will never be lost. 1 Timothy 3.15 calls the church the pillar and ground of the truth, which means that God has indeed preserved the truth within the church despite Satan's constant attacks against it. But this lack of appreciation for the true Catholic faith has made evangelicals come up with all kinds of novel and ridiculous ideas, thinking that new is better. I distrust anything new. If the church has not come up with it in the last 2,000 years, it's probably rotten. It's probably not true, okay? So that was one of the reasons why several years ago, I preached a sermon titled, Why I am a Catholic and Why the Roman Church is Not. The Reformers refused to call the Romanists Catholics, absolutely refused to. They called Rome the whore, Babylon, a synagogue of Satan, the papacy, Romanism, anything but the true church. It is a demonic cult to the core and does not even remotely resemble the church of the first 12 centuries. And there were quite a number of reformers proved, I think definitively, that the church of the first 12 centuries was thoroughly Protestant. And I've had quite a few debates on Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic forums to the same purpose. It had errors, yes. The church has always had errors, but still upholding the cardinal doctrines that Rome had started to oppose. By the way, this is why preaching on Reformation Day is not as popular today. We have become so nice that we don't want to protest against error. And it's a big mistake because Jude 3 commands us to fight diligently against the errors of the day and to defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints. And he's never rescinded that command to contend, fight, or protest. And so Reformation Day is a call to become a protestant. Okay, protest something. But there are many other ways in which evangelicals have abandoned the Reformation. I can't get into it in detail today, but They've abandoned the Reformation on how to defend the canon of the Scripture. In other words, the canon deals with what books belong in the Bible, right? And thus the embarrassing losses that they have repeatedly sustained in their debates with Rome. I've listened to numerous debates, probably a couple dozen debates, between top evangelical leaders, some of them Reformed even, and the top apologists in Rome, And I can tell you that Rome has won every one of those debates, except for Bonson's, and there was a weakness there. We'll look at it. But they've won because the evangelicals, when push came to shove, has abandoned the Reformation on the issue of canon. They say, well, how do you know which books belong in the canon? And they start arguing in terms of these church fathers said that. And they said, ah, so you've conceded the point that the church determines the canon. That's not the way the Reformation argued at all. In fact, it's one of the reasons I wrote this book here, 500-page book on the canon of Scripture, where I do not abandon the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura. The Scripture itself has made so many references and cross-references and anticipated the future. You can know beyond any shadow of a doubt, just from what God has said, that there are 66 books in the Bible, no more and no less. So, that's basically what the Reformers did. It was a Biblicist approach. Well, let's move on to another area of disputation. Evangelicals have also abandoned the Reformation teaching on textual criticism. What is textual criticism? Well, since all Bibles were hand copied for 1500 years, you can imagine that's a lot of work to copy an entire Bible. It was easy for mistakes to be copied into the text if the scribes were not extremely careful. Now, I believe the official scribes of the church were ultra careful when copying the true church copies of the Bible, not private copies. These are the true copies of the Bible, what I call the ecclesiastical text. And that's why it is so unified. Some people say there must have been a conspiracy to have all these manuscripts so unified. No, there's no conspiracy. God preserved it. And even the critics of the majority text agree that it is a remarkably coherent and unified and grammatically correct form of the New Testament. Every letter has been preserved. That is the Reformation view. But in the last couple of hundred years, a new view has emerged that adopts Egyptian manuscripts recently discovered, and especially two manuscripts that the Bibles always call the oldest and the best. And those are Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. And those two manuscripts that are supposedly the oldness of Beth, they disagree with each other in the Gospels alone 3,000 times, and they are full of grammatical errors. The reason why those two manuscripts survived is they were not trusted, and they were not used by the church. They weren't worn out by use. There were way too many errors. In contrast to those thousands of disagreements between the two main Egyptian texts, and there's far more when you delve into the other Egyptian ones, I can show you actual manuscripts that could not have been copied from each other all over the Mediterranean, all over the Roman world, and they agree with each other in entire books of the Bible, letter for letter, word for word, without any difference whatsoever. It's a remarkable preservation that God has done. By the way, there is a slander out there that no two manuscripts in the majority text are alike. Well, I can show you the exact manuscripts, the number. I can show you the photocopies of them. They agree point by point. Now, in contrast to the total agreement that we have in the New Testament, you do not have that with any of the modern versions that are built upon the ecclesiastical text. is a theoretical text. You could look at any chapter in the New Testament, you will not find a single Greek manuscript that agrees letter for letter with that Greek chapter from the Nestle or the UBS text. In other words, it's a theoretical. It's a hodgepodge that they have pulled together. And this means that 4% New Testament is up for grabs in the opinion of these modern textual critics. This deviation from the Reformation is not a minor issue. And here's the key point, rather than looking presuppositionally to what God says He would do in the preservation of His text, and He says a ton in the Bible about the preservation of the text. Most evangelicals have looked to liberal presuppositions, and yes, they are liberal, they're not biblical, and they blindly trust a committee of five liberals to decide what the wording of each book of the New Testament is. It's liberals who put together the United Bible Society text and the Nestle-Allen Greek text. It's liberals. And that's the text that most modern versions are built on. This is a scandalous deviation from every single Reformation creed out there. Let me just read from one of them, the Helvetic Consensus Formula. It says, God, the Supreme Judge, not only took care to have His Word, which is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, committed to writing by Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, but has also watched and cherished it with paternal care ever since it was written up to the present time, so that it could not be corrupted by craft of Satan or fraud of men. Therefore, the Church justly ascribes to His singular grace and goodness that she has and will have to the end of the world a sure word of prophecy and holy scriptures from which, though heaven and earth perish, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass. That is the position of the Reformation. And the London Confession, Philadelphia Confession, Savoy Declaration, Westminster Confession, others upheld the majority text. I know it's not a popular position, but it is the truth. Unless you embrace the principle that God has preserved every jot and tittle of His Word in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, And in the majority text of the Greek, you have abandoned the Reformation creeds, but more importantly than that, you have abandoned the thoroughly biblical position that is upheld in this, I prove, 11 presuppositions from the Bible that only the majority text can fulfill. It's a presuppositional approach. I've got a box full of them here. You can pick up a copy at the end of the service. Now, this issue of textual criticism was the one weak area in which Greg Bonson's apologetic was completely floundered by the Romanists. He did fantastic when defending the canon presuppositionally. But then they said, well, how do you know what the actual wording within that canon is? And he did not have a solo scriptura answer. Now, Bonson's a hero of mine. I love him, love him to death, but this was a weak chink in his armor that you need to be aware of. Here's the question the Romanists rightly ask. Who determines the text? In other words, the actual wording of certain passages. Who determines the text? That's a great question. Rome says, the church does, Of course, Roman scholars disagree with each other on which is the text that the Church has determined, because there are tens of thousands of differences amongst the Latin manuscripts. But anyway, they say the Church determines it. And modern non-Reformation evangelicals say it's this committee of liberal experts who determine it. We say it is God alone who determines the text, and He does so by giving us principles within the Bible related to its transmission that will enable anyone who believes those Bible verses to recognize it. We do not determine the text. We merely recognize the text. based on what God has said. We cannot deviate from Sola Scriptura on even textual criticism. Now am I being disputatious? Yes, I am. This is Reformation Day, this is a Reformation doctrine. Another rallying cry of the Reformation was the repeated biblical phrase that God is Lord of all the earth. That is repeated over, and over, and over again in the Bible, that God is Lord of all the earth. This is the heart of Calvinism, that God is the Lord over everything, including Lord over your salvation, including Lord over your will. Your will cannot thwart God's will at all. Now, Luke applied that phrase to Jesus in Acts 10, verse 36, and declared that Jesus is Lord of all, which also speaks to His deity, right? But Pietism and principled pluralism, and the radical two-kingdom theory have insisted that there is not lordship of the Scriptures or of Jesus over the state, over science, over everything. Meredith Klein, for example, said that he wrote his theory of origins to remove Christ's lordship from science. Am I misrepresenting him? No. Read his essay on the upper register theory that he wrote. His first paragraph says why he wrote it, and here's a part of that. He says, I wrote this so that The scientist is left free of Biblical constraints in hypothesizing about cosmic origins. Now, if the scientist is left free of Biblical constraints, he's left free of the Lordship of Christ in that sphere. It's just as simple as could be. Now, in contrast, Abraham Kuyper agreed with the Reformation and rightly said, there is not a single square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord of all, does not cry out, mine. And by the way, it's not a theoretical lordship. There is no lordship if there is not some kind of an authoritative guidance. And there is no kingdom without authoritative guidance, and He has given us the authoritative guidance that we need. It's called the Bible. I have written out the axioms of even mathematics from the Bible showing His Lordship over those. And the reason it's even needed, God's written those on our heart, right? We ought to know mathematics. But the woke movement? They don't want anything absolute in life. Just read Oregon's most recent curriculum development. It's on the website. And they have injected critical race theory into every page of their math curriculum. And they state flat out that if you insist that two plus two always has to equal four, you are a racist. I mean, it's one of the most bizarre things out there. But in any case, we know that these axioms of mathematics works because God used them. Now, He's written on our hearts, so we know them anyway that way, right? But people suppress the truth that has been put into them. I've also written out the axioms of probability, statistics, science, logic, hermeneutics, and other areas. And Lord willing, those will all be put up onto the web on the Biblical Blueprints website within two or three or four or five years. We'll see. But those axioms enable all of life to stand under the authority of God's Word in a very concrete way and acknowledge His Lordship. Even your math must stand under the Lordship of Christ. But the primary area for today's disputation will be on the subject of Reformation hermeneutics. Now, hermeneutics is just a big word that means the rules for the proper interpretation of the Bible. And the question of debate between the Reformation and everyone else is similar to the questions for all of the other areas of disputation we've looked at. Does God alone decide those rules for interpretation by revealing the rules in the Bible? That would be the Reformation principle. Or does something outside of the Bible determine the rules for interpreting the Bible? That is the position of every other form of hermeneutics that is out there. Now, because evangelicals have abandoned a Sola Scriptura approach to hermeneutics, In other words, they don't believe that it's academically respectable to go to the Bible to determine how to interpret the Bible. They say that's circular reasoning. Just stop and think about it a moment. Can there be, you have to argue, I mean, if God is the highest authority, can you appeal to anything outside of God to prove God? No, even in Hebrews it says, since there is no authority greater than God, he had to swear by himself, right? And so they say it's circular reasoning, you cannot do that. And we say, no, we appeal to God because he's revealed how he wants his word to be interpreted to us. But anyway, they scoff at that. And as a result, they are all over the map on so many issues, including issues related to feminism, medical mandates, socialism, and in recent years, the LGBTQ movement. In my library, I have books by famous evangelicals that have adopted many divergent rules of hermeneutics from outside the Bible, and they have imposed them upon the Bible, and I'll just list a few for you. Dispensationalism is a foreign hermeneutic that you will not find Jesus or the apostles ever using. It has artificial rules of interpretation that actually contradict Jesus and the apostles. Now, I was once a dispensationalist, and I love dispensationalists. They're fellow brothers in the Lord. But when I saw Jesus and the apostles interpreting the Old Testament differently than what my dispensationalism mandated that it be interpreted, I instantly fell to my knees and confessed my arrogance before God. I wept before the Lord. I had no intention of violating His Lordship, but that's what I had unintentionally done. Well, that started me studying. how the prophets of the Bible interpret the Bible, how Jesus and the apostles did so. And I discovered that even among the Old Testament prophets interpreting earlier prophets, they do it so many times you can develop an entire system of hermeneutics just from them. William Column just recently at least I just recently found it. Did you just recently purchase that, William? Yeah. Anyway, he recently put this into the church library. It's titled Old Testament Use of the Old Testament. It's about a thousand pages, and it just goes through how do Old Testament prophets interpret earlier prophets? It's going back to the Reformation principle. I've got another book here. This is maybe not in the church library, but it's a great book. It's commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament by G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson. So this is a real thing. The prophets and Jesus and the apostles interpreted the Old Testament, and they're modeling for us how to interpret the Bible. Do you get what I'm saying here? This is not just theory. This is a real thing that we need to be aware of. In any case, dispensationalism violates this rule of sola scriptura by imposing foreign ideas that the Bible has to conform to. And so does so-called evangelical feminism, which is anything but evangelical in its hermeneutics. So does the Revoice Movement, which has gone soft on what the Bible says about sexuality and about identity, okay? So does the apocalypticism of the hyper-preterist movement, which, weirdly, has gone to some discredited Jewish Gnostic literature that the early church completely rejected, and they say that you have to read the Bible through the lens of this apocalyptic literature. Nonsense. You read the Bible through the lens that Jesus and the apostles gave. So does Michael Heizer's A&E hermeneutic, which insists you cannot understand the Bible unless you are immersed in the ancient Near Eastern literature and unless you read the Bible through the lens of that ancient Near Eastern literature. Okay? And by the way, it is the very literature that the Old Testament prophets told people to flee from, to ignore, to abandon. They did not want the people of the Old Testament to be immersed in what Michael Heiser wants you to be immersed in. They told them to leave it behind. That's Baalism. They wanted them immersed in the Scriptures. And yet Michael Heiser's hermeneutics have had a huge influence, a very negative influence upon Reformed circles. Now, he's a brilliant guy. And does he come up with some good stuff? Yeah. But don't drink lemonade that's got, you know, some poison in it. That's my point. I have books by evangelicals that show the negative influence of the hermeneutical ideas of liberation theology. Yes, that's a real thing in evangelical circles to apply Marxism to their study of the Bible. And then there's others that use deconstructionism. That's a real thing, especially in the woke movement. And source criticism, and the Talmudic hermeneutics of Jewish messianic movement, and black evangelical theology. I mean, even when you're looking at the more orthodox disparity between Meredith Klein's hermeneutics and James Jordan's hermeneutics, you find many areas in which they are imposing things you will not find in the Bible, but they're reading that into the Bible. And this is one of the reasons why Greg Bonson said both Kleinianism and interpretive maximalism of James Jordan, both of those are extremely dangerous hermeneutics. I totally agree with Greg Bonson on that. We must return to the Reformation, which is another way of saying we must return to the Bible. Now, I realize that your head may be spinning by this time, and you might be thinking, whoa, this is way, way, way beyond me. I'm just going to leave it up to the pastor to tell me what to believe. No, you cannot do that. You cannot do that. You too are responsible for understanding the Bible and applying it. So when you give your sons and daughters guidance on what is modest clothing and what is not modest clothing, and you're using the Bible, which I sure hope you are doing, You are engaged in hermeneutics. It's either good hermeneutics or bad hermeneutics, but you're engaged in hermeneutics automatically. Deuteronomy 6 commands fathers, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. That passage expects fathers to understand and apply the Bible to every area of life. Now, logically, that means it's possible for you to do it, which means you don't have to have a PhD. You don't have to have studied for years in some, you know, sophisticated system of hermeneutics in order to understand the Bible. Deuteronomy says any father can do this. Yay. I mean, we ought to be encouraged by that. That passage implies hermeneutics is achievable, which is super encouraging to me because the last 100 years have seen a bewildering array of competing very, very sophisticated forms of hermeneutics. Each of those systems has rejected the biblical hermeneutics as being too simplistic, and they've substituted very sophisticated systems of hermeneutics that take years of study to master, or as I prefer to say it, It takes years of academic study to become so stupid that you think Genesis 1 doesn't mean what it seems to mean, right? Our children can understand Genesis 1 better than these hyper-trained or brainwashed PhDs. Now, don't read it now, but on the back of your outlines, I have a satire of all of these hermeneutical systems, using them to interpret a stop sign that you see on the road. I think you'll get a kick out of it, but it actually does illustrate the problems that are out there. In any case, the Reformers preferred to be biblical rather than to be wise in the eyes of the world. Reformation hermeneutics was simply an attempt to return to the hermeneutics used by the biblical authors themselves. It is a sola scriptura hermeneutics. Jesus, the apostles, the prophets of the Old Testament showed us the way. And in one sermon, there's no way I can cover all of the rules of interpretation. that are laid out in the Bible. But I'm going to give you the seven most important ones so that you can see, no, this is a doable thing. It's really not that hard. Okay, rule number one from the Bible. Treat every word of the Bible as true. That's pretty easy, right? Just treat every word as true. Jesus said to the Father, your word is truth. Psalm 119, 160 says, the entirety of your word is truth. Now that's different than saying your word is true. Wayne Grudem explains the difference, and let me read him at length because this is super, super, super, super important. I want you to listen to this. He says, the difference between your word is truth, that's what Jesus said, what Psalm 119 said, and your word is true is significant. For this statement encourages us to think of the Bible not simply as being true in the sense that it conforms to some higher standard of truth, but rather to think of the Bible as itself the final standard of truth. The Bible is God's Word, and God's Word is the ultimate definition of what is true and what is not true. God's Word is itself truth. Thus, we are to think of the Bible as the ultimate standard of truth, the reference point by which every other claim to truthfulness is to be measured. Those assertions that conform with the Scripture are true, while those that do not conform with Scripture are not true. What then is truth? Truth is what God says, and we have what God says in the Bible. This doctrine of the absolute truthfulness of Scripture stands in clear contrast to a common viewpoint in modern society that is often called pluralism. Pluralism is the view that every person has a perspective on truth that is just as valid as everyone else's perspective. Therefore, we should not say that anyone else's religion or ethical standard is wrong. According to pluralism, we cannot know any absolute truth. We can only have our own views and perspectives. Pluralism is one aspect of the entire contemporary view of the world called postmodernism. Postmodernism would not simply hold that we can never find absolute truth. It would say there is no such thing as absolute truth. All attempts to claim truth for one idea or another are just the result of our own background, culture, biases, and personal agendas, especially our desire for power. Such a view of the world is, of course, directly opposed to a biblical view, which sees the Bible as truth that has been given to us from God. Now, you can see this kind of postmodernism when people interpret novels. My major in college was English literature, and it just drove me nuts that every classic novel that was out there had a Marxist interpretation, a Freudian interpretation, a feminist interpretation, LGBTQ, you name it, had all kinds of interpretations, and of course, to be academically respectable, we had to read them all. And I'm thinking, this is nonsense, absolute nonsense. And interestingly, if those critics wrote at the very time that the author was alive and the author said, no, that is not what I meant by this novel, it didn't matter. They said that this is what it means to me. Right? They said that their interpretation was just as valid as the novelists, but they're imposing a certain viewpoint on the novel, not deriving one from the novel. Well, the same thing happens in the interpretation of the Bible. People say, this is what the Bible means to me. And I say, I could care less what the Bible means to you. I want to know what it means to God. He's the one speaking, not you. I want to know what He's saying. What does He mean by what He's saying, not what do you mean by what He's saying? Do you get the point? Anyway, if you embrace this first rule, then you can instantly spot and reject many false interpretations in the church today. If a person says, like one famous radio teacher did, that Deuteronomy 21, 18-21 is outdated and no one believes that juvenile delinquents should be put to death, and that's a ridiculous law, we can say, no, you must have a bad hermeneutic because Jesus not only upheld that law, He upheld an even more severe law of cursing, you know, a child cursing his parents. If a person says that Jesus' statement about the creation of Adam and Eve was not history, it's just adopting the mythology of the ancient world in order to communicate a point, but He's not endorsing that mythology, as I heard one pastor say. You know he has a bad hermeneutic because every one of Jesus' words are true. And every word in Genesis 1 is true. I'll give you another example. One pastor here in Omaha told me, when Paul said that women can't teach or have authority over a man in 1 Timothy 2.12, Paul's chauvinism was keeping him from accurately communicating what God intended. But he did get it right in Galatians when he said that in Christ there is neither male nor female. Okay, we would say, no, rule number one automatically means your feminist hermeneutic must be messed up here. It must be wrong. A lot of errors that throughout the Old Testament would be recognized as errors if this rule was in place. Every word of the Bible is true. This was the Reformation doctrine. For example, Martin Luther said, I have learned to ascribe honor only to those books that are called canonical, such that I strongly believe that not one of their authors has erred. And I say, amen. Rule two is that Christ wants us to live by every word of the Bible. It's not just true and irrelevant. Okay? He wants us to live by every word. He wants that word to be applied with wisdom. And that means that the whole Bible is applicable and practical and livable. That rule is given in Matthew 4, 4, which states, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And notice he didn't just say this is for Israel. He said it's for man, for mankind. OK, so here's the question that immediately comes to people's minds. Wait a minute, Phil. What about the ceremonial law? We're not morally bound by the ceremonial law. How can we live by the ceremonial law when we're not morally bound by it? Easy. Ceremonial law is just chock full of principles and axioms for mathematics and geometry, and you're going to have a hard time living in the world without mathematics. Maybe you can get by without geometry, but I seem to get by since I always get lost. Call Kathy when I'm lost. But anyway, it's just chock full of that, and it's chock full of all kinds of principles that teach us about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yes, you can live even by the ceremonial law, even though you're not literally bound by it. In my sermon on Matthew 4.4, I showed how the Bible gives us axioms for over 60 disciplines of life. As 2 Peter 1 words it, I think it's verse 3, that God has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness. All things, right? It's practical. It's applicable. It's livable. 2 Timothy 3, 15-17 tells us that every word of the Old Testament Scriptures that Timothy grew up on are sufficient to thoroughly equip the man of God in the New Testament times for every good work. Those Old Testament Scriptures give us doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction, and righteousness, everything we need to take dominion before the Lord, to serve Him. Now, this ought to make you completely reject any hermeneutic that says the Old Testament is the canon for Israel and not intended for the Church. Pretty easy rule, right? And this is a rule highlighted by Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, and all the Reformers. I won't get into that. Third rule, restored by the Reformers, is that we must approach the text with humility rather than pride. The text is Lord of us, not vice versa. And I think this is a broken rule that gets so many PhDs into trouble. But you know, it's not just PhDs that fail to approach the text with humility. We, every one of us, can easily rationalize when we are reading the Word and think, well, you know, that doesn't really apply to me. Too many people have a system that they are defending when they read the Bible, and they're constantly trying to explain away problem texts that don't fit their system. Well, they don't fit their system because their system is wrong. and is not approaching the text with a humility and submission that says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Proverbs 11.2 says, with the humble is wisdom. That's significant. With the humble is wisdom. I don't trust the writings of proud, arrogant theologians. God does not honor the proud with wisdom from his word. In fact, James says the exact opposite. He says God is on a habit of resisting the proud, but giving more grace to the humble. And so if we want the Holy Spirit's illumination, we must be prepared to change our minds even if it's embarrassing. must be prepared to obey the Bible as soon as we understand it even if it is tough. In John 7, 17 Jesus said, if anyone wants to do His will he shall know concerning the doctrine whether it is from God or whether I speak on my own authority. Indicates how do you understand the Word and apply it? Jesus said well you've got to first of all be willing to obey it. If you don't want to obey it why would God open up the Word to you? And I'm encouraged by this rule because it means that any father and mother and child can approach the text of Scripture humbly, and that father will be miles ahead of a prideful Ph.D. expert who is trying to force the Scripture into his grid. John Calvin's comments on the Psalms are to the point. He says, Now, I will grant you it is impossible to approach the Bible without some preconceptions and some wrong ideas. We all have wrong ideas. But here's the point. Those can easily be corrected if we have humility. Graham Stanton worded it this way. Once exegesis is seen as an ongoing dialogue between the interpreter and the text, the interpreter's starting point becomes less important than his willingness and readiness to run the risk that the pre-understanding with which he comes to the text may well be refined or completely renewed. He must be prepared to be interpreted by the text. That is the necessary presupposition with which he must attempt to operate. The exegete cannot allow either his own personal bias or prejudice or his pre-understanding to dominate the text. It cannot be completely avoided, but they must be no more than a door through which the text is approached. The text is prior. The interpreter stands before it humbly and prays that through the scholarly methods and the questions with which he comes to the text, God's word will be heard afresh. This is the exciting task to which the interpreter is called, but it is also a dangerous task. God's Word sweeps away my comfortably secure presuppositions. It is a word of judgment as well as of grace. This is such an important rule of interpretation. Approach the text with submission and humility. The next rule that the Reformers gave was that hermeneutics involves more than simply reading the text. Some people, you're just naive, they're going to read it. I'm not going to interpret the text. But it does require interpretation, which takes at least some training in the Scripture. Peter complained about individuals who were unstable and untaught in hermeneutics, twisting the Scriptures written by Paul. He said, as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, Now the Pharisees, were one of those who refused to get their hermeneutics from the Bible, and they twisted the Scriptures. And so Jesus modeled to the people, He reinterpreted the Old Testament passages very simply and straightforwardly, and in the process contradicted their oral teachings. He was teaching them how to interpret the Old Testament properly. Sermon on the Mount is a case in point. and over he opposed what they orally taught, you have heard it said, and properly interpreted those Old Testament passages. And he did the same for the Apostles. Jesus said in Luke 24, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken, ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory? I mean, they were prejudiced against that concept of suffering. And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. Now, because of their preconceptions of what the kingdom would look like, Jesus had to interpret the Scripture properly for them. Interpretation. Nehemiah 8 verse 8 says the teachers didn't just read the Bible, it says, quote, they gave the sense and helped them to understand the reading. So you really do need to try to understand the principles of hermeneutics. If you're going to properly read it, and apply it to yourself and to your family. Protestant Reformation, what they did, and this was genius, they took hermeneutics away from the exclusive domain of academics. Academics still do need to study it, but they brought it back and restored it to the church and the family. Now granted, those principles of interpretation still need to be studied and applied, just like anything else good that we have in Christianity needs to be studied and applied. But the Reformers wanted every person to understand at least the basics of hermeneutics. Now let me recommend another book. This book here is a super, super simple introduction to the biblical hermeneutics of the Reformation. It's by Louis Burkoff, Principles of Biblical Interpretation. High schoolers ought to be able to read this quite accessibly. There are some more sophisticated ones, but this one gives you pretty much what you need to get your day-to-day exegesis. The fifth rule that was hammered home by the Reformers was the biblical rule of context. This rule states that the meaning of a phrase must be gathered from the context and cannot violate the meaning of the context. Now Jesus and the apostles were very good at correcting bad teaching by going to the context. I'll just give you one example. Jesus used this rule in opposing Satan's false interpretation of Psalm 91 when Satan was tempting him in Matthew 4 in the wilderness. Here's what Satan said. If you're the son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, he shall give his angels charge over you, and in their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone. Now Satan quoted the passage in Psalm 91 correctly. but he yanked it out of context. The context made clear that this promise of protection was only to one who walked in God's will, and God had not commanded Jesus to throw himself off that temple, only Satan had. And the context contradicted Satan's application in several ways. God had promised in that psalm special protection for those who stayed close to Him, verses 1 and 9. Submitted to His Lordship, verses 1, 2, 4, and 9. Trusted Him, verse 2. Loved Him, verse 14a. Called on His name, verse 14b. And who opposed Satan in spiritual warfare, verse 13. Ah, he conveniently left out verse 13 when he's quoting it. You know, because that would not do very well. So Satan completely abstracted verse 12 from its context and encouraged Jesus to do something foolhardy, throw himself off the temple and see if God would catch him, okay? And then Jesus appealed to the broader context of the rest of Scripture by quoting Deuteronomy 6.16, a verse that beautifully summarizes everything that I have just said about not tempting God. So he was using scripture to interpret scripture. So he's modeling how to go to the context. to help correct an error. Now just as a side note you may not have realized that Satan interprets the Scripture, he does. He is very motivated to deceive believers through bad hermeneutics. And I believe that there are demons behind every one of those lousy hermeneutical systems that I have mentioned to you earlier. Try to keep people from interpreting the Bible the way Jesus did. In 1 Timothy 4, 1 Paul talks about the doctrines of demons. Demons develop doctrine. Demons interpret the Scripture, wrongly, but they interpret it. Demons are very interested in hermeneutics. They will do everything in their power to keep you from using a radically biblical hermeneutics. And I'll use just one example of Mormons, a very demonic cult if you ask me. Mormons who take a phrase out of context in 1 Corinthians 8, 5 to try to teach polytheism. That phrase says, there are many gods and many lords. taken right from the Bible. It's biblical. There are many gods and many lords. Boom, there you go, they say. This proves that there are many gods, and we can even become gods. Well, until you read the context of the whole verse, which makes it clear that these quote-unquote so-called gods are not truly what they claim to be, because Paul says right in context, and let me quote verses 4 through 7, there is no other god but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we live." You know what? At the time of the Reformation, the Romanists were notorious at quoting things out of context in their debates. They even quoted the church fathers out of context. Now, thankfully, some of these Reformers were just brilliant, just beyond brilliant. They had memorized such vast portions of Scripture and such vast portions of the church fathers that as soon as they would misquote somebody, Calvin or one of these other reformers, they would say, ah, back up into the context, and they would, from their memory, quote the larger context of that church father who interpreted it the Protestant way. It was so embarrassing. Even the onlookers who were not educated could see the truth clearly, so context is important. The sixth rule the Reformers found in the Bible is that the Bible must be interpreted literally, by which they meant that we must treat it as literature read according to the normal grammatical sense of language and according to the kind of genre in which it was written, whether poetry, law, history, or prophecy. For example, I'll quote from Luther in his absolutely marvelous book against Erasmus. It's called The Bondage of the Will. If you've never read that, you must. It's a fantastic book. But he said to Erasmus, quote, we must everywhere stick to the simple, pure, and natural sense of the words that accords with the rules of grammar and the normal use of language as God has created it in man, unquote. Now where do the reformers even get this rule? That's where they got every other rule of hermeneutics. They got it from the Bible. So, for example, in Matthew 4-4, Jesus isn't telling us to just get the general idea of a passage. If we are to live by every word, then every word of a sentence counts, and we need to understand the relationship of those words with each other. That's grammar. Just simple grammar. In Matthew 5.18, Jesus not only said that God would preserve every yod, that's the smallest Hebrew consonant, but every tittle, which is an even smaller mark, and He insisted we're to obey every letter of the Bible. Well, such obedience to jots and tittles requires some grammatical understanding. In Galatians 3.16, Paul bases a major doctrine upon determining whether an Old Testament noun was plural or singular, seeds or seed. Now, I'm giving all of these examples of grammar in the Bible because I know some of you kids hate grammar. Cut it out. You need to study grammar. Study it diligently. That's the only way you're going to be able to obey God and understand the Scripture and be able to live it out in the Scripture. So, study grammar. Jesus appealed to the present tense in a verse in the Old Testament to prove that souls continue to live after the body dies, something the Sadducees did not believe. So these constant references to grammar means that the words, sentences, paragraphs, and other divisions should be understood in the normal grammatical sense in which they were used. Now obviously the Bible has metaphors and similes, other figurative language, but even those are interpreted literally in that the images picture a true objective reality, not some postmodern idea that you insert into the text. The Bible is not a mystical code that only the super intelligent can understand, you know, because they got some kind of a decoder ring. on their finger. Deuteronomy 6 says that God intended to be able to be understood by every father. Now here's where it gets controversial. The Reformers said that people who allegorize are violating this rule and are inserting their own ideas into the text and making it impossible for the average person to do the same. They believed that the allegorists were twisting the scripture to make it into a launching pad for their own creative ideas. It's really a kind of postmodern thinking long before there was postmodernism. But the Reformers said that the Bible itself will identify all types and symbols. And so the sixth rule laid down by Christ and the apostles is that the Bible must be interpreted literally according to its normal grammatical sense, not allegorically. Let me quote from Calvin. He says, And the other Reformers said things very similar. Now I don't judge people who allegorize because they're doing it out of ignorance. I try to instruct them on this. Luther had a hard time undoing this habit in his life. Let me quote from him. He said, And yet I was aware that allegories were mere empty speculations and the froth, as it were, of the Holy Scriptures. It is the historical sense alone which supplies the true and sound doctrine. The seventh rule given by the Reformers was that every word of the Bible can only have one intended meaning in any one place and in any one relation. and they gave many applications of that one meaning, but they insisted that the original meaning of the phrase was one. So here's what Luther said. One should not, therefore, say that Scripture or God's Word has more than one meaning. The meaning of Scripture is a sure, simple, and unequivocal meaning upon which our faith may build without wavering." And all of the Reformers said much the same. And of course, they derived this from the Bible as well. In Luke 8, when the disciples ask, what does this parable mean? Jesus did not give multiple meanings. He gave one. The interpretation of the Old Testament ceremonies in the book of Hebrews is straightforward. It does not exhibit manifold meanings. And there are many, many other examples of this principle. The Westminster Confession of Faith worded it this way, the full sense of every biblical text is not manifold but one. Or as the Puritan writer John Owen worded it, if the scripture has more than one meaning, it has no meaning at all. Harold Camping should have, you know, he's in heaven. These are brothers, okay? I'm not being disputatious to demean them, but I am demeaning their hermeneutics. They're a false hermeneutics. Harold Camping should have paid attention to that statement because he turned everything into more than one meaning. Everything. Owen said, if the scripture has more than one meaning, it has no meaning at all. By that he means it's a rubber nose. You can twist to mean anything you want to mean, and it's so subject to postmodernism. Now, what about symbols like the rock in the wilderness? Do not such symbols falsify this rule? Didn't Paul say in 1 Corinthians 10, 4 that the rock represented Jesus? Yes, but that is still one meaning, and it is the Bible itself that identifies it as a type or symbol. All symbols or types have a singular symbolic purpose, not layers of meaning. Symbols are anchored in literal history, but they serve to point to redemptive history, and thus the literal rock that Moses struck, that was intended to point forward to Jesus being struck in judgment by Christ so that the Holy Spirit could be poured forth upon the Church. Likewise, though the vision being interpreted in Daniel 8 was a rich symbol, the vision as a whole had, quote, one meaning, according to verse 15, just one. It represents in pictorial form the future of two empires, and each word in that vision gives one and only one meaningful contribution to the overall picture. And thus the text says, Quote, the male goat is the kingdom of Greece, unquote. And therefore we should not be trying to make that multiple kingdoms like so many people in their commentaries do. It's one kingdom. Okay, enough on that. Many other cool hermeneutical rules in the Bible, such as the rule of definition, rule of original use, the rule of historical background, the rule of Old Testament precedent, rule of non-contradiction. You could go on. There's quite a number that we do need to master, but every one of those rules has dozens of examples of Jesus, the apostles, or the prophets using the rule to interpret an earlier prophecy. Now, once the great axioms project of biblical blueprints goes public, all of the axioms of hermeneutics will be up there as well. But in the meantime, I do encourage you, don't borrow this from me, buy your own copy, okay? I encourage you, by Louis Burkos, Principles of Biblical Interpretation. It's at least an introduction, and it's a book high schoolers should be able to understand. But this morning, I wanted to at least introduce you to the concept so you can realize biblical hermeneutics is not scary or complicated. It does take some study, but it is accessible to everyone. And that was the point of the Reformation, to make the Bible understandable to even the common plowboy. When people look down on you for not embracing the latest fad in hermeneutics, Don't be embarrassed by the simplicity of Reformational hermeneutics. Rejoice in it and pray for a return of the church to the Reformation on this and other areas of doctrine. May the Lord give us increasing confidence that the Bible is sufficient for everything that we need in order to glorify Him. Amen. Father, I pray that people would not be lost in the multitude of words, but that these Reformation doctrines would grip our hearts, excite our hearts, and give us enthusiasm for spreading the gospel, but also spreading the blueprints that you have established in your word. We love your word. It is a perfect word. And with David we say, oh, how love I thy law as my meditation all of the day. Father, may there be much fruit that comes from our meditating and studying upon Your Word. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.