As I'm going rather slowly through what I wanted to bring to you today, you have a choice. Maybe that's unwise. Instead of going on blow by blow, as it were, with the new evangelicalism, I think you might find it helpful if now I branch off into a more positive aspect and focus on the most serious area where the New Evangelicals are taking us down the wrong road. Now that's contentious because our brother who spoke earlier very much appreciated all he had to say. But he may say that the compromise with Rome is the most serious, and I suppose that's right, really. But short of that, what I would like to talk about is the most serious thing that the New Evangelicals have done, and that is to wreck the proper approach to Holy Scripture. They have wrecked the Reformation method of interpretation of Scripture. And by approaching this, it does enable me to spend time on what is the correct approach, and what we should be doing, and how we can get the maximum benefit from God's Word. And I think perhaps you would prefer me to do that. Would that be right? to veer into a positive direction. Well then I'd like to turn to 2 Timothy, I think you'll know where I'm going, 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 16. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, in sanctification, that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." One of the things that the new evangelical teachers have done is to take Bible-believing evangelicals ninety percent of the way back to the old German rationalism of the last century. It is quite amazing the extent to which they've done this. If, for instance, you are able to look at Dean Bergen's book on biblical interpretation. It isn't in print now, but you may be able to come across it. It's a wonderful collection of sermons preached by him in the 1880s, preached at Christ Church, Oxford. And he was a a stalwart for the old ways and for the faith. You probably know his work against Westcott and Halt on the text of scripture. But he wrote this book and it was sermons to theological students for the ministry of the Church of England and he was giving them a series of warnings and in this book he chiefly warns against the German rationalism coming into their thinking and into their churches and how it destroys the correct method of Bible interpretation. When I read this wonderful series of sermons by Bergen I was amazed, because the things he was teaching against then are exactly the things that the New Evangelicals are saying now. It is quite remarkable. There is hardly anything between them. If you read a book of Professor Walter Kaiser, who used to be at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a hotbed of New Evangelicalism, Deerfield, near Chicago. Well, you read any book by him on hermeneutics and it's pretty similar to anything that came from the German rationalists in the last century. So I want to try to explain this. It encourages a most shallow, anti-spiritual view of scripture. Spiritual exegesis, of the kind the reformers held to, not the kind the medieval interpreters held to, is scorned and spurned and the traditional rules rejected. In fact you can say that if Charles Haddon Spurgeon had been trained in a new evangelical seminary and he had taken seriously the method of exegesis and interpretation which is taught, he could never have preached hardly any of his sermons. None of the great worthies of the pulpit could have preached their sermons sermons that we stand in awe of today, which were used in revival and reformation, none of them could have preached those sermons if they had been interpreting the Bible according to the rules of the New Evangelicals. And almost any theological college you can go to in Britain, if it isn't liberal, if it claims to be evangelical, it is probably teaching the new evangelical hermeneutic, or method of Bible interpretation. Now, some Bible-loving men come out of those colleges and they abandon all they've learned. and by instinct they begin to interpret the Bible in a pastoral, spiritual manner. But if you were to take seriously what these people are teaching, as many do, you'd have hardly any pastoral lessons or spiritual sense, any message from God in the entire Bible. Now, Dr. Kaiser has done us something of a favor, because having taught the method of interpretation, which I'm going to tell you about before we go to the positive, He says this, to help you to work this out, I am myself writing a series of commentaries based on these principles. So I've looked with great interest at most of his commentaries, and I'm sorry to put it like this, you may think I'm contentious, they are dry as dust. They are just a bit of history, a bit of geography, a bit of anthropology, a bit of culture, bit of basic biblical data that you could glean for yourself anywhere and no message no meaning except here and there a very simple observation which is scarcely worth the trouble of reading no pastoral application and they're teaching this method to men who've got to feed souls all their lives from the word of God So this is something I feel very concerned about, and it's something which is not much articulated among us these days, so I'd like to say a few things. First of all, the New Evangelical Hermeneutics says that the Bible must be treated like any other book. It's what we call the ultra-scientific approach to interpretation. Now, they don't necessarily believe that the Bible is like any other book. To be fair to them, their personal opinion may be that it's most unlike any other book because it's God's holy word. But they say when you interpret it, you must treat it like any other book. You must be absolutely ruthlessly objective and behave as though it were just a human book, because otherwise you'll be misusing it, misinterpreting it. There is a phrase that's about today, the divine library. You heard that? The Bible referred to as the divine library. Well, that's actually a liberal phrase, and the New Evangelicals love to use it. But that's a horrible term you should never use, because you see, it plays into the hands of those who say the Bible is a collection of books by quite different people with different ideas. The Bible isn't a library, it's one book. maybe humanly, channels through many authors, but it's one book, spoken, if we can put it in human terms, spoken in an instant by the Lord. The Bible is truth. It emanated from Christ in a split second. But even that is not an accurate thing to say. In eternity past, and was channeled through human authors, closely superintended by God, so that every word they gave is just what God meant to be there. That's the Bible, it isn't a library, it isn't the ideas of people. But New Evangelicalism has decided that the only way you can get the respect of liberals and others is by playing their tune and interpreting the Bible their way. And so they've conceded this and they treat the Bible like any other book. So I could have read, I've lost it now, but I could have read in that Nottingham Statement a long passage where they say, we believe that the Bible should be seen inside its cultural horizons. It's a human production. We've got to treat it as though it was. Don't impose upon it divine ideas and presuppositions. We deny that. The old-fashioned evangelical following the Reformation says the Bible has its own rules and we've got to follow them. The New Evangelical has rejected the Bible's own rules for so long now, I don't think any of them know what they are. And my evidence for this is I was lecturing at a certain place in the USA, and I didn't know there was in the audience a writer and educator, a seminary professor, whose field is hermeneutics, and I was laying out the positive rules of the Bible, and he came to me afterwards and virtually said he'd never heard of any of them. Isn't that amazing? New evangelicals have been teaching semi-liberal concepts for so long, they've lost touch with the old literature and the old rules. So, second point, I'm going to tell you how they have redefined what we call the historical, grammatical, or many writers the other way around, grammatical, historical, and it's more conventional, approach to Holy Scripture. Do you know what that is? The Reformers spoke about it. The evangelicals have always spoken about the grammatical, historical approach in the interpretation of scripture. Well, it simply means, though it's hard to define in two words, it simply means that when you're interpreting the Bible, you give the first crack to the plain sense. You give the first shot to the plain, grammatical sense of the passage. The reformers brought this up. They didn't want to be like the Catholic interpreters of the past. They didn't look at the plain sense, or if they did, they said that's just about what it doesn't mean. They are read in levels, layers of fanciful allegorical meanings. And they almost never looked at the plain sense. So the Reformation grammatical historical approach says first of all you must take very seriously the actual words, their grammatical meaning, their plain sense, and you must always be anchored to that. And secondly, you must observe the historical context. You won't be bound by it, but you must observe it. And you must say carefully, in what circumstances is the inspired author speaking? Because the first sense for the passage must be assigned to that audience to whom he is speaking. Now, it may be that he's speaking something much deeper, much profounder. For example, Isaiah and Jeremiah deal at times with their immediate situation, then they deal with medium-term prophecies, in the case of Isaiah, before the event, how the people of God would be taken into captivity. Then they deal with longer term prophecies, such as how they'll be delivered out again. Jeremiah, of course, is much later. And then they deal with distant prophecies, such as how Christ will come, and what the New Testament church will look like. So they are prophesying about things, prophecies to be fulfilled in different periods, as you well know. And sometimes these prophecies have a double sense, because they prophesied the deliverance of the Jews, say Isaiah, from Babylon, which in its turn is an historical, literal as it were, visual aid prophecy of the New Testament and how Christ would come and lead out his people from the Church of the Jews and bring in a new time of glory and expansion. so you see they said things which were not intelligible to most people at their time unless they thought about them very deeply and had spirit given light so there is a mixture of warnings to the people who were listening to them who were ninety percent godless and spiritual treasures for the people who were spiritual and might understand vaguely the distant future and what they were speaking of but chiefly these prophecies come alive to us If you boxed it into the historical context, you wouldn't be allowed to look at those possibilities. Does that make sense to you? You say, how do I know the difference? When Isaiah is prophesying about the deliverance of the Jews from captivity, or the coming of the Lord, or the Lord's return, how ever can I know the difference? There's a simple rule. Think of an aircraft taking off. When Isaiah is speaking about earthly prophecies that have an earthly fulfillment in the immediate historical future, the aircraft's running along the runway, and its wheels are still on the ground. Then there comes a time when the aircraft lifts off and its wheels leave the ground. And the language of the Prophet becomes absolutely incapable of earthly fulfillment in a literal sense. The language is too grand, the language is too extravagant for earthly fulfillment. The aircraft's taken off, we're talking about the spiritual future now, the Church of Christ, the first, the second, comings of the Lord, the eternal glory. when the aircraft takes off. You can tell that for yourself. Oh, Isaiah, this language is not capable of earthly fulfillment. You've got multitudes walking across the heads of people, stationed all over the ocean. What sort of a picture is that? It couldn't happen. The aircraft's off the ground. These are pictures of glorious spiritual future events in the New Testament age. Now, I mustn't digress too much, but this is what the New Evangelicals have done. They say, we believe in the traditional Reformation method of grammatical historical interpretation. And then they say what they mean. And do you know what they've done? They've rewritten the definition. Instead of saying, this is just the first step in interpretation which gives the first crack of the whip to the literal meaning, bearing in mind the historical context, this is Dr. Kaiser's newfangled version of this old method. The sole task of the interpreter, it's loaded right from the beginning, the sole task of the interpreter is to discover the meaning intended by the original human author to be understood by his immediate hearers. That's entirely different. That's not the Reformation method of interpretation. The sole task is to try to figure out what Isaiah meant to say and meant to be understood by his immediate hearers. But hold on a minute. According to my Bible, Isaiah didn't understand a lot of the things that he said. According to my Bible, Jeremiah actually studied his own prophecies, and so did Daniel study his prophecies. These prophets didn't necessarily understand what they said. It's no good trying to find what Isaiah figured out in his mind and meant to say, which would have been tangible and meaningful to his immediate hearers. because a good deal of what he meant, what he said, God gave him and he was puzzled at it and he prayed, why doesn't the Apostle Peter tell us this? They searched their own prophecies to work out things that didn't seem to add up and didn't seem complete. And if they couldn't understand, well of course the people needed to be taught. But you see what the New Evangelical has done? No, no, there's hardly anything of a spiritual character in the Bible. That's why when you look at your IVP, Tyndale commentaries and all these things, that's why there's so little message, so little application. They all believe this way, the New Evangelicals. The sole task of the interpreter is to figure out what that Old Testament spokesman meant to say. and delimit it there. Even evangelicals, even Brother Morrison, I think you would have run into this in Scotland, even in a reformed circle, this cruelly limited new evangelical method of exegesis. Now we say, yes, you've got to have the plain sense, you've got to bear in mind the historical situation, but that's only your first step. We believe that those inspired spokesmen often said things far greater than they understood. Dr. Kaiser and the New Evangelicals say, no, they never spoke better than they knew. That's a big difference. You see, you've taken away half the depth and profundity and the spirituality of the Bible if your idea is only to get from it a kind of human message that those people would have understood and intended. Or let me illustrate it another way. There's one or two of you looking puzzled. Take Jeremiah. If you pick up Thompson's famous modern commentary, he's an evangelical, on Jeremiah, or many others, you will find Jeremiah, the entire book, interpreted within these limitations. Ah, the problem is that Jerusalem was about to fall. The problem is that poor old Jeremiah has got to warn the people about all sorts of things. So when we look at Jeremiah, we see a prophet trying to warn the people that they're about to be destroyed and trying to bring about a change in the attitude of the whole of Israel to get the old worship restored and to have them delivered safely from the condemnation which God is going to bring upon them. So there's masses of history in the commentary, masses of geography. Everything is under this general umbrella. This book is only about Jeremiah's efforts to turn the whole nation around to avoid their destruction. But how should you look at Jeremiah? Well, C.H. Spurgeon, if I may mention him again, he preaches many gospel messages from Jeremiah. You can't do that, Spurgeon. Jeremiah wasn't preaching the gospel. Haven't you heard Dr. Kaiser and the New Evangelicals? He was only warning the people to try to avoid their national disaster. He wasn't speaking as though in view is all people in all generations and they've to be one as souls, but he was. That's the point, he was. Jeremiah is only partially interested in winning the whole nation. because God has already told him the whole nation will not be one they will be doomed and he's going to be a last stand messenger to them but there is actually no hope God has already told him in a sense you are to preach to individuals you're to preach gospel arguments to individuals, reasoning with them and urging them about their own spiritual state. And the gospel arguments I will give you, the great visual aids, illustrations, will ring down the centuries from Christian pulpits in the proclamation of the gospel. The New Evangelicals have bottled it all up to the day. They've said no He sat down and God inspired him, but God only inspired him in a limited way to write things which he understood at the time on the spot. So I've given you just one example of how things differ. So the New Evangelical says away with all these preachers who see Christ all through the Bible. Oh, there are prophetic passages, of course. Ha, ha, they say. These old-time country preachers, uneducated men, who actually saw Christ in the books of Moses. Why, one of them has the burning bush standing for Christ. Ha, ha, ha. What overactivity of the imagination. How ridiculous, say the New Evangelicals. but now I'm going to borrow a leaf from Dean Bergen's book and I'm going to turn you over, if you will, to Acts chapter 28 and I think this will illustrate things very well for me Acts chapter 28 and I'm going to read verse 23 this is Paul at the end of his earthly career as a messenger of Calvary and when they had appointed him a day there came many to him into his lodging to whom he expounded and testified the kingdom of God persuading them concerning Jesus both out of the law of Moses and out of the prophets from morning till evening however did Paul manage that because Certainly in the books of Moses, Christ is not mentioned. If you take the New Evangelical method of interpretation, you're not allowed to see him even alluded to there. And yet Paul had sought him so much in the Old Testament, he preached from morning till evening. He couldn't stop. There was so much to talk about. How is that if we're not supposed to go looking for Christ in these passages? And then look at chapter twenty-eight, just back a page or two, and verse twenty-two. Sorry, chapter twenty-six, verse twenty-two. Here is Paul defending himself, saying in these words, having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come, that Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise from the dead, and should show light unto the people and to the Gentiles. Where do you find that in the first five books of the Bible? Where do you find any definitive statement that Christ should be the first to rise from the dead? But Paul says it's there. The New Evangelicals won't let us interpret the Bible in a spiritual manner. And Bergen says in fine polemical manner, he says, show me where these things are in the Pentateuch. Show me, he says. You cannot do it, he says to the German rationalists. You cannot show me Christ in the Pentateuch unless you see him in the betrayal of Joseph. Unless you see him in the Paschal Lamb. Unless you see him in the law of the offerings. Unless you see him even in the Ark of Noah. If you don't see him in those things, he isn't there. and you cannot see him. Well, how do you see him in those things? I'll tell you how you see him in those things. You let the New Testament interpret the Old. You listen to the New Testament when it tells you that the Old speaks of him. And so you see those great principles and events of the New Testament in the Old. No, say the New Evangelicals. You mustn't take the freight of the New Testament and freight it down to the Old Testament and dump it on its head. They even use these kind of irreverent terms. But you must. The Bible tells you you must. And let me just read you a couple of other passages in John chapter 5 and verse 46. It's not only Paul that says this, but it's the Lord himself. Verse 46, he's speaking to those unbelieving Jews. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my word? And without tiring you, one other little verse on this, just turn to Romans chapter 10. if you wish to, and here's a wonderful passage. This is the Apostle Paul. For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law in this way that the man which doeth those things shall live by them if you're going to get righteousness by the law you've got to keep the law and all of it verse six but the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise say not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven that is to bring Christ down from the dead or who shall descend into the deep and so on and you know what Paul is doing here He's quoting Deuteronomy chapter 30 in verse 12. He's saying, the righteousness which is by faith, Moses proclaimed that also in order to warn the Jews of the fate that was awaiting them if they thought they could please God by their own righteousness. On the other hand, he says, Moses also speaks of the righteousness which is by faith. And these are the words that he uses. And they're plucked straight out of Deuteronomy chapter 30. Now that to me is wonderful. You see, Moses speaks of me, he says. Paul then says, Moses speaks of the righteousness which is by faith. But you know, if you were following the New Evangelical method of interpretation, and you went to Deuteronomy 30, there's no way in the world you would think he was speaking the righteousness which is by faith. Unless you let the Old Testament tell you to expect that, So, this leads me to another point, and I hope this next point will clear away any fog in your mind. Perhaps I won't race to it so quickly, I'll keep my method and then it'll all add up much better together. The New Evangelicals also say that the text of Holy Scripture only has one sense. Single sense, they call it. And they blame this on the reformers. Well, of course, the reformers did teach single sense. But what they meant was this. God has a meaning, not many levels of meaning. You can't take the same few words and say, they mean this for today, they also mean this, they also mean this, they also mean this, and get half a dozen different things out of them. But, the New Evangelicals have seized on this, and they say, as far as the Bible is concerned, each passage, each text, only has a single sense, and very soon that becomes simple sense. You read their commentaries, they're so shallow, there's nothing in them. masses of technicality, virtually no message. It's become simple sense, not single sense. You see, the old-fashioned evangelical looks at the text and he says, oh well, there is one sense in the sense that there is one primary meaning of this verse. But, because it is God's Word, There are probably other arguments and principles and observations made in it also. Well, you know how true that is. Why the statesman will scrutinize the text of some diplomatic statement made by some other world government. to see the whole meaning which is there. And this is God's divine message. One verse may have an immediate impact on us. Now we're not changing the meaning to say, but in making that argument there are probably all sorts of other subsidiary things. And we teach the students this as a rule of interpretation. When you're expounding a verse, a passage, you must make up your mind what is the primary theme. Then you must try and list as many secondary themes as you can reasonably, intelligently, sensibly see in the passage. And sometimes even as you do that, you decide one of your secondary themes is much more important than your primary theme. And you change your mind. But the meaning of scripture is deep and profound. Then another thing the New Evangelicals say at Asher Ha'ari, is that you must never interpret any passage by something that was revealed later. This is very popular. No prior interpretation. No prior passage used. Rather, only prior passages used. So, for instance, you must not interpret the Old Testament in the light of the New. You must not interpret the Pentateuch in the light of the Psalms or the Prophets. Why? Well, because the original author didn't know the Psalms. He didn't know the prophets. He didn't know the New Testament. So how can they have anything to do with what he's saying? Do you see that? That is the de-spiritualizing of the Bible. The whole Bible, which was given in a split second in the mind of God, It interrelates. It's a magnificent structure of interrelating truth. Each part verifying the other part. And you must interpret the early books of the Bible in the light of the later books of the Bible. Do you know, it's grand to read old John Calvin in any of his commentaries in the New Testament. He interprets the epistles of Paul. He says, Paul says and then in the next sentence he says the scripture says and then in the next sentence he says the holy spirit says he keeps on like that all the time because as far as calvin is concerned it's all one and the same if paul said it under inspiration it's what the holy spirit says the scripture it's all one you don't say like the new evangelicals oh to understand what paul is saying we must get into the mind of paul rather like people who are commentating on Shakespeare do? Find out about his upbringing. Comment on his background. See where he got this idea, that idea from. See what the culture of the times says. And if we can figure all that out and work out what as a man he may have thought of in that context, then we know what he means. No you don't. Because what God says has nothing whatever to do with Paul's upbringing. or Paul's tastes, or Paul's experiences. God would channel to him truths and messages totally unrelated to his past experience and background. All that is of no help. You always look at Scripture as though God said it. The New Evangelicals have taken that away in their semi-liberal method of interpretation. Here's another big one, friends. The New Evangelicals, in their rules for interpretation, pretty well all agree on this. They say you must never bring any presuppositions to the text. That's not interpretation. You must never have any expectations. When you look at a passage of scripture, you must never have any preconceived ideas about the kind of thing it will be saying. Otherwise you'll never find out what it's really saying. Now, I know we have to be careful here. I know it is possible to prove anything from the Bible. if you take enough liberties. And of course we mustn't impose our views on the Bible and just use the Bible as a means of confirming what we think. But we must bring presuppositions and expectations to the Bible. You know, this is one of the Bible's own methods of interpretation. as I'll show you in a few moments uh... the New Testament tells us that whenever we look at the Old Testament we must have a kind of grid or list of expectations in our minds as to what we expect to see and if we don't have that list if we don't bring those expectations we shall misinterpret the passage in other words if we are expecting to see Christ and his church and salvation, and Christian doctrines, the doctrine of God, the doctrine of man, the doctrine of salvation. If we are expecting to see these kind of things, and as a pastor, if we're expecting to see pastoral lessons from the people of God, we won't read them in, but our minds will be open and alert to see those things. If we were doctors, we would have expectations. When somebody presents and is ill, we have our mind stored with a number of indications or symptoms which we're looking for. If the doctor was to say, I want to put my head through some sort of mind-blowing machine, which will evacuate all my medical knowledge so that I look at this patient with absolutely no expectations, well, I wouldn't want to have such a doctor. Would you? We might as well treat ourselves than do that. You must have expectations. You must know the kind of things that God has written the Holy Scriptures for. And you must learn them in the New Testament and bring them to the Old. Well then, as time is going so fast, I'm going to give you... I've lost track of the closing time. Oh, it's not so bad. Take a three-minute break, and then I'm going to do all positive for the rest of the day. Non-contentious positive, which you'll rejoice in. So just a three... And please, those friends who went outside and took... This shows the... When we come to the way in which we handle the Bible, this is the core of everything, isn't it? And it shows how dangerous the new movement is. Though it does swallow up a lot of good-hearted people, and we want to rescue them from it, there are a lot of good people involved in this. who are being taken further and further off the track. Now, the first rule for the interpretation of scripture in the reformed tradition and uh... this will lead on to some of the others is what we call the observance of the analogy of faith that's a technical term which I'll explain the analogy of faith and in simple terms it's based on first corinthians chapter two verses twelve to thirteen what it means is this that when we are trying to determine the meaning of any text We constantly look at it in the light of comparing it with all the faith. This is why you need systematic theology. This is why we often encourage young Christians, unless they're very young people, as soon as they're converted, as soon as they can, to read something like Watson's Body of Divinity. where all the unmistakable, incontrovertible certain doctrines of the Bible are arranged in a systematic order. That's systematic theology. What's the value of it? Well, don't you see, you then have a standard by which to assess everything. I mean, if somebody writes you a letter, it's a friend of yours, an old friend, and they ramble about and use a kind of shorthand expressions which you understand because you know that person, express themselves casually, but you know what they mean because you know their views and all the rest of it. But if I were to read this letter which had been written to you by a close friend, I might get completely the wrong impression of what he or her was saying, because I don't know that person. Now, the whole Bible is a letter from God. and it helps if you know the author, then you can understand better what he's saying. So systematic theology is to take out the essentials of the faith, the great doctrines, the main things which all of us can see are definitely in the Bible again and again and again and they are beyond dispute. And then we take those doctrines and we say, because the Bible is God's Word and it's absolutely consistent and every person is totally inspired in it, nothing in the Bible will contradict these doctrines. So for instance, if I find in the Bible the unassailable doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, And there it is, cut, dried, proved, so obvious in so many ways, and I won't get into explaining why. And I come across a text which seems to suggest to my mind that the believers can be lost. I say, I've misunderstood that text. because it is in conflict with the body of doctrines which are so clear and so indisputable everything else in the bible must be consistent with those doctrines if only the charismatics would do this if only they would learn some systematic theology look at each of their big points in the light of these things, well, they couldn't go on. This is the first rule of interpretation. We learn the great doctrines of the faith and We understand all the Bible in the light of those things, because the Bible is wonderfully consistent. I could give many illustrations, but I must go on in time. The second rule of interpretation is similar to it. We not only compare the passage we're looking at with all the doctrines of the faith, essentials of the faith, we also compare that passage with other passages which are speaking about the same thing. We don't interpret one passage completely out of context with all the others. I mentioned an example earlier on. We don't read the book of Judges without reading that vital chapter in Hebrews which is talking about the same thing and mentioning the same people. We compare scripture with scripture, always. And if there is no scripture to compare with the one we're reading, we are especially careful. You never build any great Christian activity or doctrine on one verse of the Bible. Everything that God means us to do, He has the habit of repeating in different ways many times. We compare scripture with scripture. Then thirdly, we always observe the context I could give an example, for instance, in the letter of James, I won't turn to it, but in chapter 5, he tells us about praying for the sick. And he says, the prayer of faith shall raise the sick. And some people completely misunderstand that. Instead of understanding that that means that prayer is answered according to God's will, if you believe in Him, They say, oh no, you've got to believe that this person is actually going to be healed. You've got to grit your teeth and summon your willpower, and you've got to really believe this is going to happen. That's the prayer of faith. And if you can only believe like that, it always will happen. But you see, they haven't interpreted the passage in its context. Because in the previous chapter, James has given a severe telling off. to Christian people who say, tomorrow I'm going to do this and do that and do that, something else, and do not say, according to the will of God. James says in everything, even your business trips, it's according to the will of God. And so it is in the next chapter when he says pray for healing. That great rule stands over it according to the will of God. But you see, if you don't read the passage before and the passage afterwards, you can make the most horrific mistakes. And that's, I think, pretty obvious to all of us. And then again, we look at the type of literature, you could call that number four, and number five, the meaning of the word. We're interpreting a passage, we want to know that we really understand the meaning of the word, and if we've got access to some of the beautiful word studies that have been written, it may help us. But I won't dwell on that too much, because in fairness to them, the New Evangelicals do that much too. But most of the other things they do not do. And I want to talk particularly for a few moments about expectations and presuppositions, as I said I would. And I'd appreciate it if you'd like to turn to Romans chapter 15 and verse 4. Here is how the Apostle Paul got his messages for preaching from the Old Testament. He says, for whatsoever things were written aforetime, all the Old Testament, every bit of it, were written for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope. Isn't that wonderful? Those journeyings in the wilderness, Why were they written down? For us, the New Testament Church, so that we should have pastoral lessons from them. Great lessons upon how God deals with his people, what he requires of them, what the consequences of obedience or disobedience will be, how God loves to bless them. Pastoral lessons as well as doctrinal lessons. And the Apostle is most specific here. He says that there are lessons in patience and comfort here. So as a pastor, what you want to do, or as an A student of the Word of God, you take a piece of paper, which hopefully will live in the back of your Bible, and you write, first of all, I am looking in the Old Testament for patience and comfort to me as a New Testament Christian. That's what it's written for. God says so. Don't you see that's an expectation? It is a presupposition. It's what we call presuppositional exegesis. When you go to the Old Testament, you have in your mind some of the things you expect to find there. This isn't just about a burning bush. This isn't just about curious events. This is about Christ and about lessons for the New Testament Christians. And we must go to the Old Testament expecting to see that sort of thing. You get it again in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. This is the big difference between old time evangelicals and new evangelicals. How you use the scripture. 1 Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 6 speaking about the wilderness events the Old Testament in general now these things were our examples to the intent we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted and then the passage goes on at great length in verse 11 now all these things happened unto them for N samples some of the modern versions say X samples again It's a problem with modern versions, they often cut corners and use the wrong words. You'll find your authorized version says N-samples. So you say, I don't know what that means. Well, it is an old-fashioned word, but there's a difference between an example and an N-sample. An example, as the term is used, is somebody or some people who do something to set us an example, whether it's a good one or a bad one. An N-sample is a pattern about how things should be done. and how, it's quite a different thing, New Testament church patterns, even in the wilderness journeys, you could learn church lessons there. So there we find another little crop of things, and if we read the whole list, things that we expect to find in the Old Testament, and then back to 2 Timothy chapter 3, and those famous words, Look at them. This is the Apostle Paul saying you must have presuppositions. You must, like the doctor with his knowledge of various symptoms, you must go to the Old Testament with a list of what you expect to find there. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, all of it. and is profitable for doctrine, all of it. Doctrine in the book of Genesis. You know, I don't go very much with these people who speak a lot about progressive revelation. They're right in a way. There's no doubt spiritual truth blazes more gloriously from the New Testament and more plainly than it does from the old, but you know, progressive revelation is not a good term, because it suggests that in the earliest days, in the early books of the Bible, there are things that are not in the later books. You wouldn't expect to find certain doctrines there, because things have moved on. And that's not true, you know. A better illustration, though this isn't ideal, is that the Bible in a way is like a baby in the first books, progressing to full adulthood. The baby has all its fingers. Baby has arms, legs, tongue, yes, we know that, mouth and so on, ears, nose, it's all there. But yes, there's some development. But when you look at a baby, you don't say, is that a human being? Of course not. It's all there. The great things are recognizable. You find the doctrine of election continuously in the book of Genesis. Paul tells us. He proves the election from Genesis for us. You find all the great doctrines of the faith in the book of Genesis. If you go to Genesis with your eyes open to recognize them, not to read them in. but to recognize them. But if you're not expecting them, chances are you'll never see them. And so here in 2 Timothy chapter 3, for doctrine, for reproof, every part of the Bible may just have a reproof for you and for me when I read it and I hear in this passage. Does it tell me some duty I've left out? Does it tell me about my lack of faith or my disobedience in some respect? Is there a reproof for me? For correction, of course, that is, almost in a nautical manner. People are not so bad when they need correction. When they need reproof, they're way off. but they may be good-hearted people who've just strayed a little off the track. So there's a gentle correction of course for them. And you'll find that in the book of Genesis as well as in the New Testament. And then for instruction in righteousness, how to be sanctified, how to be deepened in the faith. Well, I must begin to move to conclusion, or fairly quickly, and I'm going to tell you one or two special rules that have been thrown out by the new evangelicals, because these are just a few. I could give you about 20 special rules of interpretation. Well, I'll give you just a few which may interest you. One is this, that the old-time evangelicals said, The Bible does not need outside information for its interpretation. It does not need it. I was reading a book not so long ago, in which a certain exegete was writing, we don't know why the Israelites were forbidden to use mixed fibers together when they wove their garments. Maybe when a historical anthropologist discovers what strange rituals were followed by the pagans round about them, we may understand why they were forbidden from doing that. Do you need outside information? I would say that not letting dissimilar animals plough together or dissimilar textures be woven together were lessons about ecumenicity, wouldn't you? Isn't it plain to understand, say, what is behind this? What is the spirit teaching? Surely it is that unlike things cannot mix. and cannot, if you take two dissimilar garments, that's different in these days, they have all sorts of scientific treatments, you can have percentages of one and another, but they didn't have that in those days. And if they'd mixed dissimilar textures, materials, into a garment, well it would have shrunk unevenly, and it would have looked terrible. What point is being proved? You mix Righteousness with unrighteousness, you'll get a monstrous result. You mix evangelicalism with liberalism, you'll get a monstrous result. We don't need anything outside the Bible to tell us of these things. By the way, there's a wonderful illustration I could give you in connection with the spirituality of the Old Testament. And Luther treats this very beautifully. Luther sometimes can put things so well. He says, you must pay your pastors. Paul says so in 1 Corinthians chapter 9. And in fact Paul says the law of Moses says so. Where does the law of Moses say you must pay your pastors? Well it says that of course you mustn't muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. What's that got to do with pastors? How does Paul manage to get the law about not muzzling the ox when treading out the corn to say you must pay your pastors? Simple, says Paul. Does God care for oxen? Do you really think he gave the Jews that law so that they should simply treat their animals well? Don't you understand, says Paul, that when God gave that law, he had pastors in mind all along? Well, we may say, how come? Does God care for oxen? Did he write it for them? No, says Luther, because they cannot read. And that's a pretty good approach to the passage. Don't you see, says Luther, the Jews, the pious, the spiritual Jews, were supposed to think like this. If God says I shouldn't muzzle my oxen, and that's a great principle with God, well clearly I mustn't deprive my servants, because they're more important than my oxen. And if I mustn't deprive my oxen and my servants, I certainly mustn't muzzle the preachers of the everlasting word and deprive them. Paul is telling us that each of those laws has a growing principle coming out of it. And if we have spiritual eyes, it's not difficult to figure it out, is a wonderful sermon by Spurgeon. You know the law in Deuteronomy? If you have a flat roof, you must put a battlement or a balustrade round that roof, so that your youngsters don't fall off and they're not killed. Do you think God is only interested in protecting flat roofs? Well, of course he is. He's a tender-hearted God. But Spurgeon says this. It's a wonderful thought. God keeps all his own laws. God keeps all his own laws. But God doesn't have a flat roof anywhere. Oh, yes, he does. And, as a matter of fact, he has quite a sloping roof. It's called the Church of Jesus Christ. And God has put up safeguards so that people don't fall out of the truth. The law of the battlements, as it used to be called, is the doctrine of final perseverance. God who keeps his own laws will not let any of his children be lost. And so we must move according to the character of God. We must protect our young in spiritual matters, not just in the roof and our church. and ourselves, our own hearts. That's not fanciful, is it? As soon as you ask, what is God saying to the church in this law to protect the young? Isn't the application obvious? But the new evangelicals take it all away. They de-spiritualize the Bible. They remove the lot. And we've got to go back to the old Reformation ways of looking at all these things. Well, just a couple of last things. You know, if you believe in the old way of interpretation, you will say, Paul never made a mistake. Never. Not as far as the record of Scripture is concerned. He was a sinner, he made mistakes, but as far as the record of Scripture inspired of the Spirit, there is not one mistake of Paul's recorded. Why do you say that? Well, because three times directly, and three more times indirectly, the Apostle Paul says, be imitators, followers, mimics, close imitators of me. He says it three times. You must follow everything I say. In matters spiritual, in ecclesiology, in how you conduct yourself, you must be a close imitator of me. So, if the Apostle Paul says, this is how you should solve a problem, this is how you should set up a mission, this is how you should govern your church, that's what we must do. After all, the Holy Spirit doesn't contradict himself. He wouldn't have a series of texts saying, imitate Paul, and then let him have mistakes recorded about himself. that would be disastrous. So you see, if really you are following the Bible itself, you say Paul never made a mistake. You hear a New Evangelical preaching about Paul and Barnabas. As far as they're concerned, Barnabas was right, Paul was wrong. Paul lost his temper, Paul was unreasonable. They almost loved to see the Apostle Paul discredited and put in the wrong. Barnabas was so gentle and nice and everything. And then in the end, Paul admitted Barnabas was right, they say, because he received John Mark in the end, who Barnabas had nurtured back to health spiritually. But Paul never made a mistake. And if you've got that in your mind, you say, no, what Paul did, we must do. And if somebody who is appointed to Christian service abandons the work and lets the Lord down, they cannot continue with that work. A period of recuperation and recovery, yes, that may be in order. I'm not talking about moral issues necessarily, they're to be dealt with even more seriously, as even more serious, because moral matters, moral misdemeanors, the Apostle Paul says they should not be once named among us. In other words, I don't want to give anyone liberty here, but it's much, much easier to be moral and not to give way to adultery and such other things. It's much easier by the grace of God to hold the line there, than it is to stop your vindictive thoughts about somebody else or your self-pity or even your pride. You've got a real fight against that. and you will often fall. But the Apostle seems to say, when it comes to the big act of immorality, when it comes to that, let it not be once named among you. That is a different kind of sin, and you've got far more grace. Anyway, that is a sidetrack. But Paul was never wrong. Oh, but wasn't he wrong when he went to Jerusalem, when the prophets spoke in the name of the Lord and told him not to go? Of course he wasn't wrong. The prophets who spoke those words were telling him what would befall him at Jerusalem. And Luke and his dear friends who felt for him said, don't go, don't go! And Paul, as it were, said, but don't you see, if they've prophesied that I'm going to be in trouble in Jerusalem, I've got to go. Because that's prophecy, that's God's will. If only we started with Paul was never wrong, and then we look more closely at the passage, we'd see how we should understand it. Do you see that? And this is just one small example that Paul was never wrong, and I close with this, and this is a very helpful one to you, which I'm sure you probably know already. Here is a great positive rule of interpretation which is jettisoned by the New Evangelicals. How do you understand the Old Testament? If you're going to see lessons for the church, how do you understand it? Well, I'll give you a clue, because this is a rule in the Bible that we could prove quite easily from the New Testament. Whenever Israel is mentioned in the Old Testament, don't forget Israel, though they may have only been at different times, 10% of them converted, 5% of them converted, a tenth, as I was told, maybe more at other times of revival. There was only ever a remnant of the people, a minority of the Jews, who were really converted people in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, even though only a minority were converted, they are typical of the New Testament church. The circumstances through which God took them, parallel, they are analogous to the same things that happen to us as Christians. God overruled. God designed it so. So what are the spiritual lessons? You say, Israel always stands for one of two things, and sometimes both. And you have to figure out which, but at least this makes it easy. Israel either stands for the world, sometimes it stands for the whole world this is how God will deal with the whole world these are the sins of the whole world and other times Israel stands for the church most often actually and occasionally both so Israel what that lesson there is a lesson for what the church should be doing today and you know I've heard New evangelical preachers, and you know what they do? Crazy things, because they've abandoned all the old rules. They say, in this we see general principles for our land. You don't see general principles for your land. Like that in the Old Testament, Israel doesn't represent England, or Scotland, or Wales, whatever is your land, your nation. All of us together? It represents either the whole world, all sinners, or more often, and it's usually pretty obvious when you ask yourself the question, it represents the Church of Jesus Christ. Us. We are the ones under the spotlight. We are the ones to read the lessons. Now I hope this sheer quantity of matter, I'm sure it won't, but I hope it won't have been confusing to you in any way. But I really think I ought to stop there, or else if you don't go on overload, I will. May the Lord help us to value his word, and to defend the old ways, and to watch out for the new evangelicalism, because though many of those people are truly converted, they are off the track, and they are leading us further and further from the word of God, from the principles of the scripture, into worldliness, into error, even into Rome. And if I've accomplished only this today, and my predecessor speaker, well, we will be greatly blessed to have alerted some friend to the danger of our times. May the Lord help us.