Our topic, Test Everything, the Authority and Supremacy of Scripture. In our text, 1 Thessalonians 5, 21-22, test all things. If you've got the old King James, it'll say prove all things. Hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil. As the Apostle Paul is drawing his epistle toward its conclusion, he gives a broad command on the need to examine everything carefully by the teaching of scripture. That's our standard. In this context, his primary concern was on the need to examine revelatory manifestations in the church. Now keep in mind, before the death of the apostles, churches had prophets. who were still receiving divine revelation and speaking forth in their services. And they had to be tested according to scripture because not everyone who says they're a prophet is a real prophet. Now, after the death of the apostles and the canon of scripture was closed and that all ceased, the charismatic movement today is heretical. There are no new revelations of the spirit. In the first generation of the Christian church, a church member could stand up in the public worship and claim to give a prophecy. Consequently, there was a need to distinguish between a real revelation from God that carried a prophetic authority and false prophecies that came solely from men's imagination, or in some cases from demonic influence. The context reminds us of the Old Testament test of whether a prophet was genuine or not, which is based on Deuteronomy 18, 21 to 22. Number one, if he made a prediction about the future, did it take place with 100% accuracy or not? If it did not, then he's a false prophet. Of course, in the Old Testament, he'd be put to death. And, for example, there were prophecies made about the death of Jezebel and Ahab. And after the prophecies came true, exactly as they were prophesied, Jezebel was eaten by dogs and so forth. Scripture points out this proves that Elijah was a prophet. If the alleged prophecy contains any doctrinal content, does it agree with the teaching of God's Word 100% of the time? Because if it doesn't, they're a false prophet. Scripture cannot contradict Scripture. Anything that contradicts the analogy of Scripture or what is taught in the whole body of Scripture is, by definition, false prophecy. In a passage, keep in mind Isaiah 8.20, if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. They are of the darkness. They are not of the light. They're not true prophets. And the problem in Isaiah's day was people were going to, you know, fortune tellers and necromancers and astrologers, and they were following the pagans around them. Number three, does the prophet's teaching encourage the true worship of God and the true service of the Yahweh, the only true and living God, or does it encourage the worship of a false god? If they're telling you, hey, you need to worship Baal, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Muhammad, or whatever, they're a false prophet. In line with this teaching, Paul in 1 Corinthians speaks about the need to judge what the prophets have said during the public worship service, 1 Corinthians 14.29. The New Testament, the prophets are subject to the prophets, 1 Corinthians 14.32. In other words, the prophets alive during the first generation who were giving new, now keep in mind, the reason they needed prophets, they didn't have a New Testament canon that we have today. They didn't have that privilege, the 27 books of the New Testament. They only had the Old Testament. So they needed, they were getting new revelations, we were learning more, but we don't need that once we have a completed canon. And that's discussed also in, I think it's 1 Corinthians 13. When the perfect has come, prophecy will cease. Therefore, Paul is reiterating the Old Testament teaching that Scripture, that is inscripturated written revelation, is the sole standard and authority for both faith, that is doctrine, worship, church, government, et cetera, and life, ethics, sanctification, church discipline. It's our sole standard. It is the supreme judge by which all doctrinal controversies are to be determined. And this is the doctrine, the great reformational doctrine of Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Knox and others. Sola Scriptura, the scripture alone is our standard. And why was that important? Well, because the Roman Catholics did not believe in scripture alone. They believed that the church had a special authority. This teaching is a very broad application and applies far beyond the issue of the examination of the prophets in public worship. During the Protestant Reformation, this passage, along with many others, was a proof text for the Protestant teachings. The first, of course, was Sola Scriptura. Because scripture is God's infallible word, it is the final, definitive, supreme authority in all matters of faith, that is, doctrine in life, ethics, church practice, et cetera. The Bible is the only absolute objective standard by which ethics, doctrine, church, government, and worship are to be judged. And the Westminster Confession puts it very nicely, 110. the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinion of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined. And in whose sentence we are to rest can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the scriptures." And the great debate of Luther, I forget which one it was, but It's Luther against all these great church, you know, these big prominent church authorities, the Roman Catholic scholars, and they're quoting the church fathers, and they're quoting this pope, and they're quoting this council, and Luther quotes nothing but Scripture. Because at that time, you know, we don't have, they didn't have the Protestant standards to quote from. He's quoting solely from Scripture, and he says, on this I stand, I can do with no other. You cannot contradict Scripture. I don't care if a hundred popes say something. If it contradicts Scripture, it can't be true. This teaching radically separates Protestantism or biblical Christianity from Roman Catholicism, for Romanists give human traditions, as interpreted and determined by the church authorities, a role alongside of scripture. You know, last week we discussed Christmas, for example, and I showed it's not in the Bible, we shouldn't be doing it. Well, a Roman Catholic would simply say, well, the church says we should do it, therefore we should do it. based on the authority of the church. And that's basically the Episcopalian argument as well. In practice, the human traditions are actually more important and authoritative than scripture, for they are used to judge and interpret scripture. According to the papal church, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that is the bishops and the pope, which they call the supreme pontiff, And they say that when he speaks on religious matters from his chair, you know, it's supposed to be infallible. The ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the help of the Holy Spirit, chooses, authorizes, and adds its own authoritative traditions to the written and scripture-aided form of divine revelation. That's their view. So there's a bunch of stuff that they do. There's a ton of stuff that they do that's not in the Bible. And they simply say, well, this is part of our sacred tradition. The Roman Catholic creeds are clear, and their advocacy of tradition is authoritative. Here's the following documents. Council of Trent. seeing clearly that this truth and discipline are contained in the written books and the unwritten traditions. Fourth session, that's 1546. This is part of the Counter-Reformation. This is Second Vatican Council, 1962 to 65. The tradition which comes from the apostles develops in the church with the help of the Holy Spirit, for there is a growth in the understanding of the realities and words which have been handed down. the unwritten traditions. For as the centuries secede one another, church constantly moves forward toward a fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her. So instead of here's scripture, we all go to scripture. They believe that traditions accumulate over the centuries as the church discovers new traditions. And now they claim that they go back to the apostles and they're just discovering new truths, but that's obviously false. Here's the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. This came out in 1994. It's very recent. It says that the church, quote, does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy scriptures alone. Both scripture and tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence. That's a really radical statement. We treat church traditions with the same reverence and authority as scripture itself. That's exactly what they're saying. We reject sola scriptura and we treat what the Pope says and what church councils and what the Roman Catholic Church has decreed with the same authority as scripture. So when the church says in the 1850s that Mary was born without original sin and she's immaculate, we have to accept that. Now, what's the problem there? Well, you probably clearly see it. In Luke, when she has the revelation about the Christ, she thanks God that she can be forgiven. She acknowledges that she's a sinner, right in the scriptures, and she needs a savior. But anyway, Roman Catholic theologians do not admit that the additions to scripture are arbitrary or simply made up by churchmen over the centuries. They argue that the church hierarchy is bringing forth the oral teachings of Jesus and the apostles that were never written down or inscripturated. Okay, so there's all this stuff out there that was just, it's word of mouth. It was never written down. And then they just discover it over time, over the centuries. You know, the Virgin Mary ascended to heaven. The Virgin Mary was born without sin. She's the queen of heaven. a week, if we pray to Mary, she has so much, she was sinless, and she has so much merit, so we can get merits for Mary. So she becomes an intercessor alongside of Christ, which is blasphemous. Well, the problems with this view are manifold, and they're pretty obvious, if you have a brain. One must take their word for it without any objective proof whatsoever. You accept this because the church authorities say so. They can't prove it from scripture. It's like a cult leader who comes and says, well, I'm revealing new things to God from you. They contradict the Bible, but you just have to take my word for it because I am a prophet. It's where the Bible, the prophets had to, they were authenticating. God had the prophets in the Bible authenticate themselves through divine miracles. And if you study whenever in the Bible new revelations were giving forth, there were a bunch of miracles. The miracles show us that this guy's a true prophet. And then, of course, after the things are fulfilled, then we know for certain. Number two. If there is this great mass of unwritten, inspired teaching by Jesus and the apostles that is necessary for the edification, doctrine, and worship of the church, why would it be exposed by church authorities in small amounts over 19 centuries? Does that make sense to you? There's this big body of truth, way bigger than the Bible, that's out there. It's inspired, it's authoritative, you have to follow it. But you just get a little dib and dab of it over the centuries, a little here, a little there. That's pretty weird. So the church did not honor Mary as they should as being born without original sin until the 1850s. And then the stuff about Mary ascending and being a co-mediatrix, all those things. Why would the church have to wait until 1854 to learn about the Immaculate Conception of Mary? or 600 AD to learn about purgatory. So we can trace all these doctrines back to a point in time when the church made it up. Or the ninth century to learn about the idea of transubstantiation. This is the idea that the wine becomes literal blood and the bread becomes literal flesh of Christ. It doesn't represent his body and blood. It is his body and blood. They believe that. That's crazy. The Roman Catholic scenario makes no sense whatsoever. Three, a careful study of Roman Catholic tradition shows that A, some traditions explicitly contradict other traditions. In fact, I have a little booklet on Roman Catholicism, and I think I have a chart in there where you've got this Pope says this on his authority, not just commenting. Authoritatively, this Pope says something the exact opposite. They contradict each other all the time. So some traditions explicitly contradict other traditions. B, the body of tradition evolved slowly over time as churchmen innovated and made up new heirs. That's obviously what happened. So the Roman Catholic concept of tradition is simply a cover for declension, corruption, and heresy. How do I know that with 100% certainty? Because tons of what they teach, both relating to worship, church government, church practice, and the most really the doctrine of salvation itself, contradicts the clear teaching of the Word of God. They deny justification by faith alone. They worship the saints in the Virgin Mary. And what they do is they worship them. Like if you go to Rome, if you go to the Vatican, there's a statue of Saint Peter. which according to my research was actually, I think it used to be Apollo or Zeus or something. And the church adopted this statue and made it into St. Peter. And the toes are wearing off. Because for century after century after century, people are bowing to the statue and kissing the feet of the statue. They're literally wearing the toes off. That's rank idolatry. The commandment, thou shalt not bow down to or worship idols. the grammar of the Hebrew indicates that bowing before something causes one to worship it. We're not to bow down to statues, period. So it's simply a cover for declension, corruption, and heresy. There was the iconoclast controversy, the worship of pictures in the Eastern church. Now, what they didn't, in the Western Church, they had statues and they had pictures, but they had a lot of statues and they would worship the statues, and they would bow to the statues. In the Eastern Church, they forbade the use of statues, but they were allowed to have pictures. So if you go to a Russian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, the church is decorated with pictures of saints and Christ everywhere. And the people adore them, and they kiss them, and they pray to the pictures. Well, there was a general council that forbid doing that and said it was idolatry. And then the very next council, because there was a different emperor who was in favor of it, in favor of idolatry, sanctioned the use of icons for worship. I mean, it's an abomination. If you go into a Russian Orthodox church, you'll see people kissing pictures of the saints, kissing pictures of Mary. In practice, The Roman Catholic traditions are placed as a supreme authority over scripture. And this statement is proved by the following observations. Number one, the traditions are used to interpret the meaning of scripture. The Roman Catholics are not permitted the right of private judgment of the Bible based on a faithful grammatical, historical, exegetical analysis of the text. They must subject their views to what the church has determined. Okay, for several centuries, for like a thousand years, it was a mortal sin to possess the Bible in your own language. And the church forbid the lady from reading the Bible, I don't know if you know that. People were put to death for translating the Bible into the native tongue. People were killed. And it was a mortal sin to have your own Bible and read it. then that changed due to, I think, the pressure of Protestantism. The Vatican too, from 1962 to 65, they ruled that people can have authorized translations of the Bible. And you could read the Bible for yourself, but you can never have an interpretation that contradicts the interpretation of the church. And that's basically true in the Eastern Church as well. So if Paul says you're justified by faith alone and apart from the works of the law, and the Roman Catholic Church says that that's not true, you have to do good works to be saved, you have to adopt the heretical view of the Roman Catholic Church. So they still don't have private judgment, even though now they can read the Bible. You know, the Douay Bible, and then I think it's the American Bible or something. And then I think they allow another translation. Two. Whenever the Bible plainly contradicts the teachings of the papal church, the church's view must always be regarded as true, and the text of scripture must be twisted, perverted, and thus denied to uphold the Romanist dogma. They do precisely what Jesus strongly condemned the Pharisees for doing. Matthew 20, they transgress the commandment of God because of their tradition. Matthew 15, three. Tradition says this, the Bible says this, they contradict. What do they do? They toss the Bible in the dirt, they hold to their traditions. Here's what he said. This is Matthew 19, 15. In vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. And also when you get a chance, look at Isaiah 29, 13. Now Protestants also have creeds and confessions. But the creeds are presented as faithful, organized summaries of what the Bible teaches, no more, no less. They don't say we're infallible, the church is infallible. They say that this is what we think the scripture teaches. There are no added human traditions which are purported to be authoritative. In addition, the Protestant creeds acknowledge that creeds and sentence can and have erred and thus at times need to be corrected by a faithful interpretation of scripture. And the Protestant creeds and confessions are generally excellent. And I'm talking about the Reformed ones. The Westminster Standards, Dortra, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the First and Second Helvetic Confessions are excellent. I think the Helvetic has an error in it in recognizing Holy Days beside the Sabbath. But other than that, they're quite good. The Bible has an ultimate authority over the creeds and confessions. It is the sole standard. Creeds are deliberately called subordinate standards. They're derivative, they're subordinate, they're not dependent on church tradition. A creed is only authoritative insofar as it agrees with scripture. If it contains parts that are not in agreement with the Bible or that are products of man's imagination, these parts are not authoritative and it is our duty to reject them because they are human traditions. Now, why do I subscribe to the Westminster Standards? Why do we subscribe to the Westminster Standards? Because they're the most faithful creed in Confession out there. They're the best, it's the best. There's error, the proof texting, which is added a little later, there's some mistakes in the proof texting. It's well known that there's mistakes. And the passage about, from Thessalonians, about attributing, you know, the man of sin to being the Pope, It's a legitimate application of a text, but when Paul wrote that, he said he's alive right now. There were no popes around until another 150, 250 years. So it's very likely talking about Nero, the Roman emperor. Here's the passage, Isaiah 820. To the law and to the testimony, if they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. And here's a passage, Deuteronomy 4.2, you shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you. And then that's repeated in 12.32, and see 2 Timothy 3.15-17, Proverbs 30.5-6, Joshua 1.7-8, Revelation 22.18-19. It's interesting. I'm not gonna talk about the passage much, because I've exegeted it before, The assumption of the passage, the presupposition of the passage in Deuteronomy 4 and chapter 12, is that if you add your own ideas to the Bible, you'll stop obeying the Bible, which is precisely what Jesus accused the Pharisees of doing. If you add to it, you not only dilute its teachings, but you end up overthrowing its teachings, because the mass of human traditions ends up being what the people love and follow, not the text of scripture. And that's what happened to the Pharisees. And that's why Jesus and his apostles, the Pharisees had a law that you had to do a ritual hand-washing before you had your meals. It was considered a religious hand-washing. And Jesus wouldn't do it. And the apostles wouldn't do it. And the Pharisees said, well, why won't you wash your hands like this? You know, it's just, it seems like a minor thing. You know, it's just a tradition. And they did it on principle. They wouldn't do it on principle because they were adding to the word of God. The authority, completeness, perfection, and sufficiency of the Bible places the Word of God above everyone, including the church. Church officers have a purely ministerial role, not a creative or autonomous role. Let's say the pastor comes to you. Bob, I think you've sinned. and you don't think you have sinned, or you don't know what you did that was wrong. Well, Pastor Joe, tell me what did I do that contradicted the Bible or was a sin, according to the Bible. That's all you gotta do. And it's legitimate to ask that, and you need to be respectful. And then if you sinned, admit it and repent. If he's making up some crazy thing, I used to be charismatic, but I was raised Roman Catholic, then I was an atheist, then I was into Hinduism, and then I became a Roman Catholic. Excuse me, I became a Christian, a charismatic, a professing Christian, a charismatic, Arminian charismatic Baptist. And we had a pastor start ordering people, God told me to tell you to give your, if you have an extra car, give it to the church. He doesn't have the authority to do that. That's ridiculous. But a lot of people lost an extra car. Now he can ask, he can say, hey, if you've got a lot of money and we need this money for something really important, if you have an extra car, if you want to donate it to the church, that's fine. But if you don't want to donate it, you don't have to donate it. Every philosophy, ethical system, or world and life view is founded upon some source of authority. This is really critical. This comes from Cornelius Thantil basically. Gordon Clark would agree. Greg Bonson, of course, would agree, and R.J. Rushdoony, and many others. When we speak of an ultimate authority, we are immediately in the realm of religion. I'm thinking about ultimate authority. Things such as ethics, meaning, what is the meaning of life, salvation, how are we saved, why we exist, and how we are supposed to live, are found on some concept of ultimate authority. Even if you're a nihilist, you have a philosophy. So they're founded on ultimate authority or they are arbitrary and based on autonomous human thought and enforced by autonomous arbitrary human coercion. So something that's made up, it's simply made up. It has to be enforced by coercion because God is not behind it. And that's how dictators, that's how Putin and all these people function. The oligarchs put Putin in power thinking that he would let them keep all their money and be rich. Once Putin got his power, he started killing off oligarchs and taking all their money and taking over the power, because it's all arbitrary. Therefore, when Paul says, test all things, or the old King James, which I like a lot, prove all things, same thing. He is saying that the Bible has authority and jurisdiction over every area of life. You don't want to compartmentalize life. Well, in my business dealings, that's a separate sphere than my church life and religion. So you've got guys who go to church, and they pray, and they sing their hymns, and they hear the sermons, and then they go back to their business, and they cheat their customers, and they lie, and they do all this stuff. No, it doesn't work that way. The Bible has authority over every area of life. Not simply doctrine, worship, or church matters. If we conduct science, we must do so standing on the revealed truths of Scripture. Yes, even science. Any theory that contradicts the Bible, for example, macroevolution, is false and must be rejected. Theories and findings that agree with Scripture must be embraced. Atheistic naturalists will strongly disagree but their disagreements are not based on the facts. They're not based on real science. Evolution, macroevolution is a theory. It's a theory developed in the 1800s when people knew nothing about cells and DNA and RNA. They knew very little about the world. They knew almost nothing about the geological record. And that theory has been proved totally false in the 21st century. The more we know, the more it's false. Same goes with theories of the evolution of the universe. That new telescope they just released, I don't know how long ago that was, six months, a year. They've already proved the Big Bang to be false. It can't be true. at the very edge of the universe. There's galaxies that are just as complete and evolved and, you know, supposedly evolved. They're just as big, just as complex as ones that are really close to us. What does that mean? It, well, it points obviously to creation by God, but it cannot, the Big Bang Theory, because when you look back, when you look at light, It has to travel a long time. So according to their theory, those things should be evolving and just developing. There shouldn't be mature, fully formed galaxies on the way out there. According to them, it's 13.5 billion years ago or something ridiculous. But the point is, is that science objectively considered, and I'm talking about sciences actually looking at things and looking at correlations, always proves evolution wrong, always proves false theories wrong. It does. And why is that important? Because when evolution was developed and people didn't know a lot about reality, they just accepted is it true because the scientist said it was true. The more facts we know, the more we see the fossil record, the more we know about cells. A human cell is more like a nuclear submarine. The idea that that evolved from chance is the, and you probably heard this before, is the idea that you put 100 monkeys in a room, give them a bunch of typewriters and paper, and then within a couple, you know, 100 million years, they'll type the Encyclopedia Britannica. because the cells are that complex. It's just ridiculous. It's impossible. They believe in something that's according to science is impossible, but they have to believe it because their presupposition is that God does not exist. If you stick to scriptures, you'll always be safe. You'll always be right. Not simply in the sphere of religion, but also in the sphere of science. Their problem is that a priori, that is even before the facts are made or even considered, they assume that truth can only be derived from autonomous human thought. Consequently, any findings that point to a creation by an infinite personal God must be ruled out of bounds from the very start of the scientific endeavor. And I've discussed this before, that the case, this is probably before you're young, you were young, before your time. But I think it was Tennessee, they wanted to teach creationism along with evolution in the public schools. And it was ruled out of bounds by the courts because it's a religious theory. It's not science. But the problem with that is that science supports that view, that things were created by God. Something even as basic as logic or reason must be conducted standing on the epistemological foundation of scripture. Autonomous reasonings by sinful men are often wrong and irrational because they begin with a false, unbiblical starting point or axiom. Whenever you talk about ethics or meaning or salvation or things that are basic concerns of life, if you take things back to their starting point, their axiom, you see the source of their authority. As soon as men denied the inspiration and authority of scripture, they began to deny the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Why? Because they said it's not rational. Well, it's not rational according to humanistic presuppositions, but it's fully rational if you study the doctrines and you understand it. Hard to understand? Yeah. I'll acknowledge that. But it's not irrational. While these doctrines are difficult to understand, there's nothing irrational about them at all. It is clear, it is a case of sinful, finite, apostate, depraved men saying that it does not seem rational to them. It doesn't seem rational to me. And that is autonomous, sinful, depraved human thought and action. The man who commits adultery. It doesn't seem rational to me that I should be faithful to the same woman for 50, 60 years. But that's your sinful opinion. God has spoken. Till death to us part. They place God and the Bible in the dock and subject it to their unbelieving, foolish presuppositions and reasonings. So you need to be aware of that. That's one thing, that's one reason I really, if you've ever listened to Ken Ham, he talks a lot about creationism and he refutes evolution really well. Ken Ham clearly understands presuppositionalism and he exposes how these men are not really scientific, they're just giving you their presuppositions. Cornelius Van Til compared their reasonings to a saw. Now the saw cuts. But there's something wrong with the saw so that it always cuts in the wrong direction. It can't cut straight. And that's the case with sinful autonomous human reasoning. There are some brilliant people that are total pagans, Aristotle, Plato, Einstein. But when you talk about religion and ethics and matters of ultimate concern, they never get it right. It cannot cut in a straight line, it cuts, but it always cuts wrong or crooked. The principle of testing all things also applies to ethics. Although all men are created in the image of God and have an intrinsic sense of right and wrong, Paul calls it the work of the law in the heart, Romans 2.15. Now he doesn't say they have a perfect copy of the law in the heart because of the fall. But there's enough there. Francis Schaeffer called it the manishness of man. Most people have a sense of right and wrong and all societies condemn murder, for example. But there are cultures and societies that don't. The mafia, criminal gangs, drug lords, communists. Kill anybody you want at your convenience if the state says it's okay to do it. The fall has rendered the scriptures necessary for men to have a just, comprehensive, and righteous system of ethics and the civil laws that are based on ethics. Okay, why do we teach that abortion is wrong? Because you're killing a human life made in the image of God. It's not a chicken in the womb. It's not a chicken in there. It's not a pig. It's a human being, and you don't have the right to kill it. Second, humanists say, we don't want to put murderers to death, rapists and murderers who rape women and torture them and kill them. No, we don't want to put them to death. But innocent babies who've done nothing wrong, you can kill them anytime you want. And then they tell us, we're rational. We follow reason. You don't. No, they don't follow reason properly regulated by scripture. All societies have certain laws to suppress murder, fraud, assault, and theft. But the further that society is from the Christian world and life view, the more arbitrary, unbiblical, and unjust its laws will become. Okay, if you go to a liberal state in America, a super liberal city controlled by progressives, leftist Democrats, and you've got a guy who's committed 100 felonies, and they keep letting him out. You know, there's no bail. You just, okay, you've been arrested again. We'll let you out. And then he breaks into your house and you shoot him because you're afraid he's going to kill you and your wife. You're the one who probably will go to jail, not him. The progressives have revealed that they're totally insane and unethical in their thinking because they base everything on Marxist a Marxist analysis of reality, where if somebody's supposedly oppressed, it's okay for them to commit crimes. They deserve to be able to steal. And this reality has become especially obvious in the area of sexual ethics, where modern secular societies have legalized homosexuality, fornication, adultery, cross-dressing, bestiality, the trans perversion, abortion on demand, and so on. Yeah, bestiality is legal. There's a place in Oregon where men come and they pay money to have sex with animals. And the reason I know about this is because Rush Limbaugh did, you know, rest in peace, Rush, I hope he's a Christian, I know his brother is. A man died, I think he was having sex with a horse and he got killed. And it was totally legal. What they were doing was totally legal in the state of Oregon. That's madness. In a chance universe that supposedly created itself, matter plus time plus chance over, you know, trillions of years, where man is the pinnacle of the supposed evolutionary process, man becomes the measure of all things. Secular humanism, which is the doctrine of the Democratic Party, explicitly, is that man is God. And the state which would be Democrats when they're in power, speak with the voice of God and you have to submit to them and obey them. Since there is no transcendent spiritual reality or an infinite personal God who created and controls all things, who is above mankind, fallen men simply make it up as they go along. And whoever has the power has the authority. Sherman Mao, power flows from the barrel of a gun. Now he would speak of the mass of Chinese people being the god of that society. But for him, in communism and Marxism, it's the elite that is in power that represents the people. So if you want to star six million people to death like Stalin did, or murder millions and millions of people like Mao did, and Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, it's perfectly okay in their system. It's not even unethical. because their ethics are based on whoever has the power, and their ethics are totally arbitrary. Men act as God, determining for themselves what is good and evil. According to their own presuppositions, ethics are positivistic, that means they're made up out of thin air, arbitrary, changing, and evolving. The biblical view enables us to test all moral codes and concepts of ethics, as well as all civil laws, because God tells us what is right and wrong in the Bible, and his moral laws are absolute, unchanging, perfect, and non-negotiable. So the state says, some wacko in the state says, oh, we believe that two men being sodomites and committing sodomy and all kinds of perversions and fisting and gerbil activities, we believe that's totally ethical, and not only that, they should have all the rights of married people. like a husband and wife, a man and a woman. Well, how do you test that? Well, you test it according to the word of God, and you see that it's absolutely an abomination in God's sight. When professed Christians turn away from written revelation of God regarding moral laws and justice because of the influence of dispensationalism, or modernism, that's the denial of the Bible's authority, or pragmatism, and turn to concepts of natural law or tradition or intrinsic church authority, Romanism, they are embracing the world and syncretism. Why is divorce such a huge problem among evangelicals? It's a huge problem, adultery and divorce. In our society, I think it's around 50%, and for evangelicals, it's like 45% or something. It's slightly less. Why is it such a problem? because they don't teach the law of God in churches anymore because they believe the law of God is, that's the Old Testament. Now the New Testament condemns adultery, but most of the ethics and most of the really, the ethical system that we are required to learn and obey is given in the Old Testament and the Bible simply assumes that the moral laws of the Old Testament are still binding. And Jesus taught that explicitly in Matthew chapter five. And Paul teaches it in the book of Romans and other places where he quotes right from the 10 commandments. And from, by the way, they quote from the moral case laws as well, both Jesus and Paul. When professing Christians turn from God's law, they become antinomian and pragmatic, pragmatism. They do what seems right. We had a case, this is many, many years ago, so nobody will remember this, and the people who were involved in this have all gone apostate anyway, so they won't ever hear this. But a woman left her husband and stole some money, got a tattoo, and basically got her husband back by demanding all these things that were unbiblical, no more Christian school, et cetera, et cetera. So he submitted to that, and then they went after me. I was simply applying the Bible, but the people who opposed me, opposed me on the basis of a very broad humanistic definition of love. Well, that's not loving, to discipline her. Love is obedience to the moral law of God. Love is not emotions or humanism. And evangelicals, they think very humanistically when they talk about, well, we don't wanna put a murderer to death, that's not loving. Or we don't wanna condemn homosexuals, they feel that way, we wanna be loving towards them. Well, obviously we wanna treat them lawfully. But we can never condone anything the Bible condemns as unethical, simply on the basis of how we feel. That's subjective, that's humanism. And then I'll wrap things up here. To reject biblical authority and replace it with human autonomy is a form of idolatry. For one source of ultimate authority, the sphere of ethics, where ethics, meaning, and salvation is determined, is in reality one's God. If man or the state or some dictator makes up their own ethical system, then they are the God of that system. Do you understand? And that's why the Democrats say, well, if you made a loan, you had an agreement, we'll just steal from the taxpayers and give them your money. Because they believe they have the authority of God. And I'll just end with a quote from Rush Dooney, and then we'll end here. This is one of his best quotes. This is from the Institutes of Biblical Law, 1973. Law is in every culture religious in origin. Because law governs man and society, because it establishes and declares the meaning of justice and righteousness, law is inescapably religious, in that it establishes, in practical fashion, the ultimate concerns of a culture. Accordingly, a fundamental and necessary premise in any and every society of law must be, first, a recognition of the religious nature of law. Absolutely correct. It deals with ultimate reality. Second, it must be recognized that in any culture, the source of law is the God of that society. If the law has its source in man's reason, then reason is the God of that society. If the source is an oligarchy or in a court or Senate or ruler, then the source is the God of that system. Pause for a minute. Why do you think the Democrats are obsessed about the Supreme Court so much? Because they want their people in there to simply make up laws. Homosexual marriage, you got it. Sodomy is a normal behavior, you got it. Anything you want, stealing, you got it. Modern humanism, the religion of the state, locates law in the state and thus makes the state or the people as they find expression in the state the god of the system. As Mao Zedong has said, our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. In Western culture, law has steadily moved away from god to the people or the state. as the source, although the historic power and vitality of the West has been in biblical faith and law. Third, in any society, any change of law is an explicit or implicit change of religion. Nothing more clearly reveals, in fact, the religious change in a society than the legal revolution. When the legal foundations shift from biblical law to humanism, it means that that society now draws its vitality and power from humanism, not from Christian theism. Fourth, No disestablishment of religion as such is possible in any society. A church can be disestablished and a particular religion can be supplanted by another, but the change is simply to another religion. Since the foundation of law is inescapably religious, no society exists without a religious foundation or without a law system which codifies the morality of its religion. You see how Christians have been fooled by the myth of neutrality to let the humanists take over, and now we're being persecuted for believing the Bible? Fifth, there can be no tolerance in a law system for another religion. Tolerance is a device used to introduce a new law system as a prelude to a new intolerance. Legal positivism, that's the idea that the state simply makes up its own laws as it sees fit, a humanistic faith, has been savage in its hostility to the biblical law system and its claim to be an open system. But Cohen, by no means a Christianist, aptly described the legal positivists as nihilists and their faith as nihilistic absolutism. Every law system must sustain its existence by hostility to every other law system and to alien religious foundations or else it commits suicide. Pages five and six, the Institutes of Biblical Law, 1973. Shocking. If Rush Dooney had written that one book, he's written many fine books, but if he had just written that one book, one of the most important books of the 20th century. And then just one more paragraph and we'll stop for next week. When professing Christians accepted the United States Constitution, which explicitly forbade national religious testos in the establishment of any religion whatsoever on the national level, They unwittingly gave the civil government and the Supreme Court a total authority over the creation of their law order. This system in principle was radically secular and atheistic. Because our nation was strongly dominated by the Protestant Christian world and life view at that time, the unbiblical nature of the federal constitution did not become obvious until the apostasy of the mainline denominations in the late 1800s and the early 20th century. There were exceptions, such as chattel slavery. But this unbiblical practice was a result of scripture twisting and false interpretations of scripture, not secular humanism. Chattel slavery was practiced in the 1700s in the United States and the 1800s, before the general apostasy came. And it's a totally unbiblical view of scripture. Totally unbiblical. The Bible has a very limited form of slavery. Once the authority scripture was denied by the mainline denominations, universities, colleges, and the cultural elite, the deficiency of the United States Constitution became clear. The people in power would not allow the true God speaking in the scriptures to influence their political decisions or their making of the civil laws. And according to the modern interpretation of the Constitution, it's forbidden to do so. You have to pretend you're an atheist to make laws in the United States. The laws of this country are whatever the people of the Supreme Court says they are, even if they explicitly contradict God's moral law. The result is a civil government that is hostile to Christian world and life view and law order. When Democrats question perspective of persons for the Supreme Court, especially ones that they find out are strict Roman Catholics, they get all hot and bothered under the collar. you know, ask them, you're not going to apply any of your, any of the ethics you get from your religion to your decisions in the Supreme Court, are you? While the positivist and the secular humanist in the Supreme Court will appeal to other secular humanists in Europe to make their decisions. It's such a joke. You can't appeal to the Bible. It's wrong. You have to act like an atheist. They deliberately ask them if they are willing to keep the Bible and Christian ethics out of the decision making. They do this because deep down they understand that biblical Christianity is the greatest threat to the secular humanistic man is God status messianic law order. As long as professing Christians hold the position that the civil magistrate must be secular and must not bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ and his infallible word, who has all authority in heaven and earth, They have accepted their own eventual persecution by the pagan atheistic secular state. They will be ruled by sodomites, feminists, adulterers, liars, atheists, apostates, even Muslims, and all antichrists. And we'll stop there. So this seems like a very simple doctrine. Test all things by the word of God. Prove all things by the word of God. But it's a very comprehensive doctrine. We'll continue this next week, Lord willing. Let us pray. Father, we thank you so much for your Bible. infallible, authoritative. We bow the knee to Christ, and thus we bow the knee to his holy word that he has given us through his Holy Spirit. We thank you for it, Lord, and grain our minds with your truths and cause us to obey in all things. In Jesus' name, amen.