The following Bible lesson and other Bible information can be found on the official Dean Bible Ministries website. That's found at www.deanbible.org. That's www.deanbible.org. Dr. Dean is the pastor of West Houston Bible Church. And now, here's Dr. Dean with the Bible lesson. How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Jesus prayed to the Father, sanctify them in truth. Thy Word is truth. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God shall stand forever." Before we begin our study of God's Word, let's have a few moments of silent prayer to focus, refocus. Use 1 John 1-9 if necessary. Make sure we're sanctified, set apart for the use of the Holy Spirit to teach us and to use a doctrine to mature us. Let's pray. Father, again, we thank You that we can come together to study Your Word, that we can be refreshed by Your Word, that God the Holy Spirit will use it to help us to understand the Christian life, mandates for the Christian life, that we can gain a greater understanding of who You are, what You've done for us, and just how serious a matter it is to advance to spiritual maturity. Father, we pray that we would be able to focus, concentrate during this next hour, setting aside the distractions of tomorrow or today, and be reminded of your faithfulness to us in all situations. We pray this in Christ's name, Amen. We are in Hebrews 5. Hebrews 5, verse 11. Now, we're going to go back and pick up a few things I did last time at the end just to make sure that those of you who weren't here, which is most of you because you were exhausted from the conference. Somebody said, boy, I'm sure glad we had all those visitors from the conference last Thursday night because our people were all exhausted and home in bed. But we need to go through this again, and I'm wanting to develop some things out of the section we did on characteristics of a sluggish backslider. So Hebrews chapter Chapter 5, verse 12. Just a reminder to go over the background how this fits in the argument of Hebrews, what the writer is doing. We have three sections that we've covered so far. Actually, we're in the middle of the second section. Each section has a doctrinal exposition. And then there's a practical exhortation or challenge and warning. There's a didactic section. That means it's teaching. These are basic principles. The writer frequently goes back to the Old Testament to pull out principles from Old Testament circumstances and events and then shows how they relate to the present work of Christ on the cross and what is happening in this age. The second section is from 2.5 down to 4.13. This is made up of a didactic section or doctrinal exposition in 2.5 to 3.6, and then a practical challenge from 3.7 to 4.13, which begins to develop the whole doctrine of the high priestly ministry of Christ. That is an outgrowth of His advance to spiritual maturity in His humanity, which prepares Him, qualifies Him for the cross, and then prepares Him for His high priestly ministry. Then the writer of Hebrews starts to develop this section, but he gets right to the edge where he's talking about the analogy based on the royal priesthood of Melchizedek, and then he just stops and gives them just one more reaming out because they have just succumbed to spiritual sluggishness and negative volition. So there's a didactic section, a doctrinal exposition in 4.15 to 5.10, and then we're getting into the practical challenge, practical exhortation beginning in verse 11 and going down through the end of chapter 6. The warning in this section is different from the challenge. It's just encapsulated in those wonderful verses 4 through 8, which everybody wants to go to to try to establish a doctrine of temporal insecurity or no eternal security. But that's not what they're saying at all. Okay, then last time I introduced this little chart to help you understand 1-1-4 is the prologue, then the sort of peach or yellow cream colored sections, it's different on my computer, cream colored sections, the teaching section, then the exhortation, then the second point with the exhortation, and the third point with the exhortation. There's two more points to go. Hebrews 511 says, for about whom, literally, about Melchizedek, We have much to say and hard to explain, not sense, but because you have become dull of hearing." I pointed out in terms of the exegesis that the phrase, we have much to say, is a pretty good way to express it. But if you translate it literally from the Greek, it's a little stilted and wooden, but you get the thrust of it a little more. The writer says, about whom the message, with reference to us. So the nominative case noun there is the message. That's what this is about, the message about Melchizedek. with reference to us in terms of its application is great or tremendous. This is very important and we have, but you're dull of hearing. That's what he's going to say. It's about Melchizedek. There's a great message for us. But it's hard to explain because you have become dull of hearing. And that's why it's hard to explain. Not because it's a difficult doctrine conceptually. God the Holy Spirit teaches all of us the Word of God. It's not based on our human IQ or education or any of those human factors. God the Holy Spirit enables each of us to be able to understand doctrine at our rate of growth. So if you're a baby believer, you may come to Bible class and say, boy, that was over my head. That's because it's more advanced doctrine. You're getting steak instead of milk. But it doesn't mean you can't understand it. You have to learn more basic things first. You have to get your ABCs before you can start learning how to pronounce multi-syllable words. So what he's saying is that the reason it's hard to explain doesn't have anything to do with the inherent difficulty of the doctrine. It has to do with the fact that the hearers have become sluggish in their studies. They've regressed in their spiritual growth. so that they're no longer able to comprehend the significance of this right now. And he really lays into them from this verse on, but for now we just want to talk about the mechanics of spiritual sluggishness. And I've translated this word because instead of sense, because it has a stronger sense. The cause of the difficulty of explanation is their spiritual condition. They have become something that they were not. It's the perfect active indicative of genomi, meaning to become something they were not before. They had advanced to a level of spiritual maturity where they were understanding more advanced doctrine, and now because of carnality and distractions and adversity and pressure which they're trying to handle through the sin nature, they have regressed spiritually so they can't comprehend and fully appreciate doctrines that they could have at one point. The perfect tense indicates that this is a present condition resulting from a completed past action. So they've already blown it, they've already regressed, and they're in a state now where they're older believers, and they were at one time more mature believers, but now they're acting like babies. So they become sluggish. That's the word nothros, meaning lazy, sluggish, or dull. They're adverse to activity. They're indolent. They're torpid. They don't want to move around. They don't want to go to Bible class. They find other things to do with their life. There's other things that seem to intrude. And they give their priority to other factors rather than studying the Word. Studying the Word of God has to be a priority. You have to do it on a regular basis. And there's growth. It's not something that you can just do once a week. It is for every believer, the study of doctrine needs to be an avocation. It's your life. It's not just something that you do, which is how most Christians, you know, will go to church on Sunday because that's what we do. And, well, let's not have an hour-long study the Word. That's too much. Let's just make sure we enjoy our experience with God and sing a lot of choruses that make us feel better and have a little sermonette for Christianets. And that's where our whole culture has been going for the last 20 or 25 years, most Christians don't want to know the Word. They just want to have the facade of knowing the Word. They want to talk the talk and have the friends because they would rather be around Christians who have similar beliefs, morals, stability, than around non-Christians. The whole concept of becoming spiritually hard of hearing is one that you can trace back through the Old Testament. We looked at Ezekiel 12-2 that talked about the Jews having eyes to see but they did not see, ears to hear but they did not hear because they were rebellious. That's the core issue. Let me tell you what positive volition is. Positive volition is somebody who's just merely curious or casually interested in the Word of God. That's not positive volition. Positive volition is somebody who says, I need to know the word of God, and I'm going to be there Sunday morning, and I'm going to be there Tuesday night, and I'm going to be there Thursday night, and I'm going to listen to tapes. Positive volition is putting your spiritual transmission into gear and moving forward through first gear, second gear, and third gear. There's a lot of people that we all know who are just casually interested in the Word of God. They know it's important. They know the right answers, but they only show up once a week. They're the nod-to-God crowd. You don't see them on a Tuesday night, on Thursday night, or any other time, and they don't listen to tapes, but they know it's important, and God's just sort of another detail of life. But he is not the controlling factor of life. And that's the difference. It's not really positive volition. It's just a facade. So we have to be careful of that because we can all slip into arrogance and self-deception and think that we're really positive when we're just coasting. I often like the analogy of the Christian life. It's like driving a car up a steep mountain road. You have no brakes and you only have neutral and drive. That's it. So if you slip out of drive, you're just going to go backward. And that's what has happened to these believers is they've just slipped. They're not hostile to God. That's what negative volition is not necessarily hostility to God or hostility to doctrine. It's complacency. That's as much negative volition as anything else. It's complacency towards the Word of God, that it's not that important. It's not a priority to reshape your thinking through the study of God's Word. Zechariah 7-11, again, is challenging the Jews. They stopped their ears so they could not hear. They refused to listen to the Word. So we looked at a few points to answer the question, what causes a believer to become lazy, sluggish, dull, and hard of hearing? It always starts with the study and application of the word as no longer a priority. They're easily distracted. Sports, television, they're just tired. Now, that can be legitimate sometimes. I mean, when you look at what's happened in our culture in terms of work hours, in 1970, it took a one breadwinner working 40 hours a week to produce a certain level of income. In 1986, it took two breadwinners working 60 hours a week to produce the same level of income of lifestyle. And that's not just because it's their fault for trying to have more things or a higher standard of living. We had the inflation, those of you who are old enough to remember the inflation of the late 70s under Jimmy Cotta, and we had what, what was it, 13% mortgage rates? What? 18% mortgage rates? It was just incredible. But what did that do? All of a sudden, in order to get a home, in order to pay the bills, wives were forced to go to work. And they had this incredible inflation that took place at that time. And so, you know, you remember the days when you go to Bible class five times a week. But all of a sudden, when you're working 60 hours a week, it's real hard to go to Bible class every night. Because you're tired. Legitimately so. But there has to be workarounds. That's why you have tapes and DVDs and other things like that so that you can fit the study of the word into your schedule. But it always has to be a priority. Number two, the details of life have been allowed to distract us from the priority. It's real easy to let the details of life distract us. They're legitimate distractions. You sometimes hear people say, well, you know, we have all these distractions. Well, they're legitimate. Life interferes sometimes with other things that we have to do. We get sick. We have extra responsibilities at work. We have elderly parents. We have kids that need our help, whatever it may be. They're legitimate, but we can't let them crowd out doctrine. Third, sin and our human good becomes a distraction which begins to callous the soul to the truth. That happens frequently. You've got to watch that. As soon as you start trying to solve problems through your own sin nature, through human good without using the problem-solving devices, then the sin nature takes over control. And if you stay in carnality, then it wipes you out spiritually, which is the situation we're facing in the book of Hebrews. The result of this is that a person then really becomes two-souled. That's the James 1, 5-7 issue, the Disukas believer. He has human viewpoint competing with divine viewpoint. in his soul. And in many cases you have believers who haven't grown enough to really have that much of a savings account of divine viewpoint. So when they hit neutral, boy, they just operate on human viewpoint paganism. And that's their problem-solving technique. That's how they approach life. So then they become this Daisukas, two-souled, double-minded believer that seems like he's got a lot of contradictions. Then we went to the dynamics of the backsliding believer. We've covered this. I want to get past it to some other things this evening, so let's just review it quickly. First of all, there's a decision to stop walking by the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5.16, walk by means of the Holy Spirit and you won't fulfill the lusts of the flesh. The command is to walk by the Spirit. That's sticking the transmission into drive. But as soon as you slip into neutral, what happens? You are going into the default position of life, which is walking by the sin nature. So as soon as you slip that gear into neutral, you automatically are operating on the sin nature and you're in spiritual regression. If you stay there in carnality, that leads to a development of arrogance, and the arrogance skills are then refined. Self-absorption, self-indulgence, self-deception, self-justification, and self-deification, where we become the ultimate authority. This is what was happening in the book of Judges. There was no king in the land. Who was the king? It was God. There's no king in the land. They've thrown out God and deified themselves. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes. This leads to spiritual fragmentation. It leads to fragmentation in the soul. It leads to self-destruction. Fourth, this produces vacillation in decision-making. That's the Dai-Sukhas believer I mentioned a little while ago. You're operating on competing value systems in your soul, human viewpoint versus divine viewpoint. Fifth, you seek happiness in the details of life. This is the leeks and garlic syndrome of the Exodus generation. After they get out in the wilderness, even though God's providing everything for them, and they have this miraculous provision and protection every day, what do they want? Let's go back to to the leeks and the garlic of Egypt because they don't have capacity for freedom and they don't have capacity for their blessings because they're not positive to the word. They've rejected it. This leads to soul poverty. God gave them the desires of their heart, but He sent leanness to their soul. Psalm 106, verse 15. That leads to the seventh characteristic of a backslidden believer. Previously learned doctrine begins to be ignored, lost, or forgotten. It was there once, but all of a sudden it's not there. And you know people like that. We know that you really knew a lot of doctrine one time and you were squared away and now look at the decisions you're making. We just back up and regress and forget this creates a vacuum in the soul which sucks in surrounding paganism. So the more you regress, the more there's this vacuum in the soul, the more you create a vacuum, nature pours a vacuum, it just sucks in whatever's around, and whatever's around is the human viewpoint thinking of the culture that is surrounding us. And that is paganism. Paganism is a technical term for any system of thinking that's not biblical. And so we just suck it in. And it's easy to do that. You pick it up from television, from media, from radio, from peers, from teachers, from all kinds of sources. And the sin nature attracts it like a magnet. Because it is the cosmic system around us, that culture around us, that often provides a rationale for the sin nature. Self-justification. This then leads to the ninth point, which is what I want to talk about a little more this evening, is this concept of cosmic or pagan degeneracy. Cosmic or pagan degeneracy. And you see this throughout the history of Christianity. You can go back to the earliest days of the church during the time of the New Testament. And what was one of the problems there? On the one hand, you have problems with legalism. Everybody has either a trend towards legalism or a trend towards licentiousness. And in legalism, what were they attracted to? Where did they move? They moved towards the Judaistic heresies. Am I picking up an echo in here? We're picking up an echo? Okay. They know it back in the back. You have this attraction to legalism. So the Judaizers are coming along and they're feeding that. And they say, oh, it's great that Paul taught about the grace of God in Christ and that you're justified by faith alone in Christ alone. But if you really want the abundant life, if you really want the super blessings that come with the Abrahamic covenant, then the men have to be circumcised and you have to enter into the Abrahamic covenant. in order to get those blessings. So that was on the legalistic side. And on the licentious side, you had who in the New Testament most specifically illustrates the licentious antinomianism of the ancient world. Those lovely Corinthians. They're so pagan it's unbelievable. They're just trying to cloak their Greek paganism in biblical terminology, they've got all kinds of problems going on in there. So you see these two trends and just as you as an individual are going to trend towards either licentiousness or I mean, licentiousness or legalism. In your sin nature, you're going to go towards one of those two directions. The same thing is going to happen culturally. A culture is going to trend in one way or the other because a culture is just a hodgepodge of a bunch of sin natures. And so those sin natures are going to have a preponderant trend in one direction or another. And you see that. We saw that if you go back to the World War II generation, coming out of the poverty and the hardship and the difficulty of the Great Depression, there was an emphasis on hard work on values, on morality. Why? Because when you get under that kind of adversity, it drives you back to certain standards that you have to apply or everything's just going to fall apart. And then what happens in reaction to that with the 60s generation, all you baby boomers got antinomian. You know, free love, free sex, free everything, no standards, everybody just do whatever you want to do. And so as a culture, we swung from more of a righteousness, and it wasn't necessarily a biblical righteousness, but a righteousness kind of legalism, all the way to the other extreme of cultural antinomianism and licentiousness, and now there are trends that we see trying to move things back in the other direction. That's always the cycle, is bouncing back from one to the other. You can trace it all the way through history. The early church was no different. You had groups that were pushing towards Judaism, and after the close of the canon, these became known as Ebionites. And that was a problem within the church during the first century after the last apostle died. And then you had the antinomian crowd, and they became known as Gnostics. And they produced those lovely Gnostic Gospels that they discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and that bears fruit. 1900 years later in the Da Vinci Code. So you see, you never get away from history. You have to know what these trends are and trace them through. And you just see the same patterns over and over and over again. So this is played out again in this next chart. Cosmic degeneracy follows the trends of either legalism or licentiousness. On the licentious side, it produces immoral degeneracy. Nobody seems to have a problem understanding this, that there is such a thing as immoral degeneracy. You can go to San Francisco and you can get a great example of what immoral degeneracy is. You can go back in history to Sodom and Gomorrah and you can see a picture of immoral degeneracy. You can go to the fertility cults and the mystery religions in Greece at the time of Christ and you can see the immoral degeneracy that dominated in those religious systems. Immoral degeneracy has its counterpart in knowledge. How do you know what you know? How do you know truth? How do we know what is right or what is wrong? What is the way to know truth? That's another way to put it. In immorality, what are you saying? You're throwing off all restraints. You're saying there's no rules. There's no rules. I'm just going to do whatever I want to do. And so you're totally moved by whatever your own appetites are. This has its role in knowledge. How do you know truth? Oh, however my appetites move me. It's not based on any sort of standards or any sort of objectivity, and therefore we call it irrationalism or non-rationalism. And the other term for this is mysticism. This is where mysticism comes from. You have mysticism in religion, and you always see this cycle in history. where you have rationalism dominate, and then there's a reaction to rationalism because rationalism, and I'm using that in a broad sense and including empiricism with it. Rationalism and empiricism can't provide answers. And ultimately, if you follow rationalism and empiricism to its logical conclusion, it leaves you without any answers and devoid of hope. That happened in the ancient world with Plato, Aristotle, and by the time you get into the Sophists and the Epicureans and the And there's just a rejection of the ability to know what absolute truth is. And that's when these mystery religions began to really sprout. And you had the worship of Apollo, and Delphi just really grew and expanded, and Dionysian worship, and the Sibylian cult, and all these other religions. And they emphasize mysticism, and they're emphasizing what's going on inside of the worshiper. And it just blows away all kinds of restraints and absolutes, leading to licentiousness. And this works itself out in terms of how they know truth and how they live their lives. You can't separate the two. On the other side, you have moral degeneracy. And this is exemplified by such groups in the Bible as the Pharisees, who were very rigorous in their approach to spirituality, in their approach to religion. They've taken the 613 commandments of the Mosaic Law and then they built a fence around that so that nobody, if you didn't break through the outer fence, you'd never break the 613 commandments. So they set up this whole system of human traditions and laws and regulations that became known and codified in the Mishnah. And these are all these stipulations and rules that as long as you didn't break those, you wouldn't break any of the commandments. And then they came along again and built a second fence around that, all in terms of human morality, but it's degenerate. It doesn't produce anything. Now, that moral degeneracy, that orientation to paying attention to all the details and setting up all these rigorous standards has a counterpart in knowledge. How do you know what you know? And that's where the real battle is. That's where I'm going with this, is how do you know what's right? How do you know what's true? And so this led to the development of autonomous reason and empiricism. That's the counterpart. So if you're living in a culture that is trending towards immoral degeneracy, how's that going to affect knowledge? Think about it. It's going to end up in mysticism. What have we seen? Well, the baby boomers all followed the Beatles to India, didn't they? And they just sucked up monism and pantheism and all these eastern mystical religions. And that developed into the New Age movement. And back in the 80s, I remember teaching about the New Age movement, and people were going, well, where did that come from? And by the 90s, it was mainstream. And nobody thinks anything about it anymore, crystals and pyramids and everything. more degeneracy has as its counterpart reason and empiricism. We saw that in the earlier phase, which was the modernist movement coming out of the Enlightenment. There was an emphasis on natural religion in a sense, and there was an emphasis on morality, and its counterpart in terms of knowledge on autonomous reason and empiricism. That leads to asceticism and self-righteousness on the one hand, and in terms of the chart, the immoral degeneracy leads to fertility religions, the prosperity worshipers of modern times, the prosperity gospel, the health and wealth Christians are just another manifestation of fertility worship. And then the moral degeneracy leads to legalism, like the Pharisees in developing rigorous systems of religion and steps to get to God, things like that. Now, I want to talk some about mysticism because mysticism is the danger of the day. The danger of the day a hundred years ago was rationalism and empiricism. When rationalism and empiricism dominated Western European culture, what did that produce in terms of religion? It ended up producing what we call 19th century religious liberalism. If everything must be submitted to human reason, then miracles don't fit human reason. I've never seen it. I've never felt it. It doesn't fit my rational system, so miracles are out. I've never seen God, felt God, experienced God. God's out. I've never seen a virgin birth, so that's out. It's what happens when rationalism controls Christianity is you threw away the miraculous. You threw away the virgin birth. You threw away healings. You threw away the second coming of Christ. You threw away the resurrection. It's just something that was a subjective impression on the disciples. So rationalism destroyed the guts of Christianity, and that's what happened. So there was a reaction. Skepticism came into play because that's always the result of rationalism. You lose a sense of truth. Rationalism can't give you the answers. Well, when there are no answers, you can't get there through reason, then you're just skeptical. That's existentialism, and that led to the nihilism of Nietzsche, that God is dead. There's some sign, some cartoon, where it says, God is dead, Nietzsche. And underneath that, some Christian wrote, Nietzsche is dead, God. So the rationalism of the Enlightenment led to skepticism, and into the vacuum of skepticism went mysticism. Why? Because man can't live as a skeptic. You can't live as if there's no God. You can't live and say there's no God, there's no hope, there's no meaning in life. Because God has built into the human soul, as Augustine put it, a God-shaped vacuum. That in the human soul, there's an orientation to God that you can't get away from, that you can't escape. And so man then makes this sort of existential leap into meaning. I can't support it with the use of my mind, so I'm just going to believe it. And that's mysticism. It's non-rational. So we have our chart that we've seen before, but I want to review it again, make sure you understand this. This is so important. I remember when I went to seminary back in 1976, and I can't remember who it was who said it the first time, but I know that Dr. Hannah said it frequently, made the comment that the crisis of our day is epistemology. The crisis of our day is epistemology, one of the most profound statements I ever heard. Trouble is, most people don't even know what epistemology is. Epistemology is how you know what you know. How do you know truth? How do you know what God wants you to do? How do you know if there is a God? This is what epistemology is. How do you know something? If you make a statement that says God exists, how do you know that? What's your basis for knowledge? What's your basis for truth? What is your way of knowing truth? How do you know what to do in life? How do you know your ultimate value system? So what was happening in the 70s is we had just come out of what was called the post-Puritan era that ended about 1962. 1963, when the last vestiges of Reformation and Enlightenment thought are thrown off, and we began to enter into this new mysticism that we started to see in the late 60s and on into the 70s. And it affects Christianity. That's when we saw the explosion of the Charismatic Movement. That isn't historically coincidental. There's a connection. Once we threw off the constraints of reason in the culture, then the constraints of the use of logic and reason as a tool to understand the Word of God got thrown off inside the church. The church always mirrors the culture outside the church. And so the church became explosively charismatic, and Americans just exported that all over the world. Well, there's four ways in which we know anything. The top three in this chart are human viewpoint systems of knowledge, how you know things. without God. The first system is rationalism. This is Plato in the ancient world, Descartes in the modern world. Rationalism glorifies human reason. It is autonomous human reason, apart from any kind of revelation. Man on his own, through the use of his own innate intellect, can reason to ultimate, absolute truth, unifying truth that will help him understand everything. So the starting point are innate ideas in the mind or the mentality of the soul, but undergirding that is this unspoken faith in human ability. See, there aren't three systems of perception, empiricism, rationalism, and faith. Because what undergirds everything but revelation is faith. We have to understand that. Is that at the core of rationalism is faith in autonomous human ability. I believe that this is what Descartes thought. I think, therefore I am. He said, okay, if I exercise skepticism about everything, and I think that everything around me is just one big cosmic delusion. Y'all don't exist. You're just a figment that God has placed in my imagination. The world doesn't exist. This is all just some great divine delusion. Nothing exists. Well, how do I know that I exist? I'm thinking. Ah, if I'm thinking, then I must exist. That's why He said, I think, therefore I am. Because I'm thinking, I've got consciousness and I'm logically interacting, then that means that I must exist. So, that's my starting point. I exist. Now, can I get from my existence to your existence? And he developed this whole scheme for doing that and then getting to the existence of God. The trouble is, that as all the critics pointed out, you can't really get outside of yourself. And so the problem with rationalism is called solipsism. You can't get out of your own soul. You can't get there. So rationalism fell apart. But the method of rationalism was the independent use of logic and reason. And so you have the development of rigorous systems of logic. The Greeks were experts at this and everything's been developed since then is based on that. But even today you have competing systems of logic that shows that ultimately they can't agree on the starting point. So rationalism doesn't provide ultimate answers. Then if rationalism can't do it, maybe sense knowledge does. So you shift to empiricism. What I see, what I feel, what I taste, what I touch, what I hear, this then becomes the basis for knowledge. I can know things as they are. And so the starting point is sense perceptions, external experience, repeated repetition of events, and this develops into the scientific method, but once again it's faith and human ability. That when I see you, I am properly interpreting what I see, what I feel, what I taste, what I touch, and therefore it's again faith and human ability to be able to properly interpret the signals that are coming into my brain. Once again, the method that's used is the independent use of logic and reason. Now, when rationalism fails and when empiricism fails, there's no hope. What do you have to go to? Logic has failed, so now where do you go? Non-logic. You reject reason. Reason can't get you there. You just have to experience it. You just have to. See, I'm using experience in a different way than I did with empiricism. And that's the development of mysticism. That instead of some sort of external factor, now it's just internal impressions. It's really rationalism gone to seed. Because in rationalism, you're going to get to truth through the use of your thought process. But you're going to use logic and reason to get to ultimate truth. But since logic and reason fails with rationalism, logic and reason fails with empiricism, we have to reject logic and reason. So now we just jump to inner private experience. It's all about what goes on inside of the individual. And I can't see what goes on inside you. You've had this mystical experience. The God or the gods or whatever the ultimate reality did something inside of you. You had this wham-bam experience, but I can't see it, taste it, touch it, feel it, evaluate it, judge it. Why? Because it's private. It's subjective. It's not externally observable by anyone else. It is intuitively perceived. I used to say it was intuitive hot flashes, but a lot of women didn't like that. It's just this internal perception. It's independent of all external verification. It's non-logical, non-rational, non-verifiable. Therefore, you can't evaluate it. It was real to me, and it carries with it this This self-authenticative power. If you had just experienced what I experienced, but of course you can't experience what I experienced, so how do you evaluate it? How do you verify it? If you can't verify it or falsify it, is it true? How do you know it's true? It was real to me. It was internal. It is so overpowering, it just shuts down any external verifiable category. Now remember we're dealing with knowledge. How do you know ultimate things? So knowledge is always related to some kind of communication. And so we come to the only divine viewpoint basis for knowledge which is revelation. Remember, rationalism is based on faith in human reason. Empiricism is based on faith in human ability. Mysticism is based on faith in your ability to properly interpret this intuitive insight, this event that occurred privately. But revelation is based on something objective. God speaks. God spoke to Moses from the burning bush. If he had had an Olympus digital voice recorder, he could have recorded the voice of God. If he had had a cassette recorder at Mount Sinai, they could have recorded the voice of God. If they had had a DVD player, they could have taken a movie of the burning bush. It was objective, it was outside of Moses. He just didn't hear some voice inside of his head. When Paul was on the road to Damascus, it's not a mystical experience, which is what the liberals say, Because only Paul clearly understood what the voice said, but those with him heard the voice and saw the light. Everything was out of focus for them. Only Paul saw it in focus. See, a mystical experience means only the individual sees the light, hears the voice, knows anything. Those around you don't know anything or see anything. So revelation is objective. It comes from God, and to understand it, we use the cognitive abilities that God put in us at creation. Now this is important. The big battle today, as most of you know, is in the field of interpretation. That's why we have these battles before the Supreme Court on how you're going to interpret the Constitution. Is it a living document? Or do you interpret it in light of the meaning of the founders? Well, you have the same battle going on in interpreting Scripture. Is it what it means to me or what the original author intended to communicate to his original audience? Which is it? And, of course, under mysticism, you keep moving more and more towards what it means to me, that inner private meaning, so that what it means to you is different from what it means to you, what it means to somebody else, and they're all right. Isn't that wonderful? We can all just go home and be warm and be filled. So, biblical truth is based on external, objectifiable, revelation that can be verified or falsified, validated or not. And when somebody comes along, and see the problem with Christianity, again as I said, it always reflects what's going on in the culture around you. So Christianity has always had a battle within Christianity with trends towards either rationalism or mysticism. And this has gone on since the early days of the church. In fact, in the early church, by the end of the second century and into the fourth century, the church became captivated by Neoplatonic mysticism. And this gave birth to interpretation, allegorical interpretation. For example, Origen was one of the early church fathers. He did some positive things. He did a lot of harm. because he said there's a meaning in scripture that goes beyond the letter. It doesn't matter whether it happened historically or not. What matters is that you have to understand this ideal meaning of the text that goes beyond it, which means you have to have a special wavelength to God in order to get that spiritual meaning. And that was allegorical interpretation, and it meant that, for example, a thousand years didn't mean a thousand years when he came to the millennium. A thousand years was just an ideal number. So now scripture could mean different things to different people, and allegorical interpretation dominated the church throughout the Middle Ages. Well, you had this period of mysticism, of orientation towards mysticism, for much of the early part of the church, influenced by Neoplatonism. Augustine was Neoplatonic. And then there's a rediscovery of Aristotle, but C.C. Aristotle was a rationalist, so there's a rediscovery of Aristotle around the 10th or 11th century, and so the pendulum swings in the other direction, and you have this dominance of a more rationalistic approach to theology and Bible study that produces the scholasticism of the late Middle Ages. But you see, that becomes a cold, dead scholasticism where there's no relationship with God, and so people want the warm, fuzzy of a relationship So you have a swing in the other direction. You have the rise of the late middle-aged mystics, like Meister Eckhart, who influences Luther later on, and some others that came along. So there's always this pendulum swing within the church. And you have the Reformation. And then there is what many people call a Second Reformation that occurs by the middle of the 1600s. which is a shift to what is called pietism. And you have the rise of the Dutch pietists and the German-Lutheran pietists, and this eventually produces a group called the Moravians. And we're in this flow, folks. Our history drives strong and hard right through the Pietists because they had many positive elements, but they also had this undercurrent of mysticism that affects their understanding of the Holy Spirit and the dynamics of the spiritual life. So you get this pendulum swing continues and the Moravians influenced who? Anybody know? John Wesley. John Wesley, after he'd been a missionary to Georgia, he's not saved. had to leave Georgia because there was some question about a relationship he had with a young lady. Back in those days, that meant you looked at her twice across the street. It doesn't have to be anything more than that for you to get in trouble. So he gets sent home. Along the way home, he's on a ship, and there's some Moravian missionaries on the ship that give him the gospel. Because one of the positive things about the Moravians and the Pietists was they believed that you had to put your faith in Jesus Christ in order to be saved. And there had to be a personal relationship. It wasn't just belief in a creedal statement. There had to be a personal faith in Jesus Christ. So after Wesley got back to England, he and his brothers finally got saved. Well then you have the development of Methodism down into the middle of the 19th century and Methodism grows kind of cold and stale like all movements seem to do and so there's a group within Methodism that wants to go back to the original little bit mystical orientation of Wesley and that's called the Holiness Movement. Produced people like E.M. Bounds who wrote a lot of books on prayer But you see there's a strong undercurrent in the holiness movement of mysticism. And so you have the development of the holiness movement, Keswick theology, which was the higher life or victorious life movement at the end of the 19th century, and All of these people get together, and there's also dispensationalists like Cyrus Ingersoll, C.I. Schofield, Louis Barry Chafer, Reuben A. Torrey, who was the president of Moody, then went out to found Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. All these people are operating together, speaking on the same speaking circuit. They're all going to the same Bible conferences. They're all going and speaking at the same pastors' conferences, and they're all talking in the same context. Now, Chafer came along. Chafer picked up and used, because that was the going vocabulary of the day, a certain amount of this Keswick holiness quasi-mystical vocabulary. And he wrote his book, He That Is Spiritual, in about 1917 or 1918, and Benjamin Breckridge Warfield, who was the conservative theologian of the day, wrote a devastating critique of He That Is Spiritual and said, he's just all Keswick, he's Victoria's Life. But he wasn't. Warfield misunderstood him. Why? Chafer was using victorious life terminology but in a non-victorious life way. And this is the problem with vocabulary and trying to express some of these concepts. We're often limited to the vocabulary of the theological environment in which we find ourselves. Now, all of that is to lead us up to understand that in mysticism, the ultimate issue is how do we know when we're being led by the Holy Spirit? How do we know when we're being guided by God? How do we know truth? And so, as I pointed out earlier, all revelation I did this back in the third or fourth lesson in Hebrews, that revelation, that is a communication or unveiling of knowledge from God to us must be distinguished from three things. Inspiration, which is the process whereby God oversaw the process of inscripturating or recording the disclosure of scripture. So inspiration is the mechanics of how the thoughts of God were put into the minds of men, written down so that the Holy Spirit oversaw the process so that the end result was without error. It's neither a mechanical dictation view, nor is it a mystical view of inspiration. Lewis Perry Chafer completely rejected the mystical view of inspiration. Illumination is another category. Illumination is how God the Holy Spirit enables us to understand what has been written in Scripture. We know that He does, but the Scripture doesn't tell us what those mechanics are. But it's not contemplating your navel. The worst form of mysticism in the Christian life is taking the Bible and saying, okay, I'm going to read the passage and I'm going to pray and God's going to tell me what it means. It's totally devoid of any knowledge of Greek or Hebrew or exegesis or theology. It's just liver quiver exposition. It's whatever God tells me at that moment it means. The Holy Spirit works through processes. Study. Years in seminary. Learning the original languages. Studying theology. That's how we come to understand the truth. And then the leading of the Holy Spirit. This can be directly through scripture or indirectly, no such a key word, indirectly through illumination as we understand scripture. Bringing scripture to memory when we get into a particular situation. Wisdom application. See what happens is the Holy Spirit builds this reservoir of knowledge in our soul. We learn to apply it, and the Scriptures use the term wisdom, which means skill at living. And so, He leads us through that wisdom from doctrine that's in our soul. And then this is confirmed often through external counsel or circumstances, but you never see this pure, mystical, liver-quiver, God-spoke-to-me kind of thing that you often get in holiness circles. You get in, you know, let's go spend three hours in prayer and fasting and God will speak to us. The problem with that is how do you know it was God and not just something dredging up in your mind? How many of you have had the experience where you're going to pray? And you start to pray, and all of a sudden you're at the grocery store, or you're out on the golf course, or you're watching a football game, or you're wrestling with a business problem. And two or three minutes goes by and you go, oh yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to be praying. So we have all these different layers of stuff going on in our consciousness that tends to percolate up. Now, how do you know that what's percolating to the surface is coming from the Holy Spirit or just your own mentality? See, that's the issue. How do you verify it? How do you validate it? How do you say it's true or it's false? In mysticism, there's no validation anymore. Principle from the Old Testament, God never communicates in private without authentication in public. It never happens. Whenever God speaks, there are a few times in the Old Testament when there's no external voice. It's possibly the prophet is only hearing or seeing within himself. But it's always valid, even in Daniel. You see, Daniel has these dreams and visions, but what happens? An angel comes along, tell him what it means. See, there's external objective verification. It's not simply this internal subjective process. Now, Chafer recognized there was a difference between false mysticism and true mysticism, and he wrestled with this terminology. But mysticism is a bad word to use, and I'm going to show you why. When he goes to true mysticism, It isn't mysticism anymore, because mysticism is always internal. All it takes is, you know, Philosophy 101 and pull out a few dictionaries and books on mysticism and read on them, you find out what it really is. And he didn't use it well, but see, I touched on that last time. In False Mysticism, in Volume 1 of the Systematic Theology, it says, False mysticism is the theory that divine revelation is not limited to the written word of God. Now let me parse this for you a little bit. Divine revelation, that is the unveiling of knowledge to man, the communication of any kind of information to the individual, is not limited to the written word of God, but that God bestows added truth to souls that are sufficiently quickened by the Spirit of God to receive it. Now you see what happens within Christianity is you get this quasi-mysticism, what I'll call mysticism light, L-I-T-E, or soft mysticism, where they try to interpret these passages related to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, which is internal, which is not clearly described in scripture, they try to interpret it in this mystical way, where the Holy Spirit today is communicating something to you. Mystics of this class, that is non-Christian mystics, contend that by self-effacement and devotion to God, that is going out and sitting on top of a pillar or going hungry or fasting for 40 days, that an individual can attain to immediate, direct, and conscious realization of the person and presence of God and thus to all truth in Him. In other words, there's this direct intuitive knowledge of what God wants me to do. False mysticism, he goes on to say, includes all those systems which teach identity between God and human life, pantheism, theosophy, and Greek philosophy. Those are just some of them. In it are included practically all the holiness movements of the day. See, that's what he's recognizing, this holiness theology that came out of Wesleyanism that produced men like E. M. Bounds and Charles Fox Parham, who was the father of the Pentecostal movement and Pentecostalism itself. All these movements are mysticism, and he classifies them under false mysticism. And then he has the non-Christian element, Spiritism, Seventh-day Adventism, New Thought Metaphysics, which is the precursor to modern New Age movement, Christian Science, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism, Millennial Dawnism. That's Jehovah's Witness. The founders and promoters of many of these cults make claims to special revelation from God upon which their system is built. With far less complication with error and untruth, a false mysticism is discernible in the beliefs and practices of the Friends of the Quakers." Now the Friends and Quakers, many of them are Christian, but they had this inner light, God's speaking to me, I just have to be quiet. That was called quietism. I get quiet, I get alone with God, and God speaks to me. I pray for three or four hours, the Holy Spirit will guide me. Well, how do you evaluate that? Well, you can't. So it'll justify anything. Now in contrast to this, Schaeffer talked about true mysticism. Now notice how he so qualifies the term that it destroys the term. You can't really call this mysticism. But he's confusing mysticism with something that is mysterious or difficult to understand. That was common at an earlier age. But mysticism is not a belief in the supernatural. It's not to be equated with a simple belief in the supernatural. It's not to be equated with the occult. Some people do that. The occult is always mystical, but not all mysticism is occultic. Mysticism is not mysterious. There are a lot of mysteries, things we don't quite understand in the scripture, but that doesn't mean they're mystical. So in true mysticism, Schaeffer says, true mysticism contends that all believers are indwelt by the Spirit. That's good so far. I don't like the term true mysticism, but that's how he's trying to define it. It's this ministry of the indwelling Holy Spirit to the believer. and thus are in a position to be enlightened directly by Him." Oh, that sounds kind of funny, doesn't it? But read on. He tells you exactly what this enlightened by Him means. It's not a direct enlightenment. It's mediated through the Word of God. But that there is one complete revelation given, and that the illuminating work of the Spirit will be confined, notice, will be confined to the unveiling of the Scriptures to the mind and heart. It doesn't have to do with figuring out whether you ought to enter into that business deal tomorrow or not. It's not trying to figure out whether you ought to marry this woman or that woman or not get married at all. It is confined to understanding the Scripture. But you see, mysticism, accurately understood, is a totally subjective internal event. That's not what he's talking about here. So he was wrong in using this term mysticism. He goes on to say, false mysticism ignores the statement found in Jude 1.3 that there is a faith or system of belief once delivered unto the saints and that when the spirit is promised to guide into all truth, it is only the truth contained in the scriptures. It's based on objective revelation. There is a unique knowledge of the mysteries or sacred secrets of God according to those who are taught by the Spirit of God. But these sacred secrets are already contained where? In the text of the Bible. It's not some kind of liver quiver. It's not some sort of naval contemplation. It is understanding what the text says. And that's based on historical, grammatical, lexical study of the Word of God. Now, the Word was never understood mystically. Mysticism has always destroyed any kind of objectivity in Christianity. Why? Just a quick wrap-up. Think about this. Mysticism is focusing on learning knowledge, gaining knowledge. The term that we use in theology for God communicating knowledge to man is called revelation. Right? God reveals something to us. So we learn something we didn't know before. There's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and there's special revelation. Theology 101. General revelation is non-verbal. Psalm 19.1, the heavens declare the glory of God. It is what we see in the results of God's creation. That we look around the intelligent design argument is an argument for the existence of God based on general revelation. But it doesn't give you anything specific. But to properly interpret general revelation, what do you have to have? Special revelation. For example, in the Proverbs, we have Proverbs that talk about observing the ant, how the ant works hard and he's diligent and he lays up for future, he stores things for the future. But do we go to the ant for all social application? No, because there's one queen that runs all the males. So you can't just go to nature and willy-nilly draw out any application you can. Special revelation tells you how to interpret general revelation and where it applies. Now, general revelation continues today. Go outside, look at the stars, the heavens declare the glory of God. Special revelation is the other category. Special revelation is when God reveals himself propositionally to man. When did special revelation end? It ended with the closing of the canon. Therefore, is God revealing information to man after the close of the canon? No. That ends all mysticism. Ends all discussion. That means that the leading of the Spirit is not to be equated with anything other than Scripture because if the leading of the Spirit has to do with you going out and praying about something tomorrow that God is going to tell you what to do, whether to do that deal or this deal, whether to turn right or whether to turn left, then you're asking for special revelation. And special revelation ended with the closing of the canon. So when you start interpreting the filling of the Spirit, the leading of the Spirit, in these kinds of subjective categories, it immediately undercuts and eviscerates, that's a fancy word meaning it guts your whole doctrine of bibliology. Because now you're opening the door to God speaking. Well, the canon can be closed, but God still speaks. Okay, where do you find that in Scripture? Document that. You can't, because the speaking of God is always infallible and inerrant. Whether it's inscripturated or not isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not special revelation ceased or not. And if it ceased, That's it. God's not going to tell you what to do tomorrow. What you have to do is learn from the Word of God. You develop wisdom in your soul. And it's from that reservoir of wisdom that you make the decisions. And working in and through that in a mysterious way is the Holy Spirit who guides and directs you. And if you're going to make the wrong decision and the Holy Spirit wants you to do X instead of Y, guess what? y will disappear and you'll only end up with x if what you want to do is to follow and do what is right before the Lord. So mysticism always destroys your whole doctrine of revelation and your whole doctrine of bibliology and it gets Christians into some sort of internal self-analysis subjectivity and liver quiver to find out what God wants them to do and that is always unhealthy for the believer because it ultimately destroys the objectivity of the external standard of the Word of God. Let's bow our heads together in closing prayer. Father, thank you for the opportunity to study these things, to be reminded of the importance of your Word and knowing your Word, the importance of knowing how God the Holy Spirit works and doesn't work, that His work in our life is indeed supernatural. He leads, He guides, He directs, He teaches, but He does not do this within a mystical or subjective framework based on the methodologies of paganism. Father, we pray that we might be challenged to continue to make your word a priority in our life, that we can press on to spiritual maturity. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.