Alright, it is Saturday morning and we are each in various stages of consciousness and we are progressing through those stages largely aided by caffeine and that is a blessing and I have my own caffeine just behind me and I'll be frequently imbibing that as we go. We are going to get a little bit philosophical this morning, and so I would encourage you that if you can time your caffeine to hit maybe in about 10 minutes or so, that's when I think you're going to need it the most. But let me begin by saying something that in our day is supposed to make sense, but We shouldn't think it makes sense. So we're going to begin right away with confusion and the necessity for caffeine. What if I were to say to you this statement? Trust me, you cannot understand what I'm saying. I see a few chuckles. Trust me, you cannot understand what I'm saying. We think about that statement and it's rather self-defeating, isn't it? If I'm telling you that you cannot understand what I'm saying, I'm assuming the opposite of what I'm trying to assert. And again, we're in various stages of consciousness as we're waking up. But if I'm telling you that you cannot understand what I'm saying, I'm hoping that you actually will understand what I'm saying. It is a self-defeating argument and it is also a self-serving argument. So much of what happens in our day as we talk about religion and as we talk about faith We have what you might consider to be self-limiting or selectively self-limiting thoughts about God. Trust me, you cannot understand what I am saying. It's disingenuous. I'm bringing to you something that I think you can understand in order to create a space where there's no knowledge. When we consider God in our day, we want Him close but not that close. And there's a self-defeating nature to the way that we think about God. And we're going to explore that this morning under the title of what we call agnosticism. Now, agnosticism literally means to be without knowledge. But that is an impossibility. To merely say you are an agnostic, to talk about anything, to use language is to assume a certain possession of knowledge. And so what we're going to see in agnosticism is that it is deeply disingenuous. It will not function on its own terms. It is very selective. Just like my telling you you can't understand what I'm saying when in reality you can. Agnosticism is very selective in what it chooses to know. It is very self-serving. Agnosticism is a function of autonomy. We spent last night quite a bit of time considering autonomy. And as we'll go this morning, this is really going to be at the heart of what we want to get to this morning. Agnosticism, though a function of autonomy, especially in our day, is not only disingenuous, but it is deeply sad. It is deeply sad. Because we have rising generations who are growing up. Who think that what I said to begin this session makes total sense. Of course, we can't understand each other. Of course, there are no absolutes or, of course, if there are absolutes, we can't know them. Of course, God could not speak to us through a book. Of course, no one has a claim on truth that is superior to anyone else's claim. I spoke with a gentleman in downtown Pittsburgh, one of the million suburbs of Pittsburgh at one point, called Oakland, Oakland, outside a coffee shop, and I was talking to him about the Lord, and he said to me, You know, all this stuff about the universe just happening. I mean, that that's ridiculous. I mean, the universe is beautiful. There's got to be some kind of power. There's got to be some kind of God. And, you know, this Jesus you're talking about. I love him. He's a great teacher. You know, so all this nonsense about atheism is ridiculous. And so I said to him, Sir, well, if you believe that God is that powerful, do you believe also then that he is capable of revealing himself to us? In a book. And I'm not kidding. It's as if a cloud passed over his face. And he suddenly shut down. He said, no. No. It's profoundly sad. Notice the selective knowledge. God can do anything. He can create a world. Can he speak to us through a written word? No. Why? Because there's something he's trying to avoid. And he knows that once he takes that step and he acknowledges that God can do something, then he's going to have to acknowledge that perhaps he actually did. And that means that he's going to have to acknowledge that there's an accountability that he's trying to avoid. And yet again, in rising generations, that logical connection is just not there. It does not make sense to rising generations that we would have access to absolutes and the way that their logic constantly refutes itself does not even register to them. And so we are in a day that is deeply agnostic. The militant atheists are out there. They're angry. They're loud. But for the most part in our day, it's the agnostics who who carry the banner and who have won the day in terms of the spiritual culture. And also, I want to consider as we're thinking about this and drawing off of last night, we talked about those points of distance between us and that vibrant, visceral experience of the Christian life. We as believers can be practical, not can. Yeah, we can be. We have the ability, sadly, to be practical agnostics. To have certain corners of our hearts, certain habits, thoughts and behaviors. which we want to keep to ourselves, but we know full well what the Lord has said about them. We know full well, as we considered last evening, that there is power in the living Christ to fight and to overcome these sins. But we think, no, no, no, no. The cloud comes over our face. We get very selective about what we know and therefore what we do. All of that by way of introduction, and if you haven't imbibed your caffeine, please do so as we go. Hopefully everyone has a handout for session two. Knowing, assurance instead of agnosticism. Agnosticism is another one of those major gaps, those major points of distance between us and that full, vibrant experience of the life to which Christ has called us. And again, not just then in heaven, but more and more now, heaven on earth. Agnosticism's allure. There's your first point in the handout. Agnosticism's allure. Again, let's remember agnosticism is not atheism. It doesn't say there is no God. It says if he's out there, he hasn't made himself known to me in such a way that I can accept and trust him. Nor is agnosticism, or if you're familiar with the term postmodernism, fundamentally a denial of absolute truth. It's more about whether we can know absolute truth. And so you'll have postmodern scholars and many who claim to be Christians who will say, I'm not denying absolute truth. It's just the issue of the strength to which I'm willing to hold to truth claims. So it's selective. We can sum it up this way in terms of rising generations and young adults among whom I work and whom I serve. We live in a generation among Christians who believe that it is not knowing the truth which sets them free. We believe that it is not knowing the truth that sets us free. Now, why would someone take comfort in not knowing? We're even beyond the issue of comfort, just the issue of reality. Why would we want to believe that it is not knowing the truth that can set us free. Well, Francis Schaeffer writes this. If there is no absolute by which to judge society. Then society is absolute. And so if there is no knowable authoritative truth by which we are held accountable to which we are held accountable. Then we are that truth. And that's the statement in your outline. I am the law. Does anyone recognize the comic book reference to that, by the way? Anyone at all? OK. All right. You can look up Judge Dredd and then forget it. I am the law. So you'll hear it so often expressed in these terms in our day. I'm spiritual. I'm just not religious. Have you ever heard that? I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. Well, what's the difference? Well, in spirituality, there's an intentional vagueness. Everyone's an expert. If you are a spiritual person, you can have any concept of God that you want, and no one can tell you differently. However, religion seems to suggest an external authority. Rules, which we have to obey. Principles, to which we must adhere. And we don't like that naturally. And for lots of fun philosophical reasons that we could talk about and I'd love to. For several centuries, we have lived believing that there is this wall between us and knowable truth that God and absolutes and everything else are way up here. And there's this uncrossable chasm and we are down here. And all we can do is function on the level of truth with a lowercase T. The capital T is way up there. And we dress it up in spiritual language and we say, well, it would be arrogant for me to say what God is like. Who am I to say what God is like? And so then we begin into our own personal theology. I like to think of God this way. And here's what helps me. Now, you may think of God in a different way and that's fine for you. But don't you dare tell me that the way that I think about God is wrong because you have no access up here. And so the goal of contemporary spirituality. We can put it, think of it this way. Historically, the goal of religion, the goal of faith, whatever faith it was, was to try to be at peace with God. But these days, the goal of contemporary spirituality is to be at peace with ourselves. And if we have found some kind of peace of self, which is defined by ourselves conveniently, well then we must have found peace with God. The goal of contemporary spirituality is not peace with God, but peace with self. Peace with self as a means of claiming peace with God. If we're happy with ourselves, why would God be any different? That's the idea. So I'm spiritual. I'm not religious. We like to treat God in our day like we treat the sun. Soak up the sun there in your outline. We've had some intense experiences of the sun in early September already, but not that intense. Not so intense that we are literally burning. When we think of the sun in the sky, we love to bask in its warmth. especially as the cold days of winter draw and we begin to miss its warmth. We love to bask in its warmth, we love to walk in its light, but we don't want it too close, or else we begin to burn. This is the way that we treat God and His Word. We love the light and the warmth of thinking that there is someone, something out there who loves us, and that in this book that we call the Bible, there are really wonderful and wise ways of living. But to say that this is a word directly from him and that every word within it is directly from him. That's too close. Back away because I don't want to get burned. So in other words we say to God keep your distance. I'm happy to be warmed by you but keep your distance and I will control the terms. Thank you very much of how I think about you. Now in all of that. Here's where we get back to the disingenuousness with which we open in all of agnosticism's claims for all of its assertion that we can't get up here. We can't get to the realm of absolutes and truth. It is absolutely operating by an absolute. There is within agnosticism a constant immovable standard of knowledge of morality of ethics of everything and the constant immovable universal absolute unequivocal standard on which agnosticism stands is the self. We're back to autonomy for the agnostic. Why don't you believe in God? Well, because I think God should be this way, or I think God should have done that. And because he didn't, I don't believe in him. The constant standard is self. It is autonomy. It exalts itself in a position of cosmic authority. And if any fact is going to be acceptable and allowed to affect one's life. It must pass before the throne of the self to seek acceptance. And the self gets to define the self standards. And so again you can talk to someone about their beliefs and and they can say several things which immediately contradict themselves. And you can see it. And you can even humbly and lovingly point it out, which is always how you should do it. But it's like you're talking past them. More and more, there's just not a recognition of those contradictions. Because after all, if I truly am the standard of all things, there's no contradictions to be had. I can say this is something and not something. Why? Because I say it. I can like something today and hate it tomorrow. Why? because I can change my mind. And so that's what we have to understand again, especially about rising generations, is that it's not just a cold logical inconsistency. It is there, but it's fundamentally an issue of the heart and a heart that has been increasingly closed as that Romans one type suppression gets more and more severe with every passing generation. We lose even the categories by which to think rationally. We exalt ourselves as God. And that is the unspoken although sometimes spoken statement of the agnostic. I am God. Think back in the garden. What Satan said to our first parents. Has God really said Inevitably, if you cast doubt on God's word, you cast doubt on his character. So agnosticism's absolute is the self. And so there's a disingenuousness about that. But let's not get prideful and just leap up and down because we've pointed out some logical fallacies in people's spiritual thinking. or think that somehow by badgering them with them, it's going to move the heart. It's disingenuous, but it's also deeply sad. The issue with an agnosticism as it applies to an understanding of God. The issue is not a lack of evidence. John Calvin writes, and appropriately so, We cannot even open our eyes without being forced to behold God in a thousand different ways. The issue is not evidence. The issue is ethics. We don't believe in God. We don't accept his claims because we don't want to. That's Paul's argument in Romans 1. God's made himself clear to people. But we exchange the noble truth of God for a lie and we worship the creator creation excuse me rather than the creator. Now when we're getting into the issue of ethics we're getting into what we want to believe what we think is right and how we therefore think life should be lived. And here's where we get into the deeply sad stuff. The point your outline says dad's dark side. I don't know, nor do I presume to know, much about any of your relationships to your fathers as you were growing up. But even in the best of households, in the most loving, Christ-centered household, there can be aspects as we grow up, as children, aspects of our father's personality which we find hard to accept. And I'm not talking about sinful things. Decisions that are made without our permission. Decisions that are made which make absolutely no sense to us which do not seem right. But yet because he's dead he made those decisions. And so we're at a crucial moment of formation in our hearts in our lives as to this issue of autonomy versus freedom. Are we going to trust the dad whom we know loves us. Or are we going to exalt our own standards and say, because you are not doing this, you have now disqualified yourself as dad? That's what's going on in the hearts of so many agnostics, regardless of the age, but particularly among young adults. Here's a quote from someone whose popularity is perhaps fading a little bit, but still very much out there. I heard him mentioned just the other day in the office where I work at Geneva, Rob Bell. I was about to say if that name rings a bell, but that would be a horrible pun, so I'm glad I didn't say it. All right, there's that disingenuousness again. smilingly subversive. Here's what Rob Bell writes, and also this is why Rob Bell writes his massively popular books on Christianity, as he calls it. Quote, and that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians. They don't love God. They can't. Because the God they've been presented with and taught about can't be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable. Now imagine you're someone who, as I mentioned last night, is hurt. And life seems to be one unending procession of pain. And you hear someone like this, who claims to be a Christian, And he says, I get it. I get it. And you know what? God isn't really like classical Christianity affirms. The little voice inside your heart that reads some of those passages that seem so harsh and says, this can't be what God is like. That's the voice of God, not the words on the page. Can you imagine how that seems like a cup of cold water to a thirsty, hurting soul? And thousands are, in the name of Jesus, lapping it up. Because now, they get to be spiritual. Now, without saying they're doing it, or thinking that they're doing it, they get to define the terms by which God is acceptable all in the name of serving him. Vicious, disingenuous irony at the heart of unbelief. Now here's another quote. Rob Bell is often and rightly so taken to task for his lack of historical honesty, for his lack of even honesty in interpreting texts. But again, remember, when the self is the standard of truth, there's not going to be a recognition of inconsistency or even a care about inconsistency. If we talk about history and you say, no, Mr. Bell, actually, that world leader never said this or that world leader was never even in that place at that particular point. The response is, well, history is written by those who have hanged heroes. A line from a popular film from 1995. History is so skewed. Everybody has an agenda. We need to take from history and from all of life what's good for us. Because remember, the truth is up here. We can't access it. Now, is it true that history is written with an agenda? Sure it is. None of us can escape our agendas. None of us can be outside our biases as we begin. However God through his word and most magnificently through his son Jesus Christ has broken through that barrier and has spoken to us clearly and authoritatively in such a way that can be known. So we're back to the issue of ethics. We just don't like what he says. And so a scholar who who is known as a scholar and unlike Rob Bell is trained as a scholar is becoming increasingly popular is a guy named Bart Ehrman. And I am no expert on this man. So I want to be very careful here. I'm going to use one of his quotes that I think fairly represents most of his thinking. But we can even abstract it from him because it's so well represents what we have in our day by and large. Here's what Ehrman writes. And by the way, he was a professing Christian and now claims to be an agnostic. Ehrman writes this, quote, The God I once believed in was a God who was active in the world. He saved Israelites from slavery. He sent Jesus for the salvation of the world. He answered prayer. He intervened on behalf of his people when they were in desperate need. He was actively involved in my life. But I can't believe in that God anymore. Because from what I see now around the world. He doesn't intervene. Before we leap into what's wrong with that. Feel the sadness. Because whether we're willing to publicly admit it or not, have we not all at one time felt that way in our relationship to the Lord? God, you could have intervened, but you didn't. How is this plans for prosperity? How is this the loving kindness of the Lord? What is going on here, God? Why would you take this from me? Why would you take that person from me? I was so sure I was following your will, and then you slammed the door in my face. So this is not just them. And even if it was just them, we ought to love and pray. But it's us too. So we need to feel the sadness, but we cannot dismiss the sin that is operative and the autonomy that is operative in this thinking at its core. Agnosticism answered in your outline. This is from another popular writer among Christians in the PCA, particularly Timothy Keller wrote a book called The Reason for God. And this is Keller's take on essentially what the kind of argument that Ehrman made. And I know I just read it for you once. So let me remind you again. The God I once believed in was a God who was active in the world. He saved Israelites from slavery, sent Jesus, intervened on behalf of his people when they were in need, actively involved in my life. But I can't believe in that God anymore, because from what I see around the world, he doesn't intervene. And so Keller writes this, quote, again, we see lurking in this supposed hard-nosed skepticism, an enormous faith in one's own cognitive faculties. If our minds can't plumb the depths of the universe for good answers to suffering, well, then there can't be any. And he's writing that somewhat sarcastically of this view. In other words, if I can't find an acceptable answer, if God doesn't conform to my particular expectations of him, he's just not there. Or if he is, forget him. I'm not paying attention to him. As I mentioned before, do we see or we need to see how much that elevates self as the standard for what is knowable, what is right. So Keller goes on to write, this is blind faith of a high order. To have such confidence in the self is blind faith in the highest order. Think of it this way, how often do we need other people as we go throughout the day? If the car breaks down and we don't have either the knowledge or the ability or the tools to fix it. In my case, if a light bulb burns out, what am I going to do? That's a trauma. I got to find the thing and I don't want to look for it. So there's ethical issues with me on that. Not just incompetence, selective incompetence. But how dependent are we throughout the day to just live and literally to breathe? I mean, if I eat too many orange donuts and I hit the ground clutching my chest, I can't resuscitate myself. And yet. We would claim the spectacular supernatural capacity to be able to judge that the God who has revealed himself in Christ hasn't done enough in order to justify himself or that he even needs to justify himself to me. It's astounding. It's subtle, but it's so substantial and it lurks in the shadows and in the sadness. It's autonomy. We can think about the development, for instance, of airmen's statements. When he was young, you read about Jesus and he read about the exodus and Jesus was even active in his own life. But now that he's old and ostensibly wiser, He looks around the world and apparently God doesn't intervene. Notice the development. Airman says he answered my prayer. He was actively involved in my life. And yeah for Christians like we talked about last night. Make it personal. Jesus loved me and died for me. Personal but not autonomous. Airman's faith had a major about face. Why. From what I now see he writes. He doesn't intervene. It seems that even though well-intentioned, his once vibrant faith always had within it a secret focus on the self. And as long as things were going according to plan, with no doubts and sincerity within there, everything was fine. But when he observed things not going according to plan, well, then the problem wasn't here. The problem was with God. Agnosticism's selective amnesia. Ehrman is known and loved in popular media outlets for criticizing the Bible as essentially man-made and just not the divine word that it claims to be. And there's a major problem. Remember back in the Garden of Eden, you doubt God's word, you doubt his character, they're always related. And so there's a major problem with believing that the Bible is a myth. And it makes total sense that if you believe that this stuff is just fairy tales, I'm not saying that that's what Ehrman claims, but in general, that can describe the ethos of our day. Well, then it's no wonder that you have a hard time believing in the God who gave it to us. Here's what I mean by agnosticism's selective amnesia. Is life really worse now than it was in biblical times? As Ehrman looks around the world and he sees where God allegedly doesn't intervene, it's bad. And I'm not minimizing the badness. You think of ISIS, we think of other horrific things happening in the world today. But it was going on back then too. And so much of the Bible deals with those realities head on. It's not as if the Bible comes to us and says, everything's going to be great in life. And as soon as something goes wrong, that's when you can start questioning God, because the fabric of the universe has been disrupted. Well, the fabric of the universe has been disrupted by our sin. And the Bible deals head on with the consequences of sin. Job is my personal favorite book in scripture. It has just a beautiful but blunt honesty About the gut-wrenching nature of life in a fallen world and of the activity of the enemy There are so many passages of the Word of God that are dedicated to Suffering and even to allowing God's people as a form of worship to him to cry out in sincerity not insincerity, but with sincerity, in their pain. The book of Jeremiah, he's the weeping prophet. He had to prophesy and see the destruction of his beloved people. Life is not somehow better back then. These were real people. who had real sufferings that would rival anything that airmen can come up with as the worst of what's going on today. We read Lamentations chapter one. And here's where we part ways between sincere sympathy for the agnostic and the deep sadness. But there's got to come that point. That crucial juncture, what are we going to do with this sadness? Are we going to trust ourselves as God and abandon His word? Or are we going to do what Jeremiah does in Lamentations chapter 1? Is it nothing to you all, you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the fierce day of His anger. Excuse me, the day of His fierce anger. There's a real acknowledgement of sorrow there. Strong language, maybe even stronger than we would dare to express on our own. So there's that juncture and there's that parting ways point. No matter how well intentioned and no matter how seemingly sincere its beginnings. A faith that is all talk will eventually run out of good things to say about God. It will reveal its autonomous nature as it confronts situations which it cannot answer on its own terms. In which it therefore will not endure. And yet James first Peter. Everywhere in scripture. It is precisely those trials and heartaches. By which genuine faith is revealed. not as some kind of cold, capricious test from God, our Heavenly Father, but as the means of revealing His spectacular and enduring grace within us. The One who sent His sinless Son to die for people who by nature hated Him. This is not a cold, capricious God. The son who cried out on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I don't know if there's ever been a cry of deeper pain. Jesus understands this. The father sent him to do this. The spirit takes what Jesus has done and applies it to believers. Why? And I'm speaking reverently here, but this is how unbelievers so often categorize God. It's as if he's in heaven. I want to speak reverently, but it's as if he's in heaven having a giant, I told you so party. This is just some big cosmic game and we're chess pieces. There's nothing trivial about the cross. Christ dies and rises again. Why? So that we can know God as father, the one against whom we rebelled. The one against whom our first parents rebelled and every bitter tear and every bad news x-ray is an aftershock of that original quake in Eden. And it's bad and it hurts and it's terrible and it's worth crying about and it's worth crying out about. But God's grace is greater. And so the same prophet who cries out in chapter one, and since with sincere, authentic lament, says this in chapter three, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. In Exodus 17, the Israelites are in the wilderness, and they're thirsty. And again, let's see the sadness first. They're really thirsty. They've been through a lot. I've never gone, I don't know, eight or nine hours without a meal or a drink in my life. Well, sometimes, fasting or what have you, but I've never been truly hungry. The Israelites were in a very tough situation. And yet, they cry out because of God's apparent lack of provision. Is the Lord among us or not? Now that sounds like a question, but in reality it's an accusation. We're very familiar with questions that are accusations. Have you ever said this to someone? What's your problem? Technically it's a question, but in reality it's a statement that says quit doing what you're doing. It's not an expression of concern. So the Israelites ask, is God among us or not? Knowing full well that he was and he is. Jesus from the cross cries out with the question, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is a question which expresses trust. We see the results in verse 31 of Psalm 22. All the ends of the earth will come to the Lord and praise him. He has done this. And so there are questions which are genuine questions. And there are questions which are accusations. And so often within agnosticism, the latter develops into the former as we exalt ourselves as God. Moral wisdom from Old Jack, that's C.S. Lewis. He's called Old Jack, by the way. It's his nickname because when he was four, his dog, Jack, died. And he was so heartbroken that he told his parents, and he stuck to this, that he would no longer be referred to by his original name. He would now be referred to as Jack. So you see that wonderful open heart and also that stalwartness and stubbornness, in a sense, that characterized Lewis wonderfully. But he writes this. If our religion is something objective, remember up here, absolute truth. If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent. For it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. You come to that juncture. Are we going to trust the Lord and plow through? Or are we going to stop and declare ourselves a deity? It's precisely the puzzling or the repellent that which seems, what is going on here? Which conceals what we do not yet know and what we need to know. As a bit of a side note, none of us is perfectly consistent with our own thinking, so I say this humbly, but it's ironic that C.S. Lewis didn't take this advice when it came to the imprecatory Psalms. He had very harsh things to say about the imprecatory Psalms, and would that he had taken this advice. It's those hard, seemingly repellent things that we need to seek to understand because there's something there that God wants us to get. And knowing the heart of our God, it's not cruel, it's not capricious, it's wonderful. So agnosticism annihilated. The epistemological freedom. Agnosticism is all about what we know, how we know, and deciding that we are the standards of what we know. That's agnosticism. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding. In all of your ways, acknowledge Him, and He will make your path straight. Autonomy says, if you don't come to me on my terms, hit the road. Freedom says, Lord, I don't understand. But I acknowledge you. Now walk this path in faith. And again, it's not because faith is blind and irrational and there's no evidence, but it gets down to here. And these problems always point us to Christ. And Paul says in Romans 8, after talking about the suffering that we endure and the deep calamities in this world, he says, if God did not spare his own son for us, How will He not also with Him freely give us all things, everything that we need? So as always, Jesus is the answer. It's not just a cliché. It shouldn't be a cliché. We need to have, segueing into talk number three, don't worry we'll have a break, but we need to have a toddler's trust in the Lord. And by that I don't mean unintelligent. Our children are so intelligent. We expect so little from them. But think of it in these terms. Some of you have heard me give this analogy before. Imagine you have a toddler in a doctor's office with dad. And since I'm a dad, I'm just going to go with that. It's not mom in the office, it's dad. Just go with me. And this toddler, let's say three years old, if that's still technically a toddler, Okay, this toddler's been sick, and dad's got him in the doctor's office, and in comes this person wearing a white coat and brandishing a needle. The toddler looks at the needle, and even at his young stage of cognitive development, he recognizes that this needle is about to be plunged into his arm by this white coat-wearing, needle-wielding maniac. And the toddler thinks, oh, I can't wait to see what dad's going to do to this guy. I mean, this is going to be cool. But as the needle-wielding maniac approaches, dad doesn't put the toddler behind him and say, OK, let's deal with this. Dad holds him tight so the needle can be inserted. And the toddler cries. And there is not one explanation in the world at that moment, in that pain, that is going to satisfy the grieving heart of the toddler as to how this is saving his life. But when he cries, and it's all over, upon whose shoulder does he cry? The needle-wielding maniac? No, Dad. Dad who does things and who has the right to do good things which we don't understand. And to put us in pain which we can't understand. Or at least the details of which we can't seem to reconcile with what we want. How much more so the Lord, who is not only infinitely wise and powerful, but good as demonstrated most magnificently in Jesus Christ. After Jesus preaches in John, chapter six, the vast majority of the people that were there leave him. And I'll pick up the reading there. After this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, Do you want to go away as well? Simon Peter answered him. Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. And we have believed and have come to know that you are the holy one of God. No agnosticism there. See, ultimately, the agnostic, and when we play the part of the practical agnostic in keeping God away from certain hurts or certain sins in our lives, the agnostic finds something praiseworthy in himself that he finds lacking in Jesus. Isn't that astounding? The agnostic is saying, I'm wiser than Jesus. I'm more compassionate. Because Jesus didn't do it my way, he's not legitimate. Peter expresses a heart of growing faith. Lord, where else are we going to go? As you struggle in your own life, brothers and sisters, where else are you going to go? Who is wiser, more compassionate, more gloriously spectacular than the living Christ? We have known, we have believed and have come to know that he is the holy one of God. And toward the end of John's gospel, he writes this as to the reason for his writing. Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. Let's pray and then we'll have a few minutes of Q&A. Father, you are wise. And in and of ourselves, we lack wisdom. And you have said that if we cry out for it in faith, you'll supply generously. We thank you, O God, that the wisdom that you supply is not simply a cold logic Oh God, the wisdom that is from above is holy, pure, peaceable. And we need that wisdom to calm our hearts, to give us the words with which to attempt to calm the hearts of others. You've comforted us, Father, so that we can comfort others with that same comfort. Our Savior is risen, and the Spirit is ever pointing our attention to Him. Strengthen us, O God, in the faith that You have entrusted once and for all to the saints, that we would have assurance and that we would shun agnosticism. And bless, O God, we pray, those people upon our hearts this morning, those dear loved ones among family or friends who are Deifying themselves Who have decided that you and your word are not good enough. Oh God break their hearts Humble them under your mighty hand as we would pray for ourselves We pray that the grace of the risen Savior would shine in their hearts And that they would say like Peter to whom else would I go I In Grant's salvation, for your glory, we pray in the name of our risen Savior. Amen. All right. Let's have a few minutes of Q&A. If at any point the conference keepers want me to switch things up time-wise or logistically, please let me know. Any questions? And last night's talk is fair game as well. Yes, Mark. And I'll repeat the question for everybody to hear. So go ahead. Sure. Yes, he was. I'm sorry if I made that unclear. Again, we see lurking in the supposed hard-nosed skepticism and enormous faith in one's own cognitive faculties. So he's very much refuting not airmen in particular that I know of, but just that kind of way of thinking that sets the self as the standard for all things. And he refers to that as blind faith of a high order. Yes, ma'am. Oh, in the back. Yes. Yes. Sure. From the cross. The question is, how is Jesus's statement? My God, my God is questioned. Why have you forsaken me? How is that an expression of trust? Well, as we as we look at that statement, we realize that it is both the perfect and the planned expression of his pain. Because those words were written roughly a thousand years earlier by David. And so Jesus as the Messiah self-consciously steps into that scriptural language as its fulfillment. And it's not as if he is not feeling pain. It's not as if he's just quoting for the sake of quoting. There is true agony in his heart. He is experiencing that which for his eternal life he never has. And that's the wrath and the displeasure of his father. And that's the essential agony of the cross. You know it in our fanciful attempts to dramatize sometimes literally either the cross or or to think about it or even to make evangelistic appeal. We so often emphasize the physical brutality of what's going on and it was physically brutal. But it's amazing how little scripture says about that physical brutality. The Gospels tell us he was crucified and there's the nail the thorn crown of thorns and what have you. So it's not absent those details. But there's a sense in which Psalm 22 actually gives us even more detail because of the piercing of the hands and the feet. So the point is what Jesus is doing to atone for the sins of his people. And this is the means through which it's happening. And he is the one who was to come. He is God. He is man. He is making atonement for the sins of the people whom the father has set aside for him from all of eternity. And and that's why he cries out. It's very sincere, it's very self-conscious, and it's thoroughly scriptural. So it is an expression within the context of trust, is perhaps the better way to put it. Because he continues to endure the agony, despite the mockery. If you're the son of God, I mean, if you heal others, why can't you heal yourself? Come down from that cross. But of course, he suffers the fullness of what he came to do. Okay, other questions? Yes, sir. Okay, some of this goes back to last night's. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. OK. OK. OK. OK. So the question is why the lack of clarity and good solid believing churches today as the doctrinal truth and the extent to which maybe that plays into some of the major controversies boiling about the relationship between justification and sanctification. I think we want to be careful to clarify that in those debates and there's lots of them and there's lots of. names and faces to those debates about the relationship between justification and sanctification. Boy, we could toss out all kinds of names, but for the most part, those debates are taking shape within the context and among people who believe that God's Word is knowable. And so you'll have a debate over justification. One person who claims Christ will say OK we get in by God's grace but we stay in by our works. Another person will say no it's God's grace the whole way. That's a debate within the context of God's words being authoritative. And ironically enough they're believing that it's clear. So it's not the agnosticism that is operative. I think very definitely in the church but perhaps in different ways. The lack of clarity in those debates is certainly disturbing. And what is disturbing also is people's willingness to mess around with well established categories in terms of our creeds and our confessions. You know we. We are, as this conference is taught from the standpoint of Reformed theology, and we are Semper Reformanda. We want to be always reforming, so we want to ask the questions and we want to dive more deeply into God's word and understand more acutely and with our hearts that which his word has always said. And yet at the same time, his word is clear and we can have confessions, even very detailed confessions which stand the test of time. And so whether it's for whatever it's for, I don't want to impugn motives when we start. arbitrarily and kind of arrogantly messing around with some of those categories are trying to be cute and you know sloganized Christianity. There's a vagueness there but I think that's more a vagueness born out of a sloppiness and not necessarily a desire to deny knowable truth. where I think a lot of that does come in is where we are dealing with the nature of whether God's word is in fact God's word. And there is sadly so many people who would name the name of Christ in our day from teachings like we get from Rob Bell and others who are just fine with some of the miracles of Scripture not actually being miracles, or never even happening. So I think that's where we get the exaltation of, I will determine what's legitimate, I will determine what's supernatural, and that's, I think, where it floods into the Church. Great question. One or two more, because I do want to give us a substantial break. I have a good long history with George, so if I'm asking for a brief question, his hand goes down. Please go ahead. You're already failing. Yeah. who are basically illogical captains. In other words, they have no problem with holding to contradiction, lack of truth, disquieted mindset, and completely... I mean, you have to have Sure. Yeah. Yeah, let me run with that as best I can. George is asking the question, well, if you have people who don't even think in terms of categories of cause and effect or right and wrong, and they grow up with that as just gospel truth that you can't know what's right. How do you even begin to dialogue? One of the things to recognize is That fundamentally and this doesn't happen by exposing a bunch of logical fallacies in their thinking that Fundamentally their rejection of the faith has to do with an issue of the heart not that the heart and mind are separate The Bible teaches their their vital union, but there's something going on and so often for so many of these young people Particularly, but certainly older as well. They've experienced some major hurt at the hands of Christians and so It's freeing to them to think that they don't have to have all the categories and that they're OK to evolve in whatever direction in their spirituality. They find a shelter in that and to them it makes more sense of the injustice in the world. It allows them to cry out against it but not have to really. wrestle with it. So to a large extent, it's fear and it grows out of having been hurt. And so we want to address them on that level, pointing them to the love and to the compassion of Jesus Christ, owning up to what sadly the church has sometimes done in his name, not to the extent that we, you know, parade a bunch of confessions, but if that's necessary, okay. But we need to at least understand that that's the standpoint from which they're coming. Now often there is mixed within that a sense of entitlement. And so. There's lots in between but what we come down to is is the word of God which. shoots right through that gap that we set up that topples that phantom wall that we set up between us and absolutes and we begin to minister the word of God to them in whatever context that we can and not with kind of drive-by evangelism which is helpful to the extent that it is but as best we can to sit down and to really listen Part of the reason that so many people are following guys like Rob Bell, part of the reason that so many people are listening to guys like Rob Bell is that Rob Bell is listening to them. And so we need to encourage atmospheres of openness in which we sit down and look eye to eye and say to these people, hey, come on over. you know, come into my home and let's talk about these things. I think Rosario Butterfield's book is a beautiful example of that, where Pastor Ken Smith, he knew what it would be, you know, to invite her into church immediately. He invited her into and that's a good thing to invite the church and not denigrating that at all. It's through the preaching of the word of God that we come under the conviction of the spirit. And yet he had her in his home and they talked. And. So that's not a catch all but that needs to be there especially in this generation you're asking how to particularly deal with this and that's especially important because they've grown up intellectually and sometimes with very deep painfully felt experiences. To think that Christianity just hurts it's hypocritical and it hurts. So. We minister to them in word and deed that the love of Christ and it is helpful to point out the fruit of that kind of thinking and just the fact that no one lives with that kind of disingenuousness day by day. You just can't function in life thinking that something can be something that it's not something that's in the realm of theory. Real life doesn't work that way. When we talk about issues of sin we can talk about seeing sin for what it is as opposed to what it appears to be looking to the consequences of ideas. You know why were you so hurt in this particular church. Well, because these people were acting sinfully. They told you you were worthless. They told you in essence, in word and by not speaking to you that you didn't belong among them. And they were quite happy if you weren't there. That's what the Bible calls sin. That's selfishness. That's autonomy. And Jesus came to free us from that kind of stuff. And so hopefully there's a way to bridge that gap. OK, I do want to give us a good substantial stretch time. We can continue to talk over the break. Let's begin at 1030. And if we can, let's begin by singing Psalm 42d, which is just a wonderful expression of a heart's wrestling with the Lord and the Lord's calming that heart. And then we'll have our final session beginning at 1030.