Lesson 126 – Infallibility: Inerrancy of Scripture

© Charles A. Clough 1999

Charles A. Clough
Biblical Framework Series 1995–2003

Part 5: Confrontation with the King
Chapter 3: The Life of the King

Lesson 126 – Infallibility: Inerrancy of Scripture

10 Jun 1999
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

We’re looking at the last of the three doctrinal truths to be associated with the life of Christ. We looked at kenosis, which is the Greek word in Philippians 2:5-8, that means Christ gave up (as theologians say) the independent use of His attributes. We had some good discussion about “independent,” it’s not quite a nice word because it sounds like if He would have been autono­mous He hadn’t submitted. But basically it is that in His humanity He relied, He had to rely completely, by choice, when He undertook the mission for salvation, He had to rely upon the Holy Spirit as we would have to rely upon the Holy Spirit. He chose to do that. In that He authenti­cated the Christian way of life, basically. In doing so, that sets up His ability to identify with our weaknesses. Hebrews is full of that, the sympathetic high priest who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities. That all comes about because of this kenosis, and comes about because of impeccability which was the second doctrine we studied; that is if Jesus Christ was perfect, He was able not to sin and in the plan of God overall He was certain that He never would sin. So Jesus Christ becomes the perfect one, which then leads to the third issue, which we’re covering, and that is His infallibility.

Can a perfect person make technical errors? That’s the issue that evangelicals who have compro­mised the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture have had to assume. You can’t undercut the inerrancy of Scripture without shuffling the deck somehow. How do you shuffle the deck? You wind up with cards in your hand that are very odd and discomforting, because what you have to do in the final analysis, if the Bible has errors in it and Jesus authenticated the validity of the Scripture, then there’s errors in Jesus. If there are errors in Jesus, what errors are there in Jesus?

The evangelicals who did that…, it was in the 70s that this discussion broke forth with all rigor, largely where it triggered was in two groups. The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, had a man by the name of Preus who I believe at the time was President of Concordia Theological Seminary. The Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church is more conservative than the Lutheran Church. So when he became President of the seminary he decided he was going to get off of the faculty everybody that didn’t believe in inerrancy, which he did. Of course, once he did that the press picked it up and said the Missouri Synod was taken over by the right-wing extremists. Any time you’re for truth you’re the right-wing extremists, but all the other guys, they’re moderates.

Then it broke out in the Southern Baptist Convention. Dewey Beegle was a Baptist professor, I think at Louisville Seminary, and he wrote a book on the errancy of Scripture and argued that evangelicals should come of age, and should basically believe the Bible, errors and all, as we sarcastically said of Dewey Beegle. He was answered by Criswell and his staff at Dallas, the First Baptist Church at Dallas, and within the Southern Baptist Convention there was a long, hard, bitter struggle between these two groups. The press always printed it as though it was the right-wing conspiracy out of Texas that was going to take over the Southern Baptist Convention, like there’s something wrong with Texas or something. The point was it was Criswell and his group in Dallas that was saying no, we have a right; the Southern Baptist Convention is representative of the churches.

They mobilized and all of a sudden when the Baptist convention occurred, they had done a lot of telephone work because a lot of the churches get lazy and they don’t send their delegates, so the delegates never showed up and the “moderate” (quote unquote) really the liberals, had taken over by default. Same way it always happens. It had gone on far enough and the mud hit the fan with this issue of inerrancy, so that galvanized into action hundreds and hundreds, little country rural churches, everybody all of a sudden sent delegates to the convention, and now all of a sudden the moderates got outvoted and they lost. Then they started putting their little press spin on it saying that the kooks had taken over. That’s always the way it comes out when it regurgitates through the Associated Press and everybody else. You can ignore the press, the point is behind all the goofy stories there was a serious issue, the issue we’re dealing with, the issue of inerrancy.

The point is that nobody wants to say it the way it is. If you’re going to deny the inerrancy of Scripture, you’re going to have errant Scripture. If you have errant Scripture you’re going to have an errant Christ. If you have an errant Christ, then we have the problem of how can He be Lord, impeccable, the perfect Savior, and going around bumbling, making all kinds of technical mistakes here and there because He’s ignorant? When you phrase it this way everybody catches on, well gee, you can’t do that. But it’s never phrased this way. It’s always phrased in carefully polished words that don’t sound like really what’s going on.

So I want you to understand a little about church history; it’s in the last twenty years that this has happened. The liberals have long denied inerrancy of Scripture. It wasn’t even an issue. If you go to the First Liberal Church some place they could care less, they threw that out in the end of the 19^th century. But when this started coming into the conservative denominations then wait a minute, we’ve got another story here. It hasn’t been resolved yet, there are still elements in evangelical denominations that are just sitting there waiting to take over from the right-wing extremists just as soon as they show weakness.

In John 3 is a classic illustration of why you get in trouble once you start getting greasy on this issue of errancy or inerrancy. Jesus Christ puts the matter bluntly in John 3:11-12. This is a key text, a very central text, because it’s so clear, so obvious from this passage. Look what He says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak that which we know, and bear witness,” the key here is “bear witness,” we’re going spend some time showing what that means, the phrase “bear witness” necessarily involves technical historical details. It’s the same kind of thing you get in the courtroom. We said the issue in a courtroom is to destroy, or try to, by the opposing side, try to destroy the credibility of a witness. How do you destroy the credibility of a witness? By citing technical and historical errors, observational uncertainties. That’s how you do it. This is not something new with American courts; this has gone on for ages. So the credibility of someone bearing witness is very much linked to evidence that is used to bear the witness.

Jesus says “we speak that which we know, and bear witness of that which we have seen; and you do not receive out witness.” There’s the controversy. Remember, presuppositionally people don’t accept the witness. Now what He does, He says, “If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” What’s His point there? What are earthly things and heavenly things? Earthly things are things that Jesus could say and could be reported and checked on by His audience, earthly things, things that are going on around here, Jewish history, that kind of stuff. What are heavenly things? A statement like, “Your sins are forgiven.” Where are you going to go to check that one out? That’s a heavenly thing, it’s inaccessible. Jesus is telling about inaccessible unverifiable things, the heavenly things. He makes it quite clear here in verse 12, if you can’t validate what I’m telling you in the area where you are open to validation and verification, how are you going to trust Me if I tell you your sins are forgiven? Yet we have the spectacle of evangelicals, professing evangelicals, telling us that we can discount some of the earthly things that Jesus said, but go ahead and believe the heavenly things. How does this follow?

What’s happening here is that many of these people are Christians at heart and they know very well it’s wrong to disbelieve in Jesus. So they know that they can’t do that without totally wiping out the gospel, making it very clear what’s happening, so they want to hold onto this. But then they feel uneasy about standing up for an inerrant Scripture, so they want to kind of compromise this to relieve themselves of this pressure. So it’s this thing, I want to keep this but I don’t want that. It’s an unstable middle of the road position that comes on.

But the kind of reasoning that Jesus is using in verses 11-12 is very authentic, it’s very valid, and there really isn’t an answer to it. The challenge that Jesus is laying out here is, if you can show Me wrong in areas that you can check out, you have all the right in the world to disbelieve every­thing else I’ve told you. Think what that does to the whole gospel.

Let’s go back to the Old Testament, because one of the things we want to do, in the notes on page 68 I quote Matthew 11. What I’m going to do now is construct an argument of why Jesus couldn’t have made technical errors. Matthew 11:25-27. All these arguments are interrelated. Once again this shows you that you can’t take a piece out of the Bible. The Bible is an integral whole. In Matthew 11:25 Jesus is praying to the Father. This is an interesting conversation, verses 25-27, what we’re getting in on here, by the Holy Spirit we’re actually allowed to see an intra-Trinity conversation. We’re actually permitted to see the Father and the Son discussing something. This isn’t between God and man, this is between the members of the Trinity, and Jesus is talking to the Father.

He says, verse 25, “…I praise Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou didst hide these things from the wise and intelligent and didst reveal them to babes. [26] Yes, Father, for thus it was well-pleasing in Thy sight. [27] All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son, except the Father’ nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wishes [wills] to reveal Him.” Then He says, verse 28, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heaven laden, and I will give you rest.” There’s that sovereignty responsibility thing going on. On the one hand, in verse 27 He’s saying I’ll choose who I’ll reveal Myself to, that’s My decision, not man’s decision. If I didn’t choose to reveal Myself you’d never know anything about Me, nor about the Father, but I decide that. So here clearly it’s the Second Person of the Trinity that is the decider about who gets what information. Then in verse 28 He gives out the information, and there’s the open invitation to all men.

Before we get into all that, because that’s coming up more with the death of Christ, we want to notice in verse 27 that “all things,” in other words, what I’m saying here is the same thing Jesus said. Remember He said there’s one greater than John the Baptist here, and what we’re saying is that Christ is very much greater than all of the Old Testament prophets. That’s the first point in the argument, and that can be easily sustained by the Old Testament. Who is Christ greater than? The Old Testament prophets. In the Old Testament a prophet could have made technical mistakes and could very well have been ignorant, except when he brought God’s case. What does Isaiah say when he’s ready, and he’s prepared to address the people of his time? He says “The word of the Lord came to me,” and then the prophet would announce what the Word of the Lord said to them. So in the area of the Old Testament prophet, when he spoke, let me say it this way, the Old Testament prophets were infallible in an area, and in this area this is the area where they’re repeating the Word of God that came to them, when they wrote, when they preached they were infallible sayers of the Word of the Lord. We’ll show that in a little bit, I just want you to see the flow of the logic first.

However, the Lord Jesus, because He was God, He was infallible through His whole life, not just when the Word of the Lord came to Him because the Word of the Lord always was with Him. He was the Word of the Lord. So it’s a little different here, we’ve got a little different problem here. What is this? Hypostatic union. What was hypostatic union? He is undiminished deity and true humanity united in one person forever. That means that He is the Word of the Lord. The Word of the Lord doesn’t come to Jesus; He is the Word of the Lord. So that means that He has to be infallible over the whole area. The Old Testament prophets only had to be infallible when they were teaching the Word of the Lord, or giving an oracle, or giving a prophecy, or writing Scripture; then they were infallible.

In the Old Testament the prophets had a function, so let’s go back to Deuteronomy because the role of the prophet is outlined there. We want to be sure we picture correctly what the Old Testament prophets were like. The word “prophet” in the Hebrew is nabiy’, the nabiim. This was a class of individuals and they followed Moses. Notice Deut. 18:18, God announces that “I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen,” so is he Gentile or Jewish? He’s Jewish. “… like you,” who’s “you?” Moses. So Moses becomes a fundamental archetype of the prophet. The rest of the prophets are like Moses. “… and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.”

Notice the phrase, “I will put My words in his mouth,” that is something no genuine intellectual today who’s well-schooled in the climate around us of thinking, 20^th century theory of languages, could ever accept that kind of a statement, because in the whole worldview around us, it infects authors, it infects the media, it infects the classroom, it infects academia, it infects books that are written, the idea in the 20^th century is man has given up the idea that human language can convey anything that’s inerrant, absolute, and true. All language is is just like your dog barks, it’s just whatever happens to be spilling around your brain and it burps out your language. That’s what language is, it’s all relativistic. But what this challenge says, that God takes a thought from His omniscience … we don’t want to trivialize this, the unbelievers at least realize there’s a problem here. Here’s God, all of His attributes, one of which is His omniscience. Here man is and he has finite knowledge. That’s a miracle, how God can take a thought out of omniscience and project it down into this prophet’s knowledge, and not just in his knowledge but in his language and in his mouth so he can speak it.

That’s a miracle. How can God take a thought from His mighty omniscience, put it in a finite form, inject it into the mind of the prophet, and have the guy speak it. However it happens, it happens, and that’s what’s being announced in Deuteronomy 18:18. The prophets that followed on from Moses would speak the words of God, not because they thought up the words, but because the words were placed in their mouth. Does that mean that every prophet heard a tape recording of some spooky voice and that’s how he got the Word of God? No, that’s necessarily what it means. It means all of the ways that God has open to the prophet, it could be someone talking to him, it could be a thought happen, it could be the very words of God coming to them, but however the channels are, this is not pinning down the channels of flow, like electrical analogue, it’s not saying it came by this wire or another wire, they could care less which wire, maybe there’s 115 different wires connected between God and the guy’s brain. Some of them are (quote) “naturally” looking wires, some are supernatural wires, the passage doesn’t address that. All it’s says is that whatever the wire is, the net result and the final analysis is that what comes out of the mouth of the prophet is what God speaks in heaven.

There had to be some verification for this. In verse 20, obviously you have a problem with the courts of the time. Here are rules of evidence given to the courts that would convene to separate the true prophet from the false prophet, because there could be false prophets. So what are the rules of evidence, if you were on the jury, in this case not a real jury, but suppose you were in a Jewish town in the Old Testament, you might be called to be an elder, you might be called to a hearing. You say gee, how am I going to tell, I don’t know one prophet from a false prophet, a true prophet, what do I do, how do I decide? You might be called in, there might be a discussion among the elders and you’d have to give your two cents, why you think this guy’s a phony, or why do you think he’s genuine. What are you going to do? Moses says here’s what you do, verse 20, “The prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in My name which I have commanded him to speak, or which he shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.” Ooh, now we’ve got a capital offense here. This is heavy stuff, now we’re not just talking about well, I’m not going to go to his church; now we’re talking about get out the stones, we’re going to kill him right here. This is heavy; this is capital punishment under their system of justice.

Verse 21 says, “And you may say in your heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’” How will we identify and falsify the claim of a false prophet, how are we going to detect the falsity in what he says. There’s actually two tests given, one here and one in another passage, but the test here is given in verse 22, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” That little verb “not be afraid” tells you something else about a prophet. If he was a genuine prophet and the Word of the Lord had come to him and he speaks it, it’s just like he’s just written another passage in the Bible, and you had to salute and say “Yes Sir” to God, and obey it. You might not like the prophet; he might have had a personality quirk. A lot of people didn’t like John the Baptist, he was kind of weird, strange diet, wore funny clothes, and was a recluse out in the desert. Not the kind of nice guy that you’d really like to be too fond of socially, but it didn’t make any difference, if God had spoken that word through this kind of eccentric guy, then you’re not saying the eccentric guy is impeccable, remember that. This is not a claim that the prophets are personally impeccable, like Jesus is. All this is the words that he spoke had to be followed, that’s all. That’s what it means to be afraid of him, respect the authority.

So one rule of evidence, verse 22, is that you had to have 100% fulfillment, not 98%, not 14%, but 100%. Back in the 70s there was this Jeanne Dixon that made all these predictions, and she was supposed to be the prophetess, the great prophetess of our time. And she would write and you would see her quoted, and it was interesting, I forgot what the name of one of her books was, but I noticed that in the first chapter … I mean if this wouldn’t clue you as a biblically literate Christian I don’t know what would. You opened up her book and the first part of the book is a testimony to how she saw this vision of a serpent, and the serpent came to her and she looked into its eyes and it was the eyes of perfect love and warmth. If that isn’t a rendition of Eden all over again, I don’t know what is. But she plops it out in her book and everybody who doesn’t read the Bible, oh, this is good stuff, ooh, wow, and swallows it hook, line and sinker.

Here, under the providence of God, God let her spill her satanic beans in the first chapter so you can say this lady is really out of it. But even so, she says see, I prophesied this and it came to pass, I prophesied this and it came to pass, I prophesied this and it came to pass. What she doesn’t say is I prophesied this, this, this and this and it didn’t come to pass. She said but nobody’s perfect, she actually said that to defend the fact that all of her prophesies never came true. She had a high percent verification. Well, so do I, I’m a meteorologist, but I’m not infallible. The point is that she’s a phony, and she’s a phony by this criteria; this is the standard of evidence that is to be applied in these cases.

The other standard of evidence is in Deuteronomy 13. One standard of evidences is what we’ll call the historical standard. What about the historical validation of prophecy. The other one is in Deuteronomy 13:1, “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder,” now look at this, [2] “and the sign or the wonder comes true,” aha, well if it comes true, isn’t that proof that the prophet is correct? Think about this point of logic here. If I say to you that a false prophecy implies a false prophet, if you’ve had some training in logic you realize you can’t, from that statement say if a prophecy comes true that you can prove it’s true. The Bible is very, very careful here. Here’s Deuteronomy 22, here is a case, a prophecy can be true or false. Deuteronomy 22 is saying that if it’s false, that implies the prophet is false. That doesn’t say anything about if the prophecy comes true, if it’s true. You’ve got to be careful; you can’t draw that logical conclusion from that statement. All that statement says is that false prophets make false prophecies. It doesn’t say that false prophets can’t make true prophecies.

Deuteronomy 13 closes the loop logically on that dilemma, because in verse 2 it says but it does come to pass. Well if it comes to pass, what other test, what screen, what filter, do you have left. There’s another level of evidence here. “If the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,’ [3] you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” The point is in verse 2 where it says “Let us go after other gods,” it looks like it’s a quote but quotes in the Bible are sometimes indirect quotes, and it’s the sense of it. You can’t expect false teachers to go around saying, let’s not worship the God of the Bible, let’s worship another god. Satan doesn’t wear red pajamas. That’s the point, the false prophet doesn’t openly wave a red flag and say see, I’m telling you to worship another god. It’s not quite that obvious. This is the sense of it. The idea is if you follow the teachings of this person are you led to love the Lord God of the Scriptures or are you not. How are you going to tell that? By looking at the Scriptures. So we’re back to the same thing. The second screen here is that if the prophecy does come to pass, you have to subject it to another test, what about the teachings that are involved with this person? Are these teachings compatible or not with the Bible.

So you’ve got one test here, Deuteronomy 22; you’ve got the Deuteronomy 13 test here, and those are the two tests. And those are the two tests that reappear under different labels in the New Testament. The logic is the same; it doesn’t change from the Old Testament to the New Testament. But there’s some hard and fast stuff here. Notice what is not said in any of these statements. It doesn’t say how you feel, oh I feel such a peace with this person, well, it might be peace, but peace can be spelled pieces. There’s no emotional feeling, there’s nothing like that here. This is all cold objective evidences, the same kind of thing that we would see in the rules of evidence in a court room. That’s not to say there aren’t feelings, that’s not to say that people don’t have feelings, it’s just saying the feelings aren’t how you decide. It’s the teachings, whether they fit the standard of Scripture, with a logical consistency with the Bible, and the test of whether it’s validated.

Coming back to the topic, we’re looking the Old Testament prophets. These Old Testament prophets had to meet that test, and if they did they were the prophet and they would be considered infallible. Turn to Deuteronomy 32 to see the technical details issue. When these guys made a prophecy, what were they prophesying about? We covered this passage; this was a foundation part of the Mosaic Law, and this could be looked upon as sort of like our “Star Spangled Banner”. It’s a song, and it was taught to the people. Look at the verse just prior to Deuteronomy 32:1, the last verse of the previous chapter says “Then Moses spoke in the hearing of all the assembly of Israel the words of this song, until they were complete.” Then if you go to Deuteronomy 32:44, “Then Moses came and spoke all the words of this song in the hearing of the people, he, with Joshua the sun of Nun. [45] When Moses had finished speaking all these words to Israel, [46] he said to them,” notice what he says about his song, “Take to your heart all the words with which I am warning you today, which you shall command your sons to observe carefully, even all the words of this law. [47] For it is not an idle word for you; indeed it is your life.”

Moses is telling them that you have to listen and pay attention to the content of this song. What is the content of the song? The content, unlike our “Star Spangled Banner”, which reports what happened in the Baltimore Harbor, that was a historical event that’s commemorated in that song. To say that, well I don’t really believe that Fort McHenry was there, I don’t really believe that the boats were firing at it, and I don’t really believe that Francis Scott Key was out in the boat in the harbor watching the flag … if you don’t believe that there was a Baltimore Harbor, there was a battle, Francis Scott Key was on the boat, and there were canons firing and the flag was flying… that was just a neat idea. Excuse me! What does that do to the whole song; it can’t be a neat idea if it doesn’t have history behind it.

This song is the same kind of thing except the “Star Spangled Banner” looks back to Baltimore Harbor 200–300 years ago, this song looks back relative to their time but it also looks forward. So this song is a prophetic national anthem. Our national anthem is not a prophetic national anthem. Thank God, we might not want to know what our prophecy is. But in the prophetic part of this song, look what is said here. Deuteronomy 32:15, up to verse 15 it’s talking about all the blessings that God gave the nation. Everything up to verse 14 is history past relative to the time the song was written. That’s past history, God’s blessings. It’s the story of what? It’s the story of the Exodus and the conquest. But it says, “But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked—You are grown fat, thick, and sleek—Then he forsook God who made him, and scorned the Rock of his salvation. [16] They made Him jealous with strange gods; with abominations they provoked Him to anger. [17] They sacrificed to demons who were not God,” now isn’t that interesting. What that actually says, and Paul says the same thing when he talks about the communion service and how communion service can be given to demons when it’s accompanied by false teaching, because who are the authors, the instigators of false teaching? Satan and his hordes. So in effect what happens is that where deceitful and false teaching exists and comes into the church, it’s as though they’re kind of like magnets that get the iron filings attracted to them and the direction of orientation is towards Satan. So he says you’re really sacrificing to demons, “to gods whom they have not known, new gods who came lately, whom your fathers did not dread. [18] You neglected the Rock who begot you, and forgot the God who gave you birth.”

And then it goes on to say certain things. It says in verses 23-24, “I will heap misfortunes on them; I will use My arrows on them,” what are God’s arrows? He lists these arrows in verse 24, one is famine, one is plague, one is bitter destruction, one is teeth of beasts, one is the venom of crawling things out of the dust, one is talking about the enemy, soldiers, military conquests, verses 26-27. Do God is saying that He is going to rule His kingdom and He will not tolerate disobedience and disloyalty to Him. And if it happens, then boom; I’m going to lower the boom.

If you go back to Deuteronomy 32:1 and notice the language, the song when it was sung was sung before a jury. That’s the picture. Somebody else besides Israel and God are listening to this. They really are; and it’s the same thing in the New Testament when it says the angels look and learn from the church. We are being observed; we are in a fish bowl and we can’t see outside the fish bowl but we are in a fish bowl. It’s kind of unnerving actually, if you think about it. Other creatures of God’s universe are looking at us, they must be wondering how does God deal with these people, good grief! But they are looking at us and learning peculiar things… the wisdom of God I guess, from what we do, they look and see all our mistakes, all our sins. But in verse 1 when it says “Give ear, O heavens, and let me speak; and let the earth hear the words of my mouth,” these aren’t just little metaphors, poetic metaphors of the earth and the heavens. This is talking about the beings that inhabit the earth and the heavens.

Where do we see the beings that inhabit the earth and the heavens? In the book of Revelation. When the prophecies are given to the angel of the sun and the sun physically responds by upping its light intensity and the heat of the sun is changed. It’s interesting, if you read the passage it’s not just the physics of the solar disc that are involved there, there’s an angel addressed who turns on the physics, which is a peculiar and very non-scientific view of the universe, that behind these laws that we think we’ve got grasp on because we can write F = MA and we say oh how slick, behind that is the fact that these patterns, these footprints that we can describe in mathematical curves are actually the footprints of these controlling powers and principalities. Just because they work this way now doesn’t mean that in the future they can’t go like that, and then all of a sudden, gee, our computer model didn’t forecast that.

That’s what happens when God speaks to the powers that are controlling nature. This isn’t pagan animism, don’t mistake this. In pagan thought they didn’t believe in any law outside at all, they just believed there were spirits of the air, spirits of this, spirits of potato plants, I mean, in order to be blessed in your life you had to placate all the spirits. That’s animism. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying this is an orderly universe, run under the sovereign Word of God. These powers and principalities have to get screened through His sovereign and His omniscience. In the end He’s controlling. It’s not the demons under the tree that are doing this. Our God is in control. The keys of the kingdom have gone to Jesus Christ. So He reigns, the Lord reigns. But that isn’t to say that He doesn’t use means to accomplish His ends that He’s doing in reigning. So if the book of Revelation read any way but in a spiritualizing metaphorical way, you have to accept that the physics of the environment can be tampered with, and in fact, maybe supported all the time by God’s angels. And when He wants to manipulate He just tells one of them, go manipulate, and he does it. The book of Revelation, go manipulate the physics of the solar sphere, turn on some more hydrogen or something, heat it up. Okay, boom, it’s done. That’s so mysterious to our human minds, we don’t think that way because we’re not trained in our educational systems to visualize the universe in those terms. But that’s what’s happening.

Keep that in mind and turn to Isaiah 1, one of the prophets of the Old Testament. Isaiah was sent… we said the role of the prophet was a prosecuting attorney, because the prophet brought God’s case against the nation when they had violated this covenant. And when the prosecuting attorney brings his case, he’s doing it not just before the judge, but he’s doing it before the witnesses. Who are the witnesses? Who is it that Isaiah…way, way, way after Moses, who does he address here? [Isaiah 1:2] “Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth; for the LORD speaks; ‘Sons I have reared up and brought up, but they have revolted against Me. [3] An ox knows its owner, and a donkey its master’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand,” they’re worse than animals, these people.

It’s an appeal to the angels, and the issue is, has God been faithful to His covenant. The answer: yes! Has man been faithful to the covenant? No! How do you prove that? Here’s Isaiah, let’s say in the 7^th century BC, here’s Moses in the 14^th century BC, many centuries have come and gone, we have an indictment here, we have the original contract here. What is the proof of the statements Isaiah makes? How would he make the case? The case is made by citing specific historical acts of disobedience. What does the rest of the book of Isaiah do? It records history. History is the record, it’s His story. That’s why the genealogies are in Scripture, that’s why the stone monuments are in Scripture, that’s why those tribal boundaries are in Scripture, all those little nitpicky details and some of them we still don’t know what we’re going with those texts. We don’t have enough archeological background to understand some of that stuff, but it’s in there because it deals with land, it deals with people, it deals with events. How else do you build the case? Are we or are we not in the realm of historical and technical details? Sure we are.

The case can’t be made without reference to historical details. So how can you say that the prophets slip and slide and get greasy in the area of historical details, but we sure believe their ethics? Where are the ethics? Where do we get those from? We always trot them out every time we need an ethic. Somehow it’s oh, I believe this, I mean, this is good stuff—well no, I don’t believe this stuff, it’s phony if it doesn’t fit the original pattern.

So the Old Testament prophet had to get involved in history and details to carry out his role when he wrote prophecy. By the way, who is it that wrote all the historical books of the Bible? The first book in history, it wasn’t Herodotus and Thucydides like I learned when I went to high school and took a history course, those were not the first historians. The first historians were the prophets of Israel, and they wrote history, not as a neutral academic exercise because they had nothing else to do, they wrote it because there’s a purpose and a plan to history and it speaks of God and His plan and His sovereignty, and His faithfulness. That’s the motive for history.

I think that’s why many of you probably have had this happen to you personally, that it wasn’t until you became a Christian that you really began to get interested in history. What turned on the switch? Some of you may have a lot of academic training in history, but there’s a passion to know history that often times accompanies … [blank spot] …and we want to know the neat things that He does because we know that behind all the neat things is a very majestic God. And we worship Him and we stand in awe of Him, and we do so because we see His handiwork. That’s the motive for history. That’s what drives the passion; it’s not cranking out a test two weeks from now to memorize every date between 1700 and 1900. That’s not the motive for this stuff.

Now let’s come to Jesus Christ. Jesus is greater than the Old Testament prophets. So instead of just being infallible here, because of His hypostatic union, everything He says is infallible. Those are the earthly things. And when, therefore, Jesus Christ as He says …, I gave you the references on page 67, under the paragraph “Jesus’ historical and scientific claims,” there’s a lot more that He made but I gave you four references there from Matthew and Luke. In Matthew 19 He was dealing a divorce and He talked about Genesis 1-2. In Matthew 23 He’s talking about the return that He will have in history, the culmination and climax of history, He’s talking about Adam. Matthew 24 the same thing, He talked about Noah. In Luke 27 He talks about the Mosaic authorship of the Law that no scholar today basically accepts; conservative, godly scholars do, but I’m talking about the academia as a whole.

These are technical details, now are we going to believe what the Lord said or not? If He’s mixed up here we’ve got some serious, serious problems about trusting anything else the Lord Jesus Christ says. If you’ve got a blubbering idiot for a Savior, He is no longer your Savior.

Let’s go on to another passage in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 15 because Paul carries on this same logic. All the guys know about this. Here Paul is testifying to the resurrection of Christ. In verse 12, this is another key passage. I said one of the key passages is John 3:11-12, here is another good passage to remind yourself whenever you want to review this and think about it again and ask the Lord for insight and understanding, go to this passage. This is a neat one, because it’s so thoroughly honest and above board. Look what he says. “Now if Christ is preached, that He has been raised from the dead,” that’s the gospel, “how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” The people in the Corinthian church, they’re like Dr. Beegle, they believe the Bible errors and all. Well, now Paul was a nice man, you know, he was for missions and we believe in missions here, it’s just that we don’t kind of like some of the things Paul says. You know, we’re good Greeks and Greeks just have a hard time understanding resurrections. So I don’t think that we ought to preach the resurrection; that kind of offends people here in Greece. So they denied the resurrection, and there was a party inside the church, this isn’t unbelievers outside the church, these are people inside the church.

He says, “How can you be saying ‘that there is no resurrection of the dead? [13] If there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised.’” Now watch how he traps them. He starts with their argument, it’s like judo, somebody throws a punch and you take the punch further than they originally wanted, the first thing you know they’re flat on their face. This is what Paul is going to do now. He says okay you guys, you’re going to be smart, so let’s see how smart you are. If you deny the resurrection, so verse 13, “if there is no resurrection of the dead,” then the syllogism begins, then Jesus couldn’t be resurrected.

Verse 14 “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is in vain.” And in verse 15 he goes on to say and now we have an ethical contradiction. See what we’re going? We’re moving from a technical error to an ethical error. [15] “Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we witnessed against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.” Wasn’t there something in the Ten Commandments about bearing false witness? Oh, ethics. So you see, you can’t mess with the historical and technical details before you wind up in this big bog, trapped in the goo. And the goo is that you’re now violating the command not to bear false witness.

If that applies to Paul, it certainly applies to the Lord Jesus Christ, because Christ in His hypostatic union is bearing witness, bearing witness, bearing witness, everything He said, everything He did, bearing witness, bearing witness, bearing witness. And He makes mistakes? What kind of a witness bearing is that? Jesus is a false witness if Jesus made technical mistakes.

Follow with me in the notes, I want to go to two other points before we close tonight. One of them, sometimes some people find this very hard to understand, others catch on to it very quickly. If this gives you trouble, don’t feel bad about it. It’s just that sometimes you just have to think about it. Here’s the argument: infallibility can never be denied. What happens is that infallibility is relocated from God to men. If you deny infallibility of Scripture, you’re placing the judger somewhere. Right? Because now if the Scripture has errors in it, who tells you which are errors and which aren’t? Where’s the infallibility now? It moved to man didn’t it? It moves from the Scripture to man. See the move? It’s like a magician, he has you looking at this and mean­while his hand is doing something else. Let’s just look at the hand here now. What’s going on?

Infallibility has been relocated. This is useful, sometimes you might be able to use this in a conversation, somebody pooh-poohs the Bible and you say well, an infallible Bible may sound silly but I’ll tell you what sounds sillier is that a person like you can be infallible. Let’s look at this a little bit. Here’s an example. [page 69] Beegle says that the Bible “in all essential matters of faith and practice,” is “authentic, accurate and trustworthy.” So what he’s saying is that the Bible is correct when it deals with matters of faith and practice that are essential. Who qualifies what’s essential and what isn’t? Dewey Beegle does.

“Some evangelical proponents of errancy say that the rules of women’s behavior in churches given in such passages as 1 Corinthians 11 are wrong.” I’m not advocating here that every woman wears a veil in church. What I’m saying here is… this passage is a difficult passage, but however difficult it may be, you can’t kiss it off and say it’s some little cultural thing in the first century and we don’t pay any attention to it today. “Since at least 50% of most Christian congregations are female, is this matter not ‘essential for faith and practice” or not? I would rather say it is if it concerns 50% of the people, it sounds essential to me.

“Professor Paul Jewett,” another one of our errant evangelical brethren says that’s technically wrong, that’s just a technical error that crept into Paul. Oh, that’s good to know. Now how do I decide what’s essential. He thinks this isn’t essential. How do you know it’s not essential, if it applies to 50% of every congregation, you’d think it would be essential? Do you see what happens? You just get on greasy ground when you start messing around and try to deal with an errancy inside the text, because now you’ve moved outside of the text to get another platform to judge this platform. So you’re always trying to locate inerrancy somewhere.

The last paragraph on page 69, “This phenomenon of a moveable location of infallibility led Rushdoony to call infallibility ‘an inescapable concept.’ Noting how infallibility has been ascribed by unbelieving writers” now he’s going to go through some of the writers, watch this, because this has been done in history again and again. “…unbelieving writers [sometimes] ascribe it to the cosmic evolutionary process (de Chardin),” a Frenchman who’s influenced theology in the 20^th century an awful lot. It’s been ascribed “to the general will of society (Rousseau),” do you realize that Rousseau, another French thinker, my, what things have come into France, Rousseau and his way of thinking has basically taken over this country. Think about the discussion, if we take a Gallop poll and 51% of the people say something is right, we should make it into law. Huh! Why do we make it into law if 51% of the people say it’s right? Well, this is a democracy, that’s how you decide what’s right and wrong. Oh really! Then if 51% of the people decide that murder is okay, we can’t bother with it anymore, so we’ll just let it go as a phenomenon, then it’s okay? See what happens here when you deal with this.

So Rousseau tried to locate it in “the general will of society,” that’ really the heart of autonomous democracy. Then some tried to apply it “to the ruling political party (Communism),” see each one of these isms, they all have their point of infallibility, you’ve just got to smoke it out, sometimes it takes you a while, weeks, months of study, but sooner or later you’re going to find out they have their version too, it’s just hidden; it’s called by different names, hidden with the vocabulary but it’s there. “‘The word infallibility is not normally used in these transfers; the concept is disguised and veiled, but, in a variety of ways, infallibility is ascribed to concepts, things, men, and institutions.’ One observes this movement of infallibility away from Jesus and the Bible to man in the conflict between Genesis and historical science. Modern schemes of earth history are basically considered infallible in that no amount of data [it is believed] will radically alter them toward the view of early Genesis.”

Have you ever heard of an evolutionist saying well, I’m not really sure of this, after all, we might discover data that validates the Bible? They never say that. In their heart of hearts they believe that it basically is true, we’ve just to clean up a few details here and there but it’s basically true, these Christians should just give up; just give up, you’re never going to undo the case. That’s essentially, operational speaking, that’s infallibility. What is infallibility? You don’t question. It’s true; it’s your starting point.

“Another instance is the view that apparent discrepancies between the historical data of the Bible and the records of secular history will never be resolved by future data in favor of the Bible,” same thing, archeology and the Bible. “In these cases Bible critics presume an inherent infallibility in modern world views. Infallibility has thus not been eliminated at all; it has simply been absorbed by unbelieving thought and transferred to man so as to confirm his autonomy.”

Now we come to the last section, and that is why only those of us who are Christians, who take the Bible seriously, only do we have a basis for infallibility because we have God, who is omniscient, who is sovereign, we have man down here with finite knowledge, and God in His sovereignty rules history so that everything comes under His control, His omniscience provides the plan for His sovereignty, and that omniscience is communicated to man. So we have knowledge that God has knowledge. We don’t have omniscience, we don’t know all the shots, we have a finite knowledge but we have within our finite knowledge, knowledge of One who has infinite knowledge, and because of that we trust. And because of that we know that there’s a pattern out there, we know that whatever happens in our lives personally, though it’s sometimes very painful, sometimes very mysterious, sometimes shocking, whatever happens it is being controlled. That doesn’t take away the pain in every case, but it doesn’t knock you for a loop and knock you totally flat so that you just give up all hope for living. You never get to that point because you know that there is a plan there.

Now because of all of that and when this God moreover says that I’ve designed you in My image, and the Son becomes flesh, so we have the hypostatic union, it’s this that gives us the basis for infallibility. The pagan doesn’t have infallibility. So even though he tries to get a substitute for infallibility, he’s desperately trying to locate it somewhere and what he does, he locates it right up here, hanging in thin air, not a basis, no support, no justification, it’s just hanging there. Our infallibility is grounded in all this that we’ve studied over the months, the God who is our Creator, the God who providentially runs history, the God who created man in His image, and the God who incarnated Himself in man, walked around this earth and told us the truth of the way it is, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.” That sounds like a very arrogant claim, and that offended me when I was a non-Christian. I couldn’t imagine this. But it was that verse and the pain it caused me personally that led me to the gospel, because that verse forced me to realize that you couldn’t have Christianity and this and this and something else, you either had to have it as the final answer, or just throw out, that’s nonsense.

“I am the way; I am the truth; I am the life,” said the God-man. And no man, NO man ever “comes to the Father except through Me.” How did they come to the Father through the Old Testament? Through Jesus Christ in His preincarnate … who was speaking to them? Who was it that came to Isaiah when it says “And the Word of the Lord came to me?” What was that that came to Isaiah? That was God the Son. Who was it that created the world? God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” That’s the Word of God, the Father spoke. Who’s the speaker, who is that which is spoken? It’s the Son. So it’s always been true, it was true of Job, it was true of Adam, it’s true of Isaiah, it’s true of David. It’s true of the numerous people in pagan societies that believe. Think of the centurions; think of the Gentiles; think of the Ethiopians in the book of Acts that became Christians, all came to God through the Son. Only in Christianity do you have this.

To complete the notes, on page 70, Gordon Clark taught philosophy at a secular university most of his life and from what I hear he had numerous discussions with the faculty at that particular institution. But here’s what he summarizes in his discussion of infallibility. “A sinless Christ is an example of such concurrence” that means what we would say the hypostatic union, of God and man, “more stupendous than the errorless writings of an apostle ….” Remember the diagram I drew, the writings of the prophets acting infallible only in a small zone when he’s writing the Scripture. But here we have Jesus Christ 100%, everything He did, everything He said, every look that He gave was revelation of the Son. “A sinless Christ is an example of such concurrence more stupendous than the errorless writings of an apostle …. If the Second Person can become man without sin, the lesser miracle of Paul’s inerrancy is all the more possible.” Arguing from the greater to the lesser.

See, it’s not a problem to have inerrancy. How did Dr. Luke ever write a document like the Gospel of Luke, the Book of Acts, free from technical and historical error? How did Jesus Christ become incarnate? And if He was incarnate, I don’t have a problem with Luke.

Our last Q&A for a while; we’ll try start up again sometime before the end of September. We’ll try to finish the death of Christ and the resurrection. When we deal with the death of Christ it involves a large set of doctrines, because of the work that was accomplished on the cross, is the center of the gospel, so we have to be very careful how we treat that. It’s a work, again not without controversy, it’s a work that wasn’t really discussed in depth until the Middle Ages. It’s amazing, it took the church 400 or 500 years to get the hypostatic union right, it took them until AD 1000 to understand that oh gee, there was a substitutionary death. It took them until AD 1500 or so to realize that well, gee, you know if we have this substitutionary death then really that means that I don’t have any merit and I have to accept Christ’s merit. So we’re slow learners. It actually took 1500 years to understand that point. I mention those things not because I’m trying to demean the saints that have gone before us, but simply to say that when you struggle with these truths and we discuss them, and they’re hard … yes they are! And those people weren’t stupid; many of the people who were the great students inside the church were brilliant men, and godly men. It took just a lot of time to think these things through.

One of the problems being, of course, that the Scriptures were scarce. For many years they only had parchments, no printing press, and you just memorized whatever piece of Scripture you could memorize and go from there. So we’re blessed, we’re so blessed, we have access to Scripture, we have Bibles coming out the kazoo, we have five or six different translations or access to them if we need them. We’ve got Bible dictionaries, we’ve got concordances, we’ve got all these things. Those weren’t available; those haven’t been available for most of church history. And yet all this stuff was worked out. So it’s pretty amazing actually if you think about it. We don’t properly credit the work that went into all this when we just say well, here’s the doctrine, here’s the teaching, here are the verses, okay next…, and teach it like that. It took a long struggle to learn that. We can teach it in fifteen minutes, the hypostatic union, and you just memorize the statement, undiminished deity true humanity without mixture united in one person forever, but it took a while to make that statement.

So we mustn’t trivialize what we’re learning here. It may be stateable in a sentence or two, but that sentence or two came after a lot of thought and prayer, and a lot of blind alleys, people went down all kinds of blind alleys before they got it right. And in our own centuries the church is still struggling with eschatology, how do we construct the details of the return of Jesus Christ? We’d better get it ready pretty soon, we’re not going to have the rest of history to think this one out, but that’s an area that’s still under discussion.

Question asked: Clough replies: We’ve already touched on some of it, premillennialism. This isn’t a course on eschatology but we’ll go through some of the basics.

Question asked or statement made: Clough replies: In a situation like that you want to say, well ma’am, you know what we’re talking about here has been around for a number of years, in fact, if you go to your shelf and take that book called the Bible out, that approximately 2,000 years ago somebody wrote the same thing, and I don’t think Paul was an American. You’ve got to hide behind Paul and when we get into these things people want to make you, you’re the bigot, what’s the matter with you, and you have to kind of hide behind Jesus and say hey, I didn’t make this up. This is the book, check it out for yourself, it’s been around. Granted, it hasn’t been read too much, and apparently you haven’t read too much of it, but you might try it and you’ll see what I’m saying. Check me out, she’s coming to check you out, she ought to check out whether what we’re saying is American, I don’t see the book of I and II American in the New Testament, is that in there.

This conversation reminds me of a friend of mine years ago who was working in this business, and I guess it was run by a Jewish man and this guy liked to pick on him, he found out he was a Christian, and okay, now he’s going to put the bars down, just push it. Actually when they do that they’re just trying to see sometimes whether you’ll stand up for it or whether you’ll just cave in. And if you stand up politely and courteously often times nothing will happen but that sends a message, just that. So this guy was going on and on, instead of saying it was an American he was saying it was a Gentile thing, so my friend had had his entrée, because what he then turned around to this Jewish guy and said, hey fellow, the Gentiles didn’t write this book, it was you Jews that wrote it. Jesus was a Jew, this is a Jewish thing, I’m just a stranger to the whole thing, I read it and I trust the Lord, but it’s you guys that wrote this whole thing. And he said the guy just dropped his jaw, he didn’t know what to do in response to that kind of a thing. It was great. I’m slow witted, that’s something I’d think of three weeks later, but he thought of it just at the right time at the right place. It was great.

Question asked: Clough replies: That’s a good question about when do we think that Jesus in His humanity, as He expanded His consciousness as a small child, when do you suppose He became aware of this, and we’re shut up to what the Scripture says, we don’t know. The Scripture just gives us that one event when He was eleven or twelve, the Jewish bar mitzvah age, at that point it’s clear that he was convinced of His role in life. When it happened, the Scripture just doesn’t tell us. We’re left sitting there with a mystery, we don’t know. We do know that …

There’s a fascinating thing that Chuck Colson brought out, and I’ve got to get the reference that he used because I would really like to check this out, there’s a passage, apparently some scholar has recently found in one of the church fathers, I don’t know if it’s Justin Martyr, or one of the church fathers that wrote early, who says that in his day you could go down to certain places and find wooden plows that Jesus had made, and they were still being used a hundred years later. They knew He had made these, He really was working in a carpenter shop, He really made real wooden plows, and that’s never mentioned in Scripture. Gee, that’s kind of neat, I wonder, did His wooden plows look different from everybody else’s wooded plows? I don’t know. It’s just that apparently they thought enough of them that they were quality plows that lasted for a long time.

There are all kinds of things that grew up in church apocryphal literature, I have not read it but I have had people who have read it tell me that there were stories circulating in the church that when Jesus was a boy He’d throw rocks up and break them in mid-air and just have fun with the kids of Nazareth or something but we don’t know, that sounds a little cheesy to me that He would do that. The Scriptures are just silent.

Question asked or statement made: Clough replies: Then you hear stories every once in a while, Jesus went to India and that’s where He brought doctrines of the Orient into Christianity. No! Give me a break. But that stuff circulates. And the question is a genuine question, we’d all like to know that, and I think we’d like to know that because I guess we’d like to know how children learn, in particular in that case. All I can go back to is one, we know that his parents, whether it was his mother, his step-father, or both of them, they had, according to scholars who have studied the vocabulary frequency, sometimes they do statistical studies of vocabulary and expressions among different authors in the Scripture and you can diagram these out and do stuff, I’ve never done it, but other people have done it. They say if you do that for Jude, James, and Jesus, and Mary you find there’s a commonality there, that that family had its own way of talking about things.

This is not being spooky and saying Jesus did it, it’s rather He seemed to [have] inherited a strong sense of God’s work in nature. If you read the book of Jude, when he’s talking about the apostates, he’s using comets and stars. James uses the same thing. Apparently they must have thought a lot about the creation around them, and you can speculate that maybe that’s what Joseph and Mary taught their kids, they’d take them out on a dark night and show them the stars, and talk to them that way. We know that Jesus was obviously taught godliness from his parents, there’s no question about that. It’s pretty clear that His parents, by the time Jesus was born, had become aware of their genealogies, that there was something special, that this couple, that Joseph probably might not have given his genealogy too cents worth of thought, but I would have suspected that at least by the time Jesus’ ministry rolled around there’d been a lot of work here, because to confirm His Messianic role He had to justify it genealogically. So how did He learn that?

Did the Father just reveal it to Him or did they actually go to Scripture and check it out, because Jewish people had genealogical records, a lot of them did. I don’t know where they were kept but they seemed to have them, and it seems to be a tradition because when Nelson Glueck who was an archeologist in the 1940s, he was one of the early archeologists after World War II, tells a story that he was studying the Bedouins and the Bedouin are people out in the desert, unfortunately they are being absorbed into urban society, and there’s a danger of the loss of that whole complete civilization. When I visited Israel in 1976 you go out in the desert and you’d see these people, they’d usually gather around an oasis, and I don’t know how they’d stay alive, but they had their flocks and they dress … oh my, they dress in black wool in hundred plus degrees, how those people … I don’t know, they must be tough cookies because they’re out there in this black. I don’t know what the heck the problem with these people is, you look at a good old Israeli and they’re out there in Bermuda shorts and a safari hat, and these Bedouins are out there wandering around in these black garments, men and women, both of them.

But the Bedouins have preserved, they’re the last civilization on earth, the last group of people socially to preserve a lot of the biblical customs, so Nelson Glueck, after World War II realizing they weren’t going to be around long because Israel occupied the land, the Arabs did, so you have these people, in order to survive they had to start their own businesses and go into the cities, so they’ve lost their culture, like the American Indians. He wanted to study them before they dissolved, and one of the things he noticed one night, it just clicked with him, is that he looked over the campfire and this father was with his son, and they were holding a big rod, and he looked over there and what the heck is going on, the dad would be holding his hand on this section of this rod and saying something to the kid, then the kid would say something and the father would move his hand down and the kid would say something else, the father would… hey, that’s interesting, so he went over and asked them what was going on. He said I’m teaching him the family history, it’s carved on the staff, he is Ben So-and-So, Ben So-and-So, Ben So-and-So, and all of a sudden Nelson says holy mackerel, the genealogical passing of Scripture, it’s Ben So-and-So, Ben So-and-So, Ben So-and-So. For years scholars laughed at that, oh that’s just a construction. Well, here the Bedouins are still doing it. So that was one of those neat little tidbits that he discovered that that was at one time apparently universal. So Jesus probably had His own family history, apart from direct revelation. He had access to all these other things.

Then there’s that passage in Isaiah 50, He was awakened every morning by the Father, and morning by morning He awakened Him and taught Him. So that’s clearly telling you that they had some neat conversations, probably at a very early age.

Question asked: Clough replies: I’m sure, I think that it’s just that what Paul is trying to get at is what was going on in His head, when did it click.

Question asked: Clough replies: He was conscious at least by twelve, there is no question about that. The question is was it a gradual dawning, we just don’t know because the Scriptures do not tell us.

Question asked or statement made: Clough replies: His mother, it’s a fascinating study, the interaction between Jesus and His mother, throughout all the Gospels, because on the one hand the Gospels seem to be very carefully crafted to avoid Mariolatry, it’s as though the Holy Spirit has structured Scripture to protect us from any kind of Mariolatry, because it’s clear that she’s subordinate to Him, and He doesn’t necessarily follow her. The wedding feast was a good example of that. At times He almost sounds harsh to His mother, at other times, at the cross it’s the last thing He takes care of. Here He is dying for the sins of the world but He takes care of His mother, the welfare for her. So there obviously was a strong bond, always is between a son and a mother, but in Jesus’ case the disappearance of Joseph in the text, did he die, whatever happened to Joseph? He just kind of drops out. But these are neat things to think about, it’s just that we have to keep submissive to what the Scripture says and what the Scripture omits. The Scripture omits it. We’ll have considerable time in heaven to thrash it out.

Question asked or statement made: Clough replies: There’s probably room, we have no idea what the new heavens and new universe look like but it’s hard to believe that there isn’t work, there isn’t creative creation. Think of the stunted efforts, you think of the great artists, Beethoven goes deaf, and he’s writing music. You think, “Wow, gee, what would the guy do if he hadn’t lost his sense of hearing?” You read of what’s her name goes blind, and you think of the thwarted potential in this fallen world. What would it be like to be in a sinless world with none of these impediments and the full potential of the human, just the human creativity in the presence of God? It just blows your mind about that potential, and it gets back to the fact that it’s not just sitting there singing songs, it’s probably creating new ones.

Our time is up; we’ll see you in the fall. Someone says something: Clough replies: The thing about Star Wars that you want to kind of remember … there’s a mixture of things in it, but what’s always fascinated me about it, these things grip people. It’s not just because they sell toys and make extra millions, it’s the story itself grips the imagination of folks, and when you think about what he’s done there, is he’s created an epic, and epic that involves the universe, an epic that involves everything. And people in our day and age crave meaning, they still crave meaning. Our hearts are made to find meaning, and an epic gives a sense that there’s a meaning and there’s a purpose to everything, including these things that we have yet to see, they’re woven together with us in a plan, it’s just that it becomes a surrogate for the plan of Scripture, but nevertheless it witnesses to the fact that the human heart wants to dwell in a world with meaning. This isn’t just atoms banging around.