Shai Linne raps, “Were You There”
Leads worship for Thank You For Saving Me
Book recommendations: Knowing Scripture, RC Sproul
For the Love of God, J.I. Packer
Dr. Al Mohler Fields Live Questions
Kind of question that’ll excite him most: The questions that are the most difficult when you are sharing the Gospel with unbelievers.
Tim (Nashville): What makes the Bible distinct from other books that claim to be divinely inspired?
Dr. Mohler: Let’s look at the Koran first. What’s the claim? It was dictated to a man who was illiterate who was unable to understand even what he was writing. Completely passive role, supernatural event. The Koran is not a book like the Bible that is telling a story over time written by different men, but rather through one man, one oracle. The Scriptural claim is different. It begins with a God who speaks to a people, who reveals himself. It is spoken to men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit, who very much did understand what they were writing. God used these men to write every word fully inspired, so much that we say “When the Bible speaks, God speaks.”
We’re talking about inspiration – the fact that God chose to speak to his people, and He raised up men whom He’d inspired and called and prepared for this very purpose – and then he inspired the people to understand these words.
If you talk to a Muslim, they’ll know that you have a very different model of inspiration than they do. Their message is not tainted by humans. You test the Bible by its own claims of testability. Here is the evidence of how these things came about. The inspired Word of God becomes evident in the life of a PEOPLE – on the bases of its own interpretive testimony, its power in people’s lives – it proves itself to be true by experience.
The Koran can’t prove itself in the same way because no one has a relationship with Allah.
The Book of Mormon follows a more Islamic mode of interpretation and inspiration than the words of the Bible.
The sustained coherence of the narrative of Scripture…. but when you get to other sacred writings, that’s not even a parallel claim. When we speak of the Bible being inspired, we’re not paying it a compliment. Our account of Biblical inspiration starts with the one true Living God who chooses to reveal Himself. “Revelation is God’s gracious self-disclosure whereby He forfeits His own personal privacy so that His creatures might know him.”
Through the inspired Scripture, we come not only to know about God, we come to know Him. That’s a very different claim of inspiration than what you’ll find in any other scripture.
Kyle Martineau: How did the books of the Bible get selected, and why were others omitted? Specifically the book of Nicodemus and the book of Thomas?
Dr. Mohler: You’ll hear about a lot of other gospels these days. They fall into two and, today, three categories. The first is apocryphal writings. Between the OT and NT. Roman Catholic Bibles have the Macabees, Esdras, etc. Why don’t we have those books? The early church, while respecting them as good books of historical interest, but not on the level of Scripture. As the church came to understand what belonged and didn’t belong, the apocrypha took a secondary position.
Pseudopycryphal: False writings. Attributed to someone who didn’t write them
Gnostic groups: Following an ancient philosophy, Mediterranean-based, seeking to appropriate the story of Christ within their belief system of a secret knowledge and human perspective through knowledge. Think the Da Vinci Code. A category of Gnostic scriptures emerged with people who are adding writings to the early church. This is the whole reason why the early church settled on a canon of Scripture in the first place.
Greg (Kentucky): What are your thoughts on the inspiration and reliability on verses like John 7:53-8:11 and the longer ending to the book of Mark?
Dr. Mohler: The bottom line is that we want to know exactly what the text is. It gets right to Do you trust what you find in the Word? In those two passages there are significant textual questions. I believe they belong in the Scriptures, because the church, having read them, decided that they belonged in there. There is no significant doctrinal issue with those Scriptures. If there were, we’d have to call a council of the church about it. But you cannot base faith on either passage, and neither passage asks you to.
We don’t have Mark’s manuscript, and if God wanted us to we’d have it. Also in some places you see passages with a refined accuracy. This comes from a better understanding of the context, the culture, and the language.
Alan (Athens, GA): How about the application of the law to Christians? We wear cotton-polyester and eat shrimp, etc… Homosexuals defend themselves because we don’t see the need to completely keep all the OT laws.
Dr. Mohler: This is a common question. Why don’t we follow the entire OT Law? The question of the law is central to our understanding of the Gospel. Paul points out that the law leads to our death because sin comes about as a result of it….. Paul clarifies in the NT that these acts are still an abomination, and in fact gets much more specific.
His comment on the next question; Without the doctrine of inerrancy, we can’t have absolute confidence that this is the word of God. People who tell you different usually have an agenda which will come out pretty quickly.
Bethany (Louisville, KY): Should we be wary of postmodern ideas and their effect on the church?
Dr. Mohler: Yes.
The problem of postmodernism is that it denies that there is a great universal truth to which we are all accountable. No metanarrative. They’re great about little truths, but deny big ones.
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