People think they can look at the world in an objective way, totally impassive, unabated by bias, “just the facts, maam,” except that people are messed up. One important value to the holiness of God is that He has remained and remains separate from the mess. His Word retains the same holy quality. The Word of God continues outside-the-box so-to-speak.
1 Peter 2:2 calls the Word of God the “sincere milk,” which is unadulterated, pure milk. For the person reading in Peter’s day, he knew the pure mother’s milk, as seen in the metaphor of the newborn babe. The Bible isn’t affected by exposure to the world like the things of this world are.
You can compare this world to a trampled crime scene. You are looking at evidence, but it isn’t pristine or unaffected. First, there is you. You can’t see straight. Your heart is deceitful. You are drawn away of your own lusts and enticed. You retain your flesh, which distorts everything. This is why a reliance on the Word of God through the Holy Spirit is necessary. The Bible provides a prism or the necessary lemon juice to cut through the distortions to manifest the truth.
Second, there is the world itself. It’s been ruined, corrupted, crying out for its day of redemption. Lies are everywhere. Satan works through the world system to deceive. And the world influences. It’s speeches, entertainment, music, leaders, institutions, education, government; influences, more influences, corruption. Sneezing, sheered sheep wool, steel baseball spike tracks everywhere thrashing the scene. Nothing is pristine. The world is an impenetrable maze without God’s intervention.
Then, third, there is divine intervention itself. Whatever we’re looking at cannot fully comprehend or take into account all that God does in the world as He works providentially. God is sovereign over all, and things do not continue as they are from the beginning until now. God intervenes at an unknowable pace and extent.
Whatever you are looking at must be guided by God for you to understand it. The way that occurs in this day is through scripture. We have to live by faith. We have to trust what God said occurred, is happening, and will take place in the future.
Every messed up doctrine and practice comes from not getting past our own lying eyes. I’ve got plenty of examples.
What about a talking snake? Yes, a snake talked. God’s Word says so. Lying eyes say, “No, snakes don’t talk.” If God created the heaven and the earth, a snake can talk. There are many far more amazing things than a snake talking. There is supernatural intervention. Remember the crime scene. You can’t interpret these events according to your lying eyes. You have to rely on what God’s Word says.
You know at this point that we can go a lot of directions with this. I could take you to God’s Word where lying eyes were circumvented by people who believed what God said. Abraham is an example in many cases.
In recent discussions here, we’ve talked about perfect divine preservation of God’s Words for every generation of believers. Scripture says that. People’s lying eyes get in the way of believing that. They’ve got God’s Word saying it, but they can’t get past their lying eyes. Stuff litters the crime scene, but they can’t trust what God said, the only way to interpret the scene in a successful way. On top of that, God is pleased when you believe Him. When you don’t, you’re in trouble in some way. Every problem on earth relates to some way God’s Word was not believed and then practiced.
When it comes to salvation, if you keep trusting your lying eyes, you’ll go to Hell for it.
IMHO, that is why I believe mankind's first temptation to sin, was being approached by the snake with the timeless words, "Hath God said?" It's been all down hill from there for mankind in doubting God's Word.
I have just started going through this as I preach through Genesis, particularly with the temptation of Eve. Every form of false religion comes back to this offer of false experiential religion (in all of its appearances and manifestations). It's just packaged in different ways.
One of the things that John Owen argues so powerfully when it comes to the word-perfect preservation of Scripture (for the textual critics who actually want to think a little, I'll point out that Owen was pre-1950's-KJV-Only-started-by-a-Seventh-Day-Adventist-movement by a few years), is that God has obligated himself to preserve His words perfectly, because they are the only means of specific revelation of Himself that we have. Hence, if they are corrupted, so is the revelation of God Himself, and without pure revelation, we are left with God having provided a corrupt revelation of Himself (I could take it further and point out that corrupt revelation results in corrupt worship, which is, not coincidentally, a big problem today). Owen, of course, makes that point far more poignantly than I am doing.
Our eyes lie and our hearts deceive. If God's Word was not available in every generation, then He has failed in His revelation to man (upon which every generation is dependent), who cannot truly know him without the revelation that comes exclusively from God in His Word.
Ken,
Right on.
James,
Very good.