The Christian Worldview with Dr. Jeff Myers, part 2
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, visit summit.org.
Dr. Jeff Myers: The Bible is very unlike any other religious book in the world. And, as a side note, all people are religious. Not just Christians. In fact, if you look in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, you’ll find the definition of religion as:
noun – Any set of beliefs about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe.
Even an Atheist has a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of the universe. Marxists also have a story regarding the cause, nature and purpose of the universe that they want you to believe. New Age followers are also religious in the same way. Believe it or not, even people who say, “I don’t believe anything at all” are religious, in that they attest that there is no cause, that nature is irrelevant and that there is no purpose of the universe… which, by definition, is a set of beliefs concerning those things. Therefore, EVERYBODY is religious. We all have a story that we believe to be true about why the world is the way it is. There is no neutral ground. To reject one belief is to automatically accept another.
In fact, a lot of people even have a misunderstanding of what faith is all about, starting with the fact that they don’t understand what religion really is. Some people claim that, “Faith is believing in things you know can’t possibly be true.” But, that’s actually just a spin on the definition of faith. I would argue that:
What makes faith valid is not that we have it, but that the object of our belief is actually worthy of belief.
So, let’s look at Christianity from the standpoint of these criteria.
Christianity’s source of revelation is twofold: 1) In nature; and 2) the Bible. Romans 1 tells us that nature is such that people can look at it, see that it is self-evident that there is a God. But, the Bible is one of those books that is “everywhere but nowhere”.
- The Bible is the best-selling book in the world. It is printed, in part or in whole, in 2,800 languages worldwide.
- On average, 85% of U.S. households own a Bible; the average number of Bibles per household is 4.3.
Yet, even in light of these statistics, other data shows that most people have never actually read the Bible.
- Barely one-quarter of adults (27%) are confident that Satan exists, even though this is a key teaching of the Bible and something Jesus taught.
- 47% of American Christians strongly agree or agree somewhat that the Book of Mormon, the Koran, and the Bible all express the same spiritual truths.
Which means only one thing: they can’t have read any of the three of those books.
- 65% believe they are knowledgeable about the Bible but 58% were unable to correctly identify the first five books of the Bible.
- 45% of adults in the U.S. strongly – but erroneously – believe that the Bible teaches God helps those who help themselves.
- 60% of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments.
- Only 52% of young adults knew it was false to say that “Sodom and Gomorrah were married”.
- 50% of Americans, including Christians, can’t name any of the four Gospels.
So, a lot of people have Bibles, but that doesn’t mean that they actually know what the Bible is all about. No wonder so many people mistakenly believe that it’s just a book of stories and fables to help you live a better life.
But, what is the Bible, actually?
First of all, if we want to understand how the Bible is revelation from God, we have to accurately understand what the Bible says about God. There are a lot of attributes throughout Scripture regarding God, and we’re not going to go into all of them, but we do have time for at least one. The Biblical word in the Old Testament for God is the Hebrew word YAHWEH, which means, “I AM”. So, if your Bible says, “I AM said…” and you’re confused by that, then you can now understand that “I AM” is God’s name. But, it’s not just a name as we know names to be. It’s a name that describes who God actually is in regards to His nature and character. To refer to God as “I AM” is to say that He exists, as a person. God is not merely a force, electricity, light or sound. God exists as a person with a personality. Now, this doesn’t mean that He is human, but human beings are modeled after God. We are made in His image and in His likeness. Also, when God says, “I AM”, He is also referring to where and when He exists. He exists now. He has always existed. His existence never ceases.
So, just this simple, little phrase, “I AM” tells us something about the Bible’s revelation about God that is untrue about any other revelation about God anywhere in the world.
One thing that I find fascinating about this, particularly because it has affected so much of western culture, is that when God spoke to people, He actually expected them to understand what He meant.
And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth”… And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good. (Genesis 1:26-31)
In other words, God spoke to the people and expected that they would understand. This is very unique in religious traditions. In most cases, in religions that believe that there is one god, they believe that he is utterly mysterious. You can’t actually know him. For example, in Islam, we don’t know anything about god (Allah). The only thing he reveals about himself is his law.
This idea that we can not only know God but understand what He says is strangely wonderful to me. Because, I can easily imagine God speaking to me in such a way that would be completely incomprehensible. Like, I can see Him speaking to us in a way that would be so grand, so eloquent that we would be completely unable to understand a single word. I can imagine the above verses from Genesis going something like:
And God said to them, “It is to be considered an axiomatic imperative for you to consummate your consanguinity and proliferate through the Diaspora, acclimating your autonomous ego to the vicinity which you must tenaciously subjugate, and exercise prepotency over the ichthyoids of the oceana and the columbiformes of the caelum and of the animated quadrupeds that traverse the terra firma.”
…And all God’s people said, “Huh?”
But, that’s not what God did. He spoke to people in a way they could grasp. Paul David Tripp said this in his book, War of Words:
“God reveals Himself, His plan and His purpose in words. Immediately after creating Adam and Eve, God spoke to them. It was His choice to reveal Himself, to define His will, and to give identity to Adam and Eve by means of language. All of His other means of self-revelation were explained and defined by this one central means.”
It’s important to understand how distinctive this really is in the course of all of creation.
Follow Christian Podcast Central on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see our ongoing discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers regarding worldviews.
(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)