Chapter 1: What does general revelation tell us about God?
There's no place in this universe where the knowledge of God the Father has failed to penetrate, and everybody receives that knowledge, and everybody twists it and distorts it, and so everyone is guilty before God, and they can't claim ignorance as an excuse.
When sharing the gospel, has anyone ever challenged you, stating that if what you shared was true, it wouldn't be fair? Just consider the innocent person living in an unreached part of the world. Surely God wouldn't condemn that person to hell when they've never heard of Jesus. How would you respond to such an objection?
Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and I'm glad you're joining us for this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. Today and tomorrow, you'll be hearing messages from R.C. Sproul's commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. These messages were brought together to form this significant hardcover volume.
It's called Truths We Confess, and we'll send you a copy when you give a donation at renewingyourmind.org before midnight tomorrow. So what is general about general revelation? And why do we need special revelation? Here's Dr. Sproul.
When we use that language, general revelation and special revelation, the distinction is really twofold. The revelation that comes through nature is general in two senses. In the one sense, it gives us information about God that is knowledge in general, that He is, that He is eternal power, that He is deity, that He has wisdom, etc.,
but we don't get the particulars, the details of the character of God revealed to us in nature the way we receive it in sacred Scripture. So the data or the information of general revelation is general. but also it's called general revelation because the audience is general. That is, the whole world of inhabited beings are the recipients of this self-disclosure of God.
Everybody is open to and receives general revelation. That's why Romans 1 is so important. You know, one of the questions I get more often than any other question, and you've heard it a thousand times, what happens to the poor innocent native in Africa who's never heard the gospel? And I always answer that question the same way. I said, that person goes straight to heaven. He doesn't pass go.
He doesn't collect his $200. And people look at me aghast, and they say, well, I thought everybody needed Christ. And I say, well, I thought that too. But you asked me what happened to the poor innocent native in Africa who's never heard the gospel. I said, the poor innocent native in Africa doesn't need to hear the gospel. The gospel is not for innocent people. The gospel is for guilty people.
Now, the problem is you're going to need more than the lamp of Diogenes to find a single innocent native in Africa or in South America or North America or anywhere else because there aren't any innocent people out there. And they say, well, you mean to tell me that God is going to condemn somebody for rejecting Jesus when they've never heard of Jesus? I said, of course not.
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Chapter 2: Why is special revelation necessary for understanding salvation?
But the scholars that made this point here were aware of the nuances of grammar, but they wanted to emphasize that necessity to have the Scriptures by stressing that it is not just necessary to have the Scripture. It's most necessary. It's necessary to the superlative degree. For us, if we're going to know who God is, how to please Him, how to grow in His grace, we have to have the Scriptures.
It's not just that we need a doctrine of Scripture. What we need is the Scripture. We need the content of Scripture. We need the content of this revelation. This is the amazing thing to me, that even in those churches today that have a high view of the nature of Scripture, where people will fight to the death for the verbal inspiration of the Bible or the inerrancy of sacred Scripture and so on,
still ignore its pages and are derelict in mastering it. And to see where we are as a Christian community, I look in the Christian magazines, listen to Christian radio, television, and everybody's always coming. We even do it at Ligonier. We're guilty of it. We're saying, here, here's a plan for you to read through the Bible in 15 minutes a day.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to master the things of God that He has been pleased, upset in writing for your soul and for your eternal benefit and welfare, you have to forget this idea that you can do it in fifteen minutes a day. There is no mastery of Scripture in three easy lessons.
This is a lifelong pursuit to master the pages of sacred Scripture, and it starts the day of your conversion and doesn't quit until the day you die. I mean, I cannot pick up this book of the Bible, and I don't care where I turn it, where I open to it, that every time I open it, I don't see something that I missed the last time I looked at it.
And yet I feel like I've been a Christian for forty-five years or however long it's been, longer than that actually, and I still haven't begun to even penetrate the surface of what's here. I was just reading through the book of Isaiah the other day. which is one of the most popular and well-known of the major prophets, and I've studied it many times.
But as I was reflecting again on the pages of Isaiah that I haven't looked at for a while, I mean, I was stricken in my soul by the message that was in there that I hadn't really caught before. But there it was. And I said, this is the Word of God. and we have lost our capacity to tremble before the Word of God as if the Scriptures were no longer necessary for our health and for our salvation.
Section 2 of the Confessions, first chapter, says, Under the name of holy Scriptures, or the Word of God written,
now contained all the books of the Old and New Testaments, which are these," and then it lists them, 66 in nature, the books of the Old Testament combined with the books of the New Testament, and then added at the end of this list are these words of affirmation, all of which, all of these books, are given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith in life.
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