Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas
Jeremy approaches Bible teaching with a passion for getting the basic doctrines explained so that the individual can understand them and then apply them to circumstances in their life. These basic and important lessons are nestled in a framework of history and progression of revelation from the Bible so the whole of Scripture can be applied to your physical and spiritual life.
Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas
NT Framework - An Elegant Solution to Competing Interests
We all experience competing interests. My desire to spend time on my hobby and my desire to spend time with my family. My need to work to make money and my need to have time off work so I can enjoy what that money provides. These are simple examples of a far more complex problem with an elegant solution.
More information about Beyond the Walls, including additional resources can be found at www.beyondthewalls-ministry.com
This series included graphics to illustrate what is being taught, if you would like to watch the teachings you can do so on Rumble (https://rumble.com/user/SpokaneBibleChurch) or on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtV_KhFVZ_waBcnuywiRKIyEcDkiujRqP).
Jeremy Thomas is the pastor at Spokane Bible Church in Spokane, Washington and a professor at Chafer Theological Seminary. He has been teaching the Bible for over 20 years, always seeking to present its truths in a clear and understandable manner.
Welcome to Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas and our series on the New Testament Framework. Today, the full lesson from Jeremy Thomas. Here's a hint of what's to come.
Speaker 2:Like I almost don't know of any doctrine in the whole Bible that has more application than the Trinity.
Speaker 1:Legalism and licentiousness, national law and international law, the rights of the husband or the wife in the context of marriage, the rights of a minor child and a family. There are many, many conflicts in this world. How do we handle the needs of the group over the rights of the individual? Where does this conflict come from and how does it get resolved? The resolution is in the Trinity, in the triune, godhead and the balance that is preserved in that relationship. But when a nation, a society, a culture rejects God, rejects the Bible, now they have no basis for solving the problems inherent in relationships.
Speaker 2:Colossians, chapter 2, verse 8, is sort of the basis for our background study on the Trinity, and the reason it's the background is because it was one of the implications of the hypostatic union. And the hypostatic union is the doctrine that Jesus Christ is undiminished deity, united with true humanity and one person, without confusion or mixture or separation forever. And in Colossae, which Paul wrote to this small church in the foothills of Asia Minor, he is addressing various concerns of people who were bringing, first of all false philosophy into the church at Colossae, also mysticism, legalism, and so this chapter is devoted highly to dealing with these problems of philosophy and these other things seeping into the church. In Colossians 2.8, he's addressing the philosophical issues. Believers can be deceived by philosophies. It says. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ. So we looked into what these elementary principles of the world are. In the ancient world, known as the stoichia it's a Greek word here Well known to people in the ancient world these were the building blocks of knowledge according to ancient pagan thought. Ancient pagan thought, basically air, fire, earth and wind or whatever, the four basic elements or categories of what they thought made up the universe, which have their corollaries in modern day science. You know solid liquid gas and so forth, so it's really not that ancient. These ideas are still with us today as people think about. Well, these are the basic things that make up atoms, and you know the basis of physics and biology and chemistry and all these things. And so if we understand these things, supposedly we can understand the world around us. In other words, we can use them as stepping stones to have actual knowledge.
Speaker 2:Paul is saying in this verse don't be deceived by these philosophies. You are to take every thought captive to Christ, right. And then we ask ourselves well, what's the difference between what the world is doing, how they're trying to build a knowledge system, and what we're supposed to do? Well, he explains in verse 9 what it means to take every thought captive to Christ. It says, for in him, that's Christ, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. Well, he explains in verse 9 what that means to take every thought captive to Christ. It says, for in him, that's Christ, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. In other words, in Christ he's fully God, right, full deity, but he's also fully human. So what this sets up is this idea as far as thinking and logic and language, are you ready? There's the creator and there's the creature, and these are distinct. So when we think about God as creator, we're not talking about him in the same sense that we would talk about ourselves.
Speaker 2:Here's the example I'm using with Trinity. People come along they say well, christianity talks about the Trinity. You guys have an inherent contradiction at the very heart of Christianity in the idea that you've got three and one. So what they're saying is I've got threeness over here and I've got a concept of threeness in creation. I've got a concept of oneness. Threeness and oneness are not the same. Three doesn't equal one and if you put that on any math paper, you're going to get a wrong answer. It's wrong, right? One equals one, three does not equal one. So Christianity is, at its heart, illogical and irrational.
Speaker 2:Okay, now what has happened? They have taken a principle from creation of threeness and oneness and they've taken God and put him underneath this idea of threeness and oneness and judged that he is inherently a contradiction what Paul is saying. He'd already thought all this through. He's light years ahead of all of us. We could see here Romans 1, acts 17,. He's light years. He's already thought about all this is that you can't do that Because he's the creator. He's not subject to the creation, he's the creator. He's distinct from the creation. So you cannot take concepts from within creation and place God underneath them, as if the standard is what is in creation. In fact, what we end up discovering is that the concepts of threeness and oneness that we experience down here are derived from the concept that he is three in one as the Creator. In other words, there is no concept of threeness and oneness unless God is first there as three in one, and so this is the basis or root or justification for why we experience number and the concepts that we all use every single day, whether you're a believer or not. Now, I said I don't want this to become too abstract, but it's not abstract, and this problem has been pointed out. In fact, I pointed out that this is exactly the problem that Aristotle and Plato were dealing with in Athens centuries and centuries ago, four or five centuries before Christ, but here it's called the problem of the one and the many, the oneness meaning.
Speaker 2:Well, it's easier to talk about the many. The many is the individual things that are in our world, like Like you're an individual thing, okay or person. The one in this case would be our society as a whole, let's say our nation, the United States of America. Or we could also look at it this way the many would be the many nations on earth, but the one would be the whole earth or global concept of governance and law. But the one would be the whole earth or global concept of governance and law. So there's always one and many. We're always dealing with this.
Speaker 2:We have in family or, let's say, marriage, in marriage, you have the individual persons in the marriage and then you have the marriage itself. So the many would be the two individuals, the one would be the marriage itself. And we're always asking ourselves in these questions which we're all involved in every single day. You're either in a marriage, you have a family there's the concept of a one family, but there's many members in the family. You're always asking yourself which takes priority. Does the individual's rights and needs, are they the priority, or does the family's interests take priority?
Speaker 2:In our country we have people who are very individualistic. They are concerned about individual rights right, and they're strongly in that position. And then you have other people who are strongly concerned about the unity of society and keeping everybody together. So they're more interested in the one, the country, society and other people are more interested in the many, that is, the individuals and individual rights. And they say if you allow the government more power, then that will take away freedom. And we're interested in our freedom. And both of these have logical outcomes. If you emphasize one over the other, if you emphasize just the one the government, the many, the whole then of course there are a lot of laws that govern every single thing that we do and we lose freedom, right, we lose individual freedom. But if you emphasize just individual rights, right, then everything runs to anarchy because everyone does what's right in his own eyes. So we're all involved in this problem, okay, whether we like it or not. And I'm going to show you it's even worse than that. It's worse than that in the sense that you're involved in it every time.
Speaker 2:You say a sentence Okay, that you cannot escape this problem. And Plato and Aristotle knew this. They just didn't have an answer, they could never resolve it. And so societies swing from one to the other. You know we have a crisis in our country. Which way do we swing? Toward more control or do we swing toward allowing people more freedom? Well, more control. That's the tendency, because we have to come together. We have to stop this problem or solve this problem. So let's make all these laws and freedoms get restricted. So how do we balance these and what is the answer to the problem? So everybody faces it.
Speaker 2:That's the point of this slide, and you're trying to decide which gets more emphasis. So how do you solve the problem? Or the one in the money, this ancient problem, by the way? This problem, if you take a philosophy course today will likely not be discussed, and the reason, even though it is the greatest philosophical problem in question ever discussed in the history of the world, still being discussed and people are obviously still trying to deal with it, is because there's no answer from unbelief. Paganism has never been able to answer it, and so it's just been pushed out of the discussion.
Speaker 2:So how do you solve it? Well, you need two things. You need language. By that I mean propositional speech, as I'm using now. I don't mean like stomping on the ground, like a herd of elephants communicating to another herd across the desert. We're talking about propositional speech, where ideas can be entertained and discussed and words can be put together in sentences and viable ideas that present concept and logic. You also need logic. Now, those are linked. Language and logic are linked right Because logic is thinking and language is what you use to think. If you don't have language, then all you have is that's all you have. There's nothing more than a feeling. Where do you get language and logic? In other words, where's the source of them? Where do they come from? Are these just abstract universals? That's what Plato projected.
Speaker 2:In other words, plato knew this problem and he said we have to have some universal out there in order to have absolutes, and what he meant was absolute categories, like, for example, that I would look at this piece of furniture that's sitting here in front of me, called a pew, and I would actually be able to categorize that a pew, and it's not going to change tomorrow into a pu or something else. It's not going to change because if we want to have knowledge, we have to have categories that aren't changing, don't we? I mean, if two plus two is four today, but tomorrow two plus two is five, how can we ever hope to have knowledge? We can't. So the categories have to be stable and they have to be universal. They have to be absolute, and this is what Plato was understanding. So he created a world of forms, what was his absolute realm? But it was just a projection of Plato's mind. But he realized the problem. We have to have this Now.
Speaker 2:Language and logic are those basic to everything that you do every day, all the time. This is all you're doing. Okay, so it's apparent that everybody uses these. But then what happens is people come along and they criticize Trinity, but the issue is as being a contradiction, as I mentioned before. But without the Trinity, you don't have a concrete basis for language and logic. In other words, you can't get language and logic going.
Speaker 2:Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to play a minute and a half or so of a debate. This was a debate in 1985 between Greg Bonson, who is a Christian theist, and the other gentleman is one of the most informed atheists of his day, dr Gordon Stein. And this is just a portion of the debate. The name of the debate was the great debate does God exist? So I'm just going to play a portion of this, because if you're an atheist, atheists tend to be materialists.
Speaker 2:They're not all materialists. When I say materialists, I mean that they tend to think that everything is material, everything has a molecular, chemical makeup. There's no such thing as immaterial realm. Now, some atheists, to grant and be fair, do believe in paranormal and things like that, like weird ghosts and stuff like that, but they're in the minority among atheists. Atheists are typically materialistic. So I want you to listen to this debate. I don't think. Well, let's just listen to about a minute and a half about some issues and I'll give you the words up here so you can follow what's being said. If you can't hear very well and think about what happens in this debate, okay, go ahead, george, when you're ready.
Speaker 4:Just assume that that was so, because you were quoting from the Bible as if it proved the existence of God. I assumed.
Speaker 3:I asked you if I used that argument.
Speaker 4:No, you did not use the argument, but you used the results of the argument.
Speaker 3:Dr Stein, you mentioned 11 basic proofs for the existence of God. Did you mention the transcendental proof for the existence of God?
Speaker 4:No, I didn't mention it by name. I think it is not a proof. I would not call it a proof.
Speaker 3:As I think it is not a proof, I would not call it a proof, as I understand it from what you said. In other words, you didn't deal with that particular one. Are all factual questions answered in the very same way?
Speaker 4:No, they are not. They are answered by the use of certain methods, though that are the same Reason logic and presenting evidence.
Speaker 3:I heard you mention logical binds and logical self-contradictions in your speech.
Speaker 4:You did say that I said it, I used that phrase.
Speaker 3:Yes, do you believe there are laws of logic, then Absolutely. Are they universal?
Speaker 4:They're agreed upon by human beings. They aren't laws that exist out in nature. Are they simply conventions? Then they're conventions, but they're conventions that are self-verifying.
Speaker 3:Are they sociological laws or laws of thought?
Speaker 4:They are laws of thought which are interpreted by men and promulgated by men, are they material in nature? How can a law be material? That's the question. I'm going to ask you Thank you, I would say no, dr Bonson, would you call God material or immaterial? Immaterial? What is something that's immaterial?
Speaker 3:Something not extended in space.
Speaker 4:Can you give me an example of anything other than God that's immaterial?
Speaker 3:Loss of logic.
Speaker 2:Okay, you see, there are some problems, and Dr Bonson just pointed a really big one out that if you have an atheist, materialist universe, where are the laws of logic coming from? Of course, dr Stein says well, they're conventions of men, they're self-verifying, but they're not absolute. This is the struggle. This is the struggle, this is the trouble for paganism Is what you are learning today going to be true 10 years from now, or will it be obsolete? I mean, we go to school, we go to the university, we learn sciences, maths, we learn laws, ethics, all these things. But will that be obsolete 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Are the things that we're learning absolute? In pagan thought, you can't have absolute knowledge. In fact, in our society, to claim knowledge in an absolute sense of something is considered arrogant. And the problem is, of course, that our young children now have caught on to this idea that you can't have absolute knowledge and we wonder why they don't want to learn. We wonder why they don't want to read, we wonder why they just want to sit in front of the boob tube and play video games. Well, because you've told them that there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. And the knowledge that you have now, let's say in your field of computer and technology, will be obsolete 15 years from now. So why am I going to learn all this information if it's just going to be obsolete 15 years from now? So why am I going to learn all this information if it's just going to be obsolete in the next decade of my life? It's a we live in an environment now where there's not a lot of motivation to learn because apparently the things that we're learning aren't absolute, they're not going to be with in the future. And he is to in one sense. What he's admitting is that these are just convention. I want to talk about and develop this idea about logic being convention and the problem that unbelief has, but the problem that christianity has answered all along. So let's push forward a little bit. Um, how do you solve this problem? Okay, the one is a universal category. I've already mentioned this. It's the question of where do you get a concrete, universal, something that is absolute, so that we can have absolute knowledge, so that the categories aren't always changing and knowledge is always slipping away from us and we're just on the fuzzy edge of it. The many is this particular idea in a category, and I'll give an example, okay, but in order to think about anything, we have to have a universal category that that particular thing fits into. To make sense, we just have to, as you'll see. So where do you get these concrete particulars? Now, example, okay, of logic Our dog in our house is a Morkie.
Speaker 2:Now, that sentence states the problem of the one and the many Our dog is a Morkie. Morkie is a particular kind, it's one of the many in a category, the one, the one category that we call dog. Right, nobody has a problem with this, right, I know nobody thinks about this. That's what I said. You, nobody has a problem with this, right, I know nobody thinks about this. That's what I said. You got to think about thinking Okay, I know nobody, we just talk Our dog's a Morkie, okay, but you are bringing in a universal category called dog and a particular in that category called a Morkie.
Speaker 2:Okay, it could be a Great Dane, whatever. Okay, now, this example shows that we're always involved in this problem. If you don't have categories that have certain characteristics in which you can place a particular thing, then you can't talk, can you? I can say our dog is a Morkie, but if you don't understand the category dog, you don't know what I'm talking about. If you don't know what certain characteristics are of dogs, okay, we can't talk. The only way I could explain to you what a morgue was is I'd have to say come here, let's go to my house if you understand what I'm saying, and I'll actually show it to you. Right? So language is central here. We all do this. Guess what? Nobody knows how we do it. Nobody knows. Nobody in the universe outside of Christianity has ever figured out how we do this. That ought to strike you. We do it All. Right, here's a Morky. Okay, this is a Morky. Okay, this is a Morkie. An 11-pound bark machine, okay, also known as Morkie.
Speaker 2:Now, I've already given characteristics to the dog, haven't I? That's characteristics of a particular thing inside of a category, now. So, now that you've seen this cute little pup, who's probably wanting a treat, I'm going to use an example from logic, using a similar thing dog. If we're going to form a category, we have to have this thing called language, right? But it also requires logic to do this. And here's the thing in our society, in every society, if language is sloppy, guess what? Our logic will be sloppy, because language and logic are related. If I say this and this is a sloppy example but if I say all dogs have four legs, then I go out I see an animal that has four legs. I conclude well, that's a dog, it's got four legs. That's sloppy logic, right? Because there are lots of other kinds of animals that have four legs, okay. So what I have to do is I have to isolate more categories of dogs to narrow it down. So every time you see a four-legged creature, you don't say dog. Okay, now this can get Dicey, because some animals, like foxes, have a lot of characteristics of dogs, and so you have to come up with a whole lot of characteristics so you get this category. Another problem in our logic is this the word dog can have more than one meaning in the English language, and so you have to know which meaning I'm using. For example, I could say that person is a dog, meaning they're a sorry person. So our words have multiple meanings and these are two different categories, even though they're a sorry person, right? So our words have multiple meanings and these are two different categories, even though they're the same word.
Speaker 2:As a society becomes more and more illiterate okay, logic becomes less and less good. It becomes sloppier. That's what we're experiencing now in our culture a decline in literacy, and the result is a decline in logical reasoning, where most things end up becoming just a heated argument between two people's egos. And logic and reasoning has nothing to do with which side wins, it's who can throw more rocks at the other person. In other words, this is saying or signaling illiteracy in society and people not wanting to have reasoned, rational debate or discussion, and they can't do it without becoming heated. They can't control themselves. That's a result of lack of literacy In previous generations.
Speaker 2:Books I've read from the early 1900s, sentences could be almost a page long. Now you might say, well, that's not good. Some English professors may say that's not good, but they know what I'm talking about, right? Some of you kind of thought a little bit of English here and there at the collegiate level, so I know Now it's more short sentences. You know just ideas. Now, how do you solve this problem?
Speaker 2:The Greeks knew this problem. Remember Plato and Aristotle. Remember Plato on the right or left Sorry, left he's pointing up, aristotle on the right. He's pointing down. What Plato is pointing to when he points up is the need for one universals as categories over everything. And what Aristotle is doing, pointing down, is saying no, no, no, you can't forget the individuals in these categories. So one would be like emphasizing Doug as a category. The other would be saying no, we got more keys, great Danes, kali's, you know lots of opposites, and so forth and so on. That's what they were. Each was emphasizing something different. Okay, one was saying marriage, the other was saying, no, the husband and the wife. It was an emphasis issue. Now, plato knew there had to be these universals, otherwise there's no meaning, can't categorize anything. It's just basic.
Speaker 2:In Greek thought, though, and in thought that comes down to our day, there is no concrete universal out there. See, in Christianity there's God, three in one, a concept of threeness and oneness, and we say, yeah, but that contradicts our. It doesn't contradict our concept of threeness and oneness. Ours is derived from him and they're different, but they are similar enough that we know these concepts. In other words, our concept is finite, it's just limited, and I'll explain a little bit more. But in God, see, there's a unity the oneness of God. How many gods? One God? How many persons in God? Three.
Speaker 2:Now, has Islam dealt with this? Yes, they are trying to deal with this problem, but which side do they emphasize? One or many? Oneness, allah is a solitary, monotheistic God. There's no diversity of person in Allah. So this does create problems, because now you have an overemphasis on the one and Allah can't express all of his attributes within himself. For example, he can't love, because there's no object outside of himself to love, and true love is giving yourself to another. So it tried to answer the problem, but it answered it in an unsatisfactory way, because there's no diversity in Allah. Now, mormonism did exactly the opposite. Mormonism, which does it emphasize One or the many? The many, because there are multiple gods in Mormonism. In fact, one day, if you're a Mormon, you'll become a god yourself and you'll populate your own planet. Okay, so there's all these gods. So it emphasized the many, but there is no balance. See, everybody's dealing with this. Okay, it's just, are they dealing with it adequate?
Speaker 2:Adequately, in christianity, there's unity and diversity in god and I'm going to start to show you next week, um, how interesting this all is. Because in the bible, take, for example, in the burning bush, here comes moses. There's this bush burning. It's on fire, but it's not burning up, right, it's a strange sight. So he starts to approach it and this voice comes out of the bush. It says take off your sandals, for the feet, I mean, the ground on which you are standing is holy ground, right. And Moses asks, as he comes toward the bush what is your name? That I may tell the hebrews in egypt your name? And he says what I am, one or many one.
Speaker 2:Now, in the book of genesis, 1, 26, 27, 28, he's on the sixth day and he's about to create man. And he says what let us, which is the emphasis, the many In God. They're both true. There's a unity and there's diversity in him, and that's the basis for all unity and diversity that we experience in our lives all around us. This is why there are triads in creation.
Speaker 2:Now, by the way, triads, what do I mean by a triad? I mean three in one the people who founded this country, the United States of America, back in 1776, and later, when the Constitution in 1789, especially with the Constitution, they set up a particular type of government that we call a republic the republic for which I stand right. When they did that, most of these men were influenced by Christian thinking. They actually did this purposefully, based on Trinity. When they set up our one government, with how many branches? Three Everybody learned this in government class right the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch. Why not four? Why not two? Why not just one? Because they recognize the importance of unity and diversity, because they already knew about unity and diversity in God and they wanted to reflect that. And diversity, because they already knew about unity and diversity in God and they wanted to reflect that.
Speaker 2:There are triads also, as I've mentioned. One of my favorite ones is in music. You have one piece of music but it has three parts rhythm, melody, harmony. Some people have pointed out things like the egg, which has the albumen, the yolk and the shell, and they say one egg but it has three parts. Actually, if you get all involved, there's also an air sac.
Speaker 2:So my point in saying that is that when you find a triad in creation, it's never going to be perfect representation of God. It can't. It's a finite thing. God is not finite. So when we see these triads, they're very interesting, but at some point they will break down as far as being a perfect reflection of who God is. Because? Why? Because you've got the creation down here and you've got the creator, and he's not subject to the limitations that we are subject to now.
Speaker 2:So what does this mean about language and logic and category? Very simple again. We have threeness and oneness down here in creation. Right now, god is three in one, but guess what? Not in exactly the way that we experience in creation. It's similar, though, but we don't have a total grasp of him. This is the whole point. We do not have a total grasp of the nature of God. He is incomprehensible. Okay, we will never totally comprehend him. We can only understand in part who he is. But when we see three in one down here, here's the deal. It's a finite derivative of who he is, and that's why we have, and that's why we have language and that's why we have logic, and it's the reason we have categories that we can trust, whereas the world's like, we've got to have this concrete, universal a thing like a god, but there's not one there because we're in denial of that. So we just go on as if these problems are just going to go away now. So this is the problem for pagans when do they get these absolute categories? So language and logic are not slipping and sliding all over the place.
Speaker 2:Here's the question Can you ever know a thing perfectly? What do you have to know in order to know a thing perfectly? You have to have perfect knowledge of everything. Let me give an example. Do you know what a morkey is? It's particular in the dog category. Well, here's the thing have you ever observed every single morkey that has ever lived? Well, if you're not, how do you know what a morkey is and what its characteristics are? Let's say you're a dog judge and you've evaluated 2,500 morkeys and the 2,501st morkey comes along and it has a different characteristic. Here's the question Is it a morkey? Now, do we have to change the category to include this dog, or are we making a different category?
Speaker 2:This is what I'm saying about pagan knowledge. It's slippery, it's sliding, it's fuzzy, and the reason is because the categories that we set up are not built on absolute, infinite knowledge. That's why you are an economic guru, okay. Okay, you sit there and you watch markets. You take a pattern for the market. This year you take a pattern. The second year you're building a model, right based on patterns in the market. Year three, you you're building a pattern and you're saying oh, I see how this works. Year four boom destroys your knowledge, covid.
Speaker 2:Okay, the point is in pagan knowledge. Here's the problem. The problem is you never know what the next piece of data is going to be, so you can never say you know something perfectly. In fact, as I said earlier, if you actually, as a person, claim to have knowledge, an absolute type of knowledge, you'll be considered arrogant and uncultured. Okay, but this is the problem for pagan knowledge you can never get certain knowledge, because what you need for a perfect model is omniscience, and the only place you can get that is the Trinity.
Speaker 2:This is what we've seen in the whole story of evolution and creation debates over the last 200 years, starting in geology, with Hutton and Lyell in the late 1800s or 1700s, and developing this discussion. At the time that Hutton and Lyell started all this in geology, you know how much time they were trying to add to the biblical accepted age of the earth About 50,000 years, nothing, nothing I mean to compare to today, right? So on a pagan basis. Let's just say, did Hutton and Lyle have knowledge on a pagan basis? Well, it was a 50,000 year old earth. What are they saying? The age of the earth is now 4.6 billion years old. That's a little different than 50,000. I mean just slightly, just a hair off. I mean, are you kidding me? These aren't even close numbers. If I had $50,000, I'd be happy, but if I had 4.6 billion, you see the difference, right? It's quite a bit of a difference and it keeps changing. It keeps changing. Do you really have knowledge? See, that's my point. No, there's no knowledge there.
Speaker 2:I had to learn all that stuff. I had to spit it on the test and get A's and stuff, and become proctors and all this stuff for exams and teach labs and all that, and it was all what I don't know, stuff that's probably obsolete now. Why did I take up all my brain cells to do that? I, I don't know. I don't know, but I did it to get the grades right.
Speaker 2:So here's what van till stated at the end of this discussion of the one and the many, and he realized this in the 30s, the 1930s. He realized that christianity is the only answer to the problem of the one and the many, and he realized this in the 30s, the 1930s. He realized that Christianity is the only answer to the problem of the one and many that everybody is working with every day of their life, in their marriages, in their families, in their countries, in their local communities. They're dealing with this problem all the time. Okay, and he said this using the language of the one and many question.
Speaker 2:We contend that in God, the one and many are equally ultimate. Unity in God is no more fundamental than diversity, and diversity in God is no more fundamental than unity. The persons of the Trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another. Okay, I want to talk about that point. When we say there is one God and there's three persons Father, son, spirit right, this is what we don't mean. Are you ready? The Father is part of God, the Son is part of God and the Spirit is part of God. Like a pie and you cut it up into three pieces and you say see, there's one pie with three pieces Father, son and Spirit. That's not God. Okay, I already told you you can't take anything from creation and say this is a representation of exactly what God's like, because that's not what God is like In the Trinity, the persons are mutually exhaustive of one another.
Speaker 2:And you're sitting there in your mind right now going what exactly do you mean? I don't understand how this piece of the pie and this piece of the pie and this piece of the pie could all be mutually exhaustive of each other, piece of pie. Well, that's because his ways are above our ways. His thoughts are above our thoughts. We can't comprehend that idea because we don't have anything like it in creation. So what I'm trying to say now is that God is incomprehensible, but down here we have finite little replicas of him, but don't think that those are really like him. Okay.
Speaker 2:Now, the good news is that, because we have Trinity and this is actually a wonderful thing it helps us resolve so many issues in life. Okay, it helps us solve the issue of which is ultimate having a one world government or individual nation. There has to be a balance here. I mean okay, here. Okay, here's the thing. We know where the world's going, because the Bible's already said on this point it says it's going to go to a totalitarian dictatorship, right, where there'll be one world government. Okay, the Bible's already said this is what's going to happen. Everything else it said has happened, so that's going to happen too. Now, that's not a balance to the question, that's a leaning toward the one to the ultimate, to totalitarianism. But at the same time, friend, we do have to deal with international issues.
Speaker 2:What about criminals who take up residence in the United States of America from other countries? I don't know somebody from Chile, let's just say Somebody who has tried to come to the US to escape criminal charges in Chile. How do you deal with that? See, you're having to deal with some law that's neither Chilean law or US law, aren't you? I mean, there has to be something in place to deal with this problem.
Speaker 2:What about fishing off the coast of the United States of America? Where does the United States end and waters become international water? So you can fish in these waters as a US citizen, but you can't fish in those. Or, if you're not from US, you can fish in these waters but not those not from US. You can fish in these waters but not those. How do you solve these problems? See, you can't just do.
Speaker 2:Everything in this question is going to focus just on individual nations, because there are issues that transgress our boundary. So how do you answer it? Just the way the Trinity would answer it. Each is equally ultimate, each is equally important. You can't sacrifice one for the other, right? That's how the Trinity would answer it. I'm trying to inject a little wisdom in society about how to think about problems.
Speaker 2:Same thing, though, in your marriage. Which is more important? The two individuals who are in the marriage and protecting their individual rights, or is the marriage itself more important? It's obvious in marriage that husband and wife have to compromise. If you don't compromise, well, one partner is going to run roughshod over the other partner. Right, I mean, it's going to be terrible. Whichever way it works, it's going to be a nightmare. You have to learn to work together. But at the center of that, you have to remember hey, this is a marriage. And that's when you're compromising. You're saying the marriage is more important than my own personal desire. Here, I want the marriage is more important than my own personal desire. Here, I want the marriage and I'm willing to compromise and give something up for our marriage. Right, that's what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Same thing in a family. You've got husband, wife, you've got kids. Who's more important? Yeah, we're all important. You've got the family and you've got every individual person in the family. What if some family member is out there doing stupid stuff and it's affecting everybody else, right? I'm sure you've never seen it. Is that family member important? Yes, is the family as a whole important? Yes, so how are you going to solve this? You have to have equal weight put on the family itself as a unit and on the importance of that individual and helping them get resolved and stay inside the family.
Speaker 2:So this is I'm not saying these are easy, this is easy to do. I'm just giving like a, a model for how it has to be thought about and dealt with. But the good, the good uh news, see, is at least, at least we have a basis for answering the problem. At least in the trinity, one and many equal uh importance, we have a basis for it. Okay, there's a, there's a tool he's given us, okay, and so we don't swing toward one or swing toward the other, but rather there's balance. And if there's anything I can show you that's applicable out of the Trinity, which we'll really start to look at next week, you know, in the text We've already started. I am let us oh, what's going on. But this, it is highly applicational, like I almost don't know of any doctrine in the whole Bible that has more application than the Trinity.
Speaker 2:Because, you know, the Bible says things like walk by the Spirit, which is to live the Christian life. Right, walk by the Spirit, that's an individual responsibility, right. But if you're in a marriage, your individual responsibility to the Lord is connected to another person. What if they're not walking by the Spirit? Well, you still are responsible to walk by the Spirit, regardless of what they do. Here's the Bible.
Speaker 2:Here's what it says in marriage, for example, husbands, what Love your wives, wives, what Respect or honor or fear your husband? Right, it's a respect type concept Submit, respect, honor. But what if I'm not loving my wife? Does she have liberty now to not respect me? Not biblically. It's not to be conditioned on what I'm doing Now. If she's not respecting me or honoring me, should I love her? All the women said yeah, you should. They're much more vocal than you guys. Yes, you should. They're much more vocal than you guys. Yes, you should love me. Okay. But here's this might bother people, but I'm going to say it anyway why should I love her? Because he said it's an issue in me and how I am responding to him.
Speaker 2:The same thing for the wives you may not want to respect your husband because your husband is being a doofus, he's doing something stupid or making a dumb decision, but guess what? Do you respect your husband because he's respectable or do you respect him because he said to See, this is very practical. This is real world, and the reason you do these things is because you want to honor him, you want to do what he said and because he's the one that made marriage, he's the one that's unity and adversity. Here you are in a marriage which is unity and adversity. He said the two shall become one flesh. So there's a unity to the thing, but there's two-ness in there too. That's coming right out of the Trinity too, and the concepts of unity and diversity. It's not one and three. Three people don't get married. But you see the point, you see the principle, you see how it can actually exist in this world.
Speaker 2:Why has marriage basically been an institution in every single society and culture around the world? I mean, yeah, there's been deviations, polyandry, polygamy. Cultures have tried these things. Guess what? They never work. They always fall back to what? One man and one woman. Why? Because you have to create a society and you can't do that with one man and another man. You can't do that with one woman and another woman. You cannot create a society. You dip below the threshold of replacement numbers, which is 2.1. If every generation does not create 2.1 individuals per family unit, you will not exist as a nation in 50 years. Do you realize that? It's demographics? It is math. Where do we get math? The Trinity this is all interlaced.
Speaker 2:What I'm trying to show you in the grand scheme and I'll stop with this is that there is no other way to think about anything in all of life other than the way that God has charted out that it should be thought about. In other words, if someone is thinking something that's not scripture, it's essentially non-thinking. It's non-thinking and modern philosophy. One of my kids is about to take a philosophy course at Spokane Falls over here.
Speaker 2:All modern philosophy and this is the most fundamental thing you can learn about pagan thinking today is anti-philosophy. It is against knowledge, it is against wisdom, it is against understanding, and the reason is is because they've never and will never attempt to answer this fundamental question, and that's why our society is rocking back and forth between more and more laws and then people breaking out of that box and going crazy Legalism and licentiousness, because they cannot solve this one problem of the one and the many, and they won't even address it anymore. And I didn't come up with the idea that all modern philosophy is anti-philosophy. Francis Schaeffer said that in the 1970s. We're 40 years after this has already been understood. 40 years after this has already been understood. You have a blessing in the Trinity. Think about it. Think how many problems he solves, because the problems are solved in him.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us on Beyond the Walls with Jeremy Thomas. If you would like to see the visuals that went along with today's sermon, you can find those on Rumble and on YouTube under Spokane Bible Church. That is where Jeremy is the pastor and teacher. We hope you found today's lesson productive and useful in growing closer to God and walking more obediently with Him. If you found this podcast to be useful and helpful, then please consider rating us in your favorite podcast app, and until next time, we hope you have a blessed and wonderful day.