The Reasons to Believe #21

Our Reasons to Believe quote for today is from John MacArthur. He said, "Truth is never determined by looking at God’s Word and asking, “What does this mean to me?” Whenever I hear someone talk like that, I’m inclined to ask, “What did the Bible mean before you existed? What does God mean by what He says?” Those are the proper questions to be asking. Truth and meaning are not determined by our intuition, experience, or desire. The true meaning of Scripture—or anything else, for that matter—has already been determined and fixed by the mind of God. The task of the interpreter is to discern that meaning. And proper interpretation must precede application."

Our Reasons to Believe Scripture passage for today is Isaiah 50:4. It reads, "The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned."

Our Reason to Believe powerpoint today is titled "Faith and Reason" (part 2) from "The Handbook of Christian Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli:

The object of faith means all the things believed. For the Christian, this means everything God has revealed in the Bible; Catholics include all the creeds and universal binding teachings of the church as well. This faith (the object, not the act) is expressed in propositions. Propositions are not expressions of the act of believing but expressions of the content believed. Liturgical and moral acts express the act of believing. However, the propositions are not the ultimate objects of faith, but only the proximate objects of faith. They are manifold, but the ultimate object of faith is one. The ultimate object of faith is not words but God's Word (singular)---indeed, God himself. The propositions are the map or structure of faith; God is the real existing object of faith. (God is also the author of faith---both the revealer of the objective doctrines believed and the one who inspires the heart to make the free choice to believe them.)

It is equally wrong to stop at propositions and not have your faith reach out to the living God, or to denigrate propositions as dispensable or even harmful to living faith. Without a live relationship to the living God, propositions are pointless, for their point is to point beyond themselves to God. ("A finger is good for pointing to the moon, but woe to him who mistakes the finger for the moon," according to a wise Zen saying.) But without propositions, we cannot know or tell others what God we believe in and what we believe about God.