The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-23, titled "Questions and Answers--Part 51."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. Copyright 2001 by John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

Answer

Well, that’s a good question and you need to have a good answer for that. And the answer in both cases is this: when God has finished giving his Word, you can’t add to it. It is very obvious that the Word of God was not finished with the Law of Moses--it wasn’t finished. That principle is still true. We also know that with the book of Revelation written by the apostle John, the last living apostle, who wrote that in about 96 A.D., and most of the all the other apostles are long dead. You have the last apostle writing the last letter about the final end of the entire universe and God ends the Scripture at that point. And at that point, then you apply the Deuteronomy 4 passage and you apply the Revelation passage. When God is finished, that’s the end. That is the meaning of that. So you don’t want to make too big an argument--and that’s what this person is pointing out to you--you don’t want to make too big an argument about where that statement is placed in the sequence. We all know that there are 39 books in the Old Testament, which were inspired by God, but once that was finished and the canon was closed and completed and unarguably affirmed to be the true canon: God had spoken and when He was finished speaking, you don’t add to that.

But God himself wasn’t finished, even at the end of the Old Testament canon. As the writer of Hebrews says, “God who at sundry times and in diverse manners, spake in time past by the fathers through the prophets has now spoken unto us by his Son.” And so you have the whole New Testament in which God presents Christ. The gospels tell the story of Christ; Acts tells the story of the spread of the gospel of Christ; the epistles explain the meaning of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the punctuation point is the Book of Revelation, which details his Second Coming and the establishment of his eternal glory.

Those verses simply mean that when God is finished speaking, that’s the end; you can’t add to what God has said. Joseph Smith is one of those “yous” who can’t add to what God has said, and neither can anybody else add to what God has said.

Just a little footnote: I was talking to the elders a little bit about this on Thursday night because everybody gets into these kinds of apologetic arguments with people…and I want you to understand something at the very outset. It’s very good to give people answers, it’s good to give people reasons for faith, but understand this: unconverted people have no capacity to process that information. They have no capacity. If we know anything about an unconverted person that is absolutely true and definitive, it is the biblical definition of their condition. The biblical definition of their condition, in Ephesians, is that they are dead in trespasses and sins.

Dead people don’t think clearly about anything. I think we would all agree on that principle. They have no capacity to think clearly about things. In Ephesians 4, “They walk in the emptiness of their mind, their understanding is darkened, and they are alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart.” That is a profound condition!

Let me just go over that. “They are futile in their mind”; what that means is they can’t think right. If you don’t have a Christian, biblical worldview, you can’t think straight, because fallen people, though they have reason, that reason is profoundly affected by their selfish sinfulness and so convoluted that their thinking is futile in terms of grasping truth. “Their understanding is darkened,” further, “They are alienated from the life of God. They are ignorant and they are blind in their heart, they are past feeling”--I mean, it goes on. So what you’re dealing with is someone who has basically no capacity. That’s why when you talk to somebody, you argue with somebody, you get so frustrated because it’s so clear to you. [You say to them,] “Why isn’t everything so clear to you?!” You say, “Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they get it? I tell you, if we give them just reasonable stuff here, if we just lay it out, don’t they have the reasoning capacity to grasp this and to sort it out and to come to a proper conclusion?” Answer: No. No. They don’t…unless the Spirit of God awakens them from the dead.

If people don’t believe the Bible, your clever arguments aren’t going to make them believe the Bible. If people don’t believe the gospel, your clever arguments aren’t going to make them believe it. If they don’t believe doctrines affirmed by the Scripture, you can argue till you're blue in the face; they do not believe because they are blind, they are ignorant, they are empty in their thinking. You have to just keep giving them the truth.

And remember this: it’s more important that you proclaim the truth than that you somehow try to reason them into believing it. Proclamation is the thing. Proclaim the truth and if the Spirit of God wants to do the work of awakening them from the dead, the proclamation of the truth is all that’s needed. That’s all that’s needed. I’ve learned that through the years and I was telling the elders this and I mentioned it, I think, here, a week or so ago. Whoever knows the Bible best is the best defender of the faith. It’s not the person who’s most philosophically acute. It’s not the person who’s sorted and figured out all the rational arguments. Whoever knows the Bible best is the best defender of the faith because the way you defend the faith is to proclaim the faith. The only way people will ever believe it is when the Spirit of God, under the proclamation, quickens their heart to receive it.

So just keep proclaiming the faith. And what I do with people like that, whenever I have the opportunity to talk with them, is to push them towards Christ, and encourage them, unaided by some of their, you know, aberrant material, to read the record of Jesus Christ in the New Testament in the four gospels and let them reveal the reality of who Jesus Christ really is. Exposing them to the Word of God is the key.

And I say again, the way to defend the faith is to know the Bible and to simply proclaim it. The Spirit of God can quicken the heart of people to believe the Bible, even though they have all kinds of arguments not to believe it. You can argue with them and show them reasons and they never do respond, then all of a sudden the Spirit of God awakens their heart and instantly they believe the Bible! I’ve seen it happen all my life. All of a sudden, they believe the Bible. I get letters like that; they come into Grace to You constantly--just read one the other day. A man said, “I believed in evolution, I believed in evolution…God awakened my heart, all of a sudden, I believe in creation, because it's in the Bible!” It’s a resurrection. It’s an awakening.

So, I just say that to encourage you. Just keep proclaiming the faith. Make Christ the object of the your proclamation. Trying to reason with those people is difficult because they don’t have the capability that you have because you exist with a Christian worldview and a biblical paradigm and you think the way God wants you to think. They don’t.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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