Theologic
Theologic
069: Preaching the Scriptures AND the Resurrection
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Should we unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament?
This is a question posed by prominent church leaders in our day. What happens if we divorce the preaching of the scriptures with the preaching of the resurrection? Is that how Christians have always done it? As our hosts delve into the topic of the gospel, the scriptures, and the resurrection, let us think critically and biblically about the resurrection.
Now I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I proclaimed as good news to you, which also you received in which also you stand, by which also you are saved. If you hold fast the word which I proclaimed to you as good news, unless you believed for nothing, for I delivered to you as of first importance, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the twelve. After that he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all as to one untimely born. He appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, and not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me did not prove vain. But I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed. First Corinthians fifteen, one through eleven. Welcome to another episode of Theologic. I'm Zach Deacon. I'm Zach Pankey. Sean, the one and only. Two Zachs, one Sean. Uh don't get us confused. Two pastors, one deacon. Yep. You've been listening to us for a while now. You know the role. Um we appreciate you listening to us, by the way. We don't take that for granted. Please continue to listen to us. Um gospel conversation here. Um, finishing up 1 Corinthians in my personal study, and I came to a passage that really was very encouraging to me in a particular moment where I just needed to be reminded um that uh Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. Um but one of the questions that I had for these guys in particular, we can dialogue around all eleven verses. I won't hinder us in that way. But I just found it very interesting that Paul in verse eleven says, Whether it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed. I think that you look at broad spectrum Christianity in North America or evangelicalism or whatever you want to call it, that there tends to be a drift away from preaching what Paul just taught. And that's the scriptures. The scriptures say this, the scriptures say this, the scriptures say Christ did this, the scriptures you know, and so I tied those things together and I was like, man, that is so interesting, that is so encouraging, it is so challenging. I mean, he says in verse one of chapter 15, the gospel which I proclaimed to you, and then he in verse 11, I think, repeats himself, so we preach, and so you believed. So there's this preaching, this proclamation of just anything, no, of the scriptures. And so I thought it was very interesting, and I thought I would lay that out as a question to these guys who are pastors, and I'll give input in dialogue, obviously, I as I've already done. But these guys are pastors, and these guys specifically fill that role of standing behind the pulpit and giving us the word of God. And so, from their perspectives, I thought it would be very good to dialogue and get their perspective, their insight on why it is so vital, so important, that we preach and proclaim the scriptures because he says it. Yeah. So we preached and so you believe. There's a there's there's something that happens when we preach, preach what, preach the scriptures.
SPEAKER_02Right. And particularly of what's in first importance. That's what he's getting at here, is that he is speaking explicitly, plainly, of the gospel because the scripture talks of other things in the Old Testament as well. But we also recognize that as he is presenting the core of what is preached, that he does use the terminology as of first importance. So there is a kind of dynamic we talked about on here before that there are doctrines that we do not in any size, shape, or form, any context, uh, shift or compromise on. While there are other ones that we may have a differing view, which again we've exemplified on here with like end times perspectives, that just because there's a different view regarding the rapture, final judgment, that you can have fellowship with others, but there are other doctrines, such as described right here, um, that yeah, you don't you don't shift on. You don't um compromise for the sake of fellowship, for the sake of partnership. Like this is this is what bound the apostolic church together and what continues to bind us, bind us together today. And so that is something he leads out in, is just emphasizing the content that he sets before them.
SPEAKER_00I I wanted to give maybe a little bit of the broader, broader background, a little bit of the historical background to this text. And I think what what I think will we'll bring Paul's words in chapter 15, verses 1 through 10, and into verse 11, and ultimately into the whole of the chapter to help us really understand the lesson Paul is getting at, is I think we need to get a bigger bird's eye view of the text. So I'm gonna give some historical background here as we think through. Corinth was not very far away from Athens, very close to Athens, which was the center of Greek philosophy of that day. So much of the problems that arose in Corinth came because they were so deeply influenced by Greek philosophy. Um, and so that's why you sort of have a corruption of the Lord's table earlier on, where you have people uh not partaking or able to partake, and others gluttonously partaking. Um, and this was akin to one of the philosophies mentioned in Athens in in Acts 17, that's called Epicureanism, which started in the 300s B.C. And this is what the Baker encyclopedia says about it. Quote, the Epicureans were empiricists, they relied upon sense experience for knowledge. This put them in opposition to those who chose to make statements about the world on the basis of reason alone, distrusting or rejecting the data of the senses. Epicureans were concerned with natural evidence and with practicalities, thus showing the somewhat scientific character. They were unenthusiastic about mathematics because of what they took to be abstract quality, having little to do with the important matters of living, ethics, the study of right behavior was their focus. The Epicurean judged the value of an action over the thing in terms of the pleasure or pain it brought, a position called hedonism. It was egoistic hedonism because the person sought his own pleasure rather than the pleasure of others. End quote. And that same empiricism influenced the thinking of the Corinthians when it came to the resurrection. In addition to another that philosophy of Epicureanism, you had another philosophy from from Greece called philosophical dualism, that is to say, that all matter is evil and spirit is good. So you have a whole hot mess of philosophical lies that the Corinthians have believed. Many of them were saved out of that. That was that was really the hotbed of that culture in that era, and it influenced the thinking of the people uh in their places of immaturity in the faith. And so that idea, again, deeply influenced the way they're thinking to the point where they began to reject the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. For example, for this reason, Paul goes through over fifty verses about the resurrection here in chapter 15, and he starts by going through the gospel, and presumably that all of them had believed and received the message of the gospel, where it has foundationally to it a resurrected Jesus. Which is Paul's point in the whole chapter, as he begins with these first ten verses, is to remind them of the resurrected Christ that all these other people saw, all these other people, including Paul, had an experience with, and that they were the ones who had had it preached to them. And presumably, as verse 11 tells us, they had believed that message. You've you've embraced the message of the resurrection, right? You've embraced embraced the message of Christ, and it not only includes what people have said in this day, many of many of them were alive, some had died by the time Corinthians was written, but also according to what the scriptures said was going to take place. All this stuff took place according to the Old Testament. You've embraced the Old Testament, you've embraced the testimony of New Testament saints having seen the resurrected Christ, and then he goes on to explain to them the nature of the resurrected body from that point on. It gives us a sort of understanding. Because what happened, the Corinthians had embraced sort of this idea again that all matter is evil. And so, as the Greek philosophers had believed, resurrection is the idea of coming back in a sort of zombie-like state. You know, you're sort of rising from the grave like it's night of the living dead or something. And so Paul has to correct their thinking later on in 1 Corinthians. He tells them, no, no, the dead are raised incorruptible. They're not raised in a corruptible body. And so I guess I would say that verse 11 kind of provides a transition from the explanation of what the gospel is, who witnessed it, where it was found in the Old Testament scriptures, to the full-on Paul hammering down on them in verse 12. He says, Now if Christ is preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
SPEAKER_01Okay, that's interesting. I had not thought about it that way.
SPEAKER_00If you're thinking of the implications for our preaching, why do we preach the scriptures? The gospel, for example, connects us to what is our right thinking and upholds our hope. Yeah. Because that's what he's really bringing out to the people in Corinth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You're thinking wrongly about this, and it is ruining your hope, the hope that God has afforded to you in the resurrection, the very same resurrection which Christ had participated in.
SPEAKER_02It's also ruining the unity that's that should be there in the church, because within like chapter one, he opens up saying, I hear that there are many divisions among you. And so from there, there's many things that get fleshed out throughout the whole letter of him addressing the divisions and how they need to be to be reconciled. And your emphasis when you ask the question about verse 11, I do believe Paul is hearkening back to the very beginning of the book where he says, Whether then it was I or they. I believe they is referring to the other apostles that were listed off, both in this context, because he lists off the other apostles, but you also go back to the beginning where there's that whole um rebuke where he says, um, some say I follow Paul, some say I follow Apollos, some say I follow Cephas. That this comment here at the end of this passage in chapter 15, where Paul says, whether I said these things to you or they did, um, it's the same gospel. And the implication within the whole of the book is that this this news should unify you. Like it should go above and beyond your your ethic or your ethnic uh background, um, your your financial social status, like those things should not have to be. You prefer teachers, right? Whoever preferred teachers, right? Right, because we're all saying the same thing. Whether it's Apollos or it's Cephas or it's James is listed here, or the other apostles, or Paul, like what Paul just said, it's not like it's his uh version of the gospel. His comment, verse 11, is as if he's like, I'm not sure if all the persons that are hearing this letter, some of you may have heard this from Cephas, some of you may have heard this from me. I'm not exactly sure, but that that's irrelevant. We, the apostles, in that context, we're irrelevant. It's the gospel that we present and proclaim to you that is important because of many things, but one of them is it has a unifying effect. We have one faith, we have one savior, and we have one hope of resurrection that is to come.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so I believe that that verse that you emphasize, I think the reason Paul words it that way is because the overall divisions that we're forming there, where they're kind of pitting apostles against each other. And Paul's saying, we're all saying the same thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. I love that it has a it has a way of uniting us, preaching the scriptures, and I I like what Sean just brought out, right? Because that's where Ephesians 4 comes in, where the apostle Paul says that it is through the preaching of Christ who is the head that we all are joined into the unity of the body, right? That it is through the preaching of scriptural, doctrinal, biblical, Holy Spirit-inspired truth founded on Christ, that the church is moved from a sort of division to now having one, you know, one purpose, one in unity. The the truths founded on the gospel, like the resurrection, is are useful for refuting error that comes from the culture into the church. And so it not only does it unify on what's right amongst the people who are within the church, but it divides from what's wrong and destructive and destructive to our hope as well as our unity.
SPEAKER_01So I don't want to I don't want to give get on a tangent about false teachers. Well, we were joking around about a false teacher before we started recording this episode. Would you say it is a mark of a false teacher that they are not preaching the scriptures?
SPEAKER_02I mean, unless you mean like open Bible or you're talking about just teaching and there's no scre like just completely divorced from it.
SPEAKER_01Right. The more of that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Could be both. I probably want to nuance that out a little bit. Um, but yeah, if if if in principle, in concept, in word, the teaching is void of that, um, I would honestly probably tile it not a false teacher, like somebody like we were just joking about, yeah, but probably more just a pagan. Because a false teacher is normally the category of taking words, concepts, oh, a good distinction, okay, and then twisting them and spinning them in a particular way. Whereas if it's completely void, 100% void, I would just say it's a pagan. Okay. Because I wouldn't call um the Greek philosophers false teachers in the Pauline sense. Yeah. I would just say they were pagan men.
SPEAKER_00That's a good distinction. I appreciate that. And 2 Peter 3 brings that out, right? That that's the job of the false teacher within the church. Is it's not very often, it can be, but it's not very often that you find the false teacher being somebody who who completely divorces himself from the proclamation of the Bible, but it is in how he treats the Bible, right wrongly dividing the word of truth. And as Peter says about Paul's writings, many men come and twist it uh according to their own devices, their own desires. So yeah, they i you're right to say that they don't preach the Bible, it's that they it's the in the sense though that they take the words of it and make it their own spin.
SPEAKER_01As pastors, from your guys' perspective, whether just by simple way of application or theology, as we think about it in a more more deep, deeper sense, whatever. What is the connection between so we preached and so you believed?
SPEAKER_02I as I as I contemplated that question that you sent to us, really for me, the way I was thinking through that is the gospel, the content of the message according to Romans, is the power of God unto salvation. It's a supernatural work. However, as with all things, God works through means. And so on the side of the preaching, the evangelism, it's the responsibility of a Christian to be proclaiming the good news. But also we don't come into salvation, and uh depending on how I word this, I could get myself in trouble. We don't come into salvation as robots. The regeneration of the Holy Spirit, like the New Testament says more than just regeneration, more than just the new birth, the working of the Spirit. And there is a very real and active response in tandem with that. And so the statement of Paul, so we preached, so you believe. Within the power of God coming into the heart of a man, coming into a group of people, we have the human responsibility of proclaiming that news, the means by which God has ordained for of his work, his redemption to go forth. But then again, on the side of human responsibility and response, you have the belief. It is the reception, is the active response to the gospel. So these are activities done by humanity surrounding the unseen, supernatural work of the spirit. And I think one of the best images we get of this is Acts 2. What's interesting about Acts 2 is Peter doesn't finish his sermon. Everyone's always like, have a good conclusion. Which again, I think Peter probably would have concluded differently. Yeah, he got interrupted because Peter preaches, there is a pause in the quotation regarding Peter's sermon, because Luke inserts a comment where he says, and they, the men he's preaching to, they were cut to the heart. Internally, they have been impacted. And what is what is the follow-up verse? I don't think we have to see this necessarily as chronological, it's a logical order, but not necessarily chronological, as in like heart is cut, then this happens. But the two events linked together is you hear this being cut to the heart. So there's something deep that no human hand can do, followed by the men calling out, What shall we do? So Peter is preaching, he's evangelizing. There's the human activity in connection with God's saving work. But then there's the invisible thing that if you're just standing there on the day of in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost, you wouldn't have seen these hearts cut, but you would have heard tell us what shall we do to be saved. The response, the belief. Oh, like so. I would articulate that that is the first evidence we see that they are looking to Christ and trust. Now Peter gives them particulars as to what they are to do, and they ask, What shall we do? And they say, Well, repent, be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. And the promises for you, for your children, for those who are far off. I had to say the rest of that verse just for our Presbyterian brothers to also hear the part for those who are far off, not just the children. Anyway, back to the topic of hand, squirrel. Oh that so, yeah, so I think that that's the the emphasis, or doesn't necessarily the emphasis, but when we think about evangelism and preaching, it is a supernatural work of God, the gospel is his power and salvation, but it is not void of the preacher, and it is not void of a valid, real, and true response from the person that's been redeemed.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome. I appreciate that. Um any further thoughts before I move on to my next question?
SPEAKER_00Going back to what is preached, I go back to 1 Corinthians earlier on in the book, for chapter one, we preach Christ crucified to the Jews' stomach block, to the Gentiles, foolishness. And as a result of that, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, 2, for I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And how the brightness of the preaching of the message of the scriptures and the gospel really demonstrates the emptiness of the rest of the philosophical ideas of this world, the misery that's resultant from that, the hardship that comes from that. We preached and you believed, right? We are indeed, as Paul says in Romans 10, we are the instruments, we are the ones. How shall they believe without a preacher, right? The instruments of God's grace for the proclamation of the word, for the explanation of the word, and ultimately the call to an application of the word and an exhortation of that call as well. So it's a it's a joy to be a part of that.
SPEAKER_02So I would also add to that that we preach the scriptures, or to say it this way, the scriptures are to be preached. Not only is it God's word, as we read about in 1 Peter 1, um, as well as the classic passage of 2 Timothy 3, 16, verse 17, um, but also that we see the accompaniment of the Spirit at work with the word. Consider Ephesians 1, verse 13, that Paul writes and says, In him, in Christ, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believe in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. And there's many other pastors in the New Testament you can look at where you see the working together of word and spirit. Um, but then also we see that we want to we want to preach the word. As event the evangelist that wants to speak the word, the the Christians should want to share the scriptures with their neighbors. Because again, consider James chapter one. It says, Of his own will, he brought you forth by the word of truth. That we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. Know this, my beloved brothers. Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to get angry, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. So there's impact. And that's what we want to be putting that forward, where again remembering there is a supernatural activity that takes place amidst evangelism that we do not see. And so we we live in faith knowing that, and so we don't want to put any other word out there apart from scripture, and namely the gospel.
SPEAKER_00And to piggyback on that, the work of the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 1 13, in him you trusted after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, in whom also having believed, you received. With the Holy Spirit of promise. It had to have been proclaimed for the hearing in the same way that John's bringing out. We have the human side and we have the divine side as the second the other side of the coin.
SPEAKER_01Off off record or off air, whatever you want to call it, we were joking around about false teachers and laughing at that, but there's a there is a very real threat that some pastors out there, or some preachers of the word, are trying to divorce themselves or teaching people to divorce themselves from certain parts of the Bible, the Old Testament in particular. So I mean, touch on why that is so dangerous and actually contrary to this. Because I read this and I think we read scriptures and we think, but the first Corinthians didn't have this. And so when Paul says scriptures, he's referring to the Old Testament. He's referring to the Old Testament. And so and touch on that a little bit, why is it just as important to see the Old Testament as scriptures that need to be preached as vital to belief?
SPEAKER_02I would put this forward because Paul even begins before the word scripture comes up, he says, Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you. And that gospel is rooted in the scriptures, which in his day would have exclusively been the written Old Testament in the sense of a written word. There was the the the verbal teachings of Christ, yes, but as an inwritten form, they would have been looking at the Old Testament. And it just so happens that I'm preaching the next three Sundays, I'm going to be preaching from Isaiah. The gospel according to Isaiah is going to be kind of that a mini-series. And the reason I'm doing that is because I'm going into Ephesians when I get back from sabbatical. And Paul's theology is very much coming from Isaiah. Not so much in Ephesians, I'll say that. But in general, Paul's theology is very much in Isaiah. And we see this when we go to Acts. Interesting little study if you're looking to spend some time in Acts, go to Acts 2, read Peter's sermon, and then go to Acts 13, read Paul's sermon. Very similar. One of the commonalities they share is how much they rely on Isaiah. And so when I was preaching Galatians a few months or several months ago now, um, that book is saturated with Isaiah. And I started doing some digging, like, okay, this gospel they preached in Acts 13 to the Galatian church. Um, where is he getting it from when he talks about the good news? Like what where is this where is this stemming from? And within um within Acts, there go, he goes right back to Isaiah 49, 6. And there's a lot of other um references back to Isaiah and various forms of proclamation of good news. And so when we talk about the scriptures, yes, there is the sense in which Paul, in this context, in 1 Corinthians, is referring back to the general scriptures, but we can also see where throughout his writings in the epistles and his preaching in Acts, that he very much not only is just looking to Isaiah's general scripture, but he is looking to Isaiah where there are particular descriptions of the proclamation of gospel being brought forth within Isaiah's book. And so one example I would give, or a couple of few examples I would give of that just to kind of summarize this. When we think about the good news, when we start in Isaiah 40, because that's really where it starts. The first words are comfort, comfort my people. And that gets tied into the first nine verses, the first 11 verses, excuse me, of Isaiah 40. When you tie that in, you see that that is a gospel proclamation because he's just gotten done talking about judgment. He's talking in Isaiah's day, Jerusalem's going to be judged quite severely. Well, not in his lifetime, but in the future. But right after the chapter 40, God says, But here's a word of comfort. We go a little further into that unit, chapter 40, unto the end of the book, and in verse, or chapter 52, verse 7, there is talk of peace and joy. And now, chapter 52, verse 7 gets quoted in um Romans, Romans 10, where it talks about how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news. That's a quotation out of Isaiah where he's talking about this news of peace. And then in uh later on in Isaiah chapter 60, verse 6, there is a connection to this good news being proclaimed and it resulting in praise. And so before we even get to Jesus coming into Galilee in the book of Mark, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, before we even get there, we are already seeing this take place in Isaiah's prophecy. So when Paul talks about the gospel and talks about the former scriptures, he's he's got some very particular passages in mind that he goes to, and we should as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I uh I like what Paul sums up later on at the end of his life. Uh he's talking to Timothy and he says, uh, but you, verse 14 of chapter 3, you must continue in the things which you've learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you've learned them, that from childhood you have known the holy scriptures. Stop here for a second here. What New Testament book was written in Timothy's childhood? Not one. And Paul says this about the very holy scriptures that Timothy would have known, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. The old Testament was that Zacca. That's Second Timothy three, fourteen through fifteen, and that is right before we get to verse sixteen, which is one of the more famous texts. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction, and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. So, yeah, that that that Paul Paul had such a high view of the Old Testament, that he would say that it's able to save your soul, that it is able to point you and through faith in Christ Jesus, there's salvation by grace through faith in the Old Testament, and that the Old Testament is in such a high view described that it is indeed profitable, and you have that is uh that is part of, of course, you look at the rest of the New Testament, we see the writings of Paul are called scripture in 2 Peter 3, um, that it is complete, that it is thoroughly equipping you for every good work.
SPEAKER_01What what would be the temptation to say the Old Testament throw it in the trash? You know, why I mean uh I mean certainly these men, and I don't mean this as a knock on them, I really don't. Certainly these men are smart enough to see the things that you guys have already said.
SPEAKER_00Um I I think it's two things. Uh one, they don't like the judgments of the Old Testament. People don't like that they say that the God of the Old Testament is different than the God of the new, and so they don't like that, they don't like his character, they don't like they they and secondly, I think it's in a lot of ways, and I'm not I can't tell every individual person, but I think a lot of times it's they're they're trying to capitulate to the culture that it that it is truly that the in or in in order to become liked and famous or whatever, it is you you must give up the plain meaning of the words. You must give up the plain scriptures, the whole of them, or at least a part, in order to be accepted in the world.
SPEAKER_02Honestly, I think that that that question could be an entire episode. Sure. Because there's actually a lot of history there. Why guys like Mr. Stanley uh wrote as he wrote about unhitching the Old Testament. Um he is simply the very explicit expression of a mentality that's been around for quite a while, for a couple of centuries, as a matter of fact. But the culture is now to a point where even somebody with the label Christian can hear him out and for various reasons be like, yeah, I'll roll with that. So Andy Stanley is no new animal. Um, Andy Stanley is just simply the plain example of a mentality that's been around since the Enlightenment. Um, so as I said, we could literally spend an entire episode answering that question as to why. Um, the one statement I would make is this roots back in a mentality that slowly you can read about this from Francis Schaefer. He really um uh catalogs this well in his book, How the How Should We Then Live? But you go back to the Enlightenment and you begin step by step pushing God out of the scenario, scenario, just reality in general. Um, the sciences, the arts. So beauty is godless, um, the pursuit of knowledge is godless. It's a process that that happened in process. It wasn't like over the course of one decade, God's out, but that bled into uh your um your more academic interactions with the scriptures, so that you had seminary students and such, pastors that sat down at the Bible with a godless worldview, therefore the early stages of materialism where reality is what I see and touch, nothing else. So when I read about a Red Sea being split, um when I read about the miracles in the Old Testament, when I read about everything that a materialistic worldview cannot explain, I write that off. And from then, there's many other reasons we could dialogue over, but that began to, in that context, call the credibility of the Old Testament into question. Now, there are many other questions that are posed against it, um, but again, but I I emphasize that part because those questions flowed out of this very godless worldview that came to the scriptures with a particular assumption and then started posing these questions at it. And so when you go to the same questions that are being asked from faith and from a biblical worldview, you you come away with a different response. Yeah. And so there's like I said, you if you wanted to, we could literally spend an entire episode talking about why we now today in the 21st century see plain and welcomed uh calling for detaching of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that is a denial of the sufficiency of scripture. It is a denial of saying that the scripture is profitable for every good work. Um, you you need you you need to read into it your own mind, your own philosophy, your own biases instead of seeking to figure out what it means and letting it in its plain truths change your biases and transform your thinking. It is an issue of the sufficiency of scripture and also the authority of scripture. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Um it would be maybe this is an overstep as far as a criticism is concerned, and so maybe steer me in the right direction. But would it be safe to say that if we unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament or just kind of reject it, then really we can't have a foundation for 1 Corinthians 15. Correct. Yeah. And so it's interesting.
SPEAKER_02Because you have to wrestle the fact that the apostles looked at those books that you want to say, we want to divorce those out. We want to want to unhitch from them, but yet you have to answer the question, why did the apostles go there? Because what's interesting about guys like Andy Stanley, his argument is we go with the scriptures because of the resurrection of Christ. Right. Which he's got a whole line of arguments behind that. But what's interesting in a passage like this is you have the apostle that he would that Andy Stanley would say, Hey, they preached the resurrection, that's what we need to focus on, not this whole deal about the scriptures, but you cannot you cannot make the argument that the apostles emphasized the resurrection, but didn't emphasize the scriptures. Because when the apostles, starting in Acts chapter 2, when they emphasize the resurrection, beginning, Peter is pointing to uh Psalm 16, 11.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So he makes an appeal to the very scriptures that men like Stanley want to say, let's just let's unhitch those. So there's a huge inconsistency that takes place there where they say, We want the resurrection, yeah, because the apostles wanted to talk about that, but they don't want to address the fact that, okay, where did the apostles get that?
SPEAKER_01I'm just trying to make connections here for myself personally, but also maybe for our listeners, just maybe food for thought. And again, like, you know, correct me where I'm kind of wandering here in my mind trying to make connections, but I appreciated what Zach said about I read the first 11 verses, but then he made the correct and distinct dis um tie to the rest of chapter 15, which is Paul talking about the resurrection and the importance of the resurrection. And so I'm thinking, okay, I didn't think about it that way, but now I'm like trying to now I'm trying to connect the dots of if we throw out what is talked about as as what Paul is referring to in 1 Corinthians 15 as the scriptures, then we can't have a rock solid foundation for the resurrection. Right. And we are what Paul describes in 19 as we are all men most to be pitied. You can't break off or disconnect yourself from the Old Testament because then you don't have a resurrection. You don't have a foundation for the resurrection anyway. And Paul explicitly says that if the dead are not raised, then you're just the most to be pitied. Right. Like we should be going them and saying, Yeah, but if what you're saying is true about the Old Testament, then I then the dead are not raised.
SPEAKER_00And I am most to be pitied. And the whole one of the big points, right, is Paul is pointing to that for the future argument he's gonna bring out, um, one of the main points is he's got people who saw it, eyewitnesses, he's got the apostles, and very importantly, the scriptures said this was gonna happen. So uh so you're you're you are missing out, and it really does rebuke, I think, that idea of unhitching the old testament, as Andy Stanley likes to bring out. You can still have the resurrection and not the Bible. Well, it's it's exactly the opposite of what Paul is really talking about in chapter 15.
SPEAKER_01And if the dead are not raised, we are not raised. Christ is not raised, we will not, you know, we will not be raised. Sorry to get off on the tangent. Do you guys have any closing thoughts before we cut ties with another wonderful episode of Theological?
SPEAKER_00I would just say, too, that uh as I as I mentioned, the tie in it in evangelism uh and belief, the preaching of the gospel is not only something that saves our souls, not only something that transforms our thinking, but it also uh it also changes and corrects where we're wrong. Um, just as much as it says for doctrine-approved correction, instruction, and righteousness. The foundational for the Corinthians was a correction of their understanding of the resurrection and that is founded on the gospel, which is why we must not be those who well, the gospel's great. Let's move on to other things. Let's go talk about other doctrines that we want that that we're interested in. I would go with what Paul said in Colossians 2, 6 and 7. As you've received Christ Jesus the Lord, by faith, uh, having been resurrected, having taken our sins, he says this walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, overflowing with gratitude. So, again, that ties in all the preaching, it ties in everything related to what we're bringing out in this episode.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's a good way to close it, I think. Thanks for listening to another episode of Theologic. Stay tuned for more content.
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