Written by J. Warner Wallace |
Sunday, January 14, 2024
As Christians, we can defend what we believe about Jesus evidentially. We can make a case with the evidence from the first century and the universe around us. I pray that you and I, as Jesus followers, can become “Evidential Christians.” In the increasingly antagonistic culture in which we now live, we no longer have the luxury of being a Christian the way I am a Californian.

I live in California; that makes me a Californian. I’ve lived here in gorgeous, temperate, beautiful Southern California my entire life (are you jealous yet?) I’ve got a right to call myself a Californian, even though I often take it for granted. After all, without doing some research online, I’d have great difficulty telling you when the state of California was even established or what that historic process looked like. I really don’t know the precise structure of California state government (i.e. how many members are in the state legislature). I also have no idea how the state government operates (i.e. the rules that govern how a bill is turned into a law), or the content of any of its core value or mission statements (if it even has such things).  I barely know the names of the counties in my area, let alone the northern part of the state. I’m a rather poorly informed Californian, I will have to admit. But I do know that I like it here. It’s comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s sunny.
So if you ask me why I’m a Californian, I guess I’d really have little to offer you aside from the fact that I was born here, am comfortable here, enjoy my proximity to the beach and the beautiful weather.
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We must consider ALL of Scripture, and we must learn the basics of biblical interpretation. The cults and heretics are involved in twisting truth and skewing Scripture. We must do otherwise. We must accept all that the Bible teaches, but properly understood and interpreted.

God did not give us just some books of the Bible, or parts of some books. He gave us 66 entire books and he expects us to take them all seriously and see them all as authoritative. Sure, we must interpret Scripture rightly, and Paul commands us to ‘rightly divide the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2:15).
For example, we understand that some things from the Old Testament do not carry over into the New Testament. The sacrificial system in the OT is one such thing. Not only is it now fully fulfilled in Christ and his work at the cross, but even if Christians today wanted to get into those OT sacrifices, there is no temple in Jerusalem to do them in!
Other things come to mind. Physical circumcision – a requirement for male Jews in the OT – is NOT binding on Christians today. Indeed, we run with what it signified: the circumcision of the heart. So to say we need the whole Bible does not mean we are careless and reckless as to how we understand and interpret and apply the whole Bible.
What I mean by being a ‘whole Bible Christian’ is that we are not to pick and choose those bits which we like and simply ignore those bits that we find to be not so appealing. That works fine in a cafeteria for lunch, but it does not work for the Christian when he approaches God’s word.
A. W. Tozer put it this way in his book Of God and Men: “The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
Yet the problem is not just believers picking those bits they want to believe and obey. Far too many Christians hardly even read the entire Bible. How many for example have ever read the whole Bible – cover to cover? How many regularly read the Old Testament? How many even regularly read the New?
But assuming some do read the whole Bible, it is still rather easy to be quite selective in what we run with. Or we can fail two of the major rules of biblical interpretation: one, every text has a context and must be read in that context; and two, we must compare Scripture with Scripture.
Since I am now reading through the book of Deuteronomy once again, let me share a few examples of how selective reading or poor hermeneutics (interpretation) can skew how we understand the Bible. The first one comes from Deut. 26. Verse 15 offers this prayer to God: “Look down from your holy habitation, from heaven, and bless your people Israel and the ground that you have given us, as you swore to our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
That text sounds really neat, and many Christians today might want to ‘name and claim’ it – at least in a spiritual sense. But one simply has to read the verses before and after verse 15 to see the full context – and that is obedience. As we read in verse 16: “This day the Lord your God commands you to do these statutes and rules. You shall therefore be careful to do them with all your heart and with all your soul.”
In other words, these wonderful promises of blessing to ancient Israel were conditional. IF Israel fully obeys all that God commanded them to do, THEN these blessings would follow. But they certainly should NOT expect such blessings if they refused to fully obey Yahweh.
We find the same in chapter 27. Verse 3 says this: “when you cross over to enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you.”
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These words ended the opening paragraph of J. Gresham Machen’s 1923 classic Christianity and Liberalism. Fighting may be defensive or it may involve attack. When today’s news media wish to portray political rhetoric or reactions in a negative light, they often say that one side or group (nearly always the conservative side) has pounced on some person, thing, or issue. An Associated Press story from 1932 shows that neither the shallow sensationalizing of “religious” news nor the pejorative use of the term “fundamentalist” is anything new. They may as well have said MACHEN POUNCES:

“Stirs Churchmen”…and the pot?

DENVER, May 30, (A.P.) … An attack on policies and government of the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. by one of its outstanding leaders exploded a bombshell today in the ranks of the churchmen gathered here.
The attack was made by Dr. J. Gresham Machen of Philadelphia, recognized as the guiding spirit of the church’s fundamentalist faction.
Speaking before the congregation of First Avenue Presbyterian Church in Denver yesterday, Dr. Machen said “the present condition of the Presbyterian Church is an offense against God.”
(Philadelphia Inquirer, Tues. May 31. 1932)
There’s little context to show why Machen felt put upon by a decade of liberalizing declension1 in the northern mainline church. A casual reader might have assumed Machen was just some angry crank. That a sermon preached in the run-up to a presbyterian general assembly could make national news shows how much things have changed in the USA—the mainline still seemed to run the “Christian” nation of America in 1932.
Well, Machen did feel put upon and so “put it on” the moderate-liberal elites who ran the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. You may, like us, question the advisability of (church) political sermons on the Lord’s Day, but times were different. Apparently, such things were more usual 90-100 years ago. There were “really important things” about which men were most definitely fighting. Here’s how the local paper gleefully covered the pugilistic pastor:
The chief event of Sunday, however, was the appearance of Dr. Machen in the pulpit of the First Avenue Presbyterian Church of Denver, whose pastor is Dr. Thomas Murray, Dr. Machen preached two powerful sermons. He was quoted in Monday morning’s Rocky Mountain News under the following headlines: “Presbyterian Heads Flayed by Churchman … Dr. J. Gresham Machen Fiercely Assails Attitude of Modernists … Directs Suspicion … Asserts Unfaithfulness Is Being Concealed in Reign of Secrecy … Bitter Attack on the Presbyterian Church … “ One of the paragraphs of the news Item read: “Scarcely any branch of the church’s administrative bodies escaped the withering fire of his criticism. In harsh language he assailed the actions of men high in the Councils of the Church.” The whole effect of the manner in which this story was handled was to make it appear that Dr. Machen’s message was other in spirit and content than it was. It was not bitter-unless the truth is bitter. It certainly was not harsh, but it was unpleasant to many because it brought out into public view the very dangerous condition of the Church, which many people want to ignore, ostrich-like. His words were a needful and salutary purgative. In order that the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY may know the exact form in which quotations of Dr. Machen’s sermon were handed to the press, the text is reproduced on Page 4. It is an undeniable fact that, on Monday morning as newsboys at the door of the Auditorium shouted out “Dr. Machen makes bitter attack on Presbyterian Church,” a number of tempers went up to the boiling point.2
Major ecclesial figures sometimes called press conferences in 1932…and reporters even came. Sermon summaries were provided to the papers, and we have a friendlier and fuller picture from a publication with which Machen was associated—the “old” Christianity Today (as referenced in the above quote):
Dr. Machen’s Denver Sermon
FOR the information of my readers we are reproducing the exact text of news-summary of Dr. Machen’s sermon in the First A venue Presbyterian Church of Denver, during the recent assembly. This is the only form in which the sermon was released to the press.