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Because God is perfectly holy, cannot lie, and has a care for His Word, the original autographs of the Scriptures are perfect, without error, and cannot contain error. Due to God’s providential care to bring about careful scholarship, the high redundancy in the Bible, and the Bible’s frequent repetition of important teachings in various ways and literary genres, the important teachings of Scripture, as transmitted to us and as translated by honest scholars are completely reliable and dependable.80
The scale of God’s created universe with its (according to one estimate) 200 million trillion stars is astoundingly vast. God also created many plants, animals, and ecologies that show His intricate engineering. The process by which cells generate proteins is just one other example of God’s intricate engineering. And, God is mankind’s Creator. The idea that any human is qualified to judge or evaluate God, any of His doings, or His Word is thus ridiculous and absurd on the face of it. It is thus necessary to trust in God and always assume that the Holy Bible is always true. There is no other logical alternative. The absolute inability of humans to evaluate God or His Word makes trusting God and His Word the only rational response.
From Genesis chapters 1 and 2, and the Gospel of John chapter 1, we learn that:
We live in a real world; neither life nor this world is an illusion.
The Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit created this entire vast universe and its contents in six days (144 hours), all by exacting design with great skill and wisdom for His Glory. Big-Bang cosmogony81 and Darwinist macroevolution82 are false hypotheses with no proof.83 These false hypotheses are largely motivated by the desire to pretend that there is no Creator God Whom we must all obey. They are fables constructed according to scientific knowledge to make them appear real.
God made the earth to be inhabited by mankind and endowed the earth with resources such as minerals, fuels, metals, plants, and animals for mankind’s benefit and wise use. To this end, God gave dominion over the earth and its non-human contents to mankind. The earth is not a deity, endued with intelligence, or “sacred.”
God made mankind in two sexes, male and female, and instituted heterosexual, monogamous, life-long marriage for companionship and procreation.
God made mankind to glorify Him and able to communicate truly and rationally with God and one another.
God is transcendent, that is, entirely outside of and separate from His creation, even as He brings all things to pass. He is omnipresent, and intimately aware of every minute detail in the universe. God is no part of the universe, and the universe is no part of God. Nothing in the universe is “spiritual” or is divine in any way.
“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering” (Luke 11:52 ESV).
Based on the authority and reliability of Scripture (as seen above), a number of false teachings that take away the key of knowledge may be dismissed out of hand, such as:
Other religions, including close counterfeits of Christianity, such as Islam, non-Messianic Judaism, Buddhism, Mormonism, and all forms of animism, polytheism, monism, or pantheism
Philosophies or teachings that contradict the Holy Bible, such as the teachings of Marx, Darwin, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Barth, Bultmann, and so on
Movements that contradict the Holy Bible, such as Marxism, Nazism, Communism, DEI and other “Woke” ideologies; or acceptance of homosexuality, transgenderism, free love (extramarital sex), feminism, and many others
In sum, only the world view and philosophy taught by the Holy Bible itself is true.
There are also false ways of reading or interpreting the Holy Bible that also take away the key of knowledge:
From Creation forward, the Bible records, as true history, many miracles and fulfilled prophecies. These really happened, but many unbelieving “scholars” brazenly reinterpret the Scriptures, thinking that “science” disproves the existence of miracles and true prophecies of future events. For example, prophecies in the Holy Bible are deemed to be dated at the time of their fulfillment, and accounts of miracles are attributed to natural phenomena, observational error, or fraud. Please do not fall for these kinds of lies. They are false teachings that take away the key of knowledge.
Because God is Truth Itself, the teachings of the Holy Bible must not in any way be subordinated to, interpreted in light of, or syncretized with or by any other religion, philosophy, dialectic, or way of thinking. The Holy Bible must be the only foundation for thought, knowledge, world view, metaphysics, and philosophy. Put another way, the Holy Bible must be interpreted only according to its own presuppositions, philosophies, and epistemology.84 Any ideology that sets itself above the Holy Bible to determine its interpretations or teachings takes away the key of knowledge.
In common with classical sound principles of literary interpretation, the reader must submit himself to the author’s original intent. For example, poetry must be read according to the rules for poetry (Hebrew or Greek), narratives must be read according to the rules of factual narratives, and so on. For another example, the medieval practice of interpreting the Bible allegorically was completely invalid and took away the key of knowledge.
There are a number of teachings in the Holy Bible that are assumed or only briefly mentioned in this Sum, that are important keys of knowledge by which one may benefit from this Sum.
A person lives only one life on earth. Upon death, the soul goes either to Hell or Heaven. At the Last Judgment, everyone’s body is resurrected and body and soul are joined together again. Bodies of those in Hell will be transformed into bodies able to experience and endure eternal torture without being consumed. Bodies of believers in Christ will be transformed into glorified bodies. For souls, there is no annihilation, soul sleep, reincarnation, transmigration or second chance at life on earth. Neither, as Plato taught, are souls preexistent; God gives a new soul to each child at biological conception.
The laws of nature are fixed and unchanging because God operates the universe in detail in a manner consistent with His perfect wisdom and faithfulness. Miracles are just when God does something different for some good reason. Thus God’s faithfulness and constancy enable the benefits of science, engineering, and progress. God’s perfect and rational nature is why natural laws are most accurately expressed and related to one another in mathematics. Whatever happens, happens because God did it. This fact does not conflict with human responsibility for reasons known to God but incomprehensible to humans.
Just as God’s faithfulness ensures that natural laws do not ever change, so God’s faithfulness and perfect holiness ensure that His moral laws never change and are not subject to human opinion. Engineers who design aircraft or rockets must give careful attention to the laws of nature pertaining to material strength, aerodynamics, weight and balance, and so on. If they were to pretend to make up their own laws of nature to do their designs, they would not work and would possibly kill people. The same inflexibility of the laws of nature is even more true with regard to God’s moral laws.
80 Alone of all religious writings and “holy books,” The Holy Bible is true to observable reality, was written by many human authors over about 1,500 years, and each human author’s contribution agrees with the other human authors. It includes many fulfilled prophecies of future events. This is because God directly inspired His human authors. By contrast, the “holy books” of other religions were written or released to the world by single or a very few authors in a single human lifetime, do not reflect the real world, or are morally repugnant in many or most of their teachings.
81 Cosmogony refers to secular theories of the origin of the universe as it now exists.
82 Macroevolution refers to the idea that all present life forms have evolved from lower forms by time and chance, as claimed by, for example, Charles Darwin. This is in contrast to microevolution, in which small changes in characteristics allow species to survive changes in their environments without loss of the species. It is one of God’s designed methods of making species and ecologies fault-tolerant.
83 Strictly speaking, no human theory of origin even qualifies as a hypothesis, much less a theory because such are not falsifiable.
84 Epistemology is the theory of the grounds of knowledge and science of the methods of obtaining true knowledge.
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