Chapter Five
Logic: Thinking God’s Thoughts After Him

One of the clearest dividing lines between man and the animal world is our ability to think and to reason. We know from Scripture that all men and women are made in the image of God. God is the giver of every good and perfect gift to man. John proclaimed that Christ is “the true Light which gives light to every man.” Gordon Clark, in his tremendous textbook on the subject of logic, deduces from this verse that Jesus Christ has given every man and woman the light of logic. God created men and women to think in a rational, logical way. The theory of logic is imbedded in our being. A newborn baby is born with the theory of logic already working in his mind, which is the very image of God. David wrote that the Lord taught him “wisdom in the inmost place.” A child forms premises, constructs arguments, and draws conclusions. However, the dog that the child pets does not have that uniquely human ability, nor can it ever be trained to think in the same way a human being thinks. This is because the child -- and not the dog -- is made in the image of God.

Towards the end of his life, the apostle Paul stood in the city of Caesarea, speaking to Festus, the governor, and King Agrippa, and a roomful of onlookers. Paul boldly gave his testimony:

Notice how the Holy Spirit directed Paul to link the words truth and reason together! Historical, biblical Christianity claims that God is the God of all truth, but it also claims that God is the God of all reason, i.e., logic and wisdom. If we believe in the unity of the Godhead, we cannot separate the one attribute from the other. We cannot segregate the attributes of God as if they exist independently of one another. All the attributes of God complete the essence of God, and they have existed eternally in a harmonious, balanced, and interdependent relationship to each other. Consequently, a knowledge of God as the God of all truth cannot exist without the knowledge that God has simultaneously and eternally been the God of all reason. That is why Paul would place truth and reason strategically beside one another in defense of his sanity, because both of these words have their origin in the mind of God. Hence truth and reason form the only basis for human sanity.

What is Logic?

This chapter was written to teach you how to reason from God's truth, like Paul, by utilizing the principles of logic. Logic is defined as “the science of necessary inference,” or if you prefer, the science of necessary conclusions. More simply, logic is a system of rules which enable us to reach accurate (necessary) conclusions. Just as mathematics gives us the system of thinking that allows us to reach the correct (necessary) answers when working with numbers, logic gives us the ability to reach the necessary conclusions when working with ideas.
In this book, I have devoted two chapters to truth. We saw that the Bible is our axiom, the starting point for all truth. Scripture alone is our one trustworthy, unimpeachable source of all truth and wisdom. As you read the Word of God, you see that the Bible is the logic of God. The Bible is the only book ever written that displays perfect, flawless logic. The sixty-six books of Scripture are the necessary conclusions from the eternal mind of God. Now that we know that we are in the possession of truth -- the inspired, inerrant Word of God -- we must learn to reason correctly from truth. In an upcoming chapter, we will move into the field of metaphysics (pronounced “met ah fizz iks”), which is the study of ultimate meaning and ultimate reality. But we cannot approach any other discipline until we have learned to make correct deductions from the irrefutable truths of God’s Word.

Do you see how this kind of reasoning differs from man’s usual pattern of thought? Many of us reason by induction. We use a few particular things to form our broader conclusions. We observe this, and we experience that, and we form our general conclusions about truth from these few particulars of sensation and experience. In other words, we are seeking to discover truth based on our observations and/or experiments.

For example, if we were speaking to someone who claimed to be an atheist, we might well point to all the things we see in creation, such as the myriad forms of plant and animal life, the ingenious construction of the human eye, or the incredibly complex integration of various ecosystems. We would say, “Mr. Unbeliever, you see all this complexity in men and in nature. Surely this couldn’t possibly have evolved by chance! It’s like thinking that a tornado could churn through a junkyard and whip up a 747! Wouldn’t you agree that for every effect, there must be a cause? Therefore, for every creation there must be a Creator.”

You are asking the unbeliever to draw his broad conclusion from a few specifics - toreason inductively. The God of the Bible is not a conclusion drawn from specifics. His Word is the starting point. We do not inductively reason our way to God. Rather, we reason from God’s revelation concerning Himself. We have no need to use induction to discover truth, because we are already in possession of the one and only comprehensive body of truth available to mankind: the Bible.

Satan would have us attempt to reason inductively to discover “truth.” He is “the god of this world,” and induction is the world’s method of reasoning. We have already seen how Satan duped Adam and Eve into abandoning the truth of God’s revelation and trusting their own perceptions instead. Satan thought to exalt himself above the throne of God, and he would have us exalt man’s reasoning above God’s revelation. Paul urged Timothy, “Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge‑‑by professing it some have strayed concerning the faith.” We are to avoid the inductive reasoning of the world, for this is only profane and idle babbling. This babbling is falsely called knowledge by the “wise men” of this world, and by following after this false, inductive reasoning some have strayed from the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Adam and Eve were Satan’s first victims--but they were by no means the last!

Inductive reasoning outside of Scripture never leads to knowledge, because we are reasoning outside of the complete system of truth that is God’s Word. Inductive reasoning within Scripture is a bona fide system of discovering knowledge within the whole system of truth: the Bible.

Science, for example, utilizes inductive reasoning exclusively. I want to hasten to interject here that science has been tremendously beneficial to our lives. Brilliant men and women have discovered wonderful things, and the benefits that we enjoy from everything that science has contributed -- from a cure for malaria, to refrigeration, to satellite technology — have improved the quality of our everyday lives immeasurably. However, I must also assert just as firmly that science in and of itself will never lead us to truth. This is because inductive reasoning starts with the pieces and tries to work toward the whole. Let me give you an illustration that will bring the point home.

Imagine that you are trying to discover the truth about the man Michelangelo. Where would you begin? The inductive thinker would begin to investigate Michelangelo’s work. He would visit the Sistine chapel and examine the paintings, sketches, and sculptures that this man created. Based upon the work Michelangelo had done, the inductive thinker would begin to draw conclusions about the man. To make the analogy more exacting, the inductive reasoner might well climb to the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, examine a few tiny brush strokes, and proclaim, “I can tell you a great deal about what kind of a man Michelangelo was.”

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But this is the way of science. Imagine that I have a large color picture  of the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. I make a black and white photocopy of that picture, and then painstakingly cut that facsimile into 5 million tiny pieces. I hand all 5 million pieces to my daughter. “Here, sweetheart. I want you to begin putting these together.” I don’t give her the original color picture to work from, so the task seems a hopeless one. However, my daughter is a remarkably persistent and industrious young lady, and she grits her teeth and gets to work. After months of painstaking labor, she has assembled 5,000 of the 5 million pieces. I come along to check on her progress. “You’re doing well, honey. Now, based on what you’ve put together here, what can you tell me about the Sistine chapel?” Remember that she does not have the entire full-color picture. All she has is .001% of the whole picture — a tiny fraction. Can she now give me the truth of the whole panorama of the Sistine chapel? Of course not. Can she use that fragment of the big picture to tell me about Michelangelo? Can she tell me if Michelangelo was a moral man? Will she know if he liked his neighbors? Can she assert that Michelangelo thought the Bible was the Word of God? Impossible!

Yet this is the way of inductive reasoning. Christian’s often stumble into this same trap. We carefully examine a pile of twigs, and seek to reason our way to the Trinity. This school of thinking is called the evidentialist school of theology. The inductive reasoning that scientists and evidentialists use can only provide us with information. Much of that information has been tremendously useful and beneficial to society, but it does not produce truth and knowledge. Induction and evidentialism provide hypothesis -- an “educated guess” at what truth might be. They proclaim the human viewpoint. The Bible, on the other hand, reveals the divine viewpoint, and we can reason our way to knowledge only by beginning with the divine viewpoint. Likewise, the only way my daughter can come to a full understanding of Michelangelo is to start with the whole: the man himself. She would have to read his autobiography, in which he clearly stated his system of ethics, how he felt about his neighbors and about the Bible, and so on. Otherwise, she will only be able to determine a few bits of information about the man.

Christian men and women should reason by deduction. Rather than seeking to discover truth on the basis of a few particulars, we should begin with the complete system of truth, and work out the specifics from there. In practice, this means drawing our specific conclusions from God’s Word. We return to our axiom: The Bible alone is the Word of God. This is our system of truth, and if we reason from truth, then the specific conclusions we draw will be accurate. This is called the presuppositionalist school of theology. This thinking presupposes the whole system of revelation -- God’s Word -- to be the only reliable source for knowing and communicating truth. If, on the other hand, we seek to employ the specific observations and/or experiences of men (both of which are skewed by sin) as the foundation for our thinking, we are going to draw broad conclusions which are wrong - sinful.

Are There Two Systems of Logic?

It is important for us to recognize that God created us to understand His truth. There are those who point to Isaiah 55:8-9 (“‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’” says the Lord. “‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.’”) and say that it is impossible for us to know the thoughts of God. They believe that God is so wise and transcendent, and resides on such an intellectual mountaintop compared to the insignificant anthill of man’s knowledge, that man is incapable of knowing and understanding the logic of God. Such reasoning would lead one to believe that there are two systems of logic: man’s feeble thinking, and God’s lofty ruminations which are on a plane incomprehensible to us.

Gordon Clark shredded this assumption. Clark wrote, “To me, the tremendous assumption without warrant from Scripture is that God is incapable of expressing the truth he knows.” In other words, the notion that God does not communicate truth and knowledge that man can understand is not borne out by the Scriptures. Dr. Clark points out that the entire body of Scripture is a revelation of organized, propositional, logical sentences. We read in John 1 that Jesus Christ is the Word of God. The Greek word that is translated “Word” in John 1:1 is “logos,” from which we draw our English word “logic.” One could translate John 1:1 with perfect accuracy as reading, “In the beginning was the divine Logic, and the divine Logic was with God, and the divine Logic was God.”Dr. Clark also approved of the rendering of logos as “Wisdom.” Jesus Christ is the divine Wisdom, the living Word that came from God.

We are urged throughout the Old Testament to seek after wisdom. In fact, Proverbs asserts, “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” Would God command us to spend our all on that which is unknown and unknowable? I think not. Are there things which God has chosen not to reveal to us, which we cannot understand? Of course. God’s knowledge of the universe is infinite and exhaustive, and some of that knowledge is, indeed, beyond my comprehension. Scripture tells us that “The secret things belong to the Lord our God.” The Holy Spirit of God inspired Peter to write that in Scripture there are “some things hard to understand.” Notice, however, that He did not say that they are impossible to understand.

Is the entire body of Scripture written on a plane that man cannot comprehend, as some so-called theologians claim? Absolutely not! The Bible is God’s direct revelation of His eternal sovereign plan in the universe and in the lives of men and angels, for His glory. He fully intends for His people to understand His Word. You’ve all heard that glorious invitation, “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ says the Lord.” We can only reason with God if He has communicated truth to us that we can comprehend. Indeed, God has given us knowledge, and it is knowledge which we can understand and digest. However, my knowledge of God’s truth is not exhaustive. For example, it is true that I can’t exhaustively understand the doctrine of justification: that I, a vile, rotten sinner have been declared “Righteous” in the sight of Holy God. (More on that in an upcoming chapter.) I cannot comprehend -- to the same degree that God does -- the truth that when God the Father looks at me, He does not see a sinful man, but rather He sees the imputed righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ. It is true that there are depths of this knowledge which lie beyond my finite, human understanding. But I do understand the truth of this doctrine. God has expressed this truth in orderly, grammatical form in the Holy Scriptures, and I can know -without question or confusion - the words and ideas that express this doctrine and know that it is true. The doctrine of justification that God has in His mind has been accurately communicated to you and me through Scripture. The thoughts God has about justification are the same thoughts that you and I have. There is an identity of mind. Consequently, it necessarily follows that there is also an identity of truth. When we have properly digested the doctrine of justification, God’s thoughts are our thoughts! There is a convergence of understanding, a common meaning, and the Scripture is true: “We have the mind of Christ.” Therefore, there is only one system of logic, not two, and this one system of logic has been revealed to us by God’s Word so that we may comprehend and think His thoughts after Him and know His truth, as the Holy Spirit enlightens us.

There is another logical blunder that is committed by those skeptics who deny the validity of human words and human logic. If, as the skeptics say, words are inadequate and logic is invalid, then they could not formulate their views to attack their opponents, because they must use human words and human logic to construct their arguments. As soon as we assert anything, we are simultaneously asserting the existence, necessity, and indisputableness of logic. Moreover, to support the validity of human logic and human language, we know logical argument and logical inferences are legitimate because the Holy Spirit uses these reasoning tools throughout the entirety of Scripture. We also know human language is legitimate by the Holy Spirit writing the Bible in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages to reveal God’s truth to His people.

Reasoning From the Scriptures

Luke recounted how the apostle Paul, “went in to (the synagogue), and for three Sabbaths reasoned with (the Jews) from the Scriptures, explaining and demonstrating that ... ‘This Jesus whom I preach to you is the Christ.’” And we see that “Some of them were persuaded ...” These unbelievers were not swayed by some emotional appeal; they did not make a visceral, “gut” decision. Instead they were “persuaded” by Paul’s clear reasoning from the truth of the Scriptures. Paul formed his premises, constructed his arguments, and developed his conclusions from biblical truth.

Paul’s pattern mirrored that of Jesus Christ. Jesus spoke human words and used human logic, which came from the eternal mind of God. We have already seen how Jesus clearly and consistently used the Scriptures as the foundation and authority for His entire ministry here on earth. This is the pattern we should follow also -- using the Word of God as our axiom for everything we say and do. Just as Paul did in the synagogue, we, too, should reason and draw our conclusions from the Scriptures.

Tragically, this is precisely what the heart of sinful man refuses to do. Jesus told the terrible story of the rich man who died and went to hell. “And being in torments in Hades,” Jesus recounted, “He lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’”

Abraham’s reply is grim: “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.”

Recognizing that his own fate is sealed, the rich man pleads for his family: “I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.”

Again, Abraham denies his request. “'They have Moses and the prophets [the Scriptures]; let them hear them.”

And even in spite of suffering the tortures of the damned, the rich man echoes humanity’s rebellion down through the ages: “No, father Abraham; but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”

The rich man wants his brothers to be spared the agony he is suffering, and he pleads with Abraham to send a messenger to warn them. Abraham responds that the message had been delivered hundreds of years before, in the form of the completed manuscripts of the Old Testament -- Moses and the prophets. The Old Testament clearly warned that those who rejected the Word and the will of God would suffer eternal death and separation from God. Does the rich man gratefully recall that, indeed, his brothers already possess the keys to salvation? “No, Father Abraham”!He refuses to acknowledge the truth contained in the Scriptures! Instead, he insists that the only witness capable of convincing his brothers of the need for repentance is a sign, a walking dead man! The truths contained in Scripture are insufficient to lead us to God, the world says. We must have a sign, something that we can see and touch and measure and experience. This poor, blind, doomed, man was by no means the only one to succumb to this reasoning. We hear it echoed by the religious leaders of Jesus’ day: “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” Jesus replied with some disgust: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.”

Even Jesus’ apostles, the men who had traveled with Jesus for three years and drank in His teaching day after day, echoed the “wisdom” of the world: “Philip said to Him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.’”

Time and time again, the Lord God Almighty has commanded us to listen to His words:

If we reject logic, then there can be no truth, because words become meaningless! We have no way to identify — for our children, for our communities, or for our nation — good and evil because those words no longer have any meaning. And so we see in the United States that the killing of the unborn has become a “constitutional right,” but prayers offered to the Almighty in the government schools is considered an abomination. Homosexual marriage is held up by the cultural elites as good and decent and progressive, while those who proclaim God’s truth that homosexuality is an abomination are labeled as hateful, bigoted extremists. Now that words like “right” and “wrong” have lost their meaning, the United States has become a nation that calls evil good, and good evil.

The writer of Hebrews wrote that “Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” We must train our minds, through the constant, consistent use of logic, to think in such a clear, non-contradictory way that we are able to embrace morality, and rightly divide what is good from what is evil. Then we are thinking God’s thoughts after Him, and then we are reasoning properly, which is the basis for godliness.

The Primacy of Wisdom

I want to place great emphasis on the phrase, “The wisdom of God.” Logic IS the wisdom of God. Godly, rational thought is His logic, His wisdom, His thought. Our Heavenly Father urges us, “ My son, be wise, and make my heart glad.” King David taught his son Solomon, “Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.” Recall that God offered Solomon anything he wanted, and Solomon asked for wisdom. “And God gave Solomon wisdom and exceedingly great understanding, and largeness of heart like the sand on the seashore. Thus Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the men of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all men ... And men of all nations, from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom, came to hear the wisdom of Solomon.”

The Scripture tells us that wisdom is supreme! Above all else that we seek, we are to earnestly seek and pursue wisdom. James wrote that “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” When we ask for wisdom, we are really asking for more of Christ, “who became for us wisdom from God,” and “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” It was Paul’s prayer for all believers“that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.” Jesus is the Logos, the Word, the Divine Wisdom. To grow in God’s knowledge is to grow in Christ.

The Thoughts of Man

Does my heart love logic? Do I thrill to the idea of thinking God’s thoughts after Him? If I am an unsaved man or woman, the answer is absolutely NO! “The mind of sinful man ... is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.” Man loves sin, and sin is insanity. The thoughts of the unbeliever are completely distorted by the sinful nature. He resists God’s thoughts! He rebels against truth and logic. If I, as a man who is living in hostility to God, strive to think God’s thoughts after Him, that makes me responsible and accountable to God. I become dependent on Him for my very purpose in life, and for all my goodness and righteousness, for “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.” I, the unbeliever, have bought into Satan’s lie in the garden, and I desire to be like God, knowing good and evil. I want to proclaim what is truth; I want to call the shots; I want to be “The Captain of My Ship,” “The Master of My Fate,” etc. My focus is completely on the gratification and glorification of self. I have absolutely no desire to place my life and my destiny in the hands of another, particularly in the hands of a God whom I cannot see, but must rely on by faith. I have no desire to think biblically or rationally. My thoughts are in-sane, because they are hostile to God’s truth.

It is only when I have become a part of that plan, and trusted in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ on Calvary’s cross, and only when I have the Holy Spirit of God living within me that I can even begin to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” I do this by guarding my mind with a detachment of mighty centurions, the sixty-six books of God’s inspired, inerrant Word. These sturdy bulwarks of God’s truth should be placed around my mind, guarding my thoughts. They are the garrison which protects my mind. God has a plan of salvation. Salvation is logical. Salvation is rational. It is expressed in logical, truthful propositions. If Satan attacks with his apostasy and his unbelief, I unlimber “The sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,” and firmly reply, as my Savior did, “It is written ... It is written ... Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’” Then we will truly become like the mighty men of Scripture, and “Demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” We can reject the doctrines of demons, and quote book, chapter, and verse to defeat our deadly adversary. This is how we are to think; this is how we are to reason; and this is how we live a life that truly gives glory to God!

The Times Are Evil

You certainly aren’t going to see the cultural bastions of Western civilization encouraging this kind of rational, biblical thinking. Francis Schaeffer said that the United States had entered a  post-Christian era. Josh McDowell has defined our age more accurately as an anti-Christian era. It is certainly an anti-intellectual era. You see the dumbing-down of every area of our culture -- from art, to entertainment, to our horrendous educational system, to politics, and even to the pulpit, as was described so accurately by J. Gresham Machen.

Dear Reader, if anyone should labor to develop a clear, erudite mind and learn to speak with pure, unadulterated logic and rational thought, it is you and I, the bond servants of Christ! By God’s grace, our disciplined study of logic will enable us to reason so compellingly that our listeners will hear and understand the necessary, irrefutable conclusions we have developed, and will be convicted by the expression of God’s truth. Our listeners should be like those who heard Stephen’s great sermon in the days of the early church, and were “cut to the heart” by Steven’s inspired, inexorable logic. They “could not stand up against his wisdom or the Spirit by whom he spoke.” Dear reader, let me urge you to strive to be like Stephen! We should be the brightest, the most articulate, and the most intellectually challenging people on the planet, because we have the mind of Christ! We should “Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you,” and we should offer our defense of the faith — not based on our feelings or our experiences — but rather on the indisputable logic that is revealed in God’s Word. We should think and reason like no one else!

Contrary to what today’s humanist educators will tell you, the Bible is the most intellectually challenging book on the planet. The reader is introduced to the infinite, eternal mind of the God of the universe. His is a mind of eternal truth, logic, and wisdom. Wisdom is not an abstract philosophical concept! God is wisdom. He expresses His wisdom in words we can learn and understand. “I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes,” David wrote in his Psalm of praise to God’s Word. “I have more understanding than the elders, for I obey your precepts.” God gave Daniel and his three companions the gift of wisdom, and “in all matters of wisdom and understanding ..., (Nebuchadnezzar) found them ten times better” than all the  mystics and advisors in his entire kingdom! Solomon prayed for wisdom, and God answered that prayer. He has promised in the book of James to do the same for us. God made Solomon wiser than any man; and men came from all over the world just to listen to Solomon construct his necessary conclusions, and to speak with the wisdom of God. That is what we are to aspire to! We must study diligently and pray fervently that God would make us ten times more intellectually engaging than those who disdain the knowledge of God!

The Nature of Biblical Knowledge

The claim of knowledge is the claim of truth, not error, falsehood, or fallacious reasoning. Therefore, the object of knowledge is truth, and truth is always propositional, logical, and consistent. Truth does not manifest itself in contradictions, equivocations, or unwarranted conclusions. Responsibility -- the ability to respond correctly to God and to man -- depends on knowledge. Responsibility is a function of knowledge. Reason enables me to understand God’s commands. Without reason, i.e., without the law of contradiction (which gives words specific meanings), no one would be able to understand God’s commands, and no one can consistently obey a command he or she cannot understand. So the essence of logic is truth. The outcome of logic is consistency. We have laid down the axiom: God’s revelation, which is infinite, objective, external, infallible truth. This truth is in contrast to the most flimsy and unreliable standards of knowledge: sensation, experimentation, and observation. These last three depend on sinful man to supply them, and they are finite, subjective, internal, and entirely fallible! Anything that comes out of man’s mouth — if it is not a Scriptural truth or directly deduced from Scripture — is profane and idle babbling, because it sets itself against the knowledge of God! It is self-condemning, because it is anti-God. It is a lie, because it is generated by the inductive reasoning that is spawned by Satan, who is the father of lies. When Satan got inside the minds of Adam and Eve, sin entered the world of humanity. Why? Because he induced them to reason improperly. From the moment Adam and Eve purposed to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they had turned their backs on God’s revelation, and they were no longer thinking God’s thoughts after Him. They had become insane. Their reasoning was now twisted and distorted by sin. And so it has been ever since that dreadful moment of disobedience. Since that day, no man has been able to think and reason logically and rationally without sin distorting his thought processes, unless he is aided by the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit of God. “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” We cannot rely on our thoughts or our feelings to provide us with truth. Only God can do that.

I hope by now you clearly understand the critical importance of logical speech and thought. As we progress through the rest of this book, you will discover how logic enables us to deduce truths for every aspect of life, both for the individual and for a society, from God’s Word. Logic is the all-important bridge between the Bible, our axiom for truth, and the great doctrines of our faith. I wrote this chapter in the hope that I would whet your appetite for a greater knowledge of logical principles and techniques. The next chapter will introduce you to the formal and informal principles and techniques of logic that will enable you to reason biblically and deductively.