Chapter Four
The Axiom: The First Principle of Christianity

Imagine that you have spent your life building homes. Over the years you have learned from some of the finest architects, builders, and craftsmen in the trade, and you have become very proficient at your job. Now you have decided to teach your son the trade. You want to leave him a legacy of integrity and fine craftsmanship. Rather than bring him in on the middle of a job that is already in progress, you wait until your very first day at a new site to introduce him to your craft. Your son will see the house come up out of the ground from the very beginning. You understand that it is vitally important for him to learn the proper order for the construction of a solid, durable home. This cannot be approached haphazardly!

On the drive to the job site, you ask him: “What is the proper first step for us to take in building this new home?”

“The slab,” your son replies. “We’ve got to lay the slab down first.”

“That’s what a lot of people say,” you reply kindly. “You would think the slab is our starting point, but there is something we need to have in place even before the slab--the earth. We have to prepare the earth to pour the slab on. It is absolutely critical that we have the proper foundation on which to build.” You are teaching your son to begin at the beginning.

The Legacy that the title of this book refers to is the legacy that has been given to us by God--His inspired, inerrant, infallible Word, the Bible. This is our foundation, the place where we are to begin teaching our children: The Bible alone is the Word of God. This is the foundation that the people of Israel were commanded by God to lay down for their children in Deuteronomy 6. “These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up... You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” The legacy that the nation of Israel would pass on to their children was these words which God had given them.

Does Our Starting Point Really Matter, as Long as We End Up in the Right Place?

There are some very godly Christian teachers and theologians who do not use the Bible as their foundation for teaching. I’d like to briefly explain their various starting points to you, and discuss some of the nuances of thought. These distinctions may strike you as “nit-picky” at first; I urge you to stay with me, because I intend to show you the critical importance of building our theological house on the proper foundation!

Some Christians, theologians and laymen alike, begin to build their legacy with the concept of the Being of God. Their foundation is ontology, which is the study of the nature of being. They focus on the Being of the triune, infinite, personal God. Several prestigious volumes of systematic theology, which pastors study in seminary, begin with a detailed discussion of the Being of God, which is also called “Theology Proper.” Other Bible teachers prefer to begin with soteriology, which is the doctrine of salvation through the finished work of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is the foundation upon which they construct  their belief.

Clearly, both ontology and soteriology are indispensable truths for us to study, but are either of these doctrines the best beginning point? As I said before, the good is the enemy of the best, and when we set out to discover absolute, unalterable, divine truth, we should not begin with a foundation that is merely good, but with the very best, rock-solid foundation. If you were to ask the teachers of ontology to explain the Being of God, they might say, “I believe in the infinite, eternal, triune God, the Maker of heaven and earth and the seas and everything in them.” Perhaps you would respond to the student of ontology by asking, “How do you know? How can you be sure that what you’re telling me is true?” Their answer, of course, would be: “The Bible. The Bible tells me about the Being of God.” Similarly, you might ask those who base their teaching on the doctrine of salvation through faith in Christ the same question: “How can I know that what you’re telling me is the truth?” Their answer would be quick and sure: “That is the clear teaching of the Scriptures, the living and active Word of God!”

Just as there is work to be done at the site of a new home before the concrete slab is poured, there is something even more fundamental to understanding the complexities of life than the Being of God (ontology), or the doctrine of salvation (soteriology). That “something” is God’s Word, the Bible. The Bible is our foundation. It is the beginning point for all knowledge and all truth.

What is an Axiom?

Euclid, the father of geometry, created axioms that were the foundation for the entire study of geometry. These few axioms form the basis for everything that one learns during years of study in the field of geometry. Hundreds of theorems can be developed and proven from these axioms. Thousands of hypotheses (tentative ideas) can also be disproved because they don’t agree with the unchanging, undeniable truth of the foundational axiom.

An axiom, then, is our origin, our starting point for knowledge, and it can be defined as an unproven, unprovable beginning point. An axiom is the source from which all our ideas and theories for a particular subject are derived and tested. If a particular hypothesis is shown to run counter to the axiom, then the hypothesis is conclusively proven wrong, because the axiom is our plumb line, our template for truth.

It is vitally important that we Christians arm our children with a clear understanding of  the concept of presuppositions. We must teach our children that anything that anybody says--whether the speaker is a parent, teacher, pastor, or friend--every word out of that person’s mouth is guided by some sort of presupposition (an assumed philosophical starting point). You, yourself, as you read this book and hundreds of thoughts course through your mind, are measuring each of those thoughts against a beginning point that forms the basis for your own personal philosophy. Whether you consciously acknowledge it or not, that philosophy is your starting point--your axiom. It is your final basis for evaluating the truth of everything you read or hear.

Every argument, every philosophical system, indeed, all rational thinking, has its first principle. It is a beginning point: an unverifiable, indemonstratable starting point--an axiom. It is the bedrock upon which the entire system of thinking rests. You can’t dig any deeper. The entire thought, or system of thought, rests on this foundation--this axiom (or if you prefer, this given assumption).

For example, the beginning point for the English alphabet is the letter “A.” Can we prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that “A” is the correct choice to lead off the alphabet? No, we can’t, but it doesn’t matter. To question the axiom of “A” is a pointless and frivolous exercise. Our study of the alphabet goes forward from the axiom of “A.” We never go backward from there.

If you were challenged to prove your axiom, and if you could prove that beginning point, then you would have to go on to prove the beginning point of this next point, and you would inevitably tumble into a never-ending spiral of seeking to prove successive starting points.

If someone were to come to you or me and demand that we prove that Christianity is true, we would probably remember Peter’s admonition to “Always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you,” and we would begin to offer various apologetic arguments (reasons or proofs that substantiate our faith) that we have learned over the years. We might explain the historical truth of the life and death of Jesus Christ, or cite various biological or archaeological discoveries that verify the scientific and historical accuracy of the Scriptures. But, as with any system of thought, we cannot prove our axiom, which is that the Bible is the Word of God. We can cite a great deal of evidence to support the truth of the axiom, but it cannot be proven.

In exactly the same way, an atheist cannot prove his starting point, either! His axiom--the basis for his entire system of knowledge and thought--is that God does not exist. When Carl Sagan used to claim that the universe is all that there is, he was not announcing the result of years of painstaking study and research. Rather, he was proclaiming the outworking of his axiom from which he deduced all his thoughts, and through which he filtered everything he learned. Sagan’s axiom was that God does not exist.

You might ask an atheist, “How do you know your axiom is true?” The atheist has no logical answer. He will trot out his group of biologists and archeologists and historians who deny the truth of Scriptures, but the atheist’s axiom is ultimately unproven and unprovable. In fact, his axiom can easily demonstrated to be false. The only way your atheist friend can accurately and objectively claim that God does not exist is if he is omniscient: that is, he possesses all the knowledge of every aspect of the nature of God and of the history and scope of the universe. Only such an all-knowing being could claim with absolute certainty that there is no God. In fact, there is only one Being who could legitimately claim to possess this quality of omniscience--and that would be God! Unless your atheist friend is ready to assume the titles of the Deity, he must admit that his first principle--his axiom--is unproven and unprovable.

However, let’s not take an axe to the root of the tree of atheism just yet. Rather, let’s agree at this point that any system of thought comes back to one foundational starting point--an axiom--and that axiom is ASSUMED to be true.  It cannot be proven. However, an axiom is disproved if it is demonstrated to be self-contradictory, like the atheist’s first principle.

In one sense, you can see that we all start on equal footing in the marketplace of ideas. We Christians cannot prove our axiom, but neither can the skeptic, the atheist, the behaviorist, or anyone else, because each theory of thought rests on an unproven, unprovable assumption: an axiom. We have reasons to trust our axiom--there is evidence which we believe establishes the integrity of our bedrock theory of knowledge--but we cannot prove it to be true. We accept our axiom by faith. This is true of both the most Spirit-filled Christian, whose heart leaps at the very mention of the Lord Jesus Christ, and also of the most unemotional, humanistic unbeliever.

Is Any One Axiom Superior to Another?

I am confident that some of you reading this discussion are becoming a little uncomfortable. You have probably been exposed to some of the great teachers of apologetics, such as D. James Kennedy, Josh McDowell, and Henry Morris, and you are confident that your Christian faith is not founded on an assumption, but on solid scientific and historical facts. Now, along comes this author, telling you that your confidence rests on an “unprovable axiom”! You might well ask, if Christianity’s axiom cannot be proved, and if we start on the same intellectual footing as the skeptic, behaviorist, or atheist, then is Christianity’s claim to truth any more compelling than theirs? For example, I mentioned Euclid’s axioms for geometry earlier in this discussion. I used Euclid’s name because it is one that most of us are familiar with from high school. Did you know that two other mathematicians later worked out their own systems of geometry, using axioms different from Euclid’s? Each of these competing theories was consistent within its own system. In other words, the outworking of these competing systems of geometry did not lead to a logical contradiction, and therefore could not be disproved. Interestingly, none of these three systems of geometry completely agreed with the other two! All three of these theories seem to work. But which one is true?

Similarly, our lives are affected on a regular basis by the ongoing debate that takes place, both nationally and internationally, over economic theory. Perhaps the classic example of this is one of the most basic: the disagreement over the respective merits of a government-managed economy (socialism), and a market-directed economy (capitalism). There are a great many university professors and far too many politicians who actually believe that socialism is true and effective, and they present workable economic models to bolster their arguments. Free-market economists present similarly cogent arguments.

How can we know which of these economic axioms are true, if they all rest on unproven axioms? We have already seen that some axioms will not stand the test of logic. Like atheism, they are inconsistent within themselves, and crumble under the cold light of reason. In some instances, the inconsistencies of a particular axiom are spotlighted by the lessons of history. Communism, which is the ultimate outworking of a government-managed economy, claimed the lives of tens of millions of innocent victims in the Twentieth Century, utterly dwarfing the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Germany. Similarly, we see the social and economic devastation that the outworking of the pantheistic ideals of Hinduism have wrought upon many third-world nations. On the other hand, we in America are still enjoying the residual benefits of the free-market economy that our founders bequeathed to us over two hundred years ago. The lessons of history clearly indicate that a free-market economy is superior.

For Christian believers, however, the question still remains: Is there any way I can know in my mind that my axiom is superior to the unbeliever’s? The answer is emphatically, unequivocally, YES! Jesus Christ said, “Your word is truth.” Christianity asserts that the Bible, God’s Word, has a monopoly on truth. No other axiom is bold enough to make this claim! There are many axioms which claim to work, and the competing theories of geometry and economics are perfect examples. They all can be demonstrated to work, at least for a time. But there is only one axiom that dares to make the claim that it is the truth: Christianity. Dr. John Robbins summed up this concept brilliantly by asserting that “Christianity is the only intellectually defensible system of thought on the planet!” (We will spend more time on this thought in the next chapter.) No one has ever been able to demonstrate one logical inconsistency in the axiom of our faith.

The Bedrock for Believers

What is the axiom for Christianity? What is the fundamental of fundamentals for our faith? In truth, the first principle of our faith is so basic that we often miss it completely, and in so doing, we open the door for every kind of heresy. We are not strong as a church because we do not speak with unanimity of thought in this one area. We are not agreed on what the first principle is, and as a result the body of Christ is weak in America and throughout much of the world. If the church of Jesus Christ would just accept the same first principle, if we would “all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God,” we would walk and work with strength and power and conviction.

The starting point for Christianity is: The Bible alone is the Word of God. In declaring this as our axiom, we are asserting that the Bible is supernaturally revealed truth. It is a gift of knowledge to us from God, and from God alone. Man, on his own, has no knowledge! It is actually blasphemous for man to say that he knows anything on his own, because all knowledge is a result of God’s revelation. The book of Colossians makes the unequivocal assertion that all knowledge and wisdom are in Jesus Christ: “In [Christ] are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” The starting point for our faith, and indeed, the starting point for all knowledge, is God’s divine revelation.

“To the law and to the testimony!” Scripture was the only thing that Isaiah trusted in. He despised the words of those who reject God’s truth, for “If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in the triune, infinite God, so it logically follows that anyone who speaks contrary to His revealed Word is a fool, and there is no wisdom--no light of revelation--in him. In fact, Scripture clearly warns that “fools (those who reject God) despise wisdom and instruction,” and that “the mouth of fools pours forth foolishness.” Only those who respect God’s laws and heed the testimony of Scripture should be trusted. Even then, every word should be tested against the absolute truth and authority of God’s Word.

The apostle Paul was a man who had gone through the most remarkable spiritual experiences! He had, with his own eyes, seen the resurrected Savior and spoken with Him. God blinded Paul during their encounter on the road to Damascus and then restored his sight three days later. Surely this was a man whose word should have been taken as an unquestioned authority of the things of God. Yet the Bereans, commended by the Bible as a “fair-minded” people, put no such faith in Paul’s words. Although “they received the word with all readiness,” they still “searched the Scriptures daily” to  be sure that what Paul said was in line with the axiom. Paul was an apostle of the Lord, and the Bereans knew it. Yet there was only one unimpeachable source of truth for them: God’s inspired, infallible, authoritative Word. If anything they heard did not line up with that first principle, it was not to be trusted.

Scripture is Truth!

I want to assert in the strongest possible language that God’s revelation is our only source for truth. Revelation is a gift from God to man. Men may proclaim to know the truth. The philosophers of the age will postulate all manner of theorems about truth. However, unless these propositions are either drawn directly from the Scriptures or are correctly deduced from the revealed truth of our omniscient God, who has created all things and knows all things, man’s theories are mere foolishness.

“Where is the wise man?” Paul asked rhetorically. “Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” God’s revelation is in direct contradistinction to sensation, observation, and experimentation. A finite, depraved, sinful man is not capable of thinking or reasoning properly, and therefore he will never arrive at a point in his life where he can truthfully say: “I have learned, and I know this to be true”--unless he is proclaiming the revealed truth of God’s Word. Luke recounted that the boy Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men,” and that “All who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and answers.” Why was Jesus able to grow in wisdom and understanding so quickly? He was sinless! His thinking was not clouded and distorted by sin. Thus, He was able to mature at a rate that was astonishing to those around Him.

Johannes Kepler said we should think God’s thoughts after Him. We may accurately label this kind of thinking as “sanity.” A sane person is one whose thoughts are in agreement with the thoughts of the Creator. We know from the first chapter of Genesis that man is made in the image of God, so when our thoughts are operating as they were created to, then we can think rationally and properly. However, Scripture is equally clear that the heart of fallen man “is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” The image of God that is man has been marred and distorted by sin. The thought patterns of the unbeliever are the result of sin, and are, therefore, a mental malfunction. Tragically, the sinful nature pulls even the thoughts of Christian men and women away from the things of God all the time. Long ago, God saw that “every intent of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually.” Our sin nature twists and skews and distorts our thinking a great many more times than any of us would care to admit! Paul warned the Galatian Christians that “The sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.” I can not and must not trust my own observation or reasoning! There is only one trustworthy guide to the knowledge of the truth: God’s Word.

To God--Not Man--Be the Glory!

I am contending for a starting point that gives all the glory to God and none to man. God gets the glory at the outset of all recorded time: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ... In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God gets the glory throughout my life: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And it will be God who gets the glory throughout eternity: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,’ says the Lord, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’” God has supernaturally revealed His truth to us through the Scriptures, and that truth should form the rock-solid foundation of everything we think and do and say. “Blessed are you...” Jesus commended Peter and, indirectly, all believers today, “for flesh and blood has not revealed this [truth] to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” Man’s experiences and “wisdom” do not reveal truth to us--God does! We are thinking properly when we reason according to biblical truth.

Jesus told his disciples: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” It is God’s Word that gives life and truth; the teaching of man profits nothing! If I speak truth, it is only because I am repeating the revealed truth of the Bible or I have correctly deduced specifics from God’s body of truth. Therefore I cannot boast about my knowledge, for I have no knowledge of my own! The only truth I possess is a gift from God to me. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” We must not trust in empiricism (those things which can be seen or experienced by our “eye” and “ear”) or rationalism (human wisdom that has “entered into the heart of man”) to explain the truth. Our only reliable source of truth and knowledge is God’s authoritative Word!

A Command for Israel and the Church

“You have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven,” the Lord said to the people of Israel. “Do not make any gods to be alongside me; do not make for yourselves gods of silver or gods of gold... If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it.” This is no less a command for the church today as it was for God’s chosen people more than three thousand years ago!

God has spoken to us through the apostles and the prophets and given us the Scriptures. “Above all,” Peter declared, “You must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” We are not to erect any “gods” alongside the revealed truth of God’s inspired, infallible, authoritative Word. Once we use man’s tools of rationalism or empiricism to chisel away at God’s truth, we have defiled what God has given us from heaven.

Competing Voices and Conflicting Theories of Truth

The 5th Century theologian Augustine said that we can know the truth through God’s Word, plus man’s reason. In the 11th Century, Anselm taught that Scripture was unnecessary for deducing the truth. Anselm claimed that man was capable of reasoning his way to truth without benefit of Scripture. Two hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas introduced the idea that we can learn truth through sensation. This teaching resonated throughout all of Christendom in the early 13th Century. Then, in the beginning of the 16th Century, Martin Luther taught that the only truth man can know is found in God’s Word and from correct inferences drawn from that Word. Luther, with his revolutionary doctrine of “Sola Scriptura,” taught that there is no such thing as “discovered” truth. There is only truth that is revealed to us by God.

The debate has continued down through the centuries, right through to today. Does truth come from God’s revelation alone? Can truth be discerned only from what we can see and experience and measure? Or does truth come from the mind and heart of man? The result of this conflict is that people--particularly church people--are confused. There is very little unanimity of thought within the body of Christ. You see some denominations that have elevated man’s reason and tradition to the same level as Holy Scripture. Most charismatic churches, for example, give great veneration to experience, believing  that the testimony of sensation and experience is just as significant as the Word of the living God. Many Christians believe that truth is revealed by science. They place a great deal more faith in what the man in the laboratory has to say than the man in the pulpit. The body of Christ is becoming increasingly divided, and a “house divided against itself will not stand.”

In an effort to “go along to get along,” a great many churches, even those that claim to be “fundamentalist,” seek to blend man’s reason (rationalism) together with the knowledge he can gain from observation, experimentation, and experience (empiricism) and combine these subjective (“inside of me”) “truths” with the objective (“outside of me”) truth of God’s Word. Many church leaders would be genuinely surprised and offended if they were accused of adulterating the Word of God. After all, do not both the Old and New Testaments warn against adding to or subtracting from the teaching of Scripture? Most churches that introduce the teaching of men alongside the teaching of God would claim they are merely seeking to remain “contemporary” in order to attune their teaching to modern cultural trends. In reality, these churches have concocted a witches’ brew of incompatible systems of thought, which includes evolution, pop psychology, socialism, legalism, New Age pantheism, and a few sporadic threads of historical, biblical Christianity thrown in to the mix to make these man-centered systems of thought sound more “spiritual.”

“There is nothing new under the sun,” the Preacher of Ecclesiastes observed. There is nothing about “modern” cultural trends that differs in any way from the very first days of the fledgling Church. Paul warned young Timothy that “The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” Wow! Could Paul have possibly given a better description of the Church in America today? So many of us have itching ears which desire to be tickled with man’s innovations, such as the “Social” gospel, the “Prosperity” gospel, the gospel of “Tolerance,” or some other teaching which makes us “feel better” about our sinful condition. It is increasingly difficult to find churches which “have not shunned to declare... the whole counsel of God,” i.e., the pure, unadulterated truth of all God’s revealed Word.

We, as individual believers, must trim the twisted vines of sinful, man-centered thought which have grown up around the rock upon which our churches were built: God’s Word. We must reject sensationalism and rationalism as the means to “discover” truth. We do not reason our way to God! God is not the conclusion of an argument; We do not discover God through our own intellect or experience. God supernaturally reveals Himself to our minds, and He does that directly, through the Bible and the teaching of His Spirit. Just as we are not saved by faith plus good works, we will not discover truth by revelation plus sensation and observation. The Bible ALONE is the Word of God! This is the axiom! Now that we are armed with this knowledge of the sufficiency of God’s revelation as the sole source for truth, we can confidently answer the question, “What is more certain than a word from God?” The answer is: Nothing! Nothing is more sure, more certain, and more authoritative than God’s Word.

Why Must We Begin Correctly?

In Matthew 7:24-25, Jesus spoke of the critical importance of building on the right foundation. If we build our churches on the rock of God’s truth, then our homes, our communities, and our nation will withstand the raging storms that Satan sends against them. However, if we build our churches upon the shifting sand of man’s opinion and experience, our homes will collapse--and our communities and our country will follow them into the abyss.

It was upon the rock of revelation that our Savior said He would build His Church. The Bible is the only foundation for the Church. Satan will attack the Church with various philosophies. The great deceiver will seek to tickle our itching ears with all manner of sweet-sounding theories. We must stand upon the rock. We must echo Isaiah, and point our churches and our families “To the law and to the testimony!” To the Scriptures and to the Scriptures alone!

Confrontation in the Wilderness

Matthew 4:1 records one of the greatest confrontations in history. “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Satan was eager to nip God’s master plan for salvation in the bud. He had tried and failed to utilize the greed and pride of Herod to eliminate the baby Jesus. Now Satan saw an opportunity, not to destroy Jesus physically, but to ruin His effectiveness as the Lamb of God. If Jesus could be induced to sin, He would no longer be the perfect sacrifice that would take away the sin of the world. He would no longer be the Lamb “without blemish and without spot.” Satan thought he had seized the perfect moment to spring his trap for the Son of God. Jesus had been fasting for forty days and forty nights, and He was tired and hungry.

Recall that Jesus had just been to the mountaintop of spiritual experience. Just before beginning His fast, Jesus had been baptized, “and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’” What a phenomenal experience! Jesus, in His humanity, must have been thrilled at the outpouring of God’s love at that moment. This was an experience which no one had ever known. Talk about getting your ministry off to a running start!

Now, just forty days later, Satan stood before Him, urging, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” As Jesus Christ made very clear later, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Once, when His disciples urged Him to eat, He replied, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.” The original Greek text of Matthew 4:3 reveals that Satan was not questioning the deity of Christ. Rather Satan was saying, “Since you are the Son of God, you don’t need to rely on your Father for your daily bread. Be your own man, go your own way! Be independent! Make these rocks into bread and feed yourself!”

How would you have responded? Wouldn’t it have been only natural for you to reason from the basis of your fabulous experience of only a few weeks before? You might have thought, “What a day that was, when I was baptized in the river Jordan! I saw the Holy Spirit descending on me like a dove! I heard the voice from heaven! Doesn’t two plus two still equal four? God loves me! I can do whatever I want. And after all, I am hungry and some bread would sure taste good! Then I’ll feel refreshed, and I’ll be ready to match wits with Lucifer, here.”

Jesus would have none of those thoughts. Rather than trust His own feelings, our Lord drew His conclusions from God’s revealed Word, and in so doing, Jesus set the pattern for us all to follow: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” “It is written!”Jesus gave not even a passing mention of what His eye had seen, what His ear had heard, or what had entered into His heart. Instead, He went straight to the axiom: “It is written.” God’s Word was the authority Jesus cited to defeat Satan.

The Church is engaged in a conflict just as momentous as the one that took place in the wilderness almost two thousand years ago. You and I might be tempted to trivialize the debate over the authority of God’s Word as mere theological differences between ivory tower intellectuals. Don’t you believe it! The debate is as old as recorded time, when Satan first whispered to Eve, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not...?’” Satan’s great plan for devouring and destroying the lives of men and women, a plan which he successfully began to implement with Adam and Eve in the garden, is to drag their minds away from God’s Word and urge them to use their own reasoning to make decisions. Satan did not attack the existence of God. He immediately went after the axiom: what God has said! Satan is a brilliant opponent, a master deceiver. He caused Eve to doubt God’s Word, and convinced her to rely on her sensations and her reasoning. “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.” Adam and Eve turned away from the objective truth of God’s Word and chose instead to rely on what they heard, what they saw, and how they felt. As a result, sin and death entered into the world.

Satan’s tactics are no different today. Always remember that “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” We do not wrestle against misguided teachers; we do not wrestle against a radical political agenda; we do not wrestle against a sinful culture. We wrestle against the evil one, Satan, and against hosts--which are defined as “armies” or “multitudes--of wickedness! They will use any means at their disposal to render the Church ineffective, and there is no greater way to accomplish this than to cause us to forget what our first principle is! If Satan can convince us to replace God’s revelation with our own reasoning, he can easily destroy us.

When Jesus confronted Satan in the wilderness, the tempter quoted Scripture to Jesus. Far too often we in the church allow ourselves to fall prey to men and women who use the Scriptures to lead us astray! Paul warned Timothy, “In latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.” Today, in churches and in seminaries all across America, people are taught that the Bible is full of errors! They hear that Satan is only a “metaphor” for evil! They “discover” that God actually approves of homosexual marriages! We are giving heed to the doctrines of demons!

Do you think I am exaggerating the truth just to make my point? Go back to the testimony of God’s Word. Paul was concerned that “Somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted--you may well put up with it!” Ask yourself this question: would you say that many of the churches in America today are putting up with “another Jesus... a different spirit... or a different gospel”? When you see the Jesus Seminar using colored beads to vote on whether the words of Christ as recorded in Scripture are true or false, and when Bibles are being translated in such a way as to avoid “gender specific” or “patriarchal” language, are we putting up with the doctrines of demons? Paul continued, “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.” Paul is clearly warning us that there will be men and women who look good, and sound spiritual, even to the point of quoting Scripture and appearing for all the world to be apostles of Christ, yet who intend to lead us to destruction.

How do we spot Satan’s ministers? It’s very simple! We go back to basics. We return to the axiom. We emulate the Bereans and “search the Scriptures daily” to make certain that the things we hear are true. All of our reasoning should begin at--and end in agreement with--the first principle: The Bible alone is the Word of God. We build our homes... our churches... our businesses... our country... upon the rock. It isn’t the rock plus something else--perhaps a little shifting sand mixed in. (Immediately, Satan’s ministers will suggest, “After all, a little sand never hurt anything, right? Let’s stand mostly on the rock, with just a little sand of rationalism and sensationalism mixed in, OK?” No, it isn’t OK!) We build on the objective foundation of God’s Word. We do not build a subjective foundation of reason or experience. As John Robbins has written, The Bible claims a systemic monopoly on truth! What separates historical, biblical Christianity from everything else is its objective propositional nature. The focus is outside of me! The entire focus is on God’s revelation: His declarative sentences. The focus is not on how I feel, or what I believe, but on what God has declared in His Word.
Conclusion

We want our children to have a unified, comprehensive philosophy--a world view--that interprets all reality. Our kids should be able to use that biblical foundation to interpret everything they see or read or hear. When we are properly grounded in the truth of God’s Word, there is nothing--no phenomena, nor any kind of philosophy--that we cannot understand or interpret when we shine the light of God’s truth on it.

The sixty-six books of the Bible were given by the inspiration of God. They are our epistemological axiom, which simply means that the Bible is our basis for all truth and knowledge. If someone asks us, “How do you know that you know?” we can confidently reply: “This is the teaching of Scripture.” The Bible is our thoroughly inerrant, all-sufficient, and completely authoritative foundation for all knowledge, whether we are discussing metaphysics, ethics, politics, economics, or education. As my friend and teacher John Robbins has said, “The books of Scripture are prior to the Church, they called forth and they created the Church, and they judge and authenticate the Church.” We do not need the priest, the professor, or the physicist to validate the Scriptures. Rather, the words of theologians, educators, and scientists are either validated or disproved by the Scriptures. “If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”

The Bible alone is the Word of God. The Bible is our source of faith, knowledge, and practice. If we attempt to build on any other foundation than this rock, our homes, our churches, our communities, our businesses, and ultimately, our nation will collapse into the shifting sand of man’s opinion. “To the law and to the testimony!”