Tag Archives: Scripture

Deny Your Worldview.

Deny Your Worldview.

By asking a Christian to set aside the Bible and use some other starting point before he is even allowed to discuss creation, a group is already demanding that he deny Christianity up front. That is not an honest discussion. That is a rule that requires the Christian to abandon the only starting point that determines his entire worldview before the conversation begins. I saw this happen in a Facebook group called @Creationism . Someone asked what it would take for a Christian to prove creationism and what it would take to disprove it. The straightforward answer is the Bible, and disproving the Bible. Pointing out that the Bible is a different starting point from their so-called neutral evidences got me banned and blocked. The group’s rules effectively say you must use their epistemology, not yours, to participate. That is either a cruel and deceptive way to force Christians to deny their faith before they open their mouths, or it is people so confused about epistemology that they do not realize what they are demanding. Either way, Christians should see the trick for what it is.

They act like they want honest debate. They do not. Honest debate lets each side use its own starting point and then tests which one can actually produce knowledge. These rules do the opposite. They deny the Christian the ability to use his epistemology and demand that he use theirs just to be allowed in the room. That means the Christian must deny his worldview at the door. He must pretend the Bible is not his first principle before he is permitted to say anything about creation. That is not neutrality. That is a pre-loaded demand that the Christian switch systems. Jesus Christ means everything to me. I am not going to deny Him to satisfy a group’s rules. You cannot make me do it unless you first prove that your alternative starting point actually produces knowledge. That is the entire point.

Imagine the opposite. Suppose I started a Facebook group also called Creationism. I displayed it as an open public place for all different philosophies to argue for their position in honest debate. Then the rules stated that you can only defend creation or non-creation by using the Bible as your only starting point for knowledge. No opposing worldview would accept that. They would correctly refuse, because it forces them to abandon their own starting point before they are even allowed to speak. That is exactly what this group does in reverse. Their rules say the same thing against Christianity: abandon your starting point and use ours, or you cannot participate. They pretend the arrangement is fair and open. It is not. It is a one-way demand that only one side keep its epistemology while the other side is required to surrender his at the door.

The fact that this is not obvious shows that the people running such groups have no concept of what epistemology is, no matter how educated they appear. Non-Christians, the more educated they are and the more books they read, become better at deceiving themselves. They do not become more intelligent. They do not become more informed. They become better at knowing that they have a confident feeling about something. They are better at deceiving themselves. They are better at feeling confident, but they have no justification. They have no argument that their epistemology yields knowledge and intelligibility. They just go confident about it. Vincent Cheung makes the same observation in Paul and the Philosophers when he discusses probability. The scientist has never actually done a probability, because he does not have a denominator. What he has is a feeling of confidence about something. He then addresses that feeling of confidence inside a probability for which he has no justification. He is using probability the way a kid uses play-doh: something to put his feelings into a formal-looking context. He has no justified argument that the calculation produces knowledge. The education simply makes him smoother at packaging the feeling.

A starting point is not a minor preference you can set aside for a debate. It is the root that determines the entire worldview. Every true belief is either stated in that starting point or validly deduced from it. The Bible is the Christian’s only starting point. It is a closed, deductive system. Scripture uses deductive logic and declares itself the only true epistemology while declaring every rival false. If a Christian adopts a non-Christian starting point, he has already abandoned the one that determines his view of everything. He is no longer operating as a Christian. He has switched systems. That is not a temporary move “for the sake of argument.” It is a denial of the faith before the conversation even begins. No Christian who understands his own starting point will accept that demand.

That is exactly how stupid this request is. It is the very thing we disagree about. The Christian’s starting point says the other one is false. Demanding that he use the other one is not neutral inquiry. It is a request that he contradict himself from the first sentence. Flip the demand and the absurdity becomes obvious. If I asked a person who relies on observation to defend his points, and I demanded that he use a non-observational method to prove the Bible wrong, he would not accept that. Observation is his starting point. Demanding he set it aside is demanding he abandon the root of his worldview. He would correctly refuse. The same logic applies here. You do not get to demand that the Christian abandon his while you keep yours. That is not how starting points work. It is how people who do not understand epistemology talk.

You have to prove that your starting point gives knowledge, meaning, and intelligibility. Otherwise you cannot even use intelligence to tell a Christian you disagree with him. When you demand a non-biblical starting point, you are assuming your starting point can justify subjects and predicates, the law of non-contradiction, identity and difference, causality, motion, time, space, meaning, and probability. You have not shown that it can. Empiricism cannot justify a single sensation with sensation. Induction cannot produce universals from particulars. Probability collapses without a justified denominator. Science borrows categories it cannot defend. Until your starting point produces these things without circularity or self-contradiction, you have nothing. You do not even have the knowledge to tell the Christian that his starting point is not a starting point. You have no right to demand that he use yours, and you have no ability to intelligibly disagree until you do.

Vincent Cheung, Systematic Theology: the Bible is the ultimate authority of the Christian system; therefore our first principle, our starting point, is the Bible itself. From that principle the system is deduced. Non-Christian principles (empiricism, induction, human speculation) make knowledge impossible and collapse into skepticism, which is self-contradictory. Oshea Davis, sections on the First Principle and Self-Authenticating Starting Point: Scripture is the exclusive public first principle. Any claim not stated in it or validly deduced from it is not knowledge. Human starting points fail the tests Scripture itself gives. Demanding a dual or non-biblical epistemology is already a rejection of the biblical one.

Christians should refuse the setup. The burden is on the group that makes the demand. Prove that your starting point gives knowledge of the preconditions of intelligibility. Prove it without borrowing from the Christian system. Until you do, you have nothing, and the rule that forces a Christian to abandon his starting point is simply a rule that he deny Christ before he is allowed to speak. That is not going to happen. Groups that pretend to host honest discussion while requiring opponents to deny their worldview at the door are not hosting honest discussion. They are running a closed shop that already decided the outcome by banning the only starting point that makes knowledge possible.

Void Between Empiricism & Knowledge

Void Between Empiricism & Knowledge

Why sensation is not an epistemology

Empiricism walks up to the Knowledge Club door holding one chip. Sensation. A color. A pressure. A sound. That is the whole stake. Not revelation added later when the argument gets lonely. Not logic smuggled in as a house rule. If the starting point is sensation, the starting point is sensation. Think about that for three seconds. If sensation is the starting point, then that is all the starting point is. Anything that shows up in the conclusion and was not in that chip is a void. Not a hunch. Not “it feels solid.” A missing license.

A newcomer can get lost in the word epistemology. Forget the word for a second. A starting point for knowledge has one job. It has to license the first claim. A claim, here, is a sentence that can be true or false. “This is a mountain.” “The cup is on the table.” “I am sensing.” Those have a thing, and something said about the thing. A color event does not. It happens. The ticket booth at the door wants a sentence for the ticket to be valid. The chip is a patch of gray. Already the transaction looks funny. The booth attendant holds it up: “Where’s the sentence? This happens. It doesn’t say anything.”

People hear this and reach for the lights coming on, the cup where the hand expected, the plane that landed. Those are great stories about feelings of confidence. They are not evidence. A long streak of confident feelings is still a streak of feelings. Confidence and feelings are not subjects and predicates; they are not invisible premises of true or false. The question is whether the sensation contains the conclusion. It does not. The logical voids are still there. I will be using “logical void” and “hole” as the same.

Logical Void One: a sensation cannot justify a sensation

Vincent Cheung puts the knife in with a plain question (Sermonettes, Vol. 1: Questions for Empiricists), the kind a newcomer can ask without a philosophy degree. If information comes from sensation, how do you know you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation? Then do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? If the answer is always another sensation, the stack never lands. This is a true definition of being circular or begging the question. You are looking for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and calling it a foundation. Cute. If the answer is not another sensation, you have already left the foundation of empiricism to certify empiricism with a different foundation. You stepped outside the sensation to stamp the sensation as valid. When this is done, sensation is no longer a starting point.

Try it in the kitchen. The light is on. You want to know that you are seeing the light. If seeing is the only way to know, then you need a seeing of the seeing. Then a seeing of that. The light itself never said, “You are seeing me.” That sentence was extra. You do not even get to name the method. “Sensation” is a word. A word is not a color. Naming the method was a non-sensation doing the work the sensation was supposed to do.

The absence is worse, and this is the part that gets ridiculous. Do you ever not have a sensation? How do you know that? A lack of sensation is not a sensation. The report “I am not sensing that” is a non-sensation licensing a claim about sensation. You cannot sense “not doctored,” “not an atom,” “not a second moon,” or “I do not know this.” There is no color of absence. There is no pressure shaped like “not.” The moment you know an absence, is the moment sensation stopped being foundation.

That is begging the question in the strict sense. Not the loose sense of “I don’t like your tone.” The thing to be proved — that sensation can justify — is assumed in the attempt, or dropped the moment the proof needs a non-sensation. Sensation cannot pay for its own admission. It cannot pay for the sentence “this is a sensation.” A start has one job: make knowledge possible. This one cannot even introduce itself. The chip looks for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and still gets bounced at the window.

Calling the sensation patch “data” is the same loan, taken out early, with a nicer font. Data means something that counts, that differs from noise, that can be read. A color event does not contain “this is data or information.” The word already imported intelligibility, difference, and “this one counts.” The patch never issued those. If you need a non-sensation to know that you are sensing, the sensing was never the start.

Logical Void Two: the categories are not in the patch

Suppose, for the sake of argument, the first hole is ignored and a patch is simply had. Be generous. Hand the empiricist the gray slope and do not ask how he knows he has it. Knowledge still does not start. Knowledge is a premise that can be true or false. A subject, a predicate, a copula. “This is a mountain.” A sensation is an event. Events are not true or false. They happen. Rain happens. A sentence about rain can be wrong or true. Knowledge about the event is not the event itself. Not the same categories. The sentence is invisible. The look is not invisible. One is incorporeal, the other is corporeal. One is non-data, the other is data. One has meaning and the other has no meaning.

The gray slope in the eyes is not the mountain. This is the copy problem, and it is not a trick. What you have is the sensation; a momentary transient non-data patch. The mountain, if there is one, is a different item. Sameness between picture and object is a relation. No shade of gray is that relation. Dream-slope and valley-slope can wear the same colors. A heat haze can wear them too. Nothing in the colors stamps one of them “real” and the other “nice try.” If the patch is all you have, the patch does not tell you which world you are in. The booth wants a sentence that can be true or false. Your gray patch is just an event. Rain happens. “This is rain” is a different category the chip never issued.

Two slopes in a row are not “the same mountain.” Blink. A cloud passes. New shade of gray. Each moment is a new event. Nothing in the new event is stamped “still the mountain from five seconds ago.” That is not data; an event is not data. That is meaning; sensation is not meaning. Continuity is added. You brought the idea of one persistent thing. The colors did not sell it to you. Slope, then moving leaves, is not “the wind caused it.” You got order. You did not get production. The “makes it happen” is not a color and not a sound. Ball touches ball, second ball rolls. The push-power is not in the picture. One is not knowledge, the other is. One has no meaning, the other does.

This slope is not “mountain” as a kind, and not “all mountains.” One occurrence does not contain the unseen cases. A universal is not a very large particular. No pile of patches, however tall, contains the “all.” Some is not all. Grace is not works, and works are not grace. And the slope is not the law that a thing is what it is, or that it cannot both be and not be a mountain. Turn the light off and the colors go. Those relations do not go with them. They were never in the patch. Cheung’s question lands here too. How did you sense the law of contradiction? If you used it to keep sensations from being nonsense before you “learned” it, it was not learned from them. You were already using it to keep the patch from meaning everything at once.

So the order is this, and a newcomer can keep it on a napkin. First the standard fails on its own ground. Sensation cannot justify a sensation, and cannot justify the lack of one, without a non-sensation. Then, even granting the non-data patch, identity, difference, cause, motion, sameness over time, and a subject and predicate that can be true or false are different categories not in the non-data patch. They have to come out of the “sensation gave me this” column before a knowledge claim is possible. After both removals, what remains is a non-data patch. A patch is not a premise. Without a premise there is no knowledge, only an event somebody later narrates with tools the event did not contain. No ticket. No entry.

“Reliable enough” is not a middle

The soft exit sounds modest, which is how a lot of fake tickets get past the ticket booth. Sensation does not have to be certain. It is reliable enough. It predicts. The cup is where the sensation said it was. So it gives knowledge, or close enough that mentioning the difference is rude. Handing over a sticky note that says “usually works” is not a valid ticket.

Modest is not a license. If the senses are less than infallible, you need a standard that cannot fail, to judge each instance. You cannot know by sensation which sensation is the correct one, or how reliable this one is. A mirage is a perfectly ordinary visual event. A stick in water looks bent, and the bent look is a perfectly ordinary visual event. “Usually right” is a story about other days. It does not label today. The non-data haze does not come with a flag that gives the data “this is one of the bad ones.”

Cheung’s line is the sharp one, and it is worth hearing slowly. Even if seeing a mirage is “properly basic,” it is properly useless unless you can know by sensation that it is a mirage. Properly basic reliability is not enough. The empiricist needs properly basic infallibility. He does not have the weaker thing either, because he cannot know by the sensation how reliable the non-data patch is.

Any degree of dependence on empiricism on that issue drops you into agnosticism about it. Not a softer knowledge. A blank. If a non-sensory standard stamps this instance “good,” then you accepted this new non-sensation standard as your new starting point. You did not accept the sensation as the source. There is no humble middle. Either the standard can fail, and you do not know whether this case is a hit, or it cannot fail, and the infallible item is doing the knowing. The booth does not do soft exits. Your percentage is a confident feeling wearing a number, hoping no one asks to see the receipt.

The twin question is just as empty, and newcomers skip it. How do you know that you do not know? A miss is not labeled inside the non-data patch. The same sensation that cannot certify a hit cannot certify a miss. A percentage you cannot audit is not knowledge with the edges sanded off.

For knowledge to be possible, you need to know what is true or false. If the standard does not give an infallible way to know what is true or false, then you don’t know what is true or false, and you fall into an agnosticism and skepticism that denies the law of contradiction. Some might argue with rhetoric like, “Only true or hard skepticism is a denial of the law of contradiction.” This is misleading. If the topic is your starting point of knowledge, then without the infallible standard it is skepticism and skepticism denies the law of contradiction. When knowledge never starts, you don’t have it. The starting point is not a small side issue about knowledge; it is the issue. If knowledge never started, then you don’t have the knowledge to say you have knowledge, and you don’t have the knowledge to say that you don’t have knowledge. Those are violations of identity and contradiction.

The fraction that was never finished

In Paul and the Philosophers, Cheung catches the rescue in the act. A theory that cannot be proved true gets called “probably true.” Sounds humble. Sounds numerical. Probability is a fraction. Favorable cases on top. All possible cases on the bottom. You must know both. Before you have knowledge you cannot know the denominator, the complete set of relevant possibilities. Without it you cannot calculate a probability at all. To have the denominator you would already need the knowledge the experiment was supposed to deliver, and you would have no need for the experiment.

Picture a chicken coop you have never seen. And Johnny says to you this afternoon, “I picked up six eggs this morning, therefore I have half of the eggs for today.” Half of what? If you do not know how many eggs there are, “six” is not a fraction. It is a story about six. Observation gives you the hits you happened to have. It does not give you every way the thing can go, including the failures you have not met, including the cases nobody has sensed. Particulars do not contain the “all.” That is the same logical void as “this slope is not all mountains,” wearing a lab coat. Probability without the full coop is like waving a half-stamped chip and saying “probably good enough for the VIP section.” Booth: “Show me the denominator or get out. Felt confidence isn’t a ticket.”

What people actually have is a feeling of confidence, or a pattern their minds have supposedly recognized, dressed in the language of numbers. Cheung’s line is the one to keep. Probability without a true denominator is psychology disguised as epistemology. A feeling that the next slice will be there is not the fraction.

Inside a closed toy — a die you have defined as six faces — someone can divide hits by the faces they stipulated. That is arithmetic inside an assumed box. Useful for board games. It is not a probability that corresponds to reality, and it is not a measurement of how reliable sensation is. The real denominator would include every unseen case and every way the non-data patch can fail. Observation never delivers that set. So no one has completed the reliability fraction. “Decently reliable” was never calculated. It was felt, then named. The badge was never issued.

If it is not the start, it is not the epistemology

Put the logical voids next to sensation and the starting-point claim collapses in plain sight. A starting point has to pay for the first claim. This one cannot pay for its own admission, cannot pay for the categories inside the claim, and cannot pay for the stamp that says this instance is one of the good ones. That is not an epistemology. An epistemology is an account of how you know. An account that cannot license a single premise is a mood of confident feelings; what it is not, is knowledge about anything.

Confident emotions are why people still talk this way. The cup was where the hand expected. The emotion of success got promoted into a theory of knowledge. When the claim on the table is “this is how knowing starts,” the streak is irrelevant. Success at finding the cup is not a proof that the patch contained “cup,” “same cup,” and “true.”

“Part of the process” is a retreat, and it should be treated as one. Even if that concession is granted — that sensation is part of the process — part of the process is not the same as the start. The start is whatever licenses the first premise. If sensation is not that, empiricism is not the theory of knowledge. Sensation is, at most, an occasion somebody else has to interpret with knowledge, meaning, logic, and tools sensation cannot supply. The later steps inherit the bankruptcy. They do not cure it.

The dismissal makes sense only if the attack is heard as “you do not have eyes.” That is not the attack. Eyes are not an epistemology. If someone offers sensation as the starting point, it deserves the question any starting point deserves. Does this actually give knowledge? Is it possible? Looking at the non-data sensation, no. There is no route from the event to the premise that does not spend money the event never had.

They already attacked a starting point

Here is the part that gets called weird, and it is the most ordinary move in the room. A scientist says the earth cannot be that young, so if the Bible says otherwise you should not believe the Bible. That is an attack on a starting point. Reliance on the text, they say, means you do not have knowledge. They treated your start as an epistemology and checked its ticket. Fine. That is allowed. In fact, as Christians we prefer to take the debate to the starting point level. If they attack our start, we are allowed to attack their start.

Science, if it claims knowledge, has a starting point too. Whatever it does later — instruments, models, long runs, very serious faces — it still has to get a premise from observation. Observation is sensation. If sensation never issued a premise, the later steps have nothing to inherit. Length of experiment does not mint a denominator the start never had. A hundred trials are a hundred patches. A thousand are a thousand patches. None of them is “all possible outcomes,” and none of them is “this premise is true.” Doing a bankrupt thing for a long time does not make it solvent. They checked the Bible ticket and said no knowledge. Cool. Now the sensation chip gets the same check at the same booth. Long runs of patches don’t mint a premise. Plane lands — utility is great. Knowledge is different. They crossed the line first.

Attacking sensation is not a dodge around the lab. It is the parallel question. They asked whether a claimed start, in our case the Bible, gives knowledge. Sensation is the start they have to defend. Showing that it does not give knowledge is the same kind of check.

Utility can stay on the table. This is the distinction that keeps the argument honest. The plane can land. The bulb can come on. Pragmatic utility is great and we use it; but it is not knowledge. Something can be pragmatically repeatable and still be a false claim against reality; thus it is not knowledge. The cup can be where the hand expected. Pragmatic success is a different claim from knowledge. They are the ones who crossed that line, when they said reliance on the Bible means you do not know. Turning around and checking their necessary start is not unjust, and it is not a change of subject. It is the ticket check they already ran on us, but now pointed at their own.

If sensation is not the starting point, then knowledge never starts for the scientist. If knowledge never started, then there is no knowledge for any point for the scientist. The booth stays closed. Meanwhile, God’s revelation doesn’t need a chip; He stamps the ticket Himself and opens the door. Only the Bible ticket clears it, because the God who issues it causes the mind to know it. Everything else is a void, a missing license, a bankrupt chip.

Not All gods Are Under God?

Denying the Inference is Denying the Scripture.

I saw a post today calling Vincent Cheung and Gordon Clark “hyper” on God’s sovereignty, as if they had cleared the Reformed fence and run off with the livestock. The picture in that post was already more honest than the accusation. A. W. Pink barely fits inside the fence. He is scraping the rail. Jonathan Edwards is halfway in and halfway out, because occasionalism will not stay seated where the confession wants it. Then Clark, and particularly Vincent, are the ones said to have jumped. Jumped what? Jumped the fence of Reformed tradition and Reformed orthodoxy. That is the whole charge. The word “hyper” is doing the dishonest work. It is not hyper relative to Scripture. It is hyper relative to a confession, a century, a mood in the study. Scripture never got the memo that there was an upper bound short of “all.”

Here is the flip they will not make. They say Vincent jumped the fence of Reformed tradition. What they have done, by denying the inference, is jump and leave the fence of Scripture. You cannot deny the inference without denying the major premise the text affirms. Tradition is the pen they are defending. Scripture is the fence they left. We do not grade doctrine by how nervous Westminster got. We grade it by what the text says, and then we let the inference land where the text already put it.

Rhetoric is an add-on. It comes after the statement is clear. Most of the time you find people holding a handful of rhetoric with no clear statement underneath it. Strip the rhetoric and you are back in grammar school. Start with the category. All, some, or none. The Bible’s category is all.

Ephesians 1:11: God works all things according to the counsel of His will. Not some things, with a polite exemption for the awkward ones. All. Isaiah 45 does not clear its throat and say, “I form the light and then carefully distance myself from the darkness by means of a secondary cause and a mystery box.” It says, “I form light and I create darkness; I make peace and I create evil; I am Yahweh; I do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). And He does not say it once, as a stray line. Isaiah 46 picks it up again: “I am God and there is none besides me, God and there is none like me, who from the beginning declares the end… My plan shall stand, and I will accomplish all my wishes,” and then He calls a bird of prey from the east and the man of His plan from a far country. “I have spoken; I will bring it to being. I have formed it; I will do it” (Isaiah 46:9–11). That is the motif. “None besides me” is not a slogan about monotheism in the abstract. In the context, it is His own definition of what it means that He is God. He created. He is now grasping and pushing the creation. He knows the future because there is no other real cause that can stop the plan. Control over humans, human choices, good, evil, and material things. To say there is no dualism in Christian ontology is only a philosophy way of saying the Scriptural line, “There is none besides me.”

It is not only the prophet and the king. Psalm 104 is not a throne-room vision. It is the night. “You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about. The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God” (Psalm 104:20–21). The lion does not forage from a system God wound up and walked away from. He seeks his food from God. That is the cleanest line in the Book for the ordinary meal. The same hand that forms light and creates darkness puts the prey in the mouth of the predator.

The same is true in the realm of knowledge. God first put knowledge in the man, and He continues to put it there. It is not observation climbing up into a blank mind. Isaiah 28 walks through the farmer. He does not plow all day. He levels the surface. He scatters dill, sows cumin, puts wheat in rows, barley in its place, and emmer as the border. “He is rightly instructed; his God teaches him… For he is rightly instructed; his God teaches him. Dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge… This also comes from the LORD of hosts; he is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom” (Isaiah 28:26–29). Practical knowledge, the kind a man uses with his hands, is God teaching him. Spiritual knowledge is the same causality with the lights turned up. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The god of this age blinds. God shines. The knowledge is put in. It is not scraped off the surface of things. And God withholds it the same way He gives it. “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly, but are they the pinions and plumage of love? … For God has made her forget wisdom and given her no share in understanding” (Job 39:13–17). The ostrich is not uninformed because she skipped class. God did not give her the share.

Whether it is invisible knowledge, or a random eagle that no man sees leaving the cliff, God says He does it. “Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars and spreads his wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high? On the rock he dwells and makes his home, on the rocky crag and stronghold. From there he spies out the prey; his eyes behold it from far away” (Job 39:26–29). Not by your understanding. At His command. The text’s other picture is the bird of prey He calls, and the man of His plan He summons (Isaiah 46:11). Even rain is not a natural leak from a cloud that God then permits. Jeremiah asks the question and answers it. “Are there any among the idols of the nations who cause rain to pour? Or can the heavens give showers? Is it not you, O Yahweh our God? Therefore we hope in you, for you do all these things” (Jeremiah 14:22). The sky, the wind, the water, and the cloud are put on the same shelf as the wooden idol. They have no inherent power to cause the shower. Yahweh does all these things. And in all these things, the lion’s meal, the farmer’s rows, the light shone in the heart, the wisdom withheld from the ostrich, the eagle leaving a cliff no man is watching, there is none besides God.

Scripture shows Him directly and absolutely controlling, creating, and causing reality at every basic level. I say basic because there are potentially infinite aspects of reality, and the Bible would be infinitely long if it had to narrate every one. In light of who God is, it only has to show Him controlling the basic aspects to conclude that He controls all. Some verses simply say the all. “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). “He sustains all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). That includes the inside of the thoughts, the subject and the predicate and the desire. “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). If He turns the height of man, He turns the rest. It includes the random act, the card and the dice. “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). It includes the destiny before the man is born. “Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad… not because of works but because of him who calls” (Romans 9:11). Paul took a few verses from the Old Testament in Romans 3 and said, “all have sinned.” When God, at every basic part of spiritual and material reality, says “I control this,” and then says there is none besides Him who does it, the doctrine is that He controls all things. The clay does not get a vote, and the clay does not get to call the potter hyper for using both hands. Isaiah 45 already asked the question. “Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, ‘What are you making?’ and ‘Your work has no hands’?” (Isaiah 45:9). Romans 9 starts the lump neutral, before they had done good or evil, and the Potter makes one vessel for mercy and one for destruction. Paul’s opponent understood the position perfectly: who has resisted His will? Paul does not walk it back. He tells the object to stop answering back to the One who molded it.

So the category statement is this:

All things are things directly controlled by God.

Sin is a thing. Evil is a thing. Adam’s fall is a thing that happened. David’s census is a thing that happened. The lying spirit in Ahab’s prophets is a thing that happened, and the text does not say the LORD allowed it to wander in. It says the LORD put it there. Job’s friends comforted him for all the evil the LORD had brought on him, and that line is not one of the bad counselors. It is the narrator, under inspiration, closing the book. If all things are things God controls, then these things are things God controls. The “all” already contained them.

And the inference is not a commentary on the Bible. It is what the Bible asserts. A logical deduction adds no new information. It points at what the premise already swallowed. So the Bible asserts that Oshea sinned, through the major premise that all have sinned, and that assertion is just as binding as if the text said, “Oshea has sinned.” They are equally statements given by Scripture. One is not less Scripture than the other. Oshea’s sin is not less Scripture than “all have sinned,” because Oshea is already contained in the major premise. Same grammar, same authority, on the decree. “God caused this sin” is not less Scripture than “God works all things.” Denying the particular is denying the verse. You did not protect the text. You left it.

This is where the classic move shows its hand. They want the major premise. They will print “God is sovereign over all” on the wall. Then they see where the inference goes, and they suddenly discover a zone where logic is asked to clock out and sit in the hallway. If God controls all things, then God controls sin and evil. That is the definition of metaphysical authorship. They like the poster. They hate the homework. So they affirm the universal and deny the particular, and they call the man who refused to do that the one who jumped the fence. He did not. They did. They jumped the fence of Scripture the moment the particular was exempted.

Watch the same trick somewhere they cannot hide. Paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Category form: all humans are those who have sinned. Therefore Oshea has sinned, and that “therefore” is Scripture, not an optional garnish. Now suppose I keep the major premise, because it sounds orthodox, and then I announce that John Wesley never sinned, John Calvin never sinned, Billy Graham never sinned, Andrew Wommack never sinned. I have not protected the text. I have denied it. Denying the consequent denies the antecedent. A categorical syllogism and a propositional one are the same coin. Flip one face and the other face is gone. Paul already ran this play in 1 Corinthians 15. Deny the resurrection of the dead and you have already denied that Christ was raised. You do not get a participation trophy for affirming the opening line while strangling every particular that makes the opening line true.

If the inference can be denied, then the Bible can say God is God of gods and Lord of lords, and there can still be some gods He is not God over and some lords He is not Lord over. Deuteronomy 10, Psalm 136, 1 Timothy 6, and Revelation 17 all become posters on a wall. The moment you exempt one lord, “Lord of lords” was a hymn, not a doctrine. If the inference can be denied, then Jesus is the Savior of all who believe, and John Wesley is saved, Billy Graham is saved, Andrew Wommack is saved, and Jesus is not their Savior. You kept the slogan and fired the Person. If the inference can be denied, then all the saints will be with Christ, and Wesley is a saint, and Wesley is in hell. The marriage supper still has a place card with his name on it, and the place card is a lie. If the inference can be denied, then by His stripes you were healed, the “you” of Isaiah 53 and 1 Peter 2:24, and the stripes were not for Billy Graham, and the stripes were not for Andrew Wommack, and Matthew 8:17 carried sickness for a category that somehow does not contain the people in the category. If the inference can be denied, then the Ten Commandments address all human beings, the law speaks so that every mouth is stopped, and there is a province in Asia full of human beings the commandments never reached. If the inference can be denied, then there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and Wesley is in Christ, and Wesley is condemned. If the inference can be denied, then whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, and Graham called, and Graham is not saved. On and on. There is no exit. Every universal in the Book dies the same death the moment one particular is handed a hall pass.

If inference is not always binding, then it is not always true that every human has sinned, and Wesley gets his exemption, and a village in Asia gets a vacation from the Ten Commandments, and the God of gods has a few lords He does not lord. If that is not allowed, then inference is always binding. You do not get to suspend it when the particular is sin and the universal is God’s control. The Bible uses this grammar on purpose. Jesus appeals to the law of non-contradiction. Grace is not law. Law is not grace. A thing is not its contradictory. If you say the inference does not always matter, you have already said the major premise does not always matter. You just said it with a hymnbook in your hand. If God is not the author of sin, then the laws of identity and contradiction are not always binding and so grace really is works, and works is also grace.

Some try to slip out by saying the major premise only needs a qualification. Nothing wrong with the premise, they say. It just needs clarity. An exception to the rule. Here is the problem. If you say all humans are those who have sinned, and then you say there is a group in East Africa who have never sinned, even though they are humans, you did not qualify the premise. You contradicted it. “All humans are those who have sinned” and “some humans have not sinned” cannot both be true of the same subject in the same respect. Calling the second sentence clarity, a qualification, or a nuance does not change the relation. It still denies what the first affirmed. It still violates identity and non-contradiction.

A real qualification changes the subject or the predicate before the universal is asserted. “All morally accountable humans have sinned” is a different claim from “all humans have sinned.” The class was narrowed first. By saying “All morally accountable humans have sinned,” one leaves room in the major premise for some humans who are not morally accountable, such as a particular village in Asia. With that being the case, it would not be a contradiction to say some humans are not accountable.

However, what the objector does is different. He affirms the universal, then adds a member of the same class that lacks the predicate. The same holds for sovereignty. “God is absolutely sovereign” and “all things are things controlled by God” already fix the predicate. Absolute means without remainder. All means every member of the class. To follow that with “some things are not controlled by God,” or “human choices fall outside His control,” or “evil is an exception,” is not to refine the claim. It is to assert that the same subject both has and lacks the same predicate. Partial control is a coherent idea. It is simply a different idea. It is the claim that God controls some things and not others. Anyone is free to defend that claim. What he is not free to do is defend it under the name of absolute sovereignty, as if the exception were a footnote rather than a replacement of the predicate. The word “absolute” does not survive the exception. Once the exception is admitted, the proposition on the table is no longer the one that was stated.

So here is the tell. If Reformed theology affirms that all things are things controlled by God, and then refuses the inference that sin and evil are included in the all, it never affirmed the major premise. It affirmed a slogan, and then left the fence of Scripture while accusing the consistent reader of leaving the fence of tradition. Pink is already on the rail. Edwards already has a foot out, because occasionalism is just the premise being allowed to mean what it says. Vincent did not jump Scripture. The bounds of Scripture are “all.” The man who stops the syllogism where the confession gets sweaty is the one who left.

And the panic underneath the denial is a category smash. “If God authors sin, then God is a sinner.” Sin is lawlessness, 1 John 3:4. Lawlessness is a man breaking a command addressed to man. No law was ever addressed to God. There is no authority over Him to hold Him to one. Accusing the Author of being the sinner is the same move as calling the novelist a lion because he wrote a lion, or calling God a river because He caused a river. God is not what He authors. God is not what He causes. If that sentence feels hard, it is because pantheism has been sitting in the chair where Scripture should be. How much slower is the color green than the number 7? That is the intellectual level of “God sinned by causing a man to sin.” Ex lex is already too small. The potential of a law over God does not exist. Holy, holy, holy is categorical separation, not a really impressive compliance record.

As Vincent Cheung as talk us, accountability does not rescue the denial either. Romans 9 is asked the question in plain speech. If God causes it, why does He still find fault? Paul’s answer is not freedom. The answer is the Potter. Responsibility assumes a sovereign over you, not a zone He is forbidden to touch. Pharaoh did not resist the causality. He was still judged. The elect do not resist the Spirit who sanctifies them. Same metaphysics, opposite vessel. Freedom was never the foundation. Authority was.

This is not a puzzle for the back of the book. If God causes all things, then He caused the fall, the census, the lying spirit, the hardening, the disaster, and the prosperity. If you will not say that, you do not believe Ephesians 1:11. You believe an edited version that keeps the religious reputation and hands the awkward verses to mystery. Mystery is what you say when you have already denied the premise and you need a religious word for the violation of identity and non-contradiction. You would not let a man do this to “all have sinned.” You would not let him say that “Oshea has sinned” is less Scripture than the verse that contains it. You would not let him do it to the stripes on Jesus’ back. You would not let him do it to the God of gods. Do not let him do it to the decree, or to God’s control of every aspect of reality.

Affirm the inference or stop claiming the premise. There is no third category. All, or you have already slipped into some, and some is dualism with a Reformed accent. The God of Scripture is not embarrassed by His own decrees. He forms the light and creates the darkness, and He does not ask the clay to proofread the work. Believe Him as He has spoken. Then take the pen He put in your hand, the promises already yes in Jesus, and command the mountain. The same sovereignty that authored the story is the sovereignty that backed the stripes, the resurrection, and the authority He gave you. So, open your mouth and command the mountain to get out of your way. Tell sickness to leave and be healed and happy.

Is It Not With Your Senses?

This is a good example to go over. It shows how the other side often does not even understand what a worldview is, let alone how to argue for one.

Oshea (replying to a video): “Christians usually respond by attacking metaphysics, which isn’t wrong. However, it is better to attack their starting point for knowledge. Attack it hard. Using sensations to prove sensation is circular nonsense. Without knowing, there is no knowledge about any aspect of their worldview.”

Johnny Billy: “How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses? Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits? Presupposing God to prove God is also circular nonsense.”

“How do you come to belief in God? Is it not with your senses?”

No.

That sentence already assumes your starting point and then demands I live inside it. That is the very thing under dispute. If that is how debates are won, then I can just say, “Since you read the peer-reviewed article using God’s innate knowledge, I win.” I know that is what happened in the causality of the thing — knowledge comes from God — but that is not a public argument in the context of a debate. It is me describing reality on my worldview’s terms.

A blank slate cannot interpret a tree. Look at the bark all day. What leaves the eye is not “tree,” “oak,” “living,” “outside me,” or “this is not a dream.” Those are universals and judgments. Universals do not leak out of particular sensations. To understand any datum at all you already need logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. The data does not give you those. You bring them, or you do not have “data.” You have a twitch.

It is logically impossible to start with sensation in the premise and arrive at “logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, causation” without jumping categories and breaking identity. Sensation is not logic. A color-patch is not the law of contradiction. A sound is not “therefore.”

So no: I did not come to God by cataloging sensations and then inducting my way to the Trinity. The reason is simpler than a conversion story. If I start with sensation, I cannot know any term about anything in reality. Nothing. Not “God.” Not “no God.” Not “senses.” Not “Johnny.”

Vincent Cheung puts the wheel in the open in “Questions for Empiricists” (Sermonettes, Volume 1):

“What is a sensation? How did you learn the meaning of a sensation? How do you know when you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation to know that you have a sensation? If you sense a sensation, then how do you know that? Do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? Then, do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation that senses the sensation? … If information comes from sensation, then how do you know when you are having a sensation?”

That is not a cute riddle. That is the start eating itself. If knowledge comes from sensation, then knowing that you are sensing is another sensation, and knowing that is another, and you never get the first justified term. You do not even get to name the method.

“Doesn’t everyone have the same epistemic limits?”

No. That is the whole fraud you bought.

Worldviews have different starting points. Different starting points do not have the same limits, because they are different. That is the law of identity, not a Bible tract. You assume an empiricist start, then act shocked that another start does not share your ceiling. The Christian start is God’s revelation. The causality of knowledge is defined by that same account of reality: God, not nerve endings. Very different start. Very different limits.

“Epistemic limits,”

is a polite way to say your starting point cannot justify knowledge and meaning. A start has one job: make knowledge possible. Empiricism fails that job and then calls the failure humility. What it actually yields is skepticism. Skepticism cannot even be stated without using the knowledge it denies. “I know that we cannot know” is a contradiction. So empiricism does not survive as a starting point. A start that makes knowledge impossible is not a limited start. It is a dead one.

Pretending we all begin with sensation is not humility. It is a failure to argue for a worldview. The whole point of a worldview debate is that the starts differ, and you are here to show yours can carry knowledge and the other cannot. Assuming we all begin as empiricists is like walking into a room of rival worldviews and saying, “Aliens gave us consciousness, so why do you believe the Qur’an?” That is not an argument. That is you treating your story as the weather. If aliens-gave-us-knowledge is your epistemology, it is your job to argue for it. It is not a human default.

And since Scripture contradicts empiricism, if I granted that I depend on sensation to know the Bible, I would be denying the worldview I claim to believe. I would be saying the start is sensation and the start is revelation. Those are not the same thing.

“Presupposing God to prove God is also circular.”

You are confusing empiricism with every other starting point. You are so used to empiricism’s circle that you think every axiom must be the same shape. That is sloppy on its face, because my start is not yours.

Every system has an undeduced starting point. That is what a first principle is. If you can deduce it, it is not first. Empiricism uses sensation to prove sensation. That is circular, it never terminates, and it dies as skepticism. Skepticism cannot be spoken without contradicting itself. You need knowledge to deny knowledge.

Scripture does not lean on premises outside itself. It is self-authenticating by the sufficiency of its own content — similar to the law of contradiction, rather than to a hamster wheel called empiricism. The law of contradiction is not “proved” by a second, backup law of contradiction. It is the standard: to use it, you use it; to deny it, you use it. Empiricism is not like that. To “prove” a sensation you need another sensation, and another, and another. That is infinite regress, not self-authentication. So yes: sensation, used as a start, is circular. Revelation, used as a start, is a first principle. Calling both “circular” is how you hide that only one of them can even speak.

You want to talk metaphysics? Fine. You still do not have knowledge. Using sensations to prove sensation leaves you with no start. Without a start, you have no knowledge about any aspect of your worldview — including the objection you just made. You borrowed logic, self, space, time, difference, identity, motion, meaning, language, and causation. You borrowed “circular.” You borrowed “limits.” You borrowed the demand for justification. Then you pretended those tools fell out of an empiricist start you also admit is defective and limited.

Empiricism does not yield any knowledge. That is the argument.

It was never “God exists because a sunset felt warm.” It was this: your method cannot know anything, including that sentence. You cannot even know to deny my stance on God, because on your start you have no knowledge.

Love That Turns Losers Into Heroes

If I can? No. You can, if you believe.

Picture this gut-wrenching, soul-shaking scene in vivid detail. A heartbroken father has endured years of pure hell—watching his precious boy convulse, foam at the mouth, and slam violently into raging fires and deep waters as a merciless demon tries to murder him again and again. Sleepless nights that felt like torture chambers. Hope shredded to pieces. He drags the boy to Jesus’ famous disciples… and they faceplant hard in front of everyone. And when Jesus saw how hard His disciples faceplanted, He wasn’t laughing. He got angry and called them spiritual perverts.

In this scene, with tears carving rivers down the father’s dust-covered face, voice cracking with total despair yet blazing with a father’s ferocious love, he collapses at Jesus’ feet and cries out: 

“Lord… if You can do anything… have compassion on us and help us!”

Many parents feel that same knife twist—the exact same crushing weight when the doctor’s report lands like a bomb, the bank account bottoms out again, the marriage is bleeding out on the rocks, or that addiction keeps dragging you (or your loved one) under. “God… if You can just do something…”

Jesus’ response shows compassion but is delivered with frustration and irritation toward unbelief.

Jesus doesn’t hand out soft religious hugs or weak “there, there” platitudes. His compassion is edgy and shocking to faithless ears. He leans in with His signature grin and irritated fire in His eyes, and drops the bombshell:

“‘If I can?’ What are you even talking about?! All things are possible to him who believes!”

The Greek wordplay explodes—“can,” “able,” “possible”—all detonating from the same raw “dunamis” root of resurrection power. Jesus, the original extreme faith teacher, flips the entire burden: Stop wondering if I have the ability, and start looking in the mirror and wondering if you have the ability. And as you look and meditate on this, allow me to tell you the secret that the faithless kept from you, but I will shout it from the rooftops. If you believe, you—that’s right, you—have the ability to deliver your son from demons and sickness.

Jesus, the ultimate no-BS Faith Coach, flips the entire script: Stop obsessing over whether I have the power… and start obsessing over the fact that you do. This was said by Jesus, the most God-centered person who ever lived, and yes, He was even more God-centered than you. Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because you won’t find anyone more God-centered than Jesus. He said, “If you believe, you have the ability to deliver your son, crush the demon, and shatter chains.”

Think about how God-focused Jesus was. Instead of saying a typical man-centered doctrine like, “Look to My Father, who is all-powerful and with Him all things are possible. If it is His will, He will or will not heal the boy.” No, Jesus’ theology centered on God in this awesome way. “By looking at Me for the ability to deliver your child, you are centering on the wrong person. Look to yourself. If you believe, then—you, not God—that’s right, you—have all possibilities open to you. If you want the boy healed, you have that ability—if you believe.”

This is illustrated in Peter’s words in Acts 3. He did not say, “What God has, God gives.” Rather, Peter spoke in the God-centered way Jesus instructed us. “What I have, I give—in Jesus’ name, walk.” Think about that. “What I have, I give.” This is God-focused on steroids.

It is not because we have inherit power in ourselves, but because God is so perfect and seamless to fulfil His promises, when a person confesses them in faith. It is because we have been re-created in Jesus, as part of Him, conferred with His Name to use, and authority to sling around as a prince of Heaven.

Many would call Jesus cruel for not coddling the man’s pain first. Nope—this was perfect love refusing to leave him a helpless loser. And that was the hard truth. They were losers—the devil was stealing, killing, and destroying them. Jesus did not just love the father; He loved him and then showed extra love. He handed him the power upgrade that turns broken people into mighty warriors, and losers into heroes wielding resurrection power at the demand of faith.

Deeper love illustration: If I saw a stranger’s kid in danger, basic compassion would lead me to save the day, but then I would keep walking. But if that was my son? My family? My close friend. My ride-or-die love? I’m not stopping at rescue. I’d train them, equip them, and counsel them so that they would stop being losers and become heroes—stop being victims and become warriors. This shows us how much Jesus loved them. He did not coddle them, leaving them in a place where they could be hurt again. Jesus counseled the father so that when the next attack happens, the father knows he can rescue; by faith the father has the power to overcome and shut the mouths of lions.

Through the finished work of the cross—where He took every curse, sin, sickness, poverty, and demonic chain (Isaiah 53, Colossians 2:15, Galatians 3:13)—He didn’t just forgive you. He empowered you. You are a brand-new creation. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you. The authority is now yours. His Name is engraved on your tongue.

Your doctor’s grim death sentence? Jesus leans in with fire blazing: “What do you mean ‘if I can heal?’ You have the ability if you believe!”

That mountain of debt crushing your family? “What do you mean ‘if I can provide?’ You have the ability if you believe!”

That marriage storm or the habit that keeps winning? He’s still asking with that same passionate grin, yet laced with irritation: “If you believe—then anything and everything is now possible for you! You have the ability to make all things possible, when you believe.”

When you hear the irritation in His voice, do not be disheartened. It is love that compels God to counsel you to be a winner. He likes you.

No more victim prayers from the foot of the cross, warrior. Lock eyes with the enthroned King. Feel His holy, empowering challenge hit your spirit like lightning. Rise up as the new creation you already are—seated with Christ, armed with the power of the God of gods. And when you place your faith in His promises, you become a hero “of whom the world was not worthy to have known.”

So tell me, champion (yes, I’m calling you that on purpose because that’s how He sees you)… what “impossible” situation has you feeling like that desperate father right now?

Jesus loves you so much that He refuses to just heal and walk away. It hurts Him to watch His kids falling victim to demons, circumstances, and fear. That’s why He stops, looks you dead in the soul, and reveals the glorious secret: You have the ability—because He paid for it in full. He loves you too much to leave you weak. He wants you walking as the faith legend the world will talk about.

Life with God is filled with the love of God. It’s a powerful love. It is love that rescues you; and it is also love that empowers. It is love that turns losers into heroes.

 Resisting What Christ Bore

In the arena of faith, where God’s sovereign decrees clash with the feeble whispers of human doubt, Kenneth Copeland’s declaration rings out: “Whatever He bore on the cross we resist!” Amen to that. If we truly grasp the substitutionary atonement of Christ, we’d be fools—nay, anti-Christs in spirit—to promote or tolerate the very curses Jesus shredded His flesh to annihilate. But let’s clarify the battlefield here, lest we swing our swords at shadows. Jesus didn’t die to destroy healing, prosperity, the baptism of the Spirit, the blessing of Abraham, or answered prayers. No, He bore the opposites: sickness, poverty, spiritual drought, the curse of the law, and unanswered cries under bondage. These blessings are the spoils of His victory, already deeded to us in the unmerited contract of grace. To resist what He bore means we stand firm against sickness, lack, demonic oppression, and doubt, claiming by faith what His blood purchased. Anything less is epistemological treason against the revealed Word of God.

We start with the presupposition that God’s revelation is the infallible starting point for all knowledge (2 Timothy 3:16-17). If Scripture is truth and is self-authenticating, says all others are wrong and non-contradictory, then its claims on atonement must logically extend to all aspects of salvation—spiritual, physical, and material. Begin with Isaiah 53:4-5: “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried… By His scourging we are healed.” Here, “griefs” and “sorrows” translate to sicknesses and pains in the Hebrew, as Matthew 8:17 confirms when Jesus heals the sick to fulfill this prophecy. If Christ bore our sicknesses on the cross, then sickness is not our portion; we resist it as an intruder, an enemy defeated at Calvary. To accept illness as “God’s will” is to call God a liar, for His Word declares the exchange complete. Jesus took the stripes so we could walk in health—why hug the curse when the blessing is ours? We are to look at being sick as the same as we look at committing adultery, murder or theft.

Extend this logic to prosperity. 2 Corinthians 8:9 states, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.” Christ’s poverty on the cross wasn’t metaphorical fluff; it was substitutionary. He who owned the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 50:10) became destitute to enrich us. The blessing of Abraham, promised in Galatians 3:13-14—”Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law… so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith”—includes material abundance. Abraham was loaded with wealth (Genesis 13:2), and as his heirs, we’re entitled to the same covenant overflow. Poverty? That’s what Jesus bore. We resist poverty by faith, just as we resist committing sin. We confess provision as per Philippians 4:19: “My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” If God’s sovereignty decrees abundance for His elect (Ephesians 1:3-14), then lack is a thief’s lie (John 10:10). Satan steals to devour, but we reclaim it, slamming his face into the dirt with Holy Spirit power.

Now, the baptism of the Spirit—oh, how the reprobate trash mocks this! Acts 2:38-39 commands: “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.” This isn’t optional swag; it’s the empowerment for greater works (John 14:12). Jesus bore the separation from the Spirit in Gethsemane and on the cross (Matthew 27:46), so we could be immersed in His presence. Praying in tongues distinguishes the elect from the mockers (Jude 1:18-21), building up our inner man (1 Corinthians 14:4) and channeling unstoppable power (Acts 1:8). To resist the Spirit’s baptism is to embrace the dryness Jesus endured for us. No, we claim it, speaking mysteries that edify and propel us into the place where miracles are as common as silver in the streets of Solomons reign.

And answered prayers? Mark 11:23-24: “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you.” Jesus bore the unanswered cries of the cursed (the silence under the law’s bondage), so we could have bold access to the throne (Hebrews 4:16). Doubt and unbelief are what we resist—those fleshly thoughts that prioritize observations over revelation (Romans 8:6). If empiricism says “no healing yet,” we deductively retort: Scripture trumps senses, for the just live by faith, not sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).

But here’s where the rubber meets the road: We’d be anti-Christs if we promoted the curses Jesus destroyed. Imagine preaching sickness as humility or poverty as piety—that’s spitting on the cross! Galatians 3:13 declares redemption from the curse, which Deuteronomy 28 lists as disease, famine, defeat. Promoting these as “God’s refining fire” is worldview prostitution, swapping biblical epistemology for carnal empiricism. Defective epistemologies like empiricism lead to skepticism and death, while faith from Scripture yields life and power. God sovereignly decrees salvation’s total package for His elect (Romans 9:21-23), and faith assents to it, making all things possible (Mark 9:23).

Consider Moses with the Staff of God (Exodus 4:20). God gave him power, but at the Red Sea, Moses whined instead of wielding it (Exodus 14:13-16). God snapped: “Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the sons of Israel to go forward. As for you, lift up your staff!” Deduction: God cares for us by empowering us; and so, begging when we are armed, is faithlessness. Similarly, Jesus gave disciples authority over storms (Mark 4:35-41), yet they accused Him of not caring. He rebuked their “no faith,” for the power was already ours, Psalms 91 already applies to us. Today, we have the name of Jesus, the Spirit’s baptism—why tolerate what He bore?

We are to command restoration in faith, for Joel 2:25 promises God will repay the years the locust ate. Sickness stolen? Command healing. Finances plundered? Declare prosperity. The opposite of what Jesus bore—health, wealth, empowerment—is ours to bless us. They are already deeded in the New Covenant (Hebrews 9:15-17), activated by faith confession (Romans 10:9-10).

Yet, the heresy hunters scoff, calling this “name it and claim it” blasphemy. They’re the reprobates, not having the Spirit (Jude 1:19), distinguishing themselves by mocking tongues and miracles.  Tongues is the litmus test—edifying the inner man, keeping us in God’s love. Cessationists resist the Spirit Jesus poured out, promoting a powerless gospel; they lift up their skirts and expose themselves as faithless.

Brothers and sisters, whatever He bore—sin, sickness, poverty, curse—we resist with faith (Matthew 11:12). We preach the blessings of Jesus Christ: Healing flows, prosperity abounds, Spirit baptizes, Abraham’s favor multiplies, prayers avalanche answers. They are yours—already. Do not fear, only believe.

Philosophy Cannot Disagree With the Bible

Someone asked: “Why does philosophy disagree with the Bible?” 

Simple answer: It doesn’t. It can’t. 

Imagine trying to argue that “2 + 2 = 5” while using math that only works if 2 + 2 really equals 4. You’d be using the very rule you’re denying. That’s silly, right? The contradiction sits there naked, impossible to hide.

That’s exactly what happens when someone says, “Philosophy disagrees with the Bible.” It’s like the moron who says, “I disagree with the law of non-contradiction.” They use the thing they claim to disagree with to make their disagreement possible in the first place. The very sentence they utter borrows the logic they pretend to reject.

People sometimes ask, “Why does philosophy disagree with the Bible?” But here’s the truth: it can’t. There is no possible world—real or imaginary—where true philosophy stands apart from Scripture. And the reason is simple: the Bible isn’t just part of philosophy; it is the foundation of all philosophy.

To argue against the Scripture, the unbeliever must employ logic, reason, and coherence. Yet, on his own secular, materialistic assumptions, universal and immaterial laws of logic cannot be justified. He is forced to borrow from the Christian worldview—where logic is grounded in the infallible mind of God—in order to construct an argument against God.

The unbeliever who says, “Philosophy shows the Bible is wrong,” has already borrowed the very tools that only the Christian worldview can justify. Where does he get the laws of logic? From the mind of the Logos, the eternal Reason who is Christ (John 1:1, Colossians 2:3). Where does he get the uniformity of nature that allows him to reason from cause to effect? From the sovereign God who “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3). Where does he get the moral indignation to accuse the Bible of injustice? From the image of God stamped upon his soul, which he suppresses in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18-21). Where does he the concepts of time and the law of identity? He cannot even open his mouth to object without standing on ground that belongs to the Triune God of Scripture.

Where does he get such laws? If his worldview is materialistic, logic is nothing but electrochemical fizz in the brain—contingent, local, and changeable. If his worldview is evolutionary, logic is a survival mechanism that might have been otherwise. If his worldview is pluralistic or postmodern, logic is a social construct. In every case the laws lose their necessity and universality. Yet he continues to use them as if they were eternal and absolute. He steals from the Christian worldview, where logic is the reflection of the mind of the eternal Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). Without the Christian God, logic collapses into absurdity. The unbeliever cannot even deny God without first affirming the very rationality that only God supplies.

Next, the categories of thought that make intelligence possible. Identity and difference, cause and effect, unity and plurality, substance and attribute—these are not learned from experience. They are the preconditions for experience. How could anyone “learn” causality by observing sequences of events unless he already assumed that every event must have a cause? The empiricist is caught in hopeless circularity: he uses the category of cause to justify the category of cause. The rationalist without revelation fares no better; his innate ideas float in mid-air with no ontological anchor.

Science, the great idol of modern unbelief, fares no better. Every experiment assumes the uniformity of nature—that the future will resemble the past, that the laws observed today will hold tomorrow. Yet no amount of past observation can guarantee future uniformity on naturalistic grounds. David Hume saw the problem centuries ago and despaired. Bertrand Russell admitted that science rests on a “postulate” it cannot prove. The unbeliever nevertheless proceeds as if induction is reliable. Why? Because steals from the bible, which says he is wrong and only it is true.

When unbelievers use probability as a path to truth (such as dismissing the resurrection as “highly improbable”), Vincent Cheung points out a fatal flaw (see “Paul and the Philosophers” and his other apologetic works. These have helped me understand some of these forementioned points above.). To calculate probability, one must know the “denominator”—the complete, overarching set of all relevant possibilities. If you lack comprehensive knowledge, you cannot establish that denominator. If you somehow already knew the denominator, you would possess knowledge far greater than what the specific experiment or observation offers, rendering the experiment irrelevant.

“When the mind looks at a scene, it does more than receive raw impressions. It interprets using concepts such as identity, difference, number, relation, time, and cause. These are not derived from experience; they are logically prior to it. A child tracking a ball flying through the air already employs time and continuity to follow its motion from one moment to the next. Without these categories, there is no “motion,” no “through the air,” no coherent sequence—only a disconnected blur of sensations that cannot even be called a blur. When the same child declares that the ball broke the window, he invokes causality. To recognize any pattern at all requires identity through time and rules for connecting one case with another.” (A paraphrased summary from “Paul and the Philosophers.” Vincent Cheung.)

In Systematic Theology 2025 I explain that God’s revelation is the first principle of all knowledge—the starting point for everything we can know or think. All the things necessary for any intelligence only converge in the biblical worldview. You can’t even get to logic, truth, or intelligence unless God reveals Himself. Revelation is not one option among many; it is the necessary ground beneath every thought we think. Without this divine starting point, every claim collapses into skepticism, because there is nothing left to justify why your thoughts should match reality at all.

This is why I stress the first principle of Scripture for all public knowledge and the method of it being self-authenticating for apologetics. The Bible doesn’t need permission from human reason to have knowledge. Rather, subjects and predicates get their definition from God’s Mind, decree and revelation. And His nature is revealed in His Word. As 2 Timothy 3:16-17 declares with divine authority, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” That “every good work” includes the work of thinking, reasoning, and building a coherent worldview.

The Bible isn’t just a book about ethics. It is the very definition of systematic philosophy. It tells us where truth comes from, who God is, what logic is, and how to think straight. Jesus Himself is called the Logos— He is the law of contradiction and naturally used this thinking motion to create the universe (John 1:1). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” This is no mere metaphor. The eternal Son is the wisdom or reason or logic. Colossians 2:3 adds that in Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” The law of non-contradiction? It comes from God’s unchanging character; meaning, the law of contradiction is simply one of the eternal constant motions of God’s thinking. You can’t throw that law out the window and still have a conversation that makes sense, because without it language dissolves into gibberish and thought becomes impossible.

So when a person tries to use reason to attack the Bible, they are actually standing on the Bible’s own foundation to do it. They borrow God’s rules of thinking and intelligence while claiming God’s rules are false. That’s not clever—it’s impossible. There is no reality where this works. It’s like a fish trying to prove the ocean doesn’t exist while swimming in it. Talk about an intellectual own-goal: flapping around in denial while the very medium that makes flapping possible laughs at the absurdity.

Every true philosopher must begin with scripture. Anyone who doesn’t, is not really philosophizing—they’re just daydreaming with big words.

Most people think of philosophy as a neutral playground where we decide what is true. That’s a dumb mistake. There is no neutral ground. To “disagree” with the Bible using philosophy is like trying to use the rules of mathematics to prove that numbers don’t exist. It’s a personal malfunction and not actual philosophy, because you’re denying the very foundation of your own thoughts. Men can come together and pretend to have a philosophy, but that’s all it is—men in a mental delusion. There was never any philosophy; they only pretended. But it only takes one person to stop pretending and the game is up. I will be the person. I will not pretend with them.

Philosophy cannot question the Bible without ceasing to be philosophy. Philosophy only starts with the Bible, because the bible says so. You also must start with the bible so that your questions have intelligence. If you reject the Word of God, you lose the right to claim that anything is knowledge and that anything you say has any intelligence.

Stop trying to find knowledge from the outside looking in. Step into the Light, and you’ll realize the Light was what allowed you to see the path all along. Wisdom only begins with God. Intelligence ends at any disagreement with God.

So here’s the bottom line: A philosopher who rejects Scripture has already rejected the foundation of philosophy itself. They were never a philosopher. They only pretend to be one.

You can pretend to disagree with Scripture, but you can’t form a logical disagreement without first borrowing the very tools—logic, truth, coherence, intelligence, knowledge, subject and predicates—that only come from God’s revelation. That’s why Scripture never trembles before human questioning. It stands firm because it is the mind of God revealed. As 1 Corinthians 2:16 asks, “For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” Yet we have the mind of Christ.

When we align our thinking with Scripture, we aren’t limiting ourselves—we’re finally standing on the only solid ground for the pursuit of wisdom and intelligence. In a world of shifting sands and human opinion, the Word of God remains the rock that cannot be shaken. Let all who seek truth come here, bow before the King of kings, and find the true beginning of philosophy—not as man’s invention, but as God’s gift to those who fear Him.

Let God’s sovereignty be a foundation for more and more healings and miracles. Let His Word be our theology, our doxology, and our apologetic. 

Endnote: “This presentation has been informed by Vincent Cheung’s ‘Paul and the Philosophers’ (2025) and his other works on biblical apologetics.” See His works for more.”

Your Words Always Carry Authority

Sometimes the faith preachers can go too far in their teaching on words, confession, and giving Satan authority through your words of unbelief. Most of the mistakes boil down to one of two things. First is their demonic doctrine of Arminianism. Their denial of the Bible’s sovereignty leads them to say God gave up some of His power and authority and handed it to man, and then man passed it to Satan, and so on. The second is a borderline superstition about words. Jesus said, “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:14). This did not cancel His ability to raise him from the dead, because Jesus said it along with the statement, “we will go and wake him up” (John 11:11). Jesus did not say he was dead in unbelief, fearful that Lazarus could not be raised from the dead, but as a statement made on the human level of observation. Jesus said what could be observed, but contradicted empiricism by faith: “We will go and wake him up.”

With that being said, there is some truth to what is being said, and we need to address it. Proverbs 18:21 declares that life and death are in the power of the tongue. The most obvious way to see this is in salvation. If you believe and confess with your tongue, you will be saved (Romans 10:9-10). However, sometimes the confession of the tongue can be as simple as tears. For Jesus said to the woman who washed His feet with her tears, and to whom He said all her sins are forgiven, “Your faith has saved you” (Luke 7:50). Jesus, the most God-centered man who ever lived, did not say, “God saved you”; no, He said, “Your faith has saved you.” Thus, we see it is more than just words, but words backed up by faith.

Moses said, “I present before you life and death; choose your path” (Deuteronomy 30:19). And the way we choose is by unbelief or faith. If unbelief, then words of unbelief will follow. If faith, then words of faith in God will follow. This is why Jesus said to the woman, regarding the forgiveness of her sins, “Your faith has saved you,” rather than saying “God saved you.” Faith-filled words or unbelief-filled words determine the course of your life. Your position in life is finalized by your confession.

Talk about a divine mic drop—your tongue’s basically a cosmic remote control; hit ‘faith’ for blessings, or ‘unbelief’ for the eternal buffering screen.

God Is Sovereign and Still Is

Because God has not given up any of His direct and absolute control over all things, He therefore still does all that He wants. He defines His own creation and establishes connections and cause and effects. He was sovereign when He made the promises, and so He is sovereign and faithful to do them, no matter how incredible they are.

Thus, when God made the earth, God gave dominion of the earth to man, commanding man to steward it (Genesis 1:28). God did not stop being the only real cause of all things, but on the relative level, because God is in control of all things, it was His choice to put the earth under man’s authority and stewardship. Adam did not ask for this authority and dominion. It is because God is sovereign that Adam had this responsibility and authority even though Adam did not ask for it.

Because the earth was given to man, when Adam sinned, much authority and power was transferred over to Satan, by God’s choice and design. Even though Adam did not ask for the stewardship and responsibility of managing the earth, it was his because God sovereignly made it so. Thus, even if Adam did not want the responsibility for his choices and words of unbelief to result in earthly authority being transferred to Satan, he had no choice in the matter because this dynamic was established by God. The devil said to Jesus, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to” (Luke 4:6). Jesus did not refute Satan. After Jesus’ resurrection, He said to the disciples, “All authority has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18). Jesus took it back, and all those united to Him not only have the original authority and stewardship given to Adam, but much, much, much greater; it is as great as the authority Jesus has. Jesus has made us royal priests in Him forever (1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 1:6). We are not just sub-heirs, but co-heirs with Jesus (Romans 8:17). We are united to Jesus’ body; therefore, because all things, including all powers, authority, rulers, and dominions are under Jesus’ feet, they are under our feet (Ephesians 1:22-23). Jesus has given us the privilege and authority to use His Name to ask for whatever we want and get it (John 14:13-14, & ch 15, and 16). He has endowed us with the power of the Holy Spirit; the same Spirit that empowered Him (Acts 1:8).

As a believer, I did not ask to be made a royal priest in Jesus. And yet, this position of authority and power is mine, whether I want it or not. By my words, as a royal priest, I can command sickness to leave and rebuke Satan to his face. I do not go in and out of being a royal priest who can use Jesus’ name. I always have this position, whether I want it or not. Thus, my words always carry royal priesthood weight and authority because in God’s mind, He thinks I am a royal priest in Jesus. For example, if a king mutters to himself, “I want some water,” even if he did not intend for a servant to go get him water, a servant will get him water, because the word of the king is law. This is exactly what the Canaanite woman did with Jesus’ word (Matthew 15:21-28). Jesus’ word put her as a dog in the house, under the table. Thus, the woman demanded some crumbs, because it was Jesus’ word that put her there, even if Jesus did not intend for her to get healing. Even though the woman hijacked Jesus’ word, on the other hand, she honored His word as that of a King, whose word is law. Jesus was in a position of authority, and the woman was demanding that Jesus honor His word.

 Sovereign God hands out authority like candy at a parade—Adam fumbled it to Satan, Jesus snatched it back, and now we’re co-kings; just don’t trip over your own tongue, or you’ll end up cursing yourself.

This is what we mean by our words having life and death. It is not that we have inherent power in our words, but God in His sovereign choice has put us into positions of authority and power, whether we want it or not. It was this way from the beginning with Adam. Adam lost much of this authority, but God began to give it back starting with Abraham, and in Jesus much more has been given to the believer. It does not matter if you acknowledge your position of authority and power, because God in His mind thinks you are in a position of authority and power, therefore, God will see to it personally that the words you speak will bring death or life to you. It is because God is sovereign and we are accountable to Him that words bring life and death. It is because God is sovereign that I have the power to command sickness to leave, to shut the mouths of demons, and tell mountains to fly away (Mark 11:23).

This results in a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can curse yourself with death, pain, sickness, shame, and demons, or you can bless yourself with life, peace, prosperity, the Holy Spirit, health, and glory. Even if you shut your mouth, just your tears are enough for God to use His sovereignty to ensure they either damn or bless you.

There is only one word in the Bible for demon possession, and it means to be demonized, and it includes anything from being slightly harassed to outright possession. Because Adam sinned in a position of authority, this led God to give man’s authority over to the devil, and this allowed Satan to demonize mankind. For example, in Acts 10:38, Peter says Jesus healed all those being victimized by the devil. Thus, much sicknesses are caused by demons, and so sickness is largely caused by being demonized. If you are sick, then it is likely due to being demonized, although sometimes it can be just God’s curse at the fall (Genesis 3:16-19).

This is why words are so important. If the doctor says you have stage 4 cancer, and in unbelief and fear you repeat this, because God thinks you are in a position of authority, you have just authorized death and pain for you. You have given permission for demons to demonize you. If you say, “getting old means I get arthritis and feeble and fall,” then it will be true for you. You have chosen death. You have chosen unbelief and curses. God thinks you are a steward in authority over the earth, He thinks you are royalty, He thinks you are a priest, and so your words of unbelief have authorized your flesh to be sick, weak, and in pain.

Once you realize you are always in a position of authority and power, then the intelligent thing to do is use your words to confess the goodness of God over yourself, and use the Name of Jesus to get good things from God.

This is why Christianity started with Abraham, whose very name is a confession of faith in God: “I am the father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5). Christianity started with faith-filled words in God’s good promises of health, wealth, fame, and blessings. Both the Old and New Testaments say this: “We believed and so we have spoken” (2 Corinthians 4:13; Psalm 116:10). This is Christianity 101.

Satan knows this and so he has demonized the faithless into confessing death, and by confessing unbelief they are doing Satan’s job for him. They will say, “We are the worst of sinners,” and so they are (1 Timothy 1:15, but misused here). God thinks they are in a position of authority (even if it is only a mere shadow of the stewardship Adam once had), and so they authorize their souls and actions to be sinful and unrighteous. They say things like, “This sickness is sent by God to teach me something.” The ten spies of the Israel came back from spying on the Land and gave a truthful report about their observations saying, “we are small, and the people are giants, we can’t do this.” It was correct; however, God was angry because God’s promise contradicted their observations. They chose their observation over God’s promise. God made their words to be a self-fulling decree. Thus, God in His sovereignty makes unbelief a self-fulfilling prophecy of sickness, because God considers our words have weight

 Think about it. The faithless and traditionist mock the faith preachers for decreeing and prophesying. Yet, just like the 10 spies, they decree they are sick and are too weak to defeat stage 4 cancer, because that is what the doctor confessed. They prophesy about how old age makes them feeble and how arthritis bends their hands; they decree this because they already observe how their bodies hurt. They decree that they are small, but confess that sickness and old age are giants. They prophesy that sufferings from everyday troubles of life will eat away at their life, libido and happiness. And just like the Israelites who confessed their own smallness, defeat and sufferings, God made their decrees reality, and made their prophecies manifest. They speak against the faith teachers for decreeing, but their mouths pour out an onslaught of decrees and prophecies, but in the negative. And we see it come to pass. They see their confessions manifest, not because they have inherent power in words, but because the sovereign God thinks their decrees have authority and power. Their lives are a living testimony of the power of decrees and the reality of prophecy. Their doctrine is against decreeing, but their lives are a constant endorsement of it.

It does not matter if you do not want your self-deprecating statements, or observations about how your body feels, to be self-fulling prophecies, God in His sovereignty ensures your words authorizes them to be so. This is how God is using His sovereignty, so deal with it. Deal with it by speaking faith filled words in God’s blessings.    

Satan’s sneaky script flip—get the faithless yapping negativity, and poof, they’re self-sabotaging superstars; meanwhile, God’s like, “I glued the mic to your hand, it will amplify your words, so think carefully what you will say!”

There is a reason Jesus preached so much. Faith comes by hearing the word of truth (Romans 10:17). By hearing the truth, our hearts are filled with faith. When our hearts are filled with faith, we open our mouths and confess His blessings over our lives. In the Gospels, Jesus kept saying things like, “Ask what you want using my Name and get it” (John 16:23-24). And then, “What you SAY, if you believe, then you will get it.” And if you “SAY to this mountain it will move” (Mark 11:23).

Notice how many times Jesus says, “SAY.”

Mark 11:23-24: “Truly I tell you, if anyone SAYS to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they SAY will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you [SAY] for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

Lastly, we are instructed to always be praying, praying in tongues, rejoicing, and praising God (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18; Ephesians 6:18; 1 Corinthians 14:2). God knows that He sees us in authority and so commands us to continually be saying faith-filled words about His goodness, salvation, and blessings over us. Our faith, our words, and confessions need to catch up to our identity in Christ, to our high position of already sitting in the heavenly places in Christ (Ephesians 2:6), and to our position as always being a royal priest. Our words have power and authority because God is sovereign, and because He loves us. Jesus enjoys seeing the people He died for use His Name to say and command good things for themselves.

Just as speaking sickness opens a foothold for you to be demonized (Ephesians 4:27), speaking in tongues is a foothold for the powers of God to flood into your life.

Your words are like spiritual WiFi passwords: Mutter curses and invite demonic hackers; confess faith and unlock God’s unlimited data plan of miracles.

Ultimate Authority


Imagine being so stupid that when you read 2 Corin. 8:9 you think it is about “spiritual” wealth rather than financial wealth. The words say wealth and poverty. Reading comprehension? Read the words first, before determining what the words say. First rule of reading: read the damn words! Paul’s out here collecting cash, so yeah, it’s about money, not some ethereal nonsense. Only a pastor or theologian could be this delusional.

Even if you can get additional insights from a redemptive historical reading of this passages, it is only indirect and secondary, and it would have zero relevance is negating the direct teaching of the passage.

This money substitute was part of the atonement of Jesus. He took our poverty, and gave us His wealth. It was part of the substitutionary exchange with Jesus. Also, curses included poverty. And Jesus took our curses of poverty, being nailed to a tree, and gave us the gospel of Abraham, which included miracle money. Jesus took our poverty, nailed it to the cross, and gave us his bling. It’s part of the whole Jesus substitution package deal. Mock the money part, you mock Jesus and trample His atonement. You’re not just wrong, you’re God’s enemy, an anti-Christian piece of trash. Such people have an anti-Christian worldview.

They leap from money to a spiritual category so fast, they don’t even bother to read the passage to learn from it. The Bible isn’t their authority; their observations are. The bible is not their final authority or first principle of knowledge, which is why they don’t even try to pretend to read the text. They have a different worldview. They will say things like, “I don’t see all Christians prospering.” They appeal to their observations as their final authority because the bible is not their authority. It never was. They use the bible to make their observations the highest judge. They are ruled by emotions, not scripture, and it shows with “reprobate” written all over their face.

Imagine you manage an Apple store. You hire a new employee, and the next day, you notice Microsoft products displayed on the counter. You pull the employee aside and ask what is going on. “This is an Apple store, and you affirmed that we only sell Apple products during the hiring process, why did you display Microsoft products?”

They affirm “we only sell Apple,” but then say “Microsoft also has keyboards and screens and so we can sell their stuff.” Of course, it doesn’t matter what the excuse is, it is irrelevant. There is no excuse. They affirmed we only sell Apple products. Thus we have 2 options. They really are that stupid that they don’t see the contradiction of their action to sell non-Apple products. Or they are wilfully trying to destroy the store.

The person I described is a typical Christian, pastor or theologian.

They say the Bible is their only starting point for knowledge and authority on truth, but they interpret a passage so that it doesn’t matter what the terms say or the context. When you point this out, they appeal to what they observe.

2 Corinthians 8:9 is about finances and the context is also about finances. They change the category to spiritual, as if the Bible was breathed out by their words and categories, not God’s.

Imagine how proud Satan is to see a person affirming the Bible is God breathed, but you steal God’s breath and change it to your breath.

Later they say, “but we don’t see all prospering,” or regarding the promises of healing, “we don’t see all healed.” And then they conclude, “it must not be God’s will to heal all,” or “even if you have faith to move mountains, God will do what He wants despite if you believe.” They say God is their authority, but they appeal to the authority of observation and sensation. Like the new hire, they affirm we only sell Apple products, but keeps displaying Microsoft products. Has an Apple new hire been so perverted and hypocritical as to sell Microsoft? I doubt it. And yet Christians are this perverted and hypocritical when they appeal to observation as an authority.

This is a worldview issue. To have different authorities will make your entire worldview different.

I do not address them as Christians but as reprobates and outsiders. I say this, not to be harsh, but to be exact and frank. A worldview is determined by one’s starting point for knowledge. If a person uses their observations for this, then we have a fundamentally different worldview. Not just small difference; we have an entirely different way to view reality. Not just a different take, we’re on different planets here. The moment they say, “I don’t see all prospering or healed,” it is not a matter of theology, but it is now a worldview issue. It is an ultimate authority issue. We have different ways to understand reality, not just reading text. Until they can prove they can get knowledge from observations and defend the irrational use of induction and empiricism, they have no justification for knowledge.

The biblical worldview reveals itself as the only epistemology and rejects all others, including observations. The bible rejects my use of observations to determine if something is knowledge. The bible does not allow me to observe and then use this to determine if something is false or true. If a so-called Christian appeals to their observation, “I don’t see all healed,” it means we view reality differently. The reason an atheist and I have different worldviews, is because I appeal to scripture for knowledge, and they appeal to observations.

The bible does not allow me to appeal to observations, “if I see people healed or not,” as an epistemology or an authority. Thus, if a so-called Christian appeals to observations to obtain any knowledge or authority, we are now as far apart as atheism is from Christianity. Because we appeal to different authorities, we have different worldviews. Because we appeal to different foundations of knowledge, we have different realities. It is not a matter of context of a text, but of worldviews. My worldview does not allow me to appeal to the authority of my observations, but the other so-called Christian is allowed. It is a matter of ultimate authority, not context. Because observations are not consistent, or justified, and because induction is not a valid conclusion, the dual authority of observation will always leave you room to make the text say what you want. This is why atheist and evolutionist love the authority of observation, because it lets them craft their worldview in their image.

These types of people appeal to the reprobate authority of observation, because, their worldview is a reprobate reality.

Scripture: Sufficient to Condemn John MacArthur & Justin Peters

Justin Peters recently had an interview with John MacArthur. They touched on the subject of faith and miracles.

The first thing MacArthur says about the Charismatics is that their miracle-seeking is “doubt looking for proof” and “looking for a sign to validate it.”

This is calling good evil, and evil good. It’s saying black is white and white is black—like a magician’s sleight of hand, but without the applause. This is a sleight-of-hand fallacy to shift blame from oneself to something else. In the Bible, it wasn’t those doing miracles and seeking to do more miracles that Jesus said, “an evil generation seeks a sign” about; it was said against those who did not believe or do miracles and were asking Jesus and His followers to perform more signs for them.

MacArthur and Peters are the same Pharisees today. They do not believe, and they are the ones who keep asking for a sign (which is empirical evidence) to give proof if a doctrine is true or false. The Charismatics already believe; they do not seek signs, just as much as Jesus and the New Testament church did not seek signs, because they already believed. Paul said that Jesus was raised not on empirical evidence, but because the Scriptures say so. Empirical evidence can never give proof if any biblical doctrine is true or false; it cannot make a truth claim about any aspect of reality. People who ask for a sign not only show themselves to be spiritual perverts and unbelieving, but it also reveals they commit spiritual harlotry with empiricism as a starting point of knowledge over Scripture. Thus, when they say “sola scriptura,” what they really mean is “sola empiricism,” or “sola David Hume”—because nothing says “Bible alone” like outsourcing your epistemology to an 18th-century skeptic.

I would recommend these essays by Vincent Cheung for more reading on this issue of who is really seeking a sign, and who is not. (I am not affiliated with Cheung, only recommending his material). The Reformed have it in reverse order. Their doctrine is a 180-degree contradiction to scriptural doctrine—like trying to drive a car backward and calling it progress.

The Sign of Jonah

Signs of an Apostle

The Miracle Majority

Behold, I Give You Power

Another issue brought up was the sufficiency of Scripture. I agree it is an important issue, but for the opposite reason they state. Peters said, “A growing battle today is not inerrancy of the Bible but the sufficiency of the Bible.” MacArthur then responds, “The Bible gives you everything.” Other things don’t give you this, such as “philosophy or politics, or waiting around for a prophecy.”

Interestingly, considering how sufficient the Bible is, the remark is then given by Peters: “The charismatic prophets do not have a good track record.” Yet, this is an appeal to a human starting point (empiricism) and the fallacy of attacking the person, not the argument. What it is not is an appeal to the “sufficiency of Bible” and the Bible as their epistemology. Like I said before, “sola scriptura” really means “sola empiricism.” It is a natural reflex for them to be stupid and sinful by appealing to empiricism rather than the Scripture, because they are reprobates. This is who they really are: men centered on men, like a bad selfie that forgets the landscape.

With straight faces, similar people have asked me, “Why do we not see so many miracles today, unless God does not want it?” They are like the people from Jesus’ hometown who said, “This is Joseph’s and Mary’s son,” and then in unbelief demand He prove by miracles who He claims to be. But their unbelief made that impossible. These people did not start with God’s revelation; rather, their starting point for knowledge was their human observations. Scripture records it was due to their lack of faith, and not the lack of Jesus being willing and able to heal. With such people, I am asking myself, what happened to starting with God’s revelation for knowledge? Where did God go? Why is it so automatic for them to start with a “human” speculation and “human” superstition—like defaulting to GPS when you’ve got a perfectly good map from the Creator Himself?

If they only mean to do a personal attack (a logical fallacy) by saying, “Oshea (or Johnny), how many miracles have you done,” then why do they default to argumentation that politicians use? Is it because politicians are such shining examples for how to argue for truth? (Spoiler: They’re not; they’re more like debate club dropouts.)

They are like the religious leaders who slapped Jesus and demanded He prove His claim as God by prophesying. They harlot themselves with David Hume’s empiricism in the open streets, and then march back into their pulpits, and after wiping off their sweaty faces, they say with a straight face, “sola scriptura.” Maybe if they could stop humping on empiricism for just a few seconds, they might wake up and realize the disgrace they are committing against their own souls—and against those who hear them, who deserve better than this philosophical slapstick.

For a detailed explanation of how Scripture is sufficient to condemn Peters and MacArthur, read the following essays:

Scripture: Sufficient Against Cessationism

Prehistoric Orthodoxy

Lastly, MacArthur responds with this,

“If God gave miraculous gifts, why would He give it to people with such bad theology?”

I remember a quote from Vincent Cheung that gives a reason why God does such things.

“Christian ministers who teach this are often far from perfect, and subject to many criticisms, but this does not invalidate the point. Why do you think God allows many of these teachers to be so flawed and unrefined? He places a stumbling block to trip up those who walk in religious pride, who thumb their noses at those who do not present the promises of God in the way they like. God will put his blessings right in front of them, and they will fail to receive. This is his way to withhold the gospel from the unbelieving and hard-hearted.”[1]

——END NOTES——-

[1] Vincent Cheung. “God’s Extravagant Blessings.” Fulcrum. 2017 pg.33