It seems quite obvious, then, that God never intended that Christians should win the lost through purely philosophical and academic arguments, or even that they should by this means remove the mental obstacles within unbelievers so that the Word of God might penetrate their hearts. This series of articles is written by Dr John Whitcomb.
(https://metropolitantabernacle.org/articles/priorities-in-presenting-the-faith/).
Let us look at the matter from a different perspective. If an unregenerate man actually did have the right to demand full intellectual satisfaction concerning the claims of God’s Word before accepting them, he would be the greatest of fools for settling for anything less than a complete demonstration.
But in order to have such a demonstration he would have to examine carefully all the pertinent facts and every possible alternative before receiving Christ as his Lord. Of course, he would die long before he could arrive at the place where he could make a decision on this basis. Such an approach to Christian apologetics is not only unbiblical but it leads to logical absurdities!
To give an unbeliever the impression that he has a right to demand answers to all the rational problems relating to the Bible and Christianity before he repents of his sin and turns to Christ for forgiveness, is to set him up on a pedestal of intellectual and spiritual pride from which he will never descend. What can such endless debates actually accomplish in preparing such a person for ‘the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel’ (Romans 2.16)?
What can be said for such rationalistic apologetics when God has commissioned us to present ‘all the counsel of God’ (cf: Matthew 28.18-20; Acts 20.27; 2 Timothy 2.2; 4.2)? And how do we respond to Paul’s admonition to Timothy – ‘be gentle unto all men, apt to teach [ie: to teach revealed truth], patient, in meekness instructing [ie: with Scripture] those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; and that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil’ (2 Timothy 2.24-26)?
If the New Testament is our infallible guide in such matters, we must conclude that the Christian who will be most effectively used by God in winning people to Christ is not the one who knows the most about secular philosophy, psychology, history, archaeology, or natural science (important though these disciplines may be in their proper place in developing a comprehensive Christian world-and-life view). It will be the Christian who knows most about God’s Word, and who humbly seeks God’s daily strength and wisdom in obeying it.
The best Christian apologist is the best student of Scripture, who, to use the Bible’s own terms to describe him, is ‘a workman that needeth not to be ashamed’, because he is ‘rightly dividing the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2.15).
He will be a man like Apollos – ‘mighty in the scriptures…instructed in the way of the Lord…[who] spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord,’and thus by God’s Word ‘he mightily convinced’ unbelievers (Acts 18.24-28).
The writer finds himself in complete agreement with those who insist that Christianity is supremely rational. This is not because the Christian understands everything that God has revealed, for even the apostle Paul refused to make such a claim (Romans 11.33; 1 Corinthians 13.9; see also 2 Peter 3.16).
The reason why one must insist on the essential rationality of God’s inscripturated revelation is that God Himself is infinite reason. His thoughts can be communicated to us effectively and in truth. The Bible is perspicuous (1 John 2.20, 27). However, man’s finiteness will pre-vent him from knowing God exhaustively.
The Gospel may be foolishness ‘to them that perish’ (1 Corinthians 1.18), but it is not intrinsically foolish; it is perfect and infinite wisdom (1 Corinthians 1.20-29). Thus, the Christian message is ultimately rational. But this is very far from saying that the Christian message can be communicated rationalistically to lost men.
The apostle Peter, by the Spirit of God, commanded each believer to ‘be ready always to give an answer [Gk: apologian] to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3.15). Does this mean that the Christian must go outside the sphere of revelational truth to provide intellectual and academic justification for his faith in God’s Word to the unbeliever? Could Peter himself have fulfilled such a command in view of his very limited background?
Would the apostle Paul, who was widely known for his great learning (Acts 26.24; cf: 22.3), have indulged in such pursuits for the philosophically-minded Corinthians in view of his avowed determination ‘not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified…that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God’ (1 Corinthians 2.2 and 5)? Hardly so.
One therefore suspects from the very outset that the very popular semi-rationalistic interpretation of 1 Peter 3.15 is misguided.
This suspicion is confirmed by an examination of the immediate context of the passage. Peter was writing to persecuted Christians who were being terrorised by their pagan neighbours. They were commanded, however, not to sink into despair, but to recognise their truly ‘blessed’ situation.
Furthermore, they were neither to fear nor to be troubled. But why should they adopt such an attitude? Was it because they knew they could out-manoeuvre their enemies in intellectual debate? Definitely not. Early Christians did not include many wise men according to the flesh among their number.
Their confidence was really based upon their spiritual resources in Christ the Lord, Whom they were to sanctify in their hearts.
Furthermore, the words that follow Peter’s command to ‘be ready always to give an answer’ are highly significant. This defence is to be made with ‘meekness and fear’ and with ‘a good conscience; that…they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.’
Note carefully that these conditions have nothing to do with rationalistic debate, for a basic assumption underlying such debate is that a correct answer is effective regardless of the presence or absence of meekness, reverence or godliness in the one giving the answer. But in a spiritual witness to the truth of God, these factors are absolutely vital.
It is clear from this passage, then, that no spiritually effective answers can be given to unregenerate people by Christians concerning the hope that is in them until they have learned to sanctify the Lord God in their own hearts. But what does this really mean?
The term sanctify in this context presupposes that Christians are themselves sanctified or holy – set apart for God.
In the immediate context, then, Peter is saying that the believer must confess his inability to convert men by mere human reasonings, and own God’s unique and sovereign ability to do the converting. He must learn to pray that the God Who knows the hearts of all men and Who knows how to penetrate those hearts with His own Word, will present His Word, by His Spirit, to the hearers, and be glorified by the results.
During the 1944 Ardennes campaign in Belgium, better known as the Battle of the Bulge, the writer served as a ‘fire direction computer’ in a US field artillery battalion. It was his job to sit with two other men in a basement behind the front lines and to telephone directions to the artillerymen who handled the twelve 105mm guns.
The really dangerous job was entrusted to the forward observer, usually a lieutenant. He had to position himself in a high place near enough to the front lines to see enemy tanks approaching.
When the tanks came into view, a potential crisis emerged. He could either panic or he could follow strict instructions. If he panicked and fled to the rear, the tanks would proceed unchallenged, and the battle might be lost, including the forward observer. Or, he might rush toward the tanks and start firing on them himself. That would also prove disastrous to him, and to his military unit.
There was, however, a third alternative. That would be to ‘sanctify’ the field artillery in his heart! In other words, he could follow instructions and phone the ‘fire direction computers’, giving them the number, size, location and apparent speed and direction of movement of the enemy tanks, confessing thereby his inability to handle them in his own strength, and the ability of the field artillery to do the job which he could not do.
It hardly seems necessary to explain that once the artillery had located those tanks, they were in desperate danger. As dozens of armour-piercing shells whistled over the head of the forward observer and penetrated the tanks one by one, exploding inside, he was giving his greatest apologetic to the challenge that confronted him.
As God’s ‘forward observers’ in Satan’s world of demons and fallen men, Christians must learn to call upon Christ their Lord. No other system has ever really worked, nor ever shall.
What, then, is the ‘answer’ that each of us must be prepared to give to everyone who asks us to give an account for the hope that is in us? The answer must be basically God’s Word, not our own word. God’s thoughts are vastly higher than our thoughts, and His words penetrate far deeper into men’s hearts than our words.
In every sincere soul-winning effort, the believer soon discovers that his own words are dead, inactive and dull.
But – ‘the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’ (Hebrews 4.12).
It was Christ the Lord Who set the apologetic example for all believers when He thrice defeated Satan with accurate, appropriate quotations from the Word of God, and with the formula – ‘It is written.’ In His great confrontation with unbelieving Pharisees in John 8.12-59, our Lord appealed constantly to basic spiritual realities, such as the witness of His Father, rather than to sign-miracles. It is noteworthy that ‘as he spake these words, many believed on him’ (v30).
Do modern Christians sometimes feel that they have, because of archaeological, historical, scientific, and other discoveries that shed light on the Scriptures, a superior apologetic to that of our Lord and His apostles, and of the early church?
If so, they have not really sanctified the Lord God in their hearts, and their answers to lost men can bring neither conviction nor conversion in the biblical sense of those terms. God’s work must be done in God’s way if it is to receive God’s approval (cf: 1 Corinthians 3.10-15).