a word before we begin

There is a piece of the Christian life so basic that almost everything else rests upon it, My Friend, and yet it is a piece most believers have never once heard framed plainly, and so they stumble over it their whole lives without ever knowing what it was that tripped them. This little booklet takes up that one piece, that one foundation stone, and sets it where you can see it.

It is this. God has not written one book. He has written two. And learning to tell them apart, learning what each one can do and what each one cannot, learning which of them to open at which moment, changes everything about how a believer reads his Bible, how he reasons with a lost soul across a table, and how he works through the hard questions both with the world outside the church and with his brothers and sisters inside it.

So sit with me, and let us reason together about the two books God has written, and about the one Author standing behind them both.

chapter one

the problem on the table

An honest observation about the modern church, first, and I trust you will take it in the spirit it is offered, for it is offered in love and not in scorn. We have, by and large, forgotten how to talk to the world.

Oh, we still talk at the world. We post our verses online. We put our slogans on our bumpers. We argue our positions in the comment sections until midnight. But somewhere along the way we have lost the ability to actually reason with a lost soul in a way that lands, in a way that opens a door rather than slamming one, in a way that earns us the right to be heard before we ask anyone to listen.

The result is that most Christians today, when they try to share the gospel or defend the faith, do exactly one thing. They open the Bible and they begin quoting verses. And then, when the unbeliever shrugs and walks away unmoved, the believer assures himself that he has been faithful and the world is simply hardened, and he walks off as well, satisfied that he has done his duty.

But I want to suggest to you, gently, that he has not done his duty. He has done a fragment of it. He has picked up one tool out of the toolbox and swung it, and forgotten entirely that there is another tool sitting right there beside it, a tool God Himself placed in the box for exactly this purpose. And that other tool, properly used, is very often the thing that would have made the whole conversation go differently.

He has picked up one tool out of the toolbox and forgotten the other one God placed there.

So before we go any further into the hard questions, into origins and sexuality and money and suffering and all the rest, we have to settle something more basic, a question that sits underneath every one of them. The question is this: how does God reveal Himself to people, and how are Christians meant to engage the world He has placed them in, and one another within it? That is what we are about to answer, and once we have answered it, we will hold a framework we can carry into every difficult conversation that lies ahead of us.

two books god has written

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sources & notes

  1. The “two books” of God, the book of nature (general revelation) and the book of Scripture (special revelation), is a classic image of Christian theology. It is confessed in the Belgic Confession (1561), Article 2, that we know God “by two means: first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe… second, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word.” The metaphor is developed by Augustine and later by Francis Bacon, and the distinction between general and special revelation is standard in conservative systematic theology; cf. the treatment in Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology, on revelation.
  2. Psalm 19 sets the two books side by side: the heavens declaring God’s glory (vv. 1–6, general revelation) and the law of the Lord converting the soul (vv. 7–11, special revelation). On creation as a wordless universal witness, cf. Romans 1:19–20. See J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Psalm 19, which he calls the Psalm of the two revelations.
  3. In Acts 17:28 Paul quotes two pagan Greek sources. The line “in him we live, and move, and have our being” is attributed to Epimenides the Cretan (sixth century B.C.), the same poet Paul cites again in Titus 1:12; “for we are also his offspring” is from the Phaenomena of Aratus of Soli (c. 315–240 B.C.), a line also found in the Hymn to Zeus of Cleanthes. Both originally referred to Zeus; Paul repurposes their words toward the true God. See F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts (NICNT), on Acts 17.
  4. 1 Corinthians 2:14, on the natural man’s incapacity (not merely unwillingness) to receive the things of the Spirit; with John 6:44 (“no man can come to me, except the Father… draw him”) and Ephesians 2:1 (dead in trespasses). On faith coming “by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” Romans 10:17. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on 1 Corinthians 2.
  5. Genesis 1:26–27 and Genesis 9:6, on the image of God (imago Dei) as the ground of human dignity. Francis J. Beckwith, Defending Life (Cambridge University Press, 2007), develops the argument used here, that the biological humanity of the unborn is a matter of general revelation while its moral status turns on the grounding of human dignity, separating the scientific and moral questions.
  6. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Answer” (apologia, 1 Peter 3:15): a verbal defense, a speech in defense, from which the English “apologetics” derives; the same word describes Paul’s defenses in Acts 22:1 and Philippians 1:7, 17. The manner is qualified in the same verse: “with meekness and fear.” Cf. Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Hopeful (on 1 Peter).
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