An Exposition of Scripture on the Relationship Between Experience and Truth

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the relationship between experience and truth in this address from The Gospel Coalition sermon library.

“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours: grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

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Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love.

For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins.

Therefore, my brothers, be all the more eager to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you will never fall, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have.

I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, because I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things. We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain. We have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

In the history of the church, there have been many movements that have pitted experience against truth. In all fairness, the relationship is not always an easy one. Those who push a lot of experience will sometimes hear the other side saying, “Yes, yes, yes. But don’t forget, experience is so subjectively variable that at the end of the day you might domesticate the truth. You might actually end up denying the truth. You might focus on the wrong things and marginalize the truth.”

The other side will say, “Yes, the truth may be there, all right, but our capacity to understand it is inevitably shaped by our experience.” There is a sense in which experience feeds into our understanding of the truth, as well. So things go back and forth. What is interesting in Scripture is that there can be appeals to experience in various places. The trick is learning when the apostles appeal to particular experience and what kind of appeals they make.

For example, in Galatians 3. The apostle Paul writing to the believers there makes a frank appeal to their experience. He says, “Who has bewitched you? Tell me, when you got converted, (that’s a reference to their experience) was this brought about by your obedience to law or was it brought about by the work of the Spirit? Which was it?” He’s not looking for a text now.

He’s looking for an appeal to their experience. On the other hand, there can also be psalms, for example, that are full of both Scripture and experience. In fact, a friend of mine wrote an exposition of many psalms a number of years ago and simply called his book, Songs of Experience. Still at the same time, there are many, many passages in Scripture that insist on the objective truth that God has revealed. Even across the realm of history, we could relate many, many instances where people have gone wrong on one side or another.

Dr. Chris Miller referred to the fact that I’ve been married almost 29 years. On our honeymoon (I married an Englishwoman) we went to Wales. We were doing the kinds of things you do when you go to Wales. Visiting this castle and that castle and going for long walks and that sort of thing. We came out of one near Tenby and saw this old church, a Calvinist Methodist church which does not quite meet either Calvinist or Methodist.

It’s a strange thing that takes place in Wales now and then. It was clearly part of the liberal denomination. There was a lovely little sign outside offering afternoon tea. So we went in and there was this dear old duck who was passing out tea. She had to be 85 if she was a day. This was 1975. My mind is immediately doing the arithmetic. I can’t help it. There was a great Welsh revival in 1904, 1905.

This dear soul has got to be 80-something, so was she around? I’m trying to be very diplomatic and I’m looking around the place and seeing what kind of literature was there. I can see it’s so far left you need field glasses to figure out where it is. I was still trying to be polite and I said, “Have you been in this church all your life?” “Oh yes, I was brought up in the valley,” she said.

“You must’ve seen a lot of changes over the years.”

“Oh yes, many, many changes.”

“What’s the ministry here like now? Are you enjoying it?”

“Well, many of the young people seem to like it.”

Finally I thought to myself, “Oh Carson, for goodness’ sake. Blow it. Just ask your question.” So I said to her, “Tell me, during the Welsh revival, is it true what they say that the miners (the whole area was full of coal mines) lost about a third of their vocabulary and as a result the pit ponies that pulled out the coal didn’t understand them anymore. Is that true?” Well, her face lit up.

“You know about the Welsh revival? That was exactly what happened! My father was one of those miners. He did lose his vocabulary. The pit ponies wouldn’t understand them. That’s when I got converted.” And she went on and on and on and told about the glories of the Welsh revival. It was spectacular! I was transported to heaven!

Finally, when we had our 45-minute conversation and she told me all about the Welsh revival from firsthand experience. I said, “Tell me. What do you do now for biblical nourishment?” She reached over and patted my hand. She said, “I listen to Back to the Bible broadcast from Trans World Radio in Morocco.” Wales is a desert. What went wrong?

Well, there are a lot of things. One of the things that went wrong is they never really captured any of the schools or worried about theological education. The thing very quickly became merely experiential and then eventually by mid-1905, so experiential that it became more and more eccentric and was no longer based on Scripture.

It just went off the tracks. People started pursuing more intensity of the experience and it was no longer reformed by the Word of God. The result is a Wales that is nothing more than death warmed over. There are lots of accounts of all kinds, but I pass them by. I even passed by the introduction to this epistle.

If I had more time I would set up the background a little more and work through the first couple of verses that find Peter giving hints of where he’s going even by the form of his greeting. What I want to do instead is simply plunge into verse 3 and following, because in verse 3 and following, Peter stresses experience.

Then in verses 12 and following, he stresses truth. Here in a situation fraught with some danger, Peter appeals both to truth and to experience to safeguard his readers. In both instances, how he makes his appeal, what he is trying to seek from his appeal is almost as important, pastorally speaking, as the appeal itself.

1. Experience

Peter makes three points.

A) The reality of our experience is grounded in God’s transforming power.

Verses 3 and 4: “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”

The chief point in these two very condensed sentences is that the very one who calls us, whether referring to God or Jesus specifically, also enables us. The one who calls us transforms us. His power, we’re told, gives us everything we need. In other words, God follows through. He doesn’t simply call us. Thus, we become his. We are possessed by him. We are justified before. He then gives us everything we need.

He does not give us everything we lust after. He does not give us everything for every purpose. He does not give us everything we might need for some things we might desire. If your passion is to be a neurosurgeon, he may or may not give you everything you need. If your desire is to be a DJ, he may or may not give you everything you need. If your desire is to be fabulously wealthy, he may or may not give you everything you need.

But if you take the eternal view, you will see that what you need the most is godliness. Any lesser view is just plain stupid when you compare 70 years against eternity? It’s why the Lord Jesus himself says, “Don’t lay treasure up on earth where moth and rust corrode, where thieves break through and steal. But lay up treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves do not dig through and steal.” Here, we are told, God gives us everything we need for life and godliness.

He does this by this great power that he displays, that he has displayed not least in the resurrection of Christ. That’s a common New Testament theme. This great power then comes to all who have been called by God, called by Jesus Christ. Then Peter enters a small excursion. “How did he call us?”

“His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” He called us by his own glory and goodness. Isn’t that an extraordinary expression? Glory is a much-loved word by Peter. It’s used ten times in this first epistle, five times in the second. It’s a pretty flexible word.

Sometimes it is a tense of symbol that means a lot of different things in different contexts. It’s the total impact of something. Peter uses it often in connection with his own experience of the glory of Christ displayed in visible form at the transfiguration. In fact, he’s going to go there at the end of this chapter, if you recall.

“We saw his glory on the mount. We were witnesses of his majesty.” Yet the expression is more complex than that. It is the impact of the presence of God whether in miracle or in suffering or in spectacular display as on the mount, in the cross. In the New Testament, the glory of God manifested in Christ is shown in many different fronts.

Now hold that just for a minute. What about his goodness? The word that is used is actually a word that, in the pagan world, more often means virtue. The pagan world had a particular notion of virtue that we need not go into here. But in this context, the virtue that is at stake (the notion reappears later in the chapter) means something like moral excellence. “God called us by his glory and his goodness.” His moral excellence.

You start asking, “Where do these notions come together in Scripture?” They come together in a number of places. Perhaps the most dramatic place where they come together is in Exodus, chapter 33. I’m not sure that Peter had this chapter in mind, but certainly other New Testament writers have this one in mind.

John has it in mind when he is writing his prologue. He makes that very clear. In that chapter there is really a remarkable exchange between Moses and God. This takes place after the great fiasco when Aaron and the people have gone astray in debauchery and thrown gold into the fire. “It wasn’t our fault! Out popped this calf!”

“These are the gods that brought you out of Egypt.” Horrible thing, while Moses is, for his part, getting the Ten Commandments. The tablets are broken and God threatens judgment upon the people. There is Moses now pleading with God. Toward the end of this exchange of pleas, Moses cries to God and he says, “Show me your glory.”

It’s as if he knows in the horrible circumstances in which he’s living when he’s alone … he doesn’t even have his spokesman anymore, his own brother Aaron; he’s completely alone … what he needs to be grounded, above all, is a renewed, deepened vision of God. “Show me your glory.” What does God reply? God replies, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you.”

Isn’t that a remarkable response? You know what happens in chapter 34. Moses is hidden in the cleft of a rock and God goes by and intones certain things. I wish I had time to unpack that. “Show me your glory.” “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you.” Eventually, Moses is allowed to peep out and see something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of God manifested in space-time history.

When John takes up that theme, he deals with it very directly. He refers to this passage in case you miss it. He shows that Christ Jesus shows his glory in, for example, the great signs. You come to the first sign in John, chapter 2, and we are told in chapter 2, verse 11, after the turning of the water into wine, that although the crowd saw the turning of the wine, they saw the miracle …

The disciples saw Jesus’ glory, but by the time you get to chapter 12, where is the glory of Jesus manifested? By the time you get to chapter 12 of John, the glory is manifested in the cross. It’s not manifested now in miracles. It’s manifested in the shame and odium of a damned malefactor hanging on a cross.

By this display of glory, Jesus is himself glorified and returns to the glory that he had before the world began. In other words, there’s been this spectacular display of goodness. What this passage is saying, whether that kind of background is at issue or not, is that Christ Jesus has called us by his glory and goodness.

That is, what has drawn us to him has been the spectacular display of who God himself is. Not only in the transcendent, in the glorious, but in the moral excellence, in the sheer goodness of God manifested in Christ Jesus. The person of Jesus attracts people. That’s what God uses to call people to himself. I could tell you a lot of stories.

I know an Iranian who came to University of Chicago to study medicine. He had never met a Christian as far as he knew, never held a Bible in his hand. He was doing spectacularly well in the med school at Chicago when he went to some sort of conference and stayed in a hotel and picked up a Gideon Bible. He never had one. He started to read it, fumbled around in it for a bit.

He was at the conference for a few days and found, eventually, these sections that were talking about Jesus. He was enthralled. So he stole the Bible. In due course, he became a Christian just by reading the Bible. After he became a Christian, he went to a nearby church. It was a Catholic church.

He went in to the priest and said, “I’m a Muslim, but I’ve just become a Christian by reading the Bible. What have I got to do?” The priest said, “You need to think about this pretty carefully. You don’t want to make any precipitous decisions here. If you’re really a Muslim, you ought to talk to somebody of your own faith, first.”

My friend wasn’t willing to go down that route, so he tried another church. It was even more liberal. He didn’t know what to do about that. So he just kept on reading his Bible. After a few months, he felt called to ministry. He wanted to bring the gospel to his own people. So he went to the head of the med school at the University of Chicago, and he still, as far as he knew, hadn’t met any Christians.

He said, “I have to quit. I have to study theology so I can learn more about teaching the Bible to my own people.” Well, he thought he was cracked. He tried to dissuade him for two or three months, but eventually, he was going to go, and he went. This fellow didn’t know where to go to school. He just thought he’d look around for the best one.

The best one has got to be Harvard, isn’t it? So he applied to Harvard Divinity School and got in. He was taking a train across the country when he met a Christian leader who persuaded him to go to an evangelical seminary instead. Years went by. This fellow eventually did his PhD at Cambridge.

He’s a deeply committed Christian who’s going in and out of Muslim countries undercover building the church all the time in situations that would curl your hair. I can’t even tell you what his name is. It’s too dangerous. Why? He was attracted by the sheer glory and goodness of Jesus. “Through these, his glory and goodness, he has given us his very great and precious promises.” What are these promises of which the text speaks?

In the context, they’re all gospel promises. The promises that transform you, that prepare you for a life of godliness, that prepare you so that you escape from the corruption of the world caused by evil desires. They are the promise of the new covenant. They’re the promise of Jesus’ rest. They’re the promise of the bread of life. They’re the promise of resurrection life. They’re the promise that if you take up your cross and follow him you will truly be his disciples.

They’re the promises that God gives both for this world and for the life to come. Contrast them with the world’s promises. “If you play by the rules, you can get pretty rich.” When you die, you’ll take out exactly what I’ll take out. Absolutely nothing. “Play your cards right and you can be famous.” That’s really going to be impressive 50 billion years from now, isn’t it?

No, no, these are great and precious promises and they last not only for this life, but for the life to come. Not only so, these promises have been given in order that we might participate in the divine nature. That’s what the text says. “Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature.”

This is the only place in the New Testament that uses precisely this language. It’s language much-loved in Eastern Orthodoxy. It becomes almost the bulwark of their entire theological system regarding what salvation is. Some think too that participating in the divine nature means something like becoming God or becoming godlets or absorbed into God.

Shirley MacLaine, maybe. “God is everywhere and everything and I’m part of God, so I’m God.” That’s a kind of pantheistic view. Or maybe like in Contact, a Jodie Foster sort of absorption into deity. That’s not quite what is going on here. “Through the promises of God we participate in the divine nature.”

In the context first, the emphasis is on moral change. Do you hear the text? “So that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” The emphasis, in other words, is not on ontology (that is, the status of your being.) but on morality.

Moreover, one should always be careful of trying to make an expression that shows up once in the New Testament the pin of your entire theology, because you might not understand it very well. Yet there are other passages that have some similar notions. New birth, for example. Whereby we truly do become children of God.

Peter refers to the new birth in his first epistle, chapter 1. Or the language of John, chapter 17, in which we are likened to God in certain respects. You remember Christ’s prayer? “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory …” There’s the glory again. “… the glory that you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” You participate in the divine nature.

In fact in the preceding verses, the very love we’re supposed to have for one another is supposed to be a reflection of the intra-Trinitarian love of God, the love of the Father for the Son, the love of the Son for the Father. Thus, we participate in the divine nature by the transforming power that comes to us through God’s promises. Now you have promises with content grounding our experience.

B) The reality of our experience is attested by spiritual productivity.

Verses 5–8: “For this reason …” That is, for the reason just given, because God have given us everything we need for life and godliness, including a new nature that enables us to escape the corruption in this world caused by evil desires. “For this reason, therefore, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge,” and so forth.

In other words, precisely because God has given us his promises and because his power does work in us; therefore, work at it. The Bible simply does not encourage quietism. You know? “Let go and let God.” It just doesn’t! There is a sense in which you may say that sort of thing in order to emphasize that it is God who’s doing the work in you.

But it’s far more common to read in Scripture that because God is doing the work in you, therefore, work your little head off. That’s what the text is saying. So we read for example in Philippians. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because it is God working in you.” The text doesn’t say, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling because God has done his bit and now it’s up to you.”

It doesn’t say, “Don’t work at it, just trust God and let go and he’ll take over and give you everything.” It doesn’t say that either! It says, “Work out your own salvation because it is God working in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” So also here. He’s given us all we need of power, all of his promises; therefore, make every effort to work in line with all of these things to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge, and so on and so on.

Reflect briefly on this fascinating list of additions. “Add to your faith goodness.” There it is again. God has disclosed himself in glory and goodness and now you add goodness, moral excellence, genuine transformed goodness. “And to your faith and goodness, add knowledge.” Which in the context probably suggests not just intellectual content but the kind of content that enables moral discernment.

Even after you are morally discerning and pretty knowledgeable, you can be knowledgeable and discerning but still completely without self-control, in which case you might just become arrogant. “So add to your knowledge, self-control.” Not only with respect to food and drink, but in every domain: temper, speech, imagination, sex, addictions, use of time, workaholism, everything.

Then add to that not just a burst of energy in which you control yourself, “I will control myself. I will control myself. I will control myself.” Then next week will let it all go, take a holiday. But endurance, “Add now endurance.” Not just patience, which is passive, but active resolve, unmoved by difficulty, by tears, by obstreperous people, by setbacks, by discouragements, even by personal failures.

In the deepest sense, Christians do not give up. They endure. “Add to that godliness.” You see, you can put in all of these moral sorts of priorities but after a while they can look terribly horizontal. What you need beyond all of that is godliness. That is, an awareness of God in all of life so that all of this conduct is God-centered.

Yet this God-centeredness has moral and social dimensions. “Add to this brotherly love, brotherly kindness.” Not least, love itself as the high point in the so-called Pauline triad, faith, hope, and love. I wish I could unpack this one at great length. Time forbids. All of this, however, is the fruit of the tree of Christian faith.

Verse 8: “If you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Isn’t that interesting? Increasing measure of these things. In Reformation terms, that’s what we mean by sanctification. Interestingly enough however, the Reformers understood well that very often in the New Testament the verb to sanctify or the noun sanctification did not refer to the long process of continuing to grow in holiness.

Sometimes it’s what they called positional sanctification or definitional sanctification. It’s like a shovel and the tabernacle. It was sanctified. It was set aside for God. It doesn’t mean that it was moral or that it was growing. It was set aside for God and thus was sanctified. In this positional sense, we’re sanctified as soon as we’re Christians. We’ve been set aside for God.

A lot of the Pauline usages are that kind of sanctification. Does that mean, therefore, that this emphasis on sanctification as growth is wrong? No, in the New Testament there’s a lot of emphasis on growth, but rarely is this emphasis on growth actually called sanctification. In other words, the word sanctification more commonly refers to positional sanctification.

The concept of sanctification, in fact, is usually not called sanctification. So Philippians 3 is full of sanctification and never uses the word. “Forgetting those things which are behind, I press on. Brothers, I do not think that I have attained. I’m still pressing on to grasp that for which I have been apprehended by God.” That’s sanctification, and Paul never uses the word there. So the word isn’t used here, but it’s sanctification that is in view just the same.

“You possess these things in increasing measure, and that is what will make you effective and fruitful in your knowledge of God.” Do you hear that? It’s not that these things by themselves are the knowledge of God. In one sense they are the outflow of your knowledge of God. God has called you and given you the power to be transformed and cast off the evil desires.

Then you add to your faith this and this and this, and if you enjoy these things in increasing measure then you will be fruitful and productive in your knowledge of God. The thing goes in a cycle. In other words, your knowledge of God turns in part on the transformation of your entire character. In this postmodern age, throw that into your epistemology as well. You can know God, but some of your knowledge of God is going to come out of a life of transformed godliness.

C) The reality of our experience is conditioned by our unflagging perseverance.

Verses 9–11. I wish I had more time to unpack that one, but I want to use my last few moments for the flip side, which is …

2. Truth

Here, too, Peter makes three points.

A) Our confidence in the truth is stabilized by constant review.

Verses 12–15: “So I will always remind you of these things, even though you know them and are firmly established in the truth you now have. I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body,” and so forth. There is a part of us that really does want to have new things all the time.

Some of us come to church thinking, “Well, I already know it all.” Especially if we go to churches that don’t have very good Bible teaching, in any case, because everything we then do here is pretty insipid and we have heard it all. Even if you are in a church that has excellent Bible teaching in every domain, not only from the pulpit but in adult classes and study groups and small groups and evangelism, really excellent teaching of the Word of God, a fair bit of the time ought to be devoted to reinforcement, to review.

When I was a boy, we used to sing the song, “Tell me the old, old story of unseen things above.” Does anybody still sing that anymore? Yes? No? Some of you have never heard of it. I hated it. I loathed it with a passion when I was about 14. “Tell me the story simply, as to a little child.” Give me a break!

“Tell me the story often, for I forget so soon; the early dew of morning has passed away at noon.” Give me a break! I learned that last week, last year. I’ve been learning this stuff since I was a little kid. Tell me something a little more exciting and new. I loathed that song with a passion. It was demeaning for my 14-year-old brilliance.

Now I’m in my 50s and I think it’s a great song, because we all forget so soon. It’s why the Lord Jesus on the night that he was betrayed left us one of only two rites. At the heart of that rite are the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” There is a great place for teaching the truth again and again and again.

I have a friend. He’s semi-retired now from Trinity. He comes from a particular denominational background, the Mennonites. He offers a caricature of his own heritage. It is a caricature. He would tell you that. It’s very insightful. He said the first generation believed the gospel and thought that there were certain social entailments.

The next generation assumed the gospel and focused on the social entailments. The last generation denied the gospel and had only the social entailments when there was nothing to be entailed to. So in all of your desire to be relevant, to be focused or to be on the front end of thinking through epistemology or social concerns or public policy or dealing with abortion or whatever it is you’re interested in, don’t start merely assuming the gospel.

That must be the passion at the center of everything. Part of the way you achieve that is by review, by going to a church where you are constantly reviewing what is central. This does not mean that there is no place in the church for the kind of teaching that is extending you, that is stretching you, that is teaching the whole counsel of God, that is expounding book after book. That’s also true.

Although I want in local church preaching to be understood in the main outlines by any reasonably intelligent 14-year-old, I’m quite prepared to indulge in the odd excurses that will challenge the socks off the top 15 percent. Because I don’t want too many people in the church to sit there and say, in effect, “Go ahead, Preacher. Tell me something I haven’t heard before. I dare you.” Oh, they don’t put it quite so crassly, but there’s a lot of that around, isn’t there?

How dare anybody come to the Word of God like that? There’s such wealth here that they need to be exposed to some things that will take the socks off them, that will open up their categories and recognize you see that there’s still more to learn. Still, when all of those caveats are in, understand well there is an important place in the Christian church for review, because we forget so soon. We are such a fickle lot.

B) Our confidence in the truth is established on historical witness.

Verses 16–18: “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The reference is to the transfiguration. “For he received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice,” and so forth.

Consider Buddhism. Buddhism is a deeply ahistorical religion. If you could prove somehow (I don’t have any idea how) that Gautama the Buddha never lived, you would not destroy Buddhism, because Buddhism, for its credibility depends, at the end of the day, on its intrinsic attractiveness and its intellectual cohesiveness. It does not depend on any historically contingent datum. None.

Go to Hinduism. In Hinduism there is one universal truth that manifests itself in quite literally millions of gods. Supposing you could prove somehow, I have no idea how, that Krishna never lived. Would you destroy Hinduism? Of course not, go down the street to a Shiva temple, instead. Because Hinduism is not finally dependent on any alleged ostensible manifestation of a particular deity. It’s built on something bigger.

Go to Islam. Now you go to your friendly neighborhood imam and you say, “I’ve got a question for you. I need to word this carefully so you will understand me. Could you imagine that God, Allah, could have given his final revelation to someone other than Muhammad?” Probably he will misunderstand the question.

He will probably say, “I believe that he, Muhammad, did receive the final revelation. God revealed himself through Abraham and he revealed himself through Moses and he revealed himself through the prophet Jesus, but the final revelation came through the prophet Muhammad.”

You say, “I’m not disputing that. I’m a Christian. I don’t believe that, but that’s not my point. That’s not my question. My question is, could God in his sovereignty, had he wanted to do so, give his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad.” The imam will say, “Of course. Muhammad is not the revelation. He’s the bearer of the revelation. God could’ve given it to anybody he wanted to. God is sovereign. But we believe that he gave it to Muhammad.”

Now come to Christianity. The same question in Christianity is not even coherent. Could God have given his revelation through someone other than Jesus? But Jesus is the revelation and he’s not an abstract man. He’s a first-century Jewish man, a particular man at a particular time and place. There are some facts that you have to believe about him to be saved, including his resurrection, for example.

So what does Paul say in 1 Corinthians 15? “Supposing,” he says, “Christ was not risen from the dead.” What follows? First, he says, “Your faith is in vain.” Because in the Bible, faith’s validity is in the truthfulness of its object, not the intensity with which it is held. You could believe something passionately and it would not be true faith if the object of that faith is false.

In fact, Paul makes the point even clearer. Supposing you believe passionately in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but Jesus did not rise from the dead. Paul says, “Your faith is in vain. More, the apostles are liars.” Because, you see, your faith in the resurrection of Christ turns on historic testimony. Christianity is a historic religion in the sense that God has manifested himself in space and time.

The way we come to know about what God has done in space and time is by witnesses. How do we come to know something? Not just to believe it, but to know that certain things happened? How do we come to insist that certain things did happen as the truth such that we now have faith in them? In the first instance, by witnesses. If Christ did not raise from the dead, then the witnesses are all liars.

“Then it follows,” he says, “that you’re still dead in your trespasses and sins.” In fact, he says, “We’re of all people most to be pitied because we believe something that isn’t true.” In other words, Christian faith is profoundly tied to objective claims about what takes place in space-time history.

You cannot know those things with the knowledge of omniscience, but you can know them in any meaningful sense in a human knowledge sort of way through the reliability of the witnesses that have told us about these things. Our confidence in the truth is established on historical witness.

I suspect that the reason why Peter picks on this particular element from the life of Christ, the transfiguration, is because as it is presented in the Gospels, the transfiguration points back to Jesus’ preincarnate existence and thus to the incarnation, to his resurrection, to his ascension, and to his return in glory.

The transfiguration embraces all of these things and points in symbol-laden ways to all of them. All of these things come and take place in space-time history. “And we were witnesses of these things,” he says. “We heard the voice. We saw the glory. We were with him on the mount.”

C) Our confidence in the truth is grounded in biblical revelation.

Verses 19–21: “We have the word of the prophets made more certain …” This is not saying that the word of the prophets was uncertain until something else happened. That’s not the point. As if the word of the prophets was a bit dicey. You couldn’t really trust it until along came the transfiguration. Then whoop-de-do. Suddenly all the prophets are now trustworthy. That’s not the point at all. As if the Scriptures were not all that secure until Jesus came along.

Rather, the idea is that the word of the prophets in Scripture, certain as it is, is confirmed by the arrival of that to which they pointed. Since the Scriptures predicted a coming Messiah, since the Scriptures predicted the coming of the God-Man, the one who in Isaiah is described both as David’s son and as the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Therefore, when all of these things come along, they confirm all that has already been said. In other words, the apostolic witness then fulfills this word and thus authenticates it yet further, making its authority all the more transparent. So, verse 19, “… and you will do well to pay attention to all of these sorts of things just as the morning star rises in your hearts,” which probably means, in the context, rising in understanding and transformation in your mind and heart.

“Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.” That is, by the prophet’s own interpretation of the events that were experienced. “Rather, the prophecy …” What was written down, the words that have come to us. “… never had its origin ultimately in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Brothers and sisters, which shall you choose: experience or truth? The left wing of the airplane or the right? Love or integrity? Evangelism or discipleship? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience? The front wheels of the car or the rear? In the light of Holy Scripture, brothers and sisters in Christ, damn all false antitheses to hell.

I put it as strongly as that. Do you know why? Because they generate false gods. They generate idolatry. They perpetuate idols. They twist and distort our souls. They launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ and taking us away from the cohesiveness of God-given, life-transforming revelation.

The truth is that Jesus is Lord of all, of the truth and of our experience. He insists that we bring every thought into captivity to his gracious self-disclosure. He insists that we love him and that we trust him. He makes us his slaves in every domain and thereby frees us. Jesus is Lord. Let us pray.

In your mercy, Lord God, grant us in our small corners, in our small patch to know you with the balance and integrity of your self-disclosure in your Son and in your Word. Correct us when we go astray. Help us to pursue you humbly and passionately, not only to understand, but to obey and to conform to this word which you have given. We ask these great mercies for the good of the church for which Christ Jesus shed his blood and for the glory of your dear Son. In whose name we pray, amen.