My aim in the previous post was to point out that God's self-authenticating presence and revelation of himself, through the Bible, by means of the Spirit's illuminating work in that Word is a good thing for believers to know and believe, even though it may sound subjective (and, therefore, threatening). But that's the point: hearing is subjective, in that you can't prove you heard the birds sing, or the horn honk, or the kid laugh. It's possible to marshall evidence that such things have happened, could happen, and even did happen the morning or day you claim that they did, but how can you prove infallibly that your ears heard them?
If proving the truth of Scripture were possible by some test completely apart from God's authority, the authority of that revelation would no longer reside in God but in the credibility of the means that were employed. If I were to prove to you that I am 6'5" tall, I would need an accurate tape measure. But once we both agree that the tape is "objective" (i.e. that it measures accurately), you are no longer believing my claim based on my testimony but on the tape's. This removes any authority that my testimony might have carried. The same is true of God. If we expect some other means of discerning the truthfulness of his revelation to come in and bear witness for him, his testimony is no longer authoritative, and we have robbed God of his authoritative self-revelation. How could we possibly expect something outside God to be more truthful than God himself?
This is not to knock evidential arguments, or reasoned discussions, or biblical exegesis: we do well to show evidences of God's Word being verified as true and corroborating what even unbelievers can discern through natural means. However, if we think that such evidences, or even our own eloquent reason, are enough for people to "see" the beauty of the gospel and embrace it, we (as Calvin said) "mock the Holy Spirit", in that we leave no room for him to work in, through, above, or even in spite of our work. He has, in essence, no work left to perform when we try to remove all subjective aspects from seeing the truthfulness of Scripture: the Spirit has, then, no need to "bear witness with our spirit that we are sons of God", and we would be poor indeed if such work was left undone. We also, in neglecting the Spirit's subjective work of bearing witness to the truthfulness of Scripture, forget that everything we do - as either believer or unbeliever - is done as a result of the sustaining power and presence of the Spirit, whether by common or saving grace.
BHT
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