two books, one author

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.

chapter two

two books god has written

The church has known this for nearly two thousand years, though most modern believers have never once heard it framed plainly. God has written two books.¹

Now I do not mean two Bibles. I mean that God has revealed Himself in two distinct ways, and both of them are real, and both of them are true, and both of them are God actually speaking. The old theologians called them general revelation and special revelation. And once you understand the distinction between them, you will never read your Bible in quite the same way again, and you will never sit across from a lost soul in quite the same way again either.

General revelation is what God reveals to every human being, everywhere, all the time. It is the revelation He has built into creation itself, into the conscience, into the very structure of what it means to be a human being. The man in the deepest jungle who has never once heard the name of Christ still has it. The infant raised in the most determined atheist household still has it. The skeptic lecturing at the university still has it. Nobody escapes general revelation, because God has woven it straight into the fabric of the world He made.

Mark that well. The heavens themselves preach a sermon every single day, and it is a sermon that every soul on earth hears whether they know it or not. The order of the universe, the beauty of a sunrise, the precision of the planets held in their orbits, the conscience that pricks a man when he steals or lies, all of these are God speaking. They are His first book, and the whole human race has been reading it from the moment they drew their first breath.²

The heavens preach a sermon every day, and every soul on earth hears it whether they know it or not.

Without excuse. That is the sober conclusion Paul draws from the first book. General revelation is enough to leave every soul accountable before God, enough to strip away every excuse, but it is not enough to save. For that, we need the second book.

Special revelation is the second book. It is what God has revealed specifically, verbally, and propositionally, through the Scriptures and supremely through the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the sixty-six books of the Bible, God-breathed, inerrant, and authoritative. It is the Word made flesh, dwelling among us. It is the very thing general revelation can never give: the name of the Savior, the way of salvation, the specific story of redemption running from Genesis all the way to Revelation.

So we have two books. The one is universal, given to everyone alive. The other is specific, given through God inspiring the writers who wrote down the Word we hold in our hands today. The one establishes that God is. The other tells you who He is and what He has done. Both are real, both are true, and both are necessary.

chapter three

what each book can and cannot do

This next part ought to change the way you think about every difficult conversation you have ever had with a lost soul, because each of these two books can do some things the other one simply cannot, and the mature Christian learns which book to open at which moment.

General revelation can establish a great deal. It can establish that God exists. It can establish that He is powerful, and intelligent, and orderly, because the creation that bears His fingerprints is every one of those things. It can establish that a moral law exists, because every human conscience testifies to a real right and a real wrong even when men labor to suppress it. It can establish that human beings have dignity and purpose, because they cannot live for a day without reaching for both. It can establish that something is deeply and undeniably wrong with the world, because anyone with eyes in his head can see that things are not as they ought to be. And it can establish that we ache for transcendence, for justice, for meaning, for eternity, because no human heart has ever once been satisfied with this world alone. All of that is general revelation doing its quiet work, and not one line of it requires you to open a Bible to demonstrate it.

But general revelation cannot do everything, and here is where its limit falls. It cannot tell you the name of the Savior. It cannot tell you the specific way of salvation. It cannot teach you the Trinity. It cannot explain the substitutionary atonement. It cannot hand you the gospel of grace through faith in Jesus Christ. For every one of those things, you need the second book.

Paul knew exactly what general revelation could and could not do. It could make a man accountable. It could leave him standing without excuse. But it could never save him. For salvation, a preacher must come bearing the special revelation of the gospel. The two books work together, hand in hand, and neither one of them was ever meant to do the other one’s job.

The two books work together, and neither was ever meant to do the other one’s job.

Now do you see why this matters so enormously for how Christians engage the world? Most believers reach for the second book the very moment any conversation grows the least bit difficult. But the world has not yet accepted the authority of that second book, and to quote it at them as though it settled the question is to assume the very thing they have not yet conceded; you are arguing from an authority they do not yet recognize, and wondering why it does not move them. The wiser path is to begin with the first book, the one written into creation and conscience and human nature, that book the world cannot deny without denying its own self. You can reason from it. You can build a case upon it that the honest unbeliever cannot simply wave away. And once you have done that patient work, the second book lands very differently when at last you open it, because you have already shown him that reality itself matches what the Bible has been saying all along.

You are arguing from an authority they have not yet conceded, and wondering why it does not move them.

chapter four

paul on mars hill

Open your Bible to the seventeenth chapter of Acts, because if you want to watch the framework of this whole study lived out in a single sermon, this is the place to go and stand. Paul is in Athens, on the Areopagus, surrounded by Greek philosophers who have never read the Hebrew Scriptures and would not accept them as authoritative if they had. And Paul is about to preach the gospel to them.

Now watch carefully what he does, because most Christians have read straight past it their whole lives. Paul does not open his Bible. Paul does not quote Isaiah. Paul does not say thus saith the Lord. Paul does something the modern Bible-thumping believer would consider very nearly scandalous. Paul quotes their poets.

That first phrase comes from a Cretan poet named Epimenides, written some six hundred years before Christ. The second comes from a Greek poet named Aratus. Paul, the apostle of Christ, stands on a pagan hill and quotes pagan poets to make his case for the true and living God. And it is not an accident, and it is not a compromise. It is a model. It is how he meets them exactly where they are standing.³

He begins with their own altar to the unknown god, a thing they themselves had built with their own hands. He reasons from creation. He appeals to what they already know in their bones about providence and order and human longing. He builds the case carefully and patiently, working the whole time from general revelation, using their own categories and their own writers. And only then, only after he has laid all that groundwork, does he pivot to the resurrection of Christ and call them to repentance.

Three responses to the very same sermon. Some mocked. Some wanted to hear more later. Some believed. That is what faithful proclamation looks like in any age under heaven. Paul did not somehow do it wrong because not every man responded; he did it exactly right, and the Spirit of God brought home precisely the harvest the Spirit intended to bring. And the lesson is plain. Paul met educated pagans on their own ground, with their own writers, reasoning from what they already accepted, and led them step by step toward the gospel. He used both books, beginning with the first and moving to the second. And when believers today know only how to thump the Bible and have never once troubled to learn how to reason from creation and conscience, they are not being more faithful than Paul was. They are being less.

They are not being more faithful than Paul was. They are being less.

chapter five

the holy spirit and the open heart

I have to stop right here and say something that will keep this whole study honest, because there is a real temptation, when a person first learns to reason like this, to start leaning on the reasoning itself, thinking that it is the right argument that saves a soul. And that, My Friend, is simply not true.

No argument has ever saved a soul. No reasoning has ever regenerated a heart. No clever case built from creation and conscience has ever once raised a spiritually dead man to life. Salvation is the work of the Holy Spirit of God, nothing less than that and nothing other than that, and it will never be accomplished by anything else.

Read that one carefully. The natural man, the unregenerate soul, cannot receive the things of the Spirit. Not will not. Cannot. It is a matter of capacity, not merely a matter of willingness. The lost man could memorize every argument in this little booklet and every verse in your whole Bible and still stand just as lost at the end of it as he was at the beginning, until the Spirit of God opens his eyes and grants him repentance.⁴

So why do we reason at all, then? Why did Paul bother to build his careful case in Athens, if salvation is the Spirit’s work alone? Because God has appointed the means as well as the end. He ordained that faith should come by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, and He is pleased to use the patient, reasoned witness of His people as the very instrument through which the Spirit does His sovereign work. We reason; He illuminates. We plant and we water; He gives the increase. Our part is to be faithful in the reasoning and the pleading; His part is to raise the dead, and He has never once failed to do His part. It sets us marvelously free, this truth, for it lifts off our shoulders a weight we were never meant to carry, the weight of thinking that a soul’s eternity hangs on the cleverness of our argument. It does not. It hangs on the mercy of God.

We reason; He illuminates. We plant and we water; He gives the increase.

chapter six

peeling apart the layers

Out of this whole framework flows a single, enormously useful habit, and I want to put it in your hand, a habit that will serve you in every hard conversation you ever have, with the world and with your own brothers alike. It is this: learn to peel a hard question apart into its layers, and to see which layer belongs to the first book and which belongs to the second.

Take the hardest and most contested question of our day, the question of the unborn. Most believers rush at it with a Bible verse and get nowhere, because they have not separated the layers. There are at least two. The first layer is biological. Is the unborn a living human being? And here is the thing: every honest biology textbook on earth says yes; the unborn is alive, biologically human, a distinct organism carrying its own DNA. That layer can be settled without ever once opening a Bible. It is general revelation doing its work, observable facts that any honest inquirer can go and verify for himself. The second layer is moral. Does that living human organism possess the moral status that would protect it from being killed? That is no longer a science question at all. That is a philosophy question, and it hangs entirely upon what grounds human dignity in the first place. The Christian says human dignity is grounded in being made in the image of God. The secular thinker has to ground it somewhere else, and usually struggles mightily to do so coherently. That is the layer where the actual debate lives and breathes, and most Christians never even arrive at it, because they never first settled the biological layer beneath it.⁵

Do you see what has happened there? By separating the layers, we have done two things at once. We have established, on shared rational ground, something the other side cannot deny without denying biology itself. And we have isolated the actual point of disagreement so that we can walk straight up to it and address it directly, rather than talking past one another forever in the dark.

Learn to peel a hard question apart into its layers, and see which belongs to which book.

The very same move works on any hard question you will ever face. On origins, the first layer is whether something can come from nothing; reason itself says no, and science has never once observed it happen. The second layer is whether the order and the fine-tuning we plainly observe is better explained by design or by blind chance, which can also be reasoned out from observation. The third layer is the identification of the Designer, and that is the point where special revelation must come in, because creation can tell you that a Creator exists but only the Bible can tell you His name. On meaning, the first layer is whether human life can hold any meaning at all if there is no God; the honest atheist admits that it cannot. The second is whether the meaning we then so desperately need can be found anywhere but in our Creator. The third is the specific shape of that meaning, revealed to us in Christ. Every hard question is layered. Learn to peel them apart, and you will find that general revelation can do an enormous amount of the work before you ever open your Bible, and that when you do at last open it, it lands upon ground already plowed and prepared.

chapter seven

a word about method

A certain misunderstanding always arises the moment a Christian begins reasoning from general revelation, and I want to head it off, because someone in the room invariably concludes that you are abandoning the Bible. You are not, and I want to say so plainly, for I do not want a single soul walking away from this study the least bit confused about it.

The Bible is the highest authority. The Bible is God-breathed. The Bible is inerrant and altogether sufficient for faith and practice. None of that is in question, and nothing in this little booklet has questioned it for a moment. What we have been talking about, from the first page, is method, how you engage a soul who does not yet accept that authority. And the answer is that you reason from the things he does accept, patiently, until you can show him that reality itself testifies to the very thing Scripture has been saying all along.

That word answer in Peter’s instruction is worth holding up to the light, for it is the Greek word apologia, the very word from which we get our word apologetics. It does not mean a soft feeling or a bare assertion. It means a reasoned defense, the kind of careful case a man would stand up and make in a courtroom. Peter does not say give them a verse. Peter says give them a reason. The very word he reached for presumes that the Christian will be able to think, to argue, to engage, to defend. And mark well the manner he commands it in: with meekness and fear. A reasoned case, yes, but a gentle one, offered humbly and never hurled like a stone.⁶

Peter does not say give them a verse. Peter says give them a reason.

And there is a second kind of conversation worth a word here before we finish, for it matters every bit as much as engaging the world outside. Some of the hardest conversations a believer ever has are not with the lost man at all. They are with the brother or the sister in the very next pew, who has come to a different conclusion on some contested matter, a disputed passage, a secondary doctrine, a question the Scripture does not settle half so plainly as either side likes to pretend. And the same skill applies. We learn to peel apart the layers, to see clearly what Scripture actually settles and what it genuinely leaves open, to hold our convictions firmly where the Word is plain and with a wide-open hand where it is not, and to do the whole of it with that same meekness and fear, extending to a brother the very patience we would dearly want extended to ourselves. For a man can be entirely right on a matter and still be entirely wrong in the way that he holds it.

A man can be entirely right on a matter and still be entirely wrong in the way that he holds it.

And through the whole of it, from first to last, remember that the saving and the convincing work belongs to the Spirit alone. You are not the closer of the sale; you are the faithful witness, and the Spirit is the one who opens hearts. You reason; He illuminates. You plant the small seed of an argument drawn from creation, and somewhere down the road, in His own perfect time, He may cause it to grow up into a great tree of saving faith.