Sola Scriptura and the Golden Calf in Exodus

Dave Drewery: Welcome to Focal Point with another edition of Ask Pastor Mike Live. Some of the big disagreements in Christianity trace back to one big question: where does real spiritual authority come from? Today Pastor Mike Fabarez wades into exactly that, unpacking why scripture alone carries the weight it does. Later, a curious moment buried in the Old Testament gets a second look. A strange excuse, a suspicious find, and a question about what was really happening beneath the surface. Pastor Mike works through both with scripture in hand. I'm Dave Drewery and this is Ask Pastor Mike Live. Japheth, how can I help?
Japheth: I was curious about Sola Scriptura. For a lot of my life, I've been adverse to a lot of the teachings of Catholicism. At face value, it seems incongruous with scripture. I've had a strong reaction to those teachings without being very informed by them. It seems like a lot of it boils down to Sola Scriptura. That's a belief that I agree with, but it's also one that I've taken for granted and just one that I was introduced to at the beginning of my faith. I was curious if you could give your best defense of why Sola Scriptura is true.
Pastor Mike Fabarez: I'd go back to passages like Deuteronomy 29:29. The secret things belong to the Lord, but the things revealed to us belong to us and our children forever. The only way we would know anything about a God who is transcendent is if he reveals himself. In the book where he reveals himself, he says, "I've also revealed myself in creation and in conscience." So we get something that we know, that we can say, "Let's look at creation, let's look interior into our conscience that condemns us sometimes and exonerates us at other times." But he gives us the clear teaching in some objective propositional sense in the language and the words and the sentences of the Bible. That's how I know anything. If a guru or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a priest or a preacher wants to tell me something about God behind the veil, the only way I know if he's right or wrong is to ask God. The only way I'm going to get an answer from God is to look at what he's revealed. What he's revealed is in the word. That's the one objective, unalterable source of his information. It's a logical argument. There are a lot of things he hasn't told us, and those are still secret to us. Think about it. That was said in Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Bible. Moses was about to die, hand off the baton to Joshua, and basically saying, "We've got these five books, the foundation of the rest of the Old Testament, and what he hasn't told us, he hasn't told us, but what he has told us, that's ours and we know it and we're going to hold on to this and our children have it forever." Well, now we have 66 books and God has closed the canon, according to Jude, and he's once for all delivered this to the saints and we've got it now. So we're going to hang on to it until what it says comes next, and that is Christ is going to come back in glory on the clouds and set up a kingdom. Then the word of God, the incarnate person, the second person of the Godhead, is going to live among us and he is going to be the source of all information because he's going to be the God-man and live as our king. The kingdoms of the world will be gone and the kingdom of our Lord, the Father, and of his Christ, his son, is going to rule and reign forever and ever. All I can say is if anyone's going to say this is right or this is wrong, whether it's a professor or the Watchtower and Tract Society or Confucius or whatever, I'm going to say, "Well, how do we know? Who says?" I've got to go to the Bible and say if the Bible is a reasonable authority—and that's going to have to look at like the book of Isaiah, who says this should be obvious as well. Other gurus, other prophets, other prognosticators cannot tell the end from the beginning. They cannot tell the future. They can't do what God does. Even as God mocks through Isaiah's pen and his voice, "If you're gods and we're supposed to fear you, tell us what is yet to come. Tell us what's going to come. You can't. Tell us even what is in the ancient past. You can't even tell us that. You can only tell us what you've learned from historians and you don't even know the ancient past, the prehistory, and you certainly don't know what's going to come." So we're not going to fear you. Only God can do that. There is no other God but God, and God is the God who can do in the pages—and we see it from pages now—but in the voice and the pages of the prophets and the apostles, it's punctuated by predictive prophecy. So that's the book I'm going to go to because it's got God's imprimatur. It's got his signature. It's got his fingerprints all over it, and no other book does that. There's no prophetic telling of future events in the Quran, or none in the Pali Canon, or none in Confucius's writings. Even if you were going to say Nostradamus was pretty good at this, go read Nostradamus. He speaks like he's just smoked pot all day long and it's all so nebulous and mysterious. Who knows half of what he's saying? None of it is cogent as, "There's going to be Cyrus and he's going to decree to rebuild and restore Jerusalem." Clear teachings of prophecy. The Messiah's going to be born, Micah 5:2, in Ephrathah, in Bethlehem. These are clear prophecies of scripture. So I'm knowing first of all, I've got a book and God has made it very clear by how it is punctuated by predictive prophecy that it's true. Think about Paul in the first four verses of Romans. He ends the paragraph with, "I am out there trying to get the obedience of the faith of these people all the way out in Rome. That's my job." He starts with, "I'm given this apostleship, but I want to get people to obey the faith, the corpus of Christianity. I want you to obey God. I want you to obey Christ." Then he says, "Well, how did I get this authority to tell you to do all this?" He says two things: because all of this was told beforehand by the prophets that there would be this one that would come. That's the first thing. Then he says, "And he was declared with power to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead." There's the other thing. So even if we just spent our time with those two things, that there is a resurrected Christ and there is a book that tells us about that resurrected Christ that is punctuated by predictive prophecy, I'm going to say that to me then becomes the only source of information that I can trust. Since there's no one else—I don't care how funny your hat looks—there's no one else that has that kind of credential, I'm going to believe it. As it says in scripture, I would be very, as it says in Hebrews 2:1-3, I would be remiss, I would be in danger if I neglected it. I better pay attention. If they were punished for neglecting what happened on Mount Sinai, I would be really in trouble to neglect what is clearly the fulfillment of all the Old Testament when Christ came and everything that happened in Christ's ministry was confirmed by the apostolic miraculous gifts, as 2 Corinthians 12:12 says. The signs and wonders were done and proved that everything that Jesus did—the cornerstone was the resurrection itself—and we've got to obey it. It all comes from this book. That's why I'm a Sola Scriptura guy and I'm not a Watchtower and Tract Society guy, I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, and I'm not a Catholic. They build that right into their doctrinal statement and they say, "Yeah, the Bible is an authority, but we're also an authority. Everything the church has said in the past, sacred tradition, is an authority." "So we're an authority, the magisterial authority of the church, and tradition of the church is authority, and the Bible is authority." Here's what they'll say in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: you cannot have one authority without the other two. You've got to have all three. I'm going to say once you do that, then I'm thinking, what happens when they disagree about anything? About the veneration of Mary, about purgatory, about the sacramental system. If they disagree, which I think they often do—all you've got to do is take up an open Bible and read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They're going to disagree. Then I'm going to say, "Who do I believe?" I know this by talking with priests, talking with Catholics, reading the Catechism. They're going to tell you to believe the Magisterium and sacred tradition. You're going to have to set the Bible aside and you better believe them. Just like everybody else does. Pearl of Great Price, Keys to Scripture (Mary Baker Eddy), the Mormon Doctrines and Covenants. It goes on and on. "Believe us, you can't trust that book." Everybody and every cult is going to diminish the book and it's always going to promote their authority. That's not the case for us. Every preacher that's a Bible preacher says, "Listen, this isn't about me or my voice or my authority. It's really about the Bible. My job is to accurately teach it. That's all that we're about." We're nothing. As Paul said, "Apollos, Paul, Cephas, we're nothing." God is about God, it's about the truth. We are the heralds, the ones just bringing the message. God is the one and you listen to him. He's the authority. We're just telling you what he says. I just think it's a logical conclusion that God has to reveal himself for us to know anything.
Dave Drewery: You're listening to Focal Point with Pastor Mike Fabarez, in which you're hearing today are real calls from Ask Pastor Mike Live, Pastor Mike's weekly call-in broadcast where listeners bring their actual questions straight to him. No rehearsed topics, no prepared answers, just Pastor Mike and the Word of God live on the air. We want to invite you to be a part of it. Ask Pastor Mike Live can be heard every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central, and the phone lines are open to you. Get the call-in number and all the details at askpastormike.live. Let's get back to our program for today.
Japheth: Definitely. I definitely agree. I just have been wanting to avoid having strong uninformed opinions. I've had a lot of pretty strong negative feelings toward the Catholic Church without having really thought through them. I know that once you start digging into it, especially once you start getting into the church fathers and trying to investigate into tradition, there's a lot of reading, there's a lot to sift through. I was curious if you had a resource in mind that you would recommend if I wanted to go a little deeper. I know you have your bibliology series.
Pastor Mike Fabarez: Well, there's a book I just finished writing and I'm just now getting some endorsements for. It's coming out in September. It's called The Bible: A Book Like No Other. I guess it's a good Protestant 275 pages of information about why the Bible is a book like no other. It's better than any other church, any other leader, any other preacher, any other person. It is the end authority of everything. That's coming out soon. There are plenty of books—mine's not the end-all obviously—but here's what I would say in the meantime: go online and the Catechism of the Catholic Church is posted online. It's all free, or you can just buy your copy. You find them all the time at used bookstores for five bucks. Just read. Because when you read, your hair will curl in light of everything you know about the Bible. I just called up the Catechism. Here is section 890. Listen to this: "Christ endowed the church's shepherds"—now of course the word shepherds is pastors—"with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals." I just want you to think about that. Just let that one sit in your mind. "Christ endowed the church's shepherds with the charism, the divine granted gift, of infallibility in matters of faith and morals." Now Peter, who they think is the first pope, let's just think in your mind—you know the Bible—in Galatians. Paul sits there and says, "Oh, I had to go confront Peter to his face." You want to talk about how important it was that he understood the whole issue of circumcision and where it lay in the whole issue of justification? I had to go confront him because he was withdrawing from the people that didn't believe that you've got to have these signs of Judaism. He was wrong. Apparently, we know—and all you've got to do is look around—you know that the church's shepherds don't have infallibility, certainly. Go through all my sermons, you're going to find mistakes. You're going to read statements like that and say, "You're kidding me." All you've got to do to really appreciate the Bible is look at what people are saying about their churches. What you're going to find in real Protestant churches is humility. That is, "Here's our doctrinal statement and here's what we're trying to promote, and it looks biblical because it's all filled with scriptural references." You read the Roman Catholic Catechism, you know what you're going to find at the bottom of the page? Yeah, some Bible references, but you're also going to find all kinds of references—and I've got a companion reference of all the references they're quoting—and it's all the councils, the confessions, and all the magisterium historical documents that they're quoting in the Catechism. They're going back to "let us quote ourselves from 500 years ago, from 700 years ago, from 100 years ago, from 1,500 years ago." That to me, if you do that for a while, you're going to go, "Wow." You will become a Sola Scriptura Protestant through and through just by watching the way that the circular reasoning of "just listen to us, we're right, we're infallible, we know what we're doing, you can't read the Bible on your own, you've got to have us as the infallible interpreter." It's exactly what you'll find going to jw.org and hearing them say that the Watchtower and Tract Society is the infallible interpreter of scripture. You cannot understand scripture unless you go to the JW organization to learn what it says. Or if you're going to go and learn about Mormonism, they'll say, "Well, the Bible cannot be trusted. It's been copied so many times." That's why I wrote this last book, because I wanted people to say you cannot fall to these people. It's not just non-Christians that are knocking the Bible; it's the cult groups who call themselves Christian. Mormons love to be called Christian. "Don't call us Mormons, call us Christians." Why do these "Christians" knock the Bible continually? They constantly do, and we can't let that happen. Happy to send you, just for your frequent flyer miles on this program, a free copy of the book. I'll phonetically spell your name in the front and send you a copy when it comes out in September. I hope it's edifying for you. Did any of that help?
Japheth: Thank you, Mike. Yeah, definitely. I really appreciate it.
Dave Drewery: All right, let's go to Jimmy. Jimmy, you're on the air with Pastor Mike. How can I help?
Jimmy: I had a question in my chronological Bible reading for this day. I was going through the Exodus and the golden calf episode. One thing I've always wanted to ask you or any of the other pastors on radio, I've always wanted to ask them in Exodus 32:10-24. God told Moses, "The people have made a calf." Then when you get down to verses 21 through 24, Moses asks Aaron, "Why did you do this stupid thing?" Aaron says the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in the Bible. He says, "I just grabbed all this gold and threw it in the fire and the calf came out." My question about that is, what if that is exactly what happened? It would kind of be like Satan did that. That's what it sounds like, because I just can't imagine Aaron being such a knucklehead to say such a ludicrous excuse. The excuse is so ludicrous I can't imagine Aaron actually saying that unless something physically like that happened.
Pastor Mike Fabarez: Here is at least what I think is my common-sense hermeneutic in reading this text. There are a few reasons that lead me to what I think most people are going to think when they read this text: this is his deflection, this is his excuse-making, this is his cowardice when being confronted by his brother. That's another reason I think it's an excuse, because it's his brother. Just like with our family, our guard goes down the most with our family. In other words, we're more apt to give a ridiculous rationale and justification for our stupidity or our transgression with our family more than we would a colleague at work. It just seems to me that this is not a supernatural event; this is just Aaron being a bonehead and saying, "I didn't do it on purpose, it just happened." I guess it's kind of like—and I know because he's not a kid—but it reminds me of being a parent and listening to kids make amazing, fanciful excuses for their disobedience. I don't know anyone—and again, I can't remember every Exodus commentary I've ever read—but I can't remember anyone ever saying this was some kind of demonic, supernatural manifestation. If it were, I think there would be more said to this and the rest of the text would have said something about that. Here's what I think is the problem in all of this. If you really study this—I remember back to my early classes in the Pentateuch—there is a syncretism. That's the word we often use in missiology about missions. There is a blending of real worship of God with the Egyptian worship, which was often patterned after the worship of the bull, which was very important. Apis (or Hapi), the idea of the old religion of a lot of these slaves. Watching the Egyptians worship, they wanted that kind of merged with the worship of Yahweh. So they envisioned Yahweh riding on the back of the bull. They still wanted Yahweh to be a part of this and they wanted him even to be superior to it, but they were syncretizing the idea of what Moses had taught them with this kind of familiar picture. It's a lot of what has happened in going into South America, for instance. A lot of things that have gone on with the social gospel or even in places where they really are inclined toward female deities. The promotion of Mary in a lot of the more modern history of Catholicism, by that I mean last two or three hundred years, I think has been fueled by the syncretism of wanting female deities and saying, "Well, we've got that for you, at least in part. Mary can serve that role." So now we've got everybody praying to Mary and part of that is driven by this syncretistic desire to merge what is orthodox in Catholicism with cultural interest. Well, their cultural interests spiritually many of them were what they saw worshipped in Egypt. So they had this interest to go back to Egypt obviously in many ways and they often said it out loud. Whatever this was, I do think it was obviously something they had seen in Egypt—the bull worship—and they were trying to say, "Well, we're going to say this is now our way to worship God." But back in Exodus 20, clearly God had said no images involved in this. "You're not going to use images to worship me. That's not how this works." So they were violating scripture clearly. No visible, tangible icons for worship. So I don't think it was a supernatural event. I think it was just a bad, dumb, fanciful excuse.
Jimmy: It's just so ludicrous that it's hard to imagine that anybody would make up something so ludicrous.
Dave Drewery: That's Pastor Mike Fabarez and you've been listening to Focal Point and another edition of Ask Pastor Mike Live, where real listeners bring their real questions to Pastor Mike during his weekly call-in broadcast. If you'd like to be part of the next one, it airs Tuesday through Thursday at 1:00 PM Central and the lines are open to anyone. Find the call-in number and everything else you need at askpastormike.live, or watch anytime on the Mike Fabarez channel on YouTube. For more of Pastor Mike's teaching, the full library is waiting at focalpointradio.org. If you'd like it with you wherever you go, the free Focal Point app keeps every message, series, and study tool close at hand. If today's conversation gave you answers you've been needing in your own walk of faith, we encourage you to stand behind this ministry with a gift. Give once or go even further and join as a monthly Focal Point partner. Either way, your support is what keeps this teaching on the air and reaching people who need it. Call and give today at 888-320-5885 or go online to focalpointradio.org. This month when you give a gift, you'll get a copy of Sinners in the Hands of a Good God by David Clotfelter. It's a book built for exactly the kind of tension today's callers were circling: how a God of perfect justice can also be a God who rescues the people that justice would otherwise condemn. Ask for your copy when you give this month by calling 888-320-5885 or give online at focalpointradio.org. If you'd rather mail your gift, write to us at Focal Point, P.O. Box 2850, Laguna Hills, California 92654. If today is your first time reaching out to us, Pastor Mike's new booklet, Storing Up Treasures, is yours at no charge. It's a short, focused read on living with eternity in view, and it's waiting for you free at focalpointradio.org or by calling 888-320-5885. I'm Dave Drewery. Join us next time for more from Pastor Mike Fabarez here on Focal Point. Today's program was produced and sponsored by Focal Point Ministries.