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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Eugene Prewitt

How Do I Know?

Our Father in heaven, I Need that you would be our teacher this morning That you would show us what is right and true and I ask for this in the name of Jesus bit.

You can be turning your Bibles to 1 Kings 17, 24.

This morning we're talking about how do I know what is true.

1 Kings chapter 17 is a story about a little boy that has just been raised to life.

1 of the earliest examples of someone being raised to life in the Bible.

17 verse 24, and the woman said to Elijah, now by this I know that you are a man of God and that the word of the Lord that is in your mouth is truth.

How did the woman know that Elijah had the truth?

And it's a good question whether or not that was a sensible statement.

I just want to say to you, I think it's not sensible.

I think it's not sensible that you know that Elijah has the truth on the basis that he raises someone from the dead.

Because frankly, when you read the New Testament, you find there 6 different places where God says that miracles are going to be used in our day as a means of deceiving people.

In fact, I was on a plane just a little over a week ago sitting beside a 14-year-old boy named Henry.

That's how I say his name, he's from Estonia.

And Henry had a rash on his leg that doctors could not cure with medication.

For years he had it, but he went to a spiritualist practitioner and they were able to cure the rash on his leg.

And when I met him, he was on his way to a spiritualist conference.

And I'm sure that for Henry, he knows that spiritualism is right because there was a miracle that was worked on his leg.

The question is, how do you know what is true?

1 Corinthians 1, and we're looking at verse 19.

This is a passage that is kind of anti-academia.

1 Corinthians 1 verse 19, For it is written, I will destroy...

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?

For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God.

I don't wanna speed over that, that's so important.

God's wisdom said that the world should not be able to find the truth by wisdom.

They should not be able to know God by just thinking it through.

And the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom, did not know God.

It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

I'm gonna give you a little crash course in something that you've already had a thorough course in, and that is philosophy, but it's gonna be from a different perspective, perhaps, than what you've heard it before.

Then we're gonna come back to our Bible in just a minute.

In philosophy, you could divide the concept of philosophy up maybe into 3 categories of thoughts or questions.

And people in academia especially like to use big words because it makes them look smart.

And I think it's not smart to use big words, but I put them up there just in case you want to look smart.

But underneath them, I have an idea to explain what I mean by them.

Axiology is the study of what has value, what is important.

And typically, it would be divided up into 2 categories.

Aesthetics, that would be things that are valuable because they're pleasing.

Those are things that have value because they are morally good.

That's a good man, or that's a good plan, in the sense of morally correct.

So axiology, the study of what has value, why does it have value.

Then epistemology, and by the way, all spellings are for illustrative purposes only.

I just make up how to spell phonetically and you can just fix it in your head.

Epistemology is the study of how do I know what is true.

That question that I'm addressing in this message today, it's an epistemological question.

And for the typical person, when they come to finding truth, you could divide their sources of assurance into 6 categories.

They know it's true because it makes sense.

And I just wish Plato had met a Seventh-day Adventist, because he was such a student of science.

And I think, do you realize where he got to this idea of rationalism or reason?

It's because he noticed that things were just perfect.

That a horse has the number of teeth that a horse ought to have, that a grasshopper has the type of legs that a grasshopper ought to have, that everything is just the way it ought to be.

If everything is the way it ought to be, then if you knew how ought to be, you could start there and know how it is.

In other words, you could arrive at the truth, how things are, if you only had enough information about how they should be.

Did that make sense to at least 5 people here?

And he had a famous disciple or student named Aristotle who really championed a different idea.

That was the idea of experiment or experience.

The idea of Aristotle is that you could feasibly perhaps know how many teeth are in the horse by thinking it through, but you could get there by reasoning in months.

You could get there by counting in seconds.

And so that idea of doing experiment, that was Aristotle's contribution.

So you've heard these things, but you heard them and forgot them, right?

Science today thinks that this is how it typically gets to truth.

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How Do I Know?

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