“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.” . . . Saul said to Samuel, “I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.”
1 Samuel 15:22, 24
Saul was Israel’s first king. His inauguration marked a key transition in the nation’s history—even though he was reluctant to accept the responsibility and even tried to hide from it! But God gave Saul his Spirit and promised him everything he needed in order to rule well. All Saul had to do was to fear God and obey his commands. If he did, God promised that “it will be well” (1 Sam. 12:14). Not too far into his rule, God called Saul to war against the Amalekites and told him to destroy everything. But Saul kept the best of the livestock for himself and destroyed only that which was worthless or of poor quality. This partial obedience was disobedience.
Saul’s confession in 1 Samuel 15:24 shows us how the fear of man works. Why did he disobey God? Because he “feared the people and obeyed their voice.” According to the Bible, fear is more than feeling terrified. Our fear of man certainly includes that, but it also means revering people, needing them, or valuing their opinion so much that our decisions end up being controlled by them. We obey what we fear. As a result, our fear of others is a worship issue. Every human heart is always worshipping something; we were made for worship (see Isa. 43:7; John 4:20–24)! The question is, who we are worshipping—God or people?
Sprite’s slogan tells us, “Obey your thirst.” This soft-drink advertisement ends up being pretty theologically accurate. What we value indicates what we fear losing or never achieving. We can’t imagine living without it, so this fear directs our decisions and motivates us to act. Isn’t this what happens when the sports enthusiast prioritizes watching his team above attending church? Don’t we refuse to share the gospel with a friend because we fear how she’ll respond? Aren’t we reluctant to take risks for good things because we can’t bear the thought of being a failure? We thirst for and value something more than God in these moments. We obey what we fear.
A woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that [Jesus] was reclining at table in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and . . . she began to wet his feet with her tears . . . and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee . . . saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.”
Luke 7:37–39
It is one of shame’s most insidious remarks: “If they really knew me, they wouldn’t love me anymore.”
You might spend your life convinced that the only reason people still like you is that they don’t really know you. If they knew what you were truly like, the sins you struggle with, what actually happened in your past . . . if they really knew you, the true you, all of you, they wouldn’t love you anymore. ˝They would change their minds about you. ˝They would walk away. Maybe this has already happened to you.
So you hide and cover up. You pretend. If acceptance and love are contingent on your ability to keep the ugly parts of yourself out of sight, hiding naturally becomes your way of life.
Today’s passage directs our attention to a sinful woman. She is not any ordinary sinner. Her life is shameful enough that “sinner” has become her primary identity and public reputation. She draws near to Jesus to anoint his feet with ointment—and Jesus receives her. A Pharisee, watching the scene unfold, thinks to himself, “If [ Jesus] were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is” (v. 39). Here we find the all-too-familiar refrain: “If he really knew . . .”
The Pharisee assumes that the only reason Jesus receives this woman is that he does not know her. Yet Jesus knows everything. He knows the sinful woman—her past, her present, her sins, her brokenness, her reputation. In the same way, he knows us—our past, our present, our sins, our brokenness, our reputations. And he does not get up to leave. He does not cast us away. He receives us. He loves us.
This is Jesus. Whatever views we have of him, whatever half-truths we have believed about him, let it be known that our Savior receives shameful, disgraceful, disdained, hurt, and broken people into his presence—and not out of ignorance, obliviousness, or limited knowledge. He knows us fully and loves us nonetheless.
We are often so certain that Jesus has no place or patience for messy, ugly, wounded, imperfect people. Yes, our sins grieve him. Yes, he is committed to changing us. But his posture isn’t what we expect. Jesus knows us—as we are today. He knows us—yes, even those parts of us. And knowing us, he still wants us to be near him.
I love you, O LORD, my strength. The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
Psalm 18:1–2
I love you, O LORD, my strength. It is to be observed, that love to God is here laid down as constituting the principal part of true godliness; for there is no better way of serving God than to love him. No doubt, the service which we owe him is better expressed by the word reverence, that thus his majesty may prominently stand forth to our view in its infinite greatness. But as he requires nothing so expressly as to possess all the affections of our heart, and to have them going towards him, so there is no sacrifice which he values more than when we are bound fast to him by the claim of a free and spontaneous love; and, on the other hand, there is nothing in which his glory shines forth more conspicuously than in his free and sovereign goodness. Moses, therefore (Deut. 10:12), when he meant to give a summary of the law, says, “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you but to love him?” In speaking thus, David, at the same time, intended to show that his thoughts and affections were not so intently fixed upon the benefits of God as to be ungrateful to him who was the author of them, a sin which has been too common in all ages. Even at this day we see how the greater part of mankind enjoy wholly at their ease the gifts of God without paying any regard to him, or, if they think of him at all, it is only to despise him. David, to prevent himself from falling into this ingratitude, in these words makes as it were a solemn vow, Lord, as you are my strength, I will continue united and devoted to you by unfeigned love.
The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge. He is my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. When David thus heaps together many titles by which to honour God, it is no useless or unnecessary accumulation of words. We know how difficult it is for men to keep their minds and hearts stayed in God. They either imagine that it is not enough to have God for them, and, consequently, are always seeking after support and succour elsewhere, or, at the first temptation which assails them, fall from the confidence which they placed in him. David, therefore, by attributing to God various methods of saving his people, protests that, provided he has God for his protector and defender, he is effectually fortified against all peril and assault.
From the time I was twelve years old I felt a strong burden to share the gospel with my unsaved neighbors and friends. Throughout my teen years, into college, during seminary, and my years as a pastor, I struggled to effectively defend and proclaim the good news of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. No matter how much evangelism training I received, my encounters with unbelievers were short, stressful, and ineffective. It wasn’t until I audited a class on apologetics during my first year as a doctoral student in New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary that I understood why.
In that class I learned that what had been missing from all my education up to that point was any kind of exploration of worldviews and epistemology. I was taught evangelism, but always in a way that consisted of a monologue—what is often called “the gospel burp”—that a Christian would try to blurt out as quickly as he could before the unbeliever cut him off. There was no intent to ask or answer questions. We were to share the good news of Jesus with the expectation that unbelievers would get saved right then and there if we were persuasive enough. In other words, there was no apologetic taught that enabled me to have a conversation in which I answered the questions and objections the unbeliever had.
My previous teachers had always (unintentionally) taught this assumed epistemology (which rests on a non-biblical anthropology): people don’t know God; they only have a capacity to know that a God exists if they are offered enough evidence. The burden was on the evangelist to somehow prove God’s existence, without ever being told how to do so. When I first heard Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic presented in class, it was like cold water to a weary soul (Prov. 25:25). I drank in his teaching about the sensus divinitatis, the suppressed knowledge of God, the self-contradictory nature of non-theistic worldviews, the antithesis between the Christian worldview and all non-Christian worldviews, and the idea of standing inside an unbeliever’s worldview and pointing out its internal inconsistencies and self-contradictory nature. Even though I found Van Til’s writing to be dense, repetitive, and over my head philosophically (at first), I saw a kernel of an imminently useful approach to gospel engagement with unbelievers. That first semester of learning Van Til’s apologetics was so life-changing for me that I switched my doctoral focus to apologetics and never looked back. All the worldview and epistemological questions I had been asking for years were answered, and clarity about the task of effectively engaging unbelievers shone through like the sun coming out on a cloudy day.
Every Believer Confident was written for ordinary Christians who want to defend their faith but may not know where to begin. Mark Farnham’s accessible guidebook simplifies apologetics and empowers Christians to effectively present the gospel in all its glory and rationality. This new edition includes practice case studies, chapter review questions, and a new chapter on engaging in gospel conversations over the long term.
The challenge, of course, was (and is) how to translate Van Til’s ideas into a vernacular that is accessible by ordinary Christians who don’t know philosophy and will never comprehend it. This need is rooted in the exposition of 1 Peter 3:15–16 that my professor, K. Scott Oliphint, taught week by week. Peter’s call to “give an answer” or “make a defense” is issued to every believer, not just to pastors and professors. Therefore, the apologetic methodology we use must be comprehensible to and usable by non-experts, that is, ordinary Christians. What little exposure I had to apologetics before learning Van Til was mostly the classical approach, and I struggled to grasp the concepts, even though I had gone to seminary. I found more affinity to the evidential approach with its concrete examples of the historicity of the Gospels, but I wondered if I could ever learn enough evidences to be prepared for a real discussion with an unbeliever. More to the point, how long would it take a Christian who hasn’t gone to seminary to learn and implement enough evidences to effectively share the gospel with an unbeliever who raised objections?
What I found in Van Til was a profound and refreshingly biblical explanation of the unbeliever’s heart and mind (Rom. 1:18–23)—a revelation (to me) of a fundamental aspect of biblical anthropology. Unbelievers are truth-suppressors. They know the true God, but they suppress that truth through their unrighteous behavior. Their thinking is futile, their hearts are darkened; they are foolish, not wise. Unbelievers are idol-makers. Rather than worship the true God, they worship self-made idols. Therefore, unbelievers experience God’s wrath—his righteous judgment (Rom. 1:24–31; 2:5)—in their lives, not his grace. Van Til emphasizes the dialectic of knowing and not knowing that is so evident in Scripture: unbelievers know God but stand under his wrath (Rom. 1:19–21, 32), while believers know God in a relationship of grace (Gal. 4:8; 1 Cor. 1:21; 1 Thess. 4:5; 2 Thess. 1:8). Ephesians 4:17–19 provides a succinct summary of sin’s noetic effects that so distort and corrupt the unbeliever’s knowledge:
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.
Surprisingly, those who critique Van Til often do not adequately address sin’s devastating noetic effects1 and instead treat unbelievers as if through philosophical arguments they can arrive at an accurate understanding of God, apart from the work of the Holy Spirit.
Van Til’s apologetic changed everything for me because I realized that I do not have to prove God’s existence to unbelievers. Rather, I can engage an unbeliever in conversation with biblical assurance about that he knows God (Rom. 1:19–21), knows God’s law (Rom. 2:14–15), knows that he is guilty before God (Rom. 1:32), knows that the penalty for his guilt is death (Rom. 1:32), and knows that he faces a day of divine judgment (Rom. 1:32). I know that this unbeliever is suppressing the truth in some way, and I can ask questions to reveal the details about his truth-suppression. Once I have the details, I can step into his worldview and provide an internal critique to reveal that it is irrational, self-contradictory, and unlivable. Then I can step into the Christian worldview and show that it is rational, self-consistent, and livable—that it succeeds where the unbeliever’s worldview fails. Finally, I can present the good news: Christ is the truth my unbeliever is seeking to avoid. The simplification of Van Til’s approach is accessible to ordinary Christians in ways that more philosophical approaches are not.
I have been presenting a simplified version of Van Til’s approach in churches for almost twenty years now. The number of stories I hear from ordinary Christians whose witness has been transformed by using it is overwhelming. Most Christians I meet and teach find it encouraging and accessible. They are relieved to know that they don’t have to learn philosophical arguments to be effective witnesses. They learn quickly how to perform an internal critique that exposes the unbeliever’s worldview as irrational, contradictory, or unlivable. This clears the way for them to present the Christian faith in all its glory as rational, consistent, and livable and to present Jesus as the one who can forgive their sins, transform their hearts, and renew their minds. For me and many others, Van Til’s thought has enabled us to open our mouths more frequently and to engage unbelievers more fruitfully, to plant seeds of the gospel (1 Cor. 3:5–9), and to experience the joy of participating in God’s global work of salvation. Van Til’s insights enable effective gospel conversations that get right to the heart of the unbeliever’s problem: what will he do with Jesus?
Every Believer Confident is intended to equip ordinary Christians with powerful, biblical apologetic tools and with the confidence that they can effectively engage any person they meet, anywhere in the world, answer objections, and present the good news of Jesus Christ in a biblically-faithful and compelling fashion.
1One example is Keith Mathison’s critique of Van Til in Toward a Reformed Apologetics: A Critique of the Thought of Cornelius Van Til (Ross-Shire, Great Britain: Mentor, 2024). Mathison hardly addresses the noetic effects of sin and never references Ephesians 4:17–19, despite its importance in the consideration of the unbeliever’s ability to know God accurately. While Mathison may offer helpful correctives to aspects of Van Til’s thought later in the book, this key element in Van Til’s apologetic method must be answered if a critique of the whole is to stand.
The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise.
Proverbs 15:31
Who is the wisest person you know? Perhaps it’s a professor whose unmatched expertise leaves you in awe. Perhaps it’s a pastor with an uncanny ability to relate Scripture to your unique life circumstances. Perhaps it’s a counselor who always has the right thing to say to heal your bleeding heart.
How did this person become so wise? You may think their wisdom came as a result of education, age, or experience. It didn’t. According to the book of Proverbs, the number one way that a person becomes wise is by hearing, internalizing, and applying constructive feedback (1:7; 8:33; 12:1; 13:1, 10; 15:5, 31; 19:20; 29:15). We grow in wisdom when we receive criticism with humble hearts and put it to good use.
If this is the case, then we have a remarkable opportunity to grow in wisdom in our marriages. After all, in what context are we criticized more?
Unfortunately, our spouses’ “life-giving reproof ” (Prov. 15:31) often goes to waste. We don’t internalize it—let alone apply it. It beads off our hearts like water on a raincoat.
Why are we so quick to dismiss criticism from our spouses? Because it really hurts. Here’s why:
It’s often delivered in a not-so-gentle manner. Unfortunately, in marriage, we take advantage of the security of the husband-wife relationship and let our guards down when we criticize. We speak without filters. We raise our voices. Our criticism comes across as derogatory, degrading, and disrespectful.
We know that our spouses’ criticism is probably true. Our husbands and wives have clear windows into our brokenness and sin. They know the truth about us—and the truth hurts.
We love our spouses. We’ve given our hearts to our spouses. Naturally, we want them to love us back. When they criticize us, it feels like rejection from the person whose unconditional love we most desperately crave.
How do you move past the pain and rejoice when you’re criticized by your spouse? You must fall in love with the prize: wisdom. The more you love wisdom, the more you will be willing to endure pain to get it. But how do you fall in love with wisdom? For starters, don’t try to fall in love with the concept of wisdom. Nobody can truly love a concept. Fall in love with wisdom personified. Meditate on the person and work of Christ and fall in love with the one whom Paul calls “the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). The more you love Jesus, the more you will love wisdom. And the more you will rejoice when you are criticized by your spouse.
