Truth In These Days

In this episode of Truth in These Days, Heath Lambert reflects on a recent tragedy in the news and the sobering reminder it offers about the brevity of life. He points to what Scripture says about our time and the hope we can have in Jesus Christ. It's a timely, gospel-centered word for anyone who needs to hear it.

- 0:00 – The news

- 0:48 – Final words

- 2:10 – What Scripture says about our time

- 3:04 – Hope in Jesus

- 4:01 – Another voice on the radio

- 5:03 – Closing appeal

In this episode of Truth in These Days, Heath Lambert responds to a shocking announcement out of a church in Cleveland, Ohio. He looks at what the Bible actually teaches, and explains why this story matters for churches and Christian leaders far beyond Cleveland.

- 0:00 – A shocking announcement

- 2:39 – What the Bible teaches about marriage

- 6:08 – Requirements for spiritual leadership

- 7:06 – Why this story matters for your church

- 9:25 – Closing call to prayer and repentance

The Sin Silently Killing America

(And Also, Your Soul)

Heath Lambert

A Silent Killer

In our contemporary secular age, many sins threaten the future of America. The ongoing holocaust against the unborn is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Our nearly complete embrace of every form of sexual immorality including pornography, pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, gay marriage, and the transgender insanity are all absolutely eroding the foundation of our society. Our culture-wide inability to recognize and speak the truth is an unsustainable attack on reality. The way we find it impossible to have strong disagreements without hating our opponents is ending our ability to communicate about the things that matter. Many sins contend for the destruction of America.

Those obvious sins get lots of attention. This week, I don’t want to talk about the obvious, butabout a destructive sin that hardly anyone talks about because hardly anyone recognizes it. That sin is the love of money. Before we can understand how this sin is silently destroying our country, it is necessary to understand how it is destroying you.

The Impact of the Love of Money on You

The Bible talks about the love of money and its impact on us in 1 Timothy 6:10, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”

Understanding the nature of this sin requires us to be very clear in at least two ways. First, money is not evil and is not the root of evil. It is the love of money that is the problem not the use of it. Second, we need to be clear what the nature of the love of money is. In a world where we are all deal with money it can be hard to distinguish between the faithful use of money and the sinful love of money. Jesus helps us in Matthew 6:24 when he says, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

Jesus makes the critical issue one of service to a master. Money is a useful tool when used to serve God, but becomes a tyrant when you serve it as a master. We love money when we place it above God and others and in hearts and try to follow its demands instead of God’s. When that switch happens in our heart, the use of money becomes the love of money, we sin, and we are on track for disaster.

This biblical truth completely revolutionizes the way we naturally think about money. Every human being has a sinful love of money that typically goes unchecked and unquestioned. Most misidentify the sinful of the love of money as wisdom, good stewardship, or the pursuit of blessings.

But the Bible is clear that the love of money is incredibly dangerous. It is at the root of any number of wicked realities. The Apostle Paul makes clear that the love of money is more than enough to lead you away from Jesus and into a horrible world of pangs, affliction, and difficulty. When money takes over your heart, you are guaranteed to get curses rather than blessings. The curses created by the love of money are not limited to our individual lives but extend out to our entire country. 

Our Love of Money Is Destroying Our Country

If you want to understand the destruction that the love of money creates in our country, there is no clearer place to look than the national debt. The American national debt is now well over $40 Trillion. That is an absolutely staggering amount of money. To help you get the idea, imaginecreating a line of dollar bills laid out end to end. If you did that with every dollar of American debt, you would create a trail of money long enough to stretch to the moon and back over 8,200 times. That same trail of money could wrap around the earth’s equator over 157,000 times. If it doesn’t help to think about a physical trail of money, it may help to understand that, according to the Senate Joint Economic Committee, the national debt in the United States has each American household on the hook for almost $300,000. Whatever your current financial liabilities are, you need to add those six figures to it.

Our debt is not only massive but is growing at incredible speed. The United States brings in roughly $5 Trillion of revenue each year but spends nearly $7 Trillion. The government closes the gap, not with new revenue, but with deficits. This all means that lately we have been adding debt at a rate of just over $2 Trillion a year. That means right now that American debt grows by over $4.5 Million every minute. By the time you finish Truth in These Days this week the United States will have added over $45 Million of debt. Since last week’s Truth in These Days, we have added almost $46 Billion to our national total. Unfortunately, no government leader today has any plan to stop the destructive borrowing much less a strategy to begin paying down our debt. No Republican or Democrat is leading any effort to help our government know how to live within its already massive means of $5 Trillion.

And the honest truth is that it is not even really their fault. The blame lies with you and me, the citizens of history’s most indebted nation. Our politicians have figured out who we are and what we want. They know the people who vote them in to office would rather have someone who makes pretend promises of free stuff than someone who tells the truth that nothing is free, and bills always come due.

American politicians have become experts in our sinful the love of money. Unfortunately, we are all dunces regarding the truth that this love is the root of all evil and will lead to our personal and national destruction. No person and no nation can outrun reality. It is impossible to borrow endlessly without dire consequences sooner or later. 

The Solution to the Problem?

To begin to solve such a massive problem, anyone with the authority and responsibility to impact the American national debt has a moral obligation to be more responsible, to develop a plan tolive within our national means, and must begin an aggressive repayment of our national obligations. But most of you will not be in any position to make these kinds of impacts. So here are four solutions that normal Christians can begin to make to address America’s catastrophic problem with debt driven by the love of money.

First, attack the love of money in your own heart with contentment. The Bible does not only describe the devastating problem of the love of money but gives instructions about how to address it. Hebrews 13:5 says, “Keep your life free form the love of money, and be content with what you have . . .” The Bible tells us to fight the love of money with an attitude of contentment. Contentment is the ethical opposite of the covetousness behind the love of money. A crucial indicator of the love of money is the constant search for more: more clothes, more shoes, more house, more stockpiling of resources. Those of us constantly on the prowl for the newer, the bigger, the better, and the different will eventually learn that it is impossible to satisfy covetous desires. Instead, we need to learn to cultivate contentment by looking to what the Lord has already given and learning to be grateful for what we have instead of constantly greedy for what we do not. 

Second, attack the love of money in your own heart with trust. Earlier, I partially quotedHebrews 13:5, but here is the rest of it, “Keep your life free form the love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” The author of Hebrews believed the people who needed to follow the command to keep their lives free from the love of money also need to hear the divine promise that God will never leave or forsake his people. That means another problem behind the love of money is worry. We lust after more money because of our fears that disaster will strike, that we will not have what we need, and that our provision depends ultimately on us. The sin of worry looks at life as though God doesn’t exist. That is why the author of Hebrews reminds us that the God who is loves us and is always with us to care for us. None of us will probably ever have all the money we need to make us feel secure. But that is ok. God loves us and we can trust him to give us what we need, rather than fighting to provide it ourselves.

Third, attack the love of money in your own heart with generosity. The Bible offers a surprisingly counterintuitive solution to the problem of the love of money. This solution comes from the mouth of Jesus when he says in Acts 20:35 that, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” The lie of the love of money is that you need more and more stuff to make you happy. The truth of the Word of God is that generous giving is better for your soul than constant consumption. The ultimate proof of this is found in the work of Jesus. We read in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Jesus demonstrated the overwhelming blessing of giving by offering his life so that everyone who believes could enjoy the riches of eternal life. And now, God’s Word invites God’s people to share in the riches of generous giving. 2 Corinthians 9:6 says, “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.” The Bible is clear that anyone who desiresto receive generous Kingdom blessings must make generous Kingdom investments. Increasingnumbers of Christians must replace our fantasies of buying bigger houses, nicer cars, and more clothes with dreams of investing in the Kingdom in order to shine the name of Jesus in our churches and reach our communities for Christ. 

Finally, we can attack the love of money in the political realm by supporting sane candidates for office. Christians, at the very least, must stop being the fools of power-hungry politicians who seek to secure their office by thinly concealed efforts to buy votes with money that does not even exist. When candidates for political office offer us perks, money, and gifts with the price tag concealed we must be the people who know everything comes at a cost and our nation is out of money. Because Republicans and Democrats are playing the same reckless game there will be times when we must make tough choices between better and worse candidates. Sometimes we will have to pick the candidate that is digging the shallower $1 Trillion hole instead of the deeper $2 Trillion hole. But Americans in general and Christians in particular must see that our ability to live beyond reality by borrowing against the futures of our children and grandchildren cannot continue. 

In fact, there are only two ways out of this mess and neither will be free of pain. On the one hand, we could keep following the current path and reap the consequences of an overwhelming debt that no one can pay. Nobody really knows what this will look like but I’m ready to promise that it is the option with the most pain in our future. 

On the other hand, we could change course. We could embrace reality, make aggressive changes to pay off our debt, and make the hard choices necessary to live within our means. Doing that will require America to repent of its love of money. We need to pray that God would give us the grace as a nation to do that. Without that grace and repentance, we are facing a guaranteed economic cataclysm the likes of which history has never beheld. 

Capital Punishment, Pope Leo IX, and Roller Coasters:

Three Surprising Life Lessons from News about the Death Penalty

Heath Lambert

Christa Pike and the Death Penalty

Americans have been paying special attention to the death penalty lately because of severalstories in the news, not least is the one about Christa Pike. Pike was found guilty of the brutal murder of Colleen Slemmer in 1995 and was scheduled, on September 30, to be the first woman executed by the state of Tennessee in over 200 years. As everyone now knows, that is not what happened, and her extraordinary story has three surprising lessons to teach Christians.

Human Life Is Precious

The first lesson is that all human life is precious. 

Protests are common whenever a criminal faces the death penalty. The protests come from those who argue it is unjust for the state to execute almost anyone. Their argument is that even the murder of another human being is not a reason to eliminate someone’s life. Many were making that argument about Christa Pike before her scheduled execution on September 30. When officials botched her execution that argument only became stronger. 

Christians certainly share the conviction that life is precious. Together with those who object to the death penalty, we agree that the lives of murderers are no less valuable than the lives of theirvictims. The value of human life is found in the fact that human beings are made in the image of God. It is that inherent value and worth that is the moral foundation of the death penalty. In Genesis 9:6, God says, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” The value and worth of every human being means that anyone who would take the life of another ought to forfeit their own. 

This obviously biblical teaching has been embraced by the church for millennia. But last weekend objections to this clear biblical principle came from a surprising source. That gets to another surprising lesson we can learn.

We Do Not Need a Pope

That second lesson is that Christians do not need a pope. 

The cultural confusion around the tragedy of Christa Pike was made worse with some comments by Pope Leo XIV. Before I reference those comments, it is important to acknowledge that the Pope disclosed this week a cancer diagnosis that he has received. Reports are that the Pope received his diagnosis early and that his treatment is proceeding well. All Christians should pray for Pope Leo. But on October 10, the Pope made confusing statements about the death penalty when he said on social media that, “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” When Pope Leo refers to the inviolability and dignity of human beings, he is referring to their inherent value and worth that flows from the fact that they are made by God in his image.

Pope Leo is certainly correct in affirming the inherent worth of human beings. But there are at least two problems with his statement.

The first problem is that his conviction about the inadmissibility of the death penalty is blatantlyunbiblical. We saw from Genesis that God himself, said from his own mouth, that the death penalty is authorized because of the great value and worth of human life. Catholics believe the Pope speaks to the church on behalf of God. Unfortunately, in this case, the words of the Pope are directly contradicted by God himself. 

The second problem with Pope Leo’s statement is that it is spoken by one who holds an office that is not biblical. Roman Catholics believe that the Pope, the Holy Father, is the successor of the Apostle Peter. Catholics believe this because they have been taught to believe it through years of tradition. But the office of Pope is neither taught in nor authorized by Scripture. God’s Word makes clear that spiritual authority is mediated by pastors that God raises up in local churches all over the world. The Bible never teaches that God governs his church through one man who shepherds a global flock. 

Pope Leo, like everyone else on the planet, is more than entitled to his own position on the death penalty. He is, furthermore, well within his rights to express that opinion publicly. I am doing the very same thing right now. Even though Pope Leo’s view on the death penalty is incorrect, I do not wish him to have less freedom to express his position than I do mine. But when Pope Leo expresses his opinion, he is not doing it as a normal person or even as a religious leader. His opinion can only come in the formal capacity conferred upon him by the Roman Catholic Church. That means when Pope Leo shares his unbiblical opinion, he is doing it from the platform of an unbiblical office. 

That makes Pope Leo’s statements more than merely confusing. When he errs in his pronouncements there is no authority within the church to correct him and his error has the potential to confuse billions of people. When God revealed in Scripture the leadership structure for the church, he had very good reasons for not giving us a pope.

In a Sinful World Everything Breaks

A final lesson for Christians from news about the death penalty is that, in a sinful world, everything breaks. Romans 6:23 teaches that, “The wages of sin is death.” Sin pays out destruction to everything it touches in this wicked and corrupt world. In a sinful world everything is broken. A sinful world like this one is the only reality that explains the brutal murder by Christa Pike of Colleen Slemmer. A sinful world like this one is the only reality that explains her botched execution when two full doses of pentobarbital failed to end Pike’s life. 

The brokenness of a sinful world damages our ability faithfully to meet out legitimate obligations to capital punishment. That is particularly clear with the failure of lethal injection the sole purpose of which is to end the life of criminals in as dignified a way as possible. Instead, in the case of Christa Pike, it resulted in a medical emergency, a stay in the hospital in critical condition, a potentially permanent disability, and the nearly unimaginable trauma of losing consciousness believing you were entering eternity only to wake up in a Tennessee hospital.

These are the kinds of problems in the minds of Pike’s attorneys when they said, she has, “Endured punishment greater than any other person in the history of the American death penalty.” This terrible reality was obviously no one’s intention. But in a sinful world everything breaks. And it is worse than that.

This week, Hassan Kariem visited a Georgia amusement park with his family. While there, he got on the Goliath roller coaster, was ejected from the ride when his seat restraint apparently failed, and he fell to this death at the age of 42. That is a tragic picture of the devastation of sin in this broken world. In the same week a guilty woman laid on an executioner’s table and survived, while an innocent man sat in a roller coaster for fun and was killed. 

In Tennessee, there is an investigation to determine what went wrong with Pike’s execution, and in Georgia there is an investigation to determine what went wrong with that roller coaster. That is all as it should be. When disaster strikes those with responsibility must seek to understand what went wrong and try to fix it. 

But no human being can possibly fix the root problem of sin and the devastation that it always brings. That means, for now, we are all trapped in a world where disastrously awful things happen for inexplicable reasons.

In such a world our only hope is Jesus Christ. Hebrews 9:26 says of Jesus that, “He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.” The solution to sin and all its devastation is the death of the perfect Son of God on the cross to erase the power and penalty of sin, and, ultimately, its presence. For anyone who trusts in Jesus we experience the ongoing brokenness of a sinful world with everyone else. But our great hope is that one day Jesus himself will empower our escape from this terrible world of sin and enter us into a world of righteousness, peace, and joy that will never end.  

A Plan to Take Back America for Jesus

Heath Lambert

Christian Nationalism and American Decline

For years, Christians have noticed the moral decay of our society and have lamented the creeping secularism of our culture. Most Christians do not believe that America was ever a utopian paradise of perfection, but also know our country has drifted from a shared morality and a cultural consensus around the truthfulness and goodness of Christianity. Some have referred to this drift as a movement from the positive world where Christianity was assumed and accepted to a negative world where our faith is viewed with skepticism and hostility. 

The Christian response to this change has often looked like panic and frustration. These responses have led to intense debate among Christians about the best way forward. Some leaders have argued that Christians should embrace the culture defeat and begin to live as a prophetic minority. Others have argued that Christians should fight back hard and work to make America a Christian nation. That has led to many other debates, including whether such a project is wise, possible, justified by Scripture, and even what a Christian nation would look like. 

All these debates are important. Like many Christians, I have strong opinions on them and believe there is a time and place to debate them. I also think the contemporary debates obscure a basic consensus among Christians. Even as we debate the Christian response to American cultural decline, there are four steps we can take that most Christians will not consider controversial. They are steps that any Christian can take right now to help us recover what has been lost.

Pastors Must Preach

The first step is that every man called to preach must be committed to preaching that demonstrates how God’s Word calls Christians to appropriate political engagement. A commitment to do this is harder than it sounds.

One reason this is difficult is because of the role models of many preachers. Many preachers today were influenced by ministers from a prior generation who made an intentional and strategic decision to avoid political engagement in their ministries. Those ministers were reacting to a generation of preachers before them who they judged to be focused on political engagement to the point of distraction. They believed this engagement damaged their ability to preach about the gospel of God’s grace to everyone. Their hope was that silence on controversial matters of politics would lead to increased influence as they preached the gospel message. 

This well-intended decision had disastrous consequences. One problem with it is that it is simply not faithful to Scripture. Christian ministers are not allowed to pick and choose the parts of the Bible they will address or the people to whom they will address that teaching. We are to preach the whole counsel of God to the whole people of God. That means we must preach the parts of the Bible that apply to politics. The Bible is no political manual, but God does share his mind with his people on countless issues in the public square. God provides specific direction on crucial policy debates about abortion, marriage, so-called “go marriage,” the transgender issue, and many others. The Bible offers helpful guidance on everything from tax policy to zoning rules. When we Christian ministers ignore the biblical teaching on these matters, we deprive God’s people of God’s instruction, and we leave a vacuum in the public square that will be filled. And that is what happened. Christian silence on these matters has not led to Christianity’s increase in our culture, but its decline.

One of the most important ways Christians can take America back for Jesus is by listening to preachers every week who will simply preach the true, pure Word of God and apply it to the situations we are all facing out there in the world. 

Believers Must Shine

A second step is for believers in Jesus to shine. In Matthew 5:16, Jesus says, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” That passage means that every Christian reading, watching, or listening to these words needs intentionally to focus on developing a reputation for being a Christian in their family, neighborhood, work, or school. You must live your life so that the people around you eventually know you to be a committed and joyful follower of the Lord Jesus. 

There are a million miniature acts which pack a massive punch that any Christian can do: you can find ways to be the person that people know as praying for them, you can deliver a delicious treat to the family on the block who just moved in or is going through a hard time, you can invite your friends to church and to lunch after to talk about what they learned, you can be the servant who offers to help out with a home project on the weekend, you could be the nice kid at school that doesn’t gossip, bully, or tell dirty jokes, your house can be the one on the street at Halloween that doesn’t just give the very best candy but a written invitation to an event at your church, you can host a prayer meeting for anyone who wants to come, you could invite people to an evangelistic Bible study that would address what Scripture says about a controversial topic, you could tell people how much a faithful book on Christianity has influenced you, gift it to them, and take them to lunch to talk about it. And of course, you can do all these things, ready to share your personal testimony and biblical truth about the salvation that comes through Jesus.

There are multiple things on that list that any normal Christian should do. And we do not have a chance of taking America back for Jesus until Christians start doing all of them and more. 

Christians Must Engage

A third step Christians must take is to engage in the political process. Most specifically, here, I mean that Christians must run for office. 

Only a very select handful of Christians could run for high elected office like President, Governor, or Congressman. But there are plenty of other elected positions Christians can fill. There are neighborhood homeowners associations, community zoning boards, city councils, school boards, state representatives, mayors, and many other opportunities. Most churches have at least one Christian with the competency for some of these positions, and some churches have dozens of people that could do it.

Romans 13:4 says that government is “God’s servant for your good.” Christians are the people who have a relationship with God and so are most equipped to use the levers of governmental power to honor God. Some of you are the exact kinds of people who could begin making decisions today to get elected and make a difference for Christ in your community. You should consider doing it. 

Intellectuals Must Instruct

A third step is for some Christians to become intellectual leaders on this topic who will teach the larger church. So many of the issues that Christians face are obviously clear-cut matters of Christian morality. But many other issues are quite delicate and require very careful thinking. Issues of taxation, religious freedom, the specific rules regulating legal immigration, and numerous other matters all require careful thought and communication. We need growing numbers of Protestant—and especially Baptist leaders—to do this work. The gold standard on this are people like Al Mohler, Andrew Walker, and Denny Burk at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. We need many more like them who can help the church navigate these complex cultural waters with faithfulness. 

Every Christian can shine the light of Christ in their context. A significant number can become elected officials who influence government at every level. A smaller group will have the kind of intellectual gifts and opportunities to teach the church how to grow in this way. But God is raising up people to do this, and one of those people could be you. 

The Way Forward

Every faithful American Christian with their eyes open knows we are living in dark and desperate times that absolutely represent a slide away from where we have been. Every faithful American Christian also knows that our ultimate citizenship and our ultimate hope is not on earth, and not in America, but in heaven. But every faithful American Christian also knows that, during the days of our life on earth, God has made this place our home. God has raised each one of us up to be alive in these days. He is calling us to be salt and light in a culture of decay and darkness. He is calling all of us to be his ambassadors and do our part to make sure that when we go to our eternal home, we leave our earthly one better than we found it. 

There is something for all of us to do. Some of us are called to preach. Some are called to be expert thinkers who instruct the entire church. Even more, we will be called to get involved in their local governments. But every single Christian can do something. That includes you. So, pray. Ask the Lord to help you get involved, then pick something I mentioned or make something else up, and go use your life to make a difference for King Jesus.

Authentic Truth about Artificial Intelligence

Heath Lambert

The AI Revolution Is Here

Artificial Intelligence has been in the news a great deal lately, and that is not going to change. But in the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the dangers of AI. In early September, Jacob Coxon, a researcher and developer for artificial intelligence at Anthropic and OpenAI, publicly resigned, saying he could no longer accept the risk of working on the products. He said the various corporations developing AI are more concerned about beating one another in a contemporary AI race than they are about deploying the technology in a safe way. He ominously warned that AI could threaten the existence of human life by the end of the decade. 

Many statements have followed this warning: some have said the statement dramatically overstates the risk posed by AI, others have said the statement understates the risk, others have called for governmental regulation to protect against the supposed threat, others have said that no governmental regulation can adequately address the threat we now face. This week the President of the United States seemed to acknowledge that AI has a real PR problem as he called on Americans to refer to the technology, not as artificial intelligence, but as super intelligence. 

If nothing else, the swarm of attention at least means that the AI revolution is here, that the revolution can feel scary at times, and that every Christian needs to think carefully about where we are in this moment. I want to make a start at this careful thinking by highlighting three truthsin the uncertain world of artificial intelligence. 

The AI Revolution Cannot Be Stopped

The first truth about this revolution is that there is no way to stop it or even slow it down. One of the most significant conversations recently has concerned the best way to regulate the advance of the technology. Some, including Jensen Huang, arguably, the most significant leader in the AI revolution has said the best regulation is for AI companies to regulate themselves. He advocates this approach because every company wants to avoid failure in the marketplace, and the best way to ensure failure is to release a destructive product. Others, including the leaders of some technology firms, have asked the federal government to regulate corporations, who will be unwilling to impose accountability measures without legislation.

There are problems with any effort to impose regulation. Jensen Huang’s argument that private corporations will avoid releasing damaging technology out of the selfish desire to achieve success in a competitive market overlooks the law of unintended consequences and the possibility that a company interested in success could accidentally release a threatening technology. The appeal for governmental regulation is, if anything, worse. Governmental regulation has two serious flaws. The first problem is competency. There is no way legislators in Washington, D.C. will be able to develop the competence to fashion coherent legislation in a highly sophisticated and rapidly developing segment of technology. The second problem is jurisdiction. Even if the American government could figure out how to craft helpful legislation, their laws would have no force in places like China where people are working just as hard as Americans to be on the cutting edge of development. 

There is no way to stop the AI revolution, to slow it down, or to grant any one person or control over where we go from here. There is no pause button, and there is no rewind button. As my papaw used to say, the horse is out of the barn. Our best bet is to unleash the ingenuity of countless inventors and entrepreneurs. In the past, when we have developed technology that caused problems, we have had to work hard to develop more technology to solve those problems. We need to pray we will be able to do that here.

AI Can Neither Destroy nor Perfect All Human Life

Many will receive it as a hard truth that AI is an unstoppable reality because of the fears and predictions of many that AI will bring about the extinction of human life. 

Processing this concern requires understanding a few realities. 

First, expert opinions about the results of the AI revolution exist on a continuum. On one extreme are the AI Skeptics. Skeptics are the experts who believe the AI revolution is going to bring about the most dire consequences, including the extinction of the human race. Skeptics are the ones we hear about most often because doom and gloom increases views and clicks that generate advertising revenue. But AI skepticism is only one perspective. On the other extreme are AI Utopians. The utopians believe AI will generate such remarkable advances in technology that an idyllic society will be the result. 

When people of equivalent expertise make opposite predictions, it is fair to say we do not actually know where all this will lead us. 

What we do know is that AI is guaranteed to be a bigger phenomenon than anyone can imagine. Regardless of how significant you think the revolution is going to be, it will be bigger than that. The AI revolution is going to dwarf the industrial revolution, the communication revolution, the technological revolution, and the digital revolution. People who are concerned that this is going to impact every area of life are correct. Some of that impact will be good, like the marvels that are certainly on the way in medicine, communications, and travel. Some of that impact will be bad, like the challenges to morality, privacy, security, jobs, and even the loss of life. 

In spite of all the blessings and curses that are coming, Christians know that AI does not have the power to lead either to utopia or an apocalypse. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 says, “The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” 

AI is going to make some things better and some things worse. Some of those improvements are likely to be better than you can imagine right now. Some curses of AI will be absolutely horrifying. But history ends and eternity begins with Jesus, not with anything human beings can make. 

AI Will Increase the Value of Relationship

Right now, AI appears to be a threat to human relationship. We read reports of people asking AI questions they used to ask their parents, of church members raising theological problem to AI that used to go to pastors, and even hurting people using AI as a digital therapist. As concerning as such practices are, I suspect one of the blessings of AI will be the ways it increases human relationship. 

God designed human beings to interact with other people. He designed us to be instructed and to grow and change through relationship. The isolation that comes with interacting with the shining blue light of a screen glowing in your face will create an environment of cold detachment from others that will, at first, create decay in our relationships. But the decay of those relationships is the very thing that will eventually create increased desire for personal contact and authentic human interaction.

This is already happening.

The other day, a group of students from First Baptist came up to me and started asking theological questions. They had very clearly been chewing on these matters for a while, had been waiting to speak to me specifically, and were reading their questions from text messages they had been sending to one another. As they read the questions from their phones and expressed gratitude that I was talking to them, it occurred to me that the very phones from which they asked their questions also had AI applications that could have answered their questions long before they came to me. I asked why they waited so long to talk to me when they might have asked ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or any other AI app. 

These students look at me with incredulous suspicion. It was quiet for several moments. The look on their faces made it seem like they were trying to decide whether I was insane or not. Finally, one spoke up and said, “Well, we want to know what you think, not AI.”

I think we can expect more statements like that in the future, not less. 

The AI revolution poses definite challenges for Christians these days. But I think the opportunities are far greater. Jesus has been building his church for two millennia, and he is committed to that work even in the midst of the AI revolution. In these days full of chaos and concern, it is Christians who can be a steady source of stability, a pillar and buttress of truth, and a place where people can find love and relationship in a digital world.

The Cold, Hard Truth about Iran

Developments in the Conflict with Iran

In the last week, there have been several developments in America’s unpopular conflict with Iran. President Trump returned early from Camp David to the White House, and Benjamin Netanyahu made a surprising return to Israel. Both President Trump and the president of Iran have made statements in New York at the meeting of the United Nations. And, in recent days, President Trump has said that he is in a “deciding mode.” It is impossible at this point to know how this conflict will end. What is certain is that Americans in general are growing tired of the conflict in Iran, which they never really supported in the first place.

The Cost of the Iranian Conflict

Americans are unhappy with the Iranian conflict because of its tremendous costs.

Americans do not want to pay the costs of an ongoing conflict that puts American lives at risk on the other side of the world. Americans are also uninterested in disrupting their comforts at home by paying increased costs for things like gasoline.

No American wants Iran to be a global threat. Neither do they appear eager at this point to pay the necessary costs of eliminating that threat. But this situation is more complicated than a mere verdict of approval or disapproval allows, and Americans would do well to remember that.

There is Always a Cost

Americans need to remember that we live in a sinful world where there is a cost to absolutely everything. For 50 years, American governments have been at odds with the Islamic Fundamentalist regime in Iran. The Iranian regime is committed to violence, has often resorted to terrorism, and would, if it could, develop a nuclear weapon they would be happy to use against the United States, which they consider to be the great Satan.

In responding to this threat, American presidential administrations typically intervene with financial pressure. Until Donald Trump. The calculation of President Trump is that the threat Iran poses is too great to be overlooked and that the United States must at least try addressing the threat with force. The political cost Trump is currently paying is exactly why previous presidents have avoided it.

The question, however, is not whether we will pay a cost, but which cost we will pay. Right now, most Americans consider the costs of this conflict to be undesirable.

But since everything comes at a cost, we should consider the cost of allowing Iran to develop as a threat. This cost ought to be particularly apparent following the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. In the months after those attacks, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had to answer hard questions about whether they did enough to avoid those attacks. Both men were in possession of intelligence that the al Qaeda network was planning a large attack with the potential use of airplanes. Both Bush and Clinton argued strenuously that their intelligence was not specific enough to stop the 9/11 hijackings from happening. The point is that there were people willing to hold those leaders accountable if their inaction in the short term created an overwhelmingly painful cost that might have been prevented.

We need to remember this in the conflict with Iran. For decades, American presidents have had much clearer knowledge of Iranian nuclear ambitions than anything we ever possessed about the terror plans of al Qaeda. Our increased knowledge about Iranian intentions forces a reckoning about which cost we are willing to pay. Are Americans willing to avoid paying the cost of discomfort today if that requires paying the cost of a nuclear attack tomorrow? These are the calculations that are before the American president. Any president must make these calculations knowing the responsibility they will bear if their unwillingness to pay costs in the short term leads to worse costs in the long term.

Some Conflict is Intractable

Americans also need to remember that we live in a sinful world where not every conflict is winnable or easily so. This reality makes the decision to use force against Iran even more complicated. No decision to use force is a guarantee that our engagement will be easy, quick, or even ultimately satisfactory. This is not a problem with any particular president, but with the hard reality of life in a sinful world. In such a world, the challenges to winning a conflict with Iran are considerable.

On the one hand, there is the nature of the enemy. Iran is governed by Islamic radicals who are not interested in being accepted on the global stage. This means the normal carrots and sticks of international diplomacy are nearly worthless in this situation. On the other hand, there is the nature of what an unqualified victory would require. In order to declare absolute victory in Iran, the United States would have to project a massive amount of power on that side of the world well beyond what any American would support. Meanwhile, it is not necessary for Iran to come close to defeating the American military. All they need to do is stay in the fight.

Understanding that everything has a cost, and that some problems are not solvable, can help us respond to Iran. It is easy to evaluate the conflict in Iran using the same tired political grid we are accustomed to these days, where those who support President Trump trust him and give the benefit of the doubt, while those who hate him use it as another evidence of his incompetence and unfitness. 

Christians have a higher calling than this. First Timothy 2:1-2 says, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions . . .” Our responsibility as Christians is not blind support nor blind hatred of any president. Neither is our responsibility to think we have better ideas about how to handle complex problems after watching a few hours of watching news or scrolling social media. Our first responsibility is to pray. We need to pray for President Trump. In a world where there are always costs, we need to pray that God would give him the wisdom to pay the right ones. In a world where some problems are intractable, we need to pray that the current conflict would not be one of them. Regardless of your support for or opposition to President Trump, it will be a blessing to all of us if he can succeed and terrible if he fails. So, let’s pray for him.

These realities remind us that the conflict throughout history can only finally be conquered by Jesus Christ. The world’s one true King, who is alone the Prince of Peace, promises he will end all conflict and place his enemies under his feet. But the promises to do that will be fulfilled on the last day when he brings history to a close. Only on that day will all conflict end. If you’re watching, listening, or reading to Truth in These Days, that day is, apparently, not today.

That means we are all living in a world full of heavy costs where no important victory is easy or even always possible. So, we need to pray. We need to pray for this conflict. We need to pray for our president. And we need to pray, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

Common Grace and Extrabiblical Information in Biblical Counseling

Heath Lambert

Counseling Confusion

​One of the hallmarks of contemporary counseling debates is the repeated tendency of those who disagree with biblical counseling to egregiously misrepresent the position of biblical counselors. It is common for people with advanced degrees and prestigious academic posts to fail to accurately present the views of biblical counselors on common grace, extrabiblical information, and the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.

Biblical counseling opponents make many accusations, but an accurate demonstration of real error has not been a characteristic of contemporary critics. Even though biblical counselors have been repeatedly clear about their convictions, they are regularly corrected for things they do not believe and exhorted to embrace positions they already hold. Critics persist in claiming that our view of sufficiency is not historic, that we reject extrabiblical information, that we deny common grace, and are biblicistic and simplistic. Critics who advance these false charges break the ninth commandment, advance confusion instead of clarity, frustrate the search for truth,slander their brothers in Christ, puff themselves up with pride, and repeatedly violate Christ’s Golden Rule.

​Victims of this mistreatment can do little to stop it. But we can redouble our efforts to clarify an issue of great significance. As important as it is for our opponents to represent us honestly, it is also important for biblical counselors to be clear that our position raises important questions that must be repeatedly answered. The biblical counseling position is unfamiliar in a secular world that defines problems in therapeutic terms. Worse, our position is unfamiliar in a theological context full of ministers contaminated by that therapeutic mindset and trained to think of doctrine in merely systematic categories and not in the pastoral and practical categories so familiar to our fathers in the faith. Though the biblical counseling movement has been clarifying these issues for our entire existence, recent mischaracterizations are a strong reminder that our work of shining the light of truth on these matters must continue. I would like to do that here by summarizing the biblical counseling position in two sentences. 

​It is the nature of the case that no summary can say everything. Summaries always need expansion, explanation, and elaboration. But summaries help in surveying large and complex matters. In a counseling debate where misrepresentation and misunderstanding are common, a summary of the biblical counseling position in two sentences helps us to how basic essentials fit together and avoid excluding important matters. Here is a two-sentence summary of the biblical counseling position in plain English. 

The Biblical Counseling Position in Two Sentences

Because God gave Scripture to his people to address life’s problems, Christians shouldtrust the Bible to provide all the resources necessary for the ministry our culture calls counseling. Because God filled the world with immeasurable information, his people are privileged and required to know this material without using it as a replacement or competitor with the resources in Scripture addressing counseling issues. 

I will elaborate on those statements in what follows, but this is a faithful summary of the biblical counseling position for anyone honestly looking for one. The first sentence summarizes our view of Scripture. The second sentence summarizes our view of information outside Scripture. If you are committed to biblical counseling, you understand and embrace those two statements. If you are not committed to biblical counseling, you do not understand or do not embrace at least one of those statements. Critics of biblical counseling advance opposition against something in those two sentences. 

Regarding the biblical counseling view of Scripture in the first sentence, recent criticsmake statements limiting God’s Word to a few tame and heady categories, and claim the Bibledoes not address all the different kinds of problems people face in a complicated world. The biblical counseling movement has been absolutely prolific in responding to this objection for fifty years. I responded most recently in my essay, The Comprehensiveness of Scripture and The Contemporary Counseling Conflict.

​Regarding the biblical counseling view of information outside Scripture summarized in the second sentence, critics are, perhaps, even more strenuous. Opponents typically accuse biblical counselors of refusing to embrace the information affirmed in the second sentence. They erroneously argue that our beliefs about sufficiency exclude an embrace of extrabiblical information. In fact, there is nothing about an embrace of the information inside Scripture that makes it impossible or unnecessary to embrace information outside Scripture. Let me make this clear with three clarifications.

Biblical Counselors Embrace Extrabiblical Information for Biblical Reasons

First, it needs to be clear that biblical counselors embrace extrabiblical information for biblical reasons. To see this, we need to understand that extrabiblical information is all the countless pieces of data that fill the earth and our experience with knowledge. It is a massive category of very different material. Some of this extrabiblical information is positively delightful, like the existence of my glorious granddaughter, Hazel. This is the kind of material I mean when I say that extrabiblical information is our privilege to know. Some of this information is absolutely essential, like the treatment for type 1 diabetes, or where to find the food you need to survive. Not all extrabiblical information is of equivalent necessity, but some of it is required to live life. As we continue to flesh out our understanding of extrabiblical information, consider a few more categories in this massive class of material. 

Some extrabiblical information is true, like the fact that the state bird of Florida is the northern mockingbird. Other pieces of extrabiblical information are not true, like the mistaken belief of some that the state bird of Florida is the flamingo. Other kinds of extrabiblical information are disputed. Some of the disputes, like the causes and consequences of global warming, are because of ignorance, and others, like the ethics of sex outside marriage, are disputed because of morality. Still other pieces of extrabiblical information vary according to relevance. The fact that The Pickwick Papers was Charles Dickens’s first best-selling novel is just as true as the fact that the United States is over $40 trillion in debt, but the two pieces of extrabiblical information are not of equivalent relevance in any given context. All pieces of information, whether true, false, debated, relevant, or irrelevant, exist in the massive category of extrabiblical information. Everyone admits this information exists, including biblical counselors.

​One reason biblical counselors admit extrabiblical information exists is because of the teaching of Scripture. In the very first words of divine address to the human race, God indicated the existence of extrabiblical information in Genesis 2:16 when he pointed Adam and Eve to allthe trees in the garden, only two of which we read about in Scripture. The Israelites possessedextrabiblical information about the specific houses where they could find Egyptian wealth in Exodus 12:36 when they plundered the country before their escape from bondage. Solomon demonstrates extrabiblical information of the false ways to pursue life in a fallen world in Proverbs 14:12 when he talks about the way that seems right to man. Isaiah’s encounter with the holy God is perfectly preserved in Isaiah 6:1-6, but all the information he had about it was extrabiblical until he wrote it down. Jesus endorses the existence of extrabiblical information in Matthew 6:26 when he tells us to “Look at the birds” and in Matthew 6:28 when he tells us to “Consider the lilies.” Peter affirms the existence of extrabiblical information like flowers and grass in 1 Peter 1:24-25 when he says that those things fade but the Word of God endures forever. You get the idea. One reason extrabiblical information is required is that it is impossible to understand the sufficient Scriptures without it.

​The Bible does not only teach the existence of extrabiblical information but requires Christians to use it. James 1:19 says, “Let every person be quick to hear and slow to speak.” The Bible requires extrabiblical witnesses so that every charge might be established on the evidence of “Two or three witnesses” (Matthew 18:16; 2 Corinthians 13:1). The Bible warns against the foolishness of ignoring relevant extrabiblical information in Proverbs 18:13, “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.” The Bible requires the use of extrabiblical information. Biblical counselors believe it is impossible to obey the sufficient Scriptures without first receiving a tidal wave of extrabiblical information.

Biblical Counselors Embrace Extrabiblical Information Even Though It Is Tainted

​Second, it needs to be clear that biblical counselors embrace extrabiblical information even though it is tainted. In the earlier summary of extrabiblical information, I made clear that the material is an untidy jumble of true, false, and debated information. That mixture of information exists because of human weakness and wickedness. Human weakness means we are finite and frail and lack God’s exhaustive ability to know everything there is to know. Human wickedness means that sin distorts all information as it is presented to us and received by us. Some false extrabiblical information is presented to us as true, and some true extrabiblical information is received by us as false. The frustrating reality of human weakness and wickedness makes it a challenge for people to interact with and understand extrabiblical information. 

But human weakness and wickedness does not defeat the ability of people in a sinful world to perceive and present accurate extrabiblical information. In his common grace, God preserves the ability of all people to receive and share information. Common grace is all the good gifts God gives to his people even if they have not experienced the saving grace of Jesus. Just one place in the Bible that mentions this is Acts 17:25, which says of God, “He himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” “Everything” is a comprehensive category including all the good gifts God gives to people. Just one of those gifts is the clear and accuratethoughts of people.

​Belief in the Bible leads biblical counselors to embrace the truth of common grace. We believe the doctrine makes it possible for unbelievers to swim in the sea of extrabiblical information and come to know information accurately. But we must be careful. It is not the function of common grace to negate all the weakness and wickedness of human beings. Though human beings can know true information, common grace does not guarantee the accuracy ofknowledge in any given instance. Determining whether a piece of extrabiblical information is true and grounded in common grace, or is false and so a result of life in a fallen world, is farmore challenging than some wish to admit.

This challenging situation is an important point of conflict between biblical and the clinically informed counselors. When clinically informed counselors consume information from the world of secular therapy, they have a tendency to label that extrabiblical information as important and relevant and organize it under the banner of God’s common grace. Biblical counselors tend to think that such judgments are, among other things, too hasty and like to point out that secular experts often strenuously debate the accuracy of information that less-informed Christians carelessly embrace. 

When clinically informed counselors characterize the concerns of biblical counselors as a rejection of common grace, they misunderstand the position of their opponents and the very nature of the doctrine of common grace. Common grace does not justify all claims generated out there in the world. It is a theological explanation for how some claims that come from the world could be true. Before we can place an element of extrabiblical information under the banner of common grace, we must first do the hard work of establishing that the information is accurate.

Extrabiblical Information Must Never Substitute for or Compete with the Bible

Third, it needs to be clear that extrabiblical information must never substitute for or compete with biblical information. My two-sentence summary of the biblical counseling positionmakes two assertions about extrabiblical information. The first assertion states that biblical counselors embrace extrabiblical information. The second assertion states that no information found outside Scripture should ever be used to replace or compete with information found insideScripture. This is a source of much confusion for biblical counseling opponents, so it is important to proceed carefully.

It can be helpful to think about the relationship of biblical information and extrabiblical information in three categories. The first category has to do with extrabiblical information that absolutely is not found within Scripture. The existence of the planet Neptune, for example, is in this massive category. The second category has to do with information that is addressed both inside and outside the pages of the Bible in complementary ways. Since “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), we can affirm that the existence of God is one example of this kind of information. Of course, the information about God found in the pages of Scripture is different than the information about God found in the created order, but both are true and not in conflict.

The third category of extrabiblical information competes with biblical revelation. In this category we are talking about information generated by people that is specifically corrected by information contained in the Bible. An uncontroversial example of this kind of information is the nature of salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Any piece of extrabiblical information that would replace or compete with this biblical claim must be rejected.

This third category is where the debate is between biblical and clinically informedcounselors. Biblical counselors agree with our clinically informed brothers that there is much information about counseling and the human condition to be found outside Scripture. But this information is not admissible in authentic Christian ministry because the Bible has uniquely and authoritatively addressed how to care for God’s people in a way that disqualifies any otherproposed intervention. We believe God has told us the insights and interventions we need for counseling care, that he has not invited us to receive input from the world, and to receive such input inevitably replaces or competes with God’s instructions in Scripture. This position is unique in a counseling world where secular approaches dominate efforts to care for people. But it is not unique in the broader world of Christian ministry and theology. Consider two relatively uncontroversial examples. 

The first example comes from the world of preaching. Those of us committed to expository preaching believe when we stand to preach, we have a command to deliver the pure milk of God’s Word. No faithful preacher would ever consider mingling the words of Scripture with the words of man. This conviction does not mean expository preachers reject the existence of extrabiblical information and the doctrine of common grace. Preachers consume countless resources outside Scripture: biblical commentaries, books on ancient Near Eastern customs, other preacher’s sermons, and books by liberal theologians. We search for sermon illustrations in everything from Russian novels to Western research experiments, we watch documentaries, and we read texts about sermon delivery and rhetoric. We are not only privileged but required to consume information like this. We bring all that information to the preaching task and may even mention some of it. The sermon itself is an instance of extrabiblical information! But faithful preachers know that the point of the extrabiblical information is not to communicate the extrabiblical information, but biblical truth. It is not that extrabiblical information is never used or never comes up, but that it never forms the content of Christian preaching. That role belongs exclusively to Scripture. When biblical counselors consume extrabiblical information but refuse to substitute it for the biblical content of counseling, we are functioning like faithful expository preachers.

The second example comes from the world of worship. Those of us committed to the regulative principle believe God has told us how he should be worshiped and think we should not impose human principles on divine instructions. A commitment to the regulative principle does not mean there is nothing to learn outside Scripture. Most of us have been powerfully impacted by extrabiblical information in the dramatic arts and know its powerful impact on the human soul. Yet no one committed to the regulative principle argues this information is the foundation for including skits in Christian worship. We believe that, information outside of Scripture notwithstanding, God has regulated the content of worship in Scripture. Biblical counselors believe God has regulated the interventions in counseling ministry and no amount of extrabiblical information or common grace insights create a reason to add to it. We hold to a counseling equivalent of the regulative principle.

When biblical counselors embrace extrabiblical information but refuse to use it to replace or compete with biblical information, we are doing in the discipline of counseling what faithful Christians do all the time. 

Where We Disagree

I hope these clarifications can help correct some of the recent mischaracterizations. Biblical counselors affirm the existence of extrabiblical information in the world. Biblical counselors affirm the necessity of extrabiblical information in the world. Biblical counselors affirm the doctrine of common grace. Anyone who says this is not true is either terribly confused or intentionally dishonest. There is no debate in the contemporary biblical counseling movement about any of these matters. 

The contemporary debate is over how much confidence we can have that the doctrine of common grace ensures the accuracy of human knowledge in specific cases. The debate is about whether secular efforts at counseling care are more defined by the doctrine of God’s common grace or by the corrosive impact of sin on human thinking. The contemporary debate is about whether any knowledge, however accurate, should ever substitute or compete with the Bible in the ministry of the Word. These are the central and crucial matters, but too many opponents of biblical counseling have been unwilling to engage them, choosing instead to debate matters where there is no disagreement. 

The contemporary conflict is a debate regarding our doctrine of the Word of God. Biblical counselors believe the scope of Scripture’s sufficiency includes the issues that are addressed in counseling ministry. Clinically informed counselors disagree that Scripture intends to address everything biblical counselors claim and so seek help from secular thinkers. Clinically informed practitioners believe counselors must mine the extrabiblical information from secular psychology in search of common grace insights to add to counseling ministry. Biblical counselors believe such a mandate is found nowhere in Scripture and to undertake it without biblical warrant is to mistreat the Bible, common grace, extrabiblical information, and the essence counseling ministry.

In order really to make progress in this matter clinically informed counselors must finally begin to make biblical arguments relevant to this debate. They need to respond to careful arguments from biblical counselors and show from Scripture that God does not intend his Word to address the panorama of problems in human living. They also need to show where in the Bible God commands believers to syncretize his Word with secular wisdom. Making those arguments is going to be a tall order. I think if the opponents of biblical counseling knew how to make them, they would have already done it. 

Regardless, the time has come to stop peddling misunderstandings and misrepresentations as scholarship and serious argument. It is time to start talking about the issues where there is actual disagreement. It is time to start talking about what Scripture actually claimsfor itself. This debate is about the Word of God. Isaiah 40:8 says, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” That means, when this debate finally comes to an end, only those with the most faithful view of Scripture are going to be left standing. 

Islam in America 25 Years After 9/11

Heath Lambert

September 11, 2001 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was living on the North Shore of Boston and was getting ready to leave my apartment for the day when a friend called and said, “Turn on the TVright now.” I did as ordered, and watched aghast as the iconic World Trade Towers were swarmed in smoke and flames. My roommates and I forgot about any existence outside of the images on our screen. For hours, we stared in shock and watched as more planes crashed, the towers collapsed, thousands fled into the streets of New York City, and our bloodied nation took its first steps to make sense of the tragedy.

The attacks of September 11 served as the introduction of most Americans to the Islamic faith. It was a pretty scary initiation. As we learned terms like radical Islam, Al Qaeda, and jihad, we became fearful of this foreign faith that seemed so committed to destruction. That fear cut both ways. If most Americans were fearful that Muslims wanted to destroy our way of life, mostMuslims were afraid of being lumped together with the terrorists who perpetrated suchreprehensible acts.

In that environment of fear, most Americans could not have predicted what has happened to Islam in America in the quarter century since the devastation of 9/11. The story of Islam in America is one of incredible growth. Since 2001, Muslims have increased their presence in the United States from no more than a few million to around five and a half million, mostly through immigration. Because demographics are electoral destiny, this increase in population has translated to victory at the ballot box. In 2001 there were zero Muslims in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today there are five. These five are all liberal democrats, which is fairly incoherent from the standpoint of Islamic theology—but we will have to save an analysis of that for another time.

The point today is the growth of Islam in America. To be clear, Muslims are still tiny in demographic terms. They only occupy about 1% of the American population and the voting members of Congress. Still, their numbers have tripled in the 25 years since 9/11. That is breathtaking progress for a period of time that began with Islamic fundamentalists perpetrating the greatest act of terror in American history. 

On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is right for Christians to think carefully about Islam. We can do this in at least two ways.

Islam and The Truth

The most important thing Christians must say about Islam is that it is a false religion worshiping a false god. The Islamic Confession of Faith, the Shahadah, says, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” Such a statement is not only incompatible with biblical Christianity, but also completely untrue. 

In Scripture, God reveals himself as one. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” But the Bible also makes clear that this oneness is a complex unity where the one God exists in the three persons of Father, Son, and Spirit. This biblical reality of the Trinity, while notoriously difficult for finite people to grasp, is made repeatedly clear throughout the Bible. 

Islam absolutely denies this reality so basic to Scripture. Islamic teaching makes clear that the Trinity is not true, and that Allah is defined by a simplistic unity. This denial of the truth means Allah is just as false a deity as Baal in the Old Testament or anything in the Hindu pantheon. Since Allah is not the real God, it is impossible for Muhammad to be his messenger. Islam worships the false god, Allah; they follow a false prophet, Muhammad; and they obey a false revelation, the Qur’an.

To be clear, Muslims make the same charge of error against Christians, and so it is simple truth-telling to say we disagree. We need to be honest about this, but that honesty does not need to happen with a harsh and unloving spirit. 

Christians are called to love Islamic people. Anyone who has received the saving grace of Jesus understands we have no boast over any other person separated from God. Every Christian has received the same divine mercy we share with others. We must lean into relationships with ourMuslim neighbors, pray for them earnestly, and extend our love and compassion to them. One manifestation of this love is a commitment to telling the truth that the only God who exists is revealed as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and that Jesus was telling the truth in John 14:6 when he said, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” 

Islam and Culture

As Christians, we are not only concerned about Muslim people, but also about the impact of Muslim influence on our society. We are called to be salt and light to our entire culture, which requires us to think about the strength and health of our larger society. This means Christians must think carefully about the impact of Islam on culture. 

Culture is always downstream from worldview, religion, and morality. Ice freezes into the shape of that which molds it, and society always takes the shape of its dominant worldview. American society has looked the way it has for centuries because of the miraculous influence of Christianity in the founding and shaping of our country. As the dominant worldview of our population changes, it will bring inevitable societal change. 

Today, the threat to that cultural change is radical secularism far more than radical Islam. But on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Islam, while still a minority religion in America, is not isolated and is not in decline. Islam in America is ascendant. This means that Christians in particular andAmericans in general must think about the ramifications of growing numbers of Muslims in our society. We do not have to guess as we do this, but only need to look to Europe. In recent years our neighbors across the Atlantic have been dealing with massive problems posed by swells of Islamic immigrants.

The European culture closest to ours is the one in the United Kingdom, which has only lately begun to reckon with the culture-redefining nature of mass Muslim immigration. Since 9/11, the Muslim population in the UK has increased by more than 150%. London, the UK’s largest city, is now estimated to be more than 15% Muslim, and Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, is more than 30% Muslim. Birmingham has had several Muslims serving in the office of Lord Mayor since 2001, and London has had a Muslim mayor since 2016. 

While the Islamic influence in the UK has been growing, Christian influence has deteriorated. The long, slow decline of churches in the UK has been matched by rapid growth in the number of mosques. Across Great Britain, the sound of church bells is increasingly replaced by minarets shouting the Muslim call to prayer. While Christianity declines in the United Kingdom, it is not so much becoming less religious as it is becoming increasingly Islamic.

A Christian Response

As an American and a Christian—but mostly as a Christian—I believe everyone ought to have the freedom to choose their own religion—even if that religion is false. Also, as an American and a Christian—but mostly as a Christian—I think we have the responsibility to think carefully about the impact of worldview and religion on our entire culture. 

Western societies have spent a generation overlooking the fact that Islam always brings massive change to host cultures. It is never wise to ignore facts. Americans should acknowledge that the people you allow into your country ultimately reshape the composition of your country. When we make electoral decisions about who we entrust with power and immigration decisions about who lives in our country, those decisions are never isolated. They always work to create a certain kind of society. When we make these decisions, we need to remember the simple fact that a growing influence of Islam will lead to very different cultural outcomes than what we have known thus far in America. The UK has a head start on us in this change, and Americans ought to ask whether they are ready to deal with the same cultural revolution the British are facing. 

25 years after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I think the greatest surprise is that the mayor of New York City is a Muslim. Regardless of what you think about it, that is something no one would have predicted on that horrible September morning two and a half decades ago. When Zohran Mamdani took the oath of office as mayor of that great city, it was the first time in American history a person elected to that office placed his hand on the Qur’an. 

Mayor Mamdani did not place his hand on the Qur’an because that book has anything to do with the founding of the United States or the development of New York City into one of the most significant metropolitan centers on the face of the planet. When the mayor took his oath on the Qur’an, you can be sure he was not thinking about influence from the past, but about his hopes for the future. 

If Muslims are thinking about how their religion should influence our society, then, on the 25thanniversary of 9/11, at the absolute least, Christians ought to think about it too.

The Comprehensiveness of Scripture and The Contemporary Counseling Conflict

Heath Lambert

Oceans, Ponds, and the Biblical Counseling Movement

The first ocean I ever saw was the one in the field behind a barn in my small hometown of Kentucky. You might have tried explaining to me back then that there are no oceans behind any barns anywhere in the state of Kentucky. It would have been a waste of time. That wonderfulbody of water was filled to the brim with brown water, was way bigger than any other onearound, and, unlike the city pool, you could swim in it for free. That meant my friends and I usedit for relief from the intense heat and humidity of Appalachian summers. 

If you have never had the pleasure of pond swimming, you simply cannot imagine all you are missing. Let me help you apprehend the wonder of the experience. A successful swim requires entering the water at a run followed by a quick dive to the deep part in the middle where you can tread water. Such a maneuver is necessary because of the sludge layer at the floor of the pond. Standing in this sludge is technically possible, but not recommended. Once you place your feet down there, you slide into the sludge up to the middle of your shins before you hit bedrock. After your feet are firmly planted, they begin to be nibbled by numerous little critters that science has not identified yet. It is important to keep your feet out of this sludge if you want to avoid serving them for lunch. 

If this description of pond swimming fails to match your idea of relaxation in the water, you need to consider a crucial fact. The glory of pond swimming is not found in a long and leisurely swim. It is found in the emergency need for relief from the sweltering heat on a summer afternoon. The relief the pond offers does not come from entering the water. On hot days the temperature of water in the pond is dramatically hotter than the temperature in the summer air and can be, in August, a few degrees hotter than a nuclear explosion. The relief from summer heat offered by pond swimming comes only after you exit the water when the summer breeze hits your wet body. Now that can feel pretty good. But you have to enjoy it fast. After the water evaporates, it leaves behind several kilotons of dirt and minerals on your body. You discover quickly that the same stuff making the pond brown is now doing the same thing to you, and it makes your skin feel tight, sticky, and, honestly, a little gross. Relief from this new problemrequires a rinse with the water hose, which is also required in order to be granted permission to re-enter your house. Some may wonder why it is not best to just skip the pond, enjoy the hose, and avoid all the grime, sludge, and the foot-eating critters in the pond. I do not have time to address these concerns.

The point is that there is nothing quite like the joy of pond swimming.

I grew up loving that pond behind the barn as well as a few others I got to swim in. While I was growing up, I knew a handful of people who visited the ocean. They would describe to me its vastness, its beauty, how refreshingly cool it was, and how wondrous it was to be carried along by the waves. Sitting with no shirt or shoes as brown pond water dripped off my body, I would listen curiously, quite unable to grasp what they were saying. What could be so great about the ocean in comparison to the brown pond behind the barn?

The Contemporary Counseling Conflict

This essay is ultimately about how the relationship of the ocean to that pond has a lot to do with the current conflict in the contemporary biblical counseling movement. In this conflict, two different groups exist. On one side is a group of counselors I have called The New Integrationists in an attempt to identify a new crop of leaders pursuing the familiar project of integration. This group of men and women typically style themselves as clinically informed counselors. As a mark of kindness and respect, that is how I will generally refer to them throughout this essay. On the other side of the conflict are a group of counselors who refer to themselves as historic biblical counselors, classic biblical counselors, or, simply, biblical counselors. 

Understanding the conflict between these two groups requires understanding a crucial reality. That reality is that in this contemporary conflict, neither side is saying anything very new. The back-and-forth of debate consists of very old arguments being rehashed for the umpteenth time. On the biblical counseling side, the very old argument, articulated for over fifty years, isthat the Bible is the sufficient resource to guide counseling ministry and does not require the addition of secular resources. 

David Powlison described this core conviction of biblical counseling when he said,

The scope of Scripture’s sufficiency includes those face-to-face relationships that our culture labels “counseling” or “psychotherapy” . . . The problems, needs, and struggles of real people—right down to the details—must be rationally explained by the categories, which the Bible teaches us to understand . . . We have much work to do to understand and to articulate the biblical “model.” But we don’t have to make it up or borrow from models that others have made up as ways to explain people.

That is just one quote from one leader, but it is important to understand that it represents theconvictions of everyone committed to biblical counseling. When he wrote those words, Powlison was the uncontested leader of the biblical counseling movement. The remarks were a transparent disclosure of his convictions, which were made even more obvious by the title of the article, “The Sufficiency of Scripture to Diagnose and Cure Souls.” His quote from that article was one of many that I used in my doctoral dissertation, where I made the argument that—though many differences existed between Powlison himself and Jay Adams, the founder of contemporary biblical counseling—the two men had the same view of the sufficiency of Scripture. My doctoral dissertation was written under the supervision of Powlison and was later published as a book, The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams, to which Powlison wrote the foreword. The point is that this one quote is a very obvious demonstration of Powlison’s convictions, which reflect the beliefs of the larger biblical counseling movement. 

On the other side of the contemporary counseling conflict are those identifying as clinically informed and who disagree with that core conviction of biblical counselors. Clinicallyinformed counselors believe the Bible is a wonderful book that stands in authority over the counseling task, but that it is not the only resource that should control counseling concepts or contribute to counseling methods. Such practitioners have adopted the longstanding position thatit is important to mine the resources of psychology for insights and interventions that can augment counseling ministry. Clinically informed counselors are not monolithic. Just how necessary it is to augment Scripture with outside resources depends on which clinically informed counselor is talking, but all of them believe it is at least valuable, if not absolutely essential.

These are the very old arguments being repeated in a new setting. The central difference between the opposing sides comes down to vision. Biblical counselors look at Scripture and see a massive resource full to bursting with help for people facing trauma, heartbreak, addiction, anger, crippling anxiety, doubt, mistrust, abuse, confusion, and every other problem under the sun. Clinically informed counselors simply do not see the Bible this way. Of course, they think Scripture is wonderful, authoritative, foundational, and helpful. But they do not see all the realities that those of us in the biblical counseling movement see when we look at the pages of Scripture. 

This difference in vision is a source of pain and heartbreak to me. Before God, I want clinically informed counselors to see what biblical counselors see. That is why I am writing these words. In this essay, I want to try to expand the biblical vision of those who do not yet see as clearly as they one day will. The disagreements are sharp these days, but my prayer is that clinically informed counselors will begin to see a wonderful reality that, to biblical counselors, is clear as crystal. I want to do this by talking about the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture.

The Comprehensiveness of Scripture

​When all is said and done, the conflict in the contemporary counseling movement is a debate about the Word of God. That makes it essential to focus on Scripture and pay attention to what theologians call the attributes of Scripture. The most common way theologians do this is by talking about the four perfections of Scripture: authority, necessity, clarity, and sufficiency. Biblical counselors have had much to say about these perfections, but the focus of the movement and of the contemporary conflict has been the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. The solution to the contemporary conflict is found within this category of sufficiency in the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture. Let me begin by explaining the relationship between the sufficiency of Scripture and the comprehensiveness of Scripture.

​The doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture has an expansive scope. In my book, A Theology of Biblical Counseling, I talk about four categories within the sufficiency of Scripture,including: progressive sufficiency, completed sufficiency, formal sufficiency, and material sufficiency. The focus of the counseling debate has not just been the sufficiency of Scripture broadly considered but has been a peculiar emphasis on the material sufficiency of Scripture. 

​When theologians talk about the material sufficiency of Scripture, we are talking about the actual contents of the Bible. Debates about the material sufficiency of Scripture are debates about the subject matter that Scripture intends to address. The orthodox Christian understanding of this matter is that the Bible tells us everything we need to know from God about any topic. A focus on the material sufficiency of Scripture raises a crucial question. If material sufficiency means that we have all the divine words we need from God, then just how expansively does his Word address the problems in living on the table in counseling? The answer to this question is found in the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture. 

​The biblical counseling movement has often addressed the comprehensiveness of Scripture. One of the central ways this issue has been discussed is in making clear that Scripture is a comprehensive resource, not an exhaustive one. I am aware of no person in the biblical counseling movement or anywhere else who has made a serious argument that the Bible is an exhaustive resource, including every detail on every piece of information it is possible to know. Such a claim would be preposterous. The only exhaustive resource in existence is the mind of God himself. Biblical counselors have not argued that Scripture addresses all of life by being exhaustive. We argue that it addresses all of life in the only way possible, namely, by being comprehensive. 

John Frame is helpful in defining the comprehensiveness of Scripture as, “The relevance of all Scripture to all of life.” He says this means God’s “Truth covers all human life.” God, he argues, intends his “whole Word to apply to the whole world.” He warns that “The comprehensiveness of Scripture rules out attempts to limit the scope of biblical revelation.”

Frame’s teaching on the comprehensiveness of Scripture is important for several reasons. First, Frame is a theologian of the first order respected across denominational lines as one of the most faithful teachers in our generation. Second, Frame has earned great respect in the counseling world from both biblical and clinically informed counselors. That respect is important because Frame’s language about the biblical doctrine of comprehensiveness is the same language that clinically informed counselors identify as biblicistic, extreme, simplistic, and unthinking when biblical counselors say the very same things. John Frame is absolutely not open to suchcharges. Frame’s teaching on biblical comprehensiveness is important because the foundation of the clinically informed project is built on the belief that Scripture is limited in scope and the doctrine of comprehensiveness is not true. If John Frame, faithful Christian theology, and classic biblical counselors are correct that there is no limit to the scope of Scripture, then there is no reason to mine clinical resources to fill in assumed gaps, and the clinically informed approach is bankrupt.

But this brings us back to the problem of vision that I spoke about before. The doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture, so plain to theologians like John Frame and so uncontroversial to biblical counselors, is precisely what clinically informed counselors do not see. In what follows, I want to persuade Christians in the counseling world that the Bible addresses all the various realities that counseling addresses by demonstrating the comprehensiveness of Scripture in four ways. 

God Is the Agent of Comprehensiveness

​We all know information is important. It is so important that we are living in a world of hyphenated labels that counselors use to demonstrate how much information they have. Some want to be trauma-informed. Others seek to be clinically-informed. In such a world, Christians committed to the sufficiency of Scripture must be absolutely clear that there is nothing wrong with being informed about almost anything. Counseling is a discipline based on knowledge that requires information and wisdom in order to do it well. In such a discipline, we are eager for helpful information. The central issue concerns where we believe we find the best, most reliable, and most comprehensive information to do that work. 

​In such an information-dependent world, every faithful Christian knows the most important source of information is God himself. This is because it is God alone who knows things that no other person could possibly know. 1 Kings 8:39 says, “For you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind.” 1 Samuel 16:7 says, “The Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” 1 Chronicles 28:9 says, “The Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought.” Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” Psalm 147:5 says, “Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.” Proverbs 5:21 says, “A man’s ways are before the eyes of the Lord, and he ponders all his paths.” Matthew 6:8 says, “Your Father knows what you need.” Matthew 10:30 says, “The hairs of your head are all numbered” by God. Romans 11:33 says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” Philippians 4:19 promises, “God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” Colossians 2:3 says in Christ, “Are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Hebrews 4:13 says, “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” 

​There are many more examples that could be added to that brief sample of God’s knowledge of the people he has created. Just these few indicate what all faithful Christians will uncontroversially affirm: that God as creator and sustainer is the only potential source for comprehensive knowledge about people and their problems. Too many people out there are far too eager to reject the biblical counseling position. They celebrate when they encounter almost any argument against the biblical counseling position on sufficiency and comprehensiveness. This is terribly out of place. Any Christian who would reject the comprehensive sufficiency of Scripture for counseling ought to do it slowly, reluctantly, and with a broken heart. If God has not revealed his knowledge of people and their problems to us, then there is no other way to get it, and we should weep rather than rejoice. The only possible path to comprehensive knowledge of life is through God who made it and exists as sovereign over it. ​​

The Promise of Scripture Is the Guarantee of Comprehensiveness

​The possibility of Scripture’s comprehensiveness is grounded in its author, who is the only Person who could create a resource that provides every bit of information people need to know about life, the troubles we face while living it, and the solutions we need to confront those problems. The divine authorship of Scripture does not absolutely guarantee Scripture’s comprehensiveness, however, since the fact that God could give his people a resource that comprehensively addresses everything in life does not necessarily mean that he has given such a resource or that Scripture is the resource where he reveals that information. The only way to know what God intended to accomplish in Scripture is to read the divine claims within it. 

​When we pay attention to those claims, we find that God repeatedly declares his intention to provide a comprehensive resource that addresses every problem we face and provides every solution we need. The biblical revelation is so overwhelming on this point that it is hard to know how to fit information that could fill many volumes into a brief section of a short essay. As a starting point, I will focus on a few observations from just one chapter in the Bible. 

​Psalm 119 is one long, sustained exaltation of the words of the Bible. One reality the Psalmist repeatedly praises about Scripture is the comprehensive way it addresses all of life. Consider eight statements from the Psalmist about the comprehensiveness of the Bible. Throughout all your life, God promises to guide you with his Word (Psalm 119:105). God declares that he has been candid with us in his Word about problems we face in life (Psalm 119:100, 104, 130). God says the Bible functions like a counselor sharing wisdom with hurtingpeople (Psalm 119:24, 130). God says that he gave his people the Bible as a guide for how to avoid the many problems in life (Psalm 119:3, 9, 175, 176). God encourages us that when we are enduring pain, suffering, and trauma, the Bible is the place where we can go to receive his comfort (Psalm 119:25, 28, 50, 71, 92, 107, 143). God promises that there will never come a time in life when the teaching of Scripture will be irrelevant (Psalm 119:44, 112). God assures that when life inevitably brings disappointment, fulfillment is available in the Bible (Psalm 119:93, 116, 154, 156). God makes clear that the very best resources on earth face crucial limitations, but not Scripture (Psalm 119:96). Again, this is just one chapter in the Bible that repeatedly emphasizes the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture. There are many other places (e.g., Psalm 32:8, Proverbs 6:20-23; Matthew 4:4; Luke 11:28; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; James 1:22-25).

​The point of all this is that the God who alone is able to provide a comprehensive resource addressing every issue in life has repeatedly told us that he has given us this resource in Scripture. Christians must take God at his Word on this and approach the Bible with trust and confidence. There is simply no warrant in Scripture for the assumption on the part of contemporary integrationists that there is something lacking in the content of Scripture that requires Christians to be clinically informed. The promises in Scripture require us to approach the Bible with assurance that it is comprehensively relevant to the panorama of human problems.Those statements are authoritative words in the sacred Scriptures that come directly from the God of heaven and earth. It honors God when his people believe him instead of their independent logic (Hebrews 11:6). I promise that if you will trust God and put his Word into practice in your ministry, you will never face a deficit of divine resources as you provide help for hurting people.

Categorical Content Is the Mechanism of Comprehensiveness

​God is the only being in the cosmos with the ability to provide a comprehensive resource for life, and he has repeatedly promised that he has provided such a resource in Scripture. Biblical counselors embrace this reality while integrationists and their clinically informedintellectual heirs do not. To be fair, they are repeatedly clear that the Bible is essential to the counseling task and the other resources they look to are imperfect and full of errors. Where they simply cannot agree with biblical counselors is that the Bible is a comprehensive resource addressing all counseling problems. Such a view simply does not seem credible to clinicallyinformed counselors. 

Let me make the clinically informed argument more bluntly than some of its proponents have been willing to articulate in any but the most private of contexts. The belief underlying the entire clinically informed project is that the Bible is 66 smaller books full of letters, history, poems, songs, genealogical lists, proverbs, symbols, and apocalyptic literature, which can feel a little beside the point from a clinical perspective. The Bible’s most recent addition was a fewmillennia before our modern and scientific era. It is just too hard for some to imagine that a book like this could possibly be all humanity needs to understand and address the counseling problems of people in the Twenty-First Century. That belief is not just the basis of the clinically informedapproach to counseling, but also resonates immediately with average Christians. Most Christians want to be both godly and informed and assume you need to have your devotions in the Bible to live for Jesus and also assume that someone with an M.A. in psychology is more equipped to understand people than most Christians. That clinically informed assumption is the best thing the movement has going for it.

​But this assumption has never been proven. Clinically informed counselors have had many opportunities to prove it, but that proof has never come. Perhaps that is because the unproved assumption appears to have a certain amount of common-sense logic behind it. Appearances are far from proof, but I grant that it is hard for some to fathom that a 2000-year-oldbook could be as comprehensively relevant as biblical counselors claim. Because I really do understand this can be difficult to grasp, I would like to provide a clear response to those who sincerely fail to see how a very old book that is limited in length can be comprehensive in scope.

​Just one specific way the Bible is comprehensive is in its use of categorical content. All through Scripture, God speaks in categories that he explains, describes with specific examples, and then invites his people to fill in specific details with their own examples as they are trained by Scripture. Many more examples exist than I have space to cover—my argument is that Scripture is the one comprehensive document, not this essay! But we can consider a few examples.

​First, consider the comprehensive categories in Scripture for how Christians must approach life. An obvious example in this category is 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” In one passage, God tells us how to live all of life in a way that brings him honor. Every activity you will ever accomplish in life is mentioned in a single verse of Scripture. The activities of your life are not listed like a Google search with 1,345,624,197 responses. Such information would be impossible to consume, much less apply. Instead, God in his wisdom includes all the activities of your life in the comprehensive category of “Whatever you do.” The point is that God’s glory is at stake in everyactivity from the coffee you drink in the morning, to the snack you eat at night, from your attendance at a prayer meeting on Wednesday, to the annoying meeting at work on Thursday. In a single verse, God speaks to everything you will ever do in life and declares that his glory must be your goal in all of it. He does not list all the activities of your life. He does not need to. He gave you the category and expects you to work out the details.

​Second, consider the comprehensive categories in Scripture for human behavior. It is a feature of Scripture to include regular lists of behaviors that we call virtue and vice lists. These lists create comprehensive categories for how Christians should live and how they should avoid living. One clue that these lists are not exhaustive is that no two lists in Scripture are identical. Another indicator that the lists are not exhaustive are the explicit statements which explain thatthe lists are intended to create categories that sanctified Christians must fill in with specifics.

One example of these behavioral categories are Paul’s lists of the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit. Paul is very clear that his lists are not exhaustive. In Galatians 5:19, before he gives a list of specifics, he says, “The works of the flesh are evident.” Many items are not included in the printed list, but still fit the category. Pornography addiction does not appear on the list in black-and-white any more than pedophilia, but every Christian knows those sins are there in principle right along with “orgies and things like these” (Galatians 5:21). Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit are similarly non-exhaustive. The list does not need to be exhaustive because the category of “such things” in Galatians 5:23 welcomes us to fill in the virtuous category with limitless details.

​Third, consider the comprehensive categories in Scripture for God’s blessings to his people. James 1:17 says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father.” This one passage addresses all the gifts you have ever received in your entire life whether the wonderful parents you had growing up, the children you received after a season of infertility, the incredible night of sleep you got last night, the salvation you have in Jesus, yourdinner out with friends last weekend, that incredible sermon you heard on Sunday, or the breath you just took as you read these words. Every single gift you have ever received in your life is all there in one verse, not through an exhaustive list, but through a comprehensive category. 

​There are so many more examples. We could talk about Scripture’s comprehensive categories for human relationships (Matthew 7:12), its comprehensive categories for divine judgment (Romans 1:32; 2:2), comprehensive categories for suffering and trauma (2 Corinthians 1:4; James 1:2), comprehensive categories for human thinking (Philippians 4:8), comprehensive categories for sound doctrine (Ephesians 4:14, 1 Timothy 1:9-10), comprehensive categories for the gifts of the Spirit (1 Peter 4:10), its comprehensive categories for investment in your local church (Hebrews 13:16), and more (Romans 13:8-14; 1 Corinthians 16:16, 18; Ephesians 4:29; Colossians 3:5, 23). The point is that one of the most common ways God ensures the Bible is a comprehensive document about all of life is specifically by avoiding any effort at listing every possible detail and, instead, by offering categories that encompass all those specifics. 

The Holy Spirit as the Power for Comprehensiveness

​We have seen how God as the author of the Bible makes it possible for Scripture to be comprehensive, that God repeatedly makes the direct promise that Scripture is comprehensive, and that this comprehensiveness is made possible by the categorical content of Scripture. Those realities ensure that Scripture comprehensively addresses the issues of life. But we must address one final reality in this short essay on the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture. It is possible for Scripture to address all of life in a fully comprehensive way, and yet have no impact on us. The great risk before us is the presence of a Bible that is just as comprehensive as it promises to be, but which is in the possession of people who are blind to thatcomprehensiveness. God solves this potential problem with the gift of the Holy Spirit, who gives Christians the ability to understand and apply the comprehensive resources in Scripture.  

​This glorious truth is built on a promise that comes directly from Jesus Christ. In John 14:16-17, Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” Jesus goes on to guarantee in John 16:13 that, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

​The same Spirit who inspired the writing of Scripture dwells in the hearts of Christians through faith in Jesus and guides them into all the truth. This means that the people of the Spirit have the mind of the Spirit as they read the words of the Spirit. There is a living, powerful, and divine connection between Christians and God’s comprehensive Word. That connection is the Spirit of God. That ever-present Spirit is one reason why God can leave categories for Christians to be filled in with details. As Spirit indwelt believers read the Spirit inspired Word, Jesus promises that his people, living life together, will be guided into comprehensive truth. 

​These four categories help us to honor the comprehensiveness of Scripture. God as Scripture’s author, the promises of Scripture to address all of life, the categories of Scripture to make comprehensiveness possible, and the power of God living in Christians to help them know the truth are all ways that the doctrine of the comprehensiveness of Scripture can and should be embraced by every believer. They are four realities that remind Christians that whenever we make statements limiting the scope of Scripture to address life, we are speaking in opposition to God’s Word. 

Comprehensiveness and Contemporary Counseling Conflict

​All those years ago in Kentucky, you might have been one of those people that described to me the wonders of the ocean after your trip to the sea. If I sat there in my muddy jean shorts minimizing the greatness of that body of water while trumpeting the wonders of brown ponds, you probably would not have been upset with me or said I could not be your friend. But you would know for certain that anybody who talks like that has simply not seen what you have.

​That is how I feel when clinically informed counselors tell me how much we need to add the insights of secular psychology to the glorious truth of God’s Word. All the sophisticated-sounding arguments only prove they have never beheld the comprehensive marvels of Scripture. Oh, how I wish they could! There is no reason to slosh around in the sludge of secular psychology when the wondrous glory of the Word of God is right there waiting to tell you everything you need to know to help hurting people. 

It may help for me to close with a personal word. I have spent my adult life in the world of biblical counseling. I have known, studied with, and befriended almost every previous leader in the movement. I have led and helped to found a number of biblical counseling organizations. I have helped several current leaders attain their positions. I have seen how the resources, institutions, and people involved in this movement have aided my own ministry and the ministry of countless others. My investment in the biblical counseling movement has been deep.

But my involvement in that world feels like a former life. I stepped away from leadership in that movement in 2018 and only address these matters infrequently. My passion in life is to herald the Word of God every week to the people at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, the vast majority of whom have no idea about the biblical counseling movement or its alphabet soup of organizations. I have no ambition for any influence or leadership in the biblical counseling movement. That part of my life has come to an end. 

The biblical counseling movement is one thing. Biblical counseling is another. Because I love the Bible, because I want to help hurting people, and because, for my entire ministry, I have seen with my own eyes what the Word of God can do when unleashed in the lives of hurting people, it is important, every now and then, for me to make clear just how wonderful the Bible is, just how much people need it, and just how dangerous it is to use language that limits the scope of Scripture’s content. For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would want to devoteany energy to such a project. 

If you are one of my clinically informed brothers or sisters who loves the pond of secular psychology and who derives joy from treading in its murky waters, that is your choice. But I hope you will not think me your enemy as I call to you from the cliffs overlooking the vast ocean of God’s Word in order to help you see there is something far better than what you currently behold. I wish we could stop arguing about this. But those of us who have seen the ocean are never going back to that pond. So, I write to invite you to come over here. I promise if you do, you will not be disappointed, but overwhelmed with the delight, power, glory, and beauty of God’s comprehensive Word to tell you everything you need to live your life and help others do the same.