Can Christians Benefit from Books by Nonbelievers?

00:00:00.000 | We have an email today from Jonathan Edwards, who lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

00:00:04.380 | That is his real name, I checked, and his question is a good one.

00:00:08.780 | "Pastor John, I drive a forklift in a warehouse for Christian family businesses.

00:00:13.740 | We are allowed to listen in our trucks to music, books, and I recently started enjoying

00:00:18.860 | this podcast.

00:00:20.340 | I have been an avid audiobook listener at my job, and I would like to know your thoughts

00:00:24.200 | about interacting with secular literature, including fiction, philosophy, poetry, and

00:00:30.040 | history.

00:00:31.040 | What would you say, Pastor John, to Jonathan Edwards?"

00:00:33.200 | Okay, Jonathan, here's my most recent thinking about why a measured use of wide reading,

00:00:41.320 | including non-Christian authors, is a wise thing.

00:00:45.440 | I call it the reality factor.

00:00:49.700 | When I'm reading the Bible, there are dozens and dozens of experiences and concepts and

00:00:57.920 | words that I can fly right over without pausing to contemplate the reality behind the words

00:01:06.440 | and the experiences and the concepts.

00:01:09.040 | That's what I mean by the reality factor.

00:01:11.400 | We need to stop bringing the reality factor and go deeper behind.

00:01:17.760 | Now, how do you contemplate a reality without some knowledge of the reality?

00:01:27.240 | Not knowledge of the word, but of the reality.

00:01:30.840 | I would say the more knowledge of the reality, the better, if the knowledge is true and in

00:01:38.280 | true proportion to its value.

00:01:41.160 | For example, you don't need to know lots of knowledge about the size and species of

00:01:47.280 | the birds that Jesus says to watch in Matthew 6, "Consider the birds of the air."

00:01:54.520 | That's not core relevant to what he's saying, but his aim in that text is to help you be

00:02:02.500 | free from the experience of anxiety.

00:02:05.360 | Now, what if you had no experience of anxiety?

00:02:12.840 | It's really important to have deep, wide knowledge of the reality of anxiety and how

00:02:19.720 | it works and what its roots are and what its fruits are and what forms it can take in life

00:02:25.160 | and how it can sneak up on you and what devastation it's had in the history of people's lives

00:02:31.360 | and on and on and on.

00:02:32.640 | In other words, there are many realities in the Bible which assume that from life experience,

00:02:41.720 | we know what they're referring to—peace, joy, fear, anger, war, deception, beauty,

00:02:49.480 | power, hypocrisy.

00:02:51.520 | Of course, the Bible gives crucial insight into these things that come from nowhere else,

00:02:58.440 | but the raw material of knowledge is gained in large measure from life experience, and

00:03:06.680 | then the Bible takes that common fund of human experience, of reality that we bring to the

00:03:14.520 | Bible and shows how God relates to it and transforms it.

00:03:19.400 | The New Testament assumes that we have not forgotten the lesson of the book of Proverbs,

00:03:26.640 | that we should go to the ant, the little bug, the ant, consider her ways and be wise.

00:03:33.360 | In other words, look at the world.

00:03:36.720 | Learn reality from the world.

00:03:38.480 | Learn something about hard work from the world.

00:03:41.400 | Learn something about perseverance from the world.

00:03:44.920 | Grow your fund of reality experience of a thousand things that are in the world, because

00:03:52.520 | when the New Testament mentions those things, it assumes we have some experiential knowledge

00:03:58.360 | of them.

00:03:59.360 | But here's the catch.

00:04:01.240 | Most of us live lives that are so small, narrow, constricted, limited.

00:04:08.540 | We know so little about so many things.

00:04:13.120 | One of the ways, only one, one of the ways that God has ordained for us to grow in our

00:04:18.880 | knowledge of many things, many experiences that we have no immediate experience of is

00:04:26.080 | through reading.

00:04:27.920 | This means that if we have a wide and deep knowledge of things through reading as well

00:04:34.160 | as through life experience, then when the Bible speaks, for example, of the sorrow of

00:04:38.880 | losing 10 children, we may have a greater understanding of what it's referring to.

00:04:45.200 | I'm thinking of Job, what it's referring to if we walked through it ourselves, which most

00:04:51.440 | of us won't.

00:04:52.600 | Hardly anybody loses 10 children all at once.

00:04:56.500 | But we might read about it.

00:04:58.100 | We might read the various kinds of horrible things that people have walked through like

00:05:02.920 | that and deepen our grasp of the human spirit and the experience of what it's like to do

00:05:09.160 | that.

00:05:10.160 | So let me give you just a little glimpse of how this worked for the original Jonathan

00:05:14.520 | Edwards.

00:05:17.800 | Jonathan Edwards delivered a sermon about slavery to sin and what it's like to have

00:05:25.680 | Satan as a slave master.

00:05:28.240 | Now, he knows that Satan is the most wicked, cruelest, most fiendish master that ever was.

00:05:35.320 | And yet most people gladly walk in his service.

00:05:39.040 | How could Edwards feel this as he ought?

00:05:42.080 | How could he know the reality of what it means to be ruled by Satan as he ought?

00:05:48.400 | How could he say it in a way that would help others know the reality?

00:05:54.920 | Edwards had evidently done some reading about human sacrifice in the country of Guinea.

00:06:03.220 | And here's what it did for him.

00:06:06.160 | Here's what he says, "Satan and his cohorts do by you as I have heard they do in Guinea,

00:06:15.560 | where at their feasts they eat men's flesh.

00:06:20.200 | They set the poor ignorant child who knows nothing of the matter to make a fire.

00:06:25.960 | And while he stoops down to blow the fire, one comes behind and strikes off his head

00:06:32.600 | and then is roasted by the same fire that he kindled and made a feast of.

00:06:39.360 | And the skull is made use of as a cup out of which they make merry with their liquor,

00:06:47.760 | just so Satan, who has a mind to make merry with you."

00:06:54.560 | Now, that's pretty horrible, pretty powerful, pretty unforgettable.

00:07:01.800 | Edwards got that knowledge of evil from outside the Bible, and it informed biblical teaching

00:07:10.880 | about Satan's horrible, fiendish, devastating, murderous rule over his people, all the while

00:07:20.720 | making them think they're having fun.

00:07:23.520 | Now, in my case, I just finished listening to all three volumes of William Manchester's

00:07:29.460 | biography of Winston Churchill, about a thousand pages each.

00:07:36.200 | What an education in reality, insights into natural challenges of leadership, insights

00:07:45.360 | into the horrors of war, insights into fickle nature of public approval, insight into sexual

00:07:52.120 | insanity of upper-class philandering, insight into the complexities of what justice looks

00:07:59.160 | like in public policy, insight into the value of never giving up, though there's enormous

00:08:05.640 | opposition, and on and on and on.

00:08:09.000 | What an education.

00:08:10.600 | I was learning reality.

00:08:12.280 | I wasn't learning my morality.

00:08:15.640 | Books didn't teach morality.

00:08:17.160 | I wasn't learning my morality.

00:08:18.520 | I get that from the Bible.

00:08:19.920 | I was gaining awareness of realities that come from life experience, except I don't

00:08:26.480 | have any life experience of being in war.

00:08:29.640 | Things that are and what they're like, that's what I found.

00:08:35.520 | In other words, I was enlarging the raw material of reality, which the Bible assumes and interprets

00:08:43.920 | for me when I bring it to my reading.

00:08:47.800 | So what's the aim of all this reading?

00:08:51.080 | All of our reading, whether it's Christian or non-Christian, all of our reading aims

00:08:56.800 | to know God better, to know man better, to know the ways of God and the ways of man better,

00:09:06.000 | to understand the Scriptures better, that we may obey more fully what God says and be

00:09:12.760 | more useful in accomplishing His purposes and glorifying His name.

00:09:18.280 | Amen.

00:09:19.280 | Okay, well, in representing APJ listeners, I know they would want me to ask you this.

00:09:23.600 | How long did it take for you to get through all three Churchill audiobooks?

00:09:26.840 | I'm trying to think when I started.

00:09:28.840 | Sometime in the spring, maybe six months, maybe five months, I'm not sure.

00:09:33.400 | When it ended, I felt sad.

00:09:35.000 | I really felt sad because they were so satisfying to listen to because of the reality that they

00:09:42.360 | were exposing me to so many things I didn't know anything about.

00:09:45.680 | It was like reading the history of World War II, and of course, it was a biography of the

00:09:49.640 | man.

00:09:50.640 | It was a primer in political science.

00:09:52.400 | I mean, it was the most remarkable read, probably the most amazing thing I've ever read in terms

00:09:57.760 | of scope.

00:09:58.760 | Well, there you have it, listeners, a mammoth reading goal for 2017, perhaps.

00:10:03.600 | It's certainly a classic.

00:10:04.600 | Once again, the Churchill biography is written by William Manchester.

00:10:08.520 | It's titled The Last Lion.

00:10:10.560 | It's 3,000 pages long, divvied up into three volumes, Visions of Glory, Alone, and finally,

00:10:17.160 | Defender of the Realm.

00:10:19.240 | For those of you who listen to this podcast at work or on your commute or as just part

00:10:24.200 | of your daily routine, we want to thank you for making us a part of your day.

00:10:28.200 | We hope you find a number of other wonderful podcasts to mix into your life.

00:10:31.760 | Of course, we pray that you find some great audiobooks too.

00:10:34.480 | We know there are a lot of listeners out there like Jonathan Edwards somewhere in Kalamazoo

00:10:38.760 | right now.

00:10:39.760 | So, thanks, Jonathan.

00:10:40.760 | And to you, we want to say thank you for listening to the podcast and for your prayers, which

00:10:44.720 | are always appreciated, and of course, for your financial generosity that supports everything

00:10:49.400 | that we do at DesiringGod.org.

00:10:52.200 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:10:53.480 | We'll be back on Wednesday.

00:10:54.480 | We'll see you then.

00:10:55.500 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Can Christians Benefit from Books by Nonbelievers?

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