Another Potpourri Show!

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:33

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a new week. Somehow, the nation has made it through.

00:40

One more weekend, 60... What was it? 64 shot, 12 killed in Chicago over the weekend.

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I don't know about New York or any of the others, but I do know that, despite that going on, the anarchists and the

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Marxists were trying to tear down another Christopher Columbus statue, because that's far more important than doing anything about the all the black lives being taken in Chicago by other black lives.

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But that's America today. Welcome to it. And those of you outside of the

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United States, I guess things aren't quite as crazy. I think things have calmed down a little bit in other places.

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We had that stuff going on in London, even though London riots, I noticed, are sort of British.

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I mean, I think they take time out for tea and things like that because it's

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London. What are you going to do? You have to have to observe some level of propriety because you're in the

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United Kingdom. I can't believe I did not play this all last week. Can you? Can you?

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Are you ready to? OK. Had two programs last week and did not play this one minute video that we dropped, and I'd like to make sure it gets back out there because we don't...

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What? I don't know. I just grabbed it off YouTube. It's what

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I was on the front page of the website. So we don't have really smart people have likes people who think about what day of the week it is and stuff like that.

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We dropped this on a Friday afternoon, which is the same time the politicians drop the stories of their dirty laundry getting exposed.

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OK, so in other words, the worst the worst possible time is, of course, when we we drop this.

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And that's just that's just how we are. I don't know. But a fellow over in in my ancient homeland of Scotland took some of the comments they made right here on the program.

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They were not rehearsed. They are not written out. This is just a part of my normal teaching schedule and put together a and it's right at it's exactly one minute, which is interesting.

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That might be a commentary on the attention span of the average Western individual now.

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If you go past a minute. Well, it's even worse because remember, I've told you I've been on CNN. Remember when

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I did the thing on the Dr. Drew show on transgenderism? And the producer came in and talked to us in the green room beforehand and let us know that if you basically if you go more than 12 seconds with any one individual speaking, people might change the channel.

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I can think of numerous important sentences that take more than 12 seconds.

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But that's what that's the media is like, as if if the same person is talking for 12 seconds, the brain addled

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Westerner starts looking for something else to watch. It's like, but anyway, so here is why do lives matter?

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This was this was important. This was part of I really do think that in light of the

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Black Lives Matter movement, that when we speak to people,

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I was going to say in the wider society, but within the church, that we need to focus the attention, remembering that as distracted and as deceived as the person we're talking to you might be, they're still made in the image of God.

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And therefore, you can appeal to that image. And in so doing, you will be able to establish a point of contact.

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We'll talk about this a little bit later. There is no point of contact in the myth of neutrality. There is no neutrality.

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They're not neutral, and neither are you. Neither one of you can pretend to be that way. Honestly, they may pretend to be neutral, but they are not.

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And so what we do is we get their attention and we focus upon the word matters. Black lives matter.

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What does matters mean? What does anything matter? This helps get past a lot of the stuff that gets in the way.

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All right. So that's what I was talking about. And it's one thing with the silly looking old

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Scottish fellow with the scruffy beard sitting here saying it.

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It's totally completely different when you combine music and images.

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And that's how you communicate with folks today, really. That's how you do it.

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And that's what this is about. So you ready? All right, here we go. Do you believe black lives matter?

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Focus on the word matters. What do you think the word matters? If you're saying black lives matter, what does matters mean?

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I believe that black lives matter because black lives are created by God who defines what matters.

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If you're saying the government can determine what lives matter, what matters comes from the government, man, that is dangerous.

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That killed 150 million people just last century. Did you know that I can say black lives matter and Asian lives matter and white lives matter and Hispanic lives matter and fill in all the other colors of the rainbow because I have a reason for understanding the matter.

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I have a creator. And in fact, he's revealed himself in such a way that I can say lives matter because Jesus, the incarnate son of God gave his life so they would matter.

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Wow. I mean, right at thing, right at 60 seconds and gets the message across so much better than I did.

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And I did it. Yeah. So yeah, that gives you an idea.

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We need about three of those a month, four of those a month.

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Be great. Of course, that requires me to say something worthwhile at least once a week.

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That's the challenge there. Because like I said, I don't know, honestly, that I had even thought about what

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I was going to say before that program. I don't think I had that laid out. There's a lot of times that what happens on this program just it's it happens on the program.

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A couple of other things before we dive into some topics. I guess I might as well do this while I've.

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Oh, yeah. I didn't see I brought him in. Oh, I can. I'll pick him up here.

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So some of you will recall that at the

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G3 conference this year, I preached from Isaiah chapter six.

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And I've got a bunch of gold glitter all over these right now because I've been working on getting the pages separated, which is a monumental task and much more so with something this big.

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I preached from Isaiah chapter six. And what was somewhat unusual about the sermon was

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I preached from the text of the Greek Septuagint, the

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Greek translation of the Old Testament. The reason being specifically, there were a couple of interesting variants, meanings of words that were chosen in the

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Greek translation that's picked up on in the New Testament and things like that.

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And so it wasn't meant to be a a trick.

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But especially in light of the fact that the New Testament utilizes the

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Greek Septuagint more often than than it does the Hebrew by a long shot, it just was something that helped to bring in some of the background.

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And very often, even when we bring in that background, we do it in such a way that it's sort of like, oh,

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OK, yeah. And it's it's not memorable. People don't necessarily pick up on it or realize why it's important and things like that.

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So at G3, of course, thankfully, that was just before coronavirus hit.

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We had a lot a lot of a lot of folks in their booths and they were displaying stuff, and that included

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Post, Tenebrous, Lux and Jeffrey Rice. I have really gotten a lot of gold out of this. And so sometime last year,

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I had sent both of these to Jeffrey. And can you believe it?

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At one point, I actually asked him if it was possible to bind them together. Now that I look at them, that was pretty stupid.

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But after that sermon, I specifically decided, you know what? I left the one volume,

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I left this volume with him, sent this volume back. I had he had sent both of them.

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I had sent these gone through the mail. I don't know how many times. These are just the Hendrickson Reader's edition of the

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Greek Septuagint. So if you're wondering what these are, there is a two volume. I think they have it in hardback and they also have it in a leatherette type edition.

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They are not you do not have page edging. The the page edging is almost mirrored.

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There you go. Page edging. That was done by Post, Tenebrous, Lux. But these are the two volumes.

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And you'll notice what we did with them is we just did the two volumes, mirror images of each other.

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So this one has blue with the gray spine. This has gray with the blue spine.

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The ribbons are likewise mirror images.

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So you just have the two volumes. And so Genesis is here and through the

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Psalms and the prophets are in this one. I mean, this is a huge volume. I don't know how many pages is just this one.

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This is nearly eighteen hundred pages on this side. And I think this one's probably about sixteen.

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Yeah, right around just under sixteen hundred on the other one. So you're looking at a big pile of leather there.

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And so we came up with what to put on the spine and it's got the nice Cairo on the front that actually he designed off of the

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Cairo that I have. And so, yeah, it's nobody has anything like that.

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I could tell you some people that have commented on it. Big names, big names, but I won't throw names around today.

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But I did send the pictures of them to some fairly well -known individuals who, let's just say, have large personal libraries.

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And they're like, I may have to give that man some business. I said, you might. So on Sunday, on this coming

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Sunday, Jeff decided that we've got a lot of new folks at church right now.

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And I think part of that's because for a while there were only a few churches meeting in the valley.

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We we never closed down. And who knows if that won't become the case again in the future?

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I there's absolutely no reason for it. The numbers are very clear about that.

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But everybody keeps moving the goalposts and it's not November yet. So do not underestimate how far people of a certain political persuasion will go between now and November to guarantee a certain result in November.

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Just just don't underestimate it. I'm sorry. Yeah, the coronavirus will be cured on November 4th.

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Well, not only if one side wins, the other side wins. Right, right.

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Yeah, that's that's exactly right. Anyway, um, so it's a neat you distracted me there.

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So there have been so many people, new people that we decided that it would be good to do a quick series on the doctrines of grace just to remind people of where we stand and why we would use a the

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London Baptist Confession of 1689, for example, why we have the Baptist Catechism, Keech's Catechism that we that we go over in every service.

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It's become known as Pastor James's mini sermon is when we cover the catechism and a little section called we call voices, where we go over, for example,

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I the voices section this past Sunday, since we were doing baptisms, was Jerome's commentary on Matthew 28 and go teach and baptize.

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And it was interesting that even Jerome says you have to believe before baptism has any meaning for you, which was an intriguing commentary to have.

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But anyway, so next Sunday, Jeff has done the introduction, sovereignty of God, and then did total depravity on Sunday.

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And so I'm going to step in this coming Sunday, and I'm going to work on some of the key texts on the subject of compatibilism, and that is the relationship of the divine decree of God and the will of man.

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And so when you think about it, the normal three, I'll probably expand upon it, but the normal three that are utilized, the three classical texts would be

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Genesis chapter 50 with the issue of Joseph and his brothers and Joseph's recognition of the sovereignty of God in light of the evil actions of his brothers.

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Then, of course, Isaiah chapter 10 and God's utilization of the people, the

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Assyrians, to bring about his punishment of the rebellious covenant people, and then his punishment of the

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Assyrians on the basis of their acting upon the desires of their heart. And then, of course,

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Acts chapter 4, and the early church's prayer that recognizes that what took place, the combined activities of the

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Jewish leaders and Herod and the Romans together, Pilate, that all of them were working under the sovereign hand of God and accomplished that which he had predestined to take place.

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And yet they recognize, of course, the full responsibility of those individuals. This is compatibilism.

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And so what that means is I didn't bring my, I guess

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I could have grabbed this one, you know, we could have just grabbed the Tyndale Greek New Testament, also another

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Jeffrey Rice Rebind. We'll put that on top of that there. And so I could do that.

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Yeah, you know, I still think the font's a little larger on the NA28. I really think it's still a little bit larger.

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I mean, this is very readable, but I think the large print NA28 is just a little bit bigger.

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Large fonts matter. That's obviously a comment made by an older person in the other room.

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Large fonts matter. So I'm going to walk into the pulpit next

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Sunday with those three volumes. It doesn't have, it's a decent size pulpit, but it's not, the biggest pulpit

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I've ever stood behind, ever stood behind, is John MacArthur's in Southern California.

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And I've told you before, I mean, you could, I could have all, I could have all three of these open with room left over up there.

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It is, it is meant to be able to spread out a tremendous amount of material.

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Uh, but I'm gonna have a little trouble. It's, it's not gonna be, it's not that big, but I'm gonna preach from both volumes of the

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Septuagint and my NA28, uh, Sunday afternoon at Apologia, because those three texts are in those three different volumes.

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So why not? Um, it'll, it'll be great. But my thanks to Jeffrey Rice. Um, you know,

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I push, I push the brother. And if you're thinking the same thing, just let me warn you ahead of time that wasn't cheap.

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Okay. That's a lot of work. You got those, those things are huge. Those are, those are massive.

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Um, and the page edging or something that big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, just, just let you know. I mean, he's, he's, he's good.

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In fact, I just, I just saw that the, uh, spines, the, uh, I forget what you call those things on the spine, but they line up perfectly even with the

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Tyndale Greek New Testament between each one. So it must use the same pattern or something like that, uh, to make that, uh, to make that work like that.

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That's interesting. Um, so anyway, uh, y 'all have, some of you have saw the pictures.

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He takes really great pictures of his work too. Um, so some of you saw when it was posted and I posted material and of course other people were going, well, we know who's that is.

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It's like, yeah, we do. I had a friend said, you get all the nice toys and I'm like, well, all right.

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I won't, I won't argue that one. I wouldn't argue that one, but, um, yeah. So I'm looking forward to Sunday when we cover those texts and getting to, uh, juggle, uh, that massive pile of, uh, of leather on the, uh, on the pulpit.

20:44

That'll be something else. Speaking of Sunday, some of you saw, uh, I'll just be brief, but, uh, some of you saw some of the pictures that were posted.

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Uh, of course I've got videos, um, but we had a baptismal service on Sunday and, um, oh, um, uh, where, uh, where would that be?

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Um, how would I grab that real quick? Uh, there is a video.

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Um, and if my, for some reason I don't, there's,

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I guess I've just gotten so used to everything being, uh, uh, being, uh, uh, connected, uh, and there's, there's some disconnection.

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There it is. Um, I knew about this sometime.

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Um, it was last, it was recorded last week. And the reason

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I know that is, um, I'll, I'll play us here for you in a second, but, uh, the young man sitting over on the right -hand, uh, side, uh, this is, uh,

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John and Nicoletta Wibrew and their, their boys, Seth and Luke. And Seth is on the right -hand side and he actually has a, he actually says something in the video very clearly.

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He's a precocious young man, like I was, let's put it that way. And, um, so I had gone over and talked with him right after they recorded this.

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Um, and on Sunday night, I got to baptize Seth and, uh, two of my granddaughters, uh,

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Cadence and Clementine. And of course, uh, Clementine being the drama queen that she is, uh, thought the water was rather cold.

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And so there's a rather classic picture of her with her mouth wide open going, um, when we got into the baptistry, but, uh, that was of course a, a tremendous, uh, uh, honor as well.

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Some people knew about that. I didn't talk about beforehand, just, you know, there's weird people who watch this program, unfortunately.

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So it was best not to, but, um, uh, Nicoletta is my, uh, chiropractor and I've said many, many times before, she's the best chiropractor

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I've ever been to. I've been to many, I have many to compare with, uh, from around the United States and outside the

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United States. And, uh, most of you know that I'm extremely physically active.

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Um, currently on track, thanks to the coronavirus, um, currently on track for 9 ,000 miles on bike this year, uh, with about 425 ,000 feet of climbing.

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That's a lot of time. Uh, but I'm also rowing and I'm running and my

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I'm I'll be 58 in December rushing towards quickly beat your body up.

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Couldn't do it. Uh, if Nicoletta did not every once in a while, um, put everything back where it's supposed to be, especially my neck, which

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I can tell right now is out. Uh, so I need to be going and visiting the family again sometime in the very near future.

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Um, so, uh, but she's been my chiropractor for 10 years. And so I was,

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I've known the kids since the time they were born, even before they were born for that matter.

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And, um, so their story has been very, very well known to me. The Weiber's are now part of, uh, apology at church as well.

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And in fact, uh, were brought forward, uh, with the new members, um, Sunday night too.

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It was a long service. I think I got out of there a little bit before seven, we started at four.

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So that gives you the idea. Uh, but you got a lot to cram in there and that's what we did. So, uh, they put together this great video.

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Well, uh, Marcus Pittman did the video. Um, but, uh, a couple of, uh, folks from the church are going to be doing videos because we have a number of children in the congregation that have special needs.

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And these days, very often those special needs are discernible in the womb.

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And hence automatically, uh, the issue of abortion comes up.

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So here is the Weiber's story. I thought I'd share that with you. Uh, and also, uh, the reality that young man on the right, um, was one of the folks

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I got to baptize a Sunday night. So here's, here's their story. This is a Luke Elijah. Um, he has hydrocephalus.

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We chose not to murder our son and chose life. So we found out that we were pregnant with Luke when

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Seth was two. And we were so excited. We did an ultrasound and we found out that his cranial cavity, it just appeared empty.

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So what's wrong with Luke is that he, he doesn't have a, the normal tube in the spinal cord that drains the fluid that's inside the brain.

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So the brain kept swelling and swelling and swelling. And so his head kept getting larger and larger. And, uh, when he was a baby, it was the size of an adult head.

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I remember seeing the ultrasound. I remember like looking at it and just seeing black where you should normally see brain.

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Uh, and I remember the, we got transferred to a perinatologist and the perinatologist said that the likelihood of him surviving this pregnancy, uh, was low.

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We were told that we were still within our rights to have an abortion at his gestational age.

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You know, just because our baby is sick doesn't mean that we're going to have an abortion. We knew that it was going to be a hard road ahead.

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And I read statistics that one out of every 19 babies with Luke's diagnosis is murdered.

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I was just so sad that they wouldn't even give him a chance for life. Well, the fact that they were just ready to, to immediately offer that as the only option.

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We were already so strong in our faith that the road, uh, to the

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Lord and our, on our knees was already paved. And so when we came across this calamity, we were already set that we're obviously not going to terminate the life of our child and, uh, kill them.

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We were strong in our faith and we were trusting the Lord. But I remember the first thing that when we had a private moment to talk,

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John said something special that I don't think I'll ever forget. Yeah. So say we were, it was at our other house.

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We were in the bedroom together, just kind of taking in the news. And I remember just putting my head on my wife's abdomen and just saying to Luke, you know, you have a home here.

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You know, that was precious to my heart to hear my husband say that he learned to hold up his head at 10 months.

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He learned to crawl at 22 months. And then he learned to walk at, uh, he's only been walking for a month now.

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And, uh, that's, he's, uh, three years, six months. So the Lord has obviously been favorable to us.

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This is her son, Luke Elijah, and he was born with hydrocephalus. And when given the option to murder our son, we chose life.

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You're my brother. You know that? We can't do abortion because abortion really is murder because God said so.

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So there you go. Uh, I'm going to tell you, um, Luke's, uh, Luke's smile will absolutely light up a room.

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Uh, everyone who's met him says the same thing. And, uh, it was just about a month ago that all of a sudden

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I walk in and he's just standing there cause up till then he was, he would go on his knees just all over the place.

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Uh, but now he stands up and is walking around and we'll talk to you.

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And, um, yeah, he's, uh, obviously defied a lot of the odds and, uh, uh, but is a wonderful young child.

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So, um, that was, uh, that was pretty neat Sunday night, uh, for that to happen as well.

28:55

I guess I might as well transition from that, uh, into, uh, one of the stories that, um,

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I just happened to see, um, right before. Oh, great. As soon as I do that, uh, it, it, for some reason updates the, uh, the screen, but, um, right before the program started, it was talking, there was a article that has now, of course, disappeared.

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That's how social media works is you have something queued up and then you take a breath and everything disappears.

29:27

But Planned Parenthood is removing of New York is removing the name of Margaret Sanger, uh, from their buildings, uh, because of her connection to eugenics.

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Uh, yes, yes. And there it is, man, that was 34 minutes ago. Planned Parenthood, New York chapter announces founder

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Margaret Sanger over racist eugenics. Now it is obviously a wonderful thing when

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Planned Parenthood is willing to admit what Margaret Sanger really was, but if you're still doing what

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Margaret Sanger designed you to be doing to accomplish the same ends, that's not repentance.

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Okay. That's not a change. That's not taking a name off while still doing what your founder wanted you to do in murdering black babies who she, she thought were subhuman, who she thought, you know, her whole idea was to stop black breeding.

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That was her, that was her shtick. That was her thing. That's why Planned Parenthood clinics focus on minority neighborhoods and especially black neighborhoods.

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That's the reality. That's, that's the fact that's not, that's not even debatable. It's just the re that's the truth.

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Sad that we live in a day where so many people don't even think there is such a thing as truth, but anyway, that's, that's the case.

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So they're still there and they're still murdering the black babies. So take the name of the eugenicist off the building, but still kill the babies means something.

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If you want the very definition of the emptiness of virtue signaling, that's what it is.

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That's, that's the emptiness of virtue signaling. We're going to keep doing what the eugenicist told us to do because we make money doing it, but we'll take her name off of the building to try to look like we're virtuous.

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You know, the sad thing is virtue is a beautiful word, but virtue assumes the existence of a standard giver.

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You don't get to decide what virtues you are going to display and what you're not.

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I mean, this is, this is a great example of Planned Parenthood wanting to have the virtue credit of going along with a current cultural moment.

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You know, they've been promoting the Black Lives Matter stuff all over the place, Planned Parenthood. And every time they do it, there are 10 ,000 pushback tweets going, you people are a bunch of hypocrites.

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Well, you can't be a hypocrite if there is no objective morality, because if there is no objective morality, you just get to choose what rules you follow anyways.

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What does it matter? And so they get to get the virtue credit of doing something.

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It doesn't matter whether it accomplishes anything. It's just doing something today. You know, just tear down that statue.

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What does that really accomplish? Nothing, but it, that's, that's how virtue is done today. But then they stay open in the black neighborhoods and continue killing the black babies.

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Oh, okay. Yeah. I see how that works. Great. So yeah,

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Planned Parenthood's New York chapter announces founder Margaret Sanger over racist eugenics, but they don't close their doors.

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That would be the only meaningful response to a recognition that, hey, you know what?

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Our whole purpose is really racist eugenics.

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So maybe we should stop murdering black babies. Maybe you should just stop murdering all babies.

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Maybe that would be the first step of repentance. Yeah. That would be the first, first step of repentance.

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This is true. So that raises another issue.

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Over the weekend, representative John Lewis passed away and we are definitely seeing part of the impact of the woke movement, even within the church.

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In our society today, a man's consistent support of the murder of the unborn is now considered to be a virtuous thing.

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Even if that runs directly 1000 % contrary to in his earlier life, seeking in a nonviolent fashion to bring about civil rights, which

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I remind you, this is the amazing thing. When the civil rights laws were passed, they were passed by Republicans over democratic objections.

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And yet he died as a Democrat. And you might say, well, things have changed.

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What specifically? I mean, things have changed in the sense of what you need to do to get and maintain power politically.

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But sadly, what that has translated into is whatever gets votes, do it.

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It doesn't matter whether you have principles at all. The issue of principle is really what is to be brought out here.

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And amongst Christians, amongst Christian leaders today, there is great eulogizing of the man's civil rights works, but many of them will not even mention his consistent support of the very eugenicist eugenics movement that Margaret Sanger was the leader of in destruction of black babies, which is self -destruction in that context.

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Not allowed to talk about those types of things. You're not allowed to allow that to be a part of the analysis of the man's life.

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But what's interesting is the reverse of that when you talk about historical figures.

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So today, you have someone pass away and their support two months ago being a part of blocking passages of bills, anti -infanticide bills and things like that.

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Put that away. Because years ago, he did this good thing.

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And so you put that away. But when we talk about historical figures, George Washington's got to go because of his owning slaves.

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So where's the balance point there? Because if you're going to say, well, he was a man of his time today.

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Why can't you say someone was a man of their time back then? And is there not a huge difference in the level of knowledge and understanding today than there was in the past in the commensurate issues?

37:24

I mean, there is no question biologically, scientifically, philosophically, logically, there is no question of the humanity of the preborn child.

37:33

We know more. The womb is now transparent. The womb is transparent.

37:41

Up until only a brief number of decades ago, the child developed almost completely in darkness other than spontaneous abortions, miscarriages, things like that, where you could see the results.

38:00

Child development was not well known to us. But now we have more knowledge than ever.

38:12

And all of the stupid theories about go through a fish stage and then a reptile stage, all the rest of that stuff, we all know that's a bunch of hooey now.

38:23

It's completely false. We recognize what's going on in the womb now.

38:31

So there's absolutely no defense to be offered.

38:38

That's why when you hear the debates taking place in our society now, you don't hear debates from, you don't hear reasoning from the abortion side.

38:51

You hear slogans. You hear deflections.

38:57

Let's change the subject. Let's talk about women's rights. In almost anything that you read, there will be nothing about the child at all.

39:08

And because they know that's a non -winner, that they know, especially since ultrasounds started appearing on refrigerator doors, that that is a non -winning direction to go.

39:19

You've got to distract the mind from the actual action that's taking place.

39:25

You've got to. There's no other way to do it. No other way to do it. So yeah, that has shown,

39:37

I think, shown a bright light on what's going on in the church in regards to what we can and cannot talk about and what will be said about people as well.

39:52

Now, switching topics here, this is really interesting. Let me see if I can get back to it here.

40:00

Yeah, here we go. In years past, and in decades past, and in fact, back in the olden days, when on Saturday afternoons, a group of us would get in our cars, or I remember a number of times, get on our motorcycles and ride out to a, oh,

40:29

I will forget this. Hold on a second. I did say

40:36

I would reprise a story I've told, and I will forget if I don't do so, and I apologize.

40:44

But J .I. Packer went to be with the Lord this past weekend, and at the age of 93 years of age, and I don't have any

40:59

J .I. Packer stories. The only contact I had with Dr.

41:05

Packer was he was probably the most prolific book endorser, endorsement writer of all time.

41:20

I wonder if he doesn't hold the record for the number of what we call blurbs that he wrote for books, but he did it differently.

41:37

In late 94, early 95 would be the time frame,

41:44

I think. I had finished the King James Only Controversy.

41:49

I've told the story before that back then, Bethany House Publishers was just Bethany House.

41:56

It wasn't owned by some big conglomerate at that time, like it's owned now by Baker. The King James Only Controversy has a fair amount of Greek in it, textual critical symbols, and so what happened is for the first edition,

42:15

Bethany House Purchased for me a laser printer, the

42:24

Laser Master 1000, and I typeset the first edition.

42:33

I literally typeset the first edition myself. Nobody else did it. I had to format it.

42:39

I had to get, I was using, did I use Ventura Publisher for that? I think I used

42:44

Ventura Publisher for that, and so I had to print out the initial drafts for people to read, to send to people, and one of the people,

42:59

I don't remember who had the connection, somebody at Bethany House did, I don't know, but one of the people that the manuscript was sent to was

43:08

J .I. Packer, and when

43:14

I got a response from Dr. Packer, it included a couple of pages of typographical or formatting errors to be fixed, or just editorial changes as far as a grammar issue or a citation issue.

43:40

Now, you don't, there's almost nobody who reads something that you're sent that closely.

43:49

I've caught a couple things, but when people ask me to read books, I almost always have to say the only way

43:55

I can get to it at all is if I can get an electronic version, and I'll listen to it, and even then,

44:02

I may hear something while I'm out on the bike and go, that didn't sound quite right, but I'm listening to a file.

44:09

It's not like I can go back and find that very easily. I've caught a few things, and I've suggested a few things, but nothing like the way

44:18

J .I. Packer went through, and I've talked to some other people who likewise published a work, and J .I.

44:24

Packer read it and provided corrections, and you knew that when he wrote what he wrote, that he knew what the book was about.

44:40

There are a lot of blurb writers that read a few sentences on one page and another page and straight on through and then write something up, and that's what you expect, but not

44:55

J .I. Packer, no, and so that was the only interaction that I had with him was long, long, long ago, because I'm not a big conference goer.

45:08

I'm not a big conference. The big, big, big, big, big conferences other than G3 are just scared to death of me, so I think

45:16

G3 might be scared of death of me too, but I've got a track record, so I'm good. So anyway, the only other story is a story that I've told before, and it's actually an

45:30

R .C. J .I. Packer story, and it comes to the same time period.

45:35

It's Denver 1995, summer 1995. I think it was July, I think.

45:42

There used to be a big, big, big thing called the Christian Booksellers Convention, CBC, Christian Booksellers Convention, and some people called it the

45:52

Jesus Junk Convention because this was before all the online stuff started.

45:59

This was before Amazon. If you wanted books back then, you went...

46:05

CBD was around. Christian Book Distributors was around, but Christian Book Stores were still a thing.

46:15

They're really not a thing anymore at all. Are there any in the Valley at all? I don't even know where they are.

46:22

Yeah, I don't even know where they are. I've lost track of completely. Used to have Berean Christian Book Stores, and there was one down on 7th

46:31

Avenue. Yeah, I can't remember what it was either now.

46:45

That's right. What was that? Jesus Chapel? That was called Jesus Chapel. Yeah, yeah.

46:50

Oh man, see? That has been so long since any of those stores even existed.

46:57

It was a different world. It was sort of fun going to those places. It's just totally different than just click and it shows up in Postman.

47:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, what was I talking about?

47:16

You'd have these conventions, and it wasn't just the books.

47:22

It was all the trinkets and other stuff that those stores would sell.

47:31

The King James Only Controversy had come out, and of course, it was extremely controversial and was doing fairly well.

47:37

It made quite a splash. A lot of the Christian Book Stores were really interested in it because they had

47:44

King James Only people coming in all the time, and they wanted to be able to go, ah, just read that book type of situation.

47:51

Bethany wanted me there in case there were people coming up. They didn't want to have to answer any of the questions, so they flew me up to Denver.

47:59

And guess who else was there? R .C. Sproul was there. John MacArthur was there. I remember the book on Sola Scriptura.

48:11

This one here had come out too, and there was a book signing with those.

48:19

It just so happened that me and a group of a friend caught

48:27

R .C. in one of those big, you know how convention centers have these big, huge hallways.

48:34

You're supposed to be moving lots of people in and out. And so we caught R .C., and this was around the time of the

48:43

Evangelicals and Catholics together. That was in 1994. And you may recall that ECT, they had the big thing where they got everybody together, and MacArthur, and Sproul, and D.

48:59

James Kennedy, and all that kind of stuff. So that was on everybody's mind.

49:06

And I was already involved in doing ministry to Roman Catholics and had started doing debates.

49:15

We were about five years in at that point, so already had at least a few Roman Catholic debates under my belt at that point.

49:23

And well, we ran to R .C. Sproul, and so we stopped him and we said,

49:30

Dr. Sproul, Dr. Sproul, we've just got to ask you. We know you really like J .I.

49:37

Packer, and we really like his stuff too. And of course, probably the single most read presentation, and one of the most powerful presentations of particular redemption, limited atonement, is

49:55

Packer's introduction to Owen's book, The Death of Death and Death of Christ. If you've not read it,

50:02

I think it's actually been bound, or at least printed separately by itself.

50:08

But somebody put out an edition of Death of Death that had that as introduction, and it was just one of the best summary, passionate, well -written presentations on the subject anywhere.

50:21

And so a lot of us just have a lot of respect for J .I. Packer, and yet he was on the other side of evangelicals and Catholics together.

50:32

He had signed that statement. And so there are a lot of people going, how can you on the one hand write about limited atonement with the clarity that he did, and of course the

50:44

Puritans, and on the other side sign on to something that MacArthur was opposed to, and Sproul was opposed to, and D.

50:52

James Kennedy was opposed to, and things like that. And so we asked him, and in his best

51:01

R .C. Sproul voice, he goes, well, you gotta remember,

51:08

Packer is an Anglican. He's got one foot in the Bible, and one foot in Rome. We just, we weren't exactly sure what to say, you know, when

51:22

Sproul says something like that, you're like, his point was, if you go back,

51:29

Packer had a long history, that's what Anglican, Anglicanism is the via media.

51:37

It's, it has always been marked by trying to stay in the center, even,

51:46

I would argue, when the center is going to cause you to jump off of a cliff. There are times you've got to get out of the center of the road, okay?

51:56

If the center of the road makes you deny Christ, you've got to get out of the center of the road.

52:02

So Anglicanism has that air, it has that history, it had that, that's what it's all about.

52:12

And so what he was saying was, hey, that's his Anglican genetics. That's, that's who he is.

52:18

And that's why he is where he is. But you still love him. And yeah, that's, that's the case.

52:25

But yeah, those are my J .I. Packer stories. And I think it must have been

52:31

Friday night, because it's right before we did the the dialogue that, you know, my timeline blew up with all the

52:39

J .I. Packer stories. And we knew that was coming. And you could tell that a lot of people had already written their, their eulogies and obituaries sometime over the past couple of years, because he was not in really good shape.

52:51

He was fairly elderly. And so we rejoice in a servant who's gone to be with the

52:56

Lord. And once again, if you're one of those people that just, you can't see past differences to rejoice in that way,

53:05

I feel sorry for you. But there you go. Okay, try things get to here, we'll probably go a little bit over the top of the hour.

53:12

That's okay. Because I'll finish up talking about the dialogue that we did

53:18

Friday night. And, but what I was gonna start,

53:23

I started to say is, if, if we had the archives of the show back into when it started in the 80s, we go back to 98,

53:35

I think, right? 98? From the 80s? Well, those were some of those things we made available and cassette tape and stuff like that.

53:45

We don't have like the regular programs, though. Yeah, well, most of the, most of the topics back then were cult related.

53:59

Watch Our Row and Track Society, and the LDS Church. And so we went into real in depth on all those things for many, many years.

54:12

And so it is, it certainly is a sign to me of how

54:23

I am aging, to see how much Mormonism has changed and continues to change.

54:29

And I personally think that the events over the past six months have turned a very bright light on the

54:39

Mormon Church. I mean, as far as I can tell, BYU is not opening in the fall. All online.

54:46

No October conference, all online again. The Mormons have run into a shelter and are hiding in abject fear, masked fear at this particular point in time.

55:04

And I'm not sure what the cultural connection is there. I'm not sure what, if there is a cultural connection.

55:13

But you may have seen that minority students on Brigham Young's campus have called for the removal of the names of all sorts of people whose names are on buildings.

55:31

I mean, Brigham Young, the day that the black receives the priesthood is the day the church goes into apostasy.

55:41

That was his teaching. It's pretty much a direct quote, as I recall, just off the top of my head.

55:47

But I mean, there isn't any question about this. And it was at least six or seven years ago that the church threw him under the bus for that, which left a lot of us sitting here going, how do you do that?

56:01

Because you need to understand there is this thing of priesthood authority.

56:08

And it used to be you would trace your priesthood lineage back, and most of those lines went through Brigham Young.

56:18

And so if you throw Brigham Young under the bus, this has ramifications.

56:24

But Brigham Young was just one of a consistent voice.

56:30

I don't think you could find anybody in church leadership until extremely modern times that said anything whatsoever relevant to equality of rights or race issues or anything like that.

56:46

I mean, the Mormon teaching was that the blacks were descended from Cain, and they were less valiant in the fight against Lucifer in the pre -existence.

57:00

Less valiant and less intelligent. This was just a given.

57:06

And the dark skin of the

57:12

Native American was a curse of sin. Which of the two of those was the one who had the quote about the reservations, the

57:25

American Indians and the reservations? Was it Benson? Okay. They were contemporaries around the same time period.

57:33

You had people who were prophets within the past 20 years. So that's W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson.

57:40

And one of them, Rich says it was Benson, specifically made commentary.

57:48

Yeah, 30 years. Specifically made commentary about going out to an

57:54

Indian reservation and noticing that the children of the converts to the church were noticeably lighter in skin than their parents.

58:06

Because the Book of Mormon says you become white and delights them. But the Book of Mormon has been changed to where it says pure and delights them now.

58:14

But it originally said white and delights them. And the prophets of the church understood that as a physical characteristic.

58:23

There's a whole book, the Church and the Negro, I think it was what it was called.

58:29

I'll have to dig it out from my massive Utah Lighthouse Ministries pile. And I think there's a whole chapter in Mormonism, Shadow Reality, on that very subject.

58:40

You can't deny the documentation. It's that clear.

58:48

So this student group has come up with a list of names. It's pretty much every building on the campus, which would start with the name of the university,

59:00

Brigham Young. But there is a whole list of slave owners.

59:06

And look, up until 1978, every single general authority of the church had sustained the ban on giving the priesthood to the blacks.

59:25

So anybody's name up until 1978 would have to be removed from buildings.

59:33

Now how on earth is Salt Lake? Because this isn't going to be up to Provo. How on earth is

59:39

Salt Lake going to walk through this minefield? It was

59:45

Kimball. Well, I thought it was Kimball, but you keep telling me about how old

59:51

I'm getting and my memory's going and stuff. So just go with it. It was one of the two.

59:58

Same time period. How are they going to get through this? I don't know. But it's also interesting to note that the

01:00:07

Salt Lake Tribune just had an article published one day ago. As LDS Church prepares to open up more temples, leaders make more changes to the endowment rite.

01:00:19

This is interesting because the endowment, they like to say is sacred, not secret, but it's still secret.

01:00:30

It is not supposed to be discussed anywhere outside the temple and specifically the celestial room of the temple.

01:00:40

When you've gone through the endowment ceremony in the temple, you go through these various rooms and then the last room is the celestial room.

01:00:48

It's supposed to represent heaven and you can freely discuss there amongst yourselves what has taken place in the temple ceremony.

01:00:58

But once you leave there, mum's the word. So they have to be very careful about how they discuss this.

01:01:05

Now, we know what happens. It's not, this isn't just hearsay. We've known, you know, people have left

01:01:12

Mormonism from the beginning and it initially began, the endowment ceremony initially began as a mixture on the part of Joseph Smith of Masonic activities that he had learned as a

01:01:28

Mason with new weird theology that Joseph Smith developed over time.

01:01:37

I mean, obviously, initially it wouldn't be the same way as it was when Joseph Smith died and I'm sure there were some modifications once it came out to Utah that Brigham Young and others were a part of establishing.

01:01:51

But the Mormons used to believe, and many still do, the older Mormons, that the endowment ceremony is a matter of revelation, that God revealed it.

01:02:06

If you want to see a discussion of this, when I wrote Is the Mormon my brother, I went through the various levels of authoritative statements and one of the things

01:02:14

I discussed was the LDS Temple Ceremony and I gave a brief couple pages of citations from the leaders of the church in regards to the authority and the origin of the endowment ceremonies.

01:02:29

And you can make a strong case that at least originally the endowment ceremony was considered to be revelational.

01:02:38

In fact, what year was that? It was sometime in the late 80s,

01:02:47

I think, when they shut down all the temples and they made a major modification of the endowment ceremonies.

01:02:57

Was it 93? Yeah, and you thought it was

01:03:02

Ezra Taft Benson too. So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:09

What was interesting is the stuff they took out was the stuff that was the most doctrinally central to mainline

01:03:19

Mormon belief, to the old Mormon beliefs. There have been a couple modifications since then.

01:03:26

But that's when they removed... See, back up the track a second. When we first started teaching about Mormonism at the church that we were at when

01:03:37

Alpha Omega started, North Phoenix Baptist Church, first I taught the class and then

01:03:45

Mike Beliveau taught the class. Didn't you and Mike do some team teaching? Then you taught for a while too.

01:03:52

So, one of the lessons was on the temple ceremony and we had former

01:04:02

Mormons, former missionaries, attend the class. And I remember, it was

01:04:11

Kim, his name was Kim, remember? There was a Mormon, former Mormon missionary, his name was Kim.

01:04:16

He was a guy, his name was Kim, remember? Blonde guy, sort of a big guy. I wonder what ever happened to him.

01:04:24

But I remember when he first attended the class and I went through some of the things that you had to do.

01:04:31

So, you would put your arm to the square and you would draw your hand across your throat like this while saying,

01:04:37

I would suffer to have my throat slit, my tongue cut out, my heart cut out, my bowels cast upon the ground.

01:04:46

And these are things they got from masonry. And then the sure sign of the nail, the various handshakes that you would do, the five points of fellowship where at the final veil, the veil has these, you would put your hands through and there's the temple worker on the other side, you embrace through the veil and you're asked questions, you have to give your temple name and sort of the secret password type thing.

01:05:13

And there's all this stuff that you do. And the temple garments that the Mormon would wear, which have become smaller and smaller and smaller, used to be these big, difficult things to wear and they've gotten minimized, minimized, minimized.

01:05:27

But they had sewn on them the five points of fellowship, the points where you would, where the five points fellowship would take place.

01:05:36

Anyway, and I remember that missionary coming up to me after the class and not, not, not that missionary.

01:05:42

Um, he, that missionary had done these and illustrative people. And then

01:05:47

I had another guy come up to me after that class. And he said, you could have gone through numerous levels of the

01:05:54

Masonic temple with what you just did. He says, I'm a 38, 32nd degree Mason, 32nd degree Mason.

01:06:00

And those are the same things we do. And it's like, yeah, that's why it was the Masons that killed

01:06:06

Joseph Smith in the Carthage, in that kind of, in the, in the jail, um, in 1844.

01:06:12

And that's why he was giving the Masonic stress signal as he filed the window being shot, uh, was he was trying to get the

01:06:19

Masons to stop shooting him, um, because he had stolen their temple ceremony. And the temple ceremony said, this is how

01:06:25

I'll suffocate myself to be killed. If I reveal these secrets, well, there you go. So you're looking at something.

01:06:32

So Wikipedia knows everything. Wikipedia knows everything. And this is fascinating.

01:06:38

So as you started recounting this, I started remembering that the original ceremony was three hours long and then they got cut from there to an hour and a half.

01:06:51

And then what you're talking about, it got cut to an hour. Right. It went from 90 minutes to 60 minutes. That was the big one

01:06:56

I was talking about. Beginning in 1919, Church President Heber J. Grant appointed a committee charged with revising the ceremony, which was done under the direction of George Richards from 1921 to 1927.

01:07:08

So that's when they cut out all the gory stuff that people didn't. And they cut it in half into an hour and a half.

01:07:14

Okay. Okay. And... Well, there was still gory stuff. They left, well, it was...

01:07:19

It wasn't nearly as explicit. Apparently a lot of people, you know, the, the, the part about your throat...

01:07:26

Right. Breasts, body, all being disemboweled. Right. Disemboweled.

01:07:31

And then in... But you still made the symbols. You knew what you were doing. Yes. But it was much more explicit originally.

01:07:37

And it was three hours long. Goodness, can you imagine sitting there for three? So what you're talking about was in 1990.

01:07:46

Ninety, okay. Ninety. And that was where the elimination of the blood oaths and the penalties representing what the member would rather suffer than reveal the sacred signs.

01:07:55

So if folks, you don't believe us, Wikipedia. Well, well, and my recollection is,

01:08:04

I could be wrong about this, but my recollection is we already had a recording. The guy had gone through with those micro cassette recorders and he had gone through like five or six times because the cassette recorder would only last so long.

01:08:16

And he'd reach down there and start it each time. So we had the audio from that.

01:08:23

And then we got the new version of it fairly shortly after they made the new one.

01:08:29

So you knew all what the changes were. And now you've got video. Now you have the video versions of it because people have used those little teeny tiny, you know, the glasses or things.

01:08:38

Yeah, they videotaped the whole thing as well. And so we know what happens.

01:08:44

It's not secret. And neither would I argue is it sacred by any stretch of imagination from a

01:08:49

Christian perspective. Oh, it's all in Wikipedia. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Yeah, I'm sure it's fairly straightforward.

01:08:57

So anyway, so think about the current situation. In the current situation, you have the five points of fellowship through the veil.

01:09:12

You cannot do that in a socially distanced fashion. That ain't possible.

01:09:23

So they're trying to be really... So reading from the

01:09:31

Salt Lake Tribune, the endowment ceremonies include the making of sacred covenants or promises to God, they said, and resemble other such covenants, like prayer, immersion of an individual at baptism, or holding hands during a marriage ceremony.

01:09:43

Yeah, it was a lot more than that. Similar simple symbolic actions accompanying the making of temple covenants, the top officials wrote.

01:09:49

In other words, there are some physical elements to the rituals. The First Presidency urged members and friends not to speculate or engage in public discussion about what these changes might entail.

01:10:00

We invite church members to continue to look forward to the day when they may return, the letter said, and fully participate in sacred temple work prayerfully and gratefully.

01:10:09

The Temple Endowment is considered one of the holiest rites of the Utah -based faith, so it has been especially hard to be sending out full -time missionaries into their service without being endowed.

01:10:17

Well, that is interesting to think about. If your temples are closed, you can't send anybody out?

01:10:24

Yeah, isn't that interesting? That's right.

01:10:32

That's right. Wow. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Wow. So, the fact that the church is willing to make changes to what is supposed to be revelation in light of COVID -19, they didn't do this during any preceding pandemic, okay?

01:10:58

I guess you could argue maybe they didn't know about it, but I don't think so. It's just really, to me, a sign of just how media and there has been a fundamental change in the

01:11:17

American psyche and the America that sent

01:11:22

Apollo 11 to the moon, long gone. Just long gone.

01:11:29

There was a pandemic going on right then, and we still went to the moon, and you just tightened up the belt and kept going.

01:11:38

Not anymore. Not anymore. And even so, the Mormons will change their endowment ceremonies.

01:11:44

Can you imagine trying to mumble the various temple names through a mask? I can't understand anybody through a mask.

01:11:52

So, it's just, I can't, I don't know. But Mormonism is changing.

01:12:00

It is changing a lot. Really, really is. And I'm not sure where that's going to end up going.

01:12:05

I really, really don't know where that's going to go at all, but we will see.

01:12:11

We will see. Anyway, okay, one last thing. I'm not going to, well,

01:12:22

I also mentioned in the past, I texted Summer this morning, and I'm like, what's going on now?

01:12:30

I was looking at, I don't know if you follow any of her stuff, but man,

01:12:38

I haven't known this for a long time. People who call themselves Reformed can be some of the nastiest individuals on the planet.

01:12:50

And we should understand why that is. You know,

01:12:58

Hitchens said that religion poisons everything. Well, he was wrong, but he was touching on something that was true.

01:13:10

You can utilize religion to poison almost anything. And if you combine zeal for something that's actually orthodox with a heart that is infected by something that Scripture warns you about, bitterness, jealousy, wrath, division, when those things that, obviously, we prioritize lower on the scale, we do, you infect a heart with that and combine it with a zeal for orthodoxy, and the result can be horrifically ugly.

01:13:57

And she just posted some stuff. She told me some other stuff that I won't mention on the air, but just the nastiness of ostensibly

01:14:08

Reformed people. Now, we know that. We've talked about that. The little clip I did on this program saying

01:14:14

I'm not interested in being a part of the Reformed Club because the Reformed Club has these problems.

01:14:22

We know that, but unfortunately, it does seem that in these days...

01:14:28

See, I don't understand. My thought processes, the amount of energy

01:14:35

I have to be thinking. I'm looking at projects, projects where I'm trying to look down the road and going, well, okay, let's put it this way.

01:14:46

I baptized Cadence and Clementine Sunday night, and so part of my thinking is, when they're mothers, what kind of world,

01:14:57

A, are they going to be facing? They're going to be facing far greater challenges that I think

01:15:03

I can imagine right now. What can I do to either improve the world they're going to be facing or give them foundational resources to where they're going to...

01:15:16

Right now, I'm just Punkle, and Punkle debates people, and Punkle knows a lot about the

01:15:26

Bible, but I'm just Punkle. And they look up to me, and they respect me, and they look up to Pastor Jeff and Pastor Luke and Pastor Zach, and it's been wonderful to see...

01:15:42

They only moved back down here recently, but man, just plugged right into Apologia.

01:15:51

In our church, everybody's in everybody else's basements. They have basements in Mesa.

01:15:56

That is really weird. I don't know. Why don't we have basements in Glendale? But they have basements in Mesa. They're in each other's homes and fellowshipping and kind of stuff like that all the time, and they're just plugged in.

01:16:09

Caden sat there and went through the names of all the kids of all the families. I'm just sitting there going, how long have you been down in Vegas?

01:16:18

Okay, good job. I can't do that, and I've been around longer than you have.

01:16:24

Anyway, so right now, they appreciate

01:16:33

Jeff, and they appreciate me and stuff like that in the way that you can as kids. But once they're parents themselves, what will

01:16:41

I have done? What will I have produced that will benefit them?

01:16:49

And they'll look back and go, man, my grandfather gave this to us, and it's so important to us to have this understanding, this foundation to be able to press forward into things.

01:17:03

And that will be based upon a deep appreciation of Reformed theology.

01:17:11

But in many ways, it will be in spite of a lot of people who call themselves Reformed. Should it be that way?

01:17:20

No, but these days especially, the cracks and the fissures are being seen much more clearly because of what's going on all around us.

01:17:36

And so I just don't understand why people have time to be putting together private Facebook groups to slander people.

01:17:42

We know they exist. We know there are bunkers out there that have a specific purpose of...

01:17:52

The scary thing is the people in them think they're doing God's work to be doxing people and going after people and trying to destroy people's lives and employments and everything else.

01:18:06

I just don't understand that. I don't have time for that. Maybe after your 50th birthday or something, you finally realize, man,

01:18:17

I've only got a limited time left. I need to focus on what's really important or something.

01:18:22

And I just cannot imagine what life is like to be sitting online and doing that kind of stuff.

01:18:28

I don't get it. But anyway, reminded of that this morning. Okay, real quick.

01:18:40

Friday night, I did what I could to try to...

01:18:47

First of all, avoid an explosion. Some of you may have seen that. That I have no idea what the source of that was.

01:18:54

I do not know why Dr. Rausser became so lividly angry with me and so aggressive.

01:19:02

My gut feeling is I know that he and brother

01:19:10

Hayes used to go at it. Passed away recently. Who, of course, went after me all the time, too.

01:19:17

Maybe he didn't know that. Maybe he just thought I was coming from his perspective in some fashion.

01:19:24

I don't know. Maybe he looked me up. And evidently in 2016,

01:19:33

I responded to something that he said. Because when I saw the list of people that are going to be on the program, of course, I knew two of them fairly well.

01:19:39

I've done stuff with Jonathan McClatchy and I've been at SES with Dr. Howe.

01:19:47

But the name, I was like, rings a faint bell. But I actually looked it up and I found out, yeah,

01:19:56

I had done one segment on a program once about his rebellion hypothesis.

01:20:04

I don't remember if he had said something about me or respond to me about something. I had taken the time to read some stuff and I did,

01:20:10

I don't know, 10, 15 minutes or something. But to be honest with you, that was the last time I had ever even mentioned him.

01:20:17

So much so that I had to look it up and I'm watching my own video going, oh, I don't remember any of this.

01:20:23

I had not given it a second thought. And so the reason that I asked him the question, the reasons

01:20:29

I went to him first was because he had been left out of most of everything. I felt badly he had been left out.

01:20:38

And I did feel that it was important because of how important suppression is to the presuppositional perspective in understanding the biblical anthropology.

01:20:48

The only thing I knew about his position that was had any uniqueness to it was his view on Romans one.

01:20:54

So I'm like, well, let's talk about that for a second. Let's see if we can bring that out. And then I'll go to the other guys and just try to keep this thing going.

01:21:03

And, you know, try to, that's all I was doing. And so when he went and starts pushing egalitarianism and talking about the sun standing still,

01:21:14

I don't even know where in the world he was going. Well, I do know where he's going. He is not a conservative, theologically speaking, by any stretch of the imagination.

01:21:22

He's gone way out there to the left. And if I had wanted to turn that thing into a

01:21:29

Donnybrook, would have been easily done. That wouldn't have taken much effort at all.

01:21:36

But I didn't want to. That's not why, that was not my desire.

01:21:42

So I'm like, okay, could we move on? And he didn't want me to do that. He wanted to, it's like, whoa, dude, back off.

01:21:53

So I didn't think his position is an apologetic methodology anyway. It's not a methodology.

01:21:58

It's just an assertion that you can have warranted Christian belief without evidence or arguments. I think it confused most people.

01:22:06

I was disappointed in the whole thing, to be honest with you. Because what I've been told was, when

01:22:13

I hear the thesis, what apologetic methodology should Christians utilize? I'm thinking, okay, we're going to have regular

01:22:22

Christians listening to this who need some enlightenment and insight on what the methodologies involve.

01:22:33

It wasn't my desire to light up a pipe and sip a scotch and talk

01:22:40

Aristotle and Aquinas. That's not my thing anyway. I'm a presuppositionalist.

01:22:46

I'm a biblical Trinitarian. I'm a biblical presuppositionalist. And so I come to presuppositionalism not primarily from philosophical analysis, but from biblical mandate.

01:23:01

And so that's how I put my opening statement.

01:23:07

And we didn't know what order we were going until we hooked up to the Zoom thing. And I did have the best

01:23:12

Zoom background by a long shot. So that was just not even questionable. Yeah.

01:23:19

I could have had this background too. But I went with the library background. That's my library, just from the other room over there.

01:23:25

But anyway, so we won on that one. We will pass on from there.

01:23:31

Jonathan McClatchy had a white wall. Come on, Jonathan. Dude, you don't have enough sun. You don't have enough melanin to do the white wall thing.

01:23:40

No, you got to get something back there. Anyway, so I was disappointed because, for example,

01:23:48

Jonathan just presented his evidentialist thing in about 90 seconds and then started critiquing everybody else.

01:23:54

That was not... There's so many questions that even I had already raised.

01:24:00

So I was asked to go first based upon first name alphabetical order stuff.

01:24:07

Okay, well, whatever. But I'd already designed my opening statement that it would go whether I was first or last or whatever else it might be, it would fit.

01:24:17

And so it did end up being three on one or two on one, basically, because I've been criticized.

01:24:23

And I mentioned this. I've been criticized roundly by a lot of folks for not properly distinguishing between evidentialist and classical apologetics.

01:24:33

And so here we're sitting and the evidentialist and the classical apologetics guy can't hardly get separated enough to let any daylight through.

01:24:43

So it's sort of like, okay, all right. And then, well, and then, of course, my cat walked in, which

01:24:52

I expected. My wife was away. If she had been home, but look, that one cat, that's just what he does.

01:24:59

And I either had to risk what happens, the wrath of a cat when you lock it into the other part of the house and the cleanup that results from that, if they become very upset about being kept from getting outside or whatever.

01:25:14

And the risk that he's going to come walking through going, because we call him a grouser.

01:25:19

He's a grouser. He is loud. And he did show up during the closing statement.

01:25:25

Thank you very much, Cobra. It's exactly what I expected him to do it. But anyway, so you've got that.

01:25:30

Now, a couple of things have come up real quick in a Facebook group on presuppositionalism.

01:25:38

And one of them, the main thing that I recall was someone objecting to my statement.

01:25:49

Jonathan and I went back and forth. There's two things I want to talk about. I want to talk about what Dr. Howe said about the one of the many.

01:25:56

But Jonathan brought up that there are things that are simply true by definition. And they are not dependent upon the creative action of God.

01:26:05

And he talked about two plus two equals four. He talked about the married bachelor thing. And I'm like, no, no, wait a minute.

01:26:13

Those are not eternal truths that exist outside of God and separate from his creation.

01:26:21

They reflect the consistency of God to his creation.

01:26:28

But God created mankind, male and female. He didn't have to do it, male and female.

01:26:35

And the only way for a bachelor to be unmarried being definitionally true is in the world that God created, where there's males and females, and that's it.

01:26:43

God could have created three genders if he had wanted to. Who is to say he doesn't?

01:26:49

He can't do that. Why? The idea is that there's something external to God that can control his actions that he has to submit to.

01:27:06

And we have to be very careful because on the one hand, God will be consistent with his nature.

01:27:15

But that doesn't make, that doesn't, that's not the same thing as saying that there are things outside of God's creative action that can in any way limit

01:27:25

God. That's why I object to the classical concept of middle knowledge is because the origin, the origin of middle knowledge is outside of God.

01:27:34

It determines what God can and cannot do. It's an uncreated thing that exists in the universe.

01:27:40

And so I think the laws of logic represent the way

01:27:46

God thinks. And so, yes, there's a consistency there, but God did not have to create in the way that he created.

01:27:53

He chose to create in the way that would glorify him. He could have created in a lesser way, theoretically, but he didn't.

01:28:02

So when I, when I objected to what I was hearing, what I was hearing was someone saying that the laws of logic do not have to be grounded in the self -expression of God and in his being the creator.

01:28:19

That these are true things just because they're true things. And they're not true because God created them to be true.

01:28:27

And I objected to that and I would continue to object to that. The other thing that took me back, it really did take me back, was

01:28:39

Dr. Howe's, it seemed, and the problem was this, this was at the end of my cross -ex, so it's a very brief period of time.

01:28:49

So I'm hesitant to go too far with it, but, because you can say things at the end of a discussion that really should have been expanded upon and everything else.

01:29:03

But it was the issue of the one and the many. It's two minutes from when I'm supposed to be finishing.

01:29:10

I'll go a little bit longer than that. But the one and the many is, you'll find all sorts of videos on YouTube about the one and the many.

01:29:20

There's one from a reformed group that's really good. Most of them just leave you sitting there drooling, which a lot of secular philosophical stuff will do.

01:29:32

Unless that's just your thing. Anyway, the one and the many is just the observation.

01:29:40

It goes back, obviously, to the Greeks. But it's just the observation that when you consider reality, the two extremes, the cliffs off of which you can fall, it seems to be, on the one hand, if you look at the existence of each individual concrete thing, you end up with no unity in the universe.

01:30:11

Everything is different. There is no connectedness. Everything's chaotic.

01:30:17

It's the many. And it's interesting, the word all in Greek, paspasapan, that by utilizing an article and different forms of it, you can sort of touch upon these things.

01:30:36

So when Paul says that Christ created all things, he uses a form that emphasizes the fact that they really exist in and of themselves.

01:30:46

They're not just part of the... You've heard of pantheism. That's, you know, all is God. That's the same term.

01:30:55

So you either fall off on this side to where it's all chaos, and there's no connectedness, there's no unity, there's no coherence.

01:31:07

The other side, though, the one which is where the human mind wants to go, because the human mind wants coherence and connection, is to absorb everything into one.

01:31:18

And so you see it in a lot of man's religions. You saw it in Manichaeism. You saw it in Gnosticism.

01:31:23

You see it in the idea that salvation is getting freed from this physical realm of things and being absorbed back into the one.

01:31:39

And in essence, your individuality is destroyed as you're absorbed back into the one.

01:31:46

And so you have unity, but you no longer have the ability to identify concrete things and maintain their meaning.

01:31:56

So those are the two sides. So the problem of the one and the many, Aristotle's explanation of that, most people cannot understand.

01:32:08

It involves a complicated understanding of his metaphysics and adduction and analysis and all sorts of other things.

01:32:22

It sounded to me, because I brought it up just in passing, I mentioned, you know, for some reason, one of the things that stuck with me from my reading of Van Tilt, my initial reading of Van Tilt years and years ago, was his conversation of the one and the many.

01:32:39

I went, oh man, he's right. Because what

01:32:45

Van Tilt pointed out was mankind struggles with this in his various philosophies, and almost every philosophical system ends up falling off that cliff someplace because there's nothing to anchor it.

01:33:00

But in Christianity, you have God who is one, but he has many.

01:33:10

He is one in his being. He is plural, three in his person.

01:33:18

And so you have in the creator unity, and yet the persons are distinguished from one another.

01:33:27

So in the creator himself, you have the ground for seeing the unity of creation, and yet the reality of the fact that God has made mankind, has made four -footed beasts, and you have a consistency between the creator and the creation that then allows you to not fall off on one side or the other because you have the right foundation.

01:33:53

It sounded to me like Dr. Howe rejected Van Tilt's observation that the trinity is a consistent,

01:34:06

Christian, excellent grounding for not falling into the error of the one and the many.

01:34:14

It sounded like he was saying, no, Aristotle got it, and Van Tilt didn't. And the trinity is not the proper grounding for that.

01:34:25

Now, I'm hoping that that was just because we were at the end of the discussion because it would just seem to me that the

01:34:35

Christian heart and mind would find it a really positive thing that one of the primary issues that plagues the mind of man when he considers himself in the universe finds its resolution in the full revelation of special revelation in scripture.

01:34:58

Maybe that's why Dr. Howe doesn't like it is because Dr. Howe wants to strongly emphasize natural theology, but that would require actually all of philosophy to submit to special revelation in scripture.

01:35:16

And there are some people who just don't like that, maybe. I don't know, but I was taken aback, and we really didn't get a chance to flesh that out.

01:35:24

We ran out of time, I think, right at that point as far as the conversation was concerned.

01:35:29

I'll be honest with you, I think, personally, that on a worldview level, especially in our modern situation, the conversation that Doug Wilson and I had on Darwin and idolatry probably would benefit far more people than that discussion did, unfortunately.

01:35:59

I really think that as far as especially the issues that are relevant today, the sweater vest dialogue we recorded last week that dropped a couple days ago.

01:36:06

If you haven't seen it, highly recommend it to you. I've put it on all my social media stuff, but we probably need to make sure to get that on the website as well.

01:36:16

But the conversation we had of Darwin and idolatry, and he used the term in that discussion, he's used it in a couple things he said recently, and I think he's exactly right.

01:36:27

It's Christ or chaos. It's Christ or chaos. We are seeing the chaos around us, and we have the answer, and that's too simple for some people.

01:36:39

But if Christ is who Christ is, if the tomb is empty, and if Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and if he created all things, it's

01:36:52

Christ or chaos. It's Christ or chaos. Western culture has been presented with Christ and has benefited from the foundation that Christianity can provide.

01:37:05

You are now burning that foundation, and the result is chaos. It's Christ or chaos.

01:37:11

That's all there is to it. In fact, I just saw this. I saw a movie yesterday, watched a little bit of it today on bike again.

01:37:21

Inside, don't worry, I don't watch movies while outside. This time in Phoenix, it's best to ride inside, and that's what

01:37:30

I've been doing. But I had not even heard of this. It's a film that came out in 2020.

01:37:38

Haven't been many of those, have there? No. You can only get it on Apple TV, I guess, but it's called

01:37:46

Greyhound, and it's Tom Hanks as the captain of the

01:37:52

SS Greyhound. SS 538, I think it was. Destroyer Escort, 538,

01:37:59

I think. It's the true story of... Now, I read a book called

01:38:06

The Tenth Fleet back in high school. I think it was high school. And so,

01:38:12

World War II buff, and it was about... The Tenth Fleet didn't have any ships.

01:38:21

They were the people that were cracking codes, the Enigma machine. They were the intelligence people that won the war in the

01:38:31

North Atlantic, which we almost lost. Germany's U -boats, 72 ,200 people perished.

01:38:43

Millions of tons of ships are sitting in the bottom of the Atlantic that were sunk by U -boats.

01:38:49

And that was the lifeline to England. And so, the battle in the

01:38:54

North Atlantic and the Wolfpacks that would attack those convoys and decimate many of them, this was about a

01:39:02

Destroyer Escort, one of those convoys, and Tom Hanks was the captain. Highly recommended.

01:39:07

It was really good. Only 90 minutes long, which was nice, but it was really good. It was well done.

01:39:13

Very CGI, but man, CGI is getting good. It really is. I mean, it's a whole lot easier than trying to find a

01:39:21

World War II Destroyer and taking it out in the North Atlantic and waiting for bad weather to shoot some of this stuff.

01:39:29

They did it really, really well, and it gave you a really good idea of what that kind of stuff was about.

01:39:35

Now, why did I bring that up? Because it was interesting, and I don't know if it's just because this was the reality of the actual captain that they base this on, but it was interesting that he was a believer and stuck in the mirror in the captain's quarters that he would look at before he left was a card that had

01:40:00

Hebrews 13 .8. Jesus Christ is saying yesterday, today and forever, and it was prominently displayed in the film and the fact that he was a man of prayer, that when they survived and got to the side, sorry for the spoilers.

01:40:17

The last thing he does before he lays down, he's been awake for days, is he kneels next to his bed and gives thanks to God and then folds his weary, beat up body into bed, and the movie ends, and it was really well done.

01:40:40

It really was. So if you get a chance, Greyhound, it was good.

01:40:46

It was good. In fact, at one point, someone, one of the sailors near him swears and then immediately apologizes because everybody, and they showed this every time they brought food up for the captain, everybody had to stand still while the captain prayed over his food.

01:41:08

I was like, 2020 will never cease to amaze me.

01:41:14

What's going on here? So Greyhound, check it out if you're, especially because U571, Das Boot, those types of movies, it still amazes me what man did, especially during that war under the ocean.

01:41:36

Not sure I could handle that in any way, shape or form. But anyways, okay,

01:41:41

I'm done talking now. We're fine here. Thank you. And we'll see you next time on The Dividing Line.