Are We Worse Than The Pharisees?!? Jim Osman and I Respond to Daniel Kolenda

The Difference Between New Testament Miracles and Charismatic Claims

The New Testament miracles could not be refuted. I can absolutely refute the fake signs and wonders being purported in the charismatic movement today. I can absolutely refute what Todd White does out on the street when he lengthens people's legs by a half an inch.

That's a parlor trick. The very fact that there is a debate is self-evident proof that these sign gifts do not continue.

No. What this means is that these cessationist teachers have more unbelief than even the Pharisees of Jesus day. Jim. Thanks, brother.

Thanks for joining me today. How you doing? Yeah, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on, Justin. I look forward to this. Yes. Yes. So you and I were part of the cessationist film, which has been out for, I don't know, eight, nine months now.

And there's a cessationist conference coming up this October. A lot of people don't like this. And there's been a number of folks doing critical videos, not the least of which is Daniel Kalinda. And he's got a whole series of videos.

But I wanted to bring you on for this particular segment to respond to it. Because in this segment, he talks about or at least features you and me. And I thought, oh, well, that's convenient. We'll tag team here.

So you've watched the video. Now, Daniel Kalinda, he's the head of what's called CFAN, Christ for All Nations, wonky group in and of itself. And anyway, let me play the video.

The Pharisees Could Not Deny Jesus' Miracles

And when they left and went back to the other Pharisees and began to have discussions about how they would deal with Jesus, none of them questioned the legitimacy of Lazarus. What they did instead was plot a way to kill Lazarus and kill Jesus because they could not deny that that miracle had happened.

Neither believers nor unbelievers ever tried to deny that the miracles were real. The only thing the Pharisees could come up with was that they could attribute the miracles to someone other than God. And they attributed it to the devil instead.

Matthew, chapter 12, the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. They were attributing to the devil the works of the Holy Spirit. That was the best that unbelievers could come up with.

What about when Jesus himself was resurrected, which was a far more amazing and important miracle, by the way? Aren't these guys aware that the word on the street at the time was that the disciples stole his body in the night?

And just imagine how these critics would have handled that very situation if they'd been around back then. Hey, if Jesus really rose from the dead, it's simple. Just have him walk down the street or have him show up in the temple.

How come this is all being done in secret? How come he's only showing himself to his followers behind closed doors? Look, Jesus never caters to the unbelief of the critics. He didn't do it back then, and he doesn't do it today.

Jim, you Pharisee, no, no, you're not just a Pharisee. You're worse. We are worse than Pharisees. What's your reaction to Daniel Kalinda there?

All right. Number one, he says that when Jesus rose from the dead, that the word on the street was that the disciples stole the body. Number one, that was not the word on the street. That was the word put onto the street by people who could not deny the miracle.

So the text of Matthew 28 says, beginning of verse 11. Now just go to the text. It says, now, while they were on their way, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened.

And when they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers and said, you are to say his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.

And if this should come to the governor's ears, we will we will win him over and keep you out of trouble. And they took the money and did as they had been instructed. And this story was widely spread among the Jews and is to this day.

So after he rose from the dead, the word on the street was not that the disciples stole the body. That was the word put out on the street by the people who were there, saw the miracle, were well aware that the miracle had taken place.

And and it's not like the religious leaders of the nation of Israel said, you know, we've heard that this miracle took place, but we have doubts about whether or not it took place. This is why they paid the Roman soldiers to spread the story that they and the Roman soldiers both knew was a lie.

And they spread that to give people to lie to people concerning the true nature of that miracle and to give people a story because they knew the miracle had taken place and they could not deny it. And that was my point in the video.

And my point still stands. These men knew what had taken place and they couldn't deny it. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. All right. And then his second point was that why would Jesus do these miracles?

Jesus never caters to the unbeliever or to the unbelief. Well, he did to Thomas, who said, unless I see this and unless I do this, I will not believe. And Jesus appeared to him and said, do it and see it.

But you put your fingers into the wounds in my hand. Look at my side. It is I and not another. And then he ate fish to those believers, to those disciples, to prove that it was the same resurrection. He they handled him and touched him and and walked with him.

And he taught them for 40 days. He showed himself alive with many infallible proofs, Luke says in his gospel. So the disciples were not inclined to believe something that even something that they were seeing.

They were stunned by this. They were not expecting it. And when it happened, Jesus says to them, do not be unbelieving, but believe. So he was catering to unbelief in the sense that he was encouraging them to believe what he was demonstrating and proving to be the fact.

But he did. He didn't. He didn't appear to unbelievers, those hostile to the gospel. He appeared to his people, to his disciples, to 500 witnesses. And and even I think it is is it in 1st Corinthians?

He talks about him appearing to over 500. And I think it's in Luke where it says that even some of them had a hard time believing. Peter says in Acts, Chapter 10, that he appeared to witnesses appointed beforehand to his people, witnesses chosen.

So it wasn't Jesus intention to appear to every unbeliever in the land of Israel after his resurrection. It was his intention to appear to his people. And even some of them had a hard time believing and grasping what it was that they were seeing.

But the resurrection itself was an undeniable miracle that even those guards and religious leaders, the nation did not deny it. They lied about it. They didn't deny it. They lied about it. That's right.

That's right.

Exactly. Talk about your category errors. Yeah. OK, so let's continue here. Now he's going to direct his ire at me. Here we go. When Peter and John healed the man who had been born lame from his mother's womb and he was laid at the gate that is called Beautiful. This was a genuine miracle, a genuine sign and wonder.

And everyone knew it. And seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they had nothing to say in reply. What shall we do with these men? For the fact that a noteworthy miracle has taken place through them is apparent to all who live in Jerusalem.

And we cannot deny it. The New Testament miracles could not be refuted. I can absolutely refute the fake signs and wonders being purported in the charismatic movement today. I can absolutely refute what Todd White does out on the street when he lengthens people's legs by a half an inch.

That's a parlor trick. The very fact that there is a debate is self-evident proof that these signed gifts do not continue.

No, what this means is that these cessationist teachers have more unbelief than even the Pharisees of Jesus day. You know, one of the things that I talked about in my podcast series about cessationism is how this way of thinking that you see represented by these cessationist teachers.

Actually comes out of the anti-supernaturalism of Enlightenment era philosophy, something that obviously didn't exist in the first century. The Pharisees and the scribes, they might have hated Jesus, but they weren't pre committed to a cessationist worldview.

Cessationists have to reject charismatic stuff. It's baked into their worldview and into their theological system. It's codified, formalized, systemic unbelief. And, you know, if they watched a miracle happen right before their eyes, they'd find a way to reject it because they'd have to.

Their worldview requires it. Just go read some of their most influential theologians like Benjamin Warfield, who adopted the rationalism of guys like Hume and Harnack and Spinoza and Conyers Middleton to dismiss and reject all post-biblical miracles.

And even when he was faced with things that seemed clearly miraculous and for which there was no natural explanation, he just said, we are content to say that in no case was it a miracle. If they applied those same arguments that they use towards charismatics, if they applied that skepticism to the Bible and to Jesus himself, they'd all be atheists.

It's enough to make even a Pharisee cringe.

Cessationism, Unbelief, and the Nature of Miracles

Wow. Enough to make even a Pharisee cringe. There's a few things we need to unpack there, but go ahead. Give it your best shot first.

Well, yeah. Chime in. I mean, first of all, he says we have more unbelief than the Pharisees. That's not true. The Pharisees didn't believe that Jesus was God. I do. The Pharisees didn't believe that he rose from the dead.

I do. The Pharisees didn't believe that salvation is by grace through faith. I do. Some Pharisees did not believe that Jesus was the son of God and born of a virgin. They blasphemed him. I do. I believe those things.

It's not that I don't believe that miracles can happen or that miracles did happen. I believe all of that. I just don't believe that your little parlor tricks are genuine miracles. So what does this say about his view of miracles?

Does he honestly think that Todd White out there lengthening legs on the street, does he really think that that is the same kind of miracle that Jesus did? That these are of the same nature? He honestly cannot possibly believe.

Nobody with two brain cells to rub together could believe that that is true. I know. The charismatics that some charismatic talking to his TV screen saying, I think there's somebody out there with an upset stomach.

You're being healed of that right now. And they accept that. They gobble that up. They bring that in with all of the naivete. He says this cessationism is systemic unbelief. This charismatic push to turn these kind of miracles into the same type of miracles that Peter, James, John, Paul, Jesus did, that is systemic naivete.

These miracles are nothing of the same nature. Show me the man with the withered hand whose hand is made whole instantly. Show me the man born blind who is able to see, documented born blind, able to see.

The Pharisees in John chapter 9 knew the man who had been born blind. They knew his parents. He was part of the synagogue. They knew him. Now he could walk around and he could see and he could give testimony of the fact that he could see.

They could not deny that miracle. And so they brought the parents in and said, is this your son? They said, yes, it is. And how is it that he now sees? And they examined the man. They examined the parents.

Then they examined the man again. They were doing everything they could to refute that miracle, and they could not do it at the end. All they could do is resist Jesus for the miracles that he did. They criticized him for doing them on the Sabbath.

They criticized him. They said he did it in the power of the devil. They said that what he was doing was illegitimate. They could pick every bone about Jesus' miracles except the fact that he was actually doing those miracles and those signs.

Now compare that to the charismatic gifts of slaying somebody in the spirit or, you know, making somebody's toes grow back slowly over the course of a whole day. Show me the toes. Show me the toes, yeah.

And these charismatics are trying to say that what they're promoting, what they're defending, is of the exact same nature as what Jesus and the apostles did. And they're not. And they can't prove it. And if they were, they wouldn't need to prove it.

That's right.

That's exactly right. Yeah, neither one of us is doubting that God performed incredible miracles in the New Testament era. And nor, Jim, you and I are both card-carrying cessationists. And neither one of us have, in fact, I'll expand it.

Not only have neither one of us ever said this, I don't even know of a cessationist who has ever said, I don't believe God performs miracles today. Right.

I don't know of one. There might be. There might be some cessationist out there who says that there's no miraculous thing that happens today. There's nothing supernatural going on today. I don't know.

I know thousands of cessationists, and you do as well. You've been far more around the world than I have. I don't know of a single one who would say that God does not do miraculous things today. I believe that there are people who are healed as a result of prayer.

There are people who are healed slowly over the course of time. Sometimes there are miraculous things that take place that you look at and you think, I don't know how that happens. I mean, I think angels intervene in the normal course of affairs in this world from time to time.

There are inexplicable things that happen. I just don't believe that these people with horrible theology are out there doing these signs, and that God is authenticating people like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland and Joyce Meyer and Jesse Duplantis by giving them the ability to step into heaven twice a day and visit with God and perform miracles.

These people are at best low-rate B-class charlatans.

Why Cessationists Reject Charismatic Claims

Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah, and he conveniently skipped over the very point that I was making when I said, you know, the whole point was in the apostolic era, whether it was Jesus or whether it was the apostles, when they performed a true miracle, a true sign and wonder, it was undeniable.

That's the whole point. That's the whole point. That's the whole point. Even the enemies of the gospel could not deny it. I mean, the text that I read in the film there, Acts 3 and Acts 4, the man who was born lame from his mother's womb, all of a sudden he's up running around like a deer.

And they said, we cannot deny that a genuine miracle has taken place, a genuine sign of wonder has taken place. The enemies of the gospel, Jim, were in the apostolic era. They were trying to put a lid on what the apostles were doing.

They were trying to keep the word from getting out. They were trying to cover this thing up, you know, these things up. Complete opposite of what we see today, where charismatics, they have to spend so much time and energy grasping at straws, trying to come up with some prophecy that might sort of, kind of, if you look at it from the right angle and hold your mouth just right, might tangentially be partially true.

Or, you know, some, as I said in the film, Todd White, lengthening people's legs. He completely skipped over that. He didn't address Todd White lengthening people's legs by a half an inch. How convenient.

Paul's Todd White is a friend of his, and so he would never say anything.

Have you seen the newest thing is the arm lengthening? Have you seen that? Yeah. So there's a video out there of a guy in front of a congregation, and he puts out his arms. Let's do it this way. One arm is longer than this, and he does this, and they do the Humbajamba, and then pretty soon it's like this, and everybody worships and praises.

Yes. That, my friends, is your charismatic miracle. And you saw, it just happened to me just now, Justin. I think you probably just lengthened my arm. It's a miracle. I'm a charismatic now, man. You just turned me into a charismatic.

Yeah, they're parlor tricks, and the gullibility, it's systemic gullibility. It's systemic wish casting. If a genuine miracle takes place, I'll be the first one to admit it. I have no, my entire worldview is built upon a dead man who walked out of a tomb three days later.

My entire worldview is built upon a resurrection and a miracle. I don't deny a single miracle in scripture. I don't deny a single legitimate miracle. But what I do deny is that what is being promoted in these charismatic realms is the same thing as what happened in scripture.

It's not, and that's patently obvious, unless you are just desperate for this sensationalistic proof of your faith. I think it's Phil Johnson who said that charismaticism is doubt, constantly searching for proof.

Is that what? Yeah. I think MacArthur. Phil, it says, or you? MacArthur, I believe.

MacArthur said that. Okay. Okay. Yeah. But it's true. And that's kind of the ironic thing here. Kalinda and all his charismatic friends, they're accusing us of unbelief. But the reality is, and I said it in the film, is that charismatics are riddled with doubts about what they profess to believe.

And that's why they're constantly searching for the next buzz, the next dream, the next vision, the next sign and wonder, the next miracle worker, Todd White lengthening people's legs right on camera.

Ooh, ah, the leg grew, that kind of thing. As we said, these are parlor tricks. But they're on this endless hamster wheel of going after the next buzz. And they're trying to see these things because they're trying to satiate doubts.

No Unbeliever Would Believe Modern Charismatic Miracles

Yeah.

They're riddled with doubts. You know, our buddy Dan Phillips at the Cessationist Conference during the Q &A, I think it was, he had a money quote. He said, Jesus and the apostles did miracles that no unbeliever could deny.

Today's charismatics do miracles that no unbeliever would believe. Yes. That's perfect. That's exactly true. They go out there and they do their little parlor tricks. And any unbeliever would look at that and say, what are you talking about?

Say that again. Because you're right.

That's a money quote. Say that again. There is a universe of difference between saying, I'm not necessarily going to buy a 30-second hand story about a miracle and, you know, hootootoo or whatever to make up a, I hope I made up a place.

There's a universe of difference between saying that, I'm not necessarily going to buy that, and saying, over Jesus' whole career of miracles, I know where he got that supernatural power. That's Satan.

That's what the Pharisees did. Brilliant answer for how he was able to do what nobody else could ever do. And this is, you know, it'd be a poor one for a charismatic to point to because the situation in Jesus' ministry was exactly the opposite of what the charismatic situation was.

In Jesus' day, his enemies were all in a flutter trying to explain away his miracles. Today, charismatics are in a flutter trying to explain away their lack of miracles. So for them to look at that lifetime of miracle and to say, oh yeah, you know, we figured out where that power comes from because you can't deny the power.

It must come from Satan. And that's not at all related to saying, I don't necessarily believe 27th hand stories.

So you're saying that's a great observation.

And I'm not even required to say that they're of the devil. I don't necessarily believe they happen.

Yeah, so in the life of Jesus, they tried to take the supernatural things for which there was no other explanation and explain them some other way. Charismatics take things for which there are a dozen possible explanations and attribute them as a miraculous thing to prove miracles still exist.

And as you said, that's a great observation. 180 degrees the opposite.

No unbeliever could deny Jesus miracles. No unbeliever would affirm charismatic miracles.

That's excellent. That might be the money paragraph of the whole conference right there. That's a rock in somebody's palms.

No unbeliever could deny Jesus miracles. No unbeliever would affirm charismatic miracles.

Yeah, Jesus and the apostles did miracles that no unbeliever could deny. Today's modern charismatics do miracles that no unbeliever would believe.

Darren Brown and the Exposed Mechanics of Faith Healing

Exactly, exactly. In fact, Jim, I don't know if you've seen it. There's a documentary done by a guy named Darren Brown, D-E-R-R-E-N, Darren Brown. And he's not a believer. In fact, I think, I'm pretty sure he's actually a homosexual atheist, professes to be an atheist.

And he did a documentary 13, 14 years ago called Miracles for Sale. And he trained some guy. I can't remember his name off the top of my head. But trained a random stranger, had some tryouts, acting tryouts, and picked his guy that he thought would be the best at it.

And once he picked the right one out of an audition of a group, he said, okay, this is why I want you. I'm going to train you to be a faith healer. This guy was not a Christian, didn't profess to be a Christian on any level.

He was a scuba diving instructor. But Darren Brown spent several weeks with him, training him in the lingo, in the Christian lingo, the evangelical lingo, faith healing tactics, and the charismatic world.

Showed him a lot of videos, took him to some of these things, or trained him in how to do it. And as an experiment, he took this guy who was lost as a ball in high weeds, out on the streets, pretending to be a Christian preacher, and goes up to people at random and heals them, tries to heal them.

And he has the exact same results that Todd White does. He had a 100 success rate. Every single person he went up to believed that they had experienced a healing. 100%. He had the exact same success that Todd White does.

Exactly the same. And he doesn't even claim to be a Christian.

Because you don't need faith. Todd White says that in one of his video clips that you play from time to time. It doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter how religiously unbelieving you might be at this point.

It doesn't matter because God's going to do this.

You're one leg shorter than the other one, and it throws you back out. Okay, so regardless of, well, yeah, no matter what. So what I'll do, regardless of what you believe, I'm going to pray for you, and Jesus is going to grow your leg out and heal your back.

You don't even have to believe, dude. So you get into the weirdest place of belief that you want. You can unbelieve as much as you want.

He can say that because he knows that what he's doing is just a trick. It's just a show. It's just a mind game. Exactly.

Exactly. 100%. These are just psychosomatic healings. And Daniel Kalinda, he runs with the worst of the worst. He's friends with Todd White, who is an intentional deceiver. One of his biggest financial supporters, by the way, is Kenneth Copeland.

He praises Kenneth Copeland. And I have no hesitation saying this. I've said it before publicly. Kenneth Copeland is one of the darkest, most sinister, blasphemous heretics ever to disgrace the name of Christ.

He has spent well over half a century. The man is now 87 years old, I think. 87 years old. And his entire ministry has been one of teaching blasphemy. He has uttered some of the most blood-curdling heresies and blasphemies ever to cross the lips of someone who professes to be a Christian.

And not only that, ascribes those same heresies to none other than God himself and has given more false prophecies than there are stars in the sky and has exploited the poor. I've been to his meetings.

Exploited the poor, the sick, the desperate. I mean, if you can't tell Kenneth Copeland is a false teacher, you shouldn't be allowed outside of your house without adult supervision.

You can't tell if anybody's a false teacher.

If Kenneth Copeland isn't, nobody is. And not only Kenneth Copeland is he friends with and does he sing the praises of, but he's been on Sid Roth's program. He's been a guest on Sid Roth's program more than once, I'm pretty sure.

In Sid Roth, every single episode that Sid Roth does is a 30-minute infomercial of lunacy. That doesn't bother him. All of that's okay, but boy, if we question their parlor tricks, oh, that's out of bounds.

Yep.

Yeah. I mean, look, Justin, if everything you've said true about him, if that's true, then yeah, we'd have to say that there's a problem there. Yeah. I say that tongue-in-cheek because we had the discussion with people who are unwilling to identify even somebody as plainly heretical as Kenneth Copeland as a false teacher.

That's right. That's exactly right. I know. You know, regarding the leg lengthening and the arm lengthening trick and everything, I showed that to my family, and my son-in-law says, well, if the crowd thinks that's great, wait until I show them this trick.

Right. That'll really wow them.

Wow. They'll be amazed at that. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, and you said it earlier, why would God authenticate the worst heretics and the most prolific false prophets? Why would he authenticate them with true miracle-working power?

You know, it just makes no sense. And I have seen in my travels, I've talked to enough people and been enough places, I have heard a handful of very, very credible testimonies of physical healing. Not a lot, admittedly, not a lot, but I have heard some.

And when I say a miracle, I don't mean gradual recovery from cancer. I mean a healing that has no explanation from a human standpoint. There is no medical explanation for it. It had to be God. And so I have heard a few of those, a few very credible ones.

Admittedly, not a lot. But to say that we don't believe even that God miraculously heals people today is not true.

But when you have somebody who goes into a doctor and they get a full upper body scan, and they have cancers all over the inside of their body, and they come back two weeks later and all those tumors are gone, that's inexplicable.

That's supernatural. God can and does do that from time to time. And that's not his normal operating procedure. But Scripture doesn't promise that that is the lot for every believer, or that God will do that for every believer, nor does Scripture teach that God is going to do that for even people, or God is going to give an ability to heal those people of those Scriptures and teach that.

So we don't deny that supernatural miracles take place. You give me two scans of the same person's body, one with cancer, one without, I'm going to say, praise God, he answered prayer. That person was healed supernaturally, miraculously by God.

But I promise you that he's not giving the ability to heal the false prophets and false teachers to authenticate their ministries. That God is not doing. And so what they do is they fabricate these lying signs and wonders in order to authenticate their ministry.

Because without it, people won't follow them on social media, they won't listen to their messages, and they won't attend their churches, and they won't give their money and platform them on TV. So the lying signs and wonders are fabricated out of thin air, just like their theology in most cases, and God is not giving them the ability to do true and genuine miracles.

Why Charismatic Ministries Depend on Stories, Not Exposition

Yeah, that's exactly right.

That's exactly right. And these people don't have the massive followings that they do because of their expositional prowess or how they execute Scripture. I mean, I've listened to these people for the last 25-plus years, and, I mean, you know this too.

You listen to one of these folks, one of these prosperity, or any big-name charismatic preacher, they spend 90 of their time telling stories. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's stories.

Yeah. They don't open up the Bible, read the passage, and explain the text, explain how it connects to its context and what the author is developing and what the purpose of that is and what the mind of the Holy Spirit is in that passage and how this should be applied in your life and in your home.

And they don't spend their time doing that. They get up there and they rile up their crowd, and you see it with Greg Locke holding his handheld mic all the time and throwing that around and getting people ginned up into these emotional frenzies in order to set the stage for the exorcisms that are to follow.

That is the charismatic schtick. Yep, it is.

And it's not, you know, people take this and say, Oh, Justin said they never talk about the Bible. Oh, yeah, they'll reference a Bible verse or they'll read a Bible verse. They may talk about it a little bit.

But as far as digging into the text, doing true exposition, no, they don't do that. It's 90 of their time is spent telling stories, either something that they've done, they've seen, or a story they heard, one of their friends.

And honestly, when I listen to Copeland and Duplantis, I hear the same stories over and over and over and over and over. They've been telling the same stories for decades. Yeah. This is going to get me in trouble, but it's true.

A charismatic expositor is the theological equivalent of Bigfoot. You hear a lot about them. There's a lot of rumors. There's a lot of grainy, out-of-focus pictures, but there's no proof these things exist.

Apologies to a good friend of ours who thinks they probably do. But anyway, you just won't find one.

Just to the viewer who's watching this, who watched Colenda's response and how he treated us in the cessationist movement, I don't mean that he was being unkind. I mean, in answering our arguments, just compare his arguments with what Scripture says and what he is claiming in that argument.

He's not dealing with the fact. The fact is that exactly what we laid out, no unbeliever ever denied the miracles that Jesus did. They couldn't deny it because they were undeniable. And today, no unbeliever would believe the miracles that modern charismatics do.

That's a fact of the matter, and what we said in the cessationist video still holds true. All of Colenda's sort of obfuscation and smoke and mirrors notwithstanding. Yeah, indeed. Amen and amen. Yeah.

Closing Remarks and Conference Announcements

All right.

Well, Jim, thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Good chat. We should do this more often. Yeah, we should. Absolutely. All right, dear ones, links down below in the description where you can get your copy of the cessationist film.

It's excellent, and a link also to the cessationist conference that is coming up this October 3rd through 5th at First Baptist Church in Mustang, Oklahoma, right? Kind of a suburb of Oklahoma City. I will be one of the speakers there.

There will be a number of others there as well. It's a good time.

Looking forward to it. Jim, you're going to be there. I'm going to be there. Yeah, I'm not speaking, but I will be there, probably pushing your wheelchair around or something like that. One thing about the cessationist conference, whenever I post that on Twitter, I usually get somebody who claps back at me and says, oh, you're going to spend a whole conference talking about what God doesn't do as if that's unnecessary.

And we wouldn't need to spend a whole conference talking about what God doesn't do. If you didn't have a bunch of people out there misrepresenting God and saying that he's doing all these things that he is, in fact, not doing.

If you didn't have people misrepresenting what God is doing and what God is saying, you wouldn't have to have people defending and teaching sound doctrine. Yep.

On those issues. That's right. And since you brought that up, Jim, it has been my observation. You and I have talked about this off camera several times, actually. Anytime they perceive that you or me or some other, Phil Johnson, whoever, MacArthur, anytime they perceive that a cessationist has in some way misrepresented them or what they have said or what they have done or whatever, if they perceive that that has happened, their hair's on fire.

They call us slanderers and blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. They get riled up and they get really exercised about that.

They question your integrity. They say that you're unfit for ministry. They say that you shouldn't be behind a microphone. They say that you're a liar, that you can't be trusted about anything now, that you have no they can't trust you.

They couldn't trust you to tell them the time of day or the sports score or what the weather's like outside because you just have no credibility whatsoever. That's the charge they make.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And yet they are not bothered in the slightest by putting words in God's mouth that he did not say, ascribing things to the Holy Spirit that he did not do. That doesn't bother them at all.

False prophecies, water off a duck's back. Oh, it doesn't matter that they get 99 of their prophecies wrong and only 1 even maybe possibly tangentially. That's no big deal. It bothers them not in the slightest.

This is the bread and butter of the charismatic. Yeah. It is. That doesn't bother them. Slandering God does not bother them. But questioning Todd White, quite literally pulling people's legs,. Yeah. You nailed it.

That's exactly right. And that's really what it all comes down to. That's really what it all comes down to.

And we've both been on the receiving end of that. Not that we care what people say, but it is hypocrisy at the least. You can tell that they do not honor God in their speech or in how they represent him because they really don't care about people in their own movement who blaspheme him constantly.

They're constantly excusing it, making excuses, running cover for them, trying to explain it away, saying, well, I'll look into that someday, but I just haven't had time to really examine that. If what you say is true, that would be concerning, but I don't know.

They're not even interested in dealing with the liars and blasphemers in their own movement. Yeah, that's exactly right.