Gene Bridges, Anthony Bradley, Greg Johnson, Michael Heiser, and Bruxy Cavey!

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line, my name is James White. We have an eclectic program today, let's put it that way.

I actually, when I have a bunch of topics, I have to type them out, or I'll forget one of them, and I look over the list here and it's like, okay, well

I guess there's something for everybody somewhere in here. But I wanted to start off with a

Facebook post. I saw a comment, actually a meme that was placed on The Witness, a black

Christian collective, in other words, the old RON group, Reformed African American Network, a quotation from Jamar Tisby, white evangelicals must ask, why does our theology lead to republicanism?

And my response, not being a republican myself, my response was, maybe, just maybe, in the light of the skyrocketing rise the totalitarian left, we might want to ask, how can anyone with a semblance of a biblical worldview not oppose the secular totalitarianism that is the

Democratic Party? It is no longer just abortion, no, now it's infanticide.

It is no longer just homosexuality, now it is the gay mirage and the myth of transgenderism and the open desire to forcibly pervert the sexuality of our youngest children.

The party of death is on the march and they are no longer shy about saying they will crush religious liberty under their pink sequined shoes.

As doctors are forced to engage in euthanasia and abortion, that's what's happening in Canada by the way, as universities purge themselves of the last vestiges of their

Christian heritage How is it that we find professing believers saying it is okay to help them in their cause?

The answer is seen plainly in Jamar Tisby's own writings, Political Commitment to Economic Socialism Parentheses Income Equality.

That is why it is so obviously true that biblical terms like justice and equality have been redefined on the basis of leftist paradigms, surely not on the basis of Christian scripture nor a

Christian worldview. Well, there were some interesting responses to that.

A Melissa Vandenbout said, that's full on conspiracy theory level stuff and way out of bounds for folks who worship truth incarnate.

And a number of us said, do you listen to the news, Melissa? Do you read anything?

I referred her to this morning's episode of the briefing with Dr.

Albert Moeller, who discussed again, probably for the 30th time, 40th time, 50th time this year, articles substantiating each one of these things.

The court in Canada specifically ruling that Christians had to participate.

They had to become complicit in euthanasia. If someone came to you as a doctor, wanted you to, if they're a candidate for euthanasia, you had to find them someone to kill them.

You couldn't just say, I will have nothing to do with this. Nope. Got to do it. This is all over the place.

And as I have said for a long time, as Dr. Moeller has been saying for a long time, the intention of the left is to ghettoize the

Christian worldview. They specifically want to make sure that when it comes to the legal realm, the medical realm, powerful positions, doctors, lawyers, you're not allowed to have the

Christian worldview expressed in those areas any longer because the influence that those professions have in the society as a whole.

And so that's that conspiracy theory. Maybe Melissa just lives in a cave and doesn't bother to watch the news or read or think about what's going on today.

That's possible. Then Gene Bridges, and the name rang a bell.

He says later on down in the thing, when I mentioned, I said, I have copied down your entire comment.

We'll go through it line by line, live to down the dividing line. And he says, please note that I am the same

Gene Bridges who once wrote on Triablog. I thought the name was slightly familiar, but not overly.

So sorry, Gene. I don't know who you are, apologize for that, but I don't.

So maybe somebody will send me something in channel or something like that, or in Twitter that will give me some information.

But anyway, it doesn't seem like you hold those views anymore that you once did. I don't know.

But this is a lengthy comment. I just want to go through it. Again, we are absolutely realistically facing not only deplatforming, which means

YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter silencing any opposition to the immoral revolution, which is a part of the desire of people on the left to fundamentally destroy

Western civilization, remake civilization in a very, very, very different form.

And they use many different tools to do this critical theory, critical fill -in -the -blank theory applied to all sorts of different areas to deconstruct and destabilize and to divide.

So there can be no harmony between races or classes. I literally saw a video this morning put out by the

AFL -CIO with a Marxist, it was said right there, they put, that was identifying him,

Marxist worker. This could have been the 1910s in Russia before the, we have to seize the means of production.

It was playing up Karl Marx, no hiding it, no nothing.

I am a communist. We need communism. That's what it was. That's what we're facing. That's what people are trying to do.

And so in light of that, in light of the imminent loss of freedom of speech and freedom of religion in the

United States of America, this is coming. I, if you, if you doubt this, you have your head stuck in the sand.

You are not paying attention to what is going on. You are not listening to what is being said.

You are not listening to the legal decisions that are coming down. You're not seeing what's happening in the

EU. You're not seeing what's happening in Canada. You're just daft. That's all there is to it.

You're whistling as you walk by the graveyard. That's all you're doing. And so Gene Bridges responds to my statements.

How can you continue voting Republican when the GOP's economics are keeping wages low and flat for the people who are the most likely to access abortion services?

Stop immediately. The issue is the humanity of the preborn child.

And if you start anywhere else, as he does, you have bought the poison hook, line, and sinker.

You're not thinking as a Christian. You are not thinking as a Christian. Now, I would dispute that whole assertion to begin with.

In fact, it seems like most people are doing much better than they did only a few years ago.

But hey, the economy is a cyclic thing. And I'm sure there'll be a downturn sometime in the future as well.

But did you blame Obama for the stagnant economy during his time?

Probably not. Then he talks about the higher the abortion rate, all the rest of that stuff.

The abortion rate is directly relevant to moral choices. Once you turn into an economic thing, again, you're no longer thinking as Christian.

You're just a secularist. You're just a secularist. That's all you are. Alabama is a case study in this phenomenon.

And now their law seeks to imprison physicians who do this, which is tantamount to stoning them. You know full well that stoning is the option of last resort in scripture.

George's law does the same thing to women. On top of that, the motive behind these laws is outright litigiousness, which is condemned in 1

Corinthians and 2 Timothy. Just trying to follow this, folks, is going to be pretty tough.

This gives you an idea of what happens when instead of having a biblical worldview, a

Christian worldview, you take the secular leftist worldview and try to sort of baptize it with religious flavoring.

It's a mess. Yes, it is their intention for the horrific absurdity the modern -day

Dred Scott called Roe v. Wade to be thrown out. That is their intention.

You're saying that that is a violation of scripture because it's litigious? I mean, what?

So the Christian application would be to not be litigious and allow an absurdity like Roe v.

Wade to stand. How did we get

Roe v. Wade? Through litigious activities, right? I mean, the left is the essence of litigiousness.

They have abused the system and have taken over the judges.

I mean, if you want to start down that road, you got no leg to stand on, dude. Wow, amazing. Their motives are about holding on to power, position, and prestige.

No, that's the left. Now, people on the right do that too, but the motivation here is saving life, saving children's lives.

Believe me, the institutional pro -life movement has lost control of all this.

The institutional pro -life movement wanted a little bit more restriction, a little bit more restriction, a little bit more restriction, but only to a point.

They never went for full abolition. Now they've been bypassed and everybody else is like, no, this needs to stop.

And these people aren't looking for power? That's absurd. Absolutely moonbat absurd.

Aren't we supposed to resist the third temptation of Christ? I guess that's power.

And litigiousness? Why are we saving the babies by ignoring other sections of scripture? What other sections of scripture?

You're seriously, seriously, Gene, you are so confused, so muddled in morals, morality, and ethics that you can't see the difference between saving children and being litigious, as you described it.

One thing that I am certainly discovering in trying to reason with leftists is they absolutely cannot make category distinctions.

They cannot place things in proper categories. It's wow. Uh, we have got to stop falling in line with GOP on abortion when these things go along with the legislation they pass.

Yeah. So you got to go with the Democrats so that we can have infanticide and transgenderism and homosexuality and the profaning of marriage and, and destruction of religious liberty and freedom of speech and totalitarianism.

Yeah. That's the way to go. Okay. Um, why not find common ground with anti -abortion

Democrats? Because it's easier to find a unicorn than an anti -abortion

Democrat. That's why. Uh, we need to ask ourselves how scripture, scripture evils like abortion in a world of imperfect justice and hard hearts.

How scripture evil, I don't even know what that means. Okay. Scripture prohibits divorce and as I, as an ideal and another hand regulates it by way of concessions in the moral law.

Jesus actually said that was because of the hardness of the heart. Scripture also sets a similar pattern with respect to providing for indentured servitude in order to prevent chattel slavery in, uh, any

Israel, uh, ancient near Eastern Israel. Scripture also shows us that it is not illicit to reduce the number of moral evils as crimes associated with the death penalty.

Okay. Then there's, then there's these points that number one, thou shalt not emote thy way through this issue.

That is the essence of the leftist, uh, approach. However, you can't get anyone to on the left to sit down and actually try to think through, oh, well, like the woman on CNN last week, when a woman's pregnant, what's inside her is not a human being.

What is it? A dog? I mean, you can't get them to just, as soon as you try to get them to start reasoning, just emote.

That's the left man. Thou shalt recognize the hardness of the human heart and look to the scriptures.

Well, that's for sure. But that's the exact opposite of anything on the left. There is no hard human heart.

They have no, they're, they're, the human heart is irrelevant to leftists. Uh, they're all about power and, and, and structure and, and groups.

Uh, thou shalt learn to speak to each other and not past each other. And you didn't start off too well.

Number four, abortion in general is murder. When the motives that underwrite it are invidious rising to the level of murder.

If someone aborts a child, for example, because he, she values money over carrying a child full term, then that is in God's eyes is murder.

I agree. If however, the child will be born with an uber severe deformity, like the cranium outside the muscular, then there is no murder.

If the motive of the parent choosing, then that pregnancy is for example, to love the child enough to send the child to the Lord. That said, it is not generally a crime.

That said, it is not generally a crime under the civil code. Which one? I can't tell which is which, but everyone was posting the same, uh,

Florida chart a couple of days ago. Um, 95, 96 % of all abortions have nothing to do with any of that.

96 % are simply, uh, this would cost me too much or just not interested right now.

It's a birth control methodology. So 96%, I guess you would agree are murder. In order to end abortion, we shouldn't set the bar there while failing to regulate abortion.

Regulatory practices are actually on the right track in this regard. We should take the good and leave the bad. In other words, he's a incrementalist.

Six abortion should be extremely rare at the same time safe. Sounds like, uh, Bill Clinton at that point.

Uh, and it's not rare and we are funding it with hundreds of millions of dollars from the public treasury.

Um, and so that's a problem. Physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and RNs with specialist training should be authorized to carry out these procedures.

What procedures? The 96 % or the point, what was it for that fell into even those categories?

0 .1%, something like that. Uh, yeah, it's just tiny, super, super tiny.

Um, the candidate for the procedure should be treated with kindness and respect by everyone involved.

Depends on the motivations. Again, the, the only, the only issue here is the incredible rarity of the one example you gave, which is 0 .00001%.

We're ignoring the 99 % and focusing upon the 0 .1%, which again is a tactic of the left.

Uh, calling women who get abortion murderers as well as those who perform them is not

Christ like though you did it yourself up above. That it's murder in God's eyes, but I guess not in supposed to be in our eyes.

So you think Christ would have looked at someone who murders their unborn child in the womb and gone, well, no, that no, we shouldn't do that.

We shouldn't say that. I thought it was pretty straightforward with, uh, with the identification of sin. Uh, it was repentant sinners that he had all the mercy and grace for not the people you really think

Jesus would look at the shout my abortion folks and go, yeah,

I'm with you, honey. That's what it means to be Christ. Like, I don't think so.

Um, this only serves to put unconstructed roadblocks up between ourselves and people who need Christ, uh, like their sin didn't classifying physicians who perform abortions as felons worthy of 10 years.

Life is not constructive either. Unless of course they're actually committing murder, which they know they're doing.

Uh, look, look at the hermit Kermit gun guys. Now, um, if an abortion is performed, it should be in the first trimester, uh, make third trimester abortions go away.

Second trimester abortions are to be evaluated medically on an ad hoc basis. Well, again, we already know medically there's no reason to do it.

So this is, but, but again, the point is losing track, losing view of the fact this is a human being.

This is all, this is all politics, politics. Oh, here you go. Uh, I love this comprehensive sex education with a

Judeo -Christian moral element whenever possible is to be preferred over abstinence only education.

Yeah, I know. What? With a Judeo -Christian moral component whenever, whenever possible.

But if not, then let's not worry about it. Um, wow.

This just, I'm just gonna skip some of this cause it's just so obviously, um, worldly thinking.

Stop running to the courts to fix this for you. It's the left that, that designed this entire methodology of overturning the legislative process by court fiat.

It's the left that has done this. Not those trying to fight this. Uh, be honest about that.

Um, the passage of anti -abortion legislation to test the courts displays a spirit of litigiousness that does not honor

God. Stop cursing Ruth Bader Ginsburg as well. That is conduct unbecoming

Christians. The enemy curses we bless. Curse Satan and the beast, not SCOTUS justices.

That applies to all parties in this societal discussion. Wow. Okay.

Um, it's about health of the mother, homicide, pray for unity, make adoption less burden.

Well, we all know that adoption should be less, it should cost you 10, it should cost you 10 ,000 times more to abort a baby than to adopt a baby.

Um, so it goes on from there. So let's see.

Um, here you go. Your continued insistence that what is culturally and ideologically conservative in the

U .S. is also biblical is a betrayal of biblical values. Such as? It's real easy to say that.

It's real easy to say that. But be specific. Um, I, I responded to Linda Sarsoura for the first time on Twitter today.

She said something about how she was trying to figure out how you can be pro -life and pro -death penalty at the same time.

And I said, Moses managed to do it. Um, it's simple category issue.

Uh, pro -life is defending innocent human beings from being put to death.

And pro -death penalty is killing guilty human beings who have taken human life. Uh, category issues, adults do that kind of thing.

Uh, so what, what specifically do you have in mind? You want to try to defend, uh, the redefining of marriage.

So it's no longer marriage. Do you want to defend looking at a man and saying that's his wife?

Or looking at a woman saying that's her husband? Or not even be able to look at anybody and say his or her at all?

You really want to defend the transgender insanity that is the left?

Which one of the presidential candidates on the left would stand up and say anything positive from a

Christian worldview against transgenderism today? Which one? Name them. Name them.

Which one? Not a one of them will. Not a one of them will defend marriage. Not a one of them will say anything about homosexuality.

Not a one of them will defend abortion. Which one? Which one, Jean? I'd like to know which one it is.

It is a worldview. It is a worldview that has absolute venomous disgust at God's law.

About anything. And don't try to drag in some type of socialist economic theory.

Try to say, well, they got this right with Jesus. Jesus was not a socialist. Okay? If Jesus had wanted to address economic issues in his day, there were plenty of opportunities for him to do so.

And he didn't. That's because he knew his church would have to exist in many different contexts down through the ages.

So this was just, this was just an amazing example. Then he goes on to say, your attitude toward gays is also showing.

On the one hand, you say correctly that if we want Muslims to become Christians, we should love them as much as Christ does.

Which means that I accurately represent them and I specifically and clearly make sure they know exactly where their theology is in not only contrast to, but contradiction to God's revealed will.

And yet you use epithets online calling our Democrats for their pink sequined shoes.

Actually, I was talking about the totalitarians who specifically right now in our culture are shutting down anyone who would speak the truth about human sexuality in a university.

Try it sometime. Who are passing laws right now, passed the law last week.

House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, which is the end of free speech, religious liberty, and a constitutional form of government in the

United States of America. If it were to get through the Senate and be signed by the president.

That's happening right now. That, that happened on Friday. The most anti -constitution, anti -religious liberty, anti -Christian piece of legislation ever, ever dreamed of in the

United States of America passed the House of Representatives. That's what

I mean. And I will not apologize for what I just said. I will not apologize for it.

There's nothing offensive about it. It's truthful. We are being crushed under the

LGBTQ dominance, not equality, but we are being told that we must celebrate this lifestyle and this worldview.

What that means is we are being told that we must deny Christ. If you want gays to become

Christians and you should do better. I'm sorry, Gene, I haven't seen any of your debates with homosexuals that have been being done since 2001, but I have done such debates numerous times, written at least one book on the subject.

Maybe you're not aware of those things. Instead of infantilizing the

Christians who refuse to bake the cake for the gay couple. We should call them out for their legalism and encourage them to bake the cake with an underwriting motive to love them and meet them where they are with respect for them in order to shine the light of the gospel into their lives, we should.

No, sir, you've missed it again. You're not operating on a Christian worldview.

You're operating on a secular worldview. And then you're trying to baptize that with religiosity.

The emphasis and desire of the left is to force us to violate our consciences to celebrate and use our skills to celebrate their debauchery.

That is what it was about. If you can't see that, then you are the problem.

Gene Bridges is the problem, is emblematic of what's happening in the

United States. The Bible forbids gay marriage.

Actually, it never even addresses it, but it positively defines what marriage is in such a way that you cannot, by any stretch of any theological perversion, come up with the idea that there is such a thing.

Yet it also forbids us from falling from failing to love and serve our neighbors, not on the same level.

Once again, the leftist incapacity to provide proper category thinking.

It's childish. It's childish. Fundamental to human existence and culture is the first ordinance of God in the creation of the institution of marriage.

To put anything equal as a, well, but you know, hey, it's sort of like, well, yeah, so the

Bible says something about homosexuality, but it also says something about overeating. That is infantile thinking.

It's childish on its face, and yet it's succeeding in our society because our society no longer thinks as adults, they think as children.

And that's what you have here. To love and serve our neighbors means to speak the truth to them,

Mr. Bridges, not to join with them in celebrating their rebellion against God's law.

And it also teaches us that if there is no evil motive behind an action, there is no sin.

Baking the cake is not a sin and not endorsing gay marriage unless that is the motive of the baker. Should, again, you've missed the point,

I already said it. Should we oppose transgenderism? Yes. At the same time, if you cannot be bothered to address them as they present themselves, then you don't love them the way you say

Muslims should be loved. Wrong again. Total confusion. Total confusion.

What happened to you, sir? I mean, what happened to you? If you once wrote for Triablog, then you once at least demonstrated to somebody for a period of time that you had some concept of a

Christian worldview. You don't anymore because you've lost it. Let's look at that again.

Should we oppose transgenderism? Yes. Why? Because it is a fundamental rebellion against the created order.

It is rejection of God's right to determine the status, role, behavior, and function of his own creatures.

It is a rebellion against God and the entire created order and will result in a diminishment of the life of that created order.

But then notice, missing that, yet, yes, and at the same time, if you cannot be bothered to address them as they present themselves.

In other words, you should go along with their rebellion, go along with their fantasy, and use the pronouns they want, even though that means that you are joining them in their rebellion against God because that's the loving thing.

No, it's not, sir. No, it's not. That is simple capitulation. It is not Christian love by any stretch of the imagination, and you cannot look me in the eye and tell me that that's what the apostles would have told us to do.

I can just see Paul doing that. Yeah, right. I can see, right, right, right.

I can see Paul doing that about the same time that he had an ecumenical get -together with the

Judaizers. Right. Then he goes back to the

Muslim thing. Again, completely, gene bridges cannot do categories. That's the problem. And gene bridges is just simply representative of the left.

This is your classic liberal Episcopalian PCUSA, leftist

Lutherans, United Church of Christ, the whole mess.

This is how they think. This is how they think, right there, just laid out for us very, very clearly, very, very clearly.

And it is, again, simple matter of just thinking through what's being said.

If you want to see another example of this, I guess this morning, yesterday,

I don't remember, I didn't look at the time stamp on it. Yesterday, a, and I retweeted it, a graphic was put up, and I didn't know about this because it's going to be at the

Southern Baptist Convention, and I'm not a Southern Baptist. But the

G3 conference that I've been speaking at fairly regularly for at least four years now is going to do, you know, when the convention takes place, which is only in a couple of weeks, there's normally, you know, the

Armenians get together and the traditionalists get together. And there's all these, you know, since everybody's coming to town, let's all get together and do our thing.

Yeah, okay. So, so thank you, Nicholas, for posting that. There is, I guess the stuff is still posted at TriBlog.

Well, they might want to rethink that. Anyway, so G3 is going to have a pre -SBC get together, and it's dangers of social justice and evangelicalism,

SBC 2019. Tom Nettles, Tom Askell, Josh Bice, and Dr.

Troublemaker from Texas, Tom Buck, who graduated last Friday from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

His doctorate is in New Testament, and specifically expositional preaching of the book of Hebrews, something that I was practicing for a number of years.

And so Dr. Buck is going to be speaking as well. Well, I retweeted that, and the very first comment, the very first comment was, where's the black guy?

You know, you gotta, you know, the very first comment, let's racialize it, which shows that the people on that side, you can talk all you want about biblical definitions of social injustice.

You don't have either one of them. You have an overriding external definition, primarily economic and political in its origination.

It's not how the New Testament defines society. It's not how the Old Testament defines society, certainly.

The social aspect of it, you're getting someplace else. And then you try to, again, sort of baptize the justice thing in, ignoring the biblical concept of justice and come up with a different definition.

But you don't even know what's going to be addressed, how it's going to be addressed. Well, yes, we do.

We can just look at what happened to G3. And, well, I would assume that there's going to be a fair amount of consistency.

But you know what? I haven't seen anything other than wild -eyed leftist gobbledygook in response to this.

I mean, the Bradley Mason stuff, I mean, that's all there is.

And we've already demonstrated just how vacuous, self -contradictory, what a mess that stuff is, based on misrepresentations of straw men and zero meaningful biblical content and just all sorts of issues with that.

So why wouldn't it be consistent? Well, so I was seeing comments during the day, yesterday, about the responses to the announcement of the dangers of social justice in Evangelicalism SBC 2019 gathering.

And so this, I think it was this morning, I think it was this morning, I got up and Anthony Bradley has blocked me.

So, you know, there's always easy get -arounds for that stuff. But anyway, and so I see a tweet from Anthony Bradley and what he's done.

Now, there is some reason for hope. My daughter posted something.

I'm not sure if I can scroll back far enough, but my daughter posted something before the program and I was like, man, she must be having a good day.

But it was something about social media that sounded absolutely, just glowingly post -millennial.

That's the only way I could describe it. Here we go, here we go.

She posted a old picture of Clint Eastwood in response to me.

So you can sort of get an idea. My response to her was, give it 24 years, Summer, and you'll change your tune.

But here it goes. This was an hour ago. She says, I have an incredibly optimistic attitude towards social media.

I love the idea of it. The good we can do with it, our ability to communicate quickly and easily with so many people.

Trolls don't bother me. Missteps don't bother me. Let's grow, learn, dialogue, and do better. Did the kids clean up their room or something?

I mean, they all ate lunch without spilling anything or having any fights.

Like I said, my response was, give it 24 years, Summer, you'll change it. I'm 24 years older than, 20, 26 years, actually.

Yeah, 26 years older. I'm 24 years older. Anyways, I remember when my parents would stop and have to start thinking about ages and I was always like, oh, come on.

Yeah, well, once you got that many decades to calculate, there's something you got to do about it. So there you go.

Anyway, yeah, well, you know, Bradley Mason, Anthony Bradley.

Why do you all have the same name? Anthony Bradley posted a...

He took the dangers of social justice and even... Well, can you show this? This whole reason we plug this thing in.

I don't know it's going to change anything, but yeah. So here's what he did.

And he posted, now, I can't see Anthony Bradley in that, but it does say

Anthony Bradley at the top and has the hashtag, don't waste your life

POC, person of color, which I'd imagine is his way of saying, don't go to this.

But what he's done is he has juxtaposed this with something from the 1950s with a bunch of white folks protesting race mixing is communism.

Stop the race mixing. March of the something. You can see it says Christ. Race mixing is communism, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, the one positive thing here is that I read through the comments.

I normally am not a big comment person, but I read the comments and he was getting roasted appropriately, being called to repentance.

And this is slander. And he only made one comment. And that was basically his explaining.

Well, they're both coming from the same source. They're both coming from the same source.

It's the genetic fallacy argumentation that that that side likes to utilize a lot.

They're all coming from the same source. And, you know, lots of people were saying, you know, that's not true.

You know that that's not true. No, no, it's part of the narrative. And I'm sure he probably does believe that. There has been such a massive swing and it seems to be getting more radical with each passing week in in Anthony Bradley that it's it's a sad thing to observe.

But but it is there. Also, over the weekend, another rather fascinating development took place.

I remember, in fact, I thought of this yesterday. I got caught out in some bad weather yesterday.

There was zero percent rain. In the forecast. But I didn't look at 30 miles north.

And big old storms came in there. Well, there are cells, but they would be pretty heavy downpours when you when you hit one.

And I'm on a bike. I hate riding in the rain. Detest. Hate what it does to my bike, first of all. But I just hate having squishy shoes.

You know, you're hammering along and it's still fountains of water coming out your shoes because it's so wet.

So summer summer responds. She must be listening. No, lunch was gross.

And schoolwork has been a battle. And I've been called a whitewash tomb on social media today.

But don't threaten me with a good time. Dat Post Mill. Keep hanging out with Jeff. Yeah, well,

Jeff has some rough days, too. So anyway, all of that about the writing to it, it struck me that one of the corners

I went through, well, it's 83rd and Happy Valley. Was where I was,

I was on that route when I listened to the cross politic interview of Greg Johnson, the pastor of the

PCA church that hosted the Revoice conference last year. So it was about I remember it was early in the morning.

It was dark when I was listening to it. And over the weekend, news came out that Greg Johnson came out as a homosexual.

And I asked Chocolate Knox because I couldn't

I couldn't remember all the details, but I would have thought I would have remembered that part that that came up if that had come up.

Well, it did come up sort of. And so let me just play a section of it here. I asked

Chocolate Knox. He gave me a link directly to this portion of the interview. We don't need.

Oh, OK. That'll work. All right. You have nothing else to do in there. That's pretty good. We're not taking calls, you know, and this time you stayed awake.

That's good. Anyways, so here here's here's the section.

And come into this family. But before we go, I want to ask you a question. Greg, are you gay? Are you asking me out on a date?

No, I just want to know. I just want to know how you identify. That would be disgusting.

You want to know about my sexual brokenness? I am happy to talk to you about what

I talked about in the pulpit two weeks ago. And that I think is relevant to this conversation. I am a pornography addict.

I have had a pornography addiction for 15 years. Actually, 18. Are you still doing pornography,

Greg? No, I haven't for 15 years. So you're not an addict. So you're not an addict anymore.

Oh, but I know what it does inside of me. See, OK, so the point was

Chaglan asked him straight straightforwardly. Are you gay?

And, you know, that would not be the first question that I would ask in that context. And so I was sort of wondering, did that just sort of pop in your mind?

Was there something that was said? You know, I don't know. But from what he has now said, he didn't tell them the truth.

He didn't answer truthfully to that question at that particular point in time. Now, I think

I think Three Voice Conference is the same location again this year. Makes sense with the connection, you know, that type of stuff.

But he has come out and again, this is a

PCA congregation. The question is going to be, what's the PCA going to do? And there is a lot of stuff going on in a lot of places, not just the

PCA. I'll be honest with you. I've seen some stuff coming from some OPC context that I was like, which means, fellow

Reformed Baptists, I think we are in more danger of this than almost anybody else because we think we're not in any danger of it at all.

I really do. I mean, I've had conversations. And I've tried to warn,

I could never happen here. Yes, I can. As long as you think that it can't, that's when it's going to happen.

That's what's going to happen. You've just got to be constantly vigilant, constantly vigilant on what's going on there.

Okay. Now, we are shifting a lot of gears here. We are shifting a lot of gears.

We've already covered a number of different topics. This was a possible

Radio Free Geneva. I mean, we could even play the theme song because it gets everybody excited.

But then the topic I have after this isn't really relevant to that. So we won't do that. And besides, it's only 10 minutes long.

So you can't... But I knew that I had this file from a couple of years ago, hiding somewhere on the hard drive of this, my old

MacBook. And so I did a search, tracked it down.

Years ago, I had run across an audio discussion from Dr.

Michael Heiser on Calvinism. And I remember listening to it going,

Wow, I should use that in Radio Free Geneva sometime. I never did. I never did.

And so I have some stuff from other people. I've got some recently done stuff from Dr.

Andy Woods down in Texas. He's one of Brandon House's guys.

And it's really bad. It's really surface level. Lots of straw men, lots of misunderstandings, just your standard stuff.

We'll get to that, hopefully. But this was nice and short.

And to me, it demonstrates a willingness to address the subject that you clearly have never done any meaningful study of at all.

Now, maybe before the clip I had somewhere, he said, Well, you know, I don't know anything about this.

But here's my thoughts. I didn't find that part. But this is a scholar addressing

Calvinism and completely pulling this thing.

Straw man over and over and over and over again. And there's no reason for it because we're talking about basic stuff here.

Basically, his argument is that Calvinism's view of man being dead in sin means that man can't do anything.

He can't make any decisions. He is inactive in anything. And we all know that isn't true.

Calvinists don't believe that. Calvinists believe that man is suppressing the truth, is actively suppressing the truth, actively seeking to find more and more ways to hide from the knowledge of God.

Man is actively involved in rebellion, actively involved in twisting and brewing the truth. The very

Romans chapter 1, exchanging the truth of God for lie. Man is active.

What man cannot do because of his fallen nature is submit to the law of God, Romans chapter 8. Cannot do what is good in the sight of God.

That's the inability. But the entire argument we're going to hear here is based upon straw man.

And that is, well, you know, Calvinists believe this. Well, where do you get that from? What do you do?

Talk to somebody online that's claimed to be a Calvinist or something? I mean, I can reach right down there and grab

Jonathan Edwards' entire treatise on the will. Don't you think that's a little bit more relevant? Want something modern?

We can go grab R .C. Sproul. We can go grab Gerstner. There's just all sorts of stuff that is completely ignored by Dr.

Heisernes. But let's take a listen to it, and you'll see what

I mean. Again, setting that aside, you know, I wouldn't equate spiritual deadness with sinning, okay?

Sinning has to do with acts of sin. Again, you're making decisions, and there's a free will element in there.

So, you know, I don't make them synonyms. Now, when he says there's a free will element there, notice he is making, if there is any volition, if there's any choice, that means free will, rather than creaturely will.

There's already a category issue here that is not being observed.

Spiritual deadness, in my view, is the condition of being estranged from God, the source of spiritual life.

That is partly true. That is a true element, but it is not a complete description.

Calvinists, of course, make spiritual deadness about an inability to believe. Actually, that is a result of spiritual deadness.

That is what Jesus himself said. Why do you not hear what I'm saying? Because you cannot hear my words.

That is his specific statement, that we need to be set free.

He says, if you're a slave of sin, you need to be set free from sin. That's all in John chapter 8.

That's where you get the, why can't you hear? It's because they get Romans 8. Not able to submit yourself to the law of God.

Law of God says, repent, believe. Can't do that because your enmity with God. There is this, but that's the result of being in Adam and receiving from Adam only that which you can receive from Adam, which is spiritual death.

Separation from God, yes. Active rebellion against God and an inability to submit to the claims of Christ.

True faith, true repentance. Based on the idea that dead people can't do anything.

They're dead. Now, here's the problem. Dr. Heiser actually believes that, and again, it's pretty obvious he's not read any

Reformed theology to any depth at all. He actually communicates the idea that we start with the analogy of a dead body and then build our theology on top of that.

He's going to make that assertion here in a second. Rather than recognizing that we are talking about what

Jesus himself said, no man is able to come to me unless the Father sent me draws him. You're not able to hear my words because you're not, do not belong to him who sent me.

Romans chapter 8, the whole Romans 5 union with Adam, if you're in Adam, you receive death, the whole anthropology of scripture.

There is none who understands, there is none who seeks after God. No, not one. Romans chapter 3. So we start there, and then there are illustrations that are given of this.

He has it backwards. He thinks we start with the metaphor and build the theology on top of that when it's the opposite way around, which if you've done original reading in the sources, you're aware of that, but a lot of people don't do that.

But that presses the focal point of the metaphor of a dead body into an unnecessary service.

That is, it takes all the aspects of the metaphor and then loads them into the discussion.

Now, that's an intentional but unnecessary use of the metaphor. So I have a bone to pick, you know, with the

Calvinists here. The spiritual death topic ultimately hinges on how one defines death.

For Calvinists, death is the absence of conscious life. Now, you see what they did there?

Um, that is not the absence of conscious life. I would like to invite

Dr. Heiser to document this from relevant sources.

You can go back to Calvin, you can go back to Augustine for that matter if you want, but you can go back to Calvin, you can go back to the

Westminster Divines. There are a number of excellent reformed systematic theologies that would demonstrate for you that this is much deeper than you seem to understand and that you're coming at it backwards.

You're sort of coming at it from the internet chat room discussion level of things rather than reading original sources and dealing with it from that perspective.

It is not a lack of consciousness. No one is saying that mankind is unconscious.

We are saying that mankind is in perpetual rebellion, that mankind finds amazing ways to express that rebellion against God.

They loaded consciousness onto the idea of death. They load that aspect of the metaphor of a dead body into the discussion, and other people won't.

There's no cosmic rule about how little or how much you use a metaphor, how many of its components, but Calvinists basically won't tell you that because it doesn't serve their use of the metaphor.

If you define death as the absence of conscious life, in other words, if you define death, spiritual death, based on all of the elements of a dead body.

As if that's what we're doing. And again, it's not. If you say it is, document it, provide evidence, provide evidence that you actually are aware of the entire treatises that have been written on the nature of the will, bondage of the will to sin.

It goes back a long ways. I mean, that was the first written debate of the Reformation. It goes back to Luther and then

Calvin and lots of people after that, that you're completely ignoring, or maybe you've never heard of, or I don't know.

But this guy is just running back and forth in the frame here.

Dead body obviously has no conscious life. If that's how you frame death, spiritual deadness, that you're unable to believe because dead bodies don't do anything.

They can't make decisions. Okay, if that's how you're approaching it, if you just— Can't make decisions.

No, there is a kind of decision that they cannot make because it involves having the capacity to do spiritual good, which is repentance.

Jesus said, if you commit sin, you are the what of sin? Slave. So, are slaves limited?

Yes. So we're just talking about what Jesus talked about. That's pretty straightforward, but doesn't seem to be understood.

If you define death as the absence of conscious life, then you can say that spiritual death is the inability to believe, which is why

Calvin— No, spiritual death is not the inability to believe. Spiritual death results in the inability to have saving faith and repentance, because one is in constant rebellion against God and unable to submit oneself to the law of God, Romans chapter 8, once again.

But no, you're totally misunderstanding the point. The inability to believe, which is why Calvinists do that.

Or you could say that it's the absence of any volitional impulse. And again, this is the kind of thing Calvinists are going to be saying in their theological system.

Oh, which we are not. Again, you're just making stuff up, sir. It's just, you're making it up.

You really say that the lost man has no volitional, makes no decisions, isn't deciding to sin, isn't deciding to suppress the knowledge of God?

What have you read of Reformed theology? This is the kind of commentary that, again, just makes me really think that basically what you've done is you've been in some internet chat rooms, gotten some emails.

You know, that's the extent of it. Now, all of that is why Calvinism then, on the other side, defines regeneration as an imbuement with life so as to be enabled to make a choice.

Well, if you, well, regeneration means being given life.

Yeah, that's the meaning of the word. If you look carefully at the original language, that's the meaning of the word.

That is to be given life either from above or anew. And so, yes, it is a new kind of life, new creatures, a new creation, new man.

These are all New Testament words that refer to having life in Jesus Christ brought to us by the

Holy Spirit of God. And so, regeneration then would free us from slavery to sin.

So, what do you think regeneration is? If you don't think it's an imbuement of new life that does have, as a result, it's not the same thing, you're conflating things, but as its result, the ability to have supernatural capacity you did not have before as a rebel against God, such as to love

God, maybe. See, there's the consciousness element again. But that means that no human can actually be drawn to Christ or God until regeneration occurs.

It is the drawing of God that involves the...

God's drawing involves regeneration. Yes, it is all up to God. There's no question about that.

We cannot effectuate our own freedom from the bonds of slavery.

It is God's action. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's why faith is described as a gift, repentance is described as a gift.

Right. That's... You know, Ephesians 2, we've talked about that many times before. I know they don't want to say that, but I want you to think about it.

No, no, we do say that. We say that very clearly. We just don't say it with all these guys that you've already got filling the room with smoke to confuse it.

How is it that people, and I would say every person, can relate to being drawn or attracted to or intrigued by some thought or action that led to a gospel decision?

You know, in all of our testimonies, somebody said something that drew our curiosity or that, you know, drew on us emotionally.

How about that brought conviction of sin? That's the one I'm looking for. There was something that brought conviction of sin, which we would say was the work of the

Holy Spirit of God. Yes, most definitely. That got us to sort of move down the path a little bit, you know, toward a salvation decision.

But if you're a Calvinist, you have to say, well, that's God just doing it, and your brain's not engaged at all. What do you mean your brain's not engaged at all?

What are you talking about? That's not the case. You've got bad information, sir.

You have not done your homework. This isn't engaged at all, because you're spiritually dead, and dead people can't do anything.

You're just like, you know, you're like a zombie or an automaton or a robot or something. Okay, yeah, so there you go.

I mean, this is your standard straw man misrepresentation.

This is, you know, low -level misrepresentation of Reformed theology, which means it's not limited to internet folks, but people who write books and have degrees misrepresent things badly as well.

They have to do that, because they want to define regeneration as the enablement to believe. No, we don't define regeneration as the enablement to believe.

Regeneration is the granting of spiritual life, the resurrection of spiritual life by the power of the Holy Spirit of God, the making of a new creature, and the one who is thus made in the image of Jesus Christ will believe in him.

Okay, so that follows later. Again, today is not a good day for people making clear category distinctions.

So their view of the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, the way they want to try to come up with this neat chain of things that happen in salvation, you know, like justification, you know, regeneration, what order do they come in?

You know, Calvinists are kind of absorbed with that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, who would want to—we're sort of absorbed with trying to understand

Ephesians 1 and Romans 8 and 9 and things like the golden chain of redemption and the intercessory work of the

Son of God in our place and in the heavenly places. And yeah, we're just sort of a little bit more absorbed in that than we are

UFOs. Yeah, that's quite true. You know, sort of have a person be void of any volitional element prior to regeneration.

Which we don't believe. Straw man! Then how is it possible that anyone could respond to anything in any way prior to being regenerated?

Again, that's my question, because our— Well, I'm glad you have a question. I'm glad that we are able, by this program, to finally give you the answers so that you can begin your evaluation of Reformed theology, which obviously you haven't been able to begin yet because the information that you've been using has been so bad.

Our experiences, I think all of us that have a testimony of faith in Christ, our experiences are contrary to that.

Again, we weren't, you know, passive. We weren't inactive. You know, our brains were not disengaged.

You know, we actually heard something, and we had these little micro -responses to it that God used, you know, to move us down the road, you know, toward an actual presentation of the gospel or actually committing, you know, our faith.

I wonder if he would think that everybody has them, and then God's just successful in making those work in some people and not in others?

I don't know. I don't know. You know, otherwise, you have a brainless, mindless being.

You have humans, you have human beings that are no longer self -aware in a

Calvinist system prior to regeneration. Here's the elect. Which just doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't make any sense.

To try to be a little more organized in my thoughts, again, you can't say that you were consciously drawn to the gospel before your consciousness was regenerated.

So you're unconscious until regeneration. How could anyone do any meaningful reading at all in any

Reformed sources and come up with this? I don't know. I don't know. What?

Did you want to— I was just going to say, I know why the straw man is running around the room. He's trying to avoid his bick. Because he's being lit up right and left.

In other words, the approach of Calvinism, I think, just implodes. Because again, you're no longer a sentient being.

You're no longer self -aware. So to put it another way, if your consciousness is detached from spiritual attraction, how can you be drawn?

You have to notice things. You have to make— Folks, this is one of the reasons why we do Radio Free Geneva programs, is there are actually people who believe this is what we believe.

They've never listened to us. They've listened to people like Michael Heiser absolutely massacre what we believe.

And so they're like, I'm not even going to listen to that Calvinism stuff. That's just—that's crazy.

That's insane. Well, yeah, what's being presented to you is insane.

But it isn't Calvinism either. You have to be curious. These are all activities of consciousness. Again, Calvinists want to turn all that off, but then we have humans without self -awareness.

And that seems self -serving at best for a definition and kind of silly at worst. This is, again, part of the reason—

It's definitely silly. That's why you've never, ever heard anybody saying it. This is part of the reason

I think it's a lot more coherent to define spiritual death not as something that involves the shutting off of consciousness or the shutting off of self -awareness, the shutting off of all volitional ability.

I think it's more coherent to define spiritual— It's definitely more coherent. It's also more Reformed. Death as estrangement from God and therefore defining regeneration as a new birth, that is, being born into the family of God and then being indwelt by the

Holy Spirit. Now, what's interesting here, real quickly—there's only a couple more lines here—but now we're going to see part of his theology coming through here, and it'll be illustrative of another aspect of this.

That doesn't cancel out people from freely responding in curiosity, we'll say, about the

God— What is this curiosity? What's the biblical term? Repentance and faith.

Curiosity. Where does that even come from? So R .C.'s book should have actually been titled

Intrigued by God? Yes. Yes. Intrigued by God. Yes. Yes.

That'd be good for Chosen. Yeah, right. Or responding due to some emotional need.

So we've got intrigue and emotional need as the reasons why you embrace the gospel.

All right, well... Or connection that salvation needs.

So free will... Felt needs, connections, intrigue... So free will, for me, again, relates to responding to things that draw one to the gospel to make a decision to believe or to reject it.

And I'm saying you don't need to first be regenerated to respond because you're already self -aware. Yes.

The problem is the only response that a unregenerate person will have to the gospel, according to Jesus, is rejection.

No man is able to come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day.

As long as John 644 is in the canon of Scripture, you've got to deal with it, and not by staying on your head and spinning in circles and trying to say it's just about Jews or whatever other silly thing you come up with.

The words are there, got to deal with them. Free will also relates to choosing sin, you know, choosing, you know, rebellions, choosing acts of sin.

I would need to add that the Holy Spirit, you know, this always gets us into the thing, well, if you're, quote, by the Holy Spirit, born of the family of God, you know, what about that series on Hebrews about, you know, rejecting faith later on?

I would say we need to add that the Holy Spirit is the down payment of salvation in the sense that His residence in us is proof of God's grace and forgiveness, and His promise to enable us to keep believing and serve

Him. But the Holy Spirit can be quite— To catch it? Let me play it again. Now, what does

Ephesians 114 actually say? The Spirit of God is the arabone of our redemption.

It is God's down payment that He will complete that work within us.

So, when you have a God -centered view of salvation, the Spirit's presence is demonstrative of His promise to finish the work

He has begun. Now, when you no longer see the necessity of regeneration, then you've got a problem.

Because now you come up with this idea that, well, you know, I have felt needs, and the gospel helps with my felt needs.

But the Spirit then has to help me keep, I guess, feeling that my felt needs are met through my entire life.

That's the idea, because He does not believe in the perseverance of the saints. Because you don't have an elect, you don't have any of that kind of stuff going on here, and that has an impact.

To enable us to keep believing and serve Him. But the Holy Spirit— So, the

Holy Spirit's presence is to enable us to keep believing. Now, He does do that, but it is to accomplish

His purpose, not just simply make it possible for us to do it if we choose to do it.

See the difference? One—see the massive difference between the two? —quenched and grieved.

The New Testament tells us this. His presence doesn't guarantee that we cannot reject the faith.

The guarantee involved is something like, yes, if you believe, the Holy Spirit can see you through to the end.

See the difference? So, instead of a sovereign God saving a particular people through the work of the triune

God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit together, the Spirit comes to make application of the redemption that has been done in Jesus Christ, there's been union of the elect with Jesus Christ, the will of the

Father, Son, Spirit, all that. Instead, what you got is you got felt needs, you got curiosities.

Well, the Holy Spirit will help you keep believing, or otherwise not. But it's up to you.

There you go. This was very nice and illustrative of the vast chasm between God -centered salvation and man -centered salvation.

And all those who overcome and keep believing were enabled to do so by the power of the

Holy Spirit, not their own strength or their own cleverness. Our salvation is not due to our strength anymore than it was due to our merit.

We have to believe. And if we do, the Holy Spirit will remain and keep us. But that whole idea is akin to the

Old Testament presence of God, which could lead... Now catch this, catch this.

You're going to see that the nature of the New Covenant is missing in Heizer's theology as well.

Hebrews 8 isn't here. Listen to this. This is very, very interesting, because he likes to talk about being a

Semitic scholar. So this is what happens when you aren't a New Testament scholar.

But that whole idea is akin to the Old Testament presence of God, which could leave a place, you know, left the temple.

In the curses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, God said, I'm going to be out of here. I'm your

God, you're my people. That's all well and good. You're elect. That's all well and good. But if you corrupt the land through your moral abominations to a certain extent,

I'm going to remove you, or I'm going to leave. This ground is no longer fit for my presence, and I'm out of here.

You know, what I'm describing is very consistent with that. He's describing the idea as if New Testament salvation is defined by Old Covenant categories rather than Jeremiah 31, the

New Covenant, each knows me, their sins are forgiven, write the law upon their heart, all that stuff.

Now again, if we endure, if we keep faith, the Spirit will remain and keep us.

If we believe, if we keep believing, the Spirit is going to be there. So we believe that saving faith is absolutely necessary, and it comes from the work of the

Spirit of God. See, only Reformed theology can avoid the pitfalls. Only Reformed theology can avoid falling off on both sides.

Not that Reformed people haven't fallen off on both sides, but only by remaining balanced in that way can you avoid this kind of thing.

This is semi -Pelagianism, straight up. Straight up. This is absolutely consistent with Roman Catholicism, absolutely consistent with Roman Catholic soteriology at this point.

Read the Council of Trent. That's the same thing you're going to get there. So saw that, wanted to comment on it.

It was illustrative, I thought. We don't have a whole lot of time here, but I wanted to get to one last thing, just so that we would have a completely wild and insane program here.

While I was, let's see, this is May 17th, so I think it's when

I went back to Louisville. I'm looking at a picture here.

Don't bother bringing it up, but you can find this. There is an article

I'll try to remember. I've got to be someplace in 45 minutes, but I'll try to remember to link here.

Um, but, uh, brother Eric, uh, at, uh, once for all delivered .wordpress

.com. Um, I'm not sure if this was a link in, uh,

Twitter or just what it was, but, uh, Bruxy Cavi.

Okay. I, I think I reviewed a single video once a few years ago.

I've had videos queued up, never got around to them. I think part of it is it's just sort of hard for me to really take super seriously someone who's never met a comb in his life.

Um, but he's a Canadian guy. And as soon as I made a comment at all about him on Twitter, man, all the

Canadians came out saying, please, yes, do more. He's messing everything else, everything up up here.

And, and just really a lot of people saying, man, it's just really, really, really bad. He's got a huge following and he denies penal substitutionary atonement and inerrancy, and he's an egalitarian and, and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

Well, what caught my attention, uh, this article is called bad hermeneutics in a tattoo.

And so this is April 18th. It's in Bruxy Cavi's, Cavi's, whatever his name is, article, the good news in a tattoo.

I'll call him, is it Cavi or Cavi? Somebody tell, I think it's Cavi. Uh, Cavi explains his decision to listen to this, his decision to get the

Bible reference Leviticus 1928 tattooed down his forearm.

His explanation basically amounts to a dismissal of the old Testament law on the grounds that Jesus makes it obsolete.

In his estimation, this tattoo is an announcement of and testimony to the good news of Jesus forever printed in his very own flesh.

It's a conversation starter in evangelistic endeavors. I've been going tilt a lot on the program today.

You know, sort of going, um, now the, the article by Eric, um, actually has a rather extensive citation from me, uh, on the subject of Leviticus 1928.

So I won't go through all of that, but what struck me was the attitude.

Bruxy represents what I, I would call it the, it's still the remnants of the emergent church attitude.

And what was the emergent, what, what gave birth to the emergent church? Well, fundamentalism did.

Fundamentalism did, um, you talk to go, um, go back to unbelievable, go back to the radio program and look up the,

I don't know how many years ago it was. I did the program with Brian McLaren from sitting right here.

And it was very, very clear in our conversation that we both had very similar upbringings, the same squeaky black shoes, black pants, white shirt, the same experience of a fundamentalist upbringing.

But as I said, the difference between us is I learned to evaluate what was tradition in that and what was central.

And so I got rid of the tradition and kept the core, the, the scriptures, the historical

Christian faith that is a part of that. The emergent church just says, you know what?

We were wrong about this tradition here. So we're going to put it all out on the table.

The Trinity, the deity of Christ, the resurrection justification, we're gonna put it all out there and redo it all.

That is incredibly arrogant. It's arrogant to think you could ever even do it, let alone do it right.

But that's what the emergent church did, or does, is, and so here,

I've explained this before, and my explanation is quoted in the article.

But what Bruxy misses in his attempt to say, Jesus did away with this,

Jesus didn't do away with it. But you've misunderstood it. You did not contextualize it.

You did not recognize that there is an abiding validity to God's law.

You just misunderstood what it was being applied to. Because as I've said, if you look at Leviticus 19 .28, you recognize akah is what's called a hapax legomena.

We don't know exactly what it referred to. The parallel in Deuteronomy 14 .1 is shaving a circle in your forehead.

So that's a temporary thing. It clearly was some means of altering your appearance for what?

In both Deuteronomy 14 .1 and Leviticus 19 .28, what's it about? The dead. For the dead.

Well, what about the dead? Well, it is either worshiping the dead, honoring the dead, or fearing the dead and the curses of the dead.

I think it's fearing the curses of the dead. I think it's altering your appearance. The idea being that the dead come back to get you and you don't look like you used to as they can't find you.

To us, that sounds stupid, but the whole curses of the dead thing sounds stupid too. The point is you can find a lot in Canaanite religious literature that will illustrate these kinds of curses from the dead.

And the point is, of Leviticus 19 .28, is not tattooing, shaving forehead, cutting yourself.

It is being concerned about the dead rather than being concerned about the

God of the living who is in control of your life. And that remains just as valid today as it was then.

And if you don't think that it is, then you haven't been to Mexico and seen people praying to saints, and you haven't been to Ukraine and seen the ultra -Orthodox there with their fascination with saints and things like that.

You've missed it. And so his whole idea is, hey, look,

Leviticus 19 .28 doesn't mean anything anymore. It does. You just missed its meaning.

Because you took your fundamentalist interpretation, you didn't look at it close enough in its context, and created the problem.

And now you're mocking what God's law says. Leviticus 19 .28 is smack dab in the middle of the

Holiness Code. That's the same chapter, my friends, the same chapter that says you shall love your neighbors yourself that Jesus identified as the second greatest commandment.

That's the same chapter that talks about not only honoring father and mother, but taking, but honoring the elderly as a whole, paying people properly for the work that they do.

There's all sorts of stuff that very plainly has not been, quote unquote, done away with by Jesus.

And Jesus did not do away with Leviticus 19 .28. He fulfills the law for his people, yes.

But he does not do away with the moral prescriptions found therein. And a Christian cannot sit there and go, well,

Jesus saved me, so I can be concerned about ancestral curses from the dead.

No! It remains just as much of a valid issue today.

You just missed what it was about. You missed that if you alter your appearance to try to somehow, in some way, avoid the then you're clearly more concerned about the dead than you are about the

God of the living. That's what it was about. So, I'm looking at this picture of Bruxy looking in the camera.

There's another picture down where he's, you know, there's a couple pictures of the process and stuff, and he's making faces because it hurts and all the rest of this stuff and la la la la la la la.

But, oh, I guess there's, yeah, okay, here's,

I had not seen this because it was smaller on the screen, but it's a Twitter thing.

Got the tattoo of always wanted best gospel conversation starter ever. Maybe Hebrews 8 .13

on the other arm. Oh, okay,

Hebrews 8 .13. When he said, a new covenant, he has made the first obsolete, but whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.

You're going to hear a lot about this in brother Jeff Durbin's dialogue with Andy Stanley on Unbelievable comes out next week.

This is not a, this is not a, a new thing, but yeah, this

Bruxy guy. So, I probably should take time to track down some of this stuff on an air and see, because I've seen it and on Penal Substitution Atonement.

And maybe we'll work some of it in. I don't know. So, so there you go.

So talk about, I'm going to, I, I cannot close my, my window because this will help me to write up the thing afterwards, but we've covered a lot of territory today.

A lot of ground. And there's more we could have done. Um, there's a new, uh,

Kwaku L video out that we want to look at. Um, we haven't absolutely nailed it down, but I might have an in -studio guest on, uh, on Thursday.

So we'll, uh, we'll keep that in mind. We'll see. Uh, but, um, there you go.

Thanks for listening to the program today. Lord willing, regular schedule. I will be in Tucson, um, at Faith Community Church on Sunday morning.

Uh, preaching there. If you're down the Tucson area, it'd be more than welcome to come along.

Uh, and so, uh, just let you know about that. And I'll try to put up a notification of where I'll be preaching in Colorado.

Uh, I know I'm preaching there the 14th. Um, and then I think the 21st, 28th, maybe into early

August. I forget what the dates are. I'm up there for a fair amount of time. So, uh, we'll be preaching in a number of different churches in the

Denver area and also midweek down at, in Boulder where I've been before. So we'll try to get some information up on that for the summer stuff.