Being Reformed, Provisionism in Rome, Aquinas in Geneva

Greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. It's late in the afternoon, evening, really, here in Phoenix.

Sorry to be late. It's been a very, very busy day. It's been a very cool day. Second coolest day on record for this time of the year.

Only been, I think, three degrees cooler once back in 1947. And that was a long time ago.

I was not around then. And some of you think that I was, but I was not. And so, therefore, we had to break the

Coogee out. It's a new one, never been seen before. So breaking in the fall weather in style with our

Coogee. And we're doing things differently. You may notice the camera is a little bit different. Rich isn't here.

Rich is someplace else. I can't tell you where he is. He may be in a gulag someplace. They may have gotten him first.

I don't know. I might be in a gulag someplace. There might be a guy over there with a gun telling me what to say.

Not really. But this is actually how I've been doing a lot of programs recently here in the studio and doing it electronically using a camera that's, it's actually a camera sitting on a camera.

So it's pretty much the same camera angle that we're used to, but not quite. So anyways, we're doing it differently just for this program because we definitely,

I definitely wanted to get a program in today. It's gonna be an incredibly busy week. I was a day late getting home.

We have to have, we have to have that flexibility. If, you know,

I'm, I have to judge what's safe.

I also have to look at weather. And we had some fronts move through. And since I'm going west and fronts go east, that means wind right in your face.

And when you're pulling fifth wheel, at least, at least my unit is somewhat aerodynamic.

So when it's a headwind, okay, yeah, it still slows me down a lot. I was, I, I was down to eight miles to the gallon for a while and going uphill a little bit as well as you're going up over the continental divide.

But then some of the wind was cross wind. And boy, that can be fun. My unit does really well in wind.

It's fifth wheel. That's why we've got a fifth wheel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again, Derek Melton, for giving us that advice during the formative period of our decisions about these things and explaining why fifth wheel is more aerodynamic and easier to control and handles wind better and all this.

Long story short, I'm starting to get to know, especially the KOA campgrounds.

I like KOA. The folks have always been really nice. Almost always nice and easy in, easy out.

You know what to expect. I like that. I'm sure there are fancier places. I don't need fancier places. Especially I'm just staying the night.

I just need a place to pull in, hook up. And I can do that real fast. In fact,

Rich will have to testify. I can't show you the picture. That would be inappropriate. But Rich will have to testify that just a matter of hours ago,

I parked our unit back in our storage area. And the people up until this point in time, in fact,

I think the first time we parked there, there was nobody on either side of us at all. And every time there's at least been one side open.

This first time, two big old honking units were in both the slots next to us.

And these are not very well. And if you know anything about the RV life, it's backing that baby up.

That is the challenge. It's very difficult to see. And you have to do everything backwards.

Well, not everything backwards. That's the problem. You start out backwards and then sort of have to shift.

Anyways, and I'm doing this alone. So Rich will have to testify. I sent him a picture. And yeah, it was, we got her in there.

Not fast. But we got her in there. And that's, that's the important part. Anyway, so long story short,

I've already lost a day this week. And so we're sort of rushing to get to this.

And there's so many things that we want to comment about. And want to be encouragement to everybody about, especially as we're hearing all sorts of things about possible problems in the very near future.

One thing is for certain. I hope you enjoyed 2019. I did.

And I know looking back that that was probably the last bastion of normalcy, freedom, prosperity, at least in our generation, for this country.

I know, I can see some scenarios where we draw back from the brink, where we recognize the utter foolishness of communism, socialism, and all of its associated isms.

And we draw back and learn our lesson. I just don't see that happening right now.

I see all sorts of people yelling and screaming about it. But what

I don't see is a recognition of the worldview issues that would require, be required for the society as a whole, to recognize where we went wrong.

The myth of neutrality, the central aspect of Christ's law that is so foundational in an understanding of who man is and how we're supposed to treat one another and what freedom is, why freedom should even be cherished by mankind.

We abandon all those things. And even the people that I see trying to fight communism, they're basically secularists.

Most of them are secularists. I mean, I'm not talking about those of us who are Christians who are trying to sound the alarm and say, hey, this is what this is going to lead you to.

It's going to lead you to absolute abject slavery. We are selling our souls into slavery and our bodies into slavery.

When there's somebody else that controls everything, what you can think, what you can say, what you can wear, what you can eat, where you can go, who you can associate with.

When there's someone, when that's going on, you've become a slave. That's where we're headed.

It's slavery or freedom, one of the two. The problem is liberty and freedom requires responsibility and requires a worldview that is sufficient to bear up the responsibility.

And that just simply is not what

I'm seeing. For example, everything going on right now with the people protesting the 10th

Amendment, worse along, and all the associated aspects of it.

What you will not hear, even from Christians, sadly, and I listen to a lot of people talking about it, is the discussion of the reality of adultery and fornication.

It's a given in our society that you have the right to have sexual pleasure outside of marriage and without the benefit of marriage.

And sexual pleasure just simply for the sake of that rather than for the building up of the marriage and the relationship inherent there.

And so once that's a given, we can sit there and talk about, hey, look at the ultrasounds.

That's a human being. You were once one of those. All those things are true. But the other side is just simply going to say, well, you can't force people to carry a pregnancy.

Well, but that person really chose that activity that led to that pregnancy.

Well, what about rape? Well, that is a another issue that likewise is very important because it speaks of the simpleness of the act, the sacredness of the act that rape destroys and violates.

Again, it all goes back to worldviews. But I hear no one simply saying, well, the issue here is the promiscuity and the utilization of abortion as a birth control methodology.

And so I don't even want to talk about that. I want to talk about sanctity of life issues in regards to the sanctity of sexual behavior between a man and woman in marriage.

I just don't want to go there. And without that, you're putting Band -Aids on gushing wounds.

And that's not going to accomplish anything in the long run. And this culture has numerous gushing wounds.

And it's going to bleed out a whole lot faster than I think any of us ever thought that could.

And we want to be very, very clear to tell people why. This is why it happened.

And this is what could have been done about it. And this is what needs to be done in the future because what will rush in to take its place, this soulless, anti -human, anti -rational, anti -life techno -tyranny will be brutal.

It will be cold. And thanks be to God, it'll turn on itself.

It will turn on itself. Don't know how long. Soviet Union stood for 70 years.

But it will turn on itself. And it will destroy itself. I mean, this is the

Soviet Union was able to borrow some capital from its past.

There's still a Christian past that it couldn't get rid of that.

The Soviet Union did not have the time to secularize its societal base, though they forced the

Orthodox Church to compromise in many ways, stuff like that. There are those who didn't. But still, that was still, you know, the babushka down the road still had that mindset.

What's different here is that these people have prepared the environment. And so now you're looking at a secular, young generation.

And so it's going to be different. I think it's going to be much more brutal. But that could result,

I mean, not a profit or a set of problems that could take it one of two directions. It could make it last longer, especially because of the technology, or it could cause its implosion even faster because there is no moral fiber in secularism.

Secularism's moral fiber is pure fantasy. There's just nothing there to ground it. And which is why

I keep saying secularism is the greatest enemy that has ever stood in the way of the progress of the

Kingdom of Christ. That means he who conquered death will conquer secularism.

But Rome was conquered over hundreds of years.

And so we have to keep in mind we tend to impose our own time frames on things that are not necessarily biblical time frames.

And so I wasn't going to talk about any of that stuff, but there we go. So anyway, the point being where you are, you guys, seeing all sorts of things that naturally rob us of the peace of God that passes understanding.

You know, if you, we can't help right now in your church.

Rich said he was talking to somebody today called the ministry. We are talking to people who are greatly fearful and not in a cowardly sense, just simply going,

I'm going to lose my job. I'm losing my benefits. I'm going to lose my health insurance. I'm going to be treated as a non -human for refusing to do what a tyrannical government authority is demanding that I do.

Because I know that I'm not going to stop. I know if I take that first step, there's going to be a second, third, fourth, fifth.

And once you take the first step, you can't really go back and say, you know, I shouldn't have done that. Sorry, you're already in the path.

Here you go. And it's just worse and worse, worse.

It doesn't get better, better. Anybody who thinks that these tyrants, once they've tasted of power, are going to go, well, that's, that's far enough.

That's, that's good enough. We're going to, we're going to go back to the freedom thing now. And let's do just, just read history.

You will, you will recognize the premiers in Australia and Trudeau in Canada and all the rest of these people.

They're nothing but tin horn tyrants and their use of the same phraseology and same lies.

So people, they recognize that they see these people, they recognize that that's, that's a tyrant over there.

If I start following him, you know, for my sake and the sake of everybody else,

I can't do that, but it's very costly. And that's why I said in the last program, church needs to set up funds within each fellowship to try to help people who are facing these issues, minimally with just daily food, but other things as well.

And we see these things and we cannot help, but think about our own situation, our families, our children, our grandchildren.

And so there is a real need for the peace of God, which passes all understanding.

We all know how, we all know how to have it. I do.

There are a bunch of you, you will testify, you have to testify for me that I've been preaching this sermon over and over again.

The only, the only power these people have is the power that I give them by loving the stuff they can take from me, loving my comforts, loving my ease, loving the things this world is, it's the only power they have.

I know that, I know that. And I think we all know that deep down our hearts.

And so we need to pray that God would increase our love for him and his truth and purchase of self -love and love of things this world, because that's the only way we're going to stand firm.

So anyway, that's, it's going to be a completely different holiday season.

We're going to look back, if not this year, the next year, the year after that, we're going to look back on times of plenty.

I think most of people my age are going to have the experience of going, remember when you could go to a store and there were freezers full of big, huge turkeys that you could buy for relatively small amount of money.

I think the day will come when we will go, remember that? Because it won't be that way. Socialism never has full freezers full of turkeys, only, well, for the elite, but the rest of the people who work for the elite, because that's what socialism is.

They don't get to see them, they don't get that kind of stuff. And I think this could be a lot of sitting around going, remember back in 2019 when we could do this and we could do that.

And man, they really, really got us in there. They snuck up on us and boom.

And how foolish we were. I think it's going to happen. I think we're going to look back at it. So anyway,

I did, I've just looked over, I followed the

Grand Canyon National Park Service on Twitter and they posted some pictures. It snowed. This was an early, early season.

I mean, it was, we've had many Christmases, much warmer. Than today.

And it's snowed and there's some beautiful pictures of snow on the rim of the Grand Canyon and stuff like that.

You never get a chance to do that. If you get a chance to do it. I haven't seen the canyon with my own two eyes, at least on the rim since 1985.

I've flown over a few times, but that's what happens when you live in a state that has that kind of stuff.

We all know how that works, but I won't get into that right now. I saw a tweet this morning.

And so I wanted to discuss it from Soteriology 101. I guess something happened while I was on the road.

Rich told me a little bit about it in a text message, but I don't, somebody did something with URLs or something and directed them over to us.

And I guess we got accused of doing it. It's like, what are you talking about? Anyway.

And so there are two tweets, and I just want to use this as an illustration once again, of the difference between God -centeredness and man -centeredness in your understanding of grace.

This was the issue of the Reformation. I saw

R. Scott Clark. I think it was responding either to Owen Strand or to Jeffrey Johnson.

I think it was Owen. And I think

Owen was talking about the G3 movement, and he used the term reform.

And we all know R. Scott Clark seemingly feels that he has the ability to copyright the term reform.

And there are, let me put it this way, the people who are reformed, who want to copyright the term reform so as to narrow it down about yay big, so that I'm not reformed, and even amongst historically reformed denominations, there's a bunch of them that aren't reformed.

It gets down to a pretty small group that are truly reformed, the

TRs. And so he responded to Dr.

Strand, I think, or Dr. Johnson. Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, there you go.

And said, what makes this reform? And this would be one of the issues.

What makes something reform? Well, for them, patal baptism and a certain understanding of covenant theology, application of covenant theology, absolutely definitional, can't be reformed without it.

Calvin would have kicked out Geneva, which he would have. But this morning, I was listening to someone talking about a female

Presbyterian minister who's writing a book about the moral good of abortion. And I go,

I bet she practices patal baptism, just not for the babies she aborted, because she's had abortions.

But I bet she practices patal baptism. Who's more reformed, me or her? By a long shot, but it depends on how you define reform.

Dr. Clark has actually helped me over the years because of his narrowness as to what is reform.

To really focus in on what the heart of being reformed is. And again, the people who want to do that, if you don't want me in your club,

I don't want to be in your club either. Fine, you all go do your thing. I've pretty much discovered that you all end up in these little enclaves out there and no one's really paying attention to what you're doing anyway.

So you all, that's fine. We're good. When I consider what defines being reformed, it would be not only the five solas, especially sola deo gloria, but it would be

God -centeredness in all aspects of theology and especially in light of human rebellion in soteriology.

There are many who want to use elevated language of God -centeredness in salvific areas, but then redefine everything.

Norman Geisler, great example in his book, which I wrote a book in response to many, many years ago, constantly redefining terms, wanting to borrow reformed terminology and then gut it of any meaning so that it all still boils down to a man -controlled, man -centered system.

And so I really think that when we look at the issues with provisionalism, provisionism, latent flowers, soteriology 101, and that small cadre of people, we get a lens that allows us to clarify these things.

And so the tweets were as follows. Actually, this says October 9th, but it popped up in my feed this morning for some reason.

I don't know why. Probably somebody responded to it. It follows me as a man. You know how Twitter is. The last verse of scripture says, the grace of the

Lord Jesus be with all. All has been put in all caps. Amen. Revelation 22. Not the grace of the

Lord Jesus be with some, as consistently applied Calvinism might suggest.

Anticipating the charge of universalism, this is only an issue for those who assume effectuality onto God's provision.

That's not the kind of proposition that you're probably accustomed to.

So let me repeat that. Anticipating the charge of universalism, this is only an issue for those who assume effectuality onto God's provision, i .e.

anyone who has grace provided to them must be saved, which is not,

I suppose it was supposed to be a correct assumption, the grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people, which is from Titus chapter 2.

Now let's see if we can first understand what's being said, and I'd like to respond to it on the program today, and hopefully that would, yeah.

Oh, where'd it go? Oh, there it is. Sorry. Be careful what you click on. Not only is the program live,

I'm the only one working, and it's back in the dry weather.

Oh, man, being back there in Atlanta and some of those places, humid, but back into the dry, dry, dry.

All right. The last verse of Scripture does say, let's look at it, the grace of the

Lord Jesus be with all. Amen. Now that's NASB 1977. However, once again,

I think it's important that we recognize a few things. The book of Revelation, we have the smallest number of manuscripts of any book in the

New Testament. I've mentioned that many times in my lectures over the years, and we really don't have a majority text.

Even the Byzantine text is split into numerous subcategories in the book of Revelation.

When you get to the end of the book, hopefully everybody's aware, we've talked about this a million times before, about what happened with the

Texas Receptus, with Erasmus, last six verses of Revelation chapter 22, translated from Latin, Vulgate into Greek by Erasmus.

He did that just to get done with Revelation, which he did not have any respect for anyways, and to get the

New Testament published and printed and published. And then before the second edition, he told his printer, go get these guys'

New Testament, which had come out since Erasmus had, and fix Revelation based on what they did, not knowing that they had based their book of Revelation off of his.

And so he lived the rest of his life thinking that Revelation had been fixed. It hadn't. It was just as much of a mess as it was in the first edition.

And it was a mess because, as I mentioned, he did not have a self -standing manuscript of Revelation.

He had to extract the Greek from a Latin commentary. And there were lots of problems.

Aside from missing the last two pages, there were lots of problems in that process. So what all that means is, if you look at the word all in Revelation 22, it's,

Hēkārēstu kōriu ēsū. Metapontom is the simplest reading, but there are a number of variants, including in verse 21, you have, with all of the saints, that's the reading of Sinaiticus.

Then, so, be with the saints,

I'm sorry, is the first reading, all of the saints, with one possibility of all of his saints, that's a, it's a manuscript of 2030 and a couple

Syriac versions. And all of us is another.

And then the short text is found in Alexandrinus, which

Alexandrinus is often taken as the primary text in Revelation.

But the point is, there are some other interesting readings here, including with all of the saints, all of his saints, and all of us.

Those are the other readings. And with all is simply the reading of Alexandrinus and the

Vulgate. All these other scripts have extensions at that point, which is not unusual in conclusions and so on and so forth.

It'll be interesting to see what the CBGM, CBGM is going to struggle with Revelation, partly because even if they do an exhaustive correlation, which they should be able to do, because you've got people who've done exhaustive relations in the past, and there hasn't been that many manuscripts found since then.

It'll be interesting to see what they do with it. I'm wondering if Revelation will be the last. Maybe they'll follow

Erasmus and do that at the end. I don't know. But the point being, this is not an overly good text to be trying to make this point.

Did Soteriology 101 look at the underlying text, look at the variants?

I've never heard him commenting on that kind of stuff before, so I sort of doubt it. But this just is a singularly bad example to try to make this point on.

First of all, in light of, I mean, there are, let's see here.

Yeah, well, even, I just noticed this. There is a text note in the 77

NASB, some ancient manuscripts read the Saints. So I don't know what

Leighton's default translation is, but probably didn't look at that.

So then it says, not the Gracelord GSB with some.

Now, the question here has to do with, first of all, this is a epilogue.

It is a closing statement. It is not meant to be,

I mean, trying to turn this into some kind of a dissertation on the extent of grace or nature of grace is, again, indicative,

I think, of a really poorly chosen text. But notice the assumption, and this assumption is played out in the second tweet.

What grace are we talking about? Reformed theology recognizes multiple kinds of grace, just as we recognize multiple kinds of divine love.

And so you've got restraining grace, you've got empowering grace, you've got redemptive grace.

Grace actually brings salvation. And so the idea behind this is that there's only one kind of grace, and there's no such thing as an effective grace that actually brings salvation.

That's pretty much what the second tweet says, anticipating the charge of universalism. So in other words, if someone were to say, ah, you believe everyone's going to be saved.

No, I know he doesn't believe everyone's going to be saved. I would not make that charge. Instead, he affirms what

I think is a much greater issue. And this was the issue of the

Reformation. This is why Leighton Flowers is not on the Reformers' side of the

Reformation. He is on the Roman Catholic side of the Reformation. There is no question about that.

Hopefully, even he would admit that. Even he would admit that on this issue, he is on Rome's side.

He's on Erasmus' side against Luther. He is with Saddletto against Calvin.

Hopefully, he'd admit that, that he's against winged. He's against the Reformers.

Because of what he says, this is only an issue for those who, and this is such odd language and terminology, assume effectuality onto God's provision.

How about actually believe sola grata, well, the soul is, by grace alone.

You know, Spurgeon's little book, Grace Alone, that central

Protestant, for quite some time, affirmed the belief that grace actually saves.

It's actually powerful in and of itself to accomplish what God desires for us. That little thing.

So what he's saying is, assume effectuality onto God's provision.

So you build this idea of God providing something, but not actually accomplishing what the provision is intended to accomplish, but you leave that to man.

So that's the mindset of provisions. It's a possibility.

You make the possibility available. Again, this was the difference between Rome and its sacramental system.

God's put the grace out there, you work the sacramental system, you get it. Choice meets, do the sacraments.

I mean, Leighton's a good Romanist along those lines. He just doesn't have a poem. But on this issue of the will of man, the ability of man, and the nature of grace, he could move in to an apartment in the

Lateran complex and nobody would notice him, as long as everybody was talking about this.

Now, I was just trying to think of what

Leighton would look like in a cardinal's robe. And it was funny, because probably by the end of this program, there will be a meme out there with Leighton in a cardinal's outfit.

Anyway, he'd fit in. This was the dividing line. And so, he says, i .e.,

anyone who has grace provided to them must be saved. So, notice how all of this, instead of looking upward and going, what is the intention of God's grace?

God is the source of it. It's the expression of His power. It's divine expression of power.

And the reason this language is so stilted is because to try to turn that into something that's totally controlled by man is not easy to do.

So, you assume effectuality onto God's provision means

God actually accomplishes what He intends to accomplish. And we can't assume that, despite the fact that He loves us.

And anyone who has grace provided them must be saved. So, now you have this idea of grace that either tries and fails, or grace that's just given with no particular purpose.

It's just thrown out there like peanut butter. What He's trying to avoid is efficacious grace, redemptive grace.

For by grace, you have been saved. That grace, the grace that we need, the grace that we sing about, all that stuff.

Well, we don't want that. We don't want that. This is where the dividing line is so clear. And I think it's clearest here because Leighton probably wasn't even thinking about anything other than expressing positively his belief system.

That's what makes it so clear. But he does at least try. We should acknowledge he does try, but fail badly.

And it gives us an opportunity to point this out. You know, I keep telling the one thing

I wish the courtens did was take input in that little teeny tiny box.

Make the box bigger, folks. Make the box bigger, easier to see. He tries to substantiate this in Titus chapter 2.

Titus chapter 2. If you want fuller discussions of these things, I've preached a number of sermons on Titus 2.

I remember very clearly doing so on a Sunday night at PRBC, so it's on sermon audio someplace.

But briefly, what he says is, which is not a correct assumption. The grace of God has appeared bringing salvation for all people.

He is quoting from Titus chapter 2. Here's what it says.

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and appearing the glory of a great

God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deeds.

Now, tremendous text, well worth more time than we have.

As I said, if you want to pursue this, I would mention that we have done that a number of times.

But just a few key issues here. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, late in his understanding to be, well, that means since all men will not be saved individually, then the grace of God is not all that is needed for salvation.

That's the argument. That's what happens when you read just the first quarter of a sentence.

Because this isn't some peanut butter grace that provides a general salvation based upon man's freedom.

What kind of grace is it? It's saving grace. Why? Because look at verse 12.

Verse 12 begins with a participle.

And the participle has as its referent the grace of God.

And what does that grace of God do? It's a teaching.

It actually does accomplish what God intends it to accomplish. It teaches us. Well, what does it teach us?

It teaches us to deny ungodliness. Now, how could that possibly be?

How could grace teach you to deny ungodliness? Well, because people tend to have very sub -biblical views of grace.

The grace that saves and redeems is the same grace that sanctifies and makes holy.

And so the grace of God that has appeared brings salvation to all men.

Who are these men to whom this grace has come? Those who have been taught to deny ungodliness. To deny the kosmikos epithumios.

Kosmikos, cosmopolitan. Kosmikos. Worldly epithumiosa.

Almost always negative desires and wants. So the negative aspect, this grace that has appeared is a teaching grace.

And so in whose lives does God wish to instruct them to deny ungodliness and worldly desires?

What is that? That is sanctification. So the unsaved person, the unregenerate person, the non -choice meat,

I guess. Are they taught to deny ungodliness and worldly desires?

How can they even be taught? They have no ears to hear. They're spiritually dead. Oh, well, not really from their perspective,

I guess, no. But this is sanctification. So are the unsaved sanctified by the grace of God?

But then on the positive side, this grace teaches us to live sophronos, sensibly, in a self -disciplined manner.

And righteous. Righteous. And in a godly fashion.

In this present age. So this is clearly referring to people who have been delivered out of the power of this present age.

And who's that? Well, we know what the Apostle Paul says about that. Look at Colossians chapter 1.

We've been transferred out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. So this is grace that teaches us holiness.

Now I think it's beautiful because saving grace is a part of God's purpose in forming the elect in the image of Christ.

And that's what is then said. Looking for the blessed hope in the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus.

That's a gramble -sharp instruction. God and Savior are both in reference to Jesus. Despite what some

King James only has tried to say to get around the reference to the deity of Christ here and rescue the King James version of the

Bible. And then description of Christ Jesus who gave himself for us.

That's substitutionary atonement. And here's the us. Who's the us? We're the ones who are instructed by the grace of God.

So the Hasen Anthropos is all men to whom the grace of God comes.

Jews and Gentiles. That's primarily the Jewish -Gentile divide wiped out. Very consistent with Pauline theology,

Galatians, Romans. No need to explain it here. He's referring to Titus. Titus knows what the message of the gospel is.

But very consistent with Paul's position. But then Titus 2 .14 is not consistent with Leighton Flower's position.

Who gave himself for us, that is particular redemption. That he might redeem us.

Christ's self -giving has a purpose in the sovereign decree of God.

That he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself a people for his own possessions and also for good deeds.

Now aside from all the Old Testament passages in which this language is being drawn, the point is this is very similar to the

Golden Chain. These are divine actions. Not human. These have their origin in what

God is doing. He gives himself for us. He redeems us. The purpose is to redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself a people.

That's sanctification. Is that not what verse 12 is about? Yep, that's consistent reading. Zealous for good deeds.

Sounds like, oh, Ephesians 2 .8 -10. For by grace you've been saved.

Yeah, that same one. Same author. Same idea. But in provisionism that grace cannot be effective.

It cannot be efficacious. That's Rome. That was the Reformation.

I stand against it. I invite you to stand against it. Okay. Wow.

Okay. Changing directions. I got a lengthy

Facebook note from Josh Sommer. S -O -M -M -E -R.

And there's a quote when I was in Conway, Arkansas.

Here's a quote. There are some real zealous folks just view Thomas in an odd fashion. They can somehow disconnect him from all of his errors.

And they're just so fascinated by his great intellect. How he got to what he believed about God is an issue. I am not new in finding

Reformed fascination with Thomas Aquinas to be troubling and confusing.

I have expressed this for decades. Long before this current...

I expressed that before SES became the big issue.

You know, Sunday Evangelical Seminary, Norman Geisler, Aquinas, the central aspect of the theology of SES and SES's presentations.

And the central aspect of why so many people from SES converted to Catholicism over the years, so much so that they wrote books about it.

Even before that, when I was a teenager, I wasn't

Reformed in the sense of didn't have the knowledge of the terminology. And so, once I started wanting to know more about how to defend my faith, about the only thing you find bookstore is

Norman Geisler stuff, so you get Aquinas thrown at you. So, you know, I'm studying the theistic proofs and stuff and going, okay, man, it's pretty tough to use on the street.

It seems fairly complicated, but maybe I just got to keep working at it. I mean, if Norman Geisler does it, then that's how it has to be done.

And then I became Reformed, came to understand God -centeredness of the gospel and very quickly recognized, well, 1986, probably about 1986,

I had a professor, apologetics professor. I could probably go back,

Rich might be able to find it. What was his name? We interviewed him on that atheism series.

Actually, I forget which station we were on. I remember that we had Jim Lippard on that one and stuff like that.

And then I had my apologetics professor. We interviewed him. I wonder if we still have that.

Anyway, my apologetics professor, at first, no one understood.

No one understood why in the world he was going the way he was going.

And it was very difficult. Make a long story short, he was a presupposition. And he had us reading

Schaeffer. He had us reading Blaise Pascal. Oh, thank the Lord for that. Talk about God's providence.

But still, I mean, that's a huge paradigm shift. At the same time,

I was becoming Reformed. I had just Sproul, who had a very odd fascination with Aquinas as well.

But one day in class, this professor made the following statement.

He was talking about the theistic proofs. And he said, Thomas proved the wrong

God. I don't know if anybody else in the class was even conscious or awake at that time.

I sure was. Thomas proved the wrong God. You can't.

The reasoning process is backwards. And that's what all of a sudden

I was like, had to start thinking this through, had to struggle with. So this is nothing new. So that was 86.

So this is not something that's new. What, 35 years? It's not something new for me at all.

I can't remember a situation where I have seen a

Reformed person's fascination with Aquinas lead to anything but fundamental disaster.

I've always seen it.

It's always been associated with a diminishment of the centrality of biblical exegesis as the foundation of one's belief, and an exaltation of philosophical categories over biblical exegesis.

It's been consistent throughout my life. And I'm finally old enough to say that's,

I think I have enough decades to make some observations. That's been my experience with folks in SES.

And I'm seeing that coming into the Reformed camp.

And I don't see that the results are good. So I made this comment, and Josh Sommer wrote a comment on Facebook.

And I wanted to read it, even though for some reason the font looks ridiculously small.

We will do our best. There are several factors leading to a revival of classical metaphysics and classical

Christian theism, often non -technically called Thomism. Now, by the way, that is the terminology being used.

I do not grant this. Because, I mean, that's making a claim in and of itself.

This is classical Christian theism. We get to define that. Okay. You say so.

I personally reject that language. The least of which you'll be surprised to know is an actual resourcement of Thomas.

Richard Muller, James Dolezal, the follow -up from the Arbuka Debate on Impossibility, and the continued resourcement of post -Reformed source material, as is preeminently presented by Muller, but also in the readers produced by men like Samuel Renningham, have all played major roles in the rekindling of the capitalized great tradition featuring

Craig Carter, which no doubt contextualized and enabled the Reformation and its post -Reformation posterity to do precisely what they did.

Let me stop there. No one is denying that Aquinas and his work was vitally important in the definition of the pre -Reformation period, and hence had influence upon all the

Reformers. Nobody denies that. All of Scholasticism did.

But there was also a great deal of pushback against Scholasticism by the

Reformers, and especially an appropriate re -igniting, since that was used here, re -igniting of Biblical sources over against the philosophical and speculative sources.

Now, various of the writers, Luther, Calvin, all the rest, were influenced one way or another in regards to, especially categories that were not necessarily part of the battle of the

Reformation itself, and later generations would have to go back and go, well, what if they had gone this way, and what if the influence had been this way, so on and so forth.

But what gave the Reformation power was not a

Thomistic, theistic system. What ignited people's hearts was the

Word of God, and Thomas fundamentally subjects the

Word of God to philosophical categories that end up lowering the authority of the text and placing it under certain assumptions that come from other sources,

Aristotle, whatever it might be. And that was why there was clearly a diminishment of focus upon Aquinas.

If you could read the Institutes and go, oh yeah, there's

Calvin just giving us Aquinas over and over again. No, it's not. So, I continue on.

To answer your anecdote anecdotally, very few reformed Thomas, if we can even call them that. I don't even,

I see that as a self -contradictory phrase.

Especially because as much as people try to read a streak of Sola Scriptura in here or something in there,

Thomas was an orthodox child of the church.

At the very time I would put the fourth Lateran council as the time that Roman Catholicism itself starts.

Once you get transubstantiation in place, now people put it in different places. Some people say

Trent, some people say Luther. I just found the fourth Lateran council to be a useful starting point.

And Thomas is that. That is his soteriology, and no matter what you do, you cannot escape the impact.

And I do not understand. Maybe these individuals have not had to deal with as many converts from Catholicism as I have.

But you don't play footsie with that kind of stuff. If we could have learned anything in SES that would have been that.

Very few reformed Thomas, if we can call them that, have been influenced by Thomas's work directly.

But by reformed authors old and new. Okay, then why would you even use the term

Thomas? This is my experience having been involved in this discussion the last five years.

You speak of the deep truths of reformed theology, sovereignty and grace. What we believe about these great truths is entirely contingent upon what we believe about the sovereign and gracious God.

And the reformers understood this. But the reformers did not then mean, did not then understand that to mean that they had to adopt

Thomas's elevation of natural theology.

Which is really the key issue. Not natural revelation. Natural revelation and natural theology are not the same thing.

As much as they get confused, they're not the same thing. The classical theism, the reformation and post -reformation, which largely received

Thomas's metaphysics and prolegomena, Junius and Charnock, provides an objective causal ground enabling many

Christians to think more clearly about the great I am. But what it doesn't provide is a biblical ground.

That's my problem. And that's the problem I'm seeing with this, these emphases.

And the people that are basically saying, if you do not adopt Thomas's position, then you're going to be this, or you're going to be that.

And you go, but I'm not. And Calvin didn't have to go that direction.

And this guy didn't have to go that direction. And that guy didn't have to. And all of a sudden, it's, oh, no. Unless you adopt this understanding, which in some formulations, honestly,

I just have to honestly say in some formulations, makes it difficult to even begin to explain how the

Father and the Son can love one another and speak to one another. There are some formulations of Thomistic metaphysics to where the persons of the

Trinity actually start sounding much less like persons, like the

Son saying, glorify me with the Father's glory that I had with you before the world was.

And switching that over, honestly, to the

Great Spirit emanating thoughts, and then loving that thought, and that kind of stuff.

It's like, I'll take the Hebrew prophets as the foundation, the background, and not that kind of metaphysical mumbo jumbo.

It also provides them with the needed firepower against our marvelously sick society, firepower, nominalism, pseudo -fundamentalism, fideism, biblicalism, and personalism cannot provide.

I would, I don't even know what to say to that.

It's not Thomas that I'm hearing, providing the strongest response to the collapse of Western society.

I don't hear that at all. And I have read some books from people who try to make those arguments.

I found the connections, not only tenuous, but indefensible. Highly questioned at their best.

But I don't know what he means by fideism. Probably presuppositions,

I assume, I don't know. That's a misnomer, obviously, duh. A strawman if it is.

Biblicalism, there's something wrong with biblicalism, what? And personalism.

It does seem that there's a lot of really specific language that you have to buy into here.

Anyways, no one is obsessed with Thomas in my estimation. I disagree. The resurgence of Thomism is indicative of an intellectual revival taking place in a male -female.

This is a revival, quote -unquote, taking place, not in a country, but amongst

Reformed evangelicals. And we all still know male and female. And I cannot see how anyone can argue that you have to have

Thomas' metaphysics to affirm that Jesus said from the beginning, God made them male and female.

And if you can actually get to the point of saying yes, but you need to have Thomas to be able to understand how Jesus said that,

I'm going, that's what I mean by idolizing Thomas. Because I can believe that and I don't need

Thomas at all. That was true, by the way, Matthew 19 was true long before Thomas came.

And we did find it. Largely because of a bygone but gradual rejection of Thomas' metaphysics, which evidently is the foundation for everything.

And books like Jeff's, this is Jeffrey Johnson's book, which

I forgot to bring with me. Jeffrey Johnson, can't keep up.

Why? Bombastic antics of its type will never satiate.

Now this line, bombastic antics of its type will never satiate the intelligence of honest

Christians seeking robust theological answers to the big question. That's obsession with Thomas.

That's what it looks like. I've seen it for decades. I've seen it for decades.

I've heard it. I've sat with people. That's what it looks like. And no one who has it seems to know that.

But we are the intelligent and honest Christians and we are seeking robust theological answers to the big questions.

And we'll only find it in the great doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas.

Praise God for thoughtful men who are striving to be consistent in the fight rather than making hash of the divine essence.

Johnson, Poythress, Strachan at all. So if you don't do

Thomas's doctrine of simplicity and take it where he took it, then you are making hash of the divine essence.

I'm sorry, gentlemen. I have no respect for that. You can just stop it. You can just stop it. It's untrue.

It's false. All you're doing is saying, well, from our perspective, inevitably you'd have to do this.

And you've just gotten so caught up with the question answer format that you find in the

Summa that you don't listen to the other side saying, no, we're not going there.

We're not doing that. But you have to because you're not doing what

Thomas said. I don't care what Thomas said. I'm not making hash of the divine essence.

And there are serious questions as to how Thomas derived his understanding of these things.

And one thing is clearly certain, gentlemen, if you don't establish that Thomas did this first and primarily as an exegete,

I don't want to be a part of your club. You've missed it. You've missed the point.

That's the problem. So, Johnson, Forthers, Graham, et al.,

whilst trying to fight sodomites and Marxists, thereby letting them in the back way.

Why? How? Seriously? Thomas's metaphysics are what we need to be dealing with the

LGBTQ movement and Marxism? Really?

Letting them in by the back. I'd love to see how we're letting them in by the back. I'd like to see how that works.

I really would. The men you appear to be chiding are trying to protect real congregations and raise godly, thoughtful children in the glory of God.

Well, so are we. And I think you can do that without ever introducing the metaphysics of Thomas Christ.

Because we did that long before Thomas Christ came along. It's our necessary ability.

I hope to hear some more careful analysis from you in the future that takes much of what I said above about resourcement in particular into consideration.

You will fail to accurately characterize the landscape until you do your homework on this, because no one who disagrees with Thomas has ever done their homework.

And I've heard that for decades. Decades. It's just, it's part of the, it's part of the, you get your card and it says, say this, and over and over.

I'm confident to give you track record, you will give the issue the way the consideration demands and will discover the serious errors in Johnson's book to be just that, serious errors.

Well, you didn't find any in my mouth for some reason.

May God grant you the clarity of mind to proceed and may he grant repentance. Repentance.

Yeah. That's what, let me double check. Yeah. This sounds like you need to repent if you disagree with Thomistic metaphysics.

Colin Strand, Jeffrey Johnson, and the others who adopted a heterodox theology property.

You want obsession with Thomas? There it is. There is obsession with Thomas.

To compare it with some other issues, you've able to address the past. This, the, this error produced by Johnson is worse than Molinism and Continuationism combined.

Semper Reprimandum. Worse than Molinism. I'm sorry.

That is absolutely beyond belief. It's beyond understanding.

It's beyond comprehension. To question the sources that Thomas used.

To question his exegesis. To question the role of the ultimate authority of scripture in his theology, which he did not believe.

Is worse than Molinism. That is absurd. Absolutely absurd.

Guys, you've got to get out into the real world. I guess

I can see in seminaries someplace where you're not dealing with Muslims or Mormons or whatever.

I guess I can see how this kind of tunnel vision can develop. But you guys got to get out.

Some. And no. So yeah.

I wasn't going to go that long. But so Josh Sommer, sorry brother.

We are not on the same page. And I guess from what you're saying, that means I have to say that you have a heterodox theology now.

And you're going to say I have a heterodox theology because I think that Thomas is an unfruitful guy.

Wow. May I suggest that means you've really adopted a standard outside of Solus Return?

Seems to me. Anyway. Anyway. Okay. All right. One last thing

I was going to wrap up. But you know,

I'm okay. I'm going to mention two things real quickly that I want to try to get to on the next program.

Maybe. And then people remind me. I need to.

I need to be reminded because so much stuff happens and stuff falls out of the list.

I listened to Ted Alexander. I don't have it in front of me.

So I'm just going to talk about my head. King James only guy that I would love to do a debate with that I mentioned last time where he played.

I played this. I listened to all the rest of it. It was the most amazing conglomeration of what

I would call Baptist historical mythology. And it is mythology. It's made up history.

But I'm writing that more and more. Remember the debate that Nathan did? The guy who was debating making history up right and left.

Wild stuff. And even to the point of having the Montanists as early

Baptists as part of the people keeping the true manuscripts and stuff.

And I'm like, Montanists? So, yeah. See, the problem is it just takes so long to take those files and time index them and stuff like that.

But I'll try. I'll try. This is hard to speak. And then I also listen.

I get to listen to a lot of stuff when you're in the truck driving 4 ,000 miles. And I listened to, I was requested to listen to a presentation.

There was, I don't know, this was a month ago now. There was some guy, Protestant guy who was saying, you know,

I'm starting to think that this perpetual virginity of Mary thing might have some validity to it. And someone linked, a presentation was done on YouTube by a guy.

I don't know if he's Catholic, Anglican, Episcopalian, who knows. But it was, it really was a great example of how to turn historical evidence on its head.

It's by how you start, what you present as your arguments first. And then when you finally get to the real heart of the matter later on, you've completely poisoned the well, and you've completely, by the language you use, you just completely turn the subject on its head.

And I've heard this so many times in defense of the Marian dogmas, every one of them, that it would be really useful to walk through it, not just the subject, not just because the subject and talking

Roman Catholic friends and neighbors, but because it's a real exercise in just analyzing an argument and going, especially an argument from history and going, oh, wow, yeah,

I can see how people do that. And, you know, we're dealing now with a regime in the

West that just lies on its face, just change history, change facts.

It's Orwell's 1984 all over again. And so the ability to listen to an argument, for example, there was,

I noticed on Twitter, sometimes I have to expand, normally

I have Twitter in a narrow thing, so I don't see all this side stuff. Sometimes you have to expand out to open up another window in that browser or something like that.

And I also started noticing Twitter was doing everything it could, posting articles about the

Vietnam study and the hospitals in Vietnam that documented.

So I clicked on it, started reading it. They're doing a full court press to try to get around even the authors of the study.

And I'm sure there was some involved here. Even the authors of the study are saying we've been misrepresented.

Now, there was one misrepresentation, easy to understand how it was. This is the study they found that vaccinated people carried 257 or 251, over 250 times the amount of virus.

Now, here's where the issue was. As the unvaccinated, it was a comparison between 2021 and 2020.

Of course, there's nobody vaccinated in 2020, so they were unvaccinated. But that was when an earlier strain was prevalent.

That was the whole thing they focused on. We've been misrepresented. This has been taken out of context. This person's been given false information or anything else.

And it's like, but wait, time out. The research did say that vaccinated people were carrying 250 times the virus, well, the viral load of people a year earlier when nobody was vaccinated.

Hence, everyone was unvaccinated, right? Right. That was the result.

That was the point. What's going on is people are saying, oh,

I used, well, it's too late now. I used that term. We've talked about Joe's cookies. But the whole point was, what people were saying was, look, this is not what we were told vaccines would do.

This is not what anybody, hey, take our vaccine and you'll carry 250 times the viral load.

Man, you're like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've got virus. Nobody told you that.

And they documented that it was the healthcare workers, even in all their PPE, that were spreading it all over the place.

That was what the paper was about. And so the whole point was, hey, these ain't doing what you told us they were going to do.

That's March of 2020. I remember pulling into a QT gas station and there's

Trump. And we're going to warp speed. We're going to develop this vaccine. And that's when people started to, well, yeah, once we got this vaccine, then you won't get

COVID and you won't spread to anybody else. And it'll all be over. Is that where we are now?

Oh, nowhere near. Get the vaccine or starve to death because we'll fire you and not let you work anywhere.

Get the vaccine. You'll still get COVID. You'll carry 250 times viral load. You'll spread it to everybody around you.

But you might not get it quite as bad, but you still could die.

But still do it because we said so. It's almost like no one can remember what life was like one year ago, let alone two years.

Isn't that amazing? I think that's information overload as we give you way too much information here.

Anyway, so I want to do the Petro -Virginia thing and the

Kim Jong -un thing because they're both, well, they're both history stuff.

I guess that's one of the reasons I like that kind of stuff, is to deal with history and deal with those issues. So we'll try to get to them if time allows.

I've just got some stuff we've got to get done. In fact, I guess get some stuff done tonight. So that's all that.

Thank you, Brother Pierce, for making this available. I'm assuming we're still on the air.

I haven't, you know, I assume we're still going even an hour and 20 minutes in.

And it's just so quiet here and it's weird. Your seat's right over there and there's the

Rich Cam and it's just staring at nothing at all. But I wasn't distracted by comments to the wall or anything like that.

So maybe this is a good way to do it. Anyways, thanks for watching the program.

Lord willing, see you next time, even though I just said what I said for it at the end and still probably get kicked off. See you next time.