Geisler's Parable Unpacked and Refuted

Welcome to Divine Line. We're back here in the regular studio and you know, it's nice to be here but it's just as nice to be in the

Mobile Command Studio. I mean, I think we've put together a pretty awesome little situation there.

It's very, very easy to fire it up, get it ready to go and seems to work almost anywhere we are.

Now, we haven't run into, you know, bad cell situations and stuff like that.

I didn't even have to put Starlink out this last trip but we only had one, two, three stops.

So that wasn't, you know, it's not like when you're traveling across West Texas which is sort of a lunar landscape in some places when it comes to coverage.

But anyway, yeah, we're back. We just dropped the unit off for, you know, it's just warranty stuff.

You know, that's why you take it out for a shakedown cruise and trying to put together a

West Texas, New Mexico trip for May. A fairly short one and hope to get back in touch with everybody that I've got in touch with to try to get those dates figured out.

I hope to stop in Las Cruces and we're going to be, well, we'll let you know more about that when it all comes together in that particular area.

Just another good shakedown after we get the stuff taken care of.

We've got a pretty good idea what needs to be done. Well, I would imagine the folks at the

RV place are sort of like, you know, we do this professionally and you don't.

And I'm just sort of like, yeah, but I live in it. And so I think

I have some insights. I'm getting insights. I'm getting close. I don't think I'm quite there yet. I think I'm at about 90, somewhere around 94 ,000 miles pulled so far.

So 100 will be cool. What are you looking at? Yes, the lights are on.

Yeah. We sort of rushed in here and threw this together. So anyway, I don't even know what's going on in the world today, to be honest with you.

I mean, I know that clearly the States, the Straits of Hormuz are still not open because all the gas stations around here, diesel is over $6 now.

So yeah, over six bucks a gallon. Yeah.

Yeah. Get the Clydesdales out. Yeah. Well, you know, I don't know what hay costs, but it probably, you know, when you think about it,

I mean, I'm not going to spend any time on this. I want to get back to other stuff. But when you think about it, if we applied the inflation,

I mean, think about what it costs to go through a drive -thru today and get a burger and fries and a

Coke. I don't get a Coke, but burger and fries and a bottle of water. Um, it's getting close to three times what it was not very long ago.

You apply that to gas and $6 a gallon is still cheap. I mean, people in Europe and UK were paying that years ago.

We have had a very artificially low cost on stuff.

We really have, uh, when it comes to transportation and that's good for the economy, but, you know, that's what we're looking at anyhow.

So I'm, I'm looking at X and, um, my feed on X over the past few days, ever since Saturday has been romper room.

I mean, that's the best it can be described as is just a huge number of very, very immature, ignorant people, uh, blasting away.

I mean, people popping in, Oh, this is where the email list told me to come. Oh, you know, just take your

L and this is from people that in fact, a couple of times, um, for those of you who are just tuning in, we did a debate, um, less than a week ago now with Jacob Hanson on, um, up in Ogden, Utah.

And, uh, you know, I spent the last program on it. We we've covered, I think what needs to be covered.

Um, and it was on is the

God of Calvinism morally reprehensible. And as I've pointed out, uh, when

I was asked if I would debate that topic, I said, well, yes, however, um,

I will likewise be addressing is the God of Mormonism morally reprehensible.

The whole issue being, how do you define what's morally reprehensible? And if you have a God who lives on a planet that circles a star named

Kolob, and there are many gods before him, there'll be many gods after him. He is not the transcendental objective ground of all being.

Um, he is not the God of scripture that says that if it exists,

I made it anywhere. And the God of scripture, you don't have to do

Aristotle. I know Christians did Aristotle. I am well aware of the fact that starting very early on Greek philosophy became the language of theology, because as the gospel goes out, it goes out into a world that had been formed by Alexander the great.

And yes, it was the Roman world, but the Romans, uh, pretty much just borrowed the

Greek system and, you know, made a few improvements, but that's what they did. And I am well aware of how deeply influenced, especially later

Trinitarian speculation, discussion, dialogue, uh, how all of that was very much influenced by Platonism and Neoplatonism, and, um, all sorts of things like that.

I, I get it. And that was not a positive development. Um, but that aside, uh, the reality is the

God of scripture, the God that is presupposed in Jesus's teachings is the creator of all things.

Over and over again, when God talks about his uniqueness, uh, calls

Israel to recognize, uh, who he is over against the gods of the, of the peoples, it's always associated with creation.

And so later generations would create standards heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, um, to try to express these things, but you can't get around that that's the

God of scripture. And yes, thank you for doing a virus scan and blowing my cameras right out of the water.

Um, well, you know, we just, oh, great. Um, we just fired everything up in here.

So all the computers are going, help, help. I'm trying to download updates. Help, help. We just came running in here and said, let's get this done.

Cause I've got a bunch of things I gotta do today. Anyways. So anyway, the conversation, um, that could have happened would have been a very interesting one.

I'm not sure if Jacob Hansen would be the one to do it. I, the Jacob Hansen who did the debate with Joe Heschmeier, um, could have pulled that off if he had bothered to do his homework and wasn't so rabidly filled with animus toward what he thinks

Calvinism is. I mean, on that level, he was Dave Hunt level, you know, just, and can't even begin to think of the possibility that someone rational might believe something like this.

Uh, we didn't end up having that conversation. So it's been fascinating the past, not quite a week watching people who are coming in to talk about Calvinism.

Yeah. They're, they're misspelling it. They can't eat. They don't know how to spell Calvin. They spell it with a second.

Hey, and that's always a real obvious tell the person you're talking to has never read a word, uh, about the subject has no idea what babbling about and is just simply going to blast you, uh, right, left, and center.

So there's been a lot of that, but there's this, um, there's this guy, uh,

Scott Adams is that's not the Scott Adams, obviously that we might be thinking of.

Uh, he's having a conversation and it keeps, since I was tagged in it, it keeps showing up on X.

Uh, I have no earthly idea how to pronounce this fellow's name.

I mean, honestly, if I took a shot at it, it would be Mitchum, a tail, they

Pell, Wang, Poehn, I'll go wink. Okay. Which I really doubt is actually his name,

I could be wrong. I have no idea. Um, but he, he has his, his avatar is a little kitten wearing a shirt with my face on it.

Uh, it's printed on, on it. So I, maybe I'm supposed to know who this is, but I don't, sorry.

Um, but we'll just call him Mitch is trying to talk with this

Mormon. And this Mormon is basically saying, I'm really not going to get into this because you just don't know enough about what we believe.

You know, so I can sit here in the weeks before this conversation, reading from this and going through the

King Fowler funeral discourse and the sermon grove. And, and I pointed out in the last program, for example, that when, uh,

Hanson quoted from DNC 20, that was DNC, that was book of commandments 24.

And there's some questions about the dates, but it's 2930 long, long before the first vision story began to develop.

I know Mormons think that that was right there at the start. It wasn't. Um, there's zero evidence that much evidence, uh, that on April 6th, 1830, any human on this planet had ever heard of something called the first vision, let alone two distinct physical beings in this first vision.

Um, it didn't happen. It's fiction and Smith's theology developed so radically and so rapidly.

And when, when you call yourself a prophet and you start marrying every other woman that walks down the road, um, you start getting some pretty weird ideas, uh, over time.

And I've said for years, if Smith had been given two more years, just two more years, he would have been so far out that no one, not even the zealots that are defending him now.

Uh, no one could have made hedge tales out of his theology. There'd be no Mormonism. So you can thank the

Masons, um, who killed Joseph Smith in a Carthage jail in 1844, uh, for, for making sure

Mormonism could exist. If they hadn't done that, uh, I don't think there'd be dealing with Mormonism today.

Probably some other cult, uh, but not Mormonism. So yeah, his rapid descent into polytheism and infinite regress and everything else, uh, amazing stuff.

So Mitch here says, okay, after looking at the King Follett discourse and the Sermon on the Grove, I'm exceptionally skeptical of that, especially when it comes to Smith's lack of knowledge concerning the original languages.

To which Scott Adams says, this is, this really summarizes sort of the attitude that you get from Mormons.

You're trying to discuss advanced calculus without understanding basic arithmetic. When you show me that you have an understanding of the milk of our doctrine, then we can discuss the meat.

And, you know, I was gonna take the time to, um, uh, pull up the discussion, you know, there's been, there's so much discussion, even amongst

Mormon scholars, about the evolutionary nature of Smith's stuff.

I mean, it's, it's so very, very, very, very clear. Um, and yet I was going to point out that in teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith, in, it's either the

KFD or the Sermon on the Grove, they're often conflated. He makes a statement, and I'm pretty sure we read it.

Yeah, we did read it, um, a few weeks ago when we were going over this stuff. Um, he makes a statement that he has always, whenever addressing the subject of the

Godhead, preached in the plurality of God. And then you've got

Jacob Hansen quoting from DNC 2017 about how God has eternally been

God from 1830, which demonstrates that Smith was lying in 1844.

Now, interestingly enough, I would imagine that there are some reorganized

LDS, some RLDS, and, and you want confusion, um, the organized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day

Saints, which were the people who stayed behind. Back, they didn't follow

Brigham Young out. And their theology developed very, very differently because while they accepted the

Book of Mormon, they sort of cut off Smith's revelations at a certain point in time so that you could still make some sense out of it, and rejected the later

Utah developments that really represent where Smith was going from really 1838 onward, um, until his death in 1844.

And what's interesting is, you know, they tried to make a go of it, and they had the temple lot and stuff like that, and they owned some pretty interesting sites, uh, that were relevant to early

Mormonism. But, uh, they didn't get into all the, you know, they had, they had temple ceremonies and stuff, but, but it was very, very different than what you have in the

Utah Church, a very different set of theologies. And then, just a, this should be a warning to everybody, they committed denominational suicide because they adopted liberal

Protestant perspectives on scripture, life, revelation, the

Holy Land of the Arts. And now there's almost nothing left of them, um, because, well, look what's done to the

United Methodists, the Episcopalians, the liberal Presbyterians, the liberal Lutherans. Uh, you adopt that stuff, and you end up with your rainbow -stoled priestesses talking to people who average 82 years of age, and that's going to be the end of you, and your church will end up being taken over and turned into a mosque.

Um, I mean, that's a what? Or a dance hall, well, I suppose, but these days, probably a mosque.

Um, so anyway, uh, so there have been those who tried to make the argument that you could follow

Smith up to a certain point in time, and then not deal with what came afterwards, but that hasn't really worked out very well for them either.

So anyway, um, so, so what

I've been told, and no, I'm not interested in diving into this stuff. I've been very honest for quite some time that I have other priorities.

This, um, this debate was not one of my priorities. Um, the last three debates

I've done were not my priorities in the sense that they got in the way of my real priority, which is the debate on Nicaea II coming up in October, which

I've fallen way behind on now, um, because I've accepted three debates, and can you believe this?

Guess who, guess who texted me? Um, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but, uh,

Chris Arnzen and I have had a running joke for, wow, uh, how long now?

30, 35 years? Something like that? About Swedenborgianism.

Okay, and I'm not sure how it started. He might remember. But, you know,

I like to, when I go on Iron Sharpens Iron, I say, it's great to talk to the world's leading expert on Swedenborgianism, uh,

Chris Arnzen, and I, I think he used it in a, in some skit he did or something.

I, I forget what it was. He'll, he'll probably remind me. Um, but he just sent me a something on Facebook and I haven't responded to it yet.

Um, if you send me stuff on Facebook, you cannot expect me to respond to it almost ever. Uh, I hate

Facebook. I continue to hate Facebook and you dragged me onto Facebook. Um, it was all your fault from the start.

Anyway, uh, I don't, well, that, yeah, and look at the shirt you're wearing. Um, so,

I mean, that shirt is so Sun City. I mean, oh my gosh. You, when I, when I saw you stand there when I was pulling in today,

I was like, he, we are talking Sun City has taken you over.

Um, but, um, he, he sends me a Facebook message and Hey, this shirt has been in here for like 10 or 12 years and then it's been buried for the past five years cause

I couldn't wear it anymore. And now it's, yeah. So I'm sort of happy about that.

Anyways. Um, Chris sends me a message that this guy contacted him and he's,

I guess, local to him and he wants him to arrange a debate on the Trinity. He's an anti -Trinitarian guy.

And when Chris inquires about, you know, well, what do you believe positively? He's a

Swedenborginist. And, and Chris is like, Hey, would you like to?

And I'm like, okay, this, so Chris may hear this before I write back to him.

What? Um, but first of all,

I didn't think there were any left. Okay. I didn't think there were any Swedenborginists alive any longer.

I thought that was pretty much a defunct thing of history. And the only expert I know on Swedenborginism is

Chris Arnzen because I've always said that he was, I don't know if he actually knows anything about the theology or not, but I can guarantee you one thing.

One thing I am not doing is learning Swedenborginistic theology.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, not doing it. You write, you write Chris and you tell him you'll moderate. Yeah. I'll moderate the debate.

I'll moderate the debate. He does the debate. You'll moderate it. Yeah. Yeah. Not doing it.

Swedenborginism. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Oh yeah. And, and there'll be all, there'll be all this left of the

Swedenborginist in the entire world. Uh, five of them will show up. Yeah. That's, that's what it will be.

Anyway. Hey, during the debate, um, Jacob Hanson told a story at the beginning, um, about, um, you know, this person saving just a few little girls.

And as soon as he started telling the story, um, I realized what this was, what it was going to be.

And I couldn't help but thinking about the fact that if he had actually read The Power of Freedom that he was quoting from, you know, that I addressed this story in the book rather fully.

Um, let me do a little reading for you. Um, I wrote at this point,

Dr. Geisler reproduces a parable that he feels illustrates how the reform view of God's freedom and love is in fact not omnibenevolent.

Here's the illustration as it appears in Chosen but Free. So here's what Norman Geisler wrote.

See if it sounds somewhat vaguely familiar. Suppose a farmer discovers three boys drowning in his pond where he had placed signs clearly forbidding swimming.

Further noting their blatant disobedience has found a typo in the

Kindle scan. Noting their blatant disobedience, he says to himself, they have violated the warning and have broken the law, and they have brought these deserved consequences on themselves.

Thus far he is manifesting his sense of justice. But if the farmer proceeds to say,

I will make no attempt to rescue them, we would immediately perceive that something is lacking in his love.

And suppose by some inexplicable whim he should declare, even though the boys are drowning as a consequence of their own disobedience, nonetheless, out of the goodness of my heart,

I will save one of them and let the other two drown. In such a case, we would surely consider his love to be partial and imperfect.

Now, this is directly parallel to the beginning story that Jacob Hansen told in his opening statement.

And is it possible that he didn't know that I addressed this in the book?

Yeah, I think it's quite possible because I don't think he read it. I think somebody quote -mined stuff.

Maybe got the Kindle version, looked up certain words, grabbed some quotes out, something like that.

I don't know. This is what I wrote.

The reason we note that this is the form, the reason we note that this is the form it took in CBF, Chosen but Free, is that Dr.

Geisler used the exact same parable in the 1985 Basinger and Basinger work on predestination and free will.

With one interesting difference, in the 1985 edition, the final assertion that the love of the farmer, here meant to represent the

Calvinist god, is imperfect, is not included. Why is any of this relevant? Two years ago, two years after Dr.

Geisler's essay appeared in the Basinger and Basinger work, C. Samuel Storms wrote Chosen for Life, an Indirect Guide to the

Doctrine of Divine Election. In it, he provided a devastating critique of the parable of the farmer.

The critique extends for six pages and provides the careful reader with a multitude of reasons to reject the parable as having any merit whatsoever.

Chosen but Free does not contain a single citation of or reference to Storm's work. Obviously, it is possible

Dr. Geisler never saw this work, even though it was published by Baker, a major Christian publisher, but such seems unlikely.

My response to this parable will follow the outline of Storm's and draw heavily from his insights. Now, so what

I'm saying is, notice, I give credit, I did the research,

I found out that Geisler had used this parable more than once. I found out that people had responded to his use of this parable.

I gave the references to them. This is called doing due diligence, due diligence to respect

Dr. Geisler. I went back to find previous things that he had written many years earlier, 15 years earlier than, if I recall correctly,

Chosen but Free was copyright 99, if I recall correctly. But this is called doing your homework, not quote mining, just finding material.

All right, the major problem with this parable is not what it does say, but what it doesn't say, and this is the same thing with Jacob Hansen.

It is the entire blocks of truth that are ignored that allows one to conclude that the loving God who redeems the unworthy people is in fact less than all loving.

There are all sorts of hidden assumptions that lead to the completely erroneous conclusions presented in Chosen but Free or presented by Jacob Hansen.

Consider especially the fact that the parable uses a mere creature, the farmer, to represent the holy

God. I did mention that in the debate, though briefly. Immediately as we consider the example of the farmer, we do so on a human plane.

The farmer would have limited knowledge, would be sinful himself and in need of mercy, and may himself have jumped into some other farmer's pond when he was but a kid.

You see how relevant this is to Mormonism, at least to the

Mormon God as taught by Joseph Smith and taught by the leadership of the

Mormon church up until the present day? We expect certain things of human beings that we have no right to expect with the infinite, holy, almighty

God. All these things enter into evaluation of the attitudes of God based upon how we feel about a fellow human being, the farmer.

Storms notes, related to this is the tendency to think that if we, if he really wanted to, it would not affect the farmer in the least simply to take down the signs, suspend the punishment, and turn his pond into a swimming hole for everyone to enjoy.

But again, God's retributive justice is not like an old hat that he can discard if he so chooses.

Retributive justice is as much a part of God's nature as love is. Do you catch that? Retributive justice is as much a part of God's nature as love is.

Not in Mormonism. Not in Mormonism. And, you know,

I'm sitting here applying this to all sorts of different religious concepts. I'm thinking about how a Muslim would interact with something like this.

But a Mormon especially, now maybe not Jacob Hansen, I don't know.

Again, his orthodoxy as a Mormon is highly questionable. But if you accept the consistent teaching of Mormonism since 1850, and then, you know, move out to Utah, everything else,

God himself was as we are. And so maybe he did go swimming in somebody's pond.

But given that he was exalted to the status of godhood, and again, this is why

I asked Jacob Hansen the question, and he said he's eternally been exalted. Okay, that's not

Mormon theology. That may be Blake Osler's theology. That's not Mormon theology. Whatever you want to call it, just don't call it

Mormonism. Because there was a point in time when

Elohim, the god of Mormonism, became exalted.

He was once a man. And so, you know, that's why I would like to ask Jacob Hansen, are you exalted?

Because if you become a god, then have you eternally been exalted? What? Who was the,

I thought it was a prophet or an apostle who said that God was a sinner. Well, there has been speculation on that.

I don't think that anyone has said that directly. I think Orson Pratt certainly put that to his logical,

Orson Hyde, Orson Pratt took it to his logical conclusion. But I think they've tried to, they've left that as an open reality, and because that would be the only logical conclusion.

Some Mormons try to say, well, Elohim could have been the Jesus figure on his planet, and hence was never a sinner.

But the reality is, any Mormon man who believes he is someday going to become a god has to admit that if that's the case, then the vast majority of exalted beings were once sinners.

Pete I think the phrase was redeemed from another planet or something like that. But yeah,

I mean, you think about it, statistically, like you just said, statistically, the vast majority, 99 .999

% of them would have to have been redeemed. Yep, that's true. So, anyways, back to the story here.

So, retributive justice is as much a part of God's nature as love is would not be a relevant observation in Mormonism.

To make the parable even semi -workable, one would have to change the farmer into the greatest, most noble king and ruler of all time.

Then at least there would be some meaningful comparison, though still very limited. Along with what

Storms calls a straw god, the parable likewise trivializes sin. Can anyone seriously think that some good old boy swimming in a pond is to be likened to the depth of the depraved heart of mankind?

And here again is where a Mormon won't even hear this. There is no doctrine of total depravity in Mormonism by any stretch of the imagination.

One of the tracts that we used to pass out, and we've still got a little bin of them in the other room, one of the tracts that I wrote toward the end of our period of time where we were doing a lot of work out in Mesa during the

Easter pageant, was called No Man is Able. And it was based on John 644, and it talks about man's inabilities in light of total depravity and his sin nature.

Man, you want a clinker with Mormons in the sense of they're just stunned by something like that.

They're like, what? That was the whole point. You want the contrast to be as clear and strong as possible.

And man, it was. You really want to get into a gospel presentation.

What was that text? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about this.

I just want to share it, and I'll go back to this. I'll never forget. And I haven't talked about this in quite a while.

So, I mean, Algal remembers, but I'll never forget. We were standing under the street lamp at the main corner.

It's no longer the main corner. Main and Hobson. It's moved down the next street is where the main place you stand is.

And I still have it, but not in here.

It was a Oxford King James red leather with a snap on it.

So it'd fold over and protect the pages. Had a snap on it. And it was marked up a good bit. I would not be able to read it today.

Wouldn't even be able to get close to it. I mean, I suppose if I had those with me.

And this fellow, this sharp young Mormon man had come up to me, and he said, why are there so many differences between your churches, between non -Mormon churches?

And I had told him, well, it has to do with human tradition, overriding scriptural authority.

Sometimes it's ignorance. But normally, it's a refusal to actually believe and apply sola scriptura and tota scriptura.

And I explained what those things were. And he listened. And then we started talking about the gospel.

And it did not take him long. He was a sharp fellow. Did not take him long to realize I was saying that salvation is completely of God's grace.

It's completely his sovereign choice. Immediately, you just, the unregenerate man is offended when you present to him a free

God. And you can just see it. And he's like, wait a minute.

You're telling me God chooses who he's going to save? And I said, well, yeah.

And I opened up my Bible to Ephesians 111. And I read

Ephesians 111 to him. And here, God is described as a

God who works all things after the counsel of his will. And he goes, so wait, so you're saying, and I just stopped him.

And I reread the verse. And he's still astonished, just the way

I think most Mormons are demonstrating themselves to be astonished in light of the debate, which is why none of them, none of them have even tried to offer a counter exegesis or anything else to the key text

I presented. All I've ever seen anybody say, well, that doesn't have anything to do with the Calvinism.

You quote Daniel 4, and God does as he pleases.

And he disposes of men as he pleases. But that doesn't have anything to do with Calvinism and the God of Calvinism.

It's just like, wow, not even thinking. And so he says, then you're saying that, and I stopped him again.

And I just reread Ephesians 111. He sort of pulled down my

Bible a little bit, and he looked over it, and I had outlined it, you know, the fluorescent yellow highlighter.

I'd outlined it. And so he found the verse, and he tapped it with his finger. And he said, that's wrong, and I feel good saying that.

And I just remember feeling the tapping of his finger. I'm holding the Bible. I can feel it as he taps his finger right on Ephesians 111.

In fact, I wish I could find that. It's in the other office. It's in my office, because I could show you which page it's on.

I know where it's at printed on the page, because it was burned into my memory.

And now you're going to have to remind me to go find that thing after the program, because I want to see if my memory's as good as it just tried to be.

And I closed the Bible, and I snapped it up. And I said, sir, when you walked up to me, do you remember a question you asked me?

You asked me why there are so many different denominations of different views based upon the

Bible. And I told you, it's because people will pick and choose what they will and will not believe.

And sir, no one has given me a better illustration of that than you just did. I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget that. And it's true. That's exactly...

So, picking back up here, can anyone seriously think that some good old boy is swimming in a pond is to be likened to the depth of the depraved heart of mankind?

If the parable wished to be serious, the sin would have to be made realistic. The great king returns to his castle from doing good amongst the people of the land to find a group of men robbing, raping, and murdering his family and friends.

They have intentionally set fire to the castle, and if they do not quickly escape, they will perish in the flames.

At least this would capture a little more of the seriousness of sin and the horrific nature of it.

But let's add something worse. These are subjects of the great king who have benefited greatly at his hand. He has provided them with great material blessings in the past.

They have sat at his table and enjoyed his hospitality, and yet they treat him in this fashion. Unlike the parable, these rebels have sinned against the king.

In the parable, they sin against a no swimming sign, and they've done so personally. And it should be noted that this is not the first time.

They have a long track record of rebellion, and they have often found mercy at the hand of the king.

But let's move even further. These good old boys are not even described in Geisler's parable. We're told nothing about them other than the fact they're drowning.

To again insert some level of biblical truth, we would have to be informed that these men who are found by the king engaging in heinous crimes against his very own family in the king's castle are not crying out for deliverance from their activities.

Despite the mounting flames and heat, they continue in their violent behavior, destroying everything that reminds them of the king and his rule.

They are enjoying themselves immensely. They love their rebellion and their sin. They even make excuses for it, and in fact get mad at anyone who would call their activities sinful.

Indeed, they so enjoy their activities that they encourage others to join them in their attack upon the king.

Ever read Romans 1 30 and 31? But the truth is even further removed from the

Offered Parallel. If we ask, how do these rebels respond to the attempt to deliver them from their rebellion, there is only one answer.

They mock the king's attempts. Should he seek to open a way for them through the flames so as to save them, they would each invariably laugh at him and mock his actions.

They would throw debris in his face and run away into the smoke, cursing his name. Indeed, if they had the power, they would pull the king into the burning building and make sure he perished in the flames, laughing and with glee the entire time.

They would surely never cry out for deliverance or seek escape from the danger that surrounds them. This is part of the error brought into the parable by Geisler's insistence that the unregenerate man can do what is pleasing to God, in direct contradiction to Romans 8 7 through 8.

No rebel sinner, outside the grace of God bringing them to spiritual life, is crying out for help.

Even if the proverbial life ring were cast into the pond or a squad of firemen made it to the rebels in the smoke, they would not cooperate with the rescue effort.

And even this, we are missing an important element of biblical truth. They lack the capacity, due to spiritual death, to take advantage of any kind of assistance, even if they desired to do so.

On every level, the parable fails to correspond to the reality of biblical teaching. But there is more!

I mean, how did Jacob miss this? How do you,

I mean, I've spent a little time on this. The parable contains an implicit swipe of the sovereign will of God in election.

Storms rightly protest. When the farmer is finally portrayed as seeking their deliverance, he does so on an inexplicable whim.

A whim? This sort of needless caricature portrays God's solemn, most blessed, and altogether gracious determination to save as little more than a bothersome afterthought, with no purpose or design.

What the author of this illustration calls a whim, the word of God calls the kind intention of his will,

Ephesians 1 5. The conclusion of Geisler's parable is the assertion that such a farmer has a partial and imperfect kind of love.

To be truly loving, it seems, the king would not have the freedom to show mercy to some of the rebels.

He would have to show equal mercy to all the rebels. If he is all loving, the king would have to offer pardon on equal basis to all the rebels who are busy joyously trashing his castle and killing his family.

But in reality, there is more, much more. For how can the king provide forgiveness for these rebels anyway?

The law must be satisfied. He must send his one and only son to pay the price for their sin. Going back to the pond illustration,

Storms lays it out clearly. Divine biblical love, on the other hand, entails that the farmer casts his own son into the pond, knowing full well that if his son makes an effort to save the boys, he will die.

The son swims with the three boys, notwithstanding their vehement and hostile cries, that he get out of the water and leave them alone.

As he reaches the three, he extends his arms in love to but one of them. Though that one boy is vile and reprehensible in every respect, the son of the farmer brings him back safely to shore, but in so doing, he himself drowns.

The two remaining boys laugh and mock that the farmer's son has drowned. Their glee is beyond control.

The one boy for whom he gave his life to save is suddenly brought to tears as he senses the magnitude of the love that has been shown him while he was yet hateful and full of blasphemy.

The farmer lifts the boy up, dries him off, cleans the mud and filth from his body, and clothes him in the garments of his own dear son.

They embrace in everlasting love. The young boy falls to his knees in gratitude, tears flowing. The two who remain in the water continue hurling their taunts, the farmer declaring that even if they could start anew, they would dive defiantly into the middle of the pond without a moment's hesitation.

So what are we to make of Dr. Geisler's assertion that a God who saves some rebel sinners, but not all, through the miracle of divine grace, freeing them from the shackles of sin, giving them a new heart and a new nature, despite their hatred of him and his ways, is a denial of omnibenevolence?

Once all the false assumptions are stripped away, we can all see the error of the presentation.

It is based upon a false view of God's holiness, a false view of his freedom, a false view of the sinfulness and capacities of man, and a complete misunderstanding the freedom of God to show mercy as he wills, not as we demand.

The king would have a perfect right to ring the burning castle with his best troops to make sure the rebels cannot escape, and stand there in perfect majesty and let the flames consume his enemies.

It is love beyond degree if the king sends his only son into the burning structure to save any of the rebels.

There is no logical or rational argument that can be mustered to say the king must send his son to save every single one of the rebels, or else be imperfect in his love.

What Chosen but Free calls imperfection, the Bible says, is merely God's freedom to show grace to whom he will show grace, and justice to whom he will show justice.

Omnibenevolence does not mean God's grace becomes something that can be demanded by all. Grace, to be grace, must be free and freely given.

If one is going to argue that God must have the very same kind of love for every rebel sinner to have love for any, then it would of necessity follow that God must either save all or save none.

To avoid these two conclusions, evangelicals, including Dr. Geisler, are willing to say that God tries to save as many as he can, but fails to do so in many instances due to the lack of cooperation by the creature.

Now, I'm not sure how many pages that was. I didn't look it up in the paper edition here, but that was a lot of pages.

That was a lot of discussion. Jacob Hansen, of course, did not even attempt to provide a discussion that demonstrated he knew what

I said about that story, which is the direct parallel to the story he gave in his opening statement, which is meant to poison the well, create strong emotion, but it's not meant to actually communicate anything meaningful.

So, if he didn't know what the potter's freedom says about that subject, well, that demonstrates why he lost the debate so badly.

If he did, then that raises serious questions of fundamental integrity. You do what you will with that.

I'm seriously thinking, and I have not raised this to him,

I think one of the leading thinkers amongst

Christians today in reaching out to Mormons, we've been talking,

I'd like to see if he'd be willing to come on and talk about Jacob Hansen, he was at the debate, and the rise of Oslerism, and maybe just give us his insights as to why he thinks the general authorities of the

Mormon church are allowing such radical departure from the orthodox expressions of their theology of God that are easily obtainable to anyone who will take the time to look at.

In fact, I had a guy on Twitter here, let me see where I posted this, um, well,

I hate when I, oh, there it is. So, this guy named

K .M. Becker 25, Kyle, said, please say exalted man another 50 times, please, and it's a gif of a skeleton drumming its fingers, going like this.

I took that as some type of mockery of the use of exalted man, I had used the phrase exalted man, and so I quoted, again, from the student manual.

Man, I should have grabbed that thing. I really, really should have grabbed that thing. I'm not sure what

I was thinking. Sometimes it's in the stack of stuff.

Rush had a stack of stuff, and I have a stack of stuff, but my stack of stuff doesn't change as fast as Rush's.

But the student manual that I quoted from on the last program is available in PDF format in a number of different places on the web.

I just asked Claude to go find it for me, and he did, and so I grabbed it, and I quoted the section that says the following,

I see his purpose to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,

Moses 139, utter blasphemy, God never said anything like that, but anyways, which involves giving birth to spirit children and setting them on the road to exaltation.

If that is to be done, you must have an exalted man and an exalted woman.

Exactly, an exalted man and woman who have been joined together in an eternal marriage.

If this man and woman were obedient to all gospel laws except celestial marriage, what would be the result? They still could not be gods.

Now I understand celestial marriage is the crowning ordinance of the gospel. Right, I said with a smile, and with that comment,

I think we can end the discussion. So, this is the wise older Mormon talking to the younger

Mormon explaining why celestial marriage is the crowning ordinance of the gospel.

This is on page five of the student manual that was used for 25 years to prepare

Mormons to go through the celestial marriage ceremony in the temple, and again, kudos for taking it serious enough to saying you need to go through this stuff.

Great. Problem is, this is paganism. These are space gods from Kolob.

I mean, this is the same page. I think so.

I can be a god only if I act like god. Exactly right. Can you imagine the state of the universe if imperfect gods were allowed to spawn their imperfections throughout space?

If beings who did not have law under their subjection were free to create worlds.

Okay, same page. Okay, just a few sentences earlier. Normally, when

I read this stuff in my presentations, Christians are just like, wait, wait, my

Mormon neighbors believe that? And it's like, again, is this scripture?

No, it's not. So, Jacob Hanson can go, solo scriptura. But these are the words published under the copyright of the president of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. Copyright 1970, what, six and 92?

This is 1992. This is the first presidency determining what's going to be taught by the church to its members as they prepare to go through their most holy ordinance of celestial marriage for a quarter century.

And what's taught here, you can demonstrate, is perfectly consistent with what was taught 25 years before that, and 25 years before that, and 25 years before that within Mormonism.

So, there's the language. Twice, exalted man. And so,

I quoted this, what do you think that proves? Well, he said, wait, what do you think you're proving with that?

What point are you even trying to make? You're the one with the gif of the guy with exalted man.

I'm just showing you that it's easy to find apostles and prophets of the Mormon church. Yeah, but they're not necessarily.

Yes, they were. Yes, they were. They were defining theology. Yes, they used the term.

Have you ever done a search through the Journal of Discourses? Ever done a search?

I would imagine, I'm gonna find out. I bet there is now, there should be an exhaustive concordance database for every talk ever given at the

General Conference of the LDS Church. I mean, these folks were into AI before almost anybody else was.

They're into keeping records. I bet, see if anybody in the channel, see if our

AI expert can ask the AI in five minutes, because I'm using

Claude a lot now, instead of Grock, I use both, but I'm using Claude a lot now. I'm gonna throw that at Claude.

Is there such a database? And how many times do you think exalted man, exaltation, exaltation to godhood, that language has been used in the

General Conference of the church? Because remember, how many times have I had a

Mormon come up to me outside the General Conference since the 1980s and say, you need to understand, we have continuing revelation.

What's going on in there is revelation. That's why we don't limit ourselves to what you have.

It's revelation. If Mormonism cannot get its house in order, you're going to have people claiming revelation, teaching almost anything.

And Mormonism will fold like a house of cards, as far as having any kind of objective meaning.

And I'm not sure if they just have been so insulated in the

Utah Valley to have not seen what has happened to many other denominations that had millions and millions of adherents, once they abandoned any kind of objective doctrinal definition.

I mean, right now they've got billions and billions, possibly a trillion dollars and buildings and temples and all sorts of real estate holdings and all that kind of stuff.

That's what's keeping them going. But that stuff eventually goes away.

You eventually burn through that pile of cash, even a pile of cash that big. And when you can't buy fidelity to a dying system, what's going to happen?

What's going to happen? Good question. Good question. Hey, by the way, I'll bet you have no idea what

I had for dinner last night. And I'm fasting right now. I'm not doing it religiously, so don't tell me I'm losing my reward.

I started fasting last summer, and I read about great, great, great stuff that happens to your body when you fast.

And so I'm doing a 36 -hour fast right now. So I stopped eating last night about 6 .40.

I'll get to eat tomorrow morning at 6 .40. And your body gets used to it. It really does. Your body's like, oh, it's that day.

Okay, cool. You saw me drinking. I've got electrolytes, no calories, but things like that.

But I'll bet you you'll never know what the last thing I ate was before this fast that put a smile on my face.

A Taco Time crisp meat burrito. Now you may go, wait a minute.

How could you have a Taco Time crisp meat burrito? There are no Taco Times in Arizona. I know.

I went to the manager at Taco Time at the nice one down there.

We've eaten there before. I can tell what it is. I don't want to get them in trouble. And I said, could

I buy a dozen crisp meat burritos before they're cooked?

They've been made up. They're refrigerated. But could I, because I have an RV, so I have a freezer.

Could I buy a dozen? I bought a dozen crisp meat burritos. And so I put it in the microwave.

I thawed it, got a little bit warm, and I put it in because I don't even have a deep fryer anymore.

Everything's air fried now. And I put it in there. Man, that was good.

Now all I got to do is I've just got to get some tater tots, aka

Mexi fries, which are actually not Mexi fries. They're just tater tots. But man, that will, it will be, because I've got sauce.

I opened a brand new bottle of Taco Time sauce and it was,

I couldn't find expiration date. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. When your Taco Time sauce, there's so much acid in there that nothing can live in there.

It's fine. Yeah. Oh, it survived anything. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Rich is making fun of the fact that there, before the last trip, I walked in, we've got this little area in here that we were using for something else for a while.

And now we put all the RV stuff in there. And so like, I just put some things from the

RV because we dropped the RV off. So it's going to be a month before it's full again. So we store it in there.

And he's, he's gone through the food stuffs that I brought in. And they're in two separate groups.

And this group is stuff that hasn't expired yet. And this group is stuff that not only has expired, but in some instances expired, what four or five years ago, there was one in there that had 2013, 2013.

What was that? You don't remember? Hey, if it's something like salt, the world's not going to end.

Okay. You know, if it's got liquid or something like that, fine, but I'm Scottish.

You don't waste food. You just don't, you just don't waste food. So yes.

So a taco time, crisp meat burrito that made me very happy. And I, I, I, it would not be wise to break my fast in the morning with a taco time, crisp meat burrito, but probably tomorrow evening.

We'll definitely, definitely take a shot at something like that. And some of you are going, what are you talking about?

Chris taco time and crisp meat burritos are legendary in the history of Alvin and Megan ministries.

If someone ever writes a book, there will be at least a few pages on a taco time bombs and all the stuff that goes along with that.

That's just, just the way it is. All right. So there you go. What's that? Hold a thought posting it in my channel.

Oh, oh, okay. Oh, okay.

Yeah. So October, 2024. So is this someone in the chat channel?

Oh, so at go dot with the gospel, October, 2024 general conference, elder

Ruben V. Aliod, sons and daughters of God quote, we believe that God, the father is an exalted man with a glorified body of flesh and bones as tangible as man.

Well, you know, that's what all Mormons used to believe. Um, there you go.

There you go. So, all right. Thank you for that information.

Obviously, I, I, I think I bet there is somewhere.

I mean, the Mormons just, they record everything and they post everything. I mean, the Joseph Smith, Joseph Smith papers website is astonishingly well done.

And when I think, when I think of Mike Beliveau and I, how nervous we were that day when we went into the church historical department and requested that 1832, the microfiche at 1832 diary.

And that was probably 1983. Okay. So that's what, 43 years ago?

Yeah. Coming up at 43 years ago. Um, now so much stuff.

I bet the, I'll bet there's, I'm going to, I'm going to track it down. I'm going to track it down. Yes, sir. You. Well, as I recalled, didn't

Joseph Smith and Brigham Young have like a, a group of scribes writing everything down that was being said?

Yeah. I mean, it was like 10 of them. Well, and not only that, but that's become a big issue in, amongst the revisionists trying to find ways of saying, well, well, maybe they recorded this wrong and, and stuff like that.

They, they talk about who had the best accuracy and there's all sorts of discussion about who the scribes were and papers written at BYU and all sorts of stuff like that.

Yeah. That's, yeah, that's, that's out there. That's definitely out there. Uh, okay.

Well, Hey, thanks for listening to the program today. Um, I'm sure there'll be more developments.

We'll move on to other topics. Um, there's not much more to be said about a debate that was that lopsided, but, um, it is interesting what it is revealed about the current state of Mormonism.