Carl Trueman

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602, or toll -free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And good afternoon, good morning, welcome to The Dividing Line on a

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Tuesday morning, a regular -sized program, much to the chagrin of many, but not necessarily to me, because I really hope to finish up two chapters in the book today of about 48 pages total to get off to my proofreaders, and so that's just got to take precedence, and that's what

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I've got to keep working on, because my publisher cannot be patient forever, and I really want to get this thing out there.

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A couple things to address today. I saw an article called

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What's So Great About Catholicism? A Brief Response to James White et al. on the

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Call to Confusion website by Andrew Pressler, and I just wanted to just briefly say it seems that Andrew missed the point of what

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I was saying. It is quite obvious that this website is not meant for dialogue.

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Rome doesn't do dialogue. Rome says that Rome is the only true church, and that to be in communion with the

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Bishop of Rome is the highest calling, and so it's not, we accept you as equals, it's we will talk to you until we can inculcate enough confusion in your mind to get you to believe what we believe.

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So it's not a give -and -take type thing, it's not a, you're as equally right as we are type thing, no, they have a purpose, and that is to convert people.

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But their conversion is not to Christ, it's to the Roman system. And what I said is that this particular approach is by inculcating a distrust of the

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Word of God, a distrust of its capacity to communicate God's truth outside of the context of the

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Roman Magisterium, which is a part of Roman theology, you have to admit that. Rome teaches against the idea, the interpretation of the

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Bible outside of the traditions of the church, and so that's just part and parcel of what

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Romanism is. You have to destroy a person's trust that God has spoken with clarity, and instead get them to trust that God has only spoken with clarity as long as you accept these external sources of authority, which are all summarized in the modern

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Roman Catholic Church. Now, to do that, you have to abandon all sorts of common -sense conclusions about history, but that's what people do.

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And I could illustrate this very, very easily. When I talked about the fact, you know, they're not, what

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I tried to communicate, and since Andrew didn't get it, maybe other people didn't either, let me try it again.

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There is an overarching methodology that is being utilized by Roman Catholic apologists in Western culture today to specifically target the very people who have been the most consistent and strong critics of Roman Catholicism for many decades.

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Well, for actually longer than that, I would say. And that is Reformed ministers and preachers of the

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Word of God. And you could tell, you know, I've been around longer than a lot of these guys have, and there is almost no even recognition of Reformed theology and its essence in Roman Catholic apologetic material back in the day when

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Karl Keating and Gerry Matitix and Patrick Madrid and Jimmy Akin were running around.

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I mean, Jimmy Akin wrote a short article tiptoeing through the tulips and stuff like that. But the idea of actually directing particular argumentation that direction, that hadn't been done since, well, it hadn't been done a long time.

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There were books on it that were done years and years ago, but it just wasn't a part of what was very popular. That's what these guys are specifically about at Call to Confusion.

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And so what they're doing is they're creating confusion. That's why I call it Call to Confusion, is they try to create confusion in regards to the ability of the

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Word of God to function as we believe that it needs to function. The default then is, well, you accept our authority.

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You accept, well, that they don't have any authority. I don't think any of these people are actually representative of the magisterium, that all they have is their own personal private interpretations, which are themselves fallible, which is part of the whole, you know, the bait and switch of this stuff.

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You can't answer these questions, but don't ask them of us because we can't answer them either. It's all false advertising.

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But what I said was, they're not going out and saying, well, you should convert to Roman Catholicism because of these things, and you should convert to Roman Catholicism because we teach the bodily assumption of Mary.

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Well, look, the only reason anybody, anybody believes in a bodily assumption of Mary is because they have first accepted an entire complex of authoritarian claims and theology before that.

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No one, no one would ever read the

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Bible and the writings of the first five centuries of Christians and ever come to that conclusion, ever.

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It's just not a part of either scripture or tradition. The only way anyone believes in it is because you've accepted

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Rome's authority claims, period, end of discussion. And I will prove this. I am laying out an open challenge to any of the people called to confusion.

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2013, let's set up a debate. I'll take on 10 of you at once if you'd like.

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I don't care if you want to roll through the whole group. I don't care. One, two, three, 10, doesn't matter.

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You simply defend the following words, okay? You defend these words.

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A truth which is found in the sacred scriptures has been fixed deeply in the minds of faithful in Christ, has been approved by ecclesiastical worship even from the earliest times, is quite in harmony with other revealed truths, and has been splendidly explained and declared by the zeal, knowledge, and wisdom of the theologians.

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To what do we refer? Those are words from the definition of the bodily assumption of Mary, which actually began, since then the universal church in which the spirit of truth flourishes, who infallibly directs it to achieve a knowledge of revealed truths, has, through the course of the ages, repeatedly manifested its own faith.

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And since the bishops of the whole world, with almost unanimous consent, request the truth of the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven be defined as a dogma of the divine and Catholic faith, and then you have that following description.

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So will you defend the idea that the bodily assumption of Mary is a truth which is founded on the sacred scriptures?

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Secondly, that it has been fixed deeply in the minds of faithful in Christ, so has been approved by ecclesiastical worship even from the earliest times.

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So will you defend the idea that the bodily assumption of Mary is found in the sacred scriptures and was a part of the teaching of the ancient church in the earliest times?

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Now I know factually, beyond any doubt, that that is a lie. It is untrue.

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There is not any reason on this planet to believe that, other than you have already accepted the authority claims of the

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Bishop of Rome, period, end of discussion. But as I said, that's not their apologetic approach.

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Their apologetic approach is to erode your foundations, and then in fear of falling into the abyss of lacking any truth, you grab hold of the thin line of papal infallibility.

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So there you go. I think that would absolutely demonstrate and prove the truthfulness of what

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I was saying. Their approach is not to start with the bodily assumption of Mary. Their approach is not to start with the never perfecting, constantly repetitious doctrine of the

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Mass. Oh, they talk about these things. I never said, well, they've never said it. They try to hide it.

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I've never said anything like that. I'm saying the approach that they use to get people to start the process of collapsing in your belief in the true authority of Scripture so that you replace it with the authority of the

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Bishop of Rome is not to start with these things. It is to start with these questions like, well, you know, theoretically, if ten years after the last apostle died, how would you know if there were three different churches in one city all claimed to be following after John's teaching, how would you know which one was which?

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This type of theoretical thing, which they have no answers to. Well, it's apostolic succession. What do you mean apostolic succession?

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Show me how that works. Does this have something to do somewhere along the lines with the Bishop of Rome? Was the

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Bishop of Rome the means you had to go to the Bishop of Rome back then? There was no Bishop of Rome back then. That's the problem.

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You know, so they don't they don't have they can't answer these questions themselves. It's all it's all a house of cards.

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But it just seems to be working that with some people anyways, that you you take out the foundations of belief in the

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Word of God and then hope that people will just reach out and and grab hold of that. So I want to make a brief mention of that.

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And it's and it's interesting to to to look at that. Second thing

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I need to mention, I I was inundated yesterday with emails and tweets and instant messages and so on and so forth.

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And then this morning, and I knew I would forget to bring something up here. Let me see if this happens to be no, it's not even there.

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There is was it on the let's see, which Yep, there it is. It's on the

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Reformation 21 blog, Carl Truman. And did you all see the the trailer for the

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No Compromise Ever? We I posted on the blog and I've asked

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Mike Atmendroth to tell me when the other background see we shot,

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I don't know, five, at least five hours in that studio. And then the next day, we did something different, very different.

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And let's just say the background is going to be different. And so I asked him,

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I've asked him when that's going to show up. And I haven't I haven't seen a tweet back, but I I don't know whether he did and I missed it.

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I for those of you who send me tweets, I don't answer. There's there's two possibilities. I don't sit there very, very rarely, very rarely.

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When I sit down the desk, do I scroll back through all of the stuff that has gone scrolling by since I last had a chance to sit down?

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I just don't do that. All right. And secondly, sometimes

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I just ignore tweets. If you ask me some in -depth theological question and expect me to answer in 140 characters, something like that,

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I ain't going to do it, OK? Just not going to do it. And especially if you ask me stuff that's, you know, if you have something called

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Google, you could find for yourself. I'm not going to answer that stuff either. It's it's

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I don't know why people think that I have the time to be doing their Google searches for them, but many people do.

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Carl Truman this morning posted an article thoughts on an impending conversion, which should have been foretold.

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I'm not going to go into this right now. If the conversion takes place in the direction that everyone assumes it's going to be going, then

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I'll comment more fully. I do appreciate everyone who sent me that. Did you hear about this? Did you know about this?

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Blah, blah, blah. I knew all about it. And in fact, I met with the person who it is about about two weeks ago for about two hours and forty five minutes.

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And I can simply tell you and I believe he would tell you that I laid it out on the line.

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I was straightforward. I was gospel focused. And if the conversion takes place, then

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I'll tell you all about what I said, how I said it, and we'll compare it with what's said. But yep, you can stop sending me all that stuff.

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I was well aware of it and was, in fact, the last person who was talked to about these particular issues.

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And we'll just leave that at that. Next thing, I had something else

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I was going to talk about, but I want to try to lay this out one more time because people just overwhelm poor

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Rich and all of us with the same question over and over and over again. So we need to put together an

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FAQ or something or just simply have a blog article that it just doesn't move or I don't know how we do it.

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But what we get constantly blasted with, and it looks like we're having some type of a internet problem right now because I can't even get online.

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I can't even pull up something. Is something going on out there? There's no one even sitting out in the booth any longer and something is going on.

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Are we off air right now or what's going on,

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Mr. Pierce? All right. What's wrong with the...

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So we've got internet problems. Great. That's lovely.

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That's great because I can't get online either. So I guess

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I'll have to call our internet service provider again and say, hey, did you all do that same thing to us again, which you did to us,

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I don't know, six, eight months ago where internally they assigned our IP to somebody else, something along those lines.

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That was great. And are the phones affected by it, too? I'm not getting any answers.

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So evidently things are... Phones, they seem okay. Okay. All right.

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Well, it's not that we can use phones anyways, but I guess I'll go ahead and answer this question anyways, even though no one is probably hearing answer to the question as it is.

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Anyhow, what we get hit with all the time is, James talks about listening to books while he's writing.

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How does he do that? Well, I've answered that question. I don't know how many times. We've done videos on it and it's on the

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YouTube channel and we just need to make an FAQ where everyone just can go back to it.

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Let me just very, very quickly explain. A, you use

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Kindle and you plug your Kindle into your computer and you use a free audio recorder and you have the

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Kindle read the book to you. It cannot read all books. There are certain books that they restrict that to frequently because they have audio book version of it.

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Even though I've seen books that have audio versions and they still allow you to for the Kindle to read it to you.

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Maybe they haven't figured out that some of us get around buying the audio book by doing it that way. And then there are some people that don't like how the

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Kindle reads things. I understand that. Sometimes the Kindle mispronounces things.

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Sometimes it's humorous. Look, for me, the important thing is I have 12 to 14 hours a week where I can be listening to things and I can be listening to debates.

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I can be listening to books. That's when I do all my preparation for this program. Sometimes sermon preparation, debate preparation, everything else is in the 12 to 14 hours a week.

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Sometimes more like this week. It'll be more because I'm driving down. My wife and I are driving down to a place to do a massive ride this weekend.

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So I'm going to have an extra three hours. So I'll have probably 17 to 18 hours this week where I can be listening to stuff.

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So for me, it's worth listening to the electronic voice, which is fully understandable and is so much better than it used to be.

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Anyways, that that's the easiest way to do it. Yes, that has to be real time recording.

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In other words, you can't do it real fast. I set it up at night, let it record. I have a book recording right now in my office while I'm doing this.

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It'll be recording all day long. Probably most books run from six to 15 hours in length.

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But what you do is you put it on high speed. So you record it at high speed. And so it records faster that way from the

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Kindle. What if you can't get it on Kindle? Well, for the Mac and I can only address the

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Mac. I'm sure there are programs do this for Windows, but I'm not a Windows guy anymore. So I can't answer that question. And please do not send in emails asking us to look for these things for you.

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It's called Google. But on the Mac, I use a program I've been told

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I haven't looked that's in the app store for the Mac. I bought it longer. I bought it before there was an app store, as far as that goes.

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But it's called Text Speech Pro. And as long as you can select it, copy it and paste it.

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So PDFs, Word documents, HTML, text file, whatever, you can dump the text into Text Speech Pro.

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I did purchase two voices, one British, one non. And you hit export to audio.

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And five minutes later, there is a MP3 sitting on your desktop. Now, if you put too much text in with too many unknown characters and stuff, it can croak.

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And so you have to be careful. You can't just simply drop an entire

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PDF in that's a thousand pages and expect it to crunch out a two gigabyte sound file.

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That's too much for it. So you do have to break it up. Yes, I do know that what that means is, is if in your

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PDF you have footnotes, the footnotes end up in the middle of the sentence and I just don't like that. Well, OK, then don't do it.

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OK, I'm sorry I didn't design this. I'm just simply telling you how I do it. I've gotten used to listening to that.

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Yes, sometimes it's extremely annoying. I was listening to, oh,

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Michael Brown sent me The Real Kosher Jesus in PDF format. And at the bottom of every page,

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I know the exact instant when he saved the final file. OK, it was February 24th at 240 p .m.

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in the afternoon, because when I did the really fast dump in, that got repeated over and over and over again.

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And even more annoying, there were some hidden characters around those footers, which my program interpreted as question mark.

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And so there were times when it was question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, February 24th, 240 p .m.,

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question mark, question mark, question mark, and would go on for like 40 of them. And yeah, that is annoying. And after the first run on that,

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I went back and I I dumped it back in and I deleted all that stuff. But there comes a point in time where,

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OK, how much time am I spending deleting this stuff in comparison to how much time it would have taken to read it in the first place? You've got to have a balance.

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So, yes, there are some things you have to put up with. It's not absolutely perfect. It's not. Who's that guy that does the

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Bibles? Alan McKint, what's what's the guy that reads the Bible? It used to be on Bible Anthem all the time.

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What? No, not Alistair Begg. He's a he's a Scotsman. He's a preacher. And no,

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I'll stop it anyway. It's not on that level, but it is fully understandable.

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And for someone such as myself who has so much that I need to get through, it is a lifesaver.

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So you then then the other thing to remember is once you have your MP3, when you put it in iTunes, which is what

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I use because I use an iPod and most people do is convert it to an audio book.

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Why? You said the file's bigger. Yes, the file is bigger, but when you're listening to an eight hour book and you forget to convert to audio book and you reach into your writing jersey to get your iPod out and you accidentally hit the back button.

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Now you get to fast forward all the way through that baby to find out where you were. That stinks.

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If it's an audio book, it remembers where you were. And at least that's very, very helpful. So remember to turn an audio book.

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And that is how you do that. Yes, sir. This edition of Book Notes has been brought to you. Hey, look, you get you.

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You're the one that complains all the time. How many emails do you get from people? I get a lot.

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And I get them on Twitter all the time. People, how do you record that stuff? And tomorrow morning you'll get more.

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I'm going to get more. So we actually have to put this in writing up somewhere. Well, we need an FAQ, like I said, and do an

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FAQ. And then someone will want to know how you can make an MP3 of the FAQ.

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Yep. That's true. I just got I just got dumped out of channel.

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The net is so bad. So that's that's that really stinks that this is happening.

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So anyway, so I wanted to cover that. I wanted to deal with that. Secondly, the other thing before we get back to the

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Harry Knox stuff is I. I snarked this morning.

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I, I was listening to, uh, to wretched radio.

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Someone was very kind to provide me with a subscription to wretched radio.

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And so as I told the frequently tall Todd Freel, I don't listen to him first.

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I listen to Al Moller first. I listen to the briefing every morning. I listen to the briefing basically as soon as I get back from the ride or when

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I first got up about riding that morning, which is pretty rare these days. But I get back from the ride and I make sure to update my podcasts.

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And the first one I listen to is the briefing with Al Moller. And then I'll frequently go over and look at wretched radio.

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And sometimes if it's been a while, I'll look at some of the previous topics. And this morning I was listening to something from back in May.

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I think it was May 18th. And he'll do something where people call in and, you know, the mailbag thing and all that kind of stuff.

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And so he answered a question about infants and infants who die and all the rest of this stuff.

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And I was a little surprised by where he went, because basically what he said was that until and he didn't use the phrase age of accountability, but he was talking about the age of accountability.

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Until the age of accountability, a child does not have a load or a debt of sin.

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And so they wouldn't go to hell if they died, they wouldn't be condemned if they died. And I went, wow, that sounds a lot like what we had in that document that we talked about in the last

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Radio Free Geneva about, you know, what happened to what happened to Romans 5 and the headship of Adam and, you know, fallenness in him.

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And you inherit from Adam what you can only inherit from Adam, which is death. And you then if you're in Christ, you receive from him life and that kind of thing.

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And so I actually pondered looking up the number and calling and leaving my snark that way.

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But I thought, well, Wretched Radio is on Twitter. Now, I, you know, the thought crossed my mind, is this actually, you know,

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Todd? And I figured it probably wasn't, but Wretched Radio has a

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Twitter account and I'm one of the followers. So I just tweeted out, it had to be three tweets because you only have 140 characters.

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And I just tweeted a snark to Todd, basically saying, well, if that's the case, then how come infants die?

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And just wanted to get a response. So I get an email. And it's from Friel.

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And he says, I don't do Twitter. Am I supposed to respond to this?

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And there's a screenshot of the three tweets that I had tweeted.

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And I said, of course you're supposed to respond to this. But obviously you're not the freakishly geeky Todd Friel if you don't even do

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Twitter. And so he says, well, what do you want me to say?

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So I wrote back, sort of expanded out, sort of like I just said, you know, more than 140 characters and said, looks like we're on different pages here.

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I just sort of wanted to know, you know, this seems to be pretty standard reform theology. And so, you know, where are you going with it?

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And I haven't heard back yet. And from what you tell me, because you lead people astray and deceive them by taking my tweets and editing them and combining them into a single whole and putting them on Facebook.

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I think it's cheating. I think it's cheating to go on to Twitter where the rules are 140 characters, get the thought out and then go and post three posts of 140 characters in order to get the thought out.

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So over on Facebook, we're not constrained. Yeah, but if you hit a return, it'll post it immediately. Because it was designed by someone using

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Atari in the 1990s. So I combined them. Yes, I know you combined them.

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And then you made it look like I did it, and so a bunch of people are thinking

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I'm trying to start some kind of a row or something. No, only one person thought that.

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Oh, only one person. There's over 90 comments at this point. 90 comments. Yes, yes. And the thing is, we keep them.

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Because I can't get back online. There is order. And there will be order on Facebook. And so they're all pretty much on the same general wavelength.

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Yeah, whatever. So no, all I did was I just tweeted a snark to—I tweeted a snark.

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And that's all there was to it. And so that's that's that's that's that.

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Let me just—since immediately people started coming after me in Twitter.

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And so you're saying, oh, babies go to hell and all the rest of this stuff. I've addressed this subject.

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I don't know how many times. I've been at conferences and we've done videos and gone over it a bazillion times.

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But I know we get new listeners. And I wish new listeners would, you know, like before you say, everybody to hell.

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But it's just, you know, be calm, be cool, be collected. No, I'm not sending all infants to hell.

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In fact, let me—where'd it go? Ah, there it is.

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Got a few little things over here in the in the corner. This—I fully recognize that this is a difficult question.

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And I fully recognize that there are a number of different viewpoints that are taken.

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And I also fully realize that there is a tremendous amount of emotion involved in this particular issue as well.

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But I am looking at chapter 10 of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689.

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And number three says, elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the

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Spirit, who works when and where and how he pleases. The same is true of all elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called to the preaching of the gospel.

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Now, as I understand that, as I understand this perspective, what that means is

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God has just as much freedom in the salvation of infants or those incapable of cognitive thought as he does in the salvation of anyone else.

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And just as there is nothing in the sinner that draws the grace of God as an adult or a young person or anything else, it is purely of all of grace.

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And hence, he is completely free in the matter of who he saves and who he does not. The same thing is true when it comes to infants or to those who lack mental capacity.

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God is free to save as he chooses. Now, there are many people who say, well, that just means every infant who dies in infancy is going to go straight to heaven.

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And every person lacking mental capacity goes straight to heaven, because they never did anything wrong.

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Which means you don't believe in the federal headship of Adam, and you don't believe in the unity of the human race in that federal headship.

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And fundamentally, you're left having to say that abortion is one of the greatest heaven -filling devices ever devised by man.

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Now, I know you don't want to say that, but the fact of the matter is there isn't any chapter or verse in the

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Bible we can go to that answers this question. I'm sorry, it's not there.

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You can go to David, and you can go to his grief, and you can try to create entire theologies.

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But it seems like a lot of folks don't care whether Romans 5 gets thrown under the bus.

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It's a real practical thing. It's sort of what works. And that's where you got the issue.

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And I think we need to maintain the clear didactic teaching and say, look, there are different positions that have been taken.

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I've often pointed out that Ulrich Zwingli, at the time of the Reformation, said, all infants who die in infancy are of the elect.

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I can't prove it. You can't disprove it. Okay, at least he wasn't saying, oh,

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I can prove it. But a lot of people do think they can prove it. Well, David was sure he was going to go to his child.

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And that means that for every child of everybody, I don't think it goes there.

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On the other hand, and I fully understand the emotional weight of wanting to tell a grieving mother, oh, your baby's in heaven.

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But then again, what about that grieving mother whose son was 22 and just got killed in a motorcycle accident because he was driving high on cocaine.

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And had two children. He fathered out of wedlock and never darkened the door of the church and had absolutely no interest in spiritual things.

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Don't you? Do you say the same thing to her? Oh, I'm sure you'll see him in heaven. Do you lie in that way then, too?

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Some people say that's the best thing to do. Okay, that's a very pragmatic approach. On the other hand, you got a lot of folks saying, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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They all die in infancy. Power of God, sovereignty, they're toast. Because there's only one way of salvation.

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Repentance and faith. Even for those who can't do either. It's still a requirement.

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Got to be there. And boom, that's it. You're going to come up with some other means of salvation.

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Even though the Bible doesn't address those issues. But you can't come up with, you know, God doesn't have the freedom to do that.

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No, no, can't do that. So they're all toast. They're all going to hell in a handbasket.

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I am in the middle. And I think most Reformed Baptists would be. Elect infants.

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And who are they? We don't know the judge of all the earth will do right.

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We don't know. And don't fall into the trap of people who, you know, want to give you absolute certainty.

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Absolute certainty is a wonderful thing to have when God's revelation provides it. But there are people who want to have absolute certainty on everything.

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In other words, they want to be God. And they want no limitations on the extent of God's revelation.

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Which is, by the way, what would be required for you to have that kind of absolute certainty.

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Is that God has revealed everything. And the fact is, the scriptures talk about secret things that belong to Lord our

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God. And part of faith is to trust that God's in control of the secret things.

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And there's going to be a consistency there. And we'll see in time or in eternity what those consistencies are.

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So, but from my perspective, I think it's far more important to maintain focus upon what is clearly revealed.

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Than to take implicit conclusions and overthrow the clarity of revelation for the sake of the conclusions you come to that make you feel much more comfortable.

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That are only implicit. So, I wanted to address all of those issues.

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And I fully realize that absolutely nobody heard a word that I said. But will, someday,

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Lord willing, if the internet ever comes back. I can't, not me,

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I'm gone. I got no net whatsoever over here. So, don't ask me what's going on.

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But, well, this is interesting.

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Our own system won't let us in because too many connections from your IP. So, somebody needs to tell

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Randy or somebody to put unlimited connections from this one.

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This IP. So that maybe we'll be able to get in when we need to get in.

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No, connect canceled. I cannot get into the channel anymore at all. Anyway, that's just the way that goes.

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And we won't be able to do that. All right, let's get back to what will, like I said, once posted, be useful.

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And we only have 20 odd minutes left on the program today. Anyways, and that is I wanted to get back into some of Harry Knox's presentation.

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For some reason, I apologize, I forgot to put the time code into my cheat sheet here.

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And so I think I'm going to be repeating a little something here. But it was a good place to start, approximately, in his presentation.

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We're listening to Harry Knox's opening presentation, his debate with Michael Brown. This is from 2008. Let's just jump right back into where we were.

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I have spent my adult life begging my mostly Christian neighbors to stop killing me with kindness.

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For the most noble of reasons, a desire to call me to holiness. My neighbors have denied me the right to work, looked the other way when

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I was a victim of hate crimes, denied me and my partner the protections and benefits of marriage, sought to silence my voice in the church, and heaped ridicule and shame on my family.

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I think we're right around there. Because when you hear the phrase, sought to silence my voice in the church,

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I remember thinking, in other words, if you uphold biblical standards of church leadership and you uphold biblical norms in that area, then you're seeking to silence

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Harry Knox's voice. So that is the description of holding to biblical orthodoxy is seeking to silence the voice of, well, heretics.

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Okay, I'll agree with that. There is absolutely, positively, no question whatsoever that if Harry Knox were to attempt to apply for membership at my church, he would be denied, unless he was willing to repent of his sexual sin and his heresies and so on and so forth.

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Obviously, that's a different issue. But if he were to come in demanding those things, you better believe that he would not be allowed.

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He would not be given a platform. And no faithful shepherd should ever allow that.

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And if Harry Knox is right, then a church he's a part of should kick any orthodox

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Christian out. There isn't any way for there to be a coexistence within the context of a church of those two mutually exclusive views.

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No matter their motivations, they have proven that they are not my friends.

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So if you disagree with me, you are not my friend. Well, you know, it depends on what you mean by friend.

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I think you can be friendly towards someone with whom you disagree strongly.

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But I would say for Christians, true deep friendship. In fact,

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I would say, let me say this to all Christians, not just about this subject. But what is the foundation of a true friendship for a believer?

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I'm not saying that you cannot like unbelievers. I'm not saying that. But doesn't there come a point in time where your

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Christian convictions, your Christian worldview, the centrality of Christ runs up against the rejection of his centrality in someone else's worldview?

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And the closer you come to that person, the more pronounced that conflict becomes, doesn't it?

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It seems like there's a lot of, again, the younger generation of Christians that chafe under biblical categories of, well, okay,

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I'm going to use a term here that's probably only known amongst fundamentalists, but a separation.

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Separation from the world, not in the sense of a monastery, but in the sense of recognizing that there are foundational differences between what it means to follow

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Christ and what it means to follow the world. And as James said, friendship with the world is enmity toward God.

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It is enmity toward God. So there are a lot of young people who don't like that.

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They want friendship with the world, and they think that friendship with the world is the means by which they're going to impact the world.

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The reality is, friendship with the world results in Christians that the world does not have to even be concerned about, because they already know you're compromised.

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You're not gonna be able to call them to holiness. You're not gonna be able to call them to fidelity to the lordship of Christ, because you've already bowed at the altar of the world with them, and they've demanded you do that.

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I think it's an important thing to consider. You cannot deny my basic human rights and expect me to consider you to have my best interests at heart.

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So basic human rights means the entire homosexual agenda, redefinition of marriage, overthrow of Christian theology, overthrow of the form and function of the church.

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You deny any of that, you're denying me human rights. Remember, this guy was at the time with the human rights campaign.

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The stakes are much too high. Those who have sought to punish and oppress me have used the most powerful tool

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I know as a weapon against me. They have perverted the holy bible, the powerful standard of justice for even the most marginalized among us, the very touchstone of grace that offers hope and reconciliation.

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They have perverted the bible into a tool of oppression. I am a

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Christian and a gay man. I am at perfect peace with God about the condition of my soul.

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Now, how do you define perfect peace with God? Well, clearly it's not by the bible. It's clearly not by its teachings.

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And though he's going to attempt to present a homosexual -friendly exegesis of some of the relevant texts—well, excuse me,

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I apologize, I should not have used the term exegesis—a homosexual -friendly interpretation of some of the key texts, the reality is that once Michael comes back and demonstrates the fundamentally, fatally flawed procedure that he has just gone through, he's then going to come back and say, well, we dare not make an idol of the bible, and the authority of scripture will be very quickly abandoned for personal experience as the ultimate authority.

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I have prayed through many sleepless nights, begging forgiveness for the sins that separated me from God and those around me, and I have found that forgiveness.

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Now, who gets to define what those sins are? I mean, given what he's eventually going to say, how do you define that?

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Well, you know, I know I could improve in this area, or I'll be willing to say

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I should be like this, or I should be like that, but I still demand my right to stand in judgment of God's word as to what

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I will and will not accept as the parameters of proper sexual behavior, ethical behavior, financial behavior, whatever, every aspect of human life,

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I will demand the right to determine what

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I will and will not accept. And I have changed with God's help. But as God and I have worked together through what it means for me to be gay, as I have studied the bible and prayed and sought the guidance of the

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Holy Spirit, I have been given perfect peace about the fact that my sexual orientation is one of God's many gifts to me.

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So, homosexuality is a gift from God. Now, we've heard no scripture, and let's be honest, for Harry Knox, the fundamental authority for that assertion is personal experience.

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It is not scripture. There is—no one could seriously make the argument that the bible teaches this, but that's what's being presented.

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And you need to understand that that is an absolutely overwhelming presupposition in how this man and many others handle the text of scripture.

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You start there, and then you start looking for means of substantiating that kind of assertion.

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And therefore, to deny it is to deny the one who is its author and seeks its highest good through me.

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I have come to that peace not in spite of the bible, but because I have studied it with reverence and found it to be a model of liberation and reconciliation, not a tool of terror.

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Now, please understand, every word he is using here is very specific and very important and very much chosen.

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There is a reason why he just made a connection between biblical orthodoxy and the term terror.

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This is the mechanism you use not only to stir up your base and keep them emotionally committed and financially committed, but likewise to create in the minds of people who do not think critically, which is the vast majority of the

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American population today, emotional connections that are the essence of your argument.

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He knows he is not going to be able to stand up against the reasoning of Michael Brown in this debate, and he does not.

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His hope is to create in the minds of the listeners these emotional, irrational connections and thereby shut down the rational avenues of communication that Michael Brown will be using.

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And so, historical, biblical, consistent interpretation of the bible equals terror.

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Terror and terrorism, and nobody wants that. No one wants to be called a terrorist, you see.

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That's—this is not just, wow, I wonder if he ever thought—you better believe he thought about it. It is absolutely purposeful.

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I mean, these—this statement is completely crafted and created to communicate these very things.

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But if, having studied it and come to love it, I mostly run to the bible now with confidence, it certainly was not always that way.

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I first studied Genesis 19 not out of love for the text, but out of a drive to survive.

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My hands shook when I turned the pages, and if yours don't, go back and read it again until they do.

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For though I found when I actually read the story that it doesn't have a thing to do with committed relationships like mine with my partner,

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Mike, it speaks very powerfully to me as a person of privilege in America. So, here we go.

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What we're going to do is we're going to present not a range of interpretations.

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We are not going to try to fairly deal with the text. Look, someone who is starting with the presuppositions that Harry Knox is starting with is not going to be giving you that kind of argumentation, and you shouldn't expect it.

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It may sound like that, and he may say that's what he's doing, but it's not. You're going to get one very narrow possibility.

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And these interpretations are not going to be held next to each other so that you can test them for consistency or anything.

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No, no, no, no, no. What you're going to get is you're going to—you just got a presuppositional insertion of a category that's not derived from Scripture but created outside of Scripture and forced into it of loving monogamous relationships.

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We have already pointed out frequently that monogamous homosexual relationships are almost unheard of.

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Almost unheard of. Was reading an article—no.

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Yeah, I was listening. It was Todd, actually. It was Todd Friel. Was probably reading the same article

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I had seen just a few weeks ago. This was back May 18th. Like I said, it was a program I was listening to. Women in countries and in states here in the

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United States where marriage has been redefined and profaned so that they can marry each other, 150 % more divorces than amongst heterosexuals.

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The percentage of homosexuals seeking same -sex marriage, minuscule, tiny proportion.

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And when you realize that at max they make up only 3 % of the population to begin with, even though the

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American populace amazingly thinks a quarter of the populace is homosexual.

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We're talking tiny numbers here. Very, very tiny numbers.

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And yet a presupposition of this concept of a monogamous loving relationship created out of whole cloth and then read into.

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Well, it's not talking about us. And we saw that with the

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Matthew Vines response that we did just a while ago. Do you remember the story? Angels who look like men show up at Lot's house in Sodom.

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And Lot does what is required by his faith and the rules of community. He takes the men and feeds them.

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As they're eating, there comes a loud knock, a banging on the door. Now, once again, as we've pointed out so many times before, when you listen to what homosexuals leave out, then you get a good idea of what it is they're hiding from.

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And if you do remember the story, then you know that Lot had sought to not allow them to stay in the city square.

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Why would he be concerned about that? Well, because the men of Sodom would interpret that as a military invasion, and they would seek to humiliate their enemies by having homosexual sex with them, because that's how you humiliated enemies in that day, because they clearly were surrounded by enemies.

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And oh, come on. Lot knew the character of these men. He identifies their character as wicked.

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And that's what they get angry about. He knew what danger they were in, in the situation they were in.

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He strongly encouraged them to come to his house, and they do. And he is now extending to them courtesy when all the men of the city show up and say, we want to yadah, we want to know them.

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So keep that in mind. When Lot goes to answer, he sees the men of the city standing around his house.

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No women. There's no surprise there. Women have only in my lifetime begun to be sent out to war.

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Now, notice, we have absolutely, positively nothing in this text about war.

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Nothing about battles. Nothing about the enemies of Sodom and Gomorrah, if there were such things at the time.

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There's no indication that there were any soldiers standing at the gates. They were concerned about invasion.

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No. What concerned Lot was he knew what the regular, everyday behavior of the

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Sodomites was. So to import an entire concept, an entire context like this, it's just an amazing example.

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But look, Harry Knox is a very good speaker. And you can trust in the vast majority of the audiences you're addressing, they don't know anything about the

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Bible. Sounds good to me. If the guy sounds like he knows what he's talking about,

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I'll believe it. Make no mistake, those men are out for blood. Bring those guys out here, they say, so we may know them.

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That sounds kind of benign, doesn't it? So we may know them. Lot can tell the difference.

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Scholars have argued about the Hebrew word that's used here, but the context of the story makes it clear that the men of Sodom intended to use one of the oldest tools of war to make sure those two visitors to their city and anyone else like them knew they were not welcome.

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They intended to rape them in public. There's a story that is almost the mirror image of this in Judges 19 and 20.

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Only the city is called Gibeah. Same scenario, strangers, people we don't understand, people not like us, people not from around here.

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You might call them immigrants. Now, see the connection here? Now you want to try to tie in the immigrant, alien, we're so terrible, we're so horrible to these people type concept.

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Throw that in there as well to get as much of the political stuff in there that you can, all to hopefully distract people from going,

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I don't see anything, where are their swords? I don't see anything about, enemies?

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Where's the enemy part? Who were they at war with? Why weren't there any guards out front?

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How do you get the idea that this was some kind of a means of humiliating these guys who they don't know actually are enemies?

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And it's just a means to try to get you around having to answer those questions and to recognize those types of things.

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So this time what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to remember where we stopped. I'm actually going to,

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I'm putting it into my notes. So this time we don't have to have to repeat anything, but we will pick up with Harry Knox's attempt to get around Genesis chapter 19.

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And by the way, there are a lot of pro -homosexuals who will simply say, this actually has, the no here has nothing to do with sexuality.

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He recognizes that it does. Pretty obvious that it does. But once again, there are just so many contradictions in the various pro -homosexual arguments that you could truly fill a book with them.

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Well, thanks for listening to the program today. We covered a lot of ground. Hopefully it's been helpful to you.

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And we'll see you, Lord willing, on Thursday here on The Dividing Line. We'll see you then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

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Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the

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World Wide Web at aomin .org, that's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.