Mamdani, Gio Benitez and the USCCB, and Kings Back to You, Dr. Allen

You know, I've said many times, 2 p .m., which is the time here in Phoenix, is the time that I am genetically predisposed to take a nap, especially on Sunday afternoons.

But now at my age, it's just like, you know, everything. And so I just don't know why we do it at this point in time.

I guess it just works out getting home, not driving through the rush hour. Rich has to drive a lot farther than I have.

I do. So I guess that's best for him. But anyways, hey, hi there, welcome.

I heard a quote this morning from Dr. Moeller, and I double -checked to make sure that it's accurate.

I haven't had any time to talk about this. We're going to get to other stuff. We're going to get to First on 5 -1 again, because Dr.

Allen has pseudo -replied, that's the best way you can put it. Again, all he can do is rehash

Abbaciano's 12-, 13 -year -old article. That's all he's got.

But we'll demonstrate that it, again, misses the point. And we also have talked about some

Roman Catholic stuff. The U .S. Council of Catholic Bishops is meeting, and that's a fascinating political event.

Very left -wing political event. Anyway, I haven't said anything about the election of Mamdani, Zoran Mamdani, partly because there's two issues here.

Yes, he is a Shiite Muslim, in some sense.

I don't know that he would last long in Iran, so how

Shiite are you if the Shiites would kill you in a Shiite country? But that's what he claims, and that's how he's getting support from, interestingly enough, both

Shiites and Sunnis. But the main thing is, the man is a communist.

Now, no, he's not. He's a democratic socialist. Folks, the only difference between a democratic socialist and a communist is how they get to their final goal.

The communists will shoot you to get there. The democratic socialist will corrupt the political system to get you there, and then shoot you.

That's the only difference. It's still government control of everything.

Ownership of everything. No private ownership. He's talking about taking property away in New York City and giving it to the homeless and all the rest of this kind of stuff, as if they're going to maintain it, and as if they're going to pay taxes on it.

It's unbelievable. The man is a statist. The state is all in all to him.

And he's the first to be elected, but he will not be the last. And to my conservative brothers and sisters who have been, oh, everything's changing, and man, we're turning everything around, and I'll never get tired of winning.

I've had the same thought all along. The only way for us to win is to fundamentally change hearts and minds.

The educational system in the United States is still completely owned, fully owned, run by, inhabited by, protected by ultra leftist secularist nutjobs.

I mean, I think more hair dye is purchased by teachers in the United States than in any other nation in the world.

And it's purple, red, pink, and that's for the guys. Or if they are guys, they don't even know what they are.

That's the point. You know, we were so desperate for a sign that everything's turned around that you look at TPUSA and it's like, there we go.

We're getting the young people. Well, what percentage of the young people is that? And even when you see good signs of people interested in family, faith, what percentage of the young population are they?

Do we see birth rates rebounding, climbing, or are they continuing to fall rapidly?

Do we really see evidence of what is necessary for any long -term improvement called repentance, a change in worldview, you know, this kind of stuff?

And everybody's like, oh, no, no, no, no. We've got it. Now, hey, one election, one election is all it would take.

And believe you me, these people that we cannot have a society with because they will not have it, they are absolute totalitarians.

They're ethical and moral pygmies. And I mean, in regards to, they don't even think about the implications of genetic manipulation, abortion, infanticide, everything.

It's just not even part of their thinking. These folks, as soon as they get power back, the constitution is done.

It's finished. It's over with. They don't care about it. They sit there and do this number.

What does this mean in a secular worldview? What does this mean? It doesn't matter what you put this on.

You could just have it standing in air. Swear by what? You're a stinking bag of chemicals.

Swear? There's no transcendent value to any of that anymore. So they may swear an oath.

But how could Zoran Mamdani swear an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States?

His entire worldview, both religiously and politically, says the constitution United States is evil and must be overthrown.

That's who he is. So how can he swear to uphold that?

I cannot honestly see how a man like him could have held any public office of any level, dog catcher, school board member in 1980.

I don't think it could have happened. Couldn't happen. That's happening now. So the line,

I get back to this, the line that Mueller quoted this morning, okay, here it is, quote, and I've double checked it, we will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about, end quote.

Want that again? Do you want to hear totalitarianism? Do you want to hear statism? Do you want to, if you listen real carefully, you'll hear the echoes of the voices of Mao and Stalin and Brezhnev, because they're the ones that said this long ago, okay?

We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

Now, we sit here and go, some of us are old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan said the scariest words you ever hear is,

I'm from the government, we're here to help. That's exactly right.

And we all know the most ineffective way to address any problem is to let the government do it.

We all know that. Look at SpaceX. Look at what SpaceX has done as a private company.

They've made NASA obsolete. They're irrelevant as far as actual space exploration goes, because they were just, you know, they were great when they were the focus of defending the

United States and beating the Russkies and all the rest of that stuff. Then they turned into a woke, crazed, you know, again, more purple and red hair type stuff.

And now, hey, if you want to get something in space, who are you going to get it up there for you?

It ain't NASA. It ain't government programs. So we know this.

We know that if you want to spend the maximum amount of money for the minimum amount of results, let the government do it.

And here's Mamdani. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

I really wonder if all these folks that keep the government out of my bedroom, there is no concern too small for it to care about.

Wow, sounds like that's, that's big. And of course, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

So can you imagine Mamdani with the next variant of COVID becomes sweeping across the plains and is killing grandma and everybody else in the process again?

Can you imagine the lockdown? Can you imagine the governmental overreach? Yeah. Yeah.

So we literally, and yeah, I have to admit, you sit there and you go, okay, this is, um, this is

New York city, right? This is September 11th. But then you start thinking about it.

That was 24 years ago. How many of the people that voted for Mamdani were not even born?

They never saw the twin towers, never went up them, never had any idea. Yeah. And those of us that were around, those of us who had been up the twin towers less than a year before they fell like me, um,

I remember over and over and over again. Never forget. We will never forget.

We will never forget. Never is about 20 years, give or take a few.

So yeah. Can you imagine Mamdani running in, in 2002, 2005?

Nope. Couldn't have happened, but it's happened now. And we have a democratic socialist,

AKA nonviolent communists in charge in New York city. And that radical left, the democratic party has no morals left, has no backbone, has no soul left.

And so the left is taking it over, you know, Chuck Schumer.

He's done. He's done. He will not be elected to the United States Senate again.

Ain't going to happen. He's done. They want younger. They want Mamdanis. That's what they want. And they're going to get them.

And they're going to be smooth and handsome and good looking. Just like the

Bolsheviks were up until the point of the violent revolution. And they took over and then they killed everybody because no one remembers anymore that the system of government and thought that he represents killed 120 million people last century.

We don't care. It just wasn't applied right back then. Yeah. Now we can use tech and AI to make sure to kill many more people than that.

We won't miss anybody. Back then they couldn't spy from the sky and make sure they controlled everyone's motions and movements and everyone's thoughts.

Now we can. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's unbelievable.

Absolutely unbelievable to see what is what is going on. All right.

Let me just mention something. I before I go to the first John stuff cover some of the new things going on in the world.

There was a sort of a breaking story a couple of days ago.

I marked it out. I made a comment about it.

Michael Haynes tweeted on November 8th openly gay

ABC anchor Gio Benitez was confirmed into the Catholic Church.

His husband in parentheses thank you was his sponsor during the mass.

They both received Holy Communion. Father James Martin con celebrated the mass and Benita credits

Martin for leading him to the church. OK. If you don't know who James Martin is in you need to learn these things.

James Martin is really the leading voice promoting the

LGBTQ agenda within Roman Catholicism. And as we've pointed out

Pope Francis repeatedly sent handwritten notes to Martin when they would be having conferences encouraging him and thanking him for his work.

There are pictures of them glad handing together. And while the first people the

Pope Leo met after his ascension to the papal throne was with Father James Martin.

And so if Rome cared at all about being consistent in its external activities with its alleged doctrine and theology this type of thing wouldn't happen.

Something would be happening in Germany right now. The German bishops are doing whatever they darn well please.

They really are. And it's well known that the illicit same sex unions are being blessed in Germany and nobody is just all oh we don't know we don't know that's they speak a different language we don't know it's

Rome is just going to do to do to do to do to do to do because they don't really know what to do about it.

Or as a recent article suggested just a couple weeks ago 75 to 80 percent of the leadership of the church in Rome is homosexual anyway and therefore why even bring it up even talk about it.

That's a possibility too. That's a possibility too. But what's fascinating right before the program started about the half an hour before the program started this video surfaced and this is from the same guy that tweeted the other thing.

So I mean in a Roman Catholic Church in the

United States with Father Martin con celebrating the Eucharist this unrepentant supposedly in a married state which is mythology with another man and with that man being his sponsor this man was brought into the

Roman Catholic Church. No. No repentance. Did he immediately confess the sin of this relationship.

Of course not. I mean if you try confessing that the Martin what would

Martin have said. So I put this out and I said this isn't licit right.

And all these Roman Catholic the doctrine of the church is very clear. There can be no questions about the sinfulness of these things and here is the quote.

Here's the quote. And I'm like yeah I know I yeah

I know the case you can make. But here's the problem. Your pope still seem to believe you and you're not the pope.

I mean when Nancy Pelosi is forbidden to take the Eucharist in San Francisco by her bishop and she goes to Rome and Francis gives her the

Eucharist they're basically kicking the bishop to the curb. Don't tell me that Francis wasn't sending a message.

Don't tell me he was going oh I didn't know the bishop had done that. Of course he did.

It was rebuke against anyone who would believe like you believe. They don't believe that stuff anymore.

Oh they may. They may still say the words but hey what they do and what they say are two really major big different things you know.

And so I was putting this out just this morning to somebody that was like all that you're just making everybody knows exactly what the church teaches la la la la la la.

And now the same guy tweets this it's a video. Bishop Strickland at the

USCCB United States Catholic Conference United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

It's not an easy line anyway. Anyway they go to this camera and this guy is that you know you know how these meetings work.

You've got the microphone set up and someone does a motion type thing or makes a comment or something.

So here's Bishop Strickland. He stands up he makes these comments and is completely ignored.

The panel and chair ignore him. He said what he needed to say.

I appreciate the fact that he said what he said but completely ignored. So Rich is going to have to crank this up because for some reason the volume on it is ridiculously low.

But here's the point is he's pointing to the very same thing that I was talking about.

He's pointing to the fact that this unrepentant allegedly married gay man was brought into the church and given the

Eucharist with his supposed husband as his sponsor and James Martin right there.

He brings it up to all of the bishops in the United States of America and they just go

Well it's a nice day doo -doo -doo -doo -doo -doo.

Here's what he said. But since we're in the area of doctrine I don't know how many of us have seen on the social media priests and others gathered celebrating the confirmation of a man living with a man openly and it just needs to be addressed.

Father James Martin once again involved. Great pictures of all of them smiling. Here we are talking about doctrine.

I just thought I need to raise that issue. I know it's not part of any agenda but this body gathered we need to address it.

Thank you. Thank you Bishop. Thank you

Bishop Masek. Please go ahead. Yeah just continue on. Let's not worry about it. Let's just.

We're not going to address it. Ain't going to do it. Can't do it. I think they've been told from the people at the very top they can't do it.

So yeah you can you can make a strong argument from historical

Roman Catholic documents no question about it but but the problem is you have an infallible leader.

You don't you don't you you you have to depend for the definition of tradition on whoever is alive today and that's why the death penalty issue has been changed and that's why you just on the last program you know it has always been inappropriate to use co -redemptrix.

Pope Francis evidently wrote that and now it's been yeah.

So there you go. There you go. All right. Now not that long ago

I got confirmation that Dr.

David Allen had responded to the challenge that we had we had posted and I could if I had if someone had asked me all right.

If he responds what's it going to look like I would have said he'll re -quote

Abbasiano from the Evangelical Arminians and he'll throw smoke and never really answer the key issue and that is the consistent usage of this construction in First John.

He'll he'll use the exegesis of agnosticism.

You're going too far. It doesn't really say that. That's exactly what we got.

He Allen has no abilities in this field to engage in himself.

I'm sorry. I just don't. He quotes from other people. He quotes from Abbasiano which is you know fine.

He's a synergist. You're a synergist. It just demonstrates that provisionism is just mutant

Arminianism without any history and without any real ability to provide any kind of substantive response.

Starts off pretty nasty. His response does. So James White has issued once again one of his elementary school playground challenges.

That's the first line. Oh you hadn't seen that huh? Yeah elementary school playground challenges. So go back to the last program.

Look at the what we put up on the on the screen. Here's what we put up on the screen and this is what we work through.

This is what we discussed and we talked about the meaning of Gegeneitai in 1st

John and I had to move my pointer around and that made Rich very happy.

He smiled. I could have pointed at my nose. He still would have smiled. But we.

I don't know. Dr. Allen might have gotten more out of you pointing at your nose. I doubt very highly he actually watched it.

I just don't think that he did. But yeah this this my friends is a playground challenge.

A playground challenge. What an amazing thing. I go ahead and take that down.

It is astonishing to me. The behavior of this man.

I'm going to go ahead and mention this because Brian Gunter posted. Well let me finish the thing.

Since I am on the road this week and this weekend I'll only be able to respond briefly but there is really no need for me to respond as a full -throated rebuttal of White's interpretation of 1st

John 5 .1 was given nine years ago by Dr. Brian Abashiano the noted Greek and New Testament scholar. To my knowledge

White has never responded to this detail and devastating critique of his pseudo scholarship on 1st John 5 .1. So for pseudo scholarship.

This is the man who will not face me in debate. He cannot make the argument that I cannot engage in fair meaningful debate.

I have debated 200 times and the documentation is out there. He's hiding.

Okay. He's a scholarly coward. That's what he is. He's a scholarly coward. Let's go ahead and take the gloves off now.

Okay. You know why? Because I know what he's up to. I know what he's up to.

Over the past couple of months a situation arose in a church that I've preached at many times in Livingston Louisiana.

And in that church Brian Gunter, a loving pastor of his people, a man who invests in the young people of that congregation, he had me get up real early one morning before the kids would come to this little restaurant type thing and they'd get the upper level and they'd have a

Bible study. And I did a Bible study with them up there while they're eating their breakfast before they head over to school and stuff like that.

I mean investing in that church. And he's trying to get them to grow.

Grow in a knowledge of the word of God specifically. Problem is the church does not yet have a biblical ecclesiology.

What do I mean by that? Instead of being run by deacon, by elders who are qualified to engage in that type of activity, the church is still run by a deacon board.

Now I know that's very common in a lot of Baptist circles. That's what I was raised with. I saw my dad kicked out of churches by deacon boards, people that he had led to the

Lord. And it wasn't until seminary that I was challenged to look at what the

New Testament actually teaches and the deacons are never, there's never a deacon board.

There's never a, they're never given the authority to do any of that kind of stuff. There are elders, plural, not a single pastor, but elders assigned and appointed by the apostle.

That's the biblical paradigm. And yes, I've written in defense of it. There's a book that, right here,

I think it's still around, Perspectives on Church Government, Five Views of Church Polity.

The only two of us that really invested ourselves in it were me and Robert Raymond, who's gone now. I'm just noticing and sort of chuckling,

Danny Aiken was one of the people who contributed to that one. That's interesting. I didn't really know who he was back then, so we have interesting conversations now.

Anyway, so what happens is the deacons want to get rid of Brian because he's trying to get the church doctrinally sound, which includes being

Reformed. I've done debates there. What did I present? Reformed theology.

I've preached there. Every time I've preached there, consistent all along, same with Brian. Eventually, people wake up and go, well, that might mean that, and I know we don't believe that, and you know, they don't have responses, but they just don't like it, it's traditional.

So what happened was, and I just found out today, the deacons offered

Brian $60 ,000 to resign from the church's money, secretly, and he wouldn't do it.

He's got all the documents. And he wouldn't do it, so they just fired him.

No severance. Left he and his family out in the cold, thankfully.

Most of the church went with him, because they were learning and they were growing, and they have joined with a

Reformed Baptist church locally, and we have already made reservations for me to be able to preach there, the

Sunday after the big Dallas stuff. By the way, let me just say this, hold on,

I know this isn't the best time to do this, sorry about this, but heading back to St.

Charles, this is my last year in St. Charles, 25 years in a row, my last year going back to St. Charles, the first weekend in December, will be there, and will be speaking to a couple churches on the way.

We're going to do a special Christmas thing in Pryor, Oklahoma, on the way. Really looking forward to that.

But the big, big, big debate weekend in Dallas is the 6th and the 7th.

I've asked for my debate to be moved to the 6th. I'd love to be around to see the debates in the 7th, but because of what happened at that church down in Livingston, I want to get down there and be a positive influence, and encourage the folks.

And so I'm going to debate on the 6th, take off early on the 7th, it's a long drive from Dallas to Livingston, it really is, about a seven, eight hour one, on the not best roads in the world,

I assure you. And then I'm going to be preaching on February 8th.

Now, for those of you in the Dallas area, the weekend before the debates, so January 29th through February 1st,

I'm going to be with the folks at Christ Presbyterian Church in the

Dallas area, and we are going to be putting on a conference discussion on the subject of Islam.

There will be a website up, we'll be promoting it, getting all the information out, things like that.

But I can tell you now that on the 29th of January, either at the church or at the mosque next door,

I'll be having another dialogue with Dr. Yasir Qadhi. That should make

Steve Camp so very happy. Someone sent me, someone saw, they sent me some nasty gram from Steve that was posted.

It was on Facebook, so I never saw it, so I don't see any of it. But yeah, I think he's feeling a little left out, so he'll be able to...

Yeah, I know, I know. Well, somebody else saw it. Anyway, so we'll get the website and all the information up, because on the 30th and 31st, we'll have the conference on Islam, and then

I'll be preaching on February 1st, and then I'll be there in the Dallas area.

I suppose, you know, we haven't gotten a Roman Catholic debate put together yet, and I'm still hoping to find somebody to debate the perpetual

Virginia of Mary on the 5th, sort of as a pre -debate debate.

But that hasn't come together yet, so we'll see what happens. But I want to let you know about that.

They want me to let you know about that too. Should have done that right at the top of the program and not in the middle of talking about this, but I'm scattered, so there you go.

All right, so in response to this article, as I expected, because this has been a part of the constant misrepresentation for a long time, if you listened to last program, you did not hear me say that it is like a

Granville Sharp construction, which I've found to be remarkably consistent across the pages of the New Testament.

I'm not saying that in 1 John 5 .1, the relationship between Pascha Pistuon and Gegenei Tai is written in stone based upon some overarching rule of Greek grammar.

What I have said, what I've said in print, in a book that I don't think that Dr. Allen's ever read or ever would read,

I think he's a lot like Norm Geisler in that sense. He just would figure that that would be giving me too much credit or something, or he'd feel like he'd actually have to respond to what was said and he knows he can't.

In any case, as I've argued all along, in 1

John, given his understanding of what it means to be born from God, what it means to be believing, what it means to be doing works of righteousness, what it means to be loving, the most consistent reading of 1

John 5 .1 leads us to understand that the continuing believing that Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of God, is the result of having been born from God.

It's not what causes you to be born of God. You are doing that because you were born of God.

That's what I've said. And it's almost like there's a glitch in the matrix.

It's almost like, you young people won't get this part, but we used to have spinning hard drives in our computers.

And now you've got all SSDs, so solid state circuitry and stuff. But you would have to defragment your drive and what would happen is you develop bad sectors on your hard drive that couldn't hold data.

And so you'd lose stuff. You'd get corrupted files. It was lots of fun. And you'd had programs as the old

Norton disk doctor, I think is what it was called. Remember that? Norton disk doctor. Would go through and find all these bad sectors and would mark them and try to move data away from them.

There are some people whose names I can never remember because I have bad sectors in my hard drive.

There's nothing spinning up there, but there's a real close connection, I think, to where I initially saved someone's name to a less than high performing brain cell.

It's a bad sector and I really got to work. Fritz Erba. You have no idea.

If you ever hear me trying to talk about him and I don't mention the name, it's because I can't remember it. I mean,

I'm really surprised that right now that brain cell said, boy, I better perform now. So I kicked it out there, but it's just the way it is.

I just think these guys have bad sectors when it comes to hearing what is being said.

And so what they want to try to do and what both Abbasciano and Allen, and I suppose probably

Leighton Flowers, but I'll be honest with Leighton, your skills as an exegete are so minimal and your skills with Greek are so minimal,

I don't care what you say. You are so dependent upon other people to tell you what to believe, it doesn't matter what you say.

Okay? It just doesn't. They can't hear. And so what they're gonna have to say is, he's saying this is a rule of, he's overdoing it.

I can't get provisionists to listen. So I don't bother.

That's up to the spirit of God. I put it out there. Anybody who goes back and listens to the last program, listens to the presentation, listens as I walk through, will be able to understand that my assertion is, my reading is the most consistent in the context of 1

John. And it is an acceptable reading and understanding of the relationship, especially in 1

John, of what it means to be born of God in the perfect. And it's,

God is the one who causes this being born. Now the provisionists, and they did it in this,

I can point this, the articles. Provisionists constantly confuse regeneration with spiritual life.

They just, for them, it's the exact same thing. So it's, they are just as dogged about insisting on not understanding the distinction, especially in the

Ordo Salutis, as Roman Catholics are, in insisting that justification and sanctification are to be conflated.

That was the whole issue in the debates of justification in the Reformation. I don't know if most people know that today, but very, very important.

So they just won't hear it. And my argument is that being born of God is what even allows a person to, 1

John 2 .29, do works of righteousness. Now, here's the problem.

For provisionists, that's not true. They believe that a person who has not been born from God can work works of righteousness.

That's not John's position. That's not the Bible's position. That's their tradition. But that's how they read the

New Testament, is through the lens of that tradition. They don't believe what the Bible says about anthropology, about man's slavery to sin.

They just don't, they reject it. So it's just as frustrating to talk to them as it is to talk

Mormons. On Mormonism, God, men, and angels are all the same species, and so they interpret everything they read in the

Bible in the light of that overarching tradition. Well, I've seen the

Spirit of God deliver many a person from the falsehoods of Mormonism, and I've seen the

Spirit of God deliver many a person from the falsehoods of provisionism. You just have to put it out there, but I can't force anybody to see it.

You can recognize how that tradition functions. So let me just get to, real quickly, some things here.

For example, James White argues that in 1 John 5 .1, everyone believes that Jesus the

Christ was born of God. The perfect tense of gegeneitai has been born demonstrates that being born of God precedes the present act of believing and his reasoning are as such.

Now, I say precedes in the sense of is the foundation of that the spiritually dead person can't be believing that Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of God. That is a supernatural revelation of God. It is a spiritually good deed, and true saving faith is born of the work of the

Spirit of God. That's true, but I'm going beyond John to say that. That's just New Testament teaching as a whole, but he says here is his reasoning.

Gegeneitai, perfect tense, refers to an action completed before the time of the main verb. Not necessarily, and in fact, that's not the case here.

I don't confuse, and I'm not sure why Alan is confusing, paschopistuon as the main verb.

I mean, pistuon is an action, but this is a participle. It's a substantival participle.

It's a believer. So, paschopistuon, everyone who believes. So, yeah, there's action involved.

There's action involved in every participle to a greater or lesser extent, depending on context and meaning of the verb and word and everything else, but no, the fact that Gegeneitai is not a present tense, but is a perfect, is pointing to an action of God.

They have been born of God, and then you have pas, ha, and then whatever comes afterwards, whether it's loving, whether it's doing works righteousness, these are the two parallel passages.

And by the way, nothing in this article even began to dispute that these are the only passages he tries to throw first John 5 forward, but it's not parallel.

Again, I don't know that he doesn't know it's not parallel. Honestly, I do not know that he could look at that and go, okay, that's present tense.

That's not parallel construction, but he threw it in there anyways. Why? I don't know, but he threw it in there.

So, refers to an action completed before the time of the main verb. In John's theology, being born from God is what requires us, enables us, leads us to do these things.

That's John's theology. Yes, no question about it. And the parallel passage in 229, everyone doing righteousness, present participle, has been born from God.

Now, he glosses over this because he knows he can't answer it, or it gets really dangerous for him to answer.

But everybody who watched this program knows what I said was, so, Dr. Allen, are we born from God by doing works of righteousness?

Yes or no? If someone asked me a question like that, I'm answering it.

I'm not blowing smoke. I'm answering it. Not him. Okay.

Papa's Jew on present participle expresses the ongoing act of believing. No. I mean, in the sense of, it is a present tense participle, but it's pas hapistoi, it's everyone believing.

It's a category. If a person is presently believing a particular thing, and what is that particular thing?

It's something that has to be done supernaturally. Why? Believing that Jesus is the Christ, the

Son of the living God. We know from Matthew that's supernatural. We know Paul tells us nobody says that except by what?

By the Holy Spirit. No one says Jesus is Lord, but the Holy Spirit. So, the emphasis is not that hapistoi is the primary verb.

It's a participle. I'm not saying that. But that it's descriptive of every single one who is believing has been born of God.

And the question is, in John's theology, can we answer the question?

And here's what you need to understand. What we're getting from these guys, like I said, is the hermeneutic of agnosticism.

We can't really tell. We can't really know. That's what they're going to say.

Are you going to believe when someone tells you that the author of 1 John, the apostle

John, did not have sufficient clarity in his words for you to know what the relationship between belief and being born of God is?

Doing works of righteousness and being born of God? Loving and being born of God? He just threw it out there, but it just wasn't clear enough for us to know.

Really? Again, provisionism demonstrates its primary means of exegesis is by saying, we just don't know that.

We can't go that far because they don't believe what the Bible says about anthropology.

They don't believe its testimony about the sinfulness of man. That's just all there is to it.

Therefore, point three, the new birth, regeneration, must occur before belief, making faith the result, not the cause of regeneration.

That's true. That's true. But the primary point of 1

John 5 .1, in the context of 1 John, is that being born from God results in certain things, such as believing that Jesus is the

Christ, the Son of God, and doing works of righteousness, and all that loving stuff that 1

John talks about, loving God and loving the brethren, all that loving stuff. Who does it?

Those who are born of God. So, do you have to do all that loving stuff to become born of God?

Are you seriously telling us that John goes, I don't know.

I'm leaving that up to you. That's what we're being told. We didn't really know.

We just can't tell. It's very confusing. So, his rebuttal of this,

White assumes that because gegeneitai is perfect, it must denote an action completed before believing. I believe that it does, but the point in 1

John is, it's gegeneitai ectutheu. It is a specific act.

In fact, I brought this up. I hope it's still there. You didn't go away, did you?

Darn it did. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Good.

Too many windows, too many searches. Let's do something really quick here.

I have enough. I got 12 minutes. When we look at 1 John, we find this phrase, beginning in 1

John 2 .29. No, no, no, don't even bother. It's too small, and I'm not messing with the screen.

No. We know that everyone doing righteousness has been born from him.

That's first use of a form of, the perfect form of Ganav.

That's 1 John 2 .29, which we're already talking about, okay? So, since we know he is righteous, we know that everyone doing righteousness has been born of him.

Is that a distinct concept that separates light and darkness?

Believers from non -believers. Because remember, John is very, very much concerned about proto -Gnosticism.

He's concerned about the Antichrists that have gone out. He's concerned about false brethren. And so, if we know that he is righteous, if we know what righteousness is, then we know pas ha poion, everyone doing righteousness has been born of him, has been born.

What's the relationship? It can't be, and it would make no sense in the context to say, the one doing righteousness is causing himself to be born of him.

It would be absurd to say that that doing of the one doing righteousness, that present tense participle, is what gives rise to being born from him.

So, there's no relationship between the two? Or are you literally going to say, yeah, but we just don't know?

Because we can go to other places in the New Testament where participles, and finite verbs, and perfects, and presents, they have really complex relationships, and you know what?

They do. But they don't in 1 John. That's one of the problems with Baciano.

He's going all over the place, and he's just, in general terms, the perfect passive functions this way with present participles.

And look, all that's fine. Go read Wallace if you want. All that's fine.

But we're in 1 John. We're doing exegesis in a specific context, and that specific context tells us very clearly, very clearly, that John believes that there is an act performed by God.

It's not by us. It's something that God does, and it's put in the perfect over and over again.

It's not something that's happening right now. It is a state that exists right now because of a completed action in the past.

So, because of a completed action in the past, we can now describe these people as doing righteousness, as loving, and as believing that which makes somebody a

Christian. Believing that Jesus is the Christ. Okay?

So, there's first one. There's first one. Then we have 1

John 3, 9. Everyone... Now, this one's interesting. Pascha, and then you have you have genao being used here, but it's the one having been born from God is not doing present tense sin because his seed abides in him, and he is not able to sin.

Hati ek tu theu gegenetai. So, there it is.

Same term. Is it not obvious that for John, in 1

John, gegenetai is the very entrance into the Christian life?

This is regeneration, and the resultant not living in sin is because of regeneration.

Is that not plain? Is this really something that is arguable? I don't think that it is.

I'm just putting this out there for you so you can see it. And then we have 1

John 4, 7. Beloved, let us love one another, because love is ek tu theu.

It is from God, and everyone loving has been born from God and is knowing

God. If you know God, are you a Christian in 1 John? If you've been born of God, are you a

Christian in 1 John? Is that not the entrance into the Christian life? Is that not what leads to everything else in 1

John? So, what's the consistent reading of 1 John 5 .1? Pretty obvious, unless you have a tradition that says, nope, and then it won't be.

Um, I wonder why, oh, they put ganao in there. I'm not gonna, um, and then we have 1

John 5 .1, and by the way, ganao is used three times there, um, and we could actually bring the rest of the verse in to sort of support our point, but again, everyone believing that Jesus is a

Christ has been born from God, not is being born from God, or future tense, like the promise, will be born of God.

If you will believe that Jesus is a Christ, you'll be born of God. That's what the provisionists believe. That's what they believe.

They don't believe perfect tense. They believe maybe some type of subjunctive or future tense, but not perfect tense.

The natural reading is that you're believing that Jesus is a

Christ because you've been born from God. It's called context.

It's called the book. It's called following things through. That's why provisionists face plant in John 6, or Romans 1, or wherever.

Um, 1 John 5 .4 was thrown in. Um, everyone having been born from God is overcoming the world, and this is the victory overcoming the world, our faith.

Well, that's not parallel at all. Um, yeah, it's got pasapasapan, and it is ectutheu.

I mean, ectutheu is all through 1 John. Um, but the syntax and grammar are not parallel to what we had, uh, before.

Then, um, that's pretty much it.

You've got 1 John 5 .18, um, that has ganao being used, but it's, again, not syntactically parallel.

So, there's, there's the uses of ganao in 1

John. And so, what's the point? Um, the point is that in 1

John, in the context, in John's teaching that ganao is what brings you into relationship with God.

If you've been born from God, you know God. If you've been born from God, you love God. If you've been born from God, you are believing that Jesus is the

Christ. And that's where provisionism can agree with everything up till then, and then, nope, nope, nope, that is the one power that we grant only to the rebel sinner.

You have the autonomous power to believe or not to believe. So, we will not follow the logical course of argument in 1

John, and we will not follow the logical interpretation of this text, and we will actually say that you're demanding that this is a rule that we have to apply everywhere, and I've never said anything.

I interpret Scripture in the light of Scripture, in the context it is found in. Participles were my favorite study in Greek, my favorite thing to teach in Greek, and I am well aware of the rich variety, the complex relationships that exist between different forms of participles, finite verbs, and how people still argue today over the best way of rendering some of those relationships.

I mean, there's been all sorts of fighting and stuff just over the past few decades about that.

So, there you go. Interestingly enough, he renders, he references us to the article that he wrote in the fall of 2014, which had nothing to do with any of this, and completely ignored these questions.

He says, this is especially important because the participle hapistrion is substantival, describing a class of persons, actually, yeah, past hapistrion, everyone believing, not a temporal participle modifying gegeneitai.

I never said that it is. This is a basic point of Greek grammar and syntax, a point that is lost on white.

That's why this man will not debate me, because he knows. He knows. I have said for years,

I'll walk into your classroom with nothing but a Greek text, and he knows he could never do that. He knows that, but he'll take shots like this, completely ignoring what

I was saying. Elsewhere, he says not to lay out a chronology. I've never said laying out a chronology.

What I've said is John's theology of being born from God is so clear that we can know what

John is communicating. You are the one telling people we can't know, and we can.

The simplest believer can read 1 John and go, yeah, that's pretty obvious. I mean, being born from God, that not only is that something

God does, but these are the results. This is the foundation of all the rest of it. This is why you love.

This is why you do works of righteousness. This is how you know God, is you've been born from God. You don't do all these things to get born from God.

And see, this was the dividing line of the Reformation, and provisionism is against the

Reformation, not just against Reformed theology. But if these people had been alive in 1520, when

Luther was writing against Erasmus, they all would have been in Erasmus' camp, every single one of them, every single one of them, every single one of them.

Then, like I said, on page 4, if Weiss's interpretation of verse John 5 -1 was pressed as a universal

Johannine pattern, which I've never said it was, it would contradict these passages which present faith as a means of life, not its consequence, and of course, there again, confusing regeneration with the possession of life.

Well, one leads to the other. Yeah, but you still have to make the distinction. Just like you have to make the distinction between justification and sanctification.

This is the emptiness, the shallowness. Provisionism is this deep.

It's this deep. It's horrible. So, finally, last thing here, linguistic overreach, which is their way of saying, we just don't know.

We can't know what he thinks he can know. It's amazing. I literally have people here who have taught in Southern Baptist seminaries who are saying, we can't actually know what

John meant by being born from God. We can't know what that results in. And everyone who's ever read 1

John is sitting there going, what? What? What?

Okay, so linguistic overreach. White's reading imposes a strict and necessary temporal sequence onto a construction that simply does not carry that nuance in Koine Greek.

Even many Calvinistic Greek scholars acknowledge that 1 John 5 -1 cannot be used decisively to prove regeneration precedes faith because the grammar is descriptive, not temporal.

Descriptive, not temporal. So, listen to what they're saying. This is what you need to hear.

They're trying to make me say it is, what was it here? Decisive. Decisive.

As if it's a Granville Sharp construction. No exception. What is actually being said is that I say the natural reading and understanding in 1

John of being born from God results in all the descriptive phrases that John uses.

If you know he's righteous, then you know that everyone doing righteousness has been born of God. The natural reading of that is,

I know what righteousness is, and therefore those who are working works of righteousness, they've been born from God.

That comes from God. Only God can do that. That's a special work of the

Spirit of God. Exactly. Everyone loving has been born from God. How do

I love my brother? By being born from God.

If you're born from God, you love the brother. Oh, the reason these Gnostics, these

Faults, these Antichrists are not loving the brother is because they've not been born from God.

Right? Right. And so the natural reading of 1

John 5 1 that flows from the text, because all those verses came before, so you can actually just flow with the text.

We know Provisionists don't like that. Provisionists like going all over the text and jumping out of the text and going to other places.

They don't like following the flow of text. No, no, no. But we get to 1 John 5.

Everyone believing that Jesus is the Christ has been born from God. The natural reading is that supernatural act of God has resulted in their ongoing faith in Jesus as the

Christ. You see what this does? John is being apologetic, not apologizing.

He's in defense mode. Why does our community, and man, in the early church, the

Gnostics were huge. This would become one of the greatest threats to the church in the next century.

Why is our community, how is our community to be marked out differently by the work of God causing us to be born of God, resulting in our love of one another, our continuing faith in Jesus as the

Messiah, and our doing works of righteousness, and our walking in the light as he is in the light? This is the message of 1

John. Is that consistent with an understanding that saving faith, ongoing faith, that same kind of ongoing faith you have in the

Gospel of John, like John chapter 6, is the work of the Spirit of God?

Is this the same author who told us that apart from the drawing of the Father, men cannot believe, cannot come?

Yeah, it's completely consistent. The point is, in 1 John, this is the flow of the

Ohanian literature itself in this epistle. And what they failed to do, and what

David Allen will always fail to do, is to demonstrate that my reading is

A, in error, and B, impossible in 1 John. The reality is, it's the most natural reading, and that has only been clarified.

So, I thank you for that. Despite the pseudo -scholarship and everything else, I thank you for the opportunity of clarifying those things today on the program.

All right, he named that from something out of the

Count of Monte Cristo too. Kings to you for none. That 1990s movie, or was it early 2000s,

I don't remember what it was, Count of Monte Cristo, that was really well done. That was, when he said, kings to you for none, that was so good, so well done.

You even know what I'm talking about? I do. Okay, good. You know, it just, it seems to me the argument is so basic here, because it's, you can look at it in another different context and go, you know, if you see somebody doing something, it's because this is who they are.

They're born of God. If you see a guy doing something spiritual, the explanation is, it's because he's born of God.

That's what they say in the paper, and what they're trying to do is to create a distinction saying, well, yes, it's descriptive, they're descriptive phrases, but we can't find out anything temporal.

And it's like, wait a minute, if you see a man, have you ever seen

Parent Trap, the last Parent Trap movie they did? It might have been a really long time.

Where, you know, the one actress played the two little girls? Yes. Okay. What's his face?

Falls into a pool. Steve Martin. I'm sorry? Was it Steve Martin in that? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The different, oh, it was, no, okay.

No, his name's spacing me at the moment. Anyways, he climbs out of the pool and he's just dripping wet, okay?

So, if I see a man in a suit and boots staying next to a pool, dripping wet with water everywhere.

I could describe him as a wet man, but I could not evidently come up with a temporal series of events to explain why how he got so wet.

There you go, there you go. You can only describe him, you can't, you cannot say that he just climbed out of the pool because the grammar doesn't go that far.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's even a simpleton like me can understand this, it's pretty easy, but unless you don't wanna.

Unless you don't wanna, and there are lots of people who don't wanna, don't wanna. Okay, anyway, so there you go.

Went a couple minutes long, but we started an hour before we have been recently, so we got, we got the time to do it.

All right, thanks for watching the program today. I'm looking forward, I'll be honest with you, to the next week or so here in the

Phoenix area, because my weather program says starting Saturday we've got a week's worth, and, and I actually saw some 40s in the lows, and it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Oh no, I said that. Now you're gonna have 47 people calling you, I wanted to meet you on Christmas.

He literally had someone call him last week. Now I have to explain this. This, this is, so I get phone calls, folks.

I get some of the weirdest phone calls. So I don't know what it was with Monday, but there are days every now and then where it's like somebody let the people out of the

Asylum. Must have been a full moon. And so first call is a guy who says he's the world's greatest metaphysician, and somebody told him that we do debates here.

Somehow, in the process of this, the world's greatest metaphysician put two and two together and meant that's debate anything.

And so he calls up and he tells me that he's been calling churches wanting to debate, and they're like, you need to call an apologetics organization.

So he looks up what an apologetics organization is, you know, the world's greatest metaphysician. Anyway, and he sees our name and telephone number, so he calls it, and he asked me,

I understand you do debates here. I'm like, well, yeah, we do. And he says, okay,

I want to debate. So what is it you're asking about?

What is it you're wanting to debate? Well, I'll tell you after you agree. And I will put a million dollars up that I will win this debate.

And I'm like, okay, but wait a minute. What is it that you are so concerned about that needs to be debated here?

What is the subject? But no, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna let you get out in front of me on this. You have to agree first.

So I decide it's not best to continue this phone call, and so I don't.

And a few hours later, a local number, totally different guy, calls me up.

You think these guys must talk amongst one another, you know? They're in the same psych ward. World's greatest metaphysicians.

They stole somebody's cell phone. Yeah. And this guy starts off, I understand you do debates. Oh, boy, here we go again.

And I'm thinking, this does not sound like the same guy. So he wants to—he's gonna tell me what we're gonna debate.

It is he's all upset because Christians celebrate Christmas, and churches have

Christmas trees, and he wants to debate that with me. And I'm like, well, how do you know?

And he interrupts me. And I'm like, but how do you know what my thinking is on this?

It doesn't matter, because I'm on the defense, and he's going to attack it, and we're supposed to debate right now.

And so, you know, he wants to go ten hands around it. And I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna make this very, very clear for you.

I'm not going to debate you on Christmas. And he's like, why not? And I said, because it's stupid.

Thank you. Well, I told you the better line. Yes, you did.

I had time to think about it. Yes. Because when Rich told us in our ministry chat channel that what he said to him,

I said what you should have said. You should have said, because Rudolph told me not to.

Let me tell you something. You do not want to meet an angry red -nosed reindeer in a dark alley.

That's—you're all free to use that, but I would like credit. So that is a short part of a day in my life.

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. All right. Well, okay. All right. Well, that little insight into happenings around Alpha and Omega Ministries.