New Years Thoughts, God's Decree, the Pope and Mary, ET Stalkers

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. At least, I hope we're welcoming you to The Dividing Line. Seems like the network and computer is feeling about as good as I am these days, so that's probably not a good thing.

Both have undergone extensive surgery. Supposed to really improve the one, not the other, but there you go. That's what happens. First Dividing Line of 2017. I noticed that the calendar is down and we haven't replaced them with 2017 calendars yet, but we'll get around to them eventually.

It is a new year and I wanted to have... I have a bunch of pretty heavy stuff. One thing that was sort of on the list I've put off for later in the week because I'm going to have to... Well, I already have put it into audio format and I'm going to have to go through and do some editing as far as picking and choosing stuff because there's important stuff going on.

It really helps to explain why on the popular level you have Andy Stanley saying the things that Andy Stanley is saying and where he's getting his support and where he's getting his perspective at, but we'll be looking at that as time gives us opportunity.

But I wanted to start before we get into some of the heavy-duty stuff concerning God's sovereign decree today and topics related thereto and a little bit of textual critical issues and things like that.

The type of stuff that makes our folks excited to be with the dividing line. I was asked a question on Twitter last week, I think shortly after I got home, and it's interesting how sometimes someone just asking a question makes you sit back and look at a text and go, hmm, I haven't really thought through this one before or preached through this one before.

I suppose that's why it's such an incredible thing, what John MacArthur has done in preaching through the whole New Testament. If you've got to preach at all, it's sort of to dodge anything and sort of hard to miss anything.

2 Peter and the Christian Hope of a New Heaven and New Earth

But in 2 Peter, and 2 Peter gets a bad rap, in most seminaries, Bible colleges that you would go to today, 2 Peter is going to be dismissed as a late forgery, all because people will not accept the rather obvious reality of the fact that Peter himself mentions the use of an amanuensis, a scribe, and clearly there is a very different style between 1 and 2 Peter.

As a result, then the assumption is, well, 2 Peter and Jude, they're obviously closely related, they're a later point in history, etc., etc. As a result, there tends to be a diminishment of emphasis upon such books and a diminishment of their authority.

Maybe that's why you don't hear a whole lot of preaching on the subject, but it is interesting. In 2 Peter 3 .13, well, before this, you've had a discussion of the judgment, but the day of the Lord will come like a thief in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat and the earth and its works will be burned up.

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness? It's fairly rare to hear that kind of connection being made. Because of the severity of judgment, what kind of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness?

Looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning and the elements will melt with intense heat. In other words, it's similar to, I've seen a lot of people and we're going to mention someone here in a second, saying that, well, God's will isn't done on earth.

We are to pray that God's will would be done on earth, but it's not done on earth. It's only done in heaven. Missing the idea that the desire of the Christian is for God's prescriptive will to be done on earth.

It's not that God's will, his decretive will, is not done. He plainly states that he does whatever pleases him and the heavens and earth. I mean, you can't get past the 33rd Psalm. It's just right there, but people ignore these things and skip over them and things like that.

But when we, as believers, do live out the kingdom, when we are obedient, when we desire to be obedient, we do the prescriptive will of God, when we seek to be peacemakers, when we seek to live in holiness, then we are hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning and the elements will melt with intense heat.

But according to his promise, we are looking for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. And so there is a promise, verse 13, that we are looking for. And as I've thought of 2017, 2016 sort of ended on a whimper for me.

It's been a rough year for a lot of folks. And it certainly looks like it's going to be a very challenging year. There's going to be a lot of opportunities, a lot of tremendous opportunities, but a lot of opposition as well.

There's no question about that. And you may have heard sermons this weekend about what kind of resolutions you're to make. And we all know those last for a couple of weeks, and then we sort of forget about it after that.

But there's a description here of what kind of people we as Christians are to be. And we're to be looking for certain things. We are looking for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

And I wonder how much any one of us really had that as a high level of priority as we thought about 2017. How much do we value the promise of God that there will be a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells?

There will be no injustice. There will be no wrong. There will be an eternal state. An eternal state will be ushered in where righteousness, which is the foundation of God's throne, dwells. It's not just the rare thing to see it happen.

It is the normative thing. It's a new heavens and a new earth. A lot of us have been told, well, you're too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. But there is to be a looking forward and a desire for these things.

There's no question that this is part of the Christian hope. And that's the context then for the primary verse that I was asked about. Verse 14 of chapter 3, therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by him in peace, spotless and blameless.

I actually rendered that, therefore, beloved, since you are looking forward to these things, the day of God's judgment, new heavens and new earth, make every effort to be found by him living in peace, spotless and blameless.

And the question that had been asked that brought my attention to this text was, what does this mean, peace? And I think the individual probably had the issue of peace as in the peace that is provided by Christ, the imputed righteousness of Christ, and issues like that in mind, and saw a contradiction between the idea that it's Christ that establishes peace for his people, and then this idea, make every effort to be found by him in peace.

I put in the word living because I think that's in light of the form of in peace and what's being said, that that's probably the best way to understand what's being said. There is no contradiction. The reality of our relationship with God is established by what Christ has done.

This is the God-centeredness of the gospel. This is what he is accomplishing. This is what his purpose is. But there is a result in our lives, and we are given a tremendous amount, if we're willing to hear it and to listen, we're given a tremendous amount of guidance as to what our lives are to look like.

And here, the statement is made, since you're looking forward to these things, so since it is to be the mindset of the believer to be looking forward to the fact that there will be a day of judgment, someday God is going to set everything right.

There's going to be a new heavens and a new earth. There's going to be a fulfillment of all of God's promises. Sometimes we lose sight of those things. Sometimes those things are not forefront in our thinking, and they need to be.

The result of that is that we are to make every effort to be diligent, is another one of the translations, make every effort to be found by him. So in other words, when these things happen, and we are to live as believers in this state of readiness, I mean, Jesus' own parable of the virgins, the wise and the foolish virgins, this is to be something that every generation of believers, we live in this readiness.

And so we want to be ready to be found by him. It's not just something that's down the way. Any one of us, we so often get inside of a multi-thousand pound vehicle and go hurtling down the road. And we just take it for granted that we're going to get where we're going to with safety.

Don't even give it a second thought. But we know that's not the case. And we could be standing before our Lord in judgment at any moment. And so whether it is in his coming or in our encountering him, in our coming to be with him, we are to make every effort to be found by him, living in peace, spotless and blameless.

And so once again, as we think about the New Year, which is obviously an extremely subjective thing, there have been many cultures that began the New Year at another point in time, for example. There's nothing special about January 1st, but God has put eternity in our hearts.

And the scriptures do tell us to count the days, to consider the seasons in the sense of recognize the passage of time. I mean, God provides us, especially as we age, with lots of reminders that eternity is right around the corner.

We spend a lot of time and money trying to ignore those things, but that's the way we've been made. And so we should be people, sober-minded people that recognize our time on earth is limited and therefore make every effort to be found by him living in peace.

Now, we live in a, you know, the scripture itself uses the example of warfare, spiritual warfare, fighting the good fight, agonizing for the once for all delivered to the saints faith. These are all right there in scripture.

So how do you balance that with something that says that we are to be found, to make every effort to be found by him living in peace? I think maybe this audience especially needs to consider that. Many of you are very apologetically minded and there's everything good about wanting to defend the purity of the gospel and refute falsehood and expose the unfruitful works of darkness and obey all of those scriptural commands.

But there is a danger in apologetics. There is a danger of imbalance in apologetics. There's no question about that. And if your experience of apologetics leads you to a life that cannot be described as one of peace, then maybe you have the wrong motivations and maybe it's not something you should be involved with.

Not in the sense of disobeying the commandments of scripture to be to give a reason, all the rest of that type of stuff, but in the sense of actually seeking out opportunities of apologetic interaction and things like that.

I've seen, we've all seen people burned out. I can think of people who barely over a decade ago were involved in apologetics, had a position of even leadership, and yet today, I can think of at least one person who doesn't even name the name of Christ today.

And there are a lot of reasons for that, but here at the beginning of this year, knowing the amount of warfare and opposition heading my direction, my attention was caught by what does it mean to be found by Him living in peace?

And given all the conflict in all of our lives, it's going to look a little bit different depending on who you are, what your calling is, but there has to be an overarching understanding of the peace we have with God, the peace we have because of the perfection of the work of Christ.

Just as we are to experience joy even in the midst of tribulation, we are to experience the peace of God even in the midst of tribulation as well and warfare and battle. It's that balance thing again.

It's that finding the proper biblical balance, scriptural balance, spiritual balance, and it's that type of thing that honestly you don't get it by going off on some weekend retreat, experiencing some spiritual high, and then I've got it.

This is a daily type thing. This is that everyday discipline and grind that so many of us, if we're really honest with ourselves, we lose that battle. We're apathetic. We look at others and go, well, I'm doing better than that guy is, so hey.

And it is truly, I think, a mark of Christian maturity to have the daily discipline to be able to seek this kind of balance and seek this kind of peace, peace with God, and that peace then will flow outward to those around us.

We should be peacemakers, and you go, well, you're the last one to say that. Well, it depends on what you think a peacemaker is. I'm thinking of one particular individual who I will not name, and as far as I know in this individual's experience in apologetics, in all the decades that I've known of this individual, I don't believe that this person has been in the same church for more than two years, maybe three, and in almost every situation, this individual has brought about a church split, a split in that fellowship.

I can't imagine that as a legacy. I don't care what you've written, done. I don't care how powerful you are as a speaker. If you bring a lack of peace, if you bring warfare into the fellowship wherever you are, what does that say?

What does that say? If you're going to be at warfare with others, make sure it's either because you are opposing someone who is actively seeking to overthrow the truth or because they are the ones attacking you for standing for the truth, but don't let it be simply because of your ego, your pride, your tribalism.

This is my area, and so I've got my little niche over here, and don't you dare come into this area. There are reasons to be in battle, but I think any true Christian who understands the full breadth of the exhortation of scripture should be a person who seeks, even in the midst of the battle to which we are called, to be at peace in the way this text speaks of it, living in peace, in peace with God, in peace with those in our lives that have been placed there, and trusting solely and completely in Him, not in anything that we can do or ever would do.

So if you really want to have, I think, a verse that can give some guidance and some direction here at the beginning of the year, this one certainly struck me because I really had to think, how much am I looking forward to the day of God's judgment, the new heavens and new earth, and do I see any meaningful connection between that desire to see God's perfect will being done and how I live?

There is a connection in scripture. I think one of the greatest failings of evangelicalism in general in the compartmentalization of Christian theology is these intimate and important connections are often lost, not emphasized, not understood.

So I wanted to start off with 2 Peter 3 .14. Maybe it might be a verse you might want to consider to commit to memory. It certainly would be a good one to do along those lines. I saw an article, I think, it might have even been earlier today, I've just been hit with a bunch of these things, even as the program was beginning, someone in channel linked to a YouTube video, and it was a, I think someone said had 10 views, 5 of them from the chat channel, but it was some guy, I'm not going to give advertising for him, I didn't really understand what was going on, but challenging me to debate, there's a lot of those folks, on the subject of God's sovereign decree.

And I didn't get far enough into it to figure out exactly what his views are, but I think it was this morning that I was linked to a baptistnews .com article. Lots of interesting people have written on the subject of theodicy and the issue of God's sovereignty, and of course the term Baptist, unfortunately without some kind of descriptor, can mean almost anything.

I mean, American Baptist is almost always wildly liberal, would have no more to do with me and my beliefs than, you know, liberal PCUSA or ELCA or the left-wingers in the United Methodist Church or whatever.

A fellow by the name of E. Frank Tupper, Distinguished Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, he's written a book called A Scandalous Providence, The Jesus Story of the Compassion of God, and evidently even taught at Southern Seminary at one point, I'm sure it was before the Mueller period.

Okay, I'm not going to say I'm sure, I'm just assuming that. He says, I must admit that to challenge the traditional understanding of providence in my personal context teaching in a Baptist seminary meant that I was going to experience significant opposition, he said.

The two leading lines for interpreting providence was, quote, well, we didn't understand why this had happened, end quote, or quote, this is in some sense the will of God and we must accept it, end quote.

I rejected both of those ideas. His academic resolve grew even stronger, he said, in the crucible of his wife's two-year battle with terminal cancer, leaving behind two small children. Quote, Betty Tupper's experience of suffering with cancer and dying and the enormous impact it had on our family gave me the courage to say I'm going to write and interpret providence in a way, listen to this now, that is consistent with my understanding and my faith and I'm going to accept the challenges and opposition that I experience, end quote, Tupper said.

Tupper's study and experience led him to reject platitudes on suffering such as God is in control or everything happens for a reason. Now, he says, I do not believe that God is in control of everything that happens in our world, he said.

Indeed, I would argue that God controls very, very little of what happens in our world. Now, needless to say, there was nothing of scripture in the article, but the point is that here is a, quote unquote, Baptist theologian, and again, that means nothing.

Baptist theologian doesn't mean anything. The term Baptist simply has to do with how you view baptism, it doesn't really tell you much. In fact, it's interesting, most of the denominational designators that we have don't actually tell you much about the actual theology.

If you don't have a statement of faith, and there could be nothing more different as far as a statement of faith is concerned than London Baptist Confession versus something like Tupper's personal theodicy, what he has come to understand.

Again, there's a tremendous danger for we as little creatures, and that's what we are. We are little creatures. How many times does the scripture tell us we live, but for a short period of time? We are like the mist, a vapor, the leaf on the plant that sprouts and is gone.

We've all seen these things. They are excellent examples given to us by God to try to help us to understand that the most intelligent, the most, with the highest IQ and the greatest experience of mankind knows but a tiny fraction of what is knowable in his or her lifetime, and that in and of itself is but a tiny, tiny little portion of what God knows.

In other words, if we really understand who God is and we understand who we are, then we will be in the proper position to make appropriate decisions, and that decision will always be to trust God rather than ourselves, and yet that's not what mankind does.

We stand on our hind two legs, and we put God in the place of being judged, and we tell him that he's messed up and he's done things wrong, and yeah, his word may say X, Y, or Z, but I'm just not going to concern myself about that.

That's not as important as my understanding of these things. And so we have the human perspective. Now, for many years, it's weird why I have become known for somehow originating this or something. I certainly did not, but I have very clearly defended what I believe to be the biblical teaching that God is sovereign over all things, all things, that God's sovereignty is not a mere hypothetical, that God could have done it some other way but he didn't, that a statement like God is so sovereign that he sovereignly chosen to let man control all things, that's a ridiculous statement.

It vitiates, it disembowels the meaning of the term the sovereignty, the free, the kingly freedom of God. I've used that term to try to get past the abuse and misuse of so many people who will say they believe in the sovereignty of God and then immediately turn around and judge him on a human basis, limit him to the human sphere, basically just demonstrate they really don't understand what the sovereignty of God is in the first place.

I didn't originate any of these things. I've originated nothing. I have here a little old book, and in fact, I went ahead just to make my Presbyterian friends happy, I grabbed the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it's the full book, man.

It's not just, this is not just a little pamphlet type thing. So just so that people understand, I'm not making this stuff up on my own. Chapter 3, paragraph 1, God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

Now, these words were written centuries before I took my first breath. I didn't come up with them. I've been willing in public situations to defend them, but I didn't come up with them. I'm just standing in a very long line of people who are absolutely convinced that the testimony of Scripture cannot be dismissed, that it makes no sense to believe in prophecy, it makes no sense to believe in the plain statements of Scripture.

Without accepting these words, they are a truthful and faithful representation of what Scripture states. God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

Yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. Now, obviously, there had been a lot of conversation and discussion about what the sovereignty of God means and what God's decree means in relationship to man because the confession of faith immediately starts using all sorts of words that clearly had been involved in this conversation for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who are now talking about these things or making videos about these things don't bother with those conversations. Yeah, just too deep, the books they're written in are old and they're tough to read.

But part of that decree does involve, for example, paragraph three, by the decree of God for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life and others foreordained to everlasting death.

So, the number of the elect, the identity of the elect is a part of that, but that's just part of the greater reality that God has a sovereign decree that he is working out. I didn't make it up. And obviously, if I'm going to defend it, I'm going defend it biblically, and I have yet to see anyone mount much of a meaningful attack upon the decree of God outside of seeking to question whether there is a consistent biblical doctrine that could even be determined regarding God's knowledge, activities, decrees, or anything like that.

In other words, if you want to chop the Bible up into parts and not listen to what it says, then okay. But as far as people who aren't willing to do that, I've not seen a meaningful attack upon this truth.

I mean, you've got your open theists way out in the boonies someplace, and then you've got your simple foreknowledge folks, and you've got your different views. But once you abandon the highest view of scripture, there's no reason to believe what I believe.

If you don't have the highest view of scripture, just when it comes to Trinity, the atonement, everything else, there's no reason to. Once you abandon the highest view of scripture, then it's just, it's everybody's on his own at that point.

Here's a graphic. I think you should have it. That I saw this week, and it's from Kerrigan Skelly. Some of you may remember the name. We refuted his comments, one of his videos on John 6. We might have done some others too.

It wasn't, to be perfectly honest with you, with all due respect, difficult to do. As far as being an exegete or handling the text of scripture, Mr. Skelly is very poor. But he decided to pop back in.

And of course, I find this grossly offensive. But again, it's helpful to understand what's being said out there. And it just seemed to be a bunch of this all at the same time. And that's why I mentioned it.

But if you blow it up, it says, now listen, honey, I know you're upset that nasty man raped you. But Uncle James says, God made him do it to give it meaning. And the pretty little girl says, really, mommy, I feel so much better now.

And this goes back, of course, to the Bryson abomination from a few years ago, where George Bryson just made things up on the fly. And we, again, documented it very clearly. Things in the internet. The internet has no immune system.

And so infections just fester and lies just have a life of their own in the internet. But I wanted you to see where Kerrigan Skelly, once again, demonstrates a cavalier attitude toward the truth, or in other words, is dishonest.

Uncle James says, God made him do it to give it meaning. Now, anyone who has the slightest understanding of not only the historical position expressed by Westminster Confession or by the London Baptist Confession of Faith says the same thing, or has a scintilla of honesty and wanting to represent what I say accurately would never say that because it demonstrates either dishonesty or ignorance or the worst combination both put together.

A cavalier attitude toward the truth. First of all, God made him do it. For decades, I have pointed out the reality that when Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, these were not brothers who loved him and cared for him, but were forced to do something against their nature and against their desires by God.

The reality is they wanted to kill him. And God restrained their evil. And so, the idea can never be, never has been, and it is a lie on Mr. Kerrigan Skelly's part to say that God made him do it as if he didn't want to, as if he lacked the desire.

There is no morally neutral individual where the big evil God has his big theological gun out and he says, you do it. I don't care if you want to or not. This is a straw man. It is reprehensible. It is destructive of anyone's credibility who utilizes such argumentation.

God did not make him do it. And then notice the second error. I mean, it takes a fair amount of talent to cram so many errors into a single sentence. That's actually a sort of difficult thing to do, but Mr. Skelly managed to pull it off.

To give it meaning. See at the end there, God made him do it to give it meaning as if it, the evil action, exists just out there on its own and God wants to give meaning to it. Now, this is just a further demonstration of the fact that individuals like Kerrigan Skelly and others, George Bryson, they don't hear what we're saying.

They don't want to hear what we're saying. They're not interested in having an accurate knowledge of what it is we're saying. And that's why they don't provide meaningfully significant criticisms in their videos or books, whatever else it might be.

We don't believe that acts of evil just exist out there someplace and that God is running around trying to fill them with meaning. What I have said and what people take such offense at is I've dared to put the shoe on the other foot and to challenge someone to recognize that if they take the position that God does not have a sovereign decree, that when he, now again, very, very rarely do they put themselves out there and try to present a consistent, meaningful perspective on their own.

They're happy to attack Calvinism because Calvinism wants to try to honor God's truth by saying, here's how it fits together. Very often, they don't want to positively make a statement as to exactly what their position is.

That's why you can listen to some of these folks and they'll flip-flop between Molinism and open theism and simple foreknowledge and all these different things because they really don't have any coherent perspective and don't think that it's really relevant that they should have one to begin with.

But assuming, and I've forgotten now, now something, there's a little bell going off. Is he an open theist? There was something about his theology when we did the response to him. And I suppose I have to leave that option open.

I was, last night I was watching Mike Licona saying he's not an open theist, but then saying, but they've got some great arguments. They might be right type of thing. I don't recall. Maybe somebody will mention in channel or something like that.

If someone else remembers, if Algo is around, Algo will remember anything about. I know he's Pelagian, but I'm not sure exactly what his doctrine of the knowledge of God is. But again, anyone who wants to take the Bible seriously has to deal with the reality of God's foreknowledge and has to answer the question, is that foreknowledge falsifiable?

In other words, can God have false knowledge of future events? If he cannot have false knowledge of future events, then the future is fixed. God's knowledge of it is perfect and man cannot do anything other than what God already knows he's going to do.

And so the question then becomes, well, who determined that? Because if God doesn't determine that, then God passively takes in knowledge. He creates, and then he takes in knowledge of what happens. And so you can't glorify God for having accomplished his purposes because he didn't accomplish any purposes.

He checked the cosmic dice, came up snake eyes, worship me. That's not a reason for worshiping. And so you just have to ask the question. And of course, they want to use the most emotionally laden possibility out there, as in this little graphic, beautiful little girl.

A terrible, horrible action, which unfortunately takes place. We think of the sex trade, and I wish I had the name. Maybe someone, well, no, it's middle of the night in New Zealand, I imagine, but I listened to a presentation while I was down in Wellington from a man that's involved in a ministry that gets people out of the sex trade.

It was great. It was really neat to hear the stories of what they've been able to do. These types of things happen. And if you're a Christian, you have to deal with that reality. And you're going to have to either deal with that reality based upon what scripture reveals, or you're going to subjugate scripture to your own personal experience.

We saw Tupper subjugating scripture to his personal experience. I'm going to create a view of God that is amenable to me and my personal experience. That happens. That happens. In this situation, you have to ask the question, if something terrible like this happened, when God created, did he know it was going to take place?

And if he did, then what was his purpose in creating a world in which something terrible like that would happen? I am saying, the Westminster Confession of Faith is saying, the Bible is saying in Genesis 50 and Isaiah 10 and Acts 4, that God has a purpose.

We may not know what that purpose is in this life, but that there is no such thing as purposeless evil. The other side that they don't want to admit, they don't want to bring into these graphics, is that they believe in a God who either didn't know this was coming.

He created all of the possibilities. He created all of the things necessary for this type of evil to happen, but he didn't see it coming. He was too dumb to see it coming, or just not smart enough to run the numbers, or he just didn't care, or he saw it coming, knew with certainty it was going to happen, and had no purpose in it.

Well, it just happens. C 'est la vie. And what these people don't realize is that while they are muddling the minds of individuals with emotion, in the process what they're doing is they are promoting an idea that this universe exists, and while God created it, there's all sorts of stuff happening in it.

It's either beyond his control, beyond his care, or yeah, he knew it was going to happen, but it has no purpose, or you have to default to the Molinistic explanation. Well, got to play the cards you've been dealt.

Best God could do. Sorry about that, but we can have assurance that there were other worlds even worse. There's the Molinistic encouragement, comfort. The Molinistic comfort. Could have been worse. This is the best one.

So in light of that, let me see if I can find... I have a number of these up, and so let me see. Trying to... Ah, there it is. The names of these are not overly descriptive. And there. All right. Should have one there.

Got one? I think this was last night or this morning. Dr. Rick Patrick. I don't know why that's all blown up. I'm not sending it to you that way. Dr. Rick Patrick, who became real well known a few weeks ago when he spoke at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and did the promotion for Gannett 316, basically, one of the anti-Calvinist leaders in the SBC.

And he tweeted, tweeted or Facebooked, I'm not sure which. Well, it's not what I'm sending, so I don't know. Don't know what else to say. This thing has just not worked very well since we've changed things at all.

Maybe we need to look for something else. I just reset everything on it, so it should be coming to you. But anyways, he sends this thing out, says, Calvinism's Decretive Theology implies a certain kind of divine lottery in which every man must ultimately hope that his number has been drawn by God.

There it is. Before the foundation of the world. And then you've got the graphic, Calvinism, may the odds be ever in your favor. Now, I personally don't get it. Sorry. I don't know who the chick is. I don't get it.

But Calvinism's Decretive Theology, so evidently, Dr. Patrick doesn't have a Decretive Theology, doesn't have decree, implies a certain kind of divine lottery in which every man must ultimately hope that his number has been drawn by God before the foundation of the world.

So again, how do you interact with something like this? Well, ultimate beings don't use lotteries. According to Ephesians 1, the ground and the basis of God's choice in regards to the elect is his own good will, not his lottery will.

That's the basis. If you want to say that God's good will, his eudachia, is like a lottery just because it's based upon what pleases him rather than what's found in the creature. Because see, what the traditionalist synergist wants is these things must be found in the creature.

The reason for my salvation must be found in me, not in God. That's what they have to have. That's the only way that you can service the idol of man's free will, that great free will. And so someone's telling me the picture was a reference to the Hunger Games.

Well, that would completely leave me out of it since I don't know anything about those books, movies, or anything else, not seen any of them, nothing. So there you go. The woman is from the Hunger Games and is a quote by her character in the movie.

Yes, I know I'm FAS. I have no idea. Okay. So there you go. That's what it's from. Little did I know. Anyway, so the description of God's eudachia, his own will, to the praise of his glorious grace, to turn that into something called a lottery, something that has no purpose.

You see, God chose his people as a part of his self-glorification, which means he chose us and he uses us in such a way as to bring about his own self-glorification. There's nothing special about us.