KJB Fundy Numerology, Flowers’ Unwanted Child, RNS Opinion Piece on Cone

Well, greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. On a Monday, we're doing two programs. We're going to do an early morning program tomorrow morning.

And I mean early morning for us, 8 .30, it's 10 .30 Eastern time because, well, we fly to Atlanta on Wednesday and we'll be at G3 on Wednesday.

Well, I guess not really at G3 Wednesday evening, but I'm planning on meeting up with somebody.

But then Thursday and then Friday morning, Rich is going to be there through Friday and into Saturday, I think.

But then I'm heading up to New Hyde Park Baptist Church on Long Island and we'll be speaking there over the weekend and then coming back on Monday.

So we're going to try to sneak two programs in on this week. And before I get into anything, we've had some folks asking questions about what

I mentioned about the cruise. I've actually had a lot of people. I had one fellow last night telling me that he's really hoping to be able to make it and that he would be using it as a honeymoon type thing.

And I'm like, that's a tough honeymoon, but it's definitely a once in a lifetime.

But we've had people asking about the pre -conference activities in Rome, the two days beforehand.

I guess we'll have some graphics or some information about that coming up at some point. Yeah. I called this morning.

The two days is considered an excursion. So it's not something that is necessarily up against the deadline at the end of the month for the cruise itself.

That's the concern where people are feeling like they need to get in on that in a big hurry. So it's a separate item.

Obviously, accommodations and other things will have to be taken into consideration. It's not the cheapest place on the planet.

And by the way, the one place in the world where McDonald's tastes different than anywhere else in the world, and it's not a good difference.

Just thought I'd warn people. I have nothing to say to that whatsoever. Anyway, so we're going to get some graphics there in the midst of getting the web page just for the excursion set up still.

And this will be part of that. And so folks who've been calling and emailing and calling and emailing and texting and sending me private messages.

And calling and emailing. Yes, and calling and emailing. Just hang in there. The mechanisms to be able to access that, find out how much it's actually going to cost, when it's going to be.

Well, obviously, though, people, I mean, we'll have friends and supporters coming from Europe.

Right. It'd be a little bit easier for them to handle this. But people who are making a decision about the cruise and are looking at that, that's an issue.

They need to know dates and stuff like that. I get it. But yeah, it'll be two amazing days there in Rome.

Like I said, the biggest disappointment to me is McDonald's does not taste the same in Italy.

It's Ukraine, Russia, South Africa, Australia, wherever you go, but not

Italy. It has to do with the ketchup. In fact, in Italy, they don't even have ketchup.

So, and if you ask for it, it tastes really weird. We both know about New York and mustard too.

Right, right. That's the other thing. Yeah. I just think that McDonald's should be the same everywhere.

I just, by legislation. Not everybody does everything anymore.

By legislation. Okay. Got some serious things to talk about, but I didn't want to do this later in the program because we do have serious things to talk about.

And I don't take this very seriously. I don't think anybody can, but for some reason it is a part of the

Lord's allotment of my life that I get to deal with King James only -ism. Maybe you all remember last year sometime, this, uh, this video popped up and it's, it's less than a minute long, but it's, it's crazy loony,

Gene Kim and crazy loony is actually what, um, Steven Anderson calls himself when

Steven Anderson. Well, okay. Um, anyway, but it's Gene Kim and he's preaching at somebody's church conference.

I don't know, but watch the guy in the bottom left corner.

So he's up on the stage. His name's Andrew Sluder. And wasn't that sweet home,

Alabama. What weren't they? The Sluder's too. The, the, her dad, her, her daddy was always, you know, in the

Confederate uniform surrendering or something. I was that Sluder. I'm not sure.

Anyway, uh, this is Andrew Sluder down here and watch what he's doing.

He'll be waving his Bible around and it's because Gene Kim's on fire.

See, and so he's fanning the flames. And so most of us are watching Gene Kim, especially the last thing he does when he comes up to the camera and goes, and does this,

I don't know. Um, but keep an eye on Andrew Sluder because we're going to be listening to Andrew Sluder for a few minutes.

So I just wanted to play this just so you give a, you know, have an idea of, uh, what, what he's all about.

He's on fire tonight. He's on fire tonight. Those of you who had your finger at us and called us Rotmanites and idolaters, you will one day bow the knee and you will confess

Jesus is Lord and say, I am wrong. James White will have to confess because every

Tom has to confess all at Romans 14 of all their account. And James White is going to have to say this.

The original Greek is garbage. Read on the

King James Bible, son. James White will have to go to Cal Ripley, William Grady and Peter Ruffin and say,

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Okay. So there's right there is, is, uh,

Andrew Sluder. So, um, yeah, uh, there we've, we've got that.

Um, so I saw this, um, pop up. So I grabbed a hold of it out of, uh, uh, it's not a really good recording, but I, I, cause

I had to grab it out of Twitter. Um, but here is

Andrew Sluder, I guess in his own church or some, I don't know. I don't know where it was recorded at.

Uh, but he's, um, he's, he's talking about amazing things in the

King James Bible. And so let's just, let's just listen to and this is why

I'm doing this aside from the entertainment value. Um, when you teach people this kind of stuff and it's all based on circular reasoning and ignorance of history, you're setting them up.

So some kid raised in a church like this that eventually goes out in the world and encounters almost anything, let alone a

Bart Ehrman type. They're absolutely defenseless.

I mean, just they got nothing. Uh, if this is the stuff they've been taught, this stuff they've been taught.

So, yeah, um, and that's going to come up a little bit later on with some of the other stuff we're going to be looking at.

But, um, so here's, here's Andrew Sluder and this is obviously someone has edited to make this move quickly because I'm sure it moved very, very slowly.

But here we go. Psalms 118 and verse 8.

Psalms 118 and verse 8. The Bible says it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.

You know what that verse is? Psalms 118, that is the middle verse of the entire Bible. Boy, count the number of words in that verse.

Okay, I'm not going to be able to remember all this. So I guess I need to, I guess I need to um, uh, it's

Psalm 118, verse 8. Not Psalms 118. Um, you don't turn to hymns 118, you turn to hymn 118.

And so you go to Psalm 118. Um, you can just I know some

Bible programs were written by people who didn't know that and so it spits it out wrong but it's still

Psalm 118. Um, and of course the chapters were introduced during the medieval period, late medieval period and the verses, at least in the

New Testament in 1551 um, so as anybody knows the number of verses is not a, unless you're actually going to say that there is post inspirational inspiration so if you're going to make

Robert Estienne in the New Testament and since he says middle of the whole Bible then you would have to be including

Robert Estienne's insertion of verses in 1551 in the New Testament. Um, is that revelation that takes place 1500 years after the closing of the apostolic period or 1400 years?

Um, obviously there are many places where it's very apparent that the verse division was arbitrary.

Okay, you've got some verses that are very very long, some verses that are very very short. Um, there is really no great consistency uh, in the division of verses.

So the point is, it's a human addition to the text of Scripture. It is not to be attributed to the work of the

Spirit of God or um, it is not Theanostos it is not Revelation, so all the adding up of verses you know, it was right around 1998, somewhere around there

I think. Some time in the 1990s there was the big biblical numerology stuff, the

Bible Code stuff. Remember the Bible Code stuff? And there were books being sold and all sorts of stuff like this.

And I remember we had a friend on like in the PhytoNet or something like that and she got into all this

Bible Code stuff and just turned against us and you know, just got really into that Bible Code stuff. Anyway, um, so it comes and goes and people sell books and then they disappear and stuff like that.

But it's, if you know anything about the history of the Bible, then just remember both the number of chapters and verses.

And by the way, there's Quran codes too. Shabir Ali still promotes them. That amazes me.

Just totally amazes me. It does not make a lick of sense um, why

Shabir would take the positions he does on other issues and then would promote Quran codes. Um, the number 19 or whatever else it might be.

Um, you can do this with any book as long as you're willing to be inconsistent in how you're handling stuff.

You can, you can find stuff anywhere. Um, so this idea that this is the middle verse of the

Bible, well if the horse that Robert Estienne was riding one day while working on First Thessalonians uh, happened to jerk at the wrong time, something other than Psalm 118 would be the middle verse of the

Bible. So, it is again, if you teach this to your children, then you send them off to university.

Um, there's plenty of people sitting around just waiting to tear that to shreds. And appropriately so.

Appropriately so. The middle verse of the Bible. How many are in there? Fourteen.

Alright, that's right. Fourteen. Okay, so now you're counting the number of words in the middle verse of the

Bible in the King James version, but not even the 1611 King James version. Nobody sitting out there is using a 1611, they're using a 1769

Blaney. The 1769 Blaney revision has differences from the 1611.

Okay, so you're not, and the 1611's going to come up here. The numbers are going to come up here.

So, but you're counting English words. Are you counting, why not count the

Hebrew words? Because that's what was written by the psalmist, right? There are only five in this verse. There are only five

Hebrew words. Now, if you wanted to, you know, take off the pronominals and stuff like that, the prefix prepositions, um, prefix prepositions, whatever, count them as separate, but there's five functional words in the verse translated into 14

English words. So that's what he's talking about now, is he's having people sit there and they're counting up words in their

English Bibles. But it has to be the 1769 Blaney revision. And is it the

Oxford or the Cambridge? Because that can change things too. Um, yeah. So guess what the two middle words are in the middle verse of the

Bible? The Lord. That's not even the coolest part.

How many words are on this side of the Lord? And how many words are on this side of the Lord? Six. Six on this side, six on this side, 66.

How many books in the Bible are they? 66. Now, again, why make one six a 60 and the other six just a single six?

Why not add them together and come up with the 12 apostles? Six plus six is 12. But 66 books in the

Bible as we count them, the Jews didn't count them that way. The minor prophets were considered one book.

They counted 22 or 24, depending on what they did with Lamentations and Daniel and stuff like that.

But the whole 66 thing is a modern...

To take a six and a six and put them together and it's 66, again, people can do this with the

Book of Mormon, they can do this with the Quran, they can do this with anything, because there's no connection to reality in what it is that you're talking about.

The middle verse of the Bible, the middle words are the Lord, and on this side are six words, this side are six words, that's 66.

Listen, don't tell me a man wrote that book. Are you kidding me? So, the supernatural character of the

Bible is demonstrated by the Lord being the middle two words in an

English translation in one version of the English translation from 1500 years after the time of the original writing in a language that didn't exist during the time of the

Apostles and Prophets. And that proves that the Bible is inspired. How do you even respond to something like that?

It's just so foolish. So, the greatest chapter on the Bible, in the

Bible, is Psalms 119. Everybody follow me? So, how many verses are in Psalms 119?

176. And why are there 176? There are 176 because those that divided the 119th

Psalm up realized it was an acrostic poem. And it's an acrostic poem based upon the

Hebrew alphabet. So, if you look at if you look at the

Hebrew and I wasn't planning on doing this, but why not?

Oh, I haven't moved that in this one here. Oh, great. Great. Oh, well, it might work.

Psalm 119. So, if you look at the Hebrew right here, and I'll let me close this and get this a little bit bigger.

There we go. So, you'll notice it starts off Aleph, Aleph, Aleph, Aleph, all the way down to here.

And then what happens in verse 9? Beit, Beit, Beit. So, you go down past the

Beit and you get to the Gimels and there's the Gimels and every verse starts at the

Gimel. And so, then you get down past the Gimels and there's your Dalet and so on and so forth.

And so, it is an acrostic poem. And so, it's really easy to divide it up based upon the number of the

Hebrew alphabet. And that's why you have the number of verses that you have.

And at least in this instance, they broke it up properly because those doing it recognized the nature of the underlying original language, which is the important part of that.

So, anyway. What are you holding in your lap? The authorized

King James Bible. When was the King James Bible written? Huh?

1611. No, it wasn't. It was translated by groups of scholars between 1604 and 1611.

It took them a number of years. But a number of these texts would have been translated long before 1611.

The vast majority were translated long before 1611. So, it was published in 1611, but there was a process that brought that about in the year 1611.

Guess what 16 times 11 equals? Who cares?

What does that matter? 16 is the century. 11 is the years in the century.

There's no relevance. Why didn't you multiply 1 times 6 times 1 times 1?

That's just 6. How about 161 times 1?

611 times 1? It's just...

176. How many verses were in Psalms 119? What's 16 times 11?

When was your King James Bible written? No. 1611.

Coincidence? Listen, if you want to think that's coincidence, that's fine. There's just a whole lot of coincidences in your King James Bible.

Listen, I didn't get this overnight. You just got to read, read, read. Start in Genesis. That's how much

I think about it. Start in Genesis. Go to Revelation.

Yeah, that's what you got to do. You just got to read, read. Got to do a lot of studying. Got to do a lot of studying to come up with this.

I'm sorry, folks. By the way, as the person who does math around here,

I just want to let it be known that 6 plus 6 is still just 12. Right, right.

It's not 66. Just 12. That's all. It's 12. Now, if you want to take 12 and 12 times 12, you get 144 and then put some decimal points on it.

You could come up with 144 ,000 and who knows where that could go. But 6 plus 6 is still 12.

There's much you can do. Much you can do. Many books to write. But on the serious side, like I said, is it really all that difficult to understand why you send kids off from a church like that if that's all they've ever known?

Defenseless. Absolutely defenseless. And when we listen,

I was listening to a number of things today where various people in the world or even in the church have mocked the subject, the concept of inerrancy and inspiration.

That's the kind of stuff they're normally mocking. People like Sluter are not doing any of us any favors by providing that kind of...

And who's that guy? The worst guy. Worse than Andrew Sluter is this

Rager guy. I think that's his name. Rager. And that's what he does.

He's a big, big guy. And he thinks sermons are sitting around making strange comments based upon an extremely narrow worldview.

It's just... But that's the kind of stuff that people go, see, that's what anybody who believes in inerrancy is like.

They're like an Andrew Sluter. They're like a Rager guy. That's not the case in any way, shape, or form.

But that's the stuff that's out there. I wanted to go to something rather serious, but I wanted to get the silly out of the way so we could transition to the serious.

An article was posted two days ago called

The Unwanted Child. And it was posted at Soteriology 101.

And this is, again, from Leighton Flowers. But it illustrates once again to the nth degree the question, what is to be our source in defining the

Christian faith? And in our day, why are we seeing such a rapid embracing of a cultural

Christianity that is willing to abandon any type of Biblical norms in sexual behavior, marriage, all of morality and ethics?

Why is this going on? Well, because for decades we have been pandering to those who would seek to shift the focus.

In light of the fact that society is going this direction, and we're not effectively challenging the influx of societal thinking into the

Church. The people coming into the Church, and we want the seeker -friendly stuff made us afraid to challenge grossly unbiblical worldviews on the part of those coming in.

We want to make them feel warm and comfy. And so we're seeking to meet felt needs.

The felt needs movement. Because see, Christianity addresses the fact that we are creatures and that worship is...

For example, worship is considered to be a subjective experience now. It's how you feel.

It's what the music makes you feel like. It's focused upon you. That's why you have fog machines and all the lights and all the rest of this stuff.

If you want a big crowd, if you want the megachurches, it's all focused on you.

Whereas Christian theology, there is smoke, by the way, in the worship of God, Isaiah chapter 6, but it's when the seraphim speak to one another and the house is filled with smoke, and so it's not quite the same thing.

And in fact, the result is the one human that's there watching says, Woe is me.

I am pierced through. I am undone. Not, oh, I feel warm and wanted and my felt needs being met.

No. It wasn't his... He had a felt need. It was his sin. And how is it met?

The angel takes a coal from the burning altar and presses it upon his lips. There you go.

That's... Yeah. Think through what that meant. Anyway, because we have been pandering to the man -centeredness for decades, now comes this secularized movement that is focused upon the autonomy of man and the feelings of man and standpoint epistemology.

Things are true because of my experience these things. It's all man -centered.

Whereas Christian theology says worship is God -centered. That's why you can worship.

That's why you can command worship no matter how you feel. A lot of people today in the church do not even begin to understand how the greatest command can be love the

Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Because we are the...

For generations, we have had love songs. We've had love songs.

And it's all about how I feel and whether I'm in love or not.

The idea... People look at the old... I think of Fiddler on the

Roof, Tevye. And the relationship he has to his wife. Do they love each other? Of course. But it was an arranged marriage.

It was something they grew into. And yet it was real because there was a commitment.

You've got the clash of the old and the new going on and the traditions and so on and so forth. The point is the

Bible can command that you to love God. And most modern people go, that's not possible.

You can't command love. Well, then you need to change your definition of love. Because the

Bible does it. And, by the way, Jesus repeated the command. So, we have a time period in the history of the

Church in the United States and this is spreading, unfortunately, we spread everything around the world where you have a tremendous focus upon emotions and upon the centrality of man.

Rather than the objective reality of divine revelation, the worship of God as He is, the emphasis upon God's truth, this is what unified the

Church in the past was we recognized that God's truth is true in any culture. The Triune God is a

Triune God in any culture. And He defines His worship for any culture.

But now, with standpoint epistemology, that's just not even a possibility and that's certainly not very attractive and that needs to be done away with.

And there are many voices saying, let's be done with it. Let's be done with this old style

Christianity that's focused upon an alleged divine revelation. It's not going to work.

This new society and you've got some people that won't even hear what the society is saying and hence can't even communicate with them.

They're just throwing rocks and just being ugly about it. Those of us who want to stand firm recognize we must stand firm but also want to reach people.

We need to really understand where the shift has taken place and it's a theological thing. So, listen to this article from Leighton Flowers and understand where its power lies and then once you understand where its power lies, step back, turn off the switch of emotion, turn on the light of God's word and go,

Oh, wow! Because that's what you'll do. As my regular listeners may be aware, my wife is a marriage and family therapist who works with people struggling with deep trauma and relationship issues.

She has told me a number of times that those who struggle with abandonment issues can be especially devastated by the claims of what?

By the claims of what? Well, you could put Christianity there because I have repeatedly had people blame just the

Christian faith in general for trauma. We have one guy who just recently, he is allegedly a racial trauma expert who himself blamed his 30 pound weight gain recently on himself being racially traumatized.

So, hey, there's lots of things that you can blame these days.

I've seen certain women claiming that their weight gain was due to President Trump.

I'm not sure what his weight gain is due to. Maybe you can blame them. Hey, that's the way the world is today.

But this says, can be especially devastated by the claims of Calvinism. Now, I understand how a

Calvinist reading this post might take that as playing on the emotion of my readers, but I can assure you that is not my intention here.

This is not meant to be accusatory or overly dramatic, just a fact of the matter. Well, I'll let you judge that by the time we get to the end.

This is a real struggle for many who are faced with the claims of Calvinistic theology in light of their own upbringing, so please hear me out.

For those like myself who are raised by very loving parents, the terrifying fear of being unloved or unwanted by those who should love and want you the most is unfathomable.

I cannot begin to understand the feeling of being rejected by those who are supposed to be there for me. I have never felt that kind of emotional devastation, and do not even pretend to understand how that kind of pain can affect one's relationships with others throughout their life.

I can imagine, however, how the unique claims of Calvinistic theology might negatively impact someone who already struggles with fear of abandonment and rejection.

If my own mom and dad did not want me, why would my God? And if God is the kind of God who does not love and want many people, maybe he doesn't really want me either?

Regardless of where you stand soteriologically, that is a valid fear that impacts thousands of people that has to be addressed one way or another by therapists, pastors, or friends in the real world.

Peg Streep, a psychologist, wrote an article titled The Unwanted Child Feeling a Unique Kind of Hurt, in which she retells the story of Karen, a woman now in her fifties struggling with deep emotional pain due to feeling unwanted by her parents.

Remember, this article is not meant to be pulling your emotional heartstrings. I knew from early childhood on that my parents got married because of me.

I was also the reason my mother had to drop out of college, which effectively wrecked her dream of becoming a lawyer like her father.

And my dad had to take a job to support us instead of following his dream to become a writer. Mind you, they went on to have two other children five years after I was born.

Presumably, she could have gone to college when I went to kindergarten instead of having more kids, but that honestly didn't occur to me until I was in my twenties and making choices for myself.

I was blamed for her life pretty much, and she repaid me by ignoring me except for taking the time to heap blame and criticism on me and loving my brother and sister.

They'd been chosen to be born. I hadn't. My own children are treated differently by my parents than the children of my siblings.

It's apparently an inescapable legacy. Even if being unwanted or unplanned doesn't become part of family lore as it did in Karen's case.

The unwanted child often reports that she knew that she was somehow different and being treated differently even at a young age.

Continuing quotation, when my brother was born, I was four and I remember being absolutely floored by how my mom was with him, singing, cuddling him, cooing to him.

She rarely touched me, and what she did for me, she did in the most perfunctory way. I thought it was something I was doing, of course, and I worked so hard to try to please her.

Well, guess what? It didn't work. My brother was her favorite, her darling. Are you surprised that Cinderella was my favorite story?

My father was largely emotionally absent too, hiding behind his newspaper, so I had no support or validation at all growing up.

When I was 30, I finally worked up the courage to ask my mother why she loved my brother more and without blinking, she looked straight at me and said,

I never wanted a girl, I only wanted a son. Most people don't believe my story, by the way, but it happens to be true.

Now, imagine Karen sitting in a pew at a Calvinistic -led church, hearing a sermon about how

God has chosen to love and provide for some people, but not all. Whether right or wrong, where does her mind immediately go?

God, just like my mother, loves my brother, but not me. Can you understand the devastation this might cause to her relationship with God?

Even if she confides in her Calvinistic pastor by telling him about her fear, and he is somehow able to convince her that she is one of the favored ones, i .e.

the elect of God, her heart cannot help but ache for the unwanted reprobates rejected by God who picked her over them.

She knows what it feels like to be one of the unwanted children and cannot help grow angry with God for doing to them what her own mother did to her.

Again, regardless of where you stand theologically, this is a real struggle and has to be answered practically in real -world situations of life.

How would you answer someone like Karen, who has grown distant and angry with God because she had become convinced he is the kind of God who chooses to love some people before they are even born and reject all others?

Is the best response to quote Romans 9 out of context by asking, who are you to talk back to God?

I cannot imagine anyone would think this is what Karen needs to hear in her pain. I believe we have to tell

Karen, and all those like her, that God is not like her own self -centered parents. I believe she must be introduced to God's unconditional love for every man, woman, boy, and girl.

She needs to hear about his relentless pursuit of all the lost. She must learn that our God is one who'd rather die himself than to see someone perish.

She needs to hear about a God of love and provision for all his creation. She needs to know that there may be bad mothers and fathers in this world who do not want their own children, but God is good and no child is born unwanted by their maker, no not one.

Help me spread that truth. Now, I said it was serious, and it is.

Because in many pastoral situations, you have to deal with an individual who comes into the church hurting.

And what has caused them their pain, their trauma, their difficulties in life, they're bringing those into their relationships with a husband or a wife.

Very frequently in a pastoral counseling situation, it's not what the husband or wife is doing.

It's how that's being interpreted by someone because of what happened to them from their own parents.

And so they're interpreting their relationship between husband and wife in light of their parents, or the parents broken up, parents that hadn't broken up.

Multiple marriages. There's all sorts of issues that can come in today. And so there are any number of aberrant theological ideas that can develop because people are willing to filter what the scripture says through their own personal experience.

One of the amazing realities, one of the miraculous things about the gathering of the body to worship and the proclamation of the truth of God from scripture is the fact that you can preach a single sermon from a single text and then and I've experienced this many times you are talking to people afterwards and you are astonished by the needs that were met.

Diverse needs by the very same words. The application of the word of God to this wide variety of people.

You may want to pretend as a minister that you've got a pretty good grasp of what your particular people are needing on a given

Lord's Day. But it's pretense. You don't know what they've experienced. You don't necessarily know their pasts.

But the word of God made alive by the spirit of God ministers to this wide variety of people.

But then again there are times when someone come up and they heard you say something that you know you did not say.

You know you certainly didn't mean to say that if you did say it. But then when you go someone says, did you say this?

No? Well you said such and so. Well yeah I was talking about this.

Somehow they have applied that completely someplace else and in error and maybe even offended by you in the process.

That happens too. So the reality is that you do have to deal with a lot of different people.

So you've got people coming in and you may have former atheists that have no concept of God at all.

You may have former cultists. You may have former Mormons that have a view of God where God is an exalted man and himself was in a fallen state.

And this ends up causing tremendous difficulties as the individual is properly exposing themselves to all of God's truth.

In God's word they're going to keep running across all these places where God doesn't act as you would expect the

Mormon God to act because the Mormon God is an exalted man ontologically of the same nature as we are.

And so, yes in the counseling situation you have to be aware of all of these things.

But what is the answer? The answer that is offered here is that you must present to people well, first of all you have to tell people

God is not like her own self -centered parents. Well, what's the first error that Karen has made?

She is reasoning from man to God. And every time, no matter what their background is someone is taking their experience and reflecting it upwards onto God the first thing we have to do and the only thing we can do we can't buy into all of the psychology and psychiatry and everything else and try to go with a humanistic response.

We're in the church they're coming to us as leaders they're coming to us as ministers of what?

Of the word. When Paul left the elders at Ephesus knowing what they were going to be facing he said,

I commit you to God and to the word of His grace. That's what we've been given.

And so what you do is you direct them to change their thinking about God in light of His objective revelation not in light of their personal traumatic lenses.

In other words, they're wearing lenses that have been formed forged by sinful experiences and they're taking that and then they're looking at God and they're projecting that upon God.

You don't change your doctrine of God to fit their lenses you tell them to take the lenses off and adopt the understanding provided to all of us by God's word that which is theanustos that which is

God breathed. And then you have to trust the spirit of God to make the word of God to come alive in that person's heart.

And that's where faith comes in. That's where faith comes in. And so what you do for Karen is you don't edit

God's nature as revealed in scripture to remove the portions that she finds to have some correlation to her sinful parents.

God is not like her own self -centered parents but what's behind this for Layton Flowers?

It's the same thing he was saying earlier. Remember when he talked about God isn't so much about his own glorification?

Yes he is. And this is why we'll keep pointing it out and it seems to me the more people are pointing this out because there's no foundation in scripture for this perspective it just keeps moving, moving, moving, moving and eventually, sadly,

I think Layton Flowers is going to be out there with Gregory Boyd and all the other people who just keep sliding out into the stuff out there.

Into the open theism and the universalism and all the rest of the stuff that's out there. There's no place to stop.

I mean sometimes people stop just because they get afraid but there's no consistent place to stop in that slide.

And I mentioned Gregory Boyd because I was looking at a video of his he's got a book out, Inspired what was it?

Hold on a second. What did I do? Close it? Oh, window, window, window.

There it is. Facebook. What? Inspired Imperfections.

Yeah, new book on the Bible. Inspired Imperfections. That's where he's headed.

Yes, how the Bible's problems enhance divine authority. Open theism denial of substitutionary atonement it's a well -worn path that people are going and that's what has to happen when you lose vital contact with the objective reality of divine revelation.

And so God isn't like her own self -centered parents but God is doing what he's doing in this universe for the glorification of himself.

You cannot cause this to happen in someone's heart it can only be done by the spirit of God.

But you will never have anyone who is truly satisfied with what is found in the

Christian faith who does not come to recognize that you are God's creature.

He made you, he formed you for his own glory not your happiness.

We are one of the first generations to ever think that God's fundamental purpose is to make mankind happy.

We're one of the first generations to have enough riches, to have enough medicine, to have enough medical procedures to even come up with this idea.

This was not a big issue at the Reformation because everybody the black plague had killed between half and three quarters of everyone in Europe only a few generations earlier.

And it kept coming back. And so the idea that God exists to make us happy was not an issue that anyone was really dealing with.

We are his creatures called to glorify him. That changes everything. And if we think that we have to convince that we have to trick the people in our society into making an autonomous free will choice to embrace this self -denial and this death, wow, we're in trouble.

But that's exactly why we're at where we are, is that's exactly what the seeker -sensitive stuff has been about, and now we're reaping the results of it.

So I believe she must be introduced to God's unconditional love for every man, woman, boy, and girl.

So if she is what her mother said to her was horrific, no question about it, but she has to be...

You don't change God's nature so he can no longer have an actual saving love, because they might read the

Old Testament and discover that's what it's all about. They might actually sit there and go, Israel, Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, oh, what this guy's telling me doesn't fit with the

Bible. God didn't treat the Assyrians the same way

He treated the Israelites. How strange in light of what you're telling me now. You don't change

God. You point out the sinfulness of what she has experienced. You don't edit

God. She needs to hear about His relentless pursuit of all the lost.

Well, which means you need to teach her that He tries, but He fails all the time, regularly, and did so with greater regularity in the past.

In fact, again, if they read the Old Testament they're going to go, wait a minute, okay, so you're actually telling me that God was relentlessly pursuing the

Amorite high priest right before He sent the people of Israel in to wipe them all out, man, woman, and child, right?

That's where we're going? They're going to read the Bible and go, this doesn't fit.

Why are you lying to me? But notice His relentless pursuit of all the lost.

What about our duty as created beings to relentlessly pursue the truth of our

Creator? What's the difference between man -centered and God -centered?

This is absolutely 1000 % clearly man -centered response.

It has nothing to do whatsoever with calling the creature to recognize the absolute glory and power and transcendence of their

Creator. No, no, no. This is all about editing the

Creator so He becomes more comfortable to the creature. And here's the problem.

You have 47 different backgrounds and felt needs coming into your church service.

How are you going to edit God to fit all of those? Well, you're going to have to come up with a really nebulous

God to do it. You're going to have to start diminishing the specificity of your teaching about who

God is and what His purposes are. And is that not exactly what we see going on today?

And doesn't that fit our culture? We want an innocuous God. This morning on the briefing,

Dr. Mohler was reviewing a book on hell. It's promoting universalism.

From a fellow that I think, I'm going to have to look this up, but I think I've crossed swords with him in the past.

A number of the quotations were from conservatives but who are very much into abandoning

God's law regarding sexuality and marriage, universalism, no concept.

And of course, once you're a universalist, you really don't need penal substitutionary atonement.

You can go for some Chris is Victor type thing or something much less vulgar than that.

And what they want is a Christianity that is not going to challenge anyone.

It just fits into our culture. Just makes us feel good about ourselves because it's man -centered.

It's man -centered. That's what you have here. She needs to hear this.

What she needs to hear is about the one true God so that she can know the truth of who he is and get all the bad filters out of the way that she's experienced from her life.

And you can actually trust the Holy Spirit to do that. This other gobbledygook where you're doing the psychobabble stuff.

You can't trust the Holy Spirit to do psychobabble. There's no promises in Scripture. The Holy Spirit will do psychobabble.

But did you catch? Listen to this. She needs to hear about a God of love and provision for all his creation.

She needs to know that there may be bad mothers and fathers in this world who do not want their own children, but God is good and no child is born unwanted by their maker, no not one.

And I'm sitting here going, Dr. Flowers, are you saying that we are all the children of God?

Because that sounds like what he just said. It sounds like he just said we are all the children of God.

I'm used to hearing that from secularists and various and sundry liberal religionists, and of course the

Mormons believe the same thing. But how on earth do you read the

New Testament seriously and come up with that? Because Jesus said, you're of your father the devil.

And the plain teaching of Scripture is if you want to be a child of God, you repent and believe.

You're not born the child of God. You're his creation, but my cat is his creation too.

And so, did you see the not so subtle insertion of this idea?

Well, we're all God's children, and he just loves his children.

And again, the church has been willing to go, yeah, well, you know, us leaders know that's not what

Jesus taught, but you know, if it makes people feel good, they're going to read their Bible someday. And what do they do when they run across Jesus saying, the reason that you do not hear my words is because you do not belong to God.

You're of your father the devil. Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

Bad theology, bad theology. I'm sorry. It's true.

I mean, what are you gonna do? The reality is that latent flowers and provisionism does not believe in original sin, does not believe in Adam's federal headship.

They can mouth things all they want. They don't believe in it. They don't believe we have a truly depraved nature.

And so the whole idea of fallen in Adam, redeemed in Christ, which requires the elect, or you're a universalist, they're not even in the argument there.

They're not even in the argument. Imputation because of Adam?

Well, maybe imputation because of Christ, but nah, we don't want that imputation. Nah, no, no, we gotta, nah, it doesn't fit.

It doesn't work in our society today. But you read the article, and you go, man, that's gonna have punch.

That's gonna have emotional punch. And that takes us right back to asking the question, where do we go with our people?

What's the ultimate source of authority? And when you see people leave, because they will not bow to that ultimate source of authority, do you give up on that?

Or do you remember they went out from us because they were not truly of us? That can be a hard thing.

That can be a very, very hard thing. That must be kept in mind.

Um, yeah, I want to, um,

I want to, I've got some stuff that I hope

I have time to put together for tomorrow. Um, there was a,

I might not be able to get this one, but I've got to make a note for myself because it's getting old enough. I'll eventually forget it.

Bart Ehrman appeared at a Defenders conference back in, I think, December or November. And there was a discussion between some fairly big names.

Lycona was involved with it. Um, and it just seems strange that Ehrman was there.

Um, but like I said, big scholarly names, but no one who would presuppositionally challenge

Ehrman's foundations. And the result, that's going to take me a little editing to get to the key, the key elements.

I have listened to it. I'm like, oh, we've got to cover this, got to cover this. The other thing I do want to get to tomorrow, and hopefully

I'll have time to do it, is the unbelievable broadcast from last week.

Um, with Matt Dillahunty and Glenn Scrivener. I think I've had some correspondence with Glenn at some point.

I think the name goes way, way back. But I think I have, maybe.

I could be wrong about that, but it's just the feeling that I'm getting. And in general, the first third was a snoozefest, but then it started rolling.

Um, I especially want to go over Matt Dillahunty's astonishingly inaccurate summary of Christian belief.

I mean, this is a man who's talking about going into the ministry. And you just listen to this and go, wow,

I know where Dr. Clark gets his stuff. Um, I was just stunned because Dillahunty presents himself in a very different fashion, but you know,

I mean, I can summarize Jehovah's Witnesses in such a way that a

Jehovah's Witness would go, you could be an elder in our congregation. I can summarize

Islamic theology in a way that a Muslim scholar will go, yep, that's

Mormonism, whatever. Why can't atheists do that? Because there's something else going on there.

But I do want to also push back, at one point, an issue came up in regards to God's law.

And once again, a person who has a high view of God's law, which I don't see how you can avoid if you read the

New Testament, that's what the apostle said, is going to have a different apologetic response to particular criticisms than other people will.

So I definitely want to get to the unbelievable thing tomorrow. But I'll just do one more of the things

I had here, and then we'll wrap up. So, on January 9th, now,

I have written to Religion News Service, I have not heard back from them unless it went to spam or something,

I haven't found it. But I wrote to Religion News Service to ask what's the methodology of submitting a responsible rebuttal to an opinion piece published by Religion News Service.

A piece was published, and let me see here, that's interesting, that's at the bottom of the page.

And let me just click on this real quick to Andre Henry, Andre Henry, I didn't come across in my saving of it for some reason, unfortunately.

Andre Henry, oh, it did, it's down at the bottom of the thing here, I'm sorry. Andre Henry is

Program Manager for the Racial Justice Institute at Evangelicals for Social Action.

He writes a weekly email and hosts a podcast called Hope and Hard Pills, sharing insight on anti -racism and social change.

Now, I don't know who Andre Henry is, but I can tell you one thing, he is a big fan of James Cone. And the title is

White Evangelicals' Attacks on James Cone are About Power, Not Truth.

Now, what's interesting is he starts off, A specter has been haunting white evangelicalism.

It comes in the shape of James Cone, one of the founders of black liberation theology. Actually, I don't think almost anybody in quote -unquote white evangelicalism had ever heard of James Cone before 2008.

Because he's at Union Theological Seminary, he's nowhere near evangelicalism at all.

He says, As last year ended, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Daniel Aiken tweeted in response to a since -deleted tweet,

James Cone was a heretic and almost certainly not a Christian based on his teachings. We do not legitimize him. After significant pushback,

Aiken made an amendment. Though his writings and statements gave me pause and great concern for his soul, if when

I get to heaven I discover that James Cone is there, I will humbly, gladly, and joyfully greet him as my brother in Christ as we together worship

King Jesus for his amazing salvation, grace, and love. Now, what's weird to me is that as I saw those tweets, they came at me backwards.

It's one of the things I, social media, because you end up seeing things as they're retweeted by somebody else and everything else, the order in which things are said sometimes is difficult to discern.

And I saw them backwards. It almost seemed to me that the first statement about though his writings and statements gave me pause and great concern for his soul, hey, if I run into James Cone in heaven, great, and then what comes later is

James Cone was a heretic and almost certainly not a Christian based on his teachings. We do not legitimize him. I thought that came afterwards.

Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Aiken's tweets were muddled.

There's no there wasn't any reason for any of them to be honest with you, but he's in a tough situation.

He's in a tough situation because his own staff has lionized

James Cone. It was Southeastern that ran the podcast honoring

James Cone right after his death. It was Walter Strickland that was involved in those podcasts.

Whenever someone like myself just sits back and starts reading

James Cone and all you gotta do is read him, you don't have to take him out of context.

You can read page after page. You don't have to isolate anything. The more contextual it is, the more heretical it is.

In the article itself, the author is like, yeah, he raised questions about some tenets of faith that white evangelicals cherish.

What do white evangelicals cherish? The whole article is all very racially oriented.

It's white versus black, white versus black. That's the standard thing today. Particularly, the inerrancy of scripture, well, duh.

Anyone left of a small portion is going to reject that. The concept that Jesus died the death we deserve because of sin.

Tip the atonement. You don't have really inspired self -consistent scripture, and you don't have the gospel.

You don't really have the Trinity, either, if you really want to get honest about it. He says perhaps the biggest problem white theologians have with Cone's work

By the way, there are lots of black theologians that do, too, and Hispanic theologians, and Asian theologians, and Brazilian theologians, and Australian theologians.

It's all theologians who take the Bible seriously. Perhaps the biggest problem white theologians have with Cone's work is his emphasis on Jesus' humanity over his divinity, and his conviction that salvation is as much about saving black people from the clanner's noose or the officer's chokehold as it is about going to heaven when we die.

So, in other words, it's the replacement of the gospel with social justice issues based upon the American experience. And, yeah, that is heresy.

We could add to the list that the author actually admits to here, such as the reality that Cone taught that if a white person was to be saved, they would only be saved through black people.

So, there's a hierarchy of salvation. I mean, it's a completely different religion.

And, I'm not going to repeat the hours, literally. If you include the 2008 programs, the stuff we did a couple years ago, and then the past couple months,

I have sat here for hours reading James Cone on this program, straight from his own books.

I'm not going to repeat that. It's there. So, what

Cone decidedly did not lack was sincere devotion to the way of Jesus as he understood it.

Well, you could say that about Joseph Smith, couldn't you? Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, Jim Jones.

So, there's no objectivity here. You combine critical theory, no objective revelation, and standpoint epistemology, and you've got nothing left.

There is no Christianity that you can even call someone a heretic about. No, the heresy

Cone is guilty of is denying white Christian leaders authority to define what

Christianity should look like for black people. Let's just remind ourselves that the

Council of Nicaea was not infested by a bunch of white Southerners. There weren't any white

Southerners at the Council of Nicaea, Council of Ephesus, Chalcedon. No, didn't happen.

This is what happens when racists start rewriting history to promote further racism.

So, he says, what constitutes heresy in the church depends on where the boundaries for orthodoxy are drawn.

Really? And so, we get to redraw them based upon the

American experience. Man, I'll tell you, one thing I've learned is that one thing

I'm glad that I've been doing, global traveling, is it has cured me of my Americocentrism in the sense that the idea that we get to define everything.

I mean, Cone was steeped in it. Cone does not even begin to represent the

Black experience anywhere else other than urban centers in the

East Coast. There's nothing more. That's it. New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, that's the world.

And once you start creating theological categories based upon that... So, I hope that Religion News Service will allow somebody to respond to this absurd assertion.

And it is an absurd assertion. It could never survive a meaningful conversation, let alone debate.

White evangelicals attacks on James Cone are about power, not truth. That is a lie. It's a demonstrable lie.

I call on Religion News Service to allow somebody to point out the lie. Because it's right there in front of all of us.

Right there in front of all of us. Okay, so, like I said, we're going to fire all this up in the morning.

And we're going to... I really want to do the Dillahunty -Scrivener thing tomorrow.

I don't want to let that wait. But someone remind me if I forget it.

We've got to do the Ehrman stuff at the Defenders conference.

And then I still want to do... I want to work on some of Ehrman's comments about homosexuality.

Because it just seems to me that if Ehrman says it, it ends up becoming dogma for so many community college people.

That, again, we need to be responding to those types of things and trying to provide a meaningful response.

Hopefully that was of use to you. Remember, again, we only have a few more weeks before we have to start giving cabins back to the cruise lines.

And that means you need to be making a decision about the trip of a lifetime.

And it is a trip of a lifetime. Remember, the trip is going from Rome. I'm not even 100 % certain, and I'm not sure that the website

I saw was... We know what it is, but Ephesus and Athens, I think it's one on the way and one on the way back.

There's two days at sea each direction in the Mediterranean. So I'm sure we'll have a study at some point, especially if there's any weather, about when

Paul was shipwrecked someplace. It was somewhere around here.

We're not too far away, one way or the other. I've never been at sea on the Mediterranean, so that'll be a new thing to me.

I mean, I've seen it from Tel Aviv, but... Anyway, and then Jerusalem, Qumran, Masada, all the rest of that neat, fun stuff.

And then the two days... Do you have some more information about the... Yeah, I do. I've got an email here from Sovereign.

They asked me to read a little paragraph here to kind of get the lowdown on what

I was trying to describe earlier. Sovereign is finalizing excursions exclusively for Alpha Omega cruise guests, and we'll be releasing them for registration in the next few weeks.

We will have two days of optional excursions in Rome prior to the cruise, along with optional excursions in each of the cruise ports, including

Israel, Athens, and Ephesus. It will be an amazing experience to walk in the footsteps of history with our speakers,

Dr. James White and Jeff Durbin. Sovereign will also be sending out information regarding our group hotel, ship transfers, and instructions for booking your flight.

If you should have any questions, please call Sovereign directly at 877 -768 -2784, extension 105.

For those of you who have not registered and are on the fence about going, you only have two more weeks to take advantage of our group rates.

Prices will be going up at the end of the month. Don't miss out on this once -in -a -lifetime trip. For more information, go to TheHolyLandCruise .com.

TheHolyLandCruise .com. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I think that's the issue is you've got group rate when you've got a block of cabins, but then if they're not sold, then you have to give them back and it doesn't mean you still can't go, it just means it costs more.

And that's because they have to fill the ship up. I mean, that's just how it works. And I did have somebody say to me that they checked some other places and that ours was super affordable.

And it's true. And we're not trying to rip anybody off or anything else. We're doing this for all the right reasons.

It'll be a lot of fun. But like I said, the pre -cruise excursions in Rome will include the

Vatican and will include the Colosseum and other sites that have deep historical stuff.

Deep historical meaning. And so I'm really hoping that at the Colosseum we can recount some of the martyrs that died there.

I will certainly seek to bring all my church history experience to bear at that particular point in time.

But yeah, I mean, this will be a lot of work for Jeff and I.

It really is. It ain't no vacay for us because we're going to be working and working and working and that's great. That's exactly what we want to do.

I can't begin honestly to I've told you when

I came back from Israel last year and I had to come back early. But I told you then that I had never

It wasn't a big issue on my list to go.

I had heard it was highly commercialized and stuff like that. I was wrong.

I was wrong. Once I got there, the big thing for me, the big takeaway for me is how small it is.

How small it is. I will not forget standing on the beach in Capernaum and you can see the far shore.

You can't see what's on it but you can literally see the far shore anywhere around the

Sea of Galilee. So when you're talking about where the Gadarean demoniac was, that's within eyeshot.

It's a long ways over. It's a big lake but you can still see the other side. And we're up on a mountain right next to the

Sea of Galilee and from up there, it's just like well, there's Nazareth and there's

Capernaum and that's where everything is. I mean, it's just amazing.

And of course, seeing the Jordan River Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls You know, you've seen pictures but yeah, it makes a big difference to have actually been there.

There's no question about it. So yeah, it's going to be special and I know it's on the other side of the

Earth but it'll be great.

So that's what we're going to be doing so we want to make sure you had all that information and talk to the nice folks at Sovereign and say hi to Kathy if you talk to her but if you get stuck with Ryan just give him a hard time.

And when you're done giving him a hard time tell him that I sent you. No, don't do that.

I was just kidding, Ryan. Really. Just kidding. Not really.

Anyways, we'll see you first thing in the morning, 10 .30 Eastern Standard Time.