Thoughts on Scripture in Our Challenging Day

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We are live on a Thursday afternoon.

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So much going on. I have to confess, if you expose yourself to the media, to news sources, you are just overwhelmed these days.

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Even in a private chat thing this morning, one of the folks that work with us here locally posted pictures from a children's book at a local school here in the

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Phoenix area. And you put this together with what was seen at the

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Austin Independent School District, which by the way has the lowest test scores in the area.

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It's the most woke with the lowest test scores, which makes sense. When you're spending your time doing gay pride marches through the hallways, you're probably not studying reading.

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But at the same place, they had a nail painting party for boys.

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So for students. Rich, what would have happened to us in our day if you showed up at school with painted nails?

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Would not be pretty. Yeah, that's true. I don't even know how to process these things anymore.

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The book that I was referring to promoting all the

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LGBTQISAPP plus T.

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I think it's up to 13 letters now was the last one that I saw.

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Two spirits and that's 2S is two spirit. And anyway, this is what's all around us.

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And as I mentioned on the last program, obviously major corporations and this is what's new.

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So much of this is coming from corporate power. Large major corporations that control tremendous aspects of our lives and hence are unelected.

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And so you can't unelect them. You can't kick them out of office. are using their power.

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I saw a incredibly powerful individual.

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A lot of people say the corporation he's ahead of is really behind almost all of this, saying that we are coercing behaviors.

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We need to coerce behaviors. We need to force behaviors upon people. And all of this requires us to have functioning

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Christian worldviews. Functioning in the sense that when we look at what's happening around us, a functioning

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Christian worldview does not simply say that's different from what I believe.

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A functioning Christian worldview says that's different. And here is how that is a part of the culture of death.

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This is how that is a part of denying the lordship of Christ. And this is how the claims of Christ are the answer to what's happening in the society at this point.

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Claims concerning transgenderism, etc, etc. So it's not just enough. You can take,

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I don't have anything that I could use it, but you could take a mallet and smack my knee and I'm going to have my knees going to come up.

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At least it's supposed to. Last time I had a physical examination, they still did that.

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I'm not really sure what that tells you all that much, but my knee still works.

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And you can have that kind of reaction. And I see that type of reaction every day in social media against sinful, anti -Christian destructive behaviors.

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But that's not enough. That's not enough. It's not enough to say that's bad.

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We have to explain not only to the people outside the church, but to those within the church, to our children, to our grandchildren, why is that wrong?

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And even answering that question of why is it wrong raises the issue of authority.

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In the secular realm, authority is established by brute strength, by mob rule.

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You get enough people yelling and screaming and you establish yourself as an authority.

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It may not be a majority rule. In fact, the majority is frequently under the control of the minority, historically.

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And within a secular context, as long as you can get people to emotionally agree with you and be emotionally impacted by the positions you're putting forth, you'll have the power, you'll have the authority.

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And you can run right over the majority at that point, as long as it's done by emotion.

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And we see it around us all the time now. And so we have to be able to explain to our next generations, because the next generations of voters are coming out of those public schools.

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Yeah, homeschooling is growing. It's great. It's wonderful. And yeah, we're having much larger families, so maybe somewhere down the road.

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Let's put it this way. What would

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America be like if the current nominated Supreme Court justice was one of the conservatives?

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Because that's the way things are going. That's how fast things are swinging.

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And you listen to the interviews, the people on the street, the young people on the street, and the educational system has done its job.

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It's not taught them how to think, it's taught them what to think. And as such, they haven't even considered, have not even considered other possibilities whatsoever.

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It's astonishing. So why do we say to the world that it is necessary that you recognize that the direction you're going will result in death for you, for your culture, for millions of people, as it already has in regards to unborn babies and the like?

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Why should there, what authority is it that we turn to?

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And when we go this direction, we as believers do not need a new doctrine of scriptural sufficiency.

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We need to rediscover a holistically biblical doctrine of biblical sufficiency, especially if we have been coming from a fundamentalist mindset, background, etc.,

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etc. We tend to have limited the parameters of the authority of scripture to religious topics.

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And there are obviously many people within what calls itself

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Christianity who likewise will argue that the only authority scripture has is basically the authority we grant to it within the community of faith.

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When you, for example, consider almost all of the left -leaning liberal denominations would have a doctrine of scripture that would limit its authority to how it functions within the tradition of the church.

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That is why you have, and I've seen it so many times,

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I was looking at a, someone sent me the profile information on someone that, it wasn't more than four years ago.

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In fact, it may have only been three years ago that I saw this individual at G3 and he's now an

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Episcopalian with a transgender flag and pronouns in his bio.

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Three or four years at the most. How does that happen? How do you have denominations that will, on the one hand, say the

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Bible has religious authority within our tradition. At the same time you have transgender flags and rainbow flags and things like that.

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Well, you do that by contextualizing the authority of scripture.

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It's only in regards to, well, what we say that it is, but religious topics.

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And then you just simply limit that extremely in a massive way so that the scripture does not end up touching upon anything that might be inconvenient or troublesome or get you in trouble with the world or whatever else it might be.

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And so the idea, well, for example, think about it, creation, creation.

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What do most people, when they think of the Bible, if they've not come from a conservative perspective, mythology.

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It's just simply meant to tell a story and it's up to us to drive what lessons we will out of that.

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But the reality is that scripture cannot touch on quote unquote science.

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It cannot touch on anything that would impinge, especially upon the almighty authority of science and the real world out there.

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And so that's what we're facing. And that's where these people are coming from.

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And so when they hear us saying to them, it is necessary for life.

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And that is what we're saying. I am come that they might have what? Life, they might have it more abundantly.

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Well, that's just spiritual life. Well, when did we become Gnostics? You can divide the spirit and the body and everything.

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When Jesus says I'm coming to have life, that doesn't include now.

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That doesn't include fullness of life, peace with your creator now.

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If you want to have life, here's how you have it. Oh, that's just your opinion. No, it's what the word of God says.

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But what do you mean word of God? So we have in our churches, rightly,

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I think it's beautiful, for example, when in various fellowships

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I've been in, you'll have the reading of scripture and something along the lines of hear the word of the

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Lord or this is the word of the Lord. And the congregation responds, amen, yes, and indeed, and so on and so forth.

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And that's wonderful. I've seen that in ultra leftist liberal congregations too, where the words no longer have any meaning.

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That is a shame in and of itself. But when we make these claims, we need to be individuals who have thought through what do we mean when we say that scripture is sufficient, that it is our sole infallible rule of faith or rule of faith.

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That's just the church. That's just religious stuff. You can't take it outside of that. Well, let's think a little bit about the nature of scripture and recognize that once again, this is a situation,

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I've said it before, if you don't have the highest view of scripture, there's no reason for you to be a Trinitarian.

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You say, but aren't there Trinitarians who don't have a super high view of scripture? And how'd they get there?

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What was sacrificed to get there? Fealty to a traditional system.

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And I objected fairly strongly a couple of months ago, might have been just last month, actually, now

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I think about, to someone arguing that the

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Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity was something that really didn't reach its final formulation until the medieval period.

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That the concept of development continued on and requires us to embrace this type of metaphysics and that type of metaphysics.

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And in fact, would require you over the course of the history of the church to embrace all sorts of contradictory metaphysics before you come to your final conclusions.

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Strongly objected to that because there are entire doctrinal formulations that would say that scripture is subordinate to a greater traditional framework.

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And once you get there, you can no longer hold to solo scriptura. And someone ends up defining what that tradition is.

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You end up with an external authority. That is not Theanustos, that itself is not

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God -breathed. So that which is God -breathed has to be subordinated to a non -God -breathed authority.

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It's just inevitable. That's why liberal leftist denominations always start by denying solo scriptura, denying the sufficiency of scripture, and denying that scripture is

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Theanustos. That they will give lip service to these things, but they will fundamentally tell us that no,

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Paul disagreed with Paul, Paul disagreed with Peter, Paul disagreed with James. And the

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New Testament's understanding of the Old Testament, each person has a different understanding, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so you no longer have a consistent revelation from God that is intended to function in a certain way for the church.

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Once you get rid of that, now the church can determine where it wants to go in and of itself. See how that works?

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That's historically how things have gone. So let's think. I think it's important for us to think through.

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Let's make application to these things. Remember that there are only a couple of places where we are brought to a place where we have a discussion of the nature of scripture.

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And one of the most fascinating comes from 2 Peter 1.

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Now, let me just... Some people don't like when I do this, but then other people endure me doing this, and then they end up in a school someplace, and they get hit with this.

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And they're like, oh, man, I wouldn't have had any way of knowing how to respond to this, but I had to put up with listening to James White talk about 27 times.

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It is dry in Arizona right now. Let me tell you something. So here's what's going to happen.

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As soon as I mentioned 2 Peter, there are going to be those who are saying, oh, but so many people don't believe that Peter wrote 2

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Peter. And that's what you're going to get in any community college, any university, whatever.

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That's what you're going to get hit with, is there is such a difference between 1 and 2 Peter. And there is.

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Anyone who reads 1 Peter and then reads 2

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Peter will, without a question, recognize that on a grammatical level, on a lexical level, on a syntactical level, there is a vast difference between the two.

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And that's why you go buy a modern critical commentary, and they will straight up say this is pseudepigraphal, that this is someone at a later time writing these documents.

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I will just simply point out to you that Peter specifically says he's using the manuensis.

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That means he's using a scribe. And it is quite possible, and we need to recognize the reality of this, that one scenario would be that Peter is dictating in something like Aramaic, and the scribe translates into Greek.

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Now that raises the question, where is the locus of inspiration? Well, that's what's important, because Scripture does not say writers are inspired.

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It says the writings are God -breathed. There's a difference. You see, writers being inspired is different than the result being exactly what

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God intends it to be. And so I don't have any problem with the fact that the two epistles we have from Peter are different in their grammar and syntax from one another, because that actually makes sense.

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It makes perfect sense. So, with that having been said, and I know

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I've said it before, but 2 Peter 1, I thought

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I... Oh, I didn't change that. Huh. That's interesting.

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I'm going to have to play around with that. Anyways, for we did not make known to you the power and coming of our

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Lord Jesus Christ following cleverly devised myths of being eyewitnesses of his majesty.

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So, oh, I wasn't intending to put this up. I'm not going to make the font big enough to read it.

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Sorry. And I didn't do anything with the colors and things like that.

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So, here is someone who is literally claiming to be an eyewitness of Jesus's ministry.

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If this isn't Peter, this is not truthful material. And again, large portion of people in seminaries today, that's what they're going to believe.

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You wonder why they don't view scripture as having authority. Well, once you start from there, why should you believe it?

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So, we did not make known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ following cleverly devised myths of being eyewitnesses of his majesty.

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For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to him by the majestic glory,

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This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. And we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with him on the holy mountain.

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So, the unbelieving commentary says, see, this is someone later on trying to make this sound like it's

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Peter. So, Peter couldn't have ever said anything like this evidently. Any idea being, well, Peter is a fisherman, so he was illiterate.

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So, therefore, he could never have told the story or dictate it to somebody else.

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Well, that doesn't make any sense. But that's what you're told. You're just supposed to believe it. So, here's

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Peter, and he's making reference to his own experience on what we call the

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Mount of Transfiguration. So, he uses the plural. We ourselves heard this utterance.

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So, he's including himself with the apostles. Made from heaven, we are with him on the holy mountain.

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Now, when you think about people who claim to be prophets and claim to have authority over other people, man,

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I'm going to tell you, very often, they will make reference to their personal experiences.

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Joseph Smith, eventually, eventually, not at first, but eventually, I saw

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God the Father and Jesus Christ as separate, distinct, physical. And I've experienced these things, and I saw an angel do this, and I saw an angel.

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Everybody's got their shtick. And that works for a lot of people.

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It really does work for a lot of people. But notice what Peter does.

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He says, hey, yeah, we were there.

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We weren't following cleverly devised myths. But then notice what he says in verse 19.

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And we have, as more sure the prophetic word, as more sure than his own personal experience, on the

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Mount of Transfiguration, the prophetic word, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts.

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The prophetic word, you need to pay attention to it.

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You need to pay attention to that prophetic word because it's a more, it's more sure than my personal experience.

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Why this? Why? Know this, first of all, excuse me.

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Know this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes by one's own interpretation.

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Now, I think the ESV probably has the best when it goes ahead and it's interpretational.

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I'm thinking that it's ESV. Let me look here. No, it's not

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ESV. There's one of them. Sorry. Maybe it was the

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NIV. Let me see. NRSV?

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No, it's pretty straightforward too. There was one. It's funny.

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I'm not even sure that I have the NIV in my, well, let's see what this one has.

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Yeah. Okay. The TNIV, which I'm assuming sort of represents the NIV. Above all, you must understand no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation.

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Prophet's own interpretation. I think that is a good understanding of what's being said in this particular context because when it says one's own interpretation, when it uses idios there,

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I think that's in reference to the prophets.

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One's own as in of the prophets. So the idea is that no prophecy of Scripture comes about because the prophets sitting there going, well,

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I sort of feel like I need to receive a prophecy today. I haven't come up with anything new for a while, and my fans are getting a little bit concerned that maybe the prophetic well has dried up.

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My likes and retweets are down, and so we need to come up with a new prophecy.

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We see that all the time from all these amazing people in South Africa or places like that,

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Nigeria, these alleged prophets, and they literally call themselves prophets.

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Prophet Samuel or whatever, and they'll come up with some new crazy thing just to keep the interest going and the money going and stuff like that.

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Peter's saying no. Know this first of all that no prophecy of Scripture comes by the prophets own interpretation.

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It's not coming from the prophets, and I think that's borne out because some people will say, well, what this is saying is you can't have your own private interpretation of Scripture.

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Well, if what you mean by that is you shouldn't develop an interpretation of Scripture disconnected from the body and disconnected from all the people who have come before you, yes, that's obvious, but that's not what

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I was talking about. Instead, for no prophecy was ever made by the will of man, but man,

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I'm sorry, will of man, but men being moved or carried along by the

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Holy Spirit spoke from God. Spoke from God.

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Now, there is a textual variant here, and you will note that the

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King James Version speaks of holy men.

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I think it's very clear.

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The better rendering is no prophecy, literally, for not by the will of man ever a prophecy came, but by the

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Holy Spirit being carried along spoke from God men.

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Now, word order does have meaning in the

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Greek text, and it is more important than in the

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English language. No question about that. And if that's the case, then it's interesting to me that the initial emphasis in the first phrase is in the negation of by the will of man.

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And in the second, the last word in the second phrase is men.

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And what is emphasized is by the Holy Spirit. So, the picture that we're given is of by the

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Holy Spirit being born along Pharaoh to carry along.

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So, by the Holy Spirit being born along spoke from God men.

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Fully at the variant in regards to the King James, because it says holy men, and it's not the holiness of the men that is the issue.

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It's the holiness of the Spirit who bears them along as they speak from God.

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Now, they are speaking. The ones that Laleo, it's men who are speaking.

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And so, it is appropriate. And this is something that does get lost, by the way, when you have a verbal dictation theory of inspiration.

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That's not the same thing as plenary verbal. A dictation idea is sort of like the automatic writing, where you just, you know, all of a sudden go into trance and just start, you know, oh, wow,

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I just wrote an entire epistle to the Romans. No, some people have that idea. That's not what we're talking about at all.

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Men are speaking. They're speaking from God. And since they are speaking, men speak in different ways.

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Men speak in different ways. Charles Spurgeon spoke in a way that most mankind can never speak.

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And Luke writes very differently than Mark does, than John does, than Paul does.

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And it's perfectly valid to recognize, for example, the difference between 1

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Peter and 2 Peter, and ask the question, why is that? That's perfectly valid.

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But the emphasis in Peter is the by the

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Holy Spirit being born, being carried along, spoke from God men.

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And the main thing to recognize is the emphasis is not upon the man. The man's speaking, but the man is instrumental.

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Not definitive as to origin and source. So the style comes from the man, sure.

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But what is being said comes from God. They spoke from God. Here is the description that you get.

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And so if you believe what I just laid out for you, you are unfortunately currently in the

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Western world in the minority. I pray for the day and look forward to the day when we will all be in the majority.

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Because the world would be a very different place if the majority of human beings truly believed that we have this kind of word from God.

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This kind of word from God, rather than a subjective morass of oddities that we have to somehow cobble together into some kind of a coherent system or incoherent system, depending on the theological group you're looking at.

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So there's the first of those texts. You combine that, of course, necessarily, with the words of Paul in exhorting

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Timothy. I'm not sure how he did that. But his description of Scripture as theanoustos, as God breathed, and therefore being ophelimos, profitable toward didaskalion, teaching.

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Standard term for teaching. So teaching of what? Well, we'll see what it is in just a moment.

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Teaching toward elegmon and pros eponorthosin.

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Most people see those as sort of playing off of each other and being in corrective aspects in the church.

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Rebuking error, correcting error, that type of thing. And then toward training, it's a term used of raising up children, training in righteousness.

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In order that, so if you have that which is theanoustos, Timothy, then you recognize it is profitable for these things, all of which the man of God is called to do in the church.

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In order that the man of God may be artios, equipped, prepared, ready, thoroughly furnished, ex artist menos, thoroughly furnished, what?

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Pros pon erigon agathon, toward every good work. Every good work.

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So, if that is the case, then the question becomes, what is the good work?

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The man of God in the church. Let's try to approach this from a different angle for a second.

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Don't we have to believe that God was fully aware of the fact that he was going to be gathering his people and building his church for a lot longer than we thought he was going to be doing it?

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Now, why do I say that? Well, think about it. What has every single generation of the church believed about itself?

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That it was the last generation, right? I mean, that's just, I mean, it's been more at certain times than other times, but pretty much that's how it's always been viewed.

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And so, if that's the case, didn't

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God know when he started all of this that the church was going to face the persecution of the

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Romans, the degradation of the

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West after the fall of the Roman Empire, the threat of Islam, the medieval period, the invasion, the

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Vikings. That's not a football team, by the way. The Vikings, the real

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Vikings were significantly more to be worried about than the football team ever has been. I say that as a

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Minnesota native. The Black Death, the

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Reformation, the much misnamed

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Enlightenment, the rise of the secular worldview.

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You don't think God knew all of these things? Atomic weapons and power?

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See, again, if you answer yes, you're putting yourself in the minority because functionally, the vast majority of liberal theology would say no because they don't see scripture as being written in such a way as for there to be an intention to equip the man of God in every generation of the church.

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In fact, if you don't believe there's a decree of God, you really struggle to explain, honestly, how any of that would work.

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Again, when you look at the scriptures as a whole, if you believe that the promise of 2

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Timothy 3, 16 through 17 remains true today, then there must be something supernatural about this that would provide, that would make the ha -tutheyu anthropos, the man of God, artios, equipped because what we need to be equipped today is different than what someone needed to be equipped for in the 5th century.

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Now, are there similarities? Well, of course. Instruction is to the form of the church.

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The meaning and importance of the sacraments and everything else, fine. But there are good works,

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Eragon Agathon, that the man of God must perform in the church in 2022 that the man of God in 322 could not have imagined.

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Now, there are things that are still identical. I just happened to pull 322 out of the air, and then my mind went, oh, three years before the

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Council of Nicaea. So, do we have to defend the faith of who

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Jesus is today, just as Alexander was?

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Remember, Athanasius wasn't a bishop yet. Remember what Alexander was doing in Alexandria in 322?

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We do. We do. Remember when

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Dr. Kirk, in the debate that I've told you about a million times here in Scottsdale, said that we have to remember that Jesus was a 1st century man, and therefore we need to learn to think beyond him, because he was limited by his being a man in the 1st century.

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And then when I challenged him during the break, he's like, you don't think the apostles thought Jesus was God, do you? So, yeah, we still have the same challenges today they had in 322.

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But there are things in 2022 they did not have in 322, and there are things in 322 that we don't have in 2022.

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So, how can the man of God be artios and exartisminos, which is the promise of 2

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Timothy 3, 16, and 17, in light of those two different contexts?

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That requires the scriptures, because they are theognustos, to have a character that no other human writing could possibly have.

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Now, some people would say, well, what you need is you need to have an ever -growing tradition of the

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Church. But having an ever -growing tradition of the Church is not going to provide you with answers to new challenges.

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And that would mean that Timothy could be made artios by that which was theognustos, but then we can't any longer.

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That is insufficient for us. We need something that's not theognustos.

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And I would argue that if it's not theognustos, it by definition has to have a lower authority than that which is theognustos, because if it's theognustos, it's

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God speaking. So, what we're led to is to have an understanding that God is actually big enough to give us, in the written word, that which will equip us in every age of the

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Church, no matter what the challenges are. And if you're with me this far, then you've been willing to become part of a smaller and smaller and smaller minority as we've gone along.

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But I truly believe that this is the future of the Church, because the alternative is to...

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And look at every denomination that's started down this road. The alternative will result in a non -objective revelation from God that will have a different message from age to age.

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That's all you've got. I mean, I saw it today. I commented on it.

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Some people may not have known what I was talking about. But there was a quote from the

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Walker Seminary, Union Theological Seminary. I call it the Walker Seminary because it died in the late 1890s.

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And so, like the walkers in The Walking Dead, which I think they're finally wrapping that up.

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They'd have to, because I would assume by now the walkers are nothing but skeletons. But that little stuff falling off.

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But it's the Walker Seminary. It's still moving around, but it died a long time ago. They posted something today about the

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Christian duty to support abortion. A woman's choice to choose to end her pregnancy, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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This is what you end up with. People still calling themselves Christian who have absolutely positively no concept of biblical authority.

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And there's... I don't even know why they would bother to have a

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Bible anywhere on the campus of Union Theological Seminary today, other than in the museum.

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Look at what the people who founded this place actually believed in. It's amazing. It's been replaced by Buddhism.

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But anyway, this is the kind of thing you get. So, we need to think through.

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We don't need a magical view of the Bible. There's a vast difference between recognizing the supernatural nature of scripture and its ability to equip men of God throughout all the ages.

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That's not magical. It's not something about the binding or the order of the books or something, because that's not an inspired element of things.

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It is a recognition of its nature. It is

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God speaking. Jesus held men accountable to it as to God speaking to them.

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Even though the words were written 1 ,400 years before men were born, he still holds men accountable to those things.

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And so, what that does is it gives us confidence that through the accurate handling of that word, we can come to understand the principles

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God would have us understand to answer all of the issues that are facing us.

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And I do not say that lightly, because there are challenges that we are facing today that I know are...

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But let's just think about one. I was texting to a friend this morning, and I mentioned the phrase transhumanism.

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And it took him a while to respond. He said, I was looking up what that means. I had never heard of it before.

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What transhumanism? I hadn't heard about it until about two years ago, three years ago.

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Michael Fallon was the first one to hit me up on that one, along with the fourth industrial revolution and so on and so forth.

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Transhumanism, we have played on this program within the past two weeks.

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His middle name's Noah, but he's the chief science advisor to Klaus Schwab at the

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World Economic Forum. His middle name's Noah. It's other very strange names, and so they don't stick with me.

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And he was the one talking about hacking the human being. You know, hacking man is hackable.

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And this is what we're talking about as far as digital interface to the mind, genetic manipulation, biomechanical implants.

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There was a... There have been far too many science fiction warnings for decades about where this could go and what this could do, and no one's stopping anyways.

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They're doing it anyhow. And so let's use that as an example. Someone might...

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Look, the world says old book, old words, writers who didn't have an iPad, who cares?

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Who cares? And there is an empty tomb that says you should care because the one who came out of that tomb held men accountable to what was in scripture as if God spoke to them and is actually called the word of God himself.

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And so we put the world's mockery aside and we ask ourselves the question, how on earth could the

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Christian scriptures equip you to deal with the challenge of transhumanism?

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Well, don't they? If you are a

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Christian who has been reading the word, attending to the preaching of the word, have some modicum of a prayer life and relationship to the church,

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I think if you turn off the noise, spend some time in prayer, open your

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Bible and start thinking, Lord, give me direction from your word. I think the vast majority of us, the vast majority of us would come to the very same conclusions.

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What would those conclusions be? What does the Bible teach? We're made in the imago Dei. We're made in the image of God.

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That image of God has always included the reality that man's lifetime is to be limited.

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Can you imagine making it so that man can live for 300 years without that person coming to know peace with Christ?

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What's the result of that? Can you imagine the judgment? It'll be bad enough to face the sins that you committed over 70 years.

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How about 300? It is a point of demand once to die.

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Man's desire to avoid that in the sense of all the stuff about freezing and transferring of...

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This is a big one in science fiction stuff. If you're a Star Trek person and you watched the first season of Picard, spoiler alert!

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When they transfer Picard's consciousness to an android, that's the idea.

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And Data's consciousness exists in a computer. That's the whole idea.

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There's no spirit. It's electrical impulses and mappings, you see.

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And so the idea of transferring that so that you just continue on and on and on.

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The Christian recognizes from these ancient scriptures, that's rebellion. A person at peace with God does not want to live forever in a decaying body.

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And a person at peace with God wants eventually to be in the presence of his Lord. And to have perfect unbroken communion not only with his

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Lord but with those who've gone before him. And the fear of death means that you don't know him who is life.

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And so the idea of altering the imago dei, of altering what

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God has made. Now that's not the same thing as, well, you know, we live longer today because we've studied these bodies.

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Yeah, God made these bodies to be studied. And I'm getting older. In fact, look at my shirt.

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Did you see? Oldometer. This is right where I am. The oldometer is flipping over to the 60.

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My body's not doing what it did only five years, six years ago. Six years ago was my best year riding ever.

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I was the strongest I ever was. I can't do what I did six years ago. And I've got, unfortunately, because I'm a geek and I record everything and got

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GPS data and everything else. There it is. Look at that. Whee!

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It is I'm over the hill. There is absolutely no two ways about it.

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I can still outrun most of you that are 30 years younger than me, but I'm over the hill. Hey, I was yesterday second in my age group in a race people around the world.

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So I'm still doing all right, but I ain't doing what I was doing six years ago. Gets better as the competition dies off.

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Okay, that's good. All right. But look, someone could argue, look, you've got supplements.

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Yep. You know much more about protein and high -quality protein and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

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Yep. Aren't you contradicting yourself? No. It is one thing to learn about how

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God has made us and to use the body well. I'm pushing the absolute limits of my genetics.

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I really do. But I can't change those genetics. And if it was offered to me to do so, we have to say no.

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And if someone were to come along and say, how would you like implants into your brain to where you won't need your cell phone anymore, so you can access the internet directly.

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Directly into your brain. Well, given what's on the internet, that may be the stupidest thing anyone's ever thought of, but that's exactly what people want to do.

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That's exactly where these people at the World Economic Forum are going. And we have to say, no.

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That's the Borg, yeah. It's one thing to monitor this body. My watch can monitor my oxygen content in my blood and my heart rate.

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That's monitoring what God made. And that allows me to properly deal with, you know,

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I'm a heart patient. I had cardiac ablation in 2011. I've said that a million times before. Fine.

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I think that's wonderful. Great to have those abilities to keep what

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God has given us working. But it's totally different than replacing all of that with Borg implants.

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And for what purpose? For what purpose? I mean, my goal in staying healthy is to do ministry.

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You know, I've got a... I need to get a big ride in because I've got a couple books that I need to get to that are really important for upcoming debates and presentations and classes, and that's how

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I make it all work. So, the point being, yes, scripture does give us absolutely foundational revelation to be able to interact with these types of things if we would just believe that it is all meant to function in that way.

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To give us that kind of information. So, that's where we've got to stand.

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There is no future for us. There is no future. The future belongs to those who will continue to stand unashamedly on the word of God.

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That's where the future is. Now, there may be some very dark times between now and then, but that's where the future is.

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I was going to talk a little bit about that in... on the program today, but we've already gone through our time and hopefully all of that was of use to someone out there that needed to be encouraged along those lines.

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Thanks for watching the program today. Lord willing, we'll be back again next week.

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Next week should be normal, then I'm off on the road after that and then everything will change times and be from different places and all that kind of fun stuff.

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Heading up to Utah. I'll be doing a lot of ministry in Utah and then up to Idaho. We'll let you know a little bit more about that next week.