Apologetics Session 16 - Theology - Part 1

Tonight is going to be the study of theology proper. Believe it or not, we have not covered this yet. We've covered a lot of things so far, but theology proper is what we're going to look at tonight. So does everyone remember what Matt was teaching last time?

What was Matt teaching about last time? Soteriology, which is, which is Bill? Salvation. Right, the study of the doctrine of salvation. And so now we know what it means to be saved. Now we're going to learn about the great God who has provided that salvation.

How God Reveals Himself in Creation, Conscience, Scripture, and the Spirit

So we, hey Jim, how you doing? So we have a problem. We are finite beings with finite minds, and that even includes Brad. But we're going to try to describe God with our limited abilities and our limited minds and our limited language.

That's going to be a tall task, folks. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of people who say that this task is impossible and we shouldn't even try it. There are many who say that, well, since God is so far out there and he is so far above us, it doesn't make any sense for us even to try to know him or to try to understand him.

If you remember a while back we were talking about epistemology, which is the study of truth, the origins of truth, and we talked about a lot of philosophers. There was one named Immanuel Kant, who wasn't necessarily an atheist, but he had a certainly a different idea of God than the Bible.

So Immanuel Kant viewed the physical world as those things we can sense with our five senses, and then there's this noumenal world, he called it, out there somewhere that was in the metaphysical realm.

It was beyond our ability to perceive it. So he said, well, we can't really know those things. And God exists in that realm, so it doesn't make any sense that we even can know God. As a matter of fact, in R .C. Sproul's book, he said that Kant said this, he said, in this way, Kant chopped off our ability to know anything beyond the observable world.

So Kant said we can't possibly know God. But you know what, that's not going to stop us tonight. And the reason is, is because Kant, although he might have been an interesting philosopher, he was not a good theologian.

And because God is a God of grace, and even though he is infinite, and he is awesome, he has revealed himself in many ways to us, by his grace and by his mercy. So those are the first verses we're going to read tonight.

So whoever has verse 1, Psalm 8, 3 and 4, whoever has that, please read.

That. Psalm 8, 3 and 4. Yes. I know it has to do with God created heavens and the earth, and God created man a little lower than the angels. It does, but how am I.

Reading that verse? We're getting there. Everybody turn to their verses, so.

When I hit you up, you're ready to go. I left my Bible out in the car, which I know you're working on it. Go ahead, Jim. Okay, when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, and the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that you care.

For him? Amen. We talked about that verse when I was speaking up about creation the other day. God has revealed himself in creation, and there are many other verses we could read about that. Psalm 19, certainly 1 through 4, speaks of that.

Romans chapter 1 speaks of this, how God has revealed himself in creation, and we can actually know about his divine attributes and his eternal nature through what he has made. For we can see he has tremendous wisdom, tremendous creativity, he has tremendous power.

We can see all these things in what he's made. Now he's also revealed us in some other way, revealed himself in some other ways. So who has the second verse, which is Romans 2, verses 14 through 16? It says,.

For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires, have the law, but by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.

On that day, when according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of.

Men by Christ Jesus. Okay, now Apostle Paul's talking about the Gentiles there that weren't provided with the Word of God so that they could study it and read it, but yet the Lord has put on their heart his very law, that they would actually know what's right and wrong, and their conscience would convict them one way or another, that God has revealed himself in his holy nature through that conscience.

And you could also say, you know, through the Spirit convicting that conscience. So we'll read John, you know what, scratch that because that's the fourth verse. The third verse is 2nd Timothy 3, 15 through 16, if somebody has that.

This is another way that God has revealed himself. And how from childhood.

You have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Oh, finish it off please. And that the man of God may be complete,.

Equipped for every good work. Absolutely. Equipped for every good work. So how else has God revealed himself besides nature and the conscience? Through the Word. Through the Word of God. He's given us his Word, written down for us, that we may know it.

And we may know him through it. Who has John 16, 8? When he has come, and he, when.

He has come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and.

Of judgment. So who is he in that verse? Go ahead. Well, Jesus is sending the he. No, the Holy Spirit. Yeah, the Spirit, the Holy Spirit is going to come because Jesus is going to send the Holy Spirit.

And that, and his Holy Spirit is going to minister to us. Now, his Holy Spirit was active in the Old Testament as well, but in the New Testament we see the Holy Spirit not only convicting the world unbelievers of sin, righteousness, and judgment, but he also is guiding the believer into all truth.

And he gives comfort to the believer, and he reveals himself through the Spirit. So, thank God for that, that Jesus sent the Holy Spirit.

To guide us and lead us. The believer actually becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Yes. And dwells in it. And dwells. So, who has Hebrews 1, 1 and 2? Long ago, at many times,.

And in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, and he appointed the heir of all things,.

Through whom he also created the world. He's spoken to us in his Son, Jesus Christ. And there are many other verses we could read about that as well. So, the good news is God has not left us in the dark.

He is awesome, and he is almighty, he is infinite, but he has revealed himself in all of these ways. Some of these are what we would call general revelation, meaning that every man on earth can understand God through the creation of nature and the conscience.

But then there's specific revelation, which is for those who have been converted of the Spirit, that they've been born again by the Spirit, and they have the Word of God come alive to them. They understand who Jesus Christ is, and Jesus Christ ministers to them in Spirit, through the Holy Spirit.

And we understand, because we have the Holy Spirit within us, who's the author of the Scriptures, we get an understanding of the Word of God itself. It says when an unbeliever reads the Word of God, he doesn't understand and he doesn't appraise those things of the Spirit.

So God himself needs to illumine our hearts through the Spirit, so that we actually understand what he has written down. But he hasn't kept himself far off, so that his creation can't know him. He has revealed himself through all of these things, and we are very grateful for it.

Now, the question is, okay, if we can know God, how are we going to describe God? Can we define God? Somebody can answer that. The answer is no. We cannot define God, but he can reveal himself and define himself for the things he wants us to know about him.

There are some things that we're not going to be able to understand about God, because he is infinite. But because he has revealed these things in his Scripture, and we have these things written in our hearts, we can know a lot of things about who God Almighty is, because he's gracious and he's given us his Word, and he's given us his Spirit.

So if we said, in a simple definition, and I saw the simple definition online, it says he is the creator of all things, he is the owner of all things, and he is the sustainer of all things. Would that be an accurate statement about the Lord?

Some things are true, yeah.

Some things, right? But isn't that a very limited view? Because it actually is defining God by his creation itself, saying he has created all things, he sustains all things. It all revolves around creation.

He is a much bigger God than that. And we certainly can't define him by a simple statement like that. But we can endeavor to look into what the Scriptures have revealed about the very nature of God, and that's what we're going to do now.

The Self-Existence and Eternal Attributes of God

So the first thing I'd like to say about the essence of God, who he is, is that he is self-existent. That's very important. Self-existent, he is not a created being. Now I'm going to quote R .C. Sproul first, and then we're going to read a few Scriptures.

R .C. says this, he says, the idea of self-existence, which in theology we call the attribute of aseity, is the idea that something exists in and of itself. It is uncaused, uncreated, and differs from everything in the universe that has a cause.

A self-existent, eternal being is one that has the power to be in and of itself. It does not exist, or it does not receive its existence, or its being from something antecedent to itself, which means before.

It has existence inherently. It can never not be. And R .C. says, and because it has its existence inherently, it has it eternally. For all time, God has existence. So we can just stop the class, and we can think about that for a little while, if we want, but the Scriptures reveal that that is the God who we worship.

He has existed for all time in eternity, and that is a big concept to wrap our heads around. He is the only thing that is uncaused in the universe, if you can even say he's in the universe. We're going to get into that in a second too.

So let's turn to a couple other Bible verses. The Bible does describe God as being self-existent in several passages, but we'll look at a couple. So who.

Has Exodus 3 .14? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people.

Of Israel. I am has sent me to you. And we always think of those verses like, gosh, what a statement to make. What kind of a name is that, right? But he is declaring his eternal existence through those statements.

He didn't say he was who he was, or he came into being who he was. He is who he is, and he has always been that. Can someone read Psalm 90, verse.

2? Before the mountains were brought forth, wherever you had formed the earth and the.

World, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. Everlasting to everlasting, meaning he's going to go on forever. Eternal, eternity back, eternity forward. He cannot, he cannot you have to watch the double negatives here, but he cannot never be, if you kind of get that.

He always will be. And that is an incredible statement to make, and the scriptures are very clear about that. I got into a little bit of a discussion with my, gosh this is on tape here, I shouldn't say who it was.

No, probably not. I got into a discussion with somebody, right? And they thought it made more sense to say something is self-created instead of self-existent. That applies at the beginning. Right, because you can't, in order to create yourself you have to exist before you are created, and you get into that whole logical argument that's like, well, that ex nihilo, nihilo feet, which is nothing comes from nothing, and that doesn't work, and it doesn't make logical sense.

But it does make logical sense to say a divine creator has existed from all eternity past. It does make logical sense, although it's hard to get our heads around. You were going to say.

Something? Yeah, so looking back in church history, and especially around 300 AD, Arianism was such a problem, because of that whole concept that you're talking about, where they were thinking there was God and then they created being, and it was the heretical language that was all over the church, and they had Nicene Creed ended up coming out of that, because of just fighting what was happening, this heretical belief that was just permeating everywhere from that.

Just from that, what you just said there. And then Mormonism later.

And that's why we're doing what we're doing tonight, because it's in the scriptures, but encapsulating it into a class like this, saying God has defined himself in these ways, makes it clear and helps the clarity of the situation.

And we're not going to twist anything or turn anything the way we want it to be, we're going to talk about what God has declared of himself. So God also has eternal attributes, and our friend Jeff Kleewer, I will mention his name, he says this, we speak of the essential attributes for the purpose of knowing God as he revealed the essence of himself to be.

So that's in his book, The Deep Things of God. It's not just that, God has certain attributes that we call are incommunicable, and some that are communicable. So, incommunicable means they will not be communicated to another or supplied to another.

So what are some of those attributes? One is transcendence, meaning that he is above and beyond the created realm. He is beyond his creation. Omnipotence, when God creates something, he does not create that being or that thing with omnipotent power.

He is the only one. Omnipresence, he doesn't create beings with omnipresence. Omniscience is another one. Sovereignty, which is total authority and total power. Obviously he has that, but not his created beings.

And immutability, never changing. He has that, but the things that he has created do not have that. We change all the time. We talked about that before in some of the other classes, where it's like, well, I'm the same person.

Well, not really. Because even a living being, all the time our cells are dying and decaying and regenerating. I'm not the same person I was two seconds ago, because I have different air in my lungs, I have different blood flowing through my veins.

There's all kinds of things that change all the time in a living being. And if you even think of an inanimate object, like a rock or something, that goes through change over time as well, decaying and what not.

So God is the only thing in existence that is immutable. But there are attributes that God has that he has communicated to his creation. So some of these are, and we're going to go into these a lot more in depth a little bit later, spiritual beings.

His creation, the angels, the angelic realm, and also the human realm that he has created, have a spiritual existence. He has created beings with love, which he has from all eternity. He has a perfect love, but he has created us with the ability to love and love others and love him.

Faithfulness. That's a characteristic trait of God, but it's also a characteristic trait that can be displayed in his created beings. Intellect and creativity. As I said before, if you're thinking about big brain people, Brad, there's a lot of creativity there.

And we do see a lot of creativity in this world by people, and probably by the angelic realm too. We don't read a lot about that. It seems like they're more in lockstep with exactly what the Lord tells them to do.

So that's interesting. That will be a study for Ivan when he gets into angelology and the spirit realm. And his creatures have a will. His creatures have desires and they have a purpose and things that they would like to do and execute in their lives.

And so creaturely will is part of this creation as well. So those things are all attributes of the Lord, but as I said, some of them are passed on to his creation, some of them are not passed on to his creation.

And we're going to examine all of those attributes in great depth in a little bit. But think about all those attributes for a second. And now we'll talk about God Almighty being as the creator of all.

We read a sentence before that said, well, he is the creator of all, the owner of all things, the sustainer of all things. That is very true. That was a limited view of who he is, but it's certainly a true view of the things that he has done.

So God is creator of all. He alone has spoken the worlds into existence. And we see that in Genesis chapter 1 where he says, let there be light. He speaks his word and these things happen and they take place.

In Exodus 20 as well, 2011, and we take these things as a literal six day creation because that's the most reasonable way to read it. And Matt may get into the six day creation when he goes through, that's a ways off, but that's another class, but we'll get into that later.

But let's look at Hebrews 11, three, whoever has that, David, by faith, we understand that.

The universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things.

That are visible. I know a huge statement about God. He created all things by the word of his power. He spoke and it came into being. And there's many other scriptures, by the way, that say the same thing that Hebrews just did.

Psalm 33, six. Psalm 33, six. Right. That's another very good spot. There's others. So he's created all things, not just the physical world we see, but also those things are in the unseen realms. You know, the spiritual beings, the heavenly places, the things we don't see.

Now it's very important though to understand that when we say God is, and this gets into the presence, but when we say God is everywhere, you'll hear people say, well, God's in this table or God's in the chair or God's in the treehouse, especially living beings.

What's that called when people describe it? Pantheism. Pantheism, which means kind of God's everywhere and everything together make of God. That is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that God is outside of his creation, that he is unique and separate from his creation, and he has created all things by the word of his power.

So everything is in his presence. And we'll talk about omnipresence in a little bit, but he is not indwelling a table or indwelling a lamp or anything like that. As a matter of fact, Paul Little says this.

Paul Little, I like Paul Little. He's a theologian. He's written a few books. One's called Know What You Believe. Another one's called Know Why You Believe. He says this, God is separate from his creation.

He is transcendent. We've used that word before. It's separate. Above and beyond his creation, his creation in the heavens and the earth. He is not a slave to the natural law that he authored, and that's why we can trust that God can do miracles whenever he desires.

But he is independent of it, and he is above it. He can override it at will, which is the miraculous, though normally he does not interfere with it. So he's above and beyond his creation. But that is going to trip us into another possible problem, because this is where the deists got tripped up, because they say again that God is so far beyond his creation that he is not involved in his creation anymore.

He just kind of started things rolling, and things kept going and going and going. But God is not so totally transcendent that he is aloof from his creation. Yeah, he didn't leave things alone and say, okay, you guys figure it out now.

God is caring for his creation. He looks after his creation. He is involved in his creation on a daily basis, and you can count on that. So let's look at Isaiah 57, 15. Somebody.

Has that. So this is what the high and exalted one says. He who lives forever whose name is holy. I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.

So God exists outside of his creation, but yet he steps into his creation, especially by his spirit, and ministers to those who especially are believers in him. Matthew 6, 26. Forget the birds of the air.

They are neither sown nor reaped nor gather in the barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? So those who would say that God doesn't care after his creation have to ignore a lot of verses because God talks about caring for the birds.

In Psalm 104, he talks about feeding of the various animals, and it actually says in Psalm 104 that they know their creator. God very, very much looks after us every day, and that is so important to know that he has not left us alone.

He said he's going to be with us. He cares for our needs. He knows our needs even before we ask. He's a great God and an awesome God, but he's also a very intimate God with his creation, and he has promised us very precious things about how his care is going to be ministered to those who love him.

So, yes, God is creator of all. He is transcendent above his creation, but he is very active in your life every day and his care for you. That's important to know because there's problems on both ends of the spectrum we just mentioned.

So, Richie, go ahead.

Sure. It says in 1 John 4 that God is love. God is love. He's not only loving, but he is love. It doesn't say God is holiness. God is love. We know God is holy, but he identifies himself as the essence of pure love.

Yeah, we're going to talk about that attribute a lot, and we're going to break all those attributes down a little bit. Now, something else we're going to say about the Lord before we get into the individual attributes that I keep talking about.

The Trinity in Scripture

God is one, but the Scriptures have revealed that he exists in three persons, and this is a very important doctrine, and this is also a possible way for people to get tripped up and then have gone down heretical lines with this.

We need to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. You're not going to find Trinity in the Bible, the word Trinity, but you are going to find the teaching in the Bible. So that's what we're going to look at now.

I don't think I gave anyone this verse, but this is the Shema of Israel. Hero Israel, this is Deuteronomy 6, 4. Hero Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And then Jesus affirms this in Mark 12, 29.

He says, Jesus answered, saying, The foremost law is, Hero Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. The very essence of God is one, his very being, but there are three divine persons that are rightfully called God.

Now, we're going to get into the word Elohim in a second and see what that means, but before we do that, who has Matthew 28, 18 through 20?

And Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.

And who has 1 Corinthians 12, 4 through 6?

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of service, but the same Lord. And there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.

So I picked those two verses because they equate the Father, the Son, and the Spirit together as all being equal in nature and in importance, but yet having different ministries. And that's important because I could have picked another, oh gosh, I don't know how many verses, another 20 verses that would have said the same things.

It would have said Father, Son, Spirit, Father, Son. Those in the New Testament, we see that in many, many, many different places where they're equated together. And we need to understand that when they're equated together like that, they're giving equal weight or importance to those names.

So the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are equated, yet we just read before that God is one God. We see both of these things in the Scriptures. So we need to understand both, that there is one God, but He exists in three persons.

So this is a difficult teaching, and this is another one that's hard to explain, I would say. But it's not hard to teach because it's revealed in so many ways throughout the Bible. And the reason it's so hard to explain is because it's a divine truth.

And one of the things I like about it, especially, is because it's a divine truth, I find it hard to believe that man could make this up. That this had to be something that God revealed through His Word, that we would never have had if somebody said, well, Christianity is just a made-up religion.

It's like, nobody would have ever made this up. Because it's a very difficult thing to get your head around. But yet, this is God's nature, and He has revealed it very clearly in His Word. So let's look at several more verses that teach this in the Bible.

Now, I said in the New Testament there are many, many verses we could pick. We're going to look at the Old Testament for a little bit. So in Genesis 1, 1 through 3, we see God, Elohim, which is the plural for God, creating the heavens and the earth by His Word and His Spirit.

So Paul Whittle said this, he says, There is revealed thus early a threefold center of activity. God, as the Creator, thought out the universe, expressed His thought in a word, and made His Spirit the animating principle.

Just right there in that Genesis 1, 1 through 3, where He says the Spirit's hovering over the formless earth, and the Spirit's forming things. But it's God's thoughts, and of course the thoughts of the coming Word is Jesus Christ.

Because we certainly read in the New Testament that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He's the Word of God. So even in Genesis, back in Genesis, we see the nature of God being three in one. You can chime in any time you want, Richie, if you've got something on your heart.

The beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

And so we read before the Shema of Israel, which said, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Elohim is also in that. Even though it says the Lord our God, the Lord is one, Elohim is in there.

So it's like the many are one. It's not like an e pluribus unum kind of thing, you know, we're all unified. I mean, it's much more divine than that. And we see other statements in Genesis. Genesis 1 .26 says, Let us make man in our image.

There's one image of God, but yet, us means that there is a plurality of persons that have claim to that one image. That image is owned by all three persons of the Trinity. And I'll tell you, rabbis have a lot of trouble with this.

People that just believe, you know, the Old Testament, they don't want to believe in Jesus. They don't want to believe in the Trinity. They have a hard time explaining some of these verses in the plurality of God.

It's like, why were the plural words used? And why, you know, why does it say, let us make man? And they try to say, well, you know, it might have been the angels. But it wasn't the angels' images that were created here.

It was the image of God that man reflects, not the angels.

And like God, we are tripartite beings, body, soul, and spirit.

Right. And the best place to see that is in 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. The very end of 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, as far as our nature goes. So, also in the New Testament, we have passages like this. And again, this is another triune example.

So, let's read Mark 1, 10 -12. Somebody has that?

It's 10 -11, right?

Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. 10 -11.

When he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open, and the Spirit descending on him like a dove, and a voice came from heaven, Lord, my beloved Son, with you I am pleased.

Amen.

So, again, we see Jesus being baptized, the Spirit coming upon Him, and the Father speaking from heaven, saying, This is my Son. Again, the Trinity active and revealing themselves, all in one in that particular scene.

And that happens many, many times. There are many other verses in the Old and the New Testament. I did not go much further than this, but the concept of the Trinity is a difficult one, and is a place where a lot of people have stumbled, because a lot of people would say, Well, there's just one God, there's not three Gods.

Well, they're right. There are not three Gods. But you need to understand that Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, but yet they are all one, one in person. So, Paul Little again, I'll get a little help from him.

Let's see if this helps us. He says, Part of the problem of understanding the Trinity is the inadequacy of human words to express divine reality. For instance, we speak of persons in the Godhead. And the Bible uses the term Godhead, by the way, to express, again, plurality of God's nature.

We use this term because it describes a being who has intellect, emotion, and will. A person, however, is an imperfect expression of the truth inasmuch as the term denotes to us a separate rational and moral individual.

So that's a problem in our thinking. We think like, well, if it's a person, it's a separate person. But in the being of God, there are not three individuals, but only three personal self-distinctions within one divine essence.

So that's like, ooh, okay, what did he say there? But he explains it here pretty well, I think. Then again, personality in man implies independence of will, actions, and feelings, leading to behavior peculiar to the individual.

And that's true. We understand that. We all have a different bent. We all have a different will. We all do different things. This cannot be thought of in connection with the Trinity, however. Each person is self-conscious, Father, Son, Spirit, and self-directing, yet never acting independently or in opposition to the others.

They are one, but yet they have these distinct wills and distinct persons. As I said, it's not easy to understand, but it's certainly easy to say and believe, because it's written all throughout the Bible.

There's many that would say, Jesus is not God. We know that. We're going to get into the cults. And we're going to specifically talk about Christology, which is the study of Jesus Christ, a little bit later, and talk about His divinity.

And the same thing with pneumatology, which is the study of the Holy Spirit, and see how the Spirit is revealed as God Almighty in the Scriptures as well. I'm not going to get into that right now, except for what we have talked about already in all those verses that equate the Father, Son, and Spirit together and teach the Trinity in the Scriptures.

So, there are many who say that Christianity teaches there are three gods, and we do not. And that needs to be something we grasp a hold of tonight.

Muslims.

Yeah. They think that we have a doctrine we don't have. We have a doctrine that says there is one God, and He reveals Himself in three persons, He exists in three persons. So, that is the doctrine of the Trinity.

And it's very, very important. I know Pastor, as we have discussed, he's discussed many, many times, there's a movement in South Jersey called the Oneness Pentecostal Movement, and they have taught, and I guess they're bigger than just Jersey, right, but they have taught that the Trinity is a sham.

Universalist.

Yeah. Go ahead, Jack.

It's funny you mention that. I recently watched those debates that he put up on the channel, and I scrolled through the comments afterwards, too, because there were thousands, and one of them said, it was like yelling at Pastor, saying that he was making things up.

So, I pulled up Revelation 6 .17, where it says, The great day of their wrath has come. Who can stand? And Pastor responded to that comment with the Strong's definition, personal possessive pronoun, third person plural, and just laid out directly from the definition that this is a plural word referring to the three members of the Trinity pouring out their wrath on humanity.

That's very interesting, right? Now, there's a very interesting section of 1 John that it's not controversial, but some of the Bible versions do not contain the verses that I'm going to go after right here.

Does somebody have a New King James or a King James?

I can have it if you want.

I do.

Let's lay hands on a New King James if you could.

What am I?

You're going to go 1 John 5. Most of the manuscripts contain these verses, but some do not. My Bible, New American Standards, says, well, we're going to eliminate those just because it wasn't in all the verses, in all the manuscripts, but many of the manuscripts...