Word and Spirit, God Chooses the Weak Things, and Back to David Allen's Really Bad Book

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. We're doing this at.

An unusual time today. Rich and I had an appointment this afternoon, so we just came driving in and it's interesting seeing an old lady running across the parking lot. Okay. I'm not sure what that's all about, but look over at the camera feed and go, oh, okay.

We are in Phoenix and Phoenix is Los Angeles East anymore, so you never know what's going on. Anyway, here we are and I, there's just, I've mentioned, I think, last week, something weird has happened to the algorithm on X and I'm just getting blasted with stuff that just, okay, it's, it fits exactly with what we normally cover on the program.

We are an apologetics ministry and we focus upon that application to social issues has come along over time as well. But especially looking at Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians, attacks upon the scripture, things like that.

Roman Catholic Triumph and the Supernatural in Worship

And man, I don't know if I followed somebody. I don't know if I liked a post I shouldn't have liked. I don't know. But I'm just getting blasted with a couple of things. One is a triumphalistic, hubris filled posts from Roman Catholics, including priests.

And, you know, it's, it really is the worst of the, we're the ones who church, we're smarter than everybody else. Look at our glorious buildings. Look at all the pretty pictures of all of our cathedrals.

Man, aren't we awesome? And when, when someone posted the, some priest or scholar, I think he is a priest who is a scholar, talking about how the intellectual Protestants are converting to Roman Catholicism and the bad Catholics are converting to Protestantism.

Again, I guess we're stuck with the terminology, but it is just so facile when Roman Catholics don't recognize that Protestant is a primarily undefined term as far as theology is concerned, just means not Catholic.

And even then it's not, it doesn't mean exactly that. I mean, East Orthodox are not Catholic, even though they call themselves Catholic. So there is no Protestant church you can compare yourself to. They do that all the time, but there really, there really isn't a Protestant church you can compare yourself to.

And when you do that, you're comparing apples and oranges normally to your own benefit, but also to the destruction of the credibility of your argument. And so I see people doing this just constantly online.

And sometimes it, it does make me wonder if almost all these people don't just have a whole lot of doubts themselves. They're just trying to prop themselves up online, talking about how great everything is.

Okay. If you say so. But anyway, this Protestia had posted back on October 16th, so five days ago, this shot. And here's the, here's the description. It says, Roman Catholics blessing folk is the supposed liquefied blood of Saint Januarius.

Well, next to nothing is known about him other than he passed in the fourth century, he's alleged to have been. And if I click this, I'm going to lose the other thing. So it's, it's this creepy, supposed to be liquefied blood thing.

That's one of the many, many, many, many, many, many relics in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy that's supposed to have, we showed the film of the dead foot, wash it in the water. And now everybody's grabbing the water, get blessings and stuff like this.

And most of us, we, we sit around and we look at that. First of all, it just seems utterly creepy to us because we have no experience in anything like that. Now, if we lived in Eastern Europe, we'd sort of be used to it because we would have seen it most of our lives.

But if you, if you honestly, you know, have this as your standard and you go, all right, I've read the entire New Testament many times over. And I, I see the apostles and they are beaten and driven from town to town and frequently are in poverty, in want.

And the, the message of the cross is foolishness to the world. And they're mocked and derided and stoned and, and yet now, 2000 years later, you've got cathedrals. And isn't it also beautiful that we have all this gold and silver and precious stones and now our bishops and all sorts of offices that you don't find anywhere in the Testament.

Um, they run around in these uber fancy robes with big miters on their heads and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, and you, you watch at the opening of a Vatican, was it Vatican one or two? Vatican two, I think.

Anyways, the Pope being carried in, you know, with people in the world, it's like you would some King in the East or something like that. And, and now you, when you see that and you compare that with what you have, the only thing, the only thing that we have that we know is apostolic, is that, that's, that's the big issue.

Is, is this all we have that is apostolic? Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy say, no, we have much more. On a functional level, we have volumes more of infallible apostolic tradition. No, we cannot trace it back to the apostles, but we assume it.

We have to assume it because if we don't, then we cannot substantiate 99 of our religious practice. And so that's, that's the dividing line. That's what it is. There are those that would say, no, um, there's no evidence that the apostles taught these things, practiced these things, instructed others to practice these things.

And the other side says it doesn't matter because the church that descended from them, and of course they'll have entire religious wars as to which one of those churches it is. Um, the church that descended from them says that they taught these things.

We don't have to prove it. We simply believe the church and that's the end of the discussion. So when we see, you know, creepy non-congealed blood stuff, the other side goes, yeah, okay. Not in the New Testament.

Got it. It doesn't have to be. Um, once my church tells me by its own infallible authority that these things are true, then I just believe it. And I, I go with it from there. And that's, that's why you'll never see any kind of progress being made on X, uh, about these particular things.

And I, there is a Father Peter Totleben, OP, um, that commented on this protestia, quotation, it's actually a video of this creepy Saint Januarius blood. And he said, to me, this is the clenching argument for Catholicism.

We get to have this kind of stuff instead of having to sit through some awful, boring Presbyterian service, or having to listen to a narcissistic, metrosexual, and skinny jeans croon into a microphone.

Well, I am sure some of my Presbyterian brothers have delivered some less than scintillating sermons. I don't know what sermons, uh, Father Peter Totleben, uh, has, uh, has attended. But given that Pope Francis, uh, probably about six months before his death, had given his own wisdom, um, that, what was it?

Eight minutes or 12 minutes? I think it was eight minutes. Uh, that homilies should be no longer than eight minutes because no one's attention span is long enough to follow anything more than eight minutes.

Um, the Puritans would like to have a word with him. But anyway, um, you know, given that perspective, then I would imagine that any in-depth sermon would cause Father Peter to be bored, that he would not have sufficiently long attention span, uh, or even interest in what's going on.

Because one of the fundamental differences between Roman Catholics and, I will say, believing Reformed Christians, is the Roman Catholics center the experience of the supernatural with the sacraments in the worship of the church.

So it's the incense, the candles, the incantations, the prayers, the kneeling, standing up, facing the altar, and of course, then the unbloody sacrifice, the mass, and, um, blessings, and holy water, and processions.

And that's where the supernatural is located in focus. Um, Reformed Christians locate the presence of the supernatural in the prayers, in the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Um, and most importantly, and this is, this is a part of Reformation teaching that does need to be more fully explicated, I think, in our churches.

We, we sort of act in light of it, but we don't necessarily know about it. Um, the Reformation emphasized the absolute necessity of word and spirit. Word and spirit. The word had been decentralized within Roman Catholic medieval experience, partly because of the collapse of education in the West, so that so few people could read, so few priests could actually functionally read.

So that's why you had all the stained glass windows. You told the stories up on the wall. But opening the scriptures and delving into their rich depth wasn't a possibility for a lot of different reasons.

And that had to be replaced with something else, so it was replaced with mystery, and sacrament, and spectacle. And of course, you know, even that would be on a much lesser level in smaller places, smaller churches, things like that, than you'd have at the grand spectacle in Rome or something like that.

So, word and spirit, you know, it was the Reformation that made the scriptures available to the plowman, and to the farmer, and to the banker, and to the king, and everybody else. Rome wasn't doing that.

They were producing translations, but the emphasis was not, get this into the hands of every believer. That was the emphasis of the Reformation. And the teaching was that as central as the word is, without the spirit, no one can understand the word.

The spirit gives us the word, and the spirit is necessary for us to understand the word, and to make applications of the word. So, spirit and word have to go together, which was, bring it up too, another reason why the nominalism of the Middle Ages was such a problem, and why the acceptance on the part of some today within Reformed circles of, hey, it's better to have a nominally Christian nation than a fully secular nation.

How do you define the word better? Better in what way? It has been lamented that it is easier to talk to a full-on pagan about their need for Christ than it is to talk to a person who thinks they're already saved.

You know, I walked the aisle, Brother Billy Bob prayed with me, you know, I got dunked that day, and I'm on my way to heaven. Well, you have a nominal Christian, namas, nomina, sorry, not namas, nomina, in name.

So, they bear the name, but they don't have the spirit, they don't have spiritual life. And so, that nominalism was the ground out of which the Reformation grew, when the message of justification, to where you could have a true and living peace with God, and relationship with God, not just constantly running to the church to try to find some place to hide from the wrath of God, not just to get a brief appeasement, but true and living faith, true and living peace, forgiveness, true forgiveness, lasting forgiveness, a righteousness not your own.

Because we all know any righteousness that we work up within ourselves is defiled and dirty and imperfect, but the message of a righteousness that actually avails to the heart and soul that recognizes their own sin, that's the only way you can ever have peace with God.

And so, that message resonated in Europe at that time. We no longer have that fear of God, we no longer have that fear of judgment. And so, you see what's happened to Europe. Many, you know, 100 years ago, Europe was still nominally Christian, by name and by baptism, state churches in the Protestant portions of Europe, all over the place, they've all gone apostate.

None of them are preaching the gospel. And now, look at the state of Europe, look at its worldview, its degradation. That's what nominalism is all about. And so, once those state churches lost word and spirit, they no longer believed that the word was what Jesus taught it was.

And hence, you no longer had a foundation for believing and trusting in the ministry of the Spirit. You have to replace that with something else. And so, you get your rainbow-stoled women priestesses, you know, with their, yeah, eight to 10-minute homilies about how wonderful the LGBTQ movement is.

That's all you can come up with. There really isn't anything else. The church can't speak to the state any longer or anything like that. You don't have a foundation left. That's one of the massive changes that has taken place.

And the same thing in Roman Catholic Europe. You drive through Spain, France, Italy, and you drive into any little town, and what's going to be the highest building in that little town? Church. What is it now?

Casino, a mosque, closed up, used for storage. Same thing going on there, because the disease of secularism knows no boundaries. And has crossed all those boundaries. And so, back to Fr. Peter Totleben.

Without Word and Spirit, that Presbyterian service is to be just as empty as his eight-minute homily will be. But if you have the Word, if you have a group of gathered people who believe they're handling the Word of God, they have the Word of God in their hands.

God has spoken. God has preserved it, given it to his church. He's called us together in the name of Christ, in this church, at this time. The promise is that he will be with two or three who are gathered in his name.

We've gathered as the church. We are obeying Christ. We have the supper. We practice baptism. And so, we've gathered with the Word, and we trust that the Spirit will make the Word to come alive. And that the Spirit will apply the Word to hearts and lives in a way we cannot begin to understand.

We cannot begin to understand. Now, I can tell you I've preached a lot of sermons. I don't think I'm much of a preacher. I hope I'm an accurate teacher. If I have any skills, it's making difficult things understandable to people.

And I enjoy doing that. But every preacher, every preacher can tell you that they've had the experience of standing before the people of God, preaching through a passage of Scripture, and later that evening, or the next day, or next week, talking to someone who was there, or who listened online, whatever, that's a pretty unusual element of church history now.

Never happened to anybody for a long time. And somebody will say, well, you said, and now I'm getting older, so sometimes I'm just like, I did? Maybe I did. Today at lunch, Rich was mentioning something had happened on one of our cruises, and I'm sitting here, and he's telling other people, so I'm just sort of sitting there trying to look, because I had, once it was explained to me, I went, okay, I don't really remember that real well, but okay, if you say so.

And this was not 60 years ago either. It's busy times, we're doing a bunch of stuff, moving place to place, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't necessarily remember all the details. But somebody will say, well, yeah, you said such and so, and sometimes it's negative.

I took that to mean this, and I was offended by that, and I didn't really hear anything else that you said, and you're frustrated by that, and it's like, that was never on my mind, that's not what I was seeking to communicate.

And then you start digging into it, and you find out they really didn't hear almost anything that you were trying to communicate. And so, yeah, that can be frustrating and difficult. I'll tell you about it.

But, and you don't hear about this as often, because when this happens, people generally aren't quick to necessarily tell you about it. There are so many times that you get into a conversation, or even years later, somebody will tell you, you know, I heard you preach on such and such a text, and you didn't know this, but I was going through this at that time, and the Lord just made application in my heart, and I'd never seen it before, and it just met my need in a way you just can't imagine.

And you're sitting there going, you had no idea whatsoever what they were going through. When you look out over 20 to 500 faces, or whatever the Lord puts you in, as far as the situation, you can't see into their hearts.

You may know some, you may have been counseling with some people, there may have been prayer requests, there may be some things like that, but generally, you really don't know what the needs are out there.

And so, you just try to be faithful to the Word, trust the Spirit, and the application of Word and Spirit can change hearts and minds. And you might say, yeah, but you also said there's some people just don't get it.

Well, you know what? It's a miracle that the Spirit of God will take the Word of God and apply it to the hearts of saints in a way to meet their needs in a way that the pastor could never even begin to understand.

And you can't demand that God work miracles all the time. When he does so, you rejoice, it's a gift of grace. But when he doesn't do so, you know, you can sit back and go, well, simple question, had you prepared yourself for worship that day?

Boy, that's one that'll get you kicked out of the church. Because let's be honest, the vast majority of us walk into the church service, literally, I put this very directly, and I hope we all, including myself, are convicted by this.

The reality is most of us walk into a church service daring God to do something in our lives. Because we don't come prepared. We haven't prayed to be blessed. We're distracted by a million different things going on.

We just got done cursing somebody in our hearts for cutting us off traffic. And the wife and us have not been on good terms ever since that dish broke. And there's just, you know, all this stuff that we drag in there, and it's like, I dare you to bless me, God.

And he does so often anyway. It's amazing to think about it. But it's the Word and the Spirit making that application. And it's the supernatural nature of the Word. So much of all of man's quote-unquote Christian religions, whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, any type of Protestant, so much of the intellectual world, scholarly world, does not believe that this is a supernatural work.

They might say, well, you know, once the church put together, then there's sort of a blessing upon it from God or something. They don't believe that God intended this work to have the nature that it has, the words that it has, to come into existence the way that it did.

And they do not believe that there is any kind of supernatural internal consistency. That I would say to you, Jesus plainly believed that there was. That all apostolic teaching in the New Testament assumes that there is.

That Psalm 119 tells us it's there. Yeah, that's all there. But you go to the vast majority of seminaries today, of any type, and you're going to get this humanized, secularized, sanitized, surface-level blech to its view of Scripture.

And well, don't get me into a discussion of quote-unquote Christian education at this point in time. That will definitely get us off the track. So back to this thing here. I feel sorry for Father Peter because that boring Presbyterian service, it could be boring.

It may not have been prayed over and empowered by the Spirit. But then again, it might have been boring to Father Peter because Peter doesn't have eyes to see or ears to hear and wouldn't understand how an hour-long exegesis of a passage of Scripture could possibly meet the needs of people in 2025 in the Western world, or the Eastern world, or Southern world, or whatever.

I'm preaching this Sunday. Appreciate your prayers. I'm going to continue in 1 John. And so the people gathered there will be challenged to think through what John was writing and communicating in the last portion of the first century when heretics abounded, Gnostics were running wild, persecution was ramping up.

What did the beloved John think the church needed to hear at that point? And I'm going to have to double-check this, but I'm pretty certain that the last time I was in 1 John before my last trip, I got right toward the end of chapter 1.

And I like doing best because I'm dumb and I'm simple. I just want to bring the text. This is my Tyndale Greek New Testament. I could probably get away with that, but I have a little larger print edition.

My NA28 is a little bit larger, but all I got to do is use my iPad and it's 48 point font or whatever. But I like to just open the text and start reading and commenting on the things that strike me as I'm reading it.

If I have to do something I've often said, if I walk into church at 3 .30 because we meet at four o 'clock in the afternoon, to be honest with you, I've gotten used to it. I would struggle a little bit if I had to be at church at 9 .30 in the morning now.

I really would be. When you get used to it, you get used to it. I'm a little more with it at that time of the day than necessarily for a second to worry, but you adjust whatever you're doing. But if I walk into the church at 3 .30 and Christine runs up to me, our staff assistant who keeps everything running, and says, Jeff's in the bathroom puking his guts out.

We're going to get him home because he can't walk. Part of my role at the church is to be ready for that. That is to walk into the pulpit and deliver a sermon that will still meet the needs of the people.

The best way I know to do that, open the text, start reading. Let God speak. Explain things. When I say the text, I mean the Greek text or the Hebrew text. It'd be far easier for me to do the Greek text.

I spend far more time in the Greek than I do in the Hebrew. Or if I'm in the Old Testaments, very often the Septuagint anyways. Read it. Translate it. Comment on it. Make application of it. Move on to the next verse.

Point out consistency. If you're in one of the Gospels, if you're in John, one of the beautiful things about the Gospel of John is the themes that each chapter, I think the chapters were divided up pretty good.

They've done pretty well. That was before Stephanos, by the way. Because especially in John, there's a certain set of themes for John 3, and then John 4, and then John 5. You get into John 6 and you start seeing my Apple Watch just displayed and it says, here's an answer from Christianity .com.

The main theme of third John is to encourage fellowship and hospitality among believers. Well, that is actually not a bad summary, but it has nothing to do with what I was talking about. But I did say John 3, right?

So Spurgeon was never, ever distracted by his Apple Watch in the middle of a sermon. He never was. So we are facing challenges today. That's, yeah, something tells me that he probably would not wear an Apple Watch into the pulpit.

I really think that's a possibility because now I'm like, what was I talking about? No. No, seriously. Thankfully, I do remember what I was talking about, but I could see me getting right off there. You start working through the Gospel of John and you start seeing the themes from previous chapters now being interwoven into the next chapter.

Then that then appears four chapters later. It builds on itself. It's beautiful. It's purposeful. So if I were to choose, and I've done this a couple of times. In fact, I think the very first time I ever did this, where I just had to all of a sudden just, here, go.

The speaker ain't ready, go. I did John 5, and I just commented on the text, made application, and then tied it in with the themes of the Gospel of John. God's people love that. I always get positive feedback from just diving into the text in that way and allowing it to speak.

There's nothing wrong when people put a tremendous amount of effort into making their points alliterate and wonderful illustrations that they spent three hours digging out of old crusty books in the attic.

Okay, that's fine. That's just not me. That doesn't work very well for me. This kind of thing, I just find helpful for myself. Helpful in just not being the best speaker in the world to go that direction.

So anyway, I certainly agree with Father Peter that I'm not interested in the narcissistic, metrosexual, and skinny jeans crooning into a microphone either. But I would just point out to him that it's his own church that let the LGBTQ folks do pilgrimages into Rome and use official buildings under their control for their strange stuff.

Some of you may have seen that I posted something yesterday, a day before yesterday. Look, I've done a number of debates at FBC Livingston in Livingston, Louisiana. Pastor Brian Gunter and the people there have been great.

It's been a good location. The two non-debates with Jimmy Akin were there. I say it because when you show up with your entire presentation already on the screen and you will not interact with the other person saying it's not a debate.

It's disrespectful to debate and it's horrific. Anyway, but just this past year, I had the debate with Doug Levesque there, a representative of the King James Bible Research Council, and that was also at First Baptist Livingston.

So I was deeply disturbed to be informed, I don't know, two months ago approximately, that Pastor Gunter had been relieved of his duties at the church. There had been a church split. Now, he was seeking to move the church along toward a biblical ecclesiology, but they weren't there yet, and so he was facing a situation, I'm going to take my watch off because they're ding-ding-dinging in the channel again, faced a situation where you have deacons functioning as if they are the elders of the church, and my dad faced this most of his life, pretty much all of his life, and I can't tell you how many times I remember him butting heads with the deacon board and then getting kicked out of a church by a deacon board.

The pastors were all just hirelings to that situation. You had these deacon boards who just ran the church even though they weren't qualified to run the church. I was in seminary before I ever came to realize just how completely unbiblical that ecclesiology is.

So anyways, a big group of people, about 140 to 150, left with him, and thanks be to Lord, there was a small Reformed Baptist church very close by, and they got together, and basically, hopefully in February, that's my plan right now, I have asked to be able to move the debate that I'm doing in Dallas.

We're going to have some cool stuff going on in Dallas at the end of January, beginning of February. Please pray for the weather. I'm going whether it's freezing cold or not. This time, if I just have to empty all the lines of water in the thing and pull in the cold, I'll pull in the cold.

I'm not doing what I did last time. Anyway, hopefully I will get to preach at, I believe it's Salem Reformed Baptist Church in the Livingston area in February. I think February 8th is that Sunday after the debates in Dallas.

That's what I've worked on as far as reservations and working on reservations and stuff as far as the RV is concerned. So I'm very thankful that such a faithful pastor, Brian Gunter, is just, everybody who knows him knows his heart and his love for his people.

It's always sad to see something like that happen. It really is, especially when it happens this way. But it's great. My hope and prayer is that the newly constituted local church there will have great unity and they'll be able to do more now that there is that unity.

Because obviously the people that kicked them out weren't Reformed. They didn't, did not have a Reformed ecclesiology, evidently did not have a Reformed soteriology either. And you are limited in what you can do when your congregation is not unified on key central issues.

So my hope is that this will actually be a blessing to the local area in having such a strengthened, firm biblical witness. But one of the things that really caught me is that the church that I've spoken at that got rid of Pastor Gunter, guess who they're having come in to preach at their now much diminished church?

David Allen. They're bringing David Allen in to confirm them in their rejection of Reformed theology. The thing is, I've stood and I've preached there multiple times. I've stood there and defended the Reformation, meaningful biblical translation, taught them about the history of the Bible.

And I just want to say to all of them who have, who helped to get rid of Pastor Gunter and who are now wanting to rid themselves of any vestiges of Calvinism, the man you're bringing in, I have challenged debate on these issues for years.

I have offered to walk into his classroom when he was at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with nothing but a Greek New Testament to debate me on the sovereignty of God, election, predestination, the atonement.

He wouldn't even respond. Earlier this year he was finally forced to respond when he put out a horrific little book, self-published horrific little book, and he finally said he wouldn't debate me because I'm so mean-spirited.

Yeah. Okay. Now, the reason Dr. Allen will not debate me is he knows his position is indefensible. He knows he could never survive cross-examination. He could not survive pointed. He could not sit there.

He's seen me do this over and over again. He could not survive. In Romans chapter 8, if we start verse 28 and I start walking through it and I don't let him wander off throwing dust in the air, but stick with the context, he'd never survive it.

And he knows it. And that's the man you're bringing in. I just have to say to those of you who know me, shame on you. Shame on you for what you did and shame on you for what you're doing. It is truly a shame.

It really is. It has been a while, and so I have to apologize. It has been a while since we looked at that self-published little book. We were looking at it and examining it, and what we've been looking for has been the verse-by-verse exegesis of Romans chapter 8, where you walk through the text, allowing the text to speak for itself, and allow it to positively present, from his perspective, the provisionist viewpoint.

Now, what's interesting is, in reading this book, it seems like that silly, absurd, two Romans childishness that's at the beginning of this book, nobody knows how to apply it. And so it doesn't really appear.

This is the same kind of facile, simplistic argumentation that Alan was presenting before, well, probably before that guy ever thought up the two Romans silliness, let alone that he ran into it and started going, oh, this isn't all that bad.

We have to think about this. No, we don't have to think about it. So, we haven't found that exegesis yet. What we find is an excess of verbiage, and here's where we had gotten. Now, let me put it this way.

I can and have presented in writing and in word a clear, text-based, consecutive exegesis of Romans 8. We could do the whole chapter, but especially Romans 8, 28 and following. I've done this in print, done this on this program many times.

It shouldn't be difficult to do. So why don't we get that? We get a rambling scattergun, let's chase this rabbit for a while and then come back here. And the reason is simple. As I explained the last couple of times, as we looked at this, I've only got like 13 minutes anyways, we're not going to get too far, but as I explained before, the provisionist means of dismissing any evidence in the New Testament of God's freedom and salvation, which is the natural context of the New Testament, if you've read the Old Testament, if you've seen what God did with Israel, if you've seen God saying, I did not choose Israel because of Israel's righteousness or good deeds, because Israel didn't have any of those things, if you've listened to God saying, I do what I please in the heavens and the earth and seas and all deep places, if you've seen God even cause Nebuchadnezzar, upon his reason returning to him in Daniel chapter 4, to testify of the fact that there is none that can thwart the hand of God, that God is going to accomplish his purpose.

If you've read Isaiah and you see the trial of the over and over again, the argument is, not only do I know the future and the gods do not, but I know the past and why it took place. Why it took place.

See, historians can tell you normally what happened in the past, they can't tell you why it took place, and if God could tell you why it took place, then God had a purpose in it taking place. So, if you come to the New Testament with that as your background, its witness is obvious and clear.

There's no way around it. But that's not what provisionists do, and that's not what David Allen does. This book is an exercise in how to look up quotations from differing sources, some solid and some not so solid, and throw them together into what's supposed to sound like a scholarly discussion that allows you to never have to do the hard work of actually exegeting the text, actually explain to someone positively this is what it's saying.

And so, the fundamental argument that the provisionist presents in Romans 8, and in any other text, is that the Bible is talking about God's plan for believers. Believers become believers based upon the exercise of their free, unfettered will.

They start with a complete rejection of everything the Bible teaches about man's state in sin. When the Bible says man cannot, the provisionist says man can. And when the Bible says man is a slave, the provisionist says, but not that much of a slave.

And so, the whole mechanism, just read it for yourself, the whole mechanism is, well, you freely choose to become a believer. Everybody has the equal opportunity, which in and of itself is so absurd, but everybody has the equal opportunity to become a believer.

Just exercise your free will. You can become a believer. And then everything about predestination, election, the keeping power of the Holy Spirit, all the rest of that stuff, is just saying that once you, by your free will, become a believer, God will keep you a believer.

And will glorify you in the final day. So, everything is about God's plan for believers. But the one thing that they cannot possibly allow to stand, the one thing that they have to go, no, no, no, no, no, that's impossible, is that God is the one who makes believers.

That it's the free work of the Spirit of God that draws men out of slavery to death into life. That it is a supernatural work. No, saving faith is not a supernatural work, according to provisionists. They reject this.

Sadly, a lot of evangelicals do too, even though they've never given it much thought, at least a provisionist who knows what his task is. His task is to make the central aspect of Christian theology the free will of man.

That's his task. Many evangelicals function on the basis of that having been accomplished without themselves thinking through how that might be. But that's where they start. And as I've said for years, they start with man, reason upward to God.

The Bible starts with God, reasons downward to the creature. So, the result is a redefinition of so many things. Sadly, especially grace. What grace is, what grace can accomplish, what spiritual death is, all these things become redefined within provisionism.