Dan Savage

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. It was just a few days ago, as I recall, I began getting the links to this particular video.

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In fact, I believe it was when I was in Boston that I actually saw for the first time the

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Dan Savage video. Dan Savage is a radical pro -homosexual activist.

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He has been convicted of voter fraud and has, let's just say, is the quintessential in -your -face homosexual activist and clearly deeply bigoted against Christianity and just one of those examples of someone who is completely defined by sexuality and by his choice of a perverted sexuality.

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That's just the essence of who he is and it defines everything that he does.

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It's one of the reasons why these folks are so active. The rest of us just want to live our lives. We want to be married to our wives and we want to raise children, which we actually create ourselves and build a household and serve in the church and do the things we've been called to do and we don't even want to be thinking too much about these other things.

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And yet those who are trapped in this type of lifestyle, it becomes their essence.

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It is what they are. It's what they do. It's what they will dedicate themselves to. Anyway, for some reason,

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Dan Savage was asked to speak to a high school journalism conference.

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And I remember a couple of years ago when my daughter encountered a vile anti -Christian bigot in a local community college.

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I, at that time, was amazed at what was allowed to be said in the community college level.

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And now to hear the kind of language being used in... Look, people said this type of stuff in locker rooms when

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I was in high school, but it never happened in the official meetings of the school, that's for sure.

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And so things have changed a lot. Anyway, I have created a bleeped version of Dan Savage's comments, the 3 minutes and 16 seconds or so, that everyone has been seeing.

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I wasn't actually going to address this, but I just did a very brief, once you figure the breaks in, maybe 20, 23 minutes at the max, stint on issues, et cetera, talking about this very subject.

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And I had to talk very, very fast. And so since I created this, I thought, well, it does sort of fit in with what else

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I was going to talk about. Except I just realized I let the URLs that I had go streaming past me here, which may leave me completely unable to find what

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I was looking for. Hopefully they're still back here somewhere in my history, in my chat channel.

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But anyway, I want to talk a little bit about the Ron Brown situation up at Nebraska as well, because he is an evangelical

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Christian. And the arguments that were being used against him and the arguments that were being used to try to silence him on this very subject, there it is, is very much related to what we are seeing in this particular situation with Dan Savage.

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So I guess it all does sort of fit together and will be a consistent whole. And then we'll move on from there.

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Maybe take your phone calls a little bit later on. We've got a jumbo edition today, so we should have time for some of those things.

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So I'm going to stop and start, but let's listen to the

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Dan Savage presentation. And again, I know I would be more than just slightly upset if my son or daughter came back from school and this is what they had been subjected to.

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And like I said, the video camera does catch a number of people who will then be attacked by Dan Savage.

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He has apologized for that since then. It didn't stop him at the time, did it?

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But a number of students who got up and walked out. Now, of course, if they had been homosexual students walking out on somebody talking about, let's say, the sanctity of marriage, they would have been looked on as heroes, as advocates for free speech.

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And if the person up front had dared to ever say anything about them the way that Savage did here, well, they would be blacklisted forever.

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Do you think that'll happen with Dan Savage? Of course not. Of course it won't. The hypocrisy of our society is shocking.

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But anyways, let's listen to what Dan Savage had to say. The Bible.

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We'll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can't help it.

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They can't help with the anti -gay bullying. Because it says right there in Leviticus. It says right there in Timothy. It says right there in Romans that being gay is wrong.

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Now, I immediately stop. It does say that, and I'm glad that Dan Savage at least is not one of those people who tries to pervert the

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Bible and say that it doesn't say those things. That normally is the approach of the religious left to try to redefine the biblical message and try to say that, well, the

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Bible really doesn't say that homosexuality is wrong. The Bible, the biblical authors didn't know really what homosexuality was.

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They didn't understand what we know today because they didn't have psychologists and psychiatrists.

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And so they just didn't really know. And he's just straight up forward saying, yeah, the

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Bible says that. But then notice the utterly irrational argument that's being made. There's bullying.

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There's bad things happening. It's because the Bible says it's bad. Mr. Savage, sir, where does the

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Bible say that a Christian is to bully someone who is engaged in this sin?

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Where even in the Old Testament law for the nation of Israel was a fellow

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Israelite to bully? Even when the death penalty is mentioned, who proclaims that?

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The guy next door? A kid in the

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Torah class? No. There had to be a legal decision made.

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The elders of the city were involved. There was a process involved. There's nothing about bullying there.

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There's nothing about beatings there. There's nothing about individuals taking the law in their own hands.

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So where's the connection? You want to maybe try to make a connection? Well, yes, all those people doing it are

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Christians. Really? How many of those people that are doing that are actually people that are involved in their churches?

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Maybe people that are leading in Bible studies and give to their churches and go on missions trips and things like that.

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Really? Seriously? Yeah, I don't think so either. And I think he knows that.

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I think he knows that. There's something just really desperately dishonest about pro -homosexual activists in their argumentation, their perversion of history, as we'll see their perversion of the

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Bible as well. Now, let's stop right there because this is very, very common.

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Very, very common. And unfortunately, we get emails here.

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And partly, I think it's – look, I always have to remember that just because I've addressed something 10 times in the past doesn't mean that everyone who's just tuned in or something has taken the time to understand it or listen or learn or whatever.

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And just because I've written a book on a subject doesn't mean people are going to take time to read the book. We have addressed these arguments many, many times.

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I've written a book called The Same -Sex Controversy with Jeff Neal. And we addressed this argument.

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I would be interested if we still have. Maybe we need to do it again or just replay it.

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I'm sure it's on the Wayback Machine at some time, but that might mean it's played at 3 o 'clock in the morning too. We grabbed – and I do need to do this again.

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We grabbed the audio at some point in the past in The Dividing Line. I remember this. And we went through the

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West Wing presentation, remember, where we played the president mocking the

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Dr. Laura thing. Look, the homosexuals have not come up with anything new. They just keep recycling the same old stuff that we have refuted over and over and over again.

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But they depend upon the continuing ignorance of their audience. I can say this because I've debated

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Barry Lynn. I've debated John Shelby Spong. And they weren't even competitive debates because these men are used to being on CNN and only having to talk for 45 seconds and never having to answer a direct question and never have to present an argument that lasts for 25 minutes and then engage in cross -examination.

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Almost none of them can read the biblical languages. Almost none of them know about biblical history. They almost always depend upon secondary sources that they've read from this pro -homosexual scholar or that pro -homosexual scholar.

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And so we've gone through all this stuff over and over and over again.

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But look, the reason that the Dan Savages of the world get away with this is because most

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Christians don't read the Book of Leviticus or Deuteronomy.

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And they've never given almost any thought whatsoever to the nature of the

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Old Testament law, to what a creation ordinance is, to what a shadow and type are, to what laws are related specifically to the people of Israel as the people of Israel, and what laws are not.

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And so they fall for whatever excuse is thrown out there. Well, this only had to do with Israel.

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Really? That's why Jesus quotes so much from Leviticus? That's why this is the section that love your neighbor as yourself comes from?

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Oh, okay, that's a little bit simplistic. I guess we can't go that way. Yeah, it takes some work to actually look at and understand what is related to the subject of holiness and God's purpose for our lives and what is incidental to that or part of the identification of the people of Israel.

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Maybe it's something to keep the people of Israel from becoming involved with or like the people around them.

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There's a lot of work that goes into this, and I can guarantee you people like Dan Savage or Dan Brown, for that matter, do not do the work that is necessary to handle those things appropriately.

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Yeah, the program was June 26, 2008, and we're actually going to queue it up to follow this particular program.

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So I won't have to spend quite as much time, because you can just keep the feed going and listen to the next program, and you'll hear a discussion of those very things.

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And if I recall correctly, I'm not sure this was the one I did it in, but I went through some of the sections in the

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Holiness Code, and I gave some background, and I talked about why certain of these would need to be seen in such a way that we are seeing it as a general principle that can be applied today.

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Everybody knows the issue of putting a railing around the roof of your house.

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Well, almost none of us go up on the roofs of our houses anymore, but in that day they did.

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They spent a lot of time up there, and so you have the general application of the concept of doing that which is necessary to preserve and protect human life.

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And we talked about other things. We talked about being careful not to assume that certain things back then, especially if you've got terminology, it's only used like once in the

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Old Testament or once in the entire Bible. Be careful not to just automatically assume that that maps into a modern situation.

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Be careful of the hapax legomena, the terms that are only used once.

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We talked about all that stuff. I'm not sure if that was that exact program or not, but it'll be useful to you if you take the time to look at it.

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But here he's talking about shellfish. And if Dan Savage cannot tell the difference,

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I mean, just stand back. He criticizes the entirety of the Bible. He goes all the way to Philemon, which he identifies as the shortest of the books in the

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New Testament, and he talks about that, and so he's willing to draw from all of the

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Bible. Okay, how about we allow the Bible to be consistent with itself? So how about we allow

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Jesus' words in Mark to be quoted when he made all meats clean? Okay, then we have in this section something about not eating shellfish, but clearly

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Jesus suspends that by making all meats clean in the coming of the

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Messiah. But that same Messiah says in Matthew 19 that God created us male and female, and that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

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So there is no abrogation of, fulfillment of, clear teaching that those laws specifically had to do with the

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Old Covenant people and are not to be brought into the New Covenant. No, instead what you have are the

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New Covenant writers, Jesus and his apostles, repeating and reemphasizing the reality that the prohibition against homosexuality goes to the very created order itself.

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Now why doesn't Dan Savage show some integrity in dealing with the biblical text?

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Because that won't accomplish anything for him. He wants to do the shock thing.

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He wants to do the surface -level thing. He wants to do the emotional thing. Because he's not representing truth.

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That's all. It's just fairly straightforward on that. So there is no connection.

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About slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

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We ignore the Bible about all sorts of things.

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We ignore. No, we don't ignore any of those things. We look at them.

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We see how they function in the Old Covenant economy. And we don't just simply say,

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Ah, we're not in the law, we're under grace, and just forget all about those things. I realize there are some people that take that simplistic perspective.

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But I'm talking about serious students of Scripture. We want to look at each one of them.

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And we want to ask ourselves the question, Is there something here that goes to creation that speaks about God's intended purposes for us?

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Is there an abiding moral principle that needs to be applied here? Not eating shellfish was part of separating yourself out as the people of God to whom the promises of the

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Messiah had been given. The Messiah has come. And that Messiah himself made all meats clean.

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But issues of faithfulness in marriage, and virginity, and adultery, and fornication, and bestiality, and incest.

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All these things not only are not undone by the

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New Testament revelation, but simple common sense teaches you that we see these very same things impressed upon the hearts and minds of individuals who have never read a

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Bible. And yet they recognize that these things are inappropriate, they're wrong, and there is a reason for it.

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You just look at the man who's caught cheating on his wife, and I don't care what his worldview is, the reason that he looks both ways when he comes out of the hotel room is because he's got a conscience.

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And that is the issue. The Bible is a radically pro -slavery document.

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That is absurd. It's a lie. And it's dishonest.

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And he knows it. Oh, the Bible talks about slavery. It does. The Bible regulates slavery.

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But you see, he's talking to an audience where the term slavery has meaning A, and the

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Bible has meaning C, and there's a meaning B in between. And so to just throw that statement out, knowing exactly what his audience will interpret as is a lie.

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It is dishonest. It is reprehensible. And I do not accept the idea that he's ignorant of this.

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I'm sure he does know this. But you see, slavery in the

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Old Testament was different than slavery under Rome. And slavery under Rome was different than slavery in the

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American South. But he doesn't want to make those distinctions. He doesn't want to talk to you about the fact that slavery saved lives in the

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Hebrew economy. Because then he'd have to talk to you about the fact that there were people who lived right on the margins of life.

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And there are many times when a famine comes in the land, if there's a drought, if there's a flood, things like that, there would be people who were so much on the margins that they wouldn't make it through things like that.

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And slavery actually allowed a man to save his wife and his family.

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To sell himself into slavery rather than starving to death. But it was regulated, and if you remember anything about the

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Jubilee year, it was something that would be released in a period of time.

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It was a means of protecting the poor. And it was so regulated that a slave might so much love his master that at the time of freedom he may not want to leave.

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And it made provision even for that. But he doesn't want to talk about that.

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That doesn't help his paradigm any. That's not going to help him make his points.

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We don't want to talk about that. We don't want to talk about the difference between that and what you had in Roman slavery. What we want to do is even you want to bash

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Paul around a little bit. Because what you're really saying is what Paul should have done. Is Paul should have started a rebellion in his

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Rome. And he should have forever wedded the

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Christian faith to a particular political ideology and action.

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And so there were lots of people who tried to get the slaves to revolt in Rome.

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And they normally ended up nailed on crosses along major highways. And so I guess what you're saying is, well, unless Paul was willing to do that, then he was a bad guy and it's a pro -slavery document.

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That's the same document that was talking to Christian slaves as to how they should treat their masters.

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And Christian masters as to how they should treat their slaves. And then you have the completely different form of slavery in the

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American South. And he's going to say later, those slave owners held the

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Bible above their heads. Yeah, well, they were wrong too, just like you are. The abuse of a document is not an excuse for bad behavior.

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And those Southern slave owners who were fathering children with their slaves and holding the

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Bible up were hypocrites. But that's not a meaningful argument against the

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Bible any more than my taking Dan Savage's writings and holding them over my head as an excuse for some type of bad behavior makes

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Dan Savage responsible for my bad behavior. It's all this guilt by association, genetic fallacy, silliness.

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Dan Savage needs to take a simple logic class. But actually, I don't think he needs to do that. He knows what he's doing isn't logical at all.

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Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it.

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The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a

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Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn't say Christians don't own people.

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Paul talks about how Christians own people. We ignore what the Bible says about slavery because the

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Bible got slavery wrong. No, we don't ignore it. Okay, some people ignore it.

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I don't ignore it. Serious Christians don't ignore it. They actually contextualize it, understand it historically, see how it functioned in history, see how it relates to the entire message, and how if we take your perspective, basically

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Christianity could only be a modern, enlightened, Western perspective that could not have possibly existed until modern times, in essence.

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We don't ignore it. He's accusing us of ignoring things. We're not. There are people who call themselves

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Christians who ignore a bunch of the Bible and go to some big megachurches and just only worry about what a person up front, smiling at them, says about how good they are.

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We're talking about serious Christianity here. And serious Christians and serious Christian scholars have not ignored any of this.

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We have dealt with these issues. We have studied these issues. And Dan Savage could,

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I suppose, just be ignorant of that, but I don't think so. I don't think so. This is a guy with an agenda, and he is an anti -Christian bigot.

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You want to see bigotry, look at Dan Savage. This is what bigotry really looks like, when you twist things the way he's twisting things.

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Sam Harris, a letter to a Christian nation, points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong.

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Slavery. What are the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong?

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Now, Sam Harris and Dan Savage have both taken what is, in fact, a much more complex issue, and that is the

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Bible's teaching on slavery, economics, the poor, all sorts of things like that, and have simplified it, and in so doing, transferred it into a context it never had.

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And so their comments on this are just simply bogus. They're wrong, they're untrue, period, end of discussion.

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You need to be much more thoughtful in your approach. And so then we have this idea of the complexity of human sexuality.

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What you need to understand is Dan Savage is saying that Jesus, in Matthew chapter 19, was stupid.

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He was simplistic. I mean, I think if he was honest, he would say that. If he was honest, he would say, yeah,

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Jesus got it wrong. Somebody needs to ask him that.

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Be nice to get the guy to actually do a serious, moderated, public debate sometime. That would be interesting. One hundred percent.

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The Bible says that if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night, if a woman isn't a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father's doorstep and stoned to death.

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Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night, if they're not virgins, at least not yet.

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We don't know where the GOP is going these days. Yeah, again, this is in the context of, as far as I understand it, a public school, high school journalism thing.

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It seems the left can get away with anything. The reference is Deuteronomy chapter 22, and it has to do with the sanctity of marriage and the issue of a woman who claims to be a virgin but is not a virgin.

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And the discovery of this and the only issues in Deuteronomy 22 are medical issues.

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They are not ethical issues. The idea of claiming to be a virgin, claiming to be, in fact, the term that's actually used here is virgin of Israel.

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In fact, what he doesn't mention is if someone makes an accusation against a woman and saying that she wasn't a virgin and she was, the guy is not only fined, he's beaten.

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Because he's brought an accusation against a virgin of Israel. In other words, it was a very exalted thing to be recognized as a person who was a virgin entering into marriage in the appropriate way.

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Now, we realize in our society today that such things as being a virgin when you are married, being pure, avoiding engagement in adultery and fornication, who cares, right?

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I mean, that doesn't matter to anybody anymore. That's irrelevant. We're just all a bunch of animals.

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We all know once you're 13, you just start doing that, right? That seems to be the worldview that is involved there.

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But then you had it thrown together with a bunch of left -wing politics just for the fun of it. People are dying because people can't clear this one last hurdle.

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People are dying. You want to see demagoguery?

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You want to see the use of emotion to just completely cloud real issues?

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People are dying. Now, parents, if you've got young children in the room, you might want to stop the stream for a second or turn the volume down or go give them a cookie in the other room.

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But I'm going to be straightforward here. We all know about AIDS. And we all know that it is primarily a disease that was transmitted within the homosexual community and continues to be transmitted in that way.

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But what you don't necessarily know about, and it was something I had to learn about in doing my research for the same -sex controversy and the debates that I've done since then, is the huge number of diseases that medical facilities have to treat in places where there are large homosexual populations, especially in San Francisco and cities like that.

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The human body was not designed to be abused the way that it is in homosexuality.

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And the number of gastrointestinal diseases that are promulgated through promiscuous group homosexual sex, which is by far much more common in the homosexual community than in the heterosexual community.

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The idea of a monogamous homosexual is almost unknown. Certainly less than 1%.

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Including how to treat diseases caused by having to remove animals from certain orifices of the human body.

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You want to talk about people dying? You want to just talk sheer numbers? The number of people who have died from beatings or suicides in comparison to the number of people who have died from diseases brought on by homosexual behavior is microscopic.

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Microscopic. You can't get the final numbers because, of course, we're not allowed to. That's profiling, say.

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But it's just, you want to talk, the hypocrisy, the absolute hypocrisy of blaming the

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Bible for people abusing it and then not being just as clear and far more loud in calling for the ending of that kind of behavior.

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Sadly, you can go online, you'll have to turn off your security filters, your porn filters, but you can go online and you can find the videos of these gay pride marches, you can find what's going on right out in public, right off of these main streets in certain cities in this country.

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And if you're not used to seeing that kind of thing, you're not even going to believe it. So don't sit there,

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Dan Savage, and tell me that you're really all that worked up. It's so easy to get the emotions going, isn't it?

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What about your emotions for all those people who have died of those diseases? This kind of thing, well, anyway.

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They can't get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality.

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Um, one of the things I want to talk about is... Now here, if you're watching the video, he started looking at some notes, and all those kids have walked out.

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And he just, you can tell he's going, should I say it? Should I go there? So you can tell the

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Bible guys in the hall, they can come back now because I'm done beating up the Bible. It's funny, as someone who's on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the

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Bible, how pansy as people react when you push back. Oh, so he's been beaten, and he blames the

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Bible. I'm sorry if Dan Savage has been beaten, but it is abject foolishness to blame the

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Bible. Oh, but they quoted it! Uh, which parts did they quote? Did they quote the part where Christians talk about being the chief of sinners?

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Absolutely dependent upon God's grace? Need of redemption? That we have nothing we can claim for ourselves?

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Did they quote that part? Let's be honest.

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This man hates God, and he hates God's law. And he is involved every single day in suppressing the knowledge of God and that conscience that is there.

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And as a result, if anybody dares to repeat the very words that he finds so abhorrent, he's going to lash out at them.

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As he just did, oh, we just pushed back. No, you just lied is what you did. I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings.

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Uh, that sounds like a real apology, doesn't it? That covers everything! But, I have a right to defend myself and to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti -gay bigotry by pointing to the

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Bible and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other. Now, there's the end, but there's the lie.

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Because that's exactly what we are not doing at all. In case

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Mr. Savage has missed it, that's the very section of Leviticus that says you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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Uh, did we skip that one? I'm sorry that Mr. Savage hasn't invested the time to actually seriously interact with the text.

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All he's done is he's read other people who likewise haven't taken the time to seriously interact, and they probably just read somebody else who might have taken the time to seriously interact with it, but doing so from a massively bigoted perspective.

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But that doesn't change the reality that that's a lie. We're not picking and choosing randomly.

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We're not picking and choosing based upon bigotry or prejudice or anything else. And the funny thing is,

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I want to transition to talking about Ron Brown here. I've got the videotape. I've got the video camera going.

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And I've got a serious thing about something. If I try posting this, my account's gone.

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Everything I have up there on Islam and everything else, gone. You know that. You know that.

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We all know, everyone listening right now knows that that's the case. He can stand in a public high school, use profanity and lie about the

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Bible, and that's okay in our society. If we respond with logical argumentations, facts, and the context, you know it'll happen.

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You know it'll happen. And that's exactly what's happening to Ron Brown. Yesterday I was pointed to a number of articles where Ron Brown, who is a coach for the

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Nebraska Cornhuskers, both of these articles, one is off the bench on NBC Sports, the other one is at ESPN.

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One is by Gene, oh my goodness, Wojcicki. Oh my,

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W -O -J -C -I -E -C -H -O -W -S -K -I. Gene Wojcicki.

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That's the best I can do on that one. Anyway, both of them taking this man on for daring to express his evangelical

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Christian worldview in front of the Omaha, Nebraska City Council.

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The Cornhuskers assistant coach recently testified in front of the Omaha, Nebraska City Council that gays, lesbians, and transgender people shouldn't receive anti -discrimination protection under a proposed ordinance.

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He is considering testifying on May 7th in front of the Lincoln City Council, which will conduct a public hearing on proposed legislation that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

39:43

Now, of course, folks, you must understand that the phraseology is specific for these folks.

39:52

They are trying to redefine human morality. They are trying to redefine the morality upon which this nation was built as under the guise of civil rights.

40:08

And so non -discrimination now means that you must accept as positive and good and moral viewpoints that were universally seen as evil only a few generations ago.

40:28

That's what we are facing, and we have to be able to explain that, and we have to be able to say, look, what you're actually doing here is you are redefining the language.

40:40

You're using the language to avoid being honest about what you're really doing. You are asking all of us in our society to fundamentally not just abandon, but reverse our moral perspective and our moral worldview.

41:03

You're asking us to overthrow it and to embrace positively a completely different worldview and a completely different set of morality that is fundamentally opposed to the

41:14

Christian faith. Now, notice it goes on to say, this is the less snarky of the two.

41:22

This is the ESPN one. None of this would matter if Brown were an ordinary citizen with an extraordinary belief in his interpretation of the

41:28

Bible's position on homosexuality. Did you catch that? It's just one interpretation.

41:34

There are many others, because we all know the Bible really doesn't say anything.

41:40

It's just a mass of contradictory text open to all sorts of interpretation. I mean, these folks are functioning off of scripts.

41:51

It's just painfully obvious. That belief led him to compare the sponsors of the Omaha Ordinance to Pontius Pilate and to tell the

41:58

Associated Press that, based on the Bible, homosexuality, the lifestyle of homosexuality, is a sin. Now, the only way

42:07

I can catch the Pontius Pilate connection there at all is maybe he made some type of a statement similar to what

42:22

I've made in the past, and that is that to ask a

42:30

Christian to accept as a positive moral value the concept of homosexuality, lesbianism, the profanation of marriage called gay marriage, et cetera, et cetera, is to demand that we deny

42:45

Christ. Because that's what it is. That's exactly what we're being told to do.

42:50

You must deny the right of Jesus Christ to define for you your world.

43:00

You cannot follow him as Lord when it comes to this. You must deny his Lordship in this area. That is what our society is telling us.

43:09

But notice this. None of this would matter if Brown were an ordinary citizen. But it goes on to say, but Brown isn't an ordinary citizen.

43:16

He is a coach at a public university. And for a revered football program whose reach stretches from Omaha to Scott's Bluff, when he speaks, his words carry more power because of his association with Nebraska football.

43:29

So when Hollywood stars speak in behalf of gay marriage,

43:38

I suppose if we're consistent, they shouldn't have the right to do that either. Right? Well, we don't find folks on the left to be very consistent at this point.

43:51

It was no accident that when Brown spoke to the Omaha City Council, he listed his address as Nebraska's Memorial Stadium.

43:57

And there is no separation of church and state on Brown's Nebraska football office voice message. I praise

44:03

Lord Jesus Christ for today. I hope you're having a blessed day. Not able to answer my phone right now?

44:08

Give me a try back, and Lord willing, I'll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day. Oh, that's terrible.

44:16

That's terrible. Oh, can you... What a bigot to do something like that.

44:23

It's horrible. In a land where presidents used to call for prayer? Oh, it's terrible.

44:32

Horrible. Brown, as well as Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne, has said that Brown's City Council testimony reflected only the assistant coach's personal views.

44:41

I guess if you work for a public university, you can't have personal views. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

44:47

There are all sorts of people who work for public universities that will promote the most wild -eyed, leftist, immoral perspectives on the planet, and I guess that's their freedom because it's a university after all.

45:04

Unless you're a Christian. I guess that's going to be the one perspective that you can't express if you work for a university.

45:18

And the NBC one was even more snarky because it's, again, the same old, same old.

45:26

One of my favorite books in the Bible is Leviticus, where it explains what types of birds one can eat. Munch on a quail or a partridge and you're fine, but take a bite out of an owl and you're in serious, serious trouble with God.

45:37

Leviticus 11 .13. Also, you can eat crickets but not beetles. God is quite clear about this.

45:43

So it starts off, again, with a person who probably has zip, zero, not a knowledge of the backgrounds of these things, doesn't care, but is...

45:53

Can you imagine if this man was a Muslim? A black

46:00

Muslim, even. Would either one of these two articles exist? Yeah. Not on your life.

46:11

Not on your life. I'm looking down below.

46:23

A friend of mine who has recently earned his divinity master's degree has an opinion on just this type of preaching.

46:29

There is something called proof texting wherein someone has a thought and then they search the Bible to find corroboration of that thought.

46:34

It is bad preaching and it is bad theology, he said, and it has been used with venom against certain types of God's children.

46:41

Those who tout Leviticus 22 .18 do not lie with a man, as one lies with a woman, that is detestable. As their reasoning is homosexual,

46:47

I might want to read all of Leviticus. Guess what? We do. Whereas homosexuality is detestable, adultery, according to Leviticus 20 .10,

46:55

is punishable by death. Yep. Homosexuality is detestable, adultery is punishable by death.

47:00

Quite a difference! Um, no. What do you mean?

47:05

Are you saying that, which is Toei Vod, didn't bring about the death penalty? A little confusion here, but I guess that's when you only have a master's in theology.

47:12

And when three of the four Gospels in the New Testament tell us that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery with her in his heart, it makes it difficult to apply these teachings of the

47:22

Bible literally. Really? This person has a degree? Wow.

47:29

It's sad. It's sad. But we are surrounded, absolutely positively surrounded, by this stuff.

47:41

Constantly. We need to be prepared to respond to and engage.

47:51

And that may mean for some of us we need to be doing a little more thinking about the role of the Old Testament law and the

47:57

Holiness Code, and that's why we're going to play that program we did, wow, four years ago?

48:03

Yeah, almost four years ago. That's about right. Right after this one. So you can hear that, and you can see how that might be done right after this program.

48:17

So that will add a little bit to your understanding. So anyways,

48:22

I wanted to address that. I wasn't going to spend quite that much time, but since Issues Etc.

48:30

contacted me, actually just a couple hours before I went on the air, I thought, well, let's go ahead and address it for everybody.

48:40

877 -753 -3341 is phone number, dividing that line via Skype.

48:46

I think what we'll probably do is we'll take a break, and I'll sort of keep an eye on the stack here, the phone system, and if people want to interact with that, if they want to talk about that, that's great.

49:05

If the phones stay quiet, and I realize we changed the time of the program today, and that throws people off, but if the phones stay quiet, then

49:16

I will move back to some of the topics we've been addressing already because I'm getting a backlog on stuff that I haven't finished up, and sometimes it's hard to remember what in the world

49:28

I was saying if I don't finish something up that was, you know, last time

49:33

I played it was three weeks ago or something like that. So we'll see, as we look at the phone lines, how that works out, 877 -753 -3341 or dividing that line via Skype, and we'll be right back right after this.

50:00

Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.

50:06

Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.

50:13

In their book, The Same -Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the

50:19

Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including

50:26

Genesis, Leviticus, and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.

50:37

In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for His people.

50:46

The Same -Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality. Get your copy in the bookstore at AOMIN .org.

51:06

Yeah, go ahead. That was the shortest break I think I've ever had. You were working on a call there,

51:16

I guess, and boom, we came straight back. Thankfully, I was able to take a very short drink.

51:26

So, let me see here. Oh, okay. All right. LaShawn says she can make the

51:32

Thursday evening program. So I'll try to remember to do something special just for LaShawn on Thursday.

51:42

Now I've got to really remember that because then if I don't, then she's going to be all bummed out and she'll probably unfriend me and stop following me on Twitter and do stuff like that.

51:51

That wouldn't be good. So someone remind me. Ralph will remind me. Ralph will call me or something and remind me.

51:58

877 -753 -3341 is the phone number, and that is the number that Ryan called.

52:07

Let's talk to Ryan. Hi, Ryan. Hi, Dr. White. How are you doing? I'm doing very well.

52:13

I can't tell you're in Mississippi. I really can't. You can't?

52:18

Are you sure you're not in Oxford? No. I've actually been told that several times. I've grown up here in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and I've had several people before say, you don't sound like it, and sometimes they'll say it sounds like it, but I'm always thinking that it's a compliment, actually.

52:35

What can we do for you? Well, first I wanted to mention I enjoyed the broadcast just now.

52:42

I thought you could make a lot of good points, and I enjoyed it. But I also kind of wanted to ask you about last week's

52:50

Divine Monitor. It was Tuesday. Right. And your comments on the political spectrum and our current nominees for the parties.

53:00

Right. It was more about your comments regarding, I believe at one point you made the point that we're not voting for a pastor and things of that nature, but I kind of took a different thought on it because I'm sitting there going, yeah, but Romans describes the individuals as a minister of God, and so we're not voting for a pastor, sure, but we are voting for or we are engaging in the decision -making for a minister of God.

53:25

Would I be wrong in that? Well, I don't think Paul had in mind that none of the people to whom he was writing had voted for anybody.

53:34

The point was that whatever governmental system you happen to be living under, governments are ordained of God for these particular purposes.

53:47

Now, when they don't fulfill those purposes, then God will judge them. God does judge nations, and the

53:54

Old Testament, especially in the Minor Prophets, makes that clear, that when those nations do not, for example, protect the widow and the orphan and so on and so forth, they will be judged on account of that.

54:05

And it's interesting. I know of certain theological perspectives where people don't believe that anymore, but I certainly believe that that's why nations rise or fall is based upon God's judgment.

54:15

But I don't think that when we're talking about what I'm concerned about is that I hear a lot of my fellow

54:24

Christians who understand that Mormonism is not

54:29

Christianity. We're talking about Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney's a Mormon, and I don't have any question. Well, I've got almost no question as to Mitt Romney's Mormon orthodoxy.

54:41

The reason I say almost none is because there were some positions that he took when he was in the governorship of Massachusetts that I'm not sure how they fit with Mormon orthodoxy, but he may have just seen those as issues of political expediency and not reflective of Mormon theology in the first place.

55:06

I don't know. I've never heard him address that, and I really doubt that he would address it in a context that would be useful, at least for the next, what, six months?

55:18

Something along those lines. But other than that, Romney's family has had representatives in the general authorities of the

55:26

LDS Church, and I just don't have any reason to question his

55:32

Mormon orthodoxy. As a result, then I must believe that he has—I know that he has read and heard quoted hundreds of times in his life the

55:42

King Follett funeral discourse and all the theological foolishness, from a

55:49

Christian perspective, that is involved in something like that. You imagine, suppose that God was

55:57

God from all eternity. I'll refute the idea so that you may see, and so on and so forth.

56:02

And so my assumption is that he's functioning on an orthodox

56:08

Mormon worldview. At the same time, over the past four years,

56:14

I have been able to observe the worldview upon which Barack Obama and his appointees function.

56:21

And it is painfully obvious that when it comes to key issues regarding Christian morality, abortion, homosexuality, marriage, and things like that, that to identify him as a

56:43

Christian is to identify all those authors of books promoting homosexuality as Christians as well, and obviously

56:50

I do not do so. So I do not see that I have an actual Christian to vote for, and I don't believe that anyone else is going to be available as a third party to—those are my choices.

57:07

So if I'm a believer living in a nation that I am convinced is already experiencing the wrath of God, and I look down the corridors of time, and I think about my children, and I think about my grandchildren, and I think about my great -grandchildren, and I think about how they are going to be impacted in regards to their freedom to proclaim the

57:34

Gospel, their freedom to gather in the Church and to worship God, their freedom to engage in Christian marriage, their freedom to educate their children, all these things like that,

57:49

I have to ask myself the question, as a Christian, and knowing that these are the only—

57:57

I mean, there are some people who say, I'll just opt out. Well, the problem is that if you just opt out,

58:06

I see that as a vote. Because in our context, it seems to me that in the context of the

58:13

United States, and I'm sorry for those listening outside the United States, though I might point something out, as I travel outside the

58:18

United States, everybody, wherever I travel outside the United States, is very interested in what's going on here.

58:25

Up in Canada, for example, they know far more about what's going on in our political stuff than I know anything about Canadian.

58:31

Because Australia, Canada, the UK, they all know, especially over in Europe now, they all know how deeply they will be impacted by our choice over here.

58:44

They've already seen that. Especially over the past four years. Ask anybody living in Israel right now.

58:50

They're watching things very, very, very carefully as to what we're doing over here. But anyway, specifically those of us who have the opportunity of voting, here's where I've come down.

59:04

I have to look at these two candidates, and I have to ask myself a simple question.

59:10

Which one is going to be stomping on the accelerator, propelling my culture ever faster toward its own utter destruction, through the destruction of our liberties, the promotion of ungodliness, the redefinition of marriage, and so on and so forth, and which one might just maybe hit the brake at least a little bit?

59:41

Not as much as I'd like. I'd like to see someone who would take the wheel and turn it. But you're not going to get someone elected when the majority of the people in this country do not have godly priorities anymore.

59:56

I recognize that. I look around. I look at the entertainment. I look at what our society is doing, and I realize

01:00:02

I'm in a small minority anymore. Now maybe things are a little bit better down where you are, but you've got to understand, where does

01:00:09

Mississippi rank in the population in comparison to California or New York? Right. I understand your reasoning for why you might vote for one or the other.

01:00:21

I understand that. My issue more was with the statement that we're not voting for a pastor, obviously, but it is for a position.

01:00:32

We are voting for men who are taking upon a position as a minister of God, as far as I can tell.

01:00:39

Now they may not fulfill that position very well, and there may be some legitimate argument.

01:00:45

Right. So which one is more likely to apply something that is similar to a

01:00:52

Christian worldview than the other? We're not going to get a Christian worldview out of either one of them, as far as I can tell.

01:00:59

And I get that's what you're saying, but again, my concern or my question was concerning the issue of, do we still recognize that the position itself is going to be a position of a minister of God?

01:01:10

Well, our society does not identify it that way, but we as Christians recognize that anyone that is granted that opportunity, and if our constitutional form of government were to disappear overnight, and some people say, that can never happen, really, if that were to disappear overnight, whoever would take over, let's say a totalitarian government took over, they're still under the same judgment of God, whether it's a constitutional republic or a totalitarian.

01:01:41

I mean, I firmly believe that Kim Jong -il will be held accountable for all of the crimes that he committed against God's moral law as the leader of North Korea.

01:01:55

And so, was he a minister of God? You know, that's a tough way of putting it, but if you're a

01:02:04

Christian... Well, I guess it comes back to that argument of, are they fulfilling the... Well, Paul kind of makes it clear in Romans 13 what a minister of God is doing.

01:02:13

So I guess you could argue, maybe I'm wrong here, but I guess you could argue if you have a person not fulfilling any of that, then no, they're not.

01:02:20

Oh, but I think if they're put in that position, the point is that they are accountable for doing that.

01:02:26

Whether they do it or not is what they will be judged on, but if they are given that authority, then that is what they should be doing.

01:02:34

If they don't do it, then they will be judged on the basis of that. So, you know, that's where I would come down and simply state that to me,

01:02:44

I look at the future, I look at my children and my grandchildren, and I say, who is going to stomp on the accelerator and who's going to hit the brake?

01:02:57

Because I don't see anybody turning... I don't see the society changing in the sense...

01:03:04

I've not seen that repentance and revival that would be the only thing that would turn the course.

01:03:13

Instead, the issue is, how fast are we going to get there? How fast is that coming?

01:03:20

My final thing would be, questions for you would be, number one, you continue to make...

01:03:25

I'm assuming you think that perhaps Mitt Romney would step on the brake or might step on the brake, and I'm curious to why you think that is, if it has to do, as you've mentioned, that you're very aware of his

01:03:36

Mormonism and his involvement in it, and it has something to do with that. And the other question

01:03:41

I have for you is, I know Rich brought up a passage in Exodus, and, you know, you made a comment that you didn't think, if we were living in the nation of Israel today, that's not an exact quote.

01:03:54

You know, I'm trying to say what you said, but if we were living in Israel today, maybe we would, but we wouldn't.

01:04:00

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Rich quoted the section from Exodus about the leaders.

01:04:06

Yeah, but that was... This sort of does dovetail in with what we were talking about before.

01:04:14

How much transfers from the theocratic nation of Israel to people living in the 21st century in a democratic republic that is moving very quickly toward a socialist experience.

01:04:33

I don't think that the choosing of judges who are to be applying

01:04:39

God's law, so it was a religious position, is the same thing as the secular government of the

01:04:47

United States. It concerns me a little bit when someone thinks that's the same thing.

01:04:52

And I think that's what concerns a lot of people on the left. It's a theocracy thing, and maybe that's where they're getting it from,

01:05:00

I don't know, but... I don't think anyone, well, maybe some would, but for someone like myself, when

01:05:06

I had been introduced to that, and so when Rich had mentioned that, you know, it was some familiar for me.

01:05:12

And I think what we see is the principles apply the same. The principles apply if the scenario is essentially the same, in the sense that you have a civil government and a civil government.

01:05:24

Obviously, you may not apply those principles in a business world where you're choosing a boss or something like that, if you had the option to choose a boss, as silly as that may seem.

01:05:34

But they apply in a scenario if you have the option to choose those who are going to rule over you, then

01:05:42

I would think they kind of do apply. Yeah, and I'm saying you apply

01:05:47

Christian standards, and when you don't have Christians to choose from, then you have to look at their worldview.

01:05:53

And in answer to the previous question, it does strike me that one of the candidates would have a considerably more biblical worldview, in the sense that there is an emphasis upon a concept of morality, a concept of marriage, a concept of life, that is, while there are perversions within it, is a whole lot more conservative than what the other candidate has demonstrated.

01:06:26

So it does seem to me, anyways, that again we have this issue of balancing and weighing and examining and asking the question, look, who do you want choosing the next

01:06:40

Supreme Court justice? Well, I had raised to me before, and I guess

01:06:45

I'll end on this in terms of... Yeah, because we've got full lines here. Okay. Well, I've heard someone in reply to the issue, well, what happens when you don't have someone who fits these qualifications?

01:06:58

And the person in response raised the issue of when you're selecting elders in a church, and if it's between a woman and a drunkard, the options are none of the above.

01:07:08

I mean, what would you say in response to that? I would say it's not a parallel account at all. That's why

01:07:15

I said we're not voting for a pastor. The U .S. government is not, this isn't the church, and it's not

01:07:21

Old Testament Israel. It is a secularizing, socializing, western democracy, and we've got to wrap our minds around that because if we insist on turning it into Israel, we are going to continue to be utterly irrelevant in even being amongst those who put the brakes on to try to stop this thing.

01:07:43

Hey, I've never seen the board this full, so hey, Ryan, thank you. Thank you for your time. That's why. I appreciate it.

01:07:49

Bye -bye. All right. I guess I need to go to Louis.

01:07:55

Yes, Louis. Hello, Louis. One more time for Louis via Skype.

01:08:04

On Bart Ehrman's Forged. He's in channel, and he's been waiting, and we're waiting, and Rich is unplugging things and replugging things, and that's not good.

01:08:19

When Rich is unplugging things and replugging things. You there, Louis? All right.

01:08:25

Louis is not there. Let's try Kyle in Canada.

01:08:31

Hi, Kyle. Hello. Hello. Hi, how's it going? Doing good. Good, good.

01:08:37

I love your ministry. Thanks, sir. I just had a real quick question about the Koran and whether or not homosexuality is mentioned or forbidden.

01:08:48

I mean, Christianity seems to be the religion of choice to pick on when it comes to the denouncement of homosexuality.

01:08:58

I'm just wondering if you had any insight on whether or not the Koran addresses that issue.

01:09:04

It's not a big issue. I don't have off the top of my head right now, unfortunately, the reference for that, but I am aware of the fact that it does address the subject and identifies it as a sin, and homosexuality as a lifestyle or perspective is rejected within Islam as a whole, but I would have to look up the specific text that specifically mentions that.

01:09:40

I don't have it off the top of my head. I apologize. Okay, no, that's fine. I just thought, because again, typically when it comes down, and maybe it's just because Christianity is kind of the norm.

01:09:52

Oh, it is. It's a political correct thing. The folks on the left know that homosexuality is condemned, and in fact they know that homosexuals can be stoned under Sharia law, and in fact it does happen in countries today.

01:10:12

So you would think that they'd be all over that and they wouldn't be all over the Christians, but of course, it's politically correct to attack the

01:10:20

Christians, it's politically incorrect to attack the Muslims, and so that's why it goes the way it goes. Okay, well, that was my question.

01:10:27

Okay, if someone on channel pulls up the reference for me, or in Twitter or something,

01:10:34

I'll, yeah, okay, that's a possibility one.

01:10:40

In Surah 780, we also sent Lut, who is Lot, he said to his people, do you commit lewdness such as no people in creation ever committed before you?

01:10:50

So there's Surah 780 and 781, for you practice your lusts on men in preference to women, you are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.

01:10:59

So there you go, there's your references, Surah 780 through 82. All right, that's very interesting, thanks a lot.

01:11:06

Okay, thank you, bye -bye. Thanks, bye. All right, we're going to try Louis again.

01:11:12

Hello, Louis. Hey, doc, what's up? Hey, there we go, okay. I want to ask you about Barterman's book,

01:11:20

Forged, because I read it some time back, because I was doing some research on higher criticism, and, well,

01:11:28

I don't know if that's still the term they use these days, or whatever, and anyway, I was looking into issues regarding the authorship of the

01:11:35

New Testament books, particularly the epistles, and Barterman raised quite a few arguments in his book that I didn't quite know how to counter them.

01:11:45

Stuff like, for example, 1 and 2 Thessalonians apparently having different eschatologies, or some stuff about the literacy rate in 1st century

01:11:55

Palestine. I was just wondering if you know any good materials to counter the kind of claims that are presented in Forged.

01:12:03

Yeah, I did a review of Forged as soon as it came out, here on The Dividing Line, and we addressed a number of those things.

01:12:11

Then I also, right around that same week, as I recall, and I don't know if Janet Mefford archives her shows.

01:12:17

I don't think she does, at least for a long period of time. Maybe she does select shows,

01:12:22

I don't know. But she had me on to also do a review on those very things.

01:12:30

If you hold on just a second, for the previous caller, add to 780 -84 in the

01:12:38

Quran the following references real quick, just for everybody who's writing these down. 1177 -83, 2174, 2243, 26165 -175, 2756 -59, and 2927 -33.

01:12:54

So that's actually probably more references in the Quran than you have in the

01:12:59

Bible at that point. So for those that wanted to write those down, you can go back and listen to the recording and get those.

01:13:09

As to the question here, briefly, generally what you'll find is if you'll find, and the majority of them being published today are not, but if you'll find the solid, conservative,

01:13:23

Bible -believing commentaries, that is, people who don't come to the text with an automatic negative presupposition, but are actually willing to allow the text to speak before applying external standards to it in the sense of rejecting its claims, you will find, for example, in the

01:13:43

Hendrickson commentaries on the Pastoral Epistles, an extensive and very good introductory section on the authorship of the

01:13:56

Epistles, going through most of what Ehrman says was nothing new. It's based on word frequencies and vocabulary issues, and as I've pointed out, for example, saying that Paul could not have written the

01:14:14

Pastorals because they have such a different vocabulary than the assumed genuine epistles of Paul makes as much sense as saying that if you took the vocabulary that I used

01:14:30

Sunday morning, if you took my sermon Sunday morning at the

01:14:36

Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church and you transcribed it, and then you compared that to the emails that I sent to Mike Ebenroth, Carl Truman, and Phil Johnson over the course of the preceding two weeks as we were discussing preparations for shooting the

01:14:58

No Compromise video that we shot in Boston this past weekend, and you compared syntax, grammar, word usage, vocabulary, etc.,

01:15:12

etc., between those things, there is no way on earth that anyone could ever come to the conclusion that I wrote both of them.

01:15:21

Couldn't do it. Not using the standards that Bart Ehrman uses. And yet that's exactly what you have.

01:15:27

Romans, Galatians, specifically meant to be arguments, and yet if you compare the two of them,

01:15:39

Paul couldn't have written both of them, and yet Ehrman thinks he did, especially because of the emotion that is clearly evident in the author in Galatians.

01:15:49

But that's exactly what you have. You have Romans is addressed to an audience, it's meant to be a presentation of the

01:15:55

Gospel, and then you've got Paul writing to Timothy and Titus about things within the

01:16:00

Church. The real reason that Ehrman and others reject the pastorals is because they have a theory about the evolutionary development of the

01:16:12

Church, and the pastorals don't fit the theory. And so what happens when your theory runs up against something?

01:16:20

You get rid of the something. That way your theory stands. And that's what he does with textual criticism, and that's what he does in this situation as well.

01:16:30

Same thing with Peter. Why does he spend so much time trying to undercut the idea of the use of Emanuensis?

01:16:40

Because he recognizes that the most obvious answer to why there is such a difference between 1 and 2

01:16:49

Peter on the level of language is the different Emanuensi that would have been used, and the issue of translation.

01:16:58

That is, did Peter dictate in Greek or in Aramaic?

01:17:09

Good question! Was it written down? Since it was being written to an audience that would need it in Greek, did he ask the

01:17:18

Emanuensis, take what I am saying and put it into Greek?

01:17:24

Now that wouldn't bother us, because what does Paul say? Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

01:17:30

That which is theanoustos is what is written. It's not the Peter that makes it the

01:17:36

Scripture, it's what is written that makes it the Scripture. And so that's why he tried to undercut that stuff so much, is, well, we just don't have any evidence of people doing that, and Peter would have been a really dumb person that couldn't have known the

01:17:49

Old Testament. That was the thing that was amazing to me, was Peter could not have known the Old Testament. This is a very advanced writer, he's quoting

01:17:57

Scriptures, and Peter would have been a really dumb guy. What were they doing again every

01:18:03

Sabbath day in the synagogue? I forget. What is that again? That struck me as way, way, way out of bounds.

01:18:13

Fundamentally, what you want to do is, there was an interesting conversation about Forged between, oh, it's a guy down at Dallas, what's his name?

01:18:26

Name's escaping me at the moment. But a professor down at Dallas, and...

01:18:32

No, no, no. I'm sorry? Yeah, Bloch. Bok, Darrell Bok, and Ehrman on the

01:18:40

Unbelievable Radio broadcast. You can see how in -depth it can get when they're throwing sources back and forth and all the rest of that stuff.

01:18:46

But for most of us who live in the real world, good, conservative commentaries will almost always address issues of authorship and dating right up front.

01:19:00

And that's going to be some of the best resources that you're going to be able to find. And obviously there will be scholarly journal articles that go more in -depth on certain things like that.

01:19:09

But that's the best place I think you can go immediately. And some of the issues that I brought up in that review as well,

01:19:17

I just brought up now. All right, that's been helpful. Wait, so the commentary you mentioned, you said it's published by Hendrickson?

01:19:26

No, it's Hendrickson's commentary. It's actually, it's not the company, but the author.

01:19:34

Okay, okay, okay. William Hendrickson on the Pastoral Epistles. You know what commentary set that's part of?

01:19:42

The one that's, it's just his name. I mean, he and another guy, once he died, another man finished the work, but he did a whole commentary series on the

01:19:55

Bible. On the New Testament, I'm sorry. Okay, well, I'm sure I can find it someplace.

01:20:02

Yeah, the reason why I asked all this, because I'm dealing with a lot of this stuff in University Plus, and I'm also dealing with it,

01:20:10

I'm encountering it from the Muslims here, because they use a combination of textual and higher critical arguments.

01:20:17

I understand, I understand. Hey, I got lots of people to get to, Louis. Thank you for your phone call today. And let's talk to Derek.

01:20:25

Hi, Derek. Hey, what's going on, James? Tom from North Carolina.

01:20:31

And I just wanted to call first just to say thank you for all that you've done. And I never knew what

01:20:36

Calvinism was until I saw a debate with you and used to watch your world religion stuff. But my question was about voting this time around, because I'm very political, and I just see no point in voting this year.

01:20:54

I wanted to know what your thoughts were on that for the sake that I wouldn't want to vote for someone who is not a believer in the same

01:21:01

God. Then you're never going to vote, because I don't see that in this society, the way it's going right now, that, like I said,

01:21:12

I could not be elected dog catcher. The things I said at the beginning of this program, I couldn't get elected dog catcher.

01:21:19

So you're opting out and basically saying, sure, I have the right to influence things toward righteousness as best

01:21:28

I can, but I'm just not going to. And I would just simply say, for the sake of my grandkids, don't do that.

01:21:35

And the sake of your grandkids. I mean, I just don't want to look back when

01:21:40

I'm 70 years old and say I might have been able to make a difference.

01:21:47

I might have been able to slow down this decay. Aside from the things I'm doing in preaching the gospel, that's the main thing.

01:21:52

I'm simply talking about exercising my civil rights here. I mean, seriously.

01:22:00

We know, even though this wasn't what the founders intended, that the Supreme Court has come to take a much more central role in determining the course of this country.

01:22:08

And we don't know when the next Supreme Court justice is going to be up for nomination.

01:22:14

And I'd simply say, who do you want making that choice?

01:22:20

I mean, you can say, yeah, but neither one of them reflect me. Okay, but isn't there one of the two that more reflects you than the other?

01:22:32

I'm not going to say who's who, but as for me in my house, I can answer that question.

01:22:38

Right. Now, I mean, I get where you're going. which is also my professor at the college

01:22:43

I attend. He's made the statement to me, and this is why I've taken into consideration what he said.

01:22:48

You should, because you're a pastor. But he has said that it's kind of been a burden on his conscience to vote for a

01:22:58

Mormon. And he sees both political parties at this moment kind of a dead end trail.

01:23:06

I mean, he's kind of saying that he feels in his conscience that that would be improper to vote for him, considering he's not obedient to anything of the same

01:23:17

God. Even if it is morality, that still isn't... I guess it's not all moral or anything like that, because he's also a support of abortion and other things that we would stand against.

01:23:33

Well, my understanding is he would argue otherwise.

01:23:40

But it sounds like what you're saying, then, is you could only vote for a Reformed Baptist candidate for president, which means you're never going to get to vote for anybody, which in essence means that you're going to join that element of there have always been

01:23:56

Christians who, even though they live in a country where they have the right to participate, they don't.

01:24:02

And I can guarantee you, I know a lot of Christians in countries where they don't have the right to participate that would love to.

01:24:11

That would love to. I'm still learning this stuff. And hearing you say this, it's very important for me, because I think it's the same thing.

01:24:21

Why not try even taking what we do have and praying for our political parties and whoever is elected.

01:24:28

Of course, we already know God ordained them to be there. But you're helping me with this because my pastor, he's just kind of steering a direction of his own personal conscience.

01:24:39

It hasn't bared weight on me. But if you don't mind me asking, who will you be voting for? Ain't going there.

01:24:47

I think anybody with ears to hear would be able to figure that out.

01:24:55

But that's not happening on this program, because we'd like to be able to continue.

01:25:00

I mean, even after doing what I did at the beginning of this program. Let's put it this way.

01:25:07

Here's the answer to your question, and this is easy. Of the two candidates, which one would be more likely, under that administration, to punish me for what

01:25:22

I said at the beginning of this program? Alright, I got you.

01:25:29

Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you, Eric. Yes, sir. God bless. God bless. Bye -bye. Bye. Alright, let's talk with Lars.

01:25:37

Hi, Lars. Hello, Lars. This Skype thing ain't working so well today, is it?

01:25:47

Ain't working at all. That was a good question, too. Jesus and the Koran. It's one of the chapters

01:25:52

I'm working on right now, so I might have actually been able to comment on that. But we're almost out of time, so let's talk with Gregory.

01:25:58

Hi, Gregory. Good evening, Dr. Wright. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

01:26:03

By the way, I would like to ask a question, but before I ask the question, I'd like to say a few things quickly. I just read lately that Harold Campion admits rapture prediction was a mistake, and he vowed never to do it again.

01:26:17

He did. However, at the same time, he continues to teach that the church age has ended, and you cannot be saved in the church, and we need to flee the churches.

01:26:26

So I don't consider that a meaningful repentance. Okay. By the way, I have something I'm very interested in.

01:26:33

Arizona passes sweeping Internet censorship bill. We didn't know.

01:26:39

If you make negative statements, what they say would be offensive.

01:26:47

They could criminally punish you. So maybe your statements over the Internet can be prosecuted.

01:26:55

It's a possibility. I realize that was—I'm hoping the governor will veto that one.

01:27:03

Well, apparently, it just passed. Arizona passes sweeping Internet—apparently, it's already passed.

01:27:10

Yeah, but the governor can still veto it. So anyways, what's up? We're almost out of time.

01:27:15

Real quick. My question is, my question is, is that where the arrangement of the books of the canon are concerned, is the arrangement inspired?

01:27:28

And if so, which one is inspired? Is it the arrangement we have or the arrangement that the

01:27:33

Hebrews have? Because there's one theologian that I have heard say that in the very arrangement in the canon of the books are inspired.

01:27:41

But then the question I have, if that is so, which arrangement? Oh, what we have today or what the

01:27:47

Hebrews have? Well, no, I wouldn't say that the arrangement is inspired. The standard arrangement in the

01:27:54

Old Testament is referenced in the New Testament, I think, when

01:27:59

Jesus talks about from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah.

01:28:06

That's Genesis to 2 Chronicles. And we know that was the first and last books in the Hebrew Testament.

01:28:12

But I don't see any grounds upon which one could argue that whether Lamentations is put at one place or another place is actually a part of the inspired work of God, because that never comes up in New Testament teaching.

01:28:29

And certainly then we'd have a question about what the New Testament canon order would be, because the order is not necessarily always the same in the earliest list that we have there.

01:28:38

So, no, I would not say that the order of books is a part of Revelation at all.

01:28:44

Yeah, but the theologian who argues for that is Dr. Robert Murray. Well, I think that's a shame.

01:28:52

But I disagree with Dr. Murray on that. Okay, Gregory, we're out of time.

01:28:58

Thank you very much for your phone call today. Thanks for everybody. I've never seen every single line lit up.

01:29:03

We about melted them, but that's cool. And hopefully got you thinking and just hope that we'll be back again on Thursday and that people don't come busting through the doors and drag us all away.

01:29:17

So if you never hear from us again, you'll know why. Lord willing, we'll be back on Thursday.

01:29:23

See you then. God bless. The dividing line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

01:30:19

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01:30:35

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