December 7, 2004

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the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded
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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. And good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome to The Dividing Line on this
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Tuesday afternoon, the 7th of December, Pearl Harbor Day of course. And that of course is a, the best book
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I ever read on that, of course I haven't read any of them in about 20 years now. But Walter Lord's stuff,
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I always liked reading Walter Lord's stuff, he made it so interesting and his work on that and the Battle of Midway.
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Good stuff to read if you're into history, even though they're a little bit older, they're still enjoyable. And we today are celebrating of course the initiation of The Real Blog.
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And some of you are going, excuse me, but I can't keep up with that much writing. It's true. I, there is an explosion of blog activity on AOMN .org
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and the neat thing now is, the biggest thing, there's Texpress, we just came to the channel, hi Tex. Love that Edward stuff, actually that Archibald Alexander quote,
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I'm going to memorize that one. That's one of the best quotes I've ever seen. I mentioned that on the blog too. If you don't read the blog then you have no idea what
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I'm talking about and hey, you know, what can I say? But if you visit the channel, read the blog and listen to The Vying Line, you will be in the loop or loopy, one of the two, whichever direction you want to take that, most people would take the second one there.
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But anyway, what was I saying? I was saying the thing I love about the blog is that now you can link to individual articles, individual little things.
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And that is so useful when citing somebody else, I've used that feature like on Doug Wilson's blog and all the rest of that stuff and now we can do that too.
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And so I thank SN for allowing EN to do that, a little inside joke there.
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But anyway, and Shamgar and AOMN and all those guys who got it working, because it started working and then it went and died and stopped working and so then we got it working again.
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The only person who is not rejoicing today in the new blog is Dave Hunt.
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Guys, if anyone's been reading, I have a book in my hands.
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Yes, here is I'm holding it up to the microphone here, updated and expanded.
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What love is this? Calvinism's misrepresentation of God. Dave Hunt. Like I said in the blog, this is a very well -made book.
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I really, you know, what can I say? It's very, very well made.
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It's not very well written. In fact, on that level, it's really bad. But it's got nice paper.
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It's got nice typesetting. It's very easy to to read. And this has got to be the nicest slipcover
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I've ever seen. I just I think it's great. So anyway, that's the most positive thing
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I can possibly say about the new edition. But I have been documenting, of course, the editing of what love is this and the editing without the use of footnotes to say,
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OK, all right, I had originally written this. Now I'm going to now I'm going to write the opposite of that.
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But I'm not going to admit that the reason I'm writing the opposite of that is because you all have demonstrated that I'm completely clueless on this subject.
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Those notes do not appear. It's it's not there anywhere. And so that's more more to say on that a little bit later on.
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Let me just mention one thing. Eight seven seven seven five three three three four one eight seven seven seven five three three three four one.
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For those of you who would like to join us online. What was that?
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That was an odd sound. Did you turn my thing up there and I was working on that and trying to get your computer set up and ready to go for you.
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And what do you got? You got your CD unclicked again. Oh, OK. What about now?
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Let's give it a shot. I don't see still. I just I just muted CD audio, noisy computer.
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I mean, well, you know, you're in charge at stuff, aren't you there?
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We'll just we'll just we'll just compress the daylights out of it. There you go. If you try to play anything out like that.
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Hey, you know, it all just reflects on you anyway. So what can I say? So I'll just blame it on the bailing wire.
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There you go. There you go. I don't I don't know what that is. What can I say? Anyway, what was
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I saying? I was saying I was giving the number eight seven seven seven. Oh, yes. I mentioned on the last little blog thing.
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And it's sort of scary because I can throw blog stuff up so fast that I might want to, like, put myself
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I might want to make a rule for myself. Wait 10 minutes before hitting send, because it's just so easy to throw that stuff out there.
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We've created a monster. Yes. And that and that will those be searchable?
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Well, that I think I bet you those will be searched. If it's a database, it should be searchable, I would imagine. And so that would be really, really cool, because I spent a lot of time on that.
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I put a lot of effort into that. And I hope some people appreciate that. But anyway, I mentioned on the last blog thing that I was going to talk about this.
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Article that is in Newsweek this week, I gave the link and stuff on it and Jason Engler's response to it, which is really good and stuff like that.
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But, you know, there's so much stuff here that I may wait till we get a little bit closer to Christmas to do that, something like that.
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They are searchable. Yes. The guru of the blog, E. Nielsen in channel says they are searchable.
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So that is a that is a good thing. But I just want to mention this one thing and then I'm going to I'm really going to do my best to to set it aside and talk about other things.
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But reading this Newsweek thing, I just love this is so obvious that the media does not even try to to put a mask, you know, at all.
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Just don't have the search thing, the template right now. So as soon as we add the search thing, the template, then they'll be able to search for blogs.
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Cool. So we're going to get it all done. So everybody's giving Ian slaps in the back right now.
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And I'm sure he's probably wearing plaid today. So anyway, the media is just so obvious in its detestation of of Christianity.
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It's just they don't even try to mask it anymore. They really don't. There's just let's listen to this paragraph like the
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Victorians who live in an age of great belief and great doubt. And sometimes it seems as though we must choose between two extremes, the evangelical and the secular.
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Quote, I don't want to be too simplistic. But our faith is somewhat childlike, end quote, says the
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Reverend H .B. London, a vice president of James Dobson's conservative focus on the family organization
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Colorado Springs. Quote, Though other people may question the historical validity of the virgin birth and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we don't close.
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Quote, London's view has vast public support. A Newsweek poll found that 84 percent of American adults consider themselves
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Christians and 82 percent see Jesus as God or the son of God, as if those are two different things. That's not the quote, but anyway, 79 percent say they believe in the virgin birth and 67 percent think the
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Christmas story from the angel's appearance, the star Bethlehem is historically accurate. Now, I wonder what
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Reverend H .B. London actually said, because that is really so obviously, especially with the citation of, quote unquote, scholars later on, it is so obviously meant to communicate the idea that, you know, if you're an unthinking, childlike person and you don't care about facts and history.
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In fact, the very that very language was used earlier. The very preceding paragraph said the clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing out in theaters and bookstores.
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And I mentioned about Mel Gibson's The Passion Movie, literalism, as if to read the scriptures in the context they're written and to take them as containing serious history.
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This is completely below true scholarship today. It is it is something
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I mentioned this past weekend when I was speaking in St. Louis. And in fact, I mentioned this in the blog, you can get the tapes of the seminar
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I did from Covenant Grace Church there in St. Louis, and I doubt they're really ready yet, but feel free to send them on up to Dave Hunt.
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I don't I said nothing in there that I would not want him to take issue with, and I'd like him to hear what people are saying.
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And it was the seminar was about debating Calvinism. I even used the Chuck Grissmire show as the as the outline.
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We played it and then I'd start and stop it, start, stop and respond to it, sort of like we do in the dividing line. People loved it, except I was also using a
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PowerPoint presentation. So it all sort of worked out real nice. Had a great time with them. But then Sunday morning I spoke in the Synoptic Gospels.
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One of the things that I mentioned in the Sunday school, and this was really interesting. I don't know. Some of you are ministers.
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It's a bit of a challenge. I was asked to address the Synoptic Gospels on Sunday morning. So what
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I was thinking is I was going to have just an open Q &A section during the Sunday school, and then I was going to present something on the
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Synoptic Gospels in the sermon. But then the pastor said, no, once you start it in the in the
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Sunday school and finish it in the sermon, how do you do that? Because I'm one of those folks that sort of, you know, the sermon is different.
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It's not a Sunday school. It's special. And so what I ended up doing is I ended up giving the background to synoptic studies, just basic stuff that anyone should think about regarding the backgrounds, the
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Synoptic Gospels, what you should be looking at. And then I went to a specific passage. I just I really just thumbed through the synopsis,
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Quattro Eurangeliorum, or in English the synopsis of the of the four Gospels. And and I found the oh, my poor wifey wants to listen, but she's not sure how she can do that.
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Hopefully someone with great powers of of ability and technology will make that a possibility.
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Anyway, done. Yay. That was quick. What was
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I saying? Oh, yeah. I just looked through until I found a place in the synopsis where there were where you had Matthew, Mark and Luke giving the same story.
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It was a story of the healing of the paralytic in in Mark chapter two. And then I just preached out of that that section using the three
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Gospels to give us that fuller view of what was going on and so on and so forth. And so it was really neat.
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And so that's what I did on Sunday morning. And one of the things that I mentioned was the fact that when we look at Matthew, Mark and Luke, we should recognize that that we are
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Westerners thinking as Westerners and we think history should be recorded in a particular way.
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They even mentioned in this article this idea that, well, you know, John right here says these things were written so that you may believe.
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And if you're writing something so that someone should believe like you believe, you can't really trust it. Isn't that amazing thing for media people to say today?
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They're always writing in that way, and they recognize because they twist the facts.
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That must mean John and everybody else did. So you're guilty until proven innocent. And in reality, if that was the kind of history, if that's the only kind of history that can be trusted, we have no history because that's not how history was written back then.
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Look at the Roman historians and people like that. They're constantly trying to elevate the emperor and so on and so forth, a lot of kind of stuff.
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And so it's unreasonable to apply those standards. But people don't think about that.
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And unfortunately, we don't talk enough about it within the church. The more and more traveling
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I'm doing, the more I'm seeing the Da Vinci Code. You know that thing's got nine, I thought it was six million, nine million hardcover copies in print all over the place.
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The movie coming out, all the rest of that stuff. All that kind of thing.
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You as individuals, you, especially if you're listening right now, if you're listening right now, you had to put the effort out to do so.
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That means you had to to get your computer going and you had to bring this stuff up and and you've got an interest and therefore it's going to be you.
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You're the one who's teaching Bible studies at church and you're the one who's talking with folks about theology over lunch after church.
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You're the one who is going to be responsible for giving an answer to when the
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Da Vinci Code movie comes out. And when when your your son, your daughter comes home from community college and they are they've just been hit upside the head by their religion professor.
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I was talking to a young man. I was honored, just honored out of my socks to meet a young man by the name of Nathan this past weekend,
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Nathan and his wife. And I, you know, when I looked at Nathan, my my first thought, you know how you look at someone, you sort of guess their age and I'm getting old.
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My birthday is coming up next week. And and so I looked at him and I sort of put him in his mid 20s.
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But then when I found out who he was, he's a he's a army ranger and he's already served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq.
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And he showed me I've got a picture on my palm now of him and all his stuff at a 9000 foot mountain peak in Afghanistan.
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And it was really, really fun to people are PMing me as if I can actually read lots of PMs while I'm on here.
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Anyway, it was really, really, really interesting to to hear all of his stories about his training as an army ranger, all the rest of that stuff.
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But, you know, one of the things that I that I mentioned and I see what happened there.
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Someone someone tries to give me something that looks like I'm supposed to be reading it. And I'm like, now
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I completely have no idea where I was making connection with Nathan. But oh, well, I was really honored to meet him.
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And we were talking anyways over lunch about the fact that we are going to be faced with this.
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Oh, got it. Nathan's out now and he's in a community college.
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And the he got himself in trouble in a world history class because he dared to point out that the teacher would present all the other religions of the world in a fair manner.
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But then when he got to Christianity, oh, just slash and burn and attack and all the rest of this stuff.
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That's what people are up against. You know, Nathan's up against that. I think
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I've mentioned my son has gotten involved in this in this Web board and he's getting hit with everything.
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In fact, it's been funny recently. I know when he comes home because it's late at night and if I'm still over at the office, the intercom will come on.
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Hey, Dad, what's that passage where Jesus said this or, you know, hey, this guy just said this.
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What would you say to him? You know, and it's funny. Sometimes I'll be over it's over at the house when he's doing this stuff and and he'll ask a question like this guy is saying that you can be a homosexual and a
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Christian. I go, yeah, I wrote a book about that. And it's a question of Mormonism. Yeah. Address that in a couple of books on Mormonism.
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And oh, it's a Roman Catholic question. Yeah, I read a couple of books on that, too. And it's just sort of funny.
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But anyway, this stuff is out there. You are going to folks that are going to be answering these questions.
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I can I can only answer so many questions. There's only so many hours in a day. You're the one that's going to have to be giving an answer.
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And if you want to open your mouth and say anything about Scripture, if you want to open your mouth and say anything about the gospel to where someone's going to say, well, where did you get that?
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Well, it's from the Bible. Oh, the Bible that. And here comes all this stuff about the
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Bible where, you know, that they took out Mary Magdalene and all the rest of this other stuff that's just constantly going on.
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In in our society, you're the ones that have to be given the answer, you're not to be able to say, well, I'll go post that question on a website and get an answer for you.
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No, that's going to have to come from you. And that is why next next year when we do our well, it's barely it's not even a year from now when we go to Seattle for the conference next year and the cruise end of August, early
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September, that's what we're going to be focusing on. And, you know, I'm just getting
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I've got to get more and more militant about this, to be perfectly honest with you. I mean, you know, I was thinking about Nathan.
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He was talking about the it was much harder for him to survive ranger training.
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He got closer to death and ranger training than he did in combat because they push you that hard.
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And the discipline that you've got to have this goal and be willing to to give everything to get to that goal.
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Well, you know what, if if you can do that as an army ranger for for what?
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I mean, I'm sorry. I hate to tell Nathan this. I know Nathan listens to the program. Great honor to meet you, sir. But, you know, his tab that he got as a ranger, it doesn't go to heaven.
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Sorry, it just it just doesn't go to heaven. But when you spend that kind of effort in the memorization of the word of God and in understanding
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God's truth and learning to communicate, even practicing, yes, there's nothing ungodly about practicing how to answer questions, thinking it through in your own mind so that when the objection comes up, this isn't the first time you've actually tried to enunciate the response that has eternal benefits.
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No, someone just told me I should not call him, sir. You know what? An army ranger that has who pulled guard duty with Pat Tillman and who's done what he did.
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I call him, sir. I call anybody. I'm not I'm not in the military and I call him, sir. In fact,
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I told him and I do this. I'll be perfectly honest with you. I do this when I'm in an airport and I see actually when
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I'm almost anywhere, a mall, wherever it might be. But I see someone in uniform. I go out of my way to go over, stick my hand out, shake their hand, say thank you for your service.
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You should see people when you do that. I mean, I saw this guy outside the Little Rock Air actually just inside Little Rock Airport.
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You could tell he was traveling to or from. I don't know if it was, you know, which direction he was going.
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But man, I went out of his way in the rain to shake his hand and I made his day.
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That's just all there is to it. And I and I'm going to call him, sir, because I didn't
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I didn't do that. And he did. And so I my hat's off. So anyway, it's going to be up to us, folks.
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It's got to be up to us to give those answers. And that's that's the way that needs to be. And so when you hear people talking about the clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing out now, don't let them get away with that.
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So you know what? You can allow the word of God. You can allow the Bible to be interpreted in its own context. You can allow for the fact that these men, why did you believe that Jesus, the son of God, without automatically assuming they're lying?
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There is a consistency in what they're saying. And here's where the consistency is. And I bet you you've never even touched the word of God.
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You've never even looked at the Bible. All you're doing is going on secondhand sources. Would you do that with anything else? You know, we need to be on the offensive.
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I'm tired of the rear guard actions all the time. You know, we've got the truth.
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Let's let's unleash it and let it do what it's supposed to do. Eight, seven, seven, seven, five, three, thirty, three, forty one.
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One of the consistencies there, however, is if we're going to be aggressive in promoting the truth in that context of defense of the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture, folks, an inspired, inerrant scripture requires a sovereign
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God. Do you hear that? An inspired, inerrant scripture requires a sovereign
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God who can preserve it for us to this day. If you've got a God that because of your tradition, you don't believe is sovereign over what happens in the world of men.
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If you don't believe that your God has control of what happens in this world, that he's just run around up there reacting to everybody.
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If you're one of these libertarians and I'm going to tell you something, you didn't get libertarianism from the
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Bible. It came from your philosophy and you're trying to cram it into the pages of the Bible, sort of like trying to cram, you know, a bunch of extra stuff into your
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Bible and ends up breaking the spine and ruining everything. If you're one of those folks are trying to cram your philosophy of libertarianism into the
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Bible so God's no longer free. God's run around up there just responding to everybody. And he's the great cosmic butler who's trying to clean things up after we make a mess.
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You don't have a consistent basis for defending the idea either of inerrancy and inspiration or the preservation of scripture over time.
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This inconsistency that is introduced into scripture by the traditions of men fighting against the reality and the truth of the sovereignty of God, it ends up destroying your apologetic.
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Look at what happens. There's a very, very well -known Christian apologist by the name of William Lane Craig. And I like listening to a lot of what
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William Lane Craig says, and I like listening to him defending the the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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That's wonderful. But the man's theology is a mess. He's a he's a
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Molanist. He believes in middle knowledge. And he's adopted that primarily for apologetic reasons, not for biblical reasons.
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And the result's a mess. It's not consistent. You can't hold everything together.
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And so some people say, I really enjoy when White talks about about open theism or he talks about the culture wars and, you know, he's responding to the
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Newsweek thing. I appreciate all that. I just wish you wouldn't talk about people like Dave Hunt. Dave Hunt has written some good books.
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Well, maybe. Maybe. But the reality is that we need to be consistent in responding to the inconsistencies within our own group, or we really can't be pointing the finger at people outside our own group.
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In other words, if if we close a blind eye to Dave Hunt's gross misreading of history, his his utter inability or actually its unwillingness is not an ability.
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This new book, this new edition of What Love Is This has proven one thing. It's not an inability on Dave's part.
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It's an unwillingness on Dave's part. He can see when he's wrong.
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He can see when he has been refuted. He can see that he's wrong about 1
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John 5 .1. So he just removes it from his book. He can see he's wrong about Acts 13 .48.
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So he ends up ignoring every translation made by a group of scholars and ends up citing only translations made by individuals like the
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Nazarene 2000 translation. Wow. You know, I mean, that's as bad as anything the
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Jehovah's Witnesses have ever done to try to defend John 1 .1. He's willing to go as far as they as they have gone to ravage
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John 1 .1 to ravage Acts 13 .48 in the service of a tradition. See, so we've got to be consistent.
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If we are not consistent in exposing that kind of thing within the parameters of what's called evangelicalism,
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I'm never in the world. That is, that term is almost now completely useless. If you can throw the emergent church stuff and open theism and all that stuff into the mix, then who knows what evangelicalism is.
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But if what's allegedly on our side of the fence, if we won't expose that stuff, if we will not do internal apologetics in defense of the truth within our group, then we have absolutely positively no grounds to turn around and do it outside, at least if we're really concerned about truth.
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And so I know that people, they're like, oh, it's great when you go after the non -Christians, but man, you know, you're just so mean.
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Dave Hunt's a nice guy and all the rest of that stuff. Dave Hunt may be a nice guy, and I've listened to Dave Hunt speak many times, and he can be very endearing, but the fact of the matter is, his crusade against Calvinism has shown very, very clearly a tremendous willingness to twist the truth, to look at a page of text and only see what his traditions want him to see.
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He only sees the facts that he can use in the service of his position, and when showed facts that are against his position, well, wow, you know, they just sort of disappear.
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You know, even when you're shown, you know, you said Charles Haddon Spurgeon unequivocally denied limited atonement, and then in your new version of the book, you say that sometimes he preached it and sometimes he didn't, and he contradicted himself.
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Well, you know what? That's not what unequivocal means. It's obvious, very, very clear that Dave Hunt has heard the criticisms of his book, and it's not that he's so ignorant that he can't understand the criticisms of his book at all.
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Instead, the fact of the matter is, he's unwilling to admit error. He's unwilling to admit what
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I've tried to say from the beginning. This book started circulating in manuscript order, in manuscript form, only 90 days after the radio program we did where Dave Hunt said,
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I've never read the Reformers. Don't know anything about them. I'm sure there's lots of books.
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I just go with the Bible. I'm sorry, but it is not elitism to say that this field requires more than 90 days to come to an understanding of it.
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He was wrong in his ignorance then, and he's refused to change his position, even though he's then increased the number of miscitations he can provide to substantiate the ignorance that was his before.
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That's what's going on. And so in documenting these things on the blog, I'm not being inconsistent with, at the same time, responding to the zany, insane assertions of Dan Brown in his book.
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Because Dan Brown gives just as much substantiation for his assertion that Constantine created the deity of Christ out of whole cloth as Dave Hunt gives for asserting that you can read 1
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John 5 -1 in either way. I mean, just simply throwing something out there doesn't prove anything.
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You've got to be able to provide a reason. And Dan Brown doesn't do that, and Dave Hunt doesn't do that.
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So why should we think that because Dan Brown is an unbeliever and Dave Hunt is a believer, that we should, shouldn't we actually give
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Dave Hunt less room? Isn't that more inconsistent for Dave Hunt to be doing that than for Dan Brown?
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Who is living in accordance with their own worldview at that point? Good question.
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877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.
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And we actually are going to take a break at the half hour today. I think someone can tell that I could probably use one.
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And take your phone calls, 877 -753 -3341. We'll be right back. The Trinity is a basic teaching of the
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Christian faith. It defines God's essence and describes how he relates to us. James White's book,
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The Forgotten Trinity, is a concise, understandable explanation of what the Trinity is and why it matters. It refutes cultic distortions of God, as well as showing how a grasp of the significant teaching leads to renewed worship and deeper understanding of what it means to be a
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Christian. And amid today's emphasis on the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, The Forgotten Trinity is a balanced look at all three persons of the
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Trinity. Dr. John MacArthur, Senior Pastor of Grace Community Church says, James White's lucid presentation will help layperson and pastor alike.
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Highly recommended. You can order The Forgotten Trinity by going to our website at aomen .org,
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answering those who claim that only the King James Version is the Word of God. James White, in his book,
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The King James Only Controversy, examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt scripture and lead believers away from true
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Christian faith. In a readable and responsible style, author James White traces the development of Bible translations, old and new, and investigates the differences between new versions and the authorized version of 1611.
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You can order your copy of James White's book, The King James Only Controversy, by going to our website at www .aomen
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.org. The history of the Christian church pivots on the doctrine of justification by faith.
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Once the core of the Reformation, the church today often ignores or misunderstands this foundational doctrine.
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In his book, The God Who Justifies, theologian James White calls believers to a fresh appreciation of, understanding of, and dedication to the great doctrine of justification, and then provides an exegesis of the key scripture texts on this theme.
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Justification is the heart of the gospel. In today's culture where tolerance is the new absolute,
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James White proclaims with passion the truth and centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith.
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Dr. Jay Adams says, I lost sleep over this book. I simply couldn't put it down. James White writes the way an exegetically and theologically oriented pastor appreciates.
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This is no book for casual reading. There is solid meat throughout, an outstanding contribution in every sense of the words.
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The God Who Justifies by Dr. James White. Get your copy today at AOMN .org.
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Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.
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Is this favorite song of children biblical? Indeed it is. Dave Hunt writes, he says, Mothers brought young children to Jesus and disciples drove them away.
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Did the stern disciples think these children were not among the quote, elect, end quote? No, the disciples had never been taught such a concept by Jesus.
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Their problem was the same pride and lack of love indicted with which
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Christ indited the Pharisees. Ye have not the love of God in you. John 5, 42.
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And when commenting on this in channel, I had mentioned, you know, it's so easy to take a passage about the blessing of the little children and say, oh, see, there's the foundation of that Sunday school song that, you know what?
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I sang it too. I was familiar with it as well. We don't sing that one in our
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Sunday schools at our church, but I sang it when I was a kid. And I just quoted from Psalm 137, one of the imprecatory
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Psalms, and where the people of Israel who are in bondage from those who serve foreign gods and the temple's been destroyed and so on and so forth.
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There the psalmist says, Blessed are those who dash your little children's heads upon the rock.
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That doesn't appear, by the way, in this edition of the Berean Call. And there's no discussion at all of the fact that though Mr.
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Hunt has had it clearly explained to him that God's love, like human love, is able to have distinctions within it.
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That's how we have that ability. If God cannot distinguish in his love, if God was just had the same kind of love for every single human being, which is the foundational element of Mr.
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Hunt's arguments, by the way, then he would be less than personal. We do not have respect for any human being who cannot have distinctions in his kind of love.
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We do not have any respect for the man who would wake up in the middle of the night and hear a noise and go rushing into his daughter's bedroom and find a man attacking her.
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And he's paralyzed because he has an equal love for his daughter as he has for the attacker.
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And he doesn't know what to do because I love my daughter so much, but I love everybody just so much.
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And I love the attacker. And we don't respect that man. At least you better not respect that man.
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If you find a man attacking your daughter in her bedroom, you blow the guy away. Hello, that's your responsibility before God.
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That's why God made you the man of the house and said, protect your wife and kids. Okay, that's simple.
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This postmodern ooey -gooey stuff dehumanizes us. It makes us less than God created us to be.
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Okay, and so this whole idea of levels and kinds of love and everything else, that's not a part of Mr.
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Hunt's presentation. So he doesn't talk about the fact that the Canaanites were in the land of Canaan for hundreds of years and God never sent prophets to them.
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And God, in fact, when the people of Israel went into captivity, he has this odd statement where he talks about how their transgressions, their iniquity was not yet filled up.
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And then when he brings his people into the land, what does he tell them to do? Well, don't hurt anybody.
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You just go in and you talk to folks and they'll give you the land. Is that what
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God told Joshua? Ask the people at AI, ask the people at Jericho.
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That's not what God told Joshua. And if there's anybody who has a problem with what
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God told Joshua, you don't understand both the sovereignty and the holiness of God.
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And I don't think Dave Hunt does either. I don't think Dave Hunt does either. That's just very, very clear.
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I could go through a lot of this and I'll keep this the brilliant call up here open in case we have a break after going to our callers, reading some of the odd stuff going on in the channel here.
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But let's go ahead and talk with Josiah in Dallas.
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Hi, Josiah. Hi there, Dr. White. How are you? Doing well. It's great to talk to you again. What's up?
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I have a question in regard to perseverance. I don't know if it's related to Calvinism.
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So I, of course, and it's in regard to Ezekiel chapter 18, verses 21 through 26.
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I, of course, am convinced that Scripture is crystal clear in teaching that God preserves His elect in the faith.
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I do have some questions, though, about the proper exegesis of this passage in Ezekiel and would like the aid of someone whom
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I consider to be more advanced than I in the discipline of exegesis. In particular,
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I would like to know what you think Ezekiel means or God means when he speaks of a righteous person in verse 24.
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In other words, is he referring to a regenerate person or is he merely referring to a person who conforms to the behavioral standards set forth in verses 5 through 9, that is, a person who does not eat upon the mountains or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, who does not defile his neighbor's wife, etc.
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That's the first part of the question. The second one is, I would like to know what you think God is referring to in the second half of verse 24 when he speaks of the death of the righteous person who becomes wicked.
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I'm referring to his statement, none of the righteous deeds that he has done should be remembered for the treachery of which he is guilty and the sin he has committed, for them he shall die.
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Does he speak of physical death here, as Paul likely does in reference to the Corinthians who are partaking of communion in an unworthy manner, or does he speak of eternal punishment, or perhaps both?
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Well, I think one of the major problems is trying to take primarily New Testament categories and go to Old Testament passages and ask, okay, where do
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I fit this in, where do I fit that in, rather than looking in the proper direction at the development of these truths and recognizing that to go back to Ezekiel in a context where he's dealing with a people who are using excuses, they're using excuses not to obey
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God. They're saying, well, look, there's no reason for us to obey God. The fathers have eaten grapes and our teeth are set on edge.
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Everything that's happening to us is because of what our fathers have done, and so there's really no reason for us to repent.
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There's no reason for us to obey the commands of God because we're stuck in this situation anyways, and it's not really our fault, and yada, yada, yada.
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And so Ezekiel is dealing with that issue, and he's laying out basic facts, basic truths in light of their misapprehensions, and not really misapprehensions, not that they were ignorant of these things, but in light of the excuses that they were using for their own sin to take that specific context and then try to make it fit into other contexts just really doesn't allow for any type of consistency at all.
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And so what he's talking about is that context of what the people were saying, the proverb that they had uttered about the parents eating the grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge, the whole idea that, hey, it doesn't matter what
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I do. Ezekiel's response is, no, look, you are going to be held accountable for your own sin, and don't think that you can live the first part of your life observing my laws, and then, okay,
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I'm past about halfway where I'm going to live, how long to live, so I've done enough good stuff, and now
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I'm going to go and paint the town red, but I'm not going to live long enough to ever outweigh what
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I did before. No, if you're a righteous man in that sense, and then you abandon that and you live that way, don't think that your past righteousnesses are somehow going to do something, that would of course be very consistent with the presentation the
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Bible gives of the nature of the righteous man. It's not the nature of the righteous man to cease being righteous any more than it is the nature of an unrighteous man to live in a righteous fashion.
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So that's very clear throughout Scripture. But he's simply dealing with people who have a completely aberrant view of what it means to live in a righteous fashion and the reasons why one would do so, and those who are saying, might as well sin because God's going to wipe us out anyways, it doesn't make any difference, and we're actually sort of innocent ourselves, and there may very clearly be underlying this, an underlying accusation against the justice of God as well, by saying we really don't deserve this kind of a punishment, but we are experiencing it because of the preceding generations, and that then is responded to as well by the assertion that no, the soul that sins will die, and you may well, and this is where part of the problem lies in the
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Jewish idea that well, if we have physical and material prosperity within the nation, that means that's a sure sign that we are righteous and God's blessing us, and vice versa if it's not, and therefore even if they go into captivity, and that was one of the themes for both, for Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, how do you encourage people to continue to live in godliness when the people as a whole are under the judgment of God?
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How do you encourage the 7 ,000 who've not bowed the knee to Baal to endure the punishment that because they're a part of the people of God as a whole, everyone experiences?
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That's another element that generally isn't discussed in the whole passage either. So I don't know that you should try to take it out of that context and try to say well, okay, is this a regenerate person or an unregenerate?
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That's not what Ezekiel is addressing. He's addressing something in a specific context and answering it in a specific context, and you'll notice the very next verse says, yet you say, which shows this is almost in a debate dialogue format, yet you say the way of the
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Lord is not right. Here now, house of Israel, is my way not right? Is it not your ways that are not right?
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You have this corrective of unrepentant people dialogue going on, and if you don't see it within that context and try to transport it out, which believe me, people do on a regular basis.
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I mean, people will always, not actually really look at 24, but look at 23, say, do
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I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked declares the Lord rather than that he should turn from his ways and live? And see, that means there's no election, and that means that, and you know, it's just amazing that that could be looked in that way when you realize you're talking here about the prophet
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Ezekiel, and you're talking about the period of the judgment of the people of Israel. What was the explanation of that?
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What was the explanation that Isaiah gives of it? In Isaiah chapter 10, bring people to punish the people of Israel, and then they themselves are punished for their unrighteous ways.
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The fact that God is sovereign over all these things, and he's using even godless people to punish his people for their own good.
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It's very clearly a part of the text, but people just skip that part and say, oh, see, this means there's no election, yada, yada, yada, as if the people of Israel themselves hadn't been chosen specially.
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I've been reading too much of Dave Hunt recently, and so it's causing me some problems, and my blood pressure's way too high,
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I think, at that particular point in time. But, you know, and the reason, honestly, that I think most of the time this passage and passages like it, you don't get into a meaningful conversation is because the idea of examining a passage first within its native context and determining what that native context says about the passage, that's just not standard in theological discussions amongst
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Christians, and there's a reason why. The reason that it's not standard is because, and I realize there are exceptions to this rule,
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I try to make my Sunday school that I teach an exception to this rule, but in the majority of Sunday school situations, which is where,
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I mean, where do most Christians get their theological education? If it's not in that brief period of time on a
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Sunday morning, if they even attend. And yet in the vast majority of Sunday schools, the idea of teaching you how to do exegesis, teaching you how to examine a context, recognizing the role of doing exegesis, that's not what is covered at all because you want to make people feel warm and fluffy and things like that.
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And so that stuff doesn't come into the conversations vast majority of the time. And when someone like yourself raises those issues, there's an immediate suspicion on the part of the person you're talking to.
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Why? Because they don't hear that in their church. And so it sounds strange.
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It sounds like you're trying to complicate things. That sounds like you're talking about work.
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You sound like an elitist and see, and then the emotional walls come up.
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And I mean, haven't you run into things like that? I run into that type of situation all the time. And it's very easy to just throw your hands up and say, oh, forget it.
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But you know what? The Lord calls us to give an answer. And that's even within the context of others around us.
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We can be used to the Lord to be a blessing to him. And so we just got to press on. Definitely.
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Do you have time for one more question? I actually have got another caller online right now. So we'll hold it on that one and talk with you again in the future.
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Thanks a lot. Have a good day. Thanks. All righty, bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number that Eric in, oh my goodness, the capital of the
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People's Republic of California. Yes. Wow, man. You must really, honestly, have you seen the
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DVDs of the debate I had with Doug Wilson yet? No, I haven't.
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Well, as soon as Doug Wilson got on the bus that takes you from the airport to the hotel, the shuttle bus,
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I was on the bus and greeted him as he got on the bus. And so we're just starting to pull away.
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And he sort of shuddered a little bit. And he said, wow, I feel like I've got something crawling down my back.
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This is a blue state. It's like, yeah, and we're smack dab in the middle of the bluest blue.
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Because from my window at the hotel, you could see the Hollywood sign out on that hill.
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So it was like, yeah, something tells me if I could see the actual colors around here, it was there wasn't anybody who voted the other direction would stand out like a sore thumb.
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So you're right there with those wonderful legislators there in Sacramento.
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It must be really neat. Well, it's pretty difficult. But we get by.
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The Lord has sustained you through it all. Yeah. All right. What's up? Well, I had a question about Hebrews chapter two, verse nine, which
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I'm sure you've dealt with a lot. Well, we've got a little bit. I wanted to know grammatically.
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I know that in the Greek, it's there's no it's not everyone or every man, but rather though the word is just possible upon.
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Yeah. And I wanted to know grammatically what it's referring to.
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And a lot of commentaries I've looked at, you know, it says that it's referring to the sons of glory, the sons are being brought to glory in verses 10 and verse 10 and so on.
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And I wanted to know, because I also noticed that in verses eight and nine, I don't remember specifically which ones, but the idea that all things are the things that are put under subjection to Christ is actually the same word.
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From what I understand, I just wanted to know why grammatically it's not referring to that. Well, yeah, it is a term that in the
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Greek language is is so completely contextually defined.
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The term itself really almost has no meaning outside of the context which is used.
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So, for example, if you just back up to verse eight, if you're looking at the text or for those of you with Bible works 6 .0,
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please turn to Hebrews 2 8 and activate your Greek text, you will see that it starts off with Panta.
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It starts off with the all things have been put in subjection under his feet.
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Now, when you look at that, that is in the neuter. And so when you look at the neuter now, remember there while there is some connection between masculine, feminine and neuter in some senses between English and Greek in the majority of cases, that's not the case.
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So that's one of the reasons, for example, that I'll be perfectly honest with you. Walter Martin was a little bit off when he argued that wisdom in in Proverbs eight can't be
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Jesus because it's feminine. Well, that's an English way person's way of thinking about gender, that it does not reflect how a
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Greek speaking person would have understood that that situation. There's other reasons for for recognizing that citing
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Hebrews eight. I'm sorry, Proverbs eight is evidence of Jesus being created just isn't a biblically tenable thing.
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But gender is not necessarily the way that that works. But when you have a neuter, generally it's it is all things and not all people or something along those lines.
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And so you really have to look at the usage in a particular context. And when we talk about all things being subject to him, the citation coming out of the old
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Testament in Psalm eight, six, the question is, what does that mean?
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Because the writer then says, but now we do not yet see all things subjected to him. And so that's that's referring to Christ's leadership and lordship over all things.
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But then when you have the use of the term in Hebrews two, nine, the problem you have there is the form at that point can be either neuter or masculine.
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And the reason that translators would opt for the masculine and hence all people or everyone is because of both the well, it's contextual that he might taste death, coupere, pontas, coupere in behalf of a word of substitution, pontas, all which in the original context.
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And I, you know, I get I got to admit, sometimes I get tired repeating it, but it is a truth that almost no one ever takes up the time to try to respond to.
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And that is in the biblical context, in the biblical worldview, that all would be all kinds of men.
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The idea that it is a universalistic term for everyone who's ever lived or ever will live.
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The idea that what he was saying here is that Jesus tasted death on behalf of Pharaoh or Jesus tasted death on behalf of the
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Canaanites in the land that God would never even send a prophet to to announce them of the coming of Messiah, anything like that, that that is all completely read into the text from a tradition that had that's that's never been derived from the text in any way, shape or form.
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The issue here is the simple statement that that Christ has tasted death in behalf of pontas.
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And who is this pontas? Well, as the commentaries pointed out, as you yourself mentioned, when you then follow from this, what does this mean?
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He's tasted death for verse 10. It was fitting for him for whom are all things there.
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You have now there you have a different thing. And this is something else you might want to jot down here. You don't just have pass, pass upon when you have tau, when you have the article before ponta, the neuter plural.
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That is actually a very specific use in in of of that pass, pass upon form that you'll find over in Colossians.
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And most scholars feel there's a specific reason for the use of this form over against another form that was relevant that was very prevalent in Greek philosophy that could confuse
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God in the creation. This sort of more concretizes, shall we say, the creation in distinction from the creator over against the other form that could be used.
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So here you have for his fitting for him for whom are all things and through whom are all things. What does that sound like?
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This is one of the passages, by the way, just in passing that if Paul didn't write
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Hebrews and I don't know that he did. One of those folks who argues that whoever did was extremely deeply influenced by him.
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Maybe one of the theories is this is Luke translating Paul, that Paul wrote it in Hebrew and he's translating it into into Greek.
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But whatever it is, when you see this phrase here in 210, that is such a close parallel to Colossians chapter one and Colossians chapter two, that it just it there's got to be a connection there.
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At the very least, this author knew of the book of Colossians or had heard Paul preaching the subject wanted to that the language is just so absolutely direct there in bringing many sons to glory to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings.
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Now, so you've very, very quickly gone from who it is that does he give himself for?
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Who does he who does he taste death for into this assertion of bringing many sons to glory to perfect the author of their salvation through suffering?
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So now all of a sudden you have a further description of who this is. This is sons who are being brought to glory and now he is the author of their salvation.
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And then it continues on in verse 11 for both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all for one father.
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For this reason, he is not ashamed to call them brethren. So if you just follow the context through, you will be given plenty of of delimiters terms that will help you to understand exactly what the tasting of death is, what it involves for whom it is and what it results in are all going to be right there in the context.
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This is really one of the dangers, I think, of the way that we look at the Bible. We tend because of the use of versification to think that we can look at a single verse that's actually just a part of a sentence and come to a conclusion about what it says.
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And that's not, you know, versification has only existed in the last four or five hundred years.
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And yet we, especially as Western thinkers, we don't look at an entire narrative. We look at it in the micro rather than the macro.
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I'm not saying you can ignore the micro. I'm not saying you ignore the form of pasapasapan or tapanta or whatever. You look at those things, but you look at those things in the light of how they function in the bigger picture.
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We tend to look at the little teeny tiny stuff and miss the flow of a thought as it goes through this section here where the writer identifies for us who he's talking about.
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So, all righty, sir. All right. Well, thank you very much. Well, God bless you up there in Sacramento. You keep serving the
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Lord there in the midst of Sodom. Sacramento. I'm sorry. God bless you.
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God bless you. All right, bye -bye. Oh, boy, that's fun. I enjoy getting a chance to take a look at things like that.
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Even though we didn't get a chance to go back to the Berean Call, I'm sure that we will have time in the future for that kind of thing.
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It's the holiday season. Don't be so busy that you don't take some time to consider the incarnation, the gift of God, the grace of God.
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I know I'm going to find a time before Christmas to fire up Handel's Messiah. And if you don't do that,
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I would highly recommend it to you. And, you know, as long as nobody else is around, I'm going to get out my music, my sheet music, and I'm singing along.
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I'm doing the bass part. You all can join in with me. We'll see you Thursday afternoon for the Dividing Line. God bless. Amen .org.
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That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G, where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.