December 7, 2004

Opening Banter and Newsweek Commentary

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

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

It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is James White.

And good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome to The Dividing Line on this Tuesday afternoon, the 7th of December, Pearl Harbor Day, of course. And that, of course, is a... The best book I ever read on that, of course, I haven't read any of them in about 20 years now.

But Walter Lord's stuff, I always liked reading Walter Lord's stuff. I mean, it's so interesting. And his work on that and the Battle of Midway. 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. 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 AOMIN .org.

And the neat thing now is the biggest thing. Hey, there's Texpress. We just came to the channel. Hi, Tex. Love that Edward stuff, man. Actually, that Archibald Alexander quote, I've been... 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 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. 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.

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. And so I thank SN for allowing EN to do that.

A little inside joke there. But anyway, and Shamgar and Aomin and all those guys who got it working. Because it started working and then it went, bleh, and died and stopped working. And so then we got it working again.

The only person who is not rejoicing today in the new blog is Dave Hunt. Because if anyone's been reading, I have a book in my hands, yes. Here it is. I'm holding it up to the microphone here. Updated and expanded.

What love is this? Calvinism's misrepresentation of God. Dave Hunt. And like I said on the blog, this is a very well-made book. I really, you know, what can I say? It's very, very well-made. It's not very well-written.

In fact, on that level, it's really bad. But it's got nice paper. It's got nice typesetting. It's very easy to read. And this has got to be the nicest slipcover I've ever seen. I just think it's great.

So, anyway, that's the most positive thing 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, okay, all right, I had originally written this.

Now I'm going to write the opposite of that. 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.

Those notes do not appear. It's not there anywhere. And so I have more to say on that a little bit later on. Let me just mention one thing. 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341, for those of you who would like to join us online.

What was that?

That was an odd sound. Did you turn my thing up there? Yeah, I was working on that and trying to get your computer set up and ready to go for you. And what do you got? You got your CD unclicked again.

Okay, what about now?

Let's give it a shot. Oopsie, still. I just muted CD audio, dude. Noisy computer, man. Well, you know, you're in charge of that stuff, aren't you?

Fair. We'll just compress the daylights out of it. There you go. If you try to play anything, it will sound like this.

Hey, you know, it all just reflects on you anyways. What can I say? I'll just blame it on the bailing wire. There you go. There you go. I don't know what that is. What can I say? Anyway, what was I saying?

I was saying I was giving the number, 877 -753 -3341. Oh, yes. I mentioned on the last little blog thing. And it's sort of scary because I can throw blog stuff up so fast that I might want to like put myself, 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.

We've created a monster. Yes. And will those be searchable? I bet you those will be searchable. 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.

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 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. 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.

They are searchable. Yes. The guru of the blog, E. Nielsen, in channel says they are searchable. So 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 set it aside and talk about other things.

But reading this Newsweek thing, I just love, this is so obvious. The media does not even try to put a mask, you know, at all. 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 the blogs.

Cool. So we're going to get it all done. So everybody's giving Ian slaps in the back right now. And I'm sure he's probably wearing plaid today. So anyway, the media is just so obvious in its detestation of Christianity.

It's just they don't even try to mask it anymore. They really don't. There's just, listen to this paragraph. Like the Victorians, we 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.

Quote, I don't want to be too simplistic, but our faith is somewhat childlike. End quote. Says the Reverend H .B. London, a vice president of James Dobson's conservative focus on the family organization, 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 quote. London's View has vast public support. A Newsweek poll found that 84 of American adults consider themselves Christians and 82 see Jesus as God or the Son of God.

As if those are two different things. That's not in the quote. But anyway, 79 say they believe in the virgin birth and 67 think the Christmas story from the angel's appearance to the star in Bethlehem is historically accurate.

Now, I wonder what 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, in fact, 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. 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, is completely below true scholarship today. It is something 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 I did from Covenant of 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.

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. And the seminar was about debating Calvinism. I even used the Chuck Grissomire show as the outline.

We played it. And then I'd start and stop it, start and stop it, respond to it. Sort of like we do on The Dividing Line. And people loved it. Except I was also using a PowerPoint presentation. So it all sort of worked out real nice.

I had a great time with them. But then Sunday morning I spoke on the Synoptic Gospels. One of the things that I mentioned in the Sunday school. And this was really interesting. I don't know if some of you are ministers.

It's a bit of a challenge. I was asked to address the Synoptic Gospels on Sunday morning. So what 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 Synoptic Gospels in the sermon.

But then the pastor said, no, why don't you start it in the Sunday school and then finish it in the sermon. Now how do you do that? Because I'm one of those folks that sort of, you know, the sermon is different.

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 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, Quattro Eurangeliorum, or in English, the synopsis of the four Gospels. And I found the, oh, my poor wifey wants to listen, but she's not sure how she can do that.

Hopefully someone with great powers of ability and technology will make that a possibility. Anyway, done. Yay. That was quick. What was 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.

It was the story of the healing of the paralytic in Mark chapter 2. And then I just preached out of that section using the three Gospels to give us that fuller view of what was going on and so on and so forth.

And so it was really neat. 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 we are Westerners thinking as Westerners, and we think history should be recorded in a particular way.

They even mention in this article this idea that, well, you know, John right here says these things were written so that you may believe. And if you're writing something so that someone should believe like you believe, you can't really trust it.

Isn't that an amazing thing for media people to say today? They're always writing in that way. And they recognize because they twist the facts, 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. Look at the Roman historians and people like that.

They're constantly trying to elevate the emperor and so on and so forth and all that kind of stuff. And so it's unreasonable to apply those standards, but people don't think about that. And unfortunately, we don't talk enough about it within the church.

The more and more traveling 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. The movie coming out, all the rest of that stuff.

All that kind of thing. You as individuals, especially if you're listening right now. If you're listening right now, you had to put the effort out to do so. That means you had to get your computer going and you had to bring this stuff up.

And you've got an interest, and therefore it's going to be you. 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.

And you're the one who is going to be responsible for giving an answer when the Da Vinci Code movie comes out. And when your son or your daughter comes home from community college, and they've just been hit upside the head by their religion professor.

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. Nathan and his wife. And when I looked at Nathan, my first thought, you know how you look at someone, you sort of guess their age.

And I'm getting old. My birthday is coming up next week. And so I looked at him, and I sort of put him in his mid -20s. But then when I found out who he was, he's an Army Ranger. And he's already served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he showed me, I've got a picture on my palm now of him and all his stuff at a 9 ,000-foot mountain peak in Afghanistan. And it was really, really fun. People are PMing me as if I can actually read lots of PMs while I'm on here.

Anyway, it was really, really, really interesting to hear all of his stories about his training as an Army Ranger, all the rest of that stuff. But, you know, one of the things that I mentioned, and I see what happened there.

Someone tried to give me something that looks like I'm supposed to be reading it. And I'm like, now I completely have no idea where I was making connection with Nathan. But, oh, well, I was really honored to meet him.

And we were talking anyways over lunch about the fact that we are going to be faced with this stuff. Oh, got it. Nathan's out now, and he's in a community college. And 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.

But then when he got to Christianity, oh, just slash and burn and attack and all the rest of this stuff. That's what people are up against. You know, Nathan's up against that. I think I've mentioned my son has gotten involved in this web board.

And he's getting hit with everything. 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. Hey, Dad, what's that passage where Jesus said this?

Or, you know, hey, this guy just said this. What would you say to him? And it's funny. Sometimes I'll be over at the house when he's doing this stuff. And he'll ask a question like, well, this guy is saying that you can be a homosexual and a Christian.

And I go, yeah, I wrote a book about that. And there's a question on Mormonism. Yeah, I addressed that in a couple of books on Mormonism. And, oh, there's a Roman Catholic question. Yeah, I read a couple of books on that, too.

And it's just sort of funny. But anyway, this stuff is out there. You are going to be the folks that are going to be answering these questions. 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. 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?

Well, it's from the Bible. Oh, the Bible, that, and here comes all this stuff about the Bible where, you know, they took out Mary Magdalene and all the rest of this other stuff that's just constantly going on in our society.

You're the ones that have to be giving the answer. You're not going to be able to say, well, I'll go post that question on a website and get an answer for you. No, that's going to have to come from you.

And that is why next year when we do our, well, it's barely tonight. 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 September, that's what we're going to be focusing on.

And, you know, 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. He was talking about it was much harder for him to survive ranger training.

He got closer to death in ranger training than he did in combat because they push you that hard. And the discipline, you've got to have this goal and be willing to give everything to get to that goal.

Well, you know what? If you can do that as an army ranger for what? 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.

Sorry. 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 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. No, someone just told me I should not call him sir.

You know what? An army ranger who pulled guard duty with Pat Tillman and who's done what he did, I call him sir. I call anybody. I'm not in the military, and I call him sir. In fact, 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 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, and say, thank you for your service.

You should see people when you do that. I mean, I saw this guy outside the Little Rock Airport. Actually, just inside the Little Rock Airport. You could tell he was traveling to or from. I don't know which direction he was going.

But, man, I went out of his way in the rain to shake his hand, and I made his day. That's just all there is to it, and I'm going to call him sir because I didn't do that, and he did. So, my hat's off.

So, anyway, it's going to be up to us, folks. It's going to be up to us to give those answers, and that's the way that it needs to be. So, when you hear people talking about the clash between literalism and a more historical view of faith is also playing out, no.

Don't let them get away with that. Say, 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 wanted you to believe that Jesus is the Son of God without automatically assuming they're lying.

There's 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. You've never even looked at the Bible. All you're doing is going on second-hand sources.

Would you do that with anything else? You know, we need to be on the offensive. I'm tired of the rear-guard actions all the time, you know. We've got the truth. Let's unleash it and let it do what it's supposed to do.

Inspiration, Inerrancy, and the Sovereignty of God

877 -753 -3341, one of the consistencies there, however, is if we're going to be aggressive in promoting the truth in that context of the defense of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. Folks, an inspired, inerrant Scripture requires a sovereign God.

Do you hear that? An inspired, inerrant Scripture requires a sovereign 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, if you don't believe that your God has control over what happens in this world, that He's just running around up there reacting to everybody, if you're one of these libertarians, and I'm going to tell you something, you didn't get libertarianism from the 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 a bunch of extra stuff into your Bible, and it ends up breaking the spine and ruining everything.

If you're one of those folks who are trying to cram your philosophy of libertarianism into the Bible, so God's no longer free, God's running 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, you don't have a consistent basis for defending the idea, either of inerrancy and inspiration, or the preservation of Scripture over time.

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. 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 William Lane Craig says, and I like listening to him defending the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That's wonderful. But the man's theology is a mess. He's a mullinist. He believes in middle knowledge. And he's adopted that primarily for apologetic reasons, not for biblical reasons, and the result's a mess.

It's not consistent. You can't hold everything together. And so some people say, I really enjoy when White talks about open theism, or he talks about the culture wars, and, you know, he's responding to the 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. 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.

In other words, if we close a blind eye to Dave Hunt's gross misreading of history, his utter inability, or actually it's unwillingness. It's not inability. This new book, this new edition of What Love Is This has proven one thing.

It's not an inability on Dave's part. It's an unwillingness on Dave's part. He can see when he's wrong. He can see when he has been refuted. Okay? He can see that he's wrong about 1 John 5 .1. So he just removes it from his book.

He can see he's wrong about Acts 13 .48, so he ends up ignoring every translation made by a group of scholars and ends up citing only translations made by individuals like the Nazarene 2000 translation.

Wow. You know, I mean, that's as bad as anything the Jehovah's Witnesses have ever done to try to defend John 1 .1. He's willing to go as far as they have gone to ravage John 1 .1, to ravage Acts 13 .48 in the service of a tradition.

See? So we've got to be consistent. If we are not consistent in exposing that kind of thing within the parameters of what's called evangelicalism, 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Instead, the fact of the matter is, he's unwilling to admit error. He's unwilling to admit what 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, I've never read the Reformers. Don't know anything about them. I'm sure there's lots of books.

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. He was wrong in his ignorance then, and he's refused to change his position, even though he's then increased the number of missed citations he can provide to substantiate the ignorance that was his before.

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. 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 John 5 .1 in either way.

I mean, just simply throwing something out there doesn't prove anything. You've got to be able to provide a reason. And Dan Brown doesn't do that, and Dave Hunt doesn't do that. So why should we think that because Dan Brown is an unbeliever and Dave Hunt is a believer, shouldn't we actually give Dave Hunt less room?

Isn't that more inconsistent for Dave Hunt to be doing that than for Dan Brown? Who is living in accordance with their own worldview at that point? Hmm. Good question. 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number, 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. And take your phone calls, 877 -753 -3340, and we'll be right back.

It's all works righteousness, you know. And you bet your grace myself and I In some religious place By weeping hard on your face Or saying prayers to some dead saints, you know.

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James White, in his book, The King James Only Controversy, examines allegations that modern translators conspired to corrupt Scripture and lead believers away from true 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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Dave Hunt, Calvinism, and the Berean Call

And welcome back to the Dividing Line. We are discussing numerous things. I sort of like how it goes in the channel. We just discuss all sorts of stuff. I did get the Berean Call newsletter December 2004, and the title is God So Loved by Dave Hunt.

And he says, When I was a boy in Sunday school, we used to sing in simple faith, Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world. 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.

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. Their problem was the same pride and lack of love with which Christ indicted the Pharisees.

Ye have not the love of God in you, John 5, 42. 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?

I sang it too. I was familiar with it as well. We don't sing that one in our 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 Psalms, 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.

There the psalmist says, Blessed are those who dash your little children's heads upon the rock. 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. Hunt has had it clearly explained to him that God's love, like human love, is able to have distinctions within it.

That's how we have that ability. If God cannot distinguish in his love, if God just had the same kind of love for every single human being, which is the foundational element of Mr. 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. 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.

And he's paralyzed because he has an equal love for his daughter as he has for the attacker. And he doesn't know what to do because I love my daughter so much, but I love everybody just so much, and I love the attacker.

And we don't respect that man. At least you better not respect that man. If you find a man attacking your daughter in her bedroom, you blow the guy away. Hello? That's your responsibility before God. That's why God made you the man of the house and said, Protect your wife and kids.

Okay? That's simple. This postmodern ooey-gooey stuff dehumanizes us. It makes us less than God created us to be. Okay? And so this whole idea of levels and kinds of love and everything else, that's not a part of Mr. 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. 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.

And then when he brings his people into the land, what does he tell them to do? Well, don't hurt anybody. You just go in and you talk to folks and they'll give you the land. Is that what God told Joshua?

Ask the people at Ai. Ask the people at Jericho. That's not what God told Joshua. And if there's anybody who has a problem with what God told Joshua, you don't understand both the sovereignty and the holiness of God.

And I don't think Dave Hunt does either. I don't think Dave Hunt does either. That's just very, very clear. I could go through a lot of this, and I'll keep the Brian 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.

Ezekiel 18 and the Context of Individual Responsibility

But let's go ahead and talk with Josiah in Dallas. Hi, Josiah. Hi there, Dr. White. How are you?

Doing well. It's great to talk to you again. What's up? I have a question in regard to a person related to Calvinism. I, of course, and it's in regard to Ezekiel chapter 18, verses 21 through 26. I'm convinced that Scripture is crystal clear in teaching that God preserves His elect in the faith.