Lots of Things to Interest a Wide Variety of Folks on Today’s Dividing Line

And greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It's a Friday, unusual time for The Dividing Line, but we didn't do any programs this week, and we do not want you going into the weekend dividing line -less.

I am your sleep -deprived host today. Traveling across many time zones.

It made watching Interstellar a little bit more personal, because that time being all relative thing was, yeah, yeah,

I know how that works. Because you get home, and if you've got something you set the time to.

In fact, I haven't checked. Oh, I need to check. I need to check my laptop, because it's still maybe on Spain time.

You get home, and if you've been hooking up at different time zones where you've landed someplace, some of your watches maybe might change.

This is a Garmin VivoFit smart thing, and so it's Bluetooth to my phone, so the phone gets the update of time, and so it changes time.

But other stuff won't change time. All of a sudden, you're awake at 9

AM the next day. It's really weird. Anyways, that's what happens when you take advantage of opportunities that are given to you.

I thank Revelation TV so much for putting together the debate that we had in Spain with Dr.

Thomas Norris, spiritual director of the Irish College at the

Vatican. I thought that Dr.

Norris was a Jesuit and a church historian. Instead, he's not a Jesuit, and he is a theologian.

Who knew? But we did a debate. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to see it.

And because it is live television, it's not the way some of you would like it to be.

You got to realize, folks, a bunch of people go, oh, just way too much time with all those audience questions.

Look, I understand that. I would rather have just he and I for two hours in a structured type of cross -examination in the

Hawaiian Yards. That's what I'd rather have. You're not going to find anybody that's going to put that on a television station that is trying to keep its audience at its prime time, especially in Europe.

It's not going to happen. So you either don't do it at all, or you do the best you can with the situation you've got and try to get something positive accomplished in the process, which is what

I tried to do. And yeah, some of the phone calls were embarrassing, mainly embarrassing to me.

Some of the anti -Catholic, wild -eyed stuff, especially out of Northern Ireland, rather than focusing upon the important things.

But there were a couple of good calls, and there were a couple of good questions. I was thankful that a number of people asked to talk about the

Eucharist. And that gave me the opportunity of presenting the finished work of Christ. And we certainly,

I think, got to very clearly address the issue of authority. We got to address, I presented to Dr.

Norris sola ecclesia. And I've said it before. I'll say it again. If you can actually get a

Roman Catholic to try to reason with you on that subject, you will prove your point.

Because that is what Rome teaches. There is no way around it. And the harder you fight against it, the tighter the noose becomes that has you trapped.

Because that is the epistemological position of Rome. And an honest person will say yes.

Many just haven't even thought about it. And those that have or are trying to avoid it will just, anyway.

By the way, it is always funny to me. I'm hearing all these people saying, well, that wasn't a fair fight.

And excuse me, this guy has a doctorate from Oxford University. I thought all you folks think that I'm adult for having gone to Columbia Evangelical Seminary.

It makes me a fake. If that's the case, why does this keep happening? Something about my education allowed me to communicate clearly, and succinctly, and logically, and in an ordered fashion.

And oh, come on now, we all know you were just born that way. Well, thank you very much for that observation.

But anyway, look, it was a respectful conversation.

We got to some important issues. Had to move a few things aside to get there.

And listening to Dr. Norris' opening statement, I was like, and the point is?

We eventually got to the point, which was disunity. And the preceding alleged

Reformed Reformation movements didn't split the unity of the church, at least in a formal fashion.

But Luther did. OK, all right, got that. Oh, and I got to challenge the host over dinner.

Or was it the preceding program? There was a point in time where I got to challenge someone on that 30 ,000 denominations figure.

It was on the Late Show, that's right, and he wasn't a part of that. So when he repeated it, I was like, not again.

But I did not have the time. I just wasn't given the opportunity to go back and to correct the silliness of that 30 ,000 denominations thing.

But it came back again, and I guess we just have to, like dealing with James chapter 2, you just deal with it over and over and over and over again.

So anyway, we're back. I got back 18 hours ago.

Got about four hours of sleep, and then got up with my wife and my sister -in -law and headed out into the darkness and ran a 10K this morning.

My wife wanted to run before work, so we all did a 10K this morning. And so I got a little bit of a nap later on, but I'm still running on way too little sleep for way too many hours.

Because yesterday for me was a 33 -hour -long day, because I was nine hours ahead, popped back, so it makes 24 hours into 33 hours.

And how much are you supposed to eat during a 33 -hour day? How many calories are you burning, especially in the

Madrid airport, when they lose your bag? And you've got to go to the Iberia customer service thing and fill out all the forms to get it back, and then you've got to get to your flight, and it's out there somewhere.

Oh, man, I can tell you. That's a big airport. And the gates are long ways away from each other.

I was, yeah, yeah, it was interesting. Anyways, so we are here.

I'm not sure how coherent we are, but we are here. In the second chapter of the book of John, the

Gospel of John, we read these words. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. In almost every

Christian wedding ceremony, there will be a reference to this historical incident.

We're even told where it was. Wouldn't it be interesting if someday we could find out who it was?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if this couple eventually became disciples of Jesus? That would be great. Boy, what stories they would have.

But the point is that Jesus and his disciples, Jesus, who has come to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom in a short period of time, took time out of his public ministry to attend a wedding.

Go to a wedding. He honored the institution of marriage by attending this wedding.

Now, as you may know, as certainly

Dr. Moeller mentioned this morning on the briefing, or some morning, again, the briefing would come out in the middle of the day or something for me over there, so hard to remember which day was which.

The question was asked of Senator Marco Rubio if he would attend a gay marriage.

And here's what he said. If there's somebody that I love that's in my life, I don't necessarily have to agree with their decisions or decisions they've made to continue to love them and to participate in important events.

The senator said he would not hurt that person simply because he disagrees with what they have decided to do. Ultimately, if someone that you care for and is part of your family has decided to move in one direction or another or feels that way because of who they love, you respect that because you love them.

Rubio, who is Catholic, added that it is akin to attending second marriages after divorce, which are not exactly encouraged in a

Catholic church. Someone gets divorced, I'm not going to stop loving them or having them a part of our lives.

It sort of sounds like a typo, but this is probably live stuff, so maybe that's just how it came across.

So here's the question. As soon as I heard this, as soon as I heard this discussion coming up,

I was glad the discussion was coming up, first of all. Let's step away from this specific topic to something really obvious.

Are there events that a

Catholic person or a Christian should not attend, even if it does not involve them specifically participating?

Now, obviously, there are levels of Christian conscience involved here. There are some

Christians that could not attend a boxing match. There are others that would have no problem doing that, seeing it purely as sport, someone else seeing it purely as violence, a mixture all between.

When it comes to religious events, what is the difference between attendance and participation?

I don't think we give much thought to this these days, partly because we don't view our actions as a part of a holistic worldview.

And so we are rather cavalier as to where we will go, what we will do, and what we will participate in.

But it's very obvious that in God's word, there were strong condemnations in the

Old Testament in particular in regards to a lack of care and discernment when it came to religious worship and what one attended to.

And this led then in the New Testament to the entire discussion that the Apostle Paul engages in regarding the eating of meats, sacrifice to idols, and the issue of conscience.

The church existing within a pagan society, within a pagan culture, where there is going to be false religious worship.

And what is a given in the Apostle's conclusions on that is he talks about Christian freedom.

He talks about being able to eat meat without hurting the conscience, and the idol is nothing in this world, and all of that.

But it is a given during the entire conversation that a

Christian would never knowingly, purposefully attend the false religious ceremonies themselves.

They would not engage in idolatrous worship. They would not be attending the, going to the temples.

They'd be staying as far away from that as possible. That wasn't even a part of the argument. The argument had to do with, well, if this was even associated with that, if it's possible this meat had been in that, in that, what about that?

But it's a given that they were not going to the temples. I'd certainly not participating, but could you imagine someone going and just observing for the fun of it?

Well, it's my Christian freedom. I don't see that as even entering into the conversation. So I have said for many, many years, and all this gets people, so I have seen so many, so many angry responses over the years to this.

But I have often pointed out that a Christian, a

Christian who understands what the cross is about, understands the atonement, understands the once for all finished work of Christ, a

Christian will not want to attend the Roman Catholic mass.

The reason for this is they might out of ignorance, but if they know biblical truth, and if they know what

Rome teaches is going on here, they will be repulsed by the very act.

Now I have attended mass, not for purposes of just, well, you know, someone wanted me to go,

I didn't want to offend somebody, no, for research. I wanted to verify certain elements of what was going on, what was being said, what was the context, what was the attitude of people toward the statues and veneration and so on and so forth.

So it was research. It's like, you know, I went through the opening of the temple up there on Happy Valley Road, no,

Happy Valley Road? Pinnacle Peak, Pinnacle Peak, up in North Phoenix. And I was doing research.

I'm checking to see, you know, have there been any changes? You still got the 12 oxen down there.

How big is the ceiling rooms? How about the celestial room? What's it looking like?

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I'm not there in a neutral way.

I'm doing research. I'm making sure that what I'm saying about what's going on here is accurate.

But I would never, I could not, my conscience would not allow me to attend a

Roman Catholic marriage where the mass was being presented. Couldn't go.

And I would want to take the opportunity to explain why I could not go.

So as to give an opportunity of testimony to the finished work of Jesus Christ. I mean, if these folks are trapped in a system that has no finished work, then they need to know that there's something else.

They need to know that they have been deceived. They need to know that they have been misled. And so I don't think there's any place for a born again believer.

You know, you're not supposed to participate anyways. Why you ever would even think about it, I don't know. But I don't think there's any place for a born again believer in the

Roman Catholic mass. Once you understand that they honestly believe that's a perpetuatory sacrifice taking place up there.

That the one sacrifice of Christ that perfects nobody. No one's ever been perfected by that one sacrifice of Christ.

If your entire relationship to God is based upon that reality, why would you go to something where that's blasphemed?

And there's the point. It's a matter of priorities. It's a matter of recognizing what is most important and what gives order to your life.

And if that is ordered by a Christian worldview and by Christian theology, then the answer to some of these questions is very obvious.

But the fact of the matter is, the large portion of people who call themselves Christians, that's not how their worldview is ordered. It's ordered by fear of offense.

I don't want to offend anybody. I don't want to push someone away from Jesus as if Jesus' own words aren't offensive enough to do that on their own.

So using that as an example, we now go to Marco Rubio's comments and Marco Rubio's Roman Catholic.

He does not have a biblical worldview. A Roman Catholic cannot have a biblical worldview.

They can have a supernatural worldview. We can agree with them on all sorts of issues because they have been influenced by biblical teaching in those areas.

But the reality is, as long as you believe that Rome is the ultimate authority, you'll never have a biblical worldview.

You'll have a papal worldview because that's your ultimate authority. Your interpretation of anything in the Bible is determined by the magisterium of the church.

And so you don't have a truly biblical view of sin. You don't have a truly biblical view of marriage.

And so it's not shocking that Rubio would confuse the categories that he confuses in his statement.

What he's missing is the fundamental participatory nature of attendance at a wedding.

We've lost a lot of that just culturally, just culturally. Certainly in the

Jewish context, you didn't show up for an hour at a wedding. They were multi -day events.

They were huge. They were the whole community coming together. And so we tend to look at these things as something you do for an hour, hour and a half.

Maybe if you go to the reception a little longer than that, if you really get to know people. But you get the $20

Target gift card and eat a piece of cake and you're out of there.

Plenty of time to catch the football game or whatever. But we still have some of the vestiges of what this was once about because we still have much of the

English common law language that was used in, well, not common law, the

Book of Common Prayer, sorry. If anyone here has any reason why these two should not be joined together, let them now speak and forever hold peace.

Well, what was that about? Most of us find that really odd. Like, yeah, like I'd say something.

But the point was that that came from a time when it was important that marriage be honored and that if there was a reason why someone should not get married, if there were illicit relationships, illegitimate children, all sorts of things like that, you were under obligation to speak up as a truthful person.

Nobody'd ever do that today. Wouldn't do it for, oh, are you kidding? But the point is you were a participant and you are called, does it not say, before God and these witnesses, you are the witnessors of the taking of the covenant oaths.

You're participating in this. You're saying this is a good thing. This is a proper thing.

I will witness this because I support what it means.

It's good in God's eyes. It's good in my eyes. It's good for the people.

It's good for this couple. It's good for the nation. You're participating in it. And because we've lost that recognition, most of our cultural events have become irrelevant and meaningless and hence easily jettisoned.

And that's why the millennial generation has decided to break all chains of restraint and throw off the yoke of morality and ethics under the guise of a new enlightened morality and decide that all of us who came before them, we were just a bunch of closed -minded simpleton bigots.

We don't need all this stuff that came from preceding generations.

We are more intelligent than all the preceding generations put together, despite the fact that hardly any of us ever read a book.

But anyway, we have our iPads and our iPhones and that makes up for all of it.

And so when you put it all together, what

Marco Rubio is missing is the fact that to attend a ceremony that pretends to be a marriage, and that is all any same -sex union will ever be.

If there is no husband and no wife, there is no marriage. It's all there is to it.

You can play games, you can redefine terms, you can jump up and down and scream and yell about bigotry and discrimination all you want.

It doesn't matter. Words have meanings, verbs have meanings, and those verbs are filled out by their direct objects.

A husband marries a wife, not another husband. And if you've got two men, you'll never have a marriage.

If you've got two women, you'll never have a marriage. Not gonna happen, impossible. I realize that by the end of this summer, that will be the law of the land, but all that will do is condemn this nation as having decided to purposefully, knowledgeably, willfully stand up and say to God, we will not have you to rule over us.

We have asked for your blessings in the past. Only 60 years ago, our leaders would ask for national days of prayer and fasting to bless our efforts to stay alive in this difficult world in fighting the

Nazis. But we don't care about that anymore. We don't believe in any of that anymore.

We are our own gods. We do not want God's law. We will make our own.

That is what will happen by the end of this summer. You say, why you sound resigned to it?

The reality, it's the reality. I read to you last time, the words of Justice Kennedy, who is the swing vote, who years and years ago, talked about how we define reality ourselves.

If he's the swing vote, it's done. We look at Justice Kagan put in there by the

Obama regime. Look at her record as a zealous promoter of homosexuality.

You really think there's any chance on earth that Justice Kagan would do the right thing and recognize the founders of this nation would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever even contemplate this stupidity?

Of course not, of course not, of course not. In any case, to attend the profaning of marriage is to participate in the profaning of marriage.

And so the question comes down to who are you more concerned about offending? And it seems that for many people and for many denominations and many churches, the answer to that question is a given.

And that the answer to that question is I am more concerned about offending the people around me than I am

God. And I think that's a fundamental act of disbelief. You really don't think you can offend God. God doesn't really have any actual meaning to you.

And so Senator Rubio does not have a biblical worldview when it comes to recognition of the nature of marriage.

And what I'm seeing, I don't know about the rest of you, but how much you wanna bet by the time we get to the presidential election next year, and I don't know about you,

I'm gonna be so sick of it. I'm already tired of seeing certain candidates and it's only gonna get worse.

What do you bet the Republican candidate has distanced himself or herself as far as possible from this issue?

Especially in light of what's gonna happen. I don't know when the case is due to be, what is it normally,

June, July, something like that. June, July, once the Supreme Court demonstrates that the

Constitution of the United States is silly putty to be formed as we desire it to be.

What do you bet that this just ceases to be an issue? I have a feeling it will be,

I have a feeling it will be. So some thoughts on a cultural issue at that point.

I forgot to look at the phones here. No, how about those early days and you stood up and spoke at fasting and testimony meetings?

What was that all about? I don't remember. Oh, you were talking about different circumstances where you'd be researching or you'd be there to research it, but there are stories from long, long, long ago that.

Yes, there are. They still amaze me. It was before my time. I think they still cause the

Mormons some level of discomfort on the first Sunday of March. I really do, yes, yes.

I've told those stories before. If anyone wants to know those stories, ask Algo. Algo knows all things and will tell you all about them.

All right, a couple other things to get to. Wow, halfway through the program. Yikes, all right.

I'm gonna be perfect and honest with you. Roger Olson gives me hives.

Roger Olson, the Armenian Roger Olson, just really, really, really drives me crazy, primarily because his view of scripture is just not high enough to be able to really engage him in a meaningful fashion, and yet he still dares to constantly harangue

Reformed theology, while at the same time posting stuff, almost

Rachel Held Evans -ish. If you know, did you just catch that stuff? Oh, the media just loves

Rachel Held Evans, especially now she's become an Episcopalian. Well, the Episcopalians can have her.

We've been trying to say for a long time that that's where she really was anyways, and she's just now proven it for us, but someone wrote to me, and with understandable frustration, said, why are major news outlets all a

Twitter about talking about her? Why don't they ever talk to you?

And my response was simple. They don't care about someone who's saying the same thing today that he said 30 years ago.

It's abandonment of positions and showing yourself to have thought things through.

Oh, that's what they want. And so anyway, but Roger Olson gives me hives, and he, every once in a while,

I don't know if he just regurgitates him or just re -edits him and throws him back out or just whatever, but he threw out yet another of the

Calvinism as indefensible because it makes God evil garbage things, which we've addressed 15 billion times, and which is fundamentally little more than the oh yeah defense.

It is the very essence of the objector in Romans 9, the very essence of the objector in Romans 9.

And he did so again, and we've addressed all this stuff before. If you go back and listen to our critique of the young former

Calvinist guy that I was on Unbelievable with, we addressed that, and then

I think he was on the program with Michael Brown at one point, and we played portions of that, and we responded on that stuff.

But I wanted to look at just one paragraph of his article just to keep the program very broad today in the topics that we're addressing.

We've covered a fair number of things here. His final argument, here's the paragraph.

Sixth and finally, many Calvinists will simply respond by claiming that double predestination as described in the first paragraph above is what the

New Testament teaches, and therefore we have to live with the consequences, whatever they may be. But this is, of course, an appeal to a particular interpretation of the

New Testament, not the New Testament itself. Christians have always disagreed about the meaning of the classical passages, such as Romans 9, used by some to justify belief in unconditional particular election.

Calvinists should at least find it instructive that one cannot find that interpretation of the New Testament in church history before Augustine's anti -plagian writings in the early fifth century.

It is obviously not obvious that the New Testament means that, and as John Wesley said, whatever it means, it cannot mean that, that is the double decree including reprobation, because then

God would be morally monstrous. And of course, it goes no distance toward explaining

God's goodness as consistent with double predestination. So what is that a fundamental recognition of? We've all said this.

When Olson did the book a while ago, when Olson traveled around with Horton and all the rest of this kind of stuff, we've all pointed out that Olson's fundamental position, and this is pretty much what some of the emergent guys have said too, is our final authority is not scripture on this.

And if scripture actually taught this, we would rebel. We will decide what

God can and cannot be. We will decide what God can and cannot do, given our understanding of morality, which we say

God has given to us. So what he's fundamentally saying is, you can't go to Romans nine because it's been disagreed about.

Well, think about what that means for just a second. Think of how glowingly hypocritical and inconsistent

Roger Olson is. I mean, wow. Let's think about this for just a moment. This is what happens when you primarily, and this is one of the criticisms

I've had of other people, when your primary target is Calvinism, and you're not out there dealing with the best

Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or Roman Catholics or Muslims or atheists or whatever, when you're just, your bailiwick is to go after this one area, you end up saying some pretty silly things.

Every text that says there is only one true God has been disputed by Mormons. Therefore, we don't know whether there's one

God or not because that's just an interpretation of the Bible. It's not the Bible itself. And every text that teaches the deity of Christ has been disputed by Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses and Arians going all the way back to the days of Nicaea.

And therefore, it's just your interpretation of the New Testament, not the New Testament itself.

Where can we end here? Every text on the resurrection, every text on, well,

I don't know if Olson even believes in substitutionary atonement, but the whole issue of atonement, I mean, any

Christian doctrine you want, there has been quote unquote disagreement, and therefore, all you're appealing to is the interpretation and not to the text itself.

By making this kind of fallacious, absurd division, he has undercut the entirety of Christian theology.

We can know nothing. And you know what? I know a lot of our minions that are willing to go there.

So rabid is their detestation of the biblical truth of God's absolute freedom and our creatureliness, that they are willing to overthrow it all just to be free of that.

I've seen it, I've seen it. I mean, Calvinist derangement syndrome, ugly, ugly.

And you can have it in these scholarly guys, or you can go down to South Georgia. You know, a couple of churches around,

Bruton Parker there. And there ain't no scholarly guys to it, but it's no less virulent, and it's no less irrational, and it's no less willing to completely throw into the bus anything that could possibly be used to promote that terrible thing called

Calvinism. So there you have the direct admission.

Like John Wesley said, whatever it means, it can't mean that. So the words of Romans nine.

And so honestly, can you give a penny's worth of weight to Roger Olson's interpretation of Romans nine when he starts by saying, whatever else it means, this is one option that's off the table.

Doesn't sound like an overly fair, balanced, unbiased exegesis to me.

That's because it's not. That's because it's not. Now note,

I note in passing, looking forward to the debate coming up in just a matter of weeks on Romans chapter nine, surprising enough,

I was going to spend some time, I don't know if I'm going to have time to. I was listening to Brian, is it

Abrishiano's article from Jets, he's written two huge books that are outrageously expensive.

I mean, just beyond even morally being able to ask anyone to buy something for that level of money.

It's just, I mean, we've had folks buy some incredibly expensive resources on Islam, but that's different.

Anyway, but read the Jets article and I have a feeling that's where my debate opponent will be going pretty much.

And I think we will try to find some time to go over some of the specifics of that form of class election.

Because it's, I think a lot of people would find it helpful to understand exactly what some of the nuances are.

And again, once you really know what a position is and can compare it to the text,

I don't know, when Norman Geisler wrote

Chosen But Free, he had no idea that by writing that book, he would be starting entire churches that hold the opposite view.

And we can only hope that the debate will be so clear there in Dallas that God would be kind enough to open hearts and minds and to truly impress upon us, his creatures, his majesty and his majestic freedom to do with his creatures as he will.

And my prayer is that no one in that room, when we are finished, will want to be walking in the shoes of the objector to God's freedom in mercying some and hardening others, but that everyone there will want to submit to the judge of all the earth that does right and to trust him to do what is right, even when that is beyond creaturely knowledge because we have such an infinitesimally small amount of knowledge upon which to even pretend to be able to judge

God. That would be my prayer. And the text certainly is more than sufficient to be able to provide that kind of clarity, no question about it.

And all you gotta do is be able to clear away the obfuscations and the imbalances because that's all the class election concept is as an imbalance.

This is a class. This is a group of people. It does not include specific identities. And they'll talk about how no one in the

Old Testament was individualistic like modern Christians and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Real simple, real simple.

You just gotta get down to what salvation is. And once you start talking about what justification is, you don't justify classes.

You don't adopt classes. And you don't atone for classes by substitutionary atonement.

Just something to think about. Just something to think about. All right, doing pretty good here.

Doing pretty good here. Wanted to, yes, sir. Oh, two more things to get to and I think

I'll have time to do it. Facebook rumors. Facebook rumors.

As I said, I got up real early this morning. Ran a 10K in the dark.

Not thinking about much of anything, just not tripping over my own feet. That's sort of how you feel after four hours of sleep after a 33 -hour day.

And I come into the chat channel and the first three or four lines that I see in the channel, hey, hear about the

Facebook rumor about you. No, sorry, I was sort of busy yesterday.

I was going to get internet from Philly to here because I've done it before.

I want you to find out what the last bill to go -go internet was because you know what they want now?

For 30 minutes, nine bucks. And for the flight, 30.

It's like doubled or more since the last time I took that flight. And I'm like,

I ain't spending 30 bucks for internet for this flight, forget it. Anyway, so I wasn't able to keep up with Facebook rumors.

But lo and behold, we have somebody repeating a rumor that they were told by people in the know in a

Reform Baptist Fellowship thing on Facebook that said that, what was it, the most two years from now, no more than two years, and I will resign and leave

Alphan Omega Ministries, which would pretty much be the end of Alphan Omega Ministries.

So here you've got a Reform Baptist telling people that people in the know figure

Alphan Omega's got two years to go. And I'm like, really?

Why, what motivates something like this? I mean,

I've said many times that our days probably are numbered, but they'll be numbered thanks to legal action, laws, changes in culture that will basically, well, look, if you've got a guy in England that has just been fined thousands of dollars for quoting

Leviticus 2013 in a public context, yeah, could it happen in two years that the government comes in and drags us all away?

Sadly, yeah, it could. More likely, what we'd be facing are all sorts of constant lawsuits, harassment, et cetera, et cetera, for daring to say anything about anybody, having our stuff removed from the internet, that kind of stuff.

That's another reason for the government not to run the internet, and that's why they want to.

But all those things are possibilities. But this was all, yeah, people in the know.

Well, there are two people in the know about Alphan Omega, just two.

And they're within about 12 feet of each other right now. I'm gonna say 10. 10, okay, all right.

And we both went, huh? My first thought was, okay, so after the first several years where you did this full -time for what probably would work out to be less than the poverty wage.

$400 a month. $400 a month, gross. I worked 10 years with no salary at all.

Yep, and before that was one of our largest donors. We spent, I think, 15 years working out of my house.

I worked out of your house. Yes. I wrote the King James Only controversy in one of the front bedrooms of your house.

And a number of other books. Where we are now is -

Functional. Functional, and by the grace of God, affordable. Very.

And so after all of these, what, 30? We're at 32 years.

32 years for you. Well, this August will be 32 years for Alfred. It is, I think, 28 for me.

We'll just walk away here. Yep, yep. Once I hit the 30, we'll just close up shop and - Evidently, somebody knows

I'm getting offered a sweet deal somewhere. Alaska Tire Sales. I just, where do these things come from?

Well, it is Facebook. It is Facebook. What can I say? May I just suggest to people who decide that, you know,

I just heard this from somebody else, and just take it for what it's worth. That's called rumor mongering, okay?

You don't know it to be true, shut up. I would, in Facebook's defense,

Oh, you don't need to defend Facebook. I would point out that we can go back long before the internet, and the people who used to walk up to us in church and tell us we need to pray for so -and -so and so -and -so, because of, and then the rumor begins.

You are a Facebookophile, that's all you are. You know it. All right, got a few minutes left.

So, like I said, I don't know what's gonna happen two years from now, but I do want to try to remember to put a little thing in my calendar that two years from now, it pops up and says, remember the

Facebook rumor? You might want to mention on the dividing line. Because, man, you look at my scale here, where I'm going, what

I'm doing. Unless someone is saying, he's gonna get knocked off by somebody on one of those trips within that two -year time period, and I'm gonna do it.

The obvious intention of the rumor was to say that I was dissatisfied or something, and it was all just gonna come falling apart.

And again, there's all sorts of things that could mean two years from now, we're not doing this.

But I would think that would have much more to do with Supreme Court and zealous activists for totalitarian secularism than anything else.

That's for certain. So anyways, last thing here, got just enough time to get to it.

I've wanted to get to some of the comments that Zakir Hussain made in that debate that we've played just a few sections from before.

And so we've got about eight minutes. This is sort of the rat -a -tat -tat type stuff.

And one of the reasons it's useful to address in the program is, unfortunately, if you're on the street, if you're at the university, whatever, this is the kind of argumentation you're gonna get.

It's not deep, it's not well -researched, it's not seeking to be consistent in use of sources.

It is tied together primarily by the utility these arguments have for shutting down Christian witness and for insulating

Muslims from Christian testimony. That's what ties it all together. So let's take a listen to this.

This is Zakir Hussain. I'm playing it at normal speed. Why? Because Zakir Hussain generally does talk quickly.

So there isn't any reason to really speed it up. But this is in one of the brief rebuttal periods.

It looks like it's almost exactly halfway through the entire sound file here. So here's,

I'm gonna stop and start commenting stuff the last few minutes of the program. He says, oh,

Jesus forgave sins. Is that supposed to prove he's God? Because the Pharisees got angry.

But what about - Now, let me stop right there. A common debate tactic of Muslims is to isolate elements of the testimony to the deity of Christ, make them stand alone and say that is insufficient.

So here you've got, Jesus forgave sins. That's supposed to prove he's God. Well, not by itself, not by itself, but taken in the whole of the testimony of the

Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of Matthew. In the particular context, especially, where Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic and raises him up by supernatural power, then the context becomes the

Pharisees recognizing that the means by which Jesus gave this forgiveness of sins.

He doesn't say, I have been deputized to do this. Doesn't say, I have been given an authority from God to do this.

He does this in the context of healing a man and forgiving the sins that evidently led to his problem in the first place.

And that the Jews understood only God could do. And so what they do is they'll, first of all, they, again, this isn't how they interpret the

Quran. This isn't how they interpret the Hadith. This isn't how they would want us to deal with Muhammad's life.

But you cannot expect Muslims to be consistent at this point because they just can't be or won't be.

But what you do is you isolate, take it out of its argumentative context, and then ignore how it's related to the rest of the flow of the

New Testament. And that's how you make your argument. If you chapter nine, where it quotes the people who said, how glorious is

God that he gave man such authority. Now, when you hear someone's, when you are listening to the

Muslim speak, one of the things that will make you a better witness to Muslims is to understand how they think.

And one of the biggest barriers is if you didn't hear what he just said and understand what his argument is.

Let me go back here. Listen to this last section. What's the argument here? I don't feel Richard touched on most of my points.

Oh, sorry. Skipped one thing here. How glorious is God that he gave man such authority.

Now, why would that be relevant? How glorious is God that he gave man such authority. That he gave man such authority.

You see, in the Muslim mind, every time Jesus is called man, that means he's not

God. And that's one of the biggest barriers between us is that we recognize that that's not what it's saying at all that Jesus was truly man.

He entered into human flesh, but it is such a presupposition of the mindset of the

Muslim that very few of them, well, none outside of the grace of God, but very few of them can ever break out of that fundamental assumption.

And hence we'll misunderstand not only what the text of scripture is saying, but what we're saying as well. So he thinks, see, since it says this was given to man, that is a refutation of our understanding of Mark chapter two, where Jesus forgives sins and the

Pharisees says only God can do that, et cetera, et cetera. And as long as you listen to them and interpret their words in a

Christian context, you'll never understand what they actually would understand to be weighty argumentation.

And it's, look, it's not something that's easy to do. It's not second nature. It takes a little listening and a little practice too.

As James Dunn points out in his book, Parting of the Ways, the reason the Pharisees were angry is they were thinking, oh, what authority is he telling him that his sins are forgiven?

He's not part of the temple cult. So it wasn't that he was claiming to be God. Now, this is the next thing that they'll do.

And Zucker has learned very well from Shabir Ali and others. There is a wealth of liberal, unbelieving scholarship that you can go to.

Now you have to do some work, got to give Zucker credit. He's done his, he does his reading and does his research, but it has to be derived from this, this unbelief.

This isn't a consistent divine revelation, et cetera, et cetera. And so what you do is you quote a quote unquote scholar and obviously

Jimmy Dunn's a great scholar in the sense of from the world's perspective, holding high degrees and writing big books.

I think he's one of the most corrosive of all New Testament scholars in the world today.

And we'll have much to answer for if he truly is a believer. And I can't tell if he is or isn't.

I'm not going to judge that. All I can tell you is he's no friend to Orthodox Christianity, but be it as it may, what you do is you quote that person, you quote their interpretation.

You don't try to substantiate it. You just, you, you in essence, invest that scholar with ultimate authority.

And then you take it as a given that, well, his opinion is a fact and therefore the text does not say this.

That, that keeps you from doing the one thing that the Muslim engaging in Dawa doesn't really want to do.

And that is to really wrestle with the text itself. That tends to be a direction they don't want to go.

And so you, you quote a Jimmy Dunn and you, you make it a soundbite.

You assume people have some idea. Jimmy Dunn's well -known or something like that. Most people wouldn't know that, but you assume it.

Then you take his conclusion. It's now a fact, point, point done. And to, to explain why that's wrong will take 10 minutes.

That's why it's not how to do good debates, but it's how to do debates that keeps your base excited about you.

And that's why you see it happening all the time. How far did we get there? What did I, what did I cover? About 15 seconds.

But hopefully it was useful because it happens all the time. You'll see it happening all of the time. Well, I am here all of next week.

In fact, I think I'm here two weeks, aren't I? Yeah, I'm here two weeks. And yeah, yeah, got two weeks.

And then I fly to Dallas and the fun begins. Yeah. I should be,

I should be getting some decent steaks while I'm there anyways, but I'm not really a steak guy. I go to a steakhouse and I get chicken.

What can I say? Anyway, thanks for listening to VyingLine today. Hopefully my jet lag was not so severe that nothing

I said made any sense whatsoever. But I won't even remember when we have to write it up what we talked about.