The Biblical Trinity Vs. The Adventist "Heavenly Trio" w/ @answeringadventism PT. 2
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- 00:30
- And when I was studying John Frame, I mean, he really drove home the point, the distinction between creator and creation.
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- You have to understand we do not exist in the same way. We are created, we are contingent, we are derivative.
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- God is eternally existent, and I love the verse at the Areopagus in Acts 17, it talks about in Him, in God, we live and move and have our being.
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- In His light, we see light. So that's why we are image bearers, we reflect many of the communicable attributes of our creator.
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- Another quote, Spirit of Prophecy, Volume 1, page 17. Quote, The great creator assembled the heavenly host, that he might, in the presence of all the angels, confer special honor upon his son.
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- This is before the creation of the earth, by the way. The son was seated on the throne with the father, and the heavenly throng of holy angels was gathered around them.
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- The father then made known that it was ordained by himself that Christ his son should be equal with himself, so that wherever was the presence of his son, it was as his own presence.
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- Close quote. Jesus was not made equal with the father and given omnipresence.
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- If Jesus does not possess all of the divine attribution, he is not God. You can't, and what you're going to find with this heavenly trio is that, well, it's like, it's really more like tritheistic monarchianism, and I know those are kind of big words, but like for those that don't know, monarchianism is the idea that, well, the father is the almighty, the son is the next, and then the spirit.
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- There's a hierarchy with the father being the almighty alone. It's kind of like that, but tritheistic as well.
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- It's a weird amalgamation here. So those are just a couple of things that Ellen White herself said, which is where they're getting this idea of the
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- Trinity or their concept of what they call the Trinity from. She must have had a lot of free time to dream up a lot of this stuff.
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- That and she was a pretty good plagiarizer. She plagiarized a lot and didn't, she had no business claiming to speak for God and claiming to be able to tell us what
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- God was describing about himself, et cetera, let alone saying that she needed to correct everyone else that was wrong and they were the ones that were correct in restoring things.
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- So he continues, he says, furthermore, their unity is not a mathematical paradox, but a relational unity analogous to the unity seen in a good marriage.
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- So that's where Judd is getting this from, where husband and wife are united in an ever growing oneness, but without negating their individuality.
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- Are you seeing how they're interchangeably using person and being? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. And how did he word it?
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- A mathematical impossibility. What'd you say? Yeah. He said, furthermore, their unity is not a mathematical paradox, but a relational unity analogous to the unity seen in a good marriage, where husband and wife are united in an ever growing oneness, but without negating their individuality.
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- Right. There's not a mathematical paradox or problem or contradiction when you understand the two distinct categories that we are talking about now, being in personhood.
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- But like you're saying, the Seventh -day Adventists are just conflating those two, interchangeable with one another.
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- And then they are the ones with the problems on their hands. Yes. Now we're going to see the Shema, like we mentioned earlier.
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- Yes. So he says, thus, her concept is in harmony with the biblical witness of both the
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- Old and New Testaments. So remember, what he was just talking about was this relational unity of being one like a marriage.
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- After God said, let us make man in our image, Genesis 1, 26 -27, God proceeded to create humans in a plurality of forms that were capable of becoming one.
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- Did you catch that? Wow, yeah. In Genesis 2 -24, God explained his purpose in this, so that these diverse creatures bearing his image, there's a reason he puts that in quotes, could become one.
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- The Hebrew word translated one in Genesis 2 -24 is echad, which you mentioned earlier, not a monolithic singleness for which
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- Moses could have used yachid, one or only, but a unity formed from multiple components.
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- The same word occurs in Deuteronomy 6 -4. Is Deuteronomy 6 -4 saying that what makes
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- God one is there is a plurality of beings who are one in a mission? No.
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- So, earlier where we read that these diverse creatures bearing his image could become one.
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- So this is where you have to always retain the distinction between creator and creation, because God is not becoming.
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- He is not in flux. God is ase. He is self -existent. He is eternally existent, so he doesn't change, is my point.
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- And so that, to me, is the biggest problem when you're trying to look at a marriage to one -to -one, uniquely with the creator of saying, oh, well, this is how the divine trio or heavenly trio works.
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- It's like, no, I do agree that a husband and wife come together, one in purpose, in a very wonderful way to glorify
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- God together. But you can't take that principle of where two human beings are becoming one in a profound sense to then try to talk about how
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- God is becoming one in purpose. No. God is eternally one in his existence and in his essence, interchangeable terms, but they are three distinct persons.
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- So does that make sense that God is not becoming anything? He simply is. Yes. And it's wrong to take an analogy like this where something is being said, it's conflation.
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- Well, we have an example here of them becoming one, so we can now apply that to God's ontos.
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- And because it's there in the Bible, that we're biblical in doing that. Well, no, you're just wrongfully using the scriptures to now apply that wrongfully to a category.
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- You're making a category error, right? The way that two human beings come together and become one in marriage is not how
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- God is. Yeah. And when I was studying John Frame, I mean, he really drove home the point, the distinction between creator and creation.
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- You have to understand we do not exist in the same way we are created. We are contingent.
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- We are derivative. God is eternally existent. And I love the verse at the
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- Areopagus in Acts 17. It talks about in him, in God, we live and move and have our being.
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- In his light, we see light. So that's why we are image bearers. We reflect many of the communicable attributes of our creator, right?
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- It gets through. That's why we're actually able to relate to him. Analogically, that's a that's a big word.
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- But God, God meets us where we're at. Right. He speaks to us in baby talk, so to speak.
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- Yes. But the thing is, you can't take human categories and univocally one to one place that on the eternal creator.
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- And so that's why we stay away from created analogies in total, saying that that's how the the heavenly trio is.
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- You got these three beings working together, one in purpose, and that's that's how God is born. Miles.
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- Yeah, I know. So he continues here and he says that was good, by the way. Sorry, I wasn't just trying to dismiss what you were saying.
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- He says the concept of plurality of persons in unity of relationship becomes more explicit in the
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- New Testament. So now we get another analogy that's being wrongfully applied to who God is.
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- For example, Christ prayed that believers in him may all be one as he and the father are one.
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- John 17, 20 through 22. Ellen White quotes this passage as proof of the, quote, personality of the father and the son.
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- Again, we're going to get into this term person and the way they define it. And an explanation of the unity that exists between them, she wrote, the unity that exists between Christ and his disciples does not destroy the personality of either.
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- They are one in purpose, in mind, in character, but not in person. It is thus that God and Christ are one.
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- In the same year, 1905, she wrote elsewhere, there are three living persons of the heavenly trio, the father, the son and the
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- Holy Spirit. Her concept of the heavenly trio differs from the traditional trinity in that it's based on simple biblical reasoning and biblical presuppositions.
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- Then we've got the footnote here. The fact that scripture has much more to say about the relational unity of God does not preclude
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- God's ontological unity, but the ontological unity is certainly less explicit in scripture.
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- So, yeah. So did you notice he admitted?
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- Their view is not historic Orthodox Christian Trinitarianism, that supposedly Greek paganism built on Greek presuppositions and their concept is truly the biblical one.
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- Right. So why are they using the term Trinity? Well, I think it's kind of the whole point of your ministry is they're trying to pretend to be
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- Christian, but in a deeper sense, really to get Christians to join them. Right. They're they're the remnant.
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- They're the ones with the secret knowledge that you need to be made right with God to keep in the
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- Sabbath and the rest of the commandments and so forth. Yeah. So he.
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- Oh, go ahead. I was going to make one point. I won't I won't get super deep into this, but like in John 17, this is a profound prayer.
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- Jesus, a high priestly prayer. And there is a sense where we get to share in the unity of God.
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- And I would say in his purpose and his eternal will, we get to share in that in that relationship with God.
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- But even when we reach glory, we will still be creatures who are glorified.
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- Right. And I'm just saying, like, without going super deep into it, but John 17, highly, truly
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- Trinitarian language where Jesus talks about being restored to the glory that he had with the father before the foundation of the world.
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- And when you go back to the prophet Isaiah, he explains in chapter 42, the one God, the creator
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- God who shares his glory with no other. Jesus talking about that glory that he shares with the father. He was an eternal relationship, face to face relationship with father in perfect glory.
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- And when, you know, I was talking to Brant Bosserman, when we say where where were they in the context of the spirit, the spirit eternally was there with them in perfect glory.
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- But that is the one true creator Yahweh God who shares his glory, this triune
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- God with no other. Amen. So he continues in this by saying.
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- In maintaining that the father and the son are two now notice the air quotes, two distinct, literal, tangible persons,
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- James White certainly did not doubt that God is spirit, John 424. But he insisted that though spiritual beings,
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- Christ and the father are nevertheless divine persons who have a, quote, literal, tangible existence, they are neither unreal nor imaginary.
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- You'll notice that oftentimes what they mock, the idea that Christians believe in spiritual realities and spiritual beings as being unreal and imaginary because this gets into their physicalism, their monism, that really what is true and what is real is that which has organic physical matter, different stream for different time.
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- Actually just did a stream on this. For those that are curious, you can look on the channel within the last couple of weeks or so. But the
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- Trinitarian creeds he knew of, James White made God so abstract, theoretical and impersonal that God was no longer perceived as a real, caring, loving being.
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- For example, one Trinitarian creed that the early Adventist quoted fairly often was that of the
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- Methodist Episcopal Church. Their creed is actually based off of those of the likes of the
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- Westminster Confession, et cetera. Ellen White's Church of Origin, that creed says in part, there is but one living
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- God, living and true God, everlasting without body or parts. This the early
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- Adventist vigorously refuted, citing several biblical passages that portrayed
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- God as having both body and parts. So before we get into that aspect, does the
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- Father possess a physical, tangible form? No. I mean, the verse references up there,
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- John 4, 24, God is spirit. So, I mean, with the
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- Trinity concept, we can understand that God, being tripersonal, has been eternally spirit, not physical, but it's
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- God the Son that took on flesh, stepped into creation. So to kind of blur those lines and to make
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- God into having parts is literally cutting up the being, right?
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- That's why we classically talk about God being simple. He is. God is not comprised of parts like man, like created man, physical man.
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- Yeah, and what the church means by that is that, well, a couple of things. Like you mentioned,
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- God does not have like two ears and a mouth and a nose, these different parts that can be broken up.
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- He is not a complex being. He is a simple being. But furthermore, you also have being stated in this claim is that God is not like 20 percent love, 10 percent vengeance, 5 percent this.
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- His attribution is not parted out either. He is like he is love.
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- He is merciful. He is wrathful. He is all these different attributes.
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- And it's not like there's a caricature. And by that, I mean one is just overshadowing the rest of them.
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- That's what's being said by that. Yet these pioneers disagreed with this because in their minds, they thought, well, if God doesn't have a physical body like I have, how can he be relatable?
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- Right. That's not what this creed was getting at, even though obviously they would say that, no,
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- God does not have a physical being. But the Adventist pioneers took this to mean, well, then he's not personal.
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- And that's not what was being said at all, at all.
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- So, yeah, they didn't understand what was being said. But really, it shows us that the
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- Adventist heavenly trio is a complex set of beings that are made up of parts that can apparently be divided.
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- They were vehemently against the Christian belief about divine simplicity. So he continues here.
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- He says, twice in early visions of Jesus, she asked him, this is
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- Ellen White now, questions related to the form and person of God. So this is what's informing their definitions of terms.
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- When they tell you, oh, it's we're just deriving it from the Bible. He even admits in this paper that, no, they actually it's another paper on this.
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- He admits that they derived their final understandings of things. They'll claim through scripture, but then
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- Ellen White is also listed. That's where it's ultimately coming from. Twice in early visions of Jesus, she asked him questions related to the form and person of God.
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- In one early vision, she reported seeing a throne and on it sat the father and the son. I gazed on Jesus's countenance, she said, and admired his lovely person.
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- The father's person, I could not behold, for a cloud of glorious light covered him. I asked
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- Jesus if his father had a form like himself. He said he had, but I could not behold it. For said he, if you should once behold the glory of his person, you would cease to exist.
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- I've often, oh, and then in 1850, she reported, I've often seen the lovely Jesus, that he is a person.
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- I asked him if his father was a person and had a form like himself, said Jesus. I'm in the express image of my father's person.
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- Thus, her visions confirmed what her husband had written in 1846, that the father and the son are two distinct, literal, tangible persons.
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- The visions also disproved to her mind the claim of the Methodist creed that God is without parts or body or parts.
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- Thus, these early visions steered her developing view of God away from creedal Trinitarianism, though they offered nothing directly contradictory to her later statements of what
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- I have called biblical Trinitarianism. So what does that statement tell you about that first part real quick?
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- Yeah, the the the tangible persons like to me, they're conflating categories because we're big time persons.
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- You you can't put persons in a jar and examine it. This is the immaterial aspect of humanity, right?
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- Our soul, right? They don't they don't believe in that. Oh, well, you got me there. I'd have to call you if if they if I was like,
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- I can't help you. Yeah, this is their monism. They think that your your soul is basically just a combination of breath and a body.
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- And when the breath leaves the body, the soul no longer exists. So what do they do with mind? What do they think mind is?
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- Well, it depends who you talk to. Let's kind of get into a side discussion. Maybe we'll get into that at some other time. But I want to focus in on this the this beginning part, because there's one big thing here, the key thing.
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- What does the statement at the beginning tell you about the Adventist Jesus in relation to the father? She could behold
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- Jesus and see him, but the father was too majestic and glorious. They're they're distinct, right, radically from one another.
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- It sounds like just different beings. And so kind of proving our point all night long.
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- Well, and not just that, but the demotion of Jesus, like he's not as glorious as the father. I could behold him, but not the father, which if you read her writings in Tota at great length on this specific topic, you're going to constantly see this sort of monarchism.
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- The father is better. The father is more powerful. He's the almighty. He's the Lord God Almighty, that sort of stuff.
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- So that's a huge blunder right there. Plus, on top of that, it's
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- Bia, she did not talk to Jesus. But then he's but then he rightly recognizes that they rejected, again, creedal
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- Trinitarianism, showcasing that they are borrowing Christian terminology, but redefining it through what
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- Ellen White has supposedly claimed regarding Scripture. That's what's going on here, and there's a conflation of the term one going on by using the disciples as an example of actually of being in the nature of God, like applying to that.
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- But then I want to look at the footnote here really quick. Again, footnote, you got to pay attention to footnotes, man, 100 percent.
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- Jesus prayed that his disciples might be one as he is one with his father. This prayer did not contemplate.
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- Yeah, this prayer did not contemplate one disciple with 12 heads, but 12 disciples made one in object and effort in the cause of their master.
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- Neither are the father and the son parts of the three one God. They are two distinct beings, yet one in the design of accomplishment of redemption, right?
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- That's from James White, Ellen White's husband. So unfortunate his name's James White.
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- Yeah. So again, is that compatible with James White said with Trinitarianism?
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- No, it's right. Confirming what you pointed out, they are using person and being interchangeably.
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- And then we're emphasizing when you divide the beings, you have multiple gods and the heavenly trio is not monotheistic, right?
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- It's polytheistic. Yes. So he continues here in her first volume titled
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- Spiritual Gifts, which we've looked at on the channel before her belief in the Holy Spirit is not in question, for she refers to the father, the son and the
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- Holy Spirit in Christ's baptismal narrative. But she does not mention the Holy Spirit in connection with the divine councils about creation and salvation.
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- But because of their ambiguity, get this, they could be read without conflict by Adventists, regardless of both
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- Trinitarian and anti -Trinitarian leanings. Did you catch that?
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- I mentioned that earlier. No mention of the Holy Spirit being able to be let into these councils.
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- He says, though, that is the case, there's enough ambiguity where both sides of our people in this movement can support their views with the claim.
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- So that's what makes it OK. You can be an anti -Trinitarian heretic in this movement, man.
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- It is crazy. It's absolutely crazy. But you can't be anything other than a premillennialist historicist.
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- So you can't be saved if you deny premillennialism wholesale? Well, no, no, you have to believe premillennial historicism because their whole system is predicated on eschatology.
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- So if you disagree with their eschatology, their whole system collapses. So unlike the Christian faith, where it's like you can be an amillennial preterist or partial preterist, futurist, there's room for these within orthodoxy because at the end of the day, for example, if I'm wrong on my view of the mark of the beast, my whole system doesn't collapse.
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- Right. My whole system isn't predicated upon every aspect of my eschatology being correct. That's not the case for this movement.
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- All of their eschatology has to be correct at every step of the way or the whole thing falls apart, which is another red flag of the system being super, super weak.
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- And this just goes back to what you've been saying. They're trying to appeal to Christians that are Trinitarian, Unitarian.
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- It's like, hey, you can come join us. No big deal. And yet I'm saying to misunderstand who
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- Jesus is and who God is, is the difference of heaven and hell, salvation and being lost.
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- According to Jesus, according to the Apostle Paul, who warns us about false Jesus's right.
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- Yes. And in second Corinthians, we mentioned that earlier, second Corinthians 11, one through four. So we skip down a little bit here, a few pages, and then we got to get into now what she says here, defining.
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- The truth about the Godhead, as they call it, folks,
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- I'll link to this paper, by the way, in the description box, this is a PDF that I've downloaded and had on my computer for quite some time now.
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- So I'm not able to share the link in the description or in the live chat, but I will add this for those that want to read the whole thing.
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- It's not too terribly long, but these are the main things we wanted to look at specifically tonight.
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- So here he says, then she defines what she understands to be the truth about the
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- Godhead. The father is all this is him quoting now, of course. The father is all the fullness of the
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- Godhead bodily. And is invisible to mortal sight.
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- So he has a physical, tangible form, but he's invisible to mortal sight.
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- And he's the fullness of the Godhead bodily. How is physical, tangible matter invisible?
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- And she's misquoting Colossians 2, 9, right, with saying that is the father.
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- Yeah, but what she means by that is that she's talking about how they all have a physical, tangible form.
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- So they're all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. It goes back to being three beings, three persons.
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- The son is all the fullness of the Godhead manifested. The word of God declares him to be the express image of his person.
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- God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believed in him should not perish, but have everlasting life here in Christ is shown the personality of the father.
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- Remember how they're using the term personality? She just broke their own standard, right? I thought they were radically and tangibly different persons.
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- And now she's saying that Jesus is the personality of the father like that. So this is what he's saying about how this woman evolved on this.
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- Yet all of her words are barricaded by a thus sayeth the Lord. Her writings are authored by the same author of the scriptures, she said, which is the
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- Holy Spirit. Yet they have to deal with this evolution of God's supposed messenger evolving on her position of like the most cardinal foundational established doctrine of the
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- Christian faith. The comforter that Christ promised to send after his ascension to heaven is the spirit in all the fullness of the
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- Godhead, making manifest the power of divine grace to all who receive and believe in Christ as a personal savior.
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- There are three living persons of the heavenly trio in the name of these three great powers, the father, the son, and the
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- Holy Spirit. Those who receive Christ by living faith are baptized, and these powers will cooperate with the obedient subjects of heaven in their efforts to live the new life in Christ.
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- Is the Godhead three powers? No, no, for I'm just.
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- Yeah, leaving leaving emphasis there, yeah, the silence for emphasis and then want to throw in our good friend
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- Isaac Olatunji. Did he say that? There you go. Yes, he did say that because he's quoting from Ellen White.
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- No, God is not three powers, folks. There is one almighty.
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- This is not the right language to be using. This is the language of somebody who has no business claiming that they never wrote a single sentence of heresy.
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- That the words in their books are barricaded by a thus saith the Lord. Yes, we're going to be super critical on a person like this
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- Adventist. When you comment on my videos and try and downplay or act like I'm going overboard.
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- No, I'm not. This person claimed to speak for God, claimed to have over 2000 visions, claimed to be the last human being that talked with Jesus face to face.
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- And the first thing she thought to ask Almighty God when talking with him, even though she doesn't believe he's the almighty, is does your father have a form like you do?
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- Yes, we're going to draw on this hard. The standard is set very high. She had zero business talking about this and claiming that this is now correcting the
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- Christian church who supposedly has been apostate and is being restored by them. Yeah, nothing.
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- Yet they didn't understand that the Holy Spirit was even a person until, well, as you're going to see here, she clearly rejected any view of the
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- Trinity that makes God impersonal and unreal. So our view is making him unreal.
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- That's what they mean by this. But embraced a literal biblical view of one God and three eternal persons who are relationally united in character, purpose, and love.
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- Again, same thing. So now in the summary of this section, he kind of recaps some of the things we just talked about.
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- He says, This change from Adventist rejection of the traditional doctrine of the
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- Trinity to acceptance of a biblical Trinitarian doctrine was not a simple reversal. When James White denounced creedal
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- Trinitarianism in 1846, Alan White agreed with both his positive point that the
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- Father and the Son are two distinct literal tangible persons and his negative point that the philosophical
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- Trinitarianism held by many did spiritualize away the personal reality of the
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- Father and the Son, aka it says they don't have physical tangible forms. Soon after this, she added the conviction based on visions that both
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- Christ and the Father have bodily form, rejecting the teaching of one Trinitarian creed that God is without body or parts.
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- In the 1890s, when she became convinced of the individuality and personhood of the
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- Holy Spirit, so the Holy Spirit has a physical tangible form too, she referred to the
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- Holy Spirit in literal and tangible terms, much like those she had used in 1850 to describe the
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- Father and the Son. Remind me something real quick, because I know it was earlier in the article, but what is their explanation that God is
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- Spirit? Yeah, so they just essentially state that, I covered this in a stream about their physicalism about a week and a half or so ago, so people can check that out if they want.
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- It's called Physicalism, the Adventist Pioneers, and the Image of God in the Trinity, and we looked at James White, Alan White's husband, his book called
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- The Personality of God, where he talks about this and quotes this, and he mentioned it in passing earlier, but he didn't go into great detail.
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- They essentially dismiss Spirit as being unreal and fake.
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- So they'll say, well, we believe that God is Spirit, but at the same time, Spirit is truly partaking of some sort of physical tangible form.
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- Like us, like man. Yeah, because that's the folly they're doing. This is just like Greek mythology.
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- This sounds so much like Mormonism. It's not even funny. Yeah, so that's why they will say man being made in the
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- Image of God means that it's what we physically look like, and it's three of those.
- 31:31
- That's why, if you look at the Adventist art and stuff like that, angels, for example, are depicted as human beings with wings, because it's the stereotypical angel that Ellen White claimed to see when she went to heaven, supposedly.
- 31:47
- She didn't see Morona? Yeah, no, I don't. Yeah, just like Joseph Smith.
- 31:57
- So then he says again, in the same year she defined their unity. This is 1905. So 10 years before her death, she was still saying this is how they are united.
- 32:06
- In relational rather than philosophical terms, the quote, the unity that exists between Christ and his disciples does not destroy the personality of either.
- 32:15
- They are one in purpose, in mind, and in character, but not in person. It is thus that God and Christ are one.
- 32:24
- Since Ellen White clearly held the basic formula of one God and three persons, it can hardly be denied that her view is essentially
- 32:33
- Trinitarian. However, her views differ from traditional Trinitarianism in the following important aspects.
- 32:40
- I love this line, and I laugh every time I come across it, because I love how he's basically just trying to sweeten the well before he now just opens the floodgates of how it's literally nothing like, like it's nothing like Trinitarianism.
- 32:56
- But he has to start off by saying it's essentially the same thing. However, here's how it disagrees.
- 33:04
- And then we're going to look at all of these differences. But notice something here, Jeremiah. I caught this earlier, and I hadn't caught this before.
- 33:12
- And I went, wow, of course, because this is always the case. Did you notice a word that he used in that final paragraph there?
- 33:22
- Essentially. Why don't they like to talk about the being of God?
- 33:30
- Well, they'll tell you that's Greek presuppositions to talk about the essence or the substance.
- 33:38
- Yet here, he's okay with using Greek language and says, well, their position is essentially
- 33:46
- Trinitarian. Ah, okay. So it's okay to use these terms when you want to use the terms and not call everyone else a pagan presuppositionalist.
- 33:57
- That's good. Just a little recognition there, folks. That's what we're saying when we're talking about the being.
- 34:02
- We're talking about the essence. But he won't allow us to apply that in the context of God's being.
- 34:07
- But it's okay for them to say, in essence, we're basically Trinitarians. That's good.
- 34:15
- Thoughts on that before we get into the ways that she completely actually rejects, as you've already seen,
- 34:22
- Trinitarians. No, I mean, I've kind of, I feel like a broken record a little bit. I mean, they're just, they're abusing the categories of what we mean, accusing us of being pagan, being
- 34:33
- Greek, which is blowing my mind because I hope everybody sees they're just taking man and then just putting it on a higher divine plane.
- 34:42
- That's what Greek mythology does. That's what Mormonism does. They are the ones that are pagan, getting, literally, these ideas are not original with LNGY and these people.
- 34:52
- No. So now he's going to go into the ways that it is different. So now we're going to pivot, and it won't be as much of a broken record, but I think it's good that we're hammering these kind of same things over and over and showing that it's over and over and over again.
- 35:05
- So here he says, so one, and he's going to state multiple things in here. She rejected at least three of the philosophical presuppositions undergirding traditional
- 35:15
- Trinitarianism. A, the radical dualism. This will answer your question earlier about John 424.
- 35:21
- The radical dualism of spirit and matter, which concluded that God could not have a visible form.
- 35:28
- B, the notion of impassibility, which held that God has no passions, feelings, or emotions, hence could have no interest in or sympathy with humans.
- 35:41
- And C, the dualism of time and timelessness, which led to the notions of eternal generation and eternal procession.
- 35:49
- Her rejection of all of these concepts constitutes a radical departure from the medieval dogma of the
- 35:57
- Trinity. So in essence, they're Trinitarian, but it's a radical departure from Trinitarianism.
- 36:02
- It's essentially not. Yeah, so there's a number of things I want to look at here because he mentions a number of things.
- 36:11
- I want to let you say whatever you want to say before I get into these things because then we're going to look at another source because we have to read the footnote here.
- 36:17
- And I'm going to defend our Christian brothers from times past because it bothers me the way that they slander them.
- 36:26
- So thoughts on all of that, and then I'll have some stuff. Um, I just, I want to echo what we've been saying about we have to have the distinction, the creator -creation distinction.
- 36:37
- So we're saying the way that Father, Son, and Spirit relates to one another. This is in a divine eternal category.
- 36:43
- So how we relate to one another, it's not going to be one -to -one the way that God is eternally relational.
- 36:50
- Because I can understand how some people with the impassibility get confused on that. We look at many scriptures about God grieving.
- 36:57
- Well, this is man's attempt. This is Moses' attempt to describe what he's observing with God.
- 37:04
- And like I said, he is above us. He is set apart. We are merely made in his image.
- 37:11
- So, you know, a lot can be said with those things. I'm at least glad to see in this document that they are trying to, like, they're at least understanding where true
- 37:22
- Trinitarians lie. And so they're trying to figure out how to just redefine a number of things and depart in small ways to still try to sell.
- 37:31
- Well, at the end of the day, we're still Trinitarians. Yeah. So I want to read the footnote here.
- 37:37
- And then I'm going to have a number of things to share because we're going to get into some of these things, like impassibility, their wrong understanding of what's being said, etc.
- 37:47
- But it says here, Roger Olson, he used to be the director of the Ellen White Estate back in, I think, like the late 80s, early 90s, somewhere around in there.
- 37:54
- But he's also a historian in the Adventist Church. Roger Olson, a historian of theology, summarizes the situation.
- 38:02
- Augustine's God, though Trinitarian, is made captive to the
- 38:07
- Greek philosophical theology of divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility, and turns out to be more like a great cosmic emperor than a loving, compassionate, heavenly father.
- 38:18
- Halt. I saw you throw your head back. No, I'm just, I'm just listening. Go ahead. Well, no,
- 38:24
- I'm in perfect timing because I wanted to halt because of this. Okay. I've brought this out on the channel before, and I didn't have the receipts on hand at the time handy to be able to just pull out.
- 38:37
- I have City of God here. I'm going to bring it up digitally so people can see.
- 38:44
- I want you to remember this because then I'm going to have a question for you. Remember, the claim is that Augustine's God, because of the way that Augustine understood
- 38:54
- God, was more like a cosmic emperor, not one who was compassionate, which is what he goes on next to say, because he says,
- 39:03
- Anselm, which we're going to read Anselm too, says Anselm denied that God experiences feelings of compassion at all.
- 39:12
- So I'm going to read an excerpt here. This is one small excerpt out of a big book, the City of God, and then
- 39:17
- I'll have a question for you. Does this sound like a cosmic emperor to you? This is from chapter 21, or book 21, for those that are curious, chapter 15, where he's specifically talking about the grace of God.
- 39:33
- He says, For the Lord knoweth them that are his, and as many as are led by the
- 39:39
- Spirit of God, they are sons of God, quoting scripture, but by grace and not by nature. For there is but one son of God by nature, who in his compassion became son of man for our sakes, that we by nature sons of men might by grace become through him sons of God.
- 40:02
- For he abiding unchangeable, there's that immutability aspect, but yet he's talking about compassion and stuff as well, took upon him our nature that thereby he might take us to himself and holding fast his own divinity.
- 40:20
- He didn't affirm the kenosis heresy of Philippians 2, 6 through 8. Fully God, fully man.
- 40:26
- He became partaker of our infirmity, that we being changed into some better thing might by participating in his righteousness and immortality, lose our own properties of sin and mortality, and preserve whatever good quality he had implanted in our nature, perfected now by sharing in the goodness of his nature.
- 40:47
- For as by the sin of one man we have fallen into a misery so deplorable, so by the righteousness of one man who also is
- 40:55
- God, shall we come to a blessedness inconceivably exalted. So he gets into a lot of theology here.
- 41:03
- He's talking about headship being transferred, essentially what Paul's talking about in Romans 5, being transferred from the fallen family of Adam into Christ, that there's only one who is by nature son of God.
- 41:15
- The rest of us are through that one, brought into God's family, and all of this is by God's grace.
- 41:24
- It's by his compassion that he does this. The idea that St.
- 41:30
- Augustine viewed God as an impersonal cosmic emperor who experienced no emotion, shows that the scholars in this movement have not read these people.
- 41:43
- You're right. They are regurgitating and parroting information that they have heard from who knows where, and it's simply being passed down because then people like Judd Lake read these papers and they start regurgitating it like the marriage analogy.
- 42:00
- This is where they're getting these things from, folks. They haven't read these things. It's absolute nonsense to say that Augustine's God, his view of God was impersonal.
- 42:09
- So my question for you, brother, why do we call the doctrines of grace the doctrines of grace?
- 42:16
- Was Calvin novelly coming up with these things? Or I'm going to ask somewhat of a rhetorical question here, but then
- 42:23
- I want to just hear your thoughts. Or if you read Calvin's Institutes, are you going to, by proxy, just read a lot of Augustine?
- 42:33
- Right. Yeah. So my initial thoughts are Ellen White, people just in that camp, they're really just trying to bolster their case.
- 42:46
- Ours is personal. Ours is the one that's truly loving. Our understanding of the heavenly trio can show compassion and grace, but not this radical pagan
- 42:59
- Trinitarian. And I think you're right. I think it's obvious they just don't read and they don't like what's being said, even if they are reading to some degree.
- 43:08
- And we have to understand the creator -creation distinction because God is, though I know this grammatically not right, but he is his attributes.
- 43:19
- And so there's a difference in us being loving, right? That love can wane and can increase and decrease, but God is love.
- 43:28
- God is compassion. And so I think the folly, once again, they don't like not being able to fully comprehend
- 43:37
- God and his attributes from all eternity. And what they're necessarily doing and distorting
- 43:43
- God is taking human categories of our reflection of God's attributes, those communicable attributes, but they are pressing upon how we experience love onto God, onto father, son, and spirit.
- 43:58
- And so that's just the same old song and dance with Greek mythology. That's what you have going on here. They're essentially saying, unless God is like I am, he can't be related to.
- 44:07
- They are literally fashioning God according to their image.
- 44:14
- Totally. Well, now I want to read Anselm because Roger Olson in there said that Anselm's God as well.
- 44:22
- Anselm of Canterbury, another church father. As I say later, you have a good question in the chat about penal substitutionary atonement, essentially, and how
- 44:31
- God's wrath is poured on the son and how Anselm, I think, did a great job of getting into that.
- 44:37
- Totally. So I'm going to read what he says here. This is from one of Anselm's prayers.
- 44:46
- And it's called the, I'm probably going to butcher the way that it's pronounced because it's Latin, but the proslogion, however that's pronounced.
- 44:54
- Yeah, boy, it's a faith because of reason. Yeah, exactly. And it's a prayer. So we're going to read this here.
- 45:00
- And I'm going to show you that this may not have been the exact site that Roger Olson, probably not, because he probably made that statement years ago.
- 45:09
- Faith seeking reason. There we go. Oh, right, right. Yeah, the proslogion.
- 45:16
- Roger Olson was clearly reading what we're going to read here, but not understanding what he was reading.
- 45:23
- So we're going to read it and then hear a little bit of commentary from the author of this who did understand what
- 45:28
- Anselm is saying. So Anselm said, but how are you both merciful and impassible? For if you are impassible, you do not feel compassion.
- 45:37
- And if you do not feel compassion, your heart is not sorrowful out of compassion for sorrow. And that is what being merciful is.
- 45:45
- But if you are not merciful, how is it that you are such a comfort to the sorrowful? So he understands there's a paradox here.
- 45:52
- If you don't feel these things, then how are you these things to us? So right off the bat, you see, he's not saying that God is not these things.
- 46:05
- If you're not merciful, how is it that you are such a comfort to the sorrowful? So how, Lord, are you both merciful and not merciful?
- 46:13
- Is it not because you are merciful in relation to us, but not in relation to yourself? You are indeed merciful according to what we feel, but not according to what you feel.
- 46:24
- We're going to get to this a little bit more after a bit. For when you look with favor upon us in our sorrow, we feel the effect of mercy, but you do not feel the emotion of mercy, affectum over affectum.
- 46:38
- You are merciful because you save the sorrowful and spare those who sin against you, but you are also not merciful because you are not afflicted with any feeling of compassion for sorrow.
- 46:50
- The author of this article then goes on to say, here Anselm distinguishes between the effect of the mercy and the emotion of mercy.
- 46:58
- While it certainly is impossible for God to feel any emotion when he acts mercifully, we feel the effect of his merciful action.
- 47:05
- So while God is merciful according to what we feel, he's not merciful according to what he feels since he does not experience emotion at all.
- 47:13
- So if you just take that, you're going to go, oh yeah, see, he has no emotions. Keep reading. The worry for some is that impassibility, a
- 47:22
- God who does not change or feel emotions, seems to be a God who is impersonal and without love for creatures or creation.
- 47:31
- Who does that sound like? But such a strong reaction, Anselm would surely say, merely is the result of a confusion on our part.
- 47:42
- The reason some might react this way when considering emotionless divine impassibility is that they are anthropomorphizing
- 47:48
- God. That's what you said earlier, making God like we are. Making God in their image and describing him in human terms.
- 47:57
- Here's where Anselm's emphasis on eternity before discussing immutability comes in.
- 48:03
- We err in being disturbed by God as impassible because we are so accustomed to thinking of worldly things that are temporal and undergo change.
- 48:11
- In thinking about a human being who experienced no emotions, felt no compassion for those who suffer, or joy for those he cares about, we are certainly right in thinking such a person to be pathological.
- 48:21
- But there's a difference in taking this approach to God and holding this about humans. For God and humans are not the same kind of entity.
- 48:32
- God is an eternal being and humans are temporal beings. God is immaterial and humans are embodied.
- 48:37
- God is immutable and humans constantly undergo change and are affected by external things.
- 48:43
- That's the key, including emotions. We are built to be affected by external things and react to them, and thus a human who feels no emotions is like a knife that won't cut.
- 48:54
- But God is not a temporal being, and since he lacks a body, he can't have the physiological basis for emotions.
- 49:01
- Both Anselm, this is the key folks, both Anselm and Aquinas have emphasized that we should be on our toes not to anthropomorphize
- 49:10
- God and thus trap ourselves in the conclusion that God is impersonal from the fact that God is immutable.
- 49:18
- Anselm offers perhaps the richest account of this kind of dilemma that I have ever come across.
- 49:25
- Anselm is not saying that God is impersonal and experiences no emotions or doesn't have any personal relation to us.
- 49:36
- That's not what he's saying. What he is saying is that God is not swayed by his emotions like we are.
- 49:44
- I'm going to read, we've read this before on the channel, but I'm going to read a different aspect of it. This is
- 49:49
- R .C. Sproul's exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith. This same phrase, without body and parts and impassibility, is also stated in our confession, along with this
- 50:00
- Methodist confession that they were saying. It is getting at the same point and saying the same thing that Augustine, Anselm, etc.
- 50:09
- were saying. R .C. Sproul explains this very well. Speaking about the phrase without passions, which is what he quoted earlier when he said that they disagreed with one of the aspects of Orthodox Trinitarianism, which is that God has no passions, and they took that to mean that God is then not personal.
- 50:27
- So let's read it. It's a short sentence here, or paragraph here, where R .C.
- 50:32
- Sproul explains what this line means. Let's see if that's what it is. So he says,
- 50:38
- God is without passions, speaking on that line of the confession. There's often confusion on this subject.
- 50:46
- Heresies have resulted from attributing emotional disturbances and upheavals to God. For example, the tranquility and felicity that God enjoys in and of himself is eternal and immutable.
- 50:59
- Without passions means that he does not experience mood swings or become depressed, not that he has no cares.
- 51:09
- Yet scripture plainly teaches that Jesus, or sorry, plainly teaches that God has an emotive side.
- 51:16
- He takes delight in things. He loves. He regards us with affection. God is not an abstract force, but a personal being.
- 51:23
- The phrase without passions means that God is not subject to human passions. The Bible states that he is a jealous
- 51:29
- God, but that does not mean that he is jealous of us. He is jealous for us and for his holiness.
- 51:37
- That is, he cares strongly about it. Even his wrath manifests his grave concern for the behavior of his creatures.
- 51:46
- The pioneers of this movement had no clue what they were critiquing or what they were against, what they were vehemently stating is false and wrong, etc.
- 51:55
- They didn't know what they were talking about. Yet these are the people that have handed their belief system down to Adventists today who are essentially regurgitating these things, whether they know it or not.
- 52:08
- Thanks. Well, I'm so glad you quoted from Truths We Confess, where R .C. is kind of going through the
- 52:15
- Westminster Confession, right? Beautiful. I know
- 52:20
- John Gerstner on Ligonier, he has an in -depth look at the Westminster Confession of Faith as well.
- 52:27
- My church, we're actually going through another book of R .C.'s scroll of Everyone's a
- 52:34
- Theologian, An Introduction to Systematic Theology. It's phenomenal. To me,
- 52:40
- I loved how R .C. was just bringing out God doesn't get depressed. We're saying God does not possess the attributes of emotions one -to -one the same way that we do.
- 52:53
- We're getting back into the creator -creation distinction. He is his attributes, right? Yes.
- 52:58
- And so the only other thing I was going to say is R .C. Sproul is a Baptist now. Oh, why?
- 53:04
- Because he's in eternity? Yeah, that's right. Good one. I've been sitting on that one.
- 53:12
- To be determined. There's a TBD next to that. Yeah.
- 53:17
- So we got the final section here that I want to look at in this paper. And then, folks, we'll take your questions. I know this is going pretty long, but this is important.
- 53:24
- These things are very important. And I wanted to knock this all out in one. This is probably going to,
- 53:29
- I'll probably splice this up. And this will end up being what I use for the Trinity series
- 53:34
- I was going to do. Just decided to do it all tonight with you. There you go. And then get into some. Surprise that on me.
- 53:40
- Yeah. And then get into some other things. So we continue here. Final part. So he's still describing the ways that it radically departs from the medieval dogma, which, again, we could get into the medieval dogma.
- 53:51
- The idea of which I get to Anselm. Yeah, you're talking in the medieval period. But man, you've got people long before Anselm.
- 53:59
- Yeah, it's just it's interesting that they, again, equate. That's another boogeyman that they like to point things on. Like he said earlier, the immortality of the soul was a result of, you know,
- 54:08
- Greek presuppositions that were picked up and brought in during the medieval period. And yet again, you can read.
- 54:15
- What's bogus is God. And it's like, no, this is before the medieval period.
- 54:20
- And Augustine was oftentimes quoting other church fathers. But go ahead. Well, I was just thinking a lot of times critics of the
- 54:27
- New Testament try to point out how, you know, John is being too Greek minded, you know, in the prologue.
- 54:34
- And it's like, look, everything that we can find in the New Testament and the categories that we're talking now, we can easily go into the
- 54:40
- Old Testament to show that this originated in Jewish thought. Yes. Well, that's what
- 54:46
- I was saying earlier about the Targumim. I think it's I don't remember if it's it might be both
- 54:51
- Targum Jonathan or Suda Jonathan and Targum Neophyte on. Well, there's multiple places.
- 54:57
- And Anthony Rogers talks about this a lot. He's going to be on the show, by the way, folks, next Thursday to talk about the high priestly role of Christ.
- 55:04
- And we're going to bury 1844 in the investigative judgment. So tune in for that. But he talks about this regularly quoting from the
- 55:10
- Targum showing that while he uses oftentimes intertestamental Judaism and Second Temple Judaism to show that there was a plurality understanding in line with what we're saying about the
- 55:22
- Trinity. But he says here again, he's kind of beating a dead horse here. She described the unity of the
- 55:27
- Father and Son, the Holy Spirit in relational rather than ontological terms. While the traditional doctrine defined the divinity, the divine unity in terms of being or substance, she focused on the volitional and relational dimensions of their unity, a unity of purpose, mind, and character.
- 55:42
- In this sense, her concept of the heavenly trio is a more humble concept than the traditional Trinity doctrine.
- 55:49
- As Fernando Canal, one of their former theologians observes, and I say former because I think he's passed away, not because he left the
- 55:56
- Adventist church. As Fernando Canal observes, in no way could human minds achieve what the classic doctrine about the
- 56:01
- Trinity claims to perceive, namely the description of the inner structure of God's being, together with the entire creation.
- 56:08
- We must accept God's oneness by faith. Ellen White's emphasis, however, on the relational unity of God, get this, does not preclude an ontological unity of being in substance as well, but recognizes that the evidence for the ontological unity transcends the limits of our human reason.
- 56:27
- So did you notice what he said earlier, that it's their views, the more humble view, but then he says here, however, there still is probably an ontological unity.
- 56:38
- It's just not as explicit in the scriptures. Yeah, this to me is playing like the shell game because this is where I'm getting back to.
- 56:46
- This is why having a distinction between being a person is so necessary because they're contradicting themselves here.
- 56:52
- As far as I'm concerned, they're saying the beings are distinct, and yet they're unified.
- 56:58
- So they're kind of going back to the critique that the Jehovah's Witnesses have a lot of times misinformed at Christianity.
- 57:05
- But do you believe in one God or do you believe in three gods? And so this just modeled how they're oscillating back and forth with a logical contradiction.
- 57:16
- Yes. And notice this final sentence. Adventists pay very close attention here.
- 57:23
- Both Fernando Canal and Fritz Guy have warned against the danger of tritheism if the relational unity is overemphasized to the exclusion of the ontological unity.
- 57:39
- There it is. They recognize it. They know it. They don't want to go down that road, though, folks, because it's going to create problems with the writings of Ellen White.
- 57:50
- That will supposedly create problems with the spirit of prophecy, a .k .a. the
- 57:55
- Holy Spirit manifesting in the writings of Ellen G. White and Jesus speaking there as the testimony of Jesus.
- 58:02
- That's why they don't want to go there, but they rightly recognize. And if you remember in the clip we played from Jed Lake, at the beginning, he's transitioning from someone else who just gave a talk and they were ending with a
- 58:11
- Q &A and he was going up there and he said one thing on the Q &A, the question about tritheism.
- 58:18
- Why do you think people are asking questions about tritheism? Why do you think they have to say things like this?
- 58:24
- Because this is the problem that's popping up and then they have to deal with it. They want to have this middle ground limbo like, well, that's all
- 58:32
- Greek pagan mythology, but we understand that. Yeah, you do have to have that if you want to actually be saying that it's one
- 58:38
- God and not three gods, but it's still pagan and you can't play both sides of the field, folks.
- 58:44
- You can't play both sides of the field. You guys can start sending your questions through. I know there's a slight delay with the chat from us, but any questions you guys have will answer a few questions.
- 58:53
- I know it's getting late here, but if there are questions previously, I will bring up some of those.
- 59:01
- But it was specifically about the father pouring the wrath on the son.
- 59:06
- I thought it was a good question for us to maybe touch on. Well, if that person hears that and can send that through again, put a cue in front of your question, please, so we can quickly distinguish it from the rest of the comments.
- 59:19
- We got a question here, which it doesn't have a cue, but Zachariah Rutledge asks, can we be so dogmatic?
- 59:27
- Yep. Um, yeah. So when people ask me, you know,
- 59:33
- Jeremiah, what is first tier doctrine? What are the hills that we die on? And so I kind of give two points and I've already alluded to it in our discussion this evening.
- 59:43
- You got to believe in the right Jesus and you have to receive the right Jesus on the terms that he prescribed.
- 59:51
- And so I go back to John 8, 24. Jesus says, unless you believe that ego by me, then you will die in your sins.
- 59:59
- Well, Jesus is giving us the bar of who he is ontologically. He's not created.
- 01:00:05
- He's the creator. He's the eternally I am. And we understand the eternal creator is tri -personal.
- 01:00:11
- Jesus is the second person of the creator of Yahweh. And so you got to believe in that Jesus in order to have your sin forgiven.
- 01:00:19
- That's number one. And then number two is the Galatians one heresy. If you add any works, if you add anything, your accomplishments to the already finished work of Jesus, then you've totally corrupted the entire gospel.
- 01:00:35
- You've departed from a gospel of grace to legalism and estranged yourself from Christ.
- 01:00:41
- And so we're dogmatic on this because the Trinity is a non -negotiable. Now, some people say, well, do you have to understand the inner workings and death of the
- 01:00:50
- Trinity to be saved? No, but you can't deny who the
- 01:00:55
- Trinity is. First John two, we have the anointing, the Holy Spirit that guards us from heresy.
- 01:01:03
- And so I don't think it's possible for someone to be regenerated to fundamentally deny the triune
- 01:01:09
- God. Doesn't mean this kind of goes back to even my testimony.
- 01:01:14
- I believe I was trusting in the biblical Jesus, but the church that I grew up in was teaching me a form of modalism that God is kind of like a father who is also a son and a brother, but I was affirming the
- 01:01:26
- Trinity. So there are merciful inconsistencies, but we dogmatically teach the
- 01:01:31
- Trinity and we dogmatically teach salvation by faith apart from works.
- 01:01:38
- Yeah, that's good. And even outside of like the mechanics of being a person, you still have issues in Adventism.
- 01:01:45
- We read those quotes earlier. Jesus was exalted to be made equal with the Father, was given omnipresence while he was on earth.
- 01:01:52
- He veiled and gave up his divinity. They affirmed the canonic heresy such that he was only a man while he was on earth who could have sinned.
- 01:01:58
- They don't believe in the, well, the inability to sin.
- 01:02:05
- And so he doubted his resurrection on the cross. He doubted what or he doubted if he'd be resurrected on the cross because the devil was able to twist his heart, causing him to doubt.
- 01:02:14
- And he didn't know if he'd be eternally separated from the Father. He remained, all that he was remained in his body that laid in the tomb.
- 01:02:25
- Ellen White made it clear that Christ was not conscious during that period and that only the Father could resurrect him.
- 01:02:32
- You start getting into these sorts of details. This is not compatible with Trinitarianism. So no, of course, every person's not going to understand and be able to fully wrap their head around every bit of the mechanics and stuff.
- 01:02:43
- That's why I was saying at the beginning of the stream, the language that we use is so important because it's describing something specific.
- 01:02:50
- Jeremiah and I are not claiming that we understand the mechanics of all of this. That's different than claiming here's what the
- 01:02:58
- Bible portrays, though. And that's what I believe by faith. It's like saying God spoke the world from nothing.
- 01:03:05
- Excellent. I can affirm that. How did he do it? I can't tell you how God did that.
- 01:03:11
- Right. How God is all knowing. How is God all knowing? How is God omnipresent? I don't know.
- 01:03:16
- I just know that that's what the Bible teaches. How is God eternal? Well, you're asking me, a creature in time to explain something that transcends time.
- 01:03:24
- I can't do it. Well, we didn't look at it in here, but he also talks about in this article, one of the things that they reject, as well as the timelessness of God.
- 01:03:32
- They think that's a Greek pagan mythology and presuppositions. Yeah, so that's another reason why you have this physical corporeal because God is a part of time.
- 01:03:44
- So Zachariah, thanks for the question there. We got a fun question here. Anthony Rogers is in the house. He says, who is that bearded fellow?
- 01:03:51
- Well, Anthony's also a bearded fellow. So I feel a little bit left out here. You got a little mustache going on there.
- 01:03:58
- I like it. You got to go from one bearded fellow to another. Anthony, thanks for being here. I found, okay.
- 01:04:05
- So after this, Derek is the one to ask the question earlier I want to touch on. So just remind me and we'll touch on it.
- 01:04:11
- Okay, cool. So he asks, I'm still in this mess, but working my way out. Thank you both. How do you explain
- 01:04:17
- God forsaking himself or abandoning himself? Because God can't abandon himself being one being appreciated.
- 01:04:25
- That's the same question he asked earlier. Okay, you tackle it if you've got anything and then I'll have something to say.
- 01:04:31
- Bro, I got something. I don't know if it's good, but I got something. Okay, go for it. Well, so we know the phrase where Jesus on the cross said, my
- 01:04:39
- God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He's quoting Psalm 22 and that Psalm is exhaust.
- 01:04:45
- Jesus is quote. That's the thing. And when Dr. Watt pointed this out, I was like, oh, thank you.
- 01:04:50
- I've always known that Jesus is not announcing a departure ontologically him from the father.
- 01:04:57
- But Jesus is simply hearkening back to the hearers. Psalm 22. Go look at Psalm 22 because that is being fulfilled before your very eyes.
- 01:05:07
- And so when he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? You got to think about the
- 01:05:12
- Trinity. There's not a radical departure, but from eternity past, there has been perfect harmony, harmony, loving relationship between father, son and spirit.
- 01:05:22
- And so Jesus is the sin bearer. Isaiah 53, like he is bearing our sin guilt.
- 01:05:30
- And so when we start talking about, you know, wrath as a divine attribute, it's interesting because you start talking about, well, where is wrath in eternity past?
- 01:05:39
- Well, I think one of the best ways to explain the attribute of wrath is divine love, justice, holiness, when it meets sin, when it meets evil wickedness.
- 01:05:51
- Well, then we see, we see kind of the backside of divine love. It's wrath, right? That is a loving, just and holy thing for God to meet sin with wrath, with justice.
- 01:06:03
- And so what you do see between father and son is the wrath of the father for the first time to be poured out on the son.
- 01:06:12
- That does not mean a radical departure ontologically between father and son. It just is articulating
- 01:06:19
- Isaiah 53, first Peter three. I mean, literally the gospel account of what it looks like for the father to pour out his wrath for Jesus who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God.
- 01:06:33
- What do you think? That's good. You covered a lot of things there. I think also too, it kind of gets back to what we were saying about terms.
- 01:06:40
- Because when we say himself being one being, we have to get into the specifics here because when we ask who is
- 01:06:49
- God, God is father, son, and holy spirit. So one what and three who's?
- 01:06:57
- Yes. And so this is why we use these terms person and being, because it's not
- 01:07:03
- God. This question is almost the presupposition behind the question. And Derek, I'm not faulting you by this for the way, by the way,
- 01:07:09
- I'm just pointing this out. The presupposition behind this is almost like a modalist thinking of like, well, the one person, it's almost like there's one person.
- 01:07:20
- Like, how can the one person abandon himself? So you rightfully pointed out that Jesus is actually quoting from the
- 01:07:26
- Psalms there for a specific reason. This was a common thing that he did to quote the scriptures in the moment while it's happening.
- 01:07:31
- But also even just in examining the question itself, it's kind of the wrong question because it's not that God was abandoning himself because there is a plurality in the category of himself.
- 01:07:43
- That's the category of personhood. So I think Anthony would be proud of us with that answer. Totally. I've learned a lot on this doctrine from him.
- 01:07:53
- So Kevin asks, where did Ellen White get her tritheism from? I say from, yeah, from demonic influence.
- 01:08:02
- I don't doubt that Ellen White had legitimate visions in the sense that she actually experienced some things. There were lots of people around that region of the country at that time who were experiencing all sorts of fanaticism and craziness.
- 01:08:13
- Ellen White came from the shouting Methodist. That's what she was raised in as a kid. She was sunk into and permeated into this hyper charismania from a very early age in a time period where this was having all sorts of upheaval and ramifications in all sorts of groups and movements.
- 01:08:30
- So I don't doubt that the woman had visions. But when you test those things up against the scriptures, they fail, which means that they were even in her own words.
- 01:08:38
- She says if her words contradict scripture, they have to be from Satan. So that is the case over and over and over again.
- 01:08:45
- So I'm going to say from the devil, because anything that's not from God in this regard is positing an idol, a false god that's not from God.
- 01:08:55
- Would she be really mad at that? Because doesn't Satan like totally help with the the.
- 01:09:01
- What is it from Psalm 16? Isn't he the scapegoat? So he's he's a big part in the plan of redemption.
- 01:09:07
- So would she be mad at us for saying, you know, she's. Well, and again, you get into the terms of like redemption and what they mean by that, because if you've seen my streams dedicated to the great controversy theme,
- 01:09:20
- I've got one going up with your friends, actually. Dr. Josh Howard. I was on his podcast.
- 01:09:26
- He's actually a pastor in Battle Creek, Michigan, where Ellen White is buried. I'm a huge, huge area for Seventh -day
- 01:09:35
- Adventist Berrien Springs as well. But yeah, I was on his podcast and we were talking about a number of these things.
- 01:09:42
- So I'll save the rest of that for then. Heck yeah, I'm looking forward to that episode. Totally. It goes up in a couple weeks or like week and a half or so.
- 01:09:51
- Folks, that is all of the questions. I know we went super long tonight. Brother, thank you so much for being on here.
- 01:09:57
- Let people know your YouTube channel is linked in, I believe, both the title and the description box of the video.
- 01:10:03
- So people can check your channel out that way. Anywhere else you want to point people to, and then I'll do a final sign off and get us closed out for the night.
- 01:10:11
- Yes, YouTube channel, The Apologetic Dog. I'm over a thousand subscribers,
- 01:10:16
- Miles, which is awesome. So I'm learning some of those new features. I definitely want to point people to my
- 01:10:22
- Facebook page. I'm kind of old. I'm turning 31 in a couple weeks. So Facebook's kind of the extent.
- 01:10:28
- I'm eventually going to get into Instagram world and things like that later, but I'm still on Facebook.
- 01:10:34
- Definitely email me. You can find my email on my Facebook or my YouTube channel. And then I also want to tell people
- 01:10:40
- I serve as pastor and elder with Pastor Nathan at 12 Five Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
- 01:10:46
- So if you're in northeast Arkansas, anywhere close, we'd love for you to come and visit 12
- 01:10:51
- Five, be a part of our fellowship, be a part of our service. We do things a little bit different. Um, uh, we, we have a pretty intensive, um, extensive liturgy, uh, but the service does not end after the preaching of sermon and taking a communion.
- 01:11:07
- Uh, we go into Koinonia Feast, Miles, where we have a ton of food.
- 01:11:12
- It's a wonderful time to get to know guests, get to know, uh, spend time with, uh, the people here at 12
- 01:11:18
- Five. And then we have sermon Q and A, uh, sermon discussion, which almost everyone stays for.
- 01:11:24
- And then we have our benediction at the end of that because we want to encourage people to partake in all that. Do you do the baby baptisms after the benediction?
- 01:11:32
- You know, our closest thing to baby baptism is probably baby dedication. I figured you'd like that, but yeah.
- 01:11:40
- Um, oh, expository preaching to me. And that's where I love my Presbyterian brothers, uh, because we understand verse by verse exposition is how we draw truth from God's word rather than imposing our thoughts and ideas onto the text.
- 01:11:56
- Amen. Well, brother, thank you for being on here as always. Um, I'm sure we'll do another one of these sometime in the future.