Travel Project Announcement, "What is Marriage?" Debate Review

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:27

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, a road trip dividing line, as you can tell. I think it's a little bit too dark outside.

00:34

There is a lake behind me. That's very nice. It's the second time I've stayed at this particular location.

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I am in Lafayette, Louisiana. That's on our calendar, so I guess it doesn't matter if I mention where I am. And last time

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I was here was the evening after the closest call I had.

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This is an early trip, and it was the one where I almost turned a very small car into a pancake.

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This guy just turned right in front of me. It was dark. It was raining. It was busy. He was in a hurry.

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I don't know how you miss something this big, but he did. Somehow I managed to avoid him and damaged something in the process, and the folks at the church here in the area jumped to it.

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And while I was at the church speaking, there was a guy sitting here fixing this unit and did a good job.

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He did a better job than another place we had had at that. And so it has positive memories for me.

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The folks in Louisiana are kind, and I've already experienced that kindness even this evening, this afternoon, once I got here.

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Now, I do notice that I think I could throw a rock and hit

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I -10 from here. So it is a constant roar.

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It is the song of the KOA campground. If I sat outside at the park bench or the little benches they provide to you,

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I would have to yell at whoever was sitting across the way, isn't this relaxing?

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I have been to a few KOAs that were just out in the boonies, but they are rare.

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The ones I've been at, yeah, like this, right next to the freeway.

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I don't think there's a train track nearby or an airport, so only got one of the three.

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But when you're literally, I mean, I'm looking right now, I can read the, on the sides of the trucks,

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I can read what carrier they are and stuff like that from right here. So I could throw a rock, that's how close we are.

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You said, didn't that keep you up all night? Not anymore. Not anymore. Which leads us to our first topic, and maybe it's the first thing

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I should do before we get to all the other things. We have always stunk at raising funds.

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And obviously, I think there's something good about that. I've always felt that doing apologetics meant that since we're not a church, and we're not taking the place of the church, we're here to be of assistance to the church, that there's a kind of integrity that's needed there.

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And I'm not saying that those people who do, you know, I've mentioned before, I've seen other ministries and their fundraising paraphernalia, shall we say.

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And it's impressive. That's a pretty bright, as it's getting darker and darker, yeah, okay.

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Now I will not have a migraine headache by the end of the evening. And I actually have skin tone now,

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I look like a human being, yay. He's not albino anymore. Still white beard, but not albino.

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Anyway, you know, there needs to be integrity in how we do things. This is our 40th year.

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We will celebrate 40 years in just a matter of months. 40 years of ministry. There are not many apologetics ministries that have been around for 40 years.

04:39

Last night, I did my 179th moderated public debate. We'll talk about that a little bit later on.

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And it's an exciting time. It's a time to be really thankful for all that God has done.

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And as most of you know, we have made the decision, and I haven't gone into all the reasons, but we have made the decision that instead of globe hopping, as I did from, really

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I started, I did my first, my first real, well, no, no,

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I'll take that back. When was that? 2003? I don't know. I went to South America first, then to London, and that's what started everything.

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And then we started going to South Africa and Kiev. When you know your way around terminals three and five of Heathrow Airport, like the back of your hand, you know where all the best restaurants are.

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You know where all the lounges are. You've been spending a lot of time overseas, and there's a lot of money.

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Those tickets are not cheap. And once I had cardiac ablation, heart surgery, we would fly me a business class so I could actually lay down and hopefully arrive alive.

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So I was very helpful in doing ministry to be alive when you get there. And so that's the way things were through 2019.

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And that's what it looked like. You know, I assume that's what 2020 was gonna be like, and then the world changed. And I've explained in the past my issues in regards to masking and things like that, both principled and medical.

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We came up with another way of traveling. I don't remember when I first thought of it, to be honest with you.

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And we rented a little 19 -foot, super -used, self -contained

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RV that I drove back to prior Oklahoma, and Pastor Derek Melton helped me to patch it back up after I destroyed the air conditioner.

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And I was simply asking the question, is this a way that I could travel in the future, return our focus to the

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United States, primarily, at least as far as my physical presence? I hadn't been doing much traveling inside the

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United States once I started doing the stuff overseas. And that led, fairly quickly, to the purchase of a truck and the unit that I'm sitting in right now.

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And I have now pulled this unit somewhere around 30 ,000 miles. I'm starting to lose track.

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I used to know exactly, but after a while. And I've kept her in great shape.

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And I've always, in the back of my mind, I've always wondered, how long did

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Rich really give me before I cracked it up? In the back of his mind, did he think 10 ,000 miles, maybe, at the best?

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I don't know. But so far, so good. And it's not that I haven't had close calls.

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Things happen on the roads, believe you me. And today, so much construction on I -10.

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And I hate when they put those barriers on each side, those cement barriers. And then you're on the right -hand side, and you're going just a little bit below the construction speed limit.

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And here comes a frustrated Grand Prix driver, who happens to be driving a full -size semi -truck, semi -truck, semi -truck, tractor -trailer, down by you.

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It's like, wow, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. So we have interesting experiences.

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Anyway, and so here I am. I was in Houston last night, world's worst roads, no question about it.

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And so now I'm in Louisiana starting tomorrow night. I'm going to be speaking on evangelizing

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Roman Catholics, big, big, big, big issue around here, and meeting with people, just had a theological conversation with a brother on a completely different topic that I would never be able to have in other instances, going from here to northern

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Louisiana, dealing with the Trinity, because there's a lot of oneness folks in that area, from there to Tullahoma, the conference with Jeffrey Rice, meeting everybody there, the debate with Thomas Ross on the

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Legacy Standard Bible versus the King James Version, and hopefully all the way back to Salt Lake City, if weather permits, to see the debate that my son -in -law is doing at the end of the month.

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So that's just this trip. And then we've got Salt Lake coming up in the two -on -two debate,

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Jeff Durbin and I versus someone else, two other folks on, without any allowance for any freebies in the room, on God and ethics.

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And then May is a huge trip, Texas all the way to Georgia, and Ezra Institute, and July up to Minneapolis and Colorado, and then

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G3 in September, and wow, all over the place, all over the place.

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And I'm looking forward to it. Great opportunities, and it fits with my health and my age at this time in my life and things like that.

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Now, that leads me to a project that we need your help with.

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As most, as those of you who listen carefully to the program know, we were able to upgrade our pull vehicle, the vehicle that pulls this unit.

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That works so much better for us, because I'm now parked here, I'm going to be parked here for four days, but I have a vehicle to get to where I need to go, to do the things

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I need to do. When you have a fully contained unit, you can't do that unless you drag a car along behind, which makes you 65 feet long, which

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I really wouldn't want to be. And so, I was,

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I'm not going to go into all the details about this particular unit. I'm very thankful for this unit. It has served me well.

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But a while back, I started thinking, there were, I'll just mention in passing, there are two design issues that we have dealt with with this issue, with this particular unit.

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One's a convenience issue with the floor plan, that basically,

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I can't use the RV while traveling the way most RVs can be used, in other words, as a restroom, which is really, really helpful on long, long drives, especially when you're over 60 years old as a guy.

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But then the other is a design flaw that Rich has talked to the manufacturer about, and they've just basically said, yep, but we ain't doing anything about it.

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You just, if it breaks, we'll send you a new one, which doesn't help you much when you're 2000 miles from home.

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And it's an issue, so we've been thinking about those things.

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And then a while back, I just, I had this thought, I have a queen -size bed.

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Now, my wife doesn't travel with me, she's taking care of her mom, and RVing isn't really her thing. I don't need a queen -size bed, that's big, a lot of space taken up.

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And I always thought, you know, I would rather, I wonder if we can take this bed out and just put some bunks in here, something like that, and have more floor space.

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I didn't really think about it too much. And then all of a sudden, the thought hit me. There have been a couple times,

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I've got a little plastic table over there, fold -up table that I use for a lot of stuff. That was one of the best.

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You buy something for $14 .99 on Amazon, it ends up being worth hundreds of dollars because you've used it so often.

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And that little plastic table over there, that was a good investment.

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But I'll sometimes drag this over here, and we've got a, what is that, a 20, 22 -inch external screen that I can plug into the unit here, and I've displayed stuff on it, but it gets pretty complicated, and it's, you know, it is what it is.

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We love doing the dividing line here. We get so much positive response from people about doing the program because it demonstrates we're dedicated to doing this.

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We're dedicated to doing the dividing line, to commenting on what's going on, to addressing the issues biblically, demonstrating biblical exegesis all the time, and not letting the travel get in the way of that.

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And it struck me one day. Again, Pastor Melton has a 30 -foot pole behind, and he has bunks in the back, bunk beds in the back that his grandkids sleep in when they go up to the lake or something like that.

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And all of a sudden, it hit me. If we could find a unit that had bunk beds in the back, that's plenty fine for me.

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I'm perfectly good with that. We had a tiny little bunk bed in that first RV that we rented, and I was happy as a bug in the rug.

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In fact, I liked it better. If we could find a unit, now this unit is 30 feet long.

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So I've always estimated it, if you have zero to 100, 100 is those huge Greyhound bus units.

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There's some of them parked right over there in this park, million -dollar units. And then the zero is one of those little pop -up things where you, ee, ee, ee, and up comes the roof and that type of thing.

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I'd put mine around 35 to 40 in that spectrum, size -wise. And like I said, it's right at 30 feet.

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It's 29 .9, actually, but can we round up? And all of a sudden, one day, it hit me.

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If we could find one with bunks in the back, we could take the bed out of the master bedroom, which they're almost always in the front of what's called a fifth wheel.

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So I'm at the very back. Here's the back window. There it is. There's the door. This door is way toward the back.

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Most fifth wheels have a door much farther forward. It's, again, this very, very strange floor design.

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So the bedroom's on the far side. It's what's over the truck. So in a fifth wheel, the thing goes down into the bed of the truck, and the weight sits right above the axle, which is what makes it so stable in wind and everything else.

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We could take the bed out and turn the entire master bedroom into a glorious studio.

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Glorious, I guess. It's still... I can just stand up in my current bedroom.

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It's pretty tight. I mean, in here, I've got plenty of space, but you're now over the truck in there. But there would be plenty of room for not only a real nice background, lighting.

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I have a 1995 round webcam thing sitting in front of me right now.

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That's what we're using. And everybody walking by outside is wondering what in the world we're doing. Anyway, we could put a background in there, proper lighting, get a touchscreen.

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Not as big as the one we have. That'd be really... I can just imagine trying to get the big board from the big studio through the door.

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I don't think so. But something smaller than that, but still fully usable.

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I would need to have a little control thing where I could control which camera. We could have more than one camera.

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We can do accordance, we can do textual criticism, we can do all that stuff. And we could even do debates.

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Yeah, we could even do debates in a studio like that.

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And it would really expand the things that we could do on the program.

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And we'd have a place to do it. We'd have a place to do it. And it would go wherever we needed it to go, whenever we needed to go.

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So I put all that together and I go, well, we've got some safety concerns right now. And we could change that.

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And we could have the Divine Line studio. And yeah, that would really expand what we can do.

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And our new truck can handle it because I started looking around fairly quickly.

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And I don't want a bigger unit because I have to get gas.

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Being very, very practical here, I have to get gas. And I can go through the truck lanes, but it means you're going to be there for a long, long time.

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It's a major time commitment. And so I've actually never done that.

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I have always managed to find a way to get this thing to the pumps where all the other cars are.

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And that ain't easy. And if you add any distance, any length, it makes it even less easy.

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And so I found a unit. It was the first unit I found. I sat here going, you know,

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I've been in a lot of RV parks now. What do I see a lot of? What's popular out here?

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And so I picked a particular brand. And I went to the website and I started looking and looking and looking.

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And lo and behold, I found a unit very, very similar to this size -wise.

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But it has bunk beds in the back. It's four feet longer than this one.

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It's only four feet. So in reality, since a bunk bed is longer than four feet, I will have less open space in that unit than I would have in this unit.

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And that's fine with me. That's cool. This has a lot of open space in it. And so I was sitting here going, wow, there is a lot that can be done there.

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There is a lot that could be done there. And I'm not predicting that.

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I mean, I've said to a number of people. They've said to me, that's interesting what you're doing, you know.

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And they just got back from flying someplace. And it, you know, they had to sit in line, stand in line because their flight got canceled for six hours and that kind of stuff.

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And they're sort of like, wow, that sounds pretty nice what you're doing. Like, tell you what, when you decide, look me up.

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I'll hook you up and I'll tell you what you need, how to do it, how to do it effectively. I've definitely learned over the past coming up on two years now.

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And so Rich has activated a option on the donate button at AOMIN .org.

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And he told me what the name was, but I'm going to double check just for myself and look it up.

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So if you go to the donate button at the top of the screen at AOMIN .org,

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it's right pretty much in the middle between blog and bookstore. Over on the right -hand side, there's a pull -down menu.

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You'll see general travel and AO Mobile Studio Project. We are so good at marketing.

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We come up with just the most Puritan style titles, because that's what that is,

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AO Mobile Studio Project. And so as part of our 40th anniversary, we want to keep doing this.

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We want to keep getting out into the churches and taking on the tough topics, could we at least admit.

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Last night's topic was not a topic you would have... Let's put it this way, 40 years ago, never crossed my mind

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I would ever be standing in a large Lutheran church in Houston, Texas, debating the topic, what is marriage?

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That was not on our bingo card in 1983.

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Never crossed my mind, but the need is there and the opportunities are there.

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We're just reaching out to our people and saying, look, we fully understand that a lot of people are struggling right now.

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Some of you, to be honest with you, are in jobs and in industries where all of a sudden you're making bank.

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And it's just because of the way things are. And I know some people that could by themselves take care of this whole thing, because right now, the

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RV market is flooded and prices are low. What that also means is we'll get almost nothing for this as far as trade in value goes.

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It's in great shape, taking great care of it, but it's used. And when you have a glutted new market, there ain't much the other way.

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And so. We're just coming to you and saying, if you enjoy this program and you enjoy the fact that it keeps coming to you and you enjoy seeing that we're on the road doing the things we're supposed to be doing next week, debating

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Thomas Ross, going up to Salt Lake City for the debate in April. All that kind of neat, fun stuff going out the

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G3 in September, then please consider if it's something that you would be able to help us with being able to come up with the money to make this switch and pray that we find the right unit.

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I mean, it's one thing to find it on the screen. Rich sent me a graphic, but we may look at it in the future, but I've already described it for you.

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I mean, there's bunk beds in the back. There's a bedroom in the front. We're going to change the bedroom into a studio.

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They're only so long. Like I said, this one's 34 feet long, which

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I can handle. I can handle. I'm going to have to be careful. But I can handle it.

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I've come close a few times, but I take special pride.

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I basically want to see how long I can go in making

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Rich astonished that I haven't destroyed something yet. Because when we first started doing this, he had all the expertise.

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You know why? Because he pulled a boat once. And one summer, he was in a self -contained

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RV driving around the United States, but I don't think he was doing the driving.

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I think he was younger at that time. That was all we had. And so I am taking some level of pride in the fact that I have not destroyed either of two trucks or one

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RV unit so far. And I'm very thankful for that. So anyways, there's our big fundraising thing.

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And if I were Bob Larson, I could guilt all of you into putting yourselves in debt.

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He almost did that to me back in the 1980s. He really, really did. He tried to convince everybody that the whole kingdom of God was going to come falling apart if you didn't give money to Bob Larson.

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I'm not saying that, and that ain't true. It's just the reality. But we have very generous folks out there, and so we're putting it out there.

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If you go to donate .aomin .org and look at the pull -down menu,

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AO Mobile Studio Project, you'll find it there. And if you would like to bless us in that way, then please do so, and we'll let you know what's going on with that as things develop.

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So there you go. Like I said, neither Rich or I are fundraising folks.

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I have a friend who used to sell for IBM. I should have just hired him to do this.

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Because he would come up with all sorts of stuff and do it in a really classy way, I'm sure.

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But we are who we are, and that's probably why you're watching this program anyways. All right.

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Let's talk about last night, and let me do something real quick.

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I forgot my drink. Sorry. And I'm getting dry.

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So rather than be uncomfortable and start stuttering and everything else...

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Very good. Okay. Last night, if you didn't watch the debate last night, which many of you were at church and stuff like that,

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I get it, pretty much went the way

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I expected it to. My opponent moderated the radical nature of his perspectives in light of where he was.

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He knew he was in a conservative Christian church, and so he didn't make some pretty big statements about not basing our faith on the

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Bible and things like that. But when you read his books, he's written against penal substitutionary atonement.

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And I could have poisoned the well against him.

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It would have been real easy, if I wanted to behave that way, to have poisoned the well against him and talked about his book against penal substitutionary atonement.

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I did mention his book, Soul of Mysterion, the uncertainty of everything.

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But he's quoting from Buddha, and he's talking about the Christ spirit, and really way, way out there.

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He moderated a lot of that for his presentation. But as everybody noticed, after the opening statements, he had not yet defined marriage.

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In fact, he didn't get to a definition of marriage until the cross -examination period, when I asked him to give a definition of marriage.

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Which, if you're in a debate on what is marriage, most people that watched it were a little confused as to why he was doing the things that he was doing.

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But anyway, one of the things that came up,

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I'll just talk about just one thing that came up. Well, two things. I mean, I could forget this.

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This is another reason. This is also relevant to the fundraiser.

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Last night, after the debate was over, just like a year ago, we've done two debates now within one year at the same church in Houston.

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They like having debates, and as long as I keep doing my job right, I guess they'll probably invite us back to do debates again.

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Pastor Evan does a really good job in advertising and stuff like that, organizing, so I'm happy to cooperate in those ways.

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Anyway, last year and this year, we go over to a side room outside the sanctuary after the debate, and a big old long line forms, sort of like a

30:35

G3 and other places where I greet people, and they have the signed books. And we tell everybody, okay, everybody, look, it's your job.

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When you're the next in line, after the person's talking to me, they will hand you their phone to take the picture, okay?

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So you need to know how to take a picture of the person in front of you, his phone. It's just how it works.

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Now, G3, Josh does that, at least he did last year, or maybe it was year four, whatever it was.

31:06

We have a guy that just stands there and says, I'll take it. Okay, I'll take it. I'm good. Okay. And so you're tired.

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You've hopefully put yourself out there during the debate. But I've often, you know,

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Rich has got to stand, Rich has a few times, G3 had gotten to stand there and listen, because I had told him what it was like.

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And I don't know how to describe it. When person after person after person says, you know, your ministry has just meant so much.

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Here's the religion, false religion I was kept out of. Here's the false religion I was brought out of. Here's the ministry

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I'm doing now because of this. I am in second year Greek now, because you excited me about Greek.

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And I'm so into this now and doing so much with it. And, you know, a lot of people who will come up to me and say, you know,

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I don't have good solid churches in my area. And so you all have been just a lifeline.

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It just to hear it over and over and over again.

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And people all say, I know you hear this all the time. And I'm just like, yes, but each one is unique.

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Each one's different. I hate it when we have to say we only got 10 minutes left or 15 minutes because everybody's got to hurry and stuff like that.

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I hate when that happens. But, you know, this was only last night in Houston.

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Now I'm in Lafayette, Louisiana. You got to get to bed, got to be able to sleep, got to be awake enough to drive, you know.

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But it's so encouraging to hear those stories. And it's so amazing, because I know in 1983,

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I never, ever dreamed. All we were thinking about was witnessing to more missionaries.

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That was all we had. It was all we were thinking about. The Lord had so much more in plan.

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So those of you who last night stood there in line, and I do want to especially thank

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Rudy Jabouri, not only for giving me a ride to dinner the night before, but he and his family were there to the very bitter end.

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It's pretty late. It's well after 10 o 'clock. And he was sort of keeping my back in case there were some bad guys and stuff like that.

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And just so great to have those kinds of opportunities.

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It really, really was. So I want to thank all of you and all the kind words that you had after the debate last evening.

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But back to the debate itself. One of the claims that my opponent made last evening,

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Mr. Giles, Keith Giles, was that the, and at first he said it wrong and admitted it later on.

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He said the rabbinic writings and the Torah, and I think he said

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Jewish commentaries or something along those lines, said that there are six genders.

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And so I challenged him, where does the Torah say that? And we realized once we got into cross -examination, what he meant to say was the

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Talmud. And of course Talmud and Torah are two very different things. There's minimally 2 ,000 years between the two.

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But he kept bringing up over and over again. And I challenged him. He says, well,

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I've got it somewhere. I'll send it to you. You can write me an email.

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If you're in a debate and one of your primary points you can't document, that's not good.

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That's really bad. So this morning I get up. And during the debate, because again, the topic was what is marriage, the issue of homosexuality came up.

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He tried to dispute that arsenikoites means what arsenikoites means.

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And I specifically said, no, you're completely wrong. I'm well aware of the 1946 movie.

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I've challenged these people to debate. They have declined those challenges thus far. And even he said,

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I would love to see that debate. I'm like, well, yeah, so would I. But I don't think it's going to happen because it's an indefensible position.

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But I get up this morning and he has sent his documentation. And it was pretty much exactly what

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I expected it to be in regards to the subject of intersex.

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This is an important point. If you didn't watch the debate, this may be of help to you anyways. Because a lot of people are somewhat stymied when someone brings up stuff like Turner syndrome,

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Kleinfelter syndrome. These are all genetic mutations in reference to the sex chromosome.

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So he sends me, because he said, science, geneticists tell us there are six genders.

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I said, no, they don't. Yep, they do. So here's what he sends me.

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X. So just one X. So you're supposed to have XX or XY.

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So X means you're missing half the chromosome material. This is called

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Turner's syndrome. One in maybe 5 ,000 people at most.

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It is interesting. If you compare, I did this about two years ago.

37:30

I stayed in genetics in college. I was a department fellow in anatomy and physiology. My senior project as a biology major was in genetics.

37:40

So I still had all my material. And it's fascinating to go back to my material back then and now look online.

37:49

And the inflation of the numbers, the projected numbers of people who had these genetic mutations back in the 1980s, much lower than it is now.

38:04

It's inflated today. Now, why do you think they would do that? Think about it.

38:10

But Turner's syndrome, just X. Then you have XX, female. XY, male.

38:19

Then you have XXY, no more than one in 1 ,000. That's Kleinfelter syndrome.

38:29

XYY and XXXY, which you can tell, that is a reduplication error where you have an

38:38

XX, female. XY, male. But they didn't separate. And so you have maybe one in 50 ,000 that have that.

38:49

And so that's six. And he called these six genders. No one in my genetics class called those genders.

39:01

Those were syndromes and mutations. And you can go to other of the chromosomes, and there are all sorts of identified, we've mapped the whole genome now, identified syndromes and conditions that are related to mutations.

39:20

They are deleterious. They are not good for you.

39:27

Very frequently, they lead to death. Very frequently, they lead to an inability to have children, to reproduce.

39:35

They lead to physical abnormalities in the person who has them.

39:41

They are diseases. They are genetic, mutational diseases. But now, they're genders.

39:51

What happened? They're genders now. Six genders.

39:57

No, there's two genders and four major genetic mutations that can happen with that one particular chromosome.

40:06

That's all that is. Those aren't genders. I don't see XX, XY, free spirit, two -spirit, or something else.

40:19

That's what he sent me.

40:25

And then this morning on Twitter, I posted, because I wrote to Mike Brown, because he's going, oh, the

40:33

Jews say this and the Jews say that. You need to understand something. This is important.

40:43

Amongst people who call themselves Jews today, the majority religious view is atheism. It is.

40:49

The vast majority of ethnic Jews are either atheistic or agnostic, massively liberal, way on the left.

41:02

Orthodox Jews are some of the few people left who actually believe that there was someone named

41:07

Moses and that what we would call the Tanakh, the

41:14

Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim is a revelation from God. But that's a small portion.

41:20

The vast majority of Jews and the vast majority of Jewish rabbis have a significantly lower view of their scriptures than we do.

41:31

We view Genesis through Malachi, or for them, by the way, it's Genesis through 2 Chronicles. And you go, why?

41:38

Because their canon's in a different order. It's the same as ours, same number of books, but it's in a different order.

41:44

And so if you said Genesis to Malachi, then they wouldn't understand what you're talking about. So you need to be aware of that fact.

41:51

2 Chronicles is the last of the books of their Old Testament, but all the rest of them are still in there.

41:56

Don't worry. We have a vastly higher view of the nature of those writings than the vast majority of Jews, and certainly than Keith Giles.

42:10

He made that clear in his opening statement. You think Andy Stanley is unhitched from the

42:18

Old Testament? Yeah, okay, Keith Giles is far more unhitched from the

42:26

Old Testament than Andy Stanley is, though Andy's trying to catch up at some point. Anyway, so when you hear people saying, well, you know, the

42:37

Jewish rabbis say this, and they would know better than us. Really? Have you ever thought that through? Have you ever thought that through?

42:46

If you're a Jewish rabbi today, you well know what the

42:53

Christians say about Jesus, right? And you can check out those claims. And you're rejecting the clarity of the testimony of Moses and the prophets to the

43:09

Messiahship of Jesus, but you're going to say they know more about the Old Testament? Excuse me?

43:18

For the vast majority of rabbis, they view the Old Testament as nothing but historic, human, self -contradictory literature.

43:31

They have no concern about harmonization. They have no concern about this God speaking.

43:36

They do not have the view that Jesus and the disciples had, that the New Testament has about the

43:43

Old Testament as being Theanostas. They just don't have it. And so don't get cowered into the, well, the

43:53

Jews know better. They know their scriptures back and forth. If they don't believe it's divine revelation, what does it matter?

44:01

What does it matter? And certainly Keith Giles didn't. He made that very clear in his statements.

44:08

We need to start with Jesus. He was a hyper -red -letterist. You know, you've heard the progressivist, woke people, red -letter

44:15

Christians. You start with Jesus. I have a hint for you. You can't figure Jesus out without realizing the

44:22

Old Testament scriptures that were more testimony to him, that were what he based his teachings on and said, this is what

44:29

God has said, and then the explication of him found in the New Testament scriptures. You can't do it.

44:37

But he tried to do that. I spent, I don't know, five of my eight -minute rebuttal period taking that argument apart when

44:47

I had the opportunity. Could have gone a whole lot longer on that particular subject. And hopefully we all could, because this is a

44:56

Martianite view of things. But it's sadly very, very common in these progressivists.

45:03

So, back of the truck. Well, no, it's not back of the truck.

45:09

It would run into the front of the unit. Back of the truck, metaphorically speaking. And on Twitter this morning, like I said,

45:17

I contacted Michael Brown, because I knew if anyone's going to know what some wild leftist rabbi has said on this subject, it's going to be

45:29

Mike Brown. And, of course, I was not disappointed. He linked me to, well, he sent me the text to an article he had written for the

45:37

Daily Wire, but I couldn't find the article. I would have linked to it, but I couldn't find it. Anyway, he sent me the article.

45:45

And there in the middle was this section. It was, again, an ultra -leftist rabbi.

45:53

And he was making claims about Abraham and Sarah being intersex. And then there was this thing about six genders.

46:03

And so I posted on Twitter the direct link to the

46:08

Mishnah. And I'm not going to read it now, because it's not all that long. It wouldn't take you very long.

46:14

But you read it, and what they're doing, they're not saying these are six genders. What they're saying is, since they have, in Jewish law, who can inherit?

46:31

For whom does the Levirate law have to be applied? All sorts of stuff like this.

46:40

And so in the Mishnah, you're getting the codification of these traditions of what the rabbis have said.

46:49

And so what they've done is they have broken up. If you have someone who's a hermaphrodite, that's normally the, you know, like Kleinfelter's type.

47:01

I mean, they didn't know what those genetic situations were. But you have someone who has a genetic abnormality.

47:10

What they're doing is, what the Mishnah is doing is, okay, this person is not subject to these laws, but is subject to these laws, and therefore cannot be with these groups and cannot engage in these activities, but can engage in these activities.

47:26

It happens to break down to six different categories. It's not genders. It has nothing to do with genders.

47:32

It has nothing to do with queer, gender, anything that we're talking about today. It's irrelevant, 1 ,000 % irrelevant.

47:41

But see, it sounds so good. Well, rabbi so -and -so says that there were this many genders.

47:48

That sounds good. It's just completely meaningless. It has no historical connection. And the vast majority of people who repeat this stuff have never looked up the sources.

48:01

Because let's be honest, how many Christians know the difference between the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Talmud? If you've listened to this, if you're

48:10

Algo, you know. I'm not going to ask Rich if he knows, because I've explained it many, many times over the years.

48:19

But it's unfair to ask questions like that, especially when someone's not ready for it.

48:27

But for everyone's edification, the Mishnah is collected around 250 years after Christ.

48:36

So it is a valuable source of information as to the traditions of the elders. But you cannot just assume that if it's in the

48:47

Mishnah, it was already one of the traditions 250 years earlier.

48:52

There are a lot of them that are. It's very clear that intractate are both, as I recall.

49:00

I really got into midrash.

49:06

I took a class from a Jewish rabbi in seminary. I bought the Tzitzinot Talmud and a real nice Hebrew -English edition of the

49:15

Mishnah. I really, really dove into this stuff, because I figured it would probably be relevant, apologetically speaking.

49:25

And so the Korban rule that Jesus goes after, that you can dedicate your possessions to the temple, and therefore you don't have to support your parents.

49:38

Remember that story, Matthew and Mark? That's in the Mishnah. So there is an example where, yep,

49:45

Jesus attacked that. There it is in the Mishnah. But you can't automatically assume that everything that's in the

49:50

Mishnah was prevalent or known in the days of Jesus. Anyway, so that's the Mishnah.

49:56

Then you have the commentary or the sayings, which are the commentary on the

50:02

Mishnah. That's called the Gemara. You put the Mishnah together with the

50:07

Gemara, that's the Talmud. Now, there's more than one version of that, Babylonian Talmud, things like that.

50:14

And that's codified 600, 700 years, depending on...

50:20

There's arguments about... All right.

51:42

I wonder why that happens. Now, here's the test. Rich, what was

51:48

I talking about? I assume

51:59

I was talking about arguments happened regarding the final codification of the

52:05

Talmud, Babylonian Talmud, other editions, timeframes, things like that.

52:16

I can still hear you. That's cool.

52:23

But are we back again? We're live. Okay, good. All right.

52:28

I'll let you figure out how you're going to fix the mess later on. Anyway, so that's what the

52:35

Mishnah, Gemara, and Talmud are. And Rich knew all of that. I just want you to know. He could have told you the same things that I did.

52:41

I have full confidence that he would be able to do that. Anyway, so if you go to the

52:52

Mishnah, you'll get these categorizations. They are not genders. There is absolutely, positively, no reason, none, no sound historical reason to believe that any

53:08

Jew before the time of Christ, at the time of Christ, and for hundreds of years after Christ, would have ever given consideration to anything even remotely like today's transgender movement.

53:26

None. None. Zero. Wishful thinking and fantasy to say otherwise.

53:34

But you're not going to get published on Patheos if you say that.

53:42

It's not going to happen. So there you go. That's what takes place.

53:49

So we need to recognize when you hear an argument that you've never heard before, you just need to start doing a little bit of digging.

54:05

Just do a little bit of digging. And the truth will very generally come to the surface.

54:14

Okay, one more thing. I was going to talk about something else. I'm going to hold off on that, get a little more clarification from some friends, and maybe make some comments on the next program, whenever that will be.

54:32

Today is Wednesday. Yeah, we might be able to do...

54:38

I'm sorry, yesterday's Thursday. Yeah.

54:45

And this is the second program this week, isn't it? So we have at least gotten two in.

54:53

I didn't do a driving line. We'll see. We'll see. Because there's other stuff

54:59

I want to address. So we may work something out. Okay.

55:06

But really, really sad news out of England, in regards to the

55:17

Church of England. And it's collapsed on the blessing of same -sex unions. This comes just after an article that I saw.

55:29

It was posted eight days ago. The Bishop of Coventry reports member of General Synod to the police for the hate crime of promoting biblical sexual teachings.

55:47

Well, how can you have any kind of meaningful debate in the

55:54

Church of England on this subject, if the members of your

56:00

Synod are being reported to police for holding to a biblical view of sexuality?

56:08

It's not overly shocking, then, that the Church of England is capitulating on the entire

56:17

LGBTQ agenda. So here's my question for my

56:23

Anglican brothers. And you know who you are. And you know over the years that we've had conversations about what's called the via media.

56:38

Now, if you know anything about Anglicanism, you know anything about the Church of England, you know anything about Brits, the via media, the middle way, goes back to Elizabeth.

56:49

And it was the attempt to sort of stop the wars of religion, basically. You know, you've got a

56:56

Protestant king, all the Catholics get killed. You got a Roman Catholic queen, all the

57:02

Protestants get killed. So how about we try to compromise?

57:09

And we follow the middle way, the via media, the middle way. That has been absolutely definitional of what it means to be

57:19

Anglican, the middle way. But have you noticed anything? Compare...

57:29

Remember Bishop Spong? Episcopalian Bishop Spong, the

57:35

American version of the Anglican Church? And when I mentioned Bishop Ryle, J .C.

57:42

Ryle wrote The Holiness of God. And he's like, I'm not familiar with him.

57:48

Where does he serve? Was there a via media between Ryle and Spong?

57:58

No, it hung a hard left. And the reality is that the pressure on a church is always toward unbelief.

58:11

So if you keep trying to follow a via media, you will always be going to the left.

58:18

You will never find a place to put down an anchor and say, here and no farther, because you've already given up on this anchor and this anchor and this anchor and this anchor and this anchor, keeping the via media all the way along.

58:35

And so brothers, there's got to come a time when you realize we can't keep doing this.

58:43

We have compromised on women as bishops and priests and everything else.

58:53

We've ignored the biblical parameters on all of these things. And now we're collapsing on the most basic definitions of human sexuality.

59:03

And the Anglicans in Africa, I think, are simply going to say goodbye. And already there have been

59:10

Anglican split offs. I think all the Anglicans that have split off ought to get together and go, you know, we sort of outnumber those guys.

59:19

Let's take the name back, you know, something along those lines, maybe. Let's go back to Bishop Ryle.

59:26

Let's go back to the Book of Common Prayer. Let's go back to the 39 articles. So I can work with you on that.

59:36

But there is no via media. I was going to try to find a graphic, but in your mind, picture an exit on a freeway, which

59:45

I see all the time, and how you'll have those crushable barriers right before the sign that says exit 37 and then the arrow, you know, going this direction.

59:56

Where's via media go? It goes into the side. When you have a real, you've got two different directions here, you know, you can be faithful to Scripture, or you can be faithful to society.

01:00:10

But the via media will plow you directly into a steel highway sign.

01:00:17

And that's where you all are. That's where you all are. And I've applauded my conservative

01:00:28

Sydney, Australia, Anglican brothers for trying to hold the line, but you've just got to realize there is no via media with apostasy.

01:00:41

And the leadership of the Church of England is apostasy. There's no question of it. How much farther does it have to go?

01:00:50

Do you have to have a transgender Archbishop of Canterbury before you finally go,

01:00:55

Okay, I guess that's it. Does it really need to go that far? Because you're going to get one a lot sooner than you think at the speed things are going.

01:01:05

You really are. Think, think about where you were 30 years ago, and then ask yourself the question, would you have ever believed that things would be where they are this quickly?

01:01:18

And you, if you're honest, you go, Yeah, no, not really. Not really. Okay, so please pray for this weekend.

01:01:32

I have been told that there, we are certainly praying that there will be Roman Catholics coming.

01:01:39

And I want them to, you know, my desire always is when speaking on these subjects that someone who hears me speaking on what their faith believes will go,

01:01:50

Well, yeah, that is what we believe. And there was fairness shown toward us, and there was concern and kindness expressed toward us, but without compromise, whether it's

01:02:01

Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, or well, Jehovah's Witnesses aren't going to be attending one of these things, but Muslims, Roman Catholics, whenever I'm addressing those things, that's what

01:02:13

I want to see happen. Pray for Oneness Pentecostals in Northern Louisiana when

01:02:20

I speak on that subject next Tuesday evening. Hopefully some of them will come, and we'll have an opportunity to discuss the biblical evidence of that.

01:02:28

I make one promise. I make one promise to everyone in Northern Louisiana.

01:02:34

When I speak on the doctrine of the Trinity, I will speak from God's inspired word, and I will never, ever, ever, ever quote from Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas in making those presentations.

01:02:50

Because I never did it in the past, but I already started doing it now. And then the debate the next weekend with Thomas Ross, that God will be honored in that, will be helpful to people, and of course the conference and speaking there, that God will be glorified in all these things.

01:03:07

And one more time, for those who tuned in late, please go to aomin .org,

01:03:15

click on the donate button, and look at the drop -down menu, and there is a new option there for the mobile command vehicle.

01:03:24

We are looking to make a change from the vehicle I'm in right now to a slightly larger one, but a different orientation that will allow us to change the bedroom into a full

01:03:42

Alpha and Omega Ministries Dividing Lines studio, which will allow me to do the stuff that I do in the big studio with accordance and direct criticism and Greek and Hebrew and all that neat fun stuff.

01:03:58

Probably would also include, be relevant, an upgrade on the wireless system.

01:04:04

We're running on the wireless system that's part of this, and it's not able to do 5G. Need to look at other options along those lines to not have the dropouts, especially if you want to do debates, dropouts are really annoying.

01:04:21

But we need your help to be able to do this, do this project. And I know there are some folks that could probably do the whole thing in one shot, but most of our folks, that's not the case.

01:04:34

And that's the way it should be. So please pray about that and join with us in putting together that particular project here as quickly as we can, because we've got a very, very busy year ahead of us with all sorts of neat, wonderful opportunities coming our direction.

01:04:58

And we want to be fully capable of doing everything we can do to take advantage of those opportunities as they come to us.

01:05:06

So thank you very much for joining us on the program today. I don't expect to be able to do a program tomorrow, but we will see what develops.

01:05:19

And then, as I said, next week, we're back on the road again. And so we'll be able to slide some programs in there as well and keep doing what we need to do.