An Ultra Mega Dividing Line (2.5 Hours) Covering…A Ton

And greetings! Welcome to The Dividing Line. We are back. We're hopefully gonna stay on the air the whole time. If we don't, we get the program up fairly quickly, so that's sort of beyond our control.

We'll see. We hope that it's gonna work because we have a lot to get to. It's pretty rare for me to announce what we're gonna be talking about ahead of time, but I sort of had to just keep it straight for myself.

I have on the list Francis and Ahmed El-Tayeb's document. We'll be looking at that. We'll be looking at Governor Northam and Infanticide and Blackface, I guess. J .D. Greer, Romans 1 and Homosexuality.

We already announced that while I was in Munster. And then Anthony Bradley and Surviving White People. And then Stephen Anderson's 10 video response series, The King James Only Controversy. No, we're not responding to all 10 videos.

I don't think all 10 have been posted. I've seen, well, I haven't seen them, but I've listened to the first two or three. Yeah, the first three. And I've downloaded the first six. I don't know if there's any more that have been posted.

But anyway, that's a whole lot to get to. I mean, we could just do the J .D. Greer Ceremony and that would be an entire program. So we are planning on being here for a little while. Rich has brought a brown bag lunch and a comfy chair.

And we're gonna take a break about halfway through. That becomes necessary the older I become. That's just sort of how that works. And so there you go. I want to start off really quickly thanking everybody in Russia for taking care of me and keeping me from getting killed.

I guess when I was before five, I lived in a place that had as much snow, Minneapolis, as we had in Samara. But they said that that first fell in December. It had never gone away since then. So now this is the end of January.

So that's two months they've had it. And they'll probably have it at least another two months from now. So that'd be four months out of the year with snow drifts and freezing cold and doing single lane driving where you have to pull over and get out somebody's way so the next group can come by and you try to get.

Oh goodness. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Thank you. I will try to remember that when it's 116 and humid in August. I will try to remember that then because that was, that was fun for a few days, though nobody shovels sidewalks that's why I slipped and hurt my knee on the stairs.

Well, primarily because I had the wrong shoes on. I had good shoes. I had done fine up till then, but I thought, well, let's, we've done all right. Let's, let's just wear our dress shoes. You know, it's going to be Sunday morning service and there's going to be a lot of people there.

And I don't want to be taking the shoes off and blah, blah, blah. Well, that was stupid. And I've now ordered those slip on things since the next time around which might be many, many years from now. Anyway, it was quite the experience and it was great to meet the brethren there and to talk with one brother from Kazakhstan.

And we, Nick and I witnessed to a Muslim cab driver from Tajikistan. And then I had another Muslim cab driver on the way to the airport in Munster. Couldn't have been two more different people, which says a lot in and of itself, but it was a great time and it's great to see sound churches, you know, living under difficult circumstances, but they remain focused on the gospel.

And if you didn't see the link, I did put the link up for the sermon that I preached with, with Nick. My sincere thanks to Nick. I, Mikhail Levlyavsky, I could not, I could not have done that without him there.

You all are probably familiar with Nick by now, after all my trips to Ukraine and the translations, and you just don't know how much it means to have somebody who just knows you so well, and you work together so well.

And you can get a whole lot more said and done with less stress and strain when you have such a awesome translator. Nick himself is a scholar and part of the up and coming next generation that'll be taking over for us old crusty folks in the not too distant future.

And he has a great ministry ahead of him as well, so pray for him and his work over there in Russian speaking areas. And so, tremendous time in Munster, and I'm going to be talking about Munster, but not on this program, another program very soon.

I got some great pictures and did have a wonderful meeting at the Institute for New Testament Textual Studies, which we'll get into when I get back to lecturing on CBGM, which I do need to do. I realized I did one presentation, I then stopped, and I need to finish making that presentation and then get to it.

So, interesting travel experience when you switch airlines a bunch of times. Yeah, Munster, Munich Airport and Heathrow, and I'm getting to know all those places way, way, way, way, way too well. And how to get through passport control very quickly.

But I will tell you, the best money we've ever spent is registered traveler for the UK, because I can get to the baggage carousel in Heathrow faster than I can get to the baggage carousel in Phoenix. So, that says a whole lot right there.

So, anyway, oh, it's going again. Okay, all right, that's nice to know. Just had to keep pounding on it, huh? Okay, all right. If you say so, if you say so. That's not encouraging to me, but anyway. All right, so let's start off with a document that very recently was promulgated and signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam from Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayyib.

This was described as a tremendous interfaith dialogue, and so I felt like I needed to discuss it because of my past dialogue with Yasir Qadhi and is certainly Dr. Qadhi and I's intention to do further dialogues in the future.

It is fascinating to read this document. It's available at the Vatican website. It's very easy to Google it and pull it up very quickly. There's been a lot of discussion about one particular paragraph, which I'll look at.

It's already being spun, as so many things that Francis says and does have to be spun by everybody. And I've asked one Muslim so far for his thoughts on it and would be interested in some others as well, because there did seem to be some statements in it that I know certainly many Muslims that I've would take exception to, but that's for their side to speak to.

This is a document on human fraternity for world peace and living together. Interestingly, the second line is a quotation from the Quran in the name of innocent human life that God has forbidden to kill, affirming that whoever kills a person is like one who kills the whole of humanity, and that whoever saves a person is like one who saves the whole of humanity.

That's straight out of the Quran. In the name of, and then there's lots of stuff here that sounds very, very much like Francis, primarily. And then when you finally get around to God, in the name of God and of everything stated thus far, okay, what God?

In the name of freedom that God has given to all human beings, created them free and distinguishing them by this gift. Now we know Rome is absolutely dedicated to autonomous free will, despite Augustine's presence in history.

And I'm going to have to, I'm going to, if anybody wanted to say anything in channel, I, for some reason, there's almost nothing more distracting than seeing discussions about the stream in the IRC channel.

So there you go. And I'll probably take Twitter down for the same, the same reason. Like I said, folks, sorry, it's a local internet thing. We'll have to call them and see if they can fix it and things like that.

But we keep recording. Huh? Yeah, we thought they had to, but stuff ages and it sits in the sun and it gets, and they mess things up. So we will, so it's, it's dying again. Is that what's going on? Up and down, up and down.

Okay. Yeah. Well, we'll have to, another thing to put on the list there to get to, because that's, you know, people want to watch live, even though we do upload it. So we will be uploading it. Our apologies.

We'll be calling Cox once again to try to get these things hammered out because it's not supposed to work that way. Anyway as I was saying, the document focuses a lot of attention upon the concept of freedom and it's in that context that some of the major problems come up.

And obviously every time we talk about Rome, every time we reach back here and grab the universal Catholic catechism or whatever, we find the centrality of the autonomous human will in Roman theology.

It goes back to the Reformation. This is why I say so many of those who think they're a part of the Reformation really aren't because they are in disagreement with the Reformation on this very issue, that we are creatures, that we are fallen in Adam, that we are enslaved to our sin.

If you don't start there and affirm the freedom of God to act as God and then man's responsibility to act in light of his creaturely freedom, not autonomous freedom, you're going to end up with a tremendous amount of self-contradiction, which is really what you end up with in this document.

Because the document that even the Roman Catholics are sitting going, how do we spin this? Here's what it says. Remember, this was signed by both the Grand Imam and Pope Francis. Freedom is a right of every person.

Each individual enjoys the freedom of belief, thought, expression, and action. The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race, and language are willed by God in his wisdom through which he created human beings.

Now, again, on both sides, okay, a Muslim would say, yeah, God willed that there would be Muslims and Christians and Jews and that the Christians and Jews go to hell. I guess that's pluralism. That's not what Francis would mean by that.

Man, I cannot imagine even Ratzinger, the preceding Pope, using that language, let alone popes of past decades, centuries, things like that. The pluralism and the diversity of religions and then color, sex, race, and language, that's a really interesting mixture of stuff, are willed by God in his wisdom through which he created human beings.

This divine wisdom is the source from which the right of freedom of belief and the freedom to be different derives. Therefore, the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected as to the imposition of a cultural way of life that others do not accept.

Ah, I can't help but thinking a little bit about Sharia, about, for example, the very means by which you become a Muslim is culturally determined. You have to do it in Arabic. You have to say shahada in Arabic.

In almost every presentation that I make on this subject, I compare and contrast how you become a Muslim with how you become a Christian. And go to Acts 15, and that's where Christianity avoided having that type of cultural things.

So it does make me wonder, but most of the focus has been on this assertion that pluralism is the very will of God, the same as race is the will of God, or language is the will of God, or sex is the will of God.

I mean, those are creational things. Now, I've already seen one spin job on it to try to come up with stuff. There'll be more, but it's just more of the Pope. And what's, of course, from a Christian perspective, there isn't anything.

In fact, is there a... Yes, there is a find feature in this. Find within note. Yes. No reference to Jesus anywhere. Nope, not in there. Let me see if... Nope, no Christ. Nope, no Lord. Yeah, if you sort of pretend to be the head of all Christians, and you can do something like this without ever making reference to Jesus, yeah, that's the problem.

Here, you've got a good example of bad interfaith dialogue. And just compare this with what Yasir Qadhi and I did, where we're making truth claims. We're doing so in a consistent fashion. We are contrasting things.

There is trying to find places where you can, and you can find places, and this is the amazing thing, people deny this, you can find places where we actually agree. For example, the world was created by God.

Yes. The world was created by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Ishmael. I'll have to add Ishmael in there. Yeah. How has that God revealed himself? Well, that's where we need to start having debates one another, right?

Respectful, yes, but we can't pretend that the level of agreement goes beyond those particular areas. You can't make pretense in that way. So, yeah, there you go. To my Muslim friends, please realize two things.

The Pope does not represent a large portion of people who call themselves Christians. And the current Pope does not even represent a large portion of people who used to call themselves Catholics. So, keep that in mind.

I've met so many Muslims that just automatically say, oh, the Pope is the head of you guys. No, no, not by any stretch of the imagination is that the case at all. No, no, no. All right. Shifting gears.

That only took us to 2 .20. That's pretty good. We might get done in a mega time. Then again, I haven't even started playing the stuff with the audio clips, which always ends up taking a tremendous amount of time.

The material that appeared basically while I was in, I think I was pretty much, might've first shown up when I was in Samarra, but I think it was pretty much while I was in Munster, with the representative delegate tram in Virginia and the, you know, the New York's infanticide law.

Can we call it what it is? It's an infanticide law. It is very, very pleasing to Lord Moloch and to the millions of Moloch's worshipers all across the United States and the Western world. There is definitely a renaissance and revival of Molochism in our day, and he doesn't care whether you use his name as long as he gets the blood.

As long as he gets the life, then he doesn't care. We know Moloch is just a demon anyways. Listening to the New York Assembly applauding an infanticide law, just think of past generations of Americans.

How many of the preceding generations would have disagreed with the statement that if that's how far this society devolves, then may God wipe it out, take it out. They would have, that's exactly what they would have thought, but not today.

No, no, no. We still have a lot of people. God bless America. For what? And with what? When one of the most populous states in the union, and you know that California is going to do the same thing. All the leftists are now just vying with each other.

How far can we go with this and how quickly can we do it? It's sort of like Colorado giving up its vote, its presidential vote. Did you hear about that? I don't have time. The leftists took over everything in the last election.

They now have an openly gay governor. One of the first things they've done is the left is seeking to undo the constitutional method of electing presidents. What they're going to do is instead of participating in electoral college in the normal fashion, so if a conservative candidate wins the popular vote in Colorado, what they're going to do is they're going to make it by statute that their electoral college votes will go to whoever wins the popular vote.

In other words, it's a open, plain rejection of the wisdom of the electoral college by the founders. It is a plainly anti-American move and it's already been accomplished. Just boom. One of the first things they did, they're getting together with other states and that way they can get rid of the electoral college and you can just be run by California, New York, the whole nation.

Just do whatever the radical nutcases in Colorado, well, Colorado too, in California and New York say that's it. They don't care that they're overthrowing the system of government. They don't care that that means that there are going to be times when their own citizenship, their own citizens will be robbed of their vote, that your vote won't matter unless you vote the same way California, New York does.

They don't care because they want to destroy this nation and are succeeding. They're succeeding, let's just say. They're getting away with it. Anyway, all of this to take us to the situation in Virginia.

Virginia, wow, used to be a southern state. It used to be a place where you had some conservatives, but the cancer of Washington, D .C. has taken over northern Virginia and just runs the place now. And so you have a Democrat, despite CNN trying to turn him into a Republican for a while, a Democrat, Governor Northam, who interestingly ran by accusing his opponent of being a racist.

Do you wonder if when he's running and he's accusing the other guy of being a racist, do you think he ever stopped and went, man, I hope nobody ever finds any of those pictures. He even had a nickname that was a racial slur nickname.

Do you ever think he sat around going, I really hope all those good old boys I used to go out drinking beer with don't say anything. Does it really? Wow. You know, just the level of hypocrisy. But obviously the big thing that has been eclipsed by the primarily politically motivated, but also there are only certain things that can get people riled up on the left today.

And if you ever said or did anything decades ago that does not fit into today's standards, even though the standards have just recently evolved, then you're in big trouble. Um, but when he actually made comments that affirmed infanticide, this guy is a pediatric neurophysiologist neurosurgeon.

He, he does. He is a trained doctor who does operations on little infants. And he made comments about making a, if, if a child survived a late term abortion, making it comfortable while a conversation ensues conversation about what men's ass tried to get a unanimous declaration bill through the Senate.

And of course, a Democrat AKA socialist leftist, uh, objected to it. And so it has to go a different direction, you know, and the, the bill would just simply say that any child that's born alive cannot be killed in the United States.

In other words, it's an anti infanticide bill and who's opposing it. Who else? The party of death. What? Look at the worldview. Look at the worldview people. It's the party of death, but they're not going to oppose anything that would be opposed to death.

So yeah. Um, we're seeing what we've been saying is coming and what we knew was already a part of the worldview for a long, long time. And yet I'm, I still see social justicians, uh, saying, well, you know, we, we can't be single issue voters, you know, um, you know, uh, equality of pay that whole mythology, which has been demonstrated to be a mythology 10 ,000 times, but nobody cares.

Just keep repeating it enough times. Equality of pay. I can see how a Christian could consider that equal with abortion. Yeah. Only if you're insane, only if you're insane. Uh, anyway, um, they are, they are not at the, the, the, the, the barbarians are not the door.

They have broken down the door and they've taken over the reins of government. And there are a lot of people, there are a lot of people that are just openly wondering, is there, is there any hope? Now, obviously for Christians, there's always hope.

We have brothers and sisters living under incredible circumstances all around the world and they remain faithful in those difficult situations. Pretty much purged of all the self-love and stuff love that we have not been purged of yet, but they're there.

But there are people asking, is there, is there any hope for this culture or this nation? And, um, I, I wonder the exact same thing because when I look at the, at the millennials and ZGen, I guess that's what it's being called.

Um, do I find Christian people with a proper Christian? Yeah. Yeah. Are they anywhere near the numbers that would be required to have a meaningful impact in changing the direction that we're going right now?

No, no. Can God change that? You bet. But I'd like to see God change that. I sure would. Um, but what's the toughest thing to do? The toughest thing to do is to think about how you would be faithful in the midst of what's coming either in 2020 or 2024.

And that's not far away because, you know, this, um, what's the guy's name for Starbucks? Um, Schultz. Yeah. This Schultz thing. That's fascinating. That could make, I mean, talk about a zoo as what is it?

17, 18 on the, on the democratic side right now, every socialist on the planet. Um, and then you throw Schultz in there as an independent. Uh, the Democrats are not happy and they are putting pressure on him.

Like, and right now, like you would not believe. Yeah. Yeah. He would be a threat primarily to them. But whether it's 2020 or at the latest 2024, you're going to have a leftist. And by the way, stop calling them liberals.

Liberals want liberty. That's see liberal liberty. There's a root thing there. They're coming from the same root. Um, these people are not liberals. We've just gotten so used to referring to liberal as a leftist.

They are leftist totalitarians. They do not believe in liberty. They do not believe in freedom. Uh, they are statists. Uh, they want to destroy all religious freedom, uh, replace it with sexual freedom.

Uh, let, let's just be straightforward and honest here where these people are coming from, what their intentions are, what their ultimate goals are. Their ultimate goals are the utter eradication of any semblance of historic Western culture that was based upon Judeo-Christian norms because only Judeo-Christian norms can give you an objective standard by which to, to control and critique the state.

You wipe that out. The state can do whatever the state wants, all power, all the time. You are simply the subject. The state is your Lord. That is their goal. That's what they want. Uh, so, uh, they will do whatever they need to do to accomplish that.

And the millennials and the ZGen know nothing about history. Know nothing about history at all. Do not know that this is the very stuff that we were fighting only a matter of decades ago, and now is being promoted by, uh, AOC and, um, the, uh, Muslim lady from, uh, Michigan, um, and numerous others like her and the nutcase Senator from my own state.

Uh, that is so embarrassing. I've lived in this state for 40, 45 years, and it'd be 45 years this summer. And to think that this state could ever send, um, Kyrsten Sinema to the Senate is absolutely one of the most embarrassing things I can even think of.

But then again, I think of almost any state today, and you really have to work hard where do you find a state where you wouldn't have to go, wow, there's a, Oh, look at that. Oh man. That's just, that's just sort of what's going on all over the place.

So, um, I don't think the governor is going to survive as governor. Um, I think eventually somebody will put the fix in and give him a deal he can't refuse. And that, but, but did you hear that? Did you hear the news?

The Lieutenant governor, the black Lieutenant governor who could then serve out his three years and then another, so get seven years there in Virginia. As soon as it became, as all the calls for Northam to resign started getting loud, sexual assault charges started popping up against the Lieutenant governor.

One of which he's admitted, he did have consensual sex outside the bounds of marriage with this woman. Totally different. Totally different than the Kavanaugh stuff. Much more recent admitted to as far as relationship, the whole nine yards.

And yet of course the press had known about these and sat on them because he's a leftist. And because the media is the arm of the leftists. It's, we all know it. Everybody knows it. There's no reason to argue about it anymore.

It's it's, it's obvious. That's just, you know, many people in the world live in cultures like this now, where everybody knows corruption, corruption, corruption, it's all a bunch of lies. That's what, that's, you know, we just got to get used to it.

We just got to use it anyway. All right. 2 .30. I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. Stream's going strong, huh? Yeah, that's good. All right. Now I do not know J .D. Greer. Never met him. Honestly, even after he was elected last summer, that was last summer, wasn't it?

I think it was. Um, I, when he was elected, if you had shown me a picture of 10 different guys, I couldn't have told you which one was him. Never heard him speak. Um, heard from some people that he was mildly reformed in some way.

Um, don't have any bones to pick with him on a personal level. Don't know the guy, but he's the president of Southern Mass Convention. And a sermon was preached about two weeks ago now, um, from, he's going through Romans.

It's always good to go through Romans. Well, unless you go through Romans the way that we went through Romans, uh, in Sunday school, uh, back about 1985, 86. And that was about, about when it was, wasn't it?

Where you cover all of Romans in what was it about six, eight weeks, something like that. And, you know, Romans nine, 10, 11, we can skip over that part. Yeah. That wasn't way to, um, this was in the Southern Baptist quarterly.

If you've not Dave, I wonder if they even have a quarterly anymore. Do Southern Baptist have, I took Twitter down, so I guess I can bring Twitter back up if, yeah, I don't know. Um, but, um, yeah, let me ask, uh, let me ask folks in, in Twitter.

Um, uh, yeah. Do the Southern Baptist still have, uh, quarterlies because they were bad, really bad 35 years ago. They were surface level fluff balls 35 years ago. So I would imagine by this point, they would be so puffy that they would float.

They would just, no one could hold onto him, right? Oh man. They were, how do you feel about this? Anyway? Um, I don't know if I'll, if I'll get any answers to that. So why in the world would I get myself in even more trouble?

Um, because this will get me in trouble. Uh, I'm not sure how anybody can get me in trouble all that much, but anyway, um, why would I review someone else's sermon on Romans one? Well, because J .D. Greer is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention and because, um, he claims to have reformed pedigree and because he said many good and true things in the sermon, but it was the handling of the text, the direction it ended up going and the influence very plainly of the social justice movement, determining the application and even I would say the exegesis in the text in this sermon.

And when that's done by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, that makes it worth looking at. Um, uh, that's interesting. Did you know this? Did you see that? Did you know that Sinema went to BYU?

Now that's interesting. I'd like to, yeah, yeah, yeah, I knew that. I knew that. Anyway. All right. Um, my concern with what was said fundamentally comes down to J .D. Greer did not seem to understand what Romans one 26 to 27, how that's functioning in the flow of the argument in Romans one.

What he does is he removes it from being the, the, the example that Paul gives of the exchange, the giving up, not, not giving over, but the, the, the exchanging and giving up of one thing for another, the twistedness that results in the creator creation relationship when the creature refuses to acknowledge the creator and engages in idolatry.

He talked about idolatry over and over again. Idolatry is the root of everything else in this chapter. He emphasized that very strongly, but what he missed was he made, it was, it was like homosexuality was just one of the sins listed in the vice list at the end of the chapter.

And that isn't the case. There is a reason why Romans one 26 to 27 is where it is before the vice list. Homosexuality isn't just some other thing you can throw in and make the same as disobedience to parents.

And that was the thing that he's trying to do. He's trying to say all sins are equal. That's a very problematic position to take because God's law didn't treat all sins as equal. Did it? No, it didn't.

Go back to Leviticus 18, read the holiness code, read Deuteronomy. What do you discover? You discover there were certain sins inclusive of homosexuality, bestiality as well, that resulted in the nations that had been in the holy land beforehand being spewed out by the land itself.

These were pagan nations. This has nothing to do with the Jewish people not keeping the covenant and all the rest. No, no. This is the pagan nations did these things and homosexuality is one of them and the land spewed them out.

The list of things was limited. The list did not include disobedience to parents. It did not include the vast majority of the vice list that Paul provides at the end of the chapter. And so, it was J .D. Greer's attempt throughout this sermon to make homosexuality a sin like unto all other sins.

And it's easy to do that because, obviously, all sins separate from God. All sins bring the wrath of God. But not all sins bring the wrath of God in the same way. That's plain from the comparison of Chorazin and Bethsaida with Sodom and Gomorrah.

What's the difference between the two? The amount of light they have. So, even committing the same sin in different contexts of how much light you have resulted in what? Different levels of punishment.

In the same way, the penology provided by the law demonstrates that there are certain sins that the commission of which is considered to be extremely heinous in God's sight. There are a lot of Christians that misunderstand Jesus's application of, for example, you've heard it said, thou shalt not kill.

But if I say to you, if you have hatred in your heart toward your brother, you've committed murder already. Okay. A lot of Christians look at something like that. Or, obviously, Jesus is saying, you've heard it said, you shall not commit adultery, but if you have lust for women in your heart, you've committed adultery already in your heart.

And so, they go, oh, that means everything's the same. That means all sins are the same. So, go ahead and have adultery. Go ahead and do the physical act because you've already done it mentally because it's all the same.

No, that wasn't Jesus's intention. Jesus's intention was to bring the searching light of truth and justice and holiness into the thought life, but it was not meant to say that if you do it in the thought life, then, hey, it's all the same.

It's all the same. Go ahead. Why not? Same punishment? No, it's not the same punishment. You see, people could get away with the thought life part and Jesus is saying, you won't before God. But the fact remained, under the law, you had to actually commit the act before you would receive the punishment.

And so, what was missed in J .D.'s presentation, J .D. Greer's presentation, we have to be specific there. What was missed in J .D. Greer's presentation is the role that Romans 1, 26 -27 plays in demonstrating the depth of depravity and the nature of depravity and the twisting of the creator-creator relationship so that sin goes all the way down into the very self-definition of man and woman.

That's why it says, even their women gave up the natural function. This is how deeply this can impact, this rebellion can impact the human race, is all the way to that level. Now, that's in a different part of the conversation than the vice list later on.

That got all jumbled up, as we will see. As we'll see. So, I'm going to try to keep my comments succinct. Yeah, I know. I don't have a long track record of being able to do that very well. But here we go.

Okay, I guess I need to.

Select this. There we go. I will tell you that I've been pretty nervous about this message all.

Week long. I found that interesting and understandable. But in light of what he's going to end up saying and the applications he's going to make, I think part of the nervousness was how to try to make this application work with the social justice aspect to it.

In Romans 1, Paul is demonstrating to us that every single person, Jew or Gentile, religious or irreligious, all of us have essentially the same problem. And that problem is that all of us have turned away from the knowledge of God that was made known to us.

In creation and in our consciences. Now, I think it's important, another problem I had was he will later on, I'll play it, he will later on make the direct statement that you can simply take out the they and make it us.

That short circuits the very purposeful approach that Paul uses. In Romans 1, he talks about the universal sinfulness of man in such a way that requires him in Romans 2 to address the Jew who heard Romans 1 as being specifically about everybody else in broad categories.

And then so he has to, in chapter 2, address the Jew. And it's only in 3 then that he brings the two accusations together so that all of mankind, Jew and Gentile, stands before God equally condemned. But there is a progression, and I don't think it's wise to change the wording of the text and the understanding of the text to short circuit the progression that the apostle himself builds into the text.

But that ended up happening in this sermon.

I to this very poor, some of them and taking the little money they had and pointed out an offering before this statue of this God. And I remember being in that temple and just at one point just feeling so overwhelmed at what I felt like was the spiritual darkness and the oppression that I just I had to leave.

I had to walk outside and to get out away from it. And I remember later finding myself just going back over that incident in my mind and feeling sorry for the people there and thanking God kind of in my heart that I wasn't like them.

But then in the middle of that thought, it just occurred to me. I had a whole list of things in my heart that have taken God's place, just like that statue had. And those things that I had given Godlike way to my heart are just as nauseating and oppressive to God as that statue would be to me.

Okay, so here is the beginning of the attempt to flatten out all sin. All sin's just sin. There's nothing more to it than that. Sin's just sin. And so if you go into a pagan temple and offer sacrifice to a hideous idol, that's identical.

It's the exact same thing as, well, every single Christian can recognize that in our incomplete state of sanctification that there are times that the world gets in the way and we have inappropriate idols in our lives.

It's all the same thing. It's all based on idol. See, here's the problem. You can identify a common source that does not mean that the manifestation of the sin is identical. Just because it comes from the same source does not make it the same exact thing.

And that's where I think he's gotten completely off. It would be appropriate, it is necessary that the biblical writers specifically mock the idolatry that he's there going, well, now look, if he said, well, I'm certainly glad I'm not like them because I'm better into myself.

No. But if as a Christian, you are revolted by that idolatry, that is appropriate. You want to reach those people. They're made in the image of God. You want to be, you want to testify to them. It doesn't mean that you become any less revolted at the obviousness of the sin.

Paul's heart was deeply troubled when he saw the pagan worship amongst the Athenians, and that motivated him to testify. He didn't curl up in a ball and go, oh, I just do so many of the same things. No, he ends up giving that tremendous sermon on Mars Hill.

And so you can't flatten all this stuff out. You can't just simply say, well, because it has one source, then it's all the same. That's a major category error. And it's a category error that was repeated numerous times in the process.