Is the Trinity Essential? And Much More

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and we're asking the question today, is the

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Trinity essential? And you might ask yourself, why would we bother asking that question? Because we've answered it many times over the past, um, well, you know, uh, we're, we're coming up on, um, you know, uh, we, we've pretty much worked our ways way through, um, a number of decades now we're coming up on, let's see, 1983 was a start.

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So that'll, we're coming up on 40 years. That's four, four decades of this stuff.

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And we have addressed this topic numerous times, numerous times. Um, that does not mean that it does not need to be addressed again, uh, because, um, it does and it probably needs to be addressed a little bit more often than we, than we have.

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Um, the assumption being that people have heard everything we've said before, and that's, that's not a valid assumption given how many new people we get all the time.

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And we thank you for that. We don't advertise, we don't advertise. So, um, the fact that we have the audience we have is word of mouth.

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And so people come along and yes, lots of people come up to me and say, Hey, yeah,

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I've been listening to everything all the way back in the archives, back to 1998. I'm like, you poor thing. Um, and if you're doing that, then you've heard this discussion many times before, but not many people do that.

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And obviously it is a vitally important question. Um, because most, most of the people that would find this program to be useful, um, are people who go to churches that take the

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Bible very seriously. And when I say seriously, I mean in a supernatural sense. Um, believe that it is truly a divine revelation, that it's consistent with itself, um, that it is given to us by God, uh, to be the final word from him.

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That means we're a pretty small group relatively speaking, because there's a lot of people who believe that the

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Bible contains the word of God, becomes the word of God. Um, that the Bible is one amongst many revelations from God, um, that believe it's special, but not sufficient to that there is latter day revelation.

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And I don't mean just the Mormons, but I had a guy show up at church Sunday night, um, walking out.

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I preached on a revelation four and five. I'm walking out and this guy comes up to me and he, he says that, uh, he's got some special revelations from the

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Lord. And, uh, he'd like to have a few minutes to sit down with me and, uh, had something to do, had something to do with Mel Gibson movies.

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Um, did, did Mel Gibson do a movie about Paul? Cause he seemed to be saying something about Paul.

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And basically what he was saying was, if we could help him get the word out about this stuff, it would result in a movie that would make a billion dollars.

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And he would tithe off of that to the church. So yeah.

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Um, and, and I was the only pastor there. Uh, all the other guys are in Oklahoma for the big stuff going on down there today with SB 13.

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And, um, so I, I had to, I had to take the position of authority for the entire church and say, we ain't interested.

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Yeah. We don't believe in Latter -day Revelation. He was shocked. What? You, what? You don't?

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Did you just sit through the entire sermon that I just gave from Revelation four and five and didn't pick that up?

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Uh, whatever. So yes, we, if we believe these things. Oh yes. Uh -huh. I was going to piggyback on your comment about the

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Trinity and how far back yes, you go with it. The oldest recording we have on sermon audio, the oldest tape, the very first audio recording in the tape series is that you ever did two years, two and a half years before I came into the picture.

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I'm guessing around 1985. It's on sermon audio. It is called the

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Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It is the oldest subject all of our recordings.

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If you would like to hear how the human voice ages over the decades, um, listen to the young kid, um, who was at that point 22, 23.

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Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no two ways about it. It, it goes back away anyway.

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Uh, and you know something, it's, it's a little scary to have stuff you did that long ago, still available to be listened to.

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And it's like, okay, well, and you know what the second one is? I seem to remember what 002 was.

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I, cause I ran it enough times on a, on a duplicator. Well, the son of God, Lord of glory.

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God, Lord of glory. Yeah. Deity of Christ. Uh -huh. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Important stuff.

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So the point is, um, we have certainly addressed it. So why would we be addressing it today?

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Well, because a video, uh, came out from William Lane Craig.

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And what's interesting is I don't follow William Lane Craig, not for any other reason.

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Then there's only, you can only meaningfully follow so many people. Um, but a

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Muslim friend of mine sent me the link and said thoughts. So here are my thoughts.

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So we're going to listen to the comments and respond, uh, to what

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William Lane Craig had to say. Um, what? Yes, it's a black screen right now.

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Um, I will see the problem here is I would like to be able to stop and start, but if I do some of the stuff at the end, it changes the meaning of some of the stuff that was said earlier.

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So let's, let's just, let's just jump into it and see, see how it goes. The doctrine of the

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Trinity is that God is not just one person. That's called

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Unitarianism. Trinitarianism says that God is three persons,

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now I think that this doctrine is right at the core of the

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Christian faith. It serves to distinguish Christianity from Judaism and Islam, which are both forms of Unitarianism.

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We believe that God is tri -personal rather than uni -personal. I don't think that it's necessarily essential to salvation, however.

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For example, I think that Abraham and Moses will be in heaven.

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They were saved, but they didn't believe the doctrine of the Trinity. They'd never heard of it. And similarly,

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I imagine there are people today, people on the mission field who hear the gospel preached over the shortwave radio, who place their faith in Christ and are saved, who don't understand or have an appreciation of the doctrine of the

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Trinity, and sadly, there may be people in our churches, frankly, who do not understand and believe in the doctrine of the

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Trinity. But nevertheless, they are believing in Christ as Savior and believing that he is divine, that he's the

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Lord, and so I don't think that belief in the Trinity is essential to salvation.

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The doctrine of the Trinity, I think, lies at the core of Christianity because it explains to us who

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God is and what he is like. And if you deny the doctrine of the Trinity, you're probably going to be denying either the deity of Christ, which would mean that you don't understand who he really is.

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You think he's just another human being like you, which is just utterly inadequate. You cannot worship him if he's just a human being.

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That would be idolatry and blasphemy to worship Jesus if he's only human, and yet we are called upon to worship

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Jesus. He must be divine. Or the person might deny the person of the

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Holy Spirit, but then that again would be to deny one of the persons that God is and to deny his work in the world and in salvation.

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The Holy Spirit is absolutely essential to our salvation. It is he who draws us to God, who convicts us of sin, and who regenerates us and brings about the new birth, who then indwells us and enables us to live the

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Christian life. Okay. So, all right.

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With all due respect to Brother Craig, when

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I first saw this, Phil Johnson had tweeted it, and he had the best commentary.

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He said, this is just muddled. And it is. It's muddled on every level. First of all, the doctrine of Trinity given was rather inadequate.

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It assumed a number of things. It did not emphasize monotheism.

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It assumed anyone asking the question was already understood the necessity of monotheism, which as a philosopher,

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I'm sure that's the primary thing he's dealing with, but those of us that are out here in the trenches are dealing with a lot of other things other than that.

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And so, we do have polytheists and other perspectives to work with.

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So, when he talks about God being tripersonal, he does not differentiate between being in person, a person who needs that information to understand the difference between the fact there's one being of God, three divine persons being in person are not the same thing.

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All of that is passed over in the giving of the definition. And then it said that this serves to differentiate.

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Well, yeah, that's an understatement. It is the essential self -revelation of God that is seen primarily in the incarnation of Christ, His ministry, death, burial, resurrection to the right hand of the

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Father in heaven, and then He and the Father sending the Holy Spirit. And so, this becomes the center point of history.

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And everything before looks forward to it, everything afterwards looks back to it. So, it doesn't just serve to do that.

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It is God's self -revelation in an amazing reality of the incarnation of the second person, the

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Trinity. And so, the definition certainly was minimal, but you would think that if you're asking the question, is the

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Trinity essential, that you would not only define the Trinity very carefully, you would define the word essential very clearly, and it was not defined.

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What you hear is, well, it's not essential for salvation.

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But then, as he continues on, you come to understand that what he's saying is that you do not have to have perfect knowledge of the doctrine of the

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Trinity for salvation. That's what he's saying. He talks about people in the church, he talks about the person listening to the shortwave radio in the field, you know, that might not fully understand this, that, or the other thing.

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And then he does get into some of the denials, but even then does not get to the important element of what the denials would actually involve.

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And so, to ask the question is to beg that you define, well, what do you mean by essential?

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Is it essential to the defining of the Christian faith itself?

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Well, of course. You know, he says it's at the core. I would say it is the core. God is the core.

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Everything else radiates out from that. So, what could be more essential than the Trinity?

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Because the Trinity includes within it the assertions of monotheism, hence all the attributes of God, immutability, everything else.

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The doctrine of God is the central core that defines everything else.

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And so, there's no question about that. And so, if you're talking about essential as in defining, of course.

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Of course, this is why we can't have fellowship with Unitarians. So, of course, it's essential in defining the

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Christian faith, but that's not really what he was addressing.

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What he was saying, in essence, was is it essential to know the

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Trinity? Well, I would say on a certain level, yes. Since this is the highest of God's revelation, it's his personal revelation, it tells us who

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God is, to reject how God has revealed himself to exist is going to obviously put you in the position of not being able to worship the one true

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God. But even when he said, well, you know, so if you're not going to believe the

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Trinity, then you're going to be denying the deity of Christ. You're going to be denying the deity of the Holy Spirit.

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Well, actually, when you think about the doctrine of the Trinity, there are a number of ways to deny it. And if you understand the three biblical foundations it's based on, one

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God, three persons, so the existence of the

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Father, Son, and Spirit as having communion with one another, communicating with one another, distinguished from one another, not only in their relationship in the

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Godhead eternally, but in their actions and activities and creation and redemption.

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And then the equality of those persons is the third point, and that would be the deity of Christ, deity of the

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Holy Spirit. Their equality not in being the same, but their equality in participation in the one being that is

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God. So the deity of Christ, personality of the Holy Spirit. If you deny these things, there's two ways to deny these things.

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The first is to know what the doctrine is and say it's wrong. And the other is to not know what the doctrine is and think it's something else and believing that.

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One is a willful rejection of the doctrine.

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The other is ignorance. The other is could be blamed upon traditions and the church not being willing to address things it needs to address.

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There's all sorts of things. But the point is that we must differentiate between willful rejection of known truth and an ignorant lack of confession of the truth or a holding of an error again out of ignorance.

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I have said for decades now that I would be fearful to give a quiz, a test, at the vast majority of evangelical churches this coming

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Lord's Day, on the doctrine of the Trinity for fear that probably 70 to 90 percent of the people who've actually made the effort to go to church would fail that quiz.

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They would fail that test and would test positive for some kind of heresy.

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Now, how many of them would love to be corrected, to be instructed?

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A large portion of them. But this is what we are facing, and so if perfection of understanding and theology were the standard, who would be saved?

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There are very few, if any, with a perfect, complete knowledge of everything there is to know about the nature of God, the

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Trinity, and everything else. No question about it. But perfection has never been the standard.

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The essential issue—and I'm getting a crick in the neck here—the essential issue that has to be addressed is the issue of defining that keyword, essential.

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Are you talking about essential in reference to you must have

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X amount of knowledge to have saving faith? Now, obviously, we believe there is some minimal floor on that.

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There has to be some content to the gospel, and there has to be some content as to the

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God who is calling you to repentance, and it would make sense that that minimal floor of data, truth, information is going to be related to a person's capacity and ability.

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That is, the minimum necessary requirement for a five -year -old is different from a ten -year -old, which is different from a fifteen -year -old, which is different from a twenty -year -old.

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And so, you take that into consideration. And in all of this, we have to differentiate, we have to make the category distinction that was not made in the video, that you can use the term essential in defining the faith.

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And it is essential that the doctrine of the Trinity is the very definition of the faith.

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The gospel is Trinitarian, you cannot make heads or tails out of the New Testament outside of the doctrine of the

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Trinity, who Jesus is, relationship with the Father, all these things. So, in that realm of defining the faith, there is no question of centrally essential and definitional.

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But that's a separate consideration from asking, can the individual at my church who, again, if tested, has a modalistic understanding of the doctrine of the

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Trinity, be saved? Now, I'm not saying that we should try to make it so that people would be confused or make it so that people can have the easiest way of believing, none of those types of things.

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What I'm saying is, what if you have someone in your church, and I think this is the majority, who, if you ask them, would stumble?

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I've told a story about, it's illustrative at this point, so I'll tell it again. I was at a church in the

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Tampa Bay area years ago, before YouTube, and before YouTube, I could role play with people.

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I could come into a class, and I could pretend to be a Jehovah's Witness, or I could pretend to be a

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Mormon, and I would accurately represent what these groups believed, and blow everybody away, and then halfway through, you stop and put them all back together again.

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But boy, did they listen. It was a very effective thing that I haven't gotten to do for years now, thanks to what you're watching me on the internet.

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I'm not going to wear a wig, or anything like that, and try to look like somebody else.

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That's not going to happen, so I don't get to do it anymore. I went into this church, and I spoke to the junior high class.

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Now look, getting junior high schoolers to listen for more than 14 seconds is a miracle somewhere close to the global flood.

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Right on, right in the generally same area. Because I am convinced that when we're born, we begin that march toward being full humans, and we're going up, and we're going up, and then we hit 12, and then it goes back up around 16, 17.

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There's that spot in there, about 12 and a half to 15 and a half or so, where I'm just, you know, we're just lucky that we believe in pro -life, because it's just like,

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I'm not so sure about that one, you know, I'm gonna cash in the warranty on that one. And so it's tough to deal with the junior high time period.

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And so it was very effective to have me come in and tell the students that I was a

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Jehovah's Witness. Yeah, I was from the local kingdom hall. And so they're like, ooh, oh, this is gonna be cool to get to watch our youth minister, you know, talk to a

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Jehovah's Witness. This is more interesting than what happened at school this week and so on and so forth.

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So we had their attention. Honestly, within 30 seconds of starting the dialogue with this poor young college student youth minister guy,

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I had him spouting heresy. I had him spouting modalism.

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Yes, the father and the son are one person. So you believe, you know, when Jesus said, if you see me, you've seen the father, that Jesus and the father are one person.

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Well, yeah, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. All it took, that was that easy.

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And I know, he's just a kid, you know, quit picking on the poor kid. Well, you know, hopefully he's figured out the

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Trinity since then. But the point is, everybody else in the room's sitting there going, oh, okay.

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And they didn't want to be the one answering the questions, that's for sure. And so with that in mind, was he lost?

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Was he without salvation? Because when asked a very, what should be a basic question for all of us, failed to make the proper differentiation?

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Now, I will point out, if we properly catechized our people, this wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue.

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I mean, anybody who has done the Westminster catechism, shorter or longer, or Keech's catechism, or any of the abundantly good catechisms and programs that are out there, that's one of the first questions that you learn.

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And you learn to distinguish between being in person and the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit.

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And so, yeah, it does say something about the fact that a lot of our churches are very deficient at that point.

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But does that mean this person was unsaved? I say no. That only becomes a indicator of some kind of true spiritual issue if, when faced with correction, when you go, you know, because obviously we went halfway through the period of time for that class, and I stopped and said, okay,

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I'm actually James White, I'm from Phoenix, Arizona, and I'm a Christian apologist, I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, and let's go back over the stuff that we talked about here.

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And I went back and hopefully kindly, and without embarrassing the poor guy, too much anyways, corrected all of the stuff that I had just said to help them to understand.

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And it got their attention. It was an efficient way of doing things, like I said. Did he become a

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Christian once I corrected him? No. But if he had gone, no, I don't, okay, you've just shown me where the

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Bible clearly differentiates between the Father and the Son, and the Son has eternally existed as the

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Son in relationship with the Father, two divine persons, I see all that, but I reject that. I'm going to believe in a

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Unitarian God. Okay, now you've got a problem. Now you've got an issue. Because if you don't confess to the

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Son, then you'll have the Father also. If you think the Son's just simply a mere human being, then don't have the

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Father, 1 John 2, et cetera, et cetera. So now we can start dealing with that particular issue.

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But in my experience, the vast majority of believers that you talk to, once you explain these things, they're like, oh man,

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I'd always wondered about that. Yeah, of course. And it just opens up vistas of truth to them in the pages of the scriptures.

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So, the unfortunate thing about this video is that by not defining the category that you're addressing, and by not defining the word essential, and by muddling those two things up, you don't bring clarity, you bring a lack of clarity.

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And so, is the Trinity essential? Of course, it is definitional of the

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Christian faith. Is it possible for a Christian to be ignorant about aspects of Trinitarian theology?

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Well, better be, because probably all of us are. If I ask you right now to define perichoresis or go to hell, will your pulse rate go up just a little bit?

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Now, perichoresis is just simply the interpenetration of the divine persons in their relationship to one another.

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What does that involve? Some of these things, yeah, what does that involve?

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It's not a physical thing. It has to do with the relationship of the divine persons and their relationship to the divine being.

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But I would guess that 98 .5

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% of all the people who were involved in my young life in teaching the truth never, ever heard of the term perichoresis.

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Does that mean they weren't Christians? No, but it does mean that making a perfection of understanding of the doctrine of the

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Trinity the standard means that there probably aren't any

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Christians on the planet. Now, what that should do for us is encourage us to know more about what

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God has revealed about himself. If you know more about prophecies about a seven -year tribulation period than you know about the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, you've got all your priorities upside down.

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If you can't say amen, at least say ouch. That's what Woody Balcombe says, and he's right.

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So it should be something that is absolutely central, and certainly any person by the time they're in their teen years is fully capable of having a real understanding of what the doctrine of the

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Trinity is, what its ramifications are, how it's related to the gospel. Vitally important stuff.

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Vitally important stuff. Essential? Yes, most definitely, in opposition to what

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Dr. Craig said, but recognizing that Dr. Craig just simply was muddled and was using the term essential in two different ways, and that's where the problem came in in that particular instance.

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Okay, so also was sent a video from Bart Ehrman.

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I'll be perfectly honest with you, I'm afraid to play this. I have the feeling we could be

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DCMA'd by his people. I know it's fair use, and I know we'd win eventually, and it would mean that 30 days down the road this program would finally be aired again.

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So what I'm going to do is instead of playing it, I'm going to summarize it for you.

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You don't have to show it. Well, actually, if you want, we can do it that way because they certainly can't go after us about a screenshot when you're discussing something.

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All right. A video was put out, and we could probably do this in a...

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there you go. Bart Ehrman, it's less than four minutes long.

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History in five minutes. Well, I guess three minutes and 52 seconds counts in less than five minutes. And as is commonplace with Bart Ehrman, the issue with Ehrman is not the facts.

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It's the framework of the facts leading to the conclusions. Bart Ehrman's doctoral dissertation was on the development of the

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Proto -Alexandrian text type in an early Egyptian Christian writer. I'll be very interested to find out, by the way, once more of the

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CBGM analysis is completed, what he's going to say about all that because so far the

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Alexandrian text has not been identified by CBGM. But anyway, that's neither here nor there.

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The point is that he's a textual critical scholar, but back in 2009 when we debated, and you watch that, and you can see he's extremely dismissive of me.

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He's extremely dismissive of the audience. He was just there to do his thing. He gave the same presentation he'd given in the previous debate with Dan Wallace.

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He hadn't even fixed the problems. He had that presentation as far as misspelled words or anything else. He was just there to do his thing and leave, and he didn't care what was being said back to him.

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He wasn't really listening. So in that, we had initially wanted to focus upon his assertion that the presence of textual variation precludes the possibility of inspiration.

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His point is this very strange idea that if God inspired something, then he would never allow textual variation to take place, which as I've pointed out, would mean that God could not have inspired the

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Bible until 1949 with the invention of the photomechanical photocopier.

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But as it may, shortly before, he probably looked at his calendar and said,

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I'm not debating that, and forced us to use the misquoting

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Jesus title because he did not want to have to defend the theological claim that he makes.

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He says, I'm a historian, but he makes all sorts of theological claims. And so what he does in this video is he is extremely blunt in saying the historical

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Jesus believed this and didn't believe that. Now, I found that highly ironic, given that his name became a household name in any, well, it's not, okay, it's not a household name.

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Rush Limbaugh is a household name. Mart Ehrman is not. But amongst people familiar with this field, misquoting

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Jesus was his big entree there. Now, those of us in the field had read the Orthodox expression of scripture long before that, but that was really where he started grabbing public attention.

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And the interesting thing there is the whole idea of that book is we don't know what Jesus said. We, you know, given the presence of textual variation and in manuscripts and so on and so forth, you know, we're not really sure what

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Jesus said and things like that. But in this video, Bart Ehrman is very certain exactly what

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Jesus believed. But the terminology he uses is where you need to understand where he's coming from.

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He says the historical Jesus, the historical Jesus. So what is this video about?

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Well, evidently he's got a book coming out next month on Heaven and Hell. So he's doing the eschatology thing. He's doing the, again,

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I am firmly convinced when you look at the titles and topics of Bart Ehrman's popular books since misquoting

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Jesus, this is a personal journey on his part to bring as many with him on the journey of apostasy as he can.

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This is a long apologetic for denying Christianity. Here, I don't believe anymore.

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Let me help you not believe anymore. That's what it's about. So, you know, the forgery stuff, the memory stuff, and, you know, it's just all meant to undercut all the foundations of the

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Christian faith. That's what its intention is. And so now he's getting to eschatology real eschatology.

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We tend to use term eschatology of stuff that's actually ancillary to real eschatology.

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The final things, Heaven and Hell. And so he makes five points. Here's the first point,

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Heaven and Hell as concepts do not appear in the Old Testament or Jesus's teachings. So what you need to understand very quickly is most of what

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Bart Ehrman said in this video would not be considered controversial in most theological seminaries and Bible colleges across the

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United States. I said this to the folks at Apologia a few weeks ago.

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I think it was two weeks ago. And it's important for everybody to understand this. If you believe in things such as the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture, the existence of a day of judgment, the punishment of the wicked, the presence of the righteous in God's heaven, you're in a very small minority.

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And the problem is people get converted they only know the one church they were converted in.

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And therefore, they don't realize the spectrum, the range of stuff that's out there.

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And when they find out about it, they feel deceived. Well, I'm not going to be the one deceiving you. Okay, I'm just letting you know right now that.

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And here's one of the reasons I don't use the majority scholars stuff that you hear evidentialists or classic apologists, whoever they want to describe themselves, using all the time.

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Well, the majority of scholars believe blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, the majority of scholars don't believe in the virgin birth. And the majority of scholars don't believe in the inspiration of scripture.

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And the majority of scholars do not believe in the existence of heaven and hell. And these are people teaching in Bible colleges and seminaries.

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So you need to be aware of that. That means you have to have a reason for the hope that's within you.

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And so, it is very common for you to be told that heaven and hell as concepts do not appear in the

40:57

Old Testament or Jesus' teachings. And notice how that was framed, first of all, because they plainly exist in the rest of the

41:05

New Testament. And the problem is you're dealing with someone like Bart Ehrman. And Bart Ehrman just represents the rest of unbelieving biblical scholarship.

41:17

I don't know why you want to be a Bible scholar if you don't believe it. I don't get it either, but they're out there. So what you'll be told, and this is why you've heard me say this before, what do

41:33

I say the most dangerous place for a Christian is? Huh? Christian bookstore.

41:39

Why? Well, I guess there's a lot fewer dangerous places for Christians today than there used to be.

41:46

I mean, is there any even left here in the valley? But I mean, there used to be

41:53

Berean and all the, you know, you could drive. No, no, no, no.

42:03

I don't know where one is. Do you? Is that one still up around 60?

42:09

Is one up around 75th and Bell or something like that? It was, it was the last time

42:16

I was there was a trinket shop, but that was 10 years ago. The point is Christian bookstores used to be a big thing.

42:25

There was a Berean Christian bookstore right next to Grand Canyon College back when I was there. And I call it a dangerous place because as you walk down, especially the commentary aisle or the theology aisle, what you need to be thinking is that there are coiled snakes on every shelf because I've just seen it happen so many times.

42:51

A believer just wanting to know the Bible better goes to some

42:57

Christian bookstore, buys a commentary, gets home, starts reading, and is just flooded with unbelief.

43:06

This never really happened. And this is contradicting to that. And this author is contradicting to that author. And that's the normative.

43:13

That's the norm. Finding good, solid commentaries are actually based upon taking the scriptures as a whole.

43:24

You were laughing. What are you laughing about? Oh, all

43:30

Catholic bookstores. Well, you got to, got to get your, all your saints and candles and stuff like that someplace.

43:40

Yeah. Yeah. Google doesn't know. So yeah. So anyway, what you would find is exactly what you have on the screen right now.

43:54

Because you have as the background a viewpoint of, for example, the

44:04

Old Testament that does not see the Old Testament as a divine revelation.

44:12

In other words, it doesn't view the Old Testament the way Jesus viewed it or the apostles did.

44:21

And so what you have are all these distinct books separated from one another.

44:31

And so you can't connect what's said in one to what's said in another.

44:39

And so there really isn't almost, there isn't almost anything that is a coherent concept in the

44:48

Old Testament, according to much of modern thinking. Because it's just a mishmash of badly edited human documents that have, has absolutely no coherent message on anything at all.

45:05

And then when it says Jesus's teachings, you gotta be real careful here. This wouldn't include

45:12

John, for example, because most of you are sitting there going, in my father's house are many rooms or mansions as the

45:21

King James rooms. In my father's house are many rooms. I'm going to go to prepare a place for you. What do you mean

45:26

Jesus didn't talk about heaven? And what do you mean he didn't talk about hell? What? You've got to understand.

45:35

He said the historical Jesus. And the historical Jesus, we know next to nothing about.

45:43

From this perspective, you can't know whether Jesus actually said anything that was attributed to him.

45:52

Remember when we played, we did do the thing on Unbelievable where he's going back and forth with Dr.

45:58

Johnson, I think it was. Only within the past number of months. And, you know, he thought he was being generous a number of times.

46:07

But yeah, I think probably, okay, I don't know if we played this one, but I remember it clearly.

46:14

Erwin's like, yeah, I think Jesus probably predicted the fall of Jerusalem. Yeah. But if you ask him, did he do so in Matthew chapter 24?

46:24

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, of course not. You can't, you can't trust that. So all the gospels are not trustworthy as actual recordings of Jesus' words.

46:38

So all of these scholars, and if you want to see how this works out with someone who's a little less,

46:46

I don't know, I just found him to be a much nicer person personally. Listen to my debate with John Dominick Crossan.

46:53

Brilliant guy, brilliant mind. But when you take a brilliant mind and give it all sorts of disconnected facts, it's going to put stuff together in a way that reflects what that mind wants to see.

47:08

And whenever you have people doing the historical Jesus versus the Jesus of faith distinction thing, and this is central, central to understanding liberalism, to understanding the majority of people who call themselves

47:25

Christians in the United States believe there is a vast difference between the Jesus of faith and the

47:30

Jesus of history. The Jesus of history was just this moral teacher that we know next to nothing about.

47:39

The Jesus of faith is built up by later generations, and this is what you're going to get taught anywhere you go, secular university, secular college, and sadly, in a lot of seminaries and Bible colleges too, that all that builds up over time.

47:56

And so there is no Jesus of faith, or if there is a Jesus of faith, it's just the

48:02

Jesus of faith that you create in your own mind. It has no connection to the historical

48:08

Jesus. And so whether Jesus actually rose from the dead or whether there was an empty tomb or not doesn't really necessarily impact the

48:21

Jesus of faith, because that Jesus of faith only exists in your mind anyways. So all you got to do here is say, well, no,

48:33

I can't look at a text in Job where he professes faith, that he is going to see that mediator, and I can't connect that with something over here to start coming up with a picture of heaven and hell that will only be filled out, especially after the resurrection of the coming

48:58

Holy Spirit. No, I can't. You can't connect any of this stuff together. There can be no

49:05

Christian theology. Christian theology is just, remember

49:10

Tinker Toys? I had Tinker Toys when I was a kid. I'm obviously getting old because I'm posting pictures of the first typewriter, which was,

49:22

I think it probably was from the 1930s or 40s that my parents had.

49:31

And now I'm talking about Tinker Toys. Oh man. He's obviously heading straight down into the funny farm.

49:37

But I love Tinker Toys. And it would be this round thing. You'd pour them out and you could do so many things with them.

49:44

You know, you could put stuff together this way and then that way. That's what the Bible is for liberals, theological

49:53

Tinker Toys. And so you just pour it all out and you can make whatever you want.

49:59

If you want to do Legos, fine. I never got into Legos, but same thing, same principle. You get to make whatever you want to make out of this stuff.

50:09

Because there isn't anything that it's supposed to be. There is no objective revelation.

50:15

There is no objective truth. That's why I have sat in this chair over and over against it.

50:21

If you don't have the highest view of scripture, there's no reason for you to believe in the doctrine of the is based upon the idea that scripture is a harmonious whole.

50:34

Not the simplistic type of thing you get in fundamentalist circles, but that there is a objective truth that is revealed in numerous different beautiful ways.

50:50

Remember I've talked about the woven fabric of divine truth, the threads that come together. That's what scripture is.

50:59

Without that view, there's no reason to believe in the Trinity. I mean, you can go, well, yeah,

51:05

I've got a traditional reason. Yeah, well, okay, fine. I don't think it's enough, if you want to say so, but you can't say it's a divine revelation from God unless you've got some foundation to it.

51:18

These folks don't believe that. So when it's said heaven and hell as concepts do not appear in the

51:23

Old Testament, the Old Testament doesn't have almost anything in it that is coherent from their perspective, or Jesus' teachings.

51:30

You just get to pick and choose which teachings you decide are Jesus' teachings. Remember the

51:37

Jesus seminar back in the 80s? A bunch of wild -eyed liberals, leftists, that would get together and they'd study a portion of scripture, and then they'd drop little marbles in a bag.

51:53

A certain color marble meant you think Jesus actually said this. That was a black marble.

52:01

No, no, that was a red marble. Then you had a pink marble for he might have said it.

52:09

If he didn't say it was a black marble, I forget what the color scheme was. There was like four different levels. Then you pour all the marbles out, they would lose their marbles, and count them up.

52:21

They actually published books color -coding the words of Jesus based upon these leftist liberals going, yeah, he might have said it, might not have said it.

52:29

That's all you're left with. You can't know anything about Jesus, what he did, why he died, if he died, what it meant, nothing.

52:39

You got to fill all that in from psychology or whatever. That's why leftist liberal denominations all die a slow and agonizing death, because there's nothing to it, because they don't have this.

52:54

They don't believe that there is something here that is graspable and meant to communicate to us, and that we are to study and create worldview from and impact this world.

53:07

Don't believe that. That's where number one comes from.

53:15

That's the first assertion. Number two,

53:22

Jesus didn't believe in the soul going to heaven or hell. Now, again, what struck me was, while you're awfully confident of this, your concept of how we know what

53:40

Jesus taught is utterly insufficient to give you the certainty that you are expressing.

53:48

But yeah, Jesus didn't believe in the soul going to heaven or hell. Wow. When we try to say that Jesus taught about his own deity or something like that, we can't know that, but we can know he didn't believe in this.

54:02

Why? Because he was like any Jewish person of his day. But even then, you get to be very selective about what information about Tanaitic Judaism, Second Temple Judaism, you're going to get to choose and put together.

54:19

That's what liberalism is, which is why liberals write so many books, because they can write books, because they can just put stuff together.

54:27

It's tinker toy theology. It's tinker toy theology. So Jesus didn't believe in the soul going to heaven or hell. And if you're thinking about verses, they just don't get to make the cut.

54:41

And who are you to tell the great Bart Ehrman that they need to make the cut? Jesus did not teach hell as a place of eternal torment.

54:50

So, notice, again, what you have here is, in his mind, there is no apostolic interpretation of Jesus's words.

55:08

So, everything has to be in the

55:15

Gospels, but obviously for them, even that's not sufficient. But the point is, you can't take what's back here in Hebrews or back here in Revelation or up here in Romans and connect it in any way to even what is accepted as being possibly a part of the early

55:40

Jesus tradition. Can't do any of that. That's why there's no Christian theology. So, he's doing anti -Christian theology, having laid the foundation saying there's no way to do actual

55:51

Christian theology. So, that's how this functions.

55:58

And so, you can look at Matthew 25, 46, and it's not even a matter of interpreting that in light of Old Testament concepts,

56:09

God's law, justice, judgment, creative purposes. You don't have any of that.

56:15

Throw that out. So, now you've got the New Testament by itself, but it's all just a bunch of disjointed stuff.

56:23

And we don't know who wrote this, don't know who wrote that. And so, you can't connect any of it together.

56:31

And so, it's easy to come up with this kind of stuff. And then, number four, the ideas of heaven and hell originally came from Greek philosophers.

56:41

And so, there is no question that the medieval concepts seen in Dante are more

56:56

Greek than biblical. If you've got a picture of the devil running around with pitchfork and pointy tail and all the rest of this, horns and all this kind of stuff.

57:09

Yeah. Is it true that most

57:15

Christians hold views of heaven and hell that have next to nothing to do with Scripture itself?

57:27

Yep. No question about it. No question about it. I agree. Is that dangerous?

57:36

Yeah, it's dangerous because it's not all that difficult to debunk that kind of stuff.

57:42

And so, you end up throwing all the baby out with the bathwater once you discover that much of what you believed is traditional.

57:52

And I have been arguing for a few decades now that it is vitally important, vitally important, to place eschatology proper, which is what this is about.

58:09

Christ returns, Christ judges the basis of judgment, the nature of judgment, to base that upon what the

58:18

Bible teaches about man as a whole. Because for some reason, a large majority of Christians abandon a biblical anthropology as soon as you get to this subject.

58:33

So, how many times you heard the argument? I certainly did. It's still an argument that carries a lot of weight with a lot of people.

58:39

How can God eternally punish someone for sins committed in time? It was a limited amount of time.

58:46

If you've got a 20 -year -old guy who's only had a certain amount of time to commit sin in the first place, how can he be punished eternally for stuff that took place for a very short period of time?

59:01

And a lot of people, you know, I'm sure that that's a conversation that has been had over and over again in numerous

59:07

Bible studies all over the place. The problem is there's a massive presupposition that has been smuggled in without anyone even noticing it.

59:18

And it's a part of almost all discussions of this topic that shouldn't be able to be smuggled in if we have a truly robust biblical anthropology, doctrine of man.

59:34

And that is, there is an assumption, and the assumption is that we stop sinning when we die.

59:45

Why do you think that? Well, what in Scripture gives you a reason to think that as soon as a person dies,

59:55

God sanctifies them, makes them at least morally neutral, say, stop sinning?

01:00:03

But there is no morally neutral. So if you stop sinning, then what are you doing? You're doing good.

01:00:12

So God sanctifies the rebel? Gives them a new heart when they die?

01:00:20

Upon what basis do we say this? You see, the reality is that there's restraint upon the sinner in this life, but upon death, what if that restraint is removed?

01:00:38

What's the result going to be? More sin or less sin? And unless there is some kind of regeneration, sanctification, something, then it's not a matter of being punished for what you did over 10 years.

01:00:59

The punishment is related to what you are now in your continued rebellion, which is, you know, at least the annihilationists can say, yeah, that's why

01:01:16

God has to annihilate you. The problem is they say he annihilates you after a certain point in time.

01:01:22

There still seems to be a problem here because the sin is still ongoing.

01:01:29

There's never a dealing with that. But they recognize you can't have people existing for a tremendously long period of time without them being somehow kept from sinning, because then the sin debt just keeps getting piled higher and higher.

01:01:48

And so if you have a wimpy, well, sorry, my Arminian friends, if you have a wimpy

01:01:53

Arminian anthropology, you're going to have a real tough time with dealing with the issue of punishment.

01:02:04

And that's why Arminianism has so often led directly to universalism, or at least forms of conditionalism, annihilationism, and inclusivism, post -mortem evangelism, the idea that once you die and go, whoa, okay,

01:02:31

I'm sorry, I didn't get it. It's okay. Then this is what you need to do to get saved.

01:02:36

I accept, and boom, everybody's gonna get saved. That's almost always part of universalism and where that goes.

01:02:46

So yeah, but how many people have a truly robust anthropology? How many people are ever pressed to see the necessary connections between their doctrine of man, if they have a doctrine of man, and the doctrine of last things in judgment?

01:03:09

Something to think about. And finally, when it comes to the afterlife,

01:03:14

Geus and Socrates have something in common, and that was where they tried to do some sort of a positive thing of conditionalism.

01:03:22

They're all either going to be sort of blissful or just wiped out type of thing. I'm not sure, you know,

01:03:29

I was really thinking about playing some, I only saw it this morning, so maybe if I'd had time to get some time indexes up on it,

01:03:36

I'm gonna be pulling it down, some time indexes or something, that would have been, so I'm pulling it down so we need to take it off screen.

01:03:48

Then maybe I would have played some portions of it or something, I don't know. But it just struck me that wow,

01:03:56

Bart really was making incredibly firm, sure statements after having spent the last 20 years, 30 years, destroying any foundation for being able to make those statements.

01:04:13

That is a lot. Okay, let's get to a few other things here. Go to 4 .30,

01:04:19

our time, 6 .30 back there, I guess. Homophobia is now illegal in Switzerland.

01:04:33

And there's the problem. Once the government gets to define what that is, then you and I both know that what that means is any expression of a biblical standard of morality will only require one aggrieved person to cost you a year's salary defending yourself.

01:05:01

Don't tell me that that does not have a massively chilling impact upon the ministry of the

01:05:09

Church and upon the proclamation of the Church in Switzerland. And that's a nation that doesn't yet have gay marriage.

01:05:22

This is heading for all of us. This is coming the direction for all of us.

01:05:29

It will come here. It may not come here in 2021, though you and I have no idea what's going to happen between now and November, but I can guarantee you one thing.

01:05:48

There is not a single socialist candidate—they're all socialists on the one side—there's not a single one of those socialist candidates that would not sign the

01:06:00

Equality Act and bring the exact same situation to bear upon us. That's not even disputable.

01:06:09

That's not even disputable. And if you want to recognize why that is, did you see the

01:06:23

New Hampshire campaign event with Pete Buttigieg where he brings—I refuse to call this man a husband, he's not a husband—his gay sex partner up on stage and introduces him as the future first gentleman of the

01:06:48

United States. The future first gentleman of the

01:06:55

United States. I did not expect to live this long.

01:07:03

I didn't think it would happen this fast. But isn't he right up there at the top of the polls?

01:07:12

He is. And the applause and what would have caused absolute complete scandal 20 years ago is now, hey, let's celebrate.

01:07:34

Isn't that cool? Isn't that awesome? There's going to be two dudes in the White House. That's what we want.

01:07:41

We want dudes in the White House. Are they really dudes? I mean, whatever they identify as, who cares? That's where the moral revolution has gone.

01:07:51

And it is truly astonishing. It really is. Someone by the name of Dave Barnhart—I don't know who

01:08:00

Dave Barnhart is—Dave Barnhart wrote the following.

01:08:06

It's somewhat related before we move back toward a more theological topic. But he—listen to this little post here on probably

01:08:17

Facebook, I'd assume. The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for.

01:08:23

They never make demands of you. They are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor.

01:08:30

They don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct. Unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy.

01:08:40

Unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or child care. Unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike.

01:08:48

They allow you to feel good about yourself without any work or creating or maintaining relationships.

01:08:55

And when they are born, you can forget about them because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without reimagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone.

01:09:12

They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim to love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe.

01:09:20

Prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, widows, orphans, all the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible, they all get thrown on the bus for the unborn.

01:09:30

End quote. Dave Barnhart. Again, I don't know who this man is, other than I can guarantee you that he is as woke as the day is long, is in deep love with social justice and critical theory.

01:09:48

The reason I read this is there is a... this has been one of the most effective mechanisms of the enemy to damage, at the very time, because of the advances in technology, to where as soon as anybody's pregnant, there's that strange shadowy thing on the refrigerator.

01:10:25

The sonogram that allows us to see into the womb, and now you can...

01:10:34

My daughter's expecting, and she was telling on her webcast,

01:10:42

Sheologians, she was talking about how she had not had any nausea, which she had had with her previous pregnancies, and then right as she was thanking the

01:10:53

Lord for that, she got violently ill. But evidently she has...

01:11:03

it's probably just a website, maybe it's an app, I'm sure there's... I don't even want to know. Please don't tell me.

01:11:09

Please do not ruin Rich's life by sending him 47 ,000 links to pregnancy apps, okay?

01:11:15

Because I'm just... he's not going to pass them on to me. He may find them fascinating, but I'm not going to put it in.

01:11:23

But I'm sure there are pregnancy apps out there, and you can pop these things up, and you can put in how far along you are, and it'll put a little peanut on your screen, so you can see how it can only go so far, obviously.

01:11:40

But you can... we live in a day where we have more knowledge of the development of the unborn child than we've ever had before.

01:11:52

Ever had before. So right at that point in time, where people have been commenting on, you know, this seems to be a real move away from abortion rights, because a lot of the young people have grown up seeing their brothers and sisters' pictures before they were born on the refrigerator.

01:12:13

So right when that's happening, you get this. The social justice folks, the

01:12:22

Marxists, come galloping in pretending to be Christians and going, oh, oh, it's so easy to advocate for the unborn.

01:12:36

Now, of course, just point out how many of those who are fighting to end abortion provide for those who keep their babies money, supplies, support, adoption.

01:12:56

I mean, that's just a bold -faced lie. I would love to see. I'd love to get this dude, this

01:13:04

Dave Barnhart dude, try saying this when we're outside the abortion clinic and the guys will turn their heads while the ladies tear you apart, because they will.

01:13:20

There won't be much left of you. No, no. I'm thinking of some specific ladies, wonderful Christian godly women that will scratch your eyeballs out.

01:13:34

Anyway, but this is what we're now seeing.

01:13:42

Groups that were once formally in the forefront of really seeking to end abortion, now they have become diffused, because now you need to be open borders and socialistic and steal from people to give whatever they've got to somebody else and all the standard

01:14:09

Marxist stuff straight down the line. And they've taken over. If you're really pro -life, then you're going to be pro all these things too, because Jesus, as if Jesus was a

01:14:21

Marxist. I mean, these folks will never try to debate this type of thing because they would get crushed and they know it, but they use the media as their mechanism.

01:14:36

They use stuff like this to pull at the emotions, because that's where we are today.

01:14:45

Meaningful argumentation? No, no, no, no, no. Emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion. Evil people.

01:14:53

That's all there is to it. Evil people. Yeah, well,

01:14:58

I did post it. I can't do anything about it right now, but there's a...

01:15:04

You know how old that is? 10 years old. I posted on Facebook, Twitter, called

01:15:16

The Sound of Abortion, and a lot of people are not clicking on it because they think it is like the sound of a suction aspirator.

01:15:23

That's not what it is. Not even close. It utilizes

01:15:29

BBs in a tin can to help you to understand the scope, the magnitude of the number of unborn children who've been murdered in the

01:15:42

United States in comparison to the wars that the United States has been involved in.

01:15:51

So yeah, it's called The Sound of Abortion. Look it up. It's very powerful. Um, okay, so two more tweets, and then we'll wrap it up.

01:16:02

Um, I don't know this guy, okay? I'm sorry.

01:16:08

I know that I've got Christian rapper friends.

01:16:15

It's just not my cup of tea, okay? It's not what I listen to.

01:16:20

So a couple weeks ago, some guy named Flame, and I don't know who Flame is.

01:16:26

I don't know what his real name is. But he was one of these

01:16:32

Reformed rappers, and he came out and he's left

01:16:38

Calvinism and embraced some kind of Lutheranism.

01:16:43

And when I say some kind of Lutheranism, I don't know. There are a lot of different kinds of Lutheranism. Um, are we talking about Luther's Lutheranism?

01:16:53

Are we talking about Luther before 1525? Are we talking about Luther after 1525? Are we talking about Philip Melanchthon?

01:16:59

And then in the modern context, you've got conservative

01:17:05

Lutherans, and then you've got not -so -conservative Lutherans. And, um, you know, you've got the

01:17:10

ELCA, and then you've got Wisconsin, you've got Missouri. And especially when it comes to issues of Calvinism, my experience is when you're talking to Lutherans, it all becomes mystery.

01:17:23

It's all a mystery. And one of their biggest objections to Calvinists is that we do not allow for mystery.

01:17:33

And so in other words, they hold contradictory perspectives and say it's mystery. Okay, whatever.

01:17:39

So I didn't jump into it. I, you know, what can

01:17:47

I say? Um, I did last week, listen to an hour and 50 minutes of a guy from a, a two, two guy.

01:17:57

I don't know what they do. I don't know what their background is. Had never heard of them before. Somebody on Twitter linked me to it. For some reason,

01:18:02

I decided to listen to it. An hour and 50 minutes of a guy from Ear Biscuits. It used to be a crew guy, a, a, uh, on staff with Cambridge Crusade.

01:18:16

Uh, and he's left faith. And it was interesting. I, I, I sent the link to Jason Lyle because I felt that he'd find some of it to be something he may want to comment upon because it was, had a lot to do with evolution and, you know, but there's this slow chipping away, uh, at, at, at his faith.

01:18:37

So I, sometimes I do listen to this stuff, but I can't listen to all of it. Uh, there's, there's tons of it. Anyway, uh, this flame guy, um, posts this, uh, tweet.

01:18:50

The danger of presuming that Jesus only died for a limited group of people amounts to Adam being more effective in bringing sin and death on all than Christ who brings justification and salvation only to the elect.

01:19:06

The atonement is cosmic in dimensions as Adam's sin. Now I remember dialoguing with a liberal

01:19:16

Lutheran many years ago before the net, it was on, um,

01:19:21

BBS actually might've been early

01:19:27

AOL, um, whatever. Um, and yeah,

01:19:36

I don't know. Um, but the, the point is that that particular

01:19:42

Lutheran told me, yes, we are all redeemed. Um, Jesus death for everybody.

01:19:48

We've all been redeemed. And so our message is to go out and to tell people you have already been redeemed, just believe and experience.

01:19:57

And I think he probably was a universalist. And the idea was, well, they'll get to live better now knowing they're redeemed.

01:20:06

And if they don't know they're redeemed, even though when they die, they're gonna find out they're redeemed anyways. So it was, it was a form of universalism, but then there are others that would say, no, no, you've got to, it's the synergistic concept of human faith.

01:20:19

So you may be redeemed, but unless you believe, then you are still redeemed, but not really.

01:20:26

I don't know. It's a mystery. I don't get it. Anyway, my response to the tweet was this logic, of course, leads inevitably to universalism and has many times in various groups since the

01:20:38

Reformation. The particularity of God's choice of Israel is perfectly in line with particularity in the freedom of his grace.

01:20:45

So the point was, first of all, the argument is not an overly good argument. This is not a competition as to who was better at doing something.

01:20:57

Federal headship may not have been something that Flame understood before or something. I don't know.

01:21:04

Like I said, don't know anything about the man. But making it a competition as to how many people

01:21:10

Adam ruined, as if that was his intention, versus how many people Christ saves, is the same error as equal ultimacy.

01:21:20

Really, the equal ultimacy error within Reformed folks, where you have election and the salvation, election and the damnation.

01:21:27

They're just the exact same thing. They're not the exact same thing. One involves the extension of grace.

01:21:33

The other one does not involve the extension of grace at all, at least not saving grace. So a lot of other people saw the exact same thing.

01:21:44

Fundamentally, if what you're saying is for Christ to be equal to Adam, his atonement has to have equal results to Adam's sin.

01:21:54

The only way to fulfill that is universalism. I didn't see if this

01:22:01

Flame 314 fellow ever responded to any of these things, because I wasn't the only one. I looked at one thread and was like, yeah, a lot of people saying the same thing, so that's good.

01:22:10

I don't know if he responded, and that would give some indication of where he's coming from, but I didn't see it.

01:22:17

Okay, one last one. I only have eight minutes to do this. I may go a few minutes late. Trent Horn from Catholic Answers.

01:22:26

Like I said, we're going to be, Jeff and I, hopefully, if he's well, are going to be responding to Trent Horn's response to Jeff's sermon on solo scriptura, which

01:22:38

I played a section of last Thursday, I think. Yeah, the

01:22:45

Kitchen Sink video, which you named. Thank you very much. But then he posted this on February 8th.

01:22:54

Can any Calvinists tell me why Adam sinned?

01:23:01

Previous conversations didn't yield much answers. If Adam chose to disobey

01:23:06

God, then that seems to contradict Calvinism's view of God's sovereignty. But if God caused

01:23:13

Adam to disobey him, then that seems to make God the author of sin. Now, this is a a fairly standard question, but it's not a standard question just for the

01:23:31

Reformed. Medieval theologians had dealt with these issues.

01:23:41

Augustine dealt with these issues. All sorts of people have dealt with these issues. This is a basic theistic question as to the origin of evil.

01:23:52

But certainly, with all due respect to Trent Horn, this is one of the things that I sense that's different between the current

01:24:03

Catholic Answers guys and the Catholic Answers guys that I dealt with back when

01:24:08

Catholic Answers was that big. And that is, okay,

01:24:14

Patrick Madrid, I think a cradle Catholic, so he was different. But a lot of the big names for a while there,

01:24:23

Scott Hahn, Jerry Matitix, Robert St. Genes, what was their background? They were

01:24:29

Reformed. St. Genes had been a lot of things. But, I mean,

01:24:35

Jerry Matitix was the first ordained PCA minister to ever leave Roman Catholicism and leave the denomination and become a

01:24:42

Roman Catholic. And Hahn is still very popular. And there are a lot of Catholics that wonder about some of his covenantal stuff, but he's managed to keep a pretty decent following.

01:24:54

Jerry, of course, is who knows where Jerry is. Last time I saw Jerry was on Jeopardy. Anyway, but they understood the background of the subject in a way that Trent clearly doesn't.

01:25:10

And so, the whole idea of primary and secondary causes, the idea of God's sovereign decree, compatibility,

01:25:23

Genesis 50, Isaiah 10, Acts 4, doesn't seem to be a part of, you know,

01:25:32

I don't get the feeling. I mean, he did in the follow -up tweet, quote, one, he quoted from Paul Helm.

01:25:42

And I'm sure Paul Helm went into all of this, but you can never tell anymore on the net when someone quotes from somebody whether they actually had the source or they're quoting from a quotation of the source.

01:25:55

So, you don't know. But the whole discussion of compatibility,

01:26:04

I don't know about you. I have tried it on Twitter. That may be the very definition of purgatory.

01:26:15

Because I just, if there's, there are lots of topics that were never designed to actually be discussed in any meaningful fashion on Twitter.

01:26:28

Twitter can get the conversation going, but then it's just got to move to some place where you can string, you know, 10 sentences together in one context to make anything meaningful take place.

01:26:40

But I'm not sure what he means by previous conversations didn't yield much answers.

01:26:47

Normally, when people say something like that, what they're saying is, well, I just don't accept the categories that are required to understand the answer.

01:26:54

The categories would be the sovereign decree of God and the responsibility of man.

01:27:02

So, if you can look at Genesis 50 and see that God used the sin of Joseph's brothers and that it wasn't just, oh, this is how

01:27:13

I'll do it, or oh, this is how I'll do it. That there was one intention on God's part, good.

01:27:22

On the brother's evil, same action. It's a sinful action. If you don't have those categories to be able to see that in Genesis 50,

01:27:33

Isaiah 10, use of the Assyrians, then punishes the Assyrians after uses the

01:27:38

Assyrians because the attitude they had, same issue. One event, God's purposes and intentions, good.

01:27:46

Man's are evil. God's just to punish the evil. And then of course, Acts 4, crucifixion of Jesus, predestined by God.

01:27:55

And yet, everybody involved, Pilate, Jews, Romans, Herod, all held accountable.

01:28:04

It's simply allowing the fact that the Bible addresses these things in that way.

01:28:12

And so, I just wonder if the statement that, you know, if Adam chose to disobey God, every

01:28:18

Reformed person says Adam chose to disobey God, but that doesn't mean that that choice was autonomous.

01:28:29

The assumption is for a choice to be a choice, it has to be an autonomous choice. But again,

01:28:37

Pilate's choice to condemn Jesus, it wasn't that he wanted to do something nice and God forced him to do something bad.

01:28:47

Even in the case of the brothers of Joseph, they wanted to kill him. God restrained him.

01:28:53

It's not like they were just all these wonderfully godly boys that God said, I'm going to make you do something terrible.

01:28:59

No. So, my gut feeling is, given the way it's placed here, is that it's a false dichotomy between Adam choosing and God causing

01:29:14

Adam to disobey him. Can't see that in one event, both are real.

01:29:22

That there is a real choice based upon... Now, with Adam, you can't even...

01:29:27

With everybody after this, we are given enough biblical revelation to have an understanding of what the source of that is in the fallen nature.

01:29:35

With Adam, you don't have that. And anybody who tries, I've told you before, Jonathan Edwards tried to figure this out.

01:29:42

And he ended up spinning in a tight circle. This book does not intend to answer that question.

01:29:51

There's two chapters and that's not addressed. And everything else in this book addresses where we are now.

01:29:59

So, that's, you know, if you want to sit here and go, well, I'm not going to believe till I know.

01:30:06

Try running that excuse by God in the future. But if you want to believe, someday you will find out in the presence of God, great.

01:30:14

Maybe, I don't know. We're not told, but it's a possibility.

01:30:20

It's a possibility. We'll see. We'll see. All right. I think I got to... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:30:27

I do have a bunch of Radio Free Geneva stuff, and I'm just trying to figure out how to do it, get enough time to get the stuff put together.

01:30:38

It takes a long time to put that material together, but we'll see.

01:30:44

We'll obviously let you know on Thursday whether we're gonna do Radio Free Geneva or whether we're not. You were grabbing the microphone there.

01:30:49

Was there? No, we're good. All right. Thank you very much for watching the program today. Hope it was useful to you.