Sorta Road Trip DL: Squirrel's Demise, Inseparable Operations

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:36

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White and this should look somewhat familiar, though it's not really a road trip

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Dividing Line. I'm just taking a little time for some reading and writing.

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The writing isn't getting very far because I'm doing four programs while I'm over the next two days.

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I'm not sure how I did that, but that's taking up some time. But anyway, we're not too far away from home.

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We will be heading up to Colorado in August, Lord willing, and there's still gas to be purchased at outrageous prices.

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And then we've got the big, big, big, huge trip back to Washington in September into October.

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Again, all depending on the nation holding together and things like that, which can't guarantee any of that when you've got the people in charge that are in charge currently.

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I'm going to start off with a story from this morning. I'm doing some writing. The place where I am,

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I'm only about 5 ,000 feet right now, but the place where I'm writing is over 7 ,000. It's the closest place to where I live where you can do high altitude stuff, which for going to Colorado is sort of needed.

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Anyway, so I was up fairly early this morning, and I'm doing this one climb that I used to do over and over again.

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And I'm coming up to a pretty steep section, and I happen to notice in the road is a little squirrel.

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Now, that's not unusual, obviously, and especially coming down at high speed, that can be really dangerous.

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Even a squirrel can take the wheels right out from underneath you or more likely end up just splattered all over your bike, which is really disgusting.

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Anyway, what was weird was it's only a two -lane road, and so he's in the left lane, so I'm going to be passing him on the right.

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But instead of running out of the road, which they normally do, all of a sudden now

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I'm hearing myself really well. Okay, there it stopped.

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What you doing there, Rich? Okay, Rich is back.

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He had his microphone on, so sorry about that. I can see him. Not only can

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I hear it, I heard everything. You left your microphone on, and you turned on your phone to see what it sounded like, and we caught you.

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Anyway, so Moses was in the bull rushes, and what were we talking about again? Okay, so I'm on the right -hand side, and normally squirrels, you know, they start going one direction, then they go back the other direction, so it's specifically designed to make you crash, is what it is.

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He didn't move. In fact, if you've ever seen, and my cat was doing this the day

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I left, have you ever seen a cat that's in a really good mood, and it's playful, and it gets down real low, and it's sort of twitching, and you know it's just about to go, yeah, and attack your ankle and bite it and scratch it and do stuff like that?

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That's sort of what it looked like it was doing. It hunkered down the road, and it was sort of doing this little thing and looking at me, and I started thinking of all the memes that we could come up with.

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I immediately thought of Gene Pliatt, just automatically. I think most people in evangelicalism, when they see a squirrel, thinks of Gene Pliatt.

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It's really strange when you think about it, how that works, but anyway, and I thought of all the memes you could come up with as to what this squirrel, because it didn't move.

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I just went pedaling by, and it stayed right there, and I'm like, okay, but then

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I went around a corner, and I was thinking, as I went in the corner, I was like, that's probably not a good thing.

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It needs to get out the road. It shouldn't be doing the

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I'm going to hide from you in the middle of the road type thing. That's probably not good, so I finished up the climb.

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I'm coming back down, and I come around that corner, and there are his remains splattered all over the place.

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You know what happens when a squirrel gets hit by a tire. It just splats, and there's fur, and so he had obviously tried to hunker down when a

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SUV, which had been coming down when I was going up, came around that corner, and it didn't work out real well for him, and so I'm sort of like, oh, well, there you go.

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Natural selection, even as understood by Christians, functioning right there, but here's the rest of the story.

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I'm doing loops, so I'm doing this climb over and over and over and over again. I did it six times this morning.

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I was supposed to do eight, but I developed a brake issue, and so I have new brake pads to put on here.

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Anyway, and I'm coming around. I'm coming up that spot, and I see a raven type, crow type bird.

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You know, a scavenger type bird, and he's right there, and he's cleaning up.

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Hey, breakfast. This is great, and of course he flies off as I ride by, but the roadkill has already been discovered, and as I come back down,

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I notice that most of it's already gone. Then the next time up, like I said,

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I did multiple ascents. The birds are gone. Most of it's gone, and now the flies are all over what's left over.

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Excuse me. By the time I got done, because I've been watching this carefully, by the time

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I got done, even the flies were gone. If you didn't know where that little critter had met its end, it's just, you know, because there's dark spots all over roads, asphalt, whatever, you know, you wouldn't even know it, and that was within 90 minutes to two hours.

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Nature had completely recycled that squirrel.

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The flies were happy. The crows, ravens, whatever was up there were happy, and pretty much almost every biological aspect of that little critter was now a biological aspect of some other little critter, which would become biological aspects of other critters later on, undoubtedly.

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So I was really taken aback just thinking about the efficiency of God's creation that I got to watch.

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It would take me about 15, 16 minutes to go up and about seven minutes to go down, so just put those together.

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You figure how many times I'm going past it. In a relatively short period of time, I mean, nature's cleanup service showed up and did its thing, but I also couldn't help but thinking about the brevity of life and the fact that we are told

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God the Father knew exactly when that little critter met its end.

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That little critter was going to get run over by that vehicle, and since it interacts with other critters, you just start thinking about the depth of God's decree and the necessary reality of the decree.

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In other words, if stuff's happening randomly, then the interaction of things could never be known by God.

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He would have to learn them as they take place. And so when people argue that, well, if there's a divine decree, then we're all just puppets and blah, blah, blah, blah, the reality is that the decree stands behind the accomplishment of God's purposes.

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God's omniscience is in perfect accord with his decree.

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These are things that are described for us in scripture, and we are to live on the foundation and basis of that.

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We as human beings, we're like, well, yeah, the day and the hour has been all written in his book and things like that, and we think about that for ourselves, but the reality is we are a special part of God's creation.

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That's something fundamentally denied by secularism today, which has had a horrific negative impact upon people's lives.

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But I did one ascent really hard, and when you do that, you're breathing really hard, and the rest of the day,

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I'm always doing this type of thing after you push your heart rate super high, sort of the way it works.

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Anyway, there is a beautiful consistency to the

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Bible's revelation of God's decree. Notice what I said, the Bible's revelation of God's decree, not to our traditional understanding or anything like that, but to what scripture says in regards to God's sovereignty and the harmony that exists in his creation.

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So there's the little story from this morning. Literally, that is the type of stuff that I'm thinking about.

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I was listening to some presentations as I was writing, but thankfully, I had pretty much finished the one up.

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And when you're going downhill, especially when it starts getting windy, you can't hear almost anything anyways, unless you put earphones into your ear, and then you can't hear sounds like trucks coming up behind you.

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I did that for years. I really did. I had fully noise -canceling earphones when

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I would ride. And I use a rear view mirror. I've got radar on my bike. Believe it or not, look it up.

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Garmin has radar unit. Works really well. But I feel a lot better now when

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I can hear something coming than just rely upon those things. So, yeah, that is the kind of stuff that I'm thinking about as I'm riding along doing my thing.

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Don't know how many more years of that I'll have. We will try our best.

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Press hard. A couple days ago, I thought I'd mention a couple of these things.

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A couple days ago, Dr. Craig Carter, whom we have been quoting a lot, made reference to Aquinas, Van Til, and Biblicism, Thomas Aquinas, Classical Orthodoxy, and the

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Protestant Doctrine of God. Again, for those unfamiliar with recent developments, the advancement and promotion of, quote, unquote,

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Classical Theism, end quote, and the idea of the great tradition, this type of stuff,

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Reformed Thomism, is very, very opposed.

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To Cornelius Van Til, to the presuppositional method of apologetics,

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Van Til certainly was no fan of Thomas Aquinas.

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Anyone who's read Van Til, that's probably one of the first memories

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I have back in the late 80s, early 90s, reading

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Van Til was, wow, Thomas gets nuked here fairly regularly.

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This movement is very much opposed to presuppositionalism. You'll see more and more of its devotees saying, oh,

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I was once a presuppositionalist, and then I learned this, that, and the other thing, and they're abandoning.

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Every time they speak, they give clear evidence of the fact that they never really understood what the issues were to begin with.

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Anyway, here is a quotation from Dr. Carter. We still have to explain, this is from June 7th, we still have to explain somehow the phenomenon of Van Til's followers, like Scott Oliphant and John Frame, departing from the

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Classical Orthodox Doctrine of God. Let me just stop for a second. There has been obviously a great deal of discussion.

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And again, the discussion is not necessarily in those places that would make it accessible to a lot of people.

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But there have been discussions concerning both

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Dr. Oliphant and Dr. Frame, because both of them are seeking to address challenging and difficult issues.

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And so there have been people who have, believe it or not,

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I hate to tell you this, but especially in the big, big seminaries, you have lots of politics.

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It's one of the reasons I never want to be a part of a big, big seminary. I don't do politics well at all.

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I am way too plain spoken. I have said that one of my greatest weaknesses is,

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I don't know if it's so much an inability to run all sorts of filters, or just simply a dogged

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Scottish unwillingness to run those things.

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I saw this in my dad. I never got to know my grandfather, because he died when my dad was 14.

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But something tells me it goes back in the men in my side of the family. And sometimes we just make up our mind, that's just not something

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I'm going to do. I'm not going to submit myself to that. And that's just the way we are.

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Stubborn, I guess, is the term, and that may be the case. Maybe I'm just too stubborn to run the filters, to be a part of those big seminaries and those big conferences and things like that.

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But when you say that, you know, Scott Oliphant and John Frame departing from the classical, the classical

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Orthodox doctrine of God. Very regularly amongst the new classics, and every new movement tries to do this.

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Take that back. Every new movement that is claiming that it is reclaiming

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Orthodoxy and history and so on and so forth. They will all set up their own standard, and then everybody else departs from them, even if their stuff, at least in the modern period, is rather new.

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Especially if they're now talking about things that nobody was talking about 20 years ago.

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But it's now the standard, and you just simply need to bow the knee and go with it.

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So notice, departing from the classical Orthodox doctrine of God, which would be an assertion on his part that Dr.

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Oliphant and Dr. Frame are not Orthodox. In their doctrine of God. You'll notice that in our providing responses to the new scholastics, including

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Dr. Carter, we just quote them and then respond and then leave it to you to make your decisions.

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Leave it to their churches, their denominations, to do whatever they do.

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This incessant activity now on the part of the new scholastics of setting themselves up as the judges and arbiters of everyone else.

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And if you disagree with us, you're just not Orthodox. You're not really a Trinitarian. And I was reading some articles today, again, from that perspective.

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And every article ended, and if you don't operate on the basis of inseparable operations, you will inevitably be led into these heresies.

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And nobody was talking about these things for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time. It didn't lead to those heresies, but it would now for some reason.

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I'm old enough to have seen other movements coming along in the past that have long since gasped their last breath, at least for now.

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There's nothing new under the sun. Belbottoms might even come back. Oh, I really hope not.

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But this is a regular type of a thing. I don't know.

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It just makes you feel better about yourself to be speaking in this fashion.

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Even though there are, hey, I've seen lots of folks, even on that side of the philosophical divide, that don't buy a lot of stuff that Carter says.

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Anyway, but after that statement, we have this statement, quote. And we also have to explain why contemporary fundamentalists like Jeffrey Johnson and James White think they're following Van Til when they dismiss

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Thomas Aquinas in Toto. It would not surprise me one little bit if Dr.

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Carter has never listened to a single dividing line, never read a thing that I've ever written, never read a book.

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It would not surprise me at all because, in fact, I'd be surprised if he has. Because there is an attitude that I have seen over and over and over and over again.

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And it's seen right here. Contemporary fundamentalists. What does that even mean?

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I mean, people who really are fundamentalists would look at me and go, what?

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What are you talking about? The only explanation

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I can come up with is that it is meant to be dismissive. It is meant to diminish. It is meant to, you know, it's been informed that we are pushing back, that we are critiquing things that were.

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It would be nice if he was informed accurately that we have been accurately citing him, putting his quotations from his book up on the screen.

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We actually read the other side and then responding to it.

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That would be nice, but that's not always what happens. And so contemporary fundamentalists like Jeffrey Johnson and James White.

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You know, when you go back to what fundamentalist meant in 100 years ago, right at 100 years ago, 90 to 100 years ago.

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In many ways, Dr. Carter would be a fundamentalist.

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In regards to supernaturalism, virgin birth, inspiration, scripture. You know,

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I don't know if he's a young earth creationist or not, but I would think that at least as far as what the fundamentals were initially about, not on eschatology, there would be a lot of overlapping.

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But in this context, contemporary fundamentalists don't get it. Don't have any idea.

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But then it says, think they are following Van Til when they dismiss Thomas Aquinas in Toto.

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Okay. That sounds like he's saying Van Til accepted

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Aquinas in less than Toto. I don't know.

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What do you mean dismiss? I don't dismiss him as a massively important figure in church history, in the medieval period, in the formation of Roman Catholic theology.

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Absolutely foundational to the development of the doctrine of transidentiation, the mass.

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Foundational to Roman Catholic apologetics, including,

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I mean, you listen to Catholic Answers today and you will hear Catholic Answers apologists, when atheists call in, doing the standard theistic proofs argumentation and running into the exact same blank wall that you would expect them to be running into.

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I've heard it over and over again, when people are calling in and man, a presuppositional approach would have been so beneficial, but you can't, from their perspective, it's impossible.

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So what does it mean to dismiss

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Thomas Aquinas in Toto? I don't know. Maybe I'll be able to track down more of the context at some point in time, but contemporary fundamentalists, we pray that we will continue to desire to be respectful, even when the other side ain't anywhere close.

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Speaking of which, I hadn't seen this, but I saw it just before the program started.

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And by the way, what is the tip thing on Twitter?

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I've never, that's never come up on mine. There's a, because on this, on this screenshot, there's this thing that says tip.

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I have no idea what that is. Maybe that's because I only use the web interface.

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I don't use any of the other, I have in the past, they would just always fail on me and become really messy.

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So tweet deck and tweet bot and tweet bird or whatever it was,

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I don't know. So I just gave up and I just use a browser. Anyway, Jacob Denhollander and Mr.

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Denhollander has been a critic and an unfriendly one for a long time. How should we describe

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White's PhD students? So I just want to stop for a second.

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My assumption is that this is in reference to Dr.

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Strand's posting of the video yesterday,

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I think, talking about early church history, the early church history class that we'll be doing in late

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September. And, you know, that's actually a master's level class.

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That's the only thing I could think of that would prompt any discussion online about anything like this is that, you know,

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I'm professor of church history at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. So teaching, teaching church history is sort of normal.

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Not, not surprising. And early church history, love it. I'll be honest with you.

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The number of hours we have in those few days, a little bit frustrating for me.

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So much in so little time.

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Just because I mentioned on Twitter that I, I've been teaching church history for a particular church in Germany.

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And no, I'm not going to start doing that for all sorts of churches because that's, that's a whole lot of stuff to do.

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And we have been at it. I think we started right around the time

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COVID hit. So we've been at it for two years. We haven't gotten to Nicaea yet.

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Now, for a while, it was every other week. So it was fairly regular, but then traveling sometimes gets in the way.

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I've actually done classes sitting in a Walmart parking lot from my truck while traveling and not while moving.

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Could be done, but that probably wouldn't be overly wise. And so, so I, I don't like going fast.

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I want to have time to, to dig in and, and, you know, we read major portions of Ignatius and, and Clements and have discussion about what all this means and, and everything else.

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And you do up through Augustan in two and a half days.

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That's, that's fast. But that's the way seminary is in most instances.

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Anyways, that's probably, I would assume that has something to do with it. Or as was just suggested,

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I had, I posted it. It's amazing how many people not only watch this program, despite the fact they detest me, but they follow me on Twitter, despite the fact that they detest me.

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And they feel like they have to comment all the time, despite the fact they detest me.

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And these all are people who claim to be Christians. It's wonderful. They have judgment,

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I don't have to worry about it. But maybe they were just simply saying, what had happened was

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I had seen yet another conversation where the final word that determined the outcome and the conclusion was thus saith

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Moeller. All you gotta do is cite Moeller's material.

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Not Moeller, M -U -L -L -E -R. And that's, that's the end.

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You just, that's the final authority note. And so, having seen it yet again in a conversation where, and again, this is nothing new.

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You see, I don't teach here anymore, at Golden Gate anymore. Golden Gate doesn't even exist anymore.

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It's now Gateway. But for years, I taught apologetics, Christian philosophy, religion.

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Yeah, I taught that a number of times. Systematic theology.

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I taught a number of classes. Greek, Greek exegesis, Hebrew, Hebrew exegesis.

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For Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. And I even taught up on the

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Mill Valley campus. That's a beautiful campus. I wonder what they've done with it. I'm sure that it's multi, multi, multi -million dollar

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Democrat houses now. It was just a beautiful spot. Anyway, I, I taught for, for years and years there.

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And struggled with the fact that I would have to try to get through, you know, teaching

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Greek, teaching Hebrew in very brief periods of time. And I don't want to teach people to hate this subject.

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I want them to be able to actually truly enjoy it and learn from it and continue to want to learn in that field after graduation and stuff like that.

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Been doing that for a really, really, really long time. And so, one, the first, the first summer that I taught up at Golden Gate, an apologetics class.

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The students came in. I dove into Romans 1, 1

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Corinthians chapter 2. I'm dealing with foundational biblical issues to constructing worldview and all that kind of stuff.

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Nobody has a Bible. The students, it was 40, at least 40 students.

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Nobody has a Bible. And during one of the breaks, I was talking with students and I'm like, and they're like, well, we didn't expect you would need a

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Bible in this class. There's a lot, there's lots of classes we take, you don't need a Bible. Oh, okay.

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What can I say? I don't even know how to respond to stuff like that. I really, really don't. That makes me naive and that's cool.

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I'll stay biblically naive. So anyways,

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Jacob Denhollander just felt like, you know, maybe, you know, he doesn't have a lot going on in life or something.

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I don't know. How should we describe Weiss PhD students? Probably because I had posted on Twitter after watching all this stuff and nobody's citing scripture, but a quote of Muller is enough to finish the conversation.

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I said, perhaps it's time we started using descriptor like Mullerites, because, you know, they want to use

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Biblicist, redefine it, but still stick us with it anyways. And terminology like that.

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And so I just threw that on Twitter. Maybe we should start talking about the Mullerites. If you think the citation of Muller is the end of the conversation, then maybe you're a

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Mullerite. That's probably what's behind all this stuff. So anyways,

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Jacob Denhollander, how should we describe Weiss PhD students? Then Ian Clary. Now, I had seen a nasty gram from Ian Clary yesterday.

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And it was about this. And he accused me of attacking

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Muller's scholarship and stuff. Never done it. No one can find anything where I've done that.

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Unless you assume that what I just said is an attack on Muller's scholarship, which if you do, you are not a rational person.

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You don't think logically. You think emotionally, maybe traditionally, but you don't think logically.

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So Ian Clary, who again, I had only just seen, but all

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I've seen from him so far is just nasty stuff. And so his single word response is unlucky.

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Well, thank you, Ian. That's so encouraging. What motivates this kind of stuff?

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I don't understand it. I mean, it seems to be really focused on you guys' side of things.

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I mean, you folks can be really nasty. So I'm not sure if it's

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Thomas Aquinas that makes you nasty or being a new scholastic that makes you nasty.

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I don't know. But you guys can be really nasty. You're not really representing yourselves as being

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Christians, even though you're defending the doctrine of God. Like, anyway.

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And then Jordan Zenikal, who is with the London Lyceum, and they are big into Thomas Aquinas and classical theism, all that kind of stuff.

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He says, yes, but what about his culture warriors, and why are they called Wilsonites? I don't have,

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I don't own, I haven't even started my collection of culture warriors. I don't even know what that's even supposed to mean.

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But anyway. And then some guy who, Charlie Shorma, I don't know who that is.

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They should be called Whiteheads. I think Whitebeard is better. I think that's a little bit more appropriate.

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But here are scholars, teachers.

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And you just, you look at some of the programs we've done over the past number of months where we've put the quotes up and let's read entire sections of what

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I'm about to do right now in the time we have left. And I've got to wrap up the top of the hour today because I'm doing another program right after this.

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And then tomorrow, by the way, I'll be on with, after the water boy gets the first 30 minutes on Chris Arntzen's iron sharpens iron.

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I was going to say iron, but hey, iron sharpens iron. I was just, maybe it's because I had headphones on or something,

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I was listening to it, and it's like, well, they are really emphasizing iron, aren't they? They are. Anyway, we're going to do 90 minutes following up on some programs that he did on King James colonialism and confessional bibliology.

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And so I'll be commenting on some stuff there tomorrow. That'll be right before the divine line.

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So the divine line may be delayed like 15 minutes or something so that I can switch over feeds and stuff like that.

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It'll be interesting and a challenge along the way. So that's the fellow

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I'm about to do the program with. I'm just letting him know I'm still live on the air.

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So there might be a little bit of a delay on the program tomorrow. So that's how that's going to go.

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I picked up, by the way, the vote is going to be taking place a little bit later on, probably within the hour of Southern Baptist Convention.

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I suppose it's probably just best to wait, see what happens, comment from there.

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But I'll be honest with you, whichever way it goes, I think the

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Southern Baptist Convention as an entity is going to be changed radically one way or the other of necessity.

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There are too many people who understand what wokeness is. And then too many other people that are absolutely dedicated to it to keep going that direction.

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Anyway, I picked up a copy because I wanted to check some things out of the same

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God who works all things in separable operations and Trinitarian theology. There was a presentation at the

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Building Tomorrow's Church conference in separable operations. And in the beginning of the presentation, it was, now you may have never heard of this before.

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And the reality is the vast majority of us never have. And yet to see it now being presented as one of the most important tools protecting the doctrine of the

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Trinity, you just wonder how anybody made it over the past two, three hundred years.

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And some of them, that's what they're saying. Past two, three hundred years have been a wasteland of theology.

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And we are here to lead you into the promised land flowing with theological milk and honey.

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Drawn straight from the breast of Thomas Aquinas. And so I just started looking through the book.

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Dr. Vito, I'm sure, is a wonderful guy. One of the thoughts

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I've had is I just don't know how long this particular movement will last.

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Because while movements can have impacts in seminaries and schools and things like that, and that impacts, obviously, the church.

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If it cannot be clearly explained to at least the top third of people in the views, it's probably going to go bye -bye eventually.

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I want you to listen to the language. Sorry. I want you to listen to the language here.

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I'm struggling to know where to start. The doctrine of procreation.

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Have you ever heard of the doctrine of procreation? I would describe it as the means to try to make it look like you are still actually dealing with the text of scripture.

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Even after you have decided to embrace a philosophical perspective that subjugates the text of scripture to external authorities.

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And thereby determines its interpretation. It's basically saying that the actions of the divine persons, while they are all external actions, are actually inseparable operations.

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Saying that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are all involved in every action. And of course, in the sense that God is accomplishing his decree, and that there is nothing done, none of the divine person just goes off and does his own thing.

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There's perfect unity, perfect harmony. That's a given, but this is drawing from hyper simplicity.

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It's all those categories being forced together. And so, that's the background.

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The doctrine of procreation indicates the manner in which such a drawing toward the personal distinctives is to be realized.

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In appropriation, we proceed toward the personal distinction without leaving the unity behind.

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For this reason, in appropriation, we gain not a new insight, but semantic depth.

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By understanding from propositional revelation, the personal property, we discern how it is manifested in the person's common operations.

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Thus, the experience of the persons in their hypostatic distinction takes place the medium of their common operation, but it is a common operation in which we are drawn toward the persons distinctly.

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But, in this case, the experience is not a mere epistemic experience where we objectify the person.

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Rather, it is a self -involving experience where the person gives himself to me precisely through my operations.

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It is, as we have seen, more of a tasting than a seeing. It is more like recognizing a certain note in the unitary taste of a glass of wine.

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It is experiential and not discursive knowledge. To experience the sun in his personal property, then, is to know

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God. To experience the Holy Spirit in his personal property is to love God.

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Now, almost anyone is going to be confused at this point.

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Okay, this is toward the end of the book. But, even that last phrase, to experience the sun in his personal property, then, is to know

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God. To experience the Holy Spirit in his personal property is to love God. I can't tell you how many times the

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Holy Spirit of God has been involved in leading me to know God. Or how many times the work of Christ as the

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Son has caused me to love the Father. To experience the persons in their distinctness is just to experience the one

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God. And to receive, through adoption, the mode of existence of the

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Son, not instead of our Essa, but alongside it. And, through indwelling, the mode of existence of the

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Spirit, which is just the mutual love between the Father and the Son. I'm well aware that Augustine, for example, made much of the idea of the

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Spirit being the mutual love between the Father and the Son. But, nowhere does

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Scripture even hint at such a thing. And, I really struggle with that language.

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How is it, how is the love between the Father and the Son, a person who distributes the gifts as he wills?

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Sorry, I'm a Reformed Biblicist. This takes place through the invisible missions, which are made possible by the visible missions.

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Thus, distinct relations with the triune persons obtain on the basis of their inseparable operation.

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Yet, through this operation, we are drawn to participate in the life of God. And, therefore, we begin to resemble the

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Son and the Spirit as exemplars. There's a lot more here, but there's one specific one

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I wanted to get to. Here we go.

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In Christ, human nature is actuated not by its own principle, but by the

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Word. So, we're talking about the Incarnation. It exists in the Word, and hypostatically.

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In the Incarnation, creation reaches the beginning of its end. For in Christ, it is raised above its capacities to union with the

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Word. He says creation there. All of creation?

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We found the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son alone, to pose no real difficulty to the doctrine of inseparable operations.

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Since the Son doesn't do anything different from the other persons in the

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Incarnation. Now, that's an argument we'll need to look at sometime in the future.

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Because, if the Son doesn't do anything different from the other persons in the

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Incarnation, does that mean in the incarnate state? Because it's only the

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Son who becomes incarnate. See, that's very woefully expressed. Or, really troublesome.

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Rather, the whole Trinity actuates this human substance in the person of the

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Son. The Son, so to speak, receives this human nature, just like the fire receives an iron, or like a magnet receives a needle.

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The change takes place in the human nature, not on God's side. We have highlighted the distinction between operation and state.

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The Incarnation is a state of the Son alone, yet not simply conceptually, for the relation is real in the creature.

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The creature receives, the Creator gives, but what the Creator gives is exactly the mode of being, an operation of the

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Son. So here's the main one.

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The mystery of the Incarnation cannot be explained by any amount of effort. It can only be confessed and revered.

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I wish, when I read the rest of the paragraph, he had stopped right there. Christ's human nature acquires not only the mode of existence of the

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Son, but also the Son's mode of operation. The human nature only acts as the instrument of the divine nature.

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The human operation is only consequent upon the divine operation. This doesn't make it any less human.

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Unfathomably, in the person of the Son, God actuates this human nature with its operations as an instrument of the divine.

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The operations are actuated in the mode of the Son. Christ only does what he sees the

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Father doing, John 5 .19. In faith, we understand that in God, there are these three modes of existence and action.

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In faith, we do not separate them in different action tokens, but understand them purely relationally within the unity of the same action.

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To call them modes of action is not to explain what they are.

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There aren't more basic categories in which to inscribe them. We can only confess and receive that in God, there is a single operation in three of what we tentatively call modes.

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Now, a number of people had absolute conniption fits. When I read from a

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TGC article, I think it was a TGC article. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was in Thimelios.

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Anyway, I read from an article from Dr. Vidu, and I said,

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Look, I've debated oneness Pentecostals, modalists, and I've never met a modalist who would be able to make heads or tails out of what

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I just read. But when you say we can only confess and receive that in God, there is a single operation in three of what we tentatively call modes, they're ringing the bell going,

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Welcome home. This type of, and your bookstore is filled with it, if there were bookstores anywhere.

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This type of material reminds me of the importance of telling the

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Christian Academy, get out of your ivory halls, get in the streets, do street ministry.

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Go down there to the Easter pageant of the Mormon Church. Stand outside the

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District Convention of Jehovah's Witnesses. If you are so whiz -bang good at the

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Trinity, prove it. Go reach the Jehovah's Witnesses with it.

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Go reach the oneness Pentecostals with it. Because I think what you'll find is that the language that left myself and everybody else sitting there going,

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What? Three modes, tokens, what?

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This is what the New Testament teaches? This is what the early church believed?

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This is what was being proclaimed in Acts? That kind of dependence upon non -biblical, non -revelational, developed long, long, long, long, long after revelation has ceased language and terminology.

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It's not going to work out there on the street. It's not going to work at the

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Kingdom Hall. It's not going to work outside the Mormon Temple. It's not going to work with the oneness Pentecostals. And that should say something to you.

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If it doesn't, there's something really wrong going on in our conversations.

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There really, really is. And so this was not meant to ridicule.

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This is meant to explain to a wider audience. Maybe an audience that people don't think should be that wide.

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But a wider audience, where is this headed? Where is this headed?

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It's not headed to believers having a greater confidence in the doctrines of Trinity because they see it in the very voice of Christ in his word, in Scripture.

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Instead, I think it's going to lead a lot of people to go, I can't follow any of that.

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I'm not going to try either. And if that's what you need, if you have to follow that, or you're going to end up as a tritheist or a modalist or whatever else, then

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I guess I'm pretty much doomed. That is a reason,

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I think, for great concern. Very serious concern. Really, really, really is.

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But anyways, my time is expired, and I have a gentleman waiting for me to join him to talk about a different subject, actually.

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And so we will wrap things up. The intention again tomorrow, after I do

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Iron Sharpens Iron, last 90 minutes, we will reset and jump in.

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But it could be 10 minutes, 15 minutes, somewhere in there maybe. Before we're able to do that.

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So keep that in mind. Thanks for listening to the program today. I probably was a little bit confusing in some ways.

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I understand that. But hopefully a word of warning as well.

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And Gene, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I'm not the one that hit the squirrel.

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I avoided it. I really did. But I tried to make something good come out of this demise.