"Church of Christ" & SDA share in the same FALSE Gospel! w/ Miles Christian @answeringadventism

What's up YouTube? As always, welcome to the live stream.

First one back after a couple weeks here. We're gonna be continuing a conversation that I had last week with Pastor Jeremiah Nortier over at the

Apologetic Dog. If you don't subscribe to the Apologetic Dog, you should subscribe to the

Apologetic Dog. His channel is tagged in the description box down below. We talked about some claims that all the

Restorationist churches make to being the one true church last time, specifically focusing on the

SDA Church and the Church of Christ, which Jeremiah has quite a bit of experience engaging with.

So tonight we're gonna transition into discussing salvation and the gospel. We were tempted to do that actually a couple times last time and we refrained.

So I'm excited to get into some of that tonight. But we're gonna be looking to see what sort of foundational similarities there are between the two groups.

He led the dialogue last time and let me jaw jack basically the entire time. So I'm gonna let him actually talk this go -around.

But we're gonna see how that goes because he wants me to get into the investigative judgment and I don't think he understands that by doing that we're gonna be opening

Pandora's box. So the chat tonight might camp out on that. We will see. And we're gonna leave the last 20 minutes or so to Q &A.

So just hold off on your questions as usual until prompted and then send them through in the live chat with a cue in the front so that we know that it's a question.

A couple housekeeping things before we get started. This Tuesday, February 28th,

I'll be live on this channel with a former Adventist pastor and we will be diving into a whole host of topics ranging from why he left, what that looked like, and where he is at now.

And also as of right now a number of you have been asking about the next three -way tag -team stream between myself,

Pastor Loriston, and CMB the Ambassador. We will be on William Albrecht's channel,

Patristic Pillars, next week on Thursday. A week from tonight discussing failed prophecies and other

Ellen White quackery. Yes, that's next week 7 p .m. on Patristic Pillars.

Lastly, y 'all know the drill. If you'd be so kind as to smash that like button.

Break the button. Smash it so hard. Subscribe and share the stream on Facebook or wherever that would be greatly appreciated.

With that said, for those that may not know, Jeremiah is a Reformed Baptist pastor at the 12 -5

Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and has been in ministry for five years. His love for God, theology, apologetics, and people are evident as he teaches the saints.

He and his wife, Allie, have been married since 2005, and she has continually been his number one supporter in ministry.

So with that said, brother, welcome to the stream. Miles, what's going on, man?

Not much, man. I am excited about our discussion. Like I said, we were so tempted a number of times in our last stream to...

Sorry. That was my fault, by the way. No, no, you're good. Whenever we're having like a first -time discussion on these topics with anyone, not just you, we tend to, or I tend to mention some things that tend to cause people to go, whoa!

Pump the brakes. Hold on. Hold on. And then the next thing you know, it's been two hours, and we went down the rabbit hole and covered all sorts of topics.

So no worries. Like I said, I'm excited that you're here tonight. I'm excited for you to actually be able to talk some, and for us to cover

Church of Christ a little bit more. I don't know if you know this, but here in Tennessee, they're like a hotbed.

And I think you were saying the same thing, too, where you're at, that they're a pretty big hotbed as well. But I run into a lot of them.

Real quick, before we jump in, you know Tim Tant, obviously, who just got done debating a

Church of Christ fellow. Tim and I actually met out on the street. I was doing street evangelism. I've been doing that in Nashville here for about seven or eight years.

And I crossed paths with Tim out on the streets, and he had been praying that God would lead him to people who were involved in street evangelism.

So that's actually how I got connected with Tim. But that's one area that him and I out there on the street, we run into a lot of Church of Christ people.

So I'm excited to get into tonight's show. So last time, we talked about the claim that these

Restorationist churches make with regards to being the church. And I want you to give us a little bit of backstory before we get in to how you got involved engaging

Church of Christ specifically. So why are we talking about Seventh -day Adventism and the Church of Christ when there are other

Restorationist churches out there? Yeah, well, a little bit of backstory with me. So Jonesboro, Arkansas is kind of like a city of churches in the sense that there's church buildings on every corner.

You either got a bank, a restaurant, or a church. And so the biggest number of churches are either going to say

Church of Christ or a type of Southern Baptist church. Those are the main ones. And so growing up in Jonesboro my whole life, tons of friends, family, people that I know are

Church of Christ. But I grew up Southern Baptist, which is still near and dear to my heart. And growing up,

I didn't think very much about Church of other than maybe they're just another evangelical denomination.

And so when I got a little bit older, I started realizing, oh man, there's a major difference in understanding of how we're made right before God in the very gospel itself.

So for me, it was about 21. I was about 21 where I started really being more vocal with my faith, really having a desire to learn

God's Word, to not only digest it, take it in my own heart, but share it with other people.

And I was a little cage -stagey in many areas. I was a lot more vocal, and I started running into a lot of people that were

Church of Christ. And so when I do evangelism, that is where my heart's at because I know so many people.

And so with that, I met an individual. Actually, this individual is putting out ads in the paper.

He's a Church of Christ minister. And one of the members of my church came up to me, this church that I was at many years ago, said, hey, you may need to consider calling this person and talking because they were disparaging the idea of salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, and Jesus Christ alone.

They said something to me very rudimentary blunder of just saying, well, that's contradictory. You can't have all these alone.

And it's like, okay, maybe they don't understand the historical context of the five solas of the Reformation. And I started seeing in the description that this is denominational language that's found nowhere in the

Bible. So I called this individual. We went through the whole deal, and I learned very quickly, especially with the inside of Walter Martin with the kingdom of the cults, you have to scale the language,

Barry. It's always a war of defining terms and always looking at context for proof text. So anyway, my interaction with this

Church of Christ minister led eventually to him asking me if I wanted to debate one of his friends.

I was like, sure. Actually, I was at the G3 conference, I guess a year and a half ago, and I got an email saying, hey, there's a

Church of Christ minister just down the road from my town. He's looking to debate someone that would hold to faith and law and doesn't think water baptism is necessary for salvation.

And I just said, let's do it. I said, I don't need to know all the details. I want to make sure this is going to happen.

So I want to encourage people, go over to the Apologetic Dog. The main featured video is that debate that I had with a

Church of Christ minister, Brock Kendall. That was almost a year ago to the day, and I loved that so much.

I think both sides, it was a clear contrast that we're not on the same page. We believe in different Gospels, and we're going to get into this tonight.

I believe the Church of Christ holds to works, righteousness, salvation. They don't say that, but when you ask them, what must

I do to be saved? You're going to get a list of five things, and then there are hidden steps that they don't mention.

And it's works, righteousness from the core, and it comes out of this restoration movement that was around the early 1800s, even late 1700s.

And last thing I want to say, Myles, real quick, is I'm actually on the docket to have another debate on Donnie's channel at Standing for Truth.

I believe the date is going to be March 20th, where I'm going to be debating another Church of Christ member. I don't know his status within the church, but it's going to be on, essentially, is water baptism necessary for our justification before God?

So I'm super pumped about that. Cool, man. I think that's a good little primer and backdrop.

It's funny because as you're saying all that, I'm like, man, this sounds identical to the SDAs. It's like the scaling the language barrier.

And of course, they're not going to be like, yeah, we believe in works righteousness. Of course, no works righteousness group has ever said we believe in works righteousness.

So that's good, man. Before we dive too deep on this, I want us to clearly lay two things out because not just with restorationist groups, but all sorts of people can tend to get hung up on definitions if they're not clearly laid out.

And so I find that in this typical discussion, people tend to get hung up on what is the gospel and what do we mean by salvation?

So in our discussion tonight, are we talking about when it comes to salvation, are we here advocating for I went down the aisle and I said the prayer, so I got my ticket punched and I'm going to heaven?

No way. Do we believe in cheap grace? I'm very familiar with that kind of upbringing.

Not all SBC churches are cut the same, but the one I came from was very, very much emotional, an invitation and come and pray the prayer.

And I love the church that I grew up at for 15 years, but that fit the bill of what you're getting at is pray this prayer, get the ticket punched, and you can only be backslidden the rest of your life and once saved, always saved.

And so that all changed for me when I started studying the doctrines of grace, realizing that this is a work of the

Spirit from the heart. We're not just trying to get people to make a decision. We're calling them to repentance and faith in Jesus.

It's so much more than a decision. It's a heart that loves Jesus with everything in you.

And so that changes everything. And then you realize that that wasn't of yourself. That wasn't your own doing.

That was a gift of God. That was a work of God. And so I won't get into all the weeds of that, but yeah, it's not an easy believism, cheap grace.

To repent means to recognize and understand that Jesus is Lord, whether or not you recognize it.

But it is coming to that, repenting in your heart, turning from loving the things of the world, loving your sin, and turning and looking to him and trusting him alone for salvation.

Amen. Yeah, it's exactly right. We're not here peddling your channel, my channel, the discussion tonight.

We are not peddling fire insurance. We're not here saying, you need to come to Jesus so you don't go to the bad place.

That is not what we're advocating. And I say that because I've been engaging SDAs for almost a decade now in this regard.

And I hear that all the time. It's this false dichotomy of, if you're not with me, then you're automatically this other thing over here.

And those are the only two options. So I just want to set that out there that we're not here advocating for fire insurance.

The gospel is not a suggestion. It is a command. You are commanded to bow the knee to Jesus Christ as Lord.

You will either do it now, if God so wills and graces it to you. If not, you will eventually do it on the last day.

So with that said, we covered the first part. When we talk about salvation here, we're not just talking about cheap grace, easy believism, or even just justification, which is what a lot of people are getting hung up on, too.

A lot of times when we get into the Sola Fide discussion, faith alone, it can kind of get overlooked that what we're talking about is really that single -tier justification versus a two -tier justification, where the initial justification is, of course, by grace through faith.

That's exactly what Rome says as well. But then there's this second tier after that where, and we're getting into synergism here, which

I'll save this for a little bit later, but after God is essentially done by grace through faith, it's now your duty to come up alongside

God and to do your part and cooperate alongside that process.

And as long as one is doing that, they retain that justification versus the idea of justification being a one -time act that God bestows upon a person at the point of granting them faith and repentance, and then that person will automatically go into the process of sanctification because the

Spirit does not remain dormant in anybody. There is no carnal Christian.

Hate to break it to you, folks. The Spirit does not remain dormant in people. So when we talk about salvation, we're talking about the entire chain and the entire process.

We may be talking about one specific point in that, but we are not here advocating that salvation is this idea of like a one and done, like there was a single moment.

That single moment may have been when you were justified, but that's not the whole process. Yeah, and not to derail too far off, definitely bring back the the apologetic dog, but the more

I interact with Church of Christ, I've learned something very interesting. They deny that they have any indwelling of the

Holy Spirit. Like in my mind, they are the radical cessationist crowd. Not only did they deny that God works in miraculous means, but the only way that you can make sense of the passage that tell us we have the

Holy Spirit is when they say, when you read Scripture and the Scripture is in your mind, that's the

Holy Spirit indwelling you. And I'm over here like, I'm very thankful that they deny that they have the

Holy Spirit because I believe that that is true about them as well. Well bro, that's so funny you say that. Maybe we need to do a separate stream dedicated just to this, like pneumatology, doctrine around like the

Holy Spirit, because that's, again, very similar to Seventh -day Adventism. I don't want to sidetrack again with that.

Maybe we'll do a second stream, but quickly give, you know, not the systematic presentation, but we covered what we're talking about when we mean salvation.

What do we mean by the gospel? What is the gospel? That's so good.

Evangelion, right? In Greek, the good news. I even brought the good boys, the boys to help me out if I need to phone a friend.

But the gospel is the good news, right? And I'm a simple man. In order to understand good news, you have to understand bad news first, right?

What makes the good news the good news? And so the bad news is that we have all broken

God's law. It didn't start out that way, right? Man started out in the garden where he was in perfect communion with God, but long story short, man sinned, committed cosmic treason against his

Creator, and then Adam represented all of his posterity and fell into sin, and we all died in Adam.

And so from birth, we all have this disposition towards rebellion and hatred towards our

Creator. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. God is perfect in all of his ways.

That means he's perfectly just. He will judge sin. He will pour out wrath. And so that's what we all deserve.

That's the bad news, that we deserve justice for being lawbreakers. But the good news is, is when we look to Jesus by faith alone, faith apart from works, which

I hope we can get a little bit more into that terminology, then the great exchange happens, right? Jesus lived a perfect, sinless life.

He obeyed the law of God perfectly, and then he died on the cross, satisfying the wrath of God completely.

So when you look to the perfect Savior in faith, all of your sin, past, present, and future, gets put on the cross of Calvary, and in exchange, you receive the perfect righteousness covering your account.

And so when that happens, then all of your sin gets forgiven. Psalm 32 talks about the blessed man whom

God will not impute sin, will not, never will be, because you have the perfect righteousness of the

Savior covering your account. Now, it's not that we can go and abuse grace now. No, we have a changed heart.

We now desire to do the things that are pleasing to God and to practice righteousness. So we desire to be with the saints, to gather together in the church, to get that foretaste of what heaven will be like for all eternity.

Amen, bro. That's like spiritual jacuzzi, just hearing all that. It's like, oh man. Yeah, wonderful.

The doctrines of grace. So there's something you said there, too, that actually I don't want to get too off on this yet.

I would love to get back to this. You mentioned the great exchange, and just in passing on that, in case we're not able to get back to that,

I think that is something that these, and not just these restorationist groups, but lots of people who reject this idea do not quite understand.

So for example, in Seventh -day Adventism, the righteousness of Christ is something they love to tout.

They love to, you'll hear them constantly say it's one of their pillars. They have seven pillars, and it's one of the pillars. And it's all this buzz lingo that Protestant evangelical types are familiar with, but scaling that definition barrier, you're gonna find that it's not that you're actually imputed with the righteousness of Christ, that there's this great exchange that takes place, and right now, before the

Father, you're seen as holy. You're righteous right now, and you're standing before God, and nothing can alter that because God's a perfect Savior.

In their mind, the way they define it, I actually just was reading one of their pioneers.

He has a book called The Righteousness by Faith, where he's like going over their idea and concept. Their good news is this, that Christ died on the cross to make salvation a possibility.

Pretty standard synergism or semi -Pelagianism, if you will. He paid the penalty for sin and was the atoning sacrifice for sin.

Now, he sent the Holy Spirit, who's the helper, to help you if, by faith, so there's, you know, by faith, of course, you come to him, you're baptized in the

Adventist Church, you will now have the help of the heavenly trio, the Father, Son, and the

Spirit, who are working like a team. They will come alongside you and help you essentially get to a point where you are sinlessly perfect, arriving at the destination where you are now righteous like Jesus was righteous.

That's the righteousness of Christ. So when they say the faith of Jesus, that's another big phrase they love to say.

They love to point to Revelation and say the remnant are those who have the faith of Jesus. We talked about that a little bit in the last stream, not getting really into the details of the definitions, but what they mean by that is that your faith is identical to that of what

Jesus had. You eventually get to a point where your faith is perfect, it never falters, and then you're also sinlessly perfect in all of your character, thought, word, deed, everything, because, as you're gonna see when we get into tonight, their prophet has taught them that they're going to have to stand before Almighty God without an intercessor, and so when this takes place, you're going to have to have arrived at that state where you have the faith that's identical to that of Jesus and a righteousness that isn't

Christ's foreign righteousness imputed to you like Paul says in Philippians 3, 9 -10, it's a righteousness that through the help of the

Holy Spirit, you've essentially gotten to a point where you now have a righteousness identical to that of Jesus.

So before getting too deep into some of that, when it comes to salvation and the gospel, what issues do you have with the church of Christ?

You mentioned their steps, and I know exactly what you're talking about, so maybe you'll get into some of that here, but what concerns you about what they say about the gospel and salvation?

They distort law and gospel, number one. The gospel ends up becoming law.

They conflate categories of terms like obedience and legalism, to obey.

To them, when we start talking about not of works, they're gonna immediately qualify that into kinds of works, and I have tons of church of Christ people that follow my channel constantly or harassing me.

I don't really mind. It's like, help my YouTube algorithm. I don't mind, but one of the most helpful things, and I'll get into some of this, but I just want to kind of lay this out there, is one definition that I will always contend for and press them to tell me is, give me the definition of works.

Ergon in the Greek. Tell me what that means, and the gentleman that I debated, he had a debate partner, the guy that set it all up, he pointed at me and said,

I don't have to give you a definition of works. I just obey the gospel, and I'm like, all right. This is the problem, is teachers are held to a higher standard.

You're supposed to be able to teach, exegete the Scriptures, tell us what the meaning of the word is without imposing your ideologies onto the text, so at the end of it, the church of Christ, they will use the word obedience or obey to smuggle in works into the gospel, and so this is what happens.

I say, give me a definition of faith, give me a definition of works, and a lot of them can't do it, and those are synonymous words in their system.

Now, not every church of Christ believes the same thing, but I've heard some people try to say, well, faith really means the content of the

New Testament or the gospel, and they're confusing something like Jude verse 3 that says contend for the faith.

Okay, that's qualified, right? But when we read about personal faith, that's pistis. We even have, you know,

Hebrews 11 one that kind of tells us the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That's faith, right?

This is a category of the heart. This is a firm trust, and don't get mad at me for saying this, but I've done a little bit of interaction with Sam Shimon in the past, and what a lot of what they will do is redefine faith to mean faithfulness.

To me, that's a better argument than what the church of Christ do. Like, they're really grasping at straws, just not even paying attention to definitions of words and looking at context.

I had one church of Christ guy today tell me the definition of works, Myles, is works, and I'm like, oh no.

Thank you for the tautology. Yes, yes. I'm like, I didn't know nonsense was allowed here, and I'm not trying to be mean, but these are serious things, especially when you look at important passages that cannot be misunderstood

Romans for. We don't have to get into it, but that is where I take church of Christ because we see the judicial language of justification by faith apart from works.

Whether you look at works of law, whether you look at works of flesh, anything that you can point to, that's not a part of your justification except by faith and faith alone.

So that's what they do. They essentially are adding faith plus works, and we get into a conversation.

I've met some very respectful church of Christ, and I love those conversations because what I try to have the conversation is, at what point are we justified?

Is it the moment when we have faith, which God knows and you know in your heart, or until that faith works a particular action like baptism?

Is that when we're justified before God? Now that, Myles, I laid that out so clear.

They have to like understand those are the two options going on here, like a true dichotomy.

And so the problem is they're confusing a justification before man, a vindication before man, with God who is all -knowing.

Historically, the church of Christ affirming God's omniscience, and so they're really boxed into a corner when when they start saying things like, oh well you gotta really show

God that you mean it. God knows your heart. God tests the heart. He already knows before you perform the action.

So does that make sense? They're really making baptism the thing that if you don't do it, then you're not getting in, right?

And I'm over here saying, well you've destroyed the gospel of grace. You've committed the Galatians 1 heresy, and then they will talk about you can fall from grace in Galatians 5, 4 to mean you can lose your salvation.

I'm like, no. You've adopted legalism. You've severed yourself from Christ and embraced a different gospel.

That's falling from grace. So stop me because I could go for days here. Well again, it's just it's so interesting how similar, it's like all these groups just put a different veneer on themselves because really this has this argument,

I would say even before the point I'm going to mention, but the point that I'm gonna mention is when it was really,

I say God brought the magnifying glass out at that point, and that was with Luther. For anyone that's curious,

I would highly recommend that you read Luther's Bondage of the Will. Whether you're Reformed or not,

I think that it's just an important piece of history, Christian history. It's the first recorded, documented down debate within the church, at least in terms of like real scholasticism.

You obviously had controversies going on with like the Donatists, the Gnostics, that sort of thing, but really look at Luther's Bondage of the

Will because he was addressing the exact thing that you're talking about right now, which is the crux of the issue.

We can get caught off in the weeds with a lot of these groups and the way that they uniquely use terms or definitions, but really when you peel back all of the layers, what we're getting at here is that these groups have a two -tier system of justification.

When you say that they are conflating or mixing law and gospel, they don't have that law gospel distinction, something else that they could learn a lot from Luther on, that's essentially what we're getting at.

It's not seeing justification and sanctification as two separate things that are not interdependent upon one another in the sense that your sanctification is another phase of justification.

That's the core issue because, again, as you're saying that, I'm thinking about Seventh -day Adventist theology and just how you could literally port them into everything essentially that you were saying there.

They're not going to tell you, obviously, that they believe works righteousness. They're going to tell you all the lingo and the language.

I don't know the lingo as well as Church of Christ, but Adventists, the organization, has gotten really good at utilizing the right language so that people who aren't learned or aren't thinking to maybe ask about definitions are going to hear these things and then just move along as if, oh yeah, this person's saying the same thing

I'm saying. In Adventism, it kind of works like this. You'll ask them if it's a works righteousness, and they would say, no, of course not.

Of course it's not by works. Here's their system kind of in a nutshell. All of humanity is on a period of probation.

You have to go back to their pre -earth origin story, which is found in the writings of Ellen G. White, who we talked about on the last stream.

If you guys want to hear that discussion, you can go check that out. We're not going to get into that tonight. You have to go back to this pre -earth origin story.

She taught that the Father and the Son, in their work of creation, created man post this war in heaven with Satan.

The earth and man were created in a chaotic environment where sin had already crept into heaven.

You can read about this, by the way, folks, in Spirit of Prophecy, Volume 1, starting at page 17, the fall of Satan.

God created in a chaotic environment and put man on a probationary period.

So that's the baggage that's coming to the creation of man. They are essentially mono -covenantalists.

I think we mentioned this in passing. That's really what

I'm getting at with this intermingling works of law with the gospel or grace, because they don't see a distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

They have taken classic covenant theology, whether that be Presbyterian, which is the correct one, by the way, or Baptist covenant theology.

It doesn't matter. They've essentially taken a historic covenant perspective, and then, of course, they've twisted it and altered it.

I had a comment out here earlier from a guy who said, It's sad. I never heard the good news of the gospel when

I was in SDA church. It was all about burning in hell or the three angels message or the great controversy. That's exactly it, man.

Their idea of the gospel is from this paradigm of the great controversy. I'm getting ready to do a series of videos breaking this down for people who are not familiar with it, but this is like the real key to understanding the way they define everything.

I've talked about this on the stream before for anyone that's watched any of the other content. This is the paradigm for them.

So everything, justification, salvation, the gospel, it's all defined through this great controversy paradigm, which they claim was uniquely given to Ellen White, who had this vision at a funeral.

So that's where it essentially came from, and that's how they interpret everything scripturally. But they're mono -covenantalists.

So there's this intermixing of works of law with grace, and it's a combination of that that essentially brings about how a person is made right before God.

So how would you biblically define works righteousness? Yeah, so it's everything we've been talking about.

Works righteousness is if you are doing any works, any action, any ergo on anything you do or you accomplish, if that is why you are made right before God, justified, then you have necessarily imported works into faith.

And so that's why justification is by faith alone. Faith is not a work. Faith is a gift.

So that's fundamental. And when I really press for... Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, we got a number of places.

You know, God grants faith and repentance. He grants... Philippians 1 .9? Yeah, Philippians 1 .9.

He's granted us to not only suffer to believe, but to also suffer for His name's sake.

So it's not like that easy believism like you're talking about. No, it's a real faith that's in the heart, and then get ready, right?

Because we're not promised roses, right? The whole world's going to come at us hard. So with the

Church of Christ, some of the lingo, like you were talking about, because they really do. It's faith plus works, and it's a misunderstanding of James 2, which, by the way, to me, that's where all the all go to James 2 and then misinterpret that to justify their position.

But it's all baptism for them. And I'm learning so much from the Seventh -day Adventist side of things, but it's all about baptism.

It's all about seven or eight proof texts about baptism. You guessed it. And you got to be baptized in their church, the

Church of Christ. And they appeal to Romans 16 .16, the churches of Christ now greet you and salute you. And it's like, that's not talking about what the name of your church is.

That's talking about the nature of the ecclesia, the called -out ones by faith, the ones who have been called out by the gospel and respond by faith apart from their works.

So there's a number of things that I could say, but it all kind of funnels back to baptism. And earlier,

I was talking about they have five steps where you got to believe, you have to repent, you have to confess, you have to be baptized into their church.

And so this is the hidden step. You have to continue to live holy lives.

Now, what they mean when they say that is you can essentially lose your salvation because everything is contingent on what you do.

Right. And so it's works righteousness literally from beginning to end.

It's all contingent on you. I obeyed the gospel. I was saved the day, the moment that I obeyed, and I'm continuing to obey.

And something that I tell people is the way they treat Jesus is like a reset button. OK, because they they accumulated a lot of sin right from the time of the womb, which they believe you were born perfect.

By the way, this is full blown Pelagianism. And so it's your environment that corrupts you. Right. It's not that you have a corrupt heart.

You have a perfect sin. I mean, an innocent heart. Right. And then your environment corrupts you.

And then Jesus is a reset button. You hit that. You get baptized. Then you have only your past sins forgiven.

So when you do sin, it's contingent on you to now repent and ask for forgiveness. And so there's so many problems with that.

But I just want to paint the picture that it's it's all contingent on you. It's funny because, you know, we're the reform crowd.

We they see us as the enemies. They they hate everything that we talk about from our view of God.

Our view of man is really what gets their blood pumping because we're we're saying you're not good.

There's none good. No, not one. And they want to make an exception for infants.

And that's really key to their doctrine. But they essentially deny.

Now, I'll make people mad saying this, but they essentially deny the grammatical historical method of interpretation.

They have an acronym called SINI, which basically just kind of elevates this

Baconian philosophy that you don't have any presuppositions. You know, you can just read

Scripture and be a fresh, clean slate. You can look at direct command. You can look at necessary inference.

And that's what you do. If we do the things that the people did in Acts, then that's how you're a

Christian, which is self -refuting in many ways because they don't do everything that the early Christians did in Acts.

But Acts is kind of elevated to be the primary book. You know how the the SDA, they kind of elevate Revelation and a lot of obscure language.

For the Church of Christ, it's about seven different proof texts with Acts kind of this narrative book rises to the top.

It helps us interpret the epistles, the didactic texts. And we're over saying you've got it fundamentally backwards there.

So I don't know if you want to chime in with anything real quick. Yeah, there's so much there, man. That's just like, again, there's so many similarities.

They're not gonna harp on baptism as much as they're gonna harp on the Sabbath. The Sabbath. The Sabbath. And not just the

Sabbath, by the way, the seventh -day Sabbath. And even that's actually not good enough because you don't have the spirit of prophecy.

You also have to have Ellen White. So I've had a number of discussions with them over the years.

My position has actually evolved on this over the years. I am a Sabbatarian. I'm not a seventh -day Sabbatarian.

But I've had a number of fun discussions with them because I say, well, obviously they say, well, it's not the seventh -day

Sabbath, which is the true Sabbath. So you're not a Sabbatarian. They have the monopoly on how the

Sabbath is defined and understood. No concept of the new creation. No concept of the inauguration of that or any of that.

That's all according to them because there's not a verse that explicitly says, go to church on Sundays, which there's not one for Saturday either.

But because it's not like explicitly stated, now the church is to go to church on Sundays.

Therefore it's not biblical because it's not explicitly said in the text there. But a lot of similarities, man, that I think are again...

I'd like to tell you one more similarity with something you just said. So they got their five -step system.

Let me see if I can hit it right. So you got to believe, you got to have faith, you got to repent, you got to confess, and you got to be baptized.

One of the hidden steps is you have to be baptized in their church. I know I alluded to this earlier because you could...

and Tim Tant did this in Israel. It's like, okay, I've done all those things, right? So I should be saved according to your standard.

Oh, no, you got to be baptized in the Church of Christ, right? So there's that qualifier, like they're the one true church.

I'm sure the SDA say almost exactly the same. They're going to be a part of our group.

And the Church of Christ hates the term denomination. And I was on Cultish recently, and we got into a good discussion with Andrew, and he says they're not a denomination, right?

Because that should be reserved for those who are evangelical and orthodox. And I'm like, you know what? That is a fantastic point.

But it's all on how you define terms, because denomination could be looked at in a very broad sense, like you're a gathering of people that are holding to a particular standard of teaching.

And my presuppositionalism comes out of me, and it's like, when I hear self -refuting points,

I just want to expose that for all it's worth. So yes, so many similarities between the

SDA and COC. Totally. So I'm going to read a quote here. This is from the

Seventh -day Adventist inspired prophetess, and I'm going to kind of use this to segue into kind of explaining some of those similarities.

So she says, quote, "...do not appeal to your own sympathies. Do not dwell..."

This was in a letter. For those that are curious, folks, this is Manuscript Releases, Volume 12, page 40.

The online code is 12MR40 .3. I don't know what book this was published in.

That's the manuscript code. Sorry, that's not the short one for the people out there that do these. It says, quote, "...do

not appeal to your own sympathies. Do not dwell upon what Brother J has done or has neglected to do..."

So this was correction and instruction that she was giving to people regarding a backslider, a guy that was going heathen.

"...humble your own heart before God. You're not to sit in judgment upon the case of others until you show greater wisdom in making straight paths for your own feet.

You may say, does Sister White think me all bad? No, I do not. But one blot upon the character, one sin unconfessed and unrepentant of, will close for you the gates of the city of God."

So they'll tell you, we don't believe in works righteousness, but then they'll adhere to stuff like that.

So that gives you the hint or the indication that they're not defining that the way that you're defining that.

In their mind, it's, no, we could never... it's just semi -Pelagianism. No, we could never do it of our own.

There's a level of provenient grace that's given to all people. The doorway is now wide open.

That's why Jesus came. But then you have in their view tacked on Jesus came to vindicate the law of God, to exalt the law of God, to silence the accusations of Satan that started in this pre -earth origin story, all of that sort of stuff.

And so in their eyes and their system, if you're a consistent Seventh -day Adventist, we are going to get

SDAs, of course, that say, I'm an Adventist. I don't believe that. That's not who we're referencing.

We're talking about the official stated beliefs of the organization here. The official position is that the writings of Alan White speak with prophetic authority.

They are infallible. I have yet to find the SDA that will say, yep, she was wrong on that. They'll be quick to say, we don't believe that she's infallible.

We don't have anything that says that. Then you say, okay, well, where is she aired? Uh, well, and they'll always defend her.

If you bring it up, they'll always defend her. So the organizational level, the official teachings are that her writings speak with prophetic authority.

She formed their system of theology. So their soteriology involves the 10 commandments, which when they use the term, the law, that's what they're referring to.

Not all 613 commands, right? Only the 10 commandments. I'm getting ready to release a video actually, uh, in a couple of weeks, folks,

I just batched out some content yesterday where I'm going to be addressing this claim that there is this artificial divide between the

Decalogue and the rest of the law. And there's a lot of times that I've talked to reform people actually, who on the surface, they hear that and they think, well, yeah, there, there is.

It's not a threefold use like you're thinking of. It is not that. It is an artificial divide where one law was given by Moses, the law of Moses.

That's where all the ceremonial stuff was. And we talked about this in that last stream as well. That's what was nailed to the cross.

The 10 commandments though, those came from God. They were written by his finger on stone. Even though, uh,

Chronicle says that at one point the people took all that Moses wrote in the book of the law, which was the whole

Pentateuch and put it onto stone. Um, but nevermind that we're going to ignore that. Um, so they, they essentially have this artificial divide between the 10 commandments and the rest of the law.

And it's the 10 commandments that are the standard by which you're going to be tested in this investigative judgment.

So in their view, all of mankind is on probation. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus has made a way of escape.

You can now make a profession of faith, get baptized in their church. Ellen White taught that if you were baptized in a different church, you have to be baptized into the

Advent faith, which is why they have a unique set of baptismal vows that you have to agree to in order to be baptized into their church.

Upon being baptized, you're given a clean slate, just like you mentioned earlier, upon moving forward, every sin that you commit, which is funny because she says the 10 commandments are the standard by which this judgment is going to happen.

But then she has other statements where she says it's every thought, word and deed and motive. So the 10 commandments don't encompass necessarily all of that, but I digress.

Uh, essentially moving forward, any sin that you commit, if it's unconfessed, it will stand against you in the investigative judgment.

So the investigative judgment is a period of extended probation where you now making a profession will come up in this investigative judgment.

It's only for professed believers. It is a pre Advent judgment.

So a lot of times when they use the word judgment, they're only talking about this. They're not talking about the judgment that say you and I would be affirming along with the universal church through the ages of the

Creed that Christ is coming back to judge the living and the dead. It's that this is a separate judgment before that.

It is a pre Advent judgment only for professed believers for Jesus to vindicate the character of God against the accusations of Satan, as well as see who's truly worthy of salvation.

So in this process, your name will come up. It will start all the way back with Adam, the very first generation of people.

Once God has investigated every single person who's professed faith up to the point of the living, he will then begin the process with the living.

Your name will come up in this. No one knows when it could have already come up 10 years ago.

And now here you are still doing all these things, and you have no clue if your name has come up, if you've passed, if you failed any of that, your name will come up and it will be done as though you're the only human being on the face of the planet.

It will be done with scrutinizing detail. There's an angel that's been assigned over every person who's professed faith, who's documenting down these sins in a book.

In the investigative judgment, it is this book that Jesus will then open to begin going down the list of all of your sins.

If you have confessed your sins, Jesus will take his blood and blot out that sin.

If he hasn't, he'll move on to essentially the next. And if there's any sin left on your record, you won't make it through the investigative judgment.

After the investigative judgment, well, and one thing actually on all of that is, well, hold on.

After this judgment, there'll then be a courtroom scene. This is when

Jesus' work of investigative judgment will close and the period of probation is essentially over.

Satan will be there along with Christ in this heavenly courtroom before the Father.

Satan will be accusing God's people. Jesus will be advocating for them. His advocacy will be successful for all of those that he advocates for, but it's only those who have made it through this judgment.

It's not anyone who failed to pass this investigative judgment.

So oftentimes they'll point to these things and say, well, yeah, of course, Jesus' advocacy is completely successful for all of those who it's for, because they love to talk about the intercessory work of Christ and what he's currently doing, because the atonement in their view is not finished.

I think that's unique to them and I don't think Church of Christ would say the atonement's not finished, but they believe the atonement, the investigative judgment is the next phase in the atonement.

It is a work of heavenly atonement, says their fundamental beliefs. So it involves

Jesus' blood and the blotting out of sins. So you have to really understand the system to know where the works plug in.

And there's one thing I want to look at here really quick, and this is scripture. I want to look at, you mentioned in passing earlier, something that I think is of vital importance.

One was James chapter 2, which people, you need to start at verse 14. You need to not jump down to where it says, therefore we maintain that man is justified apart from, or therefore man is justified not by faith alone.

But I can't remember exactly what he says, sorry. But he says that the verse that everybody points to is essentially saying that it's man's not justified by faith alone, but they fail to understand that the context of the passage is talking about two types of faith.

There's a living faith and a dead faith, and the context is amongst people who can see one another. It's not before God, it's on the horizontal.

Before we dive into James 2, I do want to talk about a difference that I'm hearing with the

Church Christ and the SDA. Sounds to me like the Seventh -day Adventists want to be somewhat historic, pointing back to LNG White and maybe some of these other figures.

The Church of Christ really want to get away from church history with everything in them, because you're gonna find them all the way back to Alexander and Thomas Campbell, okay?

And so that's huge, because their claim to fame is we speak where the

Bible speaks, and we're silent where the Bible is silent. No creed but Christ, which is self -defeating once again.

That's the Adventist position. Yeah, and so it's interesting to me, because ultimately with us being

Reformed, man, this is the so infallible rule of faith right here for everything we need for godliness.

But we have a historic faith. I do think we talked about this a little bit last time, so it's to our advantage to look to the saints of old.

The boys. I'm making a video about this, by the way, folks. It's gonna be dropping on Monday next week about this exact topic.

Continue. Yeah, and so I just wanted to say, like, so there's a different methodology. You know, I mentioned CINI, their little acronym for, which to me just abuses the grammatical historical method of interpretation, which is transcendental.

I'm saying it's necessary for how we understand language. And so I was trying to just listen to some other things.

Some of the odd phrases in Church Christ is, in order to, you contact the blood of Jesus in the watery graves of baptism, because that's where the magic happens, essentially.

And so I just wanted to throw that in there, and then like we're going to, it's James 2. A lot of this is so important, and then bringing up how

Abraham was justified. I think we should be equipped to talk about all these things, you know. Well, that's actually where I want to go.

I was just mentioning James 2 in passing, actually. We can go there if you want after this, but that's actually where I wanted to go was Romans chapter 4, because I think there's a key thing here, folks, that we really need to hone in on, and that is, what is justification?

Justification is not the entirety of salvation, but when we were talking about sola fide or faith alone, we'll hear this from our

Roman Catholic friends, even Seventh -day Adventists, Church of Christ, etc. While the

Bible never says faith alone, there's something that's being said by that phrase.

We're not saying that necessarily the phrase faith alone is like the Bible is explicitly saying that.

What it's saying is that at the point of justification, that happens regardless of any works that a person does.

It's that justification comes at the point of faith, not after you've done things.

You don't maintain it through your obedience and your works, though there will be works and obedience. We're not saying that there won't be those, but those are now in a different category.

You've now moved to the next stage of salvation, because the Spirit begins sanctifying a person.

But I want to read here really quick. It says, this is Romans 4 .1. It says, "...what then shall we say was gained by Abraham?"

So he just got done in Romans chapter 3 talking about, well, let's start actually at 327.

"...then what becomes of boasting? Is it excluded by what kind of law? By a law of works?

No, but by the law of faith. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one.

Who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith? Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?

By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law." The Adventist Church loves that last verse there, 331, because they say, see we actually uphold the law, and this is what they use to essentially support their, you know, covenantalism.

Can I chime in with something real quick? For sure. So back in verse 28, "...for we uphold that one is justified by faith apart from works of law."

So the Church of Christ is going to come in and say, see, apart from works of law, we're not under the law of Moses anymore.

His point is, he has a positive statement, we're justified by faith, and then he has a negative statement of something that we're not justified.

He's not saying exhaustively that's the thing that we're not justified. You could put anything in that box, right?

Correct. In the negative box, right? Because he's telling us positively of how we are justified, which we're gonna look at Romans 4 and then 5 .1

really brings it to a focal point, but it ties in exactly what we're saying here. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. So what the Church of Christ like to say is, that's an obedient faith. We're saying, yeah, true faith produces obedience, but that's not what they mean by that phrase.

It's only a living faith the moment it produces an action. I'm saying, sure, to vindicate it before man, as we're about to see with Abraham, but God knows the heart, right?

And they have a different definition of faith. Here in a moment, I want to let you get going, but I want to define four key terms in this conversation.

Faith, works, justification, and sanctification. Totally. So it says,

Romans 4 .1, "...what then shall we say was gained by Abraham our forefather according to the flesh?

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.

For what does the Scripture say?" So he's gonna quote Genesis 15 here. "...Abraham believed

God, and it was counted to him as righteousness." What we mean when we say faith alone, folks, is that before Abraham did any sort of act of obedience, he was justified.

He was seen as righteous before God. He did not then maintain that justification and righteous standing before God because of his obedience.

His obedience came from being justified. That's the key. The works did not continue or add to the justification.

They were evidence that the faith that Abraham had was a true and living faith, not a dead faith, but they did not essentially maintain his justification, his righteous standing before God.

Now let me touch on why this is so important to understand

Romans 4, because Abraham precedes the law of Moses, okay? Because he's the father of those by faith, whether you're

Gentile or the Jews, because he comes before the law. So back in verse 2, we read, "...for

if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God." Well, you have to ask the question, what kind of works did

Abraham do? Well, he left the land of Ur, of the Chaldeans, right? He was told to be circumcised,

I think in Genesis 17, and he brought his son Isaac on Mount Moriah to sacrifice.

He did a lot of works, and we're saying all this precedes the work of law. Romans 4 eventually will bring up circumcision.

It doesn't matter. Whatever Abraham did, that would not make him right, justified before God, okay?

And so I want to define a few key terms here. So faith is pistis. This is where the Church of Christ, we're talking past each other.

They think faith is mental ascent, okay? I've seen it all the time, and that is a definition, but that's not the full semantic domain of pistis, okay?

And so this is where, like the Roman Catholics, they're gonna bait and switch faith to mean faithfulness.

The time that we see faithfulness used from pistis is when it's talking about God. God doesn't have a personal faith.

He is faithful. When we are faithless, He is faithful. He upholds the universe by the word of His power.

So yeah, He's constantly working all things together after the counsel of His will. So pistis qualified by God, it's different than man.

We got to have that creator -creation distinction, but faith is firm trust. It's inward and of the heart.

Works is contrasted with faith. Works is ergon. Anything that you do or accomplish that produces energy.

This is where I get in trouble with some people because I'm like, look, there's a hard dichotomy between that which is outward, the things that you do, that's your works.

And people can press me all day long. I promise you I will be consistent with that definition because whatever your ergon is, that didn't make you right before God.

So then justification, and I love what you're saying. We're talking about salvation, deliverance. That is a process.

One that begins with regeneration. We talk about justification, sanctification, and one day we will be glorified.

Salvation could refer to any one of those facets. Salvation could refer to what Jesus accomplished at Calvary. So we ask what context of salvation are you referring to?

Because sola fide, that is we are saved by faith alone in our justification.

That justification will then lead to our sanctification. This means to be set apart for special use.

We are being separated from the world and being conformed more and more to the image of Christ.

I believe it's 1 Peter 1 -2 that talks about this is a work of the Holy Spirit in us. He who began that good work in you,

Philippians 1 -6, he will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. And so those are key words to keep in mind.

The Church of Christ abused the word obey or obedience. That just simply means to submit.

Well, yeah, we submit to Jesus from the heart. That's faith, right? So they don't get to just say, well, certain works are not boastworthy, and some works are really just obedience.

No, anything that you do for your justification, that's boastworthy, right? And Abraham, he's the primary example.

And so I wanted to also read verses 4 and 5 of Romans 4 because Paul is being so intentional with quoting

Genesis 15 -6 with Abraham that precedes the law, and then he switches to the singular person, talking about a generic person.

This is so important because we're talking about the definition of works. We could say apart from works of law.

We could say apart from baptism. Anything that you do or accomplish fits in that box.

But to me, this is so important, Myles. So Romans 4 verse 4 says, Now to the one who works are gods of mine.

So it's a verb form. His wages are not counted as a gift. It's no longer of grace because it's your due, right?

It's no longer grace, unmerited favor, but it's merited favor. And the Church of Christ, Myles, they absolutely do not like it when

I accuse them of meriting salvation. Well, they've totally destroyed the definition of grace.

But verse 5, And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

So what's so important, I think I say this all day long, every day of the week. We see that Abraham, along with those that proceed the law all the way back to Abel, Hebrews 11 goes that that far back to.

They were all justified by faith. And then we see that shift to Psalm 32 to King David, who's under the law along with the

Jews, Romans 1 through 3. They are also justified apart from works of law, which is the best works a person could do.

And the point is, not even the Jews standing on their own merit of the law are going to get them in. So whatever else you can dream up, it's going to fall short to God's law.

But that's the best example the Pharisees have to offer, or the Second Temple Jews. And Paul here is saying, that's not going to get you in.

And then Paul links his justification with Christians at the end of the chapter, meaning those who come after the law's fulfillment,

Christians. We are justified by grace through faith, just like saints of all time, whether before the law, under the law, or after the law.

That's so good, man. Again, a lot of similarities there. Adventists are going to say kind of the same thing around obedience.

In their minds, it is a very truncated view of sin. Again, sin is essentially, they love to point to 1

John, but they'll never point to, say, James, who says, if you do anything against your conscience, to you it is sin.

Showing that sin is a lot deeper than just the Ten Commandments. Going against one's conscience, essentially the call and the summation of it all is to love

God perfectly with every thought, word, deed, and motive. If you are in the audience, and you think that you're doing that perfectly, you are deceived.

You need to repent of this. You don't understand the depth of sin. You need to study what we would call total depravity.

The fact that sin has touched every aspect of your being. This does not mean that it is a license or an excuse to just live lasciviously or to live lawlessly, but you need to understand the purpose of the law.

The law does have uses. We're not saying, we're not a group here, folks. We're not antinomians. We're not here saying the law has no purpose.

That's not us. A lot of former Adventists are antinomians now due to their hyper aversion now to anything regarding Sabbath and the law.

We are not that here. We're not advocating for that. We're just saying that the law has to have its proper place, and you have to properly understand it.

They're going to say essentially the same thing that you just said, that obedience is just following the Ten Commandments.

It's not that you're following the Ten Commandments to be saved. It's that if you are saved, you'll keep them perfectly.

It's essentially that type thing. Well, you have a number of issues there. This idea of you actually think you're keeping the

Ten Commandments perfectly. We could just camp out on the First Commandment, by the way, and really start peeling back the layers and showing that you don't keep the

Ten Commandments. For the Seventh -day Adventist Church, you guys violate the Second Commandment constantly through your

Second Commandment violations of depicting Jesus Christ, and you shouldn't be doing that. Nevertheless, we could go through all of the commandments and start to point out these sorts of things.

I want to read you a quote here really quick, though. You mentioned justification, and we're kind of camping out here on how a person is justified before God.

In the Seventh -day Adventist system, this is a part of the investigative judgment. I'm going to read you a quote here.

This is from The Great Controversy, the 1888 edition, for those that are curious. Page 487, and the online code is

GC88486 .3. She says,

So in this process, I mentioned to you earlier that there's an angel assigned over every person who's made a profession of faith to follow them around and document down their sin.

You're gonna find, too, in this system, they have a really... I don't mean to be rude, folks, but just a weak

God, a very weak idol who is not just a beggar when it comes to salvation.

He's not a powerful, conquering Savior. He's kind of a weak beggar, a pacifist, kind of just begging you to pick him in this war with Satan.

But even in this investigative judgment, he has to investigate to see who are his. Does that sound like the

Jesus of John, the shepherd that knows his sheep? They hear his voice and they know him.

The sheep that he came for to successfully, in covenant essentially with the

Father, to come and perfectly save all of those that he came for, that the

Father has given him, that he says in John 6, he is completely able and will completely successfully raise up to newness of life in resurrection on the last day.

All of those that the Father has given him, he will lose none of them but raise them up on the last day.

Jesus Christ knows his own, folks. He doesn't have to do an investigative judgment. Oftentimes when this gets brought up, this issue of omniscience, they'll pivot to, well, no, it's to vindicate

God's character against the accusations of Satan and to vindicate the law. But Allen said it was both.

It was for Jesus to see who's truly his, to investigate to see if your profession's really real.

And so in that, every thought, word, deed, and motive is gonna come up in this investigative judgment, and if there's any sin, a single sin on your record, you're not gonna make it.

It's only after you've made it through this investigative judgment that Jesus will then cleanse you essentially with his blood, and then you'll be,

Allen said, then you'll be given the righteousness of Christ after that. But again, the way that she defines righteousness of Christ, even if it were the imputed righteousness of Christ, you still have an issue.

It's after you've done all of this perfect obedience to the Ten Commandments, of which they've essentially redefined some of it too, namely the

Fourth Commandment, then you'll be given the righteousness of Christ. So regardless of how you define it, you have to do a bunch of things synergistically alongside

God, maintain your righteous standing before God to eventually, hopefully, make it through this investigative judgment to then be found, in her words, found worthy of being saved.

So something that's very similar with my experience with Church of Christ is the legalism, right?

It's, I obeyed the gospel. I'm continuing to be obedient. I'm doing these things.

Like I said, it's legalism from the beginning all the way to the end, and I know, and I think that Church of Christ, for being honest, they know they're putting on a front when they go to church, talking about, oh yeah,

I've been obedient every time I've messed up, I've confessed it, and I've asked questions like, what if you forget to confess a sin?

Well, it's only sins that you're aware of. It's like, okay, that's not gonna work either, right?

I mean, if you want, if you're gonna try to keep the whole law, or if you're gonna try to keep a part of it perfectly, you better aim to keep the whole thing, and you can't do it, okay?

And so I had someone message me. They were named nameless, but I will say this,

Miles, I have a Facebook group that Trey Fisher and I run. It's called the Church of Christ Exiles.

It's meant for people that are coming out of the Church of Christ, because you're gonna lose your community, right? You get ostracized, you lose friends, you lose family, and so a lot of people don't know where to go, and so we're trying to create a platform to encourage, build people up, so it's for people coming out of the

Church of Christ, or for people that want to help the Church of Christ. And so I had someone message me that came out of the

Church of Christ, and I think you'll really appreciate this. He goes, God saved me when I was trying to take my own life, because I could not possibly live up to God's standards of holiness.

I was literally a squeeze of the trigger away from being dead. I am so wicked,

I thought I thought I would never live up to God's standard, and I do not like who I am, I thought. I'm going to hell anyway, so I might as well just end the anticipation.

And then he said, but God had other plans, and just went into how God had shown him grace, and found the gospel, the true gospel, and I just thought, praise

God. I pray that more people would just be honest, because that right there is what all the

Church of Christ are feeling. Now you got tears, right? If you're in leadership, and there's pride involved,

I get it. If your livelihood's wrapped up in that, it's harder for a rich person, right, to enter the kingdom of heaven, to humble themselves, but anyway,

I just I just wanted to speak to the legalism aspect of that, and it's all cloaked under the word obedience.

It's so similar, man, to SDAs. It's the exact same thing. Whether they want to voice it or not, they message me.

They contact me. The real loud, pride -arrogant scoffers, they all comment in the comment section.

They deny this, and it may be true. Maybe they don't feel it, but I've talked with, at this point,

I don't even know if it's thousands of Seventh -day Adventists. I mean, this was my world, man. My dad's a pastor in the SDA Church.

I went to SDA schools. I went to an SDA University post being a Seventh -day Adventist, specifically to engage these people, and so they're all feeling the same way, man, and it just reminds me of what

Paul tells us about the law, and it just goes to show how a simple twist of a small thing can lead to total disaster and ruin.

The law is supposed to make you feel convicted, folks. That's its purpose. It has a use.

We're not antinomians. We're not saying the law has no purpose. It has no use. It does. You need to understand the law gospel distinction.

This is where covenant theology comes in. If you don't know what covenant theology is, I challenge you to just start studying the basics of covenant because you'll understand that there is a distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

The good news of the gospel, the reason that it's good news, is because when the crushing weight of the law comes in and you look at yourself against it and go, holy smokes,

I'm a terrible person. There's no way. I could never make it. I'm unworthy.

I'm not... how could God possibly save me? That's when the gospel swoops in as the cushion underneath you, and you really feel the goodness of the gospel.

That's when it really is good news, and you understand, wow, our God is so good.

He's so merciful. I'm so unworthy of being saved, and yet Christ died for me.

And here's another thing, because when I hear people like, I'm like, it's not your works, and they're just like, oh my goodness, you don't want to do anything.

And I'm just like, timeout. Jesus said it is finished. Jesus did all the works necessary, perfectly, to accomplish redemption.

And so by you trying to bring up some type of work, which is like baptism or one of the

Ten Commandments, you are trying to add your works to the already finished work of Jesus Christ, His perfect life.

And so that's what's at stake. And so one of the proof texts, I'll just mention this in passing, but like Acts 2 38, the question was, what must we do?

And then Peter says, repent and be baptized. And they're like, you're saying not to be baptized.

It's like, no. Peter is trying to drive their focus back at Calvary, the Mashiach that they crucified, right?

The forgiveness of sins. And your response to him is one of repent and believe the gospel, and then demonstrate that faith.

When he says, repent and be baptized, he's calling them to justification and to sanctification, because baptism is a work that we participate in.

I hope that this gets brought up in my debate before too long, because what they will say is, the

Bible never says that baptism is a work. I'm like, define work for me first, right?

And it's like, look, that's something you participate in. I will tip my hat to the

Paedo -Baptists and say that I understand how a baby is not contributing their works to that situation, because I'd recently debated a

Lutheran, very similar to the Presbyterian position, and all I had to do was say, okay, let's look at the infant baptism and the adult baptism and continue to have that conversation, because I do want to tip my hat to say, okay, that is a pretty good picture of the gospel where an infant is truly passive, but with adult baptisms, you're not truly passive.

You've had to think on these things, and you have to get up and walk into a baptistry, or how do y 'all do it?

Y 'all sprinkle? I don't know. Anyway. No, the proper term is effusion, because the

Spirit was poured at Pentecost, and that's the only real example we have of the method of baptism.

It was poured out onto the people. You're trying to provoke me, aren't you? In infant baptism, you want to turn this into the

Paedo -Credo -Baptism debate, huh? Me and you, we should square off one day.

That'd be fun. Yeah, well, that's actually getting into covenant. I was just gonna say, like everything you're saying here, the reason that the

Church of Christ, the Adventists have a really unique position on Acts 2, not just 38, but really the whole point of Peter's sermon there.

They don't think that that's been fulfilled yet. They think that that's going to come during what they call the latter rain, which

Ellen talked about, where there'll be this outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and all of a sudden, a ton of Seventh -day

Adventists are gonna start having dreams and visions, and they're gonna call people into the true church and all this nonsense.

Didn't Jude warn people about that? Well, and it's funny, man. I'll hear them preach on sermons.

I was just listening when I'm getting prepped for some content a few months down the road, and there's a pretty prominent

SDA pastor, and he has a whole series where he's talking about false teachers and false prophets, and I'm just thinking to myself, man, talk about throwing stones from a glass house.

It's just, how oblivious can you be? But I want to cover one thing here really quick, folks.

We're gonna talk about one last topic here that we've kind of been dancing around, but not actually using the right terminology, and I want to get into that for the last about 15 minutes here, and then we're gonna start taking questions.

So get your questions ready. Don't send them through yet, because I don't want them to get lost, but I'll cue you up when we're gonna take those, but it'll be within the next 15 minutes here.

So I want to talk about monergism and synergism, because that's really the crux of what we're getting at in so much of what we're saying tonight.

I don't remember the exact way that you've said it every time, but you've said something along the lines of, and me as well,

God's done His part. Now you have to do your part. God's a gentleman. Yeah, exactly.

He's not gonna force you to do anything. That's what I'm used to hearing. And so the real key to this issue, folks, and again

I point back to Luther's Bondage of the Will. If you've never read that, it's free online in PDF form.

You can buy it. It's available all over the place. I highly recommend really reading that, whether you're

Reformed, a standard evangelical, a Baptist, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, whatever you may be, just even if you're getting more versed with history.

Because Luther really highlighted with Erasmus the core issue here. And Luther said at the end of the

Bondage of the Will, which is a written response to Erasmus, who was the Roman representation of the synergist side.

Synergism is the concept of salvation is accomplished by both God and man.

It started initially by essentially provenient grace, a general grace that God gives to all people.

God has done his part, and so that is the by grace part. If it wasn't for that, the doorway wouldn't even be open to be saved.

So it has to be only that God's grace comes in. Yes? So we're talking about the five solas of the

Reformation. One is sola gratia, right? We are saying God's grace is sufficient, as where Rome is saying, no, no, grace is necessary.

So that's the difference of what we're talking about. We're saying God's grace is sufficient, and it sounds like Paul, right? Paul said that.

Well, the other technical term for that would be it's effectual. It actually brings about sufficiently, effectively, every time to the people that it's extended to, the end chain result.

You can go to Romans 8 for that whole thing. We've kind of been talking about it tonight a little bit, but those who are called are predestined to be essentially justified and then sanctified and then glorified.

And God's grace effectually brings that about in a person. And so synergism is a cooperative effort between God and man to essentially accomplish salvation.

In comparison to what Luther and the Reformers, the position we would essentially be espousing tonight, is monergism.

That salvation is a work wholly and distinctly of God. We don't mean that you just sit here sucking your thumb, and God just does everything, and you just don't.

You just sit around. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that God is a successful and powerful

Savior. He does not fail in His work of saving anyone. It's not that God has done

His part. The ball's in your court. He's working for you. Whatever terminology you want to use, you know, every group's gonna have their own way of saying this.

The Adventists are gonna say it's the heavenly trio working alongside you to maintain, you know, this pathway that you're on to eventually arrive at the righteousness of Christ, having the faith of Jesus.

That's not what we're talking about. What we are talking about is that God is an effectual and sufficient

Savior. He's powerful. When He bestows grace upon a person, this is getting into the eye of the tulip now, which has a context.

It's not that the grace of God can never be resisted. It's that the grace of God, at the point of salvation, when

God decides to raise a spiritually dead sinner to life, nothing can resist that because God is the first mover.

And upon Him doing that, it brings about a change in a person. You could call it the change of a stony heart to a fleshly heart.

You're raised to spiritual newness of life. You now have new desires. You now have conviction over your sin.

You now have, you know, this is essentially what Paul is laying out in the chapters after we just read in Romans, Romans 5 through essentially 8, is that we're now a new creature in Christ who is now warring against our flesh.

We have new desires. We don't want to just wallow in our sin. We war with our sin, but we're also realistic about the fact of realizing that as we're being sanctified and our awareness is also growing, our maturity and the faith is growing, so is our awareness around just how deep our sin runs and the things that we war with become more advanced, if you will, or more mature type sins.

And so monergism versus synergism is really the key crux issue here. Yeah, let me chime in because I get into these conversations all the time.

And historically, theologians talk about regeneration, monergistic, sanctification, synergistic.

Love that, right? So I also try to paint another, a fuller picture, right?

Just extending it a little bit. So on one hand, Ephesians 111 talks about how God is working all things together after the council of His will.

This is a Trinitarian council before the foundation of the world. All things are working together to a particular end.

You keep quoting Romans 8, 28, I believe, but all things are also working together for our good.

Those of us that love Jesus by faith, it's working for our sanctification to be conformed more and more into His image.

And so on one hand, God is monergistically working out everything, okay?

He is sovereign to the highest degree. And we also have an experience, right, in which we really do make decisions.

We really do, you know, are convicted by the gospel and we're broken over our sin and then we look to Jesus.

Yeah, well, you experienced that. But we're saying there's something more fundamental for why you're looking to Jesus is because God moved first, like you said.

And so when we're looking at passages like Ephesians 111 or Philippians 1 .6,

that He who began that good work in you, which we would say in regeneration, brings it to completion. But Philippians 2 .12

comes in and says, hey, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. We would say, okay, what's the context of salvation there?

Oh, this would be your sanctification, right? And then verse 13 goes on to say, but it's actually God who's at work in you to will and to work for His good pleasure.

And so we do acknowledge there's some paradox and there's things that we can apprehend and ascertain, but we don't fully comprehend.

But we realize that God is sovereign, right? The triune God that we love and adore and worship.

And we do play a part in it. Now, I loved what you said earlier about this doesn't mean we can just, you know, the frozen chosen sit to the side and just say, well,

God's going to do what He wants. I don't have to do anything. I tell people God is still sovereign in your disobedience.

Your disobedience did not mess anything up for Him. But the scriptures tell you to be obedient, to go live in holiness and to do what's pleasing to God.

And so even for the person that's really a critic of Reformed theology and just says, well, I guess you don't have to do anything.

It's like, hey, God is still going to accomplish what He wants regardless if you're obedient or not.

And so, man, I had another thought I really wanted to get in there with synergism.

I have articulated synergism in two rings because it's aiding

God in salvation. Now, there are semi -Pelagians, Arminians that I think are still inside the fold.

And by God's grace, they are affirming sola fide. And they get into a weird, you know, we're made in God's image and that somehow grounds libertarian free will.

And I'm over here saying, praise God that you're not trying to add your works to the gospel. Now, you have weird ways of trying to say how we come up with faith.

I don't know if you know who Leighton Flowers is. He said in the past. Oh, yeah. I've engaged with him. I've been engaging with him, man, for like seven years.

Really? I'm hoping one day. On Facebook. Oh, I was going to say, I'm hoping one day on Marlon's channel we can we can spar.

It'd be a lot of fun. But he said this. He'll bring the black binder. Do you know what the black binder is?

Well, we can talk about that offline. Leighton said something, and I think he speaks for a lot of people.

And he said, as God spoke the world ex nihilo, from nothing into existence, we too, since we're made in his image, can bring faith from nothing.

And I'm like, don't do that. So he's like, his analogies, man, are just.

Well, he doesn't. To me, he's not adhering to the creator -creation distinction, and he's using the fallacy of univocal language and knowledge, blurring the lines between who

God is and who man is. But what I was gonna say real quick is, my heart goes out to the

Arminian provision synergistic crowd that affirms sola fide. They're synergists, but not in the hard sense in which they're adding their works to the gospel, okay?

And so I think if they were consistent, though, you get to the outer ring where synergism goes bad, where you're probably more consistent, but adding your works to the helping

God finish redemption. And so I think those two rings help kind of articulate what we're saying.

There's one that destroys the gospel of grace, and there's one where there's room for sharpening, where they're trying to be consistent with faith being a gift.

I think what they do is they break sola gratia. I don't think it's all to the glory of God alone, because it could be shared, you know what

I mean? Like, you stepped up. Now, I want to be careful. I don't want to say, you know, we got all everything figured out.

I mean, me and Miles, we differ on some things, and that's okay. Like, we need to be able to sharpen one another in that way.

So I just want people to hear my heart, that I'm not just saying, if you disagree with Reformed theology, then you're a heretic.

I wish more people would be. That's okay. Does that make sense, what I'm getting at? It does, man, and that could be a show in and of itself.

Folks, you can get your questions queued up here if you want to start sending those through. I know there's a slight lag in the live stream.

How many people are mad at us in the chat? I haven't really been reading a ton of it. I just actually got in there to kind of see, because like I said,

I was getting set up here to take questions. It's about I don't know how many minutes delay, so there'll be a slight delay on there.

Folks, if you want to get your questions, you can start sending those through. Any questions you have for either of us, really, on any topic.

Hopefully, it could be something pertaining to what we're talking about tonight to kind of keep things on schedule and track, but if not, you can send those through as well.

We'll try and answer as best we can, but while we're waiting for those to come through.

Definitely, again, it's so crazy how all of these restoration groups, they all use the same arguments.

It's all foundationally, fundamentally the same thing, but the veneer is different.

It's just something else put over the top. It's the same package, wrapped differently. Yeah, exactly.

It's just fascinating. We'll have to do another stream sometime where we can continue on.

Hey, have you liked my thumbnail game? I've tried to learn from some of the stuff that you put out there.

Well, like I said, I have the unfair advantage because I'm a graphic designer by trade, and so it kind of obviously lends itself to being able to have a little spicy

YouTube channel, but yeah, they're looking good. There was something you said there about synergism and monergism, and I'm thinking back again on bondage of the will.

I've actually been back in bondage of the will here recently, which is why this has been a hot, hot button on my mind. I've been prepping some content down the road, and Luther said, and again,

I think he hit it out of the park here. I'm not a Lutheran, obviously, but on this point, I'm like, oh man, Luther knocked it out of the park.

He said, the hinge upon which the Reformation swung was this point. Is man's will completely free?

Is it libertarian? Or is man's will enslaved to something, meaning that man still does make choices?

The Adventist church loves to straw man free will. They are, like you were saying earlier, that Church of Christ can't stand

Reform people, either can the Adventists. They cannot stand the

Calvinists, the nasty Calvinists, and so but that's the caricature that they paint of Reform theology, or even the idea that Luther put forward.

Again, I've been prepping materials for this, and so I've been listening to a lot of SDA pastors talk about these sorts of things, and the way that they straw man it is

Luther believed that man makes no free choices at all. He's just an automaton, and that doesn't comport with the great controversy.

The greatest act of love that God could bestow on his creatures was to give them the power of free choice, and it paints this narrative that what we're saying is man is a robot.

Man doesn't do anything of his own volition. It's looking at things in a vacuum and not systematically, not understanding that these things have tertiary impacts.

Like the will of man is man does make choices, but he makes choices that are consistent with his nature.

He doesn't make choices completely free from any sort of influence. You're either a slave to sin, or you're a slave to righteousness.

Yeah, I was also going to say with the bondage of the will, I can't remember the exact quote, but basically his argument was we don't even need an explicit verse to know that that libertarian free will is wrong.

All we need are the attributes of God that say he's omniscient and omnipotent. If that is true, then, and I won't go into a whole spiel, but libertarian free will cannot exist.

Libertarian free will meaning that they have the categorical ability to choose to do otherwise. I ask the question, free from what?

Because what they mean is a sovereign decree. And I'm saying, but if you adopt the classical attributes of God, you have to be consistent with that with how you look at the nature of man.

Like that's necessary and makes a direct impact. And all of the problems that they have with Reformed theology, they have to put the shoe on their foot and give an answer.

Oh, Saul Scriptura, he recently, or he follows my channel, and we have a lot of good back and forth.

He's a former SDA, and he says here, I read an article by an SDA theologian, and he said the strongest position against Seventh -day

Adventism is the Reformed faith. I would agree, because thanks for the statement there.

I know that wasn't a question, Brandon, but folks, if you do have questions, feel free, like I said, to start sending those through now.

But it's the strongest position against their faith, A, I would say because it's biblical. That's the argument

I'm gonna make is that I'm gonna say the same thing Spurgeon said, that Reformed theology is just a nickname for biblical theology, and I'm willing to argue that till the cows come home.

Obviously, I don't think that I'm gonna end this debate, but yeah, it is.

It's the death blow to their system if they actually understood the system correctly. They're only able to attack a straw man of the position.

They're not able, and to be fair, they're not the only ones in this either that do this. They kind of put forth the same sort of idea that a lot of our

Synergist friends do. Miles, I was gonna tell you real quick, like my interactions with the Church of Christ, so the gentleman that would write the articles in the paper, and I eventually debated one of his friends, we were at a coffee shop, and they're confused with our understanding of regeneration and stuff, and I'm articulating everything, and he just said,

Jeremiah, if what you're saying is true, I would rather be agnostic, and you know what I was thinking? Of course you would be.

You don't want to bend the knee to the sovereign God where you contributed zero to your salvation.

It was all God's effectual grace working all things together the way that he sees fit, that he's free to do with his creation.

Yes, amen. Matthew Lucio here says, question for me, Miles, you obviously don't like Adventism.

Are there one or two things you appreciate about Adventism? To the first point, thanks for the question, by the way.

Matthew, it's not that I don't like Adventism. I wouldn't word it that way, mainly because a lot of people,

Adventism is a part of their identity, so if you say, I hate Adventism, or I can't stand

Adventism, they take that personal and think, oh, you hate the people, and so I wouldn't word it that way.

I wouldn't say that I don't like Adventism. I don't like false teaching that has people in bondage, that is proselytizing a false gospel, a false

Christ, and has millions of people in spiritual bondage. You have to look at this from my standpoint. I'm not doing this because I have nothing better to do.

I have a family. I have a son. I have tons of other things that I could be doing. I also didn't just leave

Adventism, say, yesterday. I left Adventism quite some time ago. I've been praying over this for a long time.

I've been engaging with SDAs for a long time. I talked with my pastors and my elders about this, so this was a very prayerfully considered modus operandi, and I don't dislike

Adventism. I dislike the heretical theology that ultimately spawns back to spiritual entities.

The war is not against individuals. It's not even against organizations, per se. I don't think that every

Seventh Adventist is malicious. I don't think that they're evil. I don't think all the leaders in the SDA Church are evil people or malicious people.

There may be some. I don't know. I'm not making the claim that they are, but I just wanted to clarify that first part there, that I don't like the false teaching that is putting people in spiritual bondage, because whether Adventists believe it or not, if you affirm official

SDA teaching, you are on the pathway to eternal damnation, and I'm here sounding the alarm because I don't want you to go there.

I know that you guys don't believe in that, necessarily. You believe in annihilation, but either way, I want to reach as many

Seventh Adventists as possible, and so I come across a little harsh sometimes, a little brash. Sometimes it's for a specific purpose, but it's the doctrine, not the people there.

One or two things that I appreciate about Adventism. Yes, there's actually a lot of things I appreciate about Adventism. Most of my family is, on one side of my family, still

Seventh Adventist, and being raised in a Seventh Adventist household with an

Adventist pastor, I was obviously pretty immersed in it, and so I'm very familiar with a lot of the culture. One thing I really appreciate is the strong emphasis on the family.

There's a big emphasis on not just spending time with your family, but building family traditions and those types of things.

The traditions may look differently than a lot of people outside of Adventism, but I really love the family component to it.

Also, darebase. I know that the SDA Church did not invent this. This is probably a little bit of a zinger here, but for anyone that grew up at camp meeting or even

Adventist summer camps, darebase. I absolutely love darebase, and I've seen no people outside of the

Seventh Adventist world that even play darebase, and so I associated darebase with Adventism growing up.

Jeremiah, do you know what darebase is? No. It's a game. I'm not gonna get into it now, but it's essentially a game in a field, and you have two sides, and that,

I guess, would be another thing that I really appreciate about Seventh -day Adventism is there's a big emphasis on healthy living and an active lifestyle, so growing up, we were very active.

We were outside a lot. I also was a big fan of the summer camps. Not the theology that they're teaching the kids, that looking back as an adult,

I look back and kind of see some of the false teaching that's promulgated there, but I really love their summer camps.

I was a crazy 10 weeks per summer type Adventist summer camp kid.

I was gonna chime in just a little bit because obviously I'm learning a lot about Adventism just watching your channel, and R .C.

Sproul really helped me understand this. There's so many words that are biblical that we love, but you got to watch out for the isms, right, because Advent typically is talking about the coming of Christ, right, when we celebrate

Advent, you know, season around his birth or around the second Advent of his coming, but it's the ism that imports this entire systematic theology essentially or lack thereof, so it's the ism like R .C.

Sproul would talk about. We love humans, but humanism is something totally different. Yeah, totally, totally.

That's a good way of putting it, right. The second question here is again from Sola Scriptura. I guess his first one was a statement, but question for Myles.

Why is the health reform called gospel work by EGW? That's LNG White. Oh boy, so we have to obviously give the cliff notes on this.

I can't dive into all this. Ellen White, so a person mentioned earlier a comment that I brought out about the three angels messages.

Maybe we do a stream on that sometime, Jeremiah, so we can kind of break down this Revelations three angels messages, and actually the fourth angel.

There's not just three, but the third angels message is a cornucopia of things, and one of those things is the health message, the health reform.

Ellen called it the right arm of the gospel, and so she claimed that it's a part of this third angels message, and the reason that it is called gospel work by Ellen White in a number of her books like Medical Ministry and others,

Diets and Councils on Health, is because in their view your physical body and its condition.

I just posted a short on this by the way, folks, if you want to check that out and hear a pretty crazy quote that she said regarding this.

In their view, your physical figure and frame, they don't properly understand glorification.

They think in order to essentially make it through this judgment and be found worthy of heaven, your physical body also has to be in a condition to where you're fit for heaven.

So that's where the vegetarianism comes in, that we need to abandon all flesh foods and butter, eggs, and all this.

Does she follow the Daniel diet? Dude, they love pointing to that. They love pointing to the story of Daniel, by the way, actually to say, see,

Daniel rejected the king's meat. He was advocating for God's diet, and they missed the entire purpose and point of the whole thing, as if that's the context of Daniel there.

But yeah, so the health reform is called the gospel essentially because it's part of the news that you have to essentially keep these dietary laws that Ellen White has laid out, which she's essentially claiming she's getting from Leviticus 11, and you have to be in a physical condition that is conducive to be fit for, as she said, heaven.

So that's actually the downside to the physical stuff or even the healthful lifestyle within Adventism is, while that's one of the positive things about it that I like, at the same time it grieves me greatly knowing that many of them are doing this because they think that it is putting them in a position to be found worthy of salvation.

And you have to essentially be a vegetarian by the time that translation happens.

So if you're alive when Jesus decides to return, that's when the moment of translation will happen to where you'll be translated into the kingdom of light and be given this essentially what we'd call like a glorified state.

But in order to be fit for that, you have to be a vegetarian. Hopefully a vegan, actually.

So that's essentially where that comes into the gospel work. Let's see, do we have any other questions here?

Yeah, another one. Question for Myles. I'm an ex -SDA and I never got an answer to this question. Why do they want kids baptized as soon as they turn a teenager?

Because they have a teaching around the age of accountability. This is not unique to them.

There's a lot of people and groups out there that have the same concept. I was baptized at 10 years old in the

Seventh -day Adventist Church. And that's essentially it is that Ellen, the pioneers, and the

SDA Church essentially teach that your children are innocent until a certain age where they come to an age of accountability.

And it's at that point that they really want to emphasize walking the child through the teaching stages of baptismal preparation.

So that's where you're going to be led to eventually understanding and being taught these, like the things contained within the baptismal vows, and then you're going to agree to it and essentially be baptized.

So I have a follow -up point on that. Yeah. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this too because when people are like, infants don't sin.

Like infants in the womb, they don't even sin. You did talk about the sin, you know, in James, was it

James 4? The sin of omission essentially. Well I guess that one's when you know what to do and you don't do it.

Yeah. Here's the thing. Image bearers, infants, they do not love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And so by them not obeying that, they miss the mark. And so it's just a testimony to from the womb we miss the mark of God, his law which is holy, righteous, and good.

And so anyway, I didn't know if you wanted to say something like that. Like infants are born in a state where they don't respond positively to the commandments.

Correct. So we've got a statement here. It's not necessarily, it is a question. He didn't label it as a question, but this is actually a childhood friend of mine.

He's a Seventh -day Adventist. He says, but what was the original diet in Eden? Would you like to answer that since it wasn't specifically addressed to me and then you can actually answer a question?

Oh goodness. I was teaching a college group about a year, year and a half ago, and we got into the diet of Adam and Eve.

And I found myself like, wow, I've not spent just a ton. I mean, it was in a perfect environment.

I'm a young earth creationist, so I am of the opinion that there was no death.

So I don't really see like, you know, Adam and Eve eating meat necessarily in that context.

These are not heels for me to die on. I will say that. But I do see them having more of a plant -based diet in the garden.

Like I said, I think that's more implicit, unless you know some details that I'm just not thinking about. I think the point he's getting at, only because I know the

SDA system, is that in their view, heaven is like a return to Eden. That's the phrase that's essentially used.

And so there's a big idea around like, we need to try and get back to the way that Adam and Eve were.

You know what blows my mind about that is heaven, especially the new heavens and new earth, it's gonna be so much better than Eden.

That's what I was just about to say. We're in the spirit of redemption, and this is where on my channel

I interact with full preterists, which are a different cult, a different thing, but it's like...

Mike Sullivan. Oh my goodness. Well, yeah, we're not gonna get into that now. When we get off air, another point,

I'll tell you some stories. Anyway, it's gonna be so much better than Eden. Yeah, the tree of life, we do see depicted in Revelation 22, but God is going to restore this sin -cursed world.

And so, you know, I empathize with returning back to Eden. I'm like, well, let's not stop there. Like, God's going to do something brand new.

Like, Revelation gives all this imagery about how there's gonna be no more sun, no more sea, and then it's

God and His glory that's gonna shine and sustain life. Nice. Uh -oh.

Suite 1 MCS says, question. I am for Church of Christ. Why do they deny they are

Campbellites? I don't know if she meant to say, I am for, but why do they deny they are

Campbellites and claim the church started in 33 AD? Yeah, and she's also a former SDA. Do you know the answer behind that?

Why do they deny that they are Campbellites and claim that they started in 33 AD? Well, it goes against their whole mantra, is they're the

Church of Christ of Pentecost, and they want to quote, you know, Romans 16, 16, and we're just, it's a description about churches of Christ.

And so, but it makes them look bad when you do the history of, going back to the Restoration Movement, the

Campbellite stone with Alexander and Thomas Campbell, a father and son, which, by the way, were

Presbyterian, moved to Baptist. They didn't get their way. They took elements kind of from both traditions, if you will, and then they started the

Church of Christ. And so, when you just start poking around in their history, it just goes against kind of their selling points.

Remember, they just have a few proof texts with, you know, Acts 2, 38, Acts 22, 16,

Galatians 2, 27, Mark 16, 16, 1 Peter 3, 21, on and on and on. But when you delve into the context, which, where is it, where's context is king?

I can't see it, but it's, it's over there somewhere. It's, it's up there. It's framed currently.

There, there you go. That is how you dismantle the proof text. And so my point is, when you start looking into history, it goes against kind of their, their selling points about how it's just common sense.

I wish I could send you my short. I made, it's called Grandma's Church, and it's just kind of mocking the fact that they say, you got the

Church of Christ over here, and then you got these denominational churches. I want to go to the Church of Christ. It's like, oh my goodness, you know, let's make a song out of this.

Yeah, that's good. OT Genesis says, will you post a video of how your church is connected to the apostolic church, brother?

I may at some point. The thing is, is on this channel, man, it's strictly dedicated to Seventh -day

Adventism. There are already tons of pockets out there of people arguing whether or not the

Protestant churches go back to the apostles. If so, how? This gets into the broader discussion of how you're defining church.

A lot of my Roman Catholic friends, for example, they say, you can't affirm the Apostles' Creed. You don't affirm one holy apostolic church.

Yes, I do. The issue is, is the begging of the question of just inserting the Church of Rome into that, and now having a monopoly on the term

Catholic. I believe that my church, as well as Jeremiah's church, what makes us

Catholic and apostolic is not the name Presbyterian, not the name Baptist. The actual origins behind denominations actually had nothing to do with people coming up and saying,

I'm starting my own church, as if it's its own church. None of the Reformers were doing that.

The Protestant churches, quote -unquote, were essentially birthed out of the fact that the Reformers did not want to be booted or start a new church.

They wanted to reform the church, and so when they were given an ultimatum, they essentially had to, in Luther's words, which

I just covered this again in a video that's going to be coming out on Monday, Luther, at the Diet of Worms, to Pope Pius's condemnation of him, he said, well, if the choice is to essentially submit to the

Roman Catholic Magisterium and go against my conscience, which is bound to the Word of God, I have to go with the

Word of God. And so they were booted, not because they wanted to. They weren't starting a revolution and going, we're going to start a new organization.

But upon being booted with their conscience bound to the Word of God, what were they supposed to do? And so we would say that we do go back to the

Apostles, whether you're a Baptist, whether you're a Methodist, whether you're a Presbyterian. We go back to the Apostles theologically.

We're going to say that our theology goes back. Well, then the discussion becomes with the Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the

East, the Coptics, Catholics, etc., your interpretation of the Church Fathers, because if you want to say that we're completely downplaying the

Church Fathers, this is exactly what my video is about, by the way, Jeremiah, is the true definition and understanding of Sola Scriptura, which is not unique to the

Seventh -day Adventist. There are lots of people out there, including Roman Catholics, who do not actually understand what Sola Scriptura means.

It does not mean that we have abandoned the Church Fathers. It doesn't mean that there aren't any other authorities in the Church outside of the

Bible. It doesn't mean that the Church doesn't have a level of authority. I mean, come on, man. Our whole system has different spheres of government and governance, and the

Church is one of those spheres of governance, and so we would argue that we go back to the Apostles theologically.

It's not necessarily the same way that they would say apostolic succession. Anything you want to tag onto that?

Yeah, you mentioned Sola Scriptura, which is huge because the Church of Christ may seem that that's what they're saying, but it's like what we talked about last time,

Nuta Scriptura or Sola Scriptura, where they're divorcing themselves from the historic faith.

I mean, they're restorationists, for crying out loud. And so we hold the

Scriptures as the sole infallible rule, but we look to secondary authorities. I really do. That's how we receive the

Scriptures, through space and time. God has worked providentially in creation and given us

His Word passively, which we have received. I was going to say something else, too. I loved how you painted a picture of how we are

Catholic, small c, because all that means is universal. We believe in a universal church.

We believe in a continuity of the gospel. Me and you hold the covenant theology,

I'm sure, to different shades because something that's important as I look back, the Semper Reframanda, that also is the arrow pointing back to the early church, is we're looking for the triune

God name, right? But what's important for me is also the gospel, which we're going to see

Sola Fide embedded in that, and all the heretics are messing that up.

I want to be super careful. I don't want to say names, but you've got to have the right gospel in order to be called brother.

I love people that name the triune God, but you can't fundamentally deny the gospel of grace and be a brother.

So we can see a chain of that going all the way back, church history, up to the early church fathers.

I love what you said. It's up for debate what the early church said up for interpretation because they disagreed with each other, and they disagreed with themselves.

I see a lot of doctrine about baptismal regeneration, but I also see Victorus Marius.

He also affirmed Sola Fide with a form of baptismal regeneration. I'm like, he didn't even know.

But you know what he didn't do is deny Sola Fide, right? Because when you fundamentally deny that, like Roman Catholics do because of the

Council of Trent, well, they are grounds for me evangelizing them. But people that come before that, like Augustine, well, you know,

I see a lot of doctrine over here saying, hey, he was a proto -Protestant. Now his ecclesiology needed some work.

But yeah, does that make sense? We love church history, and we see the gospel being found all throughout because Jesus promised to build his church and the gates of Hades wouldn't prevail, and that he would send the

Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. Totally, and I think that the term, one last thing on that before this next question,

I think that the term historically that we would point to is, like Augustine said, the regula fidei, that there is a constant thread of what is essentially foundational and essential, and the idea that sola scriptura means that you don't look at or understand church history, or it's just you and your

Bible. I would encourage you to read Calvin's Institutes. You're going to read a lot of Augustine.

The argument essentially comes down to how the church fathers are interpreted. Any discussion that I have with Roman Catholics, Orthodoxes here in Church of East Coptics, etc.,

it always comes down to, I think oftentimes they'll get a little bit more respect when you start showing, no,

I read the church fathers. I'm not just quote mining. I actually like the church fathers. And so then it comes down to the idea of definitions and arguing, well, how did this person mean this, or how did this person say this, kind of taking a systematic look at their whole body of work.

Yeah. Can you see this? Hey, you have the mobile version. In my pocket, boy.

Nice. Well, I have my library in the next room where I have the physical books. This next question from Ben Young, it says, do you believe, do

SDA believe that Christ was annihilated when he died on the cross? No, they believe that Jesus essentially remained in the tomb.

Well, this gets into their Christology as well as the Incarnation, which is a lot deeper than we have time to get into right now.

But they essentially teach that Jesus remained a prisoner of the tomb. Actually, let me just, well, no,

I don't have it actually pulled up right now, so I can't get into that quote. But Ellen White taught, which essentially is the SDA church's position and belief, because she said it and she was the divine inspired interpreter of scripture, essentially.

And her writings are divinely inspired. She claimed that Jesus was a prisoner to the tomb and only the father could release him from that prison and that all that he was remained in his physical body in the tomb.

So Jesus was essentially soul sleeping for three days. I got into this with one of my professors at Southern, which is an

Adventist university when I was there. And this was actually a huge avenue of discussion that we got into and then stayed after class and really got into it because it was like blowing my mind what this guy was actually saying regarding the fact that they want to claim that Jesus Christ is

God, but then you have major issues around their idea of what Christ was doing in the tomb.

ISAAC ZABLOCKI How does SDA interpret the passage where he went to preach to the spirits imprisoned? I think it's in First Peer Three.

You know, I don't have, that's not one that I'm super familiar with off the top of my head. Does it sound like he was asleep? Well, no, and more than likely, and this, again, is just a guess because I don't know.

I'm waiting actually to get their Bible commentary. They have a new one coming out this year. So that's, I think it's this year, which is why

I'm waiting and haven't got the other one, but I want to get that so that I can better get familiarized and have the official position on any given verse or whatever.

Because then what happens is you get individual SDAs who have their own opinion and then now they're the standard for the rest of the

SDA church. So when you say something, they go, I don't believe that. I'm an Adventist. I don't believe that.

So I'm hopefully able to get or hoping to get the SDA, the new SDA commentary that's coming out.

So I can answer those questions. Yeah. For Jeremiah, she is a former church of Christ as well as former

SDA. Why do they deny being Campbellites and claim that? Oh, no, this was the same question. She was clarifying.

She was both COC and SDA. Wow. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Oh, and I see that she clarified it now.

Mike Rodriguez here, Miles, what is Paul saying by new creation in Galatians 6 .15?

How much time do you have, Mike? We're getting now into what's called the formal term of the biblical theology, really, because we need to look at the entirety of what

Paul says regarding the new creation and what exactly that means and the inauguration of that.

I'm not familiar with, off the top of my head, exactly what Galatians 6 .15 says.

Circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

I would immediately say Paul is hearkening back to 2 Corinthians 5 .17, like in Christ. So that's what

I was about to say is most of it is linking off of and chaining off of 2

Corinthians 5. So 2 Corinthians 5 is where a lot of people are going to go to talk about the inauguration of a new creation, which was essentially instituted at the point of Jesus Christ resurrecting.

There's an entire motif throughout all of Scripture, by the way. I'm going to be doing videos on this in due time because this is what completely silences the

Seventh -day Adventist Church in their claim to the old creation Sabbath still being binding on all Christians and not understanding that just like all the other types and shadows of yesteryear, the

Sabbath was a type and a shadow as well. They will quote Colossians 2, by the way, because they get a lot of people, obviously, that say, well, what about Colossians 2 where it says that you're not to be judged in regarding to festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths?

And we talked about that on the last stream and how they try and essentially dismiss that. But if you pay attention to the full thing that said there, it said that those things were a shadow of the substance that included the

Sabbath. Well, they'll say there that, well, no, that was the other Sabbath, not the weekly Sabbath. That wasn't a type and a shadow.

And yes, it was. And the author of Hebrews tells you this in Hebrews 3 and 4. I don't want to get too sidetracked on that now because, again, that's a whole thing in and of itself.

But the point being that the new creation is what

Paul was referencing there. I would agree with you is in hearkening back to 2 Corinthians 5. That's talking about being a new creature in Christ, which would include being born again, being raised to spiritual newness of life.

It has a number of factors that come into that. It's not necessarily there's a now and the not yet. Another component we would have to get into here.

There's a component of now and the not yet here as well. We're not saying that you're in the glorified state yet, but it is that you are raised to spiritual newness of life.

Anything you want to add? Just a couple of things I want to add. Recently, I did a series on eschatology.

I went ahead and took the gauntlet of explaining the three orthodox views of eschatology on my channel and getting into the dangers of full preterism because it's funny.

We see that term new creation there. That's what they redefine the new heavens and new earth to be.

It's actually just what it means to look to Jesus in faith, to be in spiritual life, to be a new creation.

They're going to use that phrase and say that's really what the new heavens and new earth are talking about.

But they deny the paradigm of the already and not yet. Just kind of as a way of announcement,

I've been invited to speak at a conference in September. The conference is called Eschatology Matters.

I will be speaking on the resurrection of the dead. I'm very honored to be invited to be able to speak to that.

That's awesome, man. That's all the questions for tonight, folks. We're going to wrap it up here.

We're at about the two -hour mark. I'm going to let Jeremiah say his sign -off here. Then, as per usual,

I'll do a little bit of a shutdown here. We're going to call it a night. Jeremiah, thank you so much for being here.

Again, we will definitely be doing another one of these. I think this was really helpful, really fruitful. We have a ton of other topics, obviously, that we could get into.

Actually, we got one question here that I think might be beneficial for you. Don't feel like this has to open the can of worms because this is going to be a whole discussion in and of itself.

I know what your position is. That's why we're not going to get into a whole thing right now.

Eschatology can be the thing that... Oh, true, true, true. Oh, wait.

That's not the right one. I was like, oh. Are you pre, post, or amill?

This will be brief. I grew up dogmatically dispensational premill because of Johnny McDaddy.

Love his commentary. Love his ministry. Indebted to that man. Praise God for his ministry.

I'm talking like seven years. I know all the premillennial arguments like the back of my hand.

And I want to encourage this individual, go to my channel. I gave a positive presentation of all three of those views.

And every time you listen to one of those, you think, that's got to be what he believes. That's not necessarily the case.

But I don't mind telling people, I am caught in between postmill and amill. However...

You're on the evolution, bro. What? You're on that eschatological evolutionary train, if you will.

Because you're following the same path I followed. Yeah. I don't know what you'll think about this, but I'm leaning all mill.

And it's some very technical reasons why. I got friends, Jeff Durbin and all the guys out there at Apologia.

I talk with them often about certain issues. And there is a lot to be said in a good way about theonomy and the misrepresentations that I've even learned and what moral equitable principles look like.

And so it kind of comes down to a few key passages and things. But I will say,

I was not pleased over time how the premillennial view handled a few passages with all of it.

Discourse and Daniel 9. However, premillennialism is orthodox.

Totally. And so I wanted to remind people. Yeah. And this is where I also get into a little trouble.

We had a documentary crew come down to 12 .5. And it's going to be a documentary called

Thy Kingdom Come. And they're really excited to interview me because I'm doing debates and doing all these things similar to what you're doing.

And one of their questions was like, don't you think dispensationalism is the problem? And I said, well, which one?

All the covenant guys. Yeah. That's true. And I just said, look, because not all dispensationalism is the same.

You have the rank, traditional, classical dispensationalism, which damages the sovereignty of God and has different methods of salvation.

That is a problem. But that's not progressive or moderate with how they understand the Davidic throne and so on and so forth.

So anyway, it is a deep well. I enjoy studying. I've told people this. I'll end on this.

I will land in the eschatology that best refutes and pummels hyper -preterism.

And it's because of the nature of eschatology. I don't think each position has it all ironed out.

I think there are things that have to be continued to sharpen, but we all lock arms on the essentials. And so whichever position allows me to just better combat hyper -preterism,

I believe that'll probably be because it's closer to the truth. And so I've enjoyed that study so far,

Myles. Well, good stuff, man. I know that you do a lot of eschatology stuff over on your channel. So for people that are fancy in that thing, yeah, go for it.

Not to open up the can, but which apologetic methodology do you land in as far as classical and presupposition?

I'm hard presupp. Hard, hard presupp. Dude, after the light bulb goes off, there's no way of undoing thinking presuppositionally.

And every time, I mean, it's not to say that evidences don't have a place or that sort of thing.

That's oftentimes the straw man that people have. But man, once you really start to understand the

Vantillian, the Bonson sort of approach to apologetics, man, it is just, you got to be careful with it.

It's like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. And I'm not saying that because I'm amazing or something. I'm not. I'm not a great presuppositional apologist.

There's way better presupp apologists out there. But it shatters worldviews.

It causes you to, it will blow your mind if you sit and actually wrestle and grasp with what's going on.

John Frame talked about how presuppositionalism is solo scriptura applied.

So I've always appreciated that quote. And Greg Bonson talked about how it's not just having a defense shield for like atheists trying to poke holes in us.

Presuppositional takes the gun away from the atheist. Yeah. And they have no weapon. And it exalts and glorifies

God. God's not on trial. God is not having to be put in the hot seat for the evidence to be put forth to some other person as judge to decide, you know, that's not the methodology that we saw the apostles.

I asked because I didn't know if you're going to be like R .C. Sproul, digging his heels in the sand. He's a presuppositionalist now and perhaps a

Baptist, but that's another discussion. Well, the thing with R .C. And I obviously love R .C. The thing with R .C.

is R .C. was too. And again, this is a whole nother thing. So we are going to wrap it up on this. R .C.

was a, he, he had a great love for Thomas Aquinas and his, his, he wasn't a full blown like Thomas, but his, his

Thomas Aquinas, yeah, his Thomas Aquinas affinity, really, I think clouded some of his apologetics.

Not that he didn't do a great job. He did pray to God. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, well, dude, thank you so much for being here.

Like I said, I'm going to let you go and I'm going to do a sign off here with the audience and whatnot, but we will definitely be doing another one of these.

Go and check out Jeremiah's channel. Like I said, there's a link to it in the description box down below. If it's not working for some reason,

I'll make sure that it is, but his channel name is the apologetic dog putting out, putting out really good content.

So thanks for being your brother and we'll see you around next time. Thanks, man. I look forward to it.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, folks. Well, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for giving me some hours of your night. I always appreciate you guys.

I hope that this content was more than entertaining. I hope that it was also fruitful. I always want to camp out, especially on discussions like this.

We kind of got into some other stuff there during the Q &A, but the gospel is a serious matter, folks.

Adventists, that's who this channel is obviously predominantly dedicated towards. So that's who I'm speaking to.

I understand that there are a lot of you out there that are going to say, well, that sounds like what I believe.

And if that's the case, praise God. Praise God that people are saved inconsistently. Thank God that there are people out there who are, whether they understand the issues of an organization that they may be involved with.

Thankfully, they are still bona fide born again believers. And that is my prayer for you.

I hope that that is the case. This channel is dedicated to the official teachings of the organization.

I understand that you as an individual may disagree with some of those things. But at a certain point, it's time to get honest about the facts.

Why would you want to be a part of an organization whose official teachings do not align with you and your understanding of the gospel?

Not just the gospel, but the Godhead, because those are the two issues with Seventh -day Adventism. It is who is

Christ and the Trinity and what is the gospel? And that's really what the core of this channel is about.

And I'm going to keep banging this drum. I'm going to keep sounding the alarm on this. You're probably going to get tired of me constantly bringing this up, but it's not going to stop.

This will be the thing that I will be until the breath leaves my lungs and my spirit leaves my body.

I am going to be pounding this drum until the cows come home. The gospel, the gospel, the gospel.

And what is the gospel? And as we talked about a little bit earlier, we really were getting into the core of what it is.

And if you have an idea that the gospel is something where it made salvation a possibility, the ball is now in your court.

God's trying his best. I want to challenge you with that.

I want you to think differently with me for a moment.

What we're going to argue and present on this channel, and there's lots of content coming, folks, by the way, this spring is going to be pretty, pretty cool.

There's going to be some boots on the ground type stuff. We're going to be engaging with a lot of Seventh -day Adventist college students and professors.

So stand by for that. But what we're defending on this channel, promoting on this channel, what's stated in the about on the channel, what

I've told a number of you in emails and comments and messages, is we're here to defend the gospel of grace.

The good news of the freedom of the trying God's freedom to save for his own eternal glory.

There's nothing that you can do to merit salvation. There's nothing that you can do to add to what

Jesus Christ has already accomplished. Adventists, it doesn't matter how faithfully you go to church on Saturdays.

It doesn't matter how faithfully you seek to keep the Ten Commandments. It doesn't matter how much you try to clean up your diet and be a vegetarian or a vegan.

And live the healthiest possible lifestyle that you can to try and get yourself into a position where you feel that you're in the best possible condition that you can be and all of these things.

All of that is vanity. None of that can add anything to what

Christ has already accomplished. The good news of the gospel is not that salvation is now a possibility, that it's on the table and you can now come to God through some sort of provenient grace.

God is a perfect Savior. Jesus Christ is a perfect and successful Savior. Jesus Christ is able to save to the uttermost those who are his.

And we're not going to get deep in this right now, but Jesus has a people. A people that he came for.

A people that he knows intimately. It is not a people who is a nameless, faceless group.

But it is actually a people that he came for and he successfully paid the penalty for their sin.

But not just that, he will successfully bring those people to a point where they will eventually be resurrected to newness of life.

There's nothing you can add to this, folks. Cling to Jesus Christ by faith alone.

It doesn't mean that you should seek to live a lawless life. As we clearly said multiple times tonight, that's not what we're advocating for.

Neither Jeremiah or I are advocating for that. But it's getting real about the fact that when you're honest with yourself, if you're honest, you'll never make it.

You'll never have enough. You'll never be able to do enough to put yourself into the good graces of God.

That's the good news of the gospel though, is that despite that, Christ is enough.

I'm not worthy. I would never pass that standard. I was always constantly worried about that when

I was a Seventh -day Adventist. Not because I loved my sin. But it seemed like the more that I tried, the heavier the weight became.

The heavier the burden became. And eventually I was presented with the true gospel.

That was the gospel that saved me. That was the gospel that changed my life permanently. And I don't mean this in like the fluffy rainbows or like I, you know, was at a revival and I walked down the aisle.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to make a testimonial video. I know I've been saying that for quite some time, but I want to put a lot of time into that video.

And put the necessary bandwidth behind that. And so I'll get into that more, but that was the gospel that saved me.

That was the gospel that changed my life. And that is the gospel that until my dying breath,

I will be beating and sounding the drum on that. That you need to turn from your sins, bow the knee to Jesus Christ as Lord.

And any person that does that will find that he is a perfect savior. He will free you from your slavery to sin.

He will raise you to spiritual newness of life. He will radically change you from being a slave to sin in the kingdom of darkness, a fallen son or daughter of Adam.

He will transfer you at the point of faith into the kingdom of light. And he will begin a sanctifying work in you that he will successfully complete until the end to eventually bring you to a point of glorification.

So that is what this channel is about. That's what this channel is going to continue to be about. You don't necessarily have to agree with that.

Obviously, I hope you stick around. I know that all sorts of people across the spectrum listen to my content and I appreciate you for that.

So I'm not ragging on you if you disagree. I'm just doing what I truly believe is my duty before God.

And I'm going to let the chips fall where they may. So glory to the Triune God and may he continue the work that he has begun within his people.

And may he continue to use this channel and other channels like Jeremiah's for his glory. I just want to remind you guys as well.

I mentioned it earlier, but we're going to be on William Albrecht's channel a week from tonight,

Patristic Pillars. As of today, we are at least, unless things change. That's going to be me and E .J.

Thunder Lorston, as well as CMB, the ambassador. We've done streams on my channel as well as Sam Shimone's channel before.

And so that will be the next tag team. We're going to be discussing false prophecies and whether or not Ellen White fits the bill of a biblical prophet.

On Tuesday of next week, I'm going to have a former Adventist pastor on the show to discuss a number of things.

I think that this is going to be a really interesting discussion. So I definitely, definitely, definitely think that you guys should tune in for that.

We're also going to be doing Q &A as well. So be thinking about any sort of questions that you may have for a former

Adventist pastor. That's all that I got for you guys tonight. So until next time, may the