In Defense of Sound Guys, Oppression and Exegesis, a Bit on Psalm 12 and the Text

Welcome to The Dividing Line, it's a Monday, we gotta get things done early this week, my lord willing, and travel goes well tomorrow, then on Wednesday I hope to do a program from up in North Las Vegas, Nevada with my daughter

Summer, and probably, since they're a homeschooling family, the grandkids too.

I assume we'll try to use Zoom for that and try to make that work as best we can, but when you do stuff remotely like that, there's all sorts of possibilities of everything going wrong, so we'll give it a shot and do our best and go from there.

Important breaking news here, just before going on the program,

Ridgeline, California, when Pastor Blake Middleton's voice failed to come through the house system at Maple Street Bible Church Sunday morning, every single member of the congregation turned to look at sound technician

Johnny Bray, assuming it was his fault. After a few brutal seconds fiddling with knobs and sliders,

Bray looked up in motion for Middleton to check his wireless pack to make sure it was actually on. Uh -oh, whoops -a -daisy, looks like I forgot to flip the little switch doohickey up, huh?

My bad, the pastor said in an unprecedented admission that not everything that went wrong in the service was the sound guy's fault.

Ha! I knew it, Bray declared triumphantly, unable to contain himself. I tell you every week not to forget to turn your mic on, and every week you give me that smug little look that says you know everything.

Well, guess who's got the smug look now, Pastor? Guess you'll be eating crow at the potluck this afternoon.

A poll of congregants taken after the service, however, revealed that 92 % still blamed the sound guy for the hiccup.

Now, with all the important stuff to be talking about today, why in the world start with that? Because I could have written that, and I'm not sure why

I didn't. I could have written that, and mine would have been a better version of it, to be perfectly honest with you.

It would have been because anybody who was ever in the late 1970s, early 1980s, a member of or attended the

North Phoenix Baptist Church, Pastor Richard Jackson, would know the kind of pressure you lived under to be a sound guy in that church.

Rich thinks he has it tough in there with a little board this big. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ha! Nothing to that at all. Try getting to church at 6 o 'clock in the morning and setting up PZM microphones, 250 voice choir, full orchestra, soloists who are always going,

More me! More me! Oh, yeah.

Oh, man. I'll tell you. And one day, early on in my sound career, there were two services.

There was an early service, which was less attended. It was like 8 o 'clock in the morning, I think. And then the big service.

And Pastor Jackson, as someone who had sung a solo, Pastor Jackson, I guess, had really liked it, got up to start speaking, and I missed the first few words because there was nothing coming through the lavalier.

Now, this was before there was wireless. So lavalier, you just had this big, long thing that he had to keep throwing around.

Remember that? And he could do it without thinking about it. I mean, he's learned how to just throw that cable around, and this was a long time ago.

And so I quick pop the pulpit mic on, and I'm like, where's the lav?

Well, the other sound man happened to be up in the balcony that day. And Buddy Havens is the name.

And he was the best man at my wedding. And he jumps into the sound booth, and there's a full -size

TV camera up there. They only record the later service. And so he takes it, and he zooms in on Pastor Jackson.

There's no microphone on Pastor Jackson. He pans over to Jackson's chair, because you'd plug the lav in, and you'd hang it on the chair.

And there it's swinging back and forth on the chair. He had so gotten into the solo that he had completely forgotten to put the thing on.

But he does not know this. And I'm a new sound guy. And the point was, if you're the new sound guy, the old sound guy could leave everything.

You don't touch a thing. And Jackson would think you were doing it wrong, because you're the new guy. He trusted the old guy.

But you've messed it up somehow, even though you don't touch a thing. So I know what's going to happen, because everybody knew that what would happen is he'd start getting into his sermon, and he starts moving.

And eventually, at a certain point, he's going to take a few steps off this direction, a few steps off that direction, and he's just on the pulpit mic.

So he's going to fall right out of what are called the fullbacks up front, the speakers that he's listening to.

So right as clockwork, he takes a few steps to the left, and he's gone.

And so you see his shoulders go down, and he could get this disgusted look on his face.

He was an intimidating man. I mean, 35 years later, I still have dreams about Richard Jackson going after you about something.

And it's been longer than that, actually. Well, no, right about there. Anyway, so he walks back to the pulpit, and he goes like this.

He goes, so is something wrong? And he looks down, and then you see him go like this, looks back to his chair, and there's the microphone hanging on his chair.

And I'm just sort of sitting there. Now I'm a long ways away. But you gotta realize, North Phoenix Baptist Church, you can see what

North Phoenix looked like back then if you go online and you look up Glenn Campbell, No More Night, because it's a fairly regularly watched, been watched widely.

He did a beautiful solo about three months after I left North Phoenix. And North Phoenix was still set up then the way it was that I knew it when

I was there. And so you're a long ways away, thankfully. I don't know how many feet it is, but you're a good distance from the pulpit.

And so he gets this grin on his face, and he sort of looks up at everybody, and he says, doesn't work very well if you don't put it on, huh?

And everybody in the audience is like, ha ha ha ha ha. And I'm just, I'm just, I did not scream from the balcony.

Ha ha! I told you! No, no, that was, no, no, that was, no, that would have been really bad.

Really, really bad. The best thing you could have done if I did that was just jump out of the balcony to my death.

Same, same thing would have happened afterwards. Break, break my neck on a, on a pew, average of Jackson, break my neck.

Same, same difference. It's the same result. But from that day onward, there were no more questions about my running sound because he was right, did it wrong.

I had done it right. And so I, that was it. It was sort of like a graduation thing. And so I saw this and I'm like, yeah, yeah,

I, uh, I can't tell you how many times I've gone to churches and I've thanked the sound guy because I said,

I did it. It's thankless. No matter how hard you work, something's going to go wrong.

And they always know where to look and who to blame. There you go. Now, there's no parallel to anything that Rich does because he's just supposed to have all this done, all this down and told me that he does.

So, uh, you know, when things go wrong, it is his fault. So, so there we go.

Uh, anyway, uh, thanks Babylon Bee for completely messing all of this up.

Obviously today is Monday and, uh, over the weekend, the, uh, news started coming across slowly, um, concerning the, and I, I still don't have all the details because, uh, one story that I heard this morning was that there was only one shooter.

That doesn't make any sense that there's more than one mosque. Did he do it at two different mosques or something? And, and how could he get away from the one and to the other?

I don't know. Anyway, but the horrific actions, uh, 49, 50 people killed a similar number, uh, injured, uh, down in Christchurch in, um, in New Zealand.

And, uh, as, uh, Dr. Moeller pointed out, if you, if you run the numbers as far as the number of people killed in comparison to the population of the country, this was an interesting comparison, uh, given how, given that there are more people in the metropolitan

Phoenix area and the Valley of the sun than there are in all of New Zealand. Okay. That's how sparsely populated it is.

You run the numbers and that's their nine 11, the, the, the number, the percentage of people who died is similar to, uh, the, the 3000, almost 3000 in the

United States on nine 11. Um, so, uh, it, you just don't think of that normally, uh, in, in a place that's, that's inhabited by, uh, dwarves and hobbits and elves and things like that, uh, that they would be having a, they do have these major wars, uh, with the forces of evil all the time in which huge armies are decimated.

But I guess that's different somehow. Um, sort of how that works. So the, the news started coming across and, uh, everybody started commenting about it.

And, and I, all I said was, uh, I'm going to take some time.

I don't want to just, it's just noise. Everybody in the, uh, in, in the, in the world is, is talking about this right now and saying exactly the same thing.

I did grab the manifesto that this guy put out because someone,

I'm not sure if it was that day or the next, started talking about him as a Christian. This man is not a

Christian. Um, in his manifesto, it said, are you a Christian? And he says, that's complicated.

Um, uh, but I'm not going to go into that right now. And if you're asked, if you're a

Christian, you don't say that's complicated. Okay. This guy was into some type of weird environmentalism, you know, sort of like that Bravit guy who

I think he did mention was a Wodenist. Uh, and that has nothing to do with, um,

Odin or, or, uh, comic stuff and Thor. And I guess that's something to do with Thor.

Now I think about it, but he was a Wodenist before Thor was or something. I don't know. Anyways, these people who write these long manifestos tend to be really, really, really strange individuals.

And so the responses over the past couple of days, you've seen, uh,

I guess there, there was some Australian government official or elected official or something like that.

Did you see a kid that, that broke the egg on his head and then he turned around and smacked the kid and the kid looked like,

Hey, what'd you do? I thought I was getting away with this. I thought this was going to be a great

YouTube video for, you know, and the guy just turns around and clocks him a good one. Then they, yeah. Then they, then they went at it for a second.

Um, I don't know the backstory on that, but there was some may have been the same guy.

I don't know that wrote something right afterwards. That was really not advisable.

Um, but this kind of, you know,

I, I guess the guy, the guy live video, the whole thing, I cannot, it, the level of depravity.

And what's interesting to me is we will never understand. First of all, you, it is a simple fact that what we're seeing in Western society right now is the next generation has become so dependent upon government that they want government to be able to protect them from all things, not realizing that the only way to get that has a very high cost.

It's called liberty and freedom. And all this goes back to anthropology.

All this goes back to what you believe about man. And it was interesting that I had a little back and forth with some

Muslims on this subject. One of the major areas of difference between us is on anthropology, our doctrine of man.

Sadly, the vast majority of individuals that engage in apologetic work with Muslims have a defective or unbiblical anthropology themselves.

And so they don't normally see that this is actually a fruitful area of discussion and, uh, because you can go into God's law, you can go into consciousness of sin and, and really go straight into the gospel and in a unusual fashion with the

Muslim that way. I had seen, I follow on Twitter, a group called

Muslim Matters, and they had retweeted a tweet from someone named

Seditious Medic, um, Naveed at Seditious Medic.

And here's what they were saying, and they were promoting this.

And here's what the tweet said. It's time to silence the leaders of this terrorist cult forever.

Let's start with, and then you have a list of groups or individuals normally by their

Twitter handle. Imam of Peace, that's Tawhidi, I think. Tariq Fatah, Confessions Ex -Mu, which is a confession of an ex -Muslim.

Tommy Robinson, uh, Geert Wilders, SamHarris .org,

the atheist. And then it says, they need to be removed from society permanently.

Authorities must act today. Hashtag Christ Church attack. Now, I looked at that and I'm like, okay, first of all, you're talking about silencing people.

You're calling them leaders of a terrorist cult. Now, they're all very different from one another.

The only thing that would connect any of them together is what?

That they criticize Islam. And so you're taking the actions of a single evil individual and you're turning it, you're politicizing it and turning it into an opportunity to say you cannot criticize

Islam, even though. Far more Christians died in the past month at the hands of Muslims than this wacko, evil man, evil, not sick, not sick.

That's one of the problems. This is not disease. This is evil. This is evil in the heart. This is depravity.

Um, then this guy did in his attack. It's just in other places where the media, quite honestly, has gotten used to it.

You don't expect this in Christ Church. You don't expect this in New Zealand. And so I wrote back and said,

I am disappointed, Muslim Matters, that you would retweet a call for more violence removed from society permanently, imprisoned, perhaps shameful to see such politicization of the evil act that should be condemned by all.

And they responded. And basically, we're not talking about violence like that.

It's like, well, okay, if you're not, then how do you get these people out of society? How do you silence them?

You're calling upon the authorities to act to remove these people from society permanently.

Is this life sentences for daring to say something negative about Islam? And I gave them, um, let me see here.

Yeah, let's see if I can pop this up real quick. I gave, you know, I pointed out a reference and, uh, dee dee dee dee da.

Why? Oh, that's great. Oh, that's not gonna do me any good.

Let's try this side. There we go. No, that's not gonna do it either, is it?

Well, I, I pointed out a, um, there it is, uh, Surah 98, six in the

Quran, those who reject truth among the people of book and among the polytheists will be in hellfire to dwell therein forever.

They are the worst of creatures. I'm not sure which, this is, uh, is that Yusuf? That's terrible.

Anyway, the point is that the Quran identifies, um, rejecters of truth amongst the people of the book as the worst of all creatures.

Now, what if somebody used that verse or many other verses that you could cite in the Quran as a basis for, well, doing what

Muslims have done in many churches in Egypt and, and Pakistan and places like that go in and throw bombs and, and blow people up because they're the worst of all creatures.

And so should, what if after yet another of these attacks, someone were to tweet, um, it's time to silence the leaders, this terrorist cult forever, let's start with, and then you start with Muslim matters and you go down a whole list of Muslims and say they need to be removed from society permanently.

Authorities must act today, hashtag whatever terrorist attack has taken place against a

Christian church. How would you respond to that? Well, that's identified as Islamophobia.

Well, then why isn't this seen as having the very same horrific foundation as anything else?

Um, I was just really disappointed because Muslim matters tends to be more on the balanced side, but situations like this end balance, unfortunately.

Um, and so there has been obviously, and there will be reaction for quite some time, obviously for a

Christian, when you see this kind of violence, you are reminded that it is only the grace of God that restrains this from happening over and over and over again, every single day.

You are once again faced with having to deal with the reality that you want your places of worship to be open, you want anyone to be able to come, and yet this is the reality that can happen.

Remember the guy that, what was the church in Sulphur? No, it wasn't Sulphur Springs, but there was some place in Texas early last year, as I recall.

Um, you know, goes in and just starts shooting people up, and thankfully, a neighbor hears it and has an

AR -15 and comes after him. Sulphur Springs? Is that what it was? Yeah. Um, what is it?

Sutherland? It was something Springs. Anyway. Um, this is the reality that we face.

It has nothing to do with guns. Um, there were churches being sacked and this type of thing happening for a long, long time before the invention of gunpowder.

Um, this is a human evil situation.

This is evil men taking advantage of people who have gathered for religious purposes.

It may be good or bad religion. It happens in both places. It really does force us back to a biblical anthropology, a biblical understanding of who man is and why he acts as he does and what

God's sovereign purposes are. God can restrain evil. The scripture tells us that he can.

So, why doesn't he in all instances? Well, will we have an answer to that in this life in all instances?

We will not. Are we told to trust that God has a purpose in all these things, and are we given a proper foundation for understanding that in light of sin and the fallenness of the created order, natural disasters as well as eruptions of evil, are used by God as judgments.

Just as death is a judgment upon sin, that death can come at any moment.

And that can happen in ways that seem to us to be accidental or in ways that are very clearly the result of human evil, human animus, whatever else it might be.

My hope and prayer is that people would be prompted to think, how many times have we prayed for opportunities to reach out to the

Muslim people? I spoke on this at G3 back in January, and right now we should be praying that the

Christians in Christ's church would have opportunities. Not to try to set up debates, but to speak clearly as to why they have assurance of salvation and what grounds that's in, and that it's not in them, it is in the work of another.

Because very few Muslims, very few Muslims have any meaningful understanding, have ever had a meaningful conversation with a

Christian as to what the Christian's true hope is. And when you think of those 50 people, they will not have that opportunity.

I find it hard to pray for this man. That level of evil seems to me to be indicative of a person who's been given over.

But you never know. But I have great animosity and anger in my heart toward anyone who can, with such callous evil and wickedness, just be shooting men, women, and children, innocent men, women, and children.

They're defenseless. It's just, how do you even? I don't know.

Anyway, if you have

Muslims in your life, and because of fear you have not been speaking to them, stop.

You need to take the time to speak to these individuals, and not just give them a few verses, but to truly communicate a meaningful message to them of what the gospel is, who

Christ really is. Get that relationship going and active.

Now, on a few other topics here, it must be

March. I'll tell you, I forgot to look at what it is, but the dew points in March in Arizona are ridiculously low.

I mean, sometimes below freezing. It's so dry right now. Over the weekend,

I got in trouble because I responded to a post by Mika Edmondson, with whom

I've had some brief exchanges in the past. He was responding to another tweet.

In following some of these, I've discovered that, well, my hope for the continued existence of simple common sense within our society was pretty well dashed over the course of this weekend.

Listening to people who call themselves Christians, it's so obvious that their worldview has been completely subverted by a deconstructionist, intersectional, oppressor -oppressed worldview.

Not by a biblical worldview, not by a worldview where God is sovereign and God is working out the counsel of His will, but a very much man -centered worldview.

And they're now willing to accept almost anything, including some of the wildest leftist dreams that there is.

Anyway, someone named Lisa Sharon Harper had hashtagged,

De -Centering Whiteness in white evangelicalism would require all, capitalized, seminaries, to require all students to soak in the voices of theologians from social locations closest to the writers of the biblical text itself.

The oppressed. And call that theology. Hashtag liberating evangelicalism.

So, you see this stuff all over the place. It takes one form in the United States, takes another form in South Africa.

They're doing the decolonization thing. You know, at Cape Town, I saw an article that at one of the universities in Cape Town, they're actually undertaking to decolonize science.

Which basically means if it was written by or discovered by a white person, we're going to reject it.

So, theory of relativity. Newton's laws.

I mean, the result is insanity, of course.

The result makes me not want to drive over any bridge that any of the graduates of this particular institution would ever design.

But it's just insane. But it's the thing. And there's this insanity going around the world where everybody just wants to do something.

Whether that something makes any sense or will actually bring about improvement or is logical or rational, that doesn't matter.

It's just do something. Which is why the leftists in the United States want to lower the voting age to 16 and let anybody and their second cousin vote.

I mean, they're already doing that. We all know in Chicago, you have to die four times before you stop voting. That's just sort of how it works up there.

But this is how they want to establish one -party rule. They've already established it in California.

There's one -party rule in California. There's not a second party in California. I'm sorry? Pretty much, yeah.

New York and California. That's what they want for the entire nation. And they will succeed at the rate that they're going.

Sooner than most of us want to think. And then all the insanity that you see in California and New York will just be forced upon all of us.

And they'll take the same attitudes as this seditious medic did.

And that is silence anyone who says anything else. Remove them from society. It's the

Stasi prison coming at us yet once again. It's only been closed for what? 30 years?

Yeah, Stasi prison closed 30 years ago. And we've already forgotten it. Forgotten?

The vast majority of millennials don't even know that it happened. Even though it was within their lifetime.

They don't care about things like that. So anyway, got off topic there.

In response to Lisa Sharon Harper, Mika Edmondson had said these words.

And by the way, so what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to soak in the voices of theologians from social locations closest to the writers of the biblical text.

What does that mean? Because social locations today wouldn't be the same as they were back then.

And so the idea is the social location are the oppressed. Now, of course, we know that oppression is now defined, has been redefined just as racism has been redefined.

When I grew up, you knew what a racist was because they made it known by their words and their actions.

Their hearts were filled with animus toward another race. That's not racism anymore. Read Jamar Tisby.

There's a new definition of racism that you can't avoid no matter what's in your heart.

It has nothing to do with the content of your character anymore. Nope, that's irrelevant. It's a social thing.

And so you can be a racist without trying to be. You just are.

Just live with it type of thing. And so the same thing with who's the oppressed and who are the oppressors.

There doesn't have to be a desire to oppress someone. In some of these conversations

I had, they've totally sold out to the idea of privilege. And so I need to lay my privilege down in the service of others.

And they really think this is biblical. I mean, I had a woman actually attach that Philippians chapter 2. Instead of recognizing in Philippians chapter 2, it's within the church.

We all have equal rights before God and we're laying those rights that we have down in the service of others.

It has nothing to do with privilege. It's not a societal thing. It has nothing to do with your economic status.

And if you try to bring ethnicity and economic status into Philippians chapter 2, you will turn it into a mishmash of foolishness.

It's absolutely heretical eisegesis, but people are doing it. And it's happening in our seminaries.

And it's happening more and more often in what used to be the last Reformed seminaries. And that means your pastor in your church may be coming in sounding like the old pastor, but they're not really.

Using the same words don't mean the same things. That's what's going to cause people to go, hey, what happened?

Well, it's already happened. It's already happened. I was listening to the CrossPolitics show, by the way, but I am going to get to this.

Sorry. I was listening to the last edition of CrossPolitics where they had Doug Wilson on. It's really good.

I listened to it on a ride today. It's really good. And I'm going to listen to it again.

It was so good. I want to get it a second time. But they had some criticisms for the statement on social justice, which, you know,

I had something to do with. And one of Doug Wilson's criticisms was, it's too late.

It's too late. They were ten years too late. And, you know, again,

I remember exactly where I was. I was doing this ride because I'm going to be riding up a mountain tomorrow on a new bike with new tires and new tubes.

You always go for a ride and check that stuff out. And about seven miles in, one of my tires started deseeding from the rim.

I started feeling, thump, thump, thump. I had just fixed that, reinflated the tire with a quick fill, and was accelerating back up when

Doug Wilson said, Let's see you figure out the time index in the cross politic program based on the reinflation of my back tire.

That's not going to work too well. Anyway, Doug Wilson said, one of my criticisms is, it's about ten years too late.

And I went, yeah, I'll admit that. Because I've said from the start, almost all of us were like,

MLK 50 hit, and we're like, whoa, something just happened. But it didn't just now happen.

This has been happening, and we've been asleep at the switch. No matter what

I say on this issue, and man, the hatred that is expressed if you say anything is just stunning.

But no matter what I say, I will never claim that I saw this coming, because I didn't.

I've said over and over again, I thought Soloscriptura would be the bulwark to keep this stuff out.

It hasn't been. It hasn't been. And that's problematic.

So anyway, catch the last episode of Cross Politic, and you'll see,

I think you'll hear some good insights. Yes, I know, go ahead, send the emails, whatever,

I don't care. If you won't listen to what those guys say because of that guy or that guy's association or whatever,

I can't help you. Just telling you, if you are actually interested in insightful, meaningful commentary, there was insightful, meaningful commentary offered by everybody on the panel, including

Doug Wilson. If you can't handle that, sorry.

Back to Mika Edmondson. I'm sorry, back to Lisa Sharon Harper.

So, the social locations closest to the writer's biblical text itself, the oppressed.

So, Mika Edmondson's interpretation of this is, the oppressed are often the most faithful interpreters of Scripture, seeing things about Christ and his kingdom that privileged biases simply refuse to see.

And my response was, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Now, let's demonstrate that I can give you a generous reading of Mika Edmondson's words.

Okay, I'm listening to The Hiding Place right now. I read the book in high school, maybe before, maybe eighth grade.

Read it a couple times, saw the movie when it came out years ago. I need to rent that movie again and watch it because I'm hoping to get a chance to visit the

Ten Boom House next month and to see The Hiding Place. And so,

I'm re -familiarizing myself with the story after probably 30 years since I saw the movie over in Tempe.

Right across the bridge in Tempe where that steakhouse used to be. It finally closed down.

Mani's, was it Mani's La Casa Vieja? That was a landmark. It was a shame to see that thing go. And it was good food, too.

But, I was, you know,

Corey's father was just a fount of godly wisdom.

Really was. And, of course, what the Ten Booms experienced,

Corey and Betsy, in concentration camp, just how anybody could survive that was amazing.

But, there would be an element of truth that Corey Ten Boom, having experienced what she experienced at the hands of the

Nazis and survived it, would have insights into the suffering of the people of God, the grace of God, that would be worthy of listening to.

There's no question about that. There's no question about that. And the reason for that is that she had a firm and solid foundation in sound theology that allowed her to respond in a supernaturally biblical fashion.

But, it does not follow that every person that suffered at the hands of the Nazis becomes a better interpreter of scripture than people who did not.

We can recognize that the experience in life, not of the oppressed as some nebulous group out there, but that the work of the

Spirit of God in conforming people, no matter what their ethnicity, social status, political status, conforming them to the image of Christ is what gives insight into the scriptures.

And that's why we have the body of Christ. That's why we have people in the body of Christ who experience horrible things that we do not experience.

And yet, we can learn from them. And they can learn from us.

You think of some of the insights that we have gained from people who have had diseases and injuries to their bodies, and yet have remained faithful and do not live a life of complaint.

This has nothing to do with oppression. It has everything to do with God's sovereignty in building

His church from all sorts of different kinds of people and putting us together in one body. And we learn from the

Spirit's work of sanctification, not from sociopolitical forces. And so, you recognize the germ of truth, that is, that God has, at times, utilized what we would call oppressed peoples.

He put the children of Israel in Egypt for a reason, but He had a reason in it.

And it was His intention to deliver them out of that oppression for a reason.

And then He was going to put them back into slavery and out of slavery and into slavery and back and forth and back and forth to illustrate things and to teach things.

The vast majority of evangelicals don't have a theology of providence and sovereignty and a divine decree to even start plugging any of that in.

And so, because there's a vacuum there, because there's, your theology needs to be fully formed.

And if you've just, I'm not going to talk about that, I'm going to leave that part out, that creates a vacuum.

Something else is going to come in, and that something else in this situation is being funneled in through deconstructionism and sociology.

And that's why I'm seeing these, I just saw a glut of people over the past few days speaking

Christian words that have been filled with a completely foreign meaning because of this very issue.

And so, a lot of people responded. So, the germ of truth is that I can learn, you know, next week,

South Texas Bible Conference, Justin Peters is going to be speaking. Justin and I do not live the same kind of life.

I listened to CrossPolitik today while doing about a 26 and a half mile bike ride.

I'm training for my big rides in July, and I'm excited about that. And, you know, working on fitness, and Justin can't ride bikes, and he never will.

And so, that's, on one hand, is a great blessing. I'm very, very thankful for the health

I've had. It could end tomorrow, not only by accident, but by disease.

I know that. I recognize that. And it's all of God's sovereign will.

And so, can I learn from Justin's insights, from the limitations that have been placed upon his body?

How about Johnny Erickson Tata? How many of us have not learned something from Johnny Erickson Tata's continued faithfulness,

Justin Peters' continued faithfulness? But that doesn't make them a class of super interpreters of Scripture.

It does give them the ability to make application. But it seems to me that a lot of these folks think that there is no objective message of Scripture any longer.

It's all a matter of just how we feel. And a lot of these people, that's exactly what I say. Once you start pushing, they have bought into the liberal mindset of interpretation that does not believe that there is an identifiable core of objective truth in Scripture.

It's all experiential. It's all how you feel. So, when

I see this, privileged biases—let me just stop.

Whatever you mean by privilege. The fact of the matter is that we all have biases.

And right now, I'm seeing a tremendous amount of bias in my black brethren who are embracing racist ideas and interpretations of Scripture.

Just stop and ask yourself a question. Is that even possible anymore in someone's mind?

Because if you buy the idea that there's only one kind of privilege, it's white privilege, then you've completely bought into a non -biblical perspective.

Because there was no white privilege in Moses' day. They weren't white.

So, the point is, if these biases are, due to our fallen nature, related to sin, related to our status or something, or prejudices from the past, then if it's a matter of sin, then anyone can commit that sin.

There can be no sin where, by definition—now, of course, you might say, well, you know, like the people you were just talking about, they can't be proud of their athletic prowess.

So, there's some sense—that's different. We're talking about categories of sin. And if you tell me that a black man or an

Asian man or a Hispanic man cannot be just as biased, just as prejudiced, just as racist as any other man, including the dreaded white man, then you've bought into something that no biblical author could have ever even dreamed of.

You've already accepted it lock, stock, and barrel. So, it sounds like what

Mika Edmondson is saying is whoever it is that has privileged biases—that's buzzword for people who are not

POC—simply refuse to see things that the oppressed get to see.

Obviously, there is not a single apostle that ever even began to make such a statement, even began to teach such a thing.

And please, I did some correction of someone. Yeah, but what about Acts 6?

Oh, wow. Has—founding of the diaconate, using the men that could actually communicate with the people in need, never picked up in the requirements of the diaconate in 1

Timothy chapter 3, and yet somehow you want to read it in a way that Luke never intended.

It's getting tiring. It really is getting tiring. And I'll be honest with you, this whole social justice thing, it is really tiring.

It is really tiring. There's—you know, at least when I deal with the textual critical stuff, there's some positive thing to it.

And I suppose there's a positive thing to this in the sense of you have to defend what the scriptures teach about the unity of the body of Christ.

But it's—it's tiring. It's tiring. Well, we're getting close to the end of the hour, and I want to address one more thing here while we've got just a few minutes left.

Oh. I had it queued up, and I went so long on the rest of the stuff, I apologize. I was going to get back to some more—I had it all queued up, ready to go for some more

Anderson stuff, and I didn't do it. I apologize. But there is a fellow on a thread on Facebook that asked me some questions, and I was a little surprised.

Mainly because in defense—we're switching gears here, by the way. That's why we've just got a few minutes left here.

A fellow by the name of Cody Parrott, or Perot, I suppose, but it's probably Parrott, went after me a few days ago.

And he asked me, how do you explain

Deuteronomy 4 -2 and Revelation 22, 18, and 19, also Psalm 12, 6, and 7?

And I'm like, uh, that sounds really, really familiar to me for lots of reasons.

Mainly, it's sort of a mixture of texts here, because Deuteronomy 4 -2 is a text that we will normally utilize in talking with—at least laying a foundation in talking with Mormons.

You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh your

God which I command you. And this was in the context of the textual critical issues. So, I've had

King James Onlius use this. And so, if you don't have the long writing of Mark, you're taking away from the word of God, therefore you're taking away from the word

I've commanded you, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, obviously, we don't believe we're taking anything away because we don't believe that it's what the

Lord your God commanded you in the first place. The issue is not the establishment of a later text as a standard by which everyone else is to be judged.

But, again, I want to know what Mark wrote, or John wrote in chapter 7, or what

Paul wrote, or what was originally in the book of Hebrews. I want the apostolic witness, not something that came much, much later.

I'm not a person who thinks that church history is irrelevant, and hence dismisses the text that was used in the early church as being an irrelevant thing.

And so, the same thing is true with the Revelation chapter 22 text.

And we're not even talking about where Erasmus might have made some mistakes with that. But I testify to everyone, here's the words of the prophecy of this book.

If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy,

God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in this book. And, evidently, the idea being, well, that has something to do with the

Textus Receptus, or something along those lines. Actually, it doesn't have anything to do with the

Bible as a whole. It's very, very common for people to cite these texts.

And we did, back in the day, when we first started dealing with Mormonism, until you did some meaningful exegesis.

This is about the book of Revelation, first and foremost. It is about the book of Revelation and saying, do not add or take away from this particular book.

And because it's at the end of the Bible, people automatically go, ah, whole thing. And I know people that would defend that, as I can't defend it in that way.

I don't think it's possible to do so consistently. But there are people who would.

But, again, it has nothing to do with the textual issue. The issue we want to know is, what did John write in the book of Revelation originally?

And one thing we do know is that of all the sections of the Textus Receptus, the most corrupt, the book that has least claim to represent

John's original words is the Textus Receptus version of Revelation. There's no question about that.

None. Documentable. Documentable. Beyond all question.

But I do want to look at Psalm 12, because this is a very often misused text, in my opinion.

And I do believe I addressed this in the King James only controversy. It's been quite some time, but I believe it is there.

The words of Yahweh are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.

Oh, Yahweh, you, oh, Yahweh, will keep them. You'll preserve him from this generation forever.

And then one of my commonly cited verses right at the end, the wicked strut about on every side when what is vile is exalted amongst the sons of men.

That's a description of everything we're experiencing today. So King James onlyists especially will cite this.

And because they start where they do, they go, well, the words of the Lord are pure words, as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.

You, oh, Lord, will keep them, and the them is the words of the Lord. But then it says, you will preserve him from this generation forever.

And all of a sudden it's like, what? And this is what happens when you cite things outside of their context.

This is actually talking about evil people. If you go back, help

Yahweh, for the godly man ceases to be, for the faithful disappear from among the sons of men.

They speak falsehood to one another with flattering lips and with a double heart they speak. May Yahweh cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that speaks great things, who have said with our tongue will prevail, our lips our own, who is

Lord over us. That's an incredible statement there, who is Lord over us. Because the devastation of the afflicted, because the groaning of the needy, now

I will arise, says Yahweh, I will set him in the safety for which he longs. So you have evil men, and then you have the afflicted, and it's not class -based, it's sin -based.

I will set him in the safety for which he longs, and the words of the Lord are pure words. That is his promise that he will rescue the afflicted.

As silver tried in a furnace on the earth refined seven times, you, O Lord, will keep them, that is the afflicted, you will preserve him, the needy, from this generation forever.

That's what it's talking about when you read it in context. It's not a providential preservation verse.

Sorry, it's just not in context. You have to twist it to try to make it fit your perspective.

And so, it went on from there to repeat your standard stuff that you get from, again,

King James -only sources, and yet this is being utilized within the traditional text, ecclesiastical text type of a context.

And, you know, like it says, the Jehovah's Witness Bible is built off of Codex Aleph and Codex Vaticanus, thus making it a

Roman Catholic translation. New World Translation is based upon the 1881

Westcott and Hort text, which was deeply influenced, over -influenced, by Sinaitics and Vaticanus.

What does that have to do with Rome? How does that make that a Roman Catholic translation? I mean, aside from, you know,

Westcott was a much more conservative theologian than Hort was, and they were 19th century

Anglicans, but they weren't Roman Catholics, so what does that have to do with Roman Catholic translation?

It's the same mindset that we get out of King James -only -ism, and yet it's appearing in what's allegedly not

King James -only -ism, but in many ways mirrors that. So, Lord willing, on Wednesday, I'm not sure exactly sure when yet, but Lord willing, on Tuesday, we will be live from Las Vegas.

Let's get ready to interview the grandchildren! So that's what we'll do.

That's assuming traveling mercies and everything else, so hopefully we will get to see you on Wednesday.

Summer will be with me, hopefully, to talk about theologians and what's been going on with her and Joy and all the rest of that kind of fun stuff.

So, a little bit of a fun program on Wednesday. We hope to see you then. Thanks for listening. God bless.