Shame of Comparing Jesus to Covid19 Vaccine

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is December 18th, 2020.
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We are exactly one week away from Christmas and I am excited about the season and I have a special announcement.
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If everything goes as planned for this weekend, next week I'm going to have some very special programs that are going to be leading up to Christmas Day.
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Today, as many of you know, we have the Caffeinated Calvinist Roundtable.
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That is myself, Sam Brown, Richard Roden, the three of us come together.
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We have sometimes serious conversations, sometimes not so serious conversations, but if everything goes as planned, we're going to do our first live, all of us in person, not from being recorded from different places, but our first live recording this weekend.
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We're going to be having some special programs based on those live recordings.
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I ask you to pray for us.
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Pray that we have a good weekend and we have some productive material to show you next week.
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It's all going to be in good fun.
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It's all going to be leading up to Christmas.
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We're going to be talking about Christmas music.
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We're going to be talking about Christmas food and it's just going to be a lot of fun.
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So pray for us and we'll hope that this weekend goes very well.
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But on today's program, I want to deal with something that came across my news feed this week and I kept sort of going back and forth whether or not I was going to address it.
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And I've decided to go ahead and do that because it is something that I think is so ridiculous.
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Sometimes things are so ridiculous.
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They almost don't warrant a response, but I'm learning as I get older and as I study with people and as I teach people and learn that sometimes even the most ridiculous things can be accepted and believed by people.
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And therefore even the most ridiculous things sometimes warrant a response.
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It's not because the thing itself is worthy of a response, but because folks hear it and they think that it's okay.
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So today I want to respond to a post that was put out.
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Now I want to say this from the beginning.
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I don't know these men.
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I'm basing everything I'm saying today on simply the post that they put out.
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But I will give a little bit of information that's available online.
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The two men that are being addressed, the two men that are on this tweet, the first one is Duke Quan.
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And again, Duke Quan is a pastor.
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And according to this, he is a pastor in California.
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And let me see here, looking, excuse me, I'll pull this up.
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So I have it.
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Duke Quan spent his early years in Southern California, then journeyed to the East Coast for his undergraduate studies at Brown University.
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Duke moved to Washington, D.C.
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in 2004 to serve as the assistant pastor of Grace, D.C.'s Anchor Congregation, Grace Downtown, then in 2011 planted its second congregation, Grace Meridian Hill, a cross-cultural neighborhood church located in one of the most ethnically and economically diverse parts of our nation's capital.
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Duke and his wife Paula live in Columbia Heights neighborhood together with their three children.
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So this is a bio for him from Just Gospel 2020, which apparently he looks like he was one of the speakers.
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So that is Duke Quan, and this is what Duke Quan said in his Twitter post.
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He said, the introduction of the COVID vaccine is a vivid metaphor of life between the two advents.
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We celebrate its arrival as decisive for our future, even as disease and death rage on.
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Not the end, but the beginning of the end.
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Once and future, already and not yet.
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So we hope, grieve, watch.
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So, right away, Duke Quan's statement here is essentially comparing the advent of a COVID vaccine with a metaphor of living between the first and second coming of Christ.
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And it's interesting the way he's using language here.
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And it really is, we celebrate its arrival as decisive for our future.
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And he's talking about the COVID-19 vaccine, which is in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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And it's just interesting how he's looking at this.
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He's saying that this is not the end, but the beginning of the end.
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Once and future, already and not yet.
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So we hope, grieve, watch.
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But his post isn't really the post that got my attention.
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His post, it's just a little odd.
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And comparing the COVID vaccine to essentially living between the first and second coming of Christ, it's just sort of an odd metaphor, an odd analogy.
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But the one that got my attention, and got a lot of people's attention, apparently on Facebook and other places, was the response of Joseph Wu, PhD.
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And I'm sorry, I said Joseph.
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I meant Joshua Wu, PhD.
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And Joshua Wu is, let me see here.
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I'm looking for a little bit more information as I'm speaking.
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Doesn't say that he is a, doesn't say that he's a pastor.
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So I don't know about his particular background in that regard.
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I don't see anything.
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He could be.
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Again, I don't know who he is.
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If I find out anything more as I'm going along, I will bring it up.
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But here's one thing that says he's an author at the Emerging Scholars blog.
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I've never heard of that.
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So ultimately, okay, I don't know much about this guy, but this is his response to Duke Kwan, Duke Kwan is a pastor.
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And the response of Joshua Wu, PhD, is, and like the First Advent, too many will reject the vaccine as they reject the good news and Jesus at the first Christmas.
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Let me say that again.
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Like the First Advent, too many will reject the vaccine as they reject the good news and Jesus at the first Christmas.
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Think about that.
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Think about what he's doing here.
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He's comparing the COVID-19 vaccine with the coming of Jesus Christ.
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And again, this to me is absolutely stunning that anyone would even try to make that comparison, to even put them on the same, to even use them in the same thinking that we have the COVID-19 sickness, this virus, which certainly has been a major issue.
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But it's in many ways been, in my mind, it's been used by people in power, people in government, to instill fear and instill a sense of dread and ultimately instill a sense of preoccupation for people over the last many months that we've had here in the United States.
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It's the only thing people think about.
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I went today, I'll give you an example.
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I went today to a restaurant that I frequent often.
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One of my favorite places, went to Casa Maria, place took my brother and I went and had some tacos there at this place.
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And I walked in and I didn't have my mask with me.
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But if you've ever been to the restaurant, literally the tables are eight feet at the most from the door.
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It's not as if you walk through a large foyer.
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You walk in the door, the tables are right there.
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And so I walk in.
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I've got my brother with me.
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And the guy asked me, would you like a table or booth? We'd like a table, please.
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And so he says, well, walk this way.
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We start walking the table where another guy comes out and he walks very quickly to us.
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Do you have masks? Do you have masks? And we didn't.
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I honestly, I did not have my mask at the time.
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I normally keep a mask in my pocket just in case.
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I don't like to necessarily try to start trouble or anything, but I'm not going to wear it unless I absolutely have to.
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But I go in and do you have your mask? Do you have your mask? And I just immediately sat down and I said, I'm already here.
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I'm already seated.
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No, I don't have a mask and I'm already down.
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And I knew that in general, what you do when you walk in with the mask on, you wear the mask, the eight feet it takes to get to the table and you sit down and it's like once you're seated, then the virus knows it can't get you.
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Once you're seated, the virus knows it can't come near you.
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And some places have gone absolutely nuts.
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In some states, you have to wear the mask until the food comes.
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You have to sit there masked up until you have the food on the table.
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And others have even gone to the point of saying you have to take the mask off in between bites.
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And so it seems to me very obvious that we are not thinking about this scientifically.
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We are not thinking about this rationally.
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We are not thinking about this biblically.
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We're thinking about this emotionally.
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And those in power are thinking about how they can squeeze every ounce of control out of this pandemic that, yes, has taken many lives, but they're using this as an opportunity to...it's almost like Animal Farm.
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If you've ever read George Orwell's book Animal Farm, every time the pigs, Comrade Napoleon was the main pig in charge, and every time they wanted to increase the power of the pigs and every time they wanted to increase the status or benefit to the pigs, rules would change.
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And at one point, it was the rules, if I remember the book correctly, I've been through it several times, our children have listened to the audio book.
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I love this book, Animal Farm.
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And if I remember correctly, one of the rules was you're not allowed to eat with human beings.
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And then at the very end, the animals look in and they see the pigs eating with the human beings.
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And the rules, again, the rules have changed.
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Why? Because the people in power, the pigs who were the ones in power in Animal Farm, and again, it's all an allegory.
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The pigs have the authority and they can make the rules, they can change the rules.
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And you think about all of the ways that leaders around our country have been changing the to make things more difficult on the people, but they're not living by their own rules.
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We can only have a few people in our home for holidays, but yet they're able to have giant organized parties and giant organized events with many people there.
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One of my favorite pastors, Brian Borgman, I've had him on the show.
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Brian posted a story on his website that he had his three grandchildren with him and his wife and they had to go to four different restaurants before they could find a place where all of them could eat together because they could only eat, they can only seat four people, even though all of them were in the car together before coming into the restaurant.
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And even though they all obviously had been in close proximity to one another, they couldn't sit at the same table.
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You couldn't have more than four people at the table.
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Now, this is out in Nevada.
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That's where Brian's a pastor at Grace Community Church in Mendon, Nevada.
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And so this is out in Nevada and he said he had to go to four different restaurants before he could find a place where they could all sit together, all five of them, two adults, three children.
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So I've kind of gone off the topic, but to bring everything back.
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Yes, the COVID situation has created a lot of controversy, a lot of concern, and a lot of disagreements, even among believers.
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Should we or should we not be wearing masks? Should we or should we not be gathering in large groups? Should we or should we not be social distancing? And the argument is, well, the science tells us for certain that we should do these things.
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But that's not true.
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That's not true.
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The science does not prove these things.
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And the question often is, who is doing the science? Who is doing the studies? And what are the studies really saying? And this leads all the way back to the issue of the vaccine.
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This vaccine has come out very quickly.
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The vaccine is not going to be readily accepted by many people because the rigorous and needful safety studies have not had the time to be done properly.
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And many people do not feel comfortable having something put in their body that could be dangerous.
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There's already been some evidence that there have been some links to some very serious side effects.
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And we're talking about a disease that for many people, the vast majority of healthy people, and by vast majority, we're talking about in the 99% of healthy people, even if they got the virus, they would survive.
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And yet there is a demand for this vaccine.
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And there's a demand, and I do believe it's going to become a demand that is going to make it very difficult not to have the vaccine.
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I think one of the ways that the powers that be are going to exercise their power is to that the vaccine be taken if you want to fly on an airplane, or if you want to visit a hospital, or if you know, visit someone in a hospital or in a nursing home, or if you want to transact some form of business that's going to require you going into some federal building or some bank or something, I'm almost certain that it's going to be a demand and there's going to be pushback and there's going to be, in my opinion, there's going to be some issues.
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And bringing this all back to what started this conversation, this interaction between Wu and Quan, where Quan compares the vaccine with essentially being a metaphor of living between the advents and then Wu coming along and saying, like the first advent, too many people will reject the vaccine as they reject the good news and Jesus at the first Christmas.
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Well, let me say this to Dr.
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Wu, he has a PhD, so he is a doctorate, or he has a doctorate, so he is a doctor.
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I would say this to Dr.
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Wu, my rejection or anyone's rejection of a quickly produced, potentially dangerous, and for the most part, in many people, unnecessary vaccine is in no way to be analogized to the rejection of Jesus Christ and the rejection of the gospel.
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And to compare the two is an absolute shame.
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I do not know if you are a brother in Christ, Dr.
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Wu.
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I don't know if you're in the ministry.
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I didn't find anything about you as I was sitting here talking, I was Googling, I didn't see much about you online, and maybe it's just because I didn't do a thorough enough search.
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But let me just say this, as a fellow human being, a fellow image bearer of God, this is shameful.
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This is absolutely shameful to compare the advent, the arrival of the Lord of glory, the one who was and is and is to come, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, the one of whom carries the name that at the name of which every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that he is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
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To compare him to the COVID vaccine is a shame, and such thinking is not only juvenile, such thinking is not only repugnant, such thinking is in every way shameful.
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And I would say shame on you, sir, for even making such an awful comparison, because there is no excuse for that type of thinking.
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All right, so that has been today's program.
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As you can tell, I get a little emotional about this because to compare my Lord and Savior with this vaccine is unacceptable, and I hope you understand.
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All right, thank you again for listening to today's program.
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As I said earlier in the program, I'm looking forward to next week.
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We're going to have a lot of fun.
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We'll step away from some of the serious things, deal with some things that are a little bit more fun, but hopefully we'll still be encouraging and uplifting for you.
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And I hope today's program has been challenging and uplifting as well.
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Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey, and I've been your Calvinist.
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Thank you for listening to today's episode of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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If you enjoyed the program, please take a moment to subscribe and provide us feedback.
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We love to receive your comments and questions and may even engage with them in a future episode.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through Him.
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May God be with you.