Finishing Off Deedat's Horrible Arguments, Paul Williams and Non-Christian “Christian

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White, the great master controller, person behind everything, holding the puppet strings, because I'm just a marionette.

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We're going to hear about marionettes. I'm not sure if we're going to get far enough to hear about marionettes today, but we'll see. We could do this as a

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Radio Free Geneva if I didn't do this first part, finishing up the Crucifixion or Crucifixion stuff, because over the weekend,

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I got to listen to the Austin Fisher, Brian Zond. They were the synergists in the quote unquote

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Calvinism debate that took place, I don't know what, 10 days ago, something like that. I forget what the date was. And I don't think too many of you who watch the program are going to be overly shocked that I would like to have the opportunity of commenting a little bit on what took place.

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It was interesting. It was interesting. And there are other things going on in the world too, to address, breaking news about another beheading by ISIS, and all that kind of wonderful fun stuff.

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So, lots of stuff to get to, but we have promised and we must deliver on the promise to finish what has become known as the

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Frankenstein list. He's alive! I'm going to get repetitive here, but for those of you who maybe missed the last couple of programs, or you're in a time warp or something,

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I don't know. We have been looking at the presentation by Akhmed Didat called

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Crucifixion, as the normal spelling, and Crucifixion, F -I -C -T -I -O -N, a presentation he gave many, many times.

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And it is my understanding it was the last presentation he ever gave, not this one, not this particular recording of it, but that he gave this presentation on one evening and that night had a stroke and never spoke again.

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That's my understanding, that this was the topic that he had addressed that particular evening.

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And so, what we did is we listened to some of the stuff in the beginning, we eventually got to this list of 30 reasons from the

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Bible, allegedly, why the Bible teaches there is no crucifixion.

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Now, it would be just as ridiculous for me to come up with a list of 30 reasons from the

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Quran why Muhammad is not a prophet. It is the clear intention of the author of the

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Quran to present Muhammad as a prophet. There are entire sections on the subject, the whole argument, for example, in Surah 5 about the

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Torah is given to Moses and the Injil is given to Jesus, and now the Quran has been given to Muhammad, and there is this chain and prophetic authority.

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No honest, meaningful person could look at the

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Quran and say, I don't know, I think maybe it's actually saying that Muhammad was not a prophet.

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It couldn't do that, and we have seen that what Ahmed Deedat has to do is completely ignore, utterly ignore, the actual stated intentions of the authors themselves.

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To create this wild scheme, and so you've got

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Mary taking spices to massage the body of Jesus based upon, not the

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Greek word that is actually in all the Gospels, but an assumed Aramaic or Hebrew original, and all the rest of this stuff, and then not even taking it in its normal meaning, and just manipulating things on a level that's pretty amazing to observe.

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And so we were working through these. I'm not sure what number we're on, but we don't have many to go.

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And so we're going to finish them up, and then there's one audience question I want to play, and then we'll be done with that. So that's what we're going

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We're going to make a comment on something that, again, just comes in right before the program starts, that goes, oh, interesting, and we might look at that, and then we'll get into, especially, you know,

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Austin Fisher, okay, we'll listen to what Austin Fisher has to say, but man, his partner,

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Brian Zond, whoa, a modern day

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Martianite, had no idea that the Martianites were still around, but they are.

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And so Austin teamed up with a modern day Martianite, who simply could not,

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I mean, these guys, all of them, were just doing the real we are friendly, cool dudes thing.

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I mean, if you look at the video, you know, they're all in their open collared shirts, you know, and they're sitting on bar stools, and they're, you know, just doing the, we're just having ourselves a friendly convo type thing, you know.

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And Zond doesn't even, Zond was the best dressed of them all, he had a jacket on, that was nice.

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Evidently ties are just utterly irrelevant in public speaking situations today.

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I am now, amazingly enough, the renegade. I am the one breaking the standards, because, well, obviously sitting here

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I'm not, but I mean, I suppose I could close my collar or something. But, you know, if you wear a tie while handling the things of God in preaching or teaching, you're a freak anymore.

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But anyhow, or you're an odd fundamentalist, I suppose that's maybe why they're getting away from it.

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But Brian Zond just detests Reformed theology.

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I mean, it just oozes out of his pores. You know, the marionettes and your

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God, and I mean, he was, you know, the Calvinists were trying to be chummy chummy and stuff, and I'm sorry

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I don't think he can be chummy chummy in this situation. Zond was the most honest of everybody in the group, and he was, he's the least orthodox of anybody in the group too.

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So, we'll take a look at that, we'll get to that. But first, we need to find out that he's alive!

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And we all, of course, we all know that Jesus is alive, but the point is that the text, he is not here.

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He is alive. He has risen from the dead. That's what all the

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Gospels, that's what all of them were communicating. None of them were communicating the idea that he has swooned and recovered without assistance of medical.

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It's being put into a cold, dark place that will make you better. It's just amazing that people actually believe this stuff, but they do, but they do, and that's why we have to deal with it.

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So, let's see what number we are on here. Number 17. We are on number 17.

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Thank you. It almost looked like I planned that, but I didn't.

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I actually did not. I just knew where to start. So, gotta love, gotta love

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Audio Notetaker. Best program out there for doing what I do, which is sort of weird anyways, so I'm not sure that Audio Notetaker is happy about that, but let's go.

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Report on the whining sheets. German scientists who carried out experiments on the shroud of Turin said that the heart of Jesus had not stopped functioning, that he was alive.

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Okay, now, and I owe someone, and if you watch this you know who you are, and I'm sorry,

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I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I owe someone an email. I owe a lot of people emails. I mentioned on Facebook this weekend, what

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I tried to do to catch up on emails was, I was just getting so depressed at how big my inbox was, it just kept getting bigger, that I created a subfolder called

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Answering. Well, it's not a subfolder, my inbox was another folder called Answering. I went through and I put everything that needed to be answered, because it's funny, you leave stuff in your inbox long enough, some of it becomes irrelevant.

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That is one way of doing it, but I put all this stuff into the Answering thing, and I'm like, okay, there, now, as soon as something needs to be answered,

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I just put it over there and I'll focus on that. It did not help, in fact, it hurt, because now it's not in the inbox anymore, so you don't really see it.

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So I gave up on that over the weekend and dragged everything back in the inbox, and so it's big and huge again. But I know that there are people that I owe emails to, and there's one who has asked me specifically about the

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Shroud of Turin. Here you have Achmed Didat assuming that we all think the Shroud of Turin is authentic.

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I don't know what the Shroud of Turin is, but you've never heard me using the Shroud of Turin as an apologetic argument.

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Certainly, the scriptures never refer us to the Shroud of Turin or anything like that. It seems to me that the rolling of the bedclothes would preclude the

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Shroud of Turin, but all of that aside, all of that aside, it amazes me beyond all possible commentary that you would point to the

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Shroud of Turin and say, that guy was alive. How on earth is somebody supposed to say, hey look, there's this supernatural imprint on this old piece of parchment, but that guy was still alive.

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Really? I mean, there is no natural explanation for,

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I mean, if this was the actual burial cloth of Jesus, then the idea that there is a natural explanation for how that image got on there is automatically moved out of the realm of possibility.

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And so, what then would create that image other than some type of supernatural event?

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But if Jesus just swooned, there's no supernatural event anyways. I'm left stuttering.

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But see, I get it. See, the guys that made the movie about finding Noah's Ark, and we know that we found

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Noah's Ark, they made a movie about the Shroud of Turin, so it all must be true. They did? Yeah, didn't you know that?

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No, I've seen some documentaries on the Shroud of Turin, but I don't keep up with that kind of stuff. Yeah, see, so Hollywood made a movie, therefore it must be true.

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You know, everything they do is right. I don't know when this was recorded. So, actually, I think it was recorded sometime in the maybe 70s, early 80s.

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No, it was after his debate with Jimmy Swaggart. So, maybe early 90s. I don't know.

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Anyhow, there's number 17. Really? Seriously? Shroud of Turin? And you can somehow tell that someone's heart was still functioning on the basis of that?

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Really? Okay. Number 18, he was ever in disguise. Disguise not necessary if Jesus was resurrected.

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Only necessary if he was alive. John chapter 21 verse 4. John chapter 21 verse 4, huh?

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Well, let's pop on over there real quick and read about disguises.

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But when the day was now breaking, Jesus stood on the beach, yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Oh, I'm looking for the word disguised here.

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There never was any. No, no, there's no disguise anywhere. First of all, they don't even recognize by the voice, which means he's probably a long ways away.

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They are deep enough in the water they can cast for fish, which means they're a long ways away. The son could have been behind Jesus.

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There's all sorts of reasons why they didn't know that it was him. The idea he was wearing a disguise is absurd.

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Elsewhere, D -Dot argues that in the road to Emmaus incident in Luke 24, that Jesus is somehow wearing a disguise when it actually says their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

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It's a supernatural action. It's very clear in the text. So he will argue that because, well,

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Mary didn't recognize him, so he was in a disguise. No, they weren't expecting this. The resurrection in Jewish thought is at the end of time.

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Jesus being the first fruit is a shock to them. It's not supposed to happen now.

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It's supposed to happen then. That's why they're talking about seeing a spirit or things like that, because he had died and had now had risen and now was alive.

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That is the universal testimony of each one of the of the Gospels. Point refuted.

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When you click on another program, you got to do that. Number 19, he forbade Mary Magdalene to touch him.

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Touch me not. For this reason that it would hurt, because he was alive. John chapter 21, 17.

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Because it would hurt.

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That's why Jesus actually said when you read the verse, touch me not for I have not yet ascended to my father, which

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I think we played the section where he said that was common Jewish idiom for I'm alive.

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Now he says because it would hurt. No, that's that's not what Jesus said.

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And there is no common Jewish idiom that says I have not ascended. The father means

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I'm alive. Show me one. Show me a single example anywhere. Anywhere. But that is a common,

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I guess one example doesn't make a common, would it? Proved that's a common Jewish idiom for I'm alive.

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I'd like to I'd like to see that. I'd like to see that. I don't think he could even begin to provide something like that.

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Number 20, not yet ascended unto my father. In the language of the Jew, in the idiom of the Jew, he was saying

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I am not dead yet. In other words, I am alive. John chapter 21, 17.

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Already refuted, we move on. Number 21, Mary Magdalene not afraid on recognizing Jesus because she had seen signs of life before.

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She was looking for a Jesus who was alive. John chapter 21, 16. Well, that wouldn't make any sense at all.

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Because if his theory is true, then she'd be expecting a Jesus who is unable to move and needs to be massaged.

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Not one who is alive and standing there talking to her. That doesn't make any sense either.

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And we've already seen that the previous thing about seeing signs of life is completely bogus. So you take bogus stuff and you put it with more bogus stuff and now you get doubly bogus stuff.

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This is super uber bogus stuff. I mean, it's just wow.

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Number 22, his disciples petrified on seeing Jesus in the upper room. All their knowledge about the crucifixion was from hearsay.

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Therefore, they could not believe that Jesus was alive. Was all from hearsay.

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Now remember, one of the one of the common, not common, one of the major mistakes that D -Dot makes is he takes one statement that says they all fled and then ignores everything else about John and Peter.

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That stuff just disappears. It's irrelevant. He takes that one verse, ignores what the author then says afterwards about John being at the foot of the cross,

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Peter being in the in the outer precincts during the trial and the denials.

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That stuff just goes out the door. And what you do is you say they all left and so none of them were eyewitnesses.

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None of them actually saw the crucifixion. It was all secondhand. And now their knowledge of the resurrection is all secondhand as well because he was alive.

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And so you just, again, you just ignore the intention of the author, ignore what he's actually said, and then twist the meaning and claim, ah, see, that's what the

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Bible actually teaches. You know, D -Dot, I don't know if someone did. Maybe Brother Gilchrist did.

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But it would be a project. It would be sort of sort of boring to do over time.

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But someone back then, I wonder if they took one, a couple of D -Dot's most famous writings, and then just went through and made a mishmash out of them.

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Just completely ignore what he was saying, took a phrase here, took a phrase there, turned it upside down. That would have been a rather effective way of illustrating exactly what

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D -Dot is doing here. Because that's how he's treating the text in the New Testament. It's just, if we did this with the text of the

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Quran, they would rightly howl from the rooftops. Or if you're with ISIS, you wouldn't howl from the rooftops.

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You'd just cut people's heads off. But that's, that's what he's doing. Number 23, at food again and again in his post -crucifixion appearances.

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Or if he died, was resurrected, and has a physical body and is demonstrating to his disciples that it is a physical body and capable of a life here upon this earth.

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Not that he's dependent upon that, but that it is truly a physical resurrection.

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Remember, D -Dot has this strange, odd conviction that to be resurrected is to be a spirit.

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And he ignored, he, well, ignores 1 Corinthians chapter 15. No, he twists 1

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Corinthians chapter 15. Just as has happened in a couple of my debates, people following after D -Dot do not follow 1

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Corinthians 15 very well. And the result is that they twist what is actually being said there and do not understand the background of the

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Jewish understanding of resurrection and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And so he has that error that helps him to compound the other errors he's making.

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Number 24, never showed himself to his enemies because he had escaped death by the skin of his teeth.

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He was alive. Never showed himself to his enemies because he had escaped death by the skin of his teeth.

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What does that have to do with the historical reality that in the resurrection, Christ revealed himself to more than 500 witnesses alive at one point, many of whom were alive to that day.

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And we have the continuing witnesses in the early church. Are you, are you stating that he was under some compulsion to show himself to his enemies to, you know, pop into the middle of the

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Sanhedrin or something like that? You know, interesting thing is, you might say, well, it certainly would have helped convert them.

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You know, the funny thing is, Jesus had told a story even during his life, during his ministry.

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And what did he say? He said, even if someone were to rise from the dead, these people would not believe.

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They have Moses and the scriptures, let them hear them. So God has a purpose for who

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Jesus appears to and why he appears to them. And, you know, God could have started the church in a much more spectacular way in the sense of the initial proclamation of the resurrection by, you know, doing some spectacular cosmic thing where, you know,

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Jesus goes up in the air and circles Jerusalem and goes and visits Rome and, you know, supernaturally transports some of the, you know, take two disciples to Rome, I appear in the heavens,

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I glow, and now listen to these disciples, and then head over to, you know, some major city in Gaul or something, and maybe over to China or something, you know, and just divide all the disciples up.

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And, you know, if numbers, if you want to do it that way,

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God could do anything he wants to, I suppose. But that's not how God chose to do it. He has chosen to save his elect people through the foolishness of preaching, not through cosmic, spectacular, miraculous events.

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And you go, well, I don't like that. Well, okay, you don't like that. Doesn't change the reality.

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Number 25 took only short trips because he was not resurrected, not spiritualized, but alive.

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He went to Emmaus. He went to the upper room. Back again after eight days, he only took short trips because he was not resurrected.

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Otherwise, he would have gone up to heaven. No sense in going and coming back up and down, up and down, not from heaven to down and up above. He's going around in and around Jerusalem all the time.

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I have no idea what to say to that. It's not an argument. Short trips means he was alive.

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I don't, you know, when an argument has absolutely no evidentiary weight, when it's just the expulsion of air through the mouth and the nasal cavities.

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I mean, that is the full weight of that argument is that when

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I state the argument, I move air over my vocal cords. That's about the depth of that one.

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I mean, it's really hard to even respect it. If he had been resurrected, he would have gone to heaven.

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He did. Eventually, why does it have to be immediate? I mean, the assumptions, unfounded assumptions, now piling upon more unfounded assumptions, upon more.

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Eventually, you just go, really? Number 26, testimony of men around the tomb. They say, why seek ye the living among the dead?

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Why are you looking for a live person among dead people in the cemetery? Luke chapter 24, verse 4 and 5, that he is not dead, but alive.

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Why seek ye the living among the dead? Now again, Luke chapter 24 has so much in it on this subject.

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But why do you seek the living one among the dead is what Luke 24, 5 says.

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What's the next verse say? Oh, Ahmed boy, he is not here, but he has what?

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He has risen. Luke 24, 6. The Greek term for rise there is a gyro, which is a common term.

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I suppose, again, there is an amazing facility of the human mind to believe whatever you want to believe.

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I suppose you could say, well, yes, he got up and he left. But it goes on to say, remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee, saying, the

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Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified. And the third day, rise again.

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Rise again. I didn't even give you that. You just went and grabbed at him. I guess that's because I had it on the right screen.

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If I had had it over on the other screen, you wouldn't see that. Anyway, it's just absolutely amazing.

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Rise again, third day, crucified, plain meaning of the words. And yet, Ahmed did that. He was alive.

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Number 27, testimony of the angels. The angels say, the angels who had said that he was alive, that he live, that he live, that he's alive.

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What's wrong with people? What are you reading? The angels, what did they say? That he's resurrected.

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No. They said, that he live, he's alive. They said, no, he's not alive. He's dead.

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He did not say resurrected, but the actual word uttered by the angels was alive. Luke chapter 24, verse 23.

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28, Mary. Now, hold on a second. Hold on a second. The actual words of the angels was risen.

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You know, right there. I can blow it up if we need to see it. He has risen.

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What are you reading? Is the question. Could this just be the power of tradition?

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No, no, sorry. This twisting, this is just, it's too purposeful, too clear.

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This is purposeful deception. This is dishonesty. 28, Mary Magdalene testifies.

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They heard that he was alive and had been seen by her. They believe not. Mark 16, 11. Mary did not watch for a spook or a ghost or spirit of Jesus, but alive

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Jesus. What they could not believe was that the master was alive. Mark 16, 11.

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And the reason they couldn't believe that is because they had seen him die. And henceforth, the resurrection is at the end of the age and Jesus is the first fruits of those who slept.

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So, very simple. Number 29, Dr. Primrose, a senior anesthetist at the

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Royal Glasgow Infirmary, he says that the water in the blood was an account of scourging by stage and upset of the nervous vessels, that which was a sure sign that Jesus was alive.

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Already addressed that, has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the ancient texts, pure speculation, and goes against all the documentary evidence we have.

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Number 30, by the way, goes on for a long, long time, and it's the sign of Jonah. And he really loves to do the sign of Jonah.

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And I've seen Shadid Lewis do this and other people do the sign of Jonah thing. First of all, you know, he goes into the days, and I already mentioned on a previous program, any part of a day counts as a full day, that Paraskeway means

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Friday, it also means preparation, preparation day before the Sabbath, Fridays before the Sabbath. So, the very name in Greek for Friday is what's used in the text,

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Jesus is crucified on Paraskeway. This is very, very clear in all the Gospels. Even though people ignore this because they translate

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Paraskeway as preparation day. And so, he goes through the three days, three nights thing, he gets all literal, tries to get all literal on that.

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And then says, and the issue here is that Jonah was alive in the belly of the fish.

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So, Jesus was alive in the earth, and that that's supposed to be the parallel, which

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Jesus himself said was not the parallel. The sign of Jonah would be only what could be seen by people outside.

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And that was this going into the earth, going into the belly of the whale, and then coming forth there from.

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There was no parallel provided by Jesus about resurrection or anything else like that. He always ties this to his crucifixion, and then to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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So, there's the 30 arguments that that Didot provides, and as we see, they fall apart.

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Then at the end of this lecture, I had the opportunity of asking questions. And I found this to be a particularly enlightening question.

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Didot did not do well with questions. I could tell he didn't like them. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of audience questions because most of the time they detract from the debate because they're on other issues.

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It's almost like it really bugs me when I post something on Facebook. And, you know, the fourth comment will be, oh, nice picture.

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Hey, by the way, Dr. White, what do you think about? And then off into the ozone layer someplace.

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Like, this is my one chance. I'm going to get him now. He's going to have to answer my questions now. It's like, oh, just x, delete, gone.

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I was asking today, is there any way to post things on Facebook where people can't write comments? And evidently there isn't.

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So, I just turned notifications off on one thing because I posted something, a video this morning, and immediately everybody was off to the races with some type of end times, covenantal, dispensational stuff.

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And I'm just sort of like, okay, whatever. Turn notifications off. Ignore. Not going to ever see that again.

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So, this is a lady. This is a lady who asks him a question and nails him with three texts.

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And he just ignores to him because he doesn't really have an answer for them. And then laughs off the third in a grossly inconsistent way for a

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Muslim. Let's hear what happens. Thank you. The lady, please, into the microphone.

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Mr. Dida, actually, there's quite a few things that you have made tonight in twisting the word of God, saying things of the word of God.

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You made a whole mockery of the word of God in Christianity, which we as Christians wouldn't do of Islam and the

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Holy Quran. And that breaks my heart tonight. But what I would like to do is to just read three verses of the word of God.

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You've really been studying the word of God. I'd like to know what you have to say on these, just these three verses, which

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I've jotted down amongst many others, but time is not the Philippians chapter two, verse eight, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

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And then in John chapter 11, verse 25, we read, Jesus said unto her, this was to Martha, but the raising of Lazarus, Lazarus, I am the resurrection and the life.

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He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And also in revelation, the last book in the

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Bible, chapter one, verse 18, we read, Jesus said, I am he that liveth and was dead and behold,

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I am alive forevermore. Thank you very much. The only verse which has any connection with the subject of this evening's discussion was the last verse quoted from the book of Revelation, where Jesus is supposed to be telling to John in a dream, in a vision.

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Okay. I'm going to stop. What do you mean the others are irrelevant? You just sort of get to go, nah,

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I don't think they're irrelevant. Actually, they're very relevant, especially the Philippians one, because the

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Carmen Christi is some, it goes back to some of the very earliest tradition in the New Testament. And it is plain beyond question that this is founded on the whole idea of the death of Jesus Christ.

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That this is not something that came along later on. And that it's pre -Pauline. It's extremely irrelevant. He just ignores it, just beep.

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And now he's turned Revelation into a dream. It's not a dream. It's a vision.

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You're awake when you have a vision, not when you have a dream. And if he's going to, and what he's going to do now is he's going to say, well, dream, you know, you could have a pepperoni pizza and it comes out.

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How on earth does a Muslim who believes that the final prophet encountered

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Jabril and had a vision of Jabril and that everywhere he looked on the horizon,

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Jabril was so great that, that, that he sees him everywhere. And this is a man who believes in the mirage, in, in Muhammad riding a winged donkey to heaven, well, to Jerusalem and then to heaven.

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And you're going to just go, well, you know, we really, you know, that's book of Revelation, you know, it could be anything, you know, it's just, it's just a dream.

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That I was dead and now I live forevermore. That's the only place in the whole

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Bible where Jesus uttered such a word. During his post -crucifixion appearances, as recorded in the gospels, he never used the word that I had died and I have come back from the dead.

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And this is as bad as saying, Jesus never said, I am God, worship me. As if, as if those are the only words that would communicate these things.

34:14

Every single author, as we have seen, very clearly states the death of Jesus Christ.

34:22

Not even a question, no honest person could ever read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John come to any other conclusion.

34:29

It's just as plain as the nose on your face. But unless you write it out in these words, then

34:37

I'm allowed to, really? Again, if we were to treat the

34:43

Quran in this way, there'd be howls of complaint, but it's only a one -way street.

34:59

About the beast, you know, and the beast has eyes. How many eyes are outside? It has eyes inside and eyes outside.

35:05

It has seven horns. Look, this is something, you know, look, it is not historical. It is not factual.

35:11

An imagination of man. And we all, it happens to me sometimes when I eat too much, then you have these dreams.

35:16

It's indigestible thing. Too much meat and you go to sleep and then you dream you have nightmares.

35:22

So this is like a man who is dreaming. But I still claim, make bold to say that Jesus Christ, while He walked this earth,

35:28

He never used the word at any time telling anybody anywhere that I was dead and now I've come back from the dead.

35:34

He's proving to the contrary that I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm the same fellow, eating food, have the need of food and shelter and hiding from the

35:41

Jews, afraid of the Jews, simply because He didn't die and He didn't conquer death. Because if He had died and if He had conquered death, there would have been no need for Him to be afraid anymore.

35:50

Because the resurrected bodies can't die twice. Who says so? The Bible. It says it is ordained unto all men once to die and after that the judgment.

35:59

But because He didn't die, He had every reason to be afraid and terrified, every reason for a disguise. That's the only connection that your quotation had with the subject of this evening's talk, madame.

36:08

Next question, please. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, again, D -Dot is lying.

36:14

He's lying through his teeth. And he did a lot. Luke 24, 45.

36:21

After, well, Luke 24, 44. After saying, these are my words which

36:27

I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the

36:33

Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. And he said to them, thus it is written that the

36:41

Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day.

36:48

There it is. Rose from the dead the third day. How much clearer can that be?

36:55

Well, Jesus never said that. He never said that. Well, what does rising from the dead mean? Plain, obvious, clear, no question.

37:06

And it's sad, very, very, very sad that Ahmad D -Dot did these things.

37:13

But that's, you know. So as I said from the beginning, this presentation, unfortunately, has been viewed by hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people.

37:26

And as you speak to especially Muslims from another country, there is a large possibility that even if they themselves have not seen

37:40

D -Dot, they have been taught by people who did. And so you will encounter these kinds of arguments all the time.

37:49

And hopefully, having gone through them, you will at least, one of the problems is some of the arguments are so bad that a

37:56

Christian encountering them is left going, how do I respond to that? Because it's just it's just so bad.

38:03

But that's not a response. I mean, we have to be able to respond to even really, really, really bad arguments.

38:10

And D -Dot certainly, certainly did that. All right.

38:16

Shifting gears here. I suppose, yeah, before I get to this, there was something that was sent to me right before the program started, and I wanted to just make a brief comment on it.

38:35

Paul Williams, the apostate convert to Islam, then not a

38:43

Muslim anymore, and then now a Muslim again, and yet who knows what, where, or why, or whatever. Paul Williams, secret life, public life, that guy over there in England, in the

38:55

United Kingdom, sorry, posted on August 14th, a beautiful and honest testimony from a

39:05

Christian minister. And it's a guy named

39:12

Mark Sandlin, and the title is,

39:17

Jesus is not my God. And it starts off,

39:23

I'm a believer, mostly. I believe there is probably a small g

39:28

God, something bigger than us. I have a very hard time believing that there's not something larger than humanity.

39:34

I mean, seriously, we are the best the universe has to offer, at least as far as we know. That seems a bit egotistical to me, not to mention a bit unfortunate for the universe.

39:42

Ultimately, I don't buy it. I also believe there might not be a God, or at the very least, I frequently feel the absence of God.

39:51

And then he goes on from there to say that, and God, there's all sorts of small g gods through here, and says later on,

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I'm a Christian because Jesus, for me, is the teacher who best helps me understand this God thing. When he worshipped, he worshipped that same

40:10

God. He did not worship himself. Jesus never called himself God. Now, why do

40:20

I even mention this? Because most of us just sit back and we roll our eyes and go, you've got to be kidding me. I don't know why,

40:30

I do understand why ethnic Muslims do not recognize the gross inconsistency that they live in when they do this kind of thing.

40:45

I've told the story before of driving to a debate I was going to do a number of years ago in Southern California, it was 2008.

40:54

And there were two Muslims, three Muslims in the car. And we were talking, and one of them talked about how the

41:03

United States is a Christian nation. So that when I had mentioned what one of my other opponents had said, that Christianity invaded

41:13

Iraq. And I'm like, what? And so we got back on that subject.

41:20

And I said, honestly, do you know this? We're on a busy Southern California freeway.

41:26

What percentage of the people driving by us in these vehicles do you think actually worship

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Jesus Christ? Think about him more than once a day, pray, and make decisions in their life based upon asking the honest question, what would

41:47

Christ have me to do in this situation? What percentage? And he didn't know.

41:53

And I said, I would be shocked if it was as high as 10%.

42:00

I'd say 90 % of the people driving past us never, never give

42:07

Christ a second thought. How can you call them Christians? Now this particular individual was not an overly reflective

42:16

Muslim. But when you raise the idea that you're born into a religion based upon what nation you're in, okay,

42:25

I get that. Paul Williams should know better. Paul Williams should know better.

42:32

He wasn't raised in Afghanistan. And he should recognize, you know, he says up the top, he says, if I was a

42:46

Christian, I would join this guy's church. Exactly, Paul. Because he's an apostate and so are you. That's exactly why you would.

42:52

No question about it. We all know that this man is not a

42:58

Christian. Mark Sandlin is not a Christian. He's lying when he says that he is. And it's so easy to look at a

43:06

Muslim and say, excuse me, but I don't believe that Muhammad was a prophet from God.

43:14

Am I a Muslim? Well, of course not. Why am I not a Muslim? Because you don't believe what defines being a

43:21

Muslim, which is that Muhammad was a prophet from God. Oh, so you can deny the central teaching of Christianity and be a

43:31

Christian. But if you deny the central teaching of Islam, definitional teaching, then you're not a

43:37

Muslim. You don't see a problem there. And I've had a lot of Muslims go, well, okay, yeah,

43:43

I guess I do. Oh, okay. Now, Paul Williams knows this man's not a

43:49

Christian. So, this is not a beautiful and honest testimony from a

43:55

Christian minister. This is a bunch of babble from an apostate.

44:01

But when you yourself are an apostate, then it sounds pretty cool,

44:06

I guess. Amazing. Absolutely, positively amazing.

44:18

This can't be possible. I'd have to check this out.

44:26

But under the about Mark Sandlin, it says he's an ordained PCA minister. That's not possible. I'm sorry,

44:31

I'm sorry. Not PCA, PCUSA. It's typed out strangely.

44:37

That makes sense. You could be a, yeah, Pucasa could produce something like this. Yeah, sure.

44:42

Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. And he posts on the Huffington Post.

44:47

What do you expect? What do you expect? I was going to say, you know, most of those people driving by you that day,

44:53

I bet you they use his name a lot. Yeah. So, probably in the particular person you were talking to, his mindset, that makes him

44:59

Christian, right? Right, right. There was a debate on Calvinism recently.

45:07

What was the day on that? Somebody who has more time than I do in channel, give me the date on when that took place.

45:15

It was hashtag Calvinism debate in Twitter. It was within two weeks.

45:20

It was very, very recent. But someone give me the date when that happened.

45:28

I had never, I will be honest with you, had never heard of Brian Zond before.

45:35

And so, I had thrown, you know, someone on Twitter had put the link up to it and said, would love to hear your comments about this.

45:46

I thought, well, someone's taking the time to get me the links. So, I've got the software to just, you know, if it's on YouTube, I use a program called

45:56

Airy to just pull it down, convert directly to MP3, put it in audio book format so I can speed it up and do it on the iPod.

46:05

And it's dried out a little bit here in the desert, which means it's hotter.

46:12

109, I think tomorrow, 107 today or something, but it's dry again.

46:18

And so, August 27th, as someone's saying, is when that was.

46:23

That was very recently then. So, I threw it on the iPod and I headed out on an almost 76 miler.

46:32

So, I had to start really early because when it's this hot, you get fried pretty quick once the sun came up.

46:39

So, I'm riding along in the pitch dark, listening to this particular debate.

46:47

And I don't know the Reformed guys. They're both Southern grads.

46:53

I know the one because he wrote a response to Bart Ehrman, but I've not heard him speak before and I didn't know the other.

47:01

And then you had Austin Fisher and Austin Fisher and I did that program on Unbelievable earlier this year.

47:11

And so, it was interesting to note a couple things. First of all, Austin Fisher is significantly harder in his position now than he was, well, than he was when we talked on Unbelievable.

47:26

I mean, he was in the, well, you know, I don't have a problem with this stage or I don't have a problem with that, sort of very ishy, squishy, non -committal on stuff.

47:35

He was in a different mood for this debate and we'll take some time to listen to what he had to say.

47:44

And who knows? Maybe, you know, because he threw out the standard, you know, 2

47:50

Peter 3 .9, 1 Timothy 2 .4, Matthew 23 .37 stuff. He says he's read my book.

47:57

So, I guess it would be fair game to say, okay, I'm waiting for that counter -exegesis. Let's see what you got.

48:03

And I just got the feeling on Unbelievable that he was really trying to avoid any meaningful biblical debate at that point.

48:12

So, maybe something's changed. I don't know. Maybe he's growing into his role as the great former

48:18

Calvinist. Yeah, I was a teenage Calvinist. That should have been the title of the book instead of what it was,

48:27

Young, Restless, and No Longer Reformed. It should be, I was a Teenage Calvinist. You don't get that?

48:34

You know, I was a teenage werewolf. Oh, you didn't get it? I thought it was funny. Come on. You're just looking bored out there.

48:41

Come on. Anyway, but I pretty much expected

48:47

Austin Fisher's opening was pretty much, you know, fairly standard.

48:54

And then, the way they did this, and this is part of the problem, of course, it's less than two hours long.

49:04

And once you take the moderator's introduction and stuff out, you've got, each guy gets eight minutes, and then

49:11

I think it's a four -minute rebuttal, and that's it. There's really no interaction. There's no cross -examination. It's one side, one side, one side.

49:19

And that was the big thing when we tried to set up the debate with the Cantors at Liberty back in 2006.

49:26

We fought tooth and nail to get it up to, I think it was two hours and 40 minutes, just so you could say enough.

49:38

Otherwise, you've just got little soundbites, and you can get soundbites off the web anytime you want them. If you want to know, if you want to hear in eight minutes why somebody doesn't like Calvinism, you don't have to fly someplace and put all the money into putting something like this together.

49:51

It's easy to get that kind of stuff. It's all over the place. Well, so, you know, it's short, and that means you're not really going to get very far.

50:04

You need to go into something like this with a very, very low expectation, because just the time frame, the format is not going to allow either side to hold the other side's feet to the fire by any stretch of the imagination.

50:22

And the topic is so wide. The first topic is basically that absolute predestination is incongruous with the

50:29

Jesus of the Bible. And the second proposition has to do with monergism and synergism. So, you actually have two different topics in less than two hours.

50:43

So, you've got less than an hour to deal with these. You get what you pay for on that level.

50:51

So, the first reformed guy responds to Austin, and then up comes this guy named

50:57

Brian Zahn. And I'm like, wow, where is this guy coming from?

51:07

Because one of the main problems with this, quote unquote, debate was there are fundamental.

51:14

And remember, those of you who've listened to my discussion with Austin, what did

51:19

I say? What was one of the main things I pressed with Austin? I said, I don't think you really have a basis to remain very biblically conservative.

51:28

In fact, the people endorsing your book are not biblical conservatives, and I'm just wondering where you're going to end up.

51:34

I'm still wondering where he's going to end up, because he teamed up with a guy who is a modern -day

51:39

Martianite. He's a modern -day Martianite. Now, you might go, sounds bad the way you're using it, but I don't know what a

51:47

Martianite is. It has nothing to do with Mars. Martian was the favorite guy that the early church liked to write against.

51:58

Why? Because Martian was a Gnostic, and one of the things that Martian was famous for was playing with the text of Scripture and coming up with his own canon, and basically getting rid of the

52:12

Old Testament. The Old Testament was a revelation of an evil god. Well, Zond doesn't say that it was a revelation of an evil god.

52:22

He just doesn't say it wasn't. He just says it wasn't a revelation, period. That's the problem. What worries you say that?

52:32

Under 2013, on brianzond .com, which is a big picture of Brian right there on the front of it,

52:41

August 12th of 2013, so just a little over a year ago, he posted an article called,

52:47

John Piper and Allahu Akbar. He has a clip from Piper. Here, we probably, at the rate time is going, aren't even going to get to play any of this until the next time.

53:00

A friend brought these remarks, John Piper, to my attention and asked me to respond. I've already posted a blog on the topic of God and genocide, but here are a few thoughts.

53:08

I understand the disciples of John Calvin feel obligated to defend their ism at all costs, but my, what a cost it is when it requires impugning the character of God.

53:16

God is revealed in Jesus, not genocide. The perfect image of God is Christ, not Calvin's ism.

53:22

What I see here is the distortion of God to supreme and capricious will, capitalized will, in order to make a certain theological system work, as if the landmark verses of the

53:31

New Testament read, in the beginning was the will and the will was with God and the will was God. Now abide these three, faith, hope, and will, and the greatest of these is will.

53:38

God is will. So on and so forth. But here's the

53:45

Martianite stuff. If your theological system does not allow you to condemn genocide as always morally wrong, please pitch it and embrace the revelation of God found in Jesus Christ.

53:56

Don't begin your theology with Greek philosophical categories. Begin with Jesus. And the moment your theology of God begins to not resemble

54:03

Jesus, retrace your steps until you've found your mistake. Jesus is the doctrine of God. God didn't give us a theological system.

54:10

He gave us Jesus. That sounds wonderful. That sounds wonderful. What does it mean?

54:18

What does it mean? Because here's the problem. And he knows what the problem is. He well knows what the problem is.

54:24

Next paragraph. And don't let the Old Testament work you into a corner. You don't need to defend the

54:31

Old Testament to the extent that you find it necessary to justify genocide. God forbid. We can simply say this.

54:38

The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. Along the way, assumptions were made and they didn't get everything right.

54:49

Keep reading the Bible until you come to Jesus and then center your reading of all scripture in the light of Christ.

54:57

Now, again, that sounds wonderful, but it's the hiss of heresy.

55:04

It's the hiss of heresy. What's he saying? You don't have to worry about that Old Testament stuff where God commands the destruction of people in judgment because God would never do that.

55:16

So, what you got in the Old Testament is not really a revelation from God. It's an inspired story.

55:25

But there are all sorts of mistakes where along the way they thought that this is what God wanted. But once you get to Jesus, you found out that was all wrong.

55:34

Yeah. This sounds great to the ishy, squishy modernist.

55:45

But there's one problem. Not only is it grossly unbiblical, it's utterly indefensible.

55:52

It's utterly indefensible. It's pure subjectivism. You get to pick and choose.

55:58

It's designer Jesusism is what it is. And these people who come up with their designer

56:04

Jesus, it's amazing that Jesus ends up looking a lot like them because they don't have a revelation that they are committed to faithfulness to.

56:16

Instead, you get to pick and choose what in the revelation you want to string together to make your designer Jesus. And so, what this guy is telling us is that you can understand

56:26

Jesus without understanding the entire scriptures that he kept saying over and over and over again at the very speaking of God and that he held men accountable to.

56:37

And he just said it was God speaking. Have you not read what God spoke to you saying?

56:43

And Brian Zahn says, God, God never said that stuff. No, no, no, no. That's just an inspired story, you see, about people stumbling along and they come up with bad assumptions, you see.

56:56

No, Jesus said, have you not read what God spoke to you saying? And so, this is what

57:04

Marcion did. You don't like the Old Testament? Don't like the God of the Old Testament? You get rid of the Old Testament. You cannot understand and Jesus did not ask us to come to him apart from the scriptures.

57:16

He was the fulfillment of the scriptures. He said the scriptures could not be broken. And this man says, come to Jesus.

57:22

Just ignore what Jesus taught you about the Old Testament in the first place. I can understand why he hates

57:27

Reformed theology because the reality is he doesn't have a biblical theology and Reformed theology is just simply biblical theology.

57:35

I understand that. I can understand that. And so, we'll see that. I thought we'd get to more of it today, but it took a little bit longer to get through Achmedita than I thought.

57:45

So, we'll get to Zond and to Fisher and to their comments next time on Friday afternoon.

57:53

Friday afternoon on The Dividing Line is the next time we'll get together. Not Thursday. Not going to be able to do it on Thursday.

58:00

Friday we will be getting together for the next edition of The Dividing Line. Thanks for listening. We'll see you then. God bless.