Wide-Ranging Dividing Line

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is the Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us. Get to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the

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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. And good afternoon. Welcome to the Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon.

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I forgot to look at the temperature, last temperature, but it was 86 at least at one point. It may be even higher than that now.

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I don't know. But I understand some of you are still in the grip of the cold in other places, but not here.

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Let me tell you what. Tomorrow evening at Bethel Grace Baptist Church, 17909

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Carpintero Avenue in Bellflower, California, the reliability of the

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New Testament text, 7 p .m. And on Saturday evening at 6 p .m.,

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conducting debate to the glory of God, which will be the first time I've ever discussed that particular subject as far as a single topic at the same location.

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Look forward to seeing those of you in the Southern California area for those presentations.

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Some of you have seen the reliability of the New Testament text presentation, but I always keep expanding it, and I have to sort of look at how much time

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I've got, how much I can put into it, stuff like that. And now having gotten to go to Dublin and see some stuff at the

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Trinity Library, I've added a few things to the presentation, including a communion that had not been there before.

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So it keeps getting longer. So whenever I do it, I have to sort of look at my time frame and then go through and hide slides and do stuff like that.

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And that's just sort of how it goes. But we will be there this weekend, and I look forward to seeing folks in that area.

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I had said the last time—it wasn't the last time, it was the time before last—anyways,

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I wanted to start providing, just for a few minutes at a time, nothing major, but one of the emails that I had received that I was responding to was from a father whose son is at a community college and has encountered one of those folks.

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And I sort of feel a connection here because my daughter ran into a foul -mouthed, anti -Christian bigot as a professor at Glendale Community College.

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And you can search under Lee Carter on my blog for the open letters

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I wrote. And even though these guys, they can use profanity in class, they can tell young students their parents have lied to them, they can do anything under the name of academic freedom as long as the object is a

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Christian. I mean, we all just know this is happening. As long as the object is a

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Christian, anti -Christian bigotry is perfectly acceptable in our society.

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It can't be directed toward other religious groups, but anti -Christian bigotry, that's perfectly acceptable, that's how it is.

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And it seems that every little community college has its radical atheist that just views it as his or her responsibility and calling in life to destroy the faith of young people.

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And one such individual is constantly directing people to a website.

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And I mentioned before, this is San Diego Canyon College in Orange, California. And this particular teacher directs people to jhuger .com.

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I don't know why it's jhuger .com because the person's identified as a huber, but whatever.

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I'm not really concerned about all that. But there are questions for Bible thumpers.

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Now, I'm not sure what a Bible thumper is, but I wanted to look at some of these questions, provide some responses.

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I'm not going to do the whole thing all at once, none of these are overly challenging nor overly serious, but that's the kind of material that is thrown out there.

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Another good reason why we need to prepare our young people before we send them off to local community college, you might think, well,

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I'm not sending them off to UCLA or something like that. I'm not sending them to Berkeley.

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What do you expect in Berserkly? But the reality is it doesn't matter where you send them.

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In fact, some of the scariest places to send them are places called Christian colleges. The preparation needs to be done long before then.

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I am becoming more and more focused upon the necessity of encouraging Christians to be purposefully cultivating a

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Christian worldview. This should be something that we are passing on to the next generation.

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This is something we must encourage in the regular ministry of the word, in the regular ministry of the church, because the shallowness of naturalistic materialism, it's mind -numbing how shallow it is, and yet because they have the bully pulpit, because they have the bullhorn of public education and things like that, we need to be prepared.

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We need to know how to give an answer, yet with gentleness and respect. So, looking at the

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Bible Thumpers page, it starts off saying, The following are questions

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I have about the Bible and Christianity. I really doubt they're questions, but they are objections disguised as questions, of course.

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I've asked most of them of folks who have written to complain about my site. I have not yet received adequate answers.

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Of course, if you don't want adequate answers, you will never receive adequate answers.

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You get to determine what is adequate. I realize that not all Christians are Bible Thumpers, and not all

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Bible Thumpers believe exactly the same thing. When answering these questions, feel free to skip those which do not apply to you.

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It might be helpful to explain why a certain question does not apply, but it's not required. The KJV Bible as the literal word of God.

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There are no questions in this section, because I don't consider it worthwhile discussing things with people who actually believe that God spoke to Moses in Elizabethan English.

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For the KJV Bible to be the literal word of God, that's exactly what would have to have happened, and that's what literal means, exactly word for word what someone said.

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Well, I certainly understand why you wouldn't want to include a KJV section, but that's not exactly even what the wildest

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King James... I mean, there are some really wild King James folks who actually do go that far, but even the really wild ones are still saying the

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King James was basically inspired between 1604 and 1611, and not that Moses was speaking in English.

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But I'm the last person on the planet to be arguing about that particular one, given

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I wrote an entire book on the subject. The Bible as the word of God. Where in the Bible, if anywhere, does the

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Bible say it is the word of God? Well, many, many, many, many times, obviously when someone asks a rather simplistic question like that,

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I want to know, are they just setting up some type of a trap? Again, a simplistic and non -meaningful trap.

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In other words, I've had people say, well, where does the Bible say it's the word of God? As soon as you go to a certain passage, it talks about its inspiration, or where Jesus says this is

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God speaking, or anything like that. Well, but he's not talking about the 66 books of the Bible. He didn't say 66 books of the

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Bible. And they think they somehow have accomplished something at that point. It is very clear that Jesus recognized the

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Old Testament text, the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, as that which is inspired, that which is

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God speaking. And you just read the 119th Psalm. You read Moses himself recognized he was communicating

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God's word. The 119th Psalm recognizes that that was taking place. You get to this, and of course, since the

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Bible is written over time, this is something that obviously has to deal with the

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Bible as it is developing over time. So that when you get to the New Testament, you have Jesus very plainly recognizing the inspired nature of the

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New Testament. And then the New Testament writers in the later books recognizing that God was again giving revelation taking place in that way as well.

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The promises of Christ concerning the Holy Spirit and so on and so forth are all there. So I'm not really sure.

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Do you want the phrase, these 66 books are the word of God?

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You don't have that. If you have more than sufficient recognition that God has spoken by the prophets to the people of Israel, and that Jesus is the

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Jewish Messiah, and that his disciples then are his representatives, and they explain the gospel, and they explain the founding of the

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Christian church, and the form of that church, and the purpose of that church, and the promulgation of the gospel, then it really isn't much of a question that the

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Scriptures definitely claim that kind of authority and that nature in those classical passages that Peter gives us in regards to men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit, and in Paul's reference in writing to Timothy, that Scriptures are theanoustos, they are

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God -breathed. How do you know this applies to the Bible as we know it today and not some other collection of books?

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Well, again, there is no other collection of books that is contemporaneous and that is consistent with itself.

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The Old Testament prophets are familiar with others, the Old Testament prophets. The Old Testament prophets referred to Moses. The New Testament very clearly recognizes the very same canon of the

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Old Testament that the Jewish people had at that particular point in time. The idea that this is in reference to anything else is just simply absurd.

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For example, how do you know it refers to the Gospels of John, Mark, Luke, and Matthew and not the Gospels of Simon, Thomas, and Peter?

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Well, stop with this one because it's a very good question in a sense.

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This is one of the things that I would say. I'm going to have to put this together.

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You know what? I'm going to have to put this together and throw this out for folks.

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We should have a senior high school apologetic reading list. And if your senior is heading off to any place,

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I don't care where they're going, they should be exposed to, for example, the Gospel of Thomas. I think every young Christian person in this day walking into,

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I don't care what school you're going to, I don't care if it's Bob Jones, you need to have read the

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Gospel of Thomas to recognize what its worldview is, to recognize its ridiculously shallow textual history, and to be able to look that professor in the eye and say, when was the last time you read the

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Gospel of Thomas? Given the evidence of the New Testament in comparison to that of the Gospel of Thomas, given the fact that Thomas clearly, as it exists today, gives evidence of Gnostic influence, including forms of Gnosticism that did not develop until the middle of the second century, isn't it obvious, painfully obvious, that this represents a much later time period, unlike the canonical

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Gospels, which plainly come from the very same worldview that you have in Second Temple Judaism, that existed in Jerusalem at the very time they claim to have been narrating the events, which is what you do not have in Thomas.

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Thomas is plainly dependent upon the canonical Gospels. The others, the

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Gospel of Simon, even later, depending on which Peter you're talking about here, and that none of these are consistent with the

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Old Testament texts that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are consistent with.

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We really should make sure that our young people are well aware of this. It is absurd to think that the statements of Paul or Peter or something like that would have anything to do with Gnostic Gospels or other apocryphal

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Gospels of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. And the vast difference in the quality, consistency, and worldview of the canonical

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Gospels in comparison to the Gnostic Gospels is just, well, there isn't any comparison.

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It's a completely different world. But unfortunately, if you've not read any of those things, then you can't say anything about it.

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And you can't really engage the argument. And that's exactly what they want. They want to silence you.

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So there's just a few sentences. Respond to a few of them. I'm just going to need to download this file so I can mark it up and say, okay, we're right here, and that's what

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I'll do after the program. But let's get to at least one email question, and we'll get to your questions as well at 877 -753 -3341.

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I'll get to this one right now. I have heard you speak many times about common grace. I thought this was the position of all

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Reformers until I came across some Reformed teachers that teach uncommon grace. They would say the sun shining on the just and the unjust is common providence, not common grace.

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They would ask the question, if the sun didn't shine on the just and unjust, would that then be common hate?

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Is it not true that the common good things the wicked receive is given to in God's hatred and ultimately becomes a trap to them?

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I would appreciate your insight on this matter. There is a debate amongst some on the issue of common grace.

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There are many who would say that anyone who denies common grace is automatically to be identified as a hyper -Calvinist, and there are clearly hyper -Calvinists who deny common grace.

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But I am especially sensitive to the charge of hyper -Calvinism because there are so many dishonest individuals, even in my list of non -Hunians, unfortunately, who use that as a bat.

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Basically, Phil Johnson in his primer on hyper -Calvinism, I liked how he put it at one place.

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Let me see if I can find it real quickly here. He said, basically, let's see here.

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There's the da -da -da -da. Superlapsarianism. Finally, some critics, here it is, unthinkingly slapped the label hyper on any variety of Calvinism that is higher than the view they hold to.

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I can name names. Boy, names are popping into my mind right now. That's exactly what is done out there, is that people who are barely

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Calvinistic at all will identify anyone who is more thoroughly or consistently

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Calvinistic as hyper -Calvinist. And you know who you are, and I know who you are.

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You and your little websites. So I want to be very careful in saying that a denial of common grace may be a mark, but what you should always look for is a conjunction, a coming together of various marks that would identify hyper -Calvinism, and especially and most importantly, a denial that the

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Gospel call applies to all who hear, that you should proclaim the Gospel to all, and that every person hearing has a duty to respond.

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That's first and foremost. That's Acts 17. God commands all men everywhere to repent.

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We don't know who the elect are. We proclaim the Gospel, and we seek to see people embrace the

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Gospel of Christ. We don't know who the elect are. Our heart breaks when we see fellow creatures who are on the path of destruction.

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Do not bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. Do not repent of your sins and to flee from Him will bring eternal destruction.

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And as those who have been saved from that path, we cannot help but with zeal and passion seek to call others to bow to His Lordship and to experience eternal life through faith in His name.

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That's just the way that it is. But the real mark of hyper -Calvinism is, for example, when

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William Carey was talking about going out and doing missions work, and a man stands up and says, Young man, if God wishes to save the heathen,

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He will do it at its own time without your help. That is the kind of attitude that marks hyper -Calvinism.

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And for every squishy Calvinist out there who wants to accuse me of hyper -Calvinism,

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I haven't seen you outside the temple in Salt Lake City. And I don't see you debating the

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Muslims and calling them to Christ. And when you do, then we may have a discussion. But until then, you just might want to stop with that silliness.

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So, yeah, there are those, especially in the

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Protestant Reformed Church, who have a particular debate with the

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CRC over the nature of common grace. And that has developed. And I remember

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I had downloaded a sermon. I was listening to it. And all of a sudden, this guy broke into this diatribe about heretics talking about common grace.

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And I was like, Oh, I have a feeling I know what the background of that is. And I try to observe those things a little bit from afar and try not to get hit by the bottles that are thrown and things like that.

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But I do believe that in light of the fact that God's wrath could be brought to bear at any point in time, justly and rightly upon any sinner who is not in Jesus Christ, that obviously as a result of that, it is grace that is extended even to the reprobate in their enjoyment of life and making the sun to shine and so on and so forth.

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So I do not view that as, quote -unquote, common hate or just providence or anything else.

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I think that is an extension of a kind of grace. But I clearly recognize the difference between common grace and salvific grace.

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If you don't, if you wander off into Arminianism and prevenient grace, where grace is trying to do something but not actually accomplishing anything, then you've got some major issues on the other side of the fence.

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But yes, there is a debate there, and it can get very hot and very heavy and very nasty.

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And it shouldn't, but it very frequently does, especially when entire churches have been formed out of that particular issue.

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Real quickly, I had another question on Mark chapter 6, and this is not an unusual one.

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When Jesus is in Nazareth, he says, And Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, and among his relatives, and in his own household.

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And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

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Now, the parallel passage in Matthew actually does not say he could do no work, but he simply did no mighty work.

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Well, except he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. This gives you an idea. It wasn't that there was no healing power left in Jesus.

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And it was not a lack of capacity or even desire on his part.

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I think the obvious question that people have at this particular point is,

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Well, was Jesus' ability to do miracles dependent upon individuals?

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Because verse 5 says, And he marveled because of their unbelief. And so, because there wasn't faith there on their part, then he could not do anything.

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There are lots of people who take that perspective. I mean, you can just turn on the television, and your lack of faith is why you're not being healed, and your lack of faith is why you're not driving this kind of car or that kind of car, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

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And it's normally the excuse that is given when the prayer of faith doesn't heal the sick.

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Well, it's all your fault, and you need to do this, and you need to do that. So, the question is being asked, why does it specifically say,

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I mean, the Greek of Mark 6 .5 is, καὶ οὐκ ἐδδύνατα ἐκαὶ ποῖεσαι.

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So, οὐδεμίον δύναμεν. Eddunata, dunamis, dunamai, same terminology, incapacity, inability that we see in John 6.

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No one is able to come to me. And so, people are struck by that phrase, he could do no mighty work there.

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And so, the question that people have is, well, how can God's power be limited by man's unbelief?

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And there are people who develop an entire theology out of that. I would very strongly suggest that the answer to this question should be found in asking why

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Jesus did any of the signs or the miracles that he did. That is, there was a purpose.

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There were lots and lots and lots of sick and lame people throughout the world at that time.

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And while Jesus healed many, he did not heal all. He did not seem to make it his purpose to go and find all the places where the sick people were.

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In John chapter 5, when he goes to the pool of Bethesda, there are all sorts of people lying around.

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He heals one. And even that one seems that if we sort of look sort of carefully at the text, there was a purpose in the healing of that one, and it wasn't really his salvation.

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It was to prompt the encounter that comes afterwards. And we have no record that Jesus then went back and then healed everybody else.

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He left them there. And so the idea that Jesus was just running around emptying out all the hospitals, there wasn't any such thing at the time, but you know what

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I mean, just as a demonstration of power, leaves us with an unfulfilled mission because he didn't do that.

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There was a purpose for everything that Jesus did. And when we look at the signs and miracles of Jesus, they were meant to point to himself, and they were meant to point to his purpose and his message and his gospel and his identity.

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And so I would say that the reason that we have this strong term, adunata, that is used in Mark 6, 5, has nothing to do with Christ's incapacity, but has to do with the appropriateness of when

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Jesus does his miracles. Didn't Herod want to see a really cool miracle?

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He wanted to see a magic trick, didn't he? And I'm sure he said, I can do something with Pilate.

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I can get you out of this. I can get you out of the country. Could you just maybe raise somebody from the dead or do something really cool like that?

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And Jesus didn't even speak to the man. Jesus didn't do miracles to make people go, wow.

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Jesus did what he did to reveal himself as the son of God and as the foundation of the authority of the gospel message and repentance that he preached and taught and that he taught to his disciples as well.

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And he didn't give them the power and ability to do the miraculous things they did just simply to show off.

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And so there is an appropriate time to do things. But clearly in Nazareth, there was, notice it says, he was amazed, verse 6, because of their apostia, their unbelief.

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Maybe it was due to the fact that they had seen his sinless character for a longer period of time than anybody else had.

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I mean, it's one thing to be unbelieving when Jesus comes in your town. You've never even heard of this guy before, but this man never sinned in your presence.

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And yet you have this kind of rancor and hatred toward him, this unbelief.

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I would simply say that made the performing of miracles inappropriate in that context.

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And that's where Adonitah comes from. And I think that's why.

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So anyways, I've got one more question on here, but we've also got callers.

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And we can take your calls as well at 877 -753 -3341. And dividing .line

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for Skype is the address there. And I've got stuff queued up here.

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We are ready to go. There's no twist about it. 877 -753 -3341.

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Let's go over to where I'm going to be tomorrow evening and talk with Gus in L .A.

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Hi, Gus. Hey, how's it going, Dr. White? Doing good. I just had a simple question.

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I'm in one of those community colleges, similar to what you spoke about earlier. And the class that I'm taking right now in history, they've been talking a lot about religion, especially what they see as the early religions,

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Egyptian and everything they consider to be pre -Christian. And so how would you answer those?

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I heard your debate with Dan Barker, and I wanted to know also, what are the resources that you said that Christianity has dealt with the parallel mania before?

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Yes, yes. And also, how would you deal with those kind of argumentations, especially when they present so -called evidence?

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Well, you have to get past just simply the professor's assertion and ask for documentation.

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Some of the sources you want to get hold of. One of them we carry. One of them we need to make sure, and I think Buzz is in channel.

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Yes, Buzz is in channel, so I'm going to send this out to Buzz right now. We need to make sure that Ron Nash's The Gospel and the

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Greeks is in the AOMIN. Is it aomin .org?

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What? Amazon .aomin .org? Put it up someplace so I can see it. I can't read your mouth through the window.

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Ron Nash's book, amazon .aomin .org. Make sure that Ron Nash's book,

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The Gospel and the Greeks, is available there. It's not exciting, but it is a treasure trove of material.

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It needs to be there. There is an older book by J. Gresham Machin that we need to have there, and I know we carry in our bookstore right now,

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Reinventing Jesus. It is an excellent resource you need to have. There is a chapter on parallelomania in there, and all of them will be directing you to the same scholarly source.

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I mean, Nash's book is a scholarly source, as is Reinventing Jesus. They all are, but they will also direct you to more primary sources and help you to think through the fundamental issues.

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The only way really to respond to much of this, well, it's twofold.

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On a positive side, you have to be prepared to point out that the real background of the

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Jesus of the Gospels is Judaism. It's what you'd expect it to be. It was what

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Jesus himself said it was, and that is the prophets and the writings of Luke 24 -45.

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Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures. Why? Because they testified of him. There is no reason to be looking for anything else because the

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Jesus of the Bible walks right out of the pages of the prophetic scriptures, which we call the

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Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, the Old Testament, which we would call it, as Christians. And so that is a very strongly established scholarly position.

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That is that Jesus needs to be understood within that context of Second Temple Judaism, Tanaitic Judaism, when he lived before the destruction of the

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Temple, what was going on then, he fits right there. He does not fit anywhere else.

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And if someone starts throwing out alleged parallels, the first thing to do is say, well, wait a minute, which one is the source?

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Are you seriously suggesting that people in Palestine, where these pagan religions were despised, were grabbing hold of these things, cobbling them together and creating some type of new religion as if that is going to convince their fellow

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Jews? I mean, really, the Jews are going to be excited about Osiris or Horus or Attis or Dionysus or any of this stuff?

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Really? Honestly? That is what you are suggesting to us? But then, of course, once you get to any one of the alleged parallels, every single one falls apart.

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98 % of what you will be told online and in community colleges today about any one of these alleged gods is completely bogus.

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It's made up. There are so many people quoting so many other people who are quoting somebody else, who are quoting a source that no one can ever track down, that it's just taken on a life of its own.

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But you go, well, you're a scholar, so where is the original sources that would say...

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Mithra is real big. Where are the original sources that identify a pre -existence of belief in Mithra in the area around Palestine, amongst the

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Roman citizens of that area, in the days of Jesus? And they are going to go, because there aren't any!

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It didn't enter into Roman culture until the 6th decade and really flourished well after that, long after Christianity has been established and the

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New Testaments were written and all the rest of this stuff. The same thing with Attis. That's why

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I did the video on the raw belt, the Numa 15 stuff. It's just all anachronistic.

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But even then, well, 12 apostles, born on December 25th, and they try to create all these parallels.

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One I love the best is the Osiris parallel, Osiris rose from the dead, where in reality his wife found his body that had been cut up into 14 pieces.

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In one of the stories she only found 13 of the 14. But anyway, and then she sort of pieces him together and he becomes zombified in the afterlife.

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Oh yeah, that's the resurrection, sure. I mean, it's really hard not to laugh at this stuff, and yet this is the stuff that is being soberly presented by naturalistic materialists, as if it's really serious.

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And look, simple fact here, the majority of these types of people in community colleges, like Lee Carter, Glendale, and these other people, they don't know any better.

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They don't know any different. They are so bigoted and so biased toward Christianity, they've never even listened to the other side.

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They've just accepted it and they repeat it as if it's absolutely true. I mean, it's the exact opposite of serious scholarship, but that's what they do.

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That's what they do. So you've got to have your ducks in a row, and it's not difficult to do.

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The materials out there, there's a lot of garbage material out there too, but it's real easy to tell the difference between a

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Yamauchi's book on Mithraism and some of the silly

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Gnostic stuff that's being sold on Amazon or something like that. Well, you can buy anything on Amazon. You can probably buy

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Yamauchi there too. But there's garbage out there from people that have an axe to grind, and then there's the serious scholarship.

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Now unfortunately, the serious scholarship is normally dry, as can be. And you've got to just plow through all sorts of stuff that you didn't even know you needed to know.

34:52

But it is there. The facts are still there. And I would start with Ron Nash and with the

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Reinventing Jesus book. Those two would really get you going pretty well. Yeah, because I had brought up the same thing

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I said. The differences outweigh the similarities. And they were just at a standstill. She couldn't answer and say, well, how do you explain the similarities?

35:14

But yeah, it's just frustrating. And I did need a book 2 .2 for them to read.

35:19

It's mainly the reason why I needed the resources. Those will help you out a lot. Okay. I will be seeing you, though, tomorrow.

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I have to run a class now. But I will be seeing you tomorrow. All right. Lord willing, we'll see you then. All right. Thank you, sir.

35:32

All right. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number for you to get involved.

35:39

I guess we went blowing right past the... I'm sorry?

35:46

You can do that? I'm fired up. Oh, it's too late to fire it up, huh?

35:52

Oh, okay. Oh, great. Fine. Thanks. Whatever. All right. Let's talk with Jonathan in Georgia.

35:58

Hi, Jonathan. How are you doing, sir? Doing good. Let's see. I think you guys probably already got a bit of the details of what

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I'm calling about. I come from a somewhat trilingual household, so we're constantly reading the Bible in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

36:12

And I even dabble in the Vulgate during church as well. And so we have a somewhat good foundation to understand genders, nouns, and pronouns throughout the

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Scripture. And I also happen to have a lot of King James Only friends. And I tried discussing

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Psalm 12, verse 7 yesterday with one of them, and who the them was in verse 7.

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Fortunately, most of the modern versions correctly translate that as him referring back to the poor and needy in verse 5.

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But they have this ambiguity in English where them could actually work in the English language to refer back to the words.

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To the best of my ability, I've exhausted all efforts to explain how ridiculous that is in any other language.

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And they just don't get it, because the words are so close together. And in English, you can get by with this, which is frustrating.

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I tried to explain it as introducing your brother as, or with a reference, she.

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You know, she is my brother. And they still just don't get it, because she is not a reference to a male.

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But whenever I was talking to them about this, they said the same thing happens. You have this discongruity.

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If you take out the comma Yohannian, you have kind of a grammatical blunder over in 1

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John 5. And this is not something I've ever heard. It doesn't really bother me. It's very common, actually.

37:44

Well, I've never heard it. It doesn't bother me too much, because I could see, you know, I guess a gender getting mixed up a lot easier than an entire verse completely disappearing in history.

37:55

Well, and it's not a gender getting mixed up either. But let's explain what we're talking about. First of all, you're exactly right in Psalm 12.

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Why would anyone be talking about Psalm 12? Well, it's pretty easy. Psalm 12 is one of the texts that King James Only advocates use.

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They apply verse 6. The words of Yahweh are pure words like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.

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Now, are you aware of the fact that, just a little trivia for you here, Jonathan, you may not want it, but I'm going to offer it anyways, that there are some

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King James Only advocates that see that purified seven times and they go, aha, this.

38:35

Ah, yes, I am aware of this. Okay, what am I going to say then? Oh, you're going to say the

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King James is the 7th edition in the English language. The 7th Bible. Close, close.

38:47

I mean, anybody could, by rigging your numbers. But actually what they do is they do the five texts of Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza.

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So there you have seven Greek texts, and it was a refining process so that you finally get to the final thing with the

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TR, which is produced by the King James translators, by comparing these seven Greek texts. So I just, there you go.

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I don't think the King James Only's I speak with have a thorough enough understanding of Erasmus, Beza, and Stephanus to even go to that.

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Well, I just thought you'd find that interesting. But anyways, people look at that and they say, you,

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O Lord, will keep them, you will guard us, this is the ESV, us from this generation forever.

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And what Jonathan is pointing out is the fact that serious exegesis would allow us to ask the question, what is the promise of the

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Lord keeping in Psalm 12? And simply looking at the immediate statement of the words of the

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Lord, assuming that refers to something in a translation in a language that would not exist for 2 ,000 years at that point, making application is the classic example of eisegesis that the vast majority of meaningful interpretations of Psalm 12 is talking about when it talks about the words of the

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Lord, is specifically talking about the words of the Lord in regards to the promise to deliver the needy and the poor that came before that, like in Psalm 12, 5, and that therefore if it is keep them, there is some issues in the

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Hebrew at that point, it is the promises he made to the poor.

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And the whole point is the King James folks, once they've heard a particular interpretation of a text in English, then they can allow that to take preeminence over the original language text themselves.

40:46

That then led to someone saying, ah, well, there's a grammar issue in 1 John 5 if you take out the comma yohanim.

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This has actually been around for, I don't know, over 100 years or something along those lines.

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That was developed not so much as a defense of the comma, but just simply as an exegetical issue.

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And the argument basically goes along these lines. If you take out the three that bear record in heaven, the

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Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, these three are one, then you have left in the Greek text a contradiction in using a masculine when you have neuters beforehand.

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The problem is, I think most people who actually read Greek recognize that this isn't a really good argument at all.

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You have ta -numa -kai -ta -hu -dor -kai -ta -hai -ma kai -hoi -t 'ais -ta -hen -aisen.

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So what you have is you have ta. So ta -numa. Numa is a neuter noun.

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Now, I immediately stop and ask, what does that mean? Now, you know, Jonathan, that gender is not necessarily in a language indicative of personhood or non -personhood.

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I mean, the spirit... One of the very interesting textual variants in the

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New Testament has to do with places where masculine pronouns are used of the spirit.

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Why? Well, because the spirit is clearly personal in the New Testament. I mean, the spirit speaks, the spirit wills, the spirit does all these things that only persons can do.

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And so there are some interesting places, like in Ephesians 1, where there's an argument in the text, in a textual variant between a masculine or the matching neuter in regards to the

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Holy Spirit. So I immediately ask someone, so ta -numa, the gender here is not indicative of a non -person.

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Well, of course not, because the spirit's personal. Okay, okay, okay. And water and blood, what are these?

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And I almost never get an answer. In reality, the spirit and the water and the blood are what?

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They're testimonies to who Jesus was. And the point of John is they come together and they testify in agreement together as to the identity of who

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Jesus is. Now that's one, I think, perfectly fine interpretation of what the text is talking about.

43:43

But their argument is, since it says, hoi tris, ais ta -hen aisen, hoi tris would have to, why would you use hoi?

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Why are you not matching? And anybody who knows how

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Greek functions goes, oh, man, that's really stretching it, because you're bringing three things together, and if you're viewing them as having personal attributes, or if you even are referring to spirit as a personal way, and you're bringing three different things together into a group, the idea of trying to match a group in that way, and especially then saying that they are agreeing together as one, you really push it to say, well, you'd have to stick with a neuter form.

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It just doesn't bear much water. As you yourself pointed out, to make that kind of argument and say, oh, well, then that means an entire verse disappeared for, well, at least 1 ,350 years of Christian experience, and for 1 ,350 years, nobody had a clue what this text was about who was reading the

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Greek New Testament. That's really, really stretching it, and that's a really hard way to do textual criticism, because that would allow us to open up, for example, and this is where I get a little frustrated sometimes with my

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King James -only friends, because there are manuscripts from the ancient world where people tried to sort of,

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I don't know, smooth things out a little bit. The most famous is Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis, Codex D, and the author of D, or at least what

45:29

D is a copy of, was sort of, I don't know, a frustrated editor of the ancient world or something like that, and he liked to expand upon stuff and fix what he felt were not really smooth transitions and insert things, and it's sort of the living

45:47

Bible of the ancient world. And so I could go to Codex D, and there are many times

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I could find something in the Textus Receptus where, well, you know, this isn't really smooth here, and technically,

46:03

I'm not sure that the pronouns here really fit real well, but, well, you know, over here in Codex D, if we just brought this insertion from Codex D in, everything's nice and smooth.

46:17

Well, why wouldn't I want to do that? Well, because that's not how you do textual criticism, unless you're a King James -onlyist and you're defending the

46:23

Kamiohaneum. And it's that inconsistency. And, Jonathan, if you're trying to find a way to get these folks to be consistent, there is no such thing as a consistent

46:35

King James -onlyist. That's the whole essence of King James -onlyism, is that you must apply a different standard to the

46:43

King James than you apply to everything else. You have to. So if you're consistent, you'll stop being a

46:49

King James -onlyist anyways. Well, that was my case. Actually, I was a King James -onlyist for many years.

46:55

I'm the guy that built Gail Riplinger's website and used to attend Peter Ruckman's church. And so I started being consistent, and I'm no longer a

47:05

King James -onlyist. But, yeah, I didn't know too much about that. I'm not able, really, to study

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Greek. That's something I would love to learn. So I figured I would defer to the more knowledgeable resources in that area.

47:18

Well, I know that, actually, believe it or not, the article on the

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Kamiohanium Now, don't everybody scream and yell at the same time? on Wikipedia is very good.

47:33

Somebody who knew what they were doing put that together. For example, it has one of the, I think, the most complete listing of manuscript evidence on the subject that you can find.

47:42

And there is a discussion of the grammar issue, and there's a quote from Dan Wallace there, and so on and so forth.

47:47

So, actually, if you just look up Kamiohanium on Wikipedia, you'll be able to...

47:52

I think there is even a reference to Dan's article on it. So I direct you there if you want to have a further discussion of the gender issue.

48:01

Excellent. Thank you. All right. Thanks for your call, Jonathan. You, too. Have a good day. Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341

48:12

To Buzz and the store there, No, we have Reinventing Jesus in ours. I think it's

48:17

Christianity and Liberalism. I think. Isn't Machen's book, where he deals a lot with the parallel stuff, isn't that Christianity and Liberalism?

48:28

No, no, no. It's The Virgin Birth. Machen, wow, put them both in there. Put them both in there. They both should be available.

48:34

I think they're even available online, but some people still like to hold a book in their hand. So did you have something you wish to say, sir?

48:41

Well, inserting something in between. I got a call yesterday. When you put that thing up in front of your mouth, I just assume that you're not hiding a yawn.

48:47

True that. I got a call yesterday, a very interesting call. Sometimes somebody calls me up, and they just throw something out that I've never thought of before.

48:56

This is a pastor, and he has a young lady who is a missionary in the Middle East, visiting his church.

49:03

Oh, okay. And she is in a situation where she's working with some ex -Muslims, trying to bring them up in the faith.

49:12

Yes. And she asked the reply. Who have actually professed Christ? That's the story

49:17

I'm hearing. And this Reformed pastor was asked by this Reformed missionary, is there a catechism that I could use with these people?

49:29

And I kind of went, wow, you need to call some people that can get something published.

49:36

And the question is, is there such a thing? Yeah. Or why haven't I gotten around to it yet? I think it would be

49:42

A and B. Yeah. Yeah. Is there such a thing, and when are you going to do it? Well, you know, there are some really great

49:55

Presbyterian brothers. For example, Ilas, his book that I've used,

50:03

Understanding the Quran, it's a short book, but it's really more about all of Islam than it is just about the

50:08

Quran. I would imagine that there's at least some published material, if not a book, at least some material that some of our

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Reformed Presbyterian missionary -minded folks have produced over the years for that very type of thing, because they would be the ones, along with Reformed Baptists, who would not be scared of the term catechism.

50:36

A lot of Baptists are scared of that term. Roman, Baptist, Baltimore catechism, you know.

50:48

But I would imagine there's probably something out there. I'm not familiar with it. There definitely would need to be.

50:55

There's definitely a need for something, because just the means by which you explain the faith, there are so many landmines you can step on while talking to Muslims.

51:06

And the need to ground them on the key issues, the nature of the sonship of Christ.

51:13

That's what was so just heartbreaking, as well as so disgusting about listening to Cantor's Trinitarian faceplant with that Oneness Pentecostal pastor, was that that is the one thing that as a former

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Muslim, he should have down like the back of his hand, and he doesn't. Just amazing.

51:40

There should be so much emphasis placed upon appropriately understanding the nature of the sonship of Christ over against the constant misrepresentation and attack of it within Islam.

51:55

But off the top of my head, I don't know. But Matini Loss might be someone to contact to ask if he'd be aware of that, because I think that would be a good place to go for that.

52:08

But anyway, yeah, it is an interesting question. And who knows, maybe once we get this first book done.

52:16

Obviously, I wouldn't say this first book would be that, but it would be foundational for that.

52:23

Because what I'm doing is I'm using a series of texts from the Quran to lay out the key issues where Christianity and Islam are at odds with one another.

52:36

And that would certainly be foundational to that. So you definitely wouldn't recommend Syl Jander's book then?

52:43

No, that would definitely not be... Though we did get it today, didn't we?

52:49

You were thumbing through it. And there is an endorsement right there. There is definitely an endorsement in there.

52:55

There is no doubt about it. Passionately believe, yes. Eric and Ken are passionately, passionately believe.

53:01

Well, let me get this other question dealt with in the four minutes that we have left.

53:10

Email asking you to address Acts 17, 27, that they should seek God in the hope that they might feel their way toward Him and find

53:19

Him, yet He is actually not far from each one of us. I heard someone recently say this disproved

53:24

Calvinism, because here unbelievers seek God, but it's in hope that they might find

53:29

Him, not guaranteed that they will. I have some thoughts on this. I wanted to hear James address the

53:35

Greek and explain hope and might aspects of verse 27. I have a whole lengthy quote here from Calvin that isn't easy necessarily to follow, though I think

53:49

I would probably agree primarily with what he had to say here. But remember the context of Acts 17, 27.

53:57

Paul is on Mars Hill. He is at the Areopagus. He has taken the opportunity of seeing the altar of the unknown

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God. He is using this as a basis for proclaiming the fact that there is only one true

54:14

God and all these other gods are false gods. Beginning in verse 24, the

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God who made the world and everything in it being Lord of heaven and earth does not live in temples made by man, nor is

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He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

54:33

And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the faces of the earth, having determined allotted periods and boundaries of their dwelling place.

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I think that's God's absolute sovereignty over human affairs, nations, everything.

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That they should seek God in the hope that they might feel their way toward Him and find Him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us.

54:55

For in Him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, for indeed we are

55:00

His offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.

55:08

The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which

55:14

He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed. And of this He has given assurance to all by raising

55:20

Him from the dead. And of course as soon as He says, Anastasis, resurrection from the dead, they begin to mock because this was so opposed to them so much for the pagans having dying and rising gods all over the place.

55:33

Anyway, the point being that we have this phrase in verse 27.

55:41

And this is a conditional sentence.

55:48

It may be one of the few where everything is actually expressed. Wallace isn't certain that everything is being expressed here, but it's a very, very unusual conditional sentence in the

55:59

Greek where you have the remote possibility of a future fulfillment.

56:14

It is very remote, but it's a possibility.

56:22

So is someone saying, Oh, well, this is a contradiction of what Paul's going to say later. Paul's contradicting himself because he says there's no

56:28

God seeker. No, the point is that what you have in the previous verse, and that is God's sovereignty over the nations.

56:35

He places nations, He places times, He causes one nation to rise, one nation to fall. He is meeting man in the sense of giving evidence of His existence in the creation of all things, as well as in His divine providence.

56:50

And so He, in His creation, gives everything to man that if man would but seek

56:58

God, that if man would but grope, then man could find the truth about God.

57:03

Not everything about God. This takes us back to Romans chapter 1. There is sufficient evidence in general revelation that we should know that God exists.

57:12

We should know that He is the source of all things. We suppress that. The point is not that,

57:18

Oh, yeah, this is all within the capacity of man and everything that he says in Romans 1 and 3, he's contradicting here in Acts 17.

57:24

Maybe he learned this later on. Maybe this is development policy. No, no, no, no, no, no. The point is that God has not put boundaries in the place of man to keep him from finding

57:35

God. There is no hindrance that if man were to but look at divine revelation and look at what

57:42

God has done in this world, that he would be able to see the truth about God. The point is man doesn't.

57:48

And the end of this sermon is going to demonstrate that, because as soon as he talks about what God has done in raising Jesus Christ, they're going to scoff and mock, but there will be some who believe.

57:58

So the point is that the divine revelation that God has done in general revelation and in his providence is not a hindrance.

58:08

It's not something that man's going to say, Hey, he kept us from finding out about him. No, it's actually further revelation and only further increases man's guiltiness because man loves his sin and refuses to follow after him.

58:23

I think that's pretty much what Calvin says in his commentary as well, but I didn't use any of these vowels and things like that.

58:30

And older English, because the translation I have is in older English. And the music says we're out of time for today.

58:36

It has been an eclectic program today to be certain, but that's what The Dividing Line is all about. Lord willing, see some of you in Southern California this weekend.

58:43

The rest of you next Tuesday. See you then. God bless. I believe we're standing at the crossroads

58:50

Let this moment of sin flow away We must contend for the faith our fathers fought for We need a new reformation day

59:02

It's a sign of the times The truth is being trampled in a new age paradigm

59:09

Won't you lift up your voice Are you tired of plain religion It's time to make some noise

59:15

Howling old Wittenberg Howling old Wittenberg Howling old Wittenberg Stand up for the truth

59:23

Won't you live for the Lord Cause we're howling Howling old

59:28

Wittenberg The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries. If you'd like to contact us, call us at 602 -973 -4602 or write us at P .O.

59:38

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59:45

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