Brandan Robertson on the Death of Christianity, Jared Wilson and Galatians 2, Open Phones

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is Thursday, and we're eventually going to open the phone lines at 877 -753 -3341, because I only have a couple of items here that I really want to get to today.

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And so, please remember, this is not the Bible Ants Man broadcast. I do not make claims to be able to do that kind of thing.

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A man's got to know his limitations, as one theologian once said, one very well -armed theologian once said, and I do.

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So, there you go, 877 -753 -3341, but if you call in now, you're going to be sitting on hold for a little while, because there are some things

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I want to get to. There's a danger in how we handle the issue of support, and that is, we almost never talk about it.

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A lot of people have regular stuff at the beginning and end of the program, or commercials in the middle, or stuff like that.

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We don't do that, and it's not because we don't need it, and it's not because we've got a bunch of rich people out there that pay all the bills.

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I'll be perfectly honest with you, our experience with rich people is, you can't really trust that direction.

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They're there for a while, and then, oh, shiny thing, and off they go someplace else. So, for a very, very, very, very, very long time, our funding has been just from basic people that go, you know what,

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I want to have the dividing line around, I want to see James doing debates, I want to see him traveling the world and teaching in all sorts of places.

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He wouldn't be able to go and teach if the ministry didn't support and make it possible for him to get there.

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And I want that consistent voice, and so I'm willing to do $20, $30, $50, whatever it is, on a regular basis.

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And that's how we are funded. I mean, we used to fund a lot of stuff by selling

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MP3s and stuff like that. We've made that all available for free, so we just throw it out there, and it's available.

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And so, we need folks to stand with us. I mean, we're taking some pretty unpopular stands on a lot of stuff these days, and so if you'd keep that in mind.

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And then there's one other thing. One of the things that's been really, really, really encouraging to me, to be honest with you, is the way that people have stood with us in providing for what's called the

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Travel Fund. It's the fund we draw from to kick me out of here and to cancel the show.

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That's brilliant. We're just the world's greatest marketers. We really are. But the reality is,

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I'm going to have the opportunity of teaching in Samara, Russia, coming up in just a matter of weeks.

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Where the last guy who taught there during this class period mentioned it hit 40 degrees below zero. And yeah,

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I'm borrowing a jacket from them, because I'm like, why would I even bother buying something like that in Phoenix?

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I mean, it would hang in my closet and take up, I'm sure, a lot of room and would never ever get used again unless I went back there.

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And just transporting it would be tough enough. But anyways, I get to teach in places, get to go to churches that, because folks support the

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Travel Fund, I can go to smaller places. I can go to places that are a little out of the way, because we don't have to ask from those really small places.

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We just get me there. And so it's really, really, really encouraging when the

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Travel Fund is well supported. And so I've got a lot of traveling at the end of this year and then throughout next year to be doing.

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Got some dissertation research to do over in Germany in February.

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And all in regards to the text of the New Testament, things like that. So on the

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Support Us page, you've got the regular support thing, and then you've got the travel link there.

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And if you can help us to continue doing the things we're doing and set up those debates and do the things we've been doing all along, we would very much appreciate it.

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We don't talk about it very much. I might mention it again next week, just because not everybody listens to every program, try to cover everybody.

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But as you can tell, we're not really good at this type of thing. In fact, you realize what

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October is, and we totally... It would have been perfectly legitimate to point out that right now,

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October of 2018, is the 35th anniversary of the founding of Alpha Omega Ministries.

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35 years? It's been 35 years. And I don't know,

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I sort of feel sorry for the 35th wedding anniversary, because 25's big, 40's big, 35 just sort of sits there.

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And Kelly and I are at 36, and we sort of commented at 35, Well, okay, the next few years, get a cupcake or something like that, and just sort of wait for 40.

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How much can you make out of 37? But 35 years of ministry, and especially in apologetics ministry, is a long time.

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I, sadly, can think back through and think of a lot of folks that used to be doing this that ain't doing it anymore.

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So there you go, 35 years, we could have put together offers, send in $35, we just don't do that kind of thing.

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I think it's Rich's fault, primarily. It's supposed to be his job to think up this kind of stuff, and he's just sort of falling down on it.

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That's just all there is to it. But there you go. So if I see any $35 donations,

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I'll know what that was about. And if I was smart, I'd say $350 donations and things like that.

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There you go. So just to let people know, because we get new listeners all the time, and they're probably sitting around going, well, if they never talk about anything like that, then they just must not need anything.

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No, no, we are 100 % supported by individuals. That's the way it works.

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So there you go. So Travel Fund also needs your help.

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I didn't get to this last time, and I don't want to proverbially beat the dead horse, but you need to understand,

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I briefly mentioned the situation with Reverend Brandon Robertson.

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I mentioned the fact that if the name rings any bells with you, it's probably because at some point over the past five years or so, you would have seen this young man speaking on the subject of homosexuality as a same -sex attracted person or bisexual.

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I'm not really sure. I think both, either. I don't remember. I don't really keep track of that kind of thing, but as a person not in the standard realm of sexual expression.

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And when I first heard him, he was, at least at that time, attempting to maintain some level of what

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I would call historic theological orthodoxy in regards to key issues of the

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Christian faith. The problem was, in listening to where he was going,

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I knew beyond all question that something would have to give.

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You can't, as much as people might try, you can't maintain that position with any level of consistency.

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And the people who are going to be inviting you to come speak and things like that, you're going to be constantly being under pressure to go one direction, and it's not toward orthodoxy.

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It's certainly not in maintaining it. And so, there was a column from October 4th, so just three weeks ago, by Brandon Robertson, Why Traditional Christianity Must Die.

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At the end of his most recent book, Unbelievable, Bishop Spong, who knew he was still around?

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I'm not going to start telling the backstory on the debate with Bishop Spong, but if you want to just go watch it for yourself, you can almost figure some of the backstory out just from watching the debate.

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But the story I've told, I will tell this story because I've told it many times before. During the break in that debate, so go to YouTube, put in John Shelby Spong, James White, it'll come up.

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We debated homosexuality in Tampa a number of years ago. And during the break,

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I... which direction did it go? He was sitting over there, all he had brought to the table was a yellow pad and a pencil.

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He didn't have a Bible. He did not bring a Bible to a debate on whether homosexuality is consistent with the

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Bible. And so, if I recall correctly,

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I think I asked him to sign his books because I had his books with me.

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Because I had read his books and I had listened to his lectures and I had prepared for the debate. And of course,

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I then offered him my book on the subject, which he had never seen.

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And it was just illustrative of how all leftists are. I don't say liberals anymore,

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I say leftists because it's much more accurate. It's how they all are. He had not looked me up.

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He could care less what I had to say. He didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say in the first place. Which makes it next to impossible for him to meaningfully interact with what

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I'm actually saying. But that's just how people on the left are. They don't think we have anything meaningful to say.

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Anyway, Spong is a... technically an Episcopalian, but I think he's honestly barely a theist.

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And I really don't think it's fair to saddle... certainly not the believing

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Anglicans, but I guess the Episcopalians, they've had their atheist priests too.

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Anyway, at the end of his most recent book, Unbelievable, Bishop Spong poses a question that should be grappled with by every person of faith in this modern era.

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Essentially, he asks, Can Christianity in its theology, liturgy, institutions, and practices evolve to meet the rapidly emerging new textures of reality in the 21st century?

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As a Christian pastor and public theologian, I have often grappled with this very question, especially as I have witnessed my own worldview shift dramatically away from a traditional

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Christian perspective towards a new way of seeing and being that could only scarcely be called

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Christian by the standards of the dominant institutions within the religion. Well, that's about as good a confession as you're going to get that I am an apostate.

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I have left the faith. I have left orthodoxy. I have left what the church has taught down through the centuries.

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And why? Because of his views on sexuality. It's not that the

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Bible's teaching on homosexuality and marriage and gender is confusing or difficult or anything else.

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It is that it is so very clear and so very opposite that of a

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Western society that is running with all of its energy toward its own self -destruction by abandoning everything that is good in God's law.

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So, the more I've leaned into this question, the more that I have come to believe that the religion called

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Christianity itself may be irredeemable. Isn't it interesting that you would use the term irredeemable in getting rid of the

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Redeemer? It is common knowledge in progressive circles,

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I would say regressive circles, that the imperial religion that has dominated the world for the past 2 ,000 years is almost nothing like the radical, ethical, and social movement initiated by that first century rabbi named

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Yeshua. What he initiated wasn't primarily a religious movement at all, but a socio -political movement that challenged the fundamental ordering of his society and called for an egalitarian and communal way of existing as a human community.

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Now, that's not what you're going to get from reading the Gospels. You're going to have to ignore the vast majority of Jesus' conflict with the

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Jewish leaders. It is a perversion. It is laughable on any exegetical or historical account, but it is so common at Union Theological Seminary or any of the other quote -unquote progressive seminaries where what the

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Bible actually teaches is irrelevant. It's what you can clothe in modern

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Marxist ideology that matters. Along with these ethical and political teachings,

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Rabbi Yeshua—I remember the apostles calling him Rabbi Yeshua all the time.

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Sorry, I still have the stuff that's going around, and so I'm going to have to drink fairly regularly.

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In fact, I should back the volume off. I can tell right now. Or we're going to sound like Barry White very, very quickly.

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Along with these ethical and political teachings, Rabbi Yeshua incorporated what could be called a perennial spirituality, which called for each human to move beyond our egoic projections.

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Have you been trying to move beyond your egoic projections recently, Rachel? Every day? Yeah. We have a studio audience today.

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I'm not going to say who it is, though if I did, you'd all be going, why isn't he in here? Because he doesn't want to be in here. But he's well -known.

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Very, very well -known. Though he only looks like the guy that he's supposed to actually be, at least that's another story.

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Oh, okay, yes, he's going beyond his egoic projections. Move beyond our egoic projections in the world and to embrace our divine nature within, which unites us to all things.

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Could someone light up some incense or something here? It might make things work a little better. But do we have some little chimes or something?

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By moving beyond our carnal desires and identities, to use a Pauline term, oh yeah,

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I can just see Paul embracing Brandon Robertson's stuff, and seeking to live from our truest nature, which

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Paul taught was corrupted, we could overcome both our struggles with sin, in scare quotes, all of our greedy impulses that create inequity in the world.

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Oh, there's what sin is. It's inequity in the world. Did Karl Marx write this or what?

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And our identification with the false constructs of identity that we've been conditioned to own as our identity, which probably means

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God created you male and female, and husband and wife, and that old stuff.

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Only from that place of inner union could we truly create a united and equal society that Rabbi Yeshua dreamed of.

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Well, he must have just dreamed about it, because he never bothered to say anything about it. It's not written down somewhere.

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Well, there you go. It goes on, and it's leftist drivel is what it is.

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That's what you would expect, and it's why traditional Christianity must die.

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So there's the trajectory of apostasy. Sadly, saw it coming, knew it was coming, and there you see it.

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That's sad. It's sad to see. But as I said, we went back and forth a bit, and I informed him very straightforwardly on Twitter.

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You are a false teacher, and you're leading people astray, and I think people need to mark you out in that way. And he said the same thing to me, which is fine.

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Only one of us has a biblical basis, and the other one's just making things up as he goes along. Oh yeah,

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Scott Hunt on Twitter just said, The sword behind James makes me think of only one thing, and it's

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William Wallace screaming freedom. Except this was when he was still

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William Wallace and hadn't had his guts cut out. With his war paint on and stuff like that.

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And yes, it is a Scottish Claymore, and let me tell you something. It's not as big as the

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Wallace sword. I've seen the Wallace sword in Stirling, Scotland. So yeah, it's a beast.

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But I don't know how anybody could swing that thing around for more than about five minutes without your arms falling off.

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It is heavy. And the Wallace sword would have to be twice that. And so he must have been...

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Those were very short battles, which they weren't. Or he was an aerobic beast.

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I don't know. But yeah, the last person to win was the last person to lose.

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It was bloody stuff. No two ways about it. But yeah, thank you, Scott.

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That is a Scottish Claymore. And while it is not sharp...

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Well, since we're talking about it, and I'm going to transition anyways... That's the

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Claymore. And then this is the sword from Gladiator.

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The Maximus sword. From the opening scene. If you remember, at one point

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Maximus is in the cavalry charge and he swings at a guy with his sword and it takes a guy's head off and then it lodges in the tree.

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And he has a secondary sword, which they normally would, the cavalry officers would. And that's what he uses for the rest of the battle.

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And then after the battle's over, they show him retrieving his sword from the tree.

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And then you sort of get a little more of a look as to what it looked like. And I really enjoyed

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Gladiator. It was back during the Bill Clinton days, so it was such a contrast to our current

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Commander -in -Chief at that time, as far as character was concerned. And so I saw it a number of times in the theater.

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And so some friends of mine bought the movie prop. It is not sharp either. But the

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Claymore is sharp at the point. You could run somebody straight through with that baby, just as well as any other

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Claymore. So if the Progressives ever attack the program while we're on the air, it'd be sort of hard to swing in here.

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But they've only got one place to come in at. And with that Claymore, I'm going to take a few of them with me.

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Well, yeah, I'm not going to talk about that on the air. I don't want anybody to know about the automatic machine guns.

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Oh, did I say that? Oh, no, man. The real Claymore is boom.

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No, we don't have those. They could swing it if they were doing keto. I'm not going to comment about that.

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I'm not going to go there. Okay, one thing before we start taking your phone calls.

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877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341. Well, go ahead and start taking your calls.

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It's not going to take me that long to go through this. Last program.

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Actually, it was on Monday, remember? We talked a little bit about Jared C.

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Wilson's tweet. And I'm not sure why

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I didn't leave that up, but I will now need to find it again. I think it should be that one right.

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There it is. On the 16th,

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Jared C. Wilson, who is from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, some anonymous criticism bot has equated nonstop critique with Paul confronting

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Peter, which is weird and hilarious, given that Paul's concern was that racial justice was an entailment of the gospel.

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So this is Galatians 2. So on the last program, we took the time to walk through Galatians chapter 2 and to consider its background, consider its specific meaning in context, in the original language, and then looked at its application.

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And its application is specifically in regards to how a person has peace with God and the topic is the danger of a split in the church between a

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Jewish Christian church and a Gentile Christian church. Peter was not orthopodeoing, he was not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel, in that he was allowing the pressure from James and the

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Jewish church in Jerusalem to push him back in the old ways.

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He had been having table fellowship with Gentiles, God had given him that vision from heaven, and yet you can have a vision from heaven and still have to think through what it is that that means and the application that that has.

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And tradition, folks, I've certainly learned that tradition is so vitally important for us to examine.

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If we do not examine our traditions, we will be controlled by our traditions.

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They are powerful things, they provide the texture of our thinking, and the reason to do serious exegetical study is to keep your traditions constantly in the light, or your traditions will end up ruling you.

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And so with Peter, divine revelation, he's still compromising, he's still compromising.

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And so anyway, Paul stands up, says, don't do this, here's where you're wrong, you've been living as a

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Gentile, we're all justified by faith, whether we're Jew or Gentile. And we didn't get to this, but I just want to point out how central this is to Paul's thinking.

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You know, he says in verse 16, Nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, who are not

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Gentile sinners, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

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He talks about having died to the law, lived to God, and then of course we have one of our favorite verses, I have been crucified with Christ, who is no longer

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I who live, but Christ lives in me. Life which I live unto flesh, I live by the faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.

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But then you have verse 21, Now, that particular term could mean simply freely as a gift, but in this context it would be vainly.

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Without result, needlessly. Needlessly. So, this has to do with whether the death of Christ will be meaningful or not.

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You want evidence of something being a gospel issue?

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That's gospel issue. As to whether the cross is going to be emptied of its power, or whether it's not.

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That's what's at stake here. And the issue with the Judaizers was circumcision.

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It was not race. It was not race. Had nothing to do with skin color, had nothing to do with ethnicities, it had to do with the boundary markers of the covenant, it had to do with circumcision.

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Now, if you want to go and see, because of what we see here, then we see the importance of not allowing anything to divide the

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Church. And therefore, we should not allow issues of ethnicity to divide the

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Church. That would sound like what I've been saying, and keep getting in trouble for saying, during the

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MLK thing, I was in Colossians 3, saying there is no Scythian, there is no

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Greek, there is no bond, free, we spent a lot of time on that.

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And then we've gone to Ephesians 4, and we've talked about what that says, and I get into a lot of trouble for that.

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But some people say, well, couldn't we make that application? Well, we could make an application in the sense that there is one

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Church, and that we should stand against anything that would introduce distinctions into that Church.

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Yes, definitely. And was it not central to the argument that I have made over the course of this year, which

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I have not heard anyone else making. I didn't get this from anybody. There is one justification, there is one righteousness that is imputed to any believer in Jesus Christ.

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It does not matter what your ethnicity is. And that's how any one of us stands before God, is that one righteousness of Jesus Christ.

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And so the unity of the body is found in the cross itself, and in the righteousness that is imputed to the believer in Jesus Christ.

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No question about it. But, unfortunately, in our day today, and in the social justice movement, racial justice is not being defined biblically, because that phrase never appears.

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There's God's justice, there's everything about justice, but racial justice has all sorts of imported meanings that the wild -eyed progressives, they're open about it.

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Did you hear Brandon Robertson? You know, equality, and everybody's, you know, it's communism.

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He was saying Jesus was an early communist type thing. So it's economic equality, everybody has the same.

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You don't have rich and poor anymore, everybody's muddling along in the middle, which historically means everybody's muddling along, like in Venezuela, with nothing.

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That's how that works, but anyway. But this phrase, racial justice, when you ask for definitions of it, what you'll get is, well,

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I have a certain view of what's happening in the United States, not necessarily what's happening in the

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United Kingdom, or in Canada, or in South America, or in...

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You know, I have yet to meet, I'm sure there are some, but I have yet to meet one of these racial justice warriors who has a clue as to what's going on in India.

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One of the most populous nations on the earth. There's a tremendous amount of racial injustice and tension in India.

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They don't seem to care. Doesn't seem to matter. In fact, in comparison to India, what we have in the

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United States is nothing. Nothing in comparison to that. Nothing. There are all sorts of places around the world where racial tension, ethnic tension, far beyond anything we have here.

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Far beyond anything. But if you listen to a lot of these folks, this is the worst place in the world. I mean, people are getting gunned down every day.

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Well, people are getting gunned down every day. In Chicago, but they don't want to talk about that part. That's a different thing.

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No, no, no. It doesn't fit the meme. It doesn't fit the narrative. We've got to move on. I tweeted to one of the leaders of this movement and asked a question.

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I asked him, how many unarmed black men have been killed by police in 2018?

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Because I didn't know. And I figured, if you're a leader, you know all about this.

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He didn't know. Had no idea. The narrative seems to be one every day.

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Or a dozen every day. And you only hear about the one. Looked it up. Twelve.

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Now, you don't, when it's, all that says is unarmed. That doesn't mean unarmed, non -aggressive, unarmed, not fighting.

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We don't know. But there are twelve. I think there were twenty -some -odd whites. And then you compare that with the murder rate, black on black, in Chicago.

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And it's one thousandth? Something like that? Tiny percentage.

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Tiny percentage. Then you compare the 18 million black babies that have been boarded since Roe v.

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Wade. And my calculator doesn't go that far down in the percentage stuff. But you've got to have the narrative.

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God have the narrative. Racial justice was an entailment of the gospel.

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That's what he said. Not that we could make an application. Okay, so you go, alright, we knew about that.

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That was last time. Well, he made the statement,

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I think on, I think it was, maybe on Monday. That he was going to write an article about it. And guess where it shows up but on the

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Woke Gospel Coalition. Website. Might as well call it the

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Woke Gospel Coalition website these days. And so somebody asked me to review it.

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So I read through it. I said, that's what I expected. What he does is he dials it back.

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He walks it back. And instead of saying what the tweet said, what he says is defensible.

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And that is, well, you can make the application that because, you know, Paul's very concerned about the church dividing over this issue of justification, how to impersonate his right and the boundary markers of circumcision and stuff like that.

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That means he has an emphasis upon the unity of the church. And therefore we should have an emphasis upon the unity of the church and shouldn't allow ethnicity to divide it.

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And it's like, duh, that's what we've all been saying. But that's not what the tweet said. The tweet said

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Paul had that in mind. And Paul didn't have that in mind.

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He didn't. And no effort is made to say otherwise. And so you walk it back.

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Then you defend what you didn't say successfully. And then having successfully defended the new position, which is 20 yards behind the position that you had actually taken initially, which is now a bombed -out crater, because it was indefensible.

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This happens every day on the Internet, believe me. Then you do have the

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Jew -Gentile unity is a tension point with all the weight of Isaiah's prophetic word on Israel as a light to the nations and all the eschatological vision of Revelation 5 -9 at stake.

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Again, when you hear folks quoting from Revelation 5, realize that they are attempting to take a text that beautifully teaches the extensive nature of the work of Christ that the elect are drawn from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, and take the emphasis off of the universality of the work of Christ and shift it down onto ethnicities and skin colors.

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As if, well, see, they're going to continue into heaven, see? And so that means we're going to have all this stuff going on in heaven.

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And I just go, you really think that's what John was emphasizing? Sorry, but when

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I look at Revelation 4 -5, the emphasis is not on all the tribes, tongues, peoples, and nations.

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It's not on the 24 elders. It's not on the living creatures. It's not on the throng that are worshiping.

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It's not on the angels and the cherubim and the seraphim. It's on He who sits on the throne and the

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Lamb! And everything else is secondary! My goodness, how can that be missed?

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I don't get it. I don't understand it. It just seems like a duh thing at that point.

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But then, what he wants to do is to say, well,

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I'm not the only one who came up with this. John Piper preached an entire sermon on racial harmony from Galatians 2 -11 -16.

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Well, yeah, Piper's been tooting the racial reconciliation horn for a very, very long time and has been responded to for that, but that doesn't change the exegesis of Galatians 2.

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That just means he's not the only one who's been willing to do this. And Jared gets really snarky in this part.

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Anyway, he says, but at least I'm in good company. Southern Seminary's Jarvis Williams cited

38:53

Galatians 2 -11 following on the issue of race in the church for nine marks. Nothing surprising about that either.

38:59

Jarvis Williams is a strong advocate of the social justice movement and has, in the past, utilized very strong terms of critical race theory.

39:11

Seemingly, now that he has tenure at Southern, doesn't use that terminology as much. I don't know. I have recently gotten through his book.

39:18

Haven't had time to write up any of my thoughts on it, but at least I took the time to read it. And then you have

39:24

New Orleans Baptist Seminary's Aaron Washington made the direct connection as well, as well as Timothy Cho.

39:31

So what this means is social justice warriors will misuse Galatians 2 like I did.

39:37

That's nice. That's not a response to the reality of what the text is actually about.

39:44

What is concerning here is that this is such an

39:52

Americanized thing. If you try to transfer this to where there are other kinds of racial tensions, not only might it be poison in those places, depending upon what the source of those ethnic controversies are, but it misses the reality that this text addresses to us.

40:13

It assigns to us the very solution to any racial and ethnic problem, which was the fact that there is no ethnicity at the

40:23

Lord's table. If you want to call that colorblind, call it colorblind. It has nothing to do with not recognizing the good things in a person's history.

40:32

I've said that a thousand times before, and if you keep calling colorblind, saying that, then you're just lying and you just don't want to make any progress.

40:38

That's just all there is to it. But the reality is, at the table of the Lord, there is no ethnicity.

40:48

Period. That's the solution to all of that warfare going on in the world.

40:56

And the irony is the very people who want to be talking about how to have peace are the ones sacrificing what the real solution is.

41:04

There's the problem. 877 -753 -3341.

41:12

I'll be honest, one of these, I'm just sitting here going, I don't know that I'm going to have anything meaningful to say to the second line at all.

41:22

I don't know how it's relevant to apologetics, but we'll do our best. All right, let's talk to Mark in Houston.

41:32

Hi, Mark. Hey, Dr. White. I appreciate you taking my call. Was mine the one that's a problem question?

41:39

No, no, no, it isn't. I've learned a ton listening to you.

41:46

Before, I never heard of a textual variant or any of that kind of stuff, and I appreciate you going in and opening up the original text, and your insight, your openness, giving us really the whole counsel, behind the whole counsel.

41:59

And I had some kind of a thing that happened in Sunday school the other day was where we were going through Job and Job 2 -9, where Job's wife tells him, you know, why don't you go ahead and just curse

42:12

God and die? And the Sunday school teacher said, you know, in the original Hebrew, the word curse that they use actually means bless.

42:22

And, of course, I had never heard that, and most people didn't, and I just wondered if that's – he gave an answer, and I was wondering if you'd tell me what your perspective is on that, because I don't think from what he told me it was a technical or a textual variant as much as more of a – what did you call it, the guy that writes them down?

42:45

A scribal issue or a translational issue? Yeah, the scribe didn't want to write curse.

42:51

He wanted to write bless instead. And I don't know if that's legitimate or not. I am looking – he's correct.

43:06

The Hebrew is barach. I am looking at just scanning through the

43:22

Septuagint, which, unfortunately – there it is.

43:36

Go on. This is very strange. It looks like there is a massively major difference in the

43:51

Greek Septuagint, and I don't have time to figure out where in the – I mean, this thing's huge. I mean, verse 9 in the

43:59

Hebrew is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 – is 9 words long.

44:06

Verse 9 in the Septuagint is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 – 13 lines.

44:19

So the Septuagint version of that particular verse is huge.

44:29

Probably 40, 50 words in that one section. That would indicate that there is clearly some sort of interruption in the transmission of the text at that particular point in time.

44:50

Now, the problem is that barach, barakha specifically, can mean either curse or bless, depending on what form it's in and what context it's in.

45:14

Oh, okay. So the ESV renders it as curse, probably because it's a

45:22

PL imperative. I haven't looked up the root to be able to go through its various uses, but it's one of two things.

45:34

Either it is interpretational in light of the fact that it's barach elohim wamuth, so something

45:49

God and I. I suppose you could come up with either bless or curse, but blessing normally wouldn't result in your death.

45:58

So I would assume that that is why it's rendered in that way.

46:05

The rest of it would be to look at Job 2 .9

46:11

and figure out what on earth. Because I'm sitting here seeing sons and daughters, and it just goes off into all sorts of wild stuff that I've never seen before.

46:25

So that would be fascinating to find out what in the world happened at Job 2 .9.

46:31

But probably the reason for most translations doing it that way is not because they're looking at the

46:37

Septuagint at all, but it's because of the range of possibilities for blessing and cursing in light of its use there.

46:46

Well, I'll tell you who nailed it was a little old grandmother in the class who sounded just like my grandmother, probably like yours, who never said a negative word about anybody.

46:59

But when she could say, bless that so -and -so, you knew that bless meant something other than bless, if you know what

47:07

I'm saying. Bless you in your ministry. Yeah, we have that particular phrase. Rich and I have that one.

47:14

So, bless you in your ministry. Right. Yeah. And I think she pretty much hit it.

47:20

We're looking at context and everything, but I didn't know if that had to be or not. Yeah, I ain't arguing with Granny.

47:27

No, no. I thought, how cool is it that, you know, even though you can look down and dig into the word, whatever, if that really is the case that, let's say, the guy that wrote it, the scribe that wrote it, knew what he meant to say and everybody knew what he meant to say without him actually writing the word.

47:46

You know what I mean? Well, you know, I don't see, just looking here, I don't see, but I'm not looking at the

47:54

BHS. And I don't see my,

48:02

I need to get my paper. Oh, I actually do have one here.

48:10

Now, unfortunately, I have to get out the, yeah, I got to get out the grandpa glasses to be able to try to find this real quick.

48:31

Where'd it go? Because it's not in the same canonical order as you have in, where'd you go, where'd you go?

48:46

Well, I was going to try to look at the textual sources to try to see if there is anything listed there, because what

48:55

I have up on my screen is just the text. But maybe

49:00

I'll, when I get a chance to look at that, I'll maybe make a comment about that. It is interesting.

49:07

I had not seen that, but I'm not sure what the teacher was saying about the scribe not wanting to write.

49:17

Curse God was like something they wouldn't, I don't know where he got that from, you know, but maybe it was a commentary that said, you know, maybe the scribes were not, you know, because of piety or whatnot, they didn't want to write curse

49:34

God down on the paper, you know. Yeah, I hear you.

49:41

I'm not so sure about that. I'm not so sure about that. Okay, Job, I went ahead and got to it here.

49:48

Two, nine, and a, and this is, this is called, folks, this is called live webcasting.

50:00

This is above and beyond, man. I tell you. Yeah, I just, actually the only reference in Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia is to a comparison to 1 .5

50:13

for some reason. And I don't see, yeah,

50:21

I don't see anything in regards to any kind of a variant there. So, hmm, there you go.

50:30

That strikes me, that strikes me as interesting, mainly because if the

50:37

Septuagint has basically an entire paragraph, where the

50:42

Hebrew has a short verse, there normally is some leftover in variation within the

50:52

Hebrew text as well, but it doesn't seem to be there, so. So I found that Septuagint in the last sentence, it says something like, say something against God and die, which they understood.

51:03

Obviously, that's what they were picking up, but from whatever the Hebrew was speaking. Yeah, but to speak a certain word, aiskurion, against the

51:13

Lord, and tel yuatai, to come to your end. Yeah, but that's, in mine, my

51:21

Septuagint, that's marked as 9E, and so there's a 9D, and a 9C, and a 9B, and a 9A.

51:30

And, you know, something about hope and your salvation, and there's just, there's all sorts of stuff there.

51:37

So that, I'll have to look that up sometime, but now everybody in the audience is falling asleep, so we need to move on.

51:43

Yeah, well, let me work my way back to the shallow end, and I'll let you go. Okay, all right.

51:49

All right, thanks for your call, Mark. I sure appreciate it. All right, thanks. All right, God bless. Bye -bye. All right, we dug into that one.

51:56

Let's talk to Joshua in Orlando. Joshua, I'm really looking forward to finding out what the apologetic aspect of this is.

52:07

Oh, I'm the culprit. I was hoping it wasn't me. Yeah, you're the culprit. I was going, what? What is that?

52:12

Happy Anniversary, by the way. Yeah, right, there you go. It was Acts 18.

52:19

Me and my buddy are going through the Book of Acts, just chapter by chapter, and I was just looking at verse 18 of chapter 18 when he says that in Sancria he had cut his hair, assuming for, like, a

52:32

Nazarite vow or whatever, and I guess just trying to relate it apologetically would just, you know, maybe

52:38

I have an understanding of, in the New Testament, Christ is the fulfillment, right?

52:44

He's the substance and the things of the old, you know, we're a shadow, right, of the things to come.

52:50

And so I was just kind of wondering, you know, was that just for, you know, for the first, not just for the first century, but you know what

52:59

I mean, as far as keeping vows and having things of the

53:05

Old Testament that we can still do today as far as feasts and festivals and even

53:11

Nazarite, you know, vows, just kind of interesting. I just kind of wanted your thought on it. Yeah, well, that's what

53:18

I was afraid you were going to talk about. I almost sent Rich a message, lose

53:23

Joshua, or ask Joshua to come up with something else to ask about.

53:30

There's a lot of discussion of that very thing, and entire papers have been written on Paul and vows.

53:38

And I've read some in the past, but it's been a while, so I'm not going to say that I'm up on the current literature on the specific issue of Paul and vows.

53:46

But there would seem to be, first of all, something relevant to the reality of, by the way,

53:59

I'm willing to go to 3 .30 if the calls are, if we get enough calls. So if you want to go ahead and unbusy that line and we can take some more calls, 877 -753 -3341.

54:11

Not everyone has to be like Joshua, but anyway, just pick on him while we're at it.

54:18

My son's named Joshua, so I pick on all Joshuas. But anyway, obviously people who promote a sort of a

54:29

Messianic Jewish type thing would point to something like this as a C. You know, you can do vows and things like that as a

54:37

Jewish person. And I would think that A .D.

54:45

70 is sort of the cutoff on that. The apostles met in the temple, they prayed in the temple, all that kind of stuff.

54:56

But they didn't and couldn't, and eventually, even the connection that was born with the synagogue, because of the fact that, you know, we think about it, the early

55:08

Christians, where were the only scriptures that they had available to them? They would be in the synagogues.

55:15

It's not like they were running around with a new King James or something like that. Or King James, sorry, that didn't mean to offend anyone.

55:24

But eventually, there is a division. Now, some would argue there never should have been one.

55:29

Well, I don't know how there couldn't have been one, especially after A .D. 70. But that seems to come to an end.

55:36

You couldn't do those kinds of things after A .D. 70. You certainly could not go to the synagogue to do that kind of thing.

55:45

And so, is this just Paul exercising his freedom as a

55:51

Jewish person to demonstrate that he has not rejected that which is good?

55:58

Because when I think of a Nazirite vow, I don't see that as some type of a, you know, there's not,

56:05

I cannot imagine Paul offering sacrifice for sin, participating in Yom Kippur or something like that.

56:14

But something to where you have vowed to God to do something, and there's not a sacrifice in regards to sin or something like that.

56:25

Well, did he feel that there was a freedom to be able to do that? Possibly.

56:30

I would hate to argue, try to argue against that in light of this text and a couple of other things that the apostle did.

56:40

Most people would simply say, well, you know, this is a transitionary period. And some would say that Paul was inconsistent.

56:48

I would think by this point in Paul's ministry, he would have been already had faced, after Acts chapter 15, he's already, you know, he's already had to face these issues.

57:02

And hence would have a firm grasp of these things. But, you know, some people will make that argument that there is evolution in Paul's, you know, you'll pick that up in a lot of New Testament commentaries and stuff like that.

57:13

That's why I warn people. If they're going to go out and look it up, they might go, ah, you know, what's that all about? But, yeah, it's a good catch, and it's a tough area, and it's a tough question.

57:24

That's why I don't like it. Yeah, I'm sorry. It was either that or coherence -based genealogical methods. Well, but see,

57:30

I love that. So, you know, that's cool. You know, but I should have figured if you're in Orlando, you know, people in Florida are just weird.

57:38

That's just how it is. It's because it's flat. I'm sorry. That's why

57:43

I can't live in Dallas. I can't live in Florida. If you don't have mountains, then you never know which way you're facing.

57:49

So I just can't do it. I can't do it. I appreciate you, Dr. White. Thank you for taking my call. Thanks, Josh. All right.

57:54

Have a good one. Yes, sir. Have a good one. I'm seeing that other people are hanging up because they don't want to be abused by, ah, he's mean.

58:03

He's picking on Joshua. Oh, you've been shooting people? Oh, okay.

58:09

All right. So are you just trying to show off for the guy over there? I'm mocking you.

58:18

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, okay. All right.

58:23

So Rich is saying that the reason we're down to only two callers right now, there's two lines open, is because he doesn't want me to be mean to him on the air.

58:34

So he's saying you really need to have like an apologetically oriented question. Okay, so that's what's going on here.

58:40

So I wanted to know what my favorite early church father was.

58:50

That's not apologetic, but I would have answered it. Who is my favorite early church father?

58:56

Well, that's very interesting.

59:02

I've never been asked that before. I don't have a single one.

59:07

I suppose if I had to pick one out, I would say

59:13

Athanasius really stands tall. I still need to get back with Nick Needham.

59:21

I still want to get Nick on for us to sort of reprise what we did a few weeks ago in Inverness, where he and I did a tag team presentation on Cyprian.

59:32

And on the flight over, I read an entire book on Cyprian. How would you like it if you were about to tag team lecture to a class with someone like Nick Needham, who's written this multi -volume set on church history?

59:47

So I needed to be up to speed. So we're going to have to have him on.

59:53

But Cyprian is pretty fascinating, but we just don't have all that much from him. And he reminded me a little bit of Keith Green.

01:00:03

Keith Green was only a Christian for seven years, Cyprian for 12. That's fast.

01:00:14

Most of us have had more time in the Lord than that, and we still wouldn't want to be judged harshly by people who come after us.

01:00:19

And yet we very easily judge people who had much less time in the Lord than we did very harshly if they lived before us.

01:00:25

So I'd probably say Athanasius. Because we have an unknown writer, which we called

01:00:34

Moth Ateis. He wrote the little fragment to Diognetius in the second century. And he's got that awesome stuff about the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.

01:00:42

But you don't even know what the guy's actual name was, and you have fragments of one work. I mean, what can you do with that?

01:00:49

So anyway, there you go. Let's move on here and talk with John.

01:00:55

Hi, John. Hi, Dr. White. How are you? Doing good. I got a question about...

01:01:05

I was listening to Apologia in the episode after you and Jeff were on with Kwaku, and they were kind of reviewing that.

01:01:16

And when the Confessions talk about God ordaining all things that come to pass, it seemed like Jeff was really defining that specifically.

01:01:29

And I've heard you talk about God restraining evil, as God's hand of restraint and Him lifting

01:01:36

His hand of restraint. And they went through the passage with the Assyrians... Isaiah 10?

01:01:43

Yeah. And then you have the synergists or traditionalists that want to say that it's

01:01:52

God putting that desire for evil in men's hearts. So I'm kind of...

01:02:00

I mean, obviously, I think that's a caricature or whatever, I don't know if that's the right term, but...

01:02:06

What are your responses to how Jeff was putting that? Well, I didn't get a chance to do that.

01:02:15

I'm unaware of any differences between myself and Jeff. In fact,

01:02:21

I was just invited yesterday and confirmed that I'll do it. I'll be preaching at Apologia.

01:02:28

It's Apologia on the Sundays when I preach there. It's Apologia. We had to work that out.

01:02:35

I'm a Greek professor. I can't. I'm sorry. So they've been kind.

01:02:43

And by the way, I heard that just today they had one of the big guns on.

01:02:48

So keep an eye out. Okay. Who's actually sitting outside the window right now.

01:02:53

But anyway, which everyone's gonna be upset if we ever mention who it was. Why didn't you have him on at that time?

01:03:00

Got another microphone over there, but he just wanted to... I think he wanted to...

01:03:06

He's bored with me. He watches me all the time. And so he's bored with me. He realizes the real brains in the outfit is

01:03:13

Rich. And so he wants to see... He wants to watch Rich feeding me my answers and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

01:03:21

Because that's what's really... I'm not looking down here at a call screening thing. It's Rich typing all the answers that I'm supposed to say.

01:03:27

He can type very, very fast. So I'm just being honest for everybody. I'm not sure that's what it is. So I'm unaware of any...

01:03:34

So I'm supposed to be... I'll be preaching November 11th at Apologia in the afternoon there.

01:03:40

So anyway, I don't see any differences. But I'm not aware of any.

01:03:47

I would sort of guess that I've had some formative element in Jeff's theology along those lines.

01:03:57

And so I clearly see that God has the right to restrain evil.

01:04:07

And he also has the right to, for example, send false prophets to deceive. So as to cause unrighteous kings to go out to battle and get themselves killed.

01:04:20

So as to judge a nation. Isaiah 10 is one of the go -to texts for me as well.

01:04:28

Very plainly utilizes the king of Assyria. So as to bring about the fulfillment of the blessings and cursings from Deuteronomy 28 and 29 upon the people of Israel.

01:04:41

But then judges those that he used based upon the intentions of their hearts.

01:04:48

And so if that's the case, then I could see that in the outworking of God's sovereign decree, this impacts everything within time.

01:05:04

And all of this stuff about restraining evil or bringing judgment or anything else is a temporally based perspective.

01:05:12

We're looking downward. We're stuck in time. We're looking upward at how that divine decree is interfacing with time.

01:05:22

And so we always have to keep in mind that, you know, God can speak to either perspective.

01:05:28

He can speak to the overarching purpose that is his and he's going to, you know, that's

01:05:33

Psalm 33. That's Psalm 135, 6. That's some of the texts in Isaiah where he's simply accomplishing his purpose and he will do so.

01:05:43

And we are just like dust on the scales. We go where he says to go.

01:05:49

But then when you see discussions of the intentions of the heart, the basis of judgment, things like that, that's more addressing the how that ends up interfacing with our lives and how we see things.

01:06:06

And as I've said many times, the synergist, the person who doesn't believe in divine decree, they end up having to really flatten everything out into two dimensions rather than allowing for the full depth of the revelation of the word of God that we have in Scripture.

01:06:29

So when a synergist says, you know, so God, you know, implants the desire, the specific desire for evil in man's heart and, you know, then he's responsible for evil.

01:06:45

I mean, obviously we don't believe that he is. Well, see, I'm not sure what you mean by synergist there.

01:06:51

I've not heard many synergists saying that. I mean, most synergists don't have an explanation as to why someone does evil because they don't have a good anthropology and they believe in libertarian free will.

01:07:07

So they don't seem to have a really good answer for that. For me, given total depravity, the better question is why does man ever do good?

01:07:15

And so God is extending grace to curb evil and to limit the expression thereof to the point of what he has decreed is proper for judgment upon mankind and yet the display of his mercy and grace as he is going to wrap all things up to the praise of his glorious grace,

01:07:42

Ephesians 1 .6. I don't know how that's going to happen, but he's promised he can do it and I accept that promise.

01:07:50

So God doesn't have to make somebody do evil. They already want to do it.

01:07:56

He's restraining that. I mean, I've said many times if God stopped restraining evil, not one of us could leave our house and we probably wouldn't survive long in it either because of the chaos that would result from that.

01:08:12

So yeah, I suppose if you start with the idea that man's basically good and he just messes up once in a while, then you don't have any basis for understanding any of this.

01:08:23

But that's not what the scripture says. That's not the description of man. So I listened to one particular traditionalist who, in his critique of Calvinism, says that the implication of that is that God basically makes people do evil to achieve his purposes.

01:08:56

God has decreed the existence of evil and he will accomplish his purposes, but that assumes that man's some type of morally good individual who wants to do something else and God forces him to do something evil.

01:09:11

That's the whole point. That's not what is happening. He does not have to implant in someone's heart some evil thought to make them go after that.

01:09:22

That's already there. He's restraining that and curbing that and using that to the ultimate good of his people and to his final glorification.

01:09:32

And that's what they don't like. That's the fundamental thing. That's the breaking point.

01:09:38

Can God do with his creation as he sees fit to bring about his own glory? And there's certainly something in the

01:09:45

Bill of Rights that says that that's wrong. So that's sort of how it works. The Bill of Rights, by the way, it's an

01:09:52

American thing. So I just didn't know. That was for the studio audience that might not understand what the

01:09:58

Bill of Rights is. All right. Thanks, John. All right. Thank you very much. God bless.

01:10:04

Bye -bye. All right. I think we'll probably do well with these three calls. That's probably going to take us enough time here.

01:10:11

Oh, great. What I wasn't going to talk about today. Thanks a lot. You know,

01:10:17

David, I don't like you anymore and I like Joshua. I just want you to know that right off the bat. Okay? How's it going,

01:10:23

Mr. White? Well, fine. That's great. So my question has to do with Psalms 82.

01:10:33

That would be Psalm 82. Yes. Psalm 82. No, that's just my pet peeve.

01:10:42

You don't sing hymns 82. You sing hymn 82. So it's Psalm 82.

01:10:48

Psalm 82, yeah. I wish all Bible programs knew that too, but not all Bible programs get that right either.

01:10:54

So anyway. Okay. So I was watching a YouTube video from this guy named

01:11:01

Michael Heiser. Heiser. Heiser, there you go. And he was -

01:11:09

So you're not aware of the fact that I, on the last program, I was talking about this. No, I'm not.

01:11:15

Ah, okay. I missed the last program. Okay. Then I'm no longer mad at you.

01:11:22

I just feel sorry for you. Okay. Well, that's good. That's better, I guess. So yeah, he was saying that the word

01:11:32

God there referred to, not to the judges, as you say, but to dead spirits, and it was just really weird, and it was kind of close to polytheism.

01:11:48

And so I just wanted to know how you respond to that. Well, I'm really disappointed,

01:11:54

Rich, because Rich should have offered to take your email address and sent you the link to the lengthy article that I wrote on this in 2010, eight years ago.

01:12:08

Okay. Because that's going to be a whole lot easier. And the problem is that because Dr.

01:12:20

Heiser put out a video just a matter of days ago criticizing me about this subject,

01:12:28

I hesitate to address it right now simply because it gets everything going, and it's going to distract me from what

01:12:34

I need to be doing right now. And nothing's really changed. I mean, my objections to his position have not changed.

01:12:42

They're the same. But I did just obtain a published article that he did on this subject, and what

01:12:54

I'm going to do is I'm going to respond to it because it was written after I posted that, and yet it does not interact with my interpretation of Psalm 82.

01:13:07

And in fact, if it does, if it is, it's misrepresenting it, and it misses the key strongest element of the argument that he admits his position is a minority position, which is interesting.

01:13:22

He's criticizing the majority position, which would be mine, majority position of scholarship, and yet it makes it sound like I'm the odd man out, which is sort of interesting.

01:13:32

But anyway, I am going to get around to it. But for now, what

01:13:37

I would recommend you do is go to the website and put in H -E -I -S -E -R,

01:13:45

Heiser, in the web search for aomin .org, and you'll see we need to rename that blog post.

01:13:53

I think we do, because Carmen Massa is not relevant anymore. I'm going to jump in here because that particular one doesn't have

01:14:01

Dr. Heiser's name in the title, so it won't pop on the search. It only searches titles?

01:14:08

Yes. If you go to the very bottom of the webpage, aomin .org, and you'll find the search engine there, and put in Psalm, not

01:14:18

Psalms, Psalm 82, this will come up, that article will come up.

01:14:23

I thought that search engine searched the text of articles. Not very well.

01:14:29

It does include them, but they're way down the list in its priority of the algorithm. Okay. All right.

01:14:36

Well, there you go, David. Look that up, and then keep listening to the program. And I do intend—I've got a lot of stuff going on right now, but I do intend to interact with his published article from,

01:14:52

I think it was 2012, because what

01:14:58

I saw of it—maybe he dealt with it later on, but what I saw of it in its presentation of the position he doesn't take did not include what is, for me, the key element, the key exegetical element of Jesus' argument against the

01:15:13

Jews in John 10, and that is his identification of the Jews as false judges.

01:15:19

That, to me—because he's going, why would the Jews respond the way they did if he was just simply saying, hey, we can all be called gods?

01:15:26

No, that misses it. And I explained that very plainly in the article you'll find at aleman .org

01:15:34

if you look up Psalm 82. Okay? Okay. All right. Thank you, Mr. Walker. You're most welcome.

01:15:41

Bye -bye. All right. Yeah, I had that on the list, and I'm like, haven't had time to—I've got the article, want to go through it.

01:15:51

I don't have any interest in this war right now. I've got too many wars as it is, and I'm just not interested.

01:16:03

Okay. Two more. Let's talk to Brad. Hi, Brad. Hey, Dr.

01:16:09

White. How are you? I heard you're pretty good. I heard you're coming up on 35 years. Yep.

01:16:15

35 -year anniversary. Congratulations. That's awesome. 35 years for Alamoga Ministries. We were incorporated in October of 1983.

01:16:24

Yep. That's awesome. I had big glasses and had lots of hair. I've seen some of the videos.

01:16:32

You look like my dad. So my question is—so

01:16:39

I'm a senior at K -State. After I graduate, I'm planning on going to study at Southern Seminary in the fall.

01:16:45

At what seminary? At Southern Seminary. Okay. So one of the things

01:16:51

I'm really wanting to do in ministry is to evangelize and witness to the

01:16:58

Hispanic community in rural areas. There's a huge disconnect from most of the churches in rural communities and the

01:17:06

Hispanic community, and I don't think it has really anything to do with racism. I mean, you do find that, but not really in the church.

01:17:16

I think more so it's just cultural differences, and then there's language barriers, too.

01:17:23

But I did an internship a couple summers ago, and I have a Spanish Bible. I study

01:17:29

Spanish. It's my minor. I love learning the language, and I was going through painstakingly obvious attempts at trying to engage with them in an apologetic discussion or any kind of conversation with them, and they just were not interested.

01:17:44

They shied away from it like they were scared to engage in anything like that.

01:17:50

So I know you've dealt a lot with cultures different from our own, and so I was wondering if you could give just general tips in engaging with different cultures, especially where Roman Catholicism is involved.

01:18:10

Most of them, they identify as Roman Catholic, but they never go to Mass.

01:18:16

I mean, Sunday mornings, they're recovering from hangovers. Yeah, it's very cultural. Yeah, it's highly cultural, but it's still very strong in the sense of attachment.

01:18:30

This is one of the great tragedies of Roman Catholicism in the Hispanic community, is they see the abuses.

01:18:39

They know of the abusive priests. It was not many decades ago that the priest in the

01:18:46

Hispanic community was God. He had all power. And not only was he the means to God, but once they recognize the corruption that exists there, then there is a turning away from not so much the morals and things like that, though that comes along with it, but there isn't an interest in, you know,

01:19:16

I can't abandon the church, but I don't really believe the church is true, and I don't believe anybody else has anything anyway.

01:19:24

And for others, it's cultural, so you're asking me to abandon what identifies my culture and things like that.

01:19:34

There can be lots of impediments in the way because of how deeply saturated that culture has been within Roman Catholicism down through the past couple of hundred years here in the

01:19:49

United States. And yet, you're talking to an image bearer, and that's always the connecting point.

01:19:58

The connecting point to any unbeliever is that this person has made the image of God, and therefore, there are universal realities of the conscience.

01:20:08

There are universal realities of what it means to be a human being that we can focus in on, recognizing that they think they've heard it all before, even if they don't go to Mass, they've gone enough to know

01:20:28

Jesus and repentance and penance and stuff like that, but it really hasn't been impressed upon them that every beat of their heart, every breath of their mouth comes from Christ, that they are dependent upon him for everything.

01:20:46

The reality of an empty tomb, he truly is a risen Lord, he truly is coming again, he truly is going to judge the earth in righteousness, and certainly, they're not going to have any meaningful concept of grace and holiness.

01:21:04

The holiness aspect gets corrupted by the, well, go do ten

01:21:09

Hail Marys and God somehow will be satisfied with that. So that corrupts their concept of holiness. And then grace, the idea of grace that actually saves, and grace that actually accomplishes something, because grace is just something that's parceled out in the sacraments of the

01:21:24

Church. Finding a way to exalt those things and to communicate those things cross -culturally within the

01:21:34

Hispanic community that has been impacted and still is impacted by Roman Catholicism, that seems to me to be key.

01:21:44

That's certainly, I haven't talked about much of this in the past, but when I was in high school, so I was a little bit younger than you are right now, when

01:21:52

I was in high school, I did a lot of missions work amongst

01:21:58

Hispanic people in the inner cities in Phoenix. And I don't talk about it because people, oh, you're just trying to, you know, so I don't deal with it, but did.

01:22:08

And even back then, when my knowledge of Roman Catholicism, not anything what it is today, even then, that was the thing that you were focused upon, was instead of an institutionalized, formalized, externalized, you know, sign of the dotted line type thing, you were really emphasizing the personal aspect of repentance and holiness and what grace is and things like that.

01:22:33

And we did see that have a very positive impact. You should emphasize what?

01:22:40

The personal aspect of what holiness is, because they have a warped view of that.

01:22:48

The confessional gives you the idea that, oh, I can go do 10

01:22:53

Hail Marys and somehow I'm back being right with God. Your 10 Hail Marys mean nothing. Holiness is real and grace is real, and getting it past the theoretical into the real, that's the challenge in that context.

01:23:09

But you always have the Holy Spirit, that's the most important thing. Okay. Right. So, kind of,

01:23:16

I don't want to take too much of your time, because I know you've still got another caller, but so, I know historically, the

01:23:23

Catholic Church, they, you know, or Roman Catholics, they didn't really read Scripture, they had it read to them by the

01:23:31

Church. Historically, yeah. Yeah. Is that still the case today? Well, it sort of depends on, you know, if you're talking to people who don't go to Mass, yes, there are, there has been a, somewhat of a renaissance of Catholic apologetics with the internet groups like Catholic Answers and St.

01:23:53

Joseph Communication, and so you will encounter Hispanic Roman Catholics who really know their stuff, so don't be fooled.

01:24:02

You need to know the full orb of stuff. You may, nine and a half out of ten that you encounter may have no clue, but when you encounter the one, you're going to want to know your stuff.

01:24:14

So, yeah. They're out there, but they are in the minority. All right. I appreciate it,

01:24:19

Dr. Wright. Okay, thanks, Brent. Congratulations on 35 years. Thank you. Thank you very much. God bless. You bet. Bye -bye.

01:24:26

You know, he hasn't been alive for 35 years, and that definitely makes me feel old.

01:24:36

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that, because he said I looked, he said I looked like his dad back when

01:24:41

I had the hair and the, so now I look like his grandfather, I imagine. Yeah, so, but I am a grandfather, so that's, hi to Katie and Waylon and Clementine and Jenny.

01:24:54

Okay, let's finish off with Chris. Hi, Chris. Hey, brother.

01:25:00

Can you hear me okay? I can. All right. So, I have a question. I'm going to try to articulate it as best

01:25:06

I can and make it as quick as possible, because I know we're running out of time, but it's about general revelation, and it's kind of a two -part question, because part of it has to do with immediate versus immediate, and Well, you know, thankfully,

01:25:20

I have an expert on this subject in the other room, so if I get stumped, I'm just going to hope you can type all this in, because,

01:25:28

I mean, I was listening to this guy talking about all this on a long bike ride about a month and a half ago, and so, if I, you know,

01:25:38

I'll bring in the big guns if we need to here. So, anyway. Okay, well, it is kind of maybe a unique question, so we'll see how it goes, but just to set up the question,

01:25:51

I know that general revelation can tell us a few things. One, that God exists, in particular the biblical

01:25:57

God. Two, that he has a righteous standard. And three, that we fall short of it. And I don't know if you had anything else to add, but my question is about number one.

01:26:07

Well, in Romans 1, specifically what it said is that we know God exists, and that we are to honor him as God, and be thankful to him.

01:26:17

That's the specific stuff that's brought out by Paul, because he then says, even though we know that, we don't do these things.

01:26:24

So that's specifically, yes. Right. In the righteous standard,

01:26:30

I'm getting more from Romans 2, how his law is written on our hearts in that sense.

01:26:38

And my question would be about that first point, that we can know, in particular, the biblical

01:26:43

God. And my question is, so it is kind of two -part.

01:26:48

One, what would you say we can know about God? And by that, I mean mainly his attributes.

01:26:55

And two, which of that would you say is immediate knowledge of God? And because I'm part of the

01:27:02

Vantillian camp, I believe in immediate, inescapable knowledge of God. But I don't know if that necessarily precludes immediate knowledge of God.

01:27:11

And even I've heard Bonson define, he would say, technically, when we're looking at creation, we recognize it as God because we know the

01:27:21

God of creation. But he said, technically, when we're looking at the creation, it is mediated through our senses.

01:27:28

So it's kind of semantics, how you understand mediated. But my question is, what can we know about God immediately, and what can we know about God immediately by looking at his creation?

01:27:45

And I could give you an example or two if you want. I'll tell you what. Chris, you get a bonus here, okay?

01:27:54

Because I've been saying all day that there's a fella been sitting out watching all this, but now he can't resist.

01:28:01

So we've given him riches. So I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but I'm going to ask

01:28:09

Saiten Bruggenkate to comment here.

01:28:15

So Sai, you've been sitting out there laughing at me all this time. The reason I didn't want to be on camera is because I can't keep up with you.

01:28:22

That was the only reason, I'd embarrass myself. Yeah, and I actually,

01:28:28

I do know the way Sai defines media knowledge. He would say it doesn't require a reasoning process.

01:28:34

When you recognize your wife, you know it immediately. You don't have to point out different characteristics of her.

01:28:42

But yeah, so even with his definition of knowledge, I'm still wondering, I mean his definition of revelation,

01:28:49

I'm still wondering, what can we know about God immediately, and what can we know immediately? Well, this is something actually might be interesting for Dr.

01:28:57

White, because in the King James Version, it says that they know the Godhead. So King James only will say that they know the triune nature of God.

01:29:05

But I'd just go as far, I think that it's not clearly stated in Scripture, but I will go as far to say that they have immediate knowledge, sufficient knowledge of God to condemn them.

01:29:17

So I would go, as far as his characteristics, I think there are people that differ on that. And I don't think that they know the specific characteristics of God.

01:29:26

I think there's people who profess Christianity who are messed up on that, who by the grace of God are still saved.

01:29:32

But I would say that everybody who walks this earth has immediate, sufficient knowledge of God to condemn them.

01:29:38

But I don't think it's laid out in Scripture what those specifics are. Yeah, you know, thank you for that.

01:29:45

Let me just, before we go on, my pastor, before I came down here, he said that he missed you when you were on vacation.

01:29:51

So I want to give a shout out to Steve Richardson, because he really loves your show. When he was on vacation, it was

01:29:58

I was on vacation. When I was on vacation. I don't remember when I've had a vacation. But Scotland.

01:30:05

Oh, in Scotland. Yeah, I was in, I was just up there. Yeah, Scotland. Yeah. Anyway, remind me to remind me, by the way,

01:30:13

I proved to my family that my Scottish accent is actually very good because I recorded our taxi driver who drove us out to Loch Ness while he was talking.

01:30:26

And I said to my family, I said, I'll accept your apologies when I get home. And nobody said a word because they couldn't figure out almost anything he was saying.

01:30:35

So if you can even understand anything I say, I'm doing pretty good. Anyway, that had nothing to do with poor

01:30:41

Chris. Let me give you the answer as I understand it. What can be known? Well, I think that is directly addressed in Romans 120.

01:30:51

I mean, this is the best I can give you because it says, The invisible things of him, which is normally translated like in the

01:31:01

New American Standard, it's invisible attributes, but it's the it's the it's literally just the invisible things of him from the creation of the world by the things that are made are understood, have been clearly seen.

01:31:15

So there there is because of the way man has been made and understanding and a clear seeing of certain aspects of God's character that are part of his his invisible things.

01:31:31

And then there is a definition of this, and that is his eternal power.

01:31:39

And his Thyatis, which as Cy pointed out, is translated

01:31:46

Godhead. But the reality is that there is a difference between Thyat and Theat in its meaning.

01:31:54

Thyatis, which is used in Colossians 2 .9 and translated Godhead by the King James, which is one of the errors of the

01:32:01

King James. Thyatis means the very essence and being of God, that which makes God, God.

01:32:07

Thyatis is an aspect of the attributes of God.

01:32:15

So his eternal power, his divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are unapologetus.

01:32:24

They are without a rational excuse. They are without a defense. They may make a defense.

01:32:30

It does not say that they do not have arguments, but it is not a true apologetic. So I have always said that the content of that divine revelation is not

01:32:41

Trinitarian theology because the Trinity is revealed between the Old and New Testaments. It is in the incarnation of the

01:32:48

Son, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and Romans 1 would have been true before that as well as after that.

01:32:54

So, you know, the gospel and the stars stuff, that kind of thing, I don't buy.

01:33:01

But as Psy said, it is sufficient to render them condemned because they do not give thanks.

01:33:11

Verse 21, for even though they knew God, non -test does not mean may have known, it means knowing.

01:33:18

For even though knowing God, they did not glorify, doxadzo, and eucharisteo, they did not give thanks.

01:33:26

So they are held accountable to glorify and to give thanks. Now, does that mean absolute monotheism over against tenotheism?

01:33:36

Does that mean omnipresence versus some other theory? I don't think that that's answering those things.

01:33:43

What it does answer is that they are unapologetus. They have sufficient knowledge of God's attributes to glorify him as God and to give thanks.

01:33:55

Going beyond that, I think, is where, again, I've told this story many times before, one of the differences between two of the greatest

01:34:04

Christian theologians of the past 500 years, Calvin and Edwards, is that Calvin specifically said, we need to make an end of speaking where God makes an end of speaking.

01:34:17

So he did not want to get into the speculative aspect of things. Edwards did, and that's where he got himself in trouble, especially with Adam.

01:34:26

Yeah, I wasn't sure how far we could really go on that, and you did touch on kind of where I was going, like with God as the

01:34:35

Trinity, and I could have swore I heard Bonson say that we could know that God was triune, and maybe he just said we know the triune

01:34:43

God, or maybe that he was uniplural. Have you ever heard Bonson? Si is shaking his head.

01:34:51

I haven't heard him say that. It doesn't mean anything. I might have missed it, or it may have been, like in the debate, he would refer to the triune

01:34:58

God as the one true God. So, in other words, he will only defend the triune God, because we can only defend what scripture has revealed to us.

01:35:06

I can't defend some basic concept of a deity, because that's irrational. The triune

01:35:11

God is defensible. So maybe he was saying along that lines, not saying that Romans 1 actually says that, that that's the extent of that revelation.

01:35:21

That would be a bit much, yeah. I could be remembering incorrectly. If I find it,

01:35:26

I'll let Si know. We're friends and everything on Facebook, and I just want to say hi to Si, too.

01:35:32

He actually Skyped into my study group about a month or two ago. We were going through Jason Lyle's Ultimate Proof, and we actually just got done watching

01:35:41

How to Answer the Pool, and Si came in right after that. It was pretty cool. Yeah, there you go. So, Chris, what do you think?

01:35:48

Should I try somehow to work it out sometime to where Si and me and Jason are speaking at the same place, and after we get done, we can go out and go stargazing with Jason Lyle?

01:36:00

Wouldn't that be pretty awesome? I think that would be. I think that would be amazing. The conversation would be cool.

01:36:05

Or I think you should team up and debate, because I've always wanted to see you and Jason Lyle and Si do a debate, like a team debate.

01:36:14

That would be fun. That would be a lot of fun. You've got to make it happen. Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's got to be on the opposing side, because he's got to correspond with Jason Lyle, so that would be good.

01:36:25

All right. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks. Appreciate it. God bless. God bless. All right.

01:36:31

There you go. We went a little over our time, but who cares? I'm not on a network. I don't have to worry about that type of thing.

01:36:38

And the voice somehow managed to get through. Thanks to the guest appearance.

01:36:45

Voice only, but he is actually just outside the window there. And I was on today with Jeff Durbin and the guys over at Apologia.

01:36:55

Si, Tim, Brooke, and Kate is here. So appreciate that. I had a thing there, but he's like, no, no, no.

01:37:01

Just want to watch. Just want to learn. Okay, fine. Whatever you say. So thanks for watching the program today,

01:37:06

Lord Willen. We'll be back probably on, I think, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week is what we're going to have to do.