Certainty, the Cost of Abandoning the Created Order, A Dismissal of Presup, & Aquinas on John 10:30

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. It's late on a Thursday. Get used to it, because I think starting next week, we're going to be on the road again, just for one week, and then home for a week, about 10 days or so, and then three weeks on the road, and then like almost two weeks home, and then over a month on the road.

We'll be going back to G3, so if you've been thinking about coming to the Museum of the Bible, I've never been to the Museum of the Bible, so that'll be interesting for me, but looking forward to just thinking about the Bible, G3, and that will be in September, and then on the way, we're going to be speaking in a number of different places.

For example, in Pennsylvania, Chris Arnzen, his pastor's luncheon, be speaking there, a number of the churches that he's, well, Chris knows everybody, so churches in that area, which will be interesting for me, because I spent six years in the Harrisburg, Mechanicsburg, Shiremanstown area.

I've told the story before that in 1993, I drove back there. Well, actually, I landed, I flew to Philadelphia, and I rented a car, and I drove. Now, remember, I left when I was 11. We moved in 1974 to the Phoenix area.

I've been here ever since. Basically makes me an equivalent of a native, but anyway, and so I had some very formative years in Pennsylvania. I am so thankful for the public education system that existed half a century ago, because I was taught how to read and to read well, and that gave me the foundation for everything else, to be perfectly honest with you, and when I drove into Mechanicsburg, Camp Hill, the Harrisburg area, having not been there in, was that 29 years at that point?

I think it's about 29 years. I never made a wrong turn. I drove to every house we lived in without ever making a wrong turn. I drove to the McDonald's we'd always eat at without making a wrong turn, the schools that I went to, the church that I went to.

It was really weird. I mean, how is that even possible? Out here in Arizona, it wouldn't be because there'd be so much development going on, but it's not nearly as much development back east in that way, and so anyway, I'm definitely going to be trying to get back to Gettysburg.

I'm going to try to visit a couple other battlefield sites since I'm going to be in the area, but I'll be speaking at some churches back there. We'll try to have some details as we get a little closer to that period of time.

These days, it's always, there's a lot of, there are movements within Reformed evangelicalism that borrow from the left's playbook, including cancel culture, and I'm just simply aware of the fact that there are more and more places that if they advertise I'm going to be speaking or something like that, they're going to get more and more resistance, more and more pushback.

Yeah, you don't really want to. He's, nah, you know, he used to be okay, but not anymore type stuff. Won't get overly specific, but that's how it's working, and so you want to let everybody know, but at the same time, you don't want the local church to have to put up with all the garbage that gets thrown around, and it's just the day we live in.

That's always been an issue, but it's much more so one now, but anyways, we're going to be on the road, and a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. So Ultraman will be back in the corner because, you know, Chris Honholtz gave that to me, and, you know, Chris is getting up there.

Now, I hope he realizes that if I hadn't been sending him elf stuff and retweeting his stuff, you know, he's gotten some opportunities because, you know, we were showing him the love. He a few times wasn't certain that all that elf stuff really was love, but now I think maybe in hindsight, he's going.

So anyways, we'll be on the road, and pray for Traveling Mercy's safety. It's a lot of driving, but we're really looking forward to getting a chance to get out there, and again, as I mentioned in the last program, um, Redemption Hills Church in Denver.

I should have had my calendar program up here because I didn't give you the details on this. No, I do not want to install the update. Why does that always work that way? It happens to you too, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. That will be the 12th and 13th of August. August 12th, 13th, Redemption Hills Church in the Denver area, and I'm looking forward to that because, well, I always look forward to speaking with Jason Lyle.

Jason Lyle is the smartest man I've ever met. He's also one of the most humble men I've ever met. He's a complete nerd and geek just like me, um, and so we get along real well along those lines as well, and, um, so it's always fun to speak with Jason, but he's going to do his fractals presentation.

I've wanted to see that live. Uh, I'm going to, I'm going to bring my, uh, I'll bring my iPad with some of my best fractals on it, and I'll just sort of jump up and go, look, look, I've been doing this forever, and he'll say, sit down, white, and we'll go from there.

So anyway, uh, that's, uh, that's how that's, uh, all gonna, gonna work out. So, um, and at least for the moment, it looks like the gas supply will be fairly, um, uh, consistent, abundant, and maybe a little bit cheaper than it would have been last month.

Uh, still a whole lot more has been in the past, but there you go. Whether, whether the thin skin of civilization will, will, will rupture, uh, I, I don't know. Uh, you, you really do have to do have to wonder, uh, half an hour ago, Canon press, uh, retweeted a tweet from right wing watch.

Now I remember when right wing watch, uh, started and, uh, you know, it's spun off into this crazy leftist loony bin stuff, but, um, they have a clip from Doug Wilson and, uh, here's, here's what right wing watch says.

Christian nationalism isn't enough for radical right wing pastor, Douglas Wilson, quote, many, how many of these Christian nations are there supposed to be? No set number is given, but the simple answer is all of them.

All the nations of man are to be brought into submission to Christ end quote. Now it's amazing. That's, that's not what I was raised with. Um, I was raised with the idea of, of personal evangelism only.

That's not supposed to, the weird thing is looking back on it. I never asked the question. Well, if you really did that, wouldn't that have a longterm impact on things? I mean, and you know, if you have a really pessimistic eschatology, no, uh, because it's, there's always, you know, again, from my perspective, as I have had my shift in eschatology, I was reasoning from the bottom going up rather than from the top going down and led to all sorts of weirdness.

But anyway, what Doug is saying really catches a lot of people, you know, what, what do you mean? All the nations of man are to be brought into submission to Christ. Well, if Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, if part of the proclamation is that as risen Lord, all authority has been given to him in heaven and earth, that authority is not just a spiritual authority that is basically limited to a small percentage of humanity, but in fact is the great hope for all of humanity.

I mean, just, just think, just think about the hopelessness of the world today, the hopelessness of secularism. What is the answer? Well, we have that answer, but it's amazing that for a lot of folks, yeah, but you know, it's not really for all nations.

It's, you know, no, it is. And blessed is a nation whose God is Yahweh. Sin is reproach to any nation. And so if you don't want your nation experiencing reproach before the Holy God, then there's only one message that's going to change hearts and minds, huh?

And that's really scary to secularists because they want to control hearts and minds. They want to determine what hearts and minds can believe and think. But the problem is they've got no power outside of simple blunt force trauma.

That's all they've got. They can't change hearts. They can't change minds. They can't, they can't change a heart of stone and a heart of flesh. They can't cause people to love one another. They can't cause people to sacrifice for one another.

They've got nothing other than direct coercion. That's all they got. Secularism is a horrific dead end. And so you can understand why Right Wing Watch, which is a radical left-wing organization, thinks that Doug's statement that all the nations of man are to be brought into submission to Christ, what else could there be?

You're either in submission to Christ or you're in rebellion against Christ. It's the myth of neutrality again. The idea that, well, you know, we don't have to really put it in that stark contrast. You can just, they can just be a nation.

They're not really, you know, in rebellion or submission. It's one of the two. It's one of the two, folks. That's all there is to it. And these days you're seeing more and more and more exactly what that means.

You will celebrate the idea that this eight-year-old boy is actually a girl. You will celebrate it or we will ruin you. There you go. That's what these folks are about. So, yeah, Canon Press is going, their quotation when they quote-tweet the Right Wing Watch is, Kiss the son lest he be angry and you perish in the way.

When his wrath is kindled but a little blessed are they that put their trust in him. Psalm 2 .2. Now it's the King James, but at least they did not say Psalms 2 .12. I'm sorry, 2 .12. Okay. We won't go there.

I saw a tweet on the 5th of July. So this is a while ago. Mont MacDonald, Pastor Mont M .C. It costs you absolutely nothing to call him Elliot Page. Nothing. A bunch of you saw this and you've probably already forgotten about it.

But I clipped that. It costs you absolutely nothing to call him Elliot Page. Now, if you don't know who this is talking about, there was a beautiful young woman named Ellen Page who was an actress. Very, very beautiful young lady.

But lacking a proper Home Foundation and Worldview Foundation, she, along with so many others, was sucked into the deception and the destructiveness of the transgender insanity and has destroyed her body.

The term that even big tech demands that you use is has transitioned. There isn't such thing. There isn't such thing. Even if we could find a way, and we haven't done it yet, and if we ever do, it'll probably be massively destructive, cancer causing, life ending, and cost who knows how much money to literally change the DNA structure of every cell in your body.

Let's say we found a way to do the Star Trek thing, you know, the transporter thing, and then found a way to, I'm sure Geordi La Forge could explain it or something, use that to reprogram before you reassemble and change the genetic structure so that a genetic male all of a sudden is changed into a genetic female.

Even if we did that, it wouldn't change anything. I mean, the structures would already exist. They would start to malfunction and become diseased and all sorts of stuff like that. There's no such thing as transitioning.

And the amazing thing is, people will tell you, you can't talk about stuff like this because people who transition are even more likely to commit suicide. So we can't say this. If something makes people more likely to commit suicide, that probably means that there's something wrong with their worldview.

There's something wrong with how they're looking at the world to begin with. And the weakness is in them, not what's outside of them. The disease, the evil, the rebellion, it's in them, not with someone pointing that out.

Same thing with the Berkeley law professor who can't answer direct questions but can accuse you of being violent if you ask those questions. Same mindset that's going on there. But you have these, quote unquote, progressive ministers.

It costs you absolutely nothing to call him Elliot Page. Actually, it costs you everything. We've discussed this before. We've played various people making the argument or read from their books making the argument that this is just simply pronoun generosity, compassion, whatever terms you want to use.

No, calling her, that beautiful young woman, Elliot Page, honoring the destruction of her body, honoring the destruction of perfectly healthy organs, honoring self-deception, honoring the injection of hormones into the body that everybody knows is not going to result in a longer life, that has tremendous ramifications as far as cancer and heart disease and everything else down the road.

That's not honoring someone. That's not loving someone. That costs everything. That costs everything. So God made Ellen Page a woman and it costs you your honesty as a human being. This is, keep going back to it, but remember the Dalrymple quote that I've read for you probably so many times you haven't memorized now.

But it was where he was saying that the rhetoric of the Soviet Union was not meant to convince anybody. Everybody knew they were lying. It was meant to force you to lie along with them and a nation of people that can be forced to lie is easier to control than people who will not submit and state the lies.

And so these quote-unquote progressive pastors are just a part of the part of that process. Yeah, it costs you absolutely everything to call her Elliot Page. That's the reality in regard, in answer to Mont MacDonald, whoever in the world that is.

And then I had this one come up and I've got it on the screen here. And this is the same one we put up before, Rich. Someone named Dante Stewart. Now, I don't know who Dante Stewart is. And the only reason I saw this is because someone's used a screenshot and then somebody retweeted that or whatever.

One of the reasons I would never have seen it otherwise is once I saw this and decided that's something to deal with, I went and I tried to follow some links. And the first thing you see is this tweet is not available or something like that.

And so you use the incognito window and it comes up and you go, I wonder why it's not available. And then you start doing a search. And lo and behold, it's not long before you discover that you're blocked.

And I am blocked by Dante Stewart. Do I know who Dante Stewart is? No. Now, does he know who I am? Probably not. So how do I get blocked? Well, there are these apps, there are these services, evidently, that you can go, I want to block everybody who follows this person.

And if you're in that person's follow list, you just get blocked automatically. So a lot of times people say, I've never even interacted with this person. How did this happen? And the answer is they're just using one of these services.

They're using the stereotype thing. I don't want to even have to risk the possibility of hearing from someone who has this mindset. And so it's just blanket, you know, banning. He wrote, the greatest threat to Christianity is not secularity.

I would assume that he means secularism, the secular worldview, which is the greatest denial of all of the Christian faith, of everything that Jesus stood for. It is certainty. When you are so convinced that you are right, then you will create all types of enemies and cut yourself off from all the ways God is active in another person's experience.

I did respond to this. I took the time, we'll go ahead and bring it down. I took the time to go to the scriptures and read from Luke chapter one. When Luke began his account, he said, in as much as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught, the exact truth about the things that you have been taught.

And there are two terms, epinos, which can be translated certainty, and asphalion, which can be translated as safety, assurance, certainty. So Luke is saying to Theophilus that the reason that I'm writing this to you is so that you may have certainty.

The very thing that we're told is the greatest danger to Christianity is the thing that Luke says, I want to provide by giving you this accurate account of what happened, not only in the life of Jesus, but then in volume two, called Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, the foundation beginning of the church.

These, we are told, are a great danger to us all. You just can't make these things up. So Dante Stewart, someone you probably would not benefit from listening a whole lot to. So then I got this brief clip that I, again, Twitter's useful.

Twitter's useful. You follow a couple hundred people. There are certain people out there that post, you know, there's some people who put a lot of time into posting stuff, both preacher clips and bad preacher clips and stuff like that.

And sometimes you can't even keep up with all the stuff that they crank out. And I don't remember who posted this, but you've got capturing Christianity, uh, interviewing, uh, inspiring philosophy. Inspiring philosophy is being interviewed by capturing Christianity since we're using, as Spider-Man said that we're using our made up names.

Now this is toward the end of the program. I'll be honest with you. This gentleman looks bored out of his mind. He's sitting there sort of slouched down in a white t-shirt and, uh, it's toward the end of the program.

So let's say that his answer to this question may have reflected the fact that he was pretty much done. It could have been a long day. Maybe he was tired. There's, there's lots of options, I suppose, but it's one of those things where you've got these super chat things in YouTube, I guess, where you can make money and someone does a super chat.

And so if they do a super chat and they get a question asked, I've done a lot of interviews where questions came in via super chats and stuff like that. My recollection, I've never gotten a red thin scent from anything called a super chat or anything else.

We've always paid the phone bills so people could call in to us. And we were doing that kind of thing. Um, but anyway, I listened to this and so someone named Torio had done a 499 euro super chat, uh, hey, at IP inspiring philosophy.

I just want to know what are your thoughts on presuppositionalism or presuppositional apologetics? Well, that looked interesting. And so I listened in and that's what we're going to do. We're going to, we're going to listen in and let's, uh, let's, let's hear how it went from.

Torio. I just wanted to know what are your thoughts on presuppositionalism or presuppositional.

Apologetics? I mean, it's, it's a waste of time. It doesn't, I have seen it very, I've seen it. It does not work on a lot of atheists, especially in today's culture, maybe one or two. Maybe there are some testimonies somewhere where it worked on somebody, but I've seen very few.

And if you talk to atheists or you listen to some of their hangouts, which I have, uh, um, I've listened to some of their hangouts where they're just doing stuff on YouTube. Presuppositional apologetics is a joke to them.

It is hilarious. They love laughing about it. Do you really want to play their game? Okay. It does not work. They do not take it seriously. Get out of it. Let's just move on. You may be convinced by it personally, but if you're apologetic needs to actually be affecting the culture and presuppositional apologetics does not, I'm sorry if that hurts, get on with it.

There you have it. Okay. Last question. So, um, I, that is just a complete and utter dismissal, right? But I think what was useful is hearing the why. So what did he say? Um, well, it doesn't work. Um, you might have one or two testimonies, but it doesn't work.

And I've hung out in atheist chat rooms and in the atheist chat rooms, they laugh at it. And so it, it just, it just doesn't work. So just give it up. Now, atheists laugh at everything. Atheists laugh at the resurrection.

Atheists laugh at God's law. They laugh at the cross. They laugh at the Bible, laugh at everything. So if, if atheist laughing points is our, our goal, they laugh at the gospel. They laugh at everything in Christianity.

So I find it really really shallow, incredibly shallow, um, to have that as your standard that, well, atheists laugh at it. Atheists, I've heard atheists laugh at everything. Um, did y 'all see the debate we did with, with the atheists in Salt Lake City?

Um, yeah. Okay. There, there, there you go there. They, they can laugh at anything. So that's, that's irrelevant because atheists will laugh at him and they'll laugh at his evidentialism. They'll laugh at his arguments.

So atheist laughter is not relevant to the real issue, which should be, well, what is consistent with the biblical revelation of who man is, who God is, what the gospel is, and what the purpose of apologetics is in the first place.

And this where theology matters. This is where theology matters because if you're going to say, just, just give it up, just get out, just forget it. It's, it's worthless. It should be pretty simple for someone who's going to make that kind of sweeping generalized statement to provide something more in the way of sound reasoning.

There was no sound reasoning. That, that was the thing is, is that, okay, you, you think you're inspiring philosophy. Okay. Then why didn't you give any meaningful response to that question? That was childish.

It was surface level. Now, did I get the feeling that he had read any of this stuff? No, I didn't get that feeling. Or if he did with any, any level of concern, any, any level of listening, maybe, maybe there's something, maybe there's some stuff in here that is worth, is worth thinking about.

You know, I mean, there's been a lot of people who've come to those conclusions. I mean, I, you know, I just opened up to page 102. So then the Christian apologist whose position requires him to hold the Christian theism is really true and as such must be taken as a presupposition, which alone makes the acquisition of knowledge in any field intelligible, must join his friend in his hopeless gyrations so as to point out to him that his efforts are always in vain.

We cannot prove the existence of beams underneath the floor if by proof we mean that they must be ascertainable in the way that we can see the chairs and tables in the room. But the very idea of a floor as the sport of tables and chairs requires the idea of beams that are underneath.

This is interesting. I, I went from one yellow marker that you can tell I did this many, many years ago, 30 some odd years ago or more to another marker that actually stand, stood the, the, the test of time.

It's interesting how that, actually the paper on this one's pretty good in comparison. So anyway, I, I, we have so many, quote unquote, former presupposition. This guy doesn't claim to be a former presuppositions, obviously, but there are so many others that have decided that now that they're classical theists, that they're not presuppositionalists anymore.

And when I hear them giving their reasons why I go, well, I'm glad you've moved there because you never was, you never were one to begin with. He didn't understand what the issues actually were, but has he, has he read something like this?

Van Til's apologetic by Monson readings and analysis. Maybe, maybe frames work. Uh, maybe all offense, uh, covenantal apologetics work. Maybe that, no, I didn't get that feeling because, you know, these guys that are the big philosophers, um, you would think that it would be really, really easy to do something more than that kind of simplistic dismissal or the angry stuff that you get from young Christian intellectuals, new Christian intellectuals, whatever they think they are.

Um, you know, the, these, these just brilliant young guys that you never seen them out doing much, but they're, they're big in Facebook and things like that. When you, when someone asks a question like was asked in that video clip, um, minimally, you would think that a Christian response, let's say, let's say you reject presuppositionalism would be a, to accurately define what presuppositionalism is.

If, if you want, if you want your audience to hear what you're saying and to be benefited by it and to, um, to really learn why they should avoid this, you're going to want to define it. I don't hear people doing anything other than repeating accusations as if they're definitions.

He didn't even try to define it. You notice that there was, there was not a word of definition. So you don't even know what he's rejecting or, and you also don't even know if he knows what he's rejecting, which I have no reason to believe he does.

But there was no, no, not even an attempt to go, well, first we need to understand that, you know, the issue here is starting points, starting points for epistemology, starting points for how we know what we know.

And key to all of this is the assertion by the presuppositionalists that if you live in God's universe, uh, then he being the creator becomes the ground of knowledge and that you cannot give a rational defense of how you know in God's world that does not begin with him as the creator, because he didn't make mankind as the center point of the universe.

He is the center point of the universe. It is by knowing him that we can know truth. And further, the presuppositionalist is likewise saying that there is a fundamental problem with mankind. That is mankind suppresses the knowledge of God.

The knowledge of God gets through, but it is suppressed by man. And man must be faced with his own existential situation that he is a creature who is suppressing the knowledge of his creator. And the presuppositionalist is saying, if you, by your very form of argumentation, grant to the unbeliever, grant to the rebel sinner, the validity of his rebellion, then you are handing to him the methodology of his own self-defense.

He is, in fact, a creature that has climbed up onto the throne of the creator and is demanding to be treated as if he is the judge. You're actually saying to him, yeah, you go ahead and you judge, and I'll give you more and more truth for you to suppress.

Because you're already suppressing, you already know God exists. You're already suppressing that, I'm going to give you more stuff to suppress. And maybe someday you'll just get tired of doing it. That's what we're doing when we grant to the rebel sinner his autonomy.

And when you do apologetics as if this person is morally neutral, or as if this person is not suppressing the knowledge of God, or as if this person has sufficient ground in and of himself while rebelling against God to make sense of God's world, there you go.

What are you going to do? So it goes back to what your theology is. If your theology of mankind is such that man, you embrace some kind of Arminian concept of prevenient grace. And reformed writers talk about prevenient grace, they never mean it the same way the Arminians do.

I was reading Warfield just yesterday, and he was contrasting the semi-Pelagianism of Rome versus the Reformation. And he was talking about prevenient grace coming from God in the reformed system. And what he meant by that was the grace that prepares, the grace that sustains the elect until the point in time when their regeneration is decreed by God, etc., etc.

He was not talking about the kind of prevenient grace that the Wesley Arminian has, which sort of brings everybody back to a moral neutral point and then leaves it up to them so their free will can do what their free will is going to do.

So there's different usages of that term. You need to keep that in mind as you're seeing it being used. Anyway, theology matters. And so if you're a Wesley Arminian, if you're any type of Synergist, I have seen Synergists fall into presuppositionalism, but they can't stay there forever.

It's inconsistent. Because they recognize, if they're out there doing this, they recognize the impact of sin. They recognize the fallenness of man. They recognize that these people are suppressing the knowledge of God.

And so they see the truthfulness of what Romans 1 says, and that we have to deal with that. And that you can't just hand over the ground and pretend you have a neutral moral ground that you can stand on with an unbeliever.

There is no neutral moral ground. There is no neutrality in God's creation. Everything says made by God. Everything. The connection point is not neutral ground. It's the fact they're made in the image of God, and they're suppressing that knowledge.

That's where the connection is. And that's where you can trust the Holy Spirit to then utilize that message that is yours. So none of this comes out in this kind of simplistic dismissal. And you can just see the reason is the underlying theology is so flat and unbiblical.

It doesn't work. What do you mean it doesn't work? Define work for me. And I can guarantee you, give the guy enough time and he'll define work in a very thoroughly synergistic fashion. So as we're seeing, we've been through a period of time when it was cool to be a presuppositionalist.

Those days are over. Now we're going to find out who has ever actually understood why this is a consistent system. We're going to find out who they are, and all the other folks who were just trying to be cool are going to go on to demonstrate that they never really understood what the primary issues were in the first place.

And that's not a bad thing. It's really not. It's not a bad thing. There's benefit to those things. Okay. I do have enough time to get to the... On Twitter, I mentioned some of the things I wanted to get to.

And in a second tweet, I'd said, well, maybe we'll get to talk a little bit about this as well. But when we go back to the issue of Thomas Aquinas and the sudden onset of Thomistic theology in what were once some of our more stalwart conservative seminaries.

And yes, I am saying to those people who have the authority to interact with and speak to the programs and graduate programs and things like that in conservative evangelical seminaries, I think you have every reason to question when, for example...

Oh, I forgot to bring that up. I'm sorry. And it's highly unlikely that I'll be able to just pop this up. But when you see... But I think I already mentioned this. On... At some point, I know I did in Twitter, but there was a announcement in this new classical theology program of a scholarship for students to submit papers to compete for a scholarship.

And the criterion was to imitate as closely as possible the form of argumentation of Thomas Aquinas. And I pointed out that it was only a few months ago. We had so many people saying, it doesn't have anything to do with Thomas.

Thomas doesn't really matter. We just want to be truly confessional and so on and so forth. And yet now you're... How can you write a paper in defense of a position and make it sound like Aquinas without spending a lot of time in Aquinas?

Well, yeah, that's exactly what you have to be doing. But once again, we point out that in discussions that have been going on since December now, it's pretty much just one side that actually quotes from Aquinas and goes, well, isn't that interesting?

And so you may recall just a matter of weeks ago, barely a month ago, probably, there was a fair amount of discussion about John chapter 10, verse 30, and Jesus's statement, I and the Father, we are one.

And we looked carefully at that and we pointed out the number of the verb and the relationship. Remember, we put it up on the big board in the other room and we walked through it. But what I didn't include in that presentation was Aquinas' commentary.

And I'd like to provide that to you because I think it's fascinating and maybe will help all of us in being balanced because look, you can read Aquinas' commentaries and you will find him saying all sorts of true things.

And I said a couple of programs ago, you don't have to turn Aquinas into the worst demon that's ever lived. You don't have to say that everything he ever said was wrong. And people try to make it sound like that's what you're doing.

You just don't read any of Thomas Aquinas because he was Roman Catholic. Remember this guy? Straw man running all over the place. He's very, very active right now. He's lost a little weight because he's just running around so much.

Anyway, you don't have to do any of that stuff. You'll find good things. I honestly have never, ever seen anything in Thomas Aquinas that was biblically true that I hadn't seen expressed better someplace else.

So all this stuff, greatest theologian that ever lived. I'm just like, okay, if you say so. But then you run into stuff like this and let me just read it for you. Well, let's back up the truck. I want you to remember what Jesus is saying.

Verse 27, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give eternal life to them and they will never perish. And no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all.

And no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand. I and the father, we are one. Now in verse 29, my father which has given to me is greater than all. The word them, given them to me is in italics.

Keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that Aquinas is not dealing with the Bible in its original languages. He is dealing with Latin Vulgate. That is what he knows. And by his point in history, and this would continue into the days of the Reformation so that became a real relevant issue and would become a big issue of the Counter-Reformation.

Rome established the text of the Latin Vulgate as the text of the church. That's not the case today. Rome has recognized the supremacy of the original languages. But you could be lit up on fire and executed for hundreds of years in Roman Catholic Europe for daring to question the absolute supremacy of the Latin Vulgate.

So things have changed. But Aquinas is dealing with the Vulgate. Here's what he says. He now proves what he had said above about the dignity of his sheep, namely that no one can snatch them from his hand.

His reason is this. No one can snatch what is in the hand of my father. But the father's hand and mine are the same. Therefore, no one can snatch what is in my hand. Concerning this, he does three things.

First, he gives the minor premise by showing that the father had communicated divinity to him. Saying, what my father has given to me through an eternal generation is greater than all. For as the father has life in himself, so he has granted the son to have life in himself, John 5 .26.

It is greater than any power he has given him authority to execute judgment because he is the son of man, 5 .27. It is greater than any reverence and honor God had bestowed on him the name which at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, Philippians 2 .19.