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Good afternoon, Long Island, New York, Connecticut, and those listening internationally over the internet. This is Chris Arnsen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, and I'm very, very excited about today's broadcast.
In fact, today begins day number one of the long-awaited radio debate between Harold Camping and Dr. James R. White on the topic, Has the Church Age Ended? Harold Camping, for those of you who don't know, if you don't know, I'd be very sorry if you're surprised, he is the founder and president of Family Radio and host of the Open Forum broadcast.
Dr. James R. White is co-founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. This is day number one of a two-day debate, and we hope that you tune in. And first of all, it is my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Mr. Harold Camping.
Welcome to the program, Mr. Camping. Thank you. I'm glad to have this opportunity to have this discussion with Dr. White.
Yes, I am as well, and I really appreciate your graciousness and willingness to be involved in this two-day debate on Iron Sharpens Iron. And before I introduce Dr. White, briefly tell us something about Family Radio and how many stations you have across the world.
Oh, I really have no idea.
I don't keep track of that. We do try to blanket the world, however, either by our own stations or by buying time on shortwave stations or we have a couple of huge AM stations in China and so on. But we try to cover every country with the gospel.
And of course, nowadays, our big subject is that we feel we have been called to warn people that we're right near the very end of time and people have to prepare for judgment. And it's so wonderful that it's still a time of salvation and our people can still cry out and plead with God for salvation.
Well, thank you so much for being a part of this two-day broadcast. And I'd like to introduce now my dear friend, Dr. James R. White, the co-founder and director of Alpha Omega Ministries. And I'm so glad that you also took time out of your very, very busy schedule to be a part of this two-day debate.
Well, it's good to be with you, Chris. And I hope that everyone is aided by the discussion we're going to have, especially on how you handle the Bible, how you interpret the Bible, what the Bible teaches about important subjects, about who God is, what the church is, things like that.
We are not hearing Dr. White, incidentally, here at all.
Okay. We're going to make sure that our engineers work on that and rectify that situation. By the way, Dr. White, tell us briefly about Alpha Omega Ministries while you, if you can, and while we're having adjustments made so Mr. Campion can hear your part of the discussion today.
Well, Alpha Omega Ministries is a Christian apologetics and ministry based here in Phoenix, Arizona. And we've been active for a long time now. And, in fact, I'll be going to Australia in just a matter of a couple of weeks.
We're trying to do something here to try to help out. But I'll be going to Australia to do some debate. I'm dealing a lot with Muslims these days. And so we're keeping very busy.
Dr. White's fading in and out. But it might interest our listeners to know that there was a time when Family Radio was airing a program called Conference Echoes that featured the sermons of pastors all over the world.
And on at least several occasions, I submitted tapes of Dr. White, which were gladly accepted and aired on Family Radio. But we are looking forward to this two-day debate that these men have both agreed to participate in.
And we hope that the sound levels and everything are corrected very soon. Just to give our participants here today some ground rules, we're going to start with five-minute intervals where each, starting with Mr. Campion, will have five minutes to give an opening presentation.
And then from that afterward, from then on, each will have three minutes to either respond to the last statement or to introduce a new statement, or if they so choose, to ask a question of the other participant.
So the first two intervals will be each five minutes long. And from then on, it will be three minutes each. I'd like to get a check, a sound check here. Can both of my participants, Mr. Campion and James White, hear one another now?
We hear you perfectly now. Yeah, everything just cleared up, Mr. Campion. I hear you perfectly. You sound like you're sitting next to me. Am I hearing Dr. White?
Yes, that was Dr. White. Yeah, this is James. I hear you great, yeah. Okay. Well, it seems like God has answered prayer here. All right. Well, Mr. Campion, we apologize for flustering everyone here, but if you could, for five minutes, give an opening presentation as to your view on the church age.
We're not going to have any more commercials until the very end of the program. All right.
Shall I begin then? Yes. Yeah, well, you know, it was exactly eight years and a few days ago, I had a group of people having dinner with me. I was celebrating my 80th birthday, and at that time, I made a very solemn and sad statement.
I said to them, you know, this is the saddest birthday I've ever had. It was my 80th birthday, but it was sad. I said it's sad beyond measure because I've really been studying the Bible very, very carefully, and I've become totally convinced that the Bible is teaching that we have come to the end of the church era, just like it was back in 33 A .D., the era of national Israel representing the kingdom of God, which had gone on for 14...
They had been a representative ever since they left Egypt, 1 ,480 years approximately before, and now after 1 ,955 years, beginning in A .D. 33, when God shifted from national Israel representing the kingdom of God to the church age, now he has ended with this.
It was a dreadfully, dreadfully terrible thing to think about because I felt like I had been... I was betraying all of the churches. I had been a church member all of my life. For the 40 years previous, I had constantly told people to try to find a church that is reasonably true to the word of God because this was God's plan.
But the fact is that I, recognizing the truth of the Bible, I had to teach the way I was teaching. Well, in fact, during these last few years, God has been opening my eyes and eyes of others to a great many truths that we had never seen before.
And I wondered about that, but just a couple of years ago, I was reading Daniel chapter 12. Daniel 12. And there, God made a very, very profound statement. And incidentally, the Bible, every word in the Bible comes from the mouth of God.
It is a very holy ground. We tremble before the word of God. We don't ever look at it casually or we should never look at it as something to bandy about or whatever. It is something that is very serious business.
And Daniel had been receiving a great amount of information concerning the very end of time. And it made him very ill because of the sorrowful nature of it. And then we read in Daniel chapter 12, verse 4.
Remember, this is God speaking anything in a Bible. In the original languages, it is God speaking. But now, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book. Then even to the time of the end, many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.
And then it says further in verse 9. And he said, Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Well, you know, what is happening here? And then when we go to Revelation chapter 5, we find that where God talks about the book being open.
And as we see the book being open, we begin to understand why it's now that we're at the time of the end. And the Bible shows us when that book, when the seven seals had been taken off. We can know that date very exactly.
And when now that the book has been open, and that, of course, is the Bible. Now, the Bible has never had anything added to it in the last 1900 years. But God has a lot of ways in which he has has hidden truth until he wants it to be known.
And this is what God is doing now. He is giving us a lot of information that he has never given before. And it's all coming out of the Bible.
Okay, yeah, that's the five minutes, Mr. Camping. And by the way, before James starts, I want to let you both know, if you're free to stay till 430, we can carry this on for the full hour now that everything's working.
I certainly am. That's up to Mr. Camping. Great. Well, if you can stay on till 430, that'd be great, Mr. Camping, because we could have this full hour of broadcast for day number one. Sure, we can do that.
Yeah. Great. All right. Well, Mr. White, Dr. White, you have five minutes to give your opening presentation. Thank you.
The Scripture teaches that the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit did in eternity past covenant together to bring about the glory of the triune majesty by means of the creation of the universe and the redemption of a particular people.
And that counsel in eternity past was determined that the Father would decree the glory of the Trinity. The Son would accomplish the means of redemption through the incarnation. His crosswork outside of Jerusalem and his resurrection from the dead.
The Spirit would bring the eternally decreed salvation purchased by the Son to fruition in the hearts of undeserving rebels, raising them to spiritual life and making them sons of God by adoption through faith in Jesus Christ.
These redeemed sinners are united to Christ, placed in his body, the church. The plain teaching of Scripture believed and accepted by God's people down through the ages is that the church is central to God's purpose in this world.
Though many imposters have arisen calling themselves the church, Christ has in fact been busy in every generation building his church so that the gates of Hades would not be able to withstand the onslaught of God's spirit-led people.
The universal fellowship of true believers has been, by God's wise design, revealed to the world through the local fellowships led by elders and ministered to by deacons. When Paul wrote to Timothy, he spoke of the local fellowships and referred to them as the church, the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.
While individual local fellowships can cease to exist as God's blessings move to and fro across the earth, nations rise and fall in God's providence, Christ's church goes on. His redeemed people joining together for the preaching of the word, the observance of the ordinances of baptism and Lord's Supper, and fellowship in the spirit of God.
Today I have the privilege of responding to the claims of Harold Camping of Family Radio, who has abandoned his former beliefs and is now promoting a whole host of novel doctrines. The central assertion that brings us together is his insistence that the churches of Jesus Christ are now under the wrath of God.
The spirit has withdrawn from all churches and no one can find salvation therein any longer. Mr. Camping has taken the amazing position of insisting that his interpretations of the Bible, based upon allegory and numerology, are sufficient to allow him to claim that God is revealing new things today, never known to anyone in the history of the church.
This claim is the foundation stone of all of Mr. Camping's idiosyncratic teachings, such as his assertion that Jesus died twice, that the death of Christ on the cross outside of Jerusalem was not relevant to the forgiveness of sins, his annihilationism, and his teachings the world will end May 21, 2011.
Indeed, as I listened to Mr. Camping throughout the Doctrine of the Trinity just last week on his open forum radio program, identifying Christ as the Father, resurrecting one of the earliest heresies of the church, I was reminded yet again what happens when the sound exegesis of the text of inspired scripture gives way to personal revelation and spiritualization.
This encounter is about rescuing the Bible's trustworthiness. It is about demonstrating that the Bible is not the playground of any person who decides he has new spiritual insights no one else has ever had.
It is about defending Christ's church, his bride, and the local fellowships to which the Spirit of God joins all who are truly united with Christ. As we will see, no matter what element of this teaching comes up, the fundamental issue will be this.
Harold Camping refuses to use any kind of meaningful exegetical or hermeneutical set of principles in his handling of the Bible. There are no rules when Mr. Camping opens the Bible. He is the final authority when it comes to his system of interpretation, if that word can even be used, of the complex system of allegory and numerology that he utilizes to make the Bible speak.
I believe firmly that the only way to profess that the Bible truly is God's Word, God speaking, is to expend every possible effort to avoid inserting my desires and my thoughts into the reading of the Bible.
That is why sound exegetes unanimously avoid all of the errors that Harold Camping's entire set of teachings illustrates in glowing colors. Sound exegetes seek to understand the meaning of the original writers in their original language, in their original context, first and foremost.
And that is the exact methodology rejected by Harold Camping. In fact, given that he says that no one has seen what he now sees, and given that he makes connections across all sorts of contradictory and differing contexts without the first thought of concern as to what the original authors actually intended, there is no way that Harold Camping can claim that what he is teaching is in any logical or rational way the teaching of the Bible.
It is the teaching of Harold Camping expressed in the words of Scripture wrongfully ripped from their proper and original context. And so the issue that we need to address today is not just the individual teachings, saying that Christ died twice and things like this, and the allegation against the Church, but the foundational issue.
How do we rightly handle the Word of God so that it remains the Word of God and not merely something that we are inserting our thoughts into? How do you handle the Bible? That's what this discussion has to be about.
Thank you very much, Dr. White. And for those of you who just tuned us in, this is a two-day debate. This is day number one of a two-day debate between Harold Camping, the founder and president of Family Radio, and Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries on the theme, Has the Church Age Ended?
And now, Mr. Camping, you have three minutes to continue your thought or to respond to Dr. White in any way you choose to. You have three minutes.
Well, you know, when we start talking about hermeneutics, the Bible gives us the biblical hermeneutic, and I've never been able to find in the Bible the historical grammatical method of hermeneutic. Where does that come from?
That's one question I'd like to have an answer. Where do you find that in the Bible? I'll tell you what the Bible has to say. We read in Mark chapter 4, where God says that, without a parable, verse 34, spake he not unto them, Christ is speaking.
In other words, Christ is saying he spoke in parables, and he did it for two reasons. He said, in verse 12, that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest at any time they should be converted and their sins be forgiven them.
And on the other hand, for the true believers, the parable method is giving them a lot of new information. In other words, God designed the Bible so that, on the one hand, it would remain impossible to understand by those who are not elect of God, that is spiritually understood.
But on the other hand, for the believers, it would be. Now, the fact is that God gave further rules that have to be followed. The first rule is, in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verse 13, we are to compare spiritual things with spiritual.
In other words, any time we look at a verse and we are wondering, what does it mean, even though it sounds like we know the meaning right now, until we compare that with everything else in the Bible that might relate and find harmony, we have not found the truth.
We have to really compare everything, every idea, with every possibility in the Bible in order to find truth. And that's a terrific protection when Christ spoke in parables. You just can't go out and say, well, the spiritual meaning is this or the spiritual meaning is that.
It has to be found in the Bible. The Bible has to always be the core of truth, and never do we go out. That's why, on my kind of programming, I only quote the Bible. But the fact is that God has given us all kinds of ideas, like a lamb can refer to Christ, the field can refer to the world.
The Christ is the way. So when we see the word way, we can think about Christ. He is the truth. He is the light. There are just all kinds of emphases in the Bible where God is given, like, for example, Jerusalem.
It talks about Jerusalem. All right, Mr. Camping, your three minutes are up, and you can continue your thought after Dr. White, who has now three minutes. All right, thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me give an example of what happens when we do not go first to what the original authors meant in their original context, what they intended to communicate to their audiences.
Obviously, we know that not all the Scripture is written in parables. Only certain portions are. Jesus taught directly in a non-parabolic form. But Paul's letters are not written as parables. We have to recognize the different kinds of literature we find in Scripture.
But let me give you an example. I was listening to the open forum just this morning, and a caller called in and asked about Hebrews chapter 10, verses 24 through 25, and let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.
Now, if we read the book of Hebrews in its original context, original language, this is talking about gathering together in the Church. And it is talking about stirring one another up. The King James says, provoking one another to do what?
To do love and good works. So it's a positive thing. And so when we read this, it's talking about gathering together in the fellowship of the body of the Church and provoking one another to doing godly things.
As soon as Mr. Camping started reading this, he got to the word provoke, and he said, well, this proves that this is actually talking about that period of time when the Church age has ended, because to provoke means to create dissension.
And so whenever you preach that the Church has come to an end, you bring about dissension. And so this proves that this is about meeting outside of the Church and no longer meeting in the Church. Now, the writer of the Hebrews never would have had that idea.
His audience never would have had that idea. That ignores the context where the term itself is being used in a positive sense of stirring one another up, stimulating one another to love and good works.
And so the original words, inspired under the direction of the Holy Spirit of God, their meaning is completely lost, and instead a completely foreign concept. Now, there have been all sorts of folks down through the history of the Church who have attacked the Church who could have used this very same text in the same way that Harold Camping used it.
The Montanists could have done that, and Joseph Smith could have done—all sorts of people could have done that. But does anyone seriously suggest that that was the actual intention of the Spirit of God in penning these words?
No. These words had a meaning to the person who wrote them, they had a meaning to the persons who received them, and we are first and foremost to discover that and then live in the light of the principles that are laid down by the Word of God.
If we don't do that, then we cannot claim that our teaching of the Scriptures is reflective of the Word of God itself. We simply cannot do it, because we are not accurately representing what the original intention of those inspired writings actually was.
Thank you, Dr. White. And now, Mr. Camping, you have three minutes as well.
Yeah, well, you know, the biblical rule is that the Bible interprets itself. The Bible is not subject to private interpretation. It is its own dictionary. We find words in the Bible that we are looking at, and then we want to—if we want to understand it, that's the wonder of the commentaries, that we can find all the other words, other places in the Bible where that word is used.
And if you go on, in Hebrews 10, for example—the word provoke, incidentally, is only used in one place. It was used in the book of Acts, when there was heavy contention between Paul and Barnabas concerning taking Mark with him on the next missionary journey, and so there was a provoking between them.
There was dissension. That is the only place it is used, and it is indicating there was contention. Now, when we go on in Hebrews 10, we find for—it says that, in verse 26, for if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins.
Well, my, that's—how do you understand that? The whole Bible is telling us that Christ is a very merciful God, and Israel came to Him again and again and again for forgiveness, and here it says, however, there will be no sacrifice for sins.
You're out. You're out. And the only time that could be is in our day, because in the churches, there no longer is any sacrifice. The Holy Spirit is not working there, and that gives us the meaning now of Hebrews 10.
But outside, wonderfully, there is salvation going. Now, when we look again, when we talk about what does it mean to the local person, when Abraham, for example, back in Genesis chapter 13, he was told of God.
He was told in verse 14, lift up now thine eyes and look from the place where thou art northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land which thou see is to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever, forever.
Now, how did Abraham understand this? And this had been emphasized in chapter 15 and in chapter 17, all the land from the river of Egypt to the river of, to the Euphrates River. Well, we'll talk about that next.
Thank you very much, Mr. Campion. Your three minutes are up. And now, Dr. White, you have three minutes.
Just a couple things to recognize what was just said. First of all, the text from Peter, I think, was being misapplied when it says it is not of any private interpretation. If you look carefully at that text, what Peter is saying is that no prophecy of Scripture ever came about by the prophet's own interpretation.
It instead comes from God. Men spoke from God as they're carried along by the Holy Spirit. So that is a misapplication of that text. But secondly, I hope everyone heard what was just said, and that is we were just told that the actual meaning of Hebrews 10, 24 -25 could not have been understood by anyone until a few years ago.
Every age of Christians, whatever they thought that text meant, they were in darkness. They had no concept of what that was actually about. They must have been misled to do all sorts of things by this cryptic text.
That no one could understand until just a few years ago when Mr. Camping determined that the book in Revelation is actually the Bible. There's no reason to believe that, but that's what he asserts. And so here you have the author doesn't know what he's writing.
His recipients don't know what he's writing. The words in their own context, he mentioned that word is only used twice. It's actually used four times in the Bible. It's used twice in the Greek Septuagint.
And yes, it can mean dissension, as it's used in Acts 15 -39, but that's not what it means in Hebrews 10, 24. In Hebrews 10, 24, it is a positive thing. It is to stir one another up to love and good deeds within the community of the faith, which is the church.
And so to just simply say, well, it had this meaning over here. That means it can have this meaning here. What if we interpreted Harold Camping's books in that way? What if we took the words that he uses in the English language and we could find any use anyplace else of the same word and import it into his?
His context doesn't matter anymore, because what he's telling us is the context of the Bible writers doesn't matter. We could make, we could turn him into someone who teaches anything that we want. We could read anything into his voluminous writings based upon ignoring the original context of the authors, the original context of those who initially received these epistles.
The epistle to the Hebrews was written to keep Christians who were being pressured to go back to the old ways. And so when he says, how can you understand there's no forgiveness? Hebrews chapter 10, he's talking about those people who would go back and offer sacrifice and therefore do disrespect the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
He's talking about the same people first John talks about. And John says, I do not even say that you should pray for such a one. He's talking about those people who deny Jesus Christ. And that was the issue in the early church.
And we need to understand that first and then make application to our day. There is no reason to say that these words never had any meaning until our modern period, none whatsoever.
Thank you, Dr. White. And let me just make a quick announcement. I also want to thank the technicians and engineers for both WNYG and Family Radio for helping us to resolve the issue. But Mr. Camping, you now have three minutes.
Well, you know, you still haven't answered my question. Where did the historical grammatical hermeneutic come from insofar as the Bible is concerned? I can tell you what the Bible says. It says that Christ spoke in parables and the Bible says that we are to compare scripture with scripture.
And the Bible says that the Holy Spirit will lead you in the truth because the Holy Spirit, because the Bible is a very spiritual book. And we have to follow that very, very carefully. That's why I raised the issue of, just as an illustration, and they're sprinkled all through the Bible, about Abraham.
He was told that he would inherit all the land that he saw. And he named it a little later as all the way from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates River, that that would be given to his seed forever, forever.
Are we to understand that the land over there around the Mediterranean or adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea is going to be there forever? That's what the Bible says. The Bible says that. And what did it really mean to Abraham?
Did he understand what he was being told? Incidentally, we were arguing or discussing this matter of Hebrews 10. And I have tried to answer that question of how to handle that there remains no more sacrifice.
And every theologian has tried to answer that. But it's in our day that now we find a very clear and concise answer. And there are many verses like that, that God kept under wraps, so to speak. He would not give us a clear and concise answer until today, like Nicodemus, for example, was told nobody has ascended into heaven except the Lord Jesus.
Well, now we understand and we always have had some kind of an answer. But now we can understand it perfectly. Now, when it comes to the church, the gates of hell shall not prevail. What happened to the church in the wilderness?
What happened to it? That was Israel on Mount Sinai. Did it prevail? And it was the corporate or the external church. When the reformers, you know, talked about the invisible church. Now, it's true. The invisible church is every true believer.
But when it says that the gates of hell should not prevail, does that include the charismatic churches? Does that include the Roman Catholic Church? Does that include the Methodist Church? Does that?
Just what does it include? In fact, three minutes are up. All right, Dr. James R. White, and you have three minutes. Yes, indeed.
Thank you very much, Chris. Where did the historical grammatical hermeneutic come from? Well, every time that Paul writes to, for example, the Church of Corinth, does he expect them to understand what he's saying?
Does he expect them to interpret his letter in such a way that his words mean what his words mean in the context that his audience would have understood? Does he not hold people accountable for their behavior in light of what he has written to them in a historical and grammatical way?
The answer is, of course, he does. And what if they had, what if the Judaizers in Galatia had decided to interpret the Book of Galatians in the way that Mr. Camping interprets the text that says the Church is going to continue?
And said, well, you know, you can understand Paul's writing spiritual things here, and what he really means when he says we're anathema is that we find this other use, this word over here in the Old Testament, and that actually means we should have the preeminence in the Church.
Now, how would that, how would that work? No, his words had a meaning when they were written in the form they were written. When the apostles and Jesus interpret the Old Testament, do they interpret it in the way that Mr. Camping is interpreting it?
Where they say, well, you need to look at this word here, and then we can connect it over here, and there are 153 fishes, and that's 3 times 3 times 17, and they took numerology apart, and they connected things together.
Is that how they use the Old Testament? The answer is, no, it is not. And so why should we follow that methodology? Because you can do anything with it. Mr. Camping has done much with the 153 fishes that are pulled out of the sea.
And I would just point out, you know, well, these are, you know, there are so many people being saved, we can't get them into the Church anymore, and things like that. Why can't I point out that those 153 fishes were dragged up on the shore and died, and that this is, therefore, the end of the fishes?
I can interpret anything, any way I want to, when the original intention of the authors and the original language and their original audiences is ignored. You can't claim to be accurately representing Harold Camping if you don't interpret Harold Camping in the context in which he intended to write his words.
The same thing is true with the Word of God. You cannot say you're accurately representing the Word of God when you do that. Now, again, what I said about Hebrews chapter 10, very clearly, you have to know what the to go back to the old ways.
And there's no question about that. This isn't, you know, when you come up against a difficulty of interpretation, do you just simply throw out exegesis? That's the easy way to do it, that to have this overarching system that you just force onto every text, but that's not a way that honors God's Word.
And what is the result of all this? Even though Paul taught that God would be glorified in the Church throughout all ages, we're being told by Mr. Camping, flee the churches. The Holy Spirit of God that forms the churches is no longer in the churches.
He's no longer saving people in those churches. That's what happens when you ignore the original context.
Thank you very much, Dr. White. And for those of you who just tuned in to WNYG, this is the day number one of the two day debate. And now we have three minutes for Mr. Harold Camping to continue his thought or to respond to Dr. White.
You know, I've heard that many, many times. What did that statement by the prophet mean to the people of that day? I ask you the question, what did God, what did the statement that God made to Abraham that he would be given all the land that he could see?
He was looking at physical land and it would be given to him forever. What did that mean to him? How could he understand that? And as we look at Israel in the wilderness, they were told again and again, this and that, and they were given all kinds of ceremonial laws to follow, which were all incidentally like a parable, because to offer a blood sacrifice was a picture.
It was the earthly story pointing to the heavenly meaning, which is what a parable is, of the fact that it required the atoning blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, how much of this did they understand?
Who is the Bible for? The Bible is for all of the nations, not for those people that just happen to be living there, and God has set up rules. He spoke in parables, and in fact, he spoke in parables, as I've read from Mark chapter four, so that for those who are not elect of God, they would not understand at all.
He wrote it in a way so they could not understand. All the information that he had sealed in the book of Daniel, or excuse me, the book that is spoken of in the book of Daniel that was sealed was in the Bible, because nothing has ever been added to the Bible once it was completed about 2 ,000 years ago.
It was all here, but God sealed it. How did he seal it? He sealed it. By the way he wrote it, and by putting in difficult verses, very difficult verses, the Bible is not easy to understand at all. For example, right today, we have always believed, and this is a terrible thing that has happened, but God has allowed it to happen, namely that if we only believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, we will become saved, and yet now we understand.
Why did God wait till now to tell us that faith, which is the noun for the verb believe, faith is the noun, believe is the verb, it's the same word, and the Bible says faith is work, and we're not able to be saved by works.
My, my, what a terrible thing that is.
Okay, Mr. Camping, Dr. James R. White.
There is no question that the Bible contains many different types of literature. It also contains ceremonial laws. It contains types and shadows in the Old Testament, but these are fulfilled in the New Testament, and the problem is Mr. Camping does not see that distinction.
He blurs that and turns even the New Testament writings into something that is but a type and a shadow that then allows him to fit it into his modern viewpoint of eschatology. This ends up turning what is didactic teaching, what is straightforward teaching, that is not in any way, shape, or form expressed as future promises into the foundation of such things as saying that Jesus died twice, or identifying Christ as the Father, or saying that the church by which God is going to be glorified can be destroyed completely, that the church, which is the body of Christ, can experience the very wrath of God.
That's why you have this tremendous confusion is because you're not allowing the Bible to speak for itself. You come up with a system, and then you force it upon the Bible. He says, who is the Bible for anyways?
Is it just for those people back then? No, it's for all believers through all times, and yet it's Mr. Camping who's saying otherwise when he says, well, no one has understood until now what the Bible is actually saying in places like Hebrews 1024 or other texts where he assigns a new meaning that no one in all of church history has ever understood.
Why should we believe that the book mentioned by Daniel is the Bible? What's the basis for that? Does the book of Revelation make that connection when it talks about the opening of the seals? It does not.
So why make, just because the term book is used, there's all sorts of places where words are used, the Bible, and again, you have to make a meaningful argument that they should be taken to, that the original author intended for those things to be taken together.
Because if you don't, again, you can do with Mr. Camping's words what he's doing with the Bible, and you can connect all sorts of things together that he never intended to be connected and make him contradict himself all over the place.
Why is it that the Bible is liable to this kind of treatment, but Mr. Camping's material is not? Instead, we go to the New Testament, we ask ourselves a simple question. Did any of the apostles of Jesus Christ teach that the Christian church would cease to exist before Christ returned?
The answer is no, they did not. You have to claim modern day revelation. You have to claim some type of spiritual insight that nobody else has ever had to be able to force these things upon the scriptures.
The Jesus himself gave us the Lord's Supper and said that we are to do this until he returns. I asked Mr. Camping, are you partaking in the Lord's Supper? Has Christ returned? If he has not, then clearly you're violating his own command in not doing.
Well, there, excuse me. Yes, you can. You can begin, Mr. Camping. Dr. White's three minutes were up. You can begin your three-minute segment. Camping, you can resume. Okay. Yes. You know, you mentioned the Lord's Supper.
It's very interesting that Israel, they looked at the ceremonial laws and decided if they could keep them faithfully enough, that was their salvation. And we read in Romans 9 that they came to an end because of unbelief.
Now, the fact is when God introduced the New Testament era, the next external evidence of the representation of the kingdom of God, he gave two more ceremonial laws, water baptism and Lord's Supper, both activities that we perform.
And we put a lot of trust in that, that that assists us in our salvation or initiates salvation or is a means by which God is helping us in our salvation. We just put a lot of trust in it. And yet there are ceremonial laws.
And God warns, and this is something that really hit me hard a few years ago, that the seventh day, Sabbath day, for example, is a sign, we read this in Exodus 31, that I, the Lord, sanctify thee. In other words, even as you are not to do any work of any kind, or you're going to be under the wrath of God.
And then we go to Numbers 15 and we find there a man that picked up some sticks on the seventh day Sabbath. And Moses asked God, what should we do to him? And God said, execute him, that is stone him to death.
And they did stone him to death. Why? He had only picked up a few sticks on the Sabbath day. He hadn't made a fire. He wasn't building a building or whatever. He was a very slight thing. Now, remember, the Lord said that you keep the seventh day Sabbath because I, the Lord, sanctify thee.
And that means that you are not to do any work of any kind. It was representing the fact you're not to do any work of any kind in becoming safe. And then we find, as we examine what the churches are doing, every one of them have got work after work after work that they do in order to assure their people that you now are safe and secure in the arms of Christ.
And the fact is, all the work was done by Christ and we simply have to wait upon him. Well, thank you.
Harold Camping just said that every one of the churches say that they have work that you have to do to demonstrate you're safe in the arms of Christ. That's just simply not true. I know my church is very clear in teaching that salvation is completely of the Lord, that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves in any way, shape, or form.
What was just presented to us just simply, I'm sorry, doesn't make any sense. We were told that the Lord's Supper is a ceremonial law. No, it's not. It is part and parcel of the new covenant in the blood of Jesus Christ.
And what we need to understand is, there is no covenant beyond the new covenant. The new covenant is the last covenant. It is a perfect covenant. The law is written upon the hearts of those who are in the new covenant.
And the Lord's Supper is a part of that new covenant. And Jesus said, you do this in remembrance of me and we do this until he returns. This is our proclamation as members of the new covenant, that we have faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and that it alone avails for our salvation.
There are many churches, there are many people listening today, there are many pastors listening right now, who are preaching that God alone can save in Jesus Christ and that he saved upon the cross of Calvary.
Not some mythical pre-incarnational death, but as the Bible has always taught and as all Christians have always believed, it is the blood of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ by which our sins are forgiven.
Not something from before that period of time, certainly the cross was certain from God's perspective, but Jesus became incarnate in the person of Jesus of Bethlehem at a particular point in time. He died under Pontius Pilate.
That is when the blood is shed and the forgiveness of sins is wrought. So that is the new covenant. And so here you have, I don't know of anyone who's, any sound biblical Christian who believes the Lord's Supper initiates or starts our salvation as was just alleged.
That's not what Reformed churches believe. That's not what we've been teaching. Those things are part of our proclamation of the death of Jesus Christ because we recognize that it is only by that single one-time sacrifice that any of us can have the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to us.
That is why the cross is so central. That is why the incarnation is so central as why the resurrection is so central. And I would just like to point out that the doctrines of the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, justification by faith were not hammered out and defended by Harold Camping's method of interpretation.
And it is that method of interpretation that has always been used by those who have undercut these beliefs. That is why I am so concerned about this because I believe that we must honor the Bible for what it actually states.
Thank you very much, Don.
First of all, the idea of that being the covenant, really, we have to read in Hebrews chapter 8 where God says, now that he hath, verse 6, hath obtained a more excellent ministry by how much more he is a mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises.
For the first covenant had been, if it had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. And then he says, and finding fault with them, he finds fault with both of them. And then he tells about a covenant, the covenant that now is in action, the law.
The word covenant is the word law in verse 10. For there is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith Jehovah. And after those days, when we search that through the Bible, we find it's talking about our day after the end of the church age.
After those days, saith Jehovah, I will put my laws into their mind and write them in their heart. And I will be to them a God, and they will be to me a people. And they shall not teach every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know me from the least to the greatest.
In other words, there is this time when God is saving directly, not through a church, not through elders and deacons and Bible pastors, or teachers. I'm just directing people to show them in the Bible where to look.
But the fact is, we've aborted the fact that we were looking at that there was another book that was open, and we read about that in Revelation 5. And it was not open until the beginning of the Great Tribulation, this final 23-year period.
And that is why we are understanding so many things. But I don't know of a church that has ever considered at all what that little book or that book of Daniel that was sealed, what all that has to do with, if they have considered the import of that.
But until we do, we don't have the truth. And, you know, when Christ came, you were saying, well, what did it mean to them when Christ was preaching around the Sea of Galilee? Those people, none of them became saved.
Virtually none of them became saved. We have plenty of evidence in the Bible. And the church at Sardis, it was a dead church. And what about, I still want to know, what church is still alive? There is a church that is alive.
It's the invisible church. God is still building that church. He will build that until the day of the rapture. But it's an invisible church. It has nothing to do with a local congregation. The Bible comes up very clear when we see that God finished with the nation of Israel and then with the church age.
I want to point out that Mr. Camping.
Has just misrepresented Hebrews chapter 8. And this is a good example of what happens when you do not do exegesis of the text directly. In verse 8, he said, for he finds fault with them when he says, he identified them as the covenants.
Read what it says. He goes on to quote Jeremiah 31. He's finding fault with the people under the first covenant. That's why you have the new covenant that is then enunciated in the verses that follow.
The them is not the two covenants. There's not some third one or something that's coming. That's not what Hebrews chapter 8 is talking about in any way, shape or form. That does not follow the argument of the book of Hebrews.
That's again where you just he said, well, and we see elsewhere. No, you have to find out what the original text is saying before you run off to another text. One is exegesis, allowing the text to speak for itself.
The other is eisegesis, reading into the text, meanings that the original author and the original audiences would have had no idea of. Now, there were many people who were saved in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit of God.
I'm not sure what the idea of, well, there weren't many people saved during Jesus preaching. Well, that may be true, but there were 120 in the upper room. And when the church began to expand, there were thousands very quickly.
So when the spirit came and it was the spirit's time to draw those people, he drew them. That's what the spirit can do. Revelation chapter 5, talking about this book that is sealed. The question is asked, who's worthy to open it?
Is Harold Camping the one who's worthy to open it? No, it is, of course, the Lord Jesus. Is this the Bible? Is that what anyone reading John's words would have understood? Again, we need to understand if you take this perspective that is being presented by Mr. Camping, then John wrote this book and Christians read this book and Christians died protecting this book.
Christians gave their blood protecting this book and preaching this book. And they never had the slightest idea what it was talking about until 1900 years later when someone in Alameda, California has the book open to them and then can begin teaching this.
I'm sorry, but the very teaching of the scripture is that it's given to us for our edification. It is given to us to build us up. And that's why the scriptures were given to us. And there have been many people down through the history of the church who have come along and said, oh, I have the special insight.
I have the spiritual insight that no one else has ever had. They've all come and they've all gone. And the only thing left is the church of Jesus Christ. And he asked what churches are still teaching?
Mr. Camping, there are faithful Christians sitting in prison cells in Muslim lands today who have never heard of you or your message, but they stand firm for the name of Jesus Christ. They will not give up their confession of faith in Jesus Christ.
And you cannot say that they are not true believers, even though they don't believe what you are teaching. Thank you, Dr. White.
Yeah, well, you know, you're saying Mr. Camping this and Mr. Camping that and Mr. Camping the other thing. And as if I am just poking along just with my own ideas, I'll tell you, I have a very deep concern for the authority of the Bible.
It's not the church that has any authority. Incidentally, you quoted one place from 1 Timothy 3, the pillar of the church is the pillar of truth. That absolutely is not true. And it didn't say that either.
It's still the pillar and ground of truth. And Christ is the foundation. And the church can never, never ride herd on the Bible. The Bible is God's word. And the church was formed by the law of God. It was not the law of God that formed the Bible.
The Bible is, and the Bible is not what John wrote or what Peter wrote. The Bible is what God said, what God said. Holy men of old spoke as God, the Holy Spirit moved them. And in Jeremiah 36, God shows us, he gives us a detail of how God dictated the book of Jeremiah to Jeremiah.
And then Jeremiah's secretary wrote it down and put it in the roll of the book. And that is illustrating how God has given us the Bible. Every word came from God. And whether the apostles who wrote or the men who wrote understood, that's beside the issue.
It's what God wanted to give us. And as we read in Mark 4, he wrote it in a way that it's very, very conducive to unbelief in the lives of those who, you know, have you ever preached a sermon on Mark 4?
Let's look at that again because that really, when I discovered that years ago, I was shocked at what God was saying there. As he says in Mark 4, that he's saying in verse 11, unto you it is given, he's talking to the apostles, is given the word of God.
No, excuse me. Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables that seeing they may see and not perceive and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest they at any time be converted and their sins should be forgiven them.
Now that's the word of God. That came from the mouth of God and we have to deal with that and that shows that God's intention was that a lot of the Bible was written in a way so it could not be understood.
But as we learn the rules and now wonderfully, as we're talking now, for example, about the time of the end, May 21, 2011, God has given us marvelous proofs right out of the Bible that show us that we've done our homework accurately.
Okay, Mr. Kamping,.
I would like to ask Mr. Kamping to respond either today or tomorrow to one of the most key issues for me and that was a statement I heard him make where he identified Christ as the Father. I would very much like to find out if he has abandoned the historic doctrine of the Trinity at that point and engaged and embraced a form of modalism.
I think that's extremely important, but we just had a statement made that I somehow was misrepresenting 1 Timothy 3 .15. Let me read it to you. But in case I am delayed, Paul writing to Timothy, I write so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth, the pillar and the bulwark of the truth.
Probably a better way of rendering hadriomod there. So that is the statement that Paul makes and the context is right after he's been discussing the qualifications of elders and deacons. So we're talking about the local church.
So he's writing to Timothy so that he might know how people must behave in the local church, which is the church of living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth. It does not require us to believe that the church rules over Scripture.
Scripture is the speaking of God. The church listens to the voice of her spouse speaking in Scripture. There's no question about that. I have defended sola scriptura against the leading Roman Catholic apologists out there.
But it does not follow them that what is being said here should not be believed, that it is God's purpose, that that which holds up that which protects the truth is the local body of believers with elders and deacons.
That was what Paul wrote to Timothy. Now, if you want to explain to me from the text, not jumping to another text, but looking at first Timothy 315, how do you understand that to teach anything other than that the local church is the pillar and foundation, the pillar and support, the pillar and bulwark of the truth, that it is God's purpose that in the ministry of the Word of God, in the gathering of the saints, the instruction of the Word of God, the worship that comes from that, when we enter into that place of worship, and I have seen people saved, Mr. Camping, in the years since you started teaching this, wonderfully changed in the fellowship of the church.
The Holy Spirit of God has applied the Word of God to their hearts and lives and has changed their lives. That has happened since you have been teaching that the Holy Spirit's no longer in the church.
One of us can go to the Word of God and explain why that is. I do not believe that you can simply stay in first Timothy 315 and explain what's being said there in context, in light of Paul's intention and what Timothy would have understood and explain how your system of denying the church exists is consistent with that.
Which is found in the inspired Word of God. Well, first of all, you know, Christ spoke about tares. Remember in Mark chapter 13 that the enemy sowed tares and they were so much like the wheat, and incidentally, this is parabolic language again, the tares representing people who look so much like a true believer that you cannot distinguish distinguish them from the wheat.
The wheat representing, there again parabolic language, wheat representing those who are the true believers. And God said, don't try to throw out the tares because you're going to be throwing out the wheat.
Wait until the end. And it's in our day that that separation is developing. That's the whole purpose of the Great Tribulation. One of the big purposes is a testing time where God is separating the wheat from the tares.
But mankind can't see the heart. You can't see the heart of any people that claim that they're saved and their life has really been changed and say, now I know they're a true believer. Nobody can see that.
What about these tares that come in that look exactly like true believers? They love the Lord. They are very good Bible teachers and whatever and whatever and whatever. And yet they are tares. God knows who they are.
Now, insofar as 1 Timothy 3, you know, God, this is not untypical. God wrote the Bible and put traps in the language in order to separate. Here, this verse, for example, it says the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.
Now, the church being the pillar and ground of the truth, that that grammatically will work out. That was true, but also it will work out the living God is the pillar and ground of truth. This verse is written in such a way that you can look at it either way.
And we know without question, Christ is the ground of truth. He is the foundation of truth. And we're not going to try to figure any way in which the church is the ground of truth. Now you can do that, but you're not doing it giving God all the glory.
Glory, glory, glory goes to God. And incidentally, insofar as the Trinity is concerned, the Bible is very clear. There are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And yet the fullness of, we read that in Christ dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
And we see this when he told the disciples in John 14, you have been with me, you have seen the Father, and you have been with me, you've seen the Holy Spirit.
Oh, wait, we will be able to go another three minutes? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, thank you very much. Again, in answer to a number of the things that were just brought up, the pillar and support of the truth is in apposition to the subject of the preceding phrase, which is the church of the living God.
To make God the description of that is, again, to just completely miss the point that Paul is attempting to communicate there. Next, I wish I could, maybe tomorrow we can understand this a little bit more fully, but I don't understand Mr. Camping's response just now.
He has identified Christ as the Father. He has just used classical terms that modalists use. Does he believe that the Son has existed as a divine person from eternity past, or at least the second person of the Trinity has he existed as a divine person from eternity past in communication with the Father so that there are three divine persons who have eternally existed?
I realize he says that the Son had a beginning at the resurrection or something like that, but he actually uses the word Christ for the pre-incarnate Jesus, and it's very confusing, but I would like to, maybe tomorrow, get some clarification on that because I think that is extremely, extremely important.
But once again, I hope the people in the audience can hear. I would like to offer to Mr. Camping and to Family Radio that on May 22, 2011, I will do the open forum broadcast for a month to explain to people how to do biblical interpretation to avoid what has happened, because on May 12, 2011, when these things don't happen, then there's going to be a lot of people who are going to need to have their trust in the Bible re-established because they've been told over and over again, the Bible taught this, the Bible taught this, and just like in 1975 when Jehovah's Witnesses predicted the end of the world and it didn't happen, over a million people left the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society over the next few years.
And the sad thing is, studies have shown the vast majority of them didn't end up anywhere else. They are the great religiously abused, they no longer believe the Bible, they don't believe anything. And so I would like to offer to, on starting May 22, 2011, to talk about how to do meaningful exegesis and hermeneutics so that you can again trust the Bible and recognize that it has an unchanging message that is not dependent upon any one individual, it is not dependent upon having a charismatic leader that claims to have a special insight and opening of seals and all the rest of those types of things.
I would like to warn people and exhort people that the Bible itself should not be blamed for incoherent teachings that are attributed to it by not allowing its own words to speak for itself. Don't blame the Bible for what people do to the Bible.
Recognize that you need to listen to what the Bible said as it was originally written, its original intention,.
And to its original audience. Thank you very much for today. Thank you so much, Mr. Harold Camping of Family Radio and Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries. First of all, let me introduce to you now, Mr. Harold Camping of Family Radio.
It's great to have you back for part two of the debate, Mr. Camping. Yes. Yes, great. Welcome back to the part two of the debate. We're going to let Mr. Camping have the last word during every segment today.
We thought it'd be fair to give Mr. Camping the advantage today since Dr. White was the second speaker every segment yesterday. Today, James White will be first and Mr. Camping will be second. So for the first five minutes, we will hear from Dr. White, then the second five minutes from Mr. Camping, and then from then on, it will be three minute intervals just as they were yesterday with Dr. White leading and Mr. Camping following.
But Dr. James R. White, please proceed with your first five minutes of today. Thank you very much, Chris.
In Mr. Camping's book, We Are Almost There, we read, for example, anyone who follows the man-made grammatical historical hermeneutic, which is utilized throughout the church world, will not be able to correctly understand many very important truths of the Bible.
This includes the Bible's teachings concerning the end of the church age and the fact that the true believers can know much about the timetable and details of the end of the world. Mr. Camping's methodology of abandoning the original meaning of the text, the authorial intent, and how the original audiences would interpret those words, turns the Bible into a large pile of theological Play-Doh, ready to be formed into whatever Mr. Camping desires.
We should note in passing that the central doctrines of the faith are founded not upon Camping's allegory and numerology, but upon the sound exegesis of the original meaning of the text. This might explain Camping's confusion on the Trinity and his repeated anti-Trinitarian assertions that Jesus is the Father or the Holy Spirit.
And this is surely what we saw yesterday as we examined his allegations that God's wrath is upon the church, that Jesus died twice, his annihilationism, and his teaching that a rapture will take place May 21st, 2011.
Yet Mr. Camping attempted to defend his abandonment of any meaningful method of exegesis by appealing to Mark 4, 33 -34, which reads,. And with many such parables spake he the word unto them as they were able to hear it.
But without a parable spake he not unto them. And when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. Mr. Camping presents his exegesis of this text in We Are Almost There, page 4, where we read,.
The foregoing principle that Christ spoke in parables and without a parable he did not speak appears to be the chief means by which God assists the true believers to further understand the Bible. Now this is a gross misreading of Mark chapter 4.
Jesus did not always speak in parables. Most of the time he spoke with great plainness and without a parable. But even more so, Mark 4 says that he spoke in parables to unbelievers, not to believers. He provided plain, shall we say, historical grammatical interpretations of the parables to believers.
So to turn this historical incident into a full-blown method of interpreting the Bible is plainly fallacious. Further, John chapter 21 tells us that the gospel is written so that people might believe.
Camping has misunderstood a specific use of parables as part of judgment upon unbelieving Israel, as if it is a warrant for him to abandon the original meaning and intent of scripture, and this leads to all the rest of his teachings.
Now let me present an argument using allegory and parable and see if Mr. Camping can disprove it. We know that family radio broadcasts all the world on the airwaves using satellite, shortwave, regular broadcast signals.
Yet we also know that the prince of the power of the air is who? Well, it's Satan. So obviously and clearly the Bible, which is only speaking of our modern day and really said nothing to all those who were originally used of God in its writing, is teaching that in the end days, those who use the power of the air like family radio are under the dominion of Satan.
Therefore, we should flee family radio. Now, I think that argument's bogus. It's nuts. But the point is, how do you disprove it? The only way to do so is to appeal to the original context and the original meanings of the words.
Mr. Camping cannot do this. He has abandoned the text of scripture and turned it into a huge pile of disconnected words and phrases that he can reform into any shape he desires. So how can you disprove my argument?
All I have to do is say that God has revealed this to me, claimed Daniel 12 mentions the sealed book, make that the Bible, though the immediate context of Daniel 12 said is not the Bible at all, say that we are in the end times, the Spirit has given me spiritual understanding of the book that is now opened.
And who can argue the point? No one. Since I have now transferred ultimate authority from the inspired text to me, the inspired interpreter. And that is exactly what Mr. Camping does. Just this week on the Open Forum, callers have called in who have used the exact methods of interpretation, and I use the word lightly, to find out, for example, that Christ will come at noon on May 21st or who found the number 21 in the Bible.
Mr. Camping's reply? He rejected them all. Why? Because he can refer to some external standard and unchangeable criteria. Of course not. The final authority for reading the Bible today is Harold Camping.
He told one caller on Monday that to do what he was doing was to abuse the use of numbers in the Bible. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. But we must understand that in the world of Harold Camping, there is no means of refuting his conclusions, since he is the final authority as to what any number or allegory in the Bible means.
And this is the exact position taken by everyone in the past who has sought to gather followers to themselves, such as Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Smith, William Miller, William Branham, Ellen G. White, etc.
We were warned against these men long, long ago in Acts chapter 20. Paul said, I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves, men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.
To those who believe the apostles and listen to what the apostles said in Scripture, they will hear these words and flee from anyone who exhorts them to abandon the original meaning of the Scriptures themselves.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. White. And now, Mr. Camping,.
You have five minutes. Yes. Well, you know, I want to get into the argument that you were using in our yesterday's discussion when you were speaking of your total unbelief that 2011 could be the year of Christ's return.
You know, it's interesting that God has given us marvelous proofs in the Bible that show that what we have been, the conclusions we have been coming to are very accurate by God's mercy, only by God's mercy.
But, you know, years and years ago, I, in fact, I wrote a book, Adam Wynne, that was published for the first time about 35 years ago, following very carefully the biblical rules for understanding, because God has laid down very biblical rules.
In Mark 3, he says, Christ spoke in parables and without a parable, he did not speak. And we know that Christ is the Word of God. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We cannot, and Christ is eternal God, and we cannot disassociate him at all from the whole Bible.
Holy Spirit moved men to write, and this is what we find in the Bible. Now, on top of that, the biblical rule is we compare Scripture with Scripture, as we read in 1 Corinthians 2, verse 13. Namely, the Bible is its own interpreter.
It is its own dictionary. We have to get our information only from the Bible. Now, very carefully, following those rules, already about 35 years ago, I had learned by God's mercy that the flood occurred in the year 4990 BC, when we coordinated with our calendar.
4990 BC. And then, of course, in these latter years, I have learned that, just again, carefully, diligently, faithfully, praying for God's mercy, praying for God's wisdom, I have followed these same rules and come to the conclusion that May 21, 2011 is the day of the rapture and the first day of the day of judgment.
Now, Christ gives us a proof of that. We read in 2 Peter, chapter 3. He is saying, first of all, in verse 6, whereby the world that then was being overflowed with water perished. That's the flood of Noah's day.
Then he goes on. But the heavens and the earth, which are now by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and production of ungodly men. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about May 21, 2011.
But then God gives us a very interesting statement. But, beloved, we know from the Bible, Christ spoke in parables, beloved has to do with those who are the true believers. Be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.
Now, what is Christ saying? Well, we examine these two terrible events, the flood and the destruction at the end of the world. And we find that in Genesis, God told Noah, who the Bible tells us he was a preacher of righteousness, to build an ark and to pitch it in and out with pitch.
And incidentally, that word pitch is the same word as the word atonement. It's spelled exactly the same. And so that ark was a picture of the atonement. It is going to keep the floodwaters out. It is a place of safety.
And he told Noah, you have seven days to get into the ark because then the floodwaters will begin. And indeed, on the 17th day of the second month of the Jewish calendar of that day, the floodwaters did come.
Now, Christ here in 2 Peter 3 says, well, we'll look at that.
In the next moment. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Camping. Now, Dr. James R. White, you have three minutes. Mr. Camping just said that I have a total unbelief.
That Christ could return in 2011. Of course, he could return in 2011. He could even return on May 21st, but he could just as easily return on the 20th or the 22nd or tomorrow for that matter. And we need to recognize that by setting a date like this, Mr. Camping is saying he could not return tomorrow and he cannot return the 22nd.
This is a violation of scriptural teaching. Of course, Christ could return in 2011. That's the whole point of why we are not given the day or the hour and no man knows the day or that hour. Jesus often spoke in other than parables.
In fact, the amount of parables in comparison to the straight didactic teaching of Jesus is very, very small. When it says he only spoke in parables, it was talking about in that particular context at that particular time.
It is just so plainly obvious to anyone who reads the New Testament that Jesus did not always speak in parables. We must recognize the different types of literature that are in the Bible. Yes, we compare scripture with scripture, but that does not mean that we treat the Bible as a contextless document of text to be put together in any form we want, where we ignore the original context of anything that we're dealing with.
Mr. Camping says that he knows that the flood took place in 4990 BC and that he's used the rules given by the Bible. Well, what were those rules? Parables. He does not know when the flood took place. No one knows when the flood took place other than God himself.
The Bible does not give us sufficient evidence. People have speculated and they've put together numbers and Mr. Camping takes apart numbers and says, well, the spiritual meaning of this number is this and the spiritual meaning of that number is that.
Where does he get all of this? He doesn't get it from the Bible. He gets it from himself. And so he puts these things together and he tells us that this all happened. When he reads from Peter, why is that flood, the flood of Noah's day?
Now, it was. That's what's in the context. Remember, we can't trust the context. We can't worry about what Peter originally meant. Why, why, why can't we, why can't the spiritual man say that it's like the flood of the gospel over the world?
You see, this system of interpretation leads to an utter collapse of the meaning of the text. You can't go back and say, no, this is what it really says, because what you've done, as I said in my opening, is you've transferred the inspiration and the authority of the text to yourself.
It's no longer the text that has a meaning, because any of those words could have any meaning that Harold Camping assigns to it, or that any other teacher comes along and says, leave the churches, follow me.
I have this latter day understanding. And that's exactly what every group out there over the past, how many, hundreds of years has done, has said, flee the churches, listen to me. I have this spiritual understanding that nobody else has.
And that's why Paul warned us against those people. In Acts chapter 20, he warned Timothy about them as well. And those warnings remain valid to this very day. Thank you, Dr. White. And now, Mr. Camping,.
You have three minutes. You know, we're going, we're finding that there were seven days before, and Paul, as a preacher of righteousness, was proclaiming that because the floodwaters are going to begin.
Now, Christ said, the Bible says, in 2 Peter chapter 3, a day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day. So let's substitute a thousand years for a day. And now, Noah is effectively preaching, Ben, you have 7 ,000 years in which to get into the ark, which has been pitched with the atonement, which has the security of the gospel, the security of Christ.
Well, okay. When was the flood? 4990 B .C. When is the end coming, as we've learned, following these same rules very carefully? 2011. How many years are there from 4990 B .C. to 2011? We add the two numbers together, we get 7 ,001.
We subtract one because there's no year zero, and we find exactly 7 ,000 years. Christ has said, has given us a gigantic proof that we have come to right numbers in the 4990 B .C. and in the 2011 B .C.
Otherwise, how could it ever works out? So accurately. And not only that, but the biblical date that we find in Genesis 7, about when the floodwaters began, was the 17th day of the second month. And lo and behold, when we look at May 21, and find what the biblical date of that is, and you can check this on any Jewish calendar, you'll find it was the 17th day of the second month.
Now, this is all from the Word of God. I have not had a dream, or a vision, or eaten sour grapes, or whatever. This comes right out of the Word of God. And it truly demonstrates that we have understood how to understand the Bible correctly.
We've come up with answers that God is calling attention to. Now, incidentally, he doubles this. A day is a thousand years, and a thousand years is a day. And frankly, that also is very important. I'll speak about that right after.
Thank you very much, Mr. Camping. And now, Dr. White, you have three minutes. Excellent examples just given to us of the inconsistency of this kind of allegorical interpretation, and how there is no way for it to carry truth, because it is not disprovable.
What was just pointed out was that the 21st of May of 2011 is the 17th day of the second month of the Jewish calendar. How is a Jewish calendar calculated? It's calculated on the basis of a 360-day year, not 365 like we use.
That's why they have to build a month into it every few years to make it catch up with the solar calendar. And yet, elsewhere in Mr. Camping's writings, he uses, for example, when he came up with 8 ,723 years, and he multiplied the things out, he had to use a 365-day plus the leap year to make the numbers work out.
So in one place, he's using a Western calendar and Western solar calculations of the dates, and then now he's using a Jewish 360-day year whenever he can just make the two of them match up. And I can guarantee you, if they didn't match up, then he'd just switch from one of the others to make it match up.
This kind of writing has been around for a long time. The Jehovah's Witnesses were doing this back in the 1800s. Miller did it in the middle of the 1800s, which gave rise to the Jehovah's Witness movement.
There are shelves and shelves of books that have been written by people who have proven in the past that Christ was returning in the 1800s and in the 1900s, and all of them have had to find some way around of the clear biblical teaching that of that day and the hour knoweth no man, not even the sun or the angels in heaven.
And I think we need to point out that Mr. Camping, in trying to explain that text, has actually even suggested that when Jesus said, nor the sun, nor the angels, that the sun might be Satan. He says, well, if it's not Satan, then it's just an experiential knowledge.
This is partly due to his confusion in the doctrine of the Trinity. But again, context means nothing in these situations. You can take any number from anywhere. For example, he just said, you know, a day is a thousand years, a thousand years is a day, so on and so forth, years and all these.
What was Peter's point there? His point was that people who were mocking the coming of Christ need to recognize that God works on a different timetable than us. That's not some kind of a system that you're supposed to insert into your favorite texts.
You could take any statement about any number of days or any number of years, anywhere in the Bible, and make it mean anything numerologically by abusing that text in that fashion. And on May 22nd of 2011, that kind of abuse and misuse of the Scripture is going to be very clearly demonstrated.
And my concern is that the people who have been fooled by this will then lose their faith in the Bible, thinking that this misinterpretation of the Bible is, in fact, the same as the teaching of the Bible, and they are not the same thing.
Thank you, Dr. White and Mr. Camping. You now have three minutes.
You know, when we read 2 Peter 3, verse 8, it says a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day. Why did God double that? God set the principle in Genesis 41, in verse 32. Remember when Joseph was talking to Pharaoh and Pharaoh had the dream about the seven fat ears of corn and then the seven fat cattle.
And then God told Pharaoh through Joseph for that dream was doubled onto Pharaoh because the thing is established by God and God will shortly bring it to pass. And so we can integrate this piece of information into 2 Peter 3 and learn not only has God given us an outstanding and accurate proof that we have done our homework accurately because the year of 4990 was not just grabbed out of the air.
It came out of diligent work in the scriptures. The year 2011 did not come out of the air. It came out of very careful following the rules of the Bible. And now God doubles it to show that it is established and that it is shortly going to come to pass.
And I'll tell you, we're less than two years away for it to come to pass. But, you know, marvelously, God has given other proofs. When we study the Bible very carefully, again, following the rules, we find that we can know that it was April 1, 2000, you know, excuse me, April 1 in AD 33 that Christ was crucified.
We, that is a very, very, it has to meet all the requirements of the Bible. It had to be a Friday. It had to be a day when the biblical calendar was the day of the Passover, the first 14th day of the first month.
And other requirements. And that is all matched when we look at April 1 in 33 AD. Now, we also find that we have found from the Bible, just following carefully, following the rules of the Bible, that May 21, 2011 is the end.
Well, you know, I was teaching this a couple of years ago and a caller called up on the open forum and I'll tell you what he had to say.
Thank you, Mr. Camping. And I want to remind those of you who just called it or just tuned in, I should say. Today is day number two of the two-day debate with Harold Camping of Family Radio and Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries.
On the theme, Has the Church Age Ended? We are now going to proceed with the next three-minute segment by Dr. James R. White. Well, it doesn't look like as much of a debate today because it sounds like Mr. Camping is ignoring what I'm saying.
And just giving his presentation about 2011, which is understandable. It is not diligent work in the scripture to abuse its original meaning and to turn it into theological Plato that you form into your own ideas.
We don't know the exact date of Christ's crucifixion. It could have been April 1st, but we don't even know that it was in AD 33. To build entire things that you add to the gospel, need to believe these things as part of the gospel, based upon that is pure subjectivism.
He says that we are carefully following the rules of the Bible. Well, as someone in my chat channel just noted, rule number one, ask Harold Camping. Rule number two, agree with Harold Camping. Those seem to be the rules that are here.
Where are these rules laid out in scripture? In fact, even to interpret parables, to interpret parables properly is to recognize that parables have a single meaning to them and to not get distracted in all the things that are on the outside.
So that this is not doing diligent work. Let me show you what doing diligent work is. Mr. Camping has been corrected by a number of people who have called to his program. He has recently embraced or over the past few years embraced annihilationism.
And when people point to Revelation chapter 20, verse 10, the devil who had deceived them was thrown to the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and false prophet were. And they will be tormented day and night, forever and ever.
As soon as somebody quotes that, he says, oh, but you see the preposition in Revelation 2010 should be translated to, not forever and ever, but to. And so that means it's going to have an ending when the eternal state comes into existence.
Well, I don't believe that Mr. Camping actually reads Greek. And if he did, then he would recognize that the preposition there is part of a phrase, the very exact same phrase that appears, for example, in Revelation 1, 18, where Jesus says, and the living one, and I was dead and behold, I'm alive forevermore.
Exact same phrase. So if we take his understanding of Revelation 2010 and his retranslation of the Greek, which no Greek scholar would substantiate, that would mean that Jesus will cease to exist at the beginning of the eternal state.
That's what you get when you start playing with the text of the Bible, when you don't actually know the fields that you're pretending to address. That's what happens. This isn't diligent study of the text of scripture.
This isn't handling the text properly. This isn't giving due diligence to the lexical sources and the backgrounds. That's hard work. And it doesn't allow you to gather a bunch of followers around you who call you and ask you for your understanding of, well, everything in the Bible.
Because you see, that means that when a man really handles the word of God right, that means that there's going to be someone down the road and in the next county and the next city who's saying the same thing.
And that's because God's word doesn't change. That's what we should be doing.
Thank you, Dr. White. And Mr. Camping, you now have three minutes.
I'm sorry that this isn't much of a debate in your, according to your understanding. But you have to remember, you are making many, many charges about my, the way I am studying the Bible. And it's taking me a little bit extra time, I admit, to prove from the Bible by the information the Bible gives us that indeed I am following the Bible very, very accurately.
And it's only by God's mercy. Now, I, we were talking about this, these two dates, April 1 and May 21, April 1, 33 A .D. and May 21, 2011. And a caller called me and he said, you know, those are, there's exactly 722 ,500 days inclusively between those two dates.
And if you break that down, you're going to find it's very interesting. Well, I took the bait and I, and I'm going to tell you how you can break it down. First of all, how many years are those dates apart?
They're 1978 years apart. You subtract 33 from 2011, it's 1978. How many days in a year? Don't look at your calendar. Look at what the scientists, the astronomers have worked out as they have, as they have discovered God's perfect laws, as he, as they're able to bring a man to the moon or, or a rocket ship to Mars, that there are 365 .2422 days in a year.
No matter how many thousands of years you go back, if you take the number of years and multiply it by 365 .2422, you will get exactly the number of days. And from May, from April 1 of 2000 of 33 AD to April 1 of 2011 is exact.
When I multiply 1978 times 365 .2422, we get the number 722 ,499 .07. In other words, it's right on 722 ,499. Now that's from April 1 to April 1. If we add 51 more days to get us to May 21, we find that the number is 722 ,500 days, 500 days.
Now that's a very interesting number and we'll talk about that next. Thank you very much, Mr. Camping. And now Dr. White, you have three minutes.
On yesterday's open forum, a woman called in and asked what would happen if the May 21, 2011 date passed without anything happening. And Mr. Camping replied that we don't ask that question. That would be like asking what if the Bible is wrong?
The identification of Mr. Camping's personal opinions is numerology, is putting numbers together and oh, well, if we set this here and then we divide this by here, look, this comes out here. The identification of Mr. Camping's personal opinions based upon an unidentifiable, unprovable, incoherent method of allegory and numerology, which was used to prove 1988, 1994, 1975, 1914, and every other false prophecy of the past.
To identify that with the truth, the Bible is a dangerous, dangerous falsehood. And that's why I'm taking the time to engage in this and responding to what Mr. Camping is saying. Mr. Camping gets to present this stuff for hours a day on an entire radio network.
In a debate, you'd like to have some interaction. I've presented a number of issues that already demonstrate that there's much to be questioned about Mr. Camping's accuracy in his handling of the Word of God.
But I wish that everyone in the sound of my voice, and especially those who are listening, who listen to family radio and are convinced of Mr. Camping's perspectives, I wish you to know that the truth of the Bible is a completely different matter than the abuse of the Bible by Mr. Camping.
And I hope you come to realize that before May 22nd of 2011. I hope you come to realize that even now, as you look at the Bible and realize that it had a meaning when it was written. And there have been many people who have come along over the centuries since and have said, oh, you don't have to worry about that.
Just listen to me. I'm the one that has the spiritual insights. I get to choose what is and what is not relevant. Remember, I pointed out that people were starting to use the same type of interpretation and they bring these things up to Mr. Camping.
Oh, no, no, no, you're wrong about that. We don't need to worry about that. Why? Upon what basis? See, there is no consistent basis for saying, well, we choose these words and we put meaning into them and we assign these spiritual meanings.
But we don't do that over here. We're not consistent. I can do it to Revelation 2010 and I can change what the meaning of the Greek phrase there is so that I can maintain my annihilationism. Or I can do this over here to say that Jesus died twice, even though it completely overthrows everything that the New Testament says about the atonement of Christ.
I can do all of those things. I get to choose what I read into and what I don't. What's going to happen when Harold Camping's gone? Who's going to understand? Is it going to be somebody else? Are you going to be looking for some new prophet to lead at that point?
That is the question.
If the Bible does not have one consistent meaning for each generation, then what good truly is? Thank you, Dr. White. And Mr. Camping, you now have three minutes.
Yeah, you know, we've come to the point where there are 722 ,500 days between these two biblical dates that have come right from the Bible. Right from the Bible. We have to follow the biblical rules very, very carefully.
And when we break that down, we find that it is 850 times 850, 722 ,500. Well, and then when we break that down into significant numbers, we find that it is 5 times 10 times 17 times 5 times 10 times 17.
Now, God used words in the Bible as parables. For example, he used the word, the land of Canaan to signify the kingdom of God. He used the word sheep to illustrate the believers. He used the word lamb to illustrate Christ.
He used the word door also to talk about Christ. Christ said, I am the door. And numbers are words and he used them also. For example, he used the number five to illustrate the atonement. We find in the Old Testament where a half shekel temple tax was paid as atonement money.
And that is point five. It's illustrating the number five. And we don't have enough time, but there are other places where the number five is used that way. The number 10 or the number 100 or the number thousand is used to understand completeness.
We find in Revelation 20 where Satan will be bound a thousand years and at the end of a thousand years, he'll be loosed. Everything in the Bible points that he was bound at the time of the cross and he was loosed long after a thousand years went by.
So what God is saying is that he was bound for the completeness of God's plan. Just like he uses the word 10 coins to indicate a completeness of believers, a hundred or the hundred sheep to indicate completeness.
Now here we find in the... And he uses the number 17, for example, to illustrate heaven. And that can be shown, demonstrated from the Bible. I don't know whether we'll have time to do this right in this brief time.
But when we break down 722 ,500 into its significant numbers, it's 850 times 850 and 850 breaks down to 5 times 10 times 17. Wow. Thank you, Mr. Camping. Your three minutes are up. And I just want to make a quick announcement for those of you who just tuned in.
This is day number two of the two-day debate. On the theme, has the church age ended between Harold Camping, the founder and president of Family Radio and Dr. James R. White, the co-founder and director of Alpha and Omega Ministries.
But Dr. White, if you could continue now with your three-minute segment.
Well, thank you very much. We're not going to be having any interaction evidently today as far as the criticisms that I've made and the refutations of the errors of Harold Camping. So I just hope that the people will listen.
In fact, I would challenge Mr. Camping to do what he did. He said on Monday on the open forum that they would be posting this for people to download and listen to. I really hope that he will do that and let the people decide who has presented a consistent case and who has not.
On Monday on the open forum, Mr. Camping said, we should never try to understand God. This was in the context where he made the statement that Jesus is the Father and Jesus is the Holy Spirit. Now, Christians have always believed that God's revelation of himself was the central aspect of what God has revealed, how he's revealed who he is and what he's done in Jesus Christ.
If Mr. Camping is completely confused about the doctrine of the Trinity, if Mr. Camping cannot even accurately enunciate, it cannot defend it from scripture, if the very central aspect of God's revelation about himself is something that he confuses people about on a regular basis, then upon what basis, what reason would any logical or rational person have to believe what he has to say when he starts assigning spiritual values to numbers and multiplying them together and saying, this happened on such and such a date when no one else in the history of the world has ever come to these conclusions and saying, you need to believe this because if you don't believe this, then you're rejecting the gospel.
And on the basis of that, start teaching people that Jesus died twice, that the cross was not a perpetuatory atonement, that that had happened in eternity past, teaching people that they should flee the churches, teaching people they should not engage in baptism, the Lord's Supper anymore.
People think about what is being said here. We have a man who has come up with his own method of interpretation. He recognizes that it is not one that anyone has held before him, though I think Origen, the early church writer, came pretty close.
He managed to mess up interpretation for a long, long time, but no one else has come up with these insights. We have to create this idea that this book has been opened and that Daniel was actually talking about the Bible when Daniel's writings are in the Bible.
I mean, it's completely incoherent at its foundations, but we grab these things and we hold on to these things and we say that this somehow is what the Bible teaches. It is not what the Bible teaches.
It is what Harold Camping teaches. And when Harold Camping is gone, there's going to be nobody around to continue that on. And his followers will break up into all sorts of small groups, many of which will not ever return to the Christian faith and the Christian church because they've been taught that that has been abandoned.
It's under the wrath of God and they'd also might well be embarrassed because of the things that they've said about the church. But that's what we have going on here. And I think anyone who looks at what the scriptures say can see that this is the situation that we have.
Thank you, Dr. White. And now, Mr. Camping, you have three minutes.
Yeah, you know, we have found that Christ spoke in parables, the Bible, and without a parable, he did not speak. And we can find many, many, many, many words that have a spiritual meaning. But numbers are words and some of them have spiritual meanings.
We have, we can show that the number five can refer to the atonement. The number 10 to completeness and the number 17 to heaven. And lo and behold, when we look at the number 722 ,500, which is the exact number of days, inclusively from April 1, when Christ was the atonement, there's number five, and then go completely to the end and the fulfillment of our salvation.
When we are raptured, that's the number 10. And then what happens? We are caught up into heaven. That's the number 17. And so we find that the Bible is teaching by these numbers, also exactly the same message that we find when we're looking, when we begin at the atonement at the cross and go all the way to the end of time, to the rapture, when our salvation is completed in every sense of the word.
Wow, what a proof that we have the right dates. It couldn't happen if we just had any old date and all of these dates have been taken from careful, careful study of the Bible. Interestingly enough, you know, even the church age, and I remember years ago when I discovered this, there's exactly 1955 years from the time of the beginning of the church in 33 AD to 1988, when the Bible shows the church age came to an end.
And when we break that down, it's three or it's five times 17 times 23. And 23 is used spiritually to signify destruction. And that matches perfectly 2 Corinthians 2, where it says, we are a saver of life and or the gospel is a saver of life and a life that's, that is five, that's the gospel is a saver of, that brings people to heaven and of death and to death.
The number 23 is death and destruction. Again, how beautifully God guides us and assures us that we are being faithful to the word of God. Oh my, it is utterly amazing that God has given us that. Thank you, Mr. Campion.
Your three minutes are up and now Dr. James R. White, you have three minutes. Chris, just a quick question. This is the last three for me, I believe, right?
Yes. Okay. All right. Well, in conclusion, I'm sorry that there has been no interaction in the program today. I think yesterday, where there was interaction was very useful. But of course, I really don't believe that Mr. Campion's methodology of interpretation where he assigns the spiritual values and he just kept going on, even though, you know, we pointed out that his use of Mark 4 is an error and Daniel 12 is an error and Revelation 20 is an error.
I've talked to men who have sat down and met with Mr. Campion pastors back in the 90s, especially when he started teaching against the church and even before the 1994 false prophecy and they've all said the same thing.
He's not open to correction. He simply doesn't hear it. It's in one ear, out the other. He's got his system and that's it. And that's what we're hearing. And so I'm thankful for the opportunity. I thank Chris Irons for arranging this where anyone who really is concerned about the truth and there are a lot of people who are not.
There are a lot of people who just buy into this stuff because they're in rebellion against the church or in rebellion against God's way of doing things. And so they're looking for reasons to be out there on their own, ransacking the Bible, looking for new spiritual insights, just like the Gnostics did in the second and third centuries.
We still have our Gnostics today. We've been listening to a modern day Gnostic on that level. There are a lot of people like that. But for those who truly do seek after the truth, hopefully to hear the incapacity of this position to defend itself, the incapacity of this position to do anything more than to just proclaim itself.
And anyone who's listened to the Open Forum knows this is how it works when someone calls up with an objection, with a counter argument. Once they've made the first part of their argument, they get muted.
You hear, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. They get muted. And then thank you for calling and sharing. That's the system. That's how it works. And so today we've had the same thing. I've been on consistent mute as far as Mr. Camping is concerned, and he's just presenting his stuff.
And so even though I've documented errors on his part, his mishandling of the word of God, misrepresentation of the original languages and things like that, we're not going to hear answers to that. And you're not going to get answers on the Open Forum because there are no answers.
Once you have this kind of subjective, allegorical, numerological, spiritualized interpretation, you simply have to accept that based upon the authority of the person making the claim. That's what Joseph Smith did.
That's what Charles Taze Russell did. That's what Mary Baker Eddy did. That's what Ellen G. White did. And that is what Harold Camping is doing. And so I, once again, just plead with those who would be confused to thinking that Mr. Camping's abuse of the Bible by ignoring its original context, languages and meaning is relevant to the truth of the Bible.
Separate the two because you will see that the two are very, very different things. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dr. James R. White. And Mr. Camping, you have the final word with three minutes. Yeah, well, you know, if you have listened carefully, you'll find that everything I was saying came from the Bible.
It is by following the rules that the Bible has given us. Now, earlier on in yesterday, for example, I asked the question, in answer to the idea that, well, what does the Bible or what does the Bible mean to the local person of that day?
And I asked the question, Abraham was told to look at all the land of Canaan, all the way from the river of Egypt to the river, Euphrates River. And God said, this is for you and your seed forever. What did that mean to Abraham?
He could not know what that meant. He at all could. He could not know. What is the Bible for? Who is the Bible for? For those people that happen to be living at the time a part of the Bible was written?
Oh, yes, it was for them. But it was more for us. It's for the whole world. And that's why when the church age began a couple of thousand years ago, go into all the world with the gospel. And one of the grand things the church has done is they have gotten, brought the Bible into many, many languages all over the world.
That's wonderful. That was done. But unfortunately, in the process, they set up their own hermeneutics and decided that the church also had some right to make their own theology. And so we get all the mixtures.
And what we try to do in Family Radio is stick just with the Bible, just with the Bible. And I'm on the open forum. And if anybody hears me quoting something that is not from the Bible, that is something that's out of my own head or because it's reasonable or something, they have a right to criticize.
And I'm grateful for the criticism because I too want to be tied in just with the Bible. Well, thank you, Mr. White. And thank you, Iron Sharpens Iron for giving me this opportunity to appear on this program.
And I hope that, I hope people will remember that there are 365 .2422 days. And do their own arithmetic, multiplying 1978. And what do they get? And then breaking that down. And then you'll find that it all ties in perfectly with the Bible.
But now we've come to the end of our time.
I want to thank both Mr. Camping of Family Radio and Dr. James R. White. I also want to thank everyone here at WNYG Radio and everyone at Alpha Omega Ministries and everybody at Family Radio who made this, I think, a two-day success.
And I just, again, thank everybody who listened. Thank everybody for making this event possible.