Audio Only Road Trip Brief Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line. My name is James White. I am coming to you from, well, my flying trip home.

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I have accelerated my trip home. I've changed my reservations. Trying to get it back across the

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United States as quickly as I can without it being outrageously unsafe.

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It will be less safe than it would have been otherwise. I am going to be hitting some weather here early this morning.

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I will be trying to drive through Nashville traffic in the rain tomorrow.

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Not looking forward to that at all. I wasn't looking forward to driving through Nashville, period, let alone in the rain.

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Trying to get back in a reasonable time to the house and my wife and the family and everything else there.

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Not feeling real good, to be honest with you. I went one stop too long this trip.

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And that's just how it works. You make commitments, you keep them. But just too long on the road.

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We're going to be making some adjustments in the future. Rich and I have been talking about some things and we will let you know how all that works out in the future.

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This is an audio only dividing line for a number of reasons. I have no energy to set up the entire studio.

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And secondly, I shaved. And unfortunately, those people have been taking pictures of me and been distributing them.

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I really had hoped that wouldn't happen. All I was doing is I'm going to be growing my beard back and I just didn't want to be trying to blend stuff together.

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And so I just wanted to grow out at one speed. And I'm also letting the hair on my head grow out a little bit.

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I'm going to see if I can just use one trimmer just for all of it. Sort of one length. I don't think that's going to work, but we're going to give it a shot.

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But I look horrible. I normally look horrible. I don't know why we do video normally other than to show accordance and play videos and things like that.

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So, you know, and a lot of people don't watch the videos. A lot of people listen to the audio anyway, so they're not going to care one way or the other.

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But this will just be a video only and we'll go as long as I want to go.

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I'm not committing to any particular length of time. I just have a few topics that I wanted to touch on.

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I saw an ex post about Tucker Carlson.

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And he was making some comments about Sharia law. And he was talking about the lack of crime in Abu Dhabi and places like that.

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You know, you can leave your keys in your car or your door unlocked and things like that.

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And I was a little bit taken aback. There's so much ignorance about Sharia law.

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And there's so much ignorance about the Muslim world. And a person who actually believes in Sharia law and believes that Sharia law is the only way for mankind to live would recognize that the westernized nations, westernized

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Muslim nations that Tucker Carlson is making reference to are not considered overly

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Muslim. They're not actually applying Sharia law there. They have a type of autocracy that will have some elements of Sharia in it, of course.

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But true tried and blue practitioners of Sharia like you have in Afghanistan and places like that, they would look at those nations as deeply influenced by the

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West and sub -Islamic. And so there's all sorts of Islamic law,

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Sharia law, that just simply aren't practiced in those places. Now, you know, you could leave your keys in your car in many large portions of the

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United States in the 1940s, 1950s, even in the 1960s. And there are a few places where you could still do that today.

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I wouldn't ever feel comfortable doing that anywhere. But what is that due to?

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Is that due to a change in law? Well, sort of. The law has changed, but it has changed in the sense of the worldview of the people who are governed by that law.

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There used to be a consistency between the worldview of people living in the

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United States and the laws that had been passed by the generations before us.

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Starting in the 1960s, you begin this sexual cultural revolution, the secularization of the

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United States. And now we find ourselves in this untenable position of having laws that were crafted based upon the foundational assumptions of a

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Christian worldview and a biblical worldview. Trying to govern a people who hate all of that, reject all of that, and have no means of establishing a foundation whatsoever.

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For law and for an orderly understanding of the human condition.

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And so it's not a matter of Sharia versus Western law.

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It is a matter of the worldviews of those varying cultures and the application thereof.

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Which, interestingly enough, allows me to sort of transition a little bit into one of the other areas of conversation right now in social media.

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And that is a clip that came out from the King's Hall up in Ogden.

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And it was about black culture. And it was the pastors saying that a black

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Christian would be welcome in their church. But they would not be welcome to practice black culture because black culture is evil, demonic, violent.

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There was a whole list of terms that were utilized to describe black culture.

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And a lot of people have commented on it. I wrote a short little thing just basically saying that there is no monolithic black culture.

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You certainly cannot compare the black culture in America with Zambian black culture.

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Anybody who's been to South Africa as many times as I have been, I don't think I'll probably ever get to be there again.

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But for a number of years, I was there pretty much every year. And you have many different black cultures in South Africa because people from all over Africa, tribal

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Africa, come to South Africa. And that's one of the reasons it's such a violent, violent culture is they're frequently fighting with one another.

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And so that's a completely different context. And of course, you have all sorts of cultures around the world that are extremely violent.

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They're violent to themselves. They feed upon themselves. In Asia, you have all sorts of subgroups.

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And we don't go over there often enough to know anything about them. But there are gangs and violence and kidnappings and rapes and murders and everything all around the world.

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And we don't hear about the vast majority of it because we, well, we just don't really care, to be honest with you.

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And so there Thomas Sowell has written on this subject in decades ago when he talked about the differences in black culture.

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And the fact that until the

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Johnson administration, the Democrats started destroying the black family, that there had been great stability, that fathers stayed with mothers.

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You did not have the kind of sexual promiscuity, the baby mamas and everything else.

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But then once you started the welfare state and you started rewarding people for having children out of wedlock, you know, we now have years.

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I don't know how close to 10 years ago now, probably about 10 years ago. One of these talking head interview programs, maybe it was

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Sally Jessie Raphael or somebody, I don't know. Does anybody remember her? I don't think so.

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Anyway, they had all these young black men on and they were interviewing them and they would ask them how many children they have.

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And, you know, well, I have eight, I have 10, I have 12. By how many of them went four or five, six?

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And there was one young man had 28 children, but I think it was 15 different women. And you go, how you.

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Yeah, you could you could find some Hispanic men, some white men that would be somewhat like that, but it's not anywhere near the regularity that you have.

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In American black culture. That doesn't mean outside the

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United States, but that's what you've got inside the United States. And I believe it's been purposefully engineered by the left to.

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Well, you know, you look at Margaret Sanger and her eugenics ideas and and the stuff at the bottom of all this, it's used by the left to create all sorts of violence.

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And you get these people trapped in the idea, vote for us, we'll protect you. And yet their programs actually create the violence.

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And so you keep voting for him because they'll promise to give you money. And and, you know, you look at what

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Detroit looked like in 1940 and what Detroit looks like today. And you see what happens when the left is given this given tremendous amounts of of money and political control.

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That's always bad for the black community or any other Hispanic community. It doesn't matter.

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Homelessness, drug use. It's just rampant because these people hate

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God's world. They hate God's ways and they get they live in God's world. And so the results are very obvious.

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So anyway, going back to these types of things would not be welcome in the church.

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Well, isn't that sort of an obvious thing? It's not because it's black culture. Are you saying that fried chicken is not going to be served at the

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Ogden Church? And believe me, that's that's not a joke. Go to South Africa.

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It's embarrassing to be American and go to South Africa and see how many

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Kentucky fried chicken stores there are in South Africa. They are everywhere. I mean, you think there's too many

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McDonald's in the United States? Nothing, nothing compared to the number of Kentucky fried chicken places there are in South Africa.

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It is. I never looked up the numbers, but it's absolutely astonishing. It really, really is. Anyway, so is that not going to be allowed?

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I mean, obviously, any sinful, rebellious aspect of any culture, whether it's white, black,

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Hispanic, Asian, Norwegian, it doesn't matter.

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Any element that is opposed to God's truth and God's way can't be allowed, cannot be practiced in the church.

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Isn't that a given? And, you know, in light of the fact that we have so many people who are literally, you know,

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I had to do a debate recently against a man who was literally saying God cannot sanctify a black believer as much as a white believer, given that that stuff's out there and given that the folks up in Ogden, you know, were retweeting white boy summer stuff and all the rest of that stuff,

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I would think they'd be a little more careful about, you know, exactly what they're presenting, especially since they're in Ogden, for crying out loud.

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This is Utah, folks. I mean, they're still, you know, 40 years behind the rest of the country as far as that kind of stuff.

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Well, OK, racially, yes, not in many other ways. A lot of people are not aware of the fact that the at least a couple of years ago, the

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Utah City Council, I'm sorry, Utah City Council, Utah's not a city, Salt Lake City Council was majority

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LGBTQ. There is a there is a movement that is making tremendous headway in the great state of Utah.

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And I've commented on that before. It it still leaves me more than a little bit befuddled.

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The reason being that. Well, OK, Utah is becoming less and less and less

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Mormon. As more and more non -Mormons move in, the Mormon majority declines.

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That's part of the reason. And Salt Lake is the least Mormon city in Utah for the obvious reason.

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A lot of the headquarters for corporations and stuff are there. So so it was the first one to really start becoming more metropolitan.

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But still, it's just always, you know, the Mormon God is gendered.

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The Mormon God's a male. He has male anatomy. He has sex with female goddesses.

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It's like you would think that they'd be the last ones to give in to the craziness of the sexual revolution, especially the transgender stuff.

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But no, the subjectivism of Mormonism leaves it very much susceptible to this kind of stuff.

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And so, yeah, are there you know, when I see the violence.

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You know, if you're going to if you're going to see a bunch of kids beating up another kid in the

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United States, it's a 95 percent chance. It's going to be black kids beating up a white kid or another black kid.

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The violence in black America is directly 100 percent related to the cultural rejection of the normative place of a mature, responsible, loving father in the family.

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Black grandmas can try, but they're not men. And once young men get that testosterone going, if they don't have that kind of control, if they don't have that kind of discipline, if they haven't been taught to love women, they will mistreat women.

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They will use women. That's just that's just the way it is.

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And you see that with the just vicious and I'm not talking about the guy on the train that that guy is is if there is a an example of demonism, a modern a modern demon on video, that's what it is.

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That's what it looks like. And the the rampant use of drugs.

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Remember, pharmakia in the Greek New Testament is very directly related to spiritism and everything else.

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They are very closely related. You open yourself up to all sorts of things when you when you do drugs.

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And I'm just talking about the gang violence. You know, if you see a bunch of young men breaking into a store, what chances what chances are they that they are black in the

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United States? Now, you know, in Asian countries, they'll be Asian. But in the

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United States, nine point nine times out of 10, they're going to be black.

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And the reason is not because genetically blacks are inferior or anything else.

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It's because their culture, their community has embraced that which is utterly destructive of the very mechanisms and means that God designed in human culture to control.

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And to allow us to flourish as human beings. And the same thing with the young women.

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My goodness, the violence. You see these young women crawling over store counters and beating up store managers over a package of ketchup.

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Why is that? Because they don't have dads. That's why they don't have fathers to love them and to show through the love of their mother how they are supposed to be women.

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That's why that's what's going on. And it's it's tragic. It's horrific.

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But that's that's the way it is. And that's what we're we're seeing. So I think we need to keep a keep an eye on on who's saying what about certain things and remind folks to be careful in how they give answers.

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I didn't get to comment. Well, I haven't commented a whole lot.

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We haven't done a program since the Charlie Kirk Memorial. And I only talked to my wife briefly.

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She was able to go. She she managed to snag a ticket and she was able to go. And then

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I think I'm pretty sure Luke went.

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Maybe Jeff. I think Jeff went. I'm not 100 percent certain. Again, I'm on the road. So I'm sort of disconnected from stuff.

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But some of the guys did did go. It did get over early enough. Remember, our our Sunday services are at four o 'clock in the afternoon.

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Anyway, I've certainly seen a lot of clips.

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I've certainly seen a lot of discussion. There is a tremendous amount of speculation and talk right now about revival.

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The United States has been saved. Next generations have been saved and everything else.

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And I'm the stick in the mud over here going, you know, I think back to an afternoon in 2008.

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I think it was 2008 when David Wood, Nabeel Qureshi and I were setting stuff up in a church sanctuary for a debate that evening.

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I think that's when I debated Nader. I think that one of the two times

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I debated Nader Akhmed. I think it was anyway, you know, so we're walking around and we're just talking loudly because, you know, you're in a big room and and Nabeel raised the question.

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Of the fact that and this is still an issue today, and it was back then, that there are many people in the

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Muslim world that were claiming to have visions of Jesus and that they became Christians because they had visions of Jesus.

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And you said, you know, in light of what we believe about the sufficiency of scripture, how do you understand that?

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And we're having a good discussion about it. And one of the things I said was, well,

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Nabeel, I'll be honest with you. My perspective is give it 20 years.

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And if a person who felt that they had that kind of a vision, if 20 years later they are

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Orthodox in the faith, they are preaching the word of God, they haven't come up with other books of scripture, you know, they're not looking to that kind of thing.

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Then, you know, the proof is in the pudding. But the problem is, if you try to, you know, we get too close to things to have sufficient distance to sort of see context and let things develop and stuff like that.

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And honestly, I think we're in the exact same situation here. I would like to believe that there is a major work of the spirit of God.

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I am sure that God has drawn some of his elect people over the past two weeks or so and has used the proclamation of the gospel to do all that.

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That's true. At the same time, I'm sitting here watching a very wide variety of people speaking at the memorial.

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And they have a wide variety of understandings of what the gospel is. And when you try to boil things down to just a couple of sentences, you're going to have a hard time differentiating between historically very divergent views because they're going to use a lot of the same language.

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You're not going to have time to really develop the differences. And it sounds like everybody is sort of saying the same thing.

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But they're not. They're not saying the same thing. And that eventually has to come out.

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You know, right now, it's sort of like, you know, let's just not worry about it. Let's just, you know, let's just go with the flow.

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This is great. All these young people are so excited. And I'm like, yeah, okay,

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I get it. But what are they excited about?

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And once they get excited, then they want direction. They want leadership.

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They want to go deep into what they're learning and what they're committing themselves to.

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And that means you have to talk about the stuff that nobody wants to talk about.

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You've got to address those issues. And so when you've got

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Roman Catholics giving a summary of the gospel and a lot sounds really good, except they're

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Roman Catholic. And so the context that they're using to define those terms, you know, it was 20 years ago now, 25 years ago now,

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I think, but, you know, I'm on the Bible Answering and Broadcast with Tim Staples.

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And I had to work. I had to push. But I specifically said, if you and I were outside an abortion clinic someplace, and someone walked up and asked us, what must

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I do to be saved? Would you agree with me that we would give different answers to them?

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And I finally pushed him hard enough to where he said, yes, if we were to be faithful to our positions, we would give different answers.

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And that hasn't changed. That's still the case today. And we can go, let's just not worry about it.

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But I just sit back and go, well, we have to. What do you do once people start asking questions?

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You have to deal with these things. You can't just ignore them, no matter how strong the emotions are now or anything like that.

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We can't just go, whatever, no problem. We'll just bypass this stuff.

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No. So basically, what

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I'm saying is, the Charlie Kirk assassination is still so raw and so recent.

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And in American culture, once you get to two weeks, it's old news.

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Well, that's not really how things work. And it takes time to see what is going to develop out of a historical event like that.

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It really, really does. And I think social media has really fed into this.

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You're supposed to come out immediately and you're supposed to take a stand and all the rest of this stuff.

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And the problem is, once you take a stand and things don't develop that direction, what do you do now?

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There is wisdom in listening. There is wisdom in patience. There is wisdom in observation and in not being quick tongued.

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But man, I saw somebody, I saw some list just a few hours ago on X, someone saying that all pastors will be judged by four or five things.

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One of them was COVID and one of them was how they responded to Charlie Kirk's assassination.

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And I'm just looking at this going, I'm sorry, this is so short -sighted that it's absolutely ridiculous.

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And that's a good way to get into a lot of trouble right now is to not go with the flow.

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So I saw somebody else, and someone I really respect, someone I know, basically say, they literally just said, it's just a couple hours ago, that Charlie Kirk's death may be one of the most momentous deaths in the history of Christianity since Jesus.

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And I'm like, you can't even begin to seriously make that statement until 20 years down the road, minimally.

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There's no way you can know what kind of developments and changes and everything else is coming our direction.

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There's just no way you can make that kind of statement and have any hope of it actually being substantiated by what's going to happen over the next number of, well, 2000 years.

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I mean, seriously. And I know the danger here.

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The danger is, no, no, you've got to jump on this bus and run with it, man, or this bus is going to turn around and run you over.

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Well, maybe. But that's just not wise.

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That's just not wise. And yeah, you're just a boomer.

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You're just old. Okay, whatever. One last thing here, and I will take a few minutes on this.

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About a week and a half or so ago, we had the Joel Webbin thing about we need to teach America to hate again.

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And I had a few brief conversations, again, on the road, too busy to really get into stuff.

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But in responding to criticism of his tweet, and if you haven't figured out the guys in Ogden, Joel Webbin, a lot of these

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Christless Christian nationalists, where, you know, you don't have to have regeneration.

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There's no, you know, it's Christendom without Christ. That's the group. What they do is they'll throw out just what seems to be a wildly absurd statement.

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And they're just waiting. They've already got the follow up tweets written, where they're going to, you know, the

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Mott & Bailey thing. Well, I was just talking about this. And you get all this engagement and it's fundraising and clicks and, you know, all this other kind of silly stuff.

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And so part of his response to the criticism was to quote from Romans 12.

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And specifically, verse 9, let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.

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So abhor what is evil. Hate what is evil. And I did have a brief exchange with a guy who said, hey,

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I really respect you, but are you saying that we're not to teach unbelievers to hate what is evil?

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And my response was, they love what is evil. That's what it means to be an unbeliever. Romans 12 was addressed to Christians.

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It was so frustrating to me to see Christians sitting there missing the forest for the trees with a context that is just, it's like, really?

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Romans 12. Therefore, I exhort you. Who? Adolfo brothers. This is the church.

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By the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice. This is the same people that he's telling to abhor what is evil in verses 8 and 9.

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Are we supposed to be teaching the unregenerate to present their bodies as a sacrifice, living holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship?

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No, we're calling them to believe and repent. They have no categories to put any of the rest of this until they do so.

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Isn't that obvious? How can anyone miss this? It's just so frustrating.

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I just don't get it. And do not be conformed to this world. You have to be taken out of this world to not be conformed to this world that is regeneration, being made a new creature, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect.

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For through the grace given to me, I say to each one among you, the brethren, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think as to have sound thinking as God has allotted to each, what?

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A measure of faith. Is God allotted to each of the unregenerate a measure of faith? Of course not.

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For just as we have many members in one body. Oh, we're talking about the body of Christ here, aren't we? Yes, we are.

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For just as we have many members in one body. Well, I'll be honest with you. I think some of the people at the Charlie Kirk Memorial that we're speaking, think we're all in the body of Christ.

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We're all children of God. We're all in the body of Christ. There was some heavily inclusivistic statements in all that.

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For just as we have many members in one body, all the members do not have the same function. So we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members, one of another, but having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us.

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This is we're talking about spiritual gifts in the body here. Whether prophecy in agreement with the faith or service in his serving, or he who teaches in his teaching, or he who exhorts in his exhortation, he who gives with generosity, he who leads with diligence, he who shows mercy with cheerfulness.

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These are all gifts of the spirit within the body of Christ. And that is the immediate context of verse 9.

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This is all exhortation to the body. This is not about unbelievers.

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And they don't have a foundation to even understand why they would do these things. So, quoting, you know, abhorring what is evil, clinging to what is good.

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I like the LSV translation here, by abhorring what is evil and clinging to what is good. That's how love can be without hypocrisy.

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But until a heart of stones turned to a heart of flesh, the love of the unregenerate will always be hypocritical because it does not start with love of God.

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It can't. You're in rebellion against God. So how can that work?

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So even citing it in the context of we need to teach America to hate again, look, it's real easy to go, well, what

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I mean by that is America needs to love what is good, hate what is evil.

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That's revealed in God's law. And I go, and that will never happen by external force of law.

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That can only happen when the spirit of God moves and changes the hearts and minds of the people in the nation itself.

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I just, I don't know how you get around that. Nominalistic, Christless Christian nationalism.

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We already tried it. It didn't work. It can't work.

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Because without Christ, there is nothing Christian. What is what ends up being called

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Christian is a sham. And it is an embarrassment to the gospel itself.

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That's, that's the situation we're facing. So anyways, I wanted to talk a little bit about that.

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I had had this conversation with a fellow on X. And it's like, did you read the context?

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This is what Romans 12 is about. And sometimes people don't read the context.

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So anyway, all right. So there you go. Shortened version for the obvious reason that traveling, pray that I'll fight off whatever it is

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I'm fighting off here without it getting too much worse. I'm either going to get a whole lot worse or maybe get a whole lot better real quick.

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I don't know. We'll find out. But yeah, I need to try to get home.

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Lots of stuff to do back there. And so your prayers would be appreciated.

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All right. Thanks for listening to the Dividing Line today. I don't know when I'll be able to do some more.

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I seriously thought about recording some of this while driving today. And the last two days are more than eight hours a day on the road.

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Dangerous. And so I might try to record something there. You know why? I may be exhausted out of my mind, but if I'm trying to do something, it helps keep you awake.

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And just a reminder, I can't use the wonderful aids that the rest of you have to stay awake, like jolt or Mountain Dew or that disgusting black substance called coffee.

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I can't touch caffeine with a 10 -foot pole. I tried some ginseng yesterday. Nope, that didn't work.

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It might work if I use less of it. They have ginseng gummies. I'm going to order some of those in, see if I could, like, eat a third of a gummy and have it help some without it throwing my heart into a tizzy.

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But anyways, we'll see. We will see. All right. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.