Biblical Questions, Justification, and God's Holiness and Wrath

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

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

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

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

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

James White. Or just call me Max Headroom. What on earth was that?

You had to look on your face like, okay, I know what that was. I was playing with some settings during the

Milo intro, and I bumped something. Oh, I see.

That's the old bump. One player works fine, but the thing defaulted to the wrong player, which kind of, well,

I'll be working on it during the show. Okay. Thank you very much for that great start in this highly professional program called

The Dividing Line. I'm James White. You know, I even thought earlier today going, and the master of ceremonies, the master of all things technical.

And I was going to do this big intro for Rich, but I don't think he'd want me to do that right now. So, unknown person behind the control board.

In fact, I was saying in channel today, 877 -753 -3341,

I already have a phone call coming in, 877 -753 -3341, or dividing .line is the

Skype address. For some reason, everybody in channel today got into this

Star Wars haiku thing, which was really weird.

But it reminded me of a story, and I told a story in channel, that when that first Star Wars movie came out,

I was at this church, and I was in the television ministry.

I even did some television engineering. I ran camera and all this stuff. This was a long time ago, obviously.

It was well known to everybody who worked in television that in the Death Star scene where Alderaan got blown away, and you know, the guy with the really funky looking helmet.

Why would anybody have to wear a helmet that looked like that? But anyway, the guy with the really funky looking helmet, you know, pulls the switch down and then the things come together and blows up Alderaan, right?

Well, everybody knew in TV that what that guy was sitting at was called a grass valley switcher.

It is a television switcher, and the thing he was pulling down was how you went from one fade to another fade.

Everybody knew what it was. Well, I was sort of proud about that, so I told the story in channel.

And Micah, the Hasim, son of Ramallah, king of graphics, came up with a

YouTube video with that, and it was specifically titled Grass Valley Switcher in Star Wars Movie.

I was like, hey, look, I was right, see? I had not seen that thing, but it was just common knowledge to everybody that that was a grass valley switcher.

I'm not sure if they make them anymore. It was a Grass Valley 1600, I think, or something like that. This is back in the late 70s, so I'm sure that that's not made any longer since things have changed a little bit since then and technology has increased.

But anyway, thanks for joining us on Dividing Line today. You know, last time was sort of the sublime, lots of topics, lots of interesting information, and this time we start off with Max Headroom, Introit, and the discussion of Star Wars.

So there did things change over time. Hey, I tweeted this earlier this week, but Roger Olson, one of the few people on the planet willing to call himself an

Arminian openly, without blushing about it, put up a blog article yesterday called

What Calvinism I Oppose and Why, and one of the sentences, one of the paragraphs was, that led me to become more outspoken about the matter and finally to write my forthcoming book,

Against Calvinism, Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology.

There's an interesting topic, interesting title for a book, Against Calvinism, Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology.

This seems to be a common theme. Everybody who picks up Bryson's works, especially

Dave Hunt's works, there was the big kerfluffle this week about Mark Cahill, who

I had never heard of before, to be perfectly honest with you. I guess he's big in the street preacher movement, put out a statement,

Calvinism the Bible, which is nothing but a plagiarized hopscotch mishmash of George Bryson and Dave Hunt.

The worst of both put into one, you know, four or five page statement and it basically says

Calvinists are all going to hell. So same stuff there, you know, we need to protect

God's reputation, really, by doing what? By putting man in charge of the universe, by saying

God's doing the best he can, by saying God created a universe in which he knew that man was going to have these capacities and abilities to bring about all this terrible, horrible evil, but he did it anyway, but he didn't actually have a purpose in doing it.

Is that how you protect God's reputation? I don't know how any synergist can protect

God's reputation, I really don't, but it'll be interesting to see what comes out of that particular book.

It'll I'm sure be interesting. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number.

I guess if we do get enough phone calls, I'll just go ahead and hang with them rather than with going to any pre -recorded stuff.

You know, it's really freaking me out that you can't see the parking lot right now. It's sort of, I don't know, I'm so used to seeing those monitors on and you're just sitting out there and we're doing the

Max Headroom thing and we don't have the monitor on, it's still not on. I'm not sure, oh boy, that's an old

TV. When it takes that long to turn on, you know that it is a very old television tube shooting radiation right onto you down there.

So I guess if we get enough phone calls, we've got two of them right now and we've still got I think three lines open, 877 -753 -3341 or dividing .line

via Skype, which I believe we have one caller on that. But let's go ahead and get started.

Let's talk to James. Hi, James. How are you doing,

Dr. White? Doing pretty good. I heard you mention in the past the difference between how

Allah has ordained history and how God, the Christian God, has ordained history, and I was wondering if there is a difference, if you can maybe expand upon that?

Well yeah, and unfortunately I'm getting a straight feedback directly from you. I'm not sure why, so I'm hearing myself twice.

So it's a bad phone or something. But I will try to address that. Actually there's a couple of articles on the blog.

If you will look up Colin Smith's articles on the subject of predestination in Islam, that would be the best thing to do.

The term is Qadr, so you could just look up Q -A -D star and it would probably pull it up fairly quickly.

But it is the common argument of men like Norman Geisler, who by the way, just in passing, he is delinquent on his truth account.

It's been over 90 days since I posted the three questions to Norman Geisler video, and I'd like to remind him that he's now 90 days past due on the necessary responses to those basic questions.

I hope he will get around to doing that someday. Maybe somebody will keep reminding him of his need to do that.

But anyways, Norman Geisler likes to say that the Calvinistic view of God and the

Islamic view of God are the same. Well they're not the same, just because they have similarities in the sense that many

Muslims and there's different viewpoints amongst Muslims here, and I will confess I'm not even certain how to identify which groups yet, because I will hear

Muslims talking about free will and I will hear Muslims echoing the clear statement from the

Quran that God ordains the day of a person's death, God ordains whether a person is going to be in heaven or in hell, going to make it to Jannah or Jahannah, it's all determined by Allah.

I mean there's so many statements like that in the Quran that I don't know how you can create any type of perspective of autonomous free will or anything in man within Islamic concepts.

But be that as it may, I'll leave that to them to decide those issues. The fundamental difference is not the concept of sovereignty over history, but it goes to an even deeper level in regards to God and his nature.

And what I mean by that is that the decree of predestination in Christianity involves

God's interaction with his creation and includes the very incarnation itself.

It is extremely personal. Its focus, it's interesting, the Quran says that Allah did not create men or jinn, but that they should worship him.

The purpose of his creation is his worship. Now that sounds a little bit, somewhat like the idea that God's purpose is his glorification, but I'm not sure that that really actually does end up connecting up the way that it does in Christian theology.

And by the way, just in passing, only men and jinn have free will, angels do not have free will in Islamic theology, but men and jinn do, which is how they understand why those are the two things that are mentioned in that one verse in the

Quran. But it really goes, again, back to the very nature of who Allah is and who Yahweh is.

And the fact that Allah could never become incarnate, he could not enter into his creation, there is no personal interaction in that sense.

There is a sending down a revelation and things like that, but the very personal aspect of the relationship that exists between Yahweh and his people, seen so explicitly in Titus chapter 2, where Jesus is purifying a people for himself, zealous for good deeds.

That is the personal level that is completely lacking in the rather fatalistic concept of predestination that is part of the

Islamic system. And that's where I see the massive difference existing, is that you have

God's predestining his own personal activity in his own creation.

People think that if God has predestined all actions are going to take place, then he could just go out and go on vacation in the

Bahamas and no one would ever know the difference. That's not the case. Part and parcel of God's predestination is providence.

His own interaction in time with his people, his personal relationship with people, all those other things, all the means to the end are part of the decree as well.

And people, since they don't see how God could do that, very frequently make

God's predestining decree much more cold and distant than what is revealed in Scripture.

And that cold and distant decree may well have some representation or likeness to an

Islamic idea, but it is certainly not what we have in regards to the Christian concept.

So while the decree of God is no less expansive and is no less full and exhaustive in the biblical revelation, it is significantly more personal, and it's directed toward a personal end.

And that is the union of a people with God through Jesus Christ, which is completely absent, completely and utterly absent in the

Islamic perspective. Okay? Okay, I appreciate it. Thank you, Dr. White. Okay, thank you very much for your phone call.

Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341. Let's go with our

Skype caller to Trevor. Hi, Trevor. Hey, Dr. White. How's it going? Doing good.

I wanted to say I appreciate the ministry. It's changed my life, and I'm very thankful for all the work that you do. So thank you for that.

That's very encouraging. Thank you. My question was, with the translation of the

Hebrew word, I think it's nechem in the Old Testament, it's sometimes translated medeneheo, which is repent in the

New Testament. So I was wondering, in the Greek Septuagint, sometimes it's translated that way, sometimes it's not.

And I couldn't find information on the other terms that it was translated as, where it's usually regret or that kind of thing.

And I'm just wondering if you had any more information on that kind of thing. Well, not necessarily off the top of my head.

I mean, if you had a specific text in mind, possibly we could...

For Samuel 15, nechem is used three times in that chapter, and I think only once, which

I think verse 29, it's medeneheo. In verse 35 and 11, it's another term.

And I looked up in the Septuagint on Esword, and I couldn't get information on the words there.

Okay. Yeah, most of your text, Accordance, Bible work, stuff like that, will have the ability to allow you to find out how a term is translated throughout the

Septuagint and stuff like that, which is extremely useful, obviously. It would take some time to bring up every possible use, but it is,

I can confirm here that 1 Samuel 15, 29 does use a form of that verb, metanoeite, in regards to, and also the glory of Israel will not lie or have regret for he is not a man that he should have regret is the

ESV's translation of that particular rendering, and that is rendering nechem.

Obviously, it is a rather rich term, and the

Septuagint's understanding of it is going to vary across the Septuagint. It's funny,

I got some interesting pushback on some of the comments I made last week when the caller called from Greece, and there were folks who were actually sort of arguing that the

Greek Septuagint should have preeminence over the Hebrew text. They actually confused the

Masoretic text, the later Masoretic text from the 9th century, with the Hebrew text, from which obviously the

Masoretic text is a derivative, and obviously which was the basis of the translation of the

Greek Septuagint. But aside from the stories that people told about 70 scholars getting together and they all came out with the same translation, which

I don't know of anybody who actually believes that, it's very clear that some sections of the

Septuagint are far better as translations than other sections of the Septuagint. It wasn't all done at once, it was cobbled together over time, obviously.

The Pentateuch seems to have been done by one group of people, but other portions of the

Old Testament seem to have been done at different times and are on different levels of quality. And there isn't just one

Septuagint either, obviously, there are different streams that we have to deal with in history. So how the

Septuagint renders it is a problematic thing because it depends on what portion of the

Septuagint you're looking at and what stream you're looking at, and then you end up with the further complication of, all right, well what happens when the

New Testament writers quote from the Septuagint? They quote these particular texts and what terms they use and how do they understand the term?

And all of that is a major area of study in regards to the use of the

Septuagint and understanding of those issues. But Nakam itself can have that basic type of idea of changing of one's mind, but it certainly doesn't always have that idea, and especially when we apply any type of term that is primarily, in our experience, used of men to God, we need to be extremely careful that we do not read into it meanings that would be inappropriate.

For example, the idea that God decrees

His own unhappiness and His own disappointment and His own failure would create just direct, blatant contradiction in the text of Scripture.

I mean, the Scriptures say that God does whatever He pleases in the heavens and the earth.

That's right there. It's a direct statement. It's not the situation where you have a term that, well, you know, it might mean this or it might mean that or there's shades of meaning, there's a semantic domain, blah, blah, blah.

No, it's a direct statement. And the idea that God would have that kind of—the human kind of repentance that's either from having done something evil or, even worse, having done something stupid based upon an ignorance of future events, our open theist friends definitely go that direction, but Orthodox Christianity has never gone that direction, and there's good reason for so doing.

So I do not have a listing in front of me of every use of what every single—I do have, actually, now that I think of it, in my

Logos library, I actually have a book that would give that to me, but it would take me a little bit of time to pull that up right now to try to find that information live on the air.

Okay. I had a second question that was completely unrelated, but I don't want to hog all the time.

If you've got other stuff to get to. No, go ahead. We've got one other caller, and it looks like we're doing fine on time.

Okay. It shouldn't take too long. How far do you think that we should go in defending the historicity of Job, seeing as how it's poetry, or the literary form is poetry, and some would maybe use that as saying it's meant to give you a moral story, but not necessarily actually happened?

Well, I'm not ready to shove somebody out of the kingdom if they understand

Job in that fashion, as long as they see that it is Scripture. But when it makes specific statements about locations and times and events,

I'm very uncomfortable saying, oh, well, obviously, since it's written in a poetic form, that can't possibly have been history, because we look at secular history, and we find all sorts of secular history that's written in exactly that way.

So while we might be able to look at something like some of the

Greek historians and stuff like that, and go, oh, well, obviously, there was exaggeration here, or since it's written in poetry, that means it's not meant to be taken in a specific way.

We have to be extremely careful, because we have other examples in the Old Testament of exactly that kind of thing.

How many times does the psalmist relate a historical event that we know from 1 and 2

Samuel or from 1 and 2 Kings? We know what the background is from those historical works, but it is expressed in poetic form in the

Psalter. If we didn't have those historical books, would we automatically just dismiss even the possibility of the historicity of those events just because the only recording we had of it was in a poetic form?

That's, I think, something that needs to be considered on the part of those that are somehow uncomfortable with the idea that the actual events of Job's life took place.

I'm well aware of the fact that the important thing about Job is what he says.

Okay, but the problem is, when you remove that from the actual historical basis that the book itself presents, are you not then removing it from the context that tells us why these things took place?

Why did the friends come? Is it not important to know something about the backgrounds from which

Job's friends would be speaking? And that gives us something about the history and what people believed at that particular period of time.

I'm well aware of the naturalistic mindset because, quite honestly, that's what

I got in seminary—a lot of seminary, anyways. But thankfully, I likewise, over the years, have sort of sat back and examined that and gone, why didn't

I hear much of the pushback from that, the other side of that saying, but there's historical elements to this that would be very useful.

Why do we dismiss those types of things? So how far do we go? Well, like I said, I'm not going to send somebody off to the fires if they read it as primarily a poetic parable, but I'm certainly not going to go there because I don't see any reason to do so.

Okay, that's kind of what I was thinking, too. And I also thought at the point that the historical part isn't necessarily in poetic form, either.

Yeah, it's not, but even if it were, I don't know that that would really make any difference because, again, all through the

Psalter, you have all sorts of historical stuff being expressed in poetry, and no one would—since we have the historical books, no one would think to dismiss that, but I think that says something in and of itself.

Absolutely. Okay? Great, I appreciate it. Okay, thanks, Trevor. Thanks a lot. Thanks for your call. God bless.

Bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341. I wish I could remember off the top of my head.

I need to spend some time—in fact, that was actually something I was starting to do, and then I got distracted—is

I need to generate a PDF of the bibliography of my

Logos Libronics library so I can have it, just click on it, and track stuff down that way, because there is a text

I have that would, I think, give me every single term that's translated.

If you have Nacham in the Old Testament Hebrew, it'll give you every term that is used to translate that in the Septuagint, and I'm certain, actually, that the programs sitting in front of me could do that as well, but I'm a good multitasker, but only to a certain point.

I can talk and do one other thing, but talking and doing two other things is where I run out of the ability to do that.

877 -753 -3341, dividing .line is the

Skype address, and let's go ahead and talk with Tom.

How you doing, Tom? Hey, doing all right. How's yourself? Doing good. Good. Good to talk to you again so soon.

I just want to repeat what the last caller said, too, and thank you for your ministry. It's been a real blessing to me. Oh, okay.

Thank you. Let me frame my question for you just real quick. I have a friend.

I've been friends with him for years. A couple of years ago, his daughter asked him why they didn't keep the

Mosaic Law. So he kind of did some searching on that, and in the end, they started keeping it.

So he drifted away from the Church. Now, five or six years later, he's denying the inspiration of Paul, minimizing

John's Gospel. They prefer Matthew. He's denying outright the deity of Christ, and they place a real emphasis at this point on obeying and keeping the letter of the law.

So I guess you could say that the Ebionites are still alive and well today. Well, actually,

I have a feeling that that sounds very much like the fellow that I debated on the

Jewish Voice broadcast just a few weeks ago, because that sounds like his position. So I would not be overly surprised if there wasn't a connection there, actually.

I'll have to check into that, if they've heard of him. Yeah, Joseph Goode was his name. Okay, I'll ask him.

My basic question, then, is, since they are in so deep with all this, where should

I start? Where should my interaction with them be? Should I focus on the deity of Christ, for instance, or Paul's writings?

Well, unfortunately, it seems like in this situation, in that type of a context where you have someone who has gone that far, there's obviously some very foundational and fundamental problems involved in the person's view of Scripture, the fulfillment of Scripture in the

New Testament. And once they start creating differences of authority in Scriptural text to where, well,

I like Matthew, and I can pretty much guarantee you they probably think Matthew is originally written in Hebrew and are into, well, the original

Hebrew here would have been blah, blah, blah, blah, as if anyone actually knows that. No one's ever seen a

Hebrew Matthew. And you can guess, you can guesstimate, it's similar to when the

Roman Catholics say, well, the original Aramaic in Matthew 16 would have been, you don't know that.

You just don't know that. You can pretend you know that until the cows come home, but you don't know that, any more than we know the order in which the

Gospels were written or any of the rest of this stuff that people assume that they know very, very well.

But it really is, you know, when you have someone who said they once believed one thing and now they have moved that far out, there's almost always some reason why all that took place.

Some disappointment with the Church, some disillusionment, something to where this has become their means of excusing their leaving and abandoning the commitments that they had made in those particular contexts.

Obviously, the issue here is who Christ is and what the Gospel is, because now you're talking about someone who has a false

Jesus and a false Gospel. And it would seem, at least logically, that dealing with who

Jesus is is prior, logically, to anything else, because you can't really establish a

Gospel of grace if you don't have the right Jesus who is actually providing the proper perpetuatory sacrifice and is able to save the uttermost of those who draw nigh unto

God by him. So logically, it would seem that the establishment of the deity of Christ—and so the first thing to ask is the same question that Michael Brown and I asked of Joseph Good and Anthony Buzzard, and that is, well, if you don't believe in the deity of Christ, then do you believe

Jesus preexisted his birth in Bethlehem? Right, which they don't. Which they don't.

Then they're really in a tough spot, because at least the Jehovah's Witnesses can get around all the preexistence passages by saying, well, yeah, he was a spirit creature created by Jehovah, blah, blah, blah.

When you deny the preexistence of Christ, you're up against so much material that it's just overwhelming.

I think you'll find the programs, when they air between November 1st and November 14th on the

Jewish Voice broadcast, which is on satellite, it's on television, it's on the website, I imagine you'll be able to purchase it.

I think you'll find that to be extremely helpful along those lines, because we really did hit a lot of the primary texts that you need to deal with in regards to the demonstration of the preexistence of Christ and the identification of Christ as Yahweh, and they did not have much in the way of response.

They really didn't. So that's going to be rather useful. So I would definitely go there, but I would also press them on the very issues that Paul pressed against the

Judaizers in Galatia and this whole idea of law -keeping and righteousness.

I mean, if they're really honestly saying that it is their keeping of the law that is having anything whatsoever to do with their relationship before God, then

I would press them very, very strongly on that. And really, you know, obviously someone who was once a part of the

Church, I mean, were they part of a good Church, or were they just sort of nominal, or what? They've actually, they had a tendency of skipping around Churches, so they've been almost everywhere you could think of.

That doesn't surprise me. Church hoppers are very rarely rooted and grounded believers.

And so that sort of closes down one of the questions that I would ask, and that is, someone was actually once a consistent member of a solid

Church. And when I mean a solid Church, a Church that had a statement of faith, you knew what they believed. You knew it was being preached to the pulpit, and you knew that if someone was actually a member of that Church, that they once actually said, this is what

I believe. Anybody who's a member of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, before they become a member, they have to read our

Constitution, read the London Baptist Confession of 1689, meet with the elders. We ask them, is there anything in the

Confession of Faith and the Constitution that bothers you, that you take exception to, anything you want to ask us questions about?

And so when that person stands before the congregation, they're giving a testimony, I've read these documents,

I agree with these documents, this is where I stand. And so if someone went out from us, you could at least then approach them and say, you once said that this was the very essence of your life, that this was your hope in Jesus Christ and Him alone.

And now you're believing that your actions—don't you remember what

Paul said? If you're going to go down that road, the standard is absolute perfection.

There is no grace. He who lives by these sayings, that's what you have to do.

You can't walk down the road of obedience and grace—obedience to law so as to gain something—and grace.

You can't get very far down those two roads because they go opposite directions from one another. And that's what I would be asking of them.

But if they were just sort of floating around, I can't say, hey, you once made a clear profession that this is what you believed.

So you really can't necessarily go that direction with these folks. But other folks, that's where I would focus on.

But yeah, I think the deity of Christ is where you're going to need to go. And clearly, the many passages that describe

His eternal preexistence, His identification as Yahweh, John 1, Philippians chapter 2, the use of I Am, all these things, and find out what excuses they're going to use.

Are they going to use the, well, He was in the mind of God as a plan excuse?

Are they going to use the, well, He's the vice -gerent, the representative of Yahweh, and that's why

He can be—it depends. They'll depend on which group they've been influenced by, which sort of non -deity -believing, messianic

Jewish group they're reading their website or whatever else it is. Okay. Would you recommend watching the

Anthony Buzzard debate with you all, and with them? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you bet.

Sure. Some other time, and then witness to them about it. Oh, yeah. Well, either one. I certainly would let them know about it.

I'd watch it myself, and I'd watch it with them. I mean, I'm very confident about what the outcome was, and so I think the issues were very clear, and I think

Michael and I answered all the questions they had for us, and I think it was just obvious there were many times they could not answer in a meaningful way the questions we had for them.

So, yeah. And my understanding is the DVD's going to be available from Jewish Voice, and it's going to be on their website.

And so, yeah, I would—if they'd be willing to do so, and obviously if they have been in any way, shape, or form influenced by either of those two gentlemen, that'll help even more.

Absolutely. Yeah, so if you mention Joseph Good and go, Oh, yeah, we read his stuff all the time. It's like,

Ah, good, well, I'll have you over for some cheeseburgers, and we'll watch the

Jewish Voice broadcast together, and, yeah, well, maybe not cheeseburgers. I'll make sure it's kosher.

How's that? There you go. No bacon cheeseburger, at the very least. That's right, that's right.

Well, thank you so much for your answer. That helped narrow it down for me a lot. Okay, all right, thanks, Tom. Take care.

All right, God bless, bye -bye. 877 -753 -3341, dividing .line.

We'll go ahead and take a break, and then come back, maybe with your phone calls, or maybe not, we'll see, we'll be right back.

James White provides readers with insight and understanding into the Book of Mormon, the prophecies, visions, and teachings of Joseph Smith, the theological implications of the doctrines of Mormonism, and other major historical issues relevant to the claims of the

LDS Church. This marvelous study is a valuable text for Christians who talk with Mormons, and is an ideal book to be read by Mormons, Letters to a

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I would have to distinguish there. I mean, the sacrifice, that was, let's say that was just a little bit unusual, a little bit outside the realm of the norm.

There certainly was no concept on Abraham's mind, on Abraham's part, of thinking that by doing this, he was in any way indebting

God to him. It was the last thing he wanted to do. I think that's one thing that's significant about the

James 2 passage, is the illustration that he uses is not something that anybody else could do.

It was an illustration of obedience to a direct command from God, but it wasn't, well, here's someone who's particularly righteous because he continuously obeys the law every single day, he loves

God perfectly, or whatever else a person might claim. I think that is somewhat significant at this point.

And yet also, at the same time, understand Paul's teaching that the law can't save us.

That's a difficult task. That's what we're talking about right now. Now, immediately,

Doctress Ingenis has placed James and Paul in opposition to one another, and I think that is one of the greatest errors that people make.

Paul wrote, obviously, far more than James did, so we can't really make a comparison based upon how much they wrote.

But there is so much in Paul about obedience and sanctification and fulfilling the commands of God and the doing of good works.

Paul directly states, We are his workmanship, creating Christ Jesus unto good works with God, as we've ordained that we should walk in them.

I mean, he makes it a part of God's fordonation. He says to Titus, what's

Jesus doing? He's purifying for himself a people zealous for good deeds.

That is the description of them. And yet it is that same Paul who, while in no way shape or form diminishing the necessity of holiness, says salvation is all of God.

It's all to his glory. He saves perfectly. And so it's not a matter, it shouldn't be a matter, of trying to put

Paul and James at opposite corners and telling them to come out fighting because they are saying the exact same things.

They may be addressing different audiences in different contexts, but they're saying the exact same things.

And what's going to happen here is Dr. St. Janus is going to introduce this concept of condign, incongruent merit, concepts oddly unknown to the original writers, but placed on top of the writers to try to create an artificial means of getting around this problem.

But I'm getting in the way of actually listening to it. It's easy. And let me also talk about your thing about Isaiah 64 .6,

where righteousness is filthy rags. The problem with taking that passage, and I'm not going to disagree with you in the sense that, yeah, okay, my works are good and your works are bad,

Matt. No, I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, this is a context, Isaiah 64 .6, where Israel is in abject apostasy.

And they were trying to bring their works to God, and God says, I don't want to see these works. You guys are sinful people, so your works are filthy rags to me.

And it's the same kind of works that Paul's talking about in Romans 4. I disagree.

The issue with the apostate people is they continued to claim to be worshipping

God, and they continued to worship in the temple, but at the same time they were visiting the

Ashtoreth. At the same time, they were denying fundamental truths about the fact that only

Yahweh and Yahweh alone is to be worshipped, etc., etc. And yet they continued to make claims upon Yahweh.

It wasn't so much, well, I don't want these works, as if they thought that those works were somehow purchasing something.

They thought they were the covenant people of God, and therefore that God would never allow the place of His name in the temple,

Jerusalem, etc., to be profaned and to be destroyed. And that's really the issue when it comes to what's going on with Isaiah.

The Jews were bringing all kinds of works to God, because I don't want to see those works. I want to see faith in me.

I want to see a real personal relationship with me. So in that sense, you can't say that all works that we do are filthy rags.

That's the absolutism of your position is what bothers me. Well, and at this point, the absolutism of the position is determined by the holiness of God.

I really think once you, you know, Robert says that he is bothered by this.

Well, a lot of people are bothered by the absolutism of the contrast between man's sinfulness and God's holiness.

And that's a, obviously, especially today, given the man -centered gospel that has often been used to bring unregenerate people into the church, you see the kind of response that they get when you proclaim

God's holiness, and therefore His wrath against sin. And here you hear someone saying, well, you know, it bothers me you have this absolutist.

How can you say there are no good deeds? Well, there aren't any. There aren't any.

We're all fallen sons of Adam. We're all under the wrath of God. And so we don't do good deeds.

Now, we may do deeds that, by God's common grace, are good in the eyes of our fellow men.

But you really get a sense of just how far we have departed from a truly

God -centered standard when His holiness can be so easily compromised in the way that I think we just heard it being compromised.

Well, we'll continue on with that. Oops, I was going to take a phone call.

But what happened? Apparently he had to go.

I guess that sometimes happens. Don had an interesting question. First of all, he was bringing up a statement,

I guess, the president had made a couple years ago in reference to God.

Citations atheists love to throw at Christians. Look at how mean God is and all that. And how we are to deal with the standard worldly response of, ooh,

God is terrible. How are we to deal with the Old Testament passages that God medes out

His wrath against people who are disobedient and His enemies, etc.?

And you may have noticed that I was segueing directly into that because I saw that on the call screen.

It seemed to be a logical place to make a break from some Genesis comments because they seemed to be somewhat close to one another.

I fully understand the pressure that we feel. You know,

I think about, I don't know if you saw that clip today. You've been busy today, but O 'Reilly was on The View.

And Behar and Goldberg stomped off today.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be on a program like that and to try to make a statement about God's holiness in regards to sin.

Can you imagine Whoopi Goldberg and Joey Behar just, you know, lavishing upon you every form of opprobrium and hatred and mockery for even mentioning such a thing?

But folks, that's our contact with the lost person. That person is busily suppressing the knowledge of that very

God. They're not suppressing the knowledge of a false God. Man is not suppressing the knowledge of the fluffy grandfather -type

God. Because you know what? They know that God doesn't exist. They may wish that He did, but they know that God does not exist.

The fear that man has of punishment comes from a recognition that he knows that there is a holy

God and he knows there's a right and a wrong. Now, we spend our lives, and in Western society these days, people around us assist us in this task, minimizing the chasm that exists between the holiness of God and our best efforts.

So that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we might be able to do something that would be good enough to earn something from God.

It's self -deception. But we cannot sacrifice what is in fact the very connecting point that we have to that creature who is made in the image of God, which is their recognition.

I mean, their recognition of who God is and their own sinfulness. That's the point where the

Holy Spirit brings conviction. Now, if the Holy Spirit does not bring conviction of sin to a person, we somehow feel like we have failed.

No, folks, this is something you have to get down. You have to understand something. If we are living in a day where Western culture is under the wrath of God, and where God, because of that wrath, is allowing many of our fellow citizens around us to continue to walk in darkness and in glib rejection of his truth, we will become silent, we will be continually defeated, if we think that we somehow have the ability to bring conviction of the truth to someone's heart by the mechanism we use, the proclamation.

That's why God uses the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. So that it's not our mechanisms, it's not us thinking up new ways to do it, to get around the current objections of our society.

There's one gospel, and it's the proclamation of that gospel, which the world will always think is foolishness, is the means by which he saves his elect people.

Now, I can certainly understand why Arminians don't want to believe that. But if you trust what the

Word of God says, that he has his elect people, that there's been a certain people given by the

Father to the Son, and the Son will not fail to save them, then we can boldly proclaim the gospel and trust the

Holy Spirit of God to take that gospel and to make it come alive in the hearts of his elect people.

And when we don't see, when we see people who are just so hardened in their sin, it may just well be our continued faithfulness to the message that God uses to remove that hardness.

But the last thing we can do is to edit the gospel to make ourselves feel more comfortable.

We can't do that. And so we have to look at these people who mock, who mock the holiness of God and mock their own sinfulness.

And when someone says, how can you be so narrow -minded? I just want to look back at them and say, how can you be so hard -hearted against the message that Jesus Christ himself brought and that Jesus Christ himself lived on the basis of that message and died on the basis of that message?

He gave himself his death. His death is the demonstration that this is exactly what he believes.

So do you realize what you are saying is that the very death of Jesus Christ, the very death of Jesus Christ, you are rejecting its foundation and its basis and its meaning by what you're saying.

You need to put it back upon them and say, you need to understand, you may want to try to talk about Jesus as some moral teacher.

This is what he taught. And place it back upon them in that context. So, but we have to, look folks, we have to be faithful to the message.

It's all we've been given and it is enough. The gospel and the power of the spirit, it's enough.

If you don't believe that, well, I don't think Christianity is really for you. Thanks for listening to Dividing Line today. Be back on Tuesday.

Those of you in Minneapolis, look forward to seeing you this weekend. See you then. God bless. The Dividing Line has been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.

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