Final Road Trip DL

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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You ready? Yes. Well, greetings.

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Welcome to an audio -only dividing line, which used to be what the dividing line was all the time, come to think of it, for a very, very, very long time.

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Back when we started Radio Free Geneva, all that stuff. In fact, the only reason we went to video was because Rich wanted to do that.

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And so, I've always thought it's a waste of pixels to have me doing anything anyway.

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Hey, you know what? I can turn the bright light in my eye. I can turn that off.

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I just shorted it out while doing it anyways. That's real good. Anyway, because I don't ever work again.

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But anyhow, this is the last of our road trip

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DLs for this trip. And obviously, either we're in a location where the connections just aren't really good, or some of the local thunderstorms are interfering, or who knows what.

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I don't know. But, as of May, we are wrapping things up.

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And we're going to get home tomorrow, which happens to be October 6th.

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I left on September 6th. And tomorrow's somebody's birthday. But, you know, he's old.

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He doesn't remember that. I only remember because of the trip up conference.

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Not always, but normally. We'd have to, you know, buy a

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Twinkie or something like that and say happy birthday. But, anyway, happy birthday tomorrow,

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Rich. Anyway, we're going to get home tomorrow. And the next trip will be at the beginning of December, late

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November. Basically, I'll be leaving shortly after Thanksgiving and heading back to St.

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Charles, where we'll be doing the Trinity in a different context.

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This time we're going to be dealing with a lot of the current controversies regarding the Trinity. Those people who are telling us you need to become

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Christian Platonists to be able to attend the Trinity. Those who will say there's only one

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Orthodox way of doing so, which means there weren't any Orthodox Christians before Thomas, I guess. All that kind of stuff.

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And really getting back to an important element, that is, I have for a long, long time said

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I'm a biblical Trinitarian. And what must really gall certain people in this small cadre of hyper -technical, philosophical, theological type guys.

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Because that's in my book from the 1990s, that I'm a biblical

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Trinitarian. Now that biblical is a bad word, I'm sure you can use that as evidence of my badness.

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But I'm sticking with it. And in my experience, Christ's sheep are sticking with it too, to be perfectly honest with you.

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And so we're going to be dealing with issues along those lines. And that means presenting a biblical doctrine of divine simplicity over against a philosophical doctrine.

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A biblical doctrine of the perfection of the actions of Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

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Without the philosophical overlay that results in wild and crazy exegesis of texts.

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So yeah, we'll be doing that first weekend in December there in St. Charles. And on the way back, visiting two churches.

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And might be able to do one on the way out as well. I haven't looked at the map yet to figure that out, but I need to do that.

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Because that's a tough time. It's in the holiday season. And so you can't just drop in on people.

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It's a very, very busy time for lots of folks. And so that'll be coming up in December.

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And then we've got trips in February. And I know

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Brother Wallace up in Salt Lake really wants to get Jeff and I up there to debate conference weekend in April.

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We'll see how that works. I know I've got stuff in May.

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So yeah, all of that dependent upon the continued existence of the nation.

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Our strategic oil reserves are at the lowest they've ever been. Right as OPEC is going to drop production.

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And unless somehow sane people can retake the government.

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Because sane people do not. Our enemies control the government right now. So unless we can get our enemies out of the government,

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I don't know that anyone's going to be going anywhere. I don't know if there's going to be much of an economy to even be looking at being able to travel.

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We'll see. But our enemies have taken us from within. We will see what happens in the upcoming elections, whether there are free and fair elections to be had in the

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United States. I personally am skeptical. You've got people being arrested for people that are involved in voting machines and storing their data in China.

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It's just truly astonishing and amazing what's going on out there.

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But anyway, let's get to what we want to get to today. If you are not familiar with the

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Cauldron Pool, it's an Australian news source.

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They do a lot of really good stuff down there. Make sure you're following them. And so they have some stories on the amazing events just the past couple of days where a man was hired to be the

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CEO of an Australian rules football team. And lasted less than a day because someone dug up a nine -year -old sermon on the church's website that he is a member of.

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And I guess he has some type of, not pastoral role, but some type of leadership role in a conservative

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Anglican church there in Australia that actually holds to historic

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Christian views of marriage, homosexuality, and gender.

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And we have been saying for a long time that the time has arrived and is already here that the totalitarians, the secular totalitarians, the tyrants of the left, simply will not allow

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Christians to have a place in society. And so he was forced out within 24 hours.

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Even though, to be honest, sadly, the statement that he put out was rather squishy.

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He said he didn't even know about the sermon. He wasn't there that many years ago. Didn't need to say any of those things.

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What he should have said is, I stand firmly and fully with the Bible's teaching on this subject.

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That should have been the end of that. But what's amazing is the tyrant of Victoria, Dan Andrews.

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This man, during the pandemic, was just, again, this man is a tyrant.

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There is no reason to use any other terminology. He is an anti -Christian tyrant.

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He detests Christianity. He detests God's law. And he was asked.

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Let me see here. I wasn't going to show this before, but I was going to pull it up because there is audio, and hopefully that will work.

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We'll see, of course. Bring a website up and crash everything. I don't know if it's possible.

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Excuse me. All right. Let me see here.

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All right. Let me turn this up, and let's see if we can hear it.

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This is, again, the tyrant, Andrews, being asked a question by a reporter about this incident.

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Does his resignation show that a conservative religious figure can't take on a public role, or they might need to hide their religious beliefs?

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No. No, they might want to have a think about whether they should be perhaps a bit more kind -hearted, a bit more inclusive.

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Aren't we all God's children? Seriously, seriously, there's no place for bigotry.

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There's no place for stigmatizing people. Okay. So this man is a bigot in the actual definition of the term.

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And remember, all that this church has said is God has revealed his will concerning homosexuality, the definition of marriage, but you're not allowed to do that.

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You're not allowed to believe these things. And he likewise said, quote, in regards to the church, those views are absolutely appalling.

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I don't support those views, that kind of intolerance, that kind of hatred, bigotry.

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It is just wrong. There's no reasoning with these people. There is absolutely possibly no reasoning with these people.

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They have no moral foundation. Once you are a person of the left, there is no ethical or moral framework or belief in objective truth or anything you can even appeal to, to attempt to reason with these individuals.

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It's our way or the highway. And the language they use, be inclusive, except for we're excluding you.

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Be kindhearted. But in reality, we're talking about mutilating children's bodies, and we think that's cool.

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It is absolutely 1984, but now it's 2022. It was just off by, you know, a little less than 40 years.

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But it's the same thing. It is playing with language, playing with any kind of moral categories to be found there in total.

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So this is the leadership in Australia. This is what

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Christians down there are dealing with. So we pray for them because it's truly an amazing thing to look at.

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Wow. I just brought up Dr.

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Van Cleek's website, by the way. I was trying to find a particular article that expressed, my goodness,

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I'm wondering. Oh, okay. That's the wrong one. I wanted to find the, there we go.

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Wow, he's been busy. Wanted to find a specific text.

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It had been posted in our ministries discussion thing.

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And I'm unable to track it down here, unfortunately, because it was, well,

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I haven't had time to be looking at all this stuff. But I'll just have to sort of run with it.

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Oh, there it is. Okay. All right. I do have it. Sorry about that. But now there's like 10 articles.

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Somebody's spinning the damage control big time. And it's understandable. The vast majority of folks have made it clear.

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Before we get to that, before we get to Van Cleek, again. Isn't anybody else as fascinated as I am that John MacArthur writes an open letter to the governor?

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Now, first of all, if you're old enough to go back to the 1980s, that was not something you heard a lot about.

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You know, you had the moral majority and Jerry Falwell and stuff like that.

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But that was all sort of, I don't know, it was really fluffy. The first thing that's fascinating to me is the change that I've seen amongst a number of evangelicals to where there's all of a sudden a recognition of the necessity of the church to function in a prophetic manner.

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When I say prophetic manner, what I mean by that, of course, is to present

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God's truth and God's demands to the magistrate.

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And that was not a part of how a lot of fundamentalist, evangelical, dispensational folks were thinking only a few years ago.

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And then all of a sudden, the government comes along and says, we're going to shut you down or keep you shut down for illegitimate reasons.

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And it's like, yeah, no, I don't think so. But there's a theological foundation that that comes with.

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There's something that needs to be considered and thought of. And that is the relationship of church and state.

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And all of a sudden, I know it's one of the main topics that I'm asked to come on programs to talk about and that we've touched upon in this program.

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All of a sudden, we are thinking things through that we've never thought through before and that of necessity.

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And so it's been interesting to see some of the positive promotion of things on the part of certain individuals supporting what

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MacArthur does. Of course, lots of other people who have just been outraged that he would dare to get involved in, quote unquote, politics like this.

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But the fact is, the letter was filled with a great deal of scriptural testimony.

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And where a lot of people today are struggling is why would you bother to do that with someone who doesn't believe in scripture?

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And the answer is, whether they believe in scripture or not, isn't the point.

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That is God's word. And you proclaim it and you present it.

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And if you actually trust and believe the Holy Spirit of God is still active in this world, then the

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Holy Spirit of God is the one that will make that word to come alive in in Gavin Newsom's heart.

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Gavin Newsom can be saved, believe it or not. If Jeffrey Dahmer can be saved, so can

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Gavin Newsom. And if not in his heart, in others who hear that testimony.

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At the same time, when you present God's truth to someone and they reject it, they will be judged for that.

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You are simply called to be faithful and to be the presenter. It's not up to you to create the desired result.

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And I think it's important that we keep that in mind. This just takes me back to passing out tracts to Mormons outside the

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Macy's Easter pageant or something like that. It's a simple principle that you're operating on.

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And that is, we're here to be faithful. We're here to speak God's truth. We're here to trust God's Spirit to do what

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God's Spirit is going to do. And, man, when we first started doing that, years and years and years ago, when we were a tiny, struggling little ministry with nobody supporting us at all and certainly almost nobody listening to us, we look back now and we see all sorts of fruit from the work that we did back then that we could not have imagined.

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But at the time, it was just a desire to speak God's truth to this particular group of people that we had spent so much time studying their beliefs and preparing for and things like that.

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We couldn't see what would come down the road. We couldn't see the effect that would have. And so when people come along and say,

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I just think MacArthur is just trying to make a splash or something like that, you don't know what kind of long -term impact that can have.

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And they might come back and say, right, it could have really negative impact. Well, the presentation of God's truth, trusting the

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Spirit of God to use that, was he being accurate?

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Is this man an enemy of God? Is he constantly breaking God's law? Is he encouraging others to do so?

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Yes, yes, yes, and yes, and quadruple yes. And every day there's a new example of how this man is running headlong into perdition and trying to bring as many people as possible, kill as many pre -born babies, mutilate as many young people as possible, destroy as many marriages as possible, create as many unnatural relationships as possible.

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I mean, that's Gavin Newsom. He truly is on the

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Nero level of things because Nero could only really impact certain people there in the city of Rome, which is a lot of people, but not nearly as many people as in the state of California.

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And most people are saying he's got his sights on the White House. And just to think about that is to recognize the reality of God's judgment.

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There's no two ways about that. So I am thankful that Dr.

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MacArthur sent that letter. I think more people should be doing so.

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I mean, we have certainly spoken very boldly to tyrants and others on this program, and that's what we feel we must do to be faithful in speaking

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God's truth. That's not the same thing as just throwing hate at people because, like I said, if the letter had not had a sound fundamental biblical basis to it, then it wouldn't have had the kind of impact that it hopefully will have with certain people.

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And you pray for anyone, including Gavin Newsom, that they would come to know the truth.

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But the church must speak boldly. You know, we may look at John the

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Baptist and go, well, look what it got him. Yeah, and we all know who he was and what his testimony was, and we all know he did exactly what

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God commanded him to do. And we are living in a very dark period.

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And it is a period that will bring great destruction upon every nation that embraces this abject foolishness.

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And so there needs to be a voice. There needs to be someone saying, and this is the way out. Here is the way of repentance.

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And here is where we need to start to rebuild when the destructive actions, the cultural

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C4 that has been laid at the foundations of Western culture by its enemies, by those who love death, when that cultural

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C4 goes off and there's nothing left, someone's got to rebuild the foundations and there needs to be a foundation provided now.

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That's why I keep saying so into your grandchildren, your belief in the word of God, your confidence in the resurrection, your live daily in light of the fact that Christ reigns on high.

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And you are one of the many who bow the knee each and every day to him. This is what our nation needs.

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And so we definitely want to be a part of all of that.

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Let me just sort of piggyback just for a second off of what I mentioned about the trip coming up in December.

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I tweeted and I didn't pull this up. Honestly, part of the reason I don't have some of this stuff up is our connection was so bad with the video that I didn't want to be searching for stuff because it would slow things down.

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When you've got a real narrow bandwidth, there's no 5G towers around here that I can see.

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So that's where our problem is. Some places have it, some people don't. Some places don't. It's sort of hard to tell.

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I don't know if someone has put together a KOA campground listing as far as current quality of Wi -Fi, but that would be intriguing.

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Two things. I'm scrolling through here to see if I can find what it was that I had said.

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In essence, I had quote tweeted a statement in regards to God and Thomistic categories of act and potency.

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And I'm just noticing now that I haven't seen some responses.

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Yeah, here it was. It's in regards to something

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Craig Carter said. And again, Craig Carter, great tradition, Christian Platonism, etc.

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What marks relationality is the admixture of act potency whereby that which is in act has the potential to experience new relations.

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This would make God contingent on his creation or that which actualizes the new relation in him.

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So Carter is right. My comment in regards to that tweet was to the person who just wants to say,

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I want to know God as he has revealed himself. Please note who draws from scripture and who starts and finishes with philosophical categories unknown to any prophet or apostle.

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This will determine the definitions being used as well. And so what was my point? The people that I want to and that over the course of nearly 40 years now, we have had the distinct pleasure of being used to benefit such individuals in grounding them in the word of God.

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But I can't tell you, I really can't. I'm glad once in a while that Rich has gotten to go along to hear what it's like to stand after I speak in various contexts, after debates.

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Rich will remember the line, the greeting line that formed after the debate with, well, after both debates,

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Adnan Rashid or Trenhorn at G3. One of those, I stood there for 90 minutes just greeting people, yeah, taking pictures and signing books.

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But in almost every one of those situations, the majority of that time is people telling us about how much this program and this ministry has meant in grounding them in the truth, in encouraging them to be consistent, in giving them reasons for the hope that's within them.

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I'll give you an example from today, okay? I wasn't going to mention this, but it just crossed my mind.

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An old friend of the ministry, not that he's old, but someone that I've known for years and years, and was involved in a couple of debates we've done in helping to organize and set them up, wrote me an email a couple days ago and said, my sons, and they're like 10 and 13, my sons saw a video on YouTube that raised questions about the accuracy of the translation of the

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Bible over time. Would you be able, could we arrange a phone call where you could talk with them about that?

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And it's sort of like, you know, dad's answered the questions, but it's so helpful to have other voices saying the same thing.

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Every parent understands how that works. And so I'm driving along I -40 today, and it is amazing the technology that we have to be able to just, you know, call the number up.

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And I'm just in my truck talking, and there you go.

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We had the opportunity to talk about both the translation of the

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Bible and whether science contradicts scripture.

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So we talked about worldview, and I don't know, we spent at least a good 15, 20 minutes on the phone.

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And that's today's example of what we've been doing every program for coming up on 40 years now.

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And so you sit there and you talk to these folks, and what you hear is, you know, thank you for teaching me why

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I can trust God's word. Why, you know, what the true foundation of my faith is.

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And that's what we've been about for coming up on 40 years, and we're not going to change.

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As long as the Lord gives us breath, that's what we're going to do. And that's what I'm talking about in this tweet.

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When someone says, I want to know God as he has revealed himself, I am not going to start with a discussion of act and potency, potentialities, or anything along these lines.

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I'm not going to do it. I'm going to bring them to God's word, first and foremost.

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Combined with that, the fact that I will just be straightforward with you here.

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I have seen a love for philosophy and exaltation of philosophy destroy the ministries and lives of many promising young men who were looking at and got involved with ministry and today no longer are.

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Their faith in scripture, their submission to God's divine revelation was usurped, destroyed by the siren call, the temptation toward the wisdom of man inherent in the study of man's philosophies.

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I am well aware that great men of God have talked about philosophy as a handmaid to theology.

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Many of them, likewise, had the exact same experience that I have had in seeing this kind of destruction.

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I firmly believe that if you are going to seek to benefit and edify the people of God, the sheep of Christ, then the main thing they need is his voice.

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They need his words, his teaching, and that is found only in scripture.

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It is not found in Neoplatonism. It's not found in Aristotelianism.

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And those who say, but all truth is God's truth, are still confusing the voice of Christ to his sheep with philosophical categories.

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I'm well aware of Justin Martyr and Tertullian and all of the early church.

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We talked about all of this this past weekend when I was teaching church history in Conway.

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I get it. And I know we have to answer questions as we take the gospel out into the world.

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But the reality is when you're talking to a fellow believer in Christ, what grounds them is what has been breathed out by God.

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And the more of your time with them you spend on stuff that, hey, there are sharp atheist theologians that can come along and argue them right back out.

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But what that sharp atheist theologian cannot do is produce that which is theanoustos, that which is

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God -breathed. They can't touch it. So give them the right foundation.

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Encourage them in the ways that they need to be encouraged. And if you're going to minister to the people of God, you start there.

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And if you've got so much time with them and they are so blessedly mature that you can then spend time talking about act and potency and all the rest of Thomas Aquinas' categories of divine existence, well, you go to it.

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But the fact of the matter is most of us recognize that we have so little time in instructing our people that we need to stick with the main and plain things.

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And I will not apologize for warning people about what can happen because I think it's important.

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All right. So as I just mentioned,

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I mentioned on the last program that out of the blue, no one had contacted me.

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I'll be perfectly honest. I don't think many people see what Dr. Van Cleek is saying. This is a very idiosyncratic position, very small group.

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No one's been contacting me and saying, oh, you need to respond to this. No. But I had stumbled inadvertently across a couple of articles.

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And now, while trying to find a portion of that live here on the program with you,

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I found out there's numerous other ones. I honestly don't know how many of these I'm even going to invest my time in.

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But at least a couple of the first ones were helpful in identifying fundamental basic errors of logic, argumentation, history, facts, things like that.

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And they're on an important subject. So we'll look at them. But at the beginning of the second posting that he did, he says, but before addressing that list,

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I wanted to say a word about my chosen debate method. Having read many of the responses to the debate,

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I found that both sides of the debate really, really wanted me to address certain of the data behind JW's Erasmus claims as to get into the nitty gritty evidence for this or that reading.

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Let me give a little insight into my approach. Now, everybody knows who's listened to debate. Dr. Van Cleek does not do that.

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And given the formulation of his argumentation, I don't think he can. Both in the sense that I do not believe he possesses the ability to engage the textual data because it's something he's never done.

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And the many, many, many errors he's made in his written materials demonstrate something. He's just never done it.

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So asking him to do it doesn't make any sense. But his system, and the entire

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TR Only system, fundamentally, since it lacks a textual critical methodology that has any connection to history.

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See, this is an ahistorical textual critical methodology. It can allow what he has.

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He looks at the textual receptus, and it has no history. It doesn't matter what Erasmus said about why he chose a reading.

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It doesn't matter how all of this came together, historically speaking, about what manuscripts he did and did not have.

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About not being able to find a manuscript of relations. We asked to use a Latin commentary and extract the Greek text from it, and it's missing the last pages.

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All that stuff is irrelevant to the Van Cleef hypothesis, because the

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TR just exists as a concept, rather than a historical reality.

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The TR is something that the church has spoken of. And the church, likewise, exists merely as a concept.

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It doesn't have any historical reality to it. And so when the Roman church identifies the

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Latin Vulgate as the infallible text, as it did in history, it doesn't anymore, but did, that doesn't matter.

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Because that's not the church we're talking about. And if you ask, well, give me the dates, give me the names, he can't, because it's an ethereal thing that just floats in the mists of his mind.

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It doesn't exist in history. Same thing with TR. They cannot be examined in this way, so you can't ask specific questions about specific readings, because they can't get there.

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They don't have a methodology. They can't tell you why the longer ending of Mark has this set of arguments in its favor,

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Ephesians 3 .9 has this set of arguments, Revelation 16 .5 this set, and they're all contradictory. That no one could ever logically hold these things together, but they've decided, you know what, we don't have to.

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We don't have to. We are creating a new TR that has no historical foundation to it, so you don't have to worry about readings.

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You don't have to worry about manuscripts, you don't have to worry about Erasmus. Then, please remember something.

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I started laughing. It's one of those situations where, again, you're driving down the road, you're pulling your

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RV back there, and hopefully, like today, you've found a semi.

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I like finding duallys, because they produce even more draft, but today, I just found a regular semi that was going 65 miles per hour.

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Perfection. Perfection. I just get in his draft, and the only reason

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I lost this guy was he had to turn off at a weigh station. I hate those things, but I had at least 75, maybe 80 percent of today's trip.

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It was a short trip, but probably 75, 80 percent,

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I was on that guy's tail. Not close, not dangerously, but I'm getting benefit. I got up to 14 miles to the gallon at one point, which is really, really good.

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Anyways, you're driving down the road. I imagine people probably looked over at me and wondering, why is he laughing?

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I do sort of look over at times, because sometimes I get people who interact with the Christian signs that I have on my window.

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Normally positive, thankfully. I had one guy today that was going, yeah, all right. But anyways,

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I'm laughing, because I get to this section. If you've listened to the debate, you know that the constant, repetitive accusation of Dr.

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Van Cleek whenever I would deal with the text of Scripture as it existed in history was,

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I'm a naturalist. I'm a naturalist, not a supernaturalist. If you're a supernaturalist, you can't actually deal with history.

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What does he do? Let me pick up the quotation. I'm a naturalist.

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If I deal with stuff in history, we need to be, he says, there's nothing distinctively

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Christian about what he's saying. Here's the next part of his article. He's explaining his approach.

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First, in the 5th century B .C., Chinese military tactician Sun Tzu wrote down his tactics in a book we now call

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The Art of War. In this book, he declares that when you go to battle, you must dwell in impenetrable darkness.

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That is, it is of utmost importance to your opponent not know where you or when you will attack.

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As a result, I purposely employed arguments that I had not yet written or expressed so as to dwell in impenetrable darkness.

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This is also why the vast majority of posts on this blog during that time was not my own material.

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I wanted to give no hint of my approach. Think about this.

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Okay, can we all agree that going to a

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Chinese military tactician from the 5th century B .C. is not really the

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Christian way of doing things, okay? Secondly, this guy just self -published four books, three in print, one just digitally.

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The last one, the only one that was really meaningful, came out in June, okay, just a matter of weeks ago.

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And he gets challenged to debate on the TR. And what does he admit in his own writings?

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He didn't present the view in his own book. It came out only a few weeks earlier.

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I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me.

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Now, I could tell that a lot of the fundamental architecture and his understandings by faith and, you know, warranted

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Christian belief and blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, that goes back to the book. But here's a guy literally saying, well,

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I'm going to do a debate, and I'm not going to defend the position I just published in four books, but I'm going to do something different so that my opponent won't know where I'm coming from.

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That's not why I debate. You know, he talks about my arguments being stale. I'm saying the same things that I said years and years and years ago.

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Let me tell you something, Dr. Van Cleef, because I know you're going to listen to this. Maybe you're listening live right now. You're debating for the wrong reasons.

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Wrong reasons. It will not go well for you if you have any debates in the future.

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I don't know that you will, but you're debating for the wrong reasons. We debate for completely different reasons.

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You're reminding me, you know what you just did? You did what Dan Barker did. Dan Barker, the atheist, when

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I debated him on the existence of Jesus, which he denies he existed as a historical person. He's selling a book in the foyer of the church that he has written disputing the existence of Jesus historically.

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And so I buy his book. I'm going to respond to his position.

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What does he do? Comes up with a different set of arguments. For the same reasons. That is disingenuous.

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It's dishonest. It's childish. Absolutely childish. I will not debate like that.

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You do not show any respect. You don't show an ounce of respect for anyone who even bought your books, for crying out loud.

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Let alone the audience that's there or an audience that's going to listen in the future. How many people that have bought your books were maybe looking?

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This just sounds interesting to me. I'm going to be very interested to see how this works out in a debate.

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And then you don't use your own arguments. It's just astonishing to me.

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It truly is. When someone debates me, you're right. They know what they're going to get. And that's a good thing.

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And I'm going to stand with that. And if you want to actually tell people, you never know where I'm going to come from.

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If you think that's a good thing, well, okay.

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I'll let you run with that. But I hope there's someone who can come along in your life that you'll respect.

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Who will be able to tell you, yeah, that's not how you want to go.

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That's not the direction you want to go. That's not how you want to do things. So anyway, I'm going to pick up with a couple of ‑‑

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I'll try to at least finish off. Because he did 15 of my proclivities. We did 10 already. And then he did 15 in the second article.

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And like I said, I may glance at some of the stuff he's putting out now.

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But I'm not going to waste much of my time. Especially in light of this. I mean, it's just really hard to take someone seriously when they literally come out and admit, yes,

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I just did publish three books I want people to buy. But the fact of the matter is, I didn't bother to present those arguments because Sun Tzu told me to.

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It's just like, okay. All right. There you go. Ran into all sorts out there.

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Anyways, number 11. Dr. White regularly compares his Christian interlocutors to Muslims or Mormons.

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This is, again, an act of emotion manipulation like in number 6. What is more, Muslims believe that God is one, that Jesus existed, that God is merciful, and on and on.

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Okay. I should be back in. Zoom just ‑‑ okay.

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I'm back in. Okay. Yeah. Our wireless just completely bailed.

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It just completely dumped. So there you go. But hopefully that was a brief interruption.

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I'm not sure exactly when it bailed. So I'm going to go ahead and reread this. Number 11,

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Dr. White regularly compares his Christian interlocutors to Muslims or Mormons. This, again, is an act of emotion manipulation like in number 6.

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What is more, Muslims believe that God is one, that Jesus existed, that God is merciful, and on and on. Does that mean that Dr.

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White should compare himself to Muslims when debating Muslims on issues of the oneness of God, Jesus' existence, and divine mercy?

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Again, there's really a lot of muddled thinking on Dr.

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Van Cleek's part. And it's not a matter of comparing anyone to Muslims or Mormons.

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It is demonstrating that someone is using an argument that is used by Muslims and Mormons to defend their particular perspective.

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So, for example, when Dr. Van Cleek was on, he was on a webcast I listened to. And the guy that he was on, which he never answered, because they can't.

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It's not a part of their system. They can't answer these questions. And the guy asked, well, how does this differ from the

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Muslim testimony, the Mormon testimony? So the guy who's friendly to him, he asked, how does this differ from the

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Mormon testimony? And believe me, I know a lot about the

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Mormon testimony. And Van Cleek did not give an at all satisfying or useful response even then.

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And so it's not, this is not emotional manipulation at all. If he thinks that, then he's totally misunderstood why

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I'm pointing out when someone uses an argument that other groups use to establish their own

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Christian scriptures. I'm sorry, their own scriptures. And how are you going to respond to that?

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We need to, this is, this just goes back to something that, again, you know,

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Dr. Van Cleek said at the end of our debate, well, I've been building my vita, you know. I now have debated someone who debated

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Bart Ehrman, you know. The reality is that over decades,

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I have repeatedly said that we need to use equal scales.

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So I've said that standing in the mosque in South Africa, debating

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Yusuf Ismail on the deity of Christ, and when he attacks reliability of the text of the New Testament, I say we need to use equal scales.

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The arguments you're using are just as valid against the Quran, so you can't use them.

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And this is, I think, a very important aspect of the work that we've done for a long, long time.

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You may not understand it, but that's how it works. Dr. White regularly accuses, number 12, his

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Christian interlocutors of committing category errors. And that's because it is a very, very common thing for people who do not know a field to make category errors because they don't understand types of data, assertions being made.

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They think that you're making one kind of assertion when anyone who's actually familiar with the field knows that you're not.

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And this is something Dr. Van Cleek does regularly. He says, I am convinced Dr. White used this term when he doesn't understand something or needs more intellectual space to think about a solution.

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Okay, that's just an insult. It's just foolishness, and I'll let everybody listen.

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Given the number of category errors he made and the numbers we've identified just so far in these responses, it's really obvious that this is a major problem for him.

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He certainly does not know what it means or how to use it. In the debate, I compared inspiration of the canon and inspiration of words and the preservation of God's people with the preservation of God's words.

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I was accused of category error, and I will accuse you again because you don't seem to understand this. And I'll probably close with this one.

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Let me point something out to you. The TR Only movement has inappropriately attempted to hijack the argumentation that a number of us have used in regards to the canon of Scripture, specifically

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Dr. Kruger. And we have attempted to point out that the existence, and I brought this up in the debate.

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Evidently, he didn't understand it. I brought this up in the debate. There is a category of a book of Scripture, and there is a separate category for any variations in regards to words of that book.

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So, if you have the Gospel of John, and I may have even used this example, it just popped in my head.

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There's hundreds, thousands of examples you could have used. But if you have the

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Gospel of John, in John 1, 18, some of the manuscripts that read monogamies, theos, the unique God, have the definite article, the, ha, monogamies.

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And others do not. I'm not looking at it right now, but P66 and P75, if I recall correctly, one has the article, one does not.

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Okay, so if that was the only difference, do you have the

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Gospel of John? Well, the answer, obviously, is yes. When you talk about canonical studies, when you talk about what early church fathers possessed, what they cited from as being authoritative, the

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Gospel of John exists as a body. It has a category as a work of literature.

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That is a separate category from questions concerning the presence of the definite article or the lack of definite article.

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And Dr. Kruger recognizes that. This is why many of the people that Dr.

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Van Cleek cites never make the applications he does. Because they recognize it, too. They don't make the category error that he does.

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This is basic, basic level stuff. And so he's simply insulting me and attacking me.

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He just doesn't even know what he's talking about. Because his entire theory is based upon utilization of category errors.

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And that was demonstrated. That was demonstrated in the debate. One thing that unfortunately I did present in my opening that we never got,

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I don't think you understood it, it never came up in the process. So it just was presented, and I think a lot of people might not know.

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I tried to demonstrate the fact that the Apostles did not make the category error that he makes at this point.

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Because the Apostles knew that there was, for example, the

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Hebrew Masoretic tradition that existed in the first century. But then there was also the Greek Septuagint.

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And not all of the Hebrew manuscripts read identical to one another. We can point to variations that exist in antiquity.

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And you had variations in the Septuagint manuscripts as well. And the

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Apostles were willing to utilize language translation for the

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Septuagint when it differed from the Hebrew. So they recognize that Isaiah as a body, as a literary work, is inspired.

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But then, let's use Jeremiah, because that is what I use in the debate, so I don't want to cause confusion.

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They recognize that Jeremiah exists as a literary work. But that did not preclude them from citing a variant reading of Jeremiah, for example, in Jeremiah 31.

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He didn't pick up on that. And there's no place in his system, again, since it's very ethereal, has no place for that kind of specificity where you have a specific textual variant.

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But what it demonstrates, again, is this accusation is just completely in error on his part.

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And he just evidently does not understand how to categorize that, or how the arguments are being made.

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And his entire theory borrows from that and incorporates category error as part of it.

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It's an amazing thing to see. I'm not even going to bother with number 13, because it was just pure ad hominem.

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There was no substance to the argument. It's just pure ad hominem about philosophy, which, interestingly enough, I addressed earlier.

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So I'll try to remember to pick up, see if I can mark something here.

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Yeah, there you go. I'll try to pick up with number 14 the next time we get a chance to do something. Anyways, thank you so much for putting up with audio only.

58:20

Personally, I'll be honest with you, there's nothing much to see here.

58:25

I mean, you know exactly what the background in the fifth wheel looks like. Even though the guys who gave me the papyrus 52 things, it's up on the wall and it stayed.

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It may be permanently there. I hope so. Anyways, I appreciate that little thing. It looks cool back there.

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So next week, wow, I'm going to have to dust off the desk in the

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Dividing Lines studio. See if the computer still works and things like that as we get back to a regular schedule for at least a few weeks.

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Because like I said, I was going to say I'm not leaving again until after Thanksgiving. And then I realized that's next month.

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This year has flown by and it is amazing.

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So I've still got some shippy driving to do.

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The direction I'm taking home, there's some good uphills and downhills along there.

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So prayers appreciated. But Lord willing, I will get to hug and squeeze and squish

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Little Ransom tomorrow. And say hi to the fam and get back home.

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And get to work because there is so much yet to be done. So many projects to do.

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And I understand more and more what

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Gias was saying. Get the work done while the sun is shining. The night is coming in which no one can work.

01:00:04

And I sort of feel that way about our situation that we're facing these days. So anyways, thanks for listening to the program.