A Saturday Dividing Line

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:32

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, my name's James White. Most of me is here.

00:39

It's a Saturday, and we didn't get a chance to do The Dividing Line at all last week. It was not for lack of desire to do so.

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It's been a long week, it's actually been a long couple months in some ways. And anyways,

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I thought, you know, this is we need to, I hate to have a week go by where we don't do the program and so much stuff is happening to comment on and things like that.

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So here we are on a Saturday. Just briefly next week, we'll get the unit home unpacked and start working toward the trip in July to Colorado.

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Please pray for trying to get some debates set up up there, two of them, actually, it's really hard.

01:34

It looks like we would like to address in a meaningful fashion, not in a spitball fashion, the subject of open theism.

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Unfortunately, there is a small vocal group of open theists who don't know how to behave.

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They don't know how to be adults. They don't know how to control themselves. You know, I appreciated my debates with John Sanders.

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John Sanders is a scholar and John Sanders behaved in that fashion in our debates.

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He was a little more aggressive the last time we were on Unbelievable together, but still you can you can respect the man.

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But there are other people and I've commented on them that there's no reason to respect them.

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Their behavior does not require it. So we're trying to find some folks.

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One guy that lives up in the Denver area just says he's not available. I was hoping, because we're looking for one debate in Colorado Springs and one debate in Denver, I was hoping that since he couldn't make the

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Colorado Springs date, maybe he'd make the Denver debate because that's a week later. We'll see. But pray toward those.

02:56

We'd like to do those. We definitely have a debate. I think it's in, I won't give names until I can double verify it, but it's the weekend before the

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Fight, Laugh, Feast, Prodigal America thing in Fort Worth, which

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I think is the weekend after Reformation Day. So I think it's the first weekend of November. So I'm going to have two trips there that could be pretty close together because we've got

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St. Charles. We're trying to arrange a debate for St. Charles too. I'll be honest with you.

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I don't know. I'm trying to challenge a former world -class salesman to demonstrate that he can sell sand to Arabs to make that work.

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But so far it hasn't happened. And so we're looking for one there, the one before that.

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Yeah, we could hopefully finish off with maybe as many as four more moderated public debates.

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Not online ones, in -person ones before the end of the year. And then who knows what the situation in the

04:08

United States is going to be after that. I'll just be perfectly honest with you. It's hard for me right now to think much about the next year because I just don't know what the situation is going to be as far as ability to do anything given where the

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United States might be. So we'll see. I'm not fearful of that. The Lord's going to provide one way or the other.

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It's just why invest all the effort now in making plans when they're all going to go up in flames anyways, one way or the other.

04:48

Didn't see the Northern Lights too far south last night. But I'm excited for all of you who did.

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I only saw them once in my life when I was in Alaska and they weren't this brilliant pink that everybody saw last night.

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From what I'm reading, this is the most major solar storm in 19 years. And I do follow space weather.

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I know that sounds strange to people. So what's space weather? But yeah, I've got a bunch of solar apps. I'm a friend of Jason Lyle.

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What do you want? His PhD is in astrophysics and his doctorate was on the surface of the sun.

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So you learn stuff that way. And our sun is fascinating.

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Just absolutely fascinating. People find it weird that I enjoy that kind of stuff. But hey,

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I was Department Fellow of Anatomy and Physiology. I have a science background and I've always found that stuff fascinating.

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So these coronal mass ejections,

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CMEs, that spit straight at us and they're hitting us with a weakened magnetic field around the earth.

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The magnetic poles have shifted many times in the history of the world and they may again in the near future, which will create havoc for a while.

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But in the process, the magnetic field weakens and hence we're more subject to this kind of stuff.

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And especially older satellites are just going to turn into French fries up there if we get hit with the one they had.

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What year was it? 18... I forget which year it was. In the late 1800s.

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We got hit with a coronal mass ejection that fried telegraph lines.

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I mean, that's all we had back then were telegraphs. And no satellites. And the telegraph lines went up in flames, started fires.

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I mean, it would have been a global EMP event.

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All of our computers, all of our cell phones. Can you imagine what that would be like? I remember what it was like before all this stuff.

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But we have become so dependent. So much of our data, so much of our records, medical stuff, oh my goodness.

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Yeah, there you go. Lords in control. Well, again, if I was a secular humanist,

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I'd be really figuring we're toast one way or the other. It's going to happen.

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Wasn't there some... I didn't watch it, but there was some television series a couple of years ago. Something happened that turned out all the lights and you couldn't get electricity to work again on Earth.

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And it was how mankind tried to survive in the darkness of that.

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Which, of course, mankind had survived for a long, long time, but not with eight billion people on Earth.

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That's where the issue really, really lies. So anyway, so I want to look at something on the provisionist scale.

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It's been a few weeks and I'm thankful that it's been a few weeks. We'll look at something in a moment. But I got home and it was,

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I'll admit, it was torture because for those of you who don't follow on Twitter and things like that,

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I was headed home and on Tuesday morning I was supposed to arrive in Holbrook, spend the day in Holbrook.

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I wanted to get all my grading done for a class and then drive home the next day. And as I started for Holbrook, stuff went really, really south with my kidney situation.

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And as bad as it had been a week earlier, that had put me in an ambulance in a hospital in Texas.

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And so I probably shouldn't have driven to Holbrook, but I made it. And I know exactly one human being in Holbrook.

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And what? Two? Well, that's her husband.

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I'm talking about, yes, I know that, but I only came to know him through her.

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And thankfully she was home and thankfully

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I got there. The last hundred meters, literally, was the corkscrewiest, most extreme turn

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I've ever taken and hit bottom on the RV. I think it was just the hitch in the back.

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So I'm not pulling anything behind that RV, so I'm not overly concerned about that.

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But it wasn't anything to do about it. I had to get there. I was at the end of everything at that point.

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And so my fellow pastor, Jeff Durbin, and a dear brother from our church who does

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IV stuff and things like that, they jumped in a car. Well, they jumped in Jeff's car and drove up to Holbrook.

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It's three and a half hour drive and stuck me in the back of that van behind all of Jeff's baby seats because he has twin baby girls that they adopted and all the stuff they went through with that.

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It's really amazing. But anyways, and drove me straight to the ER at Banner Thunderbird down here in Phoenix.

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And so there I am. I'm 4 .3 miles from my house. I haven't been home in three weeks.

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I'm 4 .3 miles from my house. Do you have any idea how much torture that was? And surgery the next morning,

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I really liked the guy. He seemed really disappointed when

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I saw him after the surgery because it didn't do what we wanted it to do. And I've got surgery a week from Monday again, third one in a month and a half.

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And without going into a lot of details, these are not pleasant things to go through. No, very, very unpleasant.

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And I'm feeling a lot of pain today. Us old people, when you get injured, it takes a few days for stuff to really start hurting.

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You know, when you were young, you always knew when you would just hurt yourself. It was fast. And then get into your 40s and two days later, it's hurting and you're like, what did

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I do? And once you get into your 60s, it's, you know, three days later and by then you really have no idea what you did because your memory doesn't go back that far.

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And so, yeah, here we are, yay, yay, hoo. And it's perfectly fine.

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So the Lord knew what all this was going to be. So I get back and Jeffrey Rice, one of the packages at my home is right here.

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And I'm going to open this live right now. It's still all taped up. Jeffrey has sent one of his world famous Bibles in and Rich, likewise, is this the one you're talking about?

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Rich likewise has made this multi -layer. Is there a special name to these things?

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It's called a layered cross. What you know? That seems to be an accurate description. Layered cross.

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Rich does woodworking, as you can see. So once in a while you'll hear in the other room.

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And so we've got this from Rich and this from Jeffrey Rice and Derek Melton did make a knife, but he made it too nice.

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He made it too personalized for me. So he's going to make another one that may be less personalized that we will then be able to.

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And what are we going to do? Is this going to be a raffle type thing? Auction? Same as before.

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Okay. I thought you wanted to do something different than before. Oh, well. So we're going to have an auction.

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Rich will tell you about it next week for the cross for this and the blade when

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Derek sends that in. Man, this has got to be the dullest knife that has ever been used to open up anything.

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And by the way, I have a brand new knife sharpener that Derek got me.

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And because, you know, he, he knows, he knows knives, he knows knives anyway.

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We will put these up for auction. And this is to help with the cost of the new

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RV that we will be taking in. And I, I'm sure

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I've mentioned this, but just real quickly, um, what, oh, real quickly.

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Um, when I pulled out a month ago, not quite a month ago now, uh, we had come to realize that the

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RV we had purchased, even though it was four years old, had a grand total of about 80 miles on it.

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It had never been taken on a trip. So this was a shakedown trip. So there are things we need to have worked on when we get back.

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You always do. I don't, I don't care what the manufacturer is.

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Uh, you start bouncing something down the roads and stuff happens and it has to be, stuff has to be adjusted and no.

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So, um, I will say this, um, this thing was a joy to pull.

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It is so balanced. It is so well -made. Um, the hitch on the front, oh my goodness.

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If I had had this hitch all along, life would have been so much easier. Um, it's just a wonderful unit.

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And um, we, we had, we had upgraded the hitch in my truck, well in the ministry's truck.

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It's not my truck. Um, so I had, I had real confidence there. I mean, cause sometimes there's nothing you can do about it.

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You'll hit some of these bridges. I'm sorry. I don't know who was in charge of building them, but they should be horse whipped, um, and made to fix the bridge with nothing but a hammer and a screwdriver.

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Um, you, you just get thrown around like, I don't know what it's, it's hot. If you've never pulled something, you don't know the dynamics of the, you, the front hits something, but the back hasn't hit it yet.

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And so it creates tension. And I was so thankful that we had, um, gone with the top end, uh, hitch, the 25 ,000.

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Um, and because I just had confidence, uh, I just had confidence with this, with this unit and, um, it's a, it's, it's a true blessing.

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It really, really is a very, very thankful to have it. And so these are to help us to, um, defray those extra costs.

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And so what Jeffrey normally does, he's done here, here is the external.

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So he buys what he calls bricks, which are the, you know, what he's dealing with is the pages, uh, the bound pages together.

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And so this is a ESV. Oh, it's an ESV creasing confessions.

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Uh, so here is, um, I have an

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ESV creasing confessions from Jeffrey. Why the styrofoam attach itself to everything?

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I'm not sure. Uh, this is my ESV creasing confessions from Jeffrey. So it's got the stuff in the back, the larger catechism

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Heidelberg Westminster confession of faith. Uh, I think it does it have the London in there?

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I'm not sure. Um, but so I have one, that's a really neat resource to have.

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And so here is the new one here. And, uh, don't, don't worry.

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I'm not going to use a knife or anything like that. And, uh, as normal, very, very well wrapped and kept safe for transport, which means we'll just have to wrap it again.

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But I want people to be able to see what they're going to be bidding on anyways. And, uh, this is the fun part.

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You know, the problem is once it starts layering up, it gets stronger and stronger.

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I'm seeing sort of a, this isn't black. This is Brown, very deep, dark.

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I think this is that. Wow. I'm sure that Jeffrey could send me a description of exactly what it is, but I've not,

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I don't think I've seen this leather before. Wow.

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Look at that. We're going to take a moment to reflect upon.

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Now, this is fascinating. This is unique. Um, it has no imprinting whatsoever, completely clean.

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And it's got a deep, you can sort of see the different tones there.

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It's a little bit more rustic. Um, you can see the pages haven't been separated.

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I won't, I won't steal someone's, uh, thunder and doing that, but so smooth.

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Oh goodness. That is beautiful. That is beautiful. So, uh, this

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ESV, uh, creeds and confessions, and I didn't figure it would actually fit back in there again because there's, there's more leather on it now than there used to be.

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Uh, we will have available after someone vacuums up all the mess of middleware. Uh, ESV creeds and confessions from Jeffrey rice.

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And, uh, like I said, uh, brother Derek is going to send us a blade and we've got the layered cross from a brother

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Pierce on the other side of the window there. It hasn't been oiled yet.

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So that means it will squeak. So we've got mineral oil that will bring out the depth of the colors.

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Cause all you can hear is the Charlie Brown thing. You got no mic. Oh yeah.

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There's no stain on this right now. So it's all the natural colors and they will get deeper when, uh, he oils it.

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So, so be looking next week for that, uh, to help with the, uh, the costs on the, um, uh, the new, uh, the new

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RV. Okay. Uh, I'll just leave those there. I guess you can, yeah, you can sort of see them off to the side there, uh, from that angle anyways.

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And, um, press on here. Um, because I have some, somewhat of,

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I've got to do this pretty much in an hour. Um, because the, the truck is my means of transportation and it's in Holbrook.

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So I'm borrowing the wife's car right now and she's got stuff to do. And let me just thank everybody for all the prayers.

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Um, when I got into real problems on Tuesday, people were, um, doing everything.

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I mean, I, I've had, I had one brother back East literally volunteer to fly out.

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Uh, he's, he's a truck driver to, to drive the unit back to Phoenix for me and I'd fly back and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And, um, just a lot of folks that were very concerned saying,

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Hey, we need to have you around. There are even people on the other side of a number of issues that were praying that, you know, they'd rather defeat me in debate than defeat me in a surgical suite or something like that,

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I guess. Um, so I appreciate, uh, all of that very, very, very much. And, um, uh, but again,

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I, I, I said, uh, I've said multiple times and people are even asking today, well, why, why do a program?

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Why not just rest? You know, so it would be a whole week. The world's not going to come to an end. Well, uh,

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I just, I, I have a very strong conviction that while we, while the sun is up, we need to be working.

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Um, I mentioned you on the last program and I was listening even toward the end, uh, as I was dying on the way to Holbrook, I was listening to an audio book that I purchased.

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On the life and ministry of Adoniram and Ann Judson. And, uh, if you're at all familiar, highly recommend to you, um, get an audible book, do something just to thoroughly familiarize yourself with not only him, but there were so many, uh, in our past, so many great men and women who have suffered greatly to lay the foundations, um, missionaries who, um, gave it all.

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They, they really, I, it was just astonishing to me how much death surrounded these people.

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And I'll be honest, I've said this before, I'll say it again. I think the fact that we hide from death, we hide it from our children.

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We don't think about it. Scripture tells us, what does scripture tell us? Scripture says it is better to spend a day in the house of mourning than a day in the house of feasting.

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Now that does not mean that it is wrong to feast and to rejoice in God's goodness, to rejoice in God's blessings.

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But in this world, um, life is, is but a vapor.

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And the reality is that we learn so much and, and our priorities are aligned to God's will when we suffer and we do everything in our power to avoid suffering.

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I'm not saying you have to be like people in the early church that ran out to try to become martyrs or something like that. Um, if, if we seek to live a godly life, we will experience suffering.

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But one of the things, one of the reasons I would like to do at least one or two debates on open theism,

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I don't believe that open theists can for a second understand what

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Adoniram Judson went through. He himself said if he did not have a firm, heartfelt conviction of the sovereignty of God, he could never have survived the simple calamities that he experienced.

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I mean, this man was, was going to London to raise funds, uh, for, for foreign mission work.

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Remember you and I, foreign missions, everybody, foreign missions everywhere.

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Not back then. Not back then. It was a brand new radical idea that a lot of people didn't even like.

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There's Calvinists who were spearheading it too, by the way. And, um, he's going to London and the ship that he's on gets taken.

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It's captured by the French who were at war with England. Of course, what's new about that?

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Um, and he came this close to disappearing into a dungeon, never to be seen again, experienced great deprivation, suffering, starvation, even in that period of time.

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And if it weren't for an American military officer who heard him as they're taking him to the prison where you don't, you don't come out of this prison.

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He's at Nairam's going, I'm an American. I'm not, I'm not, we're not at war with you.

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This isn't right. An American military officer hears him, tells him quiet, quiet, you're going to get yourself killed.

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And then a few hours later in the dungeon, the door opens and there is a military officer and he has bribed his way in and gets him out.

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And hustles him to a ship and gets him out of France. Um, and he finally is able to get to London and then back.

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And remember these trips would take months, weeks and months. We do this, you know, overnight weeks and months for travel.

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Um, and then his dear wife who gave so much for him and gave so much to the

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Burmese people, three children lost. He married three times because his wives kept dying.

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And I, if I recall correctly, the majority of children born to him died before he did.

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And so many of the missionaries that went over there died. Um, in fact, one of the women that he married was the widow of one of the missionary couples that came over to help them.

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They had children. It was, it was, it was a practical thing. It was sort of almost a needful thing because there was so much death.

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And the thing that struck me over and over again was how they responded.

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Their response of trust, their response of non -complaint was due to the fact that they believed in the sovereignty of God.

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They believed this came from his hand. The open theist cannot say that. Can not say that.

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It steals and robs the children of God, the confidence they can have that what happens in their life comes from his hand and comes from infinite goodness and mercy.

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They can't have that. And I just don't know how these people even start to read the stories.

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These people that did so much because they don't believe in that God. They don't believe in the

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God of those, those, those missionaries. And the small, still struggling

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Burmese church is there because of Adenyarman Ann Judson. There's no question about it.

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When you read the story of he translated the Bible into Burmese, he learned the language and then he translated it, not from English, but from Hebrew and Greek.

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This guy was brilliant. He was brilliant. And to my knowledge,

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I could be wrong about this, but I did read somewhere that that's still the only English, the only translation in Burmese, not an

29:49

English translator. That's the only translation of the Bible in Burmese. I could be wrong about that, but at least until recently it was.

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And the miraculous way in which God protected that translation because he was put in prison due to a war between Burma and England.

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How he survived what he went through in that prison, I don't even begin to understand. But the miraculous way in which that translation was protected and eventually published, providence of God, sovereignty of God.

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It's right there in front of us and extremely challenging.

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Introduce your kids to the stories of these great men and women and be honest about it.

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Don't make cartoons out of these people. They weren't superheroes. They weren't sinless. They weren't perfect, but they were willing to suffer for Christ.

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And for me, sitting here in discomfort, it's like when

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Adoniram Judson was in that prison, I think he was in prison, I forget how long it was. It was a very, very long time.

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In the first prison they were in, in Rangoon, I think, or up the river, sorry, one of the two.

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I forget. I'd have to look. Their feet were shackled.

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If you didn't have somebody on the outside to bring you food, you starved to death. They were put in a single cell, no windows or any light, no chamber pots.

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You just went. I can't imagine what it smelled like. You never washed. And at night, these sadistic guards would take your shackles and they would hang them over a bamboo pole, and then they'd raise the bamboo pole up so that at night you slept and the only thing touching the floor was your shoulders and your head.

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Your feet would be up in the air. I don't know that I'd survived the week, and many of them didn't.

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Many of them did die of dysentery and all sorts of horrific diseases. Not only in the prisons, but sometimes just out in the streets, just the way things were, and still are in many places in the world.

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So anyway, that's a good reason, I think, to go for the open theist topic because it robs people of the biblical

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God. It really does. It reduces God to sort of an exalted man.

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Do you know Jehovah's Witnesses are open theists? The Watchtower's official theology is amenable to open theism.

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All right, so I was sent about three weeks ago. Let me see here.

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I actually have up here, this would tell me exactly how long ago I was sent this. April 13th, so it's right at a month.

33:32

No, April 11th. April 11th. Okay, so yeah, right there. I was sent this, and the individual who sent it to me,

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I think, is correct. Um, because he identifies what's being said here as truly central to the quote -unquote provisionist argument.

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And so often this stuff sounds like it's a spitting match, like it's just for people who like to go online and have arguments with other people and stuff like that.

34:09

That's not what we're talking about. Oh, by the way, you made no comments about my shirt.

34:18

There are comments. I can't see the comments.

34:25

What are the comments? Turning the shirt down?

34:32

It's too bright? Hawaiian shirts are always bright, but it's that it's cute.

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Because look, see, there's Dini. That's... So I have a shirt with Dini, and I have a shirt with Foxy, and a shirt with Sophie.

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And I matched the flowers and stuff to sort of match their color schemes. We need to pray for Dini.

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Dini's living in a tree. Dini struggles to adjust to other kitties, and he and Foxy...

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Foxy's fine. Foxy just wants to play, but Dini just doesn't want anything to do with him.

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So Dini's literally living in a tree right now. They're objecting.

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Some of us love the shirt. Okay, well, good. Well, so you can go online. And this is only for people who are weird like us, but there are a lot of you out there because you've talked to me.

35:30

I see you on Twitter. And you can take your favorite pictures of your furry friends and have a shirt made.

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So I don't care what anybody thinks. It's Saturday. I've had two rough surgeries in one month, and I don't care what you think.

35:48

It's comfortable, and it's my little Dini boy. Last night, Sophie was with me the whole night.

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And in fact, for a while, she was on top of me for at least two hours, I would say. And when

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I was gone, she did that with Kelly. But now that I'm home, she's doing it with me again.

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And so Kelly walked into the office today, and she's like,

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Traitor. I see you, traitor. Because Sophie's cuddling with me.

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And I was gone. And so what can I say? The two of us,

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I was holding Foxy today. And he doesn't really like to be held.

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But both Kelly and I started petting him ferociously. And so he's sort of like, Oh, this isn't all that bad.

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So anyway, I'm very happy to be home and see people who accept me unreservedly, shall we say.

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My little cats. Anyhow, all right. So this video clip was sent to me.

37:03

It has been about a month since I listened to it. So it's sort of going to be new for me, too.

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But I remember having listened to it that, yeah, this is key and central to the issues that people should be thinking about when it comes to provisionism.

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So if I recall, this is not an overly long... Now, that's really weird why it looks that way.

37:31

But anyway, hopefully I'll be able to hear it. And let's listen to what is said here.

37:39

I was just saying this has to do with indwelling the spirit. The spirit indwells believers. And so if David, who is indwelled by the spirit, is speaking, the words of the spirit are in his tongue, the spirit is actively guiding

37:49

David. And he's speaking the word of the spirit. And he's inspired in his speaking of that word to his audience or writing it or whatever it may be.

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And so the Holy Spirit is not indwelling the unbeliever. He's indwelling the believer so as to work on the unbeliever.

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So the spirit of the Lord is actively at work through a human means. Now, he may do some other means like some supernatural vision or some whispering or something like that, too.

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But what I'm saying is that the work of the spirit through the human vessel is a necessary and sufficient means.

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In other words, my challenge is to say you have to establish total inability in order to suggest that there has to be something extra going on.

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You have to establish because I'm not making the positive claim that people are born unable to believe divinely inspired truth.

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You are. So you have to establish that from the Bible that total inability is true. And then you can assert, therefore, something else is needed besides the presentation of the scripture, the

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Holy Spirit working through indwelled messengers to proclaim truth clearly for the world to believe it.

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And so that's I think the burden, and I may be wrong, you can show me where I'm wrong here, but I think the burden is on you for making the positive claim that total inability is true.

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And therefore, there needs to be some extra prevenient working of grace to cause people to have the ability to believe plainly spoken truth.

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Okay, that last phrase, that last section, let's play that again.

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Total inability is true. And therefore, there needs to be some extra prevenient working of grace to cause people to have the ability to believe plainly spoken truth.

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Okay, extra prevenient work of grace. With all calm respect, that's not even up to the level of Rome's view.

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Rome has a higher view of grace. And that's an amazing thing to say. But Rome has a higher view of grace than Leighton Flowers has.

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Because if you're listening, what he says at the beginning sounded like he believes that the primary work of the spirit in,

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I guess you can't even call it drawing someone, because there seems to be something in his theology that drawing was different in the past, and it's now after the cross, it's different today, and all that kind of stuff.

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But when someone comes to Christ, it sounds like he believes that everyone possesses in and of themselves the capacity to believe divine truth without a supernatural work of the spirit of God within them to free them from slavery to sin.

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Because the language that he used was that the spirits in the believer, not the unbeliever, this is not a special work of the spirit.

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Because see, obviously, if a special work of the spirit is needed to open blind eyes, to take out stony hearts, to bring the bones together in the valley of bones, all that biblical stuff, the pictures, the biblical stuff, if the spirit of God is required to do that and can actually accomplish it, then that proves election.

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That proves election. Because the spirit of God has accomplished that in specific people's lives.

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Now, you might say, well, but he tries. But the point is, if the spirit of God frees you from slavery to sin, raises you to spiritual life, opens spiritual eyes, gives a heart of flesh, takes out a heart of stone, all these things, if those are spiritual works that are required for a person to have to in saving faith, then the spirit of God is going to obviously work in harmony with the

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Son and with the Father. You can't have disharmony between Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And so you'd have to believe in election, which is the last thing on the planet they're actually going to believe in.

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A biblical doctrine of election, not a vague class election type thing that doesn't have

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God as the source of the choice. And so it sounds like what he's saying is that the role of the spirit, somehow he connects the role of the spirit in inspiring scripture.

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Because he said David is involved with the Holy Spirit and gives inspired. That's inspiration of scripture.

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That's a completely different category. Provisionists stink at categories, to be perfectly honest with you.

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But it sounds like what he's saying is that the only role, at least normatively, that the spirit has is in the believer in presenting divine truths.

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Now, I don't know what he's talking about when he talks about whispers. I don't even know how to deal with something like that.

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Where is the spirit whispering in scripture? I have no earthly idea.

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So he does sort of leave that door open just a little bit. He uses the term prevenient grace, again, utterly unbiblical concept, completely indefensible.

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It's grace that doesn't accomplish anything. It's grace that brings everybody to the same point. Depends on who's using it.

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But prevenient grace is the cellophane tape of Arminianism. It's how you hold together a system that simply doesn't work.

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And so that last statement, you know, total inability is true.

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And therefore, there needs to be some extra prevenient working of grace. Extra prevenient working of grace.

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So, prevenient grace be for everybody. But I have no idea what that's supposed to mean.

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Because it sounds like, in the Provisionist scheme, that prevenient grace is just simply what

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God has done in making the gospel available and in having people proclaim it.

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Now, that raises all the questions of, well, how come it's being proclaimed regularly in certain nations and not in other nations?

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Does that mean God couldn't get it into those other nations? Again, Provisionism lacks a coherent biblical theology of God.

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It doesn't start there. It starts with man. I've said that from the start. And I'll keep saying it because it's true.

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If you don't start with the biblical revelation of God, you are going to end up in error somewhere.

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It may be anywhere on the map because it's the doctrine of God that holds everything together in the center.

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You start with God's self -glorification, God's nature, God's unchanging purposes, the harmony that must exist between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the

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Trinity to even cohere logically, let alone reflect the range of biblical data that forces us to believe in the doctrine of the

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Trinity. You have to start there. And they don't.

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They do not. That is not their grounding. That's not their starting point at all.

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I've had to listen to way too many hours of Provisionists for me to not know that that is not their starting place in any way, shape, or form.

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So, because they don't, and because they start with man and these unbiblical concepts such as prevenient grace, then now you have this extra spiritual working being required.

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And he's saying, you have to prove that. Not difficult to do, but every illustration that I just mentioned,

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Heart of Stone, Heart of Flesh, Valley of the Dry Bones, we can go to Romans 8. There's just so many places.

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And yes, they have their surface -level responses. They're incoherent, inconsistent, but they have them.

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It's not their first rodeo. But this is the issue, because as I said, this is sub -Roman, let alone sub -Reform.

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This did not come out of the Reformation. Historically, the

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Reformation opens up the opportunities for groups like this to exist, but as far as having a meaningful theological connection to people who've come before us, these people are not even close to the

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Reformation. They don't believe in the bondage of the will. They're certainly not coming from that perspective at all.

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And look, most Lutherans don't believe in the bondage of the will either. A whole lot of Presbyterians today.

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There is such diversity now because of a willingness to deny foundational elements of the system.

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You've got Presbyterians who believe everything. You've got Lutherans who believe everything. You've got Anglicans, Episcopalians who believe everything.

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You've got Roman Catholics who believe everything. That's just where we are today.

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But to listen to the proclamation of the gospel that came from the

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Reformation at that time, and then to ask the question, what do the provisionists believe concerning the nature of grace, the priority?

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Because remember, I remember one of the last Dividing Lines we did live on terrestrial radio, and no one had ever even heard of terrestrial radio back then.

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That was not a term that was used. It was just radio. One of the last series that we did on the

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Dividing Line when we were on KPXQ was in response to Norman Geisler, who had appeared on the

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Bible Answer Man talking about Roman Catholicism, and the issue was how grace was seen by the

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Reformers. And he's telling everybody, you need to understand, Rome believes in the necessity of grace.

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Rome anathematized the Pelagians. Rome anathematized anybody who says that apart from the grace of God, you can be saved.

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And my response always has been, and always will be, yeah, that's true.

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No question about it. But that wasn't the issue of the Reformation. The sufficiency of grace.

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The power of grace. The accomplishment of grace. The relationship of grace to God's self -glorification.

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And Trent denied that sufficiency by adding in the actions of man in the sacramental system.

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The Provisionists, as much as they detest the term and waste time arguing about what

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Pelagius did and did not believe, the Provisionists just simply do not seem to understand that what they are saying, both sides of the

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Reformation recognized that man was in a significantly more dangerous spiritual state than the

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Provisionists did. Because what I just listened to was an ostensive

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Southern Baptist stating that any individual without a supernatural work, and this is why during the debate he wouldn't say that conversion, regeneration, is a miracle.

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He wouldn't say it because he doesn't believe it. And everybody in the

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Reformation recognized that was necessary. So the Provisionists are sub -Roman when it comes to the issue of the nature and sufficiency of grace.

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And so how do you deal with that? Well, I don't know that anyone can.

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There are no magic bullets. I remember a number of years ago preaching at a church in New Jersey.

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And I preached out of Romans 2 and 3, end of 2, end of 3.

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And I preached the text where Romans 1, universal sinfulness.

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Romans 2, the Jews go, yep, everybody out there is bad. And Paul's argument is you're actually worse because you have

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God's law, but you don't do God's law. And so mere possession of the law does not bring you any closer to God.

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And then you get into chapter 3. Well, then what's the benefit of the Jews? Well, they have the scriptures, etc.,

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etc. But then you have that catena of passages where the apostle brings together these texts to say that the accusation of universal sinfulness is for everyone.

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That Jew or Gentile all stand before God on the same ground.

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And the application that the apostle makes is once we recognize this, then every mouth is stopped.

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Every claim of self -righteousness is done away with. The only person who is ready to hear the gospel, is ready to hear the saving power of Christ, is ready to hear that God justifies the one who believes in him.

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Not the one who brings works, but the one who believes in him. That has to be a person whose mouth has been stopped, who stands head down, no more excuses.

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I accept that I am a sinner before God and he can do with me as he pleases. That's the person who is then ready to hear about justification by faith.

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That's the person who's ready to hear the gospel. And what we have done in the church today is we skip the bad news to get to the good news.

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But without the bad news, the good news isn't really good news. And once a person realizes their utter undoneness, the utter propriety of judgment, they're the ones who will be able to extend that empty hand of faith.

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But how do you get there? Does every person have that innate capacity to just be reasoned through to that point?

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Or is it not a given that the Spirit of God is necessary?

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When Jesus said, if the Son sets you free, you'll be free indeed. Do you really need to be set free?

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Is that really necessary? That seems like a radical thing. And if the

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Son sets you free, will you not therefore be free? How does prevenient grace fit into the

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Son setting someone free? These are questions that I don't think provisionism can answer in a meaningful fashion.

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And most evangelicals are completely—it's not the essence of what is preached.

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It's not the essence of what is preached. So that they're still open to a compromised position.

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And the compromise is, yeah, God does most of it, but I'm the one that enables him by my free will act to save me.

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And the results are right in front of us. I think we can see that very clearly.

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So I think this is the issue.

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But that's also why provisionism has gained a hearing, is because most of evangelicalism, since it doesn't root its understanding of the gospel in God's glory and God's purpose, and the perfection of the work of Christ, and the perfecting power of the work of the

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Spirit, and everything else, leaves this door open, invites this kind of compromise.

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And they use much of the same language, but it doesn't have the same meaning that it has in Scripture.

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And so I appreciate this clip being sent to me. You can go ahead and take that down.

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I appreciate that clip, because I think that it does illustrate very clearly for us the issue that the

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Reformers had with Rome, but these guys aren't even up to Rome's level.

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That's the amazing part. Now, I know you have... I was just listening to you describe this.

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It made me think of this picture. Yeah, this is interesting, because this is on the back of the picture.

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And I have to hold this far away to read it now. Well, just a second.

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Con, hold on a second. A few people know what I just said. In December of 2001,

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I presented a discussion of the doctrine of justification on the Bible Answer Man broadcast. A man...

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Boy, isn't that ironic? A man was listening to those programs, and as I spoke of the imputed righteousness of Christ, which covers us and gives us peace with God, he drew this picture.

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It is very special to me. I hope your heart rejoices when you look at it and remember you are clothed in the righteousness of another. Romans 4, 4 -8.

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I'm not sure where this sticker came from. 2001 was almost a quarter century ago for us now, so we can be forgiven.

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But you can see this forlorn -looking man, but he's covered in the righteousness of another.

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That's the clothing that he has. And so this was drawn by someone.

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It looks like it says barren at the bottom to picture the perfection of the righteousness of Christ.

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It's not something that we bring. It's not something we add to.

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This certainly is not something that Roman Catholics don't understand. Certainly in the debate with Jimmy Akin, that came out rather clearly as well.

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But honestly, I don't think it's something a provisionist understands either. And so we will continue to proclaim the truth and hope and pray that the

01:00:10

Spirit of God will honor that in the lives of others. So we will be,

01:00:18

Lord willing, we'll be back next week. Probably not on Tuesday.

01:00:24

We are going to be working with the unit at that particular point in time, but we will try to get programs in next week.

01:00:34

And then right now, I am scheduled for yet another very unpleasant surgery on the 20th of May.

01:00:43

So that's a week from Monday. And I would just pray that, like I said, the doctor that I have, what touched my heart, honestly, is he looked as disappointed when

01:00:57

I came to in the recovery room. He looked as disappointed as I was. We had had really high hopes, and we got about 20 % of that done.

01:01:10

Pray that what I'm going through right now, the process I'm going through right now, things they've put into me right now, will have the desired effect and will allow this next one to be the last one.

01:01:28

Because I'll be honest with you, if there's a whole series of these coming, I already feel like a pincushion.

01:01:41

That's almost two weeks ago now. You can see the black and blue marks from a nurse that knew there was a vein in there somewhere.

01:01:53

Some nurses are good. Some not so good. Yeah. Anyway, so for those who wish to pray or wish to pray against me, but there's no one to be listening to you if you're praying against me anyway, so I don't really care.

01:02:08

You can be praying toward those ends. And I would certainly love to experience at least a level of the fitness and health that I've had in the past.

01:02:21

But if that's not the Lord's will, then I just need to be able to do the things

01:02:28

He calls me to do for as long as I get to do them. And that's totally in His hands, and God is good through all of it.

01:02:36

God is good through all of it. So thanks for listening to The Dividing Line today. Remember, next week we'll probably put something out on the app and then maybe start the auction stuff off with the next program so we can let everybody has the auction.

01:03:00

Evidently, there's conversation going on in the room about auctions versus raffles type stuff.

01:03:08

So we'll figure it all out. But again, this will have even deeper colors because Rich will be doing the oil staining on it.

01:03:18

And then once again, the ESV, I guess we'll call this the clean cover look because it doesn't have any imprinting on it.

01:03:30

Smells wonderful. It's a little bit, I'm going to have to ask, did we get anything from Jeffrey?

01:03:38

I didn't look at Facebook because he always communicates with me. Yeah, I don't see anything. I guess

01:03:48

I'm just going to have to find out from him what he calls this. But it's the ESV, creeds and confessions.

01:03:55

Wonderful, smooth, beautiful, but more rustic, um, deep brown with a little bit of burgundy type in the, the, the leather, uh,

01:04:09

Bible, uh, that will be, uh, getting out there too. So be thinking about that.

01:04:16

Uh, prayers appreciated and, um, prayers appreciated on Monday because I'll be driving the unit, uh, back down.

01:04:24

And on this whole trip, this was the leg that I was concerned about most because if I go one direction, it's just technical rough road surfaces, two lane roads, things like that.

01:04:39

And we end up on the other side of the Valley have to come across through heavy traffic. If we go the other direction, a bunch of single lane construction, um, which is not a whole lot of fun when you're 57 feet long.

01:04:51

Um, it's all there is to it. So, uh, that's what we'll be doing on Monday. And I need to, uh, have all the physical strength that I can muster, uh, for that particular event.

01:05:03

So, uh, we will see you in God's will next week. Thanks for watching. God bless.