Game Plan for Dialoguing with Mormon Missionaries by the 7 Foot Apologist

Introduction and the Mission of Creation Fellowship Santee

Oh, I lost my mouse. Let's see. I'm going to touch that. Do my sharing thing? No, not yet. Okay. Um, I, when I, we're going to go. Ready? I'm Terry Kammerzell and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how God created the world and all life in just six days, about 6 ,000 years ago.

We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020. We've been blessed with almost 80 different speakers over that time. They've been doctors, scientists, pastors, evangelists, apologists, all sorts of different people who love the Lord and have a message to share.

They cover topics that range from creation science to current events to other theology topics. And you can find the recordings that we have of those, of those speakers by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash CFS archives.

That's C for creation, F for fellowship and S is for Santee. And while you're there, you can also click on the link to see our upcoming speakers that we have scheduled for the remainder of 2023. You can also email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com so that you get on our email list.

We promise not to spam, but we will send you emails to our upcoming speakers so that you won't miss out on any of them. Tonight, we're blessed to have back a good friend of ours, Dan Kreft, the seven foot apologist.

If you've followed us for very long, you may recall that he's been with us three times before. One of those times was to teach us some skills for how to respectfully debate people on social media when it comes to defending our faith.

Another time he did his one of a kind begats, wherefore are the begats presentation. And believe it or not, he and I actually hosted a live presidential debate watch party one time, you know, when the world still made a little more sense.

So with that, we're very thrilled to have him back tonight for a different topic. And I can tell you that a couple of us got to meet him in person since then, and we can vouch for the fact that he really is seven foot tall.

We can also vouch for the fact that this presentation tonight is going to be a blessing to you. And it's going to be so simple that even middle schoolers can track it. Just a little information about Dan.

Dan is a full-time apologist and full-time IT guy. So how does that work out with his time? Oh boy. Well, he'll explain that a little more, I'm sure. But then also he has some experience playing basketball.

That's not a surprise. And even with Shaquille O 'Neal. So that's pretty exciting. So you can read more about Dan and his ministry at sevenfootapologist .com. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you, Dan.

The Goal of the Talk: Dialoguing with Mormon Missionaries

Well, thank you very much for having me back. It is a pleasure and a privilege to get a chance to share with you all once again. Am I sufficiently shared here? Yes, it looks good. Alrighty then. Good.

So let me make some minor adjustments here to the previews. All right. So tonight's presentation is a game plan for dialoguing with Mormon missionaries. This is not necessarily about how to engage in conversations with your friends who happen to be Mormons, but I'll be more focused on what happens when you have two guys show up at your door, looking something like this, offering to talk to you about the Book of Mormon and how we should conduct ourselves.

So when you do have a couple of Mormon kids come up to your door and they're wanting to come talk to you, the first decision you have to make is what are you going to do? How should you proceed? So the first question we want to look at is what should you do?

So you have a few options before you, as I see it. The first is to turn off the lights, hide and be behind the couch and be very, very quiet. Or you could take a slightly more aggressive approach and start hollering at the top of your lungs.

Get off my lawn, you sons of perdition. You could do that. You could be a little more demure and say, well, just talk to the hand because the face ain't listening. Wait, there you go. Talk to the hand because the face ain't listening.

Or number four, you could take the approach that is my personal favorite, and that is to invite them in. So I would recommend you do that. But whenever I talk about inviting Mormons into my house, invariably there are some brothers and sisters in the Lord who will look at me and say, well, wait a minute.

Doesn't the Bible have something to say about this? Doesn't 2 John say not to invite them in? Well, let's take a look at the verses in question and see what God has to say in his word. It says, for many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh.

This is the deceiver and the antichrist. Then you jump down to verse 10. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house and do not give him a greeting. For the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds.

So we look at this and it seems to be a pretty clear cut. Well, I should not invite them into my house because we have some clear theological differences, especially regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ.

But I think it's really important that whenever we look at Bible passages, we look at them in context because the number one rule in hermeneutics is that context is king. So you must consider the context.

Let's take a look at some context from the scriptures that will help us to understand what's going on here in 2 John. In Mark chapter 6 verse 10, Jesus commanded the 12 to stay in one house for their duration of the visit to that particular city.

In Acts 9 .43, Peter stayed for some time with Simon the Tanner in Joppa. Acts 16 .14 and 15, Paul and company stayed with Lydia of Thyatira in Philippi. Then we jump over to the next chapter, Acts 17 .5 -7, Paul and Silas stayed with Jason in Thessalonica.

In the next chapter, we see Paul stayed with Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth. And then if we go all the way to the left hand side of your Bible to the Old Testament, we look at 2 Kings chapter 4 and we can see that Elijah stayed with a Shunammite woman in his own apartment.

So why do I bring these up? There's clearly a difference between the 12 apostles and Elijah and your average Mormon missionary. Well, the thing we should note here is that during the first century, itinerant missionaries were commonly stayed in host housing because they didn't really have hotels back in the first century.

So they would find a house that was willing to receive them and they would use that house as their base of operations, if you will, while they were in that particular city. So I think that's what really what's going on here is that in 2 John, John is admonishing the body of Christ not to use your house as a base of operations for false teachers.

Because if you do, in doing so, you become part and parcel, partner with them in their ministry, the same as if you had made a financial contribution to their work, right? So looking at the context, hosting an itinerant preacher is not the same as inviting Mormons in to give them a truth and frankly, to slow their progress in your neighborhood, right?

Because God has sent them to you for a reason. And they're showing up on your doorstep for a reason because God is sovereign. And while they're there, you've got a job to do. So if you want to, this is just one guy's opinion, but if you'd like another, you can scan the QR code there and you can see John MacArthur answering a question from a guy during one of his Q &A sessions, where he responds very similarly, similarly, and talks about the context of 2 John.

And I think you'll think, I think if you watch it, you'll see that it sounds very familiar to the answer that I just gave you. So yeah, sometimes God brings the mission field to your door. And I'm of the opinion that, oh, I want to make mention one thing.

Some people might not be persuaded by this. So if you're, if you're not persuaded by the context argument with regard to 2 John, then I would encourage you, do not violate your conscience. Above all else, we need to consider what Paul said in Romans 14, 21 through 23, that we need to be, in all things, we need to be convinced, we need to be consistent, and we need to be considerate.

So if you do not feel like you can, in good conscience, invite them into your house, then don't, don't let me, don't let me persuade you in that direction. Have a conversation with them on your front porch, if you like, whatever, but do not violate your conscience.

So, all right, with that said, I believe that sometimes God brings the mission field to your door, and it saves you a trip, right? So I'm of the opinion that when that happens, you should just go bananas and have fun with it.

Setting the Agenda and Defining the Terms

So I'm going to highlight for you a couple different approaches that I've learned in the years, over the years, and they're by no means the only approaches for dialoguing with Mormon missionaries, but these are a couple that I've, the first one that I've had good personal success with, and the second of which I've been looking for an opportunity to use, but the Mormons have been, not been showing up at my house for the past few years.

I don't know why. So I'm kind of sad because I want to, I want to try it out, but here we go. So the first approach is one that I learned from a former pastor of mine named Carl Payne and his book, Transferable Cross-Training, book two, Apologetics.

You can see there, there's a QR code. If you want to scan that, you can see where you can purchase this book. It's, it's very, very thin. It's, it puts the cookies on the bottom shelf for, for all the kiddies to get to them.

And I asked if Dr. Payne, if I could use the, his likeness and his book and, you know, mention it in my presentation. And he said, yeah, sure. That's okay. So we're blessed. So Dr. Payne's approach is, is pretty simple.

It really boils down to setting the agenda of the meeting and staying on task. So setting the agenda of the meeting looks kind of like this. Let's say you've got two young Mormons who show up to your door.

We'll call one of them Luke and one of them Obi-Wan, because I don't know if you're familiar with this, but Mormons go on two-year missions. And when they go out on mission, there is always one guy who is on his second year of the mission.

And the other one, that would be the Obi-Wan. And the other young, the other one would be the, the Luke of the, of the group. He's in his first year of mission. So you have the older kind of coaching the younger one around.

So we're going to use the names Luke and Obi-Wan. And I'm not going to call them elder because usually they're way younger than me. So I would go like this. Oh, hello, Luke. Hello, Obi-Wan. I'd love to sit down and talk with you.

Come on in. How much time do we have together today? This is a crucial step. You do not, you, you, you must remember to ask them how much time you have to talk today. Because as, as we'll see a little bit, a little bit later on, it's, if you don't establish this right off the bat, it's very, very easy for them to look down at their watch and go, oh, look at the time.

We have another appointment to get to. So don't forget to ask how much time you have. Make sure you get that upfront. And plus it also helps, you know, how to pace yourself. So you may have to, you may have, they may say, Hey, we've got all the time in the world, or they may say, we've only got 30 minutes.

So that'll also help you pace yourself. So then you want to set the agenda of the meeting and say something, you know, I always like to try to build a bridge before I talk to them. And I truly do admire the dedication of these Mormon, these Mormon kids.

And I know that not all of them probably want to go on mission and be away from their families for two years. But they do it. And for as far as I can tell, they do it willingly and happily. Actually, the company that I work for currently, six of my coworkers are Mormons.

And so, you know, periodically, they, you know, somebody will mention, you know, when I was on mission, I was here and I was, you know, then they seem to have been a pretty positive experience for them.

So they seem to like it. And so I try to, you know, try to build that bridge and establish a little bit of a rapport with them. And don't just, you know, try to go right for the jugular. So I would continue with like, you know, you know, I really admire your dedication to your faith.

Honestly, most Mormons, I know, put most Christians to shame in that department. You spend two years away from family, sometimes in remote places to ride around in bikes on bikes and have doors slammed in your face.

That is amazing to me. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I clearly have not done that myself. I don't know that I would. That's that's a huge commitment to take two years out of your life to go door to door to door and having doors slammed in your face, right?

And yeah, so the takeaway here is be nice, like your mom said, right? Continue setting the agenda. But there are some things that about your faith that concern me. And it's those concerns that I'd like to focus on.

To make sure we're maximally productive today, I'd like you to agree to limit our discussion to the following three topics. The nature of God, the destiny of man, and salvation. Now, I know a lot of other people take a lot of different approaches.

Some people will focus on Joseph Smith and his prophecies and how the prophecies haven't come true. They'll focus on the incredible nature of the you know, hauling around a bunch of golden plates that weighed how much and he was able to Joseph Smith was able to run through the woods with them.

There are all kinds of things you could talk about. And believe me, there are all kinds of rabbit trails you could go down when you're talking with Mormons. But those really aren't the most important things, right?

What's really important at the end of the day is that you focus on who God is, where's man going and how does he get there, right? So that's the important stuff. So the first approach, the one that I'm borrowing from Carl Payne, focuses on the nature of God and the destiny of man.

So what I like to do is like to set the stage and first of all, what you always want to do when you're having a talk, a discussion with anybody you don't agree with is you want to make sure you define your terms.

If you do not define one of the huge differences between the difficulties we have when talking to Mormon missionaries or just your garden variety Mormons you may meet in the workplace is that they use all the same words, but they don't always mean the same thing.

So what we're going to do is say, ask two questions and say, first of all, do you believe that God is omniscient? Now we want to define this term and be very very clear about what omniscient means. Omniscient comes from two Latin words, omnis and scientia.

Omnis means all and scientia means knowledge. So God is all knowledgeable. He has all knowledge. And I really like to drill down on this and say, make sure that we're crystal clear on it and say, is there anything that God does not know?

No. So no matter how big the universe is, he knows every single square inch of the universe. There's nothing in creation that he does not know. Yes, I've never had a Mormon disagree with me on this and they'll agree to the terms.

Yes, God is absolutely omniscient. There's nothing that he does not know. This is crucial. Don't forget this. You see, the reason why we want to define our terms so well is that words are kind of like buckets, right?

They're like buckets with labels on them. And you see, we have a bucket that says Jesus on it. And the Mormon has a bucket that has Jesus on it. And when you see them at first, they're carrying their little bucket and you look at it and you go, hey, look, you've got a Jesus bucket.

And they're like, hey, you've got a Jesus bucket too. And you're like, hey, brothers, right? Well, the thing is words are like buckets with labels on them. And words, they're like buckets because they carry meaning.

So what you really have to do is take your nose and stick it in their bucket and give it a sniff. Does it smell anything like what you're carrying around in your Jesus bucket? So when you go, okay, my Jesus bucket smells like this and your Jesus bucket doesn't smell anything like it.

So they have, the names are the same, the labels are the same on the outside of the buckets, but the contents are very, very, very different. And the same could be said with Jesus, with salvation, with grace, just about the entire vocabulary that there's either a subtle or a drastic difference in meaning.

So you have to make sure you drill down and define your terms. So is God omniscient? Yes, he is. Okay, we've got that established. Question number two, do you believe as Lorenzo Snow did that you can become gods?

Now, Lorenzo Snow was the fifth Mormon president. He was the fifth prophet of the Mormon organization. And Lorenzo Snow once said, as man now is, God once was, as God now is, man may be. This is the belief that Mormons can believe, that Mormons can achieve godhood.

They will become gods of their own planets and have their own, they start their own races. So normally, the response that I get when I ask this is they're, the kids are kind of taken aback. They're like, oh, well, wow, I can't believe you know that quote.

Well, yeah, so they'll get, I'll get a reluctant, yeah. But one time, these two guys came to my house, and they totally, they completely blew up my whole routine because they said, well, no, we don't believe that.

And I'm like, you're not, you're not supposed to say that. Like, yes, you do. Like, no, we don't. Like, yeah, you do. And then I was just, I was a wreck after that. I didn't know what to say, because they totally blew up my script.

And so I had to go to the books and dig around in their, in their works, and their standard works. And I found Doctrine and Covenants 88 -107. And then shall the angels be crowned with the glory of his might, and the saints shall be filled with his glory, and receive their inheritance, and be made equal with him.

So they do believe that you can be, you can be equal with God. For some reason, my remote isn't working, even though it's 12 inches away. And so, hang on. There we go. You can also, so this is from the Doctrine and Covenants, right?

So this is from the Mormon scriptures. So there's really not much, there's no, there's no room to argue with this. If you go to, there's a, there's a book that's published by the Mormons, and they, it's called Achieving a Celestial Marriage.

And in it, it says, God was once a man who, by obedience, advanced to his present state of perfection. Through obedience and celestial marriage, we may progress to the point where we become like God. In the same document, a little further down, it says, Elder B .H. Roberts stated, man has descended from God.

In fact, he is the same race as the gods. His descent has not been from a lower form of life, but from the highest form of life. In other words, man is, in the most literal sense, a child of God. This is not only true of the spirit of man, but his body also.

And that comes from the Course of Study for Priests, published in 1910, page 35. And lastly, from that same document, it says, can you see the implications of these two statements as they relate to you and your eternal destiny?

Elder James E. Talmadge did. He declared, quote, in his mortal condition, man is God in embryo. However, in any individual, now a mortal being may attain to the rank and sanctity of godship. So Mormons most definitely believe, if they're honest with you, that they can attain godhood.

They will be made equal with God. Joseph Smith, in his famous sermon called the King Follett Discourse, says this. This is a little bit of a lengthy quote, but I trust you'll bear with me. He says, quote, God himself was once as we are now and is an exalted man and sits in throne in yonder heavens.

I'm going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was from, was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea. It is the first principle of the gospel to know for a certainty the character of God and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another and that he was once a man like us.

Yea, that God himself, the father of us all, dwelt on an earth the same as Jesus Christ himself. You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you, namely by going from one small degree to another and from a small capacity to a great one, from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.

And that's once again Joseph Smith Jr. in the King Follett Discourse, a very famous sermon of his. So we've asked our two questions and we should get an answer that resembles, yes, we do believe that we can become gods.

Isaiah’s Witness: There Is No God Beside Yahweh

So now we can hop aboard the Isaiah train. Now because I'm, one of my favorite things to do is to lead people on a trail of connecting verses through the scriptures. I don't know where I picked up this approach, but I really enjoy it because I enjoy letting God speak for himself.

And the approach is pretty simple. I start with a verse and, oh, by the way, you want to make sure that you have for yourself at least three King James Bibles in your house. One for you, one for the, and one for each of your two Mormon kids.

The Mormon missionaries used to carry around Bibles, but I found that in recent years they have stopped doing that for whatever reason, probably because the Bible is a big book and it's a whole lot to carry around when you're on a bicycle.

Understandable. So don't expect the Mormons to have a Bible handy. It is one of their scriptures, so they should not have any objection to using it. The King James Bible is their preferred translation, not the Joseph Smith translation.

Interestingly enough, we can talk about that later if you like. So I like to make sure that I have three King James Bibles handy, or at least two, one for each one of the missionaries. I personally use the New American Standard.

That's my personal preference. And I have my Bible marked up for this encounter. And I'll show you an example of that in just a minute. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, could you hand them each a Bible?

And I say, can you verify that, you know, this is like a magician, right? Like, can you verify that these are, you know, ordinary playing cards? This is an ordinary King James Bible, right? There's nothing fancy going on here, no shenanigans.

So they'll look at it and they go, yeah, it's a King James Bible. So I say, could you please turn to Isaiah 43 .10? Oftentimes you have to help them figure out where Isaiah is because, well, they don't spend a lot of time in the Bible.

They spend most of their time in their other three standard works. So I ask them to turn to Isaiah 43 .10. And then what I like to do is have them read it out loud. Why do I have them read it out loud?

Well, because if they're reading it out loud, that means that they're reading it, taking it in with their eyes, they're speaking it with their mouth, and they're hearing the Word of God spoken from their own lips.

So it's an immersive experience, if you will, right? So have them read it out loud and say, could you please turn to Isaiah 43 .10 and read it out loud for me? So they said, sure. And so the verse goes, ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.

Before me, there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me. Okay, thank you very much for reading. I have a couple questions for you. Was there any other God before God, according to this verse?

Like this is God speaking, right? So according to God, was there any God before him? And if you're going to be honest with the text, and they usually are, they'll say, well, no, there was no God before him.

Okay, good. Thank you. And then the second question is, will there be any God after him? And then if they're looking at the text and be like, well, of course, there isn't because it says neither shall there be after me.

Then you want to go on to the next verse in the train. And the way I do this, I don't necessarily have all the verses memorized in order. I know where they are, but I don't necessarily have them memorized in order.

So what I do in my Bible is I do something like this. This is actually a photograph that I snapped of my Bible, and I got it labeled over here in the margin, Mormon start. This is where I start with the Mormons.

You see it's Isaiah 43 .10. And you notice that down there at the end of the verse, where it says, and there will be none after me, you'll see a little arrow and a very messy scribbling. It says 44 .6.

Well, that's my cue that the next verse in the train is Isaiah 44, verse six. You notice some scribbling there off to the right. That's when I talked to Jehovah's Witnesses. I got a different train of verses that I take them through.

So we go over to Isaiah 44 .6. So I say, please turn to Isaiah 44 .6. And if you would, please read it out loud. So they say, sure. And when they read it out loud, they say, thus saith the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts.

I am the first and I am the last. And beside me, there is no God. Thank you very much for reading. Now I have a couple of questions for you. First question, can there be anything before the first or after the last?

Now this is, you know, we're keeping the cookies on the bottom shelf, right? We're not getting super philosophical. We're not getting theological. It's a very simple question. Can there be anything before the first?

Well, obviously not, because if there were something before it, then it wouldn't be the first, right? The other thing would be the first. And likewise, there can be nothing after the last. Otherwise it wouldn't be the last.

It would be the penultimate to use a fancy word. And second question is, is there any other God beside him? Well, clearly, no, there isn't, because the text is very clear about that. This is actually God speaking, and he says, I am the first and the last, and beside me, there is no God.

So then we have another verse we want to go to. I thank them for reading. Thank them for answering. And then we look at the Bible, and you'll see that I have another arrow that says, go to 45, five and six.

So we turn over to Isaiah 45, five and six, and I say, I am the Lord, and there is none else, and there is no God beside me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known me, that they may know from the rising sun and from the west that there is none beside me.

I am the Lord, and there is none else. Thank you for reading. Can I ask you a question? Sure. Is there any God other than Yahweh? Well, clearly, no. And secondly, oh, I guess that's the only question we have for that one.

So you may be wondering, like, oh my goodness, Dan, this is so monotonous. Don't they get sick of you doing this? And, you know, I get the point, right? You can stop at any time you like during the, you can shorten the train by any, you know, by all means, go ahead and shorten the train if you want to.

But in the number, every time I've done this, the Mormon kids are, they're more than happy to read it out loud. I think it's because they're just happy to be actually sitting on a couch and not walking around in the heat or in the cold, right?

So they're happy to have somebody to talk to, and I'm happy to oblige them. So then I ask him to turn to Isaiah 45, 18, where we read, For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth and made it, he that established it, he that created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited, inhabited.

I am Yahweh, or I am the Lord, and there is none else. The question we have to ask is, thank him for reading, and then say, is there any God other than Yahweh? Well, clearly, no, there isn't, because the text is very clear about that.

Okay, thank you. Can you please turn to Isaiah 45, 21 and 22, which says, Tell ye and bring them near, yea, let them take counsel together, who hath declared this from ancient time, who hath told it from that time?

Have not I, Yahweh? And there is no God beside me, a just God and a Savior, there is none beside me. Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else. And I bet you can guess what my next question is going to be.

Is there a God other than Yahweh? And clearly the answer is no, and that's the answer they should give you. And then we go to Isaiah 44, 8. So notice that we've gone from Isaiah 43, 10, and we've gone all the way down to Isaiah 45.

But now we're going to go back to Isaiah 44. And there's a reason I do this, and hopefully it'll become clear once I read the verse to you. So please turn to Isaiah 44, 8. And there we read, Fear ye not, neither be afraid.

Have not I told thee from that time and have declared it? Ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? Yea, there is no God. I know not any. Do you see why I asked them, what if God is truly omniscient?

And ask him and really get specific about what omniscience means. Here's the question. Is there any God besides Yahweh, right? If they say no, well then that's the right answer. But here's the point, right?

It says, yea, there is no God. I know of none. So if God is truly omniscient, and he says that he doesn't know of anything, what does that tell you? There is no other God. So at this point, I like to use what Greg Kokel calls the Columbo tactic in his book Tactics.

And in his book Tactics, this book really changed everything for me. I used to be scared to talk to atheists, I used to be scared to talk to Jehovah's Witnesses until I read this book and I was like, oh wow, this is really good stuff.

Basically the gist of it is, the biggest takeaway I got from Greg Kokel's book is, he who asks the questions controls the direction of the conversation. When you don't know what to say, just ask questions, right?

So yeah, I use that. And you know, Columbo, if you're familiar with him, if you're of a certain age as I am, you might remember that Columbo from the TV show, and this is, you know, this disheveled private investigator or police officer, and he never had a pencil on him.

He was always asking for a pencil and he seemed really absent-minded and he just looked like a total incompetent slob, right? But he was brilliant. And he would play dumb and he was like, you know, I'm wondering, I'm wondering how you reconcile your belief that you can become gods with what you read from the Bible where God says over and over again that there is no God but him and never will be, right?

And there's one thing I had to learn how to do early on is just learn how to ask a question and then shut my mouth and be quiet and let the Holy Spirit go to work. I made this mistake too often with my mother-in-law.

Every time I would ask her a question, she'd go, oh, and she'd start thinking. I'm like, oh no, I've lost her. She didn't understand. So I would keep talking and try to explain it to her and completely get her off the mental track that she was on.

So learn how to be comfortable with sitting in silence and while they think about it. There are a couple of different responses that I've received in response to, the answers I've received in response to this question.

Response number one is, well, those verses just mean that there's only one God of this universe. God is our God and there is no other for us. And you see, now you see why it's so important to drill down on what omnipotence is and make sure they understand that God, sorry, not omnipotence, omniscience, and that God is indeed all knowing.

Because remember, words are like buckets and they carry meaning. So number one, God is omniscient. So by definition, there's nothing he does not know. Point two, he does not know of any other God. And point number three, therefore, there can be no other God.

So now you see why it is so important to define your terms, do it ahead of time. And it saves you a lot of grief and arguing and backtracking and all that. Another response that I've received in response to this question is, this is not the message we preach when we go to house to house.