Denigrating Marriage, Worldview, Converting to Rome, Compromising Sola Scriptura

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Third DL of the week! We covered a lot of ground from the Senate and marriage to the assertion that if you are a biblicist you will not be able to fight the current cultural fights. Next Monday we will have some special guests in studio.

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Well, greetings and welcome to The Divine Line. We snuck the third one in for the week. That may have to make up for next week.
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Since we've got Thanksgiving on Thursday, I hope you're going to have a wonderful time with your family.
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It is a distinctly Christian celebration. It really, really is.
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The fact that it is part and parcel of what was once American culture does speak to the
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Christian consensus that once existed. The fact that, for example, during the
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Civil War, both sides called upon their people to pray for the nation and things related to that.
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Very, very important. But anyway, it's so distinctively
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Christian. It is so anti -secular. It really is. There is no foundation in a secular worldview for thanks for anything.
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Fizzing bags of chemicals, ugly bags of mostly water, do not have anything to be thankful for.
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They exist for a while in a random universe and cease to exist for no reason and no purpose.
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No one's ever going to care. The universe is pitiless and merciless. There's no reason to have absolutely positively any
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Thanksgiving in any of that. Yet, we have Thanksgiving.
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I know the Thanksgiving dinner is going to cost a whole lot more than it ever has before. I understand that.
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I get that. There you go. I'll be very, very honest with you.
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I love the Christmas carol. What we used to do in my family years and years ago was...
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I have it on my phone, in fact. I have the mp3 recording of...
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was it Olivier that did it? I'd have to look it back up. But my parents had a 33 rpm, somewhere it's called vinyl record.
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First time ever showed Summer the word vinyl. She said, vinyl. It's like, yeah.
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A vinyl record of the Christmas carol. It's only half an hour long. So that's a very rapid version of Dickens classic.
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And it breaks right in the middle because he had to turn the record over. Remember turning records over?
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Oh, yeah, you bet. And on Christmas Eve, we would turn all the lights out except for the
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Christmas tree, and we would put on Christmas carol. And halfway through, somebody would have to get up and turn the record over and listen to the backside and all the pops and hisses and cracks that you get with a wonderful record, which
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I know they've become popular again. There's record stores and whole nine yards. It's really weird.
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Yeah, you don't get it either, huh? Okay. I mean, I've still got, there's lots of 33s right through that wall right there.
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And then they pretty much, yeah, since when, I don't know, since they're all 1940s big band stuff, you know, but I recorded everything
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I wanted to record out of there onto, you know, I bought a turntable that plugs into your computer. MP3'd all of them.
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Anyway, we would do that. And it was just such,
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I have a feeling. I have a very strong feeling that we are going to have to become very thankful for simple things in the future.
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We have been very pampered.
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We have lived the lives of kings and queens. And you may not realize that, and certainly the young generation does not realize that, but we had those blessings for a reason.
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And our culture has utterly rejected the foundations that gave us what we have today.
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And I believe we're going to lose those things. And I've just been doing a lot of thinking about how
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I think a lot of Christians identify God's blessing in their life, not with the true blessings that Scripture identifies to us.
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Those people around us, daily needs, we define blessings and luxuries as daily needs.
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We really do. Many of us are going to have to really rethink.
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And I'm talking to myself. I am preaching to myself. There are so many of God's children that live...
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I saw a video. In fact, I sent it to a friend of mine. It just happened to pop up on Twitter.
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Twitter has become a much more interesting place over the past few weeks for some reason. But it was a family of,
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I think, seven. I think I counted seven. Looked like India, Pakistan, somewhere around there.
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They were getting on a motor scooter. I guess it was a motorcycle, mainly.
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Small thing. They got a family of seven on the motorcycle.
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And you're just like, how did they do that? And we look at it and go, that just isn't safe.
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Well, no, it's not. It's not. But God has his children that that's how they get around if they can get around at all.
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And I just wonder how many of us would be strongly questioning
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God's goodness were we to live in those situations. Because we are so accustomed to the many, many blessings that we have.
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I'm not the only one thinking about these things. I am not the only one thinking about these things. But I'll be honest, it wasn't what
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I was looking forward to in my golden years. I mean, I've always recognized when people talk about retirement,
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I'm like, what? That's never really been something that's part of my vocabulary or my understanding of the time
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I have in this world. And especially looking back on those in the past who have had an impact on this world.
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Many of them, Calvin was carried out of pulpit, bleeding from the nose, and died shortly thereafter.
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But still, I just wonder.
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And for me, it's a matter of prayer, Lord. You look at Paul's words to the
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Philippians. When I'm in abundance, when I'm suffering lack,
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Christ is good, God is good in all of it. And you can say you're going to have that attitude.
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But after three years of it, that's when you find out whether you really, really have that attitude.
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And every time I start thinking about that, I can't help but thinking about The Hiding Place, and I can't help but thinking about the conversations that were recorded for us there from Ravensbrück in the midst of the some of the worst nightmares that mankind's ever created.
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And you think about that. You really, you really, really do. Anyway, so I hope you are looking forward to Thursday.
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I'm not going to give you a sermon on how many places Eucharist occurs in the
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New Testament. All of that would be very, very worthwhile. I'm not saying don't do that. That's just not on the plate today.
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During the last program where I had specifically addressed the Disrespect for Marriage Act, the 12
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Republicans joined the Democrats in disrespecting marriage. I know it hasn't technically passed, yet it will be after Thanksgiving before the
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Senate, in essence, calls upon God to destroy our nation once again, because that's what they're doing.
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The Founders would have recognized that. I sometimes wish you could just somehow bring the men who crafted the
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Constitution back and show them what has been done since then.
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I think they would be absolutely astonished and would probably wonder how
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God's judgment has been suspended for so long. To be honest with you, I think that's probably what would take place in that situation.
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The cloture thing was passed, and I think both
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Republican senators from North Carolina voted for this abomination.
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Romney, of course, and the other Democrats who pretend that they're
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Republicans all voted for it as well. The one guy from Missouri who has a master's degree from a
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Baptist university, which just tells you... In fact, he was president of a
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Baptist university before he entered into politics. He did the same thing.
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Some of you saw this Zach Lambert guy on Twitter.
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He gets around a good bit. I'm not sure why he keeps popping up in my feed.
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Same thing with Thomas Horrocks, who I had gone back forth with a little bit a few years ago.
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He's all of a sudden popped up in my feed as well. But looking at leftist
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Christians on this subject and how susceptible they are, and there are a lot of...
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Look, this is part of our culture. I think one of the reasons, and ask yourself this question.
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Ask yourself this question. Lambert went through about how he had come to know LGBTQ Christians.
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Okay, immediately we go, wait, the term Christian needs to be defined, and we need to know where we can derive a definition of it from.
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Someone who simply calls himself a Christian, who...
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Well, think of the phone call on the last program. A fellow called in.
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I've got these young guys. They love Jesus, but they don't want to go to church. And what was my response?
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My response was, well, Jesus said if you love me, you will keep my commandments.
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There's something about love that includes respect. And when you're talking about loving a lord, a king, a master, these are all terms used of Jesus, which obviously we don't define in the
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English language of the United States with the same gravity that they were in Jesus's day.
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Another reason why it's important to interpret scripture in its own context, what the author intended to communicate.
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Anyway, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. You call me Lord, Lord, but you don't do what
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I say. What? How does that even work? It's not supposed to work that way. So, when we talk about, well, these people love
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Jesus. Well, if you love Jesus, your first and foremost concern is to know what
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Jesus is all about and how that impacts you.
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So, in that case, you know, Jesus talked about baptism.
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Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me. These are commands of Jesus. And if you love him, not just the idea of him, but actually want to go,
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I want to know everything that Christ commanded. And there's only one place to find that, by the way.
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You're not going to find it in the traditions of men. You're going to find that in inspired scripture. There's nothing else to sell you.
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Then that's the person you take seriously who says, I want to love Jesus. But what that means is there's a lot of people who love having feelings, religious feelings, but they don't want to confront their own lusts and their own desires.
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They don't want to let go of the things that they treasure in reality more than Jesus.
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And so, when people say, oh, I once read 1
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Corinthians 6. I once read 1 Timothy chapter 1. And yeah, you know, I know in 1
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Timothy chapter 1, Paul's really following the Ten Commandments there. And he puts homosexuality right there where adultery is in the
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Ten Commandments. So yeah, it's part of the sexual sins. And yeah, clearly that's apostolic interpretation. And yeah,
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I get all that. But then I got to know some of these folks. And I immediately want to say, you got to know them.
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Did the word repentance ever come up? No, no, no. I just want to,
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I just felt so much love. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what's happened to your thinking?
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This is why there is such embarrassment. And folks, there is.
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And I'll bet you, you have it in your own church. I'll bet you, not all of you, but I bet a lot of you have it in your own church.
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Embarrassment at what the Old Testament says about God's wrath against the
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Canaanites, the Amorites, against His own people. How many times when we read of God bringing plagues against Israel during the
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Exodus, for example, and thousands of people die. Don't hear a lot of sermons about that, especially not in progressive churches, huh?
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But then you have just wholesale destruction of entire nations. And people don't want to deal with the fact that God brings
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His wrath to bear. It is, once you remove that from the narrative, you're left with nothing but sentimentality.
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And that's what people want. They want sentimentality. They want all the warm, gushy feelings. But they don't want anything that would actually change anyone so that they're more like Christ.
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And so, you know, the theologians who would prefer to translate hilosmos in the
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New Testament as expiation rather than propitiation, because propitiation has within it, as a
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Latin term, the concept of appeasing the wrath of God. And there's really no wrath.
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We're not going to worship a wrathful God. So, let's come up with a different term. This is the mindset, and it has infected so many of us.
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It has infected so many of us that we sometimes don't even recognize it.
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And so, you can listen to Zach Lambert talk about his transition into a fully affirming
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Christian. And what should the primary foundation of such a change be?
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I discovered that I had completely, I continue to believe in sola scriptura and tota scriptura.
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I want to believe everything that the Word of God teaches. That's not their foundation.
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That's what you'd expect to hear. I discovered that in reality, arsonic coitus doesn't mean it, but it does mean that.
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And there's no way around it. You can blow bubbles and throw sand and fire up the fog machines on Macs and try to hide it, but you can't change the meaning of the term.
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Where it came from, in Leviticus 18 and 20, it's there. It can't be denied.
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But instead, it's an emotional thing. Let me just point out to you, if you talk to someone about the love of God before you talk about repentance, you have it backwards, and Jesus didn't do that.
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First message He delivers in His ministry, repent.
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Kingdom of God's at hand. Not, oh, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
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Well, God so loved the world that He did something. But that something results in repentance, obeying
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His commands. That's not worth salvation. If you think it's worth salvation, you just don't have no concept of what the
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New Testament message really is. I know there are people like that. Oh, it's just belief. Don't worry about it.
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No repentance. Embarrassing. Very, very embarrassing that those folks are still out there.
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But they are facing a situation where with the passage of this bill, trust me, this isn't about enshrining
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Obergefell. I mean, they'll do that. But they already had Obergefell. This will be, just like the
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Equality Act, same thing, this will be the foundation for getting rid of tax -exempt status for churches, going after homeschooling.
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We keep warning everybody. And then five years later, it happens and people are like, wow, how'd you see that coming?
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It's like, well, because it's this freight train and it's got a big old light on the front. It's going on. And it just ran over you and splattered you all over the place.
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And now you're shocked. Great. That's what we're up against.
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So keep that in mind. Oh, by the way, that's probably what this is. Oh, no.
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Oh, that's going to be interesting to read. Anyway, right after the program today, well, not right after, but if we get done at the normal time or close to normal time, within an hour afterwards,
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I'm going to be jumping online and doing a study on election with our brother, the other
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Paul, down in Australia. And that's one of the reasons I'm wearing a kuji today, is
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I've been told that he's not going to provide a live translation because he's
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Australian. And often you need translation. So I thought maybe wearing an authentic kuji from Australia will help me to translate the
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Australian and we'll be able to communicate a little bit better. It's the best I can do because he's not going to provide live translation while we're doing this.
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So I know they call it English down there, but it's just a bit of a challenge.
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So we'll see how it goes. So there's a YouTube, I tweeted it, there's a
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YouTube link and you can grab that and we will be doing our thing in an hour and 37 minutes, specifically, is when we will be doing that.
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My poor daughter just tweeted that sickness has invaded the house and it's rough when you got a little one.
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He's not sick, thankfully, but everybody else is. So I'm sure it's,
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I hope we didn't bring it back with us from the leadership thing, but you never know, it's possible.
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I'm not going to spend too much time on this next one. I've been tweeting about it a little bit.
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As you know, Cameron Bertuzzi announced his,
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I guess it's upcoming reception because it's Easter, but he's in our CIA classes and he's swum the
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Tiber. And I'm like, yeah, I said, you're going to do that sometime in 2020. And he said to me this morning,
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I guess, well, it's because of the Bible. And I'm like, oh, don't give me that. Don't give me that.
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It's not because of the Bible. Eliakim. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Jesus has those keys, buddy.
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And you know it and there ain't no way around it. That's what Revelation 3 .7 says. And that wasn't even an argument in the early church.
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I mean, it is one of the lamest, shallowest, easiest refuted, but we've done the study.
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I could tell, and I said this and people jumped all over me for it. I thought, come on, you're so harsh.
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I could tell in 2020, and I think it was like May, it's been two and a half years.
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I could tell then that the young man had no foundation in himself, in his own theology for not being a
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Roman Catholic. He did not understand the Reformation. He didn't understand the reasons of the
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Reformation. He did not have any commitment to the imputed righteousness of Christ. He did not have a commitment to a reformed doctrine of grace.
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And just the way he was playing footsie then, it was obvious to me, and I said it.
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And other people later on went, yeah, it really seems like he's playing around. No, this is obvious from the start.
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He's just bilking it for everything to get all his attention before he finally throws the switch.
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And then I guess I heard somebody saying that he's talking about this may cause me to shut down my ministry because, and it's like, yeah, you should.
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You have no reason to be doing apologetics. These converts get the idea that they're going to be just so praised for coming home to Mother Church that they're just going to be put in positions of leadership immediately.
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It doesn't work that way. I mean, some eventually do that. Han, Mattatix was, and now he's off who knows where in the world
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Jerry is these days. But there's been lots of celebrity converts, but they're a dime a dozen.
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So, yeah, anyway, look, the fact of the matter is, if you don't, there are a bunch of Protestants paddling around the middle of the
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Tiber River. Okay, maybe they're paddling around. They don't have their feet firmly planted on the shore.
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Maybe they're over in the Bosporus, Eastern Orthodoxy. Maybe they're in the
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Tiber. I don't know what river is close to Canterbury, and I'm only talking about just the most,
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I'm not talking about the conservative Anglicans and stuff like that that still believe in justification. There are a lot of people who are what they are not because they know why they are what they are.
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There's a lot of people in our churches that way. There's a very large number of people who don't know why they are not
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Roman Catholics. Of course, there's more Roman Catholics that don't know why they're not
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Protestant. They've never really thought through it. That's sort of the majority perspective, but once you start getting involved in apologetics and things like that, you're going to get hit with that stuff.
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You're going to have to find out if you have a foundation, and if you don't have a foundation, let's see where this fellow is in two years from now, in five years from now, because I've seen a lot of converts, and a lot of them don't end up in happy places.
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They really don't. Thankfully, I've talked with converts, and they weren't the ones that tried to make a big splash and stuff like that.
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I've talked to a lot of converts that tested the waters and went, okay, no, no, wrong, oops, mistake.
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I damaged my testimony. I've damaged my family, but I'm going to do the right thing and swallow my pride and get back to where I should be.
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There you go. People are all up in arms, and I'm like, there's nothing new about any of this.
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Then last night, Trent Horn and I exchanged a few. He decided to jump in on some comment.
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I said, look, he went after Sola Scriptura, and I'm like, you know, this is not the best time,
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Trent, for you to be going after Sola Scriptura, because, you see, you've got a
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Pope who gave the Mass to Nancy Pelosi, knowing that Nancy Pelosi's bishop had told her not to present herself for the sacrament.
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He undercut that bishop and undercut the teachings of the church, and everybody knows it.
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You can play the I'm stupid game all you want, but you know what
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Francis was doing, and you know the message he was sending, and he just placed two pro -life, pro -choicers on Vatican councils.
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You know it's a scandal. You know it. So don't sit there and be doing the
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Sola Scriptura blueprint for anarchy foolishness, okay?
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You guys have got so many problems at home that I really think humility would make you go, you know,
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I think we ought to be turning our apologetic emphasis on ourselves and trying to make some, you know,
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I pointed out my church would do discipline on anybody doing what
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Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden are doing, promoting the murder of unborn children. They would not be members of our church.
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Your church does not have the commitment to do that.
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It just doesn't. Your pope knows what these guys are doing. You know he knows what he's doing, and somewhere in your heart, you know, he probably actually supports what they're doing, because he's from South America, okay?
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You know, liberation theology, follow it through, do some reading. You know, this is nothing you don't know, and you can do, well, he's just being kind.
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Okay. Say some. If you say so. I mentioned
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Thomas Horrocks earlier. He posted this yesterday.
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He said, a little strange that so many of the folks who want to swing their Bible around to protest civil protections for gay marriage seem to skip right over the part where the scripture explicitly says
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Christians aren't supposed to judge the sexuality of outsiders. I'm like, I don't remember that part.
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In fact, I remember an entire chapter that says, that lists those sexual sins as the reason why the land spit them out, and why
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God destroyed them, was for that very reason. It's swing their
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Bible around to protest civil protections for gay marriage.
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You'll notice that liberals, leftists, the quote -unquote progressives, they're the same one.
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These are the same people who five years ago, we weren't talking about gay marriage.
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No, okay, it was more than five years ago, but before Obergefell, we're not talking about changing marriage, and we're not talking about sexualizing children, we're not talking about mutilating kids, and then once it all happens, well, that's just civil protections for freedoms.
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There is absolutely no moral or ethical framework whatsoever within progressivism.
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It's just whatever the society says, we will love you if you will do this, and that's what they're all about.
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I just don't know why these people call themselves Christians. I really don't. Do you think that's what
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Jesus was about? If Jesus was a progressivist, he could have avoided the cross quite easily, but he wasn't a progressivist, and he said, if you teach anybody to ignore and break the least of these commandments, you'll lease the kingdom of heaven.
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He somehow upheld God's moral law. In fact, he went to the cross to uphold
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God's moral law. That's the whole point of it, and these folks don't have a moral law and have no foundation for a moral law.
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Speaking of churches and marriage, when this bill passes, every church, you know,
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Al Mohler started saying a few years ago, there will be no place to hide. I don't think
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I'm coming down anything. I did an absolutely insane race this morning. Well, maybe it's allergies, but I just worked as hard as I possibly could for just under 40 minutes, and when you breathe that deeply, that hard for that long, it takes you a while to recover.
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Anyway, Al Mohler's been saying for a number of years, there's no place to hide. Every church is going to have to take a stand and say, this is where we stand on the issue of marriage and human sexuality, and of course,
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Schaeffer had been saying that decades earlier, and for many years, a lot of people were saying, you need to have, in your statement of faith, a clear statement on this, and obviously, it's really neat if you have, as a part of your statement of faith, the ability to point to, and this is where we have stood for hundreds, even thousands of years.
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Now, not too many statements of faith in the past were intended to specifically address 147 genders.
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We weren't expecting to deal with just complete societal insanity, but it is unquestionable what the
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Bible as a whole teaches on the subject of God created the male and female, and there's no room in the text for the next 145 genders, and so, but still, when
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I teach through the Didache, or something like that, and we run across, when you go through the
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Didache, and you see the prohibition against abortion, when you see so many of the early writers making reference to this, when you, same thing with the
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Epistle of Diognetus, you can say, here, this is where Christians have been from the very start, and when you have a confession of faith, then you can say, and here, here's this particular group here, we utilize this, this is this many hundreds of years old, this is where we've stood for a long, long time, and it's obviously an advantage to be able to say, yeah, we're not just making this up on the fly in response to what's going on in our culture right now, which is brand new and does not have any claim to antiquity behind it at all.
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That's all great, but when I went on the Dr. Drew Show, I did not quote my confession of faith.
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I quoted Scripture, and when challenged, when my citation of Scripture was challenged,
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I then said to them, well, the one who said those words has ultimate authority to say those things, because he died and rose again and ascended into heaven, and where he rules and reigns, and nobody else has ever done that, so his authority trumps anybody else's.
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Now, there are all sorts of traditions and religious documents out there, but the ultimate authority of the claim of the
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Christian faith is found in Christ and His Word. Everything else is secondary and derivative from that, and so it's wonderful to have those things.
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It's wonderful to be able to demonstrate consistency over time on view of man and sexuality and marriage, and all that's fine and dandy, and certainly, the people of the world assume that the
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Bible can just be interpreted any old way in the world, that there's no objective meaning to be found in the text of Scripture, and sadly, it seems that there are
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Christians who feel the same way, that the only way to know the objective content of Scripture is through our confessions and traditions, but of course, we reject that and always have rejected that, and every time that whether it's religious or non -religious people who have said, well, you know, that's just your interpretation, it's like, no, actually, it's interesting when
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Jesus was disputing with others in His day, no one ever made that argument.
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No one ever said, well, Jesus, that's just your interpretation, because they understood the words have meaning, and that meaning is so clear that God will hold you accountable for it, so in refuting the
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Sadducees, Jesus said, have you not read what God spoke to you? I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
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He's not the dead, but of the living. That was the end of the argument. It was the end of the argument.
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Oh, that wouldn't be today on social media. That tells you a little something about the level of social media, but that was the argument that was given, and so our confessions are wonderful things.
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They help us to communicate with others, but they are always secondary, and whenever we decide that what they actually enshrine becomes the substructure that no longer important for us to understand what the authors intend to communicate, we've completely lost our way, and there is no recovery from that.
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I mean, aside from just repentance and going, yeah, we were wrong about that. That will collapse in and of itself over time.
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That's an internally incoherent position. It's fundamentally contradictory to say we believe in solo scriptura, but that the intention of the authors, what they intended to communicate, doesn't matter, and we can't know.
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Every single doctrine that defines, for example, us as Reformed Baptists, the exegesis that derives at it is that exegesis.
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It's not some God's mind substructure exegesis. It's, oh, look,
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Romans 5 .1 says, we have peace with God, having been justified by faith.
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That's what Paul intended to communicate to the Romans in these words, and so we will look at dikayasune, dikayao.
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We'll look at zedekah. We will see the relationship between the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament. That's how we did it, and you're abandoning it in your great wisdom.
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You're abandoning it. Every one of you know that that's how you've defended the doctrine of justification in the past.
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Can you still do that, or are you being inconsistent? So Steve Meister posted something yesterday.
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Lots of folks responded to it, thankfully, and it resulted in an interesting thread that I'm not sure if it's over yet, and I didn't want to short circuit the thread by getting involved with it, so I stayed out of it, but between himself and a professor at the
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Master's Seminary, and here's what Steve Meister said.
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He's one of the pastors up in Sacramento at the
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Reformed Baptist Church there. Churches that embrace biblicism will be defenseless in the coming cultural tumult.
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Well, coming? It seems like it's the biblicist churches that have been the ones holding the line in the cultural tumult that's been going on for quite some time.
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But anyway, if you can redefine the church's doctrine of God on the basis of an individual's exegesis and speculation on the human author's intention, why not the nature of marriage?
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Now, I think it's important for us to consider what is being said in these words.
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First of all, when challenged, he gave again this definition of biblicism that says you ignore all of church history, you ignore all the church fathers, and you only use biblical terminology.
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I don't know anybody who does it. I don't know anybody who does it. I think about 15 years ago, maybe a little bit more,
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I ran into a King James only guy who literally tried to only speak in King James English and only use biblical terms.
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You couldn't really talk with him. I wonder how he orders a quarter pounder with cheese at McDonald's.
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I don't know. Pretty weird. But those people are...
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I don't know of anybody that fits that description. I don't. I'm a
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Reformed biblicist. I teach church history, and I seek to use language to communicate with Muslims and with many others.
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But biblicism, if you're hearing people using it in all these different ways, let's once again point out the absolutely necessary biblicism for anyone who would be a
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Protestant, anyone who would be a non -Catholic, and that is
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God's truth flows from God's self -revelation.
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And that self -revelation is seen historically in the incarnation and the outpouring of the
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Holy Spirit. But normatively, so as to form the body of God's people, it occurs in Scripture.
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So there are historical events associated with that ongoing process of revelation. Exodus, Moses, Sinai, prophets, the structure of Jerusalem, all the historical stuff.
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Okay. That becomes part of the matrix in which this revelation takes place.
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But God's revelation comes to us in Scripture.
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What we believe flows from Scripture. What we recognize as being binding is communicated to us in Scripture.
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And every one of us that is Reformed knows that when we go to Scripture, we go to John chapter 6, and we walk through John chapter 6, and we make sure that we're paying attention to the flow of the argument that comes from the author who is speaking as a man.
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Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit, and so we recognize this
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John speaking, we recognize that John is connecting his words in John 6 with what's come before and what's going to come after.
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The book is a whole and is to be understood as a whole, and this is a key element of that book, and so we follow the argument as it is laid out to us, as we look at the grammar of the text, as we look at the lexical meanings of the words, we look at Helcuso, and we see that Helcuso isn't just a wooing, but it can be a powerful drawing, as in drawing nets up on the shore.
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We do our lexicographical studies, we place it in the first century, we know where this took place,
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I've stood there outside the synagogue at Capernaum where the boats would have been coming up on shore, we do all of that, and when we follow all of it through, there is a divine truth that is forced upon us by the clarity of the argumentation of the text.
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If you don't believe that, you're not Reformed and stop lying to yourself, right?
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So, you know what we're talking about. Those of you who claim to be Reformed, you know what we're talking about.
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You've been there, you've done it. You never walked through John 6 with great tradition exegesis.
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You never did it, because there ain't no such thing. There's no such thing.
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You will not find a consistent great exegesis, great tradition exegesis of John 6 that will be consistent.
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It certainly won't be as clear as actually just exegeting John 6, or John 10, or John 17, or wherever you want to go.
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So, Biblicism is simply accepting that Scripture is theanoustos and nothing else is.
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That's what Biblicism is. To be a Reformed Biblicist, living after the is to recognize
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God's been building His church, but the church is not theanoustos.
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The church is the bride that listens to the voice of her husband, and that voice is
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Scripture. So, that's why
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I'm a Biblical Trinitarian, because the Bible teaches there's only one true God. The Bible teaches there are three divine persons identified as Yahweh.
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The Bible distinguishes between those three divine persons. That's what the doctrine of the Trinity is. It's a
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Biblical doctrine. Oh, but we've come to use other terminology to answer certain questions.
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Yes, but not to redefine the doctrine itself.
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I've always been the Trinity in that way, and I always will. If I have to be put out by all the folks that want to do so, fine.
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I'm going to continue doing it. Hey, the price? All right, fine.
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I believe the doctrine of the Trinity is a divine revelation. I don't believe it's simply the result of church tradition.
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We all used to be on the same page there. If we're not anymore, then okay, fine.
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Churches that embrace Biblicism. So, I don't know of any church, and I bet you anything Steve Meister could not name you a single church.
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That embraces the Biblicism he later defined as being no church history, no confessions, no creeds.
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I suppose maybe there's a, you know, not even the Calvary Chapel guys will do that.
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I mean, you know, they've sometimes played with that kind of language, but yeah, no. What? Oh, yeah, well, he's,
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I'm left leaving him to sit over there. Churches that embrace Biblicism will be defenseless in the coming cultural tumult.
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Okay, don't know who they are, but churches that are truly
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Biblicist in the way I just defined it will be the ones that stand firm in, and have been standing firm in the cultural tumult that's been going on for quite some time.
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Welcome to the battle, Brother Steve. It's not coming. It's already here. If you can redefine the church's doctrine of God on the basis of an individual's exegesis and speculation on the human author's intention.
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Now, thankfully, a lot of folks zeroed in on speculation on the human author's intention.
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You need to hear, because I consider this extremely dangerous. Okay, I believe that Brother Meister is expressing the very things here that we need to avoid, and we need to know why we're avoiding it.
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We need to reject it. Say, we reject this, because this will fundamentally deny
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Sola Scriptura. Okay, and here's why. What's behind these words?
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Speculation. So, if, well, let's go ahead and use this.
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I think this might be useful. I was going to try to get to some more of the Baptist dogmatics thing, but I'll have to hold it off.
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I sort of figured this would probably happen. But interesting conversation took place recently over some comments that were made at a recent conference on Hebrews 9 .14.
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Let me read you the text, and this will help you out a little bit.
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9 .13, For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling those who have been defiled, sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal
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Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
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One of the key theological texts in all the book of Hebrews.
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And what happened at this conference was a presentation was made, and the interpretation, this was the interpretation, how much more would the blood of Christ, who through the eternal
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Spirit, and the interpretation was the eternal Spirit is the
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Spirit of Christ, his divine nature, that this is not a reference to the
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Holy Spirit. And so what you had being said is, here is
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Christ acting in his two natures.
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So you have the offering of Christ, and then it's being made, the blood of Christ is the offering of Christ, and then who through the eternal
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Spirit, that is his divine nature, offering the blood of the offering of the human nature.
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Okay. Cleansing your conscience. Well, it's interesting, really interesting historically to look at this.
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I see this as a Trinitarian reference. So you have Christ, you have the eternal
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Spirit, Spirit's been mentioned earlier in Hebrews 9, Spirit of God, Holy Spirit.
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There's a textual variant that actually puts that term in, and I don't have time to go into it right now, but it reflects the
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Latin Vulgate. So this is what's interesting. Since the
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Latin Vulgate makes it clear that it's talking about the Holy Spirit, then the
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Great Tradition doesn't have this as its understanding.
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So I guess the Great Tradition is cool in some places, but not cool in other places. Because you could not have a
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Great Tradition interpretation that goes against the Vulgate, because the Vulgate was the standard for 1100 years, and its reading led to the medieval consensus on the interpretation of that text as to what was being referred to there.
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So much for Great Tradition ex Jesus. We want it, fine, whatever. Now, like I said,
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I think it is clearly a Trinitarian text. But what we're doing here is we want to know what the author, and whether the guys at Jeopardy got this right or not, we'll leave to other people to argue about.
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The final Jeopardy question a couple nights ago was, it assumed that Paul wrote
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Hebrews. And one guy got it wrong, because he said
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Romans, but they gave the answer Hebrews, assuming that Paul wrote
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Hebrews. So it actually changed the tournament. So it's made a big, big woo -hoo -wah going on about that.
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But anyways, the point is, how can anyone say that what the author was intending to communicate through the use of these specific words, these very words, when he says, we need to know what those words mean.
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And we can sit here and claim to know the mind, I'm going to do the mind of God exegesis.
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I've run into people who do the mind of God exegesis on the streets outside the temple in Salt Lake City.
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Anybody can do that. But we need to know, because the reality is, whether you interpret this as the
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Holy Spirit or as Christ and his divine nature, both are orthodox, both would fit into a confessional context, so does it does not matter?
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Or is the reality that no one can escape? We need to know what the author intended by the words, hastia numitas aeunia.
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Now, do I think the Holy Spirit? Do I believe that men were carried along by the
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Holy Spirit as they speak from God? Yeah, that's the whole point. But Paul still said, bring the parchments, bring the parchments.
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That was Paul speaking. I don't need some mind of God exegesis to tell me what he meant.
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It's pretty clear. Now, this is difficult text.
01:00:09
This is a difficult text. The traditional interpretation would be a
01:00:18
Trinitarian reference, that this is the Holy Spirit. You're literally going against not only the
01:00:24
Latin Vulgate -inspired perspective, but Calvin doesn't even recognize the other perspective, and most of the people that promote it are modern.
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So I think it'd be fascinating to look at some of the patristic interpretations.
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That's all fascinating, but all that does is give you an idea of how someone at some point in the time understood this.
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That can never become the lens by which you determine these things. So when
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Meister says speculation on the human author's intention, he is fundamentally denying the centrality of the very method of exegesis that led the
01:01:09
Reformation itself. I don't think he intends to do that.
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I think he's just simply been swept up in this stuff. He seems to be someone that just sort of goes with it.
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I think he's been swept up in it. Maybe there's nobody that can speak into him and say, really, brother, come on.
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But the assertion being made here is if you can redefine the church's doctrine of God.
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So what they're saying is if you don't buy all the speculation that Aquinas comes up with using
01:01:46
Aristotelian categories on divine simplicity or inseparable operations or any of the rest of this stuff, that's redefining the church's doctrine of God.
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Thomas is now definitional for the church. So if you don't write the phrase divine simplicity the way we do, then you can't know what the nature of marriage is in scripture.
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You see what's happened here? Speculative philosophical theology, not biblical revelation, these guys will never try, never, never, never, never try to demonstrate that their extreme view of simplicity is what the apostles intended to communicate because they don't believe that.
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That's why they do the backdoor natural theology stuff because they know that it was never the intention of an apostle to communicate that to anybody.
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They know that. They know that is an extended speculation that develops over time.
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It is not a part of the biblical text. That's why you have biblicalism being attacked.
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That's why you have this type of thing going on. Now, when you move away all the dust, what's being said here is that not only is the nature of marriage not clearly revealed in scripture, but the doctrine of God is not clearly revealed in scripture, and you need something else.
01:03:31
You need something outside. You need tradition, and they may be loathe to admit it, but that's what they're saying.
01:03:43
That's where they're going. They need to stop. Some of us have been trying to wave the red flag, stop, stop, the bridge is out, but it doesn't seem like people are listening.
01:03:55
It doesn't seem like people are listening. So, if you can redefine the church's doctrine of God on the basis of an individual's exegesis and speculation of a human author's intention, the church's doctrine of God is based upon the revelation of God in scripture.
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If you do exegesis that seeks to understand that revelation in the context in which it was given, it is gloriously consistent, gloriously consistent, and fully defensible.
01:04:30
Unlike you guys, I've defended both the doctrine of God and the doctrine of marriage against a wide variety of opponents on multiple continents using the scriptures as my sole authority, and it can be done, and that's what we need to be doing.
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That's what we need to be doing. So, yeah, amazing stuff, amazing stuff.
01:05:01
And really, honestly, even if I had continued with the Baptist dogmatic things, I would have been getting into the exact same thing. But I wanted to touch on that Hebrews 9 .14
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thing, because it's fascinating to me that the non -great tradition exegesis of the text was being promoted in defense of great tradition positions.
01:05:24
It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. But anyway, all right.
01:05:29
So, like I said, in 54 minutes, I'll be doing this all over again on a completely different subject, and looking forward to doing that, like I said, down in Australia.
01:05:41
So, look that up. I tweeted it yesterday, and listen in and help me understand the
01:05:48
Australian, because it'll be a real challenge to do that. So, anyways. All right, thanks for watching the program today.
01:05:56
We'll see about next week. We'll be changing stuff. We're definitely looking at a
01:06:01
Monday program. Gonna have some special guests in studio, and so you don't want to miss that. We will see you next time.