Radio Free Geneva: Atheists, William Lane Craig, Warren McGrew

You can absolutely hear people that are Calvinist harp on this. Bah! Bah! God's suffering! God's suffering! Bah! Suffering! Suffering! Suffering! They just keep repeating it, and they repeat it so much you start to think it's a Biblical truth.

Inside the tomb of Lazarus, she says, Lazarus, come out! And Lazarus said, I can't. I'm dead. That's not what he did. Lazarus came out. She didn't mean to tell me a dead person can respond to the command of Christ.

And then you take lessons from Judas White and Jeff Durbin. It shows in this kind of sequential format and.

Do you really believe that it parallels the method of exegesis that we utilize to demonstrate those other things? Um, no.

New Calvinists, even pastors, very openly smoke pipes and cigars just as they drink beer and wine.

Even Jesus cannot override your unbelief.

A verse like that to him, he'll only sound like if he were listening to it. Blblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblblb. He wouldn't make any sense to him.

A self-righteous, legalistic, deceived jerk.

You need to realize that he's gone from predeterminism. Now he's speaking of some kind of middle knowledge that God now has to...

I deny and categorically deny middle knowledge.

Then don't beg the question that would demand me to force you to embrace it.

I'm not always talking about necessarily God choosing something for no apparent reason, but you're choosing that meat because it's a favorable meat. There's a reason to have the choice of that meat.

From our underground bunker deep beneath the faculty cafeteria at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, a saint from all those moderate Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who have read and reread George Bryson's book, we are Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to say for His own eternal glory.

And welcome to Radio Free Geneva in the AO Max studio for the first time. Yes, if you're watching live, then you, of course, are amongst those few who will be able to tell your grandchildren that you saw the first Radio Free Geneva in the AO Max studio.

And they will go, what are you talking about, Grandpa? Because they won't have any idea. Nobody will remember. Anyways, that's okay. You'll feel better about it. You know, I was thinking we might need a really good video of Tim Bushong doing that now.

Don't you think? Because now we're in a studio. And you know what? I think even Tim would agree that there would be one way to even beat that. There would be one way to even beat that. And that is if Skillet would do it.

Can you imagine Skillet ripping through a mighty fortress with the pyrotechnics and everything else in the process? I'm just planting a seed there, John. Just planting a seed. You know, I could see some shots of Seth doing his thing.

And Jen's back there on the drums. And Cory's on the keyboard. And yeah, I could see this. Anyway, welcome to Radio Free Geneva. If you have no earthy idea what in the world you just stumbled into, I'm not sure how you're watching us.

But I can understand how that used to work on television because there were like only three stations. So you didn't have much of a choice. You turned it on and there it was. But Radio Free Geneva is where we address objections to Reformed theology.

Very often really bad objections to Reformed theology. But sometimes the better stuff too. It all depends. We've covered the gamut over the how many years? When was the first one we did? We were in the garage when we did that first one.

So that was probably 2002, 2003, somewhere around there. It's been a long time. In fact, before we actually get into the Radio Free Geneva part, I do need to say something. It's just today is March 17th.

March 17th, 2021. So I just need to acknowledge that it was 40 years ago today, 40 years ago this evening, that I convinced a gorgeous, beautiful, 17-year-old girl. Yeah, 17. She was a minor. Then again, I had just turned 18.

To go out on a date with me after church, it was a Sunday, to a fancy, fancy place called Peter Piper Pizza. And that was the last time that she dated anyone but me. And 15 months later, approximately, we were married.

And that was 40. The marriage wasn't 40. We haven't gotten to 40 yet. That's next year. But we went out on that first date 40 years ago today. That's as long as Israel wandered in the wilderness. That's a generation.

That's like, wow, okay. All right. That starts giving you some perspective when you think about it. But yes, so I'm looking forward to 40th wedding anniversary coming up next year. But for now, 40 years ago.

I'm not going to tell the story. My wife would absolutely kill me because I like to do that personally. I've done that all over, literally all over the world. I've told the story of how I got my wife.

But anyways, that was 40 years ago today. Or you could figure last Sunday if you do it as the day of the week or something. But it was March 17th. 17 was a big number for us. I was born on the 17th. She was born on the 17th.

A lot of stuff happened on the 17th for us. That doesn't mean anything. It's just everybody has their little things like that. So that was 40 years ago, which was before Radio Free Geneva. But we've been doing this a long time now as well.

So let's see what we've got here. You know what? I don't want to do that one. I want to do this one. All right. I've been asked to look at this, and this fits fairly well with the main element of today's Radio Free Geneva, where we are going to be listening to and interacting with Dr. William Lane Craig's comments on the topic of Romans 9.

Now, again, if you're new to us and new to the program, things like that, you might want to at some point go back and look at the debate that I did on Romans chapter 9. I did it. I did my part on Romans chapter 9.

Leighton Flowers did his debate on another topic. But on the subject of Romans chapter 9, available on YouTube, and you can watch that there and engage in the subject. It is not my intention to completely revisit everything there is in Romans 9, though we're going to have to touch on a lot of things once we start dealing with William Lane Craig.

But I just sort of thought this just less than five minute clip fits in rather well with William Lane Craig's comments. Because you're talking with William Lane Craig, you're talking about a Christian apologist.

And so how you defend the faith is going to be impacted by what you believe about God. I mean, that should be fairly straightforward. And it has been our criticism of the famous Dr. Craig for many, many years, that it is our conclusion, having reviewed hours and hours and hours and hours of his materials, that Dr. Craig primarily begins with a philosophical foundation, and then uses that as the lens through which biblical revelation is to be filtered, rather than deriving your foundations from Scripture and judging all of man's philosophical assumptions on the basis of divine writ.

And so he is not Reformed. And in fact, when asked to identify a false Christian belief years ago by the redoubtable Mr. Hitchens, he identified Calvinism as his chosen error in Christianity. I would just compare and contrast Craig's encounters with Hitchens with Doug Wilson's entire movie of encountering Hitchens.

And you will tell very, very quickly that even Christopher Hitchens was like, wow, you're coming from a very different perspective. That's really interesting. Just for instance, if you haven't watched it, it's called Collision.

I need to watch it again. It's been a number of years. But watch it and especially, and I have to be real careful here, but especially catch the section where Christopher Hitchens decided to demonstrate that Jesus was a false prophet.

And this has been, this is very, very, very, very, very common for people to accuse Jesus of being a false prophet because he prophesied his coming and yet he didn't come. And if you are a partial preterist and like Doug Wilson and myself, a post-millennialist, Hitchens was left stuttering when Doug Wilson said, well, actually, you've completely misunderstood what's going on here, ran through it, and Hitchens is left going, I've never heard that before.

Because what you do is you turn around and you say, actually, this is Jesus prophesying what's going to happen. And it happened exactly as he said. And so go watch Collision. It's great. And you'll see.

Anyway, so we'll get to William Lane Craig and the impact of those things. This I first saw when Warren McGrew said that he was going to be utilizing this clip. And this is an atheist and a Calvinist.

And I'll be honest with you, I don't know what the context is. And I don't know what came before and after it. So I think that's a little bit unfair. And I don't know how much value there is in having a debate with an atheist about this subject.

I don't think that's what the debate was on. I don't get that feeling. But my point is the only meaningful way of discussing whether God is sovereign, whether he has a decree of election, is within the context of divine revelation.

It would be like debating the Trinity with an atheist. Why? The only reason to believe in the doctrines of Trinity is because you believe in the entirety of Scripture and that it's all been revealed by God.

And so you're believing Tota Scriptura, all of Scripture, and Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. And you put all that together and you harmonize what the Scriptures teach and you have the doctrines of Trinity.

But why debate that with an atheist? I'm not sure what the benefit of that is. All you're doing is allowing someone to just rail at God's truth without actually dealing with the foundations that make it true.

So anyways, this has been posted and so it's being thrown around. And obviously, if you're dealing with someone who is an atheist, this morning I retweeted an R .C. Sproul clip where he said that God's absolute sovereignty isn't an argument amongst Christians, it's an argument between theists and atheists.

Now obviously, a lot of Christians would disagree with that today. But I think you can make a strong case along those particular lines. But there is great frustration to be had because it reminds me of the debate that never happened in Missouri back around 1999-ish when Dean McCoy invited me out and this radio station wanted me to debate Dan Korner.

I guess he's still around somewhere. And Dan Korner only wanted to debate on eternal security. And he actually put together something I would have to sign in regards to this debate. And the assertion was that I could not make reference to any of the other four points of Calvinism.

And I was like, no, I'm not doing that. What are you talking about? You can't address the final point which is based upon the preceding literally five points, the sovereignty of God first. That's cutting it off from the foundation that gives it any meaning.

I'm not going to do that. And so the debate never happened because he demanded that I won't debate you if you're going to raise the other points of Calvinism. Similarly, you're looking at the same situation here.

There's no reason to be discussing sovereign grace of God and things like that with someone who just doesn't even believe in the existence of a personal God to begin with. But let's start working through this and provide some quick responses.

I'm not going to stop at every single point, but I want to work through this and make some comments on it. Okay, I'm not hearing anything. Are you hearing anything? We played this right before everything started.

So it's going to be a very short program if we don't have sound. So Rich has got that I-have-no-idea look on his face right now. And this is not a good thing. Yes, it has. So what are we going to do about that?

Sorry, folks, we did test all of this. It was working just fine. And that is the one thing in the back of my mind. Because you had to play something, a digital output, 100%. Everything's still fine there.

I don't know what the problem is, but things got a mind of its own, huh? Ready for me to try it? All right, let's see. How do I become a Christian? Okay, so is this thing just rebellious? Is it heretical?

It's sinful. Okay, all right. Because it worked fine, but somehow it changed its output without any input from us. So this makes me very concerned about debates and things like that. I'll be perfectly honest with you.

Anyway, sorry about that, folks. We'll probably go back eventually and cut that part out. All right, so here is the section. Let's start listening to it. How do I become a Christian? You believe. You're a friend of your sins.

You believe in Christ. I don't believe, though. So how would I ever become a Christian?

You have to be regenerated. How do I get regenerated? By the Holy Spirit. How do I get the Holy Spirit to regenerate me? You don't. You're right. You gave the right answer. I was going to lie to you and say, well, you have to believe in your heart.

Does it bother you that basically the reason why I'm not a Christian, and if I die a non-Christian, does it bother you that the reason I do not inherit eternal life is because God didn't do something in me first?

Okay, so let's stop there. Obviously this particular atheist has some level of knowledge of Reformed theology, and so what he's going to do is he's going to make an argument that is going to ignore the justice of God against sin.

It's going to ignore, for example, the federal headship of Adam. It's going to ignore Romans chapter 5. It's going to ignore Romans chapter 9. It's going to ignore all of that. And as you just heard it expressed, does it bother you that the reason that I will not go to heaven is because God didn't do something for me?

What's the assumption? Once again, whenever, and I'm not saying that Derek, I don't know Derek personally, or I can't tell from this screenshot if I've met Derek, maybe I have someplace. My reviewing this is not meant to be a criticism of Derek or anything like that at all.

But we all must learn to think presuppositionally. We have to learn to look at an argument and see it almost visually. I've expressed that a number of times, that I literally see arguments in the sense that I see how they are related to one another.

Not so much like a graphic or anything like that, but you hear what's being said, and basically what your mind is doing is, if this person were actually making a sound argument, what would it sound like?

What would be the elements that would be being expressed? What's missing and why is it missing? Is it because they don't understand it? Or is this the misrepresentation and is it purposeful? You can't always necessarily know that last part.

So when someone says, does it bother you that I won't be in heaven because God didn't do something for me? What's foundational to that? That God in some sense or fashion is accountable and responsible for doing something for you.

What is that something? That something is an act of grace. That something is free grace and mercy. Grace and mercy cannot be demanded. So there's problem number one, is that the assumption here is that God is under some type of compulsion to do this.

Assumption number two, there's nothing here about this man's willful rebellion against his creator. His creation of arguments that try to get rid of the fact that he's a pot. And it says right there at the bottom on the pot, made by the potter.

And so there is the continuing rebellion, which is a moral reality. It is rebellion against God. It is continuing sin in and of its own self. Then you have the relationship to Adam. Which again, a lot of Christians today have abandoned this.

It's not preached. But they will then turn around and talk about their relationship to Christ. Being in Christ and having the righteousness of Christ. Not realizing that the biblical foundation of that is called federal headship.

And so Christ is the second Adam. You're in the first Adam. You get from Adam what Adam can give to you. And then if you are in the second Adam, you receive from the second Adam what he can give to you.

But that's federal headship. That's one representing an entire group. And so the idea that is, again, underlying the question and underlying the assertion, ignores all of these categories. And especially works within Western categories today.

Especially with the fact that mankind thinks of himself autonomously. Puts God in the dock and says, God needs to respond to my challenges. And so on and so forth. So it's just a natural thing for the rebellious man to embrace that kind of argumentation.

So you have to step back and have to go, well, we are God's creatures. And God has justly dealt with us in our representative, Adam. Now there's the issue right there. That's where the whole thing comes down.

The creature is going to say, I reject my creator's right to deal with me as my creator sees fit. And so if they even wanted to try to deal with theology as it's actually revealed in scripture, they would have to say something along the lines of, does it bother you that God treats me in Adam?

To which I would say, it can bother me no more than he treats me as I am in Christ. So his righteousness becomes my righteousness. It can't bother me any more than that. Then behind all this, and that's about to be fleshed out in a moment, behind all of that then comes the whole creaturely denial that there can be anything outside of what is fully expressible by temporal human language.

In other words, I have to take the eternal and collapse it into time and make it all one simple two-dimensional thing. That is really the problem. And I was, you know, I'm going to do it anyways. I should have had this queued up.

I apologize. But if you go to aomin .org, you will see, and hopefully on a phone, I can pull this up fairly quickly. I'm not sure what it actually looks like in our mobile thing. But let me see here. Related articles.

Uh-oh. Maybe on the mobile thing that wasn't a really good idea. We are working on that. Great. If you go over to Theology Matters, there it is. You only have to scroll way, way down there. I put up just this morning.

I wrote this on Twitter and then eventually got it onto Theology Matters. Here's what I wrote. Consider. The one in whom all things hold together, Suneste Ken from Colossians 117, became flesh, Sarx Agenata, John 114.

The eternal acted in time. This validated the importance of the temporal without transforming the eternal into the temporal or thereby limiting it. That's a key assertion. And I'm trying to do this in bits and pieces on Twitter.

But the entrance of the Son of God into time validated the importance of time. Time is not, therefore, merely some kind of a puppet show. I've said many times, the incarnation proves that time is important to God and what happens in time is important to God.

Human language is necessarily temporal in nature as is our thought process. Our entire language is based upon time. All of our verbs, past, present, future, ongoing action, completed action, the past, future action, whatever it might be, is based upon the fact that we are time-bound creatures.

And hence, that then conditions the way that we think and the way that we then hear things. And it limits us in that way. Because of this, the temptation of our creatureliness is to transfer our limitation to the divine rather than seeking the divine solution to our limitedness.

So in other words, since we start with ourselves and we are limited due to the temporality of our experience and our language, then we tend to push that off, project that off onto God. So rather than seeking the divine solution to our limitedness, if God had not condescended to communicate to us in our finitude, we could only rise as high as our best minds could take us.

But divine revelation, which is settled in heaven, has been revealed to us in time, Psalm 119 .89. By submission to, obedience to, and meditation upon that divine word, we can, by taking its entire revelation together, not merely in parts, go beyond our temporally limited thoughts to grasp as best we can the God who has created all things.

This causes us to seek consistency and harmony not on a shallow, simple, man-pleasing surface level. Is there a problem? Okay. Man-pleasing surface level, but at the depths of Scripture where grand themes and truths are woven together into an intricate fabric of divine truth.

We can then at least begin to grasp the sweep of the description of our God as the all-things-working one. That's a rather poor English translation of the Greek phrase, to tapanta energuntas, the one all-things-working, Ephesians 1 .11, which lies beneath as a foundation and above as an ordering principle all that the Logos does when he invades time itself.

The more man comes to know of this vast creation about us, the greater will be the temptations seen in secular humanism to consider man insignificant and life on this planet a wild but empty cosmic accident.

That is now the dogma of Western society. But in the Theanthropos, the God-man, comes divine balance. Only in him does the vast eternal come into proper relationship with the temporal and created. Outside of him, all dissolves into chaos, disorder, and emptiness.

Even in the grand reality of purpose and thought, it is true, Christ, or chaos. So that is a Christian cosmology that is based upon the incarnation and recognizes that the temporal realm, the realm of time, is important to God, but that it is part of his created action.

That does not make the temporal realm determinative of the eternal. It means the temporal is dependent upon that which is decided in the eternal, but it remains absolutely central to God's purpose. Now, I don't expect an atheist to have anything in his worldview to even begin to contemplate any of this.

But he must be told, rather straightforwardly, that he has no right to be sitting up on that throne or that judgment seat judging God in the first place. He is going to go into his grave and stay there.

The one who said, I will go into the grave and rise again the third day, tells him, repent and believe. That's the challenge. So, I'm not sure how long we jumped out of that, but let's jump back in.

Well, as Charles Spurgeon, who was a Calvinist, he talks about weeping for dead souls and until the day they die, you try to grab their ankles and hold them from going to damnation. Of course it bothers me.

It would bother, and a lot of people get this mixed up, but as a Calvinist, as a Christian that is a Calvinist, I don't know. You could be one of the elect, Doug. You might become a Christian 20 years from now.

Right. I don't know.

I understand the Calvinist view very well. However, if it's true that before the creation of the universe, God foresaw me not to be a Christian.

Okay. Now, I'm not sure what that terminology, foresaw me not to be a Christian. That's not what foreknowledge really means. I'm not sure what the terminology is supposed to mean there. I would assume that what he would be saying is if God did not choose to exercise mercy and grace toward me, that's not something that can be known in this life with absolute certainty.

There are people that God snatches from the flames right toward the end, but if God does not choose to be gracious to me in this life, isn't that all on him because he made that decision before I came into existence?

So, what is that objection? Well, that objection again requires that you place the fundamental parameters of justice in time upon what God does in eternity. So, God cannot have a purpose. I think he called this gentleman Doug.

God cannot have a purpose for Doug's existence that would be morally sufficient for Doug to exist and then to experience justice for his actions. So, God cannot, and of course, we're going to go to Romans 9, so God can't have any pharaohs.

God cannot demonstrate. God cannot even have the desire for the demonstration of his wrath and his justice and his power. Can't be done because there are no categories for that within the creaturely realm because there is no creator God that is limited to the creaturely realm.

And so, that's the idea. You get people going, well, I'm just the victim here. I'm the poor victim. It's sort of like when we were looking at what Warren McGrew said about Judas. He's just the victim, that poor man.

I mean, he was forced into this. He wanted to be a good guy and God's standing behind him with the big bad gun and telling him, you be bad, bad, bad. When the reality is, what you see in Scripture, is God is constantly restraining the evil of man and when he allows that evil to be expressed, he does so in such a way that in the final analysis, God is going to be glorified in how he handled evil in this world.

Even if we cannot, in our very small little minds and small amount of information, see how that works out right here and right now. But, once again, the idea is you cannot have a purpose of God that is going to be fulfilled over here someplace.

There has to be along the road in the temporal realm, rather than the eternal realm, all these stopping points where God has to be judged for whether he's doing things the right way somewhere along the line.

And if he never regenerates me, I'm going to hell for eternity, correct? Yes. And it's not because of something that I did or didn't do. It's basically all God, right? Okay, did you catch that? It's not because of something I did or didn't do.

The judgment that will be rendered upon anyone will be based upon what you did or didn't do. It is in the realm of time because that's the only place you've existed. You can't be judged on the basis of something outside of this.

Again, the objection should be, well, I just don't think I should be in any way held accountable for Adam, and I'm going to blame Adam for my fallen nature. And yeah, you know what? I actually enjoy my sin.

I'm actually sitting here really enjoying my arrogance in arguing against the existence of God. And in fact, there are going to be people who are going to think I'm really, really cool because I can do this type of thing.

But I'm not going to worry about the fact that that's actually sinful, that I am actually denying God His glory by using His gifts in my life in such a way as to deny His existence. I'm not going to worry about any of that stuff.

Instead, I'm going to put it all on God, and I'm going to say that He owed to everyone in eternity the extension of grace. Now, they will say, well, most of them have probably never thought about it, because most Christians haven't thought about it either, but the judgment that takes place is a judgment in time.

It's a judgment based upon our doing what we desired to do. It is not a judgment that is based upon some type of action in eternity. A person who is judged by God is judged on the basis of the light that they have had.

Jesus teaches that there's going to be different kinds of judgment based upon the amount of light that people received. It's going to be more tolerable for Bethsaida and Chorazin for Sodom and Gomorrah than Bethsaida and Chorazin on the Day of Judgment.

Why? Because Sodom and Gomorrah did not have the sinless Son of God walking through their streets preaching in their synagogue. And so they had much greater light that they sinned against. And the objection that is put in is, well, but if God decreed everything that happens, then their rejection was even decreed.

They're just simply puppets, which is why I started where I started. Because if we are just puppets, then so was Jesus. If we are just puppets, then all the saints today and everything they do are just puppets.

No meaning. The Incarnation demonstrates. The Word of God was sufficient in the garden for Adam to understand that what takes place in time is important. He didn't have to have all the rest of that. That would be enough.

But if you want the ultimate demonstration, when the Word becomes flesh, then the realm of flesh is vitally important to God, and therefore the judgment that God will render upon individuals, and the very fact that Acts chapter 17 says, the resurrection is God's proof that he will justly judge by the one that he has chosen, Jesus Christ.

Remember Acts chapter 17? We talked about this a couple months ago. It had struck me for the first time in my adult life, what Paul had actually said at the end of Acts chapter 17. And that was not that the proof that God had given to men was of the resurrection, the resurrection was proof to men that God would judge the world in justice in the God-man.

So the God-man is where eternity and time meet. If you're an Orthodox Christian, you believe Jesus was the Theanthropos. That's a term that I used in the article that I posted this morning. He's the Theanthropos, the God-man.

And that's why it's Christ or chaos. That's why it's Christ or chaos. Because he is absolutely unique. He is the center point of history. So as the God-man, he is able to bring the eternal and the temporal together, just as you brought the divine and man together in a hypostatic union without confusing the two.

See, what the synergists and the provisionists and the open theists and all the rest of these people do is they conflate the two and it's sort of like breaking up the hypostatic union. The eternal realm is the eternal realm, the temporal realm is the temporal realm.

You don't have to mix them together to try to come up with some third thing, just as you don't do that with the nature of Jesus either. And so the judgment will be just in light of what these individuals have done and the light that they have received.

They will be judged perfectly by Jesus Christ in light of these things, in time, not based upon whether God did or did not choose to use them to his glory through their salvation. He does use them to his glory one way or the other, either in his justice or in salvation.

But that's a matter of grace, which is being made something that can be demanded, something that can be said to be must be given to me, or there is somehow some unfairness in the system. No, you're still,.

There's still a responsibility for what you do, even though...

Right, but I have no responsibility to attain salvation, it's all God. I can't do anything to become a Christian, correct?

Not of yourself. So, it's a monergistic thing, it's all of God that he works concurrently with you. Not synergistically, but concurrently.

Right, so if I go to hell, it's because of what God didn't do in me, correct? No, it is not.

When you have partial truths that ignore vital aspects of the whole truth, become untruths. So you're hearing, God did not, in eternity past, well, we don't know this, obviously, but, theoretically, in the part of anyone who will receive God's judgment at the end of time, God did not decree to extend grace and mercy to me.

I sinned my entire life, I enjoyed it, and God didn't stop me. So it's God's fault. Because God's eternal. And God knew things I didn't know. That's really what the argument, honestly, is. And that resonates with people who have been taught autonomy.

It did not resonate down through church history. Because the vast majority of people were smart enough to realize they're not autonomous. They are subject to God's decrees in this world. But it works real well today.

I mean, if feelings are your judge of these things, which for most people they are. No, it's because you never believed.

In Him, even though... No, the default position is Hell, correct? And if God has to do something in me in order for me not to go to Hell? The default position is Hell. Why?

The default position is judgment because of sin. The default position is if you're in Adam, you can only receive from Adam what Adam can give to you. That's the default position. So the argument is being, and therefore God is under obligation to remove me from Adam and put me in Christ against my own decision.

The decision that He's illustrating. It's interesting that basically they're arguing that this should be done against man's will. Well, yeah, in a sense it is, except there's no discussion here of spiritual deadness and inability.

So,.

Yes, but it's not God's fault. So you're getting into like, I'm a double predestination guy, but I don't believe in equal ultimacy. In other words, God has to work in you to believe. But I don't believe.

He has to work in you to keep you from believing, as some hyper Calvinist believe. So God will work in you to believe and regenerate you and all of a sudden you desire, like, whoa, I desire this now. And then He passes.

Over those.

Who. He passes over, everyone else. He doesn't have to work them to damnation because they love their sin and they stay in their sin. And that's the whole...

But I still don't see how I'm wrong with what I just said. If I go to hell for eternity, it's because of what God didn't do.

Partial truth is not... No, because that's not... Is there something I can do to get salvation?

Not of your own. So God has to do something, right? And if He doesn't do it, I go to hell for eternity.

He's talking about attaining salvation as if it's some state or something that you go into. I'm not even sure exactly how that would work, but attaining salvation. Look, there's one command from God and He's running past what the commandment is into things that are not any of His business.

To be perfectly honest with you. And that is, repent and believe. Don't put me... Don't try to put God in... on trial. Repent and believe. That's what you are called to do. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

He's Lord of all. You know you have sinned. You know you're in rebellion against God. Repent and believe. It will not be an excuse. Well, you know, I thought through the whole thing and I just didn't like how it all worked out in the end.

Well, you, oh arrogant man, I can assure you when standing before the judgment throne of God, there will be more than sufficient new revelation available to you at that time that you will not make that argument.

You may arrogantly think as some puny little creature that you're going to stand... Christopher Hitchens, I'm going to tell God that I just didn't want to live in North Korea, blah blah blah. I can assure you when you're standing before the glory of God your mouth's going to be shut.

Your mouth is going to be shut. And you're not going to be making those arguments. They may work in the atheist Facebook groups. They won't work.

Elsewhere. But it's because of your sins. And I know, I understand what you're saying but there's a category mistake here because you're still the prime, you're still a effective cause to your sins. You're actually sinning or you're actually not believing or you're rejecting God or whatever it is.