Radio Free Geneva! Dr. Steve Gaines Sermon Review Continued

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A mighty fortress is our God. A bulwark never failing.

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I don't like Calvinists because they've chosen to follow John Calvin instead of Jesus Christ. I have a problem with them.

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They're following men instead of the word of God. Our helper he amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

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On top of my feet and crying out he died for all.

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Those who elected were selected. For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us low.

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His craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate.

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Well, first of all, James, I'm very ignorant of the reformers. On earth is not his equal.

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I think I probably know more about Calvinism than most of the people who call themselves Calvinists.

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Did we in our own strength confide our striving would be losing.

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For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever were not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing.

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Ladies and gentlemen, James White is a hyper -Calvinist. And whatever we do in Baptist life, we don't need to be teaming up with hyper -Calvinists.

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Just ask who that may be. Christ Jesus, it is he.

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I said the other day in class that I don't understand the difference between hyper -Calvinism and Calvinism.

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It seems to me that Calvin was a hyper -Calvinist. Right, I don't think there is typically any difference between Calvinism and hyper -Calvinism.

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Lord, salvo his name. Read my book. From age to age the same.

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And he must win the battle. And now, from our underground bunker hidden deep beneath Liberty University where no one would think to look, safe from those moderate

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Calvinists, Dave Hunt fans, and those who've read and re -read George Bryson's book, we are

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Radio Free Geneva, broadcasting the truth about God's freedom to save to his own eternal glory.

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And welcome to The Dividing Line, Radio Free Geneva on a Monday. Boy, you're already ready to go here?

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I haven't even said anything. It just occurred to me we need to actually change the set for Radio Free Geneva.

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We need to have you in a silhouette so the front of you is completely dark and then there's a light behind you.

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Because it's the bunker, right? No. No? No. I really don't want to do anything.

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Can we start over again? It's like I just missed a serve or something.

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Anyway, hopefully without any further unnecessary interruptions from the peanut gallery, this is

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Radio Free Geneva. Just one announcement before we get started. If you see in the background there,

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I'm not sure if the camera catches that. Do you see the Codex back there? Okay.

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There's Codex Sinaiticus sitting behind me. I managed to steal all of it from St.

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Catharines and the British Library and University of Leipzig and everything else. No, seriously, that is very nice.

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And again, to whoever purchased that for me, and I don't even know who it was, but whoever purchased that for me.

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It had been on my wish list for, I don't know, two years or something like that. And someone finally had mercy on me.

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It's been extremely helpful. In fact, on Wednesday of this week on Pirate Christian Radio, I will be debating

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Chris Pinto on the subject of Codex Sinaiticus. I think the overwhelming and unquestionable evidence that it is not a production of a 19 -year -old from 1840.

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It is, in fact, an ancient document, and it has nothing to do with Jesuits or anything else. And we will be debating that subject.

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It will be a very fast debate, but it's only an hour and a half long.

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You divide that between two people, and it's a pretty brief period of time. But hopefully it will be useful to everyone and educational as well.

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I am glad that we are doing it simply because it has given me the opportunity, the necessity of studying much more about Sinaiticus and the production of manuscripts and things like that.

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And I have found that to be very useful. So I was today, for example, I looked at every single page in that huge,

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I don't know, 30, 35 -pound volume back there, checking out what

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I thought was the strongest argument I had heard from Chris Pinto. And I discovered that the argument is invalid, and that may come up in the debate.

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It may not. We will see. Yeah, it didn't pan out. But anyways, that'll be on Wednesday.

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Now today we continue our review of Dr. Steve Gaines' Sermon on the Sovereignty of God from September 8, 2013.

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I'm somewhat upset, to be honest with you. I saw on Twitter that someone feels they've been blocked from Dr.

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Gaines' feed for commenting or being a part of this review.

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I hope that's not the case. I do not believe that I have been disrespectful to Dr.

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Gaines. However, I do know that there are certain people, especially pastors of very large churches, that feel that any disagreement with them is a sign of disrespect, that there's no possible way to respectfully disagree or to even criticize, especially in regards to one's theology or one's handling of the

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Bible. That because you have to hold this big, huge thing together, any criticism is automatically an attack.

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And that's a shame, and we could talk about what that might mean as far as how we view church and things like that.

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But I'd rather focus upon what was actually said. Someone already in Twitter has said,

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That is one bright sweater. Yes, it is. I think most people, well, people who know me, know that for 20 years

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I have loved Coogee sweaters. And I was just, I literally flew in this morning from St.

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Charles, actually St. Louis, obviously. I was a little late getting in, thanks to the amount of time it took to de -ice the plane.

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We Phoenicians are not used to getting out of cars and having to be very careful about where you're putting your foot, because the entire parking lot is covered with ice and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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But that was the situation we had last night. And this morning, never got above 25 the whole time

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I was in there, got as low as 7. So for me, that was definitely seasonal weather, shall we say, that I don't experience here in Phoenix, and really wouldn't want to anyways.

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But anyway, 14 years I've been going to St. Charles, and I have spoken on Calvinism there a number of times, and things like that.

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But one of the things I like to do is it's one of the few places I can go where I can actually wear my Coogee sweaters.

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And they like me there, so they'll accept me no matter what I'm wearing. And yes,

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I did steal all of these from Bill Cosby, and he's still wondering where they went. Same sweaters, just made down in Australia.

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And I just think they're gorgeous. Actually, it's a cardigan today. What's that?

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Did I miss something? Twitter? Yeah, all I see is one bright sweater.

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I don't see anything. I'm behind? Oh, so I have to refresh it here.

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I didn't say I didn't like it. Just need my sunglasses on. I wasn't saying that you thought it was a bad sweater.

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If you know Coogees, they're actually very, very, very, very nice sweaters. But anyhow, that's just to explain that, because people make odd comments in the program.

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Anyhow, let's get back. We will pick up right where we were. We will not skip over anything. We will pick up right where we were with Dr.

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Gaines. We had just disagreed strongly with his turning upside down, really, of Romans chapter 8 and what it says there, and we had looked also at Ephesians chapter 1.

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But let's continue on with Radio Free Geneva. Dr. Steve Gaines on the sovereignty of God. God does not predestine everything that happens, because we know

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God does not predestine sin. I don't believe that God, for instance, ordained a man going into a movie theater or into an elementary school taking a gun and shooting innocent children.

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I know they were sinners by nature, and some people have a hard time saying there are no innocent children.

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I understand that. At the same time, I don't believe that you can say God predestined that from the foundation of the world.

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God made that man. God coerced that man to go in there and do that. I don't believe that. That's a slippery slope.

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Now, this to me, I think, is really the heart of Dr. Gaines' misunderstanding of the position that he so firmly denies.

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We've already mentioned that he seemingly refuses to allow for the historical utilization of language and categories at this point in time that has been a part of this discussion since the days of at least

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Augustine and certainly since the days of the Reformation. And that is, he does not allow for the distinction, the necessary distinction, the biblical distinction, in regards to the means, primary means, secondary means, etc.,

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etc. And we had pointed to biblical texts that demonstrate that, you know, I would like to know how

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Dr. Gaines would understand Genesis chapter 50 and the fact that you have one action on the part of man that's sinful, on the part of God, it is not sinful, it is holy.

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If you cannot understand primary and secondary causes, if you cannot understand the whole concept of compatibilism, if you cannot understand how man is being restrained from doing sin, not being forced, the whole language used there, that this man was coerced, forced by God, the idea that God is standing behind this man and pushing him into the school or into the movie theater to shoot people as,

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I don't want to do this, but God's making me do it. No one is saying that. That's way too high a view of man in his sin for the

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Reformed folks. Reformed folks recognize that God has to restrain the sinfulness of man.

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He has to restrain it. And so Joseph's brothers want to kill him. God keeps them from doing it.

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He does not give them their free will to act in that way and then just try to make something good come out of it.

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No, God has a purpose in selling Joseph into slavery. That's how he chose to do it. There could have been no other way.

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And if you say there could be, then I really don't believe you believe in the sovereignty of God and I really believe that the only option for you is to become an open theist.

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Dr. Gaines says he's not an open theist. That's great. That's wonderful. I'm glad. But if you're going to say that God's decree does not include the sinfulness of man, then you've got to throw

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Genesis 50 out. You've got to throw Isaiah chapter 10 out. And you've got to throw Acts chapter 4 out where God says that everything that was done by the

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Jews, the Romans, Herod, and Pontius Pilate was exactly what God's hand predestined to occur.

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Those were all sinful actions. And, in fact, given the person to whom the sin was upon whom the sin was committed, the sinless son of God were the greatest sins because, as he himself pointed out, there were no innocent children.

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We use that term very often, but we don't seem to use it in a biblical term. These were fallen sons and daughters of Adam.

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And when you really think about it, people go, oh, those little children, it's just terrible. Yes, it is terrible.

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It's terrible that this man acted upon the desires of his heart. But he had worse desires than that, and God restrained him from doing even worse things.

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But the point is, isn't it amazing how people will accuse God of being terrible and horrible and nasty and bad and, oh, he shouldn't have allowed that to happen?

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And yet they'll also be the very same ones that will turn around and say, well, why didn't God cause Adolf Hitler to get run over by a horse and buggy when he was a young person so that we didn't have what happened later in life?

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You can't have both. You can't have both. You cannot second -guess the infinite

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God along those lines because if you see a child dying in youth, you go, oh, that's terrible. Well, how do you know that wasn't the next

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Hitler? See, once you start trying to second -guess God as a temporal, time -bound being, you end up just wandering around the darkness because there's really no way out of all of that.

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And so the idea that God does not ordain sin in the sense of it is not a part of his decree,

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I would say, leads you inevitably to open theism. You can talk about simple foreknowledge all you want, but you're still stuck with the fact that when

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God created, did he know it was going to happen? And if he knew it was going to happen, then Dr. Gaines is in the exact same position that I am, except I'm open, admit that God has a decree, and therefore that everything has a purpose, including evil.

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There's no purposeless evil in the world. How does he get around that? It seems to me he has purposeless evil.

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Now, he hasn't come out and said that. That seems to be the only possible result of his position. But it sounds like he has purposeless evil that God knew was going to exist, he still created knowing that the result of his creation was going to be that it was going to exist.

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So, how does that ever explain anything? How does that work?

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I don't know. But the idea of coercion, the idea that God had to force that individual to do the things he did, nobody is saying that.

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Nobody is saying that. That is a sub -biblical view of man, and a certainly sub -biblical view of God and God's sovereignty, that this was a good man, or at least not an overly bad man, that God forced to be worse than he would have been.

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No. Reject it? That's not what we believe. And let me just ask a question.

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Does not Dr. Gaines believe that the death of God's saints is precious in his sight?

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And are not all my days written in his book? Did any Christians die in any mass murder that's ever taken place?

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Well, of course. So, did God know? If all my days are written in his book, that means that God has a specific plan, and he is going to use me in the way that he chooses to use me.

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See, you can't meaningfully talk about the sovereignty of God if you do not have an active decree of God.

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It's doublespeak. It has no meaning. And the sad thing is, we get to the end of the sermon, and he's going to say,

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God has a plan for your life, but it's up to you as to whether you experience it or not. And the plan is this vague, you know, be blessed type thing, not a specific plan tailored to you and to your happiness and to your full experience of his purpose in your life.

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It becomes this very vague thing, just like the nature of the elect is. It's this vague group, the faceless, nameless group, impersonal salvation.

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This is the result of this perspective. Now, has Dr. Gaines ever been forced to think that through?

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I don't know. The sad fact of the matter is, and I'm going to get myself in a lot of trouble here, but listening to a lot of the theological education at certain

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Southern Baptist seminaries leaves me wondering if a lot of the people who graduate from there without ever having been challenged to think through a lot of opposing perspectives.

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It's just more tradition. It's just, this is how we're supposed to think. And you're not challenged in many of those classes to think through these other things.

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So has he ever been challenged? I don't know. I don't know. My concern is that once you become the head of a huge church that you're having to try to hold together, keep it going in the right direction, then when you are challenged, you automatically interpret that as attack and therefore you're not really open to thinking through other perspectives.

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And there can't be growth. There can't be reformation. Semper Reformando, well, very rarely is how it ends up working out.

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And specifically, I've had, and you may have had the same thing, I mean, I have face -to -face dealt with the homosexual crowd.

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If you believe this, then I don't see how in the world you can argue with a homosexual who says,

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God made me this way. You can't. If you believe that God is responsible for everything that happens, and they try to say, no, we're responsible, well, you can't have it both ways.

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If God predestines it, God's responsible, whether you like it or not. And you can argue that all you want to, and I'm sure that makes somebody mad that's going to critique this thing, but hey, oh well.

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Prophetic words have been uttered from the pulpit of Bellevue Baptist Church. There you go.

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He knew somebody was going to critique this, and he's exactly right.

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And I appreciate that Dr. Gaines has taken a godly stand against homosexuality.

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I appreciate that he has taken a godly stand in regards to cultural issues. But the fact of the matter is,

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I think I've done a little bit more in that area than he has. I've debated John Shelby Spong and Barry Lynn.

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It's not been a year since I debated the head of the Gay Christian Network, and I've written a book on the subject.

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So I've been sort of in the forefront of those things. And I can assure you,

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Dr. Gaines, that, again, you have completely misunderstood not only the emphasis but the application of Reformed theology.

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God creates all of us, and he has a purpose in our lives. And, again, unless you're going to just take the view that mankind is the result of the cosmic toss of dice, then

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I just have to ask you, brother, do you not recognize that there are certain besetting sins and temptations in your own life?

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And that your struggle against those besetting sins, those temptations, the things that come from your created nature, are part and parcel of what makes you who you are?

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And it has impacted your ministry. It has deepened your ministry. Your own desire for sanctification has made you more sensitive to those who have the same concerns and cares as you.

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And has it not? Is it not your experience, brother Gaines, that when you encounter people who have temptations and trials and difficulties that you do not have,

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I have absolutely positively no propensity or temptation toward alcoholism or drug abuse.

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None. None. I cannot stand the taste of alcohol.

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I've even tried for crying out loud. You know, a little bit of it's supposed to be good for you. I've tried. Cannot do it.

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It's just horrible. And drugs? Oh, my goodness. I've told the story before. But I had

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LASIK surgery back in 2001, I think it was.

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And they offered me... I was really nervous because, you know, you can't move your eye.

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You know, you got to keep staring at this thing. And I don't care what you do. If you try to stare at something long enough, you're going to feel like your eye is moving, whether it is or isn't.

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And I was all freaked out about that. So they offered me half a Valium before the surgery.

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And I took it. And within three minutes, I was on the floor. I hate that feeling of not being in control.

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I just have zero propensity. I cannot understand the concept of addiction.

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Now, Brother Gaines, how many times in your ministry... Now, I'm talking to you as a fellow pastor.

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How many times in your ministry have you realized your own inadequacy and insufficiency because you are faced with situations and you've got no connection?

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You have to depend upon the body and other people that can understand to come in in that situation.

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I've experienced it. Now, are you going to tell me that God didn't make you the way you are, replete with strengths and weaknesses?

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Now, if that's the case, well, then we are really coming from very different perspectives.

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But I think anybody listening to me understands exactly what I'm talking about, especially people that are involved in ministry, knows exactly what

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I'm talking about. And so I would just encourage people, take what

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Dr. Gaines just said and compare it with the full debate that I did with Justin Lee up in the wilds of the cold north back in March, I think we did that.

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And compare the presentation I made to him with what

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Dr. Gaines just said. Because we are not saying that it is an excuse for my sin in any way, shape, or form.

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God holds me accountable for acting upon the desires of my heart.

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That is the realm of my accountability. And if God says those desires are against my will, then acting upon them is sinful.

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And I can't say, well, that's just how God made me. If I have desire toward arrogance, if I have desire toward boasting, and I act upon those desires, that I'm acting upon the desires of my heart, and that's what

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I am judged for. And since I'm made in the image of God, I don't have to act upon those things.

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That's what makes us human beings over against just animals. And so to say, if you believe in the absolute sovereignty of God, see,

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Dr. Gaines' primary fundamental error here is that he refuses to allow for the very distinction that we make of primary and secondary causes.

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Well, if God ordained all things, then he is the only cause.

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It's very simple, but its simplicity does not allow it to deal with the text we've already raised and to deal with the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the hardening of other kings' hearts, the destruction of their nations, all these places where God is actively involved providentially in accomplishing his purposes, all those texts just have to be ignored so as to somehow justify

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God. It's a simplistic theodicy. Theodicy, theos, dikaio, the justification of God in the matter of evil in creation.

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It's a simplistic theodicy, but it's not a satisfying theodicy. A rich, full, biblical theodicy will always drive you back to the contemplation of the majesty and glory of God.

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And you have to deal with the reality that when God created, he either had a purpose and had an end or he did not.

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And if all you're saying is he tossed a cosmic dice, looked and said, Oh, look, I won! Worship me!

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Woohoo! That's not a sound basis in any way, shape, or form. I need to stop saying that phrase for any shape or form.

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That is not a sound basis for glorifying God. It really isn't. It's not a satisfying basis.

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So I know it's easier to put it this way in a sermon, but my concern here, and the reason we do

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Radio Free Geneva and things like that, is that there are people in this audience who are going to be facing trials and difficulties in life that are bigger than these kinds of explanations.

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And that's the problem when tradition becomes enshrined in the preaching of the

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Christian church. I believe Dr. Gaines is on the side of the angels. And so I treat him as a brother, despite the fact that he may not look at me that way.

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I don't know. I don't know. But one thing's for certain. One of the primary concerns that I have is that you have literally thousands and thousands of people listening to what this man is saying.

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Listening to what he's saying. And they are facing trials and difficulties and challenges, and they need the full -orbed biblical truth to allow them to build the most robust, deep, unmoving, unchallengeable

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Christian worldview. And when traditions get in the way, and it doesn't matter where it came from,

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I understand Dr. Gaines has a tremendous amount of respect for Herschel Hobbes, I understand how that works, but one of the things

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I have seen among Southern Baptists is there tends to be a setting up of man idols.

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That man did so well that we can't question him. No, you can question him, and you need to.

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You need to. We all need to. And that's what's going on here.

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That's why we do this program. God never made anyone a homosexual. God never made anybody to be an adulterer.

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God never made somebody to be a murderer, a rapist, a child molester, a serial killer. God allowed it, but you can't say just because God allowed it that he predestined it.

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God gave us free choice. We are responsible for our sins. Now, that sounds, whenever you start in the

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Southern Baptist preaching cadence, when you all of a sudden have an acceleration, and you get that number of points crammed together, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then you move on.

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That's almost always indication of an incoherent portion of the presentation.

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That's the tradition indicator. Because what was just said doesn't make any sense.

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God never made anybody a murderer. Did God make Cain? So he made

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Cain. Did he force Cain to be a murderer? Well, what he's saying is, no.

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He didn't force Cain to be a murderer. And my statement is, God restrains the evil of men, and we could all be murderers were it not for the grace of God.

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So we're coming at it from two completely different directions. But the question is, when

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God created, did God know what would happen with Cain and Abel?

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Now, Dr. Gaines has said yes, because he denies open theism.

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So the question is, when God created, knowing what was going to happen, could he have stopped it?

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Could he have created it in a different way? If the murder in Cain and Abel, if that situation was not a part of God's decree, then it has no purpose.

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God just reacts to it, but it doesn't have any purpose. It's purposeless evil. And yet God brings it into existence.

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Why? You can't say it's for his honor and glory. You can say, well, God's glorified because he finds a way to fix it.

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So God's glorified by creating plumbing that leaks, and then we're supposed to glorify him because he can fix plumbing.

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Is that really what that's all about? That answer that was just given here doesn't make any sense.

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Well, he permitted it. Hmm. There's a reason why

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Calvin, in his writings on this subject, so often attacked the utilization of the term permission.

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Because permission, while it has an appropriate utilization in theology, is often a weasel word.

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It's a way around the hard truth of God's sovereignty over all of events.

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Because if you're only looking at God's sovereignty in his relationship to time in sort of a two -dimensional way, it's hard to see how these things relate.

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What you need to realize is God's sovereign relationship to his own creatures and creation is not a two -dimensional.

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It's a multi -dimensional thing. It's far more interconnected. The beauty of the woven fibers of God's providence and sovereignty are far beyond what you can put into a two -dimensional picture.

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That's why it's not simplistic to look at the text of Scripture on this subject.

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If it was simplistic, then you could just put it into a sort of easy picture book type thing.

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It's not that simple. It's not that easy. It actually requires the utilization of the mind and the consideration of a wide variety of biblical revelation.

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If it was any other, then man could figure it all out fairly quickly and then spend the rest of your life sort of bored.

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I don't think that's the case at all. Calvin attacked the idea of just mere permission.

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When you think about it, if you give someone permission, it's like you're setting up a second authority. It may be somewhat subject to you, but are we really saying that these things find their actual initial origin only in man?

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Start thinking about that in regards to the sovereignty of God and the intentions of God and the purpose of God, and it becomes rather frightening.

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It becomes rather frightening. It's almost as bad as the Molinist, who in essence has a God who is limited by the possibilities that are created by middle knowledge and the actions of free creatures.

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He's got to deal with the cards he's dealt. That was the William Lane Craig thing. I wonder if that came up in the

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Unbelievable broadcast. I'm still waiting to see when that's going to come out, when William Lane Craig finally debated somebody, just not me, on the issues of Calvinism and Molinism.

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Believe you me, once it does come out, something tells me Radio Free Geneva is going to be busy for a long, long time, and it is going to be busy for a long, long time right now because David Allen's talk on limited atonement has been posted, and I've already saved it as an

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MP3, and we'll be getting to it on my rides this week. So we've got

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Steve Gaines to finish, then David Allen, and then we'll get around to the William Lane Craig stuff or maybe the

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William Lane Craig stuff before we get David Allen. We'll see. But much, much, much to deal with in this particular area.

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But when you think about the Molinist concept where God has to work with the cards he's dealt with, well, when you talk about mere permission, doesn't that set up a situation where God is acting upon man's desires to do things and he grants permission to things?

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What's the ultimate source of those actions then? Is it the purpose of God? Doesn't seem to be.

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There's a lot of problems here. There's a lot of things that should be being thought through, but unfortunately very frequently are not thought through in the normal context of these kinds of sermons.

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And I could give you a lot of examples. I don't want to go off on this because a lot of times when I talk about this, people say, well,

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Brother Steve, you know, this is just one of your pet peeves. It is not. It is not. I don't think about this all that much, but when

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I do think about it, I think about it the way I'm thinking about it right now. Well, one of my objections to that statement is that how you view

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God and his ultimate purposes in all of creation should be foundational to the entirety of Christian ministry.

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That's what honestly concerns me about some of the folks who are sort of trying to create a detente and say this just doesn't really matter.

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It's a side issue. It's out there somewhere. But the reality is, this is absolutely central to how you're going to view the church, the purpose of the church, the worship of the church, the ministry of the church.

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It's going to determine what you say and do when you enter into the sick room in the hospital or the intensive care unit or the emergency room.

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It's going to determine what you say at the graveside. It's going to determine what you say in the birthing room.

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It's going to determine how you view education. It is fundamental. Whether we believe that God is working all things after the counsel of his will to his own purpose and grace, to his own glory, or whether you think that God is just reacting to man and doing the best he can to put things back together again after we, by our sovereign free will, mess everything up.

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Those are two very different visions. And so just putting it off to the side, well,

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I really don't think about this all that much. He was thinking about it enough to have crammed it into a text that actually has nothing to do with it.

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So you've got to be thinking about enough of it. Anyways, now we finally get to some scripture passages other than this particular one.

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And ironically, the first one he chooses to do is the classicus locus for open theism.

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And he acknowledges that. He says, I'm not an open theist. And yet he goes to the very text that open theists utilize.

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Let's listen in. Jeremiah said three times something that I know proves, it proves, biblically proves, that Ephesians 1 -11 could not be saying that everything that happens is the will of God.

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And I'm going to read them to you. Jeremiah 7 -31. They have built the high places of Topeth.

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Topeth is a word for drums. And what they would do is they would beat the drums so that when they sacrificed the babies, you couldn't hear the babies crying when they died in the valley of...

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Do you remember what the word was? Hinnom. Ben -Hinnom. The valley of Hinnom.

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And what did Jesus call it? Gehinnah. That's the word for hell. And it was the garbage dump outside the dung gate.

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And that's where the babies were being slaughtered. And he said, they have built the high places of Topeth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire.

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Now watch this. Which I did not... What? Say it out loud. I did not command it.

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Now the next part is even more revealing. It didn't even enter my mind. That doesn't mean that God...

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I'm not an open theist. You say, I don't know what that is. Give thanks. But it doesn't mean that God doesn't know the future.

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God does know the future. But look at me. If language means anything, this means that it was not the will of God, the predestined, preordained will of God, for these babies to be killed.

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Amen? What else can you say? What else can you say? Because as long as you simplify the will of God to just...

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You don't allow for the distinction, the necessary distinction, between the prescriptive will of God that is enshrined in His law, in His moral law, in what

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He gives to Israel, and the will of God, the secret will of God, the decretive will of God, that is behind all events in time.

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As long as you don't allow for that distinction, then this is easy. It won't allow you to interpret the

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Bible consistently. It's going to lead to where your people are going, well, but Pastor, what about this over here?

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But Pastor, what about what's said in Isaiah 10? But Pastor, what happened with Joseph? But Pastor, even the cross itself.

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And there are so many other instances, the same type of thing. As long as you will not lead your people into a deeper understanding of the full range of biblical revelation, well, then you can simplify everything and just hope no one asks you any questions.

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But you're not doing your people any favors when you do that. You're not helping your people out because what he's just said is this was not the will of God.

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Well, of course, God never commanded anyone to sacrifice their children. God never commanded.

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And of course, in Hebrew parallelism, did not command, did not enter my mind. Same thing, it's a strengthened way of expression.

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He's talking about the horrific nature, the twisted nature of these people.

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He warned his people against the pagan practices. He told them that they are going to be tempted by these things.

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They didn't listen. They didn't listen. They have now become involved in these horrific practices.

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And God says judgment is going to come upon you. And judgment did.

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You read the rest of the book of Jeremiah. But even Dr. Gaines has to go, now,

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I'm not an open theist. God knew. Okay, so then what are you saying?

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It means it did not enter his heart. Well, it just means he didn't predestine it. He didn't force anybody to do that.

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Well, we're not saying he forced anybody to do that. But are you saying that when he created, he knew this was going to happen, but he just went, aw, shucks.

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Oh, darn, I wish that hadn't happened. But nothing I can do about it. I just tossed the cosmic dice. Which is the more responsible view of responsibility?

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The one where God decrees everything is going to happen, and therefore, even evil has a purpose, ultimately, in the glorification of God.

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Or saying that God just created, and you've got all this purposeless evil, and there's no redemptive purpose to it all.

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There's no reason for it. God just created it, and it's just out there, and it's never going to glorify him.

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It just happens. That's just the way it is. Maybe you can just go, oh, that's mystery.

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I don't know. Which is the more responsible model? I think it's fairly obvious which is the most responsible model.

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But this is the key. This is the text that the open theists use. Never undermine...

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I never... When God created, he had no idea that man was going to be so evil.

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Of course, when God created, he didn't know you were going to exist. Listen to my debate on open theism from Reform Theological Seminary from, wow, a dozen years ago.

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Over a dozen years ago now. Huh? No, uh -uh. 2003?

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I think it was 2001. I thought it was. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

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Well, it's been over a decade, let's put it that way. And listen to what was affirmed there.

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When God created, he didn't know you were going to exist because you are the result of thousands upon thousands multiplied thousands of free will choices.

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Free actions of men. That's what God does not know. The free actions of men. The idea that men were going to sacrifice their children never entered

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God's mind. He's shocked. Absolutely shocked that this has happened.

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But that's not how Dr. Gaines takes it. If God wasn't shocked...

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I mean, later on, he's going to talk about Jesus talking to the rich young ruler.

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And if that was not a bona fide offer, if Jesus wasn't trying to get this guy saved, if Jesus already had decreed that he's not the elect, it's all a lie.

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It's all wicked. And I just go, again, this is why the only consistent are minions and open theists.

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Because, from your perspective, Jesus knew whether he was going to believe or not. And if he was lost,

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Jesus knew that he was never going to be saved when he said the things he said. And so you're in the exact same position I am, aren't you?

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Except, the only answer you've already abandoned. The answer that there is a purpose.

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The answer that there is primary and secondary causes and all the rest of those things. You've already abandoned all that. And yet you don't realize you haven't actually escaped the question you thought you escaped.

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Through the free will hatch. Which so many people utilize over and over and over again.

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Now here's a really short, the very next statement was, Well, that's only one.

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Oh, no, no, no. I've got two more. That's only one? Who presents the position that a biblical statement is only valid if it's repeated multiple times?

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It just caught me. I was like, wait a minute. That's only one.

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If that had been a valid argument, if it rightly represented Reformed theology and didn't result in his own having to answer all sorts of questions that he hasn't answered and so on and so forth, then that would have been enough.

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Who is it that says, Well, that's only one? I don't know who it is. It's certainly not Reformed folks. So I never really got that one.

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But anyways, we press on. Look at me. When you say that God predestined everything, including sin, you've left the

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Bible and you have turned a philosophy into a theology.

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You've reasoned in your mind and it's reasoned gone awry. Well, I would like to know how

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Dr. Gaines answers the compatibilist texts. I would like to know how he handles

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Acts chapter 4, how he handles Isaiah 10, how he handles Genesis 50. I'd like to know how he handles the hardening passages, not just with Pharaoh.

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I could probably guess that one. But that's not the only hardening passage. I'd like to know.

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I don't know. But I will say to you that whether you want to recognize that your simple foreknowledge view is a philosophical perspective or not, it still is.

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And whether you want to expose it to examination, consistent examination, on the same basis as what you're criticizing the

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Reformed view on, well, if you don't, there's that little line that I've come up with, inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.

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Your tradition has to stand up to the same level of examination that you are utilizing for the other side.

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And I just is it not fairly obvious who are the people who play other people's sermons and respond to them?

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Mainly because the other side won't engage in dialogue anyways. I really, really, really doubt that Dr.

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Gaines on his podcast or in one of his sermons would play one of my sermons on predestination election and interact with it in front of his people.

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I would love to have that happen. I think it would be great. But we all know that's generally not the way it goes. Generally, the idea is we don't want our people even exposed to these things.

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We don't even want them starting to think about these things. And I cannot tell you how many times

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I have had people come up to me. What have I said over and over again? The non -denominational denomination

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Calvary Chapel will continue to produce Calvinists as long as it does not deal with the issue head on in an honest and biblical way, which it can't do anyways.

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You've got a denomination telling people, take the Bible seriously, read all that it says, believe all it says, but let's not talk about that.

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And I cannot tell you how many times I have had people. It still happens everywhere I go. I'm one of those former

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Calvary Chapel folks and you're right. They taught me to believe the Bible and when

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I read all of it, there's that John 6 and Romans 8 and Romans 9 and Romans 10 and Ephesians 1 and Paul endures all things for the sake of the elect.

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It's just all over the place. I know. I know. Same thing here.

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Same thing here. This isn't replacing biblical theology with man -made philosophy.

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This is just listening to all that the Bible has to say on a subject and allowing it all to speak, not just simply what fits into our traditional filter.

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James, the brother of Jesus, tells us not to blame God for our own sin. James 1, 13 -15, let no one say when he is tempted,

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I'm being tempted by God. God cannot be tempted by evil. Now, here it is.

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He himself does not tempt anyone. That pretty much says it, doesn't it? Well, again, as long as you absolutely, positively refuse to allow the actual situation to enter into the conversation, it's pretty easy to strawman this stuff and that's what's going on here.

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You're refusing to accept the fact that one side is making an assertion that God's sovereign decree includes all events in time and that that sovereign decree means there's no such thing as purposeless evil and that man is held accountable for doing what?

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For acting upon the intention of his own heart. What is the intention of man's heart, according to the

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Bible? I think the phrase is evil continually? Is there any good?

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Can man who is accustomed to evil do good? No more than a what? Leopard can change its spots, right?

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And so, the problem with this synergistic perspective that Dr.

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Gaines has imbibed from his heroes and his teachers, the inconsistency of it is that its anthropology is unbiblical, its theology proper is unbiblical, and they would see that if they would bring these positions together into a coherent and consistent whole.

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But it's not my experience that, especially in these larger churches, that there is a lot of drive to do that.

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I know because I got in trouble in one of those large churches when I realized the only way to truly honor

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God is to listen to all that he has to say. You have to bring all of your theology together and your theology of man and your theology of God have to be brought together so that you can see whether they're actually consistent with one another.

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And this idea of forcing men to do evil ignores the reality that you don't have to force men to do evil, you have to restrain them from doing evil.

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And so, it's an unbiblical anthropology connected with a deficient theology proper that does not have answers to the strong affirmations of God's absolute sovereignty over all events in time.

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That's what results in the inconsistency of this position. It is me, it is me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.

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God does not ordain sin, God does not predestine sin, God is not a rapist, God is not a murderer,

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God is not a child molester, God is not an adulterer, God does not ordain abortion, God did not kill the

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Jews in genocide, God is not gassing those people in Syria right now. God is not telling a lie,

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God is holy, He hates sin, He does not predestine everything that occurs on earth, and even though He does allow sin to occur,

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God is not responsible. So, God is not responsible. This is,

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I hope what you're hearing by now is what happens when you refuse to allow the proper distinctions that godly men for time immemorial have recognized.

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You just throw them out. I don't have to worry about that. That's why I'm not a then you fill in the name,

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I'm a Biblicist. That's a nice way of saying I am not going to do the work necessary to actually enter into the dialogue that has taken place amongst the people of God for all these centuries.

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It's too complicated for me. That's hard to respect. It really is.

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That's what ends up allowing a man to stand there and say, we are saying God is a rapist. Are you telling me that what happened with Tamar was not a part of God's sovereignty?

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It's part and parcel of the very line of the Messiah himself, but it was just God doing his best he could to sort of, you know, just work around it.

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Work around it. Is that what you're saying? Think of all of the sin that was involved in the very line of the

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Messiah himself. God had nothing to do with it. But isn't it amazing he somehow managed to work it all in?

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Think about that. There is a reason why sola scriptura does not mean you ignore everything everyone has ever said before.

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It's you and your Bible out under a tree. That's not what sola scriptura means. Never has meant it, never will mean it.

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There is a balance. A balance between recognizing the sufficiency of scripture to function as a sole and fallible rule of faith and the fact that Christ is building his church and that we should not ignore what has come before us and when we do, it's always to our detriment, never to our benefit.

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And here you have just simply a rejection of the appropriate and proper distinctions that have been drawn from meaningful biblical exegesis for a long, long time.

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You throw those out and now you have squished the deep trues of the faith down to a two -dimensional flat and it sounds nice and simple, but it really doesn't accomplish anything.

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It really doesn't accomplish anything. And all the produce of the field from the day that she left the land even until now.

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And what you see is, it's hard not to see the sovereign plan of God for this woman being worked out as she submits herself to his will for her life.

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You see that she comes back, she's been gone seven years, and it just so happens that Gehazi is talking with the king about this woman when she walks in and says, hey,

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I need my land back. He said, that's the woman I've been telling you about. And all the king wanted to say, tell me some of the great things

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Elisha did. He happens to tell the story about this woman and she walks in. How many of you know that that was not just coincidence?

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How many of you know that was God? The sovereign plan of God. She walks in, she gets her land back, she even gets all the produce and the money that was taken for it for the last seven years.

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God is a God of abundance, is he not? God will do the same for each of us if we obey him.

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Now, that might sound great. I mean, the woman walks in at this particular point in time and it fulfills

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God's purpose to see God's sovereign, but I just have to point out, I really don't think

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Dr. Gaines has any foundation for making these assertions. His whole point has been the woman could have gone anywhere and done anything.

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Could the woman have been free to commit suicide? Well, no. Why not? And what if the woman had gone someplace where somebody else used their free will to kill her?

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This plan could not have been fulfilled. Well, none of that could have happened because God foresaw what was going to happen.

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Wait a minute, if God foresaw where she was going to sojourn, could she have sojourned anywhere else?

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If she sojourned someplace else, that would have falsified his knowledge, right? See, this position just hasn't thought through the issues.

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This position is not an answer. It's not consistent with itself.

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So, yes, she returns at that particular point in time. Why? Because God decreed that she would return at that particular point in time and there was nothing that could happen that could stop that.

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Now, the decree that brings that about is rich and full and there's all sorts of depth to it.

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It's not just robots and marionettes and silliness like that. When you hear someone doing the robot marionette thing, that just shows how little they think of the depth of the sovereignty of God.

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That's not what it's about. It's not a marionette type thing in any way, shape, or form.

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That's the way God works. God's will is not automatically done. God's will is just not always done.

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You say, now wait a minute, what did you mean by that? I mean, this, in the Greek, God's will is not always done.

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Some things are done that are not the will of God. Now, if you make the proper distinctions and you recognize the difference between the prescriptive will of God, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, and the decree of God, then that makes perfect sense.

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But since he denies that, what he's saying is mankind does things that messes up God's plan, and then

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God has to somehow fix it all back up, put it all back together again, in some way, shape, or form.

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Which leads to absolutely insuperable difficulties that you can see in more consistent people who work this out all the way to the end.

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Remember, I've debated some people who said, well, yeah, Paul could have said no on the

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Damascus Road, and then God would have had to look for somebody else to do what he wanted

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Paul to do. That would push his timetable back. It just creates an absolute disaster as far as biblical prophecy or anything like is concerned.

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There you go. We're going to continue with our review of Dr. Gaines' sermon.

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There's not that much of it left, specifically. There might be a good program left, depending on how much commentary

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I do. Again, as soon as the William Lane Craig material is up on Unbelievable, that likewise might influence how quickly we work through things.

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We have David Allen's sermon on the Atonement to look at, so we've got a lot to do on Radio Free Geneva and on many other fronts as well.

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Thanks for listening to The Dividing Line today. Lord willing, we will be back on Thursday, probably right around our regular time.