John Samson Continues His Series on Biblical Interpretation

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In this edition of the Dividing Line Rich Pierce starts off the show with some commentary about PC&D's new song 'Jesus, Only Jesus' and how this song exposes the Oneness views of this group. Then John continues his series on the biblical interpretation.

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Welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is John Sampson. I pastor King's Church in Phoenix, and it's a delight to be on the program today.
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In for Dr. James White, who is currently on a ministry tour of Germany, was in Ukraine, now is in Berlin.
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And we're delighted to come again here on the program. Hopefully this series of teachings on how to study the
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Bible will be of benefit to you. Thank you for those who've contacted me personally. Got a number of emails from all over the place.
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One from Japan recently, a gentleman named Richard, just thanking God for the material.
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And the thanks also needs to go to Alpha and Omega Ministries for allowing me this opportunity to actually do this.
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Rich is here and he has an update about something pretty egregious that's taking place in the
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Christian world. First of all, I'd like to update folks on what's going on with Dr. White. He is now teaching in Berlin, and it's my understanding everything is going well there, and the lights are staying on, and they're doing some busy work, and they're keeping him busy, and that's a good thing.
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When I was driving into work this morning, I was listening to KFLR, Family Life Radio, a national
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Christian radio network, and it is listener -supported.
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Christians have written Christian radio stations for a very long time, asking them to take a good hard look at Phillips, Craig, and Dean's music, their theology, and the fact that they are, in fact,
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Oneness Pentecostals in their beliefs. And I know that we received years ago a letter from K -Love
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Radio Network basically saying that the letter that Phillips, Craig, and Dean had sent out to their response—and basically it's a form letter, is my understanding,
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I've seen it a number of times from different sources—and it is a muddled mess regarding their belief, regarding the
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Trinity, and it's just enough to make Oneness Pentecostals happy, and enough to confuse the daylights out of any
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Trinitarian that may be leaning one way or the other and wondering whether or not these requests for information are fair.
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This morning I heard KFLR here in Phoenix playing Phillips, Craig, and Dean, I believe it's their newest release, and it's called
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Jesus Only. And we have been pointing out for years that these men are, they come from Oneness Pentecostal backgrounds and have never blatantly, openly affirmed
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Trinitarian belief. They have never denied Oneness Pentecostalism.
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It's always been this haze of ambiguity in all of their responses to these questions.
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At least I've never seen anything direct from them about it.
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Well, I believe they've cleared the air with this song, and I'm going to ask Christians around this country, around the world, that care about the
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Trinity, that understand that this is central to our belief system.
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This is about having a concept of the true
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Christ, and Jesus' warnings, many warnings about following false Christs.
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I believe that Oneness Pentecostalism is a false Christ, that they teach a false
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Christ. And there's another word that is used to describe
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Oneness Pentecostalism. It's called the Jesus Only Movement. And I believe this song, as I heard it this morning, is an anthem to the
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Jesus Only Movement. If you listen to the theology, you hear very clearly – and in fact,
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Dr. White found on YouTube this morning a commentary from the three of them while the song's playing in the background, where they're talking about Jesus only,
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Jesus only, Jesus only. They've finally come out, and they've cleared the air.
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It is plainly true, plainly visible, plainly understandable that Phillips, Craig, and Dean are
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Oneness Pentecostals. What I want to drive home here, folks, is that the
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Christian church in this country is being led down a primrose path by people who can sing pretty.
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And because they can sing pretty, and they can make you feel good, all right, it doesn't really matter what theology they're teaching.
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It doesn't really matter what theology they believe. But there's a wake -up call here, folks, because there's lines that all of us would draw.
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If this was a Jehovah's Witness, if this was a Mormon – and there's Mormon music. If you go to Deseret Bookstore, there's
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Mormon music all over the place. And if they could rise to a level that, oh, goodness, that's just really beautiful.
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That's just really wonderful. And of course, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, we've heard on PBS, has had them on for years.
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They sing pretty. But when we define worship and the act of worship as a handful of people getting up on the stage and strumming some instruments and they can sing pretty, we've got a real problem.
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Yes, our praise and our hymns and our songs and our spiritual songs are part of the worship event.
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But worship does not end when the singers leave the stage and the guy with the Bible gets up to start teaching.
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It is all part of the whole worship event. And I submit to folks – and I love good
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Christian music. I love it. But we have to ask ourselves what our standard for worship is, what our standard for the music is.
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We cannot fall back to the old American bandstand Dick Clark method of worship being the
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Rate a Record segment. If you remember the Rate a Record segment, there was two standards to what was good when they rated the record.
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Has it got a good beat and can you dance to it? And I submit that too many people are going into church and their quote -unquote standard for worship is, does it have a good beat and can you wave your hands to it?
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And this is why Christian radio stations have been averting their eyes from the truth of Phillips, Craig, and Dean.
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They have shielded themselves from Phillips, Craig, and Dean because they're too big.
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And I believe now Phillips, Craig, and Dean thinks that they're so big, finally coming out and being blatant about this will not harm them because they have such a foothold they can never lose it.
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And that disturbs me. And I think this topic should shoehorn right in with where you've been going, and that is biblical interpretation.
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Folks, we need to ask ourselves the question, what is important in our theology and about our faith?
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We're talking about central Christian doctrines here. A couple of weeks ago we had
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Manuel Colwell on as a guest. Dr. White kind of did this back and forth on various verses.
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Manuel and I have quite a history on the phone. And when Manuel first started calling me, we butted heads a lot.
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There was much yelling, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. And when we both finally calmed down, one of the things that I pointed out to him about Phillips, Craig, and Dean, I was simply very direct with him.
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Look, you believe in oneness theology, and you believe it with all your—it's the standard.
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What do you think about a group that is so ambiguous that is part of your camp, but they're so ambiguous and they're so afraid to offend anyone in my camp—and frankly,
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I believe it just comes down to the almighty buck is the standard here—that it will cost them in their pocketbook, okay, because their audience won't be as large, because the
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Trinitarians won't come in and listen to them and pay the price of admission.
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I said, what do you think about that? What do you think about someone representing your perspective that refuses to come out and say it plainly?
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And he agreed with me. That was not cool. They've finally done it.
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They've finally come out, and they've finally stated it plainly. And it's time to call upon Family Life Radio, K -Love
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Radio Network, and so many others, and make their committees who've decided to allow
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Phillips, Craig, and Dean on, it's finally time again to contact them and demand that they deal with the theology in this song, because it is blatant oneness
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Jesus -only theology. These people do not believe in the Trinity, and they are now taking all the haze away, and it's clear.
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Well, thanks very much, Rich, and couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. God has defined himself as the
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Trinity, and any other kind of worship is a false worship of a false god, and appreciate so much this ministry that for much more than a decade—it's been an ongoing thing for a long, long time, hasn't it?
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Yeah, this is—Eric Nielsen wrote an excellent review of where they were coming from years ago.
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A number of other people have written solid reviews, and again, you know, everybody wants to go back to that statement that they sent out years and years ago that says absolutely nothing.
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I mean, it could have been written by a
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Yeah, intentionally ambiguous, and it just—all those blinders have been taken away now.
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All right. Amen. Stand for truth, and that's why this program's called
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The Dividing Line, for that exact reason. Well, we'll move on and talk more about building our lives on sound doctrine, true interpretation, studying the
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Scriptures as 2 Timothy 2 .15 charges us. Paul, writing to Timothy, wrote in the
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King James Version, Something that is kind of fun is
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I went to my library and pulled out some of the books from the 70s and 80s regarding the end times, and this is true regarding preaching and writing, but it's also true regarding interpreting, because one thing comes before the other.
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Hopefully, you interpret the Bible, then you preach it. Well, so many look at the
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Scripture, Old and New Testament, with a newspaper in hand, and if they see a headline or even something on page 3 of the newspaper, they then search the
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Scripture for some kind of verse that would say, this is that.
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This is, in my Bible, that that I'm reading in the newspaper, and I picked out one, and this is—it's actually sad but funny.
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I wonder if we can get a close -up of this. Amazing Prophecies of the 70s.
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Amazing Prophecies of the 70s. And it's Super K.
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Can you see Super K on the front? Super K refers to Henry Kissinger. Henry Kissinger.
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And the whole message of the book is Henry Kissinger could indeed be the
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Antichrist. He does not come out. The gentleman who wrote this, Doug Clark, didn't come out and actually say he is the
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Antichrist, but he's number one in the charts regarding who he thinks he may be, and as you read through, there's pictures of Henry visiting with government officials in China.
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There's cartoons of Henry Kissinger, who's linked with Napoleon and New World Order, and it's a fascinating read.
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I was very interested to see that in 1974, there was a drying of a river in Egypt, and this, for about a three - or four -month period, was a fulfillment of a verse in Ezekiel.
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And I thought, how many of our audience would even remember that there was a dried -up river somewhere in Egypt in 1974?
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Was really that Ezekiel was talking about, and he was warning the people about?
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I don't think so. The other slight problem is that Henry Kissinger, and I checked the facts, he's actually now 91 years old, and last
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May he was 91, and I'm not sure he still has the energy to be the
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Antichrist at this late stage of his career. If he's going to do
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Antichrist -like activities, it's got to be for a couple of hours, he's 91.
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But there we go. As you read through this particular book, it tells us if Armageddon comes and is delayed until the early 80s, we will leave with the rapture in the latter part of the 70s, about six years before the battle.
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That means if you've ever thought about becoming a Christian, do it now. Now, I appreciate the heart of this man, but he has built his legacy on speculation, and we should not do that without interpretation.
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We should build our doctrine on what we can prove from Scripture. One of the things, the many things
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I appreciate about this ministry, of Dr. James White's ministry, Alpha and Omega Ministries, is the books that have been written, the articles that have been written, can stand the test of time.
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You can watch a debate from the 90s, and it's bang up to date. You can see what was written in the 90s, in the early years of this century, and 50 years from now, the same would apply, that the truth borne out of the
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Scripture is what is taught by Dr. James White. I sought to do that in my own book.
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I wanted to write something that would outlast me, that would still be true long after I'm gone, should the
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Lord tarry. But there we go. Doug Clark was not the only one who did this.
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There's actually a gentleman I met personally, a man who I esteemed very, very highly at the time, a man by the name of Barry Smith.
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He was a schoolteacher, converted, and went round the world with an end -time message of evangelism, and a terrific guy.
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He's dead now, but his books, again, articulate much about Henry Kissinger.
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He wrote a book called Warning, if you can see that, Warning, Barry Smith, and some of the books here that I'm going to mention are kind of funny when you look at it.
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He talks about the world leader soon, the false prophet, and looks at the major headlines of the day to show that this is indeed happening before our eyes.
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Now, what do you do after you've written the book Warning? Where do you go from there? Well, he wrote a second book, and he called it
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Second Warning, Second Warning. Henry Kissinger, he's running around the countryside and around the world doing naughty, nasty things.
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Well, government is upon us, attention, arrest young citizen, class unmarked, detained, mark or dispose of, reference number, so on.
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This was hot stuff in the early 80s, Second Warning. Now, what do you do when you've written two books, one called
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Warning and one called Second Warning? Well, you write a larger book, and this one's called
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Final Notice. Final Notice. We're all out of here real quickly. We're going up in the rapture.
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Final Notice. There's a lot of information about Kissinger again, and world government,
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Mark of the Beast, I wonder if you can see this, Mark of the Beast on the head there, don't leave home without it.
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Interesting stuff all the way through, Kissinger capers, and so it goes on. All right, you've written
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Warning, Second Warning, Final Notice. What do you do if you've still got a little bit of time before Jesus comes back, because the
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Antichrist is just about to be revealed, Kissinger's going to make a power ploy and articulate a seven -year peace treaty in the
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Middle East, it's all about to happen. So you've written Warning, Second Warning, Final Notice, what do you write next?
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P .S. We're just about out of here. It's a small book, and P .S.,
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we're on the verge of everything. I bring all this in to show you because we look back now at the 80s and the early 90s when these books were written, and these books now appear foolish.
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I'm convinced that much of the end time, the eschatology section of the
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Christian bookstore is written simply for marketing.
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Sometimes it is books of the 70s with a new cover and title, and they just update it with whatever is happening out in the world.
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For instance, Saddam Hussein back in the 80s, it was Gorbachev and Bush Sr., and whatever is happening, this is that, is the message.
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And that's why I don't believe we should build our doctrine on any kind of speculation.
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Teach what you can prove. If I'm teaching on the end times, people can be frustrated because it is not sensational when you say, it could be this, or it could be that.
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They want you to say, it is this, it is that, and that's what sells.
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But for the Christian who wants to truly and rightly interpret the Scripture, our methodology should flow out of a heart that says,
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I want to know what the Word of God actually says. I do not want to speculate. And so what we do know are sure things, big picture things regarding the second coming of Christ.
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And on that, all Christians can agree. And that's the kind of thing that I would be happy to preach.
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I preach and I teach what I believe I can prove from Scripture. The rest, I say, you know what, there's five ideas out there as to what this could be, but let's keep our eyes open.
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Think of the book of Revelation. Was all of the book of Revelation written only for the last 15, 20 years of human history before Jesus comes back?
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No. It was written to encourage the saints who are under heavy persecution in the first century, second, third, on it goes on, wherever they are, whether the man killing
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Christians is the Antichrist or an Antichrist, it really doesn't matter if he's actually killing you.
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It's not really a big issue as to whether he's got a capital A or a lowercase
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A on his vest. He's killing Christians, whether it's Domitian or Caligula or Nero or the
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Roman Catholic Church or whoever it might be. There are many
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Antichrists in the world. Keep your eyes open. And the Holy Spirit has more wisdom than us. That goes without saying.
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He's infinite in his wisdom. And he's written a book that applies to everybody in the history of the church.
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And it will encourage the saint who is facing absolute persecution of a degree that we in the
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West have hardly ever experienced in our day. And that's rare in church history.
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It's more common to be hounded by the government in charge than to be accepted.
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That's the more common experience of the Christians. And the Holy Spirit has written a book through the apostle
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John that is written for Christians under fire. When we're in the
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West and we're in our secluded ivory theological towers, we can speculate about a lot of different things.
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And that's the problem. The book wasn't written for the speculator. It was written to encourage the saints.
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Don't come under the sway of the beast. Don't bow before false religion.
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For the sake of marketing, which goes right along with what Rich was saying, for the sake of money, be one with the false church that says anything goes.
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Revelation 17, the woman rides the beast. It's a false system.
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But stay true to the faith. Blessed are those who have been beheaded for the sake of the name of Christ.
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And for the Christian, we actually overcome even in death. Revelation 12, 11, it says, they, the
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Christians, they overcame him, the devil, by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony.
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And they loved not their lives unto the death. That's the kind of people the book of Revelation was written for and to.
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And so the Holy Spirit and his wisdom has written something that will encourage everyone in every age of the church.
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And therefore, you've got people like Luther looking out on the world and saying, perhaps this is this, perhaps that is that.
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And they make some similar mistakes as to what I've read, but some of them go further and say, this is this, this is that.
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Jonathan Edwards, as much as I respect him, made a mistake regarding the timing of the
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Lord's return. Don't do that. The Bible actually says, no man knows the day of the hour.
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Why don't we take that at face value? I remember hearing,
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I didn't see the program, the great theologian Jan Crouch of TBN fame, when asked, you know, she says, well, we're going to ask questions about when do you think the timing of the
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Lord's return is? And someone said, well, we don't know. No man knows the hour or the day. Her response was, well, it didn't say no woman.
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I hope she was joking. I didn't hear the tape, but the whole point there is no one.
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It's the same as John 6, 44, when it says, no man can come to me. Jesus said, it's speaking of women too.
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It's a universal predicament. No one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him and I'll raise him up on the last day.
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All right. So we're talking about sound biblical principles, and I would encourage you not to speculate, but to build your teaching on what you can prove from the scripture.
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And there is much we can prove. There is much we can prove. And let's major on those things.
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The rest, we can say all else is speculation. That might not sell as many books as the latest
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John Hagee, the latest Peter Lalonde, the latest Jack Van Impey book or DVD.
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It's happening right now. Russia with the oil and this and well, let's wait 50 years and see if this is that which was spoken by the prophet.
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Time is a good indicator of what is true, but people will in the meantime sell millions of DVDs and MP3s and books.
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And when it doesn't happen, they're not saying, sorry, folks, here's your money back. They've made their money and they're onto the next thing and they're onto the next installment of Bible prophecy.
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Certain things happening with the moon. This is that this is that really let's wait a while. Let's you say this is going to happen this year.
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All right. Let's just watch. Are you in unbelief?
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No, I just believe that we should build our doctrine, what we can prove from scripture. We're walking through a number of different rules regarding interpretation, and we're up to number 16.
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If you've been following along, 16 would be this. Build doctrine on didactic, clear statements of scripture rather than possible inferences from narratives.
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Now, those are big words. Let me hopefully explain them. Narratives, I think we all know that a narrative is a story and there are story sections of our
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Bibles that certainly tell us much. We can glean great amounts of information about God because God has revealed his word to us, oftentimes in story form.
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All scripture is given by inspiration of God. God breathed and is profitable for doctrine reproof, for correction and training in righteousness.
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Second Timothy 3 16. But what I'm saying here is we can read into story sections, things that were never intended by the author.
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And we correct any misunderstandings or things we're reading into the story by what is actually declared explicitly in what we call didactic portions of scripture.
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The word didactic just simply means teaching. So when God in a teaching segment says,
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God is not a man that he should lie or the son of man that he should repent. We can deduce from that the fact that God doesn't ever change his mind.
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And we need to know that when we look at passages that seem to be saying he did change his mind.
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That's vitally, vitally important we understand that. Does God ever change his mind?
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Again, let's view our view of God. Let's build our view of God on the teaching portions of scripture rather than the story sections or poetic portions.
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That's why, although the Bible says we can hide under the shadow of the almighty, under his wing we can take refuge.
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When the Christian goes face to face with God in heaven, when we see the master, when we see something of God, I don't expect to see a winged bird.
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I don't expect to see a hen. Even though Jesus said, I would have gathered you like a hen.
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He's not a hen. He does not have wings. It's obvious picture language.
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God uses images to convey something to us. Is God a rock? Well, in one sense, yes, he's immovable.
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He's something and someone you can build your life on, just as you can build on a rock rather than sand.
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It's trustworthy because of the fact that it's immovable. That's what a rock is.
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And God is rock like, but he's not a literal rock. It's picture language.
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The theological term for that is anthropomorphic language. It's taken from two Greek words, anthropos, meaning man, and the word morphe, which means shape or form.
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God speaks to us in man form or human language. Why? There's no other way he can talk to us.
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If we're going to communicate with ants, we've got to learn ant language. And if we're going to communicate with bears, we've got to learn bear language.
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But for God to speak to us, he has to use language that we can understand.
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If God spoke to us in terms of his infinite greatness and says, as he's answering our question,
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Lord, why did this happen? And he says, there's so much information that you and I would spend a billion years trying to recapture or capture anything that God has revealed.
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He is infinite in his knowledge. You cannot get infinity into a finite vessel.
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You can't take the sea, which is close to infinite, but not quite, but you can't put the sea in a pint -sized glass.
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And we are finite. And so God has to come and use human terms, language that we understand so that he can communicate, even though everything he reveals is true.
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It's not true according to everything that he knows about that subject.
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If he did, if he told us everything, we wouldn't be able to handle it. Our brains couldn't receive that kind of amazing amount of information.
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So, anthropomorphic language, that's what's going on in the scripture when it says we can shelter under the shadow of his wings.
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That's picture language to show that just as a young bird will find refuge in the safety of the wings of the mother bird, so we will find refuge in him.
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God has at his disposal words that we can understand, and he graciously stoops to articulate his truth to us in human words, in understandable human language.
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Birds speak a bird language to converse with each other, and human beings use a human form of communication.
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And that's the way God has communicated with us. He uses terms and images that are easy for us to grasp, even though if he explained them in the way he understood them, the concepts would be so far vastly above our ability to comprehend, they'd be actually meaningless to us.
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All scripture is equally inspired by God, but each passage has to be interpreted correctly, and that means that even when we literally believe the
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Bible, we should interpret parables as literal parables. Poetry is poetry, the narratives as narratives, historical genealogies as, wait for it, wait for it, historical genealogies, rather than look for a secret, hidden meaning.
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On and on we can go. Paul exhorted Timothy in 2 Timothy 2 verse 7,
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I want his understanding, I want to understand what he's revealed, and the means by which
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I receive that help from God and that understanding from God is the process of thinking.
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All of us should be prepared to hold up our preconceived ideas before scripture and say, do they stand scrutiny?
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We all have our blind spots. We all have our traditions. The problem is we're not always aware of them.
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If we were, they wouldn't be blind spots. Therefore, the serious Bible student asks questions of himself and the text constantly in order to determine what the sacred text actually says, and then he builds his thinking on that.
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How do we know that God is not a winged bird? Well, in the teaching portions of scripture where, for instance,
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Jesus is speaking of who God is, he says in John chapter 4 verse 24,
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God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
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God reveals himself to be a spirit rather than localized in one place with a physical body.
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He's omnipresent. That's clear from the teaching portions of scripture.
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But just as a little bird can find refuge under the wings of its mother, so we can find refuge in him.
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We all have a problem. Theologians would call the problem the noetic effects of sin.
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Nothing to do with Noah here. It's n -o -e -t -i -c. It means all of us are not as clear thinking since the fall of Adam.
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The fall of Adam affected not merely Adam, but everyone who came after Adam. His whole being was corrupted by the fall.
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We're not able to think as clearly as we would had there been no fall, and we call this the noetic effects of the fall.
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None of us think perfectly since the fall of Adam, but God is not confused even if we are.
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That's why we have to learn things like words, word order, syntax, be diligent to study grammar, all of these things.
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Otherwise, we tend to, by default, read into the text, which is called eisegesis, rather than drawing out of the text what it actually says.
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In Malachi 3 .6, it says that God does not change. That's a teaching portion of the scripture.
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It says in Numbers 23, he does not change his mind. God is not a man that he should lie, the son of man that he should repent or change his mind.
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He has said, will he not do it? He has spoken, will he not fulfill it? There it is.
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So, let's go for the sake of argument to the idea that God does change his mind.
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You know what the implications of that would be? It would mean if God literally changed his mind, that would be a full front attack on God's omniscience.
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In other words, you or I or some situation has brought new information to God that he didn't know before, and on the basis of this new information, he now makes a new executive decision.
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But if we understand God knows the end from the beginning, he's the Alpha and the Omega, he's never learned anything, all of that falls to the ground.
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If you have an orthodox view of God that says he's omniscient, he knows everything.
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Before a word is formed on your lips, he knows it. Then he's not surprised by any event in time, and he's certainly not learning anything.
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Oh, now, I've prayed and given him new information. Imagine the prayer meeting, oh
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God, we pray for Sister Joan, you know that she's so faithful. She's here 30 minutes before church setting up, and she puts the flowers out each week, and God says, oh really, that Joan?
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Wow, well, I better heal her then. I had no idea it was that Joan, oh my goodness.
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Got to act now, thanks for the information. Silly, isn't it? God knows everything.
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We pray for Joan, we pray for her because of God's mercy, not because of the faithfulness of Joan, but at the same time,
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God's not getting new information when we pray. He is omniscient. His omniscience is one of the very attributes of God.
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If he ever learned anything, that means there was something he did not know. No, he has total, complete, infinite knowledge of all things from all eternity, past and future.
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He knows it all. In fact, that's why he mocks the false gods who don't know what the future holds.
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Isaiah 46 is a key, key statement. My counsel shall stand,
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I'll accomplish all my purpose. I've spoken, I'll bring it to pass.
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History is his story. We gather that from the teaching of scripture. We could talk much more about that, but let's move on.
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16 then was build teaching, build your thinking on teaching portions of scripture, that's didactic portions rather than the narratives that could lead you astray, because simply, although they're inspired by God, they need to be interpreted by the teaching portions because it's very easy to read something into a story rather than allow what the original author intended.
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Number 17, think for yourself, but not by yourself.
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This is going to take humility, but it's a good thing. Think for yourself, but not by yourself.
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You see, we are not at all wise when we isolate ourselves.
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Proverbs warns against that, the man who isolates himself. It's not wise.
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God has gifted others with tremendous insights, not only in our day, but throughout the history of the church.
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In Ephesians chapter four, the ascended Christ gave gifts to the church, and these gifts were people, people with giftings that allow the people of God to be built up so they can fulfill their ministry in the body.
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It says in verse eight, therefore it says, Ephesians four, verse eight, when he ascended on high, he led host a host of captives and he gave gifts to men.
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And then it goes on to talk about the ascended Christ. Verse 11 says, he gave, these were the gifts, he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the
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Son of God. So the passage goes on. These gifts are pastors, teachers, evangelists, apostles, prophets, and these are not just people in our own day.
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God has gifted people throughout the history of the church, and I'm learning to enjoy many, many people who are dead theologians, dead preachers, people like the
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Luthers and the Calvins and the Edwards and the Spurgeons and the Augustines. They have written much, and these are gifted teachers that God has given us to tell us more about the
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Christ and more about the way of salvation. And we impoverish ourselves if we don't stand on their shoulders, at least learn what they've learned.
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None of them individually or all of them collectively are infallible. They make mistakes.
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Sometimes they make big ones, but they're not likely to make the same mistakes as our own age.
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We are influenced by the 21st century air and breath all around us in ways we are not always conscious of.
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Somebody in a century from now might look back on some of the things we say and think, that was pretty foolish, but we're not aware of it.
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But we're not likely to make the same mistakes as perhaps those in the fifth century or the 17th century or the 16th.
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So when we look through, say Spurgeon on the Psalms, I'm gleaning marvelous things that make things in our
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Christian bookstore look so shallow by comparison. I don't know if you found that to be the case yourself.
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Use the help of these gifts. God has given gifts to the church for our edification, for our building up.
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Use the gifts. Here's some helpful quotes regarding this. This is from Dr.
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Michael Horton in What Still Keeps Us Apart. He says, The best way to guard a true interpretation of Scripture, the
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Reformers insisted, was neither to naively embrace the infallibility of tradition or the infallibility of the individual, but to recognize the communal interpretation of Scripture.
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The best way to ensure faithfulness to the text is to read it together, not only with the churches of our own time and place, but with the wider communion of saints down through the age.
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Good wisdom. C. H. Spurgeon, in commenting and commentaries, he wrote this,
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It seems odd that certain men who talk so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves should think so little of what he has revealed to others.
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Says it all. J. I. Packer, in Upholding the Unity of Scripture Today, wrote this,
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Tradition is the fruit of the Spirit's teaching activity from the ages as God's people have sought understanding of Scripture.
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It is not infallible, but neither is it negligible, and we impoverish ourselves if we disregard it.
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Couldn't agree more. R. C. Sproul, he wrote this, Although tradition does not rule our interpretation, it does guide it.
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If upon reading a particular passage, you've come up with an interpretation that has escaped the notice of every other
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Christian for 2 ,000 years, or has been championed by universally recognized heretics, chances are pretty good that you'd better abandon your interpretation.
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Absolutely. One other point. Number 18.
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I thought there would be 17, but hey, you're getting your money's worth for one extra.
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Here we go. Number 18. Avoid hyper -allegorical interpretations.
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It's kind of linked to what we talked about regarding end time teaching, but hyper -allegorical.
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These are when the passage is read, and the assumption is it can't mean what it just said.
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There's got to be a hidden secret meaning. Avoid that at all costs.
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When Scripture tells us something is an allegory, a picture of something else, then the
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Holy Spirit has legitimized that allegorical interpretation. I'm thinking of a passage in Galatians 4 that you could perhaps look up after the program today that speaks of that.
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It says something was this, but it has reference to that. It was a picture of this, but that's rare in Scripture.
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There was a man called Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis, known to us as Augustine or Augustine, depending on how you would pronounce that word,
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Saint Augustine, who lived from 354 AD to 430 AD.
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He taught a hyper -allegorical method of interpretation, which was very highly speculative.
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We have learned so much from Augustine. The problem for Augustine was there wasn't an
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Augustine alongside him. He was a towering figure theologically. There's no doubt that since the
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Apostle Paul and the first thousand years of the Church, the greatest theologian of that time was
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Augustine. I don't believe there were many who would have questioned that statement, but he had his blind spots.
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He said things that, looking back, I'm sure he wishes he could take back, but he was highly speculative regarding interpreting because everyone at that time, and he was simply a child of his day in that sense, everyone was interpreting the
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Scripture looking for what the hidden meaning was. It says, they went to the
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Jordan. What does that mean? It can't just mean they went to the Jordan and he took four stones.
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What does that mean? What are the four stones? What are the four stones? They're looking around to try and interpret in very allegorical ways things that are just simply statements of fact.
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I picked up something that is fairly commonly well, commonly known to most.
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It's Augustine's commentary on the Good Samaritan. It's taken from Luke chapter 10, verses 29 through 37.
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We don't need to read the passage. I'm sure we all know the story of the Good Samaritan, but this is how
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Augustine interpreted that passage. It couldn't just mean a man went down and did certain things.
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No, we got to look for hidden meaning. Now, just hear this. A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.
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Adam himself is meant. Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace from whose blessedness
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Adam fell. Jericho means the moon and signifies our mortality because it is born, waxes, wanes and dies.
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Thieves are the devil and his angels who stripped him, namely of his immortality, and beat him by persuading him to sin and left him half dead.
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Because insofar as man can understand and know God, he lives.
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But insofar as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead. He is therefore called half dead.
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The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by signified the priesthood and ministry of the
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Old Testament, which could profit nothing for salvation.
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Samaritan means guardian and therefore the Lord himself is signified by this name.
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The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope.
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Wine, the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which he designed to come to us.
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The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn, the inn is the church where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage.
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The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love or the promise of this life and of that which is to come.
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The innkeeper, who's the innkeeper? The innkeeper is the apostle Paul. The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the gospel was new, though it was lawful for him to live by the gospel.
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That's taken from Questionaris Evangeliorum 2, slightly abridged as cited in C .H.
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Dodd's The Parables of the Kingdom. Now, the problem with this, I'm sure you can see, is who's to say that that interpretation is true?
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What happens if someone else thinks the innkeeper is the apostle James or the innkeeper is something else?
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It's just highly speculative. God, although he used
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Augustine greatly and his writings were instrumental in what became the Protestant Reformation, Luther, being trained as an
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Augustinian monk, leaned heavily on Augustine, as did Calvin. When Luther first gained his understanding of the gospel, it was from reading an obscure essay that Augustine had written where he spoke on the righteousness of God received through faith,
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Romans 1 .17. Augustine was instrumental, but Augustine missed it here, and I believe he set the church back probably a thousand years regarding interpreting the
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Bible. He was so influential that many picked up the same cause of this allegorical method of interpretation.
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Don't do that. Don't build your life looking for hidden meanings. Look to the text of Scripture.
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Now, we've talked about several things. We've talked about 18 points that I've made regarding rules of the kingdom, regarding interpretation.
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What I'd like to do for the rest of our time, which is going to jump into it and pick it up again next time, is look at particular text.
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Look at what the Scripture says and see what it says and allow these rules to govern our thinking.
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We could go to a very, very familiar passage, the most familiar verse in the entire
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Bible. I like to do that. Let's go to John 3, verse 16. Dr.
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James White has done this oftentimes, but oftentimes there's new listeners and people tuning in who've not been aware of that.
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May I once again recommend Dr. James White's book, The Potter's Freedom. John 3, verse 16, and let's look at what it says.
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We know, don't we, that this is teaching Arminian theology. Really? Why? Because it says,
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God so loved the world. Well, in the last program, we talked about the fact that John uses the word world many different ways, and it's context that tells us how that word is being used.
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And that's true also when we come to the first epistle of John, 1 John 2 .2. Again, the word world is used.
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How does John use the word? We need to be aware of that. In the book
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I wrote called Whatabouts, I did a chapter on John 3, verse 16.
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Let me just turn to it and read some of it in the closing moments of our program today.
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The question usually posed here is something like this. By the way, I made a mistake. Not a mistake. I made a statement that said, this teaches
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Arminianism, doesn't it? I don't believe there are any Arminian verses in the
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Bible. I used to think, well, there's this verse that's very, very Reformed, and these sticky, pesky verses we've got to deal with.
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You know, when you rightly understand the Scripture, the Bible has a consistent message. And I'm Reformed, not because that's my preference, but because coming out of the deception
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I was in, which was the Word of Faith movement, it's exegesis and thinking through that brought me out.
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It was a nine -month process of just being alone, getting up and preaching, but then going back to my study and looking at the text.
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And I would just encourage you, the more you and I study the Scripture, I believe logically, theologically, biblically, we'll come out more and more and more
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Reformed in our thinking, simply because I believe that's the teaching of the Bible. That's just an aside.
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So how can you reconcile belief in divine election with John 3 .16? Most assume it's not possible.
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Actually, if we carefully take a look at the text, not just assume its meaning, John 3 .16 is a wonderful Scripture that in no way undermines the truth of divine election.
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God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
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When hearing the biblical teaching on the subject of divine election, some seek immediate refuge in a traditional, and may
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I say unbiblical, understanding of this verse. I remember preaching. I didn't have wisdom at the time when
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I was coming out of my old way of thinking. On one Sunday, I got up and preached on Ephesians 2, and the title of the sermon was,
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What is it about dead do you not understand? I didn't turn on a dime theologically.
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It took many months of intense study before I realized what
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Scripture was saying. I was way too fast at that time making the case.
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Rather than just slowly going through the text and allowing the Holy Spirit time to work on human hearts,
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I was backing people into a corner very quickly. That wasn't wise in hindsight. Hindsight is always 20 -20, isn't it?
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So, I say that because I was preaching that and one gentleman actually just got up from his chair and shouted
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John 3 .16 as he left the building. I realized he was probably not enjoying the teaching that particular
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Sunday. So, many do that. John 3 .16 negates everything you're saying about divine election.
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They say this, God can't elect certain ones to salvation because John 3 .16
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says that God so loved the world, he gave his son so that whoever or whosoever believes in Christ would have eternal life.
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Therefore, God has done his part in offering the gift of salvation in his son and just leaves it up to us to receive the gifts through faith.
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Amen. Case closed. End of discussion. Though this is a very common tradition and one
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I held to myself for many a year, it needs to be pointed out that in spite of the emphasis made by many people on the word whoever, the text does not actually discuss who does or does not have the ability to believe.
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Look at the text. It just simply says whoever believes will have this result rather than that result.
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It does not tell us who can believe or who will believe. That is not discussed in this text.
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Someone might just as well be quoting John 3 .16 to suggest that all churches need to have red carpets in their sanctuaries.
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Why? Because that also is not a topic addressed in the text. The verse is often quoted but actually has no relevance to that subject.
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For the understanding of a text in the New Testament, we need to check out the original language and let me just move on.
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It may come as a big surprise to learn that in the original Greek, there is no word corresponding to our
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English word whoever. The word whoever is expressing a phrase in Greek which is difficult to express smoothly in English.
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Literally, the text reads, in order that every the one believing in him not to perish but have everlasting life.
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So it says every or all the ones believing. That's hard to express in English.
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I would say the word whoever is probably the best word we could use if we're only going to use one word.
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But a more accurate translation would be all those who believe or all the believing ones.
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In essence, it's saying all the believing ones. That's what's being communicated. It is saying that there is no such thing as a believing one who does not receive eternal life but who perishes.
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Though our English translation says whoever believes, the literal rending is accurately translated as every believing one and the emphasis is not at all on the whosoever but on the belief.
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The ones believing will not have one consequence but will have another.
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They will not perish but will have eternal life. Why? Because of the main verb,
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God gave his son. God gave his son for the purpose, Greek word hinar, that every believing one should not perish but every believing one should have everlasting life.
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And John 3 16 speaks of a limitation, of a particular rather than a universal redemption.
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For clearly not everyone will be saved, only those who believe in Christ are saved. The father loved the world in this way.
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He gave his son for the purpose of saving those who believe. The son is given so that the believing ones will not perish but by contrast have eternal life.
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That is the purpose of the giving. So, what the text actually teaches is this.
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All who do a, believe in him, will not b, perish, but will have c, everlasting life.
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What does this text tell us about who will believe, who can believe? Absolutely nothing.
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The text does not address the issue of who will believe or who can believe.
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I believe John 3 16. I believe every verse in the Bible and I'm reformed in my thinking.
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How about that? I believe John 3 16 is a wonderful verse if we take time to understand it.
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We're out of time here on the broadcast today. It's been a joy to come to you. God willing we'll be back on Thursday.
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Pray for Dr. White and his ministry out in Germany. God bless you as you walk in the light of his word.