Road Trip Dividing Line from Ohio

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Greetings, welcome to the Dividing Line. It is, it's a beautiful evening here somewhere outside of Columbus, Ohio, I think.

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I know I'm in Ohio because, well, when

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I drove across the border, a couple things happened. First of all,

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I remembered back to the late 1960s, early 1970s, which many of you in the audience can't remember that.

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And I remember that Ohio was our bad luck state.

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Each summer we would drive from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to Kinsley, Kansas to be with, to visit my grandmother.

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And my dad would help her with all sorts of stuff, you know, work on her little house that she had and stuff like that.

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And if we were going to have a problem, because we were dirt poor, and if we were going to have a problem, it was going to be in Ohio, a car problem, and that's where it always was.

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So we considered Ohio our bad luck state. So I was thinking about that as I crossed the border. The other thing that I noticed,

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I'm almost tempted to call the Ohio Road Department, Highway Department, I don't know what they call it, here in Ohio, just to say thank you.

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Just to say thank you. Because I'm sorry, but I was stunned to discover the

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I -70, which back in the days when I was driving as a kid was a pretty nice road, isn't much of a nice road anymore.

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And especially in Indiana and Illinois, it's almost as bad as the

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I -40 in New Mexico, which is a cow path, okay? I mean, wow.

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New Mexico is, wow, third world country as far as roads are concerned. And Illinois was pretty much the same as far as I -70.

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I mean, just potholes, and you feel it a whole lot more when you're 44 feet long, okay?

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And getting onto the bridges and off the bridges, just throwing you all over the place and beating you up like anything.

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Soon as I crossed the border into Ohio, smooth roads all the way.

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Really impressive. I was very impressed. And then I got here to this campground. I've not been to this campground.

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I'm starting to visit some campgrounds multiple times, getting to know the people and, you know, how to get in and out, and that's sort of nice to know.

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So I pull into this one. It's a very treed, you know, there's lots of big trees, not little trees.

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You know, sometimes you can tell when they've been planting them. These have been here a while. These are big, big, big trees. And it's beautiful and it's cool.

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It's 69 degrees right now, which is really, really nice, but not raining or anything like that.

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And I walk into the registration place, the KOA. They have these little stores and some are really, really little and some are rather expensive, extensive.

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All depends. Well, it was like driving in. It's like I found where time froze in 1969, maybe 1968.

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Everything that they were selling was tie -dyed, as you can see from the I bought.

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Tie -dyed t -shirts and sweatshirts and they even had some really nice like ladies pajama bottom type things, really loose fitting and really super soft, you know, and stuff like that.

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And they were tie -dyed. And I even said to the lady, I said, you know,

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I should, I was thinking about maybe getting, you know, this for my wife.

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And then I said, that would be really stupid. And I mentioned that to my wife and she said, yeah, good call.

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Wouldn't touch that with a 10 -foot pole. So anyway, it's a nice little spot we're at here.

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I have a huge day on the road tomorrow, over eight hours driving. That's, I don't know how I did that. Sometimes I get on the road and then

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I figure out where I'm stopping. It's like, how did I do that? I don't know. It'll be a big one.

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Really tiring. But that'll be the last stop because from there, I'm just driving the truck.

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In fact, very thankful that we've arranged with one of our supporters, one of our friends to work with them to get me in and out of the area where the

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G3 conference is because the hotel we're staying at, it does have a small parking facility.

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And the clearance for the parking facility, six feet, two inches. Six feet, two inches.

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In other words, if you drive a Mini Cooper, and then you can walk bent over, you can park there.

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But if you've got a man's truck like I do, yeah, no, that ain't happening.

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So one last little comment before we get into the good stuff for the program today. I laid down, took a brief nap this afternoon once I got here.

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And I get up and someone has pulled into the spot next to me. And I'm not sure if you should feel embarrassed.

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Like the ladies, you know, when two ladies show up and they're both wearing the same dress.

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But I look over, I'm looking over at them right now at the slot next to me here. And it's a black pickup truck.

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I've got a black pickup truck. It's not the same make, but black pickup truck and the identical unit that I have.

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I mean, down to the model number. It's the exact same unit parked right next to me.

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So we're twinsies. But we don't know each other. I may have to at some point, jump up and run over and close the window on that side.

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Because they just had visitors show up. And I have a feeling they're going to be like doing a cookout and stuff like that, you know, within five feet of the window.

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So we may take a commercial break or just go, okay, hold on a second.

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And I closed the window so that we don't have that interruption. But anyway, all right.

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Before we talk about a lot of stuff that's going on in the world today, I was thinking about when

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I was in St. Charles, a friend of mine asked me a question about the phrase, the son of man.

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He had asked me this a few weeks ago. And he had said, this is understood son of man. And he then mentioned that that's a reference to the humanity of Christ versus the son of God, which is in reference to the deity of Christ.

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And I'm like, that's a lot more complicated than that, actually. And somebody else sent him to some longer expositions on the subject.

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But it reminded me of the fact that you can have really smart people that can believe some really dumb things.

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Bart Ehrman is a smart guy. Everybody knows he's a smart guy. But Bart Ehrman is one of those people that says that we, he believes that the son of man in Jesus' teaching is a eschatological figure and that it's not

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Jesus. And I remember the first time I encountered that idea, that this was a third -person reference.

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And Jesus does refer to the son of man in a third person. But the idea that he wasn't identifying himself as the son of man is so obvious in Mark chapter 14.

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You will see the son of man. And he quotes from Psalm 110 and Daniel 7, which is about the son of man, and applies it to himself.

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And a high priest tears his robe and says, heard the blasphemy with your own mouth.

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So it's obvious. And if Jesus wasn't talking about the son of man, he would have been like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you missed it, guys.

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I'm not talking about myself. He doesn't do that. So I couldn't help but I was just looking through the scriptures and I was thinking about what happened after the transfiguration.

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And what an incredible thing that is. Transfiguration. There's so much to discuss there.

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Wow. Here comes one of those. I mean, it's a full Greyhound bus size pulling a jeep right into not quite next to me, but close.

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I don't even know. Obviously, I don't have to worry about the fact that he's running diesel, not gas.

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So he doesn't have to pull into the places I have to pull into. But getting that thing around without running into things,

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I don't even know how you do that. Man, that's gotta be the loudest one

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I've ever heard too. Most of them are pretty nice and quiet. That one is ridiculous loud.

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So I hope he turns it off very soon because I'm having to yell to get over.

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I'm going to have to go out there and close the door one or two. Anyway, these are live programs.

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That's the way it goes. Rich, let me know if I'm still understandable. And if not,

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I'll just take a brief break and close the door so that we can continue on.

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It'd be nice if you could turn that thing off. Anyway, so I was looking at Mark chapter 9, the transfiguration and the story that is told there.

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We've done some discussion about that. You know, what does Moses and Elijah represent and things like that.

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It's fine. Okay, good. This is an amazing microphone. I mean, I can barely hear myself thinking that thing is so loud.

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And if you can still hear me over that really ultimately annoying massive thing, that's astonishing.

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I can't believe it. But anyway, in the transfiguration, who's

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Moses and Elijah, what they represent, and they both were translated and law and prophets and there's all the other stuff that you can look at in the transfiguration.

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But then in Mark 9, 9, and as they were coming down from the mountain, he gave them orders not to recount to anyone, thank you, what they had seen until the

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Son of Man rose from the dead. So this is part of what's called the messianic secret.

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The fact that, you know, Jesus understands that there are important things that the apostles are going to see and hear during the ministry that are going to take on really special meaning only in light of the crucifixion resurrection.

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And so he gave them orders not to recount to anyone what they had seen until the

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Son of Man rose from the dead. Isn't that pretty obvious who that's referring to?

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Yes. And they seized upon that statement, arguing with one another what rising from the dead meant.

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Not who the Son of Man was. They knew who he was talking about. What does it mean that he would rise from the dead?

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Because in their mind, the Messiah could not die. Not recognizing the differing roles the

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Messiah would take. And his first coming and his second coming. And they began asking him, saying, why is it the scribes say that Elijah must come first?

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And so you see, there was a very strong tradition amongst the

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Jews at this time regarding the nature of the Messiah, the ministry of the Messiah. And there was a lot of speculation, of understanding, of what the ordering of things would be.

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And they had the prophecy there in Malachi about Elijah. And so they're asking, well, why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?

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And that also might be one of the objections that they were hearing to the idea that Jesus was the

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Messiah. Was, well, Elijah hasn't come. Now notice what

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Jesus' response is. And he said to them, Elijah does first come and restore all things.

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Yet how is it written of the Son of Man that he will suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I say to you that Elijah has indeed come and they did to him whatever they wished, just as it is written of him.

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And so Jesus' response, interestingly enough, is focused upon the scriptures.

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Notice, and yet how is it written of the Son of Man that he will suffer many things and be treated with contempt?

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But I say Elijah has indeed come and they did to him whatever they wished, just as it is written of him.

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So a couple things. First, obviously, in Mark's accounting of Jesus' words,

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Jesus is identifying himself as the Son of Man. He is predicting the Son of Man's crucifixion, resurrection, rising from the dead.

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And he is well aware of what we would, in an essence, call the eschatology of the day and the ordering of things as the scribes and Pharisees or whoever else understood the coming of the

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Messiah, the roles of the Messiah, and things like that. But in the midst of that, and the importance of Jesus as the

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Son of Man, the vital importance at the end of the Gospel of Mark, and this is one of the things, whenever you hear anybody saying

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Mark has a low Christology, you're talking to somebody who has a low understanding of Mark.

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Anybody who says Mark has a low Christology has a very low understanding themselves of the

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Gospel of Mark. You may not want to say it to them in that way, but that's the reality.

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Because you get to Mark chapter 14, and just as in John, there's a crescendo.

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The crescendo in Mark is found in the trial. And Jesus' conflation of Psalm 110 with Daniel 7, that's his confession.

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That is, in Mark, what Thomas' confession is in John.

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You know, my Lord and my God. Here is Jesus taking two of the most pregnant, messianic, exaltation texts and applying them to himself.

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Which, you can imagine, scribes and Pharisees looking at this beaten man, and you take the most exalted texts about who he is.

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Craziness. But that's what you've got. So you have all of that. But then in the midst of all of that, you have this, and I honestly think we sort of skip over this.

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Maybe it's because we are really accustomed to reading all of it. If you grew up in the church, you've heard this over and over again.

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But there is so much in the Gospels that reflects for us and teaches us what

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Jesus' view of the Scriptures was.

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And therefore, for any follower of Christ, it should be rather simple for us to go, if he rose from the dead, his view of Scripture needs to be my view of Scripture.

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Scriptures cannot be broken. They are God speaking, etc. etc. It just needs to be sort of reflexive on our part to do that.

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But how is it written of the Son of Man? Just as it is written of him.

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The prophetic witness to Jesus as Messiah, to his nature as the

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Son of Man, to his work as being crucified and rising again, and the accompanying prophetic aspects.

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It's in Mark, it's in Luke, it's in John, it's in Matthew, it's everywhere. You cannot even begin to.

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It really strikes me that, and I didn't pop these up, but Brandon Roberts, the homosexual quote -unquote minister.

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We've talked about him a number of times before. His launching into apostasy over the past couple of years.

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If you go back in the archives of this program, you'll see six or seven years ago, I did a review of some of the things that he was saying at that time.

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This is not some prophetic thing, but from the start, because at first he tried to be orthodox.

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He pretended orthodoxy, he confessed orthodoxy. I don't know what it was about it, but from the start

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I said, give this guy five years and he's going to be so far out in outer space it's not even funny.

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And it's been six or seven years and he's so far out in space it's not even funny. There's no question about it.

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But he this week said something along the lines of racism is sin, Jesus was a racist, but he repented.

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He says these wild, wild, wild, wild things. You know that on every single cardinal doctrine that he has collapsed, and he has to.

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Because if scripture is what it says it is, if it is consistent with itself, then he knows it condemns his lifestyle, his orientation.

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He knows that. And so you have to fundamentally, in the most basic ways, deny the consistency of scripture.

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And if you don't have a consistent scripture, what theology do you have? He also said this week that penal substitutionary atonement was one of the greatest, how do you put it, perversions of the

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Christian faith or something along those lines. And so he's gone off to Trinity College in Dublin to get a

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PhD in apostasy. I think I should just give it to him right now. But he's gone there to learn more about how to pervert scripture.

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I'm really honored to have visited Trinity and to have debated Trinity, but sadly they'll do that.

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So there's some things that we shouldn't really bother being overly excited about Trinity College and things like that.

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It doesn't mean there aren't good people there, but there's a lot of bad stuff.

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Anyway, so I just want to mention that as you're reading the New Testament, reading the

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Gospels especially, pay such close attention. We're going to be doing a debate here pretty soon between myself and Dr.

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Peter Van Cleek Jr. I've mentioned the fact that he and his father have written three books that they've put out over just the past two years.

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Well, really a year and a half, but less than two years. They're coming from a

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Reformed perspective. Part of the argumentation is to try to use

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Reformed epistemology as a foundation for a king.

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Van Cleek just directly says he's an advocate that the King James Version should be the standard

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English version of all English -speaking people. And of course the TR is a subset of the arguments for that, but that is his perspective.

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So he is really King James only in that sense. But coming at it from an interesting perspective, and so much of what was said in the first book,

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I've read their books now. I mean this debate was only set up like two weeks ago, right before I left.

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Maybe less than two weeks, I don't think. So I had never heard of them before, sorry.

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But now I've taken the time to read the three volume series and the book

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I mentioned last time about poking the bear, which

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Van Cleek Jr. put together, which is an attack upon the practice of textual criticism.

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It is based on a level of hyper skepticism that's just astonishing. It is exactly what

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I predicted TR -onlyism must eventually do. TR -onlyism must attack the study of the manuscripts, all of that.

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Because from their perspective, the TR really doesn't come from that. Even though historically, you don't have a

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TR without Erasmus doing textual critical study.

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The TR is a reconstructed text. And for them, a reconstructed text is an apostate text.

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It's not truly the Word of God. So on one level, they literally have to say that the

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TR has existed from the beginning. And yet historically, it's utterly unquestionable that the great

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Christological controversies were decided without the TR.

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The TR did not exist. It did not exist as a body of literature in the early church.

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That is a fact. That is an absolute fact. There are readings in the

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TR that are now defended as being providentially preserved by Jeff Riddle and by Van Cleek that did not exist in the first millennium of the church anywhere.

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They have no evidence of their existence anywhere. And the idea that that text was in use by Athanasius or by Basil or Hilary or whoever is so easily refuted.

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Anybody, any seminary student, any Bible college student can demonstrate this isn't the case.

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It's easy. Even using something with as limited a range of textual variants as the

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United Bible Society's fifth edition, fourth edition, whatever you've got. I was, man, when

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I was in third edition, corrected, I think is what we had when I was in Bible college.

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But the citations in the UBS are limited, but they're fuller.

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They only give you the variants that are going to impact a Bible translation.

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It's primarily designed for people who are doing Bible translation in other languages, but they give you a lot more information about each variant and especially about the early fathers.

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And so all you've got to do is take Athanasius, take Basil, take

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Hilary, and just go to some of the unique readings in the

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TR or minority readings in the TR or even majority readings in the

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TR. And they will be noted and find how many times that Hilary, Athanasius gives a different reading.

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They're reading a different text than the Texas Receptors. Easy to do.

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It's really, really easy to do. So what I'm going to need to do for about 30 seconds is my dear neighbors have fired up a cooker right outside my window.

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My windows are open. So before my smoke alarm goes off in my unit here, we are going to take a, just go grab a soda.

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I don't know why you turned it off. I mean, who cares? Yes. Another big, huge, now this one isn't quite as big as the other one.

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Just pull them next to me, but it's quiet. It's nice and quiet. I think I need some engine work. That's just all there is to it.

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But yeah, you can see they're pulling their vehicle behind them. I'm really not sure how that works.

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I get it. You know, I just do it opposite. My vehicle pulls this. That's two engines to maintain and everything else.

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But yeah, I've said it. I'll repeat it one more time. As I look around here, even right now, you know,

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I can see two units right here. Much smaller than mine. Much, much smaller than mine. Tiny. You couldn't stand up in them.

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And then you've got these beasties. So I'm in the 35 to 40 percentile.

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So if you've got small, medium, and large, I'm in the lower end of the medium size.

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That's, I've been to enough parks now. I'm getting, when

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I get back on, Lord willing, I finish this trip off without destroying this thing. I'll have pulled over 20 ,000 miles since we got it.

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And so I've got a fair amount of experience now in these places, in looking around. And yeah,

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I'd say we're between 35 and 40 percentile somewhere.

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Maybe a little bit lower than that. Anyway, that's, that's where we are. So yeah, this is the time when everybody's pulling in.

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And this would be the time if you were, if you wanted to do a mobile home,

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RV park evangelism, you set up a table out there with a telescope and some tracks.

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And the telescope would not do anything in this park. It is heavily wooded.

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You can't see anything, unfortunately. But in many places you could, you could do that.

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It'd be a lot of fun. Okay, what were we talking about? I'm sorry. I just saw the smoke heading my direction. I didn't want the fire alarm going off.

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Hey, Roadtrip DL, man. Roadtrip DL. We just have to be thankful that they've got decent

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Wi -Fi. Well, actually it's, we're on cell, but they've got good cellular coverage here.

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And so here we are. So we get to keep doing this type of stuff. Anyhow, all right, where were we?

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We were talking about the upcoming debate with Dr. Van Cleek and the fact that I have predicted for a long time that the, really the only consistent way for the

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TR Only guys to do what they do is to simply establish their text and to attack the practice of textual criticism, even though their own text has its own history.

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And it is a recovered text. It is a reconstructed text.

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And Erasmus engaged in textual criticism. And so it's, it's an incoherent system.

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But like I said, this book really demonstrates that, you know, from their perspective, everything that has happened since 1644 or so has been irrelevant.

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It's just been irrelevant. All the papyri, all the major finds have no meaning whatsoever as far as the actual text in the

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New Testament is concerned. But what I was, what got me onto all that was that, you know,

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Dr. Van Cleek says all sorts of I completely agree with. Where we disagree is not that the scriptures have been providentially preserved.

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In fact, I even heard, I was listening, I got a ride in this afternoon, inside, my bike is five and a half feet that way.

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I listened to an interview that Dr. Riddle did with Dr. Van Cleek and Dr. Riddle talked about people who opposed the providential preservation of the text.

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It's not a matter of opposing the providential preservation of the text. It's opposing an ahistorical, incoherent, circular definition of what has been preserved over against a historically demonstratable way of understanding what has been preserved.

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So I'm looking forward to the debate. It will be interesting. Dr. Van Cleek did his

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PhD at Liberty, but he also went to Westminster, and so it'll be an interesting evening.

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It'll be very useful. What's also interesting is that Dr. Van Cleek claims to be an apologist.

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I've not seen any of his apologetic work, but it is right there that, to me, there's where the issue is.

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You can't take his position into the debate format with unbelievers because it requires you to embrace certain presuppositions, and we're not talking presuppositions as in you were created by God.

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If you're dealing with people who have another authoritative text, I just don't see how that tier -only position can survive.

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But anyways, we will see, and I'm thankful to Chris Arnson for putting this together, and I'll be perfectly honest.

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I don't even know which day next week it is, but I'll figure out when

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I get there. Right now, I need to get to G3 and do the

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G3 thing, and once that's done, then I can start thinking about that, and then once the debate's done, then

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I've got the zoom zoom drive back to Conway, Arkansas, and we've got the church history class.

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I'm really looking forward to that. I mean, the students are great, and the fellowship is great, and so I'm going to be pretty blasted by the time

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I get home, but it will have been a great experience. It's really, really great.

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Okay, let me get to my things here. Did you see the video?

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Matt Walsh was on with that guy, one of the popular guys,

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I've forgotten his name. MacArthur's been on with him, and lots of people have been on with him,

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Ben Shapiro, and Shapiro asked about the differences between Catholics and Protestants in regards to salvation, and I was once again reminded that there are such things as common grace.

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There is such a thing as natural law, but that doesn't mean that it exists separately from God's revelation of what its meaning is, but it exists because we live in God's world and we're made in God's image.

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Therefore, there is natural law. God has written his truth upon our consciences in the way that we have been made, and so someone like Matt Walsh, who is a

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Roman Catholic, can make natural law arguments, and when you're dealing with something as wildly absurd as transgenderism and the denial that we can even know what a woman is, doesn't take all that much effort to demonstrate the absurdity of these things, but that doesn't mean that you have a regenerate mind, and that doesn't mean you understand spiritual things, and a lot of people get confused about that.

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They see a Roman Catholic saying true things, and you don't recognize the difference between saying that there are

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Mormons who say true things, there are Jehovah's Witnesses, there are Muslims who say true things, because we live in God's world.

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People confuse that with having an accurate understanding of the fact that the fundamental reality that steals true peace from Roman Catholics is that they don't have a finished work of Christ, and therefore, they conflate justification and sanctification, so they can never have true peace, and never have true peace, if they're trusting in the

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Roman Catholic gospel. Like I said, I open pray that there is a large number of Roman Catholics that aren't trusting in the

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Roman Catholic gospel, but if you saw that Matt Walsh thing, it caught my attention along those lines.

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Also, since I was in Illinois, I was reminded of what's going to happen

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January 1st. I'm not sure that I'm going to want to drive through Illinois after January 1st of 2023, because if you are up to date, you know that the left in Illinois, the

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Communist Socialist Party, sometimes called the Democrats, has passed a law that basically does away with money, bonds, and bail.

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The list of things where you will now be arrested, charged, told to appear for trial, and then simply let go without any bond, includes second -degree murder.

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Almost every form of robbery, theft, property damage, and assault.

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Basically, if you don't kill somebody, you're going to be arrested and let go.

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Right now, we're seeing exactly the crime rates in Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, are through the roof.

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The reason for that is criminals now know nothing's going to happen. Nothing's good.

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Between George Soros utterly corrupting our legal system by using his money to put traitors in the positions as attorney generals and the people in charge of enforcing the law and bringing charges.

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He's used his money to buy traitors to put into these positions.

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It's self -evident that if you are a law -abiding citizen, you're not a criminal. You're not a danger to the people around you.

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If someone breaks into your home and you defend yourself, you're the one that will end up in prison, not the criminal.

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The guy breaking in may already have murdered three people and has been let go. The man that killed the jogger a couple of weeks ago, the mom, the teacher, who had been given a 20 -year prison sentence for rape and kidnapping before.

41:56

Same type of situation, except they're not even going to bother with the prison sentence part. These people will just simply be let loose on the population.

42:06

This is what you do when you want to destroy a nation. That's what they're doing.

42:12

They're destroying the nation. They are completely overthrowing law. I'll just be honest with you.

42:18

We're going to have to do some discussion about this pretty soon. It's interesting to me that many, many people who only a few years ago...

42:32

Now, there's still all sorts of votes. You even mentioned theonomy. They lose their minds. They will never be corrected.

42:39

They cannot be corrected. They know what theonomy is. If you don't believe that, then they think they can define it.

42:47

I can't deal with those folks. Believe what you want to believe, whatever. But there are just a lot of my fellow believers who are starting to realize, if we leave law to civil cultures to just come up with, if we actually don't believe that God has spoken with clarity as to what is true, what is honest, what's just, we're left in a real mess, especially when the world becomes secular.

43:25

These people are literally going to make laws that are going to say that we have to celebrate transgenderism or that we have to support same -sex mirage and denigrate what is good and true and honest and just in our own families and with our children, our grandchildren.

43:56

Man, that's a real mess when you leave it up to man to define law.

44:04

Yeah. A lot of Christians are going, man, I wish we had something we could give in its place.

44:14

It's like, well, we do. And I've said before, the first time

44:23

I ever heard about theonomy, I was in seminary and basically

44:31

Westminster Seminary was saying bad, bad, bad. And so, okay, bad, bad, bad. And if they said, well, theonomists believe that you're justified by keeping the law and theonomists believe that little children should be beaten to death at the city gate and all this kind of stuff.

44:52

Then it was sort of like, well, okay, it must be. But of course, that's not what it was about to begin with.

44:59

And now that we are living, see, back then you could get away with the myth of neutrality. The state, at least here in the

45:07

United States, wasn't coming after us yet. Now we realize, you know what? The state needs to be under the, we need to be able to say to the state, you're going to be judged.

45:21

And that means we need to have a standard by which to say that. And that's causing a lot of people real issues and problems because that sounds like that theonomy thing.

45:37

And it is. That's really all we're talking about when we talk about theonomy is that God's law was never meant to save.

45:48

It was never meant to justify. It can never do any of those things, but it does.

45:56

The promise of the new covenant is I'll write my law upon their hearts. What law was that? What law could that even refer to?

46:06

And what we're talking about is the fact that God has revealed what true justice is.

46:12

And man, we need to be able to tell people what true justice is. But the vast majority of evangelicals can't even comment.

46:21

Because, well, we can only talk about that spiritually. We can only do that in reference to the church or the

46:30

Noahic covenant. And there's nothing about that in the Noahic covenant. So we can't really comment on transgenderism or anything like that because we just don't have anything to say.

46:43

Okay. So in the midst of all this, we have this push to codify

46:54

Obergefell. So pass a law codifying what's in Obergefell so Obergefell can't be overturned.

47:03

Clarence Thomas might not have wanted to say the things he said. He was right. And he was speaking the truth.

47:09

But the left went insane because of it. And what was it?

47:15

47 Republicans voted for this thing in the House. And it could pass in the Senate too.

47:21

There may be enough Republicans because it's very obvious. I mean, just look at what's the guy's name.

47:30

Again, this isn't part of what I wrote down to talk about. But the fellow up in Moscow at New St.

47:39

Andrews did a review of Peterson's interview of this guy on the right.

47:47

Well, supposed to be on the right. The gay guy who got their designer babies, whatever the guy's name was.

47:56

You can tell how big I am on looking at that kind of stuff. And so, by the way, and I think

48:06

I mentioned this on Twitter. I was a little slow to get to this. But you want to listen to that. You want to listen to that review of the

48:14

Peterson interview with that guy on, quote unquote, gay parenting. It was devastatingly good.

48:20

It was clear. It was insightful. It cut to the heart of things. And so,

48:26

I'm slow in saying, yeah, take the time to listen to it. But it did a wonderful, wonderful job. I highly recommend it to you.

48:33

Track it down. But, you know, I'm not a

48:38

Republican. I'm certainly not a Democrat because I'm not a communist or a socialist or any of those other things.

48:46

The Republicans are not conservative enough for me. Haven't been since the 90s.

48:53

I left the Republican Party because, you know, when I was like 18, I just missed voting for Reagan the first time.

49:04

But I left the Republican Party because they were already giving money to pro -choice candidates.

49:13

And I wasn't going to support that. And I couldn't do that. And so,

49:19

I'm one of the dreaded independents. And when

49:25

I look at what's going on today, you know,

49:30

I look for the people who have recognized the importance of worldview.

49:38

And that there is a massive divide between the anti -human destructive secularism that of course is the religion of the left, but is likewise the default position of most people on the quote -unquote right.

49:57

And so, if you've got 47 Republicans that can vote for the profaning of marriage, they don't have a meaningful worldview.

50:05

They have the same worldview as the left. It's just in slow motion. It just doesn't want to go as fast.

50:13

And they're not going to conserve anything. They're not going to be willing to fight for anything.

50:20

And so, that's just the reality of what's going on.

50:25

You look at any Republican senator in the United States Senate right now that would vote to codify

50:34

Obergefell. These people are not our friends.

50:42

And you're not going to be able to look to them to save us from anything. So, it would be, yeah, fascinating if you could actually get these people to speak directly.

50:59

I just happened to glance down, this is sitting on my screen, and I don't think, I haven't refreshed my

51:05

Twitter screen. So, Capturing Christianity, and you'll notice he just loves throwing out all these little tweets about, you know,

51:16

I'm looking at the Marian dogmas. Oh, come on, guy, get serious. Get serious.

51:22

And here's one from an hour ago, and so probably about two hours ago. Christianity would be a lot easier to refute if it entailed fundamentalism.

51:34

I don't even know what that means. If you mean fundamentalism as in some type of closed -minded,

51:41

King James only, I'm going to preach 10 sermons in a row on why wearing dress pants, pantsuits, will send women to hell.

51:51

I've heard those sermons when I was a kid. So, I know it's out there. Fine, but there's a historic meaning of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism was about fundamental doctrines.

52:05

And outside of some of the eschatological stuff, they did include in the fundamentals. It's like, you know, virgin birth, resurrection, creation, the

52:15

Bible is the word of God, stuff like that. So, you know, there are a few people that can do the one -sentence really pithy stuff, but most people just faceplant when they do that instead.

52:30

So, there you go. Just a couple more things here that I was noticing today.

52:38

I wonder, I don't know if you saw the tweet. I retweeted a graphic of it because, of course,

52:46

I'm blocked by Matthew Barrett at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

52:54

But there were a number of pictures, one including, you know, the

53:02

Aquinas' Summa Theologica, and then there were pictures of Roman Catholic authors on the thought of Thomas and stuff like that.

53:12

And I just kept remembering some of my Reformed Baptist friends only a few months ago saying, yes, that has nothing to do with Thomas.

53:19

They're overblowing that. And now just follow Credo Magazine and Matthew Barrett, and it's all about Thomas.

53:30

It is all about Thomas. And I just wonder, you know, Midwestern, isn't that, you know,

53:36

Spurgeon College? You know, isn't there a bunch of stuff? In fact, I looked at their Twitter feed, they've got this saying where you can get together and people read

53:45

Spurgeon sermons, and that's great. You don't see somewhat of a contradiction in emphasis between Spurgeon and Aquinas?

54:01

I just wonder how many people who have donated to Midwestern and donated to the, you know,

54:07

Spurgeon stuff and things like that, I wonder how many of them are aware of the fact that Matthew Barrett has taken that program and the emphasis now is not exegesis, it's philosophical theology.

54:22

It's, let's give people scholarships for writing papers like Thomas Aquinas would have written.

54:30

I wonder how many are aware of that. Is that really an appropriate direction for a

54:40

Southern Baptist seminary, I wonder? I'm not a Southern Baptist, so I can't say, but I know a lot of Southern Baptists that listen to the program and it doesn't seem like it's, there's a real contradiction there.

54:56

There is a fundamental contradiction there. So there you go.

55:05

One last thing, I guess. Looks like I have just enough time to do this. We'll have covered everything and touched on everything.

55:14

Stephen Knowles tweeted, you can't actively deny the

55:21

Nicene Creed and be said to worship the true God. Okay, I agree that's true, but my concern is that we understand why it is true.

55:38

I believe it's true, but we need to know why it is true.

55:46

Because if you simply make the statement and you don't explain the foundation, then it's really just an argument of authority.

55:56

Just believe this. But why is it true? And this is central and key to everything we're facing today.

56:11

Central and key. The Nicene Creedal Statement, not the

56:22

Cans and Decrees of the Nicene Council. And that's, some of us make that appropriate distinction and many people don't even know it's a distinction that needs to be made.

56:36

It is ironic to me that many of the people who are so up in arms these days couldn't tell you what the

56:47

Sixth Canon of the Council of Nicaea was, their life, or why it's relevant. But anyway, why is the

56:59

Nicene symbol or Nicene theology, the fact the Son is fully

57:06

God? Not derivatively, not only representationally, but as to His being, eternally

57:18

God. Why is that true? It is not true because Nicaea said it was true before Nicaea.

57:32

We can point to Ignatius in 107 -108 AD giving us just as high a

57:42

Christology as Nicaea. Letter to the Ephesians, he gave you a

57:48

Christology of Christ that is equal to Calcium. He did. Look it up yourself. Hypostatic union, two natures, everything right there, long before Nicaea came along.

58:01

So Nicaea did not make something true. The truth of the

58:09

Nicene Creed has always been found in its fidelity to the

58:17

Scriptures as the Word of God. That is the only reason it's true. That's not why it's true for a

58:25

Roman Catholic. It just seems that a lot of my friends watched the debates that I did with Jerry Matitix and Patrick Madrid and Robert St.

58:39

Genes and Mitch Pacwa and all these people over the years. They watched and they, oh, yay, but didn't seem to really enter into what was being said because that's what

58:55

I was saying all along. What Rome was saying, what they were saying, is the

59:02

Nicene Creed is true because the Church says it's true. It has an authority because it is an ecumenical council.

59:11

Once you subject Scripture and no longer have solo scriptural, reject

59:17

Scripture's self -authentication and subjugate it to external authority for verification, that is the

59:28

Church, then those councils become expressions of the unwritten tradition of the and hence with the magisterium, you produce dogma.

59:46

In all the debates, even when we weren't debating solo scriptural, that was still the foundational issue. If we're debating the mass, they would say, hey, what we teach about this has that same authority.

59:58

Now, of course, it comes from councils way down the line and we will go, well, we don't accept those, but we need to be consistent, don't we?

01:00:06

Because if we say, oh, we accept the intrinsic authority of Nicaea, but we don't accept the intrinsic authority of the fourth ladder in council, on what basis?

01:00:23

Because if there is an intrinsic dogmatic authority in councils after Scripture, where do you draw the line?

01:00:32

And who gave you the authority to do it? I just don't think a lot of my brothers have thought all that through.

01:00:43

And they're doing the knee -jerk reaction thing. And so when I hear people saying, oh, I heard James White doesn't believe the council of Nicaea is authoritative.

01:00:50

That's just a bunch of baloney. I can't believe how easily people are deceived and believe lies.

01:00:58

What Nicaea said was true because what Colossians 2 .9 says is true. And so for people to say, well, you're rejecting the authority of the council of Nicaea, because I say

01:01:10

Nicaea's authority is secondary to Scripture and is dependent upon its consistency with Scripture, then you've never really thought through where your ultimate source of authority lies.

01:01:22

You've just never thought it through. Some of us have had to do this for years and we're just sort of like, well, let's keep doing it, even though we're getting canceled by our own people for doing what we've been doing all along.

01:01:32

And they just didn't understand what was happening before. So there you go. There you go. All right.

01:01:40

Well, I actually, believe it or not, I think I, yep, yep. I had actually put a little list, talk about this, this, this, this, and I got through all of it.

01:01:50

That'll also make it easier to write up the blog article, as long as I don't close the file without saving it, which

01:01:56

I've done more than once. So this weekend, hopefully be seeing a lot of you at, boy,

01:02:05

I just noticed this picture. It's really dark outside now. Yeah. That is one nice thing about being out in the boonies and sun goes down, you're amongst a bunch of trees, it gets really nice and dark.

01:02:18

So it's just this one light, the light behind my camera. So it's sort of like a spotlight type thing now.

01:02:26

Anyway, we'll be at G3 this weekend, looking forward to meeting everybody that's going to be there to be talking about the scriptures and all sorts of stuff like that.

01:02:33

Lots of Q and A and look forward to meeting with people and talking with folks and stuff like that.

01:02:39

And then Chris Arnson's pastor's luncheon the week after and the debate, more discussion on scripture.

01:02:48

And then looking forward to all the students at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, early church history, getting to talk about all this stuff.

01:02:56

We will never get it all done. If I get anywhere, if I even make it through Augustine, I'll be stunned.

01:03:04

I should go. I have to go, Pat. I have to go. We've got to get through Chalcedon, gotta get through Augustine. I'm not sure.

01:03:09

But there's so much even after that. Yeah. Anyways, that's the problem with intensive classes and I don't live in Conway.

01:03:16

So that's sort of how it goes. But I'm really looking forward to all of that.

01:03:22

Thanks for listening to the program. As always, I hope it causes you to think things through and maybe gives you an hour to where you're not having your

01:03:34

IQ sucked down lower by Twitter. Raise the level of consideration a little bit.

01:03:43

So please pray for me as I travel tomorrow. Oh, there. I just saw

01:03:48

Dave Rubin. Yes. Sorry about that. That was 14 minutes ago. But I don't know. I looked.

01:03:54

I looked on my phone and didn't see it, but I still don't see it. How weird is that? Okay. Anyways, yes, it was

01:04:01

Dave Rubin and his partner and their designer babies. And the review from the professor,

01:04:09

I believe he's a professor at New St. Andrews. Some of the best stuff you'll listen to. Need to track it down.

01:04:15

Need to listen to it. Trust me, if you enjoy this program, you'll love it. Love it. Anyways, thanks for watching the program.

01:04:21

This evening, pray for my travel tomorrow. Eight hours in the truck can be tiring and you still need to be awake at the end when

01:04:30

I get where I'm going. And so appreciate your prayers for that. We'll see you next time on The Dividing Line.