Reconciliation in Scripture Examined, Then Open Phones

Testing. Well, I got nothing up there. We are having a bad day, folks. Well, I'm not having a bad day, but someone who will remain nameless is having a very bad day. We ain't got no introduction. We ain't got no music.

And somebody in the other room just looks really confused, and everything's not working right, and there is buzzing, and he about broke his finger in the door just trying to close the door. I mean, it's not like we haven't closed this door many, many times before, but it's just one of those days for the poor nameless man that everyone feels like I pick on.

And now he's gone. He's hit the deck. He's hit the floor in the other room. This is going to be rough, I can tell you right now. It's going to be either a very short one or a very long one, or maybe a short one that's going to feel very long, or I don't know, something along those lines.

But we just sort of started, and there you go. Welcome. I'm going to predict now that it's probably not going to get recorded right, or the internet's going to collapse, or something. I don't know, before we get done here.

So I'm not sure I want to put a whole lot of effort into something that's probably never going to make it outside the walls of this particular building. But welcome to The Dividing Line. We are professionals.

We've been doing this for many years, and that's why it works so well all the time. Are we bleeding? A little bit? Wow! How did you manage to do that? There's a thing called a knob, and they're fairly smooth and soft, you know?

And so you could have just used the knob. That's how I've always done it, is I've just used it.

See, I'm going to pay you back just by opening this line and let you hear the buzz. So the buzz is back.

I'll turn the buzz up for you here. Great. Wonderful. Well, please try not to bleed on the equipment. It's already bad enough as it is in there without us having it short circuit with that. So what were we going to be talking about today?

Now I'm worried about playing anything, because who knows whether that's going to work or not. So we'll give that one a second. And what's even worse is I was actually going to take phone calls, so I'm not sure if that's even going to be a possibility.

We'll see what happens somewhere down the line. I'm going to open it up here and look at it, but we'll get to it eventually. Maybe once the bleeding stops, then we can take phone calls. We'll go that way.

Well, anyway, let's try to get serious here for a moment. There are a number of aspects to biblical study that are frequently lost because of the fact that we look at the Bible in its modern form. And again, having a divide into chapters and verses is wonderful.

It makes it so much easier for us to find things and all get to the same place at the same time. And it must have been pretty amazing for the first 1 ,500 years of the Church where you didn't have that.

But still, it leads to a mindset, especially amongst those of us in the West, that sort of atomizes the text. It breaks it up into its little constituent parts. And a lot of us are no longer trained in our schooling to read literature, to analyze themes, to follow themes across many different pericopes, things like that.

And so, as a result, we tend to miss some of the most important tools that are provided to us in understanding the Scriptures and apologetically in seeing through the shallow assumptions that are often used by some of the leading critics.

We played a quote, a couple comments on the last program, listening to Sam Harris and Bart Ehrman talking back and forth. And the assumptions, the false assumptions that both were making became very clear at that particular point in time.

And as we've been thinking about the debate between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman, there have been a number of times we've had to go back and analyze the foundational assumptions that were being made, even in the criticism of the New Testament materials.

So, the next thing we need to get to in that, I'm not sure if I'm going to be getting to it for a while because I leave a week from tomorrow for that very lengthy trip. And so, it's probably going to be impossible to do any programs while I'm overseas.

I mean, I suppose it might be able to do it, but I really, really, really doubt it. So, I'm not sure we're going to get to it, but one of the things we've been sort of touching on in his criticisms, for example, of the birth narratives is assumptions about what would have to be included by both Matthew and Luke for either one of them to be considered to be truthful.

All those types of things come to us when we look at the Revelation as a whole and we see the presuppositions that are being made by critics, as well as look at the presuppositions that are being made by the writers themselves.

So, one of the things that's extremely helpful, really, really useful in doing your study of the Scriptures is to recognize when you have parallels. Now, sometimes those parallels can be troubling. For example, when studying the Gospels in parallel, you're going to have to deal with all of the differences between the Gospels, and that takes you back to recognizing assumptions.

Does Mark have to be just like Matthew? Obviously, a good friend of mine is not listening to the program right now. When we look at the parallels in Matthew and Mark and Luke, we have to deal with the presuppositions that are found there.

Those aren't the only ones, though. Those aren't the only places where there's parallels. Lesser known are the fact that you have the historical books, you have the parallels between 1 and 2 Chronicles and 1 and 2 Kings, you have parallel material in other places in the Old Testament, and especially the very name, Deuteronomy, the second giving of the Law, means that you're going to have parallel materials between Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Exodus and Deuteronomy.

And so, when you can have a parallel, then it's sort of like getting a second point of view, a second perspective on the same material. My first exposure to this was back when the Moorah missionaries came by my home—well, they didn't come by my home, they came by my sister-in-law's home—and presented the Acts 9 -7, Acts 22 -9 issue, where Paul is narrating his conversion—well, in one, Paul is narrating his conversion, in the other, his conversion is being narrated by someone else.

And the missionaries pointed to what they felt were inconsistencies between those renderings of the same thing. Well, you can either look at them negatively like that, because you're always having to deal with people that are saying, well, see, this is this, this is that, there's a problem here, there's an error there.

Or you can, you know, when you really dig into them, you end up seeing deeper aspects of what was being said. So, for example, in that particular example, you see what was actually being said to Paul at the time, Saul, in regards to hearing and not hearing the use of sa 'ul in one of the instances.

You get a deeper look at what was actually being said and being communicated than you would if you only had the one rendering, because you don't have that second perspective to look at things. What's all this about?

Well, one of the things we have to deal with very regularly—I was listening, like I said, to that Bart Ehrman-Sam Harris thing. And at one point, Ehrman says, well, no, Paul never said that, because that's in one of the books that's only attributed to him, but he didn't actually write it.

Bart Ehrman has an extremely limited Pauline corpus—only seven books instead of 13, depending on what you do with Hebrews as well—but he has an extremely limited Pauline corpus, and so most of us, when we are reading theologians and New Testament commentaries, if you haven't gone to Fuller Seminary, you'll sometimes be sitting there reading something and the person will say something, and you're like, but didn't Paul say such and such someplace else?

And you and I, as conservatives, trying to allow the Scriptures to speak to themselves as a whole, we're a minority. The majority of Western quote-unquote scholarship chops the Bible up and does not feel any necessity or any concern to read the New Testament in the context of the New Testament as divine revelation.

And so, that's a huge, huge dividing line—a massive dividing line. And so, if we're talking about Paul's theology, and you only have seven books to derive his theology from, and somebody else has 12, 13 books—and of course, he looks at the pastoral epistles, and his theory on that is this represents a later state of the Church.

Well, you know, I'm sorry, but how do you know that? You theorize about what the early Church was like and then get rid of New Testament evidence on the basis of your theories, whereas what we have should be the basis of our looking at the Church.

That's not how they do it. Anyway, with all that said, when we start looking at what Paul gives us in Ephesians and Colossians, for someone like Bart Ehrman, that's not Paul. This is the voice of a later generation.

When we look at Ephesians and Colossians, what we discover there is very similar to what you would have, for example, when you compare part of the Petrine Peter's epistles with Jude, you know, the crossover in 2 Peter and Jude, very similar to one another.

Colossians and Ephesians, very similar to one another, but interesting differences. You can see certain topics that he's going through and that he wants to communicate in both letters, but there's clearly a different emphasis between the two epistles as well, which is fascinating because it gives us another perspective.

It makes some of the discussion all that much deeper. They're not just carbon copies of one another, and the theory that I think fits the best is that Ephesians was a circular letter. It was a letter meant to be circulated around the Lycus River Valley, and it is interesting that there is a textual variant right at the beginning.

There are just a couple of early manuscripts that do not say, to the saints who are at Ephesus, there is no specific designation of where the epistle is being sent in some manuscripts. And that would allow us to look at Colossians 4 .16, where it talks about the letter coming from Laodicea, and that would be Ephesians, that it would be going around one side of the valley and it's going to eventually get to Colossae, and that would be our letter that we call Ephesians.

And so, what we call Ephesians starts in a well-grounded church, a church that Paul invested years in the training of the elders and the grounding in theology, and yet the epistle to the church at Colossae, that's a church he's never been to.

And so, what you get to see in the slight differences in emphasis between Ephesians and Colossians and what's contained in one and what's not contained in the other and vice versa, and then what is in parallel, sort of gives you an insight into what Paul wants all the churches in Lycus River Valley, Ephesians, including the ones really grounded in the word, to know.

And then with special focus in Colossae, which is to the east, and this is where most scholarship feels Gnosticism came from the east toward the west, and so there is more of an apologetic concern about some errors that evidently Paul has heard are creeping into the church at Colossae.

So, what for me is that's fascinating because, you know, transport that to a situation today. Well, this is a good example. I'll use my dear friend Jason Wallace up in Salt Lake City. If the OPC were to put out a circular letter of, you know, just a general exhortation to the churches in regards to standing firm in the faith in our difficult days, so on and so forth, it would be like, okay, we're going to have this general letter we're going to send out to everybody.

But if we're going to send it to the church in Salt Lake, there's specific challenges that someone's going to face in that valley. Salt Lake, it's everything. Oh, my goodness. Salt Lake is just the Disneyland of heresy.

It's a small world up there. It's just amazing, but it wouldn't surprise us if there was a special emphasis upon those elements of Christian truth that need to be emphasized in dealing with Mormonism or in dealing with those who have become disenchanted with Mormonism, especially over the past number of decades, and how to especially present the Christian truth to them.

That would be putting it in a modern sense. And, of course, if you wrote to churches in Brooklyn, you've got the Jehovah's Witnesses or, you know, anything else along those lines, you can see why there would be differences.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why the argument against Pauline authorship of the pastoral epistles, to me, is just so far off base. Because they'll say, well, look at all the different vocabulary that is used in 1st, 2nd Timothy and Titus that isn't used in the genuine Pauline epistles.

Well, if you get to determine what the genuine Pauline epistles are and by that determine what is Paul's vocabulary, well, you change just one of those books, and all of a sudden that vocabulary list completely changes, and it's completely arbitrary.

But what's more, it's very obvious that when you write an epistle, you write a letter to a specific individual. Even if that individual is in a particular church, the vocabulary you're going to be using is going to be different.

Fundamentally different. And so, it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, if we were to take Bart Ehrman's letters that he writes to co-workers and compare the vocabulary with his popular books, or just compare the vocabulary of his scholarly books versus his popular books, we'd have to come up with the conclusion that there are many Bart Ehrmans and there are a bunch of forgeries running around, too.

But when that's turned on the ancient context, no one seems to say anything and no one seems to care. So, it is interesting that when we look at this material, for example, I was looking at the word renewed that is found three places in Paul's writings.

I'm sorry, reconciled. I'm sorry about that. I was looking at renewed first, then I moved to reconciled. And reconciled is used in Ephesians and Colossians, twice in Colossians, once in Ephesians. Renewed, interestingly enough, is used in Colossians, Ephesians, and Romans.

Now, again, as long as you're not really concerned about these things, you can always come up with a defense of your theory. So, if you point out, hey, here's rather specific Pauline theological language.

It's being used in Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians. Then the person who rejects Ephesians and Colossians will say, ah, that's where the person's trying to imitate Paul's language. So, when there is a parallel, it's the forger trying to imitate the language of the original.

But when he uses different vocabulary, that's evidence he's a forger. There's no way out. I mean, once you've got your theory, you've got your theory, and that's it. And look, folks, for seminary students, there is, sadly, even in good seminaries, a groupthink concept.

And you send a young man to the seminary, and he's going to be automatically impressed with those bright professors, and how much they know, and all the stuff they can quote off the top of their head.

And he's going to want to be like them. And the critical barriers often come down. And that's why many a church has sent a man off to seminary, and the guy comes back, they're like, where'd you get all that stuff from?

And it's because they want to be in the in-group, and they want to be like these men that they look up to. And it's good to look up to scholars, but the problem is, if those scholars are not deeply committed to the Christian faith or deeply committed to the local church, then that can cause all sorts of rather serious problems down the road.

But the point is, the vast majority of seminary students are just simply going to accept what they're told by their professors when it comes to issues like authorship, dating. The vast majority of folks in seminary today don't take time to be looking at that stuff.

And there is such a bias against anything that is conservative or believing or historical in seminaries today that you're not going to get published in the vast majority of instances if you're writing something that is actually supportive of traditional, historical Christian orthodoxy.

The game's rigged for you trying to find something that's new. And normally, when it comes to theology, new is called heresy. Sort of how it works. So, there's all sorts of reasons to believe that Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians.

I don't know of any meaningful, compelling reason not to believe that, but that's what you're going to run into out there, and especially, like I said, in that very, very dangerous place called the Christian bookstore.

That's what's going to be there. I forgot my water. And it's dry. These days, I tell you... I'm sorry? Well, I had already done that. That's fine. But I could just use some water. I appreciate it. Thank you.

And please don't dip your finger in it. Okay, appreciate that. Poor guy. Making fun of a poor man that injured himself while closing the door. It's just terrible of me. It is so dry out here right now that I've noticed even when teaching Sunday school.

I normally do not drink water while teaching, but right now it is just so dry that, yeah, I'm getting parched here pretty quick. That will change come the second week of July. And then, while I won't have to worry about drinking water, well, for that reason, we'll have to worry about drinking water, just because I'll be sweating so much, because it'll be so horribly humid.

Anyway, all of that meandering about, man, we have covered 47 ,000 different topics there all at one time. By the way, please be very careful in closing the door, because the door tends to close. Oh, that makes such a difference.

Ah, water is such a wonderful thing in the desert. You know what my little temperature gauge on the back porch said as I left it? 112. So, obviously, it's much warmer under there, because I've tarped it off some, and so it holds the heat in.

So it's much higher than it really is. But, so what do you do? You either hold the heat in, or you get the sun. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Yahoo, that's the way it is. Anyhow, yes, the summer has arrived in Phoenix.

It is that way. All of this meandering about, all to get us back to looking at this word, reconciliation. Reconciliation. We're hearing a lot about it today, and so a person might want to ask the question, what does the Bible say about reconciliation?

And it's interesting to me that the term is used in these two epistles that Paul writes for distribution amongst the churches there in the Lycus River Valley. And so we have it used in three places. We have it in Ephesians 2 .16, and then twice in Colossians 1 .20 and 1 .22, at least the specific term that we're looking at.

And so, in context, Ephesians 2 .13,. But now in Christ Jesus, you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall.

So we're talking here about the religious, cultural, and ethnic division that is central to the New Testament message in Paul specifically. Primarily because Paul was so concerned that it would be a permanently established division in the church.

He recognized this would be fatal. It would be fatal because it would inevitably lead to the idea that there is one way of salvation for one group, and one way of salvation for another group. And once you have that, then you're going to have to have different gospels for two different groups.

And if you have different gospels, then you have two different saviors, and it's the unity of the church, and the body of Christ is divided and destroyed. And so, if you've never really noticed just how focused the Apostle Paul is on refuting any possible idea of a Jewish Christian church versus a Gentile Christian church, you need to see it.

Every person in this audience has memorized Romans 3 .23. Probably memorized it when we were little kids, if you were raised in a church. But you need to realize when it says, for all have sinned, Paul's primary point there is not the universality of sin in the sense of every single individual, though that's true.

That had already been established in Romans 1, and then repeated in the application in 2, and then concluded in that catena of passages, Romans 3 .10 and following. The emphasis in Romans 3 .23 is on Jew and Gentile.

For all Jew and Gentile have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It doesn't matter whether you possess the law and the promises. Those are great advantages, but once you've sinned, you're under the wrath of God.

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That's Jews and Gentiles. So these are the two. So those who are formerly far off, or the Gentiles, have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

And so, for Paul, the healing of that division, the prevention of that division continuing, is part of the redemptive work of Christ himself. For he himself is our Irenae, our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall by abolishing in his flesh the enmity.

So, the enmity that existed, Paul says, which is the law of commandments contained in ordinances. So that, in himself, he might make the two into one new man, thus establishing, or making, Irenae, peace.

Now, you see the deep connection this has to Romans chapter 5. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. So here is this peace. The peace is with God in Romans 5.

Here, the peace is between the two divisions, those that have been divided from one another. And that dividing wall has been broken down, abolishing in his flesh the enmity, which is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that, in himself, he might make the two into one new man.

Now, the Jewish person could not conceive of a greater division than Jew-Gentile. There was no concept of ethnicity in the Jewish-Gentile division, because you could be a convert to Judaism, and it didn't matter what your color was.

The Ethiopian eunuch had come to Jerusalem to worship. He was attracted to this monotheistic religion. And so, you know, when Isaiah the prophet says, everyone who thirsts, there's nothing there about ethnicities, or colors, or skin colors, or anything else.

The vast majority of the people to whom these books were originally written were much darker than white Europeans are. So that thing, that element, not even there. The greatest division in the mind was between Jew and Gentile.

And Paul is saying, in himself, in Christ, he himself is our peace, no matter what your ethnic background. The two groups where the greatest division existed have been made into one. In himself, he makes the two into one new man, thus establishing peace.

So what is, biblically speaking, the ground of peace between men and God, and between men in the teaching of the New Testament, in inspired scripture? Now, Paul didn't know anything about the politics of 21st century United States.

He didn't know anything about what was going to happen in 19th century United States, or in 18th century United States, or anything like that at all. And anyone who makes the political or historical events of a nation that would not come into existence for a millennium and a half after this time, normative for the interpretation of these words, is not engaging in honest exegesis of the text and allowing the scriptures to be supreme in these matters.

Application cannot come before exegesis. Application comes afterwards. And so, the establishment of peace between the two greatest, most harshly divided groups happens through the blood of the cross. It is in Christ, and in Christ alone.

So, making the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. There's reconciliation. Ephesians 2 .16, abolishing in his flesh the enmity, that he might reconcile them both in one body.

This is why it is so important. Everybody says we're talking about gospel issues. Yeah, we are. Because, you see, there is only going to be one body that is reconciled to God through the cross. Not many bodies.

Only one body. And so, this is foundational, primary Christian teaching. This is where we have to start. And this has to be the lens through which we view everything else in history. And the less central this idea is in our thought, the less biblical and gospel-oriented our application is going to be at any point in history.

At any point in history. Whether it's the current situation, or the 6th century, or the 9th century. Hey, there were situations in all of those centuries that required a reflection upon how it is that we are to have peace with God and peace with one another.

And he quotes from Isaiah 57, he preached peace to those who are far away and peace to those who are near. In other words, Jews and Gentiles. He's saying, see, this is not something that only I've come up with.

This is a prophetic reality. This was prophesied. This is something that is important for the early church to establish. That the gospel was to go to the whole world. And that that Jewish-Gentile dividing wall was broken down in the person of Jesus Christ.

And verse 18, "...for through him we both have our access in one spirit to the Father.". Trinitarian passage. Notice that? Through him, Jesus, the Son, we both have our access in one spirit to the Father.

Trinitarian understanding can't understand the gospel or the Christian life outside of the Trinitarian reality of the New Testament. So, no one approaches the Father in any other way than this one way that has been provided.

The Jew doesn't have a different level of access. The Gentile doesn't have a different level of access. One spirit, one Father, one body. This is the radical teaching of the New Testament. And that concept of reconciliation is directly connected to the work of the cross.

So, there's the first use. It's making the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God by means of. Dia tu staru, by the cross. Reconciliation is a salvific result of the work of God.

It is the triune God's successful work based upon the self-giving of the Son. In the purpose of the Father, application of the Spirit. It's a Trinitarian thing. And it is an accomplished reality. And that is why any believer anywhere in the world, no matter what that person's ethnic orientation might be, has peace with every other believer because we have one access through him by the Spirit to the Father.

Anything else fundamentally destroys the foundation of Christian unity. Fundamentally. So, there's your first usage. And then the others are directly right next to each other in the book of Colossians.

Speaking of the centrality of Christ, I mean, the language between Colossians and Ephesians is almost identical at that point. Peace, blood of his cross, Now, what's a little bit different here, and this is why, again, I like the similar themes, different emphasis, allows you to see things from another perspective, parallels between Colossians and Ephesians.

What you've just had is the warning against seeing Christ as a lesser-than-truly-God intermediary, one of the eons, part of the Pleroma, the semi-Gnostic, early Gnostic concept that Paul's going to be warning about in the book of Colossians.

And the Son's being the creator of all things has led up to this. And then it's the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in him and through him. So, creation by means of him and now through him to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross, through him I say, where the things on earth are things in heaven.

So, you have this use the term reconciliation. Universalists will use this to try to press a universal reconciliation as in the salvation of every single created being that could be saved. I guess every personal being, angelic, human, depends on what universalist you're talking to.

But the problem is, at this point, when Paul speaks of reconciliation through the blood of his cross, he's going to make two applications. There is a sense of universal reconciliation here in that because of what Christ does on the cross, God the Father can justly deal with everything in creation.

He has provided in Christ the demonstration of his love, his mercy, his goodness, the fulfillment of the prophetic word, all these things. But at this point, up through verse 20, he's talking creation language.

Then this becomes the transition, verse 21, and although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, so now, what's he done? Now he's going to the human level. He's talking to those who were alienated and hostile in mind, that is, against God's truth.

He's talking to Gentiles primarily here. Engaged in evil deeds, yet he has now reconciled you in his fleshly body through death in order to present you before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.

So when we get to the human application, it's still God who does the reconciliation, but it's of a specific people that he is going to present as holy and blameless and beyond reproach. Very same terminology that, interestingly enough, he had used back in Ephesians 1, elect from the foundation of the earth that we might be holy and blameless before him, etc., etc., etc.

So you have the specificity of a specific people who are reconciled in the work of Jesus Christ, and they are the ones who are in the faith, if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard.

So this reconciliation is not some type of universality. It's a part of God's work, faith, repentance, the whole nine yards. But it's still the work of God. So, reconciliation. It's what God does. It's what God does in Christ by the power of the Spirit based upon the shed blood of the Son upon the cross of Calvary.

That's what reconciliation is, and it is an accomplished reality. It's an accomplished reality. So, we need to be very, very, very careful when we take a term that has such clear New Testament parameters as to its meaning and saddle it on some kind of sociological, societal, modern history movement especially when we add to it a descriptor that goes directly against the teaching of Scripture.

I refer to the phrase racial reconciliation. There's one race. There is one race in Scripture. There are many ethnicities. I mean, if you're even going to use the term, make it ethnic reconciliation. I mean, if you just have to use it, be accurate about it.

But when this terminology is used, what does it mean? It's not borrowing the meaning of reconciliation from Scripture. It's borrowing the meaning of reconciliation from sociology and then using the capital of Scripture to promote that idea rather than starting with the biblical norm.

The first thing that should cross our mind as believers is how is anyone reconciled in New Testament theology? And some might say, well, you know, we use that term in non-biblical, you know, we talk about the reconciliation of a husband or a wife or things like that.

That's true, but even in that context, what is the basis of reconciliation in a broken marriage or in a broken relationship? It first and foremost flows in the Christian context from a recognition of the grounds upon which we have been reconciled to God.

We don't have any grounds for holding something against someone else, for refusing to forgive someone else, because we ourselves have been forgiven. So it all comes back to having a proper biblical theological foundation and putting these things in the proper order.

You may continue to use biblical terminology and even make reference to biblical texts, but if you reverse the order of authority so that your sociological or historical or political utilization of terms becomes the lens through which you're defining the biblical terms, that's extremely dangerous and extremely troubling as well.

And so, here you have biblical teaching. This has to be true at any time, in any culture, no matter what has happened between any ethnicities, if the gospel is going to be a global message around the world.

You change that and you diminish or do away with the ability of the gospel to bring peace in every corner of the globe, all for the sake of one particular area, that's very short-sighted and very dangerous.

Very short-sighted and very dangerous. Well, didn't mean to go so long there, but I was wondering about, I'm afraid, I understand that. Real quickly, I want to play a clip. I was pointed to it yesterday.

It's from... I haven't taken the time to be looking really carefully, but Lydia McGrew has been making some commentary about Mike Laicona and then about other people as well, William Lane Craig specifically in this particular instance.

And so, William Lane Craig responded to some things that were said about the minimal facts argument. He says he doesn't use the minimal facts argument. Could have fooled us all because we've heard him default back to it so many times in his debates.

But he says, well, it's just because it's a debate. And so, in a debate, you only have so much time, so I'm doing it differently than I would in my books. My books are much more expanded. I don't really use this.

Seems to be an interesting distinction. But it was mentioned that his discussion of why he does apologetics the way he does apologetics might be useful, and having heard it, I agreed. And so, let's take a listen to a few moments here.

I suppose while we're doing this, we can go ahead and open the phones at 877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341. 877 -753 -3341 is the number. And if you want to get online while we're listening to this, that way you can have your place in line.

We'll only be doing a certain number of calls, so don't miss your opportunity. 877 -753 -3341. Let's listen to what William Lake Craig says here.

I think that Lydia fails to understand my evangelist's heart in presenting the evidence for the resurrection. I want to bring people to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ. And so, I want to make it as easy as possible for a person to become a Christian.

I don't want to make them have to jump through the hoop of believing, say, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, or that there were two cleansings of the temple, or that Jesus was born of a virgin.

Okay, I can almost see the audience going, what? So, jumping through hoops. Now, leaving the cleansing of the temple issue, because they get into a lot of the discussion of chronology and the debate about whether John's recording of the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of Jesus' ministry is the same as the cleansing of the temple in Passion Week.

And personally, I think there's a real rather simple answer to that, in the sense that when Jesus, at the beginning of His ministry, if He were to have done something like that, it would not be nearly as noted as the one with the huge following doing it at the end, who's, you know, people saying Hosanna and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

But leaving that one aside, let's talk about the other two of the three that were just mentioned. The other that were mentioned was Jesus' birth at Bethlehem, and the virgin birth. Am I not correct about that?

I'm going to double check that, just to make sure that I didn't miss that.

And so, I want to make it as easy as possible for a person to become a Christian.

Now, okay, just rolling it back, just to replay that, and I have to stop there. Anyone who wants to come after me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Repentance from sin. There is a theological issue here.

In Dr. Craig's mind, easy means fewest intellectual objections. Fewest intellectual objections. So, this is reflected in his synergism, his view of what is involved in salvation, and his synergistic views is what is identifying for him what easiness is.

So, from his perspective, if you're preaching repentance from sin and a full-orbed acceptance of Jesus' claims, then you're making it hard for someone. Because if it's not the work of the Spirit to grant saving faith, I guess that makes sense.

But you see how the theology is very important there.

I don't want to make them have to jump through the hoop of believing, say, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Or that there were two cleansings of the temple. Or that Jesus was born of a virgin.

So, Jesus' virgin birth at Bethlehem is a hoop to jump through. Now, he'll say later on, I believe these things. You can make good arguments for these things. But these are hoops that could be detrimental to someone's salvation.