Catching Up on a Bunch of Articles and Memes

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Well, greetings and welcome to the program today. This is The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday. It is supposed to be up to at least,

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I think, 114 today, maybe 113 in my backyard. I'm going to go ahead and start with this, and I'm, well,

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I'll forget this if I don't. Just noting, hopefully, that there are a number of people in the audience who are people of prayer.

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We have some folks to be praying for. Timothy Decker is a very bright, young, Reformed Baptist scholar,

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Greek professor, and he is waiting for a heart and,

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I guess, has been in ICU for quite some time.

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That can't be easy. That's got to be really rough. We need to be praying for him. And then Operation St.

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Cyprian on Twitter contacted me last night, and then he publicly posted the same thing.

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He's been hospitalized with numerous blood clots in his lungs, which is not a good thing. So we need to be praying for those folks.

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And then, you know, good old Squirrel, our friend Squirrel, out in the

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Piney Woods. You know, for years I've known this guy, and he's had these little rodent friends, and they don't live very long.

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And so, you know, it's always just a little while till, you know, a little booger dies, and it's sad.

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And then he started sort of adopting squirrels. And for a while it's been one named

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Splooter, and it looks like Splooter was hunted down by a predator near his home last week.

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And that's sad. And then Alan Nelson, I preached at his church this past, well, a number of months ago when

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I was back there, posted a picture of little

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Molly, a dog they had for 13 years, got run over by a car near his house yesterday,

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I guess. And it's just sad, you know, especially when a dog like that's been part of the family with kids growing up and stuff like that.

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So, you know, there's, you might say, ah, you know, would you seriously pray about something like that?

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Man, I'll tell you, what, I've lost some pets, and man, it can truly be devastating.

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I've lost some pets. I've had pets my entire life, so I've lost lots of them. It just seems the older you get, the harder it is, maybe.

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So just thinking about those folks and certainly praying for those that are hospitalized, very important, serious conditions there.

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So lots of stuff here. I need to go back to my bookmarks.

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I bookmarked this about nine days ago or so. The Associate Reform Presbyterian Church.

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Here is the statement that the 221st

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General Synod of the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church do on this solemn day condemn without distinction any theological or political teaching which posits a superiority of race or ethnic identity born of immutable human characteristics and does on this solemn evening call to repentance any who would promote or associate themselves with such teaching either by commission or omission, end quote.

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That was then followed up with a motion to make it the AARP, I'm sorry, no, the

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AARP position statement and put it on the website. This also passed without opposition. So the motion passed without opposition.

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It was placed on the website, and it's sad that this type of thing has to happen, but it's amazing how there was immediate pushback to this.

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Of course, one of our friends from Georgetown, Texas responded by saying, the

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Bible is silent on this issue because it is anachronistic to our modern time and any attempt to prove otherwise would be to stretch

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God's Word. You elevate your faux modern pietism to the level of commandment and bind the conscience of faithful ministers.

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Shameful. Well, there you go. Further evidence of where the lines are being drawn and drawn very, very carefully and clearly, and I'm just very thankful to the

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AARP for doing the proper thing. I doubt we'll find most of the

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CN guys taking on Corey Mahler anytime soon. There's a reason for that kind of stuff.

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There's a new book that has come out, I'll just mention this to you, by Simon Gathercolt called

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The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christ. It's sort of a specialized area, but it comes up a lot, especially if you have young people who go to college, they run into the

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Bart Ehrmans of the world, they're hit with the differences between the Synoptic Gospels and John, or they start running into Gospels they've never heard of before.

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I think it's one thing that's so necessary. We try to attract young people with pizza parties and movies, and as a result, our serious young people are very often left without any preparation for what they're going to be hitting when they go to college or university.

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And there must be a way of communicating to those young people a lot of the foundational truths regarding the nature of the

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Gospels and the historicity of the Gospels. Don't let somebody graduate from high school, and maybe even before then, but don't let somebody graduate from high school if they don't know what the

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Gospel of Thomas is. They don't know where it came from. They've never heard of Gnosticism.

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I mean, these are just basic things that you would think we'd be doing all the time, because constantly you hear, well, we're losing this generation, and we lose this percentage there, and that percentage there.

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There's a reason for all that. And when you hear this stuff in the context of faith, then that's one thing, but when you hear it in the context of unbelief, that's quite another.

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And so this looks like another book to add to the list of resources you might have.

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And I walked in today. Rich is still under the weather, so he's not here. He's running stuff remotely, and we're getting pretty good at that now, honestly.

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I mean, pretty soon we're going to have AI Rich. AI will be running everything.

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I won't actually be here. I'll be homeless. But he's not here today.

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So I came in, and I imagine that this came to the PO Box or something, I assume.

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But there are numerous times I have sort of ripped through books on the subject of Sola Scriptura that came out of the time period from the

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Reformation up until... Well, the last one I recommend, George Salmon's The Infallibility of the

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Church, is the late 1800s. And so I had them send those to us.

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They did a great job. Okay, I'm obviously missing some background to this that Rich seems to know.

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But anyway, this is a two -volume. You've got the

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Lutheran Martin Chemnitz does a huge response to the

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Council of Trent. There's a lot on Sola Scriptura therein. Okay, brand new publisher and publishing.

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Okay. So then you have Good's work that, again, extensive, full.

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And then you have William Whitaker. William Whitaker's A Disputation on Holy Scripture, which again, for many years,

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I only had in photocopy and still have in photocopy.

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But here's a new printing from Prolego Press. And yeah, it's got some nice commendations,

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Gavin Ortland, Peter Gurry. And so there's two volumes, about 430, so around 900 pages or so between the two of them.

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And Whitaker's probably the more accessible. I mean, it's rather full. But dealing with Greek, Hebrew, the

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Douay, the Vulgate, all sorts of stuff like this. And this one's nice because the font is actually large enough to read.

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It's not like those volumes of Jonathan Edwards over there. Are utterly unreadable.

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So William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture. If you're looking for resources, that's the kind of stuff that's going to give you hours and hours of reading enjoyment.

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And so that's, I assume it's on, in fact,

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I'm pretty certain now that looking at it that I've seen that graphic on Amazon while looking for something else.

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I don't remember. But you might want to grab that. So anyways, there's that.

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Now, somewhat related to the

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ARP thing. A couple days ago,

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Eli McGowan posted a letter, and it was ostensibly from a large church dealing with the subject of the not so anon defiant

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Baptist, a guy named Aaron. And it was ostensibly the church seeking to investigate the, obviously,

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Aaron is utterly unconcerned about New Testament teachings about the tongue and how

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Christians should behave and how they should deal with other Christians. And then again, he's not alone in that by a long shot these days.

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And so I had, all I did is I responded, I did respond to Eli's posting of it.

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And all I said was, well, that's surprisingly encouraging. I was looking for something positive that day.

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There was just so much negative stuff that was going on.

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It was like, well, maybe there's something encouraging there. That would be great. And then a few days later, and I haven't kept up with all of it, but evidently, and I could be wrong about some of this, but evidently it's all fake.

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And that if you take the first letters of the paragraphs, it's like fake and gay or something like that.

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And this has been picked up, of course, by the disgraced former pastor who destroys churches and does slander and innuendo and stuff like that.

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But he's been doing that for years. There's nothing overly new about that. But he thought it was just really great.

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And A .D. Robles, likewise, pulled something up on this, did about a 20 -minute thing here where, how did he put this?

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I've got the link here. I didn't bring it up. It's just depressing.

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But what was it that he said here? Yeah, the title of his less than 20 -minute video here is

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High -Quality Troll Deployed, Defiant Baptist vs. Eli McGowan, which he's probably purposely misspelled

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McGowan. These guys, that's just the way they are. And let me just play the beginning here.

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Oh, I can't. Hold on a second here. Well, I don't know,

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Rich, can you pull up the audio on this? Let me see if I can do that again because I've got the audio going to the thing.

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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the channel. Today is a video that I think is well worth watching because if you haven't paid attention to this saga, it's really no big deal.

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It's not that serious, but this is a thing of beauty. It's a thing of beauty.

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A thing of beauty. How is it beautiful to take a church's letterhead and write a fake letter and misrepresent the church?

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Because I'm sure the church is now having to spend time responding to people inquiring on both sides of this question. So it's a thing of beauty to create fake, slanderous, childish, infantile material that says fake and gay.

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I mean, I cannot imagine the immaturity of people that think spelling out fake and gay.

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It's the fourth graders in the playground going, look what I did to the teacher. That's what it is.

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These are not mature men. And that's the problem. Because if these people are in churches and the assumption is they are mature men, and then they're called upon to function as mature men, they won't be able to do it.

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And that's going to cause tremendous problems and issues. And so honestly,

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I sit back and I saw this. When someone posted and said, look, it says fake and gay,

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I'm like, okay, how do you have time to think of stuff like this?

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Why do you have time to think? I'm looking at what's going on in the world. I'm thinking about the future.

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I'm thinking about trying to arrange a debate. I'm thinking about teaching at the seminary in just a couple of weeks.

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Travel stuff going on there. All sorts of stuff pastorally, involving people's lives in that way.

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And I go to bed exhausted at night, and I go, who has the time or the energy to be playing these playground games on the internet and thinking it's cool?

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It's a thing of beauty. At time, you're just like, don't you all see the 20 years from now, if you mature, if you're even still in the faith, you're going to be looking back at this and going, oh

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Lord, why didn't I stop? Oh my goodness. You don't see that?

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You don't understand that? Sometimes you're just left without words.

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You are just left without words. So evidently what you have to do now, you're just looking for something positive.

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You're looking for something as an indication of a church taking seriously.

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Who knows? Maybe they will know. Maybe they didn't even, weren't even aware of all this stuff. I certainly hadn't contacted them.

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So evidently somebody did. I don't know, but maybe now there'll be some looking into it.

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Who knows? That would be an interesting backfire. But you're just looking for something positive, something like, yeah, there's somebody taking seriously slander, innuendo, lies, gossip, all that kind of stuff that evidently, once you fire up your browser, you fire up Twitter or whatever, all that biblical stuff about how you're supposed to behave, don't worry about it.

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Don't worry about it. We don't need to be concerned about maturity amongst adults in our church.

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They can be as childish as they want to be, and it's perfectly okay. Perfectly all right.

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That's not going to provide a foundation for any kind of lasting movement.

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I can guarantee you that. Because fourth graders may set up alliances to promote themselves, but we all know by the end of the next week, they'll be turning on each other.

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This is how kids are, and that's what these people are. They cannot possibly be actually doing anything meaningful for the kingdom.

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These are all the people who are talking about building Christ's kingdom, and I was like, what are you doing? Playing with memes online is going to somehow build the kingdom?

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Really? Okay, there you go. Anyway, someone directed me, shifting gears here, you know,

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I've just got a bunch of stuff here I'm trying to catch up on, to an article last, it's from June 10th, this is nine days ago too.

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I'm sorry, this was posted May 27th, so it's been a little bit longer than that.

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A fellow by the name of Bobby Grow, I don't know, the name I thought rang some bells.

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Basically, what it's saying on a James White -ian and Leighton Flowers -ian naked reading the

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Bible, and basically, he says, I was listening to James White live today on his Divine Line vlog cast, and what he reinforces over and over is that he is what some are calling a biblicist, or what

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I would identify as a solo scriptura or new descriptura proponent, despite the fact that I have, of course, refuted that assertion in the past.

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As far as the way that he approaches scripture, in this way, James White and his arch nemesis, Leighton Flowers, ironically affirm the same bibliology, and it's attending hermeneutics.

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It's not true. I'm not sure why this gentleman is confused, but he is.

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And so, he says, in this way, it is both modern post -enlightenment and Locke -ian, i .e.,

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tabula rasa in orientation, bologna. I've pointed this out over and over again, maybe he's a new listener or something like that,

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I don't know. Sometimes people write stuff and they just don't do their homework. That is, it sees scripture and its reception in a historical frame of reference.

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This frame leaves the history of interpretation, i .e., creeds, confessions, catechisms, etc., in the dust in regard to how

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White and Flowers receive scripture. This, ironically, lends itself to a modernist naturalist appropriation of an engagement with Holy Scripture.

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Insofar, the Bible, in such a frame, seems to be a white slate wherein the interpreter has some type of objective angle into its exegesis.

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Now, this does start touching on an area where I do, again, feel that there's serious issues, and we've dealt with them seriously, but there's no recognition on Bobby Gross' part that we have dealt with this seriously.

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Everyone does need to be thinking about the relationship of creeds and confessions to scripture.

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And as soon as you go, scripture must be read with the filter of creeds and confessions.

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You don't believe in any Scriptura, Sola, Solo, Nuda, anything, even

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Prima, because you have placed a humanly -derived, unless, again, here's the issue, the only way to avoid this is to say those creeds and confessions are themselves

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Theanustos. Otherwise, you are taking something that is of ultimate authority,

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Theanustos, scripture, God speaking, and you are subjugating it to something that is non -Theanustos, creeds, confessions, and as Luther was exactly right at the

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Diet of Worms, popes and councils have erred and contradicted themselves.

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That is a given. That's not even arguable.

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That is a fact and can be demonstrated over and over and over again, and the only way to avoid it is to embrace something like the

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Magisterium, the Roman Catholic Church, and say, hey, they're the only ones who get to interpret the creeds and confessions of the past, the councils and the statements, and so that way they can try to create something coherent.

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Problem is, that means you have what we had for years with Pope Francis. We don't know enough about Leo to factor him into these things,

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Leo XIV, but you have a pope who would have been burned as a heretic by the

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Council of Trent. There's no question about that. I cannot see how any honest person who knows anything about Bellarmine, the foundation of the

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Jesuits, the deadly apologetic struggle of the

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Counter -Reformation, the number of people who gave their blood over these things, this was not just some academic exercise.

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I don't know how anybody can avoid that reality and as a result go, yeah, once you establish that level of authority and say, this can only be understandable by reading through this, this has lost its objective reality.

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You can't obtain it anymore because it can change. It was objectively true for Roman Catholicism that the death penalty was given by God to the state to be exercised in extreme situations.

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That was a given reality, and that happens to be what the Bible teaches. It's not anymore. It's changed.

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That's what happens when you say, well, you've got this authority, and any set of creeds and confessions has to be interpreted, just like the

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Bible, but you don't have the promise that there is a consistent interpretation because of a sole source of revelation.

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That's what you have in Scripture. You don't have that with creeds and confessions. So even if you take seven ecumenical councils or maybe just the first four, maybe you want to do the, well, yeah, after Chalcedon, things get pretty loopy, so we will not worry about that.

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Even if you do the first four, you can only do that with the confessional statements that are made.

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You can't do that with the canons. You don't believe what those canons said.

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You don't submit to those canons. And even then, when you look at Chalcedon, you have to go, okay, this language here is meant to satisfy the originists over here and this over here.

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This all goes back to the conflicts and the fighting between Constantinople and Alexandria and the factions, and you've got all this stuff, and you're going, so that is the necessary lens through which to look at Scripture?

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So I suppose this fellow might identify the, well, the first chapter of the

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London Baptist Confession as solo or nuda scriptura. That would be foolish, but maybe he does.

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But that's what I'm saying. There is no, there is nothing else that is theanoustos that has been given to us by God other than what is

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Scripture. So you cannot subjugate that which is theanoustos to a different authority and say, well, without this, you can't interpret that.

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That doesn't mean that you, the tabula rasa thing, it's not, when we, when I debate a

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Unitarian, I am well aware of the fact that there are, there have been multiple ways of interpreting certain passages of Scripture in the past.

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That doesn't mean that they are all equal. That doesn't mean that there's a tabula rasa.

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I think there is importance in the reality of the confessions of faith that not just councils have produced or something like that, but I think that, well, to use a super, super early example, well, we could talk about Ignatius as we did before.

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We could talk about the key text in Ignatius and all the rest of that stuff on the deity of Christ.

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You can see this in, soteriologically speaking, in the

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Epistle of Diognetus, in the letter from Rome to Corinth called

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First Clement, but Clement's name is never used. It's more of a traditional thing. But you can see imputational righteousness and justification in both of those sources, things like that.

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Yes, that is relevant, and it is relevant that we can find that kind of primitive confession of these things that you can't find for the papacy,

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Marian dogmas, all the other stuff that comes from that angle.

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That is important, and it's important to know that this has been the form of interpretation that influences you.

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I mean, I have seen people argue online for the truth in a less than truthful way, and part of the reasons they did that, they were twisting the scriptures themselves.

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They were trying to make the scriptures say things that would not have been of the understanding of the original author and the original audience, and they had good motivations.

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They're trying to go to the right end. Was I looking at the wrong one? Anyway, they're trying to go to the right conclusion, but they're still twisting the scriptures in the process, and if they had a little bit more of a knowledge of how they got to where they are, that might help.

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So it is good to know those things, and it is good to be thankful for an

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Athanasius. I mean, I truly appreciate the man's faithfulness against the creeds and confessions of Ariminum and Seleucia, okay, because of his commitment to the ultimate authority of scripture, and I very much appreciate that, but that doesn't mean that I think that every argument that Athanasius presented is bulletproof or necessarily accurate.

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Certainly, when reading Augustine on the Trinity, you know, I've said over and over again, you'll read for a few pages, and oh, this is great, this is wonderful, and you turn the page and go, whoa, was this misbounded?

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Where did this come from? You know, some numerological argument or something like that that we just go, I'm sorry, what just happened here?

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So I don't have to elevate

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Augustine's bad arguments, and I don't have to sit there and go, well,

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I don't want to believe in nuda scriptura, so I guess I'll have to accept this. No, not going there.

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So, look, show me how you can avoid, well, first of all, for a lot of these folks,

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I just have to step back for a moment and say, have you ever engaged the other side of these things?

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Have you ever, you know, when I try to warn you that there's dangers in accepting these lenses and things like that that lead you directly to Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, various and sundry other perspectives, what

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I'd like to see is these folks, I'd like to see where you engage them and how you engage them well.

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That would be helpful for me, just to see that kind of stuff. But, look,

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I have criticized Leighton appropriately for, for example, in our first debate, trying to present fake material from Second Clement as if it was first century stuff.

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So, no, I don't, I don't ignore the history of interpretation. That does shed a light on things, and the primary light it sheds on things is how often we will come to scripture in light of that conflict that we are currently involved in, and try to make scripture argue our point.

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That's the human danger. That's, that's the reality.

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And that's why I have, at times, made myself unpopular by pointing out that sometimes fairly well -known people make arguments that wouldn't fare real well against the best the other side has to offer, just so that, you know,

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I don't want to see Christians going into, you know, they want to be bold, they want to speak the truth, and then they go into a apologetic context, and in the process, they end up face -planting because they're using interpretive methodologies and things like that that just, they're using one form of hermeneutics over here that they would not use over there, and there are really sharp people on the other side that will catch that, and will go, and if you've not thought about it beforehand, it's, it's an issue.

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So, yeah, you know, he tries to say, the aforementioned is problematic for a variety of reasons.

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One prominent reason ends up working from Petitio Principi's circular reasoning, that is to say, it presumes my interpretation just is the objective reading of the

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Bible. Number two, my interpretation of the Bible is a five -point Calvinist reading of the Bible. Number three, therefore, the objective reading of the

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Bible just is a five -point Calvinist reading, or just replace five -point Calvinist with provisionist reading in Flowers' case.

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What this approach fails to appreciate, for one, is that nobody approaches scripture as a presuppositionalist blank slate.

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How many times have you heard me saying that for 40 years? It's, it is, it can be a little bit frustrating to have someone publishing stuff, and it's like, have you ever listened to me before?

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Human agents are subjects, and as such, we bring a variety of pre -understandings and unchecked a priori commitments to theological paradigms as we read scripture, which is why we emphasize so strongly the need to do solid and consistent exegesis.

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We could call this a hermeneutical dilemma, neither James White nor his compadre, Leighton Flowers, acknowledges, false!

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Sir, I will accept your apology and your retraction as soon as possible. And thus, all they, all that they are left to do in their respective debates and correspondences is to sling scripture right past each other, never critically identifying or checking their theological operaries at the front end of their respective reading of scripture.

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Utterly untrue. If I wanted to invest the time to find how much of this kind of stuff is produced regularly, it would be depressing, and so I'm not going to even bother.

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And that is one thing about living in the modern period, is it's not that there hasn't always been this kind of straw man, hey,

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I'm going to make myself look good by ripping on somebody else type type thing. But you just, you didn't hear about it.

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You can, you can now find all the ruminations of all the people that wouldn't have ever been heard of 50 years ago, but now it's all out there.

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You know, just ask Grok to go find it for you, or you used to find, ask Google or something. I don't even know how this popped up.

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I don't, I don't remember exactly. I don't think anybody sent it to me. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, uh, but yeah, it's, sometimes you just, you just go, okay.

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God bless you, brother. I hope you figure out what you're talking about someday. Um, okay.

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Uh, go back to something else here. Um, yeah, here we go.

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On June 16th, I saw, again,

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I guess we're sort of doing meme theology here or something. I don't know. Um, I saw this,

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I thought, yeah, this is worth talking about. It's, um, rather simplistic meme type thing.

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Uh, you know what? I can, I can put this up.

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Dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. And Dee, are you able to catch that,

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Rich? Um, this is the meme that was posted.

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Yeah, you're gonna have to, you have to, um, go ahead and full screen that if you can.

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Um, because it's too small to see. Uh, if you can pop it up there, that would be, that would be great.

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There we go. All right. So the bread, so what was the, the, uh, introduction, the brief introduction from Angelo Romano was the

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Baptist slash evangelical understanding of John 6 is wild. Okay.

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So here's, here's the Baptist slash evangelical understanding of John 6. The bread

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I give symbolically is my flesh. How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

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Unless you symbolically eat my flesh, you have no life. This is a hard saying who can listen to it.

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The words I'm giving are symbolic. We are not following you anymore. Will you also leave over this symbolic gesture?

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Where would we go? We have no choice. So, uh, here is now look, you know, it's, it's possible, you know, gotta, gotta be honest here, uh, that Angelo Romano has, uh, run into some very, uh, confused

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Baptists that didn't give him a full discussion of this.

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And it has been, I confess, a long time since we walked through this, but we've done it so many times and my goodness, that red book right there, the fatal flaw, fatal flaw and answers to Catholic claims.

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Those are my first two books, 1989. Well, was that 89 or 90?

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I'm pretty sure it was written in 89, uh, 1990.

40:29

Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. January of 90. So I wrote it in 89. Um, oh, look at that.

40:37

And thankfulness to God, I dedicate this book to my father, Edwin White. He's been gone since, what did I do?

40:43

That was, wow, this was, that was 90. So that was 32 years.

40:49

He lived another 32 years after I dedicated the book to him. That's pretty cool. Um, ah, and Rich wants me to remind you that, uh, both are available on Kindle.

41:00

They're not available in print anymore, that's for sure. Um, but, uh, I, I dealt with all of John six many decades ago.

41:13

And of course Calvin did and all sorts of people have down through the, uh, down through the years.

41:20

But, uh, sure. I, I could understand how some people's explanation of John six would lead to confusion, but the number of Roman Catholics that I read that just aren't even interested in hearing what we're saying and don't recognize that, following up on what we said on the last topic, that they're the ones that are approaching

41:50

John chapter six with a post -Tridentine, often post -Vatican

41:58

II, uh, hermeneutical lens. And they've never even thought, when

42:08

John wrote this, who was he writing to? What was he writing about? And what would this have communicated to his original audience?

42:19

And what it would not have communicated to his original audience is the Roman Catholic concept of transubstantiation and priests and everything else that comes with it.

42:32

We could have gotten into that in the debate with Joe Heschmeyer. Instead, it ended up getting completely sidetracked with references to early writers and a strange misunderstanding in regards to the

42:48

Ignatian corpus, which really emptied it of what it should have been, which should have been much more of a biblical.

42:55

Well, we did get into biblical stuff and everything he presented, I didn't have any trouble dealing with, um, especially the

43:04

Malachi stuff, stuff like that. Man, you dig into that and it's just so, it's sort of like when Roman Catholics run around going, they, the

43:10

Protestants threw out the apocryphal, the deuterocanonical books because they teach purgatory.

43:17

No, they don't. Read it. They don't. I mean, aside from the fact that even,

43:23

I can quote Pope Gregory the Great, it's not canonical, but hey, it's just his private opinion, right?

43:29

That's how it works. Believe me, if it was the other way around, they'd be quoting it all the time. Despite all that, you know, we didn't get into, he never even defined what propitiation meant, and priests and stuff like that.

43:49

I've got one here, too, on priesthood. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get to that one. But anyways, let's just remind folks that the bread

43:55

I give symbolically is my flesh. Okay, um, let's just, let's just focus on one thing here, so make sure everyone understands what's going on here.

44:12

In John 6, 35, okay, remember what the context is? Feeding 5 ,000,

44:17

Jesus walks on water, comes to the synagogue, Capernaum. And I have to admit, as I sit here,

44:24

I am very thankful, though it was a difficult trip for me and difficult time for me.

44:30

I stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Capernaum, just a matter of yards from where the synagogue would have been.

44:44

I looked across that lake to where the feeding of 5 ,000 general area would have been, so I knew which direction it would come from.

44:54

And I'm really glad that I got that one chance to do that.

45:00

I doubt that I'll ever get that opportunity again. But to see,

45:07

I, I can see it vividly in my mind, um, what that looked like and where this took place.

45:16

And so these men have followed Jesus across the lake.

45:24

It's, again, you can see where, where you, you can stand on the seashore, and you can see where the feeding of 5 ,000 would have taken place.

45:32

The Sea of Galilee is not nearly as big. That's, it's a big lake, but it's from any point on the shore, you can see the, the opposite shore, even north -south.

45:43

I mean, it's obviously much bigger north -south than it is east -west. Um, but this wasn't a direct east -west type thing.

45:49

This would be, uh, it would have been coming from the north -west down to Capernaum from the feeding of 5 ,000.

46:01

Anyway, um, so they come seeking

46:06

Jesus, and they saw the feeding of 5 ,000, so they're excited. And Jesus seeks to focus their mind upon what is really important, and that is himself as the source of eternal life.

46:29

And in doing so, he says in verse 35,

46:35

Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Okay? Now, the

46:41

Roman Catholic, who wants to turn this into a proof text for transubstantiation, the mass, and the mass is a perpetuatory sacrifice, says, see, the bread is literally made the body of Christ.

46:58

And so, he's saying he's the bread of life. I'm the bread of life.

47:04

He who comes to me, or commonos, the one coming to me, will never hunger.

47:17

And he who believes in me will never thirst. So, the terms that he uses, um, pinao means to be hungry, um, and dipsao means to be thirsty.

47:36

These are standard terms. If in that day, you're going to tell someone,

47:42

I'm really hungry, and man, it's so hot outside, I'm really thirsty, you would use pinao and dipsao.

47:53

And that has been the context that came before this, because they're talking about, you know, the bread that came down from heaven, and that was eaten by the

48:07

Israelites. They're talking about the manna. And so, they're talking about physical stuff.

48:17

But in John 6, 35, Jesus defines the terms that he is going to use. Yesterday, they had physical stuff.

48:25

They ate the bread, the miracle bread. They're looking for more.

48:34

They want to see that miracle again. And Jesus is pointing to a greater miracle, and it's the miracle of those, the one, or commonos.

48:44

This is going to become very important, because this is, you know, he's going to say, all the father gives me will come to me, in verse 37.

48:56

And the one coming, or commonos, the one coming to me I will never cast out. So, this coming is not a physical thing.

49:06

It's not someone walking to Jesus. It's not someone believing in the dogmatic development that comes way down the road.

49:18

You know, a priest having the capacity to work the miracle of transubstantiation, and turn the bread in the body of Christ, the wine in the blood of Christ, offer an unbloody sacrifice upon the altar, all the rest of this kind of stuff.

49:35

Nobody standing on the seashore in Capernaum, or in the synagogue, very close there too, would have ever thought of any of that.

49:48

The one coming to me will never hunger. How do you satiate physical hunger by coming to Jesus?

49:59

How do you satiate physical thirst by believing in Jesus? He who believes in me will never thirst.

50:11

Now, I had to pick up the truck yesterday. I suppose

50:16

I should mention in passing, you know, that's the truck we use for the traveling, and we had to replace the catalytic converter.

50:26

That was cha -ching. Summers are rough for ministries.

50:34

People are going on vacations, and they've got a lot of things to do with their funds other than keep the lights on and keep things going here.

50:43

So, I'll just mention in passing, remember, you know, if these type of programs are a blessing to you, if they've helped you, if they've, you know, help us keep it going and help us continue doing what we're doing, there's still costs involved.

51:05

So, I had to go pick up the truck last night, and I had a super frustrating experience because Uber's, and now

51:17

I realize this is across the platform, Uber's software does not know where my house is.

51:25

Now, I live in an old house. It was built in 1969. Still got the original cabinets in the kitchen.

51:31

Gotta replace those. Um, but it's not like it's a new development.

51:37

I get it if it's a brand new development and, you know, there's a time lag for GPS, blah, blah, blah. But they couldn't get an

51:45

Uber to me to pick me up, to get me up there in time to get it. Finally, some guy parked in front of my house, and I'm out,

51:52

I'm running out there, and I eventually got there, but it was extremely frustrating. Very, very, very frustrating.

51:59

And so, by the time I got to the dealership, um, I was really thirsty.

52:06

I mean, it was, it was what, 112 yesterday, something like that. Between 110 and 112. 110, 112 degrees

52:13

Fahrenheit. I'll let you all figure out what that is for centigrade in the rest of the world. Celsius, whatever you want to call it.

52:21

And I just remember asking the guys I was paying a large amount of money, um, do you have a bottle of water?

52:29

I'm thirsty. And he got me this nice, big, cold bottle of water. It was very nice. And I pretty much had it drained down by the time

52:37

I got home. Uh, I believe in Jesus, but I still experience thirst.

52:45

And I'm looking at my truck out in the parking lot, sitting out in the sun, no coverage, and it's black.

52:52

Do you know what the temperature is inside that truck right now? Um, it's, it's hot.

53:00

Uh, in fact, I put a thermometer inside the little storage barn we have in the backyard today.

53:05

And I happened to look at it just a little while ago. In fact, I can actually pull it up here.

53:12

Uh, it is currently 133 .7 degrees

53:17

Fahrenheit in the storage barn behind my house. 133 .7

53:23

degrees. I'm sure it's hotter than that in a black truck sitting in the sun, uh, when

53:29

I get in. So I will get thirsty. Believers in Jesus still get thirsty.

53:36

So is Jesus lying? No, you need to allow him to define the context. This is spiritual hunger, and this is spiritual thirst.

53:47

And a Christian always finds Christ sufficient for spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst.

53:56

The, the massive irony, when you think about what Rome has done, is that by turning this into a proof text for a much later development, way down the road, that is based upon fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of soteriology and the atonement in the

54:13

New Testament, and it's based upon errors that come out of the development of tradition.

54:19

That tradition then overlies scripture. That's what the Reformation was all about. Um, in so doing, they literally leave their followers without the ability to have satisfaction spiritually for hunger and thirst.

54:40

Because the mass never perfects you. You're always left hungry. You're always left thirsty.

54:48

Because it's not epipox, the term used in Hebrews, once and for all, perfected by that sacrifice of Christ.

54:58

You look only to that. You don't have to look to anything else. That's the irony, is that Rome robs from its people what it's promising.

55:11

You have to let the New Testament teach what the New Testament teaches. So once you figure that out, and then you follow that through, then you see, you know, the hard saying, by the way, um, the words

55:26

I am giving are symbolic. Actually, he said they're spirit in their life. But if you scroll down, why did the people walk away?

55:38

It wasn't because of the flesh and blood thing. It was because Jesus was saying, I've told you, and he uses the imperfect, so it's the iterative imperfect.

55:46

He's repeating this. No one can come to me unless it's been granted by the Father. That's what they find offensive.

55:56

And they walk away. So, you know, again, um,

56:01

Angelo Romano may have run into a less than clear speaking

56:07

Baptist, I suppose, um, but I sort of doubt it. I would imagine this is just one of the many, many, many misrepresentations of the other side that I see very regularly from Roman Catholics.

56:18

I want to close, um, a couple things.

56:24

Like I said, just on a ministry level, summers are hard.

56:31

And if you would like to encourage us, even the smallest amount of support is a great encouragement over the summer.

56:39

Um, and there's just so much negativity out there.

56:45

It would be great to have some, uh, positive, you know, if, if, if over the years program has been a blessing to you, um, and maybe you've just, just always figured, well, it'll always be there.

56:57

They've, they've got some big donor. We don't, we don't, it's, it's the regular folks.

57:02

Uh, we don't, we don't go chasing after people. Um, you know, some

57:08

P I know ministries that have literally, they employ people to maintain the donor list.

57:18

Um, it's not something we've ever felt comfortable doing. I'm not going to condemn those to do, but it's just not something to do.

57:24

Um, so, you know, in the, the super duper heat of a Phoenix in June and July, it'd be a great encouragement to hear from you.

57:33

Uh, secondly, I'm going to give you an illustration of something that just happened recently.

57:40

We'll, we'll close with this. Um, that I've, I've been thinking a lot about we, uh,

57:47

I've told you, I think I told the story that on March 13th, a little feral kitty, we have a feral explosion going on in our, in our neighborhood.

57:58

And there's one particular family. We call them Kelly and I call them the boo family. I'm not sure where he came up with that, but and some of these cats,

58:08

I cannot differentiate from one another. They look identical. It's, it's an interesting breed.

58:14

They're black, small heads, uh, big ears, thin, long hair.

58:21

It's strange. I've never seen this type of cat before. Beautiful in a way, but anyways, this little feral mama cat, we, we saw that she was pregnant.

58:30

We could tell, uh, she never got, let us get anywhere near her. Uh, but we'd see her once in a while runs in the backyard or something like that.

58:39

We had a cat door and on March 13th, she snuck into our house.

58:45

We had never seen her in the house. There was one particular one of these, we call him boo, the main one he'd get in.

58:53

Um, but we had never seen her in the house at six o 'clock in the morning, six Oh one. I'm woken up by and I turn the lights on and I get down on my knees and under the chest of drawers next to the bed.

59:08

Here is this little feral mama kitty with four kittens already born, already cleaned up placentas dealt with umbilical cords dealt with, um, and in utter silence.

59:24

Amazing. One of the little kittens didn't make it, but we worked with her and I'd get down my hands and knees and I'd slide a little bowl of soft food under, under there for her.

59:36

And, and, uh, she'd go running down the hallway out the door, do her business, run back in.

59:42

She's never messed in the house. Not once. Um, once she moved them to next to the, under the sink next to the dishwasher that shocked us.

59:54

Um, but we did everything we could to help with her and her little kittens.

01:00:01

The three of them, two of them were twins, little twinsies. And for a while they were in the kitchen.

01:00:10

I mean, we literally had to step over them to get to the sink and all sorts of stuff. And it's like, uh, make a long story short.

01:00:19

We, uh, we got the twinsies adopted out and they've got a wonderful family down in Casa Grande and the little runt that is not pretty at all.

01:00:33

Uh, I just couldn't give up. And we thought it was a her turned out it's a he

01:00:39

Yoda or yo -yo as I, I, I like calling him yo -yo and he's growing up with us.

01:00:48

Well, mama kitty has hung around, can't touch her. She's still feral, but she doesn't mess in the house.

01:00:56

She continues to take care of yo -yo. He got sick. She's cleaning him up.

01:01:02

I mean, she's just uber mama kitty. So I'm like the best thing we can do for her is get her fixed.

01:01:09

We've got to get her fixed. I've got to, I've got to get, I got to be trapping and paying for fixing all these cats.

01:01:18

So I got her trapped a couple of days ago, not entrapped. I used a, there's a Japanese net that works a whole lot better than the round ones.

01:01:27

The Japanese net type thing that, um, I think veterinarians use. Took her in a couple of days ago.

01:01:35

Um, got her fixed, found out from the spay and neuter clinic.

01:01:41

She was in her second trimester with four more kittens. That's sad, but what could we have done with four more?

01:01:49

I have six in a tarp in the backyard from another kitten, another cat back there. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them.

01:01:55

Other than once we've gotten them taken care of that, that one's getting fixed too. Um, anyway, she doesn't trust me anymore.

01:02:06

I trapped her in that net. I put her in that cage. I took her that place. I brought her back to that place.

01:02:12

She would almost get close enough to sniff my finger before if she's staying 10 feet away from me. And that sort of hurts.

01:02:22

In fact, I'm keeping her in the house right now because you don't want her stitches opening up. She doesn't appreciate that either.

01:02:31

And I can sit there and explain it to her. And I have, we call her

01:02:36

Boo Mama. Uh, Boo Mama, we're, we're doing this for you. You, you, you can't be having kittens.

01:02:44

Um, she would have been having them during the worst part of the year. August here is just hell month.

01:02:51

August, September is horrible here. Um, we can't be having any more kittens.

01:02:56

This is best for you. We're doing what's right for you. Keeping you in. You don't want to be in, but keeping you in, keeping you from busting your stitches and getting your, how in the world would

01:03:07

I grab her now? She doesn't understand. She doesn't understand.

01:03:14

And I just, I was sitting there explaining it to her and I just thought, how many times do we do this to God?

01:03:21

How many times have I done this? She's operating on a minimal amount of information.

01:03:27

She has a very small world she's looking at. And she doesn't understand that what

01:03:36

I did for her, paid to have her spayed, um, is best for her in the long run.

01:03:43

She doesn't understand that. She doesn't understand why right now I'm not letting her out cause I've let her out in the past. Um, and she's obviously not happy with me about it.

01:03:53

And how, and I, I'm just sitting there and it struck me, how many times have I done this to God? And yeah,

01:04:00

I know we get offended. Oh, you know, we're, we're human beings. That's just a cat.

01:04:06

Yeah. But how far above us is God in knowledge and wisdom, you know, as it's, it's an almost infinite chasm.

01:04:20

And I just thought every time I am discontent, every time

01:04:28

I complain to God, I'm doing the same thing to God that that little cat that I've shown so much love for, you know, getting down on my hands and knees and sliding food into her and doing all this and making sure her kittens are growing and safe and all the rest of this stuff and giving her food and treating her like one of her own.

01:04:52

Now she's angry with me. For what? For doing what's best for her. And if any

01:04:59

Christian ever gets angry with God, I can guarantee you, I can absolutely guarantee you, you're angry at God for doing what's best for you.

01:05:08

You may not see it, but you have the promise. See, she doesn't have a promise.

01:05:14

She doesn't have a scripture. She doesn't have a promise, especially because there are so many humans that are just horrible to little animals.

01:05:23

But she doesn't have a promise that your human is always going to do what's best for you. Even if I promised her that,

01:05:29

I wouldn't always be able to do that. But we have a promise from scripture. God works all things, all things for the good of those who love him.

01:05:38

Those are called according to his purpose. We have that promise. So if you ever find yourself questioning

01:05:45

God's goodness and being angry with God, you have a promise.

01:05:52

And you're just not believing the promise that he has fulfilled for his people over and over and over and over again.

01:06:02

And I see that every time those little eyes look up at me and she backs away. She doesn't have that promise, but I still did what was right for her.

01:06:16

Will she forget eventually and maybe trust me someday? Does it matter that I do what

01:06:26

I did for her on the assumption that, okay, I'll get her fixed, but she better really like me for this.

01:06:34

Of course not. You do what's right. You do what's right from the start.

01:06:41

So anyway, just a little illustration crossed my mind as I was literally sitting there looking at her going, honey, you don't understand.

01:06:52

I'm the nicest guy you've ever met. You don't think that right now.

01:06:59

And you may never think that. And when I eventually let her out, and I probably will tomorrow, she may never come back.

01:07:10

It's possible. It's possible. Will I be sad by that? Sure. Sure. But you still got to do what's right.

01:07:18

You still got to do the right thing. So just a thought that I had, and you can take that or leave it.

01:07:26

All right. Thanks for listening to the program today. I hope some of that was useful to you somewhere along the line, and we will see you the next time on The Dividing Line.